Part Two
29
Arlington, Virginia
A black sedan pulled up just before dawn.
“Let’s go.”
Good morning to you, too, Jack.
“What about some coffee?” David asked instead, still jet-lagged after a sleepless night on the red-eye from Munich.
“We don’t have time,” Zalinsky replied with uncharacteristic impatience.
David shrugged, sighed into the frigid February morning air, and did as he was told. Zalinsky was old and tired and was supposed to have retired long before now. He was not a man to be trifled with. Certainly not today. David stared at the rapidly shrinking Starbucks in the side mirror as the two left Arlington for the George Washington Memorial Parkway, en route to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.
The car was quiet for a few minutes. David looked out at the snowcapped spires of the Georgetown University campus and the ice on the Potomac River and thought about all that had happened in the years since he had been sent to Germany and Pakistan, and some of the bizarre events that had been occurring in the Middle East even in recent days.
“Did you see that story about the slaughter of all those Christians in Yemen?” David asked.
Zalinsky did not respond.
“Some cult leader just walked into a church in Aden, pulled out a machine gun, and killed, like, forty people,” David said, looking across the frozen Potomac. “Guy claimed he was preparing the way for the coming of the Islamic messiah or something.”
After driving awhile in more silence, David added, “Weren’t a bunch of priests and bishops assassinated in Yemen just before Christmas?”
Zalinsky still said nothing.
“That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, I know it’s not my country of focus, but I’m just saying, you know?”
Zalinsky wasn’t interested. Instead, he dropped a bomb. “Look, David, I’m pulling you out.”
“I beg your pardon?” David replied, caught off guard.
“You heard me,” Zalinsky replied. “I’m reassigning you.”
David waited for the punch line. It never came.
“To what?” he asked.
“You’ll find out in a moment.”
“Why?”
“I can’t say.”
“Well, for how long?”
“I really can’t say.”
David briefly considered the possibility that his handler and mentor was kidding. But that was impossible. The man had never told a joke. Not once in all the years since their first meeting. Not once while David was in college. Not once while David was attending the Agency’s top-secret training facility in rural Virginia known as “the Farm.” Not once-according to six different sources David had “interviewed”-in the thirty-nine years that Zalinsky had worked for the CIA. The man was a walking Bergman film.
“What about Karachi?” David asked.
“Forget Karachi.”
“Jack, you can’t be serious. We’re making progress. We’re getting results.”
“I know.”
“Karachi’s working. Somebody’s got to go back.”
“Somebody will. Just not you.”
David’s pulse quickened. Zalinsky was off his rocker. If the man wasn’t driving, David would have been severely tempted to grab him by the lapels and make him start talking sense. For the past few years since getting out in the field, David had been given some of the lamest assignments he could possibly have imagined. Assistant to the assistant to the deputy assistant of whatever for an entire year at the new American Embassy in Baghdad. Coffee fetcher for the economic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Communications and intelligence liaison in Bahrain for a SEAL team assigned to protect U.S. Navy ships entering and exiting the Persian Gulf. That, at least, had sounded cool on paper, but it was mostly long hours of boredom mixed with still-longer hours of trivia and minutia. David had complained to Zalinsky that this wasn’t what he’d been recruited to do. He was supposed to be hunting Osama bin Laden, not babysitting destroyers and minesweepers.
Finally Zalinsky had relented and assigned him to a project hunting down al Qaeda operatives. So for the past six months, David had been stationed in Karachi, Pakistan, recruiting young technicians inside Mobilink-Pakistan’s leading cellular telecom-to do a little “side business” with Munich Digital Systems, or MDS, the tech company for which David now ostensibly worked. He paid these kids well. Very well. And discreetly. From time to time he threw little parties in his hotel room. Bought them alcohol. Introduced them to “friendly” women. The kind they were unlikely to meet in their neighborhood mosque. He added a little buzz, a little color, to their otherwise drab lives.
In return, David asked them to poke around inside Mobilink’s mainframes and ferret out phone numbers and account information of potentially lucrative future clients for his consulting work. The more information they provided, the more business MDS would get, and the more kickbacks he could pay these guys. Or so he told them. Unwittingly, these kids were actually giving him phone numbers and billing data for al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, couriers, and financiers operating along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
The Pak technicians had no idea David was an American. They thought he was German. They had no idea he was working for MDS as a cover for his true identity as a CIA operative. They had no idea they were engaged in espionage. They just knew David was a twentysomething, like them. They thought he was a technogeek, like them. And they knew he had access to a lot of cash and was happy to dole it out generously to his friends.
And so far, so good. Over the last few months, David’s efforts had led to the capture or killing of nine high-value targets. Day by day, David was certain, they were getting closer to bin Laden. The whole operation had been Zalinsky’s idea, and until now, Zalinsky had given David every reason to believe he was thrilled by the results. Why, then, pull the plug now, especially when they were getting so close to their ultimate objective?
Ten minutes later, the two men arrived at CIA headquarters.
They cleared perimeter security, parked underground, cleared internal security, and got on the elevator. Zalinsky had still said little-barely even a “good morning” to the guards-and David was getting annoyed. The two were supposed to be having breakfast together, catching up on the news, dishing a little gossip from the field, and gearing up for a grueling day of budget meetings and mind-numbing paperwork. Instead, Zalinsky was threatening to pull David off a project he loved for no apparent reason and then giving him the silent treatment. It seemed unprofessional and unfair.
But when Zalinsky hit the button for the seventh floor instead of the sixth, David tensed. The Near East Division-their division-was a suite of offices on the sixth floor. The director of central intelligence and the senior staff worked one flight up. David had never been, but he was headed there now.
The elevator door opened. Zalinsky turned left. David followed close behind. Down the hall, they stepped into a high-tech conference room and were greeted by a balding man in his mid to late fifties who introduced himself as Tom Murray.
David had never met Murray before, but he had certainly heard of the man. Everyone in the Agency had. The deputy director for operations was a legend in the clandestine services. In March 2003, he masterminded the capture in Pakistan of KSM-Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-the right-hand man to Osama bin Laden and the architect of the 9/11 attacks. It was Murray, working closely with the British secret services in the summer of 2006, who planned the penetration and dismemberment of an al Qaeda cell in England that was about to hijack ten transatlantic jumbo jets en route from London to the U.S. and commit what one Scotland Yard official had publicly described as “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” And as far as David could tell, it was Murray who convinced President William Jackson to begin using Predator drones to take out key al Qaeda and Taliban leaders hiding in villages along the Pakistan-Afghan border when intelligence derived from David’s own penetration of Mobilink’s databases proved actionable.