The Devil's Hand

by Carr, Jack

  The sniper wondered what Strain was doing on the rooftop in exactly the position of Nizar’s mark. He should not have been there. Nizar had been hired to kill a member of President Zubarev’s FSO security detail, a man with nationalist leanings and ties to Ukraine. Instead, his bullet had killed the American. General Yedid had passed him the details when he’d given him the order that had elevated Nizar to prominence as one of the top guns for hire in the business. He had felt nothing when he pressed the trigger on the suppressed Stechkin and sent the nine-by-eighteen round through the head of his partner, the legendary sniper known as Tasho al-Shishani.

  The student had become the master.

  Now he worked alone and solved problems. That skill set put him on the radar of a company called Masada. The Masada CEO had told him he was free to work for anyone, as long as they weren’t other Americans. Masada wanted sole American rights, a demand to which Nizar readily acquiesced. Masada paid well.

  Erik Sawyer had brokered an introduction to Montenegro’s president, a man who had previously served as prime minister, a politician who maintained power through connections with the Montenegrin mafia. He had recently been bestowed with the rather dubious honor of “Person of the Year in Organized Crime” by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an organization dedicated to ferreting out corruption through political links to the underworld. That’s how things were done in Montenegro.

  Nizar was protected by the Montenegrin mafia through the president. He maintained two homes: a flat in the coastal city of Ulcinj and a mountain cottage in Žabljak. He preferred the Mediterranean climate and beaches of the ancient settlement on the Adriatic to the mountains of the Northern Region, but in his line of work it was wise to have options. With the influx of tourists in both areas, he was able to blend in. He was also learning English from the prostitutes run by the mafia in the port town. He’d grown up at war and knew women served a purpose.

  The Ukrainian girl still slept. He enjoyed what she did to him in bed and, with her help, his English was improving. He knew she liked it when he was in town because he paid for her services and the mafia did not pimp her out to businessmen or criminals from abroad, many of whom used the powerless as heirs to their violent frustrations. The arrangement worked well for them both.

  Nizar did not use a cell phone or own a computer. He had operated without them for long enough to know that their convenience had a distinct and obvious downside. Early on he noted a commonality between those the West took out with their drones and hit teams; they all used cell phones. Sometimes they even found those without the mobile devices. Bin Laden had found that out the hard way.

  Montenegro offered access to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, but as soon as Nizar felt the tides shifting, he would be on his way to his next temporary home. Thailand? Panama? Argentina? There were options for a man with no ties. All one needed was capital.

  Nizar had grown to like the ancient seaport, a settlement that had once been the pirate capital of the Adriatic. The mafia ensured it remained connected to its roots. He varied his routine between the flat on the coast and the cottage in the mountains. He traveled enough to keep anyone tracking his movements from being able to discern distinct patterns, though Nizar knew that no matter how many precautions he took, there would always be patterns. A skilled hunter just needed to be able to study him long enough to discern them.

  He bought and read newspapers at various shops in the city. There was one cafe by the water that he particularly enjoyed. When he needed to do further research, he would visit one of the Internet cafes that still existed in Montenegro, plug in an external hard drive, and run his search through the installed search engine to minimize his trail.

  The Montenegrin government had provided him with passports and identities along with accompanying credit cards. He would miss the Balkans, but that was how one survived; you had to keep moving. There were other Ukrainian girls no matter where he ended up. They were quite popular in the human trafficking trade.

  He had read that Erik Sawyer had passed away at an island home in the West Indies. Details were sparse, which was suspicious. Sawyer’s death was disappointing. The Masada founder had sent him quite a few lucrative contracts over the past two years. Sawyer’s death was also a sign; it was time for Nizar to leave Montenegro behind.

  He pulled a book from the shelf, a book he couldn’t even read: The Great Game. It was written in English, a language he could not yet understand, though he was working on it. The book had been given to him two years earlier when he met with Sawyer in Africa. The American needed him to do a job: to eliminate a problem in Nigeria.

  Sawyer had also taught him a code. A note would arrive by courier. Inside were a series of numbers. An intelligence service could attempt to decipher it until the end of time. Its genius was its simplicity: page number, line number, letter number. Even if someone knew how it worked, without the exact edition of the correct book, breaking it was impossible.

  Nizar flipped to page 176, ran his finger down to the eighth line, and then moved it across to the twelfth letter: “J.”

  It took him a while but by the end he had a page full of letters. Nizar had no idea what it said. There were no spaces between them, just a series of letters that only someone who could read and write English could break down into sentences.

  He returned to the small bedroom and nudged the naked blond woman awake.

  “Translate,” he said in Russian.

  A destination country for human trafficking, Montenegro was a waypoint for organized crime syndicates that routinely moved young girls and women from Ukraine, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Europe and the United States and into forced prostitution. Despite international pressure, the Balkan nation remained a hotbed for the growing industry.

