serious diplomatic incident. The shooter was reprimanded and temporarily banished from the active list of covert agents. This would be a good time to bring him back. Not only was he finishing a contract job with some weapons company and was free for new orders, but he also might be wanting to prove that he was still up to doing clandestine work. Buchanan underlined the name: last name Swanson; first name Kyle.
The National Security Advisor possessed one of the most secure computers in the entire U.S. government, but Buchanan refused to believe it could not be hacked. All of those whirring and clicking sounds only meant that the hard drive was storing and shuffling information. There was no such thing as a really secure computer. He did not want anyone to someday unveil his secret correspondence to a Senate investigating committee or have it become a headline in
From his middle desk drawer, Buchanan slid out a single sheet of expensive stationery that bore THE WHITE HOUSE across the top in simple blue letters, and began to write in a neat, precise longhand. There would be only this one original, and it would rest in a briefcase locked to the wrist of a special courier. Once the instruction was read by the Marine sniper, the courier would destroy the document. No copies, no paper trail.
Buchanan finished the note, sealed it in an official envelope, and put it into a light blue file folder with a red stripe diagonally across the front and WHITE HOUSE TOP SECRET stenciled in big black letters. He sealed that, too.
Then he told his aide Sam Shafer to locate this Gunnery Sergeant Swanson and get him to that fleet Marine unit in the Mediterranean as soon as possible. Shafer would also fly out to the task force, carrying the letter in a burnished aluminum briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, to personally deliver it. By using his private staff and a CIA cover, Buchanan would bypass General Turner and the others in their fancy uniforms.
As he worked, Buchanan once again had to grudgingly approve of Gordon Gates’s enterprising and farsighted ideas. Sending in a bloodthirsty robot like Swanson was indeed a good insurance policy.
CHAPTER 14
ALI SHALAL RASSAD KNEW THAT sometimes just a little shove was all that was needed to force friends and enemies alike to do something they would later regret. He was a master of that quiet tactic, and was about to employ it against the United States of America. Rassad was known as the Rebel Sheikh not so much for being a great fighter, although he was, but because he refused to be consumed by any higher political power. His streak of stubborn independence made him an ally of convenience from Baghdad to Tehran to Washington. He worked with all, trusted none, and worked only for himself.
He had agreed to perform a very precise role in the drama involving the American general, the sort of multilayered deception that he most enjoyed. He was being paid well to lend some of his militiamen to the mission, then to hold a single brief meeting with the Pentagon correspondent from a major American television network. The reporter had been in Iraq many times and had great credibility within the United States. His story would be accepted as fact.
Rassad sipped a cup of strong tea as he scanned the
There was nothing in the papers or on television to match the fresh information on a decoded message that was also on his desk. Task Force 32-A of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet was moving into position in the western Mediterranean. Israel had granted flyover permission for the Americans. The Marines were coming. Rassad intended to spur everyone along with a renewed sense of urgency to prevent them from having second thoughts that might breed caution.
Rassad loved the game. He pushed aside the papers, finished the tea, and snapped his fingers for an assistant to clear the desk and incinerate all of the papers. Some posturing politician someday might send a raiding party to his palace in attempt to find and seize incrimination information. That would fail, of course, and the politician would soon be assassinated, but Rassad kept his most important information in his head. Everything else was consigned to ashes.
He returned to his living suite, where a barber waited to trim his beard, eyebrows, nose, and ears. The valet had laid out clothing chosen for the interview, a dark gray suit from London, an off-white dress shirt with a muted silk tie, and highly polished Italian shoes. The trousers were tailored to help offset the fact that his left leg was an inch shorter than his right, a reminder of the year and a half he had spent in Abu Ghraib prison for the crime of defending his beautiful girlfriend when Uday Hussein’s thugs had come for her. Uday himself, laughing, had wielded the long steel crowbar that smashed Rassad’s bones while telling in great detail how the girl, a virgin, had been fucked and how she screamed and how when Uday tired of her, he tossed her to the guards in a rape room, where she died. Rassad would be allowed to heal for a while after one of the torture sessions, only to undergo a repeat performance with the crowbar when he had recovered enough. He was not beaten to get a confession, for he had nothing to confess. Uday just enjoyed beating him. In the end, when the Americans had released him, Rassad could not walk on the mutilated leg.
The limp became a badge of honor for his new life as it healed, an unspoken reminder that he had paid dearly for opposing the dictator Saddam Hussein. When he was taken to prison, he had been just another bureaucrat in the Ministry of the Interior, but he emerged as a new political force, for he had channeled his powerful mind away from the pain and into how he could capitalize on his experiences. There were days now when he could almost thank Uday for the cruelty, because no one ever questioned Rassad’s loyalty to his country. It was a wonderful political bargaining chip. In the end, Rassad had the final laugh on Uday by directing the Americans to the location of the Hussein brothers, where they were killed. He kept a picture of Uday’s misshapen dead body in a folder in a desk drawer, and he looked at it often.
Today, Rassad would wear the fine suit instead of the comfortable robes in order to appear as a reasonable, moderate, westernized Iraqi leader. He did not want the American television audience to equate him with some ordinary Koran-thumping radical mullah. He had graduated from MIT, for Christ’s sake.
A sleek Bell helicopter, ornate in its coat of glistening midnight blue with gold trim, skimmed in to land at the palace after a smooth trip from the big American base in Doha, Kuwait. Jack Shepherd unfolded his lanky frame from the comfortable seat and stepped out, shielding his eyes against the rotor blast. He was disoriented. Something was missing. Something was wrong, a sense of incompleteness. It wasn’t until an escort shook his hand and helped his television crew load their gear into an air-conditioned limo that Shepherd could put his finger on what was different. It was quiet! He had heard others speak about the eerie feeling in the broad neighborhoods around the Rebel Sheikh’s palace, but he had not been here for at least a year. In Iraq, he usually came in tense and expecting danger, with bomb blasts echoing throughout the countryside, something somewhere always blowing up with the erratic constancy of a popcorn machine, but this area of Basra was an oasis of calm.
The escort gave them a quick tour before going to the palace. Shops were open, private cars jammed the clean streets, children played soccer on neat green fields, and women walked freely in the street markets, some with heads uncovered, with bags of goods on their arms. Police without sidearms directed traffic, and men in robes or open-necked shirts and trousers sat around the tables of sidewalk cafes. There was laughter.
Shepherd saw a sign giving directions to the new Toyota plant, and passed other signs of German, French, British, Japanese, and Russian companies. Foreign investment was flowing in. The new buildings being erected were not slapdash brick-and-mortar jobs, but well-engineered concrete and steel. Shepherd flipped through his mental index cards until he found the comparison-Beirut, and how the older correspondents described it back when it was a pearl of a city and not a terrorist hellhole. Military units stayed outside Basra, and some of the Rebel Sheikh’s feared private militia had been transformed into civilian police. This area of the city had been good last year when he visited, and was better today. Whatever the sheikh was doing was working.
“Jack Shepherd! It is good to see you again.” Ali Shalal Rassad stepped from the shade of an arbor of trees beside a fountain in the courtyard of the palace and extended his hand. “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
