House Divided (A Luke Stone Thriller—Book 7)

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER THREE

5:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

“I’ve already seen the photographs,” an intern said.

“Gruesome. Corpses and body parts strewn across the hillsides. To think that Marshall Dennis is one of them. God. We studied him in an entrepreneurship class when I was at Wharton. He was amazing—a real force of nature. You wouldn’t think a guy like that would ever die. Like, he wouldn’t allow it, or something.”

Luke was riding in an elevator packed with White House staffers and intelligence people. He glanced at the one who had spoken. The guy was very young, tall and fit, in a blue suit jacket and dress shirt with an open-throated collar, and a flop of blond hair nearly obscuring his face. He reminded Luke of New Wave rock bands from the 1980s.

The kid hadn’t been speaking to anyone specific, just all the elevator riders in general. He had made an announcement of sorts: he had seen the pictures already. Briefly—very briefly—Luke wondered which wealthy campaign donor the kid was the son or nephew of.

The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. People who arrived there for the first time were often surprised at how small it was. When a crisis came, like now, for example, and the place started to get crowded, it could give a claustrophobic fits. It was hyper-modern and set up for maximum use of space, with large screens embedded in the walls every few feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table. Tablet computers and slim microphones rose from slots out of the conference table in the center of the room—they could be dropped back into the table if the attendee wanted to use their own device.

Every plush leather seat at the table was already taken. The seats along the walls were filling up with young aides and assistants, most of them chatting among themselves, tapping messages into tablets, or speaking into telephones.

The young people were excited. Their futures were full of hope, and their eyes were bright with ambition. The fact that they had been awakened and summoned to an emergency meeting this early in the morning only underscored to them how important they were.

Down in the center of the room, where the actual decision-making would happen, the faces were decades older and the eyes were less bright. Susan Hopkins sat at the closest end of the oblong table, in a high-backed chair with the Seal of the President on it. At the far end stood big, chrome-domed Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor. A sprawl of tired-looking men and women took up the seats between them.

Susan and Luke always staggered their arrivals to emergency meetings like this. It was a tactic meant to obscure the fact that they had just awakened in bed together. One glance from Kurt told Luke all he needed to know: they weren’t fooling anyone—at least not anyone who mattered. Luke took a seat in the back row along the wall.

He watched Susan, just slightly below him and to his left. She held a large white coffee mug in one hand. She looked good—slim and fit in a dark blue pantsuit, her hair just a little bit wild. Susan could make the most conservative outfit look sexy. She was talking seriously to her chief-of-staff, Kat Lopez.

Stone looked Kat up and down. Long black hair, pretty face, dark almond eyes, and a tall, full-figured body hidden inside a blue business suit—she looked almost as good as Susan. Her eyes were tired, though, and were starting to show crow’s feet at the edges. Kat was not as young as she looked, and the demands of the job were putting some wear and tear on her.

Suddenly Kurt clapped his big stone hands. He had played basketball in college. His hands were enormous. Kurt himself was big, but his hands looked like they were on the wrong body.

“Order, everybody! Come to order, please.”

The place quieted down. A couple of aides continued to talk along the wall. It was early morning, people were drinking coffee, revving up, starting their day. This was a place for talkers. Quiet, introverted young people didn’t usually end up working at the White House.

Kurt clapped his hands again.

CLAP. CLAP.

CLAP.

The last one sounded like an unabridged dictionary slamming onto a marble floor.

The room went dead quiet.

“Good morning, everyone,” Kurt said. “Thank you for arriving quickly. You all know who you are, so we’re going to skip the introductions.” He paused and looked at Susan. “Madam President?”

“Mister National Security Advisor?” she said.

“Are we ready?”

Susan shook her head. “No. But that never stopped us before.”

Kurt glanced at the young woman sitting just to his left. Luke recognized her as Kurt’s long-time aide. She still wore her hair in the Hopkins Bob that Susan had recently abandoned. “Amy, let’s start with Sharm El Sheikh.”

