Soldier of God (19 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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“Just fine; thanks for asking,” McGarvey said, giving her a reassuring smile. “We got lucky this time.” He walked through to his office, Ms. Swanson right behind him.
She shook her head emphatically.“Oh no, sir, luck had nothing to do with it. Your presence did.”
“I’ll start getting the staff together,” Adkins said, heading for his own office.
“Ten-thirty, sharp,” McGarvey called after him.
Ms. Swanson got McGarvey a cup of coffee. “I worked up a tentative
agenda for you, not knowing until yesterday when you would be back, and of course not knowing about the bin Laden tape until early this morning. I’ve weeded out most of the mail, and rescheduled most of your routine appointments and telephone calls. The president would like to speak with you as soon as possible this morning, and Senators Harms, Bingham, Wilson, Daggert, and Stowe want to talk to you, as do all the usual media.” She looked up from her notes, a pinched look of disapproval on her narrow face. She was protective of her DCI.
“Liz and Todd?”
“They’ll finish up at the Farm this afternoon and be at the house by eight.”
For just a moment McGarvey was back in the water, swimming in the brutally cold Sound toward the woman and her child, knowing that he could not save them, and yet having to try. In his mind’s eye it was Elizabeth out there crying for help, and the baby was his grandchild.
“We’ll do the letters and calls this afternoon. The congressmen will have to wait. I’ll leave it up to Herb to set up a news conference, but I want it coordinated with Carleton’s office. We’re going to conduct this operation by the numbers.” Carleton Patterson was the CIA’s general counsel. Since the war in Iraq, anyone who had access to the media had questioned the legality of both the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction and the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Word had come directly from the White House that every move the CIA made would have to have a solid legal basis.
Or at least appear to, because it’s not possible to fight terrorists on any terms except theirs. Sometimes some laws would have to be bent. That’s just the way it is in the real world.
“Shall I call the president for you?”
“Yes,” McGarvey said, already up to speed. “Then have Otto come up. I’d like to talk to him before the staff meeting. And ask Dick to bring over the draft NIE and Watch Report. I want to see those before the meeting.”
Ms. Swanson’s eyes softened. “All those people … ,” she said. She focused. “It’s not just religion, is it?”
Like everyone else in the nation, she had been trying to get a handle on the issue ever since 9/11. The Osama bin Ladens of the world, and their organizations—al—Quaida, al-Nida, Hamas, hundreds of others—
were incomprehensible to the average American, who simply could not grasp the terrorist’s concept that
no one was an innocent.
“It’s never had anything to do with religion,” McGarvey said. “It’s always been about money.”
McGarvey wasn’t the least surprised that President Haynes was brusque on the telephone. Word had already leaked about the bin Laden tape and the latest threat to the U.S. and at least one network was attributing the leak to a
senior employee within the administration.
Haynes had gone through his share of major crises during his administration, and he was a president who was very dangerous to cross. He had a long memory and an even longer reach.
“I’m glad you’re back in one piece. You did a damned fine job up there. In the meantime, I assume that you’ve seen the tape. What do you think?’
“It’s authentic, if that’s what you mean, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. “But beyond that I don’t know.”
“What are you talking about?” Haynes demanded. Right now he didn’t want ambiguities, especially not from his intelligence chief.
“He’s been coming across like he’s a sick man. Like he’s dying. But I’m beginning to think that it’s been a ruse to throw us off.”
“Does the CIA have any direct evidence of that?”
“No,” McGarvey had to admit. “It’s just a gut feeling I got from watching the tape.” It wasn’t until the third time through that he had begun to notice the little signs: the forced slump of the shoulders, the moves too slow, too studied, as if the man were an amateur actor playing a difficult role. Bin Laden was no longer convincing.
President Haynes wasn’t deterred. “Unless you think his faking it affects
the current situation, we’ll put it on a back burner for now. We have to deal with the bastard’s warning. Is it real or is he merely trying to shake us up? And we have to deal with the leak. I’m going to personally cut them off at the knees when I find out who did this to us. We’re already getting more than one thousand calls every hour. By this afternoon, I’m told, that number will rise one hundredfold, and I have none of the answers, because all I’ve seen is the tape. No analysis. No facts. No details.”
Sitting at his desk, looking out the window over the pleasant early fall morning toward the Potomac, McGarvey felt unsettled to hear a president of the United States speak with fear in his voice, even though he had cause to be afraid.
If bin Laden had issued a warning before 9/11 that suicide squads were going to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, nothing could have been done in the short run. Air traffic could not have been grounded, every tall building could not have been closed, and even with armed air marshals aboard at the last minute, the attacks probably couldn’t have been prevented.
