The Mahdi, page 3
Epstein had asked her for a short-notice meeting, which was unusual behavior for him. Still, he was on the shortlist to succeed her as head of Israel’s foreign intelligence body, Mossad, so the meeting was easily arranged. She studied him over the rim of her teacup. His enormous biceps stretched the sleeves of his shirt—thus the nickname “Guns.” He had long run Mossad’s intelligence efforts in the United States under the cover of an electronics engineer teaching at the graduate school at New York University, returning from New York with upper arms the size of tree trunks. Now he was firmly in place in Tel Aviv as her number two.
“I got a call yesterday from a friend in the dark world—a Bedouin sheik, half American,” Epstein began. “He’s upset about the recent West Bank business and the stolen land argument. The Bedouin tribes have collectively appointed him to discuss the issue with the new prime minister.”
Pelzer understood his concern. “What makes him think he can see the prime minister?”
Epstein shrugged. “He wants us to arrange it for him.”
“And we should do that for him … why? Because we’re known as the softie Mossad?”
“No,” Epstein replied. “Because he was the guy who put together the Iran attack.”
Now Pelzer got it. “Ah, it all comes together now,” she said. “Cuchulain, the CIA guy.”
Some kind of a tactical-explosives maven, this operative had told the Israelis exactly when the attacking Arabs would be coming and, at no small personal risk, bootlegged several thousand of those terrific Coochmore mines that the Israeli forces had used so effectively. Pelzer remembered the exact number of dedicated Muslim antagonists who wouldn’t be fighting the next round because of Cuchulain’s warnings and equipment: 8,721.
“That battle coverage was very well done, and slaughtering the cream of the local Islamists was a big win for Israel,” she admitted. “I’ll bring it up with the prime minister. A meeting is not much to ask, I suppose.”
Epstein sat back on his chair and gazed blankly at the computer screen. Pelzer knew he was working out how to explain the risks and rewards of a situation like this to someone at least as smart as he was.
“We both know the arrogance Alex Cuchulain will face from our prime minister. How Cooch will deal with that arrogance is a national security risk,” Epstein said. “Worrying about how to prevent national security crises is what we do. In this case, we worry about Cooch. He could be a problem.”
“Mmm. This particular ‘problem’ is connected to the White House through Mac Macmillan and Brooks Elliot, no?” Pelzer asked. Although Epstein was familiar with this group from his younger days, when he was running Mossad’s US division, Pelzer herself knew Colonel Macmillan well—a formidable opponent and a vicious, ruthless, experienced man. Alarm bells were beginning to tingle in her head. “Give me your assessment of the whole cabal, individually and as a group.”
Epstein nodded, then leaned forward. “A cabal is indeed what Cooch heads. There are four key players in addition to Cuchulain. As you know, Elliot is a special ambassador to the US president. And Macmillan is Cooch’s former boss at the CIA—he’s somewhere in the National Security Advisor’s shop now, and well respected.
“Cooch is the leader,” Epstein continued. “He’s a cold-blooded killer wrapped up in a façade of civility. There’s no one as cool in battle as he is. He was a US Marine assigned to CIA special ops for eight years—reflexively violent when confronted and enormously competent at committing violence, both personal and unit.
“Cuchulain then went to Pittsburgh for a computer science and electrical engineering degree at Carnegie Mellon,” Guns explained, “before heading off to Oxford for a master’s degree in Islamic studies.
“Now he runs a gazillion-dollar trading company out of Tangier, plus a big private equity fund in New York,” Epstein said. “He’s filthy rich and well connected. And his girlfriend claims to be the smartest person in the world. I’ll get to her in a moment.”
Epstein stood up to refill his cup from a coffee pot on a plain wooden table. The cup was clearly a favorite: the purple NYU logo was fading, and the porcelain was stained a little by age and countless refills.
“We can deal with Cooch and Brooks Elliot if we have to. They’re just a pair of smart, well-connected wolverines. Cooch’s number two guy in anything related to violence, Jerome Masterson, is a retired US Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant living in Tangier—a legendary Marine sniper and trainer,” he went on. “Cooch and Masterson were battle partners. They are very close. We can handle him too, but he has reach.”
