Soldier of God (18 page)

Read Soldier of God Online

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
11.46Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“The necessary supplies are there?” Khalil blurted. He had trained some of the boys who would provide the support network in the States. It did not matter to him if they died in battle, but he did not want them to give their lives for no reason.
Bin Laden’s broad nostrils flared. “Everything was moved into position over the past two months.”
Khalil felt the first hint of trouble. He had dropped out of sight for the past two months in order to have the time to validate his Trinidad identity. He had left the real work, bin Laden was telling him, to someone else while he went about the business of conducting a doomed mission.
Bin Laden took four envelopes out of a breast pocket and laid them on the carpet beside Khalil. “These are the four death letters from our martyrs. You will personally deliver them along with fifty thousand dollars in cash to each family after they succeed. Then our cause will have more righteous converts. Money will come to us as it did after the September attacks. As it would have had you not blundered your very nearly foolproof task.”
Every muscle in Khalil’s body stiffened. Any man other than bin Laden who spoke to him like that would die now. But he gave no outward sign of his almost overwhelming rage. “It will be as you ordered. When will the attacks take place?”
“Very soon, my brother. You will keep yourself in readiness to make the deliveries. And you will remain out of reach of Western intelligence.”
“I have a most important task to—”
“Yes, killing Kirk McGarvey. Someone else will do it.”
“He is mine,” Khalil blurted.
Bin Laden’s gaze turned ice cold. “You have another mission,” he said. “See that you do it well. When the moment comes, there will be a great outpouring of fear and anger. It will be a dangerous time. There will certainly be reprisals, and we all must be ready for them. The families of our heroes must be made to know that our hearts are with them in Paradise.”
Khalil calmed himself by shear force of will, an artery in his neck throbbing. He would not be denied what was rightly his. No power on earth, not even his loyalty to bin Laden, would stop him.
Bin Laden got to his feet. “Go to your family now, and make peace with Allah. The time will be soon.”
Khalil picked up the envelopes. “How do you wish me to get the cash?”
“You are a wealthy man. You supply the money. Take it from one of your bank accounts. The ones in the Cayman Islands, or perhaps the ones in the Jersey banks. It is of no matter to me.”
When bin Laden left the room, Khalil pocketed the envelopes and settled back. He was no longer angry. He knew what he had to do, and he had a good idea how he would do it.
McGarvey was a man without a future.
Ten time zones to the west, a Navy C-130 Hercules fitted out as a hospital transport, carrying SecDef Shaw, DCI McGarvey, and their wives, touched down at Andrews Air Force Base and taxied directly over to one of the alert hangars on the far west side of the base.
A number of people were gathered on the ramp, several of them highranking brass, presumably from the Pentagon, waiting for their boss. In
addition to several military staff cars and four windowless vans with CIA series tags, there was an ambulance and a Cadillac limousine.
Watching from a window, McGarvey picked out his deputy director Dick Adkins, who stood near the limo, his hands in his pockets, his slight shoulders slumped, and his thinning, sand-colored hair ruffled in the breeze. Next to him, by contrast, was a mountain of a man who looked like a heavyweight prizefighter. McGarvey figured the muscle would be his new bodyguard; number three—after DickYemm and Jim Grassinger—in less than eighteen months. It didn’t say much for job security.
Even before the big airplane came to a complete halt, a dozen armed Air Force security troops formed a perimeter around the aircraft.
McGarvey had insisted on remaining in Denver until Shaw was cleared to travel, in part because the delay was only a couple of hours, and in part because he and Katy needed the rest. Overnight, Adkins had briefed him on the bin Laden tape. He suspected that the coming days were going to be intense.
The hijacking of the
Spirit
and the attempted kidnapping of Shaw were only the tip of the iceberg. And no one at Langley expected the threatened terrorist attacks to be the end of it unless bin Laden and the rest of his fanatical al-Quaida planners were bagged.
The president was going to speak to the nation at 8 P.M. Eastern. Before then, the CIA would have to coordinate the development of the latest National Intelligence Estimate and the Watch Report, both of which detailed the current and expected future threats to the U.S. Then the president would have to be briefed; he needed to know his options, which could range from all-out war to a purely political move such as demanding UN sanctions against whatever country or countries harbored terrorists.
A one-on-one surgical strike, of the variety that McGarvey was intimately familiar with, would be included in the list of possible actions.
So far as McGarvey was concerned, it was the
only
option.
He could see Khalil’s hands on Katy, his pistol pointed at her head. He could hear the cries of the young mother desperately searching for her baby in the water. He could hear the screams of panic as the cruise ship was sinking.
