The Last Days (7 page)

It was Bennett who'd insisted in 1998 that the tech-averse MacPherson take a major position in America Online at $7 a share. AOL had just shot past 15 million subscribers and was gobbling up CompuServe and ICQ, pioneers of instant messaging. Bennett's sources told him this was just the beginning.

At first, MacPherson resisted. He worried AOL was just a fad. CEO Steve Case was a new kid on the block.
You've got mail?
What kind of slogan was that? But Bennett practically begged him to take the company seriously. Then the stock shot past $10 a share. Suddenly MacPherson was ready to get in the game and play big. The Joshua Fund scooped up 50 million shares at an average of $11.47 a share.

Bennett was terrified. It was one thing to work your sources, trust your gut and make a recommendation. It was another thing for your boss to place a half-billion-dollar bet on
your
advice. What if he was wrong? What if the stock sunk like a rock and his job with it? Bennett became a man obsessed. He made it his mission in life to know every detail he possibly could about AOL, Steve Case, and anyone and everyone connected in any way, shape, or form with the company.

In the spring of 2000, AOL's stock hit a high of $72 a share, giving the Joshua Fund a pretax profit of over 3 billion dollars. MacPherson wanted to bolt. Bennett said no. They were just getting started. Then the tech crash began. AOL stock plunged to $47 a share in just a few months. MacPherson was furious. He prepared to dump all of the Joshua Fund's AOL holdings, but Bennett urged him to hang on for a little while longer. They were still $36 above their purchase price. AOL was still acquiring good companies at bargain prices. They'd just nabbed Map Quest. They were launching new divisions in Argentina and Mexico. ICQ had just hit 85 million members.

Bennett was onto something hot. His sources were telling him Steve Case was plotting to take over media giant Time Warner. The news hadn't yet broken publicly. But it would soon and the stock would skyrocket. MacPherson wasn't so sure. Time Warner was a strong company, but the whole market was overpriced. The Fed was trying to burst the bubble, and the Joshua Fund couldn't afford a massive loss. True, Bennett argued, but why not let the AOL–Time Warner merger news begin to leak and then see what happened? If the stock began to drop, they could dump it all. If it rose, they could hold on a bit longer, then cash out and take the whole company to the Bahamas, all expenses paid.

MacPherson had to smile. He liked this kid's moxie. Fine, he said, let it ride for a little while longer, but under no circumstances could they let the price drop under $40 a share. Deal? Deal, Bennett agreed. And the merger news leaked.

By Christmas of 2000, AOL stock hit $74 a share. When it slipped to $72, Bennett and his team began selling off. When it was all over, the Joshua Fund had sold 50 million shares at an average of $70 each, scoring a pretax profit of just under 3 billion dollars. A pretty nifty chunk of change, MacPherson had to admit. And he had Jon Bennett to thank for it. And he did.

MacPherson promoted Bennett to senior VP. He named Bennett chief investment strategist. He put him in charge of a staff of more than a hundred. And he asked him to begin helping him on an entirely new project—MacPherson's bid to enter elective politics. Sure, he was a Republican and Bennett wasn't. But so what? Bennett was a Kennedy Democrat—Jack, not Ted—and MacPherson could live with that. It was a match made in heaven.

Quietly, under the radar, Bennett recruited a few friends to form Democrats for MacPherson—first for MacPherson's gubernatorial campaigns, then again for the run for the White House. From the Iowa caucuses through the convention and right up to the inauguration, Bennett was there for MacPherson every step of the way. He did so enthusiastically, without pay, without expecting anything in return. He'd never asked to join the administration. He'd never wanted a fancy-sounding Washington title. Bennett didn't care about politics. He wanted to make money—lots of it. And why shouldn't he? He was good at it.

