Keys to the Kingdom (3 page)

‘You’re the son of Harry St. John Worley aren’t you?’ She had pronounced his name perfectly.

Worley flinched inwardly at the mention of his father’s name as he always managed to do and as he always probably would do. He had spent half a lifetime trying to control his emotions about a man he despised. ‘Indeed I am,’ Worley said turning his attention to Rosinski. He estimated her age at anywhere between forty and forty-five. The first strands of grey had begun to appear in her auburn hair. Her face was soft and very white and no feature other than her clear hazel eyes made an immediate impression on him. People would describe her as attractive rather than beautiful. Her form was hidden by a long flowing dress that was de-rigeur for most ladies at official functions where Saudis were present. Rosinski was perhaps five kilos overweight but otherwise looked in good shape. ‘It’s a rather dubious distinction,’ he added.

‘On the contrary,’ she said. ‘Your father more or less invented spying in this part of the world.’

‘Let’s not exaggerate,’ he said pleasantly. It was time to move to another subject. ‘I pride myself on placing American accents but you have me completely baffled.’

A smile lit up her face and turned it from pretty to beautiful. ‘I was born in Chicago, educated in Boston and Oxford and spoke only Polish for the first five years of my life. I suppose all that has had some effect on my accent.’

‘You’re working directly for Clark?’

‘Why didn’t you ask me outright whether I work for the Agency? Yes I work directly for Clark.’ The edge had returned to her voice.

‘You’re lucky to be working for one of the pillars of the intelligence community.’ Worley glanced around at the other groups on the lawn.

‘You really think so,’ her eyes sparkled. ‘I can certainly say that Clark is one of the good old boys of the Company.’ She looked at the retreating form of her boss and waited until he was out of earshot before speaking. ‘Look I’ve been trying to meet you for the last few months but Clark has been keeping me incommunicado.’

‘It must be very difficult for you. I think it’s bloody wonderful that your people have insisted on placing female employees in your embassy. I only wish that us Brits had half the gumption. I can only imagine the difficulty you have trying to deal with the Saudis.’ Worley knew that there wasn’t a Saudi male in the country who would deal with Rosinski on an official level.

‘It’s difficult but that’s not the reason Clark has been keeping me under wraps.’ She saw the quizzical look on his face. ‘It’s a long story and I’ll bore you with it some other time. I have to admit that I was eavesdropping on your conversation with Clark just now. What do you hear about the new Ikhwan?’

Worley hesitated for a second. ‘One of my contacts told me some months ago that the Ikhwan were reforming. You aware that the original Ikhwan were a group of warrior religious fanatics who helped Abdul Aziz carve out his kingdom. He repaid them by slaughtering most of the poor ignorant bastards. It appears that one of the Princes has been putting a religious warrior group together. What’s your interest in the Ikhwan?’

‘I’m just behaving like the new kid on the block,’ she said sidestepping the question.  ‘I’ve read all the books and I’m trying to use the experience of old hands like yourself to get a handle on things over here.’ Once a professional, always a professional, she thought as she saw the smile flit across Worley’s face. He knew she was playing her cards close to her chest and it amused him. He was a good-looking man and she might have had more than a passing interest in him if Gilman hadn’t insisted that he was gay. Maybe that was why she felt so much at ease with him. There was no sexual threat and both of them knew it. Maybe she should have looked for a job in an all gay company instead of with a bunch of macho assholes. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Saudi isn’t a barrel of monkeys for a female intelligence agent but I’ve tapped a rich lode of information that hasn’t been considered before.’ She held up her hand as Worley was about to speak.  ‘Don’t ask me about it. I’m only a few months into this vein but I’m already beginning to strike gold. When I’ve got something definite I’ll let you know but you’re right about something being in the air.’

‘Does Clark know about this rich new vein that you’re tapping?’ Worley was intrigued by Mary Jo Rosinski.

