Full Black - Brad Thor [92]
Ashford was an unrepentant bigot of the highest order. He didn’t just dislike, he actually detested working with Muslims. In his opinion, Muslims—Arab Muslims in particular—were some of the laziest and most uncreative people he had ever come across. Their zealotry bred myopia and an inability to think for themselves. In his experience, the only thing they were good for was blowing themselves up. He had yet to meet enough clever members of the faith to believe that those possessed of even average intelligence were anything more than an aberration.
He was putting the finishing touches on elevating the next commander in the Aleem network, when Mustafa Karami finally made contact.
He found the email in the draft folder of the account he was about to delete. He quickly copied it into a translation program, and when the Arabic had been translated to English, he read the man’s brief account of what had transpired in Uppsala.
Both the safe house and the apartment used for their ops center across the street had been compromised. According to Karami, a team of men posing as professional movers had been behind the attack. The ops center had been detonated, but two men survived. They were both dressed as Swedish Security Service agents.
Karami reported that both he and Sabah had been able to escape to the emergency retreat location, but that he had no idea what had become of the rest of the cell members. At this point, he was standing by, awaiting further instruction.
Ashford took several minutes to compose his reply. He front-loaded the email with what he referred to as “Muslim Mumbo Jumbo”—the blessings of Allah and all of that antiquated nonsense that he felt was a complete and utter waste of time, but was important to maintain the charade of his being the number two to the man who financed the entire network, the mysterious Sheikh from Qatar.
The Chinese had established the fictitious Sheikh as the network’s financial benefactor and ultimate authority, who allegedly took his orders directly from the al Qaeda leadership. The mistake the Chinese had made, though, was that they had not perpetrated the myth of the Sheikh much past Aazim Aleem, the operational director of the network. When Ashford had been forced to kill Aazim before he could be interrogated, there was reluctance on the part of Mustafa Karami to take over.
Karami was used to taking orders from Aazim. He had never met the Sheikh and therefore didn’t trust him. Ashford had been tempted to cut Karami out of the picture right then and there and simply move to the next commander in the network’s hierarchy, but Standing had told him to have patience. Karami had been Aazim’s designated successor for a reason. He trusted Karami and recognized him as the most able to take over, should anything ever happen to him. And it had.
Ashford had been extremely fortunate to get to Aazim before Scot Harvath and the Carlton Group could hand him over to the CIA.
As Aazim was a British citizen and Ashford had worked with Harvath and the Carlton Group to stop an Aazim cell from carrying out attacks in London, Carlton had kept him abreast of what was happening, including reading him in on the operation to apprehend Aazim and turn him over to the CIA in Yemen.
But as soon as Aazim had been killed, the information flow stopped. Ashford knew better than to be paranoid. They were closing their ranks and being much tighter with their compartmentalization. It just meant information would be harder to get. They had to believe he had something of value to trade, and an idea had already begun to form in his mind about how to get Reed Carlton to let down his guard and show his cards.
For the time being, though, he needed to focus on Karami. James Standing wanted the silver and gold attacks launched.
Carefully, he typed out the appropriate activation message, translated it, and placed it in the draft folder for Karami.
Logging out of the account, he scrubbed his back trail and shut down his computer.
He did the math in his head and computed when news of the first