The Saracen Incident Read online

  The

  Saracen

  Incident

  By

  Jack Bowie

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Jack Bowie

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the prior written permission of the author. If you would like to use material from this book (other than for review purposes), permission must be obtained by contacting the author at [email protected].

  Visit the author’s web site at www.JackBowie.com

  Cover design by Renee Barratt, www.TheCoverCounts.com

  To my wife Sharon, and daughters Lisa and Jennifer,

  with all my love.

  Contents

  Title

  Begin Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Preview

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  District of Columbia

  Sunday, 7:00 p.m.

  “GOTCHA, YOU BASTARD!”

  It had taken thirty-five hours, two Pizza King super veggie pizzas, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios, a chicken parm grinder from Genoa’s, two giant bags of hot and spicy Chex Mix, and fifteen caffeine-free Cokes, but he had finally caught the rogue.

  The surface of his battered oak desk was invisible beneath a treacherous landscape of reference books, manila folders, and crumpled sheets of notebook paper. Only a precise pyramid of the crimson and white soda cans hinted at the true character of the detective. He really should have been studying for Tuesday’s combinatorial math exam, but his quest was infinitely more exciting than computing Markov transition matrices.

  He gazed bleary-eyed into the LCD monitor that stood on the back of the desk, scanning each line of output as his detector program reported the gateway’s traffic profile. For the past three hours he had watched the status lines scroll hypnotically down the screen, showing nothing but the expected match between incoming and outgoing messages. All an Internet gateway was supposed to do was route and forward other computers’ communications. It connected his university’s internal network with the Internet backbone. Not unlike a local post office: a letter comes in, a letter goes out.

  But now one of the comparisons was wrong; one more message was sent than was received. The post office had sent its own letter. He had first seen the anomaly the week before, but had accidentally destroyed the trace trying to analyze it. Now he had proof.

  Exactly what the anomaly was, however, he couldn’t determine. It might just be a simple duplication of another message, perhaps caused by a transmission error or benign software bug. Or a maintenance message sent off to some anonymous network manager. But it could also be from a computer virus or worm. Something that could compromise the security and integrity of his network.

  It wasn’t really his network of course; it belonged to George Washington University. But ever since he had started on the network security project for Mendoza he couldn’t help but think of the University’s plexus of computers and communication lines personally. The network had taken on a life of its own; it was a dynamic, living entity feeding on the keystrokes of students, professors, and administrators, ingesting their notes and memos, files and reports to its invisible organs, and releasing their contents only to those authorized to view them. Yet there were always dangers; entities that would poison and drain the blood of the network, plagues that would disrupt the natural flows.

  He was the guardian of this soul. And if something had invaded his ward he was determined to find out exactly what it was.

  He had started programming the latest version of his detector early that morning. The bright, encouraging rays of sunlight that had filled his small apartment had now been replaced by darkness and the lonely, eerie glow from the monitor. Shadow companions of fatigue and despair had danced on the rough plaster walls of the room, coming ever closer as the hours drifted by. But he had fought off the apparitions and had caught his quarry.

  Rubbing his eyes to clear the watery blur, he scribbled some final notes on a printout and clicked open the window to his electronic mail program. He had gone as far as he could; it was time to call for help.

  The clock icon in the corner of his screen suddenly caught his eye. “Damn,” he whispered. He had an appointment in less than an hour.

  Absent-mindedly running his hand over his face another reality sunk in. He was hardly prepared to meet anyone. His face was a jumble of hair and whiskers, his clothes were covered with stains and crumbs, and his apartment had a . . . well, unique aroma. He badly needed a shave, shower, and clean clothes. And maybe an open window would clear the air.

  He forced his attention back to the keyboard and pecked out the message, oblivious to a faint tapping echoing through the room. The tap turned into a rap, and the rap to a very insistent knock, finally breaking through his concentration. A knock? What was she doing here already?

  After a final punch at the ENTER key, he slid his chair to the doorway, flipped the two deadbolts, and twisted the knob.

  “Hey, why so early?” he asked with a grin as the door swung open. “I thought . . .”

  His mouth froze in mid-sentence. Instead of seeing a smiling coed, two dark silhouettes were outlined in the glow from a bare bulb in the hallway. He groped around the jamb with his right hand and flipped the switch to the room’s overhead.

  Dirty yellow light filled the room and spilled out to the hall, illuminating the emotionless faces of two very imposing men. One was tall, he must have been at least six feet four, the other shorter, but with a neck like a professional wrestler. They were dressed alike, each wearing dark slacks and tan light-weight jackets. Dark aviator glasses covered their eyes. Their chiseled features and crew-cut hair reminded him of something out of Men in Black.

  “Mohammed Ramal?” the taller man asked.

  “Ah, yes,” Ramal blurted out little too loudly as he bounced up from the seat and gave it a kick back across the room. The chair skidded across his threadbare oriental rug and struck the desk with a force that tumbled his aluminum monument and tossed most of his papers onto the floor.

