Purpose of Evasion Read online

  The hostess showed him to the private room reserved for their meeting, where they could speak freely. Hasan was there with only two others. Karim was late, but not last. He relaxed.

  “As-salamu alaykum.” Hasan greeted him with a warm handshake. Karim’s remaining anxiety melted away. Hasan was an amazing person.

  “Waʿalaykumu as-salam.” After the Arabic greeting, Karim continued in Urdu. “I’m sorry, brother. Parking!”

  “Ah! I understand it’s difficult.” Hasan’s Urdu was clean if a bit clumsy. And then, changing to English, in which their fluency made both much more comfortable, “Now that you mention it, I should make that part of the agenda tonight. We’ll find somewhere with easier parking for future meetings.”

  With that, it was resolved. Hasan really was an amazing person.

  The restaurant was the recently-opened satellite of a well-established Lebanese chain in Washington. Its presence in Annapolis attested both to the city’s status as a college town with global tastes and to the continued sprawl of Metro Washington across Northern Virginia and Maryland. Since the crack-marred 1980s, the U.S. capital had changed into a global and gentrified city. The Northern Virginia county where Karim grew up had a Muslim-American concentration among the highest in the U.S. Annapolis was sandwiched between two counties - Montgomery County, bordering Washington, and Baltimore County, bordering Baltimore - that had Muslim populations approaching 5%.

  Every member of the Council of Muhammad was American born. Other than those early greetings, they spoke in English throughout the night. The meal was informal and enjoyable. They discussed everything from politics to the Redskins. Hasan liked it that way. He encouraged them to talk, to enjoy the fellowship of their brothers, and – for a little while - only their brothers.

  There was nothing nefarious about that. Nothing like the undertone that captivated the country during the last cycle of national elections and seemed to be taking hold around the world. The tone of us-versus-them nativism that sought to take white, Western countries back and make them great again. No, this was little more than guys’ night, as American as apple pie and as universal as a languid chat in the afternoon cool of an Islamic tea house.

  “Brothers, thank you.” The meal concluding, Hasan spoke in his loud, clear, formal imam’s voice for the first time. “Thank you for coming to another meeting. This group is taking off. It is becoming everything I hoped it might be. I understand that several of you had a difficult time parking tonight.” No remonstration, just an acknowledgment. “I will keep that in mind for future meetings and choose a venue that offers us parking on-site.”

  None of the brothers recognized this as the most significant of Hasan’s statements that night. They could not have. It was so mundane.

  “We meet tonight under the specter of an ongoing war against Islam. A war in which none of us wish to be soldiers, but to which we must never let ourselves become mere observers. Or worse, innocent victims. Just as our meeting began, news broke of another attack on the Ummah. A drone flying over sovereign airspace struck with guided munitions. At least,” Hasan consulted his phone, “at least twenty were killed. The world will be led to believe that each was a terrorist, rather than a victim. That the strike was not on a settlement, but on a training camp. Many Americans will believe that. Of course, a press release was already written. America no longer wishes its dirty secrets - its dirty war - to be revealed by news agencies, years after the deeds are done.”

  Hasan positioned himself near the door, so he was speaking back into the room, his voice directed away from the diners outside of their private room.

  “No, today, the government positions the narrative of these attacks. It sets the tone. It spoon-feeds the media the only thing that the media wants. A story. But we know that this is not a story. Instead, it is part of a plot. An arc of history. It is an arc that bends toward the injustice of Western imperialism. An arc that has its origins as far back as the Crusades.” Hasan often borrowed oratory from Martin Luther King, Jr., in this case turning King’s famous “arc of history” quote on its ear. His great gift in criticizing the West was that he was a child of the West. He understood it, as did his flock. There is no more effective criticism than that which is directed inward, emanating from one’s own tribe.

  “The indiscriminate slaughter of the Ummah was once carried out under the sword, and it continues to be violent. Witness today’s slaughter of women and children. But it has become more insidious. The West corrupts governments. It gives money and weapons. America stations her crusaders among the Sha’b. Among our people. On our blessed soil. The world today is no longer the peaceful and beautiful place the Prophet tells of. An oppressive strain, a stain of hegemony, has created violence, poverty, famine, and disease.”

  “The disease kills slowly. Materialism.” Hasan raised his index finger. “The quest to acquire makes its most important acquisition of the soul, bringing spiritual death decades before the wastrel finally shakes off mortal life. Immorality.” A second finger ticked up. “A flash of skin, on fleeting view, consummates the betrayal of the flesh. And then it must be had, again and again.”

  His audience was rapt. Hasan was more acerbic than usual, but still controlled.

  “It is no wonder then that the American soul is corrupted. No wonder that the arc of history bends toward injustice even here in the American homeland. For the legacy of American imperialism abroad is American racism at home. Witness our fellowship here tonight, in a private room, for fear that if we were seen congregating – a half dozen young, military-aged, males with dark skin - it would arouse fear and suspicion. It may even arouse action. Surveillance. America today listens to every phone call. Reads each email. The FBI visited our own house of worship. Our brothers recruited as informants.”

