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Rapp began ticking off his counterpoints, every bit as determined as the president was. “We’re talking about the same crown prince whose brother bribed the French ambassador with a million bucks. We’re talking about the same crown prince whose brother has been meeting with some guy who just mysteriously shows up whenever someone is killed—”
The president interrupted, “I know Faisal personally, and I can guarantee that he had nothing to do with this.”
“Can you?” asked a doubtful Rapp, and then in a more conciliatory tone added, “I happen to agree that Faisal doesn’t have a hand in this, but I’d sure as hell like to make sure before we lay what little we know on the table.”
“I would too, but we don’t have time,” the president said in frustration. “If we’re going to get the French to change their minds we need to open a dialogue now. Secretary of State Berg wants to present the evidence of Ambassador Joussard’s bribe to the foreign minister as soon as possible. She’s confident that once they see the evidence they will recall the ambassador immediately.”
Rapp’s displeasure was obvious. “Sir, the moment we do that we’ve tipped our hand. People will be warned. Someone will alert Omar, and he’ll fly the coop like that.” Rapp snapped his fingers. “He’ll go back to Saudi Arabia, and we’ll never get our hands on him, and we’ll never know how far-reaching this thing was.”
“What if we have the French pick up this John Doe when he lands in Paris? We can have our people from the FBI present during the interrogation.”
Rapp’s eyes were closed and he was shaking his head vehemently. “Sir, if we do that we’ll never learn the whole truth, and what little we do learn will take weeks if not months to extract from this guy. And that still doesn’t solve Omar. I’m telling you the second we grab this guy, we risk tipping off Omar, and without more evidence no one is going to lay a hand on Omar.”
Hayes sighed. “So what do you propose we do?”
“Give me twelve hours, sir. That’s all I’m asking. I’ve got a team ready to go. We can get to Nice before John Doe arrives and shadow him every step of the way.”
“And what if you come up empty?”
Rapp could tell the president was leaning in his favor. “We’re no worse off than we are right now.”
“Except that we’re up against the clock with the French.”
Rapp swore under his breath. “Sir, if I were you I wouldn’t tell the French a thing. I’d wait until that smug bastard Joussard climbs up on his high horse tomorrow morning, and then I’d have Secretary Berg ask him what he thinks of bribery. After he gets done stammering, the secretary can clobber him over the head with the evidence. The resolution will never make it to a vote, and if it does by some off chance we can veto it in good conscience until a full investigation is made into Joussard’s finances. And if the crown prince is upset, you can ask him what his brother is doing giving a million bucks to the French ambassador to the UN.”
The president actually laughed. “That would be enjoyable, but the French are our allies, and I don’t think we can blindside them like that.”
Rapp was tempted to comment on the value of having allies like the French but he decided not to. He could tell the president was leaning in his favor. “Twelve hours, sir. That’s all I’m asking. Have I ever disappointed you?”
The president was out of arguments. He looked to Kennedy for her opinion and she nodded. “All right,” Hayes said, turning back to Rapp. “You have twelve hours.”
74
David had found the long flight from America relaxing. He’d reclined in his first-class seat and ignored the in-flight movie. It was a drama, and he wasn’t in the mood for it. Maybe a comedy would have grabbed his attention but definitely not a drama. What he needed was an escape from the harsh reality of what he’d been doing. David did not enjoy murdering, but he understood it as a necessary evil in a world where it was often the only way to get things done. Thousands upon thousands of lives had been ended in the quest for Palestinian independence. What would a few more matter? None of this was new to him. He’d known it from an early age. He had seen his path in life, knowing that someday he would have a hand in shaping the birth of his nation. And now that his dream was so close, the guilt disappeared in the hum of jet engines. At 45,000 feet somewhere over the vast Atlantic Ocean he tucked a thin blue blanket up under his chin and thought of Palestine, warm thoughts of a nation at peace, and then he fell asleep.
He’d landed in Paris and changed flights without incident. The first sign that something had gone wrong was when he landed in Nice and caught a news update on the television. He’d been incommunicado for the better part of seven hours and was starved for information.
The vote had not taken place. The UN had been shut down due to a bomb threat. David’s eyes squinted at the television and instantly knew the bomb scare was a ruse. Angry but under control, he headed off in search of answers. Unfortunately, those answers would have to come from Omar. As promised, a limousine was waiting for him at the curb. David climbed into the backseat and settled in for the short ride down the coast. He was entirely oblivious to the fact that he was being watched.
