Blow the House Down (19 page)

“Remember, I know Khalid,” he replied.

The prince recounted how he'd first run into KSM at the Intercon Hotel in Peshawar. They'd struck up enough of a relationship for him to see that KSM always seemed to have money—odd because his family was poor. KSM and the prince became close. KSM eventually told him that he'd been approached when he was at school in North Carolina by an elderly gentleman who spoke fluent Arabic and had come there to recruit “consultants on the Middle East.” The offer seemed innocuous enough and KSM accepted. When he graduated, the man bought him a ticket to Peshawar. Every two months, he would appear himself, pass KSM an envelope stuffed with cash, and debrief him on the war in Afghanistan.

“Don't tell me this is the old man in the picture, the one with his head cut out? The one you think is CIA and is called Oliver?” I asked, still not ready to believe any of our officers had ever met bin Laden, let alone KSM.

“This is what I've been trying to tell you. The old man in the picture was a CIA agent, Khalid's case officer.”

The story was getting more improbable by the moment. KSM one of ours, an informant? This was going to take a while to sink in.

“Are you sure you don't know who the Iranian was?” I asked, still trying to piece this all together.

The prince shook his head.

“It's important. There's this Pasdaran colonel I've been tracking for years. If they're one and the same…”

“Do you know the name of the martyr who drove a truck into the Marine barracks in Beirut? Of course not. Some things will never be known. Don't you think it's enough that a Pasdaran officer is keeping company with a man who once tried to bring down twelve airliners?”

I didn't need to answer. KSM's dreams were clear enough to everyone. In 1994, when he was in Manila, he planned to blow up twelve American airliners over the Pacific. He'd also plotted to assassinate Clinton and the pope. When I first heard about KSM, I thought he was a fraud. He didn't appear to be capable of executing any of his plans, either back then or now. But it was an entirely different matter if he was really in league with the Pasdaran.

“Khalid found a way to make money.” The prince's voice momentarily surprised me. I'd wandered into some other zone.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

The prince told me how the Kuwaitis had pieced together from telephone taps that there was an underside to KSM's plan to blow up twelve airplanes: He was betting on the stock market—options. Several months before the attack was to occur, he'd bought deep-in-the-money puts on airline companies that would have been affected had the attack succeeded. The trades were made through numbered accounts in the Caymans and banks in Puerto Rico.

“I'm sorry, your highness, this all has the markings of someone's fabrication. I've dealt with crap like this for the last twenty-five years. And right now my bullshit detector's in the red zone.”

The prince opened up a portmanteau and pulled out a six-inch sheaf of documents.

“These are transcripts of intercepts: Khalid's calls back to his family in Kuwait. They're genuine, believe me. My brother has the actual taped conversations.”

“Your brother?”

“He's the adviser to our intelligence service.”

You had to love small, tight families like the Al Sabah.

The prince picked out a transcript of one of KSM's calls to a telephone booth in Kuwait City on June 16, 2000. After KSM asks about family and news from Kuwait, he says he's sent “six chips” to Kuwait by courier.

“Six chips?” I asked.

“Prepaid Swiss cell SIM cards to be used by his network for the next operation. We intercepted all six. The amazing thing was that they were all in sequence. Now we're able to intercept most of Khalid's calls.”

“Did you tell the CIA station about this?”

“Of course. My brother gave the chips to the station to copy. He also told them about the call options. But there's been no response.”

The prince handed me more transcripts. The details were amazing: KSM's phone calls across the Middle East, and to Germany, Spain, Italy, even the United States. In my twenty-five years with the CIA, I'd never seen better stuff.

“Tell me again what the station said.”

“I just told you. Nothing. Not a word.”

Unless I was completely misinterpreting the stuff the prince was showing me, this was insane. It was rock-solid intelligence that could be acted on.

The prince picked out another transcript and turned it so I could read it. In this one KSM says:

“What liquids?” I asked. “Nitrocellulose?”

KSM had been planning to use nitrocellulose to bring down the twelve planes in 1994.

“No. We think it's some other highly volatile substance. Something that could be added to jet fuel. Maybe methyl nitrate.”

We both stared at the words, hoping they might somehow translate themselves into something comprehensible.

“Are you sure your brother gave all this to the station?” I asked again.

“He did. And I'm also sure he never heard back. Not even a ‘We're looking at it' or ‘Please keep investigating.' Gross incompetence? We don't know.”

“Can I have these?” I asked.

