by Jay Deb
Doerr nodded. “True. But I didn’t really do anything. I thought I was just following my boss’s orders.”
“What’s going to happen, Max?” Gayle took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. Her anger started melting, and the color of her face was returning to normal. “I’m so scared. Did you tell Lazarus?”
“I told him everything except the fact that I killed the DEA top man.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Gayle sat there with her mouth agape. “I feel terrible.”
DOERR WOKE UP late, as usual. Gayle had already left for work. Doerr touched his smartphone, and the screen lit up. An icon indicated that there was a message waiting for him. He checked it promptly; it was a message from Lazarus – asking him to call back.
“Hello.” Lazarus picked up on the second ring.
“Listen,” Lazarus said after pleasantries. “I thought about you after you left the other day. I felt bad. I will never forget that you saved my life in Saudi Arabia. I talked to my boss, Stonewall, about taking you back into the CIA, and she finally agreed.”
“I never said I wanted to rejoin the CIA,” Doerr said tersely. “I just needed some access to your data and facilities to track Samuel down.”
“But the only way you can have access is if you become our employee.”
“So if I join your agency, you let me go after Samuel?”
“Yes, but there is a condition.”
“What is it?”
“The condition is,” Lazarus cleared his throat, “give and take. You have to complete a few of our assignments before we let you go after Samuel, and this is a condition set forth by Director Stonewall herself. We are swamped with field work, and as you know, most of our employees don’t like to go to the field. Almost everybody wants to sit on their ass at Langley.”
“By ‘a few assignments,’ how many do you mean?” Doerr came to the point.
“Four.”
“I will do two operations. Then I go after Samuel.”
“You will have to do three ops. That’s the minimum.”
“Okay, three,” Doerr said.
“But before any of your operations begin, you will have to come to the Virginia training center for a week. You will be trained on tactical shooting and deadly force decisions. I don’t think you have to relearn anything. So consider it a vacation. And at the end you will get the details of your first assignment; it will be in Paris, and the second op will be in Amsterdam. You will be working directly for me, just like before.”
“Okay.”
“And one more thing.”
“Yes.” More strings, Doerr thought.
“Keep the news about Samuel’s disloyalty to yourself. Only a few people at the top know that Samuel doesn’t work for us anymore. As you know, we don’t advertise this sort of thing, and we try to take care of it ourselves. Otherwise, the FBI would be arresting somebody from our agency every day.”
“No problem. I know,” Doerr said glumly. “Do you know what Samuel is up to these days?”
“The last I heard about him is that he has joined hands with the cartels in Mexico.”
It made sense to Doerr, who hadn’t been able to think of a reason why he had removed the DEA chief, but he had a reputation of being tough on drug smugglers. “One more question, Lazarus. Where are his buddies, Victor and Len?”
“They left the agency right after Samuel did.”
Doerr sighed. “Thanks.” He hung up. The strings of confusion untangled themselves and took shape in his mind; everything made sense to him now. Samuel, Len and Victor left the agency to do freelance work for the cartels, which was much more profitable than being government employees. Samuel duped Doerr into killing the top drug enforcement man with a single shot. The DEA administrator was known to be tough. He was arming DEA agents with advanced firearms and deploying more of them to the border, and the result was a twenty percent drop in drug shipments from Mexico to the US. Doerr knew all that.
The cartels abhorred that. Samuel must have been paid a bundle for the hit.
Doerr felt excited about really rejoining the CIA. Losing his son was the hardest thing he had ever had to deal with, and to be moving forward felt good.
Finally, a ray of hope was coming. He knew that the moments of happiness could be fleeting, so to share the joy, he called Gayle immediately.
LAZARUS WAS RIGHT. The training at Langley was a cakewalk. Doerr was lumped with nine other trainees, and all ten of them were kept in the guest house of the training site in rural Virginia. The trainees met over a brunch on their first day.
