Keys to the Kingdom

For Aine, Bobbie and Sean

CHAPTER 1

Baylor University Medical Centre, Houston, Texas

The only noises in the room were the whirr of the machine that kept the old man on the bed alive and the metronomic beep of the heart monitor.

A man sat on the right side of the bed. He hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d entered the room three hours earlier. He felt no need to read a magazine, procure a cup of coffee or even visit the toilet. In his younger days he had lain motionless in the Vietnamese jungle for four days while mosquitos and leeches had feasted on his blood.  He was an incongruous feature of the room principally because he was attired in a floral Hawaiian shirt, chinos and open toed sandals.  The shirt billowed around his massive girth and hid the fact that his ample belly hung over his belt line. He stared at the old man on the bed. Jack Linkletter was eighty-five years old and had been given up by the doctors. The rapidly dividing cells all over his body were destroying him from the inside. The battle was almost over and the enemy was about to win. The man in the chair looked at the emaciated body. He was reminded of a picture of a fossil of one of the first humans that had been found in East Africa. It was identified as a woman and they had given her a name but he couldn’t recall what it was. All he remembered about the picture was that the body looked like a leather bag that had folded in on itself. The man lying on the bed was the same dark brown colour as the fossilised woman. It bespoke a life that had been spent in the outdoors. Also, like the fossil, the dark brown skin hung loosely on the skeletal frame. Linkletter’s chest rose and fell with the rhythm of the machine supplying him with air. Each intake of breath filled the brown skin with air while each exhale deflated it.

The man in the chair watched the shallow breathing of the old man dispassionately. He had seen death in so many of its manifestations that viewing the last hours of an eighty-five year old who had led a full life didn’t even appear on his radar. He saw the old man’s eyelids flutter like the first faint beats of a butterfly’s wings as it emerged from its pupa stage.

The old man’s head turned slowly and the gradually opening eyes fell on the man sitting in the chair.

‘You made it,’ the old man’s voice was a faint croak.

‘It’s what I do,’ the man in the chair replied without moving.

‘You made the connection?’ the old man asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Can he do it?’ the voice was barely discernable.

‘He says he can,’ the man in the chair replied.  ‘For the price,’ he added quickly.

The old man croaked a laugh like the sound of two rocks being rubbed against each other. ‘Like money matters,’ he said.

‘It isn’t just the money for him,’ the man in the chair said. ‘He has his own reasons for wanting it done.’

Again the croaking laugh. ‘Open the drawer,’ the old man nodded his head towards the table beside his bed.

The man in the chair moved for the first time. His movements were smooth and lithe for such a big man. He opened the drawer and removed a plastic sleeve that contained a white sheet of paper. He flipped open the sleeve and looked at the paper.

‘As agreed,’ the man on the bed croaked.

The paper in the big man’s hand confirmed a transfer of $30 million to a numbered account in a bank in the Cayman Islands. He returned the paper to the plastic sleeve and retook his seat.

‘Cool,’ he said simply as he retook his seat.

‘They tell me that you always come through,’ the old man said his voice now a thin whisper.

‘They told you the truth,’ he crushed the plastic sleeve and stuffed it into his pocket. ‘Would you like to tell me why you want this done?’

‘My son was in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald on 9/11 looking into some financing for our company,’ the man on the bed spoke with difficulty. ‘He phoned to tell me he loved me before he was incinerated.’ He paused and swallowed.

The man in the chair sat impassively.

‘My grandson was killed in Afghanistan by a road side IED,’ he sucked in a breath. ‘They were the reason I built up the ranch,’ the last words were spoken through a wheeze.

A nurse entered the room and looked sternly at the man in the chair who ignored her.

The old man on the bed held out a bony heavily tanned hand towards the man on the chair. ‘Promise me you’ll see it through.’

The man on the chair thought for a moment. He was not an emotional man and when he took the old man hand it was simply to cement a business relationship. ‘If it can be done I’ll see it through.’

There was no strength in the old man’s grip and his hand fell back on the bed. His eyelids began to flutter, he took one big breath and closed his eyes.

The nurse motioned for the man in the floral shirt to leave the room.

He stood up and without casting a backward glance he left the room. He descended to the lobby resembling a five star hotel more than a hospital. He looked out through the glass doors at the blazing sunlight, removed a pair of Ray Bans from his pocket and put them on. As he exited the hospital a wave of Gulf Coast humidity hit him. He pulled a cell phone from the pocket of his chinos. He used the speed dial and waited until the phone on the other end was answered. ‘It’s a go,’ he said simply.

