The Insider Threat (22 page)

T
he connecting door opened to my room, and Jennifer came in, followed by Knuckles. He said, “This is convenient. I figured you’d want a room that connects to the TOC, but I guess we all have our priorities.”

Jennifer elbowed him in the gut, causing a
woof
of air. He backed up, rubbing his belly, saying, “Touchy, aren’t we?”

She said, “This is serious. No joking around.”

I saw her expression and knew she was about to make trouble. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with. I was analyzing Google Maps, trying to figure out the best observation points to conduct surveillance of the Internet café, the only anchor we had, and I wasn’t happy with the interruption. I preempted her, saying, “You guys finish with the plane? You got everything we need?”

While the Gulfstream was invaluable for infiltrating kit past customs, it was a pain in the ass to get said kit out of the aircraft and into our tactical operations center. A lot of back-and-forth, running “checklists” and doing “maintenance.”

Knuckles said, “Retro’s getting the last of the optics. We’re good to go with weapons and commo. Believe it or not, the front desk helped bring it up.”

Knuckles saw my glare and said, “I know, I know, but those guys won’t take no for an answer. Me and Jennifer were toting damn near a hundred pounds of weaponry in three Gucci luggage bags. If we had waved off, they’d have become suspicious. They didn’t seem to mind. Probably do that shit all the time for the Albanian mafia.”

We were staying at the Sheraton Hotel, a five-star affair snuggled between the city and a giant green space, Tirana’s version of Central Park. The hotel itself was probably the nicest property in the city, and it seemed the management knew it. They acted a little embarrassed to be working there, like the rich guy who brought home a normal date, now apologizing for the manservants and thousand-dollar espresso machines. It was annoying, but this was the only place we could find with high-speed Wi-Fi, and a lack of that was a nonstarter on this mission. Although having the management tote up our weapons was a bit much.

Jennifer said, “Hey, I’ve been going over the data from the Taskforce, and I think I’m on to something. I ran it past Knuckles, and he thinks so too.”

I said, “Unless it involves a French terrorist of Algerian descent, I do not care. Do you realize what we’re up against? The damn guy is using an Internet café right next to the US embassy. Like he’s taunting us. Or planning an attack.”

I stabbed my finger at the laptop screen and said, “He’s using our own security to prevent us from snatching his ass. Maintaining eyes-on of that café is going to be damn near impossible. It’s surrounded by police, all who work for the embassy, which we’re not allowed to coordinate with.”

Knuckles said, “Can’t be that bad. It’s a US embassy. We can get eyes-on from a distance. At least past the blast radius.”

He was referring to a document called the Inman Report, produced after the 1983 bombing of our embassy in Beirut, which mandated certain standards for standoff and blast protection. Standards that grew more urgent after the 1998 bombings in Africa. It stipulated US embassies maintain at least a modicum of defensive capability, with standoff distances from vehicle-borne explosives and even glass construction specifications. Unfortunately, like a lot of quagmire in the US government, the design parameters apparently hadn’t made it to Tirana, Albania.

The embassy was right in the heart of a neighborhood, with alleys snaking behind the back wall of the compound. It made me cringe wondering how easy it would be to obliterate, but my mission was in the Internet café tucked next to the east wall, underneath a bar called, appropriately enough, the American Bar.

It was going to be hard keeping surveillance on Rashid, because the embassy had traded standoff distance for uniformed officers of Albania. They were everywhere.

But clearly, that wasn’t why Jennifer had dragged Knuckles to my room. She had something more important in mind.

She said, “I went through the Taskforce reports.”

I countered, “Are Shoshana and Aaron back yet? I need some input on bumper locations. And we need to develop a schedule. We’re easy, but they’re going to get smoked doing a fifty-fifty stakeout.”

Jennifer crossed her arms and gave me the death stare, knowing I was trying to get her off whatever subject was coming. Knuckles said, “They haven’t come back. I think you should hear Jennifer out. She’s on to something.”

Jennifer gave him a grateful nod, and, because he couldn’t stand to back her up with me in the room, he said, “I mean, she appears to be thinking with something other than her dick.” He glanced at the connecting door and said, “Unlike you. Although, after that last punch, I’m not so sure she isn’t hiding a penis.”

