The Shadows of Power

by James W. Huston

  Madani pleaded. “Your family has been wronged. Algeria has been wronged. All of Islam has been wronged by the United States.”

  “That won’t bring my brother back.”

  “We are not here to talk about stupid ideas like bringing your brother back,” Khalida said. “Do not utter such nonsense.”

  Ismael glared at him.

  Madani continued. “You will be returning to the United States.”

  Ismael nodded.

  “Do you have no outrage over what happened to your brother?”

  “Yes,” Ismael said. “I am outraged that Algeria sent my brother out against the Americans and that his incompetent section leader fired a missile without intending to.”

  Madani looked at Khalida, who returned his look of concern. “You are speaking in a way that could result in your—”

  “And I am outraged that an American pilot gloated on the American television about killing my brother and showed the gun camera film of my brother’s airplane crashing into the sea. And no parachute.”

  Madani nodded enthusiastically. “The Americans have humiliated our country in front of the entire world. They have slapped us in the face. And you, Ismael, my friend, have been put in a unique position to do something about it.”

  “I must go.”

  “We are here to offer help. We can give you money, weapons, assistance, whatever you need. We already have people in the United States.”

  “Then why don’t they do it?”

  “Because he was your brother,” Madani answered. “It is your duty.”

  Ismael kicked at the dirt with his foot. He made no response.

  “Think about it. And when you decide what to do, talk to us.”

  “How?”

  “We have a chat room on the Internet. It can be used for communication, but you must be very careful.”

  Ismael shook his head. “No. Those rooms are being monitored.”

  “You have a better way?” Madani asked, perturbed.

  Ismael nodded. “I have created an e-mail encryption software program. It has never been used. I developed it and never showed it to anyone. In America, when you do such a thing, you are required to give the back door key to the NSA, the agency that listens to your phone calls and tries to read your e-mail. I don’t think they’ll be able to break this one. I will give it to you.” Encryption had been a hobby of several of his EE classmates at George Washington. They all theorized that the NSA could break anything. Maybe. Ismael doubted they’d break this, at least not fast enough. But he knew that if he went back to the States, he would need whatever advantages he could muster. They would have some very smart people looking for him. “Can you get me another passport?”

  Madani smiled. “Of course. As many as you want.”

  “I can’t go back to my student apartment. They will be waiting for me.” Ismael’s mind was working. Plans were forming. “I need to get back to the United States immediately, before they start looking for me at the entrance points.” He thought. “A Moroccan passport. Can you do this?”

  “Of course.”

  “I want to take a car or the train, something untraceable, to Morocco and leave for the States from there.”

  “We will get you out of the country unseen. We promise.”

  “I will meet you tonight, behind the train station by the taxi stand at eight. I will bring you a disk with the e-mail encryption.”

  Madani nodded, then handed Ismael a small package. “Here. Put this away.”

  “What is it?”

  “American cash. You may be able to use it. If not, then you can return it someday.”

  * * *

  Don Jacobs didn’t like the initial reports at all, the videotape of the funeral, the anti-American attitude, activity, and agitation. He had grown accustomed to it in so many places—constant demonstrations, the tired anti-American rhetoric—but this one was different. It was from a specific event—the confrontation between the American Navy fighters and the Algerian Air Force MiG-25s. He leaned over his desk and reviewed the file that had been hastily compiled. It was mostly speculation and guesswork, but part of his job was picking the good guesses from the bad. If you got enough of them right through instinct, analysis, or intelligence, you succeeded, and you got promoted. But if you got it wrong, it could get ugly.

  His office door opened and closed. “Sorry.”

  Jacobs looked up at him. “Come on in. See the file?”

  “Yeah,” Rat said.

  “What do you think?”

  Rat sat on the edge of the chair. “We’ve been watching those guys for years. They’ve never operated outside the country.”

  “You saw what they did in those villages.”

  “Yeah. Brutal, but that was before they got into power.”

  Jacobs kept reading. He finally threw the file down and dropped his reading glasses on top of it. “You think they’re less likely to do something when they’re in power?”

  “No. They’re worth keeping an eye on.”

  “What about the agent report we got about the funeral?”

  “The meeting in the alley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That one got my attention,” Rat said. It had gotten his attention like gears clicking into place in a transmission. It was what he had learned to look for in counterterrorism operations, when things start fitting together, disparate things, things you might not even regard as gears. He had learned they all came together for a terrorist operation to occur, and the key was spotting the gears before the operation got under way.

  “His brother was the pilot that was killed.”

  “Exactly. And he has an open ticket to return to the States. He’s been a student here for three years. Before the World Trade Center even. And he got by the heightened scrutiny of student visas because he’s a legitimate student. He’s been attending classes regularly, doing well. He’s on schedule to get his degree next year.”

  “An open ticket back to Washington. This could be a real problem.”

