by Fritz Galt
“I needed to go undercover,” Alec explained. “When I learned about Proteus trying to kick us out of CERN by going specifically after me, I thought I would lie low. I also thought I could track down Proteus on the tip that he would be in Paris.” Then he mused about Natalie. “Seems like your wife got to him first. I wonder what she’s really up to?”
Mick shrugged. “I haven’t got a clue.”
“So O’Smythe and Slimane teamed up with some greedy Asian industrialists,” Alec summarized. He still couldn’t get over it. “What a combination. I’d assume that obtaining the substrate would make them all happy, but from the way I’ve been treated by Khalid’s organization these past few days, namely taking me hostage in Paris, they aren’t trying to steal anything from us. They’re playing so rough, my guess is that the president’s life is in jeopardy.”
“And Natalie’s, too,” Anaïs said.
“Yes. We’ve got to help her,” Alec said.
“Do whatever you want,” Mick said without much enthusiasm. “She’s attending a big funeral in Settat. Lots of swarthy types there with loads of money. The funeral’s for a former bomb maker that O’Smythe bumped off in order to draw Proteus out.”
“So O’Smythe is into bumping off Moroccans. Some nice guy,” Alec said.
Anaïs didn’t immediately jump to his defense.
Mick checked the departure board again. “In the meantime, I’ve got some real work to do. I’m going stateside to find out more about this CERN project that the Japanese want to pirate.”
“Is that more important than President Damon?”
Mick’s broad, bronzed face looked grim, but determined. “I’ve already talked with Everett Hoyle about the assassination plot. I think I have Proteus headed off.”
“Is going to the States more important than your wife?”
“Let’s just assume it is,” Mick said, and stood up.
Just then, a woman’s voice came over the public address system. “Passengers for Royal Air Maroc Flight 800 now departing for New York, please proceed to Gate Two for final boarding.” Then she repeated the same message with a different personality in French and Arabic.
Mick cracked a grin.
“What is it?” Alec asked.
“That announcer should do stand-up at The Comedy Store.”
Mick flipped his last few dirhams on the table and slung a flight bag over his shoulder.
Alec rose and shook his hand. “What should I tell Natalie once I find her?”
Mick frowned. “Give ’er my love.”
Chapter 36
At CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a yellow Corvette left muddy tracks in the spacious green lawn behind the main buildings. Ahead of the car lay a thin stand of trees, then a brick wall, followed by a drop-off to the Potomac River.
Behind the car raced two white Jeeps, both bearing the security seal for the CIA.
“Spread out,” William Murphy calmly ordered into his radio mike, and gently guided the steering wheel of his Jeep to the right. Under his blue uniform, his heart was racing. His job was normally to keep people out of the high-security compound, not to prevent them from leaving.
The other Jeep took the left flank.
The Corvette slowed, trying to find a break in the wall of trees.
“Who does the car belong to?” Murphy asked over the radio.
There were thousands of employees working at the headquarters. And almost as many cars.
A voice came over the speaker. “His name is Jeremy Watts.”
“That’s intelligence for you,” he told the officer in the passenger seat.
The Corvette spun its rear wheels on the slick, dewy grass, then headed for a break in the trees.
“After him,” Murphy ordered over the radio. “He’s heading for the perimeter wall.”
A voice crackled over the speaker. It was the other Jeep. “Do we shoot him, or what?”
“Hell if I know.” Murphy quickly reviewed security precautions at the CIA. They inspected people as they entered the buildings through metal detectors. But they normally didn’t monitor vehicles for weapons as they entered the main gate. “He could be armed.”
He handed the radio to the officer beside him, leaned to one side and pulled out his revolver. He was running out of hands.
The banana-colored Corvette approached a clearing just before the ten-foot, red brick wall.
Slowing down, Murphy removed the safety and aimed his weapon out his window. “I’m going for his wheels.” He tried to steady his left hand.
“He’s going for the wheels,” his partner relayed over the radio.
Murphy fired, and a blue puff of smoke exploded from the right rear tire. The Corvette lurched to the right, then overcorrected and came to a crunching, sideways halt against the wall.
“He’s getting out of his car,” Murphy’s partner reported.
Murphy jerked to a halt twenty feet away, the other Jeep by his side.
He jumped out and crouched behind his hood. The other officers fell in beside him.
The Corvette’s driver rolled out of the driver’s side and kept low to the grass.
Murphy switched his revolver back to his right hand and trained it on the young man’s slender torso. Through the morning sunlight that glinted through the trees, he saw the man attempting to scale the wall by first jumping onto the roof of the Corvette.
Murphy grabbed the radio that lay on his front seat.
“He’s attempting to jump over the east wall. Do we shoot or not?”
A voice came back. “We want him alive.”
Murphy whispered to his partner. “What’s his name?”
“Jamie, or something.”
“He’s got a gun,” an officer whispered.
Murphy called out. “Stop, Jamie. Put your weapon down, or we’ll shoot.”
The man gained his full height on the roof of his car and reached for the top of the wall. Sunlight reflected off a gun in his hand.
“Hold your fire,” Murphy ordered his officers.
