by Brad Thor
Vaughan nodded. He scanned apartment windows for spotters and checked the rooftops for kids who might give away their approach via cell phones. He looked for the LOPs—the little old people who were always used as watchdogs. Thank goodness there were no shops along this street. Shopkeepers in Iraq were notorious spies.
It was all stupid and he knew it, yet he couldn’t stop himself. Every day in Iraq he had honed the skills that had kept him alive while other men had been killed and had come home in boxes. Once developed, those instincts don’t disappear. But why were they flooding back now? My God, he thought. I’ve got PTSD.
“You still want to do this?” asked Davidson as they reached the alley and Vaughan stood still on the sidewalk.
He coughed and shook it off. “I’m good to go. Let’s do it.”
The men entered the alley and came up behind Nasiri’s residence. It was a four-story brick building with a wooden set of stairs. There was a chain-link fence separating the property from the alley. Its gate was unlocked.
“So far so good,” said Davidson as he pushed it open and walked down the narrow gangway toward the stairs.
As they climbed, Vaughan had an inexplicable urge to pull out his gun. He didn’t. Nasiri was the driver responsible for a hit-and-run accident. They weren’t about to pop Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, his hands were sweaty and his heart was pumping harder than it should have been. PTSD, anxiety attack, or whatever this feeling was, he didn’t like it.
The open-air, third-floor landing outside Nasiri’s apartment contained a couple of rusting lawn chairs and some empty cardboard boxes. Vaughan looked out across the alley with its asphalt-shingled garages at the apartment buildings on the other side. In one of them, he could see someone watching them. Somewhere close by Pakistani music was playing.
A large window with its drapes drawn stood next to Nasiri’s back door. “I guess we knock,” offered Davidson.
“Of course we knock. The only time you don’t knock is when you have a no-knock warrant. Besides, I think we may have an audience.”
“Lawyers,” said Davidson, rolling his eyes. “No wonder you haven’t impressed anyone in the Intelligence Division.”
“There’s someone watching us from the building across the alley.”
Davidson turned, but didn’t see anything. “Don’t worry. You’re just paranoid.”
This time, Vaughan didn’t hesitate to give the man the finger.
The Public Vehicles officer knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. “Police. Open up.” There was still no response.
Davidson tried the door handle, but it was locked. “You’re right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder and gesturing across the alley with his chin. “We are being watched. I think it’s a Scumbagasaurus.”
“A what?”
“You know what those are,” he said as he bent closer to the door handle and slipped something from his pocket. “They suck blood and feed on bribes. Normally you don’t see them this far from a government building. Politicus assholus is the correct Latin term, I believe.”
Vaughan knew what the man was doing, but before he could stop him, the lock was picked and the door was open. “That’s breaking and entering.”
“The door was open. In fact, I think I hear someone calling for help,” he replied, closing his mouth and trying to throw his voice like a ventriloquist. “Help me. Help me.”
The Organized Crime cop wasn’t impressed.
“Allah akabar?” Davidson asked.
Vaughan still wasn’t buying it.
“Allah snack bar?”
“Paul, we’re not authorized to—” Vaughan began, when he saw Davidson raise his radio to his mouth, announce his intent to the patrol officers outside, and step into the apartment.
“Are you coming?” he asked.
This wasn’t the first time Vaughan had broken the law, and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Nevertheless, he wasn’t proud of himself. Shaking his head, he followed the other cop inside.
CHAPTER 23
It was a dump. They entered through the door into the kitchen. A plate of food sat half-eaten on a folding table covered with a vinyl table cloth.
“Somebody left in a hurry,” said Vaughan. He touched the food to test its temperature and then walked over to the stove and reached for the teapot. Both were cold. He shook his head at Davidson.
The fridge contained very little. There was nothing in the freezer. As they made their way further into the apartment, Davidson pulled his weapon and Vaughan followed suit.
They cleared the bedroom, living room, and bathroom. No one was there. Davidson reholstered his weapon. “Well, seeing as how we’ve already crossed the Rubicon, do you want to take a more in-depth look around?”
Neither the cop nor the lawyer in him wanted to make an already bad, and unquestionably illegal, situation worse by turning Nasiri’s apartment inside out. But it wasn’t the cop or the lawyer inside him that won out.
There was no question that what he was doing was wrong. He couldn’t moralize it, rationalize it, or loophole his way out of it. But he didn’t feel guilty about it.
Mohammed Nasiri had run down a woman and had fled the scene. People from his village then tried to cover up for him. Whether he asked them to or not made no difference. Judging from what he saw in the apartment and what his gut had told him, Nasiri had been tipped that the police were on his trail.
Cops were not bad people. In fact for the most part, cops were one of the best classes of people Vaughan had ever known. They were the good guys. They stood on the side of law and order and civilization. They manned the wall that protected everyday, good, hard-working Americans. They were the sheepdogs, and beyond that wall there were the wolves.
At times, the wolves could be smart; very smart. A few knew just how much rope the people had given their sheepdogs and they operated just beyond it. They were constantly coming up with new ways to stay one step ahead of the law. Luckily enough for the people, the majority of the wolves were stupid. When they were caught, it was not always because of great police work, but because of some colossally stupid mistake.
