Jihad db-5

by Stephen Coonts

  The NSA had also intercepted the message. It was far from clear that the doomsday safeguard had been the target. If it was, there must be at least a dozen more al-Qaeda operatives in place to carry it out. It seemed unlikely now that they would be caught.

  “The Saudis blew it,” said Lia. “They should have known the house would be rigged to explode. They went in there without even talking to us. Your boss—”

  “My boss?”

  “The station chief was supposed to get them to cooperate, not play cowboys. We could have gone in there ourselves.”

  “Then we would have been the ones blown up,” said Pinchon. “And I don’t work for Riyadh, thank you very much.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You’re just mad because they didn’t ask us. Come on, Lia, what’d you expect them to do? Wait around until it’s too late to act? Besides, the world’s better off — two pests have been exterminated. Good riddance.”

  Pinchon got up from the couch. “You’re pretty when you’re pissed off, you know that? But then again, you’re always pissed off.”

  He put his hands on her hips. Lia tensed but didn’t push him away.

  “Miss me?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He leaned to kiss her. She moved away.

  “Hey, hey, I’m not going to bite,” he told her.

  “What happened to you, Terry?”

  “Come on, Lia. Obviously I can’t talk about it, right?”

  “That’s bull.”

  He smirked and held up his hands.

  “I don’t mean just on the mission,” said Lia. “You changed.”

  “Changed?”

  “You couldn’t have let me know somehow that you were alive.”

  Pinchon shrugged. That was all the explanation she was ever going to get. But it said it all, didn’t it?

  No, the killer was that she had felt something for him, and that even now her heart was pounding — if he stopped smirking, if he came clean, if he said he loved her, what would she do?

  Pinchon reached for her, but she backed away.

  “This isn’t the place,” she told him.

  “Where, then?”

  “Nowhere.” Lia turned on her com system. “Where the hell’s that car to the airport?”

  CHAPTER 80

  “I think Dr. Ramil could certainly use some rest,” Kevin Montblanc told Rubens after he returned from the White House. “On the other hand, I think he feels embarrassed by what happened and wants to make amends. He asked about his patient — he still calls him his patient.”

  “Was the incident in Istanbul an anomaly, or can he no longer take the pressure?” Rubens asked Montblanc.

  “I don’t know. I’d recommend giving him a few weeks off. When he comes back, I could reinterview, observe him for a while. We might even send him on a training exercise to see how he holds up.”

  The problem was, Rubens needed him right now. The doctor who had been standing by with the team in Detroit had come down with the flu and had a 104° fever. The Art Room had two military doctors available as backups, but Rubens much preferred using one of his own people for security reasons.

  Still, if Ramil wasn’t up to it, there was nothing he could do.

  “What if I needed to use him right away?” said Rubens.

  “Well, in that case I’d keep an eye on him. If you really needed him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Downstairs in the squad room. I said you wanted to talk to him.”

  “Very good.”

  * * *

  Ramll sipped the iced tea, letting the cold liquid fill his mouth before swallowing. The squad room — the ops’ nickname for the large lounge where Desk Three missions were debriefed — had the air of an English country club, with thick leather furniture and a variety of amusements. It was also quiet, off-limits except to Deep Black ops and the few people who worked directly with them. Ramil felt quite comfortable here, calm and alone. Safe.

  What would a mental breakdown feel like? Something similar to what he had experienced in Istanbul, he thought, but it would last much longer. His was only temporary, a burp — he’d been tired.

  “Doctor, I’m glad to see you made it back,” said William Rubens, striding into the room. He pulled a leather club chair over and sat on the edge, pitched forward like a dentist on a stool about to examine his teeth. “How are you feeling?”

  “More relaxed. I think I was overstressed by the heat and the jet lag.”

  “It was considerable stress.” Rubens nodded. “Perhaps you’d like a long vacation.”

  “No.” Ramil felt his heart begin to race. “I’m fine. Where do you need me to be?”

  “I don’t want to push you beyond your means.”

  Ramil felt angry, as if Rubens had called him a coward.

  “I’m quite capable,” he said. “It was a temporary glitch. You know the brain is a sensitive organ. Too much stimulation — too much adrenaline, a change in the blood flow — we react. We have to react. I’m over it.”

  Rubens stared at him.

  “I’ve been through much worse situations,” Ramil told him, striving to make his voice as conversational as possible. “I can’t tell you how many times I had to operate while we were being shelled.”

  Actually, he could — fifteen in total, though only two had been truly scary.

  “Morris is sick, I heard,” added Ramil. “So I should be there, in the background, in case anything goes wrong. I’m familiar with the patient. He has a heart condition. We don’t want to lose him.”

  Rubens frowned, ever so slightly, but Ramil had seen that frown before; it meant he agreed, though with reservations. Desk Three did not have unlimited resources; it carried as many doctors as Art Room supervisors, and the latter were considerably more important to the success of any given mission. If Ramil didn’t go, Rubens would have to bring in a doctor who, even if he was on active military service — not likely in the States — would not have passed the rigorous security and background checks the NSA routinely required of even contract employees. Worse, Rubens would have no direct control over the doctor, since he would answer to a military commander. And Rubens was nothing if not a control freak.

