Honor Among Thieves Read online

  The driver swung off the turnpike and headed for the center of Newark as Al Obaydi’s thoughts returned to what the money was being used for. The idea had all the hallmarks of his President. It was original, required daring, raw courage and a fair degree of luck. Al Obaydi still gave the plan no more than a one percent chance of even reaching the starting blocks, let alone the finishing tape. But then, some people in the State Department had only given Saddam a one percent chance of surviving Operation Desert Storm. And if the great Sayedi could pull this off, the United States would become a laughingstock and Saddam would have guaranteed himself a place in Arab history alongside Saladin.

  Although Al Obaydi had already checked the exact location of the building, he instructed the driver to stop two blocks west of his final destination. An Iraqi getting out of a large black limousine right in front of the bank would be enough of an excuse for Cavalli to pocket the money and cancel the deal. Once the car had stopped, Al Obaydi climbed over the golf bag and out onto the pavement on the curb side. Although he only had to cover a couple of hundred yards to the bank, this was the one part of the journey that he considered was a calculated risk. He checked up and down the street. Satisfied, he dragged the golf bag out onto the pavement and humped it up onto his shoulder.

  The Deputy Ambassador felt he must have looked an incongruous sight as he marched down Martin Luther King Drive in a Saks Fifth Avenue suit with a golf bag slung over his shoulder.

  Although it took less than two minutes to cover the short distance to the bank, Al Obaydi was sweating profusely by the time he reached the front entrance. He climbed up the well-worn steps and walked through the revolving door. He was met by two armed men who looked more like sumo wrestlers than bank clerks. The Deputy Ambassador was quickly guided to a waiting elevator that closed the moment he stepped inside. The door slid open only when he reached the basement. As Al Obaydi stepped out he came face to face with another man, bigger, if anything, than the two who had originally greeted him. The giant nodded and led him towards a door at the end of a carpeted corridor. As he approached, the door swung open and Al Obaydi entered a room to find twelve men waiting expectantly around a large table. Although conservatively dressed and silent, none of them looked like bank tellers. The door closed behind him and he heard a lock turning. The man at the head of the table stood up and greeted him.

  “Good morning, Mr. Al Obaydi. I believe you have something to deposit for one of our customers.”

  The Deputy Ambassador nodded and handed over the golf bag without a word. The man showed no surprise. He had seen valuables transported in everything from a crocodile to a condom.

  He was, however, surprised by the weight of the bag as he lifted it up onto the table, spilled out the contents and divided the spoils among the other eleven men. The tellers began counting furiously, making up neat piles of ten thousand.

  No one offered Al Obaydi a seat, so he remained standing for the next forty minutes, with nothing to do but watch them go about their task.

  When the counting had been completed, the chief teller double-checked the number of piles. One thousand exactly. He smiled, a smile that was not directed at Al Obaydi but at the money, then looked up in the direction of the Arab and gave him a curt nod, acknowledging that the man from Baghdad had made the down payment.

  The golf bag was then handed back to the Deputy Ambassador, since it had not been part of the deal. Al Obaydi felt slightly stupid as he slung it over his shoulder. The chief teller touched a buzzer under the table and the door behind him was unlocked.

  One of the men who had first met Al Obaydi when he had entered the bank was waiting to escort him to the ground floor. By the time the Deputy Ambassador stepped out onto the street, his guide had already disappeared.

  With an enormous sigh of relief, Al Obaydi began to stroll the two blocks back to his waiting car. He allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction at the professional way he had carried out the whole exercise. He felt sure the Ambassador would be pleased to learn that there had been no mishaps. He would undoubtedly take most of the praise when the message was relayed back to Baghdad that Operation Desert Calm had begun.

  Al Obaydi collapsed on the sidewalk before he realized what had hit him: the golf bag had been wrenched from his shoulder before he could react. He looked up to see two youths moving swiftly down the street, one of them clutching their prize.

  The Deputy Ambassador had been wondering how he was going to dispose of it.

  Tony Cavalli joined his father for breakfast a few minutes after seven the following morning. He had moved back into their brownstone on 75th and Park soon after his divorce.

  Since his retirement, Tony’s father spent most of his time pursuing his lifelong hobby of collecting rare books, manuscripts and historical documents. He had also spent many hours passing on to his son everything he’d learned as a lawyer, concentrating on how to avoid wasting too many years in one of the state’s penitentiaries.

  Coffee and toast were served by the butler as the two men went about their business.

  “Nine million dollars has been placed in forty-seven banks across the country,” Tony told his father. “Another million has been deposited in a numbered account with Franchard et cie in Geneva, in the name of Hamid Al Obaydi,” he added, buttering a piece of toast.

  The father smiled at the thought of his son using an old ploy he had taught him so many years before.

  “But what will you tell Al Obaydi when he asks how his ten million is being spent?” the unofficial chairman of Skills inquired.

  For the next hour, Tony took his father through Operation Desert Calm in great detail, interrupted only by the occasional question or suggestion from the older man.

