The Lost Codex (OPSIG Team Black Series Book 3) Read online

  Uzi set his water bottle down after taking a gulp. “Based on the clothing and dishes in the apartment, we believe there were four men living and working there.”

  “So,” McNamara said. “What are we doing to find the ones who escaped?”

  “Sir,” Uzi said. “As head of the JTTF in DC, I’m compelled to recommend that in order to effectively pursue these men, and to investigate this case, I need to assign agents and bring Metro—”

  “There is no case,” Knox said.

  “No case?” Uzi glanced around at the people seated at the table. “All due respect, a suicide bomber exploded in the middle of Washington. We found a bomb-making factory with multiple devices in various stages of assembly—this isn’t going to be a one-and-done. We need to raise the threat level. The public needs to be notified that we’re under attack.”

  “No,” Knox said. “They don’t. Not yet.”

  “Sir. I—”

  “Agent Uziel, who is behind the attack?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “What was the target?”

  “We’re still inves—”

  “Are other attacks planned for the district? For anywhere else in the country?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “That is the point, isn’t it? There isn’t much we do know. We have very few facts. And dozens of questions. The media will have even more. We don’t want a panic on our hands, do we?”

  Uzi leaned forward in his seat. “Of course not. But we can’t keep this a secret.”

  “The president has asked us to keep it quiet, for now, until we have a better understanding of what’s going on.”

  “We know what’s going on. A terrorist cell of suicide bombers has set up shop in DC and we thwarted one attack before they could act. Isn’t that the intel you got from our Turk informant, Cüneyt Ekrem?”

  “As you said yourself, Ekrem is unreliable. That’s why we have to be careful and methodical and keep our eyes and ears open. We need to verify what he told us and not jump to conclusions. At the moment, we have no confirmed intel.”

  “But—”

  “Remember the panic the DC Sniper caused?” Bolten asked.

  Uzi sat back. “Of course.”

  “That’s what the president wants to avoid.”

  “Agent Vail,” Knox said, “tell us what you know of suicide bombers.”

  Vail folded her hands in front of her as she gathered her thoughts. “The study data is all over the place and often conflicting, but the lack of correlation reflects where that research was done, which political and religious ideologies were involved, and which populations were studied. The acts of a bomber in Iraq, for example, are going to be quite different from one operating in Sri Lanka.

  “Generally speaking, operationally, the first goal of the bomber is to inflict death and destruction on a specific target. The second goal—which is his overriding motivation and purpose—is to inflict emotional pain and injury on innocents who witness the carnage—and who wait, on edge, for another bomb to go off. Basically, the idea is intimidation, fear and, well, terror.

  “That’s an important point because the data is more cut and dried regarding the victim population’s point of view. The victims are frightened. They’re scared. They alter their ways of life. That’s why the terrorists are doing it, right? It’s not the people they’re killing that are affected—they’re dead—it’s those who live in the community, not knowing when another strike is going to happen—or where.”

  “Like the DC Sniper,” Bolten said.

  “Yes. In a sense, suicide bombings are similar to the terror that snipers inflict on their victim populations: you never know where they’re going to strike next. And it involves an attack on everyday citizens, who are the victims of a political agenda or revenge against people who have nothing to do with the initial ‘offense’ or perceived slight supposedly inflicted on the attacker.”

  “Suicide bombings can be an effective tactic in scoring wins during wartime,” Bolten said. “At West Point, we studied the Japanese kamikazes extensively. They had nothing to lose—their objective was to die—so they could be more daring, and penetrate enemy territory more deeply and more effectively, by taking greater risks.”

  “Right,” Vail said. “Along those lines, suicide bombings are also used as an asymmetric tactic to counter a stronger fighting force. An example would be the Palestinian bombers hitting civilian targets in Israel. A vast majority of those attacks came at the hands of Hamas, although some were carried out by its rival, al Humat.”

  Vail glanced at Uzi and saw his jaw muscles contract—and for good reason: an al Humat operative murdered his wife and daughter.

  “There are multiple MOs to their approach,” she continued. “The most common is an explosive belt or vest, though two exceptions would be Richard Reid, the shoe bomber on Flight 63, and the attack on the Saudi prince where the bomber placed the explosives inside his body. Car bombs can also be effective—like the Beirut barracks bombing in ’83 when a driver plowed his truck into the building. Or boats loaded with explosives, like the USS Cole in Aden. I don’t have to elaborate on how jets can be flown into buildings. But that’s just another form of suicide attack. Less popular tactics involve forcing a driver to crash his bus, like the Palestinians did in Tel Aviv, or driving a car into a crowd of people.

  “Given what evidence we’ve discovered tonight, it looks like they’re going the more conventional route—a vest—but since we don’t know specifically who we’re dealing with, or why they’re doing what they’re doing, we can’t rule out any of these other methods. Because of that, I do support Agent Uziel’s recommendation to alert—”

  “Noted,” Knox said.

  Keep your mouth shut, Karen. Just move on.

  “Did Ekrem say what group was behind the planned attacks?” Uzi asked.

  Knox rose from his chair and began pacing in front of a white board at the head of the room. “I’m reluctant to repeat what he said until we have verification.”

