Takedown

The damage made no difference to the assassin as he dragged the lifeless young CIA operative back from the parapet and pocketed the camera as well as the spare memory card. The only thing Abdul Ali cared about was that there never be any record of the meeting in that café.

The Americans would know its outcome soon enough, and by then it would be too late.

Two

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM

WASHINGTON, DC

MAY 18

President Jack Rutledge entered the situation room and signaled the men and women around the conference table to take their seats. He was less than five months into his second term and had already been called to this room more times than in the last two years combined.

He had hoped to use his second term to focus on the key domestic policy issues he had campaigned on and which would comprise his legacy. But more than that, the president wanted to leave his successor, Democrat or Republican, a better country than had been left to him. The war on terror, though, had much different plans for Rutledge.

Contrary to what the White House press secretary was spinning to the media, terrorist plots against America and American interests were not on the decline. They were in fact on a very marked upswing, and the United States was running out of fingers and toes with which to plug the dike.

For every attack the United States thwarted, three more popped up in its wake. The operations tempo in the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities was higher than anyone had ever seen. Despite its phenomenal successes, most of which the average citizen was never aware of, all America seemed able to do was tread water. The country was running well beyond capacity and it was only a matter of time before the overtaxed system collapsed from sheer exhaustion. Something needed to be done, and done soon.

That was the thought on the mind of every person in the room as the president finished skimming the contents of the file folder in front of him and turned the meeting over to General Bart Waddell, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” replied Waddell, a tall, dark-haired man in his late forties. As he stood, he pressed a button on a small digital remote, and the plasma monitors at the front of the room, as well as those recessed within the situation-room table, sprang to life with the revolving DIA logo. “The footage I am about to show you was shot this morning. It was developed thanks to two converging pieces of intelligence. The first was a series of satellite surveillance photos ordered up by the Central Intelligence Agency when one of its field officers spotted the subject in North Africa-Morocco, to be exact. The second piece of intelligence was a tip that pinpointed the subject’s base of operations more than six thousand kilometers southeast in Somalia.”

Waddell advanced to the first slide in his PowerPoint presentation and everyone watched as a dusty Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up in front of the weather-beaten façade of a long single-story structure. “What you are looking at is a Muslim religious boys’ school, or madrassa, on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The man getting out of the car on the right is Mohammed bin Mohammed, aka Abu Khabab al-Fari, or as our analysts are fond of calling him, M amp;M. He is known as al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker and head of their weapons of mass destruction committee. Born in Algeria in 1953, he has training in both physics and chemical engineering.”

Waddell then advanced through a series of still images as he continued to narrate. “At al-Qaeda’s Tora Bora base near Jalalabad, Mohammed not only built and managed a facility for the manufacture of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, but he provided hundreds of operatives with training in the use of those weapons. Most of you are familiar with the images that made it into mainstream media showing the scores of dead dogs, cats, donkeys, et cetera scattered outside the complex.”

Everyone in the room was indeed familiar with the photos, but it didn’t make them any easier to have to see again. Around the table, they nodded their heads in grim unison.

“The photos only heightened some of our worst fears about the ghoulish experiments we suspected M amp;M was carrying out with anthrax and other biological and chemical poisons.

“When our teams hit the site in 2001, we found hoards of documents authored by Mohammed. They bore little similarity to the other terrorist manuals recovered at al-Qaeda safe houses throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, which in comparison were extremely crude. Mohammed’s manuals contained very innovative designs for explosive devices and represented a huge leap forward in al-Qaeda’s technological capabilities.