Dead or Alive (64 page)

 

 

T
he 747 landed at Berlin’s Templehoff International at 0100 local time. Musa and the others deplaned separately, went through the rigmarole of immigration, using their Dutch passports, then walked to collect their baggage, and from there out to the taxi stand, where a German in a Mercedes took directions, delivered in English, to a certain street location. It was in what was locally called Dish City, called that for the plethora of satellite-TV receiving dishes. These allowed the mainly Arabic residents to watch TV in their own native language.

His host was already expecting him, flagged by a friend in Amsterdam, and so it took only one knock. Hands were taken and kisses exchanged, and Musa went into the living room of the small apartment. Mustafa, the host, held a finger to his lips and then to his left ear. The apartment might be bugged, he thought. Well, you had to take precautions in an infidel country. Mustafa turned on the TV to a same-day repeat of a game show.

“Your mission was successful?” Mustafa asked.

“Completely.”

“Good. Can I get you anything?”

“Wine?” Musa asked. Mustafa went into the kitchen and produced a tumbler full of a white Rhine wine. Musa took a long pull on it, then lit a cigarette. He’d had quite a long day, plus the two murders, which, he found, tended to unsettle him for no reason he could understand. In any case, sleep came quickly once Mustafa had rolled out the sleeper bed, and he’d finished off his Rhine wine. Tomorrow he’d go to Paris, await word that the package had arrived safely, then follow. Once in Dubai, he could enjoy some leisure time; the engineer assigned to the package was reliable and competent, and would need little supervision. Then again, Musa thought, what supervision could he offer? What had to be done with the package was beyond his skill level.

 

 

 

I
t was a strange name for a town, Kersen Kaseke thought. The site of Napoleon’s final defeat at the hands of Wellington. Perhaps an apt metaphor: a divinely ordained reversal of fortune for a tyrant who had kept much of the world under his thumb. Still, to find such a place here, in the middle of the “corn belt,” had been a surprise, as had much of America. The people here seemed decent enough and had treated him well, despite his funny name and heavily accented English. It had helped, he was sure, that he’d managed to pass himself off as a Christian, the adopted son of Lutheran missionaries who had died two years earlier during a mortar attack outside Kuching. Repugnant as he found it to overtly deny Islam and the One True Prophet, the story had, in fact, softened the hearts of the most suspicious of the town’s residents, most of whom were blue-collar workers or farmers. No, it wasn’t the people he despised but rather their government, and sad as it might be, citizens had been paying the price for flawed and brutal policies for millennia. For the people here, it was simply a matter of fate finally catching up with them. Fate and Allah’s will. Besides, he reminded himself, what was coming for these people was but a fraction of what his own country had suffered. While the tragic tale of his missionary parents was technically false, it was, in spirit, true enough. The streets of Zagreb and Rijeka and Osijek and dozens of others had been awash in the blood and misery of Muslims for decades, while the West did nothing to help. What would have happened, Kaseke wondered, if it had been blond-haired and blue-eyed Christian children being slaughtered in the streets of London or Los Angeles? What then?

As the e-mail instructed, Kaseke drove his 1995 Ford Ranger to the Trailways bus station on Sycamore between Third Street and Park Avenue. He pulled the Ranger into the parking lot of Doyle’s Pub, then walked back down the block to the bus station and went inside. The key he’d received in the mail a week earlier fit locker number 104. Inside he found a thick cardboard box wrapped in brown kraft paper. It was heavy, nearly thirty pounds, but reinforced with filament tape. There was no writing on the paper. He removed the box, placed it on the floor between his feet, then looked around to ensure that no one was watching before using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe off the locker key. Had he touched anything else? Left fingerprints anywhere nearby? No, just the key.

Kaseke picked up the box and walked outside, then back down the block to his truck. The box went in the passenger-side door and on the seat. He got in on the other side and turned the ignition key, then paused, briefly wondering if he should put the box on the floorboards. If he got in an accident . . .
No,
he thought.
Not necessary.
He knew what was in the box, or at least he had a good idea, given the training curriculum he’d been put through in the camp. They’d trained him well to do one thing and one thing only.

This cargo was perfectly harmless. For now.

T
HEIR LEADS INTO WHAT, if anything, the Emir and the URC were planning were three: old e-mail intercepts, which had yielded little of use, save a birth announcement that seemed to have pushed every URC cell into radio silence, as well as perhaps moving some URC pieces around the board; Hadi, a courier and a fresh face on the scene; and the flash drive Chavez had inadvertently liberated from one of the tangos at the Tripoli embassy takedown. So far the fact that the URC was using steganography had given them nothing but hundreds of gigabytes of photos from URC-affiliated websites dating back eight years. Finding a five-kilobyte message embedded in a JPEG that was two hundred times that size was not only time-consuming but daunting.

Their fifth and most promising lead happened by accident, a finger that had kept a camera’s shutter button pressed down for a few seconds longer than intended.

Of two dozen or so pictures Jack had taken of Hadi in Chicago, three were keepers, showing the courier’s face either in profile or on the oblique, and in good enough light. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t Hadi’s face that became of interest to The Campus but rather his hands. When it came to intel work, Jack knew, it wasn’t always about finding what you were looking for but rather seeing what’s in front of you.

