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Stannard nodded sympathetically but his eyes were hooded. A decade younger than Donaldson of State or Reed of Treasury, the Defense Secretary was a former international banker from New York, a cosmopolitan operator who had developed tastes for fine food, vintage wines, and French Impressionist art. During a stint with the World Bank he had established a reputation as a smooth and efficient negotiator, a hard man to convince—as Third World countries seeking overblown credits with small chance of repayment had discovered when they went away empty-handed.
He had made his mark at the Pentagon over the previous two years as a stickler for efficiency, committed to the notion that the American taxpayer should get a dollar’s worth of defense for his tax dollar. He had made his enemies there, among the military brass and the lobbyists. But then came the Nantucket Treaty, which had changed a few allegiances across the Potomac. Stannard found himself siding with the defense contractors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in opposing the sweeping cuts.
While Michael Odell had fought against Nantucket on gut feeling, Stannard’s priorities were also concerned with the brokerage of power, and his opposition to the treaty had not been wholly on philosophical grounds. Still, when he had lost his case in the Cabinet, not a flicker of expression had crossed his face; and none did now as he listened to the account of his President’s deterioration.
Not so Hubert Reed. “Poor man. God, poor man,” he murmured.
“The added problem,” concluded the psychiatrist, “is that he is not a demonstrative, emotional man. Not on the outside. Inside ... of course, we all are. All normal people, anyway. But he bottles things up, won’t scream or shout. The First Lady is different—she does not have the strains of office; she’s more willing to accept medication. Even so, I think her condition is as bad, if not worse. This is her only child. And that’s an added pressure on the President.”
He left eight very worried men behind him when he returned to the Executive Mansion.
It was curiosity more than anything else that caused Andy Laing to stay on in his office two nights later, in the Jiddah branch of the Saudi Arabian Investment Bank, and consult his computer. What it showed stunned him.
The scam was still going on. There had been four further transactions since he had spoken to the general manager, who could have stopped it with a phone call. The rogue account was bloated with money, all diverted from Saudi public funds. Laing knew that peculation was no stranger to office-holding in Saudi Arabia, but these sums were huge, enough to finance a major commercial operation, or any other kind of operation.
He realized with a start of horror that Steve Pyle, a man he had respected, had to be involved. It would not be the first time a bank official had gone on the take. But it was still a shock. And to think he had gone with his findings straight to the culprit. He spent the rest of the night back at his apartment, bent over his portable typewriter. By chance his own hiring had taken place not in New York but in London, where he had been working for another American bank when the Rockman-Queens hired him.
London was also the base for European and Mideast operations of Rockman-Queens, the bank’s biggest office outside New York, and it housed the chief Internal Accountant for Overseas Operations. Laing knew his duty; it was to this officer that he mailed his report, enclosing four printout sheets from the computer as evidence of his claim.
If he had been a bit smarter he would have sent the package by the ordinary mails. But they were slow and not always reliable. He dropped his package in the bank’s courier bag, which normally would have gone direct from Jiddah to London. Normally. But since Laing’s visit to Riyadh a week earlier, the general manager had caused all Jiddah inclusions in the bag to pass via Riyadh. The next day Steve Pyle flicked through the outgoing mail, abstracted the Laing report, sent the rest on its way, and read what Laing had to say very carefully. When he had finished, he picked up the phone and dialed a local number.
“Colonel Easterhouse, we have a problem here. I think we should meet.”
On both sides of the Atlantic the media had said everything there was to say, then said it again and again, but still the words poured out. Experts of every kind, from professors of psychiatry to mediums, had offered their analyses and their advice to the authorities. Psychics had communed with the spirit world—on camera—and received a variety of messages, all contradictory. Offers to pay the ransom, whatever it was, had poured in from private individuals and wealthy foundations. The TV preachers had worked themselves into frenzies; vigils were mounted on church and cathedral steps.
