War Shadows (Tier One Thrillers Book 2)

by Jeffrey Wilson

  Dempsey stood and looked at Grimes. “A word?” He nodded at the pair of captain’s chairs at the front of the cabin.

  “Sure,” she said and made her way forward. “What’s on your mind?”

  He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Adamo was out of earshot, and then leaned in. “What exactly do you have in mind for this interrogation?”

  A vulpine grin spread across her face. “I told you,” she said, patting his knee. “It’s a surprise.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Kakolewska Apartment Building

  46 Ulica Niepodleglosci

  Leszno, Poland

  October 22, 1430 Local Time

  “What would be ideal at this point is if we give him forty-five minutes of sleep and then bring him into the box.”

  Dempsey looked at the CIA case officer, Brian Black, and then over at Grimes.

  “No,” she said simply. “Take him out of the stress position and then sit him at a desk with a chair—not in the interrogation room you usually use.”

  Black looked like he might object but saw Grimes’s cold stare and shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got my partner coming to give you the summary of what we’ve collected so far, but there’s not much to tell.”

  Black left them alone, and Grimes looked at Dempsey.

  “I’ll get something,” she said.

  The fire in her eyes convinced him that whatever she was about to do would either break the investigation wide open or send Adamo screaming to the DNI to revoke Ember’s charter. Possibly both.

  Another man came in with a folder. He sat down, but didn’t open it.

  “Sam Jacobs,” the man said and shook hands with Dempsey, Smith, and Grimes. “I met your guy Adamo already. He’s going through the footage we have, but there isn’t much to see.”

  “We’d like a copy of whatever you have,” Dempsey said.

  “I’m not authorized to release—”

  Smith held up a finger and pulled out his sat phone.

  “Hey, boss. There is an agent Sam Jacobs here who needs an authorization to release some interrogation video . . . Yeah . . . Leszno . . . okay.” He snapped his phone shut and smiled.

  “Okay. Well, anyway—” The CIA agent was interrupted by the chirp of his sat phone on his belt. “Jacobs . . . Yes, sir. Hold on, I can give you my code.” The agent stepped away and whispered into the phone for a moment. When he returned, he looked at Smith with incredulous eyes. “Okay, well, that was spooky as shit. I guess you guys are like, what, Mission Impossible?”

  No one answered.

  Agent Jacobs shrugged. “So, I’ll have the guys burn you an encrypted file and a separate key file to open it.” Then he paused and looked back at Smith. “Do you work directly for the fucking DNI or something?”

  “You were saying? About the detainee?” Grimes said.

  Jacobs shook his head with a whatever—way above my pay grade look. “We basically have nothing on this guy. The system tagged him as possible Hezbollah or maybe Iranian.”

  Grimes looked at Dempsey. “Possible Hezbollah, we knew, but this is the first time I’ve heard Iranian.”

  “Possible Iranian,” Jacobs reiterated.

  Dempsey’s thoughts drifted back to the signals lab and the time he’d spent with Baldwin. “The green line,” he mumbled.

  “What?” Grimes asked, staring at him, perplexed.

  “The green line,” Dempsey repeated, grinning despite himself. “When I was with Baldwin and the boys, we identified an encrypted data stream from someone who had been communicating with al-Mahajer’s proxy’s Blackberry. The data matched up with archive data collected on a phone that made calls all over the place: Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Palestine, Iraq, Gaza, but also inside Iran. Maybe that phone belonged to this guy.”

  “That would make sense,” Jacobs said, nodding slowly. “Facial recognition has him at multiple meetings: Palestine at a meeting with Hezbollah leaders, shortly before the apartment attack in the West Bank last year. We also have him in Turkey, where he was in the company of a known VEVAK agent.”

  “So was this guy at this meeting in Turkey as an agent of Hezbollah or VEVAK? Pretty important fucking difference,” Dempsey said.

  “Agreed—and we don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry, fellas, I’ll sort it out,” Grimes said. “That’s why we’re here—to figure out who this guy is and who he works for.”

  “What has he given up so far?” Smith asked.