  “Can the actor be trusted?” he asked before taking another sip of coffee.

  “Lloyd Adams still owes us a little over thirty thousand dollars,” Tony replied. “He hasn’t been offered many scripts lately—a few commercials…”

  “Good,” said Cavalli’s father. “But what about Rex Butterworth?”

  “Sitting in the White House waiting for his instructions.”

  His father nodded. “But why Columbus, Ohio?” he asked.

  “The surgical facilities there are exactly what we require, and the Dean of the Medical School has the ideal qualifications we need. We’ve had his office and home bugged from top to bottom.”

  “And his daughter?”

  “We’ve got her under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

  The chairman licked his lips. “So when do you press the button?”

  “Next Tuesday, when the Dean is due to make a keynote speech at his daughter’s school.”

  The butler entered the room and began to clear the table.

  “And how about Dollar Bill?” asked Cavalli’s father.

  “Angelo is on his way to San Francisco to try and convince him. If we’re going to pull this off we’ll need Dollar Bill. He’s the best. In fact no one else comes close,” added Cavalli.

  “As long as he’s sober,” was all the chairman said.

  Chapter Four

  The tall, athletic man stepped off the plane into the U.S. Air terminal at Washington National Airport. He carried only hand luggage, so he didn’t have to wait at the baggage carousel where someone might recognize him. He needed just one person to recognize him—the driver who was picking him up. At six foot one, with his fair hair tousled and with almost chiseled fine features, and dressed in light blue jeans, cream shirt and a dark blue blazer, he made many women rather hope that he would recognize them.

  The back door of an anonymous black Ford was opened as soon as he came through the automatic doors into the bright morning sunlight.

  He climbed into the back of the car without a word and made no conversation during the twenty-five-minute journey that took him in the opposite direction to the capital. The forty-minute flight always gave him a chance to compose his thoughts and prepare his new persona. Twelve times a year he made the same journe
y.

  It had all begun when Scott was a child back in his hometown of Denver, and he had discovered his father was not a respectable lawyer but a criminal in a Brooks Brothers suit, a man who, if the price was right, could always find a way around the law. His mother had spent years protecting her only child from the truth, but when her husband was arrested, indicted and finally sentenced to seven years, the old excuse, “There must have been some misunderstanding,” no longer carried any conviction.

  His father survived three years in prison before dying of what was described in the coroner’s report as a heart attack, without any explanation being given for the marks around his throat. A few weeks later, his mother did die of a heart attack, while he was coming to the end of his third year at Georgetown studying law. Once the body had been lowered into the grave and the sods of earth hurled on top of the coffin, he left the cemetery and never spoke of his family again.

  When the final rankings were announced, Scott Bradley was placed first in the graduating class, and several universities and leading law firms contacted him to ask him about his plans for the future. To the surprise of his contemporaries, Scott applied for an obscure professorship at Beirut University. He didn’t explain to anyone why he needed a clean break with the past.

  Appalled by the low standard of the students at the university and bored by the social life, Scott began to fill his hours by attending courses on everything from the Islamic religions to the history of the Middle East. When three years later the university offered him the Chair of American Law, he knew it was time to return to the United States.

  A letter from the dean of the law faculty at Georgetown suggested he should apply for a vacant professorship at Yale. He wrote the following day and packed his bags when he received their reply.

  Once he had taken up his new post, whenever he was asked the casual question, “What do your parents do?” he would simply reply, “They’re both dead and I’m an only child.” There was a certain type of girl who delighted in this knowledge—they assumed he would need mothering. Several of them entered his bed, but none of them became part of his life.

  But he hid nothing from the people he was summoned to see twelve times a year. They couldn’t tolerate deception of any kind, and were highly suspicious of his real motives when they learned of his father’s criminal record. He told them simply that he wished to make amends for his father’s disgrace, and refused to discuss the subject any further.

  At first they didn’t believe him. After a time they took him on his own terms, but it was still to be years before they trusted him with any classified information. It was when he started coming up with solutions for problems in the Middle East that the computer couldn’t handle that they began to stop doubting his motives. When the Clinton administration was sworn in, the new team welcomed Scott’s particular expertise.

  Twice recently he had penetrated the State Department itself to advise Warren Christopher. He had been amused to see Mr. Christopher suggest on the early-evening news a solution to the problem of sanctions-busting by Saddam that he had put to him earlier that afternoon.

  The car turned off Route 123 and came to a halt outside a pair of massive steel gates. A guard came out to check on the passenger. Although the two men had seen each other regularly over the past nine years, the guard still asked to see his credentials.

  “Welcome back, Professor,” the uniformed man finally offered before saluting.

  The driver proceeded down the road and stopped outside an anonymous office block. The passenger climbed out of the car and entered the building through a turnstile. His papers were checked once again, followed by another salute. He walked down a long corridor with cream walls until he reached an unmarked oak door, he gave a gentle knock and entered before waiting for a reply.

  A secretary was sitting behind a desk on the far side of the room. She looked up and smiled. “Go right in, Professor Bradley, the Deputy Director is expecting you.”

