by Brad Thor
She was right. The Middle East was definitely where the fight was. He was also glad to hear her say that she truly enjoyed her work. The war on terror had exacted a heavy toll. In addition to those who had been killed or wounded, it had destroyed marriages and broken families both in the military and in the intelligence community. It was just wave after wave that never relented. There was only so much people could handle.
Harvath, though, had yet to reach his breaking point. He enjoyed his work, too, and Levy’s comment reminded him of the wooden sign that hung near his front door at home. The property had once belonged to the Anglican Church. In the attic he had discovered an old wooden sign engraved with the motto of their missionaries—TRANSIENS ADIUVANOS. I go overseas to give help. It was strangely fitting for the career he had chosen for himself.
Levy drove them to a squat, sand-colored building on the base that the CIA used for planning and operations. Its narrow windows were covered with reflective film meant to keep out the sun and also mitigate blast damage should a potential bomber ever get inside the wire.
“We sweep it daily,” she said as she pulled into a parking spot marked by two sun-bleached stripes. “My team just went over it forty-five minutes ago. It’s clean.”
Harvath grabbed the bag out of the back and followed Levy inside.
She led him to a midsized conference room lined with maps of the UAE and other countries in the region. A large flat-screen monitor hung on the wall at the front of the room. Waiting for them were three other CIA operatives.
Harvath wasn’t thrilled with the welcoming party. He had asked Ryan to keep his arrival off the books. All he wanted were the items he had requested and any additional intelligence they had available. After that he preferred to be on his own.
After the introductions had been made, one of the operatives, a man named Cowles, pointed to the back table and said, “We’ve got coffee, water, and sandwiches. Whatever you want.”
Harvath nodded and helped himself to a bottle of water and what looked like a turkey sandwich before grabbing a seat at the nicked-up conference table.
As Cowles worked on hooking up his laptop to the flat-screen, Levy removed a small cell phone and a black U.S. diplomatic passport and slid them across the table. “The phone has been programmed with several numbers listed as belonging to our embassy in Abu Dhabi or the Consul General’s office in Dubai. All of them will be answered by Agency personnel if dialed. The number listed for the economic advisor’s office rings to my cell.
“Now, the passport we created for you should succeed at shooing away any local law enforcement flies, but the higher up the chain you go, the less chance it’ll hold water. Hopefully you won’t need it, but if you do, be careful how you use it.”
Harvath flipped it open. The Carlton Group had provided the Agency with one of his recent photos. He familiarized himself with the name, date of birth, and country stamps, then scrolled through the numbers on the cell phone and nodded. Levy signaled for the lights to be turned out.
After firing up their PowerPoint presentation, Cowles handed her the remote and she narrated. “I know Deputy DCI Ryan gave you a partial briefing, but we’ve been able to gather some more details since then. We only have a handful of photos of Khuram Pervez Hanjour, none of which, as you can see, are terribly good.” She cycled through them slowly, stopping when she reached a photo of an obviously different man.
“This is twenty-six-year-old Najam Fahad,” Levy narrated. “Fahad is the Hawaladar being held by the Emiratis. He has identified Hanjour as one of his clients. The NSA has also just confirmed phone calls between Fahad and Ahmad Yaqub’s Hawaladar in Karachi. At this point, we’re operating with an 80 percent certainty that we’ve got the right Khuram Hanjour, so everything is a go.”
Good, Harvath thought. “What else?”
Levy moved to the next slide in her presentation. It was a satellite photo. “Hanjour is known to frequent the historic district west of Dubai creek, known as Bur Dubai. It has several mosques,” she continued, advancing through her slides. “Including the Grand and Iranian mosques.
“It has a lot of shopping streets, outdoor souks, cafés, and restaurants, which makes it popular with tourists. Fahad says he has no idea where Hanjour lives. Whenever they meet, it’s at a restaurant called the Silk Route.”
She advanced to a surveillance photo of an outdoor restaurant and Harvath studied it. “Is that at some hotel?” he asked.
“It is. It’s called the Arabian Courtyard, but I want to show you something else, first.”
Harvath nodded his assent.
“The Emiratis let us examine Najam Fahad’s cell phone.”
“Did you get anything off of it?”
“We got everything,” said Levy. “His entire phone. We cloned it. That’s how the NSA was able to link him to Yaqub’s Hawaladar in Karachi.”
Harvath smiled. “Good job. What did you learn?”
“Fahad was using a quilt.”
“A quilt?”
“It’s a layer of perfectly legitimate apps like Google, Twitter, and Yelp that hide apps underneath you don’t want anyone else to see.”
“What apps was he hiding?”
“You want the whole list?”
Harvath shook his head. “Just the important stuff.”
Levy advanced to her next slide. It was a screen capture from Fahad’s phone. “Do you know what Snapchat is?”
“It’s an app used for sending nude pictures that self-destruct once viewed.”
“You must have teenage kids,” she said.
“No kids.”
When he didn’t elaborate beyond that, Levy let it go and continued. “Snapchat can send still photos, nude or otherwise, as well as video. The sender decides how long the photos or videos can be viewed before they’re deleted from the Snapchat server and hidden from the recipient’s device.”
