Joshuas Hammer

CHAPTER ONE

Weary and worried Alien Trumble got off the elevator on the seventh floor where he had to submit to a third and final security check. There wasn’t a lot of activity in the corridors, but then there usually wasn’t except during shift changes. But from the moment he’d entered the front doors he was struck by the underlying tension here, which did nothing to dispel his gloomy mood. What he was bringing to the deputy director of Operations wasn’t going to help much; not the CIA and certainly not himself.

The civilian security officer handed Trumble’s pass and ID back. “Just down the hall to the right, sir.”

“Yes, thank you, I’ve been here before,” Trumble said. But not often and not lately. Most of his seventeen years on the payroll had been spent in foreign postings, most recently as chief of station Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. But it was time to come home now, maybe. His life was beginning to unravel and he didn’t really know why or what to do about it, except that a change of scenery might help.

He was an unremarkable looking man of medium height with thinning light brown hair, a slightly stoop-shouldered gait, and puffy features from living for too long in the dry desert climates of the Middle East. But he was an Arabic expert and that’s where the work was happening. In fact because he had lived for so long in-country he probably knew more about the region than all but the most senior analysts here. Certainly enough to know that very large trouble was brewing.

But until now he’d also considered himself to be a very lucky man. He had a job that challenged him, a wife who loved him and two children who thought the sun rose and set on their father. All of it going down the toilet. In the past year Gloria had become distant, spending most of her free time watching reruns of American television sitcoms. It was as if she had forgotten what home was like and she was trying to remind herself. Their sixteen-year-old daughter Julie had experimented dying her hair first orange, then pink, but their Saudi neighbors had begun to complain and Trumble had to put his foot down. Julie was still resentful, and she moped around the house speaking only when spoken to, and then in monosyllables. In their twelve-year-old son Daniel’s estimation it was time to go home. Most of the people they’d met over there were okay, but they didn’t really like Americans, and he was getting tired of it. He wanted a Mickey D’s, a real mall, Little League baseball and some new video games. Never mind that he had been born in Baghdad, and had never spent much time in the States. He missed it and he wanted to go home.

The deputy director of Operation’s suite was at the end of the hall from the director’s office. Trumble hurried down the broad, carpeted corridor, and went inside not at all sure exactly what sort of a message he was bringing home with him. He was the Arab expert, but this time he was out of his depth and he knew it.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Trumble,” the DDO’s secretary, Dahlia Swanfeld said pleasantly.

“Hello,” Trumble smiled, trying to hide his nervousness. “I have a two o’clock with the deputy director.” It was one minute before that time now.

“He’s on the phone. Shouldn’t be long. Would you like some coffee?”

“No thanks. We had a late lunch, McDonald’s.”

Ms. Swanfeld smiled and nodded. Though she’d never married — the CIA was her life — she sometimes acted like a kindly grandmother. Trumble could feel genuine interest and good cheer radiating from her like warmth from a wood stove on a cold winter’s day. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so good.

“How is your family? Happy to be on vacation and back home?”

“It’s going to be hard to drag them back to Riyadh. But I mink we might be coming home again for Christmas. My folks are insisting on it, and it’s hard to say no to your mother, wife and kids. I’m sorta outnumbered.”

“I’d like to meet them.” The light on her telephone console blinked out and she picked up the phone. “Mr. Trumble is here.” She looked up. “You may go in now.”

Kirk McGarvey, his jacket off, his tie loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up, was pulling a thick, red-striped file folder from one of the piles on his large desk. Stacks of newspapers and news magazines from a dozen different countries were piled neatly on the floor around him, and a television monitor, the sound very low, was tuned to CNN. The computer monitor on a credenza next to him was on, but showed only the CIA’s seal.

“Nice to see you back in one piece.” McGarvey got up, came around the desk and shook Trumble’s hand. “Gloria and the kids okay?”

“They’re out shopping. We need vacation clothes, but God only knows what they’re going to buy for me. Whatever it is, though, I’m going to have to wear it and like it.”

At fifty, Kirk McGarvey had worked for the CIA for twenty-five years and kept himself in superb condition by a strict physical regimen that included running and swimming everyday and working out at his fencing club whenever he could. He was a hard man, who until he’d taken over the job as DDO twelve months ago, had been the best field officer the CIA had ever known. The fact that he had been a shooter and had killed in the line of duty was widely known. What wasn’t so well known, however, was the number of people he had killed, or the tremendous physical and mental toll the job had taken on him and his family.

He was six feet tall, two hundred pounds and built like a rugby player with not an ounce of visible fat on his broad shouldered frame. But he was a Voltaire scholar and that curious combination — killer, academic and now administrator-seemed to fit him well. He exuded self-confidence, intelligence, honesty and above all dependability. He had never let one of his people down, he had never held anything back from them, unless in his estimation they didn’t have the need to know, and he was surrounded by a staff of very bright, very dedicated friends who excelled under his direction. There was a comfort zone around him. When you were with McGarvey you knew that everything would turn out okay. All hell might break loose, but you’d come out of it. He’d make sure of it.

His face was wide, handsome and friendly, unless he was being lied to. His motto was: Don’t bullshit the troops; tell it like it is, or don’t tell it at all.

“Do you want a beer?” McGarvey motioned toward the couch, chairs and low table by the window.

“Sounds good.” Trumble set his attache” case on the coffee table, dialed the combination and took out his report contained in a thin file folder.

McGarvey got a couple of beers from a small fridge in his credenza and brought them back. He took the report. “Not much here.”

“You might want to take a quick read, Mr. McGarvey.”

“Mac. But I’d rather hear it from you first. What are our chances?”

“Osama bin Laden is not a good man,” Trumble said, opening his beer. His hand shook a little and McGarvey noticed it. “He might be crazy.”

“What’d he say to you? What does he want?” McGarvey asked, giving his C.O.S his entire attention.

“Well, he says he wants to talk to someone in authority. Someone higher than a chief of station. It’s a good possibility that he means to assassinate whoever we send to him, providing he thinks that person is a worthy enough target.” Trumble had made the arrangements to meet with the Saudi multimillionaire terrorist in Khartoum, at McGarvey’s request. No U.S. intelligence officer had been able to get anywhere near him or his business interests in the Sudan, or his camps in the mountains of Afghanistan, but McGarvey had a hunch that he might be ready to talk. The bad part was that a lot of people here in Washington and in London believed that bin Laden was getting ready to make another spectacular strike again, but no one knew when, where or how. In 1998 more than five thousand people had been hurt and more than two hundred killed when a bomb exploded outside the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. There’d been many other attacks with loss of lives, but Nairobi had been the biggest to date. The general consensus was that there would be a next time and it would be even worse.

“They took my tape recorder before they brought me up to see him, but it really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been able to keep it, because I wasn’t with him for more than two or three minutes. He told me that I was the face of evil and that if I were to die then and there, no one would shed a tear.”

McGarvey sat back, a dark, calculating expression in his gray-green eyes. Bin Laden hadn’t balked at the meeting, in fact he’d agreed to it almost too readily, which meant he wanted something, unless he was stalling for time. It was a possibility they would have to consider. Bin Laden could be keeping them talking while he was getting ready to strike. With the latest information McGarvey had seen and the reason he’d sent Trumble orders to set up the meeting, this time when bin Laden struck it would be worse than Nairobi, much worse than anything they could imagine.

“Did he give you any names, Alien? Anyone in specific who he wanted to talk to?”

“No, just someone more important than me.” Trumble shuddered. “The bad part is that he knows more about me than I know about him. He told me to get out or die, but I thought I could push it just a little. Maybe he was bargaining they do that a lot So I promised that we’d lift the bounty on his head like you suggested.”

“What’d he say to that?”

Trumble looked McGarvey in the eye. “His exact words. He said, “Your wife’s name is Gloria, isn’t it? Your children axe Daniel and Julie?”

“Jesus,” McGarvey said sitting up suddenly. “Were you followed back to Riyadh?”

“I don’t think so. Look, it was just his way of letting me know that his intelligence was at least as good as ours and that he wasn’t screwing around. Saving face is everything out there and we are the infidels. He’s taken to heart the idea of knowing his enemies. He could have killed me then and there, dumped my body somewhere it would never be found.” Trumble shook his head, as if he were trying to shrug off the incident, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. “He doesn’t operate that way, on that small a scale, I mean. If he wants a bigger fish, killing me wouldn’t have done him any good.”

McGarvey got up and went back to his desk. “Who’s your ACOS?”

“Jeff Cook.”

“Is he ready to run a station on his own?”

Trumble was a little confused. “He’s coming along. I didn’t hesitate leaving him in charge. He can handle the routine, although his Arabic is a little weak. The Saudis get along with him okay.”

McGarvey picked up his phone. “Dahlia, have Dick come right over and then get me Dave Whittaker.” Whittaker was the area divisions chief in charge of all foreign CIA stations and missions. McGarvey held his hand over the phone. “Is he married, any kids?”

“No kids. He’s divorced, his wife’s back in Michigan, or someplace in the Midwest.”

McGarvey turned back to the phone. “Dave, I have a housekeeping job for you, but I want it done on the QT. I’m pulling Alien Trumble and his family out of Riyadh, effective immediately. In fact he’s in my office right now, so I want you to send a security detail over there to shut down his apartment and get his things back here.”

Trumble was floored, and he started to object, but McGarvey held him off.

“I’m putting his ACOS Jeff Cook in charge for the time being. We’ll see how it works out.” McGarvey was watching Trumble. “But listen to me, Dave, tell security to watch their step. Alien’s apartment could be rigged.”

Trumble’s stomach flopped. The thought that bin Laden could have ordered someone to booby-trap his apartment had never occurred to him.

“Bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “That’s what Alien told me, but I don’t want to take any chances. This isn’t going to turn out to be another Buckley case.” In 1985 CIA Director William Casey sent his Beirut COS Bill Buckley back into the field after the U.S. embassy out there had been sacked and his cover blown. He’d been picked up the day he got back. He was tortured and eventually murdered.

Dick Adkins, the DDO’s chief of staff, walked in from the adjoining office. Like McGarvey he wore no jacket, his tie was loose and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

“Hi, Alien,” he said. “How’d it go in Khartoum?”

“Not very well,” Trumble said, and they shook hands. He’d known Adkins for seventeen years, first running into him at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility near Williams burg, where Adkins had been camp commandant. At his welcoming talk to new recruits he’d impressed Trumble as a man who might be short on imagination, but who was very strong on details. The first impression he gave was that of a very steady hand on the helm. Nothing in the intervening years had happened to change Trumble’s mind. Adkins was doing the job now that he was always meant to do; acting as precision point man to McGarvey’s sometimes maverick tactics.

McGarvey hung up the phone. “I’ve pulled Alien out of Riyadh and put his ACOS Jeff Cook in charge for the time being.”

“I’d just as soon stick with it, if you don’t mind,” Trumble said. “I’ve developed a lot of solid contacts in the last three years.”

“I do mind,” McGarvey said. “Your contacts wouldn’t do you any good if you were dead.” “What the hell happened over there?” Adkins demanded.

McGarvey handed him Trumble’s report. “Take a look at this, Dick. Bin Laden was playing games with him.”

Adkins sat down and quickly read through the report, which ran only to ten pages. When he was finished he glanced up at McGarvey. “Good call,” he said quietly, and then he turned his attention back to Trumble. “Did you get the sense that he was actually going to come after you and your family?”

“I don’t know. That’s not his style. But there were a half dozen pretty eager looking kids in the room with him, all armed with Kalashnikovs. It would have taken just a word, or even a gesture, from their boss for them to kill me.”