  The young woman slipped from beneath the sheets and moved to the small desk in the main room. It was early and she needed her fix. At least he didn’t beat her or put cigarettes out on her skin. Nor did he cut or choke her or invite other men to join. Though she was never permitted to leave the flat, he treated her well. She cooked, cleaned, spread her legs, and taught him English.

  She sat naked at the bureau with the sun beginning to break though the thin curtains. It was going to be a beautiful day. After she was done, she’d make them breakfast. She liked the view from the kitchen, out over the city with a slice of the Adriatic Sea in the distance.

  Nizar started a kettle of water to make tea, keeping his eye on the lithe young figure at his desk. She circled the words breaking the unending letters into coherent sentences.

  She then translated the English into Russian on a separate sheet of paper. By the time her tea was ready, she had finished her work. She handed the document to Nizar.

  The assassin held it up to the light and read.

  It was a contract.

  It was structured in a similar fashion to Nizar’s other work for Sawyer. It informed the assassin that two million euros had been laundered through a yacht brokerage service in the British Virgin Islands to a construction company in Montenegro in the form of a fictitious invoice that would be paid to Nizar for consultation on an ongoing commercial development project. The money had already been deposited in the usual account. Unusual to this contract was that Nizar was free to leave it unfulfilled. With Sawyer being dead, that was certainly an incentive. The contract went on to state that another six million euros would be transferred upon completion of the job. Nizar thought of the cost associated with moving his operation from Montenegro to a place like Argentina if the current president was deposed, arrested, or killed, all of which were distinct possibilities.

  There was another sentence that stood out.

  The mark is actively targeting you.

  It would be best if you found him before he finds you.

  Additional incentive? That was just like Sawyer. Was it true?

  Nizar read on. By the time he finished the document he was certain of its veracity. He had connected the events in Odess
a to the death of the SEAL to the news reports of a man who was now in the employ of the United States intelligence services. A man who had proven very hard to kill.

  He lit a match and held the papers to the flame. They caught easily, the fire creeping up the parchments until it threatened to burn the assassin’s fingers. Moving to the kitchen, he dropped what was left into the sink and turned on the water. The faucet sputtered until it seemed to catch a second wind that was powerful enough to carry the charred remains of the contract into the pipes of the ancient city.

  The girl remained sitting at the small desk, sipping her hot tea. She’d learned early on to speak only if spoken to and to simply do exactly as she was instructed. She was a survivor.

  Nizar approached her from behind and stroked her hair. It felt good.

  She closed her eyes and smiled. Perhaps he would stay for longer this time and she wouldn’t have to go back to the house with the other girls. That would be nice. Maybe if she proved worthy, he’d buy her outright? She would be sure to continue giving him nights to remember.

  His hand brushed softly down the left side of her head, past her cheek and to the back of her neck.

  Maybe there truly was hope.

  The terror lasted only a second. Her eyes opened wide as he yanked her hair back, exposing the soft skin of her neck. He inserted the thin blade behind the windpipe, its sharp edge slicing completely through to the other side. Locking her body against the chair, he sawed outward the way the Russian advisors had taught him in the Syria of his youth. She struggled only briefly, scratching at the hand that was taking her life, the blood rushing from her severed carotid artery draining down her breasts and spraying onto the desk in front of her in cadence with the beating of her heart.

  Nizar controlled her head as the pumping weakened. When her heart lost the strength to circulate blood through a failing system, the pressure subsided, and her hands fell to her sides.

  He looked once more into her dead eyes before letting her head drop to the desk.

  He’d have the Montenegrin mafia clean it up. True, he would have to pay for her, but Sawyer’s money would take care of that. There were always plenty of girls. With the founder of Masada dead, she was the only other person privy to the contract in the translated note. Only in death could she be trusted to keep the secret. No one would miss or mourn her. No loose ends. That was how Nizar stayed alive.

  He walked to the sink and washed the blood from his hands. He then cleaned the blade, wiped it dry with a towel, and returned it to a drawer.

  The sun had broken the horizon: an emerging dawn with a new contract for Nizar, his most profitable to date. It was time to study his prey. If what Sawyer had written was accurate, the man was already hunting him. To Nizar, killing Fredrick Strain was business. He did not wish death to the infidels like the true believers who sacrificed themselves for the cause. To his new mark, Strain’s death had been personal. Nizar would use that to his advantage. His target’s emotion was something he could exploit.

  Nizar was a sniper, a hunter of men, an assassin.

  He dropped the small thumb drive in his pocket and grabbed his coat. He closed and locked the apartment door behind him and smiled at an old woman who was already awake and sweeping the hall the way she did every morning. He descended the steps to the path that led to a winding road. It was time to buy a newspaper and a tea. It was time to think. He had a problem to solve, a problem to eliminate.