  “Nothing. He’s a pro,” Jacobs said and rubbed his hands across his face. “This dude isn’t some disenfranchised Muslim looking to find Paradise. He’s tight—well trained at counterinterrogation techniques and experienced under duress. He employs counterinterrogation even at the edges—like in his sleep, literally.”

  “Languages?”

  “At first we thought he was Afghani, because we thought he was speaking Dari when he was in a sleep state, but—”

  “But it was Farsi,” Grimes said.

  “Yeah,” the agent said. “The differences in the regional dialects are pronounced, but we’re not linguists. I spent a great deal of time with Afghan special forces, so it sounded like Dari to me, but the linguists back home sorted it out as Persian.”

  “The two languages are basically the same,” Grimes said, looking at Dempsey. “Farsi is generally accepted to be the root language, having spread into Afghanistan and evolving from there.”

  “When sleep stressed he also spoke fluent Arabic. My partner hears a definite Palestinian dialect there. Flawless. So linguistically speaking, we peg him as either Iranian or Palestinian, but since we have multiple sightings of him with Hezbollah, we like that theory.”

  “And English,” a familiar voice said. Dempsey looked up. Adamo had entered with Black in tow. “With a slight East London accent, by the way, that appears to be acquired.”

  “All right, I think it’s time,” Grimes said. “I’m ready to talk to him.”

  The two CIA men stared at her.

  “That’s not a good idea,” said Black.

  Dempsey glared at Adamo, who obviously had neglected to grease the skids with his CIA buddies, but Adamo didn’t seem to notice . . . or care.

  “Female interrogation has not traditionally gone well in these settings with these people,” Black continued. “The shit they did in Iraq early in the war with naked women and fake menstrual blood might have caused a big brouhaha, but it never uncovered any real intel.”

  “Do I look like the kind of woman who plans to lap dance this motherfucker?” Grimes said, her face darkening.

  Black took a half step back and opened his mouth for rebuttal, when Dempsey stepped in.

  “Look,” he said, “Elizabeth is very experienced. Just give her a chance to work her magic, then we’ll give him back and he’s all yours.”

  Black folded his arms across his chest. Jacobs looked at his feet, and the corners of Adamo’s lips seemed to curl into a smile. Dempsey wanted to smack the lot of them, but he tried the congenial approach. “I realize this is your sandbox. Having someone swoop in and give orders and piss on your turf sucks. And I am sorry for that. But this is happening. Understood? And it’s happening right now.”

  “We have him in a small office with a desk and chair like you asked. He’s probably asleep already,” Jacobs said, conceding defeat.

  “We can watch here,” said Black, turning to a bank of monitors. He tapped on a keyboard, and then the six screens all filled with the same image—a bearded man in a gray tunic, his head back and his open mouth toward the ceiling.

  “I’ll take you in,” Jacobs said, and led her out of the room.

  Dempsey, Smith, Adamo, and Black all sat down in the faux-leather task chairs and rolled in for a closer view of the monitors.

  A beat later, the door behind the prisoner opened and Grimes stepped in. She stood behind the man, her arms folded across her chest, and stared at the top of the terrorist’s head as he slept, his head hanging at wh
at looked like a neck-wrenchingly uncomfortable angle. Dempsey watched, fascinated, as Grimes leaned in, her mouth close to the bearded man’s ear, and whispered something. After a moment, she put a gentle hand on his arm, still whispering intently.

  “What the hell is she doing? I can’t hear a fucking thing,” Black said, looking over his shoulder at them.

  “Relax,” Dempsey said.

  As Grimes whispered, the sleeping man began to stir. His lips started moving. She smiled and then whispered in his ear again. The man mumbled and then his eyes flickered a moment, but then his head bobbed with sleep.

  “Seriously, Dempsey,” Adamo said, now clearly agitated. “What is she doing? Where did you find this girl?”

  Dempsey ignored him.

  Grimes circled the terrorist, paused in front of the desk, and leaned in—her torso obscuring his face from the camera. She had a hand on his chest and her mouth was still by his ear. Then abruptly she stepped back and slapped him across the cheek.