  “Sir,” DeSantos said, “time is obviously critical. If we’re going to figure out who’s behind this—and stop them before they implement their plan—we need to know what you know. We can cut through the bullshit and figure out if his intel is on target.”

  Knox stopped and leaned on the back of the leather chair. “Al Humat. Maybe in coordination with Hamas. He wasn’t sure. He also suggested Hezbollah played a role, but he wasn’t clear on that.”

  “So,” Vail said, “let’s assume, until proven otherwise, that Ekrem gave us good info and there’s an Islamist angle to the planned bombings. These terrorists were speaking Arabic, so we’re in the right ballpark at least. Let’s look at this from a behavioral perspective. We know there’s a religious element to it, a political element to it, and some good old peer pressure—to help the cause, to do what your friends are doing, to sacrifice oneself for the good of the group.”

  “Groupthink,” Uzi said, moving the toothpick around with his tongue.

  “Right. These people are intent on destruction—but they’re also motivated by strong religious and political beliefs, as well as their own moral reasoning.”

  “Warped moral reasoning,” Earl Tasset said.

  “We know that Arab bombers are featured on posters and in videos as martyrs,” Uzi said. “There’s a financial angle—the bombers’ families are well compensated. Hamas has gone on record that depending on who takes responsibility for the attack, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al Humat, or the Palestinian Authority pays out a lifetime stipend of $400 a month to families of male bombers and $200 per month to families of female bombers.”

  “Apparently,” DeSantos said, “the corporate world isn’t the only place women are paid less than men.”

  The attempt at humor fell flat.

  “In the Koran,” Uzi continued, “Allah promises martyr
s heavenly rewards. We’ve all heard about the dozens of virgins a male bomber is told he’ll get. According to a Palestinian bomber who did not go through with the attack, female bombers are told they’ll become the purest and most beautiful form of angel, at the highest level possible in heaven.”

  “We’ve been approaching this as if our tangos are all male,” McNamara said. “But I do remember some cases involving female suicide bombers. Chechnya, I think.”

  “Correct,” Uzi said. “But they’ve also been used against civilian populations in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, France, Sri Lanka. The best known case out of Iraq was the one where Samira Ahmed Jassim recruited about eighty women for suicide attacks—and sent twenty-eight of them to their deaths.”

  “Must be one persuasive lady,” DeSantos said.

  “Not persuasive. Evil. She would arrange for women to be raped, and then convince them to commit suicide attacks as a means to atone for the shame of being raped.”

  McNamara shook his head. “I remember that.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Vail said, “the women who choose to become bombers on their own, their motivation is not political—opposite of their male counterparts. Most common reason is that the women are grieving the loss of family members and they’re looking to punish the person they consider responsible.”

  “Revenge killing,” Bolten said.

  “Yes. But there are also other female bombers who wanted to martyr themselves for reasons we could never figure out.”

  “What are the odds women are involved here?” Knox pushed back from the chair and began pacing again. “We may need to adjust our approach. And obviously that expands our dataset quite a bit.”

  Vail nodded. “It’s been a while since I looked at the statistics, but I think women make up about 15 percent of all suicide bombers—at least within groups that use females. Now if we’re talking about assassinations by suicide attack, women were responsible for about 65 percent of those. A fifth of them had the objective of assassinating a specific person—compared to only 5 percent for male attackers.”

  “Meaning?”

  Vail lifted her brow. “Well, I think because a woman is more disarming than a man, she’s able to get closer to a male target, no matter how well guarded he is. His defenses are down. So when you’ve got a specific target you want to kill, using a woman for the job is more successful. Bottom line, I don’t think we can rule out the use of women as part of this operation. But since we don’t know what or who their targets are, and we don’t know their motivation, for now we can’t say women are or aren’t involved. If there’s a revenge component or if they’re trying to kill a specific person, we have to look at women. Otherwise it’ll likely be males.”

  “Do we have a more specific profile?” Knox asked. “Somewhere to start?”

  “I’m not sure we have enough to formulate anything definitive.” Who am I kidding? We definitely don’t have enough.

  “Your ass is covered,” McNamara said. “We realize you’re winging it. We’re just looking for some direction based on what we know.”

  A bead of perspiration broke out across her brow. So I should make you feel like I’m giving you something useful without sending us off in the wrong direction. Yeah, sure. And for my next trick …

  Vail took a sip of water, then set the bottle down. “Broadly speaking, given what we have, we’re looking for young adult male bombers, but as I said, we should not be blind to women. Males will be twenty to thirty-five, women will be younger, twenty to thirty. Regardless of gender, they’ll be educated, middle-class individuals who may have a connection to a family member who’s been killed in either an American action abroad or an Israeli action. The recent war in Gaza is a possibility, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. Hamas has been an active terror group for over twenty years and they began suicide attacks in the early 1990s. Al Humat started a few years later, if I remember correctly.

  “Some studies suggest the bombers may be depressed or mentally ill individuals. I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at here. This is a sensitive, very daring operation and the planners wouldn’t entrust such a difficult operation to an unstable personality.

