Read The Fourth Horseman Online
Authors: David Hagberg
“Our commerce is back to normal. We have asked the other nations to return their ambassadors and staffs so that we may all continue our peaceful coexistence.
“My dreams for Paradise here in Pakistan continue. Allah has spoken to me with his message of strength.
“Be strong of heart, for the way ahead may be difficult.
“Be strong of mind, for we will face many problems.
“Be strong of arm, for the tasks that we are faced with will seemingly be without end.”
Purely bullshit, Haaris thought. Karl Marx had written that religion was the opiate of the masses. Well, this is exactly what he was giving them.
His speech went on in the same vein for a few more minutes, until in the end he promised that he would be among them. He would be a man on the street, a simple wayfarer on the highways, in the hills, on the deserts, by the sea.
He used a translation program to render his words into Punjabi before taking the speech processor out of his sealed attaché case and downloading it to the program that changed his voice to the same one he’d used on the balcony of the Aiwan.
Ten minutes after sitting down at his desk, he attached the speech to an e-mail—also sent through the remailers to the PTV, Pakistan Television Corporation, the main government-controlled network of stations throughout the country. Within minutes it would be broadcast as a flash bulletin and be rebroadcast dozens of times over the coming days.
Haaris sat back. “The Messiah has spoken again.”
“I don’t understand,” Deb said at the door.
Haaris controlled himself not to overreact. He turned to her and smiled. “I thought you had gone to bed.”
“What was that all about?” she asked.
He couldn’t see any anger, just confusion. He got up and went to her. “I wish I could tell you, but it’s stuff for work. We’re doing a disinformation operation, trying to sow a few seeds of doubt about this guy calling himself the Messiah.”
“That was you on the computer.”
“Yes, it was. My idea.”
She looked up at him, searching his eyes for the truth of what he was telling her. “What about the shower you mentioned?” she asked.
To the outside world looking in at them, their marriage must have seemed odd. They were mismatched. And yet it had to be obvious that they were very much in love. Deb believed it. And now it was coming to an end as all things must.
He slipped off his shoes and led her back to their bedroom suite, where in the bathroom he took off her T-shirt and kissed the nipples of her breasts.
“I’d like the water hot,” he said.
“I love you.”
“And I love you too.”
She stepped into the shower and started the water.
He waited for just a second or two then got in with her. She started to laugh because he had not undressed. He kicked her feet out from under her, grabbed her shoulders and slammed her face down onto the raised lip of the shower stall with every ounce of his strength. The side of her head cracked like an eggshelll, blood poured out of the wound and her legs jerked several times before they were still.
When he was certain that she was dead, he went into the bedroom and phoned 911.
“My God, my wife fell in the shower and hit her head,” he cried. “She’s not breathing! I don’t know what to do!”
“Who is calling?”
“Please hurry,” Haaris sobbed. He gave the address then left the phone off the hook, turned on the front porch light and unlocked the door, then went back to his wife.
It was late when McGarvey heard a soft sound on the stairs outside his Georgetown apartment. He unlocked the door then sat down in the dark in his living room, a cognac at hand, his Walther PPK in the nine-millimeter version on the small table beside him.
After he’d left the White House, he phoned Walt Page’s office and left a message for the director as well as for Bambridge that he’d turned down the president. He told them that he would stick around Washington for the next day or two and then head back to Florida.
He’d not answered Pete’s calls and had dinner alone at a small place a few blocks away down on M Street. Afterward he made a show of drinking too much at the bar before he staggered back home to his third-floor apartment in a brownstone across from Rock Creek Park.
But he hadn’t been drunk then, nor was he drunk now.
He’d phoned Jim Forest at the detective’s home. “How are things going?”
“I was wondering when you were going to call,” Forest said.
He and McGavey weren’t exactly friends, but they did have a mutual respect. Mac thought the kid was a good cop, though sometimes a little too earnest.
“I wanted to give you time to get the autopsy results.”
