The Last Days Read online

  were no tables or chairs in the room any longer, but shards of porcelain and glass dishes of some kind were scattered all over the wooden floor. It ap peared as though that corner of the building had been hit once by a mortar round or RPG and had never been repaired. Now it was wet, cold, and covered with mud.

  The hotel’s foyer and main lobby were around the corner from the dining room—damp, not soaked, but also quite cold. Bitter winter winds howled through the building, sending a chill down Bennett’s spine, if no one else’s. The place was eerie, to say the least. Bennett scanned the shadowy, cavernous rooms. Apparently built in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the hotel had once been quite beautiful and ornate. But everything about the place suggested it hadn’t been used or inhabited in any way for at least a decade, if not more. A glass chandelier dangled overhead, barely connected to the ceiling by a fraying wire and completely covered with cobwebs and dust. Tattered old cloth-and-wood furniture lay scattered about the room—three couches, two coffee tables, and four overstuffed chairs whose stuffing had long ago disin tegrated.

  An old Coca-Cola machine stood plugged in but not working in one corner. A stack of yellowed newspapers, all in Arabic, lay beside it. Badly mildewed Egyptian and Iraqi carpets covered sections of the floor, though several other large carpets were rolled up and leaning against the base of the once grand staircase that led up to a balcony on the second floor and then continued winding up to the third, fourth, and fifth floors above. Hideous green-and-yellow drapes covered all the windows and everything was covered in thick layers of dust and chunks of plaster falling from a damp, rotting ceiling.

  Something inside Bennett wanted to explore a little with his flashlight and his Uzi. He wasn’t entirely sure why. A few minutes before he’d been cursing the fact that he’d ever stepped into this godforsaken hellhole known as the Gaza Strip. Now, so long as no one was gunning for him, he suddenly had the urge to do a little exploring. Who knew what secrets this place might hold?

  Air France flight 1039 touched down in Mexico City.

  A few minutes later, Nadir Sarukhi Hashemi disembarked with the other passengers and cleared through customs. Not with his given name, of course, and certainly not with his nom de guerre found anywhere on his passport. No one here knew him as the Viper. Nor did anyone here know that he was really a Palestinian.

  He had no previous arrests, no outstanding warrants, no information of any kind on file with the Mexican authorities, Interpol, or the FBI. As far as the international law-enforcement system was concerned, Nadir Sarukhi Hashemi was “Mario Iabello,” an Italian citizen, traveling on an Italian passport, a senior computer programmer working for Microsoft and in Mexico City for a small business management conference. They gave him no hassles. Indeed, they barely noticed him at all.

  Nadir rented a Ford Taurus and drove to the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel and Towers, where he paid the valet with a crisp American fifty-dollar bill to park his car overnight. Next, he headed inside to reservations, then upstairs to a corner suite. He set up his laptop, checked his e-mails, and took a long hot shower. He watched the news from Gaza. The Americans were reeling. The world was stunned. The Israelis were preparing to move. It was going better than expected, and this was only the beginning.

  One e-mail worried him, though. It was supposedly from “Antonio Cabrera,” one of his Microsoft clients in Moscow. It was actually from Mohammed Jibril. The timetable had just been sped up. Rather than having a leisurely seven days to reach Atlanta and Savannah, he now had only four.

  Nadir wasn’t sure it was even possible. But what was he going to do, write back and say no?

  It was 4:37 in the morning in Washington, 11:37 A.M. in Gaza.

  Marine One touched down on the icy South Lawn as the freezing rains intensified and the National Weather Service began issuing severe winter storm warnings for the District of Columbia and most counties in Maryland and Virginia. A moment later, the backup chopper landed, as well, and Agent Sanchez breathed a sigh of relief.

  “All units, Gambit is secure at the Ranch,” Agent Sanchez said into her wrist-mounted microphone, once they were in the Oval Office and beginning to dry off.

  Sanchez turned to the president, on the phone to the Residence to check in with his wife. The First Lady had been up for hours, tracking develop ments on television, getting regular updates from the Situation Room, and working the phones to alert family and friends to pray for the wounded and for the families of those who’d been killed.

