Jihad db-5

by Stephen Coonts

  “Why do you think that’s significant?” asked Rubens.

  “Kenan was absent from class during that period. And we have this photo from Pakistani intelligence on the students at the Lahore Madrasah at roughly that time.”

  Nemo clicked the scroll button on his laptop. A fuzzy picture of a young man with pale skin and reddish facial hair appeared on the screen next to a recent picture of Kenan. Beneath it, the computer declared it was a match “with some certainty”—sixty percent on its one-hundred-point scale.

  “The Dutch passport?” Rubens asked.

  “Probably a fake. We’re still waiting for definitive word.”

  “But the real significance,” said Johnny Bib.

  “After the person using the passport returned to the U.S.,” continued Nemo, “he went from New York to Houston. He rented a car for three days. The same credit card was used at a motel in Galveston.”

  So was Lahore Two right, then? Was the Galveston chemical plant really the target?

  Rubens closed his eyes. It was the classic intelligence conundrum, with evidence supporting mutually exclusive conclusions.

  The interesting thing was that neither Johnny Bib nor Nemo seemed to appreciate the fact that they were contradicting their earlier information.

  “Has the card been used anywhere else?” Rubens asked, opening his eyes.

  “No. No links or parallels that I can find,” said Nemo.

  Was he resisting because he didn’t want Bing to be right? If so, that was a very childish reason, far beneath him.

  “Very well,” said Rubens. “Johnny, what about the claims that al-Qaeda was trying to obtain a ship?”

  “CIA.”

  “Yes, I know where the claims came from,” said Rubens, struggling to remain patient. “What about them?”

  “No intercepts.”

  “Nothing to back it up at all?”

  Johnny Bib shrugged.

  “Would it be possible to check ship registrations and somehow coordinate them with legitimate companies?” Rubens asked.

  “Many gaps.”

  “Try it anyway.”

  Johnny Bib’s face contorted in a way that warned Rubens he was about to launch into a whining speech about not having enough people, the people he had were doing jobs far out of their classifications, were working insane hours, and on and on.

  All legitimate points, but Rubens had no time to deal with them.

  “Keep me informed,” he said, cutting off the tirade by getting up. Sometimes strategic retreat was the only way to handle a bad situation. “If you’ll excuse me, I have business upstairs.”

  CHAPTER 126

  Dean got the same shrugs in Veracruz that he’d gotten in Mexico City. The police in the port city on Mexico’s eastern coast were considerably more concerned with sailors from the local navy school than possible al-Qaeda terrorists. A few thousand tourists stopped in the city’s hotels every week, but the vast majority of them were middle American gringos and their families—“People like you,” the police chief told him, “looking for bargains.”

  Dean figured it was supposed to be a compliment and nodded.

  The chief gave Dean a few recommendations for dinner.

  “Mention my name,” he explained, “they take care of you, no charge. You see.”

  “Thanks,” said Dean, making it a point not to remember the restaurants’ names.

  Dean took a walk through the city, trying to imagine what he would do if he were Kenan. But that was a lost cause; it had been a long time since he was in his early twenties. He fell back on the obvious, stopping into hotels too small and cheap to have computer reservation systems; no one recognized the photos he showed.

  He worked his way down toward the sea. Ships lined up in the distance, heading toward the port; it reminded him of Istanbul’s procession of tankers up the Bosporus.

  “You think there’s any possibility that Kenan Conkel hooked up with a ship out of here?” Dean asked Sandy Chafetz when he checked in with her a half hour later.

  “I can’t rule it out,” she told him. “But we can’t rule it in, either. Boats and ships leave there all the time.”

  “I can spread some photos around by the docks,” said Dean. “It’ll be a long shot.”

  “Before you do that, I have something for you to check out. It’s a long shot, too, but it’s much more interesting,” Chafetz said. “A boat and its captain have been missing from a town north of Catemaco called Negro Olmec since the day before yesterday. The police there say that the captain was seen with a young white male and someone who was possibly Arab.”

  “How do I get there?”

  * * *

  It took two and a half hours to drive to Negro Olmec from Veracruz. The sun had set a half hour before Dean started out, depriving him of what would have been a gorgeous view of the ocean for much of the drive. But he didn’t mind; he found a station that played American country-western, alternating between the likes of Dwight Yoakam and the Judds, with the occasional Hank Williams tune thrown in.

  “Hey, Hey, Good Lookin’ ” came on, a gringo request according to the deejay. Dean sang along. Hank Williams was one of the few things he and his father agreed on, even to this day.

  Negro Olmec had only three full-time police officers, and none were on duty when Dean arrived a little past nine P.M. But the man at the station was the cousin of the chief, and when Dean explained in Spanish that he was an American investigator who might have some information about the missing boat captain, he picked up his phone and told the chief that the case was solved.

  The police chief walked through the door before Dean could finish telling his cousin that he had only a possible lead, not a solution. The cousin waved the picture of Kenan at the chief, telling him the murderer of boat captain Oscar Nunez had been discovered.

  “You’re sure this is the man?” the chief asked Dean.

