Infinite Exposure (19 page)

John was too tired to make sense of it now. He logged out and went to bed.

***

The Brit was livid! He wanted to kill his entire team. He wanted to kill everyone they reported to, then he wanted to go out
and kill everyone he even remotely thought was a terrorist. He had the training to do it and by God it was time he put that
training to use!

What set the Brit off was the cable news. The bombings had finally happened in Lutton. Three subway trains and a bus all within
half an hour of each other. It appeared that the person on the bus got stuck in traffic, so he took out the bus because he
missed his train.

This had been what the Brit feared. People would sit on their arses and the attack would be carried out. At least the main
objective of the attack had failed. From the pattern displayed on the news, it looked like the terrorists had planned on blowing
up each train as it got to the point where one tunnel joined another tunnel. This would take out or at least block the flood
gates.

Why were the flood gates important? The Brit had it figured out long before the journalists. The last bomb, which went off
on the bus, was significantly larger than the others. This terrorist's train would have been in the tunnel under the river
when the bomb detonated. They were planning on flooding the entire subway system killing everyone on the other trains down
there. Hundreds, if not thousands would be stranded with no affordable method of getting home.

It was the kind of attack which showed a lot of planning. While the people blowing themselves up might have been illiterate
inbred bastards from some poverty stricken region of the world, the plan came from someone with training. Nobody on the Brit's
team had seen this coming, not even the Brit. Most were assuming they were going to try and blow up a pair of trains passing
each other in opposite directions to maximize casualties. Nobody had thought this far out.

“We should have thought this far out,” the Brit said. They have already tried to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge more than
once. Thankfully, the people they sent to do it were so useless they ended up getting busted in a routine traffic stop before
they had even assembled all of the explosives for the job.

The Brit was lost in his raging thoughts when the phone rang. It was the man in the suit calling him.

“I assume you've seen the news.”

“You bloody well know I have!” screamed the Brit.

“There is a team showing up at your hotel inside 15 minutes. Meet them downstairs. British authorities want to handle the
remnants of the Lutton cell, but we are cleared to round up four other cells. They aren't being arrested, they are being taken
to our interrogation center.”

“Oh!
Now
we can round them up!” screamed the Brit.

“Nobody saw this one coming, not even you!” said the man in the suit. “If you had put this before me we would have rounded
up what we had. It wouldn't have stopped the attack since we only knew of a few and still hadn't seen any explosives. I'll
wager that when the news starts giving us the identities of the bombers none of those names will be on our suspect list either.”

That truth took some of the wind out of the Brit's sails. He hadn't seen this coming and they only had three names of cell
members. This act took one more person than they had identified and there was probably a support network in place for this
team.

“What do we do with the ones we nab?” asked the Brit.

“The driver knows of a building on a runway which was used for bombers during WWII. It's mostly shut down now, but we have
people arriving there to set up a holding pen and wait for the rest of the planes.”

“Planes?”

“If you get everybody on the list you will have over 60 prisoners. That's really more than we are prepared for at the interrogation
center, but we have to nab these before British authorities start wanting to nab more of their own.”

“What are my orders for tomorrow?”

“You and the rest of the team will remain with the prisoners until they have all been loaded, so pack some rations and overnight
supplies. I don't yet have another assignment for you, but should shortly.”

With that the conversation ended. The Brit went about getting his hardware and putting some MREs along with bottled water
into his backpack. One thing was for certain, leading the life he led, the first thing he did when he landed anywhere was
to obtain a case of MREs. Militaries around the world stopped calling the food they supplied “rations.” Now the prepackaged
food troops were ordered to carry was called an MRE, Meal Ready to Eat. They weren't really ready. You had to have a little
heater kit that got hot when you put water on it to warm them up, but it was better than a can of beans, which was what rations
used to be.

Most people hated being forced to eat MREs. Some of them were good, but most made high-school cafeteria food seem like fine
dining and airline food a mouth-watering experience. If you wanted to survive in the field though, you had to have a tolerance
for them. Some of them had some nasty preservatives. They didn't seem to ship that 20-year bread anymore. Even the surplus
catalogs didn't have it these days. That stuff tasted great, and really would last in its package 20 years on a shelf. But
it had so much MSG and other preservatives in it that if you ate the entire “loaf” in one sitting you got a severe case of
the “quick step.” Nothing makes a hike pure misery faster than a case of diarrhea. In a jungle or a desert, you would be dead
before the end of a two-day march unless you happened to find lots of drinkable water along the way. Gathering water along
the way was always a risk.

Among the many sacrifices a professional in this business makes is they commit to eating at least one MRE per day even when
they aren't on duty. It's not that you like them, you simply want to live when you are on duty.

The Brit had been given time off while waiting for his next assignment. He had come home to England and taken a room at a
hotel he liked. There really wasn't much “home” left here for him. He had a sister, but he didn't really communicate with
her much. They got along well, and he loved her like a sister, but given what he did for a living, he kept his distance. She
was married with two kids and he didn't want to put any of the family he had left at risk.

Most people would take one look at this hotel and wonder why the Brit liked it. Achieving a two-star rating was simply a dream
for it. The Brit didn't mind so much. It was a blue-collar area. There were some good pubs within walking distance and the
owner liked him. The owner actually let him put a great big gun safe in a storage room. Thanks to home-owner marketing, the
gun safe simply looked like a great big safe. The only thing that made it a gun safe was the inside of it having notches to
stand guns upright on one side, hooks to hang hand guns in the back, and some shelves to put ordinary things on. This one
even had a smaller safe in the bottom of it so you could keep really valuable stuff.

