Presence of Mine Enemies

by Stephen England

  He wasn’t very good, Harry realized, watching as Yassin seized an opening—only to find it wasn’t one, rocked back as his lithe opponent landed a gloved hook to the side of his helmet. At least not yet—everyone had to start somewhere.

  But he recovered, darting forward with a flurry of blows buffeting his opponent’s arms and shoulders. Forcing him to give ground.

  “Go Yassin!” Harry shouted, forcing enthusiasm into his voice as he clapped Reza on the shoulder, the two of them standing there on the edge of the ring.

  Looking on as the boxers circled, feinting in and out. Trading blows which seemed to build in intensity until a buzzer sounded from a phone laying to one side of the ring, both boxers dropping their gloved fists as if recognizing an agreed-upon signal, the Arab cuffing Yassin playfully on the shoulder. “Another time, man—you’re getting better.”

  “Ibrahim!” Yassin called out, vaulting over the ropes of the ring as he came forward to greet Harry, embracing him fiercely. “I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

  “I dragged him along,” Reza said, grinning. “Screaming and kicking.”

  “Marwan,” Yassin said, glancing back over his shoulder as his sparring partner came up behind him, mopping sweat from his forehead and shoulders with a towel. “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. . .Ibrahim Abu Musab al-Almani.”

  “Salaam alaikum,” the young man smiled, extending his hand to Harry. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

  Finally? An alarm flashed somewhere in Harry’s brain, his eyes narrowing—watching the boxer carefully as he forced out the expected response. “Wa’ alaikum as-salaam, brother.”

  “It’s good to have you join us tonight,” Marwan went on without seeming to notice the hesitation. “From what Yassin tells me, I understand you fought in Syria?”

  Syria. His words struck Harry like a blow to the face, his mind racing. Just how much had they said? Who else had they told?

  He found himself incapable of stopping his eyes from darting to Yassin’s face—a look of accusation. Of warning.

  The young Moroccan laughed, shaking his head. “Relax, man—Marwan’s a brother. You’re among friends.”

  You’re in no position to judge, Harry wanted to say, but didn’t, glaring at Yassin for another long moment. There would be time enough to deal with him later.

  “Yes, I did,” he responded finally, turning back toward Marwan. “Once the bombings started. . .I couldn’t stand by and watch anymore. I had to do something—had to go to the aid of my fellow believers.”

  “Subhanallah,” Marwan exclaimed softly, his dark eyes gleaming at Harry's admission. Glory be to God. “A man I trained with here at this very club when I first started boxing went to fight against the apostate in Damascus.”

  He paused a moment, his voice changing ever so slightly. “He was killed three weeks later, in an airstrike shortly after he arrived.”

  “Mash'allah.” Harry smiled, reaching out to grip the young man's shoulder firmly. As God has desired. “The blood of the martyrs, it is a beautiful thing in the sight of God.”

  “Allahu akbar,” he heard Reza breathe from behind him, an exclamation of praise echoed softly by the other two young men.

  Time to move on.

  “You’re a good fighter,” he said, nodding toward the ring over Marwan’s shoulder as he changed the subject. “I used to spar myself, once—when I was in Gymnasium back in Germany.”

  “Were you any good?”

  “I liked to think that I was,” Harry smiled in answer to Yassin’s question. “I was a very proud young man in those days. And very far from the truth, as are all who are filled with such pride.”

  “You up for joining me for a round?” Marwan asked, throwing his towel over onto a duffel bag piled in the corner. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

  It took Harry a moment to realize the invitation was being directed at him, and then he shook his head, chuckling as he met the young man’s eyes. “The last time I put on the gloves, I doubt you had left your mother’s breast.”

  He saw something flash in Marwan’s eyes, as if he had taken the reference to age as a slight—Reza’s voice distracting him in that moment. “But you fought bravely against the safawi in Syria.”

  “I fought in the way of Allah, yes,” Harry replied, turning to his friend. “But that was actual fighting, not this. . .child’s play, as different from the real thing as night is from day. And once you’ve tasted the reality, it’s very hard to ever go back.”

