The living room was sparely decorated, just a black futon and coffee table. A flat-screen television was bolted to the wall, and it was on, playing a muted Spanish music video. Beside it, a closed door led to what had to be the bedroom. Wells pulled his pistol, held it by his side, moved toward the door.
It opened, swung toward him—
A woman stood in the doorway, young, brown-skinned, thick-hipped, wearing only a thin white T-shirt and panties. She looked at his face as though she wasn’t entirely surprised to see him. Then her eyes went to the pistol, and her mouth opened—
Wells dropped the pistol. A dangerous move, but he needed both hands to control her. As the pistol clattered down, he stepped to her, grabbed her neck with his right hand. He covered her mouth with his left, leaving her nostrils free so she could breathe. He looked around to be sure no one else was in the apartment, no one to jump him from behind or run into the living room and grab the pistol. Nope. Her T-shirt rode up, exposing her soft belly. Wells shoved her against the wall. He hated himself for the terror he’d put in her eyes. But he had to keep her quiet.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
She kicked at him, tried to scrape her nails across his face. Wells wondered if she knew any English.
He lifted his hand from her mouth, just a fraction, and her scream burst out. He covered it again.
“No peligro. Silencio. Sí?”
He looked into her eyes until she nodded.
He lifted his hand. Again she screamed.
No choice. He had to choke her unconscious. This was the risk of running missions in a country where he didn’t speak the language. He had no margin for error. But he wasn’t the one who would pay. He slid his hand up so that it covered her nose as well as her mouth and clamped it tight. Her lips were soft under his palm. He couldn’t avoid knowing the carnality of what he was doing. She fought for air, shaking her head side to side, but she had no chance against his strength. He held her until her eyes rolled back and she went limp.
He laid her down, trying to be gentle. Then he taped her mouth shut and flex-cuffed her wrists and ankles. Gently, of course.
In the living room, he collected his pistol and looked around. The apartment might not be an official government-owned safe house. But it had a similar feel, minimal furniture, and no personal items. The way the woman had paused when she saw him was telling, too. She hadn’t seemed entirely surprised that an armed stranger had materialized inside the apartment. As though it didn’t belong to her either.
The kitchen drawers held nothing but silverware, plates, and two half-empty bottles of aguardiente, a local liquor. No phone or electric bills, nothing with a name. Back to the bedroom. Here, Wells found a few personal items that all seemed to belong to the woman. On the bedside table, a Bible and two worn copies of Cosmopolitan en Español. A plastic bag of loose coca leaves. In its natural form, coca was a mild stimulant, useful for altitude sickness. Colombians chewed the leaves or brewed them for tea.
Under the bag, Wells found a Samsung phone that looked nearly new. He tried to look through it, but it was password-protected. The lock screen photo showed the woman who was on the floor. She wore a modest black bikini and a wide smile and stood on a beach. Wells didn’t recognize the backdrop, but Bogotá was hundreds of miles from any ocean. This woman wasn’t poor or friendless. She owned a fancy phone, had gone on vacation. Most people in El Amparo couldn’t do either. Maybe she was the daughter of Martinez’s source.
The woman groaned under her duct tape, though her eyes stayed closed. Wells couldn’t leave here without talking to her. Even if she didn’t go to the police, he’d never see her again. He had to have a translator.
He reached for his phone.
Four rings, voice mail, a blur of Spanish. Wells tried again, and this time the phone was answered.
“Tony. It’s John. From El Campín. Can you come to El Amparo?”
“El what?”
“It’s in Kennedy.”
“You get lost?”
“I need a translator.”
A pause. Then: “Five million pesos.” More than fifteen hundred dollars.
“Fine.” Duto could pay him back. “How soon can you be here?”
“Give me the exact address.”
Wells did.
“Forty-five minutes.”
“Call me when you’re downstairs.” Wells would have to open the front door to let Tony inside, and he didn’t want to leave this woman alone longer than a few seconds.
