Violence of Action, page 20
“I’m not fucking with you,” she said, but not quite ready to float Chunk’s body-double theory.
“Then why haven’t we heard anything about this?” Kim asked, turning to McLean. “If al-Saud was off the board, why didn’t anyone tell us?”
“A good question,” McLean said and looked at Whitney. “It would have been nice if you blokes had let us know you had Hamza al-Saud. Would have saved us a lot of work hunting for him.”
Screw it, she thought and blew air through pursed lips. I’m going all in.
“Look, here’s the deal. We snatched al-Saud out of Pakistan on an unsanctioned operation while trying to stop that drone strike on Kandahar. In the three months that we’ve had him in custody, we’ve failed to extract a single piece of actionable intelligence from the man. At first, we thought it was because he was just that good. But the longer it has dragged on, the more we’re beginning to have doubts. There are some people, and I include myself on the list, who believe the man in that detention cell claiming to be Hamza al-Saud is a body double—one of al-Saud’s lieutenants who gave himself up as a living martyr to throw us off the real al-Saud’s trail. Our failure to harvest intelligence from the man we have in custody prompted us to revisit assumptions we’d made about the al Qadar chain of command . . . You wanted to know what I was thinking earlier, well, here it is: Do you think it’s possible that Qasim Nadar and Hamza al-Saud are the same person?”
“Unlikely,” McLean said, the speed and certainty of his dismissal taking Whitney by surprise.
Kim, however, was not so quick to dismiss the idea. “I don’t know, boss, it’s an interesting theory.”
“I say bollocks. GCHQ has been all over Nadar since he made that trip to Afghanistan and came home with his new wife. They’ve harvested no viable SIGINT at all. Nothing. How does a man running an international terror organization like al Qadar do it without communicating up and down the chain of command?”
“This new generation of terrorists are smart,” Whitney came back. “For God’s sake, you just told me that Nadar works at British Aero on your country’s next-generation stealth combat drone. Any terrorist capable of circumventing your background checks—”
“Now wait just a bloody second,” McLean said, cutting her off. “We have not confirmed that Nadar is a terrorist. Yes, we are watching him, out of an abundance of caution. But Nadar is a British citizen, and to date, we have no evidence tying him to al Qadar.”
“I just told you he was photographed in a vehicle with Eshan Dawar at Torkham entering the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province three weeks before the drone strikes which we know originated in Mingora,” Whitney said, but she could already see the gears of damage control spinning in McLean’s head at the prospect of having failed to thwart a major intelligence breach on his watch.
“Yes, but you just shared that information with us five seconds ago,” McLean said.
“But if what she says is true, then we have a major fucking problem,” Kim said, vocalizing Whitney’s private thoughts quite eloquently. “I want to step things up with Diba. I think I can land her.”
McLean scrubbed his face with his hands and murmured a string of curses Whitney couldn’t quite make out before looking back at Kim. “Fine, do it.”
“Who’s Diba?” Whitney asked.
“Nadar’s wife,” Kim said. “I’ve been . . . cultivating a relationship with her. Just in case.”
Ahhh . . . so they’re more worried about Nadar than they let on.
She looked back and forth between her two new friends on the screen. “I think this was a very productive exchange.”
“So do I,” Kim said, smiling at Whitney for the first time.
“So . . . does this mean we’re officially cooperating now?”
“It would appear so,” McLean said and seemed to deflate on screen. “I’ll make the necessary calls.”
“We should probably step up surveillance on Qasim,” Kim said. “Put twenty-four-hour eyes on him. Maybe bug his flat while he’s at work. I can invite Diba for a lunch.”
“Agreed,” McLean said and then turned his attention back to Whitney. “Are you planning to come to London?”
“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she confessed. “Just taking it one step at a time, to be honest.”
“Understood. If you do decide to join our little party, I would appreciate some advanced notice. You Americans have a rotten tendency to show up uninvited and immediately start making lots of demands. Rubs people the wrong way, and by people, I mean me,” McLean said.
Whitney smiled. “That’s not how I roll. Let me talk to my Head Shed and get back with you. We’ve got some other pots on the stove at the moment, so as much as a trip to London sounds interesting, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But I’ll never say never.”
“Let’s stay in touch, Watts,” Kim said, her demeanor softening to something resembling cordial. “I’m going to put the squeeze on Diba and see what happens. If she talks, I suspect we’ll learn new information. If she panics and runs to Qasim, that will be informative too.”
“Thank you,” Whitney said, and then taking a page from Chunk’s interpersonal management playbook, added, “I know it’s a pain having someone show up asking to play in your sandbox. I appreciate you guys being so accommodating.”
McLean and Kim nodded, said their goodbyes, and logged off.
Whitney got to her feet, pocketed her mobile phone, and—feeling quite proud of herself—set off to find Chunk to fill him in on the news that was going to rock his world.
CHAPTER 24
british aero defense headquarters building
new malden, united kingdom
2030 local time
Qasim rode the elevator down to the lobby from his office feeling completely consumed but unable to put his finger on what was consuming him. It wasn’t a thirst for vengeance, or at least for vengeance alone. It felt more like a calling—a duty to fulfill some supernatural purpose that Allah had set aside for him. His burst of anger at the hacker safe house the other night had been more than just his frustration boiling over. It had been him finding his inner strength.