  “Ms. Telach will make the arrangements,” said Rubens finally. “If possible, I’d like you to leave within the hour.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Detroit. Asad bin Taysr arrived there an hour ago.”

  CHAPTER 81

  “The brother says the imam requested a special meeting after Friday prayers.”

  Marid Dabir nodded, carefully controlling the expression on his face. While he trusted his informant, prudence required that he not give any sign of emotion. And besides, the fact that there was a special meeting did not necessarily mean Asad was in Detroit. Dabir would have to continue methodically, discovering where the traitor was and then delivering justice.

  Dabir had arrived in the city from Ontario the night before, riding the bus through the tunnel between the two cities. The passport formalities were trivial. His prematurely gray hair made him appear too old to be a threat; the al-Qaeda organizer did not fit the profile of a terrorist.

  Nor did Asad.

  So how would Dabir find the so-called Red Lion of Mohammed, Islam’s most perfidious traitor?

  Dabir could not confront the imam, who owed his allegiance to Asad and would surely believe him rather than a man known to have fallen from favor before being banished to Germany. Nor could he send one of his people to the mosque; with the exception of his informer, they were unknown to the imam and would not be trusted with important information.

  He would have the mosque watched from a distance. Sooner or later, Asad would show himself.

  And if he didn’t?

  Then it would mean that he wasn’t here. At that point he would formulate a new plan.

  “Brother, have I done well?” asked his informant, snapping Dabir from his contemplative daze.

  “Extremely,” Da
bir told him. “Extremely.”

  CHAPTER 82

  The air conditioning in the secure conference room in the White House basement was on the fritz, and Rubens estimated that the temperature was no higher than sixty-five degrees. CIA Director Louis Zackart and Debra Collins huddled around a carafe of coffee for warmth. Even Secretary of Defense Art Blanders, who made a habit of attending even the most formal cabinet meeting in shirt sleeves, had left his suit jacket on.

  Bing entered the room with the president. Rubens reminded himself not to read anything into that; the national security advisor might very well have been stalking him in the hall.

  “Gentlemen, ladies, good morning,” said Marcke, his tone as brisk as the air in the room, “thank you for getting up early for me. Let’s get going. Where are we, Billy?”

  “The Saudi situation is stable,” said Rubens.

  He ran over the highlights quickly, indicating that the Saudis had moved after tentatively linking the two al-Qaeda contacts to the oil fields; more arrests were expected and the entire military was on alert. He then moved on to Asad — identified even here only as Red Lion — noting that he had spent the night in Detroit.

  “The operation is proceeding, but it is at a difficult stage,” said Rubens. “We still do not know what the American target is.”

  “An attack on the Alaskan pipeline would be on par with an attack against the Saudi oil fields,” said Defense Secretary Blanders. “It’ll be on that sort of scale.”

  Rubens listened as other possible targets were named: natural gas pipelines, large oil fields in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico. But the target did not have to be bigger than the Saudi oil fields to have a large impact on the U.S. Striking even a small American facility would send tremors through the commodities market. Hurricane Katrina had proven how sensitive the system was to disruption, and while that disaster had by now been accommodated, the market was still shaky. The price of oil had jumped twenty dollars a barrel following the attack in Germany. A successful strike in the U.S. might be triple that, at least in the short term. The successive attacks, fully successful or not, would make it seem as if al-Qaeda was gaining momentum in its war on the West. Within weeks it would cost over two hundred dollars to fill an economy car with gas.

  “Rather than guessing or waiting for Red Lion to tell us what he has in mind,” said Bing, “we should arrest him now and find out what the target is.”

  “I doubt we could break him in time,” said Rubens. “I doubt we can break him at all.”

  “Maybe arresting him will stop the operation altogether,” she said.

  “Arresting al-Qaeda’s number three man last year didn’t stop the attack on our embassy in Pakistan. I doubt it would work now.”

  “These points were discussed during the planning stage,” said Blanders. “I seriously doubt any interrogation will be as effective as the implanted bug. And if we want to put him on trial—”

  “We can’t put him on trial,” said Bing. “If it comes out that we implanted a bug in him, we’re finished.”

  Rubens didn’t particularly relish the idea of a trial; too much could go wrong, and inevitably some information about the operation would slip out. Still, he resented Bing’s implication that Desk Three was operating illegally, and her insistence on revisiting decisions that had been made before she was appointed.

  He resented Bing, period.

  “The legal issues were thoroughly researched beforehand,” said Rubens. “This is just another instance of electronic information gathering.”

  “I’ve read the background legal papers, thank you, Mr. Rubens,” said Bing. “And in no case do they mention what would happen in a U.S. court. The idea was always to render Red Lion to Yemen for justice. Assuming he was alive.”

  “We’ll have the lawyers work this bullshit out,” said the president angrily. “I want the bastard to pay for what he’s done, and I want him to do it here. I want a trial — I want to show the world exactly what kind of slime advocates killing innocent women and children. Bitty — have your people stay on him until they know exactly what the target is, then I want him in custody. The bug won’t be used to make the case. The attorney general assures me we’ll have plenty of evidence without it.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. President,” said Rubens as Marcke rose and abruptly left the room.

