Amid the Shadows (6 page)

13

Cheryl Roberts stood
inside the yellow caution tape examining the terrible scene where the elevator
had smashed into the bottom of its shaft, almost at free fall speed.
 
The bodies had long since been removed and
taken to the morgue for identification and contacting next of kin.

The inside of the car
was covered in gruesome amounts of dried blood, and most of the interior’s
metal walls had collapsed violently inward.
 
What little of the car’s outside that could be seen showed it to be
deeply scraped, damaged on all sides and covered in dust and debris.
 
It looked as though a giant hand had
descended upon the car and crushed it like an aluminum can.

She took the stairs to
the fifth floor and examined the small entryway in front of the elevator
doors.
 
The damaged doors were open,
revealing the area above where the charges had been planted to sever the
cables.
 
The emergency brakes had been
tampered with to prevent them from engaging when the cable gave way, but the
team had not yet identified exactly how they had been disabled.

What they
had
discovered was the explosive was not set off by a timer; it was done by remote
detonation which meant the person had to have been relatively close by.

Christine had told
Griffin and Buckley that she and Sarah noticed someone working on the elevators
that morning as they entered.
 
But when
they left, they had never actually gotten on the elevator.
 
This suggested that the person with the
transmitter had armed the bomb once he saw the two approach the open elevator
and then quickly fled himself.
 
It
probably never occurred to him they might not get in.

After dozens of
photographs, Roberts left through the front door.
 
The Human Resources Administration building
was still closed off, but a thin crowd of people watched intently from behind
the police line.
 
Roberts glanced around
as she walked toward her car.
 
She never
noticed the bald man watching her from across the street.

Once back at the 19
^th
Precinct, Roberts put her things down and attached her phone to her computer
which began downloading the pictures she had taken.
 
She sighed and leaned back, watching them
display one after the other as each file was copied.

After making a few
notes in her folder, she got up to get a cup of coffee from the break room when
she heard someone call “Chaplain” from the adjoining room.
 
Roberts poked her head in and spotted the
department’s Chaplain, Douglas Wilcox.
 
She smiled and strode in carrying her Styrofoam cup.

“Hiya Chaplain,” she
said, catching his attention.
 
Wilcox
turned his thick head of white hair in her direction and smiled when he saw
her.

“Well hello, Cheryl!”
he exclaimed.

Roberts smiled broadly
and gave him a hug, prompting him to move a thick folder from under his arm and
put it down onto the table.
 
A few years
back, they had worked together on a number of cases and developed a tight
bond.
 
She still smiled when thinking
back on how hard it was keeping up with him, even though he was twice her age.

The chaplain leaned
back and squeezed her shoulders in both hands, as a father might admire his
grown child.
 
“It’s been a while now,
hasn’t it?”
 
he grinned.
 
“You look as spry and pretty as ever.”

Roberts gave a playful roll
of her eyes.
 
He was always so
complimentary.
 
“What are you doing here
at the 19
^th
?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve
been helping over at Saint Patrick’s after the bombing, and I thought I would
stop in to see if one of the investigators were here.”
 
He looked around.
 
“Unfortunately, it looks like I missed him.”

Roberts grimaced.
 
“Oh right, Saint Patrick’s.
 
Its been all over the news.
 
How’s it going over there?”

The chaplain shook his
head.
 
“Rough, I’m afraid.
 
But we’re making progress.
 
And what about you?
 
What big cases are you working on?”

Roberts shrugged.
 
“Primarily a homicide, and a strange
one.
 
In fact, the more we dig, the
stranger it gets.”
 

“Well, I hope you don’t
have as many cooks in the kitchen as we do at Saint Patrick’s.
 
Things are starting to turn into a bit of a
mess.”

She looked down at his
thick folder lying on the table.
 
“What
are you working on there?”

“We’re piecing together
what was recovered of the cathedral’s registry, so we can identify anyone else
we might still be digging for and to contact others who were there that
day.
 
A lot of people fled and may still
need some counseling.”
 
He frowned
sympathetically.
 
“We’re trying to be
proactive.
 
Terrible events like this
often take a far deeper emotional toll than most realize.”

“I’m sure they do,”
Roberts replied.
 
“Any decent leads on
who did it?
 
Earlier they had some
experts who were suggesting it was part of an attack by Muslim extremists.”

“Ah yes,”
 
the chaplain sighed,
 
“the
terrorist
theory.”