The self-seekers had had a field day. Several hundred had offered themselves in place of Simon Cormack, secure in the knowledge that the transposition would never take place. On the tenth day after Zack’s first call to Quinn in Kensington, a new note crept into some of the broadcasts being beamed to the American people.
A Texas-based evangelist, whose coffers had received a large and unexpected donation from an oil corporation, claimed he had had a vision of divine inspiration. The outrage against Simon Cormack, and thus against his father the President, and thus against the United States, had been perpetrated by the Communists. There was no doubt of it. The message from the divine was picked up by national news networks and used briefly. The first shots of Plan Crockett had been fired, the first seeds sown.
Divested of her tailored working suit, which she had not worn since the first night in the apartment, Special Agent Sam Somerville was a strikingly attractive woman. Twice in her career she had used her beauty to help close a case. On one occasion she had several times dated a senior official of the Pentagon, finally pretending to pass out from drink in his apartment. Fooled by her unconsciousness, the man had made a highly compromising phone call, which had proved he was fixing defense contracts on behalf of preferred manufacturers and taking a kickback from the profits that resulted.
On another case she had accepted a dinner date from a Mafia boss and while in his limousine secreted a bug deep in the upholstery. What the Bureau heard from the device gave them enough to arraign the man on several federal charges.
Kevin Brown had been well aware of this when he chose her as the Bureau’s agent to bird-dog the negotiator the White House insisted on sending to London. He hoped Quinn would be as impressed as several other men had been and, thus weakened, would confide to Sam Somerville any inner thoughts or intentions that the microphones could not pick up.
What he had not counted on was the reverse occurring. On the eleventh evening in the Kensington apartment, the two met in the narrow corridor
leading from the bathroom to the sitting room. There was hardly room to pass. On an impulse Sam Somerville reached up, put her arms ’round Quinn’s neck, and kissed him. She had wanted to do that for a week. She was not disappointed or rebuffed, but somewhat surprised at the longing in the kiss that he returned.
The embrace lasted for several minutes, while McCrea, unaware, toiled over a frying pan in the kitchen beyond the sitting room. Quinn’s hard brown hand stroked her gleaming blond hair. She felt waves of strain and exhaustion draining out of her.
“How much longer, Quinn?” she whispered.
“Not long,” he murmured. “A few more days if all goes well—maybe a week.”
When they returned to the sitting room and McCrea summoned them to eat, he did not notice a thing.
Colonel Easterhouse limped across the deep carpet of Steve Pyle’s office and stared out of the window, the Laing report on the coffee table behind him. Pyle watched him with a worried expression.
“I fear that young man could do our country’s interests here enormous harm,” said Easterhouse softly. “Inadvertent, of course. I’m sure he’s a conscientious young man. Nevertheless ...”
Privately he was more worried than he gave out. His plan to arrange the massacre and destruction of the House of Sa’ud from the top down was in mid-stage and sensitive to disruption.
The Shi’ah fundamentalist Imam was in hiding, safe from the security police, since the entire file in the central security computer had been erased, wiping out all record of the man’s known contacts, friends, supporters, and possible locations. The zealot from the Mutawain Religious Police kept up the contact. Among the Shi’ah, recruitment was progressing, the eager volunteers being told only that they were being prepared for an act of lasting glory in the service of the Imam and thus of Allah.
The new arena was being completed on schedule. Its huge doors, its windows, side exits, and ventilation system were all controlled by a central computer, programmed with a system of Easterhouse’s devising. Plans for desert maneuvers to draw most of the regular Saudi Army away from the capital on the night of the dress rehearsal were well advanced. An Egyptian major general and two Palestinian military armorers were in his pay and prepared to substitute defective ammunition for the ordinary issue to the Royal Guard on the night in question.
His American Piccolo machine pistols, with their magazines and ammunition, were due by ship early in the new year, and arrangements were in place for their storage and preparation before issue to the Shi’ah. As he had promised Cyrus Miller, he needed U.S. dollars only for external purchases. Internal accounts could be settled in riyals.