Wells went back to searching the apartment. By the time he was done, he was certain the woman didn’t live here. Her only clothes were in a suitcase in the closet, T-shirts and jeans, nothing fancy. The suitcase also held twenty hundred-dollar bills in an envelope hidden in the lining. The money wouldn’t survive a TSA-style scan but it might escape a robber’s notice. If she had a wallet or passport, Wells couldn’t find it.
He did find one surprise tucked behind her clothes, a two-foot-high steel safe with a dial lock the auto picker couldn’t touch. The safe was too heavy for Wells to move by himself. Unless the woman knew the combination, he’d need a safecracker to open it.
Finally, the woman’s eyes fluttered open. When she saw Wells, she twisted wildly, kicking her heels against the floor. Wells grabbed her by the ankles and lifted her upside down. The move was absurd but effective. She stopped fighting immediately.
He put her down, squatted next to her. “Silencio. Por favor.”
With nothing else to do, he carried her into the living room, plopped her on the couch. See? If I meant to hurt you, would I let you watch Spanish MTV? They sat silently as Pitbull rapped in Spanglish. Dale mami, para mi taxi / I met her in the back seat of a taxi . . .
Finally, Wells’s phone buzzed: Tony.
“I’m about to walk into 81L. Which building?”
“Block and a half down, north side. What’s the Spanish for just talk?”
“Solo habla.”
Wells hung up, flipped the woman on her stomach. He pulled back her legs, flex-cuffed her wrists to her ankles so she couldn’t kick at the floor or try to run. He couldn’t risk a neighbor spotting her as he dragged her to the front door, so he had to leave her in the apartment. Thus, he had to hog-tie her. Of course.
“Solo habla. No peligro.”
She muttered under the tape as he carried her to the bedroom and set her down.
He stuck the Bible in the apartment door to prop it open, ran to the building entrance, pulled open the front door as Tony arrived. The last slivers of daylight were fleeing the sky. Night would be on the slum by the time they left. The guys on the corner were still there, too.
First things first.
6
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
For two days, Ellis Shafer sulked.
He and Wells had been through the wars together. Okay, Wells had been through the wars. Shafer had been through headquarters, the occasional trip to Tokyo or Paris notwithstanding. Still, he’d risked prison for Wells, saved Wells’s life more than once.
How had the man paid him back? By falling for the first bauble Duto threw his way. Julie Tarnes. Even more than most guys, Wells was a sucker for pretty women. The normal explanations didn’t hold. Wells wasn’t insecure, and he was plenty handsome, one of those lucky men who’d gotten better-looking past forty. No, Shafer blamed another part of Wells’s personality. Wells might not believe he could make much difference, but he couldn’t stop trying. He was a romantic, though he’d never describe himself that way.
Maybe seeing himself as a knight-errant, a modern Don Quixote, was the only way Wells could survive his past. But that chivalry colored the way he reacted to women. They liked him, and he liked them. Especially the good-looking ones. Like Julie Tarnes.
Duto was nothing if not an acute observer of human nature. He’d known what he was doing wh
en he put Wells with Tarnes. And Wells had plenty of excuses to dump Shafer. The agency was sick of Shafer. Shafer was years past mandatory retirement age. He hung on because his hunches were right more often than they should have been. But no one did him any favors. If Wells needed quick help in the field, Shafer wasn’t his best bet.
But the obstacles weren’t new. And they had never stopped Wells from working with Shafer before. Until now. Wells had pretended to agonize over Duto’s offer. In truth, he’d dropped Shafer fast. Especially once he met Tarnes.
Worst of all, Duto knew Wells’s disloyalty would eat at Shafer, and Duto was just nasty enough to get a charge from tearing up their friendship.
For forty-eight hours, Shafer stewed in silence in his office, skimming the reports coming out of Dallas. No one asked his opinion on the investigation. He wondered if he should resign.
But on the third day, Shafer’s fever broke. He woke up angry. With himself. For letting Duto manipulate him and try to push him out. For his absurd sentimentality. He wasn’t quitting. Not now, not ever. Forget Julie Tarnes. And Wells, too. Time to focus on Dallas.
