by Anne Holt
When Eric’s father died in 1994, it was discovered that all he had left behind was crippling debt. The small house that his son had used all his income on for the past fifteen years was still registered in his father’s name. The bank repossessed the house, and Eric once again had to start from scratch. The suit that his father had filed against the American state for unjust internment never came to anything. The only thing that old Daniel Ariyoshi had got from sticking to the rules and listening to increasingly expensive lawyers was a life of bitterness that ended in ruin.
It said in the report that it had been easy to persuade Eric.
Naturally he wanted money, lots of money, given how poor he was. But he had also earned it.
Abdallah’s finger moved on, from pinhead to pinhead.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, he didn’t want to use suicide bombers and fanatics to attack a US that they hated and had never understood.
Instead he had built up a silent army of Americans. Of dissatisfied, betrayed, repressed, conned Americans, ordinary people who belonged to that country. Many of them had been born there, all of them lived there and the country was theirs. They were American citizens, but the US had never repaid them with anything other than betrayal and defeat.
‘The spring of our discontent,’ Abdallah whispered.
His finger stopped by a green pinhead outside Tucson, Arizona. It might represent Jorge Gonzales, whose youngest son had been killed by the sheriff’s assistant during a bank raid. The boy was only six years old, and just happened to be cycling past. The sheriff made a short statement to the local press saying that his excellent assistant had been certain that the boy was one of the robbers. And that everything had happened very fast.
Little Antonio only measured four foot two, and had been six metres from the policeman when he was shot. He was sitting on a green boy’s bike, wearing a slightly too big T-shirt with Spiderman on the back.
No one was punished for the incident.
No one was even charged.
The father, who had worked at Wal-Mart since he came to the country of his dreams from Mexico as a thirteen-year-old, never got over his son’s death and the lack of respect shown by the people who should have protected him and his family. When he was offered a sum of money that would allow him to move back to his homeland as a wealthy man in return for doing something that wasn’t at all frightening, he grabbed the chance with both hands.
And so it continued.
Each pinhead represented yet another fate, another life. Abdallah had, of course, never met any of them. They had no idea who he was, and never would do either. And the thirty or so men who had worked for him since 2002, finding and recruiting this army of broken dreams, equally had no idea where the orders and money came from.
A red reflection from the plasma screen made Abdallah turn round.
The picture showed a fire.
He went back to his desk and turned up the volume.
‘. . . in this barn outside Fargo. This is the second time in less than twelve hours that illegal petrol stores have caused fires in the area. The local authorities claim that . . .’
The Americans had started hoarding.
Abdallah sat down, put his feet up on the huge desk and grabbed a bottle of water.
With petrol prices rising by the hour, and disconcerting news stories about increasingly agitated diplomatic rhetoric in the Middle East, people were rushing out to get fuel. It was still night in the US, but the pictures showed queues of irascible drivers with cars full of barrels and buckets and plastic containers. One reporter who was standing in the way when a pick-up finally made it to the pumps had to jump to one side to avoid being mowed down.
‘They can’t deny us the right to buy petrol,’ a grossly overweight farmer shouted into the camera. ‘When the authorities can’t guarantee reasonable prices, we’ve got the right to take matters into our own hands.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the interviewer while the camera zoomed in on two men fighting over a jerrycan.
‘First I’m going to fill all of these,’ the farmer shouted and waved his hand at one of five oil barrels on the back of his truck. ‘And then I’m going to empty them into my new silo. And I’m going to carry on doing that all night and tomorrow morning and for as long as there’s a darned drop left in the state . . .’
The sound stopped and the reporter stared into the camera, confused. The producer quickly cut back to the studio.
Abdallah drank the water. He emptied the bottle and then looked over at the map with all the pins in it, all his soldiers.
They had nothing to do with oil and petrol.
A large number of them worked in cable TV.
Many of them were employed by Sears or Wal-Mart.
The rest were computer people: young hackers who could be persuaded to do anything for a little money, and more experienced programmers. Some of them had lost their jobs because they were deemed to be too old. There was no place in the industry for good, loyal workers who had learnt about computers back in the day when you used punch cards and who had had to work their socks off to keep up with developments.
But the most beautiful thing of all, thought Abdallah as he reached for the photograph of his dead brother, Rashid, was that none of the pinheads knew about the others. The role that each and every one of them would play was, in itself, small. A minor detail, an offence that was worth the risk, given the payment that would follow.
But combined, the impact would be fatal.
An extraordinary number of headends – installations where cable TV signals were received and distributed to subscribers – would be affected; the generally unmanned stations had proved to be an easier target than Abdallah had imagined. Signal amplifiers and cables would be sabotaged to such an extent that it would take weeks, maybe even months, to correct it.
In the meantime, the anger would grow.
And things would get worse when the security systems and cash registers in the largest supermarket chains ceased to function. The attack on the supermarkets would be carried out in stages, with lightning attacks in selected areas, followed up by new incidents in other areas, unpredictable and strategically unreadable, like any good guerrilla warfare.