“Meaning they remain on the sending device.”
“Yup. And our friend Fahad was fond of taking selfies.”
“Fully clothed, I’m sure,” Harvath joked.
“If only. I omitted them from the presentation, but we’ve brought the phone if you want to scroll through them.”
“No, thanks,” Harvath replied. “I’ll pass.”
“Smart choice,” said Levy. “Okay. You’re one for one with the Snapchat answer. How about Grindr? Do you know what that is?”
“No, and I can’t wait to find out.”
“You asked for it,” she said, advancing to her next slide, another shot from Fahad’s phone. “It’s a geolocating app. It allows gay and bisexual men to find sex partners in their area who are looking to hook up discreetly.”
Homosexuality was a death sentence in many places in the Middle East, so gay Muslim men had to operate in absolute secrecy. The lengths they went to in order to cover their activities rivaled—and in many cases necessarily so—the techniques of the law enforcement agencies in their countries.
Because of their expertise at covertly meeting, communicating, and transmitting illicit materials, many gay Muslims had actually excelled in the Hawala industry. That they were now learning this about Fahad didn’t surprise Harvath.
“What else did you find?” he asked.
“Do you know what the acronym PnP stands for?”
He shook his head.
“It stands for party and play, also known as a chemical session or chem for short. It’s when two or more people get together to do drugs before engaging in sexual activity.”
“And Fahad—our Hawaladar and part-time drug importer—liked to PnP,” Harvath stated.
“He did,” replied Levy, “and you’ll be quite interested with whom.” She advanced to a new slide that had the same picture of the outdoor restaurant at the Arabian Courtyard Hotel. “Remember, this is the Silk Route restaurant where Fahad said he and Hanjour would meet. Now,” she said, advancing to the next slide, “look at this.”
The slide showed a man’s body from the neck down, naked.
His head had been cropped out of the shot. “This is the Grindr avatar for one of the men Fahad was communicating with. Do you see his handle?”
Harvath did. “1234KPH. Khuram Pervez Hanjour?” he said. “Not very creative.”
“It’s probably lazy and clever at the same time. The speed of sound is 1,234 kilometers per hour.”
Though Harvath knew better than to underestimate the people he hunted, he was still going to chalk the handle up to laziness. “We’ve got a headless body with our guy’s initials. That’s it?”
Levy shook her head. “He’s standing near a window.”
“With the curtains closed.”
“Let’s talk about the window first. Look at the shape, how it comes to a point.”
Harvath looked and then Levy went back a slide to the façade of the hotel with the restaurant.
“See how the hotel’s windows are all done in Arabian style, pointed at the top?”
“Unless these are the only pointed windows in Dubai, we’re going to need something more than that.”
Levy went back to the picture of the man standing in the room. “You mentioned the curtains are closed, but not completely. Look over the figure’s left shoulder, there’s a sliver of curtain open.”
Harvath leaned forward to get a better look.
Levy used a laser pointer. “Right here. This area.”
“You’re being generous with the word ‘sliver.’ ”
“It doesn’t look like much until you enhance it. Like this,” she said, advancing to the next slide. “This is how we know the picture was taken from inside one of the rooms at the Arabian Courtyard.”
“What am I looking at?”
“Across the street from the hotel is the Dubai Museum. They have a traditional Arab dhow in the courtyard. What you’re looking at is the tip of the mast through the hotel room’s window.”
She advanced to her next and final slide. It was a split screen of the enhanced photo along with a photo of the ship across the street. There was no question. They were a match.
“So it looks like KPH uses the hotel for more than just the Silk Route restaurant.”
“And based on the texts we pulled from Fahad’s phone, they get together to PnP on a pretty regular basis.”
“Then the Brit and French files were correct about Hanjour’s extracurricular activities,” said Harvath. “Do we know if he travels with any security?”
“We don’t think so. And it wasn’t in any of the files. So we’re going with no.”
Harvath agreed with the assessment. Even if Hanjour did have a security detail, he couldn’t see him dragging them around for drugs and gay sex. Security details were also expensive. Hanjour did strike him as a big enough player to warrant that type of thing. Having some means of self-defense, though, was different. “Do we know if he’s armed?”
Levy shook her head. “We don’t know for sure, but the UAE has very strict laws against firearms. One year in prison for every bullet you’re caught with.”
“The UAE supposedly has strict drug laws, too, so we’ll assume he’s armed,” said Harvath. “What about prior military experience? Any arrest record or outstanding warrants?”
“Not that we know of. At this point, you know everything about Khuram Hanjour that we do.”
“Which leaves us with only one issue. How we’re going to break him.”
“Whenever you’re ready on that,” the operative named Cowles interjected, “we’ve got what you requested out back.”
Harvath looked at Levy. “Anything else I need to see? Or are we all done here?”
“We’re done,” she said and signaled for the lights to be turned back on.
Harvath took a bite of his sandwich and followed Cowles and Levy out the rear of the building to an adjacent Quonset hut. It had a large roll-up garage door. Cowles opened it up. Inside was a black 7 Series BMW. Producing a key fob, he depressed the trunk release button.
