First Strike (19 page)

“What if he's not there?” asked Calibrisi. “What if ISIS got him out?”

“It's a possibility,” said Britt.

“Can Metro help us find out?”

Britt shook his head.

“No fucking way. Metro lost nine men. According to my source, Dewey killed at least five of them. They're not about to cooperate. In fact, they're pretty pissed off.”

“How do they know it was us?” asked Polk. “Mallory was untraceable. Dewey is non-official cover.”

In other words, Polk was questioning why Britt even divulged Langley's involvement.

“If we want the bodies back, I had to tell them,” said Britt.

“All I'm saying—” Polk began.

“Take it off-line,” snapped Calibrisi, cutting him off. “Who the hell cares if they know? Get Mallory's body out of Syria so he can be given a proper burial.”

“Already done, Chief. He's being flown to Baghdad. He'll be on a flight to Andrews by dinner.”

“What about Dewey? How do we find out if he's alive?”

“We moved some high-altitude UAVs into the theater,” said Britt. “Looking at movements out of Damascus for the past hour, there are a couple of noteworthy convoys. We're talking vans and pickups. If they haven't killed him, they took him somewhere. We have the end points for those convoys locked and under S8 surveillance. One's Aleppo, the other is a camp out in the middle of desert nowhere.”

Calibrisi looked at Conneely.

“Stacy?”

“My guess would be Aleppo,” she said. “Since ISIS took the city, they turned the hospital into a central staging area. It's the closest nexus point for them. Garotin is there. If Dewey's alive, that's probably where they took him.”

“That corresponds with one of the convoys,” said Britt. “The hospital was the terminal point.”

Calibrisi shot Polk a look.

Polk was usually a quiet, unemotional man, yet today his face looked pained. He shrugged helplessly. He moved to a map on the wall that showed the Middle East.

“We have assets in the theater,” said Polk, gesturing to the map. “We have operators in Baghdad and southern Turkey. That's before we even talk to JSOC, who could ready up a strike team very quickly. The issue is mission vulnerability. It doesn't matter who we send in or what size the team is. If he's in an ISIS stronghold—Aleppo or anywhere else, for that matter—all we'd be doing is sending those men to their deaths. Our only hope is some sort of ransom, though I highly doubt Nazir would forgo the opportunity to do something very dramatic and very public with an American agent.”

“They're going to behead him,” said Conneely. “Then they'll put it on YouTube, Al Jazeera, et cetera.”

Calibrisi glanced to the window, which looked out on a picturesque stand of birch trees.

“Anson, I want you to elevate it to JSOC. Call Joe Terry. DEVGRU, CAG, 24th STS—tell him it's emergency priority. Have him come back with a recon scenario or two. In addition, reach out to GID,” said Calibrisi, referring to Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate. “I'll call Menachem Dayan.”

“And what do I tell them?”

“We need an entity that has channels of communication with ISIS. We're going to negotiate with them. If they're willing to ransom Dewey, the president can decide whether to actually do it, but at least it'll buy us time. Focus on
proof of life.
”

“I can reach out to Lee Gluck at
60 Minutes,
” said Conneely.

“And say what?” asked Polk.

“My guess is Lee has better contacts into ISIS than we do. I'll ask him to facilitate a message into Nazir's inner circle.”

“Do it,” said Calibrisi.

Britt stood up and gave Calibrisi a nod as he rushed to the door. Conneely followed him.

“What are the parameters?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” asked Calibrisi.

“What if we establish a direct line of communication?”

“No parameters. Take it if you can get it.”

Britt and Conneely left.

Polk was standing next to a bookshelf near the door. He gave Calibrisi a long stare but said nothing. He didn't need to. After so many years working together, Calibrisi understood that Polk thought Dewey was probably dead already.

“Let's talk about Raditz,” said Calibrisi.

He moved around to the front of the desk and took a seat in one of the chairs. He was quiet for several moments as he looked at the faces of the people in the room.

“I'm not sure where to begin,” said Calibrisi, looking at Lyne. “This is such a fucking mess. Have you spoken with anyone yet?”

