Purpose of Evasion Read online

  In the seconds it took Black Truck Guy to consider his options, Yoda came up from behind with a spring-loaded autoinjector. Like all U.S. military personnel, Yoda was trained to use the device for self-administering atropine in a chemical weapons attack. But his skill owed more to a lifelong allergy to bee stings. He always carried his pen and had used it before.

  The needle was strong enough to break through heavy cloth and he hit Black Truck Guy square on the left buttock. A stream of the same Propofol/Lorazepam cocktail that was used on Hasan now flowed into Black Truck Guy’s veins. The drug required only seconds to act, but they were dangerous seconds.

  As soon as Yoda struck, Sami sprang forward to take control of the man’s flailing limbs. There was a second syringe if necessary, but after a few seconds that rivaled any bull ride, Sami and Yoda had their man under control.

  It took another two-and-a-half minutes to carry Black Truck Guy to their vehicle, secure him inside, and exit the parking deck. They texted the confirmation code to Emily and Alexa. Both women walked toward the center entrance of the building, near the main courtyard. As they walked, Emily hailed an Uber, only four minutes away. Alexa dialed 9-1-1 and reported the bomb. The call complete, Alexa removed the back of the phone and peeled the SIM card out with her fingernail. The plastic case of the prepaid phone went into a trash can. The SIM card stayed in her pocket. She would destroy it back at the safe house. Their Uber arrived.

  The entire team was gone, with their new prisoner, before the first police car responded.

  EIGHTEEN

  CULPEPER COUNTY

  The little safe house was crowded. Never meant to serve as anything other than a temporary redoubt, with just one holding area that Hasan already occupied, the team had to make-do with their second prisoner. They stopped at a country hardware store to buy a hasp and heavy-duty padlock for the upstairs bedroom. Black Truck Guy lay across the back seat, his mouth agape and tongue lolled, like a scene from Weekend at Bernie’s.

  They didn’t dare return to the safe house without a thorough surveillance detection route, but they only had one more dose of sedative and they couldn’t be too circuitous. These were unnecessary risks. And unprofessional practices. They would lead to another conflict between the team and Andy. That was even before they started digging on the Black Truck Guy and discovered who they had captured.

  They had taken nothing from his truck. Given the difficulty of conducting the snatch, in public, with an untrained two-man team, they agreed that trying to grab any intel from the vehicle was too risky. It was a grievous compromise. There was no telling what they left behind.

  The man was sequestered in the upstairs bedroom. In addition to the hasp and lock, Yoda bought dark contact paper which they adhered to the windows. One thing that the house had in ample supply was restraints. Andy must have bought them on clearance.

  And so, James Everett Clewes, a driver licensed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was trussed like a pig.

  In addition to intelligence officers, cybersecurity experts, and restraints, Andy kept a doctor close at hand. She managed the drug cocktails that had been administered to the prisoners and she was called for periodic check-ups to be sure detainees were not going to die in custody. She also came in handy when the team suffered bumps, bruises or worse. The ER was out of the question.

  As she examined the prisoners, Sami congratulated himself again on the selection of his team. Within hours of returning to the safe house, Emily and Alexa provided a breadth of open source intel on Mr. Clewes, nee Black Truck Guy. Even with Yoda yet to hack into his social media accounts, the public activity was providing a treasure trove of information.

  They had an email address and some geo-located photos to go along with the address provided on the driver’s license. These provided a sense of Mr. Clewes’ origins. They also had an academic history – such as it was – and a boatload of other public information: real estate transactions, hunting and fishing licenses, gun permits, military service dates.

  Were he sentient, the rapidity with which the team gathered this information would have enraged their prisoner, confirming his most deeply-held resentments against the government. The team did not have to speculate on these resentments. Mr. Clewes expounded upon them in some of the most singed corners of the tire fire that is the internet. He was a denizen of the Deep Web, perhaps less fearful of speaking without anonymity when he trolled and posted on websites that were left off search engine indexes, unknown to the general public.

  By comparison to the more-widely understood physical world, the Deep Web is the internet’s shady alley, a place to explore less widely-accepted proclivities. Unconventional porn, undisguised racism, unsubstantiated theories of history, sociology, and every other liberal art. Fortunately for the team, in that same physical world comparison, James Clewes did not appear to have access behind the secret doors that line the Deep Web’s alleys.

  Behind these reinforced metal doors with sliding speakeasy peepholes lay the Dark Web. It was still the internet, but it was protected by passwords, special software packages, or encryption.

  The Dark Web was where smart terrorists communicated and Yoda was the beat cop of these precincts. It was where Halif was sending messages to Hasan. In other words, Clewes did not seem to be Halif. His internet history was clumsy. The team determined that he was, always, just the Black Truck Guy. Like Karim, and like Hasan himself, Clewes was just another pawn. But for whom?

  “Given his online persona, he’s either employing one of the great public cover identities since Andy Kaufman did Tony Clifton,” Andy Rizzo’s pop culture referenced floated past the millennials and Gen-Yers on the team. “Or, he is a person unlikely to sympathize with Muslim jihad.”

