The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  “A goddamn philosopher,” Carlson snickered.

  “Exactly,” Kealey said. “Not your garden-variety crazy.”

  “He could have been quoting the Koran,” Andrews pointed out.

  “The man was clean shaven,” Kealey said. “He just didn’t have a jihadist vibe.”

  “Here’s something else, Mr. President,” Mathis said. “A month ago, a room at the Hilton was booked for this weekend by an Iranian expat named Amal Geybullah. He was a poli-sci student at Georgetown, graduated in twenty ten, and has been working as the manager of the hotel gift shop.”

  “That’s an odd career choice,” Carlson remarked.

  “Not if you’re looking to get legitimized and to network before putting yourself in a venue that has international clientele,” Kealey said.

  Carlson sat back, grumping. He did not seem pleased to have been corrected. Especially by someone who had no real standing here.

  “Where is Amal now?” Andrews asked.

  “He hasn’t been back at his apartment since this morning,” Mathis said. “We checked. He has a roommate, someone who found the place on Craigslist. Says he doesn’t know much about him.”

  “Could be a civilian casualty,” Kealey suggested.

  “It’s possible,” Andrews agreed. “They’ve only just begun clearing away the sky bridge.

  “Do we know who stayed in that room?” Carlson asked.

  “Amal told a clerk his family was coming to visit him,” Mathis said. “He requested a total of five swipe cards.”

  “That didn’t seem unusual?” the president asked.

  “Apparently not, sir,” Mathis said. “A lot of tourists get keys for each family member.”

  “Is the room intact?” Kealey asked.

  “As far as we know,” Mathis said. “Except for smoke, that section of the hotel doesn’t seem to have been affected. A couple of agents are en route.”

  “Anything else?” the president asked the table.

  No one spoke. Brenneman regarded Kealey. “You were the only one on-site while all this was going on. What’s your gut tell you?”

  Kealey had taken another bite of his sandwich. He chewed thoughtfully before answering. “Mr. President, the entire time I was in there, I did not feel that I was facing a terrorist attack. It felt more like a deployment.”

  “You don’t mean tactically, do you?” Admiral Breen asked. There was a knowing look in his eyes.

  “No, Admiral,” Kealey said. “It was well executed, yes. But it didn’t have the mission zeitgeist you get from taking a hill or securing a compound.”

  “You lost me,” Carlson said. “Mission zeitgeist?”

  “The spirit of the thing,” the admiral said, his eyes fixed admiringly on Kealey. “I believe Mr. Kealey is referring to a missing sense of completeness. Every battle has that, even a losing one.”

  “Exactly, sir,” Kealey said. “We haven’t seen anything about this online, and probably won’t, because I don’t believe these killers were there to die for a stated cause.”

  “I’m still not following,” Carlson said.

  Kealey leaned forward. He regarded Brenneman. “Frankly, Mr. President, this felt to me like a beachhead. The big opening salvo of a war.”

  He had made his way up the stairwell of the hotel, the half mask of the PBA pressed to his face. The soft, flexible silicone piece conformed to his face and provided a double exhalation valve system that minimized resistance. The oxygen for the portable breathing apparatus was attached to his back, on top of the black bulletproof vest.

  The young man moved quickly, a .45-caliber semiautomatic in his black-gloved right hand, pointed at a low angle, his eyes alert. Arriving at the third floor, he pushed slowly through the fireproof door. Ordinarily locked from this side to prevent ingress, the heavy steel doors opened automatically in the event of a fire.

  The hallway was empty. He glanced up at the nearest corner. As promised, there were no security cameras here. Because the stairwell doors were locked, there was no need. The only cameras were located at the elevator.

  He turned left, as instructed, and made his way to room 306. Upon arriving, he pulled the swipe key from his vest pocket and popped the door. His breathing loud in his ears, he entered, shutting the door behind him and swinging the security lock into place. He replaced the swipe key and removed the mask. Except for the smell, the air didn’t seem dangerous.

  The room was empty, but he moved through it cautiously, checking the bathroom and closet before making his way to the dresser. Crouching, he opened the bottom drawer. There were three marbles inside. Removing them, he dropped them in the same pocket as the key. After checking the other drawers—they were all empty—he went back to the door. He stood behind it, a foot or so into the room.

  There were voices in the hallway. He went to the door, listened. Though he was half expecting it, he started as he heard the swipe key shoved into the lock. The door clicked, one of the people pushed, and it caught on the lock.

  “What the hell?” said one of the people outside the door, his voice muffled. He was also wearing a facepiece. He was either FBI or Baltimore FD.

  Shit. How did they find it so fast? thought the young man in the room.

  He moved quietly to the window. It was too big a drop to the street, and there were people outside.

  He swore again to himself. He had come here to make sure the room was clean. Now there was only one way he was getting out. And it had to be fast.

  He put the mask back on and returned to the door. It was still open about an inch and a half. He jumped back as a pair of shoulders hit it.

  The jamb cracked but did not give. He had only moments... .

