Threatcon Delta (11 page)

J
onathan Harper had loved Washington, once.

When he had first arrived years ago, he’d felt profoundly that if he didn’t work in government he would have worked at a café or sold tickets at Union Station or driven a cab, just to be around all this. It didn’t only feel like the center of the world, it
was
the center of the world. What was decided in every office had ripple effects through every other office and thus, through all of civilization.

Then down through history,
he thought as he drove toward Capitol Hill for a meeting with a senator.

And the city endured. Washington and all it represented had weathered the extremes of Joseph McCarthy and Jimmy Carter. It had survived wars and terror threats, impeachments and assassinations. And it would always endure. As the old joke went, “Show of hands, all those in favor of abolishing democracy!”

He still loved his job but now he was no longer sure whether he deserved to love his job, having failed it. He was supposed to be protecting the nation, and Isobel Garcia was dead.

It was nine a.m. and he was stuck at his fifth red light in a row when he received a secure text message from Ryan Kealey:

 

EN ROUTE TO FT. JACKSON

 

Always full of little surprises,
Harper thought. And sometimes big ones.

Rather than text him back, the deputy director waited until he could access a secure phone line in the Russell Senate office building. Simultaneously, he opened his tablet and pulled up the IACA file on the base. The Inter-Agency Cooperation Assessment file rated the affiliations and loyalties of every military, intelligence, and industrial resource in the world. It was the equivalent of pledged delegates in a political contest. Fort Jackson’s commander, General Emory Farrell, came up with a cumulative tag of intelligence cooperation at 41 percent.

That was a good ranking for a military officer. One hundred percent, for example, would be if the president ordered everyone on the base to a war zone. General Farrell would, of course, comply. This rating—based on past experience with organizations other than the military—meant that a petitioner asking for military cooperation on a nonmilitary undertaking would have a near-even chance of getting a favorable response. Considering that Farrell’s cooperation with the navy was rated at 32 percent, that was encouraging.

What Harper didn’t know, of course, was what Kealey was hoping to accomplish at Fort Jackson. Kealey was pretty independent, with Harper’s blessings, but at least he kept his superior in the loop, even now when Harper knew he was continuing to rankle over Hernandez.

“What have you got?” Harper asked when Kealey picked up.

“Someone who would be perfect for the trip,” Kealey said. “I wanted to get to him before someone else does.”

“Name?”

“Major James Phair.”

“Isn’t he the AWOL who did the Iraq walkabout?”

“That’s the man,” Kealey said. “Only I’m not convinced he was AWOL. Not strictly speaking.”

“Sure sounded like it when I read the repatriation debrief summary,” Harper said.

“Well, if you want to look at it
that
way, it sounded more like treason, aiding and abetting an enemy combatant,” Kealey said.

“Right. That’s much better.”

“But I don’t think ‘sounded like’ is enough to base a decision on. Anyway, that’s why I want to get a measure of the man himself.”

“Shit,” Harper said to no prompt in particular. It was a general, all-encompassing utterance.

“I know,” Kealey said.

“This trip of yours already has more potential holes than surface,” Harper said. “I have no budget, no support. We have no evidence the doctor was involved in San Antonio, no firm, justifiable reason to suspect his motives and actions with this hospital in Iraq—”

“So, fine. We’re on our own, trying to stand on balloons,” Kealey said. “What else is new?”

“Balloons?”

“Something I saw at a circus in Shanghai,” Kealey said. “Too much weight in one place, they pop. Lean wrong, you fall. But if you center yourself exactly, neutralize your downward impact the way this Chinese acrobat did—”

“I see.”

“Look, we need someone who can read the situation in terms of both practical logistics and theological analysis. It’s going to be tough finding a nonsecular national we can buy or a local we can train. We might as well look at someone who has had a foot in both worlds and is still a federal employee.”

Harper had to agree with the reasoning—the logic of compromise—even if he didn’t relish the reality. He rubber-stamped the visit to Fort Jackson. Since Kealey’s logged itinerary was filed at six a.m., showing he was catching a seven-ten flight to Columbia Metropolitan Airport, his feet were probably already on the ground in South Carolina, anyway.

Kealey told him he would text as soon as he had additional information, though the deputy director knew him well enough to know this: whatever he received would probably be after the fact. In this case, though, Harper didn’t blame him.

They had no strong reason to be tracking Dr. al-Shenawi, so the less Harper knew about it before Kealey did anything, the better. The agent’s diminished level of communication with his old friend, which had been notable since Texas, saddened Harper but didn’t surprise him.