  “Mr. President, the vice president is on the way,” Sanchez said, catching MacPherson’s eye. “Where would you like everyone to gather?”

  Bob Corsetti and Marsha Kirkpatrick entered into the room. A few sec onds later, Defense Secretary Trainor and Chuck Murray joined them.

  The president told Sanchez to have the vice president meet them in the Situation Room in ten minutes. The rest of the group began going over a list of questions Corsetti had worked up. Had any of the DSS agents sur vived? Were Bennett and his team safe? How were they going to get them out? Should Murray hold a press conference? Should the president? What would they say? What could they say?

  No one said a word.

  Bennett felt sorry for his friends Galishnikov and Sa’id. They were busi nessmen, not criminals or commandos. They deserved better than this. They were used to the Plaza and the Ritz and the Waldorf Astoria. They were used to five-star hotels, not no-star hotels, and they certainly weren’t used to being treated more like fugitives than like trusted allies, not since Galishnikov had emigrated to Israel, anyway. Still, neither had much of a choice, and they knew it, so they kept quiet.

  Tariq stepped around behind the huge wooden registration desk and pointed his flashlight down at a filthy red throw rug. Then, as Bennett and

  McCoy watched closely, he pulled back the rug and lifted away several loose wooden floorboards, revealing a steel doorframe. He punched a nine-digit code into an electronic keypad built into the door, and a lock clicked open. Tariq quickly slid open the thick, rectangular steel blast door, easily moving it sideways to the right as though it were a sliding glass door leading to someone’s back porch or deck.

  Behind this door, set several feet down in concrete, was a round steel hatch, like one found on a submarine. To the left was a small, palm-sized glass pad onto which Tariq placed his left hand. The pad lit up fluorescent green, highlighted each of his fingerprints and palm prints, digitally scanned them and fed them into a mainframe computer database somewhere down below, then emitted a series of muffled beeps as it processed the incoming data. A few seconds later, satisfied that the complete handprint really was that of Tariq Abu Ashad, a.k.a. Robin—Jake Ziegler’s senior watch officer at Gaza Station—the hatch electronically unlocked. “What about Mancuso?” Bennett asked.

  “I’ll send some guys up for him in a few minutes,” Tariq answered. “We’ve got a morgue down below.”

  Bennett just looked at him for a moment. They had a morgue? Sporadic machine-gun fire could now be heard outside. Soon the entire coastal area would be swarming with militia members, firefighters and medical personnel, and crowds eager to know the Americans’ fate. Bennett offered to go down the hatch first. McCoy went down next. Then Galishnikov and Sa’id. Tariq brought up the rear, pulling the rug back in place, closing both doors above them, sealing the hatch and rearming the alarm system.

  It took a moment for Bennett’s eyes to adjust. Though the main room before him was dimly lit, the technology was spectacular. It reminded him of the safe house underneath Dr. Mordechai’s house in Jerusalem, the house where he’d almost died, and then it hit him again—in the Middle East, nothing was ever what it seemed. “Mr. Bennett, I presume?”

  Bennett stood there silent for a moment, stared Jake Ziegler in the eye, and took his measure. They were both about six feet tall, but the similarities stopped there. Where Bennett had short dark hair, Ziegler’s bleached blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. Bennett was an ethnic mutt, Scotch-Irish on his father’s si
de and Greek-Italian on his mother’s side. Ziegler was 100 percent German. Both of his grandparents had escaped the Kaiser’s regime just before the first World War, made their way to Ellis Island, and settled just south of Pittsburgh. Bennett had his mother’s olive skin, giving him a year-round look of being slightly tanned though he was hardly ever outside.

  Ziegler couldn’t have been paler. He, too, was rarely in the sun, but with him it showed. Bennett had perfect twenty-twenty vision. Ziegler wore thin, round, silver wire-rimmed glasses from a life spent in front of computers of all kinds and unnaturally dark rooms in Washington and all over the Middle East.

  Ziegler put out his hand. Bennett didn’t shake it.

  “Are the blindfolds really necessary?” Bennett asked, a bit too bluntly.

