“You finished yet, Lizard?” General Middleton asked loudly. He was seated at his desk, with a stack of folders before him.
“Just now, sir. We’re clean.” Freedman tapped a final key on his laptop, and the automatic sweep of the office for listening devices came to a halt. He hit one more key, and backup dead bolts slid home in the outer doors. Swanson drifted over and took the last seat in front of the desk.
The general looked at the four of them, his big brows narrowing toward the broad nose as he laid a palm on the folders. “All right, people, let’s get down to business,” he said. “We’ve got a Green Light package.” He handed out four of the five folders, keeping one for himself and opening it to lift out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of a man in white robes, smiling through a bearded face. “Recognize this guy?”
“It’s that fuckin’ Charlie Brown.” The gruff voice of Senior Master Sergeant Dawkins rumbled.
“Score one for Double-Oh,” the general confirmed. “Abdullah al-Mohammed, born as Charles Peter Brown in Lawton, Oklahoma, thirty-five years ago. He’s our target. Most of the rest of the papers in your folders are a compilation of what is known about him, current locations, that sort of thing.”
“How good is the information, sir?” Sybelle Summers asked as she fanned quickly through the pages. “They include newspaper clippings, for God’s sake. That’s not actionable information. Got to be some snip-and-paster over at CIA.”
“It indeed is pretty sloppy work for a Green Light, but I will do a full workup.” Commander Freedman anticipated that within a few days, he would know everything possible about Charlie Brown and could put it into coherent form. His mind was already at work, and he unconsciously started to hum the old rhythm and blues song “Charlie Brown.”
“Stop that,” the general snapped.
“Sorry, sir. The Coasters, 1959. King Curtis on the tenor sax.”
“All of you. Shut up. You are not a doo-wop group!”
They smiled. The tense atmosphere that usually came with an assassination assignment was broken. Now it was just a job.
“Where is he?” asked Summers.
“Looks like Yemen,” said the Lizard. “There’s a country that is going the wrong way in a hurry on terrorism.”
The general leaned back and folded his hands on his chest. “The little bastard crossed the line. It was bad enough that he went through al Qaeda training and then began those broadcasts in English to try to recruit more Americans, but now he’s really gotten big in operations. Buddies up with fanatical American kids and prepares them to return to the U.S. as his moles, just waiting for his command to blow up some shopping mall and create mass casualties.”
Summers asked, “So our leaders have decided there will be no due process or fair trials or that other stuff for him. We’re going to execute an American citizen?”
“Yes, Colonel Summers. That is exactly what we’re going to do. Several presidents have had the authority to do so. You have a problem with not giving Charlie Brown a jury trial back in Oklahoma?”
“Oh, none at all, sir. He forfeited that right, as far as I’m concerned. Just another terrorist bum now. Before, he was just an annoyance, but now that he wants to be a real player, he has to pay the price.” There was a murmur of agreement in the room.
“Well, gang, he likely is not going to be coming to us, so we will have to go after him. High-value target. Gunny Swanson, you have anything to add?”
Swanson was the sharp point of the Trident spear. “No, sir.” His eyes drifted to the window, and the memory of September 11 came back. “No questions at all.”
The general closed a briefing folder. “Right. Get to work. I want a plan within a week, and to have Swanson on the ground over there in two. Figure out what and who you need, and pull whatever resources are required. Keep it simple, because we’re not planning an invasion of Yemen, just a cleanup job on a stupid asshole terrorist. Send any questions to me.”
The Lizard shut down the security measures, the big dead bolts slid back to unlock the doors, and the five members of Task Force Trident drifted away. As soon as Sybelle Summers returned to her desk, her cell phone buzzed. She looked at the screen with a small frown, not recognizing the number of the caller. “Summers,” she answered with no inflection in her voice.
“Lieutenant Colonel Summers? This is Petty Officer Second Class Beth Ledford, the Coast Guard sniper?” The voice was hesitant and carried an undercurrent of worry. “When you lectured our special ops class about a year ago, you gave me this number to call if I needed some extra help?”
Sybelle remembered the meeting. She had felt an immediate affinity for Ledford, the lone little blonde trying to fit in among a classroom filled with tough-guy warriors from all branches of the armed forces. Everybody in the room had seemed at least a foot taller than Beth Ledford, who stood five-six and weighed about 115 pounds soaking wet, but the records revealed the young woman had the best shooting scores in the entire class. Summers had taken her out for a coffee afterward, and a sister-to-sister talk about succeeding in careers dominated by men.
“Well, hello there, Petty Officer Ledford. Sure I remember you,” Summers said, changing her tone from distant to neutral. “This is a surprise. What’s going on? You quit the military and joined the circus yet? Little Sure Shot?”
The offhand compliment did not bring the laugh that Summers expected. “I have a problem, Major. It’s not a glass ceiling thing, I would never call you for something like that, and I can’t discuss it over the phone, so can we meet up for lunch today? Please? It’s important.” The briefest of pauses. “National security kind of important.”
Sybelle sat up straight and snapped her fingers a couple of times, and Kyle Swanson looked over. “Lunch, then, Beth. Since we will be in public, drop the rank thing and come in casual civvies. I’m bringing someone else along.” She gave the name of a pub in Crystal City. “See you there in forty-five minutes.”
Swanson had wandered over to her desk by the time she finished the conversation and hung up. “Go put on some real-people clothes, Gunny. I’m taking you out to lunch with somebody I want you to meet, another sniper.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see.” While Kyle went to change, Summers briefed General Middleton on the conversation and the planned meeting. His eyes twitched when she said the words “national security,” and he nodded silent permission to meet the source.
THE CLATTER OF SILVERWARE against good china was drowned out by the polyglot of voices in the Delegates’ Dining Room on the fourth floor of the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. Men and women in business attire that would be acceptable back in their home countries helped themselves to the cuisine served at the long buffet, which today featured a mildly spicy menu from the lower Pacific Islands. Sunlight bathed the huge room where the administrative staff workers from the 192 member states that made up the United Nations frequently had their lunches. Although the dining room was open to the public, the dress code of no jeans, shorts, or sneakers usually frightened away American tourists.
There was normally a steady flow of people during the lunch hour, and the volume of the conversation, although subdued, was enough to cover the private talk being carried on by two men seated at a table beside the glass wall that reached from the floor to the high ceiling and overlooked New York’s East River.
“You don’t enjoy the hot food?” James Doyle shoveled another fork of lamb curry and rice into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and felt a bead of sweat pop out on his forehead. He smiled. Bliss. The lanky and nondescript midlevel diplomat was enjoying the trip to New York, getting away from Washington for a day.
“Not today. I drank too much at the Danish ambassador’s party last night,” responded the heavyset Mohammed Javid Bhatti, a cultural attache of the Pakistani Foreign Office. “In about a half hour, you’ll be sorry for eating that stuff.”
Jimmy Doyle knocked back a deep draft of cold beer. “No way, Javid. Next to a Nathan’s hot dog, this is my favorite food.”
“You should learn moderation in all things.”
