Target Deck - 02 Page 18

  Nikita eased the safety switch on his sniper rifle to the fire position.

  It was Jimenez.

  The scope's reticle bounced across the drug lord's face. He had just stepped out of the church, his face an expressionless mask. His eyes were somewhere else, certainly not on this planet. This was the top of their target deck. Nikita had High Value Target number one in his sights and every reason to put a bullet in him, except one. Aghassi.

  The soccer game ceased immediately and the body guards picked up their weapons before flanking Jimenez as they began walking across the field. From the tower, he was an invisible watcher of the entire scene below him. A voyeur that now felt helpless despite the precision killing instrument in his hands.

  “Spooky-One, we have problem.”

  “What is it,” Aghassi hissed.

  “HVT number one is on the move with his guards.”

  “Shit!”

  The sniper watched as the entourage passed through the gateway between the two courtyards.

  “He is moving towards the villa.”

  “I'm almost in the server room,” the spy said, clearly exasperated.

  “I can distract them long enough for you to try to escape,” Nikita offered. They both knew it was a death sentence.

  “No, sit tight. Let the situation develop some more. I have an idea.”

  A completely stupid idea, Aghassi thought as he squeezed inside and swung the hidden door closed behind him. Now he was pinned between the display case the actual security door that would lead into the hidden room.

  Through the cracks in the display case his coffin was suddenly lit up as someone flicked the lights on out in the living room. He heard muffled voices and doors slamming as they were opened and closed. One of the television sets was turned on.

  Aghassi swallowed. He had been in some tight spots in the past but this was really bad. The Koala pouch was squeezed into his stomach making it difficult to breath. Sweat ran down his face and stung his eyes.

  The only good news was that the alarms were disengaged so he didn't have to worry about any contact strips on the door tripping anything when they were disconnected. Now he just needed to pick the lock. It took a minute just to reach his picks in the confined space. The sounds coming from the television at least helped conceal any sounds he made while moving around.

  Inserting a tension wrench into the lock, he applied light pressure while using a rake tool to knock the lock's pins into place by flicking the rake back and forth. A small commotion went up outside before he heard a beer bottle pop open. It was beer-thirty at the Jimenez villa.

  Setting the distraction aside, Aghassi worked the rake around until the last pin fell into place and the lock cylinder rotated. Turning the knob, the pushed the door open as a whoosh of cold air blew across his face. It was literally a wave of relief after sucking it up in an upright coffin for nearly ten minutes.

  Flipping down his night vision goggles on the swing arm they were attached to, he looked down the tunnel for several moments before stepping forward and silently easing the door shut behind him. As he had suspected, there were two sets of magnetic alarm strips that would have gone off if he had not intervened at the monitoring station upstairs. Reaching into his kit, he thumbed the switch on a white lens flash light to help guide the way.

  “Shooter?” he clicked his radio on.

  Static blasted into his ear.

  “KSHHHHy-one.”

  “I'm going down into a tunnel system underground,” he responded not sure how much Nikita would hear. “You won't be able to get comms with me.”

  “KSHHHer, Spooky. WKSHHHere when you KSHHack.”

  “Spooky out.”

  A stone stair case spiraled its way down to a lower level. The stones were smooth from decades of use, mineral deposits gathered on the walls from ground water seeping in. When he got to the bottom he noticed that the tunnel had an arched ceiling and appeared very old. It had to be a part of the original construction of the villa, built into the foundation and dug into the mountain. No way was it dug during the refurbishing when Jimenez chose the site for his headquarters.

  Running along the side of the wall were a variety of cables. Taking a knee, Aghassi noted that some of them carried electricity, others were fiber optic communication lines. He was definitely on the right track. Shining the light down the stone corridor caused him recoil in fear as the beam was reflected back by a set of unblinking eyes. The rat scurried off without further comment.

  He was aware of his nerves becoming slightly frayed at this point.

  Walking through the tunnel he soon came to another door. He had no prior intelligence on how the sever room was secured or what it looked like inside. Without sniper overwatch, from here on out he really was on his own.

  26

  It took a good twenty minutes to pick the locks on the door. It would have taken longer if he had to bridge the wires on the alarm system but thankfully that was already taken care of. Aghassi was startled by the automatic lights as they suddenly kicked in. The bright fluorescent bulbs lit up racks and racks of computer hardware. Stepping inside, he closed the door behind him.

  Banks of Cisco routers and switches blinked as they hummed along next to Juniper mobile and telephone devices, hardware for packet transport and time synchronization, firewalls and other network security devices. Up above, metal trays snaked across the ceiling where various network cables ran from one device to another.

  Aghassi's attention shot to a server cabinet in the back of the room. Walking past the racks towards the servers, he also noticed several electromagnets stationed around the room. In an emergency, they could be used to sanitize hard drive platters, instantly wiping out sensitive data.