It bothered John Vaughan that while the wolves were constantly evolving and finding new ways to commit crimes and horrible acts of violence, the sheepdogs remained bound by the same rules of engagement. The courts seemed more disposed to protect the criminals before their victims and that was wrong. But so was breaking into an apartment and searching it without a warrant. Vaughan knew that, but he didn’t care; not right now. In fact, he had been slowly caring less and less the longer he stayed on the job. Did that make him a bad person? Maybe, maybe not. What he knew was that if he had to bend, and sometimes break, the rules to bring the guilty to justice, he was willing to consider it. He’d seen far too much suffering and far too many bad guys escape answering for their crimes to completely ignore the fact that sometimes the ends do justify the means.
“Which room do you want?” asked Davidson, halfway into the bedroom already.
“All of them.”
“All of them?”
“That’s right,” said Vaughan as he pushed past him into the bedroom. “Now watch the back door and make sure we don’t get ambushed.”
He worked quickly and methodically. Nasiri had a lot of books and not much else. Almost all of them were in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. It was a language Vaughan couldn’t read, so he took a picture of the books with his camera phone. He had a friend in Marine Intelligence he could send it to for translation, though he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like what he heard back.
His feeling was based on Nasiri’s other books, the ones he had in English. They had all been penned by the same author, Sayyid Qutb. Qutb was the intellectual father of Islamic fundamentalism, and his teachings were at the very core of Muslim justification for violence and jihad in the name of Islam. Two of his biggest fans were Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Vaughan had read an interesting compendium
of Qutb’s work while he was in Iraq called The Sayyid Qutb Reader by Albert Bergesen. It was his gateway into the mind of Islamic terrorism, and the fact that Mohammed Nasiri had several titles by Qutb only reinforced the unease he was feeling.
He continued to search the apartment, hoping to find something that would tell him where Nasiri had gone or what he was planning to do. There was nothing. No personal letters, no laptop, no cell phone. The man didn’t even have a landline, but those were growing less and less popular these days.
In short, he and Davidson had taken a huge risk, had broken several laws, and had come up with nothing. Even Nasiri’s shirts, trousers, and jackets were clean. What pocket litter there was, wasn’t helpful. The whole place looked more like a movie set than the apartment of an actual human being.
Vaughan walked back into the kitchen. Davidson was sitting at the table and looked up. “Anything?”
“Nothing,” replied Vaughan.
“Do you mind if I take a look around now that you’re done?”
Vaughan grabbed a towel off the counter and threw it to him. “Go ahead. Just make sure you wipe everything down. I don’t want to leave any prints behind.”
“Cautious motherfucker, aren’t you?”
“Ten minutes,” he replied, “and then we’re out of here.”
Davidson nodded and headed toward the bedroom.
Opening up the double doors beneath the sink with the toe of his shoe, Vaughan bent down and looked for another towel or a rag of his own. There were certain places you didn’t want to be linked to. An apartment you broke into without a warrant was definitely one of them, followed closely by a residence belonging to a Muslim cab driver who had a fondness for Sayyid Qutb. Nothing but trouble could come from being connected to this place.
Under the sink, he found a white plastic grocery bag stuffed with more of the same white plastic bags. In the center was what looked like a pink towel. He emptied the lot of them onto the kitchen floor only to realize that the pink mass in the center wasn’t a towel but a folded shopping bag from a beauty supply store.
It was an odd item for Nasiri to have. Maybe someone had left it in his cab. Or maybe Nasiri had a girlfriend. If they could locate a girlfriend, they might be able to locate him.
Vaughan unfolded the bag. There was a silhouette of a woman with perfectly coifed hair and the name, address, and phone number of the store. Vaughan opened the bag and looked inside. He found a receipt dated two days before the accident. Nasiri had purchased only one item, but multiple bottles of it.
Vaughan began going through the other bags looking for receipts. He didn’t find a ton, but he found enough and they were very interesting.
In addition to purchasing hydrogen peroxide at the beauty supply store, he had also bought more of the same, along with drain cleaner, at grocery stores and pharmacies. He included other odds and ends to try to mask what he was doing, but Vaughan knew what he was up to. Nasiri wasn’t giving out dye jobs and throwing drain-cleaning parties for his friends.
Davidson stepped back into the kitchen and saw Vaughan with the plastic bags. “What’d you find?”
“Do you know what the mother of Satan is?”
“No idea,” said Davidson.
“Triacetone triperoxide. TATP,” said Vaughan, holding up the receipts.
“Should I know what that is?”
“It’s also called acetone peroxide. It is an explosive popular with terrorists. Its ingredients are very easy to get. The two most important things you need to make it are hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid.”
“Where do you get sulfuric acid?”
“Drain cleaner,” said Vaughan, holding up the receipts. “It looks like every time he goes to the store, he picks up a bottle or two, or sometimes even three. He appears to have been doing it in small batches so as not to raise suspicion.”
“And fly right beneath the radar.”
