Allah's Scorpion

TWENTY-FIVE

Rupert Graham reached Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport via Paris around eight in the evening aboard a battered Pakistan International Airlines 727 that had to have been thirty years old. As they came in for the landing, most of the Muslim passengers aboard took out their prayer beads and closed their eyes. A good many of them believed that their prayers were all that kept PIA’s aging fleet in the air.

Except for security concerns, Graham had been all but mindless of his surroundings since he’d left San José yesterday morning. He was seething inside because of his failure, and now arriving in Pakistan he was beginning to feel like a junior ensign being called before the skipper for a Captain’s Mast disciplinary action.

Yet something of what bin Laden had said during their brief telephone conversation kept repeating in his head, booming like a drum calling him to battle. Allah’s Scorpion. Something much better, something more suitable to your training.

Graham, dressed in a charcoal-gray business suit, his hair and eyebrows light again, the soft brown contacts gone, the lift shoes discarded, shuffled down the corridor with the other passengers to immigration, where he showed his Australian passport, which identified him as forty-one-year-old Talbot Barry, from Sydney, here to write a piece for a travel magazine.

He was passed through without question, but when he retrieved his single hanging bag and presented it at customs, two armed officers and a drug-sniffing dog conducted a thorough search not only of the bag, but of his body. Through it all he kept his composure, cooperating completely, and even smiling.

Pakistan had been granted the most favored nation status by the United States and was getting a lot of aid. As a result, Islamabad was doing everything in its power to keep up the illusion that it was actively seeking out terrorists, especially the remnants of the Taliban, as well as al-Quaida and specifically bin Laden, who was supposedly hiding out in the mountains of the far northwest.

When his bag was finally stamped and he was given an entry pass, he marched through the busy terminal and outside, where a dark Mercedes S500 with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. Graham got into the backseat and the driver, a bulky dark-complected man in a business suit, pulled smoothly out into traffic and without a word headed into the city.

“Were you followed?” the driver asked, in English, his voice low, menacing. He was one of bin Laden’s chief bodyguards and gofers.

It was an extremely rude question, but one that Graham could philosophically understand because of his failure in Panama. “I was not.”

It was a weekday and the traffic volume was heavy the nearer they got to downtown, especially in the broad band of slums they had to pass through. But Graham was again lost in thought, only subliminally noticing his surroundings.

He’d been born and raised in the Collyhurst slum of Manchester, his father a collier and his mother a laundress. Early on he’d learned to defend himself from the other boys, because he was small for his age.

There was never enough money, and yet he showed an early promise in grammar school, so on the advice of the schoolmaster, and a scholarship, they managed to scrape together enough money to let him finish through college prep.

Of course college was completely out of the question, financially, so Graham had joined the Royal Navy and was sent to Dounreay in Scotland to learn nuclear engineering, graduating number five in his class of fifty.

From there he received his primary submarine officer’s training, graduating first in his class, and was sent out into the fleet.

A century ago, he reflected. A completely different lifetime, because in those days he’d had legitimacy, a pride in what he was doing. There had been more schooling, more promotions, new ships, new mates, new adventures.

And throughout it all, almost from the beginning had been Jillian; dear, sweet, pixie-faced Jillian whom he had loved with every fiber of his being.

He closed his eyes, a frown crossing his features. There had been two incidents during Perisher before he’d been given command of his own sub, in which the old man had taken him aside for a word in private.

Jillian had been admitted to the base hospital twice in three months; the first with cracked ribs and a lot of bruising on her arms and chest, and the second with a fractured left arm and three teeth knocked out. In both incidents she’d told the emergency room doctors that she was clumsy and had fallen down the cellar stairs.

But it wasn’t true, and although no one had believed her stories, nothing could be done. The old man had counseled Graham on anger management during times of extreme stress.

“You’ll need your wits about you if you should suddenly find yourself in a dicey situation a dozen miles off some Russian peninsula in the Barents Sea. Can’t be losing your head. Your men will be watching your every move.”

The thing was, he could no longer remember the incidents in any great detail, nor could he bring up an image of Jillian’s face in his mind. It frightened him.

But what was permanently etched in his brain was the fact that the same man who had counseled him on anger management had not sent the recall message so that Graham could get back from sea in time to be at Jillian’s side when she died.

Afterwards he’d demanded that the staff judge advocate’s office investigate. But his request had been denied. Admiral Woodrow S. B. Holmes had acted well within the responsibilities of his office by not recalling a nuclear submarine on patrol for the sake of a personal problem, no matter how high-ranking the officer was, nor how serious the problem was. The needs of the Royal Navy had to come first.

In the heart of the city’s business and banking district the Mercedes turned onto M. R. Kayani Road and two blocks later entered a secured underground parking garage that served the forty-eight-story M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre.

Graham had only been here twice before, and he thought that it was a great irony that bin Laden had been hiding out in Pakistan’s largest city all along, when the entire world, especially the American CIA, believed he was somewhere in the mountains on the border with Afghanistan.

Five levels down the driver pulled up at an elevator, but he didn’t get out to open the car door for Graham. “You may go directly up. He is expecting you.”

“Will you wait for me?” Graham asked. The driver was looking at him in the rearview mirror.

“That will be up to him.”

“Very well,” Graham said. He let himself out of the car, got his bag, and walked across to the elevator, which automatically started up. A closed-circuit camera mounted near the ceiling was trained on him. Security in this building was very tight because of all the wealthy business tenants. No one who didn’t belong here got in or out. Ever.

But an even more delicious irony was that a small international investments company on the tenth floor that handled money transactions for the Afghanistan heroin trade was, in fact, a front for a CIA special mission station. Only a very few people in Pakistan’s secret intelligence service knew about it, or its purpose, which was to find and eliminate Afghanistan’s drug overlords as well as the handlers along the pipeline to the United States.

The elevator came to a halt on the twenty-fifth floor and Graham stepped out into a plushly carpeted entry hall, across which was a single door. An old man in Western dress was there.

“Good evening, Captain Graham,” the old man said. He was one of bin Laden’s inner circle, though Graham had never been told his name.

“Will I be staying here tonight, or have hotel arrangements been made for me?”

“You will remain here, with us, for the time being,” the old man said. He was frail and his voice was pleasantly soft, but there was no warmth in his eyes or his manner. “Come with me.”

Graham followed the old man into the suite of offices and living spaces, down a long corridor to a small room in approximately the center of the building. Furnished only with an Oriental rug and a small television set on a tiny round table, the space was lit by a single small-wattage bulb that hung from the ceiling. There were no woven hangings, pictures, or any other adornments on the walls, nor were there windows. This was the inner sanctum, where bin Laden prayed five times per day, where he watched CNN, once in the morning and once each evening, and where he held the most secret of his meetings.

“Wait here,” the old man said, and he withdrew.

Graham dropped his garment bag in the corner, slipped off his shoes, and sat cross-legged on the edge of the rug.

Both times he’d been called to this place he’d met with bin Laden in this room, but never before had he stayed in the building for more than an hour. All of his other planning sessions with the man had been conducted via encrypted e-mail or encrypted satellite phone or, once in person, at the training camp in the Syrian Desert.

And at each meeting bin Laden had greeted him like an old friend, a long-lost brother. Graham suspected that this time it would be different. The mission had failed and he knew that he would be blamed, though he strongly suspected that the leak had come from someone here in Pakistan, or more likely someone from the Syrian training camp.

There was a twenty-five-million-dollar bounty on bin Laden’s head, but no one who knew the man’s real location would ever reveal it. He would not live to collect the money, let alone spend it. But feeding the American authorities information about al-Quaida missions was becoming a high-stakes cottage industry. In practical terms it meant that only a very select few men were allowed to know the whole picture of any mission.

Graham decided that if nothing else happened he would find the traitor and personally slit his throat.

A clean-shaven bin Laden, dressed in khaki slacks and a white long-sleeved shirt, entered the room. Graham started to get to his feet, but bin Laden waved him back. “It is good that you have returned unharmed. You may consider yourself lucky.”

“Who was he?”

Bin Laden sat down on the rug and faced Graham. “His name is Kirk McGarvey.”

Graham allowed a look of wonder to cross his face. “He was the director of the CIA.”

“Yes, but more than that he is an assassin.”

“The Americans no longer do that sort of thing ….”

“You’re a submarine commander, not an intelligence officer, so your error is understandable,” bin Laden said mildly. “And now you are the second man to come to me a failure against McGarvey.”

“Where is the other?”

“He tried again and died,” bin Laden said.

“I’m not so easy to kill,” Graham said, irritated.

“I sincerely hope not. But McGarvey is not your problem. You will remain here until he is eliminated.”

Graham’s anger spiked. He sat forward. “I want him,” he said sharply.

Bin Laden was unmoved. “If he sees you again he will kill you,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen. I have another use for you.”

“What?”

“In due time, my friend. Do not let your anger and impatience get the better of you. Not if you wish to continue your jihad against the godless men who abused your trust so harshly.”

“You said it was a mission more suited to my training,” Graham said. “Can you at least tell me if it involves a submarine?”

Bin Laden looked at him for a long time, before he finally nodded, the gesture so slight it was almost unnoticeable.

A thrill coursed through Graham like a hit of cocaine to a desperate man. All of his training had been for one purpose, and one purpose alone; to command an underwater warship. To train a crew and lead his men into battle. All other considerations were secondary: pain, fear, conscience, ego. Even love.

“Until the mission preparation fully develops you will remain here at my side.”

“I should be involved in the planning,” Graham said. “For God’s sake, I’m a trained sub driver. I have the knowledge.”

“Yes, which is exactly why you will not be allowed to leave this place until the time is correct,” bin Laden said. “You are too valuable an asset to risk.”

“Then why was I sent on the canal strike?” Graham demanded.

“Because I wasn’t sure that we could get a boat,” bin Laden said.

“My God, you’ve done it? You’ve got a sub?”

“In due time,” bin Laden said. “Now leave me, I wish to be alone. Salaam will show you to your quarters.”

Graham got up, retrieved his bag and shoes, and left the room without another word. His mind was alive with the possibilities that another command would give him. The entire world would be his, and he meant to take it.

By the time he was finished, the damage would be incalculable.

TWENTY-SIX

Across the bay from Leeward Point Field, which served as Gitmo’s airport, the U.S. Navy Station senior personnel were housed in base headquarters, which was also home to the U.S. Army’s senior Detainee Ops personnel.

The navy ran the station, but the army was in charge of the prisoners — mostly al-Quaida and Taliban, and the mujahideen who fought for them.

The navy’s ONI handled most of the prisoner interrogations after the backlash against the army’s methods at Abu Ghraib, but Army MPs were still in charge of security at all six camps.

It was an odd melding of the services, but it seemed to work, despite pressures from Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the international media to close the place.

This morning McGarvey and Gloria Ibenez had flown down aboard a Navy C-20D, which was a Gulfstream III used to transport VIPs. They were seated at a conference table at base headquarters across from Brigadier General Lazlo Maddox, who was the CO of detainee operations, his chief of intelligence operations, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Higgins, and Lieutenant Commander T. Thomas Weiss, the one Gloria had warned McGarvey about. He was the senior ONI officer at Delta.

“I was asked by the secretary of defense to cooperate with you,” General Maddox said. “And that’s what we’ll do. But I don’t like it.” He was a tall, rangy man in his early fifties, with salt-and-pepper hair cut short in the Depression-era style with no sideburns. He was dressed in camouflage BDUs.

“We appreciate it, General,” McGarvey said pleasantly, and he glanced over at Weiss, who had an angry scowl on his face. “We’ll try to cause as little disruption as possible, and get out of here as soon as we can.”

“There will not be a repeat of last week’s incident in which three of my people were KIA, do I make myself clear?”

Gloria stepped in before McGarvey could speak. “Excuse me, General, but my partner and I did not start it.” She was hot, but on the way down she’d promised to control herself. “Your three people were already dead by the time we stumbled onto the prison break.”

McGarvey sat back. They had not made a decision to play bad-cop, good-cop, and it wouldn’t work with Maddox anyway. He’d seen the general’s jacket. As a young captain during the first Gulf War he had been awarded every decoration except the Medal of Honor. His nickname was “Icewater.” But with Weiss it could be different. The man was in love with himself.

“If you had stayed out of it, your partner wouldn’t have been shot to death,” Weiss jumped in angrily. He was in crisp summer undress whites. “And most likely the Coast Guard would have recovered all five prisoners, and the strike force that hit us, before they got five miles offshore.”

“They could have been halfway back to Iran before anybody knew they were gone,” Gloria shot back. “Bob was just doing his job, something you apparently don’t understand.”

McGarvey held up a hand. “Can we get back on track here?”

Weiss started to say something, but Maddox held him off. “Amnesty International will be here in two days to make sure we’re no longer using Biscuit teams.” Psychiatrist M.D.s had been used in units called Behavioral Sciences Consultation Teams, Biscuit teams for short, to help interrogators increase the stress levels of prisoners. It made questioning of them a lot easier. But there had been ethical issues and the White House had ordered the practice be stopped. “You will be gone from this base before they arrive. Is that also clear?”

“I expect we’ll be done by then,” McGarvey said.

Maddox turned to Weiss and then Gloria. “And the fireworks between you two will cease and desist right now.”

Weiss wanted to protest, but he nodded darkly.

Gloria smiled. “Sorry, General, just trying to do my job.”

“Very well,” Maddox said. “What brings a former CIA director here, or is your mission so secret we can’t be told?”

“Not at all,” McGarvey replied pleasantly. He watched Weiss’s eyes. “Al-Quaida has hired an ex — British Royal Navy submarine captain, and we think the organization is trying to raise a crew for him. The five men who were broken out last week were all ex — Iranian navy.”

Weiss didn’t blink.

“We didn’t know that,” Lieutenant Colonel Higgins said. He was a West Point graduate who had never seen battle. He’d gotten his law degree and had spent a large portion of his career at the Pentagon. He was a mild-mannered — looking man, with thin brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Like Maddox, he was dressed in BDUs.

“Not ex-navy,” Weiss put in. “We think they were on active duty when they were rounded up on the Iranian border. We were working on confirming it, in which case they would have been released.”

“Why wasn’t I told?” Higgins demanded.

“Dan, we just weren’t sure,” Weiss said. “And we still aren’t.” He glanced at Gloria. “If we could have recaptured them alive we might have found out.”

