False Flag

by F. W. Rustmann Jr.

  Maggie placed her granny glasses on her head and wagged a finger at them. “I just hope they don’t notice those shot-out locks at the apartment building anytime soon. Didn’t you guys ever attend the locks and picks course down at The Farm?”

  Santos grinned. “Sure we did, and so did you. And you know damn well that opening locks with a pick isn’t like how they do it in the movies. It takes time to manipulate a lock. Sometimes a long time, and we couldn’t risk that.”

  “I guess so,” said Maggie, “but I still worry about the damage you guys did there. If they notice it—and they will the moment someone goes back in there—they will know a rescue attempt was made.”

  MacMurphy said, “Maybe they’ll think it was a robbery attempt.”

  “Right,” said Maggie with a bemused look on her face.

  “Anyway,” said MacMurphy, “it’s done. Let’s put it behind us. We’ll find out where Yasmin is from Abu Salah’s driver and then we’ll go get her.”

  Santos rolled his eyes. “And we’ll work out the details as we go.”

  “Nobody said this was going to be easy,” said MacMurphy.

  “Okay, knock it off,” said Maggie. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Well,” said MacMurphy, “your baby-sitting job is over. You can either go back home and tend to business there or stay here and help with surveillance.”

  Santos said, “We could throw a black burqa over you to help you blend in.”

  “I’d rather do that,” she said. “You boys definitely need some adult supervision, and Christy and Wilber can manage things just fine back in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “Done,” said MacMurphy. “Call the DDO later this morning and brief him. I’ll do the same with Hadi. We’ve got no time to lose.”

  CHAPTER 45

  MacMurphy’s phone call to Kashmiri was brief. “They’ve moved her out of the Lailake apartment. We don’t know where she is and need to find her. Please contact Nabil and find out where she is. Give him another envelope. I’ll reimburse you.”

  Kashmiri met with Nabil that same afternoon at their usual café. He was seated in a booth at the rear of the café when Nabil came wheeling in. They greeted each other and Nabil used his powerful arms to lift himself out of the wheelchair and into the seat across from Kashmiri.

  Kashmiri got right to the point. “We’ve got a problem. They moved out of the apartment at 67 Lailake Road. They did it last night without consulting Tehran. The Ayatollah is very upset and believes either Abu Salah has gone rogue or Hezbollah is directly defying Tehran’s orders. This is very serious, Nabil.”

  Nabil was wide-eyed. He shook his head in disbelief. “They are crazy,” he exclaimed. “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Because they are all thugs and can’t be trusted. That is why we contacted you in the first place. Your help is more important to us than ever before.” He pushed a fat manila envelope across the table to Nabil. “This is a bonus for you and Walid. It is to underscore the importance Tehran places on your cooperation, especially now.”

  “Certainly, you can count on me. I’ll call Walid right away and meet with him as soon as he is able.”

  “Do it right now. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of this.”

  It was after midnight when Walid walked into his uncle’s home. Nabil had been sitting up watching old TV reruns while he waited. They embraced and Walid sat down in a chair across from his uncle. He immediately apologized for being so late. “I’m sorry, Uncle. I know it is terribly late, but they have kept me very busy. I’m sorry to keep you up so long, but you said it was very urgent, so I . . .”

  “They called me,” said Nabil. “Tehran asked me, ‘What’s Abu Salah up to? What’s he doing?’ They said he moved the CIA hostage without their approval. They were frantic.”

  “Oh, my . . . I didn’t know.” Walid was confused. “I thought Abu Salah was just obeying orders. He doesn’t do anything without orders.”

  “Orders from Hezbollah, perhaps, but not from Tehran. They were taken completely by surprise. They do not know what’s going on. What happened?”

  Still confused, Walid said, “I wasn’t given any notice. I was waiting in the car down the street as usual. And Abu Salah came over and told me to pull up in front of the apartment building and wait. Several minutes later he came down with the old woman and the hostage in between them. At least I’m pretty sure it was the hostage. They got into the back seat and he told me to drive away.”

