Act of War

by Brad Thor

  Cheng watched. He was familiar with the routine. He had seen it many times. The last time was in China’s Uighur region when he had watched Ismail Kashgari perform it.

  When Wazir Ibrahim knelt on the rug, Cheng quietly stood from the dining-room table and slipped into the living room. He counted how many times the Somali had bowed to Mecca. As Wazir rose for the third time, Cheng stepped behind him, wrapped the garrote around his neck, and pulled the wire tight.

  It was like slicing butter with a piece of piano wire. There was a spray of blood and the Somali’s body flailed wildly for several seconds before collapsing. Wazir wasn’t as strong as Kashgari, but his desire to live had been just as powerful, and just as pointless.

  Stepping away from the body, Cheng retraced his steps through the house, making sure he had not left any fingerprints anywhere.

  • • •

  An hour and a half later, via an encrypted email, Cheng provided Colonel Shi with both an update and a recommendation. It took less than twenty minutes for Shi to respond.

  The colonel okayed Cheng’s next move, but required him to make one other stop before leaving Tennessee. Cheng didn’t like it, though he had little choice but to comply.

  CHAPTER 30

  * * *

  * * *

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Harvath had tried to get some sleep as soon as Carlton left, but he was too keyed up. He shared the Old Man’s concern that they might be missing something and he wanted to think. Exercise always cleared his head so he changed into shorts, threw on a T-shirt, and went for a long run.

  The sweat rolling from his pores and the burn in his legs felt good. The steady pounding of his feet along the shoulder of the tree-covered road had relaxed his mind.

  The game of intelligence was a lot like assembling a puzzle with the lights out or the top of the box missing. Two pieces might feel as if they “should” fit together perfectly, but in reality they couldn’t be further removed from each other. You had to be very careful about what kind of assumptions you made.

  As he ran, Harvath had gone through the bits and pieces of intelligence they had amassed so far, trying to see the bigger picture. How did it all come together? What was the attack? No matter how hard he had pushed, he couldn’t get it to come into focus. He was frustrated and it made him angry.

  Returning home, he grabbed a quick shower, changed clothes, and went out to pick up some food. He knew he needed to get some rest, but the further he could push it off, the more helpful it would be to battle his jet lag. In fact, the more sun he could get on his skin, the faster he would reset his body clock back to D.C. time.

  It took him about forty-five minutes to run his errands. Returning home, he put away his groceries and carried his lunch down to his dock. While Potomac Therapy normally involved some sort of an alcoholic beverage, this time he only brought a bottle of water. He wanted his mind clear.

  He sat there for a long time, eating and watching the summer boats pass by. He thought about Lara, the woman several years his junior whom he was dating up in Boston. Friends who had seen her picture called her the “underwear model” because of her striking resemblance to one of the Victoria’s Secret women. Friends who had actually met her, though, called her perfect for him.

  He had never dated a woman with a child before. This was completely new territory. He wasn’t just building a relationship with Lara; he was also building a relationship with her little boy, Marco, and he cared for them both very much. It was daunting, but it felt right.

  Sitting there with the late summer sun blazing down on him and the water lapping at the pier, he enjoyed letting his mind wander. When he was on an op, he couldn’t afford to think of anything but the mission. He had to wall off everything back home. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to focus. And when operators were unable to focus was when bad things happened.

  When his lunch was eaten and his bottle of water empty, he walked back up to the house. Retrieving his laptop from his office, he set it on the kitchen table while he brewed some coffee. As soon as it was ready, he poured himself a large mug, sat down at the table, and opened his iTunes app. Scrolling through, he selected Parliament’s album Up for the Down Stroke.

  With coffee to keep him awake and some of his favorite funk music to keep him company, he began to hammer out the written debrief the Old Man was expecting.

  By the time his after-action reports on the Karachi and Dubai ops were complete, all the coffee in the world would no longer have been able to keep him awake. Dragging himself upstairs, he stripped out of his clothes and fell into bed.

  • • •

  When a muffled ringing of bells beckoned from a distance, it felt as if he had been asleep for only ten minutes. It sounded like a church tower had been covered with a heavy blanket. The more he tried to ignore the bells, the closer together and more insistent they became.

  As he slowly shook off the fog of his deep, dreamless black sleep, he realized it wasn’t church bells he had been hearing but rather the old-school telephone ringtone he had assigned to Reed Carlton. He began to reach for his nightstand and realized he had left his cell phone in the pocket of his shorts on the floor.

  Leaning over the side of the bed, he found the phone and activated the call.

  “Time to move,” said the Old Man. “Briefing at the White House in an hour. I’ll meet you at the West Wing entrance.”

  With that, Carlton ended the call.

  Harvath looked at his watch. What felt like only ten minutes of sleep had actually been several hours. Getting out of bed, he walked into his bathroom and turned on the shower.

  He stood under the hot water just long enough to get soaped up and then threw the temperature selector all the way to cold. He forced himself to stand there for a full sixty seconds.

  He had heard it referred to once as a “Scottish shower,” but regardless of its origins, it was the equivalent of three cups of coffee. Nothing woke him up or sharpened his mind faster.