“There’ve been no IDs on the bodies of the strike force they sent against us,” Higgins told McGarvey. “We think they were al-Quaida, but in light of this they could just as likely have been Iranian special forces here to rescue their people.”

“With the cooperation of the Cubans—” Gloria said, but McGarvey held her off with a gesture.

“That’s purely speculation,” Higgins replied calmly. Unlike Weiss, who was posturing, he was in control; a lawyer discussing the dry facts of a civil case. “They probe our perimeter at least once a week, and that’s been going on for months now.”

Gloria wanted to protest, but McGarvey held her off again. “Our people are working on that aspect.”

“I’m sure they are,” Maddox said. “Which brings us back to the question at hand. What are you doing here?”

“We have the names of four additional prisoners we believe might have navy backgrounds. We’d like to interview them. If al-Quaida is trying to raise a crew the word will have gotten out. They may have heard something.”

“There’ve been no unauthorized communications to or from this camp,” Weiss said, and he looked to Higgins for confirmation, but the colonel merely cocked his head as he looked at McGarvey.

“Right,” McGarvey replied dryly. “They’ve got themselves a sub captain, now if they can come up with a crew they could hit us harder than 9/11.”

“Isn’t the CIA forgetting something?” Weiss wanted to know. “Captains and crews don’t mean much if they don’t have a boat. Or are you saying they managed to snatch someone’s submarine.”

“We’re working on it.”

“I’ll bet you are. In the meantime, the prisoners belong to me.”

McGarvey held his silence. If Weiss was on someone’s payroll, he was either very dull, or bright enough to hide behind what was almost too obvious a show of stupidity.

Weiss again looked to Higgins for support, but again the colonel said nothing. “Give me your names, and I’ll check them against our database,” he told McGarvey. “If I come up with something, I’ll arrange for the interviews. Supervised interviews.”

McGarvey nodded. “We’ll need a translator who speaks Farsi as well as Arabic.”

“We have them,” Weiss said. “And I’ll be looking over your shoulder.”

Otto had come up with the four names, out of the three-hundred-plus prisoners being held here. But he had no solid evidence linking any of them with the Iranian navy, only speculation derived from the transcripts of the interviews of more than two thousand detainees since the start of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The only real information he’d come up with was on the five prisoners who had been broken out last week. McGarvey didn’t think they would learn much from these four, but he wanted to see what Weiss’s reaction would be. If the navy spook was the conduit, breaking him could give them a path that might stretch all the way back to Pakistan.

“I have no objections to that, provided you promise not to interfere, and that you’ll give us a decent translator,” McGarvey said.

“We can have one of ours flown down by this afternoon,” Gloria suggested on cue.

“I have some good people on staff,” Weiss said, not asking the obvious: Why hadn’t they brought their own translator in the first place?

But Higgins got it, and he managed to hide a slight smile behind his hand.

“Very well,” McGarvey said.

Gloria took four thin files from her attaché case and handed them across the conference table to Weiss. “Assa al-Haq, Yohanan Qurayza, Zia Warrag, and Ali bin Ramdi,” she said. “We know that they’re here, but not much else.”

Weiss briefly glanced at the material, then nodded smugly. He’d managed to push his weight around. “Go over to the BOQ, get settled, and grab a late lunch over at the O Club. As soon as I come up with something, I’ll send a runner for you.”

“Make this happen, Commander,” General Maddox said. “Without trouble, so our guests will get what they came for, and leave on schedule.”

“You can count on it, sir,” Weiss said. He got to his feet, nodded to Higgins, and left.

“We’re in a delicate situation here, Ms. Ibenez,” Maddox said. “Is there any chance that Cuban intelligence knows that you’ve returned?”

“I honestly don’t know, General,” she said. “It might depend on if there’s a leak here on base.”

The general’s expression darkened. “Do your job and get out of here.” He gave McGarvey a bleak look, then got up and left the conference room.

Colonel Higgins stayed behind. “Do you need transportation?”

“Just get us a vehicle, we won’t need a driver,” McGarvey said. “What’s the problem with Weiss?”

Higgins managed a slight grin. “Tom takes some getting used to. His friends love him, but everyone else has trouble with him. But he’s got a tough job to do, and he’s under a microscope that stretches all the way back to Washington. Your being here doesn’t help.”

“Does he have any friends?” Gloria asked.

Higgins shook his head. “None that I know of.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Adkins and the others stood up as his secretary, Dhalia Swanson, ushered Bob Talarico’s widow, Toni, and her two children, Robert Jr. and Hillary, into the DCI’s office.

It was nearly two o’clock and he’d not had the time to have lunch, for which he was grateful now, because his stomach did a slow roll. Toni Talarico was a small woman, scarcely five feet tall — Bob had called her his pocket Tintoretto — but this afternoon it seemed as if she had sunk inside herself. Her ten-year-old son was as tall as she, and her eight-year-old daughter came to her mother’s shoulders.

She wore a black dress and a small pillbox hat, and the children, one on each hand, were dressed in black as well.

They looked shell-shocked. It was the first impression that came into Adkins’s mind. They weren’t so much sad as they were dazed, especially Toni. It was as if they’d been in a fierce battle, but that they expected Bob to be here in the DCI’s office waiting for them. They wanted someone to tell them that everything would be okay.

But it wouldn’t be. Because Bob was dead, and Adkins thought back to when his wife had died. He hadn’t really accepted that fact as reality until six months later when he woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. He’d turned on every light in the house and had gone searching for her, convinced that she had been hiding from him. That morning, he’d finally come to terms with his loss, and had finally begun the process of grieving and healing.

He sincerely hoped that Toni would recover faster than he had; for her children’s sake, if not for her own.

Her husband’s boss, Howard McCann, gave her and the girl a hug, and shook Robert Jr.’s hand. “I’m sorry, Toni,” he said, choking on the words.

She smiled up at him and patted his arm. “He knew the risks when he took the oath. I just want to know that what he gave his life for was worth it.”

“Every bit,” Adkins said. “What he and his partner did might have saved us from another 9/11, or at least pointed us in that direction.”

Toni looked at the others — the DDCI David Whittaker and the Company General Counsel Carleton Patterson. “Where is she?”

“We can’t tell—” McCann started.

“She’s back in Cuba following up,” Adkins said. “She has Kirk McGarvey with her. But that can’t leave this room.”

Toni actually smiled, which nearly tore Adkins’s heart out. “Bob always said that he was the best man to ever work here. And don’t worry, Mr. Director, we’re a CIA family. We know how to keep a secret.”

“Dad taught us,” Robert Jr. said, trying very hard to be brave.

Adkins caught his secretary’s eye. She was at the door, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks. She started to leave, but he motioned her back. “You may stay,” he said.

She closed the door and came to stand just behind Toni and the children.

Whittaker handed Adkins a long narrow hinged box, and a leather-bound citation folder. “You must also understand that this cannot be made public.”

Toni’s lips compressed, and she nodded. “But the children and I will know. That would have been enough for Bob. He wasn’t looking for hero status.”

“But he was just that, Mrs. Talarico,” Patterson told her. “An American hero.”

Adkins opened the silk-lined box that contained an impressive-looking medal attached to a ribbon and brass clasp, and he and everyone else in the room straightened up.

“The United States of America, the Central Intelligence Agency, and a grateful nation, bestow posthumously the Distinguished Service medal to Senior Field Officer Robert Benjamin Talarico, for service far beyond the call of duty,” Adkins began solemnly. “Although the details of the mission in which Robert gave his life cannot be disclosed at this time, be assured that the operation was of extreme importance and absolutely vital to U.S. interests here and abroad, as well as the safety of all Americans everywhere.

“Be also assured that witnesses on scene, including his partner, Senior Field Officer Gloria Ibenez, report that to the very end Robert did not hesitate to perform his duty, even though he was under direct fire from a hostile force superior in numbers and armament.”

Adkins looked into Toni’s eyes, momentarily at a loss for words. But then he handed her the medal and the citation folder. “He did good,” he said softly. “Really good.”

“Thank you, Mr. Director.”

Adkins gave her a hug. “If you need anything, day or night, call me,” he said in her ear. “And my name is Dick.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

By six in the evening McGarvey was getting the impression that just about all the prisoners knew something big was on the verge of happening. Al-Quaida was preparing to strike another deadly blow at the infidel West, and very soon. It seemed to be an article of faith at least as strong as their belief in the Qur’an. As the MP bringing in the last of the four prisoners for interrogation commented, “They’re happy.” It was ominous.

Weiss had sent a runner over to the Officers’ Club around two thirty to bring McGarvey and Gloria up the hill to the interrogation center inside Camp Delta. All four of the men on Otto’s list had been located, and had been brought over to one of the holding rooms.

Weiss had also brought a translator, Chief Petty Officer First Class Sayyid Deyhim, who’d been born in Tehran, but who’d been raised and educated in the United States since he was thirteen. He was a short, slightly built man with dark skin, thick black hair, and deep-set eyes.

“Do you also speak Arabic?” McGarvey had asked when they were introduced.

“Yes, but I do not like it,” Deyhim shot back. “Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. There’s a big difference.” He was angry. Weiss had probably warned him not to cooperate with the CIA.

“Not these days,” McGarvey had told him. “Anyway, I thought that you were an American.”

They had gathered in one of the interrogation rooms, furnished only with a low wooden bench that was bolted to the bare concrete floor. A water hose was connected to a spigot at the back of the small room, and there was a drain in the floor beneath the bench. There were no windows, but the room was brightly lit by recessed bulbs in the ceiling, protected by steel mesh.

Deyhim glanced at Weiss, who just shrugged.

“We don’t have to be friends,” McGarvey said, his voice cold. “But we will be taping the interviews, so I suggest that your translations be accurate.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“Sir,” McGarvey said.

Deyhim had glanced again at Weiss. “Yes, sir,” he said.

That had been three interviews ago, during which time the man had apparently done his job well; providing simultaneous translations of McGarvey’s and Gloria’s questions into Farsi, and the Iranian prisoners’ answers into English.

The MP ushered the round-faced prisoner into the interrogation room, where he was directed to have a seat on the bench. He was dressed in orange coveralls, white slippers on his feet. His hair had been closely cut, and his wrists were bound by a plastic restraint, which the MP cut loose before he left the room.

“This one is a Saudi,” Weiss said. “Ali bin Ramdi. He was arrested in early November oh-three, in Qandahar, Afghanistan, along with eighteen other so-called freedom fighters. He follows the rules, but to this point he’s given us no useful intel.”

The prisoner looked from Weiss, who was leaning against the wall near the door, to Gloria, who was standing next to Deyhim. He seemed calm, sure of himself, and just like the others, even a little excited, maybe happy.

McGarvey sat down astraddle the opposite end of the bench, and smiled. “How soon before Saudi women get the vote?” he asked.

Deyhim hesitated for just a moment, but then translated the question into Arabic.

A smirk crossed the prisoner’s face. “‘Never,’ he said,” Deyhim translated. “‘We are not Kuwait or Iran.’”

“Where do you get your news, Ali?” McGarvey asked pleasantly. Kuwaiti women had not been given the right to vote until after bin Ramdi’s arrest. Supposedly prisoners here were not given access to newspapers, radios, or televisions.

“‘One hears things,’” Deyhim translated.

“I’m sure they do,” McGarvey agreed. “It’s too bad about your brothers last week.”

Bin Ramdi shrugged, but said nothing.

“Their deaths were meaningless. They served no purpose. They were not martyrs.” McGarvey shook his head. “No Paradise for them.”

“‘Paradise awaits all who serve the jihad.’”

“Yes, but not like the brothers who died hitting New York and Washington,” McGarvey said. “They truly died martyrs. Allah had to be pleased. Whereas with you and the others …”

Bin Ramdi’s eyes narrowed.

“Palestinian women are willing to die for the cause, why not Saudi women?”

Deyhim looked over at Weiss and then McGarvey. “I don’t understand this line of questioning, sir.”

“It’s not necessary for you to understand,” McGarvey said. He didn’t take his eyes from the prisoner’s. “Just translate, please.”

Deyhim translated the question, and bin Ramdi’s thick lips twisted in a smirk. “‘Our women play a more important role than to be wasted thus.’”

McGarvey smiled and slapped his knee. “I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “It’s the same for American women. They even work for the FBI and CIA. Some of them serve in our military forces.”

Bin Ramdi shook his head. “‘That is not allowed for Saudi women.’”

“Not even in your navy?” McGarvey asked, as if he were surprised. “They could be trained to serve on something like one of the gunboats you crewed.”

“‘I was on a destroyer—’” bin Ramdi said, but he immediately realized his mistake and stopped.

“Destroyer?” McGarvey said. He turned to Weiss. “Commander, let me see this man’s file.”

Weiss had an odd, thoughtful expression on his face that was hard to read; it was as if he’d been caught by an unpleasant surprise. He hesitated for a moment, but then brought the file over.

McGarvey opened it, and pretended to read. He looked up. “This says you were a gunner’s mate aboard a patrol boat. Have we been wrong about you?”

Deyhim translated, but bin Ramdi knew that he had walked into a trap, and he kept silent.

“Look, straighten us out, if you will,” McGarvey said. “If you were a gunner’s mate who we think went over to al-Quaida, that’s one thing. We’ll keep you here for as long as we want.” McGarvey looked to Gloria after Deyhim finished translating. “Tell him.”

“If you follow Uncle Osama you are a pig and deserve to die,” she said harshly.

“We’re not going in that direction,” Weiss broke in before Deyhim could translate.

“Why?” McGarvey said, keeping direct eye contact with bin Ramdi.

“We’re not allowed to humiliate them.”

“But they’re allowed to crash airplanes, killing innocent people?” McGarvey shot back, without raising his voice. “Get your head out of your ass, Weiss, I may be on to something here.”

“Amnesty International would love to get its hands on something like this,” Weiss said. “Your interviews are over. I’ll talk to the general, but you two are definitely out of here. If not tonight then first thing in the morning.”

“What the fuck are you hiding?” Gloria asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Weiss demanded.

“Are you protecting this bastard, or just covering your own ass?”

Bin Ramdi was paying close attention to the exchange. It seemed to McGarvey that the man probably understood more English than he’d let on. It was in his eyes, a tightening at the corners when Gloria had challenged Weiss. The son of a bitch knew what was going on.

“The commander is right,” McGarvey said, getting to his feet. “We’re about done here.”

Gloria gave him a searching look.

“We lost one of our people, and we were to blame,” McGarvey told Weiss. “Sorry if we came on strong, but we wanted to make it right.”

