Alex Berenson - The Secret Soldier

THE PHONE ON THE bedside table trilled. “Yes.”

“Mr. Ambassador.” The voice belonged to Clint Rana, the career foreign service officer who served as Kurland’s personal aide and translator. “Dwayne Maggs would like to meet this morning. Says it’s urgent.” Maggs was deputy chief of the CIA station in Saudi Arabia, as cool as they came. Kurland couldn’t remember Maggs using the word urgent before. He checked his Rolex: 8:15.

“Tell him nine. Thank you, Clint.”

Kurland looked through his bedroom’s bulletproof windows to the embassy’s tennis court. His wife was practicing forehands with Roberto, a cook who doubled as her trainer. Roberto favored 70s-style headbands that showed off his long hair, and tight white shorts that showed off his other good qualities. Kurland wasn’t worried. He and Barbara had been married longer than Roberto had been alive. As he watched, Barbara banged a line drive into the net and grunted, “Gosh dang.”

Kurland couldn’t hear the words, but after thirty-six years, he knew. He gingerly made his way down the back staircase, wincing with each step. He’d torn his left ACL skiing five years before. The knee had never fully recovered. Now the first slivers of arthritis had come to his hips, scouts of what would no doubt be an occupying army. Getting old stank. The poets could dress it up all they liked, but the reality was simple: Getting old stank. Though it came with a few compensations, Kurland thought, like knowing what your wife would murmur when she shanked a forehand.

And here she was, in a blue skirt and white top, tall and longlimbed. She still looked exactly like the sophomore he’d seen at his spring formal at the University of Illinois. Well, not exactly . But close.

“Morning, darling.”

“Morning, dear.”

“You looked great.”

“Not how I felt.” She mimed a couple of forehands. “Practice, practice.”

“Well, you looked great.”

“Roberto looked great. As he always does.”

“Quién es más macho,” Kurland murmured.

“Are we finished for the morning, Mrs. Kurland?” Roberto shouted.

“Indeed we are, Roberto.”

“May I?” Kurland took her racket. “Make sure to tell him to wear tighter shorts tomorrow.”

“Oh, I will.”

“Do you think he gets the joke?”

“I think. I’m not sure.”

They walked side by side to the white wicker table at the edge of the court. A jug of ice water and a pot of steaming coffee awaited. Kurland pulled back a chair for his wife and poured water for her and coffee for himself. From the table he could just see the gun emplacements atop the walls around the court. At the moment, they were unmanned.

“Another day in paradise.”

“Amen to that.” She raised her water glass in a mock toast. “Anything new?”

“They broke up another cell last night.” In the wake of the attacks, the classified cables had been even more disturbing than usual. Saudi police had arrested a four-person cell planning an assault on an Aramco compound in Dhahran, home to the foreign engineers who maintained the Saudi oil fields.

“Isn’t that good news?”

“Barbara. There’s something we need to talk about.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I don’t want you to leave. I want you to consider leaving.”

“Is there a difference?”

He sipped his coffee. He’d known she would say no, but he had to keep trying. “It’s for your safety.”

“I’ve never felt safer. Every time I turn around, I see a marine. And Joshua himself couldn’t bring down these walls.”

“It seems like overkill, but it’s not. Trust me.”

“When my book’s done, I’ll think about it.” His wife was writing a novel set in Riyadh and centered on the lives of rich Saudi women. Her second book. “These ladies, the chance to talk to them, it’s once in a lifetime.” A couple times a month, a black-clad ghost arrived at Quincy House to chat with Barbara. Once the women were inside, their burqas came off, revealing the fanciest designer clothes Kurland had ever seen. He wondered if they intentionally wasted money on Chanel skirts and Dior jackets to spite the regime that made them cover themselves.

“That’s at least a year away.”

“Problem solved, then.” She drained her water glass and stood. “I’ve got to wash before I start to smell like one of those camels.” Months before, Kurland and Barbara had visited a ranch where King Abdullah kept hundreds of prize camels. At the king’s urging, Kurland had sat on one. He’d encouraged his wife to do the same. She still hadn’t forgiven him.

She kissed his bald head and walked off. He watched her go, amazed, as always, that he still loved her so much after so many years.

HIS GOOD FEELING LASTED only until he arrived in his office on the embassy’s top floor, where Dwayne Maggs waited. Maggs, who didn’t speak Arabic, had gotten the job after an extraordinary tour as a CIA security officer in Pakistan. Kurland didn’t know exactly what Maggs had done, and Maggs wouldn’t say. But it had turned him into a legend. Maggs and his team were half the reason that Kurland hadn’t insisted that Barbara leave. The other half being that he hated fighting with her.

“This came in this morning,” Maggs said, handing over a flashcoded cable.

Beneath the usual security warnings, the cable explained that the National Security Agency had intercepted calls and e-mails between Al Qaeda’s lieutenants in Pakistan — now called AQM, short for Al Qaeda Main — and the group’s cells in Saudi Arabia, called AQAP, for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. An attachment detailed the messages, leaving Kurland wishing for a dictionary that translated NSA and CIA lingo to English.

02:23:01 GST: TM from mobile phone +92-91-XXX–XXX [Peshawar,PAK] to +966-54-XXX–XXXX [Jeddah, KSA]: ????

02:25:37 GST: TM from mobile phone +966-54-XXX–XXXX tomobile phone +92-91-XXX–XXX : La. La.

03:01:18 GST: IM from XXXXXXX12@gmail.com [IP address,Karachi, PAK] to XXXXXXXXLION@gmail.com [IP address, Riyadh,KSA]: What is this?

03:14:56 GST: IM from XXXXXXXXLION@gmail.com toXXXXXXX12@gmail.com: Inshallah. [God’s will.]

And so on, for three more pages. Kurland read the attachment twice, didn’t get it. These crazy kids, with their IMs and their TMs and their suicide bombs. “Explain,” he said to Maggs.

“TM, that’s text message. IM, that’s instant message. The bracketed information is the location of the phone or computer where the messages were sent. NSA redacts the precise location, if we have it, and the exact phone number or e-mail address, for OPSEC.”

“Operational security,” Kurland said, glad to be able to play along at last. “Dwayne, I spent the last thirty years building houses for hicks.” In fact, Kurland had run one of the largest residential construction companies in the Midwest. “Help me out here. Isn’t there always traffic like this before these attacks?”

“Yes, sir. But the timing, these e-mails, they’re all after the attacks. Not before. These guys, what you have to remember about them, sir, the dumb ones are dead. We’ve killed them. The weak ones, they’ve surrendered. The ones who are left, they’re tough. And smart. They’re hiding up there in the mountains, and they know the risk they run every time they pick up a phone. They know we’re on them, and they don’t make these calls lightly. And look, they’re not taking credit or congratulating each other. They’re asking what happened. It looks like AQM—”

“Al Qaeda Main—”

“Right. The guys closest to bin Laden. I’ll try to keep the acronyms to a minimum, sir. Bottom line, looks like they didn’t have a clue this was coming. And the ones here, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, they didn’t know, either. One message, they say they didn’t. The other, they keep their options open, like they’re waiting to see if maybe they can get credit even though they didn’t do it.”