Lourds didn’t think he could have done it. Then again, he hadn’t thought he would be able to steal the book from Qayin and his followers either.
Yet he had.
‘I’ve been patient so far, Professor Lourds, out of respect for what you have done and gone through, and because my sister believes in you,’ Joachim said.
‘I told you if anyone can do this, Thomas would be the one,’ Olympia said in Turkish.
‘English,’ Cleena stated. ‘Speak English for the slow kids.’
Olympia repeated her comment in English, which only drew a snort from Cleena.
‘I need you to prove to me that you can help us.’ Joachim’s dark gaze held Lourds. ‘Can you do that?’
Lourds nodded. ‘I can, but first I need you to do one more thing for me.’
Joachim leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest, obviously displeased.
Ignoring the man, Lourds opened the book to the page with the rubbing. He indicated the image.
‘This. I need to know where you got this.’
Joachim shook his head. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘You’ve found nothing there.’ Lourds leaned back in his own chair. ‘I will.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘This rubbing was taken from a stone in the room where the older monks gave their lives to protect the secret of the Joy Scroll.’
Olympia turned to her brother. ‘Is that true?’
Holding his gaze steadily on Lourds, Joachim didn’t answer.
‘Joachim?’
Finally, Joachim nodded. ‘That was where it was found. But you could only be guessing that.’
Lourds turned back a few pages and tapped again. ‘This is one of the pages that were also found in that room. Or am I still just guessing?’
Joachim stared at the page, then back at Lourds. ‘How do you know this?’
‘Because I can read this page now.’ Lourds couldn’t help smiling at his obvious success, especially when Joachim’s eyes widened still further. ‘Would you like to know what it says?’
18
Central Business District
King Abdullah Economic City, Saudi Arabia
19 March 2010
The hotel suite was nothing more than an overly comfortable prison cell. Webster knew that and barely tolerated the situation. He wanted to leave the room just to prove that he could. And maybe he wanted to push Prince Khalid to see how far the young man would go.
Although there were no armed guards outside Webster’s door, they were posted at all the entrances to the building. He didn’t doubt that the room was bugged as well. If he had been in charge, he would’ve had the room wired for sound and video. That was why he was using one of the CIA’s white noise generators to cover his phone call.
For the last few hours, he had plied himself with liquor to take the edge off, and consoled himself with Vicky DeAngelo’s carnal attentions. For an older woman, she was a demanding and generous lover. Webster had been surprised, but his mind had focused on the promise brewing in Saudi Arabia and the threat building in Istanbul. In the end, though, Vicky proved to be as much like him as he had believed her to be. Once the fighting had broken out in the streets, she had deserted his bed and returned to her room and her computer to take control of the reporters still loyal to her within the country. News streamed from those reporters on the ground, but Prince Khalid’s soldiers worked hurriedly to find them and shut them down. Some of them had already been killed, but Prince Khalid hadn’t approached Vicky about the matter.
Webster stood to one side of the polarized balcony window and let the loose folds of the drapes conceal him. Beyond the glass, under the night sky, the city spread in neat squares, some of them lighted and some of them not. Power hadn’t been connected to all the new areas. Webster had turned the lights out behind him; he was more comfortable in the darkness. He held the sat-phone close to his ear as he spoke. Out in the streets, armed forces patrolled in heavy numbers. Tanks as well as soldiers moved constantly.
On the other side of the room, the muted television showed smuggled footage from Saudi Arabia on WNN News. FOX, CNN and MSNBC also carried much of the same footage. A lot of it came from Vicky’s people.
Prince Khalid had made good on his promise to remove the enemies of his country. Within minutes after speaking to Webster, special teams had hit the streets and begun sweeping Shia, suspected Shia and Shia sympathizers from the cities. That also meant rousting out many American and European businessmen. It also meant that anyone who had a taint of Shia about them got the boot. A religious purge had started and the repercussions were building in strength. Webster felt the power of it around him, like a roaring dark tide. It wouldn’t be calmed and he looked forward to watching it feed.
Many of those persecuted people had fought, not wanting to relinquish their businesses or their wealth. Several of those people, in fact – Webster suspected – most of those people had been killed outright. Others received rough handling or worse as they were loaded onto trucks and taken to train stations where they were herded like cattle onto boxcars. From there they were deported to India and Pakistan. Having dealt with problems of displaced people before, neither India nor Pakistan welcomed the Shia refugees. The displaced people would create a huge drain on the economies of both countries, as well as tying up manpower to keep the inevitable refugee camps manageable.
Webster knew that Prince Khalid counted on those facts. The drain on the finances and the workload of the military would leave the borders of both those countries weak. If the arrivals hadn’t been Shia, or presumably Shia, neither Pakistan nor India would have tolerated the forced expulsion flooding into their countries. And the refugees would continue to come like locust plagues. Those countries would be torn apart by Shia within their own borders who wanted to protect the new arrivals, as well as Sunni predators who would see the refugee camps as easy targets in which to hunt their enemies. Some attacks there had already started.
‘If you’re looking at the same thing I am,’ President Michael Waggoner growled, ‘then I think we’re looking at the seeds of a Middle Eastern war the like of which we’ve never seen.’
