Pursuit Of Honor (15 page)

THE landing gear thudded into the down position and the plane banked to port. Out of the nearest window Rapp caught a glimpse of the western edge of Santa Maria Island and her big ten-thousand-foot runway, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers. The place had been a busy hub during World War II and in the decade after but was now nothing more than a tourist destination and convenient meeting place for three spooks who didn’t want to be noticed.

The plane landed so softly Rapp wasn’t sure they were down until the pilots began to brake, but with ten thousand feet of concrete there was no rush. He looked out the window and saw the other two private jets parked in the distance at the refueling station. That was the other thing Santa Maria Island was known for-fuel. Roughly a thousand miles from the European mainland, the big airstrip offered a convenient place to stop for fuel or repairs on transatlantic flights.

The other beauty of the island was that it only had five thousand residents, who were more or less uninterested in the tail numbers on the planes that came and went. Even so, Rapp grabbed a pair of sunglasses and a newspaper as he prepared to exit. When the plane stopped he disengaged the safety lock and lowered the steps. He moved stiffly down the stairs and pretended to read the newspaper as he proceeded around the nose of a Bombardier Global Express. He hesitated for a moment at the base of the Bombardier’s stairs and looked around. Not a person in sight. Rapp bounded up the steps two at a time. Once inside, he glanced to his left. The door to the flight deck was closed. Rapp hit the close button on the hatch and the stairs began to fold back into the closed position. He then walked through the well-appointed galley to the rear of the long-haul private jet. All of the shades were down on the windows, and there, sitting side by side at a table near the back of the plane, were two familiar people.

They were both facing the front, but only one of them stood. At six foot four, George Butler had to tilt his head a few inches to the right to avoid hitting the ceiling. The forty-eight-year-old Brit offered his hand and said, “Hello, Mitch. Good of you to come.”

Rapp grabbed the hand of MI-6’s counterterrorism chief. “Good to see you, too.” Rapp turned to look at the woman who had remained seated. She was petite, just under five and a half feet tall and weighing no more than 120 pounds. Rapp had known her for nearly fifteen years. Her name was Catherine Cheval and she worked for France’s Directorate General for Security External, or DGSE. She gave Rapp a faint smile and offered her cheek. Rapp leaned over the desk and kissed her first on her right cheek and then the left. “Always good to see you, Catherine.”

“The feeling is mutual,” she said in perfect English. Cheval sat back and brushed a strand of her raven black hair behind her right ear. She looked a decade younger than her fifty years.

Rapp took one of the two seats across from them. Cheval leaned forward and gestured toward the coffee cup sitting in front of Rapp. “Please.” As Cheval poured Rapp a fresh cup, he apologized for being late.

Butler nodded and said, “Frankly, I’m surprised you could make it on such short notice.”

“Irene didn’t give me an option. She said it was important.”

Butler and Cheval shared a look and then nodded in unison. Cheval said, “We have discovered some information that you might find useful.”

“But before we begin,” Butler added cautiously, “we would like to revisit the ground rules.”

Rapp could have been offended by the comment, but wasn’t. In many ways, these two, and the people who worked for them, were better allies than the people in his own government. The fact that Butler had brought it up, though, told Rapp two things: first, that they had some good intel, and second, that they had come by it through means that the Department of Justice and U.S. Congress would not approve of. “If you need to modify the rules I completely understand, but remember when it comes to certain elements of my government, few have more motivation than I do to lie to them.”

“True,” Cheval said, “and we trust you. It is just that certain nosy people in your country will begin to walk the dog back. They will want to know how this information fell into your possession.”

“They might even make assumptions,” Butler added. “If they begin to stir the bleeding hearts in our own governments it could create a rather unhealthy environment for us.”

“Understood. As far as I’m concerned, none of what I hear today has to be shared.”

“That would be nice,” Cheval said, “but not realistic. What we have to tell you, you will most certainly want to share.”

Cheval reached under the table and grabbed a manila file. It was simple enough looking, and intentionally so. She placed it in the center of the table and hesitated for a long moment. Her light brown eyes slowly drifted away from the file and settled on Rapp. She looked as if she still hadn’t figured out precisely how she was going to handle the exchange of intel.

