by John Weisman
That act earned Bush the reputation of a man loyal to an agency that had suffered the loss of Vietnam and had been tarred by the stigma of Watergate. Bottom line: George H. W. Bush was well liked by most of the CIA rank and file.
The second politician was Congressman Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican and former CIA case officer whose short tenure as DCI (September 2004 to April 2005) was judged a disaster. Goss was aloof and vindictive, and he wasn’t shy about bringing politics to the seventh-floor director’s suite. His acolytes, known as the Gosslings, were largely recruited from his congressional office and composed of Hill staffers and former Agency bureaucrats who settled old scores and drove many of CIA’s professionals into retirement. Goss was almost universally detested.
By the time the forty-fourth president sent Vince Mercaldi’s name up to the Senate for its advice and consent, the only politician-turned-CIA-director just about anyone still serving at CIA remembered was Goss. The corridor gossip at Langley, therefore, was not favorable to the former California congressman. Some of the more cynical wags in the clandestine service suggested that Call Me Vince should be treated like a mushroom: kept in the dark and fed lots of manure.
Yet Vince surprised everyone. He surprised the White House staff by being his own man and not knuckling under to the strongly partisan Chicago-style politics the rough-and-tumble political staff were used to conducting. He surprised the Department of Justice by fiercely defending his CIA constituents when the attorney general decided to mount a politically motivated witch hunt against those officers who conducted what was labeled enhanced interrogation techniques and waterboarding against captured enemy combatants. And he surprised his Langley skeptics by demonstrating loyalty down the CIA’s chain of command, a tectonic policy shift from most of his predecessors, who would—and did—sell out Langley’s worker bees at the hint of a crisis or embarrassment.
Indeed by the end of 2009, it was understood almost universally at Langley that if you were straight with Vince Mercaldi, he’d be straight with you. And he’d watch your back.
0748 Hours
“You saw this?” Vince held up a sheaf of newspaper clippings, the CIA’s version of the Pentagon’s Early Bird, a daily clip file containing all significant news stories about defense policy issues and the armed forces. CIA’s version, which was unnamed, dealt with stories on intelligence, terrorism, and world politics. Vince’s copy was folded back to a USA Today clip that quoted unnamed U.S. Embassy officials in Islamabad on the subject of Ty Weaver. Their anonymous quotes, most of which hinted that he was a rogue operator who didn’t enjoy diplomatic status, didn’t do him much good.
Stuart Kapos, the National Clandestine Service director, dropped into the armchair facing the director’s desk and spoke through pursed lips. “I did. What can I say, Vince? They’re assholes.”
“Ty’s wife, Patty, called Rich Erwin, the deputy at SAD, at five-thirty. She’d just received a call from some idiot reporter in Pakistan asking her to comment. Thank God she hung up on him. Rich called his boss, and John called me. John said Rich told him Patty was in tears, Stu. Tears. She has no idea what her husband is doing out there or why we haven’t gotten him out of jail. She knew he left with an official passport and had diplomatic immunity. Now all she knows is he’s in jail, and neither we nor the State Department is doing a goddamn thing to help the situation. I’m afraid she’ll miscarry again—John told me about last year—and then there’ll be all hell to pay.”
“Can Kate help us out here?” Secretary of State Katherine Semerad and Vince Mercaldi had known one another for years and had a first-rate working relationship, despite the fact that State—or more to the point, its USAID administrator—was screwing up Afghanistan by allowing the Chinese to steal just about all of that country’s valuable mineral assets, like copper and uranium, by shutting American firms out of the bidding process.
Diplomats. They didn’t have a clue. “You know how hard it is to rein in those goddamn cookie-pushers,” Vince said. “Leak, leak, leak. I swear, that’s what they do for a living.” He uttered a bitter cackle. “They certainly don’t spend much time defending American interests.”
The D/CIA continued: “I can talk to Kate—I will, too—but we both know there’s no way she’ll be able to put the cork in this.” He paused long enough to drop the clips on his desk. “The immediate problem here is Weaver’s wife. She’s frantic.”
