by Vince Flynn
“Slower this time,” she said. “This major…what’s his name?”
“Captain…Captain Leland. You met him when you were in Afghanistan last week.”
“Any reason I’d remember him?”
“No. He’s not handsome enough.”
“But you remember him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Lonsdale asked with suspicion.
“It’s not what you think.”
“It better not be. Because if I get behind this guy and the CIA finds out he’s gay and my gay chief of staff is the man he went to, we could have some problems.”
“Babs, I have no idea if he’s gay or straight. I remembered him because he voiced some concerns to me about the CIA and their interrogation methods.”
“He better not be gay.”
“I don’t see how it matters.”
“It probably doesn’t, but I want you to find out. You know I hate surprises.” Lonsdale took a drag and then exhaled. “And these bastards won’t go down without a fight.”
“No…they most certainly won’t.”
“Please don’t tell me you think I should pass on this?”
“No, I just think you should tread carefully.”
“Ralph, according to what you just told me, Rapp assaulted this officer.”
“Black eye and a severely sprained wrist. Possible ligament damage. The doctor told him it would have been better if he’d broken it.”
“Did the doctor take photos?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure he took an X-ray.”
“I mean photos of his eye…swelling on his wrist…that type of stuff.”
“I don’t know.”
“He told you e-mail was the best way to get ahold of him?”
“Yes.”
“Send him an e-mail and tell him to take some photos and send them back.”
Wassen took a step back and braced himself for his boss’s rage. “I’m not sure he’ll be willing to do that.”
“Why?” Lonsdale asked tersely.
“He doesn’t want this to look like he came to us. He wants us to investigate it from our end as if we’d picked up on a rumor.”
Lonsdale frowned. “That’s silly.”
“Not really. Not if he wants to have a career in the air force.”
“I think I can call in enough favors with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee to get him any job he wants.”
“Posting, Babs. That’s what they call it in the military.”
Lonsdale ignored him. “We need to get him to make an official statement of some sort. Who do we have over there who we could trust?”
“Babs,” Wassen half shouted, “you’re not listening to me, and if you knew anything about the military you’d understand why he doesn’t want to be the one who comes forward…who files an official complaint.”
“Ralph, I know this is going to come as a real surprise to you, but I don’t give a shit. I have been handed Mitch Rapp’s balls on a platter, and I’m not going to let go. You tell this guy he either fills out an official complaint or I’ll consider him part of a cover-up.”
Wassen rolled his tired eyes. As chief of staff he wore many hats and one of them was to protect his boss from herself. She was a great campaigner, because like Stonewall Jackson she did not possess the ability to retreat. It was always attack and never give the enemy quarter. This, and a few other reasons, was why Wassen often fed her information one bite at a time. That way he at least stood a chance of nudging her in the most thoughtful direction. “There’s something else I haven’t told you.”
“You did sleep with him, didn’t you?” Lonsdale’s brown eyes were practically bugging out of her head.
“Enough about my sex life, all right? I did not sleep with him and I will never sleep with him, and if you bring it up again, I’m going to throw your stapler at you.”
“Fine,” she said, as if Wassen were the one who was being unreasonable.
“Have you bothered to stop and ask yourself why Rapp would do something like this?”
“You mean hit another man? I don’t need to. He’s a homicidal maniac.”
“I’ve warned you, I don’t know how many times.” A look of real intensity gripped Wassen. “If you are going to take Rapp and Kennedy on, you need to stop underestimating them.”
“Would you like to argue the last point?”
“No…Rapp definitely has some homicidal tendencies, but I don’t think he’s a maniac.”
“Well…let’s just agree to disagree for the moment. What’s this other thing you have?”
“You haven’t bothered to ask why Leland was trying to arrest Rapp.”
“Fine…why was Leland trying to arrest Rapp?”
Wassen clapped his hands together and got ready to deliver the bombshell. “Remember the two high-value targets we saw while we were over there…Abu Haggani and Mohammad al-Haq?”
“Yes.” Lonsdale stabbed out what was left of her cigarette. “And I remember leaving specific orders that they were to be treated in exact accordance with the Geneva Conventions.”
“Yes, you did, but apparently Mr. Rapp didn’t get that memo, because sometime in the early hours of this past Saturday morning, Rapp and several other unidentified individuals arrived at the base disguised as officers from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“According to Captain Leland. Rapp then went to the special interrogation facility that housed al-Haq and Haggani.” Wassen stopped for dramatic effect.
“And?” snapped an impatient Lonsdale.
“He beat at least one of the prisoners and allegedly threatened the other.”
“Beat?” asked an excited Lonsdale. “Define beat. Are we talking smacked, kicked, punched…be more specific.”
“Punched and choked. Apparently there was a lot of blood.”
“Please tell me this captain has it on tape.” Lonsdale reached for a cigarette and allowed herself a moment of anticipated glory over releasing a tape of Rapp beating a helpless prisoner.
