The Scorpion's Gate

by Richard A. Clarke

  MacIntyre drove past the CNN and NBC buildings in the manicured office park that was Media City. His taxi had already passed Internet City and Knowledge City. He wondered if he could persuade them someday to build a Magician City in Dubai. The New York Journal did not have its own building but shared one with several European newspapers.

  The Pakistani guest worker guard in the lobby was expecting him. As he entered the third-floor door of the Journal, he saw Kate on the other side of the suite, standing in front of a bank of screens showing news broadcasts in Arabic and English. She had set up a little breakfast buffet on a table below the television panels.

  The audio was on for ABC. “...but military sources here at the Pentagon stress that until the wreckage has been examined, there is no way to be sure what happened to the Viking jet that was taking Admiral Adams back to his headquarters in Bahrain from a meeting with Secretary Conrad in Turkey. At the NATO meeting there, the Secretary said that he would take all appropriate steps to respond to any aggression in the oil-rich Gulf region. Martha . . .” Kate Delmarco hit the mute button and turned to face Rusty MacIntyre.

  “I was supposed to meet him in Bahrain tomorrow,” Rusty said, staring up at the screens. “He left me a handwritten note I picked up when I was at the Navy base. Said he would call my cell tonight when he got in to make arrangements. I can’t believe that Islamyah would provoke us by shooting his plane down.”

  “Maybe they didn’t. You heard ABC just now. We don’t know yet,” Kate said, holding out a glass. “Bloody Mary?”

  “No, thanks, I’ll take a Virgin Mary. Had enough last night. I’m pretty down. I was also supposed to meet our mutual friend Brian Douglas last night and he no-showed.”

  “Okay, you want to stay sober. That’s fine,” she said, sitting down at her desk. “So, where is my mysterious Mr. Douglas? He’s got me worried. No, he wouldn’t like that. He’s got me a little concerned.”

  “Dunno,” Rusty said, looking into the ice cubes. He did know, or at least he knew where he went, maybe not where he was now. But Brian did not tell Kate and I am not about to, he thought. He had meant to ask Brian when he got back just what his relationship with Kate was.

  Trying to change the subject quickly, he said, “You heard what Conrad just said. He will respond. Not the President. Not America. Him.” Rusty took off his coat and sat down at the desk opposite her. “Look, Kate. I’ve been thinking. Conrad is the problem. He’s the one demonizing Islamyah. Scaring them with some big exercise off Egypt. Scaring Washington into thinking the missiles they got from China have nukes on them. He’s gonna get us into a war again out here real soon, and maybe with China, too, by the time he’s done. Unless somebody stops him.”

  “Really? Now what’s he doing with China?” Kate said, grabbing her notepad.

  MacIntyre placed his hand on top of the pad. “Stop being a reporter for once and work with me here.” Delmarco gave him a foul look. “Okay, Kate, you have to be a reporter? Go get some dirt on Conrad, so he’s not Mr. Clean on a white charger, saving America. It may be the only way we can stop him.”

  “You do play dirty, little boy,” Delmarco said, crossing her legs.

  “So do they. He’s got FBI agents snooping around about some charge that I told a Senator something he wasn’t cleared for. They may even know about my meeting with Ahmed. Probably charge me with giving classified information to Islamyah.”

  “What? Rusty, what are you talking about? How do they know about that, and besides what’s wrong with you meeting with a source in Islamyah? You are an intelligence officer, after all. It’s your job,” Delmarco said in her irate reporter voice.

  “No it’s not. I’m head of an analysis unit. I am out here to learn, not to go skulking about, developing agent sources of my own. I am out of my depth, as well as out of my swimming lane.” Rusty sounded tired. “Conrad could intentionally misconstrue it. Sometimes, I think he would do anything to roll over people who disagree with him.”

  Kate picked up her notepad again and opened it. “Okay, so what’s the dirt on him?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe al Saud money and his buyout company. Maybe the exiled royals and the Secretary buying support on the Hill. I have a well-placed friend on the Hill who may know more. He wouldn’t tell me everything before, but I think I may know enough now to persuade him to talk to you, persuade him that we need to throw a little sand in the gears.” Rusty got up, walked over to the makeshift bar and added a shot of vodka to his tomato juice. “Maybe throw a little mud.”

