by Tom Haase
"Yes," the president said, "and we’re hoping the Russians can provide some more information. Thank you, Mary Jean. Keep me informed. Now if you’ll excuse us, I have some things to discuss with Dean on the goings-on in Latin America."
"Good night, Mr. President. I’ll keep you updated as things occur." She got up and shook hands with the president, nodded at Avery on the couch, and left the White House. The time arrived for her to pick up the listening gear, put on her disguise, and head for Avery’s favorite restaurant in Georgetown.
She arrived at 9:45 wearing a curly black wig, a high-necked green turtleneck sweater and black pants. A medium-sized white handbag hung from her arm, and a pair of silver-framed glasses completed her appearance. The altered look was not designed as a total makeover, just enough to prevent instant recognition by someone surveying the restaurant to see if they recognized anyone.
She sat in the same position as the last time and ordered a cup of coffee and an appetizer. In front of her, she noticed the Iranian man now sat beside a woman in a chador, her face completely obscured by the black veil. The two appeared engaged in a whispered conversation.
Mary Jean placed her handbag on the chair opposite, but she could move it with her feet under the table. The large purse contained a unidirectional parabolic antenna, sufficient to capture the sounds from a small space up to one hundred feet.
The antenna needed to be positioned to point directly at the target. She used a new type unidirectional antenna, since the use of an omnidirectional one would result in the capture of all the sounds in the restaurant and then require time to filter out each voice. Mary Jean knew whom she wanted to aim at and placed the small earpiece in her ear. The sound of the man’s voice rose to slightly above a whisper and she needed to keep moving the chair with her feet to get the right direction. At last, she picked up a clear voice.
"He’ll be here soon. Don’t worry. No one knows what we’re doing. You have your assignment to get the instructions to al-Banna. Make sure you deliver them."
The woman’s response emanated as muted and unintelligible. Before she could move the directional antenna toward the woman, Dean Avery entered and positioned himself at his usual table, with his back to the Iranian and the woman.
A few minutes of silence followed. At last, he tilted his head toward the woman and said, "Let’s go. We have work to do." Then the Iranian diplomat, bending in the direction where Avery sat, said, "Don’t go with the man to Atlanta, no matter what."
23
Four Days Ago — Late Evening, Georgetown, D.C
Mary Jean watched as the Iranian diplomat got up to leave. He did not help the woman up or show her any civility at all. They both left the restaurant without making eye contact with anyone. Dean Avery remained in his booth and took out a newspaper.
There would be nothing to gain by remaining, so Mary Jean paid and walked out of the restaurant. She scanned and saw the man, but she did not attempt to follow the diplomat, nor the woman, who had already vanished by the time she got outside. How the woman had arrived, by car or taxi, couldn’t be determined. The Georgetown street overflowed with heavy evening traffic, and any car that had left over a minute ago would be lost in the maze.
She called Mike Anthony. He might have some new information for her, and she now had some for him. They agreed to meet at the Grill on Sixteenth Street in thirty minutes. At her car, she abandoned the disguise, and with a light combing of the hair and a little makeup applied in the rear view mirror, she returned to her old self as she set off for her rendezvous.
On entering the establishment, Mary Jean spotted him and approached with her hand out in greeting. He took it and gave her a quick peck on the cheek. Mike Anthony wore jeans and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, sipping on what looked like a Gibson with three onions.
"Let’s go over to a table," he said and led her to an empty spot against the wall. "You called, so you talk first."
"This is getting bizarre. I think I’m sinking in over my head. My hunch seems to be playing out and I don’t like it one bit." She waited while he took a sip from his drink and then continued, "They were at the same restaurant tonight and a woman in a chador sat with the Iranian—”
"He’s not married," Mike interrupted. "Hey, you want a drink?"
"I could use a gin and tonic. Thanks."
He sat back down after getting her the cocktail. She took a small sip and looked at him. Mike said, "I just got home when you called. I also received information that you aren’t going to like, and I don’t know how I’m going to handle it either. But, you finish first."
After relating the events she’d witnessed earlier and all she’d heard in the restaurant, she relaxed back and took a long, slow drink. "Okay, your turn. None of what I have is any good in a court, and I didn’t ID the woman."
Mike wiggled in his seat to get comfortable and then started. “My God, I don’t want to believe all this, but it’s starting to add up. He’s the national security adviser, for Christ’s sake, and what you have is completely circumstantial.” He bent over closer and spoke in a softer voice. “However, we are dealing with attacks on American military installations and the possible use of a WMD on our soil. The Patriot Act can only go so far, and then we become compelled to do whatever is necessary to stop these maniacs. So you need to interpret what I’m going to tell you not in any legal sense.”
He stopped and looked down at a piece of paper, then continued, "If I know you, it will be in the purview of military intelligence that’s collected, then correlated, then a decision is made once all the data is fused into a single conceptual plan. So I present this to you as information, not as a conclusion."
