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67
True to form, Marcus Dumond sat in his corner cubicle oblivious to the storm that was raging around him. The Bull Pen at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was a labyrinth of five-foot-tall plastic and fabric dividers. Partly out of necessity, and partly out of humor, the aisles that cut through the area had been given names such as Abu Nidal Way and Osama Bin Lane. Dumond had been the chief planner and street namer of the ever expanding Bull Pen, and he had intentionally located himself on a dead street with limited access.
While his MP3 player cranked out the tunes, Dumond worked the keys of his computer with blazing efficiency, toggling back and forth between three screens, closing windows, opening new ones and shrinking or enlarging others. He was on to something. He wasn’t sure what quite yet, but he was definitely on to something. Following Rapp’s lead, he’d focused on recent transactions made by Omar’s main assistant. The hardest nut to crack wasn’t hacking into the secure networks of the institutions in question—that was easy. The real issue lay in the enormity of Omar’s wealth. He used literally hundreds of banks to handle his vast fortune. That said, however, Dumond didn’t waste his time surfing through the prince’s transactions that were handled by Chase or the Deutsche Bank. In fact he immediately discarded all banks in the United States, England, Japan, Canada and Germany and focused on those nations known for their financial privacy laws.
Dumond had only to read the file on Devon LeClair once to know where to focus his attention. If given his choice, an anal retentive snob like LeClair would bank with only one group of people. The ever efficient Swiss were the perfect match. They thought of everything. They conducted themselves with a respectful, professional flair that properly schooled men like LeClair demanded.
Trying to run searches based on Omar’s name or those of his various holding companies had proven to be too cumbersome. Dumond had two strategies he wanted to employ before he called in the money guys from Treasury and the FBI to pore over the accounts with a magnifying glass. He’d seen the men and women do it before, chasing down every check, wire transfer and charge to its final destination. It could easily take fifty agents six months to run a thorough examination of Omar’s finances, and even then they might miss something. They had to do things the proper way, both politically and legally.
Even if they knew the tricks that Dumond employed, they would be too afraid to use them. The twenty-eight-year-old hacker from MIT could get results much quicker. None of the information he gathered would be admissible in a court of law, but Dumond had worked enough with Rapp in the past to know that he preferred to settle things in a less public forum.
Dumond had keyed in on three banks, two headquartered in Zurich and a third in Geneva. Each bank was among Switzerland’s oldest and most austere, and LeClair was authorized access to each one. At first Dumond focused his attention on the larger transactions, five to ten million dollars. He came up blank, so he started over again looking for money that had been shuffled between the three banks he was focusing on. This also proved to be a dead end.
As a last resort he went through each account for the past month looking for smaller transactions from various banks on various days that all may have ended up in a single account. He paid special attention to the name of the banks the money was being transferred to. He was looking for an accumulation of funds in one account that would get him to the proper threshold.
Dumond was focusing on blocks of money and transaction dates. In his mind he was trying to piece together a down payment followed by a later payment for successful completion of contract. He couldn’t find anything that was approaching five million dollars or even half of that number. Suddenly an amount and a bank caught his eye: $500,000 had been wired from one of the banks in Zurich on Monday to a financial institution on the island of Martinique in the French West Indies. He swore he’d already seen the same transaction. He began looking back through the transactions and sure enough, two weeks earlier LeClair had wired the same amount from another account to the same account in Martinique.
As Dumond looked at the name on the account in Martinique he couldn’t help but think there was something familiar about it. His fingers remained poised just above the keyboard and his head began to tilt to one side. It was coming to him. The name was not that common. Like his own it was French, which would fit with the French West Indies, but there was some reason why it seemed familiar to him. Dumond pulled his arms back and crossed them in frustration. He had just seen the name somewhere and it was driving him nuts that he couldn’t remember. He was about to give up and have the computer run a search when it hit him.
Dumond closed out one of his screens. His fingers flew across the keys in search of this morning’s on-line edition of The New York Times. The home page popped up on his center screen and he scanned the sidebar for the story he was looking for. After a brief moment he found it and opened the article. In the first paragraph of the article Dumond hit upon the name he was looking for: Peter Joussard. He looked back and forth from one screen to the other, from the on-line edition of The New York Times to the balance of a bank account in the Caribbean containing one million dollars. Dumond attempted to calculate the odds that it was coincidence and quickly decided it wasn’t, it couldn’t be. Yanking off his headphones he grabbed the handset of his phone and dialed Rapp’s mobile number.
68
It had taken almost exactly an hour to figure out what had happened. The White House was under lockdown. No one was being allowed in or out. The president and the other principles had all been moved downstairs to the Situation Room. Jack Warch, the special agent in charge of the Presidential Detail, had originally ordered that everyone be taken to the bunker deep under the White House, but President Hayes had countermanded the order. He’d been in the bunker once before and had no desire to go back unless he absolutely had to.
When Warch saw how serious the president was, he relented. At a minimum he asked that they relocate to the Situation Room. Hayes agreed, and the National Security Team moved downstairs where they could monitor the crisis and stay in close contact with their various departments and agencies. The heavily armed and black-clad Secret Service Counter Assault Team had taken up defensive positions around the Executive Mansion and the West Wing. Stinger surface-to-air missiles had been unsheathed and readied on the rooftop and Stage Coach, the presidential limousine, was running and waiting on the South Grounds ready to evacuate the commander in chief from the premises if necessary.
