Keys to the Kingdom (20 page)

‘For Christ’s sake, Peter, sit down. You’re giving me a headache and it’s much too early in the day.’ Sir Richard was twelve months away from retirement and the thought of spending any of that period dealing with a political crisis in a country of vital importance to the United Kingdom filled him with dread. He had already secured a very prestigious fellowship at Oxford. The College he had selected had a particularly impressive wine cellar and he looked forward to writing his memoirs in peace. He turned towards Worley. ‘What do you think, Arthur?’

‘There seems to be an acceleration in events, Ambassador,’ Worley’s eyes followed Ellis as he made his way to a chair beside the Ambassador’s desk. As soon as he was seated Ellis crossed his legs and immediately began to bounce his right leg on his left knee. ‘However, we know that the Saudi security forces are very well organised and appear to have infiltrated most of the dissident groups. I haven’t had a chance to examine the intelligence on either the Mishuri assassination or the Dhahran bombing but I would be very surprised if the Saudis don’t already have a very good idea who might have been involved. I don’t want to downplay the gravity of the situation but I would be very surprised if anything of a major nature was in the wind.’ He thought about the atmosphere the previous evening at the airport, and Gallagher. However, there was no point in creating a panic and confirming Burfield’s opinion that he was about to fall off a mental cliff.  Sir Richard and Ellis made regular reports to London. One negative comment of his performance and Burfield would be forced to pull the plug on him.  That would end his chances of locating Gallagher. It was better to play the part of the ultra-cautious intelligence agent. ‘I intend to get together with some of my Saudi sources later today. Then I can review what’s been happening and I should be in a better position to give both you and London an opinion in a couple of days. I know that our people are monitoring the situation here very closely.’

‘There you are, Peter,’ the Ambassador sat forward. ‘Our intelligence people aren’t panicking.’

‘Heaven forbid,’ Ellis said. ‘They have a habit of making the most awful blunders but they steadfastly refuse to panic.’

‘I don’t want us to be seen overreacting on this one,’ Sir Richard continued. ‘As I’m sure you are both aware we have very substantial business connections with the Saudi government. I don’t want anything to jeopardise those connections. Do I make myself clear, Arthur.’

Worley nodded.

‘Good,” Sir Richard tilted his chair back. “Find out what you can about what’s going on locally. If you think that the situation warrants it I can try to have a word with the King. A bit of over-the-top activity from the National Guard might be called for. We can cross that bridge when we come to it but let’s keep the option open.’

Why not send for a gunboat while you’re at it, Worley thought to himself. If the flame ever caught in Saudi, it would take a lot more than the National Guard or a bit of gunboat diplomacy to put an end to it.

‘Thank you, Arthur,’ the Ambassador said in his dismissal tone.

Worley left the room and headed for his apartment, breakfast and another snooze in that order.

‘Worley’s a sound fellow,’ Sir Richard said as soon as Worley had left his office. ‘Practically brought up in this country. Speaks the local versions of Arabic like a native. His local sources are impeccable.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Ellis said climbing out of the chair and moving towards the door. ‘I don’t think we should have too much confidence in our intelligence colleagues, Ambassador. I understand that our political masters are thinking of removing them altogether from the diplomatic side of things. Personally I would give a hearty welcome to such an eventuality. No need for this cloak and dagger business in the modern world. I think that a word in the King’s ear would not go amiss. Meanwhile, I will busy myself with finding out who might be Mishuri’s replacement at the Oil Ministry. We should get our oar in there as quickly as possible. There must be an Anglophile somewhere in the woodwork.’

‘Sound fellow, Peter,’ the Ambassador said to the retreating figure of Ellis.

As soon as Ellis had left the room, Sir Richard opened the locked drawer at the side of his desk and took out a leather bound book. He quickly scribbled a note to himself to have a word with the Permanent Secretary regarding Ellis. It was time to consider a more elevated position and the ambassadorial post in Yemen was becoming vacant.

