One Rough Man pl-1

by Brad Taylor

  I grinned to show I was kidding. She scowled back, which was okay because that was better than the fear.

  “It was a little bit more than that. When I dropped out of college the first time I had a bit of a bad stretch. Broke up with a guy and had the usual ‘trying to find yourself’ thing. I auditioned for Cirque du Soleil and was accepted. I trained up in Montreal for three months, learning all sorts of crazy things. That building was nothing.”

  I had seen several Cirque du Soleil shows, and the feats that were performed were unreal. Literally mind-bending. I’d watch an acrobatic trick and wonder if my eyes were deceiving me, if it wasn’t a trick done with mirrors. The focus and dedication required rivaled anything in professional sports, or my world for that matter.

  I stopped walking and turned around. We were inside another dark alley, which caused Jennifer to bump into me. I looked at her with a new appreciation.

  She said, “What? It’s not some French circus. It’s a pretty well respected—”

  “I know what it is. You were in it? For real?”

  “I sort of was. I was accepted and finished the apprenticeship, but right before I was slotted for a show I decided it wasn’t for me. I was pretty screwed up back then.”

  “Still, that’s pretty amazing.”

  “Yeah, well, I decided to go back to college. That decision’s worked out well so far, don’t you think?”

  She grinned at her joke. Success.

  51

  In Belize City, waiting at their gate for the flight to Cancún, Bakr said, “We’ve got some time. Let’s see if The Sheik has responded.”

  Sayyidd moved to a secluded space within the terminal that had a look angle to the satellite. He went through the laborious process of getting online with the M4 satellite phone, then checked the first Yahoo! address they had used.

  Bakr said, “What’re you doing? That’s the first address. They won’t respond to that. They’ll respond to the second address.”

  He looked closer at the screen, becoming livid. “Is something in the sent file? Is that the message we sent earlier? You didn’t erase it?”

  Sayyidd gave an embarrassed shrug. “We did this together. I forgot to delete it. You forgot to tell me to delete it. It’s a mistake.”

  Deleting the message from both the sent and trash files, he said, “It’s gone.”

  Bakr rubbed his forehead. He now saw that he would have to look over his shoulder for everything.

  “Please check the other address.”

  Going to the other Yahoo! account, Sayyidd glowed with anticipation when he saw four messages in the in-box. Three were for penile implants and counterfeit Viagra; one was an e-mail for them. Opening it, he read a simple paragraph, written in Arabic:

  Praise be to Allah and all thanks to Allah, your message brings hope to the breasts of true believers. Travel with the weapon to Imam Walid abdul-Aziz. Meet and discuss together the path to success. Peace be upon you in your journey. Imam Walid will send you a message in his own good time for the meeting. May Allah make this a day of pride and success for the Muslim Ummah.

  Sayyidd looked up in confusion. “Who’s Imam Walid? Where’s he located? Are we supposed to guess?”

  “Don’t worry, my friend. He’s a man that’ll help the plan you’ve come up with, just as he’s helped hundreds of other true believers in Europe. I know he lives in Norway, but don’t know his actual address. We’ll go to Cancún and catch a flight to Oslo. Send a reply to The Sheik telling him of the successful test. Before we leave, delete both messages.”

  Sayyidd did as he was told, saying, “I don’t need to be treated like a child. I can learn from my mistakes.”

  52

  I looked at the list of agencies, trying to smoke out the cover name the CIA was using at this particular embassy. I was looking for the name of an agency that sounded legitimate but was so innocuous it had no specific mandate. A name that nobody would call for anything. I knew most of the legitimate organizations, such as USAID, and focused on the ones I didn’t. Finally, my eyes settled on the pompous-sounding Office of Southern Hemispheric Relations. That sounded like what I was searching for. The title was so broad that nobody would call them unless they had been given the number.

  Jennifer asked, “How will we get to the CIA? You’re right, I don’t see them listed.”

  She didn’t just say that. I looked left and right, relieved to see that nobody was within earshot. Trying to remain calm, I said, “Please don’t say that name again. In fact, please don’t say anything.”

