The Alexandria Connection (20 page)

‘Are there any targets at present?’

‘There may be some problems in Montana.’ Crowley gave Ruger a broad outline of the Davis candidature. ‘I’m confident that Davis will run, but we’ve had to buy off some of the governor’s indiscretions.’

Ruger shrugged and listened again while Crowley gave him the bare details on O’Connor and Weizman, and the search for the Euclid Papyrus in Alexandria. If Ruger wondered why the CEO of the world’s biggest energy multinational might have an interest in an ancient artifact, he didn’t show it.

‘At the moment,’ Crowley continued, ‘surveillance in Egypt is being provided through the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, courtesy of one Doctor Omar Aboud, but we may need to eliminate him,’ he said, as if he were talking about a sports competition. ‘He’s not to be trusted. He doesn’t know it, but we’ve discovered he’s providing intelligence to an art dealer in Venice.’ Crowley left Ruger in no doubt that he too, could expect his activities to be monitored. ‘We’ll deal with Aboud in due course, but a more immediate task is the transfer of some highly sensitive cargo from our nuclear laboratories in California. You’ll be briefed on the details a little later today.’

Rachel picked up the phone on Crowley’s massive cedar desk and seconds later handed it to her boss. ‘Nancy Callahan, Governor Davis’s PA,’ she said softly.

‘Ms Callahan, good morning, Sheldon Crowley here. Thank you . . . Governor Davis, good to hear your voice. I trust you’re well.’

‘Never fitter, Sheldon. To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

‘I’ve been watching from a distance, Carter, and you’re doing one helluva job up there, and as you’ve got an election coming up soon, there are a few people down here who would like to help. I realise that it’s short notice, but there’s a very big donation in the offing, so if you can organise your busy schedule the week after next, I’ll send my private jet, and we’ll put you up at Ploutos Park.’

‘Well, that’s mighty neighbourly of you, Sheldon, just wait one . . .’

Crowley quietly switched to speakerphone. Carter Davis’s voice was muffled by his hand over the phone, but it came through clearly enough. ‘Nancy – what’ve we got on the week after next?’

‘Monday’s pretty clear, but Tuesday you have a bunch of meetings, including Pastor Elias Satchelby.’

‘Put them off.’

‘You’ve put Pastor Satchelby off three times already.’

‘Put him off again. Wednesday?’

‘Chamber of Commerce in the morning, the Jewish Board of Deputies in the afternoon, followed by the young high achievers’ awards.’

‘Get the deputy governor to stand in.’

‘And you’ve got the judging for Miss Montana in the evening. I’ll get the deputy governor to stand in for that as well.’

‘No, no, I’ll do that one . . . are you there, Sheldon? How about I come down Monday week and leave early on the Wednesday. I’ve got an important meeting Wednesday night I can’t afford to put off.’

‘We’ll be very pleased to see you, and I should have mentioned, Mrs Davis is most welcome to come down if she’s free.’

‘Mrs Davis doesn’t travel all that well, Sheldon, but no problem at all for me this end, and I’ll look forward to it.’

‘Excellent. I’ll get our secretaries to make the arrangements. Nice talking to you.’ Crowley handed the phone to Rachel.

Rachel rolled her eyes. ‘Nancy . . . I don’t think we’ve met, but I hope we can remedy that very soon. Now, one of EVRAN’s Gulfstream jets will be at Helena airport to pick up the governor at nine a.m. on Monday week, and I’ll email all the details through to you this morning . . . nice talking to you too.’

‘Hasn’t changed his spots. First time I’ve heard the “Miss Montana” contest described as an important meeting,’ said Rachel.

‘It will be up to you to keep him under control,’ Crowley said irritably, ‘but getting him down here is just the half of it. Unless we get those fucking evangelicals off their Christian asses and down to the ballot box, the election is wide open. Is Shipley here yet?’

‘Just arrived.’

‘Show him in.’

‘Pastor Matthias, thank you so much for coming,’ said Crowley, shaking Shipley by the hand.

Rachel winced. She too had shaken the pastor’s hand and it was like grasping a flabby, wet fish. Pale, and portly, Shipley was bordering on obese. The private jet and the Maserati were not the only tax-free perks available in the business of saving souls. The Hermit Road mega-church had a fully staffed commercial kitchen to respond to Pastor Shipley’s not inconsiderable love of gourmet food.

‘My pleasure,’ said Shipley, taking one of the office couches, ‘although I hope it’s not about this Davis candidature. We went through that last night.’

‘I’ll come to that in a moment, but first, let’s discuss your building fund. I was thinking of something along the lines of US $50 000?’

