Never give a hostage-taker anything before you get something in return.
“True that, but in this case the second rule trumps it.”
There are times when playing by the book can only make things worse.
The young agent stood up and sandwiched himself between Monica and Blackwell, his cautious eyes seemingly aware of the difficult history they shared. Perhaps Nishimura had subconsciously taking it upon himself to keep them from gouging out each other’s eyes. Like a child caught between their two warring parents.
“There’s no way he could be staking out the building after evac. We’ve swept the rooftop surveillance equipment and it was all clean. Maybe they have a foot soldier stationed outside the restricted zone. But nothing better than old-school analog, scanning the skies for incoming aircraft.”
“Keep talking, I’m listening,” Monica said, her arms folded across her chest.
“Here’s a crazy idea. We perform a partial extraction. Perp doesn’t know the exact number of our men on top of the building. The smart money says he knew going into this there would be an HRT regardless of whether he saw it or not, even if we just confirmed it.” Nishimura’s eyes landed on Blackwell, but not in an accusatory way.
“There’s no ‘we’ here. I might as well have gift-wrapped it for him,” Blackwell conceded.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mr. Blackwell. He didn’t sound like he was going to take no for an answer.”
“I agree,” Monica said. “Go on, Liam.”
“We remove most of the operators and stage it so it’s loud and visible. He’ll never know we left behind some implants.”
“That could work. Leave behind a small covert unit that mixes with the concrete,” Robert Slant said, giving the plan a provisional seal of approval.
Monica paced back and forth to the beat of the terrible start they were off to. Losing their rooftop firepower this early was a blow they could have done without. Blackwell hadn’t been able to extract anything meaningful. Instead, he had gaffed and probably emboldened the suspect as a result.
“Get me Al on the line,” Monica said to no one in particular.
Nishimura patched her in to Albert Voss, the lead operator of the HRT squad. A decorated solider, a revered marksman and a formidable tactician.
“This is Voss.”
“Al, blue squad’s compromised. He knows you’re there and wants you out.”
“Shit. Or else?”
“Terrible things.”
“Shit, shit, shit. How the hell did they track us?”
Monica glanced at Blackwell with a gentle smile like she wasn’t going to sully his name. “Probably a foot soldier on the outside scanned your incoming chopper. Or we’re just very predictable.”
“This one’s your call, Monica. You really want us off?”
“Yes and no. We’re considering a partial extraction. Would it fly?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“The number of guys I get to keep. Me and three others. It’s not ideal, but four beats zero.”
Monica glanced at Nishimura for approval, being the parent of this improvised soap opera. She got it fast. Then, either out of courtesy or pity, she turned her eyes to Blackwell.
This cat and mouse approach was dubious. They had no idea what they were dealing with or what sort of surveillance the suspects had access to. Another part of him felt shame for his early gaffe. Launching an early confrontation with Monica would alienate more people in the room, like Slant and Nishimura.
Let’s roll with it.
“Do it, Al. Call your chopper in and put on your best show.”
Monica hung up and strode to the conference table, her gait tense and her face no longer fresh.
“We’ve got twenty minutes before blue squad is off the building and we’re back online. What do we know about his origins?”
All eyes turned to Natasha Shaker, the language expert on the team. She was a tough woman with wide shoulders, short-cropped platinum hair and a pierced tongue. Blackwell remembered what the other spastic male agents used to call her behind her back, but he had nothing but respect for the woman. Shaker’s mastery of Semitic languages had served the Bureau well in the aftermath of 9/11. Some terrible people were now behind bars for good, thanks to her ability to find out things about them just by how they spoke. Not a bad trick to have mastered.
Blackwell skimmed through his notes to share his own intuition. “My gut reaction was Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian. Natasha?”
“Can’t pin it down with any accuracy.”
Her voice was still deep and velvety, exactly as he remembered it.
“Going on enunciation and grasp of our cultural nuances, I’ll say he’s either studied or lived in America. Perhaps of an Arab expat family background, someone who’s moved around in worldly circles. Privileged. Wealthy. Highly educated. Late thirties to early forties.”
Monica turned to Eddie Grove, the psych expert. “Motives?”
“I could be wrong about this, but I suspect he may be a tad pissed off. What do y’all think?” he said, invoking a quick and much needed burst of levity in the room.
Grove had come to the FBI from academia. His last research stint was at Guantanamo Bay, where he was embedded doing double duty.
For his research privileges, he assisted the government in unlocking tenacious terrorist minds. Then someone at the CIRG stumbled on him and decided he was too indispensable to be shared with other government agencies.
No older than fifty, his hair ran long and unsupervised, and his goatee speckled with salt and pepper. Blackwell imagined him riding to work on a Harley Bobcat, clad in leather and not giving a damn what anyone else at the Bureau thought.
“What’s with the biblical reference to Cain and Abel?”
“Baffling. Could be nothing more than fancy prose to rattle us. What intrigued me more was another religious undertone y’all may have missed.”
“Which one?”
“Aliases are rarely picked at random. They always mean something, intentional or not.”
