by Gary Haynes
“And this,” he went on, putting down the tube and picking up a shorter one about half as long and the circumference of a nightstick, “is an adaption of the US Air Force Saber 203. An antipersonnel laser used to dazzle.”
“Dazzle?” Karen asked.
“That’s a technical term for spot-blindness. It causes disorientation and enough delay for someone to stand, aim and pop a cap in enemy ass. And it ain’t no coincidence that I got an M16 for you, Karen. This baby fits into the grenade-launch mechanism. The beam shoots out in line with the scope. Effective up to three hundred metres.”
“Does it cause permanent blindness?” Tom asked.
“Nope. Unfortunately.”
“What’s in the other case?” Karen asked.
Lester opened the second lid, which looked like an outsized hatbox, and took out something that resembled a TV satellite dish. “This is anti-personnel sonic sound system.”
“We gonna drive them mad with Gangsta Rap, Lester?”
“That ain’t funny, Tom. And it’s ancient history,” he said, shaking his head. “The prototype was used against protestors in Tbilisi, Georgia, and against them Somali pirates. But, this, hell, it’ll send a freakin’ elephant to its knees.” He grinned. “Effective up to a hundred-metre radius.”
He tossed Karen and Tom a pair of ear defenders each.
“You got sensitive ears, Tom. You don’t wear those, you won’t have to worry about that no more, cuz you won’t be hearing jack shit. Okay?”
Lester said the plugs were reinforced military ones, adapted precisely for use with the sound system.
“These are somethin’, Lester,” Tom said, referring to the weapons. “I’ll give ya that. But we’re hooking up with the French intelligence service if all goes well. We won’t need them. We won’t even be allowed to use our SIGs.”
“Whatever,” Lester said. “I’ll show y’all how they work anyways. We got the time.”
Lester spent the next twenty minutes teaching them how to use the equipment, which was surprisingly easy.
80.
A Bombardier Challenger business jet, black and shiny like a beetle’s back, appeared out of a bank of cloud as dusk was fading. The plane could fly for four thousand miles and was capable of taking off and landing on an airstrip of a hundred and fifty metres or less. Three of them were on standby in DC for corporations and wealthy individuals twenty-four-seven. Tom wondered how Lester could have afforded it, but guessed that his business was doing better than he’d let on.
He checked his watch. 21:04. Fifteen hours to go.
The jet seated nineteen people in cream-coloured leather seats, with touch-screen entertainment, Internet access and fold-away teak tables. There was a well-stocked galley up front, and a baggage bay accessible in-flight in back.
After they’d loaded up and fixed their seat belts, Tom took out his small Buddha and began rubbing the mahogany surface with his thumb.
“That for luck, Tom?” Karen asked, sitting opposite.
“Not exactly.”
She cocked her head to one side. “And?”
“It’s freaky shit, you ask me,” Lester said, sitting across the deep-piled carpet, fiddling with his iPod.
“That Miles Davis?” Tom asked.
“Who else?” he said, closing his eyes.
“So, Tom,” Karen said, “you were going to tell me about your little friend.”
“It’s nothing, really,” he sighed. “Okay. It’s not a religion; more a psychological aid. It’s about controlling emotions by controlling thoughts and behaviour. In this way, you can experience a calmer mind, although, I have to admit, it ain’t working lately. But, for me, a calm mind is an optimal state of mind.”
She nodded, and he saw something in her face that spoke of recognition; regret, too.
“I guess a calm mind is important in your line of work,” she said.
Not exactly, he thought. But he refrained from saying that DS agents were taught to have a paranoid mindset, at least on duty. It would only complicate matters.
They chatted for a further five minutes or more. She had a knack of getting him to open up. But in truth, he felt a need to. He told her something he hadn’t told anyone for years. His mother had gone to the local store one day when he was a teenage kid. But she never returned. She died that day on her way home. As a result, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents in a small town in Louisiana, ten miles from where he’d lived with his mother. Good people, he said, generous with their time. His granddaddy had taught him to fly-fish; a helluva lot else besides.
