INSTALLMENT #14

While he was cooking up his new "Rob Self" identity, Carter had once again hacked into US homeland security systems. The information he had gathered was soon making its way, in various disguises, to DOE NEST teams, FBI, local authorities and everyone else who needed to know.

Knowing it was Sophiaskia material made it easy for the NEST team to find out what warehouse had the material. A paperwork check revealed it as unclaimed. Pretty soon the whole dock and warehouse was staffed with FBI agents.

Eventually, a truck came to claim the crate, but it was obviously hired. They followed the truck which delivered the material to one of those 5000 square foot industrial bays in something that looked like a mini-mall except with overhead doors. Every bay in the U-shaped development had a sign except for the one that took delivery of the crate.

Then the stake-out began. They identified 20 people routinely coming and going from the unit, though they were rarely all there at the same time. Background checks ensued. Three or four of them were already on the watch list, but most of them were new. All the newbies were followed and portfolios compiled.

When the FBI felt like it had gathered all the intel it could, their raid began, not only on the industrial unit, but on the homes of everyone they had noted coming in and out of the place.

In the industrial unit itself the terrorists were constructing dirty bombs on a level unimagined. Investigators found two dozen of the things in various states of assembly. They also found logistics plans to explode them all simultaneously, one each in various metropolitan areas. They could have brought the country to its knees.

The plans were terrifying in their implications. This "cell" was not limited to Arab-Islamic extremists. They had recruited a few American extremists, some from the heavily African-American "Nation of Islam," but most were simply disaffected nutcases in the mold of Timothy McVeigh. They used these Americans in a most insidious way.

The American recruits had been used to contact various American groups like environmental extremists, white power groups, black power militants, and so forth. These groups comprised the distribution network for the dirty bombs. The Homeland Security net had just gotten a lot bigger.

They also found evidence of a cell leader who had never been to the unit, He was a ghost; they had no way to trace him. Papers referred to him only as "Mohammed's Right Arm." Documents seized in Afghanistan had also made mention of such a figure, but that was all that was ever known of him.

The public was never told of the cell or its mission. It was judged that the implications were more than the average American could handle.