The Bug Hunter: A Novel Page 15

  “That makes some sense given the fact that the Shi‘ites pretty much took their revenge on the Sunnis during the insurgency,” Gabriel said. “Al-Sadr’s death squads were pretty damn effective. I was in Iraq during that time. Jensen here was too.”

  “Well, I contacted a friend I have at State, and he did some digging for me on their database of Iraqis who worked for the CPA. There is no record of him.”

  “Interesting. How good was their record keeping then? Seems to me it was a shit show under Paul Bremer,” Jensen said.

  “My contact seems to think they were pretty thorough in vetting Iraqis who worked for the CPA. But, of course, he might have slipped through the cracks.

  “Or changed his name,” Gabriel said.

  “Or lied about his working for the CPA,” Jensen added.

  The three were quiet for a moment. “What now?” Brooks asked finally.

  “Look, if we go after Bashera head on, we’re going to tip our hand and he may run,” Jensen said. “I’d like to know more about him before we do that. Do we have a photo of him?”

  Brooks said, “We do. It’s in his immigration file.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to run his picture by a guy at the CIA that I know,” Gabriel said. “We were in Iraq together, and he was responsible for interrogating high-value prisoners in the Baath Party we were capturing. You remember the deck of cards?”

  “Hell yes, I remember,” Jensen said. “Hussein was the ace of spades.”

  “Right. There were photos of all the Baathist leaders of the Iraqi government on a deck of playing cards. This guy knew all of them. If Bashera was a part of the Hussein regime or working for any of the insurgency groups, he’ll likely know him.”

  “That’s worth a try. In the meantime, I’ll keep digging into Bashera’s records,” Brooks said.

  “Good,” Gabriel said. “Text me his photo, and we’ll reconvene in a few hours.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Langley, Virginia

  Gabriel and Lee Jensen stood before the CIA Memorial Wall, commonly referred to as the “Wall of Stars.” There were 132 stars carved into an expanse of gleaming white Alabama marble, each representing a CIA employee killed in the line of service. And underneath the stars, like a sentinel encased in steel and glass, stood the Book of Honor, which, where possible, listed the year of death and name of the deceased. Of the 142 stars, only 105 have names; the other 37 are for people who worked in the shadows and remain secret even in death.

  Jensen traced his finger across a page in the Book of Honor until it rested on the name Mark Spalding. “He was a good dude. When we were running nightly raids against al-Qaeda in Iraq, Mark was a rock. His intelligence was always right. I never lost a man when he was involved. It got so I didn’t trust anybody else.”

  “What happened to him?” Gabriel asked.

  “One of the informants he was using put on a suicide vest and blew himself up. Killed Mark instantly. Fucking haji. That was a sad day. I was already back in the States when I heard.”

  Gabriel was about to say something when he felt a presence behind them.

  “The bug boy returns,” Sam Gaddis said with a laugh. He and Gabriel shook hands.

  “I thought for sure they’d have put you out to pasture already,” Gabriel said. “When are you going to retire, anyhow?”

  Gaddis laughed again. He was a stout man with a white beard and short gray hair in his midsixties. He wore a corduroy sport coat that looked as if it had been bought in 1972 and an open-collared shirt. On his feet was a pair of tan desert combat boots like the ones Gabriel had worn in Iraq, proving an old agency adage that you can take an operative out of the field, but you can’t take the field out of the operative. “Shit, twice I’ve put in my papers, but they won’t let me go. ISIS screwed up my retirement plans.”

  “I bet,” Gabriel said. He then introduced Gaddis to Jensen. “Is there someplace we can talk in private?”

  “Sure,” Gaddis said. They badged in and entered one of the secure meeting rooms on the ground floor. Once they were settled, Gaddis asked Gabriel, “Are you working with DHS now?”

  “Sort of. I’m helping out on a case that involves, you know, insects.”

  Gaddis raised an eyebrow and smiled. “Interesting. Does that have anything to do with orange juice from Florida by chance?”

