Andrew Britton: The Assassin

“Will they give us access to their database?”

“If we can come up with a good reason. We’ll still need some search parameters, though. They have thousands of intercepts on file.”

“What about going the other way? If you had a recording, for example, could you run it through the system to look for a match?”

“Of course. In fact, that’s the easiest way, but it still takes some time.”

“What kind of time are we talking about? Hours or days?”

She considered the question. “Again, you’re better off if you have someplace to start, like age or gender. Ninety percent of the flagged intercepts are male voices, anyway, but everything helps. Maybe a couple of days, if you were starting with nothing.” She tilted her head and frowned. “Sir, what’s going on? If this is about the Iraqi prime minister, we can send it to the top of the list. If there’s a match on file, you’ll cut down on a lot of your wait time. I think I can guarantee cooperation on the British end. The default position in a situation like this is to share everything.”

His smile was fading fast. “What makes you think that-”

“Sir, give me some credit. You ask me to bring you our watch list and this” — she held up the voiceprint folder — “which is worthless without the recordings, but you already knew that.” She paused for a moment. “They found something in Baghdad, didn’t they? A tape?”

He hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, it’s a tape. But they didn’t find it. We found it, here in London.”

That surprised her; it was standard practice to work with MI5 on such occasions. The Agency rarely took things into its own hands on friendly soil. “And?”

Mills exhaled slowly and leaned back in his chair, debating his options. It was a tough call. If he brought her in all the way, he might end up losing her back to Langley. Naomi was a valuable part of his team, but if the recording gave them something to work with, she would probably use it to push her own self-interests.

He knew that she wasn’t happy at the embassy. After what she’d managed to pull off the previous year, she would have expected a bump in the CTC, maybe to section chief. From what he had seen of her work, Emmett Mills was inclined to agree. He made his decision.

“Okay, Naomi, here’s the deal. The final casualty list for the bombing at the Babylon Hotel was released two days ago. You know about al-Maliki?”

She nodded. The Iraqi prime minister had sustained serious injuries and was still listed in critical condition at an undisclosed location. The press had engaged in wild speculation, of course, one news agency going so far as to air an in-depth profile of al-Maliki’s potential successors. The hysteria was beginning to die down, though, as it now appeared he was going to pull through.

Mills continued. “We had to wait for the list to see who was missing. The hotel manager was killed in the blast, along with most of the prime minister’s security detail. He was careful in that respect; the bodyguards were screened beforehand, so the survivors were cleared in a hurry. The gate guards were cleared as well. They were rotated on a daily basis, but in that case, the interrogations did yield some useful information. In the first week of September, a crew was brought in to repair electrical problems on the second and third floors of the hotel. The work took ten days to complete. During that time, the assistant manager, Rashid Amin al-Umari, spoke to each of the shift leaders, asking them to pass the vehicles through without a security check.”

“That’s interesting.” Naomi leaned forward in her seat. “That’s very interesting. Let me guess. Rashid has dropped off the face of the earth.”

Mills aimed a finger at her. “Exactly. We can’t find him anywhere, but it’s certainly not for lack of trying. The Iraqi Police Service raided his house in Baghdad yesterday, and” — he handed her a glossy 8 x 10 — “this morning we sent a team into this residence in Knightsbridge.”

Naomi accepted the photograph and studied it briefly. She was looking at a large home with carefully kept gardens and a beautiful stone facade. “How does a hotel manager afford a house like this?”

“Inheritance,” Mills replied. “It belonged to his father, but al-Umari lived there until three months ago.”

“ Belonged to his father?”

“Karim al-Umari died during a U.S. airstrike over Baghdad in 2003. His wife — Rashid’s mother — was also killed in the blast, as was his baby sister. Since the elder al-Umari had connections that went right to the top of the Baath regime, the bombing of his personal residence wasn’t quite seen as… accidental. Rashid gave an interview to Al-Jazeera a few weeks after he buried his family, in which he made some fairly candid remarks about his feelings toward the United States.”

Naomi took a few seconds to interpret that last remark; Mills was known to favor the British trait of understatement. “Well, that explains his motivation, I guess. But why that hotel in particular?”

“Because the prime minister frequently stayed there if he had an early appointment the next day. In this case, al-Maliki was scheduled to leave for Paris at seven a.m., so to avoid the traffic moving in and out of the Green Zone, he booked an entire floor at the Babylon for himself and his aides. The summit was scheduled a month or so in advance. Al-Maliki’s plans to attend were public knowledge, so the bombers made a decision based on precedent, which obviously turned out to be right. They had plenty of time to set up an electrical malfunction, which al-Umari used to get them into the building.”

“How did they plant the devices?”

“They built them into the walls on long-delay timers. Ingenious, really. The IRA tried something similar in ’84. They failed as well, by the way, only their target was Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet.”

“What about the tape? Where was it found?”

“In a wall safe in the house. He didn’t do a good job of hiding it, to be honest. He might as well have left it on the kitchen table.”

Naomi thought about that for a second. “He didn’t feel the need to hide it, probably because it wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place. Al-Umari recorded it himself, right? For insurance?”

“It looks that way.”

“But you can’t identify the other voice.” The chief of station shook his head in the negative. “What about the gate guards? Maybe one of them-”

“Not yet. Remember, this is a new development, Naomi. They only found the tape this morning, but it’s already in the works. The Iraqis will have a copy sometime tomorrow.”

“And the men who planted the bomb?”

“They’ve disappeared as well. One point of interest: the team leader was a German by the name of Erich Kohl. That comes from the gate guards, by the way; they didn’t do the security checks, but they did sign the workers in each morning. Kohl only showed up in the second week. Interestingly enough, the German government doesn’t have a contractor by that name in the region, at least not in an official capacity.”

Naomi nodded and reached for her coffee, which was already growing cold. “So, Kohl might be the mystery man on the tape?”

“I’d say there’s a good chance. What I want you to do is bring it to our British friends and see if they can dig up a matching voiceprint on file. The conversation takes place in Arabic… Will that be a problem?”

She shook her head. “No, probably not. We can work around it.”

“Good. There’s a copy waiting for you in Operations.” Mills leaned back in his chair and studied her plaintively. “If you need me to get involved, that’s not a problem, but I’d prefer to handle it at our level. You can see the problem… We are not supposed to have this tape. I hope someone owes you a favor.”