The Times

Bombing of Military Base Leads to Saudi Crackdown

The bombing of the Saudi air base at Dhahran in which twenty cadets, including some members of the Royal Family, lost their lives has led to the inevitable crackdown on Saudi dissidents. Within the Kingdom, Saudi Security Forces have been rounding up known agitators. The Saudi National Guard has been deployed right across the country and the Ministry of Defence has announced increased security at all military bases. Early indications are that the bombing was the work of a local dissident group.

It was reported yesterday that the King and the Consultative Council have been monitoring the situation closely. Saudi watchers expect the crackdown to continue and to be widened to include all groups who are antagonistic to the regime.

In London, the Saudi Ambassador yesterday called on the British Government to deport Dr Al-Masari, a leading Saudi dissident and the Head of the Party for Islamic Renewal.

The Saudi government has called on its friends in the West to stand by it in this difficult period.

CHAPTER 28

Riyadh

The hair on the neck of Abbas bin Naseem stood on end as he entered the majlis of the Al Hokm Palace. The room was sixty feet by sixty feet, the classic size of the King’s audience room. Abbas bristled as he looked around the room. He had visited it to clean it many times during the past few weeks but today was different. The room was one of the most sumptuous that he had ever seen. The floor was covered with hand woven carpets and soft cushions lined the walls. There was no furniture. This was not a normal room. This was where the King met with his family and his people to dispense justice. Before arriving in Riyadh, he had know little of the Al Sauds except that their deaths would further the Palestinian cause. Now he hated them because they lived in such splendour while his people lived in squalor. He pulled up his shirt and removed the canvas girdle that circled his waist. The five kilos of Semtex were located in pouches around the surface of the girdle. He removed the explosive and moulded it gently with his fingers. This was the first moment of his new life. This was what he had been born for. During his life, he had known only Israeli occupation. He had been raised on the West Bank as a violent fundamentalist. At kindergarten, he had read with awe the slogans on the wall such as ‘the children are the soldiers of tomorrow’. He was not uneducated. He had attended university but had rejected a future as a slave to the Israelis by choosing to become a martyr. The squalor and hopelessness of life in the stinking back alleys of Gaza was familiar to him. Long ago he had come to the conclusion that the Palestinian cause was a great one and that great causes required killing. If the death of the Al Saud furthered that cause, then so be it. The Israelis and their Western Allies would never push for the two state solution. Therefore they would have to fight for what was rightfully theirs – a Palestine that would stretch from the River Jordan to the sea. Moulding the explosive as he had been shown at the Karun Camp, he moved to the top of the room. He removed the cushion where the King would sit and carefully packed the moulded explosive into the plastic tubing he had laid the previous week. Within the week the
majlis
would be completely ringed with explosives. The detonators would be set and the room would be primed. When the detonator was activated, the room would be turned into an inferno and the building would be completely destroyed. He knew that there were other martyrs in other palaces around the city who were going through the same ritual. They too had prayed to Allah that they would be chosen to enter Paradise but something deep in Abbas’ being told him that he would be the chosen one. Nasrullah had assured him that he would be placed in their first choice location for the death of the Al Sauds. A tingle of excitement went through him as he realised that he was so close to attaining his destiny. He bent once again to his work.

