The Secret Soldier (36 page)

But he couldn’t remember. And so he slept.

THE WORLD HAD PAID ONLY GLANCING ATTENTION TO THE ATTACKS
in Bahrain and Riyadh. Even Princess Alia’s killing received just a few minutes on CNN.

Graham Kurland’s kidnapping provoked a very different reaction.

The ambush took place at two p.m. in Saudi Arabia, six a.m. in Washington. Within three hours, Arab news channels reported that terrorists had attacked a highway in Riyadh with multiple car bombs. Western news outlets rapidly picked up the story, though no video was available, only a few grainy photos from cell phones. Then, at eleven a.m., Bloomberg News sent a flash note to its terminals: “PENTAGON SOURCES CONFIRM AT LEAST TEN MARINES DEAD IN RIYADH ATTACK.” In three minutes, the price of oil rose two dollars a barrel and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped one hundred and fifty points.

At 11:20, the Associated Press reported that the attack had targeted an American embassy convoy. Just past noon, Fox News reported that Graham Kurland, the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was in the convoy. Asked for a statement, the White House declined comment but said the president would hold a press conference at one p.m. In two minutes, oil rose another five dollars a barrel, and the Dow dropped three hundred points more. Wall Street traders knew that presidents didn’t interrupt their schedules without good reason. And a good reason rarely meant good news.

 

 

OF COURSE, AS AMERICA
and the world would learn at one p.m., the reality was even uglier than the rumors. Among the government officials who already knew, Vinny Duto summed up the prevailing sentiment: “The fuck just happened?”

The words both question and statement.

At the time, Duto was in his office with Ellis Shafer. Duto wasn’t surprised that Shafer and John Wells were smack in the middle of this mess. He knew he shouldn’t blame them, but he couldn’t help himself. They brought doom wherever they went. Like that old joke about how lawyers were like nuclear missiles.

“You know how lawyers are like nuclear missiles?”

“The other side has theirs, so you have to have yours. They sit in their silos, doing nothing all day except costing you money. And once you use them, they destroy the world.”

Typical of Shafer to step on the joke, not even let him tell it. “That’s you and Wells right there. A couple of lawyers.”

“That doesn’t even make
sense,
Vinny. On any level—”

“Why did you get involved with this?”

“I remind you. Since it’s all in writing, anyway. Wells called me from Cyprus three days ago. Soon as I hung up with him, I called you. And gave you his strong recommendation that you put a team into Lebanon. You should have put it together, swallowed your pride, gotten everybody on board.”

“It would have been easier if he hadn’t hit the camp already under the orders and pay of the Saudi government.”

“Be sure to rehearse that speech before you give it to the inevitable congressional commission that investigates this nightmare, Vinny. Get it just right. Because you’re gonna be under oath. And your version is so far from the truth that even you may have a hard time selling it. Did you call me to help you prepare your defense? Early for that, methinks. Since we don’t even know if Graham Kurland is alive or dead.”

“I hope he’s dead. For his sake.”

“He’s not dead. They went to a lot of trouble to get him alive.”

Duto knew Shafer was right. Knew also that he needed to focus on the problem at hand and not the fallout, which was months, if not years, away. But he couldn’t let it go quite yet. His reflex for blame avoidance was too well developed.

“If State had used a chopper—”

“Black Hawks get shot down, too. Convoys are daytime protocol. As you know. Why don’t you stop wasting time and get me up to speed?”

So Duto choked down his considerable pride and told Shafer what he knew. At least fifty Americans, ten Saudi police officers and civilians, and fourteen terrorists were dead. Dwayne Maggs, the embassy’s head of security, had barely survived and was in surgery at a military hospital outside Riyadh. At best he would lose the use of his right arm.

Worst of all, Kurland was gone. Saudi cops were canvassing the homes and streets around the highway, on the off chance that he had escaped and was hiding. But more than six hours had passed since the ambush. No one believed they’d find him. He’d been kidnapped.

