Consent to Kill (5 page)

With the man’s neck firmly in the grasp of his gloved hand, Rapp forced Khalil’s chin up and began driving him back into the shadows of the alley. A basic tenet of hand-to-hand combat is that the body goes where the head goes. Khalil wrapped his hands around Rapp’s forearm, but it was already too late. His larynx half crushed, his body completely off balance, Khalil could do nothing but watch in absolute horror as the final seconds of his life played out before him like some awful nightmare. It was the perfect justice for a man who had preached terror and hatred for over two decades.

Rapp accelerated his move, wrenching Khalil’s head back as far as it would go. The man was beyond stumbling. He was on his way down, and there was nothing that would keep him on his feet. Rapp used Khalil’s weight against him. At the last second he thrust his left arm out like a piston and slammed the back of Khalil’s head into the hard unforgiving pavement. The man’s entire body went limp a split second after impact. There was a good chance the blow was fatal, but Rapp wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.

He wasted no time. He put the gun back in his pocket, spun, took a few steps, and grabbed the feet of the other man. Coleman and his team were under specific orders not to get out of their vehicles unless Rapp called for them. Rapp dragged the unknown man into the alley and deposited him next to the Dumpster. Next, he grabbed Khalil under the arms and propped him up against the brick wall of the building. Everything was done without hesitation and with great efficiency. Rapp grabbed the knife from his left pocket, pressed the button and heard the spring-loaded blade snap into position. Standing off to the right, Rapp placed his right hand on Khalil’s forehead and stuck the blade into the man’s neck just beneath his right ear. The hard steel went in with little trouble. Rapp then gripped the knife firmly and drew the weapon across Khalil’s neck, slicing him from one ear to the other.

R
IYADH
, S
AUDI
A
RABIA

A
t first glance the man appeared to fit in. He was wearing the traditional garb of a Saudi businessman. A white
thawb,
or robe made of cotton, was draped over his shoulders and stopped short of his ankles, and his sandy brown hair was covered with a
ghutra
and tied with an ornamental rope to keep it in place. Upon closer inspection, though, there were telltale signs that he was not native to the Arabian Peninsula. His skin was tan, but not the right shade, he was clean shaven and wearing heavy-soled black dress shoes instead of sandals, and above all else, his eyes were a muted blue, almost gray color. At the moment, however, those eyes were concealed behind a large pair of black sunglasses.

It was only 9:00 a.m. in Riyadh, and the temperature was pushing 100 degrees. Erich Abel didn’t mind the heat, though. He actually preferred it. Having grown up asthmatic, he found the dry arid climate of Saudi Arabia’s capital far preferable to the humid weather of the coastal cities on the Red Sea. Abel had a genuine interest in Saudi Arabia. Not because of the climate, really, or even because of the people. It had more to do with how it would soon shape history. It was an exciting place to conduct business.

The former East German spy believed in going native. It was the only way to really understand a culture. In truth, though, that was only part of the reason he wore the traditional Arab garb. The reality was, Saudi Arabia had become a very dangerous place for Westerners. Kidnapping was of course a constant possibility, but anyone dumb enough to grab him would return him as soon as they found out who he worked for, and then they would beg forgiveness at the foot of Prince Muhammad. The real problem was the increase in random killings by the crazed Wahhabis. There was great unrest in the desert kingdom, and it was very important to be as inconspicuous as possible.

If Abel had a true talent in life it was predicting change. When he’d worked for the Stasi, the ruthless and much feared East German Secret Police, he’d been the only one in his office to predict the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. He’d passed his reports up the chain of command, and they’d all told him he was too young to know what he was talking about. Just twenty-nine when the wall fell, Abel was looked upon as an overeducated intellectual by the cold-blooded ranks within Stasi headquarters in East Berlin. The Stasi prided itself on a certain crass ruthlessness that Abel lacked. Truth be told, he would have fit in better with the British foreign intelligence service, MI6. Abel had great respect for the Brits. They ran creative operations and took great joy in outwitting their adversaries. The Stasi was more like a very efficient and ruthless American organized crime family. At any rate, no one wanted to hear his predictions that their reign of terror was drawing to an end.