  “His racism is incoherent,” Yoda offered. “There are bits of Zionism and then he quotes David Duke.”

  “That’s not unheard of these days,” Alexa was having tea. She swallowed and continued. “There has been a détente between Zionists and groups that are traditionally antagonistic toward Jews.”

  “That’s right,” Sami nodded. “Against Islam. The enemy of my enemy and all.”

  “To the extent that his philosophy is inspired by any one school of thought, it’s Rebel Creek,” Yoda continued. “His positions are consistent with theirs. He cites facts and opinions from their website on message boards.”

  “That’s not our usual beat,” Sami looked at Andy, then back to Yoda. “Who are they?”

  “Domestic group. White nationalist— “

  “Militiamen from Montana?” Alexa interrupted.

  “No. From what little I have been able to find, they have mailing addresses near Pittsburgh.” Yoda checked his screen to confirm the location. “Washington County, Pennsylvania. That’s the good news, someone can get there quickly.”

  Andy raised a hand but did not stop Yoda.

  “Someone has to go to Pennsylvania! I need his computer.”

  “And whatever else we can get from his house. We need that intel.” It was Emily. She seldom spoke but she always seemed to be right.

  “Out of the question.” Andy had both hands up now. “First off, we don’t know what we’ll find there. It could be guarded. He could live with others from this group. If they are making bombs there, the place is probably guarded with arms. If TATP is on the premises, you could get killed.”

  TATP was the acronym for the complex chemical name of an explosive compound that avoided detection by many explosive detection scanners and had – despite its volatility and penchant for accidental detonation - become the IED accelerant of choice. The London bus bombings. The Shoe Bomber. The Manchester concert bomb. All had been TATP. And the team suspected it was used in Annapolis.

  “We’re just supposed to watch until the next bomb goes off?” The whole team’s anger was spilling out of Yoda now. They were all tired of fighting with one hand behind their back.

  Andy seemed to ignore him. “Second, we are at enormous political and criminal risk if an
yone finds out what we have done.”

  “Save that shit! I’m tired of your spider game. You made this web: off the books, black, unacknowledged, all the bullshit, and now you keep wanting to hang that over our heads. Are we trying to stop this attack, or not?” Yoda asked.

  “You all understood the agreement and you accepted it. The agreement does not exist for the jobs you like doing. Such agreements exist for when things go wrong, not when they go smoothly. I don’t expect anyone to express further compunction about our approach or resources in this operation. This is the last time.”

  Andy stood and continued, but Sami was distracted by words crawling across the TV screen in the other room.

  “In case you did not appreciate the full import of the bullshit you signed up for, allow me to explain. We are an intelligence special access program. By definition, that means that our presence is closely held. More than that, we are an unacknowledged IN-SAP, operating above the oversight of Congress. Only one person in government can authorize such a program and he decides who is read in. I don’t have time to explain everything entailed by this set of facts, and I’m not taking questions, but what should be self-evident is that when you spout off about calling CTC, you’re wrong. There is no call to make. No one at Langley knows that our mission exists. No one is waiting for us to come in from the cold.”

  “So, we wait? And play Keystone Kops again? Hope we get lucky a third time? That’s three more questions on top of the one you didn’t answer a minute ago. Are we trying to stop attacks? Because if we are— “

  “Shut up, Yoda!” It was Sami, from the other room, where he walked to watch the TV.

  “Sami, we need help! If he won’t, then you need to make a fucking call and get us more bodies— “

  “We won’t get them,” Sami said.

  “Because neither of you will ask! Because of ‘the agreement,” Yoda made exaggerated quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

  “No.” The feeling was surreal. Sami was watching a news report he knew was fabricated. If Andy was right that few people knew about their mission, then there was a correspondingly small list of people who could have planted the false story. “We don’t want help.”

  “Why wouldn’t we— “

  “You should listen to your team leader,” Andy interjected.

  By now only Yoda, in his state of agitation, had not picked up what was on TV.

  Anonymous sources at the FBI, unable to go on the record during an investigation, have confirmed that this man, Tahir Hussien, has been arrested in connection with a thwarted bombing at an office park in Tysons Corner yesterday.

  The broadcast washed over the team. They all knew the facts. Tahir was not a bomber. He never knew about the plot, and the bomb never even made it into his vehicle. There was a connection to Hasan through the mosque but there were dozens of others with the same connection. Hasan admitted that the Council of Muhammad members were hand-picked decoys, selected because they were clean.

  The team knew that someone else was behind the plot. Someone who was, or at least was connected to, a white nationalist group from Pennsylvania. The real bomber, James Clewes was upstairs in their makeshift holding cell.

  So why was the FBI acting like they had arrested a terrorist?

  “You still want to call them?” Andy asked rhetorically. When no one answered, he continued. “Do what you’ve been doing. But faster.”

  On TV, the reporter went to a satellite feed for an interview on this breaking story. Abu Muhammad appeared on the screen. He decried law enforcement’s response to “one bad Muslim.” He urged the FBI to stop the widespread and intimidating investigation of the entire Ummah, which he claimed began in the past two days. In seconds, he arrayed the interests of U.S. law enforcement against the interests of U.S. Muslims.