"Come on, Mike, cut the bullshit. What do you have?" Mary Jean asked.
"First of all, there’s no record of what I’m going to show you. You asked me to get what I could, so I tasked someone who owes me, and there’s no trail to anyone else. It took him two days to track down the only lead he could come up with.
“We don’t do security checks on political appointees. Their background is usually only given a cursory glance by the media. In Avery’s case, as a close personal friend of the president’s since college, they only published the stories of his success in business and how he was a master of mergers and acquisitions and that made him wealthy. So my man went back to his collegiate days.” He stopped talking here, leaned back in his chair, and took a drink. “This is going to take a while. Want another round?”
"Sure, I’ll get it this time. You want the same?"
He nodded. She went over to the bar and got the drinks. After she got herself seated again, Mike opened a couple of sheets of paper that he’d previously viewed and straightened them on the table.
"These papers do not exist. You can read them here and then destroy them, and I'll forget I ever saw them. What you do with the info is not my business, but I sure as hell don’t want to be the one to leak this information. You must understand that it’s not fully corroborated, but it won’t get any better either." He handed them to Mary Jean.
She opened the folded pages and started to read.
SPECIAL REPORT
FOR: DEPUTY DIRECTOR MICHAEL ANTHONY
FROM: SPECIAL AGENT THOMAS SYLVESTER
In order to do a background check on NSA member Dean Avery, I looked into events prior to his graduation from University of Virginia Law School. I questioned classmates who were specifically identified as friends by others prior to his long-standing association with the current president.
During his undergraduate studies, Avery became involved with a group studying Islamic culture and religion. The nearest major center of Islam in those days was in Washington. An interview with the current imam produced no useful information, since he had only recently arrived. After I searched his registry for the name of Avery from the period in question, he informed me that no one by that name appeared in his books. He suggested I contact Margaret Walsh, a member there for many years.
M
s. Walsh remembered students coming for instruction during the timeframe I asked her about. She remembered Dean Avery as one of the students who came to the Friday call to prayer every week for months and reported that he became a favorite of the imam. Avery went with the imam as part of a group to visit some holy sites in Arabia or Israel. They went for about two months.
The group included Avery’s girlfriend, a woman named Johnson. She stayed with him for months. Shortly after returning from the overseas trip, the girlfriend and Avery split up, and she left school and moved to the South—Georgia, North Carolina, or thereabouts. Walsh did not know the reason for the breakup.
After interviewing two other close student friends, I concluded that the romance seemed to be hidden. Both said that Avery did not go out with a girl on a regular basis during his college days. No one remembered the name of any girl he might have dated.
I will attempt to find the Johnson woman and that will conclude the scope of this investigation. Expect a supplemental report in two to three days.
No copy of this report exists. I made it on a typewriter.
Mary Jean handed the paper back to Mike. "Thank you. I imagine it cost a few points to get this report so no one was the wiser."
"What report?" Mike got up, gave Mary Jean a peck on the check, smiled, and left.
24
Four Days Ago — Early Morning
Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
Claude Moreau prepared to execute a previously installed program on the GPS system of Air Force One. He received the call late last night from Ricky, his cell leader, to initiate his part. The planning for this exact moment had taken months. Ricky’s company rendered technical support for aviation electronic components to three airlines operating in the Washington area, and he had sent Claude to become a factory-trained repairman on the GPS flight navigation systems of those aircraft he serviced.
This business provided a very lucrative cash flow for the cell that Ricky led, and also gave Claude a noble sense of accomplishment. Today, however, Ricky had received a specific mission from his commander, and Claude could not fail him. As he drove by Andrews Air Force Base, he sent a remote activation code to the receiver in the GPS unit, which he had embedded in the flight following system on the president’s plane last time it was serviced. He’d installed it so that the system would fail four days after initiation. Ricky had ordered him to be available at any time to come to the Air Force base to fix the “problem” when they detected it. Maintenance personnel would discover it on the morning of the next presidential trip during normal preflight inspections.
Air Force technicians fell short of the training needed to handle all the complex components on the Boeing 747, which was, after all, a civilian airliner, not a military jet. The maintenance on many subsystems aboard was contracted out to local firms that held factory certification to provide repair services on the equipment.
Claude had visited the president’s aircraft a week ago to perform a scheduled inspection on the components he serviced. With a quick connection via a USB cable, he had sent the command to the GPS unit, telling it to fail a certain number of hours after receiving the activation code. He verified the system had accepted the command, then disconnected the cable and exited the aircraft a few minutes later.
He felt elated at having accomplished this part of the mission. Whatever the ultimate purpose of this task, he would carry it out for the good of Islam, and to aid in the destruction of the Great Satan. God is great, he mumbled to himself, exiting the front gate of the air base.
He successfully activated the code to have the GPS fail in four days and called Ricky to inform him of the successful completion of his assigned mission.
"Well done, Claude. Come on back here. We have to put together an item for you to use."
"Okay. Be there in an hour."