  CHAPTER 83

  Friday afternoon prayers were held in a storefront mosque, a humble, shabby building at the outer edge of Detroit. The brothers, about two dozen in all, were mostly young men whose fathers had immigrated; to a man they were struggling to find their way in their ancestors’ faith.

  Asad, who had passed through a similar challenge himself, noted how carefully the imam answered their questions. The man was not the most eloquent — he rambled and at times lost the thread of his thoughts — but he had studied with the right teachers and lived in Afghanistan for a time, before the triumph of 9/11 had brought the struggle to the next phase. His message to the small congregation was a strong one, even if his sentences were not: the Followers of God must do all that they could to survive the Devil’s onslaught.

  A call to arms, yet one that could not be faulted by the most severe police spy.

  “This way, sheik,” Kenan told Asad as the others began filing out.

  Asad followed him to a back room and then down a set of creaking steps to a dank basement populated with cobwebs. For a moment his faith deserted him. Asad worried that he had been betrayed, brought here to die. He tensed, waiting for the inevitable blow even as he followed Kenan into a pitch-black room.

  The young man retrieved a small flashlight from his pocket. Its dim beacon fluttered across a floor of bare dirt, picking its way across cement blocks and an assortment of dilapidated pieces of wood.

  I am walking through the outer precincts of hell, Asad thought. The devil will tempt me and test my courage, but I will not fail.

  Kenan stopped before a large metal door. He held up his hand to Asad, gesturing that he should be silent. Then he knocked twice. The door swung open; light flooded into Asad’s eyes. When he blinked, a man with an M16 stood in front of him.

  “Muhammad’s Lion is here to join us,” Kenan told the man with the gun, his hushed voice full of reverence.

  The man stepped back.

  The room looked like the inside of an expensive coffee-house in Egypt. It smelled of sweet tobacco, though none of the dozen occupants were smoking. As Asad entered, all of the men rose quickly, bowing their heads and even closing their eyes in respect. Asad had personally chosen only Kenan and Nathan Green; the others had been selected by the imam, with some additional vetting by another al-Qaeda operative.

  “Sheik, we have waited night and day for your return!” thundered Nathan. A short and stocky man whose light-skinned face had the look of a jester, Nathan was given to overblown rhetoric and superlatives. But he was dependable, and as far as Asad could tell from their encounters, sincere though emotional.

  They embraced.

  “We are safe here,” said Nathan. “Let me show you.”

  He gestured at one of the brothers nearby, who produced a small radiolike device and began waving it around the air. “For bugs,” added Nathan.

  Asad, appreciating that his host was attempting to be discreet, smiled and held out his hands. “You must check me like you check everyone. There should be no margin for error.”

  CHAPTER 84

  “Checking him for bugs,” Karr told Dean. “Think they’ll find any?”

  Dean ignored his partner’s laugh, studying the satellite locator map on the PDA. The meeting was being held two blocks away in the subbasement of a building across from the mosque Asad had gone into for services earlier.

  The Art Room was feeding the intercepted conversations back to them; it played like a low, slightly off-tune radio station in the background.

  “Ranting about oil again,” said Karr. “At least it’s in English.”

  “Tell me if he explains why he murdered pe
ople.”

  “You think he’s got a good explanation?”

  “It’s not something to joke about, Tommy.”

  “I’m not joking,” said Karr — but he laughed anyway, a habit he couldn’t avoid, Dean realized. “He’s a psycho. He doesn’t have an explanation. Not one that makes sense.”

  “I guess,” said Dean. “The problem is he feels compelled to share his insanity with the rest of the world.”

  CHAPTER 85

  The message on Rubens’ secure BlackBerry consisted of two words: “Call me.”

  Not unusual in the least, except that it had come from Debra Collins at the CIA. Collins almost never used the secure instant messaging system to contact Rubens.

  Rubens went to one of the consoles at the back of the Art Room with a secure phone. To his surprise, Collins picked up right away.

  “That was quick.” she said.

  “I gathered it was important.”

  “Lahore Two says the network’s target is Houston. Al-Qaeda has purchased somewhere over a hundred tons of commercial-grade explosives and can use them in the operation.”

  Lahore Two was a CIA source in Pakistan who had an en-viable track record predicting al-Qaeda moves. While his identity was a secret to Rubens, the pattern of his revelations made it obvious he was a triple agent in the Pakistan intelligence service — probably a Pak “turned” by al-Qaeda and then turned again by the CIA. Rubens did not concern himself with the details; the source’s true allegiance would be to himself in any event.

  “Nothing more specific?” asked Rubens.

  “He’s promised a diagram or a map. I’ll have a copy sent to you as soon we get it. Assuming he carries through,” added Collins, her voice making it clear that the source didn’t always deliver on such promises. “They’ve been planning this for some time. No target date. Oil or energy is somehow involved. I gather that meshes with what you’ve already heard from Red Lion. I’ll send you a copy of the officer’s report, if you’d like.”