“Sure.” Helen frowned slightly. “But, Peter, several groups with very different agendas have claimed responsibility for the worst attacks.”
“Sure. Groups that no one had heard of before this all started. Terrorist organisations that never showed up on any law enforcement agency’s radar screen. Terrorists with access to plastic explosive, SA-16s, and now computer viruses, for God’s sake!” He shook his head forcefully. “It’s just too damned much, Helen. Every instinct I’ve got tells me that there’s someone lurking out there pulling the strings and watching us jump.” “Who?” she asked quietly.
“God knows. I don’t.” Some of the fire went out of his eyes. “Maybe those German neo-Nazis we heard about after the synagogue hostage-taking you smashed. Maybe the people who recruited those Bosnian Muslims Rossini and I tried so hard to find earlier this year.”
“So you think the terrorists, or some of them anyway, are foreigners?”
Peter nodded. “Yeah, I do. I think that’s why none of your people have ever been able to find a print they could match at any of the crime scenes. Plus, there’s at least one piece of supporting evidence that backs up my hunch.”
He sorted through the stacked documents and pulled out a stapled collection of transcripts and photocopied letters. “Take a gander at those.”
She glanced through them and looked up. “The oral and written communiques issued by the different terrorist groups?”
“Uh-huh. Supposedly issued by everybody from the New Aryan Order to the Black Liberation Front. But they’ve got one thing in common. Rossini and I both checked them over to make sure.” Peter paused to take a sip of his cold coffee, set the cup aside again, and continued. “Every single message is perfect. Not a single spelling error. Not a single misplaced comma. Not a single piece of slang. They’re all absolutely grammatically perfect.”
Helen vaguely remembered hearing or reading something similar. Had it been in a memo from the FBI’s own language experts? She frowned. So many documents had crossed her temporary desk in such a short space of time that she’d often suspected the task force would drown in paper before finding its first terrorist. Still, how had she missed something like this? How had they all missed something like this?
She already knew the answer to her question. The FBI task force had been swamped right from the day it was formed hit from all sides at every turn by new demands on its time and its limited resources. If Peter’s guess was right, that had been an important part of the terrorist plan from the very beginning. Her face darkened in anger.
He reached out and took the material out of her unresisting hand. “I think all of these little propaganda pieces were written by the same people. By people with a thorough, but very academic, knowledge of American English.”
Helen nodded slowly, still rocked by the stomach-turning possibility that the Bureau task force had been walking right past an important clue. ’God, Peter, I think you’re probably right.” She hesitated. “But…”
“But I don’t have a single shred of solid proof beyond those communiques,” he finished the sentence for her.
She shook her head. “I’ll talk to Flynn tomorrow morning anyway. We’ve been focusing all our energies on the domestic angle. Maybe it’s high time we widened our search.”
Peter smiled crookedly. “You think Special Agent Flynn’s really going to listen to a wild-eyed theory from an Army grunt?”
“Coming from a smart Army grunt? He might. Mike Flynn’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Helen countered. “He doesn’t put up with bullshit, but I’ve never seen him turn away a good idea no matter where it came from.”
“That’s nice,” Peter said, still clearly unconvinced. He bit down on a yawn and glanced at his watch. Then he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Look, maybe we should try to get some sleep. You’ve got to report back, and I’ve got a date with Rossini a little later this morning.”
“Oh? A date with the Maestro?” Helen asked, slipping her arm around his waist. “Is there something I should know about you, Colonel Thorn?”
He laughed softly, almost against his will. “Not that kind of a date, Agent Gray.” His smile slipped. “Rossini wangled a copy of that damned computer virus out of the Computer Emergency Response Team. We’re going to run it by somebody he knows a guy the Maestro says is a Grade A computer whiz.”
He shrugged. “Of course, it’s probably just a waste of time. God knows, every cybernetics expert in the federal government is already doing the same thing.”
Helen hugged him tighter. “You just keep at it, Peter.” Then she stepped back and held out her hand. “Now come take me to bed.”
Thorn’s grin returned. “Yes, ma’am. Anything you say.”
Joseph Rossini took the Dulles Access Road out toward Herndon, relying on their official Pentagon identity cards to get them through the tollbooths without having to scratch around for exact change. He also drove fast, exceeding the speed limit by at least fifteen miles an hour.
The older man caught Thorn watching him out of the corner of his eye and lifted his shoulders. “I hate poking along, Pete. Going fifty-five’s just not efficient.”
Thorn hid a smile by pretending to take an interest in the passing scenery. Saddled with a loving wife and a multitude of kids, the Maestro had obviously decided to settle for the first half of the male equation seeking “fast cars and loose women.”
They sped past what looked like a military encampment. It was a staging area for one of the security patrols established under the President’s vaunted Operation SAFE SKIES. Two Blackhawk helicopters and a couple of Humvees sat under camouflage netting in a clearing off to the side of the road. Soldiers wearing the Screaming Eagles patch of the 101st Air Assault Division tramped through the mud left by another hard rain. They looked thoroughly bored and uncomfortable.
Thorn looked away, still angry at the clear waste of good manpower. He turned back to Rossini. “You’re sure this guy Kettler can handle the job?”
“Uh-huh. Without breaking a sweat.”
Thorn hoped the Maestro’s confidence wasn’t misplaced. The man they were on their way to see, Derek Kettler, made his living as a freelance software designer and consultant. Apparently, JSOC had hired him once before to craft special security and antiviral programs for its intelligence section.
“Kettler lives and breathes computers, Pete,” Rossini con tinned. “The guy’s a little unusual, but he practically dreams in machine code. He’s good. One of the best.” “Just how unusual is he?” Thorn asked sceptically.
Rossini shrugged. “He telecommutes so he can work alone. He likes being alone. He hates having to take orders. In fact, he hates just about anything to do with authority or control.”
Thorn arched an eyebrow. “Then why work with computers? Hell, they’re nothing but rules and instructions…”
Rossini shook his head. “Those are physical limitations, like gravity or the speed of light. It’s people telling him what to do that Kettler has trouble with.”
Great, Thorn thought. They were off on a visit to the Computer Hermit of Herndon.
The older man pulled off the Access Road, fast-talked their way past the local tollbooth, and followed a series of treelined streets to a newer part of the town.
The housing development still showed signs of newness. A Dumpster loaded with construction scraps marked the corner where they turned off the main road, and two of the end units still had raw, muddy earth instead of lawns. The homes were attractive, brick-fronted, two-story town houses. Different gables and copper trim gave each a small bit of identity otherwise lacking in their construction.