The Big Short

My head was killing me, and Kelly is at least as merciless as I am. So, I handed her the Ghoststrike and said, "You do the honors. You're the one he was planning to rape."

Kelly is a PhD psychologist. It's forensic psychology, so she understands twisted minds. She got a lascivious smile on her face walked over to the bed, sat and picked up the dude's now deflated member.

She began to stroke him, feathery touches up and down the shaft. Then as it hardened she started pumping him. It was indeed an impressive weapon.

Believe me, Kelly knows how to work a cock. Very soon, the Tango's dick was taut and pulsing, veins standing out prominently. He actually moaned. She said voice oozing sex, "The Prophet has promised you 72 virgins. But, you will have a hard time servicing them without this."

At that, Kelly cut a neat little circle completely around the dude's cock, about a quarter inch above his scrotum. The cut was quick and precise, but not deep. The Ghoststrike is razor sharp. Every guy back to Adam cringed in horror.

It was a masterstroke of psychological pressure. You could see the dude fighting himself. But, a fellow like him was far too deeply invested in his own dick to hesitate long. It turned out that he was a Latino from Cabrini Green, not some rich kid from Riyadh. Who'd have thought it? We were almost neighbors.

He had been converted by a fellow he called the Qalandar. That guy ran some kind of seminary in a downtown Chicago storefront and both of them worked for a dude they called the "Caliph."

I said sternly, "What are you doing for this Caliph? What's your mission?"

He went back to stubborn. Kelly seized all of his equipment in her left hand, both cock and balls, and started to determinedly saw off the entire unit. She said threateningly, "They are going to find you with this stuffed in your mouth."

Blood gushed. I could see that it was a psychological ploy. She was lightly sawing into his crotch muscles, not his balls. But the guy didn't know that. He gave a primal shrieked of utter fear and agony. That was when we learned about the mubtakkar and how they planned to use it.

*****

Kelly had gotten what we needed, and there was no way we could leave Al-Asad alive to warn others; or perhaps rat us out to whoever was really running the show. There were still too many unknown factors in play.

I told Kelly that we had no other option based on what he had told us. She said, "He tried to murder you. He tried to rape me. He killed Holly Pritman with his bare hands and he is planning a terrorist incident that would kill thousands. If you weigh him in the balance, his death is justified."

I said reluctantly, "I've killed before. But, never in cold blood. I know it's not easy and of course we might get caught."

Kelly was hunting around the bed. Abruptly, she swooped down and came up with a big, solid-rubber ball gag. Adeel/Bobby was still cognizant enough to struggle in his restraints. I seized his head and Kelly jammed the gag past his teeth and secured it in the back of his mouth.

She said impassively, "He put that on me while he undressed and restrained me. Believe me, it's hard to breath wearing it. I screamed in distress as soon as he took it out."

I had an inspiration. I formed a Kleenex into two small solid plugs and jammed them in his nostrils.

It would take a short while before the plugs were eroded by snot and other bodily fluids. But it would be long enough. There would be no evidence of foul play. It would just look like a BDSM session gone wrong.

Adeel started making strangling noises. He had pissed himself and he was bleeding badly from the cuts. But he still had his precious cock. We left before he died.

As soon as we put some distance between us and the crime-scene, I called Chelsea. My head was killing me. But, the wound had stopped bleeding. There had been some butterfly bandages and a bottle of antiseptic in the bathroom. Kelly had cleaned it up as best as she could.

I changed out of my blood-soaked clothes and we stuffed them in a roadside trash barrel. I had put on a Ravens cap - very gingerly I might add. I didn't look like a man who just had been shot in the head. That was an illusion. I truly felt like my brains were leaking out my ears.

Chelsea told me that she had gathered a lot of important stuff. But, she was still crunching it around to make sense out of it.

I hurriedly interrupted, "It doesn't matter who-dunnit right now. We have a national disaster to avert."

I then explained the coordinated attacks that were planned for the following day. I also told her that there was too much suspicious stuff going on at the top. So, notifying the usual authorities was out of the question. I said hopelessly, "I'm out of ideas. Do you have any?"

