Gray rode the elevator to the same floor as he had the night before but entered a different room. In here were five men and two women seated around a rectangular conference table. Gray sat and opened a laptop in front of him.
“Results of last night?” he said.
“Al-Omari refused to cooperate,” one of his lieutenants answered.
“Not that surprising actually.”
“About al-Omari’s son, Mr. Secretary, do you want us to take him?”
“No. The boy can stay with his mother. A child needs at least one parent. ”
“Understood, sir,” the man said, acknowledging the death sentence just handed out to the unfortunate father.
“Take one week, and by any means at your disposal you will extract as much useful intelligence as possible from Mr. al-Omari.”
“Done,” one of the women said.
“Ronald Tyrus, our resident neo-Nazi?” Gray asked.
“We’ve already started debriefing him.”
“And the others?”
“Kim Fong has given us a confirmed lead on a shipment of a new-generation explosive allegedly invisible to airport X-ray. According to him, it’s being smuggled into L.A. next week.”
“Follow it to the buyer. I want the scientists, equipment and their financial backers, the whole spectrum. The others?”
“None of them would cooperate.” The man paused. “The usual exit strategy?”
Each of the people in this room had worked with Gray before in some capacity and stood in awe of the man. They had collectively made decisions and taken actions that were illegal and often immoral as well. Over the years these highly educated and trained men and women had been given orders to find and kill those persons deemed to be enemies of the United States; and they had dutifully carried out those commands, because that was their job. Yet the potential death of another human being, while certainly not new territory for this group, never failed to garner their respectful attention.
“No,” Gray said. “Let them go, but with tracers. And let it be known through discreet channels that they’ve talked to the authorities.”
“The result will be they’ll be killed by their own people,” the other woman present said.
Gray nodded. “Film the murders. We’ll use that as leverage. And if they won’t turn to our side, terrorist killing terrorist never fails to make the six o’clock news. Okay, give me the latest.”
The man charged with responding to this query was the youngest person in the room. However, in many ways he had more experience in the field than most agents far his senior. Tom Hemingway looked just as dashing and was dressed just as impeccably as he had been last night at the LEAP Bar. He was a rising star at NIC and its reigning expert in Middle East affairs. He also had an excellent grounding in the Far East, having spent the first twenty years of his life in those two places with his father, who’d been a U.S. ambassador, first to China, then Jordan, and, for a brief time, Saudi Arabia, before returning to China.
Because of his father’s travels, Tom Hemingway was one of the few operatives in American intelligence who could speak Mandarin Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi. He had read the Qur’an in its original Arabic and knew the Muslim world as well as any American other than his father. It was these attributes, plus physical and mental indefatigability and a gift for spy craft, that had fueled his meteoric rise through the ranks to his current position as one of Gray’s inner circle.
Hemingway clicked a key on his computer, and a screen hanging on the far wall sprang to life showing a detailed satellite-imaging map of the Middle East.
He said, “As outlined here, CIA and NIC operatives on the ground have made significant inroads in Iran, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE and Yemen as well as the new Kurdish Republic. We’ve infiltrated over two dozen known terrorist organizations and splinter cells at the deepest levels. All are on track to pay big dividends.”
“It helps when your field agents aren’t all blond and blue-eyed who speak no Arabic,” one of the other men commented dryly.
“Well, for decades that’s all we had,” Gray shot back. “And we still don’t have nearly enough operatives who can speak the language.”
“Kabul and Tikrit aren’t exactly popular career paths these days,” commented one of the men.
“What are the losses currently running?” Gray asked.
“Two operatives killed per month,” Hemingway answered. “It’s as high as it’s ever been, but with more reward obviously comes more risk,” he added.
Gray responded, “I can’t emphasize enough the importance of getting these people out safely.”
There was a murmur of largely unenthusiastic agreement around the table. Middle East terrorists dealt with suspected spies very directly. They filmed the beheading of the person and released it to the world to dissuade others from replacing the fallen. It had proved a very effective strategy.
“We’re losing soldiers over there at the rate of a dozen a day, seven days a week,” Hemingway pointed out. “And with the new front that just opened on the Syrian border, the casualty rate will only get worse. Meanwhile, the Muslim independence movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Thailand and Mindanao are allowing the spread of radical Islamic ideology to grow unabated. And Africa’s a whole other problem. Most of northern Nigeria had adopted strict sharia law. They’re stoning women to death for committing adultery and cutting the limbs off petty thieves. The terrorists’ recruiting and training operations are largely conducted over the Internet, and they use identity theft and other scams to hide their movements and conduct financing through the hawala system of informal money transfers. There’s no centralized command for our military to hit. Clandestine, undercover operations are the only viable strategy.”
“There’s a democratic government in power in Iraq, duly elected by the people,” another man said. “Despite suicide bombers and bullets flying everywhere, the people came out and voted. And look at the gains in Lebanon, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Morocco. In fact, democracy is slowly spreading across the region. That truly is a miracle and something both we and the Muslim community can be proud of.”
Hemingway looked at Gray. “It’s cost this country half a trillion dollars and counting to get to the election stage in Iraq. At that rate we’ll be bankrupt in five years. And when the Kurds declared their independence, it hardly set well in Baghdad. And the Sunnis may not be far behind in revolting from the Shia control. Meanwhile, the Baathist exiles and foreign insurgents are continuing to escalate the violence. On top of that, word is the Iraqi government will soon be asking the U.S to leave because it’s struck a deal with the Baathists for a bloodless coup. And then the Baathists will fight a final battle with the insurgents who favor a Taliban-style government. Iraq will end up far more destabilized than it ever was, with a legion of newly minted terrorists ready to attack us. So what has our money and the blood of our soldiers really bought us?”
Gray said, “I’m aware of that. We knew the day would come. Unfortunately, from our side we really can’t leave. The situation is far too volatile.”
Hemingway threw his hands up. “That’s what happens when you have a country that was artificially created by a colonial power, jamming three distinct and incompatible groups into one boundary. A one-size-fits-all democracy is not an effective foreign policy when you’re dealing with such different cultures. Western democracy is predicated on separation of church and state. That’s a difficult sell to Muslims. That’s why Mali and Senegal are the only Muslim nations rated fully free.”
Gray said calmly, “We don’t make the foreign policy of this government, Tom, we just try and clean up the mess and limit the damage. India and Pakistan?”