  Columbus School for Girls, Columbus, Ohio, is one of those establishments that prides itself on discipline and scholarship, in that order. The director would often explain to parents that it was impossible to have the second without the first.

  Breaking school rules could, in the director’s opinion, only be considered in rare circumstances. The request that she had just received fell into such a category.

  That night, the graduating class of ’93 was to be addressed by one of Columbus’s favorite sons, T. Hamilton McKenzie, Dean of the Medical School at Ohio State University. His Nobel Prize for Medicine had been awarded for the advances he had made in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery. T. Hamilton McKenzie’s work on war veterans from Vietnam and the Gulf had been chronicled from coast to coast, and there were men in almost every city who, thanks to his genius, had been able to return to normal lives. Some lesser mortals who had trained under the Nobel Laureate used their skills to help women of a certain age appear more beautiful than their Maker had originally intended. The director of Columbus felt confident that the girls would be interested only in the work T. Hamilton McKenzie had done for “our gallant war heroes,” as she referred to them.

  The school rule that the director had allowed to be waived on this occasion was one of dress. She had agreed that Sally McKenzie, head of student government and captain of the lacrosse team, could go home one hour early from afternoon class and change into clothes of a casual but suitable nature to accompany her father when he addressed the class later that evening. After all, the director had learned the previous week that Sally had won an endowed national scholarship to Oberlin College to study chemistry.

  A car service had been called with instructions to pick Sally up at four o’clock. She would miss one hour of school, but the driver had confirmed that he would deliver father and daughter back by six.

  As four chimed on the chapel clock, Sally looked up from her desk. A teacher nodded and the student gathered up her books. She placed them in her bag and left the building to walk down the long drive in search of the car. When Sally reached the old iron gates at the entrance to the drive, she was surprised to find the only car in sight was a Lincoln Continental stretch limousine. A chauffeur wearing a gray uniform and a peaked cap stood by the driver’s door. Such extravagance, she knew only too well, was not the style of her father, and certainly not that of the director.

  The man touched the peak of his hat with his right hand and inquired, “Miss McKenzie?”

  “Yes,” Sally replied, disappointed that the long winding drive prevented her classmates from observing the whole scene.

  The back door was opened for her. Sally climbed in and sank into the luxurious leather upholstery.

  The driver jumped into the front and pressed a button and the window that divided the passenger from the driver slid silently up. Sally heard the safety lock click into place.

  She allowed her mind to drift as she glanced out of the misty windows, imagining for a moment that this was the sort of lifestyle she might expect once she left Columbus.

  It was some time before the seventeen-year-old girl realized the car wasn’t actually heading in the direction of her home.

  Had the problem been posed in textbook form, T. Hamilton McKenzie would have known the exact course of action to be taken. After all, he lived “by the book,” as he so often told his students. But when it happened in real life, he behaved completely out of character.

  Had he consulted one of the senior psychiatrists at the university, the psychiatrist would have explained that many of the anxieties he’d kept suppressed over a long period of time had, in his new circumstances, been forced to the surface.

  The fact that he adored his only child, Sally, was clear for all to see. So was the fact that for many years he had become bored with, almost completely uninterested in, his wife, Joni. But the discovery that he was not good under pressure once he was outside the operating room—his own little empire—was something he could never have accepted.

  T. Hamilt
on McKenzie became at first irritated, then exasperated and finally downright angry when his daughter failed to return home that Tuesday evening. Sally was never late, or at least not for him. The journey by car from Columbus should have taken no more than thirty minutes, even in the rush-hour traffic. Joni would have picked Sally up if she hadn’t scheduled her hair appointment so late. “It’s the only time Julian could fit me in,” she explained. She always left everything to the last minute. At 4:50 T. Hamilton McKenzie phoned Columbus School for Girls to check that there had been no late change of plan.

  Columbus doesn’t change its plans, the director would have liked to tell the Nobel Laureate, but satisfied herself with the fact that Sally had left school at four o’clock, and that the car service had phoned an hour before to confirm that they would be waiting for her at the end of the drive by the main school gates.

  Joni kept repeating in that Southern accent he had once found so attractive, “She’ll be here at any minute, jus’ you wait. You can always rely on our Sally.”

  Another man, who was sitting in a hotel room on the other side of town and listening to every word they exchanged, poured himself a beer.

  By five o’clock T. Hamilton McKenzie had taken to looking out of the bedroom window every few moments, but the path to their front door lay obstinately unbeaten.

  He had hoped to leave at 5:20, allowing himself enough time to arrive at the school with ten or fifteen minutes to spare. If his daughter did not appear soon, he would have to go without her. He warned his wife that nothing would stop him leaving at 5:20.

  At 5:20 T. Hamilton McKenzie placed the notes for his speech on the hall table and began pacing up and down the front path as he waited for his wife and daughter to come from opposite directions. By 5:25 neither of them was at his side and his famous “cool” was beginning to show distinct signs of steaming.