On the large screen behind Kurt, and the smaller screens around the room, a photograph of an airport terminal appeared. The terminal’s roof was rounded and billowy, almost as though it were a tent. In the foreground of the photo was a ten-story control tower. In the background and fading into the distance were jagged red and brown mountains.

“This is Sharm El Sheikh International Airport,” Kurt said. “It’s the third busiest airport in Egypt, and serves the Sinai Peninsula, particularly the Red Sea tourist resorts located in the south. A little over an hour ago, it was the site of a devastating plane crash in which eighty-three people perished. This includes sixty-eight passengers, twelve cabin crew, and the three pilots on the flight deck—everyone on board the plane.

“Among the passengers were Sir Marshall Dennis, OBE, founder and chief executive of Dennis Hotels Worldwide, as well as the Loose Lips magazine publishing empire. Also on board were United States Representative from Texas Jack Butterfield, and Egyptian Consul-General to London Ahmet Anwar. The flight was a charter from London, carrying a group planning to celebrate the opening of a new Dennis Hotel on the Red Sea, a joint venture with the Texas-based Bonanza Hotel Group and the Egyptian government itself.”

Kurt paused for a moment and looked around the room. “The plane was arriving, and exploded in midair on its final approach to the runway. All indications are that it was foul play. The plane was three years old and had passed all recent safety inspections with no red flags. This suggests that either a bomb was planted on board, or the plane was hit by hostile fire, possibly a shoulder-fired rocket launched from the mountains you see in the photo. There were no Egyptian military in the vicinity at the time, and satellite footage shows no unauthorized use of Egyptian airspace. So there’s no chance someone fired on them by accident.”

“Which way are we leaning?” Susan said. “Bomb or rocket fire?”

“Rocket fire,” Kurt said without hesitation. “The plane was operated by TUI Airways, the largest charter flight company in the world, with an excellent safety record and a reputation for stringent background checks of employees. The flight departed from Gatwick Airport, which maintains tight security and has no history of lapses or breaches. Of course, the investigation into the personnel who loaded or were in contact with the plane before departure is just beginning. But for the moment, I am going to go out on a limb and say I have no reason to believe that a bomb was placed on board.”

Kurt looked at a man in military dress greens sitting at the conference table. He was thin and sinewy, square-jawed, with a gray flattop haircut. His hand was raised just slightly. Luke recognized him instantly.

“General?” Kurt said.

“Frank Loomis with Joint Special Operations Command,” the man said. “You’re not out on a limb. Without divulging too much, it’s safe to say we have people on the ground in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. Our early intelligence suggests that this was an attack by Wilayat Sinai, probably with an assist from out-of-towners. Maybe Al-Qaeda, maybe ISIS. Furthermore, we’re showing that…”

Kurt held up a big hand in a STOP gesture. Heavy hitters visited here a lot, and they were accustomed to running things. But they tended to find out that this was Kurt Kimball’s domain. He called the tune and you danced to it.

“Okay, General. Let’s take this one step at a time, and get everyone here on the same page. It’ll make life easier down the road.”

The general grunted, possibly in agreement, possibly in frustration.

“Amy, bring up the Sinai Peninsula, please.”

On screens all over the room, maps of the Sinai Peninsula appeared, sandwiched between the vast landscape of Egypt proper to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the north, Israel to the northeast and the sliver of the Red Sea directly to the east. Luke knew the terrain well.

“The Sinai Peninsula is the upside-down triangle you see here. Nominally part of Egypt, it’s been a political football throughout human history. From 1968 until 1980, it was occupied by the Israelis in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Border tunnels are routinely discovered between the north of the peninsula and the Gaza Strip, suggesting steady movement of fighters and materials between those two places.

“The local population are nomadic Bedouins, Sunni Muslims, elements of whom have become increasingly radicalized in recent years, particularly as Red Sea tourism in the south and east has grown.”

