Soldier of God

NINETEEN

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Storis eased alongside the Harris Harbor cruise-ship docks in downtown Juneau just before dark, and within minutes the 230-foot warship was secured by a young, highly charged crew. They had rescued 122 people from four overloaded lifeboats that were in immediate danger of swamping in the high winds and large seas.

They had also retrieved the bodies of nineteen of the Spirit’s crew and passengers from the frigid waters. Black plastic bags were lined up on the aft deck.

The wind had calmed down, but the overcast had lowered and the cold rain had started again. Despite the bad weather, police had to cordon off a large area of the dock to hold back a crowd of more than a thousand people. Media trucks ringed the fringes of the crowd, and dozens of reporters and cameramen jockeyed for positions in front. More newspeople were on their way from the lower forty-eight and from nearly every news organization in the world.

Word had leaked that the director of the CIA and the former secretary of defense were both aboard. To top it all off, it was the DCI who had apparently saved not only Shaw but more than half the passengers and crew. He was with the U.S. government and he was a hero. It was an oxymoron, and the media were buying into it. Washington had been taking a lot of criticism internationally and at home, so a story like this was front-page news.

So far, nothing official had been told to the media about the hijacking, the shooting, and the cause of the sinking. But once the Storis had come into the range of a cell-phone system, more than a dozen passengers called friends and loved ones with the story. It was picked up by a radio station in Juneau, which immediately broadcast a bulletin, even doing several live interviews with survivors aboard the cutter before the captain announced on the IMC that the FBI was requesting they be stopped until the passengers were debriefed.

That had been five hours earlier, and already the entire world knew that terrorists had attempted to kidnap the former American secretary of defense Donald Shaw to take him back to Pakistan where he would have been put on trial for war crimes.

Nothing so big had happened since 9/11.

Also gathered on the dock were six FBI special agents who made up the lead investigative team. A high school lunchroom had been set up as a processing and debriefing center for the Spirit’s crew and passengers. A triage system had been put in place, and first aboard would be doctors and nurses from the hospital who would evaluate the survivors and assign them to one of three groups. Those who required immediate medical attention, such as for heart conditions or injuries, would be taken directly to the hospital. Those needing only a bandage or a tranquilizer would be treated aboard the Coast Guard cutter and then transported over to the high school. The final group, those needing no medical attention, would be the first off the ship.

However, the media would be allowed only very limited access to the survivors until after they gave their statements to the FBI. The killings and the sinking of the cruise liner, as bad as those events had been, were secondary to the attempted kidnapping of Donald Shaw, who had been one of the driving forces behind the war on terrorism.

Shaw was big news, not only because the kidnapping had failed, but also because of Washington’s likely response. The war on terrorism would be stepped up a serious notch because of last night, and the entire world held its breath waiting to see what would happen next.

The FBI’s first task would be to extract as much information from the survivors as possible. Though the search, centered at the position where the Spirit had gone down, had been in full swing since dawn, no sign of the fishing boat or the terrorists had been found. The Bureau was looking for clues anywhere it could.

Katy McGarvey and Karen Shaw were below helping with the survivors, while the former SecDef finished briefing his people in Washington via encrypted satellite coms from the cutter’s CIC.

McGarvey was on the bridge watching the activity on the dock and on the cutter’s decks. The Coast Guard medic aboard had bandaged McGarvey’s burned hand and had put a couple of stitches in his arm where he had gashed it getting an ax from the firefighting alcove aboard the Spirit. He had already spoken with his deputy DCI, Dick Adkins, and with his special projects director, Otto Rencke, assuring them that he and Katy were fine, and getting them up and running on what was being called “Project Alpha,” a plan to identify, find, and kill the terrorist Khalil.

The project had become personal last night. Not only had they manhandled McGarvey’s wife, but they had killed innocent passengers and crew as well. Worst of all they had cold-bloodedly tossed the young woman and her child into the water, and then had shot her to death.

He would never get that image out of his head, not if he lived a thousand years.

But Otto had also told him about Liese Fuelm’s call, which got him wondering what the hell the Swiss were doing watching the comings and goings of a Saudi prince. And why had Liese tried to reach him at home? Was it something out of his past catching up with him? Such things had happened before, with unhappy consequences. He did not want to go through that kind of pain again.

But there it was: the nagging at the back of his head, impossible to ignore.

The cutter’s skipper, Commander Tom Gallagher, was speaking via walkie-talkie to his first officer down on the main deck, when Don Shaw, who was dressed like McGarvey and the other survivors in Coast Guard utilities, walked in. The captain looked up. “Stand by,” he told his first officer. “Did my people provide what you needed, sir?” Gallagher, with his square features and ruddy outdoors complexion, looked like a high school football coach. He was a sharp officer with an ace crew.

Shaw was obviously hurting. The ship’s medic had bandaged his head wound, bound up his ribs, and given him a mild painkiller, but the former SecDef had refused anything else, preferring to keep his head on straight for the moment. A team of Navy doctors was coming up from Seattle aboard the C-130 Hercules that would take Shaw back to Washington, and they would conduct a thorough examination of him in flight.

He nodded tiredly. “You have a good crew,” he said. “Thank them for me, would you?”

“Will do, sir,” the skipper said. He glanced down at the crowd on the docks. “What would you like to do about security, Mr. Secretary?”

“My ride is about a half-hour out, so if you can provide it, I’ll need a detail and transportation out to the airport.”

“That’ll be no problem, sir,” Gallagher promised. “But what about the media? Would you like us to do something about them?”

Shaw smiled, even though he was tired and beat up, and he patted the Coast Guard officer on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of that part, if you’ll just send someone down to tell them I’ll conduct a very brief news conference on the dock as soon as all the passengers are taken care of.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain said, and he turned back to his walkie-talkie as Shaw took McGarvey aside.

“I suggest that you hitch a ride back to Washington with me. It’ll make security easier.”

“If you don’t mind the company, Don.”

Shaw got a distant look in his eyes for just a second.Then he shook his head as if he was having trouble believing what had happened during the night even though he had been right there and had lived through it. “I think you have become a man impossible to ignore. Hell of a job, last night, Mac. You saved a lot of lives.”

McGarvey’s jaw tightened. “Not enough.”

