Three Weeks in Washington, page 15
part #3 of Titus Ray Series
Juliana walked in right behind him.
* * * *
Seeing Mitchell enter the room with Juliana was definitely a surprise. On the other hand, since I’d deliberately used her to delay Mitchell’s return, perhaps I should have expected her to show up.
As a rule, women rarely appreciate being used, and I had the feeling Juliana was the rule and not the exception.
Mitchell handed Roberto and me each a bottle of water. “When I told Juliana what you said about the black van, she offered to come back and tell Roberto about it herself.”
I immediately got up and offered Juliana my chair.
It was hard to decipher the look she gave me. “What I have to say won’t take that long. I don’t need to sit down.”
Juliana looked over at Roberto. “The black van I saw in your neighborhood yesterday turned out to be a delivery truck. We checked it out, and, apparently, the driver just couldn’t find the address he was looking for. That’s why he kept circling around.”
I waited to see how Roberto would respond to her story because I felt certain what he said next would indicate whether he’d decided to cooperate with me or not.
Since I’d just told him I’d invented the story of the black van in order to get rid of Mitchell, he might decide to call Juliana a liar and create all kinds of havoc for me.
Or, he could play along, accept her story, and work with me.
Roberto pointed his finger at me. “When you said I might be able to identify the black van, I knew that couldn’t be true.” He looked over at Juliana. “Since I only moved in the neighborhood a few weeks ago, I have no idea who belongs there and who doesn’t.”
Although this was the kind of answer I’d hoped for, I tried not to show it.
I looked over at Juliana, “Thanks for clearing up any confusion about that vehicle.”
She gave me a half-hearted smile. “I hate it when things get confusing.”
* * * *
After Juliana had left, I began my official interrogation of Roberto. Even though I had a pretty good idea he’d decided to be forthcoming with me, I still spent several minutes warning him about the consequences of refusing to answer my questions.
Now that I knew I was being recorded, I was vague about what those consequences would be, and I definitely didn’t mention shipping him off to Gitmo. Still, the picture I painted for him was pretty dire.
When I finished, Roberto said, “There’s no need to threaten me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“We want to know more about your conversations with Rehman Zaidi,” I said. “In your written statement, you said he talked about his meetings with the security council in Damascus, but you never gave us any details about who attended those meetings. Was there some reason you didn’t tell us who was in attendance?”
He nodded. “I knew you’d want me to give you some specific names, but I was afraid if I identified them, they might know I was the person providing you with that information, and they’d come after me.”
Mitchell asked, “How would they be able to know who’d given us that information?”
Roberto uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, jabbing the air with his finger as he tried to make his point.
“Because I knew Rehman Zaidi couldn’t keep quiet. He talked to me about things he shouldn’t have. That made me afraid he might talk to someone about me. If your military targeted anyone in that group with a drone strike, then the others might be able to figure out I was the one giving out that information.”
I assured Roberto once he told us what we wanted to know, I’d make sure he was protected. I emphasized those assurances by pointing out I’d just saved his life in the cemetery.
Finally, he relented and identified four people Zaidi had told him were responsible for planning the attack against the U.S., including Marwan Farage.
I asked, “How well do you know Marwan?”
He shook his head. “Not well at all. I met him when I was sent to Syria to negotiate a trade agreement between our two countries. Since Marwan was fluent in both Arabic and Spanish, he acted as my translator during the negotiations.”
I urged Roberto to try and remember any personal details about Marwan, especially something I could use as leverage against him. He mentioned Marwan loved Turkish coffee and talked a lot about soccer, but he couldn’t remember anything of significance about the man.
When I quizzed him about Marwan’s family, he said, “I met a few of his family members the summer I brought Ernesto to Syria with me. That was when he introduced me to Ahmed.”
“Did you meet his immediate family?”
Roberto described meeting Marwan’s wife, a daughter named Samira, and a son who was serving in the Syrian army. He thought the son’s name was Arshad, but he wasn’t sure.
After I’d exhausted his knowledge of Marwan’s family, I grilled him about Hezbollah’s timetable for the attack on Washington.
Once again, he insisted Zaidi had never given him an exact date. “Zaidi didn’t know what the timetable was. He told me it was up to the Iranian general.”
Although Wilson had identified the Iranian general during my briefing, I asked Roberto, “What’s the general’s name?”
“Suleiman. General Alizadeh Suleiman.”
“When Zaidi told you about the attack on Washington, did he say how they planned to disperse the chemicals? Did he give you any details about the delivery system they were planning to use?”
“Like I told you before, I remember Zaidi saying he couldn’t wait to see the video of the gas canisters being dropped on Washington, so I just assumed they’d be using an airplane.”
Mitchell asked, “He didn’t mention firing off some kind of rocket?”
Roberto shook his head. “No, Zaidi said nothing like that.” He put his empty water bottle on the desk and said, “Look, I’ve told you everything I know. Why don’t you ask Marwan these questions?”
