The Black List Read Online Free PDF Page B

heading for Mexico.”
    Yusuf, a Somalian terrorist, had recently escaped from a prison in Mogadishu, and according to intel reports was considered a threat to the United States. “Where?”
    “We’re not sure. I was hoping that maybe Griffin’s trip to Mexico was successful. Better to stop him before he crosses the border.”
    “The lead didn’t pan out. But we’ve sent another team down. Too big an area, unfortunately . . . Thorndike knows?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Some reason he didn’t bring that up to her royal highness and the rest of her court?”
    “One. CIA is working a delicate undercover op. After the recent debacle in the Mideast involving the loss of most of their assets, they’re not about to lay any cards on the table.”
    And no wonder, McNiel thought. Thorndike, Pearson, and he could shout national security until they were blue in the face, and Burgess and every other politician would still be racing to the first TV camera they saw. “What’s the other reason?”
    “We heard the way Yusuf’s arranging to get into the country is the golden passport.”
    “The refugee resettlement program?” There were mile-wide holes in the program that put out a welcome mat for any terrorist with half a brain to circumvent the system. And that, of course, meant the last thing they wanted to do was alert the one senator whose darling it was. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust Burgess, more that they had serious doubts she’d be cooperative when it came to the cold hard facts that put her and that program in a bad light. “I take it that has something to do with Thorndike’s op?”
    “Not quite sure,” Pearson said. When they reached the street, he hailed a taxi, then said, “All I can say is, if the intel is true, we need to get on it fast.”
    He was right, McNiel thought. If any man had an agenda, it was Yusuf. And they definitely didn’t want him in this country.

 
    6
    The creaking hulk of a truck rumbled across the rutted Mexican road, kicking up gravel and dust, the early morning air slightly chilly. Yusuf heard one of the drivers say that they were a few nights from the American border. He was glad to hear it, as it had been a long and arduous trip from that hellhole of a refugee camp in Dadaab. Unlike the others on this truck with him, migrants who hoped to cross illegally under cover of night or be smuggled over the border hidden in cargo, Yusuf actually possessed an American passport, showing he was a twenty-three-year-old from Burundi, not Somalia. He’d need to find a place to wash the streaks of sweat and dust from his skin and don a set of clean clothes, then walk across once he got there.
    If stopped, he’d show his passport, and if questioned, answer in perfect English. He hadn’t yet shared that he even knew the language. There had been no need, and wouldn’t be until he reached the border. He did not, however, know any Spanish, and had managed this far not understanding a word of the language by pretending to be deaf. If someone spoke, he pointed to his ears. They nodded in understanding, then pantomimed in exaggerated movements and spoke louder, gladly helping him past any obstacles, getting him food, water, whatever it was he needed.
    Playing deaf was how he’d learned to get by in the orphanage, a place where he’d spent most of his childhood, a place where the sound of American bombing was a constant reminder of the explosions that had killed his family. Although he’d been surrounded by other orphaned children, he always felt alone. They were not his sister and brothers, who had died beneath the rubble of what was once his house. These children had each other.
    He had no one.
    Until the insurgents arrived. That night, they dragged all the boys, screaming, crying, from their beds, herded them into a truck, and took them to a camp where they taught them to fight, hold a gun, rig a bomb. They gave them purpose, a reason for living, at least in Yusuf’s mind. And one of the men