Brad Taylor - Enemy of Mine

He gave out the address to his hawaladar , then said, “I need a place to stay. A hotel that won’t be visited by anyone in authority.”

“Nonsense. You will stay with me. I have a flat in the old town. It’s secure, trust me.”

The Ghost smiled and said, “I have one other favor.”

“What? Anything to repay my debt.”

“I need you to get me in to the Al Bustan Rotana as an employee. I have some work to do there before they lock it down for a visit from an American.”

Hamid’s face fell, and the Ghost said, “What? You told me you were being promoted to a leader in the maintenance department. I won’t tie you to the work. You’ll be safe.”

“It’s not that. I would do anything for you, but I no longer work there.”

At first, the Ghost didn’t grasp what Hamid had said, the words too destructive to contemplate. The very idea of using the Rotana Hotel had come from his friendship with Hamid. His entire plan relied on Hamid’s employment. The symmetry of attacking the United States envoy in the same hotel that Mossad had killed the Hamas operative held a poetic justice in his eyes, but it was predicated on gaining access. He’d never thought to ask if Hamid still worked there.

He considered attacking at the hotel anyway, but knew it was futile. He wanted a surgical killing. A statement that vied for publicity precisely because it duplicated the Mossad hit. Now, it would have to be a large, messy attack. And he didn’t have the explosives for a car bomb.

Hamid continued. “Right after they opened the Burj Khalifa, they had a problem with the elevators. Some tourists were trapped for hours. They fired the maintenance crew, and I applied to replace them. I’ve worked there for over a year.”

The comment tickled something in the Ghost’s memory. He reached into his carry-on bag, pulling out the American’s itinerary and saw what had triggered the recollection. The Burj Khalifa was the tallest building in the world, an engineering marvel that rose like a spear out of the desert, towering over every other building in the Dubai skyline. The envoy had left his ambassadorship six months before the building opened in January 2010. He was now scheduled for a royal tour to the observation deck one hundred and twenty-four stories above the earth.

“You work at this building now?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get me in there?”

Let me get this straight,” said the director of the CIA. “You want to move a team to Dubai without any cover backstopping whatsoever? A team that’s supposed to be in Tunisia and we clandestinely infiltrated into Beirut for no good reason?”

Kurt grimaced at the reaction. He’d purposely whitewashed the infiltration of Knuckles’ men, blurring the line between when they’d reached the point of no return on their deployment and when Pike had been rescued.

“Yes. I know it sounds risky, but we can mitigate that as far as the Taskforce goes. The team from Tunis has clean passports that we can burn after this op.”

The D/CIA pointed to the presentation Kurt had just given. “And that’s the smoking gun? That’s all you have?”

“Yes, it is, but the PowerPoint doesn’t do justice to the man. Lucas Kane is a proven killer, and he’s headed to Dubai. We’ve tried to capture him several times, and failed. The risk is worth it.”

The secretary of defense spoke up. “I get that Kane’s a threat, but you’ve got nothing to go on. You couldn’t even find him in Dubai if you wanted. You said yourself that there was more to this that you didn’t understand. That there were others involved. I think you should take some time to flesh this out, get some concrete operational information, then come back. I can’t see sending a team willy-nilly to Dubai.”

“Sir, you know me. Know I don’t cry wolf. Yes, we don’t have a handle on Lucas, and yes, there’s a bunch of threads we don’t understand, but we need to go with what we know. Lucas discussed finding assassins on tape, and Pike found the envoy’s itinerary on a laptop computer held by Islamic extremists. An itinerary that hasn’t been changed, I might add.”

He saw the secretary of state bristle and hastily continued, knowing he would need the man’s vote. “I’m not making a judgment on that decision, but the fact remains that Lucas is in Dubai, and the envoy’s headed that way. We need to assume that Lucas has the itinerary and is going to target the envoy. We can stop it now or mop the blood up later.”

By the secretary of state’s expression, Kurt knew he’d hit a nerve, and was surprised at what he said next. “The itinerary was constructed with policy implications in mind. We couldn’t change it at this late date without offending a great number of people and setting back the very agenda for the trip. Given that, I’m inclined to let the Taskforce continue, if they can do it without compromise. An attack on the envoy’s party would be devastating to the peace process, setting us back to square one. We can’t be sure we would be able to get the people back to the table again.”

The secretary of defense said, “Billings, you should sit back and watch a few of these go down before you jump so quickly to approve. Your key comment is ‘without compromise,’ and I don’t see how that can be done.” He turned back to Kurt. “How are you going to infiltrate them?”

“We’ll get them in as tourists.” He saw the SECDEF and D/CIA roll their eyes, and worked to mitigate the weakness in his plan. “I know that’s not optimal, but tourism is one of Dubai’s greatest selling points, and they don’t look too hard at Westerners. We can get in and out without trouble. This is what we do.”

“Seriously?” said the D/CIA. “That’s what Mossad used to say. After their hit, Dubai is the last country in the Middle East I would send an operative to work without complete cover backstopping, and you’re talking about sending in a shooting team with nothing.”

Kurt held up his hands. “Hold on. Don’t confuse what we’re trying to do with that operation. The target of the Mossad hit is exactly why Dubai worked so hard to solve the crime. It humiliated them to have a bunch of Israelis come in and flagrantly kill a Hamas military commander. We’re doing nothing of the sort. We’re preventing an attack in their country, against another Westerner. As long as we don’t do anything that blatantly embarrasses them, they won’t look too hard, particularly given the target. They love McMasters from when he was an ambassador. They don’t want harm to come to him, or to their reputation. Especially after the Hamas hit.”

Alexander Palmer, the president’s national security advisor, said, “Whoa, whoa. Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? Missing something? Lucas Kane is a United States citizen. Does that matter? I mean, should we discuss the implications?”

Kurt, fearing he was losing ground, said, “Lucas Kane was designated a DOA target a couple of years ago, and it’s still valid. We just quit chasing him because he no longer posed a threat to national security. No longer fell into the Taskforce mandate. We don’t need to plow over that ground again. We discussed the implications when he was designated.”

Palmer said, “I appreciate your input, Colonel Hale, but I was speaking to the Council, not to you.”

President Warren spoke for the first time. “Lucas Kane gave up any constitutional protection when he decided to attack national interests. No different than al-Awlaki. As far as I’m concerned, his citizenship has no bearing.”

He waited for a rebuttal. When none came, he said, “Gentlemen, we have an unprecedented opportunity with this peace process, beyond whatever solutions we can gain at the bargaining table. The Palestinian Authority has requested certain things that, if we provide them, may very well give us great leverage in the future. I understand this deployment is risky, but damaging McMasters’s mission would be catastrophic to future peace in the region.”