Ghost

by Fred Burton

  The attack on the pope is simply meant to be a diversion. In less than a week, Yousef ’s cell plans to use the chaos a successful assassination would cause to sow liquid time bombs on no fewer than eleven airliners heading to the United States from points across Southeast Asia. Each bomb would be stashed under seats inside life vests—the exact MO in the Flight 434 incident. Using digital Casio watches as detonators, all eleven bombs were supposed to go off simultaneously.

  Thousands would have perished, and the damage inflicted on air travel and the airline companies would have been incalculable.

  Flight 434 was a test run after all.

  We get the word out quickly that we’re dealing with a mega-threat, the likes of which America has never faced before. What Yousef ’s trying to do is nothing short of total war. In case Bojinka is already in autopilot mode, our DSS agents in the field take up stations from Singapore to Tokyo to oversee security procedures and assess potential threats. At the same time, we dispatch one of our agents to Manila. We need to have additional men on the ground out there, supporting the Filipinos.

  Where did Yousef go? He fled the apartment building and has not been seen since. Despite his mistake, he still managed to elude the authorities. If his past behavior is any indication, he’ll roost somewhere else and immediately begin to plot other attacks. We’re racing our intelligence capabilities against his ability to gather operatives and build his bombs. I’m not sure we can win this race.

  The days pass. More information emerges from the Philippines. Yousef ’s group actually set off a small bomb in a mall in Cebu City. The description of the attack sounds like another dry run.

  The Filipinos get some additional details on the plot to kill the pope. Again, Yousef ’s planning was brutally simple and elegant. He’d build an improvised explosive device and strap it to a suicide bomber dressed as a priest. Yousef knew such a disguise would probably get their suicide bomber close enough to the pope to kill him.

  Saeed has not broken yet. The Filipinos are probably beating him raw right now, but he’s holding out. He’s loyal to Yousef.

  That isn’t surprising. Everything we know about him suggests he possesses remarkable personal magnetism. People gravitate to him. He’s a natural leader who has no trouble recruiting foot soldiers when he needs them.

  More news flows in over the succeeding days. Yousef ’s fingerprints are lifted from the apartment, confirming he was there. The police who responded to the scene also saw him on the street. Had Saeed not tried to escape, they might have grabbed Yousef. But in their haste to run down Saeed, they lost their situational awareness and Yousef bolted into the night.

  A thorough list of everything found in the apartment includes a full accounting of the twelve fake passports found hidden in a wall divider, as well as a comprehensive inventory of all the chemical agents the bomb squad unearthed.

  We’ve flown in more help from other Washington agencies. The Filipinos have stumbled across a mint of intelligence information. They need backup, and we need to get into that computer and find out what else resides inside it and the four floppy disks found with it. If the pope was stage I and the airliners were stage II, where does an attack on our nuclear assets come into play? And who is Saeed? What’s his role? We need answers, fast.

  Discussing the current situation in the office on Virginia Avenue, we conclude that Yousef must know that Operation Bojinka has been overtaken by events, mainly due to the seizure of his laptop. Would he try to execute Bojinka anyway? Doubtful. He’s far too smart and cautious to do that. That said, if his past MO holds true, he won’t quit, he’ll just adapt. This can only mean one thing: He’s out there, far out of reach, planning something new. And right now, he’s winning the race.

  thirty-four

  MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING

  February 1995

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  The snow is starting to fall again. Our local radio station, WTOP, keeps warning us we’re sure to get hit with a veritable blizzard this weekend. We’ve already got a good sheen of ice and frozen snow on the ground from a storm that passed through the D.C. area earlier in the week. Bundled up in gloves, hat, and Barbour Beaufort, I’m getting ready by shoveling the driveway.

  I don’t mind this chore. It gives me time to think, and the outdoor exercise is refreshing. I’ve spent too much time in the office this winter. As the deputy director for our division, I have more authority and more ability to shape our team, but that’s come at the cost of my time in the weeds. I miss it. If I go any further up the chain of command, I’ll become purely an administrator. That doesn’t appeal to me much.

