Cloudburst

Sixteen THE PUZZLE’S CENTER

The line was silent. The director wasn’t known for his thoughtful pauses, leaving Art waiting uncomfortably.

“Who confirmed this?” The director’s voice hinted at irritation.

“Israeli Intelligence,” Art answered. “Meir Shari. He was their military liaison in D.C. when I met him. His information is solid.”

Jones had no doubt about that. The theory, though, was conjecture. There could be doubts about it. The problem was that it made sense, and couldn’t be confirmed or disproved. “We have a problem, then, Jefferson. If there is a third Khaled brother on that plane, and if the assassination was just meant to set things up as you think, there isn’t much we can do. And if you’re wrong, we might have to do something to prevent a possibility, something that just might kill a bunch of people.”

“I know that,” Art said. “But if—”

“If you’re right…” Jones thought on that. The information didn’t really change the equation in Washington, but it would end any speculation about how to respond. This would seal it, no matter what was on the plane. “Get back to your partner, Jefferson. What you just told me is going to the president. Good work.”

Art didn’t wait to hear the click. He hung up first. All Carol saw was her boss sprinting by, his jacket in hand.

The Chevy was speeding out of the underground garage three minutes later. The USC Medical Center was fifteen minutes away by car, ten if he drove hell-bent. Art would. It was his friend in there. He had to be with him.

There was no way he could know that the same pattern of logic, influenced by his growing emotional stress, had governed his fateful decision ninety minutes before. But the decision to deal with that improper action had already been made at one level of the Bureau, and would soon be approved by the highest level, the one whom Art had just finished with.

Landau slid the message from Logan into the DONNER file and tossed it onto the desk. It was late, and dark, but the lights from the CIA’s perimeter were faintly visible through the DCI’s window. The aged director reached and turned off the only light in his office, on his desk.

The outside world became instantly clearer when the office went dark. Those lights that were only specks before were now cones of light shining on the grounds. The rain had subsided hours before. Everything looked clean and fresh outside.

“Why?” Landau asked the outside light.

“Herb, you in here?” Drummond asked into the office.

The DCI turned his chair. “Yep. Right here.” He switched on the desk lamp.

The DDI waited at the doorway, leaning in. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Come on in.”

Drummond came in, but didn’t sit. He saw the DONNER file on the desk. “DONNER?”

“He’s dead. He did it himself.”

It should have surprised the DDI, but it didn’t. Assets, behind the sterile name, were people, with reasons for doing things that no one would ever know. His experience had taught him that time and again, though the loss of an agent never became “acceptable,” just “preferable” to some alternative. “Don’t try and read too much into it.”

Landau looked up, a slight smile forming. “Easier said than done, you know.”

He did. “Did he get the information we needed?”

“Exactly what we needed. I’m heading over to the White House in a few. The good news is that it’s not a bomb.”

“And the bad?” There was always bad when a person prefaced his words that way.

“That what they’ve got on board is still dangerous, but it still requires the nuclear material, which we don’t know if they have. There’s no evidence they’ve removed any from Tajoura.” Landau’s tone conveyed the frustration in that statement.

Drummond knew he had to bring some unwanted certainty to the situation. “Herb, it looks like they do have it. One of our S&T teams doing a financial trace on this whole thing came up with some damning info. It seems the colonel was in the habit of buying scrap metal through a Tunisian front company. The kind of stuff that comes from dismantled industrial plants.”

“A lot of those left around after the forties,” Landau commented.

“One of those scrap shipments was particularly suspicious. Bad documentation, a money trail through PLO and other accounts.” Drummond drew a breath, wishing the discovery had been a mistake. But it wasn’t. “That scrap came from Osirak four days before the Iraqis rolled into Kuwait.”

The DCI snickered. “So Qaddafi was playing the good Arab brother for Hussein, keeping the uranium safely tucked away.” Landau leaned back, his fingers tapping in sequence on the desk edge. “And there wasn’t supposed to be any nuclear material at Osirak anyway.”

“We always suspected there was. Even the Israelis did when they bombed the reactor back in the eighties.” Drummond finally sat. “We’ll have to figure that one out later — a Soviet slipup, more than likely. Back in the pre-Gorby days. What’s interesting is that this all appears to have been in the works before our predecessors did their dirty work on the colonel.”

“Like we knew, he’s wanted nuclear weapons openly for a long time,” Landau said. “And now he has highly enriched uranium. Higher than Tajoura.”

“It can’t all be on the plane,” Drummond commented.

The DCI shook his head. “No way. We’ll have to check on how much could be left behind, but that could present a further problem.” Or an opportunity.

It was quiet for a short period that seemed much longer. The misaligned wheels of the night janitor’s cart were audible in the hallway. Drummond turned to check the door visually. “You know, old Harry’s probably the most well informed man in this country,” he said, giving the crusty old custodian of the executive level more credit than was deserved. “The things he must’ve heard, even in just meaningless conversations. He’s been here thirty-two years.”

