26

Smooth. That’s the way people described Dylan Pierce. Smooth. Brilliant. Sophisticated. Philip Kilpatrick would add one more descriptor: expensive.

At forty-five, Pierce was one of the top litigators in the country’s largest law firm. He billed at $1,500 an hour. He once told Kilpatrick that he wanted to raise his rate to $2,000—“five hundred for each of my ex-wives and five hundred to live on.”

Pierce was everything Kilpatrick was not. He had a full head of jet-black hair, movie-star good looks, and Ivy League credentials: Harvard undergrad, Yale law, Supreme Court clerkship, and now a corner office in Washington, D.C. He also had a photographic memory. Pierce had argued five times at the Supreme Court and had never taken a single note to the podium. He had only lost once, and he still wouldn’t concede that the justices got that one right.

He showed up in the West Wing in a formfitting Brooks Brothers suit and made himself at home sitting at the polished conference table in the Roosevelt Room. One of the clerks brought him a bottle of water without even asking. Pierce and Kilpatrick traded barbs for a few minutes before they were joined by Vice President Frazier, CIA Director Marcano, and Attorney General Seth Wachsmann.

In any other administration, this would have been the AG’s show. But Seth Wachsmann disliked these meetings and had delegated most of the heavy lifting to Pierce. Seth was introverted, melancholy, and a stickler for details. His grandfather had been a Holocaust survivor, and that heritage had colored nearly every aspect of Seth’s worldview. He was sixty-one with a receding hairline, a long sloping forehead, an oversize nose, and a closely cropped gray beard.

The whole concept of a “kill list” had always bothered Seth, and in the first months of the administration he had worked hard to narrow the parameters. Amanda Hamilton had inherited a kill list of thousands from the Obama administration and some fairly loose criteria for inclusion.

What really grated on Seth were the so-called “signature strikes” based solely on the intelligence signatures of the targets. In much the same way that cops could recognize drug-running houses by the traffic patterns of people visiting, the CIA could establish that the occupants of a certain building were assisting terrorist organizations by looking at patterns of behavior established through aerial surveillance, cell phone signal intercepts, and other nonspecific sources. Drone strikes could be authorized based on such profiles even if the occupants’ identities weren’t known—wiping out not just the persons assisting the terrorists but everyone in the house.

Seth had argued that the new administration should go back to a rule that allowed drone strikes only against known terrorist leaders. He had eventually convinced the president but used a lot of political capital in the process.

That’s when the senior leadership team had brought in Dylan Pierce. He’d put together a ninety-page document called the “Authorization Memo” that justified the continued use of drones under both domestic and international law. He now attended these meetings as a counterbalance to Wachsmann—one lawyer justifying the nonjudicial killings intellectually, the other serving as the country’s conscience so that things didn’t get out of hand.

The president arrived last, briskly shook hands, and took her place at the head of the table. Pierce and Wachsmann sat down opposite each other, and Philip Kilpatrick settled in for the show. The issue today was whether they should add a Muslim cleric from Iran named Yazeed Abdul Hamid to the list.

According to sources that John Marcano called “eminently reliable,” Abdul Hamid was scheduled to deliver a sermon at a mosque in Aden. It would be a rare trip inside Yemen, and the CIA had the capability to take him out using drones or Special Forces on loan from JSOC. It could be done at night and be made to look like a highway bomb or an attack by coalition forces from northern Yemen. All they needed was the green light.

The problem was that Abdul Hamid could not be connected to al Qaeda or ISIS in any operational sense. His hate-filled sermons had inspired many suicide bombers and terrorist attacks. But was that enough?

Dylan Pierce had already circulated a lengthy memo to everyone in the meeting arguing that Abdul Hamid fit the established criteria. He went through the high points now, using the factors that had been established under the Obama administration. The capture of Abdul Hamid for detainment and trial was not feasible or politically wise. The operation to take him out would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law-of-war principles. He posed an imminent threat of violent attacks against the United States. This last point, Kilpatrick knew, was quite a stretch.

“We killed Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen with a drone strike for motivating and recruiting terrorists, and he was a U.S. citizen,” Pierce argued. “Is a man like Abdul Hamid, who inspires thousands of terrorists, less dangerous than a soldier who sets off a single bomb? We have verifiable intelligence that he met with ISIS leaders shortly before three terrorist attacks. Just because he’s a cleric doesn’t disqualify him from the list. Otherwise bin Laden would still be alive.”

“You can’t compare Hamid to bin Laden,” Seth Wachsmann contended. “Bin Laden planned the attacks, recruited soldiers, and ran a terrorist organization. He was the leader of a terrorist group and just happened to be a cleric. Hamid is an imam whose sermons we don’t like. But every time a drone takes out a leader like Hamid, ten thousand others take his place. This is dangerously close to assassinating someone for free speech.”

That comment got an immediate rise from several others, and the argument escalated. Free speech didn’t include inciting terrorist activity. Besides, Abdul Hamid was doing more than preaching sermons and spewing hate. He was meeting with terrorist leaders shortly before known terrorist actions. How much more evidence did they need?

Philip Kilpatrick watched the president’s face as the debate intensified. This was exactly what Hamilton wanted—the best thinking of smart people with the freedom to speak their minds. And as a former prosecutor, she was perfectly equipped to make the final call.

But she also had a schedule to keep, and it was Kilpatrick’s job to make sure she did.

“Madam President,” he interrupted. “The senators have been waiting for ten minutes.”

She frowned, resentful that she had to bring the meeting to an end. “It’s a close call,” she said. “Whenever I’m tempted to say no, I think about the innocent lives that will be lost because a man like Abdul Hamid recruits and inspires terrorists. But when I think about saying yes, I go back to this nation’s core principles. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen whom we killed in Yemen. But he had been tried in absentia by the Yemeni courts and found guilty of being a member of al Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured dead or alive. We don’t have that same kind of judicial basis for taking out Hamid.”

She surveyed the men at the table, cognizant that Dylan Pierce and John Marcano would be the most disappointed. “As you know,” she said, “on close calls we err on the side of restraint.”

“I understand,” Director Marcano said quickly. “But I would assume there is no objection to our sharing intelligence with the coalition army in Yemen.”

Kilpatrick watched as the president thought about this for a moment. Could they do indirectly what she had chosen not to do directly?

“They are our allies,” the president finally said. “Let’s treat them like it.”

Later that day, there was a meeting between Philip Kilpatrick and John Marcano on a park bench overlooking the Potomac River. It was a beautiful spring day, but Marcano was not in a chatty mood. From start to finish, the entire meeting lasted fifteen minutes.

Less than forty-eight hours later, on the other side of the planet, Yazeed Abdul Hamid delivered a stem-winder of a sermon at a mosque in Aden, calling on Shia Muslims to join the jihad against the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. The sermon was immediately posted on the Internet and distributed throughout the Arab world. The tall cleric cut an imposing figure with his long black beard and blazing eyes, speaking with a cadence and conviction that his followers found mesmerizing.

That night, as Hamid’s caravan traveled along the bumpy roads of a mountain range near the Yemeni coast, it was ambushed by a group of eighty soldiers who gunned down everyone in the entourage. One of the men, who had been shot and feigned death, survived. He would later describe the attackers—men wielding AK-47s, their faces hidden by black scarves. They had on the telltale garb of the coalition Yemeni forces—khaki pants, broad belts, and aviator jackets.

But it was dark, and the survivor didn’t notice the feet of his attackers. If he had, he would have seen the black low-top Salomons worn by nearly every one of the men who had killed Abdul Hamid.