The Third Target (18 page)

“Look, J. B., you can’t quote either of us on this, but the intel you’ve been given is, in fact, solid,” the CIA director began.

“Solid?” I asked, wondering if I could possibly have just heard him correctly.

“That’s right; it’s solid.”

“Well, isn’t that what I just said?”

“Hold on; just listen to me,” Vaughn continued. “What you’ve seen and heard is accurate. I’m sure of that. That’s not the problem.”

“What is?”

“It’s incomplete.”

“Meaning what?” I asked, wishing I had a notepad with me.

“Meaning the president and I have seen a lot more intel than you have, and we’re not convinced.”

“Why not?”

“Because the data doesn’t add up.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, but I’m not following you, Jack. Stipulate the facts we’re talking about so I know we’re on the same page.” I was
sure Vaughn wouldn’t take the bait, but I was certainly willing to go fishing anyway.

Vaughn looked at the president, who, to my shock, nodded his assent.

“When you’re making sarin gas, you’re combining two different chemical precursors,” the CIA director explained. “The first is isopropanol. The second is methylphosphonyl difluoride. You don’t mix them together until you’re ready to kill people. Why?”

“Because you don’t want to take an unnecessary risk.”

“Exactly. You don’t want the whole thing to blow up in your face. So you store the two different chemicals separately
 
—on the same base, but in different buildings. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, we know the ISIS rebels hit the Syrian base near Aleppo. We know that historically the base was a storage site for WMD, among other types of weapons. We know that for many years, both chemicals were stored on the base. But that was years ago. We know the rebels removed several hundred crates on trucks and that they sent those trucks to at least five different locations, maybe more. What we don’t know is what exactly was in those crates and on those trucks.”

I was surprised but pleased to hear Vaughn confirm this much. I couldn’t quote him, of course. But now I knew with even greater certainty that my story
 
—nearly entirely written and waiting on my hard drive
 
—was accurate.

“You think the rebels were carting away office equipment and linens?” I asked.

“I don’t know what they were carting away, and neither do you.”

“What about all the phone intercepts after the rebels seized the base?”

“What do they actually say?” Vaughn asked. “One rebel tells his commander his men have captured the ‘crown jewels.’ Another
boasts, ‘Allah will be most praised.’ A third e-mails Jamal Ramzy and says, ‘Zionists will suffer.’”

“Right. So why do you think they’re so happy?”

“Again, we can’t know for sure. The intercepts are intriguing, but they’re not proof,” Vaughn continued. “And remember, while it’s theoretically possible that the Assad regime hid a cache of chemical weapons at that base, the Syrians say they haven’t had any WMD in more than a decade. The U.N. inspectors went there. They searched the place, and they certified that there were no chemical weapons. The Syrians claim they gave up all of their stockpiles to the U.N. to be removed from the country and destroyed, and the U.N. weapons inspectors say they feel reasonably confident that the Syrians did exactly that.”

“You’re going to rest your case on ‘reasonably confident’?” I asked.

“You’re going to rest
your
case on nothing but circumstantial evidence that’s weak at best?” Vaughn countered.

“Look,” I said, “the agency is gun-shy after the blown call in Iraq. I get it. But here you have jihadists seizing a known WMD base in Syria and boasting they have the ‘crown jewels’ and saying they are going to annihilate the Jews, and you want the
New York Times
to back off the story?”

“You’re not listening to me, J. B.,” Vaughn protested. “I’m telling you the case is circumstantial at best. Might ISIS have chemical WMD? Yes. I grant you that. And it scares the daylights out of the president and me. Believe me. We can’t sleep at night. We’re doing everything we can to confirm this story, but so far all we have are a bunch of dots. In my position, I can’t connect them based on gut instinct. I have to have ironclad proof. I can’t tell the president of the United States that my circumstantial evidence is a slam dunk. And I don’t want the American people
 
—or the Israelis and Palestinians
 
—to live in sudden fear that we, or they, are about to get hit by chemical weapons of mass destruction unless I know that for certain. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think that’s moral. And deep down, I don’t think you do either. Am I wrong?”