There wouldn’t have been enough time.
Nor was there enough time now. The task of guarding every single home in the nation was impossible, if those were the targets that bin Laden warned al-Quaida was going to hit. Parents could not keep their children safe, so they were turning to their government to do what it had not been able to do in September 2001 , and what it probably could not do now.
In a free society with relatively open borders, no thought police, no unreasonable searches and seizures, no real way of listening in on every single telephone conversation, bad things could and would happen to good people.
Until the bad guys were hunted down and shot to death like rabid animals.
McGarvey could do nothing more than his job, and that was to give his support to the president. It was all that the job of DCI had ever been. “I’ll have the NIE and Watch Report for the NSC at noon. My people are still working on the problem. But I will have some ideas and some options for you to consider.”
“I should hope so,” Haynes said. “Now what about the leak? Could somebody over there have talked to Jennings?”
The first McGarvey had heard of it was just minutes ago from the president. “It’s possible.”
“I want a full investigation immediately—”
McGarvey interrupted. “No, sir.”
Haynes was never one to bluster. When he got angry, his voice lowered in pitch and volume. He practically whispered now. “What was it you said, Mac?”
“I’m not going to hamstring my people by chasing after someone who might have shot off his mouth,” McGarvey said. “A least not right now. I don’t give a damn who leaked the warning; it was going to come out this evening in any event. My only concern is finding out when and where the attacks are going to take place—which I think is a long shot—and finding out who’s directing the show, and then getting to them.”
“Do you mean to say the CIA believes they cannot be stopped?”
“The Israelis have much tighter security than we do, and they can’t prevent terrorist attacks.”
These were things that the president did not want to hear. “This country cannot stand another 9/11,” he said coldly. “Maybe it’s time to broaden the emergency powers provisions of the Patriot Act.”
It was a chilling idea, but McGarvey thought there was a better than even chance that Haynes would get away with it. Parents wanted to make sure their children were safe. After events like the Murrah Federal Building, Columbine, and 9/11. the nation was traumatized. This latest warning from bin Laden could very well be the last bit to tip the balance even further toward a police state.
There was little or no street crime in Nazi Germany that wasn’t committed by the Brown Shirts.
“I’ll provide you with your options as the CIA sees them,” McGarvey said. “After that it’ll be up to you how we should proceed. But I am with you, Mr. President. One hundred percent. We will stop these bastards once and for all this time. You can count on it.”
The president was only slightly mollified. “I’ll hold you to that promise, Mac. We’re going all the way. There’ll be no holding back. I don’t care what Congress or the media have to say, we’re past that. When we make our attack, collateral damage will
not
be a consideration. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly clear, Mr. President,” McGarvey said.
Dick Adkins came over with a dark blue leatherette folder. He handed it to McGarvey with a rueful look. “The NIE and Watch Report. You’re not going to like them.”
“What’s the upshot?” McGarvey hadn’t expected that he would.
Adkins shrugged like a teacher who had been asked to explain the obvious. “Assuming bin Laden’s people are already in place, and that the attacks could come from any direction at any time, our only options are to mobilize every cop and National Guardsman in the country to take criminal-suspect profiling to new heights, and to station air marshals aboard every commercial aircraft and at every airfield private or public, at every bus station and train depot, outside every mosque, and any other place you might expect to find young Arab males.”
It was something the president would understand perfectly.
“All that’s on the FBI’s turf,” McGarvey said. “What’s our role?”
Adkins pursed his lips. “Well, if we found bin Laden and brought him to trial, the attacks would probably escalate. If we found him and put a bullet in his head, there’s no predicting what the immediate reaction would be. But it’s my guess that a significant portion of the Muslims on the planet would take up arms against us.”
Something else was on Adkins’s mind. McGarvey had worked with the man long enough to know when something was bothering him. Most of the time the DDCI was a monotone presence in his office next door. That wasn’t a negative attribute; it was just Adkins’s way of dealing with the incredibly complex real-world problems that the CIA was supposed to unravel every day. Right now though, he seemed to be preoccupied and a little agitated, as if he had jumped into a situation that was over his head. “What else have we come up with?” McGarvey asked.
“It’s not in the Watch Report,” Adkins said reluctantly. “It’s too farfetched. But one of our photo interpreters downstairs in Imagery Analysis thinks that bin Laden might be playing games with us.”
“What are you talking about? Isn’t the tape authentic?”
Adkins shook his head. “It’s real all right. Or at least we think it is. But the analyst has convinced herself that there’s something fishy about bin Laden’s appearance.”
