Authors: Gary Haynes
Yawning, he said, “Who’s this?”
“Mr Dupree?”
It was a man’s voice. Businesslike, he thought, blinking his eyes slowly like a reptile.
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Can you be at Langley in an hour, sir?”
He rubbed his face with his free hand. “Langley? What time is it?”
“Zero one thirty, sir.”
Tom sighed. “You kiddin’ me?” He’d been asleep for the best part of eighteen hours.
“It’s important, sir.”
“Yeah. What’s this all about?”
“Your father, sir. It’s about your father, General Dupont.”
He sat up, switched on the arc light on the nightstand to his left. “What about him?”
“Langley in an hour, sir. The NHB,” the man said, referring to the New Headquarters Building.
Tom thought for a couple of seconds. “Okay.”
The line went dead.
He put the cell down back on the nightstand, pushed back the duvet and vaulted out of bed. What the hell did the CIA want to say to him about his father at this hour? he thought. As he pulled on a pair of jeans and a black sweater, he decided that trying to work that out would be an impossible task and, at best, could only lead to increasingly negative conclusions.
He knelt down, opened the drawer on his nightstand and eased out his badge and SIG. He clipped the badge to the belt on his jeans and, out of habit, released the handgun’s magazine, checking there was a full complement of twelve .357 SIG cartridges, and that the chamber was empty. Satisfied, he walked to his closet and took a nylon windbreaker from a hangar.
Apart from his time as head of the Secretary of State’s protective detail, and a couple of occasions when he’d been in the DS counterterrorism unit, he hadn’t had any interaction with the CIA. Truth was, he felt uneasy around them, not because he feared them, but rather because he found their take on the world changed with a disconcerting regularity. One day some group was an ally, the next it was a sworn enemy.
The CIA had advocated airstrikes against the Assad regime in Syria, which would bolster the Sunni jihadists there, and then a few months later, they’d advocated airstrikes against the same Sunni jihadists to bolster the Shia regime in Iraq, and he couldn’t imagine living his life in that way. Then there was Dan Crane, of course, the man who’d been saved by his father and had helped him find the secretary. The guy was a walking contradiction, too.
Thinking this he headed out of his second-storey bedroom and down the staircase without turning on the lights. Reaching his study he couldn’t remember where he’d left his small recording device. To the world, it was a fountain pen. Sam, his veteran DS driver, had told him once that when he had to meet with the CIA or Homeland Security he should tape it. Given that this meet had something to do with his father he felt it was doubly important.
He flipped the light switch. The sudden brightness had caused his tropical fish to dart for cover. The huge tank, which lined the fourth wall, appeared to be empty. It could be a full twenty minutes before they emerged from the encrusted rock formations and clumps of green plants, and begin to swim in the open again, circling the miniature Doric columns. They were timid souls, Tom thought; or perhaps paranoiac ones, like him. Not a bad trait for a fish in a tank to have. He scribbled a note for the lady cleaner to change the water and put in a fresh delayed feeder.
He got a text message, a world security update from the DS’s counterterrorism unit.
Truck bomb kills thirty-four in Ankara. Two American casualties.
It was only a twenty minute journey to Fairfax County, Virginia. Tom was driving his Buick, the streets deserted but well lit. The CIA HQ was known as Langley after the unincorporated community it was situated in a few miles west of DC. But it had been called the George Bush Center for Intelligence since 1999, a compound consisting of a couple of major linked buildings set in two hundred and fifty-eight acres of land.
After passing through the high-level security checkpoint, Tom parked his Buick in the visitors’ car lot and walked to the entrance of the New Headquarters Building, or NHB. It was a chilly early morning, dawn still hours away. He passed the “Kyptos” sculpture, which ran from the entrance to the north-west corner of the courtyard, a massive S-shaped copper screen containing numerous coded messages, and felt his sense of unease heighten.
The single-storey section of the compound was flanked by two marble pillars, the glass facade on either side bathed in a yellowish glow from the security lights. Atop the pillars, an elongated, curved glass roof gave it the appearance of a modern art museum, rather than the most sophisticated intelligence hub on earth. The NHB, completed in 1991, was characterized by two, six-storey office blocks and was situated on a hill behind the well-known Old Headquarters Building, with its iconic CIA seal in the entrance lobby.
