Brothers In Arms (10 page)

While she was not a shooter, she recognized, from her training in the camps, the demands of a shooting team: which way did the doors open, what sort of locks did they have, what was the distance from the little hill to the house, what was the response time of the campus police to the center, how many men and did they appear to have long guns—these were the questions that trained assault personnel needed answered.

She knew there’d be a shooting soon.

Youssef bin Hassan sat alone in the Golden Herb coffeehouse, surrounded by dozens of young people whose chatter washed over him like water over a stone. He slowly nursed one of the many coffees he drank throughout the day, and wondered why no one spoke to him. So many young people, from so many countries, all of them looking for friends in this friendliest of cities, let their gaze pass over him quickly. Not that there hadn’t been a few attempts, but Youssef had rebuffed them without really knowing why. He told himself it was for operational reasons, but his loneliness nagged at him and was plain to see in his face, which made him all the more confusing to the few who dared to cross the wall of silence he surrounded himself with.

Youssef was new to the Al-Bashir network. He was only recently out of the Sudanese training camps. He smiled to himself and touched his coffee cup with one finger as he remembered the camaraderie of the camps and the fun he’d had in training with other operators. The training course had been rigorous, with challenges presented to them in hand-to-hand combat, shooting, tactics and planning, and many long speeches from the imams on the nature of the armed struggle against Israel and the United States. The shared experiences had fostered a tight bond with his training group, a bond
that Youssef, a rare single child in an Arab family, had thrived on.

All the lectures on preparation for operating in hostile territory hadn’t prepared him for the loneliness of the singleton operator. He had permission to shave his beard, miss prayer, even to drink alcohol if it was necessary to preserve his cover, but there was an iron-clad prohibition about unburdening himself to a sympathetic ear other than his controllers. Those meetings were few and far between, and most of his communication took place through e-mail. He was starved for human contact. As an only child, he hadn’t learned how to easily make idle conversation, to strike up dialogues with the people around him. So he made the rounds of the coffee shops, and eavesdropped on other people his own age, planning their excursions and laughing with one another.

It made him angry.

There was a seed of bitterness in him that the Al-Bashir recruiters had seen, a deep loneliness that had been assuaged by his membership in the terrorist organization. It was like belonging to a large company. There were picnics with the families of other operators, parties where the senior organizers and leaders socialized with rank and file soldiers, regular infusions of money for living expenses, and tasks to accomplish. But he had none of that now, and comparing his past experiences to the present just made him more bitter.

Today would be a good day to spend in rehearsal. His final operation wouldn’t take place here, but it was good training ground. He’d been taught, and taught well, how to conduct reconnaissance and prepare the ground for his actions. Taking action now would be good, and give him a satisfaction that his action would someday show the world that he wasn’t small and insignificant; no, he was someone of hidden importance and that was something these young people shunning him would someday see.

He finished his coffee and left a few small coins on the table when he left. He shouldered his courier bag, weighty with his laptop computer and a few belongings, and strolled toward the Central Train Station with its gray towers and gabled walls. At the bridge that crossed the canal in front of the station, he paused for a while
and let the crowd move and swirl around him, watching the station and the people coming and going. Then he entered the station and wandered in the crowd, one hand curled in his pocket around the atomizer he carried there. He took out his hand, the atomizer concealed in his closed fist, his thumb resting on the spray head, and let his hand swing naturally with his body motion.

The first target was an old woman dressed neatly in a black dress and stockings; she got a spray on her back. A young man about Youssef’s age was chatting up a group of girls; he took a spray on his sleeve as Youssef brushed by him, eyes straight ahead as though nothing were taking place. Two girls ran by to catch a train; they got a spray directed at their head scarves. None of them noticed the faint mist from behind or the side; Youssef was doing well, the natural motion of his hand hiding the atomizer that sent a mist on each victim. Today it was just water.

Soon it would be something else.

“Hi, Darla,” Ford said to the cook as he squeezed through the narrow kitchen toward the back door of the center. He was dressed in running shorts and singlet, and had his radio and handgun concealed in a blue fanny pack strapped around his waist.

“Hi, Greg,” the young black woman said. “Going for your run?”

“Yeah, thought I’d get a quickie in.”

“Quickie sounds good.”

Ford grinned and said, “I wouldn’t want to hurt you, girlfriend.”

“You’re so bad!” Darla said. She snapped a dish towel at his lean flanks. “Go on, get out of here!”