“They can’t find the tape. Either Rapp disabled the security cameras or someone has destroyed the tapes.”
Lonsdale winced at the setback and took in a deep breath before speaking. “Who else saw what happened besides Leland?”
“The base commander and several MPs.”
Lonsdale quickly wrote down a few notes. “And the base commander hasn’t filed a report?”
“No, in fact, according to Leland, the base commander and Stephen Roemer, the special assistant to the secretary of defense told him to sit on his official report and wait until he gets the facts straight. They’ve promised him any posting he’d like.”
“Oh…this just keeps getting better.” Lonsdale set her pen down. “We’ve got the crime and the cover-up. Now the only question is how I keep this away from the Armed Services Committee and Intel.”
“That’s going to be tough.”
Lonsdale looked back at him. “I’ll make it a straight civil liberties issue.”
“For Leland?”
“Yes.”
“But he doesn’t want to cooperate.”
“I don’t give a shit if he wants to cooperate. I’ll compel his ass to cooperate.”
“But you need him to get the ball rolling.”
“What I need is a couple of hard-nosed special agents to sit him down and get him to make a statement. Where’s Rapp?”
“He’s on his way back from Afghanistan. I don’t know when he’s supposed to land.”
“One of the CIA planes?”
“I think so. Leland said Ridley went over to pick him up and they left the base this afternoon.”
“Ridley is involved in this too?” asked an excited Lonsdale. “Oh, this is just fantastic.” Lonsdale wrote down a few more names and then made a big circle around Rapp’s. “What about Nash? Wasn’t he just over there?”
“I’m not sure. Leland didn’t mention him.”
Lonsdale tapped her pen and took a long drag. After a good ten seconds she said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to find out when Rapp’s plane is due to land. Then I want you to get Wade over here. We’ll put him out on point for this. As the DOJ’s chief civil liberties officer he’ll be able to find out who the FBI has at that base and he can order them to track down Leland and take a statement from him. We’ll take that statement and give it to Judge…” Lonsdale began snapping her fingers. “Who would be a good judge?”
“Broeder. Extremely liberal. He’ll love the opportunity to get involved in something like this.”
“Good. We’ll use him, but we have to keep this really quiet.”
“You run the Judiciary Committee. Trust me, Broeder will play ball with us.”
“And we’ll keep this tight. You, me, Kline, Broeder, and only one staffer. Get Kline over here immediately.”
“Right away.” Wassen had already stepped over to another phone and was asking one of the people in the outer office to get him Wade Kline.
Lonsdale spun her chair around and looked out the window. She was grinning ear to ear. She could see it all unfolding in her mind’s eye. She’d move quietly tonight and then in the morning she would hold a press conference with Kline and drop the bomb on an unsuspecting Washington. Her fellow chairmen on Intel and Armed Services would be furious, but what could they do but get behind her and second everything she would say? This had the potential to be one of the biggest scandals this town had ever seen. It was one for the history books. She’d been warning the president and her colleagues about the CIA for years, and no one had listened. Now they would have to.
CHAPTER 34
CUBA
KARIM stood near the tailgate of one of the pickup trucks and watched as the last of the cocaine was loaded onto the two speedboats. On the flight from the Triple Frontier to Cuba they had stopped in Venezuela to refuel. There, the men got rid of their jungle fatigues and were given civilian clothes. The rifles were stripped down and packed away but the pistols were kept and shoved into the waistbands of jeans and khaki pants.
Karim half expected that when they landed in Cuba their plane would be surrounded, the drugs seized, and they’d be thrown in some hot, humid jail where they would rot for years. Hakim had repeatedly reassured him that everything would be fine. Aiding drug trafficking was a way for the Cuban military to both supplement their dismal pay and stick it to the Americans. Hakim had carefully plotted every step of the journey. He’d spent nearly a half year flying around the region, meeting the right people and gauging whom he could trust. Never did he discuss Islam or the jihad. This was about drugs, something that the United States was far more tolerant of than Islam.
Karim stayed away from the soldiers who had met them at the airport and ordered his men to do likewise. They could all speak Spanish to a varying degree, but nowhere near as well as Hakim, who was fluent in the language. There were ten of the soldiers. All Cuban army. An officer and nine enlisted men. They were heavily armed, but Hakim had warned him in advance not to be worried. That was simply the way of the Cubans. They carried AK-47s around like most people carried a cell phone. Most of them weren’t even loaded. The entire thing made Karim extremely nervous. For a man who was used to being in control, who had to be in control, this was the worst part of the journey. He had to simply trust and leave it to fate.