Landau heard none of it. His mind was occupied with a thought. “Qaddafi was smart on this one, Greg.”

The DDI returned to the relevant discussion. “How so?”

“He gets all this set up, the hijackers, the thing on board, all of it. The assassination, too; that’s what I think. And once it’s all over, if he’s still alive, he has surplus uranium for whatever reasons he chooses.”

“Smart and dangerous.”

Landau acknowledged the correctness of the DDI’s statement. “And the clever misinformation, placed just where we’d find it. The bomb design scam. They obviously didn’t have the capability to build something of even its crude design.”

“Just to scare us. To make us wring our hands.”

“Right. And he had us, too. What’s really on there may not be as frightening, but it could be just as deadly.”

Drummond flashed a knowing smile. “Not-so-scary things aren’t as hard to deal with.”

“Neither are other things, now that we know.” The DCI knew that Bud would agree with that thought.

“Sir, there’s a phone call for you. It’s urgent.”

Bud looked at the DCI. Urgent held little meaning when a meeting with the president was about to begin. He hovered over the speakerphone for a moment. “Who is it?”

“Director Jones.”

He debated the decision. “Herb, go on in without me. Tell them I’ll be in in a minute.”

“Where the hell is he?” the president asked. His body involuntarily paced.

“He’ll be here,” Ellis responded. “It must be important or Jones wouldn’t have called in the first place: He knows what’s going on.”

The president wasn’t angry at his NSA, he was angry at the shifting situation. The revelation from the DCI that something, though not a bomb, was on the hijacked plane had clouded an earlier decision he made. “How, tell me, how can I order that plane shot down with this new information? How can I do that?”

Neither Meyerson nor Gonzales had an answer. Herb Landau, however, saw little need to alter the previous course.

“Sir,” the DCI began, “you still have no other option, in my mind.”

“Herb, when we thought that plane was carrying an atomic bomb, then we had no choice. But now, with whatever it is, I don’t know. Mass destruction is one thing, but this…”

“This thing can’t be as destructive as a bomb,” Gonzales said.

“Do you know that… for sure?” the DCI asked. The chief of staff signaled not. “Then until we know that, we have to assume it is.”

The president checked the time. “Bud shou—”

The NSA’s entry interrupted the sentence. “We have a whole new problem,” Bud spat out. He was almost breathless, and walked right to the president, who stood in rolled- up shirtsleeves by the fireplace.

“What now?” the president asked for the others.

Bud looked to Landau. “You filled them in?” The DCI nodded. “Sir, the intelligence that came out concerning what is on the plane, coupled with what the Agency discovered concerning the source of the uranium, is disturbing; it validates to a high degree what we’ve suspected, with only a difference in the aircraft’s cargo. What we’ve been missing is the why. Why are they doing this?”

“Correct,” Meyerson agreed. “What do they hope to gain?”

Bud nodded. His movements were quick and sharp, signaling the seriousness of the unknown to the others. “We have that now.”

“Let’s have it,” the president said. He walked over to his desk and sat down. Meyerson and Gonzales came over, too, standing at the desk’s edge. Landau followed, moving slowly and leaning forward on a chair back.

“I just got off the phone with Gordy Jones. He relayed some new information from L.A. They found the man they believe was the connection for the assassins. His name was Marcus Jackson.”

“Was?” The president knew what it meant.

“They attempted to arrest him. An FBI agent was seriously wounded and Jackson was killed.”

The president rubbed his upper lip with the edge of his fist. “Ellis, find out the injured agent’s name.” To Bud: “Go on.”

Bud’s breathing eased. “This is all hot, so bear with me. Some paper?” The president leaned forward and handed over a pad and pen. “We have two assassins, the Khaled brothers, with a deeply personal reason for doing what they did. You already know about their little sister. Now, they did it — there’s no doubt. The FBI has positive identification on them from several sources and witnesses. The question was who helped them, and how? Well, this Jackson fellow was in the perfect position to put them in place without drawing undue attention, and since he disappeared right after the killings they went looking for him. No luck right away, but they did find the pickup point for the weapons. Jackson had stashed them there for an easy pickup by the Khaleds — that way there was no face-to-face meeting, no direct link. And for his trouble he got a million bucks, free and clean.”

“More moola spread around,” Landau said.

“A lot,” Bud agreed. “They found the majority of it at the hotel he was hiding out in. So Jackson has his money, and he thinks the Khaleds are going to cover his tracks — wrong. They left the original weapons’ crates at the pickup site after removing the stuff, after Jackson went to the trouble to sanitize the weapons. He just expected them to get rid of the packages.”

“That’s a no-brains plan,” Meyerson commented, finding it hard to believe the idiocy of everything. Then again, their idiocy had been quite effective so far.

“Jackson was a no-brains guy, apparently. All he needed was a million-dollar motivation and his part was in the bag, but he just didn’t put it all together. Clean up the guns and rockets, make them untraceable, and then put them back in the marked boxes. It’s stupid, no doubt about it, but it happened. So the FBI traced the crates back to Rock Island, to the armory. Lo and behold, who’s one of the soldiers with the armory for a duty station? Samuel Jackson, Marcus’s little brother. Now we have the source of the weapons and a direction for the trail, but there is still the question of how the plan originated.”

