The Ragnarok Conspiracy (12 page)

 

"Damn it, Larry, you can't do this!”

Savas had officially reached the stage of throwing a fit. He had felt it coming, building up, and had decided to just get out of its way. There were a lot of things you had to put up with in life. A lot of them you didn't.
And some you had to yell about.

“John, calm down. This isn't going to help the situation,” said Kanter as calmly as he could. Standing next to Kanter behind his desk, Mira Vujanac appeared uneasy as she watched the emotional outburst.

“I'm not going to calm down! Do you know what this guy was doing? Quoting me proverbs from the Koran! Do you think I need to hear anything from
that
book? You told me when I came here, Larry, that you hired me because I'd be motivated for this job. What gives me that motivation is the same thing that makes it unacceptable that this representative of that religion be forced on me and my team! I'm not going to allow it!”

“John, that's the last time I want to hear about what you will and won't allow, or, I swear, you'll be finding yourself another place to work!” The veins stood out on Kanter's forehead, and he anchored his hands on his desk, standing and leaning forward. He brought one hand to his face and rubbed his temples. “John, please, sit down a moment.”

Savas looked between the two of them and reluctantly took the closest seat. Vujanac sighed softly and adjusted her blouse. She sat on the side of the desk farthest from Savas.

Kanter continued. “This guy comes with amazing recommendations. He's single-handedly begun what has turned into an enormous operation against these international arms dealers. He's used his religion
as a screen to work the entire thing, to pose as a radicalized leader of a group seeking to purchase weapons for terrorist activity in the United States. He's just a few steps from setting up a sting operation, and these events have compromised all his efforts. He's willing to work for less than that original goal, to instead try and infiltrate the network to trace the path of the explosives used in these attacks. He is willing to work with us on that to coordinate domestic and international efforts.”

“I don't like it.” Savas knew he was being obstinate, but it didn't matter.

“Damn it, John, I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to make it work.”

“John,” said Vujanac softly, “Agent Jordan is an extraordinary man. He's taken a hard route to come to where he is.”

“He sure as hell has,” fired back Kanter. He picked up a large folder filled with papers and tossed it on his desk in front of Savas. “His file. Read it if you want. The guy grew up on the streets of LA. His mother was a crack addict, his father was gone before he was potty-trained. He joined a gang before he could likely write, rose in the ranks to a high position as an adolescent. Got tossed in jail at one point, found an imam and religion in prison.”

Savas rolled his eyes. The last thing he wanted was a feel-good Hollywood story. “So the CIA's recruiting ex-cons now? They that desperate?”

“He was a juvenile.”

“Larry, the CIA doesn't hire convicts!”

“Somebody made an exception!”

“They sure did.” Savas shook his head. “He doesn't sound like some ex-gang member to me. Speaks like he's Ivy League.”

“He is,” Mira interjected. “Columbia. His spiritual father was highly educated and insisted Jordan be as well. He was bright enough to master that culture, too.”

“Great, now a Muslim elitist spook.”

Kanter pressed on. “Lots of these young black kids find Islam in jail. They either get radicalized, or they join social movements for the
poor or push civil rights agendas. Well, Jordan felt a call to serve justice, something you don't see too many ex-gang members lean toward. Can you imagine how hard it must have been to get even a single serious look at a job like this? Can you imagine the interviews? He worked hard to erase his past. Some imam funded his college education. He prettied up his speech. He cut all ties with his old life. He knocked on every door until one opened. It looks like nothing stops this guy. He's on a mission, and he's made a serious mark at the CIA.”

“John, please,” said Vujanac. “We need you to put aside your personal issues. It's hard enough trying to get the FBI and the CIA to play nice. I know this is painful, but we need you to rise to this.”

Savas looked out the window at the city. Inside, he felt a war of emotions. Outside, through the glass in Kanter's office, it was utterly still, row upon row of buildings stretching until he could not see beyond them. He closed his eyes and tried to think. He knew they were right. He knew he was being childish, unprofessional. But they did
not
understand how hard this was. It was something he had never expected. The son of a bitch even
dressed
like an Arab! He shook his head and laughed bitterly.

“OK, you two. I can give you this. I have one goal, and that is to bring justice to murderers of innocents, those terrorists that kill our children and hope to see Heaven for it. I'll work with anyone who shares that goal. If he does, I'll make it work.”

“Thank you, John,” Kanter said with evident relief.

Savas rose from his chair and walked to the door. He stopped and turned around. “Just don't expect me to be friends with the man. He does
his
job, I'll do mine.” With that, he walked through the door and shut it behind him.

