Extreme Measures

A new image came up on the screen of hundreds of people standing at the south end of the parking lot. A reporter was sticking a microphone in the face of a young girl who was crying. Hakim thought she couldn’t have been more than twenty.

“Look where they are standing!” Karim said with great enthusiasm. He checked his watch. “This is perfect. We will have front-row seats this time.”

Hakim wasn’t so sure he wanted a front-row seat.

“Oh,” Karim said, clapping his hands together, “I almost forgot. I must check in with Ahmed.” He grabbed his mobile phone and pressed down on the number seven. The phone automatically dialed Ahmed’s phone. After three quick rings, the Moroccan answered. “How are you?” Karim asked.

“Good,” the man answered in a quiet voice. “Things are very busy here. I assume everything worked on your end.”

“Yes… to perfection.” Karim imagined the Moroccan lying in the woods, burrowed into a pile of leaves and pine straw.

“Congratulations. As you predicted, this place is busier than a beehive.”

“Wonderful. We will stick to our original timetable. If anything changes, I will inform you.”

“I’ll see you in a little bit.”

CHAPTER 67

RAPP stepped off the elevator with his ragtag crew. In addition to Ridley and the four men he’d picked up, he had two of D.C.’s finest with him. Both cops were roughly the same size as the man Rapp had knocked out. After Rapp had cuffed all four men and duct-taped their mouths, he stuffed two of them in the back of the squad car and brought Aabad and one other with him.

Ridley moved ahead and entered his number into the cipher lock on the door to the Operations Center. Rapp entered first with Aabad, and then the cops brought up the rear, one on each arm of the big man. Apparently, he had given them some trouble while in transit. After the man had tried to break one of the side windows with his feet, the cop riding shotgun was forced to hit him in the face with a blast of pepper spray. With his wrists cuffed behind his back, the man was left to writhe in anguish as the spray burned his eyes. If it was up to Rapp they’d all have canvas bags over their heads right now, but he didn’t have any.

Nash and two other agents met the group as they came through the door. Behind him the big screen went blue. “Where do you want them?”

“Upstairs,” Rapp said, looking up at the balcony. They didn’t have four separate conference rooms, so Rapp had to come up with a solution. “Take these three,” Rapp pointed to the big guy and the two others, “and put them in one room, facedown on the floor. If they so much as look at each other, you guys have my permission to kick the shit out of them.”

Nash looked nervously at the two cops. He was surprised to see that they were nodding with approval.

One of them actually offered to help, and Rapp took him up on it saying, “That’d be great. Follow these two agents.” As the men moved off, Rapp said to Ridley, “Why don’t you take dumb-ass here upstairs and get started. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Gladly,” Ridley said, “Come on, dumb ass.” Ridley grabbed him by the elbow and Aabad howled in pain.

“My shoulder!” he screamed in pain. “I think it’s dislocated!”

Rapp got right in his face and said, “It’s not dislocated. If it was, you’d probably pass out from the pain. It’s only separated, but when I get upstairs, if you don’t tell me everything I want to know, I’m going to rip that fucking shoulder clear out of its socket, and then I’m going to stick your hand up your own ass.”

“Come on,” Ridley said to the prisoner, this time pulling him by the collar of his jacket.

Nash looked around the big room and noticed the majority of the analysts had been watching Rapp’s tirade. He put himself between Rapp and the rest of the room and said, “I need to talk to you about a couple things.”

“Make it quick.”

Nash put his hands on his hips and was about to start talking, when Art Harris came walking up.

“Guys, you didn’t hear this from me,” Harris said in conspiratorial whisper. “I just got a call from HQ. They’re sending a team.”

“What kind of team?” Rapp asked.

“Prosecutors and Investigators. They found heavy trace amounts of explosives at the mosque as well as blood.”

“So,” Rapp said, still not getting it.

“It’s the FBI, Mitch. Someone realized after the fact that we didn’t have a search warrant. They’re all freaked out. They think a judge will kick all this evidence.”

“So they’re going to come out here and take over the interrogation?”

“I think so.”

“Fuck that. Let ’em try.”

“If I were you,” Harris said, leaning in closer, “I’d do whatever you need to do in the next thirty minutes.” Backing away, he added, “If you know what I mean.”

Rapp grabbed his forehead and moaned, “Does it ever end? This is the same type of bullshit that got us into this mess in the first place.”

“Let me handle the interrogations. I’m the one who fucked this thing up.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“If I’d brought Johnson to your attention sooner, maybe this whole disaster could have been avoided.”

Rapp grabbed him by the arm and led him into the corner. “Shut the hell up.”

“But…”

“But, nothing. A disaster is when a hurricane hits. You can’t stop God or Mother Nature. This,” he pointed at the big board, “was going to happen sooner or later. There was no way we were going to be able to hold these guys off forever. Especially when we’re playing by all these Mickey Mouse rules. If you had pulled Johnson on Monday like Chuck and Rob had told you to, we wouldn’t have these four right here. We haven’t arrived at this spot by being too careless. We’re in the middle of this shit storm right now because we haven’t taken enough risks. This Johnson thing sucks, and when the time is right we’ll honor him, but that’s not now. We can’t let up for a second. The Feds are going to come in here and throw their weight around, and Mirandize these pieces of shit. They’re going to get lawyers, and a couple of years from now they might actually go to trial.

“I don’t give a shit about any of it. It’s all a fucking sideshow. You know what two of those guys smell like?”

“No.”

“Barbecue, Mike. They smell like burnt meat. How much do you want to bet they’re the ones who fucking torched Johnson?”

Nash looked up at the balcony where the four men had been taken and said, “Let’s get this done before the suits show up.”

CHAPTER 68

AN ashen-faced analyst stood outside the conference room door and tried her best to ignore the loud but muffled noises that were coming from inside the room. She’d been asked by Mike Nash to stand there and wait. She’d asked him, “For what?” and his reply had been a simple one-word answer: “Information.”

It had been five minutes, and while she had no sympathy for the man who was being interrogated, it was very uncomfortable to know that it was her boss in there who was doing a good deal of the shouting and God only knew what else.

Suddenly the door opened and Nash appeared with a piece of paper. “Run those names through TIDE and call me on the conference room phone as soon as you get a hit.”

TIDE was the database they operated. It stood for Terrorist Information Datamart Environment.

“Hurry up,” Nash ordered, before closing the door. At the far end of the conference table Aabad bin Baaz was sitting in a chair with his hands still bound behind his back, tears streaming down his cheeks, his thick black hair sticking out in different directions.

Rapp put both hands on the table and said, “Aabad, I swear to you, the biggest computer in the world is chewing up those names right now, and if it comes up empty… the arm is coming out of the socket.”