Bin Laden’s taped message had been downloaded to McGarvey’s PDA very early this morning, even before it had been hand-carried to the White House, and he’d watched it several times.
There was no doubt in his mind that the tape was authentic and had been recorded last week, but there was something about bin Laden that didn’t set right with McGarvey He had met the man several years ago, and had spent enough time with him to form a vivid impression of how he looked, how he acted, how he spoke.
The man in the tape was bin Laden, but there was something wrong with him. It was something that seemed wrong to McGarvey. He had been turning it over in his mind for the past couple of hours without being able to put his finger on exactly what it was that bothered him. But it was something.
He had spent several hours on a secure phone link with Adkins and with Otto Rencke, his director of special projects as well as with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Todd Van Buren, both of whom were currently instructors for the CIA’s internal operations course at the Farm.
Priority one was finding out who Khalil was and where he was hiding. He was bin Laden’s right-hand man and chief planner, which meant he had not only been responsible for the attempted hijacking, but he had also had a hand in setting up the new round of threatened terrorist attacks in the U.S.
Get to Khalil soon enough, and we might be able to stop them once and for all.
“How’s mother?” Elizabeth had asked at one point.
It was around three in the morning, and McGarvey had just finished watching bin Laden’s monstrous tape for the fourth or fifth time. “She’s sleeping. But she came out of it okay.”
“Promise?”
“Scout’s honor,” McGarvey said, feeling a wave of love and protectiveness for his daughter and for his wife. Both of them, along with Elizabeth’s unborn baby, the baby her mother was carrying, were legitimate targets in bin Laden’s world.
The bastard and his henchmen were going to die. And their deaths would not be pleasant. No trumpets, no angels on gossamer wings transporting them to Paradise, only pain and then lights out.
One hour out, Katy had touched up her makeup and fixed her hair, but now as a crewman opened the forward door she still looked tired and worried. She squeezed her husband’s hand. “Will we be able to stop them before they hit us this time?” They were dressed in the Coast Guard utilities
that they’d been given after they’d been rescued from the sound by the Storis.
Of all the people McGarvey wanted to reassure, his wife was at the top of the list. But he had to give her the same answer that he would have to give the president: “It’s not likely. But no matter what happens, it’s over for them now, for sure.”
Katy’s eyes filled, and she turned away momentarily to look out the window. “Nobody will trust anybody. It’ll be worse than after 9/11,” she said, a bitter edge to her voice.
McGarvey had considered that possibility, and he thought that Katy was probably right. “Once the tape is broadcast, no parent is going to feel safe anywhere, not even in their own home.”
Katy shook her head. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.”
“Yes, it is.”
Shaw was still sedated, but Karen gave them a hug; then she gave McGarvey a searching look. “Thank you for what you did for us. But this time let’s finish the job.”
“You can count on it,” McGarvey told her. He looked down at the SecDef lying on the stretcher. Shaw was pale, but he did not seem to be in any distress. “Take care of him; he’s a good man.”
Karen nodded, a sudden look of fierce determination on her pleasant face. “You can count on it.”
McGarvey shook hands with the medical crew, then handed over the sidearms he and Katy had borrowed in Juneau to one of the aircrew. “See that these get back to the
Storis
.”
He helped his wife off the aircraft, shook a few more hands, and accepted what he figured was probably just the start of a lot of tiresome congratulations for simply doing his job. Then Adkins hustled them into the backseat of the limo, after first introducing Neal Julien, McGarvey’s new bodyguard.
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Julien said. He was a sturdy, chocolate-skinned man with a warm smile, a round nearly bald head, and a mellifluous voice that held a hint of a Bermudan accent. His manner was pleasant but professional.
“Watching over me has become a dangerous job,” McGarvey told him.
“Yes, it has, Mr. Director,” Julien said.
The SecDef was being carried off the aircraft when the DCI’s limo, with two vans in front and two in the rear, headed up to Chevy Chase, Julien in constant radio contact with the two dozen Office of Security operators in the four vans. They had no police escort, but McGarvey figured there would be at least one chase helicopter armed with air-to-ground missiles somewhere in the vicinity The bad guys might bag a DCI elsewhere, but it wouldn’t happen here on his home territory.
“What’s the drill this morning?” McGarvey asked his deputy director.
“I went through your list overnight, and everybody’s up to speed,” Adkins said. Since his wife died the previous year, he had no one at home, so he had thrown himself into his work. He was content to remain the DDCI, putting McGarvey’s orders into effect and sometimes smoothing over his boss’s administrative rough edges when needed. “We’ll get you home first so that you can change clothes. We’ve swept your house and grounds, and set up a solid perimeter, so Mrs. McGarvey will be okay for the time being. But I still think you should get to the safe house.”