  Hasan’s eyes flickered around the room. He was looking for something, a subtle hint, any gesture of acknowledgment. A look that said: Yes, me too, I was recruited. Or worse, eyes that asked: How does he know? He was trying to smoke out an informant.

  But he saw nothing. He had not expected to. He selected these men very carefully. They were all Americans, all from families that raised them in the suburbs and sent them to college. They were career men who owned homes and participated in community activities outside The Learning Center. They were no one’s radicals.

  And if they had been selected with great care, they were being groomed with even greater caution. For if Hasan’s plan was to work, he could arouse no suspicions. Not friends or neighbors. Not the FBI’s. There could be no interviews after the fact, where one of these men’s neighbors reported that they had always wondered. There could be no revelation in the newspapers that these men were suspected by law enforcement, and interviewed by law enforcement, and even surveilled by law enforcement; but, were never arrested because the American system did not permit arrests for things that people might do, no matter how suspiciously those people behaved. If Hasan used men who could fit that narrative, then that narrative – the same old story of homegrown Muslim terror – was what the media would key on. That was not his plan.

  When Hasan told those enabling this plan that he would do something never done before, there were smirks. He was telling hard men, men who had seen it all. There was nothing new under the sun. But then he detailed the plan and watched their eyes widen. His sales pitch had wooed the partners he needed. Men of action, mysterious and dangerous. Men of authority, whose influence could shape opinion. He was right, it had never been done. It had never been attempted. But if it worked?

  “Brothers, we not only see this hypocrisy, we not only understand it, but we live amidst it. We are soldiers in this war, as much as any of the brothers killed in one of the strikes that are sanitized and justified for TV. We are on the front line.” If the plan had not been so novel, now is when Hasan would have called these men to action. But, he did not. He needed their good names, not their good deeds.

  “That is why we must build the bridge. We must create the way forwa
rd to a new reality that smashes convention. A reality which succeeds in bending the arc. Bending back toward the peace and the justice that the Prophet speaks of. We must embrace our neighbors as our own. They must be as our brothers. The American. The Christian. Yes, brothers, the Jew. When they meet you, they must disbelieve the stories they are told. When they hear that America has killed more radicals, they must distrust it. They must learn that there is no distinction between those brothers killed today, under sovereign skies, and their own neighbor. They must know that the Ummah is one. Then they will know the truth.”

  And then, Hasan thought, they must fear us all.

  THREE

  NATIONAL HARBOR, OXON HILL, MARYLAND

  National Harbor’s crowd was at the summer convention season peak. Once a plantation, the land where National Harbor rose was meant to become the end of the Potomac Trail, complete with historical displays and wide bike lanes. Instead, over a period that straddled the financial crisis, a mixed-use development took shape. There was a grand resort hotel, an outdoor shopping mall, high-rise apartments, and the 180-foot Capital Wheel. As Sami walked onto the pier from the grid of streets where the shops were, he scanned the crowd. Near the end of the pier, a long line of families were queued to ride the enormous Ferris Wheel that loomed over the Potomac and boasted views of the National Mall from its apex.

  “Over here!” Andy Rizzo’s accent cut through the summer air like the scent of the stockyards through a South Side Chicago breeze a hundred years ago. Sami could have heard him a mile away, but he still had trouble picking him out of the crowd. Finally, Sami spotted Andy waving from an iron bench where he had spread his sandwich and chips over greasy wax paper.

  Rising halfway, Andy popped a chip into his mouth before offering Sami a fist bump. It was his habit to adopt the latest fads. A straight, white, Catholic man working in government, Andy was forever making concessions to progress.

  Andy gestured first to his sandwich. “Italian beef!” And then to the bag that Sami was holding. “What’d ya get?”

  The instructions were specific: park in front of CVS, no matter how many times you had to go around the block to get an open spot; do a lap of the shops for SDR; buy a sandwich from Potbelly’s; meet me on the pier.

  “Hummus and roasted red peppers.”

  Sami sat and spread his sandwich on his own lap. Andy did not stand on ceremony. Another chip struggled to find a free tooth amidst a mouthful of juicy beef. Sami watched with something like disgust. Andy was short and squat with pasty skin. His hair was so dark that if it were not for the light grey at the temples, Sami would have been convinced it was Just for Men bottle black. His eyes were deep set, and even as his jaw worked to chew, the squareness was evident. He resembled no one so much as Fred Flintstone.

  And from the accent to the Italian beef, he was pure Chicago. Raised in a South Side home that was half-Irish, half-Italian and all-Catholic, he joked that the most difficult decision in his life had been whether to attend DePaul or Loyola. The life decisions that remained after the Agency got him were easier. He made his name in Lebanon in the 1980s, burnished his reputation in Iraq in the 1990s, and earned his way off the books when the government’s black budgets skyrocketed after 9/11. Since then, Andy had been running a small and disconnected team of black assets, beholden to no specific agency or chain of command, but at the beck and call of bureaucrats in need. Freelancers.

  Call Andy’s number, outline the objective, and a few days later he presented a mission outline and budget. They were expensive and they were selective. “Fuck or walk?” Part of Andy’s team since his Army discharge came through after the third rotation of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Sami heard Andy deliver that deal-closing line often. Most of the time whoever was on the receiving end didn’t walk.

