Purpose of Evasion Read online
Purpose
of Evasion
A Sami Lakhani Thriller
J. A. Walsh
Milford House Press
Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania
To victims of hatred, everywhere
To the defenders of freedom, for everyone
“There are indeed gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen because it may happen. To these I say: How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?"
–Thomas Jefferson
CIA OATH
“I, Sami Lakhani, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
PROLOGUE
EISENHOWER EXECUTIVE OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON D.C.
July
Gerald Seymour uncorked a bottle of 21-year old Elijah Craig Single Barrel Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey. He poured two fat fingers on top of the few drops remaining in the cut crystal tumbler. It was a two-whiskey day.
The first whiskey was a longstanding habit. As summer peaked in the brief and quotation-mark-free period that a new White House experienced between the “First 100 Days” and “Midterms,” Gerald Seymour accepted that all days in this office were two-whiskey days. The only mystery when he woke each morning was whether the second drink would be in celebration or lament.
He walked across the spacious office, dark but for the glow from a laptop and the flickering of a candle. The candle smelled of Prince Albert’s Cherry Vanilla. He quit smoking a pipe eight years ago after mouth cancer fired a shot across his bow, but he could not work at night without the scent on the air. The blue-white glow from the laptop was not so easy to explain, and he passed by his desk to the window.
It was a corner office. The finest in D.C., in his opinion. From one window he looked out over the Ellipse to the National Mall and the Washington Monument. A few steps to the left and he was looking at the West Wing. For years, administration after administration, the Senior White House Advisor kept an office in the West Wing.
Republican or Democrat, proximity to the President was a prize that crossed party lines. It was conventional Washington wisdom. He hated conventional Washington wisdom. He hated everything about Washington. They had come to change it, he and the man he was responsible for putting in the Oval Office.
The window also afforded a view past the southern jutting Oval Office to the colonnade that connected the West Wing with the South Portico, the President’s back door. When the leader of the free world started his walk to the office, Gerald could start his. Or not. Sometimes he didn’t make an appearance in the White House for a few days, preferring to maintain the mystery and reinforce the notion he was somewhere behind the President pulling strings. Svengali. Rasputin.
During the transition, one of the old Republican hands they hired was shocked to hear where Gerald planned to office. “You have to be near him!”
“I wasn’t near him on the campaign,” Gerald responded without hesitation. “Never rode on that plane once. And yet everything flowed through me. I was his first call when he woke up, his last before he went to sleep. It’s not about proximity, it’s about control.”
Gerald did not conclude by adding that “The President won’t wipe his ass without asking me whether to sit or stand.” But that didn’t stop the quote from becoming conventional Washington wisdom.
This White House, and everyone associated with it, did things their own way. The mandate of their election required they did, Gerald Seymour demanded they did, and everything continued to flow through him. That was the reason for tonight’s second whiskey.
He swallowed something between a sip and a gulp and returned to the laptop. He scanned the document displayed there one more time. It was the final time. As in, final for everyone. He would never see it again and neither would his man at the FBI, who wrote it. No one else at the FBI would ever lay eyes on it.
Seymour didn’t ask any questions about the sourcing, though it seemed solid. If the allegations in the document were true, the media would relish spreading the news. If the story ever came to light, he was ruined. So was the President.
After 9/11, it became conventional Washington wisdom that the people who hated America would no longer express their feelings just by blowing up our embassies in the Middle East and Africa, and that the FBI needed to take on more counterterrorism and intelligence responsibilities. The problem with the FBI was they wanted to do things covert agencies had long done but with a bias toward prosecution. The Hoover Building was full of people who liked to arrest and indict and convict.
Langley was different. The CIA traded in information. When they found no willing customer for their reporting, they sometimes conducted misadventures of their own. But their trade was secrets, not justice. They used secrets to compromise agents who were – by definition – liars, and who – in turn – provided more secrets. If the CIA discovered that Mr. Bad Guy would like to harm America, they collected information about Mr. Bad Guy. Information, not evidence. If Mr. Bad Guy developed capabilities to harm America, they degraded those capabilities. If Mr. Bad Guy had actionable plans to harm America, they disrupted those plans. They might even kill Mr. Bad Guy. But they would not arrest him. Information was power, even if they never used it.
Langley’s approach suited Gerald much more than the FBI’s. The J. Edgar Hoover Building was an insult to its namesake, one of America’s foremost secrets-and-lies blackmailers. If the CIA had the same information included in the FBI memo Gerald was reading, the CIA would not have told the White House. Gerald would have found out because he had a guy at Langley too. But if he let this go on any longer, the FBI would be handing this memo around Washington like homeless newspapers at a Metro station.
