McGarvey’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband Todd had already arrived and were in the kitchen when he came down from his shower. He could hear them talking with Katy. He stopped just around the corner from the kitchen door to gird himself for the inevitable spate of questions about Alaska and about bin Laden’s latest threat.
In his mind the time for talk was done. If they could prove that Khalil and prince Salman were one and the same man, McGarvey would find him and kill him. It was all that mattered at this moment. It was all he was focused on.
The president’s Rose Garden photo op that afternoon and all the media requests for interviews with America’s latest hero could do nothing but slow him down. And even now he was reverting to an old mindset in which his family would hinder him too.
Excess baggage was the bane of the special operator, and most especially of the assassin.
That was a role he had played for almost all of his life in the service, a role he had tried without luck to quit over and over again. Since the Soviet Union had disintegrated, threats to Americans had popped up all over a world that had once been held in a delicate balance between the two superpowers, but was now fractured into hundreds if not thousands of factions all with one common enemy: the United States.
Neither the war in Afghanistan nor the war in Iraq put a stop to bin Laden’s al-Quaida. And until this moment the administration had only paid lip service to the goal of finding and killing the man. Now the country was on the verge of paying again for that lack of resolve.
And it was just as much the CIA’s and McGarvey’s fault that the U.S. hadn’t run the man to ground.
That was going to change. Once again he was going to pick up his gun and go hunting, no matter what the cost.
He put all that at the back of his mind, smiled, and went into the kitchen. Katy was putting a basket of cut potatoes into the deep fryer, Todd was grinding pepper onto a platter of thick steaks, and Liz was tearing lettuce into a large wooden salad bowl.
For just a moment they didn’t notice him standing in the doorway. They seemed happy to be here together, despite what had happened in the past couple of days and the new bin Laden threat. At twenty-four, Liz was the spitting image of her mother at that age: long graceful body, tiny oval face, wide, beautiful green eyes, and a frank, direct manner that had been only slightly clouded by the fact she could never carry a child. The same sadness rode on Todd’s sturdy shoulders like the world on Hercules’, but it was something he never talked about with anyone. He simply went about his job with his usual steady-handed competence, but minus some small
little spark that in the old days had showed up in his eyes or at the corners of his mouth when he thought something was funny. A little bit of his lightness had gone out.
Liz looked up first. Her face lit up. “Daddy,” she said, and she came around the counter into his arms, holding him tightly and burrowing her face into his neck like she’d done ever since she was a child.
McGarvey patted her back, and when she looked up he kissed her forehead. “How’re you doing, sweetheart?”
“Fine.” She studied his eyes. “Was it bad up there?”
McGarvey nodded. “A lot of good people lost their lives.”
“There would have been more if it hadn’t been for you,” Liz said.
“Mother told us all about it.” She shook her head, a look of adoration mixed with amazement on her face. In her eyes her father could never do wrong. He was the most important man in her life, which was another of the unspoken issues between her and her husband. “But you had such a terrible scowl on your face when the president was thanking you in the Rose Garden.”
“Makes me glad I never ran for office,” McGarvey said.
Katy was grinning, like she did lately whenever she and Liz had one of their mother-daughter talks. “It would have made for some interesting campaigns, especially when you started shooting at your opponents.”
Todd chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “Good work up there, Mac. Was it Khalil? Are we sure this time?”
“Ninety-nine percent.”
Todd nodded, and glanced at Liz and her mother. “Someone will have to go after him.”
All the joy left the room, even though all of them knew what was coming, as surely as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. It’s what McGarvey did. It was, or had been, his job. And at the moment there was no one in the Company better qualified to go after the terrorist.
“Maybe not,” Liz said, and she looked away almost as if she were ashamed of suggesting that her father not go back into the field. “It’s getting weird out there. Driving over, there was almost no one else on the roads. Even the radio shock jocks are being nice. Howard Stern was talking about Pearl Harbor and 9/11, wondering how the people who died
would have turned out. Maybe there were some artists, or scientists, or poets.”
“I’m pretty sure that the Shaw thing was just supposed to be a diversion for the main act,” McGarvey said. “If they had pulled it off, we would have had our hands full trying to rescue him. And then right in the middle of that op, they would have hit us with this warning. It would have been worse than it is right now.”
“So why did bin Laden release the tape?” Todd asked.