The president had no doubt that Bennett would have been on the
Forbes
400 list in the next five years. But events had conspired against him. Suddenly—inexplicably—everything was different. History was taking a turn for the worse. Jon Bennett's destiny was being recast. MacPherson had asked him to give up everything to serve “at the pleasure of the president,” to figure out a way to nail down a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians, a deal that now seemed impossible to achieve. And the kid said yes. As a personal favor for his onetime boss and mentor, Bennett had walked away from staggering wealth, and his dreams. And now MacPherson second-guessed himself. Had he really given Bennett the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to be part of history—or had he just handed him a death sentence?

“We don't stop for anything or anyone—is that clear?”

Bennett's voice was icy cold.

“I don't care what happens. We keep moving until we're out of the hot zone. No exceptions. We stop, we die—you got it?”

Banacci gunned the engine. He didn't like taking orders from this guy. But he couldn't argue with the logic. Bennett was right, and every DSS agent listening knew it.

Jagged streaks of lightning flashed across the sky and it began to rain, slowly at first, then harder and harder. The storm was picking up steam. They needed to move quickly. Bennett flipped on his headlights and cranked up the windshield wipers to the fastest speed. Then he turned to McCoy and nodded.

“You ready?” he asked, as gunfire exploded all around them.

“Let's do it,” she said confidently.

The lead black Chevy Suburban—Halfback, riddled with three or four dozen bullet holes and driven by DSS agent Kyl Lake—peeled out in front of Snapshot, blue-and-red lights flashing, sirens blazing. Bennett jammed the limo into drive and peeled out with him. Special Agent in Charge Max Banacci's Suburban brought up the rear as a colleague unlocked a black leather legal briefcase filled with classified contingency plans and maps marked with multiple escape routes and extraction points.

Bennett could see the leading edge of the mobs coming at them from their right, from the direction of the Great Mosque and the Sayed Hasem Mosque. So as the motorcade roared out of the gates, they turned left and shot up Omar El Mukhtar Street through a blizzard of bullets and smoke. They didn't get far.

Away from the epicenter of the gun battle, huge crowds now jammed the streets around the Fras Market, despite the intensifying rains. People were chanting something. Some were burning American flags. Some began firing pistols at the convoy, or in the air. Others started heaving rocks at the American vehicles and swinging at the windows with baseball bats.

“Halfback, take the next right,” Banacci shouted into his microphone.

“What? Say again, say again,”
Lake yelled back, barely able to hear above the rain, the deafening chants and continual bursts of gunfire.

“Right—break right—at the next street. Go, go, go.”

The lead Suburban was only moving at maybe fifteen or twenty miles an hour. In a few seconds, they'd be completely engulfed by the mob and unable to move.

“Let's go, let's go!” Banacci screamed. “Run them down if you have to, Halfback. Let's get the hell out of here. Step on it.”

Lake glanced up at his rearview mirror. Had he just heard right?

“We're not gonna make it!” Bennett yelled.

“He's right, Kyl, gun it,”
Banacci demanded.
“Move it. Let's go.”

They didn't have a choice. If he hesitated, they'd be dead.

As he approached the corner of Al-Mukhtar and Bor Saaid Streets, Lake stepped on the gas and plowed through a half dozen militants. McCoy grabbed the handle over the passenger-side door as Bennett tried to follow the path that Lake was blazing. He could hear screams outside. He saw the metal trashcan just before it smashed against the passenger-side window. Snapshot rocked violently as they hopped the curb, smashed the rear end of a taxi and blasted through a glass bus stop in their way.

 

The first story flashed on the Reuters wire at 10:19
A.M.
Gaza time.

“Paine, Arafat Dead; Gaza Erupts.”

AP's story moved one minute later—“Suicide Bomber Kills U.S. Secretary of State.” The first update posted three minutes later—“Palestinian Security Chief Blows Up Peace Process; Dozens Feared Dead, Wounded.” Still, none of the wire service stories matched the imagery beamed around the world by the television crews still alive at the scene.

Marsha Kirkpatrick studied the eyes-only e-mail from State.

