I quickly checked the headlines on my phone. Agence France-Presse was quoting an unnamed source inside Pakistani intelligence confirming that Zawahiri and two of his bodyguards had been killed less than an hour earlier as a result of an explosion, but the story offered no further details on how the al Qaeda leader’s car had exploded. A quick check of the AP and Reuters wires indicated that neither the Pentagon nor the State Department was commenting, but an unnamed White House source—cited only as a senior aide to President Taylor—said that while U.S. officials were awaiting confirmation from the Pakistani government, they were “cautiously optimistic” that “a great victory over terrorism has been achieved.”
Meanwhile, I could hear an analyst on CNN saying, “This could prove to be the beginning of the end of al Qaeda,” and adding that under President Taylor’s leadership, al Qaeda was being “systematically dismantled.”
I hoped it was true. I feared it was not.
Grabbing my briefcase and carry-on luggage, I bought a cup of coffee and a copy of the Sunday editions of both the New York Times and the Washington Post, hailed a taxi, and gave the driver the address of my apartment in Arlington. As we pulled out of the airport and headed southeast on the toll road toward D.C., the lead headline from the Post caught my eye.
President Warns Israelis, Palestinians of “Catastrophic Consequences” if Peace Talks Fail: Aides Say Administration Will Reconsider Aid Levels if Deal Not Struck Soon
Written by the Post’s top White House and State Department correspondents, the article was the latest installment in the ongoing media narrative over the past month or so that the Mideast peace talks were floundering, that the parties were not taking the process seriously, and that both sides seemed to be trying to paint the other as the intransigent and irresponsible one. This version added a bit of spice to the stew with the idea that the White House might actually reduce U.S. military aid to Israel, which averaged over $3 billion a year, and might also cut aid to the Palestinians, which averaged about a half billion dollars annually.
The story certainly fit the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, but was it true? I was now starting to wonder whether just the opposite dynamic was in motion. Yael had insisted that the parties were, in fact, incredibly close to a deal and that the consummation of a comprehensive peace treaty actually made the prospect of a major series of terrorist attacks more likely, not less so. Who was right?
The peace talks were not my beat, per se. I focused primarily on national security and terrorism stories, but obviously the two were related, and the deeper I read into the Post story, the more curious, and perhaps more cynical, I became. Was the White House trying to pull off the head fake of the century? With all the carefully timed leaks about how badly things were going, was the administration driving down expectations so that the announcement by the president of a final, comprehensive peace treaty between the Israelis and Palestinians would give him a political bounce of epic proportions?
A text message came in. It was from the senior producer at the Today Show. She wanted me on the following morning to discuss my Jamal Ramzy article and the terror attack that had nearly taken my life in Istanbul. She was also interested to know whether I thought the president had ordered the hit on Zawahiri as retaliation for what had happened to Omar and me.
As I checked my other messages, I found interview requests from a dozen other media outlets, from Good Morning America to 60 Minutes. I had no interest in going on any of them. I wasn’t a pundit. I was a foreign correspondent. And I didn’t plan to spend a second longer on American soil than I absolutely had to.
I dialed my mom. She picked up on the fourth ring. She was ecstatic to hear from me and wanted every detail. I was guarded, not wanting to worry her any further than she must already be, even though I knew she’d been reading all the coverage of the attack on me that she possibly could. She asked me, of course, to come up to Maine that night. I said, of course, that I couldn’t.
“When can you get here, honey? You missed Thanksgiving. I didn’t celebrate it either. I was too worried about you. But we could celebrate together. I’ll make you a big feast.”
“Thanks, Mom, but I’m not sure how soon I can get up there. There’s an awful lot going on.”
“I know, but sweetheart, it’s been so long, and I . . . well . . . you know, I miss you.”
She sounded so deflated.
“I know, Mom, and I miss you. I’ll come visit. I promise. But it looks like I need to go to Tel Aviv and Amman first.”
“You’re going to Amman?” she asked, seeming to brighten.
“I hope so,” I said.
“When?”
“In the next few days.”
“Great,” she said. “You can see Matty!”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I’ll have time, Mom. It’s not going to be a pleasure trip. It’s for work.”
“But, James, obviously you can make some time to see your only brother.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good. He wrote to you recently, right?”
“I don’t know. Did he?”
“He told me he was going to.”
“Maybe he’s been busy.”
“Maybe you’re not reading your mail.”
“I was in Syria, Mom, and then someone tried to kill me.”
“That’s no excuse,” she said without a hint of irony. “You really ought to talk to your brother. You two need each other.”
“I’m sure he and Annie are doing just fine without me.”
“They are fine, but the fact is they miss you, young man.”
“Okay, Mom.”
“Really, James, would it kill you to return his notes or to call him now and again? He’s your older brother. He loves you and he’s worried about you.”
“I’d really rather not talk about it.”
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
“Nevertheless . . .” I glanced out the window of the cab. Route 267, the toll road, was now merging with 66. We’d be in Arlington any moment. Which was good. I desperately needed a shower and a change of clothes.