That day, the next, and the next, Shafer stayed at Langley past midnight. Fast as he read, he couldn’t keep up with everything the FBI and the intelligence community produced. Forensic reports, intercepts, gossip—thousands of pages already, hundreds more every hour. Still, Shafer did his best. He focused especially on the FBI 302s, the summaries of witness interviews from the Bureau’s agents.
But the more he read, the more puzzled he became.
The police had killed three jihadis inside the arena. The fourth man had driven the attackers’ car. He hadn’t gone inside. Video showed him reaching into the trunk when the bomb inside detonated. No one knew why. Maybe the timer had failed. Maybe he’d wanted to have the glory of causing the explosion.
The blast had obliterated his body completely, but the cameras had caught the car’s license plates. It was a Hyundai registered to Ahmed Shakir, a cousin of one of the other jihadis. Shakir’s face matched the video surveillance of the fourth man, and no one had seen Shakir since the attacks. Thus—as Duto had told Wells days before—the investigators assumed Shakir was the fourth attacker, most likely the leader.
The theory was plausible. But it raised even more questions, and no one had answered them.
El-Masry and the other attackers had left online traces of anti-American views. The FBI had them in what it called its T4 database, the broadest of its terror lists. The database included anyone who had ever followed a known Islamic State account on Twitter and made statements supporting terrorism. The FBI didn’t have enough agents to track all sixty-two thousand people on it. The Bureau used it as an early warning system. If local police arrested someone on it for a crime, even one unrelated to terrorism, the database was supposed to alert the FBI. That way agents could ask the local cops about the arrest and interview the suspect, if they chose. But el-Masry and the others hadn’t ever been arrested, so the FBI had never spoken to them.
Further, as broad as that watchlist was, Shakir didn’t appear on it. He’d been a cleanskin, agency jargon for an operative who’d offered no hints of his terrorist sentiments before he attacked.
To unravel the mystery, the Bureau had sent eighty of its best counterterror agents to Dallas. They’d paired with a hundred ten Dallas police detectives and officers. The group had torn apart Shakir’s house and car, scoured his phone records, credit cards, bank account. The NSA had cracked his only known email account, though it hadn’t officially shared that information with the FBI to preserve the Bureau’s ability to make criminal cases against other conspirators, if any were found. Investigators had interviewed Shakir’s neighbors and friends. His high school classmates. The mechanic who serviced his car. The pet store owner who sold him cat food.
Within hours of identifying him, they learned of his cocaine dealing. Within days, they convinced a couple of his buyers to talk. The Drug Enforcement Administration was trying to trace his upstream connections, so far without success.
Yet the investigators still had no idea who or what had driven Shakir to attack. If he had ever expressed anti-American or pro-terror views, no one had found them. Not online, and not in real life. The NSA had found no evidence that he had talked or emailed with anyone inside the Islamic State, much less been an active jihadi taking orders. He’d never tried to go to Syria or Iraq. He didn’t even have a passport. Nor did he seem particularly religious. Unlike the other three attackers, he had never belonged to a mosque.
As far as the investigators could tell, Shakir had been assimilated into American society, a small-time drug dealer with a Facebook account and a cat. Until a few months before the attacks, when he cut off his friends and clients while spending more time with his cousin. That investigators found that decision suspicious. Shafer agreed. It was really the only suspicious move Shakir had made. But the investigators couldn’t find evidence that he’d met any jihadi recruiters or made any other preparations for the attack. His electricity and credit card bills and phone records showed he still lived in his house in East Dallas. He vanished in plain sight.
Until he, his cousin, and two of their buddies went to a basketball game and killed three hundred people.
The Bureau had investigated the other attackers thoroughly, too, of course. Agents had talked to the imam and congregants at the South Dallas mosque where they prayed, as well as their families and neighbors. But they interested Shafer less. They fit a more standard jihadi profile. They’d expressed anti-American views for years. They belonged to a conservative mosque. They were poorly educated foot soldiers. Throwaways.
Shakir held the key.