There it was. A little chill raised the hairs at the nape of McGarvey’s neck. He’d come to the same conclusion after watching the tape, but he had not been able to put his finger on exactly what bothered him. A photo analyst had apparently seen something too.
“She thinks bin Laden is wearing makeup,” Adkins said, almost sorry he had brought it up. “It’s something we’ve not seen before. But she spotted something funny, and pulled up several of the other recent tapes he made for comparison.”
“He’s gotten vain in his old age.”
Adkins shook his head. “The makeup made him look sick. And she thinks that he’s wearing a hairpiece.”
“There were rumors that he had kidney problems. Maybe he’s developed cancer. Could be that he’s on chemotherapy and lost his hair.”
“His beard’s a fake too,” Adkins said. “Now if our analyst is right, why do you suppose that bin Laden has to dress up in stage makeup and a costume to send us a message? What’s he playing at this time?”
Adkins had just walked back into his office, leaving McGarvey to wonder exactly what it was that bin Laden was playing at, when Ms. Swanson buzzed to say that Rencke was on his way. Before McGarvey could hang up, Otto Rencke, all out of breath, his face flushed, burst into the office.
“Oh, wow, Mac, am I ever glad to see you.”
McGarvey looked up as his director of special projects bounded across the room. Rencke was all arms and legs attached to a gaunt frame. His head seemed to be too large for his body, in part because of his wide green eyes and long, out-of-control, frizzy red hair, and in part because of his long, broad forehead. He was dressed in dirty sneakers, faded jeans, and a Moscow State University sweatshirt. He was in his early forties, a Jesuit-trained mathematician, and yet he looked and acted like a college kid or, McGarvey sometimes thought, like an overwrought, exuberant puppy.
But it was obvious even to someone meeting Rencke for the first time that he was either an idiot savant or a genius. He knew more about computers, computer systems, and information gathering, collation, and analysis than did any man alive.
Adkins once said that there were only two possible places on the planet where Rencke should be: either working for the CIA, where he could be watched very closely, or buried deep underground in a cell with absolutely no access to the outside world. There was little doubt that no computer on the planet was safe from his hacking.
The saving grace was that except for his genius, Rencke was just a baby boy who wanted someone to love him. All his life he’d only ever wanted one thing: to be part of a family. And he had found one with McGarvey, Kathleen, and Liz, and with his wife, Louise Horn, who was chief of a technical means section of the National Security Agency.
Rencke had discovered his niche and he was a truly happy man, except when his people were in harm’s way and then he became a mother grizzly defending her cubs.
McGarvey had to grin when Rencke came around the desk and grabbed him in a bear hug. “Oh, wow, you’re back, and you did it again, and you saved a whole bunch of folks who would have gone down with the ship.” When he was excited, he said everything in a rush. “Kinda hard to hide a hero.”
McGarvey patted him on the back, and it brought back a poignant memory of talking with Katy a few months before their separation and divorce about having a second child, perhaps a boy.
“Glug, glug,” Rencke said straightening up. “Ya gotta take a swim if you want to find the clues, ya know. But that takes time and concentration.”
“Do you think that the hijacking was a diversion—”
“Yeah, but not the way everybody thinks.” Rencke looked off into space for a few seconds, the animation leaving his face. When he came back, he frowned. “It’s going reddish, did you know that?” He hopped up and down, one foot to the other, as he talked. “Lots of things to consider now, ya know. But they all point toward desperation with a capital D. Lastditch stand. The
Titanic
is going down, and the captain himself is grabbing for a life jacket.”
Years ago Rencke had figured out a way to teach a friend of his, who had been blind from birth, about color. Rencke wanted his friend to actually see the spectrum, the reds and blues and greens and yellows. He was able to do it with a series of complicated tensor calculus equations—the same mathematics that Einstein used in his theories of relativity.
And it worked because Rencke’s friend was a gifted mathematician. But the same mathematical approach could also be used to reduce concepts, so complicated they were invisible, into colors. The pastels, in Rencke’s analytical models, were akin to mild problems brewing in some distant future. The deeper colors meant trouble was just around the corner. And as Rencke would say, the
baddest
of all colors was red, which meant that something awful was on the verge of happening.
“Okay, tell me what you’re seeing,” McGarvey said. When Rencke got this way, he was never wrong.
“I don’t know yet, Mac. Honest Injun. Snatching Shaw was only supposed to be the opening salvo. But you put the kibosh on that plan—” He gave McGarvey an odd look, almost as if he were a drowning man desperately gazing up from the bottom of the pool toward his rescuer, and wondering what was taking so long. “Last night you said something about Khalil that got to me. And Mrs. M. said the same thing. He was in a hurry. Right?”

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