“But without my cell phone and with Fadim and Uday keeping me company.”

“For once, Shahab, would you do something without arguing with me? That’s all I ask.”

Rashid bowed his head. “I’m sorry, Marwan. We’ll do it your way.”

“Good. Thank you. Now we need to talk about the police officers we are holding. They’re a liability and need to be dealt with.”

“I agree.”

Jarrah was taken aback. “You do?”

“Yes. No good can come from holding on to them.”

“So then they should be disposed of.”

“Yes.”

The man smiled. “This is very good, Shahab. I’m pleased that for once you see things my way. I’ll let you, then, decide how to handle it.”

“I already know how I want to handle it,” said Rashid.

“How?”

“They are going to be martyrs for our cause, and they will take many of their fellow officers with them.”

CHAPTER 64

WEDNESDAY

It took Mike Dent about three hours to get Harvath the information he needed. Within forty-five minutes of Dent’s call, he and the remaining Athena Team members were on a Citation X to Chicago.

It was a tough decision to leave their teammate behind in the hospital, but they knew Rodriguez would have wanted them to finish the job.

From that point forward, the Dutch took over the interrogation of al-Yaqoubi, though Harvath doubted they’d get much more out of him.

Meanwhile, Carlton’s people were still working on Adda Sterk. She was producing only small amounts of intel, much of it not very useful. The same could be said of the controller for the London cell who had been broken by Ashford’s team. Whoever had assembled this network had done a very good job. Everything was compartmentalized and cutouts had been used all along the way. It was only when you got closer to the top, as they had with al-Yaqoubi, that the payouts began to get bigger.

The last piece of information Harvath had harvested from the accountant had been the most terrifying. Whatever “Yusuf” had planned for America, it was set to begin in the next forty-eight hours.

Per Mike Dent, Yusuf was actually a furniture importer in Chicago named Marwan Jarrah. He had fled Iraq during the 1980s and eventually became a U.S. citizen. He was an influential member of the American branch of the Islamic Relief Foundation, or IRF, a Saudi Arabia-based charity and member of the Conference of NGOs. The IRF had conducted multiple projects with the World Health Organization, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and the World Food Program. Prominence in this organization had provided Jarrah cover to travel anywhere he wanted. It was no coincidence that the greatest hotbeds of terrorism and radical Islam were in the same parts of the Muslim world so keenly focused upon by the IRF.

In order to prevent Jarrah’s relatives from tipping him off, Dent had arranged for the ones he had questioned to be detained until Harvath okayed their release. For the first time since this operation had begun, Harvath felt that he had been able to take more than just one step forward before getting knocked on his ass.

He had to block the scenes from Amsterdam from his mind or he wouldn’t be able to focus on what still needed to be done. Along with the pit of children from Fallujah and the little Iraqi boy who had died in his arms, he tucked them all into the iron box he kept for the unpleasantness of his job and shoved it back into the deepest recesses of his mind.

He tried to think of something positive, something he could look forward to, and was surprised when Riley’s image bubbled up in his mind. It made him feel disloyal to Tracy, and Tracy brought him back to the issue of having children; the exact thing he’d been sitting on his dock thinking about when all of this had begun.

As quickly as thoughts of Tracy and the hard decision he needed to make about his relationship with her came to mind, they were pushed aside by the work he had yet to do.

There had been some debate as to how the team should proceed once it landed in Chicago. They had no arrest or law enforcement powers. Acts of terror plotted and committed on American soil were treated as criminal acts, which Harvath had always thought a big mistake. By not treating them as acts of war, the United States government was only inviting escalation, greater bloodshed, and exponentially greater loss of life. The jihadists were at war with America, yet American politicians refused to go to war with them. They saw them as petty criminals to be tried and given all the benefits of the American legal system. The Department of Defense, though, saw it a different way.

The entire idea behind the Carlton Group was to protect America and her citizens, period. That was where things were now very sticky. Harvath and his organization had knowledge of pending terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. They also had intelligence regarding the man they believed to be in charge of those attacks inside the U.S. It could very well be argued that the information should have been shared with the FBI. But that was not how Reed Carlton or the small cadre of men to whom he answered inside the Pentagon saw it.

They wanted Marwan Jarrah all to themselves and they had no intention of sharing him. They also had no intention of reading him his Miranda rights or helping him secure an attorney. There was no telling how many cells he had within the United States. They needed to grab him, interrogate him, and neutralize his network as rapidly as possible. And if it meant violating a few terrorists’ “rights” along the way, then that was the way it was going to be.

With Carlton doing the groundwork for them, they used their time aboard the plane to eat, check on Nikki Rodriguez via the in-flight Satcom system, and grab as much sleep as possible.

When they landed in Chicago, it was just after three in the morning. Two vehicles stuffed with gear were waiting for them; a windowless Chevy Astro van and a dented KIA Sportage with tinted glass. Harvath was anxious to set up surveillance and put together their plan for taking down Jarrah.

They divided up the equipment and broke into two teams. Once they had established a rendezvous point, each team made a reconnaissance drive through Jarrah’s residential neighborhood and the neighborhood where his furniture outlet and the American office of record for the IRF was located. Two things immediately became clear.

The first was that surveilling Jarrah’s house from a vehicle was going to be next to impossible. Street parking was by permit only and even if they had a permit, there wasn’t a single space to be found. There were also Neighborhood Watch. We call police signs mounted everywhere, including in people’s windows. Harvath had always hated doing residential surveillance and this was one of the biggest reasons. Neighbors tended to not only know and watch out for each other, but they also knew what everyone drove. Effectively, nonresidents stood out.

The second problem they faced was that there appeared to be multiple entrances and exits to Jarrah’s furniture store. It was a large three-story commercial building with glass along the front and doors that opened onto the sidewalk. There was a fire escape and loading dock area in back that accessed the alley, a side door that allowed people to enter from the parking lot, and an exit on the far side of the structure that fed into a narrow gangway with the building next door. It was a lot to cover.

There was a third problem that Harvath didn’t even want to think about. The fact that Jarrah’s home and business were in Chicago didn’t mean that he was. For all Harvath knew, he could be in New York City getting ready to oversee his first attack. Chicago had been their best and only lead.