KBL (5 page)

Besides, by the time Charlie began work at Camp X-Ray, he walked like everybody else. He could run five miles, stand all day, climb ladders, even dance. All it had taken was $575,000 or so worth of engineering and plastic surgery, and he was almost as good as new. Better than new. The new and improved bionic Becker.

But had all that op-sec been good enough?

Because here and now, Charlie was scared shitless.

Did the sonofabitch ID my prosthetics? Did he memorize the scars on my face? Draw sketches of my mangled hands for his handlers?

And the most important question:
Why is he here
?

Charlie knew that in intelligence work, there are no coincidences. Things never just happen. And so he knew Saif Hadi al Iraqi was in Abbottabad for a reason. Because ISI wanted him here. Why? To ID Gringos, of course. Infidel spies employed by the Great Satan. Saif had been at Gitmo, and before that, held in at least two black sites. He’d know people. Faces.

And he was being paid to ID them for ISI. Our alleged allies in GWOT—the Global War on Terror. Except they weren’t our allies. Not really. Because if they were our allies and our friends, they wouldn’t hire people like Saif Hadi al Iraqi, who had almost as much blood on his hands as UBL. Who, in fact, knew UBL.

No wonder they’d brought Saif to Abbottabad. Holy mother of God.

The major ignored Charlie’s plea. Walked past him like he didn’t exist and up to the milkshake stand. Ordered four mango
zam-zams.
Charlie heard him speak. A southern accent, Karachi. Definitely not local.

Charlie forced himself:
Do not look at the Mercedes.
Concentrate on being All Shahid All the Time.

Live Shahid.

Breathe Shahid.

Reek of Shahidness.

Charlie kept his face slightly angled downward, so as not to present a profile to the Mercedes across the road. Profiles can give you away faster at a distance.

The major put money into the vendor’s palm, collected his change, secured his drinks in their cardboard holder, and then turned toward the street. As he passed Charlie he looked down. Charlie glanced up into the man’s dark eyes.

The major scowled. “And where were you wounded?” He had a high, irritating voice. The voice of a bureaucrat.

“Miram Shah, major. Missiles—near the girls school. They killed my son Muhammad.” Charlie spat. “They do not care if they kill our children.”

“When?”

“Last year. Winter.”

The major nodded. Silent, as if thinking. His eyes narrowed. Then he peered at the Mercedes and spoke as if to himself. “The Americans are scum. They suck our blood. They defile our children. They spit on our traditions.”

He reached into his pocket, then extended his hand. Half a dozen coins clattered into Charlie’s bowl.

Charlie’s hands covered his face in a gesture of gratefulness. “Thanks be to God, brother, and to you.”

“God is all merciful,” the major said, not bothering to look at Charlie. He stepped into the street, his free arm raised to stop traffic, and crossed, heedless of the honking and cursing of drivers.

Charlie counted to twenty-five, not daring to look up, concentrating on the coins in the bowl. Only when he heard the Mercedes’ distinctive horn sound twice did he watch the car nose into traffic. Its tinted windows were rolled up.

He waited until they’d driven off, then fingered the coins to make sure they were real and not tracking devices.

Was he being paranoid?

No. He was being careful.

Careful because today the game had changed. Exponentially.
Five
teams. And Saif Hadi al Iraqi, working as an ISI finger-man.

The Paks were tightening the screws. Whatever had triggered their tripwire, it was undeniable they’d sensed something was up. Here. In beautiful downtown Abbottabad. This was not good news. Not for Charlie. Or Langley.

3

Langley, Virginia
December 7, 2010, 0645 Hours Local Time

Once upon a time, Anthony Vincent Mercaldi, currently the twenty-first director of the CIA, had been a California attorney. He also had been a civil rights lawyer at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Nixon administration and an eight-term Democratic congressman, which he followed with an eighteen-month stint as director of the Office of Management and Budget. When the forty-second president of the United States realized at the height of the 1994 presidential campaign that he needed a real adult to oversee the unruly adolescents working in his White House, he’d appointed Mercaldi to be his chief of staff.

In other words, Anthony Vincent Mercaldi, who insisted that everybody call him Vince, was one of Washington’s maybe half-dozen Big Time, Major League, superstar go-to guys.

Normally at this hour, Call Me Vince would have been doing his daily five miles on a treadmill in the basement gym at CIA headquarters, watching Al Jazeera’s English-language channel, CNN International, or the Beeb.

But 0645 in Langley, Virginia, was 1545 in Abbottabad, Pakistan—3:45
PM
in civilianspeak.

And Abbottabad was on Vince’s mind. More to the point, Charlie Becker was on his mind.

He’d met personally with Charlie three weeks before he left for Bagram to do his final mission prep. Invited Charlie for a one-on-one lunch on fine bone china bearing the CIA seal in the private Director’s Dining Room that was adjacent to his office. Of course he had. Vince Mercaldi was a congressman at heart. He’d always thought of the House of Representatives as the People’s House, and for the sixteen years he held office he’d taken as much time as needed to get together with his constituents whenever they came calling or when he was back home taking the political pulse of his district.