“That's why I showed them to you,” he said. “You have to bring them to someone's attention in Washington who will understand their value. But we haven't talked about the most important thing. Khalid isn't working alone. He has an American partner.”

“You don't mean Oliver? He's barely alive in the photo. I'm sure he was dead by 1994.”

“No. Another American. We don't have his name.”

“How do you know this?”

“Again, Khalid's calls back to his family,” the prince said. “He talked about his American partner. But here's the really scary part: Khalid is about to try again.”

“Blow up airplanes?”

The prince nodded. “There's no smoking gun yet, but it's the best conclusion we can come up with.”

“He wouldn't have discussed this on the telephone,” I said.

“We would never have believed it ourselves if we hadn't arrested two Saudis transiting from Iran in October 2000. They confessed they were working for Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.”

The prince pulled out another set of documents from his portmanteau—the confessions of the two Saudis.

I skimmed through them. Indeed, both independently confessed they worked for KSM. But what really got my attention was where they both said that a Pasdaran officer had arranged their transit through Iran, including a week's stay in Tehran. They were taken to a camp where Pasdaran explosives experts briefed them on techniques to blow up planes in midair.

I studied the prince's face. If the confessions were genuine, they were a damning piece of evidence, a
causus belli
against Iran. It was plausible, too. Someone as bloody-minded as bin Laden would never let religious differences get in the way of a tactical alliance with the Pasdaran. We'd even seen evidence of it in 1996 when we found out he had met an Iranian intelligence officer in Jalalabad, a powwow that led to an agreement to conduct joint terrorist attacks. Nothing came of it, but only because Iran's ayatollahs stopped sanctioning terrorism shortly afterward. If now the Pasdaran wanted to mount an operation independently from the Iranian government, why couldn't they outsource it to someone like bin Laden, especially to help recruit suicide bombers? No one had a better pipeline to that bottomless pool.

“Is this real?” I asked. “There's nothing about stock options.” I was still stunned I was seeing intelligence this good.

“Khalid wouldn't have told them about something like that. The options are a side deal between him and the American. The Iranians and two Saudis care only about slaughtering Americans.”

“Are you absolutely sure about the options?”

The prince picked out another half dozen transcripts of KSM's calls. The conversations were elliptical and involved code words, but you could make the case that KSM was giving instructions to arrange the trades through
hawalas
—money changers. Airplanes weren't mentioned, but I took the prince's word that they were somewhere in the intercepts.

“Fascinating stuff,” I said, “but if our station in Kuwait is not buying it, I'm not sure my carrying the bad news to Washington will make a difference.”

“The reason we're sitting here together is not to pass the time. I'm giving you the intercepts to give to your government so it will listen and stop the attack—and the bloodshed that will ensue if Khalid and the Pasdaran succeed. You Americans always get history wrong when Muslims are involved.” He was studying me hard as he talked. “Khalid is not Hamas. He's not even a good Muslim. He's a murderer, pure and simple. If he succeeds in doing what we think he will try to do, he will hurt our cause. You'll blame Muslims in general. The Jews will play you the way they always do, make you blame
their
enemies—the Arabs—and not yours.”

I felt as if his eyes were burning a hole somewhere in the back of my brain.

“You don't think I know all that?” I asked. “I'll try.”

The prince grabbed the transcripts from me and looked through them until he came to the one he wanted. It was a New York City area code and telephone number.

“New York?” I asked.

He nodded. “This is fresh information not passed to the station in Kuwait. This number should help you. It belongs to one of Ramzi Yousef's contacts who was in on the World Trade Center. He was living in Queens then.

“Here's a second number,” he said, showing me another page of the transcripts.

I recognized the country and city code: Tehran.

“Khalid's contact number. Maybe this will convince the U.S. this is serious.”

“Where's KSM calling from?”

“Usually Karachi. But in this instance…well, look for yourself.”

The transcript the prince handed me was dated February 16, 2001—a call from KSM to a phone booth in Kuwait City. At one point in the handwritten transcript KSM says, “I'm in the country of the ‘Aja'im”—a common term for Iranians.

“The number Khalid is calling from is a main Pasdaran number. You should have a record of it. But before you do anything, you need to see my brother. He's coming to Lebanon next week and will bring more intercepts.”

“The more stuff he brings, the better.”

“I understand. There's something else he will tell you about: Khalid's American partner owns a company in Maine called BT Trading.”

CHAPTER 28

Balabakk, Lebanon

A
S SOON AS
I
GOT BACK TO
B
ALABAKK,
I borrowed the Palmyra's only phone, which might have been new in 1921. My first instinct was to look for the crank.

