Pinnacle Event (18 page)

“Okay. I've heard nothing about a WMD. Neither have my brothers in the Gulf. Nothing,” Abdullah insisted.

“Tell me about the money. Could AQ come up with that kind of money to buy nukes?”

“Once maybe, not now. Their bank rollers in Qatar and Kuwait are spent out on ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt, the Nusra in Syria, their tribal militias in Libya, the Houthi down in Yemen, even Shabab in Somalia,” Abdullah replied. “It would take a major effort to get that kind of money and we would have heard about it.”

Bowman added sticks to the fire. “Can you double-check?”

Abdullah stood. “Walk up the hill a little, so we can see the stars, farther away from the villa.” Raymond Bowman followed him.

They looked down on Abdullah's villa, the lights in the pool making the water seem like a floating blob of baby blue. “I do have a very special source, which I hear from time to time. You are right about him. Washington does not know about him. He is too precious.”

“Why is he so special?” Ray asked.

“Ray, AQ is not as fractured as Washington thinks. The big man still calls the shots on major policy decisions. Using a WMD would be a major policy decision. No one would act on a WMD without his knowledge.”

“And your source would know?”

“He is a very precious source, Raymond.”

“He calls you?”

“He communicates.”

“You have an emergency way of initiating communication?” Ray asked.

Abdullah looked up at the stars. “There is Orion's Belt. You see it?”

“If a WMD bomb goes off, or several do, and you had a way…” Ray began.

“I understand. I do, truly, Raymond,
habibi,
I do.” Abdullah began to walk back down the hill. “It may take several days. It may not even work.”

“Please try,” Ray Bowman pleaded.

“Of course. Anything else?”

“Are you or the King using the Gulfstream 650 tomorrow? I need to get to Hong Kong.”

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28

THE HAMILTON

F STREET NW

WASHINGTON, DC

“But you're white,” the drummer said.

“White dudes can play tenor sax,” Dugout insisted.

“Name the great tenor saxes in history,” the drummer asked.

“Okay, okay. Charlie Parker, Coltrane, the Hawk, Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, and Stan Getz.”

“And how many of them was a white dude?” the drummer asked.

“Stan Getz.”

“You play like him?” the drummer asked.

“No, man, I play like Charlie Parker,” Dugout answered.

The four guys in the group laughed simultaneously. “This I have to hear with my own damn ears,” the bass player said. “You're in. Besides, our man Harold is sick and there ain't no other tenor sax players here tonight.”

“Yeah, okay,” the drummer agreed. “Besides it's just an open jam after the midnight show. Let's call it practice.”

“Or we could call it integration,” the bass player joked.

“What you know, Mr. Parker, or what you say your name is.”

“They call me Dugout. Why not start out hot and then go blue. So, maybe ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy' then switch up to ‘Mood Indigo'?”

The group looked around at each other, nodding. “Let's try it,” the bass player agreed.

As the blue lights came up on the little stage and the group appeared from the darkness, the bass player spoke into the mic. “We had a little problem tonight with Harold Rainman Rollins. His appendix done burst this afternoon. So, in the spirit of brotherhood, we are integrating the group tonight. So on tenor sax, we have Dugout. And because we haven't played a lot with him before, we ask of you ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.' Hit it.”

After the first two bars, the drummer hit the cymbals and the room started to clap, Dugout leaped into the sax solo, and handed off to the piano player amid a round of applause. The drummer gave Dug a wink and a thumbs-up. As the piece ended with Dug squeezing out a high note, the bass player intoned in a deep voice over the audience's approval, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

“Mood Indigo” gave way to “Green Dolphin Street,” “Desafinado,” “I Remember Clifford,” and “Isfahan.” Dugout had soaked through his black T-shirt under the lights and was wondering how long a set these guys played, when the bass player stepped up and explained to the crowd. “We appreciate that it seems like none of you all have left during this set. That's always a good sign. So, maybe we found us a good sax after all.” There were hoots and clapping. “So, we're going to close out with a piece that will let him strut his stuff. A piece made famous by his hero Charlie Parker.”