  Gabriel smiled back. There was no use in pretending. Sam Gaddis had helped train him for the Afghan mission and knew all about the capabilities of genetically modified vectors. “Yep,” Gabriel said simply.

  “I thought so. How can I help?”

  Jensen passed his phone displaying a picture of Bashera across the table. “Does this guy look familiar?”

  Gaddis stared at the photo for a good minute. “Jesus, you look at enough of these Arabs, and they all look alike. Maybe he looks familiar. Who is it?”

  “He says his name is Abdul-Azim Bashera,” Jensen said. “He teaches computer science at George Mason University. Came here from Iraq via Turkey. Only we can’t find any record of his time in Baghdad.”

  “Who’d you ask? State?”

  “Yep.”

  “Shit, State couldn’t find its own ass with both hands.”

  Gabriel and Jensen both laughed. “That’s why we’re here. I was hoping you might be able to ID him,” Gabriel said.

  “Did you say he got out via Turkey?” Gaddis asked.

  “Yes, that’s what we understand. He became a professor at the American University in Ankara,” Gabriel said.

  “No shit? The American University? Now, that’s rich,” Gaddis said, irony in his voice. He looked again intently at the photo. “Getting out via Turkey is significant. It took cash and influence to get the Kurds in the North to look the other way and allow passage. That’s not cheap. So whoever he is, I’d bet he’s important.”

  Jensen and Gabriel looked at each other. Gabriel then asked, “Do you have any records . . . ?”

  Just then Gaddis had a glimmer of recognition. “Can you guys hang out here for a bit? I want to go upstairs and look at our database. I think I might be able to find this guy.”

  “Hell, yes. We can hang out,” Gabriel said.

  “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Jensen said with a slight Bogart accent.

  Gaddis looked at Jensen and then at Gabriel. “Huh?”

  “Never mind him,” Gabriel said. “We’ll wait.”

  “OK. I’ll be back,” Gaddis said, this time with a slight Arnold Schwarzenegger accent.

  All three of them laughed.

  Gaddis’s trip into the archive was an emotionally charged return to the most exciting and frustrating time in his life. He had led the first CIA team into Iraq well before the 2003 invasion; working in the North with the Kurds, he had led a campaign to soften up the Iraqi troops in that area so they’d surrender rather than fight the Americans, an effort that had largely worked to perfection.

  But he had also lobbied unsuccessfully to influence the occupation strategy, encouraging the Coalition Provisional Authority not to disband the Iraqi army and indiscriminately purge the government of technocrats and experts that were needed to keep Iraq from falling apart. Ultimately, as history recorded, that effort failed. But as a result, Gaddis’s team was charged with chasing down the former Baath Party leaders from Hussein’s government who had escaped capture after the US invasion.

  As Gaddis paged through files containing images of Hussein’s henchmen, he was transported back to those days when the public was clamoring for heads on platters, and the Bush administration was publicly measuring its success via its deck of cards. Gaddis’s team had tracked, arrested, interrogated, and killed much of that deck. But a few had gotten away, melting into the wind and through Iraq’s porous borders. The idea that Bashera might be one of them was tantalizing to Gaddis. He could feel his pulse quicken, as if he
were back in the fight.

  Then, clicking on the next-to-last file, he found himself staring at a color image taken by the Iraqi Ministry of Information. The man in the photo wore an olive-green suit with a red tie and had a bushy black moustache instead of a full beard. But the cheeks were similarly pockmarked, and the eyes were the same—black like the night, irises bleeding into the pupils to form single dark masses. In that moment Gaddis felt that same sense of euphoria he’d felt when hunting in Iraq, a sense of anticipation, a feeling that he was about to crack a case wide open.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Langley, Virginia

  Gaddis entered the ground floor conference room carrying a manila folder, which he dramatically threw down on the table. He then sat down looking like a cat that had finally caught the canary. He was smiling, wondering how long he could keep them in suspense. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Abdul-Azim Rahman.”

  Gabriel looked at Jensen and then at Gaddis. “Who?”

  “That’s your guy’s real name,” he said, opening up the folder. He pulled out the photo and tossed it across the table. “He was Hussein’s top computer expert.”

