The Inca Prophecy (20 page)

‘All stations, we’ve been hit,’ the Black Hawk pilot announced calmly, ‘we’re going down.’ The pilot struggled to control the stricken aircraft as smoke and flames spewed from the starboard engine, and he put it down hard, not far from the Iranian position.

‘This is Alcatraz Two, copied,’ the pilot of the back-up Black Hawk acknowledged. ‘I’m inbound behind you.’

‘Crazyhorse Four.’ The Apache hovered just behind cover, the gunner scanning the battlefield.

A burst of machine-gun fire crackled around them as O’Connor, Jafari and the Seal team dived out of the burning chopper. O’Connor spotted the surviving Iranian first. He returned fire with his newly acquired Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and the Iranian fell silent.

‘You can join us anytime!’ San Quentin yelled, grinning at O’Connor over his shoulder as he sprinted back to the burning Black Hawk to plant demolition charges. It was essential to destroy the helicopter – the equipment on board was so highly classified it was not on issue to any other military in the world.

As the second Black Hawk landed, the ground around the Iranian position erupted again in fire and smoke. The Apache gunner had raked the area with a burst of 70 mm rockets, just to make sure. ‘Go, go, go!’ the crew chief yelled again, as the last of the Seal team scrambled on board the helicopter. The Black Hawk and the two Apaches powered away towards the Iraqi border as a surviving Iranian BMP 2 gained the crest of the ridge. The driver raced his vehicle towards the burning Black Hawk, but before he’d covered half the distance, the aircraft disintegrated in a massive explosion.

The crew chief handed O’Connor a set of headphones, and O’Connor plugged his mike into the comms socket. ‘Thanks, guys, much appreciated,’ he said.

The pilot turned in his seat. ‘All in a day’s work. I don’t know who you are,’ he added with a grin, ‘but it’s a pleasure to have you on board, sir.’

BOOK II

Chapter 24

President William McGovern, the Democratic incumbent, was riding comfortably in the polls, but no one was taking anything for granted, least of all his chief of staff, Chuck Buchanan, a tall, sharp-eyed – some might say arrogant – political staffer from Springfield, Illinois. Three issues were on the afternoon’s briefing agenda, and any one of them had the potential to give the President’s Republican rivals a lift in the polls. Much to Buchanan’s annoyance, the President had asked his re-election campaign manager, Lauren Crawford, to join them in the Oval Office. The slim, straw-blonde microbiologist-turned-political-staffer from Chicago had worked on William McGovern’s previous campaign, and no one on the President’s team had a better instinct for vote-winning or vote-losing issues.

Crawford well understood the importance of the agenda slated
for discussion. The Israeli Prime Minister had reacted badly to the President’s latest proposals to achieve a peaceful settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian problem, and that, Crawford knew, had the potential to influence the Jewish vote in the wrong direction. There was mounting evidence, too, that Ayatollah Khamenei, and his president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were getting closer to obtaining a nuclear arsenal. The Republicans were becoming increasingly vocal in their calls for the President to take decisive action against Iran. But in Lauren Crawford’s world of grassroots voters, it was the third item on the agenda that had the potential to be the most explosive.

One of the CIA’s most respected and brilliant agents, Curtis O’Connor, had fallen foul of his superiors and was now on the run, along with a Guatemalan academic and archaeologist, Dr Aleta Weizman. Crawford was convinced that the CIA’s new Deputy Director of Operations, Howard J. Wiley, was lying through his back teeth about O’Connor’s disappearance. The DDO had now been called to give evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. If this morning’s headlines in the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
were anything to go by, the case would capture the public’s imagination every bit as much as Watergate had in Nixon’s time, and the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame had during the Bush administration.

Crawford left her office on the second floor of the West Wing and made her way down the carpeted staircase, past the Roosevelt Room and into the office of the President’s unflappable private secretary, Donna Ferguson.

‘The President will see you now, Lauren,’ Donna said, nodding towards the corridor that connected her office with the Oval Office.

‘What’s the weather like?’ Crawford asked with a smile.