Dammam, Saudi Arabia

Gallagher sat in the passenger seat of the Landrover driving along the edge of the refinery at Ras Tanura. The car had been adapted to resemble the thousands owned by Aramco, the Saudi Arabian national oil company. Nasrullah sat at the wheel of the vehicle as they circled the refinery for the second time. The result of their reconnaissance was not good. The refinery was normally guarded by Aramco security personnel but to-day there was a heavy presence from the Saudi National Guard, an elite force specifically established to protect the Royal Family and under the direct control of the Minister of Defence who just happened to be the Crown Prince and heir to the throne.  Young men in National Guard fatigues were posted at the main gate and around the perimeter fence. Gallagher surmised that the increased security was a result of the bomb placed at the Military Airport building at Dhahran. He had anticipated such actions by some of the fringe opposition groups. In fact, he had counted on them to add to the pressure he was bringing to bear on the Saudi establishment but in this case the truck bomb and the consequent increase in security was putting at risk a vital part of his operation. Since his arrival back in Saudi, he had been planning the attack on the Ras Tanura facility. The armaments had arrived from Afghanistan and the explosives from Ireland. The process of distributing the explosives was well under way. Although they were entering the most important phase of the operation, Gallagher felt very calm. Everything was going completely to plan. Nielsen had proved to be better than his word. The Riyal was devaluing by the minute and it appeared that the Royal Family had no intention of repatriating their fortunes just to relieve the plight of the masses. Even Terman had played the part that Gallagher had mapped out for him. The Saudis were being well and truly established as the ‘bad guys’ so that when the plan went down public sympathy would be with the assassins and not the assassinated. Nasrullah and his ‘Afghasis’ had spread the rumour in the bazaar that the Royal Family was about to flee. These rumours had forced the King to issue an edict to the Royals to stay put. Gallagher needed the King to keep the targets on station for him. The apprehension he had felt after the fiasco in Antwerp had melted like the snows in spring. For more than a minute back there in the warehouse, he had the feeling that this was going to be one of those fucked up operations. But he had been wrong. They were back on track and more importantly on time. His plan depended on creating chaos within Saudi but it had to be a chaos that he more or less controlled. If events went too fast then not even an edict from the King would keep the Princes in the country. They passed the main gate of the refinery for the second time, the Landrover obviously passing muster since none of the guards gave them a second look. They carried in their pockets genuine Aramco ID cards provided by a member of the Ikhwan who worked in Aramco’s personnel department. If Aramco security became suspicious of them, they could easily explain their interest in the installations. Kareem’s help was proving as invaluable as Gallagher had anticipated. He was smoothing their path and he would ultimately prove to be the most effective Judas Iscariot since the original. But that was another day’s work. First, he was going to cripple the Saudi oil industry by taking out the town of Ras Tanura lock, stock and barrel. The town was home to the largest export refinery in the Kingdom processing more than half a million barrels of oil per day. The loading facility was the largest in the Kingdom and the tank farm with a capacity of three hundred million barrels of oil was by far the largest in Saudi Arabia. This part of Gallagher’s plan would strike a blow directly at the economic heart of the Kingdom. Ras Tanura itself was a relatively small town located on the Eastern Coast fifty miles north of the oil centre of Dhahran. Gallagher had spent two days moving around the facility working out how to do the most damage in a single coordinated attack. The centre of the facility was a series of huge circular oil tanks built along the edge of the coast and lying directly across from the loading area. A series of piled structures extended into the bay of Ras Tanura to service the tankers that came in a constant stream to take on their cargoes of Saudi crude. Through the centre of the latticed structures ran the pipes that carried the crude from the tank farm to the ships. Interspersed with the pipes were the pumps and electrical systems needed to make the whole operation work smoothly. The Landrover skirted the edge of the refinery. Gallagher looked at the faces of the men guarding the perimeter and those moving around in the blue overalls of Aramco. It meant nothing to him that within twenty-four hours many of these people would be dead or have their lives shattered by horrific injuries. They were simply pawns in the larger game he was playing with the Royal Family. He signalled to Nasrullah to head into town. They had seen enough, prepared enough. Everything was in place. All they had to do was to kill the few hours until darkness.

