The fake walk-away was another useful technique, one he’d learned watching his wife dicker for prices at flea markets, the undisputed queen of the tag sale bargain.
“Please,” Ali said. “You must understand that I am in a very difficult position. This house is being watched. If I am seen to cooperate with you, there are many who would kill me. But if I don’t help you, you will take my son. I care only about my family.”
“What I can do for you,” DeLuca said, “depends entirely on what you can do for me. I also have to bring what you give me back to my commanders, if I’m going to try to persuade them to help me. It has to be a trade. I need to talk to your brother. We’re trying to take apart the Mukhaberat. We’re trying to find the people who worked for Izzat Mohammed Al-Tariq.”
He thought he noticed Ali visibly flinch. He’d played enough poker to know a tell when he saw one.
“And I know your brother worked with him. And that he was a member of the Ba’ath party. Were you a member of the Ba’ath party, abu Kamel?”
Ali hesitated. By addressing him as Father of Kamel, DeLuca was underscoring the point that Ali needed to cooperate if he wanted to help his son. Ali nodded.
“But we all were. It was the only way to survive under Saddam. It is exactly as you’ve said. Everything is a trade. If you were not with them, they would assume you were against them. You see.”
“I do,” DeLuca said. “Was your brother Mukhaberat?”
Again Ali hesitated before nodding.
“But it was not his choice. Under Saddam, one could not appear to stand outside the government. Omar is sheikh. He leads the tribe. For his people’s sake, he is Ba’ath, he is Mukhaberat, but not for himself. He is not for Saddam. He saw that Saddam got his payments from the embargo runners who came from Syria. That’s all.”
DeLuca said nothing. He’d heard this from virtually everyone he arrested, “I wasn’t working for Saddam—I was working to overthrow him . . .” yada yada yada.
“We had a report that your brother is starting a new Hezbul Ba’ath. You know we can’t allow him to do that, don’t you?”
“It is not Ba’ath,” Ali said. “He is trying to organize the people of this area, that is all. There is no government here. He works to get electricity and fresh water. They need a place to hold school, so he makes the arrangements. Without my brother, it would be chaos. You will ask him and he will tell you himself.”
“Do you know where your brother is?”
Ali didn’t answer.
“I want you to tell your brother he has to be at the front gate at Balad Air Force post at noon. Twelve o’clock sharp.” He took the notepad from his shirt pocket and wrote on it, ripping the page out and handing it to Ali. “This is a hall pass. Have him show this at the gate and tell him to ask for Mr. David, and someone will bring him to me. And don’t try to tell me you don’t know how to reach him, because I know that’s not true. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Ali said. “Will you arrest my brother?”
“I don’t know,” DeLuca lied again. “Right now we just want to talk to him.”
DeLuca sensed a note of renewed panic in Ali’s demeanor.
“Please,” he pleaded. “If you take my brother, no one will protect us. Please . . .”
“As I explained, I can’t help you unless you help me,” DeLuca said. It was just a hunch, but he suspected the man had more to tell him. “You have to give me something I can work with. So far, I have nothing.”
“I can do that,” Ali said after considering his options, glancing toward the others in the room. “But I must speak with you alone. Please.”
DeLuca thought a moment, then gestured to Carter and Ciccarelli to wait for him in the kitchen. He told Mack to go keep VanDamm company. When they were alone, Ali spoke again, choosing his words carefully.
“I am forced to trust you,” he said. “I do have information. Valuable information, but I must only give it to somebody in authority. I must be careful who I give it to. I don’t mean to insult you.”
DeLuca had heard this tune before, too, people trying to play up the importance of what they were about to say, to increase their bargaining power.
“You deal with me,” DeLuca said. “I am the ultimate authority in this matter. It doesn’t go any higher than me.”
“I understand,” Ali said. “You are CIA, yes?” DeLuca did not respond. Ali sighed, closing his eyes a moment. “I have no choice, but it is dangerous. In exchange you must promise me you will take care of my family. That is all I will ask. I don’t care about myself. You must protect them. Because I no longer can, and if you take my brother . . . My family cannot stay in Iraq. They have no future here. For a while I had hope, but now . . . I want you to take them to the United States. This your government must do for me. I do not ask for my wives or myself. I ask only for my son and daughter.”
