Purpose of Evasion Read online

  “Samir! Your impudence— “

  “Quiet, grandfather!” Sami interrupted.

  Nothing like these words had ever passed Sami’s lips. There was shocked silence as the same realization settled on them both. Sami was no longer a little boy. Abu Muhammad was well on his way to becoming an old man. His grandfather had never been violent with him, but there was no longer the physical intimidation that freighted interactions between small children and larger authority figures. Especially those authority figures who wanted to intimidate.

  “Samir,” the old man said again as he rose, and very much wanted to intimidate, “You will leave this office now! This house! Leave now!”

  But Sami didn’t leave. He didn’t take a step back. More than physical intimidation was lacking. Obedience required respect. There was none left.

  Sami said a name. And then others. They were names that his grandfather thought he had forgotten; or perhaps never realized that Sami knew. With his grandfather staring, flabbergasted, Sami revealed why he mentioned those people and what he had discovered about them. And what they did to his parents.

  Sami listened as his grandfather did the one thing Sami never thought he would do. Beg forgiveness. That was when the old man told the lies that Sami had not unpacked for two decades, until now.

  “You are correct. I knew these people and I arranged the meeting.”

  “But you never told the FBI?”

  “How could I?” His grandfather asked. “You must understand. You must forgive me. Samir, this wasn’t the same country it is today. If I were connected with those people, people who had just attacked the American embassy, it would have been the end of everything. I knew these people, but I knew nothing of their attacks. In America, as it was then, guilt by association—”

  “It might have prevented another attack!”

  “I would have been arrested. And imprisoned. Our community. My reputation. I had already lost my son, should I lose all of that, too? Worse yet, Samir, you were so young, and you lost your parents. Could I let you lose your grandfather as well?”

  “Shut up! You lied.” Sami had never spoken to his grandfather that way. For twenty years, he wondered why Abu Muhammad allowed it. Now Sami realized it was to cover up something even worse.

  TWENTY-THREE

  CULPEPER COUNTY

  Andy messaged ahead of his arrival.

  BLACK SUV IS ME.

  A moment later, an American-made SUV pulled up in front of the safe house. It was so de rigueur in its appointments as to lack only a CIA vanity license plate. The tinting made it difficult to identify any faces, but Sami could see that Andy was not driving. There was at least one other person on board besides Andy and the driver.

  The others stayed in the SUV as Andy swept past Sami into the house. He jerked his shoulders and head to indicate Sami should follow. Alexa was roused from her sleep. It was about halfway through the 6-hour break she began just after 5 AM. The team assembled in the living room of the house, in the same positions they had occupied hours before for Sami’s debrief.

  “We’ve done well. I know that we all wish we could have prevented the first attack, but we must prevent the next one. You’ve all worked with us before, you are familiar with how this works. Sometimes, we resolve these issues on our own. But, when we have done all we can…” Andy caught himself and thought about how much he wanted to say, “When I have briefed that our team has done all we can, the decision can be made to bring the operation back home. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Not unlike Trident.”

  Trident was the code name for the operation that concluded with Sami watching a drone strike on his laptop from a Georgetown coffee shop. Sami and Andy - working with a different group of contractors like Yoda, Emily, and Alexa – provided targeting for the Yemeni redoubt that housed Chitre Al-Fazl. A German national, Al-Fazl was responsible for coordinating a series of low-tech but high-profile mass killings in Europe.

  Trident was different. It always had been. On that operation, The CIA presented BND, its German liaison, with exquisite intelligence on Al-Fazl. In its ongoing post-World War II effort to absolve itself of the unforgivable sin of National Socialism, the Germans had one of the worst cases of moralism ever seen in the global intelligence fraternity, and they would not act against one of their own citizens on the U.S. intel.

