“Yes.”
He showed what he thought was an appropriately solemn and sad expression to his secretary. “Hold my calls.”
Tranthan pulled the door closed and picked up his telephone. He held the receiver in the crook of his neck as he pulled out a cigarette and lit it up. At the same time, he opened his e-mail on his computer. Cook’s cell phone only rang once.
“What happened?” It was Billie Cook who opened the conversation. Her voice was brooding and angry.
“What the hell do you mean?” Tranthan knew anything was possible now, including telephone conversations being recorded.
“She just didn’t throw a clot.”
“What time did she die?” He made sure to modulate his voice, fainter, sadder.
“Thirty-five minutes ago.” Cook still seethed.
Tranthan followed suit, speaking with heat. “Listen, you little shithead: Don’t forget who you work for. Period.”
“You’re not stopping an autopsy.”
Tranthan didn’t respond but slammed the telephone down.
Hell yes, I will stop an autopsy.
He inhaled the cigarette, blowing the swirling smoke up into the air, as he leaned back in the chair. He looked at his hands, noting their softness. They didn’t look like the hands that dug ditches in his little Chicago suburb of Burr Ridge. Throughout high school, Tranthan worked for the street and road department, digging ditches and throwing asphalt. He remembered coming home to the small house on Hamilton Avenue from a day of shoveling dirt to the sharp, antiseptic smell of vodka that hit him as soon as he stepped through the back door. The old man’s voice always followed.
“Boy? Get in here!”
Robert Tranthan’s father spent every extra cent he had ever earned in the glass factory on a stop he made every day coming home from work. The old man worked the night shift, getting off at seven. His breakfast was picked up around eight when the liquor store opened. A cheap fifth of vodka slowly worked its way through his father’s liver.
A scholarship to a small college on the Susquehanna River deep in central Pennsylvania proved Tranthan’s way out of that hell. He hadn’t cared where he went. He left the old man at home and never looked back.
Tranthan knew the girl on sight when they met in class. The only daughter of the rookie senator from Pennsylvania. Robert could see the insecurity in her eyes. She carried the pain of never coming anywhere near the bra sizes or glamour of her sorority sisters, but she was the senator’s daughter, so most people had enough sense to leave her alone. Tranthan talked her into eloping six months after their first date. He used the excuse of love, but it took two years before she ever traveled to the broken-down house on Hamilton Avenue in Burr Ridge. A new owner was gutting the small ranch. He explained that it was a different world, back when the nearby highway was Route 66, not the truck-clogged Interstate 55. Back when it was a house in the woods of suburban Chicago. She never met his father or his poor, pathetic mother, who had taken the old man’s beatings in silence.
Tranthan picked up the telephone again.
“Laura, can you get me a sandwich and coffee?”
“Sure.”
He looked at his watch and waited for five minutes. The canteen was on the other side of the CIA campus. It would take her at least thirty minutes. He didn’t need nearly half that time. He opened his side desk drawer, unlocked a metal lock box, and pulled a pad out from within. It had a series of numbers on one sheet of paper.
Tranthan walked out to Laura’s desk, pausing to look down the hallway. Few people ventured into this floor and this end of the hallway. Most employees treated this part of headquarters as holy turf to be avoided.
Tranthan sat down at Laura’s computer and went directly to the SMTP mail server. He had an idea as to what e-mail address to use and pulled out the sheet of paper, putting in the IP address:
2001.0db8.69d3.1212.8a2e.0404.liz1
He then opened up the computer’s day, date, and time and wound it back.
Others would do the work, but James Scott and William Parker would soon be dead.
Tranthan’s counterfeit e-mail was read on a BlackBerry just east of London. The recipient forwarded it to another BlackBerry at a train station near Madrid.
The first recipient handled the BlackBerry only with a glove and then placed it under the tire of his car parked at a meter on the street. The wheel crushed it as the car drove away.
The other BlackBerry rested on a train track seconds before the commuter train entered the station.
Another target was added to the list that Tranthan had originally sent: this one British.
As Tranthan sat behind her desk, he looked up to see a man standing there.
“Shit!” Tranthan yelled out.
No one ever came to his end of the hall.
“Yes?” He yelled it out loud.
“Sir, I’m sorry.” The computer technician, George, stood there sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
“Yes, what do you need?”
“I was able to save the flash drive.”
“It wasn’t too damaged?”
“No, sir, and your password worked. I have the flash drive decoded.”
CHAPTER 47
Several white Hummers with mounted machine guns, blue lights, and screaming sirens led the secretary’s Rolls-Royce through the city. The convoy raced across Riyadh at breakneck speed, with a helicopter escort traveling above in a parallel course.
The prince knew that all was not right as his car sped into the entrance to the Prince Salman Heart Center. The medical campus appeared to be under siege, with armed military troops stationed everywhere in sight. Large armored troop carriers with .50-caliber machine guns on top sat across the streets, causing the allowed traffic to run an obstacle course of weaving between the various stop points.
The secretary recognized the king’s personal assistant, the young Prince Al-Bin, waiting at the entrance.
“What is his status?” The secretary didn’t hesitate.
“Serious.” Prince Al-Bin looked around as he spoke.
“It’s too early, too soon.” The secretary knew that this would only throw the Bay’ah Council into confusion. “The Council could end up being more destructive than positive.”
“I agree. It was meant to facilitate the transition, not be a vehicle to confuse it.” Prince Al-Bin looked too young for the job he was in. The prince was a thirty-year-old who appeared to be just out of high school. It didn’t help that he was a small man who had to look up to most of his royal cousins. “He wants to see you.”
Al-Bin followed the secretary in through the glass doors, to the lobby of the heart center. The hospital was so new that it was still recruiting physicians. Painters were still putting coats of paint on the walls in the hallways. The staff was as fresh as the paint. The nurses and physicians mostly came from the West as a result of the generous pay and a ransom of benefits. The center was a part of the larger King Fahd Medical City, which was home to well over two thousand medical staff members. But it was still far from the standards and capabilities of Western hospitals. Most of the royal family was treated in London, New York, or Houston. But the patient had to be stable enough to make the journey. Sloan-Kettering, Mayo, and MD Anderson were options if there was enough time for the patient to make it to his operating room.
“Your Majesty.” The secretary bowed as he entered the room. The patient had a pasty white appearance, as if much of his blood had been drained from his body. The king’s ink-black mustache and goatee seemed painted on the chalky white face.
“You have always been the first one by my side.” The king’s voice was weak, almost like a whisper.