Brad Thor - Full Black

“And who was he meeting in Chicago?” asked the leader of the Uppsala cell.

“Marwan Jarrah.”

“And then?”

“And then,” replied Chase, “New York and Los Angeles, but he left for Yemen and I never saw him again.”

Karami studied the young man’s face. There was no way he could know these things unless he was exactly who he said he was. Nevertheless, Sabah distrusted the newcomer, and Sabah had excellent instincts. “Tell me about the Sheikh. The Sheikh from Qatar.”

Sabah seemed interested in this question and leaned forward.

Chase looked at both men. “What Sheikh?”

“Surely,” stated the cell leader, “your uncle confided in you enough to mention the Sheikh.”

“Apparently not completely. He never mentioned any Sheikh.”

“You never questioned where the funding came from?”

“Why would I care? I’m an IT person,” replied Chase. “I had nothing to do with his finances.”

Chase’s mind was moving like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to align the information so that the entire puzzle fell into place. He had never heard about any Sheikh from Qatar. This was completely new to him.

Marwan Jarrah had been near the top of the organization’s pyramid, but Chase had always known he was taking his orders from someone above him. That someone had turned out to be Aazim Aleem. The next question was, who had been giving Aazim orders? Was he the ultimate string-puller, or was there someone else? And what was the Uppsala cell’s connection to all of this?

At least Harvath had played it smart. Had he thrown a hood over the nephew’s head and dragged him off to some black site in Eastern Europe for interrogation the minute they’d uncovered him, instead of surveilling him, the United States might not ever have learned about the Uppsala cell. It had come as a complete surprise even to the real Mansoor Aleem. His uncle Aazim had been smart. The man kept his network compartmentalized. He had to. It was like bulkheads. If one was compromised, it didn’t have to mean the entire ship was going down.

Which brought Chase back to the Uppsala cell. Why had Aazim set it up? What was its purpose? Was it an insurance policy of sorts, a guarantee that if he was taken out, their mission would continue? If so, did that mean he had entrusted them with the knowledge of his nephew? There were so many pieces of the puzzle missing.

As Chase spun the blocks of information in his mind, Karami asked him another question. It put him on edge, because it showed the cell leader was not fully convinced he was who he said he was. “Tell me about your uncle’s impairment.”

“What impairment?” Chase replied. “His hands?”

Karami said nothing. His face was impassive, inscrutable.

“He lost them in Afghanistan,” Chase continued. His gaze was locked on Karami. Just out of his field of view, he could feel Sabah’s eyes burning a hole right through him.

“How did he lose them?” asked the cell leader.

Chase could sense Sabah was ready to handle any incorrect answer. “Do you want the fable?” replied Chase. “Or the truth?”

“As the prophet, peace be upon him, said, we should appropriate truth for ourselves and avoid lying.”

Chase nodded. “It’s a shame, as the fable is much more glamorous. He lost his hands when a bomb he was building detonated prematurely. It also resulted in pitted scars around his left eye. This is why he often wore sunglasses, even in the evenings. People mistook him on occasion for being blind, but he had perfect vision.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Karami, who smiled. He also sensed Sabah relax slightly, but not much.

The cell leader was about to ask another question when one of the cell members appeared in the doorway and asked if the trio would be joining the others for Asr prayers.

“Do you feel up to it?” Karami asked.

“The key of Paradise is prayer,” replied Chase, quoting Mohammed. Apparently the men who had been watching him at the garage had told Karami of his inability to complete the Salah.

The men stood and Chase was directed to a bathroom where he could perform his ritual ablutions. After washing his hands and feet, he joined the others in the apartment’s dining room. There was no furniture, only prayer rugs spaced evenly along the floor.

Once all of the men were present, prayers were begun. Chase had been given an extra rug to use and he went through the motions perfectly. No one would have known that he wasn’t Muslim.

As he prayed, he was able to take a head count of how many men there were in the apartment. He’d also been able to at least glance into all of the rooms. From what he could tell, there were no booby-traps. He didn’t see any explosives or weapons, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t hidden away somewhere. What it did mean, though, was that there weren’t any right at hand. When Harvath and the assault team hit, they would have surprise on their side and therefore the upper hand. That was, if they hit.

Chase had still not had a chance to get to one of the windows to look outside for the car with the book on its dash. He had decided he might only get one chance to get near a window and that if he did, he should kill two birds with one stone. If he did get the opportunity, he’d look for the car while positioning the window treatments so that the team outside would have a rough idea of what was waiting for them when they took down the apartment.

Both while moving through the apartment and while at prayer, Chase kept his eyes peeled for objects he could use as weapons. If Harvath and the assaulters didn’t succeed in locating the safe house, Chase was going to have to either sneak out or fight his way out. With nine men present, Karami probably ran an around-the-clock guard. Chase slowly began preparing himself for what fighting his way out might look like. Once again he reflected on the lessons of Hagakure.

But try as he might, he couldn’t quite focus. Something was bothering him. It took him several minutes to figure it out. There was something missing in the apartment. It wasn’t just weapons that were absent. It was computers. There wasn’t a single one to be seen. If a raid did take place, they might be able to get to hidden weapons quickly, but computers? Not a chance. Not unless there was a rack of them in one of the closets, all powered up and ready for their hard drives to be wiped clean or blown to kingdom come with the touch of a button.

There weren’t many places they could be hidden. He planned on finding out if there were any here or not.

After prayers, he expected Karami to pick back up with his questioning, but the cell leader apparently had other pressing business and disappeared into one of the rooms along with Sabah and two other men and closed the door. This left Chase free to converse with the remaining cell members. It also left him somewhat free to move about the apartment.

In the first room, Chase found multiple mattresses, only one of which was covered by a sheet. There was a milk crate for a nightstand and atop it a table lamp with an exposed bulb and no shade. A small TV, DVD player, and cushions scattered across the floor completed the makeshift dormitory cum rec room. In the corner he noticed a couple of old hookah pipes.

Sitting on cushions in front of the TV were four cannon-fodder cell members-all mouth breathers, as Chase liked to call the IQ-impaired. They were watching footage of American military vehicles being taken out by IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The men found the carnage extremely amusing and were laughing out loud at every explosion.

That’s okay, thought Chase. Yours is coming soon enough. Keep laughing.

Only one of the men looked up and acknowledged that Chase had walked into the room. The cell members seemed to know that he was related to someone important, which meant he was treated with a certain amount of deference. But he was still a newcomer, so despite that deference, they kept him at arm’s length. None of the men invited him to sit.