Imminent Threat: A Fast-Paced Espionage Thriller Read online

  This book is a work of fiction, except where it’s not. Apart from the well-known locales that figure in this narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Dick

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  ISBN 978-0-9864959-3-9

  Black Diamond Publishing

  Dedicated to the unsung heroes who serve

  under extraordinary circumstances

  to protect and defend us all.

  Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you.

  – Qur’an 2.216

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  – Old Arab Proverb

  Contents

  Part I: A CALL TO ARMS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Part II: IN THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  87

  88

  89

  90

  91

  Part III: AGAINST ALL ODDS

  92

  93

  94

  95

  96

  97

  98

  99

  100

  101

  102

  103

  104

  105

  106

  107

  108

  109

  110

  111

  112

  113

  114

  115

  116

  117

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Part I

  A CALL TO ARMS

  1

  Abdul Saqr was finally ready to act. Thousands would die as a result.

  Two years ago a Palestinian banker turned mujahideen had come to him with a dream; a dream that had, at first, seemed foolhardy. Who was this man, Sayyid? Abdul suspected the Palestinian suffered from a type of madness not uncommon to those living in the occupied territories. He had tried reasoning with him, but the man refused to be dissuaded. That he was intelligent, there was no question. And his plan of attack, though risky, was inspired. Ingenious even. But impossible.

  Weeks later, after many long discussions, Abdul was convinced the Palestinian’s plan could work if—and only if—they could persuade the others to cooperate.

  That was the key.

  Two years later, standing at the edge of the estate’s grand terrace, he watched the deep red of a Mid-East sunset as it spilled across the horizon. “Look at it,” he told Kamal, “Allah has set the sky ablaze for us.”

  Kamal, sitting close by at a large table, made no comment.

  Abdul continued to stare at the blood-red sky, his hands gripping the iron railing, knuckles whitening. “It’s a sign of what’s to come,” he said.

  “Perhaps it is nothing more than a sunset, Abdul.” As a young engineer, Kamal was not prone to romanticizing his commitment to jihad and it displeased him when others did so.

  Letting go of the railing, Abdul turned. “What is it?” he asked, the fervor gone from his voice.

  “The time for rhetoric is over,” Kamal replied.

  Abdul nodded, ignoring the young man’s impertinence. He walked over to the table and sat down. “You’re right, the time for rhetoric is over. Have you finished all the necessary arrangements?”

  “I have. And the council has given their consent?”

  “Yes.”

  Abdul had assembled a diverse group of influential men—both Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shi’a—to help carry out Sayyid’s plan. The men, their political goals as varied as their places of birth, formed a powerful entity with contacts situated in every corner of the Muslim world. Working together, their potential was without limit, but they had needed convincing; their distrust and dislike of one another presenting an almost insurmountable obstacle at first. After much debate though, the council had ultimately agreed to lend its support, each member endorsing the attacks for their own selfish reasons.

  “We send it then?” Kamal asked.

  “Yes, send it now. And pray to Allah that our Arab brothers in America succeed.”

  Kamal nodded and opened his laptop. He logged onto a server account he had piggy-backed the day before. He had never used the account and would not use it again after tonight, guaranteeing the email would remain untraceable. Next, he retrieved an encrypted text file that sat on his desktop and attached it to the email. He carefully typed in the address where the email would be sent and double checked it.

  Abdul peered at the computer screen over Kamal’s shoulder. “You are sure it’s safe?” he asked.

  “We have gone over this,” Kamal replied. “It’s safe. The Americans will not get to it.” He paused, then added: “Not in time to make a difference.”

  2

  With a single keystroke, the email began its journey.

  Racing along a strand of glass no thicker than a hair follicle, the email passed under the city streets of Damascus at the speed of light. On the outskirts of the city center, where the fiber optic cable ended, it was transferred to a microwave tower, then ferried through the air down the Helbun Valley from one tower to the next.

  Fourteen kilometers to the east it reached a satellite uplink station where it was finally relayed to an orbiting communications satellite. The email was now on its way to New York City, the entire process having taken only seconds. But what neither the sender nor the intended recipient knew, was that a second satellite had intercepted the email by capturing the spillage from one of the microwave towers outside Damascus.

