Gauntlet Read Online Free Page A

Gauntlet
Book: Gauntlet Read Online Free
Author: Richard Aaron
Pages:
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East Department. Within ten years, as his skills, intelligence, and education showed through, he was promoted to Director of that department. From there he had been appointed to TTIC.
    “No way,” he was saying. “It’s al-Qaeda. The organization of it. The audaciousness. No way the ETA could pull something like this off. One bomb, maybe, but not all of this, and certainly not simultaneously.”
    Rather than paying attention to the discussion, Turbee was noodling his way along the Internet, not really following the thread of the conversation. An article had just appeared in one of the Spanish newspapers, stating that an unexploded bomb had been found, and that it had an unusual detonator—a Goma-2 ECO.
    Turbee smiled; this was way more interesting than what was going on in the office. He immediately started looking into which corporation produced these detonators. Having determined the culprit, he took a few minutes to hack into its corporate database, and discovered that 20 such detonators had recently been purchased by a numbered company registered in the Cayman Islands. That got his attention. People using numbered companies in the Caymans were generally doing something that they wanted to keep hidden. Like purchasing detonators for bombs they meant to use. Using the power of Blue Gene, he was able to hack into the corporate registry of the Grand Cayman records system, and found the only listed director of that numbered company to be a person from Morocco, by the name of Abu Dujan al-Afghani. Running this man’s name through a Madrid street address database, and further databases for power and telephone service, Turbee found that al-Afghani and one James Zoughan lived across the hall from one another in an apartment building in Madrid. Further searches on the supercomputer revealed that these two individuals had been living side by side in various other buildings in Madrid for the past two years.
    Turbee sat back in his chair and considered. If you live beside a terrorist once, that’s a coincidence. If you live beside him three times, in the same city, over a space of two years, that smacks of conspiracy. These two were connected. Using his personal web-bots, which could hack into a server, scour its contents, and send back anything they found, Turbee teased the names of 12 likely conspirators from the various databases to which he had access. Then he stepped it up—he got their current addresses as well. Just as the group meeting was about to finish up, Turbee gingerly raised his hand.
    “This ain’t school, Turbee. You can say what you want,” Dan snapped.
    In a quiet and somewhat shaky voice, Turbee answered, “It is al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Afghani, the mastermind, claims elsewhere that he is al-Qae-da’s military chief in Europe. His coworkers in this bombing were James Zoughan and twelve 12 others.” Then he gave their names.
    The rest of the TTIC team looked at him in astonishment. “How the hell did you get that so fast?” one man asked slowly.
    Turbee slowly explained his process, looking down at his shoes to keep from meeting anyone’s eye.
    “Get it down on paper,” said Dan. “We need to get that to the President right now.”
    “I don’t do paper,” replied Turbee. “Someone else can write it down. Oh, and I’ve got their addresses too.”
    With one phone call, Dan was connected to the President’s Chief of Staff, and, after a few tense seconds, he found himself talking to the President of the United States. He gave him the names and addresses of the conspirators.
    “How sure are you of this information, Danny?” asked the President. “It’s this odd whiz kid I’ve got, named Turbee. He used his search algorithms to work the information out of literally hundreds of databases. He explained it to the team. Rhodes is convinced Turbee’s got it. I would say it’s pretty reliable, sir,” Dan answered.
    “OK, Dan. I’m going to run with it. If we miss it’s going to be embarrassing,
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