She whirled to him, shouting, “Do you constantly have to fight me because I’m female? Do I threaten you that much?”

The tone of her voice broke me away from my computer. Only half listening earlier, I was all ears now. It was beyond sharp. She’d always been good-natured about the ribbing before, but today, she was out for blood.

I saw Knuckles with a look of shock on his face, his hands in the air. He said, “Whoa, whoa . . . calm down. Jesus, Jennifer, what’s up with you lately?”

She stopped and glared at him, but I could see the embarrassment coming through at her outburst.

I said, “Hey.”

She flicked her eyes to me.

“What
is
up with you?”

She stomped away, getting a bottle of water from the small desk below the television. She unscrewed the cap, then sat down. She said, “You guys have been second-guessing me since al-Britani was killed. I had nothing to do with that. I am
not
Shoshana.”

And I saw what was happening. It wasn’t
us
second-guessing. It was her. Which made all the difference.

N
obody blamed Jennifer for what had happened. Every single one of us had been in her shoes at one time or another and made a decision that had ended badly. We’d dealt with it by talking to the team, and she felt she couldn’t, because she believed she was unique. A female. She regretted the outcome of the mission in Jordan and was internalizing it.

I leaned forward, the team leader wanting to say something profound and uplifting, but before I could, Knuckles took a different tack.

He spit fire at her.

“Are you shitting me? Cut that crybaby crap. Is that why you’ve been acting like you’re on your period? Fuck, girl, I was almost good to go with a female on the team. Now I have to deal with this hormonal bullshit?”

Her eyes flew open at his words. She leapt to her feet, fists clenched. He stood firm and said, “What? You want a piece of this? Bring it on. I’m sick of Pike protecting you all the time.”

He looked at me, and I gave a slight nod, letting him know I was good with it. Showing him I understood where he was going.

He advanced on her and said, “You think you made a bad call, and you very well might have, but we all do. We
all
do. You want to talk about it, I’m all ears, but spare me the song and dance that I don’t trust you anymore.”

I saw confusion, then suspicion. She said, “You don’t mean that.”

He smiled, looked at me, and said, “You want to tell her about Sudan?”

I said, “No. I’d rather leave that fuckup in the classified dictionary of what not to do.”

He returned to her and said, “That’s
my
dictionary, by the way. You want to tell lover boy here what you found? Or just keep pining away because you don’t actually have a penis?”

Her face grew red at the insults, stiffening her will to resist. I halfway stood, knowing what was about to happen, because she was one bullheaded woman . . . person . . . whatever.

Then I saw her reflect on what he’d said. Like in Nairobi, she realized he was actually patting her on the back and giving her an out.

She sat back into the chair and said, “I don’t need to know what he screwed up. I see it on a daily basis.”

Knuckles grinned and said, “Offer still stands. You want to talk about what happened in Jordan, I’m willing to listen. But I’d hate to waste Pike’s time, since his attention span is so short. Show him what you have.”

She opened her purse, withdrawing some computer printouts.

I said, “Okay, what the hell is the big deal? We have an operation starting tomorrow, and I have a couple of loony Israelis to deal with. Conspiracy theories are taking a backseat.”

The next words out of her mouth made me second-guess who was loony.

“Pike, I read through all of the reports on Hussein, both open-source, and our own analysis. They missed something. The Lost Boys are real, and I think they’re on the hunt.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “We don’t have time for this shit. We have a mission. Feed your suspicions into the system. We take orders. We don’t make them.”

She pursed her lips, glancing at Knuckles for backup. He said, “That’s it? That’s all you got?”

I returned to my computer, mapping out my surveillance strategy. Jennifer pushed the lid down, causing a spike of anger in me. She held a finger to my lips and said, “Hussein recruited the Lost Boys. I don’t know why, but he did. Hear me out.”

I started to bark at her and Knuckles leaned in. “For once, assume you’re not the smartest in the room.”

I gritted my teeth for a moment, then spit out, “Well?”

Jennifer said, “Remember the video? Of the guy saying he was doing it for the White House?”