  “I’m afraid they are,” Ziegler said.

  “These are friends,” Bennett continued. “They don’t deserve to be treated like criminals.”

  Ziegler lowered his hand, but didn’t flinch.

  “As for saving your lives, Mr. Bennett, you’re welcome. As for your friends, I will have them escorted into a secure room where they can clean up. They’ll have clean beds, hot food, plenty to drink, access to satellite television. They’ll have a phone they can use to call out of the room—just within this facility, not local or international. And, of course, you’ll be able to see them whenever you’d like. Beyond that, I can’t help you.”

  Ziegler was careful not to give away his name or any information that could help Galishnikov or Sa’id identify where they were or whom they were with.

  “But they’re basically prisoners?” Bennett pressed.

  “No, they’re foreign nationals without U.S. citizenship or top-secret clear ances.”

  “They’re with me,” Bennett said, his voice a bit louder. “That should be enough.”

  “Please, please, it’s OK, Jonathan,” Sa’id offered. “You’ve got work to do—go do it. Don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine.”

  “First of all, it’s not OK,” said Bennett. “Second of all—”

  “Jonathan, really,” Galishnikov interrupted. “We understand. Really we do. It’s OK. Ibrahim is right. Don’t worry about us.”

  “I appreciate that,” Bennett said “But like I said, it’s not OK.”

  “It’s going to have to be,” Ziegler said, his placid demeanor unchanged. “Gentlemen, I appreciate your understanding of the unique situation you’re now in, and your willingness to make the best of it. We’ll get you all out of here just as soon as we can. But right now I’ve got a job to do and I need to get back to it.”

  Bennett took a step forward and stared hard into Ziegler’s eyes. McCoy tensed. She wasn’t sure what he was going to do, or how she should respond.

  “If you’d been doing your job,” Bennett said in a whisper, “we wouldn’t be here. So now you work for me. You got that?”

  Ziegler wasn’t sure how to respond. Bennett was right. Moreover, he knew Bennett outranked him by a factor of ten. So did McCoy. But did that mean he was really supposed to let them take over his operation? Marsha Kirkpatrick had personally called him from the White House. She’d ordered him to give Bennett anything and everything he needed, and to set him up for a videoconference with the president that was supposed to start in just a few minutes. Ziegler was already in enough trouble. His career was already on the line. Did he really want the first thing out of Bennett’s mouth when he got on the line with the president to be that Ziegler was guilty of insubordination?

  “I’ll need to run this past my boss,” Ziegler insisted.

  “I’m your boss,” said Bennett. “Now get these guys taken care of.”

  Ziegler nodded. So did Galishnikov and Sa’id. Ziegler took Tariq aside and whispered something to him in Arabic. Tariq excused himself and led the two out of the main room, through a double set of soundproof doors, down a dark corridor and out of sight as Ziegler introduced Bennett and McCoy to the rest of his team and started directing them to “seal the cave.”

  Ziegler’s three duty officers, it turned out, were all American-born Palestinians. Each was a fluent Arabic speaker, and all were veterans of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations with at least five years’ experience. Their love of the United States and willingness to die to defend her principles and values stood in marked contrast to the horror show unfolding above them, and Bennett couldn’t help but be impressed with their professionalism as they moved quickly through a series of emergency procedures.

  Nazir worked the computer systems, sending a new flash traffic e-mail to Langley—Code Red, Priority Alpha—backing up files and data systems, and doing a systems check on all of the myriad telecommunications systems to make sure they were all still working and hadn’t been compromised in any way—shut down, rerouted or tapped, for starters. Hamid worked the physical plant, double-checking the purity of the air and water coming into the facility, firing up the auxiliary power generators, and preparing to take Gaza Station off the local power grid. Maroq unlocked the weapons vault—giving everyone instant access, if needed, to flak jackets, gas masks, and fully locked and loaded M-4 submachine guns.

  Only then did Bennett offer his hand.

  “Jon Bennett,” he said, though there was still an edge to his voice.

  Ziegler eyed Bennett, then McCoy, then shook Bennett’s hand.

  “Jake Ziegler,” he finally said. “Welcome to the Bat Cave.”

