The Wrong Man (Complete 3-Book International Thriller Box Set)

by Fritz Galt

  He would get Harry Black to document the president’s transfer of twenty million dollars into the terrorists’ bank account in Riyadh. Then he would send the evidence directly to Stanley Polk and seal the Chinagate case. He had a plan of action. The president was going down, down, down.

  Chapter 10

  Chuck Romer, the White House Chief of Staff, had to drive through a snowstorm to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. His wheels slid as he wove through slow traffic and stalled vehicles. The slushy snow lying on a foundation of ice had paralyzed the streets of the nation’s capital.

  But he was in a hurry and had to take a few risks to get to the White House in time. Gertrude’s call from the West Wing had turned his blood to ice. He would have to get to that fax from bin Laden before anybody else.

  “Is it a peace deal?” he had asked her hopefully.

  “No,” she had responded. “Let’s just say that he’s demanding money. A great deal of it.”

  Through the blur left on his windshield by overworked wipers, Chuck tried to make out the grooves of tire tracks in the snow. Was the terrorist group changing their tactics, escalating the war, sending over more hijackers? And now they were tying their terrorist actions to specific concessions. That was an eventuality he had hoped would never come about, leaving blood on the hands of the American president if he didn’t comply. He had to destroy that fax before it was made public.

  For security reasons, parking at the White House was no longer allowed. He would have to park in one of the staff parking lots that encircled the Ellipse. He cursed as he stepped from his car directly into a puddle of melted ice.

  He ran under the snow-lined trees, holding his briefcase over his head. How humiliating if the American public saw him like that.

  He could hear the chants of protestors in the distance, holding vigil day and night outside the White House. Their chant was clear, “Two Four Six Eight. We don’t want no Chinagate.”

  What morons.

  He dug his security badge out of his pocket and held it up for the guard at the black, wrought iron fence.

  “You have to wear that thing,” the guard said, shivering.

  “Just let me through,” Chuck snapped. The Secret Service didn’t know the meaning of the word security, if al-Qaeda had resorted to blackmailing the president.

  But what kind of explosion was bin Laden contemplating next? Did he have a bomb under Washington? The threat alone could leave the entire nation unnerved and bring the capital’s business to a sudden halt.

  The locked gate buzzed and he entered the grounds of the White House.

  He was still brushing snowflakes off his trench coat when he reached Gertrude’s workstation just outside the president’s office.

  He motioned at the closed door of the Oval Office. “Is the president…?”

  “No,” she said. “Still asleep as far as I know.”

  That was a relief. He held out his hand for the fax.

  She laid it in his palm and turned away, presumably to indicate her disinterest in the subject matter.

  His identity badge swung over the sheet as he leaned to sit down opposite her.

  Cursing, he whipped the chain over his shoulder and stared at the words.

  The fax asked for twenty million dollars; otherwise Sean Cooper would be handed over to the Chinagate special prosecutor.

  Then, involuntarily, he found himself laughing. The bastard wasn’t threatening mass destruction. And his demands were for a paltry twenty million. What kind of amateurs was he dealing with?

  Then he focused on bin Laden’s threat. “I will turn Sean Cooper over to the special prosecutor.”

  Ha! He’d take Cooper any day. Send him Cooper today, and Chuck would have him eliminated once and for all. The Chinagate charade had gone on long enough.

  Okay bin Laden, baby. Send me Cooper!

  Eventually, his humor wore thin, and more rational thoughts entered his mind. Bin Laden would never surrender Cooper. That was the whole point about terrorism. Terrorists weren’t like normal hostage takers or blackmailers. They didn’t want something specific in return. That was the theory that Neal Jacobs, the Director of Counterterrorism, had explained during a White House briefing the previous summer. It wasn’t that negotiating with terrorists would embolden them to perform acts of greater violence. It was that the terrorists weren’t really negotiating at all.

  But what if Bernard White did pay the ransom and bin Laden threatened to make the ransom payment public? There was no end to the devastation the bastard could wreak on the United States, not to mention all of their political careers. The Chinagate imbroglio was getting too far out of hand. It was a Beltway game that played right into the hands of terrorists.

  It was time to bring in another player to wipe out all the pieces on the game board. Unable to negotiate with the terrorists, he would let the CIA eliminate the Chinagate problem once and for all. He strode briskly into his office and consulted his Rolodex. Did the Director of Counterterrorism take weekends off?

  A seasoned CIA hand, Neal Jacobs was indeed at his office in Langley, and took the call immediately. It appeared that the counterterrorism director charged with defending Americans around the world never slept.

  Chuck cleared his throat. “I can see that your operation to eliminate Sean Cooper has failed.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Recent evidence suggests that Cooper is acting in collusion with known terrorists and is operating out of southern China.” Man, he was good, turning Cooper into a national security threat, giving the CIA legal grounds for eliminating him. “The president wants you to deploy ships to patrol the waters there, and increase agents in the major cities of Southeast Asia.”

  “What specific information are you acting on?” Neal asked, clearly dubious. “If this is a smear campaign against Cooper…”

  Chuck felt his face burning. He ruminated for a moment. There was no way in hell he was going to share the fax with Neal.