  “Not only a ticket, but he used to be one of them. I saw one of your analysts thinks his whole ‘retirement’ from the killing business when he was seventeen was bogus. That he was tapped by someone higher up for bigger things. They’re running him without the old guard even knowing it. But he was just speculating.”

  Jacobs shook his head. “What are the chances of that? We whack some random pilot, and his brother is a student here.”

  “When you have five hundred thousand foreign students here, the odds aren’t that bad.”

  “You think he’ll come back?”

  “No doubt in my mind.”

  “And do what? Study?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it. But I don’t think he’d come back just to study. Not now.”

  Jacobs was thought of as one of the cleverest men in the Directorate. He didn’t take unnecessary risks, or at least what were perceived after the fact to be unnecessary risks. That was, of course, the impossible standard to which all in the Agency were held. He got up early and stayed up late just to out-think his prey. “Why can’t we just turn him back when he tries to get into the country?”

  “We can. But if we’re right, and he has something else in mind, you think he’ll just show up at Dulles and say, ‘Hi, I’m back’?”

  Jacobs shook his head. “So what’s your thinking?”

  “I know what I would do if I were him.”

  “What?”

  “Go after the symbol.”

  “What symbol?”

  “The one who was on the Today show smiling about it as the gun camera film showed his brother getting killed.”

  “The pilot?” Jacobs asked, amazed at the thought.

  “Exactly. The pilot. Lieutenant Ed Stovic.”

  Jacobs sat back and put his hands behind his head. It hadn’t even occurred to him. “You think that’s what Algeria has in mind? Not just him, but Algeria?”

  “Maybe. They may have other things in mind as wel
l, but I’ll bet that’s where he starts.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “Because people will see the symmetry. They may actually sympathize with him.”

  “And it’s simple.”

  “Very.”

  “I’m used to our war being elsewhere. We have to give this to the FBI and the INS. We can’t operate inside the U.S.”

  “You can’t. But I can.”

  Jacobs stared at Rat, not sure whether to pursue the suggestion. “Meaning?”

  “I have a company, remember? Security consultants. Weapons testing.”

  “But you work for us.”

  “That’s what you think. I just work with you,” Rat said. “I’m a private businessman. Anyone can hire me to do security inside the U.S. or outside.”

  Jacobs studied Rat. He was beginning to suspect something deeper than just an interest in the latest possible terrorist exposure. “Why do you care?”

  “He’s a Navy pilot.”

  “So?”

  “And he went to the Naval Academy.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We were in the same company. Same class.”

  “Ah,” Jacobs said, understanding now what he had been missing. “That explains a lot. It might be to his advantage for you to look out for him.”

  “You still need to tell the FBI and the INS. Maybe he will just walk off the airplane at Dulles.”

  “Maybe he will. I’ll pass all this on to the FBI. They’ll have primary responsibility.”

  “Give them my number. Tell them I’ll be around, and to leave me alone. I’ll have my team working on it. I’m also going to watch his apartment on the off chance he goes back. I doubt he will, but maybe there’s something there he needs.”

  “I don’t know about this. We should leave it to the FBI.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I’ve heard a lot about your opinions of the FBI since I’ve been around here.”

  Jacobs was taken aback. “Who?”

  “Various people.”

  “Oh? And what did they say?”

  “They said you melted down about Hanssen. Said you’d never trust the FBI with anything again.”

  Jacobs carefully considered his response. “How do you feel about the FBI?”

  “I think they’re swell.”

  Jacobs laughed out loud. “Right.”

  “So are you going to tell the FBI everything you have?”

  “I’ll tell them what I think they need to know.”

  “Tell them I’ll be looking for this Algerian too. I’ll stay out of their way, but I’m going to be around.”

  Jacobs got a very serious look on his face. “If anything comes of this, it’s your ass, not mine. Even if they trace you back to whatever government position they trace you back to, you were moonlighting. Operating on your free time.”

  “My free time. Yes, sir.”

  “Just to make sure we understand each other, I’ll deny I ever authorized you to do anything. Unless this goes overseas, in which case I’ll give you whatever help you need.”

  “I understand.”

  “Stay in touch. Give me reports.”

  Rat had heard enough. We have nothing to do with this, but give us reports. “What if I find him?”

  “That would depend on the circumstances. You’ll just have to exercise your perfect judgment.”

  Ismael walked up the stairs to his room at the Motel 6. He was in Virginia overlooking the beltway, the circular freeway that ringed Washington, D.C., like a moat and protected Washington from reality. He closed the door behind him and sucked in the chilled air that he had grown to love. He kept the room as cold as he could make it to fight off the humidity. High temperatures didn’t bother him. Algeria could get very hot. But the humidity in Washington in September was unbearable. He quickly crossed to his desk, turned on the television, pulled his laptop out of its carrying case, and plugged in the phone line. He logged on through his Internet provider and entered his PIN.