Weiss was only partially mollified. “We don’t want another Abu Ghraib here,” he said. “And Ms. Ibenez is right, I am covering my ass, and everyone else’s working for me.”

McGarvey looked at bin Ramdi and when he had the man’s complete attention, he winked. Neither Deyhim nor Weiss caught it, but Gloria had. He turned back. “Will you join us for dinner at the O Club, Commander?”

“No,” Weiss replied tersely.

“Very well,” McGarvey said, and he and Gloria left the interrogation center.

Outside, they got in the Humvee, Gloria behind the wheel, and headed back to the BOQ. “What was all that about?”

“What do you mean?” McGarvey asked absently. The first three prisoners knew nothing of any value. If they’d been in the Iranian navy, as Otto thought was possible, they had to have been very low ranking; certainly they were not officers. They had come across as dullards, probably not the sort of crew a man such as Graham would be looking for. But the Saudi had been different. There’d been intelligence and shrewdness in his eyes. His only mistake had been rising to McGarvey’s bait about being a crewman aboard a gunboat.

“You winked at him,” Gloria said.

The shift change had already been made and driving down the hill from Camp Delta the base seemed almost deserted. There was very little traffic, and not many people out and about. This was the arid side of Cuba, and it was more like a desert than a subtropical island. It was bleak here, McGarvey thought. For the guards and support personnel, as well as for the prisoners.

“I wanted to give him something to think about,” he told her.

“We’re going back in?”

“Tonight. Without Weiss or his translator.”

TWENTY-NINE

Kamal al-Turabi raised a pair of Steiner binoculars to study the house at the end of the cul-de-sac as Imad Odeah brought the Cessna 172 through a lazy turn to the left at an altitude of 1,500 feet. An Atlas moving van was parked in the driveway, and as he watched, workmen brought furniture from the house and loaded it aboard.

It was late, after six, and it seemed as if the men were in a hurry.

He’d driven down from Laurel, Maryland, yesterday afternoon in a Capital Cleaners van, to make a quick pass. The garage door had been open, but a Mercedes convertible and a Range Rover SUV were parked in the driveway. The garage had been filled with boxes. It looked as if the McGarveys were leaving town.

Now the moving van confirmed it.

“I think if we stay here much longer we will arise suspicions,” Odeah warned, his dark eyes flashing. The airspace anywhere near the capital was very closely watched.

“Wait,” al-Turabi said. A slender woman with short blond hair came out of the house and said something to one of the workmen. A moment later she looked up, directly at the airplane, shading her eyes with a hand. His stomach tightened.

“We must leave, Kamal,” the pilot insisted.

Al-Turabi lowered the binoculars. He was a slope-shouldered man with a hawk nose. “Yes, take us back now.”

Odeah turned to the northwest toward Hagerstown where they’d picked up the light plane from the club that he belonged to. Even after the post-9/11 hysteria, and the creation of Homeland Security to keep the skies safe, it had been ridiculously easy, even for a Muslim, to join a flying club.

“Every law-enforcement agency will be searching for men such as yourself,” Osama bin Laden had told al-Turabi in the Afghan mountains six months after 9/11.

“I understand,” al-Turabi had said.

“While in America you must blend in. Documents will be made available for you to get your license to practice dentistry, and you will open a clinic in Laurel, Maryland. You will dress as an American. You will register to vote, hold a driver’s license, and have a Social Security card and a U.S. passport. You will eat pork and drink liquor like an American. And you will speak like an American — hating all Muslims, especially me.”

Al-Turabi, who’d originally been a dentist in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, had been nearly overwhelmed by what was being asked of him. But he had bowed his head in deference to the only man other than his father whom he had ever loved. He had fought alongside bin Laden in the last two years of the righteous war in Afghanistan and he knew about duty and honor.

“You will be sent recruits one or two at a time, who you will train in the ways of America,” bin Laden had instructed. “This time they will hide in the open. Under the noses of the American authorities. And when the time comes your cell will be called into action. Do not fail me.”

The call had come thirty-six hours ago, and al-Turabi had spent that time trying to devise a foolproof plan. The best would have been to kill McGarvey while he slept in his own bed. He no longer had a security detail assigned to him, so it would have been a relatively straightforward hit.

“It looks like they’re moving away,” Odeah said, breaking al-Turabi out of his thoughts. “In a big hurry.”

“Yes, but there was no security detail as we feared might be down there,” al-Turabi replied. “McGarvey is on his own.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, only his wife.”

“We can come back tonight,” Odeah suggested. “But we’re going to have to get someone down here before the truck leaves so we can follow it.”

“It won’t be necessary.”

“We don’t want to lose them—”

“It’s not necessary, Imad, because I know precisely where McGarvey will be two days from now, and precisely what time he will be there. We’ll just have to wait until then to kill him.”

They were passing over the busy Beltway where I-270 split off to Rockville, and Odeah adjusted his course to skirt the city to the south. “You’re talking about the funeral?”

“Four o’clock in the afternoon at Arlington. We’ll get there a half hour early, and spread out. As soon as McGarvey arrives we’ll hit him and everyone else with everything we’ve got.” Al-Turabi had come across the funeral arrangements for the dead spy, Robert Talarico, on the CIA’s low-security Web site. He had considered it only as an alternative, because although killing McGarvey would be fairly easy, getting away afterwards would present some problems.

Insh’allah. Paradise awaited the fighter for the jihad.

“Killing a grieving widow and her children is not a good thing.” Al-Turabi’s anger, which had been fueled by fear ever since he had joined the struggle, suddenly spiked. “They are infidels!” he shrieked. He was seeing red spots and flashes in front of his face. He wasn’t aboard an airplane over the Maryland countryside, he was in a fierce battle north of Kabul, and the incoming tracer rounds from the Russian position were flying all over the place.

“Yes, Kamal, but are they worth dying for?”

“We have to kill them all.”

“McGarvey I understand, but not the others,” Odeah argued. “Listen to reason. I am no suicide bomber. Neither are the others. We’re willing to give our lives for the struggle, but not like some crazy kids from the West Bank.”

“Or like Mohamad Atta?”

Odeah was suddenly uncomfortable. He glanced nervously at al-Turabi. “He was a great hero. When he died he took more than two thousand infidels with him. Not a handful attending a funeral.”

“Pray that you die so usefully,” al-Turabi replied, no longer angry.

“Do you mean to kill us then?”

“If our deaths serve the jihad, yes.”

THIRTY

Adkins sat behind his desk, looking out the bulletproof windows across the woods behind the Building, enjoying the rare moment when he was alone, no telephones, no one seated across from him, no secretary, no pressing commitments to a National Intelligence Estimate or Watch Report. It was a few minutes after seven in the evening and all that was done for today.

But his desk was piled high with reports that would need his attention first thing in the morning, and with letters yet to be written, others to be signed, and a brutally grinding schedule of appointments that wouldn’t end until well after seven.

He’d decided that when this business was done, he was going to resign — retire, actually — like McGarvey, only his retirement was going to be permanent. He’d never been a spy, in the classical, Cold War sense, he’d been more of an administrator. He could keep the gears well oiled, the machinery moving, but he’d never had those sudden flashes of inspiration or intuition that came so naturally to men such as McGarvey. They thrived on the game, as so many of them thought of the business. For them it was a black-and-white issue, us versus the bad guys. Administration meant nothing. Neither did realpolitik.

Von Clausewitz had written something to the effect that war was a political instrument. Adkins’s poli-sci professor at the University of Indiana had vehemently disagreed. Of course he was a raging knee-jerk liberal, as Adkins had been at the time. But now everything was different. Maybe the old German had been right all along, but it was a philosophy that Adkins could not bring himself to embrace.

His secretary, Dhalia Swanson, had left for the evening, as had Dave Whittaker and most of the other senior staff. The Watch down in DO was manned 24/7 as was the NRO’s photo interp shop, but most of the Building was quiet.

The inner door to his office was open, and he saw Otto Rencke’s reflection in the window glass. Adkins turned around as the Special Projects director came in, his long frizzy red hair flying out from beneath a baseball cap with the sword and shield logo of the old KGB. His short-sleeved sweatshirt was from Moscow State University. He figured that his outfit was a good joke here at CIA headquarters.

“I thought you’d be gone by now,” Adkins said, girding himself for bad news. Rencke had the look.

“The lavender is getting really deep, Mr. Director, I had to let you know right away. Mac doesn’t want me to bother him at Gitmo, and you probably gotta do some stuff before he gets back.”

“Why aren’t you supposed to call him?”

Rencke shrugged. “He and Gloria are probably in the middle of some serious shit, ya know.”

Adkins supposed that one of the core reasons he hated this job was that lives were on the line. He’d lost some good people in Afghanistan, several in Iraq, and then Talarico last week. Gloria had been wrong; Bob’s death wasn’t her fault, that burden was the DCI’s, who had given the orders to send people into harm’s way.

“Okay, Otto, what have you come up with and what stuff do I have to do?”

“We may have caught a break, ’cause José Martinez, one of our guys in Mexico City, thought he spotted Graham, or someone close enough he could’ve been a clone, at the airport’s international terminal two days ago.”

“Why’d he wait so long to get that up to us?” Adkins demanded. His stomach was sour.

“He wasn’t sure until just now,” Rencke said.

“Is he one of McCann’s people?”

“He’s a Mexican national we burned eighteen months ago,” Rencke said, sidestepping the question. “Works airport security. He was the one who spotted Graham heading down to Venezuela.”

Mexico City had always been a big center for intelligence-gathering. The Soviets, and these days the Russians, fielded more intelligence officers from their embassy than from any other embassy in the world, including here in Washington. Some of the networks such as Banco del Sur and CESTA had been in continuous operation, spying not only on the United States, but on Mexico and all of Central America as well, since the early fifties.

McGarvey had come back from a delicate operation down there more than ten years ago, in which a lot of people had lost their lives, including Donald Suthland Powers, possibly the most effective DCI in the Company’s history. Adkins remembered it well, because he had been a senior Watch officer under Jon Lyman Trotter, who’d turned out to be the mole that Jim Angleton had been searching for all along.

“Continue,” Adkins prompted.

“Graham was moving fast and he was in disguise each time, but Martinez managed to get reasonably clear headshots. The first time he sent them up to us for the match with Graham. This time he wasn’t so sure of himself, so he did the work himself.”

“Graham?” Adkins asked.

“I sent his stuff over to Louise and she has a ninety-three percent confidence that both guys are Graham.” Louise Horn was chief of the National Reconnaissance Office’s Photographic Interpretation Center. She was almost as brilliant and as odd as Otto, and she was his wife.

“That’s good enough for me,” Adkins said. “He wasn’t heading back to Maracaibo to try again, was he?”

“Pakistan,” Rencke said.

“He’s on his way to bin Laden,” Adkins said, molten lead in his stomach. “Allah’s Scorpion. It’s really going to happen, and it wasn’t the canal after all.”

Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other. “Bingo,” he said and he clapped his hands together.

“What about at that end?”

“I sent the package to Dave Coddington, but we were way too late,” Rencke said. Coddington was chief of Karachi Station, one of the CIA’s toughest postings anywhere in the world.

“He could be anywhere by now,” Adkins said. If they could have picked up the man’s trail he might have led them to bin Laden — the big prize. But this job had almost never been that easy.

“Yes, he could,” Rencke agreed.

“Like a needle in a haystack,” Adkins mumbled.

“Mac would let the president know about this,” Rencke suggested. “We need to shift our assets into finding a Kilo sub, because that’s what they’ll probably use. The Pentagon has the resources to help us out, if they can be convinced to cooperate.”

Adkins was mildly surprised. “I would’ve expected that you would just hack their system.”

Rencke smiled. “Unfortunately not everything is loaded into a database. We might need Humint this time. Pete Gregory is a naval historian. If we could get to him, he might be able to tell us where a stray Kilo for sale might be located. I’ve got my own list, but I don’t think Graham will go to the most obvious places.”

“A submarine alone won’t do them much good,” Adkins pointed out. “They’ll need a weapon.”

“I’m working on that too.” Rencke nodded. And that’s probably going to be the worst of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s the deep lavender, Mr. Director,” Rencke said. “A lot of Kilos are capable of launching cruise missiles while submerged. Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.”

The president and his national security adviser, Dennis Berndt, agreed to see Adkins immediately. It was eight by the time the DCI arrived at the White House. His limousine was passed through the West Gate, he signed in with the Secret Service detail, and was brought back to the Oval Office.

Haynes was dressed in jeans and an open-collar shirt, which meant he’d already had dinner with his wife and daughter. Berndt was still dressed in a suit and tie. He’d been getting ready to leave for the night when Adkins called. He and the president seemed concerned.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Dick?” the president asked. He was having a Bud Light. “Or a beer?”

“No, sir. I’m not going to take up much of your time tonight, but there have been some interesting developments that you need to know about,” Adkins said.

“Concerning Graham and the Panama Canal incident?” Berndt asked.

“Graham was spotted in Mexico City two days ago, heading to Pakistan.”

The president grinned. “That’s good news—” he said, but then stopped, realizing what Adkins had just told him. “He’s on his way to bin Laden?”

“Yes, sir. But we got the news too late to be waiting for him when he got to Karachi. By now he could be just about anywhere.”

“I see,” the president said. He exchanged a look with Berndt. “You didn’t come here this evening merely to tell me that the CIA lost track of this man.”

“No, sir. But we believe that the attack on the Panama Canal was a separate operation from one al-Quaida has been gearing up for possibly more than a year.”

“Allah’s Scorpion?” Berndt asked.

Adkins nodded. “We’ve since learned that Graham was trained by the British navy to be a submarine commander. Top of his class in their Perisher school.”

“Good Lord,” the president said softly.

“He’s more dangerous than we first believed.”

“Do the crazy bastards actually have a submarine?” Berndt asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Adkins admitted. “But they have a top-flight submarine captain, and they’ve been trying to recruit a crew, so we think it’s a safe bet that they’ve already got a sub, or they’ll try to get one. Otto Rencke thinks they’ll try for a Russian-built Kilo Class boat. It’s diesel-electric, so on batteries alone it’s ultra-quiet. I’m told that it’s extremely reliable, easy to operate with a minimum crew, and almost as common as the Russian Kalashnikov rifle. Half the navies in the world own one or more. Iran has three.”

“Okay, assuming bin Laden recruited Graham to come at us with a submarine, why’d he take the risk trying to destroy the Panama Canal?” the president asked.

