The Fourth Horseman (11 page)

“Marty told us that much,” McGarvey said. “How was he handling it?”

“He’s dedicated. Said that time waited for no man, not even him. So he scurried back to his people.”

“Too dedicated?” McGarvey asked. He’d never liked things that didn’t add up.

“I guess if I were in his place I’d want to spend my last months with someone I loved, maybe lying on a beach somewhere, drinking piña coladas. Listening to some good reggae. Or maybe eating and drinking my way through Paris.”

“Unless he has an agenda.”

“Love or hate, your choice, Mac,” she said. “I’ll give you a lift over to the White House.”

“I want to have a word with Haaris first. I’ll meet you in your office.”

“I don’t have an office here.”

“Where do you work?”

“I have a place in Georgetown. Not too far from your apartment. I’ll wait for you in the cafeteria.”

*   *   *

The Pakistan Desk consisted mostly of a dozen cubicles, each with a specialist, surrounding a central meeting space that doubled as a library and tripled as a computer work center. Haaris’s office was behind a glass wall on the side of the room opposite the door.

McGarvey had been given a blue badge, which gave him access to every office on the entire campus. When he walked in, Haaris was seated in the middle of the meeting space with his staff—most of them young men, along with an older woman, her gray hair up in a bun.

Haaris looked up with a scowl. “We’re in the middle of something,” he said.

“Sorry to barge in,” McGarvey apologized. “But I’d like to have a word with you.”

“Well?”

“What’s your thinking on the situation?”

“We’re discussing it, as you may well expect.”

“I’ve been called to the White House. They want my opinion. I want yours. What’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? Seventy-two? One week? One month?”

“The million-dollar question, Mr. McGarvey. What do you think will happen?”

“Depends on whether something were to happen to the Messiah, and if it were to be blamed on us.”

Haaris laughed, though it was obvious his mouth hurt. “We were crude in Vietnam, were crude in Afghanistan and Iraq, so it wouldn’t surprise me if we botched this as well. We’ll have a position paper for the president first thing in the morning. In the meantime you may tell her, if you wish, that you are exactly the wrong sort to get involved.”

“I’ll do that,” McGarvey said. “Because I happen to agree with you.”

NINETEEN

“The man’s peckish,” McGarvey said on the way over to the White House. Pete was driving her BMW three hundred series convertible. She’d flown to Munich and bought the made-for-Europe model, and drove it for a month so that when she had it shipped back to the States it came in as a used car. She’d left to try to get over McGarvey, and she had come back with a car.

“Wouldn’t you be?” she asked.

They were on the parkway across the river, and McGarvey was in what almost amounted to a funk. He knew damn well what the president was going to ask him to do, and even some of the why of it, and he was almost 100 percent certain that getting close enough to the Messiah to put a bullet in his brain, and then getting the hell clear, was the wrong thing to do.

Except that the president would consider him expendable. If he killed the Messiah and then was caught, she could deny any knowledge. McGarvey was a rogue agent. There’d be no compunction in the White House about tossing him to the wolves. And if it came to pass that he was arrested and placed on trial, someone would show up to silence him.

It put him in a “damned if he did, damned if he didn’t” position. Which, he thought, he ought to be accustomed to by now. He’d been in similar situations just about all his professional career. Starting with taking out the general and his wife in Chile, what seemed like a couple of centuries ago.

“A penny,” Pete prompted.

“The president is going to make some wrong decisions over this thing because of the missing nuclear weapons. And I don’t know if she’ll be willing to listen to me.”

“Like you said, you can just walk away if it doesn’t feel right. But she does have a point: at least thirty nukes are unaccounted for, and we’re in no position to demand to be told who’s holding the triggers.”

“That’s one of the parts that bothers me the most. Our people went in and neutralized a lot of them, and yet other than the firefights on the ground, the government hasn’t said a word. It’s business as usual over there, according to just about everyone. For all intents and purposes Pakistan is at peace.”