“Did you recognize any of them?”

Trumble started to shake his head, but then thought better of it. He had a very good memory for faces, and the station file in Riyadh had an extensive photo archive of known terrorists and their associates. Not only the foot soldiers, but the planners, the bankers, the technicians and anyone else connected with the dozens of various movements and factions in the region. He’d wanted to do a little checking on his own first before he brought it up. He didn’t know if he was being foolish, but now he decided was not the time to hold anything back no matter how seemingly meaningless it might be.

“There was one man, older than the others, maybe forty, plain looking, who sat in a corner drinking tea. He was the only one not armed.”

“Did you recognize him?” Adkins asked.

Trumble shook his head, trying to place the face as he had done on the way back to the Khartoum airport. “I don’t think so. But I got the impression that he might have recognized me. But it was just for a second, and then bin Laden was talking to me.”

“Anything in your station files?”

“I looked, but I didn’t find anything.”

“Okay, it might be nothing,” Adkins said, clearly not meaning it. He glanced at McGarvey who was content to let him run with it for now. “What’s this number you mention?”

“Bin Laden gave it to me just before I left. It’s not a phone number, but it obviously means something.”

Adkins handed the report to McGarvey, who looked at it. “He didn’t give you any explanation?”

“He said that we’d figure it out.”

“What do you want to do, Alien?” Adkins asked.

“First of all I want some solid bargaining points that I can bring back to Khartoum.”

“Do you think he’d agree to another meeting?”

“I think so—”

“That’s out,” McGarvey cut in sharply. “I’m putting you on the Middle East Desk, and if we do set up another meeting it won’t be with you, Alien.” He and Adkins exchanged a significant look that Trumble caught.

“What am I missing?” he asked.

“Nothing for now,” Adkins said. “Do you think that you can come up with a name for this face?”

Trumble wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but he let it slide for the moment. “That’s the other thing I wanted to try. I’d like to take this to Otto Rencke. We might be able to develop a recognition search program. At least we could narrow down the list of possibilities.”

“Good idea,” McGarvey said. “You can get Otto started this afternoon. In the meantime what are your vacation plans?”

“That depended on my new orders. We were going to hang around Washington for a couple of days to see the sights, and then if there was time, see my folks in Minnesota.”

“Your kids have never really seen the states,” Adkins said. “Dan was born in Baghdad, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. But we’ve been back a few times to Duluth.”

“You oughta go down to Orlando, Disney World. It’s a little hot this time of year, but after Riyadh it should be a piece of cake.”

“They’ve talked about it.”

“That’s a good idea,” McGarvey said. “Take a couple of weeks, and when you get back we’ll have personnel find you a place to live. You’ll be looking at some eighty-hour weeks.”

“I hate to walk away from this.”

“I’m not handing out charity, Alien. You’ve earned the desk, and right now I need your expertise here, not in Riyadh.”

“Yes, sir.” Trumble closed his attache case, and got up.

McGarvey understood his frustration. “There is another factor out there, an important one. But it’ll hold for a couple of weeks. Knowing wouldn’t do you any good on vacation in any event.”

“Just something more to worry about?”

“Something like that.”

When Trumble left, McGarvey called down to Otto Rencke to tell him what was coming his way. He also read off the twelve-digit number. “Bin Laden gave this to Alien. Find out what it is, Otto. It’s top priority.” Trumble was a very good man; intelligent, knowledgeable and sensitive. But he was an academic, and nothing more than an academic, who should never have been given a field assignment in the first place.

“What do you think, Dick?” Adkins had gone to the fridge for a Coke. “Two possibilities. Either bin Laden is getting tired of hiding out and wants to come back to the real world, or he’s stalling us.”

“I meant the serial number. If it’s what I think it is, we could be in trouble.”

Adkins stared out the window, almost as if he was sorry that he was here and he wanted to escape. He was a short, somewhat paunchy man who had fought a weight problem all of his life. He had light, wavy hair and a pale complexion. Sometimes like this morning he looked as if he had been sick for a long time. “Are we going to send somebody else to talk to him?”

“I don’t think we have any other choice under the circumstances.”

Adkins turned back, his eyes washed out. “Who?” he asked quietly. He knew the answer, but he didn’t want to say it.

McGarvey didn’t respond. A snatch of something from Voltaire ran through his head. The problem is that common sense isn’t so common after all. But what good was common sense, McGarvey wondered, in dealing with a madman who’d dedicated his fortune and his life to one thing-killing Americans? All his life he had been witness to some very bright people making the most stupid of mistakes, himself included. He did not want to repeat the errors, especially not this time.

Otto Rencke had been trained as a Jesuit priest and professor of computer sciences and mathematics, but he’d been kicked out of the church for having sex with the dean’s secretary on top of the dean’s desk. His life after that had been one series of scrapes with the law after another, because he was a genius, he didn’t respect authority and he thought that he knew more about computers than anyone else in the world, which he probably did. In between troubles he had done some very good and very serious work for the CIA, bringing the Agency into the twenty-first century, and he had worked on a number of projects with McGarvey. But he’d been bored. He’d simply been playing games; with the world, with the projects he’d been assigned, with himself. The fact of the matter was that he had no idea who he was, what was driving him or where he was going. A lost soul, his mother had called him on the day she and her husband had kicked him out of the house for good.

It wasn’t until McGarvey became DDO and brought Rencke back into the fold that the forty-one-year-old maverick finally came into his own. He had finally found the one thing he’d been looking for all of his life: a family; someone to love him, someone for him to take care of, to fight for, to be with.

When Trumble walked in on him in his third floor office, he was sitting on top of a table that was strewn with computer printouts, running his delicate fingers through his long, out-of-control, frizzy red hair.

Trumble knocked on the doorframe. “Mr. Rencke?” He’d heard about the assistant to the DDO for Special Research, but he’d never met the man, and until this moment he’d disbelieved almost everything he’d been told as simply too fantastic, too bizarre.

“Bad dog, bad dog. My father’s name was Mr. Rencke, and he was the baddest dog of all.” Rencke hopped down off the table and practically bounded across the room to shake Trumble’s hand. He wore faded blue jeans, a dirty MTT sweatshirt, and unlaced black high-top sneakers, showing bare ankles that looked as if they hadn’t seen soap and water in a month. But his grip was light, and his wide blue eyes were so intense, so deep, and so utterly warm and filled with intelligence and childlike good cheer, that Trumble couldn’t help but smile. “You call me Otto, I call you Alien. Saves a lot of time that way, ya know.”

“All right, Otto. I just got in from Riyadh, and Mr. McGarvey thought that you might be able to help me with something.”

“The name is Mac, and you’re lying. It wasn’t his idea, it was yours.” Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other, something Trumble had been told he did whenever he was happy or excited about something. “Trumble, Alien Thomas. Born Duluth, Minnesota, 1960. Parents Eugene and Joyce — solid folks. Poli-sci and psych double majors, University of Minnesota, magna cum. Masters in psych, then the Company recruited you from a fate worse than death in dull, dull, boring hidebound academia.” He grinned, his mouth pulled down on the left. “Hidden talents. Farsi and a dozen Arabic dialects. You have the gift, and we’re all desperate for gifts, ya know. Married to Gloria Porter, kids Julie sixteen, Daniel twelve, apples of then father’s eye, tests off the charts in every embassy school they ever attended,” Rencke stopped in midstream and gave Trumble a strange, pained look, almost as if he’d suddenly seen something so terrible it was beyond words. “What was he like? In person, I mean. Bin Laden.”

Trumble was at a loss for words. Rencke was overwhelming.

“Come on, Alien, reticence is dull. First thing pops into your head.”

“Gentle,” Trumble said, not knowing where that had come from.

“Gentle?” Rencke prompted.

“Cobra.”

“Cobra?”

“Venemous.”

“Venemous?” Rencke prompted again, continuing the word association.

Trumble blinked, knowing exactly what Rencke was looking for. The only true knowledge, that worth having, was sometimes to be found only in the subconscious. “He’s a dangerous man because he’s smart, he’s rich, he’s dedicated and he’s completely filled with hate. It’s his religion, and he has more followers now than Jesus Christ had two thousand years ago when he was out among the people spreading the Word. When he looks at you through those hooded eyes, he’s as mesmerizing as a king cobra.”

“Kamikazes in the flock?”

“You can bet on it,” Trumble said. “He’s got people around him willing to give their lives for the jihad. Without hesitation, without even giving it a second thought, except

that they would be gaining an early entry into the gates of paradise.”

“Gotcha.” Rencke broke out into a broad grin. “That’s the guy we’re looking for. The unarmed man sitting in the corner drinking tea while all around him the troops were twitching.”

“Okay, how do we do it?”

“We’re going to generate a 3-D computer model of his face, his build, his mannerisms, anything you can remember no matter how small — just like the old police IdentiKit drawings — and then my darlings will go hunting. From time to time a candidate should pop out of the slot and I’ll fax it to you.”

“I can stick around—” “Bzzz. Wrong answer, recruit. The boss says you’re on vacation, and this might take some time.”

Trumble had to shake his head. Being around Rencke was like being in the middle of a white tornado; it left you breathless and wondering if your feet would ever touch the ground. Trumble had, in the back of his heart, figured that he was pretty smart. But Otto was smarter, a lot smarter than anybody he’d ever known including a couple of Nobel docs at the U. of M. It was almost disquieting. Thank God the man was on our side, he thought.

Rencke started hopping from one foot to the other again. “Do me a big favor, would you, Alien? Just one?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Disney World. Magic Mountain, the roller coaster. Keep your eyes closed the whole time.”

Trumble laughed. “Okay, — but why?”

“I always wanted to do that,” Rencke said dreamily. “When you come back I want you to tell me what color it was. I’m betting red.”

CHAPTER TWO

He’s a fool.” Ban Yousef put the satellite phone back in his bag, a look of disgust on his dark, narrow features. He understood the meaning of his orders. Killing Trumble and his family had to be made into a statement of terror. Strike fear into the hearts of everyone who witnessed the attack, or heard about it, here of all places, at America’s mecca for families. But the risks were great.

“You should be careful what you say,” Rachid Walid warned. “If we are given an order, then we must carry it out, because he knows what he’s doing. We’ve come this far together, and if we die now it will be glorious.”

Yousef knew that nothing was foolproof, but he could think of a dozen different methods to accomplish their goal with a much greater chance for their escape afterward. He wasn’t concerned about doing the job, he’d done a lot more difficult things, in Berlin, and Beirut, and Paris, and even in New York. But it was getting away so that they could fight in another place, on another day that worried him. He wasn’t an ignorant country boy like so many of the others, he had gone to school for two years at the American University in Beirut, so he could think beyond the moment. He shook his head in frustration.

“Hamza knows his duty,” Omar Zawattri said from the back of the van. “He’s waiting for us where he should be waiting, just like we planned. He has never failed before.

And by the time the authorities respond we well be a long way from this godless place.”

They made a second pass down the Kangaroo row where the Trumbles’ rented light-blue Toyota SUV had been parked since nine this morning. If the family followed the same routine as they had for the last four days, they would be leaving the park around 6:00 p.m. to return to their Dixie Landings hotel a few miles away but still on the Disney property.

Yousef checked his watch. It was already five o’clock. “Find us a parking place where we can watch the shuttle bus. We have been given the go-ahead.”

Walid, who was driving, glanced over and grinned. Two of his front teeth were missing, and fool that he was he refused to see a dentist in Jersey City where’d they’d lived for the past three years, because he couldn’t find a doctor who was also a man of God. He would not have an infidel attend to him. In the meantime, in Yousef’s estimation, he looked like an ignorant Bedouin. He had never blended in, which made him dangerous.

