The Phoenix Affair - Dave Moyer (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

bad, son, just about what I’d have expected. Sheesh, Randy. Alright, son, you get back to work, call me here if you get anything else off the Paris net in the next hour and a half. I’ll take the teleconference here at home, tell my people I’ll be into the office about eight-thirty.”

“Yessir.” The line went dead and Anderson replaced his handset. He rolled onto his back and stared at the coffered ceiling, painfully aware for a moment that the other side of the bed was empty. “Still not used to it, old buddy. Amelia’s gone, gotta move on.”

The big house was dead quiet, seemed like it’d been dead quiet since Amelia’d died, what, seven months ago now? Some days he thought he should sell the place, too big for just him, the kids didn’t come that often. Maybe just take an apartment closer to the city, it’d be easier on his security team and he could always just go visit the kids instead of waiting for them to come to Virginia. But he hadn’t done it. When you got right down to it he loved this house, loved the rich paneling in the study, the bookshelves lined with his library, collected over a lifetime. He liked the subtlety of the colors Amelia had used to decorate the formal living room, the kitchen, the hearth room where he’d still watch football on Sundays with his security detail. In the fall he loved to sit out on the terrace, looking past the stone baluster across the lawn littered with the falling leaves of every amber color at the Potomac as it flowed lazily south to Washington and beyond. The Guys played football on that lawn sometimes. No, this was home. It reminded him of Amelia, which was a good thing. “Good woman, none better,” he murmured. “OK, down to business pal.”

The President had been as understanding as usual last night. That was the thing about this guy that set him apart from the Presidents he’d known before. This guy understood that the gloves had to come off to fight this enemy, and he was a fighter. Since taking office he’d given the Agency pretty much carte blanche to find, take, kill, kidnap, or buy terrorists just about anywhere on the planet. The Old Man had asked a few questions about what might happen, just in case the uproar in France reached his level, but he was satisfied and said he’d handle it if it did. In the end he’d simply said “Go, Randy, thanks for coming over.” The kind of President America needed and deserved in troubled times.

“And I’m by God the kind of spook America needs in troubled times,” he growled at the empty room. “Private airplane? What the hell is that Cameron character up to?” He laughed out loud. “Well, the man’s a fighter pilot after all, no surprise he can fly one of those things. I guess that tells me something about Paris—our guys must’ve figured it was too risky to leave the country by any “normal” way.” He made a mental note for his conversation with Paris at seven. “What else?” he asked the ceiling.

He lay there staring and thinking for fifteen minutes. Finally he decided there was nothing productive he could do until the phone call at seven, so he tugged the blankets back up to his chin and rolled over, and was back to sleep in a few minutes more. Randy Anderson, DDO, was not a man to worry about much.

*****

Khalid fought to control himself as he re-read the message from Paris. His mouth was strangely dry, his breath came shallow, and he could feel perspiration on his forehead despite the air conditioning working overtime in the internet café. He looked up from the screen to sweep the room, all young Saudi men surfing the web. Nobody else was sweating, but nobody was paying any attention to him, either.

He looked back at the screen, blinked away his disbelief, and read the message for a third time. Network destroyed, probably, Ibrahim’s apartment searched by Americans, probably CIA. The General was almost certainly alive since there’d been no phone call from Salah to crow over the success of the murder attempt. Ibrahim on a train by now headed for Germany, his telephone number compromised. Unbelievable. How could his best man, his protégé, have failed so utterly? He stared at the screen, but in a few moments he realized that he was replaying the dreaded image in his head again, the one where he knelt on the stone square, hands bound behind him, the grate in the stone before his eyes and the headsman above him holding aloft the great sword. He shook himself, wiped his brow, and sat back.

Up until this he’d had the beginnings of another good day. He’d prayed at dawn, thanks be to God, then slept well until nine. After a breakfast of bread, cheese, oranges and some tea he’d bought another ten airline tickets for his men. That, at least, was progressing according to plan. In another two or three days he’d have enough to get half the force out of the Kingdom and they’d be safe.

“Well, why should it take so long to do?” he asked himself. “Of course, it need not,” he answered. Instead he resolved that he would find one more travel agent here in Riyadh today, buy ten more tickets. Then, he’d arrange for his men to begin moving some of the “assets” elsewhere in the Kingdom, smaller towns where they would clear Security for the international flights and avoid doing so at the major departure points like Jeddah, Riyadh, and Dhahran. Taif, in the mountains above Mecca would do. Then Tabuk, up north by the Jordanian border, a nice, provincial town, very quiet. He had people there, he had people everywhere in the Kingdom. He had another thought, and decided it was a good time for him to see the mountains of Hejaz himself. “Perhaps it’s time to do something a little more complex, just in case.” He’d drive West to Taif this evening, buy more tickets there tomorrow, then to Tabuk the next day to buy the rest. He’d be finished quicker, he’d feel safer knowing his men could begin moving, and he’d have broken up the pattern considerably. The picture of the grate flashed through his mind again very briefly.

