Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 10

  “I don’t know the name.”

  “He was your control officer. GIP. But he’s dead now. Shot by a firing squad and buried that night, of course.”

  The General Intelligence Presidency was Saudi Arabia’s CIA. And Sa’ad had been Kamal’s control officer for the pencil tower operation last year in New York. One that had gone wrong in the end, so it was no surprise that the man, who’d been a distant relative of the royal family, had been executed.

  Plausible deniability always came first before human life.

  “The questions are, of course, what do you want and why have you come to us?”

  Kamal took the Glock 29 Gen4 subcompact pistol from under his jacket and pointed it at Shadid. The pistol was small but reliable and fired a 10mm round.

  “You’re going to drop me off at a car rental agency, and if any of your people try to follow me, I will kill them. I’m going to disappear and you’ll do nothing about it.”

  “Don’t be stupid. If we’d sold out to the FBI your ass would have been nailed once you landed.”

  “I’m not a patient man.”

  “We were told that you were primarily a European operator. Well, this is the U.S. Different rules, a different game. Actually I’m surprised you got this far.”

  Kamal laid the muzzle against Shadid’s side, just under the armpit.

  Someone rose up in the backseat and placed the muzzle of a pistol against the back of his head.

  Kamal began to squeeze the trigger.

  “That won’t be necessary, Karim,” Shadid said. “Mr. Watson is here seeking our assistance with Allah’s work.”

  Kamal eased up and the pistol was taken away from his head.

  “You may stay with us in complete safety for as long as need be,” Shadid said. “I assume that you came here searching for soldiers of God.”

  “I need to speak with the imam.”

  “I am he,” Shadid said. “And believe me when I tell you that we have been waiting for a very long time for this opportunity.”

  * * *

  The hidden tunnel from the subbasement of the sprawling madrassa led nearly one mile out into the scrub brush.

  Upstairs on the main floors of the complex, students were taught the Quran as well as Sharia law versus ordinary American law. Guest groups in diversity classes from high schools as far away as San Antonio, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth were bused in to learn the slight differences between Islam and Christianity.

  To Muslims, Christ was an important prophet and Mary—Miriam—was equally important.

  But in the rat warren of interconnecting dark spaces at the end of the tunnel, young boys and girls were taught realities: infiltration of buildings and airports and shipping terminals, weapons use, bomb making, detonating devices, secret codes, rendezvous points and creating an entire host of false documents.

  But mostly they were taught the willingness and resolve to die.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The rain at seven in the morning was steady and cold. McGarvey, along with six other CIA recruits—one of them a female ex-marine—in the second half of their training evolution stood in an open field across from their hand-to-hand instructor, retired SEAL chief Leonard Kaiser.

  They were dressed alike in BDUs, except for the chief, who wore the trousers and boots, but only a T-shirt and no cover for his bald head. He was built like a fireplug, and did not appear to mind the weather.

  “Mr. West has recently come out of the field to join us for a bit of freshening up,” the chief said. “I expect that he’ll share with us all a few tricks he learned in badland. How long were you out there?”

  “A few years off and on,” McGarvey said.

  “Russia?”

  McGarvey nodded.

  “And what was your exact mission?”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  The others were looking at him with curiosity, and a degree of cockiness now that they had got this far. He had at least twenty-five years on the oldest of them. But the woman was appraising him as if she’d seen him somewhere. Him or his type. He was an NOC, the real deal, and every one of them wanted to give him a try. It was obvious from their expressions.

  “The gentleman teaches us the first rule in this business,” the chief said. “Keep your mouths shut.”

  They were a thousand yards above the York River, and the only sounds this morning came from one of the long-gun ranges on the other side of the hill toward Admin. They could have been on another planet, certainly not so close to civilization. Williamsburg was only ten miles away.

  “I understand that you were injured getting out. Are you here as an observer?”

  “I’m here to get my edge back,” McGarvey said.

  “Okay, let’s see,” the chief said. He motioned for McGarvey to come forward.

  Salem had taken him through the jackets of the instructors as well as support staff, but nothing had jumped out at him.

  “Might help if you told me what you were looking for,” Salem said. “Specifically.”

  “Someone who doesn’t fit the profile.”

  “Looking for you?”

  “Maybe,” McGarvey had said.

  “Well, it isn’t Len Kaiser. I’ve known the man for ten years, and I’d vouch for him with my life.” Salem shook his head. “If you’re going to hurt someone, don’t make it him. Okay?”

  “I’m not here to hurt anyone. I’m here to find out who knows that I’m still alive and wants me dead.”

  “That include me?” Salem asked.

  McGarvey had laughed. “Especially you, Bob.”

  And it was obvious that Salem didn’t know if McGarvey was kidding or not.

  * * *

  McGarvey, his hands at his sides, stopped within arm’s length of the chief.

  “Are you prepared to defend yourself?” Kaiser asked.

  “Yes.”

  The chief suddenly lashed out with a karate chop.

  McGarvey simply batted the man’s hand away, as if he were doing nothing more than swatting an insect.