Seven hundred meters across the still mostly full vast parking lot, the dimpled silver ball that was the symbol of EPCOT rose sixteen stories into the hazy blue sky. They had been told that small carts took people up inside the globe where at the very top they were given the illusion that they hovered in outer space looking down at the earth. One part of Yousef wanted to disbelieve such fairy tales, but living in America for so long he had seen plenty of other fantastic sights, so that another part of him thought the stories might be true. One of the truck drivers working for their cover company in Jersey City had told them that anything is possible in America, so maybe this was true. But none of it was worth so much as a tiny desert village, because of the godlessness. But that would change, and sooner than any of them expected. Insha’Allah.

Trumble was nearly dead on Ms feet. Five solid days of being on the go had gotten to him. He sat on a bench with Gloria in the shadow of Spaceship Earth, the EPCOT dome, waiting for the kids to come out. It had been a beautiful week, although the weather was way too humid after the years he had spent in the desert climates. The crowds in the park had been as heavy as Adkins had warned they would be. Kids were on summer vacation, and this was the ultimate family playground. But what surprised him was how efficiently everything was run. Sure there were long lines for every attraction, but the lines moved pretty quickly so that they’d never had to wait much more than twenty or thirty minutes. And another thing amazed him. With all those crowds everyday he’d expected to see a lot of litter, maybe even some graffiti and broken things, or worn-down paint. He’d watched for it, but the entire huge park looked almost brand-new, the same as Magic Kingdom. Perfectly mowed lawns, beautifully arranged flower beds and topiaries. Everything was clean and neat, everybody smiled, everybody was having a good time. It was impressive, and a far contrast to the rigidly defined structure that the Saudis imposed on their people; and it was even worse in the other Islamic countries where they’d lived. He was a Middle East expert, but he decided that he wasn’t going to miss living there very much. Coming home was going to be a new start for them.

“A penny?” Gloria asked, contentedly. She’d been a CIA wife for seventeen years, and until recently had always gotten along wherever they were assigned. But Saudi Arabia had gotten to her. He could see that now. She’d taken the news that they were pulling out with a mixture of surprise, and relief, and finally some suspicion. Transfers weren’t done so suddenly unless something was wrong. But she’d not made a point of it so far. The only blot on their vacation was the kids. They had been at each other’s throats for five days. Nothing was right. There were too many people. It was too hot. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do. Julie wanted to spend money on clothes, and Danny wanted to do nothing other than play video games.

He smiled. “A hot shower, clean clothes, one very cold martini, something fishy for dinner — maybe lobster — and two quiet children.”

“They’ll be okay. Alien. This has been a big change for them. They dreamed about it for so long that now that they’re here they can’t take it all in.”

“Maybe they’ll drown each other in the pool tonight and we can start all over again,” Trumble said. Gloria laughed at the back of her throat, like she did when she was happy. She hadn’t done that for a long time, and Trumble felt a stab of guilt.

“I wouldn’t go through that again for all the oil in OPEC.”

“Tea in China,” he corrected. “At any rate, twelve and sixteen, we’re almost home free.” He shrugged. ” “Course there’ll be college bills, a couple of weddings, grandkids.”

Gloria reached over and kissed her husband. “It’s going so fast, Alien. I’m glad we’re home.” She gave him a look that she wanted to be serious now. “Are you going to be okay with this move?”

“It’s a promotion.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Are you going to get wanderlust in a few months, reading reports from places we’ve been — where you think you still belong?”

Trumble thought about it for a moment, then nodded. “I probably will,” he admitted. “But it’s time for us to come home, sweetheart. And all kidding aside, being with you, Julie and Danny, and being back home like it used to be, beats Riyadh hands down.”

Gloria was watching him closely. “You almost said safe. Back home and safe.”

“That too.”

A dark cloud came over her face. “Can you tell me what happened, Alien? Why they won’t let us go back even to pack our things?”

“No.”

“Were we in some danger over there?” she demanded sharply.

Trumble had never been a very good liar, which was another reason, he knew in his heart of hearts, that he was never a very good spy. An expert, an administrator, an analyst, but not a spy.

“There was a possibility, and I mean a remote possibility, that something might have happened, maybe a kidnapping or something like that. That’s why McGarvey pulled us out the way he did.”

“How about here? Are we in any danger?”

Trumble looked into his wife’s eyes, certain now that their troubles were finally behind them, and told her the absolute truth as he knew it. “Not unless Mickey Mouse turns out to be a rat and bites us.”

“We’d have to go back to Magic Kingdom for that-maybe you could ride the roller coaster again,” she added coyly.

“I get sick just thinking about it.” Rencke had been right; the coaster was red with your eyes closed. Amazing.

He glanced over at the Spaceship Earth exit The kids were coming down the walk, arguing about something like they’d done all week. The crowds had definitely thinned out since this morning, and most of them looked tired, even their whirlwind Daniel. He’d not raised any objections for a change when they’d headed for the exit. He just wanted to go up in the ball one last time, and had somehow talked his sister into going with him.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Trumble said.

“Sounds good,” Gloria agreed. She got up and handed him a couple of the plastic shopping bags. Danny’s was the heaviest because he’d bought four glycerine-filled glass globes that contained models of the castle at Magic Kingdom. When the globes were shaken snow seemed to fall all around the castle. He was sending them back to his Saudi friends in Riyadh who’d not only never been to Disney World, but who’d never seen snow. Danny had always been their giver, and Julie was their fashion expert. Until a year ago when their constant bickering had taken on a new, sharper tone, they argued almost constantly, but Danny had always been able to stop his sister short by giving her something out of the clear blue. He used to spend his allowance on her; pierced earrings, watches, and once a twenty-five dollar gift certificate for the big mall in Kuwait City.

“Shut your mouth,” Julie was saying, angrily. She was tall and willowy like her mother at that age. “Just shut up.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it,” Trumble told them. “We’re going back to the hotel now.”

“This one you gotta hear, Dad,” Daniel said, grinning from ear to ear. He was tall, almost as big as his father. And at twelve he still had some of his baby fat, which his sister chided him unmercifully about.

“Daniel,” Julie warned.

Daniel couldn’t contain himself. “She’s got a bikini, Dad. And she wore it at the pool last night.” That was something just not possible in the Middle East.

Julie’s lips compressed.

Trumble laughed out loud. “Did she look sexy?”

“Nah, she just looked gross.”

“Am I going to get to see this swimsuit?”

“I don’t think that would be such a good idea, dear,” Gloria intervened.

Outside the gates they were just in time to catch one of the nearly empty shuttle trains. Daniel pulled a small package out of his pocket, and handed it to his sister. She shot him another dirty look, and although she didn’t want to open it, she couldn’t help herself.

“What’d you spend your money on now?” Trumble asked.

“There was this other girl at the pool. She had an ankle bracelet, which looked pretty cool, but Julie didn’t have one.” Daniel said it almost shyly.

Julie held up the delicate gold-plated bracelet with a tiny gold Minnie Mouse charm. “What am I supposed to do now, Mother?” she asked plaintively.

“You could try thanking your brother,” Gloria said.

Julie looked at her brother, the expression on her face softening, and she shook her head. “Thank you, Daniel,” she said.

Danny grinned. “Just don’t hang around me and my friends half naked like that. It’s embarrassing.”

Trumble put his arm around his son’s shoulder and pulled him close. “Did I ever tell you that I love your’

“Ah, Dad.” Daniel squirmed.

Julie was misty-eyed. “All the time, Father, and to all of us,” she said very seriously, back to her old self.

The shuttle train stopped at the Kangaroo 57–61 rows. They got off with a few other passengers who headed off to their cars. Trumble had forgotten which row they were in.

“Fifty-seven,” Gloria said.

Trumble glanced at his watch. It was just six. Tomorrow they were going to Sea World and it was going to be a great day because the kids were finally beginning to settle down. Washington would be pretty good after all, he decided. He might even have time to get back into tennis. Once upon a time he and Gloria had been pretty good, but now he was so out of shape that he didn’t think he could last one set, let alone an entire match. Maybe they could get Julie interested in the game — of course, she’d want the best tennis outfits in Washington. And maybe he and Danny could go fishing, or maybe even sailing on the Chesapeake, he’d always wanted to try that.

He heard a car coming up behind them, and he turned as a dark gray van headed way too fast directly at them.

Trumble shoved Danny aside, between parked cars and he raised his hand for the driver to slow down as he tried to reach Gloria and Julie twenty feet back. The van was right on top of them as its side door came open, and he got the impression of a man crouched in the back with a large gun. It was a Kalashnikov, the thought registered on his brain, and an instant later he heard the distinctive clatter of the Russian assault rifle on full automatic.

Gloria and Julie were shoved violently backward, blood spraying on the mini lids and rear windows of several cars from a dozen wounds. He simply could not believe what he was witnessing. Not now. Not here. It was impossible!

“No!” Trumble cried out. He spun around and threw Danny to the pavement, shielding his son’s body with his own. Some people in the next row stopped short, and a woman screamed. Bullets slammed into the cars, sending glass flying everywhere.

The van screeched to a halt about twenty yards down the row and immediately started back, tires squealing.

Trumble hauled Danny to his feet. “Get out of here, Danny! Run!” He shoved his son toward the next row, then scrambled around the front of the car, blocked for the moment from the direct line of fire. He was moving purely on instinct now, adrenalin pumping through his body, his mind numb by what was happening. This was America. Disney World, the safest place on earth. They were home.

All he could think of were Gloria and Julie. He had to get to them now.

He heard the van screech to a halt directly behind the car he was crouched in front of, and he moved to the left fender where he could see the front of the van. A man sat behind the wheel, looking around wildly as if he expected the police to show up at any moment. Another man ran past the car. Trumble could see him through the windows, a deep, black, sick anger welling up inside his gut. They had come after his family all the way from Saudi Arabia. The bastards! The fucking bastards!

“Dad! Dad!” a little boy shouted in desperation, and in his present state it took Trumble a second before he realized that it — was Daniel.

He scrambled back around the front of the car to the other side just as a second man came down the row. He was dark, probably Arab, Trumble thought. The man suddenly crouched down and opened fire with the Kalashnikov, cutting Danny’s cries off. None of this was happening. It was all some sort of a terribly bad joke, yet he knew it wasn’t so.

The gunman started to swivel around as Trumble leaped up and swung the heavy plastic shopping bag with Danny’s snow globes, connecting solidly with a satisfying thump on the side of the man’s head. The bag broke open sending the glass globes flying. The gunman’s head cracked open like a soft-boiled egg in a spray of blood, and he was slammed forcefully against the side of the other car, dropping his rifle and collapsing in a heap.

Daniel was down on his back and not moving between the parked cars. The front of his tee shirt was bright red, and a shockingly large pool of blood was spreading out on the pavement. Up the row Trumble could see the bodies of his wife and daughter, and still it made no sense to him. For a heartbeat he was torn between going to them, who he knew without a doubt were dead, or picking up the Kalashnikov and going after the monsters who had done this to his family; now after they had finally begun to work things out.

He turned to the downed gunman as another man ran up from the van, raising his rifle as he came. Trumble knew with utter finality that he had lost, but still he made a try for the rifle lying on the pavement. Something like a freight train slammed into his chest, and an instant later a billion stars burst inside his head as a 7.62mm standard Russian military round plowed through his forehead into his brain.

