Purpose of Evasion Read online

  Sami felt a rush of relief, but there was more. Hasan relished the moment, sensing it would be his last contact with anyone for a while, and his last chance to spring a surprise.

  “Abu Muhammad planned our jihad.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  LOUDON COUNTY | WASHINGTON COUNTY

  The cul-de-sac was picturesque. A grassy center island was lined with white oak trees. The front yards boasted mature persimmons, hollies, and redcedars. Scaley-barked shortleaf pines poked their sparse crowns up along the back of the homes. Visitors often remarked on the vague familiarity of the place. In the 1990s it had been a popular backdrop for filmmakers. When a Senator’s or Supreme Court Justice’s home was needed, they came to Sami’s Northern Virginia neighborhood. Sami would watch out the window and think: You should film what’s going on in here.

  Sami was standing on the small back deck, peering through the glass terrace door into the kitchen. His grandfather was somewhere inside – in his upstairs office, Sami guessed – but the grandson was not inclined to knock. Walking into that office and confronting his grandfather again, in the same place where they had the conversation that drove Sami away for good, would be hard enough. He preferred to retain the element of surprise and the illusion of control.

  The spy removed a simple pry tool from his back pocket and forced open the door. Stepping a few feet inside to quell the sound of cicadas from the surrounding trees, he heard nothing, no acknowledgment of his presence. He closed the door and replaced the pry tool in his back pocket. His arm brushed against the 9mm Sig Sauer secured inside his waistband. The magazine held fourteen hollow point cartridges. Sami never carried a loaded gun, but before holstering the weapon, he had racked a round into the chamber.

  He was coming home.

  ***

  It was nearly August. Even in Pennsylvania, it was too hot to be sitting outside on a 36-can cooler, trying to dent that capacity as much as possible and taking shots at the dove not yet in season. But there was Larry Day, in the mosquito-filled depression that he called The Bottom, a remnant of one of his Grandad’s old coal seams.

  The coal mine was long gone. And this wasn’t his property anymore. When the Lydon kid bought it a few years ago, Larry’s debt on the place was paid off. No more collection calls, foreclosure letters, visits from the Sheriff’s Department. Lydon gave him $10,000 cash, off the books and he let Larry stay in the house rent-free.

  “Just keep an eye out for me, Mr. Day,” the kid said. “I like privacy as much as you.”

  Lydon also told him he might see people on the property now and then, and he shouldn’t be alarmed.

  “Men from the gas company, working on the wells,” Lydon told him. “Maybe even a buddy or two of mine. Training.”

  Larry Day knew all about the Tom Tinker moniker, and all about Lydon’s politics. Larry Day was an American first. He didn’t think much of someone who talked about destroying the government and all that. But he was also a Washington County man, which meant that it was none of his business.

  That was what he liked about the place he lived. Larry Day could shoot dove whenever he wanted, and the Lydon kid could dream about religious wars. Larry knew there were always goofy ass kids over on Lydon’s side of The Bottom, shooting at old refrigerators. Sometimes he heard the concussive boom of an explosion ripping through the junk cars Lydon stockpiled.

  He didn’t think much of it when a half dozen guys came strolling up the dry bed of The Bottom, armed to the teeth. In spring, or after a big rain, the bed would hold water for a few days, breeding the mosquitoes and attracting the doves. It was dry enough now that these guys barely had any mud on their boots.

  Larry Day wasn’t worldly. Since he got back from Vietnam, he had only left Pennsylvania once, for a three-day weekend in Vegas that he funded with the cash Lydon gave him. But he was observant, especially about things country people know. These guys’ boots weren’t just dry, they were new. Expensive. They were leaner than the doughboys that ran around shooting Lydon’s guns and blowing up his junkers.

  Lydon’s pals favored cheap AR-15s modified for fully automatic. The guys passing through The Bottom had a variety of firepower best suited to an infantry platoon. Tricked out ARs, a large caliber automatic that was something like an M249 SAW, only it wasn’t American. Larry had seen them on the computer, and he guessed maybe it was an H&K. Each of the boys had a 1911 strapped to their thigh and a subcompact Glock secured in a chest holster. Then there were the grenade launchers, flash-bang canisters, and Kevlar.

