When the waiter finally removed our plates and served us coffee, we moved from the dining table to several leather chairs looking out over the water. When I commented on how lovely the Persian Gulf looked from such a vantage point, and especially at night, His Royal Highness gently reminded me that this was “not the Persian Gulf, but the Arabian Gulf, thank you very much.”
I quickly apologized for my faux pas.
When it came time to get down to business, I started things off with a direct question of my own. “So do you guys know?”
“Where Abu Khalif is?” the prince replied.
“What else?”
“No,” he said. “Not for certain.”
I took a sip of coffee. “But you must have some idea, right? I mean, obviously we can rule out Mosul. The allies have gone through the city street by street, house by house. And we can pretty much rule out Raqqa. It’s been scrutinized up and down for the past two months, and it’s not that big to begin with.”
“He’s been there, though, in Raqqa,” the prince said. “We’ve had multiple sightings, just like the Egyptians. But no, we don’t think he’s there now.”
“Then where?” I pressed.
Bin Zayed did not reply. Instead, he turned to Pritchard, who floored me.
“At this point, we think he’s with his wives and kids,” the former Damascus station chief said. “Find them, find him.”
“Whoa, whoa, what in the world are you talking about?” I asked. “Abu Khalif is married?”
“I just found out a few days ago myself,” the prince said, clearly amused by my reaction.
“I had no idea,” I said.
“Join the crowd,” Pritchard replied. “Turns out he’s got four wives and seven children.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “How did you find out?”
“For the past several years, my firm has been working closely with the prince on making sure the UAE is safe from terrorism—from ISIS, Iran, and other chief threats,” Pritchard explained. “Last week we picked up the scent of an ISIS cell operating in Abu Dhabi. We shared it with the prince, and as you can imagine, that got the leadership pretty spooked.”
I could imagine. Abu Dhabi, a city of about a million and a half people, was the capital of the United Arab Emirates and thus far one of the safest cities in the region, nearly untouched by the kind of terrorism that seemed to be plaguing everywhere else.
The prince picked up the narrative. “As soon as Paul gave me the details, I ordered our special forces into action. It got pretty messy—a nine-hour gun battle. All five jihadists were killed, but we lost two officers in the process.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. These were very fine men—smart, experienced. A difficult loss. But the site itself was a gold mine. The cell consisted of four Saudis and one Syrian. They all lived in a small apartment just blocks from the Sheikh Zayed mosque. The Saudis, it turned out, were the muscle—bodyguards for the Syrian.”
“And who was the Syrian?”
Pritchard took that one. “An aide to Abu Khalif, and pretty high up the food chain. We recovered his laptop, and once we cracked the hard drive, we discovered the guy reported to one of the Baqouba brothers—Faisal—but essentially he was a courier for Khalif. Specifically, it turned out, he was an emissary between Khalif and his wives. In other words, well vetted. Highly trusted. On the hard drive we found some of Khalif’s correspondence with his wives over the last several years. We found digital photos of the wives’ and kids’ passports. We also found digital photos of the kids, names, dates of birth, all kinds of stuff. A real bonanza. At first we didn’t even know what we’d found. Like I said, we didn’t know he was married either. But the more we kept looking, the clearer it all became.”
For the next hour, bin Zayed and Pritchard walked me through what they themselves were just learning, starting with the names of the four wives—Aisha, Fatima, Alia, and Hanan—and backgrounds on each.
“Here’s something interesting,” Pritchard said. “We’ve got medical records indicating that Aisha is barren. She was treated for several years but apparently never was able to bear children for Khalif. And yet Khalif never divorced her.”
“That is interesting,” I said. “They’re in love.”
“That was my take,” he replied, “which is one of the reasons I think she’s with him. The Saudis insist she’s not in the kingdom. Travel records say she flew to Islamabad four months ago, and from Pakistan to central Asia. But then the trail goes cold.”
“Four months, you say?”
“Yes.”
“That would have been about the time Khalif’s men were planning to break him out of Abu Ghraib,” I said.
“Exactly,” the prince said. “My guess is they were moving her to safety, and specifically to a place he could see her after his escape and maybe even live with her.”
“What about his other wives?” I asked.
Pritchard told me Fatima, who at twenty-seven was nearly a decade younger than Khalif’s first wife, had a boy and two girls. Alia, only twenty-two, was the mother of two more Khalif boys and one girl. “We think Alia is the wife Khalif loves most,” he said.
“Not his first wife, Aisha?” I asked.
“No.”
“How can you be certain?”
“Most of the correspondence we’ve intercepted is to her,” Pritchard said. “The language is flowery, passionate, laced with poetry, while letters and notes to the other wives are more newsy, more practical, less romantic.”
The last of the four wives was Hanan, a Palestinian and a distant cousin to Khalif. Hanan had married the ISIS emir three years earlier when she was only fourteen. Now she was seventeen and the mother of a baby boy.
Bin Zayed then told me that Hanan’s parents had just been found that morning—living on the outskirts of Dubai—and had been arrested and interrogated by the prince’s men. They insisted they had no idea where their daughter was. They said they had not been to the wedding and swore they had never given their blessing to Khalif to marry their daughter. In fact, both the father and the mother—interrogated separately—went to great pains to renounce Khalif and ISIS.