I nodded. She placed a digital recorder on the table. “This is the last thing Hussein said before he died.”

Hussein’s disembodied voice floated in the room, chilling because we knew it was real. And he was dead.

“It’s because of the white house. I never wanted to go there. Nobody wanted to go there. They did this. Ask Jacob. He’ll tell you about the white house.”

We sat in silence for a moment, then Jennifer said, “That’s been pinging in my head for days, because it just didn’t make any sense. His final words didn’t match what the Taskforce assessed about the Lost Boys. So I asked you for the reports.”

She laid an official Taskforce transcript in front of me.

“Hussein was incarcerated at a Christian reform school in Florida. The one that’s now closed down. Remember you told me that? Well, the chief reason it was shuttered was because of horrific abuse, and that cruelty was primarily conducted in a building on the center of the campus. Called the ‘white house.’ They weren’t talking about attacking America on that video. They were talking about something they’d all experienced. Together.”

She let that sink in, then continued, “The murder of the guard that drew the attention to the place occurred during a breakout. Three men escaped.
Three
. They disappeared without a trace.”

I went from her to Knuckles. “And?”

She slapped a cushion and said, “And they’re the damn Lost Boys! The ones in the video. One of the boys who escaped is named Jacob, for God’s sake. They’re tied to Hussein. It isn’t just a nickname given by the Islamic State. It’s a group, and they’re working together.”

I said, “Even if they are, we have a mission here. What do you want me to do about it?”

“I want to get their names in the system. Get the Taskforce to check them out. We know who escaped, but the Taskforce hasn’t looked at this thread.”

I rubbed my face, not needing this distraction. “Fine, fine. I’ll do that. Can we get back to our mission? We’ve got a killer here with intelligence training. I’m not too concerned about a bunch of escaped juvenile delinquents chopping off heads in Syria.”

She said, “Because they’re not holding a knife to your throat. But what if they’re holding it to someone else’s? Right this very minute.”

J
acob leaned against the rough-hewn brick, trying to remain inconspicuous. It was a losing battle, and he knew it. He simply looked like he was up to no good. A single man, standing by himself in the gloom of night. He imagined he was representing exactly why the street had such a nefarious name.

Originally looking for an entrance to a canal, away from the gondoliers and tourists, he’d used Google Maps to find Rio Terrà Assassini. He’d walked it, a mere ten minutes from his hotel, and liked what he saw. No stores and only one bistro farther up the lane, it was narrow and off the beaten tourist path. The far end was nothing more than a set of concrete steps that dropped into the murky canal water, the walls of the alley just over ten feet across. A perfect spot to pull up a small boat, and, since it dead-ended into the canal, no tourists or locals would be using the alley as a thoroughfare.

Walking back to the hotel, he’d become intrigued by the name. He’d Googled it, and found that the alley had a little bit of a story behind it.
Assassini
referred to the assassinations and murders that had occurred in that small stretch of stone, with pickpockets and thieves preying on the wealthier class trying to sneak to the nearby brothels located in Calle della Mandola. The discovery surprised him, but it was fitting. Centuries could go by, but the killer instinct was drawn to the same locations.

He saw a group of Korean tourists leave the wine bar fifty meters away and turn toward him, clearly going the wrong way in the maze that was Venice. He tried to appear as if he had a purpose, kneeling down and pretending to work the rope anchored above the stairs. When he stood back up, he met the eyes of the lead tourist, and the man stopped dead in his tracks, seeing something he instinctively wanted to recoil from. He muttered something in Korean to his partners, then they all turned abruptly and began walking much faster back the way they’d come.

Jacob cursed and looked at his watch. Nine forty-five.
Where is Carlos?

Their target was due here in fifteen minutes, and he wanted to get him immediately into the boat, while the man was still compliant and before he could alert any potential contingency he had planned.

He had a lot of information he needed to get from the target, and he wanted to do it out on the ocean, away from anyone who could hear him scream, should force become necessary.