  “How do you know it was the hostage?”

  “Because they were leading her, one on each arm. Then again, she looked unsteady as she walked. But—”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “No, she was covered from head to toe in a black burqa. I only saw her eyes and they were frightened.”

  “Did they speak? Did you hear her speak?”

  “Not the hostage. She was sobbing. She never said a word.”

  “Where did you take them?”

  “When they got into the car they blindfolded her. They did not want her to know where we were going. Abu Salah just indicated to me to drive and keep driving. That is what I did. I just drove around the city. Occasionally he would indicate to me to turn left or right.”

  “How long did you do this . . . drive around?”

  “About thirty, maybe forty minutes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he directed me to a building. We drove to a small bungalow next to a gas station, about two or three kilometers south of the Lailake address.”

  “Is that where you let them off?”

  “Yes, they hurried her out of the car and up the path and into the house.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, I waited there for a while. I was starving. I had not eaten. Then Abu Salah came out and sent me to get food for everyone. When I returned I just waited there, afraid to move in case Abu Salah wanted something.”

  “What time did all of this happen?”

  “We left the Lailake address at around six. I was just about to leave and get some dinner when Abu Salah came over to me. Then we drove to the new place. We got there a little before seven. Then I got the food and waited there until around eleven when Abu Salah came out and told me to go home. He stayed there all night. I got home around midnight.”

  Nabil sat back for a moment wondering if he had covered everything, if there was anything he had forgotten. “Oh yes, I almost forgot. How stupid of me. What is the address of this new place, this bungalow?”

  “I don’t know the address. I didn’t notice. But I can tell you how to get there. It’s pretty simple.”

  Nabil wheeled into the kitchen and returned with a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen. He handed them to Walid and said, “Draw me a map please.”

  Walid spoke as he drew a rough map on the pad. “Here’s the old address. From there you drive south and then cut over to Hadi Hassan Nassrallah Road over here to the west. I am sure you know it. It’s a big thoroughfare.”

  Nabil nodded.

  “Then you continue going south until you come to the end of the road, just past the entrance to the Hadath Branch of the Lebanese University. Here. Then you turn right and go a short distance to the end of that street. Then take a right again onto this little street. There is a small gas station—just two pumps and a garage—here on the corner. You cannot miss it. Just past the gas station, set back from the road, is the bungalow.”

  Nabil studied the map for a moment, thinking. He said, “Who is with the hostage?”

  “Abu Salah and the old woman. They are stuck there until I go back in the morning. They have no automobile.”

  “Did you eat with them in the house?”

  Walid laughed. “No, of course not. They do not trust me to go in the house. I ate my food in the car. I never went into the other places either.”

  Nabil nodded. “So, right now, the only people in the bungalow, as far as you know, are the three of them?”

  “Yes
, the old woman, the hostage, and Abu Salah.”

  “What about the guards? There were guards at the other place, weren’t there?”

  Nabil reflected a moment. “You’re right. Three guards rotated at the front entrance of the other place. Maybe they will come tomorrow. I do not know. But there were no guards at the bungalow when I left.”

  Walid got up to leave. He leaned over to offer a goodbye embrace to his uncle when he suddenly remembered something and pulled back excitedly. “Oh, I almost forgot. I don’t know if this is important because it doesn’t concern what we have been talking about, but it is very . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I overheard Abu Salah speaking on his cell phone. He was very excited and spoke too loudly. It sounded like he was getting instructions from someone very important in Hezbollah. A man was telling him about a plan to ambush the American ambassador’s motorcade, and he wanted Abu Salah to participate in the attack.”

  “What? Are you sure? When will this happen?”

