Locked On

  The masked guard spoke English. “Put your blanket in the hatch.”

  The Emir did not move.

  Again, “Put your blanket in the hatch.”

  Nothing from the prisoner.

  “Last chance.”

  Now Yasin complied. He had made a small show of resistance, and here that was a victory. The men that had held him in those first weeks after his capture were long gone, and Yasin had been testing the fervency and resolve of his captors ever since. He nodded slowly, dropped his blanket into the hatch, and then the hatch shut. On the other side, one of the two guards close to the window retrieved it, opened it up and looked it over, and then walked toward the laundry basket. He walked past the basket and tossed the wool blanket into a plastic garbage can.

  The man at the desk spoke into the microphone again: “You just lost your blanket, 09341. Keep testing us, asshole. We love this game, and we can play it each and every fuckin’ day.” The microphone switched off with a loud click, and the big guard returned to the glass to shoulder up next to his partner. Together they stood as still as stones, staring through the eyeholes in their masks at the man on the other side of the window.

  The Emir turned away and returned to his concrete bed.

  He would miss that blanket.

  7

  Melanie Kraft was having an exceptionally bad week. An intelligence reports officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, Melanie was only two years out of American University, where she received her B.A. in international studies, and her master’s in American foreign policy. This, augmented with having spent five of her teenage years in Egypt as the daughter of an Air Force attaché, made her a nice fit for the CIA. She worked in the Directorate of Intelligence—more specifically in the Office of Middle East and North Africa Analysis. Principally an Egypt specialist, young Ms. Kraft was bright and eager, so she occasionally reached out a little from her daily duties to work on other projects.

  It was this willingness to stick out her neck that now threatened to derail a career that was barely two years old.

  Melanie was accustomed to winning. In language classes in Egypt, as a soccer star in high school and then during her undergrad years, and with perfect grades in school. Her hard work won her fawning appreciation from her professors and then exemplary performance reviews here at the Agency. But all her intellectual and professional success had come to a screeching halt one week ago today, when she leaned into her supervisor’s office with a paper that she had put together on her own time.

  It was titled “An Evaluation of Political Rhetoric by the Muslim Brotherhood in English and in Masri.” She’d combed English and Egyptian Arabic (Masri) websites to chronicle the growing disconnect between Muslim Brotherhood public relations with the West and their domestic rhetoric. It was a hard-hitting but well-sourced document. She’d spent months of late nights and weekends creating and using phony profiles of Arab men to gain access to password-protected Islamist forums. She’d gained the trust of Egyptians in these “cyber coffee shops,” and these men let her into the fold, discussed with her Muslim Brotherhood speeches at madrassas across Egypt, even told her of Mo-Bro diplomats going to other nations in the Muslim world to share information with known radicals.

  She contrasted all she learned with the benevolent façade the Brotherhood was projecting to the West.

  She finished her paper and handed it over to her immediate supervisor. He sent her in to Phyllis Stark, chief of her department. Phyllis read the title, nodded curtly, and then tossed the brief onto her desk.

  This frustrated Melanie; she had expected some show of enthusiasm from her chief. As she’d walked back to her desk, she’d hoped, at least, that her hard work would get passed upstairs.

  Two days later, she got her wish. Mrs. Stark had passed it on, someone had read it, and Melanie Kraft was called into a fourth-floor conference room. Her supervisor, her department chief, and a couple of suits from the seventh floor that she did not recognize were already there when she entered.

  There was no pretense about the meeting at all. From the looks and gesticulations of the men at the conference table, Melanie Kraft knew she was in trouble even before she sat down.

  “Miss Kraft, what is it you thought you would accomplish with your moonlighting? What is it you want?” a seventh-floor political appointee named Petit asked her.

  “Want?”

  “Are you trying to get a new gig around here with your little term paper, or do you just want it to circulate around so that, if Ryan wins and brings in his own people, you will be the flavor of the month?”

  “No.” That had not occurred to her in the slightest. Theoretically, an administration change should have next to nothing to do with someone at her level in the Agency. “I just have been reading what we’ve been putting out on the Brotherhood, and I thought it could stand some countervailing data. There is open-source intelligence—you’ll see in the brief I cited everything—that points to a much more ominous—”

  “Miss Kraft. This isn’t grad school. I’m not going to check your footnotes.”

  Melanie did not respond to that, but she didn’t bother continuing her defense of her paper, either.

  Petit continued, “You have overstepped your boundaries at a time when this agency is at its most polarized.”

  Kraft didn’t think the Agency was polarized at all, unless the polarization was between the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to lose their jobs with a Kealty defeat and the seventh-floor graybeards who stood to move into better positions with a Ryan win. That world was far removed from her own, and she would have thought Petit could have seen that.

  “Sir, it was not my intention to cause any rift here in the building. My focus was on the realities in Egypt, and the information that was—”

  “Did you prepare this document while you were supposed to be working on your daily reports?”