“This one here,” Jack said, touching the forward button on the remote. The next photo slid onto the conference room’s LCD TV screen. It showed Hadi stepping up on the curb and sidestepping a fellow pedestrian on the way to the door. Near the bottom of the frame, barely visible in shadow, Hadi’s hand and the stranger’s hand were pressed together, and between them, an indistinguishable object.

“Brush pass,” Clark said, leaning closer. “Clean, too.”

“Good catch, Jack,” Hendley said.

“Thanks, boss, but it was dumb luck.”

“No such thing,
mano,
” Chavez said. “Luck is luck. Take it as it comes.”

“So we’ve got a second face,” Sam Granger said. “What’s it do for us?”

“Nothing. Not by itself,” Jack said. “But this might get us somewhere.” He touched the forward button again. “The guy’s suitcase, blown up and sharpened. I had Gavin work a little Photoshop magic. Check the upper-right-hand corner—that curled white square.” Jack hit forward again, and the white square expanded and resolved. “It’s a luggage claim sticker.”

“I’ll be damned,” Brian Caruso muttered. “Gotta love that computer shit.”

Hendley turned to Dominic. “Special Agent Caruso, this might be right up your alley.”

“On it, boss.”

 

 

 

A
rmed with the claim-check number, a rough time frame, and his FBI badge number, it took less than an hour for Dominic to come back with a name: Agong Nayoan, Vice Consul for Economic Affairs at Republic of Indonesia’s Consulate General in San Francisco.

“Nothing outstanding on him,” Dominic said. “Flight from Vancouver to Chicago to San Francisco the same morning as Hadi. The Frisco FO did its due diligence on him a few years back. Nothing popped. No known ties to extremist groups, politically moderate, no criminal history—”

“As far as Jakarta would admit to,” Granger said. “It’s either that or he’s covered his tracks well. We’ve got him brush-passing a known URC courier. Somebody messed up on a background check somewhere.”

With a population of nearly two hundred million Muslims, Indonesia was, according to many intelligence communities, Western and otherwise, quickly becoming the central recruiting front for extremist terrorist groups, the most powerful of which—Jemaah Islamiah, Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI), Darul Islam, and Laskar Jihad—had not only both operational and financial ties with the Emir’s URC but also sympathizers at every level of the Jakartan government. The idea that Agong Nayoan, staff member of the Indonesian consulate, had such leanings didn’t surprise Jack, but the fact that Nayoan had chosen to become a cutout for a URC courier meant they were dealing with a whole different kettle of fish altogether.

“Whatever brought Nayoan out to play has to be big,” Jack said. “If he’s caught, all he’d probably get from us is a PNG.” This was persona non grata, a bureaucratically couched term for “no longer welcome.” Expulsion. “Jakarta’s a different story, though. That’d be a welcome to remember.”

Indonesia’s Agency for Coordination of Assistance for the Consolidation of National Security, or BAKORSTANAS, had the broad and disturbingly vague mandate to ferret out and eliminate threats to the republic, which was, in turn, coupled with little legal restrictions and oversight. If expelled from the United States under accusations of aiding the URC, the best Nayoan could hope for was a dark hole in Cipinang Prison and years to consider his crimes. The government in Jakarta had in recent years been trying to get out from behind the economic shadow of China and sell itself to the West as a market counterbalance. Hard to do that with a reputation as a terrorist petri dish.

“Thoughts?” Hendley asked, looking at Clark.

“Track back the cat,” Clark replied. “We know Hadi headed to Las Vegas and maybe points beyond. We know where Nayoan is and where he came from. Let’s put eyes on him and see where it takes us.”

Hendley considered this; he looked at Granger, who nodded. “You and Chavez,” Granger said. “Start in San Francisco, then Vancouver. Dissect him.”

“How about Jack?” Clark suggested. “Good op to get his feet wet.”

Again, Hendley and Granger exchanged glances. The boss looked at Chavez and the Caruso brothers. “Gentlemen, can we have the room for a few minutes?” Once they’d filed out, Hendley said to Jack, “You’re sure this is what you want?”

“Yeah, boss.”

“Tell us why.” This from Granger.

“I already—”

“Tell us again.”

“I can do some good, I think—”

“You’re doing good right where you are. Plus, we don’t run the risk of burning you—of getting a former President’s son killed. You’re a face, Jack.”

“An average face. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been recognized in the last two years. Out of sight, out of mind. John and I have had this conversation already, okay? I don’t have any grand visions about fieldwork.”

Hendley looked to Clark, who spread his hands. “Either he’s a good actor or that’s the truth.”

Jack smiled. “Hey, worst case, I see how the other half lives and it makes me a better analyst, right? It’s a win-win.”

“Okay, you’re on the team. Mind your manners, though. No jabbing folks with needles this time around, understood?”

Jack nodded. “Understood.”

“John, where are you with Driscoll?”

“Talked to him this morning, put out some feelers. I think it’s sunk in that CID wants his head. He’s taking it in stride—better than most would be. He likes the work. I think if he had a chance to get out from under and still have his hand in the pot, he’d be interested. Any luck on your end?”

“I think we might have enough horsepower to get the AG to back down but not enough to keep Driscoll in uniform. When you get back from Chicago, go pitch him.”

Clark nodded.