Soldier of God (44 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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As Prince Salman came through the door, McGarvey stood well back beside the soaring stairs so that he was hidden from anyone upstairs. It took everything within his power not to immediately shoot the man dead.
The arrogant bastard had been driving around Washington as if he were immune from the consequences of his actions.
Salman stopped at the counter and looked at the television monitors. He looked up toward the head of the stairs, but then he spotted McGarvey standing in the shadows, and he reared back. “You.”
“You should not have come back here,” McGarvey said. His gun hand was shaking with the effort
not
to pull the trigger. A small bead of sweat appeared on his forehead.
“What do you mean,
come back
here?” Salman demanded. “I’ve never been to this place in my life.” He glanced toward the head of the stairs again. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“You kidnapped my wife, you son of a bitch,” McGarvey said. It was becoming increasingly difficult to stay on track. They had stripped Katy, making her change into pajamas. And they had hurt her. “You wanted me to come here.”
Salman was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“You put your hands on her, like you did in Alaska, and I warned you then that I would kill you.”
Sudden understanding dawned in the prince’s eyes. “It’s your people in front of our embassy.” He stepped back. “You’re crazy; do you know that? I think you
deserve
another 9/11.”
It was the same voice that McGarvey had heard in Alaska. Or was it? After hearing Salman’s voice in Monaco, his exact memory of how Khalil had sounded on the cruise liner was blurred. But Otto’s evidence was
nearly overwhelming. Whenever a terrorist attack had taken place in the past ten years in which Khalil could be placed in the vicinity, Salman was there as well. That was more than mere coincidence.
Katy had been kidnapped and she was here. So was Salman.
McGarvey motioned with his pistol toward the corridor that led to the back of the house. “Move.”
Salman stepped back a pace and shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said, haughtily. “You think that I’m a terrorist, and you’re not bluffing. You
are
going to kill me. Well, I’m not going to the slaughter like a lamb. If you want to do it, you’ll have to shoot me in the back.”
Salman glanced at the closed-circuit monitors behind the counter, one showing the front entrance, and the other, Katy in her cell. He looked back at McGarvey. His eyes had narrowed, and a crafty, calculating expression had come into his face.
“We’re going downstairs to get her,” McGarvey said. “And then the three of us will leave here together.”
“I didn’t do this,” Salman protested. But his words didn’t ring true.
“I’m not going to kill you, as much as I want to, but you are coming with me,” McGarvey said. “I’ll turn you over to the FBI and let them deal with you. Either that or you’ll die right here.”
Salman seemed to think about it, but he shook his head again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re here and so is your wife, which means you probably know what this place really is. No use me trying to lie about it. Fact is I came here looking for help to get you off my back. The chief of intelligence operations is a family friend.”
“Where are they?” McGarvey asked.
A moment of uncertainty crossed Salman’s features. “Most likely waiting for you to come to your senses and leave without bloodshed.”
“Not without my wife or you,” McGarvey said. “Nobody’s coming to rescue you, because you’re an embarrassment to the royal family.”
“You’re insane.”
“You got caught, and when you tell us what targets al-Quaida will hit in two days, your own government will cut you loose the same as they did to bin Laden.”
Salman laughed disdainfully. “You are a naive man for the director of Central Intelligence—or should I have said,
former
director? But in case you didn’t already know it, President Haynes is a close personal friend. So are a number of your key officials.”
“They’ll be disappointed,” McGarvey said. “Get going now, or I’ll shoot you.”
“Harm me and you’ll go to jail.”
This was not what he expected. None of it. This place was most likely a Saudi intelligence operational center, and Khalil’s capture here of all places would be a serious embarrassment to the royal family. So would Katy’s kidnapping and imprisonment here create a major international incident. U.S.-Saudi relations would probably never be the same, oil money or not.
But no one was coming to stop what could turn into a major disaster for Riyadh.
The only way in which any of this made sense was if someone very high in the royal family had finally decided to cut its recent losses and totally withdraw its support for the terrorists, just as Libya’s Qaddafi had done. McGarvey didn’t believe it, but in the face of bin Laden’s new threat, maybe Crown Prince Abdullah had finally had enough.
Whatever was going on, he needed to get Katy out of here right now.
McGarvey crossed the stair hall in four strides. Salman grabbed for the telephone behind the counter, but before he could reach it McGarvey shoved him back against the door frame and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into the side of the man’s head.
“Give me the slightest excuse to put a bullet into your brain and I’ll do it, I swear to Christ,” McGarvey said.
“I’ll enjoy coming to your trial for treason,” Salman said, immediately giving up the struggle. His face was inches from McGarvey’s. He smiled. “Let’s go fetch your wife, if that’s what you want. And if we’re allowed to leave, I’ll go with you to the FBI. I won’t cause you any further trouble.”
McGarvey backed off, and glanced up at the second-floor corridor. No one was there, and everything in his being told him he was walking into a trap. But he had no other choice. “Lead the way.”
Salman shook his head. “As I told you, I’ve never been here. I don’t know where she is.”
McGarvey roughly shoved him toward the corridor. Together they headed toward the back of the house, past the open door of what in Yarnell’s day had been the library, but that was now a large functional room jammed with a half dozen desks and file cabinets. Heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, but the lights had not been switched off. It looked as if whoever had been working in here had suddenly dropped what he was doing and scurried off somewhere to hole up. On one long wall was a large map of the world with Arabic markings and lines drawn in red. This was probably where their analysts worked.
