Fog of War (Justin Hall # 3) (7 page)

“Get up,” he said to Suleyman. “We’ve got to go.”

Suleyman offered little resistance as Justin lifted him to his feet. Nathan jammed the pistol into Suleyman’s back. They walked over to the Nissan. Justin climbed through the driver’s side. Nathan shoved Suleyman into the back seat, then got in and sat next to him.

“You’ve scrubbed the car really well,” Justin said. “All traces of blood are gone.”

Suleyman grinned. His boss’s blood had soaked the front seat the previous day. Someone had replaced it with a mismatched leather seat a couple of shades lighter than the original brown.

“Suleyman, tell me, why did you disconnect your phone?” Justin asked.

He started the Nissan and made a right turn. They had to go back to the diner. Their luggage was still in their Lada in the parking lot.

Suleyman did not reply. He sniveled, then wiped some saliva off his chin.

“Hey, I’m talking to you. Why? And why were you trying to kill me?” Justin said.

“Those . . . those are . . . were my orders.”

Nathan kept his gun inches away from Suleyman’s chest as he listened to their exchange.

Justin asked, “Orders? From whom?”

“The men who killed your informer in Iran.”

“Huh? What?” Justin could not believe his ears. He adjusted the rearview mirror. Suleyman’s grinning face was staring back at him.

“Yeah, I know everything about what he was giving you and who you really are, Mr. Justin Hall and Mr. Nathan Smyth of the Canadian Intelligence Service.”

Justin fell silent.
How does he know? The Colonel gave us up? Why? Or did he learn it from another source?
“Who do you work for? Tell me.”

Suleyman shook his head and kept his mouth shut. A stoic grin was stamped on his reddened face.

Justin took a quick moment to think of an intimidation strategy. “OK, Suleyman, tell me everything, or I’ll hand you over to Colonel Garryev. I’ll say you betrayed him and gave the shooters our position. He’ll make sure no one will ever find your body.”

Suleyman’s face remained calm, but his eyes glinted with a ray of fear. Colonel Garryev was notorious for his ‘persuasion tactics.’ More than a dozen men were said to have died in his hands or the hands of his henchmen.

“Talk,” Justin shouted. “Tell me everything.” He had read the fear in Suleyman’s eyes. “What happened after we left?”

Suleyman sighed. His eyes avoided the brunt of Justin’s piercing gaze, and his shoulders slumped. “I dropped the body of your informant and Ruslan’s body and headed back. The same way we took when crossing into Iran.”

He stopped and took a deep breath. Justin wanted to nudge him to talk, but decided to give Suleyman his time. A few long seconds passed, the rumble of the Nissan filling the tense space around them. Justin rounded a curve, and they were now on Mati Kulyev Street. The massive structure of the Kopetdag Stadium rose to the right.

Suleyman said, “The shooters caught up to me about half an hour later. I have no idea how they found me.”

“Who were they?” Justin asked.

Suleyman hesitated only for a brief moment. “Three Arabs and two Africans. They identified themselves as members of al-Shabaab—”

“Yes, al-Shabaab,” Justin said somberly. He felt a deep furrow forming on his forehead. “The most dangerous terrorist network in that part of the world.”

“Yes. They had found your informant and told me he was a scientist who worked in one of the Iranian nuclear plants,” Suleyman said. “He betrayed the Iranians, revealing state secrets. So they gave him his well-deserved reward. That’s what they said. And they told me who you really were, Canadian secret agents.”

The explanation made little sense. Al-Shabaab consisted of Sunni Muslims, while Iranians belonged to the Shia branch of Islam. Both sides hated each other, a hate deep rooted in their different beliefs about political leadership and religious practices.

Nathan asked, “How did they know we were there?”

Suleyman shook his head. “They didn’t say.”

“What did you tell them?”

“What I knew, which isn’t much.”

“They tortured you?”

“No, no need for it. They knew exactly who I am and what I do and how much information I had for them.”

Justin nodded. He slowed down as they rounded the corner, then made another right turn. They were back on Magtymguly Avenue, three blocks away from their diner.

“So now that your boss is dead, you work for al-Shabaab?” Justin asked.

