The Perfect Weapon Page 5

  “To kill.” Lance was not in a good mood after being killed. Drill or not, he hated to lose. “To kill us. Whoever fed the information, did so with the explicit intention of bringing in a covert ops team and blowing them to kingdom come.”

  “So where did the intelligence for this operation come from?”

  Lance looked at the others. Their faces were blank. They’d been through things like this before with their illustrious leader. So here again, three and a half years into his life of espionage, this operation was yet another test, another lesson for Preacher. He closed his eyes. The others had grown accustomed to this practice. They waited in silence.

  Lance rose a thousand feet in the air and looked down again on this fake village situated on a jutting peninsula in North Carolina. Specifically, the village was located at the Harvey Point training facility -- the CIA’s farm away from “the farm” in Langley, Virginia. Looking down on the setting in his mind’s eye, Lance examined every detail he had studied in the four days leading up to the excursion. He reviewed their route from landing on the beach, into the village and up to the building. He switched from a daytime view to enhanced night vision view using new heat sensing technology. This review took four whole seconds. He noticed the building did not change in all three shots. There were no open doors or windows. The heat signature showed low levels inside that could be humans or appliances.

  He opened his eyes. The answers he was looking for weren’t in any satellite photos. He couldn’t see bad intel. Couldn’t see the bad intentions. He knew the answer already. It was Seibel. The master had played them for fools. None of them had questioned him about the intel for the op. They had taken his words as credible. But he left the door open for them twice during briefings and they missed it.

  “I believe we did not press Papa for the source of the operational data. If I recall, he stopped at two separate instances during the build-up and we,” he looked around at the blank faces on the other three. “Or better, I, did not raise my hand and ask for the source of said data. I’m sorry for killing you all.”

  His joke brought smiles from each. Seibel turned to him. “What did I tell you about the source?”

  “You mentioned 'inside information' from sources in Beirut and Islamabad.” Lance had the details down pat.

  “Yes I did. And why would these sources supply us faulty, even deadly information?”

  “Plants, double-blinds, it could be any number of factors. The reason would be to monitor our actions after receiving the information to ascertain operational structure as well as inflicting casualties on our side,” Lance stopped. He turned to look at the building. He saw it before him and then from a thousand feet in the air.

  “The bomb is the key.” He took two steps toward the structure and turned back to the group. “It wasn’t an ambush, a tripwire or a roadside. This was a sophisticated device designed to be detonated by remote from less than 300 yards, right?”

  “Something like that.” Seibel rubbed his chin.

  “So what did I, we, miss?” Lance looked around, scanning for intricate details now visible because of the flood of lights. The other three joined him looking in all directions.

  “What are we looking for?” Tarwanah, the older of the two Jordanians, asked as he squatted down to get a better view under the Chevy. The dummies that had been propped up as guards a few minutes earlier lay on the ground at the rear of the vehicle.

  Lance looked up at the roof of the building and took a few steps back. “I don’t know. But I suspect there were a few details we missed along the way and in the lead-up. He wouldn’t have made it quite so arbitrary.” Lance turned to Fuchs. They just looked at each other for the moment. Lance noticed the German wasn’t looking around for the missed details. He figured it out.

  “Misdirection and a mole.” Lance shook his head and smiled at Seibel. “False and misleading intel and a plant in the operation.” He pointed to Fuchs but kept his eyes locked on Seibel. “Foxy here just happened to show up two days before mission planning began. You wanted me to think, to question more.”

  Seibel took his time answering. He took a few steps away from Lance into the center of a floodlight’s spill, like walking into a spotlight on stage. “Lance, Lance, Lance. My little Preacher, is it always about you?”

  Lance laughed at that. The others joined him. They all knew the answer. They were all part of it, part of Seibel’s grand plan. But each knew their place. This, all this, everything really, was for Lance. He was Seibel’s chosen one. And indeed, it was always about him. Fuchs, Tarwanah, Jamaani and every other member of the supporting cast had their role. But the big guy had his eyes on some prize only he could see, a grand vision, of which he only shared bits and pieces.