  “All right, that’s it,” Black said, scooting his chair back. “I’m pulling her.”

  “You will do no such thing,” Dempsey said, putting a hand on Black’s shoulder.

  The detainee was fully awake now, his eyes wild and darting back and forth. He looked at Grimes, and his expression became smug as he wiped a drop of blood from his split lip. Adamo reached out and turned the volume up just as the jihadi yelled something at her.

  “He’s speaking Arabic,” Smith said.

  “Palestinian Arabic—a pretty unique dialect,” Black said. “He’s telling her the CIA is wasting their time sending a woman to do a man’s job. He says he has nothing to tell in any case and that it is a violation of international law to hold a man just for his beliefs . . . Now she’s talking about his family. How does she know about his family? I don’t like where this is heading—”

  “You know what, fuck it,” Dempsey said, and reached out and muted the sound on the console.

  “What the hell are you doing, man?” Black said, whirling around in his chair.

  “Letting my operator do her job. You don’t like what she has to say, then fine, you can observe the rest in silence. I’ve had enough of this armchair-quarterback bullshit.”

  Adamo reached for the volume knob.

  “Touch that knob, and I break fingers,” Dempsey growled.

  Adamo’s fingers stopped one inch short of the knob.

  On the screen, Grimes was now sitting on the table in front of him, her legs crossed at the ankle. Dempsey couldn’t see her face, but it was clear she was talking and that the prisoner, despite his best effort to feign disinterest, was listening. She spoke for several minutes. Then the detainee spoke. Then Grimes. Then he spoke again, this time with an arrogant smirk across his face.

  She looked back over her shoulder, up at the camera on the wall, and smiled at them.

  Then, she went back to work.

  When the prisoner became unresponsive to her circling and questioning, she gently placed her right hand on his left, where it lay loosely secured to the armrest. Then, with the speed of a cobra strike, she dislocated the man’s thumb. He opened his mouth and howled in silent pain for an instant, but then quickly collected himself.

  “Jesus, she broke his fucking thumb,” Black said. “I hope you assholes are planning on taking him with you when you leave. We have oversight up the ass these days.”

  “Nope,” Dempsey replied.

  “This is un-fucking-sat, Dempsey,” Adamo seethed.

  “He’ll live,” Dempsey said.

  The prisoner glared at Grimes. If anything, he was working hard to look amused, now that he was fully awake from the pain from his dislocated thumb. Grimes leaned in again and put her hands on the man’s thighs, her face inches from his. Dempsey saw the man’s body stiffen under her contact. Then, the prisoner began to talk. When he finally stopped talking, she stepped back and renewed her counterclockwise stalking, reminding Dempsey of a shark circling moments before the kill. To his dismay, he watched as she unsheathed a SOG knife from her boot.

  “What the hell is she doing?” Adamo demanded.

  Dempsey watched her toy with the blade, drawing it gently down the jihadi’s cheek and over his neck, and for an instant he was afraid he’d made a terrible mistake giving her complete autonomy.

  “I’m pulling her,” Adamo said, jumping to his feet.

  “No,” Dempsey said. “She won’t hurt him.”

  “She broke his thumb! God knows what she’s planning next.” Adamo looked at Smith. “Are you seriously just going to stand there and do nothing?”

  “Relax, man,” Smith said. “It’s all an act.”

  As if she could hear their conversation, Grimes walked around behind the prisoner, looked up at the camera, and winked.

  “See, Adamo. Everything’s under control,” Dempsey said.

  They watched the jihadi silently mumble something to her, and to Dempsey it almost looked like the man was pleading. A beat later, Grimes stepped away and sheathed her knife. She walked to the door, but at the threshold, abruptly stopped. She turned, walked back to the prisoner, grabbed his thumb, and with a quick jerk, snapped the dislocated digit back into place. Then, with one final flourish, she whispered something in his ear, smiled, and walked out.

  With a sigh of relief, Dempsey looked at Smith, who returned the sentiment with a crooked grin.

  “What the fuck was that?” Adamo said, looking for an ally in the group. “Are you kidding me? That was amateur hour. We got nothing, and that’s a cold fact.”

