‘Damn right I am. I’ll see you here in five.’
He ordered a taxi, then went back outside to call Watkinson’s mobile. ‘It’s Richter. I just might have worked out what’s going on. What time is the World Cup race starting?’
‘This evening, in about four hours, in fact. Why?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Can we meet at the embassy right now?’
‘Thirty minutes?’
‘I’ll be there,’ Richter said, then he called Hammersmith again. ‘You’ll need to kick Simpson awake and tell him I have to talk to him.’
‘I’ll need a good reason to disturb him on a Saturday afternoon.’ The duty officer sounded distinctly unenthusiastic at the prospect of calling his boss.
‘I’ve got a very good one,’ Richter replied, and told him what he’d worked out.
‘It suddenly dawned on me that because Holden’s killer wiped the hard disk, we assumed the information contained on it was genuine. Then I realized that the data probably was genuine, but our conclusions might be invalid because we’ve been looking at it from the wrong angle. This, in fact, could be exactly what we thought it wasn’t — a deception operation — and we’ve been making far too many assumptions.’
Watkinson didn’t look convinced. ‘I think you need to explain that.’
‘It’s like the old Antony and Cleopatra story. Cleopatra is lying dead on the floor. Beside her is broken glass and some spilt liquid. Antony is standing over her, looking down. What happened?’
‘Have we really got time for riddles?’
‘It’ll take ten seconds, so humour me.’
‘OK. Cleopatra has drunk poison and died. She dropped the glass, and the liquid on the floor is the rest of the poison. Antony’s just arrived and found her like that.’
‘Carole?’ Richter asked, turning to Jackson.
‘I’d assume pretty much the same, I guess.’
‘Exactly,’ Richter said. ‘If you ask a hundred people to explain the same riddle, almost all of them will say something like that, because they’re all making assumptions that aren’t supported by the evidence. And all of them would be wrong.’
‘So what’s the real answer?’
‘It’s easy when you don’t assume anything and ask the right questions. Because I used the names Antony and Cleopatra, you assumed I meant the Roman general and the Queen of Egypt, but that’s not actually what I said. I just gave you two names. If I tell you that Cleopatra is a goldfish and Antony’s a cat, absolutely everything about the scene changes. Assumptions can be really dangerous.’
‘That’s just a word game,’ Watkinson objected.
‘No, it’s a useful example of what I mean. Look what we’ve got here. A man claims to have visions of terrorist bombings. When the devices explode we realize his information is extraordinarily accurate, so when he predicts another bomb exploding in a Gulf hotel we believe him. But Arab terrorists never give warnings, because they always aim for the maximum damage and the highest possible number of casualties, so this leaking of information through a man claiming to be psychic is entirely new.’
‘Maybe this group has a different agenda, and might not want to cause maximum casualties,’ Watkinson pointed out.
‘It has got a different agenda, I’m sure of that. I believe its target is a small but very important group of people in Dubai.’
The question was obvious. ‘Who?’
‘The royal House of Saud,’ Richter replied, and Wat-kinson’s jaw visibly dropped open.
‘This had better be good,’ Simpson snapped, from the doorway of the room where the duty officer sat at a wide L-shaped desk facing a telephone console and a bank of television sets displaying the principal real-time news channels, their audio outputs muted. On the other section of the desk were three computer monitors.
‘It’s Richter, sir.’ The duty officer stood up as the director entered, unshaven and wearing casual clothes. ‘He thinks he’s uncovered an Al-Qaeda plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian royal family in Dubai.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Simpson muttered. ‘All he was supposed to be doing was interviewing a barmy Englishman. What’s his evidence?’
‘It’s mainly circumstantial, but what he told me does seem to make sense.’
‘It had better, for his sake. Tell me about it.’
‘That’s a hell of a leap of logic,’ Watkinson said. ‘What are your reasons? And who is it down to?’
‘The second question is easier to answer. It’s probably Al-Qaeda, and I’ll explain why I think so in a minute. As for the leaks, that’s the real question, and until today I had no idea of the answer. But it’s really simple and obvious when you ignore your assumptions and just look at the facts. Holden was the lynchpin of this entire scheme, and those two bombs were detonated for one reason only — to establish his credibility, so that we would listen to what he said. Nothing else. Those incidents just proved Holden could “see” the atrocities before they happened, so that when he announced that a device was going to be planted in a Gulf State hotel, we’d immediately believe him. We’d then concentrate all our resources on trying to find which hotel the terrorists had picked, and ignore the real target.’
‘Which is?’
‘The VIP viewing stand at the racecourse, during the Dubai World Cup. That’s why I asked you when the race was being held.’
Watkinson shook his head. ‘I’m not following this. You said the target was the House of Saud. Now you’re telling me it’s a stand at Nad Al-Sheba.’
‘It’s both,’ Richter replied, with a trace of impatience. ‘Julian Caxton told me how the World Cup meeting attracts all the royalty and nobility of the Arab world. I’ve no doubt they stay in the top hotels or local palaces, so trying to target them individually would be very difficult. But the one occasion when they’ll all be together in a single location at a fixed time is during the World Cup. My guess is that the explosives smuggled here to Dubai inside Shaf’s trailer are already hidden under the VIP stand and attached to a timing device. And this evening, when all the sheikhs and princes are cheering on their horses, there’ll be a sodding great bang and the entire stand will disappear in a cloud of dust. Unless we do something to stop it.’
‘But why the House of Saud? Osama bin Laden is a Saudi by birth.’
‘Yes, but he’s had no love for the ruling family since they took away his passport and did their best to humiliate and disown him. And, if I am right, this isn’t exactly a new plan. Back in 1991 bin Laden was expelled from Saudi Arabia for plotting to replace the royals with an Islamic regime.’
‘You know there are nearly six thousand members of the Saudi ruling family? They certainly won’t all be at Nad Al-Sheba.’
‘No, but enough senior members will be there to make this operation feasible. And I’m pretty sure Al-Qaeda is behind this, just because of the callous nature of the operation. Around thirty people died in Damascus, and another six or eight in Manama. That’s nearly forty deaths whose sole purpose was to establish the credentials of one man, James Holden. And then they killed another dozen at the stables in Saudi Arabia to hide the fact that a horse had been stolen. They could have achieved the same objective by imprisoning the staff somewhere out of sight. That ruthless disregard for human life is an Al-Qaeda trademark.’
‘But surely a mass killing here would just mean bin Laden becoming even more reviled than he is already, and ensure he could never return to his homeland.’