Authors: David Hagberg

Allah's Scorpion (27 page)

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion

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CASEY KEY, FLORIDA

McGarvey, dressed only in swimming trunks, a towel around his neck, slowed to a walk, and looked out across the Gulf of Mexico as a V formation of brown pelicans skimmed just above the water, seemingly without effort. His left shoulder, where he’d taken a bullet two weeks ago, was still sore and stiff, but each day of strenuous exercise was bringing him back to the peak of physical fitness.

He’d only spent the one night at the hospital in Bethesda, before he checked himself out and Liz had driven him and Kathleen to their new house on one of the barrier islands just south of Sarasota. The day after they’d arrived, he’d started his exercise regime, pushing his body to its limits. He was now swimming in the Gulf for a solid hour every morning at dawn, and then running five miles barefoot on the beach.

Last week he’d started shooting again at an indoor pistol range off University Parkway up in Sarasota. One of the instructors had tried to convince him to take shooting lessons and to retire the Walther in favor of something with greater stopping power, but after watching McGarvey empty one clip at rapid fire, all the shots hitting within a one-inch circle, he’d walked away, shaking his head.

His physical wounds were healing, but to this point he’d been unable to get the vision of Toni Talarico’s face out of his head, when she and her children came face-to-face with the terrorist McGarvey had pulled out of the van.

He had regained consciousness and was sitting in the backseat of a police cruiser, his hands cuffed behind him.

McGarvey was being given first aid by an EMT ten feet away, when Toni and the kids had been escorted up the hill by Adkins. She’d broken away and walked over to the police cruiser to get a closer look at the man. The expression on her tiny face was of pure hatred: raw, intense, and very personal. There was no doubt in McGarvey’s mind that if someone had
handed her a gun at that moment she would have emptied it into the man’s head.

Her children were watching her, and when she turned back to them, they both stepped away and burst into tears. They’d been frightened not by the terrorist, but by the look in their mother’s eyes.

The island was very narrow here, the single road less than one hundred feet from the beach. Across the road, houses were nestled in lush tropical growth: palms, bougainvillea, sea grapes, and dozens of different flowering trees and bushes. The McGarveys’ was a two-story Florida-style, with tall ceilings, large overhangs, and a veranda that wrapped completely around the second floor. When the weather was right the house could be completely opened to catch the slightest breeze off the gulf or off the Intracoastal Waterway.

Kathleen loved the place, and that was enough for him, though they had paid what he considered an obscene price.

Reaching the path up to the road, McGarvey headed to his house, his thoughts still on the attack at Arlington. There was no doubt that he had been the target, but the only reason he could come up with was that bin Laden was afraid that McGarvey might interfere with the submarine mission.

Six of the terrorists had managed to escape clean; the one driving the van McGarvey had attacked, two in the second van, and apparently the drivers of three cars they’d managed to use as escape vehicles out the south gate. The FBI forensics people had come up with plenty of physical evidence from the abandoned vans, as well as from the bodies of the seven dead terrorists and the only survivor.

So far they’d identified nine of the attackers, all of whom were on Homeland Security watch lists. No one had any idea how they’d gotten into the United States, but according to the media, which had given the attack a lot of play, the lapse was just another example of how poor a job Washington was doing to protect the country.

McGarvey had taken only one call from Adkins last week with that information, but he had stayed out of it, for Kathleen’s sake, certain that if and when something important came up, Otto would let him know.

The house was set twenty yards from the entrance, and in the back, a lawn sloped gently down to a boat dock and screened gazebo that
overlooked the waterway. In the evenings they sometimes sat in the gazebo, listening to the quiet.

Inside, McGarvey passed through the large, airy entrance hall and went directly back to the huge open kitchen that looked directly out on the swimming pool and beyond to the Intracoastal Waterway.

Kathleen, barefoot in a colorful sarong and white bikini top, was at the counter slicing fruit for their breakfast. She looked up, a radiant smile on her face. “How’d it go this morning?”