  He went to a search engine and typed in “Lieutenant Ed Stovic.” He stared at the screen as CNN blared behind him. Finally the blue bar was done and he had five pages of hits to go through. He quickly went by the ones that were from genealogies and other irrelevant information and came up with several hits from newspapers reporting on the shoot-down. He skipped those and scrolled down the page. Finally he saw what he wanted. “The Ragin’ Bulls.” He selected the page and found himself staring at the VFA-37 web page, proclaiming to the world how great the F/A-18 squadron was.

  His face clouded as he read the latest “press release” from the Ragin’ Bulls of their great victory in the Mediterranean, but he read every word on the web page that discussed the shoot-down until he finally found what he was looking for—the pictures of the pilots. He scrolled down the names on the list until he found Stovic. He clicked on it, and a picture of a naval officer came up on his screen, the smiling face of a dark-haired officer in a dress blue uniform with Navy wings and ribbons over his left breast. It was him. The same Navy pilot as on the Today show. Stovic’s biography was summarized right next to his picture.

  Ismael read it carefully, then copied the text and saved it to his hard disk. He right-clicked on the photo and printed it on his color printer. He put the photograph in a file folder and then printed every page of the squadron web page. He finally copied the page that gave the contact information for the squadron. Oceana Naval Air Station, Virginia Beach, Virginia. He could still hear this Stovic telling the interviewer on the television how fortunate he was that the shoot-down had occurred at the end of their cruise. He was heading home to be with his family. Ismael went to a locator web site. It compared every major city’s phone book with other identification data. He entered Stovic’s name. Up came Stovic’s home address and phone number in Virginia Beach.

  He leaned back in his chair and stared at the address. He exited out of the search engine and went to Hotmail. He checked to see if he had any e-mails. There was one. The return address was a list of numbers. He clicked on it to open it and saw nothing but gibberish. He frowned, then remembered the CD he had given Madani. He retrieved the CD from his backpack and slid it into the drawer. The computer automatically loaded it and walked him through the installation of what it called “E-Mail Helper.” He waited as the blue bars ran from left to right and it was finally loaded. It asked him if he wanted to run the Helper software now, and he clicked on the “yes” box. It asked him to call up the e-mail, which he did. Suddenly the computer screen went dark, and countless combinations of numbers scrolled by faster than he could ever hope to read them. He stared at the screen, waiting. A completely different screen came up, and in the middle was the Hotmail e-mail. It was from Madani, written in the plainest language imaginable. He clearly didn’t think anyone would be able to decode it:

  Brother Ismael:

  I know you want to operate alone. I know you will do what you are going to do without our help. For now, that is acceptable. But we have recently learned of some information that you need to know. The things that were originally told to us of your brother’s death are not true. Your impressions of Hamid were apparently correct. Your brother did get out of his airplane. He died because his parachute was burned and unable to stop his descent. Recently a Liberian freighter stopped in our port to deliver your brother’s body. It has been recovered. They took pictures of him on the day of his death. Those pictures are attached. We thought you would want to know what this American pilot did to your brother. Do not look at them if you do not want to see them. Let us know if we can help you. Madani.

  He stared at Madani’s words; the news worked its way down into his mind. He had already generated terrible images of his brother, but new ones were exploding in his head. He had to look at the photos. He had to know. His imagination would be worse than anything that might have actually happened.

  He looked at the symbols for the three photographs. All he had to do
was click on them. He moved the cursor arrow over the first one and stopped, his finger resting on the touch pad. Two touches was all it would take. He waited. His heart pounded. He could feel his pulse in the tips of his fingers on his laptop. He touched quickly twice, and the computer slowly opened the photograph. His brother lay on the deck of a ship still in his flight suit and harness. Ismael’s eyes darted around the photo, drinking in the image too fast. He breathed rapidly.

  The parachute with its brown edges lay in a heap around him. He could see several pairs of work boots and shoes in the photograph of the sailors standing in a circle around Chakib. His face was completely burned on one side all the way to his mouth, exposing his teeth back almost to his ear. His hands and arms were missing the skin, and the muscles and ligaments underneath were a white, fishlike color. He had been burned badly before he hit the water.

  Ismael closed his eyes and looked down for several minutes. He finally closed the photograph and looked at the other two. They were from the same angle, only closer. He closed the photographs, then closed the e-mail and the encryption program. He pulled up a map web site and calculated the distance to Virginia Beach.

  * * *

  “How was your flight?” Karen asked.

  “Great,” he said embracing her. “2 v. 2 against Air Force F-16s.”

  Brandon and Carrie, two and five, jumped up from the table and rushed to greet him. He picked up Brandon and hugged Carrie to his leg. “How are you guys doing?”