Executive Power

FIFTY FIVE.

The old house wasn't in the nicest neighborhood, and it wasn't in the best condition, but it served its purpose. It was right on the bubble where North D.C. bordered Northeast D.C.

Compared to the southeast quadrant of the city, the neighborhood was tame, but trouble could still be found if you didn't pay attention to where you were going at two in the morning. That was the Washington take on things, but having spent most of his life living under occupation, David found the neighborhood to be extremely safe.

He'd passed himself off to the landlord as a French software designer who owned his own company and was trying to break into the U.S. market. He would only be in D.C. sporadically, as meetings with his lobbying firm and the Department of Commerce dictated, but when he was in town he would need ample space to continue his work. The rent was reasonable and the landlord didn't balk when David handed over the first two months plus deposit in cash. In the five months since then David had wired the rent to the landlord from a dummy account in Paris that matched his false identity of Jean Racine.

David's only request, which he offered to pay for, was to upgrade the electrical service in one of the upstairs rooms and get the house wired for high-speed Internet access. The landlord, who lived a little more than a mile away, objected to neither and stayed true to his promise that he wouldn't bother David as long as David was a quiet and respectful tenant.

Now David sat in the converted office on the second floor of the Victorian home and concentrated on the array of visual equipment before him. Mounted on the wall were eight Sorry twenty-one-inch flatscreen monitors costing over a thousand dollars each. Two workstations were set up on the long folding table that served as a desk. The station on the left was for checking e-mail, managing his funds, which were spread out at various financial institutions around the world, and keeping an eye on a certain online news service that provided almost instantaneous access to what was going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The other workstation was dedicated to controlling the other seven monitors as they fed him live feeds from traffic cameras around the city.

That part of the plan had been achieved with less effort than he had anticipated. Simple bribery had bought him access to the Washington D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles' traffic camera network. At any given moment he was just a few key strokes away from accessing any one of the more than one hundred cameras located throughout the District. The password to enter the system had cost him only $2,000.

The DMV was a. true menagerie of immigrants, most of whom had come from Third World countries where government salaries were often augmented by bribes and payoffs. The young Palestinian who he approached leapt at the chance to make a little extra money and never once asked why the stranger from his homeland wanted access to such information.

The man could have thrown out a decent guess, but he would have assumed wrong. David had his eyes set on a very ripe target. One that would enrage the United States and unite the Arab world. The pressure for peace in the Middle East and a free and autonomous Palestinian state was about to reach an apogee. David just needed one simple meeting to take place and he would spring the trap.