Omar fell back. He looked at the television set and saw President Wells waving to the crowd as agents pushed him quickly into his heavily armored limousine. The president’s smile surprised Omar. He should have been dead. He looked closer at the television screen and saw his father. His father was the president. Omar smiled back. His father waved to him before getting into the car. Omar blinked. But when he opened his eyes, it was not his father any longer, but the ambassador. The ambassador from Brussels! The ambassador was laughing and waving at Omar, as if inviting him to join him. Omar shook his head. His nightmares were back. They would not go away! He looked again at the screen, but now the ambassador was that horrible woman. And she was holding a gun.
Omar tried to get up. He had to stop her. She would ruin his plan, his perfect plan. He stumbled to his feet and picked up the mortar tube. With all his remaining strength, he lifted the forty-five pound object and screamed at the dreaded woman, “It’s your turn to die!”
Laura was still lying on the ground as Omar approached her, screaming at her. She fired the remaining three shots at Omar. The first shot missed, going high over his head, but the next two caught him straight in the heart. Omar dropped the large tube and fell forward on top of Laura, hitting her on the head with the heavy metal tube. But he was dead before his head even hit the ground.
The last thing Laura remembered was the sound of the apartment door being flung open and several men in black uniforms converging on her, their weapons drawn. They were wearing face masks and goggles. It amplified their eyes. She remembered thinking how they looked like men from another planet, like giant insects, and she thought she had died. She heard one of them say into his radio, “Christ, there’s a bunch of dead bodies here, there’s blood everywhere.” The men in black approached with caution, their guns drawn and ready. They were speaking into their headphones as they approached. She could hear other men whom she could not see call out “Clear” as they went from one room to the next. Then she remembered hearing one of them say into his radio, “We’ve got him, we’ve got the bastard; he’s been neutralized. Thunder is safe.”
She also vaguely remembered a photographer bursting into the apartment, taking pictures, a woman, and the masked men trying to stop her. There were voices, arguments, shouts. Then the sounds faded away and then everything went dark.
Clayborne was still standing on the press platform, cursing the very idea and regretting that he had agreed to waste his time in such a manner, when he heard Delphine’s frantic call come over the radio. “Shootout at Third and echo, southwest. On my way.”
Long, tense minutes ticked by and Clayborne was tempted to call her back, but he knew that Delphine was a professional. She would communicate again when she had something concrete to report. He would only slow her down if he tried calling her back. Several agonizing minutes passed until he heard her voice crackle over the radio.
“Jesus, Clayborne, it’s a massacre up here. Bodies, blood all over the place.”
“Is there a woman there?” asked Clayborne. “Is Laura there?”
There was a muffled sound as Delphine managed to snap a few frames before the FBI SWAT team reacted, grabbed her, and pinned her to the ground. It was, after all, what she was good at. She got the job done. IPS would have exclusive photographs and the inside story. Delphine Muller-Hoeft remained pinned on the floor, with several agents pointing their automatic weapons at her head, before one of them found the typewritten note from the FBI director.
EPILOGUE
Later that night, Chris Clayborne and Delphine Muller-Hoeft drove to George Washington Hospital, where Chester Higgins was fighting for his life. Delphine’s total access pass allowed her entry to the intensive care unit where Higgins was being treated. A quick telephone call from Potter saw to it that Chris got in too.
The bullet had barely missed Higgins’ heart, causing some damage to his left lung. But Higgins was a fighter; he had always been one. Although he was still listed in critical condition, he had taken a turn for the better and was now out of danger. He would live, the doctors told Chris.
Laura fared far better. She required only a few stitches to her head, and after a complete checkup, was released. Clayborne took Laura back to his apartment where they snuggled comfortably on large pillows placed on a thick Persian carpet in front of the fireplace. They sat there in silence, watching the flames flicker and slowly consume the large wooden logs. Chris uncorked a bottle of Dom Perignon that had been chilling in the refrigerator since the morning. He gently stroked Laura’s cheek with the back of his hand and placed a tender kiss on her lips.
“It’s all over now, Laura. It’s over,” he said.
She nodded and replied softly, “Yes. It’s over. I can rest now. I’m tired. No more violence; I’m through.”
The only sounds came from the wood crackling in the fireplace.
“Is it really over?” asked Chris. “Can you pull out? Will they let you pull out?”
“Yes,” said Laura, “they have no choice. I can’t go on.”
“Where do we go from here?”
“Where do you want to go from here?” she asked Chris.
“Are you sure you want to leave the Agency? Will you be happy doing something else?”
“As long as I’m with you? Yes.”
“Are you proposing? Isn’t that the role of the guy, usually?”
“Yes, perhaps, but there is nothing ‘usual’ about us.”
“Will you live with me?” asked Chris.
“Yes, I will if you want me to.”
“No more guns, no more spooks?”
“Yes,” said Laura, as she buried her head in Chris Clayborne’s shoulder and cried. She cried for a long time.
They were interrupted by the ring of Chris’s cell phone. It was Delphine. “Hey Chief, are you ready for this?”
“Where are you?” Chris asked.
“At the hospital. Those SWAT guys are a tough bunch of fuckers. But they are good and they don’t mess around. I thought they broke my wrist, but I’m okay. And to make up for jumping me as they did, they showed me the body of your terrorist. However, here’s a story for you. I saw the autopsy report. His DNA shows absolutely no ties to the Middle East whatsoever. And another thing, judging from his anatomy he was neither Muslim nor Jewish if you know what I mean. This is formal and I have a copy of the report. I will email it to you in two seconds. Have fun, thanks for the assignment. I’m going back to Moscow in the morning.”