  He shaved, taking care not to cut himself by going too fast, threw on a dark suit and tie, then hopped into his Tahoe for the drive up to D.C.

  • • •

  When Harvath arrived at the White House, he was cleared at the West Gate and waved in. He parked his SUV near the West Wing entrance and met the Old Man, who, as promised, was waiting for him inside.

  “The President doesn’t want either of us saying anything in this meeting. We watch. We assess. And we discuss afterward. Understood?”

  Harvath nodded and followed Carlton down to the Situation Room, where they took the last two remaining seats. FBI Director Erickson was just beginning his briefing. The flat-screens in the room showed the face of a young Asian man in his twenties.

  “The man you see here,” said Erickson, “is Thomas Ming Wong, better known as Tommy Wong. Wong is a member of a Chinese transnational criminal organization called 14K. Based out of Hong Kong, 14K is the third-largest triad in the world. They make their money from a variety of criminal enterprises including arms trafficking, the heroin and opium trades, money laundering, prostitution, child pornography, smuggling, and counterfeiting.

  “Special Agent Heidi Roe of our Los Angeles field office was spearheading an investigation into Wong when new information about the six missing Muslim engineering students came to our attention. Agent Roe?”

  Roe, who had been sitting near the middle of the Situation Room, stood and said, “Thank you, sir. 14K is one of many criminal enterprises that the FBI is focused on. Earlier this year, the LA field office targeted Tommy Wong as a likely candidate to be turned and used against 14K’s Southern California hierarchy and hopefully all the way back to China.

  “As we have been made aware, each of the six engineering students was given a cell phone, told to turn that cell phone on when they arrived in the U.S., and to await further instructions. Thanks to the diligence of the National Security Agency, we think those cell phones have been successfully identified. All six phones received one
phone call each, were turned off, and were never used again. Based on the metadata collected by the NSA, the point of purchase for each of the phones has been identified.

  “All six were purchased within Los Angeles County. Upon being given this information, agents from the LA and San Diego field offices visited the six stores involved. Of these, four had some sort of security-cam system. Only three, though, had retained their footage going back to the date in question.”

  Roe pressed her remote, the screens split in three, and the footage rolled. “As you can see, in two out of the three we get a very good view of who is buying the phones.”

  “Tommy Wong,” said the Secretary of State.

  “Correct.”

  “So we believe Wong bought the phones and then shipped them to the recruiter over in Dubai?” asked CIA Director McGee.

  “Yes,” Roe replied.

  “Do we know who called the six engineering students?”

  “It was also a phone used only once and was purchased from a store in Salt Lake City, Utah. Agents from the Bureau’s SLC field office visited the store, but no security camera footage was available.”

  “Still,” said the Sec State, “this is a huge breakthrough. Where’s Wong now?”

  “Up until this morning we knew exactly where he was. Then he disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yesterday, Wong purchased a last-minute airline ticket to Nashville, Tennessee. This morning, LAPD officers followed him to LAX and watched him pass through security. The Bureau’s Nashville office arranged to have a Nashville PD detective who works on several of our task forces be at the airport when Wong landed. The last-minute travel had piqued our interest and we wanted to see what Wong was up to. The only problem is Wong never got off the plane.”

  “What happened to him? Did he even get on the plane?”

  “He got on a plane, all right, just not this plane.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Roe advanced to her next clip, which showed footage from several different security cameras. “After clearing security at LAX, Tommy Wong proceeded to the American Airlines Admirals Club where he purchased a day pass, hung out for less than an hour, and then boarded a plane for Omaha.”

  “Omaha?” The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said. “Why?”

  “So that this man,” Roe replied, advancing to her next clip, “could travel to Nashville on Wong’s ticket.”

  CIA Director McGee looked at the Secretary of Homeland Security. “How many times have we talked about this? Anyone can switch boarding passes once they’re behind security.”

  The DHS Secretary didn’t want to discuss it. He knew it was a flaw in the system. He also knew the airlines had screamed bloody murder every time they tried to get them to start checking IDs at the gate again. “Talk to Congress, Bob. I’m on your side. I personally don’t care if it triples boarding times.”

  McGee shook his head. “Wait’ll some bomb maker checks a bag and then switches boarding passes with some patsy who thinks she’s getting a few hundred bucks just to take a flight to Miami.”

  The bomb would still have to make it past all the baggage-screening mechanisms, but the point was taken. The boarding card system was a problem. The DHS Secretary nodded in agreement.

  “This is footage of the passengers deplaning the LA to Nashville flight that Wong should have been on. The man you see here,” said Roe as she paused her presentation and zoomed in, “entered the United States today from Shanghai and was supposed to change planes at LAX for Omaha.

  “His name, at least the name we have on file for him, is Bao Deng. He is allegedly a Chinese businessman who holds an American green card and owns part of a poultry-processing plant in Nebraska.”

  “Is there any known connection between Wong and Deng?” asked the Secretary of State.

  “None that we have been able to make so far.”

  “What about CIA?”

  “Nothing,” replied McGee. “But it wouldn’t be the first time a nation-state has used a criminal organization to assist with its activities.”

