by Tom Abrahams
*
Sir Spencer sat on the edge of the bed in his room at the Hay-Adams. He was groggy after ninety minutes of sleep. He was dressed only in boxers, and the expanse of his hairless white stomach obscured the cloth as he leaned forward into his hands.
The knight rubbed his eyes and stood slowly, feeling his age in his back as it tightened instead of stretching to help him rise. His knees cracked angrily at being asked to support the weight that the knight forced upon them. He grunted, gained his balance, and walked to the bar. Sir Spencer grabbed the remote to flip on the television and then retrieved the bottle of fifty-year-old scotch.
He poured three fingers’ worth and stood against the bar, sipping the liquor and watching the presidential smotherage on television. He was amused. The knowledge of what was to come provided a shot of adrenaline to the old man.
“We’ve learned some brand-new information here,” chirped Vickie Lupo from the television set. It seemed to the knight that whenever he turned it on, she was there with her coiffed hair and sharp wit.
“We’re hearing from our ‘Avenue’ sources at the wonderful little building just east of the Capitol dome—” she smirked, the right side of her mouth curled higher than the left “—you know, the Supreme Court.”
“She amuses herself above all others,” mumbled the knight. If it weren’t for the new information she promised him, he’d have turned down the volume. “She’s insufferable,” he scoffed and took another sip.
“Our sources are telling us,” she continued bloviating, “and this is on good authority, mind you, that the Court will not render its decision until after the memorial for President Foreman.”
“Hear, hear,” toasted the knight. It was expected, but still he was glad to hear it. A decision favoring Speaker Jackson before the memorial would put a wrench into the works. He hobbled over to the pea green chair closest to him.
Sir Spencer sat down and his knees thanked him. After muting the volume on the television, he found his cell phone on the side table next to him and picked it up to dial.
He placed the phone to his ear and listened to the ringtone. It chirped once, twice, three times. Then an answer. The voice on the other end confirmed the call was secure.
“We have the location of the secretary?” The knight was splitting his attention between the muted Vickie Lupo and the overcast window view of the White House. “We know where Blackmon will be then?”
The response of the voice on the other end was certain and reassuring. The knight sensed no apprehension. He pressed the button to end the call. Everything was in motion. He pressed another series of numbers and awaited a new voice on the other end of the secured wireless line.
“Hello?” the sixth Daturan answered hollowly. He sounded tired.
“It’s me,” the knight said, knowing his accent would be instantly recognizable. “We are as planned.”
“Good.” The sixth Daturan was smiling wryly despite his malaise. He had always known that Sir Spencer could facilitate what others might claim impossible. “You know I will be otherwise engaged during this afternoon’s affair?”
“Yes.” The knight stuck his pinkie into the remaining drop of scotch before sucking on it. “I am aware.”
Sir Spencer and the sixth Daturan had known each other for years. For some time, the two of them had met privately without the knowledge of the other men in the group. The sixth Daturan wanted as few entanglements as possible. He once explained to the knight that discretion had no part of valor in the hands of a drunk, a has-been politico, a philandering professor, or a self-important artist. The knight had agreed and promised not to reveal the sixth Daturan’s identity, or existence for that matter, until appropriate.
Together the two plotted the sixth’s political path. Unlike others who refused to bow to Sir Spencer’s influence, the sixth implored the knight to secretly bankroll his campaigns and political action committees. The knight privately discredited the sixth’s opponents when he could and paid them off when he couldn’t.
Through favor, coercion, and well-played histrionics, the knight was able to help the sixth catch the eye of the Foreman administration. While the president’s unexpected death hastened their work and turned their effort violent, the sixth knew that he was always intended to be the wizard to the knight’s man behind the curtain.
It was kismet, they both agreed, that brought them together at such a time in the nation’s history and provided them the opportunity to seize power. They were so politically myopic that they failed to see the pathology of their method. As the knight was so fond of saying, they were patriots in the mold of Adams and Revere.
“We will talk later,” promised the knight, “when we’ve seen the outcome.”
“When we’ve seen the outcome,” parroted the sixth. “That’s good.”
Sir Spencer replaced the phone on the table next to the chair. He rubbed his knees, leaned back in the chair, and then he looked at the clock on the coffee table. He needed to get dressed. It wasn’t long before he needed to be at the Cato Street Pub. There was more to do and he had another phone call to make.
*
Jimmy Ings took his seat aboard the 85 passenger bus, squeezing himself into an empty seat toward the back of the vehicle. He’d paid his twenty-seven dollars to the tour operator, pulled a ragged Washington Bullets ball cap down over his eyes, and worked his way past tourists anxious to see some of the nation’s most significant buildings and monuments.
Underneath the seat in front of him, he slid a medium-sized backpack. The space was just large enough that he could shove it completely from view. Ings was nervous, but he knew his task was of critical importance to the mission.
As the bus pulled away from the Lincoln Memorial and headed toward Virginia, Ings looked out the window. He exhaled and adjusted the brim of the cap, happy to have made it aboard the tour. He was even happier to find it operational on the day of the president’s procession.
