Avenger

Paul Devereaux went to see Dir. George Tenet. "Let me go over to Counterterrorism," he begged.

"CT is full, and it's doing a good job," said the DCI.

"Six dead in Manhattan, nineteen in Dhahran. It's Al Qaeda. It's UBL and his team who are behind it, even if they don't actually plant the bombs."

"We know that, Paul. We're working on it. So is the Bureau. This is not being allowed to lie fallow."

"George, the Bureau knows diddly about Al Qaeda. They don't have the Arabic, they don't know the psychology, they're good on gangsters; but east of Suez might as well be the dark side of the moon. I could bring a new mind to this business."

"Paul, I want you in the Middle East. I need you there more. The king of Jordan is dying. We don't know who his successor will be. His son Abdullah or his brother Hassan? The dictator in Syria is failing; who takes over? Saddam is making life more and more intolerable for the weapons inspectors. What if he throws them out? The whole Israel-Palestine thing is going south in a big way. I need you in the Middle East."

It was in 1998 that secured Devereaux his transfer. On August 7th, two huge bombs were detonated outside two U.S. embassies in Africa; at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Two hundred and thirteen people died in Nairobi, with 4,722 injured. Of the dead, 12 were Americans. The explosion in Tanzania was not as bad: 11 were killed, 72 injured. No Americans died, but 2 were crippled. The organising force behind both bombs was quickly identified as the Al Qaeda network. Paul Devereaux handed his Middle East duties over to a rising young Arabist he had taken under his wing, and he moved to Counterterrorism.

He carried the rank of assistant director, but he did not displace the existing incumbent. It was not an elegant arrangement. He hovered on the fringe of Analysis as a kind of consultant but quickly became convinced the rule of only employing sources of upright character as informants was complete madness.

It was the sort of madness that had led to the fiasco of the response to Africa. Cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory on the outskirts of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, because it was thought the longdeparted UBL was manufacturing chemical weapons there. It turned out to be a genuine aspirin factory.

Seventy more Tomahawk cruise missiles were poured into Afghanistan to kill UBL. They turned a lot of big rocks into little rocks at several million dollars a pop, but UBL was at the other end of the country. It was out of this failure and the advocacy of Devereaux himself that Peregrine was created.

It was generally agreed around Langley that he must have called in a few markers to get his terms accepted. Project Peregrine was so secret that only Director Tenet knew what Devereaux intended. Outside the building, the Jesuit had to confide in one other, White House antiterrorist chief Richard Clarke, who had started under George Bush Sr., and continued under Clinton.

Clarke was loathed at Langley for his blunt and abrasive criticisms, but Devereaux wanted and needed Clarke for several reasons. The White House man would agree to the sheer ruthlessness of what Devereaux had in mind; he could keep his mouth shut when he wanted; more, he could secure Devereaux the tools he needed when he needed them.

But first, Devereaux was given permission to throw in the trash can all talk of not being allowed to kill the target or use to that end "assets" who might be utterly loathsome, if that is what it took. From that moment Paul Devereaux was performing his own very private high-wire act, and no one was talking safety nets.

He secured his own office and picked his own team. He headhunted the best he could get, and the DCI overruled the howls of protest. Having never been an empire builder, he wanted a small, tight unit, and every one a specialist. He secured a suite of three offices on the sixth floor of the main building, facing over the birch and poplars toward the Potomac, just out of sight, save in winter when the trees were bare.

He needed a good, reliable, righthand man; solid, trustworthy, loyal; one who would do as asked and not second-guess. He chose Kevin McBride. Except that both men were career "lifers" who had joined the company in their mid-twenties and served thirty years, they were as chalk and cheese. The Jesuit was lean and spare, working out daily in his private gym at home; McBride had thickened with the passing years, fond of his six-pack of beer on a weekend, most of the hair gone from the top and crown of his head. His a

Much of his career had been in foreign embassies, but never rising to chief of station. He was no threat, but a first-class Number Two. If you wanted something done, it would be done. You could rely on him. There would be no pseudointellectual philosophising. McBride's values were traditional, down-home, American.

On October 12, 2000, twelve months into Project Peregrine, Al Qaeda struck again. This time the perpetrators were two Yemenis, and they committed suicide to achieve their goal. It was the first time the concept of suicide bomber had been evoked against U.S. armed forces since 1983 in Beirut. At the Twin Towers, Mogadishu, Dhahran, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, UBL had not demanded the supreme sacrifice. At Aden, he did. He was upping the stakes.

The USS *Cole*, a Burke-class destroyer, was moored in the harbour at the old British coaling station and onetime garrison at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Yemen was the birthplace of UBL's father. The U. S. presence must have rankled.

Two terrorists in a fast inflatable packed with TNT roared through the flotilla of supply boats, rammed between the hull and the quay, and blew themselves up. Due to the compression between the hull and the concrete, a huge hole was torn. Inside the vessel, seventeen sailors died and thirty-nine were injured.

Devereaux had studied terror, its creation and infliction. He knew that whether imposed by the state or a nongovernmental source, it always divides into five levels.

At the top are the plotters, the pla

In the terror against the West in general, and the United States, in particular, Al Qaeda fulfilled the first two functions. Neither UBL nor his ideological Number Two, the Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, not his Ops chief, Mohamed Atef, nor his international emissary, Abu Zubaydah, would ever need to plant a bomb or drive a truck.

The mosque schools, the *madrassahs*, would provide a stream of teenage fanatics, already impregnated with a deep hatred of the whole world that was not fundamentalist, plus a garbled version of a few distorted extracts of the Koran. To them could be added a few more mature converts, tricked into thinking that mass murder guaranteed Koranic paradise.

Al Qaeda would then simply devise, recruit, train, equip, direct, fund, and watch.

On his way back in the limousine from his blazing row with Colin Fleming, Devereaux once again examined the morality of what he was doing. Yes, the disgusting Serb had killed one American. Somewhere out there was a man who had killed fifty, and more to come.