Zero Day (John Puller, #1)(80)

“Figured that was what this was about. Not all that good, actually. I assume you’ve been read in?”

“You can call your SAC if you want. Don White’s a good guy.”

“I will call my SAC.”

Mason pulled out his phone. “Let’s get the perfunctory shit over with so we can move on to more substantive stuff. Call him now.”

Puller made the call. Don White filled him in on Joe Mason of DHS and told Puller to be cooperative with the man.

Puller slid the phone back to Mason and looked at the file again. “So do I have to be read in?”

“I was just now thinking the very same thing, Puller.”

“And have you reached a decision?”

“Everything I can get hold of about you tells me you’re a crackerjack guy. Patriotic to the marrow. Tenacious as a bulldog, you’re gonna get whoever you set after.”

Puller said nothing, just eyed the man. He wanted him to keep talking. He wanted to keep listening.

Mason continued. “We have a situation out there. Sounds corny, doesn’t it? We have a situation. Anyway, the problem is we don’t know what the situation is.” He looked up from the file. “Can you give us any help there?”

“Is this why SecArm was so interested in the case? Why they only sent me initially?”

“The Secretary of the Army is interested in this case because we are. And while you are the only one currently visible, there are other assets deployed on this. And not just from DHS.”

“I understood DIA isn’t interested in this.”

“I would not agree with that statement.”

“FBI in on it?”

“FBI is in on everything whether we want them or not. However, we did not want to overwhelm you with alphabet suits, so I was picked to deliver the interface.”

“Okay, there’s a situation, only you don’t know what it is. I would have thought DHS would have more to do than work on something like that.”

“I would agree with you except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“A piece of chatter that NSA picked up two days ago. Want to guess where it was coming from?”

“Drake, West Virginia.”

“You got it.”

“I thought NSA could only listen to the foreign part of a conversation. That it couldn’t listen in or read the emails or texts of Americans.”

“That’s mostly correct as far as it goes.”

“What did the chatter say?”

“Well, it was in a language that one would not expect to be coming from rural West Virginia.”

When the man didn’t tell him what it was, Puller got a little ticked off and said, “New Jersey? The Bronx?”

“Try again, and head farther east.”

“Arabic?”

“Dari. You know it’s one of the major dialects spoken in Afghanistan.”

“Yeah, that I know. So Afghanistan. Has it been translated?”

“Yes. As follows: ‘The time is coming soon.’ And that everyone needed to be prepared. And that justice would be theirs.”

“And you took that to mean some attack on the United States?”

“That’s what I’m paid to think, Puller. And also paid to prevent.”

“Why was this chatter so special? People say stupid stuff all the time that leads nowhere. Even speaking in Dari.”

“The chatter wasn’t clean. It was encrypted. And it wasn’t encrypted with some fancy computer algorithm. It was in code. Code that my people tell me was very popular with the old KGB before the Cold War ended. Now we also know that the Taliban has started using old KGB codes to communicate with implanted cells. I guess it harks back to the days when the Red Army was rolling around in tanks there.”

“Taliban using a KGB code in Dari coming from West Virginia. Now that’s diversity for you. But they broke it?”

“Obviously, or else I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you. Ironically, the old code stuff is coming back into vogue, Puller, because we’ve gotten so good at cracking computerized encryption. Bottom line, it made us sit up and take notice.”

“I haven’t seen one turban in Drake. Just a bunch of proud Americans with a little red around the neck. How can you be sure the plan will be executed in Drake? The terrorists could just be hiding out there and the target could be someplace else.”

“Other components of the chatter lead us to believe that the target is at least in the vicinity of Drake.”

Puller sat back, thought about this. “Well, there’s a big concrete dome where a secret government facility operated in the 1960s. That’s probably a good place to start. In fact, it’s the only thing out of the ordinary in the place. Other than a bunch of dead bodies.”

“If it were only that easy.” Mason pulled a sheaf of papers from his file and slid them across to Puller. He said, “We tracked down what that facility was used for. It doesn’t really help us.”

Puller scanned the sheets of paper. It was a classified document that he was cleared to read. It was dated from the 1970s. He said, “They built bomb components there?”

“Key components. Not the boom part of the ordnance. The concrete dome was put in because some of the material they handled there was radioactive. Back then DoD had money to burn. And there was no EPA. So instead of cleaning up the site the military just covered it over.”