The Enemies of My Country

by Jason Kasper

  Jo Ann replied, “You seem to be advocating a blanket approval policy regardless of the fidelity in intelligence. I can list a few regimes that have done the same, and none of them represent what I think America should become.”

  “You’re missing my point, and I’m not finished.”

  Jo Ann fought the impulse to roll her eyes. “I thought you were about to run out of breath. There’s more?”

  “There is. I haven’t mentioned the December ’98 rocket strike refused by Clinton on the grounds of a prospective three hundred civilian casualties—a decision he later praised himself for in a speech less than twenty-four hours before the 9/11 attacks commenced and killed nearly three thousand Americans. And let’s not forget the CIA officers operating in Sudan in ’92, who watched bin Laden every day and had a plan to assassinate him that made it all the way to the director before being shut down.”

  Spinning her chair to face Jo Ann, Duchess continued, “It doesn’t matter who pulls the trigger, so long as it gets pulled. There’s no shortage of people willing to go into harm’s way, regardless of what uniform they wear—or don’t wear, as the case may be. The real lynchpin is political approval; we’ve got that for the time being, and for once it’s in alignment with our nation’s capabilities. But this represents a precious and fleeting opportunity. Longwing is still a burning coal; far from the fire it needs to be. Those five men you consider insignificant represent the future of stopping not catastrophic attacks, but the junior terrorists before they become masterminds capable of planning them. And it’s up to us to prove the efficacy of this concept by writing a playbook that works. You thought that I only cared about my career when I authorized the final raid in Syria. But this program is my real concern, regardless of whether it’s me running it or not.”

  Jo Ann replied in a challenging tone, “How noble of you.”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s noble, only if it’s necessary. In a way it’s not even about the attacks we can prevent—those are just the beginning.”

  “The beginning of what?”

  Duchess closed her eyes and drew a breath.

  “Three thousand died on 9/11. But since then, there have been over seven thousand US military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Civilian casualties abroad are in the six-figure range by the most optimistic estimates. Some say that number is a million or more.”

  “I’m aware of the statistics.”

  “Then be aware that what this program is designed to stop isn’t just terrorists; it’s the war, or wars, that would very likely follow an attack of that magnitude.”

  She leaned back in her seat. “And don’t ever underestimate our enemies. There is no limit to what a smart, determined terrorist can accomplish. Make no mistake, Jo Ann: until those rockets—and Bari Khan himself—are found, we are living each moment on the razor’s edge.”

  46

  Cancer threaded his way through the crowd at the airport, having followed the convoy back to its point of origin.

  And he was severely pissed.

  There was some silver lining to the situation—the leader of the free world had survived what the team had suspected was an imminent rocket attack, after all—but that was about the only happy consequence at present. Sure, he supposed there was technically a chance that BK would hit the president now that he’d returned to the airport, but Cancer knew in his gut that wouldn’t be the case. If Bari Khan had the ability to point 633 rockets at the tarmac, he damn sure wasn’t going to give the Secret Service an extra few hours to locate them by waiting until his target was on his way back out of the state. He would’ve let the president land, stroll from the helicopter toward his armored limo, and let ’em rip.

  And beyond that, there was nothing for Cancer to react to, shoot, be of good use in furthering as he slipped back into the banal Western existence that was completely devoid of adrenaline or conflict of any kind. Even that existence, he thought, was soon going to be reduced to the confines of a prison cell after Duchess realized what they’d done.

  After all the preparations, the speculation as to what Bari Khan would do or how, the team was back to square one: fully aware that their terrorist was in the wind along with the rockets, and nothing to do about it.

  Finding a vantage point overlooking the tarmac, he plucked his trusty pack of Marlboros from his pocket with a mournful shake of his head, withdrawing a fresh cancer stick and expertly lighting it with the first spark of his lighter.

  Then he watched the president depart his limo and stride across the tarmac with a Secret Service agent moving one pace to his front right. They approached Marine One’s waiting stairs, the helicopter’s twin engines spooled up for the flight ahead. The president crossed in front of a Secret Service agent standing with his hands folded, facing the motorcade. Then his escorting agent peeled off, and the president approached the helicopter alone, the lowered front stairs flanked by a pair of saluting Marines in full dress uniform. Returning the salute without breaking stride, the president mounted the stairs, and disappeared inside the helicopter.

  A somber procession of seven men trailed him, four carrying large briefcases as they moved up the aircraft’s rear set of stairs. Only then did the president’s original escorting agent trot up the front steps, followed by one of the Marines who pulled up the steps behind him as the other fired off a crisp salute to the aircraft, turned an about-face, and marched away.

  Cancer knew what was occurring outside of the camera’s purview: the remainder of the president’s top staff, along with a considerable Secret Service escort, had already boarded the trailing helicopter and trio of Osprey aircraft, unaccompanied by the ceremonial Marines who greeted the president upon his arrival.

  By then Marine One was already taxiing down the tarmac, trailed by the four aircraft.