  The information was passed to the BfV, which would be Germany’s corollary to the FBI, except that its agents did not carry weapons or even have the authority to make arrests. CIA pitched a plan, but German politics foreclosed a local operation when the target traveled back home. High-ranking individuals within the German government worked through backchannels to indicate that no great diplomatic sturm und drang would result if Al-Fazl were eliminated by others, when he was elsewhere.

  The Americans were happy to oblige and even had a model for the operation. In 2015, a drone strike killed Junaid Hussain, a British national and ISIS black-hat hacker who was located thanks to exploitation of a secure messaging app. The plan was a go.

  Even with German go-ahead, the CIA wanted the legwork off the books to protect the liaison relationship. Allies appreciated plausible deniability when it came to their prior knowledge and tacit approval of plans for U.S. intelligence to kill their citizens. Cue Andy Rizzo. INSAPs, or Intelligence Special Access Programs, afforded the cover of darkness.

  Sami knew Andy’s comparison of that mission to this one was false. The goal of Trident had always been to Kill or Capture Al-Fazl. That was how Andy briefed it from day one and Sami had yet to see a mission with a plausible capture scenario. Andy was making it sound like the CIA had only taken Trident back because Andy’s gang didn’t do drone strikes. Andy was dissembling.

  “Why now?” Sami asked. “This should stay black.”

  Sami left unsaid what he and Andy both knew: INSAPs could only be authorized by the Director of National Intelligence, so only the DNI could formalize Operation Home Game under the CIA’s authority. Only the DNI, or his boss, the President. To make that call, the DNI would have to read POTUS into the operation. Not unlike their European counterparts, Presidents didn’t like that sort of knowledge. They preferred to let dirty deeds stay in the dark.

  “Special Access Programs still are accountable to overseers. Those are the people who provide the structure that shades the dark side, and they remain in charge.” Andy said, a little too pedantically. “We maintain control, but they give us resources to stop this guy.”

  “It’s too soon, Andy,” Sami responded.

  Much of his meaning remained unsaid. INSAPs were often pulled back into the fold just before they were concluded. This not only allowed them to be put into the record, but for that record to be sanitized. The outcomes were reported nice and neat, without the complicated case history that would be present if the entirety of the operation was recorded in cables, status reports, interrogation records, and other contemporaneous accounts.

  Andy ignored the comment.

  “We are running Rebel Creek,” he said, confirming that U.S. leaders did not share all compunctions with our allies – such as targeting domestic suspects when they were terrorists. “The FBI will stay on the Muslim issue.”

  “There is no Muslim issue!” This time it was Alexa, speaking before Sami could. Emily cut her eyes toward Sami, but no one noticed.

  “Something’s not right here, guys,” Yoda said, so disenchanted by Andy’s leadership that he spoke to the whole group in a breach of decorum that approached insubordination. “We know Tahir Hussein isn’t a terrorist. That’s what the FBI is saying on TV every chance it gets! Neither was Karim Sulemani. Someone else is pulling the strings here!”

  “Twenty-four hours ago, you were the guy up my ass to take this to Langley!” Andy shouted.

  “That was before we opened the connection between Tinker, Rebel Creek, and Gerald Seymour! Seymour, as in the fucking White House! Which is something we have not even discussed!”

  For Andy, who had not been
present for the debrief of Brad’s information, the mention of Seymour’s name was a shock. He didn’t hide it well. He lost the last of his composure.

  “Excuse me!” Too loud. “We serve at the pleasure of the DNI. We always have, and everyone here knew that. Do not think because what you do is not briefed to the Intelligence Committees, you are above the law of the land.”

  Sami caught himself before he listed off the violations of the law that had been committed just during Home Game, much less Trident, and a dozen other Ops. Andy was making a mistake by getting emotional. Sami would not do the same.

  “No one is taking you off of it,” Andy continued, staring at Sami, whose first thought was: Because you may need someone to hang it on. He pushed the impulse aside. He owed Andy more than that.

  “You haven’t done what you needed to do from the beginning,” Andy continued. “You didn’t with Karim. And you still haven’t with Abu Muhammad.” There he was again.