McGarvey figured there were two reasons. The first was to keep us off-balance, to prove to the world that no matter what happened in Alaska, al-Quaida was still a power to be reckoned with. That the
jihad
against America was still in full swing. But the second, more subtle, reason was that there might be a power struggle going on between bin Laden and Khalil. Bin Laden went public with his threat because he hoped it would force McGarvey into leaving Langley to personally hunt for Khalil. Alaska was an embarrassment, and McGarvey had been a thorn in bin Laden’s side since before 9/11. No matter the outcome of a confrontation between McGarvey and Khalil, bin Laden would come out the winner.
In the meantime, the new threat, even if it was never carried out, was already having the desired effect. America was in a collective terror. “Could be he’s just taunting us.”
“But you don’t believe that, do you, Mac?” Todd asked.
McGarvey shook his head.
“You came head-to-head with Khalil, and now they’re daring you to come out and face him again.”
“That’s a possibility.” McGarvey went to the counter and got his drink from Katy. They looked at each other for just an instant, and he could see that she understood completely what he was setting himself to do. And she was okay with it finally, because of Alaska and more importantly because of the continuing aftermath of 9/11. To have it happen all over again would be a horror beyond imagining.
“It would take you away from Langley just when you’re needed the most,” Todd said. But he was just playing devil’s advocate. “Maybe you need to send somebody else.”
The problem with being a spy, especially a spymaster, was that the job
came with its own set of vulnerabilities. Give a spy a good puzzle, and he would be compelled to chase after it like a mouse after cheese in a trap. This time the spymaster was none other than the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and the bait was Khalil, the number two terrormaster behind Osama bin Laden himself. At risk were the lives of innocent American men, women, and this time, children.
“I might have a personal stake in this,” McGarvey said. He took a drink, then held the cool glass against his forehead. It had been a very long day, and it wasn’t over yet. “There’s a possibility that Khalil might be a Saudi prince who I had a brief contact with during an op about eight or ten years ago.”
“Who is it?” Liz asked.
“His name is Salman. He’s rich, well connected; in fact, he’s stayed at the White House. He’s one of the Saudis we rely on to broker some pretty big deals, holding OPEC in line, keeping an open channel with Tehran, shipping us extra oil when we’re faced with a crunch. He was one of the people behind convincing Riyadh to allow us basing privileges during the first GulfWar.”
“Doesn’t sound like a terrorist,” Todd said.
“No, he doesn’t,” McGarvey said, but then neither had Carlos in the seventies and eighties. He too had been a rich international playboy. His flamboyant life out in the open had provided him with the perfect cover.
“Can we prove it?” Todd asked.
“Otto’s working on it, and the Swiss government is investigating him. He’s got some banking interests there, and his wife and children live in Lucerne. Someone over there is trying to make the connection between him and Khalil.”
Katy winced, but no one except Mac noticed. There was nothing he could do to help ease her painful memories, except be here for her.
Todd was having trouble accepting the possibility. “I hate to say this, Mac, but are we talking wishful thinking?” He looked to his wife for support, but she shrugged. She had no idea where he was going. “It’s counterintuitive to think that a Saudi prince would be working against his own government. Bin Laden’s been after the royals since right after Afghanistan. And there’s just too much money at stake for a man like Salman to risk it all. For what?”
If Otto could nail the connection, it was one of the questions McGarvey wanted to ask the prince in person.
“Ego,” Katy said, quietly.
“That was Khalil, in Alaska,” Todd said. “I still don’t see a guy like Salman risking his life working as a terrorist.”
“I’m talking about Abdul Salman,” Katy said. “I knew him.”
Liz was bewildered. “When? From where?”
McGarvey shook his head, but Katy gave him her “It’s okay” look.
“It was a few years ago, when your father and I were still divorced. The prince was doing something big here in Washington for his government, although none of us knew exactly what it was, but he was suddenly on everybody’s A-list. He was popping up all over the place, especially the embassy parties. His English was perfect, his manners and dress were impeccable, and he knew his way around a wine list every bit as well as Darby did.”
“Still sounds like a playboy and not a terrorist,” Todd said. If he or Liz caught the significance of the name Darby or the fact that Katy did not elaborate, they gave no sign of it. “I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble buying the likelihood that Salman and Khalil are the same man.”
