Support and Defend (13 page)

M
OMENTS LATER
C
ARUSO,
the girl, and the three tattooed men in leather jackets were standing on the dark sidewalk in front of The Pig. A few couples passed them by, uninterested in or unaware of the impending trouble. The blond with the goatee squared off in front of Caruso, his nostrils pulsating as the adrenaline rush of the moment sped up his breathing.

The girl said exactly what Dom expected her to say: “Please. Don’t do this for me.”

Caruso did not reply, he only smiled at her a little. It wasn’t about the girl anymore. He faced the big man, while the other two stood behind their leader.

“One-hit fight!” The guy said it again. Dom wondered if he ever said anything else.

“Shut up, Doyle! You too, Joey. This asshole’s all mine,” replied the blond with the goatee.

Dom maintained a relaxed exterior. On the inside he was already chastising himself for not deescalating this situation. He forced himself to make one more halfhearted attempt. “So, Shane, any chance you want to just call it a night?”

“I’m gonna beat the fuck out of you.”

Dom did not reply. He knew Arik Yacoby would not have been proud of him at all, and this only made him madder at himself.

Shane was going to suffer for Dom’s anger.

Shane ambled forward nonchalantly, and Dom saw that he was trying to close the distance he needed to take him down with a single punch. Dom let him close, kept his hands down to his sides and his shoulders relaxed. Even when the big blond adjusted his stance, stepping one foot out and the other back, getting himself ready to throw a jab, Dom continued to portray an air of someone oblivious as to what was about to happen.

Dom wasn’t oblivious, however. He was reading all the tells. Shane was clearly a trained boxer, right-handed, going for a headshot, and his plan was to drop his opponent, no doubt with one shot to the jaw to impress his buddies.

Dom took a half calming breath, his eyes unfixed on anything, but all his senses primed for the attack to come.

Doyle shouted once again. “A one-hit fight!”

Shane’s right hand was down by his side, but Dom noted the instant it morphed into a massive, square fist. When the fist fired up at Dom’s face he was prepared to bob away from it, but instead he used his speed to bring his left elbow up to the side of his head as he swiveled his torso. The punch glanced off the high elbow and was deflected by Dom’s spin, knocking Shane’s arm across his own body and causing him to lose his balance since he’d thrown all his weight behind the jab.

Dom continued his spin by stepping across his body with his left leg, picking up speed as he rotated in place, whipping his own right arm out away from his body and launching it in a 360-degree arc, a blur of knuckles and leather jacket that fanned through the night air.

Dominic’s spinning back fist struck perfectly against the big bearded man’s jaw, the wet splat of bone on bone with flesh caught between echoed off the front windows of the pub. Shane’s head jacked to the left and his legs gave out, as if a switch had been thrown and all muscles holding himself upright had just been shut down for the evening.

Shane crumpled to the sidewalk awkwardly as his two big friends stood stupefied.

Dom looked up at Doyle. “Whaddaya know? You were right.”

As Dom expected, Doyle was the next to attack. He telegraphed his movements as he charged. He was a lefty, he planned a hook as soon as he got in striking distance, but Dom stepped diagonally into the hook, parried it with his forearm, and then backed up into Doyle’s advance. Dom drove his head back into Doyle’s face, then took his left arm and used it to throw the big man over his back, slamming him down on the sidewalk with incredible force.

The air bellowed from Doyle’s lungs with the impact, and he gasped like a fish on a dock, desperate to fill his lungs back.

The third big man, Joe, hadn’t said much of anything. He seemed to be in some shock that his two friends were lying on their backs in front of him, but he kept his focus on the man who put him there.

He raised his hands into fists and moved closer.

Dom said, “You don’t have to do this, Joe. Shane’s your boss, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Construction?”

“Large appliance delivery.”

“Large appliance delivery,” Dom repeated, as if this should have been obvious. Then, “He’s going to be off work for a couple of weeks. Doyle, too. He’ll be pissed you didn’t stand up for him after he and Doyle went down, but at least this way you can generate some income for him while he’s out.”

Joe seemed to consider this; he actually weighed the pros and cons. Finally he gave a half-shrug. “He won’t see it like that. He’s not that great a businessman.”

“Then find a new boss,” Dom said.

