The Faithful Spy

by Alex Berenson

  “Bonjour, mon oncle.” A moment passed, and Tarik wondered if he had misdialed the number. Then he heard Khadri’s voice, as calm as ever. “Bonjour.”

  Tarik felt an immense relief. Everything would be fine.

  14

  “WE’RE SURE WE have the right apartment?”

  “We’re sure. Sort of.”

  “Because we’re about to ruin someone’s day if we’re wrong.”

  “Either way we’re gonna ruin someone’s day,” Shafer said.

  He and Exley stood in the Secure Communications Presentation Center, watching a feed from Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on the six-foot-wide main monitor. Right on schedule, two New York City garbage trucks appeared on-screen, rolling slowly down the street. The whine of their diesel engines rumbled through the screen’s speakers. Exley glanced at her watch: 5:12 A.M. They would go in three minutes.

  “It’s too early for this,” she said to Shafer. She could feel her pulse pounding in her temples, a sure sign of a nasty headache coming on.

  “It’s too early for anything.”

  “No audio,” Vinny Duto snapped at a technician. Mercifully, the noise ceased.

  At this hour the street looked empty, or as close to empty as New York City could be. Dawn was an hour away, and the streetlamps provided the only light, a sickly yellow-orange glow. Graffiti-covered metal gates protected the silent stores. Black garbage bags were heaped in front of a Church’s Fried Chicken, offering a feast for the rats that scurried along the curb. At the intersection of Flatbush and Clarendon, the garbage trucks stopped behind a livery cab looking for the night’s final fare.

  But the street’s silence was deceiving. At the moment, more cops and FBI agents were on Flatbush Avenue than anywhere else in New York. Instead of trash, the garbage trucks held a dozen agents in their steel bellies. The homeless man lying in front of the Church’s was actually an NYPD detective. Snipers covered the street from rooftops around the intersection.

  The object of all this attention was a redbrick tenement fifty yards from the corner of Flatbush and Clarendon. Once again, Farouk Khan deserved the credit—or the blame—for what was about to happen. Two weeks before, acting on information from Farouk, an elite Pakistani army unit had swept through an al Qaeda safe house in Islamabad, catching two men. One quickly flipped, telling interrogators about an al Qaeda sleeper in the United States, an Egyptian who had entered on a student visa in 2000. The informant even remembered the Egyptian’s first name: Alaa.

  A search of immigration records by the Joint Terrorism Task Force revealed that nine Egyptians named Alaa had entered the United States on student visas in 2000. Four had left when their visas expired. Two of the other five still lived illegally but openly in the United States, according to public records. In two days, the FBI tracked down and arrested both. Neither was connected to al Qaeda, but both were immediately taken to federal detention centers for deportation hearings. Their bad luck.

  The remaining three Alaas didn’t appear on driver’s license lists or tax records or arrest warrants or voting rolls. They’d been careful. But in this case not careful enough. The JTTF passed the information from the visa applications to the Egyptian Mukhabarat. The Egyptians needed less than twenty-four hours to find the families of the three missing men. One was easily cleared; he had died in a car accident. Another was living under a fake name in the United States, working at a convenience store in Detroit. He sent money home to his family and had no known connections to terrorism in either Egypt or the United States. The FBI arrested and interviewed him, then flew him to Cairo under emergency deportation orders signed by a friendly federal judge. When he protested, he was told to consider himself lucky that he wasn’t being shipped to Guantánamo. He stopped complaining.

  Then there was one. Alaa Assad. An engineer, a graduate of Cairo University, and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian group that is half political party, half terrorist front. Alaa’s family admitted that he had traveled to the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan before getting his American visa. After he entered the United States he disappeared, they said. He never wrote and never sent money home.

  But they were lying. Alaa had made a mistake. A natural mistake, but a mistake no less. He had stayed in touch with his family. When the Mukhabarat pulled the Assads’ phone records, it found calls to a New York City cellphone. In hours the FBI tracked the phone, a prepaid model sold two years earlier at a drugstore in Queens. The phone would have been untraceable if Alaa had paid cash for it. But he had inexplicably charged it to a credit card in the name of Hosni Nakla, 1335 Flatbush Avenue, Apartment 5L, Brooklyn, New York. “Hosni” also had a New York State driver’s license whose picture matched the photographs of Alaa in the Assad family’s Cairo home. So the JTTF had decided to pay an early-morning call on apartment 5L.