“I’ll tell you why, Mr. President,” Berndt broke in. “If he’d been successful we would have had our hands full, just like after 9/11. We would have been looking the other way. Which means that whatever they’re planning next will have the potential of hurting us even worse than the canal.”

Haynes had been standing, leaning against his desk. He put his beer down, a set expression in his eyes. “What next?”

“McGarvey went down to Guantanamo Bay to question a number of prisoners who might have navy backgrounds, on the chance they may know something,” Adkins said. “His primary mission is still to find Graham and bin Laden and take them out.”

“Does he know that Graham went to Pakistan?”

“Not yet, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “He’ll be informed when he gets back. In the meantime we’d like to ask the navy for some help tracking down the Kilo boats our satellites will probably miss.”

The president nodded. “I’ll call Charlie Taggart tonight.” Taggart was the secretary of defense and a longtime friend of the president’s.

“Thank you, sir, but there’s more,” Adkins said.

“There always is,” Haynes said, and he nodded impatiently for Adkins to get on with it.

“A lot of the Kilo boats out there have been modified so that they can fire cruise missiles from their torpedo tubes while submerged.”

“Yes?”

“Before the British navy taught Graham to command submarines, they sent him to Dounreay, where he got his degree in nuclear engineering.”

Both the president and his national security adviser were struck dumb for a moment. Berndt was the first to recover.

“I would think that buying or stealing a cruise missile might be even harder than getting a submarine,” Berndt said.

“Yes, it would,” Adkins agreed. “We think they’ll probably try for a nuclear-tipped cruise missile. Graham would certainly know how to handle such a weapon.”

“He could park his boat within a few miles anywhere along our coast and fire the damn thing,” Berndt said. “We would have virtually no warning whatsoever.”

“If we knew where, we could intercept him and destroy his boat,” the president said. “Have you told any of this to Hamel?”

“No, sir.”

“Don’t,” Haynes said. “There’re too many politicians over there. We can’t let one word of this get out. It’d create a panic worse than last year’s suicide bombing scare.”

“No matter what happens this will be the end of them,” Berndt said. “We didn’t collapse after 9/11, and we toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They’ve got nowhere to go.”

“That’s what we figure, Dennis,” Adkins said. “From their perspective they’ve got to hit us. We’ve left them no other choice.”

THIRTY-ONE

A few minutes before two in the morning Gloria drove McGarvey across the quiet base up the hill to the prison’s main gate.

They’d tossed their overnight bags in the Humvee and roused the Gulfstream’s crew to get the aircraft ready for an immediate departure for Washington, because after this morning McGarvey figured they’d have to get out of Dodge as soon as possible, or they might be held until Adkins could pull some strings either at the Pentagon or the White House.

“They’re going to want to know what we’re doing here at this hour of the morning,” Gloria said as they approached the gate. “What do you want me to say?”

“I’ll handle it,” McGarvey told her. Last night they had spread the word that they were heading home first thing in the morning, and then had turned in early to get a few hours’ sleep at the BOQ. He had no doubt that Weiss had been informed, and would have let his guard down, thinking he had won.

Gloria glanced at him. “This isn’t going to work if you’re wrong about bin Ramdi understanding English. There’s no way in hell Deyhim will cooperate.”

“I know,” McGarvey said. “But we’re going to call him anyway.”

“Why?”

“Someone is going to notify Weiss that we’ve showed up, and I want him to think that he’s got plenty of time because without a translator it won’t matter what we do.”

Gloria grinned. “Sneaky. I like it. I just hope you’re right, otherwise our trip was a waste of time.”

She pulled up at the main gate. The MP who came out remembered her from last week. His M8 was slung over his shoulder, muzzle down.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he said. His name tag read ROBERTS. He looked past her at McGarvey. “Sir, may I help you?”

McGarvey held up his CIA identification card. “We need to ask one of the guys we interviewed just before dinner a couple of questions.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll call Commander Weiss for authorization.”

“He’s on his way,” McGarvey said. “But you can get our translator out of bed. He didn’t answer when we tried to call just twenty minutes ago.”

“Yes, sir. If you’ll just stand by—”

“Look, everybody’s tired, and nobody wants to be here at this hour of the morning, not us, and especially not Weiss. So go ahead and call Deyhim, but in the meantime we want to get to the interrogation center and have the prisoner brought over. It’ll save us some time, and’ll probably make Weiss a little less pissed off than he already is.”

The MP hesitated a moment, but then he nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. He stepped back and motioned for his partner in the guard shack to power open the inner and outer gates.

They rattled slowly open, and Gloria drove into the prison main yard and headed directly over to the expansive cement block prisoner processing facility. “Weiss is going to get all over those guys for letting us in.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. “He’ll be too busy coming after me, because I’m going to break a couple of laws tonight.”

Gloria gave him a curious look. “You going to kill somebody?”

“If need be,” he said. Amnesty International and a lot of congressmen, and especially a big segment of the media, had come down hard on our military for prisoner abuses here and at Abu Ghraib. Our people were accused of not being sensitive to the ethnic needs of their Muslim prisoners. But the same watchdogs had very little to say about al-Quaida’s beheading of its prisoners. Or of the endless rounds of car bombs. Those acts were America’s fault for trying to fight back after 9/11.

Such attitudes had never made any sense to McGarvey, but he’d been battling them ever since Vietnam had blown up in our faces. We had been the bad guys, and when Jane Fonda had gone to Hanoi she had visited antiaircraft guns that were shooting down our planes, but she never went to the Hanoi Hilton where American crewmen were being starved and beaten.

“Maddox will probably have you shot.”

“That’s a possibility,” McGarvey said as they pulled up. “Look, you can stick it out in the dayroom, it’s only going to take me a couple of minutes.”

Gloria laughed. “What, are you kidding?” she asked. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the world. They were the bastards who killed my partner.”

The OD, a tall, very thin first lieutenant named Albritton, had been alerted by the gate guards that McGarvey and Gloria were incoming from Post One. He got up from behind his desk just inside the front door when they came in.

“I’ve sent a runner to find Commander Weiss,” he said. “But until he gets here, I will not allow any prisoner to be interrogated. That’s SOP.”

“That’s fine with me,” McGarvey said. “We need an interpreter in any event. But in the meantime you can get the man out of bed and over here.”

Gloria handed bin Ramdi’s folder to the OD. “The sooner we can ask our questions, the sooner we’ll be gone,” she said sweetly and she smiled.

The OD was shaking his head.

“Son, I don’t want to pull rank on you, but I will,” McGarvey warned. “These are the same bastards who killed three of your guys last week. We’re just trying to find out what’s going to happen next. No one wants to go through another 9/11.”

“Sir, Commander Weiss will have my ass if I let you talk to one of his prisoners.”

“I hate to break this to you, Lieutenant, but these are not his prisoners,” Gloria said.

McGarvey snatched the phone from the OD’s desk, and held it out to the man. “Call General Maddox. He’ll give you the authorization.”

The lieutenant looked like he’d been hit with a cattle prod. “It’s two in the morning.”

“Yes, it is,” McGarvey said. “Call him.”

“Shit,” the OD said. He took the phone and dialed a number. “This is Albritton.” He opened bin Ramdi’s file. “I want you to bring seven-three-nine over on the double.”

The clock had just started. Whoever got here first, Weiss or bin Ramdi, would determine if their trip had been a waste of time.

“I sent a runner to look for him, he’s not in his quarters,” Albritton said into the phone. “Just bring the prisoner over here, if you please.” He glanced at McGarvey and nodded. “I’ll sign for him.” He hung up. “Your man will be here shortly. We’ll put him in the same interrogation room you used this afternoon.”

“Thank you,” McGarvey said. “We’ll just go back and wait for him there.”

“Be sure to let us know when you’ve found Commander Weiss,” Gloria said.

She and McGarvey went to the end of the corridor, which opened to the common room that was equipped with tables and chairs, some vending machines, and a TV set, DVD player, and a shelf full of movies. This was where MPs sometimes took their breaks. Four interrogation rooms, their doors open, were along the back concrete block wall. The lights were on but no one was there. Each room was equipped with a one-way glass. When prisoners were being interrogated, lights in the common room were kept off.

McGarvey turned his back to the closed-circuit surveillance camera mounted near the ceiling in the corner opposite the interrogation rooms and took out his pistol. He removed the magazine, eased the slide back to eject the round in the chamber, and put the magazine back in place. He holstered the gun and pocketed the 9mm bullet.

Gloria watched, her eyes bright, but she didn’t say a word.

“It might get a little dicey, but I want you to play along with whatever goes down,” McGarvey told her.

She nodded.

“I want you to be absolutely clear on one thing,” he said. “No one gets hurt. No matter what does or does not happen, no one gets hurt. Understood?”

Gloria nodded. “What are you trying to get from him?”

“He knows something about the five prisoners who were sprung.”

“They all do.”

“I think he might know why al-Quaida got them out, and killed them rather than let them be recaptured.” McGarvey had been thinking about little else since he’d gotten back from Panama. He thought he knew the answers, but he had to make sure.

Lieutenant Albritton and an MP came down the corridor with bin Ramdi. The Saudi was fully awake, but he didn’t seem quite as sure of himself as he had earlier.

“No questions until we can get Commander Weiss over here,” Albritton warned.

“Right,” McGarvey said, his eyes locked on bin Ramdi’s.

The MP escorted the prisoner into one of the interrogation rooms, then stepped out. He hadn’t removed the plastic wrist restraint.

The telephone down the corridor rang. “Stay here,” Albritton told the MP, and he hustled back to his post.

The MP, whose name tag read LAGERMANN, glanced at the lieutenant, his attention momentarily away from bin Ramdi.

McGarvey slipped into the interrogation room, pulled out his pistol, and pointed it at bin Ramdi’s head. “Al saheeh,” he said. The truth.

“Holy shit!” the MP shouted.

Bin Ramdi’s eyes flicked back and forth from McGarvey to the marine. “Sir, you will stand down!” the MP shouted.

“I’m going to kill this son of a bitch unless he starts talking,” McGarvey said, his voice low, his tone reasonable.

“No, sir, I can’t let that happen!” the MP shouted.

Gloria was right behind him. “This is the same scum bastard who kills our people, Lagermann. So who are you going to protect? Us or them?”

“Ma’am, I’m just following my orders.”

“Yeah, well so am I,” Gloria said.

“The truth, do you understand me?” McGarvey asked.

Bin Ramdi was still looking for the MP to protect him.

McGarvey cocked the hammer of his pistol. “Do you understand me?”

Bin Ramdi suddenly came unglued. He backed up, and nodded vigorously. “Yes,” he said. “I understand you. But do not shoot me.”

“Lieutenant!” the MP shouted. “We have a situation back here!”

“The five prisoners who escaped. What did they do in the Iranian navy?”

Bin Ramdi threw up his bound hands. “I beseech you. I do not know this answer.”

McGarvey stepped closer. “Tell me or I will kill you. My wife died on 9/11, and it will be so easy for me to pull this trigger that you cannot imagine.”

“They were in the navy!” bin Ramdi cried.

“We know that. But what did they do?”

“Sir, Commander Weiss is coming through the front gate,” Lieutenant Albritton said from the doorway. “He orders you to back off. Right now, or you will be placed under arrest.”

“Al saheeh,” McGarvey said. He took a step forward.

“Submarines,” bin Ramdi whispered.

It was the answer that McGarvey had expected, but the Saudi knew more. It was in his eyes, there was a certain craftiness there, as if he felt that he had succeeded in evading something even more important than what the five escapees had done in the navy.

“What else?” McGarvey demanded harshly.

“There is nothing else.”

McGarvey took another step closer, so that he was only three feet away from the prisoner, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty firing chamber with a loud snap.

Bin Ramdi flinched so badly he almost lost his balance.

“Shit,” McGarvey muttered. He cycled the ejector slide, charging the pistol, and once again pointed the muzzle directly at the Saudi’s head.

Bin Ramdi pissed in his jumpsuit.

“I want the rest of it. Why were those five men broken out of here?”

“I don’t know, I swear it!” bin Ramdi cried. His eyes were glued on McGarvey’s trigger finger.

McGarvey started to pull.

“They were transferred to Camp Echo that night,” bin Ramdi blurted, nearly incoherently. “But I don’t know why, except that Osama wanted them.”

It was not the answer McGarvey had expected, but it made sense if Gloria’s suspicion that there was a traitor inside Camp Delta was correct.

There was a sudden commotion in the common room behind McGarvey.

“Sir, I tried to stop him,” Lieutenant Albritton said.

“Shoot him,” Weiss ordered.

“Sir?” the MP asked.

McGarvey held bin Ramdi’s eyes for just a second longer, but there was no longer any guile, only relief.

“Shoot him!” Weiss shouted.

“It won’t be necessary,” McGarvey said. He lowered his pistol, de-cocked it, and holstered it as he turned around. “We’re finished here.”

The confused MP had unslung his M8 carbine, but the muzzle was pointed at the floor and his finger was alongside the trigger guard.

Weiss, dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, was directly behind the MP. He shoved the young man aside and fumbled for the Beretta in his shoulder holster. He was muttering something.

Gloria moved in from his right, batted his hand away from the pistol, and grabbed it out of the holster. She stepped back a pace. “Let’s all calm down here, before this shit gets out of hand,” she said.

Weiss was beside himself with rage. “You bitch,” he growled. He backhanded Gloria in the face, snapping her head back, and sending her bouncing off the wall, the pistol falling to the floor.

Before McGarvey could move to interfere, Weiss came after Gloria, shoving her back against the wall again. But this time she was expecting it. She rolled to the side, grabbed Weiss’s right wrist, and slammed his forearm against the door frame, both bones breaking with an audible pop.

Weiss screamed and staggered away from her, trying to cradle his broken arm against his chest.

The MP was stunned.

Gloria stepped forward, slammed the heel of her right hand into Weiss’s nose, breaking it, blood gushing out both nostrils, then hit his left kneecap with her right instep, dislocating the man’s knee.

Weiss collapsed on the floor and Gloria was about to go after him when McGarvey was at her side.

“That’s all,” he said softly.

She looked at him, her nostrils flared, her eyes wild.

“Come down, Gloria, it’s done. We’re out of here.”

Slowly she came back, and nodded.

Weiss was curled up, whimpering in pain.

“Someone call an ambulance for Mr. Weiss,” McGarvey said.