  “We have received backchannel word from terrorists that Cooper has joined their forces.” It was a stretch, but not untrue.

  “Why would they send you such information?”

  By that point Chuck’s face was beginning to prickle with heat.

  “Just know that the president wants him captured.”

  “And…?” the director said leadingly.

  And eliminated, Chuck wanted to reply. But he stopped himself short of saying it. Boy, he was wading in treacherous waters, particularly since he was no student of the law. “To testify, of course.”

  He had to make himself better understood. He would obliquely bring in the covert contract job that the Agency was running to put Cooper on ice.

  “I’d like your new assets to work hand in hand with whatever assets you already have on the ground. Their mission is virtually the same.”

  “Okay, now I think I read you. Whether he testifies or not, you still want him off the streets,” Neal said. “But as far as I see it, Cooper didn’t perpetrate the Chinagate crimes as part of some elaborate act of terrorism against the United States. I don’t see how this links to terrorism.”

  Chuck wasn’t out of the woods yet.

  “I can’t speak for the motivations of such a man. All I know is we need to get the Pentagon behind this initiative. The president is calling for an all-out blitz.”

  That seemed good enough for the director. After all, who was he to contradict an executive order? And, he was hearing it from Chuck Romer, the right hand of God.

  Chuck set down the phone with relief. If he was lucky, it would work, and an overt operation to get America’s latest terrorist might bear fruit.

  Now, all he had to do was scrounge up twenty million bucks. That was the easy part. He picked up the phone again and, from memory, punched in the number of William Ford, chairman of the party’s national committee.

  “What the—? Hello?”

  “Good morning, William,” Chuck said.

  “Who the hell is cal
ling this early?”

  “It’s Chuck at the White House.”

  “Oh yeah. Hey, what picture won the Oscar?”

  “I don’t know,” Chuck replied. In fact, he hadn’t even bothered to stay up and watch the grand finale at the awards presentation. “But I need your help.”

  “Yeah? Now that you’ve got my attention…”

  “The president needs twenty million dollars from his re-election fund in order to cover some infrastructure costs.”

  There was a pause. Chuck began cursing himself for not getting a law degree.

  “Okay,” William said slowly. “Want it in hundreds?”

  “No, nothing like that. Here’s an account number to transfer it to.” And he read off the number from the fax. He glanced around his office. Was there some tape recorder running?

  “That’s not enough,” William said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need the number of the bank to route it to.”

  Chuck caught his breath. “I don’t have the routing number.”

  “Just the name of the bank will do.”

  Chuck looked at the sheet of paper in his hands. “Let’s just say it’s the Royal Bank of Riyadh.”

  He could feel the silence on the other end of the line.

  “Okay,” William finally said. “Maybe you should get the Oscar for Best Actor next year.”

  Chuck hung up and leaned back in his chair. He had a tough job, but lying through his teeth to the Director of Counterterrorism and the chairman of the party’s national committee took the cake.

  Yeah, calling out the Army, Navy and Marines to rub out that pesky Sean Cooper and his terrorist band, along with eliminating the blackmail threat to the Oval Office, was all in a day’s work.

  It was amazing to Hiram that the tiny island nation of Purang had an airport at all.

  Morning broke quickly for him and the other dozing passengers. The view that met his eyes as he pulled open his window shade was straight out of a travel brochure. Purang was a pancake-shaped island seemingly afloat in a shallow blue sea. They were descending rapidly toward an airstrip that occupied one end of the island. Passing over the land on the way, he could tell that the rest of the island was one big overgrown plantation with the occasional resort built along the beach and a small town mid-island.

  White sand rimmed the isle, and that was fringed by palm trees and grassy vegetation. The water was a clear turquoise, and Hiram could see straight to the coral seabed.

  The Airbus landed with a small jolt, awakening the other passengers.

  “We’re heah,” he told Tiffany, gently shaking his wife by the shoulders.

  By the time the plane had taxied up to the small one-story terminal, all the passengers were awake and eagerly grabbing their carry-on luggage. Suddenly, there was a rush to be the first to jump off the plane. Hiram was no exception. He elbowed his way to the overhead compartment that contained his bag, shuffled his feet to orient himself toward the cockpit, and waited.

  Tiffany clung to the strap of his shoulder bag. When the door opened, he began to move with the rest of the passengers. At the exit, he was met by a wall of heat that smelled like straw mats that had been drying in the sun. The eight a.m. sunlight met him straight in the eyes, and he had to shade his face to see his way down the metal stairway.

  Passengers were walking in a straggly line toward the single building at the airport. A dark-skinned man in a khaki uniform stood inside and watched as they entered. Behind him, a hand-painted sign read “Baggage Claim.”

  “I guess we wait heah,” Hiram said. “Immigration wasn’t much of a hassle.”

  “Why can’t other countries be more like this?” Tiffany said wistfully.

  Hiram could already tell that this was going to be just the vacation they needed.

  Many of his fellow passengers had already kicked off their shoes and were stuffing their feet into sandals.

  Some were pulling straw hats and sunglasses from their bags. The transition from overworked city dwellers to native islanders was nearly complete.

