Charles smiled. His plane was on the image. Or rather, the Azerbaijani plane that they had bought.
“Are you certain the Americans will find that when they go looking for clues?” asked one of the men. He was a short, husky, swarthy man with a shaved head and dark, deep-set eyes. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from his downturned lips. There was a tattoo of a coiled snake on his left forearm.
“Our friend will make sure of it,” Charles said.
And they would. That was the reason for staging this attack on the Iranian oil rig. Once the incident occurred, the United States National Reconnaissance Office would search the satellite database of images from the Guneshli oil region of the Caspian. Surveillance experts would look back over the past few days to see who might have been reconnoitering near the rig. They would find the images of Charles’s plane. Then they would find something else.
Shortly after the attack, a body would be dropped into the sea — the body of a Russian terrorist, Sergei Cherkassov. Cherkassov had been captured by Azerbaijan in the NK, freed from prison by Charles’s men, and was presently being held on the Rachel. Cherkassov would be killed shortly before the attack, shot with a shell from an Iranian-made Gewehr 3 rifle. That was the same kind of bullet that would have been fired by security personnel on the rig. When the Russian’s body was found — thanks to intelligence that would be leaked to the CIA — the Americans would find photographs in the terrorist’s pockets: the photographs Charles had taken from the airplane. One of those photographs would show portions of the airplane’s wing and the same numbers seen in the satellite view. Another of the photographs would have markings in grease pencil showing the spot that particular terrorist was supposed to have attacked.
With the satellite photographs and the body of the terrorist, Charles had no doubt that the United States and the rest of the world would draw the conclusion that he and his sponsors wanted them to draw.
The wrong one.
That Russia and Azerbaijan had united to try to force Iran from its lucrative rigs in Guneshli.
FOURTEEN
The State Department maintains two offices in the vicinity of the United Nations Building on New York’s East Side. One is the Office of Foreign Missions and the other is the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Forty-three-year-old attorney Lisa Baroni was the assistant director of diplomatic claims for the Diplomatic Liaison Office. That meant whenever a diplomat had a problem with the United States’ legal system, she became involved. A legal problem could mean anything from an allegedly unlawful search of a diplomat’s luggage at one of the local airports, or a hit-and-run accident involving a diplomat, to the recent seizure of the Security Council by terrorists.
Ten days before, Baroni had been on hand to provide counsel for diplomats but found herself giving comfort to parents of children who were held hostage during the attack. That was when she’d met General Mike Rodgers. The general talked with her briefly when the siege was over. He said he was impressed by the way she had remained calm, communicative, and responsible in the midst of the crisis. He explained that he was the new head of Op-Center in Washington and was looking for good people to work with. He asked if he could call her and arrange an interview. Rodgers had seemed like a no-nonsense officer, one who was more interested in her talent than her gender, in her abilities more than in the length of her skirt. That appealed to her. So did the prospect of going back to Washington, D.C. Baroni had grown up there, she had studied international law at Georgetown University, and all her friends and family still lived there. After three years in New York, Baroni could not wait to get back.
But when General Rodgers finally called, it was not quite the call Baroni had been expecting.
It came early in the afternoon. Baroni listened as Rodgers explained that his superior, Paul Hood, had withdrawn his resignation. But Rodgers was still looking for good people and offered her a proposition. He had checked her State Department records and thought she would be a good candidate to replace Martha Mackall, the political officer who had been assassinated in Spain. He would bring her to Washington for an interview if she would help him with a problem in New York.
Baroni asked if the help he needed was legal. Rodgers assured her it was. In that case, Baroni told him, she would be happy to help. That was how relationships were forged in Washington. Through back-scratching.
What Rodgers needed, he explained, was the itinerary of NSA Chief Jack Fenwick who was in New York for meetings with United Nations delegates. Rodgers said he didn’t want the published itinerary. He wanted to know where Fenwick actually ended up.
That should have been relatively easy for Baroni to find. Fenwick had an office in her building, and he usually used it when he came to New York. It was on the seventh floor, along with the office for the secretary of state. However, Fenwick’s New York deputy said that he wasn’t coming to the office during this trip but was holding all of his meetings at different consulates.
Instead, Baroni checked the file of government-issued license plates. This listing was maintained in the event of a diplomatic kidnapping. The NSA chief always rode in the same town car when he came to New York. Baroni got the license number and asked her friend, Detective Steve Mitchell at Midtown South, to try to find the car on the street. Then she got the number of the car’s windshield-mounted electronic security pass. The ESP enabled vehicles to enter embassy and government parking garages with a minimum of delay, giving potential assassins less time to stage ambushes.
The ESP didn’t show up on any of the United States checkpoints, which were transmitted immediately to State Department security files. That meant that Fenwick was visiting foreign embassies. Over one hundred nations also transmitted that data to the DOS within minutes. Most of those were close U.S. allies, such as Great Britain, Japan, and Israel. Fenwick had not yet gone to visit any of them. She used secure e-mail to forward to Rodgers the information where Fenwick hadn’t been.
Then, just after four P.M., Baroni got a call from Detective Mitchell. One of his squad cars spotted the chief of staff’s car leaving a building at 622 Third Avenue. That was just below Forty-second Street. Baroni looked up the address in her guide to permanent missions.
The occupant surprised her.
FIFTEEN
Paul Hood arrived at the west wing of the White House at four o’clock. Even before he had finished passing through the security checkpoint, a presidential intern had arrived to show him to the Oval Office. Hood could tell he had been here at least several months. Like most seasoned interns, the freshly scrubbed young man had a slightly cocky air. Here he was, a kid in his early twenties, working at the White House. The ID badge around his neck was his trump card with women at bars, with chatty neighbors on airplanes, with brothers and cousins when he went home for the holidays. Whatever anyone else said or did, he was interacting with the president, the vice president, cabinet, and congressional leaders on a daily basis. He was exposed to real power, he was plugged into the world, and he was moving past the eyes and ears of all media where the expressions and casual utterances of even people like him could cause events that would ripple through history. Hood remembered feeling a lot of that when he was a kid working in the Los Angeles office of the governor of California. He could only imagine how much more extreme it was for this kid, the sense of being at the center of the universe.