Callan held up her hand for silence, looked at Trafford and said, her voice very quiet, “Temp, would you like to explain to me exactly why you didn’t know this, since you have all your CIA ears to the ground, listening and probing? And yet you’ve not heard a single word about Damari here to assassinate me?”
He was as shocked as the rest of them, she realized, staring at him. If he hadn’t heard anything, was the threat real? Was it possible Ari was wrong?
“No,” he said slowly, “your source can’t be right. Our latest reports have Damari in Jordan. He supposedly has a villa there—at least there’s a money trail tied to the villa, though no one’s ever seen him there. We’d kill to get eyes on the man, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Callan said, “Since he had his extensive cosmetic surgery, you haven’t gotten a look at his new face, have you?”
Maitland sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Madame Vice President, the only confirmed surgery we know is cheekbone implants, though I hardly think he stopped there. Without a new front facial baseline, we can only reconstruct so far. It’s impossible to keep Damari on a watch list if no one knows what he looks like.”
“Regardless,” McGuiness said, “if your people have had such little luck tracking him down, Mr. Trafford, perhaps it’s time to hand over the duties to National Intelligence. We’ll get a bead on him, and do it fast.”
Temp didn’t say a word. Did he realize his people had fallen down on the job? It scared her that he hadn’t known about Damari for the simple reason that it could well mean there were other critical things he’d missed. She didn’t like it, and he didn’t, either, she was sure of that.
Maitland said, “If your source is solid, Madam Vice President, I can only assume it’s to do with the president’s talks. Right, Temp?”
Temp finally said, his voice hard, “I can’t explain why we hadn’t already picked up on this threat, but you know I will find out. Now, no more playing around. We all know you’re toeing the party line here for Bradley, that personally you’re against his approach, his seeming appeasement of the Iranians, but the thing is, you’re hardly the only one who disagrees with Bradley on this; there are plenty of people who don’t want to see peace in the Middle East that leaves Israel hanging out to dry.
“So why you? Who took out the contract, and on you, specifically?”
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KING TO F1
Callan said, “It’s very possibly the Iranians acting with Hezbollah. But as yet no positive verification. I’ve given this a lot of thought. If they’re indeed behind hiring Damari to kill me, it’s because they want to disrupt and cause chaos, and damn the consequences. It also sounds like ISIS, and our never-to-be-forgotten Al Qaeda, all of them willing and eager to kill all of us, reduce us to dust. One does not assassinate someone in my position and hope to survive, unless one does not have a country or care about it at all.”
McGuiness said, “You’re right. To assassinate you would cause immense disruption not only here at home, but all over the world, because we would react.”
Maitland was shaking his head. “Therein lies the difficulty, Maureen, positively identifying the person or country behind the contract; the president would not retaliate unless he had absolute proof.”
Actually, Callan wasn’t sure what the president would do even with reasonable proof Iran were behind the hit and they denied it to his face.
Maitland continued: “Iran does sound like the most likely, their mullahs, their military, they are so fanatical, many of them don’t care what happens to their own country, their own people, so long as we—the West—are destroyed in the process.”
She nodded, told them about her conversation with Ari from the Mossad. “To remind you, there’s possibly someone else in Damari’s sights, and that means we need an alert to the other governments involved in the talks, just in case.”
Temp said, “I’m more inclined to think it’s somebody right here in the U.S., someone high up.”
“Yes, I agree.”