The walls of his office bore the usual trophy photos of Wheatley posing with foreign leaders, Senate notables, and two U.S. presidents. The comfortably large room had a couch, upholstered chairs, coffee table, and a small conference table, all standard issue for high-ranking CIA leadership.
Wheatley stood when he saw Kate and extended his hand.
“I was sorry to hear you were a political casualty of the OBL raid,” Wheatley began in a voice many described as soothing. “It’s a cost of being in the business we’re in.”
“I’m surprised you noticed, and it’s not a problem. Actually, I am grateful to have had as much time in Pakistan as I did.”
Kate was talking too fast. She felt foolishly nervous. She wanted to kick herself or bite her tongue. She had hoped to appear collected, and she would have dressed better had she known a senior manager was on her agenda.
He motioned her to one of a pair of large armchairs and took the couch opposite. She smoothed her skirt and crossed her legs demurely.
“I’ve been chatting with your old boss this morning. He tells me you walk on water,” Wheatley said. “We all know you saved his life back in February in Quetta. You’re a hero. He’s pulling out all the stops. He wants me to find a good opportunity for you.”
Kate was grateful. Poor Mortie: it was after 9 PM in Islamabad and Wheatley had probably kept him at his desk well into the evening. Kate guessed there had been plenty of late night phone calls from headquarters in the week after the Bin Laden raid. If it was daytime in Washington, it was daytime in every CIA station in the world. You learned to live on headquarters time, not local time, especially when it came to the phone ringing and responding to cables. Wheatley thought nothing of calling staffers at 3 AM, dragging them out of a warm bed.
She was intrigued by Wheatley’s comment about a job.
“Something here at the CTC?” she asked.
“You’ll need some preparation here of course, and I want to get to know you a little better before you go back out, and to get you integrated with my team. But, no, not a job here. We need you back in the field. You are exactly the person we need overseas.”
“What part of the world?”
“Right back where you came from, South Asia, Pakistan, where the bad guys roam.”
“But that won’t be possible,” Kate said. “I was pretty much kicked out for good.”
“You won’t be going back under official cover,” Wheatley said. “We’ll have to get you in under the radar.”
Wheatley was talking about a more dangerous way to get CIA officers overseas, not as one of the coddled diplomats in the safety of an American Embassy, complete with diplomatic passport and diplomatic immunity. They were planning to send her back as a NOC, (pronounced ‘knock’), an agent under Non-Official Cover. She would have no official ties to the United States Government. If caught by an adversary under those circumstances, prison—or worse—might well result.
“Now that’s not something I thought was in the cards,” she said.
“No one blames you for being PNG’d,” Wheatley said. “The Paks are pissed. Hell, I don’t blame them. I’d be pissed too. Mortie says his life has been hell since the raid. He’s surprised he hasn’t been booted out himself.”
“To be honest, I’d rather be in the field at this stage of my career. I don’t think I could do my best behind a desk.”
“This won’t be a desk job,” Wheatley said. “It’s high risk, but you’ve already been involved with Yasser al-Greeb, you’ve met General Mahmood, and you’ve demonstrated exceptional skills in the special operations area. We think you’re just right for this mission.”
“So what is involved?” Kate said. “What is the objective?”
“Ayman al-Zawahiri, the last remaining top dog in Al Qaeda,” Wheatley said flatly.
“Isn’t finding Al-Zawahiri Mortie’s highest priority now that OBL is dead?” Kate asked.
“Absolutely, and he’s totally on board with this. He asked for you personally.”
“So I’ll be working for him?”
“Actually, your contact with him will be limited for security reasons. The Paks can’t get wind of the fact that you’re back in country. We’ll insert you via Bagram and you’ll make your way to the border.”
“So who will be my handler?”
“That would be me,” Wheatley said. “We’re going to run you directly out of the CTC. This is an operation I’m going to direct myself. It’s a Code Zero on the chief’s list.”
Code Zero referred to the CIA Director’s list of priority tasks, zero being the highest priority, nine the lowest.
“This is going to be getting a lot of attention on the Seventh Floor. The Director wants daily updates.”
Kate reflected quickly on the assignment. Al-Zawahiri’s capture would signal the demise of the original top-tier Al Qaeda leadership. There could be no higher-profile operation within CIA. This was a dream job. Her feeling of total failure was being replaced now by a warm feeling of elation. This was going to be her big break, her chance to do something in the field, away from a desk.
“There is already way too much premature talk on the Hill and in the press of Al Qaeda having been rolled up,” Wheatley said. “People forget that Al-Zawahiri is more of a hands-on leader than Bin Laden ever was. He’s ruthless, he seems to enjoy killing. He’s no philosopher. He’s more of a pit bull.”
“A weird trait in a physician.”
“Exactly. He’s more of a vivisectionist, a butcher. And he’s always eager to launch the next attack, always trying to surpass the last one in terms of violence and bloodshed. Anyone who thinks he’s going to take OBL’s death lying down isn’t thinking clearly. We absolutely need to take him down fast. No doubt he will want to do something spectacular right away to establish himself as the new top man.”
