by Carr, Jack
“How long do you think the meeting will take?” she asked.
“Probably a couple hours. I want to go for a run when it’s over so I can think it through. It’s a big deal for the company and I want to make sure we are doing the right thing.”
“How you run in this city, I’ll never understand.”
“I grew up doing it, so it’s totally normal.”
“Well, you be careful. I worry about you running around these streets. It’s dangerous.”
“Well, it’s not as safe as doing sprints on campus at Maloney Field, I’ll give you that. But, trust me, I’m a professional.”
They had met as undergrads at Stanford but were now two years removed from Cardinal Red. Alex had played lacrosse and liked having had the advantage of growing up in the East when it came to a sport still catching on across the country on the left coast. When he met Jen, he instantly loved everything about her. After graduation, he had elected to join a small struggling Silicon Valley start-up founded by fellow Stanford alums and was taking payment in stock options like almost everyone else. Unlike everyone else, he had a trust fund that kept him from living off ramen noodles.
Jen had been offered a fantastic opportunity at Cantor Fitzgerald and was just beginning her third year as an investment banker. She was planning to apply to Harvard Business School and start classes next fall, a move Alec’s father fully supported in the hopes it would lure his son back to the Atlantic seaboard. They had been engaged for the past two months. Alec had wanted to wait to tell his dad in person. He was sensitive to the fact that the man who raised him had done so alone, the love of his life succumbing to cancer so early in their young lives. His father had never remarried. Alec had planned to tell him that morning at Windows on the World with Jen by his side.
“You know what?” Jen asked, before answering her own question. “It’s better this way. You two boys have your special moment together, and then I’ll let him spoil me at dinner.”
“Where do you want to go? I’m sure he’ll ask.”
“It’s Tuesday, so how about the Pool Room?”
“Dad is more of a Grill Room guy, but for you I’m sure he’ll make an exception. Are you sure I should tell him without you?”
She put her hand under Alec’s chin and twisted his head away from his “texting” so she could look into his eyes.
“I’m positive.”
* * *
“Hey, Dad!”
“Right on time, lad,” his dad said, looking at his Patek Philippe.
“I still set mine five minutes ahead just like you taught me,” Alec said, pointing to his left wrist. “That way I can be five minutes late and still be on time.”
“That wasn’t really the point, son. The point is to be early. It’s disrespectful to be late. Shows you don’t treasure our most valuable asset…”
“Time,” Alec said, completing the sentence he’d heard from his dad so often over the years.
“That’s right.”
“See, I do listen.”
“Mr. Christensen,” the maître d’ interjected politely. “Your table is ready.”
“Thank you, Charles.”
They were seated by the giant windows of the iconic New York restaurant. The Empire State Building dominated the view south toward Soho, Greenwich Village, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Lady Liberty was even visible in the distance on such a clear day from sixty-five floors up. Alec smiled, picturing Jen grabbing a bite in the lobby of her building. Maybe she had gone ahead with breakfast at Windows on the World by herself before heading to her desk and was looking uptown toward him right at this very moment.
Dobson Christensen was dressed impeccably in a dark three-piece suit, not a single gray hair out of place. His tailor did an outstanding job of disguising the fact that he was not in the best of shape. Like many of his generation, exercise consisted of walking the links at Maidstone and the occasional trek afield at Clove Valley Rod and Gun Club, both of which consisted of equal parts business and pleasure.
Alec’s usual Sandhill Road attire of khakis and a blue button-down had been accented with a dark blue blazer and tie. He dressed more formally in New York out of habit, having grown up dining with his father in places that would not approve of the more casual uniforms that were the norm in Palo Alto.
His father placed a white napkin in his lap with great ceremony as a waiter set down a French press. The senior Christensen was a regular.
“For you, sir?”
“I’ll have the same, please,” Alec said.
“So, tell me about the future of the Internet,” Dobson said. “And don’t leave out the parts about where I should invest other people’s money.”
Dobson Christensen was a bit of an anomaly. While most with money and means had sheltered in place in the world of academia to avoid the Vietnam War, Dobson had taken a different path. He’d dropped out of Princeton and volunteered for the Marine Corps. Years later he’d say he did it to just “get it over with,” but Alec knew better. Behind the suit, polished shoes, and country club exterior was a fiercely patriotic man who could have volunteered for stateside National Guard duty or qualified for a student deferment but instead was drawn to the fight. He found himself as a door gunner on a Huey gunship, which was shot down on its first mission before he could even fire a shot. The pilot and copilot were killed, but Lance Corporal Christensen survived with a broken back, pelvis, hip, and femur. He spent the rest of his Marine Corps experience recovering, first in Okinawa and then at Walter Reed. His cane and limp were a constant reminder, and when asked about it, he would say that his Purple Heart was a VC marksmanship medal. He liked to joke that he spent more time in boot camp than in Vietnam.
The waiter returned and handed menus to both men. Dobson put his aside, saying, “I’ll have the forestière omelet and a side of your thickest bacon.” He wasn’t one for wasting that most valuable of assets.
