The Last Jihad

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  “Don’t know, sir. Malfunction. Hold on.”

  “Oh my God. I don’t have time to—Gabriel, talk to me.”

  “Got it, sir. Don’t worry. Hold your breath, hold your breath. Three, two, one…”

  The Stinger missile exploded from its fiberglass tube and streaked into the night sky. The Suburban filled with a flash of blinding fire and hot, toxic, deadly fumes. For a moment, the driver began to lose control of the vehicle. Moore could see the vehicle rock and swerve. But within seconds the smoke and fumes were sucked out of the vehicle and into the atmosphere. The driver could see again. Gabriel could breathe again if he wanted to—but he didn’t. Not until he was sure.

  McKittrick knew combat firsthand.

  He’d been in the Gulf War. He’d seen gunfire and death. But he’d never seen anything like this. Nor would he again. As he watched through his high-powered binoculars from the control tower, he saw the Stinger missile tear the G4 in half. The plane then erupted in a massive fireball. McKittrick fell to the ground screaming in pain. The explosion was magnified so intensely by his night-vision binoculars that it had burned holes in his retinas, leaving him permanently blinded.

  Moore was horrified.

  Despite all of his training, he was suddenly completely unprepared for what was happening. This was no ordinary charter plane falling from the sky. It was a death machine, packed with explosives for maximum impact. The roar of the explosion was deafening, heard as far away as Castle Rock. The sky was now on fire. Night turned to day. The flash of heat was unbearable. Molten metal rained down on the motorcade.

  Cupid’s Chevy Suburban swerved hard and barely escaped being landed upon by the disintegrating G4. Gabriel was not so lucky. Moore saw one of the G4’s engines slam into the young agent’s vehicle and explode into yet another blinding fireball. But what Moore saw next terrified him more than anything else. The fuselage of the G4 was now hurtling at him like a flaming meteor, propelled forward by the force of the blast.

  “Tommy,” Moore screamed.

  Agent Rodriguez began swerving right, heading for an off ramp and praying desperately the car wouldn’t overturn. But it was too late. The G4’s burning fuselage came crashing into the pavement just behind them and slammed into the back of the limousine, sending Stagecoach careening into the concrete dividers in the center of the superhighway in a series of 360-degree spins. The car rolled over and over again in a fury of sparks and flames and smoke, eventually grinding to a halt upside down below the overpass for which Rodriguez had been racing. Inside Stagecoach—from the moment of impact—airbags exploded from the steering wheel and dashboard, from each car door and even from the roof, a feature designed exclusively for Secret Service vehicles, particularly since no one inside ever wore seatbelts.

  I-70 was now ablaze.

  The wreckage of the G4 and whatever was inside it was now strewn everywhere, on fire and scorching hot. The surviving Suburbans screeched to a halt. Secret Service assault teams immediately jumped out, armed with M-16 rifles and fire-suppression equipment. Cupid regained his bearings and quickly began to check his weapon for the malfunction. He’d personally failed his mission. He had no idea what else might transpire. And he wasn’t about to take any chances.

  Dodgeball and its security package now reversed course and raced to rejoin Stagecoach. Weaving carefully through the wreckage, the backup vehicles arrived to find assault teams taking up positions in a perimeter around Gambit’s car. Two more assault teams quickly joined their colleagues while three agents hauled a large metal box from the back of one of the Suburbans and hurried it to Stagecoach’s side. They rapidly removed a specially designed “jaws of life” kit and began trying desperately to get Gambit out of the wreckage.

  Colorado State Patrol cars and local fire trucks, along with the motorcycle units, raced to the scene. Overhead, the two police helicopters hovered nosily, each shining powerful search lamps onto the ground below to help the rescuers do their jobs.

  “John. John. This is Bud. What’s your status?”

  Bud Norris heard the explosion and the screaming through John Moore’s digital cell phone on the back seat of Gambit’s car. But now the line was pure static and he feared the worst. Norris grabbed a secure digital phone from the bank of phones in front of him and speed-dialed the lead Apache pilot.

