Duplicity: A Novel Read online

  “Listen,” Brooke said, lowering her voice. “There could be something in those suitcases.”

  “Besides his dirty unmentionables?” The officer smirked. “These homeless bums are always carting their worldly belongings with them either in trash bags or old suitcases.”

  In that moment, Brooke recognized what it was that seemed out of place.

  “He’s not homeless!” she exclaimed.

  Spinning away from the bobby, she broke into a run toward the stranger and the embassy’s front entrance.

  Her target was only a few steps away from the security booth when she tackled him from behind, striking him with such force that both suitcases flew forward from his hands, hitting the pavement in front of them.

  Two security guards from the embassy’s glass booth rushed outside. The bobby also had chased after her, drawing a truncheon from his belt as he ran.

  Brooke was now lying on the man’s back, holding his arms with her outstretched hands to keep them away from his body. As the shock of being tackled passed, he began to move.

  “Help!” Brooke shouted. “He’s got a bomb.”

  Bystanders, who had paused to watch the ruckus, panicked. Snatching up her toddler, a mother shrieked, “Run!” A man nearby hollered, “Bomb! He’s got a bomb.”

  Dropping to his knees, the bobby pressed the man’s neck against the ground with his baton while the embassy security guards helped Brooke pin his arms to the ground.

  “You’d better be bloody right!” the policeman snapped.

  “There’s wires here,” one of the security guards yelled, nodding at the suspect’s wrists.

  A strand of black wire was dangling from each cuff. They’d been attached to the suitcases but had snapped when Brooke tackled the suspect from behind and he’d lost his grip on the heavy cases.

  Another bobby hurried over from the park and used his radio to call for backup while more security officers emerged from the embassy.

  “Lock the building down,” one of them called over his shoulder. “No one gets in or out. Warn the ambassador.”

  By now, there were so many men pinning the suspect to the pavement that Brooke could release her hold. She stood and noticed that she’d torn her sleeve and was bleeding from a nasty scrape she’d gotten when she’d taken down the stranger.

  “The bomb squad’s coming,” a bobby said.

  The sound of approaching sirens was followed by the arrival of the squad’s commander and six other officers, all wearing heavy padding. “We’ll take over from here,” the commander declared. One took hold of the man’s head, another placed his knee on the prone man’s spine, while the other four each took charge of a leg or arm, keeping the suspect immobilized.

  “You folks need to move away now,” the commander said.

  Brooke reluctantly retreated but stopped about fifty feet away and watched as the bomb disposal commander cautiously ran his fingers over the man’s outer clothing. “I can feel a vest,” he announced. “Let’s roll him over.”

  The suspect started to resist but stopped when an officer pressed a forearm against his throat. “Bloke, we can search you alive or dead. You bloody choose.”

  The suspect turned limp and the commander cautiously opened the man’s topcoat, exposing a vest with bricks of plastic explosives duct-taped to it.

  “Here it is!” he said when he spotted a detonator. The bomb’s maker hadn’t tried to disguise it, nor was it complicated. Within seconds, the commander had disconnected it, rendering the device harmless.

  A Scotland Yard detective stepped in to take charge of the suspect. After removing the man’s sunglasses, the detective photographed the would-be bomber’s face. Within seconds, a facial recognition program linked to Scotland Yard’s computer network had identified him based on his passport, which had been scanned when he arrived at Heathrow Airport.

  Askar al-Seema was a Somali American who’d been born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and had arrived twenty-four hours earlier on a flight that had originated in Somalia. His name had not been on any No Fly lists.

  The detective summoned Brooke as his underlings were handcuffing al-Seema and pulling him up on his feet.

  “What made you suspicious?” he asked.

  Looking into al-Seema’s face, Brooke said, “We bumped into each other on the sidewalk and I sensed something wasn’t right, but it took a few moments for me to figure out why. The first tip-off was his sunglasses. What homeless man can afford Dolce and Gabbanas?”

  “He could have stole them,” the detective countered.

  “They weren’t the only tip-off.”