  Two local boys hauled a wagon loaded with suitcases from the cargo bay. It rolled to a halt just short of the building, and passengers pushed their way outside once more to claim their belongings.

  Hiram was among the first to pull his two suitcases from the teetering stack.

  “C’mon, Sweetie,” he said, and marched toward an untidy line of decrepit white taxis, rejects from the American used-car market.

  The first driver in line worked up his energy to heft the suitcases into the enormous trunk.

  Hiram studied the 1970s-era Ford Custom 500. Its trunk was large enough to fit a family of four. “Boy,” he remarked to the driver. “They don’t make them like this any more.”

  The driver looked puzzled. “They don’t?” His voice was somewhere between a British and Hindi accent.

  Hiram decided not to burst the man’s bubble.

  “Take us to the Sandalwood Resort,” he said. He thought of asking if the man knew where it was, then realized how ridiculous the question would be to a man who had spent his entire life on the same four square mile island.

  The taxi driver swayed around potholes on the uneven road, but kept the Ford going straight despite the fact that they were driving on the wrong side of the road. With a left-hand steering wheel and the car in the left lane, the driver was situated somewhere over the road’s shoulder.

  The drive took them past a lone fruit stand and dense fields of dry stalks. A butcher by profession, Hiram had hoped to see the local meat supply on hoof, but they were driving through walls of stalks that were higher than the roof of the car.

  “What are dey growing heah?” he asked the driver.

  “Sugar cane.”

  Tiffany looked up at him. “They’re raising cane.”

  He let out a broad, “Ha!”

  The hardy crop spread beyond the fields and was in the process of choking out a cluster of buildings.

  “This is our capital,” the driver announced proudly.

  It was also the only town on the island.

  “There is our Ministry of Justice,” the man said, pointing to a two-room police station. Presumably one room was the jail cell. “And there’s our president’s house.”

  Hiram did a double take. The cottage was a white wooden structure not unlike other houses on the single-road town. Its louvered windows looked out onto a broad patio that circled the house. Wicker chairs faced outward from the center. It wasn’t exactly the White House.

  “And here’s our Embassy,” the man said.

  “What do you mean your Embassy,” Tiffany asked. “This is your country. Why would you have an Embassy in your own country?”

  The man seemed puzzled. “This is the only Embassy we have,” he tried to explain.

  “But it isn’t the Purang Embassy,” Hiram said.

  The man looked at him through the wide rear-view mirror. Obviously Hiram and Tiffany weren’t getting it. The cement block building was their Embassy.

  Then Hiram caught the words etched into the brass plate affixed to its closed front door. “American Embassy.”

  Oh. That clarified things.

  There was no flag flying from the pole. Perhaps it wasn’t occupied year round.

  A street sign read 15 mph. The driver took it at 10. It made the town seem larger than it actually was. Hiram took in the details with interest. There was the island’s grocery store and post office all rolled into one. A mosque at either end of town.

  Funny, the guidebooks didn’t mention Islam’s foothold on the island. Surely Christian missionaries had gotten there at some point. Hiram focused on the people milling around the larger mosque as they passed. The men didn’t wear skullcaps, and the women’s braided black hair was exposed to public view. They weren’t exactly fundamentalists.

  They passed a library on the outskirts whose granite columns seemed out of place among the clapboard siding and tin roofs of town. Well, at least if to
urists got bored, they’d have something to read.

  Tiffany looked charmed. Dazzling light reflected on the smile muscles of her cheeks. He envisioned her as Meryl Streep, a colonial landowner surveying her plantation. I had a farm in Purang…

  Shortly, they entered a more natural landscape where the flora ranging from flowering bushes to stands of coconut palms that leaned out toward the sea.

  Hiram could begin to imagine his wife wearing that surprise she had bought at Victoria’s Secret and stashed out of sight. For the next three weeks, the tiny country would be their personal playground.

  “And here is your hotel,” the driver announced.

  A carved wooden sign welcomed them to Sandalwood Resort. They drove over a wooden bridge with rope handrails and circled along a conch-lined drive through a forest of palms.

  A portico made from locally harvested timber jutted out to meet them, and several porters stirred themselves inside.

  They came to a halt, and Hiram peeled himself off the springy seat.

  “What do I owe you, my good man?” he asked.

  The driver scratched his head as if calculating the mileage. “That would be three dollars, sir.”

  “You take American?” Hiram asked.

  The man looked confused. “No credit cards.”

  “No, I mean American greenbacks?”

  The man looked even more uncomfortable.

  Hiram pulled out a five and tentatively handed it to him.

  “Thank you, sir,” the driver said and took the money without hesitation.

  “Er, keep the change.”

  Tiffany had rounded the taxi and was standing beside him while two porters whisked their luggage away. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The lush tropical vegetation and pale timbers of the hotel had an exotic and pleasant smell.

  “Sandalwood,” Tiffany said, reading his mind.

  The taxi prowled away and left the two standing alone.

  “Shall we, my dear?” he offered, extending an elbow. She took it, and they entered the shaded lobby of the resort. Just beyond that, he could hear the promising sounds of splashing water and laughing people.