First, they needed to find out where he’d stashed the lady. They had only two more nights, and didn’t have the time to go searching. Second, they needed to know unequivocally if he’d talked to anyone. He knew the boys were clean, because he’d spoken to Devon. They were currently boozing it up in a pub a half mile away and had no idea what had transpired with their chaperone, but that didn’t preclude the target from having alerted his mistress.

Those questions were significant, but the primary one was whether their target had planned to be gone for the duration of the day tomorrow. The boys indicated that they were on their own, and the target had stated he was doing business meetings, but Jacob wanted to know if that was true, or if he was planning on spending the day in bed with his lover.

Jacob wasn’t too worried about a missed business meeting, as the mission would be done in a week. The worst they’d do was call the target’s phone and leave a voice mail.

After the mission, he could care less what they found, but all of that was predicated on the target doing what he told the boys. If he was lying about the meeting and instead intended to get lathered in sweat with his honeypot tomorrow, it would be an issue, because the target was never leaving the boat alive tonight.

The thought brought back memories of the Kurd, reminding Jacob of what he was doing. The meat of it. The heart. He felt the filet knife hidden in his sleeve, knowing what it would taste in the next thirty minutes. An action that plenty of kids back in the school had blustered about, but never actually done—something Jacob could no longer say.

Jacob wondered if the act was worth the sacrifice. Once he did this killing, he was on an irreversible path. There would be no turning back. He would be a hunted man forever. The only place he could return was the cauldron of the Islamic State, forced to subjugate his newfound sense of worth for the rest of his life. Ironically, a sense of worth provided by Omar and the Islamic State.

But what was the alternative? Leaving now would mean abandoning his friends Carlos and Devon. They weren’t smart enough to stay alive on their own. If he quit, fleeing to a new life, the mission would fail. Carlos and Devon would return to the Islamic State, convinced their faith would allow mercy. And they’d be tortured to death, ending up on a gruesome tape much like the very one they’d made earlier in Syria.

Hussein was already dead. Jacob felt some guilt at that. He could have gotten him out, but he had not, and he wouldn’t do the same to Carlos and Devon. Everything he had been through, both in the white house and the Islamic State, told him that family was worth far more than anything else. When everything was boiled down, that was all that was left, and he now included Omar in that circle. The one man who’d ever shown him respect.

He thought about Omar and his skill. He could work for a man like that. He could do what Omar wanted, and he could achieve a bit of success. Maybe more than a bit. He’d recognized his skill, and felt a loyalty to Omar that he’d never experienced before.

He caught movement behind him, and saw a fifteen-foot aluminum-hulled boat float out of the gloom, a grinning Carlos working an outboard motor. He cut the engine and glided in. Jacob grabbed the bow and used the anchored rope to tie it fast.

Carlos said, “Sorry I’m late. Had a little trouble with the boat.”

Jacob stood up and said, “You didn’t have to hurt anyone, did you?”

“No, no. The owner was working late. I just waited for him to leave. I’d have called, but it worked out.”

Jacob nodded and Carlos said, “Did he come?”

“Not yet. Should be here any minute.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

Jacob looked back up the alley, seeing a man break out of the crowds from the wine bar. Walking into the light, Jacob recognized the target.

“He’s here. Get ready.”

*   *   *

Chris Fulbright passed the bistro in the alley and slowed, straining his eyes. He saw two shadowy figures at the end, a canal behind them. He glanced back, as if there would be some help behind him, then continued on, much more slowly than before.

He came within the feeble light from a second-story window and saw that the men were mere boys, maybe twenty years old at the most, which raised a primordial instinct. He was unfamiliar with anything smacking of danger, but something deep in his gene pool registered a threat.

In his head, the odds were they’d been sent by the German conglomerate and were nothing more than hired messengers. But something about them was off. Feral.

Behind them was a small johnboat, with what looked like a load of rope and cinder blocks. He dismissed it as some local’s conveyance.

He resolved to hear them out but give them nothing beyond what they had. He’d trade his enormous breakthrough into Europe, throw away five years of work because of a moment of infatuation with a set of tits, but he wouldn’t give them leverage for anything else.

The taller of the two stepped forward and said, “Chris, my name is Jacob. Please step into the boat. We have some things to discuss.”