  “Nighthawk Four, this is Home Plate, do you copy?” Norris barked.

  “Home Plate, this is Nighthawk Four, we have a Code Red in progress. Repeat, we have a Code Red in progress. Please advise. I repeat, please advise.”

  “Nighthawk, you’ve got video capability, right?”

  “Affirmative, Home Plate. We’ve got three systems on board. What do you need?” the lead pilot responded.

  “What’ve you got?” Norris asked, his mind suddenly scrambling to remember the details he needed.

  “Sir, we’ve got the TADS FLIR system, which is thermal imaging. But, sir, you’ve got two police helicopters here lighting the whole scene with spotlights. It’s a freaking TV studio down there, sir. If you’d like, we can use our Day TV system with black-and-white video imaging, or the DVO system with full color and magnification. It’s your call, sir.”

  “Can you get it to me through a secure satellite, son?”

  “We can get it to the Pentagon, sir. I think they can patch you in, sir, but don’t quote me. You gotta check with Ops to be sure.”

  “I’ll do it. Start transmitting, son. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  Norris now picked up another phone and speed-dialed the other Apache.

  “Nighthawk Five, this is Home Plate. You there? Over.”

  “Nighthawk Five, standing by, sir.”

  “Set up a perimeter around the crash site and tell the news helicopters they’re grounded immediately. I’m scrambling an F-15 fighter squadron to join you in the next few minutes and I want a no-fly zone over the state of Colorado. Got that?”

  “Roger that, Home Plate.”

  Next, Norris sent out a Code Red on all Secret Service frequencies and gave the word for the vice president, the Speaker of the House and all Cabinet members—spread out all over the country for the holidays—to be evacuated to secure underground facilities immediately. Moments later Norris was on the phone with the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon watch commander. The Air Force scrambled aircraft to secure the skies over Denver.

  Now a live, color, digital video feed from the hovering Nighthawk Four began streaming into the National Military Command Center, the nuclear-missile-proof war room deep underground, below the Pentagon. It was then cross linked via secure fiber optic lines to the Secret Service command center in the bomb-proof basement of the Treasury Department in Washington, the White House Situation Room, the FBI op center, and the CIA’s Global Operations Center at Langley. Norris could finally see the grisly scene unfolding on one of the five large-screen TVs. His top staff worked the phones around him, gathering intelligence from the ground, alerting other security details and opening a direct line to FBI Director Scott Harris.

  “My God,” Norris said quietly.

  The terrorists had struck again.

  TWO

  Jon Bennett nervously sipped his Turkish coffee.

  He looked out at the rising sun warming the golden stones of Jerusalem’s Old City. But, though he now sat in a restaurant within the King David Hotel—where the British Army once maintained its headquarters, where Winston Churchill once dined, where the Rothschilds once cut investment deals, where Israel’s late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Jordan’s late King Hussein once signed a peace treaty—Bennett had little interest in the hotel’s history.

  He had little interest in its $25 million face-lift, or its exquisitely polished marble floors, or its plush Moroccan upholstery. He had little interest in the huge vases of fresh-cut Israeli roses and huge baskets of crusty French breads on the tables behind him. Or in the cantankerous elderly French couple beside him, as crusty as the breads, hunched over their travel books and
already muttering complaints on the first day of their tour.

  Bennett’s first trip to Israel was no vacation. He’d arrived at four in the afternoon the day before. He was leaving in less than three hours. He needed no travel books. He’d do no sightseeing. He was here for one purpose, and one purpose only—to get a signature, get it quickly, and get out.

  The fiftyish, balding Russian in the ill-fitting suit and thick, wire-rimmed spectacles sat hunched across the table from Bennett, chain-smoking cigarettes as he carefully read the documents before him. Only minor changes had been made from the night before. They were the precise changes on which the Russian had insisted, to which Bennett had agreed, and for which Bennett had gotten up before dawn to enter into his laptop, print out and bring to this morning’s brief and final meeting. But neither this Russian nor any other had exactly been raised in a culture of trust. So the man pored over every jot and tittle, every comma and semicolon, as the minutes ticked by.

