The Blowback Protocol: A Sam Jameson Thriller

by Emmerich, Lars

  Recognition flashed in El Anwar’s face, and a little guilt. “Nobody.”

  Sam gave him a dubious look. “Not anyone? Not one living soul?”

  El Anwar shook his head, waving his hand dismissively. “Hamid, of course.”

  It wasn’t a name Sam remembered encountering on the roster of Doberman players. Perhaps a pseudonym for someone else. Or a trap. Sam elected not to reveal her ignorance. “Using what method?” she asked.

  “The standard procedures.”

  “Of course. Describe them for me,” Sam said.

  “If you don’t know, then I sure as hell am not going to tell you.”

  “If you don’t tell me, then I won’t have any choice but to assume you’re the security leak.”

  El Anwar’s face lost a little of its color. “Leak?” he said. “There is a leak?”

  “The procedures, please,” Sam pressed.

  He described them. An automatically generated text message was sent simultaneously to a list of telephone numbers. The text message was an advertisement for a cheaper cell phone plan. It contained a link to a legitimate telecom company. El Anwar always clicked on the link, and his phone always rang minutes later. A different number every time, and never one he recognized, but always Hamid.

  “Show me the most recent number,” Sam said.

  El Anwar hesitated. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. Sam was certain the little Arab man was nanoseconds away from asking for her bona fides. She didn’t let him. “This is critical, Natan,” she said, her thumb releasing the safety on her weapon. “We must have that number. All of our security depends on it.”

  El Anwar acquiesced. He retrieved his phone from his pants on the floor, doing an odd little maneuver to hide his nakedness. He scrolled through a list of numbers and handed her the phone. Sam committed the number to memory and also memorized El Anwar’s own cell phone number.

  She rose. “Don’t go anywhere until you hear from me,” she said. “And I mean anywhere. Not to the club, not to the souk, not to visit your favorite goat or your dying mother.”

  El Anwar scowled. “How long?” he asked.

  “As long as it takes,” Sam said. She nodded toward the brunette, who was still wrapped in bedsheets. “I’m confident you’ll find a way to pass the time.”

  * * *

  “Holy smokes, Sam,” Dan said, his awe clear despite the poor international connection. “Posing as a Doberman member? That was one hell of a ballsy play!”

  “Probably a little ill-advised,” Sam said. “But I didn’t have the energy to come up with a better plan.”

  “Better lucky than good,” Dan said. “Lay them on me.”

  Sam passed the two telephone numbers. Dan typed. She heard him curse under his breath a few times as he manipulated the software application. Then he cursed more loudly.

  “You get something?” she asked.

  “You could say that. Are you sitting down?”

  18

  “The goddamned US embassy?” Sam asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Couldn’t be more so,” Dan said. “Not a cell phone, either. A landline.”

  Sam was quiet for a moment. “Just so I understand,” she finally said, “you’re telling me that Natan El Anwar initiated the contact procedures with his handler in the Doberman group, and the follow-up call he received came from a landline inside the US embassy in Tripoli?”

  “I don’t know what Natan El Anwar did,” Dan said, “but I do know the call to his cell phone, which he answered while he was sitting inside some place called the Club Paradise, came from an embassy landline.”

  Sam chewed her lip. It seemed to be proof positive that the CIA and the Doberman group were tangled up somehow. What was the CIA’s angle? Was the Agency infiltrating the Doberman group to dismantle it? If that were the case, why would the CIA bother putting Sam under surveillance? And instead of trying to “stop her,” wouldn’t they have been interested in Homeland’s help? It didn’t make any sense.

  Unless, of course, the Agency wasn’t out to dismantle Doberman at all. Maybe the CIA wanted a piece of the action. Maybe they’d already carved out their own slice of the Doberman pie. It wouldn’t have been the first time the Agency’s fiscal interests had taken precedence over its moral and legal obligations.

  Sam needed to learn more about the CIA-Doberman relationship. But how? She couldn’t just waltz into the embassy, not with that warrant for her arrest hanging over her head, but she needed to figure out who the hell had made the call to Natan El Anwar.

