Fig. 2 Elspeth’s Escape Route
Washington – December 22, 1998
Elspeth awoke from a nightmarish sleep, her head pounding in turmoil. Once fully awake, she knew exactly what the problem was – it was the tenth anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, the day her life had changed forever. She dragged herself from bed and headed to the kitchen, a strong cup of coffee her first line of defense against her malaise.
A half hour later, her emotions finally beginning to even out, she decided to call in sick. Having accomplished that, she settled down for the purpose of continuing her recovery, the television offering a welcome distraction. She turned to CNN, and there it was, the Lockerbie bombing redux. Unable to summon the strength to resist, she watched as the details of that horrid day so long ago were rehashed on national TV. Mesmerized by it all, she realized that she had previously overlooked many of the details surrounding the bombing, perhaps due to the fact that she had been so young, but also not in small measure due to the fact that she had been in mourning, her natural defenses protecting her from the reality that her parents had perished so horrifically.
Her coffee cupped within her hands, she studied the entire CNN segment, and when it was over she turned to another channel and watched more of the review of the events surrounding the bombing. Amazingly, despite years of investigation by various governmental agencies both in the U.S. and abroad, no one had ever been convicted of the bombing.
“How,” she asked herself, “Could such a heinous crime have gone completely unpunished?”
She became so engrossed in the coverage that she actually sprang out of her seat when her phone rang unexpectedly. “Hello,” she spat grumpily into the receiver, “Who is it?”
“Miss Moorehead? Elspeth Moorehead?” the voice croaked in apparent confusion.
“Yes, I am she,” she spat, this time even more viciously.
“Sorry to bother you at home, Miss Moorehead. They told me at your office that you had called in sick.”
“Right. So what is so important that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Good question,” the voice responded. “My name if Brian Spencer. I’m with the CIA. It is very important that I speak with you immediately, that is, if you are not too ill today.”
Her head suddenly clearing perceptibly, Elspeth mumbled, “Well, er…okay, I do feel a bit better than I did two hours ago. What exactly did you have in mind, Mr. Spencer?”
“Excellent!” he crowed. “There is a Starbuck’s just down the street from where you live, on K Street. I assume you know the one?”
“Yes, I do, but how do you know where I live, sir?”
“Oh, that. We always do background checks first, Miss Moorehead.”
“First? Before what?” she responded suspiciously.
“Oh, all in good time, Miss Moorehead. Shall we say – eleven o’clock at Starbuck’s?”
Glancing at the clock, she responded, “Uhm, can we make it eleven-thirty?”
“Sure,” he replied, “See you then.” And with that he rang off.
Starbuck’s – Two Hours Later
Elspeth pushed the door open and, seeing only one potential candidate, she strode directly to him and expounded flatly, “Mr. Spencer, I presume.”
Rising from his seat, he replied, “Correct, and why am I not surprised,” and reaching forward with his outstretched hand, he added, “Please to meet you, Miss Moorehead.”
“Pleasure’s mine,” she responded noncommittally, “So what’s up, Mr. Spencer? What makes it so imperative that you had to drag me from my sick bed?”
“Well, er…” he mumbled.
“Please, sir, just get on with it!” she exclaimed in obvious irritation.
Arching an eyebrow in surprise, he posited, “I assume you know what day it is.”
Her eyes flashing in annoyance, she responded, “Of course I know what day it is! It’s the tenth anniversary of the day my parents died!”
“Right, and may I offer my condolences, Miss Moorehead.”
“Condolences accepted, Mr. Spencer. Shall we move on to the purpose of our meeting?”
“Of course,” he replied and, tugging one hand through his hair, he suggested, “First, may I congratulate you on your magnificent escape from Al Qaeda in Pakistan.”
“Afghanistan, Mr. Spencer. I escaped in Afghanistan.”
“Right, pardon me,” he prevaricated, and after hesitating a moment, he continued, “The CIA has been quite closely involved in your case both before and since your return to the U.S., as I am sure you are well aware.”
“Yes, of course, I was interrogated on at least three different occasions by CIA agents after I returned home. And your point is?”
“Well, let us say that the CIA has been very impressed with you, Miss Moorehead, so much so that I have in fact been empowered to offer you employment.”
“Employment! With the CIA?” she responded in obvious horror, “Why would I want to do that?”
“Good question,” he responded, “Let us say – you have demonstrated skills that are quite rare in our world today, Miss Moorehead.”
“Skills? What skills?”
“Surely you must know that no one escapes Al Qaeda, Miss Moorehead. You are to date the only American to do so.”
“Really, I didn’t know that,” she replied with little apparent interest.
“But there is more, Miss Moorehead, much much more…” he offered.
“And what might that be, sir?”
“There is your educational background, your language skills, your service with the DIA, and your considerable experience abroad.”
“None of that is unusual, Mr. Spencer.”
“Right, but there are two more qualifications that we all agree make you uniquely qualified for the CIA. First, you have repeatedly demonstrated a deep and abiding desire to get to the bottom of things, Miss Moorehead.”
“So? What of it?”
“Second, you lost your parents in the Lockerbie bombing!”
“What! You bastard!” she exclaimed, but she knew he had her.
He stared at her for a long moment, and then he murmured softly, “To be honest, I expected you to react that way, but hear me out. We’ve been trying to solve this crime for a decade, and the pieces of the puzzle just don’t seem to fit together. No matter where we turn, it just leads to a dead end. Of course, we suspected Iraq was at the bottom of it at first, and then we suspected the Saudis for a time. But the most likely candidate seems to Gaddafi and his henchmen. Still, we’ve no proof to speak of.”
