Chapter 408

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday flew by, there was so much going on. Ching Lee and most of her staff were out west at the two new colleges we had added.

The transition had been hectic but there were only a few bumps in the road. So far none of them had been the result of our people.

The new card systems that East Coast Security had installed had glitches in the systems. Ching Lee had required East Coast to have a tech on site in the contract.

It took the experts almost a day to get it straightened out at each site. The good thing was it happened the first day when there were only a few early arrivals. Once the systems were fixed, complete backups of the programs were made and stored on a duplicate standby server and discs were made to go in our vault.

I took Friday off to help with set up the new training procedures and sites that were going to be used starting Monday. Monday was the first of a double group; 80 instead of the normal forty, made possible by the rooms at the expanded Crash Motel as it was now known.

There were two weeks of 80 and then it would be doubled again to 160 as the Horsey House rooms were put to use. All the RRT we put to use as trainers and they would be busy. We even moved the shooting backstops to Camp Smith so they could help Jamie with the firearms training.

Mid-morning I was called to my office for a SVOL conference call from Rochester. Abdul was with Kelly in the conference room.

“I feel sure you already know Rashid is being deported. I wanted to tell you I am the leader, at least for now. You had said that we could let the artist post again when a leader was chosen.”

“Yes, that is correct. The old agreement still stands, up Saturday morning, down Sunday night and no trash,” I replied.

“We are having a special event in two weeks; would it be possible to put the posters up Friday morning for that one time? I know you worked with Aadam when special things happened,” Abdul asked.

“Yes, that will be OK.”

“Kelly, put it on the daily broadcast sheet for that day that posting is approved,” I told him.

We chatted a few more minutes before I signed off.

I made a note on my pad to fill Ching Lee in tonight on our conference call. I was getting ready to call Frank to fill him in case Clayton Cheeks was still slow at his job, when in walked Robert with a sizable folder.

“Well, I think we have solved the mystery of Aadam Mohamed. Everything is close to what your CIA guy said, with a few differences.”

“Aadam did leave for Afghanistan 10 weeks ago on UAE flight 709. It made a layover stop in the Netherlands before landing in Kabul a day later. There he made several trips to the Pakistan Embassy before flying to Karachi.”

“There is not much on what he did but he spent a day at the Saudi Embassy and a day in a place called Thatta. There were lots of calls made on his cell phone from there.”

The next day airport security video shows him boarding UAE flight 1604 for Saudi Arabia. Again there were a lot of calls from his phone, both to someone in Saudi Arabia and in Rochester.

“He visited Mecca for a day and spent three more days in various places, by his credit card purchases and phone calls. He spent three hours in a call to Kareem Rashid.”

“From there he flew to Jima, Ethiopia and that was where things get dicey. He stayed there a week, it looks like. There were a lot of calls to Rochester and to Kareem Rashid. On Wednesday, there were a number of calls to a satellite phone back and forth in the same area, almost like they were testing the satellite phone. Then his cell phone went offline until Friday at noon. There were two rings and the phone went dead. There was a car bomb that killed 80 people in Jima at noon that day; the phone has not been active since and the satellite phone made the call to the cell. All of us think it was used to set off the car bomb.”