Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  And that was a problem.

  When the FBI put someone under cover, its agents created an entirely new identity. They would have given him legal Social Security cards, a driver’s license, a passport, even a birth certificate. If Ganim had needed a prescription, the Bureau would have had a trusted doctor write one to his undercover identity. That told me Ganim had hidden these drugs from his bosses. Our special agent had more going on than Havelock knew. I pocketed the two Jacob Ganim pill containers and stuffed the rest back into the Ziploc bag.

  That was when I heard the door open behind me.

  Chapter 5

  I lowered my right hand toward the firearm in my right jacket pocket before standing and turning. Asim Qureshi stood at the door. He was maybe five foot six or five foot seven, but he was well built and nearly as wide as the door frame in which he stood. A bushy gray beard covered most of his face. Anger radiated from his flint gray eyes. Though I hadn’t seen him for a while, he went to services at my mosque. He was not on Havelock’s list.

  “Ashraf,” he said. “Nassir told me you were here. What are you doing in Michael’s room?”

  I looked down at myself, trying to come up with something. It wasn’t hard given what I had done that morning.

  “I’ve got dirt and gunpowder residue on my shirt,” I said. “I was looking to borrow something, and this was the cleanest room in the building.”

  For just a second, the anger in his eyes broke, and a wisp of a smile came to his lips. Then he blinked, and the smile disappeared. His face, though, wasn’t quite as hard as it had been just a moment earlier.

  “I’ll give you a shirt. Michael’s not with us anymore.”

  I nodded and walked toward him, hoping he’d have a harder time reading a lie on my lips if I were moving.

  “His wife make him come home, or did he get tired of you?”

  Asim took a step back as I pulled the door shut behind me.

  “We don’t know where Michael is. He left a couple of weeks ago and said he had to take care of something. He hasn’t been back since.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Did he say what he had to take care of?”

  Asim turned and spoke over his shoulder as he walked up the hall.

  “No. He just told us not to worry.”

  We walked to Asim’s room. Like Najam’s, it was small and reasonably neat. I stayed in the hallway while Asim got me a T-shirt. I changed in the bathroom, and by the time I got out again, five men waited for me in the building’s main public room. Including Nassir, I knew three of the men there. The other two were strangers, but I shook hands with everybody. I also confirmed two more names on Agent Havelock’s list.

  Eventually, we sat down at a table, and Nassir cleared his throat.

  “We talked, Ashraf,” he said, looking to his friends. “We want to help you, but you can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous for us.”

  I looked at him and then to the other men. “Does everybody feel that way?”

  “It’s not that we don’t want to help you,” said Asim. “It’s that we can’t. This place is important. We can’t risk losing it by hiding you here.”

  I looked around the room. “And what is this place?”

  All the men looked to Nassir. For a split second, his eyes lit up, and he leaned forward. Then, he seemed to remember himself. His countenance became stern once more.

  “A summer camp,” he said. “It’s for children.”

  “For Muslim children,” said one of the men I had just met, speaking quickly. “We’re building a place where children who have never felt safe in their entire lives can have a childhood for the first time.”

  “It’s for the children of refugees,” said Nassir. “We’re in the Rachel Hadad Community Center now. The boys and girls cabins are named after the children and grandchildren we’ve lost.”

  I looked at each of the men there. They looked sincere.

  “You’ve all had children die?” I asked.

  Most of them nodded.

  “It’s what drew us together,” said Nassir. “I lost Rachel. Ismail lost two of his grandchildren to a suicide bomber in Lebanon. Asim lost his brother and his brother’s family to the civil war in Syria. Jim’s son died in the Army during a tour in Afghanistan. Qadi’s nephew was a Marine who died in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq. This place is our way of celebrating the lives of those we lost. I hope you understand why you can’t stay here. We’ll get you out of here. You can take my car and go to Mexico or Canada. From there, we can book you air passage to Qatar. Once you’re there, you’ll be safe for good.”

  This new information didn’t explain why Nassir frequented extremist private Facebook groups, but it did explain a few things.

  “Where’d your funding for this come from?” I asked, looking to the men around me. “This property has got to be worth a couple million dollars.”

  “Does it matter?” asked Nassir, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It matters a lot.”

  Nassir sighed and looked to his friends before focusing on me again.

  “We all chipped in, but the bulk of our funding comes from Islamic charities in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”

  And that explained his trip to Qatar, then. He was off fundraising. I looked at Nassir and then to the other guys.

  “And none of you guys know where Michael Najam is?”

  Nassir looked at his friends, perplexed, before looking at me. “No. Why? How do you know Michael?”

  “I found him in Michael’s room a few minutes ago,” said Asim. “He said he was looking for a shirt.”

  “His old shirt was filthy,” said Nassir. “I’d probably want a new shirt, too.”

  “Is the name Jacob Ganim familiar?” I asked, ignoring the two of them.

  Nassir blinked for a moment. “Ganim is an Iraqi name.”

  “Good to know,” I said. “You heard of Jacob?”

  He paused and then looked to his friends. None of them nodded or shook their heads, so he turned back to me.