He arrived in exactly one hour at the office of the Shenandoah Avionics Repair and Maintenance Company in Reston, Virginia. Claude found Ricky in the component repair facility in the back in a closed-off area.
"Claude, well done. Now we have to put this together. I got a thermos. It’s all metal, and we can take the time to melt the C-4 into the small opening and then secure the detonator into the top part. We’ll have enough room to reattach the silver cap, and it will look like a thermos you would take with your lunch box," Ricky said.
"Do you want me to make a connection to the GPS unit with a USB cable? The unit can provide the electrical current to set it off if I reconfigure one wire in the tracking unit and have the electronic pulse that would send the data to the cockpit diverted from the connector to the explosives. I also have a handheld method to set it off."
"Get that fixed up, and make sure you can put it in without causing suspicion," Ricky warned.
"No fear. I’ll get it done or I’ll die to ensure it goes off.”
"Don’t do anything so drastic."
"If it has to be, then it’s the will of Allah."
They worked for two hours to accomplish the task of turning the thermos into a bomb. In the end, they were satisfied that all would work as planned. Claude took the deadly container with him to his maintenance van and departed.
With four days to prepare himself for the chance of planting the bomb on Air Force One, he knew he could do it. He would not fail.
25
Four Days Ago — Reston, VA — 10:22 P.M
Ricky Jobin answered the phone on the first ring.
"They’re off. Mission accomplished," he heard.
"Did they take care of the target?"
"Yes, I just dropped them off at the airport. They’ll be in Seattle in a few hours. I kept all the equipment they used and will bring it to you tomorrow."
"Excellent. Good job," Ricky said as he closed the phone and smiled. Now his cell had something to be proud of. They carried out Fatimah’s orders in completing a mission of the highest priority for that group. He might get some out-of-the-ordinary recognition for his men from the controller.
The woman who gave him the orders was someone he had never met. The call always came in from a cell that showed up as “ID blocked.” In the beginning, he’d met the Iranian who had assisted him in setting up his cell and then been told that his orders would come by phone, preceded by the name al-Banna so that he would know the order was from him. How long ago was that? Before he got started on a trip down memory lane, reminiscing about his conversion to the one true faith that would soon be the religion of the world and the law of the land in America, the ringing of his phone interrupted him. Opening it, he saw a blocked number and smiled as he said hello.
"Al-Banna, you are a blithering idiot," the female voice said in a loud staccato tone. "You blew it. They got the wrong man. I told you to have them wait until I told you his location. No, you and those morons moved in and killed the wrong man."
"What? What are you talking about?" He threw up his free hand.
"Which word didn’t you understand? They didn’t get Higgins. They got his sister-in-law and her husband. Why didn’t you supervise them? They were to wait for a confirmed location. Instead, those buffoons tried to track him down on their own in a foreign city and eliminate a target they have never seen before. All they had to do was to receive my call about where he would be."
"I’m sorry. I thought they did the job," he said in a soft voice. The fiasco that had occurred at the house in Virginia, caused by the bumbling students from Seattle, was not his responsibility.
"First of all, stop thinking and do as you are instructed. Second, I have an order for you. This time there is no room for mistakes. Do you understand my meaning?"
Ricky clearly understood her implication, and he did not want to end up dead over another mistake. He breathed in deeply and reached for a piece of paper in case he needed to copy part or all of the order she gave.
"Did your avionics man plant the device to make the GPS tracking go out?" she queried.
"Yes." Ricky gradually recovered and sounded stronger.
>
"He’ll be called in to repair it in four days. He will then use the software that we developed. Is the explosive ready to be used?"
"Yes, it is, and it’ll be in place, along with the update to the system," said Ricky with a little more confidence in his voice.
"Make sure it is. There’s nothing we can do about Higgins at this time. You’ll have to handle that later."
"I’ll do it myself. There will be no mistakes."
She concluded by mentioning the chapter and verse of a passage that read, "And remember the favor of Allah on you and His covenant with which He bound you firmly, when you said: We have heard and we obey, and be careful of your duty to Allah, surely Allah knows what is in the breasts." The line went dead.
"How does she find all this out so fast?" Ricky al-Banna wondered.
26
Three Days Ago — Savannah, GA
Yuri felt confident about Basam’s security in the short-term rental, with food and medicine, so he took a taxi downtown. He arrived in the old open market area of Savannah, which provided the distinct feeling of days gone by. While walking around, he observed the open-air cafés. The wood floors and antique tables that festooned the inside of the restaurants, the horse-drawn carriages making clop-clop sounds as they passed—all combined to create the atmosphere of the “good old days.” The appearance of a hearse with the top cut off so that tourists could view the city while being fed tales of ghosts from the various stages of the city’s history seemed a little bizarre to Yuri.
A band played on an outside stage in front of Wings restaurant. Yuri sat down at a nearby table where he could hear the music and took out his laptop. He signed in, and after a few seconds he received a new email. The decryption program did its job and the plain text appeared.