shook his head. ‘What, and leave all this?’
‘Hang the Do Not Disturb sign out. It’s late; the maid won’t be back. We won’t be long. Come on, I’ll buy you one of those Irish coffees in the bar around the corner you’re always talking about.’
Yousef was adamant. ‘Let’s not take any risks. We’re too close to screw it up now.’ But he knew that Ahmed was jittery, spooked by the almost disastrous fire. Yousef closed the Toshiba laptop and placed it careful y in the top dresser drawer removing a bottle of Chivas Regal as he did so. Ahmed’s eyes lit up and he smiled. He nodded affirmatively and fetched two tumblers.
An hour passed and, with the soporific effect of half a bottle of alcohol to assist, both men lay comatose, oblivious to the smoldering fire that burned slowly on the underside of the carpet. When fire alarms sent tenants scrambling from their rooms after the sixth floor had burst into flames, brigade tenders sped to the scene. Emergency alarms also galvanized members of the nearby Manila Police Station No. 9, located five hundred metres down the street on Quirino Avenue.
With their room filled with suffocating smoke Yousef coughed awake to confused consciousness and stumbled from the shared, single bed.
‘Ahmed! Ahmed,’ he screamed as flames licked the walls. ‘Get up, Ahmed!’
Moments later the men were seen fleeing along the corridor dragging their pants on as they fled.
* * * *
‘Just some Arabs playing with firecrackers,’ the doorman answered but the watch commander, a senior inspector from the No. 9, was not convinced.
‘They let off firecrackers in their room?’
‘That’s about the gist of it.’ The doorman had seen even more ridiculous situations.
‘Where are they now?’ Suspicions rising, the inspector scanned the faces of pedestrians gathered outside on the street.
‘Well, they scrambled down the fire stairs into reception and disappeared.’ The doorman turned, his face becoming animated as he recognized Ahmed Saeed. ‘That’s one of them!’ he pointed.
‘Okay, let’s see what he has to say. Bring him over here.’
Albeit risky, Ahmed accepted that he had no choice but to return to the apartment and recover whatever material and evidence may remain before the authorities uncovered the extent of their activities in the Philippines. He had not, however, envisaged being confronted so unexpectedly, his prepared explanation obviously not sufficiently convincing for the watch commander to let him return to apartment 603.
As Ahmed offered his version of events, explaining to the inspector that he was a commercial pilot and had been on his way to the precinct to explain what had happened, the doorman tapped the officer on the shoulder.
‘There’s the other one,’ he indicated Yousef standing outside, unaware that they were staring at Ramzi Yousef, a fugitive from the United States for his role in the World Trade Center bombing nigh on two years before.
‘Okay,’ the inspector’s gut feeling was making her nervous,
‘grab that one outside and hold him with this man until we check their room.’
Ahmed whirled, managing to escape the clutches of the law as officers were caught off guard by the foreigner’s audacious move. They gave chase, Ahmed tripped over debris left by a recent typhoon, the police overwhelming the terrorist as he lay stunned.
Yousef took the opportunity to slip away into the night.
Inside 603 the inspector’s team discovered two remote-control pipe bombs, street maps of the capital indicating the forthcoming papal motorcade’s route, the pontiff ’s photograph affixed to the bedside mirror along with a crucifix, rosary and Bible. With the recovery of a phone message from a tailor advising that the cassock Ahmed had ordered was ready for a final fitting the inspector knew without doubt, that the fire had delivered assassins into their hands, and prevented the assassination of John Paul II. Although at the commencement of the grueling interrogation conducted with ‘extreme prejudice’ Ahmed categorically denied such claims, at its conclusion he declared that there were ‘two Satans that al-Qaeda would destroy – these being the Pope and the United States of America.’
* * * *
Results of the white, Toshiba laptop’s contents had revealed an even more sinister component of Operation Bojinka which, the four recovered diskettes disclosed, was designed not only to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his Holiness’ impending visit to Manila, but also a commitment which called for a massive two-phased attack on American interests. This ambitious scheme proposed hijacking a commercial jet to be crashed into the Pentagon and for the placement of explosive devices on eleven aircraft bound for the USA – both operations the blueprint for a grim future.
Details of the militant group’s suicide missions were passed to the United States Embassy, the ambitious plan treated with derision when examined by CIA specialists in Langley.
Both Yousef (the explosives expert) and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the mastermind of Operation Bojinka) managed to escape to Ahghanistan. Data on the laptop also revealed that Wali Kahn Amin Shah (the infatuated financier of the operation) used an address on Singalong Street as his safe house.
He was arrested, but mysteriously escaped seventy-two hours later to Malaysia, from where, with Hambali, he would assist the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group in spreading its tentacles across South-East Asia and into Australia.
Chapter Three
Australia – Canberra
Office of National Assessments (ONA)
“The Intelligence and security agencies are subject to the operation of Australian law unless specifically exempted because of the nature of their work.” Australian Government Legislation.
Peter Rigby waved the shared-intelligence report. ‘How do they expect us to believe that so many nukes simply went missing?’ he challenged rhetorically. The United States National Security Agency’s document revealed that some thirty suitcase sized nuclear weapons remained unaccounted for within Russia and Chechnya. The analyst crossed his arms and frowned at the damning report listing the former Soviet Union’s nuclear armory that included 25,000 nuclear weapons, of which 12,000 were strategic warheads on ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles and bombers – and an inventory of a further 13,000 warheads for tactical nuclear weapons.
With deteriorating economic conditions and organized crime activities continuing to expand across the former Soviet states, Peter Rigby was convinced that it was inevitable for nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists. An ONA (Office of National Assessments) Sr. Analyst, Rigby was also convinced that separatist groups in S.E. Asia were in the market for highly mobile nuclear weapons, and had therefore placed the topic at the top of the weekly briefing agenda.
‘Just how mobile are these weapons?’ the Assistant Director for the S.E. Asian Branch of the ONA asked. The ONA was the government body charged with analyzing international political, strategic and economic developments for the Prime Minister,
