Against All Enemies

44 COLD-TRAILING

The entire world’s intelligence and law enforcement assets were hunting for Samad and his men, and Moore had been handed an address on a slip of paper that could very well be the most significant clue anyone had.

However, that information gave him pause.

If he turned it over to the Agency, and they in turn released that intel to all agencies worldwide, the hyper-alert Samad with contacts everywhere would vanish before they ever arrived.

So with the paper tucked tightly into his pocket, Moore had come to the old safe house. It was a bittersweet return. He reflected on the many conversations he’d had with Rana as they’d sat on the balcony among the Margallah Hills, the lights of Islamabad flickering in the distance. He could almost hear the kid’s voice: “What’s wrong, Money? You look really tense now.”

And he was, while he waited impatiently for all the connections of the video conference he’d set up for himself, Slater, O’Hara, and Towers.

Once everyone was online, he abandoned all pleasantries and hit them immediately with the news. “I’ve got a credible lead on Samad. It comes from Wazir, and I trust it. I’m flying out tonight.”

“You know where Samad is?” asked O’Hara.

“I might.”

“Then let’s get a team together,” said Slater. “How many guys you need? Ten? Twelve?”

Moore shook his head. “Look, if he’s on the run, he’s traveling with his two lieutenants. That’s it. Maybe Gallagher’s helping them, I don’t know. Point is, Towers and I got this.”

“You’re pitching a two-man show? Are you kidding me?” asked O’Hara, raising his voice.

“No, sir. I’m not.”

O’Hara leaned toward the camera. “We need to capture this guy alive — because we’re hearing he’ll take over for Rahmani, and that means he’s already got significant operational intelligence. We also assume he knows where the rest of the missile teams are, and not a one of those guys has been captured. Make no mistake: Samad is the Highest-Value Target in the world right now.”

“Sir, with all due respect, the importance of the target does not necessarily dictate the size and scope of the operation. If my lead is solid, our target is already out of the U.S., and if you saddle me with a team to go down there, we’re harder to move, harder to hide, and we make a lot more noise. If the operation goes south, you’ve got an increased likelihood of witnesses, bodies, and yes, you’ve been there, done that. Towers and I will barely make a ripple. You go in there with big guns, and our guy will be long gone.”

O’Hara sighed. “So you want to go down there. Exactly where is that?”

“I’ve got an address in Mexico — and given what you’ve just said, it’s not only imperative that we take Samad alive but that we’re able to question him without political interference.”

Slater cleared his throat and weighed in. “Moore, if you and Towers get this bastard, I don’t want any other agencies involved. I don’t want the administration involved — no one, that is, until we’ve had our time with him.”

“We’re on the same page. So we’re talking about rendition.”

“Gentlemen, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down,” said O’Hara. “I can neither confirm nor deny I’ve heard any of this, and I’ll need to step out at this time.” He rose, giving them a hard look and a thumbs-up.

“We understand,” said Slater.

After 9/11, approximately three thousand suspected terrorist prisoners were captured and imprisoned by the CIA, an act known as “extraordinary rendition.” These prisoners were transferred around the world to top-secret detention centers known as “black sites,” many of them in Europe. The Council of Europe and a majority of the European Union parliament claimed that these prisoners were tortured and that both the United States and British governments were well aware of the entire operation. A more recent Executive Order signed by the President of the United States opposed rendition torture.

Consequently, O’Hara was excusing himself because he needed deniability. He would not knowingly order Moore to capture Samad then have him transferred to a black site for torture. The United States government did not engage in acts of torture, did not transfer people to places where officials knew they’d be tortured, and black sites no longer existed.

On the other hand, Slater was thankfully still living in the past. He lifted his voice: “You capture that bastard, and I’ll work with you all the way.”

“Then here’s the deal,” said Moore. “No teams, no other U.S. forces involved. We keep the administration clean. Just Towers and I. No witnesses. You let us hunt Samad down our way — and then you’ll get your rendition, and we’ll get what we need out of that miserable fuck, no matter what it takes. Otherwise, Washington gets involved, he’s moved into military jurisdiction …and even if Samad never sees the inside of a courtroom and rots away at Gitmo, he’ll never be put in a position to tell us what we want. We get him, we get what we need, then we stage some fake capture and turn him over to the administration and let them play with him — after we’ve already bled him dry. My point is, if we don’t have this all planned first, then capturing him is a waste of time. His intel is worth more than his life.”

“Wow,” said Towers with a gasp. “Wow.”

“Mr. Towers, you sure you want in?” asked Slater. “This could get ugly, as in career-ending ugly.”

