Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

Will kept still.

Megiddo took a small step toward Will. “There is a children’s concert at the Metropolitan Opera House in this city. There will be four thousand attendees and performers, and most of them, naturally, will be children. The concert is sponsored by a wealthy Middle Eastern foundation and is intended to promote peace, learning, and intercultural compassion within the Gulf and Levant regions. The concert will start at eight this evening. My bombs will destroy the child performers and everyone else in the building at nine P.M.”

Will felt his stomach tighten. “That is an indiscriminate atrocity.”

Megiddo chuckled softly. “Not indiscriminate.” His face hardened. “Certain women, Mr. Cochrane, are the real targets. There are to be guests of honor at the event. The wives of the Emirati, Syrian, Saudi, Egyptian, American, and British premiers attending Camp David. And the wife of the Iranian president.” Megiddo smiled. “Her husband is not allowed into this country, but she has been invited as a gesture of goodwill.”

“The premiers’ wives?” Will felt incredulous.

Megiddo had no expression. “I will destroy the place in the same way I would have destroyed the German government”-he shrugged nonchalantly-“had that not merely been a ruse intended to throw you off my scent. A ruse you uncovered.”

Will silently cursed as he remembered the devices that the German GSG 9 assault squad had found in the attic of the house in Berlin’s Onlauer Street, bombs that contained combined thermite cutting agents and explosives so that they could propel fire through any material, including concrete and steel, and destroy everything around them.

Megiddo looked at him intently. “I managed to get employment passes for the opera house so that my bombers could pose as cleaners within the building. They planted their tiny numerous bombs over the course of several days. The building will have been swept today by antiterrorist police with their equipment and sniffer dogs, but they will not have found the bombs. They are too well hidden, away from scent, sight, or special detectors.”

Will shook his head. “You plan to burn everyone in the Metropolitan Opera House to death? Why?”

“No doubt you find it utterly abhorrent that I am prepared to kill four thousand people, most of them children, as well as the wives of the premiers. But that is not my endgame, my masterpiece. No, my masterpiece will be of a far more epic scale.”

Will waited.

“The collective attendance of the premiers’ wives is unprecedented and has been organized amid grave concerns from their husbands that should anything happen to the women, the results could be catastrophic. But the American security services have given the Arab leaders an assurance that nothing will happen to their wives in this country.” Megiddo chuckled. “It was a very cavalier and foolish assurance.”

Will felt a sudden sickness as a realization struck him. “The Arab and Persian populations of the premiers’ countries would blame the West for any attack on the women.”

“They would indeed.” He nodded. “I live in a part of the world that is deeply conspiratorial. The fact that the First Lady and the wife of the British premier were killed in an assault would not matter to most people from my world. They would see that as simply a devious means to cover the West’s hand in the attack.”

“But you’re also going to kill the wife of the Iranian president. How can you allow that to happen?”

Megiddo leaned forward. “She needs to be sacrificed. No fingers must be pointed at Iran. The president of my country knows nothing about the attack. I have ensured that.” He was enjoying himself. “The concerns expressed to the United States by the Arab premiers were simple and blunt: Should anything happen to their wives, then the populations of their country would blame the United States. The Arab premiers and their administrations would try to calm their countrymen and tell them that the United States was not behind the attack, but their people would not believe them, would think they were weak and puppets of the West. And they would rise up fueled by anger and hatred toward them and the United States.”

“There would be revolutions, regime changes, armies mobilized.” Will shook his head. “Chaos and war.”

“Not total chaos,” Megiddo corrected him. “Iran would remain strong and would be the only nation whose leadership blamed the West for the attack. But the Arab nations would tear themselves apart before transforming themselves into new regimes that were steadfast allies of my country. Iran’s former Arab enemies will unite with us against the United States and its supporters. They will engage in total war against the West. It will be genocide, and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, will be killed in the battles that will follow.”

Will gritted his teeth but spoke calmly. “Nuclear weapons would be deployed to stop this from happening.”

Megiddo shook his head. “Only Israel will deploy nuclear weapons. The former Soviet Union and Asian and European countries will strengthen their borders, and fight terrible battles there. But as long as the Middle East is contained by those countries, they will not risk deploying their nuclear weapons in case we have the capability to do the same. And America will not deploy nuclear weapons for fear of our striking back at its European NATO allies. But Israel will certainly send missiles into Syria and Egypt, missiles that will kill thousands of people. That will result in the destruction of Israel. It will be defeated by the sheer weight of Arab and Persian armies as they sweep through the country. The other battles will then stop, and although many will have lost their lives, the loss will have been worth it for the result-the result that will be an all-powerful Middle East. A superpower whose leadership resides in the Iranian capital of Tehran.”

“And no doubt you will be part of that leadership,” Will concluded.

Megiddo smiled. “My intention is to be at the very pinnacle of that leadership, to be president of a superpower.”

Will gripped his gun hard. “Where is Lana? Is she alive?”

“For now she is alive. But she will soon die with the children and the premiers’ wives. She is tied up in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera House.” He watched for Will’s reaction. “I want her to burn alive. I want her to scream in agony as flames destroy her pretty face. I want her to suffer for thinking that she could deliver a man like me to a man like you.”

Will felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He swallowed fast to fight back an overwhelming need to be sick. He breathed slowly to try to calm his body and mind. He knew that he had to remain in control. He knew that everything relied on his staying in charge of his emotions. “You said that the other reason for your being here was to tell me why you murdered my father.”

“Murdered?” Megiddo frowned. “I did not murder him. I executed him.”

“Whatever words you use, my father was killed by your hand.”

Megiddo nodded. “He was. I killed him because he killed my father.”

“What do you mean?”

Megiddo shrugged. “Your father was part of a small CIA contingent, based in Tehran, during the lead-up to the Iranian revolution in 1979. The CIA supported the shah and had no desire to see the revolutionaries succeed in overthrowing him. They worked closely with the shah’s inner circle to protect him and to feed intelligence to the shah’s regime to help him try to thwart his opponents. In the course of their work, the CIA men discovered that there was a high-ranking traitor within the shah’s inner circle. That traitor was my father. The CIA men exposed my father, and he was brutally killed by the shah’s SAVAK intelligence organization.” Megiddo’s eyes took on a faraway look. “When I found out what had happened, I constructed a plan to seek my revenge on the CIA men who had caused the death of my father. I posed as a revolutionary defector, approached the American embassy, discovered that there were only two CIA men still operating in Tehran, discovered that one of them was the more senior of the two, decided that it had to be that man who had uncovered my father’s secret work, told them that I wanted to get out of Iran while I still could and that in return would tell them everything about the revolutionaries’ intentions for a newly built Iran.