‘Chief of staff? Stormy. President? Fine … although he’s seen the headlines in the papers,’ Donna warned. Crawford raised an eyebrow and walked down the short corridor before knocking on the President’s door and opening it.

‘Come and join us, Lauren,’ the President said, easing his lanky form from behind the magnificent mahogany Oval Office desk that had been a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford Hayes in 1880. Almost every president had used the desk, which was made from the timbers of the British ship HMS
Resolute
. An American vessel had found the
Resolute
adrift amongst the Arctic pack ice in 1855 and returned her. When the ship was finally broken up, a grateful Queen had the desk made.

‘What do you two make of the story in the
New York Times
this morning?’ the President asked, addressing Crawford and Buchanan. The paper was lying next to a bowl of fruit on the marble coffee table between the Oval Office’s two cream couches. The headline read ‘Senate Intelligence Committee to Probe Missing CIA Agent O’Connor and Guatemalan Archaeologist Weizman’.

‘This Agent O’Connor … he was supposedly a pretty good operator before he jumped ship,’ the President observed. ‘Medal of Freedom recipient for his work on the Beijing Olympics.’

‘Yes, he was,’ Crawford agreed. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the country, was equivalent to the military Medal of Honor. ‘I knew him pretty well in our days in Atlanta at the Centers for Disease Control. He’s one of the best we’ve got … or had. A few years back, O’Connor was responsible for obtaining some of the most damning intelligence on what
the Iranians were really up to, well before it was reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency. My contacts in the CIA tell me O’Connor didn’t jump ship of his own volition,’ she added. ‘In the end he didn’t have a choice, and the information I have points towards a cover-up.’

‘Is DDO Wiley across this?’ the President asked.

‘I think he’s part of the cover-up, Mr President.’ Crawford had always been a straight shooter, one of the reasons the President had her on his team.

‘We don’t have any proof of that,’ Buchanan interjected, irritated by Crawford’s direct manner. Out of habit, he ran his hand through his fine black hair.

‘No, but my contacts are pretty solid,’ Crawford shot back. ‘I’m told Wiley sent O’Connor to Vienna on a two-bit assassination mission to eliminate this Guatemalan archaeologist, Weizman. She’d made public allegations that we trained some of the generals responsible for killing civilians in the Guatemalan civil war, and Wiley was incensed.’

‘Weizman was right,’ President McGovern responded bitterly. ‘Two hundred thousand Guatemalans were massacred in that conflict, and Clinton rightly apologised for our role in it. Not one of our finest efforts at foreign policy. But why in hell’s name would we want an obscure archaeologist out of the way? She wouldn’t even come close to a presidential authorisation as a clear and present danger.’

‘I’m told that’s the conclusion O’Connor reached, but the Weizman allegations were getting uncomfortably close to revealing the details of the CIA’s role in the genocide. At the time of the
massacres, Wiley was chief of station in Guatemala City, which may explain why he took a particular interest in her claims.’

‘And my predecessor authorised this?’ the President asked, incredulous.

Crawford shook her head. ‘I doubt he even knew about it, Mr President, although the vice president undoubtedly did.’ She flicked a quick glance at her watch. ‘CNN are about to cover this live, and I think you should watch it.’

‘Mr President,’ Buchanan protested, ‘we have a very crowded schedule this afternoon.’

McGovern held up his hand. ‘Let’s see what the media are making of this,’ he said, reaching for the remote.

Newsreader Walter Crowley appeared, announcing the Senate investigation into the CIA’s involvement in the killings in the jungles of Guatemala and the disappearance of O’Connor and Weizman. ‘And we take you now to Capitol Hill, where Susan Murkowski has been following events at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence … Susan, what’s the background to this inquiry?’

The image of the CNN anchor was replaced by the network’s svelte dark-haired political correspondent, one of the media’s rising stars in Washington. A biting wind was blowing across the Potomac and Murkowski was dressed in a red overcoat, rugged up with a dark blue scarf. Pockets of snow covered the ground around the Capitol steps, and behind her, the wedding-cake dome of the Capitol building, topped by its bronze Statue of Freedom, formed an image of power against the clear winter sky.

