“Besides Egypt and Jordan?”
“Exactly. Secretary Warner was working with Cairo and Amman to keep them in the loop and make sure they were on board. But the president wanted someone else. He wanted a surprise. Kuwait seemed like a possibility. So did Morocco. But neither would sign on unless the Saudis were on board. So we went to see the Saudis.”
“Let me guess,” said Mordechai. “It did not go well.”
“No, it didn’t,” Bennett conceded.
“Whose idea was it to talk to the Iraqis?”
“Erin’s, actually.”
“Gutsy.”
“The guys at State hated the idea, Secretary Warner especially. He thought our relationship with Iraq was already complicated enough without asking them to kiss and make up with the Israelis. Erin held her ground. Her take was that Al-Hassani was already looking to break out of OPEC restrictions on how much oil Iraq could pump and sell. Maybe he’d be interested in a tacit alliance with the other new kids on the oil block.”
“And Al-Hassani was open to the idea?” asked Mordechai.
“Let’s just say he wasn’t opposed. He was willing to meet with someone close to Prime Minister Doron, but it had to be outside the normal diplomatic channels.”
“And I fit the bill.”
“You did, especially given your obsession with Babylon, the End Times, and all that.”
Obsession? The word cut into Mordechai’s heart like a knife. He wanted so badly to reengage in the conversations he and Bennett used to have. He wanted to share with his young protégé everything he’d seen and heard in Babylon.
The Scriptures were coming alive. He was now convinced the ancient prophecies were, in fact, coming true before their very eyes. For the past few weeks — ever since Doron’s e-mail concerning “GOG”—he’d been studying everything he could get his hands on. He needed to understand the signs, the timing, the sequence of events that would climax in the Rapture of the church, the rise of the Antichrist, and the beginning of the Tribulation. His head was still full of questions, and he was convinced the window for finding answers was rapidly closing.
But it was clear Bennett had no interest in joining such a quest, and it grieved him. Mordechai was tempted to have it out with him right now. Bennett was playing with fire. He was increasingly at risk of becoming a casualty, of getting himself picked off in a supernatural war he hardly knew he was in. But now wasn’t the time.
“Well, I appreciate you thinking of me,” the old man said gently. “It was a very profitable trip, and I have a great deal to tell you, more than we can cover tonight. Let me start by saying that I believe Al-Hassani was willing to consider endorsing your peace deal.”
“Was?”
“Whatever interest he had has been overtaken by events, Jonathan. At this point I’d say the entire treaty is DOA.”
Bennett said nothing. He looked crestfallen. He had to have known the treaty was dead, Mordechai told himself. Perhaps no one had actually said it out loud yet.
“I am sorry, Jonathan. I know you have worked very hard on this.”
Bennett shook his head. “Still, you said the trip was profitable. Why?”
Mordechai had thought he’d never ask.
Drudge had the story.
The full article was not yet posted on the New York Times home page, but Gogolov devoured every word he could.
It was 8:27 a.m. in Moscow, 12:27 a.m. in Washington. President MacPherson was, no doubt, asleep. But he would awake to another crisis.
According to Drudge, the front-page story by Chief White House Correspondent Marcus Jackson was to be headlined “AL-NAKBAH ATTACK IMMINENT; WHITE HOUSE HAS KNOWN OF IMPENDING STRIKE FOR WEEKS BUT CHOSE NOT TO TELL PUBLIC.”
The twelve-hundred-word article cited two unnamed “senior administration officials” and an array of other “diplomatic and foreign intelligence sources” describing the concern that three or four “Al-Nakbah terror squads” were currently seeking to penetrate the Mexican and Canadian borders to attack various American population centers, including shopping malls, supermarkets, nuclear power plants, and elementary schools.
Senior U.S. Homeland Security officials who “insisted upon anonymity” said they “could not be sure” whether the threat was real or part of “an elaborate disinformation plot.” Nevertheless, thousands of federal, state, and local law-enforcement officers, as well as intelligence agencies from at least a dozen countries, were engaged in the hunt for the terror squads.
One high-level — though again unnamed — FBI official told the Times that the FBI was engaged in “the most expensive and manpower-intensive counterterrorist effort in the history of our country, and all based on a rumor none of us can substantiate.”
What Gogolov savored most was the detailed description of the raging debate within the White House about whether to raise the terror alert level to Red or to wait until there was more evidence that the terror-squad rumors were true.
Better yet, White House Press Secretary Chuck Murray refused to comment on the story for the record, and at least one senior Democratic senator was accusing the administration of “playing games with national security and the country’s right to know.”
All this, thought Gogolov, and the Kremlin’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found. Everything was going better than even he had expected.
It took several hours.
Bennett listened carefully as Mordechai described the files President Al-Hassani had given him.
Saddam Hussein’s private diaries of his meetings over the years with various Russian ultranationalists.
Signed contracts between Russian oil companies and the Iraqi government worth tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil-field concessions.
Audiotapes of Saddam granting Mohammed Jibril access to Iraqi terror training camps, such as Salman Pak.
Copies of wire transfers funneling Iraqi funds through a series of French and German front companies and Swiss banks to Al-Nakbah operatives scattered throughout Europe and the former Soviet republics.
And that was just the beginning.
The breadth and depth of the information was extraordinary. Why had Al-Hassani given it to Mordechai in the first place? Bennett wondered. But there was a more important question to be answered first.
“Why exactly was Saddam so wired into the subversive world of Russian ultranationalists?” Bennett asked. “Wasn’t Moscow a staunch ally of Saddam’s?”
“They had been; that is true,” Mordechai agreed. “The Soviets sold Saddam most of his military hardware during the seventies and eighties. But things changed. By the time the first Gulf War was over, Iraq owed Moscow billions of dollars Saddam couldn’t repay, especially given the U.N. sanctions, and relations grew icy. Then one by one, Yeltsin, Putin, and Vadim began playing footsie with Iran — Saddam’s mortal enemy. They started selling Iran tanks and submarines and missiles and even nuclear power plants, something for which Saddam had begged the Russians for years.”
“Saddam must have been livid,” said Bennett.
“He was, and according to the files Al-Hassani gave me, that is when Saddam vowed to help Al-Nakbah overthrow the Russian government. He began funneling money to Zhirinovsky, and then to Sergei Ilyushkin, which could be used to buy the allegiances of disaffected Russian military officers and create a fifth column capable of overthrowing the politicians who had turned against Saddam.”
“But we took Saddam out,” said Bennett.
“By then it was too late,” Mordechai responded. “The damage had already been done. Using the cash flow from Saddam, Gogolov and Jibril had already built an enormous network loyal to them. What is more, Ilyushkin built an alliance between Saddam and Boris Stuchenko, opening up a whole new source of funds and accelerating the process of buying anyone and everyone upset with Vadim.”