Ghost (15 page)

“How much cash do you move out of here?” I ask the security chief.

“You mean a night? ’Bout a million.”

I do the math. No wonder Trump can afford to buy Marine One.

“Ever seen that old Sinatra film, what was it…?”

“
Ocean’s Eleven
?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Never happen here.”

“How can you be sure?”

The security chief waves a hand at all the techno-gadgets in the room. “They didn’t have all this in 1960.”

Point taken.

Long after midnight, Andreotti decides it is time to get some sleep. I’ve been too busy to see how he made out, but he seems in perky spirits when we meet him back at the Sikorsky on the rooftop helipad. We climb aboard and fly back to midtown Manhattan.

The next morning, we set up the motorcade out in front of his hotel and await his arrival. He comes down, looking fresh in a new suit and coiffed hair. We speed off out of the city, the NYPD intel car on point again. This time, we spend the day at Belmont Park, watching the races. The foreign minister meets a few friends, and they pass the day betting on the ponies and drinking Belmont Breezes.

On the way home, my cellular phone rings.

“Burton.”

“Fred, we need you back at Foggy Bottom,” says Steve Gleason.

“Okay, but at the moment I’m on my way back to Manhattan with the foreign minister,” I report.

“Get back to D.C. tonight. Ahmed’s coming in.”

Finally. A well-laid trap we’ve been preparing for months is about to be sprung. I hit the gas pedal and the Crown Vic surges forward. I’m anxious to get back to midtown so I can catch a bird out of the Big Apple. I’ve got a date with a terrorist.

sixteen

MICE

Back at Foggy Bottom I sign for a black Ford sedan and head for the parking garage where our department vehicles are kept. Today I have an interpreter named Ibrahim and a new CT agent in tow. Over the past few months, Gleason’s been good to his word, and we have received some help. We’ve got three new agents working for us, though it looks like Mullen will be leaving soon.

The interpreter climbs into the back of an ’86 Crown Vic. I drive. The other CT agent, “David,” rides shotgun. We’re going to have to take some serious precautions on this drive. Hezbollah has a long reach, and we don’t want to lead anyone back to our catch. Today we’re going to pay a visit to Ahmed.

We burst out of the parking garage at a good clip. I make a hard turn and swing onto the streets of D.C. The sun is shining and the shadows are long, giving the capital a high-contrast sort of look. Lots of light and lots of shadows, very appropriate given today’s mission. Brownish-black snow lies in slushy piles along either side of the road. The asphalt itself is icy and wet. Not a good day to drive evasively, but you take what you’re given in this business.

I goose the accelerator and the Ford speeds to fifty. Like all our sedans, this one is totally clean and comes equipped with buried plates. Officially, the car does not exist.

Inside our stealth Ford, we’re all in street clothes, but we’ve got blue raid jackets that say FEDERAL AGENT in big yellow letters on their backs tucked away in the trunk should we need them. They’re stashed right next to the Remington shotgun and the extra shells loaded with number 4 buck.

We come to a four-way intersection whose light is already green. At the last possible second, I brake hard and spin the steering wheel. The sedan skids into a tight right turn and we flare around the corner. As soon as we’re at the apex of the turn, I’m on the gas again. We shoot out of the intersection doing sixty. Meanwhile, David and I are scanning the side and rearview mirrors, checking every vehicle behind us in case we’ve got a tail.

I hit another intersection. A quick right turn at the last second and then I’m powering out of it, running up the street for the next intersection. We reach it, and I cut across incoming traffic in a surprise left turn.

This is called a surveillance detection route, or SDR. Basically, the driver stair-steps through a city grid, making frequent turns while still trending toward his eventual destination. The chance that any random civilian car would follow the driver through these gyrations is astronomically low. Thus, if you come out of a stair-step maneuver and see the same green van behind you that was there when you started, well, you’ve got a tail. And a problem.

I make another sudden right turn and stair-step up a few blocks before careening across the oncoming traffic lane again to dodge into a side street. I check the rearview mirror. No familiar vehicles. In fact, nobody followed us in that turn at all.

In the mirror, I catch sight of our interpreter in the backseat. Under his saucer-sized eyes, the rest of his face has turned a nice shade of green.

We come to a 7-Eleven convenience store, and it is time to use another SDR tactic we call a timing stop. Without warning, I wrench the steering wheel and the sedan’s back end skids sideways for a second before the back wheels find purchase and propel us forward into the 7-Eleven’s parking lot. We find an empty space and park, motor running, eyes on the street. We watch the traffic trickle by, David and I carefully noting every vehicle’s color and make. We’re trained observers, and we soon have a mental list of sedans, vans, and trucks that have cruised past us. We’ll watch for any of them to appear again once we continue our journey.