Most of them were young, certainly younger than twenty-five; there was only one guy who was a little older. It reminded Doerr about the time when he had trained with the CIA back in the mid-nineties. He had been twenty-two years old, fresh out of college. He had trained at a Pennsylvania training site sandwiched between two hills. The only way in was a dirt road that connected to a local street, just off the I-80 highway. His mother had been healthy back then. Initially, he had told her that he was joining the Army. After two weeks of training, his mother had insisted repeatedly that she wanted to visit him at the training center.
“Why can’t I come?” she had argued. “I have a friend in North Carolina. She goes to her son’s Army training center all the time.” At that point, Doerr had to tell her that he was with the CIA and not the Army, and no civilians were allowed to visit the training site.
Doerr sat in the cafeteria of the new training center on Sunday night. It was seven p.m., and there was only one server there, a woman who looked to be just older than thirty.
“What is good at this time of the day?” Doerr asked her.
“Grilled chicken sandwich is good. Or you can go with macaroni. We have pizza, too.”
“I’ll have macaroni and a bottle of Snapple.” Doerr paid with cash.
Ten minutes later he sat at the table, munching the stale macaroni. The next day, the training would start. He took a sip from his Snapple bottle, and the older trainee came and sat next to him.
Doerr chit-chatted with the guy through his dinner and later went to bed early.
The first day of training was on marksmanship. Doerr was more experienced in many areas than the trainer, who was little taller than Doerr, may be six-six or six-eight. But he was skinny and weighed no more than a hundred and ninety, may be two hundred pounds. In the morning the training was on how to shoot a pistol when the target was at a distance of more than a hundred feet, what to do when there were innocent bystanders, how to avoid civilian casualties.
In the afternoon, they were taught how to maintain firearms. “A poorly maintained gun is as dangerous to the shooter as it is to the target,” the trainer said. There was an embarrassing incident when the trainer unassembled an assault rifle and he wanted to show Doerr and others how to reassemble it. But the trainer was having trouble putting it back together. The magazine release button just would not fit.
“If it doesn’t work,” the coach said smartly, “you have to disassemble the firearm and start over.”
The trainer took the rifle apart and tried to fit it back together again, and he failed. Doerr waited for a while, and then he had to take over and show them how it was really done.
The trainer smartly said to the other men, “When you are stuck with something, get some help from your coworker. That’s the lesson here.”
Doerr saw the older trainee trying to suppress his laughter.
AFTER COMPLETING HIS so-called training, Doerr boarded a plane to Paris, where the first operation was to take place. It was a bright morning when he arrived.
Doerr walked out of the elevator and was walking fiercely to his hotel room. He felt a little edgy, given that he had been out of real, legitimate action for a while.
His target, Al Hashemi, was a known terrorist with connections all over the world – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, the UK, France and many more.
Doerr had gotten rid of many in the past that were
on their way to harm America. Their vile faces were frozen in his memory like the cereal boxes on the grocery store shelves. He could read them, count them, and sometimes those faces appeared in his dreams.
Doerr reached his hotel room, swiped the card, opened the door and closed it behind him. He opened his bag and assembled the M16 rifle and clamped the telescopic sight to it in just forty seconds, a perfection achieved by practice.
He waited and waited at the window. But two hours later, there was still no sign of Al Hashemi. What happened to the bastard? I was told he would be out within an hour.
After the long wait, he had to do something.
He picked up his phone and dialed the hotel number, speaking to the hotel clerk in French. “I will be arriving at the hotel in ten minutes. I’m meeting with Al Hashemi. Can you please let him know, urgently, for me?” It was all lies. He was already in the hotel, in his own room.
“Wait a second,” the operator answered. “Let me call him.”
A minute later the operator came back on the line. “Sir, he is not answering.”
“What’s his room number?” Doerr said.
The operator paused, but Doerr was insistent. “Please, ma’am. His father just died. I have to inform him as soon as possible.” More lies.