CHAPTER THREE

Jake’s was a glittering restaurant that had just reopened after a terrorist bomb had destroyed it last year, and the al fresco dining area fronting busy Canal Street was even better than before with firstclass food, an extensive wine list and French waiters. It was Kathleen who insisted that they have an early dinner here before the symphony at the Kennedy Center, and sitting across from her, McGarvey, ruggedly handsome in his tuxedo, could only marvel at his fantastic good fortune. They had divorced twenty years ago because she could not stand being married to a CIA case officer, but they had finally realized that they could no longer live apart because they loved each other. Being here tonight was going to be a closure, and he hoped a beginning, for both of them. He wanted this to work with everything in his being; and maybe he even needed it for his sanity.

Watching her as the waiter poured their wine, his chest swelled. At fifty she was more beautiful in his eyes than she’d ever been. She wore a black, off-the-shoulder Given chy evening dress, a string of pearls around her long, delicately formed neck, her blond hair up in back, and the cheap diamond tennis bracelet he’d given her for their first Christmas on her left wrist. On her it looked as if it had come from Tiffany’s. She was aristocratic, and when they’d come in everyone had looked at her.

She smiled and raised her glass. “You look gorgeous tonight, Kirk. I think I like you dressed up like this.”

He laughed and raised his glass. “That was supposed to be my line. You’re beautiful.”

She sipped her pi not grig io then looked at the traffic on the street. McGarvey’s car and bodyguard were parked down the block. It was just 6:00 P.M.” and still light out, and warm, but she shivered. “I hope you don’t mind coming back here.”

He put his glass down. “Are you okay, Katy?” He knew exactly what she was thinking, and why she’d wanted to come here. She was trying to erase at least a part of his violent past, which of course was impossible, but maybe being here with him, safe, secure, would help ease some of her fears.

She turned back, a serious expression on her narrow,

finely formed face. “You never told me the whole story. About Jacqueline, I mean. Were you in love with her?”

The question hurt a little, but it was an honest one, and it was something he figured she had to know if they were to put this business behind them. “I thought I was, at least for a little while, but I was sending her back to Paris.”

“Why?” she asked, studying his eyes.

“Because I knew that it wasn’t going to work,” he said softly. “She wasn’t going to leave her home, her family, for me, and I wasn’t going to leave the Company. Not like that.” That drew an almost sympathetic look from her.

“Elizabeth said that she was a good person.”

McGarvey smiled sadly. “They got to be friends, but Liz had a tough time of it when we got back to the States.”

“She wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I knew that the situation was bothering her.”

“She wanted you and I to get back together.”

Kathleen looked at her hands. She still wore their wedding ring. Even in the bad days, right after their divorce, when she hated him, she’d not taken it off. “I think that our daughter still feels a little guilty about that day, Kirk. But I can’t help her unless I know what happened.” She was frustrated.

“It’s been a year.”

“You’ve not forgotten. You never will. You never forget anything.” She’d almost said forgive, and McGarvey caught it.

“Jacqueline wanted to get married. I was supposed to quit the CIA, and go back to teaching somewhere.”

Kathleen’s chin raised a little. “But you were afraid that she was going to get hurt, being around you. That was it, wasn’t it? You did that thing for a long time.”

“That I did,” McGarvey said. He’d been a CIA field officer for twenty-five years, and he’d killed people in the line of duty. A legion of them, whose faces he saw nearly every night in his dreams. There were a lot of grudges out there looking for a place to happen, so he’d pushed the people he cared about away from him; out of harm’s way, he’d always hoped. But it had never worked, and it certainly hadn’t worked with Jacqueline.

They’d been sitting here almost at this exact spot, having drinks, when he told her that it was no good. That she might as well return to Paris, because it was never going to work out for them. She’d started to cry, and McGarvey clearly remembered holding himself back with everything in his power from reaching out for her hand, and apologizing for being such a bastard. It was for the best, her going home. There was no future here for her. She was a French intelligence officer who’d been sent to keep an eye on McGarvey while he lived in Paris, and she’d fallen in love with him. Too bad for her, too bad for all of them, because she’d followed him back to the States and had gotten herself killed.

McGarvey glanced out at the street. Jacqueline had been on the way out of the restaurant when the black Mercedes came barreling around the corner. Something, some sixth sense, had warned him just in time to hit the deck when the bomb had been tossed out the back window of the car, landing right at Jacqueline’s feet. He closed his eyes.

Kathleen reached out and laid a hand on his, her touch gentle.

“There was nothing left of her, Katy. Not a god dammed thing. Nothing even remotely recognizable as human.” Elizabeth had come up from the Farm with him, and they were all supposed to go out to dinner somewhere that night. She’d been returning from the bathroom when the bomb was tossed, and McGarvey had managed to pull her behind a table where she escaped the. brunt of the massive explosion. Two dozen people had been killed, and twice that many hurt. The visions would not go away.

Kathleen was watching the play of emotions on his face. “You saved our daughter’s life, my darling. And you got the people who did that horrible thing, and in the process you saved a lot of other lives. That counts for something, even if you don’t want to take the credit.”

McGarvey couldn’t trust himself to speak. She hadn’t insisted on coming here for herself, she’d pushed him into coming back so that he could deal with it for himself.

Kathleen straightened up. “Time to put it behind you. It’s over now.” She picked up her wine glass. “To us,” she said.

McGarvey wanted to say that the fight was never over; that there would always be some sonofabitch out there with a score to settle, political or religious, or sometimes both, but he raised his glass anyway, and smiled. “To us.”

They touched glasses and drank. Her expression darkened for a moment. “I’m sorry I brought it all back for you.”

“Don’t be. Not tonight,” McGarvey said. This time his smile was genuine because he’d managed to push the demons back one more time, and because he had his own reason for coming here tonight.

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

McGarvey opened his menu. “If we’re going to make the curtain we’d better order something now.”

“Something’s going on, I can see it in your face.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McGarvey said innocently. Her father had told him once that keeping a secret from his daughter was impossible.

“You do,” she said sternly. She had the / demand look on her face.

The waiter came and refilled their glasses. “Would you care to order now?”

“Not yet,” Kathleen said sharply. “Give us a few minutes.”

“Of course, madame.”

“What’s going on, Kirk?” she asked.

“This may be the wrong place for this. I was going to wait until after the symphony. I thought we’d go someplace for champagne afterward.” He was suddenly enjoying himself, but he kept a straight face.

“Is this about work?”

No, It’s about us.” He took a ring box from his pocket and set it in front of her.

She smiled uncertainly, almost afraid to touch it.

“I can’t do anything about the past, Katy,” he said seriously. “Neither of us can. It’s time now to get on with it.” He looked at the little velvet box. “It was my mother’s.” His heart was in his throat.

She slowly opened the box, and her eyes immediately misted over. She looked up, questioningly, and when he nodded, she took the ring out. It was a small diamond in an inexpensive old-fashioned setting. It was all his father had been able to afford on the salary of an engineer working at Los Alamos on the bomb in the forties. But it had meant everything to his mother, and it meant everything to him now.

“Let’s start over again, Katy. Do it right this time. Will you marry me?”

A tender look came over her. “I’ve always loved you, you know. I never stopped,” she said. “But I don’t think that I ever loved you more than I do right now.” She reached again for his hand. “Yes, my darling, I’ll marry you, and this time we’ll make it work … together.”

On the way back to Kathleen’s home after the concert, they rode very close together like young lovers in the back of the taxi. McGarvey had dismissed his car and bodyguard for the remainder of the evening, and he was glad he had done it. Tonight was personal, anonymous.

At the house she went up the — walk to open the door as McGarvey paid the cabby, and when he joined her, she’d already started up the stairs.

“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Just you.”

He locked up, turned off the hall light, and started up the stairs when the telephone rang. Kathleen answered it in the bedroom on the second ring. He could hear her muffled voice, and when he got to the head of the stairs she came to the bedroom door, a vexed look on her face.

“They’re sending your car for you.”

“What’s happened?”

“It was Otto. He didn’t say, except that it was worse than lavender this time.”

His heart stopped. Rencke never exaggerated. Lavender was his code word for something very bad. Worst-case scenario.

“I’m sorry, Katy.”

“Kathleen,” she corrected automatically. “Be careful.”

He took her in his arms, and kissed her deeply. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

Headlights flashed in the driveway. She shook her head sadly. “You’ll never change,” she said, and when she saw the look of pain in his eyes it took her breath away. “But I will,” she told him.

He climbed in the back seat of the Cadillac limousine, and his driver, Dick Yemm, immediately pulled out and headed off at a high speed. “Sorry to bust in on you like this, boss. Mr. Adkins held down the fort for as long as he could until we could get a better handle on the situation.”

“Okay, Dick what’s the story?”

“Alien Trumble was shot to death about six hours ago down in Orlando.” Yemm was a very small, compact man, as rigid and as tough as bar steel, but he was shaking.

It was like a ton of bricks had fallen on McGarvey’s head, but he held himself in check. “Do we have somebody with Gloria and the kids?”

“They got them too, along with a couple of innocent bystanders.” Yemm viciously cut a driver off and ran a stop sign. “Sonofabitch, boss. Sonofabitch.”

The news was simply unbelievable, impossible to digest; it was a random act of violence, like a lightning bolt. Except he knew that it hadn’t been random. “What took us so long?” he demanded.

“The Bureau didn’t find out that Alien worked for us until after eight, and by the time the duty office made contact with Mr. Adkins it was late. Nobody could believe it. We thought it was some stupid mistake.”

Already they were out of Chevy Chase on Western Avenue, their speed topping one hundred miles per hour. Luckily traffic was light. Yemm radioed his position to the duty dispatcher. “Hammerhead is enroute. ETA about twenty.”

Although Yemm was only a driver bodyguard he was the DDO’s bodyguard and he kept his ears open. It didn’t hurt that he was smart in addition to being tough. He was an ex-SEAL, and he and McGarvey had a lot of history together. For all practical purposes his need to know cut across almost the entire DO. Like McGarvey he was a man who hated bullshit and bureaucracy. He told it like it was. In addition he had given Trumble shooting lessons for re qualification last winter, so he had a personal stake.

“What do we know so far?” McGarvey asked, trying to keep his thoughts in order. He had been yanked from Katy’s arms back into the real world, and her feel and scent had already faded into that other place in his head.

“Looks like bin Ladden ordered it.” Yemm’s jaw visibly tightened in the rearview mirror. When he was mad he ground his teeth. “There were four of them, AK-47s. Alien wasn’t carrying, but he managed to bag one of the bad guys anyway. Hit him in the head with something. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC talked to the bastard in the ambulance before he died.”

“Do we have a solid ID on him?” McGarvey wasn’t going to telephone Adkins because his ADDO had his hands full now, but he needed more information.

“Bari Yousef. Twenty-nine, born in Cairo, came over here in ‘ninety-eight. Until two weeks ago he worked as a truck driver for Jersey City Transport, then he disappeared.”

The trucking company was under investigation. It was believed that it was one of a number of possible fronts for bin Ladden’s operations here in the States. The Bureau’s antiterrorist division had been warning for years that bin Laden was going to extend his terrorist attacks to the States. The trucking company and some other enterprises, among them a couple of banks in New Jersey, were thought to be the precursors to something big that was coming. Something that would make Oklahoma City look small. Yemm must have been within earshot in the Ops Center when the connection had been made.

The problem with being DDO was that he got to hear everything, not just the bits and pieces like Yemm. Where Dick was mad, McGarvey was frightened. If the consensus on bin Laden was correct they were going to have the biggest fight of their lives on their hands. This time they were playing with fire. Very serious fire. And a lot of people would get hurt unless the U.S. was very careful in how it responded..