A middle-aged woman in a business suit raised a hand. “Do you suppose this is because beach resorts bring Western culture, like alcohol, dancing, and women in bikinis?”

Kurt shrugged. “I’m sure that offends some sensibilities. And I believe that is probably the reason Marshall Dennis seems to have been targeted specifically. His resorts have a reputation for a certain brand of hedonism, and his magazines are known for salacious celebrity gossip and scantily clad young models.”

“Marshall Dennis was a pig,” the woman said.

A few people laughed. Luke rolled his eyes. It might be a little early in the morning to climb up on a soapbox. Anyway, the man was dead.

“People have strong opinions about Sir Dennis,” Kurt said. “But no matter his faults, to be clear, an element of this is economic as well. The Bedouins have been pushed off ancestral lands to make way for new development, and a class of well-paid Egyptian and international workers have been flying in to work at the resorts, causing an infrastructure building boom and driving up the prices of nearly everything. This is far from the first terrorist attack in that region.”

He glanced at his aide. “Amy, can we see the list?”

On the screens, a typed list appeared. There was very little graphic design. Each entry had a title in bold, and a brief description underneath. The list began to scroll down, giving a sense of its length—perhaps thirty or forty entries, all of them attacks.

“We won’t do this exhaustively,” Kurt said. “You can all see how many incidents there have been. We’ll just jump in here and there. December 2013—an attack on an Egyptian police compound killed sixteen recruits. March 2014—multiple cross-border rocket attacks on Eliat, Israel, activated the Israeli Iron Dome defense system. All but one rocket was intercepted, ten people were injured, and there was one death from a heart attack. February 2015—a bus was bombed along the Red Sea coast, killing three Korean tourists and the Egyptian driver. A message afterwards warned all tourists to leave Egypt.”

Kurt sighed. “And of course, the big one. Metrojet flight 9268 exploded on October 31, 2015, soon after departing Sharm El Sheikh. The flight was full of Russian tourists, and two hundred twenty-four people died, which was everyone on board.”

He paused. “In part, the opening of a new Dennis Hotel was a demonstration by the Egyptian government that they had finally subdued the Wilayat Sinai, and the Red Sea resorts were open for business again.”

“I guess that theory is out the window,” someone said.

“At the risk of sounding ignorant,” Susan said, “who are these people, this… Wilayat?”

Kurt nodded. “Of course. Wilayat Sinai, or ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, are the group formerly known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, or in English, the Supporters of the Holy House. Ansar was a loosely organized group of Salafist terrorist cells carrying out attacks in the region from the early 2000s. Since 2011, the Egyptian government has taken aggressive steps to eradicate those cells. In response, Ansar has affiliated itself with ISIS, making a formal oath of allegiance in 2014. We have widely corroborated intelligence that as ISIS loses the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, it sees the lawless tribal lands—mainly open desert and mountains—of the Sinai as an attractive possible base of operations.”

General Loomis interrupted. “Of course they do. Which I think brings me to my original point.”

“Yes, General,” Kurt said. “I think we’re ready for your input now.”

Loomis nodded. “Thank you. As much as this plane crash is a terrible thing, the chatter we’re privy to suggests that this isn’t the actual attack. It’s a magician’s sleight of hand, designed to get us looking in one direction, while the real trick takes place elsewhere.”

“What evidence do you have to support that?” Susan said.

The general shook his head. “Madam President, I’m not at liberty to discuss our top secret intelligence, or its sources, in a meeting like this one. I think you must know that.”

Susan looked sharply at the general. “General Loomis, as you must know, it’s my prerogative to declassify intelligence on a whim, if I so desire. I’m obviously not going to do that. But in the interest of getting people in this room moving, it might be helpful if you would at least share where and when the real attack might take place.”

The general shrugged. “Madam President, if I knew that, you’re the first person I would tell.”