‘Clark Gilman doesn’t have the slightest interest in anything that I get up to,’ Rosinski said with bitterness. ‘He binned my first report while I was in the room. He didn’t even bother to read it. As far as Clark is concerned, I don’t exist. Great situation, don’t you think?’

‘You’ve certainly piqued my curiosity. Are you willing to let me in on the rest of the secret?’

Rosinski smiled again. ‘Not yet, I learned through the years that it’s a bad policy to lay all your cards on the table straight away. And it just dawned on me that I’ve been doing all the talking. Did anyone ever tell you that you’re easy to talk to?’

‘They teach us to be good listeners, that and how to draft a damned good memo. Shall we rejoin the rest of the party?’ Worley turned and Rosinski walked beside him. ‘I’m off to London to-morrow for a few days. Why don’t you and I get together when I return. I’m really rather interested in whatever you can find out about this Ikhwan business and I may have a nugget or two to trade with you.’

They reached the edge of the garden party and Worley could see Sir Richard and Ellis hard at work recycling petrodollars.

‘I think you and I are going to get along just fine,’ Rosinski said. ‘See you when you get back.’

He watched her as she walked away and wondered if she had come to the party specifically to meet him. Mary Jo Rosinski struck him as a woman who didn’t do something unless there was a very good reason for it. Whatever the reason was it was going to have to wait until he got back from London. As his eyes followed her he noticed Gilman was staring at her retreating figure. ‘If looks could kill,’ he thought. Why did Gilman hate her so much? Another unanswered question that would have to wait for his return.

Rosinski flopped onto the sofa in her small apartment in the American compound. The sofa sagged under her. The damn thing had probably been shipped from the States forty years ago and had been dumped on by several generations of diplomats. Uncle Sam hadn’t put too much pressure on the Federal budget when he’d equipped the Foreign Service accommodations. Nothing in the room belonged to her. Everything in the world that she owned was sitting in forty cardboard boxes in a storage unit in Washington. All she bothered to ship to Riyadh was her clothes. Her Kindle contained a complete library and her Ipod had her total record collection. Some penny pincher at State had probably had an orgasm when he’d seen that the total cost of shipping her to Riyadh had come out at under $400. One thought had been running through her head all day:  ‘is this trip really necessary?’ What the hell was she doing playing spy in Saudi Arabia when she could have been sitting at home in the US waiting for the day she could well and truly screw her employer? It might have been professionalism but she doubted it. She was in her last days as a CIA employee whatever way the dice landed and accepting the non-existent assignment to Saudi Arabia was her only way of giving the hierarchy the finger. After three months spent taking crap from Gilman and being rebuffed by every Saudi official in sight, she’d come to realise that maybe the good old boys back in Langley were having the last laugh after all. There was one small possibility that she could execute a reverse screw and give the bastards one final shot in the ass. When she’d realised that Gilman and the all-male Saudi establishment were going to treat her like a pariah, she had turned to the only section of Saudi society open to her - the females. And what a rich source of intelligence she’d located. These women were intelligent and beautiful yet their half-assed husbands treated them like chattels. It was not unusual for two Saudi males to speak openly in front of the women serving them since, as far as they were concerned, most of the creatures dressed in the abayas were brain-dead. At least that’s what the husbands thought. Rosinski had learned that the women had two things in common, they kept their ears open and they hated their menfolk. She realised that she had connected with the best untapped source of local intelligence when she attended her first Saudi coffee morning. She stood up, walked to her drinks cabinet and poured herself a shot of Jack Daniels. She sipped the sweet smoky liquid as she crossed her living room to the briefcase lying on the table she used as a desk. The lid of the case flipped open as soon as she exerted pressure on the catches and revealed a sophisticated piece of electronics. She flicked a switch and immediately the lights started to flash on the control panel. Her room, like her office at the Embassy, had been bugged since the day she arrived. She made it a point never to do or say anything in either location that she didn’t want either transcribed or listened to. She hadn’t bothered to remove the bugs. Gilman would only have planted more. She turned the dials on the control panel and the lights indicated that the bugs were still in place. ‘Assholes,’ she said as she closed the lid of the briefcase. She sipped the Jack Daniels and sighed as the liquor bit at the back of her throat dispelling the bad taste created by the thought that she was under constant surveillance. Why should she worry?  It was to be expected. If they weren’t watching her so closely, she would have been surprised. She picked up her cellphone and inserted a pair of headphones into the socket.  ‘I love Crosby, Still, Nash and Young,’ she said for Gilman’s benefit as she made her way back to the sofa.  She sat down, slipped on the headphones and leaned back. She took a sip of her bourbon and pressed the play button.

