The Beijing conspiracy

by Adrian D'hage

  ‘He’s a prick. More dangerous than a warren full of rattlesnakes on heat,’ Curtis replied. ‘He’ll probably make a good politician one day, although he won’t get any help from his father-in-law.’

  ‘Who is?’ Tom raised an eyebrow.

  ‘The Speaker of the House, Davis Burton.’

  ‘Halliwell’s married to the Speaker’s daughter?’

  Curtis nodded. ‘Burton can’t stand him although the Speaker’s out of step with his colleagues. Halliwell throws some of the biggest parties in Washington and he’s got a lot of support in the Republican Party.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time Davis Burton’s been out of step,’ Tom observed, his admiration for the veteran politician coming to the fore. ‘I’ve briefed him many times. He’s a thorough gentleman and very sharp, and he’s about the only one who’s making any sense on Iraq,’ he added.

  ‘Neither the FBI nor Inland Revenue are convinced Halliwell’s operating within the law,’ Curtis concluded, ‘and they’re quietly watching him, but given Halliwell’s connections they’re very wary. He and the Vice President are as thick as thieves.’

  ‘What’s your view?’

  ‘I think there’s a lot more to Halliwell than the current intelligence indicates. My gut feeling says he needs watching.’

  CHAPTER 31

  THE VINEYARD COUNTRY CLUB, CALIFORNIA

  R ichard Halliwell’s helicopter preceded the President’s onto the landing pad at The Vineyard Country Club in the Napa Valley. No one in the imposing clubhouse took the slightest bit of notice. Helicopters landing at the club were almost as common as the large black limos in the car park. The Vineyard Country Club boasted three 18-hole championship courses set in a forest and vineyards that took up 40 hectares of some of the most expensive land in Napa County. The President’s visit had been kept quiet, and the Secret Service had deliberately chosen the third of the three courses, which for the last two days had been closed for a ‘visiting dignitary’. Although it was lined with tall redwoods and coastal oaks, the ‘new 18’ was more easily protected as the surrounding countryside beyond its boundaries was more open. Nothing had been left to chance. Dog squads had combed the rough and the bushes on the course the day before. They had found nothing more sinister than 40 new golf balls their owners had been too lazy to look for. A military helicopter manned by snipers equipped with long range rifles and stabilised mounts was patrolling in the distance. For those charged with the President’s security even a game of golf was an expensive logistical nightmare. Not that a visit by the President of the United States could be kept secret for long.

  One of the club’s billionaire octogenarians, Otis J. Lynberg II, had lodged an official complaint with the Chairman, Palmer Weinberger. Visiting dignitaries should be invited to play elsewhere, he’d snorted. Later, when he’d spotted the President alighting from Marine One, Otis had immediately sought out Palmer again, wholeheartedly endorsing the President’s visit but expressing his displeasure that members were given no advance warning. He’d become even more irate when he was told that members were not going to be presented to the President. It was precisely the sort of scenario Dan Esposito wanted to avoid.

  ‘What a pity the cameras aren’t around when you want them!’ the President said, his voice raised in enthusiasm as he watched his drive off the first tee bounce down the middle of the long par five fairway.

  ‘Nice shot, Mr President,’ Richard Halliwell acknowledged grudgingly, as he prepared to tee up behind his host. The first tee was nearly half the size of a bowling green, and the immaculately kept turf was on top of a raised mound, three sides of which were protected by weathered sandstone. Halliwell stepped back from his ball and assessed his drive. For the first 200 metres the fairway dropped away towards a treacherous hazard – a deep creek that could only be crossed by walking over a quaint little stone-arch bridge. From there the fairway climbed a gently undulating slope to a huge green nestled in among stately redwood pines that were more than a hundred years old. He lined up his driver and adjusted his stance. He stared at the white ball imagining it represented GlaxoSmithKline. The silence of the first tee was broken by a sharp whistling sound as Richard Halliwell tried to get his ball past the President’s.