  Bennett put his arm around McCoy’s shoulder.

  “My guardian angel,” he said. “You guys know each other, right?”

  “Just over the phone,” Ziegler replied, shaking McCoy’s hand. “Good to finally meet you in person, Miss McCoy.”

  “Thanks, JZ. Please, call me Erin—it’s nice to finally put a face with the voice.”

  “I agree. Welcome to Gaza Station.”

  “Glad to be here, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. You guys have had a harrowing morning, to say the least.”

  “You could say that,” said McCoy.

  “I’m sure you’d like to grab some showers and some rest. But here’s the deal. Mr. Bennett, in about fifteen minutes you’ve got a videoconference with the president and the NSC. Erin, the president wants you in on that as well.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I’d just like to throw on some dry clothes, but all of our luggage is at the King David in Jerusalem. We don’t have anything with us.”

  “No problem, we’ll take care of everything,” said Ziegler, directing one of the guys on his team to get clothes and towels for Bennett and his team.

  “What’s the deal with this weather?” Bennett finally asked.

  “Happens every now and dien. You may be with us for a bit.”

  “Wonderful,” said Bennett, lying.

  “Any word on the DSS agents?” McCoy asked.

  Ziegler looked down. The news could hardly have been worse. Thirty-four DSS agents were confirmed KIA, killed in action. Thirty-one others were missing and presumed dead. He’d just tasked one of his Predator UAVs to monitor the emergency rendezvous point, a coffee shop six blocks from the PLC building run by a CIA informant. Any DSS agents who had survived the initial series of attacks would know to head there immediately and reestablish contact with Black Tower, Gaza Station, or what might be left of the joint operation command, at PLC headquarters. Thus far, the Predator hadn’t picked up any signs of life, but Ziegler wasn’t giving up hope.

  The president looked around the Oval Office.

  His senior team huddled around him, around the desk where the Kennedy brothers managed the Cuban missile crisis, where little John John played hide-and-seek, where Reagan stared down the Evil Empire. They needed to start making decisions.

  First, MacPherson decided to address the nation at 7:15 A.M. EST. TWO hundred seventy million Americans were about to wake up to a horror show. They didn’t need play-by-play and color commentary from a bunch of network anchors and armchair analysts. They needed to hear from him directly. They needed to
understand what was at stake, and know that someone was in charge. He’d condemn the attack and praise the victims, and he’d vow not to let extremists deter the American government from working for a just and lasting solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. White House Chief of Staff Bob Corsetti took detailed notes, as did Press Secretary Chuck Murray.

  It was a good start, but every point generated more questions, some practical, some conceptual. Should it be an address from the Oval Office? A statement in the briefing room? With questions? Without? For now, the president said, it was enough for Murray to put the press corps on notice and ask the networks for airtime.

  Second, the president directed Murray to hold his first “gaggle”—an off-camera, background briefing for White House correspondents—promptly at 6:45 A.M. All the major morning shows—Today, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, CNN’s latest incarnation, and whatever CBS was calling their show this week—would begin at the top of the hour with the shocking footage of the suicide bombing or its aftermath, whatever the network executives thought the country could stomach over corn flakes and English muffins. Then they’d cut to the White House for a preview of the live address that was coming. It was critical, therefore, for the correspondents doing their

  live “stand-ups” out on the North Lawn to be up to speed on the latest details, to understand precisely what the president was thinking and what was likely to happen throughout the day.

  The White House needed to get ahead of this story, to shape it and mold it before someone else did. It would be up to Murray—“Answer Man”—to make that happen.

  Third, the president told Corsetti to page “Shakespeare”—the president’s chief speechwriter—at his home in Old Town Alexandria and get him into the West Wing immediately. The NSC’s two speechwriters should also be brought in ASAP. By no later than 6:00 A.M., they’d need to have a solid draft of remarks the president could make to the country. The speechwriting team should look to Corsetti and Kirkpatrick to coordinate the message. They should aim for an address no longer than seven to eight minutes, but it had to be just right, and they had to be done by six so the president could edit and practice it, or, if need be, throw it out and start over.