The Fourth Horseman (33 page)

Except for the business with Kirk McGarvey.

“We have come to a new juncture in Pakistan’s future, you and I,” his image on the monitor was saying. “One that I must apologize for not seeing. The signs were there for me to see even in my blindness.”

Haaris smiled. Politics was theater. Even, certainly, American presidents had always known it, especially Reagan, who’d been the consummate White House actor. But his had been an excellent presidency because of it. First, he had known how to hire bright people. Second, he had listened to them. And third, he played well on television.

“I have a way forward for us. Not with guns but with hope. With understanding.”

The mufti’s body lay where it had fallen, on its back, very little blood from the head shot, its arms splayed, one leg over the other.

“For us there will be no Shiite-Sunni war. We will not become another Iraq, dominated by the U.S. Our future is what we will make of it. And I promise that our future will be a bright one, beginning today.”

He got up and went to the double doors to the balcony. Already people were streaming onto Constitution Avenue. Many were coming from the direction of the parliament building, the National Library and the Supreme Court to the south, as well as the Secretariat to the north. But many came from the west, starting to choke rush hour traffic on Jinnah Avenue,

This time the crowd would be bigger than for his first public appearance. They wanted answers, and he would give them what they wanted.

He phoned Rajput. “Have you found him?”

“We think that he’s gone to ground in Rawalpindi at the house of one of our police informers, who works for the CIA but for us as well. We’ve tolerated the man because he’s given us good intel from time to time and we handed him bits of disinformation that we know got back to Austin’s people.”

“Do not try to take him into custody; this is very important, General. Kill him on sight. Am I clear?”

“Now that we know who he really is, he could be invaluable.”

“Am I clear?”

“Despite your clever speech this morning, you are not running this country. You are nothing more than a traitor—three times removed. First against Pakistan, the country of your birth. Second, against Great Britain, the country that educated you. And third, the U.S., the country that gave you employment and listened to your advice. Now where does your loyalty lie?”

“Look out the window,” Haaris said.

“I am at this moment. But what if you were to be exposed as an American spy?”

“Are you getting cold feet?”

“I don’t know what you’re up to, exactly what sort of a deal you’ve made with the TTP, but I think that it has gone too far. The Taliban have never been our friends. We have used them on the Kashmir border to keep the Indian army occupied, but nothing else.”

“Just as the Americans used bin Laden and al Qaeda to keep the Russians distracted in Afghanistan. Need I remind you of that outcome?”

“You need not,” Rajput flared. “Perhaps we will take care of Mr. McGarvey, as you suggest, and then perhaps we will come for you before it’s too late.”

“You would fall with me,” Haaris said. “But if you stay the course the outcome will be more than even you could imagine.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“Your name is written all over this operation.”

“What operation?” Rajput shouted.

“To strike a blow against Pakistan’s real enemies.”

“Save me,” Rajput said after a beat. It was the same thing the mufti had said just before his death.

*   *   *

Haaris sat sipping tea at the desk for a full half hour, before he went back to the windows. The crowd had swelled enormously, completely filling the broad avenue for as far as he could see. At least eight or ten television vans had set up at the edges of the crowd not far from the Aiwan’s security fence. He picked out ABC, CBS, the BBC and Al-Jazeera, along with others.

The international media were here for one of the biggest shows on the planet, which to this point had not involved wholesale bloodshed. It was something unique.

Before dawn he had set up the sound system on the balcony but had not called up the technicians to drag out the Jumbotron screen. It would be enough for his people to see him in person, even if at a distance, and to hear his voice.

He went to the controls and switched on the power, then took the still-bloody machete he’d used to decapitate Barazani from the closet.

As early as six years ago, he’d advised the Pakistani government to strengthen its alliance with the Taliban but to watch them very carefully should the same thing happen as happened with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA had gone along with him, as had the White House. It was to the Americans’ advantage to nurture Pakistan’s reliance on their military aid so that the U.S. could fight the war against the Afghani insurgents who took refuge across the border. Pakistan needed the money to fight the Taliban, which had turned on them, as Haaris had predicted they would.

