The Alexandria Connection

by Adrian D'hagé

  ‘I care deeply about him, and we share a lot of interests . . . and, dare I say it, there is a sense of adventure about him that I’m crazy for, but I take it one day at a time.’

  Ruger followed at a distance. He knew where they were going – Area 15 had already provided the address. Having cased the villa earlier, he’d confirmed that Badawi was the only occupant – no servants, not even a gardener. His plan was simple, and sometimes the simple plans were the best.

  Rather than having names, most of the streets in Maadi had numbers, and Ruger closed up on the Volvo as they drove along Street Thirteen and turned off into Street Eighty-Six. Ruger slowed as the gates on the villa swung open and he followed Badawi up his short drive.

  Ruger leapt from the car and wrenched open the door of the Volvo.

  ‘Get out of the car, both of you, now!’ he ordered. ‘Do exactly as you’re told and no one is going to get hurt. Inside the house. Move it!’

  Shocked, Aleta and the professor did as they were told.

  ‘Empty your pockets, slowly, and no false moves. You first, Professor Badawi.’

  Aleta glanced at her mentor. At first she thought they had fallen victim to one of the increased numbers of robberies taking place since the tourist dollar had dried up. Now she wasn’t so sure. If their assailant knew their names . . .

  Ruger pocketed Badawi’s mobile phone. ‘Now yours, Doctor Weizman,’ he said, pointing his gun at her.

  ‘Into the study, both of you,’ Ruger ordered

  Once in the room, he turned to the professor. ‘Open the safe.’

  Aleta’s heart sank. It was becoming clear what the purpose of the robbery was, but she had no way of knowing what was to follow. She and the professor would soon be bound and gagged, and headed for Corsica.

  50 Lucas Heights Nuclear Reactor, Sydney

  ‘Look what they’ve done for Allah in Melbourne, Iqbal!’ Hazim Gerges, the younger and more fiery of the two jihadis, almost spat the words at his fellow terrorist, Iqbal Safar. ‘Why are we waiting?’

  ‘There’s been nothing posted on the stamp website. We were told to wait.’

  ‘We don’t even know who we’re waiting for, Iqbal. He’s probably dead by now. Look at the carnage in Melbourne, Alhamdulillah . . . thanks be to Allah!’ Gerges pointed to the television. The coverage of the chaos had been non-stop since the attack.

  ‘We have the explosives, wire cutters, and thanks to our contact on the inside, we know where to put them. We need to move, Iqbal! Are we soldiers for Allah? Are we Mujahideen or not?’ The term literally meant struggle.

  ‘We are Mujahideen,’ Safar agreed. ‘We’ll go tonight.’

  Safar kept to the speed limit as they drove out of Liverpool and south along Heathcote Road. It was after midnight and the traffic was light and Safar drove steadily around a long sweeping bend.

  ‘That’s the intersection,’ Gerges said excitedly, as the New Illawarra Road, which would have taken them to the entrance to the nuclear reactor, loomed up on the left.

  Safar slowed and extinguished the lights as he pulled off the shoulder into a spot they’d reconnoitred earlier. It was partially hidden from the highway. They quickly extracted from the boot their big backpacks filled with explosive, AK-47 Kalashnikovs and wire cutters, and together they headed into the bush toward the reactor, Safar leading.

  Safar checked his compass. ‘It’s a little over 200 metres to the fence, Hazim,’ he said. Ten minutes later, they reached the fence at a point near Einstein Avenue, and Safar went to work with his heavy wire cutters.

  Back on the highway, a police patrol car picked up the terrorists’ parked car in their headlights.

  ‘What do you reckon that is, Sarge? Abandoned?’ Constable Murphy mused as he slowed.

  ‘Dunno . . . pull in behind it and we’ll run a rego check.’ New South Wales patrol cars were equipped with the most sophisticated image-recognition cameras available, and hundreds of thousands of registration plates were fed into the police central computers every day, identifying stolen cars – and a surprising number that were not registered.

  ‘Registered to an Iqbal Safar at an address in Liverpool, so he’s local,’ Constable Murphy said.

  ‘Run a check on him,’ Sergeant Willis replied, shining his torch into the vehicle.

