by Jim Geraghty
Ward’s mood changed. “Damn right.”
They continued exchanging theories about possible avenues of investigation when the network began broadcasting the second message. “Gotta go,” said both men simultaneously, hanging up.
Alec and Katrina watched the second video, and then squinted when the screen became simply rapidly-flashing red and blue lights.
“Gee, cable networks, you better hope nobody watching at home is epileptic,” Katrina swore. It felt like America’s media was inadvertently doing half the work of the terrorists for them.
“Blipverts,” Alec said, referring to a long-ago television show that he now found unnervingly prescient. “Atarsa is going to do the impossible. They’re going to get Americans to turn off their televisions.”
CHAPTER 44
LIBERTY CROSSING INTELLIGENCE CAMPUS
TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA
MONDAY, MARCH 29
“I’ve heard through the grapevine that the White House wants a military response,” Raquel announced as soon as they were all gathered in her office the following morning. “The decision’s been made to seek out Turkmeni cooperation on this.”
She held up a hand, anticipating and interrupting Alec’s objection. “At this point, if you want to go to Turkmenistan, you’ve got to ride on a missile like Slim Pickens.”
Alec looked as if was going to vomit. “That’s a huge gamble, hoping no one in the Turkmeni government warns Atarsa,” he groaned. “How likely is it that Gholam Gul set up a terrorist operation over there and no one in the world’s most paranoid government noticed?”
Around the table, everyone concurred the risk of Atarsa being warned about the strike was considerable.
“Send Katrina and me to check out the sites,” Alec insisted. “We’ve never worked there before. No one there knows our covers.”
“Did you hear what I just said? The Pentagon is about to create some new flaming craters of its own! Besides, you’re the last person I should send,” Raquel said. “You don’t speak the language, you don’t know the territory, you don’t blend in.”
Alec fumed. “I swear to God, Raquel, if you don’t send me, I’m just going to get a tourist visa, pay to fly there myself, hunt these two down, and if I have to, I will kill them with a fork!”
“Turkmen eat a lot of dishes without cutlery,” Katrina corrected under her breath.
Raquel shook her head. “Alec, you do not understand what we’re dealing with! A covert operation over there is not an option,” she said with irritation. “The reports from our station in Turkmenistan might as well be written by Orwell.”
“The point is, every place we’ve gone, we’ve found something,” Alec said. “The seventh floor has the Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, everybody and their brother kicking down doors—or more likely, waiting for the warrants giving them permission to kick down doors—and we’ve been one step ahead of them because this is it.” He gestured to the rest of the team. “This is us. This is our committee meeting. We decide to do it and we do it. We don’t coordinate with other agencies. We don’t sit around and wait for permission. We just show up and do it. We are a small, quick-moving, active cell, the same way the bad guys are.”
Raquel exhaled.
“No fair using my own speeches against me.”
Katrina stirred.
“Any chance we could ask the Turkmenis to let us assess the damage after the military strike?”
***
The diminutive Azi Dhaka stopped his truck a long distance from the highway. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness once his truck’s headlights were off, grabbed his bag, and listened to the wind whip through the dusk sky. Off in the distance, he saw the burning flames of Darvaza, and began heading to the tent.
As he approached it, he saw the indentations in the sand, marking where Akoman and Angra Druj had knelt and prayed. Had a local spotted them, they would have remarked they were praying incorrectly by not facing Mecca. They knelt toward the crater and beyond it, barely visible on clearest of nights, the few faint lights of the village of Erbent. But neither one had spoken to a local in weeks.
He paused at the entrance to the tent. The remote, isolated location for their tent gave Akoman and Angra Druj a lot of privacy, and he knew they indulged their passions quite regularly. He had accidentally walked in on them once, and they hadn’t stopped upon seeing him. Alas, he suspected, he had arrived too late tonight.
He drew back the tent’s curtain entrance and found the pair under a blanket. Both emerged, unclothed and unashamed.
