The Scorpion's Gate (8 page)
Senator Robinson arched an eyebrow.
“Number three, Senator, the British SIS just reported that it’s really Iran that is staging the bombings in Bahrain, not Islamyah, that the Iranians want to bomb our base there and blame Islamyah, and that they are planning some sort of uprising among the Shi’a majority in Bahrain. The King there is Sunni, but he has been reaching out to the Shi’a and doing a good job.
“Number four, I am having a hard time believing that the new government in Islamyah is as bad as everybody else in Washington seems to think. Yes, I know some of them were al Qaeda–related at some point, but we have one source who says they’re planning real national elections next year.”
“And you put all this in your famous analytical blender and get what, Rusty?” Senator Robinson asked, staring into his glass.
“I don’t know, and that’s what bothers me. I feel like—what did they say in the
Star Wars
movie?—‘there’s a disturbance in the Force.’ ” MacIntyre waved the fingers on both hands as if conjuring up the Force.
Star Wars
movie?—‘there’s a disturbance in the Force.’ ” MacIntyre waved the fingers on both hands as if conjuring up the Force.
“Well, Obi-Wan, what are you going to do about it?” the Senator said, rising and going for a refill.
“For starters I’m flying over to London tonight to see what I can stir up. They always tell us more in person, stuff they are hearing but can’t put into a liaison report to us for whatever reason,” MacIntyre said, waving off more bourbon. “And they just seem to have better analysts than we do. I’m trying to find out what that ingredient is that they have so I can inject it into our new little Intelligence Analysis Center.”
“Good idea to go to London about now, but why not keep going and drop in on some of our friends in the Gulf ? They always know more than they put in writing, too,” Senator Robinson said, moving behind his desk. “Besides, there’s a guy out there I want you to get to know. Brad Adams, runs the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain. Did a year with me up here on some sort of officer development program when he was a captain. We stay in touch. He has, well, some of the same concerns we do about the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. I’ll tell him you’re coming.”
“Okay.” Rusty accepted that his trip to London just became much, much more.
“But tell me, Rusty, do you believe this Islamyah Shura Council will really give up power to freely elected officials? Hell, these are the guys who killed some of the Saudi royal family in their coup. Some of their supporters were al Qaeda, fought us in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“Senator, we have lots of reporting that there is a rift in the Shura Council between the jihadists, who want to export the revolution, and those who want to modernize and democratize Islamyah. It’s always that way with a revolution. After a while there is a struggle among the revolutionaries, just like in the French Revolution, the Russian...”
Senator Robinson looked at the map of the Middle East on his wall and thought out loud, “Well, you’re right, Rusty, it was a relatively bloodless coup, all in all. There’s no line of royals at a guillotine. Most of the Sauds escaped to the U.S. on their private planes. The whole thing was over in three days because so much of the Saudi military was in on the coup, the revolution. And so far, all they have really done to piss us off is to eject our defense contractors.”
“Senator, it was us, the United States, that froze their bank accounts here after the coup and then stopped shipping military spare parts for the weapons we had sold the Sauds.” MacIntyre felt he could be frank with his old boss, and so continued on. “By placing a unilateral economic embargo on them, we made it illegal for U.S. companies to buy Saudi oil. It was only then that they nationalized one hundred percent of Aramco and broke the contracts to sell oil to America. We did it to ourselves.
“Besides, sir, the Saudi government was no barrel of laughs either. They beheaded people, they denied women rights, they funded all sorts of terrorist-related Wahhabi schools and charities before 9/11 and even after. There were literally several thousand royal princelings, and corruption was rampant.”
“Look, I know all of that, Rusty,” Paul Robinson sighed. “Now the royal Saudis have taken up residence in the finer parts of Los Angeles and Houston. They’re throwing their money around, getting involved in American politics. Or should I say more involved? The Bushies were always in bed with the Sauds.
“You can’t report this, Rusty,” the Senator said, leaning forward and tapping with his finger like a woodpecker on MacIntyre’s knee, “but I had one of those exiled royal sons of bitches in this room, this very room, two months ago saying he had twenty-five million dollars in an offshore account that he would transfer control of to me if I would back an intelligence finding to authorize covert U.S. action to topple the Islamyah regime and reinstall the Sauds.”
Rusty whistled in amazement. “Shit, Senator...You could have him arrested for that.”