  I clear the driveway and start working my snow shovel across the front walk. It grinds over a sheet of ice, and I have to kick it loose. Once I’m done here, I’m going to finally get to spend some time with Jimmy. We’re set to have a snowball fight once the storm arrives. He and Sharon are upstairs right now, getting ready for the day. We moved out of our old Bethesda townhouse not long ago and have gone suburban. We bought this house on Chestnut Street in Chevy Chase in hopes that our family will continue to grow. We both need to work to afford it—my government salary ensures that.

  That means Jimmy spends a lot of time in day care, and every time I drop him off there on my way to work, I can’t help but feel pangs of guilt. My own dad owned a gas station and dabbled in real estate. He worked harder than anyone I’ve ever met, but he always made enough to make sure my mom was home to raise us.

  Kids and the DSS are not a good mix. Sharon and I knew that when I first joined the service. The life of an agent means children grow up with a largely absent father. We decided to try anyway and find a way to make it work. We have, but Jimmy’s still getting shortchanged, at least compared to what my own father gave me.

  Tyler Beauregard dashes across the yard, her breath visible in the subzero air. She trots in circles around me, snuffling as she examines my work. She’s slowing down, getting old (just like me), and I don’t know how much longer she’ll be able to keep up our running regimen. I don’t want to face that. The problem with dogs is that you outlive them.

  I finish up on the walkway and return the shovel to the garage. Inside, I kick off my snow boots.

  The phone rings. God, how I’ve come to hate that noise.

  I reach for the kitchen extension. “Hello?”

  “Fred? This is Art Maruel.”

  A surge of excitement swells in me. Art is the RSO in Pakistan. He’s an old-school agent with no time for bureaucrats or Bow Ties.

  “We need to talk on the other line.”

  I detect excitement in his voice. Something big is going on, and it doesn’t sound like another attack.

  “Okay, wait five and call me back.” He hangs up. A few minutes later, the phone rings again.

  “Fred?”

  “Yeah, got ya, Art.”

  I push the scramble button on the STU-III’s console. The line pops and hisses with electronic noise.

  “Okay, go ahead,” I say after a few seconds.

  “Fred, we just got a walk-in who says he knows Ramzi Yousef.”

  Finally. A break. Art’s much too careful to bug me at home over a whack job.

  “How good’s the source?”

  “Miller and Riner grilled him for six hours. They’re convinced he’s legit.”

  I know both of those agents. Bill Miller’s a redheaded former marine whose performance earned him a tour with the Detail. Jeff Riner is a young agent who I got to know while he was stationed here at the Washington Field Office. He’s a good kid, and I trust his judgment.

  Art continues, “They’ve just given me their report. I’m about to send it out.”

  Alarm bells ring in my mind. We lost Yousef the last time when too many people learned about our other walk-in. We recently picked up information that Yousef was treated in a Pakistani hospital for chemical burns months ago. The Pakistanis never let on. The man has somebody, somewhere, in a position of power protecting his rear.
>
  “Hold up, Art. Let me think about this.” If this is on the level, we need to minimize who knows about our informant. We can’t be broadcasting the news across twenty-five agencies again.

  “Okay, send the report through DSS channels. Eyes-Only Burton. Got it?”

  This is not how things are supposed to be done. But the last time Art followed procedure, too many eyes saw our intel, and we blew our chance to get Yousef.

  Will Art trust me? I know he will. We’re like minds.

  “Understood. I’m on it.”

  “Good. I’m heading for the office.”

  We click off. I gather up the secure phone and find my briefcase and pistol. After plucking my car keys off their peg, I stand at the base of the stairs and tell my wife I’ve got to go in.

  Jimmy appears at the top of the stairs. I turn for the garage, trying to ignore the guilt attacking my conscience. I have no choice. We have a chance to stop a mass murderer.

  Thank God I bought a Jeep. By the time I back it out of the garage, the snow is really coming down. The roads will be a mess. I throw my new rig into four-wheel drive and hit the gas.