  “No, sir. I did this at home.”

  “We can open an investigation into you, to see if you used any classified resources to create—”

  “One hundred percent of the information in that document is open-source. My fictitious Internet identities were not created from actual Agency legends. Honestly, there is nothing I have access to on a daily basis that would have been any help to me in preparing my paper.”

  “You have a strong opinion that the Brotherhood is nothing but a gang of terrorists.”

  “No, sir. That is not the conclusion of my paper. The conclusion of my paper is that the rhetoric in the English-speaking world runs counter to the Masri rhetoric put out by the same organization. I think we should just keep track of some of these websites.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you think we should do this because there has been an official finding of some sort, or you think we should do this because … because you just think we should do this.”

  She did not know how to answer.

  “Young lady, the CIA is not a policy-making organization.”

  Melanie knew this, and the paper was not intended to steer U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt in any direction, but instead to offer a dissenting view to conventional wisdom.

  Petit continued, “Your job is to generate the intelligence product that you are asked to generate. You are not a Clandestine Services officer. You have stepped out of your lane, and you have done so in a way that looks very suspicious.”

  “Suspicious?”

  Petit shrugged. He was a politician, and politicians assumed everyone else thought only about politics as well. “Ryan is ahead in the polls. Melanie Kraft happens to—in her free time, no less—create her own covert operation, and thereby shoot off on a tangent that would serve the Ryan doctrine.”

  “I … I don’t even know what the Ryan doctrine is. I am not interested in—”

  “Thank you, Miss Kraft. That’s all.”

  She’d walked back to her office humiliated but still too confused and angry to cry. But she cried that night back in
her little apartment in Alexandria, and there she asked herself why she had done what she’d done.

  She could see, even at her low level in the organization and with her limited view of the big picture, that the political appointees in the CIA were molding the intelligence product to suit the desires of the White House. Was her brief her own, small, bullheaded way to push back against that? In that moment of reflection the night of her fourth-floor meeting, she admitted that it probably was.

  Melanie’s father had been an Army colonel who instilled in her a sense of duty as well as a sense of individuality. She grew up reading biographies of great men and women, mostly men and women in the military and government, and she recognized through her readings that no one rose to exceptional greatness exclusively by being “a good soldier.” No, those few men and women who went against the establishment from time to time, only when necessary, were what ultimately made America great.

  Melanie Kraft had no great ambition other than to stand out from the pack as a winner.

  Now she was learning another phenomenon about standing out. Nails that stuck out often were hammered back into place.

  Now she sat in her cubicle, sipping an iced coffee and looking at her screen. She’d been told the day before by her supervisor that her brief had been squashed, destroyed by Petit and others on the seventh floor. Phyllis Stark had angrily told her the deputy director of the CIA, Charles Alden himself, had read a quarter of it before he tossed it in the trash and asked why the hell the woman who wrote it still had a job. Her friends there at the Office of Middle East and North Africa Analysis felt for her, but they didn’t want their own careers to be sidetracked by what they saw as an attempt by their colleague to leapfrog ahead of them by working on intelligence on her own time. So she became the office pariah.

  Now she was, at twenty-five, thinking about leaving the Agency. Finding a job in sales somewhere that paid a bit more than her government salary, and getting the hell out of an organization that she loved but that clearly did not love her back at present.

  Melanie’s desk phone rang, and she saw it was an outside number.

  She put down the iced coffee and picked up the receiver. “Melanie Kraft.”

  “Hi, Melanie. It’s Mary Pat Foley at NCTC. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  Melanie almost spit her last swallow of coffee across her keyboard. Mary Pat Foley was a legend in the U.S. intelligence community; it was impossible to exaggerate her reputation and the impact her career had had on foreign affairs or on women at CIA.

  Melanie had never met Mrs. Foley, though she’d seen her speak a dozen times or more, going back to her undergrad days at American. Most recently, Melanie had sat in on a seminar Mary Pat had given to CIA analysts about the work of the National Counterterrorism Center.

  Melanie stammered out a reply: “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I am catching you at a bad time?”

  “No, excuse me. You aren’t catching me at a bad time.” The young analyst kept her voice more professional than her emotions. “How can I help you today, Mrs. Foley?”

  “I wanted to give you a call. I spent the morning reading your brief.”

  “Oh.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Thank y—… How so?”

  “What kind of response are you getting from the graybeards on the seventh floor?”

  “Well,” she said, as she frantically searched for the right words. “Honestly, I’d have to say there has been some pushback.”

  Mary Pat repeated the word slowly. “Pushback.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I did expect some reticence on the part of—”

  “Can I take that to mean that you are getting your ass kicked over there?”

  Melanie Kraft’s mouth hung open for a moment. She finally closed it self-consciously, as if Mrs. Foley were sitting in her cube with her. Finally she stammered an answer. “I … I would say I have been taken to the woodshed over my work.”

