The Devil's Breath Read Free Page B

came, would be total. Total war included the indiscriminate, unannounced use of chemical weapons. A further communiqué would follow. The note was signed ‘The Martyrs of 7th June’.
    Encrypted at the highest security classification, the contents of the note were on a desk in Washington, DC before the first of the Ambassador’s guests drove in through the Embassy gates. The gates, recently installed against possible kamikaze attacks, were blast-proof and electronically controlled. The attaché who’d first read the note watched them swing shut behind the big limousine. Ironic, he thought, remembering the terrible threat behind the letter’s last paragraph. One hundred and ninety thousand dollars’ worth of hi-tech engineering. And it wouldn’t make a cent’s worth of difference.
    *
    In Washington, the note from Amman was preserved – eyes only – until the arrival of the named addressee. Normally Sullivan was at his desk in the West Wing of the White House by 7 a.m. On this particular Tuesday, after a crippling day in London and an overnight flight back, he was two hours late.
    Sullivan hung his coat on the back of the door and sank into the big leather chair behind the desk. An early shower had caught him as he stepped out of the car. His hair was still wet. He gazed down at the note without reading it. Impending war, as he was beginning to understand, played havoc with the ageing process. Already, after a fortnight of crisis management, of back-to-back meetings and helicopter dashes to Andrews Air Force Base, he felt several hundred years old. His wife, as concerned and patriotic as the next administration spouse, was beginning to make impatient noises about nuclear strikes, an eye for an eye, the importance of getting the whole damn thing buttoned up before her precious husband succumbed to the incessant deadlines and self-destructed. Who knows? he thought. Had Saddam Hussein kept his hands off Kuwait, theymight even now be back-packing along the more remote Yosemite trails, three weeks of wilderness they’d been promising each other for nearly two years, a chance – at last – to shed a little of the bulk that seemed to come with the job. Some hope.
    He reached for the note and read it. Lifting the phone, he checked with the decrypt office in the basement of the Executive Office Building across the street. He made another call to a New York number, briefer still. Then he picked up the note and walked along the blue-carpeted corridor to the Oval Office. The President had been at his desk since dawn, one eye on the CNN transmissions piped through to the middle of the three televisions installed beneath the big framed painting of Gettysburg. Rumour was, the President never slept. Didn’t need to. Mistrusted the stuff.
    The decrypt from Amman passed across the desk. The President read it, fidgeting with a pencil as he did so. Then he looked up.
    ‘What do we know about this business in New York?’
    ‘Nothing, sir. Yet.’
    ‘OK. So let’s have us find out.’
    ‘It’s in hand. They’re checking now. They’ll phone.’
    There was a long silence. The two men looked at each other. Then the President ran a tired hand over his face. Soon now he’d be going back to Maine, a little fishing, a little sunshine, a little fun. It was important to try to kid the rest of the world that life went on as normal. Even with the Middle East about to blow up. The President looked down again at the note.
    ‘What’s the worst?’ he said.
    ‘The worst?’ Sullivan frowned. ‘The worst is, that it’s true.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘And …?’ He shrugged. ‘We close New York.’
    The President gazed at him. Fatigue, or some trick of the light, had somehow flattened the planes of his face. He looked terrible.
    ‘You serious?’
    Sullivan nodded.
    ‘Yeah.’
    The President looked at him some more. Then he shook his head.
    ‘We can’t,’ he said. He brooded for a long moment, turning in his chair and staring out of the