  Cancer took another drag of his cigarette and muttered to himself, “Well, shit.”

  47

  I stepped through my front door, slamming it shut and locking it behind me. Entering a code onto the keypad, I silenced the repetitive beeping of my security system and whirled toward the stairs.

  Ascending them two at a time, I felt the anger surging inside me, a white-hot coal of rage. I’d given every possible warning about the attack to Duchess, and waited for Bari Khan to make his next move only for nothing to happen at all. I’d assembled my team in Charlottesville with their Agency equipment, and in doing so inadvertently committed them to life in prison. And in the process of burning my team to the ground, I had absolutely nothing to show for it—it would be one thing if thousands of civilians were saved in the process; to be incarcerated until the end of time over a series of miscalculations seemed a far crueler fate.

  At the same time, I couldn’t reconcile the bare facts with my present reality. Any individual data point was bizarre unto itself; the combination of them was so fucking weird that there had to be something I wasn’t considering—there simply had to be.

  Reaching the second floor of my home, I strode down the hall and stopped at a door. After resting my palm on the handle for a second of hesitation, I threw it open.

  It was Laila’s home office.

  I surveyed the interior for a moment, her desk and houseplants in the same tidy configuration they always were. Circling the room, I used my phone to photograph it from all angles, then opened the desk drawers in sequence and took pictures of the contents. Before she returned from Alexandria, I’d have to restore everything to its original position.

  Because right now, I was about to tear this fucking room apart.

  It was possible, of course, that the rockets were still in Syria or otherwise tied up in whatever logistical means Bari Khan had set in place.

  But that explanation didn’t sit well with me; it was too convenient, too hopeful, and in my experience with criminal and terrorist organizations over the years, the real answers were anything but.

  I had to look at this from a new angle, one that would have previously seemed inconceivable. Central to th
at were two questions I hadn’t previously asked myself.

  What if the intel we’d uncovered in Syria had nothing to do with my team’s past in the mercenary realm?

  Shortly behind that, but equally valid, was the second hypothetical.

  What if our intel on the attack had nothing to do with the president’s visit to Charlottesville?

  Both lines of inquiry were ludicrous, but since the president had come and gone without the slightest blip, I had little choice.

  And when I pursued that line of inquiry deeper, the plain fact was that the scrap of paper had mentioned Laila and Langley, not myself. Since my daughter was unlikely to have many enemies of substance at her age, this led me to consider what I knew, or thought I knew, about my wife.

  Her brother, Steve, was my roommate at West Point. I met her on a weekend trip to his mom’s home in a Philadelphia suburb, when she was visiting from Ohio State. We’d been college sweethearts until she broke up with me prior to my graduation and medical discharge from the military. I knew that her biological father had committed suicide, and her mother later remarried and moved to Charlottesville to take up residence with her new husband. There was nothing suspicious about any of that, nor of her stepfather, who had until recently run a very successful local metalworking business before selling it and retiring to Alexandria.

  Laila’s mother was a nice woman, if slightly judgmental of me—in that she was fully justified, though neither she nor my wife knew the full extent of why—and her stepdad and I got along as well as could be expected. I couldn’t envision any scenario in which either had some ties to organized terror or even international finance that held some nefarious link they were unaware of.

  As for Laila, what was there to be suspicious of? She was a loving and kindhearted person, passionate about her budding career as a pediatric doctor though frazzled as of late from her residency. And, if I was being honest with myself, from the lack of parental support from my end. If she’d married a nine-to-five banker or one of her fellow doctors, I suspected she’d have no problems at all.

  And maybe that was the key, I thought. I’d never suspected her of infidelity, though if she was having an affair with someone, there was little chance I’d be aware of it. Laila’s residency involved long hours in close proximity with her fellow doctors, and while I’d met some of them at dinner events and cocktail parties, none had raised my hackles of suspicion in the slightest. For all my shortcomings as a husband and father, I trusted that I’d detect a fellow participant in the covert world of espionage or military action, justified or otherwise.

  Unless, of course, I’d never met him in the first place.

  Once my phone held the reference photos for Laila’s arrangement of her personal and professional items, I began my search.

  Much of it could be dismissed at a glance—medical journals and reference works, piles of med school textbooks and academic case files with the patient names redacted. It was possible she’d hidden something within those pages, and I’d flip through them one by one if I couldn’t find answers elsewhere.

  My thoughts were jarred by the sight of a leather-bound notebook in the top sliding drawer, an object familiar to me though I’d never once touched it.

  This was her journal, and there were dozens like it stashed away upon completion.

  Considering the implications of what I was about to do, I lifted it and flipped open to the last written page.

  My eyes settled on a handwritten line selected at random. Is it another woman? After a year of marriage, I already feel like we’re growing apart…

  I slammed the journal shut, setting it down as hot tears hit my eyes. She deserved her privacy more than I deserved mine, and at the moment I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing my domestic inadequacies through her eyes. If I couldn’t find anything else, I’d go through that journal line by line in search of a clue, maybe something that Laila herself didn’t recognize. I’d read it alongside Ian if I had to. A terrorist attack was in the works whether I liked it or not, and if it took getting my feelings hurt to stop it—or breaking my heart, as the case may be—then that’s exactly what I was going to do.