“It sounds absurd, I know.” Katy hesitated for a moment. She gave Mac a little shrug. “But trust me, Todd, I got to know the prince well enough to know for certain that there were very few men that he could work for. At the time it was a Russian KGB general, and now it’s bin Laden.”
Now Liz and Todd were on the same page. They knew about Baranov and Darby Yarnell and the operation that had ended with the deaths of Yarnell and Donald Powers, the director of the CIA at the time. They also understood how incredibly difficult it was for Katy to speak up.
Katy looked as if she wanted to crawl into a hole and bury herself. But she squared her shoulders. “There was something about Khalil aboard the ship that bothered me. But it hasn’t struck me until now. He and the prince are the same man, and I know it for a fact.”
“But how, Mother?” Liz blurted.
Katy did not lower her eyes. “Because I had an affair with him.”
Liz’s mouth dropped open. She looked at her father, trying to gauge his reaction, then turned back to her mother. It was obvious that she wanted to be angry, but she was too stunned. “Mother?”
Katy lowered her eyes. “Sorry, but none of us is ever as perfect as you think.”
McGarvey nodded. “We were divorced, and I was living with a woman in Lucerne.”
He gave his wife a reassuring look. “We knew about each other’s lives, and it made our own that much tougher because we still loved each other.”
“Do the Swiss know about this?” Todd asked.
“Probably. Otto took a call from one of the federal cops who watched after me when I lived over there. They wanted to know if there was still a connection between Salman and me.”
“What’d you tell them, Daddy?” Liz asked.
McGarvey wanted to help his daughter understand. But there were some things that were better left unexplained. “Nothing yet, but the Swiss might be sitting on something that we need. I’ll call in the morning.”
One of the security people appeared at the kitchen door. “Mr. Rencke is here, Mr. Director,” he said. He was listening to something in his earpiece. “Copy,” he said softly. “He’s alone, sir.”
“We’re expecting him for dinner,” Katy said.
McGarvey nodded, and the agent turned and disappeared down the hall. He glanced at the clock in the microwave. It was nearly 7:30 P.M. “Put the steaks on, Todd. We have a half hour before the president comes on. I’ll be just a minute.” He put his drink down and went out to the front stair hall just as Otto was coming in.
His special projects director pulled up short; his eyes were wide, his frizzy long red hair in even more disarray than usual, and his sweatshirt with the KGB sword and shield emblem filthy dirty. He’d brought a laptop
with him. “Oh boy, Mac, this is the big enchilada this time,” he gushed. He hopped from one foot to the other, something he did only when he was excited. “We can get the bastard.”
“When have you been home last?”
Rencke stopped all of a sudden, the idiot look leaving his face. “Mrs. M. will make me clean up before supper, but right now you gotta look at something.”
They went into the study and closed the door. The room was electronically swept every twelve hours, so it was reasonably secure. Otto put the laptop on the desk and booted it up. Two columns of dates and places appeared on the screen. One was headed
Khalil
, the other
Salman.
They were nearly a perfect match, date for date, place for place.
“These go back eight and a half years,” Otto said. “Now even you’ve gotta admit that this shit goes way beyond coincidence.”
McGarvey had already seen some of this, and he had to agree with Rencke. “Are there any mismatches? Any times when Khalil and Salman weren’t at the same place and time?”
Rencke thought about the question for a split second. “No way of telling for sure, ’cause most of the Khalil sightings are inferences. He’s only been nailed solid four times, including your encounter three days ago.”
“Where was Salman this last time?”
An evil grin spread across Rencke’s face. “Victoria, BC, in a private meeting with Thomas Malcovich, the Canadian oil minister. After which he picked up a leased Gulfstream in Vancouver under the name Thomas Powers, which took him to London, where he promptly disappeared for twenty-four hours. He just showed up in Switzerland a couple hours ago.”
“Why the cover name?”
“Salman has used it at least twice before when he brokered deals in secret. Once in 1997 between Moscow and Tehran over maintenance contracts for their Kilo subs, and again in June 2000 between Pyongyang and Beijing over high-pressure pumps, presumably for their nuclear program.”
McGarvey wanted as solid a case as possible before he went into the field. “Okay, so we’ve got Salman and Khalil in the same part of the world
on the same days. Not proof enough. Not even with all the other coincidences. What else?”