Suleyman frowned, then shrugged. “They let me go only after I agreed to kill you if I had the chance. I’m not stupid, so I wasn’t going to look for you. I made my way back, ditched my phone, laid low. I didn’t come after you. You chased me to that intersection. I tried to leave, but I couldn’t. I didn’t betray you or Colonel Garryev. I’m helping you.”

Justin remained silent. He thought he heard faint police sirens in the distance.

“Helping? You tried to kill him,” Nathan said.

Suleyman shook his head. “No, I was trying to scare you, make you stay down, while I could run away, push my way through the traffic. Look, I’m giving you all I know. Those shooters told me there’s a bounty on your head because of a
fatwa.
”

Suleyman’s words caught Justin completely off guard. “Huh? What? A bounty?” he asked.
Perhaps that’s why Suleyman was so eager to pull the trigger.

“Yes. A million dollars if someone kills you. Not dead or alive. Just dead.”

“Al-Shabaab put a million-dollar bounty on me?”

Suleyman nodded. “They did, or at least that’s what they told me.”

Justin eased on the gas pedal. They had come to a red light.

“What did these shooters look—”

His words were interrupted by Suleyman pushing open the door on his side. Nathan raised his pistol, but Suleyman had already slipped out of the car.

“Stay in,” Justin shouted at Nathan. “We’ll get him.”

Justin jumped the curb, driving on the sidewalk, attempting to cut him off. Suleyman broke into a fast sprint, cutting across the two-lane street, through the fast moving traffic.

Nathan said, “No, stop—”

Suleyman never saw the school bus that ended his life. It zoomed from the opposite direction, hitting him in the back. Suleyman splattered against the windshield. His body fell underneath the bus, while the driver struggled to bring the huge vehicle to a wavering, screeching stop.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Justin said. “This place will be teeming with police in minutes.”

They got out of the Nissan and left it parked on the sidewalk. Nathan wiped his fingerprints off Suleyman’s pistol and tossed it back into the car. Justin cleaned the steering wheel and the door handles.

Justin said, “Let’s take our luggage and fly out before the police connect the dots. We learned everything we could from Suleyman. It’s time to say goodbye to Ashgabat.”

Chapter Five

Washington Dulles International Airport

Virginia, United States of America

September 22, 4:05 p.m. local time

Justin swirled his tall cup and took the last big sip from his Starbucks dark espresso roast. He stood and tossed the cup at a small garbage can about five feet away. The cup bounced over the edge of the can, then fell in. Justin smiled.
A three-pointer from downtown.

It was his second cup since he arrived from Frankfurt, where he had parted ways with Nathan, sending him back to Cairo. Justin had spent last night at the Sheraton Frankfurt Congress Hotel before catching the next available flight to the States. It was a nice but short break after the events in Iran and Turkmenistan. He had briefed McClain about the incident in Ashgabat and the information obtained from Suleyman about the fatwa—an Islamic legal ruling, in this case, a death sentence ruling—against him. Justin had not allowed that information to unnerve him. His life was in danger at all times. It was a professional hazard. And most of the time, the fatwas remained just a warning, issued by powerless clerics who could not mobilize anyone to carry out their threats.

But, this death sentence had come with a bounty, a million-dollar prize on his head. The hefty sum would attract a few goons of the most dangerous kind. Justin needed a pair of eyes to watch his back. Here’s where Carrie came into play.

Carrie O’Connor was Justin’s partner in almost all operations. After two tours of duty in Afghanistan—where she served with Joint Task Force Two—Carrie joined the CIS. She took to heart the motto of her unit:
Facta non verba.
Deeds, not words. According to Carrie, the most efficient solution to a problem was often also the most extreme. The one she always favored. In this case, the solution would be to storm into al-Shabaab’s home base of operations and kill them all.

Justin had arrived forty-five minutes ago and was waiting for Carrie in Concourse B. She was taking Lufthansa too, but her flight had been delayed. He sat next to his Samsonite suitcase and briefcase and looked at the men and women rushing by. He glanced at the screens on the wall indicating the flights’ arrival and departure times. Carrie’s flight, LH418, had just landed. He figured it was going to take a while for all passengers of the Boeing 777 to clear customs and collect their luggage, especially if the airplane was packed with over two hundred people as it had been during his flight.

