Full Black

CHAPTER 24

Having seen the book on the dashboard of the car outside, Chase knew the assault team would hit the apartment before nightfall. There was no way of knowing if they had seen his signal. He hoped so, because he couldn’t do it a second time. There was a very bad vibe in the safe house. If he got caught opening the blinds or any of the windows again, he had no doubt there’d be hell to pay.

Sabah had returned, and he and Karami had shut themselves up in one of the rooms at the end of the hall. Chase wondered if there were any computers or weapons hidden away in that room. He also wondered where Sabah had gone in such a hurry and what he and Karami were now talking about.

Chase was certain that the Uppsala cell was in the final stages of something. What it was, he had no idea, but it sure felt as if they were about to go operational on something. Was the Uppsala cell Aazim’s dead man switch? Had he provided Karami with a target deck and a way to activate the network’s sleepers in the United States and elsewhere upon his death?

These were all questions Chase couldn’t wait to start asking. He also wanted to know why it had been so important for the Uppsala cell to bring Aazim’s nephew in. Was the uncle just that overprotective, or did Mansoor know something or have access to something of value? They’d be getting to the bottom of all of it soon enough.

In the meantime, Chase stayed with the cell’s cannon fodder and watched war porn. One of the jihadists got up at one point to get tea and actually brought back an extra glass for the newcomer. It was a good sign; a sign of respect. Quietly, Chase hoped that it meant that they had begun to accept him. Their willingness to believe he was one of them would affect how successful the interrogations would be once they had been deposited in whatever black site Harvath had arranged for them.

Chase knew exactly what was in store for him. Very likely, he was going to get Tasered when the assault team hit the safe house. He’d be FlexCuff’d and hooded. If he resisted, which he planned on doing quite vehemently, he’d get a tune-up, which meant he’d be slapped around.

After they were tossed in the truck with the other cell members and spirited back to the farm, Harvath would line them up in the barn and have their clothes cut away from their bodies with EMT shears. They’d then receive the same “packaging” all extraordinary rendition prisoners had been receiving since 9/11.

After being fitted with suppositories containing a psychotropic drug to make them more compliant and to disorient their comprehension of time and space, they’d be fitted with diapers for the long plane ride, dressed in matching coveralls, shackled, and with their heads still hooded with bags that allowed for no light to get in, they’d have sensory deprivation headsets fitted over their ears.

From there, they’d be placed in a different windowless vehicle from the moving van that had been used in the raid. Harvath’s clever plan for getting them out of the country, with the Swedish government none the wiser, would be put into effect.

Chase wasn’t looking forward to any of it, but no one had forced him to take this assignment. He had agreed to it because he knew that until they had hunted down every last member of Aazim Aleem’s network, America wouldn’t be safe. You couldn’t just cut out part of this kind of cancer and hope that it never came back. You had to get all of it. Any cells left behind were guaranteed to metastasize.

There were many ways of going after the cancer of Islamic terrorism. There was the radiation of interrupting terrorist financing, the chemotherapy of denying havens from within which to train and operate, and the most delicate and most efficient method, which was also the most dangerous and time-consuming, was to go in with a scalpel and carve up every single cell. Only through the last and most extreme method could you be absolutely sure that no cancer remained behind. It was in this particular area that men like Sean Chase and Scot Harvath were particularly skilled.

But unlike Harvath, because of his background Chase could be injected right into the Muslim corpus. He could drift through the Islamic bloodstream, seeking out the most radical, the most deadly cancer cells without ever being seen as foreign and eliciting any sort of immune response. Once in, he could mount his own T-cell response, calling in highly efficient killer cells, run by men like Scot Harvath, to attack the cancer and permanently purge it from the body.

Harvath liked Chase’s no-BS attitude and ability to cut through red tape to get the job done. Though he had been trained for long-term deepcover assignments with little to no contact with his handlers, when he did have to deal with day-to-day operations at the CIA, the bureaucracy bothered him. It had chewed up and spat out a lot of good operatives. A handful of them had written books about how broken Agency culture was. Much to Langley’s displeasure, one of the most insightful, The Human Factor, had become a huge favorite among CIA employees and a de facto field manual for those who wanted to keep America safe. Chase had read The Human Factor so many times the cover had fallen off.

And while he hadn’t been at the Agency long enough yet to become completely jaded, the lessons he learned from the book informed everything he did. That was part of the growing appreciation he had for Harvath. Mission success was everything to a guy like that. If Harvath broke some of the crockery along the way, that was the cost of doing business. He’d worry about the Krazy Glue later. Though it would drive his bosses nuts, that was exactly how Chase thought the war on terror, or whatever politically correct term the Seventh Floor was using these days, ought to be fought.

As the thought drifted from his mind, Chase watched one of the jihadists lean over and grab a hookah pipe from the corner. Standing up, he took it into the bathroom and filled it with cold water.

“Do you smoke?” he asked when he returned and began packing the bowl while another man pulled out a pair of tongs and a lighter.

Chase hated tobacco, flavorful or otherwise. But the men were making a new overture toward him and he was determined to take advantage of it. “Of course,” he said.

The man with the tongs used them to withdraw a small piece of coal from a paper bag near the TV. Holding his lighter underneath, he heated the coal until it began to glow and then placed it on the screen above the fruit-flavored tobacco, or shisha. Chase was offered the honor of smoking first.

The hose was covered in brightly colored braided silk. Chase placed the plastic tip between his lips and breathed in. The water inside the pipe gurgled as the smoke was cooled and fed into the hose.

Chase took a deep drag and allowed the smoke to completely fill his lungs. He held it for a moment and then, instead of allowing it to slowly escape through his mouth or nostrils, he encouraged his coughing response and began hacking.

The four jihadists roared with laughter. The newcomer was obviously a neophyte and had no experience with a hookah. Instead of telling the truth, he had lied to protect his manliness.

Still hacking, Chase struggled to stand. He continued coughing as he placed his hands on his thighs and fought to breathe. The cannon fodder laughed as if they were watching the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

Being the butt of the joke didn’t bother Chase. In fact, that’s exactly why he’d spurred on the coughing fit. Shuffling toward the window, he kept coughing as the men kept laughing. In fact, it wasn’t until he had his hand on the blinds that they realized what he was up to.

“Don’t,” said one of the men who could barely stop laughing long enough to get the word out.

“Karami will cut your hands off,” said another.

A third added, “He’ll cut all our hands off,” as the men began laughing even harder.

“I can’t breathe,” said Chase, who was pretending to be in between coughing fits. He knew the men were serious about his not opening the window and would probably try to physically restrain him if they had to. But he had no intention of opening it. He just wanted a peek outside and would then immediately abandon the window, appearing to heed his colleagues’ warnings.

As he pulled back the edge of the blinds, Chase’s cough immediately stopped. The moving van was already outside, but it wasn’t in the right place. Harvath and the assault team had made a mistake. They were hitting the building across the street.

And though it was difficult to tell for sure, it looked as if someone had adjusted the windows and blinds of an apartment across the street, exactly the way he had.