The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (33 page)

Kate nodded. The world was probably wondering who needed CIA when there was CNN?

“What no one is reporting,” Smyth said, “and what none of the media know, is that there sure ain’t no bomb aboard that ship.”

“What? They stated categorically it was on board! Why would they pull a stunt like this without the real goods?”

“All I know is what the techies tell me,” Smyth insisted. “The
Aegean Apollon
sailed under the Overhead Crossing Line just before nightfall. The measuring devices are unequivocal—there is no radioactive material aboard that ship. None.”

Part Three

The modern port of Suez is a city of half-a-million set at the southern terminus of the eponymous canal in the Gulf of Suez, the northernmost reach of the Red Sea. Suez has three harbors—Adabya, Ain Sokhna, and Port Tawfik, and port facilities consistent with the traffic in ocean-going vessels that passes through every day.

Port Tawfik, the largest harbor and the only one within the precincts of the town, also serves as the entrance to the Canal. Suez is the venue for a petrochemical plant and an oil refinery that supplies the energy needs of Cairo by direct pipeline.

But Suez is not just about ships and canals. It is a way station for Muslim pilgrims travelling to and from Mecca, with the attendant hotel and hostel facilities they require, some quite luxurious. Suez is connected by road and rail to Cairo, the Egyptian capital, and Port Said, and tiny Ismailia, the village located midway on the canal route at the Great Bitter Lake. Suez as a whole is responsible for about five per cent of Egypt’s economy, a fact belied by its small size. It is always a beehive of activity. The tolls collected from ships constitute an important and prestigious source of revenue. Suez makes possible commercial transportation on a scale that has changed the dynamics of all shipping in the Mediterranean.

Kate Langley, Brigadier Mahmood, and Keven Smyth borrowed a weather-beaten brown Embassy Jeep with bald tires for the two-hour, 80-mile drive from Cairo to Suez, arriving there around lunchtime.

Like ordinary gawkers, they drove immediately to Port Tawfik. International media were everywhere. Portable television relay towers bloomed like metal mushrooms along the water’s edge. The air was filled with a weirdly disconcerting sound, a cacophony of desert insects—but, no, it was merely the buzzing and the clicking of fabulously expensive Nikon cameras taking still pictures on the wharf. The
Aegean Apollon
was easily spotted, still moored at the end of the convoy to Port Said, dwarfed by its larger sister vessels.

The convoy had been delayed, occasioned not by the crisis, but by an unrelated event.

As Kate and her colleagues arrived, two American naval vessels, the nuclear submarine
USS Annapolis
and the destroyer
USS Momsen
, had just pulled in from Port Said. The passage of U.S. Navy vessels was a major operation for the Suez Canal Authority, owing to safety precautions they had to take—to close off the Canal to all other traffic, shut down the tunnels and bridges, and otherwise bring Canal activity to a standstill while the heavily armed craft made their regal passage into the Gulf of Suez. The media seemed largely unaware of this secondary story, so riveted were they on the
Aegean Apollon
and the bizarre tape played the night before—and every hour since—on every news channel in the world.

“Do these journalists look like they are in fear for their lives?” Keven Smyth asked no one in particular.

“Clearly not,” Mahmood said. “Though one would think that everyone would be travelling as fast as they can
away
from Suez, not toward it.”

“Al-Zawahiri never said they were going to blow up Suez,” Kate said. “On the contrary, he said AQ would spare lives, even the lives of infidels. What would be the point of killing half a million Muslims in Suez? No rave reviews on
Al Jazeera
for doing that.”

“Yeah, but why trust Al Qaeda all of a sudden?” Smyth asked.

Mahmood pointed to the American destroyer. “Your government seems to be transferring a fair amount of firepower out of the Mediterranean and into the Red Sea. That would suggest that someone in Washington wants to put a stop to this right here.”

“The passage of these ships through the Canal was planned long before the release of that tape,” Smyth said, glancing at Kate. “But it is sort of convenient isn’t it? That television spectacular changes the dynamics. It’s a global story now, not just a few undercover intelligence people covertly chasing bad guys with a bomb.”

“Mahmood,” Kate asked. “If the Egyptians have already determined that there is no nuclear device aboard that ship, would they inform the ISI?”

“I’m not sure. Our relations with the Egyptians are still evolving in the aftermath of Mubarak’s abdication,” Mahmood replied. “Before the fall, we had reasonably good military-to-military contacts, but some Egyptian officers think Pakistan is not sufficiently secular, and of course some also feel that we are deliberately harboring Al-Zawahiri, who hates all of Egypt with a passion that is deeply resented here. He is no friend of this or any previous regime.”

“So, would they share intel with you?”

“Probably not, though we could ask.”

“Well, that leaves Phil Drayton in Port Said. We can ask him to contact Farooq and find out what the Suez Canal Authority knows. That would be helpful.”

***

Phil Drayton was easily found via Blackberry. He was sitting in his hotel room overlooking the harbor at Port Said, switching every few minutes from CNN to BBC on his television, feeling that he had been cheated out of a ringside seat at the events now unfolding one hundred miles away at the other end of the Canal.

He seemed grateful for Kate’s call and he was eager to chat with her.

“Farooq has been more than willing to talk with me,” he told her, “though only in person. He doesn’t trust phones, or any other technology.”

“One of the reasons he has lived so long,” Kate said.

“I had coffee with him at mid-morning at his seaside villa. He says something does not add up on that ship. Suez Canal Authority people are swarming all over the vessel, and they’ve arrested the captain and the crew.”

“What about Al-Greeb?”

“No sign of anyone who fits Al-Greeb’s description, and no sign of a nuclear device, but of course it will take a day or more to thoroughly go through the cargo. But, get this, no one on board made any effort to stop officials from boarding the ship or searching it. They seemed as surprised by Al-Zawahiri’s video as the press were.”