“We can send someone over.”
“I thought we had.”
“We did—we do,” Kapos said. “But not on a daily basis.”
Mercaldi frowned. “Do some spade work. Talk to Rich Erwin at Special Activities. Find Ty’s friends—people he’s close to—and get them over to help Patty out. Certainly for the weekend. And starting next week twenty-four-seven if you have to.”
“Will do,” Stu said. He paused. “But can I be frank for a second, Boss?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why the big push on this? Ty knew the risks. And he’s an adult—he can handle it. I—”
“Hold it right there.” Vince cut him off. “There’s a lot at stake here. I don’t want anyone making the connection between Weaver and Abbottabad. Or Weaver and ISI. Or Weaver and the Asymmetric Warfare Group. Or, worst of all, between Weaver and the BLG, even though we’ve worked hard to keep him compartmented from anything to do with UBL. We know the Paks he killed were snatch-and-grab guys. They had stolen stuff on their bodies and illegal weapons. Even the bike was stolen. But they still had ties to ISI. So it’s a can of worms. Which is why everybody’s focused on Ty’s diplomatic status and the killings, right?”
Kapos nodded. “Yeah.”
“Well, like it or not, and no matter how tough it is on Ty, that’s where the story has to stay.”
The director looked over at Kapos. “Look, Stu, the media is smart. The Paks are smart. For chrissakes, Bin Laden is smart. Every one of them can put two and two together. I don’t want anybody getting anywhere near two.”
“Understood.”
“Then you understand one way to do that is to keep the Weaver family on our side. I don’t want Patty giving tearful sidewalk interviews to Channel 7, Oh, they sent him out with a diplomatic passport but they asked him not to use it because he was on some sort of secret mission but CIA won’t tell me anything. How do we ensure she won’t give that interview? We don’t just tell her we’re doing everything we can, we do everything we can. We make sure she sees that we are doing everything we can. We support her. We make sure she is comfortable. And informed.”
“And all those leaks from State?”
“Don’t you have any contacts in the press after all these years?” Vince gave Kapos a sly smile. “You could pass on a few words to the . . . wise.”
Kapos grinned. “I could.”
“Then do it. SECSTATE is with us on this. But the professional diplomats at Main State and Islamabad and Lahore think they know better. So make them look like the striped-pants, heel-rocking, change-jingling, equivocating, namby-pamby, mush-mouthed assholes they are. On deepest background, of course.”
Vince’s expression grew serious. “Look, Stu, when our people visit Ty under consular cover, they’ve got to be able to give him positive messages from Patty. I want him to know we’re doing our damnedest. And I want folks like Charlie Becker to know that, too. And the others. Like the folks you’ve got hunkered down at Valhalla Base. And Bagram. And Jalalabad.”
The director tossed the bundle of news clippings across the table. “This isn’t about Ty Weaver. Or Patty Weaver. Or what the goddamn media print. You and I, and Dick Hallett, and Spike, and everybody at BLG, we have to keep our eyes on the prize. Everything we do, everything we say, every action, every reaction, has significance. We have to think about everything. Look at everything holographically. Why? So nothing caroms around the table and comes back to bite us on the ass. We have to stay focused. Consider all the angles, all the subtleties, all the crazy intangibles. This is all about the bigger thing
, Stu. The Abbottabad thing. It’s about getting our hands around the throat of that rotten murdering sonofabitch we’ve been chasing for ten goddamn years. And putting him in the ground.
“UBL. That’s why Charlie’s out there risking his life. And the people we have at Valhalla Base, and Doctor Afridi who tried to get DNA for us. And all the others, too—including all those who don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. People like Ty Weaver. And the other Whiskey Trio team we used as diversions. And all those SEALs and Delta shooters and helicopter pilots Wes Bolin has in training. We’re doing this for a goddamn reason. It isn’t because we’re going to end terrorism once and for all, or make al-Qaeda or any of its franchises disappear. It’s not about bringing democracy to totalitarian regimes, or making the world a better place, or singing ‘Kumbaya.’ And it isn’t about politics or personalities. Not about me, or Secretary Hansen, or Secretary Semerad, or the president even. It’s all about KBL—Kill Bin Laden. Put him in the ground because that’s where he deserves to be, full stop, end of story. This is about KBL. That’s what you and Wes Bolin and I have to stay focused on. That one goal. KBL, and bringing everybody home alive.”