Towers snorted and checked his watch. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have time to talk. I need to catch a plane.”

“Call me on your way to the airport,” said Moore. Towers broke his connection, leaving Moore and Slater alone.

“I asked him, and I’ll ask you,” began Slater. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah. Just work with me and don’t change your mind. Don’t bow to the pressure. And don’t forget about all the blood, sweat, and tears we’ve shed trying to flush out these bastards. If Samad can help us disrupt their operations, then it’s worth it.” Moore’s gaze went distant. “I used to sit out here on this balcony, talking to Rana about doing just that. So let’s finish what we started.”

The gated and security-patrolled beachfront community of Las Conchas was on mainland Mexico’s west coast, overlooking the Gulf of California, and was about four hundred miles west of Ciudad Juárez. The address Wazir had given his great-grandson was for an estate comprising three separate living areas, with three kitchens, eleven bedrooms, and twelve baths. The home was on the market for $2.7 million, and, according to the real estate site that Moore had accessed, it offered 180-degree oceanfront vistas. The home belonged to Mr. David Almonte Borja.

And with just a little more research, Moore learned that Borja was, in fact, Ernesto Zúñiga’s brother-in-law and, according to Dante Corrales, the most likely heir to the Sinaloa Cartel.

But here was the kicker: Just forty-eight hours prior, Borja had been taken into custody by Federal Police inspectors and was being held in Mexico City on murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and drug-smuggling charges. The timing of his arrest was not entirely coincidental; Federal Police Inspector Alberto Gómez had named two colleagues who had, in turn, given up many more details regarding Borja and his relationship to the cartel.

That Las Conchas had its own security force made accessing the community even easier. Moore and Towers met with the security company’s owner, who understood the English alphabet very well: CIA.

The owner said that according to his guards, no one had been in the house since Borja had been arrested. Had the real estate agent shown the home to anyone? They didn’t think so. Multimillion-dollar homes seldom drew a lot of traffic, and were shown by appointment only after the potential buyer had been prequalified.

“Give your guards the night off with pay,” Moore told the man. “We’ll cover it.”

“Okay.”

They left him and went to see the real estate agent, an elegant woman in her late fifties who bore a striking resemblance to the movie star Sophia Loren. She was equally cooperative and somewhat depressed because she’d learned of Borja’s arrest and would lose a major commission. She gave them the code to the lockbox on the front door and the code to disarm the security system. Moore would not have minded picking the lock; there were few companies on the planet who could machine their parts to near flawless tolerances and still make money, which of course kept locksmiths, thieves, and spies in business.

With the Agency’s satellites focused on the home, Moore and Towers, wearing security guard uniforms, drove their golf cart into the driveway at five p.m. local time. Towers went around the side of the house to check on the power: Still on.

Moore plugged in the code on the lockbox, removed the key, and worked the lock. The main building had three security keypads: one in the entrance foyer, one in the garage, and another in the master bedroom. The door opened. No warning tone to indicate the alarm was about to go off or beeping to indicate the door had simply been opened. There was no sound at all, as though the alarm had not only been turned off but dismantled. Moore was right. The keypad’s status light was unlit. Wires had been cut. Odd.

They moved quietly inside, across mosaic tile that formed a zodiac wheel in the center of the grand foyer. This main house was still fully furnished in a fusion of contemporary and Southwest designs, which was to say that everything looked damned expensive to Moore. From somewhere within came the faint sound of a television.

Moore gave Towers a hand signal. Towers nodded and held back. He was recovering well from his shoulder and arm wounds, but it’d be another year before he entered his next Ironman competition. Moore clutched his suppressed Glock with both hands and took point.

A hallway ahead. A mirror on the wall, television images flashing in that mirror. He took two more steps. The bedroom door to the left was open. He smelled food …Meat? Chicken? He wasn’t sure. He glanced to his right, back into the mirror, and froze. He looked back at Towers, emphatic: Don’t fucking move! Then he faced the mirror once more, calculating distances, his own reaction time, how quickly he thought his opponent might move. He’d call on muscle memory and sheer aggression honed by years of fieldwork.

He finished plotting his advance, rehearsed it in his mind’s eye, and knew that if he thought about it anymore, he’d get the shakes. Time to move.

A toilet flushed. The master bathroom lay just inside the suite, and a woman’s voice came from within: “I’m so drunk now!”

Moore flicked a look back at Towers, pointed, and mouthed the command: You get her.

And then Moore bolted into the bedroom, where on the other side of the broad room sat a most familiar man in his boxer shorts and with a bag of tortilla chips balanced in his lap.

