Chapter 3
Pov Linda
We landed in France an hour ago. The girl, Seven seemed to really enjoy flying. I cannot help but to smile as I think about the young assassin and how she acted during takeoff and landing. She was like a child in Christmas.
When we arrived in the headquarters in Paris, she was taken to holding and I went to report to my superiors, where I am now, listening to the ramblings of an old major general.
“So your point is, you lost the asset and the assassin doesn’t have any information?” He asks, angrily.
“Yes sir, we need to question the girl more to find out what she knows, but I think it’s safe to say that she doesn’t have any intelligence of importance about the Abu-Shabaab.”
“And major, that begs the question how did she manage to single handedly kill a man, protected by a team of soldiers and analysts under your command, inside our safehouse?”
Oh great, the pencil pusher of a major general is trying to pin this on me. Well, the fact is that the asset was under my protection but there was not really much I could have done as Ala Dawuds men personally should have wetted the girls. I wanted to prohibit their entry for more reasons than one, but he wouldn’t have it.
“Sir, I tried to deny entry of the *ahem* entertainment for Ala Dawud, but he insisted. His men was the ones that did the background checks on the girls” I say that, but both of us know full well that there were no background checks. The poor girls were probably just kidnapped from their families, or sold by their families to Ala Dawud.
“That’s enough, go and interrogate the girl. See what she knows. I will report this incident to general Raven” The major general says to me. I’m glad that I don’t have to report to him myself and that they don’t just sign some random interrogator for the girl.
I walk out of the administrative building and head towards the building that houses the interrogation areas and holding cells. It is late afternoon now, the sun shines above and the Eiffel tower can be seen in the horizon. To my left is the soldier barracks and behind them are the training grounds. My destination is to my right where a L-shaped building stands. In front of me, couple hundred meters away is the main gate for the headquarters.
The J.A.T.F. bases are considered autonomous areas with diplomatic protection, but that doesn’t stop the terrorists. They have started to get more active in the recent years. A lot more active. They are planning something big, and that is the reason why the J.A.T.F. was founded.
As I walk between the patches of well-kept grass and flowerbeds I arrive to the building where they hold Seven. I walk inside, and inform the uniformed receptionist to move the subject to an interrogation room and I start heading there.
I watch through a one-way mirror at the 5x5 meter big room with gray concrete walls, a single lamp, and a steel table in the middle of it. I see the girl I’m here for. It seems they allowed her to wash herself. She is no longer sullied by blood and the white silken dress is exchanged with orange prisoner jumpsuit. There are no shackles on her feet anymore and there is normal handcuffs on her hands, which are chained to the table.
There is no panic in her face, she just curiously looks around the room and inspects her new garments. When Brian walks in to the observation room I’m in she rapidly turns her head and looks at the mirror, like she could see him. But she can’t, right? That’s impossible, there is no way she can see through the mirror and the room is soundproof.
“Are you ready to start? I’ll be observing the interrogation.” The thirty year old man says to me. It is regulations that there is always someone observing the room when a prisoner is interrogated.
“Yes I am, Brian” I say while I leave the observation room and head to the next door down the hallway.
Before I leave Brian hands me an earpiece. I doubt we’ll need it but it can get handy. He can inform me if I missed something or if he has a good question for the girl.
I open the door and Seven turns her head to me. I take my seat at opposite side of her.
“My name is major Linda Shelia and I’ll be interrogating you. The reason you are here is because you eliminated a person of interest, for the sake of said person not leaking sensitive intel to us. We hold you as long as we deem you not to be a threat to the nations over the world and till we find out can you be rehabilitated.” I say the things our regulations require me to say, before I can get to the actual interrogation.
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There are two kinds of interrogations we hold. One is the normal kind and the other one is called forced interrogation which basically means torture. Luckily, this is the first kind. This is not a time sensitive matter, and we have no reason to believe she holds any time sensitive vital information.
“Okay” She simply says. Her hands are shaking a little bit so she is either nervous or scared. The only reason she would be nervous should be that she knows something.
“State your name and age for the record.” I say as I point at the recording device on the table.
“Seven, fifteen years old, I think.”
“Is that the only name you have? And you think, you do not know?”
“Yes, and yes. I do not know for sure. I remember twelve winters, so that is my estimation.”
“Do you know who gave you that name?”
“No, I’ve been always called that”
“Who called you that?”
