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“Ah,” Karim said in a happy voice, “you don’t know how pleasing it is to me that you have no idea who I am. Now let’s get back to what we were talking about.”
Over the next hour Karim coaxed as much information out of the man as he dared. He knew there would be protocols in place for an operative like this, but since he had no way of checking them, he wasn’t sure it was worth pursuing. Instead, he focused on what the man had discovered at the mosque and what he had already passed on to his handlers. What he learned was that nothing of any value had been relayed. Indeed, the only thing that had been passed along was the fact Aabad had been shooting his mouth off that something big was going to be happening. That and the delivery of the supplies that had been placed under lock and key. Karim questioned him for thirty minutes on this one point alone. When he was done he felt extremely confident that the CIA had nothing more than suspicions.
Karim left the room and took a long moment to make sure he had everything figured out. Was it worth it to push it a little more? That was the question he kept asking himself. It was now nearly 1:00 in the morning. He doubted the man had a midnight check-in, but even if he did, this Mike Nash was likely asleep. Nothing would happen until morning, Karim decided, so he called Hakim using one of the disposable phones and ordered him to remove the back three benches from the van and return to the mosque with two of the men.
There were twenty-five cardboard boxes, each one weighing forty pounds. They were sealed and had USAID stenciled in blue on the sides. The contents of the boxes were courtesy of the U.S. government, but they could hardly be considered humanitarian aid. Each box was loaded with U.S. military C-4 plastic explosives. The shipment had been lost in Kuwait and ended up on the black market. Karim ordered Aabad to unlock the storage room and have his men begin placing the boxes on the delivery elevator. Hakim arrived twenty minutes later. His lack of enthusiasm for the change in plan was apparent from the moment he set foot in the door.
He came down to the basement and said, “We need to leave right now.”
Karim smiled and calmly said, “We are fine. I have thoroughly interrogated him. I will explain it all to you later. Right now we need to load the boxes into the van.” Karim pointed at the delivery elevator, which already had eight boxes loaded.
“But they will come looking for him,” Hakim said as he nervously moved about.
“Yes, eventually, but I do not expect them before morning. Now, don’t argue with me,” he said in a surprisingly happy tone. “Let’s get moving.”
The first load of twelve cases was sent up, as more boxes were brought down the hall. It was like a fire brigade, with four men in the basement, passing the boxes from the room, down the hall, and onto the rusted metal platform of the elevator. Then up they went and into the back of the van. With seven people helping, they had the van loaded in less than fifteen minutes.
As they were preparing to leave, Aabad inserted himself between Karim and Hakim and in an extremely agitated state asked, “What should we do with him?” He pointed back down through the hole in the sidewalk where the delivery elevator was descending.
The him, they had found out, was a twenty-nine-year-old American named Chris Johnson. He had done two tours in Afghanistan and another in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division. After his last tour he was recruited by Mike Nash to join a counterterrorism group within the CIA. There was actually no question what would be done with him, it was simply who would do it.
“Kill him,” Karim said, as if he was ordering him to move another box.
Aabad looked at the ground and began mumbling to himself as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I…” he started to say, and then stopped.
“You can do it,” Hakim hissed as he looked at Karim.
Karim looked from one end of the block to the other and thought they were pushing their luck. Now was not the time to stand around and debate the issue. To Hakim he said, “Wait for me in the van.” To Aabad, he said, “Follow me.”
Karim walked back into the mosque and down to the storage room. He looked at the bloody prisoner on the floor. He had already inflicted a great deal of pain on the man, but he still didn’t feel it was enough. He decided he would not simply put him out of his misery. Struck by a sudden inspiration, he said to Aabad, “Do you have a video camera?”
“Yes, in the office.”
“Get it.” He ordered.
Aabad went down the hall and returned ten seconds later with the camera in hand.
“Turn it on and make sure you do not get my face.” Karim pulled the hood on his sweatshirt over his head and turned his back to Aabad. “Is it recording?”
“Yes.”
“Move in for a close-up after I’m done.” Karim reached down and pulled Johnson’s head back. He looked into the agent’s tired eyes and said, “You are a deceiver, and you have insulted all of Islam. There will be a special place in hell for you.”
Karim placed the blade against the throat just beneath the Adam’s apple and drew the knife across the thin layer of flesh. The cut opened up pink, and then white, and then crimson as the blood began pouring out in a sheet. Karim stood upright and watched Johnson begin to choke on his own blood. It took a good thirty seconds for the agent to submit to his own death, and then he lay still on the blood-soaked floor.
Karim wiped the blood off the blade with what was left of the man’s torn shirt and then said to Aabad, “Wrap him up in a prayer rug, bring him to an area where no one will see you, douse him in gasoline, and burn him.”
CHAPTER 54
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA
NASH woke up to the sound of his beeping watch at 6:30. He slid out of bed without any thought of the night before or anything else, for that matter. He knew if he did not keep his head down and his mind focused he would never get out the door. The shorts, socks, shirt, and long-sleeved pullover were sitting on the overstuffed chair in the corner of the bedroom where he had placed them before bed. He picked up the stack and quietly slid downstairs. In the mudroom he stripped off his sleep pants and put on his running gear. After a glass of cold tap water he stopped by the back door and opened the cupboard at the top of his cubby. On the top shelf sat a black biometric gun safe. He placed his right thumb over the glass eye, and a second later the safe beeped and the door p
opped open. There were three pistols and two extra magazines of ammunition for each.
Nash grabbed the Glock 23 off the top shelf, put it in his right hand, and with his left hand pulled back on the slide. He looked down and confirmed that the chamber was empty. He then yanked the slide all the way back and put one round in the tube. That left him nine more in the grip. He stowed the compact .40-caliber pistol in his fanny pack with his keys and one of his phones, which he didn’t bother to turn on. Nash turned the alarm off and then turned it back on before leaving and locking the door again. He did all of this without putting any thought into it. “Good habits breed success,” was what his high school wrestling coach had always said. In the Corps, the mantra was, “Discipline is what gives us the edge.” Now in this next stage of life it was Rapp telling him flatly, “You fuck up one time and you’re dead.”
Nash hit the sidewalk running. There were only two cars parked on the broad tree-lined street and they were both familiar. The Jeep Wrangler belonged to the Gilsdorfs, and the Honda Accord belonged to the Krauses. He headed for Zachary Taylor Park. There and back was three miles, and if he couldn’t do it in less than twenty minutes it would probably ruin his day. Right up until the explosion, he consistently did it in under eighteen minutes.
