by Isaac Hooke
"Let's just say I've done my homework. If you procured some lead aprons and film badges to use as dosimeters, I could probably put together the aforementioned ingredients for you. It's really not that hard. That's what you're doing, isn't it? Building a bomb?"
Shi shook his head angrily. "You are spouting words whose meaning you know nothing about. You have read something about nuclear weapons in an Al Qaeda or Islamic State propaganda magazine, alongside recipes for making homemade ricin from castor beans, but you could not design a nuclear bomb if your life depended on it. You have no idea how firing circuits work, nor how to time blasting caps. You are a moron."
Ethan smiled politely. Perhaps it would have been better to bring his rifle after all. More intimidating that way. "You forget that my father serves on the board of a nuclear reactor project. I wonder, do you treat all of your prospective employers so poorly during the job interview?"
Shi looked away. "I'm sorry. My mouth gets the better of me sometimes."
"No, it's my fault," Ethan said. "I provoked you. I'm actually glad you're fighting for us. We need all the help we can get. You are a Muslim, aren't you?" He glanced at Shi's keffiyeh.
The scientist bowed his head in acknowledgment. "I have converted, yes."
"So you are waging jihad, too, in your own way."
Shi's eyes gleamed, like he was privy to some secret knowledge. It was a look Ethan had seen often among the mujahadeen.
"I am doing my part," Shi said. "While the foot soldiers fight in the trenches, I am at work designing something that will end this war decisively. Assad and the West are in for a very big surprise in the coming months. We're going to change history."
Ethan felt a chill travel down his spine and he knew in that moment the scientist was absolutely guilty, and must die.
Ethan lowered his voice conspiratorially and leaned across the table. "Do you need help acquiring nuclear materials? I know key personnel involved with the Jordanian reactor project. And certain smugglers..."
Shi laughed disdainfully. "I have my own contacts, but I will keep your offer in mind."
"Plutonium-239?" Ethan said.
"Uranium-235," Shi corrected with a smug smile, apparently enjoying his display of insider knowledge.
But then the grin left Shi's face as he realized he'd said too much. The scientist abruptly pushed his chair from the table. "I must go."
"Wait, aren't you going to give me your email?"
"No." Shi stood.
"How am I supposed to keep in touch with you about the reactor project?"
Shi scribbled something onto a napkin and tossed it on the table, then rejoined his bodyguards.
Ethan considered doing the deed right then with the Makarov hidden in his boot, but decided there would be too many witnesses. Plus he would probably end up in a shootout with the bodyguards.
He let Shi go, and instead glanced at the napkin. A Yahoo email address was written upon it.
When Ethan got back to the compound he sent the account ID to Sam along with a monitor request. He mentioned he had proven the target's intent, and that the scientist was looking to smuggle Uranium-235 into the country. It wasn't the fissile supplier like Sam had wanted, but it was the next best thing.
The following night he checked his email and found a courtesy message from Sam. Normally she divulged very little information regarding other operations, but on the rare occasion, probably when she felt he could use a morale boost, she told him the positive effects of intel he had sent.
Apparently Yahoo had given her team access to the scientist's account. Most of his messages were innocuous, but a few encrypted emails drew her attention. Though her team hadn't been able to decipher them, the first batch were dated from a time before the scientist had come to Syria, and were likely from Islamic State recruiters. The later batch of encrypted messages had been sent from Syria to Chinese addresses. Sam had the owners of the destination email addresses traced, and determined most of them belonged to employees of a trading company in China that was currently under investigation for illegally shipping weapons components into Pakistan. It was very likely the fissile supplier.
She signed her message with: Well done.
It would be up to her and the Agency to intercept the fissile material. Meanwhile Ethan would do his part in Syria: since Sam hadn't mentioned any modifications to the termination objective, the hit was still a go.