“Yes,” said Lyne. “Harry Black and Josh Brubaker.”

Black was the U.S. secretary of defense, Raditz's boss. Brubaker was the National Security Advisor.

“What did they say?”

“Josh wanted the files. He's going to brief the president. He also wanted to know what we're doing to rescue Dewey. He said you would already know this, but to tell you to do
whatever
you have to do to get him out of there alive. He wants you over at the Oval as soon as you're done here.”

Calibrisi nodded.

“What about Harry?” he asked.

Lyne crossed her legs. “His exact words were, ‘When I find Raditz, I'm going to cut off his balls and stuff them down his fucking throat.'”

“How the hell did this happen?” said Calibrisi, addressing Rocha. “Where did he get the money?”

“It came out of a Pentagon dark pool,” said Rocha. “This is so-called program money, outside the Pentagon budget, allocated by Congress specifically for activities they agree to give DOD that will not be scrutinized. It's never a big number, but Raditz aggregated it over a four-year period. We're still poring through it, but it appears Raditz succeeded in sheltering around two billion dollars. I should probably mention that each dark pool allocation requires both the secretary and deputy secretary to approve. Harry Black signed off on all of it.”

“Did he know where it was going?”

“Not necessarily,” said Rocha. “We were able to access the charters. There were four in all. Under the program description, they all said the same thing: ‘An Initiative to Fight Terrorism.'”

“For what it's worth, Harry mentioned this,” said Lyne. “He guessed this is where Raditz got the funds. He's opening up their files for us to look at.”

“‘Fighting terrorism,'” said Calibrisi, shaking his head in disgust. “Ironic.”

Lindsay, Calibrisi's assistant, opened the door.

“It's Jim Bruckheimer. He says it's urgent.”

Calibrisi pointed at his desk phone, indicating to send the call there. A moment later, the phone started beeping. Calibrisi hit the speaker button.

“Hi, Jim.”

“Hector, sorry to interrupt,” said Bruckheimer, “but I have some information.”

“Good.”

“Well, you were partially right, I'm not sure he knows what the hell he's doing. His passport hit the grid five days ago. United Airlines DFW to Mexico City, seat 4A.”

Calibrisi looked at Polk, then muted the phone.

“We're going to need someone down there,” said Calibrisi.

Polk nodded, pulling out his cell phone.

Calibrisi unmuted the phone. “Is he still in Mexico?”

“I don't know definitively,” said Bruckheimer, “but if I had to guess, I'd say yes. He bought a round-trip ticket but wasn't on the return flight. And other than the passport ringing the bell, there's been no electronic signature event. We have his credit cards, his ex-wife's credit cards, cell phones, bank accounts, and everything we know of, and there hasn't been any activity whatsoever. He's probably using cash or traveler's checks, though we can't find any big cash withdrawals going back six months and no purchases of traveler's checks either.”

“He's been working with a company called MH Armas,” said Calibrisi. “It's a weapons manufacturer in Tampico, on the coast. He probably visited there several times over the past couple of years. I need your guys digging deep into signals intelligence coming out of Tampico. Run Raditz's photo against any media you've intercepted from the U.S. border down to Central America.”

“Got it,” said Bruckheimer. “PRISM's going to be our best hope of finding him. It's designed to correlate seemingly random electronic activity by module.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can pinpoint an individual based on past activity even if the current activity uses a different electronic signature. For example, if we can find a record from last year, such as a credit card purchase or a cell call that was definitively executed by Raditz, PRISM will correlate the activity to present-day signals intelligence. If he called a number with his old cell phone a year ago and then called that same number with a new, unknown phone, we'll be able to lock onto him, track him, define a new set of electronic signatures, and find him.”

“I can't imagine he'd be so stupid—”

“You'd be surprised.”

“He knows how PRISM works.”

“You didn't,” said Bruckheimer.

Calibrisi grinned. “Asshole.”