Dugout felt a moment of fear, not knowing whether this was a setup, whether this was going to be something he knew how to play.

“‘A Night in Tunisia,'” the bass player exclaimed.

It was the classic Charlie Parker piece, written by Dizzy Gillespie. He knew it cold. Dug hit the opening bar and it was all his after that.

After the set, the group sat around in the audience, drinking on the house. “We're hoping to get Harold back next week, but you are welcome to join us anytime,” the bass player said as they were closing the hall.

“Yeah,” the drummer agreed. “After all, you can never have too much sax.”

It was after three in the morning when Dugout got on the red Capital Bikeshare bicycle on F Street and pedaled past the White House toward Foggy Bottom. The streets were far from empty. Students from George Washington were finding their way back to the dorms from 14th Street, from H Street, from wherever they had eaten a grease burger to sop up the booze after the bars closed. As he dodged them on his way to Navy Hill, the breeze giving him a little chill after the heat of the club, Dugout still felt the high of the music, the audience, the group. His good feeling was reflected by the fun the college kids were obviously having that night. He thought of texting a friend to see if he was still up, to see if he wanted a late-night visit.

Then he thought of the work he had to go in to do, and why. He had needed the break of playing his music, but he also felt guilty taking any time off, with Ray out there with people trying to kill him. He really should not have a life of his own, Dugout thought, until he had cracked the problem. And he had thought of new ways of running the correlations, new databases to add. As he passed a knot of students horsing around outside a fraternity, he sensed sobriety overtaking him. Unless he could crack this jumble, find out who it was they were up against, there might not be many more fun nights in this city.

He flashed his badge at the gate into the Navy Hill complex and punched in his PIN. The guard in the gatehouse knew him by sight and waved. Dugout showed up a lot in the middle of the night.

 

23

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29

GULFSTREAM 650

TAIL NUMBER JY-RF3

FORTY-THOUSAND FEET OVER KUWAIT

Not flying over Iran added a few miles to the flight, but this was one of the King's private planes that could fly over eight thousand miles without touching down for fuel. They could make it to Hong Kong without a full fuel load. As he explored the cabins and amenities on the aircraft, Ray wondered how many electronic intelligence services would be tracking the aircraft: the Saudis, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, obviously the Americans, and the Brits. The Paks and the Indians would take note when the aircraft went through or near their air space. How many of them would wonder why the King of Jordan was flying to Hong Kong? How many would know that he was actually in his palace near the Red Sea planning the moves involved with dumping yet another Prime Minister?

“Finding everything all right?” It was the blonde flight attendant, or rather one of them. She was Dutch. The other one had said she was Estonian. “We've made up the bed in the rear cabin and, if you are going to try to sleep, I can give you some Ambien,” she said.

“Oh, no, thank you,” Ray replied, “I've sworn off the stuff. Better off being jet lagged and groggy. Besides, I prefer the natural method. Do you have any single malt?”

“There are three bottles of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old,” she said.

Of course, there were. With a bottle retailing at a little under a thousand dollars, Ray Bowman found himself wondering why you would need three bottles on any flight.

He shuddered at the thought of the sleeping pill and the memory of his own Ambien horror three years earlier. He had woken, or semi-woken, in the middle of the street three blocks from his condo in Foggy Bottom, naked. He had no idea how he had gotten there, but later deduced he had sleepwalked from his bed after taking an Ambien to deal with jet lag.

In one very quick instant, he had calculated his options: skulk back home through back alleys, where he might be arrested as a lurking rapist; saunter nonchalantly down the brick sidewalks, acting as if he were some protesting nonconformist; or run as fast as possible, hoping that no one would notice that he had no trunks on. He chose the jogging option and, since it appeared to be deep in the middle of the night, and he ran faster than he ever had in his life, a blur of a six-foot-two man with very white, hairy skin, he had made it to the town house without seeing another human and, more importantly for his career, not being arrested for indecent exposure. There he had another moment of fear stabbing at his stomach, as his hand went to his pocket for the keys.

