The four men took their seats, and as if by magic a waiter appeared.
“Tea and cakes,” the emir said.
The waiter disappeared as quickly as he had arrived.
“So what was the end result in Iceland?” the emir asked.
Cabrillo filled him in on the details. The emir nodded.
“If you men hadn’t been there and made the switch,” the emir said, “who knows where I’d be right now.”
“Al-Khalifa is dead now, Your Excellency,” Cabrillo said, “so that is one less worry.”
“Nonetheless,” the emir said, “I want the Corporation to do a full-scale assessment of my security and the threats to my government as soon as possible.”
“We would be happy to do that for you,” Cabrillo said, “but right now there is a more pressing matter we’d like to discuss.”
The emir nodded. “Please, by all means.”
Cabrillo started to explain.
47
THE THREE SHIPPING containers filled with poisoned prayer rugs sat off to the side of the cargo terminal at Riyadh Airport behind a chain-link fence that covered the space of several football fields. If the time had not been so close to the hajj, the rugs would have already been moved and unloaded. As it was, arriving late as they had, they had moved down the list in priority. As long as they were in place on the ground around the Kaaba the day before the start of the hajj, Al-Sheik would consider it a success.
Right now, the planner was concerned with more pressing matters.
Along with the prayer rugs, there were nearly one million plastic bottles of water that needed to be placed, ten thousand portable toilets to supplement those already at the site, six complete tented first-aid stations that would ring the perimeter, and ten thousand portable trash cans.
Boxes of printed flyers and memorabilia, complimentary Korans and postcards, and boxes containing tubes of sunscreen sat on pallets. Food for the pilgrims, six thousand brooms for the workers to use to sweep up the daily mess, portable umbrellas in case of rain. Twelve large crates of fans to be placed inside the massive structure around the Great Mosque for ventilation.
But Al-Sheik had nothing to do with the security arrangements.
That was handled by the Saudi Arabia secret police.
At a separate area of the air cargo terminal, trucks were already moving the security supplies to Mecca—a complete command-and-control facility with radios and live video capabilities; one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition and tear gas in case of disturbances; one thousand portable plastic handcuffs; forty trained dogs with pens, food, and extra leashes and collars; and a dozen armored personnel carriers, four tanks and thousands of troops.
The yearly hajj was a massive undertaking and the Saudi royal family footed the bill.
Al-Sheik stared at his clipboard then marked off a truck leaving the compound.
THE EMIR HAD been sipping his hot tea and listening to Cabrillo speak for nearly twenty minutes without interrupting. Finally there was silence.
“Will you allow me to indulge you with a short history of Islam?”
“By all means,” Cabrillo said.
“There are three important sites to the Islamic religion, two in Saudi Arabia, the third in Israel. The first and most sacred is the mosque of al-Haram in Mecca, where the Kaaba is located; the second is Masjid al-Nabawi, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, which has the tomb of Muhammad. The third is Masjid al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, the site where Muhammad ascended on a horse to speak to Allah.” The emir paused and sipped his tea, then continued.
“The Kaaba is of critical importance to Muslims; it is the spot they pray toward five times daily. It is the very beacon of our faith. Behind the sheets that hang down over the sacred site of the Kaaba, inside the building itself, is a black stone that Abraham recovered and placed there many centuries past.”
Cabrillo and Jones nodded.
“As you mentioned, the stone is widely believed to be a meteorite sent from Allah to the faithful,” the emir added.
“Could you describe the stone?” Jones asked.
The emir nodded. “I have touched it myself many times. The stone is round, approximately one foot in diameter, and black in color. If I was to guess the weight I would say about one hundred pounds, give or take.”
“Those are the approximate dimensions of the meteorite recovered in Greenland,” Cabrillo said.
The emir’s face showed alarm.
“There’s something I failed to mention, Your Excellency,” Cabrillo said. “Our scientists have reason to believe that there might be a virus contained in the Greenland meteorite that could be released if the orb is split.”
“What type of virus?” the emir asked.
“One that consumes oxygen at an alarming rate,” Cabrillo said, “creating a vacuum that sucks everything nearby into the center.”
“Armageddon,” the emir said.