Ten minutes later, we back out of the parking space and drift to the driveway. A quick look left. A quick look right. All clear. I stomp the gas pedal and the sedan lunges onto the street, bouncing on its shocks as we hit the asphalt again. Behind me, the wild maneuver throws our terp into one of the back doors. I hear him grunt.

He hasn’t seen anything yet.

Two blocks from the 7-Eleven, the oncoming traffic lane is empty. I spin the steering wheel left, the car heels around, slipping on the ice. We start to spin, and I fight to keep the back end from fishtailing. And then, we’re 180 degrees from where we started and it is time to drop the hammer again. The engine roars and we tear back up the street past the 7-Eleven again. Any civilian watching us would think we’re idiots. In the Dark World, such tactics keep people alive, and we’re exceptionally well trained at this game.

“Helluva U-turn, Fred,” David says to me through a big grin.

I don’t respond. I’m too focused. I take this seriously; if we don’t do it right, we could get our asset killed.

We roll through one intersection and go up a few more blocks. Just as we reach another one, I swing the sedan into a violent right turn. Behind me, the interpreter blurts, “Oh, God!”

I hear him thump into the door again.

“Tighten your seat belt,” David tells him.

He frantically does as he’s told.

Twenty minutes later, we’ve stair-stepped all over Rosslyn. Both David and I are confident that we don’t have a tail. If we had one, we lost him. If they had multiple vehicles set up to follow us, we would have noticed that, too. Plus, our random movements would have made intercepting us almost impossible. We break out of the SDR and roll south for Arlington. Before we reach our destination, we execute another series of stair-steps, just to be sure nobody’s picked us up. When we’re convinced we’re clean, we make the final turn to the safe house. Actually, it is a safe apartment.

I guide the sedan into a parking lot not far from the safe house. The terp bails out of the back and mutters something about feeling like a human pinball. These types don’t like to hang with us on these sorts of missions. I wonder why.

The safe house is located inside a swanky high-rise apartment building right here in D.C. Forget how the spy novelists portray safe houses as creepy places way out in the woods. That’s the worst place to hide an asset. If you want to hide a needle, where’s the best place? In a stack of identical needles. That’s the philosophy we use with our safe houses. We hide in plain sight. It works, thanks in part to the many adulterers in the D.C. area.

All over the capital, it is easy to find high-rise apartments or condos that are leased to innocuous-sounding corporations like “Global Research, LLC.” In reality, these are love nests for the rich and powerful. Call them their crash pads, the place where they can bring their trophy girlfriends without fear of spousal intrusions. People like that tend to keep to themselves. They don’t ask questions. They aren’t nosy neighbors. In that sort of environment, we can come and go as we please, with whomever we want, and not raise any neighborly eyebrows, even when we bring handcuffed men into the building. That just looks kinky to them.

And what if we do run into a Betty Busybody who spends her retirement keeping tabs on which blonde emerges from which apartment night after night? Well, we put her on the payroll and she goes from gossip magnet to quiet lookout. Problem solved, and we’ve got another asset covering our safe house.

This apartment complex looks like any other one in this area of Arlington. Only a studious observer would notice the extra security cameras secreted around the exterior. We walk to the front entryway, where there is no doorman waiting for us. We never pick a building with a doorman. They’re too indiscreet.

We ride the elevator to the fifth floor. When the doors open, David asks, “How do you want this to go down?”

“Let me do the talking. We’ll see if he’s fluent in English.”

I turn to the terp. “Don’t let on you speak Arabic until I give you the signal, okay?”

After the ride down here, Ibrahim is not in the mood to question any orders. He nods weakly and tries to smile. It comes across more like a scowl. He still looks carsick.

Room 511 awaits. Watercolers and landscape oil paintings hang on the walls. Oak and cherry furniture give the place a down-home sort of look, but the prisoner in a chair in one corner adds sort of a Mansonesque twist to the Martha Stewart décor.

I step into the living room. It is bright and sunny, and the apartment is extremely warm. I notice there’s a sliding door leading to a balcony. The drapes are open, and the view to the north is spectacular. The Washington Monument stands out above the rest of the D.C. skyline. No wonder CEOs bring their bimbos to places like this one. High rent. Good view. All-around cozy love nest.

The man does not look very chipper. I ignore him for a minute and check out the kitchen. There’s a flock of Chinese takeout containers sitting on the counter, along with a stack of empty Stouffer’s TV-dinner trays. Bottled water sits next to the sink.

