Ghost Read Online Free Page A

lately. The “Intelligence” folder has plenty on Islamic Jihad, and before lunch I learn that it is really just a name. The real player is Hezbollah, and the power behind that name is Iran.
    The Iranians blew up our embassy in Beirut. Hezbollah—controlled, directed, and supported by Iranian intelligence—provided the foot soldiers for the attack.
    How was this not an act of war?
    I sit back and take a breath, then I press on. The witness statements are the worst. The grim, bloody retelling of broken bodies, the rubble, the misery—even the formal, objective language used in these documents can’t conceal the trauma of this attack. It was the worst one ever against a U.S. embassy. Nothing in our history compares to it. That much is clear to me just from the initial reading.
    I delve further, flipping through well-worn pages, many of which were written by Gleason himself. One thing begins to stand out. The timing of the attack was peculiar. As it happened, the CIA’s entire Middle East contingent was hunkered down in a meeting room toward the front of the embassy. When the bomb exploded, the CIA’s Near East director, Robert Ames, and seven other CIA officers were killed.
    Was the CIA meeting compromised? I open the “Unanswered Questions” file. There’s no evidence to show that Hezbollah knew of the meeting. Then again, with all the foreign nationals working in the embassy, it is quite possible that word of the meeting had been leaked. This question is a loose end, one of many stemming from the attack.
    Coincidence or cunning? In the Dark World, our instructors told us, there are no coincidences. Nor will all the puzzle pieces ever fall into place. The best you can do is assemble what you have and try to divine the rest. This first file reinforces that training lesson.
    Just before lunch, Gleason tells us the combination for the big blue door. “Don’t write it down. Just memorize it,” he says. Then he gives us the combinations to the safes under our desks. I hadn’t noticed mine until he mentioned it. They are for storing top-secret files we’re using. Every time we leave the office, the material on our desk needs to be locked up in these safes or returned to the dead bodies cabinets.
    With those combination numbers rattling around in my head, I decide to take a short break. I head for the restroom out in the hallway on the other side of the big blue door. When I get there, Mullen is just coming out. As he slides through the doorway, he grimaces at me and mentions, “Gleason told me the Weather Underground blew this bathroom up back in ’75. Took out three entire offices.”
    I’m working at ground zero of a terrorist attack. I hurry into the restroom as Mullen starts spinning the combo lock on the big blue door. I make a mental note not to spend too much time in this place—just in case.
    Back in the office a few minutes later, I find Gleason eating and smoking at his desk. He manages to multitask in ways I’ve never seen before. He alternates stuffing a sandwich into his mouth between puffs on his smoke while writing notes on a cable. Periodically, he grabs a phone and barks at somebody in that foreign language of his.
    I sit back down and begin reading again. Gleason asks, “Have you opened those two cases yet?”
    “No, I’m still studying the files you gave me.”
    “Beirut One or Two?”
    “One.”
    Gleason grunts and goes back to work.
    There was a second attack in Beirut. I close the April 18, 1983, case folder and untie the other one Gleason had given me when I first came in. Sure enough, a year after the first bombing, Islamic Jihad scored another big victory against us. Already, Hezbollah and the Iranians had crippled our military effort in Beirut with another suicide bomb attack, this one aimed at the marine barracks near the airport. That was in October 1983. Two hundred and forty-one marines died in that attack. The destruction prompted the Reagan administration to pull our troops