Quraishi turned to Cole. ‘I am very sorry,’ he said, ‘but I just have to go and take care of something. I will be no longer than a minute or two.’
And with that, he swept out of the room, white thobe billowing behind him.
Cole breathed out steadily as the door clicked closed. Was it some sort of test? Was he being left alone in the room, under surveillance, so he could be monitored?
Cole didn’t think so; it was unlikely that Quraishi’s office would be monitored. And even if it was, Cole knew he had to act anyway. He was running out of time, and it was imperative that he find something — anything — that would help his investigation.
His mind made up, Cole was out of his seat in an instant.
‘Yes, Hatim?’ Quraishi asked his assistant in the empty office next door, which was used as an anteroom for Quraishi and two other officials. ‘You found something?’
Hatim picked up the water glass Cole had used and tapped it. Quraishi noticed the equipment set up on the table next to it. ‘The fingerprints on this glass do not match what we have on file for Daniel Chadwick,’ he said authoritatively.
Quraishi’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are sure of this?’
Hatim cleared his throat. ‘With what little time we had, as sure as we can be,’ he said. ‘We’ve only done a visual match, we’ve had no time to feed the results into our computer system, but I can see that they are plainly different with just a magnifying glass. The man in your office is not Daniel Chadwick.’
Quraishi considered the situation. Jeb Richards had informed him that there were no authorized operations going on in Saudi Arabia, and Quraishi believed him. Why would Richards lie about things now? He had told Quraishi that the US government didn’t have the first idea where to even start looking.
And yet here was this man, an unknown, right here in his office. What did he want? Who was he?
Quraishi thought back to Richards’ final words, about the covert operative who had escaped arrest in Sumatra. He was the man who had found the pirate lair in the first place, and had brought the US Navy SEALs down on the place.
Could the man in his office be Mark Cole? The agent Richards said was known as ‘the Asset’?
Quraishi sighed. The meeting had been arranged by Abdullah al-Zayani. Had it been done under protest? Had this foreign agent found out that al-Zayani had financed the hijacking and interrogated him? If so, what would he have found out? What would al-Zayani have told him?
‘Hatim,’ Quraishi ordered, ‘find out where Abdullah al-Zayani is, right now. Have him brought here if possible, immediately.’
‘Yes sir,’ Hatim said, retreating to one of the secure telephones in the corner of the room.
The good thing, Quraishi supposed, was that at least al-Zayani didn’t know much. He didn’t know anything about the upcoming operation. But it seemed that he had led this agent here to Quraishi, which was more than enough.
But if this man wasn’t authorized, if he was wanted by the US government himself, then all was not lost, and Quraishi allowed himself a smile. He could get information from this ‘asset’, this Mark Cole, do whatever he wanted to him, and the man would not be missed.
‘Hatim,’ Quraishi called across the room. ‘After you’ve located al-Zayani, call the zoo and arrange a visit for us this afternoon.’
Hatim confirmed the order, and Quraishi’s smile widened. For people he didn’t want an official record to be kept on, there were other places in Riyadh to question them than the basement dungeons.
The zoo was Quraishi’s favorite.
Cole held the silken hood in his hands, eyes darting furtively over his shoulder every few seconds, wondering when Quraishi would come bursting back into the room.
He had found the hood and the robes in a briefcase which had been stored in a locked cupboard. Cole had recognized them instantly; they had been worn by the person who had beheaded Brad Butler, the same man who had spoken on video about the plague about to be unleashed by Arabian Islamic Jihad.
The bloodstains had been left on the otherwise white robes, as if in a perverse memory of Butler. The entire bag reeked of the coppery scent of blood, and Cole felt nauseated. Quraishi was able to slip out of his official robes of office and don this stinking bloodstained garment without a care in the world.
Cole stuffed the clothing back in the bag, zipped it up and replaced it in the cupboard, sure now that Abd al-Aziz Quraishi and the Lion were one and the same.
Cole closed the cupboard door and was securing the lock when he heard the footsteps in the corridor outside, sensed the hand reaching for the door; his fingers worked frantically to secure the lock, even as he saw the handle turning.
And then it was locked, and Cole dove across the room back into his chair, hitting the seat just as the office door swung open and Quraishi glided back in, the expression on his face positively beatific.
‘My friend,’ he said kindly, ‘it is far too nice a day to stay inside. I believe we should continue our conversation in more pleasant surroundings.’
Cole nodded his head, wondering what Quraishi was up to. ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘Where do you suggest we go?’
‘Have you ever been to Riyadh Zoo, Mr. Chadwick?’ Quraishi smiled, and Cole could see his eyes were blank, like a shark’s. ‘I think that you will like it.’
6
James Dorrell peered over his half-moon spectacles at the man sat across from him. Lee Rawson was the head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence’s Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, and the man he had entrusted with finding out everything he could about Abd al-Aziz Quraishi, and an associate known only as the ‘Hammer of the Infidel’.
‘So what do you have for me?’ Dorrell asked.
‘On Quraishi,’ Rawson said tentatively, ‘not a hell of a lot, to tell you the truth. As his file says, he’s connected to the Saudi royal family, he’s had a solid career in the military and government, and there’s never been any hint of anything else. Pretty low key character actually, has good relations with the US due to the exchange he did as a military cadet at West Point.’
‘Friends with Jeb Richards,’ Dorrell said, reading from the paperwork on the desk in front of him.
Rawson nodded. ‘That’s right, they met at West Point. Nothing untoward going on there that we can ascertain. He’s friends with a lot of people, actually.’
‘Richards has just gone to Riyadh, hasn’t he?’
‘Yes sir, apparently Quraishi wanted to update him on Arabian Islamic Jihad.’
‘We heard back from him yet?’
‘No,’ Rawson said, ‘not that I’m aware of.’
Dorrell made a note on a pad, nodding. ‘Okay.’ He spread his hands across the desk. ‘So Quraishi looks clean, as far as we know.’
‘Yes,’ Rawson agreed, ‘but we’ve really only started to look into him. He looks clean on the surface, but we’ve not had any reason to investigate him in depth before. We’ll know a lot more when the NSA sends us what they’ve got.’
Dorrell grunted in agreement. He’d asked Bud Shaw to start electronic surveillance on Quraishi, including office, home and cell phones, emails and any other computer records they could hack into. They were also trawling through the vast archives of previously obtained information they stored, but didn’t access due to time constraints unless a specific request was made.
The NSA routinely intercepted almost every electronic communication sent around the world through its sophisticated ECHELON system. Vastly powerful supercomputers used advanced search programs to highlight any key words from these intercepts, which would then initiate the next level of analysis.