“I can’t make you any promises,” DeLuca said. “Other than to promise to try. It all depends on what you give me.”
Ali considered his options. DeLuca suspected they were few.
“You say you are looking for Mohammed Al-Tariq. Yes?”
“We’re looking for his people,” DeLuca said. “Al-Tariq is dead.”
Ali stared at him. “He is not dead,” he said.
Now DeLuca paused. Despite his skepticism, the enormity of the statement, if true, was significant.
“I’d be interested to know what it is that makes you say that,” he said. “Because as far as I know, the proof that he’s dead is pretty conclusive.”
“Tell me—how do you know?” Ali asked.
The details were still classified, and DeLuca knew better than to reveal them to Ali, but he limned the general facts for the Iraqi policeman. Special Ops had infiltrated Al-Tariq’s household and collected both his DNA and his fingerprints before the bombing, to assist in subsequent identification. The Third Infantry follow-on had combed the rubble and discovered Al-Tariq’s fingerprints on a shoulder-fired Russian SAM-7 antiaircraft weapon, as well as pieces of human flesh from which they’d taken tissue samples, sent to the Criminal Investigations Division lab at Fort Gillem in Georgia. The CID report came back that the tissue samples matched Al-Tariq’s. There were plenty of dubious kills, but this wasn’t one of them. Al-Tariq was gone. Of that, there was no doubt.
“I can tell you that we have the DNA,” DeLuca said. “There really isn’t any question.”
Ali shook his head.
“You can believe what your laboratories tell you,” he said. “I will believe what my eyes and ears tell me. I know he is alive because he was here, three nights ago. With three of his men. Omar does not know they were here. They move from house to house. They don’t ask permission, and they will kill whoever tells of it.”
DeLuca couldn’t guess what sort of angle Ali was playing.
“So he was here then?” he said. “And three men?” Ali nodded. “Did you learn their names?” Ali shook his head. “You’d never seen them before?” Ali again shook his head. “What did they talk about?”
“This is why I must tell you,” Ali said. “Because my son was here, even though I told him to stay away from these men. And they said, ‘Kamel, we would like you to be a martyr for Allah.’ Would he like to be a Wajeh? Would he be one of the Thousand Faces of Allah? But Mr. David, I swear to you, this is not the Islam that Kamel was raised in. My brother and I have both lived in the West. Kamel was born in England. Omar says those who think that to be pro-Islam one must be anti-Western are ignorant of the Koran. So I sent Kamel away. I told him heaven does not admit assassins. This is what Al-Tariq is doing.”
“Recruiting suicide bombers?” DeLuca asked.
“Martyrs, yes,” Ali said. “He has billions of dollars in United States cash that he has hidden before the war, I think. Years before. It is his money that is training the insurgents now. His money is paying the families of the martyrs. Once it was Saddam and Al-Durri but now Al-Tariq has taken over. He will pay their family half now
and half when the thing is done. This is what they said.”
“When what thing is done?” DeLuca asked.
“When the Thousand Faces of Allah have become martyrs,” Ali said, glancing suspiciously about again, nearly whispering. “I must explain it to you carefully. This you must know. He is not just recruiting them. He is giving them weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. He has done it. You want to know why you cannot find them? They are gone. They are in the hands of a thousand assassins. Al-Alf Wajeh. The Thousand Faces of Allah. Did you think they didn’t know you were coming? They’ve known for years this war would come. Did you think they would just sit and wait for you to come find them? What did you think they were doing these last five years, while your inspectors were looking for these terrible things? Now one hundred thousand of you are looking, and you find only empty shells. Where did the contents go? Why did Saddam not use these weapons of mass destruction when your tanks were rolling into Baghdad? Because they have already been deployed. I think perhaps they are already in your country. I don’t know the details. But by the way they spoke, I believe it has begun. Lanatullah. The curse of God.”
All right, DeLuca thought. Now you’re starting to scare me.
“Lanatullah?” he said. “This is what they were calling it?”
Ali nodded.
“‘Laen Allah is in the land of the infidels,’” Ali said. “I heard them say these exact words.”