The man attempted to climb over the wall, but appeared too slightly built to pull himself up. Furthermore, the gun prevented him from getting a good grip on the wall.
He dropped back to the roof of his car, then instantly spun around, his gun spitting fire at the officers behind the Jeeps.
Murphy aimed for the heart and pulled his trigger. The man slumped onto the car roof, his head hitting it hard.
Murphy winced. That must hurt.
Then, slowly, the man slipped off the car and landed crumpled and motionless on his back in the grass.
As he trained his revolver on the figure, Murphy motioned for the others to approach the man cautiously.
Finally, one of them reached the man and knelt in the grass, pinning the man’s arms to the ground.
“He’s dead,” the officer shouted.
Murphy lowered his weapon and clicked on the safety. Then he leaned into his Jeep and thumbed the radio.
“He drew a weapon on us,” he reported. “We had to shoot him. I’m afraid he’s dead.”
Everett watched shadows lengthen across his office floor. His leather chair was still warm from the afternoon sun. It reminded him of the warm hides he had brought back to his home in Colorado. Successfully stalking his prey and neatly killing it gave him a special feeling of conquest.
The game was slightly different when he was behind a desk. His weapons were limited, and the prey was more elusive.
This time, his target was a man named Brahim Abbad.
He checked his clipboard. As Natalie had discovered, Brahim Abbad was one of the names for a Moroccan assassin who belonged to some sort of organization known as the Proteus Jihad, hired by Sir Trevor O’Smythe to assassinate the president.
Everett had dispatched Gus in Rabat to track Brahim Abbad down. Meanwhile Tobias was tapping O’Smythe’s phone for conversations that might lead to Brahim Abbad’s whereabouts.
They would have the bastard soon.
<
br /> Everett eased out of his chair and was just turning the office lights off when his phone rang. He noted with interest that it wasn’t the secure line from Washington.
He returned to his desk and picked it up.
It was Eli Shaw calling from Langley, and his voice sounded dreadful.
“Why are you using this line?” Everett asked.
“I’m not in my office, and I don’t know who to talk to,” Eli said. “So I picked you.”
“I’m honored, sir.”
“Well, wait until you hear what I have to say.”
Everett waited. Over the phone, he heard the sound of shoes in a hallway and the muted voices of a crowd.
“This morning, we shot an employee on our compound.”
“Good grief.” Everett said.
“His name was Jeremy Watts. Ever heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“Well, he went berserk and tried to flee, pulled a gun, and shot at our security officers. Now he’s dead. The point is, I started the whole chain of events. I was talking to this Jeremy Watts by phone, and the moment I mentioned the name ‘SATO’ to him, he clammed up, hung up on me, and tried to escape the building.”
“You think this had to do with SATO?”
“Pretty sure. We tried to apprehend and question him, but he pulled a gun and, it almost looks like he tried to draw the guards’ fire. It was gruesome, I’ll tell you.”
“Wish I were there.”
“Then, get this. Around noon, I get this phone call that was routed from the White House. The voice is disguised.”
“Like Deep Throat?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Eli said. “He told me to leave SATO alone, or more heads would roll.”
“As in people getting fired?”
“No. Sounded more like people getting killed.”
Like Suzy.
Everett tried to focus in the gathering dusk. He couldn’t believe such a threat was issued from the White House.
“The whole thing’s got me shaken up,” Eli admitted.
“No kidding.” Everett noticed that his own hands were as cold as ice. He was ready to drop the whole damned case. “Doesn’t the White House know that their own man is in the crosshairs?”
“Who knows?” Eli said. “The caller didn’t let me explain myself. And he seemed to know exactly what I was doing. Everett, this whole thing is so deeply embedded in the U.S. Government that I don’t know whether to expose it or bury it as fast as I can.”
The blood-red sun was on the verge of slipping over the horizon. “So what do we do now?”
“Jesus,” Eli said. “I wish I knew. I’m too spooked to call from my office phone. And I’ve got a wife and kids to think about. I’m so paranoid, I’m afraid to mention it to our director.”
“You should mention it.”
“And have my head roll?”
Everett saw his point. He looked around the darkened CIA station. He didn’t like being the last to leave. “Sir, I would watch my back if I were you.”
“And you, too.”
Eli’s voice, and the sounds of the public space terminated.
Everett set the phone down gently and stood still for a long time. In his glass-paneled office, he listened to the mechanical clicks of the embassy’s thermostats, the whoosh of the air conditioner, the clink of hot water pipes as they cooled, the hum of a photocopy machine, the creak of the floor above.
He began to feel the exquisite fear of a hunter being hunted.
Chapter 37
President Damon rose to his feet as his Friday in-house staff meeting adjourned and its members left the Oval Office.
There were few major issues of the day, but lots of logistics surrounding that weekend’s trip to Paris for an annual G8 summit and to Switzerland for some quick sightseeing and a speech at CERN followed by four days of R&R.
As far as the weekend summit was concerned, he had a stack of briefing papers five inches thick. Profiles of the national leaders, summaries of the major issues at hand, position papers for the Americans and bilateral issues to bring up with specific leaders.