I checked my grandfather’s pocket watch again.

The meeting at the White House was finally over. But it was now 7:43 p.m. The former CIA director had already been waiting for thirteen minutes, and I was mortified.

Even in retirement, Robert Khachigian was an important and powerful man. He certainly had a far tighter schedule than mine. He was leaving the country in just a few hours. What’s more, he had been a friend of my family’s for years, and I had given him my word I would not be late. Twice I had called his mobile phone from the car to tell him what was happening, but he hadn’t picked up either time. Now my guilt was spiking along with my heart rate.

A cold late-November drizzle had descended upon Washington. I had neither a warm coat nor an umbrella. I was reminded of meeting Yael in Istanbul just a few nights before, and the very thought made me feel even worse. I wanted to see her again. But how?

The black armored Chevy Suburban I was riding in pulled to a stop. Four FBI agents newly assigned to me jumped out first, scanned the area, and then gave me the green light. I grabbed my briefcase and dashed into Union Station, the mammoth train depot located just a few blocks from the Capitol building. I raced to the Center
Café, a restaurant appropriately positioned in the bull’s-eye of the gargantuan Main Hall, and prayed Khachigian was still there.

“Yes, he’s waiting for you upstairs,” the maître d’ said. “Right this way, Mr. Collins.”

Every table on the ground level was taken, and there was a line of tourists waiting to be seated as we headed upstairs. One of the agents assigned to me took up a position at the base of the winding staircase. The other three followed me to the second level.

Khachigian was sitting alone at a table for two on the far side of the restaurant. He did not look happy, though as a rule he was a fairly serious guy anyway. As I greeted him, I apologized profusely for my tardiness, but he waved it all off and told me to have a seat.

“You’re mad at me,” I said.

“No,” he demurred.

“You look mad,” I insisted.

“I’m not mad, but we don’t have much time,” he said. “We have a real nightmare developing. But how are you?”

A consummate professional, but always the gentleman.

The graying, bespectacled man before me was the elder statesman of the Washington intelligence community, and he was dressed to the nines. He wore a dark-blue suit, a light-blue monogrammed dress shirt with gold cuff links, suspenders, and a snappy lavender bow tie, which seemed to me a relic of an earlier age. At his feet stood a small suitcase. Clearly he was heading to the airport straight from this meeting.

“I’ve been better,” I said, not sure how much detail he wanted.

“Secret Service?” he asked, referring to the two agents who were now sitting at a table directly behind him and the third standing by the top of the stairs.

“FBI,” I replied. “To be honest, I’m not exactly sure if they’re protecting me or keeping tabs on me.”

“Both,” he said without hesitation. “Pain?”

“Sorry?”

“Are you in pain?”

“Oh, well, a little.”

“Percocet?”

“A lot.”

“Be careful.”

“I will.”

“I mean it.”

“I got it.”

“Addictive personality and all.”

“Yeah, thanks. Really, I’m fine.”

Khachigian and my family went way back, and he’d always seemed to take a liking to me. Almost like a surrogate grandfather, he’d kept an eye on me. In his youth he was a nonofficial cover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. He was based primarily in Eastern Europe and traveled in and out of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. When he retired from the intelligence business, he returned to Maine, the state where he had been born and raised. He and his wife, Mary, were from Bangor, a bit to the northwest of us in Bar Harbor. They had known my grandparents and later my parents and had become fairly close family friends. After practicing law for a few years, Khachigian ran for office and won the seat serving the Second Congressional District. Later he went on to win a Senate seat and wound up chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Eventually, he was appointed to the top spot at the CIA and served for almost three years before retiring for real.

