by Carr, Jack
“Sir, I’ll need to think about it.”
“I understand.” The president stood and started toward the door. Reece took the hint and followed suit. “We’ve prepared a cabin for you. Think it through. Get a workout in. The gym isn’t bad. Shoot some clays. In the morning we can have breakfast. A helo will be here at ten to take you back to the Farm. If you decide against it, it will be like you were never here and I expect you to never breathe a word of our conversation to anyone.”
They stopped at the entrance and the president opened the door for his guest. “And remember, don’t trust anyone.”
“Even you, Mr. President?”
“Trust no one, Reece.”
Reece nodded.
“Oh, Commander, before you go, there is one other thing.”
CHAPTER 8
THE GYM WAS EMPTY. Reece pushed himself hard in round after round of kettlebell swings, Turkish get-ups, and sprints. He lost track of the rounds and continued to push, spurred on by visions of the living and the dead, Katie, Lauren, Lucy, Freddy, faces of those he’d tortured and killed in a quest for vengeance. His mind came to focus on one person in particular, a sniper whose face he’d only seen in a surveillance photograph, a man whose finger had pressed a trigger and killed Freddy Strain, leaving his wife without a husband and his children without a father. A man Reece was going to kill.
Jogging back to his cabin he’d thought of Freddy’s special needs child, Sam, now dependent on just one parent for his very survival. Freddy was dead because of Reece. The money Reece had used to fund Samuel Strain’s special needs trust would ensure the child had a lifetime of medical care, but what he really needed was a father. What Joanie Strain needed was her husband. Reece had promised her that he would kill everyone responsible. To do that he needed the resources of the CIA.
As Reece lay on his bunk, watching the fan slowly turning in the shadows of the early evening light, he thought about what the president had asked of him as he left Aspen cabin.
Oh, Commander, before you go, there is one other thing.
On September tenth, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omri traveled from Boston to South Portland, Maine. It’s been speculated that they did so because of a more lax security posture at Portland International Jetport, but that doesn’t make sense. They still had to pass through security at Logan in Boston. Atta was even selected for additional screening. They made it through security just fifteen minutes before takeoff. Atta nearly missed the appointment for his own death. I want to know who they met in Maine, Mr. Reece. The FBI, CIA, no one has been able to figure it out. Find out. Find out and let me know.
With each turn of the fan, Reece saw pictures of the 9/11 hijackers imprinted in his brain, finally settling on the passport photo of Mohamed Atta. It had been broadcast across the world in the months after the attack: dark collared button-up over a white T-shirt, lips pressed together, the dead dark eyes. Forever frozen in time, at thirty-three years old he had been an instrument that helped change the course of history.
Who did you meet in Maine? Reece thought.
Whoever it was, Reece knew they’d be added to the president’s list. If it was an agent of a foreign intelligence service, Reece could only imagine what the leader of the free world would do. A man in that seat wielded a power greater than anyone in recorded history. With ever-changing launch codes and the turn of a key, he could remove entire regions of the globe from existence. The Authorization for Use of Military Force and Presidential Directive Nine gave him that authority.
The president had entrusted Reece with a secret. The popular president was not in office as a servant to his nation. He had fought overseas and returned home to amass a fortune and run for the highest office in the land not out of duty, but out of a need for vengeance; to avenge one particular victim of 9/11.
Reece understood revenge, which is precisely why the president had chosen him for this mission.
As Reece closed his eyes and fought off the nightmares, he remembered the pastor at Freddy’s funeral echoing the words from Isaiah 6:8 that he’d heard recited over the graves of so many of his SEAL brothers: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ ”
Reece was going back to war.
CHAPTER 9
Washington, D.C.
AS IRAN’S CHIEF INTELLIGENCE operative in the United States, Hafez Qassem had been conducting what amounted to a yearlong surveillance detection route. He’d been followed by agents from what he correctly assumed to be the Foreign Counterintelligence Squad of the FBI’s Washington Field Office for the better part of a year when he first took the post, though he pretended not to notice. He did not meet with sources, nor did he do anything the least bit suspicious. He went to dinners, as would be expected of a diplomat of his station, attended soccer games, drank in moderation, and every now and again would stuff dollar bills into G-strings at Good Guys Gentleman’s Club, on Wisconsin Avenue in the shadow of the United States Naval Observatory. He was setting the conditions.