  “I do think we’re dealing with a group—that much seems obvious from the crime scenes we visited tonight—and that fits with the intel we got from Ekrem. As Uzi mentioned before, we need to be aware of groupthink mentality. Are you all familiar with that?”

  She got a couple of blank stares. “Briefly, it’s a situation where members of a group blindly follow the opinions and directions of their leader because they place greater value on gaining consensus and harmony than on the critical analysis of an issue. So if a lot of people are fervently onboard with an approach laid out by their leaders, the others will set aside their personal opinions in favor of acceptance within the group, to keep from being rejected, ostracized, or kicked out. It can be an efficient way of getting things done—but if the group leaders are bad actors, as in this case, you get the situation we’ve got. Good for them, not so good for us.

  “One other thing,” Vail said. “This is a group that looks at themselves as the underdogs going up against the big, bad USA: they use these asymmetric terror tactics as a mask to project strength and invincibility.”

  Knox stopped pacing. “So if I can sum this up, it sounds like you believe Ekrem’s info is accurate: al Humat and/or Hamas.”

  Vail bit the inside of her lip. “Let’s say I think Ekrem’s info is accurate insofar as it’s a group like al Humat and/or Hamas. I can’t tell you it’s specifically those groups or another one like the Islamic State or Islamic Jihad. Then again, a behavioral profile is only designed to tell you the type of person or group who committed the crimes. We need conventional forensics and investigative procedures to put an identity to our attackers.”

  Knox frowned, then took his seat. “Understood.”

  “Getting back to what Agent Uziel said earlier, sir, we really need to open an official investigation. I can then get full cooperation from my unit. ASAC Gifford—”

  “Cannot be apprised of the situation,” Bolten said. “Absolutely not.”

  Tasset leaned forward in his chair. “You’re on this team for a reason.”

  I wish he’d stop saying that.

  “And it’s got nothing to do with London.”

  Bullshit. Vail tried to keep a poker face, but her gaze strayed over to Knox. His expression was as impassive as the sandstone columns of the White House.

  “Your expertise in behavioral analysis,” McNamara added. “It gives OPSIG a dimension we’ve lacked. You may prefer to confer with the profilers in your unit, but the cases we handle are black. Your group does not exist. The things you do, the missions you carry out, have not happened. Just like in London. That’s the way this works. This meeting, in fact, is not happening.” He turned to Knox. “I thought you explained all this to her.”

  Knox did not reply, but Vail wanted to—something like, “I haven’t been told a damn thing.”

  “Do we have a problem, Agent Vail?” McNamara asked.

  “No, Mr. Secretary. I don’t have a problem.” I’ve got so many I don’t know where to start.

  “Agent Uziel,” McNamara said. “You sit on this team for a reason as well. Given your background with Mossad and counterterrorism, is there anything you can add?”

  Uzi shoved the toothpick to the left corner of his mouth. “Director Knox mentioned that Ekrem thought Hezbollah might have some involvement in this plot. Around the time the whole thing came to a head with Iran achieving nuclear capability, we intercepted communications indicating that Hezbollah had sleeper cells across the country in dozens of US cities. It sounded like it was a well established network that had been going on for years.”

  “That’s never been verified,” Bolten said.

  Uzi bobbed his head. “True. But … NSA captured a
conversation between someone in southern California and a mobile in Mexico. It belonged to one of the Mexican drug cartels: Cortez. We began piecing it together with HUMINT,” he said, referring to human intelligence—confidential informants, interrogations, and the like. “We’re still working on it but all we’ve been able to verify is that the cartels and Hezbollah have been working together in some financial capacity.”

  “That’s a long way from sleeper cells in dozens of US cities,” McNamara said.

  “Call it a working theory. Could be that Hezbollah teaches them how to build tunnels and Cortez pays them for the engineering know-how. Or maybe it’s something else. But my instincts as a law enforcement officer tell me that this type of connection makes sense and can’t be ignored. It may just be a matter of finding proof. I’ll double down and check with my DEA guys on the task force.”

  “Hector?” Knox said. “Any thoughts on this?”

  DeSantos straightened up in his seat. “If we look at a potential threat matrix, if the US went beyond sanctions against Iran and bombed its reactors, and if there were sleeper cells here, their operatives would likely set off bombs here. We’d be under attack within our own borders. The invading army would have been living among us for years.”

  The room got quiet.

  Finally Bolten said, “We need to know if this sleeper theory is rooted in fact—and if it’s got anything to do with what happened tonight.”

  “I can have our CIA and DEA reps on the task force check in with their CIs. But they’re gonna ask why. To get it right, they have to have all the facts.”

  “No,” Bolten said. “You can’t say anything about tonight. The president made it quite clear.”

  “Some are going to put it together anyway. But the JTTF is a terrorism task force made up mostly of law enforcement officers. This is what we do. That’s our job.”

  “Your job, your orders, are to work this from inside OPSIG. This is bigger than law enforcement. It’s a matter of national security and we need to be able to operate without every goddamn blogger commenting on it, crying about privacy intrusions and racial profiling, without journalists bombarding us with questions and hampering our ability to do our work—which is finding these fuckers. You need more help, Secretary McNamara and Director Knox will get you personnel with security clearance.”