Masterson was head of security at Kufdani Industries HQ in Tangier, Epstein told her—the largest trading company in the Middle East, with offices in twenty-eight countries, nearly thirty thousand employees, and a fleet of fat cargo ships and airplanes that carried premium cargo around the world. In addition to his offices and residence, Masterson had a 15,000-square-meter training facility. He was paid to run a very elite warrior training program for the Moroccan minister of defense—the king’s cousin, who was a good friend of both Cooch and Elliot. Rumor had it that Masterson’s program had trained some eight hundred warriors, mostly Bedouin, primarily using South African 40mm belt-fed weapons.
“Now,” said Epstein, “about the girlfriend.”
HOW CAN I POSSIBLY EXPLAIN Caitlin O’Connor and the risks she represents? Guns thought, uncertain of how to fully distill the dangers inherent in someone who won a MacArthur Fellowship at age twenty-five and a Fields Medal at twenty-eight.
Guns had an interesting character of his own. His reputation in the field, back when he was running the US for Mossad, was that of a strong, direct, and ruthless operative. Among Mossad’s more politically sensitive and astute, he was seen as a bit of a cowboy, slow to get on board with consensus. That was probably why he was popular with the Americans—both local operatives and Jewish civilians. Sheila Pelzer liked him too.
“The one we might not be able to handle is the smartest member of this little cabal—a particle physicist named Caitlin O’Connor,” he said. “She rents her brain to the NSA, which in turn pays her company, Axial Systems, several hundred million dollars a year—plus another twenty million to cover her residence and its security. What exactly they are buying is unclear.”
“My word, that’s a lot of money!” Pelzer exclaimed. “And she’s a problem for us … how?”
“She’s just so friggin’ smart.” Guns shook his head. “It’s disturbing. Sometimes she talks casually about things no one is supposed to know—things we didn’t know anyone knew. It’s as if she’s reading our mail, even when it’s in a language she doesn’t speak. She is intimate with electronics at the quantum level. Our brightest physicists marvel at her skills.”
A decade or so earlier, he explained, O’Connor had invented predictive big-data analysis and never told anyone, claiming it was intellectually obvious and not immediately important despite great promise. She was done worrying about what the rest of the world had only started worrying about.
“Today we call it ‘artificial intelligence,’” Guns said. “We’re touting ChatGPT and OpenAI as miracles. Well, Caitlin O’Connor did all that stuff years ago. No one should give her a twelve-year head start on anything intellectual. I can’t imagine the ways she could hurt us if she chose. We just need to steer clear of her.”
Pelzer gazed at him. “Can I get her with a love hawk?”
Guns snorted. “Last time we tried that, we lost the hawk after she screwed him half to death and told him he was stupid. He quit Mossad and got a nice, quiet job teaching physics somewhere. And she’s just as much a pain in the ass as ever.” Guns had argued against that plan the first time and would argue all the more strongly this time around.
Pelzer raised her hands in front of her face. “What about your pal Cooch? Maybe he can be convinced to stray toward another woman … or maybe be goes both ways?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Guns replied. “And Cooch already is unfaithful to Caitlin, but only because she wants it that way.” He’d heard that O’Connor liked to “interview” top post-grad physicists with a lip-lock or something even more intimate, and that Cuchulain had long since accepted that part of the relationship.
“That’s odd. So, what is he like as a person?” Pelzer said. “Without O’Connor, and separate from business. As it affects us. How do you sum him up as a threat?”
There’s the question, Guns thought. Cuchulain is a massive threat, but how did he get that way? Cooch’s post-CIA relationship with Macmillan was already in place when Guns had started in New York over a decade earlier, and his youth was beyond Mossad’s reach except in the most academic way. But Guns knew how to spin hearsay into a story.
“As an individual, Cooch thinks through things more than most I’ve met in this business,” he continued, “and he’s maybe the most lethal human being on the planet.
