JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA
GERMAN FINANCIER DIETER NESCH hung up his telephone to end the call from Moscow, shook his head slightly, then shrugged away the call. His client, Andrei Ivanov, was checking in still again. The young man’s normally confident voice betrayed a sense of nervousness. Nesch considered it to be just a normal reaction for anyone who backed such schemes, which were very expensive to fund and risky to pursue. Nesch had seen it before, when other men with other dreams suddenly found themselves in an unsteady boat with their fates in the hands of others. The tendency to micromanage the situation was overwhelming.
His pale blue eyes moved to the calming scene beyond the window of his villa beside the Red Sea. Tall and skinny palm trees and broad manicured grounds spread toward the nearby beach, and small pleasure boats and sailing craft danced about on the water. Nesch was not nervous at all, and had counseled Ivanov to remain calm. Everything was going fine. The peace process had been utterly destroyed by the attack in Scotland, and that was only the lighting of the fuse. There was much more to come before Saudi Arabia plunged into the abyss.
Dieter Nesch was a most unlikely terrorist, and actually did not view himself that way. It was just another form of business, because somebody had to specialize in handling the money in these situations. He decided to have a bite to eat, and summoned his chef to fix a small plate that would tide him over until dinner. Nesch, in his forties, was only about five foot six and was slightly overweight because of his love for good food and wine. He was always neat and always calm.
That serene ability to remain unflappable usually worked to his advantage. Novices in the game, like the Russian president, usually bordered on panic. Part of his job was to keep them calm. Trust the plan. Trust the man. Nesch had hired the best of the best to handle this coup. They had worked together on numerous occasions in Europe. For now, he must stand back and allow this mad genius to work. From where Nesch stood looking out at the Red Sea, things seemed perfect. The storm was coming soon enough.
INDONESIA
The person whom Dieter had hired to run the show wore only a blue printed batik sarong that reached from his hips to his ankles as he stood barefoot on an immaculate floor of dark teak wood. He used the remote control to surf television news channels: American, Canadian, British, French, and Arab. Things were simmering nicely.
The old castle in Scotland lay in rubble, the historic peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel scuttled, and a number of diplomats dead. The first step was complete. Without sitting, he used the remote and replaced the chattering news people with the web site of a private Swiss financial institution that served only very wealthy customers. The agreed sum of a million euros had been deposited to his private account.
He had never met his benefactor, who had argued for a quick and final strike against the Saudi ruling family, wanting to get it all done in a single day. They were fools. With Dieter Nesch acting as intermediary, he had told them that to achieve permanent changes on such a scale, they had to give up any idea of a temporary upheaval or one day of headlines.
Small scale protests were underway already in several locations. As scheduled, the religious leader Mohammed Abu Ebara was emerging as a spokesman, cloaking his fiery words in the mysteries of Islam. The correspondents were getting interviews, and were putting the bearded face and burning eyes before an international audience of viewers. He turned off the television set and decided to take a nap.
The wide windows in his bedroom of his mountain mansion were open to the sea, with the heat of the afternoon broken by the shade of large trees and a nice breeze that stirred through the big house, heralding an evening rain. He dropped the sarong and climbed naked between light sheets of cool cotton.
No one on the island knew his background. There was speculation, but no one ever asked about the webs of white scars that were lined starkly on the tanned skin of his face, neck, and left shoulder. He had the use of only his right eye and wore a patch over the other. The mouth was always down-turned on that side of his face, as if the muscles were awkwardly locked. The left ear was only a shriveled piece of skin. There were no mirrors in his home and the locals felt an unusual presence of sorcery about him, for how could anyone who had endured so much exterior damage possibly still possess a spirit that had not been equally crippled?
The islands of the Pacific were magnets for such broken men. Throughout the years, soldiers and sailors, writers, adventurers, criminals on the run, businessmen, and others who tired of their old lives, wives, looks, and luck drifted to such havens in Asia and stayed. Many would become bent into commas from spending too many hours leaning on bars and drinking away their dreams. Life could be quite pleasant, but those with get-rich-quick schemes always learned the hard way that the poet Kipling did not lie in warning Occidentals of the fate that befell those “who tried to hustle the East.”
