Soldier of God (37 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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The Saudi deputy ambassador to the United States, Mamdouh Nuaimi, was deep in thought looking out the window of his office toward the Watergate Hotel complex when his secretary buzzed him. These were troubling times, and he wished that he were just about anywhere except here in Washington.
“Prince Salman has returned, Your Excellency,” the male secretary said.
Girding himself for a potentially difficult encounter Nuaimi keyed the intercom. “Please ask the prince to come in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nuaimi got to his feet and adjusted his tie as Prince Salman, also wearing a Western business suit, with a correctly knotted silk tie, walked in, a scowl on his dark features. Nuaimi came from around his desk, and embraced the prince.
“You honor me by coming here,” Nuaimi said, his Arabic formal, as befitted a man of the prince’s wealth and position of power. “Will you have tea?”
“The honor is mine, Deputy Ambassador,” Salman responded, correctly, if somewhat brusquely. “I have no time for tea. I was summoned and here I am. What do you want?”
“It’s a matter of some delicacy that the ambassador asked me to handle,” Nuaimi said, choosing his words with care. The prince was not a man to be offended by a careless remark. And although Nuaimi, whose brother was the oil minister Ali Nuaimi, had wealth and power, it was nothing in comparison to Salman’s. “It is the troubling time we find ourselves in at the moment.”
A brief smile crossed Salman’s thick lips. “It will serve the bastards right, another 9/11 They haven’t awakened to the real world, even yet.”
“Pakistan is cooperating—”
Salman dismissed Nuaimi with a flick of his hand, as if he were shooing away an annoying but ineffectual insect. He was obviously in an extremely foul mood. “Make your point, Mr. Deputy Ambassador,” he demanded, rudely.
Nuaimi smiled, ignoring the insult. “As you wish. The ambassador would like to know if there is anything he can do to enhance your current visit, considering the difficult moment we find ourselves in. If an al-Quaida attack were to occur, there would certainly be a problematic backlash. We merely wish to provide good advice and security for our citizens.”
“You want me to leave?”
Nuaimi spread his hands in a gesture of peace and conciliation. “We understood there was an unpleasantness in Monaco between you and the former director of the CIA. You were on your way to Corsica. Perhaps you should go there now. Or perhaps return to your family in Switzerland.”
Salman flared. “Only Crown Prince Abdullah himself can order me to leave,” he shouted.
“Please, no one is ordering you to do anything against your will.” Nuaimi said. “Not I, not the ambassador. We are merely suggesting that for your personal safety you might wish to leave the U.S. as soon as possible.”
“My safety is exactly why I’m here,” Salman said. “The madman threatened to kill me.”
It was in the dispatch the ambassador had received from Monaco. Saudi intelligence had an agent aboard the prince’s yacht. “That’s fantastic, Your Excellency. But why would he make such a threat against you?”
“As I said, he’s mad, and I’ll take this to the president—”
“No,” Nuaimi said, flatly. He’d been warned that the prince might want to do exactly that, and it wasn’t to be allowed under any circumstances. But since Salman was such a powerful man, one that even Crown Prince Abdullah did not want to cross, the job of stopping the man fell on Nuaimi’s shoulders. If Salman retaliated, the only man to be damaged would be the deputy ambassador, which was a perfectly acceptable loss under the circumstances.
“What did you say to me?” Salman demanded, his voice scarcely above a whisper.
“You will not attempt to contact anyone within the U.S. government at this time, not without the express approval of this embassy,” Nuaimi said. He was thinking about his wives and children, whom he’d sent back to Riyadh yesterday. He was glad they were gone. “I will need your word of honor on the issue, or else, regrettably, I will have to place you under arrest until your return to Riyadh can be arranged.”
“You don’t have the authority.”
“In this, I assure you that I do, Your Excellency,” Nuaimi said. For an instant he thought Salman was actually going to lay hands on him, do him physical harm. But then it passed. “Do I have your word, sir?”
Salman continued to glare at Nuaimi for a long second or two, then turned on his heel and left the office.
Nuaimi considered calling security to prevent the prince from leaving the embassy, but decided against it. Dealing with the royal family was always fraught with danger, for the simple reason, in his estimation, that most of them were insane or on the edge of insanity.
Kathleen sat on the edge of a narrow cot in a small windowless room, feeling despondent that she had been so stupid. Because of her insistence
on playing amateur sleuth, people were going to get hurt. She’d not only put herself in danger, but she’d endangered the lives of her daughter and her husband. Elizabeth had been allowed to go unharmed. By now she would have told her father what had happened, and Kirk would be going into action.