Blackwell drew a blank. He glanced at the faces around the table, and everyone else seemed about as clueless.
“Seth is the third son of Adam and Eve, the less famous brother of Cain and Abel appointed by God as a replacement for his slain brother.”
Nishimura’s eyes widened, revealing an inner geek stoked by this mythology. “What else do we know about Seth?” Before his mouth had uttered the question, Nishimura’s hands had started Googling the answer.
“He’s revered by all three monotheistic religions as the father of humanity.”
There was a brief silence in the room. Grove stood up and ran his hands through his hair as he walked around with a classroom gait.
“Now, at face value, one could read an apocalyptic flavor. Perhaps he sees himself as the father of humanity in the image of Seth.”
“Exactly what kind of crazy are we talking about here? Waco? Heaven’s Gate? Worse?”
Blackwell had backstopped both these cases in his early years at the Bureau and knew a thing or two about cult activity.
Grove shrugged and then massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers.
“Neither, to be honest. I’m not reading cultism at this stage. ‘America the crumbling empire,’ however, is a huge giveaway. The most effective rallying call for many jihadists. Robert’s initial instinct makes the most sense. A hard-core Islamic whack-job who draws inspiration from Al Qaeda’s business model.”
“Not sure I quite get the connection,” Blackwell said.
“Many Muslims believe Seth was buried in the village of Al-Nabi Shayth in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.”
Blackwell leaned forward and listened to Grove as this secondary, burgeoning theory promised to be more plausible.
“
The village is also the birthplace of Abbas al-Musawi, an influential Shia cleric and the co-founder of Hezbollah who was taken out by the Israelis in ’ninety-two.”
Grove stopped talking and left it to everyone’s imagination to connect the dots between a possible Hezbollah terrorist link and the guy across the building who named himself after a Muslim prophet.
“A Lebanese Shiite would fit the linguistic and cultural profile I am hearing in his accent. The Lebanese are serial migrants.” Shaker’s voice had a hint of uncharacteristic excitability.
Monica didn’t waste time and began firing tasks at the team. “Bob, check with Homeland for Lebanese nationals meeting the suspect’s description. Special emphasis on those recently arrived on US soil.”
“How far back?”
“Twelve months.”
“I’ll do twenty-four for good measure.”
“Eddie, jump into this little shit’s brain whenever we talk to him next and tell me what makes him tick.”
“Will do.”
“And Natasha, keep tuning in to his venom and nail him for me like I know you want to.”
Blackwell got up and pushed a coffee pod in the machine, but before he could complete his caffeine ceremony, Nishimura raised his head from behind his computer.
“Check this out.”
All eyes lasered on the rookie.
“MI5 just sent a list of people of interest. We have our first credible suspects.”
“Who are they?” Monica asked.
“Students who at some point interacted with the real Prince Omar Al Seraj during his time at the London School of Economics. Three guys, all card-carrying members of an outfit called Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
“Hard-core pan-Islamists, Alex,” Slant interrupted Nishimura, sparing Blackwell the humiliation of asking.
“Never heard of them.”
“A nasty conveyor belt of jihadists. They use the UK as their main Western hub. Back in the late nineties they were targeting university students aggressively.”
Nishimura continued skimming through the MI5 email. “Brits believe all three have since gone off the grid. They’ve initiated an international manhunt for them on our behalf.”
Maybe Slant had it right all along. Islamic Jihad.
“Hasib Khan was a British national of Pakistani descent, from Birmingham. Mehmet Ozal was from Turkey on an Erasmus student exchange at the time. The third guy is Iyad Malki, an Iraqi refugee who had just been granted asylum in the UK in ’ninety-seven.”
Natasha Shaker stopped her feverish note-taking and peered at Blackwell.
“The Iraqi option is the closest, language-wise, but I wouldn’t be so fast to discount the Pakistani or the Turk just yet.”
Nishimura clicked his remote to navigate through archival photos of the three suspects from the late nineties sent by British intelligence.
“Adorable, right?”
Slant scrutinized the pictures as if he may have had mint tea with each of their uncles in Kandahar or Kirkuk during an undercover op.
“All three are solid leads. Each one could pass for a Gulf Arab.”
“That’s all we got from MI5. No voice recordings for us to compare against our perp.”
Blackwell found that odd. “Why not?”
“These guys were at the bottom of the food chain of Hizb ut-Tahrir. Brits had them on a low-priority watch list. Never bothered to wire-tap them, but kept them under light surveillance. Where they hung out, who they spoke to, that sort of thing.”
“Do the Brits know for sure all three took a shot at recruiting the Prince?”
“Absolutely.”
Monica snapped her finger to get everyone out of analysis mode and brandished her BlackBerry in the air.
“Al Voss just confirmed the partial extraction of his unit has been completed. We’re back online with the suspect in fifteen seconds.”
Blackwell rushed back to his seat and grabbed his headset but Seth never picked up.
NINE
Saturday, November 5, 2011—8:32 p.m.
Manhattan, NY
Seth ignored the ringing phone on the conference table.