  A typical successful investigation, Exley thought. A little luck and a lot of hard work. And it had happened fast, the dominoes crashing one into the next, as the most productive investigations often did.

  ON THE OTHER hand, the Albany and the Atlanta cases were stalled. The Atlanta shootings had proved especially messy. The killers remained unidentified and the motive a mystery. At first, Exley and everyone at the JTTF had assumed the shootings were related to terrorism. But the general’s hidden life had forced them to reconsider.

  The FBI, which was leading the investigation, had discovered that General West had slept with at least five enlisted men during his career in the army. He had once forced a sergeant to retire after their relationship soured. All five of those men had alibis, but other former lovers were surely lurking. One might have killed West for revenge. Even a busted robbery was possible; the Atlanta cops had found $200,000 in a safe in West’s bedroom.

  Making the case even trickier, the physical evidence proved that West and the bodyguard hadn’t killed the Arabs. A third shooter had killed them, then escaped. But why? Terrorists didn’t shoot their own. Maybe the third man had hired the other two to help him with a revenge killing, then taken them out so they wouldn’t talk.

  That was the FBI’s theory, anyway. Exley and Shafer and the others at the agency who knew about Wells had their own suspicions. But at an emergency meeting two days after the shootings, Duto warned them all to keep Wells’s existence secret. “He’s our asset,” Duto said. “There’s no evidence that he did this. No need to tell the Feebs about him.”

  Another lie, Exley thought. Wells was nobody’s asset right now, certainly not the agency’s. But she didn’t argue. If Wells wasn’t involved in the shootings, making his name public would blow his cover. And if he was involved…Exley didn’t want to think about that.

  Meanwhile, Duto’s team was still searching for Wells. As far as she knew, they had no leads, although she wasn’t sure Duto would tell her or Shafer if they had. Exley hadn’t helped. She still hadn’t revealed Wells’s early-morning call to her. Too much time had passed, she told herself. Talking about it now would just get her in trouble. But she knew the truth. She didn’t want Wells sitting in an isolation chamber in Diego Garcia. When he was ready he would reach out to them. Reach out to her.

  SO THE FBI never heard about Wells. And that wasn’t the only problem the Atlanta investigators faced. The Pentagon had pushed to classify details of what had happened at the house, claiming that disclosing too much information could compromise national security. The Pentagon’s real motivation—embarrassment about West—wasn’t hard to figure. But the FBI had decided not to argue. Even the third shooter remained a closely kept secret. The lack of information had created a vacuum that bloggers filled with wild theories, though no one had guessed the real story. Even the craziest conspiracy theorists had limits.

  The Albany bombing had also frustrated the JTTF. The bomb hadn’t left any recognizable signature. The timer, the trunk, the battery, and the wires were available at any Home Depot. The C-4 was military grade, but military-grade plastic explosive was available for the right price all over South America and east
ern Europe. The junk radioactive material in the bomb didn’t match any of the samples the Department of Energy had on file from Russian nuclear labs.

  The Albany investigators had managed to identify the man who’d died in the explosion. He was Tony DiFerri, an unemployed grifter with a half dozen arrests for burglary and cigarette smuggling, nothing that explained how he had ended up blown to bits inside locker D-2471. The best guess from the Joint Terrorism Task Force was that the man called Omar Khadri had duped him into opening the trunk. Unless they caught Khadri they wouldn’t know how. DiFerri sure couldn’t tell them.

  IT WAS 5:14. One minute to go. On-screen, the garbage trucks had pulled over and turned off their engines. Exley sipped her coffee. “You think it’s real?” she said to Shafer.

  “You know as much as I do.” Probably a lie, Exley thought, but she didn’t argue. Shafer was especially irritable this morning. “Let’s assume it’s real. The problem—”

  Shafer broke off. On-screen, men in black flak jackets, Kevlar helmets, and plastic face shields jumped out of the garbage trucks. They halted for a moment at the front door of the tenement, then blasted open the lock and ran inside.

