Keys to the Kingdom (23 page)

Rosinski was digesting Worley’s story. She had never heard of Gallagher but anyone with a pedigree like his would have to be taken very seriously. Gallagher’s involvement in the plot moved the affair to a higher plain, increasing Nadia’s value but also increasing the danger she had put herself in. Now she understood the look of fear she had seen on Nadia’s face in the souk. What she didn’t appreciate was the fact that Worley seemed to be obsessed with this Gallagher guy. It had been her experience that the professional and the emotional life should be kept separate. You got emotional about the people you had to deal with and you began to make mistakes. Vengeance was for people with balls bigger than their brains. This was ‘make your mind up’ time. ‘I think that you and I can do business,’ Rosinski said more in hope than certainty. ‘My lawyer tells me that we’re getting close to a conclusion on my case,’ Rosinski said. ‘The finks are about to settle and as soon as they do I’ll have to hand in my pen and stapler and find myself some place else to live. But I’m funny about some things and I don’t want to leave my asset in the lurch. She’s got us this far and I want to make sure that she has someone to depend on if the shit hits the fan in a big way. That somebody is going to have to be you.’

‘That wasn’t what I had in mind,’ Worley said. ‘You people are much more efficient at spiriting people away. I’m afraid that we’ve never been much good at that kind of thing.’ He didn’t want to add that his own time in Saudi might be limited.

‘Then I’m wasting your time,’ Rosinski said. ‘And mine.’ She began to move towards the door.

A sense of panic gripped Worley. Rosinski was his only lead to Gallagher. He couldn’t let her walk out on him. The question was how the hell was he going to make good on any promise she was going to force him to give. He supposed that if the woman provided information that would ultimately safeguard British interests in Saudi then the Foreign Office would make the necessary representations to the Home Office regarding resident status. It was all very ‘iffy’.

‘Hold on a second,’ he said before she had reached the door. ‘I’d love to help but you do realise that I can’t give guarantees.’

Rosinski turned to face him. ‘All I’m asking for is your best shot.’

‘All right then,’ he said smiling thinly. ‘I suppose I can agree to that.’  

Rosinski hesitated. ‘It’s Princess Nadia, Prince Kareem’s first wife.’

Worley had never met any of the Princesses so he had no idea who Rosinski was talking about. He did know that he had just taken on a hell of an obligation.

‘I’ll do my level best to take care of her,’ he said. ‘You can count on that. But first I’m going to have to meet her. I think that you should set up a first contact between us.’

‘I agree,’ Rosinski was relieved. It was nothing to do with sisterhood or any other feminist bullshit. She just believed that everybody deserved a life.  ‘I haven’t heard from her since the day after Mishuri’s death. But when I do I’ll need your help. You know the way things are in this city. I can’t move around without a man. Preferably a local driver because if I’m seen with you and you’re not my husband then both of us can get into a lot of trouble.’

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘Yeah,’ Rosinski said. ‘First, you got to sell London on the fact that we’re on to something here. Nobody in DC is going to listen to me so you’re our only link with the outside world. There’s no way that you and I can stop these guys alone. Sooner or later we’re going to need to take these people down and that’s going to need the Saudi authorities.’

‘Of course, ‘ Worley said quickly. Maybe too quickly. There was no way he could contact Burfield without at the same time ensuring his return ticket to London. He was well aware that the next mention of Gallagher would mean the end of his stay in Riyadh and the end of his chance of bringing the bastard to justice. So, Burfield and London were out of the equation for the moment. ‘But we don’t really have anything concrete to give them. As far as they’re concerned Gallagher is dead and Prince Kareem is a respected member of the Saudi Royal Family. If we start by going around denouncing Kareem, we’ll both find ourselves on the plane for points west. By the way, I assume you’ve heard that Ras Tanura was burned to the ground last night.’ He could see by the look on her face that she hadn’t. ‘That means that if Kareem and Gallagher are behind it they intend to accelerate events.’

‘What do you mean accelerate? A prince has been assassinated, there’s been a bomb blast at a cadet training school and now the major crude export terminal has been wiped off the face of the earth. Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s going down as we speak. If they accelerate it any further, the whole country will be up in flames.’

Worley looked at his watch again. The Ambassador would be apoplectic.

‘Look,’ he said rising from his seat. ‘I have to go and soothe the Ambassador’s nerves. Princess Nadia is our only lead on this thing. If she could give us something that we could show London or Washington, we might be halfway there. You keep trying to get in touch with her and I’ll keep my ear to the ground. I’ll beat the bushes downtown and see what I can find out.’