‘That’s a very generous donation, Sheldon, and one that the Lord will welcome, but only if there are no strings attached. We could not possibly consider any candidate for the White House who has divorced his wife. The Bible’s very clear about divorce,’ Shipley said, reaching into his soft attaché case and withdrawing a well-worn leather Bible.

Rachel groaned inwardly.

‘“What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate . . .” Mark 10:2.’ Shipley tapped the page for emphasis. ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery. We need to be very clear on that, Sheldon.’ He sniffed loudly.

‘I seem to remember Ronald Reagan was divorced, and you got behind him . . . Have you ever heard of the Horus Papyrus, Matthias?’ Crowley asked.

Rachel thought Shipley looked even paler than usual.

‘Errant nonsense.’

‘But nevertheless a threat to your church. Your empire is built on the authenticity of Christianity.’

‘The Egyptians were pagans.’

‘Which is the point, is it not? If the Christian religion is a mirror image of an earlier pagan religion, that’s going to raise some very serious questions among your generous followers. An Egyptian God, Horus, who was born of a virgin on 25 December with a “star in the east” with three kings heralding his arrival. Three thousand years before Christ was even heard of, this Egyptian God had twelve disciples, walked on water, raised people from the dead and turned water into wine.’

‘It’s not the first time academics have tried to draw a parallel,’ Shipley said weakly.

‘No, indeed,’ Crowley agreed. ‘But it’s more than just a parallel, Matthias. The Egyptian Book of the Dead contained the Ten Commandments, well before Moses got hold of them. And the ancient Egyptians inscribed hieroglyphics on the walls of the Temple of Luxor that depict the Annunciation. Just as the Archangel Gabriel announces the virgin birth of Christ to Mary, centuries before, the Egyptian god Thoth has already announced Horus’s virgin birth to Isis.’

Rachel observed both men closely. Crowley, she knew, thought religion was a crock of nonsense, but he’d clearly done his homework. If religion could help get his puppet in the White House, then he was going to harness it. Shipley’s pallor had turned to puce and he was struggling to control his rage. Was this pastor a man of real faith, she wondered, or was his rage generated by the threat to the foundations of his multi-million-dollar empire?

‘Until now, you’ve been able to dismiss these similarities as the ramblings of atheist academics, but now there’s proof. This is the first time an ancient document, recording the complete details of the Egyptian religion, has surfaced . . . an almost identical religion to Christianity that predates Christ by three millennia. Those Egyptian stories that finished up in your Bible were handed down by word of mouth through the mists of time,’ Crowley continued, grinding Shipley into the mud. ‘And if the Horus Papyrus is published, the whole world will also know the Egyptian god was crucified and rose from the dead after three days . . . More than a remarkable coincidence wouldn’t you say?’

‘Where is this papyrus?’ Shipley croaked.

Crowley smiled. ‘It’s safely locked away in a vault, and provided you get firmly behind the Davis campaign, that’s where it will stay.’

‘M
urray seems pretty keen on an audit of Crowley’s books,’ O’Connor observed, as he and McNamara struggled to make sense of the intelligence coming out of the NSA and what Crowley and Khan might be up to in Alexandria.

‘Apart from being easy on the eye, Murray’s a very fine analyst . . . one of the best in the NSA, but I doubt she’s spent too much time on the Hill, or in the back corridors of the White House. If we move on Crowley without rock-solid evidence, and it all turns to custard, we’ll be hung out to dry. On the other hand, if Crowley has some sort of hold over Davis, and Davis wins the White House, Crowley gets a hold over the country.’

‘You think Murray’s drawing a long bow on Crowley’s involvement?’

‘Well, let’s look at what we’ve got.’ McNamara hadn’t survived as the country’s chief spymaster without considering every angle. ‘Point one, Crowley’s an A-grade asshole, and he’s been lobbying the Hill furiously to try and get the ban on the export licenses for both the Scorpion surface-to-air and the Taipan anti-ship missiles overturned. He’d sell his grandma if he thought he could make a buck out of the deal, but until now, I haven’t seen anything to indicate he might be working with terrorists . . . I mean not even Crowley’s going to run that sort of risk for the sale of a few missiles. On the other hand, Khan I can understand . . . did you ever meet him?’

‘Once, but only briefly when I was in Islamabad a couple of years back. He struck me as shifty. Although you could say that about more than one Pakistani general.’

‘And politician . . . but we need to know why Crowley is keeping company with someone like Khan, and if there were other people in Alexandria, who were they, and why were they there? Secondly, what’s this choke point Khan’s referring to?’ McNamara flicked a switch on his desk and a large video screen came to life on the opposite wall. He keyed in a computer command and a top-secret map of the world appeared, showing the current deployments of CIA teams.