“There would have to be a connection on this side of the Atlantic, especially to show a connection to the hijacking,” the president said.

“Right. The Khaleds didn’t just call up Marcus Jackson and ask for his help. This thing took time to set up. Someone had connections in place.”

“Who?” the chief of staff asked.

“Another Jackson.”

“What?” Meyerson asked rhetorically.

“In Joliet, serving time for something or other, is Ernest Jackson, the oldest of the three boys. He’s apparently one bad fellow, and smart.”

“The smart ones get greedy and get caught,” Landau said.

“Exactly. Plus, it gave him the perfect base of operations, and the absolute perfect alibi — almost.”

“You’ll explain, of course,” the president said, raising a curious eyebrow.

“Ernest Jackson was, and still is, a member of a Chicago terrorist group known as El Rukn. Most people just thought of them as a street gang, but they were much more. So much more that Qaddafi ‘chose’ them as his American revolutionary arm.”

“It didn’t work out too well, I remember,” Meyerson added.

“Mostly rhetoric, like we’ve expected from the colonel for a long time, but it got the ball rolling.” Bud wrote the three Jacksons’ names on one side of the paper, then drew a line down the center. He then wrote the two Khaleds’ names on the other side of the line. “The Jackson brothers had the link to Libya, a semi clean one with Ernest safe behind the walls, and they had the source of the weapons with Samuel in the Army.”

“And Marcus was the man on location,” Gonzales completed the point.

“Exactly,” Bud said. “That’s the benign link.”

“The benign link?” The president wondered how a conspiracy that killed so many could be termed benign. “That is definitely an interesting way to put it.”

“It may not be a proper classification under normal circumstances, but it is when you compare it to the really dangerous connection.”

“Which is?” Meyerson asked.

Bud put a question mark below the Khaleds. “Brother number three. There’s another Khaled.”

“And he fits into this how?” the president inquired.

“He is the concrete link. If this third brother is involved, his likely place is aboard the hijacked jet. I believe he is. It is the only scenario that makes complete sense: Qaddafi has a mind for revenge because of our rogue operation, maybe rightfully so in his mind. Imagine this: Qaddafi is successful in this whole thing and then dies, or is replaced by a crony who claims that the colonel acted without sanction of the people. In their twisted minds they might really believe that we’d accept that and do nothing. Of course, they’re wrong, but Qaddafi has played the wide-eyed innocent many, many times before. But that’s ahead of the point. The Khaleds were probably recruited by Qaddafi’s terrorist apparatus, and then the two who carried out the attack in L.A. were almost certainly trained in one of the training camps. This is just about stone-cold proven when we consider the similarities between what happened and what our asset warned us of. If we then follow that the third Khaled brother is also on a suicide mission, which is a prudent bit of conjecture, we have to consider what effect he is hoping for.”

“If this is the case, then there has to be greater effect desired than the obvious ones we’ve looked at,” the DCI said.

“Right!” Bud exclaimed. “We were looking in multiples of effect, not in multiplications of effect The two operations were not meant to be a one-two punch. The assassination was a setup. It was meant to set the stage for the real show. Think about it. We already know there is something on the aircraft meant to do damage to people other than the hostages, namely large numbers on the ground.”

“But it’s not a bomb, Bud,” the chief of staff commented.

“It doesn’t have to be. If he’s on a suicide mission, why land? He can activate those things in the air over the population, and they’ve already secured the target: There will be over a hundred world leaders in Washington, D.C., which is on a direct path from Tenerife to Chicago. That was their original intended route. A slight course change would have put them over D.C. in a matter of minutes. Even on a Havana-to-Chicago flight path all they’d have to do is stray a few hundred miles east, or even announce a new destination — say New York. They could be on top of us with no warning.”

“Oh God…” Gonzales sighed, his head sinking forward.

The thought was frightening. “It’s brilliant,” the DCI observed. “Qaddafi must know that we know about the cargo: He’s aware of our satellite capability. If the plane gets over the funeral procession and activates those things, he’s probably killed thousands of people, a lot of them heads of state. If we shoot the plane down, then we’ve killed hundreds of our own people. Those are the only two alternatives he sees.”

The president filtered the developments in his mind. “You were right, Herb. We may still have to shoot the plane down.”

“But Qaddafi didn’t think about Delta, or he didn’t consider them to be a viable threat,” Meyerson said.

“Let’s damn well hope that the secretary can get them into Cuba,” the president said, sounding hopeful. “That will make them viable.” He saw the DCI’s mindful look. “But… Bud, that contingency I approved you to get ready — give the go- ahead. No matter what happens, that plane gets nowhere near the States.”

The president knew he had just given an order that might result in Americans killing Americans. The only hope for that not to happen was in Delta. In either eventuality, people would die. He just hoped it would be those who deserved to.