“So, any word from Laura?” my mom suddenly asked.
Every muscle in my body tensed at the very name. “No,” I said.
We drove a bit longer.
“Nothing at all?”
“No.”
There was no way I was going to tell her I’d just deleted an e-mail from my ex-wife and had no idea what it said.
“I’m sorry, Mom. That chapter is over.”
“I’m so sorry, too, Son. Guess I always thought she was the one.”
I didn’t respond. What was there to say?
“Listen, Mom, I gotta go,” I said instead. “I’ll call you again tomorrow.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay. Bye.”
She didn’t sound like she believed me. I couldn’t really blame her. Nevertheless, I said good-bye and hung up. At that moment, though, I realized that rather than exiting into the city of Arlington—toward my apartment—as I’d instructed, the driver was staying on 66. In a moment, we’d be heading out of Virginia and into the District of Columbia. It was not only the exact opposite of where I wanted to go, but given the challenges of D.C. traffic, the error was going to take forever to correct. I was as annoyed as I was confused. I leaned forward and told the driver he was making a mistake.
“I have my orders,” he replied.
“What orders?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
But the driver didn’t answer. The car accelerated. The doors of the car abruptly locked as the Plexiglas screen between the front and back seats suddenly closed.
“What in the world are you doing?” I yelled, but still the driver did not answer.
I demanded he turn the car around, but he ignored me. I pulled out my phone to call 911, but now there was no signal. That was impossible, of course. We were heading into the epicenter of the American govern
ment. There was plenty of cell coverage to be had. The only possible explanation was that the driver had a device that was jamming my phone. He must have turned it on right after I hung up with my mom.
I looked at him. He briefly glanced at me in the rearview mirror. Furious and becoming frightened now, I demanded he take me home, but even if he could hear me through the Plexiglas, he did not alter his course.
We were not going to Arlington. That much was clear. I had no idea where we were going instead, but given all that had happened in recent days, I found myself fighting panic.
Who was this guy? Who was he working for? And what did they want with me?
Before I knew it, we’d passed the Lincoln Memorial.
We headed east on Constitution Avenue. Then we took a sharp left on Eighteenth Street and started zigzagging through a series of side streets before barreling down a ramp into a dark parking garage, tires squealing like a stunt car’s in a movie. Down, down we went, lower and lower into the bowels of the garage, and this guy was driving far faster than was either normal or safe. I was certain we were going to plow into a car coming up in the opposite direction, but no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than he hit the brakes and brought us to an abrupt halt on a deserted level.
The doors automatically unlocked. Immediately both rear passenger doors opened and I became aware that a half-dozen men in dark suits were standing around the taxi. They looked and acted like federal agents, but we were a long way from the Treasury Department and even farther from the Hoover Building.
“Mr. Collins, please step out of the vehicle,” one of them said.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s going on here?”
“Please step out, sir. And follow me.”
“Why? To where?”
“Just follow me.”
I couldn’t decide if I was really in danger. This was Washington, after all, not Syria. In any case, it was clear I didn’t have a choice, and by nature I was insatiably curious. They hadn’t killed me yet. The deserted level of a downtown parking garage on a Sunday evening seemed as good a place to do it as any. But if that wasn’t the objective, what was? It seemed unlikely that Abu Khalif or Jamal Ramzy had an entire group of American-looking thugs operating out of central Washington.
I got out of the cab and followed the agent who was doing all the talking. As I did, the rest stepped behind and around me. We entered a stairwell, but rather than ascend to street level, we went down a flight of stairs. The leader unlocked what appeared at first to be a utility closet but actually led to a tunnel. We stepped through the doorway into the tunnel and proceeded on our way. As we walked, I had a flashback to being taken to see Ramzy, and the farther we went, the more curious I got.
A few minutes later, the point man unlocked and opened another door, and then we were standing in a nondescript vestibule of some sort—white walls, black marble floors, a high ceiling, and a small surveillance camera mounted over the entrance to an elevator, whose door was already open as if waiting for us to arrive. One of the men patted me down and then four of them escorted me into the elevator, and soon we were ascending.
When the door finally opened, I stepped out and couldn’t believe where I was.
I was standing in the second-floor private residence of the White House.
27
The president of the United States stepped forward.
“Welcome to the people’s house, Mr. Collins. I’m Harrison Taylor. It’s an honor to meet you.”
“It’s an honor to meet you as well, Mr. President,” I said, shaking his hand.
For all my years working in the media, I had never actually met this president. Years before, I had interviewed several of his predecessors, but as a foreign correspondent for the Times who spent most of my time abroad, there was no particular reason for me to have met this one. At six feet four inches, he appeared even taller in person than he did on television, and he was certainly a distinguished-looking Southern gentleman. Slender, even lanky, with jet-black hair graying at the temples, a firm jaw, and piercing blue inquisitive eyes, Harrison Taylor was the great-grandson of a famous governor of North Carolina. He himself had made a fortune building a software company in the Research Triangle just outside of Raleigh before selling the company for a half-billion dollars, winning a Senate seat, and later winning the governorship in a landslide. Now this policy maverick—a fiscal conservative but social liberal—was president of the United States.
