The elevator dinged as the doors opened, an actual old fashioned bell, the novelty of it struck Ben. But then again, this was a pre-war building. He stepped off the elevator into the top floor office. It looked no different than any other office, a sea of cubicles filled with men and women in business wear. On the books, it was registered as an office of the Department of Agriculture, and for the most part, it was. The only thing that made it any different from a normal government office was what lay beyond a nondescript door in a storeroom.
Ben quickly made his way to the receptionist and told her that he had an appointment with Nicholas Miller to discuss pesticide development. This combination made the receptionist take her hand off of the shotgun that she'd had trained on him under the desk. She smiled and directed him to the storeroom. He thanked her and continued on his way.
The door was hidden behind a shelf of beet projections or some such nonsense. It was an effective ruse, hiding something important behind something no one cared about. It still didn't make dragging a shelf out of the way any less annoying.
Stepping into the room beyond, he found a room with dark grey walls, a conference table covered in laptops and papers, and a projector screen covering one of the walls. Out of the three people in the room, only Ed acknowledged his presence. It was a SCIF, a sensitive compartmentalized information facility. It was a TEMPEST hardened strong room meant to ensure the closest thing to complete security possible.
"Ben, good to see you. What's the prime minister's verdict?" Ed hid it well, but Ben couldn't help notice the slightest twitch. Smoking wasn't allowed in SCIFs, and knowing Ed, he'd been in there all day.
"He's in." The current prime minister was a personal friend who usually deferred to Ben when it came to covert operations.
"Good, then we can get this joint task force going. That attack was good for one thing at least, I've been able to get more done in the past three days than I have in the last month." Ed's breath smelled heavily of mint gum, his backup vice.
"Calling it a joint task force almost makes this sound officially sanctioned and legal, instead of just the two of us illegally sharing intelligence. So, can I assume that your meetings have gone well." Quite a rarity when dealing with politicians, Ben thought.
"Very well, which brings me to the good news, every op in the pipeline has just been greenlit. The guys in D.C. are scared witless and out for blood. They don't want to see it and they don't want to know how I get it, but they want it, and I've been given carte blanche to string the bastards up and bleed them out." If Ben didn't know better, he'd almost swear that he detected a touch of giddiness in Ed's voice.
"Speaking of the incident, thank you for inviting me for a private briefing." He assumed that the other two currently sharing the room with them had to do with that. He recognized both of them, he respected them, he felt sympathy for one of them, and he hated both of them.
"No problem, we're briefing the rest of the international community on the results of the investigation tomorrow, but I wanted your thoughts." Ed gestured toward the table and they both stepped forward to examine the evidence arranged there.
"So, you've told me the good news, now tell me the bad news." There always had to be bad news.
Ed sighed and shook his head, "Karen bring it up." The sole woman in the room started tapping on a tablet.
"The investigation team recovered this from a dropped cell phone from the boat." The projector lit up, displaying a diagram of the yacht where the attack had occurred. Several X's and arrows were labelled guard, the central ballroom and the server room were circled and labelled.
"This doesn't sit well with me, what other intel did the investigators find?" It didn't make any sense. The diagram was replaced by a series of pictures, all of them were young males, and all of them were dead.
"Despite the tactical gear and the advanced tactics, none of these guys were on our radar. The youngest was seventeen, the oldest was twenty two. Every one of them is a Los Santos native, from what we could find, they all meet the usual psych profiles for home grown militants. Loners, nasty family lives, dead end jobs, most had one form of mental health issue or another, the whole nine yards. We found that they'd all visited the websites of various Islamic militant groups, but no trips to the Middle East and no military experience." The usual stuff, but it wasn't right.
"The gear and the training mean they've got some real whales backing them. They're all exactly what you'd expect… out of a martyr brigade. A bunch of lone wolf attacks I could see, even a coordinated series of suicide bombings, but a high level raid on an intelligence summit. These guys were pawns at best, a smokescreen at worst." The attacker who'd escaped came to mind, he had certainly seemed a fair bit more competent then the rest. It would make sense, a large screen of cannon fodder to hide a true objective. It made sense, but at the same time… it didn't.
Ed was on the same wavelength, "I know, that's not a tactic the bastards usually use, but here's the real kicker, that catering company they were a part of, it's only been around for a couple of months, and it's set to close up for good in two weeks. We checked the remaining employees out, they're all clean."
"Has everyone except you in the American national security apparatus gone completely insane?" That never should have gotten past even the most cursory background check. Even disregarding the fact that a number of their employees were easy targets for militant recruitment, the youth of the company would have already barred them from any high level events.
"More likely than not, but the more likely cause is this man." A picture of a middle aged man in a blue polo appeared on the screen.
"Steven Haines, he was put in charge of the FIB counterterrorism task force a few months ago after Daniel Anderson was assassinated. Decorated agent, used to work the organized crimes desk, landed a couple busts there. He was reassigned to the counterterrorism task force after my team and I handed the mafia to the FIB on a silver platter." Ben could see where this was going.
"You think he's an asset for whoever hit the summit."
"A couple of our assets in the mafia let us know that this guy was peddling himself like a Las Venturas whore. He was taking money from every major criminal organization in Liberty City except the Bellics. This was outside of my purview and all evidence was obtained illegally, so it just went into my files." Ed kept any seemingly useless bits of intel on file in his personal records, it was a habit both he and Ben maintained religiously.