“Trust me,” I said, as I got to my feet, “Marwan will get his share of questions in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, you’ll need to be patient and remain here a little longer.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
I went out to the reception area and returned with the two guys in charge of babysitting Roberto. Then, Mitchell and I headed back down to 301-B.
The moment we walked in the door, Vasco winked at me and said, “I can’t say much for your style, but you certainly got the guy to talk.”
“I was absent the day they taught style at The Farm.”
Juliana laughed.
* * * *
I asked Vasco if he’d heard back from the Ops Center, and he handed over the reply he’d received. Although I’d been given permission to interrogate Marwan, it was only a PIA, a Preliminary Interrogation Authorization.
The PIA was temporary and would only remain in effect until Carlton had finished making arrangements for Marwan to be transferred to Gitmo, where his interrogation would begin in earnest.
Before that happened, I wanted to pull enough intel out of Marwan to convince Carlton he needed to send me over to Syria to see what I could turn up on Hezbollah’s plans to use the chemical weapons.
I’d just finished digesting the reply from the Ops Center when my sat phone started vibrating. I excused myself and went out in the hallway to answer it.
“Are you clear?” Carlton asked.
I opened the door to 301-A and went inside. The prison-like room made me feel claustrophobic, but I tried ignoring it.
“Clear,” I said.
“I was in the Ops Center when the feed came in and their initial assessment was that Roberto was finally telling you the truth. Do you agree?”
I was surprised to hear Carlton say the Ops Center had been receiving a real-time feed of Roberto’s interrogation. Usually, an interrogation was recorded first, and then, after being reviewed by the primary, was uploaded to the Ops Center.
Of course, should events warrant, the primary could always request a real-time feedback to headquarters, but, in this case, I hadn’t done so.
“I agree with your assessment. I don’t believe Roberto knows any details about the attack, but Marwan may be a different story.”
There was a note of warning in Carlton’s voice. “The DDO only issued a PIA on Marwan. Nothing more. He wants you to leave the heavy lifting to our people at Gitmo.”
I ignored his cautionary tone and asked, “Did you request the real-time feed of my session with Roberto?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
After a few seconds, Carlton said, “No, I didn’t request the feed. Since you’re asking me that question, I have to assume you didn’t request it either. Did you and Ken have a misunderstanding?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t get distracted by Ken Vasco. I’ve heard he’s into the political side of this business a little too much. You need to be careful. Don’t let his agenda get in the way of your main objective.”
“That won’t happen.”
Carlton briefed me on the latest signals intelligence from the Middle East and gave me a situational report on Salazar’s investigation of the shooting at the Navy Yard, which the DDO had labeled Component Two of Operation Citadel Protection. Carlton said Salazar had traced the heroin in Felipe’s backpack to Los Zetas, one of several Mexican drug cartels with known ties to Hezbollah in Syria.
Once Carlton had finished updating me, I asked him if the names Roberto had spouted off were known to the Ops Center. He told me Katherine was still probing the databases on one of the men, but our operatives in Syria already knew about the other two, as well as the Iranian general, Alizadeh Suleiman.
“Has she uncovered anything about Marwan’s family yet? Did she find anything I could use as leverage when I question him?”
“She said the preliminary data showed Marwan shipped his wife and daughter off to Beirut when the Syrian rebels first started taking over some of the outlying neighborhoods in Damascus. When Katherine accessed Syria’s military records, she discovered his son, Arshad Farage, had been killed in Al-Hadar when his unit tried to take out a rebel stronghold there.”
“Tell Katherine to keep turning over those rocks. If I’m able to get Marwan to talk, he might be able to give us the timing of the attack, as well as how Hezbollah plans to execute it.”
“I agree,” Carlton said. “I believe Marwan’s capture will yield a treasure trove of intelligence for us. We were lucky he showed up in Buenos Aires when he did.”
Was that true?
Was the capture of Marwan just pure luck?
Maybe so, but I was beginning to believe it might be the answer to the prayer I’d prayed before leaving Washington, D.C., the one asking God to look on me with favor and grant me success in Buenos Aires.
I said, “Marwan’s presence here was definitely a gift.”
“Be careful how you unwrap this gift, Titus. I wouldn’t want it to get broken.”
In the end, Marwan didn’t get broken.
He didn’t even get bent.
Chapter 21
I wasn’t ready to question Marwan yet. There was someone else I needed to question first. I went back inside 301-B and found him over in the corner by the coffee machine.
“Hey,” Vasco said, “how about a cup of Joe? I’m buying.”
After I said yes, I waved off the creamer he offered me, and then I nodded over at the video monitors across the room.
“What’s our prisoner doing?”
“Mostly rocking in place and talking to himself. Are you ready to have a go at him?”
“Just about.”
I lowered my voice and looked Vasco in the eye. “Let’s get something straight before I go in there. I’m the primary on this operation, and unless I tell you to send the Ops Center the real-time feed of the audio, don’t send it.”
Even though the smile on his face remained fixed, his eyes didn’t look happy. “Sure thing. Did I get that wrong before? I sure thought you said to wait five minutes and then send the feed to Langley.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well then, sorry about the miscommunication. I’ll get it right next time.”
