“If he works with me again, he’s finished in the Democrat Party.”
“I suspect so, sir,” Marcus said. “But actually that gives me an idea.”
62
WASHINGTON, D.C.—1 DECEMBER
It was early and dark and pouring as Marcus finished his daily five-mile run.
His phone rang and it was Kailea in London, so he took it. “What’s up?” he said, slowing to a walk and wiping the rain from his eyes.
“Got an update.”
“Go.”
“About an hour ago, some kids playing in an abandoned garage in the East End stumbled across a hackney cab. When they saw what was inside, they freaked out and called the police.”
“What was it?”
“Two bodies, a man and a woman. We’re pretty sure it’s Meryl Sullivan and Thomas Gibney.”
“Who?”
“Sullivan was a top political reporter for the BBC. Gibney was her cameraman. They were supposed to cover Evans’s meeting with the PM. But they never made it. Instead, two people showed up in their place. The names were the same, but they’d changed the photos.”
“Do you know who the substitutes were?”
“Not yet, but believe me, we’re working on it.”
“And how’d they get suicide vests through all that security? I still don’t get that.”
“No one does, but the Brits have detained everyone who was working the press security checkpoint that morning on suspicion of colluding with these imposters. I’ve got to go, but I’ll get more as soon as I can.”
Robert Dayton sat behind his large oak desk, his feet perched on a credenza.
Sporting his favorite brown linen suit, a crisp light-green Brooks Brothers shirt, and a dark-green silk tie with matching pocket square, the seventy-one-year-old senator was simultaneously listening to Morning Joe on MSNBC and reading the A section of the Washington Post. He was oblivious to the fact that three people had entered his office, even though they’d knocked twice and cleared their throats several times more.
Pete Hwang had been here countless times before. Yet this was his first time back in the senator’s spacious corner office since stepping down from the employ of the man’s political action committee and joining the Central Intelligence Agency. Dayton, of course, didn’t know he worked for the CIA. Nor did Annie Stewart. Like all of Pete’s family and friends, they believed he now worked as a physician for the Diplomatic Security Service. The real story, and Marcus’s as well, was too highly classified even for a senior member of the Intel Committee and his most trusted aide.
“Senator,” Annie announced in a loud and confident voice, “Marcus Ryker and our old friend Dr. Hwang are here to see you.”
Pete hated when she called him “Dr. Hwang.” Crazy about Annie but still too shy to ask her out, he had repeatedly insisted she simply call him Pete, but to no avail.
“Ah, yes, gentlemen, please have a seat,” Dayton said, startled out of his thoughts and fumbling to find which of the four remotes on his desk would mute the television. Finally Annie walked over and took care of it for him.
Dayton exchanged pleasantries with Pete for several minutes, asking how his arm was recovering and how he liked being over at State. Then they turned to the matter at hand.
“I met with the president last night,” Marcus began. “I shared with him what you and Annie told me, and he’d like to see you both right away.”
“Really?” Dayton asked. “I have to say, I’m surprised.”
“Well, sir, I admit it didn’t come easy,” Marcus conceded. “But in the end he asked the Secret Service to sneak you into the residence through the tunnel from Treasury so the press doesn’t catch wind of anything.”
“When does he want to meet?”
“At nine.”
“Tonight?”
“No, in an hour,” Marcus said. “But he has one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“He wants you to agree to be his new special envoy to the Middle East.”
Dayton abruptly took his feet off the credenza. “I beg your pardon?”
“I told the president what you said about being finished in your party and about ending your presidential campaign.”
“Did you now?”
“I said you remain a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. But I also told him you’re an old-school patriot who believes in putting your country ahead of partisan politics.”
“And?”
“And I suggested that he not simply listen to your counsel on how best to navigate a Saudi peace initiative but hire you to run the whole show.”
The room was silent, so Marcus continued.
“Senator, let’s be candid here. The president is prepared to put the entire weight of his presidency into making peace in the Middle East. If the Palestinians aren’t ready, that’s sad but not particularly surprising. But if the Saudis are ready to make peace with Israel, that would be absolutely historic. It could clear the way for other Gulf states to make peace with Israel as well—the Emiratis, the Bahrainis, perhaps even the Omanis. But it’s going to take someone with a tremendous amount of experience to thread this needle, and I told the president that you’re just the man for the job.”
63
Marcus paused a moment to let the thought sink in.
“The loss of General Evans, Dr. Davis, and Janelle Thomas is devastating—personally, of course, but also strategically,” he continued. “Bill McDermott is a dear friend and a fine man. He’s prepared to step into the general’s shoes as national security advisor. But he isn’t going to have the time to shuttle throughout the region to make this peace deal happen. Neither will Secretary Whitney—not while managing every other portfolio on her plate. So the president needs someone who . . . well, he needs you.”
“I certainly wasn’t expecting this.”
“Neither was the president—but when I laid out the case, he loved it, and he wants to move on it quickly.”
