Enter Abreeq, who had made a career out of terrorism for his brothers. Abreeq had no specific area of operation, no particular affiliation – he was an equal opportunity mass murderer who was willing to work for any Islamist group that could afford him.
Not that he was in it for the money. Base financial concerns were above him; ideology was his primary motivator. But he had costs to cover and travel and equipment to consider, as well as the maintenance of an extensive network of informants and spies.
Fortunately, the BRN had been able to scratch up the fifty thousand dollars the operation would require, and he’d gone to work, promising a group of bombings that would have the city reeling and put the fear of God into the population, as well as into the foreign interests that used Thailand as their handmaiden, corrupting its good people with consumerism and a reprehensible lifestyle condemned by all who were righteous and holy.
It didn’t give him pause that he was about to murder innocent tourists. In the battle for hearts and minds, there were no innocents. He’d long ago reconciled that the lives of infidels were fair game in the war to further the one true religion. His ideology was flexible enough to enable him to deny that their lives were as precious as those of his employers, and he slept soundly, his conscience untroubled. His psychopathology was perfectly suited to his vocation, at which he was widely considered to be the best.
He paused on the far side of the street and took a final long look at the hotel entrance, and then removed a disposable cell phone from the pocket of his leather jacket and placed a call. The voice that answered was gruff. Abreeq’s was surprisingly high in timbre, his words soft, the tone almost feminine.
“It is in place. Unless you have any final requests, I’ll start the timer,” he said.
“Make it so, my brother.”
“It shall be done.”
Abreeq hung up and dialed a different number – the burner cell phone connected to the timing device and detonator. The call went to voice mail, which was blank, but the ringing was the activation mechanism, and he knew that sixty seconds later the bomb in the delivery box would explode. He wished he’d been able to construct a more deadly device, but the locals had been unable to provide anything save the most primitive of explosives. Still, he’d done his best, and it would kill. The only question was how many.
He would read all about the results of his efforts later, online. For now, he still had two other bombs to place before he was done for the evening.
Abreeq was climbing onto the seat of another stolen motorcycle he’d parked in a garage a block away when the muffled boom of the bomb shook the ground and triggered the alarms of nearby vehicles.
He started the engine and putted down the ramp to where the attendant waited, the man’s attention on the street and the scream of emergency vehicles making their way to the hotel.
All too late, Abreeq thought as he paid.
“What was that?” he asked the attendant, the helmet hiding his features.
“Don’t know.”
Abreeq pulled into the crush of traffic, leaving the downtown area behind. By the time anyone had the presence of mind to seal off the area, he would be long gone, putting the other bombs into position. He wished he could trust the locals with that low-value part of the operation, but he didn’t dare. The authorities couldn’t stop something about which only he knew the details. In his business, secrecy was essential to survival.
Abreeq was on every developed country’s list of most wanted men, and the price on his head varied from insultingly trivial to a king’s ransom. One slip on even a small mission like this could cost him his life. In order to assure his safety, he’d worked through cutouts, never meeting his employers, leaving the materials in dead drops, and ensuring the targets were, in the end, of his own choosing.
In another hour Hat Yai would be shattered from the attacks, and Abreeq would have vanished into the ether, his involvement nothing more than a whispered rumor, on to his next operation, the business of terror never-ending, his services in constant demand.
He checked the time: ten minutes to the next location.
Four police motorcycles rolled past a truck blocking the street on the far side, their sirens in full wail and their lights flashing. He watched as they roared away, rushing to the crime scene, presumably to close the barn door after this particular horse was long gone.
He smiled behind the motorcycle helmet’s tinted visor and imagined the scene at the hotel. The nails and screws he’d affixed to the inside of the delivery box would have sliced a swath of death through the bodies of the bloated tourists, who would never know what had hit them. Like fat, spoiled children, they’d believed themselves safe, insulated from the worldwide struggle of which he was an integral part.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
At the next stoplight, he pushed the visor up and wiped sweat from his face, and then lowered it back into place with a small smile. The few existing photographs of him were all dated, and he’d had surgery on his nose and chin in Lebanon, altering his profile so he looked nothing like the images. Not that it was a concern – he’d taken care to wear his helmet when within range of the surveillance cameras he’d spotted early on, so even a methodical investigation would yield nothing.
Abreeq would leave it to his contractor to claim responsibility for the attacks, or not, as they liked. Fanfare and credit weren’t his style and didn’t interest him.
His was a pure ambition, his motivation simple: to rid his world of the interlopers who’d lied to his people for generations, who’d robbed them of their heritage and their birthright. Every explosion, every death, was another step toward that goal, and he wouldn’t rest until he’d achieved his aim or died in the process.
But not today. Today he was striking a blow that would have his enemies quaking in fear. Today it would be others who paid the ultimate price in blood, while Abreeq slipped away like a ghost.
