Bangkok nights were not quiet, and they were not cool. Most people, and all foreigners, kept their windows and doors shut and the air-conditioning on. Storey and Troy were both sweating heavily and paused to slurp some water directly from the kitchen tap. They also put on spandoflage head nets. Spandoflage was stretchable camouflaged elastic mesh, much faster to get on and off than camouflage face paint, and much cooler than a balaclava hood. If anything went wrong now they’d have to leave the building at a dead run, with no time to dazzle the cameras.
This time, when out on the terrace, they climbed down. The tough part was next. Because the terraces on the same floor were separated by about fifteen feet of open space. Just a bit too far for a standing long jump, especially from five floors up.
Storey unzipped the small student’s backpack Troy was wearing on his back. Fitting together the center sections of three identical four-piece travel fishing rods made one very long twenty-foot-long graphite fishing rod. Looped around the end of the rod was the titanium hook tied to forty feet of mountaineering rope. Holding the rod vertically, Storey let it down gently as if making a cast, until it rested atop the adjoining terrace railing. Pulling the rod back left the hook and rope attached to the railing. Troy pulled the rope taut and tied it to their railing with a figure-eight slipknot.
The shorter six-foot lengths of rope they’d used to climb before were tied around their waists and legs to form a climbing harness, what mountaineers called a “Swiss seat.” Clipped onto the front of the seat was a carabiner, a very strong D-shaped aluminum ring with a spring-loaded locking gate.
This was a crucial moment. Any screwup would create a whole series of problems. While Troy broke down the fishing rod, Storey reached into his shirt and pulled out the tiny Glock pistol with the equally tiny sound suppressor attached. He waited, watching and listening for any signs of life from the apartment they were about to visit.
They hadn’t brought the weapons into the country. All of the safe houses had a full weapons package cached away in the walls or under the floor. Even a bullet trap target box for test firing. The silenced weapons only, of course.
Only after an incredibly long two minutes of waiting did Storey give Troy the signal to go. The only question was whether the railings would support their weight. Troy hopped over, holding on with one hand while he snapped the carabiner onto the rope. Then he stepped off, dangling upside down, the oval aluminum carabiner the only thing connecting his seat harness to the rope.
Troy pulled himself hand over hand, the carabiner sliding along the rope like a pulley. The short trip only took four pulls. He grabbed the opposite railing and stepped over.
Now he pulled out his Glock. Covering the sliding glass door, he waved to Storey. Storey pulled himself over. He’d brought the free end of the rope over with him, tied to his belt. He gave that a hard tug; the knot fell apart and he pulled the whole rope over, leaving nothing behind. As he was stuffing the rope back into Troy’s pack, Troy pointed to the railing, which had noticeably bowed outward under their weight. Storey shrugged; they’d made it across.
With all the climbing equipment stowed away, Storey attached two more pieces of gear to his belt. A Taser stun gun and an ASP baton. The Taser fired a pair of barbed dart electrodes that were connected to the gun by fifteen-foot wires. Pressing the trigger again sent fifty thousand volts through the wires and into whomever the darts were stuck into. That much voltage discouraged any further resistance.
The ASP was a blunter instrument, in case technology failed. A telescoping billy club that expanded from a concealable eight to a full twenty-four inches with a snap of the wrist.
With everything ready, Troy picked yet another door lock. All the practice he’d been getting made him much faster this time. While Storey covered him, he slid the door open a crack, feeling for any kind of homemade early warning like a bell. He kept moving the door a quarter inch at a time, until it was open just enough for them to slip through sideways.
Once in they spread out and followed opposite walls. No one asleep on the couch—Storey had found them there before.
The sight of an insulated wire snaking across the carpet made Storey freeze. He held up a fist to signal Troy to do the same. The wire looked rust brown against the light-colored carpet. Storey followed it. The wire ended up at the front door, more specifically into a thick plastic rectangle sitting atop a pair of metal scissor legs that had been placed right in front of the door.
