Purpose of Evasion Page 7

  Home Game wasn’t on the books. There were a number of reasons for that, not least that all the targets of Home Game were so-called “United States Persons,” and legally exempt from any action of a U.S. intelligence agency. This fact was still stuck in Sami’s craw. But today, immediate practical concerns were edging out the persistent, gnawing worry that had dogged Sami since Andy brought him the mission. There was action from the enemy, and he needed to marshal his meager resources in coverage.

  OTS’s gadgets and SOG’s soldiers were a remnant of life on the light side. Here, in the black, there were limits. In recent days, Alexa had confirmed that the bulk of cash transiting into and out of Hasan’s accounts was not being transferred by electronic means. Cash was changing hands directly, but with personnel limited to his small team of collectors and analysts, Sami had no one to surveil Hasan.

  Unsure that he wanted to divulge the depth of his relationship with Karim, Sami was cryptic with the team about where the intel had been gathered, but through Emily’s access to Karim’s phone, they had the emails of each Council of Muhammad member, including Hasan. There was nothing enlightening in the email traffic.

  But the team knew where Hasan banked, so Yoda proposed a simple spear phishing gambit. An email purporting to be from his bank would elicit a password from Hasan. If he used the same password for his email, they would breach the inner sanctum. It succeeded, and it gave the team access to Hasan’s entire email history. Sami hoped that would put an end to it. Like the amateur he had so far proved himself to be, Hasan might discuss an operation or reveal a contact on his personal email account.

  Sami’s hard-won experience had proven to him that it was in mundane matters where the cohorts of an operation slipped up. Some things cannot be faked, lied about or covered up. He implored the team not to get discouraged, to keep collecting and analyzing data as planned, and to keep holding twice-daily meetings to discuss any developments. They were in one of those meetings when they got their first break.

  “Not much new to report.” Yoda was concluding his briefing on Hasan’s email communications. “Tonight could be big, but without some technical help, it will be tough to hear much. According to Hasan’s latest email, they have a private room reserved in the restaurant for the Council of Muhammad meeting. 7 o’clock. At…” Yoda consulted his computer screen, “a Hilton out on the West side of Annapolis. Going toward Interstate 97.”

  “They moved it.” It was Emily, quiet as ever, but in the face of quizzical glances from the team, she was certain. She looked at Sami, offered an apologetic shrug, and then continued, “I have an SMS from 45 minutes ago to Karim Sulemani. They changed the meeting location to the Marriott on Compromise. Downtown, by the harbor.”

  Sami frowned, “What is the recency on both data points?”

  “Mine is this morning’s email from Hasan to the group,” Yoda said. “Standard reminder. It was at 0821.”

  It was five minutes into their 2:30 meeting. 1435.

  “And yours is 45 minutes ago, Em?”

  “Yeah. That’s not all. Hasan asked to meet him ahead of time. He said,” Emily quoted from the transcript in front of her. “Need to talk with you before Council meeting. Nothing bad. How about coffee?”

  She continued, “Karim accepted and suggested they meet at the Starbucks out by the Islamic Center. He said he could be there by 17:30. Hasan responded, ‘That’s another thing. We moved the meeting to the Marriott downtown, by the harbor. Long story.’ He suggested another coffee shop for the meeting. On the other side of the Naval Academy from the Marriott.”

  Sami was leaning forward now. “Anything else?”

  Emily looked up from the transcript before reporting the next part of the communication. “He told Karim exactly where to park.”

  ***

  The energy in the room was palpable. It was the first potential break the team had seen. After ferociously tapping at the keys of his laptop, Yoda was the first to speak.

  “There are no emails to the rest of the group, or to any member of the group, after this morning’s email.”

  “No one else was told that the meeting was moved?” Sami’s intonation barely registered as a question.

  “We don’t know that.” It was Alexa, as excited as the rest but always glad to designate herself the Devil’s Advocate. “He might have texted them all and we don’t have their phones like we, apparently, have Karim’s.”

