Blowback (3 page)

DHAKA, PEOPLE ’ S REPUBLIC OF BANGLADESH

Until today, Emir Tokay had always felt safe in Bangladesh. While most outsiders viewed it as a cyclone-prone, perpetually flooded country, he had seen it as a land rich in history and, more importantly, rich in its devotion to Islam. Dhaka, the country’s capital, boasted more than seven hundred mosques within its city limits alone. Surely, it was no accident that the Islamic Institute for Science and Technology had been established here-after all, what better place to carry out some of Allah’s most important work? Now, though, Emir was having second thoughts not only about that work, but whether or not he was going to make it out of the city alive.

At first, the fatal heart attack suffered by Dr. Abbas in Dubai had seemed an unfortunate but not unusual circumstance. The man was grossly overweight and had long ignored his family’s and colleagues’ pleas to take better care of himself. The brilliant scientist had claimed that his research took all of his time and left him little opportunity for exercise. Then there was Dr. Akbar in Amman, who was just the opposite of Abbas. Akbar broke his neck diving into the pool he swam laps in every day and drowned. After Akbar came Dr. Hafiz in Damascus. He was a relatively robust man in his fifties with no prior history of health complications who suddenly died of an acute asthma attack.

Next came the deaths of Dr. Jafar in Cairo, Dr. Qasim in Tehran, and Dr. Salim in Rabat. Then the terrible hit-and-run accident involving Dr. Ansari in Lahore. Examined individually, there was nothing unusual about these deaths other than they were unfortunate and untimely. But when Emir Tokay took them as a whole, the larger picture was terrifying. Assuming Dr. Bashir in Baghdad, whom he hadn’t been able to get hold of for several days, was dead, Tokay was the last one on the research team still alive.

Tokay’s first reaction was to notify his superiors, but he knew that would be a big mistake. None of the scientists were supposed to know who they were working with. The Islamic Institute for Science and Technology had cloaked the entire project in secrecy and had kept it tightly compartmentalized. The scientists were not allowed to identify themselves to each other and had only communicated via encrypted, untraceable e-mail addresses. They were allowed to share data only-nothing about their personal or professional lives. The system had seemed foolproof, but the institute had overlooked the fundamental trait that made for a good scientist-curiosity.

It was Dr. Bashir who had begun the quest to uncover not only whom he was working with, but what their research was ultimately intended to achieve. Other than that it was to be a great triumph for the Muslim people, not much had been explained to the team. It was a puzzle all of them were quietly eager to solve.

Bashir suspected that at the very least, the institute was filtering their e-mails, searching for key words that would give away any forbidden conversations, and probably was selecting random e-mails to read in their entirety. Either way, his solution required discretion.

Bashir had named one of the white lab rats in his control group Stay-Go. The name, he said in his e-mails, sprang from the way the rat bounced around its cage.

Emir Tokay, the brilliant young Turkish scientist who had been brought to the institute to help coordinate the efforts of the project members, was the first to pick up on Dr. Bashir’s clever code. It was more the tone of Bashir’s e-mails than anything else that made him believe the lead scientist was trying to convey a secondary message to the team. It took Tokay a while to figure what that message was, but through much trial and error he eventually discovered the key lay in what Bashir had named his lab rat. The name Stay-Go was actually a phonetic pronunciation of the word stego, short for steganography. Steganography was taken from Greek and literally translated to “covered writing. “In cryptography it is assumed an enemy may intercept a message but will be unable to decode it, whereas the goal of steganography is to hide messages in otherwise harmless communications in such a way that even if they were intercepted by the enemy, said enemy would never even be aware a secondary message was present. In the digital world of today, practitioners of steganography could hide their messages in a wide array of data formats. Popular file attachments such as. Wav,. Mp3,. bmp,. doc,. Txt,. gif, and. Jpeg were perfect because redundant, or “noisy,” data could be easily removed and replaced with a hidden message. Tokay discovered that was precisely what Dr. Bashir had done.