‘Now, where would you say the major choke points are in the world right now?’

O’Connor picked up a small laser pointer from the table. ‘Depends whether we’re looking at it from a Taliban or al Qaeda point of view,’ he said. ‘From a purely Taliban point of view in Afghanistan, the Khyber Pass is key, but given the firepower we’ve got out of Bagram and Creech, they’re not going to control that for more than short bursts. The best they can hope for is to ambush the re-supply convoys.’

‘Agreed, so if we look further afield, what most affects the West?’ It was one of the reasons O’Connor so much enjoyed working with McNamara. Not only did his boss protect everyone’s back and take the heat from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Hill, but like O’Connor, McNamara had that rare ability to put himself on the other side of the fence and look at things from a terrorist’s point of view.

‘Despite the fracking boom,’ said O’Connor, ‘oil’s still one of the chinks in our armour, so if you’re a terrorist, and you want to affect oil supplies on land, you hit the pipelines and the oil refineries. There are any number of those, but without a doubt, Abqaiq and Ras Tanura are the biggest and the most vulnerable choke points,’ he continued, using his laser to highlight the Saudi-owned Abqaiq oil processing facility in the eastern desert of Saudi Arabia and the associated oil port of Ras Tanura on the coast. ‘Two thirds of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports go through Abqaiq and Ras Tanura . . . about seven million barrels a day.’

‘Hard to hit, though,’ McNamara mused. ‘Al Qaeda’s had a couple of unsuccessful cracks at them, but they’re huge targets and the security’s impressive.’

‘Which on land leaves us with the Druzhba Pipeline,’ said O’Connor, highlighting the world’s longest oil pipeline, which ran from the south-east of Russia all the way through Ukraine, Hungary, Poland and Germany. ‘That carries over a million barrels of oil a day.’

‘And it’s relatively easy to hit – there’s 4000 kilometres of it – but attacking the Druzhba wouldn’t hurt us directly,’ said McNamara.

O’Connor nodded. ‘Ever since 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, al Qaeda’s main focus has been the United States . . . I think this attack’s more likely to be at sea, and there are four choke points that a determined terrorist might have a crack at, starting with the Suez Canal.’ O’Connor focused his laser pointer on the 193-kilometre-long canal that connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, allowing oil and other cargoes to be transported from Europe to Asia without having to take the much longer route around Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. ‘When it was closed in ’56, we felt it at the gas pumps, but the Suez crisis wasn’t started by some crackpot religious terrorist . . . that was Nasser boring it up Eisenhower’s ass,’ O’Connor said. In 1956, the charismatic Egyptian president had nationalised the canal after the United States and Britain withdrew funding for the Aswan Dam, bringing on a spike in oil prices and another full-blown crisis in the Middle East which went from bad to worse when the British, French and Israelis met in secret and launched an attack against Egypt without warning the United States. Eisenhower had been livid.

McNamara’s piercing blue eyes twinkled. Fiercely patriotic, he nevertheless saw the humour whenever 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue experienced discomfort. It was a subliminal payback for the amount of discomfort he’d experienced over the years in the Situation Room below the Oval Office. ‘It was worse after the ’67 Six Day War. What did they call it? The Yellow Fleet. Sixteen cargo ships stuck in the canal for eight years.’ When war had broken out between Israel and the Egyptians and other Arab countries in 1967, Nasser had scuttled cargo ships and dredges at either end of the canal, trapping for eight years the sixteen vessels that had been travelling north. Over time, they had become covered in the yellow sands of the desert, gaining the sobriquet of ‘the Yellow Fleet’.

‘It was one of the catalysts for the supertanker,’ McNamara observed. The closure of the Suez in 1956, and again between 1967 and 1975, had highlighted the vulnerability of what was, at the time, the world’s major choke point. If oil had to be transported all the way round the Cape of Good Hope, then the oil companies had to make that worthwhile, and it had led to the design of the super-tanker, massive ships that were far too big to get into any of the world’s enclosed harbours. ‘And I see that bastard Crowley’s just commissioned two more,’ said McNamara. ‘The
EVRAN
Cosmos
and the
EVRAN
Universe
: both 510 000 tonnes, four football fields long and a draught of 80 feet. They’re the biggest in the world, and too big to go through the English Channel, but they would be, wouldn’t they . . . arrogant prick.’

‘Which is why I don’t think Khan’s choke point is the Suez,’ said O’Connor. ‘In the age of the supertanker, another closure of the Suez isn’t going to hit us nearly as hard.’

