The Icarus Agenda: A Novel Read online

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  THE ICARUS AGENDA

  “James Bond in his wildest adventures never took this kind of ride. The action, frenzied and shrill, is all over the joint—from the Oval Office to Mexico to the Middle East, California, and the C.I.A.”

  —New York Daily News

  “Perhaps more real than we know … Ludlum is atop the intrigue-writing heap for good reason.… He can choreograph a story. The Oman rescue is as well-crafted as any you are likely to read. And Ludlum does his homework, placing you in foreign streets, encampments, and even in the minds of diabolical conjurers as well as any other writer.… Plausible, tightly interwoven.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “An eerie ring of authenticity … 677 pages of ornate hand-galloping plot.”

  —Detroit News

  “Could have come right out of the headlines.”

  —John Barkham Reviews

  “Superb, highly enjoyable … fast-paced action.”

  —Milwaukee Sentinel

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  EXPLOSIVE ACTION FROM

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  THE ICARUS AGENDA

  “Get away!” she shrieked, repeating words she had obviously heard only moments before. “They want to kill you!”

  The Congressman raced toward the heavy door, grabbing the woman by the arm and propelling her in front of him as the guards opened fire at the empty metal monster surging crazily out of control, veering now into the side of the house toward the sliding glass doors of the veranda. Inside, Evan crashed his shoulder into the door, slamming it shut. That action and the thick steel-reinforced panel of the door saved their lives.

  The explosions came like thunderous successive combustions from some massive furnace, shattering windows and walls, firing curtains and drapes and furniture. Out in front of the house the seven guards from the Central Intelligence Agency fell, pierced by shards of glass and metal sent flying by ninety pounds of dynamite lashed to the undercarriage of the automobile’s engine. Four were dead, heads and bodies riddled; two were barely alive, blood streaming out of eyes and chests. One, his left hand no more than a bleeding stump, had summoned rage, his weapon on automatic fire as he lurched across the lawn toward the priestly-collared terrorist, who was laughing insanely, his submachine gun spitting fire.

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  THE ICARUS AGENDA

  A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Random House hardcover edition published 1988

  Bantam export edition / April 1988

  Bantam edition / March 1989

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1988 by Robert Ludlum.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording, or by any information

  storage and retrieval system, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81385-5

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1_r1

  For James Robert Ludlum

  Welcome, friend

  Have a great life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Book Two

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Book Three

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Excerpt from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  The silhouetted figure in the doorway rushed into the windowless room. He closed the door and quickly made his way in the dark across the black vinyl floor to the brass table lamp on his left. He switched on the light, the low-wattage bulb creating shadows throughout the confined, paneled study. The room was small and confining but not without ornamentation. The objets d’art, however, were neither from antiquity nor from the progressive stages of historical artistry. Instead, they represented the most contemporary equipment of high technology.

  The right wall glistened with the reflection of stainless steel, and the quiet whir of a dust-inhibiting, dust-removing air-conditioning unit ensured pristine cleanliness. The owner and sole occupant of this room crossed to a chair in front of a computer-driven word processor and sat down. He turned on a switch; the screen came alive and he typed in a code. Instantly, the bright green letters responded:

  Ultra Maximum Secure

  No Existing Intercepts

  Proceed

  The figure hunched over the keyboard, his anxiety at fever pitch, and proceeded to enter his data.

  I start this journal now, for the events that follow I believe will alter the course of a nation. A man has come from seemingly nowhere, like an artless messiah without an inkling of his calling or his destiny. He is marked for things beyond his understanding, and if my projections are accurate, this will be a record of his journey.… I can only imagine how it began, but I know it began in chaos.

  BOOK ONE

  1

  Masqat, Oman. Southwest Asia

  Tuesday, August 10, 6:30 P.M.

