Caruso shuffled.
The FBI special agent said, “Can I have a few minutes of your time?”
“Sure.” Shit.
They stepped back into the condo and Dom flipped on a couple lights. He looked around at his disheveled place. The only company he ever had around here was female: usually brief intense flings whom he would bring over to impress with a bottle of wine and a beautifully cooked Italian meal. In these instances he usually had plenty of time to make his place presentable.
In the day he’d been home from India, on the other hand, romance had been the last thing on his mind, and his condo looked the worse for it. “Sorry about the place,” was all he could say.
“It’s no problem. I was a bachelor myself until last year.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dom said, feigning interest in his old classmate’s love life. “Congrats.”
“Thanks. Got a baby on the way in August.”
“Awesome.” He thought of Dar and Moshe, and he steered the conversation in another direction in hopes the images would drift away. “So, you got the field office here in D.C.? That’s a hell of a good deal. I got Alabama as a first office of assignment.”
“I know you did. That thing you did down in Birmingham, punching the ticket of that child killer. That was a righteous piece of work. I told myself I’d buy you a whiskey the next time I saw you.”
Caruso stood in the middle of his living room. “It’s nine fifteen in the morning. I’m guessing that’s not why you’re here.”
The big man shook his head. “No, it’s not, but I’d settle for a cup of that coffee I smell.”
A minute later the two men sat in Dom’s kitchen at a table adorned with a months’ worth of unopened mail and unread newspapers.
They sipped coffee, or, more accurately, Albright sipped coffee while Caruso sat anxiously behind his undisturbed cup, doing his best to feign nonchalance.
Albright tracked back to something Caruso had said earlier. “Actually, I’m not at the D.C. office. I got assigned Houston right out of the Academy. Hot as hell, all the time.”
Caruso said, “Before the Academy, you were a cop, weren’t you? SWAT from some local PD force?”
“Yeah. Saint Louis.”
Dom said, “I’m surprised you didn’t go for HRT.” HRT was the FBI’s vaunted Hostage Rescue Team, the top tactical officers in federal law enforcement.
“I did. Unfortunately, I busted my foot in a training accident. It’s okay now, but it knocked me out of HRT. After three years at the office in Houston I was assigned back up here to CID.”
If Dom had been concerned about the fact an FBI special agent had come calling on him, now he was doubly so. What the hell was a “G” from their Counterintelligence Division doing in his apartment?
Nothing good, he was certain.
“CID?” Dom said. “Interesting work?”
Albright replied, “Has its moments. Like now, for example. I have a few questions about what happened the other day in India. Do you mind?”
Dom rubbed his forehead. He’d been more concerned Albright would be here to ask some questions about The Campus. Although a few well-connected senior members of the FBI and other organizations knew the existence of Dom’s off-the-books employer, Albright wouldn’t be on this select list.
The fact that Dom was in India, on the other hand, could easily be known to the FBI at large. He relaxed a touch, but still remained on guard as to what he could and could not say. “Yeah. Okay.”
“I heard you got a concussion.”
“Just a mild one.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
Dom was nervous, and he could see that Albright was aware of it. Albright said, “You were over there training in Krav Maga with Colonel Arik Yacoby, ex of the IDF?”
Dom shrugged. He didn’t know where Albright was getting his information. “That and some other PT stuff. I didn’t even know he was a colonel. I did a little yoga with his wife, too.”
“Yoga.” Albright raised his eyebrows. The incredulity on his face was obvious.
“Yeah.”
The FBI agent nodded, not taking his eyes from Caruso to write anything down.
“You seem edgy, Dom.”
“Not at all.”
“No?”
“You must be misreading my confusion about your presence in my kitchen.”
Albright sipped. “Fair enough. Let me help you, then. I’ll lay my cards on the table. This morning, when I was in the office before heading over here to interview you, I got a call from Anthony Rivalto. You know who that is, don’t you?”
“Yeah. He’s the director of the NYC field office.”
Albright cocked his head. “That was years ago. Now he’s the deputy director of CID.”
“Your boss, then.”
“My boss’s boss, but yeah. He called me directly to let me know to tread lightly with you. I can talk to you, ask you if you want to volunteer anything, but you have some sort of force field around you that precludes me from digging too hard.”
Dom did not respond.
“You have connections, is what I am saying.”
Still nothing from the dark-haired man across from Albright at the kitchen table.
“Of course at first I figured it was just because your uncle is the president. That ought to be good for the white glove treatment. But I looked into you, to see what you were doing, where you were assigned, any news about you at all.” Albright held his empty hands up. “Nothing. After Birmingham, you went black. To the dark side, I mean.”
“The dark side?”
“You’re FBI still, I got that confirmed through personnel. But only on paper. In real life you’re some kind of spook. I know you aren’t CIA proper, or at least nothing anyone wants to fess up to. I guess you could be seconded to one of the other intelligence agencies, or maybe you are affiliated with the military somehow, but I know you didn’t serve in uniform yourself. You might be with some secret spook fusion cell, but I don’t expect you to confirm any of this. Anyway, AD Rivalto basically said that if I walked in here and saw a tactical nuke on your kitchen counter I couldn’t do jack squat about it.”