‘They call themselves the Ikhwan,’ the voice was heavily accented with more than a little French overlay. Rosinski closed her eyes and tried to visualise the beautiful olive face and the deep black eyes, dewy with fear. ‘They think that the regime are becoming too western and they want to bring the Kingdom back to a more fundamentalist state.’ the voice was high and nervous. ‘I should not be telling you these things. I would be terribly punished by my husband if he knew that I had uttered a word to you. But I am more afraid that he will succeed than I am of dying. Now my life is nothing but at least I live in the hope that my daughters may one day be able to drive a car along the streets of Riyadh.’ The speaker coughed nervously. ‘When first I heard of this I laughed but every day I see them becoming stronger. They have friends everywhere. They will not announce themselves with the long beards and the rough cloaks of the Ikhwan. That will come later. Now they hide among their own kind and support the King but when their power has been fully developed they will launch the revolution. Then they will purge the Kingdom of all the foreigners. The Americans will be forced to leave and the country will be more closed than it is today. They say the King has no legitimacy, that only Allah can rule the people of Saudi Arabia. When they are ready blood will flow like a river in flood.’

‘And when will that day be?’ Rosinski could hear the excitement in her own voice.

‘I do not know. They haven’t spoken of that. But soon. They have been building their Ikhwan for many years and they are becoming impatient. The taste for blood is growing. It will be soon.’ There was a gasp on the tape. ‘You must tell no-one that I have told you these things.’ The pitch of the voice had suddenly increased. ‘What do I say? I know in my heart that I have killed myself by speaking of the Ikhwan to an American. But even dead and in Hell I will have a better life than I now live.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Rosinski looked for a trace of tenderness in her voice but couldn’t find it. She hated herself for being so damn professional.

‘My husband, Prince Kareem, is their leader.’ The voice on the tape broke into uncontrollable sobbing.

Rosinski pressed the pause button and removed the headphones. She drank the remnants of the Jack Daniels. In normal circumstances she should go immediately to her superior with such a piece of intelligence. But these were not normal circumstances and Riyadh was no normal station. Langley was in the process of trashing every aspect of her life and if she exposed a non-existent revolution they would have all the ammunition they needed to finish her career. No, it was time to verify what the Princess had told her. And that was where Arthur St. John Worley came into it. Only he could help her nail the bastards back in Langley. But something about Worley had been bugging her since she’d left the garden party. She’d tried damn hard to figure out what it was but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Worley was exactly what she had expected, urbane, suave, sophisticated. He carried himself with the confidence of someone who had been born to rule. She smiled as the phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ ran through her mind. It was entirely possible to imagine someone just like old Arthur St. John leading the stand against the Zulus at Rorke's Drift. The guy might be a dinosaur and he might be gay but he was all she had to work with. Somehow she was going to contrive to save Saudi Arabian oil for Uncle Sam and in the process she was going to screw the biggest cash settlement ever from her current employers.