“And here we are,” he said to the mufti’s corpse. “Come round full circle to the final act, which none of you in your wildest dreams could have predicted.”

He heaved the body over onto its stomach, and raising the machete nearly severed the head from the neck, the sharp blade crunching through the spinal column at the base of the skull. He had to strike two more times before he managed to cut through the cartilage and other tissue until the mufti’s head came completely free from the body.

Tossing the machete aside, he picked up the head by the hair above the base of the skull. The mufti’s black cap fell off, and Haaris awkwardly managed to put it back in place before he walked to the doors, opened them and stepped out onto the balcony.

Immediately a roar rose from the crowd.

“Messiah! Messiah! Messiah!”

Haaris raised the mufti’s head high.

A sigh swept across the mob.

“This is the face of our enemy,” he shouted. “It is they who exploded the nuclear weapon near Quetta. Their intention was to kill as many of our people as possible. But our soldiers gave their lives to make sure the death toll was small.”

An uneasy silence came over the broad avenue.

“This is just the first blow. There must be more. We need to eliminate the terrorists from our midst. We can no longer abide the murders of innocent civilians. Ordinary people like you. The killings must stop now!”

“Messiah!” a lone voice near the front cried.

“We must make a jihad against the killers of our babies.”

Several other voices joined the chorus. “Messiah!”

“But the Taliban is just a tool used by our real enemies!”

“Messiah!” The chant rose.

“The Taliban are the messengers sent to us from New Delhi!”

The cries were louder.

“Allies of America! Do not forget! Never forget!”

SIXTY-ONE

McGarvey watched from the partially open gate as the Cadillac Escalade that Austin had sent for Pete turned the corner at the end of the block. The neighborhood was strangely quiet for this time of the morning, but Otto had told him that Haaris was making another major announcement at the Aiwan. The crowds were enormous, people drawn from all around Islamabad and even down here from Rawalpindi.

“I’m not leaving Pakistan without you,” she’d told him before she got into the SUV. Austin had sent two stern-looking men to retrieve her.

“Are you coming with us, sir?” one of them asked.

“No. But whatever happens, don’t stop for anyone.”

“Good luck.”

“You too,” Mac had said.

He went back into the house to check on Thomas, who lay slumped over his wife’s body. He was dead, his hand holding hers.

A lot of sirens began to close in from the north, as Mac went outside to Thomas’s Mercedes. Two bullet holes had punctured the driver’s-side door, and a lot of blood stained the MB-Tex upholstery.

He found a prayer rug in the trunk to cover the blood, pushed the gate all the way open and drove out, just as the first of two jeeps, followed by two troop-transport trucks, rounded the corner. One of the jeeps was fitted with a rear-mounted sixty-caliber machine gun.

Mac just made it to the end of the block before the gunner opened fire, the shots going wide as he turned down a narrow side street of vendors and tiny shops. Only a few people were out and about and they scattered as he raced past, laying on the horn.

Thomas’s house was in a section called Gullistan Colony, dense with homes and small businesses, all serviced by a rat warren of streets. One neighborhood consisted of hovels, while two blocks later the houses were mostly upscale, compared to most others in the city.

He easily outran the jeeps and troop transports, but other sirens were beginning to converge from the north and east. And now they knew the car he was driving.

Suddenly he came to the end of a block, the street opening onto a broad thoroughfare across from which was what looked like parkland, trees and grassy hills but little or no traffic. It was as if the entire city had been drained of people.

A troop truck appeared around a sweeping curve a quarter mile to the north, and the jeeps and trucks that had followed him from Thomas’s house were behind him.

He accelerated directly across the highway, crashing across a drainage ditch and sliding sideways down a grassy slope, where at the bottom he just missed several trees, finally clipping one with his right front fender, taking out everything from the headlights back to the door post, and shattering that half of the windshield.

