by Flynn Vince
“It started on the jihadist sites and now it’s all over Al Jazeera. The U.S. stations are just starting to pick it up. Of course the Internet is way ahead of all of them. It’s lighting up with hysterical predictions and partisan finger pointing. Half the trolls are saying we brought this on ourselves and the other half are proposing war with every country in the Middle East.”
She started pacing again, turning what she’d been told over in her head. Alexander had been in power for almost eight years, with only one moderately successful attack on the United States and a number thwarted—largely by some combination of Rapp and Kennedy. The economy was solid with a deficit that was starting to decline. And the president was a generally well-liked former University of Alabama quarterback. It didn’t leave much room to generate the kind of fear, rage, and sense of victimization that was necessary to win an election. Up to now, she’d been forced to focus on humanity’s natural tendency toward tribalism to fuel her campaign. And while it had been effective thus far, it was really just smoke that could dissipate at the slightest breeze.
“Could this be it, Kevin? Could this be our issue?”
“It’s not an attack, Senator. It’s just a video. A good one for sure, but—”
“The danger exists now, though. It’s not theoretical. It’s right there. On TV. This administration failed to kill Halabi and now he has bioweapon technology. Maybe the only reason there hasn’t been a successful attack on U.S. soil is because ISIS was concentrating on the Middle East. But now they’re focused on us and the CIA has no idea what to do about it.”
Gray folded his arms across his chest and stared out the window for a few seconds before speaking. “The American people like their safety. It’s an issue that cuts across partisan lines and resonates with the undecideds. And it’s something real to go after Alexander on. This happened on his watch.”
She nodded. Alexander’s vice president was likely going to be the nominee and he wasn’t much of a threat in and of himself—a seventy-two-year-old blue-blood with an increasing tendency to babble about the past. It was Alexander’s support for him that made the man dangerous. Halabi’s survival, though, could take the president’s legs out from under him. If he could be forced to focus on his own political survival and legacy, there wouldn’t be much capital left for him to expend supporting his party’s candidate.
“Can we use this to bring down Alexander? Maybe even make him a liability?”
“I’m not sure,” Gray hedged. “There hasn’t—”
“Bullshit, you’re not sure. With the right message, repeated enough times on enough media outlets, you could turn the American people against Jesus Christ himself.”
He frowned. “You shouldn’t blaspheme.”
“When did you turn into a Boy Scout?”
“One of these days you’re going to slip and say something like that on a hot mike.”
“Don’t try to change the subject. How hard can this be? Halabi’s churning out propaganda videos left and right. The media’s going to eat it up and the Internet is going to turn it toxic. All we have to do is make sure it hits our target.”
His enthusiasm for her idea seemed unusually muted. The man loved manipulating people. The strange truth was that he didn’t care about the trappings of power, just the exercise of it. He wanted to bend people to his will. To force them to turn away from reality and replace it with his carefully crafted speeches, tweets, and ads. Instead of the calculating excitement she’d expected, though, he looked worried.
“What?” she said.
“Do you think Halabi could actually succeed in an attack?”
She didn’t answer, instead walking to the window and pretending to look out. In truth, she was focused on her own reflection, searching her carefully curated appearance for anything that didn’t seem presidential. At fifty-two, she was still an extremely attractive woman—a product of good genetics, a rigid workout schedule, and a few discreet cosmetic procedures. The blue suit was conservative in style but fit her curves in a way that treaded the line between sex and power. Her still largely unlined face was framed by dark hair that could be used as a surprisingly versatile prop depending on her audience.
As always, everything was perfect. Despite that, it was still almost impossible to believe that she was about to become the most powerful person in the world. She had been neither born to power nor groomed for it. Her entry into politics had been largely at the whim of her tech billionaire husband. It was he who had suggested that she leave her law practice and run for an open seat in the Senate.
His company had been under heavy scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies for improprieties that had the potential to cause both of them serious problems. He’d backed her candidacy with virtually unlimited funds, and when she’d won, she’d used her new political clout to make their problems go away.
But it hadn’t ended there. Her gift for politics had been immediately obvious, and over the course of fifteen short years she’d risen to become the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now she was poised to take the Oval Office.
Her husband, on the other hand, had been relegated to an increasingly secondary role. While still successful as a venture capitalist, he now lived a relatively anonymous life in Chicago, where her two children were in college. They saw each other often enough to keep the press happy, but otherwise their family functioned more as a business than anything else. Her husband continued to provide her campaign heavy financial support in return for the quiet privileges she could provide and her daughters toed the line to keep their trust funds flowing.
“Your silence is worrying me,” Gray said finally.
She turned back toward him. “Could Halabi succeed in an attack? I have no idea. Can I assume we’re demanding a briefing?”
“I have multiple calls into the White House. They said they’re working on it and they’ll get back to us.”