Shaw nodded knowingly. “It’s never enough. How many lives could we have saved if we had continued into Baghdad the first time, or if we had picked up on the signals leading to 9/11. They were there.”

“The leads are there again,” McGarvey said. As badly as he felt, he wasn’t going to beat himself up this time. He had a job to do. A terrorist to catch and kill. “Kidnapping you was just a prelude to—”

“My trial and the humiliation of America.”

“Something else,” McGarvey said. He’d felt something last night, watching Khalil, listening to the man’s words, evaluating his attitude and the almost fatalistic attitudes of his men.

Katy had picked up on the man’s subtly odd behavior too.

He was restrained, as if someone or something were holding him back, deterring him from doing what he wanted to do, and that was going on a frenzy of killing.

He would rather have murdered Shaw than try to take him captive.

Khalil had been saving himself for something even bigger than the kidnapping of the former SecDef.

“What are you thinking?” Shaw asked, concerned. “Another 9/11? Something like that?”

“It won’t be the same thing,” McGarvey said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet.”

Shaw looked away momentarily, an expression of sadness mingling with pain on his face. He shook his head. “We’re in this for the long haul,” he said, and he gave McGarvey a bleak look. “Especially you. It doesn’t end here for you, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” McGarvey said.

Shaw nodded his understanding. He glanced at the crowd on the dock. The media was setting up a stand for microphones across from the cutter’s boarding ladder, where the news conference would be held. “Do you want to talk to them?”

“I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You’ll have to sooner or later, you know. The president will probably insist on it. You’re a national hero, something we rather desperately need just now”

“I’ll deal with that issue if and when it comes up. In the meantime I have a job to do that could get impossible if I have the media on my back.”

Shaw nodded toward the crowd. “How are you going to get past them?”

McGarvey had to smile. “I am a spy, Mr. Secretary; I think I can manage something like that.”

Shaw smiled too. “I’ll bet you can.” He turned back to the captain. “Okay, let’s get this over with. I have a plane to catch.”

“Yes, sir,” Gallagher replied. He said something into his walkie-talkie, and ten seconds later a four-man security team carrying sidearms showed up to escort the SecDef down to the dock. Along with the local authorities, who would provide a police escort, the Coasties would stick with him and Mrs. Shaw until they were safely aboard their transport aircraft.

“See you at the airport,” Shaw said, and he left the bridge with his armed escort.

When the SecDef was gone, the captain gave McGarvey an expectant look. “How can I help, Mr. Director?” he asked.

“Have somebody fetch my wife up here, if you would. We’ll have to borrow jackets and hats and sidearms. She and I will be joining the secretary’s escort detail.”

The skipper suppressed a grin, but he nodded. “Will do, Mr. Director.”

TWENTY

The Ritz-Carlton, Doha rose from the shores of the Persian Gulf in the capital city’s prestigious West Bay Lagoon like a beacon in the night for the newly enfranchised rich — the rich of not only the Arab world, but also the West, especially the U.S., Japan, and Germany. The Ritz, the Inter-Continental adjacent to the Aladdin’s Kingdom that was Qatar’s only amusement park, and the fantastic Sheraton known as the “Pyramid of the Gulf,” were new, as was just about everything else in the small nation of only eight hundred thousand people.

Beneath a barren, hostile terrain of sand, rock, and gravel bordering Saudi Arabia lay untold wealth in oil reserves, as well as one-eighth of the world’s known natural gas. Technically there were no poor people here. But less than seventy-five years earlier, almost everyone on the tiny peninsula was a Bedouin — a nomadic person of the desert whose only possessions were his camels, his tents, his family, and his honor. Little or nothing of that past remained to be seen; all traces had been obliterated by buildings, by pavement, or by the shifting sands.

Lights from the hotels and other tall buildings reflected in the still waters of the bay in multicolored profusion, but the narrow rocky beach was empty except for two men, one of them dressed in a business suit and waiting near a jet black Mercedes E350 parked beneath a palm tree at the downtown marina. Huge multimillion-dollar yachts were tied up at the docks, and the only sounds were from the distant traffic at the Arch Roundabout. The night was warm and humid, a slight haze softening the stars overhead.

The other man, Imad Najjar, sat in the darkness on his Vespa beside an advertising kiosk fifty meters away from the car, watching the man he was supposed to meet. He was young, only nineteen, and until an hour earlier when he had begun smoking hash, he had been filled with fear. But now he was flying, like a bird with wings, far above even the range of a Kalashnikov rifle. He was dressed in blue jeans, a UCLA Dept. of Athletics tee shirt, and Air Jordans. His hair was cut very short, and a four-day stubble darkened his narrow face that was all planes and angles.

His eyes were alive, and he could see for ten million kilometers with perfect clarity. He could even see his own death, and it was as if a great joy awaited him in Paradise.

Imad had to laugh. That was the line they had fed him and the others last year in the training camp outside Drosh in the mountains of northwestern Pakistan. But he had been westernized by his father to expect — and feel comfortable with — money and the gadgets and comforts it could buy, so he never bought into the Muslim fundamentalist mumbo jumbo.

Bin Laden had not been up there in the camps, and the rumor was that the Americans had killed him in one of the first raids in the war in Afghanistan. But the mujahideen instructors had been filled with the holy zeal; this was a jihad, a striving against the Western infidels.

Some of the students had swallowed the idea, but they were mostly the losers. West Bank Palestinians, Cairo slum kids, a few spoiled Saudis, angry Iranis, and the odd lot that included one seriously screwed-up kid from Chicago or Seattle or someplace like that.

But there were women in the camps, and good hash, and the promise of money to the right boy or girl doing the right thing for the cause, at the right time and against the right enemy. A suicide bombing on an Israeli target — say, a bus in downtown Jerusalem or even Tel Aviv — would net the bomber’s family thirty-five thousand dollars or more — paid in U.S hundred-dollar bills, which Imad thought was ironic as hell.

He checked his wristwatch. He was five minutes early. The bastard could wait for him. Nobody was going to say that Imad was an ignorant Bedouin, anxious to prove his conviction to the cause. Tonight was nothing more than another simple delivery, for not much money.

His parents had immigrated to Saudi Arabia in the seventies, and his father had gone to work for Bin Laden Construction, working on the holy places at Mecca and Medina, and becoming wealthy in the process. Imad went to the best private schools, first in Riyadh and then the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, where Osama bin Laden himself had gotten a degree.

