Brad Thor Collectors' Edition #3 Page 3

  This was the area of the Central Intelligence Agency that Aydin Ozbek called home. His office was in the heart of a highly classified NCS/Special Activities program known as the Dead Poets Society. Its focus was the capture or termination of rogue intelligence officers.

  If an American or allied intelligence officer went freelance or went missing, especially if they were in possession of information critical to the interests of the United States, it was Ozbek’s job first to find out why. Had they been captured? Had they gone rogue?

  If the operative in question had in fact been captured, his or her dossier was turned over to a Special Activities “recovery” unit. If it was determined that the operative had gone rogue, Ozbek’s team then created two folders—one blue, one black.

  Placed in the blue folder was a full operational blueprint for locating the target and bringing him or her back to the United States, or another suitable facility overseas, for interrogation and an assessment of the damage they had or may have caused.

  The black folder included plans for locating and terminating the target.

  Both folders contained suggestions for damage control and additional mop-up operations, which sometimes called for elimination of persons the rogue intelligence officer had been in contact with.

  It wasn’t a game. Ozbek didn’t like killing people. But sometimes it was necessary.

  Stepping off the elevator on the fourth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Ozbek had almost made it to his office when he was spotted by his teammate, Steve Rasmussen, a five-foot-eleven wiseass in his late twenties with red hair and blue eyes.

  “Well, look who’s finally here,” chirped Rasmussen.

  Ozbek didn’t feel like getting into it with him. His fifteen-year-old Labrador, Shelby, had cancer. She had been up most of the night in pain. Her medication wasn’t working anymore. Even upping the dosage hadn’t helped, so Oz woke his vet and convinced the man to meet them at his office first thing in the morning.

  Shelby meant the world to Ozbek. She was the only woman in his life who didn’t complain about the insane hours he kept. For the time being, the vet was holding her for observation, but Oz knew he was going to have to start facing the inevitability that she would need to be put down soon. Rasmussen wasn’t a dog person, and Oz doubted he would understand.

  “Actually,” said Ozbek as he brushed past his colleague and stepped into his office, “early mornings seem to be the only time your wife and I can be alone anymore.”

  Rasmussen followed him in and sat down on the couch. “That’s not true, Oz. If you came by on Saturdays, you could have the whole day together and I could get some golf in. We’d all be winners.”

  Their status as CIA operatives notwithstanding, if Patricia Rasmussen heard either of them talking like this, she’d kick both their asses. “What’s up?” asked Ozbek, changing the subject.

  Steve Rasmussen was silent for a moment and then dropped a black file folder on the coffee table. “Someone from the Transept program needs to be dealt with.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Ozbek walked over and picked up the file. The ultra-secret Transept program was responsible for producing the most proficient killers the Central Intelligence Agency had on its payroll. And, as the American government and the CIA didn’t condone assassination, technically the Transept program didn’t exist.

  “Selleck wants you on this personally,” said Rasmussen, picking up the intricate wooden puzzle Ozbek kept on his table.

  The NCS Director. Ozbek raised his eyebrows as he perused the file. “Why me?”

  “Because it’s complicated.”

  “Obviously, but complicated how?”

  “Sunday night there was a murder at the Jefferson Memorial,” said Rasmussen.

  Ozbek finished scanning the file and handed it back to his colleague. “And?”

  “Somebody whacked an employee of the Foundation on American Islamic Relations. Are you familiar with them?”

  Ozbek was. The Saudi-funded Foundation on American Islamic Relations, or FAIR as it was ironically known, was one of the biggest Islamist front organizations in the United States. It had offices across the country with representatives who rushed to the microphones any time a Muslim was accused of anything. They were knee-jerk reactionaries who trotted out the dreaded Islamophobia slur before knowing any of the facts of a case.

  Muslims pulled over with pipe bombs in their trunk? Those are just fireworks and the law enforcement officer responsible is nothing more than a bigoted Islamophobe.

