Troubleshooters (Jackson Chase Novella Book 2) Read online

  I followed behind him, and saw immediately that he was right. Standing in the center of the room was a large woman holding a tray covered with small loaves of bread. Upon seeing us, she lit up the room with a beautiful smile.

  “Jambo!” she said. Not exactly the den of terrorists I had been expecting.

  “Jambo,” Kahembe replied.

  “Just a moment,” she said as she deftly slid the large tray into an old rolling rack.

  She was perhaps in her late forties, and wore a brightly colored dress covered by an Old Mother Hubbard apron. Her head was wrapped in a beautiful piece of fabric matching the pattern of her dress.

  “Ah, there we are,” she said, wiping her hands on the apron. “How may I help you?”

  As Kahembe introduced us, another woman came out of the back. She too wore a bright dress, apron, and large smile. It was easy to see they were mother and daughter.

  “My name is Dalia Asha, and this is my daughter Kamaria,” the older woman said. Just then, Mwanga and Sterba came through to the front room from behind the counter.

  “Never hunted down a terrorist’s hideout that smelled this good,” Sterba said with a smile.

  “Terrorist’s hideout? Bite your tongue!” exclaimed Mrs. Asha.

  “I am sorry, Mrs. Asha,” said Kahembe. “We are investigating the explosion at the hotel.”

  “Yes, such a travesty. Those poor people,” she said. Her hand went to her chest, where she caressed something under her dress. I noticed a gold chain around her neck, and imagined there was a cross beneath the colorful fabric.

  “We understand that you provide bread for the hotel?” Kahembe said.

  She nodded. “Since they reopened several years ago.”

  “And how is your bread delivered?”

  “Two brothers, Joseph and Samuel, have done our deliveries for a while.”

  “Are they here now?”

  “No. They have not come to work for several days.”

  Kahembe and I looked at one another, each coming to the same conclusion. Mrs. Asha connected the dots at that moment as well.

  “Oh, no.”

  “How well do you know these boys?” I asked.

  Mrs. Asha was silent, stunned by the thought that they would be involved. Her daughter, Kamaria, replied for her.

  “We have known them since they were very young. They worked for us to learn about the business. Joseph wanted to have a bakery of his own someday, and we were happy to teach him.”

  “Do you help them load their truck each morning?”

  “No, they begin their deliveries well before the sun rises. We bake through the evening, and they use a key to pick up the bread for delivery very early each day.”

  “I would like to speak to them,” said Kahembe, “if you could tell me where they live.”

  “Of course,” said Kamaria.

  As she was describing where they lived to the Lieutenant, there was a shout from the back room.

  “A phone! There is a phone hidden in the flour!”

  As a group, we went behind the counter to see what had been found. Naseeb looked agitated, and stood pointing at four neat stacks of flour. In between two of the stacks, a mobile phone was wedged.

  I leaned in for a look. It was a simple feature phone, easily found virtually anywhere in the world. It looked to have been hastily tossed behind the sacks of flour, but had become stuck on its way down.

  “What is that doing there?” asked Mrs. Asha.

  I noticed Kahembe look at Naseeb before replying to Mrs. Asha. “Is this your phone?”

  “No, mine is right here.” She withdrew a bright blue phone from her apron pocket. Her daughter did the same.

  “This could be the phone used to detonate the bomb!” exclaimed Naseeb.

  “Let us not jump to conclusions, Mr. Aman,” Kahembe said firmly to Naseeb. “And please, return to the car as I asked previously.”

  “But...”

  “We will handle this,” Kahembe said. I noticed him step into Naseeb as he spoke, effectively ending the discussion.

  Turning to Mrs. Asha, Kahembe said, “I would like to take this phone as evidence in case it is related to the attack.” He looked around the room and, finding a plastic bag, used it to withdraw the phone. “We will be in touch, Mrs. Asha, thank you for your time.”

