by Vince Flynn
Any one of the twenty-four-hour news outlets or all of them were likely to show up and shoot footage of the inevitable FBI SWAT team in full gear hauling a man in a business suit off an international flight. It was no criticism of the FBI. They had their job and Rapp had his. It was just that Rapp’s job was always done best when it was carried out as far away from the media as possible.
As he approached the soundproof door to the Situation Room he paused for just a second. The president and Kennedy did not need to know he’d been on the phone making arrangements. Rapp opened the door and found President Hayes, Kennedy, Secretary of State Berg, Chief of Staff Jones and NSA Haik all watching the bank of television sets and talking on various phones.
The news was out that there was a bomb threat at the UN. People were streaming out of the bland Orwellian building in droves as police cruisers set up makeshift roadblocks to keep any vehicle from getting within two blocks of the world headquarters. Rapp took a second to admire his handiwork. It had been his idea to phone in the threat.
He approached Kennedy and bent over to whisper in her ear. “Our John Doe just got on a flight bound for Paris.”
Kennedy turned her chair so she could look Rapp in the eye. It was as if she had to make sure he wasn’t kidding before she’d believe it. She told the person on the phone that she had to go and hung up the phone. Reaching over she grabbed the president’s arm and in a voice loud enough so only he could hear she leaned in and repeated the news to Hayes. Rapp placed a hand on the back of Kennedy’s chair and bent over to listen.
Before the president could react to the news Rapp took a knee and said, “Sir, this is what I propose we do. The flight is headed to Paris and then on to Nice, where I assume our guy will be meeting Omar … whose yacht is still docked in Cannes. I can have a team in the air in less than an hour. We can get there before he lands and have everything set up.”
Hayes looked at Kennedy, who only shrugged her shoulders. “What about the French?”
“What about them?” asked Rapp.
The president had been thinking about how best to use the information to forestall the vote and now seemed like a good time. “I think we need to bring them in on this.”
Rapp’s expression turned from hopeful to hopeless. Never one to sugarcoat things, he said, “I think that’s a bad idea, sir.”
“Listen,” replied Hayes a bit testily, “the French are not going to roll over on this thing. As soon as the UN opens tomorrow morning they’re going to convene the Security Council, and they’re going to put this to a vote, and I’m not going to be able to veto it.”
“Why not?” asked a defiant Rapp.
“For starters because I actually do think the Palestinians should have a state.” Hayes firmly placed his forefinger in the palm of his hand. “And secondly because Crown Prince Faisal has asked me to.” Hayes ticked off his point by adding a second finger. “And in light of what happened to his cousin just a short while ago, I’m inclined to grant his request.”
Rapp began ticking off his counterpoints, every bit as determined as the president was. “We’re talking about the same crown prince whose brother bribed the French ambassador with a million bucks. We’re talking about the same crown prince whose brother has been meeting with some guy who just mysteriously shows up whenever someone is killed—”
The president interrupted, “I know Faisal personally, and I can guarantee that he had nothing to do with this.”
“Can you?” asked a doubtful Rapp, and then in a more conciliatory tone added, “I happen to agree that Faisal doesn’t have a hand in this, but I’d sure as hell like to make sure before we lay what little we know on the table.”
“I would too, but we don’t have time,” the president said in frustration. “If we’re going to get the French to change their minds we need to open a dialogue now. Secretary of State Berg wants to present the evidence of Ambassador Joussard’s bribe to the foreign minister as soon as possible. She’s confident that once they see the evidence they will recall the ambassador immediately.”
Rapp’s displeasure was obvious. “Sir, the moment we do that we’ve tipped our hand. People will be warned. Someone will alert Omar, and he’ll fly the coop like that.” Rapp snapped his fingers. “He’ll go back to Saudi Arabia, and we’ll never get our hands on him, and we’ll never know how far-reaching this thing was.”
“What if we have the French pick up this John Doe when he lands in Paris? We can have our people from the FBI present during the interrogation.”
Rapp’s eyes were closed and he was shaking his head vehemently. “Sir, if we do that we’ll never learn the whole truth, and what little we do learn will take weeks if not months to extract from this guy. And that still doesn’t solve Omar. I’m telling you the second we grab this guy, we risk tipping off Omar, and without more evidence no one is going to lay a hand on Omar.”
Hayes sighed. “So what do you propose we do?”
“Give me twelve hours, sir. That’s all I’m asking. I’ve got a team ready to go. We can get to Nice before John Doe arrives and shadow him every step of the way.”
“And what if you come up empty?”
Rapp could tell the president was leaning in his favor. “We’re no worse off than we are right now.”
“Except that we’re up against the clock with the French.”
Rapp swore under his breath. “Sir, if I were you I wouldn’t tell the French a thing. I’d wait until that smug bastard Joussard climbs up on his high horse tomorrow morning, and then I’d have Secretary Berg ask him what he thinks of bribery. After he gets done stammering, the secretary can clobber him over the head with the evidence. The resolution will never make it to a vote, and if it does by some off chance we can veto it in good conscience until a full investigation is made into Joussard’s finances. And if the crown prince is upset, you can ask him what his brother is doing giving a million bucks to the French ambassador to the UN.”
