Al-Jama said, “Peace equals stagnation, my esteemed Secretary. When man is at peace, his soul atrophies and his creative spirit is snuffed. It is only through conflict that we are truly the beings that Allah intended. War brings out bravery and sacrifice. What does peace bring us? Nothing.”
“Peace brings us prosperity and happiness.”
“Those are things of the flesh, not of the spirit. Your peace is about owning a better television set and fancier car.”
“While your war brings suffering and despair,” Fiona countered.
“Then you do understand. For these are things of the spirit, not the body. These are the things we are meant to feel. Not the comfort of a grand home but the experience of shared hardship. This is what brings us closer to Allah. Not your democracy, not your rock music, not your pornographic movies. They distract us from our true reason for existence. We serve no other purpose on earth than to subjugate ourselves to Allah’s will.”
“Who knows what His will is?” she asked. “Who decided you know His intentions more than anyone else? The Koran forbids suicide and yet you sent a young man to intentionally crash a planeload of people into a mountainside.”
“He died a martyr.”
“No,” she said sharply. “You convinced some poor boy that he was dying a martyr and he would have his seventy-seven virgins in heaven, but don’t tell me for one instant you believe it. You are nothing more than a cheap thug trying to wrest power from others and exploiting the blind faith of a few to obtain your goals.”
Suleiman Al-Jama clapped his hands together and gave a delighted laugh. He switched to English. “Bravo, Secretary Katamora. Bravo.”
Though he couldn’t see it because of the burqa, a surprised look crossed Fiona’s face. The sudden shift in language and the conversation’s intensity momentarily confused her.
“You seem to recognize that this has always been about power on the world stage. Centuries ago, England gained it using her superior Navy. The United States has it now because of her wealth and nuclear arsenal. What do the nations of the Middle East have but the willingness of some of their citizens to blow themselves up? A crude weapon, yes. But let me ask how much your country has spent on Homeland Security since a handful of men with hardware-store knives took down two of your largest buildings? A hundred billion? Five hundred billion?”
The number was closer to a trillion, but Fiona said nothing. This wasn’t going as she had expected at all. She had thought Al-Jama would spout a bunch of corrupted passages from the Koran to explain why he’d done what he had, not expose himself as a man bent on dominance.
“Before the attacks on the World Trade Center, one in five hundred thousand Muslims was willing to martyr himself. Since then, the number has doubled. That’s ten thousand men and women ready to blow themselves up in the jihad against the West. Do you really think you can stop ten thousand attacks once they are unleashed? People like that boy who flew the plane and Bin Laden in his cave in Pakistan may believe in the cause of jihad, Madame Secretary, but they are mere pawns, tools to be exploited and discarded. We have a near-unlimited pool of willing martyrs now, and soon we will begin to use them in coordinated attacks that will see the world’s boundaries redrawn in the way I have always envisioned.”
He spoke not as a zealot but almost like a corporate president outlining growth projections for his company.
“You don’t need to do this.” Fiona found herself pleading.
“It’s too late to stop.” He pulled the kaffiyeh from down below his chin. Fiona had to will herself not to faint when she saw his face. “And your death will be the first strike.”
FOURTEEN
NO SOONER HAD LINC GOTTEN BEHIND THE WHEEL OF THE Pig and fired the engine than Mark Murphy opened the truck’s voice-activated communications system.
“Call Max.”
The ringing of a telephone sounded inside the off-road vehicle. The Pig was so well built, they could barely hear the engine as Linc guided the truck out of its hiding place and pointed its blunt snout toward the Tunisian border.
A voice no one recognized answered the call. “Max’s Pizza. Is this for pickup or delivery?”
“Be something if they would deliver,” Linc said. “I could go for a slice.”
“Sorry. Wrong number.” Mark cut the connection and tried again. “Call Max Hanley.”
This time Max’s voice muttered hello when the phone was answered.
“Max, it’s Mark Murphy. I’m in the Pig with Linda and Linc.”
“Glad you finally called,” Max said. “The stuff ’s hit the fan since you went dark.”
“I can imagine. Are you in the op center?”
“Yeah.”
“Have someone pull up the screen for the bio tracking chips.”
“Just a second.” There was a moment’s pause. While they waited, Mark used the Pig’s computer to jack into the Oregon’s closed-circuit television system so the image of the futuristic control room popped up on his screen. Max was standing next to the communications station, watching over the duty officer’s shoulder.
“That’s interesting,” Hanley muttered. “I have the three of you heading west at forty miles per hour, presumably in the Powered Investigator Ground, while the Chairman is going northeast at a hundred miles an hour. What happened, you guys get into an argument?”
“Funny. Make sure you stay on him. We’re on our way to the Tunisian border. Juan’s with the people we’re certain brought down the Secretary’s plane. We don’t believe she’s dead.”
“Did you say the plane was brought down?”
“I did, and I don’t think Fiona Katamora was on it when it crashed.”
“How the hell did they pull that off? Tell me in a second. You’d better hightail it out of there. Twenty minutes ago, the Libyans announced that they’ve located the wreckage, and their government has given permission for a team from our NTSB to examine it. They had been prestaged in Cairo and will be in Tripoli by noon, but I’m sure the Libyans will be swarming that area sooner.”
“They’re not going to find anything,” Mark told him. “A team of men came in on a chopper to demolish the site and ruin any chance of a reconstruction. They moved wreckage around, took some away, and smashed up just about everything they could lay their hands on. They even brought a lame camel to lay tracks all over the place.”
“A lame camel?”
“To make it look like nomads had done the damage,” Mark explained.
“Someone’s thinking a couple of steps ahead,” Max grunted.
“Is the NTSB coming to Libya general knowledge?” Linda asked.
“No. Langston told me it was cleared at the highest levels and kept under wraps.”
“That means the tangos have a source in the government if they knew to come back and mess with the wreckage.”
“Or they’re government sponsored,” Max countered. “Mark, you said you don’t think Secretary Katamora was on the plane.”
“There’s pretty convincing evidence that the plane landed in the desert before the crash.”
“You think they took her off?”
“Why else would they land it, take off again, and slam it into a mountaintop? They want the world to think she’s dead.”
“What do they gain by that?”
“Come on, Max,” Linda said. “She’s the damned Secretary of State. She’s either an intelligence coup for these people or the best bargaining chip in history. Remember, she was the last President’s National Security Advisor. If we think she’s dead, we aren’t going to be looking for her. They could extract information from now until doomsday and we’d never be the wiser.”
There was a pause in the conversation as all of them digested the implications of Linda’s theory. The terrorists getting their hands on Fiona Katamora was probably more damaging than if they had kidnapped the President. As a politician only in his first year of office, he was kept away from the operational minutia that went into fighting the war on terror. Because of the positions she’d held over the years, and the insatiable ability of her mind to absorb details, Fiona knew more about America’s ongoing operations and the nation’s plans for the future than the Chief Executive.