As soon as the man with the Hawaiian shirt left the old man’s room a woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform entered and without looking at the patient went immediately to the telephone standing on the table to the side of the bed. She lifted the base of the telephone and deftly opened the bottom of the base. She slid her fingers into the opening and removed a small metallic device that she slipped into her pocket. She reattached the bottom of the base and replaced the phone in its original position. She turned and left the room without noticing that the old man had opened his eyes and had watched her through the whole operation.

The man sitting in the Chevy Equinox parked in the hospital parking lot folded up the listening equipment as the man in the Hawaiian shirt exited the hospital and made his way towards the parking lot. The file of the conversation in the hospital room had already been sent to Langley.  He finished a cold cup of coffee, crushed the cardboard carton and tossed it on the floor beside the Styrofoam container with the remnants of his double cheeseburger. He watched as the man in the Hawaiian shirt opened the door of his hire car. He switched on the Chevy and prepared to follow.

Placencia, Belize

The tall suntanned man sitting on the veranda of the villa facing the ocean in Placencia in Southern Belize poured himself a shot of Jameson and opened a bottle of Belikin Premium beer. He tossed the Jameson back and followed it with a sip of beer. The sun played on his lithe brown body and the Caribbean lay directly in front of him with blue waters that were as calm as a millpond.  He closed his eyes. The phone call meant that he would soon have to leave the idyll that he had created. His eyes remained closed as he ran through the elements of the plan he had conceived. A lot of people were about to die because of him. They would simply be added to the list of all those that he had already sent to their Maker. He opened his eyes and watched as a group of children played in the edge of the surf. He moved his eyes to the left and looked at his housekeeper and live-in lover. She was half his age and two of the children playing in the surf belonged to her but not to him. Thankfully he had never produced an heir. He had already signed over the villa to her and her children and made provision for them. They were the lucky ones who would never want because of him.

She rose from the sunbed and crossed to where he sat, bent and kissed him on the lips while running her fingers through his steel grey hair.

‘I leave in two days,’ he said simply.

She pouted and pulled him up from his chair. ‘So soon,’ she said as she led him through the open door of the villa.

CHAPTER 2

Riyadh

Arthur St. John Worley detested downtown Riyadh with a vengeance. He hated Riyadh principally because he loved the rest of the Arab world so much. In Cairo you knew that you were in a city with a history going back thousands of years. Baghdad and Damascus were centres of Arab culture in the Middle Ages and Beirut was one of the jewels of the Arab world’s crown. But Riyadh contained nothing other than a very large number of modern concrete monstrosities where the Saudis either made or spent money. He walked along the Al Malek Abdul Aziz Road away from the area housing most of the Saudi ministries. Discount the heat and this part of the city could have been anywhere in the world. It didn’t even smell Arabic. Where was the smell of exotic spices mixed with the acrid smell of the tanner’s yard and donkey shit? Riyadh was an antiseptic capital. When Abdul Aziz stuck his lance into the door of the mud walled fort in 1908, the future capital of Saudi Arabia was a mud hutted oasis in the centre of the Nejdi desert. The old mud fort that Abdul Aziz has stormed still existed as some kind of testament of the legitimacy of the Al Saud family to rule over the Kingdom forever. Around it were the souks dating from the 1930’s and 1940’s but these were gradually being torn down and replaced with modern air-conditioned shopping malls. The rest was pure concrete and glass. Worley looked aimlessly into the shop windows as he walked towards his car parked on the other side of the Main Square beside the Clock Tower. He had spent a fruitless two hours waiting in the office of a senior functionary of the Interior Ministry for a meeting that hadn’t materialized. He was not bothered either by the wait or the fact that the pre-arranged meeting hadn’t taken place. He’d spent more than twenty years wandering around the Arab world and he knew better than to expect New York or London precision. What did piss him off was that his Ambassador expected a report within the next two days on the content of the discussions that took place the previous week at the Saudi Consultative Council. Worley wondered why the Ambassador bothered. The Council was a sham. However, that scion of the Foreign Office, Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador, had his knickers in a twist until he knew what weighty topics the rubber stamp Council discussed. That meant Worley had to trawl his usual contacts for tit bits of information. His recent non-meeting was the latest in a line of Saudi no-shows necessitating the invention of a fictitious report to keep his political master happy. It was evening and the concrete jungle was beginning to radiate the heat it had taken in during the day. Worley finally left the Interior Ministry building when he heard the muzzhedin’s call to prayer blasting over the loudspeakers.  He reached the Main Square just as the faithful were exiting from the Great Mosque. Worley watched the parade as it moved at a leisurely pace across his path. Most of the faces were Arabic but here and there was a face of either darker or lighter hue indicating a foreigner. Worley had always been an inveterate people watcher and perhaps that had been at the core of his interest in intelligence work. He liked to watch how people acted and then attempt to divine in their actions the inner workings of their minds. He ran his eyes over the crowd streaming across the square and came to a sudden stop. He blinked as he followed the progress of a tall man dressed in a white
thobe
and
guthra
walking away from him. The face was clean-shaven and angular. A hawk nose stuck out like a beacon from the tanned skin. The face in the crowd hurrying away from the mosque struck Worley in the heart as though it were a knife. His heart pounded in his chest and the blood rushed to his brain. The head of the man was receding quickly and had almost reached the corner of the square. Worley strode forward mingling with the crowd. As the man reached the edge of the square, his face turned towards Worley for a second but it was enough to confirm what he had already seen. It was impossible. The man he thought he recognised was dead and every intelligence agency had confirmed it. He had just seen a ghost leaving the Great Mosque in Riyadh. He couldn’t believe it possible but he was sure that he had just seen the features of Patrick Gallagher, the IRA terrorist and the man responsible for putting a bullet in the head of his younger brother in a boggy field outside the village of Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland.