 

The next morning, Husaam Jordan briefed the team on his long-standing operation. Savas was stunned at how quickly the CIA man had integrated into the group, his extreme professionalism notwithstanding. Muslim or Tibetan monk, he was serious and knowledgeable, and held an intense focus for his work that reminded Savas of the pursuit of a predator of its prey. He also had a strangely winning side to his personality, which seemed to work best with the women in his group. It was clear that the ex-marine Miller was not going to warm easily to the man, and Matt King never warmed easily to anyone.

Cohen was a supporter early on and often came to his side when some of the more hostile members of the group were expressing that hostility. Savas had to admit he was one of those. Lightfoote was positively stuck to the man, showing specific and real interest in another human for the first time in her tenure at Intel 1. She hadn't called Savas “Ruthless Overlord” once today.

Savas, despite his very mixed feelings, was fascinated with what this man had done at the CIA. In the span of three short years, he had built up an undercover operation to infiltrate some of the most powerful and profitable arms dealerships in the world. For each of them, he used the front of an African American radical Muslim who was arming his organization for terrorist attacks in the United States. Whether or not the arms dealers knew or cared anything about this, or believed his intent, was likely irrelevant. They believed that the man wanted to buy, and did buy, and paid promptly in a way that established him and his false group with a strong reputation. It didn't hurt that several major arrests, including that of Viktor Bout himself, had been made in the last few
years, disrupting organizations and forcing them to lower standards in chaotic rushes to claim client bases when they restructured. Jordan had taken advantage of this and promised his clients much larger buys in the near future.

For more than two hours, he detailed the organization, its members, foreign bases of operation and contacts, and difficult-to-trace money transfers. It was impressive, Savas had to admit. Impressive and frightening. A black Muslim seeking to become a domestic terrorist through international arms acquisition. The ruse was too plausible for comfort.

The presentation finished, Jordan turned on the lights and sat down. He appeared a bit drained and drank from a glass of water at his side. The room was quiet for a moment.

“Why do you think that this is the source of the explosives?” asked Cohen.

Jordan drank down the remainder of the glass and spoke. “Well, of course, we can't know, but there are not many ways to obtain that grade of explosive. The US government will not sell this stuff to just anyone. It stays with military or, in some cases, is sold to other nations. As you know, that's where the real black market in these things starts, and how our weapons mafia gets its sources. So there may be other ways, but I'm willing to bet that our new terrorist organization used one of these groups as its supplier. Bout's old organization is the biggest and still the best. It's a good place to start poking around.”

He looked around the table, studying the faces of Intel 1. “I'm actually curious to know who these people are that went to all the trouble to go for such top-of-the-line materials—really overkill for what they wanted to do.”

Savas had known this would come. Jordan had shown his hand from the CIA, down to the last PowerPoint slide. He expected a full briefing in return. Savas wanted to send him back to Langley with a
thank you very much!
and use this potential new lead. But the FBI needed the international reach of the CIA on this, and they specifically needed Jordan and his operation to have any hope of getting close to these dealers. Besides, it was the professional thing to do, and if he didn't, Kanter would cart someone else in to do the job.

“Rebecca Cohen will give you a briefing on what we know.”

Cohen stood up, dimmed the lights, and spent the next hour going over everything they had gleaned from the events to date. The forensics reports and details on the bombings seemed familiar to Jordan, likely from previous briefings given by Vujanac or even Kanter. She concluded with the speculation that it might be an internal, American group but was careful to note that there was little solid evidence for that conjecture.

“There are also other, wilder theories,” said Savas. He felt the eyes of the group bore in on him.
That was a hell of a thing to open up now.
Why he had done it; he didn't know. Perhaps to seek some form of acceptance, or, less charitably, perhaps to shake this Muslim up a little.

“Yes? What other theories?” asked Jordan after several moments of silence.

“His rogue Valkyries,” said Lightfoote cryptically. Savas stared at her in wonderment. Had she spoken to Rebecca?

“It's a possible connection between two cases we've been working on.” Savas summarized the worldwide string of assassinations, the use of the Sheikh as bait in a plan gone horribly wrong, and the connection between the attacks in the Afghan mountains and the murders. When he came to the subject of Norse mythology, and the speculation about the group's motivations, Jordan sat upright and still. The information on the more obscure point of the group's unusual name and symbolism seemed to interest him deeply, and he asked a number of intense questions on this matter.