“I joined the DS after college and got posted to Bangkok. I met a woman there.”
“A woman?”
“Not like that. She helped me to begin to come to terms with what had happened, I guess.”
“Was your mother killed in a car accident?” she asked.
“No.” He looked at her straight in the eyes. “I killed her.”
Karen’s forehead creased up. “I don’t understand, Tom.”
“I shoulda been there for my momma. I promised her I’d pick her up. I went fishing with a buddy instead. She decided to walk home. They found her body in a shallow grave less than a mile from our house. She’d been raped and murdered by an ex-con,” he said, his eyes glistening over.
He realized he hadn’t told anyone that.
Ever.
But the emotion it’d evoked hadn’t been the one he’d imagined it would. It was cathartic rather than shameful.
81.
Hours later, the jet banked through grey, ribboned clouds before descending in steep steps, each one making Tom’s stomach flip as he tried to pop his ears. For a man who travelled frequently by plane, his body had never quite attuned itself to altitude. He felt queasy.
Beneath the cloud line, the outskirts of Rouen were just visible in the distance, the capital of Upper Normandy, the Seine snaking through it like a dull brown cable.
“Down there,” Lester said to Tom, pointing at five o’clock.
There was a large square of grass, edged by high hedges, with acres of fields beyond. The outline of two buildings was in the far left-hand corner. It looked like a farm. After giving Lester the thumbs up, Tom reached over and shook Karen’s knee gently. She had fallen asleep less than an hour after take-off. As she blinked herself awake he checked the time difference. Paris was six hours ahead of DC, which, after the eight-hour flight, meant it was midday here. Seven hours and counting.
Karen stretched her arms and yawned. She made eye contact. “Are we here?”
Tom nodded.
They landed a few miles outside Rouen, some thirty miles from Évreux. Karen estimated that it would take them about an hour to get to the chateau. Lester told them to stay put for a couple of minutes, took their passports and left the plane, heading for a breeze-block building. The hangar next to it had looked like a barn from above. It struck Tom that it was purposefully deceptive.
“How is Lester going to get us through customs with all this firepower?” Karen asked.
“They don’t have customs at airfields like this. They rely on people’s honesty. It’s a system of prior notification and permission, or not as the case may be. Just like back in Virginia.”
“Places like these cater for small aircraft and they rely on honesty?”
“You can get searched, but it’s rare. It’s mostly just a paper exercise.” He saw her scoff. “Yeah, I know, makes as much sense as asking a junkie to mind a drugs store.”
“Are you okay, Tom?” she asked, reaching over and placing her hand on his.
He looked at her, found himself asking her to stay put in his mind again. But he said, “Don’t worry about me.” He took out his cell. “I gotta make a call.”
“You want some privacy?”
He thought about it. “No. We’re in this together,” he said, searching the speed-dial numbers.
He called Crane, who said that he’d swung it before telling Tom the directions to the rendezvous
point where he’d meet up with three operatives from the DCRI.
“Only three?” Tom asked.
“Trustworthy men I’ve worked with before. French Special Forces are getting it together as we speak. But it could be another couple hours before they arrive. What’s the one thing you know that nobody else does, Tom?”
“Something we can get them to ask Lyric to check she’s alive if we have to.”
“And?”
“She gave me a present in Islamabad the morning she got taken. A diamond-studded silver Omega. No one else knows that as far as I’m aware.”
Tom still had it on him. He would keep the engraved message to himself for now: To Tom with heartfelt gratitude. Linda G. Carlyle. US Secretary of State.
“Don’t do anything dumb.”
“I’ll call you in an hour,” Tom said, disconnecting.
“Everything okay?” Karen asked.
“Everything’s fine.”
“I need some air,” she said.