A machine gun opened fire from the highway behind him, several rounds slamming into the trunk of the Mercedes, before he came to a winding drive through the park and turned north.

The busted fender was rubbing against the tire, which within fifty yards shredded, sending him into a sharp skid to the left, off the road, through more trees and finally crashing through some thick brush and deep grass onto a golf course fairway.

Suddenly he knew exactly where he was. The first main highway was the National Park Road, and he’d managed to make his way through Ayub National Park and onto the Rawalpindi Golf Club course. Otto had given him satellite views of the entire twin-cities area of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. He’d not had the time to learn much more than the layout of the main roads and their features, but this place stuck out in his mind because it seemed out of place. An upscale park and golf course in what was mostly a slum city didn’t fit.

The course was empty, and slipping and sliding, tearing up the turf, the Mercedes barely under control, he made his way to the maintenance sheds, where he drove directly into one of the garages, slamming into the back wall before he could stop.

A uniformed cop, drawing his pistol, a radio in his free hand, came around the corner in a dead run as McGarvey jumped out of the car.

The cop shouted something in Punjabi that almost certainly meant
stop.

McGarvey jogged to the left, his leg nearly collapsing under him as the frightened cop fired three shots as fast as he could pull the trigger, all of the rounds slamming into the side of the car.

The sirens remained off to the east and north now, but they were getting closer, and back in the woods someone was firing a machine gun. His pursuers were all on hair triggers. They knew about him, and their orders were simple: shoot to kill.

Drawing the Glock, McGarvey fired two snap shots, both of them hitting the cop center mass, dropping the man.

The shed was filled with lawn mowers and other equipment to maintain the course, but just outside around the corner, a ratty blue Toyota pickup was parked, a key in the ignition. A pair of tools for taking plugs out of greens for hole placements were in the bed, along with a couple of bags of what were probably weed killer, and a large tub of green sand.

More firing came from the woods to the south now.

McGarvey closed the shed’s door, then laying the pistol on the seat next to him, started the pickup and headed up an access road that eventually led past the clubhouse and onto another broad thoroughfare, this one the GT Road.

There was some traffic here, most of it commercial, and he stayed with the flow, constantly checking his rearview mirrors.

Another jeep, followed by a troop truck, came from the north at a high rate of speed, and traffic parted to let them pass.

For now the search was concentrated on the golf course. But in the confusion, with all the shooting at shadows, it would take them some time before they calmed down enough to find the Mercedes and the dead cop in the shed, and perhaps even longer to realize that the Toyota was missing and start looking for it.

*   *   *

The massive crowds were already beginning to disperse by the time McGarvey made it up to Islamabad’s Red Section, but they were still heavy enough on Constitution Avenue that he had to take Bank Road across to Ispana, behind the Supreme Court, before he could get anywhere near the Aiwan.

He pulled over across from the National Library and called Otto. The battery on Pete’s phone was low and he had trouble getting through.

“It’s over, Mac,” Otto said. “He made his speech and he left.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Wait,” Otto said, and a moment later the connection cleared. “Your battery is about flat, I gave you a temporary fix. Haaris is gone. He told the people that the Taliban was the tool and India was the real enemy. He held up the mufti’s head, just like he did with Barazani’s.”

“Goddamnit, where is he?” McGarvey demanded, his frustration nearly overwhelming.

“I don’t know. He left the balcony, and within ten minutes a convoy of nine cars and four panel vans took off from the Aiwan’s rear gate and headed in different directions. My darlings are tracking most of them, but he has the ephemeris of our spy bird, so he knows where to hide. He could be anywhere.”

“Still at the Aiwan?”

“I don’t think so,” Otto said. “But you’re going to have to get out of Dodge ASAP. The cops, the ISI, the army, everybody’s gunning for you.”

“What about Pete?”

“She’s safe at the embassy. A SEAL Team Six squad is coming by chopper around midnight to pick her up. The thing is, you’re not going to get anywhere near the embassy. They have the place completely surrounded. What’s your situation now? Pete said you screwed up your leg or something.”