Chelsea's tightly controlled voice actually sounded delighted. She said, "Don't worry I'll handle the mubtakkar problem. I have something that I've been dying to try. I just never had a reason to do it."

She finished with "Stay out of the area until you know it's safe and believe me, you'll know." With that she hung up.

*****

The MQ-9 Reaper was based with the 174th Attack Wing at Wheeler-Sack military air base at Fort Drum. Most of the Reapers used in the Middle East are flown out of places like Incirlik in Turkey and handed over to the combat operators at Creech in Nevada once they are airborne.

But, Wheeler-Sack is a training and coordination center for two-man Reaper teams, pilots and sensor operators. Those teams practice launching and flying the drone inventory from there. That night, a couple of new operators were practicing night reconnaissance out of a Mobile Ground Control Station.

As the investigators later reconstructed it, a rouge signal was sent to the data uplink at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland. It was AES encrypted and an expert had hopped it through an impossible number of gateways. So, it could not be cracked or traced. The signal delivered a classic command-injection through a zero-day vulnerability on Goddard's public site.

Critical system functionality is always rigorously partitioned from the public-facing elements. But, both public and secure elements are parts of the same larger system and there are always a few unknown dependencies that a skilled hacker can find and exploit. Consequently, even purportedly secure government systems are vulnerable to indirect attacks.

The payload in the injection burrowed into the low memory of the root server. There, it built a surreptitious pipeline around Goddard's security sandboxes. Once the firewalls had been bypassed, the attacker uplinked an encoded signal to the military's AEHF-3 satellite.

That satellite sits in geosynchronous orbit and provides over-the-horizon command and control linkage to the Predator and Reaper inventory. The signal was a simple buffer overflow. But, the memory that it overwrote handed the Reaper's command and control system to parties unknown. Hence, at exactly 03:00 the student airmen at Fort Drum discovered that they no longer controlled their drone.

The mission had been to fly down the Hudson to New York Harbor, and fly back. They were circling over the Verrazano Narrows at 45,000 feet when the Reaper suddenly banked and headed down the Coast at 300 miles per hour.

No soldier wants to report career-ending news like that to their superiors. So, the operators tried every diagnostic they could think of to get their drone back. After that proved fruitless, they finally decided that they had to inform their unit commander.

The news that a Reaper had gone feral set off a flurry of panicked signals up and down the chain of command. At 04:38 the people at Fort Drum were just ordering up a flight of F-16s when the Reaper abruptly went on station over Baltimore.

Observers were able to track what was happening through the transmissions the drone was still sending from its monitoring and surveillance imagery systems. Thus, everybody was able to see the Reaper's wings go hot.

The two AGM 114 Hellfire missiles on the weapons pylons had been placed there strictly to give the students the look-and-feel of flying a combat payload. But now, the birds were arming themselves.

Both missiles launched as soon as they were armed. The travel time from 25,000 feet to impact was approximately five seconds. It was a precision strike that absolutely atomized an old warehouse. and the eight people inside.

Then inexplicably, the drone went into flyaway mode and operator control was immediately restored.

The accident couldn't be covered up. But the cause could. The idea of killer drones operated by our own military would NOT play well on Capitol Hill. So, the story went out that a gas leak had caused the catastrophic explosion. The incident was classified Top-Secret and locked down for posterity.

The destruction of a rundown warehouse and eight deaths wasn't even front-page news in Baltimore and the story died after a single news cycle. The only item of interest was what the first responders discovered.

Along with the stink of burning timber, and human flesh there was a distinctive taint of poison gas. Of course, that fact never saw the light of day. The rationale for burying the story was "for the public interest" instead of, "in order to cover my ass."

Subsequent investigation found that there had been enough sodium cyanide and hydrochloric acid stored in the building to kill a massive herd of Wooly Mammoths. Fortunately, the windy, rainy weather over the Chesapeake had quickly and harmlessly diffused the lethal cloud. It would have been another matter entirely if the release had taken place in a confined space.

*****

We had been watching the warehouse from a safe distance when two streaks shot down from the heavens and the whole thing disappeared in a fireball. There was no way anything could survive that blast. I immediately called Chelsea. She didn't answer. Then she called me.

