The Fourth Horseman (37 page)

McGarvey, on the other hand, wore khaki slacks, a white polo shirt and black blazer, boat shoes on his feet. His attitude was that he’d stopped over for a chat after just getting back from the front.

“Are you carrying a firearm, Mr. Director?” the marine guard asked.

“No.”

He followed Kalley across to the extremely busy West Wing.

“The Messiah has vanished,” she said. “Of course I’m sure that you knew this.”

“It’s a mess over there. Any word yet from India?”

“Their new aircraft carrier is standing about fifty miles off the coast from Karachi, and General Nasiri is screaming bloody murder, threatening to launch the air force to deal with the threat.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Wasim Nasiri; he was the Pakistani army’s chief of staff and served as a defense minister. Sharp man, from what we’ve been told. Their parliament appointed him as temporary spokesman for the government, and the supreme court confirmed it last night. But I can tell you that he’s not made any difference so far. The country is in an almost total civil war. Some of the military units, especially up north and a few in the southwest, have joined the Taliban.”

“What about their remaining nuclear weapons?”

“Nasiri assured us that they are safe.”

“Do you believe him?” McGarvey asked at the open door to the Oval Office.

“No,” Kalley said.

The president, her jacket hanging over the back of her desk chair, was just getting off the phone when they came in. “The Messiah has vanished,” she said.

Kalley closed the door.

“Did you manage to assassinate him?”

“I met him face-to-face, and in fact he has not disappeared. He is here in the States, at Langley.”

“The CIA has him in custody?”

“Not yet. He’s one of ours, and no one else but me is convinced he played the role.”

“Haaris,” Kalley said.

“Yes.”

“I want to see him here,” the president said, reaching for the phone.

“That wouldn’t be smart, Madam President,” McGarvey said.

“What did you say?”

“If I’m right he is a dangerous man who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you.”

“If he tried to get in with a gun he’d never get past the sentries.”

“He wouldn’t need a weapon.”

The president looked as if she was on the verge of exploding. “You’re convinced that David Haaris and the Messiah are one and the same man?”

“Yes, ma’am”

“You idiot,” Kalley said. “By your meddling you damned well might have sparked the breakdown.”

“That will be enough,” Miller said.

Kalley didn’t want to quit.

“Leave us now,” the president said.

Reluctantly Kalley got to her feet, glaring at McGarvey, and walked out of the Oval Office.

“I asked you here to thank you, not only for what you did in Pakistan, but for what you’ve done, and what you’ve given, for your country. Unfortunately, there’ll be no medals, nor ceremonies on the lawn.” The president got up and came around her desk. McGarvey rose and she extended her hand. “It’s all I can do for now.”

McGarvey smiled, and shook hands. “It’s enough for now,” he said.

Miller read something in his eyes. “It’s not over yet.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then don’t let me keep you.”

Outside, McGarvey walked down the hall the same way he’d come in. Kalley was nowhere in sight. At the east door he nodded to the marine sentry.

“Have a good day, Mr. Director.”

Outside he got in the Chevy, drove directly down to the gate that led to East Executive Drive and was passed through.

He picked up his cell phone. “I’m out,” he said.

“Where are you going?” Otto asked.

“After Haaris.”

“He’s still here on Campus, and you don’t want do anything there. He’ll fight back, and there could be a lot of collateral damage. Go to my place, out of his way. I’ll give Louise the heads-up.”

“I’ll do better on my own,” McGarvey said.

“No, you won’t. Anyway, don’t be so goddamned stubborn, for once in your life. We’ve done this bullshit together a long time; let’s not change the game in midstream. I’ll let you know when he’s on the move.”

“Depending how it goes with Pete, he might just try to see the president. But whatever happens, it has to be me who takes him down. He’ll take anyone out who gets close to him.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

Haaris left the small conference room where Pete had debriefed him for the past twenty minutes, his heart skipping a beat in every six or seven despite his outward calm, and took the elevator down to the first floor.