  They were trying not to look like soldiers, but they were. If it wasn’t obvious enough, as soon as they saw Larry and realized he had seen them, one of them called it in. On a throat mic.

  “Sorry, buddy. Hope we don’t scare ‘em off,” one of them said. “Fella who owns the place said we could pass through.”

  Larry waved nonchalantly. Thinking that he hadn’t seemed natural enough, he added, “Haven’t got a damn one all day anyway.”

  The half dozen members of CIA Special Operations Group had already moved past, and not registering a threat from Larry Day, had already forgotten about him. Larry wasn’t a threat. Not to them. Not to his country. He didn’t go in much for that overthrowing the government junk. But Washington County people stuck together, and he had promised the Lydon kid he would keep a lookout.

  Larry Day plucked the phone from his breast pocket and typed out a text message.

  ***

  Tonight, Sami would correct every mistake he made the last time he confronted his grandfather. He began by widening his stride to the outer edges where the stairs wouldn’t creak and climbed to the second floor. He found the door to the outer office open.

  This was unusual to Sami, but he did not know whether his grandfather kept the outer door closed – as he always had during Sami’s childhood - now that no one else lived here. Sami did not expect to find his grandfather on the other side of that door anyway, in the small sitting room where he took meetings. Whether visitors or family, all were relegated to this room.

  Only Abu Muhammad passed into the next room, the imam’s sanctum sanctorum. The room was only accessible through the outer sitting room. There were no outside doors. It was small and spartan, with a simple desk and chair, a floor lamp, and a window facing East, at the base of which lay a prayer rug.

  That was where Sami surprised Abu Muhammad twenty years ago with what he had learned about the embassy bombing that killed his parents. As he had done that day, Sami would catch his grandfather off guard and uncomfortable, seize control, and not relinquish it. It worked then. His grandfather admitted to arranging the meeting that led to one of the worst terror attacks on U.S. interests prior to 9/11.

  And killed Sami’s parents.

  Sami heaved a deep breath and shouldered through the door into the outer sitting room. There, waiting as though he expected company, sat his grandfather.

  “Come in, Samir,” he said behind a sickly smile. “I thought we could chat here this time. It is much more comfortable.”

  ***

  Larry Day’s text message was brief and cryptic. When he heard the sounds of a firefight over the hill, he wondered if he had done enough, but he didn’t wonder long. He had done his duty to his neighbor. To Washington County. Let the chips fall where they may. The chips had not fallen well for Larry in Vegas. He turned Lydon’s ten grand buyout into $850 before boarding the plane home.

  That was Larry Day. A simple guy. The kind of guy who thought he might go on a lucky streak and beat the house. The kind of guy who would not have guessed that his message was not the first warning Tom Tinker received.

  Another text arrived only moments before Larry’s, from another man who had known Tinker when he was just Lydon. Gerald Seymour. When Tinker received Larry’s text, he was already in an old pickup, with cargo, headed out the back side of his property on another dry creek bed.

  Gerald Seymour was a less simple man than Larry. He was gifted at understanding and managing the compl
ex. But now, Tom Tinker had dragged him into something so complex that he might not get them both out the other end. If they got out the other end, the country would never be the same. It would be better because it would be more like it used to be.

  Simple men like Larry Day didn’t care. They would carry on with the simple illusion of their false patriotism.

  If Seymour failed, he would become subject to a media firestorm, then he would become a prisoner, and finally, he would become a cautionary tale. But it was so predictable.

  Like any chronic disease, the whole sequence of events that would unfold were symptoms of the larger sickness. A malignancy, which needed to be excised. Tom Tinker would do his part today. Just as he hit the gravel of Rural Road 371, he heard the first distant shots.

  Rebel Creek would fall in dusky twilight and tomorrow a new day would dawn in America.