Imad was one of the rich kids who flew up to London or Paris whenever the urge struck them. After graduation, their parents told them, things would change. So while in university they were expected to study as well as have fun.

He took another toke on his bomber joint, cupping the glowing tip in his palm.

Construction was boring. Acting the part of the international terrorist was exciting. So long as his father’s money continued to flow, Imad figured he could attend classes from time to time; go on sabbaticals, as he thought of them, to places like Pakistan and Iran; and run the occasional mission when it was convenient and interesting.

Having a little extra money he’d earned himself was a plus. And when he returned to school from one of his missions, he got a lot more respect, not only from his professors, but from the liberated girls.

Life was good. Insha’allah.

He took another hit, then carefully snuffed out the glowing tip, pinched the end, and stuffed the roach in a side pocket of his backpack, before he started the rental motor scooter and slowly putt-putted to his contact.

The man at the Mercedes was much older and much better dressed than Imad was. He was slightly built, sloping shoulders and long legs. And he was intense; his eyes continually darted toward the marina entrance as if he expected someone to show up at any moment.

“My name is Achmed.”

“I am Imad. And before you ask, no, I was not followed. I made sure of it.”

Imad had worked with a different cutout each time, but they all seemed to be alike in their nervousness, as if they expected the CIA to jump out of the shadows, guns blazing. This one was no different.

He had seen the change in practically everyone since the September eleventh attack on the U.S., and the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Iran was probably next because of Tehran’s defiance over the nuclear question. Pakistan was coming under increasing fire from the West, and North Korea was skirting the edge of disaster.

On top of all that, the rumor on the street was that al-Quaida was preparing another spectacular strike on the U.S. mainland. This time it would be more personal than 9/11.

“Americans should never feel safe anywhere in the world, especially not in their own homes,” his professor of economics had emotionally told his class two weeks ago.

The feeling that Damocles’ sword was about to fall had infected the entire region. In cities from Riyadh to Islamabad ordinary people were stockpiling food and water. Hospitals were hoarding medicines. Police units were sticking close to their barracks. And the Arab press in general was less strident in its attacks on Westerners.

But watching CNN and some other Western media outlets, Imad couldn’t see that anyone in Washington or London was picking up on the obvious signals that the Muslim world was holding its collective breath.

“This is not a game,” Achmed warned sharply. He took a VHS tape from the car and handed it to Imad. “People’s lives, including your own, will depend on how well you do tonight. We have long memories of who our friends and our enemies are.”

Imad realized that the man was frightened. “I’ve done these things for the cause before. Nothing will go wrong tonight. I’ll deliver this to the Al Jazeera studio, and in the morning I’ll be on the first flight back to Jeddah.”

“I was told to expect someone older.”

“I think they wanted someone like me — someone anonymous — for this kind of delivery,” Imad said.

“You’re a rich man’s son.”

Imad looked pointedly at his cutout’s Mercedes. “Exactly,” he said. “Which here in Qatar makes us anonymous.”

Achmed’s expression darkened, and his eyes darted to the highway as a noisy diesel truck passed. “If you fail, your body will be identified, and there will be unnecessary attention.”

Imad laughed. “No chance of that happening. My father would disown me, just like Osama’s family disowned him. We’re both criminals.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Osama bin Laden was like a god.

Achmed held out his hand. “I’ve changed my mind. Give me back the tape. I will get someone else to deliver it.”

Imad stuffed the tape in the waistband of his jeans. “I’ll do it, no problem.”

“It is important.”

“What about my money?”

Achmed slowly shook his head. “Make the delivery first; then come here. I’ll wait for you.”

“I’m not doing this for my health, man.”

Achmed laughed disdainfully. “That’s exactly what all of us are doing. You will either be a part of the jihad or you will be one of its targets. The choice is yours.”

Through his drug-induced haze Imad realized that he might have gone a little too far. He nodded modestly. “Just be here when I get back.”

“Someone will be waiting for you at the east entrance. Do not talk to him. Do not look him in the eye. Just hand him the tape, turn around, and leave. Do you understand?”

Imad nodded again, and he took off without looking back. This whole gig was starting to feel bad in his mind. For the first time since he had started dabbling in the struggle, his fears were not being suppressed by the hash. Achmed was one of the crazy ones. Imad saw it in his eyes. Mujahideen, they called themselves: warriors for God. Those types would just as soon kill you as look at you.

Tonight he was backed into a corner. He had to deliver the tape to the television network. There was no turning back. But he didn’t have to go back for his money, nor did he have to accept any other missions. It’d be his luck that next time they would want him to be a suicide bomber.

Learn by example, his father said. Either take up the construction business and become a multimillionaire. Or take up arms and live in a cave in Afghanistan.

Imad decided that he was claustrophobic after all.

He followed the broad Corniche Boulevard as it gracefully curved away from the waterfront toward the Bin Omran District where the U.S. Embassy had put up its new building. To the right was the upscale New District, where the American new chancery was located, and farther out the city’s tall buildings quickly gave way to residential neighborhoods, and suddenly, as if cut off by a switch, the city ended and the desert began.

Traffic was light, with only the occasional delivery truck or private car, but Imad was getting spooked. He was convinced that someone was watching him. Unseen eyes somewhere in the darkness were monitoring his progress to make sure he didn’t screw up.

He wanted to be anywhere else except here in Doha. But he could not turn back. They would kill him if he did.

He decided that when he got back home he would go up to Riyadh and tell his father everything. Together they would figure out how to get him out of the mess that he was in.

The Al Jazeera studios were in a small, nondescript building on a tree-lined street in one of Doha’s more fashionable districts of professional offices and expensive homes set behind painted walls. Qatar was safe, but these days everyone in the Middle East felt more comfortable sleeping nights behind tall walls.

The only outward signs that betrayed the studio’s purpose were a rooftop bristling with satellite dishes and a Qatar Army Humvee parked in front. The studio’s front and side entrances were barricaded by sandbags.

Imad couldn’t see any soldiers when he made his first pass and turned the corner at the end of the block, but he knew they were there. Watching. Waiting. Over the past few years there had been a number of attacks on Al Jazeera bureaus and its correspondents.

The television network was underwritten in part by the Qatari government, so the army had placed guards at the home studios. If there was going to be any further trouble, it would not be here in Doha.