  Rushing to the door, he shoved the .45 through the opening and fired four times. There were muted cries, the sound of fabric dragging along the metal door, and then two simultaneous thuds. He listened, heard moaning. He leaned out the newly widened opening, aimed at the moaning bundle, and shot it through the mask.

  Shoving hard against the door to shut it—there was about 400 pounds of FBI agents lying on the other side—he managed to push it far enough to slip the security lock. Then he let the door swing in, jumped over the bodies, and ran back to the stairwell. Before entering it, he took a last look back to make sure no one else was in the hall.

  It was empty, save for the dead men.

  He turned and was gone, relieved to have gotten out with the goods. What had happened shouldn’t affect anything: the FBI wouldn’t find anything in the room, and the dead men would only confirm what they already suspected, that the room was somehow involved in today’s attack.

  And since the man who had rented it was clean—and dead—that wouldn’t tell them a damn thing.

  CHAPTER 14

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  The world’s finance funneled into Manhattan, and Manhattan funneled that into a few square blocks of Lower Manhattan. Within a few blocks of one another were the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and a headquarters of every major financial institution on earth.

  Lower Manhattan was also rife with skyscraper apartments, home to many of the financiers and attorneys who serviced those institutions. Residents didn’t need a car; they could walk to work. The beach and amusement park on Brooklyn’s Coney Island were an endurable subway ride away. The proximity to a great park, Battery Park, to a beautifully landscaped esplanade that ran up much of the west side of the island, to world-class restaurants, to the Statue of Liberty, to a major airport—Newark Liberty, just fifteen minutes across the Hudson River—and to the rising colossus of the new World Trade Center site also made this one of the most desirable places to live in the city.

  None of which was known to Yasmin Rassin, or mattered.

  After crossing an old iron bridge, the car moved through the thin nighttime traffic among the zigzagging canyons. The buildings flashed by, some of them stone titans, others spindly giants of glass, all of them lit with squares of light, window afte
r window, stack after stack. The woman had been in cities before—London, Istanbul, Shanghai, Sydney, and others—but none of them had created the same strong impression of a place that could have been designed by an assassin or a sociopath. So many people, so many dark streets, so many vantage points. It was a miracle civilization existed in this place, let alone thrived. Money clearly was a root of evil, but not the murderous kind. It was a shield against evil.

  Two men sat on either side of Yasmin. En route, they had changed into street clothes. They resembled nothing so much as young businessmen. It concerned her more than a little that her escorts had not sought to blindfold or handcuff her. They were letting her know where she was going, which meant one of two things. First, they expected her to be entirely cooperative. And second, they did not anticipate her leaving. These men had been in the room with the American woman at the airport. They knew about her daughter. Perhaps they also knew that was all the leverage they needed.

  Though she saw her only two or three times a year, Kamilah was the center of her life. She was the product of a situation Yasmin had created for herself twelve years earlier. She was Cara Sumaida’ie then. An orphan, a young “pleasure girl” for the Syrian police, she had given herself to those men in their barracks—or in a lavatory or an alley or an automobile, wherever they happened to be. In exchange, they had shown her how to use firearms because she was oh, so afraid for her security in the poor neighborhood in Damascus where she lived, a ghetto overrun with Iraqis and Pakistanis looking to escape war and sectarian violence in what was then a relatively peaceful nation. That was how she had come there, with an uncle. He was an automobile mechanic; she was barely able to read. When he was killed in a robbery—only his tools were stolen—she was left alone.

  She was twelve when he died. Two years of poverty, of begging, of digging through trash for food, of being threatened by police, drove her to their embrace. It wasn’t that she felt safe with these men; to the contrary, they did not understand rules or boundaries. More often than not she left with fresh bruises, sore and bleeding, her back raked raw by whatever she had been lying on. But at least she could eat and she was able to sleep in something other than a doorway or a cart.

  And something more, something that came to dominate her thoughts, her actions. Their weapons. Not just the guns, but the batons, the knives, the garrotes.

  These men were feared because they had the power of life and death, liberty and captivity. People were not frightened of them, because the police patrolled in packs. These groups were like the sea, usually calm, usually motorized, moving through a place and leaving. It was the individual, the rogue, the angry breakaway, the religious fanatic who civilians avoided. Yasmin envied that power. Not because she yearned to dominate others, but because she wanted to control her own life, her own safe zone.

  She spent all her unrestricted time learning everything she could about weapons and tactics. She learned the basics of shooting. She was a natural marksman with a supernaturally steady hand. She helped some of her mentors win bets that she could knock a bottle from a wall or pick off a bird in flight. She also learned how to stab and strangle. The police thought it was cute, adorable, to see her choke a rubber dummy or stab a bale of hay tied in the shape of a man. She retained her ability to please, and to convey enthusiasm she did not feel, just so she could stay among them. When they were not instructing her, she was watching them train, even as she lay on her back with the sergeant in his office, moaning and looking out the window at the compound.

  She was all alone. Except for one ally. A former Israeli Defense agent, Abrahem Bär. Bär was not an exceptional man: he stood several inches under six feet; had thick, dark hair with a low hairline, a rough face with a matching beard, and thick chapped lips; and his skin was gritty and tanned from spending years in isolated combat zones. He was merely a good man who had been trained well by his country. Perhaps too well.

