well.
Court rolled his eyes a little, but then he knelt down and retrieved the little note. Opening it, he saw that it was a phone number with a 973 international country code.
Court thought a moment. Bahrain. An island neighbor of the UAE.
And then, under this, Hanley had scribbled one more line: AW139.
Court nodded. The AgustaWestland AW139 was a medium-sized helicopter.
Hanley had just given Court ingression instructions, and had just given him a green light to assassinate Sultan al-Habsi.
Or, Court told himself, it was more like a yellow light. The DDO had made it perfectly clear he did not want to be associated with whatever Court did, but that was standard operating procedure, and Court was well used to this.
He headed back to the car to tell Zoya he’d have to take a little trip.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
EIGHT DAYS LATER
Palm Jebel Ali is one of two man-made archipelagos in the shapes of palm trees in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. At the far tip of Frond J, a finger-shaped island that juts out to the north, a large mansion sits at the end of the street. It is gated and guarded at all times, but on this day there was even more of a security presence than before.
The homeowner was about to become the ruler of Dubai, after all, and until he moved into the palace, this home would be treated as such.
Sultan al-Habsi took the call about the death of his father at three p.m. this afternoon, some six hours earlier. He knew it had been a long time coming, but still, the Omani doctors had promised him they did everything in their power to keep him alive.
But Sultan was barely listening to this. Two days earlier, he’d met with his father in the hospital, and through sickening wheezes and long bouts of gasping for breath, al-Habsi the father told his son that, even though his mission in Germany had ended in failure, he would make him crown prince of Dubai upon his death.
But he would not become the ruler of the UAE. There were six royal families in the UAE, each one representing one of the Emirates, and, in a move that al-Habsi took as a brutal insult, his father had gone to the executive council of the nation and suggested that the ruler of Abu Dhabi take his place in overall charge of the Emirates.
And so it was decided.
Sultan al-Habsi would be the leader of his royal house, the leader of his emirate, but he would not be the leader of his nation.
He’d been thinking about this betrayal as he ate his dinner alone this evening, and not about his father’s death earlier in the day.
He’d also been thinking about Berlin. The Germans had displayed proof that Mirza had been disavowed by Iran, and even though the bodies of the other terrorists revealed them to be former Quds fighters, the story being taken as fact was that they were all illegal immigrants in Germany, and there Mirza had recruited and brainwashed them, feigning to be a representative of Quds Force.
The drones from Turkey were shown to have been purchased and then reconfigured using money Mirza embezzled from the trucking firm where he worked, and al-Habsi knew without a doubt that this was disinformation by the Germans, because he himself had been the one who purchased the weapons and shipped them from Turkey.
The Germans were in full cover-up mode, this was clear, which told al-Habsi that either they or the Americans, or possibly even both nations, had discovered that the entire operation was orchestrated by outsiders, not Iran.
America couldn’t touch him, so they were covering their own asses by covering his ass.
Still, Sultan wasn’t taking unnecessary chances. The previous day Rudolf Spangler had been stabbed in the back in Athens as he walked from his taxi to his hotel. His wallet was stolen, and the SIA operative who stole it then tossed it into the Ilisos River.
Spangler probably would have held his tongue, but al-Habsi had determined it better to be safe than sorry.
Al-Habsi sipped his tea and looked out over the black water of the nighttime Persian Gulf a moment, and then one of his attendants entered the room. “Sir. Matthew Hanley from the CIA is on the line for you.”
Hanley had al-Habsi’s cell phone number; they’d worked together often enough over the years, but the call, for some reason, came in on the landline of the house.
Al-Habsi wondered if he was going to get some sort of a lecture, an admonishment