With Extreme Prejudice

There is a darkness that settles over me, a shadow mirrored by the sky. I know we will fly out from under it, but I suspect the leaden mood will linger. The task ahead is grave. It settles on me like a funeral service, which is what it will be for someone’s family. Hopefully not my own.

The call came early or late depending on your time zone, while I was still groggy from the night before. Don’t let anyone fool you; no one parties like the Japanese. Only a meet and greet, no active negotiations. For a few hours, it felt good to forget how that relationship would transform when they went from prospective clients to paying customers. That day, the party would end, at least for me. They would continue to drink and sing and flirt with the cute waitresses. They could afford to ignore reality and distance themselves from the consequences of their actions. They had me.

Early mornings at the airport were always the same. The only thing that changed was whether they charged for wi-fi and what overpriced coffee shop occupied the terminal. The crowds were always similar, businessmen and women preparing for a busy day ahead, couples with young children traveling home for a family crisis, overnight students and young tourists slouching across the line of seats waiting for their connecting flights. I wish I were in the last group, snoozing through until boarding or until security nudged my feet to remind me that sleeping was not allowed.

Instead, I had to identify targets and strategies based on the files my employer had just forwarded to my phone. This one looked like carnage. It would probably make the news. Hopefully not before I was long gone and on to the next mission, wherever that was. New York, Madrid, London, they all dominated the cable channels these days. Each left its scar upon society. And I was the ghost wielding the knife, disappearing before anyone knew I’d been there. But there was no escaping the devastation I left behind.

Reviewing the files turned off the portion of my brain that felt remorse, the empathetic and emotional. Now it was all down to organization and formulas, who to take out first, how the panic would spread, the objectives, the targets, the acceptable losses and collateral damage. It became an intricate game of social Darwinism; how many amputations were needed so the larger body could be saved. Salvation required sacrifice. That’s where I came in.

By the time I boarded, I’d identified where to set off the primaries. From the initial shots the panic would spread, herding victims into the desired locations, the cafeteria, the conference rooms, the auditorium, anywhere they could be gathered and dealt with quickly as a group. This time I’d have local security on my side, paid mercenaries ensuring no word of the massacre leaked until all the casualties had been dealt with. There would be no repeat of the debacle in New Delhi last year.

Just before I landed, I noticed the flagged file. This time I had an inside man. The inexperienced always thought that would make things easier. It never did. Invariably, they ignored the timetable thinking they could draw it out another six months to when their relocation wouldn’t be an inconvenience, disrupt their holidays, or make their kids change schools. Or they’d start planning too early and tip off someone in security, compromising the entire mission.

As a last act before they blacked out my electronic access on approach, I tagged the files I wanted to flash to hardcopy. I’d print them out and ink them with the final markups. I hated leaving a paper trail but sometimes it was unavoidable. I set an alarm to destroy the printouts on my way out along with all my electronic files. Infosec and plausible deniability.

At the gate, I paused to watch the television coverage of the World Bank protests. Without realizing it, they were providing cover for my operation, dominating the news cycle until I was clear. The irony was that many them supported my brand of social Darwinism thinly disguised as capitalism, though most didn’t believe in evolution and wouldn’t survive the laissez faire of a true free market economy. Soon, they would be secondary casualties in the crossfire of their own culture war. How many would be among the wounded left untreated, the dying without care? When the carnage changed their lives forever, how many would extend their empty hands, suddenly embracing Das Kapital over the Wealth of Nations? But consistency isn’t my concern, only the primary, the one target purposefully buried in the static beneath the noise.

On the tram-ride through the airport, I worked on getting into character. At the main terminal I picked up the bar-coded package from FedEx with the final instructions, a location, data access and a badge. They’d even spelled the name right, unlike the last job where they had substituted a B for initial T. Not that I was offended. It wasn’t like it was my real name. But there was still security to get past, remote, electronic and human which mismatched IDs would complicate. There could be no suspicion until after I’d cleared the building and was on the next plane to the next location or to a safe house until the next crisis mandated the public’s twenty-four seven attention, an escaped balloon, a politician’s foot tap, a pop singer’s rehab, a wide receiver’s arrest. The myriad of trivial distractions that allowed people like me to flourish with complete autonomy and anonymity. If religion was the opiate of the masses, cable news had become their crack cocaine.

This time there was another wrinkle. The primary target wasn’t identified in the manifest. I would receive an onsite update. Face-to-face intel briefing, always tricky. That meant their inside man knew more than I did. A situation of trust, one I was never good at. The point of the exercise was to eliminate the primary with enough chaos that no one knew who the target was until they sifted through the rubble. Expensive, but effective. And it wasn’t like I was paying the bills.