CHAPTER 4

Karun Training Camp, Swat Valley, Pakistan

The Islamic Jihad training camp was set beneath one of the most spectacular mountain views on earth but still looked and smelled like the dozens of other such camps located in the Bekaa Valley or on the dry highlands of Northern Sudan. Gallagher was sweating beneath his fatigues and wondering whether he was getting too old for this business. Above on the mountains was the clearest air he had ever tasted. But here on the plain all was sweat and faeces. It was more than fifteen years since he had first gazed on this verdant training ground for terrorists and in that time the whole picture of international terrorism had changed. The giants had all departed. Osama had been dumped into the sea, George Habash had given in to cancer, Nidal had given in to booze and greed and the fat Venezuelan pig, Ramirez, had given in to the French. Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine had moved over for Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Hamas.  Syria had turned terrorism into a video game where the guns were real and so were the dead bodies. The smell from the latrine assailed his nose. It was the smell of long ago and far away. It reminded him of the first training camp he had attended on the rain blown grassy hillsides in Donegal. The smell of shit had been in the air there too. He wondered whether the smell of shit and terrorism were synonymous with each other. He winced when gunfire opened up away to his left and raised his hands to cover his ears. Looking up he saw that thirty yards away a group of what looked like kids were playing with guns that fired real bullets. The little bastards looked like they were just out of short trousers. He looked for the grizzled men, the veterans who had committed themselves to the war against Israel. He saw none. Perhaps the war without end had wearied them. He moved his head in a circular motion easing the tension in his neck. He realised that he’d had his fill of training camps with camouflage netting hung over everything including the piss-pots. A picture of the blue Caribbean and the small brown bodies cavorting in Placencia flooded his mind and for a second the stench of the camp vanished. When his current project was finished, he would never be seen in this wasteland again. The fatigues clung to his skin. He kept himself in magnificent condition for over thirty years and he had the taut body of the trained athlete. The high level of fitness he maintained was the edge that had permitted him to evade the forces of law and order more than once.

‘The young ones have tired you, Abu Ma’aath,’ a stocky bearded Palestinian slapped Gallagher on the back.

‘I’m getting old, Nasrullah,’ Gallagher said hugging the man. He had known the chubby Palestinian for almost twenty years and he trusted him more than any other man alive.

‘Never,’ Nasrullah said. He put his arm around Gallagher’s shoulder. ‘Abu Ma’aath continues the fight against the Zionists. Have you not seen the way the young ones look at you? You are a beacon for them.’

Gallagher hugged Nasrullah again. ‘This will be my last mission.’

‘And your greatest,’ Nasrullah smiled. He loved this man and would follow him into the grave if that was the will of Allah. 

‘You have collected the ordinance that we require?’ Gallagher asked.

The smile faded from Nasrullah’s face. ‘There have been some problems,’ his round face frowned and took on the look of a child who expected to be scolded. ‘Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have sucked every weapon available. Come I will show you.’ He moved away towards the edge of the compound where a shed stood in isolation. ‘The Ikhwan are already well equipped,’ Nasrullah said as they marched towards the shed. He could feel the anger emanating from Abu Ma’aath and he did not like it. He had seen too many times the results of that anger.

‘I gave you my requirements, Nasrullah. I expected to come here and find that they had been met.’

They reached the shed and Nasrullah opened the large lock on the door with a key from his pocket. He flung aside the heavy wooden door and switched on the overhead light.

Gallagher’s fists clenched as he looked at the contents of the storeroom. He held himself in check. ‘The Semtex?’ he asked through clenched teeth.

‘Taken by the Islamic Jihad,’ Nasrullah said quietly. ‘I have been building a stock of homemade explosives.’ He pointed at three drums in the corner of the shack.

Gallagher whirled and pushed his face close to Nasrullah. ‘My instructions were specific. We need an explosive that’s powerful, easy to handle and reliable. That means Semtex or C4.’ He knew he had made his first big mistake by not covering the ordinance issue himself. Nasrullah was a top class man but he was an Arab. He still had the InshAllah mentality that had bedevilled the Arabs since the dawn of man. If it couldn’t be done then it wasn’t his fault it was simply the will of Allah. Gallagher had learned that human intervention was often needed to give Allah a helping hand. Maybe God should have decreed that all terrorists should be Germans. At least the operations would go off like clockwork.

