Cyber Division, Zombieland
The Theater of Insane Security continued into a second act. Mr. Gold remained in the lounge below Cyber Division, talking by phone with Memphis, while Swagger and Neill were nine feet away through the floor. It was feared by someone important with not enough to do that Mr. Gold would identify the brand of computers the FBI used and share it with Mossad. It never occurred to anybody that Mossad already had its own computers and wasn’t looking for new ones.
“Okay,” said Neill, “this is what I’ve got.” He ran through the attributes listed by Swagger. “Everybody’s in accordance? That’s it, from 1,847.5 yards at a westward trajectory, in a south wind of four to six miles per hour, with sixty-five percent humidity, over a significant body of water . . .” And on and on, through all iterations of the attributes Swagger had determined were in play with Juba’s upcoming shot.
“Can you think of another one, Mr. Gold? Any breakthroughs?”
“Not a thing,” said Gold, from nine feet straight down.
“Anyone else? Chandler, you have anything?”
“I think we’ve got it covered,” she said.
“Okay,” said Nick. “So now we are going to run these attributes against the locations of appearances of high-level officials over the next three weeks, as recorded on the highly classified Secret Service master schedule. We begin with the Cabinet and the Executive. We assume any Cabinet or Executive officer to be the high-value target that would incite a plot. But we will move on to talk-show hosts, movie directors, star athletes, best-selling authors—whatever—anyone whose prominence might incite elimination with grievous consequences, not merely to morale but, really, to everything. We’ll come up with—”
“It occurs to me,” said Mr. Gold suddenly, “shouldn’t time be a consideration?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we first became aware of this possibility upon acquisition of Juba’s south Syrian location, courtesy of Mrs. McDowell, where, after our raid, the intelligence indicated he was preparing a shot in America with an ultra-long-range rifle. That was fifty-four days ago. Since he was in preparation for the shot for some time before then, it means that their plans were suppositioned on something that had to be on the schedule and immovable for at least fifty-four days, and almost certainly longer. So does it not make sense to limit the inquiries by focusing on those few dates that were in place early enough for them to be planned against?”
“Excellent,” said Nick.
“Got it,” said Neill. He sent an email to his staff of programmers and analysts in the bay who were the actual mechanics of the cyberoperation.
“I hope that cuts down on the possibilities,” said Mr. Gold.
“Absolutely,” said Neill. “The name of the game is winnowing. Winnow, winnow, winnow. When we are down to what cannot be winnowed, we ought to have something.”
The time passed—tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. In the big computer bay, people did what they had to do, lights blinked, strange whirring noises were raised by hard-drive fairies beating their wings furiously, a giant cleared his throat, printers yawned and printed in vacuum-cleaner-like hum, and the inquiry proceeded.
“Our program will examine all the potential sites for the shot attributes, as observed from the national satellite recon database. They’ll bring the matches to us—that is, satellite recon images of potential shooting sites where the target will be accessible that fit the attributes. That’s when sniper genius Swagger puts his brain to work, and let’s hope he’s still not cuckoo from the kick in the head Brother Juba laid on him, or the fall out of the tree.”
“No problem, Bill,” said Swagger to Jeff.
Nick laughed.
“The program can only do so much,” Neill continued. “That’s where human intelligence comes into play. The computers are as literal as a German schoolmaster. They don’t do ambivalence. But when we look at the results, maybe we’ll see ways in which something the computer is not impressed with might nevertheless be in play.”
A young woman came over from Machine City.
“You’d be surprised at how much stuff we’re getting,” she said, “but here is the initial output.”
She put a stack of heavy printout paper in front of them.
Nick looked. “Wow,” he said. “Well over a hundred.”
“The field is too large,” said Neill. “We’ve got to find a way to trim it down. The more attributes, the fewer the possibilities.”
“We’ll start with these, though,” Nick said. “Meanwhile, somebody smart thinks up some new attributes. I see long-set appearances by the big guy nine times, the secretary of state five, the secretary of transportation—why would anyone target the secretary of transportation? Swagger, who is he?”
“No idea,” said Swagger.
“A she,” said Chandler. “And extremely unlikely.”
Nick resumed: “The secretary of the treasury four times, and on and on—”
“It’s pretty obvious we should go straight to President Tr—” started Bob.