“That’s totally weird,” Kate said. “If there is no bomb aboard that ship, then Al-Zawahiri will be the world’s laughingstock. This will be the collapse of Al Qaeda instead of its renaissance.”

Al-Greeb was missing, the nuclear bomb was missing, and Al-Zawahiri is made to look a fool. What could one conclude from this? Like a dark, towering thundercloud full of evil power, a terrible thought began incubating in Kate Langley’s mind.

***

The panel truck had no windows behind the two passenger doors, but was comfortably furnished for a long road journey in privacy, with a wide couch bolted to the floor, a canvas-topped table, and a small refrigerator containing fruit juice, unleavened bread, and some cuts of mutton. The truck was covered in a thin, reddish dust, picked up on the long drive north from Al-Zaafarana on the Ras Gharib highway.

The driver pulled up to the Palmera Beach Resort at Ain Sokhna, about fifteen miles south of Suez on the west bank of the Gulf. An adobe building flanked by two swimming pools overlooked a white, sandy beach and the crystalline, cobalt waters of the Red Sea. The beach and waves were far enough away from the Canal to be free of oil slick and flotsam. A dozen bathers reclined in beach chairs on the glistening sand in the intense Egyptian heat. Children were splashing in the warm water.

Yasser al-Greeb emerged from the panel truck through double doors in the rear. He was dressed in the loosely fitting white ankle-length cotton
thawb
so common in the Arabian Peninsula, along with the checkered square
keffiyeh
characteristic of Palestine, held in place on the head by a cord coil or
egal
.

Most of the guests at the Palmera Beach Resort were stressed-out Cairenes who had driven down for a three or four day holiday from urban noise and strife, but there were enough similarly dressed Arabs at the resort that Al-Greeb did not draw attention.

Al-Greeb’s driver preceded him into the lobby of the resort, identifying himself as a servant and driver and presenting a forged Saudi passport and a reservation in the name Abdullah Hassan, which was the alias Al-Greeb was using. Abdullah Hassan claimed to be a Riyadh cement merchant in Egypt on business. The driver obtained a key to a detached villa on the beach without anyone at the front desk having seen the face of their new guest.

The villa was one of half a dozen square buildings on a narrow shelf or plateau above the sea, isolated from the access road and the main buildings of the resort. It consisted of a large, square central room with a red tile floor, a small dining room, and a spacious bedroom and bath. There were two additional guestrooms in the rear, one of which was taken by the driver.

Al-Greeb’s first order of business was to perform a ritual ablution with a bowl of water in preparation for prayer. His driver had laid his prayer mat, an expensive ‘Bellini’ design from the 17th century, facing toward the Kaaba in Mecca, a direction that was conveniently indicated by a discreet brass arrow imbedded in a tile on the floor.

After the
asr
or afternoon prayer, he put on a pair of leather sandals and sat on a verandah overlooking the ocean.

Yasser al-Greeb had spent the last twenty-four hours, while Ayman al-Zawahiri’s tape was being played world-wide, on a personal pilgrimage to the Coptic monastery dedicated to St. Anthony, in the breathtaking mountains around Al-Zaafarana. The principal church at the monastery, one of five, was near an oasis, surrounded by feathery date palms.

Though Al-Greeb usually avoided contact with Christians or Jews, the monastery provided a special exception. It had been constructed upon St. Anthony’s death in 356 AD, some 266 years before the emigration of the Prophet Mohammed from Medina to Mecca, which marks the beginning of the first year of the Islamic calendar.

Since he had walked the earth centuries before the Prophet, Al-Greeb considered St. Anthony, who had lived in a cave near the monastery as a hermit, a forerunner or herald of the enlightened religion that was to come after him, and thus a kind of pre-Islamic holy man. His life and writings were thus a legitimate object for study and meditation.

Al-Greeb had been discreet and used his visit to Al-Zaafarana as the occasion for a personal retreat, for private prayer and meditation on the eve of completion of the great task he had undertaken in the service of the Prophet. None of the white-bearded Orthodox Coptic priests, in their sweltering black robes, had even noticed the slim and silent Arab who seemed so studious and intellectual, almost in a daze, so deep was he in contemplation.

Al-Greeb had pondered the three great principles of warfare enunciated by Salah ad-Din Yusuf bin Ayyub, the conqueror from Tikrit who became ruler of Egypt and Syria. Saladin, as he was known to the Crusaders, shared freely his philosophy with Guy of Lusignan and Richard the Lionheart, but these benighted leaders had not grasped it.

‘Win without fighting by avoiding strength and attacking weakness.’

‘Strike where the enemy is most vulnerable.’

‘Use deception to confuse your foe.’

Yasser al-Greeb closed his eyes and let the gentle sound of the breeze off the Red Sea and the splashing of the small waves caress his consciousness.

He had long ago perfected his grand strategy; there was nothing he could change in that now, nor would he want to. But what of tactics? Were there any last minute changes to be made? He focussed on the sound of the waves and the breeze. He could hear and feel his breath moving in his chest. He could discern, in the deep stillness within, the beating of his own heart. It was in this state that he made himself open to Allah. It was by leaving this earthly world that he found the new world, a world of light, a plain ablaze with the wisdom of the Prophet, a place where so few were granted admittance.

***

Like many of the Western journalists in Port Tawfik, Kate, Brigadier Mahmood, and Keven Smyth gravitated to the Red Sea Restaurant on El Riad Street. It occupied the sixth floor of a seven-storey hotel opposite a neglected wharf. It served an excellent sea bass caught that morning in the Red Sea and grilled in butter and lemon juice, washed down by ice-cold Egyptian
Stella
brand beer, considered by connoisseurs to be among the finest.