  Gabriel picked up the photo and stared at it. He then compared it to the photo on Jensen’s phone. “It sure looks like the same guy.”

  “It’s the same guy, and we have a ton of info on him. And you aren’t going to like what you hear,” Gaddis said, picking up the file. “Rahman was born in Samarra, Iraq. His father was a shopkeeper. He was apparently a wiz at school, because he was sent to the Baghdad Military Academy at the age of twelve. From there he joined the Iraqi army, went to Baghdad University, and studied computer science. Got his PhD at the age of twenty-five and promptly went to work for the Ministry of Technology. He was the four of diamonds in our deck,” Gaddis said, tossing a photo of the card over to Jensen.

  “Jesus,” Jensen said. “How in the hell did this guy get away?”

  “Wasn’t that hard. You guys didn’t get to Iraq until later—’07 or ’08, right? It was a mess then, but nothing like the clusterfuck under Bremer. He disbanded the entire army and Baath Party over a weekend. They all scattered like cockroaches in the light. We were damn lucky to get the ones we did.”

  “What else do we know about him?” asked Jensen.

  Gaddis silently removed another picture from the file. “This is your guy when he was working for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

  “You’re shitting us, right?” Gabriel asked, looking at the photo. It had obviously been taken from a drone. The resolution wasn’t good, but it did look a lot like Bashera.

  “You sure that’s him? Kind of hard to tell,” Gabriel said.

  “It’s him,” Gaddis said. “And it all makes sense. Many of the high-ranking Baathists turned into Sunni insurgents and fought the Americans and the Shi‘ites. You remember the chaos in ’05 and ’06? It was basically a civil war. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was the most brutal of the bunch, but not the only one. You know, we couldn’t figure out how al-Zarqawi was able to avoid detection for so long. We finally killed him in 2006, but damn he was good at hiding from us. Now I think I know why.”

  “Why?” Gabriel asked.

  “The main weakness all these groups had was that we could track their SIGINT—their cell phones and emails. Al-Zarqawi was an exception. He had a bulletproof communication system.”

  “And you think that Bashera—uh, Rahman—was the reason?”

  “I’d bet on it. Hussein was a buffoon in many ways, but the Iraqi regime had very good SIGINT capabilities. Rahman obviously took those with him to al-Qaeda.”

  “Motherfucker,” said Gabriel. “So how do you think he ended up in Turkey?”

  “My guess is that when we dropped those five-hundred pound bombs on al-Zarqawi in June of 2006, Rahman saw the writing on the wall. We found Zarqawi using intel gathered from a high-level member of al-Qaeda in Iraq who had been captured alive by the British Special Air Service. So it wasn’t Rahman’s fault. But there was a leadership purge after al-Zarqawi died, and everyone was suspect.”

  “So he became Abdul-Azim Bashera and ended up in Turkey.”

  “Yep. If Rahman had cash—and you can bet he did—he’d have had no problem getting a new passport and safe passage.”

  “OK, so let’s summarize this,” Gabriel said. “We have a professor of computer science at GMU who used to work for both Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda in Iraq. We have a murdered entomologist with Egyptian roots who clearly knew how to weaponize insects. We have another computer scientist who studied under Rahman at GMU and who has disappeared with the genetic sequences for a host of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And his brother was an Islamic terrorist to boot. And we have her,” he said, motioning to Jensen to produce the picture found in Adnan’s lab. Jensen handed it to Gaddis.

  “Ever seen her before?” Jensen asked Gaddis.

  “I wish. But, no.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Finally, Jensen said, “OK, we need to get eyes on Rahman. I don’t want him to suddenly disappear. We also need to see if we can get access to his computer. I’ll call Witt and see if he can get us a warrant,” Jensen said.

  “Call him? You can ask him. He’s upstairs,” Gaddis said.

  “He is?”