  The angry waters of the Oman
Gulf were a prelude to the storm racing down through the Strait of Hormuz into the Arabian Sea. It was sundown, marked by the strident prayers nasally intoned by bearded muezzins in the minarets of the port city’s mosques. The sky was darkening under the black thunderheads that swirled ominously across the lesser darkness of evening like roving behemoths. Blankets of heat lightning sporadically fired the eastern horizon over the Makran Mountains of Turbat, two hundred miles across the sea in Pakistan. To the north, beyond the borders of Afghanistan, a senseless, brutal war continued. To the west an even more senseless war raged, fought by children led to their deaths by the diseased madman in Iran intent on spreading his malignancy. And to the south there was Lebanon, where men killed without compunction, each faction with religious fervor calling the others terrorists when all—without exception—indulged in barbaric terrorism.

  The Middle East, especially Southwest Asia, was on fire, and where the fires had previously been repelled, it was no longer. As the waters of the Gulf of Oman furiously churned this early evening and the skies promised a sweep of ravage, the streets of Masqat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman, matched the approaching storm. The prayers over, the crowds again converged with flaming torches, streaming out of side streets and alleyways, a column of hysterical protest, the target the floodlit iron gates of the American embassy. The façade of pink stucco beyond was patrolled by scruffy long-haired children awkwardly gripping automatic weapons. The trigger meant death, but in their wild-eyed zealotry they could not make the connection with that finality, for they were told there was no such thing as death, no matter what their eyes might tell them. The rewards of martyrdom were everything, the more painful the sacrifice, the more glorious the martyr—the pain of their enemies meant nothing. Blindness! Madness!

  It was the twenty-second day of this insanity, twenty-one days since the civilized world had been forced once again to accept the dreary fact of incoherent fury. Masqat’s fanatical ground swell had burst from nowhere and now was suddenly everywhere, and no one knew why. No one, except the analysts of the darker arts of brushfire insurrections, those men and women who spent their days and nights probing, dissecting, finally perceiving the roots of orchestrated revolt. For the key was “orchestrated.” Who? Why? What do they really want and how do we stop them?

  Facts: Two hundred forty-seven Americans had been rounded up under guns and taken hostage. Eleven had been killed, their corpses thrown out of the embassy windows, each body accompanied by shattering glass, each death via a different window. Someone had told these children how to emphasize each execution with a jolting surprise. Wagers were excitedly made beyond the iron gates by shrieking maniacal bettors mesmerized by blood. Which window was next? Would the corpse be a man or a woman? How much is your judgment worth? How much? Bet!

  Above on the open roof was the luxurious embassy pool behind an Arabic latticework not meant for protection against bullets. It was around that pool that the hostages knelt in rows as wandering groups of killers aimed machine pistols at their heads. Two hundred thirty-six frightened, exhausted Americans awaiting execution.

  Madness!

  Decisions: Despite well-intentioned Israeli offers, keep them out! This was not Entebbe, and all their expertise notwithstanding, the blood Israel had shed in Lebanon would, in Arab eyes, label any attempt an abomination: the United States had financed terrorists to fight terrorists. Unacceptable. A rapid deployment strike force? Who could scale four stories or drop down from helicopters to the roof and stop the executions when the executioners were only too willing to die as martyrs? A naval blockade with a battalion of marines prepared for an invasion of Oman? Beyond a show of overpowering might, to what purpose? The sultan and his ruling ministers were the last people on earth who wanted this violence at the embassy. The peacefully oriented Royal Police tried to contain the hysteria, but they were no match for the roving wild bands of agitators. Years of quiescence in the city had not prepared them for such chaos; and to recall the Royal Military from the Yemenite borders could lead to unthinkable problems. The armed forces patrolling that festering sanctuary for international killers were as savage as their enemies. Beyond the inevitable fact that with their return to the capital the borders would collapse in carnage, blood would surely flow through the streets of Masqat and the gutters choke with the innocent and the guilty.

  Checkmate.

  Solutions: Give in to the stated demands? Impossible, and well understood by those responsible though not by their puppets, the children who believed what they chanted, what they screamed. There was no way governments throughout Europe and the Middle East would release over eight thousand terrorists from such organizations as the Brigate Rosse and the PLO, the Baader-Meinhof and the IRA, and scores of their squabbling, sordid offspring. Continue to tolerate the endless coverage, the probing cameras and reams of copy that riveted the world’s attention on the publicity-hungry fanatics? Why not? The constant exposure, no doubt, kept additional hostages from being killed, since the executions had been “temporarily suspended” so that the “oppressor nations” could ponder their choices. To end the news coverage would only inflame the wild-eyed seekers of martyrdom. Silence would create the need for shock. Shock was newsworthy and killing was the ultimate shock.