  Alexa’s disapproving look went to Emily, who ignored it. Sami noted it though. He needed to come clean but opening the book on his connections to this investigation – all his connections – was still too risky.

  Yoda filled the silence. “He has a group email thread, about the meeting, and he sends individual texts instead?” Yoda was incredulous. “Why would he do that?”

  “The problem is that we don’t know what he would do,” Emily added. She, along with Sami, had been struggling the most with the team’s limitations and blind spots.

  Sami waited another moment, to clear the air in case anyone else had a strong opinion. But he already knew his answer.

  “It doesn’t matter. We know where Hasan will be before the meeting, wherever it ends up being. He’ll be having coffee with Karim. We have to be there, too. If his instructions to Karim indicate deception, we’re there.”

  “We have nothing to lose,” Alexa said looking at Yoda. Sami was the boss, but they were all freelancers. Yoda’s would be the decisive third vote.

  “Be there? Us and what army?” Sami walked to the window as Yoda continued. “Look, I’m not as bothered by the leap of faith. That’s what intel operations are, take a data point, tease it out, analyze it; but then we’re supposed to brief someone and make a recommendation. Someone with guns. Someone with a mission. There are four of us! To do this right we need static surveillance on-site. That needs to arrive well before Karim and Hasan. For surveillance to get us any sound, we would need at least two or three people on a team. Plus, a counter-surveillance team of two or three, minimum. Then the technical side. Two vehicles, not counting the vehicles that deliver the people in play. One for command. One for collection. That’s four drivers. And an extraction plan, staffed by a vehicle with driver and two principals who would be armed.”

  Sami stared out at Duke Street. “That’s not possible.”

  “Neither is the mission!”

  “We have Karim’s phone,” Emily said, all pretense to the contrary now abandoned. “We can listen without being there. That’s our best bet.” Her tone suggested a compromise.

  “You’re both right, but it’s not enough.” Sami walked back to the table and sat next to Alexa. “This is our first opening. It might only be a sliver of daylight, but we have to take the chance.”

  “This isn’t Berlin 1950, right?” Alexa said. “We should be fine without all the bells and whistles.”

  “I’m a Marine, Lex. OK?” Yoda was standing. “This isn’t about balls. It’s about what’s practical. We can’t pull this off.”

  “As ever, it comes back to a guy thinking the decision has something to do with his balls.”

  Sami wasn’t sure Alexa was joking, but she relieved some of the tension. Yoda was right, and Sami knew it. But he had not heard anything he had not expected, and he had already weighed the risks.

  “We have to pull it off, guys.” He told them how.

  TWELVE

  ANNAPOLIS

  Karim found the open parking spot where Hasan described. He was early and with parking so easy, he was relieved to know that he would make the meeting with plenty of time to spare. His relief was such that he never considered why Hasan had been so specific about where he should park. He also never noticed the car that had been trailing him since the interstate and right into the hilltop neighborhood looking down on the Naval Academy campus.

  They had Karim’s phone and Emily believed that they would hear the conversation without anyone from the team being in the coffee shop. Her personal vehicle was sitting in the hourly lot
at BWI and she was in a rental car a block past the coffee shop with no line of sight. It was not ideal. They hoped no one would notice her sitting in the car, and if someone did, they hoped that person would not think twice about a woman sitting in her car with headphones on and a computer on her lap.

  Yoda had placed a GPS beacon on Hasan’s car over the weekend. They could track him, but without all the additional support that Yoda correctly outlined back in Alexandria, there was nothing they could do if Hasan drove by Emily in her static post. By then, it would be too late. Sami told her to pretend to be working and hope that Hasan would not pass her way when he arrived. The rental car was their only concession to OPSEC and it was a meager one. It was a risk that Sami never would have tolerated if this were a full-blown operation.

  Worse, Alexa was in her own personal vehicle. After Sami outlined the mission plan, she had immediately gone to shadow Karim. There was no time for her to swap out her vehicle. She followed him from work, ready to alert the team if he deviated from the plan, they had picked up in the SMS traffic. Karim drove straight to the coffee shop, no surveillance detection en route, nothing to indicate purpose of evasion.

