Full Black

CHAPTER 2

Mustafa Karami had not been expecting another call, especially one from Waqar. Waqar was supposed to be driving. Nafees was to send a text message when they got close to Uppsala. Something must have gone wrong. Karami answered his phone with trepidation.

“Please, you must help me,” said a distraught voice.

“Who is this?”

“Mansoor.”

“Why are you calling from this number?”

“There’s been an accident. I don’t know what to do.”

Karami was a thin, middle-aged man with a wispy gray beard. He had been extremely sick as a child growing up in Yemen and had almost died. The sickness had affected his physical development. He appeared frail and much older than he actually was.

Despite his physical limitations his mind was incredibly sharp. He was well suited to the role he had been assigned. Nothing escaped his flinty gaze or his keen intellect.

Having been brutally tortured as a young man by the Yemeni government, he had learned the hard way to place operational security above all else. He didn’t like speaking on cell phones. “Where are your traveling companions?”

“I think they’re both dead.”

“Dead?” Karami demanded.

“A car swerved and we hit a tree.”

“What kind of car?”

“I don’t know. Who cares what kind of car? Waqar and Nafees are dead.”

The young man was borderline hysterical. Karami tried to calm him down. “Are you injured?” he asked calmly.

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I hit my head. There’s some blood.”

Karami needed to bring him in. “Is the vehicle operable?”

“No,” replied the young man.

“Were there any witnesses? Have the police been called?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know that either. What am I supposed to do? Are you going to come get me or not?”

Karami forgave the boy his insolence. He was scared and very likely in shock. “Tell me what you see around you, so I can discern where you are.”

Chase rattled off a few of the landmarks nearby.

“Okay,” Karami replied as he removed a map from his desk. “That’s good. I believe I know where you are. I will send two of the brothers to pick you up. There’s a village less than three kilometers up the road. As you enter it, you’ll see a grocery market on your left. Beyond that is a soccer pitch. Wait there and the brothers will come for you.”

“Praise be to Allah,” said Chase.

Karami gave him a list of things he wanted him to do and then ended the call.

Turning to two of his men, Karami relayed what had happened and dispatched them to pick up the young computer wizard.

When the men had gone, Karami turned to his most devoted acolyte, Sabah. Sabah was a large, battle-hardened Palestinian. In his previous life, before becoming a mujahideen, he had been a corrupt police officer in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

“I want you to find this accident, Sabah, and I want you to make sure that it was in fact an accident. Do you understand?”

Sabah nodded.

“Good,” Karami said in response. “Whatever you learn, you tell no one but me. Understood?”

Once again, Sabah nodded.

“We cannot afford accidents. Not with everything that has happened. We can only trust each other. No one else.” With a wave of his hand, Karami ordered him out. “Go.”

He was paranoid, but he had cause. So many of their plans had been undone that Mustafa Karami was suspicious of everything and everyone.

He hoped that Sabah would be able to get to the bottom of it. It was a small country road, after all, and not very often traveled. Karami had selected the route himself. If the accident scene was undisturbed, Sabah would be able to ascertain what had happened. If the police or bystanders were already there, there would be nothing he could do.

If that was the case, Karami would have to conduct his own investigation. It would begin with Mansoor Aleem himself. Until he was satisfied, he could not risk trusting even the nephew of a great man like Aazim Aleem. Anyone could be corrupted. Anyone could be gotten to.

Fulfilling their final obligation was all that mattered now. Karami had sworn an oath. He would stick to that oath and he would not allow anything or anyone to get in his way.

He was reflecting on whether it was a good idea to bring Mansoor to the actual safe house or find somewhere else for him to remain temporarily when the Skype icon on his laptop bounced.

He had been sent a message from the man whom he served-the Sheikh from Qatar.

Everything is in place? asked the Sheikh.

Everything is in place, typed Karami.

Stay ready, replied the Sheikh. God willing, you will be called to move soon. And with that, the Sheikh was gone. Karami refocused his mind on Mansoor. For the time being, he would have to be kept elsewhere, away from the safe house and the rest of the cell. There was too much at stake.

• • •

The man who called himself “Sheikh from Qatar” closed his laptop with his liver-spotted hands and looked out the window of his cavernous apartment. He had quite literally a thirty-million-dollar view of the Manhattan skyline. It was stunning. Even at this predawn hour.

He had always made it a policy to be up before the markets. Despite his advancing age, he found he needed less sleep, not more.

As he privately swilled astronomically expensive vitamin cocktails and fed on exotic hormone and stem cell injections, he publicly told people he’d had abundant reserves of energy ever since he was a boy and credited genetics and his impeccable constitution as the source of his vigor.

Such was the Janus-faced character of James Standing. Even his name was a lie.

Born Lev Bronstein to Romanian Jewish parents, he was sent from Europe to live with relatives in Argentina at the outset of World War II. His parents remained behind, tending their business and hoping things would get better. They never made it out of the death camps.

At thirteen, he ran away from his Argentinean relatives, renounced his Judaism, and changed his name to Jose Belmonte-an amalgamation of the names of two world-famous Spanish bullfighters at the time-Jose Gomez Ortega and Juan Belmonte Garcia.

The newly minted Belmonte found his way to Buenos Aires, where he took a job as a bellboy in a high-end hotel. Thanks to his drive and proficiency for languages, he started filling in on the switchboard at night, eventually moving into the position full-time. It was at this point that he began to build his fortune.

Belmonte, nee Bronstein, listened in on all of the hotel’s telephone conversations, especially those of its wealthy guests. At fifteen, he entered the stock market. By eighteen, he was perfecting his English, and at twenty, he had changed his name yet again and moved to America.

Standing had been the name of a handsome American guest with a gorgeous, buxom, blond American wife who visited the hotel in Buenos Aires every winter. To Belmonte, they looked like movie stars and represented everything he felt the world owed him. Using the first name of one of his favorite American writers, James Fenimore Cooper, he adopted the Standing name as his surname and James Standing was born.

He emigrated to America, where he parlayed his substantial savings and penchant for trading on insider information into one of the greatest financial empires the world had ever seen.

Now, from his gilded perch overlooking the capital of world finance, he read all of the papers every morning before most of the city was even awake.

Regardless of his morning ritual, he would have been up early today anyway. In fact, he hadn’t been able to sleep very well. He was waiting for an important phone call.

Someone, to put it in vulgar street terminology, had fucked with the wrong guy. That “wrong guy” being James Standing. And the someone who had fucked with the wrong guy was about to be taught a very painful and very permanent lesson.

In fact, it would be the ultimate lesson and would stand as a subtle reminder to the rest of his enemies that there were certain people who were not to be crossed. Not that Standing would take credit for what was going to happen. That would be incredibly foolish. Better to simply let people assume. The mystery of whether he’d been involved or not would only add to the aura of his considerable power.

Though he’d gotten to where he was by breaking all of the rules, he still needed to appear to be playing by them-at least for a little while longer.

Soon, though, like an old hotel on the Las Vegas strip, America was going to be brought down in a controlled demolition. And when that happened, the rules would no longer apply to James Standing.