“They were on vacation, boss,” Yemm said, angry and frustrated. “Minding their own business. Not hurting anybody. Christ, you know Alien; the man would go out of his way to avoid stepping on a bug.”

“Take it easy, Dick. I know how you feel,” McGarvey said. “What about the other three shooters?”

“They were driving a Chevy van, stolen in Atlanta four days ago, on a Florida plate that the owner in Tampa didn’t even know was stolen until the cops showed up at her door. Some guy and his wife saw what was going down and they called 911 on their cell phone. The van was abandoned about a half-mile from Interstate 4, and nobody else saw a thing.”

“How’d we ID Yousef?”

“Prints off his gun. The Bureau ran them and came up with a red flag. The bastard was one of bin Laden’s shooters, and he shouldn’t have been able to clear customs in the first place. The passport people at Kennedy fucked up.”

It was a common occurrence, one of the downsides of a totally free country. As one senior Immigration and Naturalization official told McGarvey, trying to stop illegals coming ashore in leaky old boats was tough enough, but checking people flying in on supposedly legitimate passports was like trying to stop a flood with your finger in the dike.

In the end it was up to the CIA’s foreign stations to come up with lists of undesirables, and for the FBI’s special units on espionage and counterterrorism to see that the bad guys who did manage to get here didn’t do any harm. The CIA and the Bureau were doing a damned fine job, most of their successes never appearing in the media, but the problem was no less impossible than Immigration’s.

Now it was starting again, McGarvey thought morosely. In the never-ending battle you won a few, but you lost some too. The Khobar Barracks, the New York Trade Towers, Oklahoma City, the Nairobi embassy, and a host of others to which Orlando would be added.

But this was just the opening move. To what, he wondered. How far would it go this time? He had a very bad feeling that they were going to find out a lot sooner than they wanted to, and once again he was going to be right in the middle of it. Coming to work for the CIA right out of college and Air Force had been just a job, like a military career. Something you did. His parents had worked for the government at Los Alamos and it had been his turn. But after his parents had been killed in the car crash he had been locked into the Company by shackles whose links he had forged himself with his own conscience and sense of fair play. President Truman had a sign on his desk that read: the buck stops here. The sign or McGarvey’s desk read:

CHAPTER FOUR

It was 12:25 a.m. when McGarvey, still dressed in his tuxedo, his bow tie undone, reached his office. He’d talked to Trumble five days ago, sending his Riyadh COS and his family on a two-week vacation, and now they were dead. In that time the only thing they’d accomplished was to agree to wait until Alien got back to help with the ops planning for another meeting with bin Laden. Nobody had the least inkling that Trumble was in danger, but it was something that McGarvey knew he should have considered.

But bin Laden didn’t work that way; on such a small scale, in Trumble’s words. Or at least he’d never worked that way before, and there was no logical reason for him to start now. If he’d wanted Trumble dead, he would have killed him in Khartoum, not waited until the man returned to the United States presumably to report on the meeting, and then taken the risk of killing him and his family in such a public place. Yet he had to keep reminding himself that logical reason might not apply to a man such as bin Laden. Maybe the bastard had finally gone around the bend, really gone nuts. That was a cheery thought.

Dick Adkins walked in from his adjoining office, a stricken, angry expression on his face. McGarvey had seen that kind of look before.

“It came out of left field, Mac.”

“Short of keeping them in a safe house, there’s nothing we could have done,” McGarvey said bitterly. “Hell, the Secret Service can’t even guarantee a President’s life.” He took off his jacket, tossed it on the couch and went to his desk. “I want Jeff Cook alerted to what might be coming his way in Riyadh, and then I want all of our stations and missions to get the word to button down, freeze their assets.”

“We did that as soon as we found out. And I called McCafferty over at State to alert our embassies world wide.”

“Did we notify the Pentagon?”

“Couple of hours ago.” Adkins handed McGarvey a buff colored file folder with blue edging, denoting urgent attention. “This is what we’ve come up with so far. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC, Scott Thompson, is running the show down there, but Fred Rudolph called a couple of hours ago from his office, so they’re on top of it already.” Rudolph headed the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. McGarvey had a great deal of respect for the man’s abilities and judgment. He was a straight shooter; a no-nonsense cop.

“Coffee?”

“Coming up,” Adkins said.

McGarvey quickly scanned the file, which didn’t contain much more information than he’d already gotten from Dick Yemm, except that the FBI now believed that the Jersey City Trucking Company was no longer a bin Laden front, although it was still owned and operated by Arabs, mostly Egyptians.

Adkins came back with the coffee. “I don’t think there’s any doubt who ordered the hit or why. I think the Bureau is wrong this time.”

“Maybe not,” McGarvey said. Bin Laden was on the move, or getting ready to do something spectacular; he was pretty sure of that. But no matter how he looked at it, this killing didn’t add up to a bin Laden-ordered hit. “Do we have someone watching Alien’s and Gloria’s families in Minnesota?”

“I didn’t think of that one,” Adkins said. “I’ll do it now.”

“Then call Otto in.”

“He’s been here all night.”

“Okay, send him up.” McGarvey picked up the phone and hit the speed dial button for Fred Rudolph’s office over at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Is everyone else in and up to speed?”

“Since eight,” Adkins said, heading for the door.

“Staff meeting in thirty minutes.”

“You got it, Mac.”

The call was answered on the first ring. “Fred Rudolph.” His voice sounded strained. He had graduated summa cum laude with a law degree from Fordham, and had worked for a couple of years with the army’s Staff Judge Advocate’s office as a special investigator. He’d done the same thing as a civilian for the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Justice until he’d signed on with the FBI about six years ago.

“Good morning, Fred. I read your 22:30 fax, anything new since then?”

“You just get in?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Rudolph said. Sometimes he wished he’d been a banker instead of a cop. “As soon as we got a positive on Yousef we woke up a federal judge and got a search warrant. My people are tossing his apartment right now. We should have something in the next couple of hours or so. But they had a head start, Mac. So unless they get stupid we might come up empty.”

The first twenty-four hours, and especially the first six hours of these kinds of investigations were the most crucial. After that they were just picking up the pieces, because if the shooters were professionals they would be long gone by then.

“What’s your best guess?”

“Probably Cuba. There were two flights to Havana direct out of Orlando that they could have taken. Scott Thompson’s people are looking over the passenger lists, and talking with the baggage handlers and ticket clerks, but both flights are already on the ground in Havana, and won’t turn around until morning. As soon as they get back he’ll talk to them unless your people can get to them down there.”

“We’ll work on it,” McGarvey promised. “What about the weapon?”

“Except for prints it was clean. No serial number, so it could have been purchased almost anywhere. Ballistics is still working on it.”

“How about the van?”

“We lifted some pretty good prints, including Yousef’s, but we’ve come up with nothing on the others yet. Same with hair samples. We’re running DNA identification tests now, but they won’t do us any good unless we can get an arrest out of this.” Rudolph did not sound optimistic. “What about your shop? Can you tell me what Trumble was up to that made him and his family a target?”

“I can’t give you the details, but it involved bin Laden. What can you tell me about Jersey City Trucking?”

“We thought there was a connection, but we ran that operation through a ringer and came up clean last week. There’s just nothing there tying it to any of bin Laden’s other suspected business interests. Not even remotely.” “I thought they had some kind of a financial arrangement with one of bin Laden’s banks.”

“For about two months, and that was over five years ago. It’s another dead end. Everything about the place stinks, we’ll probably close them down under the RICO Act eventually, but there are no terrorists there.”

“Except for Bari Yousef.”

“We’re going to toss the business again, but unless we find something tying Yousef directly to bin Laden through the company, it’ll be another dead end. We have to play by the rules even if they don’t,” he said angrily. “This guy could have been working on his own for some reason, or for somebody else close to bin Laden. It’s happened before.” Rudolph was silent for a moment. “You would know more about that than me.”

“Anything new from INS?” McGarvey asked, sidestep ping the comment. It was hard to focus while blaming himself.

“Nothing other than what I’ve already sent you. Yousef got by them, and so did the other three. It’s another angle we’re working on. We’ll try to find out if anyone else beside him is missing from the business.” Again Rudolph hesitated for a moment. “It would be helpful if we could come up with a motive. I mean, are you laying this on bin Laden’s doorstep?”

McGarvey looked up as Otto walked in. He waved his special operations officer to a chair. “I just don’t know, Fred. On the surface it looks like it, but there’s no reason for him to have ordered the hit. If anything it’s counterproductive for him. Crazy.”

“Yeah,” Rudolph agreed. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

“Keep me up to date’ McGarvey said.

“It’s a two-way street, Mac. Sorry you had to lose one of your people that way. Especially his family.”

“There will be a payback,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection. He looked at Otto who was sitting cross legged on the chair. “You said lavender.”

“Hardly any impurities,” Rencke replied, almost dreamily. A number of years ago when he was trying to work out the mathematics and physics of a very complicated link between advanced bubble memory systems, he’d struck on what for him was a very simple, but sophisticated notion: how to explain color to a blind person. Using tensor calculus, the same mathematics that Einstein had used for his general theory of relativity, Rencke had come up with a set of equations that he’d tried out on a blind Indian mathematician, who’d made the observation afterward: “Oh, I see,” Reversing the process, Rencke developed a method by which he thought of colors to represent mathematical equations that described highly complex real world variables. Lavender was for very bad.

“Are you talking about the man that Trumble was worried about at his meeting with bin Laden?”

“I came up with a dozen candidates I was going to show him when he came back.” Otto shook his head in sadness. “But that’s not it, Mac. It’s the other thing. The bad, bad thing. Bin Laden didn’t have Alien killed. At least I don’t think so. But one of his lieutenants might have ordered it because bin Laden is probably crazy, and his people want to save their own gnarly hides, ya know.”

“Does he want to negotiate, or what?”

“Oh, he wants to talk to somebody, all right. But his troops, are passing purple peach pits ‘cause they don’t know what he wants to do. They’re playing with serious fire and they’re all wondering if they’re going to get their fingers burned big time.”

McGarvey felt a cold draft on his neck. “Do you have the proof?” Otto was almost always right, but he had to ask.

Rencke took a diskette out of the thick file he’d brought with him. “When it boots up hit any key.”

McGarvey started the disk, and immediately a complicated engineering diagram in 3-D came up on his screen and began to slowly rotate around its long axis. He stared at the device for a long time, his stomach sour, because he knew exactly what it was capable of doing to them.

“I matched the number Trumble gave us with the Russian device.”

Sometimes Rencke amazed even McGarvey. “How’d you come up with that?”

Otto grinned. “The FSB is running its own investigation, and I talked to some friends of mine in Amsterdam who hacked the system. That one was missing.”

“Why didn’t you get in yourself?”

“I wanted to keep it arm’s length this time. No telling what the fallout’s gonna be.”

McGarvey nodded at the obvious understatement. “Where’d it come from?”

“Right where we suspected all along. Yavan Depot.”

“Tajikistan,” McGarvey said. The former Soviet ground forces special storage depot was located about twenty-five miles southeast of the capital city Dushanbe. It had long been suspected, but never proved, that a small Russian maintenance crew, mostly officers, had been left behind to look after their equipment, for which the independent government received money and kept silent. But money, which was not a problem for bin Laden, was tight in Russia so loyalties had blurred.

“I’m going to need more than this,” McGarvey said.

Rencke laid the thick file on the desk. “I made hard copies. I got the names of the four Russian officers under investigation, their contacts, the how and when they got it out of the depot three months ago, the thirty million U.S. they were paid for it, and where it crossed the border at Nizhny Pyandzh into Afghanistan.” Otto shrugged. “After that it disappears.” His eyes were wild. “But bin Laden has the number, so we know where it showed up.”