Patrick Gallagher’s sixth sense was working overtime. His blue eyes had quickly scanned the square in front of the mosque but there was no perceived threat. The visit to the mosque had been a necessity to establish his credentials but it would be a damn expensive visit if it managed to expose him. After all he was dead. He had been murdered and buried on a hillside in Helmand Province fifteen years previously. He reached the edge of the square and cast a glance over his shoulder. White clad Saudi males fluttered around the square like a flock of recently released white doves. He slipped quickly into the narrow streets of the souk and cut quickly along the dark narrow alley. He turned left at the first junction and right at the second. He arrived at the house he had been looking for and knocked three times on the stout wooden door set into the mud wall. The door was opened immediately and he slipped inside.

‘Salaam Alaikum,’ an old man with a bent back greeted him and quickly closed the door behind him.

‘Alaikum Salaam,’ Gallagher said. He found himself standing in a courtyard that was typical of the Arab house. The surrounding buildings, none containing windows, shaded the courtyard. 

The old man pushed open a door at the side of the courtyard and then melted away.

‘Salaam Alaikum,’ a man with the short beard wearing a white
thobe
rose and bowed in Gallagher’s direction. ‘In the name of Allah the most bountiful I am honoured to welcome you to my house.’

‘Alaikum Salaam,’ Gallagher returned the salute and bowed to his host. ‘May Allah smile on you and your family for the hospitality you have offered.’

‘I am Naim Abdallah, please enter my humble home, Abu Ma’aath.’  The latter was Gallagher’s nom de guerre Abu Ma’aath - ‘the Father of Death’ ‘May Allah bless your house,’ Gallagher said taking the place at his host’s left hand. The place on the host’s right was being preserved for the arrival of the Big Cheese.

As soon as Gallagher was seated a woman covered entirely in a black abaya entered the room and served him tea. Her black garment disguised the woman’s shape and a stiff leather mask obscured every feature of her face except her eyes. Not a word was spoken while she filled the cups before Gallagher and his host with mint tea. Both men ignored her.

‘My master will arrive shortly.’ Abdallah said as soon as the woman departed. ‘You have been to the mosque?’

‘Yes,’ Gallagher replied. ‘It is a wonderful thing to give praise to Allah.’ Gallagher didn’t give two damns about any God. He heard a knock on the outer door and Abdallah immediately jumped to his feet. Gallagher pushed himself up slowly from the Persian carpet on which he sat. He waited nervously for the new arrival. After a few seconds, the door of the room opened and a tall Arab entered. A hooked nose preceded his thin mahogany face. He was over six feet tall and carried himself erect with the bearing of royalty. He wore a perfectly white
thobe
and a checked red and white guthra sat on his head. Gallagher’s glance went beyond the new arrival. Two men entered directly behind him. Their long scraggy beards were in direct contrast to the neat beard of their master. They wore rough cloth cloaks instead of the traditional Saudi dress. Gallagher looked into their eyes and saw that either would cut his throat without hesitation. If things went wrong, maybe it would be he who would not get out alive.

Abdallah ushered his honoured guest to the place beside him. The other men sat only when the new arrival was seated.  Immediately all the men had taken their places, the woman re-entered and poured tea.

‘This is Prince Kareem al Aziz,’ Abdallah said introducing the man sitting to his right.

Prince Kareem ignored the introduction and picked up his teacup with his right hand. ‘May Allah bless this house,’ he said in Arabic letting the words roll off his tongue while staring into Gallagher’s face. ‘So you are the great Abu Ma’aath,’ the Prince’s English had an American twang. ‘I’ve heard many things about you. You are a very famous man.’ The dark eyes embedded in the copra coloured face bore suspiciously into Gallagher’s face. ‘I am told that you are a Muslim and loyal only to Allah. I am also told that you have come to Saudi Arabia to do Allah’s work and for that you are welcome. I hope that I have been told the truth because the wrath of Allah is swift for those who transgress him.’ He glanced theatrically at his two companions.