He logged out and left the compound. It was late evening, after the fifth prayer of the day, and he had some things to do before curfew.
eighteen
Ethan made his way through the busy fashion district. Power had been made available to most of the city that night as a "gift" for good behavior, and the residents were out in force. Cars and taxis jockeyed for position on the road, honking almost constantly. Pedestrians moved to and fro among the sidewalks, the neon lights of the clothing stores vying for their attention alongside the street vendors with their greasy fares of falafel and shawarma.
Ethan moved on to a quieter neighborhood near the old cemetery. The working street lamps made the area feel safer than on previous occasions. He passed two Islamic State checkpoints and reached his destination a few minutes later.
He studied the apartment building, picking out Shi's balcony on the second floor. It was covered in a canopy like the other balconies—that ruled out sniping the scientist while he was home at night. The glow from within told him the man was still awake. Probably getting in some good laptop time while he could.
Ethan's gaze drifted to the canopied balcony beside it. Alzena's. Perhaps he could use her apartment to abet the hit.
He decided against it. For her safety, it was better to minimize her involvement from that point forward. Besides, she was a distraction. He had been thinking about her much too often these past few days.
He returned his attention to Shi's balcony. Ethan could go inside and attempt to kill the man directly, but with the bodyguards present, he gauged his chances of success at around fifty percent. No, better to take the guaranteed shot. The sniper shot.
He had two options, as far as the timing of the hit went. He could perform it at noon, when Shi left the apartment. Or at eight o'clock, when the scientist returned. The entrance was poorly lit compared to the rest of the street, so that even if the power was active the night of the operation, Ethan would need a night vision scope—which he didn't have. That ruled out the evening option. But even if he performed it in the day, he needed a proper sniping location...
The closed bakery behind him was housed in the first floor of a three-story apartment building—the second and third floors were residential suites. Ethan walked to the main entrance and pressed a few of the intercom buttons. The ongoing power meant those buttons still worked.
The initial person to answer, a mean-sounding lady, refused to let him in. Ethan pretended he had a delivery but she didn't believe him. The second voice that came over the intercom belonged to a grumpy old man who promptly told Ethan to stuff his dick in a camel.
Ethan retrieved the credit-card sized leather case from his pocket. During his Afghan and Iraq deployments, lockpicking had become a hobby. There had been so much downtime between missions that he'd become a master—at one point he'd ordered almost every practice lock out there and could beat each of them in under thirty seconds.
But he'd let the skill slide. His deep cover operations made it hard to acquire the locks he needed to practice. Still, like driving or skiing, it wasn't a skill you lost entirely.
He took out the three bump keys that were supposedly designed for Syrian locks. He glanced in either direction, confirmed that no one was around, then tried all three.
The first two wouldn't even enter the lock, while the third only partially fit. He used his phone as a mallet to tap the key anyway, applying a small amount of torque in an attempt to catch the pins outside the locking mechanism. No good.
He could have made his own bump key by taking a picture of the keyhole and marking the
depth of each pin with one of his picks, then sending a mockup to a 3D print service like Shapeways or KeyMe and getting the key couriered to Syria, but why bother when he had the skill to pick the lock?
Ethan replaced the bump keys and chose one of the picks, basically a thin file with a hook on the end, and set to work. After a frustrating couple of minutes, he chose another pick and tried "raking" the lock by placing the tool all the way in, right to the back, and applying torque while slowly drawing it out. That did the trick.
Inside, Ethan ignored the cramped, ancient elevator, worried that it might trap him between floors if the power went out, and he took the stairwell instead.
The rooftop door proved locked. He tried the bump keys. The first was a perfect fit. A few taps of his cellphone later and Ethan was on the open terrace.
He made his way between the blocky rooftop water tanks and television antennas. When he reached the ledge, he had a clear view of the apartment building across the street. The poorly lit main entrance was in plain view. The sun would be overhead and slightly behind him at noon. Basically the perfect spot to perform the hit.