Bashir Wassouf — aka Bobby Gallagher — arguably one of the most ruthless traitors in the history of the United States of America, gaped at the man standing in his bedroom.

Gallagher had a Beretta sitting on the table beside his recliner. Moore had already seen it and had anticipated which hand the traitor might use to grab it. Gallagher’s mere presence suggested that he didn’t know Borja had been arrested — a grave error on his part.

He was already reaching for his pistol as Moore shouted, “Hold it!”

At nearly the same time, the girl screamed and cursed behind them. Towers hollered at her to freeze.

In the next heartbeat, Gallagher ignored Moore’s command and snatched up his gun.

Expecting to be shot, Moore fired first, hitting Gallagher in the shoulder, then putting a second round in his leg, but it was already too late.

Gallagher had the Beretta in his mouth.

“No, no, no, no!” Moore screamed, lunging toward the man as the shot rang out.

Within the next hour, the local police arrived, the woman (a prostitute) was taken into custody, and Moore and Towers tore apart the entire estate.

Sitting atop a nightstand in one of the back bedrooms were eleven Hershey’s Kisses wrappers rolled into eleven silver balls.

Six hours later, Moore and Towers were sitting in their rental car in the parking lot, about to go inside to question Borja. They had nothing to lose. Gallagher had taken Samad’s location to his grave. The only other living witnesses were three of the six terrorists who’d boarded the planes, and they’d all repeated the same story: They knew only their mission, nothing else, and Moore tended to believe that, because the Taliban most often used compartmentalized cells. One terrorist was pulled from the wreckage of the San Antonio flight and had been so badly burned on his face and neck that he couldn’t have talked even if he had wanted to.

But Borja …He had to know something. He was involved with Gallagher. Samad had left those Hershey’s Kisses wrappers at his house. The connection was there. He couldn’t deny that anymore.

Moore spoke to Slater, who agreed. A deal must be brokered.

Borja was much younger than expected — mid-thirties, perhaps — with a shaved head and enough tattoos to earn him the admiration of most sicarios. But when he’d opened his mouth, his cadence, diction, and inflections were those of a well-educated businessman, and that was auspicious, because they were about to get down to some serious business.

The interrogation room smelled like bleach. Apparently, the last guy who’d been questioned there had been, according to the police, “sloppy.”

Moore narrowed his gaze on Borja and began abruptly: “Gallagher’s dead. He killed himself at your house in Las Conchas.”

Borja folded his arms over his chest. “Who?”

“All right, let me explain this very carefully. You’re going to jail for the rest of your life. I’m willing to help broker a deal between our two governments. If you know anything about where Samad is, you tell me. And if you’re telling the truth, I get you full amnesty. Clean fucking slate. You walk away. Let me say that again very slowly …You …walk …away.”

“Who’s Samad?”

Towers interrupted Moore by sliding over his laptop so that Moore could glimpse the screen. Their colleagues at Fort Meade had come through once again: cell-phone calls between Borja and Rahmani picked up by the NSA’s satellites, the evidence finally collected and confirmed only hours ago.

“You were talking to Rahmani, too, huh?” Moore asked. “There’s no point in lying now. We know.”

Borja rolled his eyes.

“Were you helping Samad escape?”

Borja leaned forward on his chair. “If you’re going to get me full amnesty, I want it in writing from the government. I want my lawyers to go over it to make sure it’s legitimate.”

“Okay, but that’ll take time. And I’m sure our buddy is on the move. I promise you, you give me what I want and I get Samad, you’re free.”

“I’m not going to believe one fucking gringo.”

Moore rose. “Your choice.” He turned to Towers. “Let’s go …Start extradition papers. We’ll deal with this asshole in the States.” They headed for the door.

Borja slid back his chair and stood, his hands still cuffed behind his back. “Wait!”

Borja, like any good heir to a Mexican drug cartel, feared extradition to the United States more than the wrath of his own government, and so his shoulders had slumped and his mouth had worked to spin the yarn of how he’d been commissioned by Rahmani to form a new smuggling alliance and how he’d been charged with helping Samad and two of his lieutenants to reach a safe house in San José, Costa Rica. Samad and his men had been hidden in Borja’s vacation home, where they’d remained until just the previous night. They’d been flown in one of Borja’s private planes to Goldson International, then driven out into the jungle to a safe house on the New River Lagoon in Belize. Borja said the house was used by mules moving Colombian cocaine into the vacation areas of Cozumel and Cancún, where the coke was sold primarily to American college students. Lovely. Borja had hired a Guatemalan pilot with an R44 Raven single-engine helicopter to pick them up and fly them down to Costa Rica, with one refueling stop in Nicaragua.