Vaughan nodded. “Exactly. It’s called the mother of Satan because it is so volatile. One of the ways we could spot bomb makers when I was in Iraq was because the best ones were missing fingers, sometimes even hands.”
“The best ones were missing fingers or hands? That doesn’t make sense.”
“They were the ones who learned to respect their craft. Lose a finger, or two, or three and you become incredibly conscientious. Lose a hand and you’ll probably end up being an instructor.”
“Is that the stuff that was used in the London bombings?” asked Davidson.
“Yup. It was also part of the shoe bomber plot, the 2006 transatlantic plane bombing plot, the underwear bomber plot, and what that Afghan named Zazi they busted in Denver was working on.”
“So Nasiri is a bomb maker?”
“That, or he was acquiring the ingredients for someone else,” said Vaughan. “Either way, this is probably the real reason he took off after hitting Alison Taylor.”
“So what do we do now? I’m no lawyer,” Davidson stated, drawing the word out, “but that evidence is definitely fruit of the poisonous tree.”
Even though his metaphor was a bit mixed up, he was right. Evidence obtained through an illegal search, seizure, or interrogation was known as a poisonous tree. Any evidence later discovered because of knowledge gained from the first illegal search, seizure, or interrogation was known as the fruit of the poisonous tree. None of it would be admissible in a court.
It would also be impossible to get any warrants based on it. This put the officers in a very difficult position. Nasiri was up to no good, but legally their hands were tied. They couldn’t share what they knew about the bomb-making ingredients.
While the mechanic’s information had been given under duress, they probably could get a warrant with it and come back, but someone across the alley had already seen them enter the apartment. As far as the apartment was concerned, they were dead in the water.
“We’re definitely impounding the cab. Somehow, there’s got to be a way to get it tested for bomb residue. If we get a hit, then everyone is going to climb on board this case.”
“Let’s say you do figure out a way to bury our poisonous fruit and get them to test the cab. What if there’s no residue?”
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t give up. We’ve got to stay on this guy. We legally obtained his name and photograph. We can put those out across the PD and I’ll reach out to a guy I know on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. I’ll have him pull all the flight records and see if Nasiri has tried to board any aircraft.”
“And if he hasn’t?” asked Davidson.
“Then we should assume he’s still in the city and that he’s not planning on taking his bombs back to Pakistan with him.”
Davidson looked down at the half-eaten plate of food. “We should also assume he’s not coming back here.”
“Agreed. So if you were him, where would you go now?”
“Someplace safe.”
Vaughan nodded. “Someplace with people you could trust.”
“Like members of your terror cell?”
“Bombers tend to need support, so I’m willing to bet there’s a cell.”
“But how do you track it down?” asked Davidson.
“We may not have to,” replied Vaughan. “Let’s finish up here and get back to your truck. I want to see if Nasiri will lead us to it all by himself.”
CHAPTER 24
Abdul Rashid’s cell phone vibrated again. He held it up so the man sitting across from him could see it.
Rashid was in his mid-twenties with dark hair and a handsome, angular face. He was lean and stood about six feet tall. He had green eyes, an unusual feature that marked his mixed Arab descent. “The longer we ignore him, the more dangerous this gets.”
The man gave a dismissive, backhanded wave.
“That’s your answer?” asked Rashid. “Are you serious? You know what? Fuck you, Marwan.”
Rashid stood up from his cushion and threw his cell phone at the man.
Marwan Jarrah, a man in his late fifties
with gray hair and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, dodged the phone and smiled. He loved the younger man’s passion. Rashid had more than earned the right to be so outspoken. He was one of the very few true believers who could effortlessly stroll among the infidels without raising their suspicion. His methods of waging jihad were often unorthodox, but they were also brilliant. It was why Jarrah kept him close. It was also why Jarrah tolerated Rashid’s impulsiveness and foul language.
Blessed with a Caucasian father and an Egyptian mother, Abdul Rashid possessed a mixed set of features. Those features were such that Westerners never saw him as an Arab, or as being distinctly Muslim. To them he appeared perfectly American, while to Muslims he looked Arab. Such was the magic gift of his parents’ combined DNA.
With family scattered across the Muslim world, he had a backstopped cover for the extensive trips abroad where he studied in some of the most rigorous and extensive mujahideen camps. Marwan had personally witnessed him gun down two Jordanians who had tried to double-cross them in Iraq. Though they had known each other for only a couple of years, he was proud to call Rashid his brother, even though he was more like a son. The man’s experience and skills were beyond question. So talented was he, and so beloved, that he was referred to in Arabic as Shahab—a bright star that illuminates the heavens.
As talented as he was, though, he often could be obsessive about details and got angered when others didn’t listen to him or follow his plans. Marwan attempted to calm him down. “The man doesn’t know enough to be a danger.”
“Give me my phone back so I can throw it at you again.”
“You worry too much, Shahab.”
“It’s my job to worry,” said Rashid as he walked behind his boss’s desk, parted the blinds, and looked out the office window over the showroom floor. “You should worry too.”
“Why?” said the older man with another wave of his hand. “You worry enough for both of us. Everything will be fine. We are in no danger. We will send Mohammed Nasiri back to Pakistan.”