Between Two Scorpions Read online

  The really amazing thing, Alec realized, was that ominous portents like the destruction of Khobar Towers, the bombing of two American embassies, and a speedboat full of explosives blowing a sixty-foot gash in a US Navy destroyer just got lost in the noise. Everybody slept, everybody tuned out, everybody chose to forget the unpleasantness. But Alec wouldn’t let himself forget. He smiled, he joked, he greeted the absurdities of life with goofy puns and deadpan snark. Very few people knew that behind all the laughter, he was looking for somebody rotten enough to remind him of the composite portrait of malevolence that he imagined had taken Sarina, and when he found a suitable candidate, he dished out punishment with relish.

  He and Ward had discussed Sarina once, early in their friendship and at length; after that, they rarely felt the need to revisit the topic. Ward understood completely. He had been in Oklahoma City the day of the bombing, too young to do anything to help, but similarly scarred by the sights and sounds and smells. Like Alec, Ward would be forever determined to find the next man with evil in his heart.

  Despite their country-mouse-and-city-mouse differences, Alec and Ward completely understood that barely audible whisper in their ear in their solitary moments: someone, somewhere had to pay for those tragedies.

  In the disappearance of a Connecticut girl without a trace and the sight of children’s bodies pulled out of wreckage in Oklahoma City, both men understood the how cruel the fallen world could be. Both men, having once been hurt so badly, could only cope by finding someone sufficiently morally culpable and acting out the Johnny Cash lyric: “I will make you hurt.”

  Ironically, Alec’s work never quite brought him across what remained of the IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Real IRA, or the latest reconstituted offshoot, Nua Éireann Arm. Someday, he figured.

  CHAPTER 46

  K STREET

  WASHINGTON DC

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

  Ward was surprised to see that so many charities and nonprofits had their DC offices in a three-block-by-four-block radius near K Street: Special Olympics, Reading Is Fundamental, Fight for Children, Oxfam America, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, US Fund for UNICEF, CARE, and the relatively new Better Tomorrow Foundation. Philip Shuler, formerly treasurer for the New Beginnings Foundation and the man listed as the primary contact on all of its tax forms, now worked as director of development at the Better Tomorrow Foundation.

  “Better Tomorrow, New Beginnings, these all sound the same,” Ward said, shaking his head.

  Cabinet officials from a previous administration founded the Better Tomorrow Foundation a few years ago. In addition to the black-tie annual gala, the foundation ran a slew of major conferences and other events on trendy charitable causes: mental health and counseling clinics in struggling communities, cancer treatment for refugees still escaping the Syria Toxic Zone.

  Ward opened the door and entered. No one was in the small waiting room that offered the standard quasi-comfortable chairs, a coffee table, the nonprofit’s glossy brochure featuring smiling Third World children, windmills, solar panels, and several black tie–clad figures holding a large check that included a lot of zeroes. A not terribly busy receptionist looked up at Ward.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I need to see Philip Shuler,” Ward said.

  The receptionist explained to Ward that he would need an appointment.

  He not-so-subtly bumped his holstered gun against her desk.

  “I’m with the American government. Let me show you the latest addition to the FBI most wanted list,” he said, holding up his phone. “You know those threatening videos from Atarsa?”

  The receptionist nodded with concern.

  He held up the phone. “The woman in the videos is Zahra Amadi, also known as Sarvar Rashin. Your boss Shuler used to work for her. Now, I can call my boss to get started on the paperwork for charges obstruction of justice,” Ward lied, “or you can get Mr. Shuler now.”

  “Let me show you to his office!” she sprang out of her seat.

  ***

  Philip Shuler only had a moment or two of disgruntlement when Ward and the receptionist entered without knocking.

  “Mr. Shuler, this man is with—is—” the receptionist suddenly realized she hadn’t gotten Ward’s official affiliation.

  “Ward Rutledge,” he said to the deeply concerned Shuler, who was in a suit without a jacket. “I’m working out of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive.” He was indeed working out of their offices. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but we’re up against the clock here, and I need you to answer some questions.”

