Locked On Part 15

Melanie nodded and said, "You are taller than you look on TV."

Jack smiled. "I haven't been on TV in years. I've grown up a bit, I guess."

Mary Pat said, "Jack, I kidnapped Melanie from her desk at Langley."

"Thank goodness for that," Melanie said.

"You couldn't work for a better boss," Jack replied with a smile. "Or do more important work than NCTC."

"Thanks. Are you here because you are planning on following in your dad's footsteps in government service?"

Jack chuckled. "No, Mary Pat and I have a lunch date. I'm not here looking for work. I appreciate what you guys do, but I'm a money guy. A greedy capitalist, you might say."

"Nothing wrong with that, as long as you pay your taxes. My salary has to come from somewhere."

They all three laughed about that.

"Well, I'd better get back to work," Melanie said. "It was nice meeting you. Best of luck to your father next month. We're rooting for him."

"Thank you. I know he appreciates what you all do here."

Mary Pat had just shut the door on Ryan's Hummer, he had not even turned over the engine, when she turned to him and smiled. He smiled back. "Something on your mind, Mary Pat?"

"She's single."

Jack laughed. With a slight affectation in his voice, he said, "I have no idea what you are talking about."

Mary Pat Foley just smiled. "You'd like her, she's very smart. No, not smart. I think she's d.a.m.n brilliant. Ed and I have already had her over to dinner, and Ed is smitten."

"Great," Jack said. He did not get embarra.s.sed particularly easily, but he was starting to blush. He'd known Mary Pat since he'd been in diapers, and she had never once even asked him about his dating life, much less tried to set him up with someone.

"She's from Texas, if you didn't notice her drawl. Doesn't have too many friends around town. Lives in a little carriage-house apartment down in Alexandria."

"This is all interesting, Mary Pat, and she seems nice and all, but I actually had another reason for coming down. Something a little more important than my love life."

She chuckled. "I doubt it."

"Just wait."

They pulled into a strip-mall sus.h.i.+ bar on Old Dominion Drive. The little restaurant was as nondescript as any eatery in the city, stuck tight between a cleaner and a bagel shop, but Mary Pat promised the sas.h.i.+mi was as good as Ryan would ever eat this side of Osaka. As the first customers of the day they had their pick of tables, so Ryan chose a secluded booth in the back corner of the restaurant.

They chatted about their families for a while, ordered lunch, and then Ryan pulled the two photographs from his Tumi bag, placed them side by side.

"What am I looking at here, Junior?"

"The guy on the right is ISI. Head of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous."

Foley nodded, and then said, "And that's also him on the left, younger and out of uniform."

Jack nodded. "LeT operative named Khalid Mir, aka-"

Mary Pat looked up at Jack with astonishment. "Abu Kashmiri?"

"That's right."

"I was wrong, Jack."

"About?"

"About your love life being more interesting than what you wanted to talk about. Kashmiri was killed three years ago."

"Or was he?" Ryan asked. "Rehan is Khalid Mir. And Khalid Mir is also known as Abu Kashmiri. If Rehan is alive, then, to paraphrase Mark Twain-"

Mary Pat said, "The rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated."

"Exactly."

"I saw a digital image of a body, but it was after a particularly well placed h.e.l.lfire, so it could have been anybody. That's one of the troubles with missile strikes. Unless you go in and get DNA yourself, then you never really know if you got the right person."

"I guess we don't have CSI Waziristan just standing by, ready to rush to every scene and swab for evidence."

Mary Pat laughed. "I am so stealing that line." She turned serious. "Jack, why don't I know about this Kashmiri-ISI connection already?"

Ryan shrugged. Gerry had directed him to keep detail of Campus operations out of the conversation, so he couldn't tell her that Dom and Driscoll saw this guy in Cairo and their photo actually made the connection in the recog software.

"Jack?"

Ryan realized he was just sitting there.

Mary Pat said, "Let me guess. Senator Hendley told you to show me the pictures but not to reveal your shop's sources or methods that discovered the connection."

"Sorry."

"No need to be sorry. That's the business we're in. I respect that. But you are here for some reason other than to just show me you've made this connection, right?"

"Yeah. This guy, Brigadier General Riaz Rehan. There was a sighting of him a few days ago in Cairo."

"And?"

"He was meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi."

Foley's eyebrows rose. "Well, that's not good. And it doesn't make a h.e.l.l of a lot of sense. El Daboussi has a benefactor already; he's Muslim Brotherhood. He doesn't need the ISI. And the ISI has militant organizations doing their bidding right there, in Pakistan. Why would Rehan need to go to Cairo?"

Jack knew what Mary Pat Foley was thinking but not saying. She wasn't going to come right out and mention el Daboussi's work on the training camps in western Libya. That was cla.s.sified intelligence. It was also something The Campus had intercepted from CIA traffic to NCTC, which is how Jack knew this in the first place.

"We don't know. We are surprised by it, too."

When the food came, they ate in silence for a moment while Mary Pat Foley mult.i.tasked, using her iPad to look at some sort of database. Jack a.s.sumed it was cla.s.sified intelligence, but he did not ask. He felt a little uncomfortable knowing that he and his organization were, in a manner of speaking, spying on the NCTC and the work they did, but he did not dwell on it long. He needed only to look at this conversation here, where Jack and his colleagues had exploited intel derived from U.S. intelligence community sources, improved on it with their own work, and now fed the new-and-improved product right back to them, free of charge.