The secretary of state had already asked Saeed and Abdullah to let FBI into the Kingdom to aid the investigation. Neither man had responded yet, but the bureau was flying agents to Dubai on the assumption that the Saudis would soon agree. Meanwhile, the
muk
was providing hourly updates to the CIA station chief in Riyadh.

The
muk
reported that witnesses had seen Saudi cops drag a hooded man from Kurland’s Suburban into a police vehicle on the northbound side of the highway seven to eight minutes after the attack began. Cell phone photos confirmed the timing. The problem was that no Saudi officers had reached the Suburban for fourteen minutes. The obvious conclusion was that the cops who’d taken Kurland were fake.

But the Saudis had no cameras on the highway north of the ambush site. No one knew what had happened to the SUVs. The
muk
figured the kidnappers had stowed them and transferred Kurland to another vehicle.
Muk
officers and National Guard soldiers were setting up roadblocks across Riyadh and highways around the Kingdom. The checkpoints had created massive traffic jams, but the police hadn’t found anything yet. Riyadh had been placed under an eleven p.m. to five a.m. curfew that night, with the curfew to be widened to other major Saudi cities by the next night if Kurland wasn’t found.

“What about helicopters? The kid told Wells that there was a helicopter pilot at the base.”

“I think they’ve shut down civilian air traffic.” Duto punched a text message into his BlackBerry. “I’ll have Lecaine double-check.”

Meantime, the embassy was in lockdown, Duto said. Barbara Kurland, the ambassador’s wife, had tried to leave the compound—destination unknown—when she was told what had happened. She became hysterical when the marines stopped her. The embassy doctor had sedated her. She was resting in the infirmary for now. The president had spoken with her, promising to do everything he could to rescue Graham. He’d asked her to fly out so she could wait in Dubai or Berlin, but she’d refused. The president had ordered that she not be moved against her will.

The president had also ordered the army to transfer two Delta squads from Baghdad to the embassy. They would arrive by midnight. They didn’t need Saudi permission to enter the Kingdom, because they were technically coming in as a defensive replacement for the marines killed in the attacks. They wouldn’t be legally allowed off the embassy grounds. The White House counsel was trying to figure how many laws the squads would be breaking if they left the grounds to rescue Kurland, but for now the consensus was that they should be used only as a last resort. If they killed Saudi civilians in an attempted rescue, they’d worsen the situation. And they had no armored vehicles and only one Black Hawk, so as a practical matter their range was limited to Riyadh.

The CIA and the other three-letter agencies were combing their databases for sigint, comint, humint, geoint, or just plain int that might lead to Kurland. But the kidnappers appeared to be operating independently of Al Qaeda and every other known terrorist group, and the attacks in the last month had come as a surprise. So no one expected much, not right away.

“We’ll find them,” Duto said. “It’s too big an operation to hide. Too many vehicles. Too many guys, and they didn’t all get blown up. Some of them will talk, whether they want to or not. Hopefully the bad guys will milk Kurland for a while, try to build the tension, work the press. Give us a chance to catch up.”

“I don’t think so. He’s a depreciating asset. They’re smart, they turn up the pressure quick. Make it ugly.”

Duto didn’t want to argue the point. They’d find out soon enough. “What about Wells?”

“Far as I know, he’s still in Cyprus.”

“He hasn’t called you?”

“I’ll remind you. He no longer works for us. And we’ve dealt with his efforts to work
with
us ham-handedly. By ‘we,’ I mean you. By ‘ham-handedly,’ I mean—”

“I know what you mean. We gave him the overheads, didn’t we?”

“And told him to use them at his own risk. And you’ve been stringing him and Gaffan along about covering them with the Lebanese. I wouldn’t be surprised if they made other plans before this happened. They may be in transit.”

“Find him, will you? Tell him the situation has changed, and if he’s got any intel on this we’d like it. And that of course we’ve got his back with the Lebanese.”

