The Fourth Horseman (38 page)

“Could be he has a team. Someone local, unless he imported three suicide bombers willing to push a button and sacrifice their lives for Allah. It’s not likely he’d be willing to die himself.”

“Don’t be so sure,” McGarvey said. “He only has a few months to live, so he has nothing to lose.”

“Something else has come up. There’s a federal warrant for your arrest. Came from the White House. The president’s national security adviser.”

“Kalley.”

“That’s right. You’re to be considered armed and dangerous. Which was stupid, actually, because a lot of people in the Bureau and the Secret Service know who you are, and know damned well that you would not open fire on any cop doing their duty.”

Otto broke in, and he sounded excited as he always did when he was on to something.

“Haaris made one call from his cell phone to his house, and pulled up the ADT alarms and monitors. We made sure that the police tapes were gone and no one was watching the place. Soon as he was finished with that call he pulled the SIM card, so I lost him. At least at first.

“I hacked into his house system and went through the recordings from the time he pulled the SIM card until ten minutes ago. But he never showed up. It’s telling me that wherever he’s stashed his walking papers, they’re not there.”

“Why did he go through the bother of doing a surveillance search?” McGarvey asked. “Unless it was to keep you busy.”

“Bingo. But it backfired.”

“Tell me.”

“He had his escape well planned, I’ll have to give him that. I figured that he would need not only papers, but he’d need new wheels. Renting a car somewhere was too obvious, so I started a search within a thirty-mile radius of Campus for self-storage facilities that had units large enough for two cars.”

“Why two?” Pete asked.

“Because he didn’t want to screw around pulling one car out and then parking his Mercedes inside. Might attract too much attention. Just one little detail he figured would help with his margin,” Otto said.

“He would have wanted a place that had no onsite security, other than fences and a surveillance system. Mounted cameras.”

“Right, but he made a mistake. For whatever reason he missed the cameras and at least three people paid for it with their lives.”

“Did someone stumble on to him?” McGarvey asked.

“The manager and two people looking at units. They parked their car up front, and I hacked into the surveillance system and saw it all. He’s driving a five-year-old Toyota Camry, dark blue, with Maryland tags.”

“Where’d he go?”

“We’ll have to put something in the air to find out,” Otto said. “But he lured the three people into the garage, shot them all, then locked up and drove off. Five minutes later it exploded, taking out twenty other units. He either set the explosion, or maybe his aim was lousy and one of them survived and tried to open the door, which was wired.”

“I can retask Flybaby Prime to find him,” Louise said.

The designator actually included a constellation of four Jupiter satellites in moderate Earth orbits, just above the International Space Station, arrayed in such a way that at any given time, twenty-four/seven, one would be above Washington, DC. The program, which had been put in place in the aftermath of 9/11, was classified Top Secret/Flybaby Prime access. It would take practically an act of Congress to retask any one of the birds. But Louise had been one of the designers and first administrators of the system.

“First of all, you can go to jail for the rest of your life, and if Washington is one of Haaris’s targets, you’d be leaving the city unprotected,” Pete said. She was clearly playing devil’s advocate.

“Ten-second snapshots every sixty,” Louise said. “I’ll send the feed to Otto, and he can insert a loop showing just before and just after the ten seconds that the bird would be off task.”

“Make them one second every fifteen, and there’ll be no need for a loop,” Otto said. “I’m working on a recognition program now. My darlings will pick out every dark blue Camry in the bird’s line of sight and read the tag number.”

Louise had already taken her laptop from the kitchen desk, opened it on the counter and turned it on.

“We’ll need to hustle, sweetheart,” Otto said. “We don’t have that wide an angle. If he gets more than a hundred miles out, there’s a good chance we’ll miss him.”

“Don’t wait for me, I’m on it,” Louise said.

Her computer finished booting, and within twenty seconds she had gotten into the NSA’s highest security programs’ mainframe, had entered all the passwords and was in the Flybaby Prime control program.

“Gotcha,” she said. She looked up. “Your call, Kirk. Which way is he heading?”

“Box the compass,” McGarvey said. “North first.”

