The Assassin

by Andrew Britton

  Rashid Amin al-Umari had been a driven man since the fall of the Baath regime. His drive was mired in hate, which was not unusual in this tumultuous region, though a rage of such rigidity is rarely forged by one incident, as was the case with this young man. Despite his youth, al-Umari often felt that he had nothing left to look forward to. All that remained to him were memories. Memories of the good years, the years before an American bomb stripped his world away.

  He remembered that day with the kind of clarity that only enduring pain can provide. The Pentagon, of course, had called it an accident. Months later, unnamed U.S. government officials had, in a vague admission of sorts, described his mother and sister as “collateral damage,” but the fact that they had been innocent bystanders was glaringly obvious; the most callous observer could not argue otherwise. On the other hand, even Rashid could concede that his father’s activities had made him a valuable target. When the rubble was finally cleared, not enough of Karim al-Umari had remained to fill his grave, but the man’s legacy lived on.

  Karim al-Umari’s rise to power had begun long before Rashid had the presence of mind to truly appreciate it. In later years, the elder al-Umari rarely indulged his only son when it came to the intricacies of the family business — or the politics of his country — but for Rashid, a naturally astute young man, it had not been difficult to piece it all together. The signs were hard to miss, the whispers easily overheard. By 1988, Karim al-Umari was known and feared as a dominant figure in the Baath Party, made prominent by the wealth his construction empire generated, made powerful by his connection to the chairman himself. It was the newly installed leader of the party who saw fit to provide the fledgling company with several lucrative contracts in the late 1970s, shortly after his own succession to the aging Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. When it came to the expansion of the capital, it seemed as though the party’s funds were limitless; even the prolonged, costly war with Iran had failed to lessen the regime’s enthusiasm when it came to spending the people’s money, and with each new government building that cropped up in the capital, the family empire continued to reap the benefits.

  It was not, however, until 1985 that the elder al-Umari received his just reward. This prize came in the form of position, a chair on the Revolutionary Command Council, which carried with it control of the southern provinces of Muthanna and Qadisyah. It could scarcely have been a better gift. For Karim al-Umari, the oil-rich land offered an irresistible opportunity. He borrowed heavily against his company’s assets to purchase several refineries, and as with all his business ventures, it proved to be a successful gamble. It was al-Umari who first adopted Western extraction techniques, and al-Umari who proposed the construction of a pipeline to the Red Sea port of Jeddah. When his plan was implemented in 1989, his newly created Iraqi Southern Oil Company saw an immediate 30 percent boost in profits. One year after Iraqi oil started winding its way across the Saudi Arabian desert, Karim al-Umari’s personal net worth exceeded one billion U.S. dollars, and his position within the party was rivaled by only the chairman himself.

  The al-Umari oil conglomerate endured the occasional setback, of course. The first gulf war was extremely costly; Rashid’s father lost tens of millions over the course of the following decade, including the cost of repairing a bomb-shattered refinery south of Basra. In truth, though, Karim al-Umari barely noticed those losses; by the late 1990s, his considerable power was worth more to him than any amount of money. Unfortunately, that power also made him a target, and with the American invasion of 2003, it all came crumbling down.

  In the thirty-six months since the bombing that claimed the lives of his mother, father, and twelve-year-old sister in the Iraqi capital, Rashid had worked to align himself with the insurgency. It was difficult, at first; it was a world he did not understand, and his connections were tenuous at best. Ironically, it was the demise of Karim al-Umari that provided his only son — the sole heir to the al-Umari oil empire — with the means to make contact. In those early days, Rashid’s contributions were limited to his rather generous donations, most of which found their way to the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. Because of his ties to the former regime, the trust was hard won. He was forced to labor for months in the background, offering support from a distance, working his way into their confidence. The test, when it came, arrived in the form of information: the time and location of a meeting involving several high-level officials. When the empty building was not razed by a surgical airborne strike, it was believed that he was true to the cause, that he did not belong to the West, but to Moqtadr al-Sadr himself. With the trust came a place in the organization and the friendship of the most senior commanders. And then, on a frigid morning in late January, three days after he’d flown in from London via Amman, he’d been introduced to the German.

  No one seemed to know exactly where Erich Kohl had come from. More uncertain still was his role in the organization, though the fact that he rarely left the sheik’s side said much in itself. Some suggested that he’d been aligned with the Red Army Faction in the early nineties; others, that he had worked for the Stasi — the East German secret police — before the wall came down in ’89, though al-Umari had quietly pointed out at the time that the German appeared too young to have taken part in those events.

  In time, his interactions with the foreigner became more frequent. Their alliance was a strange one, born more out of their status as outsiders than anything else. Despite their respective ties to al-Sadr, Kohl remained an infidel, Rashid nothing more than the wealthy son of a Sunni power broker. Over the course of many conversations, al-Umari gradually revealed the depths of his frustration, the impotence he felt when the greatest victory they could claim was the lives of a few young soldiers on the road to Najaf. During these discussions, Rashid never noticed that the German’s words were few and far between; al-Umari did the talking for both of them, but he was never dissuaded, never brushed aside.