“Ah, I’ll have…” Alec said, scanning his choices, “the…”
A sound he could only associate with a freight train barreling by at full speed shook the room. Stunned patrons gripped their tables, bracing themselves for what some thought was an earthquake even though their left brains were telling them that couldn’t be true.
Alec looked to his father, whose eyes were focused southeast. Alec followed his father’s gaze and stood, pressing his hands and face to the glass. He watched the plane descend from across the Hudson into the city between the buildings. Veering toward its target, it disappeared into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Fire, smoke, carnage, death. Jen.
Alec sprinted for the elevator.
“Come on!” he shouted. He glanced at the stairwell and contemplated the option but forced himself to wait, knowing the elevator would still be the fastest way down.
Most people were glued to the windows, watching the smoke rising from the North Tower, so when the elevator doors opened, Alec was alone.
Please, God, let her live. Let her be in the lobby. Just let her live!
Fighting back the bile in his throat, he pressed his eyes shut, willing the elevator to descend faster.
Where did that plane hit?
He knew Cantor Fitzgerald occupied floors 101 to 105 and that Windows on the World was perched atop the North Tower.
Come on! Come on!
The doors parted and Alec launched himself through a group of businessmen unaware of the disaster unfolding just a few miles south. He hit the street at a full sprint. Turning toward the subway, he stopped and looked at the steps leading down, then back toward the dark smoke invading the blue sky over his beloved city. He made his decision.
He ran.
Sprinting toward the smoke and the flames, he dodged those not yet aware that the world had changed. Heart pumping, lungs burning, his legs propelled him forward, tearing through intersections oblivious to the honking horns and the cursing of those he knocked over in his mission.
Sirens, he’d always r
emember the sirens.
As the mortally wounded building loomed larger, he pushed past people stumbling in the opposite direction, some in a panic, others in a daze. He began to charge by police officers and firefighters yelling at him to turn around. He then heard the screaming engines of what he would later learn was United Airlines Flight 175 as it homed in from the south. He felt the impact in his soul.
Two planes. He had to get to Jen. Dear God, let her be all right.
He thrust himself forward, closer to the broken glass and twisted metal, toward the jet fuel burning its way through the steel heart of the structure. He ran toward the dead and dying. He ran toward bodies plummeting from the sky. He ran toward Jen. He ran toward Hell.
* * *
“Sit,” her husband commanded.
Aliyah sat, the stale smell of the couch on which he’d first choked her filling her nostrils.
They had already competed fijr, their morning prayers, he in the main room and Aliyah in the bedroom. Islam forbids men and women from practicing the second of the five pillars of Islam together.
She’d performed wudu with water from the bathroom sink as he did so from the kitchen, ritually washing the body: mouth, nostrils, hands, arms, head, and feet. Though not purified water as prescribed in the Quran, they were on enemy soil and Allah would forgive them this one indiscretion. Instead of adhering to salah that morning, she had sat on the bed and looked through the small, dirty window listening to her husband recite Quranic verses in Arabic. They spoke Farsi in the home but true adherents to Islam prayed in the language of the Prophet. She entered the main room only after she heard him finish and turn on the small television.
They watched CNN in silence.
When the first plane hit, she remembered. She remembered Mohammed Haydar Zammar from the al-Quds mosque during their time in Germany. She remembered his hatred of America. She remembered his incessant talking. She remembered the hard floor and paint peeling from the walls of the women’s prayer room. And she remembered the man with the empty eyes. Though his picture would not be plastered across television screens around the world for a few days, she remembered where she had first met the man in the stairwell. She remembered him sitting down with her husband in their Hamburg apartment. He was soft-spoken, almost aloof, paying her no attention. She had made them tea. They had talked about planes. His name was Mohamed Atta.
“We have triumphed over our unjust enemy,” her husband said, without taking his eyes from the screen.
“Praise be to Allah for this victory,” she replied dutifully.
“This,” he said, pointing to the billowing clouds of smoke coming from what, until that moment, had been a symbol of America’s economic might to the rest of the world. “This is only the beginning.”
PART ONE ORIGINS
“One of the most striking proofs of the personal existence of Satan… is found in the fact, that he has so influenced the minds of multitudes in reference to his existence and doings, as to make them believe that he does not exist.”
—WILLIAM RAMSEY
CHAPTER 1
CIA Applicant Processing Unit
Dulles Discovery Building
Chantilly, Virginia
Present Day
“IS YOUR FIRST NAME James?”
“Yes,” Reece replied.
“Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”
Reece paused.
“Yes.”
“Do you intend to answer these questions truthfully?”
Another pause.
“Yes.”
“Is today Wednesday?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?”
“Yes?”
“Are we in Virginia?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever committed murder?”
“Ah…”
“Just yes or no, please.”
“No.”
Reece saw the polygrapher make a note.
“Are you a United States citizen?”
“Yes.”
Through his peripheral vision, Reece saw the polygrapher make another notation and adjust a setting on his laptop.
Great.
“Have you ever been part of a group that has wanted to overthrow the United States government?”
