“What now?” asked Munez.
“We wait back in the truck,” said Pritchard. “At least for an hour or so. If he doesn’t show, we’ll set up surveillance and call it a—”
Pritchard’s voice trailed off as he slowly tilted his head. He was looking sideways at the floor, his eyes fixated on the stained and tattered Persian rug directly underneath Elizabeth’s feet.
Pritchard raised his forefinger to his lips. Shhhh.
CHAPTER 20
PRITCHARD QUICKLY resumed talking, rambling on about setting up around-the-clock surveillance of the house and how the teams should be manned.
But no one was listening. They weren’t supposed to. It was Pritchard’s hands that were doing the real talking.
He was pointing at the slight curve of the wood floor beneath the rug. His other hand was motioning for two of the officers to move the coffee table sitting on top of it. As for how the table should be moved, that was a given.
As quietly as humanly possible.
Elizabeth stepped back off the rug, eyeing the slight curve of the floor. The wood was warped. It was an old house. The warping could’ve been caused by years of winters and summers, heat and cold. Over and over.
Or it could’ve been something else. Like a section of the floor had been removed and put back, on and off. Over and over.
Pritchard clearly had a gut feeling it was the latter.
The second the coffee table was moved, he pointed down and spun his finger. Still, he kept talking, the sound of his booming voice masking the footsteps of the officers as they rolled up the rug.
Everyone stopped and stared at what was underneath. It sure looked like a hatch.
The circle was no bigger than a manhole cover, the deep cut along the perimeter the product of a reciprocating saw and a pretty steady hand. The cut itself was also wide enough to get your fingers in and lift.
Why a circle and not a square? Elizabeth knew why. She figured everyone else in the room did, too. It was a common question in law enforcement interviews. Why are manhole covers round?
So they can’t fall in.
“You guys see that Yankees game last night against the Angels? Man, that Mike Trout has got some serious range in center field. I’ve got to hand it to him,” said Pritchard, holding out his hand.
Everyone nodded, including Elizabeth. Never mind that she knew—or cared—as much about baseball as she did seventeenth-century Russian poetry. Pritchard was asking for one more toy.
The house that didn’t have a basement according to planning and zoning apparently now had a basement. Or at least something underground—something deep and dank enough to shield body heat from thermal imaging. It was time for plan B.
Make that plan R.
CHAPTER 21
THE SWAT commander, Munez, reached for the Range-R radar device strapped to his left hip, handing it over to Pritchard. No bigger than a stud finder but definitely its far more advanced cousin, the device used stepped-frequency continuous-wave radar to detect motion behind walls. Or, if need be, below hatches.
Pritchard continued talking baseball as he pressed the device flush against the floor. The Yankees needed better starting pitching. The bullpen was overused. What else was new?
All the while, he kept his eyes trained on the device’s readout. Finally he shook his head. There was no movement happening underneath them.
Munez quickly bit off the cap of a pen and wrote something on the palm of his hand. He held it up. One word: Rover?
Pritchard shook his head again. It was either a calculated risk or an insane amount of impatience. The hatch could’ve been booby-trapped, but bomb-squad rovers had only one gear: slow. Pritchard didn’t want to wait.
No one else wanted to wait either. Without prompting, the two officers who had rolled up the carpet positioned themselves on either side of the hatch, ready to lift. Everyone else formed a wide circle, their guns all aimed at the hole that was about to be.
“Get out of here,” Pritchard whispered to Elizabeth.
She wasn’t sure if she heard him right. “What?” she whispered back.
“I said, go wait by the truck.”
Elizabeth was never so sure of a decision in her life. Wait outside? “Fuck the truck,” she said.
Pritchard smiled. Then he held up three fingers. On the count of three …
Up came the hatch, immediately tossed to the side like a Frisbee. Every hand on every gun tightened, all eyes waiting for some kind of movement or sound. There was neither.
“Stick,” said Pritchard.
The officer to his right quickly handed him his search mirror. It didn’t exactly qualify as another toy, but it was the only tool for the moment.
Pritchard extended what amounted to a glorified selfie stick, angling the mirror while Munez shone a light into the hole. From her angle, Elizabeth could make out part of a ladder.
“Anything?” asked Munez.
Pritchard didn’t answer. Instead, he handed over the mirror to Elizabeth and climbed down the ladder. “That explains the no movement,” he announced moments later, his voice slightly echoing.
Elizabeth thought he meant the space was empty. It seemed like the only explanation.
Then she caught a glimpse in the mirror of what was lying next to Pritchard’s feet. There was another explanation.
The dead don’t move.
CHAPTER 22
LANDON FOXX shook my hand and promptly told me how he really felt. “You shouldn’t be here, Reinhart,” he said.
“That’s odd,” I replied. “I could’ve sworn you were the one who gave me the address.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But you still shouldn’t be here.”
And there in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, is what it’s like working for the CIA. A constant diet of contradictions that still somehow manage to make sense.
Some things never change.
