The President Is Missing(120)

“My CIA director told me, yes.”

“Yes. As you know, Mr. President, the Saudi royal family is a large and diverse one.”

That’s an understatement. The House of Saud numbers in the thousands and has many branches. Most family members have little or no influence and simply receive fat checks from oil revenue. But even among the core group of leaders, numbering somewhere around two thousand, there are branches and hierarchies. And, as there is in any family and any political hierarchy, there is plenty of resentment and jealousy. When Saab ibn Saud jumped over a lot of heads to become the next king, there was more than enough of both to fuel and fund the scheme that brought us all to the edge of disaster.

“The members who attempted the coup have been…discontented with my rule.”

“Congratulations, Your Majesty, for your massive understatement and for catching the conspirators.”

“It is to my great embarrassment that such plans were able to blossom and flourish without my knowledge. Right under my nose, as you would say, and I was unaware of it. It was a lapse in our intelligence that, I can assure you, will be corrected.”

I know the feeling of missing something that’s right under your nose. “What exactly was their plan? What did they want?”

“A return to a different time,” he says. “A world without a dominant America and thus a dominant Israel. They wanted to rule the Saudi kingdom and rule the Middle East. Their intent, as I understand it, was not to destroy America so much as weaken it to the point where it was no longer a superpower. A return to different times, as I said. Regional dominance. No global superpower.”

“We’d have so many of our own problems that we wouldn’t bother with the Middle East—that was the thinking?”

“However unrealistic, yes. This is an accurate description of their motives.”

I’m not sure how unrealistic it was. It almost happened. I keep thinking the unthinkable—what would have happened had Nina not installed the stopper, the keyword to disable the virus? Or, for that matter, if she hadn’t given us the peekaboo to tip us off in advance? What if there hadn’t been a Nina and an Augie? We would never have known it was coming. Dark Ages would have become a reality. We would have been crippled.

Crippled, not killed. But crippled would have been enough, from their perspective. We would have been far too concerned with our troubles at home to worry much about the rest of the world.

They didn’t want to destroy us. They didn’t want to wipe us off the face of the earth. They just wanted to knock us down enough to force our withdrawal from their part of the world.

“We have been successful in our interrogation of the subjects,” says the king.

The Saudis permit a little more leeway in their “interrogation” techniques than we do. “They’re talking?”

“Of course,” he says, as if it were obvious. “And naturally we will make all this information available to you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“In summary, Mr. President, the members of this splinter group in the royal family paid the terrorist organization, the Sons of Jihad, a tremendous sum of money to destroy the American infrastructure. This included, apparently, hiring an assassin to eliminate members of the Sons of Jihad who had defected from the group.”

“Yes. We have the assassin in custody.”

“And is she cooperating with the investigation?”

“Yes,” I say. “We’ve reached an understanding with her.”

“Then you may know what I am going to say next.”

“Perhaps so, Your Highness. But I’d like to hear it from you anyway.”





Chapter

125



Have a seat,” I say inside the Roosevelt Room. Ordinarily we’d do this in the Oval Office. But I’m not having this conversation in the Oval Office.

He unbuttons his suit jacket and takes a seat. I sit at the head of the table.

“Needless to say, Mr. President, we were elated with the results from yesterday. And we were grateful that we could be a small part of your success.”

“Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Andrei, please.”

Andrei Ivanenko looks like he could play someone’s grandfather in a cereal commercial—the crown of his head bald and spotted, wispy white hair along the sides, an overall frumpy appearance.

The look works well for him. Because beneath that harmless-seeming exterior is a career spy, a product of Russia’s charm school and one of the elites in the former KGB, shipped off later in life to the diplomatic arena and sent here as ambassador to the United States.

“You could have been an even bigger part of our success,” I say, “if you’d warned us about this computer virus in advance.”

“In…advance?” He opens his hands. “I do not understand.”

“Russia knew, Andrei. You knew what those Saudi royals were up to. You wanted the same thing they wanted. Not to destroy us per se but to diminish us to the point where we no longer had influence. We would no longer be a check on your ambitions. While we were licking our wounds, you could reconstruct the Soviet empire.”

“Mr. President,” he says, almost like a southern drawl, thick with incredulity. This man could look you in the eye and tell you that the world is flat, the sun rises in the west, and the moon is made of blue cheese, and he’d probably pass a polygraph test while doing so.