Although most people wouldn’t have recognized the tension in the president’s voice, Webster had known the man for years. Waggoner was as close to losing his cool as Webster had ever heard.
‘I’m looking at it,’ Webster said. ‘On the television and in the streets here.’
Waggoner cursed, another thing he rarely did. ‘I hadn’t forgotten you were there in the middle of it, Elliott. Sending you there might not have been the best idea after all. I’m worried about you too.’
‘I know, Mike. It’s a tough time for all of us.’
‘Are you all right? If you think you or your people are in danger, just say the word. I’ve got a Marine special OPS HRT waiting on board an aircraft carrier nearby. The colonel says he and his teams can be there in twenty minutes or less to get you out.’
‘There’s no need to do that yet,’ Webster said. ‘We’re safe enough here at the moment. If we do pull out, it could be taken as a sign of weakness. We don’t want that hanging over us.’
‘I know. I keep telling myself that.’ The president sighed tiredly. ‘I just don’t know how this situation went south so quickly.’
‘Our presence here didn’t have anything to do with that,’ Webster lied. ‘Prince Khalid already had an agenda. This whole time, the Middle East was only two heartbeats away from this kind of madness. Those two heartbeats have been silenced.’
‘Does Khalid really think he can get away with this without any repercussions?’
‘Prince Khalid’s in a powerful position. He’s not addicted to wealth and power like his father and brother. He’s looking to avenge his mother, his father, his brother and the rest of his family who were killed. He doesn’t care about repercussions. He wants to prove his manhood to the world. And he doesn’t think anyone can stop him. More than that, no
one will stop him. Not everyone, perhaps no one, can afford to stop buying the oil Saudi Arabia has to sell.’
‘He’s insane is what he is.’
‘Crazy like a fox, maybe.’
Below in the street, a few quick flurries of flashing lights drew Webster’s attention. He recognized the muzzle flashes at once and knew that another battle or massacre had begun.
‘I thought you had a handle on this guy,’ Waggoner said.
‘With his father in place, I did. I’d hoped some of that goodwill might rub off on the son eventually. But he’s young and convinced of his own rightness in the world. We can both remember being that young, Mike.’
‘I know.’
‘His brother was much more manageable.’
‘Just our luck that we end up with the wrong son in power.’
It wasn’t luck, Webster thought. Everything is going according to plan.
At least, everything was going almost according to plan. The situation in Istanbul was more than a little troublesome. Webster had expected Eckart to report success there. He hadn’t, and things were still loose regarding the whereabouts of the scroll. That was troubling, but Webster had full confidence that the scroll would soon be his.
On the television, Saudi Arabian tanks rolled through the streets and scattered pedestrians in all directions. A man darted out in front of a tank. He held a Molotov cocktail in one hand. Hardly pausing, he lobbed the bottle and it shattered against the tank’s armoured skirt. Flames licked over the metal and drove the commanding officer back inside. Then a machine gun opened up on deck and.50-calibre rounds hammered the man to the ground. Before the body stopped twitching, the tank ran him down. When the tank passed, nothing recognizable as human remained.
‘I’m getting a lot of pressure here at home,’ Waggoner said. ‘A lot of American corporations are concerned about having their assets privatized over there. They’re thinking that the Saudis are going to be drilling wells with their equipment, then selling it to China or India. Needless to say, that doesn’t make anyone here happy.’
‘That’s going to happen,’ Webster said. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it if Khalid wants to do that. Unless they’re willing to pay the oil prices here, which I’m betting will be raised in the near future.’
‘They’re going to be less enthusiastic about paying inflated oil prices there when it’s been pumped through equipment they financed or built and claims they’ve located.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe it’s time to let Prince Khalid know that we can play hardball too.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘As you pointed out, we’ve got a Marine expeditionary force and the US Navy not far from here. It could be time for us to flex a little muscle.’
Waggoner was silent for a short time. ‘I’m not entirely satisfied that we’re there yet.’
‘I understand, but the longer we wait, the harder this is going to be to get control of.’
‘I know, I know.’ Waggoner sucked in a deep breath and expelled it. ‘Do we know if a Shia assassination team is even behind the attack?’
‘No. The prince insists that it was a Shia cell.’
‘No one had eyes on those people?’
‘No. Prince Khalid has found a trail that leads back to Shia extremists.’
‘Are they extremists?’
Webster approached the desk where his laptop lay open. ‘According to the CIA, they are.’ He glanced at the faces displayed on the screen.
Eckart and his men had found the ‘Shia terrorists’ nearly a month ago. They had actually been Shia businessmen operating in Financial City. During their surveillance, Eckart had sent pictures to Webster, who in turn had paid a computer hacker to insert the images into files at Langley. Overnight, they had become terrorists, but that hadn’t been revealed until the night they had killed the Saudi king and his firstborn son.
‘We knew about these people?’ Waggoner demanded.
‘We did, Mike, but we didn’t know they were going to do this.’
‘Or do it so well.’
‘No, we didn’t.’ Webster sipped his whiskey. It was bourbon mash from Tennessee and he took it straight. The fiery liquid burned the back of his throat.
