“Oh my god. So then funding an attack would give you that knowledge too,” Brooke said.
“Yes. You would know when and where and make prudent market moves, or order ‘put and call’ contracts, accordingly, to trigger once the shit hits the fan.”
“With that set up, a person could rake in a fortune without lifting a finger after the attack . . . At one level it’s disgusting, but on another level it makes perfect sense.”
“Business sense,” Peter said.
.G.
“Hey, Frank. Why don’t you knock it off early? It is slow night, and there is no need for there to be the two of us to be working.”
As usual, it took Frank a moment to untangle Yussie’s mangled English, then he checked his watch: 11:20 p.m. Their shift ended at midnight. Since it was a temperate night, there would be no drains on the system and getting to the bar over in Woodside earlier meant a better chance to chat up some girl before the rest of the four-to-twelve shift invaded. And Yusuf was a pretty smart guy for an assistant substation technician. Frank suddenly had a stab of conscience. Yusuf was a scrawny kid who’d gotten a bad case of acne over in Egypt or Arabia or wherever the hell he was from, leaving his face scarred and pockmarked. That and the scrawny beard accounted for him and some of the guys at the plant calling him “the Terrorist” behind his back. But the kid was alright. “Thanks, Yusuf. I owe you one! You’ll sign me out?”
“Sure, Frank, you go. You have good time.”
“You’re okay, Yussie!” Frank put on his jacket and put his blue Con-Ed hardhat on hook #37 where his coat was. Only Yussie’s coat remained on the wall of hooks.
“See ya Monday!” Frank said as he swiped his FOB card to unlock the door.
.G.
Yusuf had studied electrical engineering in Egypt then gotten his masters in France and went to work for the French. For a short time he’d worked at Électricité de France, then in 2006 he’d been transferred as Chief Engineer High Voltage Operations to their then new British subsidiary, EDF Energy, or as millions of Londoners knew it: the power company to which they paid their bills.
Yusuf took out his phone and texted a one-word message: Clear.
As soon as Yusuf landed in London he’d met a group of other immigrant workers that had a plan to strike a blow for the cause. Although the actual details were known only by a few and his part had been very small, he’d felt a surge of pride on July 7, 2005. Although all he’d done was deliver a package to an address on Kings Road. He’d always believed that package contained the detonators by which the bombs on the underground were set off. But he would never know. The cellular insulation that the support group had practiced could have meant his package was empty and five other men had delivered similar packages—one or more with the actual components. As an engineer, he well understood double redundancy and stress testing of systems. Whether he’d been the placebo or the actual deliverer was only an academic point, for all who were involved in the 7/7 attacks had served in the struggle against the Great Satan.
He was sure, however, his allegiance and loyalty had gotten him into this New York operations group of which he was now, definitely, a core member. Their meetings at the various music practice studios and the ingenuity of the plan meant certain glory for him and his cellmates.
His phone buzzed and the text message “outside” appeared.
.G.
“Peace be upon you, Dequa.”
“His blessings on you, Yusuf. Show me the transfer switch.”
They went into a large area, which hummed. There was a slight tickling sensation to the fine hairs on the skin, as the intense electrical field caused the iron in the hair and bloodstream to vibrate ever so slightly. Before them was something that at first looked like a great mousetrap. It was in fact a large relay. Its main function was to act as a circuit breaker to disconnect Manhattan and Queens from the national power grid in the event of a cataclysmic event . . . or so it was designed.
Next they went out into the transformer farm with the lights of Manhattan reflecting in the undulating waves of the East River just beyond its fence. At the side of the building lay many huge steel girders two feet wide and twenty feet long, for use in anchoring new or replacing old transformer footings.
“Will these be adequate?” Dequa said.
“Most assuredly.”
Chapter 16
Offices and Meetings
10 days until the attack
The following morning, after an evening of dinner and drinks with Peter Remo, Brooke knew two things for sure; one brought her relief the other raised her level of concern to new heights. First, that Peter Remo was not a threat to her marriage was a good thing, and that, to some extent, she wasn’t tempted in any way to tease or test that fact gave her another notch on her self-esteem belt. However, the new thinking about Prescott’s involvement in funding terrorists changed her day, investigation, and purpose. Now it was all about the question: Could Prescott actually have been hiring terrorists? That was a game changer.
And she learned one more thing: four glasses of white wine with a light dinner still gave her one bitch of a headache the next day. She’d forgotten what Mush had taught her to drink a glass of water with every glass of wine. It was how he avoided hangovers from clouding his command judgment the next day.
At 8:00 a.m. her team was assembled in the secure conference room. She started right in. “Good morning. Today I want to change the line of our investigation. Up to now we have been looking for some ideological sympathies by which to explain our suspicions that Prescott and his company’s funds found their way to militant cells. Now I want us to invert the chart. Namely, did Prescott seek out terrorists, in effect engaging them to strike and using that information to buttress his positions in the market and take maximum profit from a man-made calamity?”
George was rolling the end of his pen around over his teeth as he rolled the new concept around in his head. “So in effect, look for active enlistment of bad guys to carry out Prescott’s plan?”