  “I said I love it when you play dirty,” Delmarco smirked and pointed her pen at him.

  “Don’t start,” MacIntyre said emphatically, returning and grabbing the pen away.

  “All business. All right,” she replied. “I can leave for Washington late tonight. New York has wanted me back for consultations for a month now. I just hope I don’t miss the action out here while I’m gone.”

  “I can’t promise you that.” MacIntyre took a pen and held it up to his jacket. “Bada-bing!” he exclaimed, and the pen appeared to penetrate the jacket, half of it coming out the other side.

  “You nut. Why put a hole in your coat?” Kate laughed. He handed her the coat. There was no hole in it. She kept laughing.

  “I just thought we needed something to cheer us up, and magic tricks almost always do,” he said, digging in his coat pocket for the vibrating BlackBerry. “Who the hell is calling me?” MacIntyre put the device to his ear and clicked to answer. “Hello?...Well, yes, it’s great to hear from you, but have you been listening to the news?... How?...Here, in Dubai? Lunch at the Four Seasons?...I look forward to meeting you, too.” He put the BlackBerry down and looked blankly at Kate, shaking his head.

  “What’s the matter? What was that?” she asked.

  MacIntyre didn’t answer right away, still stunned by the call. Then he picked up her notepad and handed it to her. “Well, I guess you would say that was an exclusive for the New York Journal. How ’bout something like ‘Admiral Bradley Adams, Commander of the Fifth Fleet, arrived this morning at Dubai International Airport on a commercial flight from Turkey. It was earlier thought that Adams was on board a Navy aircraft that crashed off Kuwait, but it has now been learned that Adams sent the aircraft on without him when he received a last-minute invitation to visit the Turkish navy. The admiral learned of his reported demise upon landing in Dubai.’ ”

  “Wow!” Kate yelled. “And we’re going to meet him for lunch?”

  “No. I am. You are going to get ready to go back to the States tonight, remember?” He looked up at the eight channels of news on the screens above. “We have a helluva lot of work to do if we’re going to stop Conrad from doing something that could set the whole Arabian peninsula alight.”

  Doshan Tappeh Airport

  East of Tehran

  We get so many people from Monash University at this time of the year, Professor,” the ticket agent said. “Here we go. Seat 4B. It’s a window, as requested. We try to accommodate all the requests from the Melbourne travel agency, since we do so much business with them now. Any luggage?”

  “Well, we have quite the exchange program with Kish University. No, the luggage was shipped ahead, since I will be there the entire semester. Quite a lot to carry. May I say that your English is most excellent. Thank you so much,” Professor Sam Wallingford said, taking the ticket for the Kish Air flight from the little airport outside of Tehran to the resort island in the Gulf.

  They were boarding when he got to the gate, the only gate. It was an ancient thirty-seat Fokker 50, gaily decked out in the colorful Kish Air livery. Since it was an internal flight to the island of Kish, the security man had barely looked at the Australian passport with Iranian visa and entry stamp before waving him along. If he even had a “wanted” list of passports, he didn’t check it. It was nothing like what would have happened at Imam Khomeini International, but in a nod to capitalism, Kish Air had moved its flights to the less crowded, less expensive Tappeh. Tap
peh had been an air force base and then closed altogether for a year before reopening for internal flights by smaller airlines.

  Sitting in the Fokker waiting to take off, Brian Douglas as Sam Wallingford replayed the tapes of the morning in his head. What had happened to Soheil? Despite his assurance that he was not under suspicion, he must have known that he was. The unplugged phone, the radio, the drapes, the rifle. And he had met with Douglas anyway. Given him the gold. It was Soheil’s own ministry security people who suspected something. Maybe they had caught on to the fact that he had downloaded the documents off the ministry intranet. They had sent only two officers to question Soheil. And Soheil had been ready for them, with the hunting rifle. After shooting both, he had taken one of their pistols and killed himself. And now the other officer’s pistol was at the bottom of a storm drain, not at Soheil’s. He hadn’t really needed it; he should have left it at the house. If he had used his hand to hit the Mercedes man, rather than the gun, the man might be unconscious instead of dead in the boot of his own car in a yard down the road from the little airport. He had never killed an innocent man before. He had struck too hard, from the heartpumping rush of fleeing. It was a rookie move. He hated himself for it.

