by Jack Bowie
James had managed to get along with some of the best, and the worst, reporters on the planet, but after only three weeks with Rodriguez he didn’t know how much longer he could stand it.
Oh well, there’s always work in video documentaries.
Surprisingly, the scene just across the tightly cordoned area of the football—well, they called it football—field was a historic moment. Crown Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia was taking his message of peace and coexistence directly to the Israeli people, today in the form of a visit to an obscure Israeli kibbutz.
Samar was a small village, less than 300 inhabitants, most of whom were staunchly anti-Arab. But as he had in previous visits, the sincerity and charisma of the Crown Prince were having their effect. Already, he had been deemed the Bill Clinton of the Middle East; in his case for the former US President’s personality and popularity, not his all too memorable peccadilloes. It was for the world-wide inquisitiveness of all things surrounding this new actor on the political stage, that Rodriguez had been given the assignment to cover his latest “trip of peace.”
James hoped it wouldn’t kill him.
* * *
Rachael Weitz gathered her students in a half-circle and waited for the arrival of the Saudi. A horde of reporters and photographers thankfully stood behind barriers about twenty meters away, chattering and clicking away. Weitz wasn’t all that happy about participating in what was at best a self-aggrandizing photo op for the Crown Prince, but she had received a pleading request from Jerusalem to support the visit.
The Crown Prince, and three others, had just been announced as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for their ground-breaking Anti-terrorism Treaty, further boosting the importance of the event. So here she was, standing in the burning sun trying to look grateful at having her well-planned class schedule completely disrupted.
Most of her students had been indifferent to the chaos of the arrangements around the event but there was one bright spot. Noam Geer was a pathetically shy boy of eleven who had moved into the area from America just a few weeks before. He and his father had decided to start a new life following the death of Geer’s mother. Both were having difficulty adapting to the frontier-like lifestyle in Samar.
Geer’s one love seemed to be football, which he continued to call soccer. He carried a battered ball, probably from his home in the States, stuffed into his knapsack everywhere he went. When he had heard that Faisal had been on the Saudi national soccer team in his youth, Geer had been ecstatic. Weitz had made sure he was up-front in the greeting party.
The armored Range Rover drove up the gravel road and stopped at the assigned location. Four beefy security guards jumped from the vehicle and quickly surveyed the area. Apparently not seeing any hooded militants with ammo belts and machine guns, they opened the back door and Faisal emerged in a burst of blinding white robes trimmed in gold. He was a tall and handsome man, with swarthy skin and an ebony-black beard. Weitz could almost understand the tabloids’ obsession with the man.
Following the requisite introductions and flowery remarks, the Crown Prince actually made an effort to speak to the children. He shook their hands, asked their names and answered their questions. As he approached Geer, the child absolutely beamed.
“You’re a famous soccer star!” Geer exclaimed.
“Hardly a star,” Faisal responded with a smile. “But I did have a pretty good corner kick.”
“Show me. Please!” Geer begged. “Please.”
“Noam,” Weitz said, putting her hands on Geer’s shoulders. “The Crown Prince doesn’t have time to …”
Faisal looked around at his handlers. “But I don’t see a ball anywhere,” he finally replied.
“I have one,” Geer shouted. He dropped his knapsack, extracted his precious football, and ran down the field.
After he had gotten about twenty meters away, he turned back and gave the ball a mighty roll toward the celebrity.
* * *
“There!” Rodriguez suddenly yelled through the window of the van. “The Crown Prince. Get that shot for background!”
James woke from his musings and grabbed his camera. Rodriguez must have been watching the proceedings from the van. In what he would later describe as the longest ten seconds of his life, he jammed the viewfinder up to his eye and scanned the field for his subject. Locating Faisal, he then zoomed in and pressed RECORD, just in time to capture the Crown Prince lining up on the rolling ball, cocking his left leg, bringing it quickly forward to its target, then disappearing in a pink cloud of smoke, sand, and shrapnel. His finger stayed frozen on the button until the explosion’s percussion knocked him rudely to the gravel of the access road.
The Pulitzer Prize committee would later comment that James’ footage captured the personal horror of the new face of terrorism in the same way Eddie Adams’ photograph of Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing a handcuffed prisoner personified the obscenity of that war.
In the chaos following the assassination, Noam Geer, and his father, disappeared and were never located.
Chapter 2
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Monday, 9:30 a.m.
“Yes, sir. We will definitely prepare that ASAP.”
It took all of Roger Slattery’s estimable self-control to quietly place the handset in its cradle instead of smashing it down in an explosion of wire and plastic.
Slattery was a CIA lifer who had moved from field agent to division manager to his latest position: head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. On this journey, he had butted heads with some pretty intransigent individuals, on both sides of the black world, but the latest Director of National Intelligence was quickly rising to a unique position on Slattery’s enemies list.
Morgan Dean had been in the position for over a year, taking over when the previous DNI had left under less-than-ideal circumstances. Circumstances all too familiar to Slattery.