“Okay, who are these friends of yours in Amsterdam?” It was the news he’d been expecting, and yet it was none the less frightening.

“Just kids,” Rencke said. “Their parents were the ones who hacked the system over at Lawrence Livermore in the eighties. Only way we found out about it was because they’d screwed up the payroll section. Wouldn’t balance.”

“Think they can get back into the FSB system?”

“The Russians aren’t spending much on security, but their encryption programs are still pretty good. What do you want them to look for?”

“I want to know what the FSB is doing about this. They sure as hell wouldn’t tell me if I picked up the phone and called Kuznetsov.” Anatoli Kuznetsov was the director of the Federal Security Service, which was the new KGB.

“They got in that far, they could take the next step.” Otto grinned again, which he did whenever he was contemplating doing something illegal. “I can give them a little incentive.”

McGarvey gave him a hard look. “I brought you back to help out, not to give away the store.”

“Mac, this is worth it, if we can stop the bastard. The next time out ain’t gonna be so pretty. All I’m giving them is an encryption buster. An old one we don’t use anymore.”

“Okay, so what about the guy with bin Laden that Alien told us about?”

“I came up with a dozen possibilities, but I’ve gone as far with them as I can without more hard information. A description from another source, something in his handwriting, maybe a strand of hair, or a recording of his voice. Anything.”

“Maybe I can help with that.”

Otto’s eyes went wide. “Come on, Mac, you’re not telling me what I think you’re telling me now, are you? Bzz, wrong answer, recruit. Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

McGarvey smiled sadly for his friend. Candide once said that optimism is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly. He’d never been guilty of that frame of mind, or of its opposite, though both were common maladies in Washington. He was going to drop a bombshell in the President’s lap, and he hoped the man was up to the decisions he was going to have to start making. A lot of lives depended on it. But Otto was as naive as he was brilliant. One of his failings was trying to keep his friends out of harm’s way. Maybe it was a failing they all should have.

The DDO’s conference room was a long, windowless space that was mechanically and electronically isolated from the rest of the building, and from the outside world. Anything said or done in the room was completely safe from any kind of eavesdropping. The weakest links were the people who gathered here, and McGarvey knew and trusted all of them. It was all he’d ever had, all he’d ever wanted and worked for — trust. Now that he had it he was afraid of letting his friends down.

When he arrived at 1:25 a.m. all nine of his staff members were seated and waiting for him. They included Dick Adkins, his assistant deputy director of operations; Randy

Bock, chief of Foreign Intelligence which was in charge of espionage activities; Jared Kraus, Technical Services; Scott Graves, Counterintelligence; Arthur Hendrickson, in charge of the Covert Action section, which was responsible for propaganda and disinformation; Raife Melloch, Missions and Programs; David Whittaker, the area divisions chief in charge of the CIA’s bases, stations and missions worldwide; Brenda Jordan, Operational Services, which came up with cover stories and legends for field agents; and Otto Rencke.

“Good morning,” McGarvey said, taking his place at the head of the long table. “Thanks for coming in, but it’s going to be a long night, so take your coffee strong and black.”

Everyone around the table was angry and pumped up. One of their own had been murdered. But worse than that, his family had been killed too. They would have no trouble staying awake this night.

“As you know by now, our Riyadh chief of station Alien Trumble, his wife and two children, and two other innocent bystanders were shot to death seven and a half hours ago in the parking lot of Disney’s EPCOT in Orlando. This was not a simple drive-by shooting, it was a carefully planned operation carried out by professionals. Our first tasks are to find out who ordered the hit and why.”

“I don’t think there’s any question about that,” Adkins said. His eyes were on fire, he looked like an angry pit bull ready to attack.

“I don’t agree,” McGarvey replied sharply. “So I want all of you to go into this with open minds. There are no foregone conclusions. Clear?”

Heads nodded, but he could see their skepticism and reluctance.

“We’re going to generate a SNIE this morning, which I want on my desk no later than 0800.” National Intelligence Estimates, which listed targets for the entire U.S. intelligence community, estimates of future international events and enemy strengths, a technical intelligence review, and decisions on which product was to be shared with which

U.S. allies, were usually generated once a week. They came from the U.S. Intelligence Board made up of the director of Central Intelligence, the heads of the military intelligence branches, the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, FBI, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Treasury Department. Special National Intelligence Estimates were done by any of the agencies on an incident basis. The purpose of the documents was to brief the President and the nation’s top policy makers on whatever crisis the U.S. was faced with. “If it’s a fact, state it. But if it’s a wild-ass guess, make that clear too.”

“Where are you taking this, Mac?” Adkins asked. “Because from where we’re sitting it looks pretty clear. Alien met with bin Laden and a week later he was assassinated. At least one of the shooters had a connection.”

“Okay, that goes in the SNIE as your guess, or as a consensus estimate. The Bureau thinks there’s a strong possibility that the other three shooters took a commercial flight out of Orlando to Havana. I want our resources there to see what they can come up with. But I don’t want anyone burned trying to get to the air crews in Havana this morning. They’ll be back in Miami or Orlando later this morning.

“Fred Rudolph is handling the Bureau’s investigation, so it’ll be a good one. But I’m telling you now that he thinks the Jersey City trucking company where Yousef was apparently employed hasn’t been a bin Laden operation for five years. I want you to keep that in mind.

“I want you to keep a number of other things in mind too. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack yet, something bin Laden’s followers always do, even if he doesn’t take any of the blame personally. Alien met with him in Khartoum, so why’d they wait for him to come home to kill him? And bin Laden told Alien that he wanted to meet with someone else. Someone with more authority, which means he might have something on his mind that he wants to talk about.”

“Maybe he just wants to burn a bigger fish,” Whittaker said. Trumble’s murder had devastated him. His chiefs of stations were family.

“That’s a possibility too,” McGarvey said. “And I want it in the SNIE. But we’ve been waiting for bin Laden to pull off something big. I believe he’s made his plans, and now he’s having second thoughts. He really does want to talk to someone.”

“Bullshit, Mac,” Adkins exploded, “He’s setting up a trap and someone’s supposed to walk into it?”

McGarvey didn’t mind the outburst. He expected nothing less than complete honesty from his staff, and they gave it to him. “Maybe, maybe not. But if he wanted to lure someone else close enough to take the shot, why kill Alien and his family?” McGarvey shook his head. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well then, who did it?” Adkins asked, frustrated.

“One of bin Laden’s people who might be afraid that his boss is getting cold feet.”

“It’s a warning?” Whittaker asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“It could be that they don’t want bin Laden talking to us.”

“If we lay that on his doorstep, whoever’s behind this has to know he’d be risking another missile attack on their camps,” Jared Kraus said. “Makes him either very stupid, or a man who knows something that we don’t.”

“Or thinks he does,” McGarvey said. “Bin Laden gave Alien a serial number that Otto has found a match for.”

Rencke had loaded his briefing into the large-screen rear projection television monitor built into the wall at one end of the room. He dimmed the lights and the same 3-D diagram that he showed McGarvey came up. It got everyone’s attention, and for the next ten minutes he explained what he’d come up with and what he thought it meant. When he was finished the room was so quiet that they could hear the gentle rush of air through the AC vents. The only thing left showing on the screen now was the engineering diagram of the device.

“I can see why he wants to talk to somebody,” Adkins said, subdued. “This might be too big even for him.” He tore his eyes away from the monitor. “Who are we going to send…?”

Whittaker interrupted. “That could be a moot point unless we can find him first. Our contacts in Kabul say he’s dropped out of sight again. The Taliban aren’t saying anything, as usual, but it’s possible he’s no longer in Afghanistan.”

“He’s done that before,” McGarvey said. “If he wants to talk to us, he’ll get the word out when he’s ready.”

The telephone console at McGarvey’s position burred softly. He picked it up. “Yes.”

“I’m here.” It was the CIA director, Roland Murphy.

“We’re just finishing, General. I’ll come over in a few minutes.”

“Very well.”

McGarvey hung up and checked his watch. It was coming up on two. “Okay, we have six hours to put this together. In the meantime I want our assets and people hunkering down for the moment.”

“While trying to find out where bin Laden is hiding out, and who ordered the hit,” Adkins said dryly.

“Right,” McGarvey said.

“You still haven’t told us who you’re going to send to meet with him if we can arrange it.”

“No, I haven’t,” McGarvey replied softly. There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times. Voltaire wrote that to Cardinal de Berms. He was talking about the Catholic Church, which he despised, but the idea was no different here and now, McGarvey thought, because he was even wondering about admitting the whole truth to himself just yet, except that he had let Tremble and his family down.

It was one of the worse times in McGarvey’s life, because in his heart of hearts he knew that he was to blame for the deaths of Alien Trumble and his family. And he knew that he was going to have to drop a bombshell in the lap of the new President. When he walked into the DCI’s palatial office with its view of the river valley, Murphy was on the phone. He poured a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette and took a seat in front of the desk.

Anger would come, he knew, but for the moment it was his job to keep his head on straight so that they could pick up the pieces and avert a much larger, more terrible, even unimaginable disaster from befalling them. He also knew that he would forever look back at this time as a watershed in his own life; a new chapter in his long career in the Company beyond anything he’d ever imagined in his most violent nightmares. The same insistent voice in his head that had told him on countless occasions to get out while he could, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the people he loved and respected so that when the bad guys came looking they would find only him and not his friends, was hammering at the back of his head now. And he had run, more than once; from Lausanne, from Paris, and even from Milford, Delaware where he’d once taught eighteenth-century literature. But it had done no good, because each time the call to action had come he had responded. And each time someone he had cared for had lost their lives. Marta Fredricks, Jacqueline Belleau, even his ex-wife and daughter had almost been killed because of him. Now it was Alien and his family. McGarvey tried to see the good in what he had done, especially in the year since he had been called back to take over the DO, but he was having a hard time focusing.

He could almost hear the distant sound of trumpets; the battle horns; the sounds of men shouting and screaming, bullets flying; people dying because he knew that this one was going to be bad. A call to arms again, like he’d heard for twenty-five years? Or just now this morning an overwrought imagination caused by tiredness and guilt.

He looked at his hands and he could see Alien Trumble’s blood on them.

Roland Murphy finished his conversation and put the encrypted telephone down. He stared speculatively at McGarvey for a few beats, then the expression on his craggy, bulldog face softened, “I know how you feel,” he said gently. “We’re all feeling the same thing. But this was not your fault. Do you read me?”

“Ultimately everything that happens in the DO is my responsibility,” McGarvey replied softly. It wasn’t a matter of whose fault anything was, that was Washington bureaucratic bullshit. The only thing that mattered right now was making the right response. Already his black mood was being replaced by a quiet anger and determination, but he knew that he would have to be careful not to lash out at everyone around him. It was one of his least endearing character flaws.

“You’re right,” Murphy conceded. “But don’t beat yourself to death over it, because we have work to do. That was Dennis Berndt. We’re briefing the National Security Council at nine o’clock.” Berndt was the President’s national security adviser, and he was no friend of the CIA’s, though no one knew why. “They’re going to ask some tough questions, and we’re going to have to give them some tough answers.”

“The SNIE will be ready by eight,” McGarvey said. “But attacking bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan again is not one of the answers I’m going to give them.” He kept his anger in check and his tone reasonable. “There was no reason for him to kill Alien, and especially not his wife and children. Not now.”

“Speculation, Kirk, nothing more.”

