Soldier of God (28 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Soldier of God
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McGarvey looked at his cards. He’d dealt himself a queen and a seven.
Salman looked at his cards, and shrugged.
“Carte,”
he said, which meant his hand totaled five or less.
McGarvey dealt the prince the six of hearts faceup.
Salman shrugged again, and he flipped his down cards over to show a jack and a king. His hand totaled six.
McGarvey threw his head back and laughed, then gave Salman a vicious look of satisfaction as he turned his cards over.
“Sept,”
he said. “I win, you lose.” He laughed. “Again.”
The young woman with Salman reached down to kiss him on the cheek, but he brushed her away like she was an annoying insect. “Eight hundred thousand?” He directed his question to the
chef de parti
.
McGarvey shook his head, and slid the shoe to the man on his right. “I came looking for a challenge, not a slaughter.”
Salman turned, his eyes narrow, a slight sardonic smile on his thin lips. “Perhaps another time, then? Another, more interesting game?”
“I’m looking forward to it.” McGarvey got up, tossed two black plaques to the croupier and chef de parti, and walked out, the crowd parting respectfully for him.
The opening shot had been fired, and walking back to his hotel McGarvey found that he was actually looking forward to whatever came next. He wasn’t yet certain that Salman and Khalil were one and the same, but he was certain that he would kill the man, and do it very soon.
McGarvey was having a late breakfast on the balcony in his suite when Salman’s secretary telephoned at nine. “The prince would like you to join him aboard the yacht this morning to continue your conversation, then perhaps take a short cruise this afternoon.”
McGarvey smiled. Salman was reacting exactly the way a man with an overinflated ego would act. “What time should I be there?”
“A car and driver are at the front door of your hotel now.”
“Tell the prince I’d be happy to join him,” McGarvey said, and he hung up the phone.
From where he sat, he could see Salman’s yacht docked at the outer pier just inside the breakwater across the bay in La Condamine. A French Alouette helicopter was parked on the ship’s afterdeck, but the distance was too great for McGarvey to make out much detail, except that the ship was very large and all her flags were flying as if the prince was celebrating something.
Which, McGarvey mused, he was if he was the terrorist Khalil.
McGarvey took his time finishing his coffee and croissants and the
Herald Tribune
before he took a leisurely shower and got dressed in white slacks, a soft yellow, light, V-neck sweater, and tasseled loafers without socks. He debated arming himself, but decided against it. This invitation to the yacht was too open and public a move for anything untoward to happen, unless it was an accident, for which a pistol would be no defense.
The car was a pearl-white Mercedes S500 with Spanish plates, and if the very large German driver was impatient for having been kept waiting, he did not show it as he opened the rear door.
“There was a pretty girl with the prince at the casino last night. Tall, blonde. Will she be aboard this morning?” McGarvey asked.
The driver nodded. “That would be Inge Poulsen, the prince’s social secretary.”
McGarvey snapped his fingers, as he’d forgotten something. “Give me a minute,” he said, and he walked back into the hotel.
He went to the concierge, an attractive young woman in a light blue blazer with the hotel’s crest on the breast pocket. She looked up, smiling. “Good morning, Monsieur Brewster. How may I be of service?”
“How soon can you have a dozen roses delivered to Prince Salman’s yacht?”
“How soon would you like them delivered?”
“Within fifteen minutes.”
Her smile broadened only slightly. “That won’t be a problem, sir.” She took a card from a drawer, and handed it and a pen across to McGarvey.
“They’re to be delivered in person to Mademoiselle Inge Poulsen,” McGarvey said. He wrote on the card as the concierge dialed a number.
From an admirer. Kirk.
She said something into the phone, then nodded and hung up. “The flowers will be delivered to the yacht within fifteen minutes.”
McGarvey handed her the card and a one-hundred-euro note, then put on his sunglasses and went back out to the car and driver Salman had sent for him. The docks were less than one thousand meters as the crow flies, but they had to skirt the bay, and traffic was heavy, so it took nearly ten minutes to get to the yacht.
The morning was warm. Only a slight breeze fluttered the flags that had been run up on halyards along the port and starboard and from the bow to the masthead above the bridge deck. The yacht was a Feadship, built in Holland. At 428 feet on deck, she was sleek, with a long tapering bow, a sharply sloping superstructure with sweeping curved lines, until the stern, where a wide sundeck overlooked an even wider helipad.
In the bright sunlight the brilliant white hull sparkled like a precious stone under a jeweler’s lamp. No other yacht in the harbor came close to the splendor of the
Bedouin Wanderer
, and in fact, Salman’s ship was larger than Adnan Khashoggi’s before him, and even larger than the yacht on which Aristotle Onassis had hosted parties with his wife Jacqueline.
A ship’s officer, dressed in an immaculate white uniform shirt and shorts, waited at the head of the boarding ladder, but McGarvey ignored him and sauntered down the dock to the stern of the yacht for a better look at the helicopter. It looked new, its registration numbers were Spanish, and although the rotors were still tied down, the windshield was not covered and the engine air intake ports were not blocked. Nor were the tips of the rotors sheathed, as they would be if the ship was preparing to sail this afternoon with the chopper on deck.
A florist’s van pulled up behind the Mercedes, and the delivery boy brought a long flower box across to the yacht. He said something to the officer, who gave McGarvey a questioning look, and then led the boy aft and up to the sundeck above the helipad.
After a moment or two the delivery boy followed the officer back to the main deck and left the ship. In the meantime, Inge Poulsen, the beautiful woman from the night before, came to the rail of the sundeck. She wore only the thong bottom of a white bikini. Her breasts were small, her shoulders and neck narrow, her face tiny with high cheekbones, and when she lifted her sunglasses, McGarvey could see that her eyes were very large.
