by Marcus Wynne
“We don’t know,” Dr. Green said.
“Sad holiday,” Dale said. “I wonder what that means.”
Charley Payne was enjoying his job. He walked outside on the manicured lawns and carefully maintained flower beds that bordered the Victorian house, and drank in the summer air. He lingered for a little bit on a wide piece of grassy space that was bathed in sun, and he closed his eyes for a moment and let the heat of the sun warm him.
Life was good.
He was banking 1,500 a day plus his minimal expenses and working with a fine crew. He enjoyed his conversations with the younger Dale, who was a good team leader—seasoned and confident enough to clearly state what he wanted and then get out of the way of his people while they did their work. He enjoyed being partnered with Dale. The younger operator had a hell of a resume, bits and pieces of which came out in their frequent conversations. Charley relished the interplay between him and the other members of the team, and it reminded him, painfully, of his best days as an operator. He knew his best days were behind him, but Dale was just into his prime, and Charley wondered what his team leader would do once this operation got handed over. Charley had his photography, but Dale didn’t have a mission. The suppressed mentor in Charley wanted to take Dale under his wing, urge him to find something he could lose himself in, but he wisely bit his tongue and let the young man run.
That was the beginning of wisdom, to know when you didn’t really have anything to say anymore.
Charley let his arm down and pressed slightly against the Glock holstered beneath his shirt. He was dressed in Levis and a short-sleeved denim shirt worn with the tails out. A small walkie-talkie was tucked into the shirt pocket of his shirt, with an earpiece running from the pocket to his ear. The team was small enough to maintain an open single frequency.
“One-Zero, this is One-Two,” Charley said.
“One-Zero, go ahead,” Dale’s voice was tinny in the earpiece.
“All clear at the quarter hour,” Charley said.
“Roger all clear,” Dale said. “One-Zero out.”
Charley continued his stroll around the grounds, and walked up the slope of a small hill that bordered the center. The access road came in from the parkway road there, wound around the hill, and then made a horseshoe loop in the driveway in front of the center. A bicycle and jogging path followed the road along the parkway, and from where Charley stood he could see people jogging as well as a solo bicyclist slowly peddling along.
It was a beautiful day, and there was no sign of a threat in sight.
Marika Tormay peddled her bicycle as slowly as she could without stopping. She saw the lone man standing atop the slight hill that hid the Torture Center from the main road. She had come this way several times a day for the last few days, looking for signs of security. There was the uniformed presence of the university campus police, who patrolled the grounds of the center and other properties here on the edge of the campus area, but in recent days she’d seen men in plainclothes lingering on the grounds of the center—not staffers, but not patients either. Their attention to who and what was in the immediate area marked them out as security.
She’d ridden her bicycle down the access road and made a loop around the driveway. While no one had challenged her, she was aware of the scrutiny of a man in the garden, who’d been joined by another man. Both muscular, dressed in casual clothes, with their shirttails out, no doubt to hide their weapons. They had the look. She had plenty of experience with armed men, first in the West Bank, then in Beirut, and her training in the camps in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon had refined her eye even more. As an intelligence gathering operative for the Al-Bashir network, she had been idle, a sleeper agent on a student visa in the cosmopolitan—and very large—student population in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She’d been activated to surveil a small group of Iraqi exiles, and had for the first time met another sleeper agent in the Twin Cities area. The two of them worked up a profile of one of the men—who ended up dead in a spectacular hit. The woman and the other man had been harder. They hadn’t been able to finger the man’s location, and the woman stayed in for the most part, hidden behind formidable security. Now the woman had disappeared, but before she had gone, a small convoy of cars had driven her here to the Torture Center, where Marika had walked in on the grounds and was rewarded with a glimpse of the woman talking to a tall man in a track suit accompanied by a doctor.
They’d found the third man.
Since that time, the surveillance cell had worked up a target folder focusing on the center. Marika had dressed in business clothes and paid a visit to the offices of the remodeling company that had renovated the Victorian house that housed the center; she’d left with a complete set of floor plans and photographs. Her partner, a silent and serious Palestinian, had carefully, over a series of days, taken digital video of the house and the surrounding avenues of approach, and on his I-Mac computer carefully edited the raw footage into a detailed and comprehensive documentary on the center and the surrounding grounds. They had reached a point where more was not possible with the standoff approach; someone would have to get inside the building and see if they could identify where the target was located to take their work to the next level.
While she was not a shooter, she recognized, from her training in the camps, the demands of a shooting team: which way did the doors open, what sort of locks did they have, what was the distance from the little hill to the house, what was the response time of the campus police to the center, how many men and did they appear to have long guns—these were the questions that trained assault personnel needed answered.
She knew there’d be a shooting soon.