  She brainstormed alternate approaches to get inside the embassy. A lost passport under a pseudonym? Non-starter. They’d fingerprint and ID her and she’d be arrested and sent back to the US in a matter of minutes. Maybe a manufactured emergency requiring embassy help? Same problem.

  “Is there any way you can tell who made the call to El Anwar?” she asked.

  She heard typing. “That number is not part of the published phone listing,” Dan said.

  Sam cursed, but it wasn’t an unexpected development. Most embassy employee numbers were unpublished.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s try another angle. Can you look up an embassy employee named Mercer?”

  More clicking as Dan worked the computer. “No such employee,” he finally said.

  Again, not unexpected news. Nobody ever used their real name when working with joes. “Can you get me a list of all incoming and outgoing calls to and from that embassy number?” she asked.

  “It’ll be easy like falling down,” Dan said as he clicked the mouse a few more times. “I just posted it to the private server. It’s hidden in the server log.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said. “I’ll look at it as soon as I can. In the meantime, can you get the computers crunching on it? A network analysis, I mean.”

  “It’ll be hard not to raise eyebrows with an embassy number at the center of everything, but I think I can play it off.”

  “You’re more than just a pretty face,” Sam said. “Any further developments on my arrest warrant?”

  A long pause. “Just be glad you aren’t here. Homeland’s taking a beating over ‘rogue agents’ like yourself operating above the law and getting civilians killed. I keep expecting the stiffs upstairs to issue a statement in your defense, but so far they haven’t said anything at all.”

  Sam shook her head. “Great. They’re probably all reading from Oren Stanley’s script.”

  “That’d be my guess. And I don’t imagine it helps that Justice is calling you a fugitive.”

  “A fugitive? That’s bullshit! I’m protecting myself from a potential threat to my life!”

  “Not by their way of thinking,” Dan said. “You haven’t received any threatening messages and none of your property was stolen or damaged. They don’t see the threat.”

  “Breaking and entering? Tampering with my alarm and security system?” Sam’s voice grew strident. “I mean, how many targeted killings have we investigated that started off that way?”

  “You don’t have to convince me,” Dan said. “I’m just telling you what the other side is saying. As far as they’re concerned, you could easily have made it all up.”

  “This whole thing is bullshit,” Sam said. “The intel was solid. We looked at it nine ways to Sunday. Ezzat was our guy. And there was nothing even remotely violent in his background. No record, no priors, nothing. I mean, he didn’t even play violent video games.”

  “I know, Sam,” Dan said. “I went through it all with you, remember?”

  “So why are they hanging me out to dry?”

  “Honestly, I think they’re doing it because Oren Stanley has a death grip on Homeland’s budget, and for some reason Oren Stanley wants your head on a platter.”

  Sam shook her head. “But why? It makes no sense.”

  Dan didn’t have a theory.

  “Goddammit,” Sam said. “I’m really over the barrel here.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” Dan said. “This whole thing is fucked u
p.”

  Sam was silent for a long moment. “I suppose I’m eventually going to have to turn myself in,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and frail.

  “I’m afraid you’re probably right,” Dan said.

  “I’ll be a sitting duck,” Sam said.

  “Maybe if they take you into custody, whoever is behind this will figure you’re out of commission. Maybe they’ll just leave you alone.”

  Sam shook her head and looked out over the dusty Tripoli street. “I was out of commission already when they started all of this. I’d been yanked from the investigation and I was headed for suspension. How much more could they have wanted?”

  Dan didn’t have an answer.

  * * *

  Sam looked at her watch. It had been two hours since her first visit to Natan El Anwar’s apartment and it was time for a follow-up. She went inside his building and took the elevator, this time all the way to El Anwar’s penthouse stop. She walked down the hallway toward his door with her gun drawn.