Rapp had seen the file before, and it had always carried information that was far more valuable than its worn, simple appearance would lead one to believe. Ingenious on Cheval’s part, Rapp had always thought. The files at Langley were made of sturdy, heavy stock. The important ones were red, although Rapp had known a few people over the years who had used Cheval’s method of misdirection. Typically, though, the really important stuff was in red files with letters strewn across the label. Some designations were easy enough to figure out, like Top Secret, but most were covered with phrases like Eyes Only and a string of letters that were nonsensical to the uninitiated. All of it was Compartmentalized Intel. Some had locks and most had twine clasps-the kind you had to twirl around a little disk to secure and unwind to open. The twine wasn’t there to defeat prying eyes. It was there to give a person pause, one more step to go through to get the thing open, and hence an extra few seconds to consider just what the hell you were doing.

The CIA was funny about that. They liked their people to keep their attention focused on their particular area of expertise. During Rapp’s tenure he’d seen two complete overhauls of the system and a bunch of little modifications. At the end of the day, one of the quickest ways to land yourself in serious trouble was to get caught opening a file that was none of your business. The French and the Brits operated with similar constraints, so Rapp had guessed long ago that Cheval’s worn file had likely never been carried through the security checkpoints at the DGSE headquarters in Paris.

Cheval asked, “Have your services made any headway on the identity of the men who carried out the attacks?”

“Very little.” Talking to two colleagues like this, Rapp was slightly embarrassed to admit that they had made zero progress. The race to find out what had happened had been going on for a week, and they were still wandering around the starting line looking for clues.

“Nothing?” Butler asked, looking surprised.

“As far as the six guys who raided the CTC are concerned… there isn’t really anything left to identify. The surveillance footage doesn’t give us anything useful. They were dressed in full SWAT gear, complete with balaclavas, goggles, helmets, gloves, heavy vests…” Rapp shrugged, “There’s nothing to see.”

“Physical evidence?” Cheval asked.

Rapp thought about the stew of body parts that had been created when all six suicide vests were detonated at the same time. They were still finding bits and pieces in the woods a couple of hundred yards away. The men had ended up at the base of the twenty-foot-wide parking ramp. The smooth, poured-concrete walls looked like an old subway car that had accumulated five years of graffiti, but instead of spray paint it was chunks of bone and flesh and lots of blood, and instead of a half decade, it had happened in the blink of an eye. “They’ve been able to identify six separate sets of DNA, but that’s about it.”

“Surely, there’s a fingertip or two to be found,” Butler said.

“I’ve seen a lot of nasty shit over the years, George, but this one was disgusting.” Rapp thought about it for a second and then corrected himself, saying, “I take that back. It wasn’t disgusting… it was bizarre. There was nothing left, except chunks of indistinguishable goo.”

“But you did manage to get six separate sets of DNA?” Cheval asked.

“That’s what I was told.”

She asked, “FBI?”

“Yes.”

“We might,” Cheval said guardedly, “have a relative in our possession.”

“Can you get me a DNA sample?” Rapp asked.

Cheval and Butler glanced at each other.

Rapp picked up on it and asked, “What?”

“It would be best if you gave me what you have. I will see if I can get a match.”

Rapp gestured with his hands as if to say, no big deal. “I think I can take care of that. This relative,” he continued, “sister, mother, father?”

“Brother,” Cheval answered.

“Where’d you find him?”

“This stays here.”

“Of course,” Rapp said.

“One of my teams picked him up in Casablanca.”

“Moroccan?”

“Yes.”

“Active investigation?”

Cheval shrugged her slender shoulders as if to say, “who knows?”

Rapp gave her a disbelieving frown. Cheval ran the DGSE’s Directorate of Intelligence. Anything on the covert side of the business fell into her purview. “How can that be?”

“My operative who brought this to my attention,” she paused, “how do I say this?” After a moment of searching for the right description, she smiled at Rapp and said, “He reminds me a lot of you.”

Rapp grinned. “Tall, dark, and handsome… highly intelligent. Women hanging on his every move.”

“Don’t forget delusional,” Butler added with a wry smile.

