Maybe he should have let McCoy take the wheel, but things were happening so fast. They'd be moving in a second — they'd be moving now if Bennett were leading. He couldn't say it out loud. He could barely say it to himself. But the fact was that even a bulletproof, armor-plated limousine wouldn't be enough if they were stopped and surrounded. Eventually, the mob would break in, the four of them would be yanked out, and, if history were any guide… it was a thought he couldn't finish.
Yuri Gogolov held the satellite remote in his hand.
He was transfixed by the coverage from Gaza. He was watching on four different television sets, while checking the latest updates from AP, Reuters, and Agence France Presse on a laptop. The images of fire and death were mesmerizing. Thus far, the operation was going far better than expected. But these were just the first, early minutes. The world had no idea what still lay in store.
MacPherson's thoughts turned to his own Judas Iscariot.
Stuart Morris Iverson — held in isolation under a twenty-four-hour-a-day suicide watch at a federal maximum-security prison — wasn't talking. He re fused to cooperate unless the Justice Department — and the president him self — promised to take the death penalty off the table. The man wasn't asking for a pardon, or immunity. He knew such inducements were out of the question. He was simply negotiating for his life, and he was a world-class negotiator.
Unless MacPherson spared his life, Iverson — the man who'd served as president and CEO of the Joshua Fund and GSX, who'd served as the na tional chairman of then-governor MacPherson's campaign to succeed George W. Bush as the forty-fourth president of the United States, who'd been approved by the Senate ninety-eight to nothing to become MacPherson's Treasury Secretary — would simply refuse to talk. He'd refuse to divulge what he knew about a terrorist conspiracy whose tentacles reached from Moscow to Tehran. He'd refuse to tell the FBI the inside story of Yuri Gogolov— the shadowy Russian ultranationalist — or his Iranian operations chief, Mohammed Jibril.
FBI Director Scott Harris and Attorney General Neil Wittimore didn't care. The case against Iverson was solid. They didn't need a plea bargain. They needed to fire a shot heard round the world. The president had to send the world a message: terrorists would be hunted down and brought to a final justice. To send Stuart Iverson, a personal friend of the president, into the gas chamber — or order him to receive a lethal injection — would do just that. Yet to show even the slightest bit of leniency — especially with Iverson— would be devastating to the country's war-on-terror efforts, Harris argued. It was a compelling case, even to a president who could generally be described as willing but ill at ease with enforcing the death penalty.
"Mr. President, you've got an urgent call from the Sit Room."
Was there any other kind?
The president looked up from his reading.
"Which line?" he asked.
"Line three, sir."
MacPherson picked up the phone and found his National Security advisor on the line. Marsha Kirkpatrick quickly briefed the president on the crisis in Gaza.. She explained that Bennett and his team were pinned down, and a torrential electrical storm made it impossible to send in a rescue team by air — not yet anyway.
MacPherson tried not to betray the emotions suddenly forcing their way to the surface. But it wasn't easy, and for a few moments, the line was silent. He was numb. He'd never even considered the possibility of Arafat being assassinated. Certainly not by a fellow Palestinian. And certainly not by Arafat's own personal security chief. It was unthinkable. Abu Mazen, maybe. Mazen didn't have Arafat's stature in Palestine, much less throughout the Arab world. He might never develop it. But Arafat was Palestine. He was the face, the voice, the spirit of the Palestinian revolution.
Most of MacPherson's top advisors considered Arafat a major obstacle to peace. Jack Mitchell's guys at the CIA were adamant that MacPherson should refuse to even acknowledge Arafat's presence or give him a role. The Clinton team had courted Arafat aggressively, constantly inviting him to the White House. But what had they gained? The most violent phase of the Palestinian intifada began during the Clinton years. So did the suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And the evidence was compelling — the vast majority of those suicide bombings (Mitchell called them "homicide bombings" to put the emphasis on the fact that their purpose was murder, not self-sacrifice) were encouraged, paid for, and/or explicitly or tacitly approved of by Arafat and his henchmen.
The Bush team had reversed course. They'd refused to deal with Arafat directly. They'd isolated him internationally. They'd given Israel the green light to invade the West Bank and Gaza and rip up Saudi- and Iranian-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist cells. And they'd pressured Arafat and the Palestinian Legislative Council to appoint Abu Mazen as a new, "moderate" prime minister, someone who the United States, the West, and Israel just might be able to deal with over time.
Everyone knew the Islamic radicals felt threatened by Mazen's rise to power and by even the slightest prospect that Arafat and Mazen might con sider accepting the new American peace plan. But could anyone have predicted this level of carnage? MacPherson began to reconsider his own strategy. He'd tried to combine Clinton's willingness to deal with Arafat with Bush's insistence on dealing with Abu Mazen. Had he moved too fast? Had he pushed too hard?
They made a good team, thought Bennett.
McCoy was smart and gutsy and she had great instincts. Based in the GSX London office — overlooking the Thames and the British Parliament — at one point she'd been jetting back and forth across "the pond" several times a week, a Virgin Atlantic preferred customer. She'd often met with Bennett in New York or the Denver headquarters until the wee hours of the morning, mapping out strategies, crunching numbers, debating best- and worst-case scenarios. The two had traveled all over the world together during the last eight months — Davos, Paris, Tokyo, Cairo, Riyadh, and Jerusalem, to name a few — always business, never personal.
McCoy had earned his trust over the past few years, not an easy thing to do, and he'd twice promoted her. When he'd hired her, he'd known she was the best-qualified woman who had applied, and the best looking. She had an economics degree from UNC Chapel Hill, an MBA from Wharton, and a license to make money from the Securities and Exchange Commission. What he hadn't known was that she also had a license to kill from the CIA. She'd worked for Bennett for almost three years, but only in the last month had he discovered who she really was — a mole in his operation, planted by the president and the director of Central Intelligence to watch his back and clear him for government service. Any way you sliced it, she was a mystery, and the longer Bennett knew her, the more he wanted to figure her out.
McCoy adjusted her earpiece and buckled her seat belt. She still couldn't get a bead on what was happening. The mobs on the streets now couldn't be the "silent Palestinian majority." These couldn't be people who Ibrahim Sa'id claimed were exhausted by the intifada, longing for peace and willing to accept a two-state solution with Israel for the sake of their children and grandchildren.
These had to be "Mohammed's mobs," drawn from a small but highly radicalized subsection of Palestinian society who saw themselves as hard-core Islamic loyalists. They despised Israel and were deeply committed to jihad, a "holy war" against the "Zionist infidels" and their conspirators from the "Great Satan" known as America. They weren't the vast majority of Pales tinians. They weren't even a plurality. They weren't "nominal" Muslims. They were true believers, and — though she'd never admit it to anyone in this car — what they believed terrified McCoy.