  She knew it was all wrong before she even knew how she knew. Scratches on the door, maybe, or just that sixth sense that could only develop over years in the field. As she got closer, it became clear that the lock had been forced. Clumsy and entirely unnecessary. Even teenaged street urchins in this corner of the world knew how to pick a lock.

  Sam nudged the door with the barrel of her pistol and it swung open. Shattered glass, wadded clothing, upended furniture, tipped-over potted plants, and a foul-smelling liquid of some sort littered the floor. The place had obviously been rolled.

  She searched the penthouse carefully. There was nobody home. In the bedroom, a small bloodstain caught her eye, roughly in the center of the bed. Had El Anwar been attacked?

  El Anwar’s cell phone was one of the items strewn on the floor. She picked it up, slipped a small device into the smartphone’s receptacle, waited for the little light to turn from red to green, then removed the device and returned it to her pocket. She’d upload the data as soon as possible for Dan to analyze. She wasn’t sure, but it felt like a significant windfall. El Anwar was lightyears beyond “person of interest” in her book.

  She wiped El Anwar’s phone clean of her fingerprints and dropped it back roughly where she’d found it. Then she picked her way carefully through the ransacked apartment, taking pains not to disturb anything and taking greater pains not to walk into an ambush.

  She left the front door ajar, cleared the hallway, and eschewed the elevator in favor of the stairs. She took her time, descending each flight of stairs deliberately and quietly, blinking away the burn of fatigue in her eyes and breathing deeply to quiet the thump of her heart in her chest.

  She wondered who had rolled El Anwar’s flat. She wondered if the timing was related to her earlier visit or merely coincidence. She wondered if she’d somehow missed a tail despite all her precautions. She suddenly felt tired and on her heels and wondered if she’d have the wherewithal to prevail in any kind of a physical confrontation.

  Her thoughts wandered as she walked down the stairs. She thought about how to get the data from El Anwar’s cell phone back to Dan, but she shouldn’t have been thinking about that. She should have been thinking about making a very tactical exit from the building. As it was, she chose to leave via the building’s service entrance, which appeared to be entirely devoid of humanity.

  But it wasn’t. She was still three paces from the door when it opened from the outside. Desert light assaulted her dark-adjusted eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t make out the silhouette. But soon enough it came into focus. A short, thin, brown man. Green pants. Green shirt. Red beret. Black assault rifle. Grim smile.

  “Do not take another step forward,” he said in surprisingly good English.

  19

  Sam’s demands to be delivered posthaste to the US consulate fell on deaf ears, and her beret- and fatigue-clad captors studiously ignored her as she waved her fake passport at them.

  Probably just as well. Delivery to the embassy would mean instant extradition to the US given the warrant for her arrest. Any hope of figuring out whose crosshairs were trained on her would go up in smoke, and she would be a sitting duck in jail, completely at the mercy of whoever meant her harm—Agency, Doberman, or other as-yet-uncategorized assholes.

  They shoved her rudely into the back of what passed for a police car. One man drove while another sat in the front passenger seat. His job was evidently to fix a menacing glare on her.

  A third man sat next to her in the backseat. He was young and wiry and his face was in a losing struggle to produce a proper Muslim beard. He was obviously nervous. He held a large-caliber weapon in his shaky hand. Sam didn’t recognize the make. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and she viewed the drawn weapon as overkill.

  “You can put that away, junior,” she said. “I’m not going to gnaw you to death.”

  She knew the young man understood her because his cheeks turned rosy, but he kept the gun pointed at her ribs.

  “At least put your finger outside the trigger guard. That damn thing might have real bullets in it.”

  He gave her a long look, but then his finger moved from the trigger and came to rest alongside the barrel. She relaxed a little. At least now, one of the seven million Tripoli potholes wouldn’t jar the kid’s finger and launch a bullet through her heart.

  “Why have you detained me?” she asked.

  The guy riding shotgun sneered at her but said nothing. The driver’s face took on a knowing look. It was the kid who spoke. “You have been accused of seditious acts against the teachings of the Prophet.”

  “Seditious what?”

  “Seditious acts against the teachings of the Prophet.”

