Moncrief cut in. “Skip, you don’t want to know.” He wiped his hands with a stained white rag.
“We believe it was part of a play being made by certain Western forces, but the intelligence can only a play guessing game at this point.” Ludwig seemed to enjoy being indirect.
“Translate Western forces for me?”
“Well, the best person to ask may be Mr. Scott.”
Parker lost patience with the extent to which Ludwig would avoid directly answering the question.
“So the CIA wanted al-Megrahi out.”
“Yes.”
“What about this Omnipol?”
“That’s the interesting part.” Ludwig’s eyes shifted around as if he was looking to make sure the room was clear.
“Yeah, you gotta hear this,” Moncrief chimed in on the video conference.
“Omnipol is a Czech company based in Prague. It is one of the world’s largest suppliers of arms. It is, by far, the largest supplier of Semtex, and the Semtex they supplied had a certain chemical trace to it. But that’s not the important part.”
“Okay?” Parker prompted.
“We believe it is owned by Yousef ’s cousin, Ali bin Saleem, who is the secretary of the council that will select the next king of Saudi Arabia.”
CHAPTER 10
The night before the meeting, the village had been in an uproar. The brothers of the woman named Medi had suspected for several weeks that she was meeting her lover in his two-roomed home, tucked well into a wash in the hills just outside the village of Kawas in western Pakistan. Medi, of the Mahmoond tribe, was barely out of her teens, and stupid. Both her brothers had warned her repeatedly.
A neighbor who lived up the trail had heard moaning as he passed the mud stucco and thatched-roof hut just after sunset. A man from the village representing the elders went there the following morning and found the walls covered in sprays of blood — the floors as well. He stepped into a puddle of black, congealed blood, which stuck to his shoes like molasses. Flies swarmed around the room, occasionally landing on his cheek, even as he brushed them aside. The bodies had been pummeled with bricks found nearby, covered in the same sticky blood. Both of her brothers owned up to the crime. No arrests followed.
Yousef had heard of the incident. He knew better than anyone that their cultural laws ran deep. A sister or daughter who committed adultery was stoned to death. He was concerned, though, that it drew attention to the village and threatened to compromise the meeting place.
“Are we late?” He looked at his watch again while the truck, jumping back and forth like a porch swing, slammed into another pothole. The road was meant more for the mule-pulled carts than for a four-wheeled vehicle.
“No,” said the driver, his hands gripping the wheel so tight his knuckles turned white against his dark skin. The truck slowed for a pack of ragged, emaciated dogs that had gathered at a crossroad, then followed the other road up into a gulch. No more than a stone’s throw away, he saw men gathered in their black-and-white-checkered turbans, smoking their cigarettes. Apparently, this was the road that led up to the murders.
The Americans have a better chance of breathing life back into those two dead bodies, Yousef thought, than of changing these people.
The death of some young man or woman as a martyr in a suicide bombing was insignificant. And with the monies given to the martyrs’ families, the supply was endless and unstoppable.
He thought of the two bodies with the blank stare of death, their heads deformed by the beatings. He thought of the fragments of broken bricks embedded in her forehead. Her round, brown eyes fixed in an eternal stare.
“Hate,” he muttered. Hate was the limitless raw energy fueling this Muslim nuclear reactor. Hatred combined with deep, pitiful poverty. A simple breach of culture or tradition, or even an inappropriate word, could set off waves of hatred which, in this part of the world, transformed swiftly into violent action.
The truck pulled into a three-walled hut just outside the village. The thatched roof would hide the vehicle from the UAVs and satellites that were constantly patrolling the skies of western Pakistan.
From the hut they would walk the remaining miles. The road quickly became steeper and was cut in two by several washouts that a man could stand in up to his knees. A wind brought up a choking cloud of dust that hung in the air, causing Yousef to cover his face with his turban.
After several miles they climbed up the final hill and crossed over into another valley, which had an orchard of short, stumpy apple trees. The twisted brown trees with their canopy of green leaves stood in stark contrast to the rocky hillsides on both sides. A ditch of a stream cut through the grove, the obvious source of the water that kept the trees green. There, near the end of the row of trees, was another mud-brick house. Several guards with AK-47s stood watch in front of the hut.
“As sala’amu alaikum,” Yousef yelled to the party as he approached.
“Walaikum as sala’am,” the oldest guard said with a wave of his rifle, knowing Yousef both by sight and reputation.
He pointed to a path near the side of the hut and Yousef followed, traveling down a short hill to a tent beneath the trees. Its walls were rolled up, as the staggering heat of the day would have made a closed tent unbearably hot. The fabric of the tent was a strange, thin material that had a metal reflection to the bottom side.
Yousef reached up and touched the material. It felt like paper-thin copper, no thicker than a sheet of aluminum foil.
“It protects us from the infidels’ eyes.” The older guard was pointing to the sky.
There, seated on several rugs, their legs crossed like Boy Scouts at a campfire, were three men, one of whom he recognized. The other two were strangers.
“As sala’amu alaikum,” Yousef said again.
“Walaikum as sala’am,” said the older, gray-bearded, thick-spectacled man as he pushed up his glasses on his round nose. He was a cousin to a cousin of the House of Saud. A physician by training, he was considered a reliable messenger whom the elders respected. The doctor smiled at Yousef like a mentor at his student. He had known Yousef since he was a toddler.
These meetings were very rare. It had been several years since Yousef and the doctor had been together in one spot, their last having taken place in Paris. Although this meeting was much closer to the danger of the American troops and more recently the Pakistan Army’s intrusions into the region, the valley near Quetta was considered safe. The Sherani clan of the Pashtun tribe took great pride in protecting their guests. From the time of Muhammad, it had remained a basic tenet that one must receive into his tent the guest and protect him. Yousef remembered from his youth the tale of Bu Zaid. A hero of the Bani Hillal tribe, Bu Zaid slaughtered his last camel so as to provide food for his guests. With the loss of his last camel, he would starve, his family would starve, but his guest would be cared for. And so it was written.
“Yousef, I want you to meet these two brothers, Malik Mahmud and Mohagher Iqbal.”
Yousef had heard of both men. Mahmud was a leader of a Muslim group called the Free Aceh Movement. It was known in Malaysia as GAM. GAM’s small force was dedicated to establishing a Muslim state in Aceh, a province of Indonesia. More important, the guerilla army was feared by the world because they were at the chokehold of the western Pacific called the Strait of Malacca. The large vessels would pass within easy reach of the armed marauders. More than sixty thousand ships passed through the strait every year.