Final Winter

Adrianna padded across the concrete floor in her bare feet, wincing at the cold. She went around to the other side, behind the stairs. There was a wardrobe bureau standing there, heavy and immovable. She reached behind the wardrobe, flipped a switch. Inside the wardrobe, hidden casters at the bottom were suddenly released. Well-oiled and balanced, the casters allowed her to move the wardrobe easily to one side of the cellar.

Now revealed beneath the stairway was a small door with a combination lock. Flipping through the combination with ease, she unlocked the door and ducked down, entering the small space underneath the stairway. A light came on and she closed the door. Then she relaxed, sitting down on a small office chair. Before her was a horizontal wooden plank, serving as a desk, and on the plank was a laptop computer. She switched it on, waited for it to power on and boot up. She looked around the small space, which had a network of cables running across the wooden walls and the concrete floor and the ceiling which was also the bottom of the steps. She had spent months putting the wiring in place, working quietly and taking her time, making her own bubble.

Ah, yes, the bubble. An open secret for many members of the media and readers of obscure books about foreign policy: whenever American diplomats went overseas and were not staying at their own embassy, they would use a bubble -sometimes the size of a small tent — to discuss matters they wanted to be kept secret, knowing that if they were within the bubble, they were impervious to any forms of electronic surveillance. Bubbles were kept close to the chest and weren’t something one could pick up at the local Radio Shack, but someone smart and dedicated (like moi, Adrianna thought) could make one at home.

Which was what she had done. Which meant no electro-magnetic radiation at all could leave this small space under her cellar stairs. Not a bit. And with sensing devices available to certain intelligence agencies that could record the minuscule signals created whenever a laptop keyboard was used, that meant a lot.

She moved the laptop closer. It was in a black case and had no identifying insignia at all: no Apple or Sony or Dell or IBM. Zilch, because this particular laptop had been made within the CIA’s own Technical Services Division, and she had stolen it nearly four years ago. Pretty simple: it had been left in someone’s car in plain sight in one of the satellite parking lots at Langley, and Adrianna knew that particular lot’s surveillance camera gear was out for maintenance that month. So, with the skills learned at Camp Perry, she had entered the car and stolen the laptop. Later she learned that the analyst who had allowed the laptop to be stolen had been fired.

Oh well. Collateral damage.

But it meant that she had one of the most powerful and secure laptops in the world for her exclusive use, and my, had she put her own little laptop through its paces these past years, even managing to upgrade it here and there by doing some deft access work to one of the CIA’s mainframe systems.

There. The screen snapped into focus. She typed in the password that allowed her entry and got to work. So many files, so many records, so many dead ends over the years…

Yet look at what she had accomplished, all she had done, from the safety and security of this surveillance-proof cubbyhole in her condo unit. Something that would make a wonderful book or movie, if the world would allow such a thing when she was done.

There. A file opened up and she stared at the list of names there. She rubbed her chin, shivered some in the cool cellar air.

Amil Zahrain of Pakistan.

Ranon Degun of Bali.

Henry Muhammad Dolan of Great Britain.

Three men from around the world, three men who had similar things in common: living on the edge, crippled in some way, and all infused with an undying hatred of America and all it represented. Easy enough to locate them — being a Tiger Team leader meant so many case files and intelligence briefings were open for your perusal — and it was also easy enough to figure out what to do with them once you had their locations and their backgrounds in your eager little hands. For one of the perks of being a Tiger Team leader was being able to see what kind of message traffic was flowing among the various terrorist cells out there, and to see what the messages were saying.

And once you knew what kind of codes were being used, and once you knew the way the codes were passed from one cell to another, from one cell member to another, it was also quite easy to plant fake messages. Fake messages that increased the ‘chatter’. Fake messages that made the cell members think that they were part of some grand, glorious plan.

And fake messages that let her own people think that an anthrax attack was imminent.

She had to smile at that. There was no attack. There were no cells. Nothing. It was all made up, made up by one Iraqi Christian woman, working from her cellar.