State of Attack (31 page)

He had drifted after that, although he’d been a keen reader and had had an inquiring mind. He had explored the various religious traditions, including those from the East. But it’d been Islam that he had been drawn to, the self-discipline and importance of family, at first, which contrasted with his whole experience of living in the West.

He hadn’t joined a mosque, not because there hadn’t been that many in the state in which he’d lived, but rather because he’d felt uncomfortable about going into what he’d perceived as being an alien environment. An outsider, then, even among the people of faith.

He’d begun to teach himself Arabic so that he could study the Holy Qur’an without turning to a translation, and after he’d gotten a job as an insurance salesman, he’d earned enough money to rent an apartment and had taken private lessons from a foreign student at Columbia University in New York, who’d been from Saudi Arabia. That had changed his life.

Now, as he came upon the house where another Saudi man was, a sick and dying man, he knew that Allah had brought about this human symmetry. For here his life would change again, for eternity. He knew, too, that Allah had brought the American, Tom Dupree, here, so that his men might smite him when it was time.

He’d ordered that Dupree be taken into Lebanon. The Jews didn’t go into Lebanon. Not any more. Yes, he thought, Allah had been good to him. Allah had allowed him to smite all of his enemies since he’d given his life to him.

The Amir met him at the bottom of the staircase that led to the isolation room where the Saudi was dying. The Amir was still being held aloft by his bodyguards, as he’d been the first time he’d seen him.

“I’m ready,” Ibrahim said.

“And Allah is ready to receive you, brother.”

He followed the Amir up the steps, watched again as the old man used his digit to secure entry. He knew a row of empty glass phials lay on a yellow cloth in the lead-lined safe in the corner of the room. The virus was spread via blood, urine, sweat and spittle. There was an incubation period of ten days. Ten days before he would wreak havoc. Others would come here over the next few days. The Silent Jihad has begun, he thought.

There was no mystery to this. He had been like many thousands of Muslims who’d given their lives willingly. Some had died in the hope of killing a single enemy. Now, he knew, he could kill countless numbers.

The only other difference was that he was white.

The sun was white too and at ten o’clock when Ibrahim and two bodyguards emerged from the house. He’d chosen to inject the Saudi’s blood into his own bloodstream rather than use any other method. But he knew that when he got to the US he only had to brush a sweaty hand on someone, or mix his spittle with food or drink to start an epidemic.

He heard the first explosions about a mile away, when the car they were travelling in was a hundred yards or so from the house. The second explosion was much closer. Agitated, he turned and saw the billow of black smoke above street where the house stood, or had stood, he thought.

Three assault helicopters came out of the sun and hovered above the dissipating smoke ball. Ibrahim ordered the driver to stop. He watched helpless as the Israeli Special Forces fast-roped down, knowing they would surround the building and, despite a firefight, secure it, and gain entry and search every inch.

He didn’t blame Allah. He didn’t blame himself. He blamed the Jews. Now he was the only vessel, and he would survive, no matter what.

Chapter 87

Crane was sitting in the secured conference room at Langley. The director had her leg up at twenty-five degrees, her right foot resting on a pulled-out drawer.

“Tough day, ma’am?”

“Sciatica. But that’s just between us. Feels like a hot poker is stuck in my leg. Did it working out at the gym. Ironic, huh. Felt something pop. It’s called the piriformis muscle,” she said, pointing above her thigh. “A trauma, the physio says, that inflames the nerve. Got me doing Pilates. Popping more pills than a goddamned junkie. You say that to anyone, Dan, I’ll send you to Kazakhstan. You got that?”

Crane nodded. “Upside, I’m no longer your biggest pain in the butt.”

“Don’t ride your chair, it makes me nervous and tell me something nice.”

Crane said that the Israelis had raided a house in Gaza, well, the remnants of it, anyway. Beneath the rubble they pulled out a lead safe with phials inside. Among the dead was a man tested as being a carrier of an unknown virus, which had strains of MERS and SERS.

“Ibrahim?”

“Could be they got him. But it’ll take days, maybe weeks before they can test what DNA samples they got from the corpses against the hair found at the mall, even if they come up with a match. As yet the word is that there were no obvious Caucasians among the dead or wounded.”

