The Cloud Collector by Brian Freemantle Page A

It escalated with the mid-morning journalistic scoop disclosing the wounded man’s identity and escalated even further with Al Jazeera showing on both its Arabic and English-language channels a terrorist video sent to the station in advance of the Rome attack.
    The film opened on a split screen, one-half showing an official portrait of Giovanni Moro to establish that the long-haired, tightly bearded man on the opposite half of the picture was unquestionably the grandson of Aldo Moro, the two-time Italian prime minister assassinated in May 1978 by Italy’s Red Brigade terrorists.
    Giovanni Moro spoke in impeccable English from behind a desk in an undisclosed room. The predominant, greatly enlarged photograph on the wall behind him was of his grandfather’s body as it had been found in the boot of a Renault 4 on Rome’s via Michelangelo Caetani. Beside that major photograph was a slightly smaller although clearly visible picture of a man its caption referred to as Steve Pieczenik.
    In a level, unemotional voice Moro said he had obvious personal as well as ideological reasons for his rejecting his country to live in exile in the Basque country of northwest Spain, and for his converting to Islam to embrace it and its opposition to the American-dominated West. His grandfather had literally been sacrificed in a plan orchestrated by the CIA—an intelligence organization matching in evil the then-Russian KGB and now its FSB successor—to prevent the Italian Communist PCI party from gaining a coalition position in the Christian Democrat government of the day.
    The man gestured to the second photograph, claimed to be that of Steve Pieczenik. This man, declared Moro, was the then-U.S. State Department official sent from Washington to mastermind the killing. ‘So blatantly arrogant were the U.S. government and its pernicious Central Intelligence Agency that this man Pieczenik openly admitted the crime,’ continued Moro. ‘He went on public record to boast, “We had to sacrifice Aldo Moro to maintain the stability of Italy.” What he really meant was to maintain the United States’ control of the affairs of Italy, a determination it retains to this day throughout the world, particularly against Islamic countries.’
    Moro was issuing the video for publication in the event of his death or capture, concluded his diatribe. If he was captured alive and put before a court, he would use the trial as a platform from which to illustrate further examples of America’s manipulative global interference.
    The U.S. State Department’s premature denial, within an hour of the Al Jazeera Qatar transmission, was directly and just as promptly contradicted by 1987 television news footage of Pieczenik actually making the quoted admission, adding a diplomatic dimension to an attempted act of sensational terrorism.
    Charles Johnston wasn’t sure if the current Colosseum attack and past incidents, both ultimately traceable back to the covert operations directorate, were a personal danger or potential benefit, but self-protective as always he ordered a full copy of the Al Jazeera transmission and the complete case records of the Aldo Moro killing. He took it as another sign of good luck that no-one had tried to retrieve the records ahead of him.
    *   *   *
    Five hours earlier Akram Malik, the new American, had put forward his suggested deciphering, which Irvine hesitantly accepted at Burt Singleton’s announcement that al Aswamy had turned his computer and cell phone on.
    â€˜He could be getting ready to move!’ said Marian.

 
    9
    â€˜What’s the most quoted eulogy for George Washington?’ rhetorically demanded Malik. ‘That of General Henry Lee—that Washington was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” What’s beaten us all night, until now? The three different encryptions for the word first, then