Soon the dipshit Director would know and while he served at the pleasure of the President, he was not someone that the President appointed. If the Director knew so would the Attorney General. The President did appoint him, but he was a cocksucker who worried Gerald. It could not get that far. He would tell his guy to make sure the FBI backed off.
Still, someone needed to determine if what was in that memo was true. If it was, then it needed to be stopped. If it couldn’t be stopped then it needed to be managed. Gerald’s problem was that the CIA had limitations. Like the Harlem Globetrotters, they did not play home games. The United States was the FBI’s jurisdiction. But the Bureau didn’t stop things from happening, they responded to them when they did. Since 9/11, a debate had raged about whether there was a third way that was within the Constitution.
The Constitution went out the window when we let people who hate this country live in it, Seymour thought, as he turned away from the window.
Fortunately for Gerald Seymour, he was not the first person who dealt with a dilemma like this. He might shun conventional Washington wisdom, but some good work had been done over the years. There was a third way. There were people to call who were not concerned with chains of command or jurisdiction. They didn’t participate in Washington’s wars for bureaucratic turf. Gerald Seymour drained the last of the bourbon and picked up the phone. It was not a call he could have made from the West Wing.
ONE
BATTLEFIELD
Samir Lakhani zipped the weapon into his backpack, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and walked out of the internet café into the heat of a crowded street. He headed east.
Of Pakistani Muhajir origin, Samir’s skin was a caramel color and when he grew a beard it was wiry and black. A mustache could age him into his mid-forties. Clean shaven, he could pass for twenty-five. He was tall and thin, and he dressed fashionably but not fastidiously. Nothing too noticeable. He could be a computer programmer or your Uber driver.
Or a Soldier? Freedom fighter? Spy? Terrorist? He wasn’t certain where he fit on that spectrum anymore. Whatever he was, he still needed tradecraft. If anyone was following, the Spy would smoke them out with a good surveillance detection route.
His SDR left the busy commercial street for a deserted residential block where no one could hide from his scrutiny. Two blocks from the café, he turned left up a side street that climbed a steep hill. The foot traffic thinned, and the incline would challenge any pursuer to appear casual. There were no vehicles moving.
Stop for a smoke. Now was the time. He had crested the hill and turned left again, onto a street parallel to the main road. He was above and behind the café now.
Stand in a doorway…take out a cigarette…struggle for the lighter…have a little trouble sparking the flame.
All the while he looked through hooded lids to see if anyone was watching from a parked car, or if some amateur would steam around the corner trying to make up ground while line of sight was broken. The cigarette was cover but the smoke in his lungs was not unwelcome.
The world did not know yet, but from the café, with nothing more than an internet connection, he played his role in an attack that killed at least a dozen. Maybe more. He didn’t know for sure, Freedom Fighting was an inexact science, but he watched the explosion from 7,000 miles away. It was eerie. Silent. The dust settled without any of it catching in his own throat like it would have in the beginning of the war when he was face-to-face with the enemy and he saw the bodies.
Back then, he went village to village with other soldiers, corn-fed infantry jarheads who looked nothing like him. He entered the homes of Afghani and Waziri families who could have passed for his cousins, and yet no matter how many times the scent of their homes singed his nose, the same realization always surprised him. They were strange to him. He had more in common with these boys from Alabama and Massachusetts than he did with his grandparents, who were born in one of these villages.
Clearing homes meant knocking on the doors, if no one answered, then they kicked in the door. If there was any resistance inside, they erred on the side of caution and that meant three bullets center mass to any “military-aged male” who stepped up. But how could they not step up? Their wives, mothers, and children were in the house.
As he cleared small home after small home, he watched these men’s defiant eyes fill with doubt and then drain to despair. The soldiers went room to room in a tight, tactical group. By the time they left, the same eyes bulged like a fish, flayed on bleached white fiberglass.
The women and children were corralled outside. More than once Samir saw that the defiance had not died with the father but was staring back at him from the eyes of the youth, who were scared and innocent just moments ago.
Smoking was part of the routine. The Soldier needed it to decompress, and all the pictures of blackened lungs in the world could not change that. He passed above the café and continued to the next corner, turning left down the hill, back toward the main road. Smoking passed for high risk these days. Now that he was not face-to-face with the enemy. Not on his own ground. No more house-to-house. No more detentions. No more interrogations. The rules had all changed and that changed the war, and the soldiers, and spies, and freedom fighters.
Was that when they changed him into The Terrorist? Bombing from 7,000 miles away?
There had been something courageous about the earlier days of the war, when both sides risked their own. Now his victims never saw him coming. No convoy rolled across the border. No thunder of Humvees passed by. No boots on the ground. Just a glint of light reflected 20,000 feet up in the sky. And then nothing. They had been laughing, or smoking, or doing one of the other innocuous and stupid things that people were doing when he blew them up.