Some of the regular stops along the Mall and the northern part of the “American Heritage Tour” weren’t available because of the blockages along Constitution Avenue. The southern part of the tour was still operational.
The bus chugged and hummed its way across the Potomac as a man’s voice narrated the points of interest over a loudspeaker inside the cabin. Ings was too preoccupied to listen. The job that lay ahead was consuming him.
Before hustling to catch the bus, he was sitting alone in his second-floor apartment, watching a “College All-Stars” episode of Jeopardy! that he’d recorded the night before. The category was “Royalty”. The clue was “This Kentucky poet laureate based All the King’s Men on the life of former Louisiana governor Huey Long.”
Ings had known the answer and was about to blurt it out between sips of scotch when his cell phone rang. Disgusted, he’d paused the DVR and picked up the phone. He’d pressed C and then answered.
“Who is Robert Penn Warren?” Ings had asked as he pressed the phone to his ear.
“James, what are you talking about?”
“You interrupted Jeopardy! The answer to the clue is ‘who is Robert Penn Warren’.”
“I see,” said Sir Spencer. “So the clue was about poetry? Or was it about Cajun politics?”
“Cajun politics.” Ings had taken another swig.
“And where is James Carville when you need him? Right?”
“I didn’t need him. I knew the answer.” Ings had chomped on a piece of ice before sucking the sweetness from it. “What do you need, Sir Spencer? Are you coming over early?”
“No.” The knight paused a beat. “I need you to run an errand. You likely won’t be back in time for the meeting at Cato Street.”
“Oh?” Ings had picked up the television remote, hit the off button, and sat up in his recliner. “Why’s that?”
“As you well know, James, we may have been compromised last night at the opening. There’s really no telling what the government knows or does not know.”
“But I t
hought you said—”
“Wait, just hold on.”
“Okay.”
“So, James,” Sir Spencer had continued, “we need to create a little diversion. And in that effort I need your help.”
“What is it?”
“There is a backpack behind your bar downstairs that contains an extra explosive. It’s one of the four that you built with George.”
“Uh-huh…”
“The assigned number to that phone is on a card inside the small front pocket of the backpack. I need you to take it somewhere for me and leave it unattended.”
“Why?”
“I need you to do this,” counseled the knight, “because a young man’s ambition is to get along in the world and make a place for himself. Half your life goes that way, till you’re forty-five or fifty. Then, if you’re lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.”
“That makes no sense to me.”
“Aside from the point that this is your opportunity to release yourself from the chains of an ordinary life, and aside from the hope that your actions will enable to plot to move ahead as planned, it’s a quote from Robert Penn Warren.”
Despite his misgivings about the unexpected mission, Ings had dutifully gotten up from his comfortable seat, found the backpack behind the bar downstairs, and left a key under the front doormat for the men to find later.
Now he sat on a tour bus pulling up to the gate at Arlington National Cemetery.
Chapter 35
Matti was nonplussed. She’d called her supervisor’s direct line and his cell phone. She’d paged him and texted him. He’d not answered, replied, or called her back. She was sitting in the back of a coffee shop at 2300 Wisconsin, just north of her alma mater.
It was empty except for two baristas and an unkempt undergrad with an unshaven face, a pair of earbuds, and a large espresso. He was so deep into Uriah Heep and the latest issue of FHM that Matti thought him oblivious. This was as good a place as any to find relative privacy.
There was no time to head back to Fort Meade. She needed to skim the journals for details so that when her boss called, she could provide him with actionable intelligence.
Matti was nursing a latte while thumbing through the most recent Davidson journals. She scanned the center of the pages for relevant passages and notations, amazed at the breadth of the information. Matti now had a Daturan’s perspective of the last several days.
“Sir Spencer tells us the end game is regime change,” Davidson had written. “He tells us that the founding fathers were heroes to us and terrorists to the British. The man convicted of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 was a terrorist to us. But when the Scottish released him from prison, the Libyans rejoiced in the streets. He contends that the line between patriotism and terrorism is all in the eye of the beholder.”
The passage seemed familiar to Matti, as if she’d heard it somewhere before. She scanned her memory quickly. Then it hit her. She had heard it before. The asset used almost the exact same argument during one of their phone sessions. She must have taken it from the journal. Matti was more determined to keep reading the little books the AG had entrusted to her.
She learned more about the amount of Semtex available to the conspirators and how they’d obtained it. She knew how they planned to sneak the explosive material into the Capitol and the method by which they were to detonate it.
But most importantly, the young analyst was learning about the motive and the endgame. She was sure that as much as the NSA thought it knew about the plot, it knew little if anything about the reason. As Matti read through Davidson’s notes about the plot, she had trouble believing it herself.
“Spencer Thomas,” wrote the AG in a small, hurried script that hugged the lines of the pages, “is a megalomaniac. He has conceived this violent plot to overthrow a government he believes is ill-equipped to serve its people. I know that our path as a nation has strayed from one that is truly righteous and abiding of the constitution. But he is misguided.”