  THE RAID WENT smoothly. At 5:22 A.M. four agents came out of the building holding a dazed-looking man in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his hands and feet manacled. They shoved him into an unmarked van and drove off, trailed by two police cars.

  Inside the Secure Communications Presentation Center, a small cheer went up.

  “Little early to get excited, don’t you think?” Shafer murmured to Exley under his breath. “We don’t even know if it’s the right guy.”

  Shafer was probably right, but she didn’t want to hear it. After everything that had gone wrong the last few months, the JTTF needed a break. “Can’t you be happy for five seconds?” she said. “If we’re wrong we’ll cut him loose. He can get a lawyer and sue us. Like everybody else.”

  “Assume we’re right. Assume he’s real,” Shafer said. “Somebody set up these cells very carefully—”

  “Khadri,” Exley said.

  “Sure, Khadri, whoever he is. Somebody. John Wells. Anybody.”

  Exley put her hand on Shafer’s shoulder and turned him so that she could see his face. “You don’t really believe that,” she said.

  Shafer shook his head. “No. But the more time that passes, the more I wonder. Why doesn’t he just call us?”

  Exley could feel her temples throbbing as she thought of Wells. “He knows we’ll bring him in if we find him,” she said.

  “Or he’s turned into a damn mole rat. He’s lived underground so long he can’t do anything else. He wants to hide forever.”

  “If he had something, he’d tell us. I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you be sure of anything about John Wells?”

  A very good question, and one she couldn’t answer.

  “Forget Wells,” she said. “Go back to Khadri. Or whatever his name is.”

  “Whatever his name is, he’s very good. We have no picture, no bio, nothing. And his network is airtight. We’ve had four hundred people working for five months to crack the L.A. bombing. Heck of a diversion, if that’s what it was. What leads do we have? Same for Albany.”

  “His network’s not airtight. It sprang a leak today.”

  “Even if he’s real, that was pure luck.”

  “We caught a break. That’s how it goes, Ellis. And maybe this guy is the thread that unravels everything else.”

  “I’ll bet you he isn’t. One dollar. I’ll bet our new friend Alaa has been waiting for a phone call since he got here. That’s why he got sloppy. He got bored. He’s a drone. Khadri’s too smart to give a drone anything important.”

  “No more bets, Ellis,” Exley said. “You still owe me a hundred for Wells. And you can say what you like. I’m glad we caught this guy.” She tried to keep her tone even, but she could feel her anger rising.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? The first time we capture an al Qaeda sleeper agent in America and you wish we didn’t?”

  “Jennifer, relax.”

  “I hate it when men tell me to relax.”

  “Then don’t relax. But think it through,” Shafer said. “Khadri can see us closing in. He has to figure the worst case, that we’re right on him, right on Network X. I think he’s going to move very soon.”

  “Before he’s ready.”

  “You mean before we’re ready. So it’ll be five thousand dead instead of twenty thousand.” Shafer laughed sourly. “Too bad we’re not as close as he thinks we are.”

  Exley wanted to beat her head against the nearest wall. “You told Duto this?”

  “I told him two days ago we should watch Alaa but not arrest him. Not tip our hand.” Shafer looked at the main screen. The van holding Alaa was speeding over the Brooklyn Bridge toward the federal detention center in downtown Manhattan. “You can see what he thought of that.”

  “Let me guess. He said you were speculating. Pure conjecture. That we don’t leave al Qaeda sleepers on the street. Especially after what happened in Albany. And Los Angeles. That there’s no evidence anything we do will cause al Qaeda to change its plans. And that we won’t know what Alaa knows unless we ask him.”

  “You forgot the part where he told me I was crying wolf.”

  “It’s all true,” Exley said. “Everything he said was true.”

  But she felt sick. Shafer was right. Finally, after all these years, the agency and the FBI had bumped against the edges of Network X. They had lit the fuse.

  “You’re right,” Shafer said. “I’m just guessing.”

  “Like you did in 2001.”

  Nothing had changed since then, Exley thought. The agency and the JTTF were still stuck on small, showy operations instead of finding the men who really mattered.

  “Duto reminded me that we don’t second guess at the White House anymore. We’re an instrument of national policy. We do what we’re told. I’d forgotten that.”