“I’ll bet he does,” said Dayton, rising from his seat and beginning to pace his office. “But you know what you’re asking me to do, right? I’d have to resign my Senate seat, which I’ve held since the Stone Age. That, of course, would create an open seat. Then my governor—a Republican, mind you—will either take the seat herself or appoint some fire-breathing, pro-life, evangelical conservative who’s the polar opposite of me. Then I’ll have really burnt my bridges with the Democrats, and all for an appointment that will be quickly over if the president is not reelected?”
Pete saw his moment. “Senator, that’s exactly what I told Marcus you’d say.”
“Really?” asked Dayton. “And?”
“And I told Marcus that he and the president were getting way ahead of themselves. The last thing the administration needs right now is to send another high-profile official overseas to become a new target for this Kairos group. So, knowing you as I do, I told Marcus how this should work, if it’s going to work at all.”
The senator raised an eyebrow. So did Annie. But they were both listening, so Pete continued.
“The Senate doesn’t come back into session until next Tuesday, right?”
Dayton nodded.
“Okay, so you and Annie make a secret trip back to Riyadh, not as an emissary of the president—not publicly or officially, anyway—but as a go-between, a back channel. Marcus and I come with you to watch your backs. You sound out the Saudis and find out just how serious they really are. Marcus reports everything back to Bill McDermott. That keeps everything quiet and deniable. But if it’s real—if the crown prince is really prepared to go to Jerusalem—then the president brings you in to get your thoughts, and he has to promise to give you credit for helping broker a historic peace summit in Jerusalem with the Saudis and the Israelis. Specifically, he invites you to the summit as a key player in the negotiations. It’s a huge story. It’s bipartisan. Your base will hate it, but so what? You’re not running anyway. And if the Saudis and Israelis really want to hammer out a treaty, then
it’s your choice—stay in the Senate or step down and be appointed the president’s special envoy. The Republicans control the Senate, and your colleagues will want credit for something so huge, so your confirmation is guaranteed. But it would be your call, and there would be no pressure publicly or behind the scenes from the White House.”
“That’s not bad,” said Annie.
“Thanks.”
“Have you spoken to the president about this?” she asked Marcus, protecting her boss from having to ask.
“We called Bill just before we came here,” Pete said before Marcus could answer. “He’s already spoken to the president.”
“And?” Annie pressed.
“Well, obviously he’d prefer it if the senator would come on board immediately, but he’s ready to move either way that seems best to you.”
The senator leaned back in his chair, smiled, and ran a hand through his hair. Then he turned to Annie. “What do you say?”
“I say we head to the White House, sir, and get this thing done.”
64
ROME, ITALY—2 DECEMBER
Hamdi Yaşar landed at noon and was picked up by the Al-Sawt bureau chief.
Forty minutes later, he pulled his silver Mercedes onto the grounds of the Rome Cavalieri Hotel, a sumptuous, five-star property owned by the Waldorf Astoria group.
“Here are your room keys, some cash, and a local mobile phone,” said the bureau chief, handing over a large sealed envelope. “I booked you in a king Imperial Room as you requested. You’re already checked in, and I put down a network credit card to cover all of your expenses while you’re here.”
At precisely 2 p.m. local time, the knock came. Yaşar opened the door to the adjoining room and gave Mohammed al-Qassab an unusually warm embrace. He assured al-Qassab that his room had been “thoroughly cleaned.” Then he praised the man profusely. “You have done a mighty deed, my friend.”
“Praise Allah,” al-Qassab replied, smiling broadly for the first time Yaşar could ever remember. “I only regret that the British prime minister was not among the victims.”
“Even so, overall the operation could not have gone better,” Yaşar continued as they sat in the living room of the spacious suite, looking out over the city of Rome and the Colosseum in the distance. “Father is very pleased.”
“You talked to him?”
“I did, and he asked me to tell you there is a great reward awaiting you, not only in paradise, but in your numbered account in Zurich.”
“This was a miracle of Allah. I can take no credit.”
“Still, Father is counting on you to deliver an even bigger prize. Have you come up with a plan?”
“I’m working on one.”
“Why is it not finalized?”
“Hamdi, you cannot be serious. Look, it is one thing to take out a national security advisor or a deputy secretary of state. But to kill the president of the United States? There is a reason it hasn’t been done in this century. Not that it hasn’t been tried. It has, many times. But the rules of the game have changed. The technology has changed. The training and procedures of the Secret Service have changed.”
“Is it more money you need? I can get you nearly anything you ask for.”
“No, no, it’s not money I need—it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“To think, to come up with a plan that has a reasonable chance of success, and then to train my teams properly.”
“What did you do in London?” Yaşar asked. “It was brilliant, and the police are still completely baffled.”
“That’s just it,” said al-Qassab. “I knew there was no way to get someone wearing a suicide vest through all that security, not at Number 10. So I tried a variation of something I learned when I was in Yemen on a recruiting visit last year.”
“Go on.”