“So it’s not over?” she asked.

“No, it’s not over, ma’am.”

“How can we be sure that nobody has been contaminated by it?”

“We can’t. Not one hundred per cent. And Ibrahim went back to Gaza for a reason. Now he either got there before the Israelis went in or he didn’t.”

“I want your people to keep looking for him.”

Crane pinched his jowls. “I’d like to leave Dave Perkins in charge here for a couple days.”

“I don’t need to ask if this is important to you, Dan. But is it the right time?”

“It’s connected, ma’am. And Dave’s a good man.”

She arched her fingers. “And if I say no?”

Crane sighed. “Then, ma’am, I will have to do something I’d regret. I’ll resign.”

Crane saw her looking at him. They knew each other too well for her to spout off about doing his duty at a time of emergency. And he knew that his job could be done just as well by Dave Perkins. Sitting behind a desk and sending young men and women to kill and die wasn’t exactly brain surgery, he thought.

“I want you back at Langley by the end of the week tops,” she said.

Crane nodded slightly. “Thank you.”

“Anything you’re not telling me?”

“The late General Dupont’s son, Tom Dupree, the special agent who found the Secretary of State, has gone missing in Lebanon.” Crane had received an update from the Mossad. Both GPS signals were showing that he’d been taken over the northern Israeli border.

“I don’t want to know any more, Dan. But don’t do anything – well, you know what I mean.”

Crane stood up, turned and walked towards the door.

“Dan.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said without turning back around.

“So you’re going to Kazakhstan after all.”

He left without saying a word, knowing that the director had just covered her traumatized and ambitious ass, but he didn’t blame her.

Halfway along the corridor to an elevator he took out his cellphone. “Jet. Now. And get me Gabriel and his team.”

The men he’d sent to pick up the general in Ankara had been in Gaza for the past week and were the toughest and, it had to said, the most ruthless in Department B.

When he was asked his destination, he said, “Lebanon.”

He’d vowed never to go back, and the CIA had been fastidious to ensure that he didn’t even have to control missions there from his office. He knew he might just find a mangled corpse there. But he had to believe Tom was still alive, just as the general had believed he was still alive all those years ago.

If there was a hell on earth, he thought as he stepped into the elevator, he was going to it.

Chapter 88

Lebanon, officially in Western Asia, was known to be both a land of great beauty and a land of great tragedy. It was bordered in the east by the shores of the Mediterranean, and to the south by Israel, a country it had been invaded by on more than one occasion, and had had a full-blown war against in 2006. That conflict followed the Lebanese civil war, principally between the Christian groups, the PLO and Muslim militias, which had begun in 1975. It had been a brutal and merciless conflict that had lasted sixteen years, causing over one hundred and fifty thousand deaths.

Today, rather than Israel, it was its northern and western borders that concerned Lebanon most, where the schism in the Islamic faith between Sunnis and Shias had created mayhem in Syria and Iraq respectively. Incursions from Sunni Islamists across these borders had already begun, and everyone believed they were only going to intensify. Added to which Lebanon was on the verge of imploding, too, due to the internal conflicting political and religious groups that made up its population: Sunni al-Qaeda, Shia Hezbollah, the Maronite Christian militias, and the war-hardened Alawites.

Tripoli, the northern coastal city, the second largest city behind the capital, Beirut, had already suffered badly. The fifty-thousand strong Shia-based Alawite community was packed tight on a hilltop called Jabal Muhsin, and was surrounded by ten times as many Sunnis. The gold-coloured apartment blocks were peppered with bullet holes and damaged by mortar fire and RPGs. Random sniper fire was rampant from both sides. On the frontlines, they lived within a few yards of one another, the stony streets wet with both seeping sewerage and the blood of the martyrs.

Besides the main combatants, hundreds of splinter groups made up of local militias had appeared, protecting small patches of ground. Young men dressed in jeans, undershirts and short-sleeved shirts carried AK-47s openly and drove around in rusted cars. The Lebanese army in their armoured trucks did what they could to quell the violence, but, in truth, they were as ineffectual as the Iraqi army had been in defending the northern cities against the Islamic State group.

