The Beijing conspiracy

Начало книги

‘W e will strike you when you least expect it, beneath Eternity where the windmill has been stolen. This is the first of three warnings. If you do not heed these warnings and if Allah, the Most Kind, the Most Merciful wills it, we will be forced to implement the final solution.’

The mood in the White House war cabinet was tense. The briefing had been hastily convened in the cramped Situation Room beneath the Oval Office in the West Wing. The video being viewed was grainy, but the features of sixty-year-old Dr Khalid Kadeer were clear enough. Like the Hydra of Greek mythology, al-Qaeda had grown another monstrous head, and the terrorist mastermind was calm and chillingly confident. Unlike his thinner and more familiar colleague, Osama bin Laden, the Muslim Uighur from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China was powerfully built. He was tall and his demeanor was menacing. His dark, oval face was etched with the lines of a lifelong Islamic struggle against the West and the Han Chinese, and his narrow, hooded eyes were black and coldly calculating. An elegantly embroidered doppa, the traditional headgear of his Uighur people, covered his fine, grey hair.

Читать дальше →