“Tough economy.”

Dom regarded the statement. “True. I guess you better just let me beat the shit out of you.”

Before he got the last words out, Joe charged forward. Dom was surprised by the man’s sudden speed and intensity, and the attacker managed to get inside of Dom’s punch and wrap his arms around Dom’s arms, pinning them high over his head.

Dom’s bruised ribs cried in agony and the muscles around them seized, his back spasmed from his shoulder blade to his tailbone.

The big man lifted him in the air with ease. Dom had no doubt he was one hell of a large appliance deliveryman.

As Dom felt himself go inverted behind Joe’s head he pushed out of the hold around his arms, then kicked harder, away through the air behind his attacker. He landed on his feet, unsteady and in pain, but perfectly positioned when his Joe turned to find the man he just tossed like a rag doll an instant before now facing him in a fighting stance.

Dom punched the man hard in the nose. His head snapped back but quickly returned to neutral. His nose was red, but he showed no sign of any physical deficit from taking a hard jab to the snot box.

Joe smiled at Dom as if to say, “That’s all you’ve got?”

Dom answered the unasked question by firing out another jab, but this time he extended his fingers, turning his fist into a spear, and he gouged into the big man’s solar plexus, then followed with a spear from his left hand into Joe’s throat, just enough to put him on his back, rolling in the street in a coughing fit, five feet away from Shane, who was still out cold, and Doyle, who had rolled onto his hands and knees but was still gasping in search of air to replenish his empty lungs.

Dom stood in the middle and regarded his handiwork. He knew Arik wouldn’t have been proud of his student’s inability to move away from an avoidable threat. But Arik couldn’t have faulted his fighting skills. He’d taught Dom a lot in a month of daily grappling and training.

And Dom had put it to use.

After a moment, however, he remembered this altercation had involved a woman. He looked around for her, and found her standing by the curb. This wasn’t his first bar fight over a female. He knew the brunette would either be repulsed by the fight, and think as little of Dom as she did for the men he was trying to protect her from—and in that case she would walk away quickly, now that it was over—or else be drawn to him. She would latch on, and she wouldn’t be going anywhere without her brave defender.

He looked up the sidewalk to see which one this girl was going to be. He saw her standing there the night, her arms crossed tightly over her body, shielding herself from the fight in front of her.

She said, “That was honorable, what you did. Trying to talk the one guy out of it.”

“He didn’t want it any more than I did. He was just obligated. Boys’ rules.”

She nodded. Said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I really thought chivalry was dead.”

“It’s in intensive care. Occasional signs of life.”

She smiled, batted her eyes. He saw what was going on behind the eyes. She was sizing up this situation. Bar fights and strangers coming to her aid weren’t the sort of thing that happened to her.

“I’m Monica.”

“Dominic.”

They shook hands. Dom turned to head back to his place, doing his best to hide the fact his ribs and back were killing him, but she didn’t let him get twenty-five feet before she caught up to him.

“I hate to sound trite, but would you let me buy you a drink? Seems the least I could do.”

Dom jerked his head toward The Pig. The windows were full of patrons and employees staring at the three big men on the sidewalk and the smaller man who’d put them there. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m not welcome back in there tonight.”

“We can go to the bar at my hotel. I’m at the Loews Madison. It’s right around the corner.”

Dom sighed a little, but he didn’t let it show. His designs on mindless sex tonight had fallen by the wayside the moment the bear-hug flip aggravated the pain in his badly bruised ribs. As beautiful as the woman in front of him was, at the moment he felt more passionate about going home for a short-term relationship with a bag of ice.

“I’ll walk you back to your hotel,” he said. “Just in case those guys manage to put themselves back together and hit the streets looking for mischief. But then I’m going to call it a night.”

Monica seemed a little crestfallen, she just nodded without replying. Dom figured it upped his cachet with her even more. Once she got over the embarrassment of rejection, she would take his rebuff as chivalry.

