Mason shrugged his shoulders, taking another sip of his wine. ‘Not me. But the president does, I’m afraid and — for now, at least — she’s in charge.’
Richards smiled, knowing that Mason had his own eyes on Abrams’ job, fancied himself as the party’s chief candidate for the next election in just over four years’ time, when Abrams would step down after completing her second term. If she won the November election.
But it was generally believed — and the polls supported the assumption — that Abrams would win again, her appeal still high after surviving the assassination attempt. Richards knew that Mason had no wish to oppose her directly this November; but he also knew that the Secretary of State did want that top job one day, and wanted to appeal to this sense of ambition.
‘You’re right,’ Richards said eventually as he slurped unceremoniously at his own wine, ‘you’re right. We can only hope that our next president’ — he looked pointedly at Mason as he spoke — ‘is more sensible, and has a better grip on both foreign policy and internal security.’
Mason nodded his head in understanding. ‘Some of us take those things very seriously,’ he said with affected gravitas. ‘Very seriously indeed.’
Richards nodded his own head, pretending to be impressed with Mason’s words, his dedication. ‘I think that perhaps this incident might play badly for Abrams,’ he said at last. ‘It would be most unfortunate of course, but — after committing to finding the ship as she’s done — if the Fu Yu Shan was never found, if — let’s say — certain obstructions were placed in her path — then it would be very embarrassing for her, politically speaking.’
Mason smiled, warming to the idea. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That would be very unfortunate, wouldn’t it?’
Richards smiled as he watched Mason finish his wine and gesture for the attendant waiter to pour him another glass. Mason picked it up, and Richards joined him with his own. ‘Here’s to the Fu Yu Shan,’ Mason said over the tinkling of crystal.
‘The Fu Yu Shan,’ Richards agreed, knocking back his own glass.
So Mason was aboard, he thought happily; and his own personal agenda was now one notch more secure.
‘Yes my friend,’ Abd al-Aziz Quraishi said into the secure telephone which rested on his office desk, ‘in sha’Allah.’ If God wills it.
It always amused him when infidels attempted to impress him with their vain attempts at expressing Islamic concepts. Quraishi knew that — for the man on the other end of the line — they were entirely empty words, devoid of meaning. For how could an infidel ever hope to understand?
But it did not matter to Quraishi; all it meant was that The Lion was a man who others needed to impress, even the man on the phone; a man with some considerable power in his own world, but who wielded no control at all over the leader of Arabian Islamic Jihad.
Quraishi put the phone down without another word and stretched out, pleased with how the day was progressing so far. This was the second good news he had received; he had already spoken earlier to Amir al-Hazmi, his beloved Hammer of the Infidel, who had assured him that preparations at the operations base were coming along exactly as planned. The scientists had not only received the necessary package, but were making good progress in understanding how to get the most out of it.
Quraishi stood and moved to his window, staring out at the busy streets of Riyadh below. The people of Saudi Arabia went about their daily lives with no idea about how those lives were about to be changed. Saudi Arabia — even the name of his beloved land offended him; but it wouldn’t last long.
For no longer would there be the corrupt rule of the House of Saud, in thrall to the American government and defiling their great nation with their continuous dealings with the hateful Satan. The hypocrisy of the regime continued to amaze Quraishi even after all these years; how could a nation which espoused shariah law and a strict interpretation of Islam also allow such gross disbelievers to desecrate their holy lands with their armed forces? How could they engage in business deals and political relationships with the enemy? It made Quraishi physically sick to think about it, but soon — very soon — America would fall, and without the backing of that nation’s all-powerful military, the King and his entire regime would crumble to dust under the might of The Lion and the AIJ.
None of the citizens in the street looked up at the building which housed the Ministry of Interior, and Quraishi was not in the least bit surprised. The Ministry was responsible for the Mabahith, the feared secret police unit which pulled men, women and children kicking and screaming from their beds in the dead of night and dragged them away to the brutal interrogation chambers dug out of the cool earth underneath the city — some located within the three subterranean levels of this very building.
Quraishi had worked within the Mabahith himself for many years — a perfect cover for a man his own organization would have recognized as a terrorist — and it had been a horrific time. To maintain his cover and progress his position, he had had to willingly torture and execute his fellow freedom-fighters, his fellow believers.
It had taken an enormous force of will to do the things that he had done, but he had trusted in Allah that it was all for a reason, believed that it would be worth the sacrifice when his final mission came to fruition, as it was now doing.
The innocent blood on his hands would be cleansed, and Allah would forgive him.
Quraishi opened a window to breathe in the air of his homeland, and the thick heat washed into the room immediately, smothering the overworked air conditioning and clawing its way over his body, sweat rising instantaneously from his pores, soaking his shirt.
He stood there looking out at Riyadh, thinking about the other reason people tried to ignore the building — it was hideous.
A gigantic upside-down concrete step-pyramid capped by a huge concrete dome, it was too modern by far for Quraishi’s traditional tastes, and merely another example of the regime’s Western perversions. The architecture of the various ministry buildings had been lauded across much of the world as bringing Saudi Arabia out of the dark ages, but to Quraishi they looked as if they had been designed by an unimaginative American kindergarten child with a box of broken crayons and a sight impediment.
Quraishi looked again at the people in the streets below him and was surprised to find a tear in his eye. He didn’t know whether it was caused by the memories of his horrifying past working in the Mabahith’s dark dungeons, or simply by his passion to release these people from their chains of slavery, bound as they were to a house of corruption and evil; but whatever the reason, he wiped the tear away, his face hard.
Now was not the time for emotion; not when there was still serious work to be done.
He could release all the tears he had when America was destroyed and Arabia had reestablished its true position as a holy land, and a paradise for true believers.
3
Cole’s head emerged from the dark waters, scanning the river ahead of him with his waterproof night-vision goggles, an unknowing gift from the dead arms dealer Wong Xiang.
Cole had managed to access Wong’s computer files through the cellphone’s internet connection, and had soon found reference to several storage warehouses rented in Wong’s name throughout western Java.
One had been not too far from Serang, a secure lock-up in the small coastal town of Cilegon, and Cole had headed straight there, wanting to beat the authorities before they accessed Wong’s records and made their own way there.