  Reaching into the Koala pouch, the mercenary reached for his picks and raked open the lock on the cabinet. Inside he found several high-end IBM servers. He knew from previous experience that they would be running AIX and Oracle as a backbone for data management. Sun Sparcs were running Solaris to provide the file server services for Linux, Apace, and MySQL providing internet web services.

  He had actually expected somewhat stronger security on the sever room, but the security plan designer must have felt that it was pretty secure as it was inside a hidden underground tunnel that could only be accessed from inside a very secure fortress. More than likely, the security measures had been put in place to ward off nosy employees and unauthorized cartel personnel. They didn't seriously think that a covert entry team could get this far.

  Opening his notebook computer, Aghassi connected to the server with an ethernet cable. Once he was connected he duplicated a portion of the server's software that allowed him to surf the network as a digital drone and continue his stealth reconnaissance in the digital world. Installing a backdoor into the system took some time. There were several software safeguards in place that he had to bypass as quickly as possible. The clock was ticking, and every minute that passed increased the odds that he or Nikita would be discovered. If they weren't over the wall by dawn, they'd be stuck there all day.

  With the code inserted into the servers, Cody would be able to access the entire network from the OPCEN back at Samruk's compound. From there, Jimenez' telecommunications infrastructure would belong to them.

  It was a good thing too because the alternative would be to leave a wireless device connected to the router. The security manager or IT technician was due back to do his sweeps in a few days and once he discovered an intrusive signal being beamed out, they would be toast.

  Finally, he copied a worm virus onto the network that would infect any laptop that connected to it. The nasty little bug would secretly be recording audio and video through the webcam and microphone on the connected laptop computers and then transmit the data back to Cody once the computer was connected to the internet. This was why breaking into the server room was so important, why it was more important than placing a bomb in the compound, or even assassinating the drug lord himself. Modern covert and counter-ter
rorism operations were about data. They were about networks and how to dismantle them. Whoever had access to the right type of data, whoever could aggregate it and analyze it, would be the one who took the enemy's network a part piece by piece.

  With his work completed, Aghassi unplugged his notebook and put it away before locking up the server cabinet. He was extra cautious about making sure he left everything exactly the way that he found it. On the way out he closed the door and made sure it was locked before he walked back the way he came, his flashlight beam bouncing across the tunnel in front of him.

  Aghassi wiped the sweat from his forehead for what seemed like the hundredth time that night.

  Now came the hard part. Escaping with his life intact.

  “Bitches,” Jimenez huffed as he entered his bedroom. “Out!”

  The two women moved in slow motion, lethargic as they oozed out of bed. They were still high.

  “Now!”

  The junkies staggered out, not even bothering to get dressed. His men would take care of them, one way or the other. He cleared off an area of his desk and laid his laptop computer down next to the weeping candle sticks. Santa Muerta had been appeased. Now she would grant him favor with The Beast that lived beneath his fortress. Night and day, it heard and saw everything.

  Opening up the computer, he sat down wearing only his blood splattered pants.

  With Arturo gone life had grown more difficult for the drug lord, but what had been lost with his pet intelligence agent had more than been made up for by The Beast.

  With a few clicks, Jimenez opened up a program called Analyst Notebook which displayed a giant link chart showing how people were associated with one another. One by one he looked at the picture of each and every Judas Goat in his organization.

  Using his cellular phone, he placed a call to his right hand man. Ignacio ran the nuts and bolts of franchising out tasks to various freelance agents from his base in Oaxaca City while Jimenez remained in his fortress up in the mountains. He would be waiting for the phone call.

  Ignacio picked up on the first ring.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “It is time.”

  Aghassi peeked out from behind the display case before carefully swinging it open.

  A dozen of Jimenez' men sat around the television screens watching European soccer. Engrossed in the sport, they cheered on, oblivious to the Samruk mercenary as he slipped behind them and up the stairs. He was almost to the top when the two naked, large breasted women he had spotted earlier in the bedroom stumbled on by. They disappeared into the corner room of the villa, slamming the door shut behind them.

  Back in the security monitoring room, Aghassi clenched his teeth. It was a near miss. He was more than a little creeped out by what he had seen in the compound, his nerves shot, and was in a hurry to get the hell off of the objective. He had to take care not to get sloppy.

  “Shooter-One?”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Are you clear?”

  “For now, I'm back in the security monitoring room.”

  “The lights are on in the room you entered into on the second floor. Someone is there.”

  It had to be Jimenez. Nikita saw him entering the villa and he must have been the one who kicked the girls out of his bedroom. It would be a simple affair to walk into the bedroom and shoot him dead with the suppressed pistol.

  Aghassi hurried to restore the security room to its original condition before setting the timers on all of the alarms on a sixty minute delay. The security manager would find everything in place the next day when the alarms came back online after he and Nikita had escaped.

  “Shooter-One, this is Spooky-One,” he said into his radio.

  “Yes?”

  “I'm going down the hall. We can finish this now.”

  “He's isolated?”

  “I think so. It is now or never.”

  “Roger.”