“Every day it’s better,” he said, flexing his shoulder. He came over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “What’s on the schedule for today?”

“How would you feel about driving up to Largo this morning?” Katy asked, pouring him a cup of coffee.

The business wasn’t over with, not until they found Graham and the submarine, and until bin Laden was dead. But for now there was nothing for him to do. For now it was in Otto’s hands. “Sure. What’ve you got in mind?”

“The Island Packet boatyard is up there. I was thinking we might buy a sailboat. Or at least talk to somebody about it.”

McGarvey had to smile. “You’ve got our retirement all planned, have you?”

Kathleen shrugged. “This fall you’re going back to teaching, and probably working on your Voltaire book, and I’ve been talking to some of the charities about going on their boards. We’re going to be busy, and we’ll be needing some sort of a diversion. What’s wrong with sailing? We both like it. The weather here is great.”

“Do I have time to take a shower and have some breakfast?”

“We have all the time in the world,” she replied brightly.

McGarvey’s mood instantly darkened. “For now,” he said, and her face fell, but for just a moment.

“Then we’ll make the best of it while we can,” she told him.

“It won’t last forever, Katy,” he said.

She managed a weak smile. “That’s what you said last time.”

“It has to be done.”

“I know,” she said.

McGarvey went upstairs and took a shower, the water drumming against the back of his neck soothing. Since Arlington he’d concentrated on healing his body as quickly as he could because he knew that his call to action could come at any moment, and when it did he wanted to be ready. He desperately
wanted the semiretirement that Katy had planned for them, but he just as desperately wanted to see an end to bin Laden’s reign of terror. The United States certainly couldn’t depend on the Pakistanis to do the job; they were beset with so many internal problems that President Musharraf ’s hands were tied. Much of his military and a significant portion of his intelligence service personnel were sympathetic to al-Quaida’s cause. There’d even been attempts on his life by bin Laden’s supporters.

Taking the man out had always been a one-on-one mission.

When he was drying off, the telephone in the bedroom rang. Kathleen answered it in the kitchen on the first ring. He was dressing when she came to the door.

“It’s Otto,” she said, and she looked resigned.

McGarvey wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, but she’d always been able to see through that particular lie of his. He picked up the phone. “Good morning. Have you found the Kilo?”

“Oh wow, not yet, Mac,” Rencke gushed. “How are ya feeling? Okay? Louise wants to know.”

“I’ll live,” McGarvey said. He glanced up, but Kathleen was gone. “What about the sub?”

“There’s none missing. Honest injun, if he had grabbed a boat we’d know about it by now.”

“Then he’s got help from somebody,” McGarvey said crossly. “Goddammit, Otto, bin Laden didn’t hire a submarine captain for no reason.”

“I know, and we haven’t stopped looking.”

McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment. He had some serious visions about nuclear weapons being lobbed at the United States from a few miles offshore, giving absolutely no response time. “Sorry,” he said.

“No sweat, Mac. If he gets his hands on a Kilo boat—from no matter where—we’ll bag him.”

“That’s not why you called.”

“No. We got lucky with the guy you pulled out of the van at Arlington. The Bureau finally figured out who he is. Kamal al-Turabi, one of bin Laden’s top enforcers. They lost track of him last year, but it looks as if he was right here under their noses for at least eleven months. He was posing as a dentist up in Laurel. Neighbors said he was a great guy, about as American as they come.”

“Where is he right now?”

“They’ve got him tucked away over at Andrews.”

“Has he talked to anyone, maybe an attorney?” McGarvey asked. “Are there any leaks to the media that we’ve got him and why?”

“I don’t think so,” Rencke said.

“I’m flying up there today, but in the meantime I want you to do a couple of things for me,” McGarvey said. “Tell Adkins I’m on my way. I’m going to need some help, but I’ll explain when I get there. Then I want al-Turabi transferred to Gitmo tonight, but with no ID. I want him classified as John Doe, an American combatant working for al-Quaida.”