I walk to the back bedrooms. The door to one is open. The bed is unmade, but aside from a couple of lamps, there’s nothing on the nightstands or the chest of drawers. The next door is closed. I knock, and it swings open. This is normally the spare bedroom, but for our purposes it is Big Brother Central. Sequestered within are a couple of beefy agents looking tired and unkempt. They are the watchers. They’ve been here since we bagged Ahmed at the airport last night.

The room is full of electronics gear. Several TV monitors occupy one wall. There are cameras hidden everywhere in the living room, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The monitors show various angles of the apartment, plus the hallway outside the door, the entry lobby, the parking lot, and the building’s perimeter. We have more cameras than a television studio.

Audio and video recorders, radios, and other stuff sit on folding tables. The entire place is bugged; microphones have been placed in every lamp, in the walls and vents and other nooks and crannies throughout the apartment. Not a word will be spoken that doesn’t get recorded.

More cartons of Chinese takeout litter the scene. One of the agents is busily pecking away at some crispy beef with a set of chopsticks.

“Damn, I hate these things,” he complains as he fumbles a slice of beef. It falls back into the carton, and he digs after it.

A TV in the back of the room is tuned to CNN, the ubiquitous station of our Dark World lives. Next to the TV sit a couple of Uzi submachine guns and a quartet of gas masks.

“Gentlemen, we’re going to get started.”

“Roger that, sir.”

I close the door and head back into the living room. The man cuffed to the chair glances at me with fearful eyes. He’s trapped. There is no escape, and he knows it. He’s a man who holds no cards in this game.

“Ahmed,” I ask, “do you speak English?”

His dark eyes focus on mine. Through bad teeth he answers, “A little.”

“Good.”

I grab another chair and place it right in front of his. When I sit down, my knees are almost touching his. He recoils from the invasion of his personal space and pushes his chair back into the corner as far as it will go. I don’t let him off the hook. I sit up and scoot my chair forward until I’m right in his face again. He looks utterly miserable. I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t a treacherous, murdering scumbag.

We’ve been laying this trap for months, ever since we got word from one of our informants that Ahmed was a relative of his. We persuaded him to write Ahmed and invite him to the United States. He could leave Lebanon and start a new life here in America. Our informant did just that, and Ahmed took the bait. We fast-tracked his visa application and his green card, and sure enough, Ahmed decided to immigrate to the Land of Opportunity.

Funny thing. The last time I’d seen him, he was wearing an AK-47 and chanting, “Death to America” on
World News Tonight.
That was after he and his confederates had taken an unarmed U.S. Navy diver and shot him in the right temple. His body fell out of the TWA airliner Ahmed’s fellow terrorists had hijacked. It landed with a sickening thud on the tarmac at Beirut International Airport.

Ahmed was part of the terrorist cell responsible for TWA Flight 847 and its hostage-crisis aftermath. Last night, he got off his plane and strolled into a Dulles terminal as if he were just another weary immigrant coming to make a new life.

Of course, he never got out of the terminal, not as a free man. Our DSS and FBI agents descended on him like hawks on a prairie dog. He had nowhere to hide and knew it. He offered no resistance as he was stuffed into a government rig and whisked away to the safe house.

“Ahmed,” I begin.

His eyes stray from mine. I notice he’s fixated on the balcony, and I wonder if he’s heard the same stories I have about one notorious terrorist’s interrogation experience. The CIA caught that particular bad guy in New York a few months back. When he wouldn’t talk, the spooks hung him out over the balcony, apparently so he could get a good look at the street, some thirty stories below. He sang like Michael Jackson on speed after that.

We do things differently here, but I won’t tell Ahmed. Not yet, anyway.

“It could be worse, Ahmed,” I tell him. He looks surprised, like I’ve gotten into his head. Perhaps he was thinking about the Syrians and how they interrogate their Lebanese prisoners. Generally, the Syrians start by stripping the detainee naked, strapping him to a chair, and then stuffing a running garden hose down his throat. It gets less pleasant from there. Think electricity.

“Let me advise you on your rights.”

Ahmed’s eyes grow wide. I’m not sure if he’s surprised or uncomprehending.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney. Do you understand?”

I firmly believe in our system of laws. I believe in justice. Reading Ahmed his Miranda rights makes my stomach do slow rolls.

Our prisoner looks over at Ibrahim, then back to me. “I understand.”

“Good. Tell me. What do you know about the Americans held hostage in Lebanon?” There’s nothing like getting to the point.

Ahmed starts sweating in his black turtleneck. He doesn’t answer me at first, preferring instead to steal surreptitious glances at the balcony again.