by Chris Culver
“No,” said Nassir. After a few moments, he glanced at me before focusing on the road again. “You don’t look like you’re on vacation.”
“I always take race week off.”
He glanced at me again, his brow furrowed. “I didn’t know you were a race fan.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’ve taken race week off every year I could just so I don’t have to be on drunk patrol.”
“You should have stayed at work.”
“I’m starting to think that, too,” I said.
We drove for another few moments. Then Nassir started drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
“I have friends in Qatar who could take you in,” he said. “We’d have to get you out of the country first, but they might even be able to get you a job working security. Hannah and the kids could move later.”
I sat straighter. “You have friends in Qatar State Security you’ve never told me about?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re business people, but they’re well connected. Qatar isn’t a big place.”
I didn’t doubt that. Money was power. It was one of those very rare societal norms that transcended both culture and time. If it came up, I’d ask him about those friends later, but for now, I had to keep him focused.
“I’m not leaving the country,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. That was my mosque. Those FBI agents drew their weapons first, they shot first, and then they refused to back down when given a chance. I wish I didn’t have to do what I did, but I don’t regret it.”
Especially because the men I “shot” were probably taking showers to wash away the fake blood even as Nassir and I were driving.
“We can’t hide you forever,” said Nassir. “We probably can’t even hide you for very long.”
“I’m tired of hiding,” I said. “It’s time to stand up and fight.”
For a moment, Nassir didn’t say anything. Then he put on his turn signal and pulled onto the interstate’s shoulder. We were on I-65 just south of Franklin, Indiana. A semi whipped past us going seventy or eighty miles an hour, rocking our vehicle. Nassir didn’t even blink. He stared directly into my eyes.
“I understand your anger and your frustration, but I need you to listen to me, my friend,” he said. “You can stay with me, you can eat my food, and you can sleep in my home. I will share everything I have with you, but if you intend to hurt more people than you already have, get out now.”
He looked sincere, but I had seen his postings online. Nassir was old enough to know how the world worked. He never advocated violence, and he never encouraged those who did, but at the same time, he played a role in a violent community. He didn’t advocate violence online because he didn’t have to. Other people did it for him. It was enough that he perpetuated the conversation.
I crossed my arms. “I never pegged you as a pacifist.”
“And I never pegged you as an idiot. You already killed three FBI agents. You may have been justified, but they’re still dead. If you want to hurt more people, I have no place for you in my life. My work is too important.”
I looked at him and tried not to look too interested. “What kind of work are you involved in? We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
Nassir gritted his teeth before putting the car in gear again and looking over his shoulder to pull into traffic.
“If you think this is the middle of nowhere, you have an impoverished imagination.”
I waited for him to say something else, but he went quiet. He didn’t need to tell me everything right away, though. I had time to work on him.
We took the interstate south for another twenty minutes and then exited near Columbus, Indiana. After that, we headed west through deep woods and across rolling hills on a two-lane highway. Very quickly, dense woods surrounded the road, leaving us to drive in shadows so deep Nassir had to turn on his headlights. After about fifteen miles on that two-lane road, we slowed and pulled onto a narrow pockmarked asphalt road cut through the woods. The street didn’t have a name as best I could tell, but it followed a shallow creek through the woods.
Indiana may not have had majestic mountains or dramatic coastal cliffs, but it had its fair share of beautiful areas. Even though I knew Nassir and his friends were likely using their property to hide illegal activities, it felt peaceful and serene. One day, if I had a lot of money, I wouldn’t have minded owning a little piece of property like that.
Hopefully, my property wouldn’t have a terrorist training camp next door.
“This is pretty,” I said, sitting straighter to see the rock-strewn creek to my right. Overhead, trees kept most of it in the shade, but I could see gentle rapids in the shallow water. “You and Rana thinking of retiring here?”
He sighed. “It would have been nice, but no. This is something else.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that, and Nassir didn’t volunteer the information. We slowed a few minutes later as we came to a gate.
Directly ahead of us, the road turned to gravel and cut through a grass field. A man probably in his mid-fifties sat atop a big green tractor and trimmed the lawn. He wore a blue Indianapolis Colts baseball cap, and he had draped a white cloth across the back of his neck. I didn’t remember the guy’s name, but he and his family attended services at my mosque. He was pretty well off, if I remembered correctly. Why he was driving a tractor and mowing the grass in the middle of nowhere, I had no idea.
Nassir rolled his window down and waved as we passed.
“How many people are out here with you?” I asked.
Nassir shrugged and hit the button to close his window. “Four or five at any given time. It varies.”
The Bureau didn’t know how big Nassir’s cell was, but Agent Havelock had a list of nine suspected members. My primary responsibility was to find out who killed Michael Najam, but if I could verify Havelock’s list, I certainly would.
“Are they all from our mosque?”
He glanced at me. “Have you always been this nosy?”