Rapp stood at the window of his hotel room. The lights were off and he was careful to stand a few feet back from the glass. Before leaving the States he’d honored his new agreement with his wife and told her the destination and likely duration of his trip. She wanted to know if his sudden departure had anything to do with the car bomb, and after a slight hesitation, he told her that it did. All in all he was surprised how well the conversation had gone.
Rapp pressed a pair of high-powered binoculars to his face and looked down on the harbor of Cannes, in the South of France. The Albert Edouardo Pier stretched out before him. Some of the world’s finest yachts were berthed for the night, crowded together with barely a foot to spare between each, all neatly tucked in. As grand and opulent as all the other vessels were one stood out above the rest. Actually, it towered above the rest. Rapp had seen wealth before. He’d traveled the world and visited many cities, most of them port cities, but he had never seen a noncommercial or military vessel as large as
Omar’s yacht. The massive ship was moored at the end of the pier, no individual slip was big enough to hold it. Omar’s yacht was easily twice as large as the next biggest vessel, which was no small thing when one considered that it was parked in a harbor that was known as the ultimate playground for the world’s wealthy.
Rapp had never met Omar, and until this week had only heard of him in passing. He suddenly had a great desire to meet this corpulent Saudi prince. The signs were easy enough to recognize; Rapp had seen them before. He knew how to analyze himself better than any shrink. He would like to put the prince on the other end of his gun and watch him squirm. Men like Omar were never humiliated. That was their biggest problem. They went through life with a very warped sense of reality. Their own lives took on an overexaggerated sense of importance while virtually everyone else around them became trivial … expendable … small. His yacht symbolized how Omar perceived himself. He was his ship, the biggest and thus most important. Everyone else was secondary. Only his desires were what mattered.
It was approaching midnight. Rapp and his team had arrived two hours ago and were in the process of calibrating all of their equipment to make sure it worked perfectly. They didn’t need much. The British surveillance team that had been in place since Monday was on top of things. They briefed Rapp thoroughly, and as always their cooperation was excellent. Rapp had worked with the folks from MI6 before and had found them to be extremely good at their jobs.
In addition to what the Brits already had in place, and their own directional microphones, Scott Coleman had just finished placing listening devices on the hull of the yacht. Rapp looked through the binoculars at the small sailboat and watched as Coleman handed his scuba tank to one of his men and climbed aboard. The British sailboat was tied up two jetties over from Omar’s yacht and was partially blocked by a sizable cabin cruiser. When Coleman was finally back on board the sailboat Rapp relaxed a bit. Everything was in place.
Their guy had landed. He was no longer John Doe. With the delivery of the encrypted file from Mossad, Kennedy had put a name with the face. He was Jabril Khatabi, the Palestinian who had given Mossad the intelligence boon that had turned into a massacre. The man who had started it all. A man who interested Rapp greatly. On the flight over, Rapp had read every scrap of Jabril’s file, and the more he read the more interested he became. On the face of it, this Jabril did not seem like a pawn. Marcus Dumond had plunged into his financials and so far had discovered a personal fortune in excess of five million dollars, almost all of it in highly liquid assets. He had been educated at the very bosom of American agnostic liberalism, the University of California at Berkeley. He’d gone to work for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley after college and had traveled the world, focusing mostly on investments from Arab oil people. Everything in his file pointed not to terrorism, but to capitalism.
If it weren’t for the audio surveillance they had of his meetings with Omar, and the fact he’d been a Mossad informant, Rapp would have sworn the man was nothing more than one of Omar’s abundant financial advisors. He found it hard to believe this wealthy man from a well-educated family was a terrorist, but the evidence was conclusive. Before the night was over Rapp was hoping to have a little chat with the Palestinian to see if he could clear a few things up.
They didn’t have much time. The president’s deadline was firm. Every time Rapp had talked to Kennedy she’d reminded him of that. Things in Washington had grown even more hectic since he’d left. Neither the French nor the Palestinians had been placated by Israel’s withdrawal from Hebron. The Israelis now claimed incontrovertible evidence that there had been a bomb factory in Hebron, and they were prepared to present that evidence before an international board of inquiry. The evidence of course had been planted during the military occupation of the town, in order to save Prime Minister Goldberg from a controversy that would spell the end of his government.
The French ambassador to the UN had privately confronted the American ambassador and accused the CIA of doing exactly what they’d done; phoning in a bomb scare in order to delay the vote on Palestinian statehood. Ambassador Joussard was offended and indignant that the world’s lone superpower would stoop so low. Even though he was right, it was rather amusing that the condemnation was coming from a man who’d been bribed into putting forth the resolution that was causing so much consternation in the first place.
