The Towers (24 page)

“Which building?” she muttered. Al-Safani pointed. She looked aside in the dimness and made out men standing in rough lines to either side of the door. The back of the building faced the cliff. She whispered, “Back door?”

“Already blocked.”

“Neighbors? Did you warn them?”

“No. It's best to go in cold. As little notice as possible.” The PSO officer spoke in a low voice to a shorter man who came up, and Aisha caught the superior-to-subordinate tone. She glanced up at the windows, some lit, others dark, and edged away, loosening the SIG in its holster.

“This way,” the colonel murmured.

Doanelson, doubly bulky in Kevlar, followed. Aisha too was wearing the ballistic vest, but in the night, in her dark abaya, she didn't see how anyone could see to target her. Unless they had infrared scopes, which, considering the money behind their organization, was possible. “We didn't get much of a briefing,” the FBI agent said to the colonel. “What's the plan? Assaulting force? Backup? What do you expect inside?”

Al-Safani kept glancing away. His explanation sounded hasty and somehow misleading. The ten-member team of the PSO's Rapid Reaction Force would infiltrate up the stairs as quickly as possible and once in position assault into the apartment. Three snipers overlooked the back, which, like most Yemeni buildings, didn't have fire escapes—how could mud brick catch fire?—but did have wooden back porches or verandas where families took the air after dark. From there, it was possible suspects could drop with ropes from the third floor, where the intelligence said they were located. If they did, the snipers would take them out.

Aisha glanced up at the cliff, its black mass poised over them as if to fall. Unless they had some way up, it would act as a perfect barrier; even if someone managed to exit the apartment, she couldn't see how they could escape the others—“catchment” teams, Al-Safani called them—huddled with weapons ready behind cars at either end of the block. Her gaze met Doanelson's. The FBI man raised his eyebrows; she nodded.

“Sounds good,” Doanelson said. “Where you want us?”

“Back here's best. Out of the line of fire.” Al-Safani winked at Aisha. “The last thing we want is for our American guests to catch a stray bullet.”

Benefiel didn't seem to care for this. Her assistant asked if he could get closer. The colonel said jovially that he understood, young men wanted in on the action; to follow him. They vanished in the direction of the apartment entrance. Aisha checked her weapon again, adjusted her Kevlar, and settled in. From somewhere up the cliff came an unearthly chuckle. “What the hell was that,” Doanelson said uneasily.

“Hyena?”

“They have hyenas here?”

“Didn't you ever go to the zoo?”

“What zoo?”

“The Sana'a zoo,” she said patiently. They'd had leopards, baboons, a cute little caracal—a sort of bobcat. Small cages, but with what they had to work with, it had been neatly kept. She'd taken pictures of each animal and e-mailed them to Tashaara.

The FBI man squatted in the dark. She fell silent too, remembering this preraid combination of boredom, sleeplessness, and jitters. Her first, in San Diego, on a broken-down cabin cruiser in the base marina reputed to be used by a dealer who targeted the local marines. How her pulse had pounded, crouching under the pier! The dealer, a retiree, hadn't been there, but they'd found weapons and drugs, enough to pass a warrant to local law enforcement. The gate guards had arrested him a week later. So run-of-the-mill, yet, at the time, so exciting.

Twelve years later, was the thrill still there? Enough to give up relationships, and time with her daughter?

A stir ran through the shadowed forms. Then, on some unheard signal, they streamed in. The radio crackled with orders. Doanelson frowned, a sure indication he couldn't follow the conversation.

Several minutes later, flashes came from an upper window, the distinctive blue-white glares of the British flash-bangs the Yemenis used. Their explosions reached street level as distant cracks. She cupped her ears for return fire, but heard none. No other lights came on. No one came out onto his balcony.

Al-Safani, on the radio: “Aisha? Scott? You can come up now. I believe we have the situation well in hand.”

*   *   *

BUT
when they got up there, the colonel was nowhere in sight. She and Doanelson lingered in the haze-shrouded hallway. Her eyes and nasal membranes stung. Tear gas; she squatted to get below it. Someone was screaming inside. She noted that unlike in the United States, the other apartment doors stayed firmly sealed. She called ahead, “
Isma'!
Assault team? We're coming in.”