McGarvey had managed somehow to escape from the ISI, and later that night a SEAL Team Six helicopter had picked him up and taken him and Miss Boylan across the border to Jalalabad. The worst of it was that both of them were convinced that he was the Messiah, though apparently they had only the slightest glimmer of his motivations and absolutely none of what was coming next.

She had refused to tell him where McGarvey was at the moment, but it was a real possibility that he could be here on Campus.

“We’ve determined that the Messiah’s voice was electronically modified. We’ve had a computer program working the problem since the first speech, and we’ve come up with a number of certainties. The speaker was born in Pakistan, most likely in Lahore. He got his education in England, starting as a young boy, and his diction, grammar and manners are of the old school. He’s in his late thirties and has spent some time, perhaps years, in the States. The programs picked up a few traces of an American accent. Northeast.”

“Interesting,” Haaris had said.

“The profile fits you, Mr. Haaris. Can you explain that?”

“No, I cannot, except to ask if you are formally accusing me of being the Messiah?”

“What do you suppose the Messiah’s agenda is? Simply a nuclear war between Pakistan and India?”

“It’s what I hope to discover with my team’s input. The president will be needing a briefing from my desk sooner rather than later,” Haaris had said. “So, if you will excuse me, Miss Boylan, I will get back to work.”

Pete said nothing until he was at the door. “You’ve made a mistake, you know.”

He turned and smiled faintly. “Oh?”

“You got Kirk McGarvey involved.”

Haaris took the covered walkway past the cafeteria, the sculpture “Kryptos” outside in the courtyard, but instead of taking the second covered walkway past the library, he turned left. At the end of the corridor he scanned his pass and went outside to the parking lot and his Mercedes.

He figured it wouldn’t take long for the bitch to realize he had left the building instead of going directly to his office, which didn’t leave much room for error.

On the way down to the gate, he called his house from his cell phone and scanned the outside as well as every room in the house. No cars he didn’t recognize were parked anywhere in the neighborhood. The crime scene police tape had been removed from the front and back entrances, the sliding glass doors from the pool into the family room, and the garage door. The inside of the house had obviously been searched, but as far as he could tell nothing was missing except for his laptop.

Every closet in the house had been searched with a fine hand; nothing had been pulled out and tossed aside, no holes been punched into the walls to find a safe or a hiding place.

The bathroom where he’d killed Deborah had been cleaned by his service, and using the surveillance detection program on his phone, he could find no traces of any electronic eavesdropping devices other than his own.

A forensics team had checked for evidence relating to Deborah’s murder but not for the supposition that he was a spy.

The guard at the main gate didn’t bother to look up as he flashed past in the exit lane, the bar code scanner on a corner of the car’s windshield automatically registering his identity.

Instead of turning right on the parkway and back toward the city, he turned left, to the north, merging with I-495 a few minutes later and crossing the river into Maryland.

Following the Beltway as it merged with I-270 and heading off to the east, he kept checking his rearview mirrors for anyone keeping pace with him, and the sky for any signs of a helicopter dogging his trail. But if the alarm had been sounded no one was coming after him.

Using one hand he removed the battery cover on the phone and took out the SIM card. Until it was back in place even Otto Rencke wouldn’t be able to trace him.

Fifteen minutes later, still certain that he wasn’t being followed, he turned south on State Highway 295; a half mile later he pulled up at the gate of a self-storage company and entered his password. No one was around. Arranging for a storage space was done by appointment only, and there was no security except in the evenings. Five years ago when he’d begun to put his preliminary planning in place, he searched for a mostly unattended self-storage place just like this one.

His was a large, two-car garage space, which had been another of his requirements. The lock was an old-fashioned combination, and when he had the door up, he drove inside, parking next to a five-year-old dark blue Toyota Camry, possibly the most common car in America.

So far as he could tell nothing had been disturbed since the last time he’d checked the place the week before he’d left for London. In fact, if someone had tried to break in, the garage and most of the units for fifty feet on either side would have disappeared in a massive explosion of nearly one hundred kilos of Semtex placed in two barrels filled with roofing nails.