“The calm before the storm?” Pete asked.

“Maybe,” McGarvey said. “But whatever happens, could be it won’t turn out so well for us as we want it to.”

*   *   *

They were expected at the East Gate and were allowed through. Pete parked at the foot of the stairs at the east portico and went up with McGarvey; one of the president’s staffers, who did not identify himself, escorted them to the West Wing.

“Just you, Mr. McGarvey,” the staffer said.

“I’ll wait out here,” Pete said.

President Miller was seated behind her desk, and when McGarvey walked in she picked up her phone and told her secretary that she was not to be disturbed. They were alone in the Oval Office.

“Thank you for coming so soon,” Miller said. She motioned for McGarvey to have a seat across from her.

“A call from the president is something difficult to ignore.”

Miller smiled faintly. “For you, not so difficult sometimes.”

McGarvey shrugged. There was no answer. “Madam President, will someone be joining us?”

“No. This meeting is just between you and me.”

“Considering what I expect you’ll ask me to do, I think a witness might be wise.”

“For exactly that reason there will be no witness,” the president said. “I want you to find and assassinate the man the Pakistanis are calling the Messiah. The one who beheaded President Barazani. I assume that you’ve seen the tape.”

“Before I agree to take on the job, I think that you have to consider what might come of it, whether I succeed or not.”

“I have,” the president said coolly.

“Such an act, even if it could be done, could spark a regional war. India might not sit on its hands if Pakistan’s government fell apart. So far as I’ve been briefed, this Messiah has not threatened to retaliate for the attacks by our nuclear response teams. Send Don Powers back to talk with him.” Donald Suthland Powers, Jr. was the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, and his father had been a legendary director of the CIA a number of years earlier. He and most of his staff had left the embassy shortly after the attacks by the Taliban had begun.

“This Messiah murdered the legitimate president in cold blood with his own hands. Nasir was murdered as well. And two hours ago I got word that the supreme court has granted the man executive and legislative authority for the next four years. He’s become a dictator.”

“The same thing happened with Musharraf in two thousand, and the country settled down. They avoided a war.”

The president was sharply angry. “Don’t try to teach me history or politics, Mr. McGarvey.”

“I’m sorry, Madam President,” McGarvey said. “But don’t try to teach me my business.”

The president started to say something, but McGarvey held her off.

“Someone on your staff, or possibly at the CIA, knowing that you had asked for me, tried to have me killed.”

“I’m told that many people and even a few governments would like to see you neutralized.”

“Two most likely Middle Eastern men, both of them dead. Maybe the autopsies will give us a clue where they were from. For now I’m betting Pakistan.”

“I told no one at the CIA why I wanted to talk to you.”

“That’s right.”

The president got it, and she flared again. “No one on my staff has any knowledge of who hired someone to kill you.”

“Before I agree to do this thing, I’ll first do as you suggested and eliminate the other possibilities. If someone else is gunning for me, I’ll find out who it is.”

“We don’t have time. The situation is too unstable. It won’t last. And at this moment I have to consider the primary threat that Pakistan poses—that of her thirty or more remaining nuclear weapons, and her ability to deliver them. And you must know that a good number of those weapons are tactical only—with ranges under one hundred miles. They’re meant for only one thing, and that’s to kill their own people.”

“Is that what your advisers are telling you?”

“No one expects India to send ground troops across the border.”

“Do you actually expect me to take on an entire country?”

“No, Mr. McGarvey, just the man; the country will follow.”

McGarvey got up.

“I’m not finished with you, mister,” the president practically shouted. “If need be you’ll sit this one out in jail.”

“That would be much easier for me.”

Miller sat back and ran her fingers through her short dark hair, a calculating look in her eyes as she considered her viable options.

At that moment McGarvey almost felt sorry for her. Just about everyone who wanted the presidency was shocked and disappointed at exactly how little actual power they had. They were mostly administrators, who hopefully would, from time to time, come up with some idea that actually worked. Truman had been right: the buck did stop in this office, though a lot of presidents after him had tried to sidestep the responsibility.