“Adkins will have to pull some serious strings,” Rencke said.

“Tell him to make it happen, with as few people in the loop as possible, except for Commander Weiss.”

Rencke was silent for just a second, but then he chuckled. “Weiss isn’t going to be a happy camper, especially if you show up down there again with Gloria.”

“If we get lucky I think I know how to find bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “But I also need you to ask Jared Kraus for an assist.” Kraus was chief of the Company’s Technical Services Division. They were the people who came up with the gadgets that field officers used.

“What do you need?” Rencke asked.

McGarvey explained what he wanted from Kraus and how he was going to use it, but there would have to be limitations.

“No sweat, kimo sabe,” Rencke said. “I’ve already seen the technical specs, so we’ll be up and running by the time you get up here.”

“Oh, and send someone down here to keep an eye on Katy, would you?” McGarvey said.

“Will do.”

FORTY-TWO

CIA HEADQUARTERS

Cabbing it out to Langley from Dulles, McGarvey felt detached. Already he was beginning to leave his home and his family, putting his love for his wife and daughter and granddaughter in a special compartment in his mind; one in which he could forget about them while he was in the field. The bane of any assassin were attachments to places, to things, and especially, to people.

Lawrence Danielle, a mentor during his early days in the CIA, had cautioned that the field officers who lasted the longest were the ones who either carried no baggage, or those who knew when to forget home and hearth. “Completely forget, Kirk, as if there was no one in your life.”

It had been one of the hardest lessons for him to learn; and one that had cost him his marriage when Katy had faced him point-blank with the choice of her or the CIA.

He had been an arrogant bastard in those days, with his own set of demons, and he had just returned from a particularly nasty assignment in Santiago, Chile, in which he had assassinated an army general and the man’s wife. His emotions were all over the place, so he’d turned around and walked out the door.

He’d run to Switzerland then, to hide, and it had been a very long time before he and Kathleen got back together; lost years not only for him and his wife, but for their daughter Elizabeth.

But that was then and here he was now, ready to go back into the field.

Kathleen had stoically packed for him, saying nothing as she watched him gather his weapon, a couple of spare magazines of ammunition, and his escape kit of several passports, matching, untraceable credit cards, and ten thousand dollars in various currencies to be sent ahead as a bonded Homeland Security package.

When he was done, she handed him his tan sport coat. “Any odd idea how long you’ll be gone, in case I want to make dinner reservations or something for us?” she’d asked.

“Maybe ten days, not long this time.”

She wanted to say something that would make him change his mind; he could see it in her eyes. “Should I circle the wagons or something?”

“Someone’s coming down to ride shotgun for you. Otto will let you know.”

She’d come into his arms and shivered as he held her tight. “Take care of yourself, Kirk,” she said in his ear. “Come back to me.”

“Count on it.”

Receiving a visitor’s pass at the gate, McGarvey could remember Katy’s body in his arms as they kissed goodbye at the airport, but when he signed in he’d already forgotten her scent and how badly he’d missed her even before he left.

Adkins had been advised of McGarvey’s arrival and was waiting at the door to his office. “Hold my calls,” he told his secretary.

“Yes, sir,” Dahlia Swanson said. She’d been McGarvey’s private secretary when he’d been the DCI. “How are you feeling, Mr. McGarvey?” she asked.

“Much better, thank you.”

She was an older woman with white hair and old-school reserved manners, but she gave him a warm smile. “I am glad.”

He winked at her, then followed Adkins into the seventh-floor office.

“I managed to push through al-Turabi’s transfer to Guantanamo Bay, in fact he’s probably already on his way,” Adkins said, going behind his desk. He motioned for McGarvey to take a seat. “But Otto didn’t give me any of the details. Would you like to fill me in?”

“Al-Turabi is one of bin Laden’s top executioners. Important to the cause.”

“All right, I understand the reason for sending him down as a John Doe. But then what?”

