by Tom Clancy
The next day at 6:18 a.m., a Facebook post from Danny Phillips tagged Braxton and said the two men had had their coffee and were heading to the set. Along with the hashtag “#BloodCanyon,” Phillips added “#coffeefortheroad.”
These foolish Americans had made it easy for him, Dalca thought at the time. The metadata revealed it was the same location as before.
Dalca checked pictures of the Laurel Canyon Starbucks on a dining review website and saw it did have a drive-through, but from the Twitter photo Braxton’s vehicle seemed to be in a parking space, indicating they had stopped to go into the café.
Since Braxton seemed to be making a daily ritual out of his coffee run, the Romanian determined this would be a good location for his clients, the ISIS guys, to go after their target.
It was solid data, but he had erred in his failure to search for recent images of Danny Phillips. If he’d taken the time to do so he would have found many; he was a popular actor and every day people stopped him for pictures, pictures that made their way onto social media sites like Flickr or into the cloud or onto any of dozens of other photo streams online. He could have seen that Phillips had grown muttonchops, and noted the general similarity in size and appearance of the two men, and he could have then warned his client of the danger of misidentifying their target.
He wondered if his contact, the man who spoke English with an obvious Middle Eastern accent, was going to try to blame him for the failure of the op.
Probably not, Dalca decided, simply because the Braxton assassination, which turned into the Phillips assassination, had been claimed as a success by the group.
Hell . . . none of the ISIS guys had gotten killed on that outing, unlike on most of the others.
On the live news from America playing on his computer now came early reports about the shooting and bombing in Alexandria, Virginia. Instantly Dalca knew the target would be senior CIA Middle East expert Edward Laird. As soft a target as he’d sent to his client, to be sure, yet the reporter on CNN was claiming that three or possibly four attackers had been killed in the assassination.
He wondered if these jihadi terrorists were just that bad at their jobs, or if Laird had had some sort of protection that Dalca had missed in his exhaustive research into the man’s daily activities.
All in all, Dalca was disappointed in what was going on in America. Not because of the carnage of the innocents—Dalca made no distinction between guilt and innocence—but because of the carnage to his clients.
These four assassinations had cost the ISIS guys six of their killers, a hefty price to pay, and considering the four targets were relatively low on the totem pole as compared to some of the other packages he’d provided, Dalca imagined there could well be a lot more dead terrorists in short order.
If the ISIS guys didn’t step up their game, Dalca wasn’t going to make as much money as he’d hoped from this enterprise, and that meant he’d eventually have to go out and find new customers.
He watched now while the American news recapped the events of the past two days, showing a blurred-out image of a body lying in a pool of blood on a kitchen floor. The reporter declared Michael Wayne was an Army Green Beret.
“Delta Force,” Dalca corrected aloud with a shake of his head. In Romanian he said, “Fucking reporters can’t get anything right.”
From the door to his office behind him he heard a voice.
“What’s that?”
Dalca spun around to see his thirty-five-year-old boss, Dragomir Vasilescu, forearm on the door frame, as if he’d been standing there for some time.
“Oh. Hello, Drago.”
Vasilescu entered the small room, pulled a rolling chair out of the corner, and positioned himself next to his lead researcher. He kept his eyes on the screen. “What was that about reporters getting stuff wrong?”
Nobody could think on their feet faster than Alex Dalca. It came from growing up making a living lying to people on the street and on the phone. “Oh . . . I just had CNN on while I worked. Helps me refine my English. There was a shoot-out near Washington, D.C. In the space of a couple minutes they gave out two different ages of one of the victims.” Dalca added, “Unless I am mistaken. Not paying close attention.”
Vasilescu watched the monitor now while the reporter stood in front of a Metro station somewhere in America. The director of ARTD spoke English, but not well enough to entirely keep up with the reportage. When the images switched back to the video released by the Islamic State taking credit for the earlier incidents, he turned away from the screen and looked at Dalca. “Fucking ISIS, huh?”
Dalca nodded distractedly. “Yeah, for sure. Fuckers. Did you need something?”
“Yes. The Seychelles Group. Everything going okay with them?”
Dalca was surprised by the question. This was the front company for Chinese intelligence, the ones who started the ball rolling with the hack of the American personnel records database, giving Alexandru access to twenty-five million applications for classified access. Dalca oversaw the project to find the spies the Chinese were looking for, but the team of young researchers under him did most of the day-to-day work. Dalca was the only one allowed into the room with the air-gapped computer holding the treasure trove of raw data, but he delegated most everything so he could spend his days searching files for targets to sell to the ISIS guys.
That didn’t stop him from taking credit for everything. “Absolutely. Everything is more than fine with the Seychelles Group contract. As a matter of fact, I located an American asset in Guangzhou just yesterday, and I sent Seychelles the complete file, including updates of where the woman is working and her known associates. I added a complete picture of her espionage against China. It took us all week to put together. Why do you ask?”
