“I don’t know what to tell you, Mike. You’re probably right, but the priority right now is to get answers and make sure we find these guys.”
“Why is he bringing them here?”
“It doesn’t matter at this point. The cat’s out of the bag. The FBI has agents crawling all over the mosque. Bringing them to Langley is out of the question. NCTC is a shared facility. You guys are the lead agency on counterterrorism, so you’re the logical choice.”
“Why can’t we just lose them for a couple of hours? Let him do the rough stuff off-site.”
“Trust me…I’ve wondered the same thing, but if I’ve learned anything over the years it’s to let him do what he wants to do in these situations. He has it all figured out. He wants a rapid-fire interrogation. Set them all up in separate rooms, and go right down the line. Plus, he needs a secure video feed to Bagram. He’s convinced the best way to get al-Haq to talk is to have Lonsdale tell him their deal is off. He either talks or we hand him over to General Dostum.”
“Did Lonsdale say she’d cooperate?” Nash asked in near shock.
“I think this attack has crystallized the issue for a lot of people.”
“I suppose.”
“I have to run. Call me in thirty with an update.”
“You got it.” Nash placed the phone back in its cradle and looked up at the casualty tally on the big board. There were 327 injured and 31 confirmed fatalities, and that wasn’t counting anyone at the Monocle. Nash thought of Johnson. His was a name that would never be added to the list, even though it should. Nash felt a pang of recrimination for not raising the alarm earlier. Maybe the entire disaster could have been averted.
CHAPTER 66
TWO of the men started their escape on the Orange Line, and were out of the downtown area five minutes after the first blast. The other two had to take the Red Line and then transfer to the Orange Line, so it took a bit longer for them to clear the area, but even so, by 1:00 they had all emerged from the West Falls Church Metro Station and were boarding buses for their next destination. They traveled in pairs as they had been taught. The FedEx shirts and ball caps had been discarded and stuffed into garbage cans. The men were not concerned about leaving any DNA, just getting clear of the city. They had long-sleeved T-shirts under the FedEx uniforms to make the change easy. Karim had hammered the point over and over. The bombs would cause traffic mayhem and it was possible that out of fear of future attacks they might shut the Metro down until they got a handle on what was going on.
All four men rode the same bus to the Tysons Corner Shopping Center. One pretended to listen to an iPod while the others pretended to read newspapers. When they got off the bus, they walked in pairs away from the mall. Karim had schooled them to look casual. To laugh and smile, so as to not attract any unwanted attention. Their next destination lay a little over a mile to the northwest. Unlike the previous warehouse, this one was relatively new and in near perfect shape. It sat in an upscale mixed-use industrial office park. Farid had the keys and he entered the space from the front, where the offices were. The other three men, with their baggy pants and long-sleeved T-shirts, went around to the back, as if they were day laborers coming in to unload a truck.
Less than five minutes after their arrival, the black Lincoln Town Car and the Suburban rolled into the all-but-empty warehouse space and the big door was closed. Karim had been so thorough in his planning that he had even anticipated this moment. He had told them the reunion would be sweet, but their celebration would be silent. Karim stepped from the front seat of the sedan with a massive smile and his fist in the air. He walked steadily over to the four men. He approached Hakim first, shook his fists in the air, and then wrapped his arms tightly around the man’s shoulders.
“We did it,” Karim whispered in his ear. “We did it. I am so proud of you.” Karim moved onto the next man and hugged him as well. He moved down the line telling each man, in a hushed emotional voice, how well he had done. When he was finished, there were tears in his eyes.
He stood in front of them and said, “I have never been so proud in all my life. This truly is a great day for us, but we are not done,” he was quick to add. “You must hurry and change clothes.” He clapped his hands together. “Hurry now. All of your stuff is in the back of the truck. I want guards posted on twenty-minute rotations. Eat, poop, and drink some water. You all know what to do. We’ve covered this a thousand times. I want to be ready to move in thirty minutes, if we need to.”