The Campus had been doing this for much of the past year, and it was a good relations.h.i.+p, even if one of the members of the romance was not aware of the other.

Mary Pat looked back to Ryan. "Well, I now know why this General Rehan was not on my radar. He's not a beard."

"A beard?"

"An Islamist in the Pakistani Defense Force. You know they are split down the middle in the Army over there, the ones pus.h.i.+ng for theocratic rule, and the ones who are still Muslim but want a nation ruled under a secular democracy. There have been two camps in Pakistan for the past sixty years. 'Beards' is the term we use for the theocratic government proponents in the PDF."

"So Rehan is a secularist?"

"The CIA thought he was, based on what little was known about the man. Other than the name and the one photo, there is literally no bio for the guy, other than the fact he was promoted from colonel to brigadier general about a year back. Now that you have shown me that he is also Abu Kashmiri, I'm going to go out on a limb and say the CIA was wrong. Kashmiri was no secularist."

Jack sipped his Diet c.o.ke. He wasn't sure how important this information was, but Mary Pat seemed energized by it.

"Jack, I am very glad to hear you guys have been working on this."

"Really? Why?"

"Because I was a little worried you were involved in that shootout in Paris the other day. Not you, personally, of course, but Chavez and Clark. I guess if your shop is working in Cairo, then you weren't operating in Paris at the same time."

Ryan just smiled. "Hey, I can't talk about what we are and are not involved in. Sources and methods, right?"

Mary Pat Foley c.o.c.ked her head a little. Jack could tell she was trying to get a read on him right now.

Quickly he changed the subject. "So . . . Melanie is single, and she lives down in Alexandria, huh?"

Judith Cochrane took her seat at the little desk in front of the window into Saif Rahman Yasin's cell. He was still seated on his bed. He held a notepad and a pencil in his lap. Upon seeing his lawyer, he stepped up to the window and sat on his stool, bringing his pen and his pad with him.

With a smile and a nod, he lifted the receiver of the red phone on the floor.

Cochrane said, "Good morning."

"Thank you very much for arranging for me to get some paper and a pencil."

"That was nothing. It was a reasonable request."

"Still, for me it was very nice. I am grateful."

Cochrane said, "Your writ of habeas corpus was denied.

We knew it would be, but it was a motion we had to go through."

"It is of no consequence. I did not expect them to let me walk away."

"Next, I am going to pet.i.tion the courts to allow you to-"

"Do you have any ability, Miss Cochrane, to draw?"

She wasn't sure she heard him correctly. "To draw?"

"Yes."

"Well . . . no. Not really."

"I enjoy it very much. I studied art for a short period in England at university, and I have continued it as a pastime. Normally I draw architecture. It fascinates me very much the design of buildings all over the world."

Judith did not know where, if anywhere, this was going. "I can arrange perhaps some paper that is a better quality if you would like or-"

But Yasin shook his head. "This paper is fine. In my religion, it is a sin to photograph or draw the face of any living, walking thing." He held up the pencil in his hand as if to clarify the point. "If you are doing it for no reason. It is not a sin if you are doing it to remember a face for some important reason."

"I see," Cochrane said, but she didn't see the point in this conversation at all.

"I would like to show you some of my work, and then, perhaps I can teach you a bit about art." The Emir reached into his notepad and pulled out four sheets that he had already torn from the pad. He held them up, one at a time, to the thick bulletproof gla.s.s. He said, "Judith Cochrane, if you would like to a.s.sist me with my case, if your organization has any interest in holding your nation accountable to its own laws, then you will need to copy these pictures. If you work slowly on the desk there with your pen, I can watch you and help you along. We can have an art cla.s.s right here."

Judith Cochrane looked carefully at the drawings. They were sketches of four men. She did not recognize them, but she had no doubt that they were real people who would be recognized by anyone who knew them, so detailed and careful were the renditions.

"Who are they?" she asked, but she feared she knew the answer.

"These are the Americans who kidnapped me. I was walking down the street in Riyadh. They came from nowhere. The young one, this man with the dark hair, he shot me. The old man, this one, was the leader."

Cochrane knew the FBI men could see her through the closed-circuit camera behind her. If they were watching right now, and she was certain they were, then they would see the Emir showing her pages from his pad. There was no reason for that to raise any sort of red flag, but still she waited nervously to hear the door behind her open.

"We have been through this over and over. I can't discuss any of that with you."

"You are my lawyer, are you not?"

"I am, but-"

"Judith Cochrane, I have no interest in helping the United States government in a charade to convince the world I am guilty. If I cannot tell my own lawyer what has happened to me, then I-"

"We have rules we must obey."

"Rules imposed on you by your opponent. Clearly they are-what is the term you use in America?-stacking the deck."

"Let's talk about your nutrition."

"I am not going to talk about my nutrition. It is halal, it is permissible for a Muslim to eat. Other than that, I don't care about it."

Cochrane sighed, but she realized he was still holding up the pictures, and she realized she was still looking at them. Despite herself, she asked, "Are they CIA? Military? Did they tell you who they worked for?"

"They did not tell me. I a.s.sume they are in your Central Intelligence Agency, but I need you to find out."

"I can't find out."