The here where I wasn’t supposed to be was a dimly lit hallway outside an operating room in the basement of a safe house in Brooklyn that was currently doubling as a mortuary. Foxx, the CIA’s New York section chief, had acquiesced and allowed me to be here—against all rules and protocol, not to mention the fact that he never much liked me—because he knew what good friends Ahmed Al-Hamdah and I had been.
He also knew that Ahmed once had saved my life back in London. It was only right that I be able to pay my last respects. No matter how wrong.
The “official” count of the dead from the Times Square bombings stood at 216. That’s what was being reported all over the news. The actual count was 217.
Ahmed would forever be unaccounted for in every sense of the word. His parents were killed in a car accident when he was a toddler. He was an only child. The aunt who then raised him in London died from cancer while he was at Oxford. She never knew he’d been recruited by MI6. No one did.
Ahmed was required to lose touch with the friends he’d made at school. He was also forbidden to make any new ones outside work. The same rules applied when he later joined the CIA. The reason he and I first bonded was shared grief. I’d also lost someone I loved to cancer. Moreover, the same cancer as his aunt: pancreatic. My mother had died four months after she was diagnosed, when I was thirteen.
By the time Ahmed moved to the US, he was a true nowhere man. Those who crossed paths with him “off duty” knew him by a fake name. Even then, they rarely saw him. So rarely, in fact, that he once joked, It will be years before everyone realizes that they haven’t seen me in years.
Now, for sure, they were never going to see him again. They’d never know why either. Only a handful of people on the planet would ever know he had perished in the initial Times Square attack—after sacrificing his life trying to stop it.
Oh, the glamorous life of a CIA operative.
“He was embedded with a cell here that was connected to another cell that carried out the bombings,” said Foxx.
“Multiple cells?” I asked. The mere thought of there being o
ne active in the area was bad enough. But two?
Foxx straightened his broad shoulders and nodded. In his mid-fifties without an ounce of body fat, the guy was a total gym rat and addicted to running marathons. That was how he managed the stress of the job. It was far healthier than wearing out a barstool.
“We get smarter, they get smarter,” he said. “Picture a bunch of capos working for a single mob boss, only the capos don’t actually know one another or even the identity of the boss himself. That’s what we’re dealing with.”
Yeah, that was smarter. “In other words, no single member can ever bring down the entire operation.”
“Exactly. Only Ahmed was on the verge of doing just that. He’d infiltrated one of the mini cells and had just cracked another. That was the one that carried out the bombings,” said Foxx. “Ahmed was literally running toward Times Square in hopes of defusing at least one of the bombs when he was shot. By then he’d been exposed.”
Foxx watched me flinch. He knew the details of what had happened to me in London. I’d been exposed during the Westminster Abbey sting. Ahmed killed my would-be assassin a mere second before the son-of-a-bitch would’ve been my assassin.
“Tell me more about this cell,” I said.
“You know I can’t do that. I’ve already told you too much.”
That’s what you think, Foxx. But we’re only getting started. You just don’t know it yet.
I slid my heel along the concrete floor, the scraping sound echoing up and down the hallway. Timing is everything.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I said. “Did I mention the guy who came to visit me yesterday?”
“What guy?” asked Foxx.
“The one who’s part of the cell,” I said.
CHAPTER 23
FOXX FOLDED his arms, rolled his eyes, and let out a deep and pissed-off sigh all at once. “Way to bury the lede, Reinhart. And you wonder why I never liked you.”
“I never wonder at all,” I replied. “I know exactly why you never liked me.”
“You were reckless.”
“I took risks.”
“You withheld information from the Agency.”
“I was careful whom I told things to.”
“You were a wiseass.”
“Yeah, okay, you got me there,” I said. “Guilty as charged. Now, do you want to hear about this guy or what?”
I told Foxx everything about my visit from Benjamin Al-Kazaz, or rather, the guy posing as a lawyer by that name. He’d somehow connected me to Ahmed but clearly didn’t know if I was CIA or merely an old chum from our London school days. Hence the charade.
“How did you know the guy was lying?” asked Foxx.
“He picked the wrong fake name.”
“Al-Kazaz?”
“No, his first name,” I said. “I made a joke about his returning to Saudi Arabia and how they’re not exactly welcoming Benjamins these days. He had no idea what I was talking about.”
“That makes two of us,” said Foxx.
“A few years back,” I explained, “the Saudi government banned a bunch of baby names. There were about fifty in total, and if you were a Saudi, there’s no way you wouldn’t know about it. One of the names, if not number one with a bullet, was Benjamin.”
Foxx didn’t need any further explanation. It was all the more obvious to him given that he’d been stationed in Israel during Obama’s first term. “Really?” he asked. “Because of Bibi?”
“Yep.” Saudi parents were now forbidden from naming a boy Benjamin because of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Talk about holding a grudge.
“So this guy, Al-Kazaz, or whatever his real name is, isn’t a Saudi, and he knew Ahmed was dead. Why did he want you to think he was Ahmed’s lawyer?”
“Because of this,” I said, opening my hand.
Foxx stared at the tiny flash drive in my palm. “He gave that to you?”
