Threatcon Delta

by Andrew Britton

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Last month,” Phair said. “He is a driver. He has a nice little business, which I suggested to him.”

  “Whom does he drive?”

  “Iraqi soldiers,” Phair said. “They go home every week with their pay.”

  Dell paused to read her notes. “You were not in a good way when the Irish soldiers found you.”

  “Not physically.”

  “Yes, I should have been clearer,” she said. “You were in the back room of a soup kitchen—”

  “That was when the explosion occurred,” he said. “They found me in the front room. I was trying to help poor Kim. Have you ever seen a child make snow angels?”

  The woman nodded.

  Phair said, “That was what she was doing. In her own blood.”

  The woman stopped nodding. She looked at her file.

  Dina put her fingertips to her lips as if she were thinking. The movement surprised her. It was an old tell revealing that she’d had an emotional reaction. She’d trained hard to wipe all such tells from her system and hadn’t exhibited one in years. Something about the chaplain was getting to her.

  “Before you arrived at the soup kitchen,” the psychologist continued, after a decent pause, “your trek to Basra had subjected you to hunger, dehydration, heat, cold, the elements, and occasional abuse. Also malaria and several forms of the flu. And you were nearly killed when someone from a Sunni neighborhood noticed you and followed you.”

  “Yes, I was wearing the clothes of the Kurdish Peshmerga.”

  “They took you prisoner and would have executed you, but you escaped.”

  She paused again. Dina realized that she was trying to find a new way to ask a question she’d tried before. Had he said how he escaped from the Sunnis? If not, that would certainly explain why the military brass doubted whether he had escaped at all . . . or if he had been turned by them and planted back with the Americans.

  The silence continued. Eventually Dell asked, “Why didn’t you leave Basra after you escaped from the Sunnis?”

  “Because I had—a mission,” he said. “I was being exposed to the many faces of God. I was not yet finished with my study.”

  Dell looked over the typed report from the unit that had discovered him. “This says you were found in the street. How did you get there?”

  “With help from a Kurd I didn’t know who had heard of my plight and risked his life. How ironic,” he said. “He never would have helped me thinking I was Catholic. Or American. Yet I am the same person as the man in the Kurdish clothes.”

  “You would have helped him, though, in a similar situation?”

  “Of course,” Phair said.

  “What happened after that?” she asked. “You could have fled.”

  “They were looking for me,” he said. “I might have fled right to them. So I pretended to be homeless until they stopped searching. So many are homeless now, you see. I knew no one would notice me. But a few days later the Irish soldiers did.”

  “You were wearing your dog tags,” Dell said.

  “Yes.” He absently rubbed the flat of his fingers across his waist.

  “Why?”

  “In case anything happened to me,” he replied. “I wanted someone to know. They would have been sold in a curio shop and made their way back, eventually.”

  “You were wearing them on your belt, tucked inside,” she noted. “Were you afraid they’d be seen around your neck?”

  “That was one reason,” he said. “Did you know that Herod the Great carried his bona fides around his waist, and not his throat?”

  “I did not,” she said. “Was he your inspiration?”

  “No. He feared someone would use them to strangle him. I was not. I had a rosary attached to the chain when I first started out. It made me feel closer to God, though I’m not sure He would have appreciated the location. Still, He knew what was in my heart.”

  “You didn’t have the rosary when they found you.”

  “No,” he said. “It broke while I was running from a militia and fell through my pant leg. Perhaps God had the final say after all.”

  “You still sound as though you wish the Irish Guardsmen hadn’t found you.”

  He sighed. “Part of me was ready to come back. I had run out of resources.”

  “Physical?”

  He nodded. “To have any significant impact here requires money and more hands and hearts. And—something else. I don’t know what.” The forty-five-year-old grinned. “It certainly requires someone who is a little more rested than I am.”

  “You can continue to do your original job, now that you’re back.”

  He managed to sustain the grin. “Do you think they’ll let me?”

  “That depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  She replied, “On how badly you want it.”

  “That is the question, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes slid to Dina Westbrook.

  Later, after the chaplain left, Dina discussed the situation with Major Dell.

  “Spiritually,” the psychologist said, “I have never met anyone who is more plugged in. He has squeezed every bit of religious and cultural juice from the sects he has encountered, but without taking on any of the political pulp. I would say that of course he feels lost, being removed from what he perceives are his spiritual roots.”

  “But is the air of being lost just a cover for patience and a plan?” Dina queried.

  “I don’t think so, but honestly, it will take much more time to find the bottom of this man. He is a deep well.”

  “All right,” Dina said. “How about we make sure you are assigned to the Warrior Transition Brigade when you get back to the States, so that eventually you can continue to work with him?”

  “I would very much appreciate that.” It was clear that Dell was covering an even more enthusiastic response.

  They shook hands, and the psychologist walked Dina to the door. “Do you believe him?” Dell ventured.

  Dina started to raise her hand to her lips but stopped. “I’m prepared to withhold judgment,” she said, almost to herself. Then she smiled brightly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  The old reality was back.