  Al-Seema’s eyes were filled with contempt as he listened.

  “He’s wearing cologne.”

  “Cologne?” the detective repeated. He stepped forward and sniffed al-Seema’s neck.

  “Why would someone who is homeless and dirty be wearing cologne?” Brooke asked. “Especially Burberry Brit Rhythm for men. It retails for about fifty pounds in London stores for three ounces.”

  The detective chuckled and instructed the officers guarding al-Seema to put him in a waiting police van.

  “You a cologne expert?” the detective asked.

  “Hardly. I recognized the scent because my boyfriend wears the same cologne. I bought him a bottle last week for his birthday.”

  “Bloody lucky for us you did. My guess is al-Seema didn’t think about it this morning when he got up. He probably went about his normal routine and that clearly involved splashing on cologne—either that or he wanted to smell good when he met those celestial virgins he’d been promised.” The detective laughed at his own joke, but Brooke wasn’t paying attention. She was texting a note to her dinner date, telling him that she was going to be late.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Brian Coyle Community Center

  Cedar-Riverside neighborhood

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  With the rhymes of Somali Canadian rapper K’Naan playing in the background, community activist Nuruddin Ayaanie “Rudy” Adeogo spoke in a fatherly tone to an eleven-year-old boy named Yusuf seated in front of him.

  “You must stay away from the gangs,” Adeogo warned.

  “They saying, ’cause of my brother, I gots to join ’em,” Yusuf replied.

  “I knew your brother. He wouldn’t want this. I remember the night he was murdered. Joining Outlawz will only get you killed too.”

  “No, Outlawz gonna protect me. Them blacks in school don’t like us. Whites neither.”

  “Not everyone is prejudiced, Yusuf. You need to make friends with boys and girls who aren’t. Stay in school. Go to the mosque and pray. Don’t join a gang.”

  Adeogo paused. He wasn’t certain he was convincing. “Yusuf, I know from inside my own family how it feels to lose a brother to a gang.”

  “You gots a brother who’s a banger?”

  “I had a brother who got caught up in a gang.”

  “What he be? Outlawz?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Yusuf. It was a terrible thing.”

  “He dead?”

  “Let’s not talk about my family, let’s talk about you.”

  Yusuf rose from the cheap molded plastic chair and retrieved his backpack from the tile floor. “I’ll be trying,” he said.

  Adeogo watched him leave the bare-bones conference room. Yusuf was one of a half-dozen Somali teens whom Adeogo met with weekly in a group called Ka Joog, which means “stay away” in Somali.

  Life in the city’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood hadn’t gotten any easier for Somali Americans from when Adeogo had been born there thirty-nine years earlier. His parents had been part of the first wave of Somalis who had fled their native land in the 1970s to avoid a war. Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, the country’s self-proclaimed president for life, had attacked Ethiopia over a border area called the Ogaden region. At first, Barre’s troops had won several decisive battles, but the Soviet Union, which had been supporting him, inexplicably switched sides, sending fifteen thousand Cuban soldiers to fight with the Ethiopians. Barre’s troops had been driven back and Adeogo’s father had fled with hundreds of other Somalis rather than die in Barre’s ego-driven, losing campaign to defeat both the Ethiopians and the Cubans.

  His parents had settled in Minnesota because Hubert Humphrey, one of the state’s favorite sons, had visited the African Horn as vice president, becoming the first and only sitting White House official at the time to show any interest in it. Somalis lionized him. With help from Minnesota’s strong contingent of Lutheran churches, Minneapolis had become a beacon of hope for Somali refugees.

  In the early 1990s, however, the city’s welcoming attitude began to change because of a tsunami of refugees. They fled Somalia in waves after rebel troops forced President Barre into exile, igniting two decades of civil war as power-hungry warlords wrestled for control of their bleeding country. One in every three Somalis who’d sought political asylum in the United States headed to Minnesota. The majority settled in Cedar-Riverside, a poorer section of Minneapolis that had been a haven for immigrant waves beginning with Scandinavians in the mid-1800s. But while earlier immigrant groups had been assimilated and moved to other parts of the city, Somalis had remained entrenched, turning Cedar-Riverside into an isolated neighborhood of Somali American immigrants in a triangle between highways 35 and 94 on the west side of the Mississippi River. The census put the Somali American population at 100,000, but everyone agreed it was a low estimate.