The men and women under Warch’s command had reacted with the precision and efficiency that he expected. They’d run the drills over and over until every agent and officer knew not only their own responsibilities, but those of the people who stood next to them. Now the one-hundred-plus-person force stood primed and poised, ready for whatever would happen next. As the minutes passed they began to realize that the White House was not a target. At least not today.
The initial reports that came into the Situation Room were that the State Department had been hit by a car bomb. Those reports were quickly proven inaccurate when Secretary of
State Berg contacted her office and was told the point of the explosion was actually several blocks away on Virginia Avenue. The first real clues to the carnage were provided by a Fox TV crew that had been at the State Department doing a live shot. After recovering from the initial shock of the explosion they packed up their gear and hoofed it to the site of the detonation.
They were lucky enough to get to the scene before the Metropolitan Police could set up a perimeter. Fox broadcast live footage of fire crews trying to douse the flames of several twisted wrecks. The FBI and ATF arrived twenty minutes later and had the Fox TV crew moved to the other side of the barricades with the rest of the networks and cable outlets.
The bomb experts from the ATF and FBI quickly ascertained the exact point of detonation and found what little was left of the vehicle that had been used as the platform. After that everything was a little confusing. There were shattered windows on both sides of the street for at least a block in each direction. Injured people streamed out of office buildings, many of them with nothing more than paper towels to stem the blood that flowed from gashes caused by flying glass. The George Washington University Medical Center, just a few blocks to the north, was inundated with patients. Fortunately only a few of them had injuries that were life threatening.
The actual target of the bombing was not immediately obvious. Several cars were flipped, twisted and charred almost beyond recognition. Many of the buildings had received superficial damage, but none had collapsed. The true target of the attack came to light when someone from the Saudi embassy called to see if the ambassador was still at the White House. The answer was unfortunately no. It appeared the ambassador’s staff, after seeing the footage, had tried to reach both the ambassador and his security detail. No one was answering their phones.
An FBI agent at the scene verified that one of the charred vehicles did in fact appear to be a limousine. It had taken the brunt of the explosion. Torn in half and flung across the street, it was now resting upside down in two pieces on the opposite sidewalk. The bodies inside the limousine were burned beyond recognition. The make of the vehicle was verified as a Mercedes with diplomatic plates. Prince Abdul Bin Aziz, the Royal Saudi ambassador to the United States of America, was dead.
President Hayes’s range of emotions went from disbelief, to confusion, to outright anger. When Rapp entered the Situation Room for the second time the president was absolutely furious. He had been in the midst of trying to figure out what to say to the crown prince when CBS broke the story. The speculation began almost instantly. In the new twenty-four-hour news cycle it wasn’t enough to just report the facts.
Talking heads were taking to the air on every station throwing the names of terrorist organizations around like they were corporations traded on the New York Stock Exchange. So-called experts were calling into question the effectiveness of the FBI and CIA and the new department of Homeland Security was being denounced by one particularly self-righteous pundit as a monumental failure.
During that initial media scramble to try to get ahold of the story, one lone voice caught the president’s ear. A spokesman for the Palestinians wondered aloud if Israel could have been behind the assassination in an effort to delay the vote before the UN and drive a wedge between America and her greatest Arab ally. The story had struck such a chord that even Rapp paused to give it serious consideration. Both he and Kennedy shot each other quick, worried glances upon hearing the hypothesis.
If it wasn’t for the fax that Rapp held in his hand he would have been more inclined to believe Israel was behind this entire operation. Prime Minister Goldberg was ruthless and daring enough to launch such a plan and Ben Freidman was the perfect person to carry it out. If this car bomb got pinned on any one of a dozen terrorist groups the crown prince and the rest of the House of Saud would put their wallets away and begin cracking down on fanatics like they had never done before. The Saudi ambassador and the crown prince were very close, having been raised together and schooled as if they were brothers. He was the perfect target, and what better place to do it than on U.S. soil.
Several things didn’t fit, however. There was this mysterious John Doe seen meeting with Prince Omar twice in the last two weeks. There was the audio recording from the Brits that had them talking about war and money, and even more interesting was the sudden appearance of this John Doe in both New York City and Washington, D.C.
All of this could be explained away as some exotic operation by Mossad to put the Palestinians on the defensive, stick their finger in the eye of the UN and drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. In a contorted complex way Rapp could see why Freidman might launch such an operation. The suicide bombs were not stopping and in the minds of men like Goldberg and Freidman action was always better than inaction. All of that fit with one exception.
Rapp held up the fax one more time and read it. This one piece of evidence unearthed by Dumond cast everything else they had in a different light. Rapp was about to tell Kennedy what the young hacker had discovered when a marine captain came up and told him he had an important phone call.
69
President Hayes was leaning forward in his leather chair with both elbows planted on the long shiny conference table that dominated the Situation Room. One hand clutched the white receiver of his secure telephone unit and the other was placed over his brow to shield his eyes from any distraction. He was talking to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, a man he considered his friend. The prince was someone who Hayes felt truly wanted to see east and west merge peacefully, but was unfortunately saddled with a populace that for the most part preferred religious rhetoric and inflammatory speech over enlightenment and liberty.