She stepped cautiously through the haze, flashlight and weapon extended. The acrid fumes mixed with the bitterer, just-as-choking gases from the flash-bangs. The screams sounded as if they were from children. Her fingers tightened on the pistol. In the States, you tried to get kids out of the way by some pretext before you went in. She couldn't believe they'd used gas, either. Usually, in a raid, gas handicapped the entry team as much as or more than the people they were taking into custody. It also increased the chances of civilian casualties, due to the difficulty of identifying targets through vision-restricting masks.

But this isn't the States, Aisha, so stop expecting it to be. She followed her gun's muzzle around a corner and found herself covering a woman. Three children huddled against her, eyes blown wide as they stared up. The PSO troops were pulling clothes out of closets, pushing trunks over to dump the contents, rifling suitcases. “Where are they?” she asked the woman, snapping it out in peremptory Arabic between coughs. Glass shattered as the troops flung windows open and leaned out to yell down to buddies in the street. Cool air flooded in, but the gas lingered, roiling, clinging to every surface, reluctant to depart.

“I don't know—I don't know who you're talking about,” the woman mumbled through a fold of cloth held to her face.

“You take her. I'm going on,” Doanelson said, behind her.

Aisha said to the Yemeni woman, “Yes, you do. The men who live here. Where are they?”

“No men here,” the woman said. “My husband only. He is a trucker. He is often away.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don't know … maybe Saudi. Yes, he must be in Saudi.” The woman clutched her weeping children. “Hush, the woman won't let them hurt you. She will keep us safe.”

A Saudi connection; and a trucker would have a great cover for smuggling. But as she went from room to room Aisha saw no weapons, no bomb-making materials, no radios or computers. In one small room a motionless bundle lay in a makeshift crib against the wall. She approached, pistol pointed, but it didn't move. The girl seemed asleep.

She went back to the woman. “Where are they? We'll find them, you know. When did they leave?”

The woman began wailing, pulling at her hair. “I told you! Only my husband! That is his picture, on the wall. My daughter is disabled … she can't move … I told them come in, search, do whatever you have to do, but they started shooting, and then she couldn't breathe.”

Aisha felt cold. Daughter? Disabled? She went back into the other room, found a trooper pawing at the bundle of blanket. He pulled back the cover to reveal a motionless face, a gaping mouth, eyes that did not open. A wheelchair with a bedpan stood in the corner. Brownish foam stained the mouth. Aisha bent and put a gentle hand on the girl's forehead. It was still warm, but the bubbles at the corners of her lips did not move at all.

*   *   *

SHE
caught up to Al-Safani as he was climbing into the truck with his men. Lifted her hand, almost timidly; she didn't want to appear to be ordering him around in front of his troops. He still looked displeased, but tossed his helmet in, turned back, dropped off the truck. Confronted her as it gunned its engine, the roar echoing from the tenements.

“Where will the hot washup be?” she asked him. “I'd like to come. If I may.”

She got a blank look. “The what?”

“The … meeting, after the raid. To discuss what went wrong.”

“Nothing went wrong,” Al-Safani said, regarding her as if she weren't making sense. “A very successful operation. As your deputy chief of mission will report, I believe.”

She wiped her nose; the gas seemed to be digging into her sinuses. “Maybe I didn't understand. Wasn't this a raid to nab—I mean, apprehend—I mean, catch some of the ALQ members you gained intelligence on from Al-Nasiri? Wasn't that the mission?”

“This was a successful raid.”

“Well, I don't see anyone who looked like ALQ. Just women, and kids. And what about the dead girl?”

“Dead girl?”

“The one in the back room, Colonel. The quadriplegic!”

“That one was dead long before the raid. Her condition had nothing to do with us.”

Get a grip, Aisha. You gain nothing by confrontation. She forced calm into her voice. “Was this a wrong-door raid, Colonel? We do those too. It happens.”

“A what?” He wasn't looking at her again. Not a good sign, with a Yemeni male.

“When a raid hits the wrong address. The wrong apartment.”

“No, this was the correct address.” Again, that feeling he knew something different from the version she was getting.

“But there was a family there. Children. Couldn't you have waited until they left?”