  Chagrined, Jennifer lapsed into a sullen silence.

  We had made the last bus to Belmopan without any other trouble, and had crashed in the nearest hotel we could find. Waking up this morning, it had taken little time to find the embassy and get through the outer security. Now was the hard part — how to get past Marine Post One. I would need to get someone from the CIA to meet me in the lobby, because I wasn’t on any approved access roster that Post One maintained.

  I waited for the young Marine behind the bulletproof glass to finish what he was doing and ask me my business. I asked for the number to the office, moved to the phone provided, and gave them a call, Jennifer standing expectantly beside me. A man answered on the third ring. It took a little bit of convincing, made harder since I didn’t want to say anything specific on an open phone line, but I finally managed to get him to meet us in the lobby. I gave him my description and hung up the phone.

  Jennifer looked at me with a question.

  “Someone’s coming down. We’ll see if it’s the right guy or not.”

  Eventually, a young man came out of the elevator, dressed in chinos and a button-down shirt, looking like he would start to shave in a few years. He glanced nervously around the lobby, passing over me and focusing on Jennifer. He smiled at her, then continued to look around. Great. An idiot. I stood up and walked over to him.

  “Looking for someone?”

  He showed a spark of surprise, quickly covered up by bluster.

  “I’m Eric. You apparently had some information you wanted to pass?”

  “Yeah, can we go to your office?”

  “No. Let’s go over to the couch and you can tell me what you have.”

  I’d figured he’d do that and agreed. I was in a little bit of a quandary, since I didn’t know if this guy was really in the CIA, and knew there was no way he would admit to it, so I would either have to dive in headfirst, or walk away.

  Eric pulled out a notebook and pen, turning to me to speak when he noticed Jennifer walk up. He went into a random diatribe about the weather. I relaxed. He’s a flunky, but he’s a spook. Nobody else would have flexed at the approach of a stranger.

  I interrupted the soliloquy. “She’s with me. Don’t worry about her.”

  He stopped talking, looking from me to Jennifer and back. I took the initiative, telling him why we’d come. As I went through the story, conveniently leaving out a majority of the death and destruction, I noticed that Eric kept stealing glances at Jennifer’s chest and had failed to write down a single thing. I stopped talking.

  Eric, smiling yet again at Jennifer, finally felt the silence and turned back to me. I leaned into his personal space.

  “Look. You had better start writing some of this stuff down. There’s going to be a cable coming out of this that I expect you to send. Understand?”

  That flustered him. “Hold on a minute. You asked me to come down here, not the other way around. I’ll decide what we do with your information, not you. Let’s get that clear right now.”

  My rage began to bubble up, catching me by surprise, an unwelcome enemy determined to show who still owned my soul. Jennifer put her hand on my arm, probably seeing the signs and trying to blunt the edge. It worked, at least a little. I no longer wanted to kill him, just hurt him.

  “Give me your pen and paper.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to write your cable. I’m close to ripping off your head a
nd shitting down your neck. To save us both the embarrassment, I’m going to tell you what to send.”

  Eric handed me the pad and backed away. Jennifer glared at me, clearly upset at the way this was turning out.

  I took the paper and wrote a one-paragraph note. At the end of the note, I wrote, “PrometheusPike.” Handing the pad back to Eric, I said, “Send that in a cable. I don’t care who you route it to, as long as you include the crypt at the bottom. Do you understand?”

  Eric nodded, completely subdued. “Is there some way I can contact you here? If I need to?”

  I thought for a second. “Yeah, get me a hotel with an embassy rate and you’ll know where we’re staying.”

  “Okay, okay, I can do that. Give me a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

  Five minutes later, he returned with the confirmation number, the address to the hotel, and a little bit of his confidence back.

  “Here’s where we send all of our TDY folks. It’s on my credit card right now. You need to put it on your card, or your cable’s going in the trash.”