  Returning to the cars, we could see Naseeb fidgeting next to his Land Cruiser. “Have you arrested them?” he asked.

  “No, Mr. Aman,” replied Kahembe.

  “But you have it? The phone!”

  Sterba turned to me and raised his eyebrows. He too was wondering why Naseeb was so fired up. Frankly, we had enough to think about after visiting the bakery, and we did not need Naseeb’s excitement. I wanted to diffuse this, and said, “Naseeb, what you found was a phone. It could be a great lead, or it could just be an old phone. We don’t know yet, mate. How about you take a break while we go back to the police station with the Lieutenant? We will call you when we’re ready to leave,”

  Naseeb looked at Sterba, and then turned back to me. “Very well, Mister Chase. I will be ready when you need me.”

  I shook his hand. He looked at the bakery one more time before getting into his Land Cruiser and leaving.

  Standing in the cloud of dust left behind, Sterba said, “We’re not going to the police station, are we?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “We’re going to the delivery boys’ home,” said Kahembe.

  Joseph and Samuel lived together on the edge of town not far from the bakery in a tiny cinderblock rectangle that had surely seen better days. When we arrived, a police car was waiting. Kahembe signaled for us to wait while he handed over the phone found at the bakery for delivery to the station.

  “We will see if Miss Chen can find anything out about the phone,” he explained. “Now, let us see if we can find these young men.”

  Our approach was as before, with Sterba and Mwanga taking the back, while Kahembe and I headed for the front door. Again we were cautious, approaching through the dirt and grasses at an oblique angle. I checked the lone window for movement, and had the sense that the building was empty. As I looked at the door, however, I noticed that the wood around the knob had splintered, and it was an inch or two ajar.

  I crouched slightly and withdrew my sidearm from its holster. Seeing this, Kahembe adjusted as well. My hands signaled him to look at the door. He nodded and drew his weapon.

  We arrived at the side of the building and I took position closest to the door, Kahembe behind me. I moved my SIG to my left hand, and used my right foot to push the door open. Bursting quickly into the doorway with my weapon leading the way, I was immediately hit by a terrible smell and a waft of flies.

  I took in the interior space, scanning from right to left. Empty. I stepped forward, looking for hidden spaces where someone might hide. Nothing.

  “Clear,” I said and holstered my weapon. Kahembe joined me inside, followed by Sterba and Mwanga.

  “This doesn’t look good,” observed Sterba.

  “No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

  The inside of the tiny house was simple. There were two beds, one on each side of the single room, both tidy and made. A small bench top with a sink looked old and precarious, but the dishes appeared to be clean and were stacked in an orderly way. It looked like the home of two young men that had little, but took pride in their meager belongings.

  But the center of the room was what drew our attention. A table and two chairs, one plastic and one of wood, had been knocked over and were resting in a pool of blood. It had coagulated, merging with spilled coffee, milk, and bread to form a sickly almost gelatinous goo. The surface swarmed with flies and insects.

  “So much blood,” Kahembe said, transfixed by the horrible scene.

  “No one could survive this much blood loss,” said Sterba.

  “But where are the bodies?” I asked.

  Kahembe looked up from the mess. “We will look, but to be honest it is v
ery easy to dispose of a body in Africa. Leave it in the bush at night, and it’s gone by morning.”

  While delivered as a simple fact of life in Tanzania, this statement created a vision that was both vivid and horrific. But it also brought with it the firming of our resolve to find those responsible.

  7

  We made our way back to the police station, where Kahembe briefed his officers on the status of the young men. Chen had made her way there as well, and was working on her laptop at a battered old desk. We found two chairs, took a seat, and updated her on the bakery and the grisly scene at the delivery boys’ home.

  “I hope you have better news,” I said, pointing to the phone we had found at the bakery. It sat next to her computer in a new plastic bag with a few illegible grease pencil markings.