  It only took a few minutes for the chopper to rattle the magic dust from Kealey. His thin mantle of peace fell away as they followed Route 7 and then picked up I-95 and traced it south. The noise and shaking weren’t bad as helicopters went, and the fuel smell was no worse than he could have expected. But the sight of the traffic, the industry, New York and Philadelphia—they were all the world he had wanted to leave behind. The change from power-down mode to plugged in felt like he was pulling a dusty, ratty, indigent coat from the closet. It fit like a second skin but it wasn’t what he wanted to be wearing.

  By the time they touched down at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Kealey was back at war with himself: this-is-my-duty versus I-don’t-want-to-do-this-anymore. Only now that he had tasted clarity, the cacophony was maddening. The sound of the aircraft arriving and departing, the vehicles roaring and thumping across the tarmac, the haze in the air where he knew the city of Washington, D.C., was lurking—all of it was oppressive. He felt Ryan Kealey starting to backslide into ryan kealey, a mere cog in a big machine. He had to pull that old coat around him, button it up, polish up his skills and achievements like the coat’s buttons, to retain a sense of his personhood.

  It was a necessary machine, his left brain reminded him. A machine that keeps totalitarianism at bay.

  His right brain felt only burnout. Allison had warned him about this day.

  Kealey was surprised to find Harper waiting for him on the tarmac. The deputy director had a golf cart and a civilian driver. He looked ten years older, thirty pounds lighter, and a couple of inches shorter than the last time they had been together. The toll of the convention center attack was different on him than it had been on his wife, Julie. And then there w
as the pressure of the job....

  “No luggage?” Harper asked.

  “Back in my car,” Kealey replied. “It was my to-go bag.”

  That was the bag Kealey kept packed for sudden trips. Its contents duplicated all the essentials he had at his place down here.

  “We’re only going over to the JIB,” Harper said.

  Kealey did not ask, “And then . . . ?” Whenever a government official met you at an airstrip, it meant they did not intend for you to stay very long.

  Kealey did not want another mission. By God, he did not want one.

  The JIB was the Joint Intelligence Building. During the Cold War, the nondescript, two-story brick structure was a staging area for Emergency Rapid Responders. That was a relatively benign name for the flight crews designated to evacuate key officials from the capital to secret bunkers built deep in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downsizing of the air force, evacuation operations were consolidated at nearby Andrews Air Force Base. The building at Langley was given over to DHS.

  The two upstairs floors were for monitoring everything from e-mails to cell phone calls to websites and blogs. Only two desks were needed to monitor news sources worldwide, down from half a floor just two years before. The basement, formerly the communications center for the ERR teams, was where the influx and analysis of joint field intelligence operations took place. That was where Harper took Kealey via an elevator, the shaft of which was built to withstand a nuclear detonation, literally. They went to a small conference room that had dark monitors on every wall. There were laptops on the rectangular table. None of them were turned on. The only other object on the table was a briefcase.

  The driver had accompanied them and Harper asked him to get coffee.

  “What can I get you, sir?” the driver asked Kealey.

  “A Get Out of Jail card,” Kealey smirked. “I’m okay, thanks. I had a water on the chopper. What’s your name?”

  The young man snapped a look at Harper to make sure it was okay. “Solomon Gill,” he said.

  “Pleased to know you,” Kealey said with a knowing smile.

  “He’s a good man,” Harper said when the driver had left. “Wants to be a field agent.”

  “What is he, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three,” Harper said.

  “Fresh out of which Ivy League school?”

  “Princeton,” Harper said. “Doing a lot of recruiting there now.”

  Of course, Kealey thought. Director Robert Andrews went there. “Well, it’s good to see the bright, enthusiastic new blood. Remind you of you?”

  Harper grinned. “I wasn’t hungry, I was patriotic.”

  Harper had begun his career as a young analyst working the Soviet desk, but it wasn’t long before the smart, intuitive young man had found his way into the Operations Directorate. By the mid-1980s he was running agents behind the Iron Curtain and arranging for the safe passage of a few defectors whose positions within the Committee for State Security made them valuable assets to the CIA.

  “You were pretty ambitious back then, too,” Harper noted.

  Harper had intentionally understated that one. Kealey had joined the U.S. Army as soon as he was able and fast-tracked it to the rank of major in eight years. He had a chest full of medals to show for it: the Distinguished Service Cross, the Legion of Merit with one Oak Leaf Cluster, the Bronze Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters—the list went on. He led an A-Team in Bosnia and became a Company man—all before his thirty-first birthday. He spent the next three years with the Special Operation Division, putting out wildfires in places no one else could get to, in ways no one else had even considered—or dared. He had been so busy it never occurred to him, then, how accurate the SAD acronym had been. Kealey kept shrugging off the atrocities he saw and the things he did until the cumulative weight of it could no longer be ignored.

  Gill arrived with the coffee—already prepared the way Harper liked it—and shut the door. Harper opened the briefcase with a thumbprint on the top panel. It hummed open. He removed a tablet, turned it on, handed it to Kealey. There were photos of a dead man, one after another. The resolution was sharp enough for Kealey to see the flies on his stab wounds and bird droppings in his dried blood. The eyes were gone, probably not from the attack itself.

