The Aden Effect (44 page)

A few days later a new beggar appeared on the filthiest street of Sana'a. His tongue had been cut out and his right hand and left foot had been amputated in accordance with Quranic law governing
hirabah
. The passersby who threw him an occasional scrap of food would never know the wailing beggar's name.

E
liot Green turned off the outside lights to avoid attracting insects and stepped onto the deck off his study for a late-night smoke. Summers in D.C. were miserably hot and humid, but having a house right on the Potomac River helped. Furious that Sumner and Stark had foiled him again—just as they had in Canada—he made plans to cover his tracks in the affair. Some money had to be returned, and some planned major purchases had to be deferred as a result. It was an inconvenience, nothing more.

Sumner hadn't provided the details yet, but somehow she had succeeded in getting the Yemenis to sign an oil agreement. He slapped his hand on the deck rail in anger, then stubbed out his cigarette. When he opened the door to go back inside, he found himself facing a man standing in the shadows with a gun pointed at him. Eliot Green feared no one in Washington, D.C.—until this moment.

“Sit down, you fat, malevolent bastard,” commanded a second voice from the far wall, out of reach of the dim light coming from the hallway.

Eliot Green, who never obeyed anyone, obeyed now. He began to sweat. “I have money.”

“How nice for you,” said the second voice.

“What do you want?”

“Answers,” responded the first voice.

“To what?”

“Your role in Yemen,” answered the second man, still hidden at the other side of the room.

Green heard a click, then a recording. The voice he heard was clearly that of a man in pain, but the words were muffled.

“
Al-Amriki is a powerful man in Washington. He ordered the Navy ships away from here. He told me that he had taken weapons away from the cruiser
.”

A second voice sounded from the recorder. “
Does he work in the Navy? In the Pentagon?
”

“
No. He works for your president
.”

“
Do you know his name?
”

“
No, but Asha told me it was a color
.”

“I know your voice,” Green said to the man standing out of sight.

“You should, Eliot.” Stark stepped forward.

“You look older, Stark.”

“And you look guilty, Green. Illegal use of military assets to assassinate a Somali warlord, conspiracy in the murder of Dunner's son, conspiring to kill a U.S. ambassador and military personnel, treason. Shall I continue?”

“You have lies from a man clearly undergoing torture. You've got nothing.”

“Actually, I have quite a lot. Thanks to my friend here, I've learned that a Chinese firm made deposits into an Antiguan account that belongs to you. The payments coincide nicely with some interesting dates—the day Tomahawks landed on a certain warlord in Somalia, the day the attacks were made on Ambassador Sumner and the defense attaché, and others. The Chinese firm's payments also coincide with payments made to the al-Ghaydah family and suspected terrorists in Yemen. Nice group you've tied yourself to.”

“What do you want?” Green snarled. “You know you can't touch me.”

“C'mon, Eliot, you know the D.C. playlist: ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?'”

Green scoffed at the questions. “What did the president know? Shit, he knows what I tell him. And that's only as much as I let him know or he wants to know.”

“Which was it for Yemen?”

“He wanted to know.”

Stark snorted. “Nice. So you destabilize Yemen, help the pirates, create an incident, get the United States out of there, and make the Chinese seem like the nice peaceful people they are. And you get a whole lot of money from the Chinese. Did the president know about killing C. J. Sumner?”

“Yeah, he agreed to it. But he didn't like it. She was his favorite mistress, after all.”

“His what?”

Green burst out laughing. “You didn't know? After all this time? I thought you had half a brain, Stark. Hell, how do you think she saved you from a dishonorable discharge after your little escapade in Canada?”

“C. J.?”

“You've spent all this time with her in Yemen and she didn't tell you?” Green was getting his confidence back now. “She couldn't stop the court-martial, so she used the relationship she had developed with Becker when he was in the Senate. There's more. I'm the man who knows D.C.'s best-kept secrets, Stark. Walk away with your friend and your guns now, and I may even share a few more with you.”

“Go to hell, you bastard.”

Green reached for a cigarette but stopped when he heard an unmistakable metallic click.

“Put your hand back where I can see it,” commanded the first voice.

“What's next?” Green sneered. “Are you going to have someone arrest me?”

“No,” Stark replied.

The first man stepped forward from the shadows. Green didn't recognize him. “Who the hell are you?”

The man reached into a pocket and pulled out another pistol, this one specially made for the Soviet Spetsnaz.

“You can't shoot me,” Green said incredulously.

The man spoke with a hint of a British accent. “That's true. I can't. Unless it's in self-defense,” Golzari said. “But no one can trace this gun anyway.”

“Do you know the story of General Rommel?” Stark asked. “How he died? He was given a choice: a predetermined public trial and the Nazis' destruction of his family or a dose of cyanide. Same choice, Green. One bullet. It's easy.”

“I don't have a family. You lose.”

“Ah, but what
do
you have? Power? You'll be discredited; the president will drop you rather than further taint his administration. Hell, with this recording we just made of you implicating the president, that'll be a moot point because he'll be impeached before the next election. You'll go to jail. Money? That'll be gone with your legal fees if the government doesn't take it first. Reputation? After a long and nasty trial you'll never have a job again. Not to mention the Chinese, who probably won't be happy when all this comes out. What would they do to keep you quiet? You have nothing, Green.
You
lose.”

