Brad Thor - Foreign Influence

The architecture of any human network, whether it was created for gathering intelligence or committing acts of terror, was pretty easy to understand. As you climbed the food chain, each layer was designed to protect the operative positioned above it. Those layers were people, and they were known as “cutouts.”

At the ground level was the cell itself. The number of people in that cell was dependent upon their specific assignment and the overall goal of the network.

The cell had a leader whose job it was to make sure that the cell operated efficiently and to communicate up the food chain. The next rung on the ladder was the controller. He or she might control only that one cell or he or she might control many cells, but that person’s primary job was to act as a go-between and protect the identity of the regional controller.

The regional controller could be limited to controlling all of the network’s activity in a particular region, in a particular country, or even a group of countries. The regional controller then reported to a figure known as “tight control.”

“Tight control” was in charge of the entire network worldwide. Despite site 243 being a Chinese project, Harvath doubted that any of the controllers were Chinese. Most likely, they were all Muslim men who totally believed they were operating within a true Islamic terror network. That was the brilliance of the operation.

Whoever “tight control” was, Harvath was confident he didn’t live anywhere near China. He very likely operated similarly to bin Laden prior to 9/11, as the guest of a country sympathetic to the Islamist agenda. Pulling his strings would have been achieved through coded communications. For all intents and purposes, the man could very well have believed he was working directly for the al-Qaeda hierarchy, even though he’d probably never met any of its members face-to-face.

It was the perfect turnkey operation. Why go through the trouble of building your own Muslim network when you could hijack one from the Chinese? What Harvath couldn’t figure out, though, was why they had done it. Why unleash the carnage? What was the point?

To figure that out, they were going to need to get to “tight control”; and to get to him, they were going to need to work their way up the food chain one bite at a time.

They all agreed that the terrorist who had received the text was most likely the cell leader and the sender of the message had been the cell controller. While Harvath would have liked to have applied “pressure” to the terrorist, he was barely clinging to life as it was and would not have withstood interrogation.

What’s more, reverse engineering a network was very delicate work. Members were taught distress codes and could easily relay to their controllers that the cell had been compromised. They didn’t even need to send the message themselves. Often they could trick their captors into doing it for them. It could be as simple as a chalk mark in the wrong place, a window shade at the wrong height, or the wrong color or style of font in a chat room.

Knowing full well the pitfalls, Harvath decided it best to force the controller out into the open. But to do it, Robert Ashford and Rita Marx had to call in nearly every favor they had ever accrued. For the first time in Britain’s modern history, its entire electronic surveillance apparatus was focused on one objective and one objective only-locating a single phone somewhere within the United Kingdom.

When everyone was in place, Marx radioed for the tactical teams to move in on the mosque, whose morning worshippers had already departed.

High above, television helicopters were broadcasting the entire thing. All the rest of the team could do was wait and hope that the cell’s controller would expose himself.

The gas company trucks converged on the mosque from opposite ends of the street. When the officers poured out, they were all heavily armed, armored, and wearing gas masks.

Rounds and rounds of tear gas were fired through windows as the officers rapidly advanced on the mosque. Across the country, viewers were undoubtedly glued to their sets. If the cell’s controller was watching, which Harvath prayed he was, all he would be able to surmise was that the mosque his men had been using for their headquarters was compromised and was now under a full-scale assault.

The fact that he hadn’t been able to reach any of his cell members would only heighten his anxiety. Very likely, the only question greater in his mind than how the cell had been discovered, was why his men hadn’t yet detonated their explosives. That was what their training would have dictated.

The only thing the controller would have been able to attribute the delay to was that the cell members were trying to draw more police officers into the mosque before blowing it up.

That sort of deviation definitely would have been against protocol. Their job would have been to detonate, not fight it out or try to take as many officers with them as possible.

There was one other option that the controller would have had to consider. He would have to entertain the possibility that the men had lost their nerve.

Either scenario was unacceptable. The controller would have been left with no other option than to engage the fail-safe.

When the tactical team hit the mosque’s front doors, Marx’s voice came over Harvath’s headset. “The cell phone detonators have begun lighting up.”

“Give me a location.”

“We’re working on it,” she replied. “Stand by.”

Precious seconds ticked down as the tac team flooded into the mosque. Harvath studied the faces of the Athena Team members sitting next to him. To the untrained eye, they would have appeared cold and even expressionless, but Harvath knew the look of operators about to go into battle. The women were the picture of professionalism.

He could also sense their impatience. He was feeling it too. This was their one shot and the window was narrower than almost any other he had ever dealt with. If the Brits couldn’t get a lock on the controller, they were going to be dead in the water.

“We need that location,” Harvath repeated.

“Stand by.”

“Come on. Come on.”

Finally, Marx’s voice came back over his headset, “Got it.”

The woman from Scotland Yard rattled off a set of coordinates.

“Roger,” replied the helicopter pilot, who then announced to Harvath and his passengers, “Hold on.”

The pilot banked the AgustaWestland Lynx and sped toward the center of London. It was the fastest helicopter in the world and speed was exactly what they needed right now. As Marx worked on pinpointing the exact building the controller was in, she had already begun sending undercover tactical teams in the general direction. But unless the teams were in the immediate vicinity when the address was revealed, Harvath had a strong feeling he and his team were going to be the first boots on the ground.

Buildings whipped beneath the belly of the helo as it rapidly closed the distance with their destination. Harvath had been surprised by the central London location. It wasn’t that the cell’s controller couldn’t be fully integrated into British culture-the wave of British doctor attacks had proven that-it was just incongruous with what Harvath’s experience had been. Normally, these guys used ethnic neighborhoods as cover. There, they could blend in and disappear. The neighborhoods were difficult for non-Muslims to penetrate and the close-knit, often ethnic makeup of their inhabitants provided an unending supply of lookouts and human trip wires.

That said, only hours earlier, Harvath had cautioned Bob Ashford not to underestimate their enemy, and now he reminded himself to heed his own advice. Expecting the controller to be holed up in some blighted Muslim neighborhood sitting on a carpet drinking tea while he coordinated bombings was sloppy thinking on his part. He was trained better than that. This guy could be a banker or a professor at the London School of Economics for all he knew.