She didn't quite know what to make of it. Most state-run television networks throughout the Arab world—including Al Jazeera—were covering the secretary's arrival live when the suicide bombing occurred. None of those networks had pulled the plug on the transmissions from Gaza. They were still broadcasting the live, horrifying images.

The implications of that intrigued Kirkpatrick. Millions of Arabs had just seen Yasser Arafat's own security chief assassinate the father of the Palestinian revolution. They'd just seen dozens of Palestinians slaughtered by a fellow Palestinian. No matter what kind of conspiracy theories Arab state-run newspapers might write tomorrow, people were seeing the truth right now.

What did that mean? What kind of effect might that have? There was too much else to concentrate on for the moment. But Kirkpatrick made a mental note and stuffed the report in a file. There was something there, something she was missing. She was just too tired, too busy to figure out what.

 

“Look out!”
screamed Ibrahim Sa'id.

Through the pouring rain and fogging windows, Sa'id could see a masked gunman in a black hood—fifteen, maybe twenty yards ahead—raise an AK-47 and open fire. He screamed, sure they were all dead. But he couldn't look away. Round after round came straight for their faces and smashed into the front windshield. The bulletproof glass splintered wildly but didn't shatter. Beside him, Galishnikov's heart was racing. His hands were clammy. The air conditioning was on full blast to suck out the rapidly rising humidity. But Galishnikov could still feel the sweat running down his back.

Bennett didn't blink, didn't flinch. He gunned the engine and headed straight for the guy. Flames and smoke were pouring from the barrel of the machine gun, but none of the rounds were penetrating their mobile fortress. Bennett's skin turned cold. He saw the gunman's bloodshot eyes go wide, then disappear under the hood.

Lake focused on the road ahead of him, quickly becoming a river of rain. It was almost impossible to see now. Thunder kept crashing overhead and lightning ignited the skies like a strobe. Lake sped down Bor Saaid Street, looking for a way to outflank the mob and cut left, back toward the Mediterranean. That was escape plan “Alpha Bravo”—the plan they'd mapped out back in Washington.

The first flash traffic didn't move until 10:27
A.M.
local time.

It was Jake Ziegler's job to nail down precisely what was going on and feed a continuous stream of data and analysis back to CIA headquarters at Langley and the White House Situation Room. But that was easier said than done.

They were experiencing the classic fog of war. Reports were pouring in from his slim but growing network of agents and informers. But everything was so chaotic. What was real? What was reliable? It was hard enough to establish hard facts in these first few minutes of the crisis. Establishing what any of it meant was nearly impossible. And the clock was ticking. Headquarters had already called twice. The DCI would be briefing the president soon. They needed something fast.

Thirty-seven, fluent in Arabic, and the father of a four-year-old daughter, Ziegler had been working undercover in Gaza for only eighteen months. The work was brutal. Long hours, low pay, high stress. But it kept his mind off the searing pain of his divorce.

Technically, he was an analyst, reporting to the CIA's DDI—deputy director for intelligence—not the DDO, the deputy director for operations. But just before his wife had filed for divorce—a divorce he angrily maintained was not his fault and was fighting in family court back in Montgomery County, Maryland—he'd been assigned to slip into Gaza incognito. His mission: to bring coherence to a heretofore woefully inept CIA intel-gathering and analysis operation.

For years, Langley had simply relied on Israeli and Egyptian intelligence, to the extent that it was provided, to understand Gaza. But the president and the DCI had insisted that if a serious Israeli-Palestinian peace process were to ever really get under way, they'd need a far better ground operation and listening post than they'd had up until then. That certainly meant ELINT, electronic intelligence. So nearly $25 million had been covertly invested in outfitting Gaza Station as a state-of-the-art joint CIA-NSA operations center underneath an abandoned hotel just outside of Gaza City.

They also needed a far better network of HUMINT, human intelligence—i.e., agents and informants. That would take time. Lots of it. But it had to start somewhere.