DeLuca considered. There’d been a constant stream of threats, coming from all kinds of sources on virtually a daily basis, saying, in effect, “We will avenge the occupation . . . we will destroy you . . .” etc. Playing the WMD card was nothing new or noteworthy.
This was qualitatively different.
“So why were they telling you all this?” DeLuca asked. “Why confide in you?”
“They wanted my help,” Ali said. Ali bit his lip and, for a moment, appeared to be ashamed. “They did not come to me because they thought I was their friend. They came to me because they thought I would be too afraid to say no. I know Al-Tariq. I was interrogated myself by Mukhaberat once. If they knew I was telling you all this . . .”
He didn’t have to finish the thought.
“I understand your concerns,” DeLuca said. “I can tell that you’re trying to be truthful with me, but I also have to consider the proof we have that Al-Tariq is dead. I don’t know how to reconcile that with what you’re saying.”
“Do you want proof that he is alive?” Ali said. “That he was here?”
“You have proof?” DeLuca said.
Ali asked to go upstairs. DeLuca sent Carter with him. When Ali returned, he was carrying a small package, something wrapped inside a white cloth. Ali set the package down in front of DeLuca, who untied the string holding it together and unfolded the white handkerchief. Inside, he found two pieces of paper, rolled into tubes with the ends folded over. Inside the tubes, he found a pair of syringes.
Using the handkerchief, he picked up one of the syringes, holding it to the light. It contained a clear watery liquid. He held the syringe under his nose and sniffed. The syringe smelled strongly of rubber, like a tire’s inner tube. It was also the smell of insulin. Elaine had come down with Type 1 juvenile onset diabetes when she was eight. DeLuca knew the aroma because he’d squirted some of his sister’s insulin onto his tongue once, thinking it was going to taste like sugar.
According to the files he’d read, Izzat Mohammed Al-Tariq was also diabetic.
“Can I keep these?” he asked. Ali nodded.
“Mr. David,” Ali said. “You must promise me you will not fail. I think . . . I think this is a very serious matter.”
“I will treat it seriously,” he said. “I can promise you that.”
“You don’t understand,” Ali said, leaning forward again and lowering his voice. “I must tell you this. Some years ago, before I was a police officer in Ad-Dujayl, I was in charge of security for a division of the Mukhaberat, at a place called the Muthanna State Establishment. Have you heard of it?”
DeLuca nodded. Muthanna was a biological and chemical weapons plant, second in size only to the Al-Hakam facility that UNSCOM had closed down in 1996. Muthanna, 120 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, had been heavily damaged during the Gulf War and inspected several times thereafter, by UNSCOM and by David Kay’s boys. It had at one time been capable of producing weapons-grade biological and chemical material, but it had been shut down since 1994. DeLuca said as much. Ali nodded.
“Yes, it was destroyed,” he said. “But only after the equipment was moved, to a place called Al Manal. Also called the Daura Foot and Mouth Disease Facility. Have you heard of this?”
DeLuca shook his head.
“Al Manal was top secret. I do not know what was done there,” Ali continued. “But you must ask about the Jamrat Project. The security needs for this were beyond anything else.”
“Rami el Jamrat. Throwing Stones at the Devil,” DeLuca said. Rami el Jamrat was the name of the ceremony pilgrims on the hajj performed. Ali nodded. With a finger, he sketched out a diagram on the rug before him of Al Manal to illustrate his story.
“They built a facility. Under the ground. In the southeast part of Baghdad. We were told not to allow anyone near it. It was a top-grade containment laboratory, designed by the Russians. And the men who built it, I believe they were killed afterward. That is how important the secret was. After that, we did not ask. Project Jamrat was something terrible. I don’t know what the weapon was, but I believe it was never destroyed, and I believe it is what Al-Tariq intends to use. It was his money that built it. My sense was that it was kept secret even from Saddam. When Saddam’s own cousin came, we were told not to let him near it.”
“I’ll make it my top priority,” DeLuca said. Part of him felt as if he’d just been told a ghost story. The other part of him was scared.