After retrieving the package, I used a self-serve terminal to burn a hardcopy of my files. I made the final markups as I waited in line at the taxi stand, then stuffed them into my briefcase with the more sensitive and volatile items I needed for the operation as I climbed into a cab. After a quick review of the SatNav app on my iPhone, I gave the driver an address a few blocks down from the target’s main entrance. I’d street hike it the rest of the way to avoid my transport being captured on the security cameras outside the building. Based on the configuration, experience and intuition, there was a high probability I’d find a secondary entrance inside the parking structure. With a badge, it would be trivial to ghost in behind someone else, eliminating a scan. I knew security and Feds would eventually piece it all together. This was just another delaying tactic to help secure my line of retreat. In the worst case scenario, this could turn into a game of seconds.

The cab ride gave me an opportunity to plot out contingencies. Fortunately, I could make a few educated guesses as to the high value target. Usually a director or vice president, more rarely a program manager. I could identify those by cross-referencing their listed projects with a company news search on Google Finance or their personal profiles on LinkedIn. Sometimes there was a specialist or technical lead. Usually, I would ID them by the Ph.D. on their corporate resume. A handful of times those searches had revealed nothing, but in those cases target hadn’t had a particularly lofty title or advanced degree, just his name associated with a number of critical intellectual properties revealed by patent search. The one time all those searches had failed me, the target had been an IT specialist buried deep in the corporate core. This time, no names stood out. Fortunately, with an operation as large as this, there weren’t many variations on the main theme.

My employer had been generous with their margins, expanding the number to several times the initial thousand that had enticed me into taking the job on such short notice. Surgical strikes required extensive planning and cover stories. This job should be as easy sawing a few branches off an org chart and walking away before they hit the ground. That’s all these operations came down to in my mind, crossing out a few boxes, rearranging the cubes of a few dozen departments, wiping the databases of a few thousand names. All very clean, detached and remote. The real chaos wouldn’t erupt until I was far, far away.

As I arrived on site, I found exactly what I’d hoped for from the street maps, a back access to an adjacent shopping center. Really just a poorly marked door that meant employees didn’t have to brave the weather to purchase necessities or get takeout, a rare perk for them. For me, it became an unobtrusive entrance into the company parking structure that avoided the first line of security. From there, simple patience disguised as a hurried call for a woman to hold the door as I juggled netbook, papers and cell phone gained me and my briefcase access into the building after she glanced at my badge, just to make sure I had one. A smile, an ID and a genuine "thank you" were all it took to enter the target unsearched and unnoticed. The magnetic key incorporated into the badge should have worked alone, but this ensured that security wouldn’t be alerted if I’d already been compromised.

Inside, I ducked into the nearest bathroom to hack into the company intranet for a floor plan. I had a room number for the rendezvous, but I needed to find the least trafficked halls and stairwells to get there. It wouldn’t do to step into an elevator with a company director or VP. Looking lost or asking directions would garner me unwanted attention. Cracking a company intranet from the outside required tunneling through all the firewalls and encryption. Tapping into their wireless network from the inside was easier, especially using the name and employee number I’d stolen off my friendly coworker’s badge. Amazingly, I’d found an easily modified iPhone app to do almost exactly what I needed. I also monitored a freeware RF scanner on my netbook patched through a wireless antenna booster with the alarms routed directly to my e-mail, just to make sure there wasn’t a lot of chatter on the security handhelds or any unusual volume of traffic coming in and out of IT. Everything was as quiet as a graveyard on a midwinter’s night.

I tried not to read the names on people’s badges as I navigated the building to the designated location. I was good at names. I had to be to piece together the information I needed to identify the targets. But I never wanted to put a face to my work. The few I had still haunted me in the quiet moments between jobs. I knew what my work did to people’s lives. It was hard to ignore the statistics. But if I didn’t do it, someone else would. And they might not be so compassionate.

The meet was slated for a large conference room just off an unused lobby that had once been a side entrance but had been enclosed and was now used exclusively for VIP reception, with a tiny, reserved parking area standing empty just outside. It was adjacent to a back stairwell that would provide inconspicuous access. The only drawback was the copy room just up one hall, and the secondary access to the labs just down another. Still, the layout suggested it was one of the least trafficked areas in the building, with the room itself used less than once a month. My contact had done his homework.

I scouted out the location with a walk-by on my way to the closest coffee station. It always paid to check the nearest employee break area. If security were on alert, five would get you ten that you would find a team congregating there.

