Terminal Justice (8 page)

“Nice suit, man,” a heavily accented voice said behind him. A.J. turned to see three young Hispanic men approaching him. They were dressed in similar fashion, each wearing flannel shirts buttoned to the collar and baggy black pants. Their hair was cut almost to the scalp, and one wore a red bandanna. A.J. recognized the garb as that worn by a local street gang. “Looks real expensive.”

A.J. said nothing as he turned to face the gang members.

“I bet a man with a suit like that must carry a lot of cash,” said the one with the bandanna. “How about it, man. You got money for me?”

“No,” A.J. replied firmly. “I didn’t bring my wallet.”

“You wouldn’t be lying to us, would you? We don’t like liars.”

A.J. knew he should turn and run. There was no doubt that he could outdistance them in short order, but he also knew that at least one of them had a gun. Instead of running, A.J. laughed.

“What’s so funny, man?” the youth asked harshly, spitting out his words. “You laughing at me?”

“Let me get this right,” A.J. said. “You don’t like liars. A gang of thieves, bullies, rapists, and killers are okay, but liars are beneath you.”

“You know what I’m gonna do, man?” the gang member said viciously as he pulled a .38 police special from under his shirt and
pointed it at A.J.’s chest. “I’m gonna shoot you in the head, steal your money, and take your fancy running suit. Do you find that funny, man?” The hood then nodded to the other two gang members, who approached A.J. and took hold of his arms.

To the gunman A.J. said, “How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”

“Old enough to blow your brains all over this street.”

“Maybe this question is easier for your twisted little mind to answer: Are you the leader?”

“Yeah. So?”

A.J. smiled, nodded, then with astonishing speed he swung his arms back and then upward, breaking the grip of his would-be captors. With the same fluid motion he grabbed their faces in his large hands, and with all of his well-honed strength he smashed their skulls together with a sickening thud that echoed down the street. The two men slumped to the sidewalk unconscious. Without wasting a moment, A.J. turned sideways and rushed the gunman. A.J. heard the shot fired and saw the flash from the muzzle, but his sudden move to the side kept him from being hit. Half a moment later, A.J. had the gunman’s outstretched arm pinned under his own left arm with the gun pointed behind him.

With his right hand, A.J. seized the gang member by the throat and squeezed enough to cause pain, but not enough to close his trachea or pinch off the carotid arteries. A.J. wanted him conscious.

“I don’t like you or hoods like you,” A.J. said viciously, his eyes wide and his jaw clamped shut so that he had to force the words through his teeth. “You are leeches who live off the blood and terror of others. You tear down the good that others do. Day after day I see your kind threatening and torturing the innocent, as if you have some right to take what’s not yours. For you, my friend, that ends today.” The hood struggled to free himself, but A.J.’s adrenaline-aided strength was too much for him.

Anger boiled in A.J., anger that was fueled by the death of Dr. Judith Rhodes and now the loss of the
Sea Maid
. His heart beat
strenuously, and adrenaline seemed to pour into his veins by the gallon. He felt strong and alive and powerful. “The only question here is, do I kill you or just maim you? Do you know what the word
maim
means, my young friend?” The man struggled to free himself, but A.J. squeezed his throat until the man’s eyes widened. “It means to mutilate, cripple, and disfigure. If that’s too complicated, then let me say it in a way you’ll understand.”

In one rapid motion, A.J. turned on the balls of his feet, placed his hip into the side of gunman, and threw him headlong to the ground where his head bounced off the concrete. The gang member dropped the gun. A.J. grabbed his victim’s hand, pulled his arm up, and twisted it forcefully until his attacker groaned. “This leaves you with one arm to redeem yourself. If I see you with a weapon again, I’ll use it to kill you and everyone you love.” A.J. placed one foot on the man’s head, forcing it to the concrete, and his other foot on the man’s side so that A.J. was standing on the assailant with his full weight. With a firm grip on the gang member’s arm, A.J. pulled up and twisted with all of his strength until he heard the arm come out of the socket over the attacker’s screams.

Moving from gang member to gang member, A.J. searched each and removed their weapons, which he tossed down a nearby storm drain. A moment later he was jogging back to Barringston Tower, feeling refreshed and in control.

Jogging always made him feel better.

Fingers lightly drummed on the computer keyboard, making little clicking sounds that echoed off the hard surfaces of the computer room yet without sufficient force to depress the keys. A hand moved from its place, picked up a lit cigarette from the nearby glass ashtray, and delivered its smoldering cargo to the mouth of the user. The operator inhaled the smoke deeply and blew a long stream of smoke at the computer monitor.