The first thing he would do, when he got back to base, would be to read Al-Tariq’s file again. The second thing would be to have the syringes tested—if Al-Tariq had used them, they would contain traces of his DNA, which could be analyzed and compared to previous samples. If that suggested Al-Tariq was still alive, then he’d worry in earnest.
DeLuca went to the window to assess the situation. A crowd of about thirty people had gathered around the Humvees. He told Ali they were going to need to put on a show, lest onlookers think he was cooperating. Ali understood. DeLuca told Ali that at some point, he was going to have to report to the post and tell his story again. From that point on, he probably wouldn’t be able to go home again, so he needed to get everybody ready.
“You’ve done the right thing,” DeLuca told him. “I think we’ll be able to work something out.”
“I will explain to Kamel,” Ali added.
DeLuca summoned Carter and Ciccarelli from the kitchen, asked the translator to open the front door, then threw Ali through it.
“Do not shoot at United States soldiers!” DeLuca growled at him dramatically, loud enough for everyone gathered to hear. “Do you understand me?”
He manhandled the prisoner into the vehicle, after which he dusted himself off.
He took one last look around the courtyard, then climbed back into the Humvee for the ride home. When Specialist Ciccarelli asked permission to return to the house to retrieve something he’d dropped, DeLuca told him to hurry it up. He watched Ciccarelli stoop down in the garden, stand up again, and hold something above his head to indicate he’d found what he was looking for. He smiled. Through his binoculars, DeLuca could see that Ciccarelli held a photograph of a girl in his hand.
Then Ciccarelli’s head exploded, throwing a spray of blood up against the side of the house. A split second later, DeLuca heard the report from the sniper’s rifle.
As the raiding party quickly deployed to cover, DeLuca crouched low beside the Humvee, but there was no further gunfire. Two MPs rushed to where the translator had fallen, and one made a cursory slashing gesture toward his own throat to signal that the young man was d
ead. Carter ordered his men to fan out into the nearby countryside as DeLuca scanned the surrounding hills with his binoculars, to no avail.
When Carter established an “all clear,” an infantryman returned to DeLuca with a piece of paper he’d found tacked to the tree, about a quarter mile off, from which the sniper had apparently fired. He showed it to DeLuca. It was the wanted poster DeLuca had seen earlier that morning.
As DeLuca mounted the Humvee and headed back to Camp Anaconda, he knew full well what the attack had meant. Most Iraqi snipers were incompetent, poor marksmen who rarely allowed for windage or calculated for elevation, and few ever used sniper rounds. Judging from the severity of the damage done, this was clearly a large-caliber soft-pointed shell fired from a high-velocity rifle with a telescopic sight, the weapon wielded by someone who knew what he was doing. Someone who wanted to claim the reward.
Ciccarelli had died because the drawing looked more like him than it did like DeLuca. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ciccarelli,” DeLuca would have to write, “The United States Army regrets to inform you . . .” He wouldn’t have to tell them how unnecessary or unfair their son’s death had been—they would already know that.
DeLuca had been the target.
This meant that whoever shot at him had been given information about his movements and his mission. The only people who’d known what his mission was going to be were the people in the raiding party—but none of them had been told where they were going—and a handful of personnel who’d been in the TOC that morning.
This meant that somebody inside the wire was willing to sell him out.
In other words, there was a traitor on the post.
Chapter Three
WITH HIS NEATLY TRIMMED SALT-AND-PEPPER beard, his silver hair swept back from a receding hairline, his gunmetal three-thousand-dollar Italian-cut Fazioli suit, his silk five-hundred-dollar charcoal Gregg d’Arcy tie, and his pale gray eyes, the man at the center of attention at the Harvard Club, on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts, looked as if he’d been forged from solid steel. He was, as anyone who met him soon discovered, impressive, despite his short stature, charismatic, a man whom women were drawn to and men envied. Since 9/11, his phones, at home and at the university where he lectured, had not stopped ringing with requests for him to appear on talk shows, news programs, roundtables, think-tanks, panels, and academic seminars, everyone wanting to know the same thing—why did the Arabs hate the Americans so? He’d done his best to explain, though he didn’t like trafficking in generalities. What he never said was, “If you have to ask that question, you’ll never understand.”
Team Red Page 4