T
HE
E
CONOMY
I
NN
in Richmond, Virginia, was a locally owned and operated establishment, although it did its best to trick travelers passing under its sign on Interstate 64 into thinking it was part of a well-known and similarly named national two-star chain. Anyone fooled into stopping for the night, thinking they would find some standard of at least minimal quality, would be disappointed as soon as they were buzzed in to the tiny lobby. The bait-and-switch sign over the interstate had clearly been the main marketing focus of the owners, because the property itself was an unapologetic dump. Cheap furniture, old and threadbare carpeting, and a sour smell greeted anyone entering the three-story motor-court-style hotel’s common area, and the rooms themselves were no better.

The inn was less than fifteen percent occupied, but two middle-aged men sat together on a lumpy bed in room 309, anxiously smoking cigarettes and looking at their mobile phones. Both men were big; one was an ex–tight end at Virginia Tech, though that had been twenty-two years earlier, and since then his job at an auto parts retailer required him lifting nothing heavier than the occasional car battery. And the other man was just fat. He’d never done much of anything sports-related. Just a young nerd who’d morphed quite naturally and comfortably into a middle-aged sloth.

The tight end illuminated the screen on his phone for the twentieth time in the past thirty minutes. “Ten-fifty-eight. Where the hell is this mother—”

A soft knock at the door caused both men to bolt upright. The fat nerd stood and took a step back away from it, and the tight end stood and looked through the peephole in the door. He nodded to his cohort, then slowly opened it.

A small, young-looking man stood in the dim of on the third-floor landing. He was alone; his dark eyes seemed wide and terrified as he looked up to the man filling the doorway. “Uh . . . You are Mr. White?” His accent was French.

Behind the tight end in the doorway, the fat man by the bathroom door said, “That’s me. You are Mr. Black?”

The small man on the landing looked back and forth quickly between the two men. He seemed like he might turn around and run away. Instead he said, “I . . . I do not understand, Mr. White. We had an agreement. You were to be alone.”

The tight end grabbed him by the collar and led—not quite pulled—him inside the room. He kicked the door behind him.

Mr. White said, “Relax. I brought a friend just in case you brought anyone with you or tried anything funny. He’s going to search you for a wire.”

The tight end had the young man against the wall a second later, and he pulled off the man’s backpack and tossed it on the bed, then felt under his jacket, raking his hands all over.

The young foreign man said, “A . . . wire? What does this mean?” His voice cracked as he spoke. He looked and acted petrified, and this relaxed the two Americans considerably.

“Just calm down,” White said. “You understand my predicament here. I have to make certain you aren’t a Fed.”

“But you
know
me. We have been communicating for over a year.”

“And you know
me
, Black. I’m taking a big fucking risk meeting you like this. I don’t know this isn’t some kind of a sting. My buddy is going to make sure you’re legit, and then we can get down to business.”

The tight end lifted the man’s shirt up, and realized the foreigner couldn’t be one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet. He turned around to face White. “He’s clean.”

“C’mon, man. You forgot to check his bag.”

“Oh, right.” He opened the backpack, pulled out a thin MacBook Air computer, a mobile phone, and some power cables. He turned the bag upside down and shook it over the bed, but nothing else came out.

“Good,” said White. “Have a seat.”

The foreign man sat down at the little chair by the desk and White sat back on the bed. There were less than five feet apart in the tiny room.

The tight end stood by the door, looking down on the both of them.

Mr. Black put his hands on his knees as if to steady himself or to fight off a wave of nausea.

“You okay?” asked White.

“Would it be okay if your friend waited outside while we conduct business? I am sorry, but I am a little nervous about this.”

White just smiled, lit another cigarette, and nodded to his friend. “Eddie, go out and have a smoke.” He looked at the small foreign man in front of him. “I’ll shout if I need something.”

The tight end said, “I’ll be right outside.” The big tight end left through the door, pulling his cigarettes and lighter off the table as he exited.

M
R.
W
HITE’S NAME
was not White, it was Phillip McKell. He was a systems infrastructure analyst for L-3 Communications Corp., a government contractor that worked, like Booz Allen Hamilton, on the U.S. government’s classified intelligence networks. He was an expert on JWICS infrastructure, and he held a top-secret security clearance. He’d met Black, in the virtual world anyway, in an online technology forum a year earlier. The relationship started with a few comments under each other’s postings, but soon McKell realized the two shared many interests. At first the man he came to know as Black claimed to be a university student interested in all things related to America and computer science, but over time Black revealed during private encrypted chats to McKell that he was, in fact, a French national and, most interestingly to McKell, he was a member of Anonymous, the largest and most infamous worldwide hacktivist group.