  “I’ve made some progress,” she said. “We received access to the carrier’s switches, which, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting.” She gestured for us to take a look round the police station, and we immediately knew what she meant. Not a single desk bore a computer. A few had typewriters, but for the most part pencil and paper were the go-to data entry tools.

  “One of the officers has what they call a ‘computer driver’s license’, meaning the basic skills to operate email and the few applications they have. He’d never done anything like this, and explained that they typically use manually-typed records for looking up phone owners.”

  “Oh, no! You mean actual paper?” Sterba said in a mocking tone.

  Chen fixed him with a look, and continued. “Since we have a precise time for the detonation, and considering the early hour, the number of possible calls was extremely small. It was rather simple to find the phone that triggered the device.”

  “Can you locate it now?” asked Sterba.

  “She doesn’t have to,” I said.

  “Aw, shit,” Sterba said, realizing that the phone used was sitting right on Chen’s desk. And this was in complete conflict with our instincts telling us that the delightful Mrs. Asha and her daughter were innocent.

  Sterba nodded. “What else do you have, Haley?”

  “I was able to find the IMEI numbers—the identification numbers unique to each handset—in the cell switch data. Unfortunately, they are disposable phones. Burners. There’s no relationship between them that I’ve been able to see.”

  “I think we could have guessed that, Haley. We all saw plenty of burner phones in the sandbox.”

  “Bear with me,” she replied. “The other identifier in a mobile phone is the ICCID on the SIM card that allows a phone to connect. The ICCID is like a serial number for a SIM card, and it’s shared with the cell switch as well.”

  “OK,” Sterba said, encouraging her to continue.

  “I ran the ICCIDs for the detonator phone and the one from the bakery through a few databases, and came up with nothing. They were ghosts.”

  “You said ‘were’?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I asked the NSA for access to some of their larger databases, and permission was granted almost immediately. Seems Director Nichols was true to his word that we would have access to anything we needed.”

  “He’s a Ranger. If you can’t trust a Ranger, who can you trust?” Sterba asked no one in particular.

  “On the NSA system, I had a hit. It turns out the reason the SIM cards weren’t showing up in any of my earlier searches was because they were stolen. Three months ago, Somali pirates captured a freighter off the coast. A pallet of SIM cards making their way from Malaysia to Europe was among the items stolen from the ship’s cargo.

  “The pallet was a European startup’s first production run, and the loss put them out of business. All support was shut down, and the cards simply hit the market in an unlocked state. They became as good as gold on the East African black market.”

  “The terrorists’ own unlimited calling plan?”

  “Exactly,” Chen replied.

  “It looks like what we need to do is find who else in town is using SIM cards from this batch,” I said.

  Chen rubbed her eyes and then replied, “Yes. The NSA computers are churning through the data now, but it’s going to take a while.”

  It was clear the jet lag had caught up with her, and I realized I was fighting the same weariness. It was early evening, and with the time change none of us would be thinking clearly very soon.

  “Let’s call it for the day. Quick dinner and then some rack time.”

  8

  We woke early the next day to find a note from Chen on the table in the lounge that separated her room from ours.

  Woke early. Meet at the police station after you have some coffee. Coffee here is fantastic! It was signed Haley, 5:30.

  After a quick shower, we went down to the café in the lobby. I had written off Chen’s praise of the coffee to her caffeine habit, but, true to her word, she was right. The coffee was rich and delicious.

  After a second cup, we walked the two blocks to the Arusha Regional Police station. Despite it being only half-past seven, the place was bustling. Chatter in Swahili was peppered by the occasional prater of old-fashioned typewriters.

  We found Chen at the same desk she had used the day before. Two empty coffee cups sat next to her computer along with a small, crumpled bag. I looked closely at the label: Asha Bakery. I raised my eyebrows at Chen.

  “Better watch out. Last batch exploded,” I said.

  Chen smiled. “Mrs. Asha came earlier this morning to ask Kahembe what he’d found out about the boys. Came in with a big smile and some treats for the policemen.”

