When a dead Marine's fingerprint turns up on the van that bombed a U.S. embassy, CIA operative Shane Alexander leads a covert team into Algeria to bring him home, and to learn whether he is a victim, a traitor, or something in between.
Homeland meets Zero Dark Thirty
In the company of Traitor, The Kingdom, Sicario and The Covenant
- Genre
- Espionage thriller
- Period
- 2000, with flashbacks to the 1990 Gulf War
- Locations
- Astana · Langley · Biskra and the Algerian coast · the Kuwait–Iraq border
- Format
- Feature screenplay, teaser and three acts, 102 pages
At 10:17 a.m. on a winter morning, a white delivery van detonates at the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Astana. Four Marines and five civilians are killed. In a CIA forensic lab, a burned-in ridge pattern on a twisted piece of chassis comes back as a match for Corporal Jason L. Conrad, a Marine explosives technician who vanished from an observation post on the Kuwait–Iraq border in 1990 and was declared killed in action two years later.
Langley splits the hunt in two. Army CID reopens the cold case in the Kuwaiti desert, where an old radio tape and a goat farmer's memory tell a different story than the file. Shane Alexander and his team fly into Algeria with a Mossad asset to watch a walled compound on the Mediterranean, where a guarded Westerner walks the yard and advises the men who built the bomb.
To get him out, they have one window: a lonely plateau farm where the convoy stops to swap vehicles, and seven minutes before the operation turns into a funeral. Getting him out is the easy part. Then they have to hear what he did, and why.
Full synopsis (spoilers)
Conrad was never killed. On November 18, 1990, a Gulf-region contact calling himself "Falcon" tried to use Conrad's radio as a back channel. Conrad refused. Days later, an ambush on a desert road took him off a Humvee at gunpoint. He was shipped by fishing boat to North Africa and handed to a European middleman known as the Broker, who once built intelligence pipelines for the West and now rents them to anyone.
Held by the militant group Almukhtar Min Allah and its commander Amar Saidi, Conrad was shown tapes of his wife's laugh and his children's voices and told where they went to school. He taught bomb-making to keep his family alive, and he quietly sabotaged the work until a fizzled test killed three fighters and the threats sharpened. For two years he argued against hitting an embassy. When Saidi went ahead anyway, Conrad checked the device so it would not go off in the street outside a school. Saidi made him do it bare-handed, so that one day someone would find his print.
Shane's team takes Conrad at the plateau farm in under four minutes and flies him out on a chartered turboprop. At Langley, his confession gives the government exactly the ambiguity it feared. DOJ settles on a sealed indictment and a cooperation agreement: acknowledge the coercion, hold him accountable anyway, and use what he knows against the network. Sarah Conrad, remarried with a folded flag on her mantle, comes to see the husband she buried. Shane goes home to Shannon and makes her a promise he can keep.
Years later the Astana embassy stands rebuilt, with a plaque for the Astana Four. In a room somewhere, the man called the Jackal hears that Conrad and Saidi are in American hands. "Then we adapt," he says. "There are always other ghosts."