and his eyelids heavy. He might well have missed them altogether.
He thought about how remarkably easy it had been to satisfy the apartment manager in the
spring of 1998, when their predecessors had first set up in the city. It had taken nothing more
than a few crumpled twenty-dollar bills to gain her permission, and the camera had gone up that
same day. Positioned just above the transom inside the doorway, it gave him a clear shot of
everyone leaving and entering the building. There was no sound; a video cable alone provided
the images on the 20" screen in front of him, but he knew who these people were, and he knew
why they were here.
As he called out for Darabi, his eyes never left the monitor.
Arriving on the fifth floor, Naomi saw that the operators were already in their preassigned
positions. She held back with Green, her heart pounding in her ears.
One of the men extracted a fiber-optic snake from his pack. Holding the miniature video
monitor in his left hand, he kneeled and slid the unit’s tiny camera under the cheap wooden door
of Apartment 5A.
Vanderveen was on 12th Street heading south when his cell phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.
He pulled the motorcycle over to the side of the road and answered immediately. Only one
person had this number, and she had been instructed not to call except in case of an emergency.
“Yes?”
“Listen carefully, I don’t have a great deal of time. The authorities are coming up the stairs right
now.”
“How many?”
“Seven. Five are heavily armed.”
He managed to stay calm, despite the fact that this woman had personally wired the necessary
funds to his bank account and knew the name he was currently using. “What are you going to
do?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t be around to tell them anything. The place we’re using is clean. We’re
almost finished wiping the disks.”
“What about the phone? They can track—”
“The phone was cloned. Believe me, you have nothing to worry about on your end. I’ve been
doing this for a long time. Do you have the necessary funds?”
“I already have most of what I need, and money left over for the rest of it.” He paused briefly.
“So that’s it, then.”
“I’m afraid so. Good luck.”
Fatima Darabi pressed END without waiting for a response, her hands shaking as she deleted
the call log on the phone. She had known it could come to this, but she had never really
expected the worst. Now that the worst had happened, though, she knew she would do her duty.
She felt a sense of falling inside, and wondered if her brother had endured the same as his plane
fell to the surface of the Atlantic. Her reverie was broken as al-Maroub emerged from the
bedroom, cradling an automatic rifle. She looked up. “Is it done?”
He nodded. Darabi reached for her weapon.
Without turning around, the operator crouched at the door, lifted one finger, then a second. His
eyes, focused on the small screen in his left hand, suddenly went wide. Naomi, in the stairwell
just behind the SAC, was leaning forward to whisper a question in his ear when a hail of bullets
punched through the door in front of the entry leader. The first rounds caught him full in the
chest, pushing him back across the dirty tile as the assault team returned fire.
Kharmai dropped to the ground as the hallway erupted. Her hand was down by her side,
Page 121
tugging at the pistol, then groping for the strap that held it in place. The door in front of the
fallen operator was being torn apart by bullets, as was the thin drywall on either side. The
operators were scrambling for cover, but three went down before they could get out of the line
of fire. Bill Green was lying next to her on the stairs, trying to talk, his mouth filling with blood.
His face was frozen in a look of disbelief. Naomi saw with horror that at least a dozen rounds
had shredded his body armor.
In that paralyzing moment, fear was an iron fist around her heart. She was gasping for breath,
her eyes welded shut. She could hear the whine of the bullets as they slammed into the drywall
inches above her head. The downed operators were screaming in pain until one of the terrorists
filled the hallway with another magazine full of 7.62mm rounds.
The two surviving agents finally pulled it together, one providing cover as the other tossed a
flashbang through a gaping hole in the shattered door. Naomi, with her eyes closed, didn’t see
the blinding light that spilled out into the hallway, but the grenade’s concussion left her senseless
as the door crashed inward and the operators disappeared from view.
Sitting on the Honda at the side of the road, Vanderveen watched the traffic pass. His face was
blank, but his mind was churning.