“You should contact him directly. We can’t give out that information.”
“Please understand. His family wants to talk to him right now. The only way I can speak to him is if I go to his room.”
“He is in 447,” the operator said grudgingly.
Now Doerr had the man’s room number. He disassembled his rifle and put the parts back into the duffel bag and took out his Glock and a fresh silencer from the suitcase. The gun went to his right pocket and silencer in his left. He took the elevator to the fourth floor and passed the janitor; soon he stood in front of room 447. The polished wooden door was shut. Knowing the janitor might be watching him, he didn’t risk touching the handle. He knew it would not open anyway.
He kept walking, taking the stairs down to the ground floor. The hotel clerk behind the desk was an old black man, in a suit, with a serious face. Lights from the powerful wall lamp reflected from his rimless glasses. Doerr observed the clerk for a few seconds and decided to head for the bar. Once seated, he ordered a glass of Bordeaux and a sandwich. He sat on a stool and then shifted his position, the silencer in his left pocket making him uncomfortable.
He savored the wine and kept a close eye on the hotel clerk. By the time he had eaten half of his sandwich, a new hotel clerk appeared, an elderly woman. He pressed a button on his phone and whispered, “Is the bird still in its nest?”
“Yes, confirmed. The bird still in nest,” the voice at the other end said.
After paying the bill, he rushed to the hotel clerk. She was a heavyset woman, nails polished in a shiny red, her makeup done perfectly. Doerr could not locate a single wrinkle on her red dress.
He put on the cutest smile he could as he approached the clerk, “Are those real diamonds in your earrings?” He knew the colorless stones were far too large to be worn by a hotel clerk unless she was also the owner or wife of the owner.
“No,” she said with a big smile, “they’re imitation. How can I help you?”
“The thing is,” he reached inside his pocket as if searching for something, “I lost my room key. Can I have a duplicate?” He tried to put up the look of a kid who had just stolen a Snickers bar.
“Room number?” the lady asked.
“447.” The room number of the man he was about to kill.
“Okay.” She took a quick look at the computer, swiped a card on the machine and handed it over.
“Thanks, sweetie.” He gave her another smile and rushed to the elevator. As he walked to room 447, he screwed the silencer to the barrel of his Glock surreptitiously.
Facing the door, he looked once to the right, then to the left. A middle-aged man carrying a suitcase was walking toward him. Doerr didn’t care; he inserted the key and opened the door rapidly, slipping through the gap and closing it behind him even more quickly.
Al Hashemi was a rather short man. He was only five feet five, or maybe even shorter – seven or eight inches shorter than Doerr. His brown beard was as long as his face.
But the man looked strong; his deltoids looked like large rocks. Wearing a white tunic that covered his entire body, except his face, he was sitting on the bed. As soon as he saw Doerr, he extended his hand to the table on his right, trying to pick up the Beretta that lay there in plain sight. Doerr was sure the gun was loaded, and he was ready with his own Glock. In a split second, Doerr took the shot, but he missed the mark, hitting Al Hashemi in the neck instead of the head.
Strong like a bull, Al Hashemi clutched his neck with his left hand and pushed himself with his legs, reaching again for his gun.
Doerr was momentarily distracted as he stumbled on some clothing left on the floor. He raised his gun, but it was late. A bullet came out of Al Hashemi’s Beretta, and it hit Doerr’s hip, shattering his bone. Doerr dropped to the ground, his vision blurring with the pain, the magnitude of which he had never felt before.
Propping himself up on one arm, Doerr squinted through the pain and fired one more shot, which struck Al Hashemi between the eyes. Hashemi slumped, his body crumpled on the bed. A soap advertisement was showing on the muted TV.
Al Hashemi didn’t really have a chance against his trained opponent. But this time, Doerr was hurt. Doerr tried to stand up, but the pain in his hip was too great. The agony was spreading through his entire body.