Violence is a necessary part of my evolution—my rebirth into the man I need to be.
To fulfill his true calling, he had to be more than just an engineer, more than just a victim of Western aggression, and more than just one of Hamza al-Saud’s loyal followers. He had to grow into the al Qadar leader that Hamza had encouraged him to be. He could no longer afford to allow anyone to regard him as less. He could no longer allow people to disrespect him. Even the armed, rough fighters he’d feared when he’d first met Hamza in Pakistan must come to fear and respect him.
He crossed the lobby and gave a cursory nod to the friendly night security guard behind the reception desk.
“Burning the midnight oil again I see,” the guard said.
“For God and country,” Qasim said with a chuckle, his Received Pronunciation getting better by the day.
He’d been working diligently at stripping the Afghan undertones from his speech to sound more like a native-born speaker. He’d become quite the chameleon of late, and he was getting better at managing the two identities always warring for his attention. At times, it seemed almost inconceivable that his career at British Aero had once been his real passion and joy, and not just a cover for his secret life. At other times, when sussing out a thorny aeronautical engineering challenge, it felt like his other life as an al Qadar warrior was a hangover memory from a terrible nightmare. But this was his life.
He was Janus—the two-faced god of beginnings and endings, duality, and change.
Qasim left the building, exiting onto the B283 just south of Dukes Avenue. Tonight he was meeting Hamza, but he needed to perform a series of countersurveillance activities before he did. London was the CCTV epicenter of the universe, so he had to be methodical and careful.
Assume people are watching you and behave in a way that makes them feel foolish for bothering to do so, Hamza had told him.
So Qasim walked to the corner and then feigned a sudden realization he had forgotten something. He turned back and entered the Tesco convenience store at the corner of Apex Tower. Once inside, he forced himself not to scan the store for anyone who might be watching him. Instead, he wandered to the aisle where the over-the-counter medicines were located and selected two different brands of painkillers, flipping them over as if to compare the ingredients. In his peripheral vision, he watched as a heavily disguised Hamza al-Saud entered the store. Hamza browsed for a while before making his way to the aisle where Qasim pretended to shop.
“Excuse me,” Hamza said in an altered accent as he reached for a bottle of Calpol.
“Certainly,” Qasim said, stepping aside for Hamza to reach the shelf. “By the way, do you think Calpol works better, or Nurofen? I can’t decide.”
Hamza shrugged and smiled. “My wife swears by Calpol, so that’s what we take.”
This preplanned exchange told Qasim that it was safe to meet. Had Hamza answered Nurofen, he would have aborted and walked straight home.
“Cheers, mate,” Qasim said, placing the Nurofen back on the shelf and walking to the register.
Outside again, Qasim crossed over the B283 at the circle and then headed east on Dukes Avenue as was the plan. He forced himself to walk slowly, a man alone with his thoughts, the bottle of painkiller swinging from his right wrist in the little white plastic bag the clerk had given him. It took great effort not to scan the streets for would-be British agents who might be following him. That was Hamza’s job now—to clear his tail and make sure he was not being followed.
At Malden Hills Gardens he turned right and slowed his pace. Inside, his pulse was pounding as he worried if he was under surveillance by MI5 or some other British agency. A block farther, that worry morphed into fear as he approached the corner of Kings Avenue and still Hamza had not texted him with the all clear. Without the message, he would abort and walk home, but just as he reached the corner, his phone chirped. He fished the burner mobile he was carrying tonight from his pocket. In keeping with standard computer programming protocol, a one meant the meet was on and a zero meant it was off.
He checked the screen and saw the number one.
His heart a bass drum in his chest, he turned right and headed west, counting off residences as he did. For some reason, he had a very bad feeling that tonight was the night he was going to be arrested. He’d been far too lucky for too long . . . Why did Hamza have to come in person? On reaching the eighth home, he turned and walked to the front door. The flat was dark inside and no exterior lights had been left on. He squatted, retrieved a key from beneath the doormat, and let himself inside. Movement in the dark room to the rear caught his attention and fresh panic washed over him. He balled his fists, peering into the dark, ready to defend himself . . .
“It’s only me, Qasim,” the familiar voice said as a table lamp clicked on, illuminating Hamza who was standing beside a leather chair. “I entered through the back door. Please, come and sit. There is nothing to worry about, this house is perfectly safe. There are no listening devices here, no CCTV cameras, no one across the street listening with laser microphones. I have spent a small fortune to have this face-to-face meeting with you tonight because I do not know when the opportunity will present itself again.”
Qasim nodded and let out a shaky exhale as he slipped into one of two high-backed chairs, his body still burning off the adrenaline dump. On the wall behind Hamza hung an oil painting of a naval battle between two tall-masted ships from a lost era—maneuvering in gray, rolling seas set against storm clouds and lightning in the background.
“How are you, Qasim?” Hamza said with unnerving casualness, taking a seat opposite him.