After being processed by internal security and given a laminated visitor’s badge, Tom entered the lobby area of the NHB, which was dotted with commemorative plaques and an impressive collection of donated statues. The four-storey glass atrium between the two tower blocks had three model drones suspended overhead. They were beetle-black and would ensure that visitors were left in no doubt that what went on here was deadly serious, Tom thought.
The main entrance to the NHB was on the fourth floor of one of the blocks, with an impressive skylight ceiling. Tom stepped out of an elevator into the corridor. At the end, he could see the still well-lit structure of the Old Headquarters Building, integrated by a network of further corridors, the wall space broken up by hung works of abstract art of the Washington Color School.
Before he could be questioned at the reception desk, he noticed a slim young woman dressed in a black business suit with a large-lapelled white shirt walking towards him. Her blonde hair was cut in a neat bob, her gait confident.
As she held out her long-fingered hand to greet him, he caught a waft of her perfume. Expensive and classy, he thought, reminding himself that he hadn’t been in a relationship with a woman for close to three years. He was left feeling oddly remorseful about that, given the circumstances of his visit.
“Cindy Rimes,” she said with a distinct New York accent. “Thank you for coming, Mr Dupree.”
Tom shook her hand and nodded. “My pleasure, ma’am.”
He got the impression that she was slightly embarrassed by her name, but couldn’t think why. It was as good a name as any. He didn’t ask her why he’d been woken up and told to report here. He’d get the answers regarding his father soon enough, he figured.
“Please follow me, sir,” she said, leading him down the corridor.
Getting about halfway up the corridor he saw a large alcove and was invited to sit on a low-slung chair behind a chrome and glass table, containing several copies of the
National Geographic
and promotional material for the agency. Apart from a water cooler and a vending machine, the space was empty.
Thirty seconds later he watched another woman approaching him, her hair in a French plait. She was wearing a fawn skirt and pearl-white blouse. He declined the offer of coffee and was led into a meeting room nearby. Judging by the acres of glass at the NHB, he reckoned it was the only room without windows. It was roughly thirty feet square, with bare walls and a tiled floor. He sat on a chrome-armed chair at the oblong pinewood table and waited. The woman, a six-foot redhead, with flawless skin, a twenty-thousand-dollar porcelain smile and an Ivy League assuredness, had said that someone would be along shortly.
After a couple of minutes, the door opened without a knock and a heavy-set man in his early sixties entered. He wore a dove-grey suit and shiny loafers. Dan Crane, the newly appointed director of the agency’s National Clandestine Service, although that was classified.
He sat at the table and immediately began to ride the chair. “You look better than the last time I saw you, Tom,” he said. “But saying that, you couldn’t have looked worse if you’d been trampled by a herd of goddamned wildebeest. Those jokers in the DS handed you a medal yet? Saving the Secretary of State’s ass singlehanded like that. I told ya, come work for me.”
“You put weight on?” Tom asked. He didn’t like Crane’s jibe about the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and his back was up. Crane had a habit of doing that.
“Nah. Lost a couple of pounds in point of fact.”
“What’s this all about?” Tom said.
“Your father was the victim of a truck bomb in Ankara.”
Tom felt nauseous, his brain finding it hard to digest what he’d been told. He clenched his jaw and grimaced.
“You wanna glass of water? Something stronger?” Crane said.
Tom fought hard to hide his shock; his pain, too. “Just tell me he’s okay and then give it to me frame by frame.”
Crane stopped riding the chair, eased forwards a fraction and pinched his forehead. “He survived the blast, but the last I heard, he’s in a bad way.”
“You don’t have anything up to date? I heard there were two American casualties.”
“No. Sorry, Tom. He was there on an official visit to find out how the sectarian violence is panning out, and whether there’s a threat of civil war. Face-to-face is always preferable,” Crane said. “They hit him in a square. The bomb was likely Semtex. The Americans were a couple on a world tour. Pensioners by all accounts. Goddamn bad luck.”
“That it?”
Crane nodded.
“If you’re holding out on me, I won’t take it kindly.”