  But for now, there were other places to search, and I began poring through her remaining desk drawers.

  Then I found another mess of paperwork, neatly filed in large manila envelopes and labeled by date. Most of the stacks of paper within seemed to be too pristine for her to have handled much, photocopied packets of some kind. I was quickly able to discern why: these were the documents of her parents’ sale of their metalworking business, a process that Laila had been peripherally involved in by way of helping them make the transition to Alexandria.

  This should have been a dead end, but something caused the hair on my forearms to rise before I realized what it was. Something both strange and familiar at the same time, though I spent no small amount of time flipping through the packets to figure it out. Eventually I realized it was the typeface itself.

  And reaching the page that changed everything I thought I knew, my eyes settled on a line that made my breath hitch.

  Beneath the legal documentation of her parents’ new residence in Alexandria was a second line. It read, Next of kin: David, Laila, and Langley Rivers, 427 Spring River Drive, Charlottesville, VA 22901.

  At that moment, I didn’t need to consult the photograph I had of that scrap of paper I’d found in Syria. That image was emblazoned in my memory, as startling and vivid as if I were looking at it that second; and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this particular sheet of the public domain was the same piece of paper.

  And that’s when I realized the truth, however improbable.

  The Syrian connection with my family had nothing to do with me. Instead, it had to do with Laila’s parents, and their sale of the metalworking business in Charlottesville.

  Finding the phone in my pocket, I dialed Ian and breathed quickly, my heartbeat racing as I waited for the goddamned call to connect.

  48

  Ian spun his chair away from the computer, the phone pressed to his ear.

  “Just slow down,” he said. “You’re sure it’s the same piece of paper?”

  David was frantic. “Do I sound like I’m in doubt? It’s the exact same page, and if you need me to come down there and do your job for you, then I will—”

  “All right, all right,” Ian said, “take it easy. Let’s think this through.”

  “Thinking is your job. I have no idea what to make of this, so start using that thirty-pound brain of yours.”

  “It could...no, wait...unless…”

  Then he stopped abruptly, looking up.

  “It’s probably a strongarm ploy.”

  “A what?”

  Ian spun his chair to face the computer, speaking quickly.

  “Think about it: if these people wanted to acquire that business for something shady, then they could feasibly need the next-of-kin information so that if they needed to intimidate some people, that’s who they’d strongarm. Don’t you get it? It wasn’t a threat against your family. You were just backups in case something went wrong with the sale. Or the aftermath. If they needed to hold leverage over the original owners of that metalworking facility, then they had three hostages in Charlottesville. Either way, it’s not about you or us. It’s about that business.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  Ian thought for a moment.

  “It could be two possibilities. The first is storage for the cargo. Why risk renting a storage unit and subjecting yourself to surveillance footage when you can buy a factory in advance and use it as you please?”

  “That’s smart,” David said.

  “No, it’s not. Far too high-profile, and too much effort for such a simple purpose. That brings me to the second possibility that a metalworking factory would serve: production of the launch assembly. Now you could launch those rockets from properly-sized PVC tubes if you had to. But given what you just found, there’s a possibility that the met
alworking factory was acquired for the express purpose of building an assembly capable of launching the entire load at once, and doing so with extreme precision for the kind of meticulous attack we’ve been looking for.”

  “So you think everything’s at the factory now—the missiles and the launch assembly?”

  “I didn’t say that. Bari Khan is no idiot, he wouldn’t pair the launch assembly with the rockets until the last moment. And how much did the factory sell for?”

  “$5.2 million.”

  “Jesus, I got in the wrong line of work,” he said. “But think about that: there’s no way BK has the means—or the connections—to facilitate that sale himself. Someone handpicked him because he was smart and motivated, but the guy comes from a poor village in western China that had almost its entire population imprisoned or killed by the government. That means we’re looking for a financier. Find me the buyer data. Names, addresses, all of it.”

  Ian put the phone on speaker and set it on the desk, then set to work opening browser windows on the computer and inputting information as fast as David could relay it to him.

  “POC is Sam Burgess, making the buy on behalf of Steno, LLC in Richmond.”

  “Address of record?”

  Within minutes, Ian had fourteen browser windows open, tracing the chain of business links as high as he could.

  And when he found what he was looking for, it was with a sense of exhilaration that he couldn’t keep out of his voice.

  “Steno, LLC is one of seven under a corporate umbrella owned by a multinational conglomerate called Palvita International. That conglomerate is headed by a businessman named Wei Zhao. Now there’s plenty written about this guy; he’s one of the hundred richest men in China.”

  “So you think Zhao has some Uyghur connection,” David replied, “and is bankrolling the attack through one of his business entities?”