  Aghassi had his pistol drawn and the door halfway open when he heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. Closing the door, he held the pistol at the ready. The footsteps continued down the hall. Easing his way out into the hall once the coast was clear, he could see that the bedroom door was open. Jimenez was having a pow-wow with his men.

  Shooting across the hall, he cracked open the door that the two junkies had gone through. Neither could be seen so he stepped inside. Voices came from the adjoining bathroom. The giggles and girl talk made it sound like they were taking turns doing lines of blow.

  “I missed my chance,” he whispered into the radio. “I need an out.”

  “The sentry is on the blue side of the villa, the green side is clear.” The sniper was using code words for the east and west sides of the building.

  “Roger.”

  Looking over his shoulder, he waited for another explosion of laughter, using the noise to muffle the sound as he pushed open a window. One leg after the other, he slipped outside and onto a narrow ledge, shutting the window behind him. Taking a deep breath, he stepped off and fell down to the ground. With his feet and knees together, his legs acted like a giant piston to help break his fall. It didn't prevent him from gasping in pain as he scuffed up his knees and elbows though.

  Readjusting his earpiece, he tried making contact with his sniper overwatch once more.

  “I'm on the ground. Talk to me.”

  “The sentry is half asleep over on the far side of the building. From up here I can see a drainage ditch running towards the target wall we came up over.”

  “I think I see it.”

  Moving at a crouch, Aghassi walked through the grass until he found the shallow muddy depression. Getting down into it, he leopard crawled forward, arm over arm, happy to put as much distance as possible between him and the villa.

  “We've faced some trying times. Times that have tried our faith,” Jimenez looked up at the goat skull mounted on his wall. “But tonight we strike back. Tonight we strike back at the gringos and their colonial masters.”

  Jimenez spoke to his Lieutenants who he had called and gathered around him.

  “The gringos come from the north and bring with them their military technology, their technology of oppression. But this technology can also be used against them. They forget that this is Mexico. The tax man, the pharmacist, the milk man, they all belong to us.”

  The cartel soldiers chuckled.

  “And the telephone company, they especially belong to us. Both the real cell phone towers and the ones we build, they are all ours. Now let me explain,” he took his time laying it out, assuring his men that he was still in control. “This computer program here compiles information. It takes the records of all cellular phone traffic in Oaxaca and shows us who is talking to who. We can look at it telephone to telephone like this,” Jimenez pointed to the computer screen.

  Displayed on the screen was an icon for a single cellular phone. Branches reached out representing each call made with the phone to other cell phones and land line phones showed incoming, outgoing, and missed phone calls.

  “This is what normal cellular phone traffic looks like,” the Jefe explained. With a few more clicks he brought up a new link chart showing one cell phone connecting to another single cell phone by incoming and outgoing calls.

  “This,” he said pointing to the screen. “Is what the phone calls of a snitch look like. No one uses their phone to call only one number, except those who have been given a drop phone for one specific purpose, to rat on their brothers.”

  The Lieutenants looked at each other for a long moment.

  A few more clicks on the laptop brought up a new link chart showing side by side comparisons for two different phones.

  “Now you see here, these two phones belong to the same person. One phone shows normal phone calls going out to his friends, family, and his brothers here in our family. However, the second phone is kept for one specialized purpose, to compartmentalize the calls to this single phone number from all the others. The Beast has sniffed out this information f
or us and there are many more like him but this cell phone belongs to someone in this very room.”

  Jimenez reached over his computer and grabbed the Smith and Wesson Governor revolver. Spinning in his chair, he bounced the hand cannon in his fist. The pistol was capable of firing .45 ACP rounds but more importantly it was designed around the .410 shotgun shell. The massive revolver was essentially a scaled down shotgun.

  “Jose,” Jimenez stated coldly. “This is your cell phone.”

  The cartel lieutenant took a step backwards, his hands coming up in front of him defensively. Whatever words he was about to say died in his throat.

  “What do you want me to do about this Jose? This is a dead ringer as they say. One phone that only calls one phone, always in the middle of the night? You are a source and you have been talking to that whore, the former Police Chief's daughter. She works with the gringos now, you know that!”

  Jimenez aimed down the tritium night sights, lining up the front sight post square on Jose's face.

  “At least in death, you will serve Santa Muerta.”

  The drug lord squeezed the trigger and the revolver jumped in his hand with a flash, the recoil pushing the barrel up towards the ceiling. Jose's face disappeared in a splash of gore and shattered bone. He was dead before his body hit the floor.

  Jimenez tossed the pistol back on the table where it landed with a heavy clunk.

  “Next order of business-”

  “SHIT!”

  Cody looked away from the computer monitor and turned towards Frank. He had watched the entire exchange as it was recorded by the webcam imbedded in Jimenez' laptop. Aghassi's worm virus had infected the server, installed itself on the drug lord's computer, and started uploading through the cartel's own satellite uplink where it landed on Cody's computer.

  “What is it?” Frank asked, setting down his spit bottle.

  “Our entire human intelligence network is about to get rolled up.”