“What about Yasser al-Greeb. How does he figure into this?” Kate asked.
“As you know, Al-Greeb is still out there. The guy who tried to blow you up was a Moroccan, low level cannon-fodder who was using Al-Greeb’s name to get close to us.”
“And the real Al-Greeb is our pathway to Al-Zawahiri?”
“That’s our working hypothesis,” Wheatley said. “Al-Greeb is in Al-Zawahiri’s inner circle now. We think they are both in Peshawar. Al-Zawahiri is an easy man to disguise and so he is more easily concealed in a crowded urban area. Al-Greeb is a cipher for us, all we have is a grainy, low-quality mug shot from Amman.”
“We have to capture or kill him?”
“Exactly. And it will have to be done the hard way. Predator drones are useful for reconnaissance, but we can’t bomb inside Peshawar with Hellfire missiles. Too many innocent people would be taken out as collateral damage. It would be impossible to conceal.”
“So what is our link to Al-Greeb?” Kate asked. “What’s the connection?”
“That’s the most interesting part of all this,” Wheatley said, “and one of the reasons I want you for this operation. It’s all about Mahmood Mahmood. We happen to know that Brigadier Mahmood has been meeting on a regular basis with Al-Greeb, perhaps to monitor Al-Zawahiri, perhaps to protect him, we don’t know yet, though I’d be willing to bet serious money that Mahmood is not a turncoat. You’re going to find out for us. You have the previous contact with Mahmood. It could be the one thing that can give us a small edge here.”
“And Mortie, too, of course,” Kate said. “He knows Mahmood a lot better than I do.”
“Yes, of course,” Wheatley said, “and Mortie, too. But you’re going to track Mahmood and Al-Greeb in a way that Mortie cannot, and you’re going to find out for me what Mahmood is really up to, and you’re going to follow the trail right to Al-Greeb’s safe house.”
***
Kate spent the afternoon shuttling from one administrative office to another in OHB, completing her end-of-tour debriefings, filling out forms to ship back her meager household belongings from Islamabad, surrendering her State Department credentials and othe
r expired ID while getting the new home office credentials necessary for getting access to headquarters, performing all those menial chores required of anyone who chooses to live and work in a Federal bureaucracy, even one as small as CIA. Kate found it nearly impossible to concentrate on these routine matters. Her mind raced over her conversation with Wheatley. She could not carve out any free time for herself to think and plan until the following day.
Once assigned a cubicle in the CTC and an internal computer account, she tried to develop background materials on Yasser al-Greeb. Though CIA publicly made a big deal about its cutting-edge technology, the IT systems within the Agency were basic and dataflow was still mired in the Age of Gutenberg. Paper was everywhere. She was able to glean a little from an internal electronic archive that contained biographical profiles of enemy foreign nationals, but the main value of these databases was to steer her to more in-depth material kept at higher levels of security and in paper files stored in a central registry. The fact that CIA was mainly a paper-based organization was not something the PR folks advertised on college campuses garnering new recruits.
Accessing web-based materials in the public domain had to be done on a separate computer system in an isolated area, since the internal computers had ‘airwalls’ (instead of firewalls, meaning that the internal computers were not connected to the outside world at all, even by UB ports or CD drives, and therefore could not be hacked by any technology short of mind-reading).
Kate found that the basics of Al-Greeb’s 34 years on the planet were straightforward: Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb was born in 1977 in Kuwait City, Kuwait, in a middleclass family of five brothers and two sisters. The parents were both originally refugees from Palestine. Yasser was the youngest child. His father, an oilfield engineer, moved the family to Jordan in 1990 when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Yasser graduated with honors from Amman High School in 1996. He then studied medicine for six years at Istanbul University, graduating with a combined bachelors of science and medical degree in 2002. He did an internship in internal medicine at the University of Jordan Hospital and at the Islamic Hospital, run by Jordan’s Islamic Brotherhood, in Amman. He married in 2004 to a woman from the Al-Rusefiah Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman. Little was known about her beyond her name, Samiha, and her Palestinian antecedents. The couple was thought to have had one child, a son. They lived in one of the poorer suburbs of Amman, Jabal Nuzhah.
Kate took this to be exactly what it was—the unremarkable biography of a middleclass Jordanian doctor. There were scores of men with identical résumés, but they had remained physicians caring for the sick in Amman clinics. What had taken Yasser al-Greeb to the battlefields of Afghanistan and the terrorist safe houses of Peshawar and Quetta? What had induced him to leave a new wife and a child for a mission from which he might never return? And why had a Moroccan suicide bomber expropriated his name?
If there were answers to those questions, Kate would have to find them by delving into files that were not kept on computers.
Chapter 5 — Moscow, Russia
Jacques LeClerc was confident that his trip to Russia would yield enormous profit. He checked into the 98-year-old Savoy Hotel on Rozhdestvenka Street, the most expensive in the city, where he took a two-room apartment for $550 a night. He charged it to a black American Express card issued to Security Exports, S.A., his personal firm, based in Paris, the Cayman Islands, and South Florida, where he also maintained a luxurious condo.