  6:26 P.M. British Summer Time

  The Nell

  London

  “So the wife tells me, now and again,” Phillip Greer replied, seemingly unperturbed by Marsh’s outburst. He took a long sip of his beer before continuing, pausing to wipe the foam from his lips.

  “I can’t be looking at this kind of thing, Phillip,” the former director-general went on without waiting for him. “I am under suspicion of having ordered his death, and these are—”

  “Arthur Colville’s financial records,” Greer interjected calmly, adjusting his glasses as he leaned forward, tapping the folder with a long forefinger. “And if you’ll turn to page 11, you will see something very interesting.”

  Marsh obeyed grudgingly, his eyes running down the long columns of figures displayed on the page. Hundreds of transactions, incoming and outgoing. “What am I looking at here?” he asked finally, glancing up.

  “Eight years ago, the Daily Standard was on the brink of insolvency,” the counterintelligence officer responded, using the name of Colville’s paper, “and then, Colville began receiving money from right-wing groups in the United States. First a few thousand pounds a month, then more. ‘Donations’ in the tens of thousands, pouring in almost every month from over three dozen organizations.”

  Marsh shook his head. “He was telling them what they wanted to hear. Confirming their apocalyptic vision of ‘Eurabia’ as they wished to see it, and they chose to finance the furtherance of their narrative. I don’t see how any of this involves us.”

  “It involves us, Julian,” Greer said, his eyes narrowing behind the glasses, “because from what I’ve seen thus far, I can state with measured confidence that most of these groups simply don’t exist.”

  “Then where is the money coming from?”

  Greer raised a suggestive eyebrow. “Where do you think? Who’s spent the last decade steadily building up right-wing elements all across Europe, picking out the most extreme voices and ensuring they had the funding to drown out all the rest?”

  Russia, Marsh thought, a sudden chill seeming to wash over him, knowing all too well to what Greer referred. No one had ever done influence operations like the Russians, and these last few years. . .he caught himself suddenly, looking sharply across the table at his colleague. “What exactly are you saying, Phillip? My God. . .you're not trying to tell me that Russian money was behind the terrorist attack on Her Majesty? It's—”

  “Too early to say,” the counter-intelligence officer said cautiously. “Earlier still to say whether such was by design. Colville's money was, we know that much. And we now know that his money was not his own. Everything else is speculation, and will remain such until we can gather more intelligence. I think you can now see why I asked for this meet, Julian. I need your help.”

  “No, you don't,” Marsh responded, shaking his head. “You need far more than I'm in any position to provide, Phillip—this needs to go straight to the DG. You're in a position to do so, and he can—”

  “No, Julian, I can’t.”

  “In the name of God, why not?”

  “The Colville affair,” Greer began slowly, seeming to weigh his words with more than usual care, “is one which Ashworth is desirous to put behind the Service—permanently. He would prefer that his own tenure not be. . .tarnished, by any association with the mistakes of his predecessor.”

  My mistakes. Marsh drew a deep breath, only too aware of how his career had ended. And yet, Ashworth’s instincts w
eren’t wrong—in this brave new world of relative public transparency, the Service needed good press. Needed it fast.

  And they weren’t going to get it by re-opening their investigation of a man they were suspected of having assassinated.

  But Greer wasn’t done. “When I came across the first evidence that the source of this money might not be as represented, I went to Ashworth with my concerns. And was ordered to leave it alone.”

  “And you didn’t, did you?”

  A quiet smile. “You’ve known me for more than twenty years, Julian. You know I follow my own lights.”

  Chapter 3

  9:42 P.M. Central European Summer Time

  The apartment

  Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium

  “. . .she asked me to spar with her the other day, bro, honest. Right there in the club.”

  “And?”

