‘Khalid! Abdul! Come back inside, both of you!’ Hayrinisahan scolded, covering her mouth and nose as a thick cloud of dust swept into the house, settling on the elegant Uighur carpets covering the walls.
A short while later, Hayrinisahan’s face paled as the sounds of systematic gunfire rent the air. Friday prayers at the little village mosque would have finished and although she’d expected her husband, Ali, to be home by now, he often dropped in to see Khalid’s parents and was sometimes a little late. She hadn’t worried unduly.
The day before, one of Ho’s soldiers patrolling in the village square had been knocked down and killed by a runaway horse.
‘Make an example of them!’ Captain Ho ordered. ‘That house over there!’
Twenty Chinese soldiers stormed into Khalid’s house, rounding up Khalid’s mother, father, uncle, brother and his little sister. With his mother crying and his sister screaming in fright, they were roughly paraded in front of the captain.
‘String them up!’ he commanded, ‘and leave them there for three days, so these people learn how to keep their animals under control.’ Captain Ho caught sight of the village Imam in the door of the little mosque. ‘And set fire to their mosque,’ he added with a sinister smile. ‘Perhaps Allah will help them put it out.’
Khalid woke with a start. The images of his mother and father, uncle, brother and baby sister, their heads twisting grotesquely as they swung from wooden poles beside the burned down mosque were seared indelibly on his soul.
Khalid’s forward scout scanned the foothills below. He’d seen a movement behind a large rock that stood sentinel-like on a bend ahead. The scout moved forward cautiously, keeping off the narrow, rocky track, alert in case the infidel had chosen to put in an ambush. He caught the movement again, a shadowy figure with a weapon, and he stopped, holding his position on the dominating high ground.
CHAPTER 5
THE SITUATION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC
A s Agent O’Connor had predicted, his explanation of the mushrikeen and the Muslims’ belief in only one God infuriated President Harrison, especially when he compared it with the Christian worship of the Trinity: God, his son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
‘This is a Christian country with Christian values, and we need to smoke these little Muslim terrorists out of their hideouts and round ’em up,’ the President responded angrily, in no mood for a theological discussion on the Qu’ran.
As a plan, it was a little short on detail. O’Connor said nothing.
‘I couldn’t agree more, Mr President.’ The video link to the Vice President in Atlanta, despite going through a complex series of unbreakable encryptions, was clear and the image of the Vice President seemed to dominate the entire room. ‘I’ve just finished addressing the National Rifle Association, and you have their full support. This is just bluff.’
‘In the meantime, Mr President, we’ll need to make a public response,’ Dan Esposito stipulated.
Curtis O’Connor reflected that it had not taken President Harrison’s powerful and cunning little advisor long to reduce a discussion on a terrorist threat that might affect millions of lives to one of politics and votes.
‘We will need to reassure the public that Kadeer is bluffing and stick to the agreed line that we are winning this war on terror and that it is a war that is crucially important for all freedom-loving people around the world.’ Dan Esposito’s voice had a touch of steel, daring anyone, including the President, to disagree with him.
‘I don’t think Kadeer is bluffing, Mr President,’ Curtis O’Connor said quietly, glancing towards the camera so that the Vice President would also be left in no doubt as to what O’Connor thought of his views.
‘And what facts do you have to base that on, Officer O’Connor?’ Esposito spat the words across the room.
Curtis O’Connor suppressed a wry smile. The use of his CIA rank was a none-too-subtle reminder from Esposito that opinions that did not support the White House line were not welcome. The Administration and the Party’s private polling was probably a lot worse than what was being published, Curtis thought to himself.
‘I’ve been involved with Islam and Islamic terrorists for nearly twenty years, Dan,’ Curtis replied, ignoring Esposito’s bullying rank tactics. ‘Dr Kadeer is not only a brilliant microbiologist, he is a deep thinker and philosopher and his threats should not be dismissed lightly. He trained as an undergraduate in Beijing and he did his doctorate at Harvard. He knows this country well and knows how to strike fear into the population. His hatred of both the West and the Han Chinese is deep-seated, but his struggle is not confined to the West and the Chinese. Kadeer is first and foremost a Sunni, and although he is very tolerant of other religions, he is committed to a return of the Caliphate.’
‘Meaning?’ President Harrison’s exasperation was reaching breaking point, but he wasn’t the only one in his Administration who was struggling to comprehend Islam. Most of his senior advisors and his own cabinet had completely misjudged what might be driving Jihad, the call to action amongst the Islamic fundamentalists or Islamists as they had become known. Some of the cabinet, including the President, had not realised there was a difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.
Curtis again answered calmly. ‘Islam is translated literally as “surrender”. A true Muslim surrenders his or her entire being to Allah, and strives to meet Allah’s demand that human beings treat each other with justice, equity and compassion.’
‘You’ve got to be fucking joking,’ Esposito muttered.