“I’ll forgive you that one, Tom, cuz of your old man and I like ya. But you keep pulling my chain, I won’t take kindly to that, either,” Crane said, and he began to ride the chair again.
Tom nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Crane smiled, his lips closed. “Okay then. The Pentagon is sending a medical team. If he’s up to it, he’ll come home where he belongs. I’m sending four CIA paramilitaries to make sure there ain’t a replay. You’re free to go along, too.”
“Who was it?”
“We don’t know. Yet,” Crane replied. “But I promise you this, Tom, when we do they’ll either rot in solitary, or the earth.”
Ibrahim had been driven for three hundred and forty miles due south on state highway D715 to Bozyazi, a journey that had lasted just over seven and a half hours. Bozyazi was a remote Turkish town on the Mediterranean. The roads from either direction along the coast or over the Taurus Mountains, which formed a monolithic backdrop to the town, were too hazardous for sightseers, and that was good.
From there he’d been put aboard a fishing boat that had motored the forty-seven miles to an isolated bay in the Karpass Peninsula in northern Cyprus, which the Turks had styled the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus following the military invasion in 1974. Not one country had recognized it as legitimate, yet it still existed.
Ibrahim had left the fishing boat in the remote bay and, with his head and face covered by a white linen scarf, had been rowed ashore the last half a mile, where he’d been met by two Turkish Cypriots who dealt smack for the mafia to European tourists and residents on the island. He hadn’t liked having to rely on these types, but the Afghan Taliban had been growing and trading heroin for years to fund their jihad and it had been a necessary evil, he’d believed.
He’d stayed hidden in a beach shack for several hours before heading south-east via the Mediterranean Sea for a further sixty-two miles. He’d travelled in the hold aboard a small freighter, with a cargo of fruit bound for Lebanon. It was the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East, albeit due to ongoing sectarian violence, it was the most segregated, too.
The main religions, Ibrahim knew, were Muslim and Christian. In terms of percentages of population, there was an equal split between the Sunnis and Shias, closely followed by Maronite Christians. The Sunnis primarily occupied West Beirut, the north of the country and the southern coastal regions. Given his ultimate destination, the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian territories, the freighter had travelled down the coast to the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon, a major port about twenty-five miles south of Beirut.
Sidon was the third largest city in Lebanon. If a man wanted to stay hidden, Ibrahim had learned, he had two choices: go somewhere remote or somewhere teeming with humanity. But their network was growing after the death of bin Laden. Apart from Hamas and the Islamic State group, there was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Shabaab in East Africa, a dozen more smaller affiliated organizations. Even the hawks in Washington, he’d been told, were admitting that al-Qaeda and militant jihad generally was on the rise.
After docking, he’d been met by a local Sunni fighter, who’d driven him in a rusted Mazda to Sidon’s walled medieval city. It was located on a promontory jutting out to the Mediterranean, a veritable maze made up of a plethora of narrow alleyways. After resting up in a first-storey room a hundred yards from the Sea Castle, and eating a meal of fresh fish, bread and citrus fruit, he’d linked up with a two further Islamists and had been hidden in the back of a truck beneath a pile of cardboard boxes and a filthy tarp.
He’d been driven to within six miles of the Rosh HaNikra Crossing between the small coastal city of Naqoura, Lebanon, and the northern Israeli kibbutz that bore the name of the international boundary. But he hadn’t been able to cross over there as the terminal was operated by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and Israeli Defence Force, the IDF, and forbade the passage of tourists or visitors. Instead he’d been led along a narrow goat track to the outskirts of the city.
The Gaza Strip was surrounded on two sides by Israel, and travelling in what Ibrahim considered to be the most anti-Muslim country on earth was just too dangerous. The routes into Gaza were either open or closed and the situation changed regularly, depending on whether or not Hamas and Israel were at war. Even entry by sea to Gaza was a hazardous lottery.
A land, air and sea blockade had been in force by Israel since 2007. This was in direct response to Hamas winning legislative elections there the year before and their victory against Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the subsequent battle for the city. The Israelis had long memories and, despite the promises, things remained the same, especially after the intermittent kidnapping of Jewish settlers led to violent IDF incursions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.