Full Black

CHAPTER 20

Chase had zeroed in on the cell leader the moment he’d been shown into the apartment. Mustafa Karami was a slight man who looked much older than the other members. He sported a patchy beard, a slim nose, and a pair of deeply set, dark eyes.

He radiated a controlled, simmering anger that seemed ready to erupt at any moment. He was different from most of the jihadists Chase had come across. Not unique, just different. Most of them were not very bright, and they lacked self-control. That wasn’t Karami, though. He was the picture of self-control. He was also very intelligent. Chase could tell that just from one look at his face. That’s what made him different.

As the man embraced and kissed him on both cheeks, Chase sensed something else. This was a man who would slash your throat at a moment’s notice if he felt it necessary. He would feel no remorse about it either. He’d probably sit there and drink his chai as he watched you bleed out on the floor. Between Karami and Sabah, his number two, Chase had a lot to be concerned about.

The other cell members in the apartment were like the two men who had picked him up at the soccer field and had taken him to the garage. They were either muscle or simply jihadist cannon fodder. None of them were exceptionally intelligent nor were they particularly talented. He doubted they’d be of any intelligence value whatsoever.

After welcoming him, Karami sat Chase down and asked the huge man named Sabah to fetch tea. He made small talk as was customary and when Sabah returned with a tray, he poured the tea and offered Chase a snack. There were bowls of dates, figs, and nuts. Chase thanked him and helped himself.

“Your uncle was a wonderful soldier of Allah. He is in Paradise now.”

“Masha’Allah,” Chase replied. God has willed it.

“It was your uncle’s desire that if anything happened to him, we take care of you.”

Chase shrugged and took a sip of his tea. It was important that he maintain his aloof, disinterested hacker attitude.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

Karami was testing him as Sabah had. The last time Chase had seen Aazim Aleem was when pieces of him had been blown all over a Yemeni sidewalk, but he couldn’t exactly share that. He also couldn’t exactly share how he and Aazim had first met.

Chase had spent three years infiltrating Aazim Aleem’s terrorist network. He had worked his way right into a position next to a man named Marwan Jarrah, who was helping coordinate Aazim’s attack plans for the United States. Then Harvath showed up, Jarrah was gunned down, and Aazim disappeared, but not before several attacks in Chicago were launched and scores of people were killed.

These attacks had come on the heels of a wave of attacks in Europe targeting American tourists. Aazim had built a very sophisticated network. What bothered the CIA was that many of his American cells were believed to still be in place. Nobody knew who they were, much less where they were hiding and what they had planned.

Chase had met with Aazim only twice. He was the only American operative to have ever done so. The first time had been brief and had taken place while Chase and Jarrah were traveling through Pakistan. The second meeting had happened in Chicago and had been much more substantive. Chase had finally put another piece of the puzzle in place as he discovered that Jarrah was working for Aazim, who controlled the network.

The meeting had taken place in Jarrah’s office and Chase so impressed Aazim that the terrorist mastermind invited him to help execute a nationwide string of attacks beyond what was planned for Chicago. These attacks, it was alleged, would cause airplanes to rain from the sky, radiation and plague to infect American citizens, and multiple other horrors. Aazim despised America and his goal was for it to know terror like it had never known terror before.

And as that prediction began to unfold, a Mumbai-style siege was launched against three commuter train stations in Chicago and many innocent civilians had been killed.

Jarrah had explained to Chase that Aazim had come to Chicago to check on their final preparations. From there he was going to Los Angeles for the next attack, and he wanted Chase to handle an attack planned for New York City.

When one of the Chicago train station plots was interrupted and Jarrah was murdered, the L.A. and New York attacks never materialized. According to chatter, Aazim had fled the United States. That’s when Chase had been charged with hunting him down.

The hunt had led him to Yemen, but Aazim had proven elusive, at least for the CIA. Harvath, somehow, had much better luck. He not only located the terrorist mastermind, he managed to capture him and stuff him in his trunk.

