Take the Fourth (21 page)

Chapter 31
 

T
he day of the shootings at the mall proved to be a quintessential turning point in the fight against terrorism. It took only a mere half of day to pinpoint all of the assailants, much to the chagrin of evil doers worldwide. Yes, that day placed second thoughts in the mind on many would be terrorists. It was that day that every arm of American law enforcement seemed to be under one umbrella. It was the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA, local and state police, and a few black ops that no one knows about, that on that day, the day of carnage, worked as if they were all tentacles of the same octopus. They communicated effortlessly, efficiently—teamwork at its finest. They worked together, they exchanged data together, they analyzed together, they solved together and together they didn’t do a damn thing to abolish this perception. Smoke and mirrors, duct tape, chewing gum, lies upon lies, who knows what else was holding this mirage together; in reality the togetherness was just a veneer, a pipe dream, brought on by Homeland Security. Homeland Security was supposed to be the glue, the middle man, the collaborating partner in the fight against terrorism—holding a warehouse of information and communication protocols for everybody’s use but behind the scenes there was discombobulation. Agencies were still very protective with the data they gathered and the data they shared but somehow, somewhere, and at some point in time, the pivotal data in this case was placed on the databases of Homeland Security and acted upon, thus providing a perception of alertness and justification—remember perception is ninety percent of the battle.

It was a phone call that started the chain of events that day, a phone call placed by Scott Norwood.

“Listen,
obviously
you’ve
heard
the
news
about
the
mall
and
that
two
assailants
were
taken
out,
I’ve
just
talked
with
the
President,
he
gave
the
nod,
I
need
as
much
information
within
the
hour
so
it
can
be
fed
to
the
proper
channels,”
a
click
was
the
next
thing
heard.”

With that, an IP address was dial up on his monitor, a login and password entered, and just like that he had access to a database the world would never see; the very notion of its existence would shatter the world and consume the government’s infrastructure, never to be trusted again. He had very few facts to go on: he knew the location, the approximate time, and that two assailants were killed, everything else was sketchy at best. The first order of business would be to gather the complete lists—the before list and the after list. The before list was a list of tax identification numbers a.k.a. social security numbers (everybody in the U.S. had one—it was the law) that were within a five hundred meter perimeter of the mall just before the shootings occurred. The time of the shootings were approximately 2:15 p.m., so the reference time would be 2:10 p.m. since each pass of a satellite receptor was a five minute interval. Oh how times have changed thanks to technology. In the old days the intervals first started out as every twenty-four hours, then twelve, eight, and so on and so forth, to the present day of just every five minutes. Tomorrow it will be every minute and the next it will be instantaneous but until then five minutes will have to do. He then needed a reference ending time and chose 2:20 p.m. The next key information is the approximate latitude and longitude of the shootings easily obtained from any satellite photo or even Google Maps for that matter. Time and place are entered into the prompts of the custom program and in a flash there is a list of 34,302 people who have been identified within the proximity of the shootings that were alive at 2:10 p.m.—the before list. Next he entered the same criteria except changing the time to his ending reference and the information is much different. This is the after list—27,443 social security numbers within the original radius; a difference of almost seven thousand people. A quick analysis yields a mass exodus just after the shootings and rightfully so. Since the NID’s need pumping blood to maintain communication, cross referencing the seven thousand people difference with those still transmitting at 2:20 p.m. yields sixty-two individuals who are no longer transmitting. At 2:25 the number jumps to sixty-four, then to sixty-five five minutes later but when all is said and done—hours later, the number is seventy-eight—the exact confirmed death toll of the Holiday Mall Massacre. Now out of the sixty-two, two of them are the assailants and a further breakdown of the data confirms there are two different shooting locations: location A—the one with twenty-six people no longer transmitting and location B—the one where thirty-six people are no longer transmitting. Now this is where multi-tasking takes place, while at his computer he overhears the television and two different reports confirm that two gunman were brought down outside of Macy’s. Checking the exact location of Macy’s, he also confirms that group “A” now contains the two dead gunmen—his reference set just got smaller, only twenty-six people . . Again listening to news reports, the two gunmen appeared to be in their late teens to early twenties and Caucasian, the reference set grows smaller yet again. Crosschecking yields only six victims in that range, two of which are the gunmen. With six social security numbers at hand and on the computer screen in front of him, further investigating is mere child’s play. Of the six people, two are from Wayne, Pennsylvania, one from Philadelphia, one is from a little town in New Jersey, and the other two are from Ohio, he now fully concentrates on the pairs of men. The Ohio men yield some fascinating results in the database. As of five o’clock this morning they were staying in the Holiday Inn right across from the mall. Further data mining tells us they were staying there for the past month and appeared to be working at the mall for the past month as well. Just like Interpol in Europe, the United States requires each hotel’s database to be online with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Homeland Security, which can also be accessed by the CIA or DNI. Crosschecking the hotel’s database proves they were using aliases for there were no matches based on their social security numbers, however the hotel’s database provided the credit card numbers for all persons whose stay was greater than twenty-one days. There were four rooms booked and three of them were to the same credit card number. Using a credit card for three rooms, using aliases with fake ID’s upon checking, working at the mall, one plus one plus one certainly adds up to a fishy three. Without a doubt in his mind the names of the gunman were found; two of them at least, from Ohio. On a hunch he inputs more search parameters into the program—out of the filtered list of seven thousand who were now missing from the scene within a ten minute window of the crimes, just how many were from Ohio and in the age range of sixteen to twenty-five? Again in a flash, the programs spits out only five social security numbers up on his screen. So where were these five as of five o’clock this morning? One was in Valley Forge staying at a residential address, the other was in Atlantic City at the Trump Plaza, one was staying at the exact Holiday Inn as the others—bingo again, and the last two staying at a Comfort Inn just up the street from the mall. Checking the Comfort Inn’s database, and guess what—aliases again. Three more gunmen have been found. A wee bit more checking finds that the five cold blooded killers lived within a twenty-five mile radius of one another just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. They were Michael Romberger age 18, Matthew Gieger age 21, Steven Tyler (no relation to Aerosmith’s lead singer) age 18, Gene Lynner age 18, and Brian O’Neil age 19.