  He pulled out his wallet and counted out five twenty-dollar bills, shoving them into her hand.

  “That’s for Wells.”

  Exley flushed. “I was just kidding, Ellis,” she said. “I don’t want your money.” She tried to push the bills back to him, but he stuck his hands in his pockets.

  “Keep it,” Shafer said. “Maybe it’ll be good luck. Get the mole rat out of his hole.”

  “I thought you don’t believe in luck.”

  “I don’t.” He walked away.

  IN A MARRIOTT in Stamford, Connecticut, Khadri saw the arrest in Brooklyn on the local news from New York. The report was sketchy—the police hadn’t disclosed Alaa’s name or any details—but Khadri knew who had been arrested as soon as he saw the apartment building.

  Even worse, he couldn’t figure out how the kafirs had found Alaa. Only two people knew Alaa’s real identity or where he lived. One was Khadri himself, the other the leader of Alaa’s cell, a Lebanese named Ghazi who lived in Yonkers, just outside New York City. Khadri would have to make sure Ghazi was safe. But what if the Americans had already arrested Ghazi and were waiting for Khadri to call?

  No. Ghazi’s wife and children had been killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1983. He hated the Jews and the United States more than anyone Khadri had ever met. Ghazi would die before he betrayed his al Qaeda brothers. The kafirs had found Alaa some other way. Fortunately, Alaa didn’t know much, just the number of a cellphone Khadri would destroy as soon as he could, and an e-mail address that Khadri would never use again.

  A knock at the door startled him. Khadri looked at his briefcase, where he kept his gun. Were the kafirs coming for him already? “Yes?”

  “Room service.”

  Right. His breakfast. He opened the door, still half-expecting to see FBI agents lined up, guns drawn. But the only person outside was a waiter with a tray. “Just leave it, please.”

  “Yessir.”

  Khadri looked down at his food: hot coffee, scrambled eggs wi
th the steam still rising, a glass of fresh orange juice. Normally he would have been ravenous. But this morning he had lost his appetite. In just the last month, he had lost three of the ten sleeper agents that al Qaeda had in the United States. Including Qais, his best operative.

  Khadri had explained to Qais that he’d designed the mission in Atlanta to test Wells’s loyalties. He had warned Qais to be careful, to kill Wells immediately if he felt at all threatened. So Khadri couldn’t understand what had happened. Wells had e-mailed him afterward, explaining that the mission had gone wrong because West wasn’t sleeping where they’d expected. He was outside the main house, having sex with his bodyguard. The bodyguard had shot Qais and Sami before Wells killed him and West, Wells said.

  The story was so bizarre that Khadri almost believed it. Almost. He wished he knew if he could trust Wells. He had debated that question endlessly with himself, and he still wasn’t sure. But he believed that the answer was yes. More important, he didn’t have much choice, especially after what had happened in Montreal.

  Yet another disaster, Khadri thought. Allah had not blessed him this month. Crazy Tarik Dourant. Khadri understood why Tarik had snapped. His wife had deserved what she’d gotten. But why couldn’t Tarik just have waited? Khadri would gladly have taken care of Fatima and her kafir boyfriend in due time. Instead Tarik had lashed out—and now his work was about to be lost. The Montreal police had already interviewed him about Fatima’s disappearance. Soon enough they would come for him. Before he was arrested, Khadri needed to get Tarik’s germs into the United States.

  Wells was his best choice. Khadri’s other sleepers might have problems at the border, but Wells could cross easily. And Khadri thought he had found a foolproof plan, one that would work even if Wells was an American agent. A plan that would turn everything around and shock the world.

  As soon as possible Khadri needed to get authorization from Ayman al-Zawahiri for the new operation. Zawahiri wouldn’t be pleased with the change. Al Qaeda prepared its attacks years in advance. An operation as important as this wasn’t supposed to be revised on a few days’ notice, and the new plan would cost al Qaeda all its American sleepers at once. But Zawahiri would understand. Better their men should die gloriously than be arrested one by one. Better to strike while they still had the strength to land a heavy blow. This attack might not be as elegant as his original plan, but it would kill just as many people.