She returned to the window, this time gazing past her reflection and into the American capital. In reality, a limited biological attack would be an ideal scenario for her. There was no way Alexander and his party could ride something like that out this close to the election. It would be a deathblow.
“We’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve always been strongly opposed to our involvement in the Middle East in general and Yemen in particular,” Gray continued.
“Because I was told that Halabi was dead. That ISIS was defeated.”
He looked skeptical. “You staked out that position before ISIS even existed and I don’t remember Irene Kennedy ever saying that ISIS was defeated or confirming that Halabi had been killed.”
She took a seat behind her desk again. “The American people don’t give a crap about political positions and they care even less about the truth. What they want is fireworks. They want a show and we’ve just been handed the script. While the other side talks about health care and the economy, we’ll be talking about Islamic terrorists unleashing a plague that could wipe our country out. About watching your children die while Irene Kennedy covers her ass and Mitch Rapp chases his tail. This is a gift, Kevin. Use it.”
CHAPTER 8
AL HUDAYDAH
YEMEN
“BUT it’s your last one,” the man said, staring longingly at the slightly bent cigarette Rapp was offering him.
Over the last five days, Rapp had graduated from sitting alone near the edge of the terrace to being crowded around a long table near its center. In that time, he’d gone through more than thirty cups of tea, twenty cups of coffee, every food product Yemen had to offer, and way too many cigarettes. It was a good way to blend in and make friends, but at this rate cancer was going to kill him before ISIS did.
“You’d be doing me a favor, Jihan. My youngest wife has been begging me to quit.”
“This new generation,” the man responded with a disapproving shake of his head. “They think they can live forever.”
There was a murmur of gen
eral agreement from the men around them.
“Tell me. How old is she?”
“Sixteen,” Rapp responded.
After another few seconds of thought, Jihan accepted the cigarette. “Then I’ll smoke it. You need your strength.”
The table burst into laughter and Rapp joined in, crumpling the empty pack and tossing it on the ground as the conversation resumed. The men wandered through the topics of the day—the Saudi bombings of the night before. The Iranians’ backing of the rebels. The continued spread of disease and famine. And, finally, America’s role in it all. Rapp tuned it all out, watching the discarded cigarette pack blow around on sun-heated cobbles.
The Agency had implemented round-the-clock overhead surveillance on the building full of former ISIS soldiers that Rapp had found. And the NSA had cracked all their communications with the exception of a couple of burner phones they couldn’t get a bead on. Unfortunately, all that had been accomplished was to confirm his first impression. Those men were nothing more than a bunch of violent dipshits whom Halabi would have no use for other than maybe to stop bullets.
Rapp let himself be drawn back into the conversation, but it was a waste of time. There was no solid intel to be gained from restaurant gossip—particularly in a country where no one drank alcohol. Either the politicians needed to let the Agency commit resources to this part of the world or they needed to get out. Half measures against a man like Sayid Halabi were pointless. He was all-in, and anyone going up against him had better be the same.
The conversation had just turned to Syria when the voices around Rapp began to falter. He followed the gazes of the men around him to an old CRT television set up in the shade. The endless stream of Arab music videos had been interrupted by something that seemed almost like a twisted homage to them. Images of young people dancing and singing were replaced by ones of violence and death, with a sound track voiced over by none other than Sayid Halabi.
Rapp had seen the prior version of the video, but not this update. The backing music was more somber and the footage of the assault on the village more extensive. Halabi droned on about Muslim unity and combining forces against the West, but Rapp focused on the footage of the ISIS team tearing through the village. The men couldn’t have been more different than the ones he was keeping tabs on in Al Hudaydah. They moved more like SEALs than the undisciplined psychos he’d come to expect from ISIS. More evidence of Halabi’s efforts to turn his organization into a tighter, more modern force.
The video ended and was replaced by a CNN interview with Christine Barnett. The men around him began an animated discussion of Halabi’s role in the region but Rapp remained focused on the television. The flow of the interview was pretty much what he would have predicted, with the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee insisting that she’d been assured that Halabi had been taken out.
So after managing to flail her way to a massive lead in the polls, Barnett had finally found her message: that the current administration had lied about Halabi’s death for political gain while leaving the American people completely unprotected from the threat ISIS posed.
It was a demonstrable lie, but she’d probably get away with it. Sure, there was endless footage of Irene Kennedy saying that Halabi’s body had never been found, but why would the press want to dredge that up? They knew a ratings grabber when they saw one.
Barnett went on to blame the very security agencies she’d been hamstringing for failing to utterly eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth. And, of course, she rounded out the interview the way all politicians did—by implying that she, and only she, had the answer. All the American people had to do was elect her president and they’d be guaranteed safety, wealth, a hot spouse, and six-pack abs.
The scene cut again, this time to a couple of know-nothing pundits speculating about the type of attack that the kidnapped medical team could conjure up. The debate had devolved into nonsensical shouting about Ebola and plague when Shamir Karman came up behind Rapp and whispered in his ear.