Roberts tilted her head
inquisitively.
 
“Something tells me you
don’t agree.”

The chaplain exhaled
and hesitated for a moment.
 
They had
gotten to know each other well during their time working together, and he
always found her to be surprisingly objective compared to the other officers.
 
It was one of the reasons they had such
interesting conversations.
 
She reminded
him of himself when he was younger.
 
“Well, I suppose I find the terrorist theory rather…convenient.”

“Meaning?”

“I don’t know,” he
said. “It just doesn’t feel like it fits.
 
There are details about the attack which don’t seem to make sense under
a terrorist plot.
 
Terrorists or
extremists, call them what you like, usually want to cause the most damage
possible, to really upset the enemy’s psyche and hopefully shake their belief
system.
 
You see it’s not just about the
deaths, it’s about damaging the belief system itself.”

Roberts continued
listening.
 
She remembered the chaplain
had degrees in both Theology and Philosophy.
 
He was, of course, a man of deep faith, but he was also curious and
genuinely interested in understanding other faiths outside of his own.
 
“We’re all God’s children,”
 
he used to say to her.
 
“We often just have different
explanations.”

“What’s different about
Saint Patrick’s,” he continued, “is if the attackers wanted to achieve the most
damage possible, then their timing was very poor.
 
They attacked on a quiet Saturday
morning.
 
If it was really about damage
and terror, anyone else would have attacked during mass.
 
Which makes me wonder whether timing was a
real consideration.”

Roberts leaned back,
sitting on the edge of the desk and listening.

“That’s just one
puzzle.
 
Another was where the bombs were
located.
 
Again, if the death toll were
the real objective, the bombs should have been placed in the center of the
church where most people tended to spend time and take pictures.
 
But these bombs were almost the
opposite.
 
They were placed along the
walls and set up in series, which means they didn’t go off at the same
time.”
 
He looked at her.
 
“There is another group of people I can think
of who set off bombs in series like that.
 
They do it to complement each other.”

Roberts shook her head
slowly and raised her eyebrows.
 
“What
group?”

“Demolition
teams,”
 
he answered.
 
“The teams that are tasked with taking
structures down.”

 
“You see,” the chaplain said, now with a
deliberate tone, “Jihad, or a religious war, is usually just that, a war or
struggle
for a religious or secular cause.
 
But
that doesn’t seem to be what this is about.
 
Instead of targeting the individuals or the believers, it almost seems
as though the target was the church itself.”

“So you think it was
someone unrelated to terrorists?” Roberts asked.

He shrugged again.
 
“Well, if it
was
someone else, would
it not be more useful to have it blamed on a more convenient enemy?”

“I suppose it would.”

The chaplain suddenly
smiled.
 
“Ah well, I’m sure I’ll prove
myself wrong in the end, but I’m always a little leery of a group
consensus.”
 
He looked at his watch with
a start.
 
“And I’m afraid I just
remembered that I need to catch someone before they leave for the night.
 
So if you will excuse me.”

“Of course,” she said,
standing and hugging him goodbye.
 
“Can
we please have lunch the next time you’re around?”

“I would like that very
much.”
 
With a wink, he hurried across
the room and turned down the hallway back toward the stairs.

Roberts stood there,
thinking about what he had said.
 
Objectivity was always the straightest path to the truth.
 
She wondered if she was being objective
enough in her own case.

She looked down and
realized that he had forgotten his folder still lying on the table.
 
“Oh no, Chaplain wait!”

Roberts turned to run
after him but fumbled and accidentally knocked the folder to the floor,
spilling the papers everywhere.
 
“Dammit!”
she yelled under her breath.
 
She looked
up hoping he had heard her, but he was gone.
 
Roberts frantically worked to gather up the papers and put them back in
the folder.
 
Several pages were filled
with columns of names from the church registry.
 
She was trying to quickly put them back in order when she suddenly
froze.

In her hand was the
second page in the list, and her eyes instantly recognized a name near the
bottom.
 
A name she had been looking at
in her own file just a few minutes before,
Barbara Baxter
.

14

Ron Tran was one of the best
computer hackers alive.
  
He sat quietly
in a small internet café, drinking a latte in downtown Beijing, dressed in
jeans and a faded T-shirt with a Pepsi logo on the front.
 
While Tran waited, he watched the rows and
rows of teenagers glued to their giant computer screens, each playing one of
the many popular, virtual world computer games.
 