“They weren’t after me,” McGarvey said. The last couple of times they had run to ground had not been very successful anyway.
Adkins shrugged, knowing it was the answer he would receive. “The staff meeting is set up for ten-thirty, and the full National Security Council meets at noon at the White House. We should have the NIE and Watch Report pretty well cobbled together by then.”
“What about this business in Switzerland?”
Adkins glanced pointedly at Katy but McGarvey nodded for him to continue. It had always been an unwritten understanding that what the DCI’s wife was told or not told was up to the DCI’s discretion.
“Ms. Fuelm’s call was evidently a back-burner request by Zurich for information on the prince. Otto figures they used her because of her … history with you. Anyway, Otto’s working on it, but of course he won’t tell the rest of us what he’s doing. Apparently the Swiss are interested in his comings and goings, and they put Liese Fuelm in charge of the investigation.”
Katy had caught the
history
reference, and she gave her husband a questioning look, which he caught.
“Liese was one of the cops, along with Marta Fredericks, watching me when I lived in Lucerne. Her people probably figured to use the contact, see if there were any sparks still smoldering somewhere.”
Sometimes when Katy was tired or particularly stressed out she became brittle, and the old, sharp-tongued, suspicious Katy emerged. Her dark moods had always been about a lack of self-confidence and a low self-esteem. “Are there?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” McGarvey told her, but secretly he wouldn’t be surprised. Liese had been in love with him, and she had fallen hard when he left, and even harder when Marta, her best friend and McGarvey’s lover, had been killed. “Why do they think I’d know anything about Prince Salman?” he asked Adkins.
“I don’t know if Otto knows, but he’s working on it.”
At the mention of Salman’s name, Katy stiffened slightly, but neither man caught her reaction. She turned and looked out the window, apparently no longer interested in the briefing.
Morning traffic was heavy on 1-95 but moved well, so it was just a couple of minutes after nine when the driver pulled up at the McGarveys’ sprawling colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac on the fifteenth fairway of the Chevy Chase Country Club. The somewhat exclusive neighborhood was quiet, except for a couple of lawn-service people at work two houses down. They were legitimate; otherwise, the Office of Security would not have let them come within five miles of the place. After the screw-up with the
Spirit’s
passenger and crew list, no one at Langley or the Pentagon or downtown at the FBI was taking any chances.
By this afternoon, after the president met with the National Security Council, all the major players in Washington would know about the latest bin Laden threat. And by tonight, after the president spoke to the nation, the same fear and paranoia that everyone felt after 9/11 would be back in full force.
The attempted kidnapping of the former secretary of defense wouldn’t exactly become yesterday’s news, but the story would be eclipsed by the bin Laden tape. Not many people would get much sleep tonight.
Two teams of security operators would remain on-site, the vans parked in the cul-de-sac and on Lenox. Four agents would remain inside the house, and would rotate in shifts with those stationed outside in the vans, and at several strategic locations on the golf course.
No one liked the arrangements; they were too loose, but it was the
best they could do under the circumstances.The safest place for the director and his family would be the DCI’s residence at the Farm, but he was needed in Washington.
The house was quiet. The security officers were keeping watch from the upstairs front and back spare bedrooms. When McGarvey and Katy went up, they appeared briefly at the doorways like curious ghosts and then disappeared.
“This is starting to get real old,” Katy said, but before McGarvey could say anything, she touched a finger to his lips. “It’s not your fault, darling. You’re a cop, and it’s your job to deal with the bad people in the world.” She looked at him with a wave of love and admiration. “Thank God for you, and all the people you work with.”
McGarvey’s throat was suddenly a little thick. “Thank you,” he told his wife, and he took her in his arms, glad that they were here like this together. Yet another part of him was already at Langley—and wherever this business would take him.
It was after ten when they reached the sprawling CIA headquarters across the river, the parking lot full, a steady stream of traffic coming and going. Since 9/11, recruitment had risen to an all-time high. The Company was finally able to screen for the kind of people it wanted, rather than just accepting any warm body that walked in the door.
McGarvey’s secretary, Dhalia Swanson, dressed as usual in a conservative suit, her gray hair up in a customary bun, got up when McGarvey and Adkins walked in. “We didn’t expect you back so soon,” she said. She was obviously relieved. “Mrs. McGarvey is well?”

Other books

AHuntersDream by Viola Grace
Gull Island by Grace Thompson
0.4 by Mike Lancaster
The Body In the Belfry by Katherine Hall Page
La sombra by John Katzenbach
Overshadow by Brea Essex
The Sexy Stranger Bundle by Madison, Tiffany
Wrong Number 2 by R.L. Stine