For three months Bashir had been embedding a simple, repetitive message inside his digital pictures of his white lab rat, Stay-Go: “Who are we and what are we doing? Be cautious with your response. Our e-mails are being watched. Dr. M. Bashir.”

Once he had discovered Bashir’s code, Emir worked feverishly to find a way around the institute’s electronic filtering and monitoring of the team’s communications. Like many organizations, the institute was far more concerned with attacks originating from outside their computer system than from within. Soon, Tokay was confident that he had devised a way for the team to send and receive e-mails without the institute’s knowledge. In time, the scientists began trading clandestine messages on the average of once a week. From what they could tell, the project they were working on was more a game than anything else. No one could understand what practical application their research could possibly have.

It wasn’t until the final stages of the project that Dr. Bashir floated a terrifying supposition about what they might be working on. Before they could fully discuss the possibility, the team was officially disbanded. Only Emir was kept on at the institute to assemble the team’s research. Immediately thereafter, team members began dying. But why?

Alone in his lab in Baghdad, Dr. Bashir had come up with the correct answer. Each of the team members had been recruited to help give birth to an abomination. It was the only thing that made sense, but Emir Tokay had no intention of continuing to be a party to it. The type of Islam he believed in would never allow what the institute planned to unleash on the world. It was pure evil, and Islam was a religion of peace. He wouldn’t allow any more fanatics to hijack his faith for their own vile ends.

The one problem he had was that he couldn’t prove anything if he was dead. He needed to get back to Turkey and the safety of his family. The airport was out of the question, as was the train station. They were too dangerous, too obvious. If he could catch a bus south to the port city of Narayanganj, he could board a ship and everything would be okay. But, before he did that, there was one last thing he needed to do at the institute.

After sending off a final e-mail and gathering his files from his office, Emir wound his way through the bustling old town and emerged on one of the crowded streets parallel to the Dhaleswari River. When he saw his bus coming, he allowed himself to believe that he just might make it.

His thoughts were soon interrupted by a speeding black Mercedes that screamed to a halt alongside him, filling the air with the smell of burnt rubber and tire smoke. When three masked men armed with AK-74s leapt from the car and surrounded him, he knew he had been a fool to think he could ever make it out of Bangladesh alive.

WASHINGTON, DC

Pennsylvania Democratic senator Helen Remington Carmichael watched the footage for the thousandth time, and it still gave her the chills. It wasn’t that she abhorred violence. On the contrary, she saw the calculated application of force for exactly what it was-a necessary means to preserve liberty. In this case, though, what the images on her television screen represented, what the footage millions of Americans were seeing repeatedly on Fox and CNN and Muslims around the world were watching on their respective channels, was the beginning of the undoing of American President Jack Rutledge.

She had known it was only a matter of time. The man’s approval ratings had been ridiculously high. It started with sympathy over the loss of his wife to breast cancer during the first campaign, then it followed him through his first term as president with his kidnapping, his dismantling of several high-profile terrorist organizations, and most recently a successful showdown against the Russians. It had seemed as if the man could do no wrong. And then this. The heavens had opened, and God had handed Helen Remington Carmichael the one thing she had been praying for since considering a run for the vice-presidential slot on the Democratic ticket.

One step at a time, she had told herself. She knew how the press perceived her. She was the power-hungry bitch who had used her successful husband to catapult her into a Senate seat. She didn’t even like Pennsylvania, but when it became obvious that aging senator Timothy Murphy wasn’t going to run again, she had grabbed her husband by the balls and had moved the entire family out east to establish residency and make a run for the Senate.

The people of the state liked her fire, and Murphy had thrown not only his endorsement but all of his political weight behind her. The young Republican the GOP put up against her never had a chance.

