by J. B. Turner
The newsroom was hushed as Harry spoke. Apart from the sound of his voice there was only the occasional fax machine whirring or phone ringing unanswered to be heard. His message was brief and to the point.
Whatever happened, Sam was a newspaperman first and foremost. The rest of them had to do their jobs. He would expect nothing less.
Back in his office, Harry tried the number again. This time there was an answer.
‘Sorry to call,’ he said. ‘It’s Harry Donovan of the Miami Herald. Look, I have a problem. We need to talk.’
There was a slight hesitation. ‘I’m out of the country…can’t this wait?’
‘Someone knows about Andrew. How is that possible? You told me no one would ever—’
‘Hold on, Harry. What are you talking about?’
‘I want to keep my personal life private. I thought that was part of the deal.’ Harry explained the situation.
‘Okay, okay. I’ll put in some calls. If it’s someone at my end, then they are in deep shit. I’ll get to the bottom of this. We value you, Harry.’
‘I hope you do. Because if I don’t get some answers and reassurances I will be going straight to the feds about this. Do you understand me? Deal or no deal.’
‘Don’t do anything rash, Harry. That would not be a good idea. I’ll get back to you by the end of the day.’
Harry called back just before six. But this time the tone of the man at the other end wasn’t conciliatory. ‘This is far more complicated than I thought at first,’ he said.
‘So what’s the bottom line?’
‘Harry, I say this as a friend,’ the man replied, clearing his throat, ‘but there are powers at work here over which we have no control. I cannot protect you anymore. I’m sorry. You need to do what is right for your family’
‘So that’s it, then? You’re cutting me loose?’
‘Don’t call this number again. I can’t help you. You’re on your own.’
32
The dark sky outside the hospital window was beginning to lighten. Slowly, miraculously, Sam began to open his eyes, as if he was afraid of what he’d see.
Deborah gazed at him for several moments. Then she smiled and kissed the back of his hand.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’re back. And you’re safe.’
Sam stared at her. Then gave a small nod.
Deborah leaned close and kissed his unshaven cheek. ‘I knew you wouldn’t leave me, Sam.’
There was a flicker of his distinctive world-weary smile.
Deborah immediately rang the buzzer beside the monitor. A few moments later there was a flurry of activity as the medical team checked his chart, the monitors and the ventilator and decided on a new set of assessments.
‘What the hell happened?’ she heard Sam croak.
• • •
The arrival of Sam’s sisters Lauren and Miriam was a big relief for Deborah. They hugged her and thanked her for never leaving him before they sat either side of their brother, holding a hand each as he lay back and smiled at them. Deborah was close to exhaustion. But she remained with Sam’s sisters, content to watch over him, stroking his hair and telling him everything was going to be all right.
But Deborah did make sure to call the Herald.
In no time at all, a buoyant Harry Donovan turned up, regaling Sam and his sisters with old newsroom gossip. Then he had to dash back for the usual morning meeting. ‘The news doesn’t wait for an old newspaperman playing hookey,’ he said with a grin as he closed the door.
A short while later Byron, the Herald’s legal counsel, turned up. He didn’t stay longer than the regulation fifteen minutes, and Deborah accompanied him to the elevators.
‘Thank God he made it,’ Byron said. ‘The place is not the same without him. Or you, for that matter.’ He squeezed her arm. ‘Get some shut-eye. You look like you need it. Oh, and tell Sam,’ he said, as the elevator doors opened, ‘that he got the go-ahead.’
‘Go-ahead for what?’
‘Opa-Locka. We checked things over. It’s all fine.’
• • •
Deborah’s decision to get back to work was met with incredulity by Faith. Unable to persuade her to reconsider, she insisted that Jamille Powers, who’d visited the hospital the previous night, accompany her and stay with her too.