“Maybe. But there’s no hard proof that bin Laden ordered them murdered.”

“Slaughtered, you mean,” Murphy replied sharply. His anger was bubbling to the surface. Like everyone else at headquarters he wanted to strike back right now at whoever was responsible. Which was a good thing, and something that the President was going to demand, providing they didn’t hit the wrong target for the wrong reason.

At sixty-two. Murphy was twelve years McGarvey’s senior, although this morning he looked twenty years older than that. In his day he had commanded a tank battalion, and he had earned the nickname Bull Murphy, after the navy’s Admiral Bill Halsey, because despite his size he could move quickly and decisively, and like Halsey he had no trouble making straight-ahead decisions. It was quite a combination, an old friend of Murphy’s had told McGarvey a few years ago. Watching Roland climbing in and out of tanks was like watching an angry bull that had taken ballet lessons. It was nothing short of awesome. You got out of the way when the man was on the move. But nearly two decades behind a desk had softened his lines, blurred the edges, slowed his body, though not his mind.

“It wasn’t his style, you know that. You read Alien’s report.”

“The bastard thinks he can kill our people and get away with it,” Murphy countered strongly. “Well, he’s dead wrong, and we’re going to show it to him.” Murphy had directed the CIA through three White House administrations, and he had never been responsible for the loss of an employee’s family. Do the job, but get it done safely, was his watchword. The old cowboy days of shoot ‘em outs in Czechoslovakia, parachute drops into Hungary, clandestine jungle training camps in Honduras and arms deals with the Contras were things of the past. Intelligence-gathering in the twenty-first century had become primarily a matter of technical means; electronic eavesdropping, satellites, computers. Shooters like McGarvey had become anachronisms, and Murphy, who had directed many such black operations, had always despised the endeavors with everything in his soul, while at the same time understanding that sometimes violent means were necessary. But he counted this tragic business with Trumble a personal failure. He was ready to turn the clock back. Strike the bastard responsible where he lived.

He glanced at the clock on his desk. “I want you ready at eight-thirty, that’ll give us plenty of time to get over to the White House. Since it’s your operation you’ll give the briefing.” He gave McGarvey another speculative look. “Killing one of our chiefs of station is one thing, but his family? That’s nothing but terrorism, and bin Laden is the master of it. We’re going to teach him a lesson. It’s something that the President wants, and it’s something I’m going to go along with.” “There’s another consideration, General.”

“Then you’ll have to offer the man an alternative, Kirk. Otherwise we’re going to war.”

CHAPTER FIVE

The DCI’s limousine pulled up at the White House west gate a few minutes before 9:00 a.m.” and the guard waved them through. Both Murphy and McGarvey were well known to the Secret Service. They proceeded up the driveway to the portico where Ken Chapin, the DCI’s bodyguard jumped out and opened the car door for his boss.

McGarvey let himself out and stood for a moment looking up at the marine guard at the door. Forty-two presidents before this one had made a lot of tough decisions from this building. Just one year into an administration that was thrust upon him, Lawrence Haynes was going to be faced with a very tough call. McGarvey had the feeling that the man was up to it. At least he hoped for all of their sakes that he was.

“Let’s not keep the man waiting,” Murphy said, and McGarvey fell in beside him. Together they entered the White House and took the elevator downstairs. They were met by a security detail outside the situation room who checked their briefcases before they were allowed to go inside.

The President had not arrived yet, but already the mood around the long table was somber. Flanking the President’s empty chair were Dennis Berndt his adviser on national security affairs, and Anthony Lang, his chief of staff. They were deep in discussion, but Berndt looked up and gave McGarvey a penetrating glance that was anything but friendly. He looked pissed off, and in the short twelve months of his tenure he’d built a reputation as an easy-to anger, formidable force to be reckoned with. On the other side of them were the secretary of defense Arthur Turnquist, secretary of state Eugene Carpenter, attorney general Dorothy Kress, FBI director Herbert Weiss man, who had himself just arrived, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Richard Halverson and the National Security Agency director Air Force Major General Thomas Roswell. Murphy and McGarvey took their places next to him, everyone around the table acknowledging them with a nod.

Most of the people at the table were new to this administration, and although McGarvey knew all of them, he didn’t know them well enough yet to be able to predict their responses like he had with President Lindsay’s staff and cabinet.

Haynes had been vice president when Lindsay had suddenly resigned because of ill health last year. One of Haynes’s first promises to the American people was to guarantee their safety by threatening swift and merciless action against any man, organization or government bent on terrorism. He was taking back the fear, and he’d packed his administration with tough, like-minded men and women who were not afraid to make decisions. It was, with some few exceptions, a pleasant change.

Roswell handed Murphy a thin file folder. “These are the latest telephone intercepts from bin Laden’s headquarters. I think you might find them interesting.”

“What’s the upshot?”

“He never returned from Khartoum, and his people are starting to get nervous.” Roswell, who looked like a banker with a stern, sometimes sour expression on his round, bland face, had no sense of humor. But he ran his agency, which was three times the size of the CIA, with a lot of creativity. It was said that he played a competent second violin in a string quartet, but that was only speculation because no one admitted to ever having heard him play.

“They know we’re listening, it could be orchestrated for our benefit,” Murphy said.

“That’s what we think,” Roswell said unblinking. “But if that indeed is the case, why do it? What is he up to?”

McGarvey handed a diskette to a corpsman to load into the briefing computer. The remote control was on the table in front of him.

“He’s not stupid, Tom,” McGarvey said. “He’s probably figured out that we’re going to blame him for this, and we’re going to make a response. He’s keeping his head down.”

Roswell gave McGarvey a hard look. “About what I’d do.”

The President came in and everybody got to their feet until he had taken his position. He looked angry, and, like everyone else around the table, tired. None of them had gotten much sleep last night.

“Let’s get started, people. We have a busy day ahead of us.” Unlike Lindsay, who was tall, thin and “Lincomesque” as the media called him, this president was built like a Green Bay Packer linebacker, with a massive head, twenty five inch neck and broad shoulders bulging with muscles. The political cartoonists all exaggerated his physique; in a number of instances they showed him in the boxing ring with captions along the lines that if wars were outlawed in favor of leaders duking it out in the ring, there’d never be any doubt who’d come out the winner. A lot less blood would be shed too.

But as tough as he was, his wife Linda was a kind, gentle spirit. Compared to a young Barbara Bush, she was universally loved by just about everyone in America. As was their beautiful twenty-three-year-old only child, Deborah who had never left home because she was retarded, suffering with a mild form of Down syndrome. From a distance she could be mistaken for a Siberian athlete, or even a Russian haute couture model who had defected to the West. But up close you could see the vacancy in her eyes and in her warm but childlike smile. Haynes was a family man, highly intelligent and honorable, with a squeaky-clean past. Not once in a twenty-seven year political career, which included two terms in the Senate from Oklahoma, had there ever been so much as a hint of scandal associated with him. The media was sometimes frustrated by the lack of juice, but when he’d become President the nation had signed a collective sigh of relief: Finally we got a good one, with a family we can love and even feel a little sorry for. What made it even better was that Haynes had never capitalized on his daughter’s affliction, though he could have done so for political gain. Everyone, even his enemies, respected him for this. In the next election it was expected that he would win by a landslide no matter who was put up against him.

McGarvey passed a stack of leather bound folders around the table. “Mr. President, this is the SNIE that we prepared. I’ll make my briefing short this morning, but all of the supporting data and dissenting arguments are included in the folder.”

The President held McGarvey’s gaze for a long moment then looked around the table. “I want you all to be perfectly clear on one thing. A brutal act of terrorism against American citizens on American soil has been committed. We will make an appropriate response. A harsh response.”

“Damn right we will,” Berndt said.

McGarvey glanced at his copy of the SNIE open in front of him. He’d had time to briefly scan it on the way over from Langley, but his staff had come up with very little that was new in the past six hours.

“Everyone here knows that our chief of Riyadh station, Alien Trumble, was shot to death along with his wife and children and two tourists down in Orlando yesterday afternoon. In the past fifteen hours we’ve been trying to make some sense of their murders, and what that act of terrorism might mean for the future.” McGarvey closed his SNIE folder. “Mr. President, it’s going to be very easy to jump to conclusions, possibly the wrong conclusions, so I’m going to ask everyone to keep an open mind until I’m finished here this morning. It was the same thing I told my staff last night.” He could see the same look of skepticism and anger around the table as he had during his briefing last night.

“Fair enough,” the President said, nodding. “You may continue.”

“In June I asked my Riyadh station to try to open negotiations with Osama bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “I did this for a number of reasons, among them the generally held belief that bin Laden was getting ready to make another strike against U.S. interests somewhere in the world, and possibly even here on our soil.” The situation room was suddenly very still.

“In my opinion I thought there also was a possibility that bin Laden might finally be tiring of his life of exile, and might want to go home to Saudi Arabia. He’s in his forties now, he has three wives and more than a dozen children, plus family and friends at home. His life in Afghanistan has to be getting old. To date nothing he has done has changed anything, except that we’ve frozen as many of his assets as we could find, and we’ve put up a five million dollar bounty on his head. Step by step his movements have been restricted, and even the Afghani Taliban party is starting to get weary of his presence.”

“What were you going to offer him?” Berndt demanded. “I never saw such a proposal.”

“The operation had my approval,” Murphy said softly.

“For starters, the return of his assets, and lifting the bounty. He’s said all along that one of the things he wanted was the removal of our forces from Saudi Arabia. We’re already talking about doing that, so all that’s left would be to broker a deal with the Saudi government so that his family could return home.”

“No amnesty,” the President said angrily.

“No, sir. Bin Laden would be made to understand that he’d have to face charges for what he has already done. Possibly in the World Court at the Hague. He’s a fighter, and he might agree to the proposal because it would give him the forum to tell his side of the story. He’d certainly get the attention of the entire world.”

“Well, we know what his response was to that proposal,” Berndt said.

“Not necessarily,” McGarvey replied, keeping his anger in check. He wanted to tell the NSA to shut up and either read the SNIE or listen to the rest of the briefing before he shot off his mouth. But he couldn’t do that.

“All right, Mr. McGarvey, what was bin Laden’s response?” the President asked.

“We set up the meeting through our embassies in Pakistan and the Sudan, and Trumble went to see him in Khartoum. It only lasted a couple of minutes, but bin Laden said that he was willing to talk, but only to someone higher in rank than a CIA chief of station. That’s the report Alien brought back with him. Along with a serial number.”

“Five days later bin Laden had him killed,” Berndt said.

“We don’t think so,” the FBI director said. “The one terrorist left behind was Egyptian, and he’d been in this country for more than three years working for a company that had only a brief association with bin Laden’s interests. And that was more than five years ago.”

“Oh, come on, Herb, that’s a load of crap and you know it,” Berndt said. “Maybe bin Laden didn’t actually pull the trigger, but he was responsible.”

“I haven’t heard anything yet to change my mind,” Admiral Halverson said angrily. He turned to McGarvey. “You said yourself that the bastard was probably planning something big. Maybe this action was meant to keep us busy, keep our attention and assets focused in one direction while he hits us someplace else.”

“Can we pinpoint his location?” Berndt asked.

“The CIA is working on it,” McGarvey said.

“Fine,” the national security adviser said as if the decision had already been made. “As soon as we have that, we strike him with cruise missiles.”

“It didn’t work in ‘ninety-eight,” McGarvey pointed out softly.

“Because of faulty intelligence information,” Berndt shot back. “If you do your job right this time, we’ll be able to do ours.”

“How soon can we be ready to make such an attack?” the President asked Admiral Halverson.