The search took fourteen minutes. The time was now 2:46 p.m. Three of the gunmen are MIA but not for long. Inputting the three remaining social security numbers into the computer and the results are the coordinates and a big “Gotcha!!!” The three social security numbers are just outside Downingtown, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, at a service station. The three numbers will now have a marker placed on them and the program will begin updating their coordinates every five minutes—they will be tracked and with nowhere to run.

“Just how much more information should be obtained,” he asked himself? “Another forty-five minutes worth,” was the answer. So let’s build a timeline. 2:45 p.m. three gunmen at a service station on the PA turnpike. 2:15 three gunmen are in a parking lot outside the mall, two are dead. 1:30 p.m.

From 1:30 p.m. back to at least 10:45 p.m. the following day, the five gunmen were in their various hotel rooms. Going back a month, they can be seen going to and from the mall and the hotel; all of them working different stores but all in close proximity to the shooting sites. The timeline doesn’t vary much but there are the occasional trips outside their realm. For instance, on December 15th all five ventured to a movie theater, based on the time and the theater’s database, they watched the latest slasher flick by Wes Craven. Rifling through all sales receipts for the show time proved they paid cash unless they used another alias and credit card. On December 8th all five again went out, this time to Chi Chi’s, a local Mexican eatery. Linking the database from the theater on the 15th and Chi Chi’s on the 8th, there is a credit card match—a one Mr. William Parker. Upon closer examination of the restaurant’s bill and matching it with the credit card receipt, one can see five entrees were ordered, three appetizers, two sodas, and six beers (looks like there might be some pretty good fake ID’s in the mix as well, for only one was of legal age in the state of Pennsylvania and Chi Chi’s always, always cards being on probation and one more violation from closing). Coincidence is plausible until the card also has one transaction for five tickets to a Wes Craven film on December 15th. This credit card is flagged for all expenses in the past year along with the cards used at the hotels. Back to the timeline. Right before Thanksgiving, actually the Monday before and before the busy holiday season when stores need the most help, they are located on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading east but the five are not together—separate cars. At noon the cars are two hours apart but at nine o’clock, three hours earlier, the cars were within one hundred feet of one another. Strange, why the lag time all of a sudden? Car problems maybe? More digging is required. A little before 7 a.m. Monday morning they entered the PA Turnpike—somewhere between 6:45 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. At that point in time the turnpike’s computer has roughly six hundred cars entering the exchange so cross check with the credit cards that were already flagged and lo and behold there are two rental cars; one for a grey Chrysler Neon, the other for a red Dodge Daytona. Now it is a matter of querying the Avis data banks and the license plates are obtained. The license-plates are matched to the picture database the turnpike stores and within thirty seconds the software spits out sixteen images, eight of each car. Smile, you’re on candid camera. Clear as a bell too. There are great pictures of the Neon, the driver, and two passengers. Same holds true for the Daytona—again the driver and two passengers are clear as the day the planes hit the towers on 9/11.

Wait! Two passengers? Two passengers in each car? A total of six gunmen, not five. What happened to the other gunman… the lone gunman? Checking the clock he has fifteen minutes before his report is due to Scott. Still time. Now he must isolate the Daytona, preferably away from traffic as to not to interfere with other social security numbers in the same coordinates. Remembering the coordinates are accurate to within six feet, he also needs to take into account any passing automobiles. At 7:00 a.m. the first search based on a coordinate pairing produces twelve social security numbers—two of the numbers are already identified, so the lone gunmen resides in the other ten. At 7:05 and 7:10 respectively, there is only an elimination of one other number, it looks as though traffic was at a crawl. Spacing out the search by another half hour and the magic number is shown on the screen, belonging to a Simon Trudell, age 18. So where is Simon now… . and “Access Denied.” Strange he thought and tried it again—“Access Denied.” He tried another search, this time for his wife and the same reply was shown on the screen “Access Denied.” He didn’t get a “Server Unavailable” or a hundred other messages implying database backup or system maintenance. It was he himself that was being denied access which was strange in and of itself for there were only three other people who had access to the machine and knew its purpose and two were at the White House and one of them had asked for his help in the research.