He lined up his scope with Shi's balcony, but as expected he couldn't see through the thick canopy. He set aside the Dragunov, grabbed his TruPulse 360 and did a quick range check on the lower entrance. It was difficult in the low light, but eventually he got the finder lined up with the lobby. Thirty-three meters. An extremely easy shot with the 4x scope.
He crossed to the rear of the rooftop. There was a shared courtyard in back, hemmed in by neighboring apartment buildings. In the dim light he made out a shoulder-high cinder block fence, blocking off the far side. That courtyard would serve as a good exfil route, because he certainly wasn't going to leave by the front door after completing the hit. Too bad there was no fire escape. He returned downstairs—there was no way to get to the courtyard from the lobby, either. That complicated things, but not overly so.
Ethan visited the supply room in the barracks the next morning to inquire about rope. The Syrian on duty explained there was none left, and no inventory was forthcoming for a few weeks. Since the man also ran the black market currency service, Ethan obtained the equivalent of five hundred US dollars in Syrian pounds. He wanted to exchange more, but the Syrian didn't have enough on him.
When Ethan got back from checkpoint duty that night he left a quick encrypted message for Mufid telling the clothing store owner to secure him a static climbing rope, one centimeter in diameter, fifty meters in length, or, barring that, several vehicular tow ropes that could be strung together. He instructed the man to be at his shop at eight o'clock in the evening the next day to deliver them.
Picking up some bike gloves from a street hawker along the way, Ethan met Mufid at the designated hour. The shopkeeper had managed to procure a static climbing rope, fifty meters in length, precisely as asked. He also gave Ethan the intel he had requested previously—the GPS coordinates of various Islamic State buildings, including the destination of the scientist's motorcade—on a memory stick.
"Do I get my money now?" Mufid asked.
"I do have a small amount for you, yes." Ethan paid Mufid the Syrian pounds he had obtained from the money changer.
Mufid accepted the amount with a puzzled expression. "Where is my fifty thousand?"
Ethan wrote an IOU in Arabic for the amount of fifty thousand US dollars, signing it with an alias Sam used in the Middle East. "Bring this to a US embassy."
"But there are no US embassies in Syria!"
"Then go to Turkey or Jordan. Or wait until the US embassy reopens in Damascus." The embassy had closed down in February 2012, and probably wouldn't reopen for some time.
Mufid threw up his arms theatrically. "But that could be years from now! This is ridiculous. You promised me fifty thousand."
"And so I did. You're holding it in your hands."
Mufid fumed a moment longer, then pocketed the note. "American embassy, you say?" He stamped his foot loudly. "To hell with you and your American friends! What help have the Americans ever given us? While Assad was busy gassing us with his chemicals, the Americans watched idly, never coming to our aid. But now that the Islamic State has come, the Americans suddenly show an interest again. The West is full of two-faced, cynical, selfish liars concerned only with their own national welfare."
"I won't disagree with you," Ethan said. "But are you done your little tirade? Good. Because here's what I want you to do for me in the coming days."
He instructed the shopkeeper to buy a piece of flatbread from the bakery at eleven thirty in the morning each day, and then to wait at a nearby street corner until twelve thirty. He was to continue that daily routine until Ethan showed up to retrieve the bread.
"Why should I do this?" Mufid demanded. "You have not paid me my due! You have given me a pittance, along with a useless piece of paper."
"Do this," Ethan said. "And I'll give you the same pittance the next time we meet. And maybe another piece of paper."
Greed flashed in Mufid's eyes, though he quickly hid it. The 'pittance' Ethan offered was likely the same or more than the clothing store pulled in after a month of sales. For a chance to earn double or triple that amount with very little work, of course Mufid would jump at the opportunity—it came as no surprise when the man eventually consented to the task.
Ethan slid the coil of rope over his shoulder and hiked to the building across from his target. Once there, someone actually buzzed him inside that time. He had come earlier than the previous night, which may have had something to do with it.
