Legends

The briefing in Washington had taken place on neutral turf, a nondescript Foggy Bottom conference room that had been swept by Company housekeepers and then staked out until the principals showed up at the crack of noon. From word one, the tension had been as thick as the fog Lincoln had braved driving to work that morning from the safe house in Virginia. It wasn’t so much the FBI briefer, a short, stumpy veteran counterterrorism maven named Felix Kiick with the low center of gravity of a NFL linesman; the CIA had dealt with him on any number of occasions (most especially when he directed the FBI’s counterterrorism team at the American embassy in Moscow) and considered him to be a straight shooter. The tension could be traced to the clash of cultures; to the mistrust J. Edgar Hoover (who had run the FBI with an iron hand until his death in 1972) had sewn into the agency’s bureaucratic fabric during his forty-eight years at the helm. The fact that the FBI, acting in obedience to a formal presidential “finding,” was being obliged to pass on to its arch competitor at Langley an operation and the assets that went with it, or what was left of them, only made matters worse. Kiick put the best possible face on the situation in his opening remarks. “Triple Border,” he told Lincoln as Crystal Quest and several of her wallahs looked on, “which is the nickname for the zone where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet up, is a cesspool filled with scum from Hamas, Hezbollah, Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatist group ETA, Colombia’s FARC, all of them operating under false identities or false flags. The FBI’s interest in Triple Border goes back roughly ten years when a large expatriate population fleeing the civil war in Lebanon gravitated into the area. The local authorities, some of them bribed, some of them intimidated, turned their backs on the sharp rise in crime in their backyard. You could buy and sell almost anything down there—passports for two-thousand dollars a clip, including the mug shot and the official government stamp; stolen cars; cheap electronics; along with the staples on any lawless frontier these days, drugs and arms. Several terrorist organizations set up guerilla training camps in the mato graso—the outback—to teach recruits how to rig car bombs or shoot the Soviet hardware that anyone could purchase in the back alleys of the border towns using money conveniently laundered by the banks at Triple Border.”

“Sounds like your people have a handle on the problems,” Lincoln said. “Why are you backing off?”

“They’re backing off,” Crystal Quest said, “because the director has convinced the White House that American interests would be better served if the CIA held the Triple Border action.” Quest fingered some crushed ice out of a bowl and began munching on it. “Drugs, contraband cars, a black market in computer software or pirated Hollywood films are small potatoes. We have reason to believe that Triple Border has become a staging area for Muslim fundamentalist groups working in the western hemisphere; at Triple Border they can purchase all the arms their hearts desire and launder the money to pay for it. And their fedayeen can get some R and R at the local bars, out of sight of the mullahs who expect them to remain chaste and pray five times a day. The mosques in Foz de Iguaçú on the Brazilian side and Ciudad del Este on the Paraguayan side are filled with Sunnis and Shiites who in other parts of the Muslim world don’t give each other the time of day. In Triple Border we suspect that they’re plotting to attack the United States and kill Americans.”

Kiick spoke up. “Despite what the CIA thinks of our collective abilities, the FBI did manage to run a handful of assets in Triple Border. With some persistence one of them struck pay dirt, pay dirt being the Egyptian named Ibrahim bin Daoud who runs the fundamentalist training camp called Boa Vista. Daoud, whose real name is Khalil al-Jabarin, has a record—al-Jabarin was convicted of being a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and served serious time in a Cairo military prison. He has the physical and mental scars to show for it; electrodes attached to testicles are said to be the torture of choice of Egyptian jailers. No doubt about it, Daoud himself is a cold-blooded killer—whether it’s the result of his suffering or his genes we don’t know. What we do know is that last month he snuck a crocodile into a swimming pool in São Paolo and then pushed in a man accused of being a police informer while some local hookers holding paper plates filled with defrosted hors d’oeuvres looked on. Money was spread around and the murder was hushed up. We know the story’s not apocryphal because one of the hookers was a collateral asset. The dead informer was our principal asset in Triple Border.”

“So the FBI has gone blind out there?” Lincoln asked.

“For all intents and purposes, yes.”