O
n the books, the two hangars at the Cairo International Airport were a training center for the Egyptian Military Academy. But it was an open secret that this was a staging area and barracks for Task Force 777. The government had chosen this site for that reason. They wanted emissaries from other nations, especially countries in this region, to see the comings and goings of the airborne soldiers. They wanted outsiders to know that Egypt was watching its borders, that gunships were prepared to take action against expeditionary forces. They wanted the world to know that their internal affairs were settled and strong enough to withstand any scavengers who might be thinking Egypt had been weakened over the past few years.

After the helicopter had returned to collect them as scheduled, Lieutenant Adjo and his team had gone directly to the debriefing center in Hangar One to make their report. It was a small room with ivory-white walls and a small wooden conference table in the center. There was a computer, a phone, and a pitcher of water with a glass. There were folding chairs, which the men opened for themselves. They were not permitted to go to barracks, however much a shower and change of clothes would have been welcome. The lieutenant general liked his information raw, unwashed, without a cleared head. He feared that minute, important observations could be lost or memories freshened as traces of the site itself were washed away.

Adjo was not looking forward to the meeting. He disliked failure, disliked it more than his superiors. But that was small comfort. He had confirmed that something was going on up there, but that was all. He had been unable to identify anyone and had chosen not to go to the cave to reconnoiter. That was outside the mission parameters and he did not want to risk scaring away whoever was there.

Adjo gave the memory sticks containing the audio and video data to a staff sergeant who loaded them into the computer just as Task Force 777 commander Lt. Gen. Adom Kaphiri Samra arrived. He had dark eyes, a trim moustache, and a crisp uniform that was nonetheless sweat-stained under the arms. He had been working hard. He had been
worrying
hard.

The men stood and saluted. Samra motioned for them to sit. “What did you find out?” the officer asked eagerly.

“Sir, we should talk after you see the data,” Adjo said.

Samra frowned. “Is a picture worth so much or is your data worth so little?”

“Both, sir.”

Samra continued to frown—directly at Adjo now— as he motioned for the sergeant to run the recordings. Adjo had spent the three-hour return flight trying to figure out exactly what to say to his superior. That wasn’t it. Yet Samra—who was a fierce nationalist—would probably like the next part even less.

Adjo and Massari had bookmarked sections where figures were active and noteworthy events transpired. That was roughly five minutes of merged video and audio. After watching the section with the serpent four times—which was the bulk of the recording—the commander rose so that he could see the men. His expression had gone from displeased to puzzled. It matched that of Adjo.

“I see what appears to be a stick becoming a snake and then a stick again,” the officer said.

“That is what appears to be happening,” Adjo agreed.

“What did your
eyes
tell you?” he asked.

Adjo was silent.

“Sir,” Massari said, “I was watching the cave without night-vision glasses and I saw nothing but the lanterns and their immediate vicinity.”

The dark eyes of the senior officer shifted slowly from the acoustic engineer back to Adjo. “You heard nothing?”

“Only the wind, sir.”

Samra steepled his fingers on the table and leaned forward.

“I had men on the scene who saw and heard very little,” he said. “Yet people who were not there know much.”

“Sir?” Adjo said.

“Between last night and my coming here, Internet discussion of this man has quadrupled,” Samra said. “In just the last hour, visa applications from our sister countries have increased”—he tapped the keyboard and looked at the monitor—“sevenfold. We can slow the processing of these applications, but that will not stop many from crossing the borders illegally. Either they know something we do not—which, I needn’t point out, would be rather an embarrassment as this is an intelligence division—or they are being misled. Either this man we were not quite observing is the prophet Moses returned or he is not. So. What do I tell the commander in chief? What does he tell the supreme commander?”

The four men were uncomfortably silent.

“Should we infiltrate the cave with the next wave of pilgrims, who are bound to arrive presently?” Samra asked with growing impatience.

“I am not sure that would produce useful results,” Adjo offered.

“Why is that, Lieutenant?”

“If this man is not the
Gharib Qawee,
no one will believe us,” Adjo said. “Besides, an effective disinformation program would take days if not weeks to mount. Conversely, proving that to be so would accomplish nothing. We would still have the problem of what to do with him and the crowds he is bound to attract.”

“Do you have a constructive next-step offer?”

“Perhaps,” Adjo said. “I read the daily intelligence packet on the ride back. It contained an interview with the English professor Wesley, who first observed this phenomenon last week. Did you see it, sir?”

“I have not yet read the transcription,” Samra told him. “Perhaps you can summarize it?”

“Sir, he referred to this as a ‘throwback’ to ancient days, when what he described as ‘a movement through the grasses’ elevated remote desert and mountain hermits to the level of holy teachers and
mahdis.
”

“This ‘movement through the grasses,’ ” Samra asked. “What does that mean exactly? Like a snake?”

“No, sir. It means a force, like a wind stirring the land,” Adjo replied.