  “I’m not sure, but he mentioned the American ambassador had scheduled a meeting with some Syrian officials near a place called Aanjar on the Syrian border. Abu Salah was very happy. He said, ‘Don’t worry. The sonofabitch will never make it to Aanjar.’ Those were his exact words. He was very excited.”

  CHAPTER 46

  They were not taking any chances.

  Yasmin’s wrist was handcuffed to a metal cot in a small bedroom at the rear of the bungalow. Moving her wrists was agony, so she tried her best to keep them still. The feeling in her legs and feet had finally returned. The muscles in them felt sore and irritated, but any feeling was better than the numbness she had feared would never completely wear off. She wore a black burqa over her clothes. It stank of a body odor that was not hers.

  She tried to remove the burqa. But with one hand chained to the top of the cot, she could not get it all the way off. So the smelly garment ended up hanging painfully from her wrist to the floor. She guessed it belonged to the old woman. Black burqas were her uniform.

  Yasmin looked around the little room. There were two small windows, both of which were boarded up with plywood. The walls were papered in a gaudy floral pattern of yellows, purples, and greens. The paper was stained and peeling and the oak flooring was uneven and warped.

  Like her previous prisons, the only furniture in the room, aside from her bed, was an old wooden table and four matching chairs. Her blindfold had not been removed until she was in the room, so she had not seen the layout of the rest of the house. But she knew they had walked her through the entrance and down a hall to her room.

  She could hear the muted sounds of a TV or radio coming from down the hall behind her. She surmised that there was a kitchen or living room at the front of the house and that this was where the sounds were coming from. She could also hear the distant sounds of aircraft flying low overhead, which led her to believe she was still fairly close to an airport.

  She had been there for about an hour, trying to get her bearings, when the old woman entered the room with a plate of food and a tall glass of lukewarm tea. Yasmin resisted the urge to cry out in pain when the woman unlocked the handcuff from the bed and let the burqa fall to the floor. The woman stilled the swinging handcuff in an iron grip, and Yasmin couldn’t stifle the small scream that escaped her throat. Unfazed, the woman asked if Yasmin wanted to use the restroom before eating.

  Yasmin nodded. The woman led her down the hall past Abu Salah, who stood menacingly by the door, to a small bathroom. The old woman accompanied her, never releasing her end of the handcuffs, while Yasmin did her business. Then she brought her back to the bedroom. At the table, Yasmin sat down and the woman attached the handcuff to the back of a nearby chair. To distract herself from her throbbing wrists and legs, Yasmin stared hard at her food and tried to think of other things.

  At least they are feeding me three times a day. But why all the extra precautions? Yasmin thought.

  Yasmin sat eating her meal with one hand while the old woman sat across from her, staring up disinterestedly at the ceiling or across the room. Neither spoke. Abu Salah had closed the door but she sensed he was not far away.

  She gingerly pushed the food around on her plate but could not eat much. Her stomach would not stop fluttering in trepidation. Yasmin knew this was the beginning of a new phase of her captivity and feared the worst. What was going to happen to her? Was anyone looking for her? What were her CIA colleagues and the rest of her government doing to gain her release?

  Yasmin was well aware of her NOC status and that she had no immunity, and this added to her dismay. She was afraid Pouri wouldn’t be able to keep her promise and was anxious about who would replace Bashir. Obviously, Iran would send someone who could do what both Pouri and Bashir had failed to do, someone with more extreme methods.

  Yasmin shook and she stared hard at her food.

  CHAPTER 47

  MacMurphy briefed the team on his late-night telephone conversation with Kashmiri while they ate breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. He led with the news of the planned Hezbollah attack on the American ambassador’s motorcade. When he finished, he shook his head and said, “That’s all we know. But we can fill in some of the holes ourselves. I don’t think the ambassador has multiple upcoming meetings with the Syrians, not in Lebanon anyway. And the distance he will have to travel—it’s what, a three- to four-hour drive to the border?—should help us narrow down the intended attack date.” He turned to Maggie expectantly.