A hood had been placed ever Kathleen’s head as soon as they’d turned the corner on Thirty-second Street, so she had no idea where they had taken her. Nor was there any clue in the room as to her whereabouts, which could only ever have but one use—as a jail cell. There was a toilet without seat or lid, and a small, stainless steel sink with only a coldwater tap. There were no mirrors, no covering on the bare concrete floor, and only a single dim light in a ceiling recess, protected by steel mesh.
Besides her stupidity, the other thing that bothered her the more she thought about it was the stains on the concrete floor. They looked like rust, but she suspected they might be blood.
For the first time since Alaska, she was truly and deeply frightened.
Two days, her captors had told her, and then she would be released provided her husband cooperated and stayed out of it.
But if Khalil was here and had engineered her kidnapping, she did not think she would get out of this one unscathed no matter what Kirk did or didn’t do.
Someone was at the door, turning the lock. The tiny viewing window was blocked so Kathleen could not see who was coming, but she knew who it was, and she shuddered in anticipation.
The door opened and a tall man came in; he was wearing an expensive, dove-gray business suit, a white silk shirt and tie, and a bland expression, one almost of indifference, on his long handsome face. He looked at Kathleen for a few seconds, as if he were studying some interesting specimen in a test tube, then gently closed the door.
Kathleen’s throat constricted, and she was sick to her stomach. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t be sure.
She wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing her terror
. “I thought that I detected your unpleasant odor. You couldn’t beat my husband, so now you’ve come to take your revenge on me.” She laughed. “Is that it?”
Khalil smiled faintly. He took off his suit coat and hung it on the doorknob.
“Why yes,” he said, his voice gentle, as if he were talking to an animal or a small child and didn’t want to spook it.
Kathleen’s heart skipped a beat. She recognized the voice from Alaska.
Khalil loosened his tie, then rolled up his shirtsleeves.
Kathleen realized with an intensely sick feeling that the man was insane, and that he meant to hurt her. “I don’t care as much for my own safety right now, as I do for the baby that I’m carrying,” she said.
He shrugged indifferently and started for her.
Kathleen leaped up from the cot, doubled up her fist, and smashed it into his face with every ounce of her strength. His head rocked back, but then he punched her in her stomach just below her rib cage, sending her sprawling backward on the cot, her head smashing into the concrete wall.
She saw spots in front of her eyes, and bile burned at the back of her throat, making her gag.
Khalil was right there, over her. He grabbed her by the front of her blouse, dragging her to her feet and ripping the thin material to shreds. Holding her arm with his left hand, he backhanded her in the face with his other. Her nose gushed blood, but the cobwebs suddenly lifted from her brain.
“Bastard,” she cried, as she drove her knee into his groin.
He grunted in pain, but continued to hold her with one hand while slapping her with the other.
She tried to knee him again, but he deflected her blow with his leg. He looked into her eyes, still with a frighteningly bland expression on his face, doubled up his fist, and struck her very hard in her left breast.
The pain was instant and incredible. Her knees buckled, and the room went hot and dim.
Khalil struck her again in her breast, then in her stomach, and he slammed his knee into her groin.
She could not fight back, nor could she feel more than a dull pain throughout her entire body. But she felt a wetness in her panties, and she despaired that she would lose Elizabeth’s baby.
There had been so much suffering in their family. So much loss. Not this, she cried inside. Please, God, not this.
The last thing she was aware of was Kahlil’s fist connecting with her face
.
McGarvey stood beside the front bedroom window looking down at the cul-de-sac as Liz, driving her mother’s Mercedes, pulled into the driveway; Otto, in his battered Mercedes diesel sedan, was right behind her.
McGarvey had trotted over from the fifteenth fairway and entered the house through the pool-deck door to make sure that neither the Bureau nor anyone else had shown up to look for him. Sooner or later they would be coming in response to Kathleen’s kidnapping. But he figured there was still time for him to make his preparations.
He was not angry. He was beyond that. At this point he was in his hunt-find-kill mode, and no power on earth could stop him from doing what he was going to do to find his wife and damage her captors.
Khalil had been at Yarnell’s old house, possibly hoping that McGarvey would make the connection and come looking for him. Instead it had been Kathleen, and the Saudi terrorist had taken her.
She was the bait that would draw McGarvey into a trap. What Kahlil could not guess was just how eager McGarvey was to comply.
What made no sense to McGarvey were the Saudi ambassador and embassy staff. The royal family was walking a tightrope, continuing to sell oil to the U.S. while funding and even encouraging terrorism. Kidnapping the wife of an important American government figure and then holding her hostage at the embassy was risky.
Too risky for the Saudis? Or was he missing something?
He went to the closet, where he stripped off his shirt and khaki trousers, changing into dark slacks, dark blue sneakers, and a black pullover that covered the pistol holstered at the small of his back. He also donned a lightweight reversal windbreaker—dark on one side and white on the other—that had several zippered pockets.
“Dad?” Elizabeth called from the front hall.