  “I’m Special Agent Harding and this is Special Agent Nathan, from the FBI.” The men pulled small black leather wallets from their pockets and mechanically flipped them open so Ramal could read the ID cards. “We’re doing a security check on one of your classmates and would like to ask you a few questions.” The cards were quickly pocketed as Harding finished the familiar monologue. “Okay if we come in?”

  Too surprised to debate the issue in the doorway, Ramal managed a curt “Sure” and stepped back from the entrance.

  Despite the odd hour, the appearance of the agents was not that unusual. A number of his friends in the department had applied for jobs with the spooks and he knew that background checks were routine. The security agencies were always recruiting at GW; Langley and Fort Meade were nearly next door, and they both were major employers of comp-sci grads.

  The two agents stepped slowly into the room and Ramal couldn’t help but be intimidated by their watchful, measured bearing. He’d never thought about being a spook, but they did interesting work and had really cool toys. The cavernous underground computing facility at NSA was said to contain more processing power than that in most countries. He was bright, spoke Farsi pretty well, and had a good understanding of Islamic history. It couldn’t hurt to ask a few suggestive questions could it?

  As he turned to close the door, he noticed that the
shorter agent was carrying a large plastic grocery bag. Why hadn’t he noticed that before?

  Harding wasted no time, delivering the shuto swiftly and accurately. The blow fractured the spinous process of the axis, or second cervical vertebra, just at the base of the neck. It drove the process into the arch of the smaller third vertebra, crushing it, the resulting bone shards easily slicing through Ramal’s cheese-soft cervical spinal nerves. There was little blood and this particular injury would later be unrecognizable.

  Instantly paralyzed from the neck down, Ramal collapsed like a severed marionette onto the ragged oriental. Unable to move or breathe but still conscious, he felt his heart pound like a jackhammer trying to push life-giving blood to the rest of his body. But without functioning lungs, the anoxic fluid only caused increased screams from his dying muscles. He watched, powerless, as the visitors went through his apartment while his consciousness, and life, slowly dissolved into darkness.

  * * *

  Ramal had been connected through his cable modem to trumpet, the main computer science server for George Washington University. His email program queued his outgoing message to outmail.gwu.edu, the outgoing SMTP server for the University. outmail.gwu.edu released it at 7:17 to the nearest Internet router, gwu-gate. After six seconds, gwu-gate forwarded the message to the next stop on its journey, cmu-common, on the Carnegie Mellon campus. Forty-five seconds later, cmu-common successfully sent the single block of computer data to the input network driver on certcc, the incoming server for the CERT Coordination Center at the Software Engineering Institute in Pittsburg.

  Bob Bennett was the response operator for the evening shift. This was Bennett’s second year working part-time at the Center. It wasn’t a bad gig; basically, he got paid for the time he spent doing his homework. Usually there weren’t very many interruptions; which was a good thing tonight since he had a killer exam in number theory the next day.

  It took him sixty-eight seconds to open and read the new email. It was 7:19 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The message was sufficiently vague, and promised further detail, so Bennett classified it as a Grade Three, low priority. He saved the message into the designated electronic folder, and went back to figuring out why Riemann manifolds didn’t belong on Jeff Gordon’s NASCAR racer.

  * * *

  After circling the block twice, Susan Goddard finally found a parking spot on Colburn Street, slipping her BMW in the space as a rust-infested chartreuse Beetle lurched out. Pleased with her success, she set her car alarm, walked to the corner, and turned down Grady Avenue toward her friend’s apartment.

  Street traffic was light this Sunday evening and only a few couples, they looked like undergrads, strolled the sidewalk. She was fifteen minutes early but had gotten a cool new idea for their simulation while reviewing some journal articles and couldn’t wait to tell Mohammed about it. Besides, it had been another weekend spent by herself. She badly needed some human interaction.

  Goddard had spent Saturday cloistered in the stacks of the Library of Congress excavating articles on the geo-political development of the Malay Peninsula, and today staring into her web browser searching the literature on computer-aided instruction for some nugget useful to their project. All part of the unbridled excitement of being an overworked grad student. She really had to get a social life. Unfortunately, this evening’s “study date” was as close as she was going to get.

  She was only half a block away when a blinding flash of light froze her in place. Less than a second later, a high-pressure shock wave slapped her back to life, nearly knocking her down onto the cracked concrete sidewalk. She straightened up and saw a cloud of smoke and debris surround her destination like a dark cocoon, while fragments of glass, wood, and metal rained down onto the street.

  Her book bag fell to the ground as she raised her hands to her face and let out a terrified scream.

  Chapter 2

  District of Columbia

  Sunday, 9:45 p.m.

  DETECTIVE SAM FOWLER, District of Columbia Investigative Services Bureau, Second District, double-parked his faded blue Taurus a block from the crime scene. It was a sultry spring evening in D.C., temperature in the mid-sixties, humidity about one hundred fifty percent, and dead calm. Fowler peeled his sweat-soaked back from the vinyl-covered seat and headed into a haze of smoke, guided only by spears of red and blue light shooting from the light bars on two patrol cars parked further up the street.