  Alexa remained in her position now, a half block away from where Karim parked, with a view of his car. They assumed that Hasan might park here, too. Otherwise, why had he been so specific with Karim? It would be a rookie mistake to have both vehicles in one place, reducing any opposing force’s surveillance requirements, but Sami had no sign that Hasan and Karim were professionals.

  There was no indication that Karim and Hasan would be covered by a counter-surveillance team of their own, but if they were capable of an armed attack in the U.S., then Sami needed to consider the possibility. Sami should be the spotter because that role held the greatest risk, but he would be exposed and given his relationship with Karim, Sami could not hide in plain sight. The job fell to Yoda.

  That left Sami where a team leader belonged, controlling the operation. All communications came through him. He didn’t want the team looking at their phones, checking communications traffic. If they had something to report, they passed it through him. If someone on the team needed to know something, he sent the message. After everyone notified him they were in position, there was a tense period of waiting.

  The team was using an encrypted chat app for their communication, and the first message came from Emily. When Sami read it, he could not believe the demure tech had written it.

  FUUUUUUUCK!!! ANTHONY HERE. CRUZNG ST WHR I PRK. LOOKING FOR SPOT???

  Anthony was Hasan’s cryptonym. He was looking for a parking spot on a residential street around the corner from the meeting place. As bad luck would have it, the same street where Emily was sitting in their makeshift listening post.

  Sami responded. OK. HANG TIGHT. LET ME KNOW WHEN A ON FOOT.

  ***

  Hasan found a spot on his second pass around the block, and parallel parked his car. He didn’t drive a truck. He had no need for one. In fact, in about four hours, this car would no longer be his. Nothing in the world would be the same as when he awoke that morning. The life he knew would be over. Inshallah.

  He stepped onto the sidewalk and could not help a nervous glance around. It did not betray a lack of commitment, but a lack of training. As he rounded the corner, he put his phone to his ear, pretending to be on a phone call. For verisimilitude, he decided that he would pretend to be talking to the restaurant where that night’s meeting would be held. As he walked to the front of the coffee shop, he muttered: “that’s right…the final number will be seven.” He looked through the windows, straining to see past his own face reflected in the afternoon sun. He spotted Karim, offered a wave, and gestured to the phone with the universal shrug for Sorry, I’ll be done in a moment.

  Hasan turned away from the window, counted to five, and then took the phone down from his ear, pretending to conclude a call. He opened a chat app and sent the message Zechariah had told him to send. He was told things would happen quickly, but he didn’t know how long he needed to keep Karim. He would wait for a message back and then conclude the meeting.

  ***

  Across the street from the coffee shop was a laundromat. In some ways, it was like other laundromats: dryers along the walls and washers standing in the center, a large plate glass front that afforded fishbowl views, and a window sill littered with dozens of copies of a local independent newspaper.

  In at least one way, it was remarkable: behind the pages of one of the newspapers, a Marine Corps reservist and freelance spy was working. Yoda’s chair afforded a direct but oblique view of the coffee shop. He peeked out and watched Hasan thumb the text. He cursed under his breath because he did not know what the SMS said. It was annoyance at their meager resources but also a commentary on Yoda’s worldview: if something went typed, texted or talked, his skills entitled him to access.

  Instead, he was limited to dashing off his own text.

  ANTHONY IN HOLE

  Sami responded to Yoda’s message with a note to the whole team.

  A IN HOLE. HOLD POS.

  Less than a minute after Sami’s message came through, Alexa saw a black pickup stop near Karim’s truck. It had to have been close, but Alexa did not see where it came from. The driver put the truck in reverse and backed into a position where its bed was adjacent to Karim’s, as if to transfer something from one vehicle to the other. The driver of the black truck got out, pushed a button on a key fob and unlocked Karim’s truck. He opened both tailgates and climbed up. It all happened so quickly that Alexa barely registered the need to send a message.

  SOMEONE HERE!!

