Murder at the Opera - Margaret Truman [33]
Wearing his customary turquoise bolo tie and pointy, tooled cowboy boots—he’d recently served a lackluster one term as governor of Oklahoma—he made his announcement in the Homeland Security department’s temporary headquarters at the Nebraska Avenue Complex. The complex, consisting of thirty-two buildings on thirty-eight acres, was the permanent home to the Naval Security Station. Heavily guarded, it was surrounded by residential neighborhoods.
The Department of Homeland Security’s decision to become tenants of the complex did not thrill its neighbors. A citizen’s committee had been formed to protest the traffic congestion and parking violations that had developed since late 2002 when DHS began moving in personnel and material. The complex’s community relations staff did what it could to soothe neighbors without resorting to what it considered the ham-handed truth, that a few traffic jams was an economical price to pay for protecting the neighbors and the nation against terrorist annihilation.
It hadn’t been easy finding appropriate space to house the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters and many of its almost two hundred thousand employees. The situation was one of few that could not be attributed to the current president. The major problem could be traced back…well, to George Washington’s administration. The first president had signed into law a statute requiring that all government “offices” be located within the District of Columbia, unless exempted by legislative act. The CIA, Department of Defense, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission had received such dispensation and had located their agencies outside the District. But DHS, despite its lofty mission to protect the homeland, had not as yet, and so it was limited to finding space within D.C., settling on the Nebraska Avenue Complex, at least for the time being.
The secretary’s one-sided press conference had resulted from a frantic series of meetings held since early morning in secured conference rooms throughout headquarters.
• • •
The genesis of those meetings had occurred three days earlier in an alley off King Feisal Street, in Amman, Jordan, where Ghaleb Rihnai played a spirited game of tric trac, the Arab name for backgammon, with a dour young Iraqi who’d moved to the Jordanian capital soon after the Americans invaded his home country. The table on which the game board rested was an overturned crate. Rihnai sipped from a lethal cup of strong black coffee. His opponent looked up from the board only occasionally to inhale from his narghile. Whenever he exhaled, the smoke from the water pipe created a haze over the board, like morning fog on a river. It was four in the afternoon, two months to the day since the Jordanian, Rihnai, and the young Iraqi had first met, or to be more accurate, two months since Rihnai had made an effort to befriend the Iraqi.
“You’re winning,” the Iraqi said, not attempting to conceal his displeasure.
“Yes, I see that I am, but the game is not over. Roll the dice and pray for good fortune, my friend
The Iraqi’s prayers were answered. Twenty minutes later he emerged victorious.
The Iraqi carefully returned the board, dice, and small disks to the bag in which he kept them, and the two men left the area, where others continued their games. They walked slowly and seemingly without purpose, stopping at an occasional stall to look at goods and foods being sold, or to chat with familiar shop owners. They eventually climbed the hill leading to ancient Amman, where the Jebel Qala’at, the Citadel, an ancient fortress rebuilt by the Romans during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, provided glorious views of the surrounding valleys and of Raghdan, the Royal Palace. They sat without speaking beneath a gnarled olive tree alongside a stream known as Seil Amman,