Abel had been a sickly child, in and out of hospitals. When he was out, he spent much of his time in bed with barely the strength to read. While the other kids advanced physically, he advanced intellectually. He graduated from university early, at the age of twenty and with dual degrees in math and economics, and was recruited by the Stasi. The employment opportunities in East Germany in the early eighties were not good. That fact combined with the idea of doing some bullying after being picked on for much of his youth appealed to him in a perversely satisfying way.

For the first three years with the Stasi he pushed to get transferred from the analytical side to the operations side, but his delicate appearance always prevented him from reaching his goal. Abel stood five feet ten inches tall, but back then he weighed just 145 pounds. Slowly, he put on weight and spent every moment of his free time working out in hopes that he could pass the physical requirements needed to get out from behind his desk.

He was rewarded in his fourth year by a transfer to operations and began taking part in the systematic kidnappings of Westerners who traveled to East Germany. Abel would help identify targets and sometimes even lure them into traps. His baby face and slight stature meant he could pass for a young teenage boy. Homosexual businessmen who traveled to the east were easy targets for blackmail. Abel would loiter on the appropriate corner, or park, or bar and wait for a man to come along and make a lewd request. He’d give the proper hand signal and the other members would swoop in, throw the man into the back of a van, then dump him in an interrogation room. The man would then be told he could choose between jail and public humiliation, or he could buy his freedom. Abel recalled, all these years later, that all of them but one chose to buy their freedom. That stubborn son of a bitch was eventually taken to an extremely harsh location where after a month of beatings he was strangled to death by a very sadistic and homophobic Stasi officer.

Each kidnapping would usually yield several thousand marks. The Stasi had contacts in almost all of the western banks and they would do their homework before they named the price of freedom. His ultimate catch was a West German noble who brought in $500,000. The man was in their custody for less than twenty-four hours. Abel estimated that his unit alone had brought in over five million dollars in a two-and-a-half-year period.

After that he was promoted to counterintelligence, which gave him reason to travel to West Germany more frequently. He was just getting involved in some serious spycraft when everything fell apart. He’d been warning his superiors for months that the signs were there, but they were too busy shuttling back and forth to Moscow kissing the asses of their KGB bosses. The last thing they wanted to do was tell the autocrats at the KGB that they were losing control of the Soviet Union’s westernmost European satellite. Such news was likely to get them marched out back and shot in the head.

Abel had studied the economics of East versus West. He knew the numbers manufactured by the governments in East Germany and Russia to be false. As a general rule, he divided them in half in order to recalibrate for exaggeration and deception. The West, however, was a different matter. The evil capitalists had these things called corporations, and these corporations had a fiduciary responsibility to be honest with their shareholders. An amazing amount of data was public information. Every time Abel ran the numbers he came away with the same conclusion. They were getting their asses handed to them by the West, and they were about to collapse under the weight of their lies and economic inefficiencies. The empirical economic signs were right there for anyone who opened their eyes. The data on its own should have been enough, but Abel saw something else that was equally alarming.

The communist dictators stayed in power by using two tools. The first was intimidation. Through a network of secret police, phone taps, and informants the populace lived under constant fear that if they said anything critical of the government they would be snatched from their beds in the middle of the night and disappear forever. The other tool was not physical in the painful sense, but rather mind-numbing. It was the state-controlled media. The dull thrum of propaganda that George Orwell himself had predicted so eerily in his monumental novel
1984
was churned out day after day on state-run TV and radio and in the newspapers. Abel saw the rise of the information technology age for what it was and knew the German Democratic Republic was about to lose its monopoly on the news and thus on people’s thoughts. A full year before the wall came down, unification had become a moot point for the young spy.

More than a decade and a half later, Abel got that same feeling when he visited Saudi Arabia. Change was afoot, and there was no stopping it. It wasn’t whether it would happen or not, it was a matter of when. The hugely uneven distribution of wealth itself was forcing the country toward a boiling point. Add to that the supercharged religious component and Abel was willing to bet his life that Saudi Arabia was headed for serious upheaval.

The worldwide economic implications of such an event were staggering. Change for most people was stressful, but for Abel, it presented opportunity. He’d already made millions, but at forty-seven he had grander plans still, and large multinational corporations, international banks, investment houses, commodities firms, and even a few governments were listening to him this time. They were all paying him adequately for his services, but that wasn’t enough for a man like Abel. Like a true German he believed one must always strive for efficiency and perfection in order to obtain complete self-realization. He’d built into all of his consulting contracts large bonuses that were contingent on his global predictions coming to pass. Some of those contracts were due to expire in the coming year, and Abel didn’t like the idea of being right, but late. The revolution was going to take place. It was inevitable. He might as well profit from it.