“No postcard from Jaguar or the Queen Termite,” Dhaka reported. “Otherwise, the news is good.” He reached into his bag and removed a slightly dog-eared copy of the most recent issue of The Economist, obtained from the gift shop of Ashgabat’s nicest hotel for foreign visitors. He tossed it onto the bed, and Akoman and Angra Druj saw the cover depicting the Statue of Liberty crouching and covering her eyes, under the headline, one nation under fear. Akoman picked it up and gave the cover a satisfied nod.
He looked up at Azi and recognized the tension in his face. As far as Azi was concerned, their plot relied on too many disconnected people following precise instructions upon vague, easily missed signals. Akoman stepped closer and looked into his lieutenant’s eyes, communicating a distilled essence of confidence. Everyone had been taught their part long ago, he knew. Everyone had gone their separate ways, confident they had never attracted unnecessary attention. Everything was proceeding as he had foreseen. The Voices were devouring their nourishment. The Queen Termite had performed her role perfectly so far, and they needed to trust all of the remaining Atarsa members would fulfill their missions.
Their silent, communicative look was interrupted by the alien sound of Akoman’s satellite phone ringing. A communication like this was intended only for the direst emergencies. Akoman picked it up and recognized the number. All three exchanged looks of grim concern, but Akoman didn’t answer, merely grabbing clothes and his bag.
***
By the afternoon, Raquel had ensured that Katrina and Alec could be sent on the next available US Air Force flight to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, to join the Turkmeni military and intelligence services for assessment of damage by US air strikes. They were to pack bags and get themselves to Ramstein Air Base in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany as soon as possible.
Raquel turned to Ward and Dee.
“Don’t think that I let you guys get completely left out,” she said. “I turned to the terror financing guys and found a job for you.” She handed Ward a sheet of papers.
“Numbers? Bank records?” Ward recoiled. “What do I look like, an accountant? That’s Alec’s job. It was my understanding that there would be no math involved.”
“One of Sarvar Rashin’s known aliases is Zahra Amadi—apparently one of the most common first names and surnames in Iran—it’s their Jane Smith,” Raquel said. “It created roughly a million hits for the Treasury Department—”
“Kind of like Juan Lopez!” Dee piped up as she leaned over and started bringing up search programs on her computer.
“But Treasury found the name Zahra Amadi on an account that two years ago sent a half-million dollars to a now-closed US nonprofit, the New Beginnings Foundation.”
“What’s so special about this one?” Ward asked.
Raquel handed Ward another pile of printed-out documents. “Founded six years ago, it ran a volunteer service to provide emotional support to troubled youth. It suddenly closed its doors last year, citing financial difficulties, even though it seemed to be humming along, with twenty offices in US cities.”
Ward looked up at her skeptically. “I’m your Rambo, and you’re telling me to be a forensic accountant.”
“The FBI and Treasury are going to be busy sorting through a ton of Zahra Amadis, God knows when they get to this one. I liked this one the moment I saw it. You want to find the Atarsa guys here in the States? Follow the money!” Raquel emphasized.<
br />
He grumbled. “Deep Throat never actually said that.”
CHAPTER 45
DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
VIRGINIA
TUESDAY, MARCH 30
Alec called his parents from the departure lounge. He and Katrina were scheduled to take a commercial flight to Germany and then catch an Air Force flight to Turkmenistan. He had been meaning to call them for a while, but he always found their conversations awkward, as his description of his life inevitably ran to conversational brick walls. CIA employees generally told their families and close friends the vaguest and most general gist of their daily work, revealing nothing classified. Alec found himself trying to explain overseas trips with Katrina to obscure locations and coming back with odd injuries. He lied about the details, and his parents knew he was lying, and he knew that they knew that he was lying.
