Peter Grenchev had learned of Baddour’s death shortly after waking. Now, some two and a half hours into his day, he found himself sitting across the table again from Josef Solkov as the two men congratulated themselves. Because they were in the second day of the ninth month of the Muslim calendar, the holy month of Ramadan, the cafe and the square were less busy than usual.
Instead of talking, Grenchev read the accounts of Baddour’s death in the various morning papers and Solkov watched the news on TRT, the government-funded Turkish television network.
The news of Baddour’s assassination was confined to small sidebar stories in the newspapers, but TRT was giving the story extensive coverage. It was only when Grenchev finally put down his paper that Solkov turned his attention away from the newscast.
“Then you have spoken to directly to Colonel Fahid?” Grenchev asked.
“Da,” Solkov confirmed, “early this morning.
We spoke even before the news of Baddour’s death was broadcast on the television.”
“Everything went according to plan?”
Solkov nodded again. The usual dour expression was gone.
“Fahid indicated he was most pleased. He is convinced Comrade Ozal suspected nothing right up to the very moment when Fahid shot him. It went exactly according to our plan.
Already he is telling the press that NIMF counter-surveillance agents have uncovered the plot in which two mercenaries, an American and a man carrying Turkish citizenship papers, were employed by Abbasin loyalists to assassinate General Grenchev drained the last of his kahve and continued to probe for details. He was relishing the moment. He could only assume his comrades in Moscow were equally pleased.
“What about the American? Where is he now?”
Solkov likewise was enjoying the moment.
“Later today the American will be put on display for the international as well as Iraqi press and Fahid will further reveal what he has learned. He will say the American has confessed it was the Americans who approached the government in Baghdad with the plan because they were eager to put an end to both the development and testing of chemical weapons by Baddour and Rashid.”
Grenchev allowed a rare smile to play with the corners of his mouth.
“Our comrades in Moscow, they knew of the assassin’s fate when he was selected for this mission?”
Solkov dismissed Grenchev’s concern.
“What is one man? Sergi Doronkin was expendable. Besides, it was Colonel General Drachev himself who decided his fate. When we informed him that we had learned Bogner was in reality an American agent posing as a representative of the weapons merchant, he saw the opportunity to implicate the Americans. Brilliant and most fortunate for us, da?”
“Most fortunate indeed,” Grenchev agreed.
“What happens now?”
“Fahid will proceed with phase two of our plan.”
Grenchev marveled at both the simplicity and workability of Colonel General Drachev’s quickly revised plan now that it had actually been implemented.
There had been four men in the room; two were dead. Dead men could reveal nothing.
All that remained was the accused and his accuser — and, as he knew Fahid was viewing it, the sacrifice of a goat was a small price to pay for such a momentous reward.
For Bogner the events of the previous evening were still a confusing tangle of reality and nightmares.
He had been confined to a cell after the shooting but had not slept. The same doctor who had treated him earlier had come to assess his wounds and bandage them, then left. This time, however, he had not spoken to Bogner as he had earlier. Afterward, Bogner had sifted and resitted through the bizarre events of the last twelve or thirteen hours as he tried to find a thread of meaning for all that had transpired.
He could still see Fahid walking calmly around the desk to press the button that would open the door for Baddour’s guards and pointing to him as the man who had shot their general. Fahid had handed them an automatic he had taken from the fallen Ozal, and even though everything Fahid was telling the guards was in Arabic, Bogner knew Fahid was explaining how he had shot both Bogner and Ozal, wounding the former and mortally wounding the other.
Piece by piece Bogner was putting the fragments together, but the thing that bothered him was that none of it made any sense.
In the small, starkly appointed room where Lattimere Spitz usually retreated to get away from people. Spitz found himself surrounded by Peter Langley, Clancy Packer, Bob Hurley, and more important, the President himself. David Colchin wore the expression of a man already embattled and about to be more so.
The five men watched as the TRT satellite relay through to CNN gave them an all-too-vivid picture of Bogner being led down a hall through a crowd of men into an even more crowded room and seated in front of a long conference table. The voice of Fahid’s English translator droned on, overlaying the voice of Baddour’s former chief-of-staff as he recounted the events of the previous evening:
General Baddour and his dinner guests retired to his office following dinner. At that point, an American who has since been identified as one T. C. Bogner, an Internal Security Agent for the United States, opened fire on General Baddour. The American managed to get off two shots, both of which hit and mortally wounded General Baddour. The fourth man in the room at the time was a man by the name of Taj Ozal, a Turkish citizen, and an accomplice of the American. He, like Bogner, was part of the plot between Abbasin loyalists and the American government to assassinate General Baddour.
At that point the camera panned over to Fahid holding up the 9mm automatic he claimed showed traces of blood as well as the fingerprints of the assassin, Bogner.
As the translator droned on, Packer looked across the table at the President. David Colchin’s expression divulged both his concern and anger.
When he finally looked back at Packer he said, “Does someone want to tell me how the hell we got tangled up in this one?” He was shaking his head.
“It looks like we really stepped on our dicks this time.”
Clancy Packer had known the President since the early days of his political career when Colchin was the junior senator from Texas. Over the years Colchin had been a staunch supporter of the ISA, and knew Bogner as well as any man in the room.
Packer weighed his words before he began.
“As you are aware, Mr. President, we have been tracking Baddour’s program of chemical weapons development for some time now… and following evidence of several recent poison gas attacks on the Kurds in northern Iraq, we decided to send Bogner in to see what he could learn about t
Baddour’s Ammash facility. We have every reason to believe, based on recent satellite photos, that General Baddour is using Nasrat Pharmaceutical as a cover to develop and test weapons developed by Dr. Zilka Rashid.”
Spitz had spent most of the morning preparing for their meeting. He handed Colchin copies of the satellite photos.
“You’ve heard of GG-2, Mr. President?”
Colchin nodded.
“The one they call the Gehenna gas, right?”
“That’s the one,” Spitz confirmed.
Colchin looked up from the photos at Langley.
“And how the hell do you fit into all of this, Peter?”
Peter Langley gave a painstakingly detailed report of his last thirty-six hours and concluded with: “Bottom line, when we got to Koboli we were able to confirm that it was the chopper Bogner and Banks were on. I visited the Kurd village where they were taken after the crash. The people in the village confirmed that two days later an NIMF helicopter came in and after destroying the village, flew Bogner and a Turkish national, Taj Ozal, on to Ammash—” Spitz was nervous, and cut in before Langley finished.