He stretched his legs and closed his eyes, albeit for a few seconds. He had spent a restless night in Frankfurt, dissecting Suleyman’s words and the operation in Iran. He was sure there had to be an intelligence leak, but he could not determine how it had happened or the identity of the mole.
If there was a mole. Perhaps it was a case of mishandled information. Someone’s eyes or ears saw or heard something they weren’t supposed to, and they gave it to outsiders. Or maybe al-Shabaab was following the scientist, and that’s how they got to us. To me.

He rubbed his temples, then massaged his forehead. He had slept very little on the plane and had developed a grave headache. His forehead was throbbing with a burning pain, and he felt dizzy. He reached for a medicine bottle in his suitcase and swallowed a couple of Tylenol pills. It would take some time before the drug produced its pain-relieving effect. He decided to kill the next few minutes by browsing the newspaper stands by the Starbucks’s entrance.

It was a presidential election year, and all newspapers and magazines had dedicated a large part of their covers to the race to the White House. The popularity of the incumbent President was in decline, according to the polls, because of her perceived soft stance on terrorism. Although unmanned drones were exterminating terrorists from the mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Yemen, the popular perception was a difficult thing to change. The President had tried to reach out to the Muslim world and had called on the American people to make an effort to understand Islamic religion beliefs. One headline noted the President’s soft stance on terrorism was going to cost her the re-election.

Justin moved on to the other stand, dedicated mostly to entertainment, not that there was not plenty of entertainment from editorials and opinions in the pages of the news media. His eyes caught a glimpse of
International Geographic
—close to the bottom of the stand—and he picked up a copy and bought it, mostly because of amusement rather than curiosity. It was a little-known magazine that focused on travel, geography, outdoor activities, a sort of international version of
National Geographic.
It also served as Justin’s cover as a travel journalist, often publishing photographs supposedly taken by him, and, on occasion, an article supposedly written by him. In this way, if someone checked his cover, it would seem legitimate.

He returned to his bench, flipped through the pages, and glanced at the table of contents. He found what he was looking for. Two small photographs of deserts in northern Sudan were buried somewhere close to end of the magazine. Justin smiled. He had not taken those shots and the credited name at the bottom of the caption was not his. Still, he had been close to the area and could talk about that landscape.

A shrill sound dragged him out of the magazine’s pages. A little boy—perhaps not older than three—was toddling next to his mother, struggling to hold on to her hand. Justin followed his unsteady steps until they disappeared in the flow of hasty passengers. Justin wondered whether he would ever have a little boy.
What would he look like? Will he have my eyes? My hair? My personality? Or will he look more like Anna?

Justin had a Mediterranean complexion—dark olive skin, raven wavy hair, which he had cut short a couple of weeks ago, big black eyes, and a large thick nose—inherited from his Italian mother. It allowed him to blend in naturally in most of the terrorist hotspots he infiltrated during his missions. His personality with an unpredictable flaring temper came from his Scottish father. His fiancée, Anna, had fairer skin and blue eyes. She used to work for CIS Legal Services in Ottawa, but after they fell in love during the Arctic Wargame operation, she left CIS to avoid any conflicts of interest. Now an in-house counsel for a large multinational corporation, Anna was more easygoing and calmer, matching Justin’s wits and bringing some much-needed balance to his life.

He turned a few more pages, then stood up, glanced to the right and scanned the faces in the ever-changing crowd. He paced along the hall and back. He stuffed the magazine in his suitcase, rolled it behind him, and returned to Starbucks. The digital clock on the wall told him Carrie was going to show up at any minute. He ordered another espresso for him and a grande caffè mocha without whipped cream and a blueberry muffin for her.

Just as he was picking them up, he heard Carrie’s voice behind him, “Hey, wanted man.”

“Hi, Carrie.” He turned around and fell into her arms.

“You look good,” he said when they broke their embrace.

“No, I don’t. Just came back from a ten-hour flight, after another flight for three hours from Moscow to Frankfurt and another one from Grozny to Moscow. Not to mention the layovers. My hair’s a mess and I feel so dirty.”