Chase had just been given the keys to Harvath’s car when it was struck by an RPG and Aazim was incinerated.

The reason the CIA had allowed Chase to join Harvath’s current Uppsala operation was that they were bound and determined to uncover the remainder of Aazim’s network, both within the United States and, if possible, the rest of the world.

The powers that be back at Langley didn’t much care for Harvath’s cowboy reputation. They cared even less for Harvath’s boss, Reed Carlton, but they had little choice but to cooperate.

Chase had invested years of his life in infiltrating Aazim’s network. He knew more about it than anyone else in the intelligence world, and he made it crystal clear to Agency brass that if they didn’t sign off on his joining Harvath’s op, he would quit and sign up with the Carlton Group. Either way, he would finish the job he had started.

Chase was a virtual encyclopedia of Aazim Aleem information. British by birth, the terrorist had been a fat man in his late sixties with a long gray beard when he had been shredded in Yemen. But his girth and facial hair were not his most distinguishing features.

That honor belonged to the two stainless steel hooks that he had where his hands should have been. He had traveled to Afghanistan in the eighties to fight in the jihad against the Soviets, and legend had it that Aazim had lost his hands attempting to defuse a land mine near a school. The story was pure propaganda. The jihadist was a bomb maker and had lost them in a premature detonation.

He had been an adept Islamic scholar who had studied at Egypt’s prestigious hotbed of Muslim extremism, Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Known only as the “Mufti of Jihad,” his anonymous writings and audio sermons on violent jihad were famous throughout the Muslim world. Until Chase, no Western intelligence service had ever been able to uncover the Mufti of Jihad’s true identity. Aazim had traveled extensively promoting war against the infidels and the West while collecting a full disability pension back in the United Kingdom.

Since no one really knew who he was until Chase discovered him, the man had traveled freely under his real name. Once he disappeared, Chase went back and studied that travel extensively. It wasn’t hard to put together a trail of tickets and every time his U.K. passport had been scanned. It was how he was able to answer Karami’s question. “I saw him about three months ago,” he replied. “Before he left for Chicago.”

“And who was he meeting in Chicago?” asked the leader of the Uppsala cell.

“Marwan Jarrah.”

“And then?”

“And then,” replied Chase, “New York and Los Angeles, but he left for Yemen and I never saw him again.”

Karami studied the young man’s face. There was no way he could know these things unless he was exactly who he said he was. Nevertheless, Sabah distrusted the newcomer, and Sabah had excellent instincts. “Tell me about the Sheikh. The Sheikh from Qatar.”

Sabah seemed interested in this question and leaned forward.

Chase looked at both men. “What Sheikh?”

“Surely,” stated the cell leader, “your uncle confided in you enough to mention the Sheikh.”

“Apparently not completely. He never mentioned any Sheikh.”

“You never questioned where the funding came from?”

“Why would I care? I’m an IT person,” replied Chase. “I had nothing to do with his finances.”

Chase’s mind was moving like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to align the information so that the entire puzzle fell into place. He had never heard about any Sheikh from Qatar. This was completely new to him.

Marwan Jarrah had been near the top of the organization’s pyramid, but Chase had always known he was taking his orders from someone above him. That someone had turned out to be Aazim Aleem. The next question was, who had been giving Aazim orders? Was he the ultimate string-puller, or was there someone else? And what was the Uppsala cell’s connection to all of this?

At least Harvath had played it smart. Had he thrown a hood over the nephew’s head and dragged him off to some black site in Eastern Europe for interrogation the minute they’d uncovered him, instead of surveilling him, the United States might not ever have learned about the Uppsala cell. It had come as a complete surprise even to the real Mansoor Aleem. His uncle Aazim had been smart. The man kept his network compartmentalized. He had to. It was like bulkheads. If one was compromised, it didn’t have to mean the entire ship was going down.