Over the years, my grandparents
 
—and my mom
 
—contributed to his various political campaigns. In college, I did an internship in his Senate office. During election cycles, my mom often volunteered to put up signs and answer phones and go door to door leafleting for him. She and Mary Khachigian became quite close. They were pen pals and loved to host an annual Christmas tea together for friends
and political supporters
 
—that is, until Mary passed away of ovarian cancer three years ago.

Interestingly enough, Robert
 
—called Bob by his friends but always “Mr. Khachigian” by me
 
—had never been a source of mine for all those years. He probably would have agreed if I had asked, but I never had. There was no question he was a treasure trove. He obviously had a great deal of insider details from his various government positions, and I certainly would have benefited from access to all that behind-the-scenes information, especially in the early years when I was building my career. But it never seemed right. I never wanted to cross the line, never wanted to make him think I would trade on a personal relationship. I actually felt uncomfortable even when my mother asked Mary to get me the internship way back when.

I’ll never forget the day Khachigian called me out of the blue and asked me to meet him in London, where he was giving a lecture the next evening. At the time I was still a young reporter, and the timing was hardly ideal, and he refused to give me even a hint as to what he was thinking or why he wanted me to come. Nevertheless, I found myself so intrigued that I immediately booked the flight.

Upon my arrival, Khachigian picked me up at Heathrow, alone, and drove me to the Dorchester, one of the swankiest hotels in London. There we had a private, intimate dinner with the up-and-coming leader of the Israeli opposition at the time, a man by the name of Daniel Lavi.

“James, this man is going to be the prime minister of Israel soon,” Khachigian told me the moment Lavi and I shook hands. “The polls don’t show it. Most analysts don’t believe it. But I’m telling you right now it’s going to happen. And Daniel here specifically asked me to arrange a meeting with you. He’s an admirer of your work. Has read it all. Says you’re one of the most trustworthy reporters in the biz. I agree. So I decided to introduce you before Daniel’s life gets much busier.”

The following morning, Khachigian and I drove to the Ritz in
the Piccadilly section of London. There he led me up to the Prince of Wales suite (which I later learned went for a jaw-dropping 4,500 pounds per night) and introduced me to an older gentleman who turned out to be Prince Marwan Talal. At the age of seventy-eight, he was an uncle of Jordan’s King Abdullah II and a trusted senior advisor to His Majesty. Khachigian seemed unusually pleased by bringing the two of us together.

“James, His Royal Highness is a dear friend and a most faithful, stalwart ally in the fight against the extremists in the epicenter,” he told me as the three of us talked over brunch. “He is not a public man. He lives in the shadows, and he prefers it that way. Few people outside His Majesty’s inner circle even know his name. But he knows theirs. He knows where all the bodies are buried. And I mean that literally. He has seen all there is in the region
 
—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Confidentially, I will tell you that Prince Marwan is the king’s consigliere when it comes to the peace process. He was an advisor to the late King Hussein, God rest his soul, and upon taking the throne, King Abdullah began leaning on this man
 
—his uncle
 
—for counsel. He’s a devout Muslim. He is worried for the future of his country and region. And whenever I find myself growing pessimistic about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, I sit with Marwan and drink coffee and eat hummus and become hopeful once again. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that one day
 
—perhaps not too long from now
 
—you two will find it useful to know each other. This is why I wanted to bring you both together now, before the maelstrom comes.”

Khachigian’s instincts had been remarkable. Daniel Lavi was now not only the head of Israel’s Labor Party; he was also the Jewish State’s prime minister. He had recently toppled the right-wing government of his predecessor and cobbled together a center-left coalition most political analysts had believed to be unlikely at best just a few short years earlier.

And now, if my sources were to be believed, Lavi was on the phone almost every day with the prince. Together they were trying to fashion a peace deal that the world said was impossible. I too had thought it impossible. But finally, it seemed, it might actually be coming to pass
 
—unless Abu Khalif and Jamal Ramzy had their way.

I trusted this man implicitly. So what was so important that Khachigian had to tell me tonight or tell the
Post
if I didn’t show up in time?