Each generation developed its own rules, based on its own changing values, based on the facts of its own wars. This generation’s values seemed especially temporal. They killed in the open now. His side and the enemy’s. They carried their weapons in backpacks. No matter which of them struck a blow, there was a press release in the can, and they ran to the computer before the smoke cleared to disseminate the news.
He stubbed out the cigarette. He was glad he quit. Too risky.
He turned back onto the crowded main street and walked east, approaching the internet café again. Full circle. He barely felt the weight of his bag, but his weapon was not some shitty homemade bomb like the enemy might use in a market in the Middle East, but the means to target a Metal Augmented Charge. It was officially a Hellfire missile, but they called it MAC Daddy and it was the laser-guided air-to-surface missile that he had helped the drone team to target from his computer.
There were precautions necessary when killing from this far away. As he approached the coffee shop again, he tossed the burner phone on which he received the mission code into a trash can. He had destroyed the SIM card with a multi-tool before he walked out. His black box, an internet device that housed a warren of VPN encrypted proxies to mask his online trail, was stowed in the backpack with his computer. For next time. That was the thing, no matter how many times Sami helped kill the top guy, there was always another mission.
About 20 feet before the café door, he cut left down a small alley. If anyone was on him, he couldn’t miss them. He climbed the stairs and tried the door. Unlocked. The way he left it. The world’s best spies were taught to be exacting, never to leave a trace. They would never do something stupid like forget to relock the door after an infil. It was muscle memory. Double check, did we relock the door?
If they were good, they might remember to leave Sami’s door unlocked. If they weren’t so good, he might catch them out. Either way, no lock would stop the kind of person who would hunt him, so leaving the apartment unlocked was Sami’s safest choice. Just another of the paradoxes that defined his life.
He flipped on TV news and saw that the press release was already being repeated.
“A Predator drone dropped a precision-guided 18-pound bomb…”
Close enough. It wasn’t a Predator. And operators like Sami did not call them drones. They were Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The Americans had not yet gone public with the latest UAV design, its name or payload.
Sami looked out the front window, over the crowd of tourists and college kids on M Street’s sidewalks. The rickshaws toting tourists in town for 4th of July were still filling the gutters. Ubers were everywhere. It was summer, a hot weekend night, and it was busy.
This apartment in Georgetown was small, but he loved it. It sure beat the FOBs in Iraq or Afghanistan. He had seen both sides of the war. Wherever he fought from, he was valuable to the U.S. intelligence community because he knew the rhythms and tones of the enemy. He might feel more like the American boys he deployed with, but he was not sure they felt the same about him. He spoke the language of the enemy and worshipped their God. He fought with those boys on far-flung battlefields, but he fought another war too, inside. 7,000 miles from the desert, he still fought on both fronts.
In Yemen, a group of men and boys had been taking a day off from their training for some falconry. They wanted to kill Americans. Their mistake was that some Americans discovered their plan and since the Americans could no longer
grab them and hold them forever in a cage on a hot stinking island, the Americans killed them first.
The missile was fired from the sky above them but carried by an unmanned aerial vehicle that was controlled by a twenty-two-year-old kid working a joystick in New Mexico. The targeting was Sami’s job. Now that it was done, he was thinking about ordering takeout.
This was unlike any war in history.
Sami loved his country and he did his job. This operation killed fifteen of the enemy, including one of the top targets in all foreign jihadism. It was the sixth such notch in Sami’s belt. He followed the rules as they stood each day. He followed orders.
In the lead up to a big mission, there was anxiety, but now he was calm. He killed strangers for a living, but he endured the nature of his work because those strangers had done – or planned to do - bad things to Americans.
His conscience was clear. But maybe it shouldn’t be.
TWO
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
Parking in Annapolis was always a pain. Especially in a pickup truck. Although why he was driving a pickup truck, Karim was unsure. Hasan said the Learning Center could use one, but he didn’t want to drive it, and he didn’t want it to just sit without being driven, so Karim should get one and the Learning Center would pay for it. Karim was still paying off his student loans from George Washington, so the deal was an easy sell for him. Besides, Hasan had grown the Learning Center so successfully that the members rarely asked questions.
Karim never asked any questions, even when he noticed a few other guys pulling up in pickup trucks in the weeks after he got his own. But then they stopped meeting at the Learning Center, where there was a parking lot. Worship still happened at the mosque, which Hasan insisted they always call the “Learning Center,” but the meetings of this smaller group, which Hasan called the “Council of Muhammad,” were now in downtown Annapolis where parking was always a pain. Karim would be late. He finally found a parking spot for the truck and jogged three blocks. It was only when he pulled open the restaurant door that Karim realized the keys were still in his tightly-curled fist. He didn’t like to be late for Hasan.
Purpose of Evasion