The Phoenix Affair, Dave Moyer [best ebook reader for surface pro TXT] 📗

this time, and just the lightest trace of a smirk on his face.

“Bon,” Jean whispered. “I’ll take care of it. You take care of setting up surveillance on the Americans, and God help us. The man I saw on the street is dangerous. Send your best people and tell them to be careful.” He left quietly, headed in the direction of the cold stone room and the Arab, who would not see another dawn.

*****

At Langley it was just after midnight, but Jones was hard at work, putting the final touches on his briefing for the DO in the morning. It was, he reflected as he finished looking at his electronic charts, a fairly complete picture.

On the main area of concern, they’d made considerable progress. State had provided a list of Saudis who held legitimate US passports, which was good. Not so good but not much of a surprise, there were several thousand. However, Jones and a sharp young kid down in the Directorate of Intelligence had worked for the last several hours on that list, and managed to reduce it to about a thousand men of what he considered “military age,” between sixteen and about forty-five. Still a large group, but that’s where Intel had really done it’s duty. There were about a hundred who were known to have spent time in Afghanistan during the Soviet jihad, mostly now getting up there in age, but still important. Another couple of hundred had certainly not entered the US anytime in the last five years, another group in ten, etcetera. Presuming that the people he was most interested in would not have been in the US recently, a ploy he would have used to throw off just such an analysis, he would focus on this group. So, they were looking at maybe two hundred, possibly three hundred-fifty if you wanted to look at some of the older guys. A big list, but manageable with the new systems that State and Immigration had brought online since the 911 wakeup call. The list was already out there, and any of these guys trying to enter the US would be flagged and detained for some special attention.

Cameron’s thoughts on a small-unit infantry attack were also helpful, not something anyone had thought much about. Again, the Intel guys, once they’d warmed up to the idea, had produced some good stuff. They’d put together a computer simulation to illustrate the impact of one or several such events in small-town America, and the results were surprising. Taken together, the total effect appeared to be much more worthy of the effort on the part of the terrorists than anyone had previously thought, and therefore much more worthy of some hard thinking and preparation on the part of American security people. FBI was now working on that along with the team over at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center. A cryptic and probably not-too-helpful note had gone to all the police departments in the country. That would probably draw some fire from the press: another non-specific warning about a terrorist attack “somewhere” that nobody would be able to do anything about. But Jones knew a few things about small unit actions that the press did not, and he knew that across the country police and sheriff’s departments would read the warning and at least think just a little about “what if in my town?”. That by itself could make a difference if it came to it, but he hoped to do better with some more time to work.

He turned to his computer and switched to the next section of the briefing. The phone-intercept picture was pretty complete by now, and had been remarkably productive. The roll-up of the terrorists in Paris had been pretty big, the biggest ripple-effect anyone had produced since Fall of 2001. The take in London and across Britain had been even better, and now there were lots of people in custody, guests of MI-5 or Scotland Yard, and he knew they would provide even more good intelligence, eventually.

But one of the down-sides of success was that things began to get quiet very fast. Since London, his phone contacts had pretty much gone silent. Even the multitude of numbers on the twenty-five or so phones taken in England weren’t talking, to say nothing of anyone in Paris that started this whole thing. And the Saudi connection had recently gone dead, too.

He opened a file and found the latest transcript from that most interesting but most un-disciplined suspect, Khalid was his name. He read through the short conversation again, wondering. Well, Saudis were big about parties, especially for family no matter how extended. Could be that’s all this is, just a party for his nephew in Ha’il. Still, it might be worth checking, maybe he’d get lucky. He opened another application on the computer, and was soon staring at the National Reconnaissance Office’s classified “Overhead Asset” intelligence request site. It took a few mouse-clicks and five minutes to fill in the online form, but by the time he pushed the “Submit Request” button at the bottom, he’d done all the paperwork required to get high-resolution photographs of the town of al-Ha’il, Saudi Arabia, on the next available pass of a suitable satellite. He didn’t know when that might be, yet: he hoped for sometime Saturday. Whenever the space-cadets decided when and what “next available” was in his case, he’d get an email. It would have to do, but if it didn’t happen by Saturday, he made a note to ask the DO to see if he could bump up the priority. That done, he added a couple of bullets to the last chart to describe the “overhead” plan.