“Do you believe them?” I asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” the prince conceded. “We’ve just gotten started with them. Give me another few days.”
“What did you find in the house?”
“Nothing that links the parents directly to Khalif or the Baqouba brothers, or even to ISIS,” the prince replied. “But we’re still looking.”
“Okay,” I said. “So this is a big breakthrough. Abu Khalif has four wives and at least seven children that we know of, right?”
“Right,” Pritchard responded. “Four boys and three girls, ranging in age from two to twelve. And based on the correspondence we’ve captured, he seems to be very fond of the children. Remembers their birthdays. Sends them presents through the courier. Sends them cash. And keeps saying he misses them and wants them near him.”
“So like you said, if we can find them, maybe we find him,” I said.
“Exactly.”
It made sense, but my head was still reeling.
“How come no one had this before?” I asked. “Marriage? Kids? How do you keep these things secret from the world’s greatest intelligence services?”
“Good question,” Pritchard said. “Painful—but fair. To be blunt, the first answer is simple: I don’t know. We missed it. Everybody missed it. That’s on us. On me. But the second answer is, the guy lives in the shadows, right? I mean, until your profile of Jamal Ramzy and then Khalif himself, we hardly knew anything about these guys. There had always been bigger fish to catch before them—bin Laden, Zawahiri, KSM, Zarqawi, the list went on and on. So Khalif and Ramzy came up through the ranks. We knew some basics, but until you put a spotlight on them—and they let you—they had stayed off the radar. That’s how they survived. That’s how they climbed to the top of the greasy pole. They didn’t want their names
in the papers—they didn’t want to draw the attention of foreign intelligence agencies—because they knew that those who did had a very short life span.”
“But somehow the Iraqis captured Khalif,” I said. “They knew he was a threat. They obviously went after him. They caught him. They put him in Abu Ghraib.”
“I talked to the Iraqis specifically about this after your story was published,” the prince said. “They say they caught Abu Khalif in a raid aimed at scooping up other bad guys. Khalif just happened to be in the room at the time. They weren’t targeting him. In fact, at first they didn’t know who they had or how big a deal he was. Obviously that changed over time, but the Iraqis insist they didn’t even have a file on Abu Khalif when they caught him. It was sheer dumb luck, and since he refused to talk—except to you—they never got anything out of him when they interrogated him. They didn’t really know who he was, or anything about his associates, much less his family members. They certainly didn’t know he was married or that he had kids.”
I sat back and thought for a moment. This was a big deal. It gave us eleven new trails to follow. Only one of them had to take us to Khalif. But it was a race against time, for new attacks were being planned and they could be unleashed at any moment.
80
It was almost midnight when I got back to my hotel room.
But it was clear that sleep wasn’t anywhere on the horizon. Yael and the local Mossad team were hard at work on their laptops, sitting around the dining room table in the executive suite with stacks of dirty dinner dishes and used glasses and coffee cups all around them. I was eager to discuss the conversation I’d just had. The new intel on Khalif’s wives and children was astonishing to me. I also wanted Yael’s take on the aggressive effort Prince bin Zayed and his men were making to hunt down Khalif himself. I knew she’d been listening in on the conversation. But that wasn’t all. I also needed to process everything I’d learned about Paul Pritchard.
First of all, not only was Paul Pritchard still alive and well, he was still unofficially working for the CIA. Yes, he’d been publicly “fired” by Khachigian, but that, he’d told me, was only so that he could be sent on assignments that could not be traced back to the U.S. government. For nearly a year, Pritchard had maintained his own identity, using his supposed firing as motivation for wanting revenge against the agency. He’d managed to convince several jihadist leaders in Syria and Iraq that he was a turncoat and an ally of theirs. When the usefulness of that technique had run its course, Pritchard got himself officially knocked off in an elaborately staged car bombing in Sudan. Then he’d gotten plastic surgery, changed his name, moved to the United Arab Emirates, set up a small private security firm, and begun working as an intelligence advisor to Prince bin Zayed. Only a handful of people on the entire planet knew his real identity. Robert Khachigian was one of them. And now so was I.
Particularly interesting to me was the fact that Paul Pritchard’s real name was actually William Sullivan. To my astonishment, he was the son of Lincoln Sullivan and the father of Steve Sullivan, my new attorneys back in Maine. It turned out that Khachigian had known the family forever and had personally recruited William into the agency some twenty-five years earlier.
This finally explained something I hadn’t understood about Khachigian’s letter to me, the one I’d been given that fateful morning back in Portland. There was an odd line early in the letter that read, If I know you, you’re wondering about Steve’s father . . . We’ll get to that in a moment. I had indeed been wondering about Steve’s father. And yet Khachigian had never come back to that point, never finished the thought, never explained himself. Rather, on the back of the letter there were three names I was supposed to track down, with contact information for each. Now it made sense.
I was eager to talk about all this with Yael and the team. There was just one problem. Yael and her team had neither the time nor the interest for such a debriefing. They had news of their own.
“The PM made the call,” Yael told me when the hotel room door was shut and locked behind me.