India answered on the third ring.

“Max? You were supposed to call me a week ago. I absolutely have to see you. I can't tell you what's going on, not on the phone. Can you come back here?”

“Not now. What is it?”

The silence stretched out so long, I gave the phone a shake to see if it had gone dead.

“Dad has a problem.”

“He can't find a Scottish castle with central heating?”

“Max, this is dead serious. He owes money. I have to talk to you about it.”

“Sure. I should be back in a couple weeks.”

“I think it's all going to crash before then. They want someone to run some stuff out to Riyadh in the next twenty-four hours. Any chance you could meet me there?”

“Not right now.”

“I'd heard you were in Saudi Arabia.”

“A rumor I started.”

I could hear the panic in India's voice, but my traveling to Riyadh was out. The fact that she'd heard the rumor that I was in Saudi Arabia was enough to tell me they'd taken the bait. I thought about asking India to come to Balabakk, but I knew our embassy in Beirut would never let her. Damascus might, though. People going TDY to the Middle East often stopped there on their way back to buy rugs. I didn't want to risk saying any of this on the phone, especially from the Palmyra, where the phones were sure to be tapped by Hizballah.

“Remember your dad's and my stories about the time we camped out in this part of the world?”

She had teased me about it only maybe a month earlier. I counted on her remembering.

“Sure. The border—” India caught herself, but I was sure she had the place down.

“I'll be there Saturday at noon. Alternate twenty-four hours later, same place. Third alternate forty-eight hours after the primary.”

“They'll have my head.”

“You won't be crossing any borders you're not allowed to.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Think about it all you want, but I'll be there,” I said as I hung up.

Frank out of money? As if I needed another reminder that life is fragile.

CHAPTER 29

Haditha, Syria

A
 
FREEZING WIND BLEW IN
off the barren hills. India was exhausted but radiant. She looked like a schoolgirl who'd just pulled off the prank of a lifetime as she ran up and gave me a hug. We were standing in front of a Dunkin' Donuts next to the duty-free store. The nearest Syrian checkpoint was fifty feet away, but no one was paying any attention to us.

We had an hour, maybe two at the outside, no more. She was taking a plane out that afternoon, to Geneva and on to Washington the next morning. A whirlwind round-trip. I stepped back to have a look at her, and as I did, her mood swung from giddy to serious.

“What is it, India?”

“They're going to burn you. There's a journalist—a guy with the
Times.
He's writing an article that you've hired yourself out to a foreign intel service—”

“It's bullshit.”

“What if they accuse you of working for somebody like Mossad? It could get you killed here.”

“They just want to shut me up. Is it Vernon Lawson?”

I didn't even wait for India to nod yes. Lawson was one of the tame journalists the seventh floor at Langley used to spread disinformation and punish its enemies. He'd even written a couple books on the CIA—big hits, packed with lies but with the ring of truth. No question, Vernon Lawson would be delighted to out me on page one, above the fold.

“Did you talk to your dad about Lawson?”

“I tried to.”

“Webber's behind it, right?”

“I never said—”

“You didn't have to. He was there, wasn't he?”

“Dad kept quiet.”

I could tell she was protecting her father.

“What's happening with your dad? He doesn't know you're here.”

“I wouldn't dare tell. I told you, he's mad at—”

“So why are you here?”

“I think Dad's going under.”

He was about to make me his right-hand man, I selfishly thought.

“I don't want to talk about it now,” she said, turning her face away from me. She wiped her sleeve across her eyes.

When she turned back to me, her eyes were red. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she pushed it away.

“You said something to someone that pissed Dad off.”

“Did he tell you what?” I asked, deciding to let her father's money problems drop. She would tell me in her own time.

“He wouldn't say,” she said.

“They're both pieces of shit,” I said, more to myself than to India.

“Who?” Anger. Hackles way up.

“Not your dad,” I said, correcting course, although I was starting to wonder. “Webber. Lawson.”

Calmer again. “Webber's gunning for Chief/NE.” NE is the Near East Division in the Directorate of Operations. “It's out in the open. Dad—”

India stopped talking as a Syrian armor convoy of T-64 tanks rolled past into Lebanon. The roar of the diesel engines and metal treads on the road was deafening. The decks were stacked with the crews' belongings, everything from old pots to sacks of flour. The tanks looked as if they hadn't been painted in years. The Syrian army definitely hadn't fared well since the end of the Cold War.