On the other hand, the visit to Switzerland would be pure joy. He had a helicopter tour of the Alps planned, then the speech, followed by four days in Zermatt, with the Matterhorn all to himself.
Someone working for Al Montgomery, his new science advisor, had written his speech for CERN. He wanted desperately to formalize things there, but above all, he looked forward to an opportunity to relax in the Alps, away from the daily pressures of Washington.
Vic Padesco, his national security advisor, lingered behind in the office.
“What is it, Vic?”
“I wanted to talk with you privately, sir. We have some grave reservations about your trip to Switzerland.”
“What do you mean? It should be a piece of cake.”
“Sir, I’m talking about concerns for your personal safety. We have confirmed reports from Bern that there’s a security threat to you at the laboratory.”
“What, in Switzerland? Security there is as tight as a virgin’s—” He looked up and saw his late wife’s portrait staring at him from across the room. “There shouldn’t be any trouble.”
“All the same, sir, some in the Secret Service want you to reconsider the trip.”
“Reconsider? As in change the venues?”
“As in cancel the trip.”
“Cancel? You know I don’t cancel trips. Besides, I’ve got to cement our relationship with CERN. We can’t afford to lose our superconducting research at this point. Our country can’t afford it. What’s Robert Zimmer doing about all this?”
“I’m in daily contact with him. SATO seems to be falling apart. Agents are being knocked off.”
“That bad, eh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Charles’ eyes traveled back to his wife’s portrait on the wall. What a battle she had fought against the cancer, enduring it all the while in the public eye. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do in her memory. Being a coward wasn’t one of them.
“Vic, I’ve taken many risks in my personal, military and political life, but they’ve never seemed like risks to me. The risk was always in not doing something. I’m afraid that’s the case here.”
“So what do I tell the Secret Service?”
“Tell ’em I’m going to Switzerland.”
Gus Carlucci may have once been a street urchin growing up in an Italian ghetto of Milwaukee. But now he was darkly handsome, worked for the CIA and could pull a few strings in Morocco.
He stared at the name he had written down from his phone conversation the day before with Everett Hoyle in Bern. Those Euro-wimps didn’t know real criminals. All they dealt with were catching jewel thieves and finding war criminals.
He already had a sketchy memory of General Abbad, the disgraced leader of the military, who had killed himself decades ago after his failed attempted coup.
Now that was a real player.
Speaking of players, he decided to bypass the Foreign Ministry and call Morocco’s intelligence service directly.
He dialed Ali Faroud, his contact at intelligence, and asked him if he knew of Brahim Abbad.
“Are you kidding?” Ali said over the phone, his Bronx upbringing showing immediately. “Everybody knows who Brahim Abbad is.”
“Okay, then. Clue me in.”
“Well, you heard of his father, General Abbad, who tried to assassinate the king. Brahim shot Algeria’s leader to pieces. He’s just like his dad, a one-man government wrecking crew.”
“Okay, spare me the hyperbole.”
“The what?”
Ali Faroud had grown up the son of a Moroccan diplomat at the UN in New York. He had the lingo down, with only the occasional gap in vocabulary or cultural knowledge.
“Never mind,” Gus said. “Do you know where he is now?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do.”
Gus raised an eyebrow, switched the phone to his other ear, gr
abbed a pen and waited. And waited.
Ali said nothing.
“Are you going to tell me, or what?”
“Well, it’s a bit embarrassing, really,” Ali said.
“Don’t tell me it’s a state secret.”
“In a manner of speaking. You see, Brahim is currently in country. We’ve been tracking him since he entered through Casablanca. He’s staying south of Casa in a village called Settat.”
“Well, why don’t you arrest him?”
“On what charges? Do you have a warrant for his arrest?”
“No,” Gus said. “Don’t you?”
“He hasn’t committed any crimes here. Why should we arrest him?”
Gus held his head, confused. The Moroccan kingdom was a virtual police state. “Don’t you have search and seizure powers?”
“Of course, we do.”
“Well, this guy’s part of a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States. And we need evidence in order to arrest and convict him.”
He heard the sound of Ali Faroud sucking in his breath. “The President of the United States? Boy, he sure does aim high.”
“I’ll bet he’s aimed at your king on occasion.”
“We don’t have proof of that.”
“Then we’re in the same boat, aren’t we?” Gus said. “How about we crack some doors open in Settat and see what crawls out?”
“Are you talking about raiding his house?”
“He has a house?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Gus shook his head. In Morocco, things weren’t always black and white. Sometimes they were simply opaque.
“I’m saying,” Gus said coldly, “raid his house.”
“Okay. I hear you,” Ali replied. “I’ll send men in to find out what’s going on down there. I just don’t want to disturb a hornet’s nest, if you know what I mean. This guy Brahim has connections all over the region.”
“Fine. Then tread softly. And let me know what you find out.”
Gus hung up and decided to take a brief walk for a breath of fresh air. Outdoors was like a blast furnace. The air didn’t move. People didn’t move. Nothing moved.
Pausing in a shaded breezeway between the low-slung embassy buildings, he lit a cigarette.