  “So who’s the bigger fish here? Who should we be more concerned with? A triad member who buys phones for terrorists or a Chinese businessman who switches places with him at the airport?”

  “The FBI wants both of them,” Director Erickson asserted. “And to answer your question, you don’t fly a guy all the way from China just to be a decoy. Tommy Wong is a street thug with no tradecraft. If he’d been properly trained, he wouldn’t have been caught on camera buying those phones.”

  “Good point,” said the Secretary of State.

  “Do we have any leads to either of their current whereabouts?” asked the DHS Secretary.

  Erickson nodded to Roe, who continued her presentation. “Both our Omaha and Nashville offices have been fully mobilized and additional assets are being sent in. For the moment, all we have is the footage from the airport CCTV systems. Upon arriving at their respective destinations, both men boarded hotel shuttles and disappeared.”

  “What do you mean disappeared?” said the Secretary of State.

  “Tommy Wong took a shuttle to the Super 8 motel, two miles from Omaha’s Eppley Airfield. The Super 8 doesn’t have any external cameras. He got off the shuttle but didn’t check into the motel. FBI agents spoke with management and staff, showed them Wong’s picture, and no one fitting his description has been seen by anyone other than the shuttle driver.”

  “What about this Bao Deng?”

  “We have a little more there, but not much. Based on CCTV footage from the Nashville airport, after Bao Deng deplaned, he went to the baggage level. There, he bought a ticket and took a shuttle to the Opryland Resort and Convention Center about twenty minutes away.

  “Just like Tommy Wong and the Super 8 in Omaha, Opryland has no record of a Bao Deng checking in. In case he was using an alias, agents showed his picture to management, desk clerks, and staff. The only person who could positively ID Deng was the shuttle bus driver. He states he has no idea where Deng went once all of the passengers got off the bus.

  “The Opryland Resort, though, does have external CCTV cameras and allowed our agents to review the footage. Deng can clearly be seen debussing and then entering the nearby shopping mall called Opry Mills. But sifting through the mall’s security footage has been a nightmare. Opry Mills is one of the largest malls in the southeastern United States and has over two hundred stores. It was very crowded. We’re talking thousands and thousands of people.

  “There were a couple of times Deng appeared on camera, but because he had his carry-on bag with him, we think he may have changed clothes. The mall is a mix of retail and outlet stores. If Deng also disguised his luggage by using some of those oversized outlet store bags, he may have slipped out an exit looking like a normal shopper.

  “We have agents going through every piece of the footage frame by frame. Maybe we’ll get lucky, but we’re not pinning all of our hopes on it.”

  “What about the poultry plant in Nebraska Deng was invested in? Are you checking there?” asked the DHS Secretary.

  “Yes, sir,” Roe replied. “We are not leaving any stone unturned. We’re placing additional agents at Nashville’s and Omaha’s airports, train stations, and bus stations. Bao Deng and Tommy Wong have had their names and photos added to the no-fly list, but with a ‘contact the FBI before any action’ flag. We expect to have more for you by the next briefing.”

  With that, Special Agent Roe took her seat and the President went around the table asking for updates from the rest of his national security team. Ten minutes later, the President adjourned the meeting.

  As the attendees filed out of the room, Director of National Intelligence Johnson, CIA Director McGee, and FBI Director Erickson remained seated with the President. Once the door with its pneumatic lock had clicked shut, Harvath and the Old Man moved forward and took seats at the conference table.

  The President looked at them and said, “We’ve got a few
other developments that weren’t included in the briefing. Let’s go over those first.”

  CHAPTER 31

  * * *

  * * *

  DNI General George Johnson slid two briefing books across the table—one to Harvath and the other to the Old Man. “Whose idea was this Facebook thing?” he asked.

  Carlton cocked his head at Harvath and said, “It was his idea. He deserves the credit.”

  “It was pretty clever and may be the break we’ve been looking for,” said Johnson. “According to the NSA, all six of those engineering students have a Facebook account. None of them have been posting to their accounts. Total radio silence. Except,” he said, pausing and looking at Harvath.

  “They’re still tuning their radios in and listening,” said Harvath, recalling what he had brought the Old Man back into his house to discuss.

  “Bingo.”

  “Can you be more specific?” the President asked.

  Johnson ceded the floor to Harvath, who replied, “Facebook, sir, is huge in the Middle East. Asking six young men to refrain from posting is a big deal. With the right carrot and stick you could probably get them not to post. But what I was wondering was whether they would be able to stay off Facebook altogether. Would they ‘sneak’ on just to look? Just to check in and see what their family and friends were up to back home?”

  “And that’s what they’ve been doing?”

  The DNI nodded and pulled up a map of the United States on the monitors. “One account has been accessed multiple times from Seattle, another from Las Vegas, another from Des Moines, one from Dallas, one from Baltimore, and, surprise, one from Nashville.” As he named each city, he tapped a key on his keyboard, which highlighted it and then popped up the corresponding engineering student’s picture next to it.

  Johnson then zoomed in on Nashville and showed where the Facebook account was being accessed from. “This is an example of how our engineering student is accessing the Internet from different locations offering free Wi-Fi.”