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Youssef bin Hassan sat alone in the Golden Herb coffeehouse, surrounded by dozens of young people whose chatter washed over him like water over a stone. He slowly nursed one of the many coffees he drank throughout the day, and wondered why no one spoke to him. So many young people, from so many countries, all of them looking for friends in this friendliest of cities, let their gaze pass over him quickly. Not that there hadn’t been a few attempts, but Youssef had rebuffed them without really knowing why. He told himself it was for operational reasons, but his loneliness nagged at him and was plain to see in his face, which made him all the more confusing to the few who dared to cross the wall of silence he surrounded himself with.
Youssef was new to the Al-Bashir network. He was only recently out of the Sudanese training camps. He smiled to himself and touched his coffee cup with one finger as he remembered the camaraderie of the camps and the fun he’d had in training with other operators. The training course had been rigorous, with challenges presented to them in hand-to-hand combat, shooting, tactics and planning, and many long speeches from the imams on the nature of the armed struggle against Israel and the United States. The shared experiences had fostered a tight bond with his training group, a bond that Youssef, a rare single child in an Arab family, had thrived on.
All the lectures on preparation for operating in hostile territory hadn’t prepared him for the loneliness of the singleton operator. He had permission to shave his beard, miss prayer, even to drink alcohol if it was necessary to preserve his cover, but there was an iron-clad prohibition about unburdening himself to a sympathetic ear other than his controllers. Those meetings were few and far between, and most of his communication took place through e-mail. He was starved for human contact. As an only child, he hadn’t learned how to easily make idle conversation, to strike up dialogues with the people around him. So he made the rounds of the coffee shops, and eavesdropped on other people his own age, planning their excursions and laughing with one another.
It made him angry.
There was a seed of bitterness in him that the Al-Bashir recruiters had seen, a deep loneliness that had been assuaged by his membership in the terrorist organization. It was like belonging to a large company. There were picnics with the families of other operators, parties where the senior org
anizers and leaders socialized with rank and file soldiers, regular infusions of money for living expenses, and tasks to accomplish. But he had none of that now, and comparing his past experiences to the present just made him more bitter.
Today would be a good day to spend in rehearsal. His final operation wouldn’t take place here, but it was good training ground. He’d been taught, and taught well, how to conduct reconnaissance and prepare the ground for his actions. Taking action now would be good, and give him a satisfaction that his action would someday show the world that he wasn’t small and insignificant; no, he was someone of hidden importance and that was something these young people shunning him would someday see.
He finished his coffee and left a few small coins on the table when he left. He shouldered his courier bag, weighty with his laptop computer and a few belongings, and strolled toward the Central Train Station with its gray towers and gabled walls. At the bridge that crossed the canal in front of the station, he paused for a while and let the crowd move and swirl around him, watching the station and the people coming and going. Then he entered the station and wandered in the crowd, one hand curled in his pocket around the atomizer he carried there. He took out his hand, the atomizer concealed in his closed fist, his thumb resting on the spray head, and let his hand swing naturally with his body motion.
The first target was an old woman dressed neatly in a black dress and stockings; she got a spray on her back. A young man about Youssef’s age was chatting up a group of girls; he took a spray on his sleeve as Youssef brushed by him, eyes straight ahead as though nothing were taking place. Two girls ran by to catch a train; they got a spray directed at their head scarves. None of them noticed the faint mist from behind or the side; Youssef was doing well, the natural motion of his hand hiding the atomizer that sent a mist on each victim. Today it was just water.
Soon it would be something else.
TORTURE REHABILITATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA CAMPUS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
“Hi, Darla,” Ford said to the cook as he squeezed through the narrow kitchen toward the back door of the center. He was dressed in running shorts and singlet, and had his radio and handgun concealed in a blue fanny pack strapped around his waist.
“Hi, Greg,” the young black woman said. “Going for your run?”
“Yeah, thought I’d get a quickie in.”
“Quickie sounds good.”
Ford grinned and said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you, girlfriend.”
“You’re so bad!” Darla said. She snapped a dish towel at his lean flanks. “Go on, get out of here!”
Ford laughed as he shouldered open the back door. He paused, from long force of habit, and looked far and then near, wide and then close, before he set off in an easy shamble that ate up the miles. He went over the little hill that adjoined the center and down to the bicycle and jogging trail that paralleled River Road and followed the banks of the Minnesota River as it meandered south. The path was pleasant: level with gentle curves and plenty of hills, tree-lined, with a good view of the river. His basic course took him five miles out and back. Normally he wouldn’t take such a long run on a job, but the boss had said to go ahead and get his run in. He liked Dale Miller. He’d never worked with him before, though they had been in Special Forces at the same time, but they knew some of the same people in Delta and in Seventh Group where they’d both done their A-Team time.
Ford’s runs were his favorite time of day. He liked being alone with the rhythm of his body and he relished the challenge of the hills and the occasional encounter with a runner in his class. He saw a woman on the path ahead of him, running, not jogging, with the easy, relaxed upper body and smooth pace of a coached runner. He kept his pace strong and hard and drew up even with the woman with the long blond ponytail.
“Hi,” he said, between breaths.
She looked over at him and smiled. “Hi, yourself. Great day for a run, isn’t it?”