“The Carl Vinson and her battle group are already in the Indian Ocean. They could be in striking range in the Arabian Sea within forty-eight hours.”

“Is that enough of a force to deliver a decisive knockout punch?”

“Providing we know exactly where bin Laden is hiding, yes, sir. We can put upwards of one hundred fifty cruise missiles on target in under twenty minutes.” Admiral Halverson looked at McGarvey as if he were expecting to be challenged. “If need be we can finish the job with air launched smart bombs.”

The President’s lips compressed. “Okay, that’s an option. Mr. McGarvey, comments?”

“There is another consideration, Mr. President, perhaps the only consideration.” McGarvey brought Rencke’s briefing file up on the screen at the end of the room. The three dimensional engineering diagram appeared. “This is the Russian version of our Mark XVII nuclear demolitions device. The serial number that bin Laden sent back with Trumble matches the serial number of a Russian device that is missing.”

The entire room was stopped dead. Even the President was at a loss for words.

“We believe with a high degree of confidence that bin Laden purchased it from Russian caretaker officers at the Yavan Depot near Dushanbe, Tajikistan, for thirty million dollars. We think that it was taken across the border into Afghanistan near Nizhny Pyandzh two months ago where it disappeared. Currently the Russian FSB is conducting an investigation to find out what happened.”

Everyone around the table stared at the image on the screen. The President was the first to look back at McGarvey.

“This is a nuclear weapon?” he asked, subdued.

“Yes, sir.”

“Officially they don’t exist,” Secretary of Defense Turnquist said uncomfortably.

“They were supposed to have been destroyed,” Secretary of State Eugene Carpenter explained softly. Nearing eighty he was the oldest man currently serving in a position of power in Washington. His quiet, studied views were well respected here and abroad, especially in countries like China where old age was venerated. “Do you understand what could happen if you’re correct, and this madman has one of the things?” He shook his head because of the enormity of what they were facing. “We have no defense.”

“We built a hundred of them,” McGarvey said. “We think the Russians built a similar number in the mid to late seventies. Ours were designed at Los Alamos and put together at the Pantex facility in Texas, and so far as I know, Mr. Secretary, they still exist.”

“And you’re telling us that bin Laden has one of these things?” The President glanced at the diagram again. He was shaken to the core. “What’s he going to do with it? Doesn’t he need a missile or something to deliver it?”

“No, Mr. President, because it’s not a bomb in the conventional sense of the word. It only weighs about ninety pounds, and it fits into a suitcase-size package. They were designed for behind the lines sabotage to take out major bridges, dams, submarine pens and hardened bunkers for fighter aircraft.”

“Was it meant to be carried by a man?”

“A strong man, or maybe two of them to switch off. They could sneak up to the target in the middle of the night, hide the package somewhere close to their objective, and then withdraw.”

“How powerful is it?”

“About one kiloton, enough to do a very considerable amount of damage wherever it was fired.”

“Just how much damage?”

“Mr. President, if it were loaded in the cargo hold of a commercial airplane and detonated over Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles, or any other large city, as many as a million people would die either from the actual blast and heat, or from the aftermath fires, or the long-term effects of radiation poisoning. Roads, schools, government buildings, radio and television stations, telephone towers and exchanges, power plants and distribution centers, satellite antennae — a major portion of a city’s infrastructure would be totally destroyed or heavily damaged in just one terrorist attack. It would make the Oklahoma City incident look like a toy popgun.”

“Just wait a minute,” Berndt broke in. “You don’t just walk up to an international airport carrying a nuclear weapon and board the first flight to New York.”

“It might not be carried aboard, but it might get through customs disguised as electronic equipment, machinery or even office supplies. And unless it was damaged it wouldn’t leak radiation so it’d be invisible to most airport security measures. Even bomb sniffing dogs wouldn’t be able to sense it. Nor would our satellites, or NEST (Nuclear Explosives Search Teams) units. It could be moved anywhere around the world almost as easily as a case of beans or a sack of rice.”

FBI Director Herbert Weissman shook his head. “We have scenarios in place to deal with anthrax or nerve gas or a dozen other biological and chemical attacks, but not this. Not something this portable.”

“Until now there’ve been tight controls on the things,” McGarvey said.

Even Berndt was subdued. “Assuming for the moment that bin Laden has this weapon, and that he can get it here, how is it fired?”

“It’s exceedingly simple, sir. Almost foolproof. It can be set off by a simple turn of the key, by a timer, or even by remote control up to a mile away depending on conditions. Or, the signal to detonate could even come from a satellite, one disguised as a simple telephone call.”

“Christ,” Sec Def Turnquist said. “Can we get any cooperation from the Russians?”

“I doubt it, sir,” McGarvey said. “They won’t even admit they ever built the things, let alone they lost one. They were never included in any of the SALT treaties. Neither were ours, for that matter.”

Berndt sat forward, “I think I know what Art is trying to get at. If we can get the Russians to help us, why couldn’t we send the signal to detonate the thing right now, while it’s still in Afghanistan?”

“No,” the President said sharply.

“It’s better than taking the risk that the crazy sonofabitch will actually try to bring it here.”

The President looked to McGarvey. “It could be anywhere by now, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan, or in Kabul itself. Or even here in Washington?”

“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said.

“Then we’re at the bastard’s mercy already,” Berndt observed. “All the more reason to hit him with cruise missiles as soon as we can. Dead men don’t give orders.”

The President ignored his NSA, his eyes locked on McGarvey. “You have our attention, Mr. McGarvey. What do you think we should do?”

“Bin Laden wants to talk, so that’s exactly what we do.”

“Your man in Riyadh tried it, and it got him killed,” Berndt pointed out.

“Alien was probably killed on the orders of one of bin Laden’s followers. A fanatic. Someone who wants to use the bomb against us.”

“But bin Laden doesn’t necessarily agree,” the President said. “Are you saying that he got it as a bargaining chip?”

“I think that’s a possibility we have to consider, Mr. President.”

“Okay, who do we send?”

“Me,” McGarvey said. It was a bombshell around the table, even to Murphy who saw it coming. As DDO McGarvey was the third most powerful man in U.S. intelligence, bagging him would not only be a major coup for a terrorist such as bin Laden, but it had the potential of harming the U.S. even worse than Aldrich Ames had done. Ames had spied for the Russians in the eighties and early nineties. Because of him nearly all of our deep cover assets in the Soviet Union were blown, most of them assassinated. The CIA still was not fully recovered. “He wants to talk, so I’ll go talk to him.”

“It’s a suicide mission,” Admiral Halverson said. “If you’re wrong, and bin Laden did order Trumble’s assassination, you’d be walking into a hornet’s nest.” He shook his head. “Hell, even if you’re right, and it was one of bin Laden’s followers, what would stop him from ordering your death the moment you set foot in Afghanistan?”

“Considering what we’re faced with, it’s a risk I’m willing to take, Admiral,” McGarvey said. “The same risk your people signed on for when they put on a uniform.”

The comment stung, and the admiral sat back, chastised.

“I don’t think we have any other choice now,” Secretary of State Carpenter said in his studied way. “But what would you say to the monster that would make any sort of difference?”

“I’ll tell him that we got his message about the bomb, and ask him to turn it over to us,” McGarvey said. “I can’t think of any other reason he gave the serial number to

Trumble. He wants to make a deal with us. We’ll give him back his assets, lift the bounty and try to get the Saudi government to let his family come home. At least that’d be a start.”

“We’ve been over that,” Berndt said.

“There’s something else he wants. I don’t know what it is, but it’s something he wants badly enough to agree to talk to us.”

“Kill him,” Berndt said flatly.

“Another failed missile attack could drive him into using the bomb,” McGarvey said. “None of us want that.”

“I mean if you actually get close to him, kill the man.”

McGarvey went eye-to-eye with the President’s national security adviser. “Are you giving me that order, Mr. Berndt?” The room was quiet. “Because if you are, I would like it in writing.”

“Dennis, we’re a long ways from ordering a suicide mission assassination,” the President said. “If we strike his camps with cruise missiles the mission will be to deny him the capability to wage a war of terrorism. We will not specifically target the man.”

It was a very fine point, barely within American law, and no one missed it, nor did anyone offer comment. Assassination as a political weapon was not an option, although if bin Laden were to be killed in a missile raid, then so be it.

“How sure are you that he’s not simply setting a trap?” the President asked. “It comes down to that.”

“If he is, he wouldn’t have killed Alien. He would have waited for someone like me to show up. He wants something, and I have to meet with him.”

“How soon could you set it up?”

“We’ll put the word out, and if he responds it’ll be within the week, maybe two,” McGarvey said.

“Safeguards?” the President asked.

“We have some limited resources in Kabul.”

“Assuming he’s still in Afghanistan, how would you get there? Government transport is out.”

“Ariana Airlines, through Dubai,” McGarvey said. “For

the moment it’s the only reliable carrier to Kabul. From there I would expect he’d send someone for me.”

The President shook his head. “I don’t like this, but I don’t see any other alternative under the circumstances.”

“No, sir,” McGarvey said.

“General?” The President turned to Murphy.

Murphy gave McGarvey an odd, almost pensive look. “He’ll have to go in clean. If we try to set something up for him, some kind of a backup, and bin Laden finds out about it, Mac will be a dead man.”

The President looked around the table. “Have there been any leaks yet?” To this point the media was accepting the FBI’s story that the shooting in Orlando was a case of mistaken identity in a drug cartel war. The eye witnesses said that the shooters were slightly built and dark-skinned, which was a close enough fit to generalize that they were Colombians. Bari Yousef’s identity and Alien Trumble’s real employer were being kept secret.

“No, sir,” Berndt assured him.

“Then we’ll keep it that way,” the President said. He looked again at McGarvey. “Do it,” he said softly.

“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. A whisp of something from Voltaire came to him: I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom. Before he put himself into the lion’s den he would try to even the odds as much as possible. He wanted to stop bin Laden, but he also wanted to make it up to Trumble’s family.

Berndt and Admiral Halverson remained behind as the others filed out of the room. When everyone was gone they followed the President upstairs. On the way in he told his chief of staff to push everything back for another ten minutes, then he went to his desk.

“We can monitor McGarvey’s movements into the Afghan mountains, am I correct in this?”

“To within a few meters,” Berndt confirmed.

“Okay, if he actually comes face-to-face with the bastard, and if bin Laden so much as farts, I will order the immediate missile attack on his camp once McGarvey is clear.”

“Or dead,” Berndt said darkly.

The President nodded. “But I’ll need an ironclad confirmation of that before we go. Clear?” Berndt nodded. “Admiral, I want the Carl Vinson and her battle group moved into position as soon as possible. And we’re keeping the lid on this.”

“I’ll see to it immediately,” the admiral said, happy to go into action.

“It’s a trap,” Berndt predicted. “All he’s going to accomplish is get himself killed.”

“McGarvey is a capable man. We will give him the chance before we do anything.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Berndt said. “Now, what about the funeral for Alien Trumble and his family? We’re going to have to stay out of it, officially, if we want the cover story to hold.”

The President’s eyes went to the photograph on the desk of his wife and daughter. He was doing this for them, he thought. For all Americans, but especially for them. “The CIA will handle it. Whatever they want.”

“But, Mr. President—”

The President looked up, an angry set to his jaw. “Alien Trumble was an American hero, Dennis. He will be treated as such.” His eyes narrowed. “Let’s keep focused. We’re facing a madman in possession of a nuclear bomb who has shown a willingness in the past to kill innocent men, women and children. Don’t forget it.” The President shook his head. “God knows, I won’t.”