Charon's Landing

London, England

There are two options for London’s weather in the midfall: warm and rainy with a heavy overcast, or cold and rainy with an even darker overcast. In the few moments it took him to duck from a limousine to the lobby of a discreet Belgravia hotel, Khalid Khuddari was chilled almost to the bone, the heavy rain forming camouflage splashes on his Burberry overcoat. He shivered in the marble and gilt lobby for a second, wringing water from his thick hair with one flattened hand. The doorman watched him gravely, taking Khalid’s rush into the lobby as a personal affront, for the umbrella in his hand could shield a family of four.

A concierge led Khalid to the registration counter, actually an eighteenth-century ormolu and teak desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl along its delicate recurved legs and bordering its broad, glossy top. An exact replica of the table shimmered up from the white Carrara marble floor. The receptionist’s smile was almost warm enough to make Khalid forget the miserable weather. “Good afternoon, Minister Khuddari. I apologize about the weather. The telly said it should have cleared by now.”

Khalid wasn’t surprised that she knew his name; hotels such as this knew everything about a guest. “I’ll be sure to take it up with the management.” He grinned boyishly. “I specifically requested no rain for my entire stay.”

“I’ll pass on your request to the BBC weather bureau and see what can be done about it.” She mirrored his smile.

Like the older and more discriminating banks of Switzerland, which looked nothing like a place of business from the outside, the St. James Belgravia didn’t look like a hotel at all. It more resembled a large well-kept private home. Georgian in style with leaded casement windows and stone walls thick enough to turn away cannon fire, it even lacked a sign at the front advertising its presence. The lobby felt more like a grand entrance hall, with the desk and three oxblood wing chairs around a low cherry table. A sideboard hugging one wall under a giltwood mirror held crystal decanters, matching glassware, and the distinctive green neck of a Dom Perignon bottle in a sterling ice bucket.

One had to have money to even know that such hotels existed and even more to actually stay.

Khalid smiled tightly, knowing that Siri had not only booked the first-class flight from the UAE but also arranged for the hotel and the limo from the airport. It was her way of teasing him and demonstrating her affection, of which he was not unaware.

“Minister, I normally wouldn’t ask this of you,” the receptionist said almost apologetically. “However, you have never stayed with us before. I must see your passport for just a moment.”

He slid the document from his breast pocket, laying it open for her. She copied what she needed onto a guest card and handed back the diplomatic passport with another smile. “Thank you very much, Minister. The bellman will have brought your luggage to your room by now and will see to it that it’s unpacked if that is what you wish. You’re in room number seven. Alfred will take you.”

In his suite, Khalid dismissed the two bellmen without letting them unpack his bags. He noted that they didn’t wait for a tip, and he smiled again. Hotels like this never bothered their guests with such plebeian tasks as paying gratuities, but he was certain that having the men lead him to his room probably cost more than his grandfather made during his entire life. After a quick shower and shave to rid himself of the flight from the Gulf, he was back out of his room. The limo was waiting for him, as he had instructed earlier.

“The Savoy,” he told the West Indian driver as he eased into the plush leather of the black stretch Daimler.

Remarkably for such a big car, they managed to bull through the snarled city traffic in record time and were soon edging down the alley that led to perhaps the most famous hotel in the world.

Given his natural good looks and the fact that he could recite ten thousand lines of romantic poetry, it was little surprise that Trevor James-Price was talking to the most attractive woman in the Savoy’s American Bar. James-Price and the woman sat at the long bar angled toward each other with the intimate and exclusionary attitude of illicit lovers. Even as he approached, Khalid heard the woman’s laughter, sweet and clear with a hint of sexual throatiness.

“Ah, there you are, Trevor. The other warders have been looking for you all over town when we discovered you’d left the asylum without your medication.” With Trevor, Khalid could let his long-suppressed schoolboy humor flow.

James-Price looked up quickly, the sandy cowlick hanging over his forehead lifting and falling like a bird’s wing. His eyes sparkled with pleasure. They shook hands warmly.

“Khalid, please meet Millicent Gray. Millie, this is the Thief of Baghdad, Khalid Khuddari.” Trevor paused for a beat while Khalid shook the woman’s hand. “Now, if you will excuse us, I’ve got to talk him out of blowing up Parliament. I’ll meet you at Les Ambassadeurs at nine.”

She brushed her hand along Trevor’s as she stood, then smiled at Khuddari and sauntered through the room. At least half a dozen heads turned to watch her go.

“Les A, huh? I thought you were broke,” Khalid teased.

“What can I say? She invited me.” Trevor knocked off the last of a club soda and nodded for the barman to bring two more. “Glad you could make it to your first OPEC meeting as a Petroleum Minister.”

“I almost didn’t come,” Khalid said darkly.

“So I gather. You want to talk about it?”

“Not really. I think I may be jumping at shadows or I could be facing real darkness.” Khalid shook his head.

Trevor was quiet for a moment. “Well, you might be facing the Abyss after all. I found out about Rufti’s commiserations with the Iraqis and Iranians. If they pull it off, that hundred-thousand-dollar check you said you wrote won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.”

