“Sir, we have Rashid.” The OD was younger even than Metzger and his voice revealed that.
Suddenly the Smoke vanished. And so did Nance Laurel, Lincoln Rhyme and virtually every other blot on his life. Rashid was the next man in the Special Task Order queue, after Moreno. Metzger had been after him for a very long time. “Where?”
“He’s in Mexico.”
“So that’s his plan. The prick got closer than we thought.”
“Slippery, sir. Yes. He’s in a temporary location, a safe house the Matamoros Cartel has in Reynosa. We have a short window. Should I forward details to the GCS and Texas Center?”
“Yes.”
The operations director asked, “Sir, are you aware that the STO has been modified in Washington?”
“In what regard?” he asked, troubled.
“The original order provided for minimizing collateral damage but it didn’t prohibit CD. This one does. Approval is rescinded if anyone else present is a casualty, even wounded.”
Rescinded…
Which means that if anybody is killed with Rashid, even al-Qaeda’s second-in-command about to push a nuclear launch button, I’ve acted outside the scope of my authority.
And I’m fucked.
It didn’t matter that a pure asshole died and a thousand innocent people were saved.
Maybe this was part of the “budgetary” meetings.
“Sir?”
“Understood.”
He disconnected and told Boston the news. “Rashid? I thought that son of a bitch was going to hide out in San Salvador till the attack. He paid off members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang — aka the MS-13s — for protection. Had some place in District Six, near Soyapango. If you want to get lost to the world, that’s the place to do it.”
Nobody knew Central America like Spencer Boston.
A flag arose on his computer. Metzger opened his encrypted emails and read the new STO there, the death warrant for al-Barani Rashid, suitably modified. He read it again and added his electronic signature and PIN number, approving the kill.
The man was, like Moreno, a U.S.-born expatriate, who’d been living in northern Africa and the Gulf states until a few months ago.
He’d been on a watch list for several years but only under informal surveillance, not in any of the active-risk books. He’d never done anything overt that could be proven. But he was as vehemently anti-American as Moreno. And he too had been seen in the company of groups that were actively engaged in terrorist actions.
Metzger scrolled through the intelligence analysis accompanying the revised STO, explaining to Boston the details. Rashid was in the undistinguished town of Reynosa, Mexico, on the Texas border. The U.S. intelligence assets NIOS was using down there believed Rashid was in town to meet with a senior man in northeastern Mexico’s biggest cartel. Terrorists had taken to working closely with the cartels for two reasons: to encourage drug flow into America, which supported their ideology of eroding Western society and institutions, and because the cartels were incredibly well equipped.
“We’ll have him handle it?”
“Of course.” Him. Bruns, that is, Barry Shales. He was the best in the stable. Metzger texted him now and ordered him to report to the Kill Room.
Metzger spun the computer and together he and Boston studied the images, both on-the-ground surveillance and satellite. The safe house in Reynosa was a dusty one-story ranch structure, good-sized, with weathered tan paint and bright green trim. It squatted in the middle of a sandy one-acre lot. All the windows were shaded and barred. The car, if there was one, would be tucked away in the garage.
Metzger assessed the situation. “We’ll have to go with a missile. No visuals to use LRR.”
The Long-Range Rifle program, in which a specially built sniper gun was mounted into a drone, had been Metzger’s brainchild. LRR was the centerpiece of NIOS. The arrangement served two purposes. It drastically minimized the risk of innocent deaths, which nearly always happened with missiles. And it gave Metzger the chance to kill a lot more enemies; you had to be judicious about launching missiles and there was never much doubt after the fact where the Hellfire had come from: the U.S. military, CIA or other intelligence service. But a single rifle shot? The shooter could be anybody. Plant a few references to a gunman working for an opposing political party, a terrorist group, or — say — a South American cartel, and the local authorities and the press would tend not to look elsewhere. The victim could even have been shot by a jealous spouse.
But he’d known from the beginning that LRR drones wouldn’t always work. For Rashid, with no visible target the only option was a missile, with its twenty-pound high-explosive warhead.
Boston’s long face was aimed out the window. He brushed his white hair absently with his fingers and played with a stray thread escaping from a cuff button. Metzger wondered why he always wore a jacket in the office.
“What, Spencer?”
“Is this a good time for another STO? With the Moreno fallout?”
“This intel’s solid. Rashid is guilty as sin. We have assessments from Langley and the Mossad and the SIS.”
“I just meant we don’t know how much of the queue got leaked. Maybe it was just Moreno’s order; maybe it was more, Rashid’s included. His was next on the list, remember? His death’ll make the news. Maybe that damn prosecutor’ll come after us for this one too. We’re on thin ice here.”
These were all obvious considerations but Metzger had the need inside his gut and, accordingly, was free of the Smoke.
He absolutely didn’t want this relief, this sense of comfort, of freedom, to go away.
“And if we don’t take him out, you know what Rashid’s got planned for Texas or Oklahoma.”
“We could call Langley and arrange a rendition.”
“Kidnap him? And do what? We don’t need information from him, Spencer. All we need from Rashid is no more Rashid.”
Boston yielded. “All right. But what about the collateral damage risk? Firing a Hellfire into a residence with no visual reference?”
Metzger scrolled down the intel assessment until he found the surveillance report. Current as of ten minutes ago. “Safe house is empty, except for Rashid. The place’s been under DEA and Mexican Federales surveillance for a week for suspected mules. Nobody’s gone inside until Rashid this morning. According to the intel, he’ll be meeting the cartel man anytime now. Once that guy leaves, we’ll blow the place to hell.”
CHAPTER 63
Al-Barani Rashid looked over his shoulder a great deal.
Figuratively and literally.
The tall, balding forty-year-old, with a precise goatee, knew he was in danger — from the Mossad, the CIA and that New York — based security outfit, NIOS. Probably some people in China too.
Not to mention more than a few fellow Muslims. He was on record as condemning the fundamentalists of his religion for their intellectual failings by blindly adhering to a medieval philosophy unsustainable in the twenty-first century. (He had also publicly excoriated moderates of the faith for their cowardice in protesting that they were misunderstood, that Islam was basically Presbyterianism with a different holy book. But they simply blogged insults; they weren’t going to fatwa him.)
Rashid wanted a new order, a complete reimagining of faith and society. If he had any model, it wasn’t Zawahiri or Bin Laden. It would be a hybrid of Karl Marx and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who happened to have attended his own school — the University of Michigan.
But as unpopular as he was, Rashid believed in his heart he was right. Remove the cancer and the world will right itself.