“It may be the way to get what we know to line up better with a motive.” Brooke had learned through her years with the FBI, and before that in the JAG corps, that you don’t have the full story until all the parts line up. Sometimes looking at it another way, like walking around a pool table to see how the balls line up to a possible shot, suddenly lets you see the connections all the way to the pocket. She wanted her team to start looking at this from other angles.
“Jeannine, get me on the next plane out to DC and ask Secretary Cass for five minutes when I get there.”
.G.
Looking out over the vast expanse of Central Park, Dequa felt a slight touch of vertigo from being sixty stories up. A police helicopter buffeted by, its rotor noise barely audible through the thick glass “walls” of this penthouse office. The copter was at the same level as his eyes. He turned away as a precaution, just in case they were taking photos or using long-range imaging to ID him. The butler appeared with his reflection shimmering in the black marble floors. He pointed up the semi-circular stairs that connected the first floor to the second level of the sixty-five million dollar duplex in the sky.
At the top, there was an office behind sliding glass doors that silently parted as he approached. Kadeem, a tall, serious man who had been Kitman’s bodyguard forever, was on the other side and gestured for him to raise his arms. Knowing the drill, Dequa complied. After the security man patted him down, he stepped aside, allowing Dequa to enter the office.
There, in the large, sunlit, glass-walled office was the Desk. He thought of it often. It was a formidable piece, which hailed back to the Tsar Alexander. He wasn’t sure if Kitman had purchased it or gotten it as a gift from a Russian oligarch. It surely weighed a thousand pounds, being crafted of rich, heavy ebony and mahogany wood with elaborate carvings and gold inlay. Yet, right in the middle of the surface, a flat, fifty-i
nch touch-screen computer was mounted into it, making a twenty-first century Windows desktop on the nineteenth century priceless desk’s top. It was an atrocity to antiquity, yet its current owner, a “Tsar” of Wall Street, felt that since he owned it, he could desecrate it at will. Dequa sat in one of the chairs right in front of it and waited.
The wall to the right slid open and Mr. Kitman, or El-had Berani as he knew him in the mujahedeen, emerged from the small hidden room with the prayer rug on the floor. As he sat behind his desk, the wall silently closed without leaving a trace of an opening. “Chai?”
“Thank you for your kindness but I have had my tea for this morning.”
“Then what do you have to report?”
“Our progress is right on schedule and much good fortune has come our way.”
“So phase one is complete?”
“Yes and many elements of phase two are already in place, again, by His grace.”
“Good, very good. So our date still holds?”
“Yes, phase three is still on track.”
“What about the federal agents?”
“They have nothing. We were able to inflict the virus our Iranian friends didn’t know they lent us.”
“So you are confident that everything is erased and that destruction is total.”
“In many ways, the Ayatollah would be proud, if he knew, that so far the best of the best of the American government’s cyber experts can’t retrieve what we have done. So they have no way to connect you or your company to Prescott.”
“What about Prescott himself?”
“We still have our initial leverage.”
“May this all indeed be a sign of our good fortune. Is there anything else?”
Dequa hesitated. “No . . . No, nothing else.”
Kitman tried to figure out what was on his mind. “What is it, Dequa?”
Dequa looked around the office with all its capitalist trappings. He scrutinized the original artwork, sculptures, and busts that commanded small fortunes and in quantities that rivaled a museum’s inventory. Interspersed among the artwork on the walls were photographs of Kitman’s yacht, private jet, and mansion in the Florida Keys.
Kitman followed his eyes. “Ah, you are concerned. Concerned that I have been seduced by all this,” Kitman said, turning with his hands out.
“It is a far distance from the caves in Tora Bora.”
“And I have shaved my beard and adopted western dress and speech, all in the name of the cause.”
Dequa was well acquainted with the ways of taqiyya and kitman. That it was not deemed a sin to lie to one’s enemies or to infidels. Then he looked at the wall behind which the prayer room was hidden and calmed himself. “I am not questioning your loyalty to the struggle, but are you sure you can give all this up when the time comes?”
“Last week, I was invited to Washington to attend an economic summit. I was twenty feet from the president. If the knives on the tables hadn’t been plastic, I would have slit his throat before his guards could have shot me dead.”
Dequa was immediately caught in a dilemma. Had Kitman actually assassinated President Mitchell on a whim—as strong a blow as that would have been—in order for it to have value, his ties to the cause would have needlessly been revealed. That would have compromised their current mission. And that mission would have a far more devastating and long-lasting impact than trading a replaceable president. For the attack they were on the verge of staging would ensure the fulfillment of scripture, of the caliphate itself. He chose his next words carefully. “It was the plastic that thwarted you? Not compromising our operational security?”
Kitman quickly amended, “Yes, of course, it was merely a momentary impulse, which I did not act upon exactly because it would jeopardize our grand event.”
Dequa stood silent as he questioned himself. Had he pushed too far in questioning Kitman’s resolve, causing him to recount that tale with more machismo and carelessness than one would demand of a leader? He decided not to press the issue but to make note of the impulse as a reminder that Kitman could, at some point if pressed, act out on impulse rather than follow the dictates of the supreme leader. “I understand the urge,” Dequa said and he immediately witnessed a relaxing of tension from Kitman’s face that he hadn’t been aware of earlier.