  ES 79 was one of more than a hundred spy satellites belonging to the United States Government. Overseen by the National Security Agency, the satellites were tasked with intercepting all possible human communication: emails, cell phone conversations, texts—all of it collected and relayed to ground stations scattered across the globe. Several million discrete communications were collected every half-hour by the network, codenamed ECHELON.

  22,000 miles below ES 79’s orbit, in the English countryside of North Yorkshire, sat RAF Menwith Hill. Home to over 1,300 American personnel, it remained an RAF base in name only. On-site sat 32 giant radomes housing extremely sensitive antennae aimed toward the sky. From afar the radomes resembled giant mushrooms sprouting from the lush countryside. Radome thirteen was currently receiving the data feed from ES 79 which had captured what would later be referred to as The Damascus Letter.

  Deep below ground, software programs called “sniffers” sorted through the millions of intercepts. The programs, running on Cray supercomputers, searched tirelessly for keywords, email addresses, and text patterns that might lead to the discovery of vital intelligence or potential threats. Although not as powerful as those at NSA headquarters, the Menwith computers were capable of over one hundred billion calculations per second. Encrypted, and having originated in Syria—a state sponsor of terrorism—The Damascus Letter was priority-selected and fed into the computers less than an hour after being intercepted. Several minutes later multiple keywords and phrases on the NSA’s watch list were identified in the text.

  Red flagged, the email was immediately forwarded to NSA headquarters with a level three security designation: Urgent Attention Required.

  3

  At Georgetown University in Washington DC, professor Akil Hassan broke off his lecture without warning.

  Stepping out from behind his lectern, he walked to the edge of
the stage, paused for a moment, then jumped down with the grace of an athlete. As he walked up the center aisle, a mounting crescendo of chatter began to fill the auditorium. His first-year PolySci students looked to one another, searching for an explanation, wondering what was happening.

  At six-three, with a taut physique and short cropped hair, Akil could be an intimidating figure when he wanted to be. He was well aware of this. A highly decorated CIA officer, he had conducted covert operations overseas for more than a decade. Recruiting agents and infiltrating the treacherous breeding grounds of the jihadi, he had worked most of the Middle East at one time or another: Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Beirut.

  Then the CIA had fired him. In a heartbeat, his career was over.

  He had crossed a line. He knew that.

  Now he taught part-time at the university, having finally come to terms with the fact he was no longer a part of the CIA. Accepting this new reality had been a painful process and he’d be the first to admit that teaching political science was a poor substitute for his life as a spy. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy teaching. He did. But ever since graduating from The Farm, he’d been unable to picture himself doing anything else. He missed the adrenaline rush of operating in hard-target countries and meeting with agents. The work required a particular mindset and a unique set of skills, all of which he possessed.

  He’d tried working for private contractors, but found their commercial ethos unpalatable. Without knowing what to do next, he’d ended up teaching at the university.

  Halfway up the aisle Akil pivoted to his right and faced the student who had caught his attention. The student he’d targeted—this wasn’t the first time he had done this—wore a black leather jacket and a trucker-style baseball cap. A sketch pad sat in the student’s lap. He was shading in the jawline of a lop-sided skull, a bullet hole etched in its forehead.

  It wasn’t the dubious art work that interested Akil, it was the oversized headphones the student was wearing. He could hear the music bleeding from them now. Industrial metal of some kind. German maybe. The volume was obviously maxed out, which explained why, despite the entire class having come to a halt, the student remained oblivious.

  Akil waved his hand in front of the student’s face in order to get his attention.

  The student looked up, surprise making his eyes widen.

  Akil smiled, then reached down and pulled the headphones off the student’s head. Rapid-fire guitar and crashing symbols ricocheted off the walls and ceiling of the auditorium to the delight of the class.

  “Hey!”

  Akil gave the student a well-honed look that stalled any further complaint. “You’re going to want to listen to what I have to say, Mr. Sobel.”

  With that, Akil turned and walked back down the aisle towards the stage, the headphones still in his hand, the umbilical cord trailing behind him. Akil didn’t look back, only listened as Mr. Sobel—realizing his professor wasn’t joking around—jumped out of his seat, scrambling to release the headphones from his smart phone in time.

  He was too late. As the cord’s tension peaked, Akil felt the momentary tug as the headphone jack ripped free of the device. No doubt there had been some damage done, but that wasn’t his problem.

