by Tom Clancy
Ryan said, “John. When you told me to go down to the lobby, I shouldn’t have questioned that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Clark nodded. “I’ve been around the block a few times, Jack. I know what I’m doing.”
“Of course you do. I just thought—”
The older man interrupted. “Thinking is good. It was your thinking that put us in a position to help by sending us after Rokki, and your thinking when you saw the van with the suspicious guys sent us to the right location. Your thinking saved a lot of people’s lives. I’m never going to tell you to stop thinking. But I will tell you when it is time to shut up and listen to orders. If everybody does what they think is right when the bullets are about to start flying, then we won’t operate as a cohesive unit. Sometimes you may not like the order you are given, sometimes it might not make sense to you, but you have to do as you’re told. If you had spent some time in the military, this would be automatic to you. But you haven’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me.”
Ryan just nodded. “You are right. I just let my emotions get in the way. It won’t happen again.”
Clark just nodded. Smiled.
“What?” Jack asked.
“You and your dad.”
“What about my dad?”
“The similarities. Stories I could tell you.”
“Go ahead.”
But the older man just shook his head. ookl y“‘Need to know,’ kid. ‘Need to know.’”
Jack himself smiled now. “Somehow, someday. I’m going to get all those stories out of either you or my dad.”
“Your best chance was on the Gulfstream coming back over the Atlantic. Miss Sherman had me pretty well loopy on pain meds.”
Ryan smiled. “I missed my chance. Hope I get another chance that doesn’t involve you getting shot.”
“Me too, kid.” Clark shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve been shot worse than this, but this is the first time I took a round from some cop just trying to do his job. It’s hard to get good and mad at anybody but myself.”
Clark’s phone chirped on his desk. He picked it up. “Yeah? Sure, I’ll send him down. Me too? Okay, be right there.” Clark looked up at Ryan as he hung up the phone. “Tony Wills needs us at your desk.”
22
Jack found Tony Wills sitting in his cube, which was next to Ryan’s. With Tony sat Gavin Biery, the company IT chief. In Ryan’s chair, his cousin Dom Caruso sat waiting for him. Sam Driscoll leaned against the partition of the cubicle. Sam Granger and Rick Bell, chiefs of ops and analysis, respectively, were also there and standing around.
“Is this a surprise party?” Ryan asked. Dom and Sam both shrugged. They didn’t know why Tony had called them down, either.
But Wills had a pleased grin on his face. He called everyone over to his monitor. “So it took a while, mostly because the Paris op got in the way, but also because of the quality of the photos, but the facial-recog software finally came back with some hits on the guy that Sam and Dom saw meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi in Cairo the other day.”
“Cool,” said Dom. “Who is he?”
“Gavin,” said Wills. “You have the con.”
“Well”—Gavin Biery made his way through the scrum of men in the cubicle and sat down at Wills’s chair—“the software has narrowed Cairo man down to two probables.” He worked the keyboard for a moment and one of the pictures taken by Dom’s covert camera in the caravanserai in Cairo appeared on one half of the twenty-two-inch monitor.
Gavin said, “Facial recog says there is a ninety-three percent chance that this guy is…” He clicked his mouse. “This dude.” A picture appeared next to Dom’s photo of the man. It was a shot of a Pakistani passport for a man named Khalid Mir. The man wore glasses with round frames and had a trim beard, and he appeared to be several years younger than he looked in the Cairo photo.
Immediately Caruso said, “He’s changed a lot, but I think that’s the same guy.”
“Yeah?” said Wills. “Well then, your boy is a Khalid Mir, aka Abu Kashmiri, a known operative for Lashkar-e-Taiba over in Pakistan. They are nasty, and Khalid Mir used to be one of their big shots.”
“Used to be?”
Ryan answered before Wills, “One of Kealty’s drone attacks supposedly took him out in Pakistan, about three years ago. That was about the same time LeT started branching out and sending its operatives against Western targets. Before that they had been almost exclusively a Kashmir-based terror group who struck India and only India.”
Dom Caruso spun around and looked at Rvelyan. “No offense, Junior, but aren’t you supposed to know all these guys on sight?”
Jack shrugged. “If this guy was LeT fighting against India, and he died three years ago, he wasn’t exactly on my threat matrix for dangerous Western terrorists.”
“Makes sense. Sorry.”
“Not at all.”
Granger looked at Driscoll now. “Sam? You aren’t saying anything. Dom thinks this is the guy you saw in Cairo.”
Dom answered for his partner: “Sam pegged the guy at the time as a military officer.”
Driscoll nodded. “I was sure of it, but this photo does look like it could be the same guy.”
Gavin Biery smiled. “You thought he was a military officer, huh? Well the recog software says there is a ninety-six percent chance you are right.” He made a few more clicks of his mouse. The photo of Khalid Mir’s passport disappeared and was replaced by a grainy photo of a man in an olive green uniform crossing a street, carrying a briefcase and papers under his arm. This man looked older and fuller in the face than the passport photo of Khalid Mir.
Driscoll nodded forcefully. “That is the guy from Cairo.”