The door to the basement was across from the pantry where McGarvey had come in. He directed Salman to open it. Dim lights illuminated the stairway and the corridor below.
McGarvey glanced over his shoulder at the closed-circuit television camera mounted on the wall just below the ceiling. Its red light was on, indicating it was functioning, and it was tracking them.
Someone was watching. But what were they waiting for?
Salman started down the stairs first, McGarvey directly behind him. From what he remembered, there was no way in or out of the basement except for this door.
It’s not a cellar; it’s a redoubt
, Otto had remarked at the time.
Kept the philistines from stealing Darby’s wine.
Every nerve end in McGarvey’s body tingled. The basement corridor could very well turn into a shooting range. It would all hinge on the timing.
They held up at the bottom. Four doors opened off the narrow corridor that ran only thirty feet from the back of the house toward the front. The end door led to Yarnell’s wine cellar, which had taken up nearly onefourth of the entire basement, extending from one side of the house to the other. The other doors opened onto storerooms and the big area where the furnace and utilities were located. Katy was being held in the last room next to the wine cellar. Its door, unlike the others, was made of steel.
All the doors were closed, but the television camera on the ceiling had swiveled from the spot McGarvey had observed upstairs at the monitor, to the stairs. Trouble, McGarvey decided, would come from the kitchen above, unless they actually meant to allow him to leave in peace with his wife now that he had Salman.
“What now?” Salman asked.
McGarvey pulled out his stiletto, reached up over his shoulder with his free hand, and cut the wires to the camera. Its red light went out.
“Won’t matter,” Salman said. “If they don’t want you to leave, they’ll just wait upstairs, and there’ll be no way of getting past them.”
“In that case we’ll find out how good a negotiator you really are,” McGarvey said. He prodded the prince in the back. “At the end.”
Two small bulbs in the ceiling provided the only illumination except for the light that filtered down from the open pantry hall door. Except for McGarvey’s and Salman’s footfalls on the bare concrete floor, there were no noises. No machinery running, no water in the pipes, no traffic outside, nothing. The house and the entire neighborhood could have been deserted.
When they reached the steel door to Katy’s cell, McGarvey tried the latch, but it was locked. He directed Salman to go another ten feet to the very end of the corridor. “Sit down and cover your head; I’m going to blow the door.”
“Very dramatic,” Salman said, languidly. But he shrugged and did as he was told.
When the prince was safely out of harm’s reach, McGarvey slid the cover away from the small viewing port in the door. Katy was still seated on the cot, her knees hunched up.
“Katy,” he called to her.
Her head snapped up and her eyes went wide. “Kirk? My God, is that you?”
“It’s me, sweetheart. Are you okay?”
Katy got up and hobbled to the door. She was obviously in a great deal of pain. The side of her face was swollen and bruised, and there was some blood on her pajama bottoms. “I’m afraid for the baby,” she cried. “Get me out of here, darling. Please.”
McGarvey looked at Salman, who was watching him with an inscrutable expression in his hooded eyes. It took every ounce of will in McGarvey’s body not to put one round into the man’s forehead. End it here and now, so that no matter what else happened the bastard would be dead.
But in less than forty-eight hours al-Quaida would hit us again.
Only Khalil knew exactly when and where the strike or strikes were going to take place.
He turned back to the viewing port. “Listen to me, Katy. I have to blow the door. I want you to turn the cot over on its side and get behind the mattress. When you’re set, I’ll do it.”
“Okay,” she said, and she turned away.
“I did not kidnap your wife,” Salman said. “I was at my embassy the entire time, and I can prove it.”
McGarvey stuffed his pistol in his belt. “Move and I will shoot you,” he said. He took out a Semtex packet, and quickly molded the small block of plastic explosive around the door lock and latch handle, while keeping a cautious eye on the prince.
The fuse was set for five seconds from the moment he cracked the acid cylinder.
He looked through the viewing port. Katy had the cot over on its side, and she was huddling down behind the mattress. “Are you ready?” he called to her.
She looked up over the edge of the cot. “Yes,” she shouted.
“Keep your head down,” McGarvey said. He cracked the fuse, then stepped a few feet away from the door, flattening himself against the wall and turning his face away.
The Semtex went off with an impressive bang, an eight-inch-wide piece of the door and its latch clattering off the corridor wall.
McGarvey pulled out his pistol, went back to Katy’s cell, and pulled the door open. “It’s okay now; you can come out,” he told her.
Salman raised his head. “May I get up?”
“Just a minute,” McGarvey told him. Katy was having trouble getting out from under the cot. “Stay put,” he warned Salman. He went into the cell, pulled the cot and mattress away, and helped his wife to her feet.
Katy came into his arms, shivering. He wanted nothing more than to hold her until she calmed down, but there was no time.
“We have to get out of here right now,” he told her. “Can you walk?”
She looked up into his eyes, and nodded. “Yes, I think so.”
“On your feet,” McGarvey called out to Salman as he helped Katy to the door.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Kahlil, the bastard who did this to you.”
At the door Katy looked at Salman as he got to his feet. Then she turned back to her husband. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“What do you mean, Katy?” McGarvey asked. “It’s him. The man from the cruise ship, the one who brought you here, did this—”
Katy was shaking her head. She looked at Salman again. “Darling, I recognize the man, of course. He’s Prince Salman. He could practically be Khalil’s twin. But he’s not the one who beat me up. The one from Alaska. I know it for a fact, because he was just here not more than an hour ago.”

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