The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

Chapter 40 — Suez

  The sea outside the Palmera Beach Resort was as smooth as a desert sand dune, though of a deep hue of cobalt, and it reflected the brilliant cumulus clouds above the water. It was a sultry day. The French doors of the villa were open, admitting a gentle sea breeze. Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb sat on his Bellini prayer rug on the tiled floor and watched the sun’s shadows shorten before noon and then start their lengthening slope. It was time for dhuhr prayers.

  Though his daily times of prayer usually cleared Al-Greeb’s mind and brought him to a serene focus, today he could not get a phrase out of his mind, it kept repeating itself again and again like a taunt. He could almost hear the whispered voice of Salah ad-Din Yusuf bin Ayyub, the great jihadi battle commander, personally admonishing him: ‘Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.’

  How had he failed? And what could Al-Greeb salvage from the disaster in Jerusalem? To be attacked by infidels was expected, but to be betrayed by a fellow Muslim was an abomination.

  The name Mahmood Mahmood came to his mind, the ISI spymaster whom he had never fully trusted, but whom he had distantly apprised of his plans. Was this the enemy he had failed to know? Surely he knew himself? Others were to blame for the failure of the attack on the Dome of the Rock.

  After prayer, Al-Greeb asked his driver to take him into Suez. For this purpose, the driver used an SUV he had rented from the hotel, not the windowless panel truck used for the drive up from the Coptic monastery at Al-Zaafarana. Al-Greeb wanted to see the Aegean Apollon, the vessel upon which he had sailed, with its precious cargo, all the way to Jeddah. The ship was still moored offshore Port Tawfik, surrounded by Egyptian Navy tenders.

  Military authorities were shooing away photographers from shore when the SUV pulled up to the water’s edge.

  “This is a restricted zone!” Al-Greeb heard one of the officers shouting at those taking photographs.

  “You do not have permission to take pictures!”

  “We should leave this place,” the driver whispered to Al-Greeb. He nodded, barely aware of the contretemps that had alerted the driver to danger. Closer to shore, salvage workers were raising a sunken passenger vessel, the El-Salaam, by splitting it into parts and lifting it with cranes.

  “Take me to get some tea,” Al-Greeb said. “And park this car. I need to walk.”

  The driver cruised around Port Tawfik until he came to a marina for small personal sailing craft at the end of El Riad Street. He parked the SUV and followed Al-Greeb as he wandered along the edge of the marina, keeping a few paces behind him. Over a low fence, a circular swimming pool was filled with laughing children. Al-Greeb went to the terrace of this building, a hotel, and sat at a table beneath a bright yellow beach umbrella.

  Al-Greeb was beginning to feel the return of his accustomed sense of inner calm and control. He would return to Pakistan immediately, he thought, and begin the planning for the next campaign. Al-Zawahiri was finished as a credible leader. It was time for a new leader of the Al Qaeda jihad. As for failure, what was each individual failure but a successful step toward eventual victory?

  The World Trade Center bombing had taken ten years and two separate campaigns to bring to a successful conclusion. Was the first effort to bring down the towers a failure? Or was it a necessary step leading to the second effort, which resulted in the collapse of both towers?

  Was it surprising, then, that his first effort at jihadi nuclear warfare had ended in ‘failure’—who was to gainsay the Will of Allah, or even attempt to look at the world through His eyes? If events unfolded in a certain way, then that was necessary proof that this was how it was meant to be. There were no accidents in the unfurling of Islamic destiny.

  Al-Greeb motioned to his driver, who was standing at a discreet distance, that he wanted to go indoors. He still had not got his tea and there were no waiters serving in the area covered with the beach umbrellas. He made for the rear entrance of the hotel, a pair of glass doors leading to a narrow lobby. There, he asked an attendant for directions to the restaurant; he learned it was on the sixth floor of the hotel. So much the better, he would have his view of the Aegean Apollon denied him by the photographers on the quay.