“I know, but I would have had no proof,” Robinson said, leaning back into his chair.
“So what’d you do?” Rusty asked. He had known Paul Robinson for sixteen years, since the now-Senator had hired him as a junior staffer for his House office right after Rusty had graduated from Brown. The Senator was as honest as any man he had ever met and hated dishonesty of any kind, intellectual, financial, political. Corruption just really pissed him off. Robinson had first risen to national attention on a subcommittee that investigated financial fraud in U.S. thrift savings banks.
Senator Paul Robinson had pushed through the creation of the Intelligence Analysis Center because, he said, he and the executive branch were not getting intellectually honest reporting. When the center came into existence and the Director of National Intelligence selected Ambassador Sol Rubenstein to run it, the Senator had told Rubenstein that his confirmation hearing would go a lot faster if he picked Rusty as the first Deputy Director of the IAC.
When Rusty learned that had happened, he’d called the Senator and thanked him, but joked, “You know I was doing well with this Beltway Bandit firm. You just cut my salary by two-thirds.”
“Don’t try that on me, Rusty,” Robinson had replied. “It’s not about the money. Not for you. Not for me. Never was. It’s about honest government, and I’ve been feeling like Diogenes down here trying to find someone who will do some quality, honest intelligence analysis. You’re it.” There was no way that the Senator would let a bribery attempt go by, like the one the Saudi had tried to pull.
“Well, Russell, I did not call the FBI and report the son of a bitch. But I did slip an amendment into the Omnibus Appropriation that requires the Treasury Department to keep all royal Saudi assets in the U.S. frozen until Treasury files a detailed report with us on whether the funds are really personal or should be considered national assets of the people of their country. We then have a hundred and eighty days to review the report, and that period can be extended upon request of any chair of any committee of relevant jurisdiction in either house,” the Senator replied as a Cheshire cat grin spread across his face. He really was a legislative master. “So that’s how I helped them. How can I help you, Rusty, as you go gallivanting around Europe and the Middle East?”
“Not like that, Senator,” Russell said, still laughing at the legislative maneuver. “I haven’t been out to the Gulf region for a while. What can you do, sir? Just keep your eyes and ears open, especially with your friends on Armed Services.” MacIntyre rose and went for his overcoat, which was lying on the leather couch. “And watch my back.”
“Always do, Rusty, always do.” The two shook hands and then embraced. “And give my best to that lovely, lefty wife of yours,” the Senator said, smiling.
“I’ll need to give her something. Right now she’s probably sitting outside in her car waiting to take me to Dulles, and freezing,” MacIntyre said, walking toward the door.
“Then get your ass in gear, boy.” The chairman laughed, flicking his wrist. “Go, go. Never leave a pretty lady waiting in the cold.”
Sarah Goldman was feeling cold at the moment, in more ways than one. Their drive out the Dulles Airport Access Road together was more taxing on MacIntyre than negotiating with the Brazilian intelligence service (which he had done three months before, hoping to learn what one of South America’s leading spy agencies really knew about the Hezbollah presence in the “triangle area” near Uruguay).
“I don’t mind that your job means you can’t go to our friends’ dinners or that you won’t be here when my brother arrives tomorrow. I just don’t like being told at the last minute, that’s all,” Sarah said, gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly. “I know your job means you can’t always tell me why, and I accept that it’s more important than my work, but...”
“Honey, I never said my job is more important. What you do for refugees is sometimes a matter of life and death, too,” MacIntyre said, regretting he had put it that way as soon as he said it. He patted his various pockets looking for his passport. “It’s just that in addition to secrecy, my job also involves a certain unpredictability, a spontaneity. And if I had remembered that your brother was coming to town tomorrow, I would have delayed a day; you know I love Danny.
“And if I knew for sure when I was coming back, I would tell you, but this trip is a little open-ended,” he said, retrieving the worn black diplomatic passport from the new Coach attaché case her mother had given him for Chrismica.
“It’s all right, Rusty, seriously,” she said, looking at him and not the traffic. “It’s just that I leave Sunday for Somaliland. So I am giving the cat to Max and Theo and you have to remember when you get back to go and get Mr. Hobbs from them. And then you need to feed him, and not starve him like you did last summer when I was in Sudan, poor thing.”
