Swiss closed the panelled door behind him, leaving the chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services sitting in his congressional office on the second floor of a fifties office block in the Capitol Complex, The Dirksen Senate Office Building. A seven-storey structure faced in white marble. The senator was fifty-eight years old with balding grey hair, reddened skin and a solid paunch. He’d cultivated a past that hinted of old money, although Swiss knew he’d worked the nightshift four times a week at a fish-processing factory in order to put himself through Stanford, and had spent the summers on construction sites in San Jose, the city of his birth. But he had power. The kind of power that could ensure the reversal of the military cuts and that revenge was meted out to the secretary’s fabricated killers. The cutbacks would mean near-financial disaster for ADC, since it would hit mostly weapons-and-equipment procurement.
Swiss took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, he stood on the sidewalk, away from the barrier and the black-metal security bollards, opposite the guarded parking lot. He watched his Range Rover pull up at the sidewalk on the other side of the road. He felt a chill go through him, put it down to the wind cutting across the intersection of Constitutional Avenue and 1st Street, and buttoned up his dove-grey overcoat. Grimacing, he took out a disposable cellphone and spoke in French to a guard at the chateau in Normandy, asking for Proctor.
After a few minutes, the Englishman said, “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure yet. But something is.”
“You want me to move her?”
“No. Besides, we don’t have time.”
“You want me to do it now?” Proctor asked.
“No. We have to proceed as planned. But when it’s over I have a new job for you back here, if you’re still for hire.”
“Could be.”
Swiss hit the disconnect button, thinking that he would get Proctor to work on the two-star general called Dupont. He’d find out what he knew and then order him killed.
Travelling in the Range Rover to his home a mile or so from Pentagon City, he still felt rattled. He’d had to kill a good man, Hawks, and all because Brigadier Hasni, the ISI boss, had ratted him out to the DS special agent called Tom Dupree.
If the whole plan was compromised as a result, he was finished. But dead men didn’t speak, and he hadn’t been called after leaving the warehouse. He guessed Tom Dupree really hadn’t known anything. He could have stayed around, just to be sure, but he had no stomach for torture. Never had. When a gnarled-faced Legion sergent-chef, a veteran of the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire in 1978, had suggested cutting the ears off a terrified Iraqi prisoner during the Gulf War in 1990, Swiss, who was then a young officer, had threatened to court-martial him for even suggesting it. His world had changed since then. Now he allowed such things, but only on the proviso that he didn’t have to witness them firsthand. Just like every politician he had ever known.
Sitting in the back seat beside him, his Russian bodyguard took a call on her cell. He turned his head, saw her nodding silently, her face as white and hard as alabaster; her blue-green eyes unblinking.
“Our source at Pentagon says all leave cancelled for the Marine Corp and 101st Airborne Division. They put on twenty-four-hour standby,” she said, disconnecting.
More good news, he thought. But he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “The man’s a useless leech. That kind of information could’ve been picked up from a private’s wife at a grocery store.”
The woman shrugged.
He thought about the Saudi ambassador. He’d been contacted by him six months ago. His proposition had been stark and ambitious: the kidnapping and murder of the US Secretary of State. If he could organize the men, the ambassador would ensure that the Pakistanis wouldn’t interfere. They would, in fact, facilitate it. Apart from bringing about a war with Iran, which could only benefit ADC, the ambassador had promised him exclusive contracts with the Saudi military.
Although the survival and growth of his business was his overriding driving force, Swiss found it peculiar that the US had such close links with the Saudis. Politically, the country was essentially a feudal system, with no voting rights. Eleven of the fifteen hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were Saudis, after all. Women were forbidden from driving and people were still executed for sorcery. Saudi Arabia wasn’t exactly a model state.
It was, he knew, the natural reaction to what the Saudi religious leaders had been preaching for years: Wahhabism, an extremist form of Sunni Islam. The CIA considered it the soil in which al-Qaeda grew. And yet in the Arab world, the Saudis were seen as the most pro-Western state, despite being the biggest backer of anti-Western Sunni terrorist groups. A paradox, perhaps.
But Swiss knew that for years the Saudis had increased oil production in order to boost the US economy at times that coincided with presidential elections. The deal had been the same since Roosevelt had met with the founder of the Saudi kingdom: security for oil. Politicians had gained personal and family wealth from that arrangement. But it also meant that whereas Iraq and Afghanistan had felt the full force of US military might, the Saudis had escaped it. Whether the Washington elite had allowed personal gain to dictate US foreign policy was an argument he had no intention of getting into. For him personally, though, it was obvious.
As the Range Rover reached the gated entrance to his country spread – a seven-bedroom, single-storey ranch house with four paddocks, three lines of stables and miles of fenced grassland – he’d calmed down a little. The world was full of contradictions, he thought. But if selling arms for a living was deemed morally reprehensible, politics and the oil business were Faustian pacts.