Dom gestured to the one appliance on his small kitchen counter. “For the record, that’s a juicer. I’d prove it, but it’s broken.”
Albright didn’t smile. “I know the drill. I’ve been working around here for five years. I’ve run into a fair number of guys who couldn’t say shit about what they were doing, who they worked for. I just wait for the dreaded wink and nod from my higher-ups, and then I move on.”
“And the call from AD Rivalto was the wink and the nod?”
“It was. Still, you and I are buds from way back, so I told Rivalto I’d drop in on you for a cup of coffee and a chat, and I’d stay within bounds.”
Dom said, “And here we are.” He played with the bandage on his arm absentmindedly. He and Albright had never been friends. Just classmates.
Albright asked, “Did you notice any surveillance on Yacoby or yourself when you were in India? Anything out of the ordinary at all?”
This was more comfortable territory for Caruso than talking about himself. He said, “My guess is the Palestinians were using a local for intel. Someone who blended in. They were traveling in a dairy truck that I’d seen around the town a few times in the weeks before. I know the Indians are looking into that.”
“I heard you killed three of the tangos.”
Dom replied with, “It’s the four that slipped by me that really count.”
Albright still wasn’t writing anything down. Dom noticed this because special agents normally don’t interview a subject involved in an investigation without writing up an FD-302, an official form, and to do this they need to keep some sort of record of the conversation. Dom found the absence of a pen and paper comforting, although he wasn’t about to let his guard down.
“Colonel Yacoby didn’t say anything to you about any enemies in the U.S., di
d he?”
This surprised Caruso. “In the U.S.? No.”
“Any enemies at all? Anywhere?”
“No, although it was obvious he was ex-IDF. You do that for a while and you piss some people off. Especially Palestinians.”
“Yeah, I imagine so. Good guy, this Yacoby?”
“Good? No, he was more than that. He was a great man with a great family.”
Albright nodded, drummed his fingers on the kitchen table while he thought about his next question.
Caruso furrowed his eyebrows. “I’ve got to ask. Why is U.S. counterintelligence involved in this? What, exactly, are you investigating?”
Albright put his cup down. “A leak.”
“A leak?”
“Yep. A digital breach. Arik Yacoby’s name and location were on a CIA file that was part of a cache of documents improperly downloaded from a terminal in the Eisenhower Building a few months back.”
“What kind of files?”
“The file with Yacoby’s name on it was an after-action report about the IDF raid on the Turkish freighter in the Gaza flotilla a couple years back. Classified TS. It named him as the leader of the team that fast roped down to the deck and killed the Al-Qassam operatives. Another file made reference to the fact the colonel was now living in Paravur.”
“Are you suggesting someone in the U.S. government ratted out Yacoby’s name and location to the terrorists?” Caruso all but shouted the question.
“Take it easy. We don’t know that. We know his name was in the files, and we know someone brought up the files on a terminal on the third floor of the Eisenhower Building, which is where the National Security Council staff works. Whoever downloaded the data obfuscated things in the system so we can’t tell who did it. We don’t know, as of yet, anyway, if they communicated the contents of the files to anyone, much less to the Palestinian terrorists.”
Caruso was barely listening. The Eisenhower Building was less than a half-mile from where he now sat in his kitchen in Logan Circle. His blood boiled as he considered the possibility that someone in his town, in his government, had been involved in the killing of the Yacoby family. He wanted to leap out of his chair, to grab the Smith & Wesson pistol on the top of his bookshelf by the door and storm down Vermont Avenue to demand answers.
Instead, other than a slight flexing of the muscles in his jaw, he showed no evidence of the depth of his emotions. “What are you doing to find the traitor?”
“We’ve whittled it down to thirty or forty people who had access and opportunity. Starting the narrow-scope polygraphs tomorrow. I’ll do secondary interviews if anyone flags after they get boxed.”
“What else?” Dom was challenging Albright now, almost accusatory, but Albright let it go.
“We’ve got some computer forensic people on it, trying to cut that number down a little more by digging into the skills set necessary to pull off the breach.”
“That’s it?”
Albright leaned back and crossed his arms. He was the one under interrogation now. “I’ve run leak cases before. When we do find the culprit, odds are we’ll learn the leak wasn’t executed with malice aforethought. Instead, we’ll find some system administrator who cut corners because he wanted to leave early for the weekend, so he used unauthorized means to move some data around without going through protocol, then covered it up after the fact. If not that, it will be a well-meaning dolt who screwed up and moved the wrong files onto the file server portion of the server, and then they made it out into circulation without his or her knowledge.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, Caruso, that I expect to learn that the intel slipped out negligently, maybe even purposefully, but not maliciously. The chance there is a mole in the government working for Palestinian terrorists is next to nil.”
Albright saw this was doing nothing to calm the fiery man sitting across from him.
“Having said all that, I take this shit seriously. Whatever the reason for the unauthorized access, it happened, and I’m going to find out why.”
Caruso said, “You’d be doing me a hell of a favor by giving me a call if you learn anything after the polys.”
