They had all heard the shots and the screams. They knew those weren’t SWAT teams giving or receiving.
Colin’s cell phone was on vibrate, hidden down the front of his boxers. When he felt the rhythmic buzz of a push notification, he knew there was only a small chance that it was something important. More than likely, it was one of his friends checking to see if he was all right.
But it could also be his aunt Allison with important information.
He passed his eyes around the room. The guard who’d entered with his group had turned almost entirely toward the open door to converse with another masked lunatic in the hallway. If he was quick, Colin believed he could reach for the phone without being seen. He’d done it once already, albeit when they were still standing.
There were walls behind him and to his right. To the left, no one was paying him any attention. The young man quickly unbuttoned his waistband and slipped his hand into his trousers.
Grabbing the cell, he worked it awkwardly from his undershorts and tucked it between his bent legs. He huddled down, as though he were resting his head on his knees. That would also help to conceal the glow of the screen. Then he focused his eyes on the display and scrolled down his timeline with his thumb. At the top of his feed, he read the words:
Leave yr phone somewhere w/vol LOUD. In 5 min. it will ring, DO NOT answer. #BaltimoreConventionCenter // Stand by.
Colin felt his stomach drop. He clutched the phone for several seconds more, rereading the message.
Pressure, he thought.
There was no way of knowing what their captors would do if they heard the cell.
Shoot into the group of twenty-odd souls? Take him out and execute him as an example to the others?
She wouldn’t have sent that message without good reason, he reflected. And it wasn’t a stretch to conclude that it had something- no, everything — to do with Ryan Kealey. It was no secret on the university campus that the visiting prof was former CIA, and even that didn’t begin to define what set him apart from the other academicians there. Colin had read news articles about his role in preventing a terrorist incident near the United Nations a few years back. From the day they met, Colin had gotten the sense he had seen things most people hadn’t, and was capable of doing things most others weren’t.
But there was always a price for action.
Colin exhaled until his lungs felt entirely deflated. He estimated a full minute had passed since her tweet. Four minutes left to figure this out. Allie had hashtagged the words Baltimore Convention Center. That told Colin she-or rather, Kealey-believed the tweets were being monitored. Obviously, Kealey had given this some thought. He had a plan. He knew what he was doing.
Or so Colin needed to believe, if he was going to disobey the commands of his seriously unbalanced keepers.
He looked around him. The spare decor didn’t afford many places of concealment, even for a small object, but he thought he saw one that might do the trick.
Making certain the guard was still turned toward the door, Colin made his move.
CHAPTER 8
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Facing the Pentagon from the green, tree-clustered slopes above Bolling Air Force Base, the Department of Homeland Security’s vast new 4,500,000-square-foot facility occupied federal land on the west campus of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. All bald concrete and glass, it housed more than sixty DHS offices, which had been previously scattered across Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, though the vast majority had been relocated from the department’s original temporary headquarters at the historic Nebraska Avenue naval complex across town.
It was here that the National Operations Center, or the NOC, worked year-round, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to monitor, protect against, and manage foreign and domestic threats to the United States under the umbrella of the DHS Office of Operations Coordination and Planning. While it shared some similarities with the FBI-SIOC synergy, the DHS-NOC relationship was a much more separate and different wheel on the massive wagon driving the nation’s homeland security efforts. Thus, while SIOC served as an intelligence hub for law enforcement and investigative agencies, the NOC was the focal point for information flowing between state, regional, and tribal governments abroad, as well as private infrastructure elements-power and telecommunications grids, mass transit companies, airlines, school systems, hospitals, and other essential service providers. The idea was for these wheels to spin in smooth coordination and keep the wagon moving forward, rather than flying off its axles when things got bumpy.
Despite all the happy talk about cooperation, there were still rivalries between the subsystems in each of the branches. SIOC and the NOC competed for funds and thus competed with one another. Brenneman had learned that early on, which was why only SIOC had a voice in today’s meeting. But that did not mean the NOC hadn’t turned its considerable resources on the convention center attack.
The NOC’s Social Network Monitoring Center, or SNMC, was located on the second floor of the building, in a large, nondescript room with rows of computer workstations along the aisles. Established in 2008, the unit monitored social media networks and other public Web sites for information related to terrorist activities. In accordance with Constitutional privacy guarantees, the NOC was barred from setting up fraudulent user accounts and was restricted to utilizing publicly available search engines and content browsers. But its Web-based platforms had been configured to skim through and pluck potentially valuable morsels of intelligence from Internet traffic.
Of the social networks, Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Myspace-with their combined 800,000,000 unique monthly visitors-received the most attention, although there were scores of other personal and professional networking sites, from Plaxo to LinkedIn, which accounted for millions of additional users. Also identified, sorted, and analyzed were scraps of information collected from blogs, news sites, online forums, and message boards that might, in NOC parlance, contribute to “situational awareness and establish a common operating picture” of a particular threat or event.
On the day of the Baltimore Convention Center attack, DHS 10:00-5:30 action officers Dick Siegel and Clare Karl were preparing to carpool home to the Arlington County suburb where they both lived. Workers on the 5:30-1:00 shift were just beginning to arrive. They exchanged quick, impersonal hellos with their daytime counterparts. All the shifts shared desks, which limited the personalization and added to the sterility of a room that was already function oriented.
It was Siegel’s turn to drive, and he’d been about to grab his cell phone from his desk when there was a three-tone computer ping alerting him to a “situation.” He glanced at the leftmost of his three monitors, the one earmarked for general use, and saw the red-boxed “alert” prompt.
“Got something,” he told Karl, who was already watching other officers checking the update. She stepped behind Siegel as he leaned over the keyboard.
“Hope it’s not important,” she said. “I have a T-ball game to get to.”
“I think we’re playing you,” Siegel said.
Almost as soon as word of the attack reached the NOC, the first dribbles of intel began coming from the center. The SNMC’s automated software applications, or web robots, generated hundreds of meta tags that enabled them to sniff around for suspicious or otherwise noteworthy keywords, and the ones that got the Twitter bots hopping at approximately 5:15 p.m. that Sunday evening were all of a kind: explosion, blast, bomb.
“What the hell is this?” Siegel wondered aloud as updates came up on the other two computer screens.