“If he stayed at a hotel, if he bought a meal, if he so much as bought a pack of gum a year ago and he uses a traveler's check from outside of Mexico, or visits the same hotel or store, we'll flag it. Doesn't mean it's him, but it might be. You'd be surprised how quickly it narrows it down. People are creatures of habit.”

Calibrisi reached for the phone. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Bruckheimer. “The urgent part. Just for the hell of it, I had one of my analysts look at the passenger manifests on that United Airlines flight from Dallas. One of the other passengers aboard the flight tripped an algorithm. Approximately ten minutes after the flight landed in Mexico City, someone other than Raditz made a phone call to a PBX switch located in Berlin that previously correlated to Raditz. In other words, PRISM flagged the call because it already had Raditz's cell records.”

“How do you know it wasn't him?”

“Because we listened in. We caught the last few seconds. The PBX is some sort of cloaking device, a conduit frag—hides both users and then encrypts their conversation. But before the encryption took hold, we heard him. He was Arab.”

“Did you run it through voice recognition?”

“Yes. It didn't match anything in our files. But it wasn't Raditz.”

“Okay, I'm following.”

“The point is,” Bruckheimer continued, “Raditz himself has either called or been called through the exact same switch at least a dozen times, including a week ago. Anyway, we marked the correlation and then ran the caller's cell activity against the passenger manifest in order to try to narrow down who it was. An hour ago, the owner of the cell used his passport to check into a hotel in Mexico City. Because we're tracking the cell by SAT, we know it's the same individual.”

Calibrisi glanced at Polk, who pointed at his cell and gave him a thumbs-up, indicating he had someone on the line.

“Anyway, so here's the interesting part.”

“It's already interesting, Jim.”

“I know. I mean
really
interesting. It's a French passport that belongs to someone named Pierre Lagrange. He's a thirty-year-old male from Marseilles. That all checked out, but when we processed his photo, that is, when we ran it against our facial recognition platform, it popped. We have a match on four photos, all showing this guy with Nazir. He's in the background. He's an Iraqi named Haider Allawi.”

“What the hell does it mean?” asked Calibrisi, speaking to no one in particular.

“It means Nazir is cleaning up his mess,” said Polk.

“Why hasn't he killed him yet?” asked Calibrisi.

“Maybe he has,” said Polk. “Or maybe it's a RECON—”

“You guys are jumping to conclusions,” interrupted Bruckheimer. “It doesn't mean Raditz is there too. It's circumstantial. I just want to be clear.”

“Do you have this guy's location in real time?” asked Polk.

“Yeah,” said Bruckheimer. “He's at the St. Regis Hotel in Mexico City.”

“Call us if you find anything on Raditz,” said Calibrisi, “and thanks, Jim. It's damn fine work.”

Calibrisi ended the call and looked at Polk.

“They must need Raditz alive,” he said.

Polk picked up a small remote and hit a button, lowering a plasma screen from the ceiling. A moment later, the face of a young, handsome Hispanic man appeared. He was outdoors. He had longish black hair, a beard and mustache, and was shirtless, his chest, shoulders, and arms ripped. He wore sunglasses and was leaning back in a white lounge chair, the blue water of a swimming pool behind him, along with several bikini-clad women. He communicated through an earbud as his cell streamed his image back to Langley.

“Hello?”

If he was at all self-conscious about lounging by a pool, half-dressed, surrounded by beautiful women, he didn't show it.

“Franco, it's Bill.”

Franco was Franco Gutierrez, a member of CIA paramilitary under the direction of Special Operations Group. Gutierrez was based in Rio de Janeiro, though his area of activity stretched from the U.S. border with Mexico down through Central and South America.

“Hey, boss,” Franco said, grinning. He had a soft Spanish accent.

“Where are you?” asked Polk.

“Medellín.”

“You need to pack up and get to the airport,” said Polk.

Gutierrez's smile vanished. He stood up and started walking through the throng of young women and men socializing by the rooftop pool, pulling on a short-sleeve linen shirt as he moved.

“Do I need to arrange transportation?”

“No, we'll take care of it. Get to the private terminal. You'll get your orders when you're in the air.”