She got up and disappeared through the clamshell door. He saw her a few seconds later, stretching on the grass, her arms clasped above her head, her sweater and T-shirt riding up as she flung her head back and drank in the cool air. Behind her, Tom saw Lester emerge from the building and get into a dark-green Land Rover that was parked between a Citroën and a Fiat on the small lot adjacent to the building, thinking that his friend was … what? Too resourceful? He shook his head and dismissed the notion. The sooner this was over, the better. He felt as if his mind was deliberately playing tricks with him and he didn’t care for it. He got up and walked down the short flight of steps to the narrow runway.
Lester parked the car next to the plane, so that they could unload the equipment into the large trunk space. He said that he’d agreed with the pilot and co-pilot that they’d hang around for six hours. They would refuel via the truck parked on the other side of the hangar. If they didn’t get a call to stay longer, they’d fly back to the States. Tom put his arm on Lester’s shoulder, leading him away from where Karen was still stretching her body.
“I went back to Islamabad the same day the secretary was taken. I met up with a Pakistani, a CIA asset. I nearly got captured by the ISI. A few hours later, a bunch of guys at a remote roadblock had my photo on their cells.”
“They know you were coming?” Lester asked.
“A CIA guy in Kabul said his room had been bugged, so when we’d discussed the fact that I was going over the border, I guessed that someone was listening,” Tom said, referring to Crane. “He figured my cell had been bugged, too.”
“That’s why you asked the DS agent I capped at Fresh Pond.”
“Coombs, yeah. He coulda bugged the room. He sure as hell sent the photo of me to them.” Tom kept quiet about the CIA woman, figuring it would complicate matters for Lester.
“So that’s it, right?”
“I guess. But Coombs didn’t admit to bugging the room.”
“No, he didn’t,” Lester said. “He just made a noise as he was dying.”
“And, Lester, let’s just keep this between us. I don’t want Karen getting spooked for nothing.”
82.
Rahul Al-Dhakheel was sitting at an ornate desk in a high-backed chair, the rosewood-panelled walls half covered with photographs of him shaking hands with the famous people he’d met in his career.
The room was the ambassador’s study, with numerous leather-bound religious books in gilded cases. It was also a showcase for his collection of Islamic antiques: engraved brass coffee pots, calligraphic panels, silver vases and valuable murals; all protected from the world behind locked glass cabinets. He’d spent hours reading here; hours admiring the skills of the artisans who had created such exquisite works, too. But now his mind was on pragmatic matters.
The two-thousand-strong House of Saud had ruled his country since the kingdom had been established in 1932. Back then, he knew his nomadic grandfathers would’ve gladly traded land for camels; water, even. Now the absolute monarchy had the world’s second largest oil reserves, and was ranked sixth in terms of natural gas. Allah had willed that they live in a desert, but He had buried enormous wealth beneath it.
They had used that wealth to expand their influence and defeat their enemies, usually by proxy, spending twenty-five billion dollars to support Saddam Hussein in his war with Shia Iran. That backfired after the tyrant attacked Kuwait. They feared they were on his target list. As a result, the then Saudi king invited 400,000 US troops onto their sacred land, an act that prompted bin Laden to become radicalized and led ultimately to 9/11. The ambassador knew the unofficial reason was that the White House believed that the invasion of Iraq would produce a Shia regime to be a pro-Western counterbalance to a Shia Iran. But the opposite happened. The Iraqi president was a friend of Iran, who’d backed the Russian opposition to the West’s intervention in Syria. Added to which, the US removal of Saddam both led to the Sunni-Shia civil war that was raging in Iraq, and sparked the current region-wide Shia revival to get back at the Sunnis. But the world was changing and with it those who wielded power. The new king’s links with the US were in danger of blinding him to that. Besides, as the ambassador knew well, within a few years the US would be almost self-sufficient in oil, due to its fracking operations.