  Muslim imam airline passengers praying loudly right at the gate, deriding America in Arabic, switching seats to configurations similar to the 9/11 hijackers, and asking for seat belt extenders that could be used as weapons although they are not overweight and simply leaving them at their feet? These poor men are guilty of nothing more than flying while Muslim. And FAIR will help coordinate the imams’ lawsuits against the Islamophobic passengers who were unnecessarily frightened and reported the men’s completely normal activity to the flight crew.

  FAIR’s efforts had had a chilling effect across the country. The FBI was openly attacked for publishing pictures of Middle Eastern men wanted in connection with unusual surveillance of ferry boats in Washington State. The cowardly Chico Enterprise Record newspaper refused to publish any description further than the ages of numerous men who were actively surveilling fire stations across northern California with cameras, video cams, and sketch books. When asked by firemen what the hell they were doing, the Middle Eastern men fled in waiting vehicles.

  As far as Ozbek was concerned, there was nothing “American” about the Foundation on American Islamic Relations and the word should be stripped from their name. They were an Islamic supremacist organization pure and simple who wanted to see the American government overthrown and replaced with an Islamic one governed by sharia law. They made him, as well as the overwhelming majority of responsible, law-abiding Muslims in America, sick.

  What’s more, they were entirely too well connected in Washington. Though Ozbek couldn’t prove it, he was certain that FAIR’s chairman, Abdul Waleed, had been strategic in one of the most egregious scandals to come out of the Pentagon in decades.

  The Defense Department’s sole advisor on Islamic law and Islamic extremism had been recently terminated because a high-ranking Pentagon official, who also happened to be Muslim, found his opinions too critical of Islam. It was like firing the government’s only advisor on Nazism right in the middle of World War II, or sacking its lone Communism advisor in the middle of the Cold War, just because a German or Russian staff member was upset that the advisor wouldn’t tone down his opinions of the enemy and what drove them.

  Ozbek had seen FAIR’s chairman photographed with the Muslim Pentagon official, Imad Ramadan, too many times not to believe that the pink-slipping of the Islamic law expert didn’t in some dark way bear FAIR’s fingerprints.

  The entire event was insane, even for the PC quagmire that was Washington politics.

  But be that as it may, Ozbek didn’t see what FAIR or a murder at the Jefferson Memorial had to do with the Special Activities Division. “What’s all this got to do with the CIA and the Transept program?” he asked.

  “This is where it gets complicated,” replied Rasmussen. “First of all, the suspect arrested at the scene, an Andrew Salam, claims he didn’t do it. He says he was framed.”

  Ozbek rolled his eyes.

  Rasmussen set the puzzle down and raised his palms. “I know. I know. But listen to this. He claims he’s a NOC for the FBI.”

  NOC, pronounced knock, was an espionage term largely used by the CIA that stood for non official cover. It designated a covert operative who had no official ties to the government he or she served. The problem was that the FBI didn’t use NOCs.

  “Let me guess,” said Ozbek. “The FBI disavows any knowledge of this guy?”

  “According to them, Andrew Salam has never had any connection to the Bureau whatsoever.”


  “Maybe he’s making it all up. He wouldn’t be the first law enforcement impersonator who got caught. Maybe the guy’s delusional.”

  “I don’t know,” said Rasmussen. “He interned in the Near Eastern section of the Library of Congress and graduated top of his class at the Georgetown Center for Arabic Studies.”

  Ozbek knew Georgetown’s Arabic Studies Program. It was a prime recruiting pool for many of the intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, but that didn’t mean this guy wasn’t unbalanced. “Fast-forward to where Transept plays into this,” he said.

  “Salam claims he has been running an FBI-sanctioned operation to infiltrate and develop intelligence assets in radical mosques and Islamist groups across the country.

  “One of the groups he infiltrated was the Foundation on American Islamic Relations. He had turned an employee inside the organization and was meeting with her at the Jefferson Memorial.”