But he was in serious political trouble. The U.S. economy was stalled. His immigration reform agenda had likewise stalled in Congress. His foreign policy was in disarray. And his approval ratings were drifting ever downward and were currently in the dangerous midthirties. He had ridden into the Oval Office on a wave of populist sentiment and had benefited from a late-breaking scandal in the Republican nominee’s campaign, but more recently he had struggled to find his political sea legs, and I found it striking to see up close how much the last several years in office had worn him.
“Of course, you know Jack here quite well,” the president said, turning to Jack Vaughn, the former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee who was now director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“I do, indeed, Mr. President,” I said, shaking Vaughn’s hand. “Good to see you, Jack.”
“Good to see you, too, J. B.,” Vaughn replied. “So glad you’re okay.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Bet you’re wishing now you’d followed my advice, eh?”
“Now, now,” the president interjected. “There’ll be no ‘See, I told you so’ speeches in this house, Jack. Not today. This is going to be a friendly conversation. Mr. Collins wasn’t exactly expecting this meeting, but I’m grateful he’s here. So let’s be on our best behavior. Fair enough?”
Jack smiled. We both nodded.
The president led us from the foyer by the elevator to the Yellow Oval Room. I had seen pictures but had never had the privilege of actually standing in the distinctive room before. It was here that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had famously been relaxing when he was told by aides that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Most of the chief executives who followed Roosevelt tended to allow their First Ladies to use the parlor for their own meetings, but I had read somewhere not long ago that President Taylor liked to use it for more personal and in-depth conversations with visiting heads of state.
The room was certainly less formal, and thus perhaps less intimidating, than the Oval Office. But it was still more exquisite in real life than in any of the pictures I’d seen. The walls were painted a lovely pale yellow, and the couches and chairs were all upholstered with a fabric that was paler still. The room featured a high ceiling, a marble fireplace on the east wall, and two candelabras, one on each end of the mantel. Two large couches faced each other perpendicular to the fireplace. Below our feet was a thick, rich carpet—pale yellow, of course—with an intricate design of flowers and swirls of red and blue and green and a half-dozen other colors.
But what really caught my eye was the door to the Truman Balcony. Ever the politician, as soon as the president saw me admiring it, he marched right over, opened the door, and invited Jack and me to step outside.
A bit embarrassed that I was acting more like a tourist than a hardened, grizzled foreign correspondent, I nevertheless accepted the invitation. I’d seen this view in movies, of course, but it was quite something to be overlooking the South Lawn of the White House, the Washington Monument in the distance, the Potomac River beyond that. It was a stunningly beautiful sight, surely the most beautiful in Washington. What’s more, the gleaming green-and-white Marine One helicopter was idling outside.
“We just got back from meetings at Camp David,” Jack noted.
“Discussing what?” I asked, fishing for a story.
“You,” the president said.
I couldn’t help but chuckle, sure he was kidding.
He was not.
“Look, J. B., we need to t
alk candidly,” the president said.
“What about?” I asked warily.
“Your stories on Jamal Ramzy and ISIS,” he replied. “They’ve made a lot of waves in this city. They’ve got European leaders on edge. I’ve gotten two calls from Lavi in Jerusalem. He’s getting heat from his cabinet. You’ve created a firestorm.”
Vaughn added, “Everyone’s trying to figure out what ISIS is up to, what their next moves are, what their next target is.”
“Especially now that you’ve taken out Abu Khalif’s chief rival,” I noted, hoping to get some insight into the president’s decision to assassinate Zawahiri.
“Everything we say here this evening is off the record,” the president said. “Is that understood?”
“That would be a shame,” I replied. “People are eager for your thoughts on the strike on Zawahiri. Why not go on the record with me right now?”
The president smiled one of those pitifully fake political smiles. “I’m afraid I can’t make any news for you on that, Mr. Collins,” he said. “I’ll make my thoughts known to the American people at the appropriate time. But this is a very delicate moment. And that’s why I’ve asked you here today. So are we agreed all this is off the record?”
What choice did I have? “Of course, Mr. President.”
“I have your word?”
“You do.”
“Good, now let’s go back inside. You survived Homs and Istanbul. I don’t want you catching pneumonia outside the White House.”
We went back in. The president sat in an ornate wooden armchair near the fireplace. When Jack retired to one of the couches, I took my place on the other, directly across from him. A steward served us all coffee and then stepped out of the room. Two Secret Service agents took up their posts by the doors, but other than that we were alone, and the president turned his attention to me.
“Look, Mr. Collins, things are very sensitive at the moment because . . . well . . . because the Israelis and Palestinians are about to sign a final, comprehensive peace treaty and create a Palestinian state once and for all.”