Most of them were merely part of the human flotsam and jetsam on the Pacific trade routes, pushed about by the tides of centuries until they eventually were washed away. Nevertheless, generations of gaijin in Tokyo, the farang in Bangkok, the gwai-lo in Beijing, the tipua among the Maoris and generations of expats from everywhere had come to Asia to scrub off their homelands and make a new try at life. The Australians said such men had “gone troppo.” However hard they tried, they would always remain the big-nosed foreigner, a large person who usually had filthy manners, a loud voice and strange customs and would be welcomed and tolerated, but never truly accepted, even by a new bride’s family. There were rare exceptions and the disfigured man on the mountain was one of them.
He knew all about the negatives of living in Asia and did not care. After all, he had to live somewhere and there were not many choices left; certainly none as pleasant as being in this rambling house that overlooked the ocean on one of Indonesia’s more than 13,000 islands. Maybe he had gone troppo himself.
HERE ON THE ISLAND, the scarred man was known as Hendrik van Es, a reclusive Dutch entrepreneur, and seemed to be a rather mild person. He stood just under six feet tall, weighed a lean 150 pounds and his full head of hair had turned completely white, although he was still relatively young. His intelligence, generosity, and quiet kindness had won over the inhabitants of the nearby village. Girls who came occasionally to spend the nights would confide to their friends the next day that the lonely man was a good lover, once they closed their eyes, pretending sexual ecstasy but in reality avoiding looking at the awful scars.
He existed in near seclusion, with a Javanese staff running his house and technicians handling his various enterprises out of an attached office complex. He hired only Muslims, although he had long ago rejected the tenets of any religious faith.
The perception of gentleness was inaccurate. He had another name, Juba, and he was once the most wanted terrorist in the world for killing thousands of men, women, and children with biochemical attacks in both London and San Francisco.
Juba lay in his comfortable bed, knowing that sleep would not come. It never did without the aid of narcotics or alcohol. The dreams arrived, however, the pages always turning backward to memories of the man who had turned him into a hideous hermit who lurked on this Indonesian mountain. The thoughts flooded back, unbidden and unwanted.
As a young man, Juba had been a master sniper in the British army, decorated for bravery and promoted up the ranks to color sergeant ahead of his peers. He had worked hard and believed no one was better, a belief that came to a bitter end when he met Kyle Swanson, the best scout-sniper in the U.S. Marines. Worse, Swanson did it more than once, always one step faster, one thought ahead. What had begun as a once-friendly rivalry eventually became fierce combat duels with many lives at stake.
After the biochems, Swanson had hunted him down and left him for dead beneath a destroyed house in Iraq. Juba, a legend among Muslim fighters, had been dug out by villagers, barely alive. At that point in the voyage of dreams, Juba could allow himself a smile. He had endured the pain and re-created himself, almost as if he had risen from the dead. Eventually, some day, somewhere, he would repay Kyle Swanson in full.
The time would come. He would make certain of that. Meanwhile, the burning desire for revenge had become secondary to his resurrected career. Once he had regained his health, Juba organized a private network with a global reach and fielded teams that would provide specialist services for terrorist groups and nations. London and San Francisco had been his high points; now he could reach even higher. It was good to be back in the game.
HE CLOSED HIS ONE good eye and breathed deeply, sliding into meditation. There was no hurry. He would take the next step later, maybe even waiting until after a nice dinner before pushing a button on his computer in Indonesia and making something happen in Riyadh.
The e-mail would hurry through a meet-your-true-love Web site to an address in that troubled country, a warm and flirty message that would raise no curiosity. On the other end was supposedly a woman in Medina, but she did not exist. The true recipient was a soldier who had created the account with a false résumé, complete with the comely photograph of a young woman that he had pirated out of Photobucket.
Who guards the guards? Juba had pondered. More specifically: Who guards the guards who guard the King?