“But what makes you think I can do any better than the whole of the CIA?”
“Let us say – a desire for revenge, Miss Moorehead.”
Eyeing him carefully, she eventually murmured, “Well, there is that…but tell me – what’s in it for me?”
“Just that, Miss Moorehead – revenge.”
“I’m really not out for revenge, Mr. Spencer,” she lied.
“Oh?”
“But I will say this – I’d really like to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to some young lady, perhaps a girl of fifteen, just like I was when my parents were blown to smithereens.”
“Just so, Miss Moorehead, just so,” he responded and, hearing no response, he continued, “May I take it then that you will consider it?”
Peering at him silently over her coffee cup, she finally replied, “I’ll think about it. Now, if we’re finished, I think that I shall be off, Mr. Spencer.”
“Of course, sorry to have dragged you from your sick bed, Miss Moorehead,” he responded, “Oh, and here is my card. Please, feel free to call me at any hour of the day.”
A week later Elspeth began her new job working for the CIA.
CIA Headquarters – Summer 1999
Elspeth had now been working for the CIA for more than six months. At first it had been extremely dissatisfying. It seemed to her that, unlike the DIA, the CIA was saddled w
ith a sort of paranoid obsession with secrecy. She herself was not a field agent. In fact, she was in her own mind doing exactly the same thing she’d been doing at the DIA – searching for mysteries, oftentimes mysteries without answers.
For several months she had been delving into the doings of Al Qaeda. Founded in 1988 by Osama bin Laden and co-conspirators, it seemed to be an organization bent on the destruction of anything and everything related to Western culture. To date Al Qaeda had been connected via both circumstantial evidence and their own claims to both the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa on August 7, 1998. However, given that Al Qaeda had not even been founded at the time of the Lockerbie bombing there was no evidence whatsoever that they had been involved in that bombing.
Working with others in the Middle East Terrorist section of the CIA, Elspeth had been assigned to follow the trail of money that was providing funding to Al Qaeda. This she had readily agreed to do, her suspicion already strong that many of the terrorist activities in the Middle East were connected by the money trail. Accordingly, she had concentrated on banking transactions at several banks in Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, the primary locations where many of the wealthy Saudis kept their vast fortunes. Of course, the Swiss were well known to be highly secretive, but occasionally it was possible to hack into their financial records, thereby discovering bits and pieces of information along the way.
It was at a group meeting in April that one of Elspeth’s colleagues mentioned that he had recently found a transaction record for a Saudi named Abdullah Al-Khoury that he considered to be somewhat suspicious. Checking into it, Elspeth was able to confirm that he was the selfsame Al-Khoury who had funded Al-Wadi for the purpose of bombing the Lido Hotel in Las Vegas. Accordingly, Elspeth was assigned to follow up on this rather flimsy lead.
Following the financial trail, Elspeth was able to determine that Al-Khoury had purchased a yacht in Beirut for the sum of one hundred million USD, a ridiculously high price for a private yacht, and this purchase had taken place shortly before the bombing of the Lido.
Over the course of the succeeding months, Elspeth was able to determine that the name Abdullah Al-Khoury was quite possibly an alias, there having been no one born by that name in Saudi Arabia during the span of time that he was supposed to have been born. Additional pieces of information floated in from time to time, such as the rather disconcerting fact that whereas he had paid an enormous amount of money for a yacht, there was no evidence that he actually possessed a yacht at all. So what exactly had the transaction paid for? Elspeth was convinced that whatever it was, it must have been a real whopper.
Accordingly, Elspeth now renewed her study of the bombing that had taken place at the Lido Hotel in Las Vegas. She had nothing more to go on than the fact that Al-Wadi and Al-Khoury shared hyphenated last names. For some as yet unknown reason, the bomb had been placed in a rather out-of-the-way spot underneath a stairwell within the basement of the building, so that only one person had been killed when the bomb had gone off. Still, the circumstances surrounding the bombing remained a mystery, the woman who had planted the bomb remained at large, and neither the CIA nor the FBI had yet succeeded in making any sense of the entire episode.
CIA Headquarters – Fall 1999
One day Elspeth made a discovery, something that changed the entire complexion of her search. In the course of studying the flow of money to Al Qaeda, she discovered that the Commerce Bank of Switzerland had been the receiver of the invoice for Abdullah Al-Khoury’s mythical yacht. Not only that, within days of that transaction, sixty million dollars had been transferred to a Lebanese Company named Medi-Products Limited. A month later a sum of twenty million dollars had been transferred to a Libyan Company named Agri-Exports. She had not yet traced the entire one hundred million dollars, but she was certain that in time it would all add up to the amount Al-Khoury had supposedly paid for the missing yacht.
Working backward in time from the Lido bombing she was able to determine that three weeks before the Lido bombing a sum of two million dollars had been paid to Kareem Al-Wadi by Agri-Exports for “farm products”. There was now more than circumstantial evidence that the bombing of the Lido had been financed by Al-Khoury. Based on this information Brian Spencer gave her free rein to delve further into the business dealings of the mysterious Saudi Abdullah Al-Khoury.
September 11, 2001
Elspeth, along with the rest of the world, watched in horror as events at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded on television. The world had changed overnight, and little did she know, but for the next decade her attentions would necessarily be drawn away from the Lockerbie Bombing. Al Qaeda had overnight become the chief threat to the United States. As a result, Elspeth necessarily turned her attentions to Osama bin Laden and his henchmen.
Merging Destiny Page 9