“Tell your staff what you’ve asked me to do.”

Miller started to object, but he held her off again.

“Tell them, and say that I’m thinking about it. In the meantime get Powers in motion to head back to Islamabad with most of his staff—just the volunteers—plus one.”

“You.”

“Yes. But I’ll need a day or two to see who might come out of the woodwork after me. And this time I’ll try to keep them alive long enough to ask some questions.”

“Let the CIA know,” the president said.

McGarvey shook his head. “Just the opposite. I’m going to tell them that I’m not taking the job.”

“I see,” the president said. “Isolating my staff from the CIA’s.”

TWENTY

Haaris stopped at a 7-Eleven just off Massachusetts Avenue and bought the early edition of
The Washington Post
before he drove the rest of the way home. It was coming up on three in the morning and not a lot of traffic had been moving on the parkway down from the CIA or anywhere in the city.

Steering his team into coming up with the recommendation that the U.S. should take a wait-and-see attitude on the Pakistan issue for at least the next forty-eight hours had been relatively easy, considering their respect for him, and considering he had hand-picked each of them, not for their intelligence and certainly not for their ability to think outside of the box. They’d also agreed to recommend that the entire U.S. embassy staff be sent back to Islamabad, and that an attempt at a dialogue with the Messiah be initiated.

Deb had heard the garage door open, and wearing only one of his old T-shirts as a nightgown, was waiting for him in the kitchen. Her blond hair was tousled and she was half asleep but she was smiling.

“I was getting worried about you,” she said, coming into his arms.

She was warm and soft and for just a moment he responded. She was a dolt, but she was sometimes comforting, and her love for him was unconditional. He knew what he was doing and why he was doing it—that hate burned deeply—but every now and then, like right now, he wavered.

He kissed her deeply, and when he withdrew she didn’t want to pull away.

“Come to bed, darling,” she said, her voice husky.

“Fifteen minutes. First I have to do something at my desk, and then I’ll take a shower.”

“Haven’t you done enough work for one day?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

She smiled again. “Maybe I’ll go back to sleep.”

He pecked her on the cheek. “I’ll figure out some way of waking you.”

She laughed and went back to their bedroom.

Haaris poured a glass of wine and went into his office, which overlooked the large backyard and flower garden that was Deborah’s second leading passion. It was pleasant here in the summer, when on rare occasions they sat outside listening to the night sounds, the traffic and the troubles they represented seemingly in another universe.

He turned on his computer, and once he was online entered a forty-seven-character alpha-numeric-case-sensitive totally random password that he changed on a regular basis. Almost at once a Pakistani ISI Web site came up through remailers in Sri Lanka, India and the Czech Republic.

He turned on the computer’s camera and held up the morning’s
Washington Post.
The lead stories were about the confusing issues unfolding in Pakistan. The main headline read: PAKISTAN’S BARAZANI CONFIRMED DEAD NEW MESSIAH TAKES OVER. Only the center of the front page itself, not the borders and not his hands, was visible in the image.

Entering another long password, he brought up a sub-program that contained four speeches that he had prepared five months earlier.

He clicked on one and opened it. The room was dark, the background anonymous except for a computer-generated image of Pakistan’s green and white flag with the crescent moon and a single star. He was seated on an easy chair, only his head and shoulders visible. His face was almost completely covered by a kaffiyeh, his eyes in deep shadows. The image he presented was meant to be ominous, and it was.

“My friends, we have reached the first of many way points in our blessed journey together,” he said in English.

He picked up a
Washington Post
from off camera and held it up. It was dated five months earlier. Haaris clicked on the newspaper and moved it off screen, replacing it with the morning’s front page.

“We are at peace. Across our great nation the guns and bombs have stopped. We are no longer at war with each other or with our neighbors. And yet America still sees us not as equals but merely as a client state.”

His image on the screen let the newspaper fall away.