  “Where she wound up dead,” said Ozbek.

  “He claims he and his ‘asset’ were attacked,” replied Rasmussen.

  “And he survived.”

  “He says that when the attackers saw Park Police approaching, they bolted before they could finish him off.”

  “Lucky for him. Did he get a look at them?”

  Rasmussen shook his head. “They were supposedly wearing masks.”

  “What about CCTV footage? The Park Police have cameras at the Jefferson Memorial.”

  “They were down at the time the crime occurred. They’ve been ‘looking into it.’”

  Ozbek was getting more interested. “Any romantic history between him and the victim?”

  “Investigators are looking into that too.”

  “What else do you have?”

  “Park Police are confident that they caught him in flagrante delicto—blood on his hands, clothes, everywhere,” said Rasmussen. “Salam says he was trying to save the victim’s life.”

  “Was there a weapon?”

  “A knife, but it was wiped clean. No prints. The D.C. cops have been sweating him since he was brought in. He’s been shut up tighter than a clam and just when they thought he was about to break, that’s when the NOC story surfaced.”

  “What was his alleged asset meeting with him to discuss?” asked Ozbek.

  “According to Salam, she had stumbled across something pretty substantial. Supposedly, FAIR had hired an assassin.”

  “And this assassin graduated from the Transept program?”

  Rasmussen nodded. “Whether this guy is full of shit or not, he did mention Transept, and you know as well as I do what a closely guarded secret that program is. He couldn’t have made that up.”

  “No, he couldn’t. Obviously somebody has been talking about things that they shouldn’t.”

  “I’ll tell you something else. The D.C. cops might not be overly impressed with this guy, but he really talks like an intelligence operative.”

  Ozbek looked at his colleague. “Maybe he actually thought he was working for the FBI.”

  Rasmussen nodded again. “I spoke with our liaisons at the Bureau and a contact I have with D.C. Metro police who are heading the investigation. Because the Agency has come up in the interrogation and they can’t make heads or tails out of this guy, they’re prepared to let us have access to him.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as we want.”

  “All right,” replied Ozbek. “Let’s pull everything we have on the Foundation on American Islamic Relations, Andrew Salam, and especially the Transept program.”

  Rasmussen picked up the folder. “That’s fine, but as far as the FBI, D.C. Metro, and this Salam guy are concerned, we’ve never heard of the Transept program. That’s the word from on high.”

  CHAPTER 7

  PARIS

  A ghost in his mid-forties wearing tan corduroys and a navy blue cashmere sweater sat on a narrow green bench admiring the medieval ruins of the Parc Monceau. He hadn’t been seen by anyone from his past life in over five years.

  His brown hair was medium in length and his wire-rimmed glasses framed a rather unremarkable face punctuated by two sharp green eyes. When standing in his brown leather shoes he came to just over five feet nine inches tall. He had the trim frame of an endurance athlete.

  In a discreet pocket inside the man’s Barbour jacket was a passport that bore a false name. It was as good a name as any—no better or worse than any of the names he had assumed throughout his career. Distinctly Anglo-Saxon, like the name he had used for his assignment in Rome, it suited him, as had his true Christian name, Matthew Dodd.

  He had renounced that name when he embraced Islam. It wasn’t hard to let go. With all of the different aliases he had assumed over his career, it was difficult to remember who he really was anyway.

  The only things that had ever grounded him and given him a true sense of purpose were his beautiful wife and his little boy, but they had been gone from his life for almost ten years now; killed in a car accident by a spoiled, drunken teenaged girl in her brand-new BMW while he had been away on an assignment.

  His handlers hadn’t even had the decency to tell him when it happened. They had waited until the operation was complete and then informed him—a full month after his wife and son had been buried. One week later, the teenaged girl who took his family from him walked out of the substance abuse program her well-connected family’s slick lawyer had arranged with the court and picked her life back up where it had left off. The girl had never spent a single day in jail. It was not only wrong, it was immoral.