It was time to walk away. Despite the woman’s words, he knew she would overlook something;
it was inevitable. After all, they had somehow managed to track her down. He had a second set
of documents that she had no knowledge of, a set that he kept on his body at all times. He had
used them already, and needed them for the 26th, but they could serve him now in a different
way. National Airport was just across the bridge, not more than a few miles to the south. From
there, he could connect to an international hub and be out of the country in less than two hours.
But then what? There were certain truths he had to consider here. There would be no place for
him in the organization if he walked away now, that much was certain. The Iranians were the
bigger threat. They might give him the benefit of the doubt, but more likely, they would assume
he had blown the woman’s cover. Either way, his own future was now inexorably linked to the
outcome of the operation.
More important than any of this, however, was his own personal desire to see it through. For
many years he had delighted in the perverse irony that the country he hated was giving him the
tools of its own destruction. It had not been easy to feign his loyalty, especially in the beginning,
when he was required to live in the squalid barracks and forced to take meals with his supposed
peers. When he had finally revealed himself in Syria, it was with one end goal in mind: to inflict
his pain on as many of them as was humanly possible. What waited in the barn on Chamberlayne
Road would, in a few short days, advance this goal considerably. He could not, would not waste
it now.
He was dimly aware of a rising rage. He had to push it down; it would not serve him here, but
the question remained: how could this have happened in the first place? They clearly didn’t have
his bank account, the one he had used for the house and the van, otherwise they would have
moved on him in Virginia. It had to be an outside source… Shakib? If he had been given the
location of the safe house, it was certainly possible. But he’d never know because Shakib was
dead, blown apart in the Kennedy-Warren, with Ryan Kealey waiting in the street below.
Nothing changed in Vanderveen’s face with this recollection. Kealey. There was no doubt in his
mind that his former commanding officer had something to do with this unfortunate
development. It was bad enough that the man had the audacity to survive what should have been
a kill shot in Syria. Now he was really pushing his luck.
Something sparked behind his eyes. If Kealey wanted to be involved, then so be it. Vanderveen
started the Honda and eased back into traffic.
When she came back to herself, Naomi was alone in the hallway. Standing up, she checked
herself for injuries, afraid of what she would find. Miraculously, her body seemed to be intact.
Page 122
She walked on shaky legs toward the wrecked apartment. As she reached the doorway, the two
remaining operators pushed out, oblivious to her presence, talking quickly but calmly into their
lip mics.
“TOC, this is Alpha 4, I have four agents down. I need EMTs now.”
Naomi stepped into the devastation, slipping her pistol back into its holster. The cheap
furnishings had been nearly destroyed, the carpet littered with splinters of wood and shards of
shattered glass. One of the terrorists was lying spread-eagled on the floor. She felt bile rise in her
throat when she saw what was left of the man’s face. She looked away quickly and forced a few
shallow breaths, briefly catching the voices behind her in the process: “TOC, make that five
down. I repeat, five down. Two tangos out of play. Confirm ambulances en route.”
Passing into one of the bedrooms, she was aware of distant sirens. The room was sparsely
furnished, its most notable feature a desk that had been smashed by bullets, and what looked like
the remains of a laptop computer.
Fatima Darabi was sitting against the wall where she had fallen. Her body was ruined, but her
mind was still intact and all she knew was pain. She opened her mouth to breathe. When nothing
happened, she realized that she had only a few seconds left. Through the rapidly encroaching
darkness, Darabi watched as the dazed-looking woman wandered into the room.
Darabi’s fading brown eyes flickered to the handgun lying next to her. One of the agents had
kicked it out of reach just after he fired a half dozen rounds into her chest. It was a stretch, but
she would try for it anyway. Her body was dying, but the hatred that drove her was as strong as
ever.
As Naomi examined the contents of the desk, she sensed something move behind her. She
turned to stare at the body propped up against the wall, thinking she must have imagined the
sound — until the eyes moved. Then, to her disbelief, the woman’s hand was reaching out for
the Makarov that lay a few feet to her right. The operators had obviously assumed, in their haste
to get back to their fallen team members, that the subject was dead. But she wasn’t dead, at least
not yet, and the gun was in her hand and rising as Naomi frantically groped for her own pistol…
Naomi was far too late. The dying terrorist leveled her weapon and squeezed the trigger.