“My trainers, handlers and the people who gave me my instructions.”
“Yes, we have determined that the people who trained you, rented you out to other terrorist organizations. Like I said, when their locations was leaked we launched a coordinated airstrike.” I open my folder and put some pictures in front of her. They are the bombed locations, there are four of them. One is a desert location, a cave system in iran. Second is a small building complex in Syria, third is a building in Turkmenistan and the fourth is an old testing site of the Russian military’s long range missiles. It is an abandoned town inside a forest, taken over by nature over time, full of ruins. All of the locations are bombed and the ruined city is even more ruined.
She skims through the first three pictures and stops at the fourth. Her expression is hard to read, she seems to be relieved and sad. A single tear runs down from her eye, like when I first told her about the strikes.
She pushes the picture in question to the middle of the table, and looks at me. Brian said not to pity her but it is hard, she looks like she lost the only thing she knew in life.
“That was where I was trained”
“For how long?”
“As long as I can remember.”
So she has no idea who her family is and she has always been in the hands of Al-Alam.
After that I showed her pictures of the recognizable bodies. Some she didn’t know, some she identified as her handlers or trainers. According to what she says we got them all, at least the ones she was familiar with.
“Where else you were trained?” I continue.
“Only there. I left the forest only five times in the past to do a mission.”
So that means she hasn’t done any missions we aren’t aware of.
“What was your mission this time?”
“To infiltrate a J.A.T.F. safehouse by masquerading as one of the girls the targets men were delivering to him and to terminate the target.”
“How did you infiltrate the girls?”
“I was given the location where they were kept before their delivery. I sneaked in and killed one of them and took her dress. I surveyed the place long enough to figure out that the girls didn’t know each other. I hid the body and waited for the delivery.”
She killed the original girl? Just like that? The way she explained herself was like she has done nothing wrong. The group that trained her really did a number on her.
“What were you trained at?”
“To hunt, to infiltrate, to track, to fight, to survive, to kill”
A prompt response. They taught her to battle and survive. From the way she spoke to me before, I guess the only thing in her mind in the safehouse was her mission. They didn’t give her a name, but a number. They rented her out to others but didn’t use her them self. Basically they raised and treated her as a weapon. Al-Alam had to be more than just a regular terrorist group. We suspected this before too. What kind of terrorist organization can infiltrate an abandoned Russian military testing site within their borders, and to use it as a training site. And now we learn that they even managed to launch missions from said location.
I really wish to continue investigating Al-Alam, but all our intel indicates that we destroyed them completely.
I decide to go out on a limb, and give her pictures of other person of interest. Mostly terrorist leaders, but some country leaders and officials. I do this to test her knowledge about the persons of interest in the conflict zones and over the world.
“Do you recognize any of them and what do you know about them?” I ask, as she starts looking through the pictures.
“This is Ali Ibrahim, primary location is Damascus, Syria. Secondary location is Byblos, Lebanon. Leader of the Abu-Alim group, Likes women, cocaine, and fast cars. Hates America and the United Nations. Bad heart, uses pacemaker. This one is…”
She continues naming some of the pictures, others she pushes aside indicating she doesn’t know them. The way she describes them is a little morbid in my opinion. She names them, tells their position, possible locations and possible weaknesses to exploit. Some of the information is news to us too.
“… This is general Raven, one of the leading figures of J.A.T.F. and their public spokesperson. Primary location is Rue Legendre 17, Paris. Secondary location is J.A.T.F. headquarters administrative building. His office is in the south-east corner, there is a line of fire from the buildings to east, but one would need a .50 Cal armor-piercing bullet to get through the multilayer bulletproof glass. He has a wife Valentine and a 19 year old girl named Annie. And he is type one diabetic with an automated insulin pump."
That leaves me speechless. How could anyone get their hands in that much information or how the girl even remembers it all? And the information about general Raven isn’t accessible even to the other leaders of J.A.T.F.
The door swings open.
“How do you know all that?!” Brian comes in and yells.
The girl startles for a split second, after which she regains her composure.
“Hello Brian” She says, smiling. Why is she smiling?
“My trainers gave me the intel to study and memorize in case they ever became targets. They didn’t tell me more.” She says, no longer smiling.
“We need to talk.” Brian addresses me, and I nod.
“We’ll be taking a break now. Someone will bring you food and drink.” I say, while rising from my seat and walking towards the door.