The problem, as Imad saw it, was that if he stopped at the east entrance and tried to deliver the tape, the army guards would first demand to see his identification. That was something he did not want to happen. He did not want his name listed on some roster of suspected terrorists when it was discovered he had delivered a tape for al-Quaida to the studio.

Yet he could not toss the tape in a trash can and go home. Al-Quaida would find him and kill him.

He turned around in the middle of the block and stopped. The Vespa idled softly in the balmy night air. How had he gotten himself into this situation? What had once seemed like a lark now seemed to be a terribly dangerous enterprise. He wanted to be done with it and get out of there.

The tape was like a brick of hot lead against his belly. Achmed said to hand it to a man who would be waiting at the east entrance. But there were soldiers there, behind the sandbags.

Imad suddenly gunned the Vespa and accelerated down the street. He had to slow down for the corner, but then he accelerated again.

A soldier stepped out from behind the Humvee and raised his hand.

Imad cranked the throttle full open, the Vespa’s engine buzzing like a million bees. At the last possible moment, he maneuvered around the soldier and yanked the videotape out of his jeans. As he passed the east entrance, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy figure in the doorway six or seven meters away.

He threw the tape toward the figure at the same instant the soldier behind him shouted, “Halt!”

Twenty meters from the corner, something like a bee sting, but with the power of a sledgehammer, slammed into his back, lifting him off his motor scooter.

He grunted as all the breath was knocked out of him, and the night went black as he smashed face-first into the pavement.

TWENTY-ONE

Kelley Conley got to her desk on the second floor of the U.S. Embassy in Doha at 8:00 A.M. sharp as she did every morning, six days per week. She was a slightly built, attractive woman, who at thirty-two was the youngest assistant to any U.S. ambassador in the world. Divorced three years earlier, she had to send her two children to live with her parents in Waterloo, Iowa, until she was either reassigned to Washington or given a post in what she believed was a more stable part of the world.

As a result she was ambitious and earnest almost to a fault. And she was almost always nervous, expecting the Islamic struggle against the West to blow up in her face at any moment.

As far as she was concerned, all Americans living and working in the Middle East were on borrowed time.

Ambassador Peter Sorensen was in Washington this week, so all problems facing American interests in Qatar ended up on her desk. This morning the first two items were a reported shooting the night before in front of the Al Jazeera studios, less than a half-mile from where she sat. And the second was the arrival of Kamal Isomil, a senior news editor with the Arab television network.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the two things were related.

And all of that was in addition to the attempted kidnapping yesterday of Secretary of Defense Shaw. Every U.S. embassy and consulate in the world was on high alert. Everyone was jumpy.

“Did he say why he’s here?” she asked the receptionist downstairs at the security desk.

“No, ma’am. Just that it was a matter of some importance.”

“Very well. Have someone escort him up,” she told the receptionist.

She buzzed her secretary to say that Isomil was on the way, and two minutes later the Al Jazeera senior editor showed up with a plain padded envelope, which presumably had been checked by the Marine guards and bomb-sniffing dogs outside at Post One, the gate to the compound.

“Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice and at this early hour,” Isomil said, graciously, in English. He was a short, somewhat paunchy man with wavy gray hair, dark eyes, and a ready smile. This morning, however, he was serious.

Kelley had gotten to her feet when he came in. “You have piqued my curiosity.” She motioned him to sit down.

“It’s not necessary, Mrs. Conley. I’ve only come to deliver this.” He handed her the padded envelope. “It’s a copy of a videotape that was delivered to our studios last night.” He seemed relieved to be rid of it.

“There was a shooting.”

Isomil nodded gravely. “The messenger did not stop when he was ordered to by the army, and unfortunately he was shot to death.”

“Good heavens,” Kelley said.

“It’s another message to the United States,” Isomil said.

Kelley stared at him. “From whom?”

“Osama bin Laden. And it’s very recent. He holds up a New York Times for June sixth.”

A tight fist clutched at her stomach. “Last week?”

“Yes,” Isomil said. “We must broadcast this, of course. But we are giving you twenty-four hours.”

It wasn’t the first time that a video or an audiotape from bin Laden had been delivered to the Arab network, nor was it the first time that someone from Al Jazeera had brought a copy of the tape to the embassy. But never had such a senior network executive played the role of delivery boy, nor had any messenger before appeared so solemn.

Bin Laden’s last message had come nearly a year ago. “What’d he say this time?”

Isomil looked as if he felt sorry for her. He shook his head. “View the tape, Mrs. Conley, and then get it to Washington as quickly as possible. We can only give you twenty-four hours, as I said.”

After the Marine guard escorted the Al Jazeera editor downstairs, Kelley brought the tape across the hall to Neal Stannard’s cluttered office. Stannard, the CIA’s chief of mission in Qatar, was just getting off the phone. He looked up, his round face, horn-rimmed glasses, and polished complexion making him look like an eager contestant on a quiz show.

Kelley handed him the padded envelope. “Al Jazeera just brought this by. It’s bin Laden.”

Like Kelley, Stannard was young for his posting, but unlike her he wanted to be in the Middle East, where the action was. “Close the door,” he told her.

While she was doing that, he took the tape out of the envelope and checked to see if there was a message of any sort, which there wasn’t. Then he turned on his portable television/tape player and started the tape.

Bin Laden looked ill. His face was gaunt, his cheeks hollow, his long beard mostly white. His hands shook with a slight palsy when he held up a copy of The New York Times close enough for the camera to catch the date. He was seated on a Persian rug in a nondescript room, which had no furnishings whatsoever. When he started to speak, in Arabic, his voice was low and ragged as if he needed to clear his throat.

“I want this translated—” Kelley started.

Stannard held up his hand. “I speak Arabic.”

The recording was less than three minutes long, but it was of good quality and the sound was clear. Stannard made some notes, and when the message ended he rewound the tape and started it again, this time translating for Kelley.

When it was finished for the second time, Kelley’s legs felt shaky. “Jesus,” she said softly, “he’s a monster.”

“And then some,” Stannard said. He picked up his secure phone and dialed a number. “I’m taking this to Riyadh this morning. They have the equipment to digitize the tape so we can send it via satellite to Langley and to NSA. They’ll need to get on it right away. Has this been broadcast yet?”