  Why was Andy so obsessed with my grandfather? Unless he knows about Seymour? Or, worse, knows what I know about Baku in 1996?

  When Sami cleared his head, he saw Emily watching him, trying to gauge his reaction. Her eyes willed him to speak, but he didn’t.

  “We’ll have security on the safe house. These detainees may be moved, but that is no longer your concern. You’ll head back to D.C. later today. I’ll need you to brief personnel that are reading in for the move on Rebel Creek. Pack your things.”

  ***

  Time was warped. Like a bicycle tire bent by a curbstone, the last few days had lost their circadian shape. As they stood on the front porch of the house, Sami checked his watch to confirm that the twilight discernable over Virginia’s hills heralded a new dawn and not the ending of an interminable day that began in Annapolis.

  The country was still in shock, but the proximity Sami had to the events of the last few days afforded him perspective. Practical concerns were returning. The rental car that Alexa drove to the scene in Annapolis was parked behind the cabin and needed to be returned to BWI. Then they needed to rendezvous at the keyman office in Alexandria to wait for their briefing. Andy would summon them when he was ready.

  Yoda sat on the steps. Alexa nodded back to sleep in a rocking chair. On another chair, Emily was thumbing her phone. Sami was watching the sky to the east, hoping to catch the first ray of sun coming over the mountains. It was the least active they had been and yet when they looked back on Operation Home Game, this was the moment of their biggest break. When Sami’s phone buzzed. It was a 703-area code. Northern Virginia.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, sunshine.” It was Brad, but he wasn’t calling from the cell phone where he and Sami exchanged texts yesterday. He was at home, Sami thought, remembering it was early. He caught himself. Brad lived in the District. 202.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Sami asked. Maybe it was time for that date. Maybe he would finish this whole mess in time for tonight.

  “If you cannot speak freely for two minutes, tell me ‘It’s been a while,” Brad instructed. It was a modified duress code, a signal to confirm that Sami was safe and could discuss sensitive matters.

  “No. It’s good to talk again so soon,” Sami responded. He didn’t say Brad’s name, but he wouldn’t hold anything else back. He trusted the members of his team.

  “Something’s not right, Sami. About that matter we discussed yesterday. Now it’s a hot potato. And the FBI dropped it.”

  “As ever, I’m just a soldier,” Sami said. He walked off the porch and away from the house, out of earshot of the new team of guards. “But,” he continued, “things sure look different from the front.”

  Sami explained the three-letter agencies seemed very interested and his team had just been pulled off Home Game. “Not pulled off. They were clear about that. But we have been staff-augmented into irrelevance.”

  “Someone to hang it on,” Brad responded. He was quick and perceptive.

  Sami wanted to hear more. “Give me the context,” he said.

  “I mentioned that we have been working Aryan Nations for years, and that we lost track of Tinker and lost the plot on Rebel Creek. Well, we had picked it up again. The information I shared with you last night came from an ongoing investigation. It’s been multi-faceted, but about a year ago we caught a break with a CW.” Brad was telling Sami that the FBI had someone inside Rebel Creek, a Cooperating Witness. “That’s how we got wise to the weapons angle. Not to stockpiling. We knew that. That’s typical militia and no violation of the blessed second amendment. We didn’t know that Tinker was seeking training, cooperating with some nasty dudes to get some of his people trained.”

  “How nasty?” Sami asked.

  “Globally nasty.”

  “Trained? To attack in the U.S.? At scale?” Even for the 1990s militias, a movement that spawned the Oklahoma City bombing, this would be a bombshell.

  “Trained in bombmaking. But not for their own attacks. At least, that’s not what we were told. In exchange for the training, he offered support. Logistics. These groups, who had the knowledge he wanted, needed something from him in return. Access to the U.S. Houses. Cash. He becomes the armorer of choice for domestic attacks in the U.S. It makes sense. For Tinker, it was a beautiful marriage of his ideologies: capitalism and racial nationalism.”