So Jake Ziegler—the Agency's best Palestine analyst—was given less than seventy-two hours to kiss his wife and baby girl good-bye and hook up with a navy SEAL insertion team that would slip him unnoticed into the Strip in the dead of night to establish a beachhead and start feeding Langley information it could really use. It was the assignment of a lifetime, and he threw himself into the work.

For eighteen hours a day for the past three and a half weeks, Ziegler and his brilliant but miniscule and overworked team had been working to get ready for Bennett's trip. And they'd blown it. They'd completely missed the attacks that were coming. They'd been blindsided, and the cost was incalculable. Numb didn't even begin to describe how Ziegler felt at the moment. His career was over. But he still had work to do.

What was coming next? What did his superiors in Washington need to know that they couldn't learn simply from watching television? How could he justify a $25 million operation if he didn't have the foggiest notion what was happening around him? Ziegler was still scrambling to synthesize everything he and his team were seeing and hearing. But he had to get something to Washington fast.

 

102710L DEC 27 2010

>>
FLASH TRAFFIC
<<

FROM: STATION CHIEF, GAZA STATION //CIA-OPS//

TO: DCI, CIA-LANGLEY, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//

DDO, CIA-LANGLEY, WASHINGTON DC //OPS//

DDI, CIA-LANGLEY, WASHINGTON DC //INTEL//

NSC, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//

WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM //OPS//

SECSTATE, WASHINGTON DC //OPS//

SECSTATE-BLACK TOWER, WASHINGTON DC //DS//

CJCS WASHINGTON DC//OPSPA//

HQ USCENTCOM, TAMPA FL//OPS//

HQ USEUCOM, VAIHINGEN GE //OPS//

JOINT STAFF WASHINGTON DC//OPS//

CLAS—EYES ONLY—PRIORITY ALPHA

SUBJECT: POSSIBLE PALESTINIAN CIVIL WAR ERUPTING

 

INITIAL ASSESSMENT FROM THE GROUND: ATTACKS APPEAR PREMEDITATED, WELL PLANNED, AND COORDINATED.

 

POSSIBLE PALESTINIAN CIVIL WAR ERUPTING…. BATTLE TO SUCCEED ARAFAT COULD BE BRUTAL…. WATCH FOR PLO FACTIONS TO MOBILIZE.

 

AT LEAST 150 DEAD SO FAR…23 DSS AGENTS CONFIRMED KIA…. STATUS OF OTHER DSS AGENTS—THOSE NOT WITH TRAVEL PACKAGE—UNCLEAR AT THIS MOMENT…. OTHER AGENTS OFF THE AIR…. CAUTION: CASUALTIES COULD MOUNT…. NUMBERS NOT FINAL.

 

TRAVEL PACKAGE ATTEMPTING TO EXECUTE ALPHA BRAVO EVAC PLAN…. BUT RESISTANCE HEAVY.

 

MEDITERRANEAN CHOPPER EXTRACT IMPOSSIBLE DUE TO WEATHER…. NO U.S. GROUND FORCES AVAILABLE TO GO IN…. ISRAELI GROUND RESCUE PACKAGE AVAILABLE—BUT ADVISE CAUTION DUE TO POLITICAL RISKS…. REPEAT: ADVISE CAUTION DUE TO POLITICAL RISKS.

 

MORE TK.

 

JZ //GS-SC//

To their left, every street was blocked by burning cars.

So the motorcade kept zigzagging to the right. Word of the bombing was out. News of Arafat's death spread through the city and refugee camps like wildfire. Angry crowds were pouring out of their homes. Teenagers were setting tires and Dumpsters on fire. Lake and the team worked their way toward the beach. It was simple, direct. It was a landmark they knew and could follow most of the way out of the city.

They were driving through wretched, filthy slums. Bennett had never seen poverty like this. None of them had. Crumbling cinder-block tenement buildings. Bombed-out shops. The scorched remains of cars. Empty playgrounds. The stench of uncollected garbage. The farther they moved from center city, the farther they seemed to plunge into a wasteland of human misery.