"So you think he found a few new clients when he moved into counterterrorism, and that those clients paid him to handle all the details to make sure that they could get a hold of the server." Not unexpected, as they say, capitalism finds a way, Ben thought.
"He was the one in charge of the security, time, and location of the summit." So they had their inside man.
"What about the gear?" Ben knew that where they got their equipment came from was as important as the men who used it.
"Dead end, they came from an arms shipment the Aztecas were moving. The shipment was ripped off by this man." The screen changed to a Royal Canadian Air Force ID photo.
"Trevor Philips, Canadian born, enlisted in the RCAF straight out of high school, took them a full four years at the air force academy to realize that he wasn't psychologically fit for duty. Ran with one of our mutual friends in Los Santos for a number of years until the incident in North Yankton led to him going off the grid and becoming a midlevel drug lord in Blaine County. He's been running guns and meth ever since. No ideological bent, he sells to whoever pays."
"What about the ballroom, could the drive be a decoy for an assassination?" It was unlikely, but so far this wasn't following any of the other standard expectations for a terrorist attack.
"No, they killed a few political players, but none were in any major positions of power, mostly bean counters working financial counterterrorism desks. The part of the ballroom attack that I can't understand is why they didn't use suicide bombers. The footage from the ballroom has the group that reinforced the advance team storming the place with assault rifles and grenades. They could've had a much higher body count if they'd outfitted the infiltration team with suicide vests. Instead they kill a few people before the security team guns them down. Not only is this against the standard tactics, it's not even practical."
"Did your investigators ever find out how the reinforcements got on the yacht?" they'd searched the ship and the corpses, no wet suits, no boats in the vicinity.
"We're assuming that they came by a boat that left immediately after dropping them off. We haven't been able to find it or whoever was driving it. Our flashbang wielding friend probably rendezvoused with it after he escaped." The screen changed to show satellite pictures of where the yacht had been anchored for the party.
"There's only one place that's close enough to serve as a launching point." It's all coming together, Ben thought. It didn't make sense, but it was all connecting to one place.
"San Andreas." The screen changed to satellite pictures of Los Santos and Blaine County.
"It's all connecting to San Andreas. The attackers were all Los Santos natives, the guns came from an arms dealer in Blaine county, Haines is head of a task force based in Los Santos, and the only viable launch points are in San Andreas." It was the common link.
"Agreed, so what do you think?" Ed gestured and the screen went dark.
"I think that absolutely none of this makes any sense. The gear, the intel, the inside connection, it all smells of a well-heeled backer. However, the execution was completely amateur, I can think of a thousand ways that they could've done better, regardless of whether they were after the drive or the ballroom. And there's one thing that still doesn't sit well with me." Intelligence work didn't often make sense, but it was ridiculous in this case.
"The cell phone?"
"The cell phone," Ben agreed.
"Why would they run the risk of brining it, much less dropping it. The only reason that I can think of is…"
"That it was left there for us to find," Ben said, finishing Ed's thought. "But why would they do that?"
They stared silently at the files that lay before them for a long time, each pondering the issue with insight of their decades of experience.
Finally coming to a conclusion, Ben spoke, "Well, I know one way to narrow down our field of targets."
Ed looked back at him, "Los Santos."
Ben nodded, "It's the common thread, we burn away everything else, whatever's left in the ashes has to be either what we're looking for or something connected to it."
Ed thought for a moment, "best case scenario, we find who we're after and roll up the entire network, worst case, we send a whole lot of terrorist scum shuffling off the mortal coil, let's do it."
"Normally, I'd speak from the Torah, but I believe Joshua is more fitting for this occasion." Ben always liked to quote a religious text before undertaking large operations.
"And it shall be, when ye have taken the city, that ye shall set the city on fire."
…
Aliza lay comfortably in her bed, enjoying the sound of her current partner's breathing, it had been a long, intense night. Lily certainly proved to be quite the skilled submissive, she was even better than she had been on the plane. They had an enjoyable friends with benefits arrangement going, both acknowledged that they shared no romantic feelings for the other, but they were both attractive and their sexual preferences complimented each other.
Neither one of them saw any reason to complicate things any more than that.
BZZZZZT, BZZZZT, her phone vibrated on her nightstand. Lily stirred slightly, before rolling over and pulling the covers more tightly around her body.
Aliza was tempted not to answer it, but it could be Gerald with a top priority job, or it could be Lamar in trouble again, or any number of important matters that had become her concern since arriving in the city.
She rolled over and snatched her phone off the nightstand, "hello."
The voice on the other end of the line awoke memories of passion, danger, and death from years past.
"Shalom Commander."
Wooh! Barely made the deadline I set for getting this chapter out this week. This is one of those chapters that I don't like, but is necessary. I don't like chapters that are purely exposition and set up unless I can work some style into them, which in this case, I couldn't. it's too dialogue heavy for my taste. This also feels kind of forced, so I might have to make some changes later on.
But I suppose that briefings are a boring part of the job in the world of intelligence, so it makes sense that this would be a boring chapter.
What do you guys think?
By the way, has anyone guessed who the mutual friend in Los Santos is?
I'm going to try and get the next chapter out in the next week, but between college, work, and volunteering at the library, don't hold me to that deadline.
R&R people.