“Is it what I heard?” Price asked, coming up the corridor.
“Do you ever sleep?” Then he thought about it. “I want you in on this.”
“Why me, sir, I’m not–”
“You’re supposed to know about assassinations, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Then right now you’re more valuable to me than a spook.”
THE TIMING COULD have been better. Daryaei had been surprised by the information just delivered. Not in the least bit displeased by it–except maybe the timing. He paused for a moment, whispering a prayer first of thanks to Allah, then for the soul of the unknown assassin–assassin? he asked himself. Perhaps “judge” would be a better term for the man, one of many who’d been infiltrated into Iraq ages ago, while the war had still been going on. Most had merely disappeared, probably shot one way or another. The overall mission had been his idea, not nearly dramatic enough for the “professionals” working in his intelligence service. Largely leftovers from the Shah’s Savak–trained by the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s– they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They’d proceeded along “conventional” lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah’s perverse blessings somehow or other–but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely
201
the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d’etat such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he’d become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.
It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn’t know all the things he had done, or all the people he’d dispatched.
THE DIGITIZED RENDITION of the event didn’t change much, though now he had a more professional opinion of the options:
“Mr. President, a guy with a Silicon Graphics workstation could fake this,” the NIO told him. “You’ve seen movies, and movie film has much higher resolution than a TV set. You can fake almost anything now.”
“Fine, but your job is to tell me what did happen,” Ryan pointed out. He’d seen the same few seconds of tape eight times now, and was growing tired of instant replay.
“We can’t say with absolute certainty.”
Maybe it was the week’s sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the stress of the job. Maybe it was the stress of having to face his second crisis. Maybe it was the fact that Ryan was himself still a carded national intelligence officer. “Look, I’m going to say this once: Your job isn’t to cover your ass. Your job is to cover mine!”
“I know that, Mr. President. That’s why I’m giving
202
you all the information I have. . . .” Ryan didn’t have to listen to the rest of the speech. He’d heard it all before, a couple of hundred times. There had even been cases when he’d said similar things himself, but in Jack’s case, he’d always hung his hat on one of the options.
“Scott?” Jack asked the acting SecState.
“The son of a bitch is dead as yesterday’s fish,” Adler replied.
“Disagreement?” President Ryan asked the others in the room. Nobody contradicted the assessment, giving it a sort of blessing. Even the NIO would not disagree with the collective opinion. He’d delivered his assessments, after all. Any mistakes now were the Secretary of State’s problem. Perfect.
“Who was the shooter?” Andrea Price asked. The answer came from CIA’s Iraq-desk officer.
“Unknown. I have people running tapes of previous appearances just to make sure that he’s been around before. Look, from all appearances it was a senior member of his protection detail, with the rank of an army colonel, and–”
“And I damned well know everybody on my detail,” Price concluded the statement. “So, whoever it was, he belonged there, and that means whoever pulled this off managed to get somebody all the way inside, close enough to make the hit, and committed enough to pay the price for it. It must have taken years.” The continuation of the tape–they’d watched that only five times–showed the man crumble after a cavalcade of pistol shots at point-blank range. That struck Agent Price as odd. You damned well wanted to bag such people alive. Dead men still didn’t tell any tales, and executions could always be arranged. Unless he’d been killed by other members of a conspiracy. But how likely was it that more than one assassin had made it that far? Price reflected that she could ask Indira Gandhi that someday. Her whole detail had turned on her one afternoon in a garden. For Price that was the final infamy, killing the person you were sworn to defend. But, then, she hadn’t sworn to defend such people as that. One other thing on the tape got her attention: “Did you notice the body language?”
203
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“The way the gun came up, the way he took the shot, the way he just stood there and watched. Like a golfer, it’s called follow-through. He must have waited a long time for the chance. He damned sure thought about it for a long, long time. He must have dreamed about it. He wanted the moment to be perfect. He wanted to see it and enjoy it before he went down.” She shook her head slowly. “That was one focused, dedicated killer.” Price was actually enjoying herself, chilling though the subject of the meeting was. More than one President had treated the Secret Service agents as if they were furniture, or at best nice pets. It wasn’t often that big shots asked their opinion of much more than narrow professional areas, like where a bad guy might be in a particular crowd.
“Keep going,” CIA said.
“He must have been from outside, a guy with a totally clean record, no connection at all with anybody who made noise in Baghdad. This wasn’t a guy getting even for somebody taking his mother out, okay? It was somebody who worked his way up the system, slow and careful all the way.”
“Iran,” CIA said. “Best guess, anyway. Religious motivation. No way he’d walk away from the hit, so it had to be somebody who didn’t care. That could also mean straight revenge, but Ms. Price is correct: his people were clean in that respect. Anyway, it wasn’t the Israelis, wasn’t the French. The Brits don’t do this anymore. The domestic angle is probably taken out by their vetting procedures. So it wasn’t for money. It wasn’t for personal or family motives. I think we can discount political ideology. That leaves religion, and that means Iran.”
“I can’t say I’m familiar with all the intelligence side, but from looking at the tape, yeah,” Andrea Price agreed. “It’s like he was saying a prayer, the way he killed the guy. He just wanted the moment to be perfect. He didn’t care about anything else.”
“Somebody else to check that out?” Ryan asked.
“FBI, their Behavioral Sciences people are pretty good at reading minds. We work with them all the time,” Price responded.
204
“Good idea,” CIA agreed. “We’ll rattle the bushes to ID the shooter, but even if we can get good information, it might not mean anything.” . “What about the timing?”
“If we can stipulate that the shooter was there for a while–we have enough tapes of public appearances to determine that–then timing is an issue,” CIA thought.
“Oh, that’s just great,” the President opined. “Scott, now what?”
“Bert?” SecState said to his desk officer. Bert Vasco was the State Department senior desk officer for that country. Rather like a specialist in the trading industry, he concentrated his efforts on learning everything he could about one particular country.
“Mr. President, as we all know, Iraq is a majority Shi’a Muslim country ruled by a Sunni minority through the Ba’ath political party. It has always been a concern that the elimination of our friend over there could topple–“