Before Khalid could react, Trevor continued, “I finally got someone to open up to me, a Saudi prince who says he’s being blackmailed by Rufti and wants to see the fat bastard taken down. Seems the royal personage is tired of being extorted because of his exotic tastes in pleasure.

“Last year, Rufti met with a former KGB agent named Ivan Kerikov in Istanbul aboard this prince’s yacht. I’ve found that this Kerikov has also met with the Iraqis and Iranians on separate occasions since then. I guessed that all of them are involved with something unsavory, so I bribed a waiter at the restaurant where Rufti and his cohorts met last night. He secreted a tape recorder under their table.”

“And?” Khalid prompted when Trevor paused for dramatic effect.

“Because of the economic pressure of the American decree, the Iraqis and Iranians have agreed to put aside their religious differences for the greater good, namely their Swiss bank accounts. With the help of the UAE, they’re trying nothing less than to take over the entire Gulf. As you know, Iran, with a little help from the Emirates, can choke off the Strait of Hormuz to all seaborne traffic, tankers and warships alike. Then, with a combined army of ten million men and chemical and biological weapons that the UN inspectors never even suspected, Iraq and Iran will swallow Kuwait and a good chunk of Saudi Arabia long before anyone knows what’s happened.”

“That’s ridiculous. The Americans would respond immediately, with NATO backing them. It would be a replay of the Gulf War.”

“Would it?” Trevor arched a pale eyebrow. “When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he made only one miscalculation. He never imagined that U.S. soldiers would be allowed to use Saudi Arabia as a base for retaliatory attacks. And if you recall, it was by only a narrow margin that the Saudis agreed to let foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula. You wogs are real touchy about who gets to walk on sacred sand and all that rot.

“Saddam never would have paused at the Saudi border had he realized America would be given those bases. This time, you can bet the tanks won’t stop rolling until they’re parked in downtown Riyadh.

“Furthermore, despite President Bush’s assurances to the contrary, the Gulf War was fought over oil and nothing else. The Americans didn’t care about the plight of the Kuwaiti people. Until the war, most Americans probably thought Kuwait was a type of fruit. No higher principles, no moral calling, just good, sound economic policy. Well, in ten years, nine now, America won’t give a goddamn about oil. They’re going to turn off the valve and let the Middle East collapse. If a combined front of Iraqis and Iranians try again, Congress is going to say the hell with it.” Trevor slipped into a mocking American accent. “ ‘Let the fig-eating sand niggers kill each other all they want. It no longer concerns us,’ some Southern senator will say. They won’t commit combat troops to a cause that doesn’t affect American wallets. Period.

“With Saudi Arabia cut in half by Iraqi troops and Hormuz closed by Iranian and UAE gunboats, the Americans couldn’t do anything anyway. They would have no tactical presence in the region. They’d have to use airfields in Turkey and Cyprus, at the extreme range of Coalition jets, and a land-based invasion force assembled in western Anatolia would face rugged mountains that have staggered armies for millennia. They wouldn’t stand a chance, no matter how many smart bombs and stealth fighters they used. No, my friend, it would most certainly not be a replay of the Gulf War. And think of this — with Iran and Iraq ruling the Gulf with the help of a UAE puppet regime, you can bet the dominoes would start falling. Jordan, Syria, even Israel could be swallowed as soon as the dust settled.”

Khalid sat back as if physically struck. What Trevor said was entirely feasible. The defining principle behind the United States’ Middle Eastern policy was the assurance of an uninterrupted flow of Gulf crude. Take away that need and the region became as unimportant as Togo or Bhutan. America poured billions of dollars into the Levant in the form of military loans in an attempt to maintain a balance of power between the nations. Usually these attempts were one-sided and heavy-handed, creating the very dictators the United States feared. Still, oil had flowed for fifty years with only a few minor hiccups.

Without the thirst for crude, America had really no interest in Middle Eastern politics. They would rattle their swords and pass a few condemning resolutions in the United Nations, but they wouldn’t act. History was full of wars. Most textbooks highlight their causes and effects, as if warfare was the water-shed in civilization’s development. Without exception they had all been fought for economic gain.

“I see one major flaw in your thinking,” Khuddari finally replied. “The UAE would never join Iran and Iraq if they invaded Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.”

Trevor had the uncanny knack of a school headmaster, the ability to shrivel another person with just a glance. “With the exception of the great democracies, the average life span of a ruling government for most nations is something like eight years. The UAE has existed for nearly thirty, and I think your time may be up.”

“You mean Rufti?”

“Precisely.”

“I spoke to the Crown Prince about the same thing, and I have to agree with his assessment. You may be right about Rufti, but the threat is still several years away, more than enough time to deal with him.”

“Are you dense, old fruit? He may not try for the whole government right away, but I’m damned certain he wouldn’t mind occupying your office for a while. Christ, the way he’s been swaggering around London, you’d swear he was already Petro Minister for the entire UAE, not just his own dusty corner of the country.”

Khalid hadn’t considered this.