  He emerged from the haze into a confusion of activity. Debris from the blast spread all the way across the narrow two lane pavement. Three patrolmen were trying their best to keep the press and other civilians away from the evidence as they wrapped the area in bright yellow “Crime Scene” tape.

  The neighborhood was typical for this part of the northwest quadrant of the District of Columbia. Both sides of the street were lined with three-decker row houses, most built in the 1940’s. Decades of paint hung thick on the clapboards blurring the lines of the siding and making the homes look like over-frosted birthday cakes. Cracked brickwork had been repaired and repointed so many times there was more mortar than masonry remaining. Still, the small lawns were clipped, and the litter was down to a manageable level. Overall, the houses were livable and in reasonable repair, the structures standing the test of time better than those in other parts of his District.

  The full force of inner-city D.C. crime had not yet come out this far, and the owners of the tri-levels, most of whom were residents as well, were trying to slow the relentless invasion. The Second had its slums and its mansions; Fowler had seen them all. He hoped they could hold on. Still, it was hard to believe that there was anyone or anything in this neighborhood that was worth blowing up.

  Fowler trudged forward, awkwardly ducking under the tape, then carefully stepping over the glass, wood and metal littering the ground. His eyes burned from the smoke and the throbbing that had begun in the back of his head was starting its forced march to his temples. This was his second murder of the shift and he hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, a long ten hours ago.

  He stopped in front of number 94 and stared up to where the third floor apartment used to be. The two six-over-six windows had been completely blown out and black smoke still swirled through the ragged holes. Shards of glass, splinters of window frame, and sections of shingles littered the ground. Damage to the rest of the building seemed minimal so it couldn’t have been all that big a charge. But from what the dispatcher had said, the scene inside was pretty ugly.

  Two more blue and white patrol cars were parked in front of the row house alongside an unmarked he assumed was from forensics. Looking down the street, he saw the Bomb Squad van parked at the corner. They always did know enough to stay out of the way.

  Fowler flashed his shield at the patrolman guarding the upstairs entry, and headed up. The detective was a big man, six foot three and 230 pounds, and found himself angling his body sideways as he trudged up the narrow staircase. His wife had given up nagging him about his weight, but climbing two flights of stairs at the end of a shift was almost enough to put him back on his diet. Almost.

  The smell of gunpowder bit at his nostrils as he neared the third floor landing. He hadn’t had a bombing case for a couple of years now, but the memory helped brace him for the chaos inside.

  Fowler walked into what must have been the living room of the apartment and was again reminded of what even a small amount of explosive could do. The destruction was nearly total. Two portable floodlights glared into the apartment illuminating what was left of the tenant’s belongings.

  The furniture had been completely shredded, pieces blown into every corner. Fowler could make out the remains of an old sofa and at least two chairs. The frames of what looked like two television monitors were scattered on the floor. Dark red stains covered the carpet and dotted the bare plaster walls.

  The stench attacked him again, this time a mix of smoke, cordite, and human remains. One member of the forensics team knelt on the side of the room, picking up
and cataloging debris. Lying in the middle of the room was Fowler’s reason for being there: a blood-stained white sheet covering what was left of a human being. He tried not to think about the state of that piece of evidence.

  He was about to check out the rest of the apartment when a familiar face appeared in the doorway. Rick Thomassini was a rookie, barely on the job a year, but Fowler had already worked with him on a couple of cases and liked the young cop. He gave straight answers and didn’t try to play junior detective, a welcome change from most of the other rookies he’d met.

  “How are you, Rick?” Fowler asked stepping around the rubble.

  “Doing fine, sir.”

  Thomassini always said “sir” to a superior, even when he was off duty. Fowler was sure he’d get over it soon enough, but the salutation was a welcome change from the greetings he usually received.

  The rookie was a touch under six feet tall with a thick neck and muscular arms. His slicked brown hair and dark eyes made him look more like his Italian longshoremen ancestors than a D.C. cop.

  “Wes and I got the call about 7:50,” he recited. ‘Big blast over on Grady’, they said. Called the Bomb Squad right after we got here. Then Captain Rodgers after we found the body. Or what’s left of it. That was about 8:15. The Captain said to call you. I put a request in for the M.E. but they said he’s had a busy night.”

  “So I heard. Any identification yet?”

  Thomassini pulled a small spiral notebook from his shirt pocket. “The apartment’s rented to a Mohammed Ramal. Dark skinned male, early twenties, probably an Arab. Student at GW.” He paused and glanced back to the body. “It’ll take a while to be sure of any identification though. The owner and his wife are downstairs if you want to speak with them.”

  “Thanks. I’ll get to them later.” Experience told him the owner and neighbors would be of little help. Nobody wanted to “get involved” anymore. He would be on his own, as usual.