“Cuchulain’s father, Mick, had earned the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam and spent many years in a wheelchair from the wounds accompanying that award. When Cooch got into high-school trouble, his father used Macmillan to get the boy into the Marine Corps. Then Macmillan yanked Cooch out of Parris Island to CIA special ops.”
“As I recall, Macmillan ran that group for years,” Pelzer said. “I assume this Cooch person blossomed into whatever he’s become?”
Guns took a big swallow of his coffee and thought about how Cooch had spent much of those years in special ops—studying with a master of violent movement—and how he’d ended up today.
Six-foot-three or -four, about 240 pounds, maybe 2 percent fat, he thought. Senses movement as it occurs, without seeing it. Goes against dozens of people and comes out the other side. It affects how he thinks, drives his anticipation.
Guns had seen it over and over, and it was scary. He wasn’t sure how to explain that to Pelzer, but it would be important for the longer term when dealing with Cuchulain.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s safe to say he blossomed.”
Pelzer got up, stretched her lower back, and turned to the teapot behind her. “So he could be a real pain as an individual, even aside from the group. But how smart is he?”
“Very bright and a good electrical engineer, mostly when it comes to explosive design. He’ll know what he wants and be clear about it,” Guns said. “And he’ll do whatever he promises to do, if he can. He’s a notable planner. And Elliot is a Rhodes Scholar, you know. Those two are best friends—I’ve heard them discuss Thucydides and Machiavelli, as if the two thinkers go together somehow …?”
“Mmm, they do,” Pelzer said. “The latter studied the former. As did I.”
Guns nodded, though ancient philosophy wasn’t exactly his specialty. “Anyway, it almost doesn’t matter how smart Cooch is. O’Connor will be involved, and Elliot. They all will.”
This was a cabal of true experts. Guns couldn’t possibly stress that point enough.
“There’s another woman too: Elliot’s wife, LuAnn Clemens,” he continued. “She runs the money-making side of Caitlin’s business and Kufdani Industries alike. She’s a noted lawyer and quite competent—probably tangential to the West Bank thing. She’s buddies with the American First Lady, so we should try not to piss her off.”
“Mmm, I suppose.” Pelzer gazed at the ceiling for a long moment. “So, it looks like this guy could do us some damage if he chose. Eliminating him would likely cause a giant problem with the Americans, so I’d recommend against that. Yet we don’t know quite how to predict what he will do. So, it seems safer to set up the meeting and see what we can learn. Fair?”
“Fair,” Guns agreed. “Let me know if there’s a glitch, but I’m sure Cooch will make room in his schedule for the prime minister.” He paused. “Oh, and in our world, he calls himself by his Bedouin name.”
“Which is …?”
“Kufdani.”
TANGIER
SUNDAY
A QUARTER MOON HUNG OVER TANGIER HARBOR. “ROUND MIDNIGHT” BY Oscar Peterson was playing on the extraordinary speaker system. Caitlin’s large, luxurious living room—adorned with overstuffed, red leather furniture, facing a bay window that looked down on Tangier harbor from the second bench of land above the sea—was beyond comfortable. At that moment, in the small, superbly equipped corner kitchen (nearly unused), the gracious hostess was opening a bottle of 1990 Le Pin, a legendary Bordeaux merlot that LuAnn had never tasted.
Looks like I have a new best friend, LuAnn chuckled inwardly.
Her husband had returned to Washington that morning. Alex was off doing planning things, and Jerome had gone home to his several wives. This evening, it was just LuAnn and Caitlin against the world.
The previous afternoon over in Alex’s offices, when LuAnn had raised her eyebrows at Jerome’s casual disclosure, he’d merely laughed and said things were different in Tangier and the Muslim world. As Jerome told it, his first wife complained that she needed help keeping up their place. When he had said, “Hire someone,” she suggested instead that he marry a friend of hers, who would help with things and perhaps bear more children. Jerome worked a lot, went the logic, and the first wife was bored.
Long story short: the second wife came with a sister who was slightly mentally challenged, and they demanded he marry her too. Now the three women, who bore him several children among them, had no problem getting the housework done, and passed the time (according to Jerome) by ganging up on him.