“I worked out their most logical escape route,” Otto said. He pulled up a map of coastal Alaska and Canada from Juneau to Vancouver on the laptop’s screen. Overlaid were several red lines. “You said that Khalil left with somewhere between five and ten of his operators aboard a small sportfisherman. Canadian Coast Guard found the boat abandoned on Kupreanof Island a half mile from the airport at the town of Kake. That’s less than thirty miles from where the
Spirit
went down. The boat belonged to a family who ran a fishing resort a few miles farther south. Their bodies were found this morning. And there was evidence that a dozen or more people had been at the resort for as long as five days. They even did target practice.” Rencke looked up, his eyes owlish. “Nine-millimeter rounds, according to the Canadians. Fits with what weapons you say they carried.”
“Polish-made RAKs and Steyr GBs,” McGarvey said. “Old-fashioned but effective.”
“They had some of their people on the cruise ship, probably as early as Seattle, and the rest of them took over the fishing resort a few days ahead of time. They used one of the boats from the resort to rendezvous with the
Spirit
, and when you screwed up their plans they went to the airport at Kake, where they left aboard a twin Otto floatplane.” Rencke highlighted one of the red lines that reached out into the Pacific from Kake. “If they had snatched Shaw, they were going to ditch the Otter at sea and a cargo ship was going to pick them up. There are three possibilities, all of them Liberian registry. Our Coast Guard is heading out to them right now.”
“Okay.”
Rencke highlighted a spot four hundred miles south of Kake on the northeast coast of Graham Island just across Hecate Strait from the town of Prince Rupert on the mainland. “A fishing crew spotted what they thought was a small explosion in midair about the time the Coast Guard was rescuing you and the survivors. A Canadian search-and-rescue team finally found the wreckage of the Otter three hours ago. At least six bodies, possibly one or two more. One of them has already been identified as Rupert Thompson, a contract pilot working for Airways North. All of the
others were male, and none of them carried any identification, though at least two of them were armed with Steyr pistols.”
“What were they doing so far south?” McGarvey asked.
“The same question I asked myself,” Rencke said. “The times of Salman’s meetings with the Canadian oil minister are all before the hijacking. Several days before. After which Powers disappeared, as if he flew back to Switzerland. But of course he didn’t show up anywhere outside of Canada until
after
the hijacking.”
“There weren’t supposed to be any survivors from the Spirit,” McGarvey said.
“That’s right,” Rencke said. “But with you in the picture Khalil had to figure that someone would have made it off the ship before it went down, and then it’d be just a matter of time before we put it together and boarded every cargo ship in the vicinity. So he had the pilot take him down to Vancouver or some out-of-the-way spot nearby, and he sent his people back. But he somehow sabotaged the plane to blow up hopefully over the open water, and voilà, he disappeared back into the limelight as Prince Salman, and all the evidence aboard the Otter was supposed to disappear into the sea.”
McGarvey wanted to believe it, because if Salman and Khalil were the same man, it would unravel a ten-year-old mystery of how the international terrorist had been able to move around under the noses of every law enforcement and intelligence agency in the world and never be caught. The world was focused on Prince Salman and never saw Khalil.
But it was too easy. The answers were too pat.
“Did you know that the Bureau investigated Salman after 9/11?” Rencke said. “He was one of the Saudis who took flight training in Florida the year before, and then in June he went up to Minneapolis where he did flight simulator time on the 747.”
McGarvey smiled grimly. “Let me guess. The investigation was dropped because Salman was a friend of the White House.”
Rencke clapped his hands together in glee. “Give that man the Kewpie doll. But it’s not just the White House and not just this administration, Mac; it’s everybody who’s anybody inside the Beltway. Salman is a Saudi, the Saudis give us oil, and the prince is the chief broker of some of the most important deals around. He’s a holy cow.”
“Maybe he’s just that,” McGarvey said, softly. “A holy cow. A megarich prima donna who’s innocent of everything except being a wheeler-dealer.”
Rencke was suddenly subdued. He averted his eyes. “What about Mrs. M?” he asked, hesitantly. “She knows.”
They’d been through so much. So many heartaches. So many troubles. They didn’t need this.
“Maybe she’s mistaken.”
Rencke looked at him, his long face sad. He shook his head. “She’s not.”
Down in Washington the president of the United States was going over the finishing touches of the speech he would give to the nation in a few minutes. He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure what he was going to propose. But he could think of no other course of action that made any sense. Nor had his advisers been much help.
God help us all,
he thought.
And God help the Republic.