‘And the Saxhorn?’ Gallagher said more in desperation than in hope.

Nasrullah moved to a wooden box in the corner of the shed. He lifted the lid and removed the body of a rocket launcher.

‘A fucking RPG-7,’ Gallagher said looking at the metal body in Nasrullah’s hand. ‘We’re spending money like water on this operation and you buy me this out of date piece of shit.’

‘Wait,’ Nasrullah said quickly. He pulled a second wooden crate towards him and opened the lid. ‘A Saxhorn could not be obtained in time. But I have managed to get five OG-7 rockets. Very difficult to obtain.’ He lifted one of the straight cylindrical bodied rockets from the crate and passed it to Gallagher. ‘It has a 0-4M impact fuse like the ones used with the 82mm mortar HE bomb.’

Gallagher examined the rocket. His disappointment at not having access to the Saxhorn guided missile launcher was beginning to evaporate. He had used the RPG-7 many times himself and if the rocket was up to the job then maybe they wouldn’t miss the Saxhorn. The Semtex was another matter. He would have to take care of that himself.

‘It’s designed for anti-personal use,’ Nasrullah continued quickly. ‘And carries a charge of 210g of A-IX-1 hexogen. Let me show you what it can do. Then you will be happy with Nasrullah.’ He picked up the RPG-7 and ushered Gallagher out of the shed. 

They crossed about twenty yards of terrain before Gallagher halted. He held out his hand. ‘Give it to me.’

Nasrullah handed him the rocket launcher.

Gallagher snapped the telescoped tube into its firing position. He screwed the cardboard cylinder containing the propellant to the missile. His hands worked deftly. This was a weapon he had used many times before. He inserted the missile into the muzzle of the launcher with the small projection mating with the notch in the muzzle to line up the cap with the percussion hammer. After removing the nosecap, he extracted the safety pin.

‘The maximum range is one thousand metres?’ He scanned the area in front of him and picked out a tree about eight hundred metres directly before him.

‘Yes,’ Nasrullah confirmed.

Gallagher raised the launcher to his shoulder. There would be no need to compensate for the non-existent wind. He cocked the hammer. The rangefinder sight was of the subtension type and Gallagher adjusted it carefully until his target was in the centre of the sight. He pulled the trigger and heard the click as the cocked hammer was released. The missile sped from the muzzle of the tube. Gallagher had braced himself for the reaction but he still staggered slightly. The missile covered the distance to the target in three seconds. The tree erupted and the area around it became an inferno. Forget the Saxhorn, Gallagher thought as he watched the explosion. This rocket was exactly what he had been looking for. Man’s capacity for devising weapons of destruction never ceased to amaze him.

‘Did I not tell you that Nasrullah would not fail you,’ the Palestinian slapped Gallagher on the shoulders.

‘You have done well,’ Gallagher said folding the launcher and handing it to Nasrullah. ‘Now make sure that it and the four rockets reaches our friend in Saudi.’

‘It will be done,’ Nasrullah said.

‘And the young men?’ Gallagher asked as they walked back to the armoury shack. 

‘The first of them has arrived,’ Nasrullah said. ‘He is waiting in my office.’

‘Are you sure that he will accomplish our goal?’ Gallagher asked.

‘He has been prepared for a mission such as this,’ Nasrullah said. ‘Last year his friend blew up a bus in Tel Aviv with a suicide bomb and killed 22 Israelis. He considers his friend to be a great martyr, a hero. He begs for such a death.’

‘Allah is indeed great,’ Gallagher said smiling. ‘Let me see the young man.’

The two men strode towards the brick building in the centre of the compound. It was slowly coming together, Gallagher thought. If everyone played his part to the full then he really had a chance of pulling off the greatest terrorist action of all time. The obliteration the House of Saud would dwarf 9/11. And the beauty of it was only a handful of people would ever know that he was involved.