  Just sign the thing, be done with it, and be rich, Bennett thought. Yet the more anxious he grew internally, the more it seemed his dear Russian friend would slow down, and reread some paragraph again and again and again.

  At forty, Bennett was one of the youngest and most successful investment strategists on Wall Street.

  Single, six feet tall, and an obsessive runner, Bennett had wavy dark hair, grayish-green eyes and rakish good looks. He was, more important in his mind, smart and sharp and rich—in part, because he was stealthy.

  Unlike his colleagues ten to twenty years his senior—the chief investment strategists for the powerhouse firms like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and UBS Paine Webber—Bennett didn’t appear on CNBC, or kibitz with Maria Bartiromo, or speak at Fortune 500 conferences, or get himself profiled in the Wall Street Journal. Run a LexisNexis search on him and you’d come up empty-handed. To most he was unknown. To the few who knew him outside his own company, he was underestimated. To those who underestimated him, he was considered unimportant. And this gave him precisely the element of surprise he needed to stay one step ahead of the vicious competition.

  Bennett wasn’t a stockbroker, or a bond trader, or a mutual fund manager. In fact, he didn’t trade money at all. His trade was information.

  “Foreknowledge cannot be elicited from ghosts and spirits,” wrote Sun Tzu, the Chinese war strategist. “It cannot be inferred from comparison of previous events, or from the calculations of the heavens, but must be obtained from people who have knowledge of the enemy’s situation.”

  This was Bennett’s life verse. Beyond Wall Street, he seemed to know everyone, though few seemed to know him. He spent nearly every day on the phone with junior staffers and doormen and secretaries and drivers and flight crews and bank tellers and temps from Silicon Valley to the Jordan Valley, from Hong Kong to obscure oil drilling-equipment manufacturers in Waco, Texas.

  He trolled for seemingly meaningless tips. Properly analyzed, he believed such tips could unlock important truths. Such truths could foretell emerging trends. And such trends, he knew from personal experience, could beget unspeakable treasures. Get the facts, get them right and get them first, Bennett told his elite team of researchers over and over again. Yes, make the most of charts and graphs and statistical analysis. But don’t stop there. Build personal relationships with people who don’t even realize they know the world’s most important secrets, and you’ll quietly enter the world of people whose secrets they hold.

  Bennett’s currency, his stock-in-trade, was precious little nuggets of information about the future of companies and countries and the leaders who ran them. He knew how to pan for such nuggets. He knew how to melt them down and extract the precious from the worthless. He knew what to do with the gold he found, and how to sell it for large fees, rather than give it away to lazy reporters, or worse, blab about it to day traders on CNNfn. That was why he was in Jerusalem today, while his colleagues were back in New York. The big-name strategists-turned-stars of Wall Street—and their fast-talking, high-priced PR pitchmen—were fanning out to talk with the worldwide media about what the successful U.S. war against terrorism and rising consumer confidence would mean to the markets. Not Bennett. He knew something his colleagues didn’t, and it was big. Very big.

  Bennett took another sip of his coffee.

  He checked his watch, obsessively tapped his foot and discreetly scanned the room. It was still fairly early, and nearly empty. But not for long. He glanced again at his Russian friend. Three more pages to go.

  For crying out loud, just sign the bloody thing, Bennett silently screamed. Sign it before someone sees us hiding in plain sight.

  No question, this was the biggest deal Bennett had ever worked on.

  By the end of the year—possibly by the end of the month—he would be named the new president and CEO of his company. Thus, the financial rewards of the Russian across the table putting his Ivan Hancock on the dotted line in the next five minutes were something beyond even Bennett’s most vivid imagination. Within five years, possibly less, he could actually be a member of the “Nine Zeroes Club,” a billionaire on the Forbes 400 list. His cover would be blown. He would no longer be obscure, operating in the shadows. But it wouldn’t matter. The world would know he had discovered buried treasure, and before he was fifty he would know a measure of wealth once inconceivable.

