So they found where Ibrahim Haddad lived. So what. Haddad no longer existed.
Sydney, Australia
Friday, 3 August
Morgan Taylor’s bulletproof limousine, shuttled aboard one of two C-5s, now powered through the highways from Glenbrook Air Force Base to Sydney. Actually, three limos left the belly of the Galaxy transports. Two of them were decoys; one was the true presidential limousine. For nearly sixty kilometers, they jockeyed position in a high-speed shell game. Sometimes decoy number one moved in front. Then an identical car took the lead before it dropped back in favor of one of the others. They made the move so many times that it would have been difficult for an observer to tell which limo carried the president.
As the cars approached The Ville St. George, one limo peeled off and entered the underground garage. The president’s?
The two remaining cars continued at full speed with police and military escort. A kilometer away, the second limousine broke for the Park Hyatt on Hickson Road. The third did the same a minute up the line, pulling into the Marriott Sydney Hotel, a block away from the harbor.
This ruse was the design of Presley Friedman, the president’s Secret Service chief. The St. George was out of the question. He didn’t want to put the president up in the other hotels either; not this trip. But Morgan Taylor needed to stay somewhere, so it was decided he would eventually end up at Kirribilli House.
Since 1957, Kirribilli House has welcomed royalty, heads of state, and Congressional and Parliamentary members, in addition to serving as the residence for the Prime Minister and his family.
Taylor changed modes of transportation in an underground loading dock at the Park Hyatt. He completed his ride in a laundry van.
When it came to safety, the usually boisterous Taylor remained quiet. He didn’t argue with Friedman. Taylor wasn’t the boss of this part of the trip.
The New York Times
the same time
“Hello, this is Michael O’Connell. I’m with The New York Times and…”
“I’m sorry. I’m not interested in a subscription.”
O’Connell often got this reaction when he didn’t explain what he did fast enough. “I’m a reporter working on a story about Elliott Strong. Is this Bill Bueler?”
“Yes,” the caller responded with trepidation.
“Well, can I speak with you for a few minutes?”
O’Connell found his first lead through the Grants, New Mexico, Chamber of Commerce. Bueler was an old deejay, presumably around the time that Strong worked at the same station. Now he was a manager at a local McDonald’s.
“Strong, you say?”
“Right. You worked together about eighteen years ago.”
“Can’t help you,” Bueler interrupted.
“Just a few questions.” O’Connell said lightly. “I understand you had the morning shift. Strong followed you.”
“I don’t remember.” It was a cold response.
“Oh? Didn’t you spend some time together?”
“I said I don’t remember.”
O’Connell sensed real hostility. “Mr. Bueler, it’s really a simple matter. Strong’s gone onto become one of the nation’s most popular syndicated hosts. I’m sure that you…”
“It was a long time ago. A lot of people came and went.”
“Strong used Grants as a jumping-off point for a station in Arizona.”
“Once and for all, I can’t help you.”
“Can’t or won’t, Mr. Bueler?”
“Goodbye, Mr. O’Connell.” The former deejay hung up.
Sydney, Australia
Government House
Saturday, 4 August
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first session of what we trust will be an historic conference,” Prime Minister Foss said resolutely. “We have a great deal of work ahead. Preliminary sessions with members of our staffs have paved the way. Now it is our job to forge a new South Pacific Alliance—a model for the four corners of the world that will proclaim we stand united against terrorists and those nation states, individuals, organizations, or even corporations that support or shelter them. Ironically, it is an ancient Arab proverb that best describes our union—‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ I see new friends joining us at this table. May we all have the resolve to make the world safer.”
Foss looked around the State Room of the Government House. The Colonial Building, the most sophisticated example of Gothic Revival in all New South Wales, had been closed to the public since Australia’s SASR approved it as the secure site for the summit. In attendance were leaders from seventeen nations including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, the United States, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Foss removed his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves.
“What do you say we get to work?”
The New York Times
The New York Times reporter tracked down Marcy Ripenberg in Prescott, Arizona. It was a brief call. Ripenberg didn’t want to talk about Strong. But as she hung up, O’Connell was certain he heard the word, “fucker.”
His next series of phone calls focused on a similar set of characters in Phoenix, Arizona—an old program director who was out of the business and another former secretary Strong slept with, Sheila Stuart. She was the first person who was really willing to talk.
“Yeah, he was a real mover and a shaker. And I’m not just talking about his announcing,” she said through a fit of coughs. She sounded like she’d smoked for far too long. “I knew he wasn’t going to spend much time here. Just passing through.” She laughed. “Phoenix and me.”
O’Connell ignored the comment. “Where did you think he was going?”
“To the top. Any way he could.”
“What kind of person was he?”
“He read like crazy. Sometimes I couldn’t get him to put his book down, no matter what I did.”
“And what did he like to read?”