Lieutenant Albritton had moved well out of range and he kept looking from Weiss to Gloria and then to McGarvey. But he didn’t say anything.

McGarvey looked at bin Ramdi, who had shrunk back into a corner of the interrogation room, a mostly unreadable expression on his face. But it was obvious he was impressed by what he’d just witnessed, and extremely wary.

“You sons of bitches are going to fucking jail!” Weiss shouted.

McGarvey looked down at him and shook his head. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to hit women?”

“Evidently not,” the MP said, half under his breath. “But he sure got told this time.”

THIRTY-TWO

They’d not been interfered with as they left Camp Delta and drove across base down to the ferry landing. Nor were they stopped from reaching their Gulfstream, even though it was very likely that by then General Maddox had been informed about what had happened.

In this case McGarvey thought that it was probably for the best that it wasn’t a prisoner who’d been roughed up, though by the time they reached Washington he was pretty sure that McCann would try to bring Gloria up on charges.

It was morning, the sun just rising above the Atlantic horizon as they approached the U.S. East Coast. Gloria had been far too keyed-up to sleep on the fourteen-hundred-mile trip back to D.C., but she hadn’t wanted to talk about what had happened.

She came forward from the head where she had splashed some water on her face, and straightened out her hair and touched up her makeup. She sat down in the big leather seat facing McGarvey, a resolute expression on her round face; she had screwed up and she was ready now to face her punishment.

“I jeopardized the mission,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“He had it coming.”

Gloria smiled tightly, and nodded. “I might have killed him if you hadn’t stopped me.”

“The paperwork would have been endless,” McGarvey said. “Ask me, I know.”

Without averting her gaze, Gloria began to cry silently, tears welling in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

McGarvey’s heart suddenly went out to her. She’d had a difficult life, losing her mother and then her husband, so she was seasoned to pain. But she wasn’t much older than his daughter Elizabeth. And she had the same sort of tough exterior that was a cover for a sometimes confused and frightened little girl who wasn’t sure if she was ready to be an adult.

He reached out and touched her knee. “You did a good job down there. Because of you and your partner we found out what Allah’s Scorpion is, and now we’ve got a good shot at shutting it down.”

“I got Bob killed.”

“It wasn’t you who killed him, it was the bad guys,” McGarvey told her. “You’d better understand that, otherwise you’re not going to be much help to me.”

Her dark eyes widened slightly. “I thought I would be pulled out of the field after this.”

“Are you kidding?” McGarvey asked. “Why do you think Weiss came after you?”

Gloria’s jaw tightened. “Because he’s dirty, and he knows that I suspect him.” She shook her head. “But I don’t have any proof, and Howard’ll go ballistic as soon as Weiss starts making noises.”

“Which might not happen,” McGarvey said. “He’s gotten rid of us, and I think Maddox is going to order him to take his lumps and shut his mouth.”

“I don’t get it, Mac, why would somebody like Weiss work for al-Quaida? It doesn’t make sense. I mean he’s an asshole, but he’s apparently got a good career going for him. Why would he take the risk?”

“Money. Ego. Arrogance,” McGarvey said. He’d seen the same sort of thing many times before. Men, and a few women, who’d thought that they were better than everyone else. Superior. Smarter. Quicker. Or, for some of them, it was the same sort of thrill that a bungee jumper gets when he steps off the edge. It was almost a death wish. When some traitors were caught they were relieved that they no longer had to lead a double life. In many respects prison would be easier.

Weiss, if he was guilty of anything other than being a simple asshole, was not cut of the same dangerous cloth as Rupert Graham. Men like Graham, and others McGarvey had come up against, who were as brilliant as they were ruthless, were at war with the world. Whatever brought them to that point, and there was no one reason that McGarvey had ever discovered, did not interfere with their skills on the battlefield.

Carlos the Jackal had been the first of the specialist killing machines in the modern era, and Graham was just another. He would never be brought to trial, because he would simply take his war into prison. Men like him had to be killed. There was no other solution.

“Hijo de puta,” Gloria said softly.

“Yeah.”

Coming back out of the field, as he had done countless times before in his career, brought back a host of memories. A good many of them were very bad: missions in which he had made kills; missions in which he had nearly lost his life; missions in which his family’s lives had been placed in jeopardy. Riding into the city he remembered the face of every person he’d killed. The number wasn’t legion, but over a twenty-five-year career he had a lot of blood on his conscience.

Adkins had sent a Company limo out to Andrews for them, and on the drive in McGarvey had made a quick phone call to his wife.

“Touchdown,” he told her.

“You’re in one piece?” she asked, and he heard the relief in her voice.

“All my fingers and toes.”

“ETA?”

McGarvey glanced at his watch. It was a couple of minutes after ten. When he looked up, his eyes met Gloria’s. There was an odd, hungry set to her mouth. “I should make it by lunchtime or a little later. How’d the move go?”

“Most of our worldly possessions are on the way south,” Kathleen said. “How about us?”

“Soon,” McGarvey promised.

“As in tomorrow or the next day?”

“Soon,” McGarvey said. He felt bad, because this sort of conversation had interrupted his marriage for a lot of years. These days Katy was more pragmatic about what he did, but the uncertainty and hurt was an ever-constant pressure in her gut. He could hear it in her voice. She was afraid for him.

“We’ll talk then,” Kathleen said and broke the connection.

The Company had provided them with a furnished apartment not too far from their house in Chevy Chase until McGarvey was finished with this assignment. He’d wanted her to drive down to their new place in Sarasota, and Liz had volunteered to ride shotgun for her mother. But Kathleen wasn’t leaving town without her husband.

“You okay?” Gloria asked.

McGarvey managed a smile. “Just trying to get retired and stay that way.”

“Soon?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Their driver radioed ahead and they were passed directly through the executive gate, and whisked to management’s underground parking where the elevator was waiting for them. “Welcome back, Mr. Director,” the driver said.

“I’m not back,” McGarvey told him.

He and Gloria rode up to the Directorate of Operations on the third floor. He got out with her. “You don’t have to come with me,” she said. “I’m a big girl, I can handle Mr. McCann.”

“I’m sure you can, but I’ll put in a good word for you anyway,” McGarvey told her. “This isn’t over, and I have a feeling I may be asking for your help again.”

Gloria’s eyes lit up with pleasure. “Any time,” she said, and she headed down the corridor to the DDO’s office.

McGarvey went in the opposite direction back to Rencke’s office, which a few months ago had been moved out of the mainframe room here to Operations, where he could be closer to the Watch. His big office behind glass walls had originally housed a dozen cubicles where Directorate of Intelligence analysts task-shared with DDO junior desk officers. Their offices had been scattered all over the third floor.

Rencke was standing in the middle of the room on one leg, like a flamingo, his red hair flying everywhere, while data streamed across nine computer monitors arrayed around the perimeter. The wallpaper on each of them was lavender. He was leaning up against a long conference table that was strewn with maps; high-resolution satellite photos in real light as well as infrared; stacks of file folders, many of them with orange stripes denoting top secret or above material; empty Twinkie wrappers and a half-empty bottle of heavy cream.

McGarvey knocked on the glass door and let himself in.

“Bad dog, bad dog, go away and come again another day!” Rencke shouted.

“Just me,” McGarvey said.

Rencke spun around so fast he almost fell over. “Oh, wow,” he cried. “Did you find the golden chalice? Did you?”

“You were right, it’s a submarine operation. The five guys they sprung last week had all been submarine crew.”

Rencke clapped his hands. “Uncle Osama isn’t about to waste the skills of a Perisher dude. No way.” He stopped suddenly, the animation leaving his face. “You found something else?”

“They were transferred to Echo the same night,” McGarvey said.

“Gitmo’s starting to smell like a barnyard,” Rencke said. “Any ideas?”

“Guy’s name is Tom Weiss. He’s the ONI officer in charge of interrogations,” McGarvey said. “He’s either an idiot or he’s on someone’s payroll.”

“Same one who hassled Gloria last week. He couldn’t have been terribly happy to see her on his doorstep again.”

McGarvey explained the confrontation they’d had this morning, and Rencke was loving it.

“Big man on campus got taken down a notch by the little lady.” He laughed. “Wait’ll I tell Louise. She loves that kinda shit.”

“Take a peek down his track, but don’t make any waves yet,” McGarvey said. “If he is dirty he’ll have cutouts, probably someone else there on base, unless he’s set up a little nest egg account somewhere. Maybe the Caymans. But he’ll have to have a line of communications.”

“If it’s electronic I’ll find it,” Rencke said. “But there might be a letter drop somewhere. Any idea how often he gets back to the States? Could be here, ya know.”

“I don’t know anything about the man, except that Gloria thinks he’s dirty, and for now that’s good enough for me.”

“She’s kinda like Liz, isn’t she?” Rencke said.

“I thought the same thing,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime, while Graham is looking for a crew, we need to find out where’s he’s going to get a sub and a weapon. And for some reason I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time on this one.”

“It’ll probably be a Kilo boat. I’m running an inventory right now for all of them our spy birds can spot, but we’ll miss all the ones either locked up in sub pens, or tucked away in some remote inlet somewhere. I was thinking about asking Pete Gregory. He’s a naval historian over at the Pentagon.”

“Go ahead and hack their database, but hold off on Gregory,” McGarvey said. “If you don’t find anything in the next twenty-four hours I’ve got someone else in mind who might be able to help us come up with a short list. And I know that he won’t leak anything to the ONI.”

THIRTY-THREE

Adkins closed a file folder on his desk, and got to his feet as McGarvey walked into the DCI’s seventh-floor office. The director looked worn-out, the weight of the world on his shoulders. His jacket was off, his tie loose.

“Here he is at last,” he said. “From what Ms. Ibenez has been telling us, you two have probably created a firestorm for us.”

Gloria was seated across from the DCI, along with Rencke’s boss Howard McCann. None of them looked happy.

“He had it coming, Dick,” McGarvey said, crossing the room. He pulled a side chair over and sat down next to Gloria. “And there’s a good chance he’s dirty. I’ve got Otto looking into it for us.”

“Dirty or not, he could charge Ms. Ibenez with criminal assault,” McCann pointed out dryly. “There were two witnesses.”

“Actually there were three witnesses if you count me,” McGarvey said. “Has Weiss or anyone from the ONI called or filed a complaint?”

“Not yet, but I expect it’s coming.” McCann glanced at Gloria with obvious distaste. “God help us if the media gets the story. We’ll never hear the end of it.”

“We’re going to put Ms. Ibenez on the South American desk until this blows over,” Adkins said. “It’s a good idea that she keep a low profile for now.”

“That’ll have to wait. Ms. Ibenez has agreed to give me a hand.”

“Oh, come on, McGarvey,” McCann said. “I’ll give you anyone you want. Hell, take your daughter if you need a woman on the mission for some reason. But Ms. Ibenez is going to keep her head down.”

“Liz and her husband have got their hands full out at the Farm,” McGarvey said. He was having second thoughts about Whittaker’s recommendation for McCann to head the DO. The man was a competent administrator, but he knew nothing about the sort of people who worked for him. CIA field officers were a breed apart. And he was no spy. He’d spent nearly all his career behind a desk, writing reports rather than generating them.

“Okay, I’ll give you someone else—” McCann said, but McGarvey waved him off.

“She’s already up to speed. And where I’m going I might need someone to cover my back.” McGarvey smiled faintly. “She’s already proved that she can handle herself in a fight.”

“In my book, injuring a military officer when he was doing nothing more than his job is not exactly a sterling recommendation,” McCann shot back.

“Apparently she hasn’t told you that Weiss was pulling out his gun to shoot me with, so she had to disarm him,” McGarvey said. “That alone makes her my new partner.”

“She didn’t have to break his arm,” Adkins suggested.

“Did she tell you that Weiss hit her first, even though she was trying to defuse a situation that was getting out of hand? Nearly knocked her unconscious.” He looked at McCann. “What would you have done in that situation, Howard? Throw harsh words at the man?”

“I wouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” McGarvey said. “And if you don’t mind a suggestion from someone who’s held your job, ease up on your people. Don’t be such an asshole.”

McCann flared, and he nearly came out of his chair. “Shooting people to death or threatening them with great bodily harm is not proper tradecraft.” He nodded toward Gloria. “And this woman managed to get her partner shot up with no problem.”

“The bad guys shot him, Howard, and then killed themselves. They’re the same sort who hit us on 9/11, and the same sort who damned near nailed the Panama Canal, and who are trying to come up with a submarine, a weapon, and a crew to hit us again.” McGarvey glanced at Adkins. “I’ve never been politically correct, and I sure as hell am not about to start now.” He turned back to McCann. “Yes, I’ve killed people in the line of duty. And I plan on doing it again. However many it takes for me to get to Graham and stop him, and however many more it takes for me to get to bin Laden and put a bullet in his brain.”

McCann wanted to say something else, but Adkins held up a hand. “Otto thinks Graham will probably try to get his hands on a Kilo boat.”

“That’s what he told me,” McGarvey said, though he wasn’t as convinced as the Special Projects director was. It seemed too pat, too easy. Maybe they were missing something.

Adkins read some of that from McGarvey’s body language. “But?”

“I don’t know, Dick. But I don’t think we should limit ourselves. Graham knows the business. He might have connections we know nothing about. Just like bin Laden does. Pakistan and Iran both have submarines. So do a lot of other countries.”

“In the meantime Otto has got the NRO doing a complete survey of every single Kilo submarine,” Adkins said. “Louise is in charge of the project, but it’s big. Our best guess is in excess of fifty boats spread out from Russia to India, and from Iran to Romania. A few of them are at sea, some of them submerged. Some are in sub pens and therefore invisible, some are in breaking yards being dismantled for scrap, while most are tied up at their docks in plain sight. But it’s the ones we’re going to miss that worries me.”

“What about bin Laden?” McGarvey asked. “Have you guys turned up any new leads yet?”

“The Pakistanis may be closing in on him in the mountains along the Afghanistan border near Drosh,” McCann said.

“They’ve been saying the same thing since 9/11.”

“It’s a tough place to search,” McCann countered. “They’re not only fighting the terrain, but the local tribal chiefs who don’t much care for Islamabad.”

“We have four augmented teams on the ground with ISI right now, and another four en route,” Adkins said. “If he’s there we’ll definitely find him this time.”

“I hope so, because some of those people are going to get killed up there.”

Adkins lowered his eyes, and fingered the file folder. “Did you really want this job, Mac?” he asked. “Did you ever like it?”