  Finding something of value in a seemingly worthless field was something of a gift for Bennett. Persuading clients to buy an entire “worthless” field in order to quietly, stealthily capture the hidden gems within it was something of an art form, and though his countenance rarely showed it, he loved every minute of the game. It wasn’t the primal thrill of an African safari, of lying in wait and going for the big kill, though some of his colleagues seemed to love that metaphor. It was more like the quiet, private thrill an offensive coach experiences when—after watching hour after hour of an upcoming competitor’s game films—he suddenly, unexpectedly, sees something no else has: a chink in his opponent’s armor, a tiny, nearly imperceptible weakness that—properly analyzed—could be exploited to major advantage. He stops the videotape, rewinds it, and looks at it again and again and again. Then, convinced he’s right, he faces the challenge of convincing his head coach not only that he’s right, but that he’s also got a strategy to seize the moment. Victory is found in the tiny details, Bennett believed, and he had an uncanny track record for being right.

  Sometimes it still amazed Bennett how he’d gotten here.

  He’d graduated from high school at seventeen, and locked down an undergraduate and MBA degree from Harvard in near-record time. He’d worked for a summer as a junior reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York, covering the oh-so-thrilling world of variable annuities and long-term life insurance products. Bored stiff and making peanuts, he knew he needed a change of attitude—and altitude.

  Good-bye Wall Street, hello Denver.

  It took a few months—during which he busied himself with backpacking and mountain biking—but he finally landed a job as a research assistant to James MacPherson, something of a legend in the financial services industry. A decorated Navy fighter pilot in Vietnam, MacPherson came back from the war ready to make serious money—and ski. He’d worked his way up Wall Street’s greasy pole as a bond trader in the mid-1970s, then jumped ship in 1980 to Fidelity to help launch new mutual funds, eventually managing one of the largest himself. A millionaire several times over by 1988, MacPherson then made his own move from Wall Street to Denver, in this case to launch his own aggressive global growth fund—the Joshua Fund—and be closer to his beloved Rocky Mountains, the mountains of his youth.

  Simultaneously, MacPherson founded Global Strategix, Inc., known by insiders as GSX. One part strategic research firm, one part venture capital fund, GSX advised multibillion-dollar mutual-fund and pension-fund managers—including MacPherson’s own Joshua Fund—on the strengths and weaknesses of individual companies, market sectors, the U.S. and foreign economies, currencies, stock exchang
es, regulatory, tax and political developments, and anything else that could affect the value of a client’s assets. Both companies caught the wave and became phenomenally successful, creating MacPherson’s legend of building two multibillion-dollar companies at the same time. But Jon Bennett, his young protégé, knew the truth was a little less dramatic. MacPherson once told him on a late-night flight from Rio that he’d never been entirely sure the Joshua Fund would actually succeed, and created GSX to fall back on if necessary.

  Over the years, GSX developed the reputation among fund managers as the industry’s “AWACS”—its airborne warning and control system, referring to the U.S. military’s premier air battle command-and-control plane that warns friendly forces of incoming trouble long before it arrives. GSX seemed to have an uncanny ability to forecast financial trouble and chart a consistently impressive path to safer, sunnier skies.

  GSX also developed a reputation for finding “sure things,” early investments in fledgling, start-up companies that hit the jackpot and paid off big, both in terms of profits and stock prices. In fact, whenever MacPherson and his team found a “sure thing,” they not only advised their clients to play big, but invested heavily themselves as well. Indeed, it was rumored they weren’t above actually “forgetting” to mention the occasional “sure thing” to even their best clients, and instead investing only their own venture capital funds. Asked by reporters about such rumors, however, MacPherson never tipped his hand. He would simply smile.

  Early on, MacPherson snagged the help of one of the most prescient of global economic wise men, a man widely regarded as something of a master at seeing around corners and over the horizons, be they East or West. He hired a man named Stuart Iverson, the blunt-talking, pipe-smoking, French-cuff wearing, never-married, newly retired U.S. ambassador to Russia, to be president and CEO of Global Strategix and vice chairman of the Joshua Fund.