The Fourth Horseman (17 page)

Deborah’s ashes were in a small cardboard carton that he had packed into a zippered nylon bag. The only other luggage he’d brought over was a wheeled bag. When it was his turn at one of the counters, he handed over his passport and customs declaration.

“Anything to claim, sir?” the agent asked. “Tobacco, spirits, plant matter?

“Only my personal belongings plus my wife’s cremated remains.”

“May I see?”

Haaris opened the nylon bag. The box had been sealed in Washington with tape from the funeral parlor. He handed the agent the death certificate.

“Sorry to do this, sir, hope you understand,” the agent said. He handed the box to another agent, who stepped across to a baggage scanner and ran it through. A few moments later he brought it back.

The customs agent cleared both bags. Haaris walked out into the main terminal and headed toward the ground transportation exit, where the man in the dark blue blazer and open-collared white shirt who’d tailed him from the gate unobtrusively fell in behind him.

Just at the doors to the cab queue, Harris suddenly turned and walked up to the agent. “I assume that Tommy Boyle has sent you to watch over me.”

The CIA officer, caught out, smiled and shrugged. “Mr. Boyle thought you might spot me, sir. But considering what happened to Mrs. Haaris, he thought it might be wise to watch your back.”

“Good enough. I assume you have a car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you can save me the cab fare and drive me into town. I’m staying at the Connaught, actually, just around the corner from our embassy.”

“Yes, sir, I know it.”

Haaris arched an eyebrow. “You do?”

Caught out again the young officer could only smile. “I meant to say I know where it is.”

The officer’s car was a white Ultima, and he was a good driver. The traffic was heavy on the M4 into the city center, and they didn’t speak much except about the weather in London versus Washington.

At the hotel a uniformed bellman opened the door for Haaris while another opened the boot and took out the two pieces of luggage.

Haaris looked back through the open door. “Tell Tommy that I’m sorry but I don’t want any company this time around. But if he wants to keep a tail on me, stay out of sight. He’ll understand.”

The young officer didn’t know what to say.

Haaris had made reservations for five days in a corner suite, and after check-in he ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He took off his jacket and tie and laid them on the bed. When the wine came he sat by the window looking out of one eye down on Mayfair toward Buckingham Palace and out of the other toward the nylon bag with his wife’s remains.

He’d felt no remorse, killing her. It had been a necessity. Nor had he ever felt any love for her. She had been another necessity for his cover. The union had been perceived as odd by others, which was exactly the sentiment he’d wanted to promote. Looking too closely at something unusual diverted attention from reality.

Things like that, people’s perceptions of him, were another thing he’d hated about the West—especially Great Britain and even more so the U.S. Narrow-minded, provincial bastards, all of them, who couldn’t see past their own self-perceived superiority. The white man was the world’s salvation. Always had been.

Of course life wasn’t any better in Pakistan, or India, or China or even the new Russia with its oligarchs. But he’d worked all of his adult life to pit the East against the West. Pakistan against the U.S., who was the real enemy, not India. The ISI against the CIA. The man on the street in Rawalpindi or Lahore against the man from West Point or Des Moines.

It had always been a grand game for him. Revenge. Making England and the ISI the sparring partners for his game was far too tame. But antagonizing the U.S., which still held out hopes that by sending massive amounts of military aid to Islamabad that Pakistan would actually be a moderating influence on the Taliban and the dozens of other terrorist societies in country, was actually sweet.

Washington had never learned the folly of its ways. The Pentagon supplied bin Laden and al Qaeda with Stinger missiles and other weapons to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan, apparently never really understanding the first principle of blowback. The generals never dreamed, or never wanted to admit, that someday those same Stinger missiles would be used against its own forces.

Just as they could not see that all the military aid to Pakistan would one day come back and bite them in the arse.

Payback time was coming, and Haaris had a front-row seat for the most over-the-top game on earth: revenge for all the shit he had taken since his uncle had brought him to England.

Sitting now drinking his wine he understood that he’d never really considered the possibility that he was insane. Stark raving mad, as one of his teachers at Eton had railed. “All wogs are barking mad. Happens at birth.”

