Abdallah sat down, put his feet up on the huge desk and grabbed a bottle of water.
With petrol prices rising by the hour, and disconcerting news stories about increasingly agitated diplomatic rhetoric in the Middle East, people were rushing out to get fuel. It was still night in the US, but the pictures showed queues of irascible drivers with cars full of barrels and buckets and plastic containers. One reporter who was standing in the way when a pick-up finally made it to the pumps had to jump to one side to avoid being mowed down.
‘They can’t deny us the right to buy petrol,’ a grossly overweight farmer shouted into the camera. ‘When the authorities can’t guarantee reasonable prices, we’ve got the right to take matters into our own hands.’
‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the interviewer while the camera zoomed in on two men fighting over a jerrycan.
‘First I’m going to fill all of these,’ the farmer shouted and waved his hand at one of five oil barrels on the back of his truck. ‘And then I’m going to empty them into my new silo. And I’m going to carry on doing that all night and tomorrow morning and for as long as there’s a darned drop left in the state…’
The sound stopped and the reporter stared into the camera, confused. The producer quickly cut back to the studio.
Abdallah drank the water. He emptied the bottle and then looked over at the map with all the pins in it, all his soldiers.
They had nothing to do with oil and petrol.
A large number of them worked in cable TV.
Many of them were employed by Sears or Wal-Mart.
The rest were computer people: young hackers who could be persuaded to do anything for a little money, and more experienced programmers. Some of them had lost their jobs because they were deemed to be too old. There was no place in the industry for good, loyal workers who had learnt about computers back in the day when you used punch cards and who had had to work their socks off to keep up with developments.
But the most beautiful thing of all, thought Abdallah as he reached for the photograph of his dead brother, Rashid, was that none of the pinheads knew about the others. The role that each and every one of them would play was, in itself, small. A minor detail, an offence that was worth the risk, given the payment that would follow.
But combined, the impact would be fatal.
An extraordinary number of headends – installations where cable TV signals were received and distributed to subscribers – would be affected; the generally unmanned stations had proved to be an easier target than Abdallah had imagined. Signal amplifiers and cables would be sabotaged to such an extent that it would take weeks, maybe even months, to correct it.
In the meantime, the anger would grow.
And things would get worse when the security systems and cash registers in the largest supermarket chains ceased to function. The attack on the supermarkets would be carried out in stages, with lightning attacks in selected areas, followed up by new incidents in other areas, unpredictable and strategically unreadable, like any good guerrilla warfare.
The whole invisible army of Americans, spread over the entire continent, unaware of each other’s existence, knew exactly what to do when the signal was given.
And it would happen tomorrow.
It had taken Abdallah more than a week to work out the final strategy. He had sat here in this office, with long lists of recruits in front of him. For seven days he had moved them round on the map, estimated, calculated and evaluated the impact and maximum effect. When he had finally written it all down on paper, all that was left to do was to call Tom O’Reilly to Riyadh.
And William Smith. And David Coach.
He had summoned the three couriers. They had been in the palace at the same time, without knowing about the others. They had each been sent back to Europe in a separate plane, at thirty-minute intervals. Abdallah smiled at the thought, and lightly stroked the picture of his brother.
He could never be certain of anything in this world, but by burning three of his safest bridges, he could be fairly sure that at least one of the letters would reach an American postbox.
He had used three couriers, and all three had died just after they had posted the letters that all said the same thing. The envelopes were addressed to the same person and the contents would be meaningless to anyone other than the receiver, if they should by any chance fall into the wrong hands.
And that was the weakest link in his plan: they all had the same addressee.
Like every good general, Abdallah knew his strengths and his weaknesses. His greatest strengths were his patience, his capital and the fact that he was invisible. But the latter was also his most vulnerable point. He was dependent on operating at many levels, using straw men and electronic detours, through covert manoeuvres and, occasionally, false identities.
Abdallah al-Rahman was a respected businessman. Most of his operations were legitimate, and he used the best brokers in Europe and the US. He was swathed by a mysterious inaccessibility, but nothing and no one had ever blemished his reputation as an unmitigated capitalist, investor and stock-market speculator.
And that was the way he wanted things to stay.
But he needed one ally. One person who knew.
Operation Trojan Horse was too complicated for everything to be controlled from a distance. There were to be no traces that could lead back to anything that might involve Abdallah, so he had not been to the States for more than ten months.
At the end of June 2004, he’d had his meeting with the Democrats’ presidential candidate. She had been positive. She was impressed by Arabian Port Management. He could tell. The meeting had run on for half an hour longer than planned because she wanted to know more. On the flight home to Saudi Arabia, he had for the first time since his brother’s death thought that it perhaps wouldn’t be necessary to implement the project after all. The thirty years of planning, positioning and developing a network of sleeping agents all over the US might in fact go to waste. He had leant his head against the window of his private jet and looked out at the clouds below, which were an intense pink colour in the last rays of the sun they were flying away from. He had told himself that it didn’t matter, that life was full of investments that gave nothing back. Taking over the majority of America’s ports would make it all worth it.
She had as good as promised him the contract.
Then she had just dropped him, so she would win.
All the letters would go to one recipient, a man who would then set into action Abdallah’s detailed plans. Nothing must go wrong, and Abdallah had to take the risk of making direct contact. He trusted his helper. They had known each other for a long time. It bothered him sometimes that this last remaining, fragile link between him and the US would have to be eliminated as soon as Trojan Horse had been implemented.
Abdallah rubbed the glass in the frame carefully with his shirtsleeve, then put the photograph of Rashid back down on the desk.
He did trust Fayed Muffasa, but on the other hand, he hated having to rely on another living soul.
VI
‘Well, isn’t this a Kodak moment?’
President Helen Bentley was sitting with Ragnhild on her knee. The little girl was asleep. Her blonde head had flopped back, her mouth was wide open and you could see her eyes moving from side to side behind her paper-thin eyelids. At regular intervals she produced little grunts. ‘There was certainly no need for you to…’ Johanne stretched out her arms to pick up the child.
‘Just let her be.’ Helen Bentley smiled. ‘I need a break.’
She had been sitting in front of the computer screen for three hours. The situation was serious, to put it mildly. Far worse than she had imagined. The fear of what might happen when the New York Stock Exchange opened in a few hours’ time was enormous, and it seemed that the media had been more concerned about the economy than politics over the past twenty-four hours. As if it was possible to make such a differentiation, Helen Bentley thought