He dropped his gun to the ground, took his cell phone from his pocket, and pushed the redial button. “Bird is down in nest 447. Send a cleanup crew.” After a pause, he said, “I’ve been hit.”
The crew arrived shortly, one after another, wearing different disguises – a total of seven of them. Doerr was taken to the safe house in Montrouge and given preliminary care, but the X-ray revealed a badly damaged bone. Under the cover of night, he was taken to a local airport and was airlifted to a state-of-the-art American hospital in Kuwait City.
The lead doctor told him, “You are lucky, Mr. Doerr. Normally we would recommend amputation when there is this much hip bone damage. But, because you have such an athletic body, we think we can save your leg.”
After the surgery and months of intense rehabilitation, Doerr was back on his feet. He could do pretty much everything just like before; running was the only activity that gave him a twinge in his leg.
DOERR WAS BACK in New York, continuing his therapy.
“Why don’t you take it easy for another month.” Lazarus called one day. “Maybe you got a little rusty after being out for a while.”
“All the rust is gone, Lazarus,” Doerr said. “I have to find my son’s killer. I only have pain in my chest. That pain is more intense than anything else.”
“We want to make sure you’re fine. But…”
“I’m fine, Lazarus,” Doerr interrupted. “My leg is fine. I want to go to Amsterdam today and start my operation. I want to go there today.”
“You can’t go today. Maybe next week. I will send the flight and other details.”
Doerr hung up the phone. He made some coffee and drank it. He turned all the lights off, sat in a reclining chair, and kept thinking. Darkness helped him to contemplate better.
Samuel’s vile face flashed in his mind. Sitting in his apartment was not working, so he decided to take a walk outside and get some fresh air.
He walked for about a mile. His legs felt fine. On his way back he felt a small niggle in his hip, which he was sure would go away soon.
He arrived back at his apartment and heard a beep from his phone. There was a message waiting. He hit the play button and listened.
Max, don’t try to be smart. Just do your job and forget about me. What is done is done. If you come after me, there will be consequences. You got injured in Paris, and I’m sure you don’t want to be hurt again. So don’t look for me. D
on’t seek revenge.
From the voice, Doerr had no doubt who the caller was – Samuel. Doerr could never forget his voice.
Doerr checked the caller ID. The LCD displayed ‘unknown.’
Doerr grabbed the phone and threw it on the floor in frustration. The device shattered into pieces.
Samuel was trying to threaten him. Samuel knew everything Doerr was doing.
But how?
Did Samuel pay off someone in the agency? Maybe a techie, who had access to all the data stored in the computers?
Doerr didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Catching and killing Samuel was his goal.
BOOK 2
Chapter 13
ABU HALIM WAS the eldest among nine sons and four daughters; his father had three wives and had produced many heirs. Halim’s affinity for leadership started early in his life. He graduated from the University of Dubai in Business Administration with an eye to take over his father’s oil business one day. He proceeded to Oxford Business School for a year, to earn an MBA.
But Halim never finished his MBA. Three months into it, his mother died. Halim immediately returned home, planning to mourn his mother’s death alongside his father, only to see his father move on in his life, seemingly without grief, with his two younger wives. Halim cried alone. He remembered those nights when his father had screamed at his mother, and Halim used to put his arms around his mother as his father slammed the door, heading for the bedroom of one of his other wives.
Days and weeks passed after his mother’s death. His tears stopped, but the pain in his heart only swelled. The desolation waned only when he took a silent vow in the mosque, while praying, to kill his father and both stepmothers.
The next few weeks he acted in a very friendly way with his younger stepmother, Nasrin. She was just five years older than him. He started having breakfast and dinner with her every day – even reading the Quran with her. On a Sunday afternoon, when the whole family was having a gala lunch with shish kabobs, made from halal goat meat, and lamb curry, his father smiled when Halim told him that Nasrin was his new mother. With his lips pursed, Halim also smiled – inside his mind. Outside, he maintained a serious face. His plan was working.