“Sure you don’t want me to threaten him? Tell him he’s been a bad boy and if he doesn’t help, he’ll get a warning letter?”

Duto wanted to reach across his desk and grab Shafer by his dandruff-specked collar. “I recognize the reality of the situation. You’re smart, you won’t rub my face in it. And if Wells won’t come in himself, at least have him drop off the kid somewhere—Meshaal, isn’t that his name?—so we can talk to him.”

“Yes, suh. Soon as possible, suh.”

“Prick.”

“Takes one to know one.”

 

 

THE PRESIDENT OF THE
United States was congenitally unsuited to express anger. Enemies called him icy, friends calm. For better or worse, he kept his usual tone at the press conference. He could have been reading recipe ingredients:

SAEED WATCHED THE SPEECH
from his giant palace in north Riyadh, a few kilometers from Abdullah’s. Islamic calligraphy covered the walls of his study. Rare eighteenth-century copies of the Quran filled its shelves. Saeed never forgot that the House of Saud was Islam’s ultimate protector. Besides, the clerics liked them.

When the president walked off the podium, Saeed stepped onto his terrace. He’d returned the president’s call a few minutes before, during the conference, knowing that the man would be unreachable. He wanted to delay talking to the Americans as long as possible, until he had some idea what they knew, and if Abdullah had told them about the camp in Lebanon. They would have to let in the FBI, but Saeed hoped to keep the team as small as possible. His men needed to find Kurland before he was killed—or, even worse, tortured for the world to see. Saeed could only imagine how the United States would react to that kind of provocation. Arabs paid a high price when they underestimated America, as Saddam Hussein had learned.

During the day, a white umbrella bloomed automatically from a flagpole on the terrace to ward off the sun. The Saudis had installed thousands of similar umbrellas at Mecca, to protect worshippers. Now the sun had set and the flagpole was naked, giving Saeed a clear view south, toward central Riyadh. A dozen police helicopters buzzed over the concrete city, noisy and irritating as wasps. Without a target, they were useless. But the Americans at the embassy were surely reporting to Washington every few minutes, and Saeed and Mansour wanted their men to seem busy.

The overnight curfew was equally hopeless. The kidnappers had gotten a three-hour head start before the
muk
pieced together what had happened, easily enough time to shift Kurland into a fresh vehicle. From there they could have driven him into the desert or one of the smaller towns in the Najd. Searching the desert would be impossible. Saudi Arabia was a vast country, nearly as big as the United States east of the Mississippi. And if Kurland was still in Riyadh, he was no doubt locked in a safe house.

Meanwhile, crews were scraping the highway clean of the ambush, taking the broken and burned vehicles on flatbeds to an army base near the airport. Tonight the road would be repaved and repainted. Saeed knew they might be destroying forensic evidence. He didn’t care. He wanted all trace of this madness gone. He wished he could erase it from his mind as easily. How had he allowed his son to lead him down this path? He didn’t even know the name of the man running the operation, the man who must have betrayed them. Greed and age had made him a fool. Now, too late, his mind was sharp. He was fully awake.
If you don’t test the depth of the water before you dive, you won’t get to test it once you’ve drowned,
the fishermen on the Red Sea said. He and Mansour were in deep now.

He heard steps and turned to see his son. An idiotic smile creased Mansour’s face, as though he still believed he could charm Saeed into accepting his reassurances. “Father. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be inside? We can sit—”

“Tell me the name of the man behind this.”

Mansour hesitated.

“Now.”

“Ahmad Bakr. He was a major in the National Guard. He was living in Suwaidi, but he’s gone.”

“You’re sure it was him and not Ibrahim.” This was General Walid Ibrahim, the man who had recruited Bakr and served as the cutout for Mansour.

“I think so.”

“You
think
so.”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you ever meet Bakr?”

“Of course not. I told Ibrahim what I wanted him to do, and Ibrahim told him.”