Jack leaned in next to Dvora to look more closely at her monitor. It showed a map of America with little circled numbers and corresponding information points down the right side.
“You know, it feels to me like these attacks might be a smoke screen,” he said. “I suspect that there is some overriding objective, and all of this is meant to obscure that objective.”
“A smoke screen.” Ehud considered for a moment. “Many of those groups are competitors for money and resources. Terror attacks gain them status. Status gets them money, resources, and recruits. They are not going to cooperate with each other.”
Jack lifted an eyebrow. “They would if they didn’t know they were merely a diversion and if the whole thing was promoted to them as a competition of sorts—a chance to show off what they are capable of. A big game day of sorts.”
“Put to them by who?” Ehud asked.
Jack shrugged. “Take your pick. But only a state sponsor would have the weight and authority to be able to bring all these different Islamic terror groups together for a chitchat and convince them to attack at the same time. What if these groups thought they were taking part in an audition of sorts to see who should receive that state’s financial support?”
Ehud hooked a thumb behind his belt. “You’re connecting a lot of dots that we don’t see, at least not yet.”
“Maybe. But it worked to get José to try to blow himself up. He thought he was doing something great. I’m sure they didn’t tell him the truth that they were only using him as a diversion to accomplish something they wanted more—getting rid of Uziel. After all, because of Uziel, we took Wahib captive. I think someone might be doing the same kind of thing here—creating a diversion.”
“I’m listening,” Ehud said.
Jack gestured at the monitor. “These attacks were carried out by different groups. Right? It seems like the coordination and lethality of Islamic terror groups have reached an entirely new level.”
“It certainly has the US up in arms,” Dvora said.
“But could it be a diversion, like José was?”
“All right,” Ehud said, “I like the way you always think outside the box, but a diversion for what?”
Jack thought a moment. “Can you pull up any photos from the American cameras at the border crossings where the attacks happened?”
“Why the border crossings?” Dvora asked. “What about the rest of the attacks? Do you want them as well?”
“For now I just want to see the border-crossing attacks.” Jack gave them both a meaningful look. “José was simpleminded. I think he became more useful to them as a diversion, but when he walked away to do their bidding, he walked away with a bit of plutonium stuck in his shoe. Where would they want to go with plutonium?”
Ehud and Dvora shared a look.
Jack gestured to the screen. “Let me see the photos you have from the border attacks.”
“There’s surveillance photos and video from the Canadian-US border attack,” Dvora said. “The terrorists’ timing was off. They started before the cyber attack brought down all the systems. That means the cameras were still in operation during the attack, so we have some good visuals.”
First, Dvora clicked through dozens of facial-recognition photos of people in cars waiting in line. She stopped at a young couple in a pickup. The woman had a black scarf on her head.
“This is the couple that carried out the attack. The facial-recognition software didn’t hit on them, so they weren’t on a watch list. Nothing about them triggered alarms.”
“A lot of homegrown terrorists don’t show up on any watch list,” Ehud said. “They only become known to authorities after they kill people. That’s why the people you find, like Uziel, are so useful.”
Next Dvora showed Jack a video overlooking the lanes of traffic, with the man and woman’s truck waiting in line a few vehicles back from one of the booths. Suddenly, the man and woman both sprang out of the truck with AK-47s and started spraying bullets at the border agents. The attacking couple looked to have no intention of trying to get away. They didn’t fire from cover. They were there to the death. Jack could see several agents go down and smoke from gunfire off-camera being returned.
They both screamed “Allahu Akbar” as they killed surprised people. Some of the people in cars leaped out and tried to run, only to be cut down. Some people tried to hide in their cars, only to have the couple spray their vehicle with a deadly hail of bullets, killing them where they hid.
They fired their weapons in sequence, alternately switching full magazines for empties while the other fired. That indicated practice and planning. It also kept up constant fire, with lethal rounds going everywhere to make it more difficult to return fire. They stood in the open on either side of the truck, shooting at officers in the booths as well as through the windows of a building off to the side. Armor-piercing rounds went right through the bulletproof glass, vehicles, and vests.
A well-placed shot to the head abruptly took out the man. The woman was wounded in the leg and left arm but kept firing her weapon until she was killed by a bullet through her throat. When she went down, a bomb in the truck went off and took out the camera.
“They weren’t refugees or illegal aliens who had slipped into Canada to carry out an attack,” Dvora said. “They were both identified as children of Syrian parents, both born and radicalized in Canada. They left a lot of online rants. Chatter from American authorities indicates they believe that the woman convinced the man to devote himself to jihad, along with her.”
“What we’re looking for wouldn’t be homegrown terror,” Jack said. “Show me what you have from the Oeste Mesa border crossing with Mexico.”
Dvora pulled up files, then clicked on one of them. It was a video from a surveillance camera that showed a normal day at the border checkpoint. Vendors could be seen in the distance walking between trucks, hawking their wares.
“As you can see, everything looks routine,” Ehud pointed out to Jack.
Dvora nodded. “All the video is from before the cyber attack shut everything down. Everything went dead some time before the attack began, so there isn’t any video showing where the attack came from or how it unfolded.”
She showed him a series of photos of the aftermath. It looked like a war zone in Mosul. Pieces of truck frames, heavy parts like axles and engines lay scattered. The checkpoint facility was in ruins and bodies lay strewn everywhere. Rebar stuck up from broken concrete barriers. All the skeletal remains of the trucks were blackened from the intense fires.
“It was a horrific attack,” Ehud said in a tone of voice that sounded as if it were in reverence for all the dead.
Jack had seen carnage plenty of times. It didn’t tell him anything. “Do you have any of the facial-recognition photos, like the ones at the Canadian border?”
“Sure. But those cameras went down a while before the attack just like all the rest of their equipment, so they don’t show anyone the Americans suspect of being involved. They believe the attack came from people waiting in trucks farther back, before they could be captured on the cameras.”
Dvora started opening files of one face after another of men sitting in their trucks, waiting in line. Nothing Jack saw looked out of the ordinary. It struck him that many of the faces he was seeing of people waiting in line would die that day.
After a few minutes, though, something caught his eye.
“Stop!” He pointed. “Right there.”
Dvora halted on a photo of a driver sitting in his truck. It was a photo similar to all the others taken by cameras at every lane at the border crossing, the same way every truck then had to go through X-ray machines and neutron scanners.
The photo showed a driver who looked Mexican. He was yawning so that you could see that he had a gold molar.
Jack tapped the screen. “There. Blow that up.”