Friday, December 19

CTD Midwest Division Headquarters

St. Louis, Missouri

The Yoo-hoo and Diet Mountain Dew Code Red blended together as they were poured into the cup, forming a frothing concoction the color of moderately underdone roast beef. Cherry chocolate nectar of the gods, Scott Ross thought as he threw out the empties.

It had been ten months since Scott had made the transition from AFSOC to Homeland Security, but already he had created a name for himself as a top communications analyst. His ability to tie together seemingly random pieces of information was almost eerie. “It’s as simple as playing connect the dots,” he liked to say, “only without the numbers.”

Scott grabbed a handful of ice from the drawer and added the cubes to his concoction. Three weeks ago, he had stayed after hours to insulate the bottom drawer of his workstation at the counterterrorism division (CTD) of Homeland Security. He had dropped in some coils from a small refrigerator left over from a long-ago failed attempt at dorm life, then cranked the setting up to high and let it cool overnight. The next morning he’d stocked his new minibar with the ingredients needed to create his cherished brew, dropping ice in a specially designed rear compartment. This was just one of Scott’s ways of “sticking it to the man”-“the man” being the guy who refused to stock the vending machines with Yoo-hoo.

Even before the firefight in the Bagram Valley had left him bloodied and dazed, Scott had known that military life wasn’t for him. It was way too structured. The only reason he had joined the air force to begin with was that he had burned his bridges at two different colleges, and home was not a place anyone would want to go back to.

He had grown up as an unusual kid-odd, some might, and did, say-in central New York. He was extremely intelligent but had struggled with what one of his teachers had termed a “focus deficiency.” Unfortunately, his parents had been too wrapped up with their own addictions to get him the help he needed.

When he reached high school, his creative energies had started taking on a more destructive nature. That was when he met Mr. Pinkerton, the head librarian at the Fulton Public Library, where Scott spent much of his time devouring books like The Anarchist Cookbook and The Big Book of Mischief. Mr. Pinkerton had steered him to the classics-Milton, Dickens, Dostoyevsky-and to the sciences-Einstein, Hawking, National Geographic, and anything having to do with mathematics and statistics. Eventually, Mr. Pinkerton had become Scott’s mentor-a relationship that had lasted several years. But while the older man had greatly expanded Scott’s mind, he couldn’t do much with his authority issues, which expressed themselves by his barely graduating high school and later receiving invitations to leave both the University at Albany and Adirondack Community College.

Strangely enough, Scott had thrived in the air force. He seemed to do much better when there were no choices offered to him than when he had the option to do something stupid. He completed the Special Forces training with flying colors and quickly rose to the rank of staff sergeant. But even with all his success, he’d known his military career would not last long. The air force had taught him discipline and focus and how to live with purpose. But his need for independence, combined with the extreme difficulty of getting Yoo-hoo in Afghanistan, cemented his decision to accept the employment offer presented to him by the Department of Homeland Security.

“Hey, Scott, check this out,” fellow analyst Tara Walsh called.

Scott grabbed his drink and moved to her workstation. “What’s up?” he asked as he leaned over her shoulder.

“Oh, gag!” she cried, pushing the cup away from her face. “I asked you not to bring that stuff over here. It leaves a lingering odor like five-day-old birthday party.”

“Sorry,” he said as he quickly chugged the drink and set the cup on her desk.

“Oh, great. Now it’s five-day-old birthday party mixed with two-hour-old Egg McMuffin. Just keep your head turned when you breathe. So, anyway, I was sent up these strings of chatter, and they reminded me of what you were talking about in our briefing this morning. Check out these key phrases.” Tara laid summaries of two intercepted phone calls and one e-mail on her desk. She circled each phrase with a red felt-tip pen as she said it. “‘Hand of Allah’ here, here, and here; ‘heart of capitalism’ here and here; and ‘Allah controls the weather’ here, here, and here.”

Immediately Scott’s brain kicked into high gear. All animation disappeared from his face, and his eyes became vacant as words and phrases flashed into his mind and were either kept or discarded-an interview from last week, a report from yesterday morning, an intercepted satellite phone call from back in October-bits and pieces flowing in and being flushed out. Hypotheses and theories were built up and shot down, but out of the wreckage would emerge other possibilities. Tara, like Scott’s other coworkers, had learned that when he drifted to this mysterious place in his head, it was best to just stand there, shut up, and wait.

A few months ago Scott had been asked to describe the analytical processing his brain went through so that others could be trained in it. The invitation had caused Scott to flash back to the eighth-grade algebra class that had led to his expulsion from Fulton Junior High School. He had gotten all the answers right on his midterm but found it impossible to show the steps he had taken to figure them out. He had been called in to see Principal Stansfield, who wouldn’t believe Scott’s pleas of honesty. The principal had called him a cheater and accused him of stealing the test ahead of time. This had caused Scott to make the slight error in judgment of hurling a decorative lead-framed picture of Stansfield’s wife and two lovely daughters through a glass window, accidentally hitting the school nurse in the forehead as she was on her way back from lunch. “No thanks,” he had told the trainers. “I’ll just do what I do best and let you guys who have nothing better to do train the newbies.”

“Where’s my cup?” he cried, suddenly returning from his trance. Glancing around, he spotted his oversize maroon mug with the gold letters spelling out “University at Albany: The Path to Success Starts Here” slowly rubbing off its side. Then he remembered his little chugfest. “Okay, never mind. Now, follow my train of thought here. ‘Hand of Allah’ has hit at least thirteen places in the last week that I can think of with the occurrences crescendoing up to today. ‘Weather’ obviously means inclement weather can either affect the implementation of the action or the number of casualties-I’m leaning toward the latter. I still can’t figure out the ‘heart of capitalism.’ Is it a financial center like Wall Street or maybe a manufacturing area? It’s got to be someplace with a real possibility of a major storm system shutting down or at least slowing the operation. We’ve got to put more time into this, but every indication I’m getting, Tara, is that the ‘hand of Allah’ is big and it is imminent.”

“Do you think we have enough to take this to Porter?” Tara asked. Division chief Stanley Porter was notorious for ripping to shreds analysts who wasted his time. Countless were the times that Scott had left the DC’s office pondering the ways he could cause his boss the greatest amount of physical pain while leaving the fewest visible marks.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” Scott replied. “Give me fifteen more minutes to connect the dots; then we’ll enter the belly of the beast.”

As he walked back to his workstation, he became more and more unsettled. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was the same one he had experienced many times in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, whenever it came on, nothing good ever followed.