Chapter 12
Langley, Virginia
“Yes, Don, I do know Mac Dekker.”
Eliza Porter Elkins opened a fresh bottle of Maker’s Mark and poured it into the decanter.
She was drinking too much these days, but she needed someone to talk to, and she was her own best friend.
No one else was as witty, perceptive, or honest. She refilled her glass, then stood at the window and peered out at the rolling countryside.
The leaves were turning. Another month and the trees would be bare.
Eliza buzzed her assistant. “Hold all calls.”
She flicked a switch on her table lamp, activating sound baffles that threw off white noise, making it impossible for any unfriendly parties to listen in.
She took a cell phone from the bottom drawer of her desk.
It was a stealth special, modified for just this kind of thing.
Untraceable. No number. No GPS. The equivalent of digital scrambled eggs.
She hit speed dial and was connected to a nameless office in the bowels of the NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, down the road in McLean. She identified herself, then asked to speak with their European substation, located (conveniently) in Paris, France.
“One moment, please, while we connect you.”
“Thank you,” said Eliza, before enjoying a long, slow sip of bourbon.
In her mind’s eye, she wasn’t gazing out upon a bleak, rainy autumn landscape.
She was staring up at the noonday sun near Baghdad, thinking she’d never seen a light so harsh and unforgiving.
March 2006. She was forty, recently retired from the US Navy, a lieutenant commander with seventeen years in as a helicopter pilot.
Her bird was a Sikorsky Sea King, and later the MH-60 Sierra, combat search and rescue.
It was her first trip overseas out of uniform.
She was eager to do a good job. No, not just a good job; an exemplary job.
Eliza had come to the Middle East previously as a member of the Iraq Survey Group, or ISG.
The ISG’s mandate was to search Iraq top to bottom for proof that Saddam Hussein was indeed manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.
For years now, the country had heard rumors of chemical weapons and yellowcake and secret laboratories where the Iraqi strongman was expending millions of dollars to build nuclear weapons that might be used against the West. Not just rumors.
There was hard intelligence. Irrefutable fact. A casus belli.
But two years after the invasion, nothing had been found.
Perhaps a few rockets tipped with mustard gas left over from the Iran–Iraq War, twenty years earlier.
Maybe a few tins of sarin poison gas, just enough to foul a small village’s water supply.
But that was all. No centrifuges. No enriched uranium. No sophisticated laboratories. Nada.
A report had been written—“The Duelfer Report,” it was called—and presented to Congress.
Depending on which side of the aisle one sat, the report was viewed either as a humiliating admission of failure on the part of the teams searching the country or evidence of gross misrepresentation on the part of the administration.
In the end, however, pretty much everyone agreed.
The government had flat-out lied to the American people.
Eliza had traveled six thousand miles across the globe to rewrite that narrative.
Her trip was a last-ditch effort to repair the president’s reputation; a personal mission on his behalf, made at the request of Eliza’s father, Senator Davis Porter Elkins, ranking member of Congress and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
“What is this place?” asked Eliza, staring up a tall, ugly concrete wall topped with concertina wire.
“Abu Ghraib,” said her official escort and bodyguard, Mackenzie “Call me Mac” Dekker, a retired marine major, now with the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I thought it was bigger,” she said.
“Big enough, I guess,” said Dekker.
By then, everyone knew about Abu Ghraib and the serial mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners of war.
Even so, the place was worse than she expected.
The smell, the confines, the creepy feeling of paranoia once inside the complex.
It was as if the evil of Saddam’s regime had seeped into the prison walls and possessed everyone who set foot inside.
Eliza and Dekker were shown to an interrogation room.
The man she had flown six thousand miles to see was seventy, frail after a month in prison, his skin grayer than the few strands of his hair that remained.
Officially, he was Dr. Mahmoud Shah, by his own account a professor of physics at Baghdad University.
Back in DC, the senator and his minions called him “the Savior.”