  Dempsey and Smith ignored him. Black said nothing.

  Grimes strolled into the room a few seconds later, Jacobs complaining over her shoulder.

  “I said I was sorry,” Grimes said. “What else do you want?”

  “We don’t even know who you fucking guys are, and now we have a medical injury to report. It’s not like the old days, lady. Careers get ruined over shit like that.”

  Grimes took a deep breath and plastered on a conciliatory smile. “Look, I really am sorry. You guys are not to blame. You don’t design the political culture where a terrorist who kills American soldiers is afforded more rights than the people he murders. You have to live inside the SOPs passed down from on high, but aren’t you glad that now you know there are still people out there operating with the authority to get shit done and keep radical psychos like our friend in there from slitting throats and channeling money to terrorists who blow up little girls?”

  “The reason the CIA doesn’t do this cowboy shit,” Jacobs fired back, “is not because of the bureaucracy, it’s because it doesn’t work. There are tons of data that show coerced intel gleaned under torture and threats is worthless. It is completely unreliable.”

  “FBI data,” countered Smith. “They work in a different world. They’re building cases, hunting for details about networks that they want to infiltrate. We know something big is coming and we’re just looking for anything to lead us to the next bread crumb before hundreds or thousands of people are murdered. It doesn’t have to hold up in court or under scrutiny at The Hague.”

  “Well, thanks to you, we have a prisoner with a dislocated thumb.”

  “Oh, Agent Jacobs, relax. I put it back,” Grimes said, and blew him a kiss in a perfect Marilyn Monroe imitation.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jacobs swore and then left the room. Shaking his head, Black followed after him.

  “Go talk to them,” Dempsey told Adamo.

  “And tell them what? They’re in the right; they have every reason to be pissed off. No wonder no one is willing to help you guys.”

  “You work for Dempsey now,” Smith said, getting in Adamo’s face. “He told you what he needs, now go do your fucking job.”

  Adamo’s face turned red, and he spun on a heel and left the room.

  Dempsey turned to Grimes, barely able to contain his curiosity. “So?”

  “He’s Iranian,” she said with a victorious grin.

  “How do you kno
w?” Smith asked.

  “His fingernails are clean; his hands aren’t callused. I could see the line where he used to shave his beard thin, the way Iranian diplomats and government officials do. No one in Hezbollah is allowed to do that. Compared to most, he’s manicured,” she said. “He defaulted to Farsi there at the end when he was under duress. His respiration rate picked up when I threatened his wife and son in Tehran.”

  “Wait a minute,” Smith said. “How did you know he’s married and has a child?”

  “I took a chance. Married VEVAK officers in Tehran are no different from married CIA officers in Virginia. They settle their families in nice neighborhoods, put their kids in the best schools. When I was giving him a shave, I made reference to watching his wife picking up his son at Allameh Helli . . . he didn’t like that.”

  “You were fishing?” Dempsey asked.

  “Confirming a hunch.”

  “Okay, so he’s Iranian. Now what?” Smith said.

  “It’s a big win, Shane,” Dempsey replied, surprised at Smith’s response.

  “Don’t get me wrong, this is huge. An Iranian agent working with Hezbollah and dialoguing with an ISIS commander is a serious problem, but it tells us nothing about what al-Mahajer is planning. Did you get anything else, anything else at all?”

  Grimes looked at the monitor; the prisoner had fallen asleep in his chair. “In the very beginning, he was mumbling in his sleep. He kept repeating the phrase bawwaba šamāliyy.”

  Dempsey shook his head. “I don’t know that expression. Is it Farsi?”

  “No, it’s Arabic,” Smith said. “It means ‘the northern gateway,’ but it’s not a particularly common expression.”

  “What do you think it means?” Grimes asked, reaching back to fix her ponytail.

  “I have no idea. We need someone intimately familiar with the current tactics and code words being used by Hezbollah,” Smith said, rubbing his chin, “and I think Jarvis might know just the right guy.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Brussels, Belgium

  October 23, 2042 Local Time