Jihadis had “self-radicalized” and come out of nowhere before. But never on this scale. Further, the deadliness of the attack—and the fact the jihadis had used C-4—suggested that Shakir and the killers had received substantial training. Terrorists normally made bombs from TATP, triacetone triperoxide, an explosive any college chemistry student could make in a kitchen. But TATP’s volatility made it as dangerous to bombmakers as to their targets. It had a nasty habit of blowing up on its own. C-4 was far more stable, the reason the American military used it. But buying or stealing C-4 was nearly impossible. Making it required expensive equipment.
Where exactly had Shakir gotten hundreds of pounds of it?
The FBI had concluded the four attackers had acted on the orders and with the help of an as-yet-undiscovered Islamic State cell inside the United States. Which raised the most uncomfortable question of all: Were other attacks in the works?
His murky status at the agency notwithstanding, Shafer had every classified clearance the government offered. Now he wanted to see Ahmed Shakir’s last moments for himself. Shafer didn’t even have to leave his office to watch the videos. The FBI had uploaded them to servers at its headquarters. Fiber-optic cables went to Langley, Fort Meade, the White House, and the Pentagon, a private Internet solely for classified traffic.
Of course, the Bureau wouldn’t have been the Bureau if it hadn’t added fifty hours of video from every conceivable angle. Quantity over quality. But Shafer eventually found what he was looking for, cuts of Shakir’s Hyundai turning off the highway . . . making its way through the game-night traffic . . . Parking close to the arena . . . el-Masry and the other two jihadis getting out the car . . . Shakir following a few seconds later . . . The other three grabbing assault rifles from the trunk . . . starting to shoot, muzzle flashes clearly visible . . . moving quickly away from the car before it blew . . . A silent horror movie that turned Shafer’s stomach.
Unfortunately, the video coverage wasn’t great. The cameras outside the arena focused on the pedestrian plaza, not the roads. More than a dozen cameras had caught the shooters as they approached the turnstiles. But only three showed the car itself. Only one had a direct angle on Shakir as he went to the trunk. None offered a view of Shakir’s hands inside
the trunk. The entire sequence lasted barely forty seconds, start to finish. Still, the video mesmerized. Shakir stepped out . . . looked around . . . went to the trunk . . . reached down . . .
And the screen went white.
Shafer watched it a dozen times. And a dozen more.
With every viewing, he became more puzzled. The video was black-and-white, and the camera had been about fifty yards away, so the resolution wasn’t great. Shafer couldn’t make out Shakir’s facial expressions clearly, much less read his lips. But he could see which direction Shakir was looking. As Shakir stepped out of the car, he didn’t go directly to the trunk. In fact, he took two steps the other way. Then he stopped, looked around. Not just around. Up. Like he was looking for a plane. Or a helicopter.
Only after el-Masry yelled to Shakir did he move to the trunk. The other men quickly reached inside, pulled out the AKs. Not Shakir. He froze again. As the shooting started, he shivered. Jumped, really. The others moved and fired. Shakir stayed in place, almost crouching, looking side to side. He still seemed to be waiting for someone. After another five seconds, he tilted his head as if he’d heard something. Finally, he came out of his reverie. He turned back to the trunk and reached inside.
In their report on Shakir, the FBI’s profilers had noted his odd behavior. They’d dismissed it as the last-second panic of a suicide bomber. A CIA/Mossad analysis of suicide attacks had found that one in three bombers failed to pull the trigger. Most analysts believed the percentage would have been higher if not for bomb belts that were remotely detonated and thus blew even if the attackers changed their minds. After a brief hesitation, SHAKIR detonated the bomb, the profilers wrote.
But when Shafer watched the video cold, pretending he didn’t know Shakir was involved in the attack, reacting only to what he saw, the scene played out differently. Shakir seemed scared, yes. But he also looked surprised at least three times. First when he stepped out of the car and didn’t see whatever he was expecting. Then when his cousin started to shoot. Finally, just before he reached into the trunk.
The Deceivers Page 10