  The chief danced back a step and hooked a foot behind McGarvey’s left ankle right at the prosthesis joint and pulled hard as he slid in the opposite direction.

  Mac went down, and he remained for just an instant as if the wind had been knocked out of him, until the chief made the mistake of coming in for the disabling move.

  It was almost as if they had rehearsed the dance in order to give the others a chance to learn that a man with a peg leg wouldn’t have to be a liability in the field.

  McGarvey rolled away as the chief’s boot was coming toward his head, using his false leg as a lever to deflect the kick and upend the ex-SEAL, sending the man to the ground.

  In an instant, McGarvey was on top of the chief, the muzzle of his Walther pressed against the man’s forehead.

  The chief relaxed, a big smile on his face. “You’re not supposed to be carrying in this exercise.”

  “I take a shower with my gun,” Mac said. “Hoorah.”

  “That’s marines.”

  “Close enough,” McGarvey said. He got up and held out a hand for the chief.

  The recruits were looking at him, their mouths half-open. McGarvey’s left pant leg was up to the knee beneath which was where the prosthesis was attached to the stump. A fair amount of blood had soaked the fabric and had run down his plastic leg.

  The chief shrugged. “Make use of all of your assets all of the time,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if Mr. West hadn’t taken off his peg leg and tried to beat me to death with it.”

  McGarvey pulled down his pants leg and went back in line.

  “People, you are here to make mistakes. Learn from them.”

  * * *

  Salem came over to the dispensary after McGarvey’s stump had been bandaged. He brought a couple of Heinekens with him.

  “Kaiser’s never heard of you, so naturally he thinks that you’re a ringer, though he can’t figure out why you’re here.”

>   “He’s a good man,” McGarvey said. The drapes were drawn around the cubicle, and he was the only patient there. He took a pull from the bottle. “Did you call Franklin?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Salem said. “He’d have my ass and so would you. But it’s worse than that.”

  “Pete called?”

  “Yeah, I just got off the phone with her. She’s a tough woman to say no to.”

  “Tell me about it. What’d you tell her?”

  “The truth.”

  “She coming down here?”

  “No,” Salem said.

  McGarvey was relieved that he wouldn’t have to deal with her, and yet he had mixed feelings. “Anyway, I’m out of here first thing in the morning. Light duty for a couple of days. I might even limp a little around the Ball Buster tomorrow.”

  Salem took out a tablet and handed it to Mac. Several photos of the woman in the hand-to-hand class this morning were on the screen.

  “Marine Lieutenant Grace Metal, and trust me, her last name pretty well fits the bill. She got out of the corps two years ago and finished up her law degree at Maryland in one year.”

  “When did she join the CIA?”

  “She applied last year, but she was fast-tracked and accepted one month later.”

  “Who’d she know?”

  “No idea, except that she was working on Weaver’s campaign and took a bye until two weeks ago, and she was assigned to me.”

  McGarvey stared at her photographs for a long time, several random thoughts flitting through his head, though none of them made any sense. They were just feelings. Hunches. Vague guesstimates.

  “Something standing out in your mind?” Salem asked.

  McGarvey handed the tablet back. “She was the only woman in our group, and she looked like a hardass.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  * * *

  When Salem was gone McGarvey phoned Otto with the woman’s name and what little background he’d gotten from Salem.

  “She might be the one gunning for you?” Otto asked.

  “Probably not, but something’s there,” McGarvey said. “How’s Pete?”

  Otto laughed. “Ready to storm the castle, but she’ll hold for now.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The high-desert camp was located in a valley thirty miles north of the tiny Mexican town of Ricardo Flores Magon, two hundred miles south of El Paso. ISIS-U.S. leased the five thousand acres from the Sinaloa drug cartel, in exchange for free passage rights for product to and from the poppy fields of Afghanistan.

  Kamal stood inside a tent, the flap open, looking out at the apparently deserted training facility as night deepened. The two dozen shelters were hidden under camouflage netting, as were two satellite dishes—one for communications and the other to track the one U.S. satellite that passed over this spot on a random basis, spot-checking for drug-smuggling activities.

  Saudi GIP Captain Ayman Baz, who was the camp commandant, came up behind Kamal. He was a short man with a paunch who was stuck out here in this deep-cover shit hole of an assignment because he couldn’t claim one drop of royal blood.

  “We’re getting pretty good at taking shelter just before the bird comes up over the horizon in the west.”

  Kamal had been here three days and this was the first time they’d been alerted to a satellite passage. He was impressed. “What about the generator? It has to throw out a lot of heat.”

  “We have two guys whose only job is to shut it down, and toss a couple of thermal blankets over it, especially around the exhaust vent.”

  “How often does this happen?”

  “This is the second time this month for us. And it’s only overhead for less than four minutes.”

  Kamal turned around. The moment he’d gotten here by car from El Paso he’d known something was terribly wrong, and he had almost turned around on the spot and left. The captain was a drunk who had been sent here and ordered to remain.

  “Sooner or later someone is bound to make a mistake,” he’d said.