“Stop right there,” said Nick. “We’ve moved on to target possibilities, but I don’t want to hear any names. Names carry connotations—history, backstory, political biases—all of which we must put out of our process. Thus, the gentleman you were about to call by name shall henceforth be known by his Secret Service code name, which is Mogul. To us, he is not a man, he is a cipher standing for an office only incidentally occupied by a human being. We are protecting the office, that is all. Is that understood?”
“Since you brought it up,” said Bob, “it seems like I ought to ask something everybody’s been thinking.”
“Been waiting for this,” said Nick.
“If you read the papers, or breathe, you know in some quarters Mogul is not popular. What if in all our digging and probing and chasing, we come upon some evidence of Americ—”
“Again, stop,” said Nick. “I don’t want to hear that. It is groundless speculation, and in this part of the forest, groundless speculation is poison gas. That is why we are proceeding on this one totally as a criminal investigation, not as some kind of coup. That is why I have tried to keep the Agency out of it and stay as low-key as possible with the Secret Service. That is why I have not made overtures to the White House. We need clarity, not a drunken-monkey orgy. If—and I say ‘if’—you come across any such thing, it is only to be discussed with me, not among yourselves. I will make a determination whether to take it to the Director. But if it gets out—if even the possibility gets out—that, using foreign assets, someone, somewhere, with influence and connex here in D.C. has set up the elimination of Mogul, you know as well as I do that a drunken-monkey orgy is definitely in the cards. Not good for anybody except the drunken monkeys. So, barring hard evidence of that scenario, noses down, eyes locked in, small picture, not big. Understood?”
The lack of comment and response meant yes.
“Okay, handing these out, look hard and see what you’re getting. Sorry, Mr. Gold, can’t show ’em to you.”
This was the real work of the day. Swagger ran his eyes over the photos, which were hazy, blurry sky-down views of unknowable zones, each with a circle centered on the executive’s appearance location, the circle being 3,694 yards in diameter, putting anyone on the circle the required 1,847 yards from the center—that is, the target. That meant the shooter could be hiding anywhere on the circle.
He tracked directions and angles without regard to identified targets. The best shot clearly would have been on the secretary of transportation, where Juba could have perched atop what looked like an oil storage tank in Illinois and gotten a bullet across the Mississippi into Busch Stadium, where she was slated to throw the first pitch at a Cardinals game. But it just made no sense.
The Mogul sites were less promising, but not without a whisper of possibility. Of course, Mogul was so improvisational in his day-to-day, the long-term aspects seemed problematic. He might take off for golf in Florida that morning. He could do anything he wanted. He was the president!
The best shot would have been at an appearance in Baltimore, where he was more or less slated to appear at a luncheon at The Center Club—prominent, big-money businessmen—in the USF&G Building. He might be accessible from a mile-plus out from the Exelon Building across Baltimore Harbor, but that would involve shooting through glass, which hadn’t been in the specs. Could there be another shooter who could fire at a raking angle from closer and shatter the glass, and in that frozen moment, Juba could take his long shot on the target? Well, theoretically, but . . . so many moving parts.
At a certain point, it was time to break for dinner. But they didn’t break for dinner. Then it was time to break for coffee. They didn’t break for coffee either. They didn’t break for anything.
Finally, it was Chandler who said, “Everything we’re coming up with is vaguely possible but, for this reason or that, unlikely.”
“And your point is?” asked Nick.
“Maybe there’s a fundamental error at a crucial spot.”
“Did you hear that, Mr. Gold?”
“I did, and I think she has a point. But the question would have to be, at what crucial spot?”
“Well,” Chandler said, “the servo mechanism that puts possibilities before us is the Secret Service master schedule, right?”
“Yes.”
“Of all the attributes, that seems the most fragile. I mean, Swagger measured the yardage. That’s a hard figure, empirical, unarguable. All the other things—the weather, the wind, the angles, all that stuff—is hard data. But the master schedule is assembled by people acting on information from other people. People talking to other people often have motives in the mix, even unconsciously, and there’s miscommunication, it’s imperfect, any of a dozen things can go wrong.”
“All this is true. Do you want to call Secret Service and lean on them to recheck the schedule?”
“Here’s my thought,” she said. “Maybe what’s upcoming isn’t considered a Secret Service enterprise. You know, requiring special planning, the movement of assets, additional personnel, ground recon, prior coordination with local authorities. It’s not special. It’s normal, run-of-the-mill activity. So it’s not on any schedule.”
“How do we find out about it?”
