Brothers In Arms (9 page)

“No. Only that he was a high-level intimate of Saddam Hussein and his son-in-law.”

Dale found himself sneaking a look at the broken man, who returned his gaze with a guileless stare like that of a child.

“I expected him to look differently,” Dale said.

“Why so?” Dr. Green said.

“I suppose I had a picture in my mind of what a torture victim is supposed to look like.”

“For the most part they look quite normal, Mr. Miller. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all broken. You can see it in their body language when you know what to look for. It’s in his posture—you see how his shoulders turn in, how he seems stooped all the time? Exaggerate that posture and you have the fetal position, the position we fall into when we’re overwhelmed by events, the basis of the protective position when you’re being beaten.”

“Do you know anything else about his background? Schooling, education, whether he had any military experience?”

“Only what his wife told us. He had no military experience, but apparently he was afforded certain military privileges because of his high position. He was educated in Iraq and England. His advanced degree was in biochemistry.”

“Biochemistry?”

“That’s what his wife told us.”

Dale turned and looked once again at the tortured man.

A biochemist.

To protect someone, you must think like an attacker. To protect someone from a terrorist attack, you must think like a terrorist. It’s the ability to anticipate the moves of the attacker that’s essential to a protector, and that ability was shared by Dale Miller, Charley Payne, and their two teammates. When they surveyed the Torture Center, they walked the grounds as an attacker would, analyzing avenues of approach, cover and concealment, alarmed points of entry, location of the lights, and the places of deepest shadow at night. Inside the old Victorian they identified all possible entry points, studied the locks, doors, and windows, and every possible way to approach the room where their principal slept at night. They brainstormed scenarios ranging from a stealthy entry to a full-scale armed assault and built contingency plans to counter each. The team was light with only four men, but their skill and experience made them formidable. They all knew the strength of a protection team is not the ability to fight, but the ability to avoid a fight and flee with the principal if necessary. While they could fight and fight well, each man knew the basic tenet of bodyguard protection: if they were drawing their weapons, they’d failed in their preplanning and situational awareness. And, more than likely, they were already dead and just hadn’t realized it yet.

While both Dale and Charley had worked as protection operators before, they quickly came to rely on the recent field experience of Harrison and Ford. The stocky Harrison was especially good at survey work and preplanning, and Dale liked the way his mind worked. The bodybuilding ex-Special Forces NCO had a cunning and devious mind and cooked up all kinds of possible attack scenarios, which they then gamed to a defense. His greyhound-thin partner Ford was the team diplomat, popular with the center’s staff, and became the secondary liaison, after Dale. The team worked a routine twelve hours on, twelve hours off, with the off shift staying on-site in a bedroom converted to their use.

Dale came down the hallway from the bedroom they used as their operations center and tapped lightly on Uday’s door, then went in. He found Uday dressed and standing by his window, looking out at the flowers as he liked to.

“Good morning, Mr. Uday,” Dale said.

“It is morning,” Uday said. “The morning after the night. The night was quiet.”

“I’m glad,” Dale said.

He gently took Uday’s arm and guided him to the door. Uday stiffened when Dale touched him, then relaxed. Dale took him down the hallway to the commons room, where Uday took his breakfast with the other patients and staff. Dale sat him at a table and a white-clad staff member brought a tray with his breakfast. Dale took some coffee, and nodded to Dr. Green where she sat at a nearby table with some of the staff. She waved him to the table.

“Excuse me, Mr. Uday,” Dale said as he stood. Uday didn’t answer, concentrating instead on spooning oatmeal into his mouth. Dale brought his coffee to Dr. Green’s table and sat in the open chair.

“How was your night, Mr. Miller?” Dr. Green asked.

“Uneventful. Just the way I like them. And you?”

“Good. How is Mr. Uday this morning?”

“He seems to enjoy our company.”

“I have him for therapy this morning.”

“I have it on the schedule. Would you mind if I sat in?”

“Is it necessary?”

“No. Would it be a problem?”

“I think not,” Dr. Green said. “Do you have specific concerns?”

“I’m curious about some of the threads that come up, like his insistence on a sad holiday. Any ideas about that?”

“It may not mean anything. At this point I don’t have any specific idea what he means by that. It’s a recurring theme, but his delusions are still very much internal, and we only have these small bits that rise to the surface, like his sad holiday and the One, to work with.”

“Have you been able to determine why he was tortured? Or was it just luck of the draw and a byproduct of his relationship with Saddam?”