The whole invisible army of Americans, spread over the entire continent, unaware of each other’s existence, knew exactly what to do when the signal was given.
And it would happen tomorrow.
It had taken Abdallah more than a week to work out the final strategy. He had sat here in this office, with long lists of recruits in front of him. For seven days he had moved them round on the map, estimated, calculated and evaluated the impact and maximum effect. When he had finally written it all down on paper, all that was left to do was to call Tom O’Reilly to Riyadh.
And William Smith. And David Coach.
He had summoned the three couriers. They had been in the palace at the same time, without knowing about the others. They had each been sent back to Europe in a separate plane, at thirty-minute intervals. Abdallah smiled at the thought, and lightly stroked the picture of his brother.
He could never be certain of anything in this world, but by burning three of his safest bridges, he could be fairly sure that at least one of the letters would reach an American postbox.
He had used three couriers, and all three had died just after they had posted the letters that all said the same thing. The envelopes were addressed to the same person and the contents would be meaningless to anyone other than the receiver, if they should by any chance fall into the wrong hands.
And that was the weakest link in his plan: they all had the same addressee.
Like every good general, Abdallah knew his strengths and his weaknesses. His greatest strengths were his patience, his capital and the fact that he was invisible. But the latter was also his most vulnerable point. He was dependent on operating at many levels, using straw men and electronic detours, through covert manoeuvres and, occasionally, false identities.
/> Abdallah al-Rahman was a respected businessman. Most of his operations were legitimate, and he used the best brokers in Europe and the US. He was swathed by a mysterious inaccessibility, but nothing and no one had ever blemished his reputation as an unmitigated capitalist, investor and stock-market speculator.
And that was the way he wanted things to stay.
But he needed one ally. One person who knew.
Operation Trojan Horse was too complicated for everything to be controlled from a distance. There were to be no traces that could lead back to anything that might involve Abdallah, so he had not been to the States for more than ten months.
At the end of June 2004, he’d had his meeting with the Democrats’ presidential candidate. She had been positive. She was impressed by Arabian Port Management. He could tell. The meeting had run on for half an hour longer than planned because she wanted to know more. On the flight home to Saudi Arabia, he had for the first time since his brother’s death thought that it perhaps wouldn’t be necessary to implement the project after all. The thirty years of planning, positioning and developing a network of sleeping agents all over the US might in fact go to waste. He had leant his head against the window of his private jet and looked out at the clouds below, which were an intense pink colour in the last rays of the sun they were flying away from. He had told himself that it didn’t matter, that life was full of investments that gave nothing back. Taking over the majority of America’s ports would make it all worth it.
She had as good as promised him the contract.
Then she had just dropped him, so she would win.
All the letters would go to one recipient, a man who would then set into action Abdallah’s detailed plans. Nothing must go wrong, and Abdallah had to take the risk of making direct contact. He trusted his helper. They had known each other for a long time. It bothered him sometimes that this last remaining, fragile link between him and the US would have to be eliminated as soon as Trojan Horse had been implemented.
Abdallah rubbed the glass in the frame carefully with his shirtsleeve, then put the photograph of Rashid back down on the desk.
He did trust Fayed Muffasa, but on the other hand, he hated having to rely on another living soul.
VI
‘Well, isn’t this a Kodak moment?’
President Helen Bentley was sitting with Ragnhild on her knee. The little girl was asleep. Her blonde head had flopped back, her mouth was wide open and you could see her eyes moving from side to side behind her paper-thin eyelids. At regular intervals she produced little grunts. ‘There was certainly no need for you to . . .’ Johanne stretched out her arms to pick up the child.
‘Just let her be.’ Helen Bentley smiled. ‘I need a break.’
She had been sitting in front of the computer screen for three hours. The situation was serious, to put it mildly. Far worse than she had imagined. The fear of what might happen when the New York Stock Exchange opened in a few hours’ time was enormous, and it seemed that the media had been more concerned about the economy than politics over the past twenty-four hours. As if it was possible to make such a differentiation, Helen Bentley thought to herself. All the TV stations and Internet papers were still reporting regularly from Oslo to keep the public updated on the President’s disappearance. But it still seemed that Helen Bentley and her fate had actually been pushed out on to the periphery of people’s consciousness. The focus was now on essential things, like oil and petrol and work. The tumult in more than a few places was close to rioting and the first two suicides on Wall Street were now a fact. The Saudi Arabian and Iranian governments were united in their fury. Her own Secretary of State had had to reassure the world several times that rumours of a link between the two countries and the kidnapping of the President were unfounded.
The words from his speech the night before were still hanging in the air and the conflict was escalating.
She had for a brief moment surfed public pages on the Internet. But she knew that sooner or later she would have to access websites that would make alarm bells ring in the White House, so she would wait to do that until it was absolutely necessary. The temptation to set up a Hotmail address and send a reassuring message to Christopher’s private inbox was almost overwhelming at times. But thankfully she had had the willpower to withstand it.