The Iranian embassy in the United States had been boarded up since 1979 following the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the ensuing hostage crisis that would usher in the Reagan era. Diplomatic matters were handled through the “Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the United States,” which was conveniently housed in the embassy of Pakistan on 1250 23rd Street NW in Washington, D.C. As part of a small Iranian contingency, Qassem enjoyed diplomatic immunity and could travel freely to and from Iran on one of the planes designated for the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
As Iran’s top spy in the United States, his job was not to spot, develop, and recruit spies; he had a network at the tactical level responsible for identifying potential assets. His job was to oversee that intelligence, to analyze it for exploitation, identify patterns, and detect possible double agents. It was well known that the NSA collected and read all electronic communications in and out of Iran, so Qassem’s reports were sent directly to the Supreme Council of National Security via diplomatic pouch. Because he was not actively involved in recruitment, there was little the United States could do about him. As with every other embassy, to include those of staunch U.S. allies, it was expected for there to be an intelligence section to the diplomatic mission, just as the United States operated out of all of their embassies and consulates abroad. To the Americans, he was a boring bureaucrat, enjoying a drink or two beyond the watchful eye of the regime. Americans could understand that. It was the ones who never drank, prayed five times a day, and avoided scantily clad women who made them nervous.
After the first six months, his around-the-clock initial surveillance was reduced to what amounted to a “checkup,” to ensure nothing had changed and that Qassem was still passing his time with nice dinners and soccer games. When the FBI did monitor his activities, they were easy to spot. Qassem had been a player in the game long enough to know when something was out of place. He hadn’t met physically with an asset on American soil in almost twenty years, back when a meeting in a pizza restaurant in Maine had made his career and altered the destiny of a nation.
Following the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, the up-and-coming spymaster had successfully turned it into a client state of Iran. CIA sources, as part of their deep penetration programs, eagerly switched sides after the American abandonment, believing their past CIA associations would come to light. They were looking for a new guardian. The intelligence windfall on CIA tactics, techniques, and procedures was a treasure trove for the regime. Qassem was rewarded with a promotion.
More recently, he had overseen the recruitment of U.S. Air Force Sergeant Monica Elfriede Witt. She defected to Iran in 2013, and still lived there today. Qassem had met with her numerous times over the years and spent untold hours reading her debriefings. The Americans had not realized what was happening until she was safely on Iranian soil. They should have killed her at the first hint of betraya
l, before she was beyond their grasp. That’s what Qassem would have done: raped, tortured, and killed her as a warning to others. If the MOI ever suspected changing loyalties, they would not hesitate to put a bullet in her head before she could cross the border, a condition of internment of which she was well aware. She would stay put. Not only had she provided the names of U.S. intelligence sources in Iran, but she also helped reveal a covert communication network code named COVCOM, used by the CIA to securely communicate with agents in Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea. It was the biggest intelligence coup since the end of the Cold War, and it was Qassem who had been its mastermind. Intelligence gleaned from COVCOM served another purpose—it confirmed that the United States did not know who Qassem was or the role he had played in 9/11.
Unlike some of his counterparts, he kept a low profile. Revolutionary Guard Quds Force Commander General Qasem Soleimani, Hezbollah chief of staff Imad Mughniyeh, Islamic Jihad leader Fathi al-Shkaki, and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had been relentlessly hunted for years. Only one of them had died of natural causes. It was important for the West to have their devils. Qassem planned to remain a ghost. He was more effective that way. While his contemporaries had become martyrs, Qassem would rather live for the cause than die for it. He’d stay off the radar to increase his chances of remaining aboveground.
Not even he had known what was coming. In 2001 he was simply a messenger, tasked to pass along a word. He’d taken that word from Iran, to Turkey, to Germany, to the United Kingdom, to Canada, and finally into the United States, where he’d whispered it to the man with the dead eyes. Qassem had suspected a truck bomb near the White House in the months ahead, not a multipronged attack using commercial airliners as instruments of terror the following morning.
The Sunni-Shia rift was commonly pointed to by academics as the reason Iran could never have played a role in the attack on America. Qassem had listened to the experts on CNN, Fox, and the BBC for years. The accepted histories of the lead-up to that September morning focused on the Soviet-Afghan War, disenfranchised mujahideen, U.S. troops on the sacred lands of Mecca and Medina, the banishment of a Saudi son, and a Sunni group called al-Qaeda; a convenient history for those accessing the past from an ivory tower. Those academics failed to understand the bonds forged between al-Qaeda and Iran in Sudan after the son of the Saudi construction magnate was expelled from the Kingdom. Al-Qaeda and Iranian leadership were not concerned with a seventh-century dispute of succession; they had a common enemy in the twenty-first century.
Al-Qaeda operatives were sent from Sudan to train in Iran and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, adding tactics of terror to their battlefield experience from the land of the Pashtuns. The godfather of modern terrorism, Imad Mughniyeh, met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Khartoum, passing on the lessons of 1980s Beirut and the success of martyrdom operations against Western targets. Al-Qaeda was listening and learning. As Qassem worked his way up the ranks of Iranian intelligence, he would discover the lengths to which his country had gone in assisting al-Qaeda in the assassination of Ahmad Shah Masoud, commander of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, just two days prior to 9/11. The Sunni-Shia divide was a convenient talking point for the so-called terrorism experts on CNN. The view from the foxhole told a different story.