“The more people who see me, the more trouble I can cause,” I said, lying as clearly and forcefully as I could. “I don’t want these guys to be arrested.”
“God will protect us.”
“I hope you’re right.”
The gravel road led to an outcropping of buildings beneath some trees. There were three cars there: a Mercedes, a Land Rover, and an Audi. Judging by the price of their cars, I doubted these guys worked with their hands for a living, and yet, here they were on Nassir’s little farm.
My brother-in-law parked beside the Audi, and I stepped out into a bucolic landscape. To my left was a concrete building with a big porch and bug screens where the windows should have been. To my right was a raised concrete pad covered with artificial turf and a metal rod jutting about six inches from the center. There was an identical concrete pad maybe ten feet across from it and two large rectangular pits dug into the earth nearby.
Aside from the holes in the ground, it looked like a rustic resort.
I pointed toward the concrete pads. “Horseshoes?”
Nassir nodded. “Ismail built the set, but don’t play with him. He’s too competitive.”
I recognized the name. Ismail Shadid was a sixty-two-year-old materials science engineer with Raytheon’s Analysis and Test Laboratory in Indianapolis. He had a top-secret security clearance at work and five children and a spouse at home. He specialized in structural finite elemental analysis of military systems, which meant he had spent his life learning how military hardware broke when put under stress.
Hearing his name confirmed one thing: I was in the right spot. Ismail was at the top of Havelock’s list.
I looked at Nassir. “What now?”
He blinked and then looked down. “I need to talk to my colleagues to tell them what happened at the mosque.”
“They going to be okay hiding a fugitive from the FBI?”
He hesitated before speaking. “They may not agree with your metho
ds, but they understand the world we live in. All believers in God are brothers. If you can’t stay here, we’ll find somewhere else for you. We’ll do everything we can to keep you safe. I’m sure of that.”
Had the circumstances been different, it would have been the kindest thing he had ever said to me. Considering the circumstances, it was a felony. Still, it was touching. I paused and then lowered my voice.
“Thank you, Nassir.”
“Of course. There are rocking chairs on the porch behind you. Stay here. I’ll be back.”
I nodded and then watched him walk away. As I looked over the fields surrounding us, I memorized the landscape, knowing there was a very real possibility that I’d have to tell the leader of an FBI tactical team how best to attack it without getting shot.
Chapter 4
The property was almost three hundred acres, and Nassir’s friends could have been anywhere on it. Not only that, cell reception was spotty at best, and the rolling hills and dense forest made two-way radios next to useless. Nassir would have to track down each man individually. That gave me some time to search.
Once he disappeared down a hill, I knelt down and unholstered the subcompact Glock 26 strapped to my right ankle. Unlike the firearm I had shot earlier that day, this one would kill if I pulled the trigger. Holding it and knowing I might have to use it on someone I once considered a friend made my situation real somehow. I felt almost ill as I slipped the firearm into my pocket.
Intellectually, I understood the situation. I was in the middle of nowhere in the base camp of a potential terrorist organization. If Special Agent Havelock was right, they had already killed a highly trained FBI agent. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill me, too. At the same time, Nassir had helped me teach my daughter to ride a bike. The other men here looked just like me. They came from the same parts of the world my mother and father did. They worshipped the same God I did, oftentimes in the same mosque.
I hated this assignment.
For once, I hoped I was wrong about everything. I didn’t want Michael Najam’s murder to make sense. I hoped for something random—a gangbanger making his bones before joining up, a sociopath who killed strangers because it gave him a thrill. Those random cases were the hardest to solve, but it would have meant my brother-in-law wasn’t a murderer. I would have taken that tradeoff in a heartbeat.
I turned to the northwest and headed toward a building they had completed just a couple of weeks ago. It was the largest structure on the property, and though it was far from the main gate, Nassir and his buddies had extended the gravel driveway to its front door. Based on the aerial photography taken during its construction, Agent Havelock’s analysts believed it was made of reinforced concrete on a slab foundation. It was about a quarter mile away from the buildings suspected to be living quarters, which would have made it a good spot to store or make explosives.
Agent Havelock theorized that Nassir had became radicalized after his daughter died a couple of years back. It made sense to me, knowing Nassir as well as I did. When Rachel died, Nassir lost a part of himself he’d never find again. He was angry more often than not, he stopped going to work, and he even stopped going to Friday prayer at our mosque.
Instead of coming to his family for help, he apparently turned to the internet, where he found a radical Islamic community that encouraged him to hate the world. Rana, my sister, had told me he used to stay up for hours at night, just reading posts on Facebook and watching sermons from imams in Syria or Iraq. Losing his daughter had broken him. There was no way to come back from that.
I followed the gravel road to the building. While its core may have been reinforced concrete, the building had a painted aluminum skin, making it look like any pole barn on any farm in Indiana. It had three open garage doors and a white metal roof that reflected the sunlight. Nobody came outside to greet me, so I walked inside.
