met men who were not members of his personal household, but he would dispense with custom whenever it interfered with operational security.
Ibrahim smiled thinly. He trusted no one absolutely, but he considered Lahoud levelheaded and discreet.
An Egyptian by birth, Lahoud had been handpicked to head the Persian Gulf Environmental Trust by Ibrahim himself — as had all the trust’s personnel. It was a separate company, privately held by Ibrahim. Its public charter proclaimed a determination to counter the rampant pollution in the Gulf by funneling a fixed percentage of Caraco’s corporate profits into worthy environmental efforts.
“You found your trip a pleasant one, Mr. Lahoud?” Ibrahim asked, signaling Hashemi for coffee.
Lahoud nodded. “Both pleasant and speedy — thanks to your generous assistance, Highness.”
A Caraco helicopter had been waiting at Taif when Lahoud’s plane landed — bringing him directly to the estate.
“And your family? They prosper?” the prince continued.
“They do, by the grace of God,” Lahoud answered.
Ibrahim let the conversation drift through the pleasantries that always preceded any meeting in the Middle East for several more minutes before turning to more serious matters. “I assume the trust has been approached to fund another special endeavor, Mr. Lahoud?”
“Indeed, Highness.” The Egyptian handed him a slim manila folder. “A most worthy venture in my judgment.”
Ibrahim flipped it open. A single cover sheet moved straight to the heart of the matter.
Project Summary
The Radical Islamic Front has learned that Anson P. Carleton, the American Undersecretary of State for Arab Affairs, will visit Riyadh from June 6 to June 8. Carleton’s mission is to press the Saudi government for a renewed rapprochement with the State of Israel.
Among other incentives, he intends to offer an extensive military aid package conditioned only on an agreement by Saudi ministers to meet directly and covertly with representatives of Israel — either in Washington itself or in an undisclosed neutral capital.
The Front has developed a plan to assassinate Carleton as soon as he arrives on Saudi soil. They seek the funds necessary to carry out this action.
Ibrahim turned to the detailed proposal attached to the cover sheet.
He studied it intently in silence and then nodded. The Radical Islamic Front was a small group — a breakaway faction of the much larger and more loosely organized Hizballah. They were known to have good intelligence sources, and it looked as though they’d scored quite a coup this time.
The Front’s plan was a clever one — simple, direct, and with only a minimal chance of detection by the Saudi security services.
And he agreed wholeheartedly with their choice of target.
He’d followed this American’s activities closely now for a number of months. Carleton had apparently dedicated himself to restarting the perennially stalled Middle East peace process once again.
The thought of instigating Carleton’s assassination intrigued Ibrahim.
The man was one of the U.S. State Department’s rising stars, and his official visit would naturally be made under tight security. Killing such a high-ranking diplomat would not only embarrass the Americans and the Saudi security services, it would also make them afraid — unsure of where the next terrorist blow would land. It was also guaranteed to paralyze American policy-making in the region for weeks or months — at least until a new undersecretary was appointed to fill the dead man’s shoes.
All of which would dovetail rather nicely with his own larger plans, Ibrahim decided.
He smiled thinly, imagining again the horror that environmental scientists with Persian Gulf Trust grants would feel if they ever learned they shared funding with some of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organizations. Not that they ever would. He had spent most of a lifetime living and working in two very separate worlds — one the world of international business and finance, and the other the armed struggle against Israel and its allies in the West.
Only a handful of men still living — all of them his most trusted servants knew that Prince Ibrahim al Saud, the chairman of Caraco, was also the hidden financier of international terrorism. For year after year, he had funneled money into carefully selected terrorist operations — always laundering his contributions through a labyrinthine maze of front organizations and other cutouts. And, as other sources of funding for terrorism had dried up, the prince had gathered more and more of the reins of power into his own carefully concealed hands. His word was fast becoming law for terrorist groups as diverse as Hizballah, Hammas, ‘the Radical Islamic Front, Japan’s Red Army, and Colombian’s M19 guerrillas.
Month in and month out, year in and year out, the cycle continued.
Proposals for major terror actions percolated their way upward through his networks until they reached his desk. And then orders issuing the necessary funds filtered back down to the men carrying the guns or bombs. Sometimes Ibrahim felt as though he had been fighting his covert war with America, Europe, and Israel forever — that the long, weary struggle stretched from the moment of his birth and would last until his death.
But he knew that was not so.
Ibrahim could pinpoint the instant, the very second almost, that his hatred for the West had first flared to life.
His eyes closed briefly. Even now the memories were painful.
He had been just seven years old. His father, a farthinking man in many ways, had seen the outside world fast encroaching on Saudi Arabia’s isolation — run by the oceans of oil beneath the Kingdom’s desert sands. Oilmen from Texas, Great Britain, and other Western countries were pouring money into the once impoverished land at a fantastic clip — altering age-old patterns of life in the span of just a few years. To prepare his oldest son to meet the challenges of this new age, Ibrahim’s father had arranged for him to be taught English and schooled in the ways of the modern world.
But his father, so wise in many things, had been so weak and so foolish in others.
The memory stabbed at Ibrahim yet again.
It had been early in the evening. He had come into the room his father used to entertain his prized Western guests — eager to show off the top marks he’d just received from his tutor. Two American executives were there. Americans who worked for one of the major oil companies. Both of them stood looking down at his father with expressions of utter contempt on their faces.
And his father? His once-loved father lay in a drunken stupor on a divan, still clutching the bottle of forbidden whiskey his “guests” had plied him with.
Ibrahim’s stomach churned. It was almost as if he could smell the smoky reek of liquor still hanging in midair.
He remembered one of the Americans glancing quickly toward him, then swinging back to his companion with a harsh, muttered laugh. “No problem. It’s only the sand nigger’s boy.”
From that moment, Ibrahim’s path — his duty — had been clear to him.
His formal education gave shape, form, and purpose to his hatred.
During his years at university in Cairo and Oxford, he gravitated toward fellow students and teachers who preached the need for radical change — first by words and then by violence. Their creed was simple, strident, and seductive. Israel, its American and European backers, and those Arabs and Muslims corrupted by Western money were the source of all that was wrong in the Arab world. Only by armed struggle could the peoples of the Middle East throw off the shackles of their Western exploiters and regain their true place in the world order.
Determined to play a leading role in this new war, Ibrahim had even spent a summer training at one of the new terrorist camps springing up across the Middle East. The men masterminding the resurgence of Arab radicalism had been delighted to find a scion of the House of Saud among their disciples. But they had quickly made it clear to him that he was too valuable an asset to be used as a gun-or bomb-carrying foot soldier. Instead they had given him special skills and training — teaching him how to organize self-contained terrorist cells, intelligence networks, and moneylaundering operations. He had been schooled in the arts of command and deceit and then sent back to Saudi Arabia to put those lessons into practice.