“For years”—his handwriting was like that of a man in a hurry; it was approaching scribble—“I have gone along with the idea that we could effect change at the very highest levels of government. Never did I envision violence. The greasing of palms and the quid pro quo of political favor was murky enough for me. I did not sign up for murder.”
Matti made a mental note of Davidson’s assertion that an unknown conspirator was somehow involved in the plot, but she kept reading to finish Davidson’s thoughts. It was the only part of the journal that she’d read so far, which was rife with personal opinion.
Her cell phone chirped, indicating she’d received a text message. She picked up her phone and checked the message. It was from her boss. Finally.
U R OFF THIS. I THOUGHT I MADE MYSELF CLEAR.
It was not the kind of reply Matti had been hoping to receive. She didn’t want to leave a phone message or send a text that contained sensitive information. She flipped open the keyboard on her phone and typed.
I HAVE NEW INTEL. NEED TO MEET. URGENT.
She pressed send. The phone chirped again, confirming to her that the text was successfully sent. She went back to the journals.
Though Davidson was certain the Daturans would detonate the Semtex with cell phones, he did not denote which kind of cell phones they would use.
Her phone chirped again. Another text message alert was flashing on the display. She marked her place in the journal and picked up her cell, hoping her supervisor had agreed to a meeting.
NO MEET. BUREAU HAS CONTROL. LEAVE IT ALONE.
Matti stared at the screen, trying to process the text. She hoped that reading it more than once might change the words on the small screen.
Why would he not meet with her? Why would he NOT want new intelligence? She dropped the phone onto the table and pushed it away from her. She blindly picked up her coffee cup and sipped through the small slit in the plastic lid. The drink was still hot and singed the tip of her tongue. She touched it to the back of her teeth and winced.
Matti might have been naïve about the nastiness of her chosen profession, but she’d long known its shortcomings. She asked herself why her boss was so disinterested in potentially valuable information while instantaneously answering it in her head.
The FBI had taken over control of the investigation. That meant that the heat was off the NSA and that her boss didn’t feel the need to staple an addendum to the file. Her agency, she thought he’d have reasoned, did everything that was asked of it and kindly passed along all relevant information. Therein lay the most dangerous problem in American intelligence gathering.
Despite the debacle of 9/11, when the FBI had information about the hijackers that was never passed up or down the command chain to the appropriate people, the United States intelligence community never fully got used to the idea of shared turf.
While the prevailing wisdom was that legal walls prevented the sharing of information between agencies, Matti knew that perception was wrong. She’d read the 9/11 commission report that concluded there had been no legal reason why the information could not have been shared. She’d also read James Bamford’s book about her own agency, which argued that the lack of adequate information sharing was due solely to interagency rivalries.
The Department of Homeland Security was created to facilitate cooperation and information sharing. All it really did, many believed, was create a greater bureaucracy through which good intelligence was filtered from bad.
Nowhere was that more evident than in the aftermath of the attack at Fort Hood, Texas, in late 2009. A full eight years after 9/11, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was suspected of opening fire on dozens of unarmed soldiers and civilians in a medical clinic at a readiness center on post.
Hasan, an American-born Muslim and a practicing psychiatrist, killed thirteen and wounded another thirty people. In the aftermath of the mass shooting, the FBI revealed that Hasan was “on their radar” for months as a possible Al-Qaeda sympathizer. Matti remembe
red that FBI director Robert Mueller ordered an investigation into how the agency mishandled information about Hasan, employing the help of a former director, William Webster, to get to the bottom of the communication breakdown.
In the midst of that investigation, a young Al-Qaeda-trained Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutalleb was charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it traveled from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Matti recalled that he’d worn a chemical explosive in his underwear and managed to light it as the plane approached its destination. Had he been successful, he could have killed hundreds.
Matti remembered from news reports that the kicker was that the government had information about the suspect prior to his attempted attack, yet it failed to act. Intelligence suggested that, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, Al-Qaeda leaders had discussed a “Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. But that information was never passed along to the appropriate authorities.
What’s more, the suspect’s father had gone so far as to contact the US Embassy in Nigeria to express his concerns about his son’s radicalism and association with terrorists in Yemen. He met with the CIA and other agencies to discuss his assertions. A summary of those meetings was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley. The embassy cabled Washington with the information along with instructions to raise alarms if Abdulmutalleb applied for a visa.
It was discovered he already had a multiple entry United States visa and it was not revoked. Abdulmutalleb’s name was put into a database of 550,000 people with possible ties to terrorism, but he was never put on the no-fly list. So, according to the government, the radicalized Nigerian boarded a plane armed with chemical explosives.
President Obama admitted there were missed signals and uncorrelated intelligence that should have prevented the would-be bomber from ever getting on the plane. He said the nation’s security agencies were guilty of “a mix of human and systemic failures”.