“It’s okay; I’m changing,” he called back. “Be right down.” He opened a secret compartment in the floor of the closet, which contained his escape
kit: six clean passports under six different names from the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, and Canada; credit cards and other bits of identification to match; twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, mostly in U.S. currency, but some in British pounds and a fair amount in euros; hair dyes; lock picks; a spare Walther PPK with several magazines of 9mm ammunition; a custom-made Austrian silencer; a stiletto; several small bundles, each the size of a package of cigarettes, that contained blocks of Semtex explosives and securely protected acid fuses; and a few other odds and ends.
The cache was an old habit of his. Whenever he landed somewhere, one of his first tasks was to establish an escape kit against the day he might be required to step outside the establishment and suddenly go to ground.
Like now, he thought. On his own for the most part. Beholden to no one, following no orders other than his own, on a single-purpose mission.
He taped the spare Walther to his left calf, strapped the stiletto in its leather sheath to his chest beneath his windbreaker, and pocketed a small mag light with red and white lenses, two spare magazines, the silencer, and three of the Semtex packages.
He left everything else. He had no need for the passports or the money, because when this was over he wasn’t going to run. And he decided he wouldn’t need the lock picks. What he was going to do would not require stealth. He had the Semtex for any locked gate or door he might encounter.
For just a moment he stood over the compartment staring at the envelope of cash and identification documents. His first instinct had always been to run. It was a survival tactic he had learned in the jungles of Vietnam. Plus he’d always wanted to distance himself from the people he loved so that they would not come into harm’s way because of him.
No running this time
, he thought, closing and securing the compartment.
Not now. Never again.
Downstairs Elizabeth was in the kitchen drinking from a bottle of Evian. When McGarvey came in, her eyes were round and worried and still apologetic for a situation she felt was largely her fault.
“Where’s Otto?” McGarvey asked.
“In your study. He’s trying to get to Dennis Berndt, to tell him about mother.” Elizabeth hung her head. “The dirty bastards. I pretended to be her bodyguard. If they’d known I was her daughter, they would have taken me too.” She looked up at her father. “But I didn’t know what else to do, Daddy.”
“You did the right thing, sweetheart,” McGarvey assured her. In all likelihood they might have killed her and left her body to be identified. It would have been an even more powerful incentive for McGarvey to rush into the trap, blinded not only by fear for his wife’s safety, but also by grief over his child’s death.
“You’re going after her, but how are you going to get in?” Elizabeth asked. “The Saudis aren’t just going to let you come up to the gate and invite you in.”
“You and Otto are going to create a diversion,” he said. “But not until tonight, after midnight. And in the meantime we’ve got a lot to do. I want to make them nervous. Maybe the Saudi ambassador will put pressure on Khalil to give it up, at least release your mother. Stranger things have happened, and I don’t think they want that kind of political trouble, especially not right now.” Something else suddenly occurred to him, and he looked away.
“Daddy?” Elizabeth asked. “What is it?”
Men like bin Laden and Khalil and their followers firmly believed they were in a war for their very existence, and they believed that there were no innocents in the war. Every Christian and Jewish man, woman, and child was not only fair game in the jihad, they were also the prime targets. It was a view 180 degrees out of sync with what McGarvey had always believed. Minimize the risk to the noncombatants. Minimize the collateral damage.
The woman desperately screamed for her baby, but there’d been no hope. Khalil had known it, as he had known McGarvey would try to save them anyway. The dark water aft of the cruise liner had become a killing ground, the woman and child the bait.
Just as Katy was the bait. And just as Kahlil had picked out another killing ground.
Rencke came from the study. “I got to Berndt, and he’s agreed to take this to the president—” He looked from McGarvey to Liz. “What’ve I missed?”
“I just thought of something,” McGarvey said. “But I’m going to need an untraceable cell phone. Is that possible?”
Rencke shrugged. “Sure. Where’s yours?”
“Out on the hall table.”
Rencke went to fetch it, and when he came back he was entering a series of numbers. He pressed the pound key, and then Send. A code came up, and he entered a second series of long numbers and letters, pressing the pound key and Send again. Another code appeared on the display, and Rencke looked up, grinning. “You’ll keep the same number, but all your calls in and out will be routed through a redialer in Amsterdam.” He handed the phone to McGarvey. “It’ll drive anybody monitoring you nuts trying to figure out how you got outta Dodge so fast.”
“What are you going to do?” Elizabeth asked.
“Play Khalil at his own game.” McGarvey said, pulling up a number from his cell phone’s memory. He pressed Send. “Give him something that he’ll understand.”
It was after lunch and Liese Fuelm was getting ready to pull the pin and head back to her apartment in town when her cell phone vibrated at her hip. She was accomplishing nothing out here on the lake. They had learned that Salman was in Washington, probably stalking Kirk, but that’s all she’d been told. Gertner wanted her here, where keeping an eye on her would be easy.