Although welcoming the idea, Deborah felt slightly intimidated by the six-foot Overtown goalkeeper, a former kick-boxing champion who had worked in the late 1990s as a bodyguard for Jennifer Lopez and Cher. Prior to that she had been a tough street hooker in her neighborhood. But she had cleaned up her act, like all the soccer girls, and now had a Master’s in political science from the University of Miami and was in the final year of her PhD. According to Faith, Jamille’s IQ was ‘off the scale’, although she always ‘carried her little gun, just for emergencies.’
Meanwhile the apartment had been cleaned up by Faith and the girls, the locks changed. Deborah recharged her cellphone and after a quick shower she put on some fresh clothes—T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. Then she went down with Jamille to the car.
• • •
Opa-Locka had been built in the 1920s and boasted some of the finest Moorish architecture in the world. Minarets, domes and outdoor staircases dominated the city skyline, but the days of grand visions in this forgotten outpost of Miami were long gone. Now Opa-Locka was synonymous with despair, drugs and gang violence.
Dusty palms lined the streets and graffiti adorned shuttered shops, but the street dealers and gangs were nowhere to be seen so early in the day.
It had been a picture-postcard town when it had first been built, but all that had changed once the US Navy shut down its base at Opa-Locka airport. The slow decline had begun in the 1960s. The white middle classes had moved out, and the poor blacks had moved in.
Crack cocaine had transformed the area at night into a war zone, especially the Triangle, a nine-block hellhole torn apart by gangs toting AK-47s. Recently a young mother who’d gone out to get milk for her child had been shot dead by an anonymous sniper. Also, a five-year-old girl, whose family had been fleeing the area with a police escort, had been killed by a sniper’s rifle—drug gangs fired at anything that moved.
The secure self-storage facility was situated just off Railroad Drive, five blocks from Duval, a notorious intersection with Lincoln Avenue. Drive-by killings there were commonplace. The place even attracted gangsters from Carol City, trying to make a name for themselves.
Jamille’s car jolted over a pothole. ‘Goddamn it,’ she muttered.
She accelerated down 22nd Avenue past run-down housing complexes, then down 152nd Street near the railway line—windows barred, disintegrating sofas rotting on sun-bleached front yards—and then along Railroad Drive.
A billboard for the secure self-storage facility indicated that they were ‘only 500 yards away’.
The vast parking lot was empty, except for one car. This was no state-of-the-art facility swept by security cameras and patrolled by guards.
A young black man wearing an ill-fitting suit was nodding his head behind the security glass. He took off his earphones when he noticed the two women.
‘Here to pick up some of my things.’
‘Got ID?’
Deborah shook her head.
‘Sorry, ladies, but I can’t let you in. Company rules. Very strict on that.’
‘Look, it’s for a friend. I’ve got the passcode.’
‘Like I said, we got rules. And the rules say if you ain’t the keyholder, you ain’t getting in. End of discussion.’
‘Gimme a break, will you? This is important.’
The young man just shrugged. ‘Sorry, lady, but it ain’t my problem.’
Jamille stepped forward and smiled. ‘Tell me, honey, what’s your name?’
‘Reggie Purcell, ma’am.’
‘You from around here?’
‘No, ma’am. Hialeah. Bo
rn and bred.’
‘Thought you looked familiar. You’re cute. Didn’t we hook up at that big party thrown in Hialeah couple of years back? If I remember right, you said you lived on East 56th Street.’
‘You must’ve gotten me mixed up with someone else, ma’am.’
‘No, I’m good with faces. I distinctly remember you saying you lived two doors down and that there had been a double shooting three days earlier. Kinda freaked me out. I asked you to walk me home.’
The young man gave a shy grin and casually scratched the back of his head. ‘I don’t think so. I live with my folks on East 8th Street. Sorry to disappoint.’
‘So you’re not going to help us, is that what you’re saying?’
‘You got it.’
‘Okay, we’ll see about that.’ Jamille turned away and pulled out her cellphone. Then she punched in a few numbers.
‘I’m sorry – what are you doing?’ Reggie said behind the glass.
‘Calling your head office to complain about your attitude.’
‘My attitude? Lady, there ain’t no attitude from me.’
Jamille kept her back to him, phone pressed to her ear as she examined her nails.