Reece sat in the nondescript room of what would have been a normal office park anywhere else in America. This one was located in Chantilly, Virginia, and was owned by a front company created by the CIA. Reece was halfway through day one of his three-day CIA processing evaluation. Even with his past experience and relationship with the Agency he still had to pass the medical and psychological screening tests to officially join the ranks of Ground Branch. Bureaucracy was, after all, bureaucracy.
“Let’s try this again,” “John” said in a tone meant to convey exasperation. “Be sure to answer yes or no honestly. And remain completely still. Keep your eyes focused on one point on the wall in front of you or we will have to start all over.”
Reece felt his pulse quicken. He’d been on the receiving end of an interrogation before, and then, just as now, he wanted nothing more than to tear his interrogator’s throat out. He’d completed a form in the waiting area, answering the exact questions he was currently being asked. He’d even gone over them with his “examiner” before being hooked up to the machine.
“Have you ever been part of a group that has wanted to overthrow the United States government?” the polygraph examiner asked a second time.
“No.”
“Have you ever been in the employment of a foreign intelligence service?”
Reece tried to reframe the question in his mind. Instead, a memory intruded; Ivan Zharkov standing in the snow outside his dacha in Siberia, the flames from the downed Mi8 helicopter smoldering behind him, the dead bodies of his security detail strewn about the ground around him, a security detail Reece had killed.
Are you offering to spy for me, Mr. Reece?
“No,” Reece responded.
The polygraph examiner made another note.
A blood pressure cuff squeezed Reece’s left arm, two rubber air-filled tubes called pneumographs encircled his chest and stomach to record his breathing, and galvanometers had been placed on the first and third fingers of his right hand to measure sweat secretions. His chair was fitted with a sensor pad, thanks to Ana Montes, a senior Cuban analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who had been recruited by Cuban intelligence while in graduate school at Johns Hopkins. From 1985 until her arrest on espionage charges in 2001, she routinely passed classified information to Havana that was then transferred to the Soviets. Later, that information was sold to China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. Her Cuban handlers had trained her to manipulate her polygraph by contracting her sphincter muscles, which is why Reece now sat on a sensor. He was also in socks, his feet resting on two individual pads. All movements would be recorded by the polygraph.
The room was small, but not claustrophobically so, about twice the size of a single patient room at a doctor’s office. Reece thought it was possible the off-white walls had faded to their current hue by absorbing the fear that permeated the space on an almost daily basis. There was a camera visible in the upper left-hand corner, but Reece was sure the CIA had concealed a few others so as not to miss a single eye twitch or muscle movement. Though he stared at a blank wall, a mirror had been installed just off-center, two-way of course, for observation. The room was bare of any additional distractions other than the small table to his left where the polygrapher sat with his computer. It was unquestionably designed to make CIA candidates as uncomfortable as possible.
“Have you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?”
Visions of his dead wife and daughter caused his heart rate to increase. Reece swallowed as he remembered watching the silver Mercedes G550 SUV crest the rise on the mountain road outside Jackson through the magnification of his Nightforce NXS 2.5-10x32mm scope, just befor
e pressing the trigger to send a Barnes Triple Shock .300 Winchester Magnum through the brain stem of Marcus Boykin, the first person Reece had eliminated on his quest to avenge his family and SEAL Troop.
“Mr. Reece?” his examiner asked.
“What?”
“We have to get through these questions. Have you ever committed a crime for which you were not caught?”
Reece felt the working end of his Winkler/Sayoc Tomahawk catch in the bone and brain matter of Imam Hammadi Izmail Masood’s crushed skull before twisting it out and going to work on the gristle of the terrorist’s neck muscles. Reece had freed the head from the terrorist’s body so he could impale it on the spiked fence of the mosque as a warning to the others that death was coming for them all.
“No,” Reece lied.
“Have you visited antipolygraph.org to prepare for this examination?”
“Yes.”
This answer visibly perturbed the examiner.
“Are you sitting down?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever committed murder?”
“I thought we covered that.”
“Just yes-or-no answers.”
Again, Reece’s mind accessed memories he’d never be able to repress. He remembered hitting send on the cell phone that detonated the suicide vest on political fundraiser Mike Tedesco, turning him and SEAL Admiral Gerald Pilsner into human mist.
He remembered shoving the HK pistol into Josh Holder’s mouth, feeling teeth breaking around the long suppressor before the .45-caliber bullet blew the back of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service man’s head off.
“No.”
“Have you ever plotted to overthrow the U.S. government?”
Reece thought of the EFP, Explosively Formed Penetrator, he’d built. It was an instrument of terror overseas, but Reece had used the tactics and techniques of the enemy on home soil. He’d become an insurgent. The IED sent a slug of molten copper through the armored Suburban of Congressman J. D. Hartley in SoHo, eviscerating the conspirator and bringing the reality of war to the home front. Reece saw the look of abject horror in Secretary of Defense Loraine Hartley’s eyes as he shot her twice in the chest and once in the head in her Fishers Island mansion.