LeClerc rationalized the pricey hotel by telling himself that the cost was a bargain by Paris standards. The magnificent old hotel was also a stone’s throw from Red Square, where he would make his first contact the next morning in front of Lenin’s mausoleum.
Without bothering to unpack, he ordered from room service a bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne and a croque-monsieur sandwich dripping with melted Gruyère cheese, butter, and béchamel sauce topping two slices of toasted Italian bread and a half-pound of thinly sliced ham, the mid-day snack of a man who has opted for a short, luxurious life rather than a healthy one.
Rich meals, to be honest, were only one of many self-indulgences of this arms trafficker, for that was Jacques LeClerc’s profession. Nearing fifty, he had already reached a ripe old age for a man in his business.
Trips to Moscow were routine for LeClerc. Russia was the go-to nation for brokering weapons deals. The volume of small arms lying around from the Soviet days was staggering. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, weapons were everywhere.
After the withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya, the separatist regime discovered 28,000 rifles, 200,000 hand grenades, and over 13.5 million rounds of ammunition left behind. For a time, Chechnya was the main source of illegal small arms in Russia. But it was not the only source. There were large caches of arms in all of the former Soviet client states.
The bread-and-butter of LeClerc’s business, which generated between $1 million and $2 million a year for him personally, was the purchase of crates of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s iconic automatic assault rifle, the world’s most abundant military firearm, for export and resale in Africa and Asia.
Though he would deal with anyone who had the money to pay him, from rump revolutionaries in godforsaken African hellholes to urban criminal gangs in European and American cities, LeClerc was a purist of sorts. He insisted on buying, whenever possible, real AK-47s produced before the collapse of the USSR and warehoused by military officers, not cheaper knockoffs like the Hungarian AMD-65, a shorter-barreled cousin with a forward handgrip and a futuristic muzzle that, for reasons he could not fathom, had become popular in Afghanistan.
LeClerc also snapped up other light weapons, including the experimental AN-94 Nikonov assault rifle, a revolutionary weapon with shifted pulse recoil, a system designed by Kalashnikov engineers to minimize the gun’s kick after the first shot. This was said to increase accuracy. He was also always in the market for Dragunov sniper rifles, Bizon-2 submachine guns, and portable surface-to-air missiles. SAMs were hard to find but commanded a 100 per cent markup. By special order, LeClerc could also supply anything from a 100-bed field hospital to various military aircraft, including helicopters. Payment was in advance, of course.
Though he had kept his eyes open for one since the late 1980s, there was a particular weapon, a legendary kind of weapon, that had eluded LeClerc for his entire 22-year career as an international arms trafficker. It was a weapon so rare and so profitable that, should he ever succeed in acquiring one, it would end his need to work for the rest of his life.
There were said to be about 150 of these weapons, manufactured by the USSR before it dissolved, that could not be accounted for. They were said to be floating around within the borders of the former USSR alliance. They were likely in the hands of retired or cashiered Soviet officers who had expropriated them as a kind of substitute 401(k) retirement program.
This particular weapon would weigh between 90 and 250 pounds, the size of a small refrigerator, like one of those cube-shaped boxes found in every American college dorm to store beer. It would be portable enough to use a specially designed backpack or tent duffel bag as the means of delivery.
Yet notwithstanding its small size, this weapon could deliver huge destructive power. It was, of course, a nuclear device, one yielding between one-quarter and five kilotons of explosive force, enough to level lower Manhattan and kill, just in the initial fireball, between 300,000 and 1.5 million people in a crowded urban area.
LeClerc was seeking what was known in the popular imagination as a ‘suitcase nuke,’ or ‘mini-nuke,’ or even a ‘vest-pocket-nuke,’ though LeClerc himself doubted whether any such devices had ever been made smaller than a very large backpack.
The following morning, LeClerc had scheduled a meeting with a retired Soviet-era deputy defense minister, a man he had dealt with for years, who claimed he could provide him with a contact with access to a backpack nuke. It was warehoused not far from Moscow.
First hearing this news, LeClerc had shown appropriate
skepticism so as not to telegraph his eagerness to pursue such a deal, especially since he would be fronting his own money to buy it. Resale, LeClerc was confident, would not pose a problem for him.
***
A week later, a low ceiling of leaden clouds obscured the noonday sun at Podalsk, the grimy industrial city 25 miles south of Moscow that blights the banks of the Pakhra River. Retired KGB Colonel Viktor Marchenko, a rugged 65-year-old veteran of MinAtom and the Soviet nuclear defense industry, arrived at the Central Train Station a quarter-hour early so as not to miss his guest.
A pack of feral dogs, a growing menace in poverty-stricken greater Moscow, was circling inside the wooden turnstile. The dogs took one look at Marchenko and slunk away, heads low. Though long retired, Marchenko still had a lean, fit body, crew-cut iron-gray hair, a military bearing, mustache, and an understated air of menace. Animals and humans alike were instinctively wary of him.
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