The president actually laughed. “That would be enjoyable, but the French are our allies, and I don’t think we can blindside them like that.”
Rapp was tempted to comment on the value of having allies like the French but he decided not to. He could tell the president was leaning in his favor. “Twelve hours, sir. That’s all I’m asking. Have I ever disappointed you?”
The president was out of arguments. He looked to Kennedy for her opinion and she nodded. “All right,” Hayes said, turning back to Rapp. “You have twelve hours.”
74
David had found the long flight from America relaxing. He’d reclined in his first-class seat and ignored the in-flight movie. It was a drama, and he wasn’t in the mood for it. Maybe a comedy would have grabbed his attention but definitely not a drama. What he needed was an escape from the harsh reality of what he’d been doing. David did not enjoy murdering, but he understood it as a necessary evil in a world where it was often the only way to get things done. Thousands upon thousands of lives had been ended in the quest for Palestinian independence. What would a few more matter? None of this was new to him. He’d known it from an early age. He had seen his path in life, knowing that someday he would have a hand in shaping the birth of his nation. And now that his dream was so close, the guilt disappeared in the hum of jet engines. At 45,000 feet somewhere over the vast Atlantic Ocean he tucked a thin blue blanket up under his chin and thought of Palestine, warm thoughts of a nation at peace, and then he fell asleep.
He’d landed in Paris and changed flights without incident. The first sign that something had gone wrong was when he landed in Nice and caught a news update on the television. He’d been incommunicado for the better part of seven hours and was starved for information.
The vote had not taken place. The UN had been shut down due to a bomb threat. David’s eyes squinted at the television and instantly knew the bomb scare was a ruse. Angry but under control, he headed off in search of answers. Unfortunately, those answers would have to come from Omar. As promised, a limousine
was waiting for him at the curb. David climbed into the backseat and settled in for the short ride down the coast. He was entirely oblivious to the fact that he was being watched.
• • •
Rapp stood at the window of his hotel room. The lights were off and he was careful to stand a few feet back from the glass. Before leaving the States he’d honored his new agreement with his wife and told her the destination and likely duration of his trip. She wanted to know if his sudden departure had anything to do with the car bomb, and after a slight hesitation, he told her that it did. All in all he was surprised how well the conversation had gone.
Rapp pressed a pair of high-powered binoculars to his face and looked down on the harbor of Cannes, in the South of France. The Albert Edouardo Pier stretched out before him. Some of the world’s finest yachts were berthed for the night, crowded together with barely a foot to spare between each, all neatly tucked in. As grand and opulent as all the other vessels were one stood out above the rest. Actually, it towered above the rest. Rapp had seen wealth before. He’d traveled the world and visited many cities, most of them port cities, but he had never seen a noncommercial or military vessel as large as Omar’s yacht. The massive ship was moored at the end of the pier, no individual slip was big enough to hold it. Omar’s yacht was easily twice as large as the next biggest vessel, which was no small thing when one considered that it was parked in a harbor that was known as the ultimate playground for the world’s wealthy.
Rapp had never met Omar, and until this week had only heard of him in passing. He suddenly had a great desire to meet this corpulent Saudi prince. The signs were easy enough to recognize; Rapp had seen them before. He knew how to analyze himself better than any shrink. He would like to put the prince on the other end of his gun and watch him squirm. Men like Omar were never humiliated. That was their biggest problem. They went through life with a very warped sense of reality. Their own lives took on an overexaggerated sense of importance while virtually everyone else around them became trivial … expendable … small. His yacht symbolized how Omar perceived himself. He was his ship, the biggest and thus most important. Everyone else was secondary. Only his desires were what mattered.
It was approaching midnight. Rapp and his team had arrived two hours ago and were in the process of calibrating all of their equipment to make sure it worked perfectly. They didn’t need much. The British surveillance team that had been in place since Monday was on top of things. They briefed Rapp thoroughly, and as always their cooperation was excellent. Rapp had worked with the folks from MI6 before and had found them to be extremely good at their jobs.
In addition to what the Brits already had in place, and their own directional microphones, Scott Coleman had just finished placing listening devices on the hull of the yacht. Rapp looked through the binoculars at the small sailboat and watched as Coleman handed his scuba tank to one of his men and climbed aboard. The British sailboat was tied up two jetties over from Omar’s yacht and was partially blocked by a sizable cabin cruiser. When Coleman was finally back on board the sailboat Rapp relaxed a bit. Everything was in place.
Their guy had landed. He was no longer John Doe. With the delivery of the encrypted file from Mossad, Kennedy had put a name with the face. He was Jabril Khatabi, the Palestinian who had given Mossad the intelligence boon that had turned into a massacre. The man who had started it all. A man who interested Rapp greatly. On the flight over, Rapp had read every scrap of Jabril’s file, and the more he read the more interested he became. On the face of it, this Jabril did not seem like a pawn. Marcus Dumond had plunged into his financials and so far had discovered a personal fortune in excess of five million dollars, almost all of it in highly liquid assets. He had been educated at the very bosom of American agnostic liberalism, the University of California at Berkeley. He’d gone to work for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley after college and had traveled the world, focusing mostly on investments from Arab oil people. Everything in his file pointed not to terrorism, but to capitalism.