McGarvey knew exactly what Adkins was feeling. He’d been there himself. “No one’s supposed to like it. You’re just supposed to try to make a difference.”

“Bob Talarico’s funeral is at four this afternoon at Arlington,” Adkins said. He looked up. “Will you be there?”

“Of course,” McGarvey said. “I have to go over to the apartment to change clothes and see if Katy’s okay. Our furniture is on its way to Florida.”

A bleak look came across Adkins’s face. “There’s no telling how long this’ll take, you know.”

“Don’t worry,” McGarvey said, getting to his feet. “I’m in for the duration.”

“What’s your next step?”

“Gloria and I are going to help Otto find the Kilo boat, because when it shows up Graham will be aboard.”

“Good luck,” Adkins said.

“We’re going to need it,” McGarvey replied. “If Graham gets any wiggle room at all we’ll probably lose him.”

“I’m going to need Ms. Ibenez to file a Sitrep and sit for a debriefing,” McCann said. “No use asking if you’ll do the same.”

“Later,” McGarvey said.

“Go ahead,” Adkins told Gloria. “I’m assigning you to temporary duty under Mr. McGarvey’s direction.”

“Do you think that’s wise, Mr. Director?” McCann asked.

“No, but that’s the way it’s going to be.”

“Thank you, sir,” Gloria said, getting up.

“Keep us posted, would you, Mac?” Adkins asked.

“Through Otto,” McGarvey promised, and he and Gloria left the office and took the elevator down to the parking garage.

“Thanks for rescuing me,” she told him.

“This won’t be easy,” McGarvey warned. “Screw up and you could get both of us killed.”

“I’ll try to keep up,” she said. “But why me? I thought you always worked alone.”

McGarvey had to smile. She was bright as well as good-looking, but she still had a lot to learn, and the curve on this one would be steep. “I usually do, but your boss was getting set to gang up on you. And I’ve never liked bullies.”

She turned away. “I know what you mean.” When she looked back a veil had dropped over her eyes, as if she weren’t focusing. “Look, can I bum a ride to Arlington with you? I don’t think I want to be alone.”

“I have to go home and change first.”

“My apartment’s in Bethesda, on the way to where you’re staying. I have to change too. You could drop me off, and then pick me up on the way to Arlington.” She shrugged. “If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” McGarvey said, and there was a sudden lifting at the corners of Gloria’s eyes that was mildly puzzling, but he let it go. She was under a lot of stress, and losing a partner was almost as traumatic as losing a spouse.

THIRTY-FOUR

Osama bin Laden, dressed in traditional Muslim garb, entered his inner sanctum prayer room at ten thirty in the evening, local time. He paused for a longish moment to study the faces of the four men gathered at his request, then stepped out of his sandals and took his place on the rug at the head of the room, his back to the television set that had been switched off.

“Good evening, my friends,” he said, his voice soft. “May Allah’s blessing be upon you. We are nearly ready to strike again at the infidel and this time we will hurt them worse than we did in Manhattan and Washington combined.”

Rupert Graham, the only Westerner at the meeting, gave bin Laden a bleak look. There was a leak somewhere in al-Quaida and it could very easily be either the Sudanese, Ghassan Dahduli, or bin Laden’s Saudi adviser Khalid bin Abdullah. The third man, Abdel Aziz Mysko, was from Chechnya, and Graham hadn’t met him until this evening. But he was in the inner command circle, which made him a suspect.

“Is it to be Allah’s Scorpion finally?” bin Abdullah asked, his eyes bright. He was a stoop-shouldered man with a dark complexion and a hawk nose; a third cousin of a minor Saudi prince, which made him royalty. He was an idiot, but he was a major money source for the cause.

“Yes, we have waited far too long since 9/11, and already the world is beginning to forget,” bin Laden said. He avoided Graham’s eyes.

“A wait that would have ended last week, if Captain Graham had been more thorough with his preparations,” bin Abdullah said harshly. “Pray that his spirit is more steadfast this time.”

“Perhaps we should find someone else to lead the mission,” Dahduli suggested gently. He was a homely, round-faced man with a closely trimmed full beard and very large lips and ears. He had been with bin Laden almost from the beginning, but hadn’t risen to the inner circle of advisers until many of bin Laden’s top people had been killed or captured during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the simple reason he wasn’t very bright. He’d been a carpet merchant in Khartoum.

“That’s out of the question, my friend,” bin Laden replied patiently, as if he were a father explaining something to a son. “This is a submarine operation, and Mr. Graham is a submarine captain.”

Dahduli refused to look at Graham. “If that’s the case, why did we send him to Panama aboard an oil tanker? If he had been killed or captured, we would have lost his expertise.”

“Because the time was right to strike,” bin Abdullah said. “My money sources are beginning to demand action. They want something in return for the risk they are taking. With the Panama Canal destroyed by a Venezuelan ship and crew, oil from Saudi Arabia would become even more critical to the United States than it already is. Two hundred dollars per barrel would be conceivable. And such prices would surely bring the infidel to their knees.”

“As well as enrich the royal family,” Dahduli commented dryly. “But the question needs answering: If Mr. Graham’s skills are so important to our righteous cause, why was his life placed in danger on that mission?”

“Because we did not have a submarine or a weapon to fire or a crew to operate it,” bin Laden said, his voice barely above a whisper.

Graham’s breath quickened, catching in his throat. He shot a glance at the Chechen, who was the only man in the room other than bin Laden who didn’t look surprised. “Son of a bitch, you got a Russian Kilo boat,” he said, in wonder. “From the Pacific Fleet.”

Bin Laden smiled broadly. “You’ll see,” he said.

“We don’t have the boat yet, but it would only be a matter of days once I am given the word,” Mysko said. He had been introduced to Graham this evening as a major in the Russian Special Forces. He was a hard-looking man, very compact, with a three-day growth of whiskers, deep black eyes, and narrow high cheekbones that made him look like some dark jungle cat. Very dangerous. He’d pretended to go along with the Russians, fighting against his own homeland until eight years ago, when he came down to Afghanistan and joined forces with al-Quaida and the Taliban.

Graham turned to bin Laden. “Can we count on this man’s promise?”

Mysko flared. “You have never trained aboard a Kilo boat, can we count on you to know how it’s done without fucking it up?”

Graham willed himself to remain calm. He knew that he could kill the man here and now, but he did not want to ruin the chance to return to sea aboard his own submarine. With a Kilo boat the world would be his, because once he submerged, no navy on earth would be able to find him.

Even bin Laden’s Allah would be no match.

“My apologies, Major, I meant no disrespect,” Graham said humbly, his thoughts soaring. He was beginning to see Jillian’s face again.

Mysko’s smile was as sudden as it was disingenuous. “Nor I, Captain. But it has taken me many months, and a considerable amount of al-Quaida’s hard currencies to get to this stage. I would not like to see all of that effort go to waste.”

“I understand,” Graham said.

“Please tell them everything, Abdel,” bin Laden prompted, still smiling gently, and it came to Graham that the man was hiding something from them. Something important.

Mysko nodded. “I have arranged for us to steal a Kilo Six-fifty Class boat from Rakushka, which is about three hundred kilometers northeast of Vladivostok.”

Graham’s breath caught in his throat again, and he looked at bin Laden, who nodded. Almost every Kilo Class submarine was equipped with standard 533mm tubes, which gave it the capability of firing standard high-explosive (HE) short antisubmarine torpedoes as well as the long antiship weapons. But it had been rumored that a new class had been fitted with 650mm tubes that would allow the submarine to fire the SS-N-16 nuclear-tipped missile. That’s the class Kilo that Mysko was talking about.

Mysko glanced at Graham to make sure the 650 designation had been understood, and he smiled. “Security up there is normally loose, but I paid more than one million U.S. to a lieutenant general in charge of overall intelligence operations for the region, to divert the key guards for our boat during a twelve-hour window. When the time comes I will share all the details with you, for now I need only to know the target date.”

Bin Laden shook his head. “The details are not as important as the results,” he said. “And I will give you the date very soon.”

“Very well,” Mysko said. “I managed to come up with eighteen Russian crewmen, who were a lot less expensive than the one general. Eleven of them are already at Rakushka, but I will need forty-eight hours to get the rest of them up there.”

“Will they be sufficient to operate the boat?” Abdullah asked.

“The Kilo normally carries a crew of sixty men and officers, but it can be sailed with as few as eighteen men, if all of them are officers,” Graham said.

“All the men I recruited are officers,” Mysko said. “Russian navy pay is very bad, and prices are high. Even an officer has a hard time supporting himself.”

“Then what?” Graham prompted.

“Security at the weapons depot there will also be nonexistent during those twelve hours. Time enough to load two missiles.”

“That will create a lot of attention,” Graham said. “There’ll be heavy lifting machinery and a lot of lights. Someone is bound to ask questions.”

“I’m assured that won’t happen. But we must be done and out of there before the twelve hours is up,” Mysko said. “That means we must be at sea and submerged by then.”

There had to be much more than a simple breach in security for the plan to work. At the very least, U.S. surveillance satellites would pick up the submarine’s move out of the pens and then the loading of weapons. The bay emptied into the Sea of Japan, which was constantly monitored and patrolled by the U.S. Seventh and the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force, but Graham let those considerations pass for the moment. “Where am I in all this?”

“Standing by aboard a North Korean fishing boat five hundred kilometers to the east. Within twenty-four hours the submarine will rendezvous with you and surface,” Mysko said. “After that she’ll be your boat.”

“How long to reach Panama?” Dahduli asked.

Graham was working it out in his head. “Can’t go straight there from Vladivostok, Japan’s in the way,” he said. “I expect we’ll have to sail north along the inside passage between Sakhalin Island and the Russian mainland. That’s about a thousand miles north, and another thousand south before we could head through the Kuril Islands and then southeast.” He shrugged. “It’s a long trip. Seventy-five hundred miles perhaps, right at the Kilo’s extreme range at seven knots. I’d need a schedule of U.S. satellites so I could know when to run on the surface.”

“How long?” Dahduli pressed.

“If we were lucky, it’d take a month and a half, maybe six weeks,” Graham said. “And you realize that once the Russians figure out that one of their subs is missing they’ll come looking for us. Just like The Hunt for Red October, only for real.”

“Are you saying now that you are incapable of doing this?” Dahduli demanded.

“Not at all,” Graham responded sharply. “But it may take much longer than six weeks if I have to spend time submerged, evading detection. It’s even possible that we’ll need to take on diesel fuel somewhere.”

“Where would that be?” Dahduli pressed.

“At sea in the middle of the night. Probably somewhere north of the Hawaiian Islands.”

“That’s the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet,” bin Laden said.

“Yes, it is,” Graham responded. “But I know someone who could bring the fuel out to us.”

“Trustworthy?” Dahduli asked, sneering.

Graham raised his left hand, a gesture very rude to an Arab. “I am beginning to tire of your lack of faith, Ghassan. Take care that you do not cross the line after which I would have to take action.”

Dahduli’s eyes bulged. “Infidel—” he said.

Bin Laden silenced him with a glance. “We have much to do before we can strike this blow. Get on with it.”

“I’ll need a timetable, and personnel files on my crew,” Graham said.

“Remain here, and we will discuss your role,” bin Laden said.

The other three men clearly wanted to remain, they felt that their positions as inner circle al-Quaida advisers had somehow been usurped by an infidel, but they got up and left the chamber.

“You have reservations about this plan,” bin Laden said to Graham when they were alone. “Tell me.”

“It’s far too risky,” Graham said. “Getting away in the middle of the night with a submarine from Rakushka is possible. I’ve actually been there, I know the waters of Vladimir Bay. But I don’t care what assurances Mysko gives us, loading a pair of weapons aboard would never happen unnoticed. At the very least, we’d be spotted by an American satellite, and before we ever got out of the bay and into the Sea of Japan, we’d have a reception committee waiting for us; either a Los Angeles Class attack submarine, or maybe a Seawolf or a Virginia. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Bin Laden fell silent for several seconds. But then he nodded. “I came to the same conclusion, my friend. But we will let Mysko carry on with his plan; it may divert the Americans’ attention.”

“You’ve found another submarine?” Graham asked. The catch was back in his throat.

“Yes, and two missiles; we have friends elsewhere,” bin Laden said. “In any event, the Russians have no love for us.”

“Will the target still be the Panama Canal?”

“In thirty days President Haynes will give a State of the Union address to Congress. If you were to get within two hundred and fifty kilometers of Washington before you fired your missiles, there would be very little time to evacuate the building.”

Graham saw it all as one piece, as if he’d been planning for something like this all his life. “I’ll get us so close that they will have no time to react,” he said, and smiled. “This time I cannot fail.”

THIRTY-FIVE

McGarvey thought that Katy was holding up well until he walked in the door of the CIA safe house a few minutes before one in the afternoon and saw the brittle expression on her face. There was more there than the stress of their move and her husband’s being called back into the field.

She had a small bourbon, neat, ready for him at the pass-through kitchen counter, and when she came into his arms and clung to him, she was shivering. McGarvey hadn’t seen her this uptight since last year just before he’d resigned as DCI.

“Have you see CNN this morning?” she asked. “They’re running a story about a gunfight aboard an oil tanker in the middle of the Panama Canal.”

“No, I haven’t,” McGarvey said, surprised.

“A Venezuelan oil tanker. Someone aboard a cruise ship just in front of the tanker had a camcorder. There you were, right in the middle of it.”

“It’s all right, Katy,” McGarvey told her. “I’m back now.”

“You don’t understand, Kirk.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“Every crazy bastard on the planet knows that you helped stop the attack, and now they know your face.”

“It doesn’t matter,” McGarvey tried to assure her. “I was the DCI, and just about every time I testified to a committee on the Hill I made all the networks.”

“Yes, but you were supposed to be retired,” Kathleen insisted. “Everyone in the world now knows that isn’t true.” She pulled back and looked into his eyes, an intense set to her mouth. “You’ve done enough,” she said. “Let this be the end of it. Someone else can finish the job.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Katy, I can’t walk away from it. Not yet. Not like this.”

“Until when?” she cried. “How much longer, Kirk? Goddammit, give me a date. I need something to believe in.” Her fingers were digging into his arms. “I don’t want to end up alone, just another widow in Florida. I can’t do this, Kirk. I can’t lose you. Don’t you understand?”

“I don’t want that to happen either, but I have to finish it this time.”