  There was a brief pause. “Well done, Ms. Kraft, I think your initiative was brilliant.”

  A return pause. Then, “Thank you.”

  “I have a team going over your report, your conclusions, your citations, looking for information relevant to the work we do here. In fact, I’m planning on making it required reading among my staff. Beyond the Egypt angle, it shows how someone can hit a problem from a different slant to shed new light on it. I encourage that from my people over here, so any real-world examples I can find are very helpful to me.”

  “I am very honored.”

  “Phyllis Stark is lucky to have you working for her.”

  “Thank you.” Melanie realized she was just saying “Thank you” over and over, but she was so focused on not saying anything she would regret, it was all that came out.

  “If you ever are looking for a change of pace, just come and talk to me. We are always on the hunt for analysts who aren’t afraid to upset the apple cart by delivering the cold, hard truth.”

  Suddenly Melanie Kraft came up with something to say. “Would you be available this week sometime?”

  Mary Pat laughed. “Oh, God. Is it that bad over there?”

  “It’s like I have leprosy, although I suppose if I had leprosy I’d at least receive get-well cards.”

  “Damn. Kealty’s people over there are a disaster.”

  Melanie Kraft did not respond. She could riff on Foley’s comment for an hour, but she held her tongue. That would not be professional, and she did actually consider herself to be apolitical.

  Mary Pat said, “Okay. I’d love to meet you. You know where we are?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Call my secretary. I’m pretty tied up through the week, but come have lunch with me early next week.”

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  Melanie hung up the phone and, for the first time in a week, she wanted to neither cry nor smash her fist through a wall.

  8

  John Clark and Domingo Chavez sat in their Ford minivan and watched the apartment building through the rainy night. Both men held SIG Sauer handguns in their right hands, resting on their thighs. They kept the weapons low in the shadows but ready for quick use. In their left hands, Clark held thermal binoculars, Chavez a camera with a long-range lens. Crushed plastic coffee cups and gum wrappers filled a plastic bag on the floor below the passenger seat.

  Though their weapons were drawn, they would do their best to avoid using them. Any shooting that might be necessary tonight would be defensive in nature, and the trouble wasn’t likely to come from the terrorist assassin and his pals up the street in their safe house, which, in actuality, was a fourth-floor walk-up tenement flat. No, the immediate threat was the neighborhood itself. For the fifth time in the past four hours, a dozen-strong crowd of steely-eyed young men passed on the sidewalk next to their vehicle.

  Chavez took a break from staring through the telephoto lens of his Canon at the lighted entryway of the apartment to watch the men pass. Both he and Clark kept their eyes on the group in their rearview mirror until they disappeared in the rainy night. When they were gone, Chavez rubbed his eyes and glanced around at his surroundings. “This sure isn’t postcard Paris.”

  Clark smiled, reholstering his pistol in the shoulder rig under his oiled canvas jacket. “We’re a long way from the Louvre.”

  They were in the banlieues—the outer suburbs. The safe house was located in a housing project in the not inappropriately named Stains commune, in Seine-Saint-Denis, a ban-lieue of low-income residents, many of them poor immigrants from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, North African nations from which France had imported millions of workers in the twentieth century.

  There were housing projects all over Seine-Saint-Denis, but the two Americans had the misfortune tonight to find themselves on the outskirts of one of the roughest. Decrepit, graffiti-festooned concrete apartment buildings lined both sides of the street. Gangs of youth milled about the neighborhood. Cars blaring North African rap music drove by s
lowly, while rats scurried along the trash-strewn gutters next to the van and disappeared down the iron drains.

  Earlier, during their afternoon and evening sitting in the minivan, the two Americans noticed that the neighborhood postman wore a helmet, lest items be thrown from the buildings onto his head just for kicks.

  And they also noticed that they had not seen one police car in the neighborhood.

  This part of town was too dangerous to patrol.

  The Ford Galaxy Clark and Chavez sat in sported torn molding and a dented, rusted body, but its windows and windshield were intact and deeply tinted, all but obscuring the inside of the van. Most strangers in parked cars who sat for long on this street would have been harassed by the locals, but Clark had picked this vehicle out from a budget lot in Frankfurt because, he felt, it would give them the greatest chance for anonymity.

  That said, it would take only one set of curious eyes to pick out this vehicle, to spend some time looking it up and down, and to realize that it was not from around here. Then the neighborhood heavies would surround it, smash the windows, and then loot and torch it. Chavez and Clark would race off before they let that happen, but they certainly did not want to give up their surveillance on the safe house two hundred meters up the street.

  The Americans had positioned themselves on the avenue at the rear of the building, assuming that even with the bare minimum of tradecraft, the cell would, at least, know not to enter and exit the building on the other side, where there was a high-traffic boulevard and consequently many more eyes that could turn their way as they came and went.