Page 72 of Whisper

“I have to. The hijackers, their names were on my desk. And we should have known. With Bin Laden’s ’96 declaration of war and his fatwas. His three warnings, like the Quran prescribes, for declaring war. We should have put the dots together. I should have seen…” Kris chewed on his lip. “I bear some responsibility for what happened.”

“Kris—”

“I do. I knew Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were dangerous. I knew they wanted to hurt us. The embassies in Africa, theUSS Cole.I just didn’t think… I never imagined they’d do what they did. I didn’t think it was possible.” He sighed, biting his lip and rolling it back and forth. “I need to spend the rest of my career making up for that. And always think about what is possible. What is coming next. I have to.” Kris scooted close to David, hitching one leg around David’s calf. “What about you?”

“I have another few years left on my second enlistment. Sounds like my unit is linking to the CIA. Happens, occasionally. I’d never been part of a CIA secondment before.” David stroked Kris’s leg, his palm circling Kris’s thigh. “I want to stay with you,” he said softly. “I’m afraid I’ll get lost in this war.” His eyes were black holes, and the burning edge of his soul peeked out, just barely. Like the shadow of a crescent moon, or a whisper against Kris’s skin.

“I think the whole world is going to get lost in this war.”

Chapter 13

Islamabad, Pakistan

March 29, 2002

The web stretched across an entire wall in the CIA station. Spindly lines crisscrossed each other, tracing points back to the dead center.

Someone had drawn a reticle around the photo in the center. A black marker sniper’s scope circled the black-and-white passport photo of a thin, young Saudi with a close-cropped beard and moustache, his hair hidden under a neat keffiyeh.

Abu Zahawi.

Langley said he was al-Qaeda’s third-highest officer, third in command after Bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. He’d been the externalemir, the high commander, of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan before the invasion. The Khaldan camp was where the hijackers were trained, where Bin Laden regularly visited. Where all high ranking al-Qaeda operatives transited.

They needed Zahawi.

And they would have him. Tonight.

In January, Kris, George, and the rest of their combined CIA-Special Forces team stepped out of a helicopter in Islamabad and started fighting the CIA’s next war.

“We have a new position at the CIA,” Bill, Islamabad’s chief of station, had told them all during their first briefing. “Targeteer. These guys are going to be the most important people in the agency. They’re hunters. Anything and everything we get on a high-value target gets routed straight to their desks. The targeteers package all of that intel together. Make sense of it. And then they find our targets.” Bill thought fast and spoke fast, and his eyes peered around the room, dancing over each person on the team. “It’s part forensic psychology, part jigsaw puzzle, part sifting through haystacks, and part voodoo. You’ve got to be a cultural anthropologist, a translator, a psychologist, and a psychic. So. Who is going to be the targeteer on this team?”

George hadn’t hesitated. “Kris Caldera. That’s made for him.”

Bill’s stare had pierced Kris. He’d had a thick stack of folders on the table in front of him stuffed with CDs and DVDs, papers and photos. Bill had pushed it all toward Kris. “Here’s your first target. Abu Zahawi. He’s in Pakistan. And we have to find him.”

He’s in Pakistanturned out to be the agency’s most popular line. Everyone was in Pakistan, from Bin Laden to the most minor al-Qaeda recruit, and they were supposed to find every last one of them. Pakistan was the size of Texas but had the population of the United States. Karachi was the fourth-largest city in the entire world. Finding anyone in the crushing mass of humanity, much less someone purposefully hiding, was a near impossible task.

Zahawi’s name, and about a dozen phone numbers associated with him, kept coming up in documents and debris recovered in Afghanistan from destroyed al-Qaeda camps, captured fighters, and picked from the dead. From Marines and soldiers, combing through the remains of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, to Islamabad, hordes and hordes of information flowed.

Not all of it was intelligent. There was just too much of it, too many bits and pieces and names and addresses scattered across thousands of leads.

Kris nearly buckled.

Palmer’s men hit the streets, going to Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi, trying to scour the cities with a small passport photo, searching for Zahawi like they could pick him from the millions and millions of people crowding the streets. David came back from each trip frustrated and filthy, and always exhausted.

“I need more resources,” Kris told George at the end of January. “I can’t make a man appear with nothing but luck.”

“What do you need?”

“Give me an entire electronic net over Pakistan. Zero in on the numbers we have of known al-Qaeda agents. The phone numbers connected to Zahawi. If anyone calls those, who do they call after that, and then after that, and then after that. We need to build a web.”

The invisible electronic net dropped. Calls were vacuumed up, scrubbed and searched for names and keywords. When calls to Zahawi’s known numbers didn’t connect, America’s digital eyes tracked the calls they made next, asking for instruction, and then again, and again. Everything went on the wall, a giant web of connections, of unrelated people trying to live in hiding, exposed by the pattern of their phone calls.

Finally, they found Zahawi’s new numbers.

Zahawi had fourteen new numbers tied to fourteen locations. Thirteen in Faisalabad, the third most populous city in Pakistan, and situated far from the Afghanistan border, south of Islamabad. One in Lahore, a city almost on the Indian border.

They hit the streets again, winding through the tangled, twisted alleys and dirt roads. Faisalabad was a rough, dangerous, and hopelessly poor city. A never-ending sprawl of shacks, dump lots, and precarious slums. Children played in raw sewage. The stench of rot slipped under their clothes, into their noses, down their throats, gagging them all. Cars and rickshaws and bicycles and donkeys and camels crowded every inch of the roadways. Walkers glided in and out of traffic lanes and passed angry cabbies shouting in thirteen different languages.