  Despite his rhetoric, the arrangement was largely satisfactory to Rashid al-Umari. He was doing his part, and in private moments, he could concede the truth: that no matter what he felt, that despite the terrible thoughts that drove him, he was content to speak with his money. He was a student of science, an academic… It was not in him to lift a weapon against his enemy, to find a man in his sights and squeeze the trigger. With this distinction in mind, the view from the periphery was enough to feed his inner rage; he felt no particular need to take the next logical step.

  All of that began to change on a cool, still night in late May. It was Rashid’s third trip to Sadr City in as many months, and although he took meticulously planned, circuitous routes out of London, he could not help but fear that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service — better known as MI6 — would eventually take an interest in his movements. This concern had been expressed to Kohl in hushed tones, along with his displeasure at having to leave so early in the ongoing offensive, despite its undeniable lack of success. It was a familiar refrain, but the German did not offer his usual sympathetic ear. Instead, he spoke quietly of another path. He murmured of men in the north who were waiting to act, and the names he used were instantly recognizable to al-Umari. Some were dated names that went back to his childhood, while others could still be found on every watch list in North America and Western Europe. Here, at last, was the possibility of a real victory. Rashid al-Umari listened intently for two hours and, the following morning, left Sadr City for the last time. He was not sorry to leave it behind.

  Since then, his meetings with the foreigner had been extremely limited, their last conversation coming ten days earlier in a musty apartment on the west side of Baghdad’s Jadriya district. In that meeting he’d been given the travel arrangements and the necessary papers, which might or might not have gotten him through an IPS checkpoint. Al-Umari was all too aware of the changing attitude in government service; the American-trained security forces could no longer be counted on to accept a generous bribe in return for safe passage, but as it turned out, he had not been forced to
face that particular risk. In fact, the whole trip — including the border crossing south of the al-Maze military airport — had been astonishingly easy. The German had suggested that this might be the case, but that had not stopped him from delivering a seemingly endless litany of security precautions. The foreigner’s words were still clear in his mind, but Rashid al-Umari was a young man with a young man’s stubborn mentality, and the Old City of Aleppo was not without its charms.

  The Aleppo souq, one of the oldest in the north and the best outside of Damascus, was somewhat crowded in the early evening. Old women and young wives, most wearing the traditional chador, others daringly clothed in Western attire, ventured out of their homes as the heat finally dropped to bearable levels. It was dark beneath thick canvas draped over stone archways, the individual stalls lit only by crude iron lanterns dangling precariously overhead. Rashid al-Umari turned left on Souq al-Zarb and began making his way through the city market, moving slowly in an attempt to take it all in.

  It was truly a wondrous sight. It had been many years since he had seen such an array of goods; it seemed as though there was little one could wish for that could not be found in these crowded streets. Headscarves and jalabiyyas, the long robes worn by men and women alike, could be found in every size and color imaginable. He passed stalls bearing perfumes and spices, fresh meats and vegetables. He turned his head to gaze down one narrow hara and saw row after row of gleaming yellow metal. Another corridor was lined with stands heaped with antique silver jewelry. The sights of the bazaar battled only with the sounds; al-Umari was assaulted from every direction by the calls of Syrian vendors and the guarded replies of their potential customers. The steady sound of passing traffic to the east fought to drown out the tinny whine of an American pop song, which was emanating from a child’s battered radio. It was, Rashid thought, completely chaotic, and yet, there was also something strangely controlled about the whole scene, for these were a people separated only by the worn counters over which they traded.

  Certainly, it could not be compared to his own city. One could hardly turn around in Baghdad without seeing another American patrol. The superior smiles were always evident on those clean-shaven faces, despite the vast losses they had sustained. How can they be so persistent? Rashid wondered, the anger welling up as it always did. Why can they not accept that they have failed? It was incomprehensible to this young man that the Americans could be so ignorant of history. Had the British Empire not learned that the Iraqi people could not be ruled? The Europeans had certainly tried, of course, caught up in the New Imperialism which had dominated the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. Al-Umari smiled as he considered what Britain’s greed for new territory in the Middle East had actually gotten them: disastrous losses in Afghanistan at the hands of Pashtun tribesmen, followed by two Anglo-Afghan wars, which resulted in the complete withdrawal of British forces by 1919. His own people had fought equally well the following year. That proud, bloody rebellion against colonial rule had earned the Iraqi people their independence in 1932.

  Al-Umari mused over that point as he left the market on the west side and found a small coffee shop. Soon he was seated on a warm wooden bench outside, sipping from a small cup of shai, the hot, sweet tea favored by the Aleppines. Iraqis on both sides of the Sunni-Shia divide could point to the uprising in 1920 as one of the few times they had worked together in defense of their country, and that was something else to consider.