He changed clothes from the trunk of the Camry, dressing in khakis with cargo pockets for three fifteen-round magazines of forty-caliber ammunition, plus an advanced Vaime silencer, and a quick-draw holster for the compact Glock 27 Gen4 pistol.

Also pocketing a fold-up knife, several four-ounce bricks of Semtex with chemical fuses, and a thirty-two-caliber revolver in an ankle holster, he backed out of the garage.

Included in his kit were two different sets of identification: one for Rupert Mann, from Brooklyn, and the other, complete with an Irish passport, for Pete O’Donald, from Belfast.

When this was finally over he’d planned on disappearing. Maybe the South Seas somewhere. Maybe even Venezuela. He had enough money in various offshore accounts to buy his way into relative luxury in just about any Third World nation.

But that had been before he’d learned he was dying. Now the money and the escape didn’t mean much to him. Only the plan did, and only because doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing except waiting around to die.

He walked back into the garage and armed a switch that would set when the door was closed and fire when the door was opened.

Turning around he came face-to-face with the manager of the property, along with a man in his twenties and a pretty woman of about the same age, both of them dressed in jeans, both of them smiling.

“Mr. Dodge,” the manager said. He was a florid old Cuban in jeans and a guayabera, sandals on his feet. “I’m glad you’re here. This couple is moving and they have need of one of our largest storage units. Showing an occupied unit is better than showing them an empty one.”

It was an irritation, nothing more, except it made no sense to Haaris, and he was suspicious. But the couple were not in the business, it was obvious, and the manager was an idiot. He stepped aside and motioned them in. “Please,” he said.

They went inside.

Haaris quickly screwed the silencer on the Glock’s muzzle. No one else was around. The couples’ car had to be parked in front. He fired three shots, dropping them. And then walked back inside and fired one shot into the backs of each of their heads.

Closing the door, which armed the explosives, he shoved the padlock home and drove away. Sooner or later the young couple would be reported missing and their car discovered here, but there would be nothing to link him to the place.

Unless McGarvey put it together. But time was running out. And no matter what else happened Haaris had the number in his cell phone.

As soon as the call went through the three nuclear devices would explode wherever they happened to be.

He wanted them in New York, Washington, DC, and London.

It was the last stage of his plan.

SIXTY-NINE

In the kitchen at Rencke’s safe house McGarvey sat staring out the window at the swing set in the backyard. He and Louise had sent Audi down to the Farm, where she would be safe until the trouble blew over. And there’d been so many incidents in the past couple of years that she had started to grow up there and was the mascot of the training facility. Everyone doted on her. It wouldn’t be long before children’s toys like swing sets would be far too tame for her.

Louise came in from outside. “My Toyota is in the driveway. When you leave, take it. The staff car stays in the garage till we get past this. Haaris will know it’s someone from the Company, namely, you.”

“You shouldn’t be involved.”

“Don’t be silly. You saved my husband’s life in Cuba. What would you have me do?”

McGarvey’s cell phone rang. It was Pete. He put it on speakerphone.

“I’m on a secure phone in Otto’s office. Haaris left the Campus almost forty-five minutes ago, but we didn’t catch it until one of his staffers called Marty’s office to complain that his debriefing was taking too long.”

“He could be practically anywhere by now. Check Dulles, Reagan and Baltimore.”

“That’s the first thing we tried, but if he’s booked on any international flight there’ve been no last-minute additions.”

“Expand the search to domestic flights. But he’ll need documents, money and a clean credit card or two. We either missed his go-to-hell kit at his house, or he’s got a stash somewhere else. A storage locker.”

“How about an APB on his car?”

“He’ll have switched cars by now, and I want to keep the cops at arm’s length. Anyone approaches him is probably going to die.”

“SWAT teams?”

“We need the man alive, Pete. Three nuclear weapons are missing from Quetta, and I think we have to consider the possibility that they’re already here in the country. Only he can tell us where they are and when they’ll be detonated. The man has a timetable, and he’s going to stick with it no matter what.”