  “How can I help you?”

  He held up the image on his phone.

  “This woman, Sarvar Rashin, or maybe you knew her as Zahra Amadi. But you knew her.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I met her only a few times,” Shuler said, glancing nervously at his receptionist. “Maybe twice a year, I was at the New Beginnings Foundation for about three years. She came from overseas, one of the Gulf States, I think.”

  “Try Iran,” Ward corrected.

  “Okay, maybe Iran,” Shuler said, nodding, rapidly becoming a bundle of nerves. “When a benefactor comes with six-figure checks to keep suicide hotlines and counseling programs going in nearly two dozen cities, you don’t look that gift horse in the mouth.”

  “Tell me about anybody else who came with her, worked with her closely,” Ward continued, hitting record on the voice recorder in his phone.

  “There was another guy, I think. Azi. Azi Dhaka was his name. He was more of a details guy. He stayed a few weeks after she would visit. After we had set up a crisis counseling center, he came in, implemented a new program. He said they had a treatment and counseling method that had been very effective in other countries, and he wanted to try it here.”

  Ka-thunk. Ward could almost feel the tumblers falling into place in his mind.

  “Ah. An Iranian, from a country with a regime that sponsors suicide bombers, comes to you with some new way of dealing with suicidal people. And this didn’t smell funny to you at all?”

  The blood drained from Shuler’s face.

  “What did this guy Dhaka want?”

  “He, um …” Shuler gave a nervous look at his receptionist.

  Ward snapped his fingers in front of Shuler’s eyes. “Don’t look at her, look at me!” he barked. “What did Azi Dhaka want?”

  “He told us that he wanted us to refer call-ins that met certain parameters to this new initiative, a particular treatment program. Troubled young men. Isolated.”

  “Where was the treatment center?

  “I don’t remember the name, I’m sorry—”

  Ward slammed his palm flat on the desk. “Don’t lie to me!”

  “Okay, let me think,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m not lying to you. The program’s name was something Greek. Iso-something. Isoceles. Iso-metric-era, something like that.”

  “You’ve been helping a terrorist group, Mr. Shuler,” Ward said.

  “I swear to you, I had no idea!” Shuler screamed. “Wait, wait, let me check my old e-mails.” He turned to a computer and began typing. Ward casually and slowly put his hand by his gun, fearing that Shuler was preparing to destroy some sort of electronic evidence. Ward thought, That’s so cute, he thinks I’m here for court-admissible evidence.

  After a few moments of digging through his Gmail account, he nodded. “Okay, I found it,” Shuler said. “Isoptera.”

  “I need every damn thing you have on Isoptera and the people referred to it,” Ward said. He handed him a business card—just a name, cell phone, and e-mail—and wrote down Dee’s e-mail as well. “Forward everything you have to these addresses. I really need lists of names, personnel records.”

  “I don’t have—” Shuler looked up and saw the expression on Ward’s face. “You know, I might have hard copies, papers from my New Beginnings years in my home office, but that’s out in Great Falls.”

  “Let’s go, ri
ght now,” Ward said. “And I swear, if you try to run away from me once you’re behind the wheel, I will catch up and run you right off the road. Are we clear?”

  Shuler nodded, eyes wide, wondering if some sort of modern red-bearded Viking warrior had suddenly invaded his life. Ward turned to Shuler’s secretary.

  “You’re probably going to want to clear his schedule.”

  ***

  About ninety minutes later, Ward was in the nicest home office he had ever seen, as Schuler sorted through a stack of file folders and papers five inches thick.

  “Raquel, we’ll talk about my bonus later,” Ward said into his phone. “There’s a lot to go through here, but I’ll bet we just found a bunch of Atarsa’s recruits.”

  “That’s terrific,” Raquel said. “I have Elaine from the Bureau here.”

  “Good, the Bureau is probably going to want to check on all of these people.” Ward saw Shuler was waving at him from his home printer/copier.

  “You need double copies of all of this?” Shuler said.