Mr. Hobbs was their cat and surrogate child, an arrangement that Sarah seemed to be perfectly happy with, most of the time. When he’d press Sarah for a decision to try to have their own human child, she would point out that both their travel schedules and his work hours meant that something would have to give. “It can’t just be my job to raise our child like it is just me taking care of Mr. Hobbs. It would have to be an equally shared responsibility.” He accepted that concept, but he did not see how he could walk away from his job to some thirty-hour-a-week position at a boring think tank like Brookings or RAND. There was too much going on. There were too few people who knew how to do it. And his mind would turn to mush writing think-tank monographs that no one would ever read.
Yeah, he wanted a child, their child. Sarah always ended these conversations with the same unconvincing assertion: “It’s not like we’re failures if we don’t have a kid. I am not like my mother, and I just don’t buy that I have to procreate to justify my space on the planet. Believe me, there are more than enough people doing that without us adding to it.” So he had bought toys for Sarah and the cat in airport shops around the world. They were not much appreciated by either.
Sarah wove her way through the triple-parked cars, taxis, and police on the departure level of Dulles, to the Virgin Atlantic door. She threw on the emergency blinkers and got out of the car to embrace him, while the Dulles policeman yelled, “Move the car, lady.”
“Be safe and be careful, wherever the hell you’re going,” Sarah said as the kiss ended and their breath formed two columns of hot air in the cold night.
“London has been perfectly safe since the Underground bombings in 2005, really . . .” he tried. She put her finger across his mouth to silence him, then slipped her hand inside his coat pocket. “You heard me, mister,” Sarah said. She smiled warmly at the Dulles cop and got back into the car.
Rusty waved, hoping that she would be looking at him in the rearview mirror. Then he started looking for his badge to get through security. What he found first, in his coat pocket, was a card deck and a note on a yellow Post-it: “You need to practice the Ambitious Card trick for the IAC Charity Show. Have a great trip, boss, Debbie.”
After bypassing the long security line, MacIntyre went to the Virgin Club to await his flight. He sat at the bar and opened up the deck of cards. Somehow, he realized, on trips he felt free of all the tension between him and Sarah. He was already feeling it, his muscles relaxing. As he shuffled the cards Debbie had sneaked into his coat, Rusty looked up at the plasma screen carrying CNN. Secretary of Defense Henry Conrad was giving a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Dallas. He asked the bartender to turn on the sound.
“. . . dating from Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with the Saudi royal family aboard the cruiser the USS
Quincy.
Those who have forced the Sauds from power, for now, are al Qaeda murderers. They plan to spread their jihadist government throughout the region, threatening our allies in Egypt, Bahrain, and elsewhere. But I have a message for them. The United States of America will never permit them to harm our allies and will work for the restoration of the rule of law and order on the Saudi peninsula.”
Quincy.
Those who have forced the Sauds from power, for now, are al Qaeda murderers. They plan to spread their jihadist government throughout the region, threatening our allies in Egypt, Bahrain, and elsewhere. But I have a message for them. The United States of America will never permit them to harm our allies and will work for the restoration of the rule of law and order on the Saudi peninsula.”
In Dallas, the crowd roared. In Dulles, Rusty MacIntyre cut the cards, and ordered a Wild Turkey.
FEBRUARY 4
The Burj al Arab Hotel
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
N
ew York Journal
reporter Kate Delmarco took a taxi to the world’s tallest hotel, a building shaped like a giant dhow’s sail on a man-made island a hundred yards off the coast of Dubai. She did not enter the hotel, but instead climbed into a golf cart that took her back over the short causeway to the shore, past the Wild Wadi Water Park, and then down to a dock where electrically powered little dhows departed for the canals of the nearby hotel and shopping complex. Alighting at the modern air-conditioned souk, she followed the signs through the mall to an Italian restaurant.
ew York Journal
reporter Kate Delmarco took a taxi to the world’s tallest hotel, a building shaped like a giant dhow’s sail on a man-made island a hundred yards off the coast of Dubai. She did not enter the hotel, but instead climbed into a golf cart that took her back over the short causeway to the shore, past the Wild Wadi Water Park, and then down to a dock where electrically powered little dhows departed for the canals of the nearby hotel and shopping complex. Alighting at the modern air-conditioned souk, she followed the signs through the mall to an Italian restaurant.
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