The Brit grabbed his large duffel bag and headed for the gun safe. He met the owner on his way there.

“You've seen the news?”

“Aye mate.”

“They are sending you out to do something about this?” the owner queried, seeing the bag and backpack.

“Not this one so much as stopping the next three,” the Brit responded. “Too many regulars involved in this one for us to wander
in.”

With that the owner nodded and unlocked the storage room. Normally you wouldn't lock a storage room with little of value in
it, but the owner knew the gun safe was in there and given some of his clients, he'd lock up the little bars of soap if he
could. The owner didn't stick around to see what was in the safe. He understood this man's occupation enough to want to know
even less than he did know.

It was always kind of odd when the Brit stayed here. It was like the whole town knew the mercenaries were back. Fights didn't
happen in the bars very often. The really low-end scum didn't try to rent a room at his place. The drug dealers hid themselves,
well, most of them did, the others were just found dead in an alley shortly after doing a deal in the open. The people out
on these streets seemed to know the second one of these guys' planes touched down. Anyone who lived here long enough would
notice the quiet. It was like the quiet when wildlife flees before an earthquake.

***

Vladimir had his Web surfing interrupted by a special WAV file playing on his ping server. One of the control programs he
had loaded on the email user's machines was designed to gather a fresh information packet about the machine and send it to
him every time the machine booted. The machine serial number indicated the long silent first trainee had found his new home.

Another program was busy sending copies of each email message he received to a special folder on the ping server.
This guy wastes no time,
thought Vladimir. A routine check of the IP address showed that an email hub was once again in Pakistan.
Well,
thought Vladimir,
at least they won't have to move too far.
He prepared an email for the man in the suit and Hans containing the new location information and a link to the folder containing
the inbound email. He was pretty certain they would put the Brit to work on the email messages once his holiday was over.

The day was shaping up to be both quiet and productive. Soon there would be some new ping hits from the outbound emails being
opened. Things were going to be back to normal it looked like.

Fate simply doesn't like normal. No sooner had Vladimir thought this than he got another packet from a reboot. The machine
ID matched the second trainee, but the IP address looked different. A quick search of the previous packets proved Vladimir's
suspicion. Still in Bangalore, but no longer with the trainer. Vladimir sent out a tiny ping request to the trainer's machine
just to be sure it was still up and running. He had noticed a distinct drop off in the quantity of email messages being handled
by the trainer. Now it was starting to make sense.

The second email from Vladimir was much more excited. He included the new location information and the following:

All,

Second trainee has moved to new location in Bangalore. Not far from trainer, might even be in same housing complex.

Volume of email being handled by trainer almost non-existent now. Something big is getting ready to happen and the trainer
will be one part of the operation.

Vlad

As always, Vladimir was pretty certain his reports would be filed in the shredder by the man in the suit. Hans appeared to
actually read them and respond once in a while, but Vladimir knew he changed little when it came to the major decisions. They
did, however, take his advice about how to proceed with these email hubs; that was most unusual. Right now he was wondering
if that was such good advice. Strategically it made sense if you wanted to expose as much of the network as possible, but
that was before the trainer went nearly silent. Unless the team found out he had some terminal disease with only months to
live, this was a scary thing. Al-Qaeda didn't normally compromise assets this well placed.

***

Heidi was nearly dead on her feet. As expected, the couriers didn't spend very long at the interrogation camp. In less than
a week they all came to the second camp. They definitely needed a better method of harvesting because the small team they
had wasn't going to be able to handle the 60+ patients that just landed this morning at the interrogation camp if they all
came here at once.

She had a choice in front of her now. Drag her tired ass over to the dorm facility to take vitals, etc. of the two women there
now so she could sleep longer when she got home, or drag herself back here after only three hours of sleep. It wasn't that
difficult of a decision when you phrased it that way. She could have gotten four hours of sleep had she dared sleep in one
of the dorm rooms not being used by patients. Two of the surgeons were on their way to do just that now.

Two of the courier women had opted to serve as brood sows for embryonic cell creation. It really struck Heidi as odd that
two women who had been working for al-Qaeda would opt to do such a thing. Nikolaus explained to her that these were simply
couriers. They weren't part of a cause, just someone who collected a fee for carrying a dangerous package. They served terrorists
and drug dealers equally. One of the women was really a girl. She was not quite 16 yet. Besides being a courier she had been
selling sex to old men. She was tested for every kind of social disease when they found that out. She was also two months
pregnant when they nabbed her. Some time tomorrow she would have an abortion.

Perhaps it was because they were cooperating, or perhaps Nikolaus was getting soft in his own age. The women were allowed
to chose the method of insemination they received. They were presented with three options:

Extraction of egg, fertilization outside of the womb, and replacement.

Artificial insemination once it was verified they were ovulating. This would have to be done multiple times during ovulation.

Natural. Also would have to be done multiple times during ovulation.

Heidi couldn't believe both women asked if they would be able to choose the men and when they were told they could only select
from those at the camp they each chose natural. The women were allowed to roam around much of the dorm. They could only go
out on the second story balcony. The dorm was well guarded, and even if it wasn't there was no way they could get through
the camp's perimeter. It was stronger than a maximum security prison.

Each one had a television and radio. The television had a satellite feed with some movie channels. There were also quite a
few books in the library area, but most were technical reference books. Of course the library wasn't much use to these women.
They didn't speak much English and the girl couldn't read at all.

There were bedding, sheets, towels, etc. all provided for them. Each room had a little fridge which was kept stocked with
beverages and some snacks. Meals were brought over three times per day. They had been provided some additional clothing and
toiletries as well.