Chapter 467

I made record time getting to the gym. I needed to see what Robert’s top secret file was about. I went straight to his office.

“There are two files; one is the pictures of the dead from Windhoek. I ran them through the facial program. There were at least 20 that came up on terrorist watch lists or Interpol, which was no surprise. Two were from the Rochester group. Hagg Hasmi and Cassem Farooq; that was one surprise,” Robert said.

“The second surprise was that two of them are cousins of Diya Daharr; Careem Al Daharr and Faaz Al Daharr. From what I have been able to find out they left Minneapolis about six months ago,” Robert said.

“Damn, we just can’t seem to get away from that group,” I said.

“We have been doing the same thing that your team has probably been doing with the numbers off Diya’s phone, but most likely a little different. Any active phone we ignored. We learned that from searching for pedophiles when we worked for the criminal task force,” Robert said.

Burt added, “Anyone that is real deep in bad shit - the advanced pedophiles, drug cartels, and the biggies in terrorism - have gone to using burn phones with a twist in combination with the deep web. Part of the communications takes place on the dark web and the rest on the phones.”

“Very few people are skilled enough to deal with the encryptions of the deep web, especially the peons of the groups. So they set up a time for calls. When that time comes they put the battery in the phone, make the call at the appointed time and end the call in less than four minutes, then the battery comes out,” Robert said then he added.

“They know that it takes at least 5 minutes to do a trace on a wireless call if you are expecting the call. When we worked for the state cracking kiddy porn, we were in the process of developing a program that would scan a list of inactive burn phone numbers. It would flag any numbers that went active even for 30 seconds.’

“With enough computer power driving the program it could begin the process of locating that phone. If the call is ended before the computer finished it retains the information and compares it the next time a call is placed from the phone. That way it has a head start on that call as long as the call is placed in the same general location,” Robert said.

“What I am getting at is we pulled all the data off one of the big mainframes and loaded the program along with all the inactive numbers off Diya’s phone. Then we hacked into the Ma Bells, ATT, and Sprint’s wireless system. If they find it, it looks like one of their own or the NSA equipment,” Burt added.

“At 10:00 this morning, 6 of the phones went active within 1minute of each other and did what we think was a conference call. Four minutes later the call ended and the phones went inactive, the batteries were out,” Burt said.

“We think the phone that started the call was Saif. I know it is a wild guess but we are hoping. We will know a lot more every time it goes active if our program works like it should; it all depends on how often they do a call,” Robert said then added.

“When we bought the new servers and mainframes, we did not know all the big programs we would be adding as part of the security department or the massive expansion of the general business programs.”

“In a few months we are going to have to curtail some operations or make another expansion of the IT equipment,” Robert said then he added, “There is really no room to put what is needed in the current IT room.”

“Robert, order what you think we need; plan for 2 years of growth at least. Get it here; I will have a place where it can go,” I replied.

“The names that Vicky gave you, have you had a chance to work with them yet?” I asked.

“No, not yet, Vicky said there was no rush, we were busy working on the phone thing,” he replied.

“That is correct, I was just curious. Stay on the phones, but don’t neglect day to day operations,” I replied.

I went to my office and sent the pictures of the dead to Ben-David along with the three names I had gotten of the two from Windhoek, “What can tell me about these three?”

Then I went to our meeting. I was surprised to see Jake, Kathy, Tony and Janet from the Philadelphia J&J Construction office at the table. I knew why but didn’t think it was going to happen this quickly.

With the purchase of the last C130s, the 737 and now the C5 were going to be a permanent addition plus several more for the Air Force; contract space on the tarmacs was getting critical. Lorrie wanted to put large plane parking to the south end of the super hanger.

Lorrie wanted to expand the tarmac by 600,000 square feet; 400 feet by 1500 feet or 12 acres. It sounded like an enormous amount, but with wing spans of 175 feet and a 200 foot long plane, just sitting on the pad takes up over an acre and a half. They use up three times that making an average turn. A wing hitting another plane takes both of them out of service for weeks or months.