‘Although it’s intriguing that Khan and Crowley appear to have met in Alexandria,’ McNamara mused. ‘But if not the Suez, where’s the strike?

‘The Straits of Malacca is another possibility.’ O’Connor focused his laser on the 800-kilometre-long stretch of water that separated the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the major shipping channel for ships moving from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans. ‘Narrows to about one and a half nautical miles, here,’ said O’Connor, ‘just south of Singapore, and carries a bit over a million barrels of oil a day . . . about the same as Suez, and although that’s significant, I wouldn’t put it at the top of a terrorist’s list.’

‘Yeah, I agree. Any others?’

‘The Bosphorus is the world’s narrowest, in fact it’s downright dangerous,’ said O’Connor, indicating the 17-nautical-mile strait that flowed past Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, through which ships gained access to the Aegean and the Mediterranean. ‘The current runs at seven to eight knots, and there’s a 45-degree turn required here, near Kandilli Point.’

‘So it’s easy to attack, but that’s going to impact mainly on Russia and the Ukraine.’

‘Exactly, which leaves the Strait of Hormuz, and that would be my pick,’ said O’Connor, moving his laser pointer to the stretch of water that connected the Gulf of Oman with the Persian Gulf. It was one of the most sensitive choke points in the world, and the Arab Spring uprisings against dictators like Egypt’s Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali and his wife Leila, wanted by Interpol for high treason and money laundering, had further destabilised an already volatile region.

‘If I was a terrorist, and I wanted to hit the West hard, especially the US, I’d do it there,’ O’Connor continued. ‘With seventeen million barrels of oil a day passing through that choke point, and most of it destined for Western Europe, Japan and the US, the queues at the gas stations would be longer than they were after the Yom Kippur War in ’73.’ In 1973, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, ordinary Israelis had been either praying in the synagogues or relaxing. In the lead-up to the war, Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat had demanded that the Egyptian Sinai, lost in the ’67 Six Day War with Israel, be returned. Syria’s president Hafez al-Assad had been similarly rebuffed in his demands for the return of the Golan Heights. On 6 October 1973, Egyptian forces stormed across the Suez Canal, and the Syrians attacked the Golan Heights with five divisions, taking the Israelis by surprise.

‘I remember that war,’ McNamara said. ‘I’d only just started out in the CIA, and I’d been posted to Tel Aviv. Israel damned near got pushed into the Mediterranean. “Tricky Dicky” Nixon was missing in action and didn’t attend a single formal meeting of the National Security Council. Spent the war bunkered down in his Key Biscayne retreat, stalling Special Prosecutor Cox’s demands for the Watergate tapes.’ With Israel down to its last three days of ammunition, and in danger of being pushed into the sea, it had been left mainly up to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to organise support for Israel. The Arab states were furious, and the OPEC nations, led by Saudi Arabia, had promptly cut exports of petroleum to the United States.

O’Connor grinned. ‘Not to mention having to deal with the fallout of the resignation of his vice president. Spiro Agnew – caught with his hands in the cookie jar.’

‘The queues at the gas stations stretched for block after block . . . people waiting for hours to fill up and panicking that fuel would run out,’ said McNamara. ‘You think an attack on Hormuz would have the same effect?’

‘We’re better prepared these days,’ said O’Connor, ‘but it would still hit the West hard. In 1973 oil shot up from eighteen dollars a barrel to over a hundred, and today, a closure of the Strait of Hormuz would have the same effect. A quadrupling of prices at the pump really starts to damage the West and the rest of the world’s economy.’

‘Which these al Qaeda assholes couldn’t give a shit about,’ agreed McNamara. ‘Problem is, the satellites are working overtime in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on Syria, but I’ll see what can be done.’

‘Should we be briefing Pennsylvania Avenue on this?’

McNamara shook his head. ‘Not until we’ve got a little more to go on. McGovern’s up to his armpits with Iran and their nuclear program, Netanyahu and Israel, al-Assad and Syria, Karzai in Afghanistan . . . he needs this like a synagogue needs a pork chop. I’ll let them know through the back door, and I’ll have a word with the Secretary of State. In the meantime, you’d better get yourself across to Alexandria and unearth who the hell was at that meeting and what was on the agenda at the Kashta Palace. Take a couple of extra days in Alexandria, and give Aleta my best,’ McNamara said with a grin, getting to his feet.

O’Connor walked back to his temporary office, turning Barbara Murray’s card over in his hand. It didn’t escape him that she’d given him her personal card. He turned his thoughts to Carter Davis as president. Surely the American people couldn’t be that gullible? He shook his head. With someone like Crowley behind him, Hailey Campbell might need a little more than Chuck Buchanan, Megan Becker and a high approval rating.