It was the same when he was eight and nine, and being raped by the older boys. No matter that his grades were in the top 5 percentile, he was a wog. A thing. An object to be used.

And he’d bided his time.

He took a shower and changed into a pair of khaki slacks, a light yellow V-neck sweater and a comfortable pair of walking shoes. He arranged for a rental Mini to be brought to the hotel and took the nylon bag with Deb’s ashes downstairs.

Ten minutes later he drove off, all the way down to Pulham, where he parked in the lee of the Putney railroad bridge and dumped Deborah’s ashes in the river. They floated on the surface and spread out as scum, along with the oil slicks and other industrial flotsam. It was several minutes before the broad patch disappeared downstream.

One of Boyle’s minders, driving a shiny gray Vauxhall had pulled over fifty yards away, and when Haaris got back in his Mini and drove off the CIA officer pulled in behind him, staying three or four cars behind.

For a time Haaris drove around south London as if he were merely trying to escape the memory of tossing his wife’s ashes in the Thames, but then he drove back to the Connaught, where he turned in the car and went up to his suite.

A man who could have been his twin, dressed in khakis and a yellow V-neck sweater, was sitting on the bed, and when Haaris walked in he got up without a word and walked to the window, where he sat down and poured a glass of champagne.

Haaris changed into a pair of jeans and a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves that buttoned into place. He left his passport, other IDs and money on the dresser, and without a word left the suite. Taking the service elevator down to the basement level he left the hotel via the loading dock. A dark blue Mercedes S500 with deeply tinted windows was waiting for him, the rear door open.

He got in, closed the door and the driver headed away.

THIRTY-ONE

McGarvey rode with Otto out the back Campus gate at three in the morning, and they drove directly over to Haaris’s house in Embassy Row just off Massachusetts Avenue, in light traffic. They’d managed to get out of the OHB without being spotted by anyone who knew Mac, and the gate guards hadn’t paid much attention to who was driving. Their main brief was to vet everyone coming onto the Campus.

After Landesberg had finished, around one-thirty, he’d turned on the lights in the big mirrors and swiveled McGarvey’s chair around. The effect was nothing less than stunning, and even for someone who’d used disguises before, a little disorienting.

“Tamp down your west Kansas drawl, Mr. Director, and your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

Otto had gone over to the cafeteria for some coffee and doughnuts, and when he’d come back he’d almost dropped the lot, a large grin animating his face. “You’re a genius, my man,” he’d said to Landesberg.

“What do you think, Mr. Director?”

“I have to agree with Otto,” McGarvey said. “It’s me, but it isn’t.”

“That’s the point.”

Otto had phoned Louise to meet them at All Saints at seven sharp, and when she’d pressed he told her that he was with Mac on the Pakistani thing.

Crime scene tape still blocked the front door of Haaris’s place, but not the driveway, when they pulled up. The houses in the neighborhood were all dark, except for the carriage lights out front. And before they’d come around the corner Otto had pulled over and brought up the security systems, including cameras and motion detectors, in every house, shutting them down with a universal password of his own design. The security services would show that the systems were operating as normal, but the view from the eaves-mounted cameras would show only a street with no traffic.

Otto followed McGarvey around to the rear of the house, where Mac picked the lock to the kitchen hall in under twenty seconds, and they were in. They’d checked with London Station earlier and were assured that Haaris had arrived in the morning, had spread his wife’s ashes in an industrial section of the Thames and had returned to the Connaught, where he remained.

“Find his computer. I’ll take the master bedroom,” McGarvey said.

Otto went to the study, while McGarvey found his way to the master suite. The curtains were tightly drawn so he switched on a light in one of the bathrooms.

The bed had been made up, and Deb Haaris’s walk-in closet, crammed with clothing and maybe two hundred or more pairs of shoes and boots, was a total mess. Clothes were piled on an upholstered chair, lying in heaps on the floor and stuffed in jumbled, sloppily folded piles on the shelves.