‘You might recall, Walter, that not so long ago an ancient Maya artefact, the Maya Codex, was discovered in a tomb in the jungles of
Guatemala,’ said Murkowski. An image of yellowed leaves of bark, inscribed with Maya hieroglyphics and bound in a concertina book, appeared on the screen.

‘And the codex contained a warning?’ asked Crowley.

‘That’s right, Walter. The Maya predicted a very rare planetary alignment – one that occurs only once in every 26 000 years. At eleven minutes past eleven on Friday 21 December 2012, our planet will align with what the Maya called a star gate, in the dark rift at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. NASA has now confirmed that not only were the Maya correct – and we should perhaps remember the Maya predicted this 800 years before Galileo even picked up the world’s first telescope – but NASA also says it has identified the Maya star gate as a supermassive black hole of unimaginable gravitational energy. Scientists are speculating that as we move into its gravitational field, our weather will become more unpredictable. And this gravitational field may well explain the extraordinary ferocity of the latest earthquakes, snowstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes and wildfires. Some scientists are even warning of a geographic pole shift and a change in position of the world’s oceans, which would submerge coastal cities under hundreds of metres of water.’

‘So why is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence looking at this?’

‘It’s not so much the ancient Maya warning that it’s investigating, although no doubt that is of interest; it’s more the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the codex. There are claims of a cover-up over the disappearance of one of our most trusted CIA agents, Curtis O’Connor, and a Guatemalan archaeologist, Dr Aleta Weizman. The details are sketchy, but there are accusations from an unnamed
whistle-blower that the CIA was involved in the attempted assassination of Weizman. Weizman had accused the CIA of training some of the armed forces responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during that country’s civil war in the nineties. It was O’Connor and Weizman who brought the Maya Codex, which is secured in a museum in Guatemala City, to light, but both O’Connor and Weizman are now missing.’

‘And what’s been the CIA’s response?’

‘Howard Wiley has yet to take the oath at the inquiry, but I understand his denials are likely to come under intense scrutiny when Agent Ellen Rodriguez appears before the committee. My sources tell me she will give evidence that suggests there was not only a contract on Weizman, but that the CIA, or at least Wiley, wanted O’Connor eliminated as well.’

‘Rodriguez was on Wiley’s staff?’

Murkowski nodded. ‘Like O’Connor, Rodriguez is one of the most experienced and respected agents in the CIA. She served in the CIA’s Berlin, Vienna and Lima stations, and she was, for a while, on the staff of the Clinton White House. I understand she has a high opinion of both O’Connor and Weizman, and she reportedly clashed strongly with Wiley when she was at the Latin American desk at Langley at the time these alleged contracts were put out.’

‘And has Rodriguez said anything since the disappearance of O’Connor and Weizman?’

‘Not publicly, and she won’t until she appears before the committee.’

‘Do we know anything of O’Connor and Weizman’s whereabouts?’

‘The Maya Codex may not be the only ancient warning … an Inca warning is said to lie somewhere in the jungles of Peru and my sources tell me the CIA is pouring a lot of resources into tracking them down. We’ll have to stay tuned on that one.’

‘And where is Rodriguez?’

Murkowski smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s one of the most closely guarded secrets in Washington, Walter.’

The assassin turned left off the George Washington Parkway on to Route 120 and followed the road south into Arlington until he reached North Yorktown Boulevard. It was approaching mid-afternoon and rush hour was yet to begin, so the traffic was moving relatively freely. He drove past Yorktown High School and finally turned into North 27th Street, parking alongside Greenbrier Park, about one hundred metres from the safe house. A small two-storey grey and white house with a wooden porch, it was located in an area that more than met the criteria of anonymity. North 27th Street, Arlington, was a middle-class family neighbourhood. The assassin knew that the US Marshal Service was providing protection for CIA Officer Ellen Rodriguez, a slim, attractive brunette in her late thirties. Inside the safe house, Rodriguez was preparing for a meeting with her lawyer, scheduled for later in the evening. Her thoughts turned to O’Connor. She had long since ceased to contact him directly; those days were history, but she still cared. Without thinking too much about it, she did the next best thing. She texted Aleta on her cell phone.