“I’ll be damned,” muttered Sam Granger. “Who is he, Tony?”
“He is Brigadier General Riaz Rehan.”
“General of what?”
“He’s in the Pakistani Defense Force. He is also the current director of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous of the ISI. A shadowy figure, even though he’s a department head and a general. There are no known photos of the man other than this one.”
“But wait,” Clark said. “If this is Cairo guy, can Khalid Mir be Cairo guy, too?”
“Could be,” said Biery, but he didn’t clarify.
Tony Wills admonished him. “Gavin, we talked about this. No dramatics, please.”
Biery shrugged. “Damn. We IT guys never get to have any fun. Okay, here’s the thing: Both of these pictures, the ISI guy and the LeT guy, have been in the database the CIA uses for facial recognition for a long time, but they were never matched with one another.”
“Why not?” asked Clark.
Gavin seemed glad to be asked this question. “Because facial-recognition algorithms aren’t perfect. They do better when the faces being compared are photographed from the same angle with the same light values. By using facial metrics, that is to say the distance between key landmarks, like eyes and ears and such, the software determines a statistical probability that it is looking at the same face. If there are too many anomalies, either because the faces don’t match very well or because the photographs are taken at different resolutions or one of the pictures is registering some movement of the subject, then the match probability goes down precipitously. We can solve for these external discrepancies somewhat by using something called the active appearance model, which removes the shape of the face and only uses the texture as a comparison.”
Dom Caruso said, “Sorry, Gavin, but we have to be back upstairs in ten minutes. Can you cut to the chase?”
“Dom, let’s indulge him for another minute, okay?” asked John.
Dom nodded, and Biery addressed Clark directly now, as thoughnowlge the other men were not in the room. “Anyway, the picture of Khalid Mir on his passport and the picture of Riaz Rehan crossing the street in Peshawar are just too different for current facial-recognition software to connect, because there are too many variances in angle, lighting, type of equipment used f
or the photograph, and of course Rehan is wearing sunglasses, which is not as much of a problem as it used to be before a newer software design began being used, but it sure doesn’t help. So these two pictures”—he drew his cursor back and forth between the two older pictures on the monitor—“do not match.” Then he took the cursor over to the Cairo picture taken three days earlier. “But both of these two pictures do match this picture, because it retains just enough of the characteristics of the other two. It’s in the middle, so to speak.”
Chavez asked, “So all three shots are definitely the same guy?”
Biery shrugged. “Definitely? No. We don’t like to use that term when discussing mathematical probabilities.”
“Okay, what is the probability?”
“It’s about a ninety-one percent chance Cairo dude, general dude, and dead dude are all the same dude.”
All eyebrows in the room raised high. Ryan spoke for the group: “Holy shit!”
“Holy shit indeed,” said Wills. “We have just learned that a known terrorist for LeT is not only not dead but is now a department chief for Pakistani intelligence.”
And Granger said, “And this department head for the ISI, who is, or was, an LeT operative, is now meeting with a known bad guy in Cairo.”
“I hate to state the obvious,” Dominic said, “but we need to learn more about this Rehan guy.”
Granger looked at his watch. “Well, that was the most productive lunch break we’ve had in a while. Let’s head back up to the conference room.”
Back upstairs, Granger filled Hendley in on the developments. Immediately the discovery made by Tony Wills and Gavin Biery superseded the Paris operation as the main focus of the meeting.
“This is big,” said Hendley, “but it’s also all very preliminary. I don’t want to jump the gun on this and leak intelligence to CIA or MI6 or anyone else that isn’t one hundred percent solid. We need to know more about this general in the ISI.”
Everyone agreed.
Hendley said, “How can we check this out?”
Ryan spoke first. “Mary Pat Foley. The National Counterterrorism Center knows as much about Lashkar as anyone. If we can find out more about Khalid Mir, before he became Riaz Rehan, maybe we can use that to link the two guys together.”
Hendley nodded. “We haven’t paid a visit on Mary Pat in a while. Jack, why don’t you give her a call and take her to lunch? You can run on down to Liberty Crossing and show her the Mir-Rehan connection. I bet she’ll find that very interesting.”
“I’ll give her a call today.”
“Okay. Keep our sources and methods under your hat, though.”
“Understood.”
“And Jack? Whatever you do, don’t mention that you just got back from Paris.”
The conference room erupted in tired laughter.
23
Sixty-one-year-old Judith Cochrane’s rental car came with in-dash GPS, but she did not set it for the forty-mile drive down from Colorado Springs. She knew the way to 5880 State Highway 67, as she had been here many times to visit her clients.
Her rented Chrysler pulled off South Robinson Avenue, and she stopped at the first gate of ADX Florence. The guards knew her by sight but still they looked over her documents and identification carefully before letting her pass.
It wasn’t easy for an attorney to see a client at Florence; it was harder still for an attorney to see a client housed in H Unit, and a Range 13 client was nigh on impossible to meet with face-to-face. Cochrane and the Progressive Constitution Initiative were in the later stages of drafting a lawsuit to address this issue, but for now she had to play by the rules of supermax.