“Ready, Bear?” Louise asked. Teddy Bear, or usually just Bear, was her pet name for Otto.

“Go,” he said.

Louise expanded the satellite’s view and changed its direction to the north for one second, then brought it back to its original parameters.

“Searching,” Otto said. “You can’t believe the number of dark blue Camrys on the highways. We should send this to Toyota for a commercial.” Two seconds later he was back. “No.”

Louise reprogrammed the satellite to look east, took the one second-snapshot and brought it back.

“Shit,” Otto said.

“What?”

“Dark blue Camry, Maryland tags; it’s our man. He’s heading east on U.S. Fifty just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into Delaware.”

McGarvey had it all at once. “Dover Air Force Base.”

“Yes,” Pete said. “He had to get the weapons out of Pakistan. They were put aboard military transports to Dover.”

“From there at least one made it to Washington,” Otto said. “A second to New York. And the third?”

“I’m going to ask him just that,” McGarvey said. “We still don’t know how he’s going to get them out. I don’t think he’ll simply trigger them in place.”

“We can get a NEST team in the air within fifteen minutes,” Louise said.

“If he finds out he’ll push the button,” McGarvey said. “Keep looking for his cell phone. I’ll need to know the second he replaces the SIM card.”

“I’m coming with you,” Pete said.

“I need you on Campus to back me up in case this thing goes south,” McGarvey said.

“Goddamnit, Kirk.”

“If there’s going to be any future for us, you’ll have to start listening to me. At least every now and then.” He could hear her draw a breath. It was dirty pool, but she hadn’t left him any other choice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

SEVENTY

Haaris parked at the Dover Mall just past lunchtime and walked directly into Macy’s department store. It was a weekday and the place was almost empty. By now if McGarvey had enlisted Rencke’s help, they could know about the incident at the storage center, including the car and its Maryland tags. If Rencke’s wife had also become involved it was possible, though unlikely, in his estimation, that she could have retasked one of the Flybaby satellites to follow him.

But that led to a number of other unlikely, though disturbing, possibilities. They knew that three nuclear warheads were missing from Quetta. And if they had traced him here they might have figured out that the weapons had arrived from Pakistan.

A host of
what if
s.

He had passed the entrance to Dover Air Force Base just off Delaware Route 1 a couple of miles back, but there hadn’t been any unusual activity. No helicopters circling. No police cars or military cops parked alongside the road leading to the main gate.

In any event, if he was cornered with no way out he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the SIM card in his phone and make the call. It would be a waste of five years, but once again people in the U.S., and this time in Great Britain also, would feel the same sense of vulnerability that they’d felt after 9/11. No place would ever seem safe again.

He went to the men’s department, where he bought a light-colored poplin jacket, and in another section a Nike baseball cap.

In a stall in the public restroom at the opposite end of the mall, he removed the tags and put the jacket on, zipping it all the way up.

Stuffing the hat inside the jacket he walked down the broad mall corridor to the Sears store, where he found an old-fashioned pay phone, called the number from memory of the City Cab Company and asked to be picked up outside JCPenney and taken to the Dover Downs Casino.

He walked back through the mall to JCPenney, and when the cab pulled up, he put on the cap and walked outside.

The man who had arrived in the Camry had disappeared, as had the man who’d walked through the mall wearing a jacket but no hat.

*   *   *

At Langley, Pete was with Otto in his suite of offices, when the satellite feed Louise had been sending them suddenly shut down. The phone rang, and it was she.

“The system’s malfunction alarm came up, so I had to pull out,” she said. “Is it Dover?”

“Yes, Mac was right,” Otto said. “He parked in front of Macy’s at a mall a couple of miles north of the base. We were waiting for him to come out.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can use the satellite any time soon. They’ll be revamping the malware system, and until I can get the bypass codes we’re out of luck.”

“Will they trace it back to Louise?” Pete asked.

Otto grinned. “No,” he said, at the same time his wife did.

He picked up the GPS signal from McGarvey’s phone, then called.

“I’m about thirty miles out,” McGarvey said. “Is he in Dover?”