  Who?

  What?

  How?

  Who …? That was the essential question whose answer would lead to a solution—a solution that had to be found within five days. The executions had been suspended for a week, and two days had passed, frantically chewed up as the most knowledgeable leaders of the intelligence services from six nations gathered in London. All had arrived on supersonic aircraft within hours of the decision to pool resources, for each knew its own embassy might be next. Somewhere. They had worked without rest for forty-eight hours. Results: Oman remained an enigma. It had been considered a rock of stability in Southwest Asia, a sultanate with educated, enlightened leadership as close to representative government as a divine family of Islam could permit. The rulers were from a privileged household that apparently respected what Allah had given them—not merely as a birthright, but as a responsibility in the last half of the twentieth century.

  Conclusions: The insurrection had been externally programmed. No more than twenty of the two-hundred-odd unkempt, shrieking youngsters had been specifically identified as Omanis. Therefore, covert-operations officers with sources in every extremist faction in the Mediterranean-Arabian axis went instantly to work, pulling in contacts, bribing, threatening.

  “Who are they, Aziz? There’s only a spitful from Oman, and most of those are considered retarded. Come on, Aziz. Live like a sultan. Name an outrageous price. Try me!”

  “Six seconds, Mahmet! Six seconds and your right hand is on the floor without a wrist! Next goes your left. We’re on countdown, thief. Give me the information!” Six, five, four … Blood.

  Nothing. Zero. Madness.

  And then a breakthrough. It came from an ancient muezzin, a holy man whose words and memory were as shaky as his gaunt frame might be in the winds now racing down from Hormuz.

  “Do not look where you would logically expect to look. Search elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Where grievances are not born of poverty or abandonment. Where Allah has bestowed favor in this world, although perhaps not in the after one.”

  “Be clearer, please, most revered muezzin.”

  “Allah does not will such clarification—His will be done. Perhaps He does not take sides—so be it.”

  “But surely you must have a reason for saying what you’re saying!”

  “As Allah has given me that reason—His will be done.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Quiet rumors heard in the corners of the mosque. Whispers these old ears were meant to hear. I hear so little I should not have heard them had Allah not willed it so.”

  “There must be more!”

  “The whispers speak of those who will benefit from the bloodshed.”
>
  “Who?”

  “No names are spoken of, no men of consequence mentioned.”

  “Any group or organization? Please! A sect, a country, a people? The Shiites, the Saudis … Iraqi, Irani … the Soviets?”

  “No. Neither believers nor unbelievers are talked of, only ‘they.’ ”

  “They?”

  “That is what I hear whispered in the dark corners of the mosque, what Allah wants me to hear—may His will be done. Only the word ‘they.’ ”

  “Can you identify any of those you heard?”

  “I am nearly blind, and there is always very little light when these few among so many worshipers speak. I can identify no one. I only know that I must convey what I hear, for it is the will of Allah.”

  “Why, muezzin murderris? Why is it Allah’s will?”

  “The bloodshed must stop. The Koran says that when blood is spilled and justified by impassioned youth, the passions must be examined, for youth—”

  “Forget it! We’ll send a couple of men back into the mosque with you. Signal us when you hear something!”

  “In a month, ya Shaikh. I am about to undertake my final pilgrimage to Mecca. You are merely part of my journey. It is the will of—”

  “Goddamnit!”

  “It is your God, ya Shaikh. Not mine. Not ours.”

  2

  Washington, D.C.

  Wednesday, August 11, 11:50 A.M.

  The noonday sun beat down on the capital’s pavement; the midsummer’s air was still with the oppressive heat. Pedestrians walked with uncomfortable determination, men’s collars open, ties loosened. Briefcases and purses hung like deadweights while their owners stood impassively at intersections waiting for the lights to change. Although scores of men and women—by and large servants of the government and therefore of the people—may have had urgent matters on their minds, urgency was difficult to summon in the streets. A torpid blanket had descended over the city, numbing those who ventured outside beyond air-conditioned rooms and offices and automobiles.