“You got out of Dodge before I could get to you. A Gulfstream left SRQ for Andrews. I assumed that you were aboard and that you were definitely involved. But the one guy had a forty-five-caliber slug in his head, and you carry a Walther. Mind telling me what the hell you’re involved with this time and who was helping you?”
“I can’t tell you a lot, except those two guys came to kill me, and I think they may be Pakistanis.”
“Holy shit,” Forest said softly. “They rented the boat at Marina Jack up in Sarasota under the name Walter Smith. One of them showed a New York driver’s license and left a deposit with an American Express gold card in the same name. But the rental agent said neither guy’s English was very good.”
“Anything show up in their dental work?”
“Nothing yet. But a coroner’s jury wants to talk to you.”
“Later, once I get something settled.”
Forest was silent for a beat. “Is this about what’s going on right now in Pakistan?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Just tell me that you’re not bringing any more shit down here. I have my hands full as it is. The chief knows that I know you, and he’s asking some very pointed questions. You come back to Sarasota and bring another shooting war with you, we’ll probably both end up in jail.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. A lot depends upon what happens here in DC over the next twenty-four hours or so. Could be it’ll all blow away.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“Shit,” Forest said. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, take care of yourself, Mac.”
“I’ll try.”
Someone knocked.
“It’s open,” McGarvey said. He snatched his pistol, got up and moved quickly across the room so that when the door opened he would be behind it.
“It’s me, so don’t shoot,” Pete said softly. She opened the door and stepped in.
“Are you alone?” McGarvey asked. He could see the hallway through the crack at the edge. It was empty.
“Yes,” she said and came the rest of the way in.
Pointing his pistol down and away, McGarvey reached around her and locked the door.
“How about some light?” she said.
“Were you followed?”
“I don’t think so.”
At the window McGarvey carefully parted the curtains and looked out. Nothing moved on the street below; the same cars that were parked there earlier were still there. “Where’s your car?”
“I left it down on Dumbarton a couple of blocks away,” she said. “I knew that you were lying the minute you came out of the White House. Why didn’t you at least tell me or Otto?”
McGarvey laid his pistol on the table and switched on the small reading lamp. “I didn’t want to get either of you involved. Especially not Otto, he’s a terrible liar. And I needed the illusion to hold for at least until tomorrow.”
Pete stood flatfooted, her blue eyes wide. “I’m a pretty good liar. And not so bad at covering your ass. I have a vested interest that I want to protect, you know.”
A number of years ago McGarvey had been shot up pretty badly and had lost one of his kidneys. Then during an incident that had gone bad a few months earlier, McGarvey had lost his remaining kidney, and Pete, who by happenstance was a close enough match, donated hers without hesitation.
“They won’t take the bait now.”
“Would have been stupid if they had, anyway,” she said. “Otto wants to talk to you, but your phone is off and he didn’t want to turn it on in case you were in the middle of something. But he knew that you were here or at least that your phone was here.”
“So he sent you?”
“I volunteered,” Pete said. “The Messiah came on PTV in Islamabad. When Otto couldn’t reach you he sent the recording to me. But he said he thinks something was wrong with it.”
“What, exactly?”
“Something about the newspaper. He was holding up this morning’s
Washington Post,
but Otto says it was dubbed.”
McGarvey turned on his encrypted cell phone and called Otto, who answered on the first ring. McGarvey put the call on speaker.
“Pete’s okay?”
“She’s here. What have you come up with? She says something about the
Post
was wrong?”
“It was this morning’s early edition, but the bottom right edge didn’t line up. You won’t be able to see it on a small phone screen, but one of my programs picked up on it, and when I put it up on the table it was there. The message was recorded sometime in the past. But how long ago I don’t know.”
“Did he have anything significant to say?”
“Just that he wanted peace, and he invited everyone to send their embassy staffs back. Business as normal.”