As a result, he had decided to work closely with the so-called Brothers of Faith, a group of five of the king’s nephews who were opposed to the monarch’s lack of vision and decisive action. Just as Saddam’s Iraq had been a threat, Iran had replaced it. But apart from encouraging the US to go to war, the king had refused to bend to the Brothers’ promptings to go down a unilateral route. He wasn’t alone. Without the US, many in the House of Saud believed that their influence in the Middle East would dwindle.
But the future lay, Rahul believed, with China. The Iranians knew that, too. China now imported fifteen per cent of its oil from Iran. Although the US was encouraging the Chinese to wean itself off this supply, the opposite was happening. China had become the world’s largest importer of oil, and was hungry for natural gas. Due to geographical necessities, only Iran could pipe in the seemingly insatiable demand. The Chinese saw Iran as the new power in the region, and would, in time, protect them with its enormous and expanding military, he believed. Just as the US had protected his own country for decades, and for just the same reason. Military security for energy security.
Knowing he was already a trusted confidante, the Brothers of Faith had asked him what should be done about all this. To some, this would have been treasonous. But he’d convinced himself that it wasn’t the case. The line of succession in Saudi Arabia was based on agnatic seniority, whereby the crown passed to the king’s younger brother, rather than his eldest son. And since the Brothers were the king’s nephews, one of their fathers would eventually succeed. In this way, Rahul was just protecting his future, too. And he’d been promised a ministerial post if everything panned out, something that had seemed unreachable in the past.
He had thought about the Iranian conundrum for a full four months. The Saudis had already stoked the sectarian divide in Pakistan, using the Madrassas, agitators, and pamphlet propaganda, together with carrying out bomb attacks on sensitive Sunni sites and blaming it on the indigenous Shia. That had been a successful strategy, leading to the military assuming temporary power and, in turn, sabotaging the Iran-Pak pipeline. But more had had to be done to paralyze Iran’s exports and secure Saudi wealth and, more importantly, political influence in the Middle East.
The answer had come to him one night as he’d lain awake, listening to the chirping of cicadas. It was a simple matter of duplication. Turn Iran into something akin to the bloody chaos that was Iraq, the country’s infrastructure so decimated by the US and the ensuing civil war that Iraqis had to heat their food in darkness over makeshift braziers.
The only way to do that, he’d told the Brothers of Faith, was to get the US to do it for them, and the only way to do that was to make the US fear and hate them. The Brothers ac
cused him of being as weak as the king. But he outlined the full extent of his geopolitical plan. The Iran nuclear programme, which the Saudis were eager to exaggerate, although the threat was potentially extreme, went a long way to securing the former. The abduction and execution of the US Secretary of State would go a long way to securing the latter, he ventured. The Brothers had, of course, agreed.
He stood now and walked to the huge oblong window that overlooked the embassy gardens. He pulled a weighted string and the slatted blinds flicked open. The early-morning sun poured in. He smiled. His youngest son was riding on the back of an Irish wolfhound. His favourite hunting dog. His favourite son. The boy exuded a near-primal vitality. He was laughing, flinging his head back as he rode. The dog sensed it, too, obeying his son’s every prompting. Both, he concluded, wondrously unsullied by the world around them.
Brigadier Hasni had told him once that he’d sent his son, Mahmood, to Harvard to enable him to think like the Americans. Rahul had decided to bypass that. His son would one day simply act like them: imperious and feared.
83.
The three French DCRI operatives had done some initial covert surveillance of the chateau, with high-powered scopes and long-range listening probes, after getting the call from Crane hours ago. The operative in charge was called Philippe, a fifty-two-year-old with a weather-beaten face and the flattened nose of a boxer. He’d worked with Crane on a number of occasions, and both liked and trusted him. But something wasn’t right. The men who’d rented the chateau had looked to him like flabby desk jockeys, rather than hardened mercenaries. There were no visible signs of an attempt at securing the place, either. Satellite observation had likewise come up blank as far as incriminatory evidence was concerned.