Karim turned to Hakim and put a hand on his shoulder. “You have done an amazing job, my friend.” He looked around the fifty-by-thirty-foot space. “This is perfect. Do you have the TVs I requested?”
“Yes.” Hakim motioned toward the front. “They’re in the office up front. Three of them.”
“Good. Let’s go.” He began walking. “I want to see.”
The office was good-sized with a desk, a couch, and a credenza with three 27-inch flat screens. Karim stood in front of the desk while Hakim turned on each TV. He then grabbed the remotes and turned them to the channels he thought would provide the best coverage.
Karim’s eyes floated from one screen to the next. He was not surprised to see that there was no aerial footage, since the airspace over the Capitol and the White House was restricted. Most of the shots were of reporters standing behind barricades while emergency vehicles raced past. You had to look very hard to assess any damage. Karim was actually disappointed for a second and then he heard the female newsperson on one of the American channels say that early estimates of casualties were as high as five hundred. Karim was ecstatic. He had been hoping for numbers as high as three hundred. The TV on the far right switched to a new reporter and then the screen changed to what Karim at first assumed was a shot from a helicopter until he realized it was being taken from a building.
Pointing, Karim said, “Turn the volume up on that one.”
“What you are seeing,” said a male voice, “is what is left of one of Washington’s most storied restaurants…the Monocle. It appears that the blast completely leveled the restaurant.”
Karim moved closer to the screen while the reporter talked with an anchor up in New York. There was nothing left of the building except a half wall on the southwest corner. “It’s gone.” Karim practically giggled. “Look!” He pointed at the screen. “There is nothing left. There is no way anyone survived that.”
Hakim looked at all the emergency vehicles. Men with axes and shovels were climbing over the rubble, and two dogs could be seen sniffing the pile. “I think you’re right.”
A new image came up on the screen of hundreds of people standing at the south end of the parking lot. A reporter was sticking a microphone in the face of a young girl who was crying. Hakim thought she couldn’t have been more than twenty.
“Look where they are standing!” Karim said with great enthusiasm. He checked his watch. “This is perfect. We will have front-row seats this time.”
Hakim wasn’t so sure he wanted a front-row seat.
“Oh,” Karim said, clapping his hands together, “I almost forgot. I must check in with Ahmed.” He grabbed his mobile phone and pressed down on the number seven. The phone automatically dialed Ahmed’s phone. After three quick rings, the Moroccan answered. “How are you?” Karim asked.
“Good,” the man answered in a quiet voice. “Things are very busy here. I assume everything worked on your end.”
“Yes…to perfection.” Karim imagined the Moroccan lying in the woods, burrowed into a pile of leaves and pine straw.
“Congratulations. As you predicted, this place is busier than a beehive.”
“Wonderful. We will stick to our original timetable. If anything changes, I will inform you.”
“I’ll see you in a little bit.”
CHAPTER 67
RAPP stepped off the elevator with his ragtag crew. In addition to Ridley and the four men he’d picked up, he had two of D.C.’s finest with him. Both cops were roughly the same size as t
he man Rapp had knocked out. After Rapp had cuffed all four men and duct-taped their mouths, he stuffed two of them in the back of the squad car and brought Aabad and one other with him.
Ridley moved ahead and entered his number into the cipher lock on the door to the Operations Center. Rapp entered first with Aabad, and then the cops brought up the rear, one on each arm of the big man. Apparently, he had given them some trouble while in transit. After the man had tried to break one of the side windows with his feet, the cop riding shotgun was forced to hit him in the face with a blast of pepper spray. With his wrists cuffed behind his back, the man was left to writhe in anguish as the spray burned his eyes. If it was up to Rapp they’d all have canvas bags over their heads right now, but he didn’t have any.
Nash and two other agents met the group as they came through the door. Behind him the big screen went blue. “Where do you want them?”
