Page 101 of Cross Down
The captain goes back to her computer. “Preach it, brother.”
“I do,” he says, turning to leave. “But nobody listens. Or cares.”
Chapter
116
The door toGeneral Wayne Grissom’s office flies open and a female captain he doesn’t know bursts into the room. His assistant, Colonel Kendricks, is right behind her, and her usually placid face is twisted in anger.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but she pushed past me and—”
Grissom holds up a hand. “All right, Colonel. All right, Captain, what’s going on?”
The captain is slim with short black hair and a bad complexion; she’s wearing black-rimmed glasses and holding a sheaf of papers. She swallows hard and says, “General Grissom, I’m sorry, but I had to see you. It’s an emergency.”
“And you are?” he asks, voice cold.
“Captain Hillary Cardinal,” she says. “Defense Intelligence Agency, sir.”
His voice is sharp when he says, “And you violated good order and discipline and jumped over your chain of command to come here?”
“It’s important, General,” she says, stepping closer to his desk. “I drove over here as fast as I could from Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. I mean, it’s only about a fifteen-minute drive, but I was afraid I might get pulled over for speeding, because I was really speeding, but once I finished our analysis, I—”
“Our?” he says.
She nods, takes a chair without being invited to. “Yes. I’ve got a cousin who works for the CIA and another one at the NSA, and last month, we were in Tessie’s hot tub, me and Paula, having some wine, and we started talking about the terrorist attacks and…”
A hot tub,he thinks.A damn hot tub.“Go on.”
She smiles, taps a finger on the papers she brought. The nail has been chewed down to the quick. “We were all working on finding the sourcing and funding for the attacks, and we realized that each of us just had a part of the problem. We should have gone to our respective supervisors, but we didn’t think there was enough time. Plus, the bureaucracy and paperwork and the permissions…well, we, um, sort of took it into our own hands. Sir.”
Grissom says, “And what did you find out?”
Another nod. “We realized the scope of our work, our individual investigations, was too narrow. All we knew was that the various groups were getting support, funding, and orders via pop-up sites on the dark web. The information was being transmitted on data packets using various VPNs, and the traces were gone before we could find them.”
“But you did find something.”
“Yes, sir, we did,” she says. “That’s what we meant by expanding the scope of our investigation. Instead of just relying on our own intelligence agencies, we took it a step further.”
He feels a sense of horror at what he’s hearing. “You brought in foreign intelligence services?”
“Not exactly, sir,” she says. “We knew that the Chinese, the Russians, the British, the Israelis, they all had to be doing similar investigations. We sent in a highly sophisticated phishing program called Pitbull—it’s called Pitbull because once this program snaps up the intelligence you’re looking for, it won’t let it go. We got bits of intelligence from those overseas agencies, then compared and contrasted it to what each of our agencies—the CIA, the NSA, and the DIA—had found, and we cracked it. We know where all of it—the funding and the operational orders to the groups and individuals to commence their attacks—comes from.”
Grissom is speechless for a moment. “Then give it up, Captain Cardinal. Please.”
Her face flushes. “At first we didn’t believe it, but it checked out. You see, sir, one thing that Congress doesn’t know is that each cabinet department has its own discretionary funds to spend at the request of that department’s secretary. Some departments have more funds than others, although all of this is kept quiet and close to the vest. But once we started going down the trail, it was reasonably easy to nail it down.”
“Captain Cardinal, what did you find out? Now, if you please.”
“Oh, yes, General, so sorry,” she says, licking her chapped lips. She takes a breath, taps the papers once again.
“It’s the Department of Homeland Security,” she says. “We’ve been doing it to ourselves these past months.”
Chapter
117
Sylvester is drivingthe bright red two-axle Mack integrated tow truck—big enough to haul a tractor-trailer and its load without breaking a sweat—northeast on I-395. As he approaches Washington, DC, traffic slows down, and he sees flashing lights.