“All of these trappings are the sheep’s clothing in which I gain acceptance and rise above suspicion of the herd.”
That analogy reminded Dequa that El-had was known as the Wolf. He had successfully decimated a Russian tank barracks by dressing the part of a Russian colonel and, once inside, killing thirty troops as they slept. Their seven T55 tanks had become useful tools against the very Russian invaders themselves, until the gas and artillery ammunition ran out. They’d used the last shell of each tank to disable the armored weapons when they’d finished with them.
“Is there any other damage from the Prescott matter?”
“A few loose ends, which will be trimmed by tomorrow, but nothing that could affect our ability to execute.”
“Very well. Keep me informed.”
.G.
In her career, Brooke had taken the shuttle to DC a few hundred times. This time was different. This time she wasn’t a subordinate, wasn’t one of many working on a team; now she was the leader, heading up an op. At her new director-level status, the entire team worked for her.
This time she wasn’t flying down to get guidance or approval, she was meeting with the Secretary of the Treasury to inform him of her change in investigative focus. As Brooke had found over and over again, nothing says total commitment and unassailable motives better than a face-to-face meeting. So even though it made a huge hole in her day, she deemed it worthwhile.
Somewhere between reading the reports from her field agents and the plane landing, she slipped off into a light nap. When the wheels hit the tarmac, she was jolted awake. A smile was on her face because in the REM phase of slumber she’d been on a beach in Hawaii with Mush.
.G.
“Just a minute!” Cynthia called out, wondering why the doorbell had to ring right now. She wrapped her wet hair in a towel and threw on a robe. She looked for her slippers but couldn’t find them, so she left wet footprints on the terracotta tile floor all the way to the stairs as she went down to the front door. She looked through the sidelight and saw it was a FedEx delivery person. “Sorry, I was in the bath.” She signed for the package, and then realized she didn’t have any money on her. “Hold on.” She gently let the door remain ajar and went to the small telephone table by the door, opening the drawer she always kept tip money in. She counted out five bills and handed them to the deliveryman. “Thank you.”
She rested the box on the secretary desk in the hall. She couldn’t make out the sender’s address. She used a letter opener and opened the small box. There was an envelope. She slit it open and read, “For the boat. A woman never has enough sunglasses.” She was tickled to find Gucci sunglasses, Louboutin Flats sandals, and a lovely Hermès beach wrap carefully packed in pretty tissue paper. She sighed. “Oh, Paul. You are such a romantic.” She actually danced her way upstairs to the bedroom with the box in her arms like it was Fred Astaire.
.G.
Since the Sec Tres’ office didn’t have a “Remo” switch, Brooke suggested that Cass meet her for a walk out on Fifteenth Street.
Five minutes later, Brooke and Cass were like tourists on the DC sidewalk.
“Okay, now why the spy novel tactic, Brooke?”
“There’s a big leak, sir. At least out here we can speak freely.”
“I don’t like the insinuation that . . .”
“Sir, I have changed the course of my investigation. I no longer think Prescott was a part of the financing scheme. I believe now that they were actually the organizing element.”
“You’re saying Prescott deliberately financed ter
rorists?”
“Yes I am. I am no longer treating them as co-conspirators but as the initiator of the action.”
“What would be the reason? Why would ISIS need the money? They are pulling in millions every day from captured oil fields. They could certainly fund any operation.”
“Market manipulation.”
The Sec Tres pondered the idea. “I see. If you can predict where, when, and how a major event inflicting damage on the country is going to occur you can use that knowledge to make prudent moves.”
“Exactly. It fits the chatter and their own statements.”
“How did you come to this?”
“The woman, Cynthia. She was a compliance officer but also kept the books. We stumbled over a code in the ledger. I believe that code was the slush fund. And furthermore, she knows it too. I want to offer her full immunity.”
“You have that power. Why are you asking me?”
“Because I found this . . .” She held up her iPhone with the picture she had snapped of the framed photo hanging on Cynthia’s wall that showed her, Cass, and Morgan Prescott on some kind of fishing trip.
Cass was stunned. Not so much in the revelation but in the deft way Brooke had, in one move, gotten what she wanted and pulled a power play over him. Yet, Brooke’s move was shrewd in that it appealed to his survival instinct. With immunity, Cindy couldn’t be pressured into revealing their relationship. “Sounds like the right move. But I assure you, Cynthia is in no way connected to me. As I remember, she was on that trip as a perk for some good work she had achieved.”
“Well, all the same, sir. I wanted to give you the chance to tell me if there was anything more, before I proceed.”
“No. No. There is nothing more.” Cass looked out across Fifteenth, at the White House. He wondered if Brooke was going there next. He knew she was harboring a suspicion that he and Cindy were more than just casual acquaintances. Damn, why do women hold onto emotional attachments like pictures . . . That knowledge could be powerful if it was used against him. Of course, if he were able to get some dirt on her and her affair with the president, it could be a powerful bargaining chip, if it ever came to that. “Are you heading back to New York now?”
Give Us This Day Page 12