She had taken the roses out of the box and held them to her nose.
McGarvey raised his sunglasses.
“Bon matin, Mademoiselle. Le parfum c’est agreable?”
“Très bien, merci. Mais vous êtes trop aimable.”
“Not at all,” McGarvey said. He nodded to her, then walked back to the gangway and boarded the yacht. “I believe that I’m expected,” he told the officer who looked nervous, as if he was expecting trouble.
“The prince has been awaiting your arrival, sir. Are you familiar with the yacht?”
McGarvey glanced through the big windows into the main saloon, and shook his head. “Never been here before.” He looked at the officer. “Where is everybody?”
“There are no guests this morning,” the officer said. He pointed the way aft. “The prince is in the
salle de gym
. I’ll show you.”
McGarvey almost laughed. On a boat such as this, owned by a man such as Salman, there would not simply be an exercise room. He followed the officer beneath the stairs that led up to the helipad and sundeck, through a door, and down a short, plushly carpeted and expensively decorated passageway to a second door.
“Just here, Monsieur,” the officer said, opening the door and stepping aside to allow McGarvey to pass.
Two figures dressed in white jackets and knickers, mesh masks covering their faces, were fencing in the large gymnasium that was located directly beneath the helipad. The port, starboard, and forward bulkheads were mirrored floor-to-ceiling, but the aft bulkhead was a solid sheet of floor-to-ceiling tinted glass that curved across the entire stern. Fencing blades and masks and other equipment were lined up on a rack against one wall, and state-of-the-art exercise equipment trimmed in gold was scattered here and there around the room, except for on the fencing strip that was two meters wide and ran the length of the
gym.
The effect was stunning; it was a hedonist’s pleasure palace, like the yacht’s exterior, very expensively done, but gaudy and without taste.
The taller, much bulkier fencer, who McGarvey took to be Salman, was much better than his opponent; his footwork was superior, his hand speed dazzling, and his technique of the blade very strong, very aggressive.
Twice the smaller fencer was forced backward under Salman’s onslaught, the second time stumbling and almost falling to the deck when Salman moved in with a counter six, viciously disarming his opponent and sending the épée clattering into a stationary bike.
Salman ripped off his mask and tossed it aside. His face was screwed up into a state of extreme disdain and anger, as if the person he’d just beaten was nothing more than an insignificant insect who’d had the audacity to challenge him. He said something sharp and harsh in Arabic.
His opponent stumbled back another step under the verbal onslaught, then slowly removed her mask to reveal that she was just a round-faced girl, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. Her eyes filled with tears. She spotted McGarvey, and immediately turned away in embarrassment. She said something to Salman that sounded like an apology, then hurried away through a door on the opposite side of the gym.
The prince studied McGarvey’s reflection in the mirrors, then turned, a wry smile on his handsome face, the épée held loosely in his right hand. “I expected you sooner.”
McGarvey shrugged. “I was engaged, doing my sums.”
The prince’s smile widened. “It was only money.”
Khalil wasn’t a man who expected to lose, and McGarvey figured that was another point of similarity between the two men—if they were two. “There was that too.” He nodded toward the door the young girl had left by. “Do you treat all your women that way?”
Salman’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing in Monaco undercover, Mr. McGarvey?”
McGarvey shrugged again. “Looking for some action, like last night.”
Salman was amused. “Your luck would have turned, and you would have lost your million dollars.”
“I don’t think so. I’m not some young girl you can slap around and intimidate.” McGarvey grinned, trying to goad the man. “I fight back.”
Salman was like a chameleon; none of the anger directed at the girl remained. His color had returned to normal, and his composure was nearly perfect, except that his fingers tightened on the épée handle. “If you must know, Sofia is my daughter. I am raising her to be strong.”
McGarvey knew Salman had no daughter that age. “The Bedouin way with their girls, is that it? Raise them to be strong, or else leave them exposed in the desert to die. Better six weakling sons than one daughter, no matter how able.”
Salman’s jaw clenched very slightly. “I would have thought that a man of your position … and talents … would have remained on the job in Washington after what happened in Alaska, and then bin Laden’s warning to your country.”
“Perhaps I’m still on the job.”
The prince snorted derisively. “You’re desperate for our oil, and yet you continue to accuse us of financing terrorism. I’ve heard it all before, and frankly little men like you are becoming tiresome. I can understand why Haynes fired you.”
For just a second McGarvey could almost believe that Salman was innocent. A man didn’t have to be a gentleman to be not guilty. But all of the evidence that Otto had collected on Khalil and Salman’s movements was too much to be nothing more than a fantastic run of coincidences. And looking into the man’s eyes, talking to him now, seeing the slip in his self-control when he’d been angry with the young girl, his bearing and conceit, the way he held himself, the way he spoke, his words, his tone of voice—all of it was Khalil.
Yet McGarvey could not be certain his belief that Salman was Khalil was not just the product of his wishing it to be so.
Alaska weighed heavily on his mind. He could not erase the images of the young mother and her infant dying in the water, and of Khalil’s hands on Katy.
“Actually I resigned,” McGarvey said, realizing that he would have to push the prince into making a mistake before he could be sure.
Salman’s expression darkened. He seemed to be on edge, his mood brittle. “You think that bin Laden is getting his money from Saudi Arabia, and that I’m brokering his connections?”
“He’s run through his own fortune, and his family has cut him off. He’s getting money from someone.”
Salman nodded. “There are a lot of wealthy Arabs who aren’t in love with America. Bin Laden has no lack of admirers. If he’s still alive. But then your FBI has already identified many of his banking connections. So
that can’t be the real reason you’ve targeted me. So what could it be? Why
are
you here?”
“I’d have thought you would have figured that out by now,” McGarvey said easily. “I’m here to kill you.”

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