Turning to Laura, Chris said, “What the fuck. If he wasn’t Palestinian or Iraqi, nor Syrian or Arab or even Muslim, then what the fuck was he? More to the point, who the hell was he?
“I’m afraid that we will never know . . .”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Laura. “I have a feeling that we have stumbled onto something huge.”
***
Colonel Aref Attiyef stood on the snowy slopes of the Golan, scanning the Israeli lines with his powerful field glasses. Something was wrong. Word had not yet arrived to attack, and even worse, the Israelis had been moving men and matériel all night long. He looked across the UN buffer zone and spotted an Israeli officer looking straight at him. For a brief instant he lowered his glasses, believing the enemy would go away. But when he raised the powerful scopes again, the officer was still there, looking straight at him, as if taunting him. He could now see the Israeli lower his binoculars and saw his face. The man was clearly smiling, as if to say, “We know what you were planning. We’ve had you figured out all the time.”
Colonel Attiyef picked up his field telephone and spoke to his general, in a bunker some hundred yards away. Both men had been present a few days earlier when Brigadier General Kamal Kader briefed them.
“They have been moving troops up all night, sir. Thousands of them. And armor too. I haven’t seen anything like this since 1973.”
On the other side of the Golan, Brigadier General Eliahu Ben Yahar looked back at the Syrian officer. “We’ve had you all along, m
y friend, all along,” he said in a low voice.
Brigadier General Kamal Kader stood silently at the large window of his office on the second floor of the Ministry of Defense in Damascus. From here, the Syrian general commanded a clear view of the snow-peaked Golan Heights. In the streets below, traffic was gradually subsiding after the evening’s rush hour, although heavy fumes from old battered buses and cars still lingered in the cold January night. The general stared out the window. Behind him a television set was still broadcasting live images of the American president, proudly parading down Pennsylvania Avenue. The general realized that somehow the Palestinian had failed. Tears slowly filled his eyes and the hatred inside him grew even more. The general would not take his revenge today. Not today.
He looked away from the television images being broadcast “live” on Syrian state television showing that life was normal in Damascus. The “live” shot showed the large square outside his office at the Ministry of Defense. The general looked away from the television and out the window. What he saw was another reality. There were three tanks guarding the entrance to the building and about half a dozen carcasses of blown-up cars, debris, and soldiers in full combat gear protected by a wall of sandbags guarding the approaches to the ministry. He looked back at the television set now broadcasting images of a gardener planting flowers along the narrow strip of road between the north and southbound traffic lanes. He looked out the window and saw another picture altogether.
He barely heard the news coming from his television set. “Just a few hours after Richard Wells was sworn in, the American president said he would convene the Washington peace talks next week in the US capital, and promised he would push both sides to seek a quick and lasting solution.”
***
In Tijuana, just a tram ride away from San Diego, Paco was watching the news on CNN in Spanish as it was projected on the huge plasma screen that took up almost half the wall in his study. He was in a jovial mood, though somewhat nervous about the next few hours. If everything went well, he would become the most powerful drug lord in the world. No, not if—there could be no ifs today. He had gambled much. Today had to work. He was sure it would. Although he was assured as late as the previous evening that all was on track, there was always the chance of something going wrong.
He held a large tumbler of cognac in one hand and a cigar, Cuban of course, in the other. As a precaution, he had his plane readied with orders for the pilot to be ready for a quick takeoff from the private airfield about one mile from his residence. He also had his driver waiting in the car, with the engine running. One could never be too careful in this business. If something went wrong he would have the Americans, the Mexicans, and—worst of all—his fellow drug barons after him.
What Paco didn’t know was that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had been onto him, and given the gravity of the situation had shared the information with the CIA.
A special task force was put together in utmost secrecy, with special forces from the US working with a special unit of the Mexican Federal Police, whose members were all hand-picked and then sent to a secret CIA facility in Panama, where no communication with the outside was possible. There, the joint task force trained on the mission ahead. No one was told who the target was or when the operation would take place. The evening before the inauguration, the task force was divided into seven groups, each composed of twelve men, six Americans and six Mexicans. They were flown in unmarked planes to holding operation centers close to their target areas where they went through a final briefing. They studied the layout, watched surveillance videos, and examined photos.
The next morning, on Inauguration Day, each team boarded two helicopters—six men per craft—and headed for their target areas. At precisely noon, as the American president-elect was sworn in and the attempt on his life unfolded on international television, and the seven drug lords were busy watching what they had paid for, and therefore captivated by the events unfolding on their screens, the special joint task force units repelled from the helicopters onto the roofs of their targets’ villas.
Before any of the guards had time to react, the first men out of the choppers had already silenced them using guns equipped with silencers. In under four minutes, all seven drug lords were apprehended, handcuffed, had a black hood placed over their heads, and placed aboard a helicopter. The choppers were flown to a heavily guarded remote airfield, where the prisoners were transferred onto a Hercules C130 military aircraft. The plane took off instantly for the secret CIA facility in Panama.
In Langley, Virginia, the Agency, through a meticulous process of surveillance and telephone taping and Internet monitoring and intercepts that required a task force of more than one hundred people and that took months of hard work, had finally paid off. The list of suspects was narrowed to two possible candidates. And a couple of months later all the analysts were leaning heavily in favor of one candidate and just as they were about to make an arrest new evidence surfaced that made their existing evidence circumstantial. They were not much more advanced than when they had first started.
The head of the task force at Langley opened his combination safe and took out a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch. He poured himself a glass and raised his glass in a mock toast.
“Here is to HUMINT over ELINT any day of the week and any week of the year.” He downed the Scotch, called his secretary, and told her to arrange a meeting of the section chiefs.
Inauguration Day Page 21