Storey unfolded his little multitool one-handed and quietly clipped the wire. A claymore antipersonnel mine: a sheet of ball bearings backed up by more than a pound of plastic explosive. Electrically fired, and the clacker was probably under their target’s pillow. A stick with a drinking glass balanced atop it was propped up against the door to fall over if it was opened. Simple and effective. Coming in the back door was looking very much like the right move.
Storey very carefully and quietly moved everything out of the way in case they needed to leave quickly.
Troy was still frozen in place in the living room. Storey pointed toward the bedroom. Standing in the little hallway, he signaled another halt so he could think things over. Specifically, whether to enter the bedroom slow and quiet or fast and hard. Normally he’d lean toward slow and quiet, but that would be a mistake if there was another claymore and glass behind the door. He decided on hard and fast. Screw the noise and zap him with the Taser before he had a chance to do anything. He made his intentions clear to Troy with hand signals.
Storey holstered his pistol and readied the Taser. The unit had regular pistol sights, but also a visible red laser. Helpful for aiming in the dark.
Troy had his left hand on the bedroom doorknob, the pistol ready in his right. Storey had his left hand on Troy’s shoulder. He squeezed.
Troy pushed the door forward and sprang into the bedroom, going left across the doorway. Storey went right. A pause to see where the bed was—against the far wall. A figure was already thrashing in the sheets and rooting under his pillow. Storey settled the laser dot and fired the Taser. A loud pop as the two nitrogen cartridges went off, propelling the darts. Storey pressed the trigger again to fire the electricity, but the target didn’t fall back and start twitching from the current. Instead the hand under the pillow came up with a pistol.
Storey dropped the Taser and snapped out the baton, but he knew he’d never get across the room in time. Two hisses superimposed on the metallic snaps of a pistol slide cycling. Now the target fell back on the bed spasming, but from two 9mm slugs to the head.
Storey flicked on the light and went over to see what had happened. A young Arab staring up at the ceiling, two holes a thumb width apart in his forehead. Great shooting, especially in the dark. And two Taser electrodes stuck in his chest, right where they were supposed to be. Except that everything had turned out wrong.
Troy returned from checking the rest of the apartment, just to be sure. They were silent for a while, two perfectionists infuriated at having failed. Then Troy said, “What happened with the Taser?”
Storey was checking the unit. “I dunno. Who knows how long it sat in that cache? Maybe the battery connections corroded in this humidity?”
“You pissed at me?” Troy asked.
“For saving my life again? What else could you do, try and shoot the gun out of his hand?”
Not much in the mood for laughing, each of them gave only a couple of grim grunts. A fixture of the old westerns, and a physical impossibility in real life. Though Storey had heard of a SWAT sniper doing it to a guy who was sitting down and dangling his pistol between his legs.
“Motherfucker was quick,” said Troy. “I hate prisoner snatches. When they go bust it’s like a ton of hard work for nothing.”
“Maybe we’ll turn up something here,” said Storey. He hated failure—he felt it in the pit of his stomach.
“Hey, what could we do? Other than test-fire the Taser at one of the surveillance team to see if it worked.”
“The
y’d probably balk at that,” said Storey.
They spent all day on the search, and it was a small apartment. Sliced open all the furniture, pulled up the carpet. A closet held a folding-stock AK-47, loaded magazines, and a shoe box filled with an assortment of hand grenades. Nothing unexpected.
“Claymore in front of the door was a nice touch,” said Troy, as they examined the ordnance.
“I knew an operator who spent a lot of time in Lebanon, used to do that all the time. Someone John Wayne’s your door, you pop the claymore and go out the window.” Storey had removed the blasting cap and was turning the mine over in his hands. “I thought it was one of ours but it’s the Chinese copy, Type 66. You can probably pick one up in Cambodia for twenty bucks.”
Storey expected the phone to ring some time during the day. It never did.