  The Fokker began to taxi. It would be over two hours to Kish Island. Two hours in which the police might be notified of the missing man with the Mercedes. Might find the Mercedes, despite where it was parked, despite the mud on the tag number. Might realize that the little airport down the road now had flights to the Kish Island resort in the Gulf. Might call ahead to the Customs or VEVAK at Kish.

  He looked down at the slight tear in the lining of the old suit jacket. He had thought it had been a risk to put the Australian identity in the lining, silly to have alternative ways to get out of the country. But Pamela had been right, as always. He hoped she was right about the next bit, too.

  As the plane lifted off, he thought of what Bowers would be doing: taking Simon Manley’s things out of the hotel room. Paying for Manley as well as himself at the checkout. Flying out on the Joburg run about now. Would their database at Khomeini Airport Customs link Bowers’s visa to Manley’s? Where is Mr. Manley? Traveling up to Shiraz for a day.

  Brian Douglas closed his eyes, but could not sleep on the bumpy flight over the mountains. His heart was still pumping. His mind was still racing. Poor man in the Mercedes. Nothing justified it. But what he had on the flash drive in his sock was at least worth Douglas’s risking his own life by running about in the field, solo, overage, undercover. No one else could have gotten it. Soheil and his father would not have trusted anyone else. What if the father had not been at the newsstand? Douglas would have come home empty-handed and looked the fool. But the father had been there, and so far it was working. Very messy, but working. Thank God Pamela had insisted on an emergency egress plan being in place.

  The jolt of the landing woke him. So he had gotten some rest. His bones ached. The terminal was bigger than he would have expected and far more modern. He tried to remember the diagram from Pamela’s briefings. There was the men’s room. His watch said 11:40. They were ten minutes early. Would the Omani be there yet?

  He went to the last stall and pushed on the door. “Oh, so sorry, it wasn’t locked, you see, I . . .” The Omani, with his pants around his ankles, jabbered back at him in Arabic. The Omani had been there early and had the papers in his hand. The exchange of papers had taken place in three seconds. Brian Douglas went in to the next stall. The papers looked good. A New Zealand passport, with a Kish exit stamp. Ticket on Hormuz Airlines, boarding in a few minutes for Sharjah. Someone had taken some baksheesh along the way, but that was never a problem in Iran.

  Nor would you have found another airport in Iran where international arriving passengers could mix with those about to leave the country, but this was Kish. Tehran had allowed it to be a free trade zone, an international tourist destination. The new high-rise hotels on the beach made it look like Dubai. Everything was a little bit more lax here. China had Hong Kong. Iran had Kish, a permeable membrane, a place where needed commerce was permitted, a place where people looked the other way.

  He got in line to board. It was some sort of Ilyushin that looked as though it might have been sold off from Aeroflot. He was two people away from going through the gate when he heard the public address system in Farsi: “Valnford, Professor Valnford. Please see a police or customs officer.” His stomach contracted. Had the Omani bungled? But he was not Samuel Wallingford. Not now. He was the New Zealander Avery Dalton. Smile at the ticket taker. Climb the stair up into the old Ilyushin.

  The plane had no sooner taken off than it was landing. He feared it had turned around and gone back to Kish at the call of the police or customs officer. But no, this was a smaller airport and this was not an island. Bump. Landing like a ton of bricks. No this was not Iran again, this was Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. And so the sign said over the customs and immigration booths. Welcome to the United Arab Emirates.

  “You will have to come with me, Mr. Avery,” the immigration officer was saying. He had run the passport under an optical scanner.

  “What? It’s Dalton. Mr. Dalton. Avery is the first name, you see,” he stuttered.