If it weren’t for the audio surveillance they had of his meetings with Omar, and the fact he’d been a Mossad informant, Rapp would have sworn the man was nothing more than one of Omar’s abundant financial advisors. He found it hard to believe this wealthy man from a well-educated family was a terrorist, but the evidence was conclusive. Before the night was over Rapp was hoping to have a little chat with the Palestinian to see if he could clear a few things up.
They didn’t have much time. The president’s deadline was firm. Every time Rapp had talked to Kennedy she’d reminded him of that. Things in Washington had grown even more hectic since he’d left. Neither the French nor the Palestinians had been placated by Israel’s withdrawal from Hebron. The Israelis now claimed incontrovertible evidence that there had been a bomb factory in Hebron, and they were prepared to present that evidence before an international board of inquiry. The evidence of course had been planted during the military occupation of the town, in order to save Prime Minister Goldberg from a controversy that would spell the end of his government.
The French ambassador to the UN had privately confronted the American ambassador and accused the CIA of doing exactly what they’d done; phoning in a bomb scare in order to delay the vote on Palestinian statehood. Ambassador Joussard was offended and indignant that the world’s lone superpower would stoop so low. Even though he was right, it was rather amusing that the condemnation was coming from a man who’d been bribed into putting forth the resolution that was causing so much consternation in the first place.
Israel was offering to sit down and discuss peace with the Palestinians as soon as the Palestinians honored a cease-fire agreement. The Palestinians for their part refused to abide by a cease-fire agreement until they had it in writing that Prime Minister Goldberg would close and relocate every Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Prime Minister Goldberg flat-out refused such a request and the violence continued. Both the Russians and the Chinese were suspicious about the timing of the bomb scare that shut down the UN, and both were vowing to make sure the French resolution was voted on first thing in the morning.
The president was getting a great deal of pressure from the secretary of state and his chief of staff to bring the French into the fold on the entire matter. Rapp had just spoken to Kennedy on the secure satellite phone and she had reassured him that although the president was tempted, he was going to honor his commitment of twelve hours.
75
David tipped the driver and declined the man’s offer to carry his lone bag to the yacht. He stood for a long moment at the beginning of the pier and looked toward the hulking white ship. It seemed as if all of his strength and energy were being sucked from him. He did not look forward to seeing Omar. He desperately wanted information; he just wished there was a way to get it without having to sit down for a royal audience.
Reluctantly, he put one foot in front of the other and started for the white yacht. He was barely halfway there when he spotted Devon LeClair standing in the open gangway at the side of the ship. High above on the bridge David could see men in white uniforms moving about. He knew from previous visits that the ship was always more active at night. That was when Omar entertained, when he held his hedonistic parties after he’d returned from the discos and the casinos. The casinos in Cannes didn’t even open until eight in the evening. The high rollers like Omar rarely showed up before midnight.
David secretly hoped Omar was gone and Devon could tell him what was going on, but he doubted he would be so lucky. Omar would want to hear all the details of his trip to America, especially the car bomb in Washington. That had been Omar’s idea. At first David had said no. There were too many things that could go wrong, too many innocent bystanders who could be hurt. Omar persisted though. He’d badgered him for months and had thrown larger and larger amounts of money at him. He threatened to pull out of the entire operation, and send David packing. He pointed out that the brutal murder of the Saudi ambassador would put the crown
prince in a position of sympathy. Omar explained that he had been preaching to his brother for years to stand up to the Americans and that when the time was right he would be there in his ear telling him what to ask of the Americans when they apologized for the shocking international incident that had taken place on their soil.
Everything hinged on the Americans. They had the veto power and they alone could stand in the way of the creation of a Palestinian state. Omar explained that international pressure wasn’t enough. They needed economic pressure on their side and they needed the American president to feel guilty over the death of Crown Prince Faisal’s favorite cousin. It wasn’t enough to simply show the world once again that Israel was run by thugs. The world already knew that. Killing the Palestinian ambassador would rally the UN to their cause, but would it be enough pressure to forestall a veto by the United States? Possibly not.
David didn’t like the idea of putting so much into his plan and coming up short. Omar was right and like everything else in his princely life he eventually got his way.
As he approached the gangplank he asked himself again what could have possibly gone wrong. They had thought of everything, but somehow the Americans had delayed the vote.
He forced himself to smile at Devon. “Good evening.”
“You look tired,” was all the Frenchman said in response.
“Thank you,” replied David with feigned sincerity. “And you look marvelous as always.”
Devon frowned at him from behind his glasses. “The prince is waiting for you in his private salon.”
David nodded and stepped into the ship.
“Leave your bag, and I’ll have someone put it in a stateroom. I assume you’re staying the night.”