  ‘That’s big trouble in there, Hal!’ President Harrison shouted with the enthusiasm of a small boy in the middle of a marbles match. Halliwell’s lips compressed into a hard, thin line as he watched his ball take on a vicious hook and disappear into the thick rough underneath the trees just short of the creek.

  ‘It’s not over until the fat lady sings, Mr President,’ Halliwell replied, struggling to keep the jocularity in his voice. Much to the President’s amusement, Dan Esposito nearly put his ball in the creek but at the last moment it bounced into the trees on the opposite side of the fairway to Halliwell’s.

  Halliwell combed the thick rough, trying to keep his agitation in check. Finding his ball in here would need a small miracle, he thought, and he was not one to believe in miracles. He took a quick glance back towards the fairway. Dan Esposito was in the rough on the far side and the President was giving him stick from his cart about 20 metres away. The Secret Service agents were all scanning the sides of the fairway ahead. Choosing a small clear area, Halliwell put his hand in the pocket of his golfing slacks, undid the zip that he’d had his tailor sew in the pocket and dropped a brand new ball down his trouser leg. He always played with a number one that was embossed with the gold Halliwell ‘H’, and as the ball rolled into a depression he gently moved it into a better lie with his foot.

  ‘Want some help, Hal?’ the President called.

  ‘Got it thanks, Mr President.’ Richard Halliwell walked back to the cart he was sharing with the President and selected a five wood. Moments later he watched with satisfaction as he drilled his ball over the creek and up the slope to within striking distance of the hole.

  ‘Nice recovery, Hal,’ the President shouted. Richard Halliwell waved his golf club in acknowledgment.

  ‘Number three, Mr Esposito?’ the Secret Service agent asked, looking at the partially buried ball. The Secret Service agents assigned to protect the President detested the arrogant little advisor. Esposito waddled over and grunted. ‘Stupid fucking game,’ he muttered, but ‘Whatever it Takes’ was Esposito’s motto in politics and in life and if today that was a golf game, then so be it.

  While the President and Richard Halliwell played golf, both men yet to discuss their plans to change the course of history, satellite imagery from the top-secret National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia was on its way to Pakistan where a more violent and menacing history was about to be written.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE OFFICE, CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  T he National Reconnaissance Office or NRO top-secret satellite ground station connected to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain, and to many other similar stations besides – had a large plaque on the wall of the command centre. It was inscribed around the edges with ‘National Reconnaissance Office: We Own The Night’. The logo looked like something out of science fiction, but since September 11, a lot of science fiction and reality had become indistinguishable. The inner circle of the plaque was black with a pair of sinister-looking owl’s eyes peering out from behind a silver mesh that was identical to that on the Lacrosse series of satellites’ wire mesh antennae. The logo was a reminder to the operators hunched over their high-resolution screens that dozens of sophisticated US satellites were orbiting between 300 and 40,000 kilometres above the Earth, their cameras turning night into day. Some, like the Defense Support Program satellites controlled by the US Air Force operated in the infra-red spectrum to detect missile launches. Others were capable of reading the numbers on a letterbox. In the NRO command centre, Iraq was still dominating collection priorities, and the KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites were sending back real-time information as they passed over Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and othe
r Iraqi cities every hour.

  The Lacrosse satellites, codenamed onyx, vega and indigo, and weighing a massive 15 tonnes, were in a relatively low orbit – 650 kilometres above the earth. Travelling at over 6 kilometres a second, with huge power-generating solar arrays the size of the wings on a 747, the synthetic aperture radars were peering through clouds and weather that might have made targets hard to detect. Right now, a satellite from a sister program – the highly classified advanced KeyHole series KH-11 – was directly over Baghdad on its midday pass over the city. Launched from a massive but expendable Titan IV rocket and costing more than $1.5 billion, KH-11 was also the size of a school bus and its cameras operated in the near infra-red and thermal infra-red spectra, which enabled it to see at night, as well as operating in the visible light spectrum for daylight surveillance. The photostream could detect someone wearing a pistol, but even though the satellite cameras could pierce through clouds and bad weather, there was still no way for them to determine what vehicles might contain explosives.