The pay phone was on the far edge of the lot, shielded from the storefront by a row of
dilapidated vehicles, climbing out of a small mountain of refuse and cigarette butts. The metal
casing was dented and scarred, and the telephone book absent, having been ripped away from
its metal wire a long time ago.
Vanderveen didn’t need the book, as the number was already seared into his mind. It was the last
thing he needed to do in the city. He could not make the call from his cell phone or from his
rented home in Virginia. Nor could he have done it from the waterfront, despite the slim chance
that it would be traced back to that location. He picked up the receiver and dialed the number.
“Hello, you’ve reached the U.S. Army Rangers Association. This is Pam speaking, how may I
help you?”
“Hi, Pam. My name is Ryan Kealey. I’m a member of your organization and I receive your
newsletter, the ‘Ranger Register.’ I haven’t been getting it lately, though… I recently moved, and
I was wondering if you have my new address on file.”
There was only a minor risk in this approach. She might ask for his Social Security number,
former address, date of birth… any number of things, none of which he could answer. If she
asked, he would simply hang up and look for another way.
“What is your new address, Mr. Kealey?”
He breathed a soft sigh of relief. “It’s 1662 Manor Drive, Springfield, Illinois.” He gave her the
zip code. “I wasn’t sure if I sent it or not… Is that what you have?”
He could hear the distant sounds of a computer keyboard over the line. “No, sir, I have 1334
Page 123
Village Creek Road, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. I’ll go ahead and change that for you now.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Vanderveen looked up in annoyance before answering. Several ambulances were racing past him
on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Freeway, and he could barely hear the woman over the scream of
their sirens. “No. You’ve been very helpful.”
“You’re welcome. Have a good day, sir.”
Vanderveen hung up and walked back to the Honda. He remembered Kealey as a man with
incomparable devotion to the units in which he served. Since he had served in a number of units,
it had taken a number of calls. A lot of calls, in fact. Vanderveen had almost given up when it
finally came to him.
In that glorious moment of epiphany, he remembered that Kealey had once gone to the
commanding general at Bragg with a fund-raising idea for the Ranger Memorial Foundation.
This recollection had then led him to the USARA, one of the leading organizations chaired by
former Army Rangers.
Vanderveen felt a twinge of satisfaction as he crossed the Francis Case Memorial Bridge and left
the darkening Washington skyline far behind. He had come to a decision. He was going forward
with it. He had come too far, worked too hard to throw it all away now. To assume the woman
had taken her own life before talking required a tremendous leap of faith on his part, but he was
prepared to take that leap. There was too much to lose if he didn’t.
It had been a productive day, and Vanderveen allowed himself a glimmer of satisfaction at the
knowledge that he once more held the power of life and death over a man whose fate should
have been sealed on a Syrian hilltop seven years earlier.
After the late-night dash from the Hay-Adams, Kealey had traded down to a far more modest
hotel on the outskirts of Alexandria. He had paid cash in advance before learning that the Elgin
story was already dead, thinking that if the reporters managed to track him down, they had
probably earned themselves a story. He was drained — physically from the long hours and the
constant stress, and emotionally from the protracted argument with Harper that had not
managed to resolve itself.
Ryan had no illusions that his career would continue at the Agency, but he respected Harper,
counted him as a friend, and it bothered him that he had walked out of Langley without trying to
repair the rift between them.
He brought the BMW to a halt in the dying light of the hotel’s parking lot. He breathed deeply
and closed his eyes, allowing himself, just for a moment, a glimpse at what life might hold when
it was all said and done. The teaching at Orono wasn’t bad; it was boring, but he could live with
that. Maybe he’d get more involved, take on some extra classes. Maybe they would move, find a
place closer to the city. Katie had suggested it recently, but he wasn’t sure if she had been serious