  ‘Nothing unusual inside the car,’ he said.

  ‘And no criminal convictions, Sarge, but he’s on ASIO’s radar . . . spent time in Syria, but they couldn’t pin anything on him.’

  ‘Ordinarily I’d say he might have broken down,’ the alert sergeant remarked, ‘but he’s parked as far into the bushes as he could get it, and the bloody reactor’s only about 200 metres in through there. Put a call through to Security. Tell them we don’t want to be alarmist, but just in case.’

  ‘Move it, Iqbal,’ an agitated Gerges urged his partner. ‘There are cameras on this fence.’

  The phone rang in the central security guardhouse.

  ‘Okay,’ Bill Sullivan said, ‘thanks for the warning.’ The duty guard checked the screens. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he swore. His colleague looked up from his paperwork. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘The southern border fence near Einstein Avenue,’ Sullivan said, pointing to the screen. ‘Sound the alarm, and grab your weapon.’

  ‘They’re on to us!’ Gerges said nervously as a siren began to wail. They climbed through the fence and raced toward the new OPAL reactor on the western side of the complex.

  The security car, lights flashing, came flying along Rutherford Avenue and down Fermi Street, catching the terrorists in the headlights.

  ‘You – hold it right there!’ Sullivan yelled. He and his partner both leapt from the car, pistols drawn.

  Safar had spent many months in Syria, training for just such a moment. He calmly fired two bursts from his AK-47, killing the guards instantly.

  ‘Security’s four-wheel drive . . . we’ll go in that,’ Safar yelled. He gunned the Toyota down Mendeleeff Avenue, lined up the entrance to the reactor and floored the accelerator. The vehicle bounced up the steps and the bull bar hit the doors in an explosion of glass, setting off more alarms.

  Armed with the layout of the reactor, Safar blasted his way through several more doors, Gerges urging him on from behind. They reached the reactor’s pool. Glowing an eerie blue and contained by reinforced concrete, it was precisely this design that would work in their favour. The concrete block would direct the force of the explosion into the core of the reactor, spilling the highly radioactive coolant, and exposing the core.

  The sirens were growing in the distance. Safar quickly connected the detonators to the 50-kilogram ammonium nitrate bombs in each backpack.

  ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’ the pair screamed together as Sergeant Willis’ patrol car and a second and then a third patrol car screeched to a halt and the police ran into the building, guns drawn.

  For Sergeant Willis and his young constable, it was their last day on the job. The massive explosion ripped the heart out of the reactor, and the reinforced concrete block concentrated the explosion against the core. Freed of its coolant, the core began to heat dangerously toward a meltdown, as thousands of litres of radioactive coolant escaped.

  51 CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  Barbara Murray was shown into McNamara’s office where he was following the financial carnage on Wall Street on the TV screen. They could see the despair on the faces of the brokers and traders amid the chaos on the floor of the New York stock exchange.

  ‘The Melbourne bombing sent a shudder through the markets,’ CNC’s finance correspondent observed, ‘and the London and Chicago bombings started a wholesale sell-off, but when the Australian nuclear reactor was bombed, raising the prospect of attacks on other nuclear facilities, the markets went into free-fall.’ Her face white, the normally calm and well-respected correspondent was clearly rattled. The shot cut first to the streets of a deserted Chicago, then Melbourne, and then to London, where vast areas of the city north
of the River Thames had been evacuated, including the financial district. Then there were images of Sydney, the harbourside city eerily deserted, the streets jammed with cars and vans, left when their owners fled on foot. Smoke was still billowing from the reactor at Lucas Heights, with the authorities desperately trying to contain the meltdown. Outside the hospitals, patients – both the seriously ill and the ‘worried well’ – had spilled on to the footpaths. The situation had only been made worse by the numbers of doctors and nurses who had also fallen ill.

  ‘No analyst has been brave enough to predict where this might end, but the Dow Jones has suffered its biggest one-day fall since records began,’ she said. ‘After the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the markets fell 62 per cent, but already we’re in unthinkable territory, and a short while ago, the Dow had fallen a staggering 71 per cent. It would have fallen even further were it not for some aggressive buying that once again is thought to be coming from the Crédit Group banks.’