Moore questioned the man about every detail, including the type of helicopter being used, the name of the pilot, the pilot’s phone number, everything and anything.

For once, their timing might be favorable. Samad and his men were scheduled to be picked up at midnight, local time, and the chopper was going to set down in one of the clearings near the ruins of Lamanai (a word that meant submerged crocodile in the Mayan language). The Mask Temple, High Temple, and Temple of the Jaguar Masks were frequented by tourists during the day but closed in the evenings. The safe house was about nine miles south down the river, and Samad and his men were supposed to take one of several Zodiacs up to the rendezvous point. Borja had given Samad two bodyguards, so Moore and Towers were expecting a party of five.

They would move in on the safe house as a team of two, but Slater was already working on some creative backup forces for them, should the need arise. He’d already arranged for weapons and transport.

Moore’s watch read 9:12 p.m. local time when they landed at Goldson International Airport, just north of Belize City. The plane was met by two vehicles: a four-wheel-drive Jeep Wrangler and another vehicle, a local taxi.

“Welcome to the armpit of the Caribbean,” Towers said, lifting his shirt against the stifling humidity.

Moore snorted. “You’ve been here before.”

A young man no more than twenty-two, with a crew cut and dressed in black T-shirt and khaki pants, hurried out of the cab, opened the trunk, and tossed a big duffel bag into the back of the Wrangler, even as the Jeep’s driver, a man who could be the first man’s brother, left the Jeep and hurried into the back of the cab. Moore approached.

“You’re all set here, sir,” the kid said, his British accent unmistakable. “Night-vision goggles on the front seat. Garmin GPS has been programmed. Just listen to the nice lady with the sexy voice, and she’ll tell you how to get there.”

Moore shook the kid’s hand. “Thank you.”

“It’s not over yet, right?” He thrust a satellite phone into Moore’s hand.

Moore nodded and hopped into the Jeep, with Towers coming around the other side.

“Great service around here,” he said.

Moore threw the Jeep in gear. “I was just trying to impress you, boss.”

“I’m duly impressed.” Towers tapped a couple of buttons on the GPS, and the sexy lady with the British accent told them they had 30.41 miles to their destination. “Now, then, I’ve just got one more question: What if Borja lied?”

“You mean we get to the safe house and no one’s home? They’re already gone or they weren’t there in the first place?”

“Yeah.”

“I just checked before we got off the plane. The National Reconnaissance Office has had eyes on the house since we called it in. NASA and a whole group of universities are always using satellites to map the ruins here, so the NRO’s got access to quite a few sources. They already spotted two individuals out on the dock. They’re there. And remember: Borja knows he doesn’t get shit if we don’t get Samad. That punk in jail is our number-one fan.”

The sexy GPS lady told them to take the left fork in the road, which Moore did, and they bounced over several potholes and continued on, the headlights pushing out through the swirling bugs toward the narrow passage, the power poles like those grave markers in San Juan Chamula. The dense jungle occasionally grew alive with the shimmering eyes of troops of baboons watching them from the trees. They had to go through a police checkpoint, but the officers there had already been informed of their presence by their British contacts and waved them through.

When they reached the sign for the Howler Monkey Resort, Moore donned the night-vision goggles and switched off the headlights to cover the last eight miles to the house. After they passed the main lodge and cabins, the road grew a little more rutted and uneven, and Moore veered twice around dead turtles taken out by other motorists, although they had yet to see another car.

While it felt like he and Towers were alone, thousands of miles from home and driving deeper into the Belizean jungle, Slater, along with analysts in the counterterrorism and counterintelligence centers, was at this very moment monitoring them, reporting their every move, and he and the analysts were holding their collective breaths.

He and Towers drove on in silence, each man mentally preparing for the raid to come. Moore wondered if Towers was a religious man, or maybe he chalked it all up to fate or a merciless universe. For his part, Moore thought in more simple terms: It was time to say thank you to all the people who’d made the ultimate sacrifice. It was time to capture this bastard Samad and do it for them, in their name.

And yes, the trail had finally grown warm. Very warm.

Within one mile of the safe house, Moore pulled off the road, threw the Jeep into park, and turned off the engine. He and Towers looked at each other, banged fists, then climbed out.

It took a few seconds before Moore realized that his boss was humming a familiar rock-and-roll anthem: Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” Moore smiled weakly as he wrenched open the Jeep’s tailgate, and they got to work.