“I’m well,” he said, setting his briefcase and plastic bag on the floor beside his chair.
“I understand from Fun Time you paid a recent visit to the cyber team,” the terrorist prince said with an inscrutable smile.
Qasim nodded nervously.
But instead of reprimanding him, Hamza said, “I was pleased to learn you asserted your rightful dominance. Never let lesser men disrespect you.”
A chilling memory of Hamza ordering the murder of a subordinate in Mingora flashed in Qasim’s mind. Hamza’s bodyguard had practically cut the man’s head off as Qasim had looked on. Qasim had nearly pissed himself with fear in that moment, but now he understood why Hamza had been forced to give that order. To be respected in this world, you had to be feared. To be feared, you had to demonstrate strength and the willingness to punish. Fun Time and the other hackers had disrespected him because they hadn’t feared him. They’d seen him as weak, and it had been necessary to change their perception.
“They needed a reminder of who was in charge,” Qasim said at last, wondering if he could give an order to kill like Hamza, should the situation demand. “However, despite their insolence, Fun Time and his hackers are very talented.”
“Bring me up to date with their progress,” Hamza said, his voice ripe with conspiratorial interest rather than accusation or concern.
A very good sign . . .
“As discussed, we’re mining social media to build a database of American operators. We’ve made good progress unmasking the identities of SEALs and Green Berets, connecting them with specific commands, identifying their home addresses, spouses, and what schools their children attend and so on . . . This database creates many new opportunities for us.”
“What are you suggesting, Qasim?” Hamza asked, leaning in, forearms resting on his thighs. “That we attack schools in America? That we kill women and children? Then we would be no better than the animals who attack us in our own country—the animals who killed your sister at her own wedding.”
“That’s not what I’m suggesting,” Qasim said, but felt unsure if that was true. Did not the American animals, as Hamza called them, deserve to suffer the same pain and anguish he suffered? To feel the same loss? But then, what would that make him? “What I suggest is that it might be possible to target the operators on American soil when their guard is down. We could hit them on the way home from the grocery store, or the base, or while out on a run in the neighborhood. What impact would that have on the Special Operations community? What psychological impact might that have on the families? Can you imagine the outrage? The Special Operations commands would become paralyzed. Many active duty personnel would resign for fear of their families being targeted. Would that not take our PsyOps program to the next level?”
Hamza stroked his well-trimmed beard. “Interesting that you propose this, Qasim. I would not have expected it from you.”
“Can we operate inside the United States? Do we have that capability?”
Hamza stared at him for a long moment, and Qasim wondered suddenly if Hamza fully trusted him.
“Yes,” the al Qadar leader said finally. “It could be done but operating on American soil is the ultimate challenge. There is a high likelihood of losing all members of the team, but what you suggest could be worth the cost. It also might help solve the ultimate objective that all my operations attempt to influence.”
“Which is what?” Qasim asked, feeling himself relax with Hamza seeming to confide in him, to even brainstorm with him like a colleague—perhaps one day as an equal.
“The Americans have been in the Middle East a long time. Their network of intelligence assets has been developed for decades. They are so firmly entrenched it is nearly impossible for us to be effective—even with them officially out of Afghanistan, they are always just over the horizon. Just like they rooted out our operation in Mingora, they found our safe house outside Erbil—thankfully only one of our snipers was in residence at the time of the hit, but it was a big loss.” Hamza let out a heavy sigh. “We need the Americans to lose their stomach for war. They are not like us, Qasim. Tribal peoples have known war for generations, but this is the longest the Americans have ever been at war and their people grow weary. It is why your suggestion carries such promise. This would send a message that their lawless presence in the Middle East is driving terrorism back to their own country. Your strategy might create a sea change in US foreign policy and accelerate a full-scale withdrawal from the region, not just from Afghanistan. I will consider it carefully. Thank you for having the courage to share it with me.”
“When Eshan introduced us . . . when my journey began, I was filled with so much fear and uncertainty,” Qasim said, overcome by a strange and overwhelming compulsion to unburden himself to this man. “I find myself flip-flopping back and forth about whether violence against our fellow man is Allah’s true will.”
Hamza laughed and patted him on the leg. “I have always known that about you, brother. To be called to Allah’s purpose is terrifying and at times uncertain. We all struggle with such feelings.”
Qasim raised his eyebrows and stared at his mentor. “Even you?”
“Most especially me,” Hamza said, his face soft and his tone patient. “Men who do not contemplate such things are not warriors, but sociopaths. Extreme violence is unnatural for introspective men like us. You and I are, at our core, men of peace. Our faith teaches us to be so. But only a few are called—and Allah knows only a few are able—to be a sword for peace in a world governed by warmongers. I struggle with this seeming contradiction constantly, brother. If you did not share the same struggle, I could not trust you as I do.”
Qasim nodded and considered the sage words from this complicated man he both respected and feared.
“Your words are a comfort to me, Hamza. Especially as I ask what I am about to ask.” Qasim took a long cleansing breath. “I wish to know more . . . What other operations do you have planned? I desire a greater role. I’m ready to do more for the cause. Will you read me into the full breadth of al Qadar operations?”