  Maggie sat there stunned before answering. “Holy crap! We need to get this to the DDO as fast as possible. He’ll be able to figure out if the information is correct and, if it is, the date of the meeting.”

  Santos said, “And if it is good info, all the ambassador has to do to prevent the attack is cancel his meeting. If he doesn’t actually have a meeting scheduled, we’ll know the information is bad.”

  MacMurphy completed his briefing on the location of the new safe house and said, “We won’t know how difficult this surveillance is going to be until we get out there and take a look. Hadi will join us at the site later this morning. Let’s grab our surveillance duds and get out there ASAP. We’ll meet at the Land Cruiser as soon as Maggie finishes her call with Rothmann.”

  They met at the car twenty minutes later and headed toward the new safe house. MacMurphy drove while Santos navigated from the hand-drawn map spread out on his lap. Maggie sat in the back seat, awkwardly pulling a black burqa over her street clothes.

  As they headed south down Nassrallah Road, Santos remarked, “Hey, this surveillance might not be too bad. This is a good neighborhood. Lots of shops, restaurants, and relatively upscale buildings. Not like that other slum.”

  Maggie said, “Yes, that’s the entrance to the Hadath Branch of the Lebanese University coming up on our left. We’ll do fine in this neighborhood. Lots of students and middle-class people walking around.”

  “Turn right at the next street,” said Santos, looking down at the map. “Go to the end and turn right again.”

  MacMurphy turned and proceeded down the paved, two-lane road, lined on both sides with three-story, red-brick apartment buildings. They guessed they were in a section of student housing. At the end of the road, the pavement ran out and so did the nice neighborhood.

  He made a sharp, right U-turn onto a dusty, unpaved, pothole-infected road that ran parallel to the road they came in on. The small gas station, surrounded by a junkyard filled with an acre or two of rusting automobiles and trucks, was on their right. To their left, on the other side of the road, they saw empty fields dotted with scrubby trees, polluted with garbage, and pockmarked with the occasional squatter’s hut. The huts were built mostly of corrugated roofing, old metal signs, and a few two-by-fours. A bit further down the road sat a dilapidated, pea-green-colored cottage. Their target.

  “Merde!” said MacMurphy. “This is impossible!”

  “Jesus, how are we going to hang around here witho
ut attracting attention?” said Maggie. “There’s no traffic and, aside from the natives, there’s no one on the street.”

  MacMurphy drove a bit further down the road and came to a dead end. “Sonofabitch . . .”

  An old woman in a black burqa stepped out from behind one of the shacks and stood staring at them while picking at her nose with her pinky finger. MacMurphy struggled to turn the Land Cruiser around. The woman’s mangy dog began barking incessantly.

  “What do we do now?” said Maggie.

  “We get the hell out of here,” said Santos.

  MacMurphy said, “Maggie, shoot as many pictures of the cottage as you can when we pass by.”

  Afraid to roll her window down, Maggie took photos through its tinted glass instead. She kept shooting until MacMurphy pulled onto the pavement of the main street and turned back toward the university.

  They gathered back in MacMurphy’s room at the hotel. “Well, that was disappointing,” said Maggie.

  “That’s an understatement,” said MacMurphy.

  Santos sat reviewing the photos on Maggie’s camera. “Wait a minute.” He turned the camera toward them and scrolled through the photos. “Do you see what I see?”

  Maggie said, “I see a bunch of dark photos of a crappy, pea-green bungalow sitting out in the middle of a junkyard. That’s what I see. Good location for a prison.”

  “Look more closely,” said Santos.

  “I see it,” said MacMurphy. “You’re talking about the backside of the apartment buildings along the road we came in on.”

  “Yes, they look out over the rear of our target.”

  Maggie said, “You’re right. Observation posts. A whole row of them. Maybe we’re back in business. Let’s get Hadi Kashmiri on it right away. We need a real estate agent.”

  CHAPTER 48