  ***

  “Sit,” Abu Muhammad urged. His manner was discomfiting for its mock-welcoming effect.

  Sami planned the infiltration, parked blocks away and approached on foot, broke in through a darkened backdoor, and crept upstairs. Yet it was his grandfather who sprang a surprise.

  “You were always a sneak,” The grandfather said in response to his grandson’s expression. “Perhaps not always but beginning in your teenage years and ever since. It demonstrates that sexual prurience is not a sickness itself, but symptomatic of a larger behavioral disorder. Somehow you thought you fooled everyone. You still believe that. Man is what he hides, Samir.”

  Sami could not place the quote, but it was not from the Qur’an. Rather than ponder the source, he thought of an appropriate retort. But Sami didn’t utter it. Not right away. Instead, he entered and sat in a chair across from his grandfather in the small library. Even when he sat, he paused in silence. The pace of the conversation was good. His grandfather was an impatient man. Sami felt the Sig pushing hard against the small of his back, but silence would be his weapon.

  His grandfather was wearing the same clothes he wore on CSPAN, the brown slacks wrinkled. The jacket hung on a corner rack. Abu Muhammad’s skin was the color of blanched coffee, his aged complexion more ashen than in Sami’s youth. His hands also showed concessions to time and arthritis, gnarled and clawlike in his lap. He had a prominent forehead, giving his eyes a deep set that could appear meditative or sinister. The shirt sleeves were short and with the collar hanging open, Abu Muhammad looked every bit the cleric from Sindh.

  To calm his nerves, Sami ran through a mental Abu Muhammad dossier. He was trying to sequester his resentment and his anger, make this like any other job. Andy had been right all along, doing his job meant Sami had to talk to his grandfather.

  Annoyed, Abu Muhammad broke the silence.

  “Surely you have not come here, after many years, to say nothing.”

  “It’s nothing to do with my words that brought me back,” Sami replied awkwardly. “It was your words.”

  That was all. He said no more. Sami’s existence was an affront. His mere presence was an instigation. The grandfather could not brook even these minor irritations from his grandson.

  “Speak, boy! Say what you have come to say or slink off as you did before – I thought permanently.” Despite the exhortation for Sami to speak, Abu Muhammad showed no sign of stopping himself. “You are a traitor to your family, your people, your God— “

  “You made a mistake.”

  Sami’s interruption infuriated his grandfather. Again, the old man waited for more. Sami kept him waiting. After ten seconds of huffing, puffing and rearranging himself in the chair, the old man’s patience was at its limit.

  “Say what you have come to say! Or do what you have come to do!”

  Why aren’t you telling me to leave? Sami considered the question as he watched his grandfather boil over. Having driven his grandfather to distraction, and to the brink of fury, Sami began.

  “You made a mistake— “

  “You’ve said that— “

  “You’ll listen now.” Sami held up a censorious finger. The little boy inside flinched, but the Spy’s poker face held. “Perhaps the mistake was not making adequate changes to the speech after Hasan Khalifa was captured? If not for that oversight, we might not have made the connection. But no, before that you erred in writing the speech. Someone who knows your style could still detect your fingerprints. The biggest mistake was conceiving this plan at all. Once you did that, the path was inexorable. That was your original sin, and now you’re beyond your depth. You are not a tactician and you cannot overcome that shortfall. You were always going to make mistakes. Mistakes that would lead me to you.”

  “Please, tell me about this plan.”

  “You thought if you found a bombmaker, it would be enough. If they can make and conceal a bomb, how hard can it be to deliver? To detonate? Your plan relied on entrusting that to your partner. Someone who had limited experience, and even then, his experience was dated. It came from a time when we needed phone taps and other physical surveillance to monitor communications. It came from a time when we could not track the sale and movement of bombmaking materials.”

  Abu Muhammad smiled sickly, but his eyes betrayed him. Sami continued.