“A call for you just came in. Use the phone in the office.”
• • •
Rapp took a seat behind Karman’s desk and made sure the door had swung all the way shut before he picked up the handset.
“Go ahead,” he said in Arabic.
His greeting was met with silence on the other end and he suspected he knew why. Since taking over logistics for Scott Coleman’s company, Claudia Gould had been diligently trying to learn Arabic. Unfortunately, she was still in the “See Dick run” stage. Partially it was his fault. She was also the woman he lived with, but he always found a reason not to get involved in her language education. Patience wasn’t his strong suit.
“Hello,” he said, simplifying his Arabic. There was no way he could use the English or French she was fluent in. One overheard word and he might as well tattoo CIA to his forehead.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Mitch.”
He hated to admit it, but it was good to hear hers, too. The soft lilt was a reminder that, for one of the few times in his life, he had something to go home to.
“First,” she continued. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” he said, keeping his responses basic.
“Don’t worry. I didn’t call just to ask that question.”
“Then why?”
“I assume you’ve been watching the news and you’re aware of Halabi’s videos?”
He grunted an affirmation.
“The Saudis have located the village he burned. It’s in central Yemen about five hundred kilometers east of you.”
“And the people?”
“The ones he kidnapped? The reporting has been pretty accurate about them. What hasn’t hit the networks is that they were there caring for the victims of a respiratory disease similar to SARS. Based on the Agency’s analysis of Halabi’s videos, he must have known about it. He went in when none of the medical personnel were in the infirmary they’d set up and his people burned everything without coming in contact with the villagers.”
“And?”
“The Saudis want to incinerate the village from the air as an additional safety measure. It appears that they’re already making plans but they’re not sharing the details with the Agency. I don’t think there’s any point to you going there. It seems high risk, low return.”
While her assessment was hard to argue with, high risk, low return was a front-runner for the engraving on his tombstone. Currently in third place behind Do you think they’ll be able to stitch that up? and Does anyone else hear ticking?
It was a thin lead but it was better than sitting around Al Hudaydah giving himself emphysema. There was always a chance that Halabi or one of his men had left something useful behind.
“Can I assume you disagree with my analysis and insist on going?” Claudia said, filling the silence between them.
“Yes.”
“I thought you’d say that, so I sent the village’s coordinates to Scott in Riyadh. They know a Saudi chopper pilot who’s willing to pick you up and take you to the village.”
“Where and when?”
“Before I tell you that, you have to listen me. I know you always want to charge in, but are you sure it’s worth it to spend a couple of hours looking around a burned village? Al Qaeda and ISIS control that area. We have no eyes there and no idea of their strength or distribution.”
“Understood,” he said, swallowing his natural urge to just bark orders. It was the main drawback to having the woman he was sleeping with handling his logistics. The upside was that she was one of the best in the business.
“I’m not finished.”
His jaw clenched, but he managed to get go ahead out in a relatively even tone.
“The Saudi pilot isn’t one of ours. He has a solid reputation, but he’s not Fred and he’s not loyal to us.”
“He’ll be fine.”
There was a brief pause as she translated his words in her head.
“One last thing. Doctors With
out Borders gave us information about the virus that the medical team was dealing with and it sounds terrifying. Without going into detail—”
“This is your definition of not going into detail?”
She had no idea what he’d said but chose to ignore it based on his tone. “It’s incredibly dangerous, Mitch. And more important, it can survive on surfaces for days. Don’t take the idea that the fire killed it for granted. You need to use the biohazard protocols you’ve been trained in. I’m serious. If there’s even a vague possibility that you or one of Scott’s men has been exposed to this, you’ll have to be quarantined and you’ll probably die.”
He was starting to think that she was enjoying his inability to give anything more than one-word answers. “Understood.”
“So, you promise to be careful and not touch anything?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then. The chopper will pick you up outside of town at exactly 2 a.m. I’ll send the coordinates to your phone.”
CHAPTER 9
WESTERN YEMEN
SAYID Halabi stood on the ancient minaret looking out over the landscape hundreds of meters below. The village’s tightly packed stone buildings dominated the top of the peak, offering 360-degree views of mountains dotted with cloud shadows. Steep slopes had been terraced for agriculture over the centuries, and some were still green with the coffee plants that Yemen had once been so famous for.
Up until about a year ago, this place had been home to a community of farmers who had contracted with an American company to produce and export coffee beans. The hope had been that the industry would regain its economic foothold and stabilize the region.
The foreign businessmen had quickly recognized the realities of trying to carve a secular commercial paradise from this war-torn country and given up on the enterprise. Most of the farmers and other workers had moved on shortly thereafter, leaving a core group of thirty villagers who were either too rooted to this place to abandon it or had nowhere else to go.