All clear.

I took a moment to locate a disposable cup in one of the cabinets, then poured coffee from the fullest pot, the odds on favorite to have been cooking on the burner the least amount of time. One hesitant sip told me I wouldn’t need to add any powdered creamer, which could only enhance the flavor of truly hideous coffee, just a packet of sugar. Someone either sprang for name brand, or I’d stumbled onto a coffee klatch’s private stock. Either way, I was content as I snapped a lid on my cup. Coffee was as much a necessity at the point as a cover. Last night’s karaoke and the intervening time zone shifts were starting to catch up with me. I needed to be alert for this meeting, and during my impending escape.

I went back the conference room, popping my head in the door to verify it was empty. Seeing it was, I flicked on one bank of lights and settled in a chair behind a line of tables in a back corner where I had command of both doors. I pulled a lab notebook out of my briefcase along with a stapled sheaf of papers and the netbook, and started penciling notes. Anyone entering would assume I was taking advantage of a quiet room to finish a presentation, or was waiting for an informal meeting. Like a good worker drone, I’d offer to leave if anyone else came in. Unless he was my contact, of course.

I didn’t have long to wait. I’d arrived fifteen minutes early, just to make sure I’d be the one occupying the dominant position in the room, not walking in off-balance as others had tried with me before. In my line of work, it paid to be the one in the blind not the one in the sights. I’d only been sitting about five minutes when an attractive young woman in a corporate-clone blouse and skirt that would have been unremarkable had it fit any less perfectly entered, her fiery ponytail bobbing as she looked somewhat startled to find me there. Even as I began to collect my things and offer to abandon the room, she slipped the door closed behind her and uttered the magic code words with an unidentifiable international accent. "Mr. Tuttle, I presume? How was your flight from Brazil?"

I eased back into my seat, somewhat surprised. Nine out of ten insiders were men, usually angry, white and middle-aged, men defending a territory, men who had been passed over, men trying to endear themselves to a patron higher up. Men shouldering an ax they felt was in constant need of grinding. I had encountered one or two women, but never one so young. This one must be ambitious to stake her future on cleaning up after an operation this large. But my grandfather had often reminded me that two of the three Irish gods of war were women, and any descendant of the land of the Celtic Tiger knew better than to cross them. I didn’t think much more about it before I gave the agreed upon reply, "You know, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there’s trouble."

"A man alone," she finished the protocol with a hint of a smile.

"I finished the preliminaries on the way in," I said, wasting no time with social niceties. "All I need is the primary plus five minutes and I can flash you the solution to bring this place down. Just make sure you and your friends are under cover before the clock starts ticking."

I looked up with my fingers poised over the keyboard, expecting her to come closer before she told me who the target was. When I saw she hadn’t moved, only crossed her arms in front of her, my impatience got the better of me, "Come on, honey, I need a name."

"You don’t remember me, do you?" she asked with an edge of silk polished steel to her voice.

As I studied her a moment, a sense of familiarity began to niggle at me. I became convinced that I’d seen her somewhere before. Still, I couldn’t connect her face with a name.

"Bali, three years ago," she offered almost as a question. I just shook my head, my stomach beginning to fall as though I was already in the express elevator headed down. "Well, I remember you," she added with lilting note of certainty.

Any hope of bluffing my way through this encounter began to fade. Still, I had to try. "That’s nice but we don’t have all day."

"Actually, we do," she said, her arms uncrossing to reveal a corporate issue Blackberry. "And yours is just beginning." She tapped a few keys with perfectly manicured and crimson lacquered fingernails. A tone that no longer sounded dulcet from my netbook informed me that I’d received an e-mail, the last before my access was cutoff and all my processing locked down.

"As you can see," she continued as I stared blankly at her message, unable to read or focus, "your contract was transferred under our corporate umbrella as of this morning. Your bonus has been cancelled and your contingency fees retracted. You’ll also find our latest press release attached at the bottom. Security will be here momentarily to escort you and your briefcase out of the building, right in front of the press conference already in progress. By market open tomorrow, your name and face will be splashed all over Fox Business, Bloomberg and CNBC. I think even the Feds might want a word with you, something about financial terrorism and unpaid taxes. By the time our corporate counter-espionage team helps them unravel your shell corporations and offshore accounts, you’ll be lucky to see daylight again."

I should have planned for this eventuality but hadn’t. She smiled wickedly as the full weight of her snare settled across my shoulders.

"For all the people you’ve made suffer without cause, it’s my turn to say it," she finished sweetly. "You’re fired. The terminations of your associates are already underway."


© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III