Mordechai never saw his attackers run for the hills. He never heard his car smash on the rocks below. He did not feel the force of the explosion or the searing, roaring flames consuming his flesh. He felt nothing and heard only the echo of his wife’s name as he drifted into darkness.
12
Al-Hassani retired to his suite.
There, in the sprawling executive conference room adjacent to his almost equally spacious office on the sixtieth floor — overlooking the city of Babylon, which seemed to be rising like a phoenix from the ashes — the Iraqi president met privately with a dozen of his foreign guests over hot tea and sweet cakes.
“Mr. President, with all due respect, you have caught us all completely off guard,” an Iranian CEO began when Al-Hassani opened the small meeting to questions. “If I understand you correctly, you are essentially proposing that we give up our sovereignty and turn over our oil assets to you.”
Al-Hassani paused a moment and scanned the other faces. “Is that how you all see this — as a power grab?”
“On the contrary,” said one of the few Saudi princes who had survived the near destruction of his country. “I believe you have been quite generous. You are proposing that we band together and maximize our economic and political clout rather than remain divided and thus defeated. I think it makes great sense.”
“I agree,” said the son of the Kuwaiti oil minister, who had lost his entire extended family. “Under the circumstances, it is the most hopeful news I have heard since this nightmare began.”
The Iranian businessman could not believe what he was hearing. “After all the Iraqis have done to your countries — and to mine — how can you both sit there and say that with straight faces?” he demanded. “How can you be so naive? Can you not see what is going on here?”
“How dare you lecture me about Iraqi history?” said the young Kuwaiti man, his face turning red. “Don’t let your passions blind you to the truth, my friend. The rape of our countries was not committed by Mustafa Al-Hassani. It was the act of a single madman, and President Al-Hassani is not Saddam Hussein. He is not about to invade my country or yours or fire Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia.”
“He won’t have to,” the man from Isfahan shouted back as he jumped to his feet. “You’d gladly hand over your children on a silver platter.”
“Enough,” demanded Syria’s former finance minister, who had been on vacation in Switzerland when the devastation occurred. “Enough. This is exactly our problem. We are in the midst of a terrible crisis. We must make decisions very quickly or have them made for us, and we haven’t the luxury of feuding among ourselves.
“Look around you. Have you not noticed that even with oil at over two hundred dollars a barrel, our treasuries are all but empty? Have you not seen that OPEC essentially lies in ruins? And while we bicker over trivialities, our real enemy is rapidly becoming a global superpower. If we do not join forces and get our oil and gas industries back on line, we will be ceding the entire playing field to the true and ultimate enemy of our people. Wake up, brothers. Medexco now controls the flow of oil to the world and has suddenly become the wealthiest company on earth. President Al-Hassani is not the enemy. Iraq is not the enemy. The Jews are our real enemy.”
The man from Isfahan sat down. The Syrian, an elderly man in his late seventies, asked Al-Hassani if he could make a few more points.
“By all means,” said the Iraqi president, privately wondering if Khalid Tariq, his chief political advisor, had coached this man in advance.
“You are most kind, Your Excellency,” said the Syrian. “My brothers, please, consider what the Europeans have done. They fought two world wars. They massacred tens of millions of their neighbors. Fifty years ago, no one in their right mind could ever have imagined the emergence of the European Union. Had someone predicted the rise of a common market, a common currency, a central government in Brussels, a unified foreign policy, or any of the rest of it, he would have been committed to an insane asylum.”
He pulled a single euro coin from his pocket and tossed it into the center of the enormous conference table. “But there it is. The euro is crushing the dollar, the yen, and every other currency in the world. Don’t you see it? It’s a symbol that nothing is impossible if men of goodwill come together and unite under one banner, for one cause. Open your eyes, my brothers. Europe is rising. She is triumphing. Why? Because she has unified. She is competing with the Americans and she’s winning — not divided, but together. We are witnessing the rebirth of the Roman Empire, and if we are not careful, we will be eaten alive.”
The Syrian paused and looked around the room. “Which leaves us where?” he asked. “Divided, confused, bickering, feuding, and thus consigned to the ash heap of history? Is that what you want for your children and your children’s children? Are you really so blind, so young, and so foolish as to miss the fact that what President Al-Hassani has just laid out for us is not only a brilliant vision of what our future could be, it is in fact our only hope?”
“Ken, it’s Marsha Kirkpatrick. Sorry to bother you at home.”
“No problem,” Ken Costello lied. He was just back from a marathon few days at the White House and now coming down with a fever. “What’s up?”
“I know you and Tracy are close to Eli Mordechai,” Kirkpatrick said.
“Sure,” said Costello. “We just saw him Saturday at Jon and Erin’s wedding. Why?”
“Well,” she said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
A different Iranian CEO rose to speak.
He was thirty-three and had been educated in the U.S. “I must say I agree with my brother from Damascus. Together, we could be a very powerful force, and it is not as though we have a lot of options on our own. The fact is, we need to raise reconstruction capital from somewhere, and President Al-Hassani is right. We can either join forces with him, or we can beg on our knees from our competitors — the Americans and the Europeans. I say we work together. We could create a new OPEC, a force the rest of the world would have to fear and respect. But, that said, Mr. President, we must have certain guarantees.”
Every eye turned to Al-Hassani.
“Guarantees?” the elderly Iraqi leader asked, a glint in his eyes.
“Yes,” said the young Iranian. “For one thing, everyone in this room must have real governing authority in our regions — the power to legislate, the power to tax, and so forth, like American governors and legislatures have over their states.”
“Of course,” said Al-Hassani. “It goes without question. I am proposing a republic, not a dictatorship.”
“Good,” said the Iranian. “And we would all need to share equally in the oil and gas profits, which will eventually be enormous.”
“I don’t see how this new republic could work any other way,” Al-Hassani agreed.
“We would also need to create a national governing body,” the Iranian continued, “a legislature with equal say in the decisions that are made over the currency, the tax laws, budgetary decisions, and so forth, like the American Senate.”
“God help us,” said Al-Hassani, to a round of laughter. “We will have to come up with something better than that.”
“Fair enough,” the Iranian conceded. “But that’s not all. We will have to get the Egyptians and Jordanians involved, and the Moroccans, too. We could do all this without them, but it would be far better with them.”