  Hopping back onto the stage with cat-like ease, Akil tossed the headphones into a metal garbage can he’d placed there earlier. The sound of the headphones clanging to the bottom of the receptacle provided his exclamation point. Message sent—not just to Mr. Sobel—but to the entire class. He was serious, and so was his subject matter.

  With the stage set, Akil carried on: “America and its citizens are in grave danger,” he said, his voice projecting to the back of the room. “Far more than we realize. Somewhere in the world Islamic terrorists are plotting against us, planning to kill more Americans in the name of God,” he said. “Al-Qaeda. The Islamic Brotherhood. ISIS. Take your pick. The list is extensive.”

  Holding the projector remote in his left hand, Akil cued the next slide. A man wearing a green headscarf to hide his face—an AK-47 thrust above his head—was yelling on a crowded street.

  “These soldiers of God, these jihadi or freedom fighters—whatever label you apply—are a minority in the nation of Islam. By definition, marginal, and yet extremely dangerous. Driven by religious fervor and a political will born out of a growing sense of humiliation and desperation, they continue to embrace acts of terror. Some are small, yet deadly. Acts of opportunity for instance, like driving a vehicle into a crowd of innocent civilians. Others are much larger. Operations planned out and executed with sophistication and precision; the kind our imaginations cannot fathom until they unfold before us in horrific fashion.”

  Akil triggered the next slide.

  The smoldering image of an obscured Manhattan skyline—choked with smoke and dust—filled the media screen behind him. Working his way across the stage, Akil cross-faded the image onscreen with a quote from the Holy Qur’an.

  O Prophet, urge the believers to fight. If there are twenty patient men among you, you shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred, they shall overcome a thousand unbelievers, for they are a nation who do not understand.

  – Qur’an 8:65

  “Allah has clearly willed the jihadi to take up arms against us—the unbelievers. Christians. Jews. Atheists… Red Sox fans.”

  The class broke out in laughter.

  “Even other Muslims,” Akil continued. “It’s a holy war. That’s what the jihadi preach to their young Muslim brothers. It doesn’t matter that in doing so they distort the words of the Prophet Muhammad.”

  With one arm resting on the lectern, Akil took a moment to assess his new students. The young men and women looking back at him were mostly first year undergraduates. Innocent still; naïve in ways they could not yet perceive. It seemed a lifetime ago that he had been in their shoes, initially at Brown, then that all-important first assignment overseas with the Agency. As he looked at their young faces he began to isolate and register each one individually, memorizing them. Cataloging them.

  Old habits die hard, he thought.

  “I was born in Lebanon, but grew up here in the United States,” Akil said. “Thanks to my parents, I speak fluent Arabic. As a result, I’ve had the chance to live and work in the Middle East. More than once I’ve sat down and shared a meal with those who have preached hatred against America.”

  Akil engaged the remote.

  Several Arab faces popped onto the screen behind him.

  “The zealots portrayed in our media are not the crazed caricatures you’ve been led to believe. They’re far more dangerous. The ones I met were extremely articulate, organized, and resourceful. I can assure you that the recruiting drives are working. The number of radicals is growing. Innovative financing schemes are being put in to action so that new terror operations can be funded. Nine-Eleven may feel like a distant memory, but these terrorists are determined to strike at us again in dramatic fashion. Right here. On American soil.”

  Akil stepped away from the lectern and moved slowly across the stage once again.

  “Take this into consideration,” he said. “Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world. The only religion still increasing its numbers. Nearly one out of every five people on Earth is Muslim and more are converting every day. If present trends persist, that number will increase to one in three by the year 2030. There are over three thousand mosques in the United States alone and anywhere from four to six million Muslim men, women and children. Since 1950, the Middle East’s population has more than quadrupled. And more importantly, the number of active jihadi has spiraled upwards.”

  Akil switched to the next slide.

  We have never targeted an American target or American interests despite its hostility. Until now we did not. I am talking about now. In the future, God knows.

  – Senior Hamas Leader

  Akil watched his students shifting in their seats, whispering asides to one another. By delivering tonight’s lecture, he’d hoped to create a jumping off point for the rest of the course by sparking debate. The last thing he wanted to do was bore his students. Better, he thought, to provoke them.

  “Let’s do the math,” he told them. “The probability of a WMD being unleashed in a major American city by a terrorist cell is what?”

  He scanned his audience but there were no takers.

  “Twenty percent?” he asked.