  “I thought you knew. He’s meeting with Director Maddox right now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Langley, Virginia

  The seventh-floor suite of offices of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency was significantly more luxurious than Witt’s office at Homeland Security. Though DHS was far newer, and far bigger, Witt’s department got stuck with a hodgepodge of furniture from the alphabet soup of agencies it had been created from—Secret Service, FEMA, US Coast Guard, INS, and a handful of others. The D/CIA, on the other hand, had leather couches facing a wall of original artwork, and a highly polished ebony conference table that you could see your reflection in.

  “Thanks for coming over, Jason,” Anne Maddox said. She was in her midfifties, with blond hair and bright blue eyes. She wore a jet-black suit and a cobalt-blue blouse set off by a string of luminescent white pearls. She’d been a career operative in the CIA’s Clandestine Service and had spent her career overseas in some of the world’s hairiest spots, including Beirut, Islamabad, and Cairo. And even though she’d become a political animal and was thus looking to promote the agency and its interests, Witt thought of her as a straight shooter.

  “How’s your son doing? He’s what? Nineteen now?” she asked. Maddox had never married and had no kids, and she was always interested in other people’s children.

  “Nate, yes. He’s nineteen and a sophomore at Maryland.”

  “Has he chosen a major yet?”

  “Political science. You’d think by now he’d want to be as far from politics as possible. But somehow he’s caught the bug.”

  Maddox was quiet for a moment. “Oh, to be idealistic again.”

  Witt glanced at his phone and saw that Lee Jensen was calling again—the third call in the past five minutes. Witt dismissed the call and said, “I appreciate whatever you can give me on Lebedev.”

  “It’s not much, I’m afraid,” she said, picking up a folder from her desk. “He landed in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on an Aeroflot flight from JFK on Saturday, which is now five days ago. He cleared customs and then got on a bus to Grozny and was picked up at the Chechen border three days ago after we alerted the Russians we were looking for him. From there he was brought back to Moscow. We’ve requested through our ambassador to speak with him, but so far they aren’t cooperating.”

  “Fat chance. The FSB will never let us get to him. Poor bastard.”

  “He’s probably in Lubyanka right now with a car battery clipped to his genitals. All their interrogation techniques are enhanced,” Maddox said, her voice trailing off. Witt knew that this was
a sore spot for the D/CIA, who’d run a number of CIA dark sites where high-value targets from Iraq were taken for—then legal—enhanced interrogation. When President Cooperman nominated Maddox for D/CIA, she had undergone a brutal grilling from Democratic—and some Republican—senators about her role. It had left wounds that were still fresh.

  Just then Maddox’s assistant entered the room. “Director, Sam Gaddis is here with an Agent Jensen from Homeland Security and another gentleman.”

  “Were you expecting a visitor?” Maddox asked Witt.

  “No, he’s leading this investigation,” Witt said. “But I didn’t know he was here.”

  “Well, I’ve known Sam Gaddis for twenty years, and we’ve worked together in more than a few shit holes. If he’s here, it must be important.” Maddox motioned to her aide to show them in.

  As Gaddis led the group in, Maddox and Witt stood. “Director Maddox, this is Lee Jensen and Gabriel Marx. Gabriel is our bug expert,” Witt said.

  “Bug expert. That does sound intriguing. Someday I should like to hear more about that. Unfortunately right now we’re short on time.”

  Witt raised his eyebrow at Jensen signaling for him to proceed. “Yes, ma’am. Agent Gaddis here has moved our investigation forward significantly today by identifying this man,” Jensen said, handing her the picture of Abdul-Azim Rahman. Jensen then recounted the dossier Gaddis had on Rahman, including his role in al-Qaeda in Iraq.

  “So Abdul-Azim ends up in Turkey after al-Zarqawi is killed,” Maddox said. “How does he get pulled back into al-Qaeda? Or does he? Who is he working with?”

  “A few minutes ago I chatted with Stan Baker,” Gaddis said. “Baker was our station chief in Istanbul for years. He wasn’t familiar with Rahman but did say that under Erdogan, ISIS has had a very active cell in Turkey and has pretty much displaced al-Qaeda. So his bet is that Rahman’s working with ISIS.”