O’Connor ignored him. ‘For Kadeer, the future of Islam depends on its ability to return to its past. For thirteen centuries, until 1923, Islam was always responsible to a supreme authority. The last such authority able to trace his lineage back through Baghdad and Damascus to the Prophet Muhammad was the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet VI in Istanbul. In 1922-’
‘Mr President,’ Dan Esposito interrupted, irritated that they were straying from the main game of winning the next election but the President held up his hand for silence.
‘In 1922,’ Curtis continued, ‘Ataturk overthrew the last Sultan and replaced the Caliphate with a secular government and moved the Turkish capital to Ankara. Kadeer is a Sunni, and he wants to re-unite Muslims under a single Caliphate which not only pits him against the West but also against Shiite countries like Iran and large parts of Iraq and Lebanon.’
The President and more than one member of his cabinet were still looking puzzled.
‘The Sunni-Shiite divide dates back to the death of Muhammad in 632,’ Curtis explained. His mind was racing as to how he might distill the long-running feud into a few simple sentences. ‘The Sunni are those who accept that the Caliph can be elected for his qualities of being the most competent and knowledgeable to lead Muslims by the Sunna – or the laws of the Prophet – and when the Prophet died they prevailed with the election of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, as Muhammad’s khalifah or representative. The Shia, on the other hand, have always believed that the Caliph should have a lineage back to Muhammad’s family, and the Prophet’s cousin Ali, who was not elected as the fourth Caliph until 656, only to be murdered in 661. Kadeer knows it’s a huge ask to achieve unity but despite the arguments over succession, in terms of what they believe, Sunnis and Shiites have much in common and he’s still prepared to try. In that sense Kadeer and bin Laden are united. Both are Sunni and for them the end of the Caliphate was a catastrophe which the West has only exacerbated by attacking Iraq and supporting Israel against Lebanon and Palestine.’
It was too much for the Vice President, and once again he dominated the room from the video screen. ‘Mr President, is any of this relevant? A Muslim is what a Muslim does and that’s attack our freedom and our democracy!’
‘What’s your point, Mr O’Connor?’ the President asked, looking even more confused.
‘Not long after September 11, on 7 October 2001, bin Laden made a video broadcast over al-Jazeera, not unlike the one we have seen today. I
n it he declared that “What America is tasting is only a copy of what we have tasted… Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Like bin Laden, Kadeer is deeply offended by the presence of our troops in the revered and holy lands of Saudi Arabia, and his speech today only underlines his outrage over what has happened in Iraq and Lebanon.’ O’Connor could feel the hostility of those around the table but he didn’t hold back. This was a rare opportunity to urge the President of the United States to change course. Curtis O’Connor had an uncommon ability to look at any given situation through the eyes of his enemy, and he was convinced that if he let this cabinet believe Esposito’s spin that Kadeer was bluffing, it would be another deadly mistake.
‘Whatever you may think of Kadeer’s religious beliefs,’ O’Connor said, ‘he holds to them strongly, including the belief that the end times have been predicted in the Qu’ran.’ O’Connor was tempted to observe that Dr Kadeer was not the only one who believed that the twenty-first century and the looming clash of civilizations heralded the end times. Biblical prophecies about a rapidly approaching Armageddon and ‘the rapture’ were also being aired by some of the President’s own equally fanatical religious advisors. Advisors like the Reverend Jerry Buffett who had unprecedented access to the Oval Office. Curtis noticed that the President was becoming increasingly agitated, and he decided to bring his forceful briefing to a close.
‘Kadeer has made a number of lesser threats in the past, and,’ O’Connor concluded solemnly, looking at Esposito and towards the camera at the Vice President, ‘he has always carried them out. The only difference this time is his final solution. When he issued the threat of a single strand meeting its double, he used the words “if Allah wills it”. He has not used that terminology before and it may mean he has yet to complete his plans for the final attack.’
O’Connor was not to know that he had got that part of the puzzle right. Although Kadeer had not yet secured everything he needed to put his final solution in place, he was ready to implement his series of warnings. He had not only issued a demand for coalition forces to be withdrawn from Muslim lands, he had brazenly pinpointed the exact location of the first warning attack. Neither Curtis O’Connor nor anyone else in the CIA had yet been able to decipher the deceptively simple code that gave this location. There was also a clue to the final deadly assault and if the nature of it wasn’t yet clear, it would be in time; a conspiracy that would have its zenith in Beijing, driven by the threat from Islam and by the rise of China. With chilling calm, Dr Khalid Kadeer had revealed he was close to acquiring the means to annihilate a large part of the human race.
CHAPTER 6
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
K ate Braithwaite tossed restlessly in her sleep in the small, one-bedroom apartment the government had provided for her in Atlanta. She’d drifted back to her boarding school days at St Catherine’s in Sydney and, as usual, her challenging mind had got her into trouble, this time with Sister Agnes, the history teacher. The lesson had been on wars and violence in the twentieth century. In 1987, Kate was in her third-last year at high school.