While his job was to a large degree administrative, Khalid knew that an OPEC Oil Minister still possessed a great deal of respect in the international economic community. It would be a great starting point for someone wanting to gain power without calling attention to himself. Given the tense climate within the UAE’s seven-member Supreme Federal Council, it would be possible for the smaller Emirates to pressure the Crown Prince to appoint Rufti if Khalid was somehow not able to carry out his duties. If he was, for example, dead.

“Steady, old son, you look as if you’d just seen a ghost,” Trevor said, snapping Khalid from his thoughts.

“Yes, I did. Mine.” The training facility that he’d inspected with Bigelow took on an even more ominous dimension. “Listen, are you sure about Rufti and the Iraqis?”

“Well, I put a lot of it together myself,” Trevor admitted. “The information from the tape was sketchy, but it certainly fits. Especially in light of the way you’ve been acting recently.”

Khalid looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go to a reception at the British Museum. The Saudis are lending a bunch of early Islamic texts to the museum, and tonight is the opening. It’s supposed to be a big gala and it’s part of the OPEC agenda, an informal get-together before tomorrow’s meetings. Listen, I wouldn’t ask this normally, but we need to get together later at my hotel. It would mean breaking your date with Miss Gray.”

“If it means that much, and I know it does, I’ll be there.” Trevor stood with Khalid and they shook hands. “And by the way, it’s Mrs. Gray, not Miss. Well, Lady Gray, actually.”

Khalid waited for a moment under the Savoy’s dark portico for his limo to be brought around. A doorman escorted him to the Daimler, and seconds later they were back in traffic, heading toward the Bloomsbury section of London and the British Museum. Uncomfortable in limousines, Khalid wanted to talk with the driver to help pass the short commute, but the dark glass partition between them was closed and would not respond when he tried to lower it.

He considered rapping on the glass but instead sat back to watch the parade of interesting people as they drove through Soho. At Cambridge Circus, they turned right onto Bloomsbury Street, where the darkness of the night was held at bay by theater marquees and advertising signs. Rain streaked past the windows of the limo like Christmas tinsel.

Past New Oxford Street, the whole character of the cityscape changed. Low Tudor buildings, wooden signs swinging over cramped storefronts, and the occasional gas streetlamp gave an impression reminiscent of Dickens. The great stone edifice of the British Museum was just ahead on the right, an unnatural glow pouring down Great Russell Street from the television lights set up to capture famous faces headed into the opening. Even from this distance, Khalid could see the reflection of flashbulbs popping like lightning. Such enthusiastic photo taking could only mean a film or recording star had just arrived.

The limo turned on to Great Russell, the museum looming before them on the left, a small side street to their right shooting down between heavily windowed eighteenth-century buildings. Just past the gates of the museum entrance, the road was blocked by police cars, a security van, and a couple of motorcycles. Uniformed bobbies manned a temporary barricade to keep back junior members of the press and the hundred or so curious onlookers. Senior reporters and photographers were on the museum grounds, solidly flanking the steps up to the building.

The scene was familiar. Although he’d been to the museum many times during his schooling, Khalid had the feeling that he’d somehow seen this night before. The barricade, the streets, and even the buildings were like the vague outline of a dream.

The desert, a training camp just recently abandoned but thoroughly destroyed, streets, buildings, this place.

Even as the realization struck him, the partition between the passenger and driver compartments began sliding down. The limo had stopped in a line of other luxury automobiles waiting to enter the museum grounds. The West Indian who’d driven him from his hotel to the Savoy had been replaced by a Turk, or maybe an Afghani. Khalid had just enough time to notice this when the man raised an automatic pistol into view.

Khalid lurched to the side, a silenced shot punching a neat hole in the leather upholstery, the compartment filling with the sharp smell of gunpowder. He grabbed for the door handle and threw himself out of the car. The second round tore the seam at his suit coat’s shoulder, missing his body.

He hit the wet pavement hard, rolling once against the curb, then scrambling to his feet and lurching behind a heavy flower planter. Already he felt the eyes of cameras turning toward him. He had never felt more naked in his life, but he could not move. The driver’s window was open and he could see the man looking for him. The planter offered minimal protection.

Khalid thought about running behind the car and ducking down the side street, hoping that he wouldn’t be detected. Then he remembered the nine-millimeter shell casing that Bigelow had found at the abandoned training camp. Khalid knew enough about guns to recognize that the driver had used a.22-caliber automatic. There were others hunting him.

A bloom of light appeared in a window across the street, two floors up in what appeared to be a residential apartment. It turned into a streak that raced across the space between building and car in a fraction of a second. Khalid was in motion again, running as the shoulder-fired missile struck the Daimler squarely in the hood and exploded.

Burning fuel, molten metal, and deadly shrapnel filled the air as the limo disintegrated. Khalid was lifted from his feet and tossed through the air. He smashed against the wrought-iron gate that fronted the museum, the breath sucked from his lungs by the concussion. The driver/assassin behind the wheel of the Daimler had been vaporized.

Even as he fought to recover his breath, even as his ears rang, Khalid heard automatic gunfire, like the ratcheting of some great machine. He looked behind him and saw a whole army rushing toward him, their guns spitting tongues of flame.