“Upstairs,” Rapp said, looking up at the balcony. They didn’t have four separate conference rooms, so Rapp had to come up with a solution. “Take these three,” Rapp pointed to the big guy and the two others, “and put them in one room, facedown on the floor. If they so much as look at each other, you guys have my permission to kick the shit out of them.”
Nash looked nervously at the two cops. He was surprised to see that they were nodding with approval.
One of them actually offered to help, and Rapp took him up on it saying, “That’d be great. Follow these two agents.” As the men moved off, Rapp said to Ridley, “Why don’t you take dumb-ass here upstairs and get started. I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Gladly,” Ridley said, “Come on, dumb ass.” Ridley grabbed him by the elbow and Aabad howled in pain.
“My shoulder!” he screamed in pain. “I think it’s dislocated!”
Rapp got right in his face and said, “It’s not dislocated. If it was, you’d probably pass out from the pain. It’s only separated, but when I get upstairs, if you don’t tell me everything I want to know, I’m going to rip that fucking shoulder clear out of its socket, and then I’m going to stick your hand up your own ass.”
“Come on,” Ridley said to the prisoner, this time pulling him by the collar of his jacket.
Nash looked around the big room and noticed the majority of the analysts had been watching Rapp’s tirade. He put himself between Rapp and the rest of the room and said, “I need to talk to you about a couple things.”
“Make it quick.”
Nash put his hands on his hips and was about to start talking, when Art Harris came walking up.
“Guys, you didn’t hear this from me,” Harris said in conspiratorial whisper. “I just got a call from HQ. They’re sending a team.”
“What kind of team?” Rapp asked.
“Prosecutors and Investigators. They found heavy trace amounts of explosives at the mosque as well as blood.”
“So,” Rapp said, still not getting it.
“It’s the FBI, Mitch. Someone realized after the fact that we didn’t have a search warrant. They’re all freaked out. They think a judge will kick all this evidence.”
“So they’re going to come out here and take over the interrogation?”
“I think so.”
“Fuck that. Let ’em try.”
“If I were you,” Harris said, leaning in closer, “I’d do whatever you need to do in the next thirty minutes.” Backing away, he added, “If you know what I mean.”
Rapp grabbed his forehead and moaned, “Does it ever end? This is the same type of bullshit that got us into this mess in the first place.”
“Let me handle the interrogations. I’m the one who fucked this thing up.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
“If I’d brought Johnson to your attention sooner, maybe this whole disaster could have been avoided.”
Rapp grabbed him by the arm and led him into the corner. “Shut the hell up.”
“But…”
“But, nothing. A disaster is when a hurricane hits. You can’t stop God or Mother Nature. This,” he pointed at the big board, “was going to happen sooner or later. There was no way we were going to be able to hold these guys off forever. Especially when we’re playing by all these Mickey Mouse rules. If you had pulled Johnson on Monday like Chuck and Rob had told you to, we wouldn’t have these four right here. We haven’t arrived at this spot by being too careless. We’re in the middle of this shit storm right now because we haven’t taken enough risks. This Johnson thing sucks, and when the time is right we’ll honor him, but that’s not now. We can’t let up for a second. The Feds are going to come in here and throw their weight around, and Mirandize these pieces of shit. They’re going to get lawyers, and a couple of years from now they might actually go to trial.
“I don’t give a shit about any of it. It’s all a fucking sideshow. You know what two of those guys smell like?”
“No.”
“Barbecue, Mike. They smell like burnt meat. How much do you want to bet they’re the ones who fucking torched Johnson?”
Nash looked up at the balcony where the four men had been taken and said, “Let’s get this done before the suits show up.”
CHAPTER 68
AN ashen-faced analyst stood outside the conference room door and tried her best to ignore the loud but muffled noises that were coming from inside the room. She’d been asked by Mike Nash to stand there and wait. She’d asked him, “For what?” and his reply had been a simple one-word answer: “Information.”