Ever the savvy politico, Carmichael had been working hard to soften her image, but no matter what she did, everything about her still screamed bitch. While some of her aides privately debated whether or not she should ditch the pantsuits and grow her hair out, there were others who said none of it would matter. No matter how you dressed or coiffed her, the woman not only acted like a bitch, she just plain looked like one.

The word among her staff was that maybe all she needed to soften her up was a little sex, but her husband was too busy chasing other women.

The fact of the matter was that the only way Carmichael was going to get elected to the presidency of the United States was to serve as one hell of a vice president first.

But to even get that far, there was something very serious standing in her way-Jack Rutledge. The Democrats didn’t have a single candidate they could stand up against him and hope to win with. The only way they were going to win was to politically batter the incumbent president until his numbers were so low they could walk in and take the office right away from him.

THE WHITE HOUSE

President Jack Rutledge waved his chief of staff, Charles Anderson, into the Oval Office and signaled that his phone conversation was almost complete.

“Yes, Your Majesty, I realize that, and we appreciate the lengths you have gone to to keep militants in your own country in check. Your help in the war on terror has been invaluable. Let me assure you that this is one of my top priorities and we are going to get to the bottom of it,” the president said. He paused and then said, “I’ve heard that rumor, too, and I can understand why your people would be upset, but let me again state that there are always two sides to every story. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, and as soon as we do, we’ll brief you on our findings. I guarantee you that we are taking this very seriously.”

The president paused again and then answered, “And I thank you for your time as well. Goodbye, Your Majesty.”

As the president hung up, he turned to Anderson and said, “This is an absolute nightmare. That’s the sixth call I’ve had today from an Arab head of state. You know what they’re calling it over there? The showdown at the al-Karim corral.”

“Yeah. I’ve heard that one,” replied Anderson. “Not very original, if you ask me.”

“Original or not, this is a big black eye for us. The Muslims take an extremely long view of history, Chuck. Much longer than we do. To many of them, the crusades are as fresh in their minds as if they happened last week. All of this on the heels of the whole Abu Ghraib prison fiasco. That might as well have happened ten minutes ago as far as they’re concerned.”

“Abu Ghraib was bad. No question about it. And this al-Jazeera thing has got the potential to be much worse-”

“The potential? Chuck, I have no idea how the view is from where you’re sitting, but this has gone way beyond the potential for being worse. It is worse. Monumentally.”

“I’ll admit it doesn’t look good, but I want to remind you, as you yourself just said, we don’t have all the facts yet.

“That soldier is an American. That’s all that matters,” said the president. “We’re not fighting this war on terror in a vacuum. Every single move we make is watched around the world. Every single thing we do has countless repercussions. It takes us years to gain a mere foot of credible ground in that region and only seconds to lose it.”

“Agreed,” said Anderson, “ but the Muslims’ long view of history notwithstanding, I don’t think the United States should have to wear the weight of the crusades around its neck. America didn’t even exist in the eleventh century. Europe launched the crusades.”

The president leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. “It doesn’t matter. In their minds we’re an extension of Europe. Everything the West does, whether it’s Europe or America, is connected. Seven minutes or seven centuries ago, it’s all the same to them. They paint us with the same brush. It’s frustrating as hell, but these people just don’t think the way we do.”

“Nobody thinks the way we do. We have a unique spirit, and that spirit is what defines America. Freedom, democracy, liberty, and the willingness to use force when necessary to help preserve those ideals-that’s what we’re all about. You pick any man or woman on the street in the Middle East and give him or her the option of staying put or coming to America to start their lives over again with the rights and freedoms we identify ourselves by, and they’ll choose the good ol’ USA every time. They might burn our flag for the cameras, but throw a handful of green cards in the air and they’d cut each other’s throats to get their hands on them.”

“I wonder what al-Jazeera would do with that footage,” said the president as he shifted his gaze and focused on his chief of staff.

“Don’t get me started on al-Jazeera. We could be passing out blankets, medicine, and gold-plated copies of the Koran over there, and they’d still find a way to make us look like the bad guys.”