  “We have no record of this entry visa having been issued. It is not in the database. It will just be a moment. This way, please.”

  The door had one-way glass and a sign that said “Police” in English and Arabic. Inside, however, it was bright and comfortable. “Please have a seat, sir.”

  “Might I use the phone for a local call? Maybe I can clear this up. Thank you so much.” He froze for a moment, trying to recall the number. Then it came to him.

  “British Consulate, Dubai,” the woman seemed to sing in a rising lilt on the other end.

  “Exchanges Office, please,” Avery/Wallingford/Dalton/Manley/ Simon managed to get out.

  “Exchanges Office. May I help you?” the South London–accented man grunted.

  “It’s Brian Douglas. I am from Bath,” he said using the station’s own clear code for Require Assistance. “I am with the customs or the immigration police at the Sharjah Airport. Some problem with my papers.”

  There was a brief pause on the other end as the officer recalled what being from Bath meant, and then as he realized that the head of station for the entire Gulf was not in Bahrain but twenty minutes down the highway from Dubai, being held. “We will be right there to pick you up, sir, and will call the local service boys in parallel.”

  It was Avery or someone who had called, but Brian Douglas who hung up the phone. He turned to the young immigration official and said in Arabic, “Might I have a cup of hot tea?”

  12

  FEBRUARY 16

  Security Center of the Republic

  Riyadh, Islamyah

  “You were the one who told me we could not trust the Chinese to be here,” Abdullah bin Rashid said, “and now you want me to trust the Americans?”

  “Not all the Americans. Some of them. They are not all imperial warmongers. Many of them are like the Canadians,” Ahmed tried. His brother looked at him, unconvinced, but he continued. “My point is just that we do not want them acting against us based on false assumptions about whether we have nuclear weapons or not. And there are some Americans whom I think we can talk to.”

  Abdullah picked up a folder and handed it to Ahmed. “Read this. A pack of lies. It’s a summary of the American media reaction to the crash of their Navy plane off Kuwait. It’s full of speculation that we shot it down.”

  “Did we?” Ahmed asked, scanning the papers.

  Abdullah paused, irritated at the question. Finally he replied, “No. No, we did not. Our radar showed nothing near the aircraft and no missile fired at it.”

  Ahmed passed the folder back to his brother. “So it just blew itself up in midair?”

  “So it seems, Ahmed. First they try to blame us for the attack on their Navy base in Bahrain—which you prevented! Now they try to blame us when one of their
aircraft blows itself up. They are looking for an excuse, Ahmed, can’t you see it?” Abdullah walked back behind his desk.

  Ahmed placed his palms down on the other side of the desk. “What I see, brother, is a need to calm things down, to open a channel with the Americans so that we can prevent misunderstandings like these.”

  Abdullah gathered up files from the desktop. “You want to see what I’m dealing with? How hard it is to convince my fellow members of the Shura that we should be moderate? Come with me, now. The Council is meeting here today. Because they think we need to meet in a highly secure location. The public cannot attend, but you can attend as my aide.”

  Ahmed bin Rashid followed his brother, the Director of Security of Islamyah, down corridors to a small conference center within the former palace. The room was filled with men in white robes, many with long beards, loudly chattering in small groups before the meeting. In the middle of the room was a large oval-shaped table with a microphone at each place. Abdullah pointed out the Interim President of the Republic, Zubair bin Tayer, a cleric who had spent most of the previous decade in Damascus, Tehran, and London. Bin Tayer was moving to the seat from which he would chair the meeting.

  Electronic bells sounded in the room. “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate . . .” bin Tayer started to pray into a microphone. The prayer continued for several minutes and was followed by three readings from the Holy Koran. As soon as bin Tayer stopped and was seated, a man on his right began reading a resolution. Ahmed finally determined that the subject was the appropriate punishment for a group of college students who had been detained by religious police for protesting against the extension of the religious law, the Sharia. The punishment was to be public flogging in a square in Riyadh.

  “Does the Shura concur?” the man on bin Tayer’s left droned into his microphone.