The American (27 page)

 

The apartment building on D Street was less than impressive. The outside looked respectable enough, with a four-story brick facade and worn stone steps leading up to a solid door of weathered oak. As soon as she stepped inside, however, the smell hit her like a slap to the face. The stench was a putrid combination of various cooking smells, which wafted up from beneath closed doors and permeated the filthy walls, and the lingering scent of spilled beer and what might have been the contents of a baby's diaper. She almost retched until she started breathing through her mouth, and then saw that the others were doing the same thing.

Above it all, the piercing cries of a child and screamed obscenities from a Korean couple at the top of the stairwell.

Naomi lingered behind as Green and the HRT operators moved rapidly up the first flight of stairs. She had been given a flat 9mm pistol, which hung loose from her hip.

“How are they going in?” she asked Green when she finally caught up with him.

“It depends on what they hear. If there's activity inside, then it's entry rounds. If it's quiet, they'll go with the ram.” She nodded and started forward, but he reached out to grab her arm. “Hold on, let them get into position.”

The SAC listened to something over his earpiece, then turned back toward Naomi. “Okay, we're moving up. Stay behind me.”

 

Inside the cramped apartment on the fifth floor, Abdullah Aziz al-Maroub watched intently as the last two agents went up the stairs. If it had to happen on his shift, he was glad it happened early, before the monotony of the work set in. In another hour, his back would have been sore and his eyelids heavy. He might well have missed them altogether.

He thought about how remarkably easy it had been to satisfy the apartment manager in the spring of 1998, when their predecessors had first set up in the city. It had taken nothing more than a few crumpled twenty-dollar bills to gain her permission, and the camera had gone up that same day. Positioned just above the transom inside the doorway, it gave him a clear shot of everyone leaving and entering the building. There was no sound; a video cable alone provided the images on the 20" screen in front of him, but he knew who these people were, and he knew why they were here.

As he called out for Darabi, his eyes never left the monitor.

 

Arriving on the fifth floor, Naomi saw that the operators were already in their preassigned positions. She held back with Green, her heart pounding in her ears.

One of the men extracted a fiber-optic snake from his pack. Holding the miniature video monitor in his left hand, he kneeled and slid the unit's tiny camera under the cheap wooden door of Apartment 5A.

 

Vanderveen was on 12th Street heading south when his cell phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He pulled the motorcycle over to the side of the road and answered immediately. Only one person had this number, and she had been instructed not to call except in case of an emergency. “Yes?”

“Listen carefully, I don't have a great deal of time. The authorities are coming up the stairs right now.”

“How many?”

“Seven. Five are heavily armed.”

He managed to stay calm, despite the fact that this woman had personally wired the necessary funds to his bank account and knew the name he was currently using. “What are you going to do?”

“Don't worry, I won't be around to tell them anything. The place we're using is clean. We're almost finished wiping the disks.”

“What about the phone? They can track—”

“The phone was cloned. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about on your end. I've been doing this for a long time. Do you have the necessary funds?”

“I already have most of what I need, and money left over for the rest of it.” He paused briefly. “So that's it, then.”

“I'm afraid so. Good luck.”

Fatima Darabi pressed
END
without waiting for a response, her hands shaking as she deleted the call log on the phone. She had known it could come to this, but she had never really expected the worst. Now that the worst had happened, though, she knew she would do her duty. She felt a sense of falling inside, and wondered if her brother had endured the same as his plane fell to the surface of the Atlantic. Her reverie was broken as al-Maroub emerged from the bedroom, cradling an automatic rifle. She looked up. “Is it done?”

He nodded. Darabi reached for her weapon.

 

Without turning around, the operator crouched at the door, lifted one finger, then a second. His eyes, focused on the small screen in his left hand, suddenly went wide. Naomi, in the stairwell just behind the SAC, was leaning forward to whisper a question in his ear when a hail of bullets punched through the door in front of the entry leader. The first rounds caught him full in the chest, pushing him back across the dirty tile as the assault team returned fire.

Kharmai dropped to the ground as the hallway erupted. Her hand was down by her side, tugging at the pistol, then groping for the strap that held it in place. The door in front of the fallen operator was being torn apart by bullets, as was the thin drywall on either side. The operators were scrambling for cover, but three went down before they could get out of the line of fire. Bill Green was lying next to her on the stairs, trying to talk, his mouth filling with blood. His face was frozen in a look of disbelief. Naomi saw with horror that at least a dozen rounds had shredded his body armor.

In that paralyzing moment, fear was an iron fist around her heart. She was gasping for breath, her eyes welded shut. She could hear the whine of the bullets as they slammed into the drywall inches above her head. The downed operators were screaming in pain until one of the terrorists filled the hallway with another magazine full of 7.62mm rounds.

The two surviving agents finally pulled it together, one providing cover as the other tossed a flashbang through a gaping hole in the shattered door. Naomi, with her eyes closed, didn't see the blinding light that spilled out into the hallway, but the grenade's concussion left her senseless as the door crashed inward and the operators disappeared from view.

 

Sitting on the Honda at the side of the road, Vanderveen watched the traffic pass. His face was blank, but his mind was churning.

It was time to walk away. Despite the woman's words, he knew she would overlook something; it was inevitable. After all, they had somehow managed to track her down. He had a second set of documents that she had no knowledge of, a set that he kept on his body at all times. He had used them already, and needed them for the 26th, but they could serve him now in a different way. National Airport was just across the bridge, not more than a few miles to the south. From there, he could connect to an international hub and be out of the country in less than two hours.