“Yes, that is a good plan,” he gloated. It did not escape his notice that he’d be on the road, or far from the power center of Riyadh, at least, when Mohammed attacked the troublesome General’s house in Dhahran this evening.

He looked up again at the sound of movement, and saw that many of the other customers were shutting down and moving to the counter to pay for their time. Right then the call to noon prayer, is-salat id-zohr, issued from the loudspeaker of the mosque a half-block down the street from his chair, a penetrating, clear tenor voice, and others took up the call a fraction of a second later. “God is most great, God is most Great, come to prayer . . .” Khalid had too much to do to spend the next thirty minutes at prayer, but it was after all a part of the rhythm of his life, and he would be conspicuous if he tried to avoid the mosque right here. In any case, the café would close, the clerk was already beckoning frantically at him and another man to shut down and pay so he could shutter the shop.

He killed the cursed message and the browser, and shut down the computer as quickly as he could. Reaching into the pocket of his thob as he stood he produced two ten-riyal notes, waving them at the harried clerk. The man nodded with a grateful smile, and Khalid left the notes next to his machine.

Out on the street men flowed in a heavy stream toward the mosque on his right, and he blended in with the crowd. It would be good to pray again today, it would calm him, Allah would give him wisdom and strength. He reached into his left pocket for the phone, dialed Mohammed in Dhahran, and walked toward the mosque.

“Nam?” the voice answered.

“Mohammed, may God give you life, brother,” Khalid said cheerily. How was your preparation last night? I hope your mother is well?

“God gives you life, brother,” the other replied. She is well, praise be to God, but the mullah here is about to begin the prayers. Can it wait, I must turn off my phone.”

“And here, my friend, here as well of course. I was just wondering if you still plan to call on my nephew tonight as we agreed. It’s very important to me that he receive my greetings tonight.”

“Yes, yes my friend, it will be done. I’m looking forward to, ummm, seeing him. It should be an exciting party, I doubt he’s expecting it at all.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” he said in a tone he hoped conveyed a warning. He had a strange feeling about this, such was the effect of Ibrahim’s failure. “If you want it to be a true surprise, you must be careful. He’s a clever boy like his father, my brother. You have help, do you not?”

“Yes, I do, it will be a good surprise. Now I must go.”

Khalid had reached the door of the mosque, and men filing past him through the door looked disapprovingly at his phone. He heard the beginnings of the mullah leading prayer over the phone just as it went dead.

He closed his own, pocketed it, and joined the flow of men into the cool interior of the mosque. The entry hall was littered with shoes already, and he removed his own sandals, putting them aside in a corner where he was pretty sure he’d find them. He padded forward on the cold tiled floor to the ablution stations, thinking as he always did that the Prophet, Peace be upon Him, had been wise to ensure that the prayers happened at the same time of day, by the sun, everywhere on earth rather than at the same time by the clock. Thus, prayers were about five minutes earlier on the coast, in Dhahran, than they were here in the center of Arabia. When his turn came he stepped up to the long ceramic-tiled trough with a fountain of water spilling into it from a large perforated pipe above, and he performed the ritual washing that always preceded prayer. First his hands up to the wrists, and then he took water into his mouth three times, spitting it into the trough each time. Next, he snuffed water into his nose three times from his right hand, blowing it out each time with the aid of his left. Then he washed his face from ear to ear three times, and from chin to forehead three times, from wrists to the elbows three times, from the forehead to the back of his neck and back three times. Next he washed each ear with the corresponding hand, first finger brushing the inside of each ear while the thumb ran along the rear of the outside of the ear. Finally, he washed each foot, beginning with the right, leaving them damp, and spoke in a whisper the ritual kalimatus shahda: ash-hadu alla ilaha illallahu wa-ash-hadu an-na muhammadan 'abduhu-wa-rasuluh, there is no God but God and Mohammed is His Messenger. He was ready, clean, and pure to hear and speak the words of the Holy Q’uran.

Khalid followed the men ahead of him into the mosque proper to find a place to pray. As it often was with small, out of the way mosques, while the building was dusty stucco on the outside, plain and a little unkempt, inside it was magnificent. Thick carpets covered the floor, many of them clearly very old, but thick and soft nonetheless, in many patterns, but most of them dark reds, blues, blacks. Khalid recognized