Harvath looked inside and studied the contents. Everything that he had asked for was there. “Excellent,” he said, shutting the lid and pocketing the fob. “Safe house?”
Levy removed a map and pointed to where it was and recited the address. “We plugged a bunch of decoy addresses into the car’s GPS system. One is for a Dubai temp agency that’s at the end of the block on the opposite side of the street.”
“What about the Emiratis and their intelligence division?” Harvath asked. “What do they think we’re up to?”
“They know we’ve begun looking into an Emirati suspect named Khuram Hanjour, but we told them it was in relation to a Russian organized crime ring.”
“And they bought that?”
“For the moment, yes. We’ve buried them with requests to run down a ton of leads. We also gave up two high-end Ukrainian call girls out of Dubai who we know are working for the FSB and who were sent here to seduce influential Emiratis. That alone should be enough smoke to keep them busy and cover us for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If we need more to throw at them, we have it.”
“Sounds like our bases are covered.”
“There’s one last thing,” said Levy. “The assistant DCI wants a countersurveillance team on you. Just in case.”
Harvath shook his head. “No way. We don’t want to spook Hanjour. If the wind even blows the wrong direction, he’s going to bolt.”
“I understand that, but there are too many unknowns here. We don’t know if he has a team of floaters that follow him. We don’t know if we’ve accidentally piqued the Emiratis’ interest in him, even though we’ve tried to downplay it. We don’t know if Al Qaeda is watching him to make sure no one else is. We don’t know much of anything, except that he’s the only lead we have and if he disappears, we’re all in trouble.”
“But if we flood the zone,” Harvath replied, “he’s going to pick up on it. That’s what matters.”
“We’re not going to flood the zone. We’ll use a very light footprint.” She paused for a moment, trying to choose the right words to make the Agency’s case. “I can’t force you to do anything. I’ve been told this is your operation. We just want to make sure that as you’re going after Hanjour, nobody’s going after you. Make sense?”
It did make sense, but it didn’t make it easier for him to accept. He preferred to operate alone, or at the very least with professionals he knew. He didn’t know any of these CIA people.
He knew he could roll Hanjour up on his own, but if anything went wrong, it would be on his head. And a lot could go wrong. Karachi was a perfect case in point. They had been successful, but only because they had involved other people. Rule number one if heading into a gunfight was to bring a gun, preferably two, and all of your friends who had guns. Harvath didn’t know what he was headed into, but he knew that he didn’t want to be taken by surprise again.
It was not an easy decision, but he made what he hoped would be the right choice. “All right,” he relented. “Let’s go over how we’re going to handle this, including if anything goes bad.”
CHAPTER 13
* * *
* * *
SECOND DEPARTMENT, BEIJING
Colonel Shi knew who was at his door even before he heard the knock. General Yi Ming Wu’s cigarette smoke usually arrived before he did. “Come in,” Shi said.
Wu opened the door and stepped inside. He was a large man in his early sixties with a round face, nicotine-stained fingers, and a growing spare tire around his middle. Wedging himself into one of the narrow chairs in front of Shi’s desk, he removed a pack of cigarettes and offered one. The colonel shook his head.
The general took it between his lips and used his old cigarette to light it. After taking a deep drag, he crushed the old cigarette into the ashtray Shi kept on the corner of his desk. “You should go back to smoking,” he said. “It’ll help your mind work better.”
Shi was now running five times a week and feeling healthier than he had in years. As much as he respected the general and his directorship of the
Second Department, the man was one of the last people who should be dispensing health advice.
Shi had been waiting several hours for his boss to return from his meeting and was eager for the man to get to the point. “How did it go?”
The general exhaled two tendrils of smoke from his nostrils that twirled up toward the yellowed ceiling tiles above the desk. “Not good.”
The colonel had expected that. “Not good, how?”
“The general secretary is still particularly upset that you have lost one of your assets.”
Shi shook his head. “You of course explained that I didn’t lose the Somali?”
Wu shrugged. Semantics. “It’s your operation. You’re responsible.”
“Fine. I’m responsible. I’m responsible for the Emirati engineering students, as well as the Somali accomplices we teamed them with. Now what was the Standing Committee’s decision?”
“They discussed many issues. In anticipation of America’s collapse and the global economic shockwaves, China has been quietly stockpiling food, fuel, and medicine.”
“It has also not-so-quietly,” Shi added, “been stockpiling gold.”
The general dismissed the concern with a wave of his hand. “Gold goes up in price, gold goes down. Everyone is buying. There’s too much debt everywhere and no one trusts paper currency anymore. Some countries have even begun repatriating their gold from third-party vaults abroad because they want it closer to home. Our gold purchases are not that unusual.”
Shi believed that China was buying too much, too fast. He had expressed his concern, but it had fallen on deaf ears. None of that mattered at this point. “What did they end up deciding?”
“You know, there are some who think you orchestrated this problem.”
“Me?” the colonel replied, taken aback. “That’s ridiculous.”
“The timing is quite coincidental, wouldn’t you say?”
“Do you think I wanted a cell member to go missing so the operation and our national security could be thrown into jeopardy?”