Act of War

CHAPTER 14

It was after five o’clock and the dusty Bur Dubai neighborhood was still crowded with tourists. Businessmen were headed home or out for drinks. Taxicab drivers, immune to the heat, drove with their windows rolled down, picking up and dropping off customers in front of shops emblazoned with brightly colored Arabic script. Clothing, jewelry, and electronics competed alongside prayer rugs, hookah pipes, and antique furniture for buyers’ attention. The scent of the Gulf mingled with the aromas wafting out of restaurants up and down the neighborhood streets.

One of the first things Harvath had noticed about Bur Dubai was that it wasn’t as security-conscious as other parts of the city. There weren’t cameras on every single building and street corner. He was glad. It would make his job a lot easier.

He had gone around and around in his mind as to the best way to grab Khuram Hanjour. What about an invitation from Fahad? Would he respond to something like that? Would he respond on short notice? From what Harvath had seen over his career, particularly in his training with the Secret Service, people who engaged in risky behavior were extremely compulsive. The risk alone delivered its own high, and they were constantly trying to top the last time. It was a reasonable bet that if Hanjour was in town, he’d drop everything to come PnP with Fahad.

Based on Fahad’s Grindr account, as well as the questions Levy’s colleague had asked him in the prison, Fahad and Hanjour had had no contact for over a week. All Harvath had to do was properly bait the trap.

He and Levy studied the previous messages back and forth between the men. After a brief discussion, Levy crafted a short but seductive invitation. All they had to do was wait. Hours passed.

They had held off until after arriving in Dubai, sweeping the safe house, and checking into a room at the Arabian Courtyard, before attempting to contact Hanjour. If he was anxious to meet and they were still on the road from Abu Dhabi, they might have blown their opportunity. There was too great a chance that if Hanjour wanted to play, but Fahad was hours away, he’d simply scroll through Grindr and find someone else.

Despite that possibility, there was something about their communications that suggested the fifty-seven-year-old Hanjour had an affinity for the twenty-six-year-old-Fahad. Harvath assumed it was akin to older straight men who got their kicks dating women half their age. He couldn’t be sure, but he hoped that if there was something there, it would work to their advantage.

When the chime sounded on the cloned phone, Harvath and Levy immediately stopped what they were doing and read the message. Hanjour wanted to meet. “SR@1800,” he typed.

“Silk Route at 1800?” asked Levy.

Harvath nodded, “Six p.m. at the Silk Route.”

It was on. Hanjour had taken the bait, but now the real work would begin. The biggest problem with Bur Dubai, next to the traffic, was the fact that there was no parking. The Arabian Courtyard offered a valet service, but there was no way Harvath was going to place his operation at the mercy of how quickly valets could bring a car around.

Being able to devote someone from their team to remain with a vehicle was a big advantage. Harvath was reminded once more of the advantages of not always going it alone. Levy and her resources were worth their weight in gold.

In addition to leaving a man with the BMW, she placed a couple of spotters outside the hotel on Al Fahidi Street to watch for Hanjour. Once they saw him, their job was to figure out whether he was alone. Levy also put a man and a woman in the restaurant to have a long, leisurely dinner at a table where they could observe everyone who came and went.

It wasn’t exactly the light footprint Harvath had envisioned, but it was the right thing to do and Levy more than knew her stuff.

Their biggest challenge was where and how to actually grab Hanjour. Bur Dubai was a lot like being in the French Quarter in New Orleans, but with three times the people. It was going to be impossible to pull up, stuff him in the trunk, and take off without anyone noticing. Even if they could slip him a drug like Rohypnol, it would be a tightrope act getting him out of the restaurant and through the hotel without attracting attention.

What they needed was for Hanjour to do their work for them. He needed to walk right into their arms, and that gave Harvath an idea.

When he presented it to Levy, the first thing she said was, “What’s Plan B?” It wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.

But as Harvath explained how it could play out, Levy came around to his way of thinking. That didn’t mean they didn’t need a Plan B. Harvath and Levy assembled one, as well as Plans C, D, and E. If all else failed, they’d go to Plan F — universally known as Fuck it, we’ll do it live. Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to anticipate and plan for all eventualities, things just went south. When that happened, it usually happened fast. At that point, you relied upon your training and did everything possible to secure the objective. A lot of times it got messy. Very messy. Harvath was hoping this wouldn’t be one of those times.

At seven minutes to six, the call came in that a man fitting Khuram Hanjour’s description had just pulled up in front of the hotel. He valet-parked his white Mercedes and walked inside. There was no one else with him.

As the spotter relayed what the man was wearing, Anne Levy told the rest of her team, particularly the couple she had sitting in the restaurant, that the target had arrived.

Turning to Harvath she said, “Now what?”

“Now we wait,” he replied.

The Arabian Courtyard Hotel was built around a grand atrium with glass elevators you could watch ascend. That allowed Cowles, who was seated in the ground-floor lounge, to watch Hanjour cross the marble lobby, get into one of the elevators, and take it up to the Silk Route level. After relaying the target’s movements, he sat back and pretended to enjoy a coffee as he continued to scan the lobby and the front door for any unwanted guests.

“We’ve got him,” the female CIA operative said over her Bluetooth earpiece when Hanjour entered the restaurant. She watched him speak with the hostess and then be shown to a table near the windows.

Hanjour was a balding man of medium height with a thin build. He wore an obviously dyed, tightly cropped black beard and a pair of stylish, frameless glasses. He had paired his khaki trousers with a white, short-sleeved silk dress shirt and a pair of soft leather driving shoes. On his right wrist was a large gold Rolex and on his left pinky finger was a gold signet ring. He wore no other jewelry and carried nothing in his hands that they could see.

He ordered a gin and tonic and surveyed the room as he sipped, waiting for his companion to arrive. The young CIA couple kept him in their peripheral vision, pretending to be more into each other than anything else. The last thing they needed was for him to know he was under surveillance.

When the clock on his phone read two minutes past six o’clock, Harvath texted Hanjour a picture. It showed a pillow on a turned-down bed. Propped up against the pillow were two small plastic bags. One was filled with what looked like meth and the other with what looked like synthetic marijuana. There was a box of condoms and a red rose. The only text that accompanied the picture was the room number, 501.

Hanjour slid the phone from his pocket and read the message. Taking out his wallet, he left some money for the waitress and walked over to the hostess. He said a few words to her and she smiled as he tipped her. Then he exited the restaurant.

The female CIA operative rang Levy. “He just left.”

Levy pinged Cowles down in the lobby and told him to watch the elevators. Raising his coffee cup to his mouth, Cowles turned his attention to the elevators and gave a play-by-play of what he saw, ending with, “The elevator is stopping on five. He’s getting off. Headed in your direction.”

Levy looked at Harvath and said, “Here he comes.”

The door had been propped open using the swing guard lock. When Hanjour entered, he would walk down a short hallway with the darkened bathroom to his right. The bedside table lamps were on, but had been covered with pieces of red fabric to dim their brightness and add to the mood. A small amount of incense had been burned so that it would appear that perhaps Fahad was trying to cover up that he had already started partying and was ready to go right to play mode. The bedspread had been kicked off and dropped on the floor at the foot of the bed. The radio was playing softly.

Dim lights, a little bit of incense, the bedspread on the floor, and music. It was all designed to throw Hanjour off balance; to reinforce in his mind what he wanted to see.

All they needed now was for him to walk through the door, which was exactly what he did next.