Some of whom were still in their seats from the day before.

Tran smiled to himself.
 
He resembled at least half of the males in
the room; intentional, yet none of them had any idea who he was.
 
He was known to the hacking community as
GtheWhite
,
yet his official identification showed him to be an accountant at a small
fertilizer company living in a small apartment with seven other friends.
 
As far as anyone knew, he was saving money to
buy his first car and had aspirations of starting his own accounting company
someday.

In reality, Tran had become
extremely disillusioned with the reality of the world around him.
 
The Chinese government ran the country with a
stranglehold grip on over a billion citizens who only seemed to stop and ask
questions when their television or internet service was interrupted.

Yet, the other major
countries were no better.
 
They were
simply controlled by other secret groups, oligarchs, or bankers.
 
They merely manipulated and controlled their
citizens through different languages, different constitutional loopholes, and
from beneath different colored flags.
 
They all lied and they all obfuscated.

What made Tran different was
that he despised the
herd
.
 
Opinions and conventional wisdom were nothing more than affirmations for
each other.
 
They were barely aware of
each new squeeze on their collective throats.
 
They were cattle being driven straight toward the slaughter house, but
some of those cattle knew the truth and he was one of them.

Ron Tran hated what the world
had become.
 
The core of human existence
was now deeply corrupt.
 
It needed to be
changed from the inside out, and he was one of the few who had the skills to do
it.

He continued watching the
herd in front of him, imperceptibly shaking his head.
 
Not only did they not know who he was, but
they didn’t know why he was there either.
 
Just a fellow gamer waiting for a friend to drop by with a new game.
 

Finally, the person he had
been waiting for walked in and looked around.
 
He ignored everyone’s face and hair color since he didn’t know what
GtheWhite actually looked like.
 
Instead
he looked for a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo.

The man spotted Tran and approached
casually.
 
He was also dressed in jeans
and a T-shirt, but being a government official, he wasn’t pulling it off quite
as well.
 
Nevertheless, he sat down next
to Tran and handed him a DVD case with a picture of a popular game on the
cover.

“Here you go,” he said in
broken English.

“How is it?” Tran asked.
 

“It’s great,” the stranger
said.
 
“You’ll love it.”

“Awesome.” Tran raised his
voice just loud enough to be heard by some of the others.
 
“Are you going to stay and play?”

“No,” his friend said.
 
“I have to get back to the restaurant.
 
My father needs me.
 
I’m already gone too long.”

 
“Okay.
 
I’ll play for you.”
 
Tran laughed
out loud and handed a second DVD back to him.
 
“In the meantime, try this game.
 
You’ll like it.”

“Cool, I will.”
 
His friend nodded, then got up and gave him a
friendly departing wave.

Tran flipped over the cover,
pretending to take interest in the description of the game.
 
Instead he was just wasting time, waiting for
a machine to become available.

More than an hour later, Tran
finally got an available computer.
 
He
was glad to see that it was far toward the back as he collapsed into the chair
and pushed his black hair out of his eyes.
 
Inserting the DVD into the computer brought up a big splash screen,
displaying the game’s artwork.
 
Like many
modern games, there was a deep back story to this one, and Tran let the
computerized animation play out.
 
What no
one around him noticed, however, was the small window he opened and moved to
the bottom corner of the screen.

He immediately started
typing, opening up a connection to another machine over the internet and
several cities away.
 
Once he was on the
second computer, he opened up another connection to a third, then to a fourth
and a fifth.
 
From those five he launched
a small computer script that automated the process and created new connections
in every direction and many levels deep, connecting to more and more computers
in more and more countries, until he had taken control of over a thousand
computers in less than thirty minutes.
 
One by one, each of the remote computers proceeded to route themselves
through encrypted proxy servers which would protect him behind a very
complicated and confusing wall of misidentification.
 
If anyone tried to trace his connections,
they would end up in Kenya before they would end up in Beijing.

What the thousand computers
then proceeded to do, was nothing.
 
Their
primary instruction was simply to wait until they received a special
command.
 
For now, he would let the scripts
run on each new computer, which would then quietly reach out and connect to
even more.

Tran closed the small window
on his screen and looked around.
 
Had
anyone noticed?
 
No, they were so
engrossed in their games, they probably wouldn’t notice if he was wearing a
pink dress.
 
Satisfied, Tran removed his
disc and stood up.
 
He took one last look
at the sheep around him.
 
They had no
idea what was coming.