‘You trying to get my ass fired?’ Reggie flipped open the plastic hatch that was there for parcels to be handed through. ‘I said what are you—’
Jamille spun round and grabbed Reggie around the neck, her fingers gripping his throat like a vice. His face was pressed up to the plastic, eyes wide and petrified, as she held him tight. Now, I don’t like coming on all heavy, honey, that’s not the way I work. All my friend was asking for was to be allowed through to pick up her friend’s belongings. A simple request.’
‘What the hell you doin’?’ he rasped. ‘I ain’t authorized to let you in without ID.’
Jamille squeezed a little tighter and the young guy screwed up his eyes. ‘Reggie, I now have your name, and the street where you live. You understand where I’m coming from? So stop being so officious and just let us in.’
Reggie shook his head. ‘Please…I can’t…I’m going to college. I need this job. I’m a good kid.’
‘Then do the right thing, Reggie. Let us in. And no funny business. Got it?’
‘Okay…okay.’ His eyes were watering. ‘We’re cool.’
Jamille released her grip. ‘There’s a good boy.’
Reggie pressed a buzzer, opening a side door that led into a cavernous metallic warehouse full of hundreds of lockers of different sizes. They headed down the first aisle, then spotted a sign for 61-70. Locker 62 was at eye level.
‘What the hell were you doing, Jamille?’ Deborah asked. ‘That was downright brutal what you did to that guy.’
‘That ain’t brutal, honey. That was a choke hold learned in judo class.’
‘But the guy was just doing his job.’
‘Yeah, whatever. Just open up the goddamn locker, Deborah, so we can get the hell out of here.’
Deborah took a deep breath before entering the code. There was a click and she pulled open the locker. Inside was a battered blue Nike backpack. She unzipped it to find a plastic protective folder that contained the documents. She didn’t check the contents. That could wait until she and Jamille were safely back at the apartment.
• • •
‘So, what’ve you got here?’ Jamille said as Deborah unzipped the transparent plastic folder.
Deborah stared at the front page of a Congressional dossier and felt her heart quicken. Below that there was a CIA report, the familiar seal with the bald eagle against a blue background at the top. ‘The woman at MIT who taught John Hudson mentioned that he was obsessed with the twenty-eight missing pages in the Congressional Report into the September 11 attacks. This must be it.’
‘No wonder they wanted to keep this quiet,’ Deborah said eventually. She whistled. ‘They’re identifying a Saudi princess who runs some Islamic charities here in the States as one of the main backers of the September 11 attacks!’
‘Shit!’
‘I read the original report cover to cover. Came in at eight hundred-plus pages. Caused quite a storm at the time because people were well aware that no one wanted to mention the fact that members of the Saudi royal family were funding Al-Qaeda. We want their oil, they want our military hardware. Very cozy.’
Jamille pointed to the top of the page. ‘Does this name mean anything to you?’
‘Omar al-Bayoumi. Sure. Apparently he was living on the West Coast just before September 11. He was employed by the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. He was based in San Diego and met two of the 9/11 terrorists in Los Angeles. They lived right across the street from him. He gave them money. Allegedly! Bit of a coincidence, right? There was a massive investigation by the feds, and the guy was cleared.’
‘Princess Hind al-Bassi.’ Jamille pointed to another name.
‘She’s the one. We need to find out everything about her,’ Deborah said.
‘That Hudson boy’s death was no accident, Deborah, was it?’
‘Never in a million years. Look, it says here that Islamic Health Centers she funded ended up giving money to some of the September 11 attackers. Apparently the princess has several homes in America, including one in Palm Beach. We’ve got a Florida connection.’
‘So, what’ve we got here?’ Jamille said, examining the CIA report. She read the title aloud. ‘A Fallback Position—an Unacknowledged Special-Access Program (SAP) entering discussions with Al-Qaeda.’
It took them about half an hour to read through all the information.
Deborah shook her head. ‘This is mind-blowing. The CIA has a secret plan to enter into discussions with Al Qaeda if a military solution can’t be found. I’m going to courier all this to Harry Donovan.’