“No. They’re giving us twenty-four hours,” Kelley said.

“Has anyone else seen it?”

“They didn’t say.”

Stannard glanced at the clock on his desk. “It’s a little after eleven in Washington. You should try to reach Peter. State will need a heads-up.”

Kelley nodded, sick at heart, and suddenly she felt very naive. “Do you think he’ll get the people to do it?”

Stannard shrugged. “Why not? He got the guys for 9/11, and that op was a big success for them.” His call went through. “Charlie, it’s Neal Stannard in Doha. I’m coming over this morning. We got a new bin Laden tape, and this one is definitely flash traffic.”

Dennis Berndt, the president’s adviser on national security affairs, arrived at his White House office a few minutes before 7 A.M. He was in a highly charged mood because of the stunning events of the past twenty-four hours.

First was the hijacking of a cruise liner, the murder of dozens of innocent people, among them an infant child, the attempted kidnapping of the former secretary of defense, and finally his dramatic rescue by the director of the CIA.

Then late last night was the call from Peter Sorensen, the ambassador to Qatar, about the videotape from bin Laden and the hint about its disturbing contents.

And finally the call just after midnight that the Navy plane transporting Shaw and McGarvey to Washington had made an unscheduled stop in Denver. The SecDef had suffered a mild heart attack, and his medical team needed the use of an MRI machine. Shaw would be okay, but the unscheduled stop was delaying his and McGarvey’s return by several hours.

Berndt had come to Washington from a professorship in international law at Harvard. Within the first year he had shed his academic persona and had reverted to his more comfortable background as a midwest lawyer. The media classified him as “one of the most laid-back presidential advisers in recent memory.”

He was a large, amiable man with a warm smile, but this morning he was worried. His mother used to say that troubles came in threes, each one worse than the one before it. He’d seen that very thing happen. And if that old saw held any water, God only knew what was coming that would top the hijacking of the Spirit of ’98 and bin Laden’s new warning.

His secretary hadn’t arrived yet, but the messenger from the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence was waiting in his outer office with an attaché case. Berndt signed a release form, and the messenger handed over the tape.

“Thank you, sir,” the young woman said. “I was instructed by Mr. Doyle to tell you that a translation line was added by us to the bottom of the screen, and that NSA analysts have a ninety-eight percent confidence that the message is authentic.”

Berndt had almost hoped for a hoax. “Have Mr. Shaw and Mr. McGarvey arrived at Andrews yet?”

The messenger glanced at her wristwatch. “Any minute now, sir.”

“Good.”

Berndt’s charged-up mood had turned dark and somber by the time he finished viewing the three-minute tape for the second time. He took no notes; it wasn’t necessary. Bin Laden’s message was as simple and straightforward as it was chilling. When Al Jazeera broadcast this to the world in another fifteen or sixteen hours, there were going to be a lot of nervous Americans.

He ejected the tape from the player and took it down the West Wing hall to the Oval Office.

The door was open, and already this morning the usual people were gathering: secretaries, chief of staff, speechwriters, and others in preparation for the usual 9 A.M. CIA briefing to the president. Three telephone conversations were going on at once, and four television monitors were tuned to the three major network news shows plus CNN. All of them were using the attempted kidnapping of Shaw as their lead story.

President Lawrence Haynes, a cup of coffee in hand, seemingly oblivious to the turmoil around him, stood next to his desk watching ABC’s Charles Gibson give his spin on what the event meant in the war on terrorism. Gibson, like the other news anchors, was making a big deal out of McGarvey’s daring Die Hard rescue. Finally someone was willing to step up to the plate and strike back one-on-one. America had a new hero who had saved the day.

Haynes was built like a Green Bay Packer linebacker, with broad shoulders, bulging muscles, and a flat stomach. Despite his hectic schedule he managed to keep on a strict diet and maintain an exercise routine every day except Sunday. He was a family man, with a deeply rooted sense of honor; he knew the difference between right and wrong, and even his enemies could not fault him in that respect.

He looked up when Berndt walked in. “Good morning, Dennis. Have you been watching this?”

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Berndt said. “I saw it on Fox and Friends on the way in.” He stepped in front of the president, switched the television to channel three, and popped the cassette in the player.

“What is it?” Haynes asked.

“Watch,” Berndt said, and he pushed the Play button.

Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing as the image of Osama bin Laden came up. The Saudi terrorist picked up a copy of the front section of The New York Times and held it for the camera to home in on the date.

He began to speak, in Arabic, and two lines of script scrolled across the bottom of the screen, one in Arabic and the other in English.

“The great (jihad) struggle against the Western infidel has been in its infancy. Despite the many valiant and courageous successes by our brothers and sisters around the world; despite the triumph in the nest of thieves on eleventh of September 2001; despite the strike at the heart of the warmongers’ headquarters; despite the righteous blows against the embassies, barracks, warships, and even the buses and shopping centers of our enemies, of the blasphemers against Allah; despite the virtuous pain caused to show the unbeliever the correct path to Paradise, we are not finished.

“We are at the dawning of a new chapter of our book of just causes.

“The infidel has learned to pay attention. But they have only taken the first halting steps; as a child would upon leaving its mother …”

“When did we get this?” the president asked.

“It showed up at our embassy in Doha about eleven o’clock our time last night,” Berndt said. “CIA Riyadh digitized it and sent it by secure satellite link early this morning, and NSA’s people are saying it’s really him.”

“ … time now to continue in earnest the battle we have only just begun.”

Bin Laden carefully laid the newspaper on the floor next to him. He moved slowly and deliberately, as if he were in pain. It looked as if he was having trouble with his back or the muscles in his flanks. When he turned again to face the camera, he was still grimacing, but his facial muscles slowly relaxed and he smiled again; he was a man who was extremely sad, but who was at peace with himself and his terrible decisions.

Seeing the tape for the third time, Berndt was suddenly struck by the notion that bin Laden was not only a man at peace, but he was also a man who had made peace with his maker.

Bin Laden was dying, or preparing to die.

“No infidel should feel safe in his own home. No woman doing her household duties should feel protected. No man at work should feel sure his family will not die very soon. No person anywhere in the U.S. should feel secure that his children will reach their destination — unless their destination is Paradise, and then only if they have made amends with Allah.”