‘May you have long life, Highness,’ Gallagher replied in Arabic putting on his most obsequious manner. ‘I too have heard many things concerning you.’ On the flight from Belize to Europe he had devoured the dossier prepared for him on his future partner-in-crime. Kareem al Aziz was the forty-third and last son of Abdul Aziz. He wasn’t exactly the runt of the litter but in the Al Saud family lineage was everything and Kareem was right at the end of the food chain. Like many other of the minor princes he was frustrated by the fact that a small coterie of Abdul Aziz’s sons, the so-called Saudieri seven, held complete control of the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia was in no way a democracy. The Royal Family currently numbered some 4000 Princes and 30,000 other souls and that was a hungry beast to feed. The minor princes, like Kareem, were bought off with stipends from the Saudi state or by allowing them to claim ‘commissions’ on the vast amounts of money flowing through the Saudi economic system. Kareem wanted power and if that meant that his brother Princes would have to go under the chopper then so be it. There was a strain of butchery in the Al Sauds that hadn’t entirely disappeared when they had stuffed Abdul Aziz into a hole in the ground. The Prince shuffled on his cushion and Gallagher caught a glimpse of his left hand. The fingers were stiff and wrapped in the shape of a claw. No sooner had the hand appeared than it disappeared into the folds of Kareem’s
thobe
. Gallagher had heard about the deformities typifying the members of the Al Saud family. Several generations of intermarriage had produced a series of consanguineous deformities. Kareem’s hand was simply the tip of the iceberg. He wondered what maggots might be floating around in the Prince’s brain cells.

Prince Kareem put down his teacup carefully and looked pointedly at Abdallah. ‘They have told me that you wish to help us change the way my country is governed. You have come highly recommended but I am wondering why we should trust you.’

‘In the name of Allah the most merciful,’ Gallagher began remaining totally cool. ‘I converted to Islam twenty-five years ago and since that date I have devoted myself to doing the work of God. I have fought the Israelis in Lebanon and throughout the world so that this boil on the behind of Islam could be lanced. And while I have been trying to remove one boil a second and more dangerous sore has been festering. The winds of revisionism have been blowing at the very heart of Islam. Those entrusted with the protection of the Holy Places have been straying from their sacred duty. They have given themselves over to fornication and the search for material wealth. They have forgotten their heritage and care little for the joy of following the ways of the Prophet. This running sore cannot be permitted to infect the body of Islam. Those responsible for betraying the trust placed in them by Allah must pay for their treachery with their lives.’ Gallagher looked at the men in the room. The brightness of their eyes told him that he had struck the right cord. His features remained suitably fervent. ‘They must be expurgated. They must be excised from the body of Islam so that purity can be restored.’ He looked directly at Prince Kareem. ‘They must be replaced by those who owe their very being to Allah and who will work only to restore Him to His rightful place in the minds of the people. Only under the leadership of such a servant of Allah will Saudi Arabia take its rightful place as the leader of the Arab nation.’ Gallagher watched as Kareem and the bodyguards digested his words. His fate was about to be decided.

‘You have spoken well and you have spoken the truth,’ Prince Kareem said. ‘Our leaders, my illustrious brothers and cousins, have become fat and lazy. They have neglected their duty to Islam.  They think only of their palaces and seek the company of loose women. They are mistaken in the thought that they have infected all the family. In my youth they infected me also. They sent me to study in California where I fornicated with loose women and polluted my body with alcohol and drugs. I have betrayed Allah once but it will never happen again. The desire to do God’s will burns like a fire within my breast. Corruption must be cut out branch and root. Together we will rid my country of the pestilence afflicting it.’

Gallagher looked into the Prince’s burning eyes and saw that he was more than halfway there. ‘May you live long, my Prince.’ He glanced across at the two scraggy beards. ‘Between us we must put the maximum pressure on the family and the government. When I give the word, your brothers will begin a campaign of terror against the infidel and against those who have accepted the ways of the West. You already have a cadre within the Army?’

‘Yes,’ the Prince said quickly. ‘And they are all willing to die to serve their God.’

‘Good,’ Gallagher said. ‘We will create many martyrs. You must alert your followers. The centres of Riyadh, Jeddah and Taif will be turned into areas of fear.’

‘We will be ready when you call on us,’ the Prince said hastily. He nodded at the two silent ‘beards’ seated at the other side of the room.  ‘We will make the cities run red with blood.  And you, Abu Ma’aath, what do you wish for yourself?’