The President asked, “How the hell did they know the exact address this guy was staying at? And how did they know the lieutenant commander was staying in the B-and-B up the street?”
Foley replied with obvious frustration. “We still do not know. The DoD and the entire IC are running tests on all networks, looking for any hints of new penetration that might have exposed these men. So far, nothing.”
Ryan said, “This is like the Commander Hagen incident, another attack on the Navy.”
Burgess said, “Except this time the attackers are ISIS, not a Russian college dropout. But, yes, their intel is every bit as good and difficult to account for as the Hagen attack in New Jersey.”
Ryan said, “Okay. That’s our immediate threat abroad. Any chance this attack indicates that Abu Musa al-Matari is in Europe, and not, as we’ve been fearing, on his way here?”
Mary Pat Foley spoke up now. “Doubtful. The Islamic State’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau has its own European operational leadership. They all live there, work there. Hell, most of them were born there. Al-Matari wouldn’t be on home turf in Europe the way a dozen other men of his rank would be.”
“Makes sense,” Ryan said.
“Plus,” Mary Pat added, “we do have some news on Musa al-Matari.”
Ryan said, “Good news, or bad news?”
Dan Murray said, “It’s not good. We’ve been trying to identify this ‘Language School’ the Yazidi girl told us al-Matari spoke of. We think we found it in the jungles of El Salvador, close to where the Guatemalan ex — Special Forces men had gone to teach a training class.”
Ryan said, “A group of jihadists in El Salvador didn’t get noticed by the local Feds?”
“No, but this place was way out in the sticks.” Murray frowned. “FBI agents toured through it yesterday. It had already been abandoned, totally cleared out, but there were enough shell casings around to indicate some serious training had gone on.”
“Small-arms training?”
“We found evidence of pistols, rifles, and small explosives. But just because we didn’t see anything else, that doesn’t mean they didn’t train on other weapons.”
“Size of the encampment?”
“Hard to say, because these were existing structures. They’d been around since the eighties and weren’t built for the use of the ISIS group. But from the burn pit, and from the locals who say they heard shooting for something like three to four weeks, we think we could be looking at a force between twenty-five and fifty pax.”
The AG went on. “If they are coming here, they’ll split up, obviously, groups of four to eight, I’d guess, but the good news is it’s not a compartmentalized operation. If we take down one of these terrorists, they will have knowledge of members from other cells.”
“Why would they train them together?” Ryan asked.
Mary Pat jumped in now. “That’s a good question. It flies in the face of normal practice. But al-Matari is a smart man. This wasn’t a mistake. He had an operational reason for putting everyone in the same place.”
Dan Murray said, “I widened the scope of my original investigation. Anybody who had been on the terror watch list in the past five years, men and women who were no longer under scrutiny, we checked out again.
“Almost immediately something popped up. A guy we had looked at once before was murdered last month in Hallandale Beach, Florida. He ran a 7-Eleven, was working at the counter with his wife when they were both shot to death. But nothing was stolen. Local police saw it as a robbery gone wrong, but we put men on it, interviewed the other employees. One of them said his boss had been talking about taking some time off to go to a language school in Guatemala. Right before he was murdered, he told his employee that his wife put the kibosh on the trip.”
Ryan’s eyebrows furrowed, but not from interest. He was an intelligence man himself, and this wasn’t much to go on, at all.
Murray knew Ryan wouldn’t be impressed by that alone. “We found another guy” — he looked down at his iPad — “named Kateb Albaf, a Turkish national who’d been in school at UC Santa Clara we’d had on the watch list a couple of years ago due to some of his radical statements to a reporter at a rally. We interviewed him, put a soft surveillance package on him for a couple of months two years ago, and determined he was just a student. He never knew we were interested in him.”
“Where is he now?” asked Ryan.
“Up until a month ago, he was back in California right where he was when we last saw him, but we found out he just went on a trip to Honduras.” Murray looked up from his iPad and to the President. “According to a classmate, he was going to spend six weeks at a language school — claimed a newfound interest in learning Spanish. We looked into his airline travel and they match the dates the Guatemalan commandos were away from home.”
Ryan said, “Wonder how good his Spanish is now?”
Dan Murray grumbled, “Probably not as good as his ability to build an S-vest.”
Ryan looked back and forth between Mary Pat and Dan. “C’mon. Tell me you have more than this.”
Mary Pat said, “We do. A second man formerly on the watch list, a twenty-six-year-old used-car salesman from Atlanta named Mustafa Harak, also told associates he was going to Central America to a language school. He says to Guatemala. The dates match up very closely to the Turkish national.”
Ryan rolled his head back and forth. He was seeing some distinct lines between all the dots. “Guatemala and Honduras both border El Sal. They flew into these other nations, bussed over into El Salvador, and learned how to shoot people and blow things up. You’re probably right, we should tail these men carefully now.”
Murray said, “Unfortunately, we cannot tail either Albaf or Harak, because neither of them are home. Their cars are there. But they are not.”
Ryan asked, “Credit cards?”
“Neither man’s cards have been used since before they went to Central America. Kateb, the Turk in California — his wife, Aza, has disappeared, too.”
Ryan said, “Shit. They’ve got tradecraft, and they are already pre-positioning.”
Foley nodded. “That’s right.”
Ryan said, “We managed to stop Abu Musa al-Matari’s first attack against the United States when his training camp was discovered on sat photos over Syria. This time he moves the training to El Salvador.”
Mary Pat said, “We’re looking into boats out of La Libertad, the closest port, just fifteen miles away. Of course flights out of San Salvador, too. Charters, cargo, anything that came up to the States in the past ten days.”
Murray added to this. “They could have flown out of somewhere else, stopped and transferred along the way. But it’s all we have to go on.”
Ryan said, “There have to have been hundreds of planes that fit that description just landing at Miami International. Throw in Houston, L.A., Atlanta… Good Lord.”
Mary Pat said, “Jay and I will keep at it on our end, and Dan will keep the heat up on the domestic side. We’ve already notified Homeland Security to BOLO these guys.”
Ryan looked down to the artist’s rendering made from the recollection of the Yazidi girl. “It’s time to put Musa al-Matari’s face out there.”
Murray said, “I agree. We’ll say we think he’s here in the U.S., and he’s dangerous, tied to ISIS. It will get the coverage we need, although it’s not going to be hard for this guy to alter his appearance.”
Secretary of State Scott Adler had been quiet for the past few minutes, but he spoke up again now. “Mister President, back to the attack at Sigonella. There is something else you need to know. This might be a bad time to bring this up, but you will be questioned about it in the news conference when you land.”
When Adler said this, SecDef Bob Burgess visibly snarled. The two men could not see each other on the monitors, but Ryan noted Burgess’s reaction to the secretary of state, and this told him Burgess knew about the matter Adler was bringing up, and he wasn’t happy about it.