“It is a container for radioactive materials,” said Dr. Shah fervently, recognizing Eliza for what she was. His last chance. “From Hussein’s most advanced government laboratory.”
The so-called container sat on the table between them. It resembled a cocktail shaker, stainless steel with a bulky cap, maybe twenty-five inches tall, and more than anything else, amateurish.
“What do you think?” she asked Dekker, who’d shepherded teams from the ISG a year earlier.
“Who found this?” said Dekker. He was tall and broad, tan as a saddle and as weathered.
Those blue eyes, the dark, close-cropped hair, the way he sat, owning the table.
He wore a gray short-sleeved shirt over his Kevlar vest, and dark trousers and mesh desert boots.
He had a pistol strapped to a web belt, and he wore it low on his thigh like a gunslinger.
“He tried to sell it to an undersecretary at the embassy,” said Eliza.
“For real?” said Dekker. “This?”
Eliza nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was imperative to maintain a professional distance. It was imperative not to acknowledge the slipshod contraption on the desk. It was imperative not to betray a hint of desperation. It was imperative that “the savior” be believed.
“Why was he arrested?” asked Dekker.
“Suspicion of involvement in a government program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.”
“He’s your smoking gun,” said Dekker, not quite loudly enough for public consumption.
“Excuse me,” said Eliza, angered by his impudence. Dekker was her escort, a newly minted field grade, barely more than a flunky. She was Eliza Porter Elkins, emissary of the president of the United States.
“I don’t believe that this came from a government lab,” said Dekker.
“We have no way of knowing where it came from,” said Eliza. “It might have been an early prototype.”
“So there might be more where this came from,” suggested Dekker.
“That would not be an unreasonable conclusion,” said Eliza.
Dekker laughed derisively. “I call bullshit,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she demanded.
“On this,” said Dekker. “Whatever it is.” He reached out and tapped the metal container with his fingernail.
“I used to take apart engines with my dad. He had a sixty-eight Camaro SS. Red with a white racing stripe down the hood. Three hundred fifty cubic inches. V8. This feels like it’s made from the carburetor.
And this from a radiator . . . or something like that. Go ahead. See for yourself.”
“We have to take every possibility seriously,” said Eliza.
“What happens to him?” asked Dekker, nodding at the old Iraqi.
“What do you mean?”
“If you decide the device is real,” said Mac. “Which it isn’t.”
“Not up to me,” said Eliza. “And we haven’t made an official determination.”
“You’re not going to send him to GITMO, are you? He’s a con man. He wanted a little money. Isn’t that right?”
Shah shook his head violently and let loose a loud, passionate screed in Arabic.
At which point, Mac picked up the “suspected radioactive container sourced from one of Saddam Hussein’s most advanced engineering laboratories” and pulled it apart.
“Stop,” said Eliza, rising from her chair. “That’s government property.”
“It’s not lead,” said Dekker, looking inside the cylindrical metal flask. “The first thing you need if you want to transport radioactive material is lead. And not just a quarter inch thick. If anyone put five grams of uranium-235 inside this, it would burn its way through in ten minutes.”
“I didn’t know you possessed expertise in nuclear physics,” said Eliza.
“I’ve helped you guys before,” said Mac. “You didn’t find anything then; you’re not going to find it now.”
They left the prison thirty minutes later, Eliza with the promise to return the next day to complete her interrogation.
Eliza most certainly would not bring Dekker back with her.
There were plenty of other Agency employees capable of driving with her to the prison and, once there, of keeping their mouths shut.
But the story didn’t end there.
On the drive back to the Green Zone, Eliza asked that they pass through Sadr City, the Baghdad suburb ruled by the Mahdi Army, the Shia sect led by a duplicitous cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr.
“Not a good idea,” said Dekker, speaking to her from the front seat of their armored Chevrolet Suburban. “We’re not welcome.”
“I’m told the city has been pacified,” said Eliza. “The senator would appreciate an on-the-ground report.”
“A sitrep?”
