Massive Attack (A Guy Niava Thriller Book 1), Dana Arama [novel books to read .txt] 📗

and what was happening with the security forces there. I had to look at all the angles, because of the complexity of this whole affair. Any piece of information might shed critical light on the situation, and with it, we might be able to capture our target. I couldn’t afford to leave any seemingly peripheral information ignored.

I was standing at the door on my way to my room when a young clerk walked into the room. She walked hesitantly toward where all the cyber experts were huddled together. By the look on her face I saw there was something wrong.

“What happened?” I asked her. There was a hush in the room.

“You took me off from what I was doing before and moved me to work on the business map.”

“So?”

“I took a break and went back to my former station. I glanced at what I had done beforehand and checked Murat Lenika’s emails and communications. There was something new in his Twitter account.” She handed me the copy of the screen shot. I took the page from her. It contained numbers and letters which didn’t seem to have any recognizable sequence. “What is this supposed to be?”

“I don’t know.”

One of the guys held his hand out and I laid the paper in the center of the big table. They all leaned forward. One of the guys counted the number of digits. “There are twelve digits… Maybe it’s a location point?”

“So what are letters then?” asked one of the twins.

“Sixteen random letters,” Bobby said, leaning over the table to count them. “Mmm… Interesting.”

“We also received the coordinates of the apartment in New York through Murat Lenika’s Twitter account, right? That was how Jonathan Niava communicated with us,” I thought out loud. “I believe that this is another message from him.”

“Give it to the decoder analyst,” I ordered her. “Let’s focus on the mission at hand.”

The youngsters, who moments before were hesitant, were suddenly filled with renewed energy. “We have decided to switch on all the panel lights.”

“Do you know how to do it?”

“We’re on it.”

“Please hurry. Linda may be back any minute with the destination point and we don’t want to miss our chance.”

They returned to their stations. I turned to the kitchen. I was tired and I needed a strong cup of coffee before I went into the decoder room.

The decoder room was dark and stuffy, even though there were only three people inside. There were eight screens glowing in front of them and one large screen on the wall. “Gentlemen, do we have any results?” I asked.

“The numbers are most probably a location point, but it’s in the middle of the ocean. Does that make sense?”

“It sounds reasonable. Excellent work. Have you passed on this information to those who are trying to find the ship?”

“Yes. The answer was that the ship is no longer there.”

“What do the letters mean?” I tried not to show my disappointment.

“Look. It didn’t result in anything, until…” On the big screen was a picture of a big standard keyboard. I came up closer and saw there was a letter in Hebrew and a letter in English. “I used a different keyboard, one that has two languages.”

“Hebrew?” I noted and added, “Great idea.”

“I took into account the origins of the kidnapped boy. Now, if I type the letters in English, I receive a meaningless message, but on the Hebrew keyboard I got something different.”

He typed letter after letter and received a long word in Hebrew. “Do you know the language? Can you decipher what is written here?”

“I speak a bit of the language. It doesn’t seem to be a word with any meaning.”

“Correct. It needs something else added to it. Spaces between the letters. Look what happens if I put spaces in the correct places. Because my parents forced me to go Hebrew lessons when I was a kid, I know where the spaces go…” He pressed on the space bar.

I read out loud, “SOS Jonathan Niava.”

“Exactly!”

“Great work!”

Without another word, I walked over to the operations room and announced, “Turn on all the satellites. I want to know where this ship is heading, according to the last location point when this message was Tweeted. We have to dismantle this ticking bomb; this is threatening to be the most massive terror attack we’ve seen yet.”

Guy Niava,

7 a.m., somewhere on a road

The signal of life sent by Jonathan had renewed my energy. The boy was being held captive but has not lost hope. He was fighting the only way he knew how. From the moment Laura told me the news from him, I focused on the wheels of the motorcycle touching the road. I couldn’t allow myself to lose concentration, despite the burst of adrenaline that surged in me.

The frenzied driving through the night turned into frenzied driving through dawn, and by the time the sun rose the weather had improved, and I drove on, into a morning of unknowns. How would things pan out? It seemed my brother was traveling south. How far south would he go? And like an answer to my thoughts, I heard Laura’s voice through my earpiece. “Guy, we managed to hack the GPS. He is traveling to Florida.” She sounded worried as she added, “We can organize to pick you up on the way so that you can wait for him at point we decide, instead of this crazy chase.”

“Have you found a way to get him to drive into a gas station?’

“We are still working on that. When we succeed, we will be able to disengage the engine completely so that he won’t be able to start it again and then you will be able to catch up to him.”

“Very good. Try to hurry up,” I answered immediately and asked, “What about the ship?” I asked because knowing that Jonathan was in the middle of the ocean deeply perturbed me. It was very easy to get rid of a body out at sea.

“It isn’t so simple. It is a well-used