“Get what right?” Mitchell asked, walking up behind him.
Vasco seemed startled to hear Mitchell’s voice and almost spilled his coffee. “Oh, hey, Ben, I didn’t see you there. Titus and I were just discussing procedures. I sent Langley the real-time feed when you were questioning Roberto before, and, evidently, I wasn’t supposed to do that.”
Mitchell looked over at me and said, “No harm done, right?” He laughed, “It’s not like we laid a hand on him.”
Vasco laughed along with him. “Exactly.”
My aversion to doing a real-time feed while interrogating a subject stemmed from a bad experience I’d had in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when I hadn’t been able to alert the Ops Center I wanted to pursue an unusual line of questioning with a Taliban fighter. After the Ops Center had listened to the audio for a few minutes, they’d notified my handler to pull me out of there. Consequently, we’d never gotten the answers we needed from the guy.
Now, I preferred to delay the feed and inform the Ops Center later about what I was trying to accomplish with my line of questioning.
I was tempted to explain this to Vasco and Mitchell, but instead, I turned to Mitchell and said, “When you’re the primary on an operation, you’ll discover it’s less about appearance and more about context.”
I wasn’t sure Mitchell got my meaning, but I was sure Vasco did.
* * * *
A few minutes later, as Vasco began telling Mitchell about a sting operation he’d run in Colombia—one he claimed was all about context—I excused myself and walked across the room to where Juliana was manning the computers and monitoring the surveillance cameras.
I nodded toward the screen showing Marwan rocking back and forth in his chair. “Any thoughts about our prisoner?”
“He continues running through the gamut of self-comforting techniques, so I’d say he’s pretty afraid right now. If you played around with that fear, he might be willing to tell you what you want to know.”
“Tell me again why you’re still in surveillance after seven years.”
She laughed. “Routine. I like the routine.”
“Now I remember.”
“Then you probably remember my surveillance crew never spotted any suspicious vehicles, especially black vans, within a mile of Montilla’s residence.”
“I do remember that. You were excellent in there, by the way.”
“Would you mind telling me what was happening in that room before I interrupted you?”
“I’d rather not, but I’ll give you a hint.”
Before saying anything, I glanced over and made sure Mitchell and Vasco were still engaged in conversation.
They were.
I said, “When you were a detective, and you wanted a suspect to spill his guts before he started screaming for his lawyer, what would you do?”
She thought about it for a second. “Get him to trust me.”
I nodded. “And now you know what was happening in the Bub’s Subs senior manager’s office before you and Ben showed up.”
I heard a ping-ping-ping from the computer in front of Juliana, and, at the same time, a blue box popped up in the lower right-hand corner of her screen.
We both glanced down at it.
It was a red-flagged message addressed to Principals, Operation Citadel Protection, Component One, Buenos Aires.
Juliana said, “It’s a priority one message from the ASA office for you.”
The office of Analysis and Strategic Assessment (ASA) was Katherine’s department, and her counterintelligence analysis teams were some of the best at the Agency. Even so, I was surprised to be hearing from her so soon after Carlton’s update.
After Juliana printed off Katherine’s five-page report, I took the document over to a small conference table in a corner of the room. Once I’d read the first page, I got Mitchell’s attention and told him to join me.
I didn’t invite Vasco over.
When Mitchell sat down, I laid the first page in front of him and continued to feed him the rest of the pages as I finished reading them.
The first three pages of the Strategic Analysis Report (SAR) provided the biographical data on Marwan and his family. Although it was just the raw data—listed chronologically without analysis—Katherine pulled all the threads together in the final two pages. Here, she noted the areas where her team had been unsuccessful in digging up information or exact dates. Notably absent from Marwan’s biography was anything about his parents, his growing up years, and the time he’d spent in Hezbollah’s militia unit.
She summarized her findings in the final three paragraphs at the end of the report.
Although Marwan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, he was living in Barcelona, Spain by the time he was a teenager. He met his wife, Yamina, when he went to work at her father’s restaurant in Barcelona, and they continued living there until their daughter, Samira, was three years old. At that time, he moved his family back to Beirut, and that’s where their son, Arshad, was born.
Around that same time, probably 1992, Marwan joined a Hezbollah-funded militia fighting the Israelis in southern Lebanon. After Marwan distinguished himself in that action, he rose rapidly in the ranks of Hezbollah’s militant wing, and, several years later, he came to the attention of Hezbollah’s leadership when they needed a Spanish translator to deal with the Zeta drug cartel.
As more of the drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia joined forces with Hezbollah to expand their drug trade, Marwan took on the role of an advisor to Hezbollah instead of just a translator. Now, Marwan is a member of Hezbollah’s security council in Syria and represents their Latin American interests.
At the very end of the summary, Katherine had added a notation: “Trying to ascertain the location of Yamina and Samira Farage. At the present time, whereabouts unknown.”
After I handed Mitchell the last page, I sat there and thought about Katherine’s report. Something in the data gnawed at me. It was on the very edges of my gray matter, and I waited for the synapses to fire and send me my own red alert.