Last, he summarized what they knew of the French connection. Their Gallic friends had Salah the Egyptian and were, presumably, having an entertaining time at his expense. Nothing had happened for two days on Kisani’s phone, which might mean he’d gone silent, too, but it might be he was just sleeping off his beating. Jones smiled unconsciously at this and shook his head, picturing the small Moroccan getting pummeled by a bunch of Paris thugs, with Cameron listening a couple hundred yards away and out of sight. Man, what’d he’d have given to have thought that one up. Brilliant. “It’s getting late,” he said aloud, jerking himself out of this reverie and returning to the briefing. He added a few bullets about the French operation in Paris, the likelihood that Cameron was compromised in France, his own deduction, something that would have to be “fixed” at a high level once this was all shut down. Cameron would certainly want to travel as a tourist in France again someday—his passport history clearly indicated that he and his wife had a thing for Paris—and it would never do for the French to arrest him on his next trip and put him on ice. Not at all. The DDO would have to fix it, or maybe State, perhaps even the President. No worries. Finally, he noted the report of the events in Amman, and his suspicion that the mystery agent in the cab had likely been French. “Nothing much to that, just a hunch,” he thought, “but it would fit. What Anderson said about his chat with the DGSE chief just made him feel like the man in Paris probably was fully in the game by now, and playing hard. He wondered what his Boss would think of that in the morning.

Jones scrolled back to the top of his presentation and went through it once more, making sure the story flowed as he wanted, and that he’d left nothing out, trying to guess what questions might be asked by the Boss, and by others he thought might attend. Finally, satisfied, he logged off and closed down the machine for the night. Tomorrow would bring something new in this game, he was sure. XX. The Desert, Northern Saudi Arabia

Colonel Cameron took another long pull on the bottle of water, then poured some on the neckcloth he’d removed a few moments ago and swabbed his forehead. It was just before noon Friday, and he thought briefly of the call to prayer that would just be getting under way in the cities and towns. Here, two and a half hours east of Amman, there was nothing but open desert in every direction, bisected by the long, straight ribbon of asphalt that reached to the Eastern horizon.

He turned and cast a worried eye Northwest, but there was nothing to be seen. He’d not seen a car or anything else on the road behind them for more than an hour. That meant that their diversion had either been successful or unnecessary, and it didn’t really matter which. It had been fun, though, he had to admit.

He’d found Allen and the Chief of Station in their ops room, had been allowed into that most sensitive and secretive space in all US Embassies the world over, and there they’d talked for over an hour. The diversion was simple, yet ballet-like in its intricate interplay of moving parts. The Embassy owned three Suburbans, all black. They were each a year older than the two the Saudis were traveling, in, but that would have to do. Only a practiced admirer of GM vehicles would know the difference, especially if they were moving fast. The plan was to be moving fast.

Everything was loaded and ready to go by nine, Cameron had been impressed by the industry and speed of the Saudis who’d come to collect them. They were smart and quick, and surprisingly hard-working. They’d made some adjustments to the plan that made good sense.

The morning was really “made” by the appearance of Ripley, which Cameron had not expected, but he was pleased. The DDO concluded sometime late last night that Allen needed another hand along to ride shotgun, and Ripley got the nod. An all night flight on a chartered jet delivered him to the Embassy about 6 this morning. For his part Patrick was beaming. Not his part of the world, he’d said, but he’d grown fond of the Colonel as he put it, and looked forward to a run across the desert and whatever might lie at the other end of the trek.

The Company did its duty in the equipment line. There were two Iridium satellite phones, the ones that used the commercial satellite constellation that Motorola designed, built, and launched as a commercial venture in the early 90s, but which had failed to find a market. The whole system was now owned by the US government and used mostly by the Defense Department, and it provided cellular-like coverage anywhere on the planet. There were also two handheld GPS units, much like the ones hikers and hunters used everywhere these days, but with an important difference: these contained “Blue Force Tracker” transponders that allowed the units not only to know where the bearer was to within about 3 feet anywhere in the world, they also transmitted this position back to the nearest satellite and from there to whatever US operations center might be interested in where they were. Langley would be interested, of course. Last came the Station Chief’s personal vehicle, a lightly armored Suburban in silver, with a