“As you all know, Mecca and Medina are the two holiest sites to Islam. Because of that, they are off-limits to any non-Muslims. Kasim is the only member of our team who practices the Islamic faith, so he was selected to lead the teams. The emir arranged for a cargo plane and a fleet of multipurpose street and trail motorcycles to be shipped along with the members of Kasim’s group to Yemen. They arrived early this morning and slipped across the border to Saudi Arabia by driving along a wadi, or dry streambed. The latest update shows them already past the Saudi town of Sabya and driving north. Then they will board public buses to take them to the two mosques. Once there, they will spread out and search for explosives.”
“What about the shipping containers?” Halpert asked.
“As you all know,” Hanley continued, “the team that was in Maidenhead discovered traces of a toxin that we believe was sprayed onto the prayer rugs inside the containers. Kasim dispatched eight men on a commercial flight to Riyadh and they have already taken up positions around the cargo area where the shipping containers are stored, awaiting delivery to Mecca. Quite simply, we caught a break there. If those containers had arrived on time, they probably would have been unloaded by now and the toxins would have been released into the air. As it was, Hickman was so late with the delivery that the trucks were rescheduled for other tasks. According to the schedule the NSA intercepted from the planner’s PDA, he moved the delivery date to tomorrow, the seventh. The plan is to have the team at the cargo depot hook up the containers themselves and start down the road to Mecca. Somewhere between Riyadh and Mecca, we’ll need to destroy them or move them out of the country.”
Just then the telephone in the conference room buzzed, and Cabrillo walked over and answered. “Got it,” he said, and hung the receiver back in the cradle. Hanley looked at him in expectation.
“That was Overholt,” Cabrillo said. “His agent detected radiation near the curtain around the Kaaba. Hickman somehow managed to switch the meteorites.”
IN LONDON, MICHELLE Hunt had spent the last few days cooped up in a hotel room being grilled by CIA agents. She was tired but still cooperating. Quite frankly, the CIA was beginning to realize there was little she could do to help their efforts. Right from the start they had dismissed the idea of her calling Hickman. Even if he was carrying a portable telephone, once he saw that she was not phoning from her usual number he’d know something was up.
A plane had been scheduled to fly her back to the United States, and it was scheduled to leave within the hour. For the most part, all Hunt had been able to do was shed some light on Hickman’s life.
And that she had done in minute detail. They had asked her about everything, and she had complied. The agent in charge just needed to wrap up details on a few more points and he could submit his report.
“Now, back to the beginning,” the agent said. “When you first met, you said he flew into Los Angeles to inspect an oil property he was thinking of purchasing.”
“Yes,” Michelle Hunt said, “we met that day at lunch at Casen’s. I had a gift certificate from a girlfriend for a recent birthday. I was not in a position to afford expensive meals—even lunch—at that time.”
“What happened next?”
“He came over to my table, introduced himself, and I asked him to join me,” Hunt said. “We were there all afternoon. He must have known the owners because when the lunch crowd cleared out, they left us alone. They were setting the tables for dinner around us—but no one said anything.”
“Did you eat dinner there that night?”
“No,” Hunt said, “Hal arranged for us to fly over the oil field at sunset so he could check it out. I would guess he was trying to impress me.”
“So you flew over the field and glanced at it from the window of the plane?”
“No windows,” Hunt said. “It was a biplane. I sat in the seat behind.”
“Hold on,” the agent said, “it was a two-seater?”
“An old Stearman, if I remember correctly,” Hunt said.
“Who was flying?” the agent asked.
“Well, Hal was,” Hunt said, “who the hell else?”
“Mr. Hickman is a pilot?” the agent asked quickly.
“Well, he was back then,” Hunt said. “If Howard Hughes did it, then Hal tried it too.”
The agent raced for the telephone.
“THIS ADDS ANOTHER layer to the picture,” Hanley said. “Now we not only need to recover Abraham’s Stone from Hickman, we have to switch it back without being detected. The president has advised us that he wants to keep the Saudi government out of this operation if at all possible.”
At that moment one of the hundred-inch monitors in the conference room lit up. The screen was split in half vertically, and Stone could be seen on the left side. “Sir, I’m sorry,” he said, “I know you asked not to be interrupted, but this is important. Watch the other half of the screen.”
An image filled the right half.
“This is from a pair of cameras the CIA stationed at the locks on the Suez Canal. The image was recorded within the last fifteen minutes.”
The camera panned across an old work ship. A couple of crewmen were working the lines as the ship passed through the locks. A single man stood on the rear deck drinking coffee. The camera caught him looking up.
“I overlaid it with the program Ms. Huxley created,” Stone said.
Everyone in the room watched as the 3-D image floated over the man. The edges of the lines matched up perfectly. When the man in the boat moved, the computer-generated re-creation tracked along.
“Sir,” Stone said quickly, “that’s Halifax Hickman.”
“Where’s the ship now, Stoney?” Cabrillo said.
The left side of the screen showed Stone in the control room glancing at another monitor. “She’s out of the locks and slowing to come into Port Said, Egypt.”
“George—” Cabrillo started to say.
“We should be fueled and ready by now,” Adams said, rising from his seat.
Four minutes later the Robinson lifted from the deck. It was two hundred miles from the Oregon’s position to Port Said. But the Robinson would never reach Egypt.
51
VANDERWALD’S PLANE CAUGHT a tailwind and they arrived a half hour early.
Traffic was nonexistent; it would be another hour before commuters began to clog the roads heading to work, and he arrived in front of his house only fifteen minutes after stepping off the plane. He gathered a pile of mail from the mailbox on the street, slid it under his arm and carried his single bag to the front door.
Once he was inside the entryway, he set the bag on the floor and placed the mail on a desk.
He was just turning around to close the door when a man appeared from the side and the sound of footsteps came from the hall leading to the kitchen.
“Morning, shitbird,” the first man said, pointing a gun with a silencer screwed to the barrel at Vanderwald’s head.
The man said nothing else. He simply lowered the weapon and shot Vanderwald in both knees. Vanderwald dropped to the floor and began to scream in pain. The second man was in the entryway now, and he crouched by Vanderwald, who was rolling on the floor. “Do you want to explain this invoice we found on your computer for a DC-3?”
Two minutes and two well-placed shots later, the men had their answer.
A minute later the first man delivered the coup de grace.
The two men exited by the rear door and made their way through an alley off the rear of the house, then down a side street to where they had stashed their rental car. They slid into the seats, and the passenger peeled off his gloves and dialed his cell phone.