  “No. Why?”

  “I think Jacob Ganim was Michael Najam’s real name,” I said, pausing and considering what I wanted to say next. I looked down at the table and then to each of the men in the room. “The fertilizer in the barn to the northwest. Why do you have it?”

  Nassir furrowed his brow. “How do you know about the fertilizer?”

  “Please just answer the question,” I said, allowing a measure of anger into my voice.

  The group looked to Qadi with bemused expressions. He looked at them as if they were idiots.

  “It’s cheaper if you buy it in bulk,” he said. “I explained that to you when I bought it. I saved us several hundred dollars. You put me in charge of the soccer field, and I’m going to give you a healthy soccer field.”

  “So you bought several tons of fertilizer for your soccer field?”

  “They’re big fields, and there are two of them,” said Qadi. “I’d like to see you do better.”

  “I’m sure you’re doing fine,” I said, thinking that through and trying to put it into context. Havelock’s case against Nassir might have been blowing up in front of me, but Jacob Ganim or Michael Najam—whatever he called himself—was still dead. These men were likely among the last to see him alive. “What did you guys know about Michael Najam?”

  Nassir blustered for a moment. “He’s a good Muslim, and he came here to work. He was vouched for.”

  “By whom?” I asked.

  “The imam,” said Ismail. “They knew each other somehow.”

  Now that was interesting. The imam at my mosque was cooperating with the FBI in an investigation against some of his congregants. I didn’t know what that meant in practical terms, but I filed it away as important information.

  “Michael was murdered six weeks ago,” I said. “He was an undercover FBI agent sent to infiltrate a terror cell. His real name, I think, was Jacob Ganim.”

  “What terror cell?” asked Nassir.

&
nbsp; I tilted my head to the side, raised my eyebrows, and stared right at him. Gradually it dawned on him. He opened his eyes wide and then touched his chest.

  “Us?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding. “The case against you was weak but still worth investigating. That’s why they sent in Jacob—or Michael, as he called himself here.”

  For a moment, nobody said anything. Then Ismail leaned forward and looked directly in my eyes.

  “Michael’s really dead?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  Again, we lapsed into silence. Nassir cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry to hear about Michael. I’ll contact an attorney I know. We should get moving. You still need to leave.”

  “I agree, but not for the reason you think,” I said. “This morning was a setup. It was fake blood, fake guns, fake everything. The Bureau needed to get someone in here to investigate Jacob Ganim’s death. Given the situation, Kevin Havelock at the FBI thought I was a good choice. We thought you would accept me easier if I proved myself to you by killing some FBI agents.”

  “You have a very low opinion of us, don’t you?” asked Nassir, lowering his chin.

  “You dumped my sister, so I’m not your biggest fan,” I said. “That aside, I’m here to work a murder, which means I need to interview each one of you individually. The others can wait in your rooms. Once I’m done, you can go back to whatever you were doing before I arrived.”

  “Do we have a choice in this?” asked Qadi.

  I looked at him and shook my head. “No. You either talk to me now, or FBI agents storm this entire camp and tear it apart looking for anything illegal. Even if they don’t find anything, they’re going to make your lives suck for a while.”

  Nobody was happy about it, but they agreed to the interviews. It took about two hours to get through everybody. Over the years, I had arrested maybe a hundred people for murder, so I had a pretty good background in the subject. Nassir’s friends didn’t act like killers.

  Qadi, the man who had been on the tractor as Nassir and I drove in, teared up halfway through his interview. The other guys didn’t look too much better. A lot of people cried during interrogations, but usually they were blatant and transparent attempts to manipulate me. I didn’t get that feeling with these guys. They looked like simple men who’d just learned their friend had died.

  More telling than their mannerisms, though, was the fact that Nassir was the youngest man there by at least a decade. It took quite a bit of physical strength to move a corpse around. Even I would have struggled, and I’m a pretty big guy in his early forties. Nassir’s friends were all in their sixties. Working together, they probably could have killed a healthy, young FBI agent and then dumped his body in the Ohio River, but even that was a stretch.

  None of these guys knew Ganim worked for the FBI, and even if they had known, they had no reason to fear him. They were men building a summer camp. Unfortunately, that left me without much to go on.

  After interviewing each man individually in the dining hall, I let them get back to their chores. Nassir hung around and sat down heavily across from me when Ismail left. Even with just a bug screen to shield us from the outside, little air moved, making it feel warmer than it truly was.

  “I need a list of everyone who’s come to the camp and worked with Michael.”

  “You don’t think one of us killed him, do you?” asked Nassir.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. “Not really. I’ll need to clear everybody just the same, though.”

  “I’ll get you the list, then.”

  Neither Nassir nor I had anything else to say, so we sat in silence for another moment. Then he stood. Before he could leave, I cleared my throat to get his attention.

  “Hey,” I said. He looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “This is a good thing you’re doing. I wish I had come out here under better circumstances. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  A wistful smile formed on his face as he shook his head. “An FBI agent told you I was a terrorist. Instead of talking to me, you decided to investigate me. Then you pretended to shoot three people because you thought I’d approve. I’ve known you for twenty-five years. Even after all this time, you have no idea who I am. We’re strangers. Please don’t try to pretend we’re anything more.”