‘Be careful who you talk to,’ Rosinski said. ‘According to Nadia the Ikhwan is everywhere -the Army, the ministries, the universities, everywhere. If these people find out that we’ve got wind of their plans, they’re going to want to find out how we got inside their operation. I don’t want us to do anything that will put Nadia in more danger than she’s already in. The poor woman is ready to crack.’

Worley remembered the meeting with Al Tawil and a shiver ran down his spine. What the hell had he said to the man? He knew he had mentioned Gallagher but that had been all. They were playing a dangerous game but he had nothing to lose. He looked at Rosinski. In a couple of days she would be at home and out of harms way. Then the only person at risk would be him and that was all right.

‘I’ll be discreet,’ Worley said watching Rosinski rise. ‘I want to thank you for taking me into your confidence.’

‘I need you,’ she said standing directly before him. She could smell him. She wanted to have sex with him. Neither of them moved.  ‘Nadia’s safety means a lot to me,’ she said finally.

They moved side by side to the door of his apartment. Now they were in this thing together.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said

‘Make it sooner rather than later,’ Worley said before heading off in the direction of the embassy.

She watched him disappear in the direction of the main embassy building. Everything was about time and place. Another time and another place they might have ended up as lovers. Maybe they still would. She could see that he carried a deep hurt inside. That kind of hurt can turn you into a loner. Something big was about to break in Saudi and she had been lucky to get the inside track on it. Now she was going to be forced out before she could have the satisfaction of seeing Gilman and the rest of the misogynists in Langley eat shit.

Worley’s heart was pounding as he made his way towards Sir Richard’s office. Rosinski had tossed him a lifeline he never thought he would have. He finally had confirmation that Gallagher was in Saudi. Princess Nadia might just be the key to locating him. Saudi Arabia consisted of two and a quarter million square kilometres, an area fifteen times the size of England. Finding Gallagher could prove to be more difficult that finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. But he was finally on the trail and his prey might not yet be in sight but he had seen his spoor on the ground.

CHAPTER 31

Langley, Virginia

Alan Simpson’s desk at CIA Headquarters was littered with coded cables from Saudi Arabia. He had been at the office when the news had come in that the shit had been blown out of Ras Tanura. He had remained at the office throughout the night to follow the events. Even before Ras Tanura, lots of ordinary Saudi had been hitting the streets in protest against the fall in the currency and political repression. Although he could never have guessed it when he launched his private campaign against the Saudis, Gallagher was succeeding beyond his wildest dreams. If future Middle East historians ever discovered Gallagher’s role in the downfall of Saudi Arabia, maybe they would consider him to be a geopolitical genius or perhaps they would just conclude that Saudi had been an over-ripe apple that was ready to fall. Just another victim of the spread of the Arab Spring. Sifting through the cables from the various operatives led to only one conclusion: the Al Sauds would have to act quickly to arrest the slide into chaos. Such action would require a high level of Family unity that didn’t exist. And that was what Gallagher was counting on. He flicked to the screen that held most of his attention these days. His oil portfolio was increasing by the day and if he were to liquidate it more than five million dollars would be flying to his account in the Cayman Islands. He had prepared his wife for his impending retirement. The idea of spending their declining years in the sunshine in close proximity to a beach with servants doing the cooking and cleaning appealed to her.  He had constantly assuaged the misgiving of State by passing intelligence from Gilman that everything was in hand. There would be no U.S. intervention, no boots on the ground. Adams had put out an alert on Gallagher, but the man would be impossible to find. Interpol were also looking for him after the slaughter in Antwerp but they had also drawn a blank. The man was a ghost. Saudi was going down and nobody had any idea what was going to replace the Ruling House. Look at Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and extrapolate it. A lot of people were going to end up dead. The figures on the screen shifted and he had just made another hundred thousand dollars.  Alan Simpson liked his bank balance but he didn’t like himself. Sometimes in the middle of the night he awoke sweating and thought about the Hellhound he had unleashed.

