Seven Months Later
WASHINGTON, D.C., IS A CITY OF MANY SECRETS—but ultimately, secrets only poorly kept.
The word had begun to surface that a federal grand jury had been convened in the District regarding actions of Undersecretary Kenneth Sharptin—the subject matter was illegal campaign fund-raising, possible violation of several foreign relations laws, and influence-peddling and international bribery regarding Warren Mullburn’s attempted entrée into OPEC. The federal prosecutors handling the grand jury were in possession of unique evidence that had been gathered by the FBI.
The FBI’s agents had followed up on Will Chambers’ strange story of his abduction by Abdul el Alibahd. Will’s description of Alibahd’s physical condition confirmed other information gathered by the CIA and military intelligence. The terrorist, it appeared, was dying, and his web of international criminal activity was expected to soon unravel; his organization, it was thought, would be retooled and continued by several of his lieutenants. But that would not happen. American military operatives were closing in on Alibahd and his group. Soon they would kill his bodyguards, and capture the man himself. Consumed by lung cancer, Alibahd would be carried away by Delta Force commandos on a stretcher—gasping for air, but finding none.
The FBI was also actively investigating the message Alibahd had delivered to Warren Mullburn through Will. Mullburn himself soon became their focus, as well as his cozy relationship with Kenneth Sharptin and his financing of Sharptin’s bid for the vice-presidential slot. But the federal agents were astonished at the breadth and audacity of their apparent conspiracy: a joint effort to bribe their way into a foothold in OPEC’s oil monopoly by using the currency of pro-Islamic American policies and leveraging increased U.S. military aid to the Arab nations.
All of that was more than sufficient, several times over, to short-circuit any possibility of Sharptin’s running as the vice-presidential candidate. The public explanation given by the White House for Sharptin’s name being dropped from the shortlist of running mates was that he needed to “spend more time with his family.”
The real question was—what family? Sharptin’s wife had moved out a year before, when she had learned of his various affairs.
One night, after Sharptin had learned that he had been targeted by the grand jury, and while his mistress slumbered beside him in the bedroom of his Old Town Alexandria townhouse, the Undersecretary slipped out of bed, put on his best bathrobe, and quietly walked down the plush, carpeted steps to his well-furnished den. He eased himself down onto the smooth luxury of his leather sofa. Then he popped the top off a small plastic bottle and poured the contents into the glass of liquor that was sitting in front of him on the glass coffee table.
There would be no hesitation. Kenneth Sharptin prided himself on being a man who knew how to make decisions. He looked at the glass for only a second before he swallowed the contents in a single gulp.
The next morning, following that fatal decision, his mistress would find his body sprawled out on the couch. She would grab her things and slip away, before the police—and the press—descended on the townhouse that was about to achieve fleeting celebrity status as the scene of the suicide of the Undersecretary of the U.S. Department of State.
By the time the news media started reporting Sharptin’s suicide and the grand jury in progress, Warren Mullburn had already relocated his primary residence to a secret villa in Switzerland. To his extensive staff he had left the formidable task of clearing out his Nevada desert mansion. Fifteen moving vans and three auto-transport trucks were needed to contain the imported antique furniture he had collected from France, Austria, and Russia, some modern furnishings inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Italian stone fountains, the eclectic mixture of original artwork ranging from Cézanne to Andy Warhol, the antiquities purchased from dealers around the world, the classic antique automobiles, and the large collection of the world’s most expensive sports cars.
The last thing the staff did, before locking the doors to the sixty-five-million-dollar compound, was to drain the Olympic-size swimming pool.
Then the parade of moving vans and transports began rumbling past the property’s “For Sale—By Appointment Only” sign and down the desert road on their route to the highway that led to Las Vegas, and points beyond. The convoy of trucks, bearing the spoils of Warren Mullburn the multinational corporate raider, snaked its way along, creating clouds of dust in the Nevada desert like a procession of some modern-day Genghis Khan.
Only this Genghis Khan had already skipped town.
The only trace of Mullburn’s presence in the Nevada desert was the now-vacant collection of buildings known as “Utopia,” and a decaying corpse that would be found months later in the nearby hills. The murdered body, identified as one Bruda Weilder, had been left to be preyed on by the beasts of the wilderness.
While his small army of agents and employees were moving his worldly goods, Warren Mullburn was on the telephone from Switzerland, talking to his attorneys. The subject was how to fend off a possible criminal indictment against him. The law firm was Kennelworth, Sherman, Abrams & Cantwell—the Washington, D.C., office.
However, the attorneys were worried about a potential conflict of interest in representing Mullburn because of the possibility that Dr. Albert Reichstad, also their client, might be named as a conspirator by the grand jury. That, of course, would be a shame—if not a tragedy—for the firm, as Mullburn was a high-profile client, and was certainly in a position to pay every penny of their high-profile legal fees.
But the decision of the attorneys in that firm about representing Mullburn became much easier when, about three A.M. that Sunday morning in Jerusalem, Reichstad would suddenly become indisposed from being the client of Kennelworth, Sherman, Abrams & Cantwell—or any other law firm for that matter.
Reichstad had been working through the night inside the excavation tent at the burial site at St. Stephen’s Gate. His assistants had all left for the night and returned to their hotels. A disturbance farther down the eastern wall of the Old City had drawn all of the guards away from the area momentarily.
A man, carrying what looked a little like a black trombone case, was climbing the hill just above the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane. He stopped at the spot where he could view St. Stephen’s Gate and the great white tent of Dr. Reichstad.
The man opened the case, took out a lightweight missile launcher, and rapidly assembled it. Then he loaded in an armor-piercing missile, pointing it toward Reichstad’s archaeological dig site, and looked through the sighting device until he had the center of the white tent perfectly lined up. When he squeezed the trigger the missile left a faint wisp of smoke behind it as it flew across the small valley that separated the Mount of Olives from the old wall at St. Stephen’s Gate and slammed into the excavation area where Reichstad was in the process of using an X-ray machine to analyze the ancient corpse that was scheduled to be moved the following day.
After the explosion, very little of Dr. Reichstad—and nothing of the corpse—was left. Reichstad was able to be identified only because a few of his teeth were found at the scene of the missile hit.
News reports indicated that no suspects had yet been named by either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority. However, several media accounts speculated on whether “Christian fundamentalists” intent on preserving belief in the resurrection of Jesus could be linked to the murder of Dr. Reichstad and the destruction of the tomb at that archaeological site.
The Secretary General of the United Nations, a few days later, had the occasion to comment on the attack. He remarked that “it was time for all nations, peoples, and groups to renounce that kind of religious fanaticism that breeds violence.” And then, while urging “Christian leaders around the world to exhort their flocks and congregations to be tolerant toward ideas that might challenge their own deeply held beliefs,” the Secretary General suggested that it might be time to take concrete steps regarding religious extremism.
“Let our children and grandchildren,” he continued, “see the twenty-first century as the time when all the people of the earth come together, through the United Nations, to prevent the spread of that species of religious fundamentalism that threatens global peace.”