  “Isn’t everything about me?” Lance played along.

  “One might think. But alas, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Seibel made full use of the stage he found himself on and offered up some Shakespeare.

  “O day and night dear Hamlet, but this is a wondrous strange.” Lance took a little liberty with the line. He knew quite a few of the famous lines from the Bard’s repertoire and knew how fond of them Seibel was.

  “So where did we go wrong in this operation Mr. Priest?”

  Lance looked back over the past six weeks from Baghdad to Harvey Point to Hamburg to examine the pieces he'd missed. For the briefest moment, he saw her face and felt the pinprick and blur of its distraction. The past few days of planning and preparation for this drill had given him much to occupy his mind. He had gone whole hours without thinking of her. A smile curled at the edge of his mouth as he forced her from his mind. He looked at Seibel and wondered if his master knew what he was thinking.

  “I think my only mistake was taking you at your word. You provided most of the intel for this operation, including location, target, timeline.”

  “And where might your reliance on one source of data have cost you and your compatriots their lives?”

  “At the beginning, in the middle, and then about five minutes ago.” Lance was, for whatever reason, the only one who could match Siebel wit for wit. While others were left in their master’s strategic mind’s dust, Lance was the only one who could even get close to staying with him for any length of time.

  “So for all intents and purposes, everything I told you might have been corrupted or at least wrong.”

  “Of course not. Not everything, just the important stuff. You gave us many salient and usable facts. The team merely neglected to properly vet your information. It seems that you decided to change your tactics yet again and guide us into a death trap to teach me, teach us, that you and everyone else in this world are untrustworthy.”

  Seibel smiled. His teeth gleamed under his spotlight. “And why would I do that?”

  This little to and fro could have gone on for several more minutes if Lance let it. Seibel was in full “Socrates” mode. But Lance didn’t need any more mental poking and prodding. He knew where this was heading.

  “Because you are about to launch me out into the big, bad untrustworthy world. I’m going to go live into the three-ring circus without a net. And if I had to guess, it has something to do with bombs.”

  “Go on.”

  “That little exercise in Hamburg wasn’t a vacation was it? I wasn’t just there to watch and learn. I was there explicitly to capture Shafiq,” Lance stopped. A light bulb went off. He looked down and shook his head again. When he looked up, it was not at Seibel, but at Fuchs.

  “I can’t believe I missed that.”

  “What?” Fuchs was dismissive. His accent was heavy on the German.

  “If I asked you where you were two weeks ago would you tell me?”

  “Of course not.” Fuchs smiled.

  Lance turned to Seibel. “You sent him to Hamburg just to delay Shafiq for a few minutes so he would be late arriving to the arrest party at the café.”

  Seibel gave no response.

&nb
sp; “Just to make him late so I could run him down and spend a few quality minutes with him picking his terrorist bomber brain.” Lance still had so much to learn from the master. “Damn. You just move the pawns around on the board and voila, the game falls into place. You have me and everyone else figured out, three, four moves in advance.”

  “And yet, you still walk into a trap set by a bomb maker.” Seibel was done with the show. “You took the bait, missed a variety of tells along the way and got yourself and everyone else killed.”

  “You got everyone killed. You killed us to make a point.” Lance wasn’t done.

  Seibel pointed at the building. “That pretend bomb and the pretend guy who made it are going to be your life for the next year at least. You don’t get second chances when you are smack dab in the blast radius.”

  “So I’m going to hunt bombers?”

  Seibel turned back to him. “No. You're going to become one.”

  Chapter 8

  The two of them were in Lance’s room at Harvey Point, where they had sat and talked numerous times. Seibel was in no mood for small talk and pulled several files from his leather case as he sat down in the desk chair. Lance looked through the first of three files. He was sitting on his bed and had laid out several sheets of paper and photos.