Therein the problem with all religious translations; the true and crucial meaning is in the subtleties. “So it’s more like a wildfire?”

“That is a fair translation, yes, sir. In this case, since the fire already exists, the question is how do we douse it?”

“Can we evict him as a religious agitator?” Massari asked.

“That might cause the flame to grow brighter,” Adjo suggested.

“And if this is real, we must be careful,” said the radio operator, who seemed anxious. “I mean, sir, it was real once in history. Could it not be again?”

“I don’t believe that,” Samra said. “I won’t.”

“If this man is real, we probably won’t succeed in stopping him any better than we did the last time,” Massari said.

Samra shot him an angry look.

“I still say it doesn’t matter,” Adjo insisted. “Even if we were to capture this man and his magic rod, he could say that his is the only hand that can make it work and he can decline to do so. Even if he is a false prophet, the believers will continue to believe.”

“We don’t even know who he is or what he looks like,” Samra pointed out. “I wonder if he was hiding from you or from his own people.”

“Why hide from his own people?” Massari asked.

“The unseen is more powerful than that which is in the open,” Samra told him.

“Which is what I was leading up to,” Adjo said. “If we
can
get a look at him, perhaps we can trace his movements back to where this started. We might be able to attach him to a cabal of some kind. Perhaps some foreign military. That might undermine his credibility with the common people.”

“I’m not sure such a connection exists,” Samra said. “Before you arrived I was reviewing images taken over the past week by the GRU’s Bliska-3 satellite.”

The GRU—Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the KGB’s rival and survivor—was Russia’s General Intelligence Directorate. The Kremlin had a mutual support pact with Egypt that gave Cairo access to Middle East satellite data and Moscow the use of Egyptian airspace for sorties to protect tankers entering the Mediterranean from the Black Sea.

“I wanted to try and determine if we were dealing with an individual or a group,” Samra said. “There do not seem to be any unusual patterns of group traffic. Image-comparison software suggests that every tourist who went up the mountain as part of a group came down as a group. I examined bus records. No missing persons were reported. My presumption is that an individual arrived, perhaps on foot or by taxi, went up at night to prevent being spotted from above, and began his ministry.”

“How, sir?” Adjo asked. “Did he simply start throwing down his stick to the ground and wait for people to notice?”

“Why not?” Samra asked. “Prophets don’t think the way we do.”

“You just told us the Englishman likened this to the way prophets made names for themselves in ancient times,” Massari asked. “This would fit well with that idea.”

Adjo nodded but he didn’t buy it.

“Lieutenant, I agree that we must investigate every angle,” Samra told him. “But we mustn’t simply assume there is a conspiracy. If we are facing one crazy or ambitious individual, that would be better than having to deal with a larger, well-organized plot. It would certainly inform our tactics going forward.”

Massari shrugged. “The man could just disappear from his cave one night.”

“Sir, I would prefer if your scenario were correct,” Adjo said to the lieutenant general. “But I can’t believe the video crew just
happened
to be there when a pilgrim who
happened
to see someone who said he was the prophet just
happened
to come down the mountain.”

“They were at that site for fifteen hours,” Samra pointed out. “To see one man in that time is hardly a miracle. I’m not saying this so-called prophet may not have accomplices, which is why I want you to go there, Lieutenant. See what you can discover, find out whether this is the work of God or men.”

“Yes, sir,” Adjo said. He was still chewing on what Samra had said. It wasn’t going down. “And what then? Time may not be on our side.”

“I honestly don’t know,” Samra admitted. He watched the recording again. “I’m going to send this out to allied intelligence services and see what they make of it, what they suggest.”

From where he was sitting, Adjo could see the screen. The image was green, grainy, inconclusive. Adjo the military officer wanted to know what was happening out there. He wanted to keep his country safe. But Adjo the man wanted to know as well. He was not a Muslim of great faith and yet something had touched him out there. He wanted to make sure it was the mountain, perhaps the shadow of history, and not the man they were investigating.

The lieutenant general removed the memory stick and put it in his shirt pocket. He faced his men and they stood.

“We’ll have this computer-enhanced, but I doubt it will tell us much,” he said. “You know, I’m informed that the priests of the pharaoh were able to duplicate this miracle using simple catches and releases set inside a painted tree branch.”

“I myself have seen street corner magicians perform similar tricks, causing canes to sag and stiffen,” Massari remarked. “The transformation itself means nothing.”

“To us,” Adjo said.

“You’re right,” Samra told him. “And I hope to keep it that way.”

“What do you mean, sir?” the radio operator asked.

Samra turned to go and the team saluted.

“I mean I truly hope this man is a fake,” the commander replied as he left the room. “I’ve had boils and I don’t like them.”