  “Elaborate on the nationalism for me.” Sami was following, but still a little muddled. He needed sleep. “How does arming radical Muslims support his objectives?”

  “That’s the same question that came up in the Bureau. It’s what I asked the guy who showed me the intel from the CW. ‘What’s the end game?’ And we short-changed Tinker. We figured he hates Muslims, but he agrees with the idea that they should have their caliphate. White Christians should have theirs, too. In America. But we missed the forest for the trees. He’s a devious motherfucker, Tinker. That wouldn’t be enough for him, just the idea. He’s not a dreamy-eyed revolutionary. He’s a revanchist racist.”

  Brad stopped himself, but Sami could feel the idea that had formed in his friend’s mind. Sami knew Brad was right. He had pieced together the facts that Sami and the team had watched unfold and that Hasan confirmed. He might not have known that Karim and Tahir were set-ups, but he had deduced that Tinker was supporting the attacks because they would destabilize America’s delicate racial politics.

  “The guy who showed you the intel, who—" Sami began.

  “Don’t even take us there!” Brad interrupted. His source was off limits. “But I saw the interrogation notes. It was a redacted copy with the CW’s identity minimized, but I saw it. That’s what I’m calling about. It’s gone.”

  “Gone, how? What do you mean gone?”

  “I mean the report I was not supposed to know existed, much less have seen, is no longer present in the files of the FBI. I should be walled off from it, but I should be able to see it exists. Someone panicked. They panicked, and they dumped the file, and by doing that they left a trail.”

  “You are saying someone within the FBI is— “

  “Is trying to cover up the only solid indications we had of the cooperation between Rebel Creek, a domestic white nationalist group, and this domestic Muslim cell that attacked in Maryland and Virginia this week.”

  Sami hesitated and then said, “There is no domestic Muslim cell.” He felt he owed that much to Brad. “That’s what I plan to tell the FBI when I brief them today.”

  There was a brief silence as Brad processed Sami’s information. Sami loved him for not asking the questions that were swirling in his head about how Sami discovered it.

  “So, your Op is Rebel Creek then?” Brad asked.

  “Yes. Although as of this morning, the Rebel Creek Op has gone back to Langley.”

  “S.A.D.?” Special Activities Division of the CIA, the paramilitary arm directed by Langley.

  “I assume so,” Sami said. His confidence level was 90 percent.

  “They do it with black helicopters and the Rebel C
reek raid never makes the news,” Brad said. “But the Muslim round-ups going on now? That’s front page.”

  “They might get the explosives, Brad. They probably will. We needed their resources for that, to stop another attack. But someone’s heart is not in the right place.”

  “Governments don’t have hearts, Sami. Only heads. Remember that.”

  Brad was right. The CIA, the FBI, the White House; they were organs of government. The new White House spoke about combating terrorism and had a strong-armed foreign policy, but they were untested against a U.S. attack.

  “Wherever their head is at,” Brad continued, “I’ll tell you this: FBI agents are crawling all over National Harbor today.”

  National Harbor? Sami was puzzled.

  How could he have forgotten? Today was the opening of the annual convention of the Association of Muslims in America. The event was a three-day gathering of Muslims in the U.S., but it always attracted global attendees and attention. If the FBI decided to make hay at that event...Sami did not have to finish the thought. The whole operation was coming full circle to where Andy first read Sami in.

  “National Harbor is going down in history with Selma and Montgomery,” Brad said. “The White America that voted for this President, that wanted to ban Muslims, will get their moment. The FBI using the proverbial fire hoses, this time on uppity Muslims. The government will be wrong this time too, like they were then.”

  Brad was right, but Sami didn’t have time to dwell on the historical ramifications. Or the question of why the FBI was

  ignoring information, much less disappearing it. There would be another attack. One that Rebel Creek would pin on American Muslims. And Sami knew where it would happen.

  TWENTY-FOUR