‘In the meantime, Mr President, we’ll need to make a public response,’ Dan Esposito stipulated.
Curtis O’Connor reflected that it had not taken President Harrison’s powerful and cunning little advisor long to reduce a discussion on a terrorist threat that might affect millions of lives to one of politics and votes.
‘We will need to reassure the public that Kadeer is bluffing and stick to the agreed line that we are winning this war on terror and that it is a war that is crucially important for all freedom-loving people around the world.’ Dan Esposito’s voice had a touch of steel, daring anyone, including the President, to disagree with him.
‘I don’t think Kadeer is bluffing, Mr President,’ Curtis O’Connor said quietly, glancing towards the camera so that the Vice President would also be left in no doubt as to what O’Connor thought of his views.
‘And what facts do you have to base that on, Officer O’Connor?’ Esposito spat the words across the room.
Curtis O’Connor suppressed a wry smile. The use of his CIA rank was a none-too-subtle reminder from Esposito that opinions that did not support the White House line were not welcome. The Administration and the Party’s private polling was probably a lot worse than what was being published, Curtis thought to himself.
‘I’ve been involved with Islam and Islamic terrorists for nearly twenty years, Dan,’ Curtis replied, ignoring Esposito’s bullying rank tactics. ‘Dr Kadeer is not only a brilliant microbiologist, he is a deep thinker and philosopher and his threats should not be dismissed lightly. He trained as an undergraduate in Beijing and he did his doctorate at Harvard. He knows this country well and knows how to strike fear into the population. His hatred of both the West and the Han Chinese is deep-seated, but his struggle is not confined to the West and the Chinese. Kadeer is first and foremost a Sunni, and although he is very tolerant of other religions, he is committed to a return of the Caliphate.’
‘Meaning?’ President Harrison’s exasperation was reaching breaking point, but he wasn’t the only one in his Administration who was struggling to comprehend Islam. Most of his senior advisors and his own cabinet had completely misjudged what might be driving Jihad, the call to action amongst the Islamic fundamentalists or Islamists as they had become known. Some of the cabinet, including the President, had not realised there was a difference between a Sunni and a Shiite.
Curtis again answered calmly. ‘Islam is translated literally as “surrender”. A true Muslim surrenders his or her entire being to Allah, and strives to meet Allah’s demand that human beings treat each other with justice, equity and compassion.’
‘You’ve got to be fucking joking,’ Esposito muttered.
O’Connor ignored him. ‘For Kadeer, the future of Islam depends on its ability to return to its past. For thirteen centuries, until 1923, Islam was always responsible to a supreme authority. The last such authority able to trace his lineage back through Baghdad and Damascus to the Prophet Muhammad was the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet VI in Istanbul. In 1922-’
‘Mr President,’ Dan Esposito interrupted, irritated that they were straying from the main game of winning the next election but the President held up his hand for silence.
‘In 1922,’ Curtis continued, ‘Ataturk overthrew the last Sultan and replaced the Caliphate with a secular government and moved the Turkish capital to Ankara. Kadeer is a Sunni, and he wants to re-unite Muslims under a single Caliphate which not only pits him against the West but also against Shiite countries like Iran and large parts of Iraq and Lebanon.’
The President and more than one member of his cabinet were still looking puzzled.
‘The Sunni-Shiite divide dates back to the death of Muhammad in 632,’ Curtis explained. His mind was racing as to how he might distill the long-running feud into a few simple sentences. ‘The Sunni are those who accept that the Caliph can be elected for his qualities of being the most competent and knowledgeable to lead Muslims by the Sunna – or the laws of the Prophet – and when the Prophet died they prevailed with the election of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, as Muhammad’s khalifah or representative. The Shia, on the other hand, have always believed that the Caliph should have a lineage back to Muhammad’s family, and the Prophet’s cousin Ali, who was not elected as the fourth Caliph until 656, only to be murdered in 661. Kadeer knows it’s a huge ask to achieve unity but despite the arguments over succession, in terms of what they believe, Sunnis and Shiites have much in common and he’s still prepared to try. In that sense Kadeer and bin Laden are united. Both are Sunni and for them the end of the Caliphate was a catastrophe which the West has only exacerbated by attacking Iraq and supporting Israel against Lebanon and Palestine.’
It was too much for the Vice President, and once again he dominated the room from the video screen. ‘Mr President, is any of this relevant? A Muslim is what a Muslim does and that’s attack our freedom and our democracy!’
‘What’s your point, Mr O’Connor?’ the President asked, looking even more confused.
‘Not long after September 11, on 7 October 2001, bin Laden made a video broadcast over al-Jazeera, not unlike the one we have seen today. In it he declared that “What America is tasting is only a copy of what we have tasted… Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Like bin Laden, Kadeer is deeply offended by the presence of our troops in the revered and holy lands of Saudi Arabia, and his speech today only underlines his outrage over what has happened in Iraq and Lebanon.’ O’Connor could feel the hostility of those around the table but he didn’t hold back. This was a rare opportunity to urge the President of the United States to change course. Curtis O’Connor had an uncommon ability to look at any given situation through the eyes of his enemy, and he was convinced that if he let this cabinet believe Esposito’s spin that Kadeer was bluffing, it would be another deadly mistake.
‘Whatever you may think of Kadeer’s religious beliefs,’ O’Connor said, ‘he holds to them strongly, including the belief that the end times have been predicted in the Qu’ran.’ O’Connor was tempted to observe that Dr Kadeer was not the only one who believed that the twenty-first century and the looming clash of civilizations heralded the end times. Biblical prophecies about a rapidly approaching Armageddon and ‘the rapture’ were also being aired by some of the President’s own equally fanatical religious advisors. Advisors like the Reverend Jerry Buffett who had unprecedented access to the Oval Office. Curtis noticed that the President was becoming increasingly agitated, and he decided to bring his forceful briefing to a close.
‘Kadeer has made a number of lesser threats in the past, and,’ O’Connor concluded solemnly, looking at Esposito and towards the camera at the Vice President, ‘he has always carried them out. The only difference this time is his final solution. When he issued the threat of a single strand meeting its double, he used the words “if Allah wills it”. He has not used that terminology before and it may mean he has yet to complete his plans for the final attack.’
O’Connor was not to know that he had got that part of the puzzle right. Although Kadeer had not yet secured everything he needed to put his final solution in place, he was ready to implement his series of warnings. He had not only issued a demand for coalition forces to be withdrawn from Muslim lands, he had brazenly pinpointed the exact location of the first warning attack. Neither Curtis O’Connor nor anyone else in the CIA had yet been able to decipher the deceptively simple code that gave this location. There was also a clue to the final deadly assault and if the nature of it wasn’t yet clear, it would be in time; a conspiracy that would have its zenith in Beijing, driven by the threat from Islam and by the rise of China. With chilling calm, Dr Khalid Kadeer had revealed he was close to acquiring the means to annihilate a large part of the human race.