  “Yes,” Ward glared.

  “Can I get compensated for the paper?” Shuler asked hopefully.

  Ward resisted the urge to shoot him. “I’m on the phone with the FBI, and we’re deciding whether to charge you with obstruction of justice, so maybe this would be a good time to consider the paper a cost worth swallowing.” He rolled his eyes. “Take the business expense deduction!”

  Ward hadn’t told Shuler that the second set of copies was for him; he would continue his pursuit of the Atarsa members independently of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The sight of the burning school bus in the Atarsa video convinced him a sleeper was operating near his home and family.

  “In fact, let me put you on speaker,” Ward said. “Shuler, this is Elaine Kopek of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He figured with Shuler’s information, Kopek would be transferred from public affairs to the Joint Terrorism Task Force by the end of the day.

  “Tell her what you told me about the profile of troubled youth that this Azi Dhaka guy wanted you to send to their separate treatment center.” Ward had learned from Alec that sometimes it paid off to ask the same question multiple times, to see if someone would add more information when retelling it.

  “Like I said, young men,” Shuler said. “They wanted subjects with anger issues, grievances. The kind of deeply troubled young man you’re afraid is going to shoot up a school someday.”

  Ward felt a flash of anger. “And you just sent them to this other facility, no questions asked?”

  “We were told Isoptera’s staff had worked with angry young men all over the Middle East, the kind of aspiring jihadist types, and gotten them off the wrong path, off to productive lives.” He bristled at Ward’s accusatory glare.

  “And did you follow up on these angry young men that were sent off to this mysterious Iranian program?”

  “Yes, and there were sterling results!” Shuler said defensively. “Gainfully employed, out of trouble with the law, drug-free … I still can’t believe this was connected to terrorism. There was no indication that anyone in Isoptera was even religious!” Shuler scoffed. “You seem to think that I should have suspected terrorism just because this woman was Iranian!”

  “No, but it might have seemed a little odd to you that a wealthy Iranian would be so interested in finding violent, angry young men,” Ward growled. “Nothing about all this seemed too good to be true?”

  Shuler shook his head. “I don’t even think any of the young men in the program were Muslim … They weren’t jihadist in their thinking, they were more like … you know, the Columbine shooters or that nut in Santa Barbara who shot women because they wouldn’t go out with him. You know, not terrorists.”

  Ward shook his head in disgust. “Close enough for my government work. These papers we’re going through … please tell me you kept the names of every person who was referred to this Isoptera.”

  “I can’t be one hundred percent certain,” Shuler said quietly. “If the list was kept in one place, I didn’t have it. But a lot of the names are in here. I had to be able to demonstrate that we were genuinely referring the callers to counseling centers, in case the IRS doubted we were a genuine charity. Most of these should say where they were referred to.” He held up the oldest stack of papers, with the edges dulled.

  “Here, here’s one of the first ones. Calvin Smith, twenty-five at the time, right here at the end of the column, ‘Referred to Isoptera.’”

  Ward looked down at the sheet of paper.

  “Calvin Smith’s dead, Philip,” Ward growled. “He was the guy who started stabbing people at the Marriott in Detroit.”

  Philip Shuler’s denial shattered. He looked at the paper, then started rifling through the pages behind it until he could find another. “Reginald Brown.”

  “He was the guy who stabbed people in Cleveland outside the arena,” Ward growled. Elaine’s exhale was audible over the phone line. This was it; somehow the previous investigations had missed that both Smith and Brown had been through the Isoptera program—probably because of juvenile records that had been either sealed or expunged. And, she surmised, had most of the Atarsa recruits.

  Shuler’s hands started shaking and he stumbled over to his desk chair. He wheezed out, “I didn’t know!” and then began sobbing.

  “Agents should be at the house in about fifteen minutes, Ward,” Kopek said. Ward responded affirmatively and signed off. Then he figured he had about fifteen minutes to get through the stack of papers and find every name referred to Isoptera before the Bureau took over the investigation.