  My old Jetta never would have made this journey. As it is, my drive turns into a mini-epic. The windshield wipers barely keep up with the snowfall. Sheets of ice and drifts make the roads treacherous. Few people are out, though I do see one hearty bureaucrat on skis, his suitcase strapped to his back, heading for some downtown office with admirable persistence.

  When I finally reach Foggy Bottom, I head straight for FOGHORN to wait for the report. It comes in a few minutes later. I take it back to my cubicle, fix some coffee, and sit down to read it.

  Art’s agents are right. This does look good. On Saturday morning, Islamabad time, the embassy got a call from a frantic wife of one of the staffers who lived in the diplomatic enclave within the city proper. A very agitated Pakistani had forced his way into her house and refused to leave. She needed help.

  Jeff Riner and Bill Miller hopped into an embassy SUV and sped over to her house. There, they found the Pakistani inside the house looking practically apoplectic with fear. At first, he was so nervous they couldn’t get much out of him. Then he produced a copy of Newsweek and showed Bill and Jeff a copy of an article on Ramzi Yousef that included his photo. As he pointed to the picture, he told the two agents that he knew Yousef and where he was staying in Islamabad.

  Why did he show up at an American staffer’s house and not the embassy?

  Bill and Jeff asked him that. He told them he feared detection if he went to the embassy.

  Does that mean our embassy is under surveillance? Probably.

  He knew the house he selected belonged to an American diplomat because he drove through the neighborhood with Ramzi Yousef, scouting potential targets.

  So Yousef held true to his MO. Instead of going to ground after Bojinka was compromised, he’s already planning his next op. That drive through the diplomatic enclave was the first step in constructing his next target profile.

  Our informant tells us that he had initially been taken with Yousef when they first met. Yousef started grooming him as part of his plan to build a new cell in Pakistan. The informant turned out to be a bad selection. When Yousef took him to Thailand and ordered him to carry out attacks on airliners, the informant could not bring himself to do it. He masked his reticence with plausible excuses that security was too heavy on his flights. Yousef seemed to understand and did not hold his failure against him.

  Our man realized he was no killer. In fact, he has a family—a wife and child. Our informant wanted out. Once you join Yousef ’s cell, though, there is no escape. You remain loyal, or you end up dead.

  He heard about the Rewards for Justice program and concluded it offered the only way out of his predicament.

  Jeff and Bill disguised the informant and hid him in the back of their SUV. With a blanket covering him, they drove back to the embassy and talked to him all afternoon. The details they gleaned from the informant match much of what the Filipinos found in the Manila apartment.

  For two million dollars and a get-out-of-Pakistan-free card, the informant will lead us to Ramzi Yousef.

  If it saves lives, that’s a bargain. The problem is, how do we pull it off?

  thirty-five

  FINALE IN PAKISTAN

  I finish reading Art’s report. I call him on the office’s STU-III and tell him to avoid paper from this point forward. The more that gets written down, the higher the probability this chance gets blown. We’ll move fast, for sure, but we’ll communicate only via secure phone.

  Art’s aboard. What we’re about to do will be risky. Avoiding the proper channels and blacking out this operation so that only a handful of people even know about it will certainly engender outrage. I’m prepared to deal with that, though. I learned long ago that it is better to act and get chastised later than ask permission and never get the shot.

  We will need two teams: Art’s in Pakistan and a key group in Washington. Art will use Jeff Riner and Bill Miller as the lead agents, but I know we’ll also need Pakistani help. That’s going to be very tricky.

  First things first. Who do we need here in D.C.? I’ll bring in only people I personally know and trust. I make my first call to John Lipka, the chief of the D.C. Joint Terror Task Force.

  Despite the storm, John comes over to the DSS office when I tell him we’ve got something big cooking. After I brief him, he thinks about what our next step should be. “We need to bring in John O’Neil,” he tells me.

