SEVENTY FOUR.

    David had found the long flight from America relaxing. He'd reclined in his first-class seat and ignored the in-flight movie.

    It was a drama, and he wasn't in the mood for it. Maybe a comedy would have grabbed his attention but definitely not a drama.

    What he needed was an escape from the harsh reality of what he'd been doing. David did not enjoy murdering, but he understood it as a necessary evil in a world where it was often the only way to get things done. Thousands upon thousands of lives had been ended in the quest for Palestinian independence. What would a few more matter? None of this was new to him. He'd known it from an early age. He had seen his path in life, knowing that someday he would have a hand in shaping the birth of his nation. And now that his dream was so close, the guilt disappeared in the hum of jet engines. At 45,000 feet somewhere over the vast Atlantic Ocean he tucked a thin blue blanket up under his chin and thought of Palestine, warm thoughts of a nation at peace, and then he fell asleep.

    He'd landed in Paris and changed flights without incident. The first sign that something had gone wrong was when he landed in Nice and caught a news update on the television. He'd been incommunicado for the better part of seven hours and was starved for information.

    The vote had not taken place. The UN had been shut down due to a bomb threat. David's eyes squinted at the television and instantly knew the bomb scare was a ruse. Angry but under control, he headed off in search of answers. Unfortunately, those answers would have to come from Omar. As promised, a limousine was waiting for him at the curb. David climbed into the backseat and settled in for the short ride down the coast. He was entirely oblivious to the fact that he was being watched.

    Rapp stood AT the window of his hotel room. The lights were off and he was careful to stand a few feet back from the glass. Before leaving the States he'd honored his new agreement with his wife and told her the destination and likely duration of his trip. She wanted to know if his sudden departure had anything to do with the car bomb, and after a slight hesitation, he told her that it did. All in all he was surprised how well the conversation had gone.

    Rapp pressed a pair of high-powered binoculars to his face and looked down on the harbor of Cannes, in the South of France. The Albert Edouardo Pier stretched out before him. Some of the world's finest yachts were berthed for the night, crowded together with barely a foot to spare between each, all neatly tucked in. As grand and opulent as all the other vessels were one stood out above the rest. Actually, it towered above the rest. Rapp had seen wealth before. He'd traveled the world and visited many cities, most of them port cities, but he had never seen a noncommercial or military vessel as large as Omar's yacht.

    The massive ship was moored at the end of the pier, no individual slip was big enough to hold it. Omar's yacht was easily twice as large as the next biggest vessel, which was no small thing when one considered that it was parked in a harbor that was known as the ultimate playground for the world's wealthy.

    Rapp had never met Omar, and until this week had only heard of him in passing. He suddenly had a great desire to meet this corpulent Saudi Prince. The signs were easy enough to recognize; Rapp had seen them before. He knew how to analyze himself better than any shrink.

    He would like to put the Prince on the other end of his gun and watch him squirm. Men like Omar were never humiliated. That was their biggest problem. They went through life with a very warped sense of reality. Their own lives took on an over exaggerated sense of importance while virtually everyone else around them became trivial… expendable small. His yacht symbolized how Omar perceived himself.

    He was his ship, the biggest and thus most important. Everyone else was secondary. Only his desires were what mattered.

    It was approaching midnight. Rapp and his team had arrived two hours ago and were in the process of calibrating all of their equipment to make sure it worked perfectly. They didn't need much. The British surveillance team that had been in place since Monday was on top of things. They briefed Rapp thoroughly, and as always their cooperation was excellent. Rapp had worked with the folks from MI6 before and had found them to be extremely good at their jobs.

    In addition to what the Brits already had in place, and their own directional microphones, Scott Coleman had just finished placing listening devices on the hull of the yacht. Rapp looked through the binoculars at the small sailboat and watched as Coleman handed his scuba tank to one of his men and climbed aboard. The British sailboat was tied up two jetties over from Omar's yacht and was partially blocked by a sizable cabin cruiser. When Coleman was finally back on board the sailboat Rapp relaxed a bit. Everything was in place.

    Their guy had landed. He was no longer John Doe. With the delivery of the encrypted file from Mossad, Kennedy had put a name with the face. He was Jabril Khatabi, the Palestinian who had given Mossad the intelligence boon that had turned into a massacre. The man who had started it all. A man who interested Rapp greatly. On the flight over, Rapp had read every scrap of Jabril's file, and the more he read the more interested he became. On the face of it, this Jabril did not seem like a pawn. Marcus Dumond had plunged into his financials and so far had discovered a personal fortune in excess of five million dollars, almost all of it in highly liquid assets. He had been educated at the very bosom of American agnostic liberalism, the University of California at Berkeley. He'd gone to work for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley after college and had traveled the world, focusing mostly on investments from Arab oil people. Everything in his file pointed not to terrorism, but to capitalism.

    If it weren't for the audio surveillance they had of his meetings with Omar, and the fact he'd been a Mossad informant, Rapp would have sworn the man was nothing more than one of Omar's abundant financial advisors. He found it hard to believe this wealthy man from a well-educated family was a terrorist, but the evidence was conclusive.

    Before the night was over Rapp was hoping to have a little chat with the Palestinian to see if he could clear a few things up.

    They didn't have much time. The President's deadline was firm.

    Every time Rapp had talked to Kennedy she'd reminded him of that.

    Things in Washington had grown even more hectic since he'd left.

    Neither the French nor the Palestinians had been placated by Israel's withdrawal from Hebron. The Israelis now claimed incontrovertible evidence that there had been a bomb factory in Hebron, and they were prepared to present that evidence before an international board of inquiry.

    The evidence of course had been planted during the military occupation of the town, in order to save Prime Minister Goldberg from a controversy that would spell the end of his government.

    The French Ambassador to the UN had privately confronted the American Ambassador and accused the CIA of doing exactly what they'd done; phoning in a bomb scare in order to delay the vote on Palestinian statehood. Ambassador Joussard was offended and indignant that the world's lone superpower would stoop so low. Even though he was right, it was rather amusing that the condemnation was coming from a man who'd been bribed into putting forth the resolution that was causing so much consternation in the first place.

    Israel was offering to sit down and discuss peace with the Palestinians as soon as the Palestinians honored a cease-fire agreement. The Palestinians for their part refused to abide by a cease-fire agreement until they had it in writing that Prime Minister Goldberg would close and relocate every Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Prime Minister Goldberg flat-out refused such a request and the violence continued.

    Both the Russians and the Chinese were suspicious about the timing of the bomb scare that shut down the UN, and both were vowing to make sure the French resolution was voted on first thing in the morning.

    The President was getting a great deal of pressure from the Secretary of State and his chief of staff to bring the French into the fold on the entire matter. Rapp had just spoken to Kennedy on the secure satellite phone and she had reassured him that although the President was tempted, he was going to honor his commitment of twelve hours.