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confirmed that one of his Gulfstreams was at the airport. They parked it in a hangar but one of the Reapers we had overhead snapped a photo of it before they got it under cover.”
    Jessica leaned forward in her seat. “Obviously, it couldn’t have been coincidental.”
    “Definitely not,” said Calibrisi. “Fortuna was apparently involved in several meetings between El-Khayab and Mahmoud Iqbar, the president of Iran. He’s close to El-Khayab. As we all know, he helped to organize and fund the radical cleric’s run for the Pakistani presidency. He spent at least twenty-five million dollars to get him elected last year. He believes El-Khayab is the Second Coming of Ayatollah Khomeini.”
    “How old is Aswan Fortuna?” asked President Allaire. “I mean, not to sound too blunt here, but shouldn’t he be dying one of these days?”
    “He’s seventy-five years old,” said Calibrisi. “And if we had any luck, he’d be dead already, sir. It would be a crying shame if this guy died from old age.”
    “How much of his son’s fortune is still floating around?” asked Lindsay.
    “When we killed Alexander Fortuna, we were able to freeze more than twenty billion dollars that he had scattered about in various accounts,” said Jessica. “Switzerland, Abu Dhabi, England, even the U.S. But he had at least ten billion more than that. Most, if not all, is controlled by Aswan now.”
    “Why would we not have taken the opportunity to, well, to reduce his presence?” asked Lindsay.
    “You mean to kill him?” asked Calibrisi. “There’s a presidential directive allowing us to target and remove Fortuna as well as his son, Nebuchar. We’re allowed to say that, Mr. Secretary.”
    “You had him pinpointed in Tehran?” asked Lindsay.
    “We took the photos by drone,” said Calibrisi. “This has been the debate. Kill Aswan Fortuna and what happens next? I would happily order one of my kill teams to take him out or have one of my Reapers turn him into an ink stain. But we had all better be prepared for the consequences.”
    “We have significant tracking measures in place,” said Jessica, looking at Lindsay, then the president. “We know where most of his money is, where it’s going. If we kill Aswan Fortuna there is no way of knowing what will happen next. It will be chaos. Look at what bin Laden did with two hundred million. Aswan Fortuna has somewhere between eight billion and twelve billion dollars.”
    “That’s fine, Jess,” said the president. “But we can’t just sit back and watch him spend it. That’s tantamount to not knowing about it.”
    “Jessica’s right, Mr. President,” said Calibrisi, looking at Jessica. “If we take out Fortuna right now it will be chaos, especially when you look at Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is a cheap fuck, excuse my language. He’s sprinkling the insurgents and various jihadist splinters with a few million here, a few million there. If he’s gone, we could be talking about fighting against an enemy, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with as much money in the theater as the U.S. And remember, these nut jobs don’t need cotton sheets and flush toilets like we do. They can go a lot farther on a buck. Right now, we’re better off with an avaricious Aswan Fortuna alive than with ten billion on the street. His largest investment to date was in El-Khayab’s election.”
    “We now have a radical Islamist as the democratically elected president of the sixth most populous country in the world,” said President Allaire. “A country with a nuclear weapons arsenal. A strong ally of China. Next to a country they’ve vowed to destroy, India, which, by the way, is a U.S. ally and a key piece of our regional strategy to thwart radical jihad. If Fortuna had been killed a year ago, El-Khayab wouldn’t be president of Pakistan.”
    “It would’ve been hard to kill Aswan Fortuna a year ago, Mr. President,” said Calibrisi. “Just to remind everyone, he went dark following his