Nasrullah pushed open the wooden door set into the centre of the brick building and Gallagher entered the shack that served as an office. The room was dark and sparsely furnished. The young man, swarthy and with close cropped hair sat on a wooden chair in the corner of the room.

‘This is Abbas,’ Nasrullah said in Arabic as the door closed behind him.

The young man shot to his feet.

‘May Allah bless you,’ Gallagher examined the young man closely. ‘Sit.’ Behind Abbas he saw a heavily marked map of Greater Israel hanging on the wall. Someone had cut off parts of Gaza and coloured them green. A battered blackboard, lumps missing from the edges, was the only other wall covering in the room.

Abbas retook his place on the wooden chair. Above his head a rusted fan circled slowly, barely moving the hot air in the office.

‘You have been chosen by Allah to fulfil your promise to take your place in Paradise as a shahid,’ Nasrullah began.

‘Let it be soon,’ Abbas intoned staring straight ahead. ‘The Jews must suffer.’

‘You will serve our cause in another country,’ Nasrullah continued. ‘Those you will kill are not Zionists but the deaths you will cause will bring the creation of an Islamic state in Palestine closer. We have declared a jihad against the corrupt rulers of Saudi Arabia. The Koran says that the holiest way to fight is through martyrdom. Your place in heaven is assured.’

Abbas’s eyes burned.

‘And what if your courage fails you?’ Gallagher asked.

Abbas shook his head and his mouth twisted in a smile. ‘Impossible.’

‘Soon you will fly to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia,’ Gallagher sat down facing the young man. ‘All the papers have been prepared. You will be met at the airport and your duties will be explained to you. Your contact in Riyadh will supply you with explosives. You will place those explosives exactly as Nasrullah dictates. When the time is right you will be called on to fulfil your promise and you will join Allah in heaven. But remember you must be the one that no one sees. Not the least suspicion must cling to you.’

‘It shall be as you say,’ Abbas shifted in the chair. ‘I live only to serve Allah.’

‘Good,’ Nasrullah said looking at Gallagher who nodded imperceptibly.

‘Now you must eat and prepare yourself to travel,’ Nasrullah said. ‘Soon you take your first step towards your place in Paradise.’

Abbas pushed his thin body out of the chair and made for the door. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he said before he pushed the door and left the two men alone in the dingy office.

‘You have chosen well, Nasrullah old friend,’ Gallagher said as soon as Abbas was out of the room. ‘He will serve our purposes perfectly.’

‘And that Saudi dog Kareem?’ Nasrullah asked. ‘Did I not choose well there also?’

Gallagher laughed. ‘You should have been a psychologist, old friend. Kareem is both proud and arrogant. Either one alone makes even the most intelligent blind but together they will reduce him to putty in our hands. I have no fear but that he will play the part we have chosen for him.’

Nasrullah joined in with Gallagher’s laughter and showed a set of gapped front teeth. ‘That Saudi dog thinks that we would make him King,’ he spat on the concrete floor. ‘Who will have the pleasure of ending the cur’s life?’

‘That will be your happy labour,’ Gallagher stood close to his friend. ‘I will need you in Saudi in two, maybe three weeks. There is much work to be done in creating the chaos that will be necessary. And when I have finished you will be responsible for carrying out the rest of my plan.’

‘And my payment?’ Nasrullah asked.

It was always the same story, Gallagher thought as he looked into Nasrullah’s wide eyes. No matter how devoted to the cause they were there was always the need for money.

‘There will be chaos when we have finished our work,’ Gallagher said softly. ‘The homes of the royal princes will be stained with their blood. Their money, gold and other trinkets will be scattered like the useless dross they are. Goats and chickens will shit on their priceless Persian carpets. Then you and your men will collect.’

Nasrullah’s eyes positively glowed with the thought of the Aladdin’s cave of treasure he would carry off. ‘I will not fail you, Abu Ma’aath. All will be done as you wish.’