He peered over his aviators at the NCS director. “I mean, that is the goal, right?”
Kapos sat silent. Stunned. In almost three decades at CIA he’d never heard a director express himself with such passion for the mission and loyalty to the people who were putting their lives on the line to achieve it. Finally, he thought, someone who doesn’t consider us chess pieces. Or political pawns. This man gets it.
At that instant Call Me Vince reminded Kapos of his football coach at the Naval Academy. Now, he realized in an epiphany, he was lucky enough to have known two leaders for whom he would willingly run through walls. And one of them was a fricking fourteen-karat certified Washington insider. A pol. Who woulda thunk it.
He stood and tossed his boss an offhanded salute. “Aye-aye, sir.”
Vince cracked a smile. “You wouldn’t be spelling that ‘c-u-r,’ would you now, Stu?”
“No way, Boss. I save that for the diplomats.”
“Then get the hell outta here. You have your sailing orders. Go make the diplomats unhappy. I’ll do the same for the Pakistanis.”
12
Abbottabad, Pakistan
February 14, 2011, 2035 Hours Local Time
Charlie Becker made a habit of changing his sleeping arrangements every two to three weeks. It was one way of making sure he didn’t fall into a recognizable pattern. Patterns were bad juju, because they put you in the same place at the same time every day, which made it easier for your enemies to find you and harder for you to notice your enemies. For example, sometimes he’d be at Waseem’s tearoom after morning prayers, sometimes after midday. That way he could watch out for watchers. He did much the same with his other daily circuits. He followed no set schedule or itinerary.
Six days ago he’d taken new lodgings in back of a carpentry shop that sat northwest of the Bilal Mosque, at the edge of Hassan Town, a residential subdivision of smallish villas just off Kakul Road. The location was perfect: about a kilometer and a half from the Khan compound Charlie called GZ, and slightly less than that from Valhalla Base. The neighborhood was quiet, mostly retired Pakistan military and faculty from the academy, along with a few shops that had been there before the development started. It was precisely the anonymous kind of place Charlie always sought out. He’d only begun talking to the carpenter, Mohammed, the previous month, although he’d been wheeling himself past the shop since November.
It turned out Mohammed had a thriving business because of all the development in Abbottabad. He’d even worked on the Khan compound. He also, Charlie noted, had a storage shed that faced the plowed field behind the carpentry shop. And so, when it came time to move again, it occurred to Charlie to ask.
Two weeks ago he’d mentioned that he was losing his accommodations, and while he didn’t want to be presumptuous, he’d seen that Mohammed had an unused outbuilding in the alley behind the fence. Perhaps the carpenter would like to rent it for a few weeks?
“It would be an honor, brother,” Mohammed had said.
The shed was a rectangle about the size of a jail cell, with a sloping roof and an earthen floor. Charlie borrowed some of the pallets stacked behind the shop, and he and Mohammed created a sleeping platform. The carpenter had offered him a couple dozen burlap bags as insulation and padding.
It was all very comfortable—and a lot warmer than Charlie’s previous crash pad, which had no glass in the windows. He’d tried to pay Mohammed a few rupees in advance for his lodging, but the carpenter refused, saying he’d been blessed quite enough by Charlie’s request for shelter and didn’t want to insult God by taking his money. He even put a door on the structure to give Charlie some privacy.