  I stared at him in silence until he began to falter, glancing over his shoulder at the Marine in Post One for help. He finally held out the address and confirmation number with a slight tremor. Jennifer shook her head and took the Post-it note, thanking him for his time. Then she turned without a word and began walking at a brisk pace out of the embassy.

  Catching up to her outside, I said, “Well, that went better than expected. We very well might get a cable out, and as a bonus, we got a cut-rate hotel room.”

  Jennifer turned so quickly I ran into her. “Do you have to be such an asshole to everyone? He was just trying to help. We’ll be lucky if he uses your note to blow his nose.”

  She was as mad as I’d ever seen her, slightly trembling but looking me in the eye and daring me to bark back, waiting on the inevitable rage she knew I had.

  Instead, my anger not only disappeared, as it had in the past, but it reversed. For some idiotic reason I wanted to calm her down. To make her smile. Jesus. I want her to like me. I was so conflicted I wasn’t sure what to do. I hadn’t given a shit about any person on earth since Heather, and that’s the way I had liked it. What the hell? Am I going crazy? Crazy or not, she had something that seemed to stop my slide into the abyss. Kept me human. Or at least reminded me of what human was. An innocence I wanted back.

  “You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. He pushed my buttons. I don’t want to be a prick, but it just happens sometimes. I’m working on it. Can we forget about it?”

  She looked confused, then suspicious. “Well… okay.”

  She waited a second, as if she expected a trick. When none came, her anger deflated a little bit. “Let’s just hope he does something with what we told him.”

  I smiled, relieved. “He’ll send the cable. It’s too volatile not to send in this day and age. Easier to pass the responsibility to someone else.”

  53

  Eric returned to his office, still flustered by the encounter with Pike. On the one hand, he didn’t want to send the cable precisely because Pike had demanded he do so. Yeah, maybe I was a little distracted by Pike’s companion, but that’s no reason to act like such an asshole. On the other hand, if he did nothing and Pike’s wild story proved to be true, there would be hell to pay.

  Today was one of the few times he could send a cable out on his own. Ordinarily, he just wrote the cables for release by the chief of station, but Belize had been without a chief for six months, and would probably be without one for the foreseeable future as the CIA pulled experienced hands to fill the gaps created by dealing with a substate threat that couldn’t be seen by satellites. With the deputy chief on leave, and Steve, the only other case officer, out doing what he was paid to do, he was now left alone at the wheel.

  A year out of college, six months out of training, Eric had the requisite skills for his position of collating reports and sending cables but had little to no experience in the rough and tumble world of covert operations. He decided it would be better to send the cable and get scolded for clogging up the pipe than not send it and get hammered for missing a terrorist attack.

  He typed up Pike’s paragraph, adding some of his own observations, and launched it out, including the Counterterrorism Center on the distro, along with the usual Latin American Affairs desks. He included the crypt that Pike had given him.

  * * *

  The cable traveled at the speed of the Internet, instantly residing in the in-boxes of the people he had put on the distro. Because of the crypt, it was rerouted to several select boxes as well.

  Seconds later, alarms began to go off in some of the most powerful offices in Washington, D.C. Some had official titles; others were simply oak doors with no indication of what was behind them. The crypt that Pike had given was unique to his last unit, and was guaranteed to get attention. It was a verification, sometimes a distress code that allowed operators working in deep cover to send a message through “ordinary” CIA channels during extreme situations, when established communications had failed. It had never been used. It was designed to get attention, and within a second or two of Eric’s finger depressing the button on his computer’s mouse, it had done its job.

  * * *

  Inside Taskforce headquarters, the duty officer sat staring at a computer screen, bored out of his mind. The man was dressed in casual business attire, but like everyone else in the office, except the little old ladies downstairs, he looked like an athlete. He always wondered if maybe they shouldn’t change their cover to something with professional sports. Maybe be Jerry Maguire’s D.C. office or something. Maybe hire Kelly Preston to roam around here, solidifying the cover. Before his mind could wander to something less savory, the computer at his desk signaled an incoming message. He stood up and printed it out, giving a low whistle when he saw the crypt.