  ***

  Kate Langley and Mahmood Mahmood were sitting at a table by a window commanding a broad view of the harbor where the Suez Canal debouched into the Red Sea. Both were tired, but each of them was alert. It was Mahmood who saw the bony figure of Yasser al-Greeb, made ghostly by his white thawb, enter the Red Sea restaurant and head for a table also by the bank of windows overlooking the sea, accompanied by his driver.

  “Your long-expressed wish may be granted,” Mahmood whispered enigmatically. Kate looked at him, not understanding.

  “Have you not told me so many times that you wished to interview Yasser al-Greeb? The man himself has just entered this restaurant.”

  Kate blanched, thinking first that they were both about to become victims of a suicide bomb. Mahmood gently shook his head.

  “I don’t think that is the end our friend has in mind for himself,” he said. “He burns too brilliantly in his own universe to serve as cannon-fodder.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Kate said. She looked carefully over her shoulder.

  At this moment, Al-Greeb’s eyes met Mahmood’s. Al-Greeb stiffened, but a moment later proceeded slowly toward the Pakistani brigadier.

  “You are far from home,” Mahmood said.

  “I am never far from home when I am near Allah,” Al-Greeb said pleasantly in heavily accented English he had picked up in Amman. “And this must be the famous gunwoman who dispatched my namesake in Quetta last February.”

  “I had hoped to interview you, not shoot you,” Kate said.

  “Can you join us?” Mahmood said, motioning to any empty chair. “We have been waiting patiently for the Egyptian authorities to let us examine your ship, but so far they have not been accommodating.”

  “I was drawn here for the same reason,” Al-Greeb said. “I wished to see my vessel for the last time. The means by which I effortlessly breached many international frontiers.”

  “You were an elusive and always challenging target,” Mahmood agreed. “I think you might have gained enormous sympathy in the Muslim world had you stuck to the original plan, to keep the bomb on board your ship in the middle of the Canal and negotiate for status.”

  “That was never my plan,” Al-Greeb said smoothly. “That was the thinking of the Egyptian wet-nurse back in Peshawar. Defeatist thinking. Collaborative thinking. Pragmatic thinking that relied on compromises with the West to succeed. That is not my way.”

  “Still, it seemed to be getting a fair mount of public sympathy,” Mahmood persisted.

  “It is dishonorable of you to debate strategy with me,” Al-Greeb said pleasantly, “when it is you yourself who betrayed me to the Americans.”

  “Actually, I did no such thing. You misled me yourself,” Mahmood said. “You told me you were adopting a plan that would have substituted intelligence for bloodshed. I am quoting your exact words.”

  “Your way is the way of appeasement and failure,” Al-Greeb said in a whisper.

  “And yet Pakistan is a sovereign nation with a modern army and with weapons as mighty as those possessed by the West,” Mahmood said. “We have achieved equality, at least in some ways. I would much prefer that we had also purchased a better living standard for our citizens.”

  “Equality! There is never equality!” Al-Greeb said. “There are only winners and losers, victors and the vanquished.”

  “And so what are you then?” Kate asked.

  Al-Greeb glared at her, his black irises gleaming. He had been speaking directly to Mahmood and seemed not to have even acknowledged her presence at the table.

  “I am the vindication of my people,” Al-Greeb said calmly. “What I have attempted once, I can succeed at a second time,” he added.

  Al-Greeb rose quickly and motioned to his driver, who had been standing a few feet
away, out of earshot. He began walking briskly toward the entrance of the restaurant.

  “Shouldn’t we raise an alarm?” Kate asked.

  “On what grounds? In this part of the world, Yasser al-Greeb surely has better credentials for survival than we do,” Mahmood said. “He might end up having us arrested, not the other way around.”

  “So he just walks away?”

  “Not only walks away, but he is free to plan his next attack.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better just to follow him downstairs and shoot him?”

  “I doubt that very much. It might buy some time, but you forget that it is the allegiance so many millions give to Al-Greeb and his like that is the source of their power. If Muslims all over the world worried less about where their next meal comes from, perhaps we would defuse it.”

  Kate thought that was the sort of thing an American philosopher might say, and at the moment it seemed irrelevant. A dangerous man was escaping. A criminal!

  “I want to follow him anyway,” Kate said. Her hunter’s instinct was so strong she could barely sit still in her chair.