Jamille raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that wise?’
‘We can’t keep this secret any longer.’
33
Deborah sat at her laptop for the next six hours. She Googled Princess Hind al-Bassi. She also accessed the Miami Herald’s vast archives and put in a call to Sam’s old friend McNally. Slowly but surely a picture began to emerge. The princess was a reclusive super-rich woman who lived in Palm Beach, surrounded by a coterie of servants and advisers, in a palatial white marble mansion that had been built three years earlier, costing a cool twenty-six million dollars. Her nearest neighbors—about a mile from her fifty-acre estate—included Donald Trump and a former member of Led Zeppelin.
It was clear that she had channeled money through the 9 /11 attackers but, amazingly, had not answered one single question about her involvement, according to secret FBI documents obtained by McNally from a source on Capitol Hill. On eight separate occasions the FBI had taken her in for questioning but had released her without charge. A leading FBI investigator concluded in a report that she was being ‘protected by people on high’.
It emerged that the princess was the sister of the Saudi oil minister, no less, who himself was the eldest son of the current king. And she was highly educated. After Downe House, an exclusive all-girl boarding school in Berkshire, England, she had studied art history at Oxford. And then she’d moved to the States, to do a Master’s in medieval art at Princeton.
She had remained single but, like the majority of people in Saudi Arabia, she adhered to Wahhabism, the strict theological interpretation of the Koran.
She was aged thirty-five. For the last eight years she had set up a variety of Islamic health projects in the States, but she’d also funded, according to the missing twenty-eight pages, at least two of the 9/11 attackers to the tune of nearly two hundred thousand US dollars. And she had underwritten the cost of building Islamic religious schools—madrassas—in Pakistan. Many of the Taliban were educated in such Saudi-financed schools. She had also contributed funds to build mosques in North Africa—including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia—which were known to support Jihadists for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he
r first foray into funding the madrassas in Afghanistan started way back in the 1980s, when she was at college in England. From these Islamic schools a wave of young Muslim men emerged who, tacitly backed by CIA dollars, were organized to fight first the Soviet Union—before they turned their attention to the West.
Deborah remembered reading about a major fraud investigation into bribes involving a British systems manufacturer and the Saudi government which had to be scrapped because the Saudis had threatened to pull the plug on a multibillion-dollar fighter-plane order.
Deborah turned her attention to the Simmons file. It wasn’t long before she unearthed a little nugget of information. It transpired that Dr Simmons had apparently worked as a consultant for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He had been assigned to look into the deaths of prisoners held by the CIA or their sub-contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
‘How much do you wanna bet that Simmons was asked to go up to New York and do the autopsy?’ Deborah said. ‘Above the head of the local Chief Medical Examiner? The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology is an agency of the Department of Defense. Their HQ is based in Washington.’
Jamille shook her head.
‘You know what the problem is, Jamille? There is just so much information that I don’t know where to begin. There are two separate stories—perhaps three, if we consider Simmons.’
Her cellphone rang and she picked up. ‘Deborah Jones,’ she said, rolling her eyes at Jamille. ‘Sure, Harry I’ll be there in half an hour.’
• • •
The remnants of a pale pink Biscayne sunset filtered through the conference-room blinds. Deborah felt strangely nervous as she sat across the table from the Herald’s executive editor.
Harry adjusted the large knot in his paisley-pattern tie. ‘Have you lost your mind, Deborah? Well, have, you? Aren’t you on indefinite compassionate leave?’
Deborah shifted in her seat.
Harry put on his half-moon spectacles and flicked through the copies of the papers that had been couriered to him earlier by Deborah. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that your investigation into the deaths of John Hudson and Richard Turner had been shelved. I’m at a loss to understand this. I’ve watched your meteoric rise, Deborah, and I’ve never, ever had any problems with it. But I take the responsibilities that come with being executive editor at a major American newspaper very seriously and I’m damned if I will allow you to disregard the paper’s line, whether you are Sam’s girlfriend or not.’