  “You knew your partner was inexperienced. Not as experienced as those with whom you worked in the past. In the Middle East. The mujahideen of your own faith, too many of whom in your own network have made themselves experts at waging war against the innocent and defenseless. But you couldn’t risk involving them. It would take too long and be too costly. There were too many obstacles. It was far better to have American Muslims hang for this anyway. Good, middle class, Americans who were Muslim. If some mujahid - some kid who had been to Syria or who was in chat rooms going on about the jihad - could be connected, then it would be the same old story. The media would cut-and-paste the same narrative with a new name. No, you needed wholesome names and faces. You needed America to fear every Muslim. And in that yearning, you found a partner. A friend from your past. His organization had some operational shortcomings, but he made up for it in this shared goal. And you trusted him.”

  Sami’s suppositions elicited a chortle. Not a sinister laugh, like in the movies, just a single, sibilant exhalation and a curl at the corners of Abu Muhammad’s lips.

  “That’s what you have? The speech?”

  “I have the speech. Your words matching Hasan Khalifa’s version.” Sami paused before he continued. The next piece of information was a giveaway, but he gave it for a reason. “And I have Hasan Khalifa.”

  The information did not surprise his grandfather. The lack of a reflexive reaction was a tell.

  “I have Tinker’s delivery man. I have a special operations team in the hollows of Western Pennsylvania. They will get the people and the materials that are there. Capture or kill. If that does not neutralize the threat, if we still sense that people are at risk…” Sami paused, to see if his grandfather’s face would tell him whether the bombs were already on site at National Harbor. “Then I come for you.”

  “Do you?” Abu Muhammad said in Sindhi. He preferred the intimacy of Sindhi. With friends, they spoke the more common Karachi-area language of Urdu. The fluidity with which they switched languages had been a hallmark of Sami’s childhood. Sami would not let Abu Muhammad continue to infantilize him.

  “If it is necessary to come tonight, or tomorrow, to neutralize any ongoing threat, I come with the gun. After we have compiled all the evidence implicating you, the FBI will come anyway. With handcuffs. Either way, someone comes for you.”

  His grandfather laughed again. This time, he was genuinely amused.

  “You will do this, Samir?”

  “I am not alone.”

  “Ah, but as I understand it, you are very much alone. You don’t control this mission. You do not even represent your country on this investigation. Not any longer. Isn’t that right?”

  Sami’s mind cut to Andy. The weeks of insistence that Sami talk to his grandfather. The reluctance to follow
Sami’s leads. Outside of Sami’s small team, who else knew that Sami was no longer lead on the bombings?

  “You have no one behind you. You have no authority. You criticize my tactics, Samir, but you haven’t done your own homework. The FBI doesn’t answer to you. I know this. Your threats are grandiose dreams. There is only you. You have no plan and you have no power. You don’t even have the handcuffs about which you speak.”

  The certainty and smugness stung Sami, as much for its cumulative effect after a lifetime as for the recognition that Abu Muhammad might be right. He might get away with it. Politics might protect him. The law might not assess his culpability beyond a reasonable doubt. Would a jury convict and sentence an old man to the punishment he deserved for killing Karim and targeting innocent people?

  All of that was fiction. Politics, law, sentencing. It was for lawyers and lawmen inside the Beltway, not for Sami. He had learned one thing going door to door in Samarra with Army Rangers. The law, the rules of engagement, none of it meant shit when a gun was drawn. When that happened, the person on the other end did what they were told. That was real.

  Before he knew it, Sami had the Sig leveled at his grandfather’s head. For the first time that night – or ever - he saw surprise in his grandfather’s face.

  “I have everything I need to do justice.”

  Abu Muhammad tried to rally. He smiled but Sami could see beads of sweat spreading a stain across his shirt.

  “You will shoot me? You, Samir? You have betrayed your family. Your people. Allah. In these acts, you demonstrate that you are a low form of life. But not a killer. You are also something else, something worse. A faggot.”

  The sting of the word pulsed through Sami’s body and his finger jerked the trigger. He felt sick. In his own home, the place where he had grown up, the person who had given him food and shelter called him that name. Without a punch thrown or a shot fired, Sami lost ground. It was as if the air had been taken from his lungs.