Qassem had proven himself adept at orchestrating the proxy war against the Americans in Iraq while simultaneously infiltrating every ministry of the Iraqi government to include the office of the prime minister. Iran now dominated terrain from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea and had done so right under the nose of the American soldiers and diplomats trying so hard to bring George W. Bush’s vision of Jeffersonian democracy to the Middle East. Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld—their arrogance had cost their country dearly and allowed the regime to outwit the enemies of Islam in the new Great Game.
After his success pushing the Americans from Iraq, Qassem was transferred from the senior office of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security to the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a more flexible entity established at the behest of the Supreme Leader in 2009. It gave Qassem the freedom to think and to plan. His mentors had taught him well. They had been the architects of a proxy war against the Americans for almost forty years, ushering in a wave of suicide bombings targeting the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut. Their greatest achievement was contesting the religious ban on suicide bombings. Sunni organizations had eventually followed suit. They made martyrdom operations acceptable within Islam and successfully exported the tactic from the Middle East to the rest of the world. Qassem had studied their operations and identified the gaps in their ideology of terror. Truck bombs and airliners would not destroy a nation as prosperous and resilient as the United States. It would take something more. Formenting chaos through proxies was what Iran did best. They were about to bring that expertise to the land of the free.
The contents of a diplomatic pouch are protected under Article 27.3 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, shielding them from any searches by a host nation government. Searching a properly marked diplomatic pouch including via x-ray was a violation of international law. And so it was that a pouch arrived in the mail section of the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C., properly marked as official correspondence with DIPLOMATIC POUCH clearly identifying it as protected material between Islamabad and its mission in the United States. Inside was another box labeled as property of the government of Iran and addressed to a member of their diplomatic staff.
Even though the contents of the diplomatic pouch were protected by the Vienna Convention, Qassem took his time opening the box; the small vial within contained the death of a nation. In many ways this was the most sensitive part of the operation. Once he passed the contents of the package to the asset, there was no turning back. There was no recalling it. There was no abort code. The poison would be released into America’s bloodstream and just like a cancer-ridden patient, America would turn against itself, compounding the problems of racial discord, Marxist communist protests, a domestic insurgency, and the economic hit of COVID-19. This was the time to strike, before they could regain their footing or rally around a foreign threat. There couldn’t be a country or organization to blame, bomb, or destroy. It had to look like a naturally occurring event, and if the plot were uncovered, the menace had to have come from within. Nothing could tie it back to Iran; on this, the Ayatollah had been clear.
Qassem had learned something else from the traitorous Air Force sergeant, a detail she didn’t even know was important. It was why he continued his conversations with her. Initially he’d been interested in the U.S. cyber-warfare capability and what Iranian actions would trigger a U.S. nuclear response. Almost as an aside she’d mentioned another protocol, a nonnuclear OPLAN more secure than anything she knew about her country’s designs on Iran. She’d learned about it during a briefing in Hurlburt, Florida.
Why, Qassem wondered, did the United States have multiple MC-130s from the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command on standby in Florida armed with GBU-43/B bombs, and why was their mission a more closely guarded secret than the nuclear OPLAN for Iran?
MC-130s were not a traditional long-range strategic bombing platform like the venerable B-52, B-1, or B-2 stealth bomber. MC-130s needed to be forward deployed to a combat theater of operations to be effective. Why the secrecy surrounding this squadron in Florida always on standby? How far could they fly from their base in the panhandle? A Caribbean or Central or South America contingency? Maybe, but there had to be another reason to have those platforms on constant alert.
Qassem was missing something.
He made a trip to an apartment in the Tajrish neighborhood of Tehran. Located near good shopping and restaurants but still far enough from the chaos of city center, the third-floor apartment was the last stop for a man who had once been a senior biologist at the Institute of Medical Biotechnology in Moscow. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he ha
d been one of those recruited by Iran to help modernize its biological weapons program.
The old scientist was frail and not completely lucid as he struggled to make tea for his guest. He’d given up trying to return to the Ukraine of his birth. He’d sold his soul to his masters in Tehran. This is where he would die.
Valeri Bakayev was not a young man when Gorbachev instituted his policies of glasnost and perestroika. With a wife who had left him for a more attentive suitor, Bakayev was alone in the world when the paychecks stopped arriving and the Soviet Union dissolved before his eyes. The Iranians had recognized their opportunity and pounced. When presented with the prospect of dying alone of starvation in a cold Moscow apartment or continuing his work in Iran for more money than he ever thought possible, Bakayev left Mother Russia with the clothes on his back and a lifetime of biological warfare knowledge in his head.
Contingency.
What do you mean, Doctor? Qassem had asked.
On this particular point the old scientist’s memory had been clear. Using the Socratic method so popular with those in the legal and medical professions, he’d led Qassem to the answer.
What would you do if a deadly pathogen you’d developed in violation of international treaty escaped your lab and threatened to infect a town, a city, a nation, the world?