It had been a long and cold day—freezing wind blowing off the mountains that ringed Abbottabad in the northwest. And Charlie had felt unsettled, because the seed-under-the-gum-line sensation was back. It was nothing he could put a finger on, just an instinctive reaction to a stimulus he couldn’t identify. He put it out of his mind because the new equipment and crew for Valhalla were coming in. Despite occasional rain showers he had maintained constant countersurveillance from a series of locations way out on the perimeter. He’d been gratified to see that everything seemed to have gone without a hiccough.
On the surface, all that happened was that a family of Pakistanis came to visit their relatives, who lived in one of the newer villas in Bilal Town. Family visiting family. The visitors, a plump, obviously prosperous Pakistani and his equally ample wife, arrived in a Suzuki SUV with Amritsar plates and loaded down with all the essentials you need when you’re visiting family for a week or two, you have babies in tow, and you want to be generous to your cousins or brother-in-law. There were suitcases and bundles and lots of economy-size bundles of Pampers and gifts and all the other miscellaneous stuff well-to-do families carry when they travel with kids.
Charlie had to marvel at what the Agency was capable of these days. The babies—dolls, of course—were so animated and lifelike one was crying and actually kicking its little legs as it was bundled into the house.
The prosthetics were also incredible. Langley had come a long way since fake beards and glue-on mustaches. Today Agency disguises were made by the same people who created special effects and makeup for Hollywood’s most high-tech movies. There were masks that adhered like a second skin; Mission: Impossible stuff that was good enough to make it through checkpoints and roadblocks. From eighty yards away, Charlie, a Jurassic relic from the analog days of Walkman cassette tapes, couldn’t tell whether it was real or Memorex.
And NSA’s techno-geeks had gotten good about creating equipment that could be broken down into transportable, innocent-looking packages. Gone were the days of shipping a parabolic electro-snooper in a four-by-four-foot wooden crate weighing sixty kilos. Now even the most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment could be concealed in a couple of everyday suitcases—or something that looked exactly like a Costco-size bundle of diapers. Parabolics unfurled like umbrellas and weighed ounces, not pounds. Lasers that used to need power packs the size of beer cases now ran off two or three quarter-size 2032 batteries.
And next week, two of the old crew would leave, wearing the same faces and clothes the visitors had worn. Charlie had no idea who they were or what they did. But he admired them. He was mobile. He could get around. And he’d created an E&E plan very early on just in case the you-know-what hit the fan. But the people who staffed Valhalla, they were sitting ducks. They seldom left the base, even though Charlie guessed that some of them at least had language skills. They’d have to be able to pass—at least on the surface—to get out to the dead-drop sites, shop for groceries, put out the garbage, handle all the details that running a covert base in a hostile or denied area entailed.
Moreover, if they were discovered, CIA would deny their existence. That was how it worked in the real wo
rld. And they knew it. Yet, still, they were here.
Not only here, but volunteers.
That, thought Charlie, took real guts. It came to him as he wheeled himself around the corner and crossed onto Hassan Town Road, that today was Valentine’s Day. Maybe he should send them all flowers. Bouquets for the Brave. The thought brought a smile to his face.
2042 Hours
He worked his way slowly toward the alley between the shop and the house next door. It was very dark. The waxing moon was obscured by clouds tonight. He was wet, chilled to the bone, and couldn’t wait to climb into dry clothes, wrap himself in his burlap insulation, and get some sleep.
The dolly almost flipped when it hit a crease in the uneven pavement—what there was of it. Times like these Charlie wanted his Surefire, one of those mini LED flashlights that gave you 120 lumens on one lithium battery.
From sixty feet away he could see a car parked on the road in front of the carpentry shop. His antennas went up. Mohammed drove a Toyota pickup, which was parked alongside the shop. This was something else—midsize, dark. He stopped. Waited for some traffic on the road. After perhaps sixty seconds a car turned from Kakul Road onto Hassan Town Road, its lights hitting the parked car as it drove past, heading northeast. The car’s interior was empty.
Charlie pushed off, his sticks scuffing the pathway. He made his way past the parked vehicle, brushing the hood with his hand as he did. The metal was cool. The car had been there for a while. He pivoted his dolly and pushed himself sideways, into the alley.