“That’s a very good question. Is this going in the newspaper?”
“Possibly.”
“Oh. You’ll leave out the part about…”
“Yes.”
She coughed more. “Tons of history. I guess it was for his radio show. He was always quoting this president or that president. I couldn’t keep them straight, but Elliott knew them all. And nothing could break his concentration. Not even when I was under the desk when he was…. You won’t use that either, will you?”
“No.”
“On account of my husband,” Stuart added.
“I understand,” O’Connell replied. “But it sounds like you really wish the two of you could have made a go of it.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right. But I wasn’t part of his plans. Never really was.”
“He was that talented?”
“Talented? I don’t know about that. He was good. But he was better than good. He was lucky.”
O’Connell bolded luck on his computer notes. It was the second time he heard it in context with Strong.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she added. “He was damned good on the air. He could think fast and, for someone his age, he really had a knack for politics. But it was the accident that helped him the most.”
“What accident?” This came out of nowhere.
“The crash. The car crash that killed Buck Roberts, the drive time, you know, the afternoon host. Elliott was doing weekends. Roberts was heading home one night and he ran off the road into a ravine. Killed. Just like that. Elliott got called to cover the next day. It was just before an L.A. outfit bought the station. They were putting together a regional block of stations. A month after Elliott took over for Buck, he was on seven stations. That’s what I call lucky.”
“Damned lucky, Mrs. Stuart.”
Washington, D.C.
the same day
“Now what?” Roarke asked Shannon Davis.
“We wait.”
“I hate waiti
ng. I’m not good at it. Besides, what do we wait for? For Cooper to say, ‘Here I am!’ That’s not going to happen.”
Davis put his feet up on the table in a conference room in the White House basement—their war room. They knew who the enemy was, but aside from the story leaked to The Times, they didn’t have a clue what to do next.
“Start with the assumption that he saw the report. He could go into deep hiding, which would be the smartest and easiest thing. Does he do that, or does he come after us?”
“Not us. Me,” Roarke corrected. “He knows me by sight now and I’m sure he’s realized I’m after him.” Roarke craned his neck, moving his head from shoulder to shoulder. He felt tense and frustrated. He finally sat down next to his friend. “That means he’s more likely to go on the offensive.”
Neither man added to the conversation for two solid minutes. Roarke finally broke the silence. “Another assumption: Cooper’s got more than enough money to live his life out. He also has the ability to pass himself off as just about anybody.”
“So that and his shoe size are supposed to deliver him to us?”
“No, it won’t. As far as we’ve seen, this guy doesn’t do a thing without surveillance and preparation. There’s a better-than-fair chance that he’s the most skilled assassin that’s emerged in a long time. And if he’s not the most skilled, he’s at least the most careful.”
“Which leaves us at square one.”
They sat quietly for another few minutes, sharing only deep, frustrating sighs.
Davis tried another approach. “We do know his assignments came from a man named Haddad. What if we announce we’ve caught him, that he’s talking to us. That might snarf him out.”
Roarke didn’t like the idea.
“Okay then, we pull in Cooper’s parents. Hold them on conspiracy charges. Hell, they might even be involved and…”
Another no from Roarke. “Unless we catch the right man, with the proper proof, the press will fry us. Remember, it’s been a year since he killed Jennifer Lodge and six months since he shot Teddy Lodge. The story’s already off everyone’s scope. We bring in the wrong man and the FBI takes the fall. Probably the president, too.”
“So I guess that’s it,” Davis said getting to his feet. He reached for his dark blue suit jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair. Roarke had nothing to add that would keep the conversation going.
“Write if you get work,” Davis said. Roarke saluted with two fingers.
That was it. They were in the middle of a chess match, not knowing whether the other guy even wanted to play. To make matters worse, the opponent was winning.
The New York Times
the same time
The impact of being on one Houston radio station was far greater than the seven New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada stations. That’s where Elliott Strong went next. O’Connell spoke to Linda Dale Lockhart, the retired media critic of The Houston Chronicle. She was quite familiar with O’Connell’s writing, which made it easier for him.
“Yup, he was in this market about eighteen months, maybe closer to two years,” the critic remembered. “He stirred up all sorts of shit. I think he really found his voice here—a pretty angry one at that. As I recall, he never had guests—not that he had to. When they threw out the Fairness Doctrine, stations had no reason to broadcast balanced shows. So a lot stopped trying. But as I understand it, there was a loophole, anyway. Call-in shows weren’t really governed by the Fairness Doctrine.”
“No?” This was different from what O’Connell had generally heard and what most critics understood.
“Well, presumably by inviting a cross-section of the community to express their opinions, the scope of the opinion broadened—at least on paper. Of course, things were tame back then anyway. Who knew where it was all going? It was all pretty local. Now? Seems whoever’s the loudest gets the most attention. And for a while in this market, Strong was the loudest of them all.”