Which brought Chase back to the Uppsala cell. Why had Aazim set it up? What was its purpose? Was it an insurance policy of sorts, a guarantee that if he was taken out, their mission would continue? If so, did that mean he had entrusted them with the knowledge of his nephew? There were so many pieces of the puzzle missing.

As Chase spun the blocks of information in his mind, Karami asked him another question. It put him on edge, because it showed the cell leader was not fully convinced he was who he said he was. “Tell me about your uncle’s impairment.”

“What impairment?” Chase replied. “His hands?”

Karami said nothing. His face was impassive, inscrutable.

“He lost them in Afghanistan,” Chase continued. His gaze was locked on Karami. Just out of his field of view, he could feel Sabah’s eyes burning a hole right through him.

“How did he lose them?” asked the cell leader.

Chase could sense Sabah was ready to handle any incorrect answer. “Do you want the fable?” replied Chase. “Or the truth?”

“As the prophet, peace be upon him, said, we should appropriate truth for ourselves and avoid lying.”

Chase nodded. “It’s a shame, as the fable is much more glamorous. He lost his hands when a bomb he was building detonated prematurely. It also resulted in pitted scars around his left eye. This is why he often wore sunglasses, even in the evenings. People mistook him on occasion for being blind, but he had perfect vision.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Karami, who smiled. He also sensed Sabah relax slightly, but not much.

The cell leader was about to ask another question when one of the cell members appeared in the doorway and asked if the trio would be joining the others for Asr prayers.

“Do you feel up to it?” Karami asked.

“The key of Paradise is prayer,” replied Chase, quoting Mohammed. Apparently the men who had been watching him at the garage had told Karami of his inability to complete the Salah.

The men stood and Chase was directed to a bathroom where he could perform his ritual ablutions. After washing his hands and feet, he joined the others in the apartment’s dining room. There was no furniture, only prayer rugs spaced evenly along the floor.

Once all of the men were present, prayers were begun. Chase had been given an extra rug to use and he went through the motions perfectly. No one would have known that he wasn’t Muslim.

As he prayed, he was able to take a head count of how many men there were in the apartment. He’d also been able to at least glance into all of the rooms. From what he could tell, there were no booby-traps. He didn’t see any explosives or weapons, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t hidden away somewhere. What it did mean, though, was that there weren’t any right at hand. When Harvath and the assault team hit, they would have surprise on their side and therefore the upper hand. That was, if they hit.

Chase had still not had a chance to get to one of the windows to look outside for the car with the book on its dash. He had decided he might only get one chance to get near a window and that if he did, he should kill two birds with one stone. If he did get the opportunity, he’d look for the car while positioning the window treatments so that the team outside would have a rough idea of what was waiting for them when they took down the apartment.

Both while moving through the apartment and while at prayer, Chase kept his eyes peeled for objects he could use as weapons. If Harvath and the assaulters didn’t succeed in locating the safe house, Chase was going to have to either sneak out or fight his way out. With nine men present, Karami probably ran an around-the-clock guard. Chase slowly began preparing himself for what fighting his way out might look like. Once again he reflected on the lessons of Hagakure.

But try as he might, he couldn’t quite focus. Something was bothering him. It took him several minutes to figure it out. There was something missing in the apartment. It wasn’t just weapons that were absent. It was computers. There wasn’t a single one to be seen. If a raid did take place, they might be able to get to hidden weapons quickly, but computers? Not a chance. Not unless there was a rack of them in one of the closets, all powered up and ready for their hard drives to be wiped clean or blown to kingdom come with the touch of a button.

There weren’t many places they could be hidden. He planned on finding out if there were any here or not.

After prayers, he expected Karami to pick back up with his questioning, but the cell leader apparently had other pressing business and disappeared into one of the rooms along with Sabah and two other men and closed the door. This left Chase free to converse with the remaining cell members. It also left him somewhat free to move about the apartment.