Ford laughed as he shouldered open the back door. He paused, from long force of habit, and looked far and then near, wide and then close, before he set off in an easy shamble that ate up the miles. He went over the little hill that adjoined the center and down to the bicycle and jogging trail that paralleled River Road and followed the banks of the Minnesota River as it meandered south. The path was pleasant: level with gentle curves and plenty of hills, tree-lined, with a good view of the river. His basic course took him five miles out and
back. Normally he wouldn’t take such a long run on a job, but the boss had said to go ahead and get his run in. He liked Dale Miller. He’d never worked with him before, though they had been in Special Forces at the same time, but they knew some of the same people in Delta and in Seventh Group where they’d both done their A-Team time.

Ford’s runs were his favorite time of day. He liked being alone with the rhythm of his body and he relished the challenge of the hills and the occasional encounter with a runner in his class. He saw a woman on the path ahead of him, running, not jogging, with the easy, relaxed upper body and smooth pace of a coached runner. He kept his pace strong and hard and drew up even with the woman with the long blond ponytail.

“Hi,” he said, between breaths.

She looked over at him and smiled. “Hi, yourself. Great day for a run, isn’t it?”

She had a faint accent.

“Sure is,” Ford said. “How far you going?”

“Not far . . . I’m coming back from an injury. You?”

“Just five out and back.”

“Don’t let me hold you up,” the tall blonde said.

“See you!” Ford said, picking up his pace. He felt the woman’s gaze on his back and that warmed him.

Isabelle Andouille stretched out her pace, enjoying the easy run ahead of her and the feeling of being uncramped after her long transatlantic flight. Men were so easy, she thought, not for the first time in her career. They never consider women a serious threat.

“So what kind of take are you getting?” Ray Dalton asked Mike Callan.

“Just interesting tidbits,” Callan said. “The detail is going well. I hooked Dale up with a good crew. He talked Charley Payne into being second in command.”

“How is Payne doing?”

“Good. It’s an easy detail. They haven’t spotted any surveillance, they keep Uday buttoned up tight on the grounds, they’ve got assistance from the campus police . . . they’re in good shape. Payne seems to thrive on it.”

“How is Dale?”

“He wouldn’t be happy to know that you’re signing his check. He’s still carrying baggage over the whole Jonny Maxwell job, but then so is most anybody who was involved in that operation. He’s doing a good job.”

“What else?”

“Dale’s been sitting in on Uday’s psychiatrist sessions. Uday keeps making reference to someone called “the One” and something about having a sad holiday. Dale thinks this is important and linked to why he was tortured. It seems that Saddam may actually have
witnessed or even taken part in the torture of Uday, which means he was pretty damn high up in the pecking order.”

“Should we take him over?”

“I don’t know if the Agency shrinks could do a better job. The people at the center are the best in the world at what they do, and I don’t think that scooping up Uday at this point is going to help his recovery. I don’t think you’ll get anything more than what they’re getting. I’d wait, and see what develops. What have you got on Uday in the computer?”

“Not much. Uday is an Iraqi, high in Saddam’s social circles, and doing some kind of secret work. A close associate of Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defects in 1995 long enough for us to debrief, and then goes back to Iraq, where he’s tortured and executed. Uday, because of his association with Hussein Kamel, is scooped up by Iraqi intelligence and internal security, and tortured till his mind breaks, and for no other reason we can discern except that he was close with Hussein Kamel. We know that Uday has to be a big muckety muck because he’s got a double, at least one, in his personal secretary. After the war, Uday’s family money buys him out of prison and gets him, his wife, and personal secretary out of the country and into the United States, where he comes up on our radar. Seeking asylum, with immigration paperwork pending, they come to Minneapolis where Uday is accepted into the Torture Center’s rehab program. Uday’s secretary takes Uday’s name and makes himself seen with heavy bodyguard protection, all of which serves to be useless on the day the Twins settle their sights on him.”

“So the Twins thought they were taking Uday out?”

“Yeah. And they probably intended to take the wife and secretary out, too, as a matter of housekeeping. But I think Uday is number one on their hit parade. So what makes him so important that Saddam himself supervised his torture, and when he escapes out of Iraq, someone hires the most expensive and talented team of hitters you can find to take him out?”

“Dale reported that Uday had been trained as a biochemist. What about that?”

“That adds up to a bad scenario. Hussein Kamel was in charge of the biological and chemical warfare program.”

“And Uday was a biochemist and a close associate of Hussein Kamel.”

“Which takes us to something about their biowarfare or chemical warfare programs.”

Ray Dalton leaned back in his leather chair and steepled his fingers. “I can have our people run cross-checks and see if Rahman Uday comes up in connection with the biological and chemical warfare program.”

Mike Callan shook his head from side to side. “Maybe you do have enough to swoop up Uday and hide him away till he gets well enough to spill his guts about what he was up to.”