Dean was ex-Army and ex-NSA; two black marks in Slattery’s experience. Slattery had never liked Steven Carlson, the previous DNI. He had been an autocratic sonuvabitch—in other words, a typical Marine—but Slattery had never imagined the replacement could be even worse.
The current royal edict was around the CIA’s report on the assassination of Crown Prince Faisal. Dean asked, or rather demanded, that Slattery prepare a comprehensive report, for Dean’s eyes only, before the end of the day. Never mind that the assassination only occurred earlier that day, in Israel, under the eye of the Saudi’s version of the Secret Service. Dean wanted a complete accounting of the possible assassins and an analysis of how the murder would affect the Anti-terrorism Treaty. Dean seemed more concerned about the political fallout of the death and how it affected the President than the death of the Crown Prince.
President Joseph Matthews had spent the last year personally negotiating a comprehensive treaty to eliminate, or more realistically, significantly reduce, the funding of terrorist organizations by Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While the threat of the jihadists was diminishing, military action continued to be of marginal impact and very costly in terms of political capital. Matthews’ thinking was that the only way to achieve a long-term solution was to cut off the extremists’ funding from the established Muslim states. It had taken nine months, but in the stifling humidity of Riyadh in July, the treaty had been signed much to the consternation of terrorists around the world.
Then last week, the Oslo Nobel Committee had named the four as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.
And now one of the signers, arguably the most prominent individual in the Muslim world, was dead.
What the hell is going to happen next?
Slattery dropped his head in his hands and rubbed his throbbing temples with his thumbs. It had already been a helluva day.
He had been awakened by an explosion of text messages at 3:15 AM. After a quick look, he got up and dressed. He padded back over to the bed and, before leaving, kissed his wife on her forehead. Beth opened one eye, mouthed a silent “Be careful” a
nd promptly went back to sleep. When they were first married, she would have bolted upright, fully awake. It hadn’t taken her long to adjust to her husband’s unorthodox schedule.
Back in Langley, Slattery had spoken with his Mossad counterpart, Ziv Bloom, at the break of dawn. As was to be expected, Bloom was enraged over the assassination in his country and was scrambling to get his report completed for the Prime Minister. As far as hard intelligence was concerned, his cupboard was bare. Mossad had not a clue which of the Middle East actors could be responsible. The circumstances were outlandish even for the jihadists. The possibility of an unknown actor was even more frightening, but Bloom had had no better explanation.
That left Slattery on his own to compose an explanation, based completely on conjecture, that would keep Dean off his back until they had real data.
He raised his head and noticed the digital clocks lined on the opposite wall. Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tokyo. The number of clocks was a frightening reminder of the state of the world. Maybe he was getting too old for all this.
As he stared blankly at the glowing numbers, their meaning suddenly broke through his daydream.
Shit! He was already late.
Slattery grabbed his coat and briefcase and headed for the elevators. He had to get to Fairfax for his other top priority task.
On his way out, he stopped at the desk of his new administrative assistant, Cassandra Lewis. As always, she was busy doing something on her computer.
Lewis was a pretty, fresh-scrubbed twenty-something who had rapidly worked her way up the CIA’s admin ladder by her outstanding technical competence. She supposedly knew every desktop app ever developed and her ability to navigate through the CIA’s maze of record systems and databases was said to be unique in the Agency. All skills that he was sure explained her placement outside his door.
The problem was her disposition. For all her abilities, she was acutely shy and seemingly insecure. She needed constant reinforcement. Skills that were not in Slattery’s psychological profile. He couldn’t believe she was happy in this job. It would be a race to see which of them surrendered first.
“Cassie.”
She looked up from her screen. “Yes, sir?”
Slattery shook his head. None of his other admins had ever called him ‘sir’.” He was getting old.
“Tell John and Lee I need everything they have on the assassination and the House of Saud.” John Carter and Lee Reaves were Slattery’s lead analysts on Middle East affairs. He’d need their help if he was ever going to satisfy the DNI. “I’ll be gone a couple hours. Set up a review for when I get back.” He turned, but then paused and looked back. “And tell them to cancel any plans for this evening.”
* * *
Colonel Henry Rockwell, U.S. Army Retired, stood at attention and stared into the cloud-draped mountains outside his office window. His silver hair was cropped close, as it had been for nearly four decades, and his gray eyes burned with the same vigor they had throughout his service to his country. Perhaps there were a few more wrinkles, and he could no longer run seven-minute miles, but he could still recognize his duty and still had the strength to execute it.
The mists of the mountains reminded him of the difficulties they had encountered making themselves known in the shadow world. You could never be sure whether the jagged peak you so carefully approached was a valuable contact, or a chimera ready to send you down a deadly fissure. He had run through every name in his address book, called in more favors than he could afford, and spent nearly all his savings, to get to this point.
Over the past year, he had secured a few minor contracts, more tests than real sanctions, but his team had performed well, satisfying his employers. Those successes had led to the current assignment: a contract that would place him at the top of the world’s contract military organizations. Something that had long been his objective.
And something that would finally put his doubters to rest.
