As always, everything was perfect. Despite that, it was still almost impossible to believe that she was about to become the most powerful person in the world. She had been neither born to power nor groomed for it. Her entry into politics had been largely at the whim of her tech billionaire husband. It was he who had suggested that she leave her law practice and run for an open seat in the Senate.
His company had been under heavy scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies for improprieties that had the potential to cause both of them serious problems. He’d backed her candidacy with virtually unlimited funds, and when she’d won, she’d used her new political clout to make their problems go away.
But it hadn’t ended there. Her gift for politics had been immediately obvious, and over the course of fifteen short years she’d risen to become the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Now she was poised to take the Oval Office.
Her husband, on the other hand, had been relegated to an increasingly secondary role. While still successful as a venture capitalist, he now lived a relatively anonymous life in Chicago, where her two children were in college. They saw each other often enough to keep the press happy, but otherwise their family functioned more as a business than anything else. Her husband continued to provide her campaign heavy financial support in return for the quiet privileges she could provide and her daughters toed the line to keep their trust funds flowing.
“Your silence is worrying me,” Gray said finally.
She turned back toward him. “Could Halabi succeed in an attack? I have no idea. Can I assume we’re demanding a briefing?”
“I have multiple calls into the White House. They said they’re working on it and they’ll get back to us.”
She returned to the window, this time gazing past her reflection and into the American capital. In reality, a limited biological attack would be an ideal scenario for her. There was no way Alexander and his party could ride something like that out this close to the election. It would be a deathblow.
“We’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve always been strongly opposed to our involvement in the Middle East in general and Yemen in particular,” Gray continued.
“Because I was told that Halabi was dead. That ISIS was defeated.”
He looked skeptical. “You staked out that position before ISIS even existed and I don’t remember Irene Kennedy ever saying that ISIS was defeated or confirming that Halabi had been killed.”
She took a seat behind her desk again. “The American people don’t give a crap about political positions and they care even less about the truth. What they want is fireworks. They want a show and we’ve just been handed the script. While the other side talks about health care and the economy, we’ll be talking about Islamic terrorists unleashing a plague that could wipe our country out. About watching your children die while Irene Kennedy covers her ass and Mitch Rapp chases his tail. This is a gift, Kevin. Use it.”
CHAPTER 8
AL HUDAYDAH
YEMEN
“BUT it’s your last one,” the man said, staring longingly at the slightly bent cigarette Rapp was offering him.
Over the last five days, Rapp had graduated from sitting alone near the edge of the terrace to being crowded around a long table near its center. In that time, he’d gone through more than thirty cups of tea, twenty cups of coffee, every food product Yemen had to offer, and way too many cigarettes. It was a good way to blend in and make friends, but at this rate cancer was going to kill him before ISIS did.
“You’d be doing me a favor, Jihan. My youngest wife has been begging me to quit.”
“This new generation,” the man responded with a disapproving shake of his head. “They think they can live forever.”
There was a murmur of general agreement from the men around them.
“Tell me. How old is she?”
“Sixteen,” Rapp responded.
After another few seconds of thought, Jihan accepted the cigarette. “Then I’ll smoke it. You need your strength.”
The table burst into laughter and Rapp joined in, crumpling the empty pack and tossing it on the ground as the conversation resumed. The men wandered through the topics of the day—the Saudi bombings of the night before. The Iranians’ backing of the rebels. The continued spread of disease and famine. And, finally, America’s role in it all. Rapp tuned it all out, watching the discarded cigarette pack blow around on sun-heated cobbles.
The Agency had implemented round-the-clock overhead surveillance on the building full of former ISIS soldiers that Rapp had found. And the NSA had cracked all their communications with the exception of a couple of burner phones they couldn’t get a bead on. Unfortunately, all that had been accomplished was to confirm his first impression. Those men were nothing more than a bunch of violent dipshits whom Halabi would have no use for other than maybe to stop bullets.
Rapp let himself be drawn back into the conversation, but it was a waste of time. There was no solid intel to be gained from restaurant gossip—particularly in a country where no one drank alcohol. Either the politicians needed to let the Agency commit resources to this part of the world or they needed to get out. Half measures against a man like Sayid Halabi were pointless. He was all-in, and anyone going up against him had better be the same.
The conversation had just turned to Syria when the voices around Rapp began to falter. He followed the gazes of the men around him to an old CRT television set up in the shade. The endless stream of Arab music videos had been interrupted by something that seemed almost like a twisted homage to them. Images of young people dancing and singing were replaced by ones of violence and death, with a sound track voiced over by none other than Sayid Halabi.
Rapp had seen the prior version of the video, but not this update. The backing music was more somber and the footage of the assault on the village more extensive. Halabi droned on about Muslim unity and combining forces against the West, but Rapp focused on the footage of the ISIS team tearing through the village. The men couldn’t have been more different than the ones he was keeping tabs on in Al Hudaydah. They moved more like SEALs than the undisciplined psychos he’d come to expect from ISIS. More evidence of Halabi’s efforts to turn his organization into a tighter, more modern force.
The video ended and was replaced by a CNN interview with Christine Barnett. The men around him began an animated discussion of Halabi’s role in the region but Rapp remained focused on the television. The flow of the interview was pretty much what he would have predicted, with the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee insisting that she’d been assured that Halabi had been taken out.
So after managing to flail her way to a massive lead in the polls, Barnett had finally found her message: that the current administration had lied about Halabi’s death for political gain while leaving the American people completely unprotected from the threat ISIS posed.
It was a demonstrable lie, but she’d probably get away with it. Sure, there was endless footage of Irene Kennedy saying that Halabi’s body had never been found, but why would the press want to dredge that up? They knew a ratings grabber when they saw one.
Barnett went on to blame the very security agencies she’d been hamstringing for failing to utterly eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth. And, of course, she rounded out the interview the way all politicians did—by implying that she, and only she, had the answer. All the American people had to do was elect her president and they’d be guaranteed safety, wealth, a hot spouse, and six-pack abs.