She said, "I'm sorry I couldn't answer the phone. I was busy giving the drone back to the Air Force."

She added brightly, "It looks like we've solved our terrorist problem." As I said, little Chelsea Hughes-Meissner is one of the most awe-inspiring women on the planet.

*****

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. The guy running the Office of Intelligence Integration was named Easton. He was Skull and Bones. So was Pritman. The two of them had a regular get together in Chicago, one that featured the characteristic sixty-year-old ex-frat-boy hijinks, booze, drugs and slutty women.

The old Yalies were reminiscing about nine-eleven. The conversation was kicked off by a discussion of what Easton REALLY did for a living. Pritman said regretfully, "Nine-eleven was a tragedy. But I would have made a fortune if I'd known it was going to occur."

Easton was a bureaucrat. His degree was in public policy, not finance. He said puzzled, "How would you have done that?"

Pritman explained about short selling and the stock market. He said, "The Dow lost $1.3 trillion between Tuesday September eleventh and the following Friday. If I had known that was going to happen I would have doubled or tripled my wealth."

Easton had worked in intelligence analysis for thirty-four years. He knew the counter terrorism game. He said speculatively, "There are still a lot of nine-elevens out there. What if you knew about one before it happened."

Pritman laughed and said, "Both of us would be rich beyond our wildest dreams."

*****

Kelly and I were sitting in Charlie Palmer's Steakhouse. Charlie Palmer's is infested with the eight-thousand-dollar suit types. For the uninitiated, those are lobbyists not Senators.

Maybe it's the proximity to the Senate side of the Capitol building, or the fact that our elected representatives are decidedly carnivorous. But, that is the place where power has lunch.

We were sitting with the hottest grandmother in the history of well preserved 60 somethings. She was accompanied by a guy you see a lot on TV, if you watch C-SPAN.

Like his two predecessors in this current term, the old dude was warming the seat of the Director of National Intelligence. But for years prior to that he had been a Senator from a reliably red State

Maddie Hughes is one of those people who can get meetings with anybody, usually at a moment's notice. That's due to the fact that she can make a lot of cash miraculously appear in your campaign coffers or those of your opponent, it depends on how she feels about you.

Since members of Congress are eternally running for office, they want to make Maddie Hughes happy.

Maddie is the mother of Chelsea Hughes-Meissner and William Hughes, formerly of the Blue Angels. A couple of years ago Billy, as his folks called him in order to differentiate him from his dad, fell into a carefully constructed treason frame. Kelly and I pried him out of it and the Hughes's have treated us like family ever since.

We were having lunch to "informally brief" the Director about some of the activities that were taking place underneath him. Basically, we wanted him to know that one of his minions was shirking his duty; at least, when it came to his apparent willingness to deal with a massive terror plot.

The Director was aware of the lost drone and he could probably connect the dots, but he was a politician. Hence, he feigned ignorance and outrage. He looked directly at Maddie - Kelly and I being too insignificant to notice - and said, "What authority do you have for this?"

Maddie said, "Seriously!!?? For God's sake Dan!! You just had a Level One environmental incident in Baltimore!! And you're asking me about the authority of my intel?? Wherever that was going to be used, and we both know it would be a Tokyo Subway type attack, you dodged a bullet."

She added, "We're just here to bring you up to speed on the situation. What you do about it is up to you." And she shoved a thick dossier across the table. It was material that Chelsea had assembled.

The Director knew that Maddie had every one of the culprits, including himself, dead to rights. That would play itself out at election time if he didn't do something apocalyptic to protect himself. What he didn't know was that the information had all come from Maddie's beloved daughter.

Given the fact that Chelsea Hughes-Meissner was roughly one white Persian cat short of being an actual Ian Fleming super-villain, those questions were things that Maddie didn't want to address. But then again, after what Maddie showed the Director I was certain that the dude would clean up his own mess and it wouldn't be pretty.

Career Washington bureaucrats have their ways and the last thing they want is an awkward incident on their watch. Our luncheon guest worked in the shadows of counter-terrorism. So, in my humble opinion, a subordinate who threatened that cushy sinecure would be fortunate if he only got fired, not renditioned.

