‘Why would they do that?’ the President asked.
‘Because your administration’s policies on the restriction of free trade and support for red — tape preventing the excesses of major banks and corporations interferes with MJ–12’s main business of profit making,’ Ethan explained. ‘The profits of major corporations are reduced if they have to care for their workers better or can’t use overseas sweatshops, or their weapons are banned by international treaties that your administration supports. These men of MJ–12 make most of their money off the back of the suffering of others less powerful, Mister President, and everything that you’re doing is threatening that. I don’t believe for one moment that they would directly conspire to assassinate you, but if they have the means to know that Abrahem Nassir is in the country and intent on attacking you, and the FBI has the lead in protecting us from that attack…’
The President nodded silently, already knowing how such a conspiracy could play out.
‘Some of the country’s biggest corporations finance presidential campaigns in order to ensure that any administration is allied to their business interests,’ he said finally. ‘I managed to win the election without such support, but it wasn’t easy.’
‘Then now is the time to strike,’ Jarvis said. ‘They have no hold over you, no way to control you, but once your time in the White House is over how long do you think it will be before a new President with less moral fibre is sitting in that chair?’
The President folded his hands over and rested his chin on them for a moment before he spoke.
‘Organize the Joint Chiefs of Staff and send word to the CIA,’ he said finally. ‘We can’t just arrest LeMay, but perhaps we can let him implicate himself should Nassir make it into the city. Ensure that the FBI is prevented from accessing any of the information that we have learned and let’s distribute Abrahem Nassir’s image to every law enforcement agency in the country.’
Jarvis stepped forward.
‘I suggest you hold off on tomorrow’s Trans Pacific ceremony too,’ he said as the President stood to leave the bunker. ‘You’re going to be a target.’
The President smiled. ‘I’m always a target, Mister Jarvis.’ He looked at Ethan and Nicola. ‘You have my authority to stop Nassir any way you can, and I assure you that for the time being at least the FBI will not be able to stop you. Track him down and stop him; whatever it takes.’
XXXIII
The waters of Cape May’s Harbor of Refuge were silent and black as the small boat chugged its way north west toward a long stretch of Delaware coastline known as Slaughter Beach. Abrahem Nassir could not help but feel a grim amusement at the choice of names for the location of his entry into the United States.
The state of New Jersey was visible across the bay to his right, betrayed in the darkness by twinkling lights that were reflected across the rippling surface of the water. To his left beyond the sparsely populated coastline, just a hundred miles to the west, was Washington DC.
The enemy was close, he reflected, but he was closer. The narrow escape from the American soldiers in Somalia had cemented in both his mind and that of Tariq that there was no longer any time to waste. The Americans would locate the vessel Abrahem had used to travel from Kuwait to Somalia, interrogate its crew and learn of his movements. Abrahem doubted that the Somalian pirates would have held any loyalty to his cause once overpowered by the Americans, and it had only been Tariq’s quick thinking that had allowed them to escape among the women and children, overpowering two Americans on the way out and scattering into the sparse bush with the coming of the dawn. With too many targets to follow, the Americans had been misled and both Abrahem and Tariq had escaped south.
His journey across the Atlantic had been facilitated on a private jet owned by Tariq out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, the customs officials at the airport easily bribed. The flight had landed in Dakar, Senegal, to refuel before making the long flight across the Atlantic Ocean to land in the Dominican Republic. From there he had boarded a maritime ship bound for Maine before once again leaving the vessel en route off the coast of Delaware and being picked up by a smaller boat out of the town of Bowers, on the shores of the equally grotesquely named Murderkill River.
A deck hand approached him with a small cup of hot, sweet coffee. Abrahem took the cup with a nod and a smile of gratitude, his bones still aching from the bitter chill of the North Atlantic. Despite the provision of a life raft and food, Abrahem had been forced to wait over an hour for the small boat to locate him as he floated alone on the dark waters, praying to Allah that the United States Coast Guard would not stumble across him first. Good fortune had been on his side and he had remained undetected. Now, he sat wrapped in blankets as he waited for his muscles to warm up once more as the boat approached the shore.
America.
He had never seen the country before, despite hearing so much about it and having hated it with all the considerable passion in his heart for almost half of his life. The tranquil shores and twinkling lights against the starry sky reminded him somewhat of Basra, and for a moment he once again allowed himself the thought that perhaps the people of the two countries were not so different. It was the politicians who were to blame, the warmongering “hawks” of the American Senate and their thirst for oil, money and power. Everybody in their right mind in the entire world knew that the invasion of Iraq had been a business venture, a hostile take — over undertaken beneath the thin veil of the liberation of a country from the rule of a tyrant. What they didn’t shout so loudly was that one tyrant had merely been replaced by another, the flag waving democracy of the United States that had raped Iraq of its finances, its soul, and then abandoned it to crumble beneath the blind corruption of Islamic militants and warlords. Furthermore, it was now widely accepted around the world that America’s administration of the time had lied in order to justify the war; there had never been any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and anybody who had raised such a point had been ridiculed and even betrayed by that same administration.
Abrahem’s resolve hardened. The American people had voted for their leaders, who touted their democracy to the rest of the world as an example of leadership by the people, for the people, despite the fact that they then so brazenly acted without any consideration for those people in whose name they claimed their positions of power.
Abrahem recalled his youth, of the day when the Americans had first rolled into Basra to cheers and cries of gratitude. Abrahem had cheered with them, ecstatic at the presence of troops from a country where the voice of the people actually mattered, overjoyed at where their protection might take Iraq. And then the troops had fired all of the police and the army, and then the American companies had come into the city and begun rebuilding things that did not need rebuilding, repairing things that the Americans themselves had destroyed during their fighter — bomber attacks of “shock and awe“, had refused to employ the impoverished builders and artisans of Iraq in favor of paying their own people via the American government.