Dead or Alive (28 page)

After a five-hour journey by car, he boarded a plane in Caracas for the flight to Dallas and points beyond. Shasif Hadi’s carry-on bag held a laptop that had been duly checked at the gate to make sure it was real. Also checked were the nine CD-ROMs in the bag with various games for him to play on the hop across the ocean. Except for one. Even if that one had been examined, it would have been shown to contain gibberish, robustly encrypted data written in C++ computer code that made no sense at all, but unless the TSA had programmers or hackers on staff at the checkpoints, there would be no way of distinguishing it from a regular computer game. He’d been told nothing of the contents and had merely been given a meeting place in Los Angeles to hand it over to someone he would know only by the exchange of carefully scripted recognition phrases.

Once that was done, for appearances’ sake he’d spend a few days in California, then fly to Toronto, and from there back to his semipermanent home base to await another assignment. He was the perfect courier. He knew nothing of genuine value and could therefore betray nothing of value.

He desperately wanted to be more directly involved with the cause, and he’d made this desire known to his Paris contact. He’d been loyal; he was capable and ready to lay down his life if asked. Admittedly, he’d had only rudimentary military training, but there had to be more to this war than pulling a trigger, didn’t there? Hadi felt a pang of guilt. If Allah, in all his wisdom, saw fit to ask more of him, then he would gladly oblige. Similarly, if his destiny was to play only this small role, he should accept that as well. Whatever Allah’s wish, he would obey.

He proceeded through the checkpoint with little trouble beyond the supplemental search most Arab-looking men got nowadays, then made his way to the gate. Twenty minutes later he was aboard the aircraft and belted in.

His total time in transit would be only twelve hours, and that included his automobile ride to his airport of origin. And so he sat in the aft-most first-class seat on the right side of the airbus airliner, playing his mindless shoot-’em-up game and thinking about a movie on the mini-screen provided for free with the cost of the ticket. But he was close to a personal record on the game, and he passed on the movie for the moment. He found that a glass of wine helped his score. Must have relaxed him just enough to steady his hands on the laptop’s trackpad . . .

C
HIEF OF STAFF Wesley McMullen hurried down the hall, got the nod from the secretary, then pushed through the door and into the Oval Office. He was late, not quite by a minute, but the President was a stickler for timeliness. The group had already assembled, with Kealty in the wingback chair at the head of the coffee table and Ann Reynolds and Scott Kilborn seated on the couches on either side. McMullen took the chair opposite the President.

“Car wouldn’t start this morning, Wes?” Kealty joked. The smile seemed genuine enough, but McMullen knew his boss well enough to recognize the warning.

“My apologies, Mr. President.” As he was every day except Sunday, McMullen had been in the office since five a.m. Sundays he worked a half day, from nine until three. Such was life in the Kealty administration and the rarefied atmosphere of the executive branch.

It was a Tuesday, the day of Kealty’s biweekly meeting with Director of Central Intelligence Scott Kilborn. Unlike the previous President, Kealty wasn’t hands-on when it came to intelligence, trusting Kilborn to keep him up to speed.

Kilborn, a supporter of Kealty’s since the President’s days in the Senate, had left his post as chairman of the political sciences department at Harvard to serve as Kealty’s foreign affairs adviser before being nominated for the slot at Langley. Kilborn was competent enough, McMullen knew, but the DCI was overcompensating for the previous administration’s foreign policy platform, which both he and Kealty had proclaimed wrong-headed and counterproductive. McMullen agreed, at least marginally, but Kilborn had swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, pulling back from some of the CIA’s overseas operational initiatives that had finally started bearing fruit, something that McMullen knew had infuriated the Clandestine Service. Case officers who had been living overseas, away from their families, for six to eight months at a time and risking their lives where a white face was as good as a bull’s-eye had recently been told, “Thanks for all your hard work, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction.” The rumor was that in the next few months Langley was going to be seeing an exodus of retirement-and near-retirement-age case officers putting in their papers. If so, it would set the Clandestine Service back nearly a decade.

Worse still, with Kealty’s tacit approval, Kilborn often sidestepped into the state department’s turf and poached issues that lay in that arguably gray area between diplomacy and intelligence.

As for Ann Reynolds, Kealty’s National Security Adviser, she, too, was smart enough but painfully inexperienced. Plucked by Kealty from the House of Representatives during her first term, Reynolds had little background in security matters, save a junior membership on the House Intelligence Committee. She was, Kealty had told McMullen at the time of the decision, a “demographic necessity.” He had badly mauled his challenger for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Governor Claire Raines, winning the party nod but losing a good chunk of his female base in the process. If he had any hopes of a second term, he had to win it back.

Reynolds was well spoken and had a good academic mind, of that there was no question, but after nearly a year on the job, she was still far, far down the wrong side of the learning curve and realizing, McMullen suspected, that the real world and the world of textbooks had little in common.

And what about you, Wes, old buddy?
he thought. A black man, under thirty, a Yale-graduated lawyer with half a dozen years of quasigovernmental think-tank service under his belt. He had no doubt the media and gossip mavens said the same thing about him: He was an affirmative-action choice and in way over his head, which was partially true, at least the last part. He was in over his head but learning to swim quickly. The problem was, the better his backstroke got, the dirtier the pool seemed. Kealty was a decent enough man, but he was too concerned with the big picture—about his “vision” for the country and its place in the world—and less focused on the “how” of making it happen. Worse still, he was so worried about reversing the course his predecessor had set that he, too, like Kilborn, often sent the pendulum swinging dangerously in the other direction, too lenient in his stand against enemies and too forgiving of allies who failed to follow through on their commitments. The economy was warming again, though, and with it the President’s approval ratings were rising, and Kealty took this as a blanket indicator that God was in his heaven and all was well with the world at large.