  “No. I want to know if it is. I’ve been looking for him. He came to Veracruz about two months back. I’m wondering if he came back in the past few days.”

  The chief picked up the phone, dialed a number, and began shouting into it, speaking so quickly that Dean couldn’t decipher his Spanish.

  “Come,” demanded the chief. He put down the phone and marched out the front door, down the short flight of creaking wooden steps and across the street to a small stucco house where a battered Volkswagen with bubblegum lights sat in the driveway. By the time Dean got into the car, the chief was drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Dean had barely closed the door when the policeman threw the car into reverse, skidding onto the road with a screech of tires that would have impressed Tommy Karr. Fifty yards down the road he jammed on the brakes, sending Dean against the dashboard.

  An elderly woman was waiting at the door of the house. Before Dean could take the photo out of his pocket, she was proclaiming that Kenan had murdered her son, the most dedicated son in all of Mexico.

  “How do you know he’s dead?” Dean asked. “I thought he was only missing.”

  The chief nudged him aside. “We find the body today,” he said in English. “And the boat. Fifty miles offshore.”

  “Fifty miles?”

  “Maybe it drift, maybe not. The ocean is like a wandering woman. The captain — shot through the head.”

  “I’d like to see the body,” Dean told him.

  * * *

  Negro Olmec’s morgue was not only a funeral home but a restaurant and travel agency. The police chief assured Dean that this was the village’s best restaurant and most likely the best on the coast.

  “Julio will show you when we are done,” he said, as the funeral home director and restaurateur led them down the hall to the funeral parlor. “Yes, Julio?”

  “Anything you want,” said Julio. He took out his keys and unlocked the door. “I have to go back now. The customers come on nights when we have shark. We’ve been so busy. You stop by; you’ll see.”

  The smell of fish stew flowed into
the large viewing room with Dean and the chief, staying with them right up to the door to the back room. There a new odor took over, the scent of decay and the chemicals meant to arrest it.

  The body had been brought in just before dinnertime at the restaurant and had not been worked on yet. Sea birds had picked at the dead man, and there were gouges on his face, chest, and hands. Dean took out his PDA and placed the camera attachment on it to beam images back to the Art Room.

  “A good hunk of the jaw is gone,” Dean said, ostensibly talking to the police chief but really passing the information along to Chafetz and a pathologist.

  “A big wound, yes,” said the chief.

  “See if there are any shots to the chest,” Chafetz told him. “Examine the clothes carefully.”

  Dean glanced at the side table, looking for gloves. He didn’t see any. Gingerly, he picked at the dead man’s shirt, moving the handheld computer across it slowly.

  “I don’t see any bullet wounds, do you?” he asked the police chief.

  The chief didn’t answer. He was standing across the room, face toward the door.

  The pathologist directed Dean to scan the skull slowly, then had him turn his attention to the jaw.

  “Shot him in the face?” Dean asked.

  “No, that’s probably an exit wound,” said the pathologist. “There is a smaller hole toward the top that would line up almost exactly. I can’t be sure, but it looks to me like he was shot from above at an angle. Definitely from above.”

  Dean couldn’t find any other wounds and bruises, aside from the damage done by the birds. When he was done, neither he nor the police chief were in any mood to eat. They went back to the police station and looked at the bullet that had been recovered from the boat; Dean could tell from a glance that it had come from a rifle.

  “One other went through the side of the boat, making a hole,” said the chief. “But it was high enough that only a little water came in.”

  “Can we take a look at it?”

  “Yes, come.”

  Dean braced himself for another car, but the dock turned out to be across the beach directly behind the police station. The chief showed the way with a large flashlight whose light conked out every ten steps or so; he would tap it and the light would flash back on.

  “What sort of customers did Senor Nunez get?” Dean asked as they walked out onto the pier.

  “Some scuba, sport fishermen.”

  “He ever take drug dealers or smugglers anywhere?”

  “I’ve never heard that he did,” said the police chief. “And now that he is dead, who would speak ill of him?”

  Even in the dark, Dean could tell the boat wouldn’t be a smuggler’s first choice. Twenty-nine feet long, it was thirty years old at least, with a stubby, low-slung cabin and a single Mercury at the rear — the sort of boat you might call dependable, but never fast. It would be cheap to rent and inconspicuous — the sort of thing a terrorist might prefer when rendezvousing with someone else.

  If the blood was any indication, the boat’s captain had been standing near the wheel when he’d been shot. Dean climbed up onto the cabin deck and had the police chief stand at the wheel. His head came to Dean’s waist.

  “How tall are you?” Dean asked him.

  “Five foot nine, señor.”

  “How tall was the captain?”

  The chief shook his head.

  “Six-three,” said Chafetz.

  Dean adjusted his arms, figuring where he would have to hold a rifle to shoot someone at the wheel to hit him in the middle of the head. It was possible, but far from likely.

  “You’d have to hold the gun way up here,” said Dean, acting it out for the police chief. “Be a very unnatural shot. Easier to shoot him like this, in the face.”

  “Assuming the bullets came from a rifle,” said the chief.

  “True,” said Dean. “Where’s the hole?”

  The police chief pointed it out on the starboard side of the vessel.