The last tank was rumbling by when I noticed two Syrians in uniforms walking toward us. A third joined them. We weren't going to be left alone after all.

“Time you go back to Damascus.”

“I'm not done lecturing you, Max. You can't stay—”

I gestured with my chin toward our welcoming party.

“Three choices,” I said. “We part here now. I ask the Syrians for political asylum and go to Damascus with you. Or we go into Lebanon.”

“I've always wanted to visit Lebanon.”

“You can't. You're on a plane tonight to Geneva.”

“A full-fare ticket. I'll rebook for tomorrow—tell them I got caught in traffic on the way to the airport.”

“There is no traffic in Syria.”

“Well, then the taxi had a flat tire.”

“You do understand going into Lebanon is hideously transgressive.”

Transgressive in more ways than one. India could get fired for entering a country she didn't have headquarters permission to enter. It was stupid of me, too. If you're traveling on a stolen foreign passport in a name not your own, the last thing you want to do is hang around with someone traveling on an American diplomatic passport. But I wanted more time with India and decided to flush caution down the toilet.

The Syrians were maybe half a dozen feet from us.

“Know a good place to have lunch?” India asked. “Some scenic spot in the Biqa'?”

 

We sat in the front seat of the service taxi. In the back were two Syrian grunts—one with a caged bird—and an old woman dressed all in black. Sharing a ride with foreigners didn't lighten their dispositions.

“My God, if Dad found out,” India said under her breath. She was practically giggling again.

In Bar Ilyas, we found a new taxi to take us to Balabakk. This time we sat in the backseat. For the next forty minutes, I listened to India off-load on what a miserable bureaucratic hell my ex-employer had become. Her day was spent running traces for the station in Saudi Arabia, names the case officers sent in just to make it appear they were doing something.

“How did you last so long, Max? It's mind-numbing.”

“Saudi Arabia's different. We don't do any spying there.”

“What about the good old days you and Dad liked to hash over? The romance, the adventure.”

“It'll be different when you get overseas,” I told her. “Hold on.” I'd been mouthing the same platitude for years to new recruits. It never felt so false as it did just then.

We'd reached the outskirts of Balabakk. I pointed to the military barracks on the hill just east of town.

“That's where Bill Buckley was held,” I whispered into India's ear. For all I knew, our cabdriver was the one who separated Bill's head from the rest of him.

“Who's there now?” she whispered back.

“No one. The Lebanese army took it back from Hizballah, and the Iranians left town. Well, more or less.” I didn't add that we never would have come to Balabakk for lunch otherwise.

The Palmyra Hotel's restaurant was completely empty. The waiter showed us to a table next to the immense fireplace, still filled with old embers. I ordered a bottle of wine: a Kasara red, Reserve du Couvent, a vineyard not far from Balabakk. What greater irony in life than that one of the world's best wines grows in the birthplace of Islamic terrorism.

India handed me my glass, took hers, grabbed my arm, and pulled me back into the lobby so she could take another look at the photos and letters of the Palmyra's famous guests: Agatha Christie, T. E. Lawrence, Cocteau. She kept going until we were out in front of the hotel, on the terrace overlooking the Roman ruins. India sat down in a dusty old wicker chair and motioned me to the one next to her.

The waiter followed with a low table that he placed between us, then left and came back with the rest of our bottle of wine and a platter of fresh vegetables and mezzah.

Her father's daughter, India sat mute until the waiter had gone away again.

“What are you doing here, Max?”

“Here? I'm staying here. The rooms are nice. We'll visit the ruins after lunch. Over there is the largest cut stone in the world,” I said, pointing at the temple of Jupiter. “Did you know—”

“Here. Lebanon. Tell me.”

“A truth for a truth?”

“Just tell me.”

I did. But not the truth Nabil or the prince had told me. She'd have to see the prince's documents to even start believing. Or maybe I just didn't think this was the time to get into it. I gave the old story instead, the reason I kept coming back to Balabakk, the search that had led me to the photo that had somehow led me here.

We couldn't see the barracks from where we were sitting, but I motioned behind me in its direction. I told her how after Buckley was kidnapped, I'd spent the next two months working the Biqa', sure he was being held there, but still coming up empty-handed, not picking up a single lead, not even a rumor. There was no way to get inside because it was guarded day and night by the Pasdaran. We only found out Bill had been there when one of the hostages escaped and told us. It didn't matter, though, because the Iranians moved all the hostages the same day.

“That's the last solid piece of intel we had on Buckley until his body was found in the southern suburbs,” I said. “It's never let me go. The mystery. The truth. I don't know which. Are they different? At any rate, since you asked, that's why I'm here.”

