Spy Thriller: The Fourteenth Protocol: A Story of Espionage and Counter-terrorism (The Special Agent Jana Baker Book Series 1) (31 page)

83
             
 

“What do you mean,
a body
?” yelled Latent.

“Not a body, sir. A victim! They’ve got a live victim down there!”

Latent burst through the door of the command post and sprinted towards the habitrail enclosures.

“What’s happening?” he yelled deep into the decontamination chamber.

“It’s coming on the video monitors now. They’ve got a live one down there, sir. He’s barely alive, but he’s talking,” said an agent through his double-walled helmet. “Over there,” he said, pointing towards a bank of computer monitors.

Latent was glued to the video feed. “Give me that headset,” he said. The younger agent yanked them off his head like they were on fire. Down in the basement, Agent Fry and Keller were kneeling over a man stretched out on the ground. His breathing was shallow. He appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent.

Agent Fry said to the man, “What’s your name?” The man seemed to drift in and out of consciousness, and even when he was conscious, he was barely lucid. “Hey, can you hear me? What’s your name?”

The man mumbled something that sounded like “Thu-su-me . . .”

“I think he’s speaking in Arabic,” said Agent Keller, struggling to hear the low mumbling.

Fry yelled, “Can you speak English? What’s your name?”

The man lost consciousness but then snapped back, his black eyes fluttering.

“Shakey. They all call me Shakey.” His accent was heavy but his enunciation clear. He was punch-drunk—a cross between semiconscious and buzzed.

“Shakey? Okay, what’s your last name, Shakey? Your surname.”

“They all call me Shakey. Shakey Coon-deeeee . . .” The “d” sound rolled off of his tongue and seemed to reverberate against the cement walls.

Keller whispered to Fry, “Did you get that? I can barely hear him.”

Fry said, “Shakey?” He was yelling again. “Shakey? Stay with me, okay? What is your final objective? Hey, man, wake up. What-is-your- fi-nal-ob-jec-tive?”

Shakey grinned, and his head bobbed from side to side like he was listening to music. His eyes shut against the bright light as though he thought it might scorch his retinas.

“It is too late, my friends. Yes, too late . . . too late . . .” said the man.

While Fry distracted him, Keller knelt down and pressed the man’s right pointer finger and thumb against a small digital pad, about the size of a cell phone. The screen blinked to life and scanned the fingerprints. Keller clicked the upload button. The prints would be instantly run through the National Crime Information Center’s database.

“What are we too late for?” said Fry. “Shakey? Shakey?” But his eyes, still slightly open, froze then the pupils rolled upwards. And where the whites of his eyes should have been, only a bloodshot shock of red and umber remained. He was gone. “Shit, where’s my goddamn medic? Quick, grab his feet, let’s get him out of here. Maybe they can revive him.” But both agents knew it was too late.

84
             
 

“All right, now, roll the video back to the sixteenth, the date of the train derailment. Right, good,” said Jana, peering over Charlie’s shoulder and looking at the surveillance video. “Scroll up to about the time of explosion. I want to see what happened inside this plant when the bridge blew up.”

“Okay, well, that’s going to take a while,” said Charlie. “We have sixty-four cameras inside the facility. Where do we start?”

“It’s easy,” said Jana. “Start with the cameras that monitor where the nuclear material is stored. Not the material that’s inside the reactor, but where the excess uranium is stored prior to use.”

“Okay, inside the storage facility. Here you go. This camera angle shows the entrance to the room where the material is normally stored.”

The view on the video screen revealed a room deep inside the recesses of the building. The room was triple-walled in glass or some type of thick Lucite. While some workers were entering the room, a few stood on opposite sides of a sealed, translucent box that ran most of the length of the room. Their arms reached deep inside the box through small circular openings that were lined with thick, arm-length rubber gloves. At the bottom of the screen, a digital readout displayed the time of day down to the millisecond. The numbers rattled by.

Cade said, “Can you fast forward this? Good, good. Okay, we have people working inside the room . . . what are they doing in there? What’s inside that giant aquarium thing?”

“See, I told you,” said Mize. “It was a swap day. They’re collecting the canisters of enriched uranium to move them to the reactor.”

“This is ridiculous,” Jana said. “You can’t even tell who’s who. All of them are covered head to toe in those damn space suits. If you put them all in a police lineup, you’d be staring at twelve guys dressed as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”

“They’re all removing canisters from the box and placing them on that sealed cart,” said Cade. “What about this guy? The guy on the end. He looks a little . . . I don’t know . . . twitchy?”

Jana focused on the man. It was hard to distinguish any features, but he appeared to be of average height and build. There was no way to see his hair color, much less his face.

“So wait,” said Jana. “Check the time of day. 8:38 a.m. Jesus, that’s about five minutes prior to the train derailment. Can you zoom in on that subject?”