“This Columbia professor,” Jordan said, “I think he may be right, and his analysis makes for a very dark view of what we are up against.” Jordan nodded thoughtfully toward Savas. “Now I see where you are headed, Agent Savas. You believe that this group is responsible for both the assassinations and these bombings, and that the motivation is the same—a hatred of Islam. Beyond that, a desire perhaps to wage a war against Muslims the world over. By this symbolism, an unending war until Judgment Day.”

Rideout cut in. “Come on, people! Look, you've got a terrorist
group that is playing to fears in a very effective way. You have a set of assassinations. The only thing connecting them? Scary mythology and some strange occult symbols.”

“Pagan,” interrupted Lightfoote.

Rideout flashed her an annoyed look.

“Well, trader-man, they are
pagan
, not
occult
,” she countered. “There's, like, a
huge
difference.”

“Fine.
Pagan
symbols,” said Rideout. “This is all Wizard of Oz, if you want my opinion. Some real bombs and guns, and a lot of some ivory tower magician's hocus-pocus to rattle all the cages.”

“Rattling the cages is only scary when you're in a cage,” said Lightfoote.

Rideout rolled his eyes, his fatigue showing through. “This is what I left seven figures for? What the hell does that mean?”

“Look, enough!” said Miller, steering things back to the topic at hand. “From my vantage point, we have a string of murders and bombings that, even if not related, require our concerted efforts. The question is, what do we do now?”

Matt King answered in his nasal twang. “We track down all the shipments of this material, try to ID the lot used. Mira told us that each lot gets a different ratio of the additives that tag the explosives; we just need to get this material more thoroughly analyzed and figure out where this stuff went.”

“Forensics is on that, Matt,” said Savas. “But we don't have the equipment for that here. We need some really top-flight mass spectroscopy to ID these batches, and that's got to be farmed out. That takes time.”

Rideout sighed and threw his pen onto the notepad before him. “Look, what's the pattern here? I know it's embassies and Middle Eastern oil countries but specifically New York, Washington—I get that. That's front-page material. But Venezuela? I mean, what's that all about? Why not Europe, or China, or the Middle East itself? What's the pattern in these attacks?”

“Well, with only these three bombings, that may be a hard thing to identify,” rumbled Jordan.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Rideout, “but I think we need to spend some time looking at this. The embassies, the people. Do they share something that we are missing? They must have chosen these targets for a reason.”

“OK, J. P., why don't you work with Manuel on that? Let's compile all the data we can on these places, cross-referencing everything.”

“We're missing the point here, my friends,” boomed Jordan. He looked tired, frustrated, and deadly serious. “We have a good lead that could bring us to contacts that could be one or two steps away from the men we are looking for. This should be our priority.”

Savas suppressed an urge to tell the man that, as group leader, he would decide what Intel 1 should and shouldn't be doing. “So, what would you do, Agent Jordan?” he said somewhat tensely.

“This is where my position in the CIA allows me freedoms you do not have. I have reached a decision, Agent Savas. It is a hard one and will ruin years of work, as well as cost tax payers millions of dollars and perhaps some agents their lives. I am going back to Sharjah.”

“Sharjah?” asked Savas over the silence. “Why?”

Jordan stared forward, as if glimpsing something in the distance. “You can remember from my presentation—we have established inroads into two of Viktor Bout's primary centers of operation: Belgium and the United Arab Emirates. Bout was pressured out of Belgium in the late 1990s as the press uncovered his shady dealings. His organization never closed up shop there. But the heart of it moved with him to Sharjah in the UAE. There he was coddled by many members of the royal family and developed deep connections to international companies playing with money laundering and terrorism, civil war, and murder. He left behind a well-organized machine.”

Cohen took her glasses off and stared at the CIA operative. “Husaam, what do you plan on doing there?”

Jordan paused a moment and took a deep breath. “I may be in the minority, but I take quite seriously the intentions of this terrorist organization and the hypothesis put forward by Agent Savas. Perhaps I have to—after all, it could be a declaration of war against my faith. I believe
we must take whatever action we can in order to find out who these people are and how to get to them. I'm going to take my team undercover into Sharjah, as we have before, but this time to set up a major arms purchase and use that opportunity to break into their organization and seize any records they have on the sale and distribution of Semtex-like explosives.”

A heavy silence fell over the group. Rebecca's eyes flashed upward toward Savas. Rideout whistled, adding, “You're likely to end up buried in the sands out there. That's either really damn brave or really damn stupid.”

Jordan smiled grimly. “It is written, ‘What God writes on your forehead, you will become.'”