  As he walked the narrow stone streets of the port city, the final line of the contract echoed in the recesses of his mind.

  It would be best if you found him before he finds you.

  When the Internet cafe opened, he would pay his three-euro fee in coins, plug in the external search engine, and begin developing a pattern of life on Lieutenant Commander James Reece.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS IS A WORK of fiction. Fiction with whispers of truth.

  On August 7, 2020, al-Qaeda’s second in command, Abu Muhammad al-Masari, was assassinated. It is rumored that the gunmen were Israeli operatives acting with tacit or explicit support from the United States. Also killed in the assassination was the widow of Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son. The assassination took place in Tehran, Iran.

  In the fall of 2017, I had a remarkable conversation with a man in Argentina. He will remain anonymous in this work, though he is mentioned by name in the 9/11 Commission Report. He asked me how nineteen foreign nationals could pass through security at three separate international airports and one regional airport, some even flagged for additional screening, and not have one report in subsequent investigations of a screener noticing a box cutter or knife.

  The regulations pertaining to knives allowed on aircraft prior to September 11, 2001, were confusing. Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibited “knives with blades four inches long or longer and/or knives illegal under local law.” Seemingly in contradiction to that regulation was a nonregulatory Checkpoint Operations Guide for screeners interpreting those FAA regulations and prohibiting “box cutting devices.” For nineteen terrorists to pass through screening without one security screener at least noticing a blade and ensuring it was of legal length struck him as odd. That conversation provided the basis for The Devil’s Hand.

  The first sentence of the notes to Chapter 1 of the 9 /11 Commission Report reads: “No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why Atta and Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10….” Twenty years later that question has still not been successfully answered. Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari took that secret with them to their graves.

  On the topic of Iranian involvement in 9/11 the report states: “We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack…. [However] We believe this topic requires further investigation by the U.S. government.”

  The report also notes that at least eight of the 9/11 terrorists traveled to Iran between October 2000 and February 2001. Tehran is believed to have been a waypoint in travel to and from terrorist training camps in neighboring Afghanistan. There is evidence that suggests senior Hezbollah officials were aware of, and actively tracking, the travel of these al-Qaeda operatives. To what purpose remains unknown.

  Al-Qaeda, Iran, and Hezbollah have an incestuous history. The foundations of the relationship were laid in the early 1980s with the founding of Islamic Jihad but were cemented during the 1990s when Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, then al-Qaeda’s second in command, took refuge in Sudan. In the 1990s, Sudan was a breeding ground for terror.

  Chapter 2 of the 9/11 Commission Report notes: “In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security.”

  From Sudan, al-Qaeda sent operatives to train in Iran and Lebanon. In April 1991, Ayman al-Zawahiri traveled to Iran and met with Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was responsible for the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, the kidnapping and murder of CIA Lebanon station chief William F. Buckley, the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985, the 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, the 1994 attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. Mughniyeh would later meet with bin Laden in Sudan, further bridging the Sunni-Shi’a divide and cementing the al-Qaeda connection with the regime in Tehran.

  Two days prior to 9/11, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was assassinated by two al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists. A declassified, though heavily redacted, Novemb
er 2001 Defense Intelligence Agency cable obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive at George Washington University reads: “Through Northern Alliance intelligence efforts, the late commander Massoud gained limited knowledge regarding the intentions of the Saudi millionaire Usama bin Laden and his terrorist organization al-Qaeda, to perform a terrorist act against the U.S., on a scale larger than the 1998 bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.” Massoud’s al-Qaeda assassins obtained their forged documents via the Iranian Embassy in Brussels.

  One of the most damning pieces of evidence on Iran’s complicity in 9/11 comes from a classified Iranian document dated May 2001, a transcript of which can be found in Ronen Bergman’s The Secret War with Iran.

  The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Intelligence Apparatus of the Supreme Leader—Top Secret

  Date: May 14, 2001

  Reference: 4-325-80/s/m

  By: Head of the Intelligence Apparatus of the Supreme Leader

  To: Head of Operations Unit no. 43 [in the Iranian Intelligence Ministry]

  Re: Orders regarding the decision of the Honorable Leader [Khamenei]

  [Dear] Hujjat Al-Islam Wal-Muslimin [Mustafa] Pourkanad [director of general Operations Unit no. 43]

  We wish your dedicated and courageous team every success. The results [described] in your recent reports have been examined, along with other opinions. After consideration, and in order to remove the existing lack of clarity regarding support for al-Qaeda’s future plans, the Honorable Leader has emphasized that the battle against the global arrogance headed by the U.S. and Israel is an integral part of our Islamic government, and constitutes its primary goal. Damaging their economic systems, discrediting all other institutions of these two allied enemies of the Islamic government [in Iran] as part of political confrontation [with them], and undermining the stability and security [of the U.S. and Israel] are obligatory duties that must be carried out.