“In a sealed envelope, yes. He claimed it was from Ahmed and he’d been holding it for him. If Ahmed died, he was supposed to get the envelope to me.”
Foxx eyed the flash drive. “It’s probably a virus—a way for him to hack your files and learn more about you.”
“Not probably,” I said. “That’s exactly what it is.”
“Wait. You actually—”
“Of course I plugged it in,” I said. “That’s what someone who’s never been in the CIA would do, right? I just made sure to use an old laptop. Lecture notes, research for my next book—the guy saw the life of an ordinary college professor, that’s all.”
“Did he actually fake a letter from Ahmed?”
“No, this guy was cleverer than that. He put a file on there that wouldn’t open. Meanwhile, the virus gets embedded and he becomes a ghost. The phone number on his fake business card? It’s out of service.”
“What about fingerprints?” asked Foxx. “The envelope he handed you? Or the business card?”
“Both clean,” I said. “I figure he was using tips on his fingers.” Tips are ultrathin silicone patches used to cover one’s fingerprints. Bomb-making terrorists are big fans of them.
Foxx continued to grill me like a prosecutor. That was his style. “Any cameras in your building?”
“Plenty,” I said. “But he wore a baseball cap in the lobby and in the elevator.”
“So we’ve got nothing to go on, huh?”
“I’m just thankful he doesn’t either,” I said. “I’ve got a family, and he knows where I live.”
The sound of the door opening next to us brought our conversation to a halt. A head peeked out. There are only a handful of imams in the world working secretly for the CIA. This was one of them.
“Okay,” was all the imam said. It was all that was needed.
Foxx turned to me. “Go ahead, take a few minutes.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I knew what I would see when I entered the room. Ahmed had long ago educated me on the death rituals of Muslims, beginning with the body being bathed and shrouded in three sheets. The imam was slightly breaking with tradition by leaving Ahmed’s head uncovered until after I could say my final good-bye.
Still, knowing what to expect isn’t always the same as when it actually happens.
I stood there and stared at Ahmed’s face, the sadness running through me. I felt numb.
Then came the guilt. I knew it wasn’t rational, but I felt it just the same. He had once saved my life. I wasn’t able to save his.
Suddenly all I could think about was Ahmed’s love of westerns. It now made more sense than ever. The best ones always feature a loner on the wild frontier, someone who never looks for the spotlight or needs to take credit for doing the right thing.
I’d left the Agency for all the right reasons. No regret. But standing there next to my old friend, that’s all I could feel. I somehow owed him justice.
What would Gary Cooper do? Right, Ahmed?
Of course, I had no way of knowing that I was about to find out.
My high noon was coming.
BOOK TWO
MASQUERADE
CHAPTER 24
THE ROOM was as hot as hell. It reeked of sweat and mold and something even worse.
Fear.
That’s him. He’s arrived.
The impeccably dressed man they all called the Mudir, the Governor, came walking into the room with a black duffel bag casually draped over his shoulder as if it were filled with laundry or whatever else someone might carry around who wasn’t actually a mass murderer.
Without a word of greeting to the thirteen men seated on the folding chairs in the basement of the mosque, he placed the duffel on a metal table with rusted hinges and slowly unzipped it. One by one, he removed the guns—all Russian made and all of them chosen for a specific reason, a feature or attribute that would help ensure the greatest amount of casualties.
Finally the Mudir spoke.
“Six of you will use the AS Val,” he said, holding up the assault rifle often used by Spetsn
az, the Russian Special Forces. “Its integrated suppressor will silence your rounds and delay the initial panic. The fewer people who are running, the more of them you can kill.”
The Mudir then lifted the AK-47, explaining that another six men would be stationed at the three main staircases connecting the lower level to the main concourse. There would be two men per staircase, both positioned halfway down the steps so as to ambush all those trying to escape from either level. “The two shooters will stand side by side. One aiming up, one aiming down. Fish in a barrel.”
All the men in the room had been embedded in the US for close to five years. They were well versed in American slang and idioms. They all spoke English fluently. None of them were married. All of them had jobs. These were the requirements.
Lastly, the Mudir raised the MP-443 Grach, the standard-issue semiautomatic pistol of the Russian military. He explained that all twelve men would be armed with the pistol in addition to their assault rifle. “It will function as backup should your rifle jam.”
That took care of the weapons portion of the presentation. The Mudir next discussed timing and transportation. As he spoke he began seeing what he expected. A few of the men were stealing glances around the room, doing a head count to themselves. They were confused by the math.
The Mudir kept referring to the dozen men who would take part in the attack, but there were thirteen of them in the room. Was someone going to play a special role not yet discussed?
Yes.
“Are there any questions?” asked the Mudir.
One of the men raised his hand. The Mudir nodded at him. Permission to speak.
“Why are there thirteen of us here if only twelve are needed?” the man asked.
The Mudir smiled. The trick to turning men into murderers was to show them how little control they had over their own fate. Life was not precious. It was not special. It wasn’t anything.
And if you truly believed in what you were doing—your god and your cause—then life was yours to take from others at any time.
It required radical thinking to radicalize people.
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