“Ah, sure. But I don’t think it will help. His mask will obscure everything.” They watched closely as the man ambled back and forth.

Cade said, “It’s almost as if he’s appearing to be busy without actually doing anything.”

“Yeah, but look at that,” said Jana. “He just checked the time on that wall clock. He’s checking the time. What does this asshole think he’s waiting for?”

The view from the surveillance camera rattled sharply, causing the video to shake and distort.

“That’s it,” blurted Jana. “That’s it! Freeze the video. Look at the time stamp! 8:43 a.m. That was the exact moment the bombs detonated on the bridge.” Red strobe lights in the room erupted into a frenzied pulse due to the shockwave from the nearby bomb blast. Most workers froze in their tracks and looked at each other as tremendous vibrations rippled under their feet and shook the facility. One of them, likely a supervisor, waved his hands wildly, motioning everyone out of the room. As other workers evacuated, the lone subject rushed to the far end of the huge incubator-looking box containing the uranium tubes. He pushed his arms into a set of the arm-length rubber gloves built into the sidewalls of the box and grabbed one of the thick, cylindrical tubes. He placed it into a sliding metal drawer, yanked the drawer open, then removed the cylinder. In the chaos, no one noticed the cylinder at his side as he shuffled out of the room and disappeared from camera range.

“My God, my God,” said Mize as he collapsed into a swivel chair. “I just, I just . . . I can’t believe it. Right from under our noses. Oh my God.” Mize looked like a man who had just jumped off a high dive only to realize there was no water in the pool below. “Everything went haywire when that train was derailed. You don’t know what it was like. We thought it was an earthquake. Part of the train fell onto the roof of the loading facility. The entire facility went into full alert. We scrammed the reactor because we were afraid of radiation leakage. There was chaos. Just chaos.”

Jana’s hand pounded down on Charlie’s shoulder. “I want you to follow this motherfucker on camera wherever he moves. You got that? Pull up every recorded camera angle you have. If he moved anywhere in this facility, I want to know it.”

Jana stepped aside and pulled out her cell phone. “I need Bill Tarleton please. This is Special Agent Jana Baker . . . no, I can’t hold . . . I don’t care where he is! You listen and listen closely—you tell him this is a bright boy alert! I say again, this is a bright boy alert. This is not a drill. Do you understand that?”

Within moments Uncle Bill picked up the call, “Jana? Bright boy? Jesus Christ, where are you?”

“Bill, no-time-to-explain.” The words rolled off her tongue so fast it sounded like an auctioneer in high gear. “I’m going to be sending you a bunch of video streams from surveillance cameras inside of the Millstone Nuclear Power Station. We’ve got to identify someone in the video, and it’s not going to be easy.”

“Roger that. We’re on it. Just hand the phone to whoever’s there. I can give them instructions on how to send us the files.”

Three minutes later, on the video monitor, they watched the subject weave his way through hallway after hallway and out a side exit towards the employee parking area. At every view from the recorded video cameras, red strobe lights pulsed. People ran in all directions. The facility had gone into an emergency state as percussion from the blasts tripped an earthquake sensor. The reactor was shut down. Mize was right, it was chaos.

The camera that peered out onto the parking lot was obscured by a bright spot in the morning sun. The subject had shed the bulky white protective suit and was now visible as a male with a dark complexion and black hair. He wove across the parking lot, holding what looked like a particularly heavy small sack in his right hand. His face was obscured in the grainy images, but it appeared as though he stopped at a car that was just out of view on the far side of the lot. After a few moments, he returned to the facility—the bag was not in his hands. Even though he was walking into the camera angle, his face was still obscured.

Jana said, “Dammit, we can’t even see his vehicle. Okay, he’s walking back. He’s entering the building. We’ve got to have a face shot of him when he gets inside that doorway.”

“Hold on, hold on,” said Charlie, working the controls as best he could to find the proper camera angle. “Okay, this one is the north entrance. It’s pointing right at that door. Let me pull up the image.”

But as the image came on the screen, the sea of people darting in all directions made it impossible to tell which one was the subject.

“Shit,” said Jana. “All right, box it up. Get all those video streams to NSA.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Charlie.

Senior Operations Chief Mize stared off into space. “I, I don’t understand. How did you know? How did you know we were missing some nuclear material?”

Jana said nothing.

“It was a hunch, wasn’t it?” said Mize. “You didn’t have a shred of evidence, did you? What brought you here in the first place?”

Jana looked at him. “The train derailment. It was too much of a coincidence that it occurred almost on top of a nuclear facility. We had to find where they got the nuclear material. And now we know. I’m sorry.”