It had been five minutes, and while she had no sympathy for the man who was being interrogated, it was very uncomfortable to know that it was her boss in there who was doing a good deal of the shouting and God only knew what else.
Suddenly the door opened and Nash appeared with a piece of paper. “Run those names through TIDE and call me on the conference room phone as soon as you get a hit.”
TIDE was the database they operated. It stood for Terrorist Information Datamart Environment.
“Hurry up,” Nash ordered, before closing the door. At the far end of the conference table Aabad bin Baaz was sitting in a chair with his hands still bound behind his back, tears streaming down his cheeks, his thick black hair sticking out in different directions.
Rapp put both hands on the table and said, “Aabad, I swear to you, the biggest computer in the world is chewing up those names right now, and if it comes up empty…the arm is coming out of the socket.”
“I have not lied. Those are their names. You can go ask them.”
“Of course I could go ask them,” Rapp said in a reasonable tone, “but how do I know they’re not going to give me some bullshit name that you guys have agreed on?”
“I am telling you the truth. It was just the four of us.”
Without any warning, Rapp wound up and cracked him across the back of the head with an open hand. Aabad let out a yelp like a scared dog.
“I told you,” Rapp warned him, “every time a lie comes out of your mouth, I’m going to smack you. Let’s go back to last night. During evening prayer you said you found my guy poking around in the basement of the mosque. Rashid, the big, stupid idiot, offered to torture my guy and you took him up on it.”
“Yes.”
“You then found out he was CIA, so Rashid killed him, rolled him up in a prayer rug, stuffed him in a trunk, drove him to an abandoned lot, and lit the thing on fire, but you weren’t there for that part.”
“Yes!” Aabad nodded enthusiastically.
“So between then and the time we ran into you, you and your little four-man terrorist cell managed to place three separate car bombs around the city, get back to the mosque, and make your break for…” It occurred to Rapp that he hadn’t bothered to ask one obvious question. “Where in the hell were you headed, Aabad?”
“The airport.”
“Which one?”
“Baltimore.”
“Ticket already purchased?”
“Yes.”
Nash snapped his f
ingers and jerked his head toward the far corner.
The two walked over and Nash whispered to Rapp, “He’s full of shit. Twenty minutes ago Treasury called. They took a look at their 15th Street cameras. They have the whole thing on tape. A FedEx van pulled up in front of Bobby Van’s at 12:29. The driver jumped out and started running north with a package in his hand. Twenty-six seconds later the van exploded. You had eyes on all four of these guys. They were a mile away at the mosque. Can’t be in two places at once. How much do you want to bet the other two blasts went down the same way, which means there were at least three more guys involved…probably more than that.”
Rapp looked back over his shoulder at Aabad, who was nervously watching them. “All right,” Rapp said, “I’m done fucking around.” He walked back over to the prisoner and said, “Aabad, you know what I think…that gerbil in your underdeveloped brain? I don’t think he can run fast enough on that wheel to keep up with all your lies.”
It was obvious by the confused look on Aabad’s face that he hadn’t followed a word that Rapp had said.
“What he’s saying,” Nash said, moving in to translate, “is that you’re too fucking stupid to run an operation like this, and on top of all of that, you definitely aren’t smart enough to keep all your lies straight.”
“I am not lying!” Aabad screamed.
“Give me the other names,” Rapp said in a no-nonsense tone.
“I have given you all the names.”
“All right,” Rapp said without missing a beat, “here is how this is going to go down. I’m going to dislocate your right shoulder. I already told you,” Rapp said as he registered the look of horror on Aabad’s face, “it was not dislocated. Just a minor separation, which is proof, that in addition to being stupid, you’re also a puss.”
“I have not lied,” he whimpered.
“Shut up and listen to me.”
Before Rapp could finish, there was a knock on the door. Nash walked over and opened it a crack. Harris was looking back at him, and without wasting a second, he said, “They’re downstairs in the lobby,” and then walked away.