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I was eavesdropping on a suspect when General Lee dropped by my office. After six weeks in the job I still couldn’t believe that the former helicopter pilot was now a big gun at the National Security Agency with total responsibility for intercepting data from non-Americans.
“Anything fresh on Bennet?”
“She’s logged onto a red-flagged site, Sir.”
The only indication of the general’s alarm was a tightening of his lips. “She’s in Perth you say.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“What else do we know about her?”
“Very little, apart from her name,” I said, all too aware that my boss was watching me with a mixture of anxiety and annoyance. “Her blog was set up using the email address elizabethbennet@gmail.com, I’ve searched Western Australia’s electoral rolls and phone books, but all the name-matches are squeaky clean.”
“Are you monitoring her email?”
“Yes. But it’s inactive.” I paused. “Personally, I think she may have multiple email addresses.”
“Have you checked with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple?”
“Yes and they have nothing on her. If she does have another address it has to be in a different name?”
“What have you learned from her social media profiles?”
“She doesn’t have any, Sir ... not even a Facebook page.”
“That’s suspicious. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bennet turned out to be a man.”
I shook my head. “According to our linguistic expert, her word choice, use of slang and idiomatic expressions identify her as a university educated Australian female between the ages of 18 to 34 years.”
He frowned. The majority of terrorist attacks in the States were committed by young US-born males living at home and it was the same in Australia. Radicalized females were thin on the ground. “Have our IT guys set you up with a blog and the popular social media sites?”
I nodded. “The creatives gave me an alias.” I touched the keyboard and Eli Malouf’s blog appeared on the screen. I swivelled the monitor so that Lee could see the screen.
“Good looking guy. Who is he?”
“A US infantryman, killed in Afghanistan and, according to a bud in the CIA, guaranteed untraceable.”
Lee smiled his enigmatic smile. “Very good.” He shot the cuffs of his jacket and glanced at his vintage Rolex.” According to Otis, Lee’s father, took the watch off a dead Japanese soldier’s wrist during the Sino Japanese War[12]. At the time, his father was a major in the Republic of China Forces in Taiwan. “Have you tried messaging her?”
“Yes. I commented on a post she wrote about the horrors of Unit 731.”
“Did she get back to you?”
“Not yet, Sir.”
“Have you contacted her again?
I shook my head. “Some women get nervous if a guy is too eager. There are a lot of dodgy people on the internet and a surefire way to creep-out a girl is to bombard her with one message after another, without giving her time to reply. I don’t want her to block me.”
“To hell with that, get a conversation underway. If she blocks you we’ll set you up with a new persona.”
Personally, I thought Bennet was the least likely candidate on the Australian list of suspects to be an extremist. I figured she was a typical female idealist blathering on futilely about world peace. I said, “Am I missing something here? All she’s doing is exercising her constitutional right of free speech.”
General Lee frowned at me for a moment, then sat down in the visitor’s chair, crossed his legs and pulled at the knife-edge creases in his trousers. “Perth is hosting the G20 next month with the main talking point being the effects of refugees on the members’ economies. She could be planning a terrorist attack.”
I didn’t see it. The woman’s posts simply denounced the use of chemical weapons. It seemed a big jump to label her a terrorist. But then I suppose if I was in charge of counter-terrorism I’d want to cover all bases. “In that case why not change the location of the G20 to Sydney or Melbourne, Sir?”
Lee positively scowled. He hooked his fingers over the arms of the chair so tight that his knuckles were bone white. “It’s only four weeks off ... there isn’t time to arrange another venue. Besides if al Qaeda forces us to shut it down they’ll become a worse menace than they already are.”
I said, “But Sir, you can’t let the conference go ahead ... you can’t put the leaders of the world’s top twenty economies at risk.”
My boss smiled grimly, “Nothing will go wrong on my watch. You’ve got twenty-eight days and the technological resources of Five Eyes to trace this woman, Lieutenant. Don’t let me down.”
* * *
Lee’s appeal slash threat aroused my masculine pride. I’d show him he’d chosen the right man for the job. I opened Bennet’s blog and appraised her post a second time. It made disturbing reading. I scrolled down to comments. Damn, she still hadn’t replied. General Lee had left me in no uncertainty as to the necessity to keep the conversation going. But I didn’t really see how I could make that happen.
Lots of my mates use Facebook as a free pick-up site. The trouble was that most guys struck out. Being blocked doesn’t faze them because they operate on the plenty-more-fish principle. But I couldn’t risk Bennet unfriending me. Anyway, the analogy was worthless because she wasn’t on Facebook. Now that, I thought, is suspicious.
Instead of joining the geeks having morning coffee around the exercise pit I drank mine at my desk. Somehow I had to find a way to get Bennet to open up and I have a lot of faith in coffee. It’s common knowledge that caffeine is a surefire way of jump-starting a sluggish brain. I downed a double shot espresso. The lack of ideas remained unaltered. Desperate, I considered asking Jenny, the copywriter who wrote the guff for my site to help me out. But yesterday I’d overheard her telling her mates I was such a keeg[13] — just because I couldn’t figure out how to install an in-app notification tool. In Syria I’d been the squad’s hotshot. I didn’t take kindly to being the butt of jokes. I thought, who needs her help when I have the wisdom of the world at my fingertips?
In Google, I typed: how do I get a girl to open up to me? And started reading.