  Disagreeing with orders he’d been given to remove the presence of peaceful civilian demonstrators near his post near Kiryat Shmona, Bär had gone AWOL from the IDF and had met Cara while he was hiding out in the slums of Damascus, waiting for the heat from his desertion to die down. In spite of her past experiences, Cara was remarkably genial at the time, her hair was much longer, she kept it combed and delicate for her many mature handlers, and her body had only recently developed into womanhood. Bär had propositioned the then nearly sixteen-year-old girl, and when she met with him for what she thought would be intercourse, the multilingual, twenty-eight-year-old Israeli explained that he intended only to take Cara under his wing, to help her along what, in his eyes, seemed to be a serrated road she was traveling down.

  Listening to her lurid stories of abuse, rape, and torture and disgusted by the treatment she was receiving, but unable to help her financially or even afford her a safe place to stay, Bär helped her to train harder, to find her self-worth, to fight for herself. To fight back.

  In the early mornings, before the sun broke over the horizon, the pair would trot alongside each other for miles into the desert, where Bär would work with Cara to perfect her long-range shooting ability. She learned to recognize her surrounding conditions and adjust accordingly—something as slight as the direction and intensity that a target’s hair was blowing started to give her killer insight. She learned to be a one-woman militia, a sniper without need of a spotter, a captain without the assistance of soldiers, a killer without use of her conscience. Some mornings consisted of simply skull dragging for hours in the desert heat. Moving slowly, undetected, dragging her stomach, legs, and face in the dirt and sand to get close enough to her target, a true test of her will. On more than one occasion Bär would spot Cara moving too quickly, or moving at all, and would send her back to the starting point. Although she sometimes thought he was being cruel, this proved to be an invaluable technique.

  Between the jogging in and the walking out of the improvised training grounds, it wasn’t long before their teacher-student relationship crossed their respective barriers and the two became romantically involved. This was the first time a young Cara felt that sex could be enjoyable for the female, too, that it wasn’t just about letting a wolf feed off the remains of a carcass, but about finding a rhythm with a partner and working together to match strides and momentum. Making love. Making mistakes met with laughter rather than hostility.

  During their many nights together he taught her how to contain her impulsive rage and maintain focus by using Krav Maga techniques he had learned throughout his IDF training to concentrate on pinpoint precision, counterattacks, and neutralizing her enemies without losing crystal clear awareness of her surroundings.

  “The hardest part is the escape. Don’t ever lose sight of that. Or your target,” he’d tell her. Bär’s friendly eyes would crinkle and his crooked smile would actually make her lose focus when he joked. But he never distracted her for too long before giving her something else to consider. Bär loved her because she was rough like him. She was beautiful, but in many ways she was ugly, and he was fond of that, too.

  He always reminded Cara to attack before being attacked, which was ironic because Bär would be shot in the back of the head by a jealous Barzeh police officer who wanted a piece of Cara. He would have told her to learn from his mistake.

  Her name, Cara, meant fortress, and that was what the young woman became. Emotionally closed off, she was single-minded in her purpose. Shortly after Bär was killed, Cara realized that she was pregnant. Desperately hoping it was his, she put all of her accumulated hostility into killing a courier for the Central Bank of Syria, stealing the ten thousand in al-lra as-sriyya he was carrying, and used the currency to buy her way into Egypt. People had compassion for a pregnant girl on her own, and money bought those for whom that wasn’t enough. It was there that she gave birth to her daughter, in the hovel of a midwife who was recommended to her. She was barely seventeen.

  Egypt’s capital was a place where one could find—or be—anything one wanted. What Cara
wanted was a new life. She began with a new name. She drew it from separate articles on the front page of a newspaper she found in the trash. The compost pile seemed a fitting place from which the new woman, Yasmin Rassin, should arise.

  In retrospect, that had been a terrible, possibly fatal error.

  Who could have known that one day newspapers would be searchable online? she thought. Inputting her name would not only place her in Cairo at that time, on that day, but it would suggest, strongly, that she had been there under another name. Most likely in a poor section, if she was looking to start over and picked her name from a newspaper without bothering to change it legally.

  The midwife, Akila Fazari, was probably still delivering babies there. The CIA had Yasmin’s photograph from when she was captured by the British. That could have been how they learned about her daughter.

  Will either of us ever be free of the Americans now? she wondered.

  The car stopped across the street from Battery Park, an open area at the foot of Manhattan. Yasmin saw Castle Clinton, a circular fortress whose function was once to defend New York from the British. Beyond it stood the Statue of Liberty, aglow in the spotlights that surrounded her. Yasmin felt that this symbol of freedom should mean something to her; it did not. She was a captive here, most likely about to be coerced into killing. The irony was that if the Americans had simply been true to their capitalistic nature, they could have hired her to do their dirty work. They didn’t have to threaten her daughter.

  A chill rolled from her shoulders down her back.

  What if that isn’t why you’re here?

  “Here.”

  Yasmin looked to her right. The man to her right held a plastic water bottle. Beyond him she saw a short block of tall old buildings.