  Ward thought highly of the FBI, but the thick stack of papers suggested that there were dozens of names—dozens of Atarsa sleepers, waiting for their signal to attack. One of those sleepers was, judging from their threatening video, lurking near the community that was home to his wife and children. And while Ward didn’t mind the Bureau arresting almost every last one of the Atarsa sleepers, he was hell-bent that one who had dared threaten his community would be dealt rough justice by his own hand.

  CHAPTER 47

  March

  To: Raquel Holtz,

  From: Merlin,

  Raquel, I know I’m not in a position to give orders anymore, and I have great faith in your decision-making. But I cannot overstate my sense of risk at sending Katrina to Turkmenistan in these circumstances.

  This goes well beyond our discussions that growing swaths of the world are growing more dangerous over time. Start at the Morocco-Algeria border and head east; you won’t find a stable safe corner until you reach the Pacific.

  But this is a particularly bad neck of the woods, particularly for those of us who care to research long-forgotten history. Those long-lost cities of Agartha and Shambala. Legendary wild men of the Central Asian plains. The old Silk Road is littered with natural fires that never go out. It’s not just the “Gate to Hell” in the Darvaza crater that Alec thinks is the Atarsa hideout. In Azerbaijan, there’s a hillside outside of Baku that has been on fire for as long as anyone can remember—it’s blamed on gas leaks. The flaming stone at the temple of Yanartas near Antalya, Turkey. They call the fire in the crater of Baba Gurgur in Kurdistan the eternal flame; some theorize it has burned for more than 2,500 years. These places have always been associated with local legends of devils, demons, curses, and misfortune.

  If, as we suspect, Atarsa represents not just a new name on a familiar version of modern Islamist jihadism but some dark mutation using its trappings—inspiring fear for the sake of fear, a band of rage-filled serial killers wound up and deployed by a particularly insidious strategic mind who has studied the weaknesses of American society—then we are likely dealing with beliefs, culture, and psychologies that Westerners barely understand. I suspect everyone associated with Atarsa has struggled with their own demons and let them set their path.

  I know this sort of talk gets me dismissed as a doddering old man, but I increasingly believe that ignoring all these ol
d myths and legends is an unaffordable luxury. We’re fools if we blithely assume these stories that were first told long before you or I were born have no influence on our world today.

  Let me hit you with one other local legend, one that might seem particularly pertinent to the moment. Right next door to Turkmenistan is Uzbekistan, where, in 1940, Western scholars discovered the oral history of the Karakalpak people. They shared an epic, 20,000-line poem about a legendary group of warriors, called the Kirk Kuz, who would have been active in the early 1700s. There were forty of these warriors, and they were unparalleled in everything: horse-riding, marksmanship with a bow and arrow, throwing axes and knives, sword-fighting and every martial art imaginable. Strength, agility, cunning, nerves of steel—the DNA of these warriors had to be a double helix of sheer concentrated lethality. They repelled invading hordes and every man in every direction feared the ruthless, silent efficiency of the Kirk Kuz warriors.

  What makes the Kirk Kuz different is that they were all women, yet another group that may have inspired the legend of the Amazons. They only left their sisters in death or marriage.

  This band of warrior-women kept the peace and defended their land for ages in a region called Samarkand. Which is just down the road from the city of Bukhara.

  The tale of the Kirk Kuz would be easier to dismiss as merely a legend if you and I didn’t know a woman born in Bukhara who’s ruthlessly effective with all weaponry and a modern-day Amazon.

  If her lineage is as special as I suspect, perhaps Katrina is indeed just the right person to send to a place called the Gate to Hell. But who could stand alone in the face of those fires?

  CHAPTER 48

  INTERSTATE 95 BETWEEN FREDERICKSBURG AND

  RICHMOND, VIRGINIA

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

  Ward was driving back toward Williamsburg when the radio announced the news that the president would be addressing the country that evening. Within a few minutes, it had leaked: the Pentagon had launched a series of air strikes in Turkmenistan, targeting terrorist training camps used by the group Atarsa.