Brad Thor - Blowback

One of the Saudi ruling family’s biggest fears, and the reason Reynolds held the position he did, was that its state oil company, Aramco, was incredibly vulnerable to attack. With so much infrastructure above ground and unprotected, American forecasters had prognosticated that it would only take a small, well-organized band of saboteurs to completely decimate Saudi Arabia’s oil production capabilities, push the al-Sauds from power, and create a worldwide domino effect that could send oil prices soaring over $100, or maybe even $150 a barrel. Geopolitical, social, and economic upheaval would immediately follow. Stock markets would collapse, and civilization would be thrust into a modern version of the dark ages from which it might not ever recover.

It was no wonder Reynolds had nightmares. Saudi Arabia had over eighty active oil and gas fields and more than a thousand wells. There was no way he and his men could be everywhere at once. There had been small, amateur efforts at sabotage in the past, more nuisances than anything else, but it was the “what if” big one that everyone was worried about.

The only way to prevent a major attack was to keep an eye on those most likely to commit one, and that’s exactly what the Saudi Intelligence Services’ agents were supposed to be doing. The problem, in Reynolds’s opinion, was that most of them, including Faruq, weren’t even worthy of the envelopes used to mail their paychecks.

Reynolds downloaded the real daily threat assessment and then cherry-picked e-mails and memos that had flowed between the kingdom’s various intelligence branches over the last twenty-four hours. As he read, something unusual caught his eye.

Over the last two years, Reynolds had compiled his own terrorist watch list. Almost all of the list’s distinguished honorees were radical Muslim fundamentalists from the militant Wahhabi sect, and all were young men the Saudi Intelligence Services currently had under surveillance. The report he was seeing now, though, gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. He had read this same report somewhere before. But how was that possible? He had to be imagining it. Tailing subjects and writing up daily reports were two of the few things the Saudis actually did correctly.

Accessing his removable drive, Reynolds opened the folder he had created for the surveillance subject in question-a young Saudi militant named Khalid Sheik Alomari-and pulled up his previous surveillance reports. It took the security consultant over twenty minutes, but he eventually found what he was looking for. Six months ago, the Saudi agent tailing Alomari had filed the exact same report, verbatim.

It had to be some kind of mistake. Reynolds decided to check the most recent reports on some of the other young Saudis who were known to be close associates of Alomari’s and who attended the same militant mosque on the outskirts of Riyadh. Anything having to do with Khalid Alomari gave Reynolds a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t without cause. The fact that Alomari had been suspected, but never convicted, of several ingenious terrorist attacks within the kingdom, as well as hailing from Abha, the same remote mountain city in the southern province of Asir as four of the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, had cemented his position at the top of Reynolds’s list of Wahhabi wiseguys worth watching.

Four more cups of coffee and two and a half hours later, Reynolds had pieced together a very puzzling picture. Saudi intelligence agents had been substituting old surveillance reports not only for Khalid Alomari, but also for four of his associates. Reynolds didn’t like it.

For the past two months he and his team had quietly been on heightened alert. From the various streams of intelligence he was tapped into, something big was in the works, but nobody had any idea what it was. If it was an attack on Aramco, it could be anywhere. Reynolds and his people had added extra security in spots where they felt the company was most vulnerable, but other than that, there wasn’t much else the company itself could do. There was, though, something that Reynolds could do.

Picking up his cell phone, he dialed his secretary and left her a message that he was going to be spending the next few days in the field. He shut down his computer, stowed his portable flash memory drive, and grabbed his Les Baer 1911.45-caliber pistol. Until he knew what the Saudi Intelligence Services were up to, there was no way he could speak with any of his contacts there, especially Faruq. For the time being, he’d have to figure this out on his own.

WASHINGTON, DC

I t took the man sitting in the car outside the Washington Plaza Hotel three rings before he found his ear bud, plugged it in, and answered his cellular phone. Very few people had this number. When he heard a woman’s voice say that she was calling from “The Flower Patch, “He knew right away who was behind the call.

“We have your order ready,” said Jillian, “but our driver is out sick, so we were wondering if you could arrange to pick up the roses yourself.”

Lawlor was all too familiar with the code. Harvath had a person, or persons, who needed to be brought in to protective custody right away. “Can you remind me again what color I ordered?” he asked. “Pink or red?”-meaning were the person or persons foreign or domestic.

“Pink.”

Foreign.

“It might take me a while to get there,” replied Lawlor.

“Well, we’re going to be closing early, so you’ll have to hurry.”

“Understood. I’m sorry to be so forgetful, but has the bill already been posted to my account?”

“Not yet,” said Jillian.

Lawlor knew that meant that Harvath had not yet posted the details for him on their clandestine electronic bulletin board. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for it.”

“Good. We’ll get it to you as soon as we can.”

“In the meantime,” said Lawlor as he tried to figure out how to phrase the next piece of information in such a way that it would make sense to Harvath, but not to anyone else who might be listening in on their call, “the special blue roses I asked you to look for overseas are rumored to be available domestically now.”

Jillian looked at Harvath, who suddenly had a very concerned look on his face. Blue roses was how they referred to their current assignments. Lawlor was talking about the illness. Somehow, it had made its way to the United States.

“The roses haven’t been put on sale yet, “ Gary continued, “but I’d sure like as much information as you can provide me. Rumor has it that they’ll be on the market in just a few days.”

“We’ll get right on it,” Jillian said. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, one last thing. I’ve gotten several calls that Wal-Mart has gotten into the blue roses business as well. You might want to check into it and see what they know.”

With that, Lawlor punched the end button on his cell phone, set aside the pad of paper he had been taking notes on, and looked up just in time to see Helen Remington Carmichael’s car emerge from the hotel’s underground parking structure.

ITALY

What did he mean by the blue roses are about to go on sale domestically?” asked Jillian.

Harvath looked at her and said, “It means they have intelligence that al-Qaeda has managed to smuggle the illness into the United States.”

“How?”

“Who knows? There’s got to be a million ways they could have done it. All that matters is that it sounds like they have succeeded in getting it in.”

“They haven’t released it, though, right?”

“No, but apparently they’re planning on doing it within the next several days.”

“What are we going to do?” she asked.