“Do what Mr. Gold said: assume that it has to be something locked in early. It’s been on the sched early enough for the bad actors to plot to it. So, chronologize the data by the length of time on the schedule. Not the master schedule of appearances, just daily operations.”
“What have we got to lose?” said Nick.
He made the call, getting his Secret Service liaison out of bed. However, that guy was good at the job, got on the horn to SS operations—a 24/7 shop—and the larger schedule was emailed over to the FBI in a matter of minutes.
The data it contained hardly needed a program to be analyzed. It was just a matter of finding the earliest date of entry. That happened quickly enough.
“New York” was all it said, and ID’d a date a week further on, the next Thursday, the eighth of the month.
“So Mogul is going to New York on the eighth,” said Nick. “Why? And why would he know so far in advance? And why would it be ho-hum to Secret Service?”
Obviously, nobody had any knowledge.
The next call was to the FBI–White House liaison. It took a little longer because the guy was at the movies, he had to get home, go to his monitor, bring all this stuff up, check his numbers, call a good source in the White House, before he got back to them.
Nick took the call, listened, nodded, and looked up.
“Okay,” he said, “we have a date. We also have politics, ego, vanity, media manipulation, and personal enmity in the mix. In other words, any day in D.C. since 1784. On that date, Renegade is scheduled to give a speech here in D.C. At some Arab–American Co-Prosperity function, funded by the Saudis.”
“Who’s Renegade?” asked Bob.
“Think hard,” said Nick.
“Oh, I get it. The predecessor. Number forty-four. The—”
“You got it,” said Nick. “So Mogul knows Renegade’s talk will get a lot of attention and press. He doesn’t like it. So he counterprograms. He learns that on that day a certain newly constructed building is being officially opened. No, Mogul doesn’t own it, his company didn’t build it, but he’s pals with the guy that does and did. It’s in the East Village, overlooking Roosevelt Drive. The guy’s a big contributor, but, more, he’s a deep and abiding enemy of the mayor of New York City, who definitely won’t be at the ceremony. He hates the mayor, Mogul does, so it’s a New-York-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing as well as a Renegade-in-your-face-schmuck kind of thing. So it’s been widely known for some time in New York political circles that Mogul would make a day trip up there, unannounced, and say a word at the ceremony. Maybe make a major announcement and pull the spotlight off Renegade.”
Everybody looked at everybody else.
“The building overlooks the East River,” said Nick. “Can someone go online and find an address?”
It took Chandler about seven seconds.
Neill called to one of his long-laboring computer techs, who came by and got the info and went off to run it against the shot-attribute program.
“Okay,” said Bob, “is this just a party for geniuses like Mr. Gold and Chandler or can a country boy get a word in?”
“Go ahead,” said Nick.
“I just thought of another attribute. Sorry I didn’t think of it earlier, but it’s crucial.”
“Does it help us winnow?”
“I think it does. It just come to me like a kick in the head. See, there’s been a key component missing. My fault, nobody else’s.”
“Go on.”
“Most folks think you point a gun at someone, pull the trigger, and down he goes. Instant, like in a millionth of a second. But it ain’t that way.”
“Go on.”
“The bullet takes some time to get there. The farther it travels, the longer it takes. If you’re shooting at over a mile, it would be somewhere in the five-second range. It’s officially called time in flight. Could figure it out more precisely, but trust me on this.”
He waited for the import to strike them—but it didn’t.
“That means the target has to be still. The shooter has to be assured he ain’t going to leave to get a Coke between the pull of the trigger and the arrival of the bullet.”
“So he’s stationary?”
“Totally. He’s giving a speech, he’s sitting on a chair, he’s at his desk. He’s sitting down or standing still.”
“We could cut out three-quarters of the possibilities by that test,” said Neill.
“On the dais at that New York opening, he’d be still,” said Chandler.
The young woman came back with a new sheet of paper.
“I think you’ll like this,” she said. “It’s fourteen for fourteen on the attributes.”
They all clustered around and saw about half a mile’s worth of circle arcing through the dockside real estate across the East River in Brooklyn, and, 1,847 yards away, across a broad expanse of river, the docks, Roosevelt Drive, the building at which Mogul would be in place, still as a posed portrait.
“So that’s got to be it, then,” said Nick. “Next Thursday, the eighth, at three o’clock in the afternoon, shooting from an unknown site in Queens a mile out, Juba’s going to kill Mogul.”