“Finish what?” she sobbed. “They’ll just keep coming out of the woodwork, pulling the triggers, blowing themselves up, and killing anyone nearby. We’re not safe anywhere. Not in an airplane, or on a bus or train. Even sitting in a restaurant.” She was searching his eyes for some hint that she was getting through to him. “You and Elizabeth were almost killed when the bomb in front of the restaurant in Georgetown went off. That was just a few years ago. Or have you forgotten already?”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“What about me?” she demanded. “What about us? When is it our turn?”

“I’m going to kill him,” McGarvey said softly. “It’s the only way we can think of to put an end to the attacks.”

“You don’t know where he is,” Katy pleaded. “Please don’t do this, my darling. Please walk away from it. Let’s drive down to Florida right now. You stopped them at the canal. It’s enough!”

“I’m sorry—” McGarvey said, and Kathleen pulled away from him. She gave him a bleak look, then turned and stormed out of the kitchen. He heard her stomp up the stairs and then slam the bedroom door.

His cell phone rang. It was his daughter Elizabeth. “Hi, Daddy, are you at the safe house?” she asked.

“I just got here,” McGarvey said. “And yes, your mother saw the canal story on TV, and no, she’s not taking it very well.”

“I have someone on the way, should be there within the next few minutes,” Elizabeth promised. “I assume you’re not finished.”

“Something like that, sweetheart. I want you and Todd to keep a close watch on her. I don’t want the same thing happening as last year.”

“Not a chance,” Elizabeth said. Her mother had been kidnapped, held, and beaten badly before McGarvey could get to her. “Todd’s mother is taking care of Audrey until this business is finished.”

McGarvey’s heart warmed. “How is she?” Audrey had just turned seven months last week.

“Noisy,” Elizabeth said. “And fat, and happy, and wonderful.”

McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment. It was for Audrey and untold millions of others just like her, the innocents of the world, that he was doing what had to be done.

“Daddy?” Elizabeth prompted.

“We’ll get him this time,” McGarvey said.

“Mom will be fine,” Elizabeth said softly. “Promise.”

“Okay.”

“Will we see you before you leave again?” she asked.

“That depends on what we come up with over the next day or two,” McGarvey said. “But I expect I’ll be in town until then.”

“Dinner tonight?”

McGarvey glanced up the stairs at the closed bedroom door. “Give it a couple hours, then call your mother.”

“Will do.”

McGarvey knocked the drink back, then girded himself to go upstairs and face Katy again. He had to change into a dark suit, and pick up Gloria. He wanted to get to Arlington at least a half hour before the service to personally check security. But Katy had been right about one thing; just about every bad guy on the planet knew that the former DCI had not stayed retired.

McGarvey took Highway 355, which in D.C. was Wisconsin Avenue, up to Bethesda. It was a pretty afternoon and traffic was fairly light. He got on his cell phone and called Rencke.

“NRO’s about halfway through the fleet with no hits yet. At least nothing missing. Louise figures we should bag all but a half-dozen by tonight.”

“What about those?” McGarvey asked.

“That’s anybody’s guess, Mac. But they’ll be Graham’s most likely targets. I’ve got some Jupiter satellite time reserved, and an Aurora is standing by at Andrews.” The Aurora was the supersecret high-flying stealth spy plane that replaced the U2 and the SR-71 Blackbird. “We’ll have to take them one at a time. But it would be my guess we’ll need some on-ground resources at some point.”

“How about weapons?” McGarvey asked. At one time the countryside out here between the city and the Beltway was mostly open rolling hills, woods, fields, even a couple of farms. But now there were houses, businesses, and even strip malls. In Bethesda itself were a few high-rises and a Hilton Hotel. Americans were devouring their green spaces.

“If you’re talking nukes, it’s gotta be Russia, or some of the breakaway republics. Tajikistan comes to mind right off the top of my head. Hold on a sec.”

McGarvey could hear Otto’s fingers on a computer keyboard. He came back a few moments later.

“We might have something. Pavlosk Bay, east of Vladivostok. Used to be headquarters for the Pacific Fleet’s Twenty-sixth Submarine Division. But it was disbanded six or seven years ago. Since then it’s been a dumping ground for decommissioned subs as well as the fleet’s service ships, and weapons stores. It’s near the city of Dunay, right on the Sea of Japan. Unless we were looking, they could grab a sub and a weapon and break out of there before we could do a thing about it.”

“Are there any Kilo boats there?”

“Unknown, but I’ll check it out.”

“Good,” McGarvey said. If anyone could crack a database to find something, it was Otto. “But we need the last leg of the triangle. The target.”

“The big ditch?” Rencke offered. “They might not figure we’d expect them back so soon. Anyway it would give us a better idea of their timetable.”

“How do you see that?” McGarvey asked, puzzled.

“Graham is a sub driver, right? So why was he sent to hit the canal with an oil tanker? It was partly because all Venezuelan oil ships are run on a contract from Vensport to the transport firm GAC. Care to guess where GAC’s headquarters are located?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dubai. The United Arab Emirates.”

“How about that,” McGarvey said, not really all that surprised. It had become a small world.

“But they sent a sub driver ’cause they were being pressured to hit us, but they didn’t have a sub.”

“Yet,” McGarvey finished the thought.

“Yet,” Rencke said. “Are you coming in?”

Something was tickling the back of McGarvey’s consciousness. Something that he was forgetting. Something important. “No. I’m going with Gloria to Bob Talarico’s funeral. It’s at four.”

“Oh, gosh,” Rencke said, subdued. “I spaced it. Should I come over?”

“Did you know him?”

“Not very well,” Rencke admitted.

“Stay there and find that sub for me,” McGarvey said. “Quickly.”

“Will do,” Rencke said. “Oh, I almost forgot. Gloria’s buddy down at Gitmo is almost certainly dirty, unless he’s got a rich uncle we don’t know about. He lives in a two-million-dollar house out in Kettering, he drives a new Jag, and his uniforms are all custom-tailored. Two years ago he started spending more money than he was earning. Last year alone, three-quarters of a mil.”

“I thought so,” McGarvey said. He decided that it was going to give him a great deal of pleasure to bust the man. “Run the money trail, and inform someone over at the ONI. I want this guy isolated, without making it obvious to him. He could be a source back to bin Laden. Or at least lead us in the right direction.”

THIRTY-SIX

A few minutes after 2:00 P.M. an older model E300 black Mercedes sedan in decent condition turned off Eastern Boulevard in Baltimore’s south side and headed into an industrial park area that had long since seen better days. Al-Turabi was behind the wheel, and he was impatient to get started, but he had forced himself to remain well within the speed limit, for fear of attracting any attention.

The Mercedes was one of three, which whoever survived of him and his seventeen men would use for their escape from Arlington once the massacre was completed and McGarvey was dead.

Most of his men would probably die. Insh’allah. Security at the funeral might not be tight, but by all accounts McGarvey was a man to be respected. He would almost certainly be armed and he would fight back.

They’d been given nearly unlimited resources for this operation, because it had the personal blessing of bin Laden himself. In addition to the nearly perfect identity documents all eighteen of them carried, they’d been equipped with the three cars and two dark blue vans that had been repainted with the logos of the Prince William County Sheriff ’s Department. Drivers would wait with the three cars at the Farragut Drive exit, while al-Turabi and the other fourteen freedom fighters would take the vans to a spot above and behind the gravesite.

As soon as McGarvey showed up, they would take him out. And for that job they’d been supplied with a variety of weapons including four RPGs, and the new Heckler & Koch M8 carbine.

Against those odds and that firepower, and with the element of surprise, al-Turabi knew that there was no way they could fail. In a few hours McGarvey, and anyone standing next to him, would die.

Al-Turabi bumped across railroad tracks, then turned down a narrow lane between derelict warehouses in which a community of squatters had sprung up over the past few years. The police did not bother them this far south, because they were out of the public’s eye, and seldom caused any trouble. One of the members of the Baltimore cell had suggested the mission be staged from here, and he’d been spot on. It’s as if they were invisible.

The service door on a building marked CAPITAL CLEANERS rumbled partway open as al-Turabi approached and he drove up the ramp and inside.

One of his mujahideen was there, an M8 slung over his shoulder, and he closed the door, as al-Turabi stopped at the rear of the building where the other two cars and the two vans were parked.

Odeah came over when al-Turabi got out of the car, and they embraced. The others who were sitting around on packing crates and chairs, making last-minute checks of their weapons and loads, which had been laid out on a tarp, looked up. They were expectant, but they had been in other battles before, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Madrid and London, so al-Turabi knew that he could count on them.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” Odeah said. “Everything is finished here. How did it look?”

“I didn’t see anything other than the normal security. A couple of cars at the Memorial Drive gate. A couple of Park Police on patrol in pickup trucks. The marine at Kennedy’s grave. And, of course, the closed-circuit television cameras here and there throughout the cemetery grounds.”

“Our sheriff ’s department vans shouldn’t attract any attention,” Odeah said. “How about visitors?

“About what we’ve been seeing for a weekday,” al-Turabi said. “Nobody suspects a thing. After all, almost everyone there is already dead.”

“There’ll probably just be the family and maybe a couple of officials from the Agency with their bodyguards,” Odeah said. “It’s just a simple funeral for one of their spies.”

Al-Turabi glanced at the array of weapons, and at his men. “And Kirk McGarvey,” he said. “Let’s not forget him.”

Odeah lowered his voice. “I still say that we should find out where McGarvey and his wife are staying, and kill them there. It would be much less risky.”

Al-Turabi’s temper flared. “Are you afraid of martyrdom, Imad?” he asked sharply.

“Not at all,” Odeah answered matter-of-factly. “But I do not want to give my life meaninglessly.”

“Nothing for the jihad is meaningless,” al-Turabi said, just as matter-of-factly. “If we all die killing McGarvey, it will be worth the sacrifice.”

“One man,” Odeah said in wonder.

“Yes, but a man very special to bin Laden.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Gloria’s apartment was on the second floor of a condominium-garden apartment complex off Old Georgetown Road on the outskirts. A half-dozen buildings skirted a nine-hole executive golf course, with a lot of walking paths, the fairways defined by dense woods.

McGarvey, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and subdued gray tie, his 9mm Walther PPK holstered at the small of his back, parked his Range Rover in front, walked upstairs to her door, and rang the bell.

He’d not been able to calm Katy down before he’d left, and her deepening fear and premonition that something horrible was about to happen weighed heavily on him. Leaving the safe house he’d felt as if he were walking away from her again, like he’d done in the old days; abandoning her, instead of remaining by her side until he could make her understand and accept that what he was doing was vital.

“It’s open,” Gloria called from inside.

McGarvey let himself in. A short corridor opened on the right to a small kitchen, to the left on a bedroom, and straight ahead to the well-furnished living room with sliding-glass doors that looked out on the condo complex pool and beyond to the golf course and woods. “What if I was one of the bad guys?”

Gloria laughed from the master bedroom off the living room. “I saw you drive up,” she called. “How are we doing on time?”

“We’re good,” McGarvey told her.

“Make yourself comfortable, I’ll just be a minute,” she said. She came to the bedroom door. She was dressed only in a black lace bra and matching thong panties, her dark skin glowing. A small white dressing covered the gunshot wound in her left hip. She smiled. “There’s beer and wine in the fridge. Pour me a white, would you?”

She was a beautiful woman, with a fantastic body. McGarvey grinned. “I will, if you promise to put on some clothes.”

She put one hand up on the door frame and struck a provocative pose. “I thought you said that we were good on time.”

“Not that much time,” McGarvey said. He went into the kitchen. “Get dressed,” he ordered over his shoulder.

Gloria laughed throatily. “Too bad,” she said.

McGarvey was flattered, despite himself. In another time, another place, when he was young and single, he would have taken her up on her offer. Gladly. Such things were not unknown in the Company. In fact it was sometimes encouraged. A couple in the field seemed to pose less of a threat than the lone officer. It was a psychological thing. Though such pairings were one of the reasons that the divorce rate was so high among CIA officers.

There wasn’t much else in the fridge except for a six-pack of Michelob Ultra and an open bottle of Pinot Grigio, but she and her partner had been out of the country for a long time. He found the glasses in the cabinet over the sink and poured her some wine, then went back into the living room.

“You can come get your drink if you’re decent,” he called to her.

She came out of the bedroom. She hadn’t put on her shoes, but she was wearing a modest black dress that came down almost to her knees. It wasn’t zipped up in the back yet. “Better?” she asked.

“Better for my heart,” McGarvey said.

She laughed. “That’s good to know,” she said. She came over, took the wine from McGarvey, and took a sip. “Thanks,” she said. She looked up into his eyes. “Aren’t you having anything?”

“After the funeral maybe.”

She put her glass down on the coffee table and turned around. “Zip me up, please.”

He reached for the zipper, but she reached around for his right hand and placed it against her breast as she turned her lips to his and kissed him.

“Nice,” she said huskily.

“Very,” McGarvey told her, and he kissed her again, more deeply, holding her for several long moments, before parting.

Her eyes were wide, her lips parted. “We have time,” she said.

McGarvey smiled gently. “All the time we want,” he told her. “But it’s not going to happen.”

“Later?” she said hopefully.

“You’re a beautiful woman, and I’m complimented that you want to go to bed with me.”

Her face fell and she shrugged. “It was worth the try,” she said. “No offense?”

“None taken. It’s just that I’m a man who happens to be in love with his wife.”

She nodded, but didn’t lower her eyes though she was clearly disappointed. “Lucky her,” she said. She turned around. “Just the zipper this time. Scout’s honor.”

The shortest route to the cemetery would have been through downtown, but the quickest was around the city on the Capital Beltway, then the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the river, the city off in the distance like an ancient Rome with its monuments in white marble.

“Thank you for coming with me today,” Gloria said. She’d been quiet since they’d left her apartment, embarrassed by what she’d tried. And now as they got closer to Arlington the reality of what had happened in Cuba was finally starting to sink in.

McGarvey had read all of that from her body language and her reaction on the Parkway as they passed the mileage sign to the cemetery. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her.

“If I had followed orders, Bob wouldn’t have gotten killed,” she said, staring out the window.

“You were set up. Weiss is probably on the payroll. No matter what you did or didn’t do he wasn’t going to let you take your investigation any further.”

She turned and looked at McGarvey, her jaw tight. “I will be there when the man is brought down,” she said. Her eyes glistened, and she shook her head. “But I don’t know what I’m going to say to Toni and the kids.”