  He took the cable directly to Kurt Hale’s office. He knew Kurt was in the process of packing up to go on a date night with his wife, something they hadn’t done in over six months. He saw Kurt’s expression change when he walked in, Kurt recognizing that his night might be shot.

  “What’s up, Mike?”

  “We got a Prometheus message five minutes ago.”

  Kurt stopped what he was doing, running through his mind the two active operations currently ongoing. Only Knuckles was anywhere near an endgame. The other operation was still in the formative stages, laying the groundwork for execution two or three months from now. A Prometheus alert meant something had gone very badly for someone.

  “Which Team?”

  “Well, that’s what’s strange. I think it’s from Pike. It’s not from anyone active here.”

  “Pike? Pike Logan?” Before Mike could respond, Kurt realized he was asking questions that Mike couldn’t possibly answer. He reversed himself and said, “Okay. Let me see the cable. And holler down the hall at George.”

  “You got it. Here’s the message.”

  Kurt read the cable, a short, simple paragraph. Skipping through the usual disclaimers about walk-ins, no established reporting record, and the ominous “Contact may have been attempting to influence as well as inform” trailer, he read:

  Contact stated he had information regarding a potential WMD terrorist attack. Contact had no concrete information about the attack, but stated that he had intercepted Internet traffic implying an Al Qaeda involvement in procurement of WMD for the application against United States, Israeli, or Iranian interests. Contact stated that he believed the WMD was not radiological. Contact stated that two unknown subjects of Arabian descent were in the process of procuring the WMD. Contact became evasive when questioned on his knowledge of the aforementioned WMD, refusing to state how he knew this information. Contact firmly believes that the procurement is time sensitive, and that the AQ members are actively pursuing this aim.

  It was impossible that anyone on earth would know the Prometheus alert crypt unless Pike had told them, and in Kurt’s mind, it was equally imp
ossible that Pike would have told anyone such a secret. On the other hand, the Pike he knew might no longer exist. Maybe he’s slipped down completely, and is selling plasma on the street for his next bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, babbling secrets to anyone who will listen. Kurt rejected that, as it didn’t explain how a stranger was able to contact the CIA in an overseas embassy, then send the message. Everything pointed to its being Pike, however bizarre it appeared. Even so, they would need to confirm the identity before proceeding. Kurt turned at the knock on the door, seeing his friend and deputy commander.

  “How long’s it been since you made a trip to Central America?”

  George looked puzzled by the question. “Well, not since we were supporting the Contras back in the good ol’ days. Are they now the next terrorist threat? We going down to take them out?”

  Kurt chuckled, filling him in on what he knew, then saying, “Call the station down there and let them know we’re coming. Tell them to contact whoever’s calling himself Pike. If it’s him, we’ll figure out what’s going on. If it’s not, we’ll figure out where the breach occurred. Either way, this is too big of a problem to ignore. We should be able to get down and back in one day, two at the most.”

  “Easy enough. I assume we’re leaving tomorrow morning?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a date tonight that I can’t miss.”

  54

  A few miles away, Harold Standish sat at his desk in the Old Executive Office Building, silently reading the Prometheus cable. He saw an opportunity. A way to get America back on war footing, and get control of the Taskforce at the same time. A way to strengthen the defense of the United States. If the whiners on the Oversight Council are too timid to preempt an attack, maybe they need to see one up close.

  The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. America had lost its focus on terrorism precisely because it hadn’t been attacked in close to a decade. The stupid electorate had the memory of a bovine, conveniently forgetting the threat, instead lambasting the very government that provided their protection. A WMD going off would wake them the fuck up, that’s for sure. There would be a feeding frenzy just like 9/11. All the politicians would be screaming for action. The Oversight Council would have to bend with the pressure. The Taskforce would be turned loose. With any luck, the council will be too busy doing their day jobs to look closely at Taskforce activities. I’ll be the man left at the wheel. It’s not like my day job takes up a lot of time.