  “I’d say he had to have been shot from another boat,” said Dean. “Something higher to get that angle.”

  “Or a ship,” said Chafetz. “Much more likely. We’re sending a pathology team down there to check out the dead man and the boat. Good work, Charlie.”

  CHAPTER 127

  Tommy Karr pushed the baseball cap back on his hat and surveyed the tarmac next to the terminal at Stewart International Airport. Small planes generally lined up along the terminal’s eastern end, filling a small number of slots. Marid Dabir’s plane would be directed to the slot at the extreme south. Ordinarily passengers disembarked into a large room where they could pick up their baggage. Special dividers had been brought in, creating a narrow hallway to control the traffic. Dabir would be seized in the hallway after he was surrounded by FBI agents dressed as airline and airport workers. Lia would be on the flight with him and would make sure they got the right man.

  Assuming, of course, they had the right man to begin with.

  Karr wanted to see where Dabir would end up if he managed to slip out of the plane somehow. A parking lot for rental cars was just around the comer from the gate area where they were going to bring Dabir’s plane. Hopping the fence would take all of five seconds; he’d have to put two guys on the plane side of the fence to forestall that possibility. That was in addition to the people they’d have disguised as ground crew on both sides of the plane.

  A hangar across the way that was used by U.S. Marine reserve units to maintain some of their aircraft had been vacated a few hours before. Right after the plane carrying Dabir landed, a CIA Gulfstream would taxi over to the area in front of the hangar; the jet would take off a short time later — a ruse to make anyone watching think Dabir had been taken away. In fact, he would be moved to a trailer set up in one of the large C-5A hangars on the Air National Guard side of the complex, guarded by a team of FBI agents and federal marshals as well as U.S. Air Force security. Several members of the Justice Department and FBI interrogators were already there, preparing for their interrogation.

  Karr checked the truck that would be used to ferry him across the base, then looked at the two vans which would carry the federal agents. The trucks were guarded by a pair of U.S. Air Force security men, who were trying to look nonchalant while holding M-16s at the ready.

  “Lookin’ good,” Karr told them after circling the trucks. “Now tell me, no bullshit: Where’s the best pizza place in town?”

  CHAPTER 128

  Between fatigue and his concerns about the operation set to grab Marid Dabir, Rubens found his patience in short supply from the very start of the evening conference call updating possible al-Qaeda targets. He tried to explain how circumstantial the evidence his people had found that the Galveston-Houston area might be a target was, but the others clearly didn’t hear the nuances. As soon as he mentioned that one of the terrorists had possibly met a boat or ship off Mexico — information that the Art Room had given him only a few minutes before — they put two and two together and came up with forty-four.

  “Sink a ship in the Houston Ship Channel and it would be even more devastating than blowing up the chemical plant,” said Cynthia Marshall, second-in-command at Homeland Security. “We’ll need National Guard troops. I’ll move the Coast Guard over and blockade the port. The Navy will have to help as well.”

  “There’s no evidence the channel is being targeted,” said Rubens. “And from what I understand about the threat coming from the sea, there’s no evidence there either.”

  “We have one source saying al-Qaeda may be interested in ships,” said Collins from the CIA. “That’s the extent of the intelligence.”

  “Can we really take a chance?” asked FBI Director Griffin Bolso, who until now had been a voice of reason and an ally. “Blow up something there, and it’ll be worse than 9/11.”

  “We have to be prudent in using our resources,” said Rubens.

  He might just as well have read the horoscope, for all the good it did. Bing ended the m
eeting by saying that the Houston and Galveston area would be put under a virtual lock-down, with the navy and coast guard tasked to search every ship in the vicinity. Searching the ships would take weeks, not days, but the general representing the Department of Defense on the conference call was from the air force and clearly didn’t understand the logistics involved.

  A few minutes after Rubens hung up, Collins from the CIA called him back. He’d promised to update her on the Dabir operation.

  “They’re overreacting on Houston,” she said without prompting. “But you can’t blame them. We’ve given them bits and pieces of possible conspiracies, and they put them together in the worst way.”

  “Concentrating on the wrong target may be worse than concentrating on none,” said Rubens.

  Collins didn’t answer. Rubens told her about Dabir; when he was done, she asked if she could send a CIA interrogation team there as well.

  Even though he’d expected the question, he wasn’t sure how exactly to answer it. The Justice Department had been adamant that the CIA people not take part; truth be told, they would have greatly preferred it if Desk Three wasn’t even involved in the operation, since the intelligence agencies would inevitably complicate any prosecution. But Collins was a potential ally against Bing, and Rubens knew that telling her no wasn’t going to go over well.

  What else could he do, though? Base his decision on politics?

  “Justice wants to handle the interrogation itself,” said Rubens, hoping that would end the conversation.

  It didn’t.

  “Justice wants a lot of things. The FBI has a terrible track record on interrogations. We don’t.”

  “I can’t argue with you, Debra, but it’s not my call.”

  “If you said the team was from Desk Three, no one would question it.”

  “Well, I can’t lie,” blurted Rubens.

  A moment of awkward silence followed.