McGarvey never knew what to say in these kinds of situations either. “The truth,” he suggested. “She deserves at least that much.”

“Yeah,” Gloria said, and she turned away again to stare out the window.

McGarvey had taken a look at her personnel file. Ever since her husband had been captured and killed by Cuban intelligence she had thrown herself into her work. She was a damned fine field officer, even driven, but she had to be desperately lonely. According to Internal Affairs’ latest annual background investigation, she did not date. The only man currently in her life was her father, and they only occasionally saw each other. Her mother was dead, what relatives there were in Cuba who hadn’t been rounded up and shot after her father had defected were out of reach, and there never had been children.

Ten minutes from the cemetery, McGarvey telephoned Rencke, who answered on the first ring.

“Pavlosk is a wash,” Rencke said sharply. He sounded angry with himself. “Weapons up the ying yang, waiting for anyone to pick them up, but no Kilo boats. Just derelict nukes.”

“Any possibility one of them could be activated?”

“Most of the reactors have been cut out. The others leak like hell. They’d be death traps. The crew would never make it to Panama.”

“What’s next?” McGarvey asked.

“Let Louise do her job with the NRO’s assets, and in the meantime I’ll keep looking,” Rencke said. “We’ve at least eliminated one possibility.”

“Keep on it, Otto. We have to know where he’s coming up with a boat.”

“He might already have one, ya know,” Rencke said. “Could be he’s already on his way.”

“That’s what worries me most,” McGarvey agreed. “The boat we can’t find.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Al-Turabi lowered his binoculars and glanced at his watch. It was precisely four o’clock as a black Cadillac limousine with government plates pulled up and parked at the head of a line of nine cars and the long hearse. He was crouched in the back of one of the PWCS vans parked one hundred meters up the gently sloping hill from the gravesite. He’d not spotted McGarvey yet and he was beginning to get worried.

The six men crowded into the van with him were all dressed in deputy uniforms, with the correct badges and identifications, so they’d not been questioned by Park Police when they’d entered at Columbia Pike. But all the planning would be for nothing if McGarvey never showed.

His men were looking at him as he turned back to the silvered window and raised his binoculars to see who got out of the limo.

Two bulky men, in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, jumped out of the front seat, their heads on swivels as they swept the area immediately adjacent to the gravesite. One of them spotted the sheriff ’s van and looked directly at the silvered window behind which al-Turabi was watching him, but then, apparently satisfied there was no threat, turned away.

The second van with Odeah in charge was parked fifty meters farther away from the south gate where the three cars were waiting. Between them they would catch the mourners in a cross fire from which nobody could possibly survive.

One of the bodyguards turned his head and his lips moved. Al-Turabi realized that he was speaking into a lapel mike. The bodyguard looked up and nodded at his partner, who opened the rear door on the passenger side.

A slightly built man with sandy hair got out first, and al-Turabi instantly recognized him as Richard Adkins, the director of the CIA. He turned and helped a tiny woman, dressed in black, a veil covering her face, out of the limo. She was followed by a boy, dressed in a dark suit, and a little girl, dressed like her mother in black, but without the veil.

They would be the spy’s widow and family, al-Turabi figured. Well, they couldn’t begin to guess that they would soon join the man they’d come to mourn this afternoon. One happy little American family together again. It would be interesting to be at the gates of Paradise to see how Allah received them. They would get no martyr’s welcome.

Adkins said something to his bodyguard, and then he took the widow’s arm and they headed the few meters down the slope across the grass to where a knot of about fifteen or twenty people had gathered on folding chairs around the open grave and the flag-draped coffin. The bulk of the Pentagon loomed large in the background, and the sound of traffic on Washington Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Highway was constant.

But McGarvey was not among them, and al-Turabi was beside himself with fury. The funeral service was about to begin and their target had not shown up. How in Allah’s name could he have been so wrong? What was he going to tell bin Laden? And what would Odeah, who’d been perfectly correct to suggest killing McGarvey at home, report to bin Laden?

“Where is he?” Odeah radioed from the second van. “Do you see him from your position?”

Al-Turabi wanted to scream at the bastard for breaking radio silence. It was only supposed to be for an emergency.

One of the bodyguards, who’d followed Adkins and the family down to the grave, suddenly stopped and brought his right hand up to his ear. Someone was speaking to him.

He turned and looked up the road, his eyes passing the sheriff’s van. He was searching for something or someone. And it suddenly came to al-Turabi that Odeah’s transmission had been monitored. The infidel bastards knew that something was about to happen.

Adkins and the family had reached the gravesite, and the mourners had all got to their feet. At that precise moment, a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind a tree thick with foliage.

Al-Turabi was struck dumb. The man was saying something to the bodyguard up the hill. Al-Turabi focused on his face. It was McGarvey. He must have gotten to the cemetery first, and had been hiding like a coward all this time.

A good-looking, dark woman had gotten to her feet with the others, and she stepped to the side. There was something about her that seemed familiar to al-Turabi. She seemed to hold herself like a cop; probably an intelligence officer.

“It’s him,” al-Turabi told his men. “Radio Imad, we go now!”

The hair on the back of McGarvey’s neck was standing on end. Neal Julien, who had been his bodyguard when he was DCI, was trying to get Adkins’s attention. It was something about an intercepted transmission.

“Here in the cemetery?” McGarvey called up to him.

“Yes, sir!” Julien shouted back.

Adkins, finally realizing that something was going on, started to turn toward his bodyguard, when the Anglican minister in his dark coat and white collar suddenly exploded in a bright flash of blood, chips of bone, and big pieces of flesh and muscle.

A split instant later a tremendous bang rolled across the gravestones and trees.

The mourners, covered in blood and carnage, with more body parts dripping from the tree branches, were slow to react, having no comprehension of what was happening.

But McGarvey knew exactly what was going on. The minister had been in a direct line from a firing position up the hill. Whoever had fired what was probably an RPG had missed their intended target, but they wouldn’t stop for long to reacquire.

“Get down!” he shouted. He was at Toni Talarico’s side in two steps. He scooped her and the children in his arms and bodily hurled them to the ground as a second RPG slammed into the tree he’d just stepped away from with a loud flash-bang.

Almost immediately automatic weapons fire from two positions up the slope from the gravesite tore into the mourners who had been too slow to move, tearing into their bodies.

Julien had shoved Adkins to the ground behind the coffin, shielding the DCI with his own body as bullets slammed the earth all around them.

McGarvey pulled out his pistol as he rolled over, in time to spot the shooters who were crouched behind one of the sheriff ’s vans that had showed up just a few minutes ago. He’d seen them pull up and figured they were part of the security arrangements. He held his fire because they were way out of effective range for pistols.

But Gloria was down on one knee, firing at the nearest van, as was Adkins’s other bodyguard, who suddenly cried out and was flung backwards.

More automatic weapons fire raked the gravesite from the second van fifty meters farther down the hill, and it was clear that their principal target was McGarvey.

“Stay down,” he told Toni and the children, and he jumped up and headed at an oblique angle toward the second van.

Immediately, the terrorists concentrated their fire on him, leaving what remained of the funeral party in relative safety for the moment.

McGarvey raised his pistol as he zigzagged through the trees and opened fire on the second van, emptying his magazine as quickly as he could pull the trigger.

An RPG round passed his left side with an audible whoosh and a split instant later a grave marker a few feet in front of him disintegrated with a loud bang, flying chips of marble cutting his face.

He veered left toward several large trees about twenty feet closer to the second van, ejecting the spent magazine from his pistol, pulling the spare out of his pocket, and ramming it home.

All the fire from both vans was concentrated on him now, but he could hear pistol shots from the gravesite, which meant that Gloria and Julien were still on their feet.

Something hot stitched his left shoulder, causing him to stumble and drop to one knee. One of the shooters had come out from behind the second van, and unlike the others, who had simply been shooting indiscriminately, had steadied himself against the hood, taking care with his aim.

McGarvey pulled off four snapshots, the third and fourth hitting the terrorist, and spinning him away from the van, where he collapsed in a heap.

For just a second or two all but the pistol firing stopped.

McGarvey struggled to his feet and raced the last few yards to the trees before the stunned terrorists could react.

“He’s getting away,” al-Turabi shouted insanely. He and his men had concentrated on McGarvey’s retreating figure, which had given the DCI’s bodyguard and the black woman time to advance up the hill, closer to the van, where they’d taken cover. Now they were shooting methodically, pinning him and his people behind the van.

The walkie-talkie lying on the seat in the van hissed to life. “Rashid is down,” Odeah radioed excitedly.

Al-Turbai reached through the open door and grabbed the radio, no longer caring if their broadcasts were being monitored. “Where’s McGarvey?” he screamed.

“Imad hit him and he went down. But then he disappeared into the woods like a ghost. We must leave now while we can!”

“Not until McGarvey is dead,” al-Turabi ordered.

One of his people, who had peeked around the end of the van, suddenly fell backwards, a hole in the center of his forehead just above the bridge of his nose.

“Kill them!” al-Turabi bellowed, spittle flying everywhere. He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Blanket the woods with RPGs!” he shouted.

His people had begun to lay down heavy fire in the direction of the bodyguard and the black woman, who were well hidden behind large grave markers. But even over the heavy fire he could hear several sirens in the distance.

There was no time left, and he suddenly realized that he did not want to die here.

He keyed the walkie-talkie. “We’ll come to you as quickly as we can.”

Two of his people went down under the accurate fire from below the road, leaving only him and twelve others; the mujahideen in the second van, plus the three drivers waiting at the south gate.

He keyed the walkie-talkie again. “Why aren’t you shooting?” he demanded.

At that moment two RPG rounds exploded in the woods down from the gravesite, and he tossed the walkie-talkie back in the van, and climbed in the back. It was time to get away from this accursed place without being killed or captured.

“Let’s go!” he shouted to his people. “Now!”

THIRTY-NINE

Two RPG rounds, one right after the other, exploded within a few yards of where McGarvey was crouched. He’d seen the two terrorists step out from behind the sheriff ’s van, but before he could shoot, they’d fired the rockets.

Spears of wood and shrapnel flew everywhere, several hitting McGarvey’s left side, cutting his leg and torso, and opening a fairly substantial gash in his neck. The two concussions also knocked out his hearing, leaving behind a whooshing sound as if he were inside a jet engine.

Picking himself up, he staggered across to the bole of a larger tree, from where he had a good line of sight up to the second van. He counted at least four men plus the one on the ground.

The same two who had fired the RPGs had reloaded and emerged from behind the van again.

McGarvey’s vision was hazy, but he steadied his gun hand against the tree and squeezed off a shot that slammed into the hood of the van. The terrorist stepped aside, and then started to bring the RPG around.

Before he could fire, McGarvey pulled off two snapshots at the other terrorist holding an RPG, knocking him down, and then scrambled as fast as he could across an open swatch of grass to another clump of trees.

An RPG round struck a few feet behind him, spraying his back with what felt like thousands of needles or buckshot.

Aiming over his shoulder he fired two shots at the terrorist who’d launched the RPG, and the slide locked in the open position, the pistol dry.

He pulled up behind one of the trees, and laid his head against the trunk. His hearing was still bad, but he thought there were sirens somewhere in the distance.

Easing around from behind the tree, he took a quick look up the hill, then ducked back. He counted three bodies on the road, and perhaps two other terrorists crouched behind the van.

He released the slide. The Company’s chief armorer had been after him for years to carry a SIG Sauer or Glock, something with more stopping power than the Walther, and one that held at least fifteen rounds. But the PPK was an old friend that had saved his life on more than one occasion.

He was light-headed from his wounds and the loss of blood, and he had done all that he could. The police would be here soon, and they could finish the job.

From here he couldn’t see up to the gravesite, nor could he hear any shooting.

He looked out from behind the tree as two of the terrorists were dragging the bodies off the road. A third had gotten behind the wheel of the van and was gesturing at the others to hurry.

Dropping low, and keeping behind the trees as much as possible, McGarvey headed up the hill toward the van as fast as his legs would carry him.

Fifteen feet out, one of the terrorists looked up and spotted McGarvey charging up the hill, pistol in hand, blood streaming from a dozen wounds, and he fell back against the van, a look of abject terror on his long, narrow face.

“Kifaya baa!” McGarvey shouted. That’s enough!

The second terrorist had already climbed inside the van with the driver, and he was trying to bring his M8 carbine to bear.

McGarvey reached the man by the hood, grabbed a handful of his shirt, and pulled him around to cover the open door, when the terrorist inside fired the M8, three rounds slamming into the back of his fellow mujahideen’s head.

The driver slammed the van into gear and stomped on the gas pedal.

McGarvey shoved the dead terrorist aside and as the van started to pull away, its tires squealing, he reached inside, grabbed the man’s arm, and pulled him out, both of them tumbling backwards off the road.

The terrorist had lost his rifle, but he pulled out a Beretta auto-loader from his belt. McGarvey snatched it out of his hand and smashed the butt of the pistol into the bridge of the man’s nose, knocking him senseless.

Scrambling to his feet, McGarvey hobbled back up to the road and fired three shots at the retreating van until it finally got well out of range.

Someone was shouting his name as if from a very great distance. It sounded like a woman’s voice to McGarvey.

He turned in time to see the second sheriff ’s van barreling up the road, practically on top of him.

McGarvey caught a glimpse of Gloria, racing on foot down the hill from the gravesite shouting his name, as he leaped backwards. The van swerved to hit him, but its front wheel dropped off the side of the road, and the driver frantically brought the van back onto the pavement.

Gloria started to fire at the retreating van, but she ran out of ammunition by the time she reached McGarvey, who had landed in a bloody heap next to the still unconscious terrorist he’d pulled from the first van.

Gloria bent over at the waist, clutching her sides as she tried to catch her breath. She had taken some shrapnel or marble chips in her head, and the wounds were oozing blood.

“You don’t look so hot,” McGarvey said, sitting up. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Ambulances are on the way,” she said, her voice far away. “You have any serious wounds?”

“I don’t think so. How about Toni and the kids?”

“They’re okay, thanks to you. But we lost six people, plus Max Schneider, one of Adkins’s people.” She glanced over at the terrorist. “How about him?”

“He’ll live,” McGarvey said.

“Well, he’s the only one we have, unless the Bureau or someone catches up with the others,” she said, looking down the road in the direction the two vans had disappeared. She turned back to McGarvey. “They were after you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She managed a slight smile. “You’re not a very popular guy.”

He smiled back. “Do you suppose it’s my personality?”