Sleeper Cell

by Chris Culver

  Havelock narrowed his eyes. “Where’d you find these pictures and drugs?”

  “I found drugs in his room at my brother-in-law’s camp and in his house near Broad Ripple Park. I found pictures in his basement.”

  Havelock looked down. “You were told to investigate Michael Najam, not Jacob Ganim.”

  “I’m working a homicide and following the evidence,” I said. “And the evidence tells me you’re either a liar or you’re incompetent.”

  Havelock closed his eyes and took a step back. “I’ll ignore the insult for now. What else have you found?”

  “My brother-in-law, the guy Ganim was sent to investigate for potential ties to terrorist organizations, is very likely clean. Every piece of evidence you have against him is circumstantial. You had no right to go after him the way you did. The only crimes I’ve found so far are those committed by your agent. If he were alive today, I could get arrest him for possession of a schedule I substance. I might even be able to get him for possession with intent to sell. And did you know he had a history of depression? He had no business whatsoever being undercover.”

  “I didn’t know about his depression or the drugs,” said Havelock, his voice low.

  “What did you know about this guy?” I asked. “From what I’m seeing, it can’t be much.”

  Havelock looked to his right and pointed to a set of white wicker furniture. I nodded, and he sat down on a loveseat. I continued standing but leaned against the thick, wooden railing that separated the porch from the yard. Then I crossed my arms.

  “Ganim wasn’t my agent,” he said.

  “Who was he?”

  Havelock looked up and caught my eye. “I have no idea. I got a call from DC a couple of months ago telling me the Bureau’s counterterrorism division planned to run an operation in my area. I found out later that operation involved Jacob Ganim. I didn’t know him, I had never seen his personnel file, I had never seen his mission reports, and I had never spoken to his co-workers or his handler. Before he died, I didn’t even know what he looked like. I supported the operation because that was my job. I called you in after Ganim died because I needed someone independent to tell me what went wrong.”

  I put my hands on the rail behind me. “Everything went wrong. That’s what happened. You’re getting played. I don’t know who’s doing it or why, but Ganim wasn’t working a case against Nassir or his friends. Not only that, the moment I got to Ganim’s house and started getting somewhere with my investigation, a guy came after my sister and told her to call me on the phone you supplied, the one no one should know about.”

  Havelock stood up and started pacing the front porch.

  “He must have had Ganim’s house under surveillance.”

  “Since he knew my phone number, he has access to at least some of your files. I highly doubt he’s working alone, either. We’ve got to assume somebody in your office is playing for the other side. Ganim was either involved with him or found out about him. Either way, Ganim’s dead now, and somebody came after people I care about.”

  Havelock nodded and then stopped pacing.

  “I should probably turn this over to the Office of Professional Responsibility for them to investigate.”

  He didn’t continue. He was waiting for me to say something.

  “But if you do that, you’re afraid your higher-ups will bury it.”

  He grunted, nodded, and started pacing again. “If you want out now, I won’t hold it against you.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Whoever this guy is, he came after my sister. He and his friends are using my community for cover for whatever they’re doing. This is personal.”

  Havelock returned to the wicker loveseat he had sat on earlier and took out his cell phone.

  “I’m going to put a team together to search Ganim’s house. We’ll figure out what’s going on there.”

  “You still have his body?” I asked.

  Havelock thought for a moment and then slowly nodded. “We should. Why?”

  “I’d like Dr. Rodriguez in the Marion County Coroner’s Office to look at it. With everything else going on, we need to make sure we can trust the autopsy results.”

  Havelock blinked as he thought that through. “We can bring him in as a consulting pathologist. He won’t get paid, but I’ll make sure he has access to the body.”

  “It’d be better if we could ship the body to him so he can examine it without someone looking over his shoulder. I’m sure your pathologists are good, but you know the old saying. Too many cooks in the kitchen.”

  He sighed and cocked his head to the side. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I need one more thing from you. Someone put a gun to my sister’s head today. I need you to keep her safe until I find the guy and put him in custody.”

  “Of course,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve got a safe house in town. She’ll be okay there.”

  “If you know about it, so do the bad guys,” I said. “It’s not safe.”

  “What do you suggest, then?”

  “Nassir’s camp. It’s remote and defensible. The main building is concrete and built on a hill. You’ll have sightlines for at least a kilometer in most directions. Plus, if the bad guys know the situation as well as I think they do, they won’t expect Rana to go there. She’ll be safer there than anywhere you can put her.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think your brother-in-law will appreciate more FBI agents showing up on his doorstep.”

  “He’ll get over it for his wife’s sake.”

  Havelock ran his fingers through his hair and then turned his back to me. “We’re really doing this. I’m violating my direct orders and spearheading an investigation into the most decorated division within my agency.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re doing your job and following the evidence where it leads you. If the evidence leads us to someone within your own agency, tough shit for them. Now let’s go. You have work to do, and so do I.”