Hakim and the Cuban officer were smiling and laughing about something. Karim assumed it was that the man now had in his possession three times more cocaine than he had originally been told he would. The officer’s take of ten percent was now worth more than a million dollars if he could unload it through the right channels. Hakim had played it perfectly. Every step of the way he had told these people that he was an advance man for a drug cartel which was looking for new trade routes to get drugs into the United States. If they knew this was a onetime deal, Hakim feared they would simply take the drugs and throw them in jail or worse. Hakim talked a big game. He told them they were not interested in a onetime deal. They were looking for partners who could help them build their business. They were going to test several routes and then begin running shipments every two to three weeks. With those kinds of numbers, any man who was not grounded in his religion would be tempted.
The Cuban officer and Hakim were now saying good-bye. Karim watched as his old friend reached out and hugged the man, kissing him once on each cheek, and then announcing for all to hear, “Viva la Revolución!”
The rest of the Cuban contingent repeated the chant and shook their rifles in the air. Hakim took a moment to thank the rest of the soldiers. Clasping an arm here and shaking a hand there, he went down the line flashing his infectious smile and looking each man in the eye.
Karim had always been in awe of his childhood friend’s ability to charm virtually anyone who crossed his path. He was a chameleon, capable of socializing with wretches and princes alike. He was never idle and always interested in what other people were doing and how they got from point A to point B. How they made their laundry business work, how they had become a professor, how they’d started their construction business, how they took care of their fishing boat, how they became a bond trader…the list went on and on. If it weren’t for their years of loyalty, Karim would have probably been threatened by the ease with which Hakim walked through life, but he wasn’t.
Their loyalty to each other stemmed from having been childhood friends. A healthy competition that had grown into a deep respect. It also helped that Hakim was one of Karim’s biggest believers. Always the better student and his equal athletically, Karim was looked up to by Hakim. It was Hakim who was the first to believe that Karim had a destiny that would make him a historic figure in the fight to save Islam from yet another assault from the West. As teens they had dreamed of greatness. They had dissected what was good and what was wrong with the various jihad groups and they had set their own course.
Hakim had been the one to first suggest setting up their own network. Both men had grown suspicious of all the infighting between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The infighting was disgusting, and they both feared that it had led to various factions intentionally sabotaging their brothers by leaking information to the Americans. Karim had not liked the idea of sending Hakim off on his own to explore other options, but his old friend had been his usual persistent self. After Zawahiri had saddled him with his moronic nephew, Karim decided he could with good conscience turn Hakim loose.
Karim looked around the small marina and felt great pride in his friend. He had never fully understood the word irony. He wasn’t sure, but he thought people often confused it with happenstance. Whatever the case was, he found it rather amusing that as a teenager Hakim had been completely enamored with the American author Ernest Hemingway. He so admired the man’s sense of adventure that at age thirteen, after reading The Old Man and the Sea, he’d hitchhiked on his own to Jeddah and convinced a fisherman to take him out for a day. At nineteen he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and at twenty-one he’d fulfilled what he’d said was his greatest thrill of all, catching a swordfish off the Florida Keys. Hakim had confided in him one cold evening that the real reason why he had come to fight in Afghanistan was because Hemingway had run off to be an ambulance driver during the Spanish Civil War. He felt that a man had not lived until he had experienced the raw thrill of war.
Hakim ambled over with his disarming grin. He placed an arm on Karim’s shoulder and said, “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?”
“You amaze me.”
“Even after all these years?”
“Yes, even after all these years.” Karim looked nervously back over his shoulder at the soldiers. “So we are free to go?”
“We are encouraged to go.” Hakim made a motion toward the men in the boats and they fired up the engines. “They do not want us to loiter.”
“Good, so we are leaving?”
“Yes.” Hakim pointed west at the setting sun. “I have rations on the boats.
We will leave now and sail around the western end of the island out into international waters. Then we’ll set course for the Florida Keys.”
The two men stepped onto the old wood dock, careful where they put their feet since the planks were rotten and uneven. “Are you sure that this is the right spot?” Karim had always thought they should try to enter the country farther north. Up toward Tampa or even the Panhandle.
“I’ve told you before, my friend. It is a numbers game.”
“I know…more coast, more boats…”
“Yes. They can’t tell the difference between drug runners and fishermen. We take our time tonight and then in the morning we meander out into the Keys.”
“And if their Coast Guard shows up?”
“Then we run like hell.” Karim pointed down at the two dull gray fiberglass boats. Each vessel had three 250 hp Mercury outboard motors on the back. “These boats are as fast as anything they have.”
“As fast but not faster?”
“No, but don’t worry. We have a secret weapon.”
The creases on Karim’s forehead deepened. “What secret weapon?”
“You and your men. They are not used to being shot back at.” Hakim laughed and pointed at the second boat. “Stay two hundred meters back and follow in my wake. Everything is programmed into the GPS, and if you have any questions, just call me on the radio.”
Karim reached out and stopped his friend. “Wait. That is the extent of your plan? We run?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Karim felt the symptoms of one of his anxiety attacks. “After all we have been through…after all the preparation…this is what it will all come down to?”