There was still far too much that she didn’t understand.
The fact that Warren had double-crossed her was in itself unbelievable. But her life experience had taught her that people took the most incredible gambles sometimes. And if God’s ways were mysterious, they could in no way compete with those of mortal beings.
It was the bit about the child that she couldn’t work out.
The letter that Jeffrey Hunter had shown her early that morning, which now felt like a lifetime ago, had said that they knew. That the Trojans knew about the child. Or something to that effect. She couldn’t for the life of her remember the exact wording. As she read the letter, an image of her daughter’s biological mother had flashed in front of her: the red-coated figure in the rain with eyes wide open, the plea for help that was never answered.
Little Ragnhild tried to turn.
She was a beautiful child. Fair, wispy hair and white teeth behind wet red lips. Her eyelashes were long and beautifully curved.
She looked like Billie.
Helen Bentley smiled and made the child more comfortable. This really was a strange place. It was so quiet here. In the distance, she could hear the roar of the world from which she had hidden. There were five people in here, and they chose not to speak.
The odd housekeeper was sitting by the window, crocheting. Every now and then she smacked her lips noisily and looked out at the enormous oak tree. Then she seemed to talk herself round again in a silent mumble, and focused on her bright pink handiwork.
The child’s mother was a fascinating woman. When she told the story about Warren, it felt like she had never told it to anyone else before, which gave Helen a feeling of shared destiny. Paradoxically, she thought, since her secret was about her own betrayal, whereas Johanne had very definitely been betrayed.
Us women and our damned secrets, she thought to herself. Why is it like that? Why do we feel ashamed whether we have reason to or not? Where does it come from, that crushing feeling of always carrying the blame?
She couldn’t work out the woman in the wheelchair at all.
Right now, she was sitting on the other side of the kitchen table, with a paper on her knees and a cup of coffee in her hand. But she didn’t seem to be reading the paper. It was still open at the same place that it had been about quarter of an hour ago.
Helen couldn’t work out who belonged to whom in this home. For some reason, it didn’t matter. Her strong need to control would normally have made the situation unbearable. But instead she now felt calm, as if the unclear constellations made her own absurd situation more natural somehow.
They hadn’t asked her a single question since she woke up at daybreak. Not one.
It was unbelievable.
The child on her lap sat up, drunk with sleep. For a moment she caught the smell of sweet milky breath before the child looked at her suspiciously and said: ‘Mummy. Want Mummy.’
The housekeeper was up faster than she dreamed was possible for such a scrawny, lame person.
‘You come to your Auntie Mary, darlin’. Let’s go look for Ida’s toys. Let the ladies sit here in peace.’
Ragnhild laughed and held up her arms.
They must come here quite a lot, Helen Bentley thought. The little girl looked like she adored the old scarecrow. They disappeared into the sitting room. The sound of the child chatting and the woman scolding faded into the background and there was silence. They must have gone into another room.
She turned back to the computer. Somehow she had to find the answers she was looking for. She had to keep searching. She must be able to find what she was looking for somewhere in the chaos of information that swirled around in cyberspace, bef
ore she let anyone know where she was and got the world back on its feet.
But she wouldn’t find the answer on an ordinary computer. She knew that. There was nothing in the outside world that could help before she logged on to her own website.
She caught herself staring at her hands. The skin was dry and she had broken a nail. Her wedding ring seemed to be too big. It was loose and felt like it would slip off when she caught it between two fingers and turned it. Slowly she raised her head.
The woman in the wheelchair was looking straight at her. She had the most incredible eyes that Helen Bentley had ever seen. They were icy blue, almost bleached of colour, and yet at the same time they gave the impression of being deep and dark. It was impossible to read her face: no questions no demands. Nothing. The woman just sat there looking at her. It made her feel small and she tried to look away, but it wasn’t possible.
‘They tricked me,’ Helen Bentley said in a quiet voice. ‘They knew what they had to do to make me panic. To make me go with them, willingly.’
‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ the woman asked and started to fold the newspaper carefully.
‘I think I have to,’ Helen Bentley said, and took as deep a breath as she could. ‘I don’t have any other choice.’
VII
‘And that’s all you have to say?’
The head of intelligence, Peter Salhus, looked dissatisfied and scratched his cropped head. Adam Stubo shrugged and tried to sit as comfortably as he could on the desperately uncomfortable chair. The TV on the filing cabinet was switched on. The volume was turned down and was distorted. Adam had already seen the same clip four times. ‘I give up,’ he said. ‘After that episode last night, it’s not been possible to get so much as a peep out of Warren Scifford. I’m almost starting to believe the rumours myself, that the FBI are doing their own thing. Someone in the canteen even said that they had broken into a flat during the night. In Huseby. Or . . . maybe it was a villa.’