Berndt’s flesh began to crawl, the hairs at the nape of his neck stood up, and he had a bad taste in his mouth. When this next part was broadcast, no one in America would get a good night’s sleep, and tomorrow would be a day of panic and chaos.

“We will strike in America’s heartland.We will deliver a blow that the infidel will never forget.This time we will send our arrow of justice into the heart of the evil ones.We will prove that there are truly no innocents among the evildoers.

“By now our soldiers of God are ready to strike the very nests where the children of the infidels lay their heads each evening to sleep; where they dream in peace certain that their parents are near to protect them; where they first learn the heretical words that cause them to wrongly believe that there are gods other than the One God.

“Infidels, send your children to bed, but do not expect them to wake in the morning.”

One of the president’s staff stifled a sob.

“There will be no further compromise. Insha’allah.”

Bin Laden looked away and made a gesture to someone off camera, and the tape went to snow.

The president and the others in the Oval Office, struck with the enormity of bin Laden’s message, did not move at first. Always before the warnings were vague, calling for terrorist strikes against the U.S. and our interests. This time he had specified the targets: America’s children in their homes.

“Al Jazeera is giving us another fifteen hours before they broadcast it,” Berndt said. “Shall I play it again?”

The president tore his eyes away from the television and shook his head. “No need to ask if he means it, or if he has the resources to carry out his threat.”

“No, sir.”

“Is McGarvey back yet?”

“He should be arriving about now. I expect his people will be bringing him up to speed right away.”

The president’s jaw tightened. He glanced again at the blank screen, then nodded as if he had made a tough decision. Everyone in the office was looking at him, waiting for him to say something, to let them know how they should react.

“This attack will not happen,” he told his people. “I am putting every resource available to me for the single purpose of finding bin Laden and killing him.” His expression hardened. “He will not be offered amnesty, nor will an attempt be made to arrest him and bring him to trial. Any possible collateral damage will not become a consideration. I want to be very clear on those points. No deal making. We’re going to get that bastard once and for all.”

It was the reaction Berndt had expected. Haynes was slow to get angry, but once there he became an unstoppable force.

“I’ll meet my National Security Council at noon. That should give Mac time enough to get fully briefed and up to speed.” He gave his staff a reassuring look. “I’ll speak to the nation tonight at eight, before the tape is broadcast. There will be a lot of panicky parents who’ll want to know that we’re doing something to stop the monster.”

No one challenged the president, who had already broken several laws by ordering an assassination, nor did Berndt think that the Democrats would do so. The current mood of the country was one of subdued anger at the al-Quaida terrorists and frustration with Washington for not having gotten rid of bin Laden. Once this tape hit the airwaves, all that would change. The entire country would be behind the president.

TWENTY-TWO

At that moment it was 6 P.M. in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and arguably one of the most dangerous spots on the planet, when a Gulfstream bizjet with British tail numbers touched down at Jinnah International Airport. Ground control directed the pilot to taxi to a private boarding gate on the west side of the field, which serviced Pakistan International Airlines’ diplomatic and VIP passengers.

When the jet was parked and the engines were spooling down, the steward, a young Bangladeshi man supplied by the air-leasing service, opened the door and lowered the stairs, then stepped aside politely as the lone passenger got up and exited the aircraft without a word.

Khalil, who had traveled from Vancouver via Montreal, London, and Cairo under the name of Thomas Powers, walked over to a waiting Mercedes sedan and got into the backseat. He was dressed in a stylish linen suit, with a white silk shirt, a pale blue cravat loosely tied around his neck, and hand-sewn tan Brazilian loafers.

Even something more than a casual glance would not connect him with Thomas Isherwood or with the terrorist who had hijacked the Spirit of ’98 thirty hours ago. He was a completely different man now. His facial expression was different, the way he carried himself was not the same, and the color of his eyes and hair, which had both been dark, were now light brown.

The major change was the look in his eyes. On the cruise liner he had been a man on a carefully controlled military mission, but now he was a wild animal, scarcely in control of himself, poised to strike at anything that crossed his path. A Bengal tiger who was disappointed and angry because he had missed his kill, he was extremely dangerous as a result.

A minute later the steward came over with two pieces of matched Louis Vuitton luggage and placed them in the trunk.

The solidly built, capable-looking driver, dressed in a Western business suit, handed a sealed manila envelope — addressed to Ibn Rashid care of the Sheraton Karachi — over the seat to Khalil, who accepted it without a word. Inside were Khalil’s new passport, stamped by Pakistan customs, as well as several other identity and credit documents.

Thomas Isherwood, who had traveled to and from Alaska, and Thomas Powers, who had made his perfect escape here to Karachi, no longer existed. Those identities were as false as the Rashid persona.

In fact, Khalil thought, he sometimes had trouble remembering his real identity, his real background. Since he received the call fifteen years ago and slipped underground, he had become a man with no name and no past.

The name “Khalil” had been assigned by the CIA simply as a code word, a way to identify him. He had found out about it from a source in the Egyptian Embassy in Washington and had adopted it as his own.

Very few people outside the business even knew that code name.

All that would change when the director of the Central Intelligence Agency lay at his feet, the rich, red American blood flowing like a river. What sights would be seen in McGarvey’s eyes at the time of his passing.

The car was waved through the airport security gate, and Khalil settled back, not noticing the slums they had to pass through to get into the city proper. Most people in Karachi were desperately poor and filled with a religious fervor. They were a dangerous force, like dynamite near an open flame, ready for one spark to set them off.

He was in a very dark mood this evening, mostly because of his failure, but also because of his impatience to get on with the task he had set himself to do: kill Kirk McGarvey.

Impatience was rare for him, and whenever the mood arose, like now, he stopped to closely examine its cause. In his business inattention to detail could get you killed.

On the desert, where the nearest oasis might be one hundred kilometers away, and where noontime temperatures might reach fifty-five degrees Celsius, to make an error in judgment because the wanderer was in a hurry was a sentence of death.

He had never failed before, nor had he ever been bested by anyone. Bin Laden had warned him that if he ever came up against McGarvey to kill the man immediately. He had been unable to do that, and the only reason had been his own weakness, his lack of ability He was desperate to right that wrong.

He looked at his reflection in the window. Perhaps he had lost his edge. Perhaps he had been away from the desert for too long.