Rapp chuckled.

Cheval smiled and said, “He does not follow directions well.”

“Ahhh,” Butler said while nodding at Rapp. “He has authority issues. I think I know the type.”

“Yes, that is the phrase. He has authority issues. Very difficult to manage. Unnerving at times.” Cheval smiled at Butler and he nodded as if to say, “I share your pain.”

Rapp laughed at both of them. “Well, if he’s so difficult, why do you put up with him?”

The question had a solemn effect on Cheval. “You know why I put up with him?”

“Because he gets things done,” Rapp said with a bit of pride in his voice.

“That is correct. He is extremely effective, but…” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Let’s just say I know how Irene feels.”

Rapp was well aware that Kennedy and Cheval shared a history that went all the way back to Beirut nearly thirty years ago. “You’re afraid he’s going to land you in jail one day.”

“No.” Cheval shook her head.

“Then what?”

“Every time he leaves the country, I wonder if he will return.”

Rapp lowered his eyes and felt like a bit of a moron. “Sorry.” He’d been through this with Kennedy on many occasions. He didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about his fate, but apparently she did.

“No need to apologize. It is the business we are in. This man spends a fair amount of time in Algeria and Morocco, and he has very good contacts. He picked up a rumor that some of the men involved in the attack were Moroccan. After some diligent work he found a man who was bragging that his brother had participated in the attacks on America.”

Rapp frowned. “There are probably a million young Muslim men who are claiming that they had a relative involved in the attacks.” Rapp knew he sounded slightly ungrateful, but it was the truth.

“Trust me when I say my man verified the information.”

Rapp looked at Butler for confirmation.

The Brit nodded and said, “I think you will want to hear the rest of the story.”

It was Rapp’s nature to be skeptical. The craft of espionage was filled with half truths and guesswork, lies and deception, so much so that it was often impossible to unravel all the layers of misdirection, but this was not Cheval’s or Butler’s first dance. They were every bit as suspicious as Rapp, and maybe more. And both had a look that said they had solved a very important piece of a complex puzzle. Rapp had seen this same look on their faces a few weeks earlier sitting at this very table on this same little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was when they had informed Rapp that a third terrorist cell was at large and headed to America. Rapp reached for his cup of coffee and settled into the plush leather seat. He braced himself for what was to come and said, “Let’s hear it.”

THE original plan had called for three cells to hit America. In typical al Qaeda fashion they had picked New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Ninety percent of the intel they collected pointed toward attacks on those three cities. Occasionally Chicago or another major city popped up, but al Qaeda was especially obsessed with New York and Washington, D.C., for obvious reasons. Al Qaeda was acutely aware of the role media could play in amplifying their message. Infidels were infidels, but killing a couple of hundred people in Toledo, Ohio, simply wasn’t as good a story in the media’s eyes as hitting a big, glitzy city.

The Brits had nabbed one terrorist cell while it was transiting through Hong Kong and the French had picked up the second cell in West Africa. Much better at keeping secrets from their elected officials, MI-6 and the DGSE took the men to black sites and proceeded to peel back the onion on what was to be a very lethal operation of three coordinated attacks. The one thing they couldn’t do, however, was glean the whereabouts and identity of the third cell. The various groups had never met. The only thing they knew about each other was that they existed, and that they each had been assigned one of the three major cities. No specific targets were known to anyone other than the individual cell leaders.

Rapp wondered if they had managed to squeeze a little more information out of the men in their possession and asked Cheval, “Have you had more success with the cell you intercepted?”

“My man,” Cheval said without pretext, “was heavily involved in those interrogations. Like you, he is not afraid to get his hands dirty. So I have absolute confidence in what I am about to tell you. We originally told you that these three groups didn’t know each other. No crossover whatsoever. While that is still true, the men all belong to the same organization in the broad sense.”

“And the majority of them earned their stripes fighting in Afghanistan,” Butler added.

“Terrorists talk the same as everyone else,” Cheval continued. “They were tight-lipped about operational details but there is gossip about the more trivial aspects of their lives. They looked at their best men to create these three teams. There were quite a few rivalries. The Saudis, with their usual arrogance, demanded to be in charge of all three units and fill the ranks with their own people. That, however, presented a problem.”