“Too true,” replied Rutledge, “but lack of journalistic integrity at al-Jazeera is a conversation I’m tired of having. What did you want to see me about?”

“I take it that was King Abdullah you were speaking with?” asked Anderson.

The president nodded his head.

“And the rumor you were referring to was that the man seen being beaten by our soldier was just a nobody, a fruit stall vendor, right?”

Again the president nodded.

“Well, that’s not a rumor any longer. He is a fruit stall vendor.”

“That’s fantastic,” said the president, as he threw up his hands and stood up from behind his desk. “It couldn’t have been a terrorist off our most wanted list, could it? That would have been too easy. Heaven forbid we get an opportunity to bolster our credibility in the region by taking a known killer out of circulation.”

“Even if the guy was a known terrorist, from a PR standpoint I still don’t think this is how we would have wanted it to go down for the cameras,” replied Anderson as he watched the president pace.

“You know what I’m trying to say. Our credibility is so thin over there, all you have to do is hold it up to a light bulb and you can see through it. We talk about being a just nation-a nation that observes the rule of law, a place where people are innocent until proven guilty-but those are only words, aren’t they? And what speaks a thousand words? Pictures. And what pictures are being watched the world over by anyone who has turned on a television set in the last eight hours? A faceless American soldier beating the pulp out of an Iraqi fruit stall vendor. What a picture that made, straight out of Central Casting. A uniformed American GI and a typical local citizen complete with turban. “

“It was actually a kaffiyeh, sir, not a turban. There’s a difference.”

“I know there’s a difference, and you don’t have to tell me,” barked Rutledge. “I saw the footage.”

“Of course. I’m sorry, sir.”

“My point is that we can’t just talk the talk. We have to walk that talk-all of us. From the lowliest buck private all the way to the people working in this building. Damn it. Just when it seemed we were getting some PR traction in that part of the world, this happens.”

Anderson waited a moment for the president to cool down and said, “There may be a piece of information that could work to our favor in all of this.”

Rutledge stopped pacing for a moment and raised his eyebrows. “Really? Like what? Are you going to tell me that the attack was self-defense somehow? Maybe the fruit vendor was selling bad dates, because if he was, then this whole thing is okay, isn’t it? I mean, if this guy had the balls to sell bad dates, then the gloves understandably come off. God knows we’re not a nation that stands for bad dates, and heaven help any fruit vendor who tries to sell them to us.”

The chief of staff knew that the president was only one step away from blowing his stack and decided to tread very lightly. “The fruit vendor’s stall was nowhere near where this incident took place. In fact, it’s completely on the other side of Baghdad. He should have been manning his stall when this all went down, but it turns out he paid one of his cousins, and not a small amount of money, to man it for him.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because somebody paid him even more money to take the day off and hang out a couple of blocks from the al-Karim bazaar.”

“Who? And why?”

“The Iraqi Security Forces have been trying to get that out of him, but the man claims he doesn’t know,” said Anderson. “And before you make any remarks about the effectiveness of the Iraqi Security Forces, keep in mind that they were almost immediately on the scene at al-Karim and shut the al-Jazeera crew down before they could get our soldier’s face on tape. We’re lucky that it was all shot from behind.”

“Who cares if they got his face? They got that little two-by-three-inch patch with the stars and stripes on his upper arm,” said the president, not at all convinced there was anything positive about this catastrophe. “That’s all they needed to get.”

“True,” said Anderson, “but the fact that his face wasn’t shown will definitely help buy us a little more time.”

“Time? Time for what? Time to hope this story will just fade away, because that’s not going to happen. This isn’t something we can claim ignorance of and quietly sweep under the rug. People are incensed, Chuck. The entire Muslim world is up in arms. They see this as a direct attack on Islam and are literally out for blood. I’ve been asked by no less than four governments in the region to hand the soldier over once he’s been ID’d so he can stand trial under Islamic law. Not only has every two-bit imam across the region issued a fatwa against him, the U.S. Military, and the United States in general, but some of these people are calling for a war crimes tribunal in the Hague.”