  “Faster. And smarter,” Andy finished.

  NINETEEN

  WHITE HOUSE

  The briefing was held in the Oval Office. Gerald Seymour insisted. He had been operating on the President’s authority without the President’s approval or knowledge. After the anonymous call came from Tysons Corner, it took the FBI the rest of the day to get Tahir Hussein on the radar. Once he was there, Seymour not only ordered the arrest, but he directed the FBI to make it splashy.

  He was confident he short-circuited any connection between this Muslim terror spree and the document he reviewed in early July. The best way to be sure, was for this investigation to get big and to get there fast. To become its own thing. FBI guys got hard-ons for shit like that.

  And they loved face time with POTUS. In the Oval.

  The President, who knew nothing more than what the FBI would tell him today, would issue the orders Seymour had prepared. Orders that the FBI could not ignore, no matter what reservations the Director had about the inordinate amount of interest that Gerald Seymour had taken.

  There was time for the Situation Room. Seymour guessed that they would reconvene there soon. After what came next.

  If what came next could be avoided, if he could stop it, then he would. He would direct resources to that end. But if it couldn’t be stopped, then it meant something would happen that he could not have made a first-term goal in his wildest dreams.

  America would divide even further. Between Christians and Muslims.

  It was a path Seymour laid out long ago, even choosing men suitable to the task. That was before he ever conceived of himself running a White House. Directing a President. Since the inauguration, things had gone so poorly that he wondered if he had chosen the right man to put in this office. But he knew he had chosen the right man for this more important mission.

  TWENTY

  FOGGY BOTTOM

  There were bigger gay bars in D.C. And better ones. But Sami couldn’t think of one more suited to his purposes than Blueskin. Named after one of George Washington’s Revolutionary War mounts and housed in a low-slung brick building on a quiet mews in Foggy Bottom, patrons had counted on its professional drag show for decades. Now a haunt for the capital’s professional gays, you were as likely to see a Deputy Assistant Secretary or a Congressman as you were a well-known stage performer.

  Sami made the appointment while Yoda was buying detention supplies in the hardware store, before Andy elucidated all the ways that contacting officials from any three-letter agency was a bad idea. Before Abu Muhammad appeared on his TV. Neither of these facts changed the plan.

  Despite Andy’s direction, Sami was meeting Brad to seek clandestine help from the FBI. Or at least someone in the FBI. He used Abu Muhammad’s TV gig as an excuse to break away and break communication for a few hours. Andy had been begging Sami to talk to his grandfather since the 4th of July. Sami told him he finally was.

  Sami liked Brad. They had dated once. They were gay men in intelligence with roots in the D.C. suburbs. They had that in common. Brad’s great-grandfather founded the prep school he – and half of D.C. – attended. His father was a retired Rear Admiral. Sami’s parents were killed in a terror attack on a Central Asian U.S. embassy and he was raised by a Muslim cleric. They didn’t have everything in common.

  The relationship was perfect really. It was no one’s fault it didn’t work, it was just that circumstances never lined up. They still met. Like this.

  A few hours after setting their meeting, Sami sent Brad a text:

  REBEL CREEK

  When Brad replied with three question marks, Sami followed-up in-kind:

  ???

  He knew Brad couldn’t resist something so cryptic.

  Sami was early. It wasn’t tradecraft, just habit. Or maybe it was that tradecraft had become a habit? He threw back the first vodka martini with abandon and was nursing the second. No wonder he didn’t have a boyfriend. He was meeting a guy he liked and could imagine himself with. The kind of guy he had clicked with in college. The kind of guy he liked to wake up next to.

  Maybe he would wake up next to Brad tomorrow morning? He might do that. He was still considering it, and a few mo
re martinis would make the decision for him.

  Those were the things Sami was thinking.

  What he knew was that he would get his PIRs. Priority Intelligence Requirements. He knew that much, and if he went into a date with that level of deceit and duplicity, then how could he make anything like a real relationship work?

  A question gnawed that was less easily considered. It only surfaced when he drank, and he could keep drinking to make it crawl back under the rock in his mind.

  Was he too complicated a person for anyone to love?

  He was a gay man raised by a grandfather who preached the fundamental impropriety of homosexuality. He was a Muslim who fought a war against radical elements of his own faith. He was an American spy working on an operation he worried was taking him close to secrets that implicated his own government.

  That shook him from introspection. Who leaked Tahir’s name to the FBI? It was too big a question, so he ran through the list of PIRs again, unchanged, and now familiar.

  Where did the money for the trucks come from?

  Who made the bombs?

  Who was the delivery man?

  What was the next target?

  The last question would evolve with each attack. The rest were coming into focus. James Clewes was the answer to #3. He provided – at least – a connection to #2. He had to get the bomb from someone. His online behavior suggested that the connection might be more than incidental, more than just as a courier.

  Might Clewes also direct Sami to answers for #1, the Money Man? Sami didn’t know a lot of white supremacist groups that had money laying around, not after they bought and assembled a TATP device the size of those detonated in Annapolis and tried in Tysons Corner. But Brad knew white supremacist groups. He was their worst nightmare.