She had a faint accent.
“Sure is,” Ford said. “How far you going?”
“Not far . . . I’m coming back from an injury. You?”
“Just five out and back.”
“Don’t let me hold you up,” the tall blonde said.
“See you!” Ford said, picking up his pace. He felt the woman’s gaze on his back and that warmed him.
Isabelle Andouille stretched out her pace, enjoying the easy run ahead of her and the feeling of being uncramped after her long transatlantic flight. Men were so easy, she thought, not for the first time in her career. They never consider women a serious threat.
DOMINANCE RAIN HEADQUARTERS, FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA
“So what kind of take are you getting?” Ray Dalton asked Mike Callan.
“Just interesting tidbits,” Callan said. “The detail is going well. I hooked Dale up with a good crew. He talked Charley Payne into being second in command.”
“How is Payne doing?”
“Good. It’s an easy detail. They haven’t spotted any surveillance, they keep Uday buttoned up tight on the grounds, they’ve got assistance from the campus police . . . they’re in good shape. Payne seems to thrive on it.”
“How is Dale?”
“He wouldn’t be happy to know that you’re signing his check. He’s still carrying baggage over the whole Jonny Maxwell job, but then so is most anybody who was involved in that operation. He’s doing a good job.”
“What else?”
“Dale’s been sitting in on Uday’s psychiatrist sessions. Uday keeps making reference to someone called “the One” and something about having a sad holiday. Dale thinks this is important and linked to why he was tortured. It seems that Saddam may actually have witnessed or even taken part in the torture of Uday, which means he was pretty damn high up in the pecking order.”
“Should we take him over?”
“I don’t know if the Agency shrinks could do a better job. The people at the center are the best in the world at what they do, and I don’t think that scooping up Uday at this point is going to help his recovery. I don’t think you’ll get anything more than what they’re getting. I’d wait, and see what develops. What have you got on Uday in the computer?”
“Not much. Uday is an Iraqi, high in Saddam’s social circles, and doing some kind of secret work. A close associate of Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defects in 1995 long enough for us to debrief, and then goes back to Iraq, where he’s tortured and executed. Uday, because of his association with Hussein Kamel, is scooped up by Iraqi intelligence and internal security, and tortured till his mind breaks, and for no other reason we can discern except that he was close with Hussein Kamel. We know that Uday has to be a big muckety muck because he’s got a double, at least one, in his personal secretary. After the war, Uday’s family money buys him out of prison and gets him, his wife, and personal secretary out of the country and into the United States, where he comes up on our radar. Seeking asylum, with immigration paperwork pending, they come to Minneapolis where Uday is accepted into the Torture Center’s rehab program. Uday’s secretary takes Uday’s name and makes himself seen with heavy bodyguard protection, all of which serves to be useless on the day the Twins settle their sights on him.”
“So the Twins thought they were taking Uday out?”
“Yeah. And they probably intended to take the wife and secretary out, too, as a matter of housekeeping. But I think Uday is number one on their hit parade. So what makes him so important that Saddam himself supervised his torture, and when he escapes out of Iraq, someone hires the most expensive and talented team of hitters you can find to take him out?”
“Dale reported that Uday had been trained as a biochemist. What about that?”
“That adds up to a bad scenario. Hussein Kamel was in charge of the biological and chemical warfare program.”
“And Uday was a biochemist and a close associate of Hussein Kamel.”
“Which takes us to something about their biowarfare or chemical warfare programs.”
Mike Callan shook his head from side to side. “Maybe you do have enough to swoop up Uday and hide him away till he gets well enough to spill his guts about what he was up to.”
“Like you said, we don’t know if we’d get any more from him that way. It might hamper getting what we need out of him. Better that Dale continue doing what he can to see what comes up in Uday’s therapy sessions.”
Ray stood up and went to the window.
“This has the feeling of something spinning out of control. We just can’t see it yet,” he said over his shoulder.
“I don’t know about that,” Callan said. “You’ve got good people on the ground . . . let it play out a little.”
“We’ve got a lot of information on the biological and chemical program from Hussein Kamel’s debriefing. It’s been an administration priority . . .”
“You’ve got a little more, now. See what comes up.”
“Right,” Ray Dalton said. “We’ll see what comes up.”
TORTURE REHABILITATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA CAMPUS, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
The best time for a raid is in the darkest hours of the night, in those hours right before daylight, when the body’s rhythm is at its slowest, and the brain struggles in the landscape between dream and waking. It’s an old military axiom that you want to strike when the enemy is at his weakest, and it’s at night that the defender is weakest.
Jimmy Harrison kept that in mind as he walked the perimeter around the center at 3 A.M. He struggled to keep his mind focused and alert as he patrolled. He and Greg Ford—who was inside, sitting outside the door of Rahman Uday’s bedroom—were working the 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. shift. Dale Miller and Charley Payne were both sleeping in the spare patient bedroom the detail had turned into a security ready room.