“We don’t know,” Dr. Green said.

“Sad holiday,” Dale said. “I wonder what that means.”

Charley Payne was enjoying his job. He walked outside on the manicured lawns and carefully maintained flower beds that bordered the Victorian house, and drank in the summer air. He lingered for a little bit on a wide piece of grassy space that was bathed in sun, and he closed his eyes for a moment and let the heat of the sun warm him.

Life was good.

He was banking
1,500 a day plus his minimal expenses and working with a fine crew. He enjoyed his conversations with the younger Dale, who was a good team leader—seasoned and confident enough to clearly state what he wanted and then get out of the way of his people while they did their work. He enjoyed being partnered with Dale. The younger operator had a hell of a resume, bits and pieces of which came out in their frequent conversations. Charley relished the interplay between him and the other members of the team, and it reminded him, painfully, of his best days as an operator. He knew his best days were behind him, but Dale was just into his prime, and Charley wondered what his team leader would do once this operation got handed over. Charley had his photography, but Dale didn’t
have a mission. The suppressed mentor in Charley wanted to take Dale under his wing, urge him to find something he could lose himself in, but he wisely bit his tongue and let the young man run.

That was the beginning of wisdom, to know when you didn’t really have anything to say anymore.

Charley let his arm down and pressed slightly against the Glock holstered beneath his shirt. He was dressed in Levis and a short-sleeved denim shirt worn with the tails out. A small walkie-talkie was tucked into the shirt pocket of his shirt, with an earpiece running from the pocket to his ear. The team was small enough to maintain an open single frequency.

“One-Zero, this is One-Two,” Charley said.

“One-Zero, go ahead,” Dale’s voice was tinny in the earpiece.

“All clear at the quarter hour,” Charley said.

“Roger all clear,” Dale said. “One-Zero out.”

Charley continued his stroll around the grounds, and walked up the slope of a small hill that bordered the center. The access road came in from the parkway road there, wound around the hill, and then made a horseshoe loop in the driveway in front of the center. A bicycle and jogging path followed the road along the parkway, and from where Charley stood he could see people jogging as well as a solo bicyclist slowly peddling along.

It was a beautiful day, and there was no sign of a threat in sight.

Marika Tormay peddled her bicycle as slowly as she could without stopping. She saw the lone man standing atop the slight hill that hid the Torture Center from the main road. She had come this way several times a day for the last few days, looking for signs of security. There was the uniformed presence of the university campus police, who patrolled the grounds of the center and other properties here on the edge of the campus area, but in recent days she’d seen men in plainclothes lingering on the grounds of the center—not staffers, but not patients either. Their attention to who and what was in the immediate area marked them out as security.

She’d ridden her bicycle down the access road and made a loop around the driveway. While no one had challenged her, she was aware of the scrutiny of a man in the garden, who’d been joined by another man. Both muscular, dressed in casual clothes, with their shirttails out, no doubt to hide their weapons. They had the look. She had plenty of experience with armed men, first in the West Bank, then in Beirut, and her training in the camps in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon had refined her eye even more. As an intelligence gathering operative for the Al-Bashir network, she had been idle, a sleeper agent on a student visa in the cosmopolitan—and very large—student population in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She’d been activated to surveil a small group of Iraqi exiles, and had for the first time met another sleeper agent in the Twin Cities area. The two of them worked up a profile of one of the men—who ended up dead in a spectacular hit. The woman and the other man had been harder. They hadn’t been able to finger the man’s location, and the woman stayed in for the most part, hidden behind formidable security. Now the woman had disappeared, but before she had gone, a small convoy of cars had driven her here to the Torture Center, where Marika had walked in on the grounds and was rewarded with a glimpse of the woman talking to a tall man in a track suit accompanied by a doctor.

They’d found the third man.

Since that time, the surveillance cell had worked up a target folder focusing on the center. Marika had dressed in business clothes and paid a visit to the offices of the remodeling company that had renovated the Victorian house that housed the center; she’d left with a complete set of floor plans and photographs. Her partner, a silent and serious Palestinian, had carefully, over a series of days, taken digital video of the house and the surrounding avenues of approach, and on his I-Mac computer carefully edited the raw footage into a detailed and comprehensive documentary on the center and the surrounding grounds. They had reached a point where more was not possible with the standoff approach; someone would have to get inside the building and see if they could identify where the target was located to take their work to the next level.