  Adeogo had watched his community decline economically and spiritually over the years. Expectations of living the American dream had been crippled by high unemployment, poverty, and prejudice. Somali clans, the backbone of the Somali family system back home, had mutated into vicious street gangs.

  Determined to help his
community, Adeogo had first run for public office at the age of eighteen. It had been the first in a series of losses. He’d campaigned for the school board, the city council, even the library commission. When he wasn’t seeking some public office, he was working for the Greater Somali Association, a nonprofit community group. Over the years, politicians had sought his help and he’d faithfully knocked on doors in get-out-the-vote drives. But he’d grown weary of getting others elected, mostly African Americans who claimed all of the seats controlled by minorities. In 2012, Adeogo helped get the city’s election lines redrawn, creating a new ward composed almost exclusively of Somali Americans. Not only had this guaranteed a city council spot for a Somali American, it also had gerrymandered the community inside a single congressional district. The redrawing of lines had set the stage for a Somali American candidate but none had stepped forward until now. Adeogo was seeking election to Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District seat.

  As soon as Yusuf exited, Bess Dixon hurried into the conference room where Adeogo was packing up his briefcase. She was one of the volunteer political advisors helping his cash-poor but enthusiastic campaign and one of the few who knew that Adeogo secretly understood that he didn’t have a chance of actually getting elected.

  Despite the gerrymandering, polls showed Adeogo would finish behind the popular incumbent, Representative Clyde Buckner, a ten-term congressman and staunch member of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, known as the DFL. (Hubert Humphrey had helped form the DFL in the 1940s by convincing the state’s Democratic Party to merge with the populist Farmer-Labor Party, giving the DFL an edge over their Republican rivals.) If anyone was going to unseat Buckner, it would be his Republican challenger, Buddy Pollard, a former state legislator. Adeogo’s campaign as an independent would capture 5 percent of the popular vote at best, placing him last in a three-candidate race.

  None of that mattered to Adeogo, because he hadn’t entered to win. Both of the other candidates supported passage of a federal immigration bill that was unpopular in Cedar-Riverside. Adeogo was hoping to lock in enough support from the Somali American community to broker a deal. He would throw his voting bloc behind whichever candidate would flip-flop on the immigration bill. So far, neither had taken him or his campaign seriously.

  “You’ve got to read this!” Dixon exclaimed, holding up the front page of the Minneapolis Gazette like a shield in front of her.

  CONGRESSMAN PUTS MOM-IN-LAW ON FEDERAL PAYROLL, the banner headline read.

  “Congressman Buckner has been caught paying his elderly mother-in-law a five-figure salary with public funds,” Dixon explained. “He’s got her on his congressional payroll, and she doesn’t even live in Washington. And that’s just the tip of it. His mother-in-law has dementia and is in a locked unit in a Florida retirement home. He’s using her as a ghost employee!”

  “How did the newspaper find out?” Adeogo asked, as Dixon lowered the paper to her waist.

  “Someone tipped off the Gazette, and its reporters dug into his financial records.”

  “He’ll need my support now,” Adeogo said excitedly. “He’ll have to cut a deal on immigration.”

  “Forget making a deal,” Dixon replied. “The newspaper is running a series on all three of you candidates, and a friend of mine has told me the Gazette has dug up dirt on your Republican rival too. Scandalous stuff as bad as the congressman’s. Has the paper interviewed you yet?”

  “I’m scheduled to talk to a Gazette reporter tomorrow morning.”

  “These stories could be game changers,” Dixon gushed. “If voters turn against your opponents, you might actually have a shot at winning.”

  She paused and then added, “Assuming you don’t have anything hiding in your past—no skeletons in your closet.”

