Jack Coughlin - Clean Kill

Delara replied, “The American ambassador and the U.S. secretary of state have entered the grounds. The helicopter of Prince Abdullah is in the air, with an ETA of eight minutes. The Egyptian foreign minister’s plane just landed at Edinburgh, and a helo is waiting for him. Twenty minutes.”

“Very well,” he said, and straightened the sleeves of his midnight black tux. “Ladies, shall we go down and greet the guests?”

“Not until you tell me about Kyle.” Lady Pat crossed her arms and stayed put.

“Well, I showed him all around the perimeter and described our security precautions. Where guards would be on duty in static positions and the routes of the roving patrols. The electronics. I told him that if a squirrel shat out there, we would know it.”

“Jeff! Watch your language. Children are present.”

“I apologize, Delara,” he said. She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I told him how all of the international teams were cooperating and how tight this net was going to be, and asked if he thought he could penetrate such a band of security and take out a target.”

“Obviously he would tell you that he could,” Lady Pat almost snorted. “Little bastard thinks he is Superman.”

“Worse. He said it would be easy. So we extended the protective perimeter to two miles in every direction. Not only did Kyle say that still would not be enough, but insisted that protecting this place was tactically impossible. Centuries ago, it made sense to put a castle on a hill so it could dominate the region. In the twenty-first century, he says it’s a security dinosaur.”

“And that got you all upset. We are having this wonderful reception to mark an historic event and you let Kyle Swanson needle you. He was probably saying that just to get under your skin, and he did.” She grinned. “Delara, dear, please make a note to remind me to box Kyle’s ears the next time I see him.”

“Yes, m’lady.”

Pat linked her arm into Sir Jeff’s again and got him moving toward the stone stairs that descended from the wall-walk into the castle courtyard. The first black limos were arriving. “Now smile and prepare to welcome all of these important people to our stately manor.”

SCOTLAND

I BRAHIM B ILAL WAS FIRSTout of the minivan when it pulled off a narrow farm road and into a brush-obscured driveway three miles away from the castle. A few scruffy Highland cattle grazed around him but there was no other sound. He pressed a button on his wristwatch and started the attack countdown and called for the others. “Out! Quickly now. Quickly!”

Four more men dismounted, all wearing insulated smoky branch camo overalls and strong climbing boots and with their faces smeared with NATO camouflage paint sticks. They hauled open the rear doors of the small truck, handed around backpacks and strapped them on. The loads contained only radios, water, some snacks, dry socks and shoes, and a complete change of clothing. Holstered pistols with a single spare clip apiece would be their only personal weapons. Very soon, every ounce would count.

The rest of the cargo was pulled out, then they covered the vehicle with a ten-by-twenty foot mottled mesh camouflage net and branches were used to erase the tire tracks. That done, they helped each other add the new loads, grunting with effort as they distributed several hundred pounds of additional weight among the five of them, using the backpacks to take some of the weight and better balance the loads across their shoulders. “Life isn’t easy,” Bilal joked. “Go now.”

Moving at the head of the column, he took them through the cows toward a small hill at the far west end of the pasture. A helicopter roared high overhead and passed beyond the crest, with its bright landing lights pushing columns of white through the gloom. Bilal looked at his wristwatch as he walked. Right on time.

“I NEVER THOUGHT I’Dsee this day,” the American secretary of state, Kenneth Waring, told Sir Jeff as the sleek helicopter touched down with barely a wiggle. The engines were shut down and the blade slowed its spinning.

“It is the inevitable outcome of the extremely difficult work by dedicated men and women of good will over many years,” Cornwell replied. His hands were moist from nervousness.

“Sir Jeff, your work behind the scenes was vital in this final stage of the negotiations. I doubt that we could have done it without your assistance. You know so many influential people and they all trust you to be an honest broker. Believe me, that sort of reputation is rare today.”

Jeff was uncomfortable with compliments. He felt he had just done his duty, keeping all of those hard-headed politicians and diplomats going in private meetings when they all had conflicting agendas. They had been arguing for years and Jeff had helped nudge them toward a decision. “The danger comes over the next few months, while the heads of the regional governments try to keep the fanatics under control.”

“Jeff, if anybody can pull this off, it is Prince Abdullah. Either he is successful or we probably get another century of Middle East misery.”

They were not the only ones having doubts.

P RINCE A BDULLAH, THE S AUDIambassador to the United States, looked out from the window of his helicopter and saw the eager faces of his hosts and the big blue wall of the old castle. He knew that when he stepped from this aircraft, he would be changing the world and in a fleeting moment of fear, wanted to order the pilot to take off again, to rush him back to the airport so he could fly back to Washington and resume his normal and familiar routines. Let this burden fall on other shoulders.

The prince was in his early forties, tall, handsome, and athletic, and had been groomed for this role since he was a boy. Highly intelligent, multilingual, and experienced both as a soldier and a diplomat, he might never be king, for he was not the monarch’s eldest son, but the family had molded Abdullah into their version of an enlightened, modern political figure. If forced to evolve into a democracy, he would be the prince who could run for office, although that plan had also fallen into ashes in this turbulent time. His new reputation, historic as it might be, would not win him many voters. The man who made peace with the Jews!

Abdullah had reviewed the diplomatic cables and the latest news while on the flight across the Atlantic. There was unrest at home, which had been expected, for to have Saudi Arabia sign an official peace treaty with Israel carried huge risks. The nation where Islam’s most holy cities of Mecca and Medina were located was switching sides, a monstrous development in the view of religious fundamentalists who championed a stern theocracy. Blind hatred for Israel was a bedrock belief for millions of Muslims. Violence had blossomed in dozens of places.

The royal family in Riyadh saw things differently than the imams and mullahs. Egypt had made a similar agreement with the Jewish state forty years ago, withstood the ensuing political storms, and prospered. To survive in the tumultuous twenty-first century, the Saudis also needed to make political adjustments. Controlling one-fifth of the world’s known oil reserves was no guarantee of a stable long-term existence because the product was only that, a product to be sold. It was a finite resource and would either run dry or, more likely, be overtaken by other energy sources and the nation could disintegrate right back into the desert sands from which it had come, having been rich and powerful for only a few generations. Hatred of the Jews had outlived its usefulness. National survival was at stake.