At the rooftop he surveyed the steel supports holding up the water tanks. Four bars held up each tank, though they were all fairly corroded. The television antennas were little better.
Ethan looped one end of the rope around the steel support of the water tank closest to the courtyard anyway. He threaded roughly half the rope through the bar, then tossed both ends over the ledge. The dangling cords gathered into a pile on the dried grass of the courtyard below.
Ethan placed the bike gloves beside the ledge and tested the rope, grabbing both sections and leaning back to put his weight on the anchor. When he was satisfied that it would hold, he let his body dangle entirely over the edge. Seemed good.
He returned to the snipe position on the far side, dropped, and set down the Dragunov. He retrieved his Android and readied himself, taking a few deep breaths. Then he activated a timer on the cellphone and stuffed it in his pocket. He scooped up his rifle, dashed to the far side of the rooftop and yanked on the bike gloves. He grabbed the two sections of climbing rope and slid them between his legs and up across his right buttock, over his chest, about his left trapezius muscle, across his upper back, over his right deltoid muscle, along the outside of his right palm, finally looping the twin strands over his hand and gripping the ropes firmly between his fingers. The dulfersitz method.
Ethan slid the rifle strap over his neck so that the weapon hung over his chest and wouldn't interfere with his descent, then he rappelled down, his right hand functioning as the lead, his left hand behind him serving as the brake. He eased the rope through his fingers, letting it slide over his body as he dropped. He twisted his torso slightly downward to ease the friction pain on his groin, and he pushed off from the wall with his boots as he went.
When he reached the bottom of the three-story building, he extricated himself from the ropes and then pulled on one section, hand over hand, until the entire cord was free of the anchor and the far end dropped at his feet. Then he picked up the rope pile and sprinted through the dark courtyard.
He stowed the rope behind a shrub and then grabbed the wide, flat rim of the cinder block fence and hauled himself up.
The street below was quiet, the pavement clear of obstructions.
Ethan lowered himself back inside the courtyard and stopped the timer on his cellphone.
Forty-five seconds.
Exfil route, good to go.
nineteen
In the computer room o
f the barracks, Ethan loaded up the memory stick Mufid had given him. On it were the GPS coordinates of several government installations, including a local courthouse used to administer sharia law. He also found a photo to go along with the latitude and longitude of the building where the motorcade brought the scientist every day. It looked like a repurposed industrial complex, no doubt converted into a weapons research facility. Ethan forwarded all of the information along to Sam. She would probably leak the information to the Assad regime after he performed the hit—there would be a few barrel bombs dropped in the days after, no doubt. Whether they hit their targets or not was another story.
Sleep proved difficult that night. It felt particularly hot and stuffy in room three-ten; Ethan lay atop his sleeping bag, his loose clothes drenched in perspiration, his flushed face throbbing in time to his heartbeat. It didn't help matters that he kept mentally reviewing the planned hit. When the time came, he felt confident he could carry out the assassination without a hitch, but there were many variables that could go wrong. There always were with something like that, which was why he had tried to keep the plan simple.
He also dwelled on Alzena. When Shi was dead, the militants would almost certainly ask the scientist's wife if her husband had been in contact with any strangers lately. The wife would mention that the neighbor had arranged for Shi to meet a Jordanian only a few nights before. Members of the Khansa'a Brigade would visit Alzena. Ethan had coached her on what to say via their shared email account—she was to claim she had never personally met the Jordanian. If she was asked to reveal her email exchange with the man, she would tell the Khansa'a that it was her habit to delete messages from her inbox and sent folders, because she liked to "keep her account clean," and so she had no record of the correspondence. She had promised Ethan she would delete everything save for a select few emails from the last year, that way if the Khansa'a forced her to log in to her personal account, her story would appear true. Also, when they revealed that her Jordanian friend had assassinated the scientist, her shock would be real—Ethan had left out that small detail.