Haaris’s closet, on the other hand, was precisely organized. Slacks were hung in order of color right to left, shirts the same, the fronts all facing left, as were the sport coats and blazers, first, a dozen suits and two tuxedos next. Shoes were on low shelves. Racks held belts and ties; drawers, socks, or underwear. Nothing seemed to be missing.

McGarvey was not able to find a wall safe or floor safe or any other place to hide something in either closet, in the separate bathrooms or the bedroom itself.

Otto was just coming out of the study when McGarvey passed through the living room.

“Anything?”

“Nada,” Otto said. “He’s a careful man.”

“What about his computer?”

“Empty.”

“Even if he erased the hard drive, you can retrieve some of it, can’t you?”

“You don’t understand, Mac. His computer is empty. The hard drive is missing as are the RAM chips. Nothing left but a keyboard, screen and hard-frame wiring.”

McGarvey looked toward the front windows at the neighborhood, still asleep. “He did tell us one thing at least.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s not coming home. At least not soon.”

*   *   *

They stopped at an all-night McDonald’s not too far from the old Columbia Hospital for Women just off Pennsylvania Avenue. A few people were having early morning breakfast and coffee. Several of them were outside smoking at the picnic tables.

“We’ve come a long ways together, you and I,” Otto said.

“Yes, we have,” McGarvey said, not really hearing yet what his friend was trying to say.

“There was a time in France when I didn’t think I was going to make it. No one knew what hacking was all about then, but I was really on the verge of being one of the true assholes. Doing that kind of shit out of pure spite. Boredom, maybe. I was pissed off at the world and really didn’t know why. Then you showed up on my doorstep one day and gave me my purpose.”

“It was a two-way street. I was having my own troubles then, before Katy and I got back together.”

“But then the two of you did.”

“Not for long enough.”

“But you had each other,” Otto said, looking away momentarily. “I was really jealous of you, until Louise. Mostly because I didn’t understand what it was like to…”

“To be in love?”

“Yeah. And here we are again, on the actual brink, you and I. We can’t do it alone, Mac. Never could. Of all people I thought that you would understand most.”

Suddenly McGarvey understood what his old friend was getting at. “Two things,” he said, maybe a little too sharply. “Don’t write me off just yet, and second of all, leave Pete out of it.”

Otto managed a smile. “I haven’t on the first, and I won’t on the second.”

*   *   *

Louise was already at All Saints when they arrived. Breakfast was being served to the half-dozen patients on the third and fourth floors, but Franklin hadn’t arrived yet. It was he who signed all release orders. Pete wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much she protested, until the doctor said so.

Last night Louise had stopped by Pete’s apartment to pack a couple of bags for at least a few days, maybe as long as a week, on Campus. “If she needs anything else in the interim, I’ll get them,” she told McGarvey.

She was waiting upstairs in the second-floor visitors’ lounge, watching
Good Morning America,
when McGarvey and Otto got off the elevator and came down the corridor.

“Is Pete awake yet?” Otto asked.

“Awake, dressed and pissed off,” Louise said. “She wants out now.” She turned to McGarvey. “And who are you?”

McGarvey and Otto exchanged a glance.

“Travis Parks,” Otto told his wife. “He’s been assigned to act as Pete’s minder.”

Louise guffawed. “Lots of luck, Parks.”

McGarvey smiled. “Maybe I can take her by surprise for a change,” he said, reverting to his Kansas drawl.

Louise’s expression changed by degrees. “My God, it’s you,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes, but I didn’t notice at first.”

“That’s a good thing,” McGarvey said.

He went down the hall to Pete’s room. The door was open and he knocked on the frame before he walked in.

Pete was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of her bed, her breakfast tray untouched. She looked up. And for just a moment her mouth pursed in irritation, but suddenly she brightened.

“Kirk, you look worse than I feel.”

THIRTY-TWO

McGarvey showed up at Joint Base Andrews in a CIA Cadillac Escalade with civilian plates and was dropped off on the tarmac where a C-32A military VIP transport aircraft was boarding the Islamabad embassy staff for the overnight flight. The twin-engine jet was the military version of the Boeing 757, which the vice president and sometimes even the president used. In this case it was meant as a show of the U.S. commitment to diplomacy with Pakistan.