  Iraq was not the only place in the world being examined in minute detail, and another bank of computers further over was linked to the KeyHole series footprinted over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. A few hours ago the huge satellite had passed over Peshawar and the nearby foothills of the Hindu Kush. The real-time photos of a white van with Hyderabad Laundry Company emblazoned on the side, approaching what looked like a dirt-poor village didn’t mean anything to the operator, but like thousands of other images that might be connected with the new war on terror, the file was marked for transmission to Langley, just in case.

  Rob Regan ran his hand through his hair and stared at the imagery on the screen in front of him. The satellite photographs were grainy, but he could clearly make out the words ‘Hyderabad Laundry Company’ on the side of the white four-wheel drive.

  ‘What do you think a fucking laundry truck would have been doing in a place like Darra Adam Khel and why would it now be headed for Peshawar?’ he mused out loud.

  ‘Not collecting the sheets would be my first guess,’ his lanky deputy, Tony Carmello said, getting up from his own desk and ambling over to his boss’s.

  ‘Precisely. This war on terror would be a fucking sight easier if the Pakis got off their black asses and cleaned out this cesspool on their border,’ Regan grumbled.

  ‘Fat chance,’ his deputy responded. Both men knew that the Pakistani government had been unwilling to exert any serious control over the border with Afghanistan. Despite intense pressure from the United States and the UN, Pakistan had refused to regulate the madrassas, the Islamic schools that were financially supported by the puritanical Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia and other equally fanatical Islamists. Hundreds of the Taliban schools were flourishing in the North-West Frontier Province. The invective from furious and often illiterate Imams filled impressionable young minds with a burning hatred towards the West. The world was being flooded with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers, but any Pakistani leader who tried to rein in the madrassas and restrict their teaching to the real messages of the Qu’ran risked losing office at the hands of Pakistan’s Islamic hardliners and the ISI, Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, which was a strong supporter of the Taliban. In Pakistan’s relatively short history a coup was an ever-present possibility.

  ‘Have we heard from Crawford?’ Regan asked.

  ‘Not since yesterday; I’ll check what’s happening.’

  A minute later, Tony Carmello handed his boss a handset that was connected through an encryption system that no terrorist would be able to break. ‘Crawford. He says his target hasn’t left the hotel.’

  ‘Back entrance?’ the station chief asked his latest recruit bluntly.

  ‘There’s a loading dock but I’ve got that in view as well,’ the young CIA agent answered confidently. ‘The only movement out of there has been a laundry truck and that was early this morning.’

  ‘Would that have belonged to the Hyderabad Laundry Company?’ Regan asked.

  ‘I think it might have,’ Crawford replied, less certain now.

  ‘If you’re going to be successful in this game, Crawford, you’re not only going to have to think, you’re going to have to know!’ Regan barked down the phone. The long hours were taking their toll. ‘How big was the truck? What colour?’

  ‘A Toyota four-wheel drive and it was white,’ the young agent replied nervously.

  ‘Get yourself up to Peshawar and find it because right now I’ve got satellite imagery that tells me a white four-wheel drive Toyota belonging to the Hyderabad Laundry Company is headed towards there and something tells my end of nose that it might be the same four-wheel drive you watched leave this morning. When you do find it, I don’t want any fucking heroics. Just keep it under surveillance and see if you can find out what they’re up to. And be careful. Peshawar isn’t a tourist resort.’

  ‘Whatever they’re up to, I think you’re right, it’s got fuck all to do with delivering clean linen,’ Regan said when he’d hung up the phone. Sometimes, all a CIA agent in the field had to go on was a hunch, but hunches based on years of experience sometimes paid off.

  CHAPTER 33

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  W hen will the contingency plan for a terrorist attack on the Beijing Olympics be ready?’ Tom McNamara asked O’Connor, turning the focus away from what Richard Halliwell might be up to.