85
             
 

Two hours later, Jana and Cade stood on the edge of the radiation containment zone in Queens. All residents had been evacuated and were waiting in queues to be interviewed. Dozens of agents were taking statements about anything and everything that might be related to the Hiroshima Hilton. All of the information from the Millstone Nuclear Power Station had been relayed to Latent, who was thrilled to get a break in the case.

Latent barged out of the command center tent and spun back around, yelling into the entryway. “Goddammit! Where are my fucking fingerprints? We should have had an ID on this dead asshole already! I want some prints, and I want them yesterday.”

A muffled set of “yessirs” ushered out.

“Baker! Damn good work. Unbelievable work.” He leaned towards her and said, “Before we sent you into the Thoughtstorm building, I took a look at your personnel file. You were raised by your grandfather? Let me tell you something, Jana. He would be very proud of you right now.” The sentiment, sincerity, and thought of just how right he was reminded Jana of the emptiness of her past. Her throat tightened.

“Thank you, sir,” was all she could muster. “Sir, about Uncle Bill, I’m betting he’s going to have an ID for us on the subject at Millstone. He’s got everyone working on it.”

“I know he does, Baker,” said Latent. “Bill and I just talked. Listen, Mr. Williams has been invaluable up to this point.”

“But?”

“But I’m afraid it’s going to get a little dangerous from here on out. Besides, Bill wants Cade working with him directly. He’s still poring over Rupert Johnston’s papers, and Cade might be instrumental in spotting anything in those writings that would tip us to the last bomb chucker. There’s an NSA jet inbound to pick him up.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jana.

“We’ve got more agents than we need on these civilian interviews,” said Latent. “So far we haven’t turned up shit. I tell you what, that jet won’t be here for a little while. Why don’t you two report over there to Agent Hill. He’ll give you a few houses that are just outside the containment zone to canvas. I know it doesn’t sound like exciting work, but if there’s a thirty-eighth terrorist with a nuclear device out there, we can’t catch him if we don’t know what he looks like, what he’s driving, or where he’s going.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Baker, keep your eyes open for anything, anything at all. It could be the littlest thing that catches him right now.”

Forty-five minutes later, Jana and Cade knocked on their seventh door. The previous six interviews of civilians produced exactly the result that Jana anticipated, nothing. Latent was right, this was boring work.

“Well, this has been a colossal waste of time,” said Jana.

“Hey remember, Agent Baker, he said the littlest thing could be important right now.”

“Damn, you might as well be an agent yourself,” she said.

“Who is it?” called a female voice from behind the home’s front door.

“Federal agents, ma’am.” Cade looked at her; Jana just shrugged. “We have some questions, please open the door.”

The woman was in her late twenties and carried the burden of a little black-haired boy, whose legs swung wildly against her sides. The grin on his face was as wide as a banana.

“LOONS, Mama, loons. Loons, Mama, loons,” said the boy, his eyes darting up to the ceiling each time.

“Hush, honey, hush,” said the mother. “Let’s talk to these nice people. I’m sorry, he gets a little excited. How can I help you?”

“FBI, ma’am,” said Jana holding out her credentials. “As you know, there’s been an incident a few blocks over. We’re asking residents if they’ve seen anything unusual in recent days or weeks.”

“LOONS, LOONS, LOOOOOOOONS, Mama, loons!”

“Now hush, honey. I’m real sorry about that. Yes, I saw all the commotion. And you evacuated four square blocks? Wow. That must be some incident.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, ma’am. He’s just fine. Have you seen anything unusual that you can think of? Anything at all?”

“Mama-loons, mama-loons, mama-loons!” The words rolled off the boy’s tongue with the rhythm of a freight train clicking across the tracks. The boy laughed hysterically and buried his face in his mother’s hair.

“Now, honey! Here, you go play.” She put him down, and he ran off, dragging a white security blanket along with him, giggling the whole way. “Loonloons, loonloons, mamaloons . . .”

Jana smiled at the boy. “What’s he saying, by the way? What are loons?”

“Oh! Loons, yes. That’s his word for bal-loons. He’s obsessed with balloons. A four-year-old. Can’t clean up his room but he can darn sure blow up a balloon all by himself. I don’t know what made him start spouting off about balloons just then. Anyway, ah, no, I can’t say I’ve seen anything unusual. Was there anything specific?”

“We’re trying to locate anyone who may have seen people going or coming from the house. Here’s a card with a number you can call. If you think of anything, even a small detail, please let us know. We appreciate your cooperation.”

As the door closed, Jana and Cade walked to the next house.

“That just about cracks the case, huh?” said Cade.

“Well, sometimes you get to knock on a few doors asking inane questions, and other times you get to go to a nuclear plant and tell the supervisor you’re going to crack his skull if he doesn’t cooperate. You take the good with the bad, I guess.”