  “And here is number two.” Seibel closed up a manila file folder and handed it to Lance. “You’ll like him. He’s a real bad-ass. More than a dozen confirmed events with over 40 kills in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” Lance gathered up the papers from the first file and took the second.

  Seibel let Lance digest the second portion. He held the third file in his hands. It was very thin.

  “Man. This guy is something. These are confirmed?” Lance asked.

  “All confirmed by first-person and secondary sources.”

  “Damn.” Lance leafed through more pages.

  Seibel sat forward. “Okay. Here is number three. He is considered significantly more dangerous than the other two. Significantly more dangerous than anyone we are tracking at present.” Lance looked up from the second file at that. Seibel handed him the third.

  Lance opened it and pulled out the two sheets of paper inside. His brow furrowed. “This is it?”

  “That’s it.” Seibel sat back.

  “So we don’t know anything about this guy other than he was seen in Pakistan in '89? One sighting.”

  “Just the one recorded sighting in Pakistan. The other was in Brazzaville in September of that same year.”

  “Says here a plane exploded in mid-air on its way from the Congo to Libya. So we think this dude had something to do with that little incident?”

  “That’s what we think, yes.” Seibel laced his fingers behind his head.

  “So, I’ve looked all over these two sheets of paper and the tab on the folder and I don’t think I see a full name for this guy.”

  “Correct. We know nothing more about him. Just Anwar.”

  Lance stared at him. He knew Seibel better than that. There was always something more. “But.”

  “But this.” Seibel reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two grainy black and white photos and handed one to Lance.

  Lance looked at it for a few seconds. “JFK?”

  “Very good.”

  “When?”

  “Three weeks ago.”

  “Damn. Is he still in the US?”

  Seibel handed Lance the second photo. “Yesterday.”

  “Shit. Where’d he fly to?”

  “Jordan.” Seibel sat back again.

  “So, we have a virtual ghost for years who shows up in New York. What else do we know about him? I’ll bet everything on his passport turned out to be fake.” Lance looked deeper into the grainy image to see any details. They were difficult to discern.

  “Looks like that is the deal, at least for now. None of the contact information listed on his passport checked out. All dead locations.” Seibel locked his fingers and stretched out his hands. “We are now scouring any databases in New York to see if he shows up. We can’t be 100 percent certain, but we may have a hit involving the blind Imam.

  “Crap. So looks like I am going to start in New York?”

  “Actually no. You're going to the Philippines first.”

  Chapter 9

  Actually, Lance decided to go off mission before heading to the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Three months and six days after the conversation with Seibel, Lance disappeared.

  He had been training for this step for years, his whole life, really. He knew Seibel was counting on his particular set of innate devious skills perhaps more than any other element when he brought Lance into the CIA fold. Lance had been patient along the way, soaking in every lesson, every detail. During the first year of his training at Harvey Point, Preacher wanted to ask Seibel on many occasions when the “spy stuff" was going to start. He learned about munitions, invasive penetration operations, target extraction protocol and any number of special ops skills. He wondered why Seibel didn’t just have him join the Green Berets or Rangers or even Delta.

  It took him a good two years to figure out that Seibel didn’t recruit him to train him to be a spy. Lance had been born one.

  He learned to master technology and techniques, but he was hardwired to be disingenuous, manipulative, unscrupulous. He did not need training to lie and pretend to be someone he was not. And instead of putting young Preacher through in-depth training in forgery or surveillance or misdirection, Seibel had Lance accompany him and Fuchs on a number of trips. On these excursions, Lance learned that instead of the actual process and logistics of preparing false papers, for instance, it was infinitely more important to know others who possessed these skills. It was about relationships. And one thing Seibel had in spades was relationships. All around this little globe.