  Despite his background, Rashid al-Umari did not believe that the Shiites should be denied a place in the new Iraq. What he had seen in Sadr City, however, caused him to distrust the capabilities of the insurgency. It was reason enough to exclude the Mahdi Army, but there was something else: despite their ill-defined allegiances, al-Umari rightly suspected that they would not be able to get past the attempt on Nuri al-Maliki. It had been deemed necessary; the man was too closely aligned with the West. The fact that he had survived was not at all important. From all accounts, he was in no state to resume his duties, and with the prime minister out of the picture, the Americans were stripped of one of their most powerful allies in the region. It was only a start, of course. Their allies were many, including the oil companies, which had been so quick to prostitute themselves after the fall of Baghdad.

  It was so typical, Rashid thought bitterly. History always repeated itself; the greatest of empires were also the greediest. After all, what really separated the current American government from the British imperialists of the twentieth century? The answer was simple: nothing. In the end, the only real objective was to enrich the invading country, and no matter what the Americans said, their intent was not benevolent. One only had to look at the Western contractors pouring into the region to see that.

  But what of my ambition? Rashid Amin al-Umari lifted the cup to his lips once more as he considered that point. The plan they had set in motion, the laborious, dangerous weeks spent making contact, would benefit his people as a whole. Of that, he had no doubt. He was sincere in his desire to liberate the Iraqi people from their most recent oppressors, though his motivation was decidedly less pure in its origins.

  Yes, he finally admitted, I am almost as selfish as the Americans.

  Almost, but not quite.

  CHAPTER 8

  LONDON

  “This is going to take forever,” Naomi finally said.

  “Not forever,” Liz Peterson replied. She shot the younger woman a teasing grin and said, “But close.”

  They were seated in identical chairs in a secure room on the fourth floor of the Ministry of Defence, a nondescript eight-story building faced in pale Portland stone. The room was cool, dim, and windowless, which didn’t bother Naomi in the least, as the sight of rain drifting over the city for the third day in a row would not have improved her sour mood. They had been staring at the computer screen for nearly two hours now, and the young CIA analyst was beginning to think they were chasing a ghost.

  As Peterson worked the keyboard, Kharmai studied the equipment laid out on the table. She was somewhat surprised at the quality of the MoD’s spectrograph equipment, though she didn’t know why this should be. If anyone could come close to matching America’s bloated intelligence budget, it was the British. Some of the specific innovations were new to her, but she knew the process inside and out; after all, it was Bell Labs, her first employer, that had pioneered the use of voice-recognition technology back in the 1940s. Things had come a long way since then. Significant advances over the past few decades had done away with the cumbersome magnetic tape and photographic paper of the analog spectrograph. Digital signal processing, or DSP, had since taken its place, though in some ways, the new equipment was almost as tedious to use.

  The British computer engineer caught her curiosity. “Have you guys replaced all that junk your contractors came up with in the sixties?” she asked, with a smile. Peterson knew about Naomi’s years before the Agency.

  “I couldn’t really tell you,” Kharmai replied honestly. “We obviously don’t have anything as good over here, but I’m not sure about Langley. Last time I checked, they had a contract with Motorola in the works, but I’m not sure if they ever bought the gear.”

  “If your Admin Directorate had anything to do with it, they probably decided to look for something cheaper. Our budget people are the same way; they’d take the cost of this stuff out of our salaries if they thought they could get away with it.”

  Naomi smiled in agreement. Liz Peterson was the “man in mind” she’d mentioned to Emmett Mills the previous day. She had first met Peterson at an embassy function shortly after arriving in-country, and they had hit it off immediately, despite the fact that they were technically competitors. On the weekends they frequently met for drinks at the Dorchester Hotel, and while they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, both women habitually took those opportunities to dig for a little information. They both knew it was part of the job, and they took it all in stride. Naomi was well aware, for instance, that her access to Wh
itehall’s database had been approved by somebody much higher on the pay scale than Liz Peterson, despite the informal nature of her request. She also knew that whatever they managed to turn up would soon land on the prime minister’s desk, most likely within an hour of discovery. Sharing information with one’s allies was the cost of doing business, but that wasn’t much of a price to pay, especially when they managed to come up with something interesting.

  Peterson sat up in her seat as the numbers paused on the monitor. Fixing her pale blue eyes on the screen, she brushed a strand of blond hair out of her face and brought up the relevant information.

  “You have something?”

  “Maybe,” Peterson replied, a hint of excitement coming through. She leaned forward and traced the amplitude waves with her index finger. “Just going by the visual, that’s a… sixteen-point match.”

  “Good enough for a probable,” Naomi murmured. After purchasing their first analog spectrographs in the late 1970s, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology had adopted, for lack of a better system, the forensic standards used by U.S. law enforcement at the time. A “probable” identification was assigned to any match greater than fifteen but less than twenty points on a given spectrogram. In other words, there was an 80 percent chance that the voiceprint in the MoD’s database matched the voice found on the tape in al-Umari’s Knightsbridge home.