And why are you staying,
he asked himself for the umpteenth time,
now that you’ve seen the emperor’s new clothes?
He didn’t have a ready answer to the question, which worried him.

“Okay, Scott, what’s happening in the world today?” Kealty said, starting the meeting.

“Iraq,” Kilborn began. “Centcom has submitted a final drawdown plan for our forces. Thirty percent over the first one hundred twenty days, then ten percent each sixty-day period to follow until we reach nominal force status.”

Kealty nodded thoughtfully. “And the Iraqi Security Forces?” The training and outfitting of the new Iraqi Army had progressed in fits and starts over the past eight months, leading to a debate in Congress about when, if ever, the ISF would be ready to take over completely. The problem wasn’t skill but rather unit cohesion. For the most part the ISF soldiers absorbed the training well enough, but like most Arab nations, Iraq was little better than a collection of sects and extended families, both secular and religious alike. The concept of nationalism came in a distant second to tribe loyalty or Shia/Sunni affiliation. For a time Centcom had toyed with the idea of organizing units and commands based on such familial and religious alignments, but the plan was quickly abandoned as the analysts realized the United States would be doing nothing more than creating well-armed gangs who were already predisposed to internecine warfare. The question was: Could rival clan or sect members stand side by side and fight for the larger good of their country?

Time, McMullen decided, would be the judge of that.

The fact that Kilborn was giving Kealty this drawdown news rather than the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Stephen Netters, told McMullen that the President had already made up his mind about the drawdown in Iraq. At last week’s Thursday meeting, Netters had argued against the ambitious pace of the withdrawal, citing the universally dismal reports on the ISF’s readiness from the Army’s brigade commanders. The ISF was certainly not ready now, and they certainly wouldn’t be ready in three months, when the first U.S. forces were scheduled for withdrawal.

For his part, Kealty had to get it done, McMullen knew, having centered much of his campaign on troop reduction. Whether Netters was right or not was irrelevant to Kealty, who ordered his Chief to get it done and make it work.

“There’s debate between brigade and division commanders about the readiness figures, but the data seem to support our plan. Four months isn’t much time, but the initial drawdown will be gradated over three months, so it’ll be a full seven months until the ISF will really start to feel any pressure.”

Crap,
McMullen thought.

“Good, good,” Kealty said. “Ann, get the draft from Scott and run it through the NSC. If they don’t find any problems, we’ll move forward. Next, Scott.”

“Brazil. There are indications their expansion plan for their refinery infrastructure is more ambitious than we’d projected.”

“Which means?” Kealty asked.

Reynolds answered. “Their Tupi fields are richer than they either thought or were letting on.”

At least on the surface, the ever-growing scope of the Santos Basin’s potential had been as much a surprise to Brazil as it had been to the United States. There’d been not a whisper of it until Petrobras’s press release, and that was not the kind of news you could keep secret for long.

“Sons of bitches,” Kealty growled. Shortly after he won the general election and even before he had taken the oath, Kealty had ordered his presumptive Secretary of State to reach out to the Brazilian government. Along with getting the United States out of Iraq, a reduction in gas prices had been a cornerstone of Kealty’s campaign. The oil importation deal with Brazil, set to go into effect at the end of the month, would go a long way to fulfilling that promise. The downside was that the Brazilian government, friendly as it was now, had in its hands a lever of considerable strength. The question that no one seemed to be able to answer at this point was whether Brasília would remain benevolent or go the way of Saudi Arabia—one hand outstretched in friendship, the other clutching a dagger.

“We don’t know one way or another whether there’s intent there, Mr. President,” McMullen said, trying to head Kealty off at the pass. “When their expansion plans changed or to what degree they will change is still a question mark.” McMullen looked hard at Kilborn, hoping he’d take the cue, which he did.

The DCI said, “That’s true, Mr. President.”

“Wes, when we’re done here, I want to talk to Ambassador Dewitt.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What else?”

“Iran. We’re still working a few sources, but there are indications Tehran’s going to be ramping up its nuclear program again.”

Ah, shit,
McMullen thought. Among Kealty’s many campaign promises had been to resume direct diplomacy with Iran. Bringing Iran into the wider community of nations and working on areas of mutual interest, Kealty had proclaimed, was the best way to convince Tehran to halt its nuclear ambitions. And until now, it seemed to have been working.

“Define ‘ramping up.’”

“Centrifuges, refinement plants, some back and forth with Moscow.”

“Sons of bitches. What in God’s name are they up to?” This question Kealty directed at his National Security Adviser.

“Hard to say, Mr. President,” Reynolds replied.

McMullen thought,
Translation: I have no fucking idea.

“Then make it easy,” Kealty barked. “Get on the goddamned phone with State and get me some answers.” Kealty stood up, calling the meeting to an end. “That’s all. Wes, Scott, stay for a moment.”

Once Reynolds was gone, Kealty strolled to his desk and sat down with a sigh. “What do we know about this Ryan thing?”

“The Secret Service is still working the case,” DCI Kilborn replied. “But it looks like there was only one shooter—no ID on him yet, but dental work says he’s Jordanian. The gun came from a stolen shipment of Egyptian military sidearms—it matched two found after the Marseille bombing last month.”