Keys to the Kingdom (31 page)

The interior of the Great Mosque was deserted as Worley rushed through the front door. He didn’t bother to take off his shoes but looked through the gloom for the way leading to the minarets. The stairs to the nearest minaret were to his right. The second minaret was at the other end of the building. Worley assumed that Gallagher would take the closest position. He ran for the stairs and threw himself upwards taking the concrete steps two at a time.

Gallagher was in his final position. He had released the safety on the launcher and was ready to fire the high explosive missile at the Palace. The limousines were drawn up along Al Ferayan Street. He would give the Al Sauds a few minutes to get organised and say hello to one another. Then he would blow the living shit out of them.

Worley panted as he raced up the stairs. His mind was numbed by the fact that he might in the next few moments come face to face with the man he had hated for more years than he cared to remember. He was aware that Gallagher might have already fired the fatal shot but he pushed himself to climb even quicker. He burst through the door and the top of the stairs and found himself on a parapet holding two large sun-bleached wooden boxes housing loudspeakers. His eyes stung from the strong light and the sweat streaming off his forehead. He walked out onto the parapet and turned to his left in the direction of the Al Hokm.

Gallagher was raising the RPG to his shoulder when he caught sight of the movement to his right. He swivelled holding the handles of the RPG in his hands. Worley stood on the edge of the parapet looking directly at him. ‘You’re a persistent wee fucker, aren’t you,’ Gallagher smiled his most charming smile. He didn’t need Worley right now but aside from putting a high explosive missile through him he didn’t appear to have too many options. He cast a glance at the pistol that Worley held in his hand.

‘Put the launcher down,’ Worley said aware of the quiver in his voice. He held the pistol directly in front of him clutched in both hands. His hands shook slightly and he hoped that Gallagher hadn’t notice. He had seen what an RPG could do during one of his weapons courses. It was evident that Gallagher didn’t just want the King. A lot of people were going to die if the rocket hit home. He noticed the second rocket sitting at Gallagher’s feet.

‘And who’s going to make me, pretty boy,’ Gallagher said the smile disappearing from his face. Worley looked like he was about to piss his pants but down the years Gallagher had developed a healthy respect for men holding a gun. The older Worley wasn’t a patch on the younger version, he thought. If Robert Worley had ever got the drop on him, he’d be dead. This one was made of different stuff and that just might be his way out ‘Put that fucking pea shooter down and fuck off away before you shoot yourself by mistake.’

Worley looked at the gun in his hand for the first time. It was a Beretta 1910, the oldest model made by the famous Italian manufacturer. Not exactly his choice of weapon but beggars could not be choosers. He wondered idly where Rosinski had come by such an antique. ‘You murdering bastard,’ Worley said putting as much steel in his voice as he could muster. ‘You killed my brother.’

‘It was a war, you asshole. So it was him or me. And that time it was him. Nothing personal.’

‘Even in war you don’t hide the body. My brother is lying in some stinking bog hole in South Armagh.’

In the bowels of the Al Hokm, Abbas was waiting for the sound of the rocket striking but he heard nothing. His finger was poised directly above the control unit. What if something happened to Abu Ma’aath? The Royal Family was already assembled in the majlis. He only had to press the button and they would all die. He should press the button now.

Gallagher swivelled the launcher in Worley’s direction. He remembered the conversation at Kareem’s. He should have let Nasrullah kill the little bastard but there was no use crying over spilt milk. Abbas was in the Al Hokm waiting for the signal to blow the place to smithereens.

‘Can you even imagine what this rocket would do to you if I pulled this trigger?’ Gallagher said coolly. He watched a rivulet of sweat leave Worley’s forehead and slither down his cheek. ‘They’d have to look for miles around even to find a trace of you. Think about it. Your body would be scattered to the four winds. Are you willing to be torn to bits to save the Al Sauds? That crowd of shits aren’t worth dying for.’

‘It isn’t about the Al Sauds,’ Worley said.

‘It surely isn’t about your brother, is it?’ Gallagher said. ‘That was a thousand years ago and a continent away. Grow up, man. He was a stupid little shite who thought that he’d been sent to Northern Ireland to rub Paddy’s nose in it. He would have pulled the trigger on me in a second. It was kill or be killed. It’s all ancient history now. It’s ironic,’ Gallagher smiled. ‘You’re here to avenge your brother and I’m here to avenge my wife and my unborn child. Maybe we’re not so different after all.’

‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Worley said sweat blinding his eyes. ‘All I want is justice for my brother.’ It was all about revenge, he thought. And guilt. He had felt so many years of guilt about Robert’s death. And now it appeared that guilt and revenge was Gallagher’s motivation. He was wrong, they were totally different people but driven by the same need to avenge. Was it really his place to seek justice for Robert’s death? Faced with his White Whale his resolve was beginning to weaken. But what about the Princes gathered in the room at the al-Hokm. His finger felt stiff on the trigger. He knew he was thinking too much. His former SAS instructor’s voice screamed in his mind, ‘kill the bastard, pull the fucking trigger, man’.

Gallagher didn’t have the time to indulge in a psychology session. He had already made up his mind that Worley didn’t have the balls to shoot him. The man was a fucking desk jockey. He’d kept Abbas and the Al Sauds waiting long enough. He would deal with Worley later.

‘I’m just about to dispense a little justice myself,’ Gallagher turned and pointed the rocket launcher at the room where the
majlis
was being held. ‘Have it your own way.  Every man has to do what he must. It’s the human condition.’

‘Don’t,’ Worley said.

Abbas had waited long enough. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ he shouted and pressed the button on the control unit.

The explosion of the Al-Hokm took place almost instantaneously with Gallagher firing the RPG into the room where the
majlis
was taking place and Worley firing the Beretta. The air around the Al Hokm seemed to vanish and the centre of Riyadh became a mass of flying concrete and torn bodies.

CHAPTER 42

Placencia, Belize

Frank Terman sat in the chair on the veranda of Patrick Gallagher’s house. He sipped a rum punch and watched the calm waters of the Caribbean lap onto the beach a hundred metres below him. He’d given up watching the television and reading the newspapers after seeing and reading the bullshit they circulated after the Saudi business. For them it had been the Arab Spring, the Palestinians, Al-Qaeda, internal opposition forces – you paid your money and you took your choice. Only he and a few others knew that it had all started with a dying old man in a hospital in Houston. And he wasn’t about to raise his head above the parapet. He had survived Paris but he had no doubt that if he started to blab, his life wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel. He smiled. It was like the Kennedy business. He liked having the inside track but he also liked staying alive. Anybody with experience of the Middle East would have been able to foretell the results of Gallagher’s efforts. Within days of the explosion in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia had descended into chaos. The country had fragmented into three separate states. The Shias had ripped off the Eastern Province but not before fifty percent of the oil wells had been set on fire and a couple of thousand people had been butchered. The Iranians had immediately moved to support their Shia brothers and a treaty of friendship between the Eastern Province and Iran ensured that the new fundamentalist regime was secure. The merchant class had annexed the Holy Cities and had asked King Hussein of Jordan to provide his son as a ruler. So it was, that the Hashimites, the legitimate heirs of the Prophet came to claim their birthright and rule over the holiest cities in Islam. The few Al Sauds that survived the holocaust ripped off the Nejd and set up an independent Kingdom there. In fact, it turned out pretty good for everybody except the women. They had been put back several hundred years. The oilmen had to leave Dhahran. Saudi was hot and Siberia was cold, but they both had seemingly unlimited resources of hydrocarbons. The revolution in Saudi had set the local oil industry back twenty years. The price of petrol in the United States had reached the almost socially unacceptable level of $10 a gallon, less than half of what the average European paid. American scientists had gone back to research abandoned in the late 1970s to invent a pill that could be dropped into a gallon of water and turn it into a gallon of petrol. The only time a trick like that had really worked had been at the marriage feast of Canna. Sometimes Terman wondered what had happened to Patrick. None of the media outlets had mentioned him and very few foreigners had died in the attack on the Al-Hokm. Maybe Patrick had survived and would return some day to reclaim his house. Until then, Terman would stay where he was and would keep his head down.  