“Well, if the Muslims want to try our soldier, they’ll have to take a number, because the Democrats on the Hill are already calling for their own hearings.”

The president sat back down in his chair and massaged his temples with the heels of his hands. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“We are in an election year.”

“Even if it weren’t an election year, it wouldn’t matter. Our side would be all over this as well if the situation was reversed. This is just too juicy to pass up. “Looking up, he asked, “Who’s leading the charge?”

“Helen Carmichael,” replied Anderson. “And here’s the kicker-she wants the hearings televised.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me either?”

“It shouldn’t. She’s looking to score major points with her party before Governor Farnsworth’s campaign team and the DNC nail down who the number two person on their ticket is going to be. What’s surprising, though, is that she’s launching the hearings from her own seat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

That did surprise Rutledge. “The Intelligence Committee? What the hell for? This doesn’t have anything to do with them. Why isn’t she giving it to Armed Services?”

“We think it’s because she smells blood in the water.”

“Of course she smells blood in the water. We’re hemorrhaging. Islamic fundamentalists are going to use that al-Jazeera footage as a perpetual recruiting tool, and it’s going to work. Thousands of Muslim youth who might not otherwise have signed up are going to be asking themselves, What if that was someone I loved or cared about being beaten by an American soldier? We handed them this one on a silver platter. It’s going to take us decades to recover. But that still doesn’t explain what possible interest the Intelligence Committee could have in holding hearings on this.”

“You might change your mind about the committee’s interest once you know who the American in the al-Jazeera footage is,” said Anderson.

The president leaned forward in his chair. “Who’s got him? The Army? Do they know who he is?”

“The Army doesn’t have him, and they don’t know who he is.”

Rutledge waited for the other shoe to drop, but when Anderson didn’t say anything, his mind started turning. “I don’t suppose this guy is a private contractor we can plausibly disavow?”

“We’re not going to be that lucky on this one. If it was a contractor, this entire thing would be over already.”

“He’s an operator then, isn’t he?” said the president.

Anderson nodded his head. “Part of one of the direct action teams authorized by the DOD and this office.”

“Is he CIA?”

“I don’t think you should know any more at this point. There’s a good chance Carmichael is going to be issuing subpoenas, and I don’t doubt there’ll be one with your name on it.”

“My name? What the hell for?”

“We’ve got him on a C130 en route to Andrews Air Force Base right now. He won’t be on the ground until much later tonight. In the morning, there’ll be a thorough debriefing, and afterwards I’ll come to you and we can talk. In the meantime, I’d rather you stay outside the loop on this.”

Rutledge had known his chief of staff long enough to trust his judgment. Shielding the president from political fallout was part of Anderson ’s job. “Until the morning, but that’s it,” said Rutledge. “Now, what about Carmichael? Does she know we’ve got him?”

“I don’t think so. Not yet,” replied Anderson.

“Does she know who he is?”

“She’s got her teeth into something, and she’s working around the clock turning over every rock in town.”

“Well, if we’ve got him, then we have to get out in front of this story and control how it unfolds. I don’t care about the elections. They don’t supersede the sanctity of this office. We’re going to do the right thing on this, and if it means this operative has to take one for the team, then he’s going to have to take one for the team,” said the president.

Anderson shook his head and reached for the BlackBerry device vibrating on his hip. “You might not feel that way once you know who we’re talking about.”

“Are you saying I’m familiar with this person?” asked the president.

Anderson didn’t respond. He was too busy reading the message he had just been sent.

“Chuck, I’m asking you a question,” repeated the president. “Is this person someone I know?”

The chief of staff looked up and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. President. We’ll have to take this up later. You’re needed in the situation room immediately.”