‘In summary,’ the stout and severe-looking Sister Agnes said, ‘Idi Amin was responsible for the murder of nearly a half a million of his countrymen; Pol Pot murdered three million people – a third of Cambodia’s population; Joseph Stalin was responsible for the deaths of twenty million, a million of whom were executed; Mao Tse-tung, somewhere between fifteen and twenty million; and Hitler, sixty million as a result of the Second World War, including six million Jews murdered in his Nazi gas chambers. In the twentieth century, somewhere between 170 and 200 million people have already been murdered or killed as a result of war and violence, and with Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, that number is likely to increase. On that rather depressing note, does anyone have any questions? Yes, Katherine.’
‘Sister, the one common denominator in all this carnage is that the perpetrators were all men, and in more recent wars, such as those in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, where religion is a major factor, once again those inciting the violence and bloodletting are men. It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s Islam or Christianity. In our own church the leadership is always male. Don’t you think we females deserve a go, surely we couldn’t do any worse than the men?’
A titter rolled around the room.
‘I’m not sure what you mean by deserving a go, Katherine, but I will thank you not to cast any aspersions against the leadership of our Holy Church,’ Sister Agnes sniffed haughtily. ‘Now, for homework
…’
Kate was invariably at the top or second-top of her class in every subject except one. Every annual report had marked her down for religion.
Kate tossed onto her side as her dream changed tack.
‘What’s this “Religion – a disappointing attitude”?’ her staunchly Catholic father demanded after he had summoned Kate into his study on ‘Bulahdelah’, the family’s 30,000 acre sheep property on the New England Tablelands west of Armidale.
Kate shrugged, unable to tell her puritanical father that she’d lost the faith he’d instilled in her since as long ago as she could remember.
‘Well?’ her father demanded. Dalton McKenzie was a big man in every sense of the word. His square, weatherbeaten face was flushed, as it always was when he was angry. He’d been elected Mayor of the Armidale Dumaresq Council on no fewer than three occasions and was known throughout the district for his no-nonsense conservative National Party views. Once again, his disappointment with Kate surfaced. When Kate’s diminutive mother Muriel had produced a son and heir for her husband, the baby had been stillborn. Kate’s father had made no effort to hide his disappointment when the doctors told Muriel McKenzie she would not be able to have any more children.
‘I don’t see why we always have to agree with what the nuns teach us,’ Kate replied finally. ‘Why are the leaders of religions all men?’
‘There’s only one true religion, Katherine, and that’s the Catholic faith,’ her father replied angrily. ‘The leaders are men because the Bible says so, something you would obviously do well to read more often, young lady.’ Dalton McKenzie reached for the old family bible with its cracked and worn leather cover that held pride of place on his desk. Opening it at Saint Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, he began to read from Chapter Two. ‘Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing
…’
‘One day you will meet someone and be able to establish a home for him and provide him with a family. Until then, I suggest you guard that unruly tongue of yours. Now go to your room!’
Kate stormed out of her father’s study, angry that she was fighting back tears and determined he wouldn’t see them. She had long ago come to terms with having a father who hardly gave her the time of day, although if she was honest with herself, deep down she still craved his approval. Kate slammed the door to her room and, as she often did when she felt alone in the world, she sat down at her desk, took the cover off her most prized possession and switched on the Nikon microscope that had been a Christmas present. Her father had been puzzled by her request but in the end he’d agreed. Cookbooks would have been far more appropriate, but if his daughter wanted to muck about with bugs, maybe it would make her happy. Kate’s tomboyish qualities only made him feel more acutely the disappointing loss of a son.
Kate tossed again in her sleep as her dreams shifted to Tiananmen Square. Standing at the Tian’an Gate, which separated the square from the Forbidden City, Kate gazed south across the vast flat snow-covered expanse of the largest paved square in the world. It had been designed to hold a million people, yet today the square was eerily deserted. In the distance people we
re fleeing the city in their tens of thousands. A 38-metre high obelisk, the Monument to the Peoples’ Heroes, stood in the centre of the deserted square. Beyond it, on the southern edge, Kate could see Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum – a large, low building supported by pillars where the great tyrant’s embalmed body lay in state in a rose-coloured glass enclosure. To the west, the Great Hall of the People dominated while the eastern side of the square was flanked by the National Museum of China, the roof adorned with dozens of huge red national flags with the big yellow star and four smaller stars in one corner. The large paving stones seemed to be moving, and the reason for the people taking flight soon became clear. The snow on the great square was covered in millions of wriggling, deadly Ebola viruses. The long thin strands were curled at the end and Kate could see that the capsids – the protein covering that protected the virus’ nucleic acid – were finely textured, another characteristic of the filovirus with no known cure.
The images of Tiananmen Square faded to the Forbidden City and the huge pagodas of the old Imperial Palace. Knobbly, grenade-like smallpox viruses were bouncing down the steps of the Taihe Dian, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and into the vast snow-covered courtyard. Thousands more people were fleeing in front of the smallpox and Ebola, their bodies covered in raised, bleeding pustules, blood streaming from every bodily orifice.
Kate sat up in bed, shocked by her dream and wondering what it meant. She looked at her watch to find that she’d been asleep for less than two hours. Had she known about a meeting that was about to take place between the Vice President of the United States and Richard Halliwell she would have realised that the cosmos was warning her of what was to come.
The Beijing conspiracy Page 3