“In the Dover Mall just north of the base. We’re waiting for him to come out.”

“There’s no reason for him to stop at a mall, except to ditch the Camry. He either walked away, or someone picked him up.”

“How about a cab?” Pete asked.

“That’s possible. It means he knows or suspects that we’re watching him, and he considered the likelihood probably from the beginning. He’s on his way now to pick up another car.”

“You think he’ll try to get on the base?” Pete asked.

“Guaranteed,” McGarvey said. “Call the commander and get me a pass.”

“We still have time to get a NEST team up there,” Otto said. “It’s worth a try.”

“If he so much as gets a hint that those people have shown up he’ll pull the trigger.”

“Maybe he will anyway,” Pete said.

“He’s got bigger targets in mind. Somehow he managed to get the three weapons shipped over, and they’re sitting in a warehouse or empty hangar somewhere on base waiting for him to pick them up. And from there he’ll take them probably to Washington and New York.”

“They’re sending back lots of military equipment out of Lahore now that most of the operations in Afghanistan have been shut down,” Pete said. “Rajput was helping him so it would have been fairly simple to slip three packages through. Shielded crates, maybe, even hidden in boxes of aircraft parts. Anything.”

“Medical waste,” Otto suggested. “Could be marked
biohazard.
I have a feeling that Dover doesn’t have the facilities to dispose of something like that, so it’d have to be shipped to a safe site somewhere.”

“Find out as much as you can,” McGarvey said. “It’s a good bet he’s going to get on base with the proper credentials and paperwork to pick up whatever they’re packaged in. And at this point I’d guess biohazardous material would be the most likely. The packages would be sealed, and no one would be tempted to open them.”

“We’re on it,” Otto said.

“I’ll be at the main gate in less than thirty minutes.”

*   *   *

Haaris paid off the cabby and went inside the casino, where he ditched the hat in a trash can. He had a cup of coffee in one of the snack bars, then bought an oversized dark blue sweatshirt printed with a pair of dice with a five and two showing, the casino’s name below them.

He left the jacket in the men’s room, pulled on the sweatshirt and went back outside, where he caught another cab, giving the driver a residential address on the west side of town just off Forrest Avenue.

Just before he got in the backseat, he looked to the southeast toward the base as a C-5M Super Galaxy troop transport made its approach into the pattern. NEST teams did not ride around in aircraft like that, but he was still worried that something was coming up on his six. McGarvey.

Ten minutes later the cabby pulled up in front of a ranch-style house with a two-car garage in a quiet middle-class neighborhood. It was a weekday, so husbands were at work and wives were either home doing housework or off shopping with friends, whatever housewives did during the week. He’d never wondered about Deborah’s schedule while he was away. But then, he’d never really given a damn about her.

The last time he’d been up here for a long weekend he’d taken the ten-year-old Chevy Tahoe out of the garage and washed it in the driveway. One of the neighbors came over to say hi, and they’d chatted about absolutely nothing for ten minutes until the poor bastard had wandered off.

Haaris came across as an okay neighbor who kept his place neat but was standoffish and hardly ever home. No wife, no kids or pets, probably a salesman on the road most of the time. He’d owned the house for three years and most of the time he arrived by cab, just like today. Nothing unusual.
Ted Johnson is home again. Blend with the woodwork. Show them what they want to see.
Just like the Messiah had.

Inside he made a quick inspection of every room, all the doors and windows, to make sure no one had been inside or had tried to get in since the last time he was here. There was dust on everything; no one had been here.

He changed into a long-sleeved white shirt and opened the garage door. The Tahoe started with no trouble, and he pulled out, closed the garage door for the last time and drove directly back to Forrest Avenue, traffic almost nonexistent compared to that in DC. Past the AAA offices, Forrest turned into State Road 8, and six miles out of town he came to what had once been a metal fabrication company behind a tall wire-mesh fence, but was now long since deserted.

He’d bought it through a shell company two years ago and had come out only once in person, at night. The one-story office building was set just off the road, behind it two fabrication buildings and a warehouse and parts inventory facility. The driveways were cracked, weeds growing everywhere.