Alec’s father, Joseph Flanagan, was a retired and once quite successful banker, icon of the Westport, Connecticut community, active in the Chamber of Commerce and Knights of Columbus and coaching soccer. He and his wife, Aneta, had three sons, Michael Patrick, Martin Ryan, and Doran Alexander. Michael followed in his father’s footsteps into the world of banking; Joseph tried to nudge Martin into the priesthood and Doran into police work, two iconic professions of Irish-American families. Neither set of nudges worked out the way Joseph expected, as Martin had become a musician, specializing in the theme music for professional wrestlers, and Doran’s interest in police work eventually led him to the gates of Langley.
The Flanagans were prayer-before-dinner, attend-mass-every-week Catholics, and Joseph tried his best to instill in his children an intense pride in their Irish heritage. The boys’ great-grandfather fled the Potato Famine and arrived at Ellis Island with “eighty dollars and three suitcases,” as Alec could recite from memory. Early in his adult life, Joseph reconnected with some distant relatives left behind in Ireland and became an active American supporter of Irish nationalism.
Doran had grown up with dinner-table stories of the noble struggle to unite Ireland’s thirty-two counties, the awful brutality of the Protestant/Unionist authorities and gangs, the horrible barricades dividing neighborhoods and the inspiring, impassioned murals of defiance. The Flanagan home became a small personal museum of Irish-American history, complete with the requisite portrait of John F. Kennedy on the mantel above the fireplace. Joseph Flanagan was a generous donor and fund-raiser for NORAID, the Irish Northern Aid Committee. His name came up in a mid-1980s investigation of the organization diverting funds for IRA arms purchases, but he was never charged with any crimes. Joseph dismissed all of the allegations as complete nonsense—adding that even if the charges had been true, it would only have been because the freedom fighters had been so unfairly outgunned.
But Doran—who began to insist people call him “Alec” in high school—kept seeing inconvenient facts in his parents’ narrative. He asked how anyone calling themselves Catholic could possibly build a car bomb. His father could quote a lot of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and “just war” essays, but he just grumbled quietly when Alec pointed out that the Enniskillen Remembrance Day parade bomb had killed a pregnant woman—a rather glaring violation of Catholic pro-life principles. Aneta scolded her husband and son for bickering.
But all of the Flanagans carried stubbornness in their DNA and more than a bit of “Irish Alzheimer’s”—an ability to forget everything except a grudge. Alec pestered his father about the Provisional IRA’s decision to work with and buy arms from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. His father would counter with morally problematic alliances throughout history, including the World War II–era American alliance with the Soviet Union. Alec reminded his father that the Libyan dictator had once pledged to attack “Americans in their own streets.”
Alec became increasingly convinced that his father’s romantic vision of a united, happy Ireland had led him to a moral inversion. In the son’s eyes, the IRA’s attacks looked nothing like a war of national liberation. It was garden-variety terrorism: bombing the Brighton Hotel, firing homemade mortar shells at 10 Downing Street, leveling Canary Wharf in London, detonating a 3,300-pound bomb in downtown Manchester.
Over the years, Alec’s arguments with his father grew angrier and more heated; he declared the IRA as bad as the nut-jobs who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center. For a while, Alec thought he might join the FBI, to be one of those cool-under-fire investigators who found all the clues and caught the killer and celebrated with coffee and cherry pie. He envisioned himself dismantling the IRA’s fund-raising network in New England—and imprisoning all of his dad’s rotating cast of long-lost friends from the old country with unexplained scars and the occasional missing finger.
Alec scoffed at teenagers who thought rebelling against their parents meant playing loud music.
But Alec’s law enforcement ambitions faded after one of his classmates disappeared in his junior year of high school. To Alec, Sarina Locke was the artistic girl who seemed so much mature than everyone else, who seemed to have endless knowledge about obscure bands and movies and books that no one else did, who seemed to have spent all of her time away from school in some cooler, sophisticated, more exciting and dangerous universe. If high school was an extended waiting room, with the pleasures and dangers of adulthood locked behind the door to the next room, Sarina had somehow snuck into that adjacent chamber of mysteries and come back, willing to teasingly hint at what she had seen and experienced, but never quite tell the whole story.