Not yet, not yet. There was at least one more battle to be won.

His real age was nearer to fifty than the CIA guessed, but he looked thirty-five. Tall, with an olive complexion, dark flashing eyes, and a feline grace, Khalil could project an intimate warmth if the circumstances dictated it, but could in an instant become as cold, indifferent, and deadly as a king cobra ready to strike.

His family had been Bedouin, wanderers on the open deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. They had a tradition of being tough, heartless people who had to be that way in order to survive the harsh conditions, not only of the desert, but also of the constant internecine fighting of the royal family, of which they were a minor branch.

It was a way of living that had been bred into them over the generations. And like theTikritis of Iraq, which spawned such warriors as Saddam Hussein, Khalil’s family had been exceedingly strong and close knit, in contrast to the modern Saudi family that was as often as not dysfunctional and scattered.

Since the oil boom many of the royals had spent untold billions of dollars on hedonistic pleasures around the world — yachts, jets, mistresses.

All that time Khalil’s family believed that the royals needed to pay more attention to their internal affairs and to the principles of Wahhabism, the strictest and harshest form of Islam.

Only through Allah will the world be saved.

As a child growing up in the late sixties and early seventies, Khalil was trained to be a true Bedouin. A hard, religious fundamentalism was beaten into him by his masters. He learned to be heartless when it was needed, cruel when it was called for.

The Bedouins’ philosophy, and Khalil’s, was a stern obedience to the fatalism of a harsh environment.

Even in this modern age a true Bedouin is able to harden his heart in order to kill his own daughter as an offering to Allah.The refinements of modern life are nothing more than the effeminate devices of degenerate men.

Khalil had never been able to think in any other way, though he could easily slip into the role of the playboy if and when the need arose.

And during the rare times he went home, he acted the role of a kind, loving husband to his wife, and a compassionate father to his children.

To his house staff and servants, he was by all accounts a considerate man. His third cousin, Prince Faisal, once told him that a man could be judged by how he treated his inferiors.

It was important that a man do the correct things when important people were observing, and do the necessary things when important principles were at stake.

Khalil looked up out of his thoughts long enough to realize they had already driven past the Chaukhandi Tombs, because they made the turn on Shahrah-e-Faisal Road directly into the heart of the modern city with its luxury hotels and high-rise commercial buildings. Away from the outlying districts, Karachi could be a large city almost anywhere in the world.

Yet it was here, right in the capitalistic heart of Pakistan, and not in some mountain hideaway as Western intelligence thought, where the real planning for the jihad had taken place well before 9/11.

President Musharraf and his National Command Authority were happy to cooperate with the American CIA’s hunt for terrorists in the remote mountains of Drosh, Chitral, and Shoghot on the far north border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was an open secret among Muslims that only the bandits and Kashmir rebels were left up there. But it occupied the Americans, who thought they were making real progress in their “war on terrorism,” and Pakistan benefited because American aid was starting to flow.

The faint trace of a smile briefly crossed Khalil’s face. The early days of the movement in the mountains of Afghanistan had been a wild adventure. Khalil, like many Saudis, longed to go back to nature. It was no different than Americans who camp in the woods. For many Saudis, including Khalil, it was going back to the desert to a simpler time when religion and a respect for the land were important.

If the oil were to be permanently shut off, the West would be forced to return to its roots, just as the Saudis would have to return to the desert.

It was an intriguing thought.

Downtown on M. R. Kayani Road near the red sandstone pile of brick cupolas and balconies that housed the Sind Provincial Assembly, the driver slowed the Mercedes and entered a parking-garage ramp beneath the modern glass-and-steel, forty-eight-story M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre.

“Were we followed?” Khalil asked, softly.

“No,” the driver replied succinctly. Karachi was his city The suggestion that he had been careless in his duties coming from anyone other than Khalil would have angered him. As it was, he took it to be a reasonable question from a professional.

He pushed a button on a remote control, and a steel gate rolled back allowing them entry. Five levels down, at the far southeastern corner of the ramp, he stopped in front of a single elevator, its doors open.

“Leave my bags in the trunk, and remain here. I won’t be long,” Khalil said. He got out of the car and walked across to the elevator. The doors automatically shut and the car started up.

The floor-selection panel was locked out, and a miniature closed-circuit television camera was mounted in the ceiling. Security was unobtrusive but tight. Wealthy men conducted their business in this building. It was expected that security measures would be in place.

In order to hide the lizard, change his color to red and place him in a rose garden.

The elevator stopped at the twenty-fifth floor. Across a thickly carpeted hall, a plain wooden door opened as Khalil approached. An old man in evening clothes, whom Khalil had known all his life, nodded pleasantly. “Good evening, Mr. Rashid. I trust your trip was a productive one.”

Khalil preferred the mountains, although this place was a more secure hideout. “I’m in a hurry.”

The old man smiled indulgently. “If you will just go straight through, Mr. bin Laden is waiting.”

Khalil passed through the small, plainly furnished receptionist’s office, into a dimly lit, plushly decorated corridor right out of an English manor house, to a small windowless room at the end. The walls were plain plaster, and the only furnishing was a Persian rug in the middle of a plain tiled floor. A single light in the ceiling cast a pale yellow glow.

He slipped off his loafers and sat down at one end of the carpet to wait, but it was only a minute or two before the door opened and Osama bin Laden, dressed in a British tailored business suit, but with an open collar, a gentle smile on his clean-shaven face, walked in. Khalil started to rise, but bin Laden waved him down.

“Please, do not arise for me, my friend.” He spoke in Arabic, his voice strong and clear. He took off his shoes and sat down on the rug. “You had a safe journey. Would you like refreshments?”

Khalil looked for a sign in bin Laden’s eyes that he was disappointed or angry because of the failure to kidnap Shaw. But there was nothing to be seen except for the pleasure of seeing an old and trusted lieutenant.

“No, thank you, my brother. In fact, it is not my intention to stay with thee for long this evening. I have further urgent business elsewhere.” The Arabic language was more formal than English; rightly so, in Khail’s mind.

“All of us have urgent business to attend to now,” bin Laden said. “I have ordered the next phase in the war against the infidels to begin. I have rereleased the message.”

Khalil let his surprise show. The tape was not to have been made until after Shaw had been safely brought to Pakistan, put on public trial, and convicted for the world to see. “The timing is perhaps incorrect?”

