25

 

Foggy Bottom, State Department

Washington, DC

Jennifer Moran did not like being kept in the dark. What was especially galling was that she’d witnessed the terrorist attack, and now it appeared the White House was deliberately keeping her at arm’s length. It was more than frustrating.

She walked across the office quickly, her heels making a sharp click, click, click as she left the carpet around her ornate desk and headed across the wood floor that made up most of her rather large office. She leaned out of the doorway and spotted her executive assistant. “I need the president,” she snapped.

“The president of the United States?” her assistant asked meekly.

“Yes, that president,” said Moran.

“I should just call the White House and ask for the president?” her assistant asked.

“Yes,” she said simply, then walked back into her office. She knew she shouldn’t be so hard on her staff, but she was flat-out irritated. And when she got this way, her staff knew enough to stand clear. They had no choice but to get their assigned jobs done, without asking too many questions.

A minute later, the executive assistant buzzed her boss on the intercom. “Madame Secretary, I have President Camara’s assistant on the line for you,” she said.

Moran picked up the phone. “But does she have the president?” she asked her assistant.

“I—I don’t know for sure,” said the anxious assistant. “She said she would let you know when the president could speak to you.”

“How about now?” Moran asked curtly. “Can you please tell the president’s assistant that I’ll be here in my office, waiting for his call?”

“Yes, Madame Secretary.”

Moran hung up the phone and swiveled her chair away from the doorway. She closed her eyes and waited. Less than a minute later, the intercom buzzed again.

“The president is on your private line,” her assistant said quietly.

“Thank you,” she said, only slightly concerned that she’d just put her assistant through the worst five minutes of her young career. She switched lines. “Mr. President?”

“Secretary Moran, I’m delighted you called,” said President Camara. “I was about to call with a briefing on the Dulles incident.”

“I’m certain you were,” she said with only a slight trace of sarcasm. “I’ve heard nothing from your national security team. Have they confirmed the nature of the attack at the airport?”

The president paused only briefly. “In fact, they have. Just in this past hour. As we suspected, it was someone loosely affiliated with al Qaeda. What made the person so much harder to track is that he’d been here, working in a nondescript job quietly from before September 11.”

“Which nationality? Pakistan or Yemen?”

“Neither,” the president said. “That would have been too obvious. No, he’d lived for years in Bahrain, then the United Arab Emirates, and London before that. He’d gone to school in England then transferred to the United States. He was in the final year of his PhD program at a school here in Washington.”

Moran caught her breath. “That can’t be. Really? It doesn’t fit any known profile.”

“No, it doesn’t. But what that tells me is that this is all becoming much more difficult. And that our enemies are getting that much smarter about avoiding obvious traps and filters.”

“What’s NSC say about a rationale?”

“They’re still working on that. I’m being briefed by Susan Wright within the hour. But the preliminary facts on the ground indicate that al Qaeda has determined they will no longer stay out of the kingdom.”

“So Saudi Arabia is now a target?”

“It would appear so,” the president said. “The complicated deals that the House of Saud has managed to make all these years are no longer working. Money bought peace for a time. But that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore.”

“It’s not unexpected, if you think about it,” Moran said. “The Arab Spring revolts—combined with the death of their leader— have changed everything for al Qaeda. They’ve lost the ability to convince the world that change occurs in these regimes only through violence and terror. The peaceful student uprisings have changed everything, and al Qaeda knows it. They will need to radically change their own plans, their allies—and their way of operating in many of these countries.”

“It’s hard to believe that the world could have changed this much, so quickly, through the rapid-fire dissemination of information and peaceful protest.”

“No one could have predicted these movements in all of these countries. I know we didn’t. And our enemies certainly didn’t.”

“But it means that the game has changed,” the president said. “In fact…”

“What is it, Mr. President?” Moran said quickly. “Has something happened that I should know about?”

The president hesitated. Moran knew she’d once been the president’s rival, and he probably wondered whether he could entirely trust her. Nevertheless, she was now his secretary of state, and she deserved to hear of developments that would change everything in the Arab world, regardless of whether there was any truth to what they’d heard.

“Can you make it here to the White House in an hour, for Dr. Wright’s briefing?” he asked.

“I’m on my way,” Moran answered, even as she grabbed her bag and jacket from the chair nearby. “In fact, I wanted to brief you on my meeting with Prince Muhammad.”

“Was your guess correct?” the president asked.

“It was. Once I told him that we’d neutralized the threat on his life at the airport, he reciprocated with information.”

“So he is in line to be the new king?”

“He is. He will become the interior minister first. Natal will become king for a time, and Prince Muhammad becomes the crown prince, while still serving as the governor of Mecca.”

“Israel won’t like the Natal play,” the president said.

“It won’t be for very long, I don’t believe. The changes will occur quickly in the kingdom. Natal is quite old. They need to transition to the grandson as quickly as possible, and I think they know that.”

“I think you’re right.”

Moran hurried toward the door of her office. “I’m headed your way. Can you tell me what I’ll be hearing about?”

The president paused. “The Twelfth Imam, if you can believe it. And a meeting between Ali bin Rahman and the Reverend Amir Shahidi in Tehran not long ago.”