“So, I guess we have everything we need right now except a guy to share it with. Right, Caitlin?” LuAnn said, one foot on the floor and another on the bench of the rag sofa where she sat.
“I’m used to that, and I’m good with it, apart from the lack of sex,” Caitlin said, handing LuAnn a glass of Bordeaux, one-third filled. “I like my own company. And of course, I like your company.”
LuAnn smiled and considered how little she really knew Caitlin. Maybe she wasn’t as earth-shatteringly bright as everyone thought. How could anyone truly know, anyway? I’ve worked with many lawyers who thought they could move the earth with their intellect, thought LuAnn. They couldn’t.
“I am curious,” she said, the wine making her bold. “How does one become the smartest person in the world? I mean, how do you know you’re that smart?”
Cailin sat back and raised her glass to LuAnn. “There’s a long story and a short one. Which do you want to hear?”
“Which one did you tell the president?”
”The short one, of course,” Caitlin replied. “He’s the president.”
LuAnn rolled her eyes. “I’ll take the long one.”
“Okay,” Caitlin said. “Much of it is on my parents, as they say.” Her father was an astronomer and well thought of in that bunch, she explained, while her mother was a Leibniz scholar and called herself a statistician. Both were full professors at Princeton. So to begin with, in the world’s IQ score bucket, Caitlin was the product of two people probably in the upper one-tenth of 1 percent. “They weren’t exactly into parenting. I was a distraction that resulted from them being in love. But I was smart and thus perhaps could be a source of amusement to them.”
Caitlin explained she spoke in full sentences at age two, read English at age three, and was consequently a voracious reader of any book she found in her parents’ library, as long as she could reach the shelf.
“What did your parents think of all that?” asked LuAnn, amused by the image it conjured.
“They were amused, as planned,” Caitlin said.
By age ten, she said, she was fluent in Latin and had read much of Sir Isaac Newton’s work in the original language. After Latin, naturally French, Spanish, and Italian came easy. Then she’d discovered calculus. But her parents decided she should save thinking about that until she had finished the foundational work in Newton’s Principia, so they put the calculus books on the library’s top shelf.
LuAnn could hardly believe her ears. “What did your schoolteachers have to say about your learning style?”
Caitlin chuckled. “It was hard for me when I went to public school. Other kids picked on me for being a smarty-pants, and I thought the teachers were stupid and told them so. I got in lots of fights and learned to swear.” Calling other kids “pus-nuts scumbag motherfuckers” was not a big hit, so she got sent home a few times. Her mother had to come for her.
LuAnn sipped her wine. This was an amusing conversation. “And how did your mother handle that?”
“She took me to the study and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“To wit …?”
“She said I was interfering with her lifestyle, which was beyond what our relationship could bear, and she would put me in Catholic day school if it happened again. If that didn’t work, they would find a Catholic boarding school for me. Good discipline there, you know? If you don’t behave, they just hit you.”
“Harsh, but to the point,” LuAnn conceded. “Did you run to your dad?”
“Run to him? He was sitting across the room, reading a book. He looked up and said, ‘You are an embarrassment. Get yourself under control. Think, then act.’”
“Whoa,” LuAnn said, “a unified front.”
Caitlin’s mother had convinced the school administrators to let her daughter sit in the back of the classroom and read her own books, as long as she took their standardized tests and added to the school’s academic glory. So Caitlin did her homework and didn’t make much more trouble. At the playground, meanwhile, she played as rough as possible, so what friends she had were mostly boys.
“By sixth grade, I was into Newton’s calculus at last and stayed busy with my books,” Caitlin continued. “Mom and I would argue Leibniz versus Newton after dinner. Dad and I talked about stars and the galaxy broadly. He liked to talk about Jupiter. That was great fun.”
LuAnn stood and went to the bar to fill her glass. “I’m getting it. You were a bit of a problem child. Did something come together after a while?”
“Yeah,” Caitlin said. “What came together drives what I do and my business today.” She’d figured out that calculus enables the natural sciences and that being good at calculus had enormous personal value. “Without calculus, you ain’t good at advanced biology, physics, chemistry, any of it. And with calculus, you compete with me.”