“Sorry, Dom. It’s a need-to-know kind of thing.” Albright stood up from the kitchen table.
Caruso stood up as well, only faster. “I need to know.”
“You making this personal?”
Dom shook his head. “Of course not. Shit doesn’t get personal with me. I’m just asking for a little professional courtesy. I am FBI, after all.”
“On paper.”
“In the flesh.”
“Right. If you are working on some sort of fusion cell within the CIA, which I suspect you are, you know they can make a formal request for information. There are channels.” Dom shook his head. “It’s just me, Darren. It’s just me asking you.”
Albright seemed to consider this while he walked back through the living room. At the front door he turned around. “All right. You have my word. I’ll give you a shout if something turns up with this, but only if you promise me you’ll let me and my team do the work.”
“You got it. Thanks.”
The men shook hands and Albright said, “In the meantime, here’s a little advice. You need to take it easy for a while. The dark side can get along without you for a few weeks. No offense, but you look like shit.”
Albright stepped out into the hall, and Dom shut the door behind him.
“I wish everyone would stop telling me to take it easy.”
DOM REACHED GERRY HENDLEY at his seaside home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he went from time to time to get away from the pressures of Hendley Associates, The Campus, and Washington, D.C., in general. Dom reported his contact and conversation with FBI special agent Darren Albright, which both he and Gerry, after some discussion, determined to be both good news and bad for The Campus. Yes, Gerry agreed, it was good news that the leak that exposed Arik Yacoby to the Palestinians didn’t look like it had anything to do with Dominic Caruso or The Campus. But now the FBI at large was aware of and interested in Dominic. This could, and probably would, draw more attention to him than usual, even if it was only that he was witness to a crime. Already Albright had dropped in, who’s to say as the investigation into the leaked documents progressed that more Feds with more questions wouldn’t dig deeper into the day-to-day life of Dominic Caruso?
Gerry decided Dominic needed to continue his hiatus from all Campus activity and contact with the rest of the team. It was just temporary, he insisted to his frustrated operations officer.
Hendley ended the conversation by soliciting from Dominic a promise to continue to take it easy and recover from his injuries.
Dominic wasn’t happy, but he saw no alternative to Gerry’s logic, so he reluctantly agreed. “What else am I gonna do, boss?”
He hung up his phone and reached for the television remote, hoping he could find something to take his mind off of everything going on, because he knew he didn’t possess the personality type to sit on his ass for very long.
9
UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 951, a Boeing 777 flying from Brussels, touched down at Washington Dulles International Airport at one p.m. in a driving rain. The first to deplane were the first-class passengers, and within this group was a small man with short black hair and a boyish face.
If any of the deplaning passengers noticed him at all they would have presumed him to be a foreign exchange student, perhaps from Turkey or Lebanon or Saudi Arabia. His backpack was sleek and trendy, his jeans were designer, and he certainly looked no older than twenty-three or so.
In truth he was thirty-five, and he’d not come to America to study.
The man’s name was Mohammed Mehdi Mobasheri, but the documents he presented at immigration control said something altogether different. They claimed him to be a young Lebanese diplomat, flying from Beirut via Brussels. A call to the Lebanese embassy in the Woodley Park neighborhood of D.C. would have confirmed his tra
vel and his bona fides, but no call was necessary because his diplomatic visa appeared to be in order.
But while it was true his flight had originated the day before in Beirut’s Rafic Hariri Airport, the Lebanon-to-Belgium leg of his journey was, in fact, the second leg, and not the first. He had flown into Beirut early the previous morning from Tehran on a military transport, and he’d received his Lebanese documentation only in a guarded room at Rafic Hariri a halfhour before wheels up to Belgium.
And now he was in the immigration line in Dulles. He stood with a pleasant, if somewhat tired, smile on his face while he was cleared for entry into the U.S. He passed through quickly, and then he breezed through customs with nothing to declare.
During the flight over, Mobasheri had sat by himself in the first-class cabin, but four more men tasked with serving him were on board UA951. The four had traveled all the way from Tehran, as well, though they had stayed apart from one another since deplaning the military transport in Beirut. They flew in coach, carrying Lebanese identification, though their documents claimed them to be businessmen and not diplomats.
Mohammed left the airport terminal on his own, and he was met by a limousine from the Lebanese embassy in the arrivals cue at Dulles and whisked away, and the other four were picked up in a Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows.
Mobasheri had earned the privileges bestowed upon him. He was a member of a special elite unit within the Iranian Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, more commonly known as the Revolutionary Guards. The four men who traveled with him in a clandestine fashion were Quds Force, Iranian foreign intelligence operations. They had all come from Iran via Lebanon because Iranian intelligence used the Shiarun Lebanese government as a proxy when necessary to pass men and materiél into nations where teams of declared Iranians government agents might otherwise raise red flags.
The five reunited one hour later in a safe house in Falls Church, Virginia. Here they met with more Iranians, two operatives who lived and worked in D.C. These were official cover intelligence officers from the Iranian embassy, and they worked for yet another group in Iranian intelligence, MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran.