The Triple Agent Read Online Free Page A

in Pakistan, and one of the CIA’s Predators had been hovering nearby as Swedan left the girls’ school for an early appointment. As the CIA watched, Swedan met with a man he appeared to know, and the two traveled back to the girls’ school together. The second man’s face was obscured, but everything about him matched the description of the terrorist commander the CIA had been looking for. The duty officer at the Counterterrorism Center had made a judgment call and phoned Hayden for his consent.
Permission to strike?
    Hayden had a standard set of questions for situations such as this, and he proceeded to go through them.
    How long have you watched this location?
    What is the history of this location, and how many times have you looked at it?
    Have you seen women and children in this compound, ever?
    From its vantage point a half mile above the village, the lead Predator, which had followed the two men, had already locked its video tracking system on the girls’ school while awaiting further instructions. The odd-looking aircraft with its narrow fuselage and bowling alley–length wingspan cut lazy circles in the sky above the town, moving at speeds barely above those of freeway traffic. With a full tank and the usual complement of missiles, it could have continued to hover for fourteen hours without a pause. Instead, with a subtle shift in the engine’s pitch, the aircraft widened its arc to line up its body with the building below. In Langley, the live video feed flickered on a pair of flat-screen TVs in the operations center, while the aircraft’s two-man crew, in a separate building, made small adjustments to the aircraft’s movements with joysticks and the click of a computer mouse.
    Hayden thought for a moment. Swedan was inside the building; that was certain. The man with Swedan was doubtlessly an accomplice and very possibly al-Kini himself. The building was a known training facility for al-Qaeda that probably contained explosives and was far enough from the village to ensure that no one else would be harmed. Three for the price of one, Hayden thought.
    One or two of the Predator’s Hellfire missiles would probably do the job, but Hayden wanted to be doubly sure.
    Use the GBU
, he ordered. At the command, the Predator’s flight crew bypassed the aircraft’s fourteen-pound Hellfire missiles and switched on a far larger weapon hidden inside the bomb cavity, a five-hundred-pound laser-guided GBU-12 Paveway. The weapons officer checked the guidance system, made one last tweak, and pressed a button. He counted backward as the missile hurtled toward the village at a speed slightly faster than sound. Three, two, one, the operator called. And then: “Impact.”
    The building in the black-and-white screen erupted in a massive fireball.
    The drone lingered for hours, to record the recovery of two mangledcorpses. A local Taliban official confirmed the deaths of the two men he called foreign fighters and “close friends.”
    By then, the drone operators had ended their shift and climbed into their cars for the journey home, a commute made refreshingly easy by Washington standards because of the holiday.
    Hayden sat on his bed to watch the last few minutes of the football game and then fell into a deep sleep. The next morning an intercepted phone call in Pakistan confirmed the death of Osama al-Kini, the last high-ranking al-Qaeda leader to be killed by orders of the Bush administration.
    The whereabouts of the other Osama remained unknown.
    Weeks later, Mike Hayden was officially out of a job. Newly elected President Barack Obama had opted for a fresh start by naming an old Washington hand, Leon Panetta, to run the CIA. Panetta had no significant intelligence experience but was a proven manager, having been chief of staff in the Clinton White House. One of his first decisions was to retain Hayden’s popular deputy, Steve Kappes, as the agency’s deputy director and to keep the agency’s entire counterterrorism team