“That navy commander Gloria Ibenez roughed up could be on the take. Otto is working the money trail back to the source now, but it’s possible that Weiss is on al-Quaida’s payroll.”

Understanding began to glimmer in Adkins’s eyes, and he shook his head. “Please don’t tell me that you’re going back down there.”

“Yes, I am,” McGarvey said. “And I’m taking Gloria with me, so you’ll have to pull a few more strings.”

Adkins sat back in his chair. “I didn’t want your job, you know. So if you’re doing this to get back at me, you can stop it.”

“The minute al-Turabi shows up at Camp Delta someone is going to recognize him, and Weiss will get the word.”

“Continue.”

“Gloria and I are going to lean on him, hard, and my guess is that Weiss will arrange for him to escape.”

“I don’t buy it, Mac,” Adkins said. “Even if Weiss is connected with al-Quaida, which would make him a traitor, why would he risk his neck with you and Gloria right there?”

“We’re only going to stay for a couple hours, just long enough to put some heat on him.”

“And?”

“When al-Turabi gets out of there, I’m going to follow him.”

Adkins said nothing for several long moments, obviously trying to put what he was being told into some kind of perspective. “You think he’ll lead you to bin Laden?”

“I think it’s a possibility, Dick,” McGarvey said.

“Why do you want Ms. Ibenez to go with you?”

“I want her to keep Weiss busy.”

“And pissed off,” Adkins said. “Because pissed-off people make mistakes.”

“Yes, and this one will cost him more than a couple of bruises,” McGarvey said. “But we don’t want to blow the whistle until I find bin Laden.”

“And finish the job,” Adkins said delicately.

“Yes,” McGarvey replied just as delicately. He’d come face-to-face with bin Laden in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan. It was before 9/11, and he’d not been able to get the man’s image out of his head since then.
“There are no innocents in this struggle,” bin Laden had said.
He had proved his point in New York.

“He knows you’re coming. That’s why they tried to hit you at Arlington.”

“God bless the media,” McGarvey quipped. The attack had hit the front page of just about every newspaper in the world.

“He won’t stop, you know,” Adkins said.

“I hope he doesn’t,” McGarvey said. “Arlington was a mistake. Who knows, maybe he’ll make another.”

“When do you leave?”

“Soon as I can round up Gloria.”

“She’s down at the Farm, finishing her debriefing,” Adkins said. “Did you know?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “Sounds like Howard McCann’s doing.”

“She’ll be glad to be rescued.”

McGarvey’s visitor’s pass would not allow him to access Technical Services’ Research and Development corridor, so Jared Kraus had to come out and personally escort him inside. Kraus was a portly man in his late thirties, with a serious demeanor. Nothing was ever a joke to him. His staff claimed he had no sense of humor whatsoever.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Director,” he said. “Mr. Rencke is waiting for us in the conference room.”

“Were you able to come up with what I need?” McGarvey asked. Kraus’s left eyebrow rose a notch, as if the question was a personal insult. “Of course.”

The doors to most of the R & D labs and testing facilities were secured with retinal print identification devices that would open only into safe boxes that acted like air locks aboard a spaceship. The inner door to the facility itself could not be opened unless the outer door was closed and locked.

The wing was a beehive of activity, but no one spoke above a whisper. This place and the people who worked here, dreaming up toys for field operations officers, had always struck McGarvey as science fiction, something out of the old
Mission Impossible.

“Just in here, sir,” Kraus said at the conference room next to his office at the end of the corridor.

Rencke was sitting cross-legged on top of a long table, fiddling with what appeared to be an ordinary satellite telephone. Beside him was a small leather case, about the size of a thick notebook.

He looked up, his eyes bright like a kid with a new toy. “Oh, wow, I just finished programming the third Keyhole, and nobody will be able to detect what I’ve done.”

“You know that we have a serious limitation in size,” McGarvey said.

“We’ve taken care of that for you, Mr. Director,” Kraus said. “Actually we’ve been working on the technology for a few years now, even before you left the Company.”