McKell was disbelieving at first, but when Black told him, again privately, about an upcoming Anonymous computer denial-of-service attack on the websites of the British government, and then the attack actually happened, McKell realized he was in communications with the real deal: an actual Anonymous hacktivist.

McKell knew he shouldn’t have continued the online relationship. He was already violating company regulations by having an online identity and communicating with others on technical forums; if L-3 found out he’d engaged in private chats with an Anonymous member, he’d be fired on the spot and stripped of his security clearance. But McKell saw in Black a potential payday. There was a reward for information leading to the arrest of members of Black’s organization, and McKell knew people collecting the reward could remain nameless. This was an attempt to protect traitors to the Anonymous organization, but McKell thought he might be able to collect a reward for turning Black in to the authorities, so he remained in contact with the Frenchman. Early on he realized he had nothing tangible whatsoever on the man, and attempted to cultivate more of a friendship in the hopes of learning real information about his identity. That, he felt certain, would earn him a big payoff.

Unfortunately for Phillip McKell, however, his priorities changed when he lost his job at L-3 and his coveted security clearance, after a surprise spot audit of his home computer turned up a record of his online forum postings. McKell argued that he did not share classified information about government networks, and all his correspondence online was kept to a general open-source level. But the investigators didn’t see it like that. Sharing any details about his work was a violation of his security clearance and then, with the pulled clearance, came the loss of his job on secure networks.

He was actually told by the chief government investigator on his case, “You’ll never work in this town again.”

After he lost his job he quickly became desperate for money. He tried harder to get Black to reveal his identity so he could collect the reward, he even shared information about himself—it hardly mattered now that his clearance had been yanked. But when Black didn’t budge, McKell decided he’d earn money by working the opposite end of this equation. The out-of-work American actually made a proposal to Black. He told him he could give Anonymous information about the inner workings of U.S. government networks. His thinking was that Black’s organization might pay for technical help in designing its own direct denial-of-service attack on Washington, D.C.

Black promised he’d ask his higher-ups what they thought it was worth, and then, a few days later, he came back to McKell with a shocking counterproposal.

Anonymous wanted to conduct an actual infiltration of JWICS top-secret Intelink-TS network, and they wanted McKell to build the infiltration agent software to do it.

McKell laughed when he read Black’s request, and he quickly typed back it was impossible, since the top-secret network was not accessible via standard Internet access unless one had access to a virtual private network. McKell wasn’t on a VPN when he worked for L-3, and he sure as hell wasn’t now. Someone would have to physically breach the network by sitting at a computer on the system to load the software. Anonymous hackers couldn’t do it from some basement in France or Germany.

Black replied, quite simply, “That’s our problem, not yours. If you build the infiltration agent, we’ll find someone to upload it. For your work you will be paid three million dollars.”

From that second on, McKell thought of nothing but all that money and how he could get his hands on it. He set up an account in Dubai, gave the account and routing numbers to Black, and within hours one hundred thousand dollars had been deposited into the account as earnest money. Satisfied he was dealing with people who could and would fulfill their end of the bargain, Phillip McKell locked himself in his house, ate nothing but pizza delivery for nearly six weeks while he worked on his code for the infiltration agent.

McKell knew the U.S. intelligence infrastructure back to front, and through this knowledge he was aware of the physical drive locations where top-secret information was kept. The key to his infiltrator program was its “crawler” function, which went into the location, then both copied and categorized the data before downloading it.

After his weeks of constant work and never-ending pizza, McKell’s task was complete. He contacted Black, and the delivery date was confirmed.

And now Mr. Black sat in front of him. But just as White’s name was not White, Black’s name was not Black.

His name was Mohammed Mehdi Mobasheri. He’d arrived from Tehran via Beirut the day before for this meeting, after having spent the past year cultivating McKell on the technology forums, while simultaneously confirming his position and access with L-3 Communications.

This was just the first step of Mohammed’s plan, approved by the Supreme Leader, but the rest of the plan hinged on the obese, amoral, and obviously godless American seated on the dirty bed in front of him.