As one of the most regular visitors to ADX Florence, Judith had come prepared. She would carry a purse with nothing of value in it because she would have to leave it in a locker, and she would not bother entering with her laptop or cell phone, because these would be taken from her immediately if they were on her person. She knew to wear comfortable shoes because she would be walking from the administration unit to her prisoner’s cell, a journey of hundreds of yards of hallways and covered outdoor walkways, and she made sure to dress in an especially conservative pantsuit so that the warden would not refuse her entry due to the preposterous accusation of provocative attire.
She also knew she’d be going through X-ray machines and full-body scanners, so she followed prison rules for visitors and wore a bra that was free of underwire.
She drove on past the guard shack, past a long, high wall. She looped around to the south and went through more remote gates, and as she drove slowly she encountered more guard towers, shotguns, assault rifles, German shepherds, and security cameras than she could possibly count. Finally she pulled into a large, half-empty parking lot outside the administration wing. Behind her, at the entrance to the lot, a row of bright yellow hydraulically operated spikes rose from slats in the concrete. She would not be leaving until the guard force here was ready for her to leave.
Judith Cochrane was met at her car door by a female guard, and together they walked through a series of secure doors and hallways in the administrative wing of the prison. There was no conversation between the two, and the guard did not offer to help the much older woman carry her briefcase or pull her laptop bag.
“Lovely morning,” Judith Cochrane said as they marched down a clean white passageway.
The guard ignored her comment but continued to lead the way with professionalism.
Most guards at ADX Florence didn’t think much of the attorneys who defended the prisoners incarcerated here.
Cochrane didn’t care, she could schlep her own bags, and she’d long ago decided that she much preferred the company of the inmates of supermax prisons to the guard force, who were, as far as she was concerned, just uneducated thugs.
Her worldview was as bleak and cruel as it was simple. Prison guards were like soldiers who were like police who were like any federal agent who wielded a gun. They were the bad guys.
After graduating and passing the bar in California, Judith Cochrane was hired by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group that focused on civil rigd o="1em">
After that, she worked for the ACLU for a dozen years, and then Human Rights Watch for several more. When Paul Laska funded the development of the Progressive Constitution Initiative, he’d recruited her personally to join the well-bankrolled liberal judicial advocacy group. He didn’t have to work too hard at getting her; Cochrane was thrilled to take a job that let her pick and choose her cases. Almost immediately after the start-up of the organization, the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, and to Judith Cochrane and her coworkers, that meant something truly terrible. She knew a witch hunt by the American government was on the horizon: Christians and Jews against Muslims.
For more than half a decade Cochrane was asked to appear on hundreds of television programs to talk about the evils of the U.S. government. She did as many appearances as she could while still defending her clients.
But when Ed Kealty was elected President, Judith Cochrane suddenly found herself blacklisted. She was surprised that the networks didn’t seem to care as much about civil rights when Kealty and his men ran the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon as they had during the Ryan years.
These days, with Kealty in the White House, Cochrane had as much time as she needed to work on her cases. She was unmarried with no children, and her work was her life. She had developed many close personal relationships with her clients. Relationships that could never lead to anything more than emotional closeness, as virtually all of her clients were separated from her by Plexiglas windows or iron bars.
She was also married, in the figurative sense, to her convictions, a lifelong love affair with her beliefs.
And it was these convictions that brought her here to supermax to meet with Saif Yasin.
She was led into the warden’s office, where the warden shook her hand and introduced her to a large black man in a starched blue uniform. “This is th
e unit commander for H. He will take you to Range 13 and to the FBI detail in charge of your prisoner. We don’t have actual custody of Prisoner 09341-000. We are essentially just the holding facility.”
“I understand. Thank you,” she said as she shook the uniformed man’s hand. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
The unit commander replied professionally, “Ms. Cochrane, this is just a formality, but we have our rules. May I see your state bar card?”
She reached into her purse and handed it over. The unit commander looked it over and handed it back to her.
The warden said, “This prisoner will be handled differently. I assume you have a copy of his Special Administrative Measures, as well as the directives for your meetings with him?”
“I have both of those documents. As a matter of fact, I have a team of attorneys preparing our response to them.”
“Your response?”
“Yes. We will be suing you shortly, but you must have known that already.”
“Well… I—”
Cochrane smiled thinly. “Don’t worry. For today, I promise to oblige your illegal SAMs.”
The unit commander was coe s taken aback, but the warden stepped in. He’d known Judith Cochrane long enough to remain unfazed, no matter what she said or accused him of. “We appreciate that. Originally we had planned to have you meet with him via ‘video visiting,’ like our other Special Housing Unit inmates, but the AG said you absolutely refused that arrangement.”
“I did. This man is in a cage, I understand that. But I need to have some rapport with him if I am to do my job. I can’t communicate with him on a television screen.”
The unit commander said, “We will take you to his cell. You will communicate to the prisoner via a direct phone line. It is not monitored; this has been ordered by the attorney general himself.”
“Very good.”
“We have a desk for you outside his cell. There is a partition of bulletproof glass; this will serve as an attorney/client visiting booth, just like if you were meeting with one of your other clients in the visitation center.”