Death In Oslo

V

It was Abdallah al-Rahman himself who had come up with the name The Trojan Horse.

The thought had amused him enormously. Choosing a name was not, strictly speaking, necessary, but it had made it far easier to trick Madam President into leaving her hotel room. In the weeks after it had been announced that the President was to visit Norway in the middle of May, he had applied guerrilla tactics to American intelligence.

Quick in. Quick out.

He had planted information that was fragmentary and insignificant. But it did intimate that something was going to happen, and by carefully using phrases like ‘from within’, ‘unexpected internal attack’ and then the mention of a ‘horse’ in a memo that the CIA found on a corpse that floated ashore in Italy, he had them exactly where he wanted them.

When the information reached Warren Scifford and his men, they took the bait and it became the Trojan Horse, just as he wanted.

Abdallah was back in the office after having gone for a ride. Morning in the desert was one of the most beautiful things he knew. The horse had really gone through its paces, and afterwards he and the mare had bathed in the pond under the palm trees, by the stable. The animal was old, one of the oldest he had, and it felt good to know that she was still fast, supple and lively.

The day had started well. He had already finished his regular business. Answered all his emails, had a telephone conference. Read a board report that told him nothing of any interest. As early morning changed to mid-morning, he noticed his concentration flagging. He told reception that he was not to be disturbed and logged out of his computer.

CNN news was playing, without sound, on a plasma screen on one of the walls.

On the opposite wall was an enormous map of the US.

A large number of coloured pinheads were spread out over the country. He sauntered over to the map and zigzagged between them with his finger. He stopped at Los Angeles.

That was perhaps Eric Ariyoshi, Abdallah al-Rahman mused, and gave the pinhead a slight caress. Eric was a Sansei, third-generation American-Japanese. He was nearly forty-five and had no family. His wife left him four weeks after they married, when he lost his job in 1983, and since then he had lived with his parents. But Eric Ariyoshi had not let himself go under. He did odd jobs wherever he could until, at the age of thirty, he finished evening classes and became a qualified cable engineer.

But the real change came when his father died.

The old man had been detained on the west coast during the Second World War. He was only a boy at the time. Together with his parents and two younger sisters, he had spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Only a handful of the detainees had actually done anything wrong. Most had been good Americans since they were born. His mother, Eric’s grandmother, died before they were released in 1945. Eric’s father never got over it. When he grew up, he settled on the outskirts of Los Angeles and ran a small flower shop that only just managed to keep him, his wife and their three children alive. And he filed a suit against the American state. It was a long case, which became very expensive.

When Eric’s father died in 1994, it was discovered that all he had left behind was crippling debt. The small house that his son had used all his income on for the past fifteen years was still registered in his father’s name. The bank repossessed the house, and Eric once again had to start from scratch. The suit that his father had filed against the American state for unjust internment never came to anything. The only thing that old Daniel Ariyoshi had got from sticking to the rules and listening to increasingly expensive lawyers was a life of bitterness that ended in ruin.

It said in the report that it had been easy to persuade Eric.

Naturally he wanted money, lots of money, given how poor he was. But he had also earned it.

Abdallah’s finger moved on, from pinhead to pinhead.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, he didn’t want to use suicide bombers and fanatics to attack a US that they hated and had never understood.

Instead he had built up a silent army of Americans. Of dissatisfied, betrayed, repressed, conned Americans, ordinary people who belonged to that country. Many of them had been born there, all of them lived there and the country was theirs. They were American citizens, but the US had never repaid them with anything other than betrayal and defeat.

‘The spring of our discontent,’ Abdallah whispered.

His finger stopped by a green pinhead outside Tucson, Arizona. It might represent Jorge Gonzales, whose youngest son had been killed by the sheriff’s assistant during a bank raid. The boy was only six years old, and just happened to be cycling past. The sheriff made a short statement to the local press saying that his excellent assistant had been certain that the boy was one of the robbers. And that everything had happened very fast.

Little Antonio only measured four foot two, and had been six metres from the policeman when he was shot. He was sitting on a green boy’s bike, wearing a slightly too big T-shirt with Spiderman on the back.

No one was punished for the incident.

No one was even charged.

The father, who had worked at Wal-Mart since he came to the country of his dreams from Mexico as a thirteen-year-old, never got over his son’s death and the lack of respect shown by the people who should have protected him and his family. When he was offered a sum of money that would allow him to move back to his homeland as a wealthy man in return for doing something that wasn’t at all frightening, he grabbed the chance with both hands.

And so it continued.

Each pinhead represented yet another fate, another life. Abdallah had, of course, never met any of them. They had no idea who he was, and never would do either. And the thirty or so men who had worked for him since 2002, finding and recruiting this army of broken dreams, equally had no idea where the orders and money came from.

A red reflection from the plasma screen made Abdallah turn round.

The picture showed a fire.

He went back to his desk and turned up the volume.

‘… in this barn outside Fargo. This is the second time in less than twelve hours that illegal petrol stores have caused fires in the area. The local authorities claim that…’

The Americans had started hoarding.

Abdallah sat down, put his feet up on the huge desk and grabbed a bottle of water.

With petrol prices rising by the hour, and disconcerting news stories about increasingly agitated diplomatic rhetoric in the Middle East, people were rushing out to get fuel. It was still night in the US, but the pictures showed queues of irascible drivers with cars full of barrels and buckets and plastic containers. One reporter who was standing in the way when a pick-up finally made it to the pumps had to jump to one side to avoid being mowed down.