Garden City, New York

Mary Jo Rosinski walked across the green campus of Adelphi University. She was aware that she still walked with a limp but a lot less aware than she had been one year previously. A lot had happened to her since the day the male members of the Al Saud family had been assassinated en bloc. She’d been flown out of Saudi the day after the explosion and had spent the next month in hospital recovering. Her hearing had returned pretty quickly but her leg had been broken and required an operation to fix. As soon as she had been ambulatory, she had been moved to the ‘Farm’ for a de-briefing. Nobody wanted to believe that she had been right on top of the assassination attempt but that nobody had been willing to listen to her. Some stupid assholes spent two weeks trying to convince her that her story was the product of hallucinations while she had been in hospital. She heard on the grapevine that Alan Simpson had been forced to retire. Chuck Gilman had survived the cut. She had no idea how but she reckoned that it might have had something to do with him being the Grand Brouhaha in some male club or other. There was no other convenient explanation. When she was finally in one piece, she tried to make contact with Worley but drew a blank everywhere she turned. Worley had disappeared off the face of the earth. Kind of convenient for the British Secret Service. Nobody wanted to hear about Patrick Joseph Gallagher. The guy had been dead for years: buried in some sand dune in Afghanistan. The real culprit it turned out was a Palestinian suicide bomber. She wondered whether Princess Nadia was spinning in her grave. Rosinski’s lawyer had picked up the check from the ‘Company’ and she had become a rich woman. She’d tried the Caymans but had grown tired of them. There was only so much you could take of sun, sea and what some of her occasional companions called sex. Then she’d received the offer she couldn’t refuse. A college friend had been appointed Chairperson in the Political Studies Department of Adelphi University in Garden City. She’d visited the campus and instantly fallen in love with it and a cute English professor her friend had introduced her to. She jumped at the job of teaching young American how to deal with strange cultures. She sucked in a breath of clear air as she strode across the campus to the clapboard house where she and Mike had set up home. The thought of having dinner with him before settling down for an evening with a good movie filled her with more joy than she had ever known. Her life was pretty good. The small clapboard house she had bought with what remained of her ill-gotten gains stood nestled in a stand of elms. The trees had a timelessness that reminded her of the deserts of Arabia. The sand and scrub had existed long before the Al Sauds came to power and they would still be there when the Al Sauds would be a distant memory. She looked at the majestic trees in her garden and realised that they would be there long after she had been forgotten. The voice inside her had been whispering to her for some months and threw in another comment that it was time to produce a young Rosinski. The biological clock was ticking like mad.

‘That smell is out of this world,’ she said as she entered the kitchen.

‘Penne a l’arrabiata to begin,’ Mike put his huge arms around her and hugged her close. He was a bear of a man but his touch was the gentlest Rosinski had known since her father had held her. ‘Then lamb with garlic and rosemary. There’s a bottle of Pinot Noir open on the table.’

She nestled into his great chest. ‘I could really learn to love you.’ She presented her lips for kissing and he accepted the invitation.

‘I bet you say that to all the guys,’ he laughed as the kiss broke down naturally.

‘I do not,’ she punched him playfully in the side. The time is right, Rosinski, the little voice inside her said emphatically.

‘Then what’s that?’ he nodded towards a small package standing on the table. ‘It arrived by messenger half an hour ago.’

‘Let’s find out,’ she said disengaging herself from his arms. ‘Get back to your cooking man while I see who’s been thinking of me.’

She picked up the six square inch box and shook it.

‘For God’s sake open it,’ he was watching her from the cooker.

Rosinski smiled. He really was jealous. She tore the outer wrapper off the box. Inside was an envelope and a strong cardboard container. She laid the envelope on the table and held the container in her hand.

‘Why don’t you open the envelope first?’ Mike stirred the pasta sauce with as much nonchalance as he could muster.

‘Because I’m a woman,’ she said carefully opening the cardboard container. The layers of stiff paper came away to reveal the
Iznik
mug she had admired in Worley’s apartment in Riyadh.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s about two years of an English professor’s salary,’ she said continuing to admire the beautifully decorated and rare mug. She laid it gently on the table and picked up the envelope. The paper inside was embossed and felt expensive to the touch. The heading read ‘Finton, Brach and Jones, Solicitors’. She read the single paragraph slowly.

‘Our client, Arthur St. John Worley, has recently passed away. In accordance with his wishes we are forwarding the enclosed mug. Our client particularly wants you to have it.’

Al Hudayn, North Yemen

The man sitting at the front of the Madrassa intoned the words of the Holy Koran. The children sat in rows in front of him repeating the words as best they could. None was old enough to recognise that their teacher was not a native Arabic speaker. Had they had that skill, they would have known that he spoke with an accent that was more Lebanese than Yemeni. The teacher sat awkwardly and changed his position often as though he was constantly in pain. His long white beard covered most of his thin and haggard face. Apart from the prominent cheekbones, the most striking feature of that face was the pair of dead eyes that stared constantly at the book set before him. The teacher was revered in their village. Their parents touched their breasts in respect when the teacher shuffled by. When the children asked why the teacher merited such respect, they were told that the teacher had once been a great warrior and that his name had been Abu Ma’aath.

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Author’s note

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