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Authors: Marcus Wynne
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cosmopolitan—and very large—student population in Minneapolis and St. Paul. She’d been activated to surveil a small group of Iraqi exiles, and had for the first time met another sleeper agent in the Twin Cities area. The two of them worked up a profile of one of the men—who ended up dead in a spectacular hit. The woman and the other man had been harder. They hadn’t been able to finger the man’s location, and the woman stayed in for the most part, hidden behind formidable security. Now the woman had disappeared, but before she had gone, a small convoy of cars had driven her here to the Torture Center, where Marika had walked in on the grounds and was rewarded with a glimpse of the woman talking to a tall man in a track suit accompanied by a doctor.
They’d found the third man.
Since that time, the surveillance cell had worked up a target folder focusing on the center. Marika had dressed in business clothes and paid a visit to the offices of the remodeling company that had renovated the Victorian house that housed the center; she’d left with a complete set of floor plans and photographs. Her partner, a silent and serious Palestinian, had carefully, over a series of days, taken digital video of the house and the surrounding avenues of approach, and on his I-Mac computer carefully edited the raw footage into a detailed and comprehensive documentary on the center and the surrounding grounds. They had reached a point where more was not possible with the standoff approach; someone would have to get inside the building and see if they could identify where the target was located to take their work to the next level.
While she was not a shooter, she recognized, from her training in the camps, the demands of a shooting team: which way did the doors open, what sort of locks did they have, what was the distance from the little hill to the house, what was the response time of the campus police to the center, how many men and did they appear to have long guns—these were the questions that trained assault personnel needed answered.
She knew there’d be a shooting soon.
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Youssef bin Hassan sat alone in the Golden Herb coffeehouse, surrounded by dozens of young people whose chatter washed over him like water over a stone. He slowly nursed one of the many coffees he drank throughout the day, and wondered why no one spoke to him. So many young people, from so many countries, all of them looking for friends in this friendliest of cities, let their gaze pass over him quickly. Not that there hadn’t been a few attempts, but Youssef had rebuffed them without really knowing why. He told himself it was for operational reasons, but his loneliness nagged at him and was plain to see in his face, which made him all the more confusing to the few who dared to cross the wall of silence he surrounded himself with.
Youssef was new to the Al-Bashir network. He was only recently out of the Sudanese training camps. He smiled to himself and touched his coffee cup with one finger as he remembered the camaraderie of the camps and the fun he’d had in training with other operators. The training course had been rigorous, with challenges presented to them in hand-to-hand combat, shooting, tactics and planning, and many long speeches from the imams on the nature of the armed struggle against Israel and the United States. The shared experiences had fostered a tight bond with his training group, a bondthat Youssef, a rare single child in an Arab family, had thrived on.
All the lectures on preparation for operating in hostile territory hadn’t prepared him for the loneliness of the singleton operator. He had permission to shave his beard, miss prayer, even to drink alcohol if it was necessary to preserve his cover, but there was an iron-clad prohibition about unburdening himself to a sympathetic ear other than his controllers. Those meetings were few and far between, and most of his communication took place through
They’d found the third man.
Since that time, the surveillance cell had worked up a target folder focusing on the center. Marika had dressed in business clothes and paid a visit to the offices of the remodeling company that had renovated the Victorian house that housed the center; she’d left with a complete set of floor plans and photographs. Her partner, a silent and serious Palestinian, had carefully, over a series of days, taken digital video of the house and the surrounding avenues of approach, and on his I-Mac computer carefully edited the raw footage into a detailed and comprehensive documentary on the center and the surrounding grounds. They had reached a point where more was not possible with the standoff approach; someone would have to get inside the building and see if they could identify where the target was located to take their work to the next level.
While she was not a shooter, she recognized, from her training in the camps, the demands of a shooting team: which way did the doors open, what sort of locks did they have, what was the distance from the little hill to the house, what was the response time of the campus police to the center, how many men and did they appear to have long guns—these were the questions that trained assault personnel needed answered.
She knew there’d be a shooting soon.
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Youssef bin Hassan sat alone in the Golden Herb coffeehouse, surrounded by dozens of young people whose chatter washed over him like water over a stone. He slowly nursed one of the many coffees he drank throughout the day, and wondered why no one spoke to him. So many young people, from so many countries, all of them looking for friends in this friendliest of cities, let their gaze pass over him quickly. Not that there hadn’t been a few attempts, but Youssef had rebuffed them without really knowing why. He told himself it was for operational reasons, but his loneliness nagged at him and was plain to see in his face, which made him all the more confusing to the few who dared to cross the wall of silence he surrounded himself with.
Youssef was new to the Al-Bashir network. He was only recently out of the Sudanese training camps. He smiled to himself and touched his coffee cup with one finger as he remembered the camaraderie of the camps and the fun he’d had in training with other operators. The training course had been rigorous, with challenges presented to them in hand-to-hand combat, shooting, tactics and planning, and many long speeches from the imams on the nature of the armed struggle against Israel and the United States. The shared experiences had fostered a tight bond with his training group, a bondthat Youssef, a rare single child in an Arab family, had thrived on.
All the lectures on preparation for operating in hostile territory hadn’t prepared him for the loneliness of the singleton operator. He had permission to shave his beard, miss prayer, even to drink alcohol if it was necessary to preserve his cover, but there was an iron-clad prohibition about unburdening himself to a sympathetic ear other than his controllers. Those meetings were few and far between, and most of his communication took place through
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