‘If we could find these guys, prove it was them, do you think the prince would be satisfied with his pound of flesh?’
Webster watched the violence scroll across the television. More news, much of it directly linked to the fighting in Saudi Arabia, scrolled across the bottom in ticker-tape fashion. The death toll mounted almost every minute. Back on one of the new stations, a reporter on the ground covering an armed conflict was shot down. The cameraman got it all, then took off running for cover. Judging from the tumultuous way the camera flipped through the air and landed so suddenly, Webster didn’t think the cameraman made it.
‘It’s not just about Prince Khalid and his father,’ Webster said. ‘Not any more. Even if we could calm the prince down, do you think the Shia would back off at this point?’
‘No. But maybe we could open up peace talks.’
‘Because those have worked so well the past.’ Webster let the sarcasm sound in his voice.
‘We’ve got to do something. If the situation in the Middle East gets torn completely to shreds, the United States might not be able to withstand the economic repercussions.’
‘I know. You’re forgetting who wrote most of the Middle East diplomacy scenarios we’ve been working with while you’ve been in office.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten, Elliott. I just hoped it would never come to this.’
An excited smile spread across Webster’s face. He felt it stretch his lips. He hadn’t thought things were going to be so easy, or that President Waggoner would ever concede to the desperate measures they had concocted.
‘We’re not ready – our country isn’t ready – to give up our dependency on oil,’ Webster said calmly. ‘Steven Napier is close to a solution. But even when he has an alternative fuel source that works as well as we need it to, converting the United States over to that alternative fuel source is going to take time. We need time. That time was one thing you and I both agreed on.’
‘I know. I do know. And I still agree. I just don’t like where this leaves us.’
‘We didn’t leave us here, Mike. We didn’t leave the American people without recourse. Khalid did. If you’ll keep that in mind, that will turn everything around for you.’
‘Not entirely, Elliott. If we do this, a lot of lives are going to be affected.’
‘If we do nothing, a lot of lives are going to be affected. There’s no getting round that.’
Waggoner didn’t speak.
‘The American people – our people – are depending on us to do the right thing,’ Webster said. ‘And the right thing isn’t letting Prince Khalid hang us out to dry or start a religious war that may leave the whole Middle East disrupted for years, if not generations.’
Waggoner didn’t say anything.
‘Let them fight over whatever they want to out here,’ Webster said. ‘They’ve been doing that ever since the first one of them picked up a rock. No matter how much we try to civilize these people, they’re never going to tolerate someone who isn’t them.’
‘If we do this, if we – God help me – invade that country-’
‘Not invade, Mike. We’re only going to make sure the whole world isn’t disrupted. Someone has to. Otherwise, we won’t have heat in the winter. Our elderly and our children will freeze, our industries will lapse into recession. And these people won’t care. They don’t have to because we’ve always handled them with kid gloves.’ Webster set his empty glass down on the windowsill. ‘The world is always divided into us and them. Only civilization allows for one us. If these people can’t be civilized, then they have set themselves up against us.’
‘This is still a big step.’ Hesitancy vibrated in Waggoner’s voice.
‘Genocide isn’t an acceptable retribution,’
Webster said. ‘And that’s what Prince Khalid intends. That’s what all these countries over here intend. Retribution. Destruction. Winner take all.’
‘We can’t live like that.’
‘No, Mike, we can’t. Our people can’t live like that. Do you want your children growing up in a country without hope, without a future?’
‘Of course not. I just keep hoping there is some other way.’
‘If there was another way, I’d let you know. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you trust me?’
‘I always have, haven’t I?’
‘Then trust me now.’
Gazing into the window, Webster saw his reflection highlighted by fires burning aboard luxury vessels moored in the marina. Webster didn’t know if the fires had been started by Shia resistance or by Sunni military units seeking to do as much damage to Shia property as possible. In the end, it didn’t really matter. The flames just needed to be fanned.
Webster licked his middle finger and thumb and smoothed his eyebrows into place. ‘Mike? Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s get this done. Let’s set the hounds loose and let them hunt. We don’t have to get our hands dirty, and we’ll come out of this looking like heroes.’
Across the world, the President of the United States took a deep breath and let it out. Webster listened to the sound and knew he had the man right where he wanted him.
In fact, nearly everything was right where he wanted it.
‘All right,’ Waggoner said. ‘Make your calls.’
‘I will.’ Webster smiled at his reflection. ‘Everything will turn out okay, Mike. I’ll make a believer of you yet.’
‘Call me as soon as you know something,’ Waggoner told him.
‘This will take some time. Keep your chin up. We’re going to win.’ Webster broke the connection then started calling numbers he knew by heart.
Catacombs
Hagia Sophia Underground
Istanbul, Turkey
19 March 2010
The tunnel was only wide enough for them to walk comfortably in single file. Lourds’ head kept knocking against the low stone ceiling. Only the sound of shoes scuffing the stones beneath their feet and their breathing echoed within the tunnel. All else was silent as a crypt – a crypt like the room where the elder monks of the Brotherhood of the Scroll had willingly paid the final price to protect John of Patmos’s secret.
The Lucifer Code Page 24