  McNamara turned to Murray. ‘If that were the only problem we had, we could probably get by,’ he said, a grim look on his face. ‘I’ve just been advised that Doctor Weizman and Professor Badawi have been taken hostage,’ and he brought Murray up to date on the seizure of the missiles aboard EVRAN I.

  ‘Do we know who’s responsible for the kidnap?’

  ‘There’s been no announcement as to who might have done it . . . although obviously we have our suspicions.’

  ‘Pharos?’ Murray asked.

  ‘Or Crowley . . . or Crowley acting on behalf of Pharos. Crowley’s not in Dallas, and his office is saying they can’t comment on the chairman’s whereabouts for security reasons. The president’s called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, but as soon as that breaks up, I’ll clear the way for a warrant to search EVRAN’s headquarters on the basis of the missile discovery. But it’s still not a smoking gun – for all we know, Crowley may not be involved, so we’ll need some top cover.’

  ‘Where’s O’Connor at the moment?’

  ‘On his way back from Belém in the Amazon. Why?’

  ‘Because you may want to redirect him to Venice, or at least alert the Italian polizia,’ she said, passing over a top-secret summary of her latest intercepts. ‘After some months in hospital, Khan has recovered, and is now in Venice picking up what we suspect is the Tutankhamun falcon pendant from Rubinstein. He obviously still has a lot of pull in the Pakistani military, because he’s travelling on a Pakistani Air Force Gulfstream IV executive jet, and interestingly, its return flight plan is via Figari Sud-Corse.’

  ‘Corsica?’

  Murray nodded. ‘We’re still working on it, but one of those intercepts seems to indicate that he has something else to pick up . . . I can’t be sure, but it seems very odd that a Pakistani Air Force jet would be using an airport other than Corsica’s main international one.’

  McNamara read the transcript, and for a while said nothing, weighing up the risks. ‘If we alert the Italian polizia, they’ll want to bring in the Guardia di Finanza, their financial police, and that will make the media. If there’s a connection with Crowley, that may tip his hand, and put Weizman and Badawi at even greater risk . . . if they’re still alive,’ he added chillingly. ‘It’s risky, but I think we’d better get O’Connor to have a look inside Galleria d’Arte Rubinstein.’

  52 Venice

  Three a.m. O’Connor put Aleta out of his mind as he crossed the Calle Ghetto Vecchio bridge. The Campo del Ghetto Nuovo square was deserted, and he made his way silently toward the narrow cobblestoned alley, and to Galleria d’Arte Rubinstein’s entrance, a wooden door at the far end.

  O’Connor smiled grimly to himself. The entrance was unmarked and there was no sign of a burglar alarm. Perhaps the last thing Rubinstein wanted was the Italian polizia poking around his gallery and he relied on anonymity for security. If you had business with the dark side of the art world you would know where to go. The door was heavy and old, and the lock was almost as old – a ‘five-pin and tumbler’ barrel lock. He delved into his shoulder bag and extracted a small tension wrench and a selection of picks. Two minutes later, the old door swung easily on its heavily oiled hinges and O’Connor closed it gently behind him and listened. Nothing. He switched on his torch and made his way through a strangely sparse display room, down a stone passage and into a back room. O’Connor closed the door, and confident it would not be seen from the passage or square outside, he switched on the light and looked around.

  Neatness was not one of Rubinstein’s long suits, he thought, as he was confronted with two heavy desks, piled high with papers, art magazines and other paraphernalia. Set in the stone wall on the far side of what appeared to be Rubinstein’s office was the heavy steel door of an old combination safe with a single dial.

  O’Connor extracted a stethoscope from his bag, spun the dial to clear the tumblers and placed the stethoscope diaphragm on the gradations. He turned the dial very slowly to the right until the cam and lever mechanism engaged with a click. Standard 25 as the last number, he thought.

  Working slowly, as he’d been taught on his course by an old master safecracker recruited from the dark side, O’Connor rocked the dial back and forth until he picked up a soft nikt on 68. A while later, he picked up another nikt on 52 and he allowed himself another grim smile as the final nikt in his earpiece fell on 33. He quickly cleared the tumblers, and dialed in the combination. The rusty handle turned with a clunk and he swung the vault door open.