‘They can’t deny us the right to buy petrol,’ a grossly overweight farmer shouted into the camera. ‘When the authorities can’t guarantee reasonable prices, we’ve got the right to take matters into our own hands.’

‘What are you going to do now?’ asked the interviewer while the camera zoomed in on two men fighting over a jerrycan.

‘First I’m going to fill all of these,’ the farmer shouted and waved his hand at one of five oil barrels on the back of his truck. ‘And then I’m going to empty them into my new silo. And I’m going to carry on doing that all night and tomorrow morning and for as long as there’s a darned drop left in the state…’

The sound stopped and the reporter stared into the camera, confused. The producer quickly cut back to the studio.

Abdallah drank the water. He emptied the bottle and then looked over at the map with all the pins in it, all his soldiers.

They had nothing to do with oil and petrol.

A large number of them worked in cable TV.

Many of them were employed by Sears or Wal-Mart.

The rest were computer people: young hackers who could be persuaded to do anything for a little money, and more experienced programmers. Some of them had lost their jobs because they were deemed to be too old. There was no place in the industry for good, loyal workers who had learnt about computers back in the day when you used punch cards and who had had to work their socks off to keep up with developments.

But the most beautiful thing of all, thought Abdallah as he reached for the photograph of his dead brother, Rashid, was that none of the pinheads knew about the others. The role that each and every one of them would play was, in itself, small. A minor detail, an offence that was worth the risk, given the payment that would follow.

But combined, the impact would be fatal.

An extraordinary number of headends – installations where cable TV signals were received and distributed to subscribers – would be affected; the generally unmanned stations had proved to be an easier target than Abdallah had imagined. Signal amplifiers and cables would be sabotaged to such an extent that it would take weeks, maybe even months, to correct it.

In the meantime, the anger would grow.

And things would get worse when the security systems and cash registers in the largest supermarket chains ceased to function. The attack on the supermarkets would be carried out in stages, with lightning attacks in selected areas, followed up by new incidents in other areas, unpredictable and strategically unreadable, like any good guerrilla warfare.

The whole invisible army of Americans, spread over the entire continent, unaware of each other’s existence, knew exactly what to do when the signal was given.

And it would happen tomorrow.

It had taken Abdallah more than a week to work out the final strategy. He had sat here in this office, with long lists of recruits in front of him. For seven days he had moved them round on the map, estimated, calculated and evaluated the impact and maximum effect. When he had finally written it all down on paper, all that was left to do was to call Tom O’Reilly to Riyadh.

And William Smith. And David Coach.

He had summoned the three couriers. They had been in the palace at the same time, without knowing about the others. They had each been sent back to Europe in a separate plane, at thirty-minute intervals. Abdallah smiled at the thought, and lightly stroked the picture of his brother.

He could never be certain of anything in this world, but by burning three of his safest bridges, he could be fairly sure that at least one of the letters would reach an American postbox.

He had used three couriers, and all three had died just after they had posted the letters that all said the same thing. The envelopes were addressed to the same person and the contents would be meaningless to anyone other than the receiver, if they should by any chance fall into the wrong hands.

And that was the weakest link in his plan: they all had the same addressee.

Like every good general, Abdallah knew his strengths and his weaknesses. His greatest strengths were his patience, his capital and the fact that he was invisible. But the latter was also his most vulnerable point. He was dependent on operating at many levels, using straw men and electronic detours, through covert manoeuvres and, occasionally, false identities.

Abdallah al-Rahman was a respected businessman. Most of his operations were legitimate, and he used the best brokers in Europe and the US. He was swathed by a mysterious inaccessibility, but nothing and no one had ever blemished his reputation as an unmitigated capitalist, investor and stock-market speculator.

And that was the way he wanted things to stay.

But he needed one ally. One person who knew.

Operation Trojan Horse was too complicated for everything to be controlled from a distance. There were to be no traces that could lead back to anything that might involve Abdallah, so he had not been to the States for more than ten months.

At the end of June 2004, he’d had his meeting with the Democrats’ presidential candidate. She had been positive. She was impressed by Arabian Port Management. He could tell. The meeting had run on for half an hour longer than planned because she wanted to know more. On the flight home to Saudi Arabia, he had for the first time since his brother’s death thought that it perhaps wouldn’t be necessary to implement the project after all. The thirty years of planning, positioning and developing a network of sleeping agents all over the US might in fact go to waste. He had leant his head against the window of his private jet and looked out at the clouds below, which were an intense pink colour in the last rays of the sun they were flying away from. He had told himself that it didn’t matter, that life was full of investments that gave nothing back. Taking over the majority of America’s ports would make it all worth it.

She had as good as promised him the contract.

Then she had just dropped him, so she would win.

All the letters would go to one recipient, a man who would then set into action Abdallah’s detailed plans. Nothing must go wrong, and Abdallah had to take the risk of making direct contact. He trusted his helper. They had known each other for a long time. It bothered him sometimes that this last remaining, fragile link between him and the US would have to be eliminated as soon as Trojan Horse had been implemented.

Abdallah rubbed the glass in the frame carefully with his shirtsleeve, then put the photograph of Rashid back down on the desk.

He did trust Fayed Muffasa, but on the other hand, he hated having to rely on another living soul.