Another flash and he remembered that the backup key was in the dirt around the little fir tree in the giant pot. Later as he sat on his deck, wearing running trunks, watching the sun begin to turn pink the distant sky over Maryland, he sipped a twelve-year-old Balvenie single malt and told himself he would never again use Ambien.

“That would be great. The Macallan. Three fingers, neat,” he told the Dutch woman.

As he sipped the liquid mahogany, he thought how well he was dealing with the fact that there were people trying to kill him, people whose identities he did not know. He had focused instead on the more important fact that those same people were probably trying to kill a lot more people than just him, that they were even at this moment probably moving nuclear warheads into place in some great cities.

When they did that, there was no way of knowing what the consequences would be beyond the immediate disaster area. They would, however, be momentous and negative. And when exactly they would do that, Washington thought in its collective, classified wisdom, was sometime in the next week, the last week of the presidential election campaign. He tried to find hope in a scenario in which the Hong Kong meeting would reveal that some of the new Trustees knew who had bought the nuclear devices. Just a lead, that was all he needed, a thread that he and Dugout, and Dugout's machines, could pull on.

The Gulfstream had climbed to forty-two thousand feet as it headed out of the night and the Arab Gulf into the Indian Ocean, racing toward the sun.

He sipped the single malt and thought of what was waiting ahead when the Gulfstream touched down. He knew the last Police Commissioner of Hong Kong, but not his replacement. At least the new guy had agreed to meet with him. What a story the Commissioner was going to hear.

 

24

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30

HONG KONG GOLF CLUB FANLING

NEW TERRITORIES, HONG KONG

“You should let me win once in a while. Maybe you would get promoted, Richard,” Stephen Cheung joked as they walked toward the clubhouse.

“I don't think I am ever being promoted again, Commissioner,” Richard Taylor laughed. “There is a glass ceiling for people with English surnames and I have hit it. So, after thirty years on the force here, I take my little satisfactions where I can.”

“You must be our guest for drinks,” Commissioner Cheung said, looking up at Raymond Bowman, standing on the steps of the clubhouse. “This is Assistant Commissioner Richard Taylor, Crime and Security. We have reserved a private room. Follow me, if you would.” The threesome walked past portraits of English military officers and colonial officials from earlier centuries, up a narrow back stair to a perch atop the clubhouse, looking out and down on a city in the distance, in the smog.

“We know who you are Mr. Bowman. The American Consulate has explained who you report to,” Commissioner Cheung began. “My predecessor, Peter Wong, recalls you fondly from his year at the Kennedy School. He sends you his best. I did not get to go to Harvard. My year it was the Royal College of Defense Studies, which made my wife happy. You see we met twenty-two years ago when I was a bobby for two years in Scotland Yard. She still loves London.”

The Assistant Commissioner was mixing two gin and tonics at a drinks dolly. “Will you join us in a G and T?” Taylor asked. “Can I make a third?” Bowman nodded agreement.

The Commissioner waved Bowman out on to the small balcony. “Don't let all this British atmosphere fool you, Mr. Bowman. We are ruled by Beijing. Our semiautonomous stature goes only so far. That city in the distance is in China.”

“You seem rather unlike the People's Armed Police,” Bowman replied.

“Very unlike them, yes,” Richard Taylor agreed, joining them on the balcony. “Hong Kong Police are independent. We get no help from the mainland. We have to have our own little navy of boats and our own little air force of helicopters to secure one of the most densely populated cities in the world and its many islands. But the Ministry of State Security and the People's Liberation Army stay in their compound in Central, where the British Army used to be. Beijing knows what goes on here, although not always in real time.”

“So it is I who will decide whether to assist you, not Beijing,” the Commissioner asserted. “Tell me why I should.”

“No city anywhere in the world has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon in over seventy years. That may be about to change,” Bowman began. He told the two Hong Kong policemen most of what he knew. “What I am asking your help with is surveilling the new Trustees and their meeting.”