Green thought it over, his mind churning to come up with some way to save himself. He always had before. But not this time. He had no chance to escape.
All his precious contacts would fade away if a crack opened in his glass house of power. He'd have no one, no money, no power. Shit. Stark had won.

Green opened the desk drawer and slowly pulled the pistol out as Golzari took a stance that demonstrated he would drop him at the first sign of a wrong move. Green brought the barrel up to his face and stuck it in his mouth. “Huck hue,” he snarled, glaring at Stark instead of his accomplice holding the gun.

“Really, Green? Those are your last words? They'll go down with ‘I have but one life to live for my country.' I'll remember your words and cherish them.”

“Huck hue!” Green grunted louder, then pulled the trigger. His lifeless body dropped backward into the high-backed leather executive office chair, which rolled a few inches across the study floor.

Golzari, wearing latex gloves, handed Green's laptop to Stark and was checking Green's desk for more evidence when the two men saw the lights of a car outside.

“The police couldn't have been called this quickly,” Stark whispered. He made his way to the study's closet and slipped inside, leaving the door ajar. The digital recorder was still on; he held his gun at the ready. He motioned Golzari to go out the door leading to the deck.

The front door clicked open. No one had rung the doorbell. Stark heard footsteps coming down the hallway—at least two people. As they appeared in the doorway, the dim hall light revealed that both were Chinese. The one Stark assumed to be the leader motioned to the other, who went around Green's desk and used a flashlight to examine the bloody mess in the office chair. They spoke again in muted Chinese and began looking around the room. They were searching for something—the laptop maybe?

Stark slowed his breathing and raised his gun, preparing to emerge from the closet. He waited until the one behind the desk was bent over sifting through the drawers and then opened the door wider, keeping his gun trained on the leader.

He had taken two steps out of the closet when the man behind the desk noticed him and reached for his weapon. As stealthily as a panther, Golzari slipped up behind him and put the Russian pistol to the henchman's head.

The other Chinese man, the one closest to Stark, said something, and the man obediently pulled his hand back from his holstered weapon.

Stark stepped slowly to the right, keeping both men in view as he maneuvered to a position where his back was to the rear wall of the house and he could see all the way through the study's entrance to the front door.

“Who are you?” he asked the leader.

In the semidarkness he thought he saw a smile on the man's face.

“No one of concern to you.”

“You are of concern to me if you had an appointment with Green.”

“It would be best if you allowed us to go on our way.”

“Why?”

“Green is dead. My business with him is finished.”

“What was your business with Green?” Stark kept his eyes moving between the two men and the front door, ready for sudden movement from either direction.

“You are interfering,” the leader said, and again said something in Chinese. This time the man behind the desk didn't react.

A shadow crossed the deck, and Stark retrained his pistol toward the double doors leading outside. The second man made a move for his gun, and Golzari shot him in the arm. The double doors swung open and another Chinese man burst into the room. Stark shot him, missing the center of the torso where he had aimed. The man lived but dropped his weapon.

The leader simply stood there, immobile and uncooperative.

Golzari heard police sirens in the distance. Most likely a neighbor had heard the shot when Green killed himself and reported it.

“Our business is done. Get out now,” Stark told the leader, who motioned to his men and left the house. When they were out the door, Stark retrieved the computer from the closet where he had stashed it and followed Golzari out the back door.

On the way to his car a few streets away, Stark turned off the digital recorder and slipped it into a pocket, intending to have a friend at one of the intelligence agencies identify the voice and translate the man's words.

“Hu?” Golzari asked.

“That's my guess.”

“Why'd you let him go?”

“We got what we wanted—for now,” Stark responded.

Golzari shook his head in disgust. “Well, that went bloody well. Do you even believe in the law?”

“I believe in justice.”

C. J. sat directly across from President Hamilton Becker in the informal office at the presidential retreat in Maryland.

“It's so good to have you back, C. J. I wish I could come around this desk and take you in my arms.”

“You asked to see me, Mr. President?” she said coldly.

“C. J., this Hadiboh Accord you got us into. We didn't exactly get what we wanted, did we? The United States had no intention of entering a partnership with India.”

“If it hadn't been for Commander Stark, we wouldn't have anything at all, sir.”

“Stark. Yeah, I have a report here that Eliot and the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee put together yesterday that cites a number of issues involving him: assuming command of a U.S. Navy ship without authorization, attacking local merchant ships, attacking innocent Somali fishing dhows and killing innocent people, attacking a Chinese-flagged ship, participating in unauthorized joint operations . . . the list goes on and on.”

“Tear it up.”

“What?”

“Tear it up. Now.”

The president reared back in surprise. “You can't tell the president of the United States what to do, Miss Sumner.”

“I damn well can, Hamilton. And there's more. Here's what's going to happen. First, you're going to get Helen Forth's resignation.”

“I won't do that without checking with Eliot.”

“Second, you're going to announce tomorrow that you have decided not to accept your party's nomination for reelection at the convention in two weeks.”

“What the . . .”

“Oh, and you're going to push the party damn hard to nominate John Dunner at the convention.”

“But . . .”

“But nothing. I'm doing this to make sure you don't ever get the chance to do again what you did in Yemen. I know all about Green's role in the attack on the
Bennington
, and I know that you knew about it. I have recordings to prove it.”