He brought that meet-and-greet tradition with him to the seventh-floor suite of offices at Langley when he became D/CIA. How, he had reasoned, could you ask a man or woman to put their lives on the line and not look them in the eye?

So now he was reading the flash cable Charlie had burst-transmitted as soon as he could after his encounter with Saif Hadi al Iraqi. And Vince was worried. About Charlie, whom he both liked and admired, and about The Operation.

It wasn’t the first time The Operation he’d fought to mount had been jeopardized. The previous October, just as CIA’s Bin Laden Group (BLG), the successor to Alec Station, the first of the CIA’s working groups devoted exclusively to Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, was setting up the Abbottabad safe house, some idiot NATO officer (Vince had his staff run it to ground and discovered the culprit was a pussy-chasing Norwegian lieutenant colonel trying to ingratiate himself with a Brussels-based female reporter) had told CNN that UBL wasn’t hiding in some cave in Afghanistan or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but living the life of Reilly in a villa somewhere in northwest Pakistan.

Of course, CNN immediately put it on the air. Who wouldn’t have?

At Langley, bells and whistles went off. By October the BLG had more than 250 people working under the cover of CIA’s Special Activities Division, but in point of fact it was a stand-alone unit reporting directly to two people: CIA Director Vince Mercaldi and Stuart Kapos, the director of the National Clandestine Service, the successor to the old Directorate of Operations.

A straight line. No middlemen.

BLG was virtually unique at Langley in that unlike most covert units, its existence had never leaked. The whole world knew that there was a CIA Bin Laden unit called Alec Station. Indeed a former Alec Station chief was a constant bloviator on cable news shows, where he pummeled CIA regularly. And everyone knew about CIA’s CTC, the Counter-Terrorism Center, originally created by the legendary spy Duane “Dewey” Clarridge in 1986 and still in full operation against America’s enemies.

But very few individuals—certainly no one on leak-prone Capitol Hill—were cleared to know about the covert intelli-gnomes who had been working in a secure, cipher-locked suite of offices located in the subbasement of the new CIA headquarters building since late the previous July. The individuals who worked there were listed under their previous assignments. The sign on the door read “Special Activities Division: AFPAK Technical Support Group.” And that’s how the unit was listed in CIA’s internal phone book. But it was BLG—all Bin Laden, all the time.

It was a potpourri of talent, each one hand-picked. There were linguists, analysts, and operations officers from the National Clandestine Service and its Special Activities Division (SAD); there were intel squirrels, psy-ops specialists, SEALs, Delta Force operators, and other snake-eating individuals from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and there were Soldiers and contractors from the Army’s most nimble counterterrorist-slash-counterinsurgency-slash-unconventional warfare unit, the Asymmetric Warfare Group from Fort Meade, Maryland.

It was a first: BLG was a task force of organically integrated intelligence and operations personnel with an established chain of command and the authority to initiate both long-term and actionable intelligence gathering and then exploit that intel in its own unilateral operations. It was a seamless integration of CIA’s intelligence-gathering and paramilitary capabilities and JSOC’s unique talent pool. Its budget ran well into ten figures. And it all revolved around one mission objective: to find and kill Usama Bin Laden.

Some of the personnel had been focused on Bin Laden for more than a decade. But the BLG was the first entity that allowed them to work as part of a holistic team. For the first few weeks, BLG had met only at night, so its members wouldn’t attract attention. Then, when the information started to build more rapidly, they went full time with Vince Mercaldi’s complete support. In fact from the very first days, the director met daily with BLG’s chief, Richard Hallett, to monitor the group’s progress.

And on the first of September, Hallett told Call Me Vince that they had found UBL—at least they believed strongly that they’d found the sonofabitch. The courier named Tareq Khan, the man who used the phrase
al mas,
“the Diamond,” had returned to the villa. The people at BLG were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that Tareq had come home in order to deliver a long-awaited message to Usama.

Tareq’s return to Abbottabad was one of the reasons Charlie Becker was now in Pakistan. And why Dick Hallett, a supergrade spook who’d come of age in the Marine Corps but spent the past twenty-nine years as an operations officer in some of the world’s most nasty places, had, by Labor Day and with the strong encouragement of Vince Mercaldi and D/NCS Kapos, begun some complicated and hugely sensitive advance work. Hallett’s efforts resulted in the establishment of a covert CIA safe house 250 yards from the Abbottabad villa in which Hallett and his top analyst, whom he called Spike, believed Usama Bin Laden was living.

Then, on October 18, not ten days after the safe house had been set up, CNN broadcast the NATO-sourced “Bin Laden’s living in a villa in Pakistan” story, and back at Langley all hell broke loose. Quietly. Covertly. But very, very intensely.

The reverberations had taken almost a week to quell.

That first day of panic, Vince Mercaldi himself assumed hands-on management of BLG’s damage control. He had the presence of mind—the genius, Dick Hallett said later—to immediately call Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat, consummate Washington insider, and the president’s special envoy to Pakistan.