  Andy kept Sami busy. There were highs and lows, busy times and lulls, moments where the political moment darkened the relative opaqueness of their authorization for action; but Sami could not complain about working for Andy.

  Not without a little difficulty, the slab of half-masticated beef made its way through Andy’s esophagus, and he reacted to Sami’s order.

  “Hummus, huh?” And then, skeptically, “Well, dig in, Dost.”

  Dost. Sindhi, for “friend.” It was always that way in public. When they were sure they were not being recorded and Andy said Sami’s name, he pronounced it as the American “Sammy,” with considerable Chicago-inflected shortening of the first vowel. Sami found either form condescending, even though he knew it was not meant that way. Andy wasn’t like the soldiers Sami served with in Iraq. They were mostly country boys and they called every Iraqi a “Hajji,” unless he was a big-time Iraqi, then he was “Ali Baba.”

  Andy surrounded himself with people like Sami and he not only saw them as integral to the mission, but he saw them as people. That Andy’s use of dialectic nicknames was also integral to his career ambitions made the whole thing a little less comfortable. That Andy Rizzo was Straight, White and Catholic did not make him any less smart. Sami knew that. But it had made his career that much easier all along the way. Sami was not at all sure that Andy knew that. Andy had spoken freely in the past about “hitching his star” to young, first-generation immigrants with the language skills and cultural context he didn’t have, but which he marshaled like a quartermaster.

  “You watch the game?” Andy exhaled the words before another voracious bite.

  “You know I did. I’m sure you checked the tickets.”

  The webcast of the UAV strike was accessible only under specific circumstances. Sami connected a small black box to his computer’s USB port. Once connected to the internet, the box routed him through a web of VPN-encrypted proxies to a verification screen. A day before, he received a burner phone, and the access code was sent by SMS. The black box was reusable. The phone’s SIM was destroyed, thrown in the trash can outside the coffee shop on M Street Northwest and buried under thirty feet of trash in a Virginia landfill by now. The point was, Andy knew who had watched.

  “Another good win. Built a lot of credibility with the new DNI.”

  The Director of National Intelligence was a Cabinet position created in the fallout of 9/11. Because the DNI’s office had sole oversight of sensitive operations like those run by Andy’s team, he was an important constituency.

  “This administration has more of an appetite for collateral damage than the last guys. If we can just demonstrate that our targeting intel is correct, they don’t care as much about the blowback.”

  Sami swallowed his first bite. “Just keep finding bold faces then?”

  “Not you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “We have a new contract.” Andy conceded to the beef and cheese by raising a napkin to his chin before continuing. It was time to talk business. “Something special that is going to tie you down a while.”

  “From who?”

  “Whom. ‘From whom,’ Dost. I know that you know that. I must have corrected you on that a dozen times.”

  “You have. And every time it hasn’t worked to distract me from the fact that you didn’t answer the question.”

  “I never do.”

  “Same again, I suppose?”

  “You suppose correctly.”

  “Worth trying.”

  In the years that Sami had been under Andy’s chain of command, the nature of his work had become more opaque. There were operations like the UAV strike where the whole team was involved, and everyone was read in. But there were other operations where Sami would only complete his small task. Like part of an assembly line, his job was to make sure that, as the widget passed by his station, it got what it needed before the next stop on the line. There were operations where his task was completed in a black box. He could not see the widget he was working on, and his own work was walled off from anyone else, even those read in. Operational Security.

  OPSEC was not unfamiliar territory. Sami’s career started on the military side of intel, and when they we
re chasing a commander’s Priority Intelligence Requirements, the provenance was not always forthcoming. There had been that hairy time, after the New York Times revealed several intelligence programs authorized by aggressive post-9/11 interpretations of Title 10 of the United States Code. By then, Sami was on loan to a civilian intelligence agency, and the rules – and his boss – changed each day. The uncertainty was enough for him to take the discharge and join Andy’s group. Being off the books had offered its benefits. But Sami was not so sure anymore.

  “Anyway, this will keep you tied up a while.” Andy continued, “I want you to lead a detachment. Totally compartmented.”

  “What’s the objective?”

  “The details are still sketchy, but it looks legit. Domestic attack. Homegrown.” Andy responded to Sami’s raised eyebrows. “The bad guys, they’re enamored of it now. Paris. Brussels. Manchester. The fucking European services cannot get out of their own way.”

  “Liberal democracies are pesky like that.”

  Andy ignored the sarcasm. “It’s the homegrowns that are tricky. They have unparalleled freedom of movement, cultural awareness, contacts, access to resources. We saw flashes of emphasis on jihadi websites after Boston and San Bernardino, but Paris opened their eyes as much as ours. The comms we have on this, Dost? The U.S. has never seen anything like it before.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s not just whack-a-mole with an AR-15. Or some reprobate driving a rent-a-truck into the fuckin’ farmers’ market. Kill as many as you can before the cops, and glorious martyrdom, arrive. Local law won’t be able to stop the bleeding on this one. It’s bigger.”