  Chapter 10

  Once Havelock and I had the outline of a plan together, I knocked on Rana’s door and waited for her to open it. Her eyes were harder than they had been a moment earlier. When I first came to the house, she had been scared. Now, she was angry—and rightfully so.

  “Agent Havelock and I have been talking. We’re not sure that it’s safe for you to be here right now.”

  She crossed her arms and nodded. “Okay. What does the brain trust suggest, then?”

  Rana’s angry expression made her look even more like our mother than usual. I blinked and took a stutter step back.

  “The man who came to your house this morning seems to have access to information that he shouldn’t. We can’t put you in a safe house because we don’t know whether they’ve been compromised. In our opinion, the best place for you is probably Nassir’s camp. It’s remote, it’s defensible, and nobody would expect you to go there.”

  For a moment, she became as still as a statue. Then she narrowed her eyes and nodded.

  “I appreciate your concern, Ashraf,” she said, her voice almost artificially sweet. “But in the future, I humbly ask that you include me in any discussions involving my welfare.”

  “I’ll make arrangements for one of my agents to—” began Havelock. Before he could finish his thought, Rana glared at him, and the FBI agent stopped speaking.

  “I’m not done speaking,” she said, looking from Havelock to me. “I will most certainly not be joining my soon-to-be ex-husband at his little playground. If I’m not safe in my own home, I will make arrangements on my own to go somewhere safe.”

  “I understand that you may not want to see Nassir, but Agent Havelock and I truly think his compound will be the safest place for you.”

  When Rana looked at me, her eyes practically flashed red.

  “I would rather be tied to a stake and set on fire than spend time with Nassir. If you drag me to that camp of his, you’ll have a new murder to solve very shor
tly after my arrival.”

  Neither Havelock nor I said anything for a moment as we thought. Rana’s tone didn’t seem to leave a lot of wiggle room.

  “What do you propose, then?” I asked.

  “I will go to Chicago, where I will rent a suite at the Drake Hotel. I will shop, go to museums, and have massages at a spa. My husband will gratefully pay for the entire trip.”

  I tilted my head to the side. “If the bad guys can track you to your house, there’s a good chance they can track your credit cards.”

  “Then I will withdraw cash from my bank account and use that cash to purchase prepaid credit cards they can’t track. I will not stay with Nassir, and that is final.”

  I knew Rana well enough to know she wasn’t going to budge on this, so I looked at Agent Havelock. He thought for a moment and then drew in a breath.

  “If that’s what you want to do, you should be fine,” he said. “I’ll call the field office in Chicago to let them know you’re in the area. I’d prefer if you rented a car instead of taking your own.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. “I will.”

  Havelock looked at me and then to her before nodding and walking back to his car, giving us some privacy. I looked at Rana and softened my voice.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I’m fine.”

  I knew she wasn’t, but I didn’t plan on pushing. I looked down so I wouldn’t have to meet her gaze.

  “I’m sorry about Nassir. I don’t know whether I’ve told you that yet.”

  She drew in a breath and blinked away a tear. “I want to hate him, but I can’t. He’s the father of my only child. We had a life together. Things were starting to turn around. He seemed happy. And then he just discarded me like I was garbage. He didn’t even give me an explanation. He just left.”

  “He’s a fool,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “And I still love him.”

  I stayed with her on the porch for another few minutes, but we didn’t say much. I wished I could comfort her in some way, but I was just her little brother. She needed time. Before leaving, I gave her a hug and told her to call me if she needed anything. She promised she would.

  As I walked back to my car, I found Kevin Havelock walking back to the house, probably to help Rana make arrangements to disappear temporarily. Havelock and I might have disagreed about how to run an investigation, but he was a good man who would do everything he could to keep her safe. That made him all right in my book.

  When I got back to my car, I focused once again on the case in front of me. Even after searching his house, I didn’t know a lot about Jacob Ganim. It took time and planning to do the kind of surveillance work he did, though. The women he photographed and identified were important to him. That meant they were important to me, too.

  I put my car in gear and headed to the city’s southeast side, where I eventually pulled into the parking lot of a seedy, two-story hotel. Unlike on previous trips, no prostitutes loitered near the office, but neither did women in hijab. I parked beside a pickup on the edge of the lot. There was a fallow field across the street and the white barns of the county fairgrounds just beyond that. Modest family homes on large, rural lots stretched into the distance east and west.

  As I got out of the car, I heard a cow mooing from the fairgrounds. They must have been having a cattle show.

  I didn’t know what to expect at the hotel, so I kept my eyes open for threats as I walked to the lobby. Nobody came out of any nearby rooms or peered through the windows at me, though. It was just a crummy place to stay.

  The lobby’s interior smelled like stale cigarettes. There was a sofa pushed against the right wall with a chipped wooden coffee table in front of it. A television blared from a stand near the front desk. The woman behind the counter looked up at me and then down to the phone in her hand without saying a word. Her name tag said her name was Kylie.

  “Hi, Kylie, I’m here looking for one of your guests,” I said. “My sister’s staying here.”