“Let me guess,” Rapp said, “they found out it was a one-way trip and the courageous sons of Arabia decided they’d pass.”

“That was part of it. The other problem lay in the fact that the Saudi ranks are bloated with wealthy men who rarely see combat. They are there to provide funds and then go home and thump their chests. For this operation they needed real shooters… real veterans of combat. The best without question are the Afghan and Pakistani tribesmen, but these men didn’t like the idea of dying in a strange country thousands of miles from their homes.”

Rapp said, “So they looked to the Moroccans, Algerians, Syrians, Jordanians…”

“Precisely,” Cheval said, “and these men talk. There is a rivalry that is not different from that in our own military services. They like to brag and inflate their successes, and of course taunt the other groups.”

“And they all hate the Saudis,” Butler said, “but tolerate them because they have the money.”

“Yes. At any rate, my man picked up in one of his interrogations that the Moroccan contingent was very proud that three of their men had been chosen to serve on one of the teams. I checked with George,” Cheval said, glancing at Butler, “and he confirmed that none of the men in his possession were Moroccan.”

“So you guessed that the three men were in the third and unknown group.”

“Yes. So my man went to Rabat and then Casablanca and began to beat the bushes. It took him a week, and then he found what he was looking for.”

“The sibling.”

“Yes.” Cheval gave Rapp an uneasy look and added, “It was slow work at first.”

“You mean the brother was not cooperative,” Rapp said.

“That is correct. It took a little longer than my man would have liked, but you know how such things work. Eventually, even the toughest decide to cooperate.”

Rapp thought of asking if the sibling was still alive, but thought better of it.

“We now know the identities of all three Moroccans who participated in the attack.”

“Let me guess… they were all part of the suicide crew?”

Cheval shook her head. “Not according to my man. One of the men is still alive.”

Rapp leaned in a bit. “One of the three we are looking for.”

“Yes.” Cheval ran her ring finger along the edge of the file and flipped it open, revealing a photograph. She spun it toward Rapp and said, “Look, but do not touch. No reason to put your fingerprints on any of this.”

Rapp nodded. “Who is he?”

“Ahmed Abdel Lah. Twenty-four, born in Casablanca, spent the last three years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“And you’re sure he’s still alive?”

“As sure as one could be considering the situation.”

“How?”

“He sent his brother an email yesterday.”

Rapp lifted his eyes from the photograph of Ahmed. He had a you-have-to-be-kidding-me expression on his face. “What did he say?”

“He told his brother not to worry. That he is alive and well and that his mission was a total success.”

“Did you get a fix on it?”

She shook her head. “Only that it originated from a server in America.”

“What about the other two?”

“We have some ideas, but I think George should fill you in on what he has found out first.”

Butler cleared his throat and said, “We think we know how they funded their operation.”

“Saudis.” Rapp had found over the years that nine out of ten times the money trail led back to Saudi Arabia.

“No. Surprisingly enough, we think it was South American drug money.”

This piece of information caught Rapp off guard. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Butler continued. “I’ve been able to piece together a strange string of events which I think will explain how this cell managed to get into your country.”

“South American drug money?” Rapp repeated himself, still not quite buying the idea. They had looked into the possibility years ago due to the opium trade coming out of Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. The rationale was that if the cartels could run drugs and sneak them into the country, they could easily do the same with terrorists. “They’re all Catholic down there,” Rapp said, referring to South and Central

America. “And I mean old-school Catholic. The Church has made it very clear that it’s their continent, and the Muslims aren’t welcome. As strange as it sounds, the cartels are very loyal to the Church on this issue. Plus it would be bad for their business if we found out they aided a terrorist group. The leaders know it’d be a good way to get a two-thousand-pound bomb dropped on their heads.”

“I’ve seen the same reports, and I agree with your assessment,” Butler said, “but this is something different. This third cell,” Butler said in an admiring tone, “they’re smart. They decided to do something none of them have tried before.”

“What’s that?”

“They unplugged.”

“Unplugged?” Rapp asked with a puzzled look. “What in the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“They cut all ties to al Qaeda. Strict operational security.”