The only items of interest were found in a small desk in the bedroom. Road maps. Of eastern Thailand from Bangkok to Cambodia. And southern Thailand and northern Malaysia. Storey handled the maps very carefully. You could tell a lot about where someone had been by the way a map was marked and folded. In the same drawer as the maps was a manila envelope filled with what looked like gas station receipts. Storey and Troy both read Arabic, but the receipts were in Thai script and would have to be translated. They were in neat stacks held together with rubber bands.
Without removing the band, Troy flipped through one stack with a gloved finger. “Each stack a different trip?”
“Maybe he kept these to claim his expenses,” said Storey. “Be nice to know where he was driving.”
“Too bad these guys don’t keep diaries,” said Troy.
“The Marxist revolutionaries liked to keep one for when they wrote their memoirs after the final victory over imperialism. Too bad it’s not Al Qaeda policy.”
They bagged up the maps and receipts. The dead man had four different passports in four different names. Pakistan, South Africa, Yemen, and Belgium. All current, and at first glance genuine. And all with customs stamps the intelligence analysts would find interesting.
They took the dead man’s photo and fingerprints, and a swab from the inside of his cheek for DNA comparison.
Working steadily into the night, they subsisted on tap water and Powerbars. They found nothing else. They took the papers and left the weapons, after recording the serial numbers. The Thai police could draw their own conclusions from them, and the shredded apartment, when the body was discovered.
After midnight they left through the front door, dazzling the stairway cameras on the way down. Then out a back service door, unobserved because the surveillance team had their lasers aimed at the cameras on that side of the building.
Back at the safe house the famished pair plowed through a pile of takeout while two of the surveillance team, fluent Thai speakers, looked over the papers. Happy they were near Chinatown, Troy stuck with khao mu daeng, Chinese-style red pork on fragrant rice. He watched Storey shovel down a bowl of kaeng khiaw wan, green curry and shook his head. “Figured you were one of those hot food freaks.”
“It’s good,” Storey said with his mouth full, the sweat pouring down his face. “Try some.”
“No way, man. I’m a Maine Yankee, remember? For me spicy food is brown mustard instead of yellow on my ham and cheese sandwich.”
“On white bread,” Storey said, grinning. “Before I joined the army, I never knew there was anything else. First time I ever saw wheat I thought it was burnt. Told everyone the bread had gone bad and they laughed their asses off.” He said it jokingly, but couldn’t keep out the hard edge that recalled the humiliation.
“Which trip do you want first?” the Thai-speaking army staff sergeant asked them. He’d originally been an electronic intelligence intercept operator, and also spoke Mandarin Chinese.
“Most recent,” said Storey, still eating.
“Okay,” said the staff sergeant. “This was only two weeks ago. He starts at Bangkok, heading west. Then down the peninsula. Overnight at a hotel in Surat Thani. Phatthalung; Pattani. The South African passport crossed into Malaysia, gasses up right at the border. Then nothing. Trip back, he crosses back into Thailand, gasses up at the same place. Almost a full tank. Now, I’m looking at meal receipts, and I’m thinking two people on the way down, but only one back.”
“Drove someone to Malaysia, dropped him off, and came back,” said Storey. “Interesting. When was the next to last trip?”
The staff sergeant picked up another stack. “Almost three months ago. To Cambodia.”
“Too long,” said Troy, going over the time line in his head. “We need to be looking at that Malaysia trip.”
“What was he driving?” Storey asked the staff sergeant.
“Same Toyota Land Cruiser he dri . . . or should I say drove around Bangkok? Registered to the scrap metal business. Registration is on the customs declaration when he crosses into Malaysia.”
“Northern Malaysia’s jungle, villages, and a few small towns,” said Storey. “If we know the mileage a Land Cruiser gets . . . and the size of the gas tank . . . and where he gassed up crossing the border . . . and how much he put in the tank . . . and where he filled up and with how much when he crossed back—”
“And we get ourselves some good topographic maps and a protractor,” Troy broke in, “we should be able to figure out pretty near where he dropped his passenger off.”