  “This is the wrong place and the wrong time, Kate. I have a feeling you are going to get another shot at this man soon enough. Learn to be patient.”

  “But I’m not patient!” Kate was on her feet before she finished speaking the words.

  ***

  At the entrance to the hotel, traffic was congested on both sides of El Riad Street. Though he was not the only Arab wearing a thawb, Al-Greeb was thin enough and his quirky, marionette-like gait distinctive enough for Kate to pick him out easily as he moved toward the harbor on foot, his driver following behind him. And Mahmood was a few steps behind her, shadowing her but not interfering with her movements.

  “This is a mistake,” Mahmood said loudly enough for her to hear. “One should choose the time and the place when one responds. Your own president has said so many times.”

  “Sometimes you just play the hand you’re dealt,” Kate said. “I can’t just let this guy walk away.”

  She reached the corner of El Riad and the main thoroughfare that carried traffic into and out of Port Tawfik, the Avenue of the 23rd of July, but she could see no sign of the tall Arab in the white robe. She went the other way, toward the water and the jetties.

  Kate took up a slow trot so as not to attract the unwanted attention she would surely draw by running. She reached a block of elegant red-tiled mansions with direct access to the waterfront, but still there was no sign of Al-Greeb. Then, she thought she saw him ahead near the water, a tall, striking Arab with a traditional checkered square keffiyeh held in place by the black and gold coil of cords. He was approaching a 70-foot Austal aluminum catamaran police tender flying the Egyptian flag and manned by a cluster of Egyptian police and military officers.

  By the time she reached the harbor-front, the Austal police boat was pulling away from the jetty. Soon, it was speeding away, perpendicular to the water’s edge, at twenty knots.

  Kate stood at the edge of the jetty watching the receding vessel. Mahmood joined her and put his arm gently upon her shoulder.

  “That was him?” Kate asked. “Boarding the Egyptian police boat?”

  “He has powerful friends,” Mahmood said softly.

  A cool breeze blew off the Red Sea. Tourists were promenading along the Corniche. It seemed even to Kate that all was well with the world.

  About The Author

  The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage is Francesca Salerno’s first work of fiction, though she has been an avid reader of spy novels since she snuck Ian Fleming’s James Bond paperbacks out of her father’s library as a child in Geneva. They helped her to learn English, she recalls.

  Francesca Salerno, the charming and stylish Swiss-born wife of a European diplomat, is an 18-year veteran of the travel industry who has worked as a travel consultant and advisor in three European capitals and Los Angeles. Before her marriage, she managed a major worldwide tour guide operation based in London. After the birth of her first child in the mid-1990s, she realized that planning vacations for her friends and incentive travel opportunities for her husband’s colleagues was more fun than work, and she quickly resumed her career.

  Françesca and her husband spent two years on an official posting in Tunis. Over a period of more than twenty years, she has traveled extensively in North Africa and the length and breadth of the Southern Mediterranean basin, lingering especially in her three favorite nations of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.

  Françesca and her family apportion their time between a gracious, bucolic home nestled in the vineyards of Napa Valley, California, and an elegant duplex apartment in the Via Cola di Rienzo in Rome. They take advantage of the standing offer of a family friend to make use of a lovely residence in Casablanca’s exquisite Triangle d’Or, and they continue also to visit frequently the grande luxe hotels of Tunis and Algiers, capitals where they have friends and colleagues of long standing. Françesca is an ardent swimmer and snorkeler who much prefers the warm Med to the chilly Pacific.

  Françesca has published two previous books on Amazon Kindle. The first was Your Best Vacation In North Africa and the second is titled A California Cookbook, both published in 2013.

  You can write to Francesca at: FrancescaSalerno21@yahoo.com

  May I Ask You For A Book Review?

  Word of mouth is crucial for any author to succeed. If you enjoyed The Pakistan Conspiracy, please consider leaving a review at Amazon, even if it is only a line or two. It would make all the difference and would be very much appreciated.

  Thank you!

  Françesca Salerno

  PS – And do please follow me on Twitter! @FrancesSalerno1