“What have you come up with?”

Kraus zippered open the leather case and took out one of four hypodermic syringes, each about a quarter-filled with a milky solution, and handed it to McGarvey. “It’s nanotechnology.”

The opening at the business end of the syringe was larger than most needles, and was covered by a plastic sheath. “What is it?”

“That’s the good part. The liquid is actually a derivative of sodium thiopental—truth serum. But also contained in each syringe is the GPS transmitter you wanted, no bigger than a grain of sand.”

McGarvey held the syringe up to the light, but he could not make out the device. “It can’t have much range.”

“That’s why I programmed three satellites,” Rencke said. “The Keyhole will be able to pick up the signal only if the transmitter is almost directly beneath it. It’ll show up on the sat phone, but the signal will be intermittent, depending on a satellite pass.”

“How do I activate the phone?” McGarvey asked.

“Four syringes, four GPS transmitters. Enter three ones and pound, and the phone will display the latitude and longitude of the first transmitter. Three twos and pound, gets you the second unit, et cetera.”

“There’s another downside,” Kraus said. “Battery life. Best we can do is seven days, so you’ll have to be quick about it. The good news is that the batteries won’t go active until they’ve been exposed to the subject’s body heat for sixty to ninety minutes.”

“We’re giving you four of them so Weiss won’t be sure if you and Gloria came back just because of al-Turabi,” Rencke said. “It’s all going to depend on how quickly he can get them out of there and into the hands of Cuban intelligence. Since the last break, Gitmo has been locked up tight.”

“He’ll manage,” McGarvey said. “Al-Turabi is just too big a catch.”

WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

It was about two in the afternoon when McGarvey got down to the CIA’s training facility off I-64 outside Williamsburg. Located in a remote section of Camp Peary Naval Reservation on the York River, it was where recruits were taught basic tradecraft that field operations officers needed, and it was also where old hands went to hone their skills or to pass along things they’d learned, usually the hard way.

McGarvey’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd Van Buren, had taken over as camp commandants shortly after 9/11 when recruitment levels were at an all-time high. They were young enough that the recruits could relate to them, but experienced enough that the recruits had respect for them.

“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” the guard at the gate said. “Mrs. Van Buren is expecting you up at the office.”

“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and he followed the long drive through the woods to the collection of rustic buildings that housed the camp’s headquarters, classrooms, and the POW center where recruits were subjected to rigorous, sometimes even brutal, interrogations as if they were spies captured by a foreign power. The mess hall, dayrooms, and housing units were also located in the administration area.

Several cars were parked in front of the main office, and across in the parking lot a blue bus with U.S. Air Force markings had pulled up and fifteen or sixteen new recruits were piling out, to be greeted by several instructors dressed in BDUs.

Elizabeth, who was slender, with a pretty round face and short blond hair, practically a twin of her mother at that age, came out of the administration building as McGarvey pulled up. Like the instructors she was dressed in army camouflage, her boots bloused. In addition to running the camp she and Todd also taught many of the classes, including hand-to-hand combat, night field exercises in the swamp, and demolitions. She liked to blow up things as much as her husband did.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said, and she and her father embraced.

“How are you, sweetheart?” McGarvey asked.

“Just peachy,” she said. She linked her arm in his. “Let’s go for a walk.” She seemed brittle, on edge.

They headed down a dirt track behind the administration building that led eventually to the outdoor firing range, and beyond that the demolition training bunkers and urban warfare village.

“Everyone can pretty well guess why Dick Adkins called you back,” she said. “We’ve had no luck at all finding bin Laden. You’re the only one who’s come face-to-face with him and lived. And the fact that they tried to hit you at Arlington pretty well proves he knows that you’re gunning for him.”

“That could work to my advantage, when the time comes,” McGarvey said.

Elizabeth suddenly stopped and looked up into her father’s eyes. “Were you aware that Gloria Ibenez is in love with you?”

BOOK: Allah's Scorpion

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