83

U.S. EMBASSY, JERUSALEM

“Agent Ryker, do you have a moment? I’ve got something you should see.”

Marcus had just walked into the “war room,” but he was in no mood to talk to anyone. He was hungry. He was thirsty. It was almost eight thirty at night. He hadn’t had any dinner and still had hours of work ahead of him.

Roseboro had converted the conference room down the hall from the ambassador’s office into a makeshift operations center for the senior members of his advance team, even as another forty lower-level Secret Service, DSS, White House, State Department, and Pentagon officials and staffers had arrived in recent days and had taken over the embassy’s cafeteria to further prepare for the summit. Now, as Marcus poured himself a cup of coffee and tried to catch his breath from another brutally long day, Noah Daniels was asking for time he did not want to give.

It was all Marcus could do not to brush the guy off and tell him whatever it was would have to wait. But he knew that the thirty-four-year-old communications whiz kid didn’t actually work for the White House Communications Agency. In reality, Daniels secretly worked for the CIA. Stephens had confided to Marcus before leaving Washington that Daniels was one of the Agency’s most valuable assets. So Marcus played along.

“What’ve you got?”

“Well, on Friday you asked me to make sure we were intercepting the calls and emails of every current and former employee of the Waqf, right?”

Marcus sighed, then took a sip of coffee so rancid he had to spit it back into his mug.

“Right —so?” he asked, wiping his mouth and dumping the sludge into the sink.

“We’ve picked up two calls I thought you would want to know about.”

Noah handed Marcus two stapled sets of transcripts —one in Arabic, the other in English. The first was a conversation between Palestinian Authority chairman Ziad and the Grand Mufti, from the day after Clarke’s speech. Noah pointed to the key sentence in the transcript, in which Ziad insisted that the Grand Mufti do everything in his power to keep the peace summit, which he called “blasphemous,” from taking place.

Marcus winced. It was exactly what he’d feared. The Grand Mufti was a serious liability. The question was, how were they going to handle him and make sure he didn’t act on Ziad’s explicit instruction?

“Who else has seen this?” Marcus asked.

“So far, just the translator and me.”

Then Noah explained that the second transcript, several pages longer than the first, involved a series of intercepts from the mobile phone of Dr. Mashrawi’s wife, Yasmine.

“Was she even on the tracking list?” Marcus asked.

“No, but I figured if we were having the NSA intercept and record all of the calls, texts, and emails sent or received by Waqf employees, I might as well have them check spouses and children, too.”

“Good idea. So what’s this?”

“These are from the last twenty-four hours,” Noah said. “Thirteen calls and text messages. They all relate to Dr. Mashrawi needing an emergency root canal. There are interactions with the dentist, conversations with friends, and finally a tearful call from Mrs. Mashrawi to her father, the Grand Mufti.”

Marcus quickly scanned the pages. “Fine, but I already knew about the root canal. So what?”

“Well, sir, you radioed in this morning that Mashrawi wasn’t at your meeting with the Grand Mufti and that the Grand Mufti said his son-in-law had to go get an emergency root canal. You wanted us to make sure that was really true.”

“Apparently it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Noah said. “It would seem Dr. Mashrawi was telling the truth.”

“Good to know,” Marcus replied. “Write up a cover memo explaining exactly what you told me, and get both sets of transcripts to Roseboro, the director of DSS, and Director Stephens at Langley. Then get me every single thing you possibly can on the Grand Mufti. My worries about him are growing by the minute.”

“Yes, sir,” Noah said. “I’m on it.”

As the young man stepped away, Marcus’s satphone rang. It was Kailea in London.

“Please tell me you’ve got good news,” Marcus said, ducking out of the war room into the hallway, where it was quieter.

“I do,” she replied. “You’re gonna like this.”

“What?”

“After going through all of the computer files and phone logs for the medical clinic we raided, we found several odd emails and three phone calls from Dr. Haqqani to a banker by the name of Michel al-Jalil,” Kailea explained. “According to everyone we’ve talked to so far, al-Jalil is a Palestinian Catholic. His family lived in the Galilee region of Palestine during the British Mandate. When war came in ’48, they fled to Lebanon and settled in one of the refugee camps. That, supposedly, is where this guy, Michel, was born. But he was a sharp kid. He got out of the camps and earned an undergraduate degree from the American University of Beirut, then headed to the U.K. and got his MBA from the London School of Economics.”

“And?”

“And there’s simply no record of a Michel al-Jalil ever being born in Lebanon or going to AU in Beirut,” Kailea explained.

“So?”

“So the guy’s real name is Mohammed al-Qassab. As best we can tell, he’s never set foot in Palestine or Israel. He was born and raised in Damascus. His father was a Syrian general under the Assad regime. Al-Qassab served in Syrian intelligence and was last stationed in Beirut.”

“Cut to the chase.”

“Early this morning, we raided an investment bank in the Canary Wharf section of London, where this guy worked, and the flat where he lived, a penthouse overlooking the Thames. We now believe al-Qassab is working for Kairos and has been acting as Haqqani’s handler. The case is circumstantial at the moment but compelling. The laptop in his penthouse flat was wiped clean. But FBI technicians were able to recover his Internet search history off the cloud. You’ll never guess what he’s been into.”

Marcus sighed. “I have no idea. Just spit it out.”

“He’s been studying the four assassinations of American presidents and dozens of failed attempts as well.”

That got Marcus’s attention.

“He’s also been to Greece twelve times in the past two years,” Kailea continued. “And two hours ago, MI5 picked up his fiancée. They’re interrogating her now. I’ll get you everything I can the moment they’re done. But Geoff just sent you a photo and a quick dossier on this guy, everything we know so far.”

“Any idea where he is now?”

“Unfortunately, yes, and that’s the main reason I’m calling.”

“Don’t tell me he’s in Israel.”

“He got there Friday.”