CHAPTER 32

London

Burfield rubbed his red-rimmed eyes as he watched the dawn break over the River Thames. He had just entered the Land of Nod when the duty officer’s call had rudely awoken him and summoned him immediately to his desk. The news of the Ras Tanura explosions and fires had been coming in all during the night. The Saudis had put a news blanket on the event and Burfield had been dependent in large part on the information that had been transmitted by various tanker captains in the Gulf. A British tanker had been preparing to take its place at the loading station when the explosions had begun. According to the skipper of the tanker, a dour Scotsman who had stayed on the radiotelephone for over an hour describing the mayhem, there had been a series of explosions in the tank farm and a major explosion in the refinery. Every fire tender in the Eastern Province had been sent to Ras Tanura but with little effect. It was obvious that it would be days before the fire was contained and in that time the blazing heat would reduce the refinery and the tank farm to a mass of heated and twisted metal resembling an artist’s view of Armageddon. Burfield had been busy preparing the brief that he would deliver to the Foreign Secretary through his hierarchy later that morning. The scenario he had built up was worrying. There was no doubt in his mind that something was afoot. The Riyal was continuing its plunge into the basement of world finance and the currency traders were having a field day forcing it lower and lower. There was certainly a currency war going on. The disappearance of Ras Tanura was a major blow to Saudi crude oil exports. Jubail and the other export routes were still open. The Iranians and the other members of OPEC would be happy to take up the slack and it would be years before the damage could be repaired. The oil markets would let them know during the day what the effect on the oil price would be but in Tokyo oil was already trading at $20 higher than its London close on the flimsiest information of what had happened at Ras Tanura. Ever since Burfield had felt his job to be under threat, he had gone into defensive mode. The draft script of his brief sat before him on his desk. He had tried not to be too pessimistic but the signs were less than promising. In the past weeks he had been canvassing the military for an assessment of the Saudi military situation. It has always been the British position that the Saudi military was the principal player in whether a coup would succeed or fail within the country. The main elements, the navy, army and air force, were directly under the control of a member of the Royal Family. It was the Service’s opinion that the military establishment had not yet developed a sense of ‘national service and purpose’. It was still loyal to the Ruling Family but had as yet not developed the notion of the ‘defence of the realm’. Personal loyalty to the Al Sauds overrode all other loyalties, even loyalty to the tribal chiefs. Therein lay the real danger. If the current threat was perceived as one to the nation as a whole, it was unlikely that the military would intervene. The Royal Family itself would have to be threatened before the military would react. Even then the ability of the military to intervene in certain situations was limited. During the siege of the Holy Places, the King had been forced to ask for outside assistance. The military had also not distinguished itself during the Gulf War. Burfield’s conclusion: the British had been unwise in placing most of their faith in a military establishment too closely connected to the Royal Family itself. He wondered which particular wunderkind at the Foreign Office had come up with a support strategy that had been shown to be woefully inadequate in attempting to save the Shah of Iran. Everyone had thought that by funnelling arms and equipment to the Shah’s army that they were in effect preserving the monarchy. The only flaw in the strategy was that once the army turned their guns on the generals there was nobody to stop them from taking over the whole bloody country. He read the brief once more. The British over-reliance on the Saudi army was his central theme and he hoped he had not laboured it too much. The Foreign Secretary was not well known for his intuitive grasp of detail and he was sure that the ‘mandarins’ responsible for the current British position would modulate the conclusions of his brief to suit. That meant that if the worst came to the worse, and that was always a possibility in the Middle East, then someone in an exalted position at the Foreign Office would be looking for a scapegoat. And he could just imagine in whose direction they would begin looking. If he hoped for salvation, he would have to look beyond the corridors of the British Civil Service. The U.S. Congress as far back as 1974 had studied the feasibility of occupying the oil fields in the east of Saudi and the possibility of securing safe trade routes. The plans were still operational and Congress had already given the Pentagon the necessary authority to launch them. But after the Gulf War, most analysts agreed that a future occupation of Saudi Arabia would be a lot more trouble than it was worth. He stared at the envelope on his desk then leaned forward and tipped it upside down. The photos tumbled across his desk. Some fellow from MI5 called Connally had sent the envelope to him with minimum comment. There were five photos of Arthur Worley standing at a doorway, being admitted and leaving. The comment on the rear of the photos read simply ‘the Gallagher homestead Belfast – woman identified as Mary Gallagher’. The second set of photos showed a tramp at the same door, being admitted and leaving. The comment on the back of the photo read ‘Patrick Gallagher?’  It just wasn’t possible. Burfield was convinced that Arthur had finally lost it. Why had Connally sent him the photos? The only conclusion he could arrive at was that Arthur and Connally were connected in this fantasy that Gallagher was still alive. But what if they were right? What if Gallagher was behind the mayhem in Saudi? Burfield could feel his stomach rumble. He looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. That meant it was nearly three o’clock in Washington. It had been some considerable time since he had contacted his opposite number at the ‘Cousins’. Alan Simpson could always be relied upon to stand behind one in a crisis. And this was most certainly a crisis. Yamamah II hung in the balance. The bribes had been paid and the middle men had socked away their millions. The tabloid press would have a field day. He needed reassurance that Arthur and Connally were indeed fantasists. He prayed that Simpson would be able to provide that reassurance. He picked up his phone and dialled.