  O’Neil is a legend in the counterterrorism business. An overachieving workaholic in a field full of them, he stands out as one FBI agent who can be counted on to do the right thing. He doesn’t play politics; he doesn’t rationalize justice. He just wants to stop terrorists and save lives. He is the chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism division.

  Together, John Lipka and I drive through the storm to the Hoover Building. The halls are deserted, as is nearly every office. But when we reach John’s, we find him hard at work. We didn’t even need to call ahead. John has a reputation for always being in the office.

  Together, John Lipka and I outline our plan. When we finish, we can see O’Neil’s bought into it. “Sounds good, let’s do it.”

  It takes a few days to get the pieces in place in Pakistan. The informant gives us conflicting information at first, sending our agents off on wild-goose chases to confirm what he’s said. Finally, Art’s men pin down Yousef ’s exact location. He’s staying in a hotel called the Su Casa Guesthouse.

  I give Art the green light to assemble his team. While he’s preparing to take down the hotel, we need to get him some support. We need the Pakistanis to help us.

  John O’Neil, John Lipka, and I talk this over. There’s really only one Pakistani we trust: General Rahman Malik, one of the Federal Investigation Agency’s senior leaders. We give him a call, and he joins our little circle of conspirators. He’ll provide the entry team, and he handpicks the best of his agents for the mission.

  We’re ready. To coordinate the op, O’Neil, Lipka, and I meet late Tuesday night at the FBI’s ultramodern Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC). Nobody is around. It is just the three of us in the room together, standing in front of a bank of three large projection screens surrounded by empty desks and blissfully silent phones. The place is so quiet that I feel like we’re inside a submarine.

  We’ve been able to keep a lid on this, which is an accomplishment on its own. O’Neil’s briefed one other FBI agent, but that’s as far as the news has traveled within the Bureau. For my part, I brought in my immediate superior, Al Bigler. After Beirut I, Al’s body was found amid the debris. The rescue crews thought he was dead and dumped him on a heap of corpses. A Lebanese cop who knew him just happened to walk past the dead bodies and noticed Al. The two were friends; when the cop realized Al was still alive, he got him to the hospital and saved his life. Al is going to join us in the SIOC later this evening. He doesn’t want to miss this; he
has scores to settle.

  Before we can pull the trigger and order the snatch, O’Neil tries to get an FBI agent onto the scene. Unfortunately, there isn’t one in Pakistan at the moment. After some running around, we learn the nearest Bureau agent is in Bangkok. O’Neil orders him onto the next plane to Islamabad, but he won’t be on the ground in time to take part in the op.

  Al Bigler storms into the room. “What have you got?”

  “We’re just about to link up with Art,” I tell him.

  He takes up station, leaning against an empty desk. I establish contact with Art through a secure phone and put him on speaker.

  “Okay, Fred, what do you want us to do?” Art asks through the electronic pops and hisses of the secure phone.

  I look around the room. Every one of us knows what will happen if this goes bad. If we lose an agent, if the man we take down is not Ramzi Yousef, if the Pakistanis make a stink—we will be chum to the office piranhas in our midst. Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. We’re risking our livelihoods here. And our pensions.

  To be honest, I don’t care about my career. My ambitions don’t revolve around climbing into the halls of power within the State Department. They’re focused on winning this war we’re fighting that so few Americans seem to recognize even exists. After the World Trade Center, counterterrorism remains at the bottom of our national priorities. Perhaps that’s why I don’t care about the title before my name or how much power I accumulate. That means nothing when lives are at stake every day. All I want to do is carry the battle home to guys like Yousef so more of my countrymen do not end up free-falling from thirty-one thousand feet. If we don’t do it, who will?

  There’s the rub. Who will?

  We will. Looking around the room, I see good men, equally if not more committed than I am. We’re the veterans, the men who have waged this campaign against terror our entire professional lives. John O’Neil has made plenty of enemies within his own bureaucracy by doing the right thing. He’s given his life to this fight, just as Al and John Lipka have. Maybe the Black Dragons are right. We are zealots. But our side needs zealots, too.