Vasilescu said, “Because they are dropping in on Monday morning for a meeting.”
Dalca cocked his head now. The Chinese are coming? Here? “You mean . . . physically dropping in?”
“Yes. It’s rather odd. Obviously, we know whoever comes from this Seychelles Group will have an affiliation with the Chinese Ministry of State Security—we’re not stupid. Hopefully they will give us enough credit to realize we will know who they really are. I see no good reason why we should have to interface in person.”
“But . . . why are we going to interface in person?”
“Because they are one of our largest clients, and they were very insistent.”
“No, I mean . . . what are they coming to talk about?” Dalca’s voice almost cracked with worry.
Vasilescu said, “I have no idea. They wouldn’t say. I hoped you might have thoughts on why they felt the need to fly to Romania. It might help me prep for the meeting. You have been sending them the product on schedule, haven’t you?”
Dalca glanced back to the computer monitor showing the activity in the USA. This is not good at all. “I . . . uh . . . of course. I mean, we, my team and I, have ID’d several CIA officers in the embassy in Beijing, and the consulate in Shanghai. Others in companies based in Hong Kong. And we’ve provided them with dozens of men and women with connections to these officers. This female agent in Guangzhou I just mentioned, for example. We’ve done what they requested. These things take time.” He faked a smile. “Lots of files to pore over, even with the automation I’ve designed to streamline the process.”
Vasilescu looked at his employee for a long time. Then he broke the staring contest and patted Dalca on the leg, startling him. “Oh, well. Maybe they’ll want to expand our role, give us some new work. That would suit me just fine.”
“Yeah . . . me, too,” Dalca said, but his brain was racing at full speed, trying to figure out what was going on. He fought through the unease. “Don’t worry about it, Drago. I’ll talk with them, deal with any concerns they might have.”
“Excellent. We’ll meet in the main conference room. Ten a.m., Monday.”
Dragomir Vasilescu left Dalca alone in his office, the monitor in front of him having now switched to images of fighting in Syria.
“Să mă ia dracul,” he muttered. It was a Romanian version of “Oh, shit,” but was more precisely translated as “May the devil take me.”
He tried to think of some benign reason for this short-notice visit by the Chinese, but the only thing that came to mind was not benign at all. The Chinese saw the outbreak of attacks in America, just three days old now, and they already had suspicions that the intel that set them off came from the massive theft of OPM files—a theft that could, theoretically anyway, be traced back to China. While Dalca had not imagined that the Chinese could possibly link his sale of intelligence to the raw product ARTD had stolen on behalf of the Seychelles Group, he did have to acknowledge that the Ministry of State Security was a global intelligence powerhouse, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they had inside information involving the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Indonesians—information that helped them realize that high-level identity intel, or IDENTINT, had been handed off by a mysterious party weeks ago.
That, and the timing of the ISIS attacks, Dalca understood now, could possibly be enough to spook the Chinese. And while Dalca had handed them over evidence of American spying in China, the MSS would have every right to be concerned about exploiting this evidence now, lest they be lumped in with the other intelligence leaks going on against the Americans.
If they arrested this woman in Guangzhou, for example, would that tip off the Americans that they were part of the leak ISIS and the other actors were employing against America?
There was a lot of bellicosity between the United States and China, but Dalca didn’t imagine the Chinese would want to be associated in any way with the killing of American spies, intel analysts, and military personnel in the USA.
“Să mă ia dracul,” he said again. From that first moment months ago when he decided to cash in by merging the OPM data harvest with his unique ability to turn it into viable targeting information, Dalca had known he might somehow be exposed, and he might need to run. He’d made plans for slipping out of Romania quickly, just him and the numbers of his offshore bank accounts full of millions of dollars, and his millions more in Bitcoin.
Yes, he had an escape route, and a good one, but it was a theoretical escape. He’d need the collusion of an old friend to make it happen, and he really did not want to ask anything of this man.
Dalca thought some more. Was it really time for him to hit the panic button? If the Seychelles Group had called for a meeting, did that necessarily mean the Chinese were coming here to snatch him and kill him? Or were they just concerned, seeking some sort of assurance that the data they had ordered converted into information to help their counterintelligence personnel inside China had not, in fact, been misused and passed off to jihadi terrorists and other bad actors?
Dalca forced himself to look at the evidence dispassionately, and when he did, he convinced himself there was little real danger. Not yet, anyway. Yes . . . these men from Chinese intelligence were coming, they might be worried, but they had no proof that anyone, much less Alex Dalca, had screwed them over.
They would need a good talking-to, a convincing story. And if there was one thing in this world Alexandru was good at, it was bullshitting a customer.
He’d stay in Bucharest, he’d keep coming to work, he’d talk to the men from the Seychelles Group, and he’d keep a bag packed, ready for his run if he thought the walls were closing in on him.