  The receptionist thumbed a final message in and then put her phone down. She had straight white teeth and freckles on the tip of her nose. Though she was probably in her mid-twenties, her skin still had the tanned glow of youth, and she smiled easily and well with just a bit of reserve. Her smile faded just a little as I drew nearer.

  “We don’t give out guest information, sir. Sorry. There are a lot of crazy people out there.”

  I nodded. “That’s understandable. You don’t have to tell me her room number, but could you call her for me?”

  Her smile turned uncomfortable. “Okay, sir. What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Fatima Jaffari.”

  It was one of the names from the pictures in Ganim’s house. Kylie’s uncomfortable smile didn’t waver, but she shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, but we don’t have anybody by that name here.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, leaning against the counter. “You didn’t even check the computer.”

  She forced herself to laugh. Then she looked down. A lock of brown hair fell over her forehead.

  “I’m not supposed to say this, but we’ve only got a couple of guests right now. Most of our customers arrive late in the evening and leave early in the morning. This isn’t the kind of place you stay at for long.”

  “How about Aisha Shalhoub?” I asked, leaning forward to rest my arms on the counter. “That’s my other sister. They might be staying together.”

  She looked thoughtful for a moment and then frowned before exhaling. “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have anyone by that name, either.”

  “Well, who do you have staying here?”

  She tittered uncomfortably. “Like I said, I can’t give out information about our customers.”

  “How about Milana al-Amin?”

  Her smile faltered for just a second, but then it came back as she regained her composure. She laughed softly.

  “You have a lot of sisters,” she said. “Bathrooms must have been challenging growing up.”

  “Milana’s not a sister,” I said. “I met her on Tinder.”

  She leaned forward and started running a finger down my forearm to my wrist and then to the knuckles of my hand. When she spoke, her voice was a little low and sultry.

  “You don’t look like the kind of guy who needs to meet girls on the internet.”

  I pulled my arm back. “I’m usually not. How about Michael Najam?”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “Nope.”

  “Jacob Ganim? Is he familiar?”

  For just a second, she tensed. Then she stood straighter and shrugged. Where previously her hand gestures and body language had been fluid and natural, this was a little wooden. She knew Jacob.

  “Never heard of him. Sorry.”

  “You sure?” I asked. “He’s a reasonably good looking guy. His skin is a little lighter than mine, and he has a slight build. He’s maybe a year or two younger than me. You never saw him?”

  She raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “Nope, and sorry. If you’ll excuse me, though, I’ve got some work to do.”

  “Of course,” I said, taking a step back. I pointed to the couch and television with my thumb. “I’m pretty sure my sisters are planning to stay here, though. I’m willing to wait for them, so I’ll just take a seat and watch TV for a while. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  She smiled as she considered. Then she leaned forward and looked around the lobby conspiratorially.

  “You know, there’s not really a whole lot going on around here right now. There’s an open room right next door if you want to hang out with me. I can help you pass the time a lot better than the TV.”

  I took a step toward the counter and leaned forward so that our faces were only a few inches apart. She bit her lower lip and smiled just a little. It almost looked real. Her breath smelled like breath mints and something sweet. Strawberries, maybe. Then I unbuckled my badge from my belt and put it down on th
e counter in front of her.

  “I appreciate that you’re willing to go this far to protect these women, but it’s time to cut the shit. Are they here, or are they not?”

  She looked at my badge, and then to me, a blank expression on her face. Only when I looked down, did I see her thumbing a message into her phone. I grimaced, and she tilted her head to the side and shrugged.

  “Sorry. They’re not here. I’ve never even heard of them.”

  “Even if they’re not here now, I know they were here at one time. They’re not in trouble, and neither are you. Okay? I just want to talk to them. They may have information about a homicide.”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’ve never—”

  “Please don’t lie to me again,” I said, interrupting her and staring directly into her eyes. “Jacob Ganim, the man you pretended you didn’t know, is dead. I’m working his murder. I know he was here. I know he took pictures of the women I mentioned. I want to know who they are and why he was interested in them. You’re not in any trouble, and neither are the women. If they’re in the country illegally, I don’t care. I’m not going to tell anybody about them. If you make me get a warrant, though, I’m going to have to bring in a lot more people, and things will get complicated very quickly. It’s your choice.”

  She blinked a few times and then licked her lips. “Get a warrant.”

  I had hoped she wouldn’t say that, but I nodded anyway.

  “If that’s how you want to do this, that’s how we’ll do this,” I said, reaching for my wallet and the business cards I kept in there. I put one on the counter in front of her. “Talk to your friends. I’ve seen pictures of them, so I know they wear hijab. If they have any contacts in the Islamic community in Indianapolis, have them ask around about me. I’m well known, and I’m fair. I can’t protect them or you if you make me bring in my entire department.”

  She nodded, so I took my badge from the counter and hooked it on my belt.

  “My cell number’s on the back of the card. Be smart and use it.”