“There are often children where we raid,” he said, frowning as if it were a stupid question. “How not? Even the Salafi evildoers have families. I tell you, this was the right address. It is simply unfortunate that the men we sought seem to have departed, just before we arrived.”

Yes, she was tempted to say, how very unfortunate. Hurling his words back into his face. That would not be wise. Not wise at all.

But, oh, how she wished she could do it.

*   *   *

THAT
evening, back at her stolen office, sitting with fingers poised over the keyboard. Studying the screen.

Results of the raid: Only women and children were encountered, and a handicapped female 16 years of age died, apparently from tear gas. This agent's impressions were that none of those taken into custody (all female or below the age of 15) were ALQ, local Salafi, or even sympathizers or family members. The entire operation appeared to be aimed solely at paying lip service to US demands for action, while the actual subjects of interest are either carefully avoided or warned in enough time to depart and sanitize the premises.

This conclusion, in conjunction with the release of Al-Nashiri (suspect D546576), causes this agent to conclude that either:

1) the information D546576 and/or others gave PSO was a false lead, due perhaps to application of torture, resulting in misleading information given simply to feign compliance; or

2) the PSO is still shielding the real (read: foreign Arab) bad guys in hopes of their carrying out a planned strike against the Saudi royal family or government figures.

She sat back, stretching her neck. It was all so speculative. Of course most investigative work was, but counterterrorism was even murkier than pursuing qat smuggling or stateside rings that stole ammunition or weapons.

The NCIS had little training for the intelligence function. Now she was being drawn into another world, chasing deadly, elusive criminals with close ties with host governments; so cunningly woven into the fabric of their societies that just trying to identify them was like wandering through a wilderness of mirrors.

She'd worked a Mafia case out of the naval air station in Sigonella that reminded her of this in some ways. But Yemen was Sicily squared. Was it feasible that senior officers in the PSO, or maybe even above that—the slippery Minister Abdulilah—were still facilitating the people they were now pretending to pursue? Had supplied the weapons that had nearly killed her?

Benefiel came in, looked as if he were about to say something; then just sat and logged in. They both had terminals now, one good thing the augmented investigative element had brought along with Caraño: a container of computers, chairs, file cabinets, stationery supplies. They no longer had to beg ink-jet cartridges from the attachés.

Okay, she thought, tapping her nose. Let's look at it from their angle. The Honorable Abdulilah and General Gamish and Colonel Al-Safani. They want to push back against Saudi activity on their borders. So the PSO facilitates a plot against the Saudis. Or maybe it's not the whole organization that's helping Al Qaeda, but some key member of the regime. Let's call him X. So, X hears the president's public denunciations of ALQ, or AQ, as the FBI called it; but he's a clandestine supporter. Or maybe not, but still wants to use it as a cover, a smoke screen, his actual intent being to foment an attack on the Saudis and blame it on AQ, with the always slippery Yemeni president holding tight to plausible deniability.

Okay,
why
attack the Saudis? To send some sort of message, to warn them off? Or, an alternate explanation, to trigger more friction; generate enough internal fear and coercion that the president reverted to a fundamentalist foreign policy, as opposed to the semicollaborative relationship with the United States he seemed to be developing at the moment?

Benefiel cleared his throat. “Want to, uh, get a sandwich?”

She ignored him. So who was X? And if indeed there was an X, and she was anywhere close to his rationale, then, investigatively speaking, how would she get any traction on him? They needed access to the day-to-day relations of Yemeni officials with the local Salafis. Which they'd never get if they depended on the PSO itself, and if X was within the PSO. Or above it—if X was someone like Abdulilah, at the ministerial or even presidential level.

Okay, how else? Usually, when you had an idea who your perp was, you started with those close to the suspect. In Sicily, she'd turned the driver who took Signore Salvatore Lo Tocco to work every day. Worked from him to the dry cleaner who got the drugs onto the base, and passed the package to the Italian “Catturando” organized crime unit that had picked up Lo Tocco and his consigliere in Palermo. The big guys seldom thought twice about the little people around them. The secretary, the clerk, the guy who gave him his haircut. But the help saw the comings and goings, overheard conversations. They understood what they witnessed and sometimes were willing, given a promise of protection, to testify.