  “And I told her ‘no’, of course,” Harry heard Yassin respond, the two brothers bantering ahead of him as they ascended the stairs to their third-floor apartment. “I’m not fighting a woman! She was a beauty, though—”

  “As beautiful as Nora?” Reza asked, naming his girlfriend—a young French college student whom Harry had met a few weeks before at the mosque. She had, Reza had told him, converted to Islam the previous year. “I doubt it.”

  He shook his head at the folly of it all, feeling anger build within him as the three of them moved down the dimly lit corridor, pausing outside the door as Reza fumbled with his key in the latch.

  He’d managed to keep his head down for two months, stay off the radar. All of that, potentially blown by the loose lips of these fools. It was possible that he would have to leave Brussels, to go on the run. Again.

  Go black.

  “. . .isn’t that right, Ibrahim?” he heard Yassin ask, glancing back at him as they entered the flat. “You’ve been quiet, man, is—”

  “And you’ve been talking far too much,” Harry hissed, something seeming to snap within him as the door clicked shut behind them, the anger boiling over.

  He turned on Yassin before the younger man could react, his forearm driving into the young Moroccan’s throat as he forced him back against the thin wall of the apartment, the drywall seeming to shudder from the impact. “Who else have you told?”

  “Easy, man, easy,” he heard Reza protest, placing a hand on his shoulder, but he shook him off—his blue eyes boring fiercely into Yassin’s own as he pressed harder.

  “Answer me now! Who have you been telling about me?”

  Yassin shook his head desperately, taken completely off-guard by the sudden outburst of violence. “Mar-Marwan,” he stammered out in a near panic, “and a couple more of the brothers I know from the mosque. No one else, no one I couldn’t trust.”

  “Ibrahim, my brother—let him go!” Reza exclaimed again, this time pulling Harry away from his brother. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “No one you couldn’t trust?” Harry demanded, ignoring Reza as he moved back toward where Yassin still leaned against the wall, rubbing his sore throat—jabbing out a long forefinger toward his young friend. “And just who are you to make that decision, tell me that? Who are you?”

  “Ibrahim, just calm down,” Reza attempted to interpose, “there’s no need for this. We can—”

  “This Marwan,” Harry spat, cutting him off as he turned to glare at the younger brother, “how long have you known him?”

  “A month and a half, two—I think,” Reza replied, shaking his head in incomprehension. “Why does any of that matter?”

  “How do you know he’s not an agent of the Sûreté de l'État?” Harry shot back, using the French name for the Belgian intelligence service otherwise known as the VSSE. “Of the French secret service?”

  He saw Reza flinch at his words and pressed them home, his anger fully real. If they realized he was here. . .

  It would only be a matter of time before the Agency came after their own. And after all that he had done in the UK—there could be no redemption.

  “But neither of you ever even thought about any of that, did you?” Harry swore, turning his back on both of them as he stormed into the kitchen. “I went to fight in the jihad in Syria, I sacrificed everything in the cause of Allah. But if I am arrested now, if the secret police come through that door because you just had to talk, it’s all for nothing. My usefulness, at an end. An end, do you understand that?”

  He shook his head, his hands closing around the curved back of the lone wooden chair at the table as he forced himself to calm down. Message sent.

  He didn’t know what the odds were of them having spoken to an actual intelligence service asset were, didn’t care to find out. He’d give it a couple days, then make his excuses and leave them—move on, he knew not where.

  No sense in trusting to fate. As many times as it had betrayed him before.

  He looked up to see Reza standing in the doorway of the kitchen, his dark eyes regarding him carefully.

  “Ibrahim. . .” the engineering student began slowly, almost apologetically. As if shamed by the knowledge that what he had said was all too true. “There was a reason we told Marwan. . .and the others, of the part you played in Syria. We’ve been wanting to strike a blow ourselves in the struggle of God. Here.”

  4:51 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time

  Russell Senate Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  “You will lower your voice, Roy,” Scott Ellis announced firmly, leaning back in his chair, “or you will leave. If I wanted to be yelled at, I’d go on talk radio. I’m not going to sit and take it here in my own office.”