  O’Connor let out a low whistle as he recognised a Picasso, a Monet, a Gauguin and a Matisse, the proceeds of a break-in to the Kunsthal art gallery in Rotterdam in the Netherlands; but it was the old locked trunk in the corner of the vault that caught his eye.

  He had it open in an instant, and he extracted the first of several leather journals and thumbed through what was clearly one of Rubinstein’s real books of account, arranged by client, in alphabetical order. It took less than a minute to find the transactions attributable to Crowley, and O’Connor let out another whistle. He ran his eye over a voluminous list of priceless stolen art: a Rembrandt and a Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Turner’s 1813 Landscape in Devonshire, and Vincent van Gogh’s Poppy Flowers. The criminal world no longer surprised O’Connor, but the sheer audacity of the last entry was extraordinary: ‘Funerary mask of Tutankhamun €110 million’. Perhaps even more importantly, a very minor stolen Egyptian artifact had, three years earlier, been consigned by courier, to a villa in the mountains north of Sartène on the island of Corsica.

  O’Connor photographed the pages relevant to Crowley and turned his attention to the Khan entries. The list was not as extensive, but again, it was the last entry that caught his attention: ‘Tutakhamun falcon pendant €60 million’.

  He photographed the Khan entries and relocked the old trunk.

  As the CIA Gulfstream jet levelled off at 30 000 feet, O’Connor eased into one of the secure communications stations and put on the headphones for an encrypted call back to Langley. He briefed McNamara on what he’d discovered in Rubinstein’s art gallery, and then listened as McNamara brought him up to speed on the FBI raid on EVRAN.

  ‘The FBI have uncovered a commercial intelligence operation in EVRAN headquarters that would rival what we’ve got here,’ said McNamara. ‘While that’s not illegal in itself, it would appear that Davis was in possession of Walter Cronkwell’s script before the debate. That will send the media into a tailspin and call the whole Davis candidacy into question, but that’s not our problem. The question is, where is Crowley? Because I’m hoping Crowley will also lead us to the whereabouts of Badawi and Aleta, over.’

  ‘Hopi One Four, roger . . . the address I gave you for Crowley’s Corsican villa puts it in the hills above Sartène, and if Khan’s aircraft is headed for Figari Sud-Corse, there’s a strong chance that he’s headed for the villa as well. If Crowley can’t be found in Dallas it may be that he’s in Corsica too. Let’s hope so, over.’

&nb
sp; ‘Roger . . . I’ve been in touch with my contacts in Paris. They’ve agreed we should search the villa, but they’ve also told me it’s heavily guarded, so they’re readying a detachment from their Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale.’

  O’Connor nodded as he listened. He’d worked with the group before and it was one of the best. A special forces unit of the French military, they were specifically trained to deal with counter-terrorist and hostage rescue missions.

  ‘Given the circumstances, and what we have riding on this, the French have agreed to a joint mission, which will be launched from Figari Sud-Corse, and I put that about 50 kilometres from Crowley’s villa. I didn’t want you to feel lonely, and since they’ve been with you from the start, your Korengal team is inbound to Corsica as we speak. As to the Pharos Group, the trading on the stock market by the Crédit Group of banks has come to the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and we’ve sent them across a top-secret brief. Apparently it’s raised more than a few eyebrows, and our chief of station in Cairo is liaising with his counterparts to organise a raid on the Kashta Palace in Alexandria.’

  O’Connor moved back to one of the big, comfortable leather chairs in the cabin, and as the pilots changed course for Corsica, he once again had to detach himself from his feelings for Aleta.

  53 Château Cornucopia, Corsica

  Crowley pushed the button under his desk in the stone-walled study of his château, and the huge 80-inch screen rose silently from the sideboard. He flicked on CNC to get an update on the election, but he first had to sit through images of the continuing panic on the streets of London, Chicago, Sydney and Melbourne. When the anchor finally got to the election, Crowley listened intently for any mention of what might have happened in Dallas.