  I deserved some of that, but he carried his fair share of blame, too. I laced my fingers together on the table in front of me.

  “I investigated you because the FBI had very serious evidence against you. I wanted to disprove it. I wanted them to leave you alone. Instead, I found that you follow radical clerics on Facebook, you comment on the pages of people who advocate violence, and you engage in theological debates with people who joke about mass murder. You’re exactly right, Nassir. I’ve known you for twenty-five years, and I have no idea who you are. After what I’ve seen, my concern is whether you’re a threat.”

  Nassir screwed up his face. “The FBI is monitoring my Facebook account?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “They monitor the radical groups in which you post. You happened to show up in places you shouldn’t have.”

  For a moment, Nassir covered his face with his hands. Then he leaned forward and rested his palms on the table so our faces were only a foot or so apart.

  “And what if I am a threat? Are you going to arrest me?”

  I locked my eyes on him. “Without hesitation. Now get me a list of everyone who had contact with Michael Najam.”

  Nassir stood straighter and nodded. “Is this how it’s going to be from now on? We’ll be adversaries?”

  “Until you can prove to me that you’re the man who married my sister twenty-five years ago, yes.”

  He looked at the ground and drew in a heavy breath. “I’ll write down the names for you. I assume your friends at the FBI will have most of them under surveillance anyway.”

  “Thank you. While I’m here, do you have a computer with internet access I can use?”

  “In the office,” he said, sighing heavily. “Follow me.”

  I followed him down the main hallway and into the first room on the left. The office was a little bigger than the bedrooms, and it had actual glass windows, but otherwise it looked like every other room in the building. There were two desks pushed against the east wall. Both had computers. Nassir pointed to the one nearest the door.

  “You can use that one, but please don’t install malware to track the things I view online.”

  “I’m pretty sure the FBI doesn’t need me to install anything on your computer to monitor your internet usage,” I said. “If you’d like me to pretend that’s what I’m doing, though, I certainly can.”

  Nassir shook his head. “I’m going for a walk. I’ll get you the names when I return.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He grunted and left. I pulled the pill canisters from my pocket and opened a web browser to look up the first drug: alprazolam. It was the generic name for Xanax. Physicians prescribed it as a treatment for anxiety disorders and depression. I looked up the second drug, escitalopram, next. It was the generic name for Lexapro, an antidepressant.

  I left the screen open and pushed back from the desk to think. Going undercover was one of the most stressful things an FBI agent could do. Because of that, the Bureau had strict protocols for its undercover agents. If Ganim had a history of depression—which the pills clearly indicated—he never would have passed those protocols. Not only that, he had enough opioids in his room to keep an NFL team pain free for a week. That should have been a red flag, too.

  He lied to his superiors to get here. He knowingly risked his job, his pension, and his life to get to this summer camp. I spun around in the chair to think.

  Ganim didn’t come here to spy on old men as they played horseshoes and mowed pastures that would one day become soccer fields. He didn’t come here to work, either. Ganim disguised his identity and came here for a reason. Then, presumably, he was murdered for that reason. This
wasn’t a homicide investigation, or at least it wasn’t just a homicide investigation. This was something else.

  I wasn’t certain about anything except one fact: Nassir and his friends were in trouble. If a man was willing to kill an undercover FBI agent, he would certainly be willing to kill the hapless old men who gave him cover. No matter what else was going on, that left me with a very cold feeling.

  Chapter 6

  Though he had only been in the United States a few hours, Hashim Bashear was already behind schedule. He and his son, Hamza, stood in the basement of their rental home. Around them were heavy tables strewn with all manners of equipment and firearms. Foremost among them, though, were a pair of vests laden with explosives.

  When bomb makers in the Islamic State made a vest, they typically used whichever high explosive was available to them. Most commonly, that was TNT. It worked well for most purposes. With its relatively low detonation velocity, TNT created a low-pressure wave that pushed outward, shattering everything—including human tissue—within its blast radius. Because the low-pressure wave propagated slowly, it lasted a relatively long time and traveled farther out than a pressure wave created by explosives with higher blast velocities. When one was relying upon the blast wave itself to kill, TNT was a fine choice.

  Hashim needed something special, though, and he had the resources to procure it. The two vests on the table in front of him had six compartments, each of which contained a kilogram of dime-sized steel ball bearings. In addition, they had ten kilograms of Chinese-sourced RDX. RDX detonated with a velocity nearly two thousand meters per second faster than TNT. Though it made a poor mining tool, it was an excellent weapon.

  Once the RDX ignited, its fast-moving pressure wave would impart a significant percentage of its blast velocity to the ball bearings. The ball bearings would then shred everything around them like a blast from a shotgun. Where a vest made with TNT alone might have a lethal blast radius of ten meters—not bad for use in a crowd—a vest with RDX and ball bearings would be lethal to almost two hundred meters. One was an easily manufactured weapon of terror, while the other was a weapon of war. This fight had stopped being a terror campaign long ago.