  Alexa didn’t even have a camera. To hold up her cell phone camera would have been out of the question, even if she didn’t need to use the phone to message Sami. So she stared. The black truck man was white, between 35 and 45 years old. Despite her panic, it did not fail to occur to Alexa that as ever her adversary was a middle-aged white guy. He reached into his own truck bed and grabbed something. It was heavy. He didn’t lift it up. It took considerable effort for him to slide it out of his own truck and across the divide into Karim’s. Her phone buzzed.

  WHO? And then immediately after, WHAT’S GOING ON? It was Sami.

  The man struggled for a moment, trying to find a place to get sure footing on one of the two tailgates as he pushed and pulled the heavy object between the vehicles. He straddled the vehicles, a foot on each. That didn’t work so he hopped down and pushed from the ground.

  WHITE MALE.

  Why am I writing this like a bad police drama? She shook her head and continued.

  WHITE GUY. NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE. LOADING SOMETHING INTO

  Fuck! What is Karim’s cryptonym? Brutus!

  INTO BED OF BRUTUS TRUCK.

  HOW DID HE GET INTO THE TRUCK? Sami asked.

  HAD KEY!

  WHAT DID HE LOAD?

  IDK. CAN’T SEE. I’LL GET CLOSER.

  Sami responded immediately. NO. DO NOT MOVE. TRY TO GET THE TAGS BUT HOLD POSITION.

  Get the tags! That was something. Alexa looked up. Black Truck Guy had pushed the object as far into the bed of Karim’s truck as he could. He slammed his own bed shut and moved to the driver’s door. He never saw Alexa watching. He never raised his eyes at all. He pulled his own truck forward a few feet and jumped out again. The few feet of space between his own truck and Karim’s was just enough for him to step between the trucks and push the object with leverage enough to load it all the way in Karim’s bed.

  Alexa had a split-second view and the black truck was gone.

  ***

  Two minutes after Alexa messaged that the guy was gone, Sami got into her passenger seat. She was uncharacteristically ruffled.

  “I’m so sorry, Sami.”

  “For what? No way. You did the best you could.” The pep talk was brief. Sami was commanding the operation and two of his team were still engaged. “Did you get the tags?”

  With tears in her eyes, Alexa shook her head. Sami reached out and
touched her arm.

  “It’s alright. This was something, Lex. This is the first break we’ve had. Don’t beat yourself up for getting it. Did you see what it was?”

  “I saw it, but…” Alexa’s essential strength was already building back. She was cycling from disappointed, to frustrated, to pissed. “I don’t know what it was. It was black. Big. Like, I don’t know, like the size of a trunk.”

  “A trunk? Like a footlocker?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It was a box? Rectangular? With a lid, or…”

  “No. It didn’t look like it had a lid. It looked like it was wrapped. Maybe wrapped in a tarp. I think I saw bungee cords around a black tarp.”

  There was one way to find out, but as soon as Sami considered the idea, he dismissed it. It wasn’t part of the plan. Sami may not have been a covert action expert, but he knew that there were too many variables outside of their control for him to add complications. Stick to the plan. Adjust the plan based on new facts, but don’t wing it. Not in the field. There was too much at risk.

  THAT WAS QUICK!

  The message came from Yoda, still in the laundromat.

  THEY DONE? Sami replied and then thumbed out a message to Emily. He waited before hitting send.

  DONE. BOTH ON FOOT. Yoda replied.

  Sami sent the message warning Emily that Hassan was coming.

  SIT TIGHT.

  The rendezvous point was Alexandria. Unless Sami texted the distress code. Then everyone was to make a hasty retreat to their vehicle and meet at a gas station three exits away on I-50. Sami waited. He hoped he would see Emily’s message that Hasan was gone before he saw Karim. He didn’t. Maybe Hasan was sitting in his car checking his phone. Maybe Karim was just a fast walker. Whatever the case, Sami saw Karim coming and he sent the distress code. He hoped that Emily would be patient, stay in place, and not put herself or the operation at risk. He turned to Alexa.