“Look at the photos,” Page insisted. The secretary of state nodded at Harris, who pressed a few buttons on a console. A screen descended on the far wall and the lights darkened. Harris fiddled for a moment with a slide projector and then the faintly blurred image of men sitting around a campfire filled the screen. Everyone in the room stared at the screen. Only Allen looked away pointedly and sighed.

“Have we identified all the players?” Wallace asked. Page looked at Harris, who pulled open his collapsible pointer and went up to the screen.

“That’s Abdul Sa’ad there,” Harris said, slapping the pointer against Abdul Sa’ad’s face on the screen. “He leads a fanatic anti-western Wahabi faction in the Saudi royal family. If the coup succeeds, he would be the most likely candidate for king.”

“How did this ‘Scorpion’—Wallace pronounced the code name with distaste, as if he were being forced to swallow something disgusting—come up with Abdul Sa’ad as the ringleader?”

“Actually, he was supposed to be on another op,” Page replied.

“What was that?” General Baker asked.

“He was looking for Ormont’s daughter. The one who disappeared,” Harris said.

“Did he find her?” Wallace asked.

“He says Abdul Sa’ad’s got her,” Harris said.

“I see,” Allen said pensively, his expression troubled.

“Who’s this?” Wallace asked, poking towards a face on the screen as if pushing a button.

“That’s Nuruddin, the Bahraini millionaire. We think he could be the link to the KGB. Nuruddin was educated at Cambridge in the early thirties. We checked with the British SIS, who report that he was a member of the university Labour Club at that time. The old NKVD did a lot of recruiting from that bunch. They also discovered that he was friendly with Burgess, Maclean and, most importantly, Kim Philby, son of the famous Arabist. They could have recruited him back then,” Harris said.

“Could have …” Allen intoned like a Greek chorus.

“What else?” Wallace prompted.

“The Scorpion says that this man, the one he terminated, was a major in the PLO. Our Middle East IA section tentatively identified him as Major Habad of Al Fatah. He had close ties to the Arafat faction and we know that they’re also tied closely to Moscow.”

“Tentatively …” Allen sighed.

“The guards at the meeting were Yemenis, Palestinians and Saudis and they carried AK-47s,” Harris said, pointedly ignoring Allen’s interjection. “The Scorpion identified this man as a South Yemeni and we know that the Russians were having secret meetings in Aden and San’a. We also have a Samos spy satellite recon photo suggesting a movement of Cuban troops from Ethiopia to Aden. Plus, we have unconfirmed reports from both ELINT and Riyadh station about South Yemeni troops moving up the Red Sea coast.”

“Unconfirmed …” Allen said, his eyebrows raised quizzically.