“Well, nothing ventured nothing gained,” the operator said aloud and returned the cigarette to the ashtray. “Be fast now, be
sharp.”
Click, click, clack, click
. The whine of the high-speed modem joined the muted noises of the keyboard and the hard drive’s buzz. The modem, the fastest and most efficient ever made, sent its digital message from the tiny room into the phone lines and three thousand miles across the country to the secluded CIA Satellite Reconnaissance Building in Virginia. Brightly colored billboards appeared on the screen offering routings to different computer systems. Wasting no time, the operator selected the screen button marked
RECON
and activated it with the mouse. Another screen appeared on the video monitor: “
Q
”
CLEARANCE REQUIRED; ENTER ACCESS AUTHORATION. In red letters were the words: ALL TRANSACTIONS ARE REPORTED TO THE DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE CIA. ATTEMPTING TO GAIN ACCESS TO THESE FILES WITHOUT PROPER CLEARANCE AND AUTHORITY IS A FELONY PUNISHABLE BY FINES AND IMPRISONMENT
.

The operator reached to the right of the terminal and tapped in a six-digit code on a small keypad affixed to an electronic device mounted in a briefcase. Immediately, the whine of the modem intensified until it sounded like a thousand ant-sized bees buzzing in frantic frenzy. The screen blinked. The image scrambled for a moment but returned to normal. The words
ACCESS GRANTED
appeared.

“Yes!” the operator exclaimed. “Good work, baby.”

With a series of quick actions on the keyboard and mouse clicks, a menu of files appeared. “Where are you?” the hacker asked. “I know you’re there. You can’t hide from … gotcha!”

Quickly the user activated the FILE menu and selected DOWNLOAD. Another window, smaller than the others, appeared on the monitor. A long, empty horizontal rectangle indicated how much of the file had been transferred from the CIA computer to the user’s terminal—10 percent … 15 percent … 20 percent … “Come on, come on,” the operator said. “Go, go, go.” The user picked up the cigarette and inhaled deeply, then, finding no solace in the action, quickly exhaled the smoke. Each second passed slowly as the file yielded its information in tiny binary bits. The user drummed
fingers on the table and unconsciously jiggled a leg in a rapid up-and-down motion—70 percent … 80 percent … 90 percent. “Almost baby, you’re almost there.”

Suddenly the indicator window stopped, and a moment later the screen went blank. The operator smiled, knowing that the electronic theft had been discovered but that enough of the file had been copied. A few keystrokes later the connection was broken, and the computer was turned off. Looking at the device next to the terminal, the operator’s smile grew into a laugh. The laughter came from the image of CIA personnel scrambling around trying to trace the origin of the call. They would fail. The same device that disarmed the security system also sent out false information about the call’s origin. Before the sun would rise, CIA and FBI agents would be scouring the small town of North Pole, Alaska, for the computer genius that who defeated their fail-safe systems, but they wouldn’t find what they were looking for—indeed, they were several thousand miles off course.

In a Georgetown home overlooking the Potomac the phone rang at 4:30 in the morning, waking CIA director Lawrence Bauman from a sound sleep. The caller’s message was calm but cryptic: “We have a compromise in SRC.”

“I understand,” Bauman said stoically, camouflaging his churning stomach. “I’ll be there within the hour. See if you can have a report for me.” He hung up the phone and quietly swore.

It had been four days since Roger had arrived in Mogadishu, Somalia, and it was four days longer than he cared for. Each day had plodded along with a vexing slowness. The equatorial sun would rise over the deep blue Indian Ocean and ascend to its zenith, driving the air temperature over the one-hundred-degree mark. The air conditioner in his room struggled valiantly against the oppressive heat and humidity, but it could do little more than move tepid, stale air around.

An uneasy feeling washed over him. He hated this country, and he especially hated this city. His animosity was deeply rooted in one catastrophic day in October 1993 when he walked the city streets as a U.S. Army Ranger. He had been part of a detachment to aid and protect relief workers from violence-prone warlords who had been using the famine of that year to solidify their power. He and other rangers and special forces personnel had been charged with the task of capturing the vicious warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid. Heavily armed, he and the others hot-roped out of Blackhawk helicopters hovering over the Somali’s headquarters. Everything that could go wrong did. Before it was over, eighteen Americans had been killed by Aidid’s followers, and seventy-six had been wounded. It should never have happened, but it had, and Roger had the wounds to prove it. Aidid had never paid for his crimes, and that fact burned in Roger’s stomach every day. Roger bore as many emotional scars as he did physical. A bullet can wound a soul as well as a body.

Gazing out the window, Roger took in the city that was Mogadishu. As Somalia’s largest city and busiest port, the ancient town had served as the country’s capital since 1960. It had come a long way since its founding by Arab merchants in the early tenth century. Over the centuries it had grown in importance and prominence, its excellent port being leased by the Italian government, which ultimately purchased the city and made it the capital of Italian Somaliland. Yet despite its potential, its Somali National University, and its ideal location on the horn of Africa, Mogadishu had fallen into disarray. The once bustling city of 700,000 was devastated by infighting, civil war, and clan hostilities in the early 1990s. On November 17, 1991, civil war broke out, leaving 15,000 people dead and 30,000 wounded in the city alone. Now the city resembled Beirut.

As Roger scanned the buildings from his window he could see the devastation brought by civil war. As usual, it was the innocent who suffered. “The problem with this old world,” Roger said to
himself, “is that it’s populated by people.” Roger lacked the optimism that his employer, A.J., possessed in such great quantities. No, Roger was a pragmatist who considered each day a success if he survived it.