He was perched over Mark Price holding the Perrier water bottle he had just used to strike him in the jaw. Price’s lips exuded blood and his eyes bled raw fear.
When Seth had commandeered the building and released the nonessential staff, he’d ordered the ones he kept hostage to sit on the floor of the conference room where he could see them. He divided them into three groups: men, women and Mark Price. After frisking them, he seized and disabled their communication devices and ordered them not to speak to one another.
A few minutes ago, before he had attacked Price, Seth noticed a notification on his phone from the Sniffer app he had installed in Los Angeles. The app was part of the spherical digital bomb Bone had given him to jam cellphone communication and video devices. Someone in the room had tried to dial out and was blocked by the device. The Sniffer had logged no less than fifteen outgoing call attempts within the span of forty-five seconds.
Seth temporarily deactivated the sphere. Using the landline in the conference room, he dialed the offending number. As it rang, he scanned the hostages to determine who among them had the contraband phone. Judging from his eyes and fidgety body, Mark Price was his man.
Seth reactivated the digital bomb, then stood up and grabbed a cold Perrier from the glass-door fridge in the conference room. He marched toward the CEO of Exertify and said, “Stand up.”
Barely had Price gotten up on his feet before Seth swung the bottle with decisive force, straight into Price’s face. Something should have broken judging by the cracking sound. He collapsed on the floor in quiet, internalized pain, perhaps to retain some dignity in front of his staff.
Now towering over Price ready to punish him more if he had to, Seth didn’t blink once.
Even though the spherical device had proven reliable in preventing anyone with a hidden phone from dialing out, Seth wasn’t about to risk six years of planning.
In a voice strapped in ice he whispered, “Take it out.”
“Take what out you goat-fucking monster?” Price expelled under his breath, holding his face in agony as he spat a blob of blood and mucous.
Seth struck him again in the exact same spot. If Price’s jaw had survived the first blow unfractured, only a miracle would allow him to fare as well this time.
“Take it out now and give it to me.”
Seth waited a few seconds, then retracted his arm like an automated demolition ball.
“Wait!” Price finally crumbled and pulled out a microscopic phone concealed in his crotch.
Seth flaunted the phone to the rest of the staff. Young and exceptionally well groomed, they reeked of wealth, professional success and unbridled egos. Now under his mercy, the men were mice and the women emotional wrecks.
“Have I not been civil with you so far?”
The entire room acquiesced.
“I haven’t tied your hands, gagged or blindfolded you. I’ve been the perfect gentleman with your women,” he said, caressing the face of a particularly stoic brunette.
“One last time in case you missed what just happened to your boss.” Even before he fully articulated his threat, a handful of iPhones and BlackBerries magically emerged from the crotches and cleavages of his hostages.
Returning to his seat with his bounty, Seth couldn’t keep his eyes off Mark Price crouched on the floor, damaged and humiliated. The things he had to do to get to this man and break into his castle.
Mark Price ran his company with notorious paranoia. Exertify didn’t transact with unknown clients, but handpicked its ‘partners’ after long and exhaustive research. This due diligence was not out of any ethical imperative to avoid working with shady characters like terrorists, criminal oligarchs and drug lords, but purely ou
t of self-preservation. Like his older brother who had built a dependable political brand name, Mark Price also believed the company you keep could make or break you.
Exertify’s main clients were the Pentagon, US law-enforcement and federal agencies, and foreign governments. It maintained only a tiny dossier of private clients hand-picked by Mark Price either for public relations mileage or as a shortcut to potential big business. The company was an impenetrable fortress and Mark Price its mythical gatekeeper. That is, until now.
Seth had laid down a simple but cunning trap. When you want an audience with the devil, you can’t just go knocking on the gates of hell. You have to first convince Satan you had something he desperately wanted that you were unwilling to part with. Only then would he come begging.
Many years before Seth had transformed into what he had become today, he had spent nine months as a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics. Although he had dropped out before graduating, while he was there, he had met and befriended the man whose identity enabled his penetration of Exertify, Prince Omar Al Seraj.
The son of a Gulf princess and a Syrian oil tycoon, Omar, like Seth, was in his mid-twenties when they first met. The prince had already been married to his first wife for six years and fathered three children.
To party hard in London under the pretense of academia, he left his family back home and lived alone in a multimillion-dollar penthouse in the heart of Knightsbridge. A breathtaking home from which he imbibed in a particularly shameless brand of decadence. Omar had taken a shining to Seth and adopted him in his inner circle of friends.
Fifteen years after they had parted ways, the prince had not amounted to much in the business world or in the royal circuits. multiple sclerosis had ravaged both his appetite for excess and his ability to travel. The Knightsbridge penthouse had remained operational nevertheless. The rich don’t sell the properties they rarely use. They maintain them in top condition, just in case.
The idea first came to Seth late one night in Berlin. He was half watching a documentary on the Gulf War. The images of the US First Marine Division crossing into Kuwait and the voice of George Bush Senior declaring the country liberated had pried open a part of his brain holding the memories of his Gulf Arab friend of royal lineage.
Terminal Rage Page 7