  “Two days ago, Yerby was watching for a mule train that Danny Hernandez was part of,” Harper told him. “He was hooking up with Iranians who want to use his resources to transport WMDs into this country.”

  “His orders were—?”

  “Removal. The permission slip was verbal, eyes only, DEA administrator Ryan Beit and deputy administrator Deborah Brook. I know them both. No paper trail and there’s no way they told anyone.”

  “Who watches the watcher?” Kealey asked.

  “Exactly. Someone had protective eyes on the party and spotted Yerby,” Harper said.

  “Crossbow and knife,” Kealey said, examining the photos of the wounds.

  “Yes, and it was surgical. The killer wasn’t one of the typical message-sending thugs.”

  “Footprints? Trail?”

  “They found some broken grass, crushed bugs,” Harper told him.

  “Urine?”

  “Not a trace. There were a couple of partial footprints, enough to give us a size 8D boot,” Harper went on. That would fit what little intel we have about the cartel, that it’s gender-blind.”

  “It’s easier for women to recruit females as agents, especially girls that lost their mothers,” Kealey said. “It’s probably the same in that trade.”

  “Worse,” Harper said. “For many of them, from poor villages, the only other option is prostitution. Which these guys force on girls who refuse to carry for them.”

  It was a stinking business. There was nothing ideological that a bleeding heart could use to defend it. This extreme human abuse was about greed and power, nothing more.

  “Okay, so you’re involved because of the Iranian connection,” Kealey said. “Why do you need me? You’ve got a lot of good people and for that matter so does the DEA.”

  “The Iranians have some bad people on their side, too,” Harper told him. He retrieved the tablet and opened another file. He handed it back to Kealey. There were computer-enhanced photos of several people.

  “Crap,” was all Kealey said.

  Several of the images clearly showed the features of Dr. Hanif al-Shenawi in a hotel. Two of them, timestamped in the early evening, showed him sitting in the backseat of a sedan with dark windows.

  “We were tipped off by a DHS agent in Iraq, Dina Westbrook.”

  Kealey chuckled.

  “You know her?”

  “I’ve heard they call her the ‘Icebreaker.’ Haven’t met her, though.”

  “She was interrogating a driver on an opium route from Iran through Iraq to the Gulf. He mentioned that an Iranian doctor used the route about a week ago. We put the system to work and computers pulled these images through the sedan window and matched them with an old surveillance photo. Once we had those pictures, we grabbed a few more along his itinerary.”

  Kealey examined the partial profile shots of the physician in the hotel. A lifelong jihadist who had spent time in an Egyptian prison, Dr. al-Shenawi treated the highest-ranking Iranian officials—but, while that high-profile position was legitimate, it was also a cover. Attending medical conventions around the globe, he was a top recruiter for Iranian intelligence. The man was said to oversee a terrorist training center in Kyrgyzstan, in caves that were part of the Tian Shan Mountains. United States intelligence had never been able to pinpoint the location.

  “He’s never needed secrecy in Iran,” Kealey pondered. “He flies direct from Tehran to whichever international conferences are convenient for his plans. Why would he smuggle himself out with an opium driver this time? Was he showing someone that the route works?”

  “It’s possible. The images of him in the sedan were taken by a pair of state troopers who were workin
g with DHS to test low-light, high-speed, license-scan software on I-15 in Fallbrook. That’s a few towns out from where Yerby was killed later on the same day. Several hours after these photos were taken, al-Shenawi showed up in security footage at the airport in Ontario, California, for a flight to San Antonio. We cannot account for the hours in between.”

  “So he may have met Hernandez.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hernandez may have been proving his end of the route works, too. Any idea whether they met to talk or to make a pickup or drop-off?” Kealey wondered.

  “That’s a damn good question,” Harper said.

  “Did the doctor fly commercial to both destinations?” Kealey asked.

  Harper nodded.

  “So it would have been stupid to carry anything into the country,” Kealey said. “And if he were picking something up he could have driven to Texas to avoid airport security. No, this was a classic meet-and-greet.” That was not so common with terrorists, who preferred to work through couriers carrying coded messages, but drug dealers were different. They wanted to look into the eyes of their top-level counterparts in any new arrangement.

  “Agreed,” Harper said. “The worry, obviously, is that something from Iran is en route to Mexico and al-Shenawi was there to solemnize the new relationship with Hernandez.”

  “Do we know if the Iranians contacted Hernandez or whether the cartel wants them for something?”

  “We do not know.”

  “And why San Antonio?” Kealey went on. “Who or what is there?”

  “We don’t know that, either,” Harper said. “And we have no way of finding out.”

  Kealey suddenly understood why he was here. “You lost the doctor.”

  “The SOB went to worship at a mosque on San Pedro Avenue in San Antonio. The FBI was watching him using existing video equipment in the street. They got eyes-on inside the mosque, a woman disguised as a worshiper, within three minutes of him going inside. They never saw him inside or coming out.”

  “A disguise?”

  “Possibly,” Harper said. “Over four dozen people have gone in and out since he did. Any one of them could have swapped clothes, head scarves, or beards with him.”