The bottle was empty. I went inside to get the waiter to bring us another one.

“Now your turn,” I said as I sat back down.

India tried to stand up. I didn't know where she thought she was going. She held on to the chair to steady herself, and fell back, spilling wine on her Levi's. She laughed, covered the stain with a napkin, and settled in.

“You know what I hate most about my job?” she said.

“The parking lot?” I joked.

“The sleazebags.”

“They're everywhere,” I told her.

“You know who I'm talking about.”

“Webber?”

“The very same.”

“A man for all seasons.”

“He hit on me.”

“Oh, come on. The guy's asexual at best.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Maxie, but that's not it.”

“It?”

“Why I can't stand his sleazeball guts.”

“Why, then?”

I reached over, poured for both of us. The mezzah sat untouched between us.

“He's dangerous.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Can't. You're out. Rule 2201, Subset C-3.”

“What happened to truth for a truth?”

“I get boxed in two months.”

“The polygraph. That
is
a problem.”

She looked over the ruins and back at me.

“You'll protect me?”

I nodded my head and put my hand on hers. She laughed, shifted her chair slightly in my direction, and propped her feet on my knee.

“There's some case out in California,” India began. “Two Saudi Takfiris showed up in San Diego, up to no good, and Webber stole the case—turned it over to some contractor to monitor them.”

I immediately thought about the two Saudis arrested in Kuwait. Were they connected?

“They were tied up in the East African embassy bombings,” she continued. “Turki came to Washington especially to tell us. He said they were part of a bigger team. They're preparing some big attack.”

The chief of Saudi intelligence, Turki Al Faysal was hard to ignore. He came to Washington rarely, only then when he had something important to say.

“Maybe Turki's blowing sunshine up headquarters' ass, hoping to squeeze some more toys out of us.” True to training, I was fishing for detail.

“Max, this is serious. There's a Saudi case officer in touch with them in San Diego. Under cover of Saudi Civil Aviation.”

“Did Turki say what the targets were?”

“Maybe a Texas refinery.”

Destroying a refinery. Why not? If this had anything to do with KSM, you could make a fortune on gasoline options. More than on airline options.

“Turki was missing a lot of detail,” India continued. “That's why he wanted us to watch them. But Webber won't bring the Bureau in until we've got more to go on.”

“What happened to NE?” The Near East Division was where the case should have ended up. That's the way it was supposed to work.

“Webber was at the meeting with Turki. He grabbed the case and turned it over to a contractor. Chief/NE fought it and lost. They supposedly have a surveillance team on these two guys.”

“A contractor doing that kind of surveillance? Jesus.”

“I see the invoices they're sending to the desk. A hundred sixty thousand a week. It's grotesque what—”

“The contractor's sending the invoices through the Saudi desk?”

“Yup. We pay for it. Counter-Espionage runs it. Cute, huh?”

“Is it Applied Science Research?”

“The contractor? Could be. Does it make a difference?”

My guess was that Frank hadn't told India about what happened to me in New York, or if he had, he'd kept the facts to a minimum. Applied Science Research seemed to mean nothing to her.

“How about the Saudis?” I asked. The wind had gone flat. The sun beat down on us as if it meant to melt us in place. India's face was flush with the heat.

“One's gone—maybe to Europe. Webber insists the contractor can handle the other on its own.”

“You didn't happen to hear about two Saudis arrested in Kuwait?”

Sitting on the Saudi desk, she should have seen the traffic from Kuwait. Or maybe it was compartmented and she wasn't on the distribution list.

“Two Saudis arrested in Kuwait? How would you know—”

“My turn. How do you know all this about the Saudis in San Diego?”

“C'mon, Max, I'm not deaf and blind.”

I found myself thinking about something Frank had told me: that it was India's idea to sign on, that he'd objected.

“Why did you join the CIA?” I asked her.

“You know. Dad told you, I'm sure. His big idea.”

“And who got you on the Saudi desk?”

“Dad. The Old Boys' network, its nine lives.” She was flicking her fingers up—one, two, three, four—counting each life with a little meow.

Jesus, I'd been slow. Frank had placed India right where he needed her, the Saudi desk. His own in-house, in-family agent. Obvious, especially considering his business partner was a Saudi. And that was only the beginning. That's why Frank offered to set me up with Rousset: another cog in his networks. Frank Beckman, collector of relationships. I'm not sure when I had felt quite so totally stupid, so scammed.