Administrations changed, as did opinions on what the CIA should or should not be doing. What was justified in the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks might take on a different light when re-examined from some point in the future. As far as Harvath was concerned, the best way to avoid being judged by history was not to be a part of it to begin with.
Harvath understood the President’s position. He had deep feelings about individual liberty. He also cared about keeping Americans safe.
He had seen the utter barbarism of groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda up close. He had witnessed what they had done to their victims, including women and children.
One of the most painful moments of his career was rescuing the kidnapped son of an Iraqi policeman, only to have the little boy die in his arms. The torture the child had been subjected to was beyond horrific.
There were only so many dark corners in a person’s mind to hide such experiences. It was why, from time to time, Harvath needed to be alone with a couple of six-packs or a bottle of bourbon. Long runs and pushing heavy stacks of weights brought him only so much relief.
It wasn’t the healthiest way to deal with things, but unfortunately the human mind didn’t have a Delete button. Sometimes, if only for a little while, he just needed to forget.
It was a terrible burden to drag around, but it was part of the job. Without someone to hunt the wolves, the sheep would never be safe. The wolves were multiplying too quickly. The sheepdogs were being overrun. It was a matter of survival.
So when the President had decided to alter America’s rules of engagement, Harvath had agreed to go along.
Those new rules of engagement were what had placed him at Burning Man, operating without official sanction. There just weren’t enough fingers and toes at the FBI to plug all the leaks springing from the terrorism dike.
Whenever possible, the CIA shared its intelligence with the Bureau. Too often, though, that intelligence was placed on the back burner. It wasn’t their fault. They were being forced to drink from a fire hose.
With the President’s quiet encouragement, Langley had begun to develop, plan, and execute more operations on its own. Depending on your point of view, Burning Man had been either a spectacular success or a spectacular failure.
Listening to Harvath’s debriefing, McGee and Ryan both saw the op as a success. Had the other bombers been able to detonate, many more people would have been killed and injured.
No one, not even Harvath, had known it was an active plot until moments before it had gone off. Even if they had shared their mountain of intelligence with the FBI, it would have taken too long for them to assign a surveillance team to Hamza Rahim.
“Once the plane lifted off from Black Rock City Airport,” Harvath said, wrapping up his report, “I went to work on them. You know the rest.”
Yes, they did. Rahim had been extremely uncooperative. Harvath had quickly ratcheted up the pressure, playing on the would-be bomber’s fear of being returned to his native Egypt.
Harvath convinced Rahim that not only did their jet have the capacity to make the flight, but also that the Egyptians would gladly accept him and help get the information he wanted out of him.
Rahim knew all too well how the Egyptians operated. He had been viciously tortured by their secret police before. He had no desire to experience it again. No matter what the Americans had in store for him, it couldn’t be worse than going back to Egypt.
So, he had slowly begun to cooperate—revealing how the attack had been planned, financed, and why he had returned to the RV.
To avoid detection, the materials for the suicide vests had been smuggled in separately and assembled on site. The bomb maker, though, had become nervous. Rahim was concerned that he might be having second thoughts and was worried he’d be captured after the attack.
It was a business decision—no more, no less. The bomb maker was a loose end that had needed tying up.
Rahim and the other cell members had been transferred to a secret facility in Colorado for further interrogation. As soon as the handoff was complete, the jet had flown Harvath and his team to D.C., where they had gone their separate ways.
Though Harvath was renting a place in Boston, to be closer to his girlfriend and her family, he hadn’t officially given up his house in Virginia. It was along the Potomac River, close to George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. Most of the furniture was gone, but he’d left just enough behind to make it livable.
If nothing else, it was good to be “home” and to shower off the playa dust and toss all of his clothes in the washer.
He’d been in the midst of arranging to return to Boston when he had gotten the call about a meeting at the blue lockhouse. He figured the main point would be deciding what to do next about the ISIS plotters who had tasked Rahim with the attack.
“So what’s next?” Harvath asked. “The refugee camp where the cell members were recruited?”
McGee shook his head. “We’re putting somebody else on that.”
“Somebody else? Why?”
“This is why,” the Director replied, as he opened a file, removed a photograph and handed it to him.
Harvath studied the photo.
“His name is Mustapha Marzouk,” said Ryan, taking over the briefing. “He was a graduate student in chemistry from Tunisia.
“Three years ago, during a raid on an ISIS compound by a CIA-backed rebel group in Syria, a laptop was found. At first, no one thought anything of it. It wasn’t password protected and all the drives were empty. But then we started drilling down on it and discovered over 146 gigabytes of hidden material.
“Among the more than thirty-five thousand files were all the usual things you’d expect to find on a laptop at an ISIS stronghold—justifications for jihad, military manuals, terror videos, et cetera. Then came the interesting stuff—document after document showing that the laptop’s owner was researching weapons of mass destruction.”
From the minute she had mentioned chemistry, Harvath had begun to develop a bad feeling. “Let me guess. The laptop’s owner is Mustapha Marzouk.”
Ryan nodded. “Correct. For three years we have been looking for him. Syria. Iraq. Libya. Tunisia. We even followed an alleged sighting in Somalia. Everything, though, has turned up empty.”
“So why are we talking about him now?”
“Over the last several months, we’ve been picking up chatter about an impending series of attacks, culminating in something very big, somewhere in Europe.”
“Any clue as to what that something very big is?”
“The laptop contained a thirty-page fatwa from an obscure, jailed Saudi cleric justifying the use of chemical and biological weapons.”
Harvath felt a chill sweep over him.
Ryan opened the folder in front of her and read from the Islamic ruling. “If Muslims cannot defeat the unbelievers in a different way, it is permissible to use weapons of mass destruction. Even if it kills all of them and wipes them and their descendants off the face of the Earth.”