The hell with him.
The caller ID showed a U.S. area code and number, but the call was coming from Amsterdam.
“Oui?”
“Hello, Liese, is your phone being monitored?” McGarvey asked.
Liese’s stomach gave a little lurch. Ziegler was upstairs getting some sleep, and LeFevre was in the kitchen finishing his lunch. For the moment no one was seated at the equipment table. “Just a minute.” She went over to the recording machines and pressed the Pause button. “It’s okay now, Kirk. Are you really in Amsterdam?”
“No. I want you to do something for me.”
Liese was thrilled. “Yes, of course. Anything.”
“Don’t be so fast to agree. What I’m asking will be dangerous. Could get you hurt, and at the very least get you fired.”
“I don’t care—” Liese protested. The man she was in love with had asked for her help. There could be only one answer.
“You’re still in love with me, aren’t you?”
Liese closed her eyes. She nodded. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Kirk.”
“Nothing can ever come of it,” McGarvey said, gently.
“I know.”
“Khalil is here and he’s kidnapped my wife, and what I want you to do for me might help to save her life, and possibly stop the terrorists before they hit us.”
“My God, I’m sorry,” Liese said, and she was sincere. She wanted Kirk, but not that way. Not at the expense of his wife’s life. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
There was a short silence. “Will your badge get you into Prince Salman’s compound sometime today?”
Liese was startled. “Of course. There’s a house staff over there, including bodyguards, but they wouldn’t turn away a Swiss Federal cop. Getting in would be easy, but the instant I approach the gate my surveillance crew will pick up on it and inform Gertner.”
This time when he spoke, McGarvey sounded cautious. “Are you able to monitor conversations inside the house?”
“Yes. At least in most of the apartments,” Liese said. She could hear LeFevre rattling around in the kitchen. “Whatever I say or do once I’m in will be recorded here.”
“Good. Then there’ll be no mistakes. No one will rush in with guns blazing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want you to get inside the compound, and hold Salman’s wife at gunpoint.”
A jolt of electricity shot through Liese’s body. “She’s not involved in any of this. I’m not going to hurt an innocent woman.”
“Listen to me, Liese. I don’t want anybody hurt. If something doesn’t go right, then get the hell out of there. Or put your pistol on the floor and raise your hands. Your people will bail you out. No matter what happens, there’ll be no shooting.”
All at once Liese understood what Kirk was trying to do. By taking
Salman’s wife hostage, a possible trade could be made for Kathleen McGarvey. That was crystal clear, and it might work if nothing went wrong here. But what was also perfectly clear in Liese’s mind was just how deeply Kirk loved his wife. There was no hope after all. Liese closed her eyes again to squeeze away the tears. “When do you want me to do it?” she asked.
“Within the next few hours,” McGarvey said. “Call me when you’re in.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’m going after Khalil.”
“Kirk—”
“Yes?”
“Be careful,” she whispered.
My darling
.
McGarvey’s voice softened. “You too.”
“Oh, wow,” Rencke said, hopping back and forth. “Do you think she’ll pull it off? Do it, ya know?”
McGarvey was looking at his daughter, who had an odd, hurt expression on her face. “I think so.”
“If somebody gets hurt, especially the man’s wife or his kids, we’re going to be the bad guys.”
He didn’t know how he could live with himself if something did happen. But he didn’t
know anything else that would get to a man such as Khalil, except by threatening his family. It was a universal language, the one point of commonality between the terrorists and us. Except that the terrorists were perfectly willing to target innocent women and children, while up until now the Americans were not.
“Were you in love with her?” Elizabeth asked. She was obviously having trouble saying the words.
McGarvey understood his daughter’s fear. He had left her once, and she didn’t want to lose him again. He shook his head. “No, I was never in love with any woman except your mother. Then or now,” he added.
Elizabeth took several seconds to digest her father’s answer. “Okay, Daddy, what do you want us to do?”
“Three things. First, I want a major surveillance operation on the Saudi Embassy started as soon as possible. Vans, cars, foot patrols, choppers,
the whole works. I want to saturate the entire area one block out from the building, and I want them to know that we’re doing it.”
Rencke’s eyes narrowed. “The Bureau will want to know what’s going on, and the Saudis will start screaming bloody murder the moment they spot us,” he warned. “Won’t take long till someone over at the White House orders us to pull the pin.”
“Communications will be very bad this afternoon and tonight,” McGarvey said. “I’ll need just a few more hours, no longer. And as for the Saudis, I want them to start making noises as soon as possible. Maybe even create an incident. Maybe DC Metro would have to be called in, especially if there’s trouble on the streets
outside
Saudi territory.”

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