A knock broke his concentration. He reluctantly turned away from the vista and strode slowly back to his desk. Rockwell wore his standard daytime work clothes, a sharply pressed set of fatigues, carefully tailored to his five-foot-eight-inch frame. His shoulders were locked, square and broad, a characteristic that led colleagues to refer to him, at least behind his back, as Ramrod Rockwell. He sat down in his hard wooden chair, straightened the papers that were already precisely placed on the top of his desk and barked a curt “Enter.”
The door to the study opened and a slim, haggard man entered the room. He was about six feet tall with dark brown hair slicked back over his head. He silently moved to a position directly in front of the desk.
William Penrose was easily underestimated, a persona he cultivated, but he was an ex-SEAL and Rockwell had seen him dispatch men twice his size with apparent ease. His nose had been broken so many times it looked like a Rocky Mountain switchback trail and sunken brown eyes exuded a simmering intensity. Smart, and not one who took prisoners, he was the perfect aide-de-camp.
“Excuse me, Colonel,” Penrose began, “we have some preliminary information from Berlin.”
“Continue, William,” Rockwell replied quickly. He required the use of his rank but given the diverse backgrounds of his men, other military protocols were not observed.
“We have received approval to proceed, sir. The message was just decoded.”
“Excellent. This is a significant milestone. Please inform the men. Everyone will receive a bonus for their contributions. Has the squad returned?”
“They are still in transit, sir. Extraction from Israel proved more difficult than we expected. Mossad reacted quite quickly.”
Rockwell nodded. “Understood. As long as they are on their way. Have them report to me as soon as they arrive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How are preparations for the next phase?”
“Going very well. We received the package from Germany and training is nearly complete.”
Rockwell felt the satisfying surge of adrenaline. His right hand, resting lightly on the tabletop, slowly curled into a white-knuckled fist. It was time to show the world what he could accomplish.
“Gather the squad, William. Let’s be sure we don’t eliminate the wrong person.”
* * *
Adam Braxton looked up from his laptop and gazed over the Northern Virginia countryside. He had heard the stories of the lush green pastures and the dark emerald forests of years before. He knew some of that still existed, but it was far beyond the black macadam of the access highway and Dulles airport. Now his window was filled with soaring concrete and glass office buildings and rows of picture-perfect condominiums, all housing those that ostensibly did the people’s work: government employees, lobbyists and the never-ending line of consultants ready to tell anyone who will listen how to do their job.
What had been bothering him most lately was that he was one of those consultants. Cerberus Consulting, his company, was a boutique consulting firm specializing in Internet security. Over the past two years, he had built a solid reputation among clients in both the public and private sectors.
By all accountings, he was doing pretty well. He had a strong backlog of business. More, in fact, than he could handle. He probably should bring on some technical help, but that would mean supervision and management. Skills that he had learned were not part of his genetic makeup. So for the moment, he would go it alone.
But he felt restless. Every day seemed to be filled with writing the same reports and making the same recommendations. His father had taught him to be a problem solver. To figure things out. That’s what he liked to do. Maybe that was just a child’s dream.
Still, he hadn’t been lied to, arrested, or shot at for over a year. That was a plus.
“Adam?”
Karen Chu’s mellow voice came through the intercom and broke him out of his funk. Chu was Cerberus’ first, and currently only, employee. She was, in fact, also o
ne of the main reasons his company was still in business.
Braxton had hired Chu a month after he had abandoned Cambridge, Massachusetts and hung out his new shingle in Reston, Virginia. She had been a sharp-tongued, Gen X wife and mother who had burned out teaching math in the Fairfax County school system and had wanted to apply her considerable analytic abilities to a new profession. Chu had attacked the mess he had created like a commando, organizing every client engagement, and putting him on a strict need-to-know basis. She had learned more about the federal contracting system than any senior executive Braxton had ever known. She had been invaluable in stabilizing, and growing, his nascent security consulting business.
He had to find some way to tell her how much she was appreciated.
“Yes, Karen?” he answered into the box.
“Mr. Smith is here to see you.”
Braxton paused and glanced down at his appointment card. Every morning, he found an index card on his desk, printed with his day‘s schedule. Sure it was a throwback to simpler days, but there was something emotionally satisfying about this simple piece of pre-computer technology.
But today’s card had no entry for a Mr. Smith.
“I don’t see any appointment for a Mr. Smith, Karen. What does he …”
“It’s that Mr. Smith,” Chu replied quickly.
What kind of an answer is that? Who is she talking about?
Oh. Him. It had been over a year since Braxton had had any contact with his least favorite CIA agent. Roger Slattery, at least that was the name by which Braxton knew him, had single-handedly brought Braxton more problems than he could have ever imagined. And then each time brought him back from the edge of oblivion.
Maybe that’s what spooks do to civilians.
He felt his heart beat a little faster. Was it fear? Or anticipation? “Show him in, Karen.”
“Are you sure, Adam?”
“Yes. It’s okay. I’ll be careful.” Did he really believe those words?
Mr. Smith strode into the office and offered his hand. “Adam,” he said with a friendly smile.