“You might be right,” said Storey, putting down some more green curry. He loved the combination of the coconut milk and the green chilies. “If he didn’t carry an extra can of gas to screw up our math.”
“Good thing there aren’t any officers here,” said Troy. “Would have taken five times as long for someone to make up their mind.”
Everyone laughed.
Storey was still eating and thinking. “We may just be able to pick up a trail.”
14
Beth knew that when an investigation hit a dead end, only methodical, grinding police work could set it moving again. She also knew that she didn’t know her way around Detroit, and that was just fine with the agents of the local field office. They wanted the counterterrorism superstars from Washington sitting in the backseat while they drove the investigation. As far as Beth was concerned, that kind of pissing contest was the bosses’ business.
Looking for an end-around, she sought out the Detroit office’s primary liaison to the Muslim community. She’d been really impressed by a brief he’d given them, though based on recent events she didn’t expect much cooperation.
Beth couldn’t have been more wrong. Special Agent Theodore Weaver was the kind of FBI agent whose credentials civilians always asked to look at twice because he just didn’t look like the public image of an FBI agent. He looked like someone’s favorite uncle, prematurely gray, a little fleshy, rumpled, and supremely laid-back. The absolute opposite of the typical territorial Doberman type.
Which he proved by cordially inviting Beth into his cubicle and putting his feet up on the desk. Exposing, she noticed, a hole in one sock.
“I only met Muhammad a couple of times,” he said. “I’d drop by his garage, and it was either charge me, show me a warrant, or get the hell out. A real hard-nose, with quite a reputation. If you were talking to someone on the street and he came walking by, one stare from him shut them up. Have you read his jacket?”
Beth nodded.
“Of course you have,” he said, smiling.
This was the kind of agent she loved. Knew everyone on his beat, had three Rolodexes full of contacts. People liked him so much they just wouldn’t stop talking.
“He grew up stealing cars,” Weaver said. “Celebrated his eighteenth birthday with a tire iron assault with a deadly weapon on a guy who didn’t want his car stolen. That ADW put him inside as an adult in ninety-one. Which was around the time the Nation of Islam really lost its monopoly among the prison population. The Saudis came in with their money. Pretty soon the only Islamic literature in prison was their hard-line Wahhabi brand. Hate the inf
idel—love holy war. The only chaplains who could afford to preach full-time were the ones the Saudis subsidized. It wasn’t something prison staff had any interest in.”
“And Muhammad converted,” Beth said.
“He was eighteen, and he didn’t want to end up as someone’s punk. But he really took to it. Understand that the Muslims in prison have real stature. It seems more real than one of the gangs to a lot of kids. They look up to the older guys; they belong; they have something to believe in for the first time. You ever hear of the Lucasville riot?”
“No,” said Beth.
“Southern Ohio Correctional. They were vaccinating against tuberculosis. Tuberculosis vaccine has an alcohol base, and alcohol is haram, forbidden to Muslims. The authorities didn’t pay much attention to that, so the brothers had themselves a real nice riot in 1992. Muhammad was right in the middle of that as one of the foot soldiers. Spent his time in solitary, which only boosted his credentials. Got out in 1994. Followed one of the prison chaplains up to Dearborn. Applied for a passport in ninety-five. No, we don’t know where he went, but I wouldn’t have any problem betting on it.”
“Afghanistan,” said Beth.
“Wherever he went, when he came back he opened up his garage. The prison chaplain, name of Najm, guaranteed the loan. Saudi diplomatic passport, but don’t read too much, or too little, into that. Saudis handed them out like candy to their missionaries, or anyone who knew a sheik. Najm tried to take over a mosque in Dearborn. Usual Wahhabi model. Big donations, preach purity, get the young men all fired up. Then accuse the elders of not being Islamic enough, not enough segregation of women, cut off the money until changes are made. They tried to occupy the building, but in this case the congregation showed up with baseball bats and threw them out. Muhammad was one of the foot soldiers again, preaching jihad to the young men.”
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