  “The prophet? Which one? Elijah? Moses?”

  A hard slap landed on her cheek. It came from the jerk who was riding shotgun. He was much faster than she had given him credit for. “Moses,” the man spat. “Zionist whore.” He cocked his hand again but restrained himself, his voice trailing off into a stream of Arabic curses.

  Seditious acts against the teachings of the prophet, Sam thought. Grounds for beheading? Ass rape followed by stoning? Islamic law wasn’t known for its justice or for an over-reliance on facts. She’d landed in a hell of a pickle.

  Clearly, the situation was entirely contrived. Maybe someone within the Doberman organization had a healthy hunch about where the Ezzat trail would lead. Ezzat was obviously compromised, which left a loose end that could conceivably have led her to his replacement, Natan El Anwar. Maybe they had kept El Anwar’s place under surveillance and called in the goon squad when Sam showed up.

  Or maybe it was El Anwar himself who had arranged for Sam to be arrested. Maybe he’d dropped a dime after she left his apartment. She considered it unlikely—her read on him was that he didn’t like being pushed around by a “Western harlot,” but that he had bought her ruse. But she’d been wrong before.

  So exactly how does one refute charges of seditious acts against the teachings of the prophet? Sam wondered. She hadn’t gotten very far down that line of reasoning when four loud pops sounded in quick succession. The driver cursed, the car swerved wildly back and forth, and Sam watched the driver’s hands torque the steering wheel left and right like an amateur, ensuring that the four flat tires that suddenly afflicted the police cruiser were going to cause bent metal.

  The tire rubber shredded to bits, the rims dug into the pavement with an ear-splitting screech, and the car careened down an embankment. A palm tree loomed large in the windshield and Sam realized to her horror that the cops hadn’t bothered to buckle her in.

  She didn’t have time to prepare herself for the impact. The car came to an extremely abrupt halt as the bumper folded around the palm tree, and Sam’s body crashed into the protective screen that separated the front and back seats. She’d managed to turn her head to the side at the last instant, protecting her face and neck, but the blow knocked the wind out of her and left her reeling and disoriented.

/>   More loud pops. Gunfire.

  Glass shattered, and she heard a gurgling unnnnnnhhhhh sound come from the young cop next to her. She looked up at him and instantly regretted her curiosity. Blood sailed in jets from his neck. His hands clutched wildly, trying to stem the red river spewing from him, but Sam knew it was no use. He’d be dead in a matter of seconds.

  More rifle fire sounded and more glass shattered. The cop riding shotgun let loose a few deafening shots with his pistol, but he was quickly overcome by a fusillade of automatic rifle fire from somewhere outside the car.

  Another gunman appeared at the driver’s side door. He unleashed a fury of fire. Parts of the driver splattered the inside of the windshield.

  So this is it. I hope they don’t rape me first. Sam let her body slump to the floor of the car. She curled into a ball, her hands still bound fast behind her back.

  “Allahu Akhbar!” a man’s voice yelled, the asinine phrase Muslim terrorists always yelled. But even amid the chaos, obscured by shouts and the ringing in her ears left over from the gunfire, the phrase clanged in her ear. There was something weird about it. Sam could have sworn she heard an American accent in the Arabic words.

  A shadow crossed the window nearest to her. Sam froze, held her breath, feigned dead. She was somehow completely unscathed but covered in the young cop’s blood, which she hoped would be enough to convince the shooters not to fire a few dozen extra rounds her way.

  She felt the shooter’s eyes linger over her, or maybe she imagined it. Either way, an eternal moment of breathless, motionless panic passed. Then she heard footsteps receding in the sand, male voices conversing in low tones, a car engine groaning to life, and the sound of tires crunching over gravel.

  Sam exhaled. Her heart rate began to slow. She looked around, taking stock. Blood everywhere, three dead Libyan cops, hands cuffed behind her back, and bullet holes everywhere. She shook her head. How had she not been minced in the crossfire? Perhaps she should start believing in miracles again, she thought.