Riyadh

Worley sat outside the office of his contact at the Saudi Ministry of the Interior. He had been waiting for over an hour for an audience and he was beginning to feel that he might have to wait a lot longer. After a breakfast of fruit and coffee, a short snooze and a shower he had begun to feel human. During breakfast, he had reviewed most of the intelligence material collected locally since his trip to London. Burfield was right to be worried. Although the oligarchy ruled the country, the bazaar was the centre of life. And it was obvious that the bazaar was worried. Rumours were a part of Arab life and the bazaar had been rife with every rumour possible in the past weeks. The King was dead or was about to abdicate in favour of a younger relative. The Royal Family had chartered several 747s kept at a military airport outside Riyadh in preparation for an enforced departure. Any or all of these rumours could have been true. However, Worley could not see the Al Sauds cutting and running that easily. They had a stranglehold on the military and security apparatus of the country and there would be a lot of blood in the streets before the 747s would be boarded. He took from his pocket the sheet of paper he had been scribbling on during breakfast. In the centre he had drawn a circle and had written ‘opposition group’ in it. Surrounding the circle he had drawn another series of circles with ‘Gallagher’, ‘Mishuri’, ‘Dhahran Bomb’ and ‘Riyal’ in them. He had linked each of the circles to the other. Then he had tried to look for some logic in the series of events. What if an opposition group had hired Gallagher to do their dirty work for them? He could very easily have been responsible for the assassination of Mishuri and the Dhahran bomb. The assassination bore all the characteristics of a professional job. The gun had been discarded in classic fashion. The assassin knew in advance that nothing could be traced to him. But none of the reports from the airport at Dhahran mentioned a Westerner. Unless of course Gallagher had been heavily disguised. The bomb at the airport was another matter. The guards at the gate were unequivocal that the men who had planted the bomb had been young and Arab. Gallagher could perhaps have recruited them or they could have been members of a subversive group. He tried to remember the details, released by the Saudi’s, of the bomb. Although those details were sketchy, it had certainly been a crude affair using fertiliser as the base. Gallagher was an expert bomber back in the late eighties. It was inconceivable that he would have forgotten so much of his trade. Conclusion, Gallagher had nothing to do with either the Mishuri assassination or the Dhahran bombing. Where did that leave Worley’s theory?

Finally, a male secretary put his head around the door. ‘His Excellency will see you now.‘

Mohammed Al Tawil stood and shook Worley’s hand as he entered his sumptuous office. Worley had known Al Tawil for more than five years and had watched carefully his rise within the hierarchy of the Ministry of the Interior. After returning from the University of California at Berkeley, Mohammed had gone American, greeting guests with ‘How you doin’, man?’ and shortening his first name to ‘Mo’. It had even been rumoured that the young Al Tawil had indulged freely in the drug culture. Despite the rumours, Worley’s predecessor had spotted him as a ‘comer’ and had recommended full recruitment as a source. London had vetoed this suggestion because it was assumed that the CIA had already beaten them to the punch. London, in the shape of Burfield, had opted to support the young man’s career and to ingratiate themselves with him through the use of freebies. When Al Tawil had been twenty-eight and the rising star of the Ministry of the Interior, a fellowship had been organised for him at Oxford. At the age of thirty-two he had reached the last but two rungs on the ladder.

‘May Allah bless you,’ Al Tawil said formally as he indicated a chair to Worley.

‘May you have long life,’ Worley responded. The ‘How you doin’?’ days were obviously very far behind Al Tawil.

Al Tawil sat behind his desk and Worley moved to a position in front of him.

‘How can I help you, Arthur?’ Al Tawil was well aware of Worley’s position and role at the Embassy.

Worley was always a trifle uncomfortable in Al Tawil’s company. Al Tawil’s father was a full Saudi but his mother had been a Syrian beauty and the son had inherited her fine features. Al Tawil’s skin was not as dark as most Saudis and his snow-white
thobe
was the perfect backdrop for his olive skin. He often boasted to Worley about his many conquests in Berkeley. Worley had always treated Al Tawil as a source but he was sure that the Saudi never thought of himself as such.

‘Sir Richard is rather worried by the recent events,’ Worley began. ‘The portents are not very positive, the assassination of Prince Mishuri, the bomb at Dhahran, the run on the currency.’

Al Tawil smiled. ‘Come on, Arthur. You of all people should have a deep understanding of this country. Events such as these are like grains of sand in the desert. They occur and then they blow away to be replaced by other events. You tell me. How many bombs have there been in your country, but one never speaks of the portents not being positive? How many times has your country devalued its currency but no official from the Saudi Embassy in London has ever visited your Foreign Secretary to complain that the value of Saudi holdings in the United Kingdom are seriously affected by such devaluations? We are grateful for Sir Richard’s concern but there is no need for it.’

The Secretary arrived and laid on the desk a tray bearing two small cups of brownish-red tea. He left without saying a word.

‘Tea,’ Al Tawil offered the tray to Worley.

‘Thank you,’ Worley took the cup and sipped the over-sweet liquid. ‘I will be delighted to report that you consider the recent events to be unimportant. Is the government going to do anything to steady the Riyal on the international market?’