“With thirty-plus nuclear weapons still on the loose,” McGarvey said, piecing it together. “He probably said something like he’ll be around, but he wouldn’t be making any public appearances.”
“He said that he’s going to be the invisible man on the street, in the hills, out in the desert. Anonymous.”
“How about the voice?”
“We’re working that,” Otto said. “The spectrum analyzer I’m using says it’s a match with the speech he made at the Aiwan. But it’s too perfect a match.”
“Do you have a confidence level? Eighty or ninety percent would be good enough.”
“Just gut instinct, but something else came up in the past few minutes that I just don’t know what to make of. The timing is all wrong, unless the same people who want to shut you up want to get to Haaris.”
* * *
“What else?” Pete asked.
“Haaris’s wife slipped and fell in their shower. Hit her head, and by the time a paramedic crew got there she was dead.”
“Was he there when it happened?” McGarvey asked.
“Apparently he’d just gotten home and found her,” Otto said, then hesitated.
McGarvey picked up on it. “And?”
“Maybe I’m getting to be an old lady hearing rats in the attic, but I got the real funny feeling that Dave Haaris might just be the Messiah.”
Two minutes later, McGarvey’s phone rang. It was Otto again. “Dr. Franklin just called. Haaris had his wife’s body brought to All Saints. You might want to go over there.”
A distraught, angry Haaris charged out of the waiting room when they came in. “The sons of bitches murdered her just to get at me,” he said. “I want both of you in on this, because no matter what I said before, my advice to the president is different now.” His clothes were still wet.
“How do you know someone killed her?” McGarvey asked.
“Dr. Franklin figured it out. And if it really is Messiah’s people who did it to keep me off balance there’s no possible way the political situation will ever get back to normal in Islamabad. That’s clear to me. The bastards. The dirty bastards. She never hurt a soul in her life. She was incapable of doing anything mean. To anyone.”
Dr. Franklin, his jacket off, his shirt collar open, got off the elevator from the second-floor operating theater, a long look on his face. “Good morning, Mac, Miss Boylan. I assume that David has filled you in.”
“Did you find what I asked you to look for?” Haaris said, a little more in control of his emotions.
“I’m sorry I missed it earlier. She could have fallen with enough force to cause the damage to her skull. But you were correct in assuming that someone was in the shower with her. I found a displacement of her left ankle. Whoever the killer was probably grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand and the back of her head with the other, and kicked her legs out from under her, forcing her down.”
“My God,” Pete said. “Could it have been someone she knew?”
Haaris’s face colored. “She wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you meant to imply.”
“I’m sorry, I was just looking for options. It would have been a very big deal for someone to send killers after your wife, unless they were specifically looking for you, and she got in the way.”
“There’s no accounting for stupidity.”
“You and your think tank are our reigning experts,” McGarvey said. He’d been watching for any signs that Haaris was faking his emotions, but he couldn’t see it.
“We can see trends, possibilities, likelihoods. But for whole systems. One rogue operator changes everything. People are unpredictable, nations usually aren’t. They’re too ponderous, too slow to react or change in any fundamental way.”
“The Messiah is fundamental.”
Haaris stopped for a beat.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Dr. Franklin said. “It’s been a very long day and I’m going home to bed now.”
Haaris shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for confirming something I’d already suspected.”
“I’m terribly sorry, David. For everything.”
“I appreciate it.”
Franklin left down the hallway to the rear parking area.
Pete touched Haaris’s wrist. “I’m truly sorry too,” she said. “We all are. As hard as an accident is to accept, something like this is a million times worse.”
Haaris nodded.
“What’s next?”
Haaris gave her a look. “If you mean what’s next vis-à-vis Pakistan, I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”
“Anything that you’d care to share?” McGarvey asked.
“The president asked you to assassinate the Messiah, and the word is you turned her down.”
“I may rethink it.”
“Because of my wife?”
Again McGarvey tried to read the man, but he came up blank. Haaris was either a consummate liar. Or he was filled with genuine hate. “In part.”