  “Only to find herself locked up?” Sterba asked.

  “No. I think we all know that darling woman is innocent. She did, however, leave very sad after hearing about the scene at the boys’ house.”

  “I can imagine. They wanted to set up their own bakery one day, and Mrs. Asha had taken them under her wing. Quite a kind thing to do,” Sterba said. “They don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Agreed. Only half a million more suspects to go,” I said as I took a seat at Chen’s desk. “I hope you can help us narrow it down.”

  “Afraid I can’t narrow it down, but I did find something interesting.”

  “What’ve you got?” asked Sterba, taking a seat on the edge of Chen’s desk. It gave a slight creaking sound. The desk might not have been made for the man—or perhaps I should say Chief—of steel.

  “The NSA computers have been churning on the SIM card IDs I sent. Take a look at this.” She pressed a few keys and turned her computer so that we could see a map of eastern Africa, from Ethiopia down to the northern half of Mozambique, shown in black, with gray coastal lines and darker gray national borders.

  “OK,” she continued, tapping away on her keyboard, “now I will add in some date parameters—let’s say, the past month—and then query our SIM card batch.”

  She hit the return key, and instantly the black map was flooded with yellow dots.

  “Jesus,” Sterba said. “How many of those things were stolen off the ship?”

  “25,000,” replied Chen.

  “It looks like the path of a river, or an epidemic.”

  Sterba was exactly right. The greatest density of dots was around Mogadishu, and from there they distributed inland. Paths of stray dots meandered north, south, and west, clumping in cities as they progressed.

  There were small clusters in Ethiopia. To the south, dots packed around cities in southern Somalia, and down to Mombasa and Nairobi in Kenya. The path wove down to Tanzania, and showed high density in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.

  And, as we suspected, a group appeared right here in Arusha.

  “The NSA computers have only been able to run these in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and part of Ethiopia,” Chen said. “It’s a huge amount of data to gain access to and then query. Given the spread, I’ve had them broaden the region. But it will take time.”

  “Good,” I replied. “This is great intel that will be useful to someone down the road.”


  “Can you zoom in on Arusha?” Sterba asked Chen.

  “I can. But what you’ll see are tower locations, not precise locations of specific calls.”

  She tapped some keys and used the trackpad to zoom in on Arusha. Yellow dots were scattered throughout the city.

  “What happens when you narrow the time range down to the morning of the attack?”

  Again, she tapped the keyboard, adjusting the parameters of her query. A dozen dots remained on the screen.

  Tapping one of the dots near the Meru Grand Hotel, I said, “So this one is the detonator, and one of the others is our triggerman.”

  Chen nodded.

  “Can you get more precise locations than the call towers? Like GPS coordinates?”

  “The Utah data center is compiling it now and working on giving me direct access to sort the data,” Chen replied. “I can use their computing power, but the connection here is terrible. Tanzitel is the local provider, and they said I could use their office to get closer to the trunk.”

  “Can’t do it here?” Sterba asked.

  “I could, but it would be better to do it there.”

  I nodded. “While you’re doing that, I’d like to go back to the scene. Naseeb can take one of us, and one of the Lieutenant’s men can take the other.”

  “Lieutenant Kahembe’s also given us keys to one of the old police vehicles in the yard. Number 56,” Chen said after a quick glance at the key fob.

  I turned to see that Sterba was already dialing Naseeb to give us a lift to the Meru Grand Hotel. He waited a moment, and then spoke briefly, leaving a message.

  “No answer,” he said.

  Chen slid the keys across the desk. “Why don’t you two take the car? I’ll have someone here run me over to the phone company.”

  “Call Naseeb for a ride back. He’s supposed to be on call for us 24/7,” I said.

  “And if he still doesn’t answer, we’ll come get you,” Sterba added.

  “Got it,” Chen replied. “I’ll send the coordinates as soon as I can.”