The interior was silent, attesting to the concrete walls. The air held a chemical odor. There was an oil slick on the ground near one of the garage doors but no equipment or vehicles. There were, however, enough bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer stacked in the northeastern corner to turn the world green.
I bent down and pulled a prepaid cell phone from a holster on my ankle. That far from civilization, I couldn’t get a cell signal, but I took a dozen pictures from as many angles as I could so the FBI’s analysts could properly estimate how much ammonium nitrate Nassir had. Then I went outside again.
Nassir and his friends had to have fuel for their tractor, so I walked around the building until I found an elevated diesel storage tank. I took pictures of that, too.
Then I sat down on the grass in the shade cast by the barn. Nassir and his friends needed a tractor to take care of their camp, and they needed diesel so their tractor could work. What’s more, they needed some fertilizer if they wanted to keep their fields healthy and lush. I knew all that, but I also knew that fuel and ammonium nitrate happened to be the two primary components of the explosive device Timothy McVeigh used to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City in the mid-nineties.
I closed my eyes and banged the back of my head against the building’s aluminum siding.
“Fuck.”
Even if they were innocent, this was a bad look. The diesel I could understand, but they didn’t need thousands of pounds of fertilizer to keep their plants healthy. They had that for some other purpose entirely.
When I agreed to this investigation, I had hoped I’d waltz onto the property and find real, concrete facts that put all of Havelock’s circumstantial evidence into context. Despite all the theatrics it took to get here, I had hoped I could prove Nassir and his friends were innocent—stupid, maybe, but innocent. The more I saw, though, the more confirmation I had that Havelock was right.
I banged my head against the wall again. Even if Nassir had an excuse for the fertilizer and diesel, the case against him was building. I left the barn and walked back to the cars.
When Havelock had shown me aerial photographs of the property, we had named most of the buildings after places on a golf course. The barn I had just searched was the maintenance shed, eight small buildings on the east side of the property had become the sand trap, an identical set of eight buildings to the west had become the ninth green, and the building Nassir and his friends had parked beside had become the clubhouse.
Now that I stood near it, it struck me that clubhouse was actually a good name. It was concrete, but it had wooden trim around the windows and doors, which gave it a softer feel. Someone had put rocking chairs and a low table on the covered front porch. As I walked closer, I noticed a pair of coffee mugs and a chess set on the table. Had its owners not been plotting the demise of the Western world, it might have been a pleasant place to relax.
I pulled open the door and stepped into an open room with a vaulted ceiling and a couple of tables and chairs. Winters would be a bear without insulation or glass in the windows, but it was comfortable on a spring afternoon. A hallway on the eastern wall led to private bedrooms, each of which had a sign outside designating its occupant. Only two rooms in the hallway had locks. One was the bathroom, while the other was a heavy steel exterior-grade door with a padlock.
Nassir could have kept a lot of stuff behind a heavy door like that one. If he had purchased the ammonium nitrate and diesel for a bomb, he’d need a high explosive to detonate it. I probably wouldn’t have kept high explosives so close to my living quarters, but if they had blasting caps or dynamite, that’s probably where they kept it. One way or another, I needed to get in there. That would have to wait, though. For now, I had other matters to investigate.
I went to the room with Michael Najam’s name on the sign outside and opened his door. The bedroom was small but neat and reminded me of a college dorm. There was a metal framed bed against the far wall. Thin berber carpet covered the ground, and open windows gave him a view of the grounds outside. Like the rest of the building, bug screens kept nature outside but afforded little privacy.
And that was it. At least I wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time searching.
I started by unzipping the duffel bag and running my hand between and around T-shirts, jeans, thick canvas pants, socks, and boxers—the usual things I’d expect from a man who spent significant amounts of time at the camp. Najam liked blue and green shirts, evidently, and he didn’t keep secret messages with his clothes. Beyond that, I didn’t really learn anything new.
Next, I dumped out his laundry bag. Mud caked most of his clothes, but if he had left a message in dirt, it was too subtle for me to see. I stuffed everything back in the bag and then began moving the stuff from the trunk.
I popped the lid on the trunk and found shoes, toiletries, a couple of books, and a gallon-sized Ziploc bag full of amber prescription drug canisters. The drugs gave me pause.
Everybody got sick, but even cancer survivors—my wife included—had fewer pill containers than that lurking around. I opened the bag and dumped it on the navy blue comforter of his bed. He had an antibiotic, a drug for lowering cholesterol, a multivitamin, and a drug for heartburn. If those had been all he possessed, I wouldn’t have been worried.
Unfortunately, he had four canisters of oxycodone as well, and each looked about half-full. That was a lot of painkillers to have lying around, especially for an FBI agent under cover. In addition, he had two drugs I didn’t recognize, and each had been prescribed to Jacob Ganim. Both had been filled at the same pharmacy outside Indianapolis. Havelock hadn’t given me information on Michael Najam’s real identity, but I had the feeling I had just discovered it.