  When he found out, the assassin had felt as if hooks on long chains had been sunk into his skin, tearing the flesh from his body in sheets. After the pain had come a disturbing numbness. In a culture of gray where anything could be justified, rationalized, or spun to mean just the opposite, he longed for a line to be drawn between black and white. More than that, he longed for someone to explain how all of this could have been allowed to happen. Some placed the blame on the driver’s parents, some on her peers, and others still on society in general. Dodd just slipped deeper into depression.

  His employers put him on medical leave and then, when they needed him back, shuttled him through a battery of tests, rated him ready to return to the field, and dispatched him once again to do what they needed him to do.

  He had drowned his sorrows in booze and blood, taking chances and assignments no one else wanted to take. There was nothing else for him in his life anymore. Or so he had thought.

  He could still remember the day he became a Muslim. That’s when he had chosen for himself the Muslim name of Majd al-Din—Glory of the Faith. It was a good name and one that suited his new life.

  Through the bitter anguish of losing his wife and son, Dodd had realized that the Muslims had something in overwhelming supply that his countrymen were very quickly running out of. That something was faith. More than that, Muslims abided by a clear moral code that delineated the difference between what was right and what was wrong.

  Up until the 1950s, American children yearned for adulthood. When their time came to be adults they stepped into the role proudly, leaving childhood behind and taking up the mantles of responsibility, honor, and dignity. They embraced and championed the ideals of those who came before them while valiantly tackling new ideas and problems that their families, communities, and nation faced. Those days were long gone.

  Americans now shunned adulthood, preferring to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence. By failing to move forward with grace and dignity, they left a gaping hole in American society. They treated relationships like disposable lighters, tossing marriages away when they ran out of gas. Children were left without families, and even worse, they were left without adults who could be role models of responsible behavior.

  With this lack of willingness to step forward and embrace adulthood, the nation had lost sight of its core values and ideals. In its place had morphed an every man and woman for himself mentality in which materialism was placed before spirituali
ty and submission to God.

  Dodd saw it as a lack of respect and a lack of order in American society and therein lay the appeal of Islam for him. Skeptical at first, the more he witnessed the lives of the devout Muslims he came in contact with in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the other places his assignments took him, the more he realized Islam was the answer he’d been seeking.

  Islam provided honor. It provided a code by which to live with dignity and in peace. It wasn’t the problem—it was the solution, and it was the only thing that would save the United States.

  CHAPTER 8

  To hasten America’s salvation, Dodd had given himself wholly to Allah. He viewed himself as a precision instrument which would be guided as Allah saw fit.

  That guidance arrived quickly in the form of a soft-spoken imam in Baltimore where Dodd kept a small apartment. The imam had been suspicious at first, but when he realized that Dodd had truly embraced Islam he looked into Dodd’s background and then introduced him to another imam he thought Dodd could be useful in serving.

  The imam’s name was Mahmood Omar. Dodd had never met the man before, but he was immediately impressed. Not only did the Saudi-born, forty-something cleric’s penetrating eyes and large stature contribute to a commanding presence, but he was well schooled in the ways of the West and America in particular.

  Dodd was determined to put his unique skill set to work for the betterment of America, and Sheik Omar was pleased to have such an experienced warrior fighting on behalf of Islam.

  Omar was a facilitator of international jihad and started Dodd out on small operations, always outside the United States. As both his confidence and trust in Dodd grew, so too did the scope of the assignments he was being sent on. More often than not, Dodd was carrying out sanctions on behalf of Omar’s colleagues and benefactors in the Middle East.

  It was tedious work that Dodd began to chafe under. After a time, he could see no benefit to America in any of it, nor could he fathom how it might be advancing the Muslim cause in the U.S. As corrupt and decadent as it was, Dodd still loved America and he missed it. He wanted to be back home. He was tiring of death and wanted to get on with living. Then the Khalifa assignments had come up.