It was all a moot point anyhow. This was Monday. There had been no catastrophic terrorist incident on the previous Friday, the market had surged, and the Dow's rising tide had ensured that all of the players in the short-selling gambit were going to pay the piper.

*****

Kelly and I flew back to ORD with one goal; to personally present the bill to Trey Pritman. But, we had one stop to make first. Bobby Martinez had mentioned the Qalandar. That is a term for a Sufi saint. But the dude we encountered in a rundown storefront was no saint. He was a southside ex-pimp with a gimmick.

I had to give him credit. There are a lot of "Praise the Lord and Hallelujah" types making a buck in the ghetto. But, diversifying into Salafism was a brilliant marketing strategy.

The Qalandar was puttering around in the back when we entered the former shoe store, which was now his Madrasa. He was a relatively harmless looking old black dude in the standard Mullah robes. Since he was clearly a guy who knew the street I didn't think bouncing him around would do much good. Instead, we approached him with a straightforward proposition.

I told him that we had had a long talk with Bobby Martinez, who was the former Adeel Al-Asad and we knew the Qalandar's role in a potential terrorist attack. The guy had been around. He knew what that boded for a former street-punk turned Sufi saint. So, I told him that we wouldn't hand him over to the Feebs if he gave up the name of the Caliph.

The Caliph was the mastermind. Hence, I wanted to have a long heart-to-heart talk about his many crimes. The Qalandar turned a pair of rheumy eyes on me, ones that had seen it all and said, "Unfortunately, I don't know his name Brother. Only his title. He is the person who funds our good work in the community."

I held up my phone and said, "Is this his picture?"

The Qalandar got a look of reverence and said, "Yes, that is him. He is the Caliph. He is the one I am paid to connect to our brothers worldwide."

*****

I let Kelly make the arrangements because she's the smooth one. She's also hotter than Pritman's former wife and the old goat obviously appreciated beautiful women. He probably thought Kelly was a potential next Mrs. Pritman.

It was the same scene all over, except it was early summer now. Trey was standing in the same window. He looked broken. I already knew that he had lost $800 million two Fridays ago. That would have been punishment enough except he still had $400 million left. That's what being a one-percenter is all about.

Trey had misunderstood why we were there. Kelly had made certain of that. Otherwise our benefactor might be a little harder to track down. He said wearily, "Welcome my friends - please tell me the details of Holly's death. Her funeral was very sad and elegant. She would have been touched."

Kelly and I picked a couch. I gestured to the other one. Trey looked annoyed. But my head was hurting, and I wasn't in a mood. He could sense it. So, he sat. I said, "Adeel asked us to send you his regards. He can't come in person because we killed him."

Pritman recoiled in shock. I added menacingly, "The only thing preventing you from spending the rest of your life in a comfy little cell on the island of Cuba is my willingness to keep my mouth shut."

I gave him my patented homicidal stare and said, "I know you're the Caliph and I know that you orchestrated the whole thing. What particularly hurts is that you tried to throw Kelly and me under the bus; that is, while you were killing thousands of American citizens."

Pritman started to sputter about how he didn't know what I was talking about. I said, "We have the whole slimy trail - all the phone calls and electronic correspondence between you and Easton." That was courtesy of my little friend in St. Lucia. She has access to the NSA recordings of government phone traffic, which is stored at the Massive Data Repository in Bluffdale, Utah.

I hit the play button on the tablet. Trey's voice said, "It's all in place. But, it's a narrow window. We hit the DC Metro and New York Subway system at 10:00. Then the Acela at 10:30. They'll close the Exchange right after that. So, it's imperative that we cash our short call options no later than 10:45."

Trey got the distinctive look of a cornered rat. I said, "There is plenty more incriminating stuff. But I think you get the picture. Nobody has heard this yet but us... So far. That'll change if you don't do exactly as I say."

Maddie Hughes had provided a list of charitable causes. That list was going to benefit by $350 million dollars. She would handle the disbursement. I trusted her to do that wisely. It would leave Trey with a measly $50 million, which probably felt like poverty and homelessness to a guy like him

Why didn't I drag his ass down to the cops, or the Feeb's Chicago Office?