  ‘We’re still developing the possible scenarios and our responses, but the head of the Olympic Task Force will have a draft for you within the next couple of months,’ Curtis replied.

  ‘How’s it shaping up?’ McNamara asked, keen to get the views of an agent he knew to be a straightshooter.

  ‘The biggest worry is a biological attack. Genetic engineering of viruses is a very real threat and we may not have the right vaccines. I haven’t seen anything to confirm my suspicions, but if someone like Kadeer can get hold of a bioweapon and we don’t take notice of his warnings to start negotiating, I think he’ll use it.’

  ‘At the Olympics?’

  ‘The Beijing Olympics are particularly vulnerable because for two weeks in August over three million people from hundreds of thousands of different places around the world are going to be concentrated in the one spot. Once they leave the area, if they’re carrying a deadly virus it would be like exporting a far more deadly bird flu all over the world. Although it’s not as simple as the media make it sound, Tom. You and I know that in the 1980s and 1990s Aum Shinrikyo were successful when they put plastic bags full of sarin on the Tokyo subway trains and punctured them with umbrellas, but you might remember they carried out at least nine other attacks and the only one of those that was successful was another sarin attack. The anthrax and botulinum attacks all failed.’

  Tom McNamara nodded grimly. ‘Shoko Asahara. Another fucking crackpot who thinks the world’s about to end. He and that raving lunatic Buffett make a good pair,’ he grumbled. ‘What gets me is that otherwise sane and intelligent people believe all this shit. If the Japanese police hadn’t tumbled to these whackers, they might have killed a lot more than nineteen people and what was it… 1000 wounded?’

  ‘Plus another 4000 “worried well”; although I guess we can’t blame them for being worried. When you see hundreds of people lying on the ground with blood pouring out of their noses and mouths, it’s not a pretty sight. And you’re right, if they’d had more time and if their university whiz kids had isolated the virulent strain of anthrax rather than the vaccine strain, it might have been a very different story.’

  ‘Hmm,’ the DDO grunted, ‘but did you see the final report on the Daschle anthrax?’

  Curtis nodded. ‘I’ve got my own theory on that and that was a different story. That stuff was weapons grade.’

  Curtis O’Connor and Tom McNamara had both been startled when, just six days after September 11, someone in New Jersey had mailed anthrax to the New York Post, to CBS, ABC, NBC and the offices of Senate Majority Leader, Tom Das
chle. Two mail workers in the Brentwood mail-sorting facility in Washington had died and epidemiologists from the CDC had frantically tested over 5000 employees from Capitol Hill for exposure to the deadly spores.

  ‘Whoever mailed that stuff, Tom, not only had a very high degree of professional expertise, but he or she had access to some pretty sophisticated laboratories.’ The perpetrators had been able to achieve what Aum Shinrikyo and other terrorist organisations had not. They’d been able to refine the anthrax to the point where it was lighter than air so that it would float like an aerosol mist. ‘That anthrax was not only very pure and concentrated but whoever did it found a way to coat the spores.’

  ‘Is that hard?’ the DDO asked, deferring to his younger colleague’s earlier years as a biochemist.

  ‘Very difficult. The Daschle anthrax would have had to come from a state-run facility. Outside of here and some of our allies, there are not too many labs that have that capability,’ Curtis added pointedly, suspicious that the attack had originated from somewhere within the United States. ‘Anthrax spores are ovoid, like a headache capsule, except they’re measured in microns or millionths of a metre,’ he explained. ‘You can’t see them with the naked eye but someone found a way to coat them with even smaller superfine particles of silicon dioxide.’

  In a chilling discovery that had been kept under wraps, the scientists at USAMRIID had discovered that the tiny anthrax spores used in the Daschle attack had been coated with microscopic particles of glass that were thousands of times smaller again than the spores themselves. It was the equivalent of being able to place a grain of sand on an apple, but in dimensions that an ordinary compound light microscope would not be able to detect. It would take the extraordinary resolution power of an electron microscope to even see it.