  “We had a deal,” Roy Coftey repeated for the second time in as many minutes, his voice lower this time—his eyes blazing as he glared across the desk at the Senate Majority Leader. The man he had made the Majority Leader.

  Gratitude is a disease of dogs.

  “The operative word there, Roy,” Ellis responded, seemingly unmoved, “is ‘had.’ We had a deal. The political realities have changed.”

  Coftey shook his head, as if incapable of believing what he was hearing. “The realities are unchanged. Our nation was attacked not seven months ago, Scott—our allies continue to suffer these ‘lone wolf’ attacks on what seems like a weekly basis. We’ve never needed a robust intelligence capability more than we do at this very moment. Those are the realities.”

  Ellis let out a heavy sigh. “Look, Roy. . .I get it. You and I have both spent a long time in this town, and on this issue—we’re not so very far apart.”

  Here it comes, Coftey thought cynically, recognizing the majority leader’s tone of voice.

  The one the former prosecutor reserved for cajoling influential donors and the despised “electorate.” Equal parts flattery and empathy—the way he would have stroked a chicken right before popping its head off growing up on the farm in Oklahoma. It wasn’t going to work on him.

  “I was glad to kill SB286 for you,” Ellis continued, “not just because our deal and your resulting change of party affiliation secured the Republican majority in the Senate, but because, between you and I—I genuinely felt that the President’s allies in the Senate were taking things too far. You can make the argument that the intelligence community has needed to be reined in, but they were going to gut it. They—”

  “So now we’re gutting it,” Coftey said flatly, not giving an inch. He saw Ellis raise a hand in protest and plowed on, ignoring him. “I’m not one of your donors, so don’t sit there and condescend to me, Scott. I’ve been in this town too long for that. You’re telling me that we’re going to do the wrong thing, because we don’t have the backbone to do the right one.”

  “I’m telling you that we aren’t going to have the votes to do what I’d like to do, Roy,” the New Mexico senator responded, letting out a deep sigh as he reached for the smartphone laying in front of him on his desk. His thumb moving across the screen for a long moment before he extended it toward Coftey. “You’ve seen this, I’m sure.” />
  A nod. It was the kind of thing he hadn’t seen since Vietnam, the former Green Beret realized, staring at the photograph displayed on-screen. The lifeless, partially-charred bodies of men and women strewn across a desolate courtyard—the strangely perfect visage of a young boy laying half-buried in rubble.

  “Images like this one, of the civilian casualties from our drone strike in the Sinai, have been going viral for almost a week now,” Ellis said quietly when he looked back up. “I doubt there’s anyone in the world with Internet access who hasn’t seen them or at least heard about them. They’re shifting public opinion, Roy, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is Abu Ghraib all over again.”

  “Can we even be sure this is really them?” Coftey asked, leaning back in his chair as he stared coldly across the desk at the Senate Majority Leader. “Who’s to say this picture isn’t from one of Bashar Assad’s bombing raids on civilians in Syria? Or even the last time the IDF rolled into Gaza?”

  “God, you’re such a cynic,” Ellis exclaimed in seeming disbelief, shaking his head. “You just don’t get it, do you? Whether the picture is real or not—whether it’s from the Sinai or not—doesn’t matter. What matters is that people out there believe it to be real. And they believe that we did it.”

  Unbelievable. Coftey bit back a contemptuous laugh as he looked away from Ellis, out the window—the dome of the Capitol itself visible through the trees, just across Constitution Avenue to the southwest. “So what you’re telling me is that our national security stance is now governed by what people think on the Internet.”

  “No, I’m telling you that circumstances have changed, Roy,” Ellis snapped, his patience seeming to reach an end. “Don’t be obtuse. We both know what we would have once liked to have accomplished, but public opinion is no longer on our side. So you can either get onboard, or get run over. Those are our—your—choices.”

  “With respect, Scott,” Coftey began, a dangerous light glittering in his eyes as he rose to his feet, buttoning his suit jacket, “I’ve heard that song before.”