36
It was 8:30 a.m. in Dubai when Sami bin Rashid arrived at his office for a Sunday morning of work. He’d not looked at any news on the way in, but as soon as he took off his coat and sat down he flipped on an English-speaking international news station.
With his elbows on his desk he watched a rundown of the attacks in America. He’d already known about the first three; even though they hadn’t immediately been worldwide stories, he’d been hunting specifically for news in cities where targets lived, and he’d learned of each incident almost immediately after it happened.
From this research the day before, he knew that two of al-Matari’s men had been killed by law enforcement in North Carolina. Losing two men in the killing of one man infuriated bin Rashid, because this was obviously an unsustainable rate of attrition, and because he had a lot riding on this operation. So this morning when the coverage switched to Alexandria, Virginia, to what was described as a massive shoot-out, bin Rashid all but held his breath.
He knew the target would be Edward Laird, former CIA director of operations for Near East Asia. Laird was an old man who lived alone, probably as soft a target as any bin Rashid had sent to al-Matari, and he presumed the assassination would take place in the man’s home. But when bin Rashid saw jerky cell-phone video of the Metro station and heard what sounded to him like a half-dozen firearms all going off at once, he knew something had gone horribly wrong.
“Police say two of the nine dead were a D.C. transit police officer, and four more were the attackers, one of whom was driving a rented Nissan Pathfinder with Michigan plates.”
Four dead?
He felt sweat form on the rear of his scalp and run down the back of his thick neck.
Four dead!
Sami bin Rashid looked at a monitor on his wall that gave him the time in all U.S. time zones. It was evening in the D.C. area. He didn’t know where al-Matari himself was in the United States, or even if he had been among the dead, but he snatched his phone up anyway, his hands shaking with fury.
It took a full minute for the man on the other end of the line to answer.
—
Musa al-Matari sat alone in his room in the Chicago brownstone, looking at his phone while it rang in his hand. It was a Silent Phone app call, and he’d changed the default settings so that calls wouldn’t roll to voice mail until twenty rings, knowing that anyone who had this number had something important to communicate. Al-Matari did not want to miss any calls coming in for the duration of his operation here.
But this was one call he did not want to take.
He was alone up here in his room. Two members of the Chicago cell, as well as Algiers and Tripoli, were downstairs, and four more cell members were out, preparing for an operation that would kick off soon.
Al-Matari blew out a long sigh, and on the fifteenth ring he answered his phone, already dreading the conversation that was sure to come.
“Yes?”
“You lost four men going after a retiree! Explain that to me.”
Al-Matari wasn’t going to be lectured to by the Saudi. “We don’t know what happened. Obviously there was protection for Edward Laird that your fucking intelligence did not specify.”
“Ah, yes! Of course. Now you will blame me for your failures.”
“And what of Todd Braxton? All the information you sent and you fail to notify us not only that he had changed his appearance, but also that he was traveling with a man who looked exactly like him?”
The Saudi said, “Your people on the ground have to identify your targets. I can’t come over and shoot people for your cause, brother. I have to do the hard work here.”
Musa al-Matari snapped back, “We are over here in enemy territory. Taking the risks. Operating with only the information you send us to go on. Whatever it was that happened today that got four men killed and whatever caused the misidentification of the target in California are intelligence failures, not operational failures.”
The Saudi replied coolly, “You haven’t even attempted any of the top-flight targets. These were the easy marks. And still, six are dead. One in five of your total strength.” The Saudi had been told that a total of thirty operators would be in America at the beginning of the mission.
“I know this. You think I don’t? But we’ve known from the beginning that there will be losses, and that the numbers of op
erators will move in both directions. Men will be martyred, and new blood will come in in the form of new recruits.”
“What new recruits? Success breeds success. We have to have victories to pull more recruits in.”
Musa al-Matari had planned from the beginning to keep operational details away from the Saudi. But he broke his own rule now. “We will have multiple actions with a day’s time. One of them will be a top-tier target.”
“Which target?”
“I am not revealing operational information to someone who, frankly, has no need to know.”
After a time, bin Rashid said, “Very well. That is how it should be. We are all on the same side here, my brother. I just remind you, you need a win. A big win. You need to show the world that your cause is strong.”
Al-Matari just said, “Watch your television, Saudi. You will see something great, inshallah.” And then he hung up the phone.
—
Adara and Midas drove to John Clark’s Emmitsburg, Maryland, farmhouse just after ten p.m. A determination had been made by all that the coast was clear after this morning’s debacle in Alexandria, especially after a confidential conference call among Gerry Hendley, Dan Murray, and Mary Pat Foley. Mary Pat and her husband, Ed, had been friends with Eddie Laird for decades, and she and Dan were pleased that Campus employees had killed the four terrorists before they’d managed to do more harm, even if they admitted they would have much preferred that at least one of the men had been taken alive.