“How so?”
“Well, remember, he was preaching to the converted. That’s what talk-show hosts generally do. But he must have slipped something in Houston’s Kool Aid, because his ratings took off here.”
O’Connell asked the next question with some notion of what he might hear.
“Would you describe him as lucky?”
“Funny you mention it. Now that I think of it, yes.”
“How so?”
“Well, let’s see, he was on the number-two talker in town. The number-one was a powerhouse station with a bona fide Houston legend. Race was his name, Bill Race. Well, he had a heart attack. 44.”
“He died?”
“Yup. Deader than a doornail. And Strong moved right in on his audience.”
O’Connell kept the critic engaged for a few more minutes, but he had learned enough.
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
the same time
“What about other prints from Haddad’s condo?” Mulligan asked Bessolo.
“Some illegals on the cleaning staff. And one that matched a California driver’s license.
“You have a name with that?”
“Ali Razak.”
“Razak.” He spelled it. “No police record. We’re checking with the IRS on anything they may have. I have a picture of him from California. I’ll forward it up to you. A big guy.”
“Big, like bodyguard big?”
“Try Godzilla.”
Chapter 62
The GAO report was more of an indictment than a study. The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accounting Office, charged that the Pentagon couldn’t reconcile where all its Category I weapons were. Translating the GAO paper into people-speak, the military simply did not know how many Stinger missiles—believed to have been shipped to the Middle East during the Gulf War and through the subsequent war in Iraq—were missing. Inventory records of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) differed from GAO’s physical count, not by dozens or even hundreds, but by thousands of missiles.
Since 1970, several hundred thousand MANPADS were manufactured and issued to American military. Thousands were sold internationally through the Foreign Military Sales Program. Problems in record keeping, storage, theft, and black market trade revealed that the armed services could not account for the actual number of missiles that had been in their stores. The reason? Lax reporting on serial numbers of MANPADS produced, fired, destroyed, sold, or transferred.
To put it another way, there are better records on who owns America’s laptop computers than who’s holding Stinger missiles capable of downing an aircraft.
And what of personal arms? In Vietnam alone, some 90,000 semiautomatic pistols were abandoned by American combatants during the troop evacuation. Add to that 791,000 M-16A1 rifles, 857,600 other non-classed rifles, and thousands of other weapons, including 550 tanks, the total of arms left behind reached an estimated 1,882,238.
The number of deaths these weapons have inflicted by guerilla fighters and terrorists around the world is impossible to calculate because there are no end-use controls that prevent them from getting into the hands of undesirables. The potential destruction from the MANPADS on the market is even worse and less excusable.
More recently, a combat theater commander in the Persian Gulf relaxed administrative requirements permitted by operational regulations, which ultimately led to missiles being transported on unguarded trucks and driven by third-country nationals. In addition, ammunition sites were left wide open.
In Europe at one depot, facility managers’ records recorded that 22,558 Category I missiles were in storage. The GAO counted 20,373, a frightening difference of 2,185 missiles. The GAO’s conclusion, enumerated in GAO/NSIAD-94-100:
“It is impossible to accurately determine how many missiles are missing at the item manager or storage level because the services did not establish effective procedures to determine what should be in their inventories.”
In hard numbers, it is estimated that one percent of the worldwide total of 750,000 MANPADS—or 7,500 missiles—were beyond the control of the U.S. military or formal governments. Luis Gonzales had two.
Paris, France
Sunday, 5 August
The wires picked up the New York Times story. Cable news ignored it. There were no visuals. But the foreign press took note. Two days after Michael O’Connell’s brief article ran, The International Herald gave it a paragraph on page six.
The United States Army has reopened an investigation into the deaths of seven members of a Special Forces team killed in Baghdad, September 2004. The combatants died during a devastating apartment building explosion. Reports at the time indicated that it was a trap. The exact reason for renewing the inquiry is unknown, but a Pentagon source told The New York Times that some irregularities have recently surfaced…
Canadian Robby Pearlman sipped his latte on the balcony of his suite at the Hotel Meurice. He looked over the Tuileries and the city beyond. It was the Vancouver real estate developer’s third trip to Paris. By far, it was his best.
The tall, athletic businessman turned back to the bedroom where a 26-year-old blonde lay naked on the bed they shared. They’d met the previous afternoon at the Louvre, on a Da Vinci Code museum tour. She was on holiday from London where she worked as a teacher. She was hoping for a suave Frenchman, but the handsome, soft-spoken, well-read Canadian caught her eye.
She slept as he read the newspaper and contemplated what to do.
Lebanon, Kansas
the same time
“Bring your cell phones with you and call in. And you can text message friends, because I guarantee you, it’s going to be too loud to hear any rings.” The phones were an important component to the real success of the Bridgeman March on Washington.
Executive Treason Page 41