Abel stopped in front of Abdullah Telecommunications and stared up at the benign, monolithic six-story building. As someone who grew up in Leipzig, a city famous for its Renaissance architecture, Abel couldn’t have been more unimpressed. As much as the former spy tried to embrace the Saudi culture, its architecture was one thing that as far as he was concerned had no redeeming value whatsoever.

After checking with the man behind the large block of stone that fronted for a reception desk, Abel was told politely to wait. No more than thirty seconds later a very anxious man exited an elevator and walked stiffly and quickly across the lobby. The man extended his hand, and in English presented himself as one of Abdullah Telecommunications’ senior vice presidents.

Knowing how Arab businesses worked, Abel was unimpressed with the title. A company like this was likely to have dozens if not hundreds of senior vice presidents—almost all of them related somehow to the main man, Saeed Ahmed Abdullah. They all collected sizable checks, maintained generous offices, and with the exception of a handful of Abdullah’s most talented relatives, stayed out of the way of the Western consultants who ran the company’s day-to-day operations. Abel and his escort took the elevator to the top floor, where Abel was walked through three separate sets of gold-plated doors. He was reverently deposited in a room that oozed Arab masculinity.

The mahogany-paneled walls were covered with the heads of exotic animals. In the center of the room, no more than ten feet away, a spotted leopard was staring him down with his glass eyes. The beast was mounted in a permanent state of agitation, which was conveyed through a snarl that fully exposed the deceased animal’s jagged teeth. A large oil painting of a desert landscape hung above the granite mantelpiece of a fireplace that Abel assumed was never used. The entire room was intended to convey virility and strength. That was obvious. How far Abel should read into all of this he was not sure. Some of these Arab men used such decorations as a way to make their position in the pecking order crystal clear, while others did nothing more than pay an overpriced French interior decorator to do what he’d done for some other member of the royal family. They were not big on original thought or content.

A door at the far end of the room opened. Abel turned to see an older man dressed in traditional fashion come striding in. There was a look of tension on his face. Abel met him halfway, by the sneering feline.

“I am Saeed Ahmed Abdullah.” The right hand was extended.

Abel was not surprised to hear the man speak English. It was the language of business in the Kingdom. “I am Erich Abel.” The German took Saeed’s hand. “Prince Muhammad asked me to come see you. He tells me the two of you are very dear old friends.”

“We have known each other since the age of nine.” Saeed gestured for his guest to sit. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Coffee would be fine, please.” Abel sat on one of the long couches.

Saeed pressed a button on the nearby phone, rattled off instructions in Arabic, and then sat on a different couch. Almost immediately, a service cart was wheeled into the room by two Indonesian men in crisp white jackets. They served coffee and left small plates of delicious-looking pastries in front of each man, then vanished as silently as they’d entered.

“Prince Muhammad has been a very good friend to me.” Saeed took a sip of coffee. “I think he has been treated unfairly by his brother the king.”

Abel immediately thought the man a bit reckless for offering such a frank opinion to a stranger. Always cautious he replied, “I have great respect for Prince Muhammad.”

Saeed reached for a pastry and then decided against it. “Did he explain to you my tragedy?”

It was obvious to Abel that his host was very anxious. “No, he merely told me that you were a dear friend, and he would consider it a favor if I would see you.”

Saeed clasped his hands together and looked up at the painting of the landscape.

Abel took a sip of his coffee and then set it down. “Mr. Abdullah, let me be blunt. I am not a squeamish man. I doubt that you could shock me. Tell me why you seek my services, and I’m sure we’ll be able to come to an agreement.”

Saeed looked the German in the eyes and said, “I want a man killed.”

Abel nodded casually, signaling that the request did not surprise him. “And who is this man that you would like eliminated?” he asked as he reached for his coffee.

“He is an American.”

Abel took a sip of the rich coffee as his interest increased. “Continue.”

“He works for their government.”

The plot thickens,
Abel thought to himself. “His name?”