  When Adeogo didn’t immediately reply, Dixon looked concerned. “Rudy, you don’t have any skeletons in your closet—do you? Nothing that is going to embarrass us, right?”

  Adeogo smiled. “Of course not. I have nothing to hide.”

  Rudy Adeogo was not a good liar, but he was good enough to fool Dixon. Without missing a beat, she began blabbering about his upcoming interview with the Gazette reporter. But his mind was elsewhere.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An Internet café

  Mogadishu, Somalia

  The sword-wielding American, who had freed his fellow jihadists during the prison break at Dera Ismail Khan and in the process decapitated a Shia prisoner and fired a fatal bullet into the skull of Canadian do-gooder Christopher King, slipped unnoticed into an Internet café in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia.

  In an impoverished country where the average yearly income was less than $500 U.S., Somalis had access to some of the most technologically advanced telecommunications and Internet services in eastern Africa. This was because of telecommunications companies based in the northern tip of Somalia in a region known as Somaliland. The residents there had declared themselves an independent country in 1991, but Somaliland still was not recognized as a sovereign nation by many foreign governments.

  According to his Facebook profile, the man was a twenty-year-old Egyptian male studying to become a medical doctor, but none of that was true. Only one descriptive fact in the American’s social media profile was accurate. It described his religion as Islam.

  Abdul Hafeez couldn’t lie about his faith, even if it might help conceal his actual identity from U.S. intelligence agencies. It would have been an insult to Allah.

  Typing quickly on a worn Samsung keyboard, Hafeez sent a message to Nancy Rutherford, whose Facebook profile identified her as a Somali American, age forty, employed as an assistant professor at St. Cloud State University, located about an hour outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Rutherford was her married name and her profile was factual.

  “Please tell mother happy birthday for me,” Hafeez wrote.

  Within seconds, a return message arrived.

  “If you cared about our mother, you would stop what you are doing and come home.”

  Controlling his temper, Hafeez typed: “Do not ask me to turn away from Allah. Mother understands.”

  The all-caps response was instantaneous. “NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THE CRIMES YOU COMMIT. YOU BRING SHAME ON OUR PARENTS, OUR BROTHERS AND ME.”

  “My only brothers are my fellow jihadists. The others are dead to me. You are also a kafir, an unbeliever.”

  “Little brother, it is you who is perverting our faith. You have taken something beautiful and made it ugly. Your fanatical brothers and sisters kill innocent children with their suicide bombs.”

  Hafeez could no longer control his anger. “You dare lecture me about Islam? Suicide bomber is a derogatory term created by jews in the western media. It is true that our teachings forbid suicide but martyrdom is rewarded. To quote the Holy Qur’an 4:74 ‘Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.’”

  “Little brother. I may not quote scripture, but I know in my heart that Islam is not a violent religion.”

  His response came lightning quick. “You know nothing. Your heart knows nothing. Listen to the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini: ‘The purest joy in Islam is to kill and be killed for Allah.’ Hear the words of the prophet Muhammad from the Hadith, al-Bukhari (52:54), ‘I would love to be martyred in Allah’s Cause and then get resurrected and then get martyred, and then get resurrected again and then get martyred and then get resurrected again and then get martyred.’ To be a jihadist is to love death, to welcome it.”

  “Do not write me again. Reading your blasphemy is too painful. I will not tell mother about our conversation. Unless you end your fight and return to your senses, it is better for her and our family that you be dead.”

  Hafeez logged off. Staying connected to the Internet for longer than a few minutes was risky, given the U.S. government’s ability to intercept messages. Besides, there was no point in arguing with his sister. She was a woman, and religious matters were beyond her comprehension. He blamed his father for not beating her into submission. Instead, his parents had given her an American first name at birth and encouraged her to assimilate. No one was surprised when she’d married a white American. She was the opposite of him. Hafeez had rejected U.S. culture and changed his name for one more pleasing to him. Abdul. In Arabic, it meant “Servant of God.”