She and Alec weren’t dating, but they had grown considerably closer when she suddenly disappeared from her parents’ house one autumn night. Many believed Sarina had run away from a troubled home, with the town rumor-mill reporting that her irregularly employed father was an alcoholic and that her mother was emotionally disturbed and had recurring “problems with drugs.” Alec never believed it—he had certainly never seen her unhappy enough to just disappear without a trace—and found himself wondering about every stranger he had seen in town in the days, weeks, and months preceding her vanishing.
Sarina Locke’s disappearance brought two weeks of media hysteria to Westport, a brief appearance by the FBI reviewing any possible leads for kidnapping, and an investigation that was thorough by anyone’s standards except those of a quietly distraught sixteen-year-old. Sarina Locke was never found, no solid leads were ever generated, and no one was ever charged with any crime in connection to her disappearance. The New York City television station vans left the park in front of town hall on Main Street. Alec looked on in bewilderment as the yellow ribbons faded and eventually fell from the trees after months of exposure to the elements. The window signs came down and the community meetings and newspaper articles stopped. Everyone else’s life went on; Sarina’s parents divorced and moved away and young Alec never heard exactly where.
By the end of his senior year of high school, Alec walked around with silent, seething anger, feeling like Sarina had been erased and everyone around him had volunteered for selective amnesia, forgetting she had ever walked those halls, fought with her stubborn locker, forgot her homework, or worked on the decorations for the fall dance. At the end of the school year she disappeared, Alec took one of Sarina’s pieces of artwork from the art room. It was a self-portrait, from an assignment to try to copy the style of Gustav Klimt, using a lot of gold paint. She had initially tried to paint herself in a near-copy of Klimt’s Judith and the Head of Holofernes, right down to Judith’s sheer top and exposed nipples. The art teacher insisted Sarina use some more gold paint to make it “school appropriate.” Sarina’s self-portrait still sat in a cardboard box in Alec’s attic. He spoke about his memories of her with Katrina once in a great while.
Alec left his hometown thoroughly disgusted with the way his classmates, teachers, neighbors, and friends managed to move on from tragedy and forget about it, and with what he perceived as the police’s complicity in the communal decision to forget. Alec feared police work would lead to a slow,
steady erosion of his capacity for outrage, and knew he would never be an FBI agent. The bureau seemed too bureaucratic and rule-bound, too comfortable with leaving someone else’s world-destroying tragedy unsolved in a box of cold case files. No, he knew his impatience and growing disregard for rules would only be accepted in the infamous, legendary, glamorized organization specifically assigned to break the laws of other countries: the Central Intelligence Agency.
Years later, when he was well situated in the Agency and with considerable resources of the intelligence world, Alec tried to restart a personal investigation into Sarina’s disappearance, but he was no more successful than the local police. He did find himself intrigued by the number of mysterious disappearances reported across the country in the years before and after her vanishing.
He thought the nineties were a dark time in America that no one seemed to want to acknowledge, no more than his old hometown had wanted to acknowledge the unsolved crime that claimed a high school junior. His temper would flare if someone described that decade as a big national party, a rollicking cavalcade of presidential sex scandals, dot-com profits, and wildly embarrassing dance crazes.
To Alec, those years were series of ill omens, all blindingly obvious in hindsight: One plane crash after another off the New England coast. An Egyptian airliner suddenly diving into the sea, a calm pilot at the controls. Some guy in Milwaukee caught eating people. Cults committed mass suicide; fashion adopted the look of heroin chic; a certain bloody nihilism permeated the breakthrough of independent film. The sex scandals weren’t always the stuff of political farce; a murder-minded Lolita on Long Island become a national antihero, the biggest stars in Hollywood feared the revelation of their names in the black book of an infamous madam, and Los Angeles crowds cheered a wife-beating double-murderer on the run. Something dark and twisted was working its way through the American psyche in those years, and Alec convinced himself that this amorphous darkness was tied into Sarina’s sudden disappearance. That darkness waxed and waned since then but had never really left.