Chapter 3
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Trash blew along the boulevards of the urban sprawl that was Dhaka, colorful brochures scattered to the winds comingling with discarded wrappers, plastic bags, and bits of unidentifiable material best left unexamined. The entire city suffered from a stench often described as a combination of raw sewage and rot. The Buriganga River, which flowed past the outskirts, was little more than a polluted greenish brown sluice dotted with smokestacks belching poison into the heavens, rendering the stinking water in which the locals bathed and dumped their waste an environmental hazard that could blister skin.
The capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka and its surrounding suburbs were home to over fifteen million souls, many of whom lived in extreme poverty. A pall of pollution blanketed the city as the sun rose, coloring the sky orange and mauve. The juxtaposition of modern green glass skyscrapers against a backdrop of shanties served as a constant reminder of the economic disparity that defined the nation.
Uri Efron shifted on the uncomfortable seat of an ancient Nissan sedan as he and his companion, Gil Rubin, thirty-two years his junior, watched the doors of one of the city’s many mosques. As a senior operative of the Mossad, Uri had been stationed all over the world, but it was difficult to mistake his current posting as anything but a career backhand that he endured with stoic calm. Gil, on the other hand, only with the Mossad for nine years, was less accepting of his fate, and spent a large amount of his day cursing his luck for winding up in a fourth-world slum that made hell sound appealing.
An endless parade of rickshaws streamed toward them on the street, their operators pedaling in the dank heat of morning with the resigned acceptance of prisoners serving life sentences. The sheer press of humanity most days, at any hour, was onerous even in the relative comfort of the car, which was made worse by Uri’s endless smoking of the local cheap cigarettes to which he was addicted.
The older man coughed, an ominous, wet sound that transitioned into a wheeze, and stubbed out his seventh cigarette of the morning.
Gil eyed him without comment, knowing it was pointless to complain about his superior’s repellent habit.
“This isn’t working,” Gil griped. “We need to get into the mosque, not sit out here wondering what they’re doing inside.”
“Huh, why didn’t I think of that? Maybe you can slip in, looking as much like a native as you do and speaking perfect Bengali, and linger around where the great man’s holding court?” Uri spat in a tone corrosive as battery acid. “You know, see if he’s handing out ‘terrorist wanted’ cards or anything.”
“Then what’s the point of monitoring his movements? He could be digging a tunnel to Jerusalem and we’d never know it.”
“Because I said so.” Uri eyed the younger man and his tone softened. “I understand this is frustrating. I’ve asked for more support, but budgets are lean. You know the story. We’re to do the best we can and notify headquarters if we learn anything.”
“How can we learn anything sitting out here?”
“Well, we saw the great man go to Western Union and get money, so that tells us he’s still receiving foreign support. Which may not seem like much, but it’s something.” Uri looked back at the mosque. “And I’ve learned to hate Dhaka even more than yesterday, so at least you’re not alone in that.” He laughed drily. “Look at the bright side – at least I’ve still got cigarettes left, so you don’t have to find a store.”
The younger man looked at his watch. “They’ve been in there for an hour. Prayer service was over, what, twenty minutes ago?”
“Maybe he’s using the can.”
“Seriously. What are we doing here?”
Uri gave Gil another long-suffering stare, his eyes like a basset hound’s, yellowed where they weren’t bloodshot, and the bags beneath them dark and drooping. “We’re recording who he’s in there with. It’s the best we can do.” Uri tapped his PDA screen. “See? Camera’s still in position, and we should be able to grab faces from the footage and compare them using the recognition software our enterprising American colleagues have generously shared with us.”
“Without knowing what they’re talking about, this is a huge waste of time,” Gil countered. “We should be bribing the Western Union clerk so we can trace the money he received.”
“I know you’d like to go in with guns blazing, but that’s not what we do, my young friend. Patience is a virtue. Good things come to those who wait.”
“You should write fortune cookies.”
“I may have to if they cut our expense account any further.”
“Did you tell them that we picked up local chatter about something being planned?”
Uri sighed. “Of course. They asked what it was – which, of course, we don’t know. They wanted to know who was involved. Which again, we don’t know. They asked about a target. Which we know zip about. Let’s just say that their response to our earth-shattering news was less than enthusiastic.”
“We can’t learn any of that without the resources we need.”
“Agreed. In the meantime, we sit here, I regale you with colorful stories of the Mossad’s glory years, and you learn a thing or two about tradecraft.”
“My tradecraft’s fine.”
“Pride goeth.”
Gil stiffened and looked back at the mosque. “Wait. The doors are opening again.” They’d watched as the building had emptied out after the morning prayer, but their target, a local imam named Ajmal Kahn, hadn’t been among those who’d left – unusual, and the first time in the month that Uri and Gil had been following him.
A VW van slowed to a stop in front of the mosque. Kahn’s two bodyguards, slim young men with scraggly black beards and the expressions of hawks, stepped out of the entryway into the hazy sunlight, followed by Kahn, who as usual looked as though he was ready to single-handedly command the heavens to open so the wrath of eternity could rain down upon those around him. His humorless face could have been carved from granite, etched with deep frown lines and eyes black and beady as a weasel’s.