In one of the cramped backstreets encircling Jabal Muhsin, a Sunni fighter walked under a concrete doorway into a courtyard, the crumbling pillars of the ancient colonnade enwrapped in poison ivy. He was carrying a brown-paper package that contained a pair of sandals, which, he’d been told, had been taken from a foreign spy and needed to be examined immediately.

Shaded from the butter-yellow sun by the now corrugated roof, dotted with the dense nests of swifts, he reached the end of the corridor. He stopped outside the wooden door that led to a small room used as a workshop and knocked. After being told to enter, he saw the grey-haired man, his narrow shoulders hunched over a wooden worktable, which was strewn with all manner of instruments and appliances. He had a small pair of tweezers in his hand and was examining a radio with a magnifying glass.

“They are a priority,” the fighter said, placing the package down on the worktable.

The old man placed down his tweezers and magnifying glass without complaint and proceeded to undo the package, which was tied with string in a bow. He took out both sandals and, pushing the paper aside, immediately checked the heels.

After just a few minutes of manipulation and fiddling around with a scalpel, he slipped open the detachable heel. He prized the sensor out with the scalpel gently and let it drop into his free palm. The fighter saw that the object was the size and shape of a watch battery. The old man lifted it up with the tweezers and turned on a desk lamp, so that he could see it clearly.

“GPS?” the fighter said.

The old man nodded.

“Are you sure?”

“Eighty per cent.”

“Be one hundred per cent,” the fighter said.

The old man nodded and placed it back onto the worktable and used the tweezers and scalpel to open it. He examined the two pieces in the desk lamp and then did so again, using his magnifying glass.

He placed the second piece back down, together with the glass. “One hundred per cent,” he said.

“Now put it back together and put it back into the sandal.”

A few minutes later and halfway down the dusty corridor, the fighter knew he had to head up the hill to a narrow side street where a barricade marked the demarcation line between his people and his enemies. Beyond the barricade the snipers hid behind sandbags in what remained of the concrete apartment block.

Just yesterday, he knew, a boy of nine had been shot in the head after he’d gone to retrieve a soccer ball. He would toss the sandals over the wall from the safety of one of the buildings that abutted it. Those who would be tracking the foreign spy would believe he had been taken to Jabal Mohsen, and they would suffer the same fate as the boy. Even those dogs have a use, he thought.

He hadn’t seen the spy, whose nationality and identity had been guarded jealously by his Palestinian brothers. But when he’d collected the sandals, he’d heard that the spy was being taken to Beirut. A man he hadn’t recognized, who was said to be the group of Palestinians’ leader, had told his men to keep the spy fresh until a great jihadist act had occurred, something whispered to be the Silent Jihad. He didn’t know what that meant. But then the leader had ordered that they send photos of the spy’s decapitated head to the US Secretary of State. He didn’t know why, but the thought of it appealed to him. When the other Palestinians had asked their leader if they’d meet him there, he’d said that he would meet them in Paradise.

Chapter 89

Crane had used his contacts with the Mossad to agree safe passage from northern Israel across the border with Lebanon, together with Gabriel’s team of CIA paramilitary operatives, and they had entered the outskirts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, a few minutes ago.

The city had changed a lot since the civil war and had undergone major architectural and infrastructure reconstruction. Located on a peninsula, it had been inhabited since the fifteenth century BC, and was one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the Middle East. Once, decades ago, it had been the playground of wealthy Arabs and Europeans, but no more.

A sea breeze ran through the few remaining palm trees, but the blacked-out windows in the two adapted minivans supplied by the Mossad were closed, the glass impenetrable to all but a projectile from an anti-material rifle.

Gabriel and the other paramilitaries, who looked recognizably Arab, were upfront, so that they could be seen through the clear windshields. The minivans had Beirut plates and kept at least four cars apart to avoid any hint of suspicion. But the drivers weren’t averse to using their horns, which would be expected. The whole team, including Crane, spoke fluent Arabic, and were well-versed in the customs and culture of the Greater Middle East.