Frederick Forsyth - The Negotiator

“It’s coming alongside,” she said.

“Drive normally,” mumbled Quinn from his hiding place. “Give ’em a nice bright smile and a wave.”

The Mercedes pulled up alongside. It was still dark, the interior of the Ford invisible from outside. Sam turned her head. She knew neither of them, the refrigerator-freezer or the dog handler of the previous morning.

Sam flashed a beaming smile and a little wave. The men stared, expressionless. Frightened people on the run do not smile and wave. After several seconds, the Mercedes accelerated ahead, did a U-turn at the next intersection, and went back toward town. After ten minutes Quinn emerged and sat up again.

“Herr Lenzlinger doesn’t seem to like you,” said Sam.

“Apparently not,” said Quinn sadly. “I’ve just shot his pecker off.”

It is now confirmed that the Saudi jamboree to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of the declaration of the Kingdom will be on April 17th next,” Colonel Easterhouse told the Alamo Group later that morning.

They were seated in the spacious office of Cyrus Miller atop the Pan-Global Tower in downtown Houston.

“The half-billion-dollar stadium, entirely covered with a two-hundred-meter-wide acrylic dome, is complete, ahead of schedule. The other half of this billion-dollar exercise in self-glorification will be spent on food, jewelry, gifts, hospitality, extra hotels and guest mansions for the statesmen of the world, and on the pageant.

“Seven days before the actual pageant, before the expected fifty thousand international guests arrive, there will be a full dress rehearsal. The climax of the entire four-hour pageant will be the storming of a life-size replica model of the old Musmak Fortress, as it stood in 1902. The structure will be completed by Hollywood’s most skilled set designers and builders. The ‘defenders’ will be drawn from the Royal Guard and dressed in the Turkish clothes of those days. The attacking group will be composed of fifty younger princes of the House, all on horseback, and led by a young relative of the King who bears a resemblance to the Sheikh Abdal Aziz of 1902.”

“Fine,” drawled Scanlon. “Love the local color. What about the coup?”

“That’s when the coup takes place,” said the colonel. “In that vast stadium, on rehearsal night, the only audience will be the topmost six hundred of the Royal House, headed by the King himself. All will be fathers, uncles, mothers, and aunts of the participants. All will be packed into the royal enclosure. As the last participants of the previous presentation leave, I will computer-lock the exit doors. The entrance doors will open to admit the fifty riders. What is not foreseen, except by me, is that they will be followed by ten fast-driving trucks disguised as Army vehicles and parked near the entrance gates. Those gates will stay open until the last truck has passed inside, then be computer-locked. After that, no one leaves.

“The assassins will leap out of the trucks, run toward the royal enclosure, and begin firing. One group alone will stay on the floor of the arena to dispatch the fifty princes and the Royal Guard ‘defenders’ of the dummy Musmak Fortress, all armed only with blanks.

“The five hundred Royal Guards surrounding the royal enclosure will attempt to defend their charges. Their ammunition will be defective. In most cases it will detonate in the magazines, killing the man holding the gun. In other cases it will jam. The complete destruction of the Royal House will take about forty minutes. Every stage will be filmed by the video cameras and patched through to Saudi TV; from there the spectacle will be available to most of the Gulf States.”

“How you going to get the Royal Guard to agree to a reissue of ammunition?” asked Moir.

“Security in Saudi Arabia is an obsession,” replied the colonel, “and for that very reason arbitrary changes in procedure are constant. So long as the authority on the order looks genuine, they will obey orders. These will be given in a document prepared by me, over the real signature of the Minister of the Interior, which I have obtained on a blank sheet. Never mind how. Major General Al-Shakry, of Egypt, is in charge of the ordnance depot. He will provide the defective issue of bullets. Later, Egypt will have to have access to Saudi oil at a price she can afford.”

“And the regular Army?” asked Salkind. “There are fifty thousand of them.”

“Yes, but they are not all in Riyadh. The locally-based Army units will have been on maneuvers a hundred miles away, due back in Riyadh the day before the dress rehearsal. The Army’s vehicles are maintained by Palestinians, part of the huge foreign presence in the country of foreign technicians who do the jobs the Saudis cannot. They will immobilize the vehicles, marooning the nine thousand Army troops from Riyadh in the desert.”

“What’s the Palestinians’ kickback?” asked Cobb.

“A chance of naturalization,” said Easterhouse. “Although the technical infrastructure of Saudi depends on the quarter-million Palestinians employed at every level, they are always denied nationality. However loyally they serve, they can never have it. But under the post-Imam regime they could acquire it on the basis of six months’ residence. That measure alone will eventually suck a million Palestinians south from the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon, to reside in their new homeland south of the Nefud, bringing peace to the northern Middle East.”

“And after the massacre?” Cyrus Miller asked the question. He had no time for euphemisms.

“In the last stages of the firefight inside the stadium, it will catch fire,” said Colonel Easterhouse smoothly. “This has been arranged. The flames will engulf the structure fast, disposing of the remains of the Royal House and their assassins. The cameras will continue to run until meltdown, followed on screen by the Imam himself.”

“What is he going to say?” queried Moir.

“Enough to terrify the entire Middle East and the West. Unlike Khomeini, who always spoke very quietly, this man is a firebrand. When he speaks he becomes carried away, for he speaks the message of Allah and Mohammed, and wishes to be heard.”

Miller nodded understandingly. He, too, knew the conviction of being a divine mouthpiece.

“By the time he has finished threatening all the secular and Sunni orthodox regimes around Saudi’s borders with their imminent destruction; promising to use the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollars-a-day income in the service of Holy Terror, and to destroy the Hasa oil fields if thwarted, every Arab kingdom, emirate, sheikhdom, and republic, from Oman in the south up north to the Turkish border, will be appealing to the West for help. That means America.”

“What about this pro-Western Saudi Prince who is going to replace him?” asked Cobb. “If he fails…”

“He won’t,” said the colonel with certainty. “Just as the Army’s trucks and the Air Force fighter-bombers were immobilized when they might have prevented the massacre, they will reenter service in time to rally to the Prince’s call. The Palestinians will see to that.

“Prince Khalidi bin Sudairi will stop by my house on his way to the dress rehearsal. He will have a drink-no doubt about that; he’s an alcoholic. The drink will be drugged. For three days he will be detained by two of my Yemenite house servants in the cellar. There he will prepare video and radio tapes announcing he is alive, the legitimate successor to his uncle, and appealing for American help to restore legitimacy. Note the phrase, gentlemen: the United States will intervene, not to conduct a countercoup, but to restore legitimacy with the full backing of the Arab world.