The three men looked around expectantly, and one of the bodyguards held a cell phone to his ear as the van’s sliding door opened. The imam and his men climbed inside and the panel slammed shut.
Gil eyed Uri. “Well? Let’s go.”
“Not so fast. We know our friend is in the van. What we don’t know is what he was doing in the mosque, or who he was with.”
“One of us has to follow him.”
“Agreed. I’ll take the car. Think you can find someplace discreet to watch the entrance from? Take photos of anyone that comes out.”
Gil nodded. “You’re lucky my phone’s state-of-the-art and not that piece of shit they authorized.”
“We’re all grateful for your profligate habits, young man.”
“Where do you want to rendezvous?”
“Back at my place,” Uri said, referring to the shabby office in the basement of his building that served as cover for the Mossad’s Dhaka operations. “Better snap to it, or I’m going to lose him.”
Gil stepped out into the heat, and the toxic dust that swirled around him instantly coated him with a film of filth. He was dressed like the locals, in cheap dress pants and a lightweight button-up shirt, but with a fanny pack that contained his essential spy tools, which in this case were a cell phone and a butterfly knife.
The Nissan pulled away in a cloud of poorly combusted exhaust as the van negotiated through the rickshaws, and Gil focused his attention on the mosque, whose doors were now closed again. Three small boys approached him, begging for coins, and he shooed them off, ignoring their colorful curses – language that would have made a pirate blush, and not one of them over six, he guessed. Gil had long before hardened himself against the pervasive poverty in the city, the desperation, the disease, the alarming evidence that God had long ago abandoned the place. It was routine to see beggars without legs stewing in their own feces outside towering office buildings, or children with limbs rotting off and no medical care in evidence, every kind of defect or abomination on display as the more fortunate avoided their brethren, taking care to skirt their begging positions so as not to sully their shoes.
His attention was drawn from the parade of misery to the doors of the mosque, where two young men appeared from within. Gil pretended to text on his phone as he zoomed in and photographed them. After a brief hug, the pair separated and walked in opposite directions down the street.
“Well, well, well. What have we got here?” Gil muttered to himself as he watched them part.
He waited another half hour, but nobody else left the building. After debating staying in position, he decided that he wasn’t going to learn anything more standing in the street and hailed a rickshaw – one of a half million of the primitive conveyances that plied their trade in the swelter. The driver, barely more than skin and bones and tanned the color of beef jerky, set off at a plodding pace while Gil studied the photos he’d snapped.
On the small phone screen, it was hard to see much detail, but the camera had the latest in high-resolution technology, and hopefully the images would enlarge sufficiently to run through the magic software the Americans had given them.
Of course, it was entirely possible that the two men were nobodies – that they were workers of some sort, or any other of a hundred kinds of innocent visitors.
Gil didn’t think so, though. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but something about their body language, even from across the open sewer of a street that fronted the mosque, had struck him as strange. As if they were up to no good.
Furtive, for lack of a better word.
Perhaps it would amount to nothing, as so many of his efforts had. There was no way of knowing until he tried. That was the job.
Gil punched his speed dial and waited as Uri’s phone rang and rang.
“What?” the older man finally answered.
“We have two possibles. When will you be back?”
“I’m enjoying the sights and smells of one o
f Dhaka’s leading cesspools. Figure…an hour, tops?”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting. I may have something to go on. Anything promising on your end?”
“If you consider watching ice melt promising, you’d be in heaven.”
“Ah. Well, at least you have cigarettes.”
When Uri met Gil at the office, they worked together to put the photos through the image-recognition software, and waited for hours until they got a result. They eyed the printout with the two possible IDs, and Uri shrugged.
“This isn’t a high enough degree of certainty to cause a fluster,” Uri said.
“It’s above eighty percent.”
“I could put a picture of my foot in it and it would show eighty percent. We’ve got nothing.”
Gil paced in front of the computer monitor. “We’ve got two possible terrorists meeting with Khan. That’s worth making some noise over.”
“Thanks for the career advice. I’ll let you know when I’m recalled.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
The rest of the day went by in tense silence. One of Uri’s local watchers lingered outside the imam’s residence, cell phone in hand. Nobody entered or left, and at the end of the afternoon, as Uri greedily inhaled his sixtieth cigarette of the day, Gil stood and stretched. “It’s been a pleasure being asphyxiated by you, but I’m going to grab a decent meal and get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything. Should be back by seven tomorrow.”
“You should show more respect for your elders, young man.”
“Right. And eat more carrots. I’m working on both.”
“Smartass.”
“Good night.”
“To you as well. Stay away from those loose women in your neighborhood. Your body is a temple.”
“Says the man who smokes a carton a day.”
“Says the man who isn’t dying of AIDS.”
Gil locked the door behind him, leaving Uri in a cloud of nicotine as he stared at the printout. After several minutes of consideration, he stood and moved to the secure, scrambled line that connected to Israel. He placed a call and waited. After several delays, Yael Sheron, the number three man in the Mossad, came on the phone.
Ops Files II--Terror Alert Page 2