“Precisely.”
“Suit yourself.” Dekker told the driver to take them through Sadr City. Ten minutes later, they left the highway and entered Baghdad proper.
“Sadr wants to rule the country,” Dekker said. “He doesn’t respect the Americans. He doesn’t listen to the Sunnis. The only people he pretends to like are the Iranians, and secretly he hates them too.”
Sadr City was an occupied ruin, buildings gutted from shellfire, roads pulverized, the whole place a wasteland.
“This is their Wisconsin and M,” he went on, pointing out various landmarks. A restaurant, a café, a ruined movie theater.
“What can we do to win them over?” Eliza asked.
“Leave,” said Dekker.
It was at that moment that the IED exploded.
The lead vehicle was destroyed, blown high into the sky.
A direct hit. Eliza’s vehicle ground to a halt.
Debris and fire rained down. There were two vehicles behind them, and she had a clear memory of them reversing at speed and rounding a corner out of view and her thinking, “Oh my God. We’re dead. ”
Eliza’s vehicle couldn’t reverse. Its engine was damaged, and the driver couldn’t get it started, no matter how much he swore.
She stared out the window, too dazed to be frightened.
A dozen figures lurked in doorways and on rooftops, firing at them.
Striking the armored vehicle, the bullets sounded like a xylophone played by a drunk musician.
“Stay put,” said Dekker.
Like that he was out the door, M4 assault rifle at his shoulder.
Aim and fire. Aim and fire. She watched as he shot the men dead one after another, never flinching as bullets struck the vehicle behind him, the ground at his feet, and seemingly passed through his hair.
It was over in a minute. Either the bad guys were all dead or they’d run away.
By the time Mac opened the door to sound the all clear, a Bell Jet Ranger was hovering above them, blasting at the surrounding rooftops.
“I didn’t know it was so loud,” Eliza said to him at dinner that evening. “My ears are still ringing.”
They were sitting at a squalid hole-in-the-wall inside the Green Zone, one everyone called “the Baghdad Country Club.” There was a stereo powered by someone’s iPod.
A few tables. Fake shrubbery. And too many mercenaries to count—“private contractors” was their formal title—most of them three sheets to the wind.
Eliza had no recollection of what they ate.
Nor could she recall what they talked about, except that it wasn’t about Dr. Shah or the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.
It was all a haze. She was married and, she admitted, unhappily so.
He was divorced, disillusioned with the war and subsequent occupation.
Two wayward souls. A war zone. A scrape with death.
A bottle of arrack, the local firewater.
He was, she decided, the bravest man she’d ever met. Nature took its course.
Later, she wondered if she’d given herself to him out of desire, or if it was something else, something less genuine, a kind of payment or inducement.
You can have me, but at a price. And the price was Dr. Shah and his slipshod contraption.
The laughable container of radioactive materials. Keep your mouth shut.
Either way, it hadn’t worked. A week later Mac Dekker had betrayed her. Eliza Porter Elkins never forgot it.
“NCTC Paris,” said a bland male voice.
“Intervention,” said Eliza.
“One moment.”
“Intervention,” said a new robotic voice, not American, but hard to place. Spanish? Italian? Greek?
“We have a liability outstanding,” said Eliza. “Name: Mackenzie David Dekker. American citizen. Retired company asset. A.k.a. Robert Steinhardt. Swiss national. Last seen in Paris today at four p.m. at or near the Hotel Bristol.”
She set forth the details of the assignment, including Dekker’s description as well as the instructions on apprehension and captivity. She ended with two words: “red flag.”
There was a pause. Static on the line. Someone was being patched in. A supervisor.
“This is Intervention, level two,” came a new voice, older, seasoned. “Please confirm formal issuance of a red flag on Mackenzie David Dekker.”
Eliza hesitated. Past was past. Present was present. And now here she was with Mac Dekker’s life in her hands.
Karma.
“Please confirm,” the older voice repeated. “Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you there?”