“When?” I asked, taking a seat at the table across from her.
“He and Mahfouz finally connected about an hour ago. Ari just called to brief us.”
“And?”
“We’re in business,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Mahfouz really appreciated the PM’s call. The two agreed to swap intel on the hunt for Abu Khalif, provided there be absolutely no leaks. It all has to be hush-hush.”
“Wow, that’s great,” I said.
“There’s more. The attack near the palace wasn’t ISIS, and it wasn’t directed at you.”
“What?”
“Mahfouz says his people just arrested a Muslim Brotherhood cell—four men and two women—earlier today. They were found with weapons that matched exactly those used in the attack. Their vehicle matches one seen on several surveillance cameras. And one of the suspects has confessed. He said they were targeting Walid Hussam for his role in arresting Brotherhood leaders when he served as the head of Egyptian intelligence. It had nothing to do with you. The palace is absolutely certain of it.”
I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks. It was my first prayer since getting off the plane, and I suddenly was overwhelmed by a desire to call Matt.
But Yael had more.
“Mahfouz didn’t waste any time before sharing intelligence with us,” she said. She explained that the Egyptians had an informant in Doha, the capital of the Gulf state of Qatar, 225 miles due west of where we were seated. The informant was the sister of three ISIS jihadists, one of whom was a bank manager in Doha. “But that’s just a cover for his ISIS role,” she insisted. “Turns out he’s a key player in the ISIS courier system.” She claimed that three times in the last eight months, video and audio recordings created by Abu Khalif, including the most recent, had been passed along to Al Jazeera through the bank manager.
“Why don’t they just grab the bank manager?” I asked. “Interrogate him, put pressure on him, make him talk? We’re running out of time.”
“Because he doesn’t know anything,” she said. “Egyptian intelligence is waiting for another courier to make contact. It might be Faisal. Whoever it is, they could lead us to Khalif.”
This was good news. Big news. A real lead.
Yael sent a flash message to Shalit via secure text outlining the basics of my conversation with bin Zayed and Pritchard. She promised a full report by daybreak. Then she recommended that he brief Prime Minister Eitan and that the PM brief President Mahfouz. The fact that Khalif had wives and children—and that they had been positively ID’d—was huge. We needed to get the Mossad’s best people working on this. But we needed the Egyptians’ help too. They might be able to tap sources we didn’t have. What’s more, it would be an act of good faith for the PM to share sensitive information back to Mahfouz just hours after receiving it himself.
“We need to get the Jordanians in on this as well,” I said.
“You’re probably right,” Yael said, yawning and rubbing her eyes.
“I’m definitely right, and I don’t think we can wait anymore,” I said. “The prime minister should call the king first thing in the morning, right after he talks to Mahfouz.”
Just after 5 a.m., the guys went back to their rooms, and Yael and I were suddenly alone. I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and changed into gym shorts and a T-shirt. When I came out, I grabbed a spare blanket and pillow from the closet and lay down on the huge couch, leaving the king-size bed to her. She nodded and disappeared into the bathroom for a few minutes. When she returned, she said good night and crawled into bed.
I forced myself to close my eyes, then pulled the blanket over my head and said a prayer as she turned off the light.
She fell asleep almost instantly. I, on the other hand, had no such luck.
81
BAHRAIN AIRSPACE
J. B. Collins’s life is in danger—we need to talk.
That was the ur
gent message we’d just received from Jordanian intelligence, and that was the totality of the message. We had no other details. We didn’t know the specific nature of the threat or how the Jordanians knew it existed.
Yael and I had, however, been summoned to a private meeting with King Abdullah II at the royal palace in the port city of Aqaba. So suddenly we were back on the Learjet, racing from Dubai to the Hashemite Kingdom. Total flying time for the nearly 1,300-mile trip: just under three hours. A quick glance at my grandfather’s pocket watch suggested that would put us on the tarmac by midnight.
To my surprise, despite the gravity of the threat, the truth was I wasn’t particularly worried for myself. Not anymore. For the first time in my life, I was absolutely certain where I was going when I died, and while I didn’t want to go prematurely, I felt ready for heaven. I wanted to see my mom. I wanted to see Josh. I wanted to see my grandfather and Khachigian and his wife, Mary, and so many other believers who had gone on before me. But far more, I wanted to meet my Lord and Savior face-to-face. I was new to the team, and I had wasted so much of my life running from the truth. But I was done running. I was ready to go home, whenever that moment came.
What truly worried me now, however, was the thought that more harm might come to Matt, Annie, or Katie because of me. I couldn’t bear the thought that Abu Khalif and ISIS might still be hunting them.
To her credit, Yael did her best to calm my mounting fears. She reminded me that my family was in hiding, under the protection of the U.S. government. She pointed out that the message from Amman indicated that I was in danger, not my family. Her words didn’t do much to assuage my anxiety. But for the first time since we’d reconnected, she was acting like my friend and not my adversary.
After a while she switched tactics. She was, after all, a professional spy. She’d been trained in the art of misdirection. So rather than trying to convince me that my family wasn’t in danger, she instead tried to keep me focused on the primary task at hand.