She picked up the pistol and stroked it gently. “I was working for the Iraqis — Operation Black Box, it was called. We were trying to stop the Israelis from finding the Ark and the treasures, trying to stop them from building the new Temple. Then you and Erin got in the way, and I realized I had pushed the envelope too far. They were going to find me. So I ran.”
“You worked for Al-Hassani?” Bennett asked in disbelief.
“Indirectly,” she admitted. “But we never spoke.”
“Who was your contact?”
“Khalid Tariq.”
69
“This is CNN breaking news.”
U.N. Secretary-General Salvador Lucente and Chinese Premier Liu Xing Zhao sat in a small study in a wing of the Great Hall of the People. For the last hour or so they had sipped tea and tracked the latest events and speculated on whether the Venezuela story was real or presidential sleight of hand. But now they were riveted by CNN’s exclusive report that President William Harvard Oaks had just “died of injuries sustained in yesterday’s gun battle inside NORAD headquarters.”
“A high-level administration official who asked not to be named publicly says Vice President Lee Alexander James has been sworn in as president,” said a correspondent at Peterson Air Force Base. “CNN has also learned that Defense Secretary Burton L. Trainor has been sworn in as vice president, though sources say he will continue running the defense portfolio as President James rebuilds his Cabinet.”
“It sounds like a coup,” Lucente said, almost in disbelief.
“It does,” Zhao agreed. “But the U.S. has never had one.”
“Perhaps they’re due,” Lucente said.
“What does it mean for us?” the premier asked.
“It depends,” Lucente said.
“On what?”
“On whether James is really going to war, and with whom.”
“Do you think James wanted to come after us,” Zhao asked, “and Oaks was against it?”
“I don’t know,” Lucente conceded. “But if I were you, I’d call your defense minister and see if there are American missiles or bombers in the air.”
Zhao’s hand reached instantly for the phone.
“Why did Tariq hire you?” Bennett asked.
“To help them build a world-class intelligence operation,” Rajiv explained. “Tariq and Al-Hassani had a plan from the minute they came to power. They were never true democrats. They were opportunists from the start. They wanted to unite the Arabs, the Persians, the Turks. They wanted to protect the Middle East from U.S. imperialism. They wanted to bless their people and give them hope, and they wanted me to help them.”
“But why did you say yes?”
“Because the world is out of balance, Jonathan. I hated to see the U.S. running roughshod over the entire Middle East, killing innocent civilians to save a quarter on a gallon of gas.”
“How much did Tariq pay you?” Bennett asked.
“Five million a year,” Rajiv admitted. “But like I told you, it wasn’t about the money. I couldn’t even touch the money until I got out. Even now, most of it is sitting in a Swiss bank — twenty million and change. Well, that was before the twenty-five you guys wired the other day.”
“Twenty? I don’t get it,” Bennett said, quickly doing the math. “How long have you working for Tariq?”
“Two years.”
“Then you should only have ten million.”
“Some of it is from China.”
“How much?”
“Three million.”
“And the Pakistanis?” Bennett asked.
“Two.”
“That’s still only fifteen million total,” Bennett said. “Where did the other five come from?”
Rajiv hesitated.
Bennett asked again, “Indira, where did you get the other five?”
“It was a bonus,” she said hesitantly.
“From who?”
“Tariq.”
“For what?”
There was a long, awkward silence.
“For what?” Bennett asked again.
Rajiv took a deep breath, then looked Bennett in the eye and said, “For helping him kill MacPherson.”
Dmitri Galishnikov and his wife huddled around their TV.
Oil prices were going through the roof. The last he had checked, the spot market had Israeli sweet crude going for more than $416 a barrel, up 6 percent in the past forty-eight hours. The Medexco empire was awash in cash, and the possibility of a war in Venezuela — one of the world’s few oil-exporting countries not directly affected by the Day of Devastation — meant the Galishnikovs were fast on their way to becoming the wealthiest couple on the planet.
But in their palatial home overlooking the churning Mediterranean, they were scared. Israel had been saved. For now. But the world was blowing up around them. Their money meant nothing. They felt helpless. They couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t keep food down. Dmitri, a lifelong avowed atheist, had gone so far as to buy a Hebrew Bible and a yarmulke. When his wife wasn’t watching, he was secretly surfing messianic Jewish Web sites, even Eli Mordechai’s. If this wasn’t the end, he thought, what could it possibly look like?
“Hold me, Dmitri,” his wife moaned as they followed the latest news of the assassination of President Oaks, and he did, trying desperately to comfort this wife of his youth, though he had no comfort of his own. “Tell me everything is going to be okay,” she said, her voice cracking in midsentence.
“I wish I could, darling,” he replied. “I wish I could.”
Bennett couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
But as livid as he was, something inside him told him not to show it, to keep her talking, to see where this all was leading.
“The attacks on the U.S. the other day — they were your idea?” he asked, fighting to keep his voice steady, not to make her defensive.
“No,” she insisted, “they weren’t.”
“What do you mean?” Bennett asked. “I thought you just said—”
But she cut him off. “I met with Tariq in Rome in early February,” Rajiv explained. “I had left Peter. I had left Langley. I was ready to help him build the intelligence network he and Al-Hassani needed to control all of North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and its oil. But the first thing he asked me to do was help him kill the president.”
“Why didn’t you say no?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“What do you mean?” Bennett asked, incredulous.
“I knew he was right.”
“Who?”
“Tariq.”
“About killing MacPherson.”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“It was the only way,” Rajiv said.
“To do what?”
“To humble the world’s only superpower,” Rajiv insisted. “To show the American people — and the world — that she wasn’t all-knowing, all-powerful, that she had weaknesses too, vulnerabilities.”
She paused for a moment and stared at the pistol in her hands. “Tariq said all he needed from me was intelligence — how the president moved, how he was protected, where might be the best place to strike. He said he’d wire me $5 million, and the next day it was there. I knew I couldn’t plan an operation like that from Rome, and he didn’t want me anywhere near Babylon. He didn’t want his fingerprints on this thing. So I came here.”
“To Yodok?” Bennett asked.
“Well, to Pyongyang, and eventually to a terror training camp a few kilometers from here.”
“But why North Korea?”