  “We’ve been here a year,” Baz responded.

  “Riyadh would cut you loose. Admitting to the presence of a Saudi operation down here would damned near be a declaration of war.”

  “My legend, including my passport, is Syrian. I’m an expendable. Just like you.” Baz lit a cigarette with unsteady hands. “Anyway, this is war, or are you here for something else?”

  Kamal was struck as he had been in Texas at the training camp for ISIS sympathizers that despite his planning, his tradecraft, things were starting to spin out of control. Shadid had known about him or at least had expected him to show up sooner or later, and so had Captain Baz.

  “I have three missions.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me, and I have come up with just the boys and girls to do your business.” Baz looked away. “Stupid, actually, but this was the major’s operation from start to finish. No way out for any of us, he told me. But then, he chose us well—there never was a way out for me.”

  “You could have gone to the Americans. They would have taken you in trade for your intel.”

  “Sa’ad warned me about that too. He assured me that the White House had always looked the other way when it came to Saudi Arabia. Even after nine/eleven. I would have been on the first flight to Riyadh. Ended up the same way the major did.”

  Baz made no sense to him. “Then why did you agree to come here? What were you offered?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “The lives of my wife and two children. They were allowed to come to the States eighteen months ago.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But here you stay.”

  Baz shook his head. “Suppose they aren’t already dead. Suppose I found them somehow. Where would we go?”

  “Disappear.”

  “That takes money,” the captain said. “As long as we hold out here, they’re safe. And, who knows, maybe in the end you’ll find a way out for us.”

  Kamal wasn’t about to dignify the remark, but Baz wasn’t through.

  “I know your face. I have your fingerprints, your saliva. I know what you’re planning to do.”

  Kamal smiled. His face was not on record in any intel database, nor were his prints or DNA. The only man on earth he had any respect for was possibly out there somewhere. But even if he was still alive, he must have been severely injured in the car bomb. No threat.

  And yet.

  “If we succeed, I will arrange for you to find your family and go someplace where no one will find you.”

  “It’s a trade, then?”

  “Yes, a trade,” Kamal said.

  Baz started to turn away, but then turned back. “Most of these kids think they’re going to paradise.”

  “But not all of them?” Kamal asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why do the nonbelievers do it? Why Paris and Brussels and Tokyo?”

  “They’re nuts,” Baz said.

  * * *

  Of the sixty-seven martyrs for Allah who were currently in training, three had been to San Francisco, two had been to New Orleans and just about all of them had heard of western Kansas and had a vague idea what it was like.

  Which was remarkable to Kamal, because all but three of them were American born, graduates of high schools mostly throughout the Midwest, many of them from Minneapolis. Yet they knew more about the history of Islam than they did about the thirteen colonies, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and more about the geography of the Middle East than of the U.S.

  “We’re not wiring explosive vests to geniuses,” Baz had said.

  And it was the same thing Shadid had told him: “The smart ones know better.”

  Kamal didn’t bother with the names of the three who had been to San Francisco—two stocky girls in their late teens and one boy with thin eyebrows who the girls thought was handsome—but when they came into the conference tent he had them ta
ke a look at a highway map of the city and its surroundings.

  “Can you find the Golden Gate Bridge?” he asked.

  One of the girls looked up as if she thought Kamal was an idiot. She stabbed a finger on the bridge. “Do you want us to blow it up?” she demanded.

  She was angry, and Kamal figured that she had no real idea why. “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

  The young man, probably in his late twenties, grinned. “No shit?”

  Kamal powered up his cell phone and connected it with the PowerPoint app to a computer that projected images on a small whiteboard just off the end of the table.

  He showed the camper van and the explosives packed inside, the approaches and center span of the bridge at rush hour, and a detailed street map showing the location of a long-term private parking garage a few blocks from St. Mary’s Cathedral off Gough Street.

  “You will shave your beard, take off your burkas and dress as ordinary Americans,” Kamal said.

  “What is an ordinary American?” the girl whose name was Lamia asked.

  “A Christian,” Kamal said. “Take a taxi to within two blocks of the church, walk to the camper and drive directly to the bridge, where you will detonate the explosives. Do you see any difficulty in these instructions?”

  “No.”

  The second girl had held her silence to this point. “I will do this as a Muslim!” she shouted.

  “Or not at all?”

  “Yes.”

  Kamal pulled out his pistol and shot her in the middle of the forehead. “We will strike a blow for Mohammed,” he said. “A blow for justice.”

  Lamia and the young man looked like they had just slipped into some realm of insanity. They had become untouchable.

  Baz appeared at the open tent flap.

  “I have my first soldiers of God,” Kamal said. “Bring me the next team.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Major Rankov left his office a few minutes before noon and reached Yasenevo Park on foot thirty minutes later.

  He took care with his tradecraft, checking for reflections in store windows of someone behind him. Turning suddenly and crossing one of the wide boulevards in an effort to catch someone in a SUV or sedan tailing him. Entering buildings and passing straight through to a rear exit.