“For several years, al Qaeda was experimenting with how to plant a bomb inside a human being. They tried everything but couldn’t make it work. I mean it worked in the sense that a person could blow himself up. But rarely was the explosion large enough to cause significant damage to others.”
“Why not?”
“Several reasons. First, the human body is mostly water. And the bombs the al Qaeda guys were using were too small. As a result, most of the explosive energy released by the bomb was absorbed by the body of the bomber himself. Second, the bomb was typically inserted in the person’s rectum so it wouldn’t be detected by a pat down at an airport. The problem was that whatever explosive force wasn’t absorbed by the body of the bomber was released through the rectum. This created enormous holes in the floors, but it didn’t project the force of the explosion outward toward people standing nearby. In the end, the al Qaeda operatives I spoke to had all but given up on the idea.”
“But not you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was convinced they’d given up too early. So I recruited a doctor—a surgeon, a true believer, one of us—and asked him to run a series of experiments significantly different than what had been done before.”
“How so?”
“First I asked him whether he could actually surgically implant a bomb inside a human body, and higher up—in the abdomen or near the rib cage.”
“And?”
“I also asked him if he could use bigger bombs—implant several pounds of high explosives, not just a few ounces.”
“And?”
“For months he practiced—on dogs, then on sheep, and finally on camels.”
“Where?”
“In the mountains of Yemen.”
“What were the results?”
Al-Qassab smiled. “Perfection. My theory was right, and the larger bombs worked.”
“So this is what you used in London?”
“Yes. I flew the doctor—a Pakistani already living in England—to London last fall and placed him with a group of plastic surgeons I know there. They had no idea who he really was, and they never suspected a thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. We tapped the phones of everyone in the office. We monitor all of their emails. Everyone loves the guy. He’s so good, so quiet, and makes them all so much money that they eventually let him hire his own nurses. I, of course, insisted that he hire people who work for us, and everything went beautifully.”
“And who did you find to carry the bomb?”
“A brother and sister team from Chechnya. Their mother was a Black Widow years ago in Moscow. They both wanted to follow in her footsteps. I vetted them extensively and watched them closely for a full year. I didn’t tell them until late in the game how I was going to deploy them, but they accepted the mission with great joy.”
“And now they are shahids?”
“They are.”
“And you think this same approach could be used against the president?”
“That’s my hope,” said al-Qassab. “But my fear is if we don’t find a way to do it quickly, the Americans and the Brits will figure out what we did in London and develop a countermeasure against it.”
“A moment ago you said you needed more time. Now you’re saying we need to move quickly. Which is it?”
“I have the technique,” said the Syrian. “I don’t have a willing bomber, not in Washington, not yet.”
“So you need someone willing to become a shahid, a true martyr for Allah?”
“Yes.”
“I can help you with that.”
“No, you don’t understand. I can’t use a Chechen again or a Syrian or a Yemeni. We’re going to need an American, someone who can buy a ticket into a fund-raiser for President Clarke, walk right up to him, and detonate himself or herself. That will not be easy to find.”
“Don’t worry. We have nearly unlimited funds. We can do this.”
“But finding the right person—an American we can totally trust—is only the beginning. We still need to get my doctor into the United States. And we need enough time for him to surg
ically implant the bomb, and for the person to recover from the surgery before the fund-raiser, or whatever event we deem appropriate, and all before the Secret Service figures this thing out, which honestly could be by the end of this week.”
65
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—3 DECEMBER
It was nearly two in the morning when the private jet touched down.
The Learjet taxied not to the private aviation terminal but to a military facility on the far side of the airfield. The hangar itself was nearly deserted. Just a single armed guard was posted outside. Inside, a small crew who worked directly for Prince Abdullah bin Rashid and serviced his private jet was standing by, along with the prince’s chief of staff, a driver, and a black Mercedes SUV.
Both the timing and the low-key manner of arrival were intentional. Neither the Saudis nor the White House wanted anyone to know Robert Dayton and his entourage were in the country. Not airport staff. Not the usual ground crews. Not foreign intelligence agencies. Certainly not the Saudi media or foreign reporters. Not even other Saudi government officials. It was not unusual for American senators or congressmen or members of the executive branch to come in and out of the kingdom. It was, however, unusual for a senator to return to the kingdom so quickly after his previous visit, particularly a Democrat.
The senator climbed into the front passenger seat, while Marcus climbed in the far back, and Pete and Annie took the middle seats. Thirty minutes later, after a high-speed blitz down a maze of deserted highways, the Mercedes turned onto al-Diwan Street. They soon arrived at the al-Yamama Palace, stopping before two armored personnel carriers, each mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun and manned by soldiers in full combat gear. A commander of the guard, wearing a black uniform and black beret, requested everyone’s passports and took them back to his guard station. While they waited, a K-9 unit worked its way around the vehicle, sniffing for explosives. Another soldier carrying a long pole with a large mirror attached at the end checked the underside of the SUV to be sure there were no bombs present. Two other soldiers checked under the hood and in the trunk while still two more searched their luggage.
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