But then what? There were certain truths he had to consider here. There would be no place for him in the organization if he walked away now, that much was certain. The Iranians were the bigger threat. They might give him the benefit of the doubt, but more likely, they would assume he had blown the woman's cover. Either way, his own future was now inexorably linked to the outcome of the operation.

More important than any of this, however, was his own personal desire to see it through. For many years he had delighted in the perverse irony that the country he hated was giving him the tools of its own destruction. It had not been easy to feign his loyalty, especially in the beginning, when he was required to live in the squalid barracks and forced to take meals with his supposed peers. When he had finally revealed himself in Syria, it was with one end goal in mind: to inflict his pain on as many of them as was humanly possible. What waited in the barn on Chamberlayne Road would, in a few short days, advance this goal considerably. He could not,
would
not waste it now.

He was dimly aware of a rising rage. He had to push it down; it would not serve him here, but the question remained: how could this have happened in the first place? They clearly didn't have his bank account, the one he had used for the house and the van, otherwise they would have moved on him in Virginia. It had to be an outside source…Shakib? If he had been given the location of the safe house, it was certainly possible. But he'd never know because Shakib was dead, blown apart in the Kennedy-Warren, with Ryan Kealey waiting in the street below.

Nothing changed in Vanderveen's face with this recollection.
Kealey.
There was no doubt in his mind that his former commanding officer had something to do with this unfortunate development. It was bad enough that the man had the audacity to survive what should have been a kill shot in Syria. Now he was really pushing his luck.

Something sparked behind his eyes. If Kealey wanted to be involved, then so be it. Vanderveen started the Honda and eased back into traffic.

 

When she came back to herself, Naomi was alone in the hallway. Standing up, she checked herself for injuries, afraid of what she would find. Miraculously, her body seemed to be intact. She walked on shaky legs toward the wrecked apartment. As she reached the doorway, the two remaining operators pushed out, oblivious to her presence, talking quickly but calmly into their lip mics.

“TOC, this is Alpha 4, I have four agents down. I need EMTs
now
.”

Naomi stepped into the devastation, slipping her pistol back into its holster. The cheap furnishings had been nearly destroyed, the carpet littered with splinters of wood and shards of shattered glass. One of the terrorists was lying spread-eagled on the floor. She felt bile rise in her throat when she saw what was left of the man's face. She looked away quickly and forced a few shallow breaths, briefly catching the voices behind her in the process: “TOC, make that five down. I repeat, five down. Two tangos out of play. Confirm ambulances en route.”

Passing into one of the bedrooms, she was aware of distant sirens. The room was sparsely furnished, its most notable feature a desk that had been smashed by bullets, and what looked like the remains of a laptop computer.

 

Fatima Darabi was sitting against the wall where she had fallen. Her body was ruined, but her mind was still intact and all she knew was pain. She opened her mouth to breathe. When nothing happened, she realized that she had only a few seconds left. Through the rapidly encroaching darkness, Darabi watched as the dazed-looking woman wandered into the room.

Darabi's fading brown eyes flickered to the handgun lying next to her. One of the agents had kicked it out of reach just after he fired a half dozen rounds into her chest. It was a stretch, but she would try for it anyway. Her body was dying, but the hatred that drove her was as strong as ever.

 

As Naomi examined the contents of the desk, she sensed something move behind her. She turned to stare at the body propped up against the wall, thinking she must have imagined the sound—until the eyes moved. Then, to her disbelief, the woman's hand was reaching out for the Makarov that lay a few feet to her right. The operators had obviously assumed, in their haste to get back to their fallen team members, that the subject was dead. But she wasn't dead, at least not yet, and the gun was in her hand and rising as Naomi frantically groped for her own pistol…

Naomi was far too late. The dying terrorist leveled her weapon and squeezed the trigger.

 

The pay phone was on the far edge of the lot, shielded from the storefront by a row of dilapidated vehicles, climbing out of a small mountain of refuse and cigarette butts. The metal casing was dented and scarred, and the telephone book absent, having been ripped away from its metal wire a long time ago.

Vanderveen didn't need the book, as the number was already seared into his mind. It was the last thing he needed to do in the city. He could not make the call from his cell phone or from his rented home in Virginia. Nor could he have done it from the waterfront, despite the slim chance that it would be traced back to that location. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number.

“Hello, you've reached the U.S. Army Rangers Association. This is Pam speaking, how may I help you?”

“Hi, Pam. My name is Ryan Kealey. I'm a member of your organization and I receive your newsletter, the ‘Ranger Register.' I haven't been getting it lately, though…I recently moved, and I was wondering if you have my new address on file.”

There was only a minor risk in this approach. She might ask for his Social Security number, former address, date of birth…any number of things, none of which he could answer. If she asked, he would simply hang up and look for another way.

“What is your new address, Mr. Kealey?”

He breathed a soft sigh of relief. “It's 1662 Manor Drive, Springfield, Illinois.” He gave her the zip code. “I wasn't sure if I sent it or not…Is that what you have?”

He could hear the distant sounds of a computer keyboard over the line. “No, sir, I have 1334 Village Creek Road, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. I'll go ahead and change that for you now.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”