  So after months of intensive training in design, construction, deconstruction, detonation and detection, Lance was well versed in the ways of the bomb. He still had much to learn, but between his ears he now possessed knowledge imparted by the nation’s premier bomb experts. He also studied the works of leading mass murderers around the world. He could read through the details of a bus bombing in Tbilisi, Georgia and know what type, amount of accelerant, ignition source and other intricate details of the explosion.

  He visited with bombers, both domestic and overseas. In their eyes, he always saw the same look when they spoke about explosions. He catalogued this look under 'orgasmic pleasure.' The Israelis let him interview a Hamas bomb maker who had fitted several suicidal true believers with explosive vests packed with ball bearings and nails that then ended the lives of dozens. The guy took real pride it the deadly, violent, reprehensible blasts "his babies" produced by combining mere chemicals and substances that alone had no relation, no reaction.

  Lance read day and night on bomb making, explosive ordnance and munitions, blast physics and simple elements that could be combined in small quantities to produce massive explosions. Scary shit.

  He built dozens of “poppers” at Harvey Point and watched from a safe distance as they blew apart buildings, vehicles and dummies playing the roles of innocent bystanders. He learned both basic and highly detailed bomb-making techniques. It was knowledge that made him powerful and dangerous and strangely regretful. He felt the rush of adrenaline in the moments before pushing the button and then rejoiced in the unique sensation produced by the shockwave preceding the sounds of the explosion. He became more than a little fascinated by the shockwave, the temporary redefinition of gravity that expanded out from the initial detonation to cause most of the blast's destruction.

  Humans stood no chance should he choose to use this knowledge for evil. It was truly godlike.

  Seibel worked from the basic philosophy that it takes one to know one, and therefore catch one. Lance was to become one of them. A terrorist bomber. A weapon of mass destruction. His orders were simple. Catch these extremely dangerous individuals and garner as much information as possible about their
organizations and affiliations. And then kill them violently, publicly if possible. He was to teach a lesson to those who believed they could inflict pain and misery and death on others from a casual and comfortable distance.

  Lance knew this was not his actual mission. But like always, Seibel kept certain details to himself. Papa's modus operandi was always compartmentalization. Lance had grown to appreciate this frustrating aspect of working with someone so brilliant. He knew he was a tool in Seibel’s belt, a brush wielded by a master who could see elements others could not when looking at a blank canvas.

  Before departing, Lance was required to visit with Stuart Braden, the CIA psychologist tasked with keeping Seibel and his team of ruthless killers in check, mentally at least. Lance was his favorite patient, for several reasons. The visit with Braden was brief and uneventful. He told the psychologist a variety of creative and emotive lies. He enjoyed his sessions with Braden, but was just not in the mood this time. He left out quite a bit, and that told Braden all he needed to know. Lance was already gone. Not available for evaluation and diagnosis. The psychologist would have to try to dissect Preacher's mind another time.

  Good luck with that. Lance thought to himself looking out the window of a Gulfstream III aircraft into the black night and black Atlantic Ocean below, Lance let his mind wander. Six hours earlier he called in his first “relationship chip” by phoning a navy pilot Seibel had introduced him to two years earlier. This particular pilot, Lt. Stan Meadows, was active Naval Reserve and the preferred pilot for transportation of high-ranking military officers and dignitaries. Meadows flew generals, admirals and even lowly colonels around the world, often with only a few hours notice.

  Lance had learned through a little lie-sprinkled digging that Meadows earned his stripes flying F-18's off aircraft carriers. His spotless record earned him recognition. His dedication to confidentiality and secrecy made him a valued commodity for the nation’s espionage elite. Meadows was respectful to every passenger as he ducked his 6 foot 6-inch frame and walked the aisle of the 14-passenger jet prior to every flight. He would introduce himself and move on, not waiting for a reciprocal introduction. He was the trusted pilot, that’s all. It was “need to know.” And that meant he did not ask Seibel or Fuchs or Lance any questions before, during or after the flight.