“In fact, the timing is perfect,” bin Laden replied mildly. “My message was delivered to Al Jazeera last night, and as I suspected would come to pass, a copy of the tape was handed over to the CIA in Doha and transmitted to Washington. By now the criminals in the White House believe they know what they are faced with.”

“We have lost the element of surprise that made the September attacks so successful,” Khalil pointed out. He had come to Karachi expecting to be chastised for his failure. Instead he was being told the next attack on American soil was going ahead

“We will strike fear into their hearts,” bin Laden said. His voice was still mild, but he was angry. His mouth was set, his eyes narrowed. This was bin Laden just before a battle.

Khalil knew that he had to choose his words with care. “Yes, my brother, but their law enforcement agencies will be watching for our soldiers.”

Bin Laden’s expression darkened. “They are already in place.”

“The necessary supplies are there?” Khalil blurted. He had trained some of the boys who would provide the support network in the States. It did not matter to him if they died in battle, but he did not want them to give their lives for no reason.

Bin Laden’s broad nostrils flared. “Everything was moved into position over the past two months.”

Khalil felt the first hint of trouble. He had dropped out of sight for the past two months in order to have the time to validate his Trinidad identity. He had left the real work, bin Laden was telling him, to someone else while he went about the business of conducting a doomed mission.

Bin Laden took four envelopes out of a breast pocket and laid them on the carpet beside Khalil. “These are the four death letters from our martyrs. You will personally deliver them along with fifty thousand dollars in cash to each family after they succeed. Then our cause will have more righteous converts. Money will come to us as it did after the September attacks. As it would have had you not blundered your very nearly foolproof task.”

Every muscle in Khalil’s body stiffened. Any man other than bin Laden who spoke to him like that would die now. But he gave no outward sign of his almost overwhelming rage. “It will be as you ordered. When will the attacks take place?”

“Very soon, my brother. You will keep yourself in readiness to make the deliveries. And you will remain out of reach of Western intelligence.”

“I have a most important task to—”

“Yes, killing Kirk McGarvey. Someone else will do it.”

“He is mine,” Khalil blurted.

Bin Laden’s gaze turned ice cold. “You have another mission,” he said. “See that you do it well. When the moment comes, there will be a great outpouring of fear and anger. It will be a dangerous time. There will certainly be reprisals, and we all must be ready for them. The families of our heroes must be made to know that our hearts are with them in Paradise.”

Khalil calmed himself by shear force of will, an artery in his neck throbbing. He would not be denied what was rightly his. No power on earth, not even his loyalty to bin Laden, would stop him.

Bin Laden got to his feet. “Go to your family now, and make peace with Allah. The time will be soon.”

Khalil picked up the envelopes. “How do you wish me to get the cash?”

“You are a wealthy man. You supply the money. Take it from one of your bank accounts. The ones in the Cayman Islands, or perhaps the ones in the Jersey banks. It is of no matter to me.”

When bin Laden left the room, Khalil pocketed the envelopes and settled back. He was no longer angry. He knew what he had to do, and he had a good idea how he would do it.

McGarvey was a man without a future.

TWENTY-THREE

Ten time zones to the west, a Navy C-130 Hercules fitted out as a hospital transport, carrying SecDef Shaw, DCI McGarvey, and their wives, touched down at Andrews Air Force Base and taxied directly over to one of the alert hangars on the far west side of the base.

A number of people were gathered on the ramp, several of them highranking brass, presumably from the Pentagon, waiting for their boss. In addition to several military staff cars and four windowless vans with CIA series tags, there was an ambulance and a Cadillac limousine.

Watching from a window, McGarvey picked out his deputy director Dick Adkins, who stood near the limo, his hands in his pockets, his slight shoulders slumped, and his thinning, sand-colored hair ruffled in the breeze. Next to him, by contrast, was a mountain of a man who looked like a heavyweight prizefighter. McGarvey figured the muscle would be his new bodyguard; number three — after DickYemm and Jim Grassinger — in less than eighteen months. It didn’t say much for job security.

Even before the big airplane came to a complete halt, a dozen armed Air Force security troops formed a perimeter around the aircraft.

McGarvey had insisted on remaining in Denver until Shaw was cleared to travel, in part because the delay was only a couple of hours, and in part because he and Katy needed the rest. Overnight, Adkins had briefed him on the bin Laden tape. He suspected that the coming days were going to be intense.

The hijacking of the Spirit and the attempted kidnapping of Shaw were only the tip of the iceberg. And no one at Langley expected the threatened terrorist attacks to be the end of it unless bin Laden and the rest of his fanatical al-Quaida planners were bagged.

The president was going to speak to the nation at 8 P.M. Eastern. Before then, the CIA would have to coordinate the development of the latest National Intelligence Estimate and the Watch Report, both of which detailed the current and expected future threats to the U.S. Then the president would have to be briefed; he needed to know his options, which could range from all-out war to a purely political move such as demanding UN sanctions against whatever country or countries harbored terrorists.

A one-on-one surgical strike, of the variety that McGarvey was intimately familiar with, would be included in the list of possible actions.

So far as McGarvey was concerned, it was the only option.

He could see Khalil’s hands on Katy, his pistol pointed at her head. He could hear the cries of the young mother desperately searching for her baby in the water. He could hear the screams of panic as the cruise ship was sinking.

Bin Laden’s taped message had been downloaded to McGarvey’s PDA very early this morning, even before it had been hand-carried to the White House, and he’d watched it several times.

There was no doubt in his mind that the tape was authentic and had been recorded last week, but there was something about bin Laden that didn’t set right with McGarvey He had met the man several years ago, and had spent enough time with him to form a vivid impression of how he looked, how he acted, how he spoke.

The man in the tape was bin Laden, but there was something wrong with him. It was something that seemed wrong to McGarvey. He had been turning it over in his mind for the past couple of hours without being able to put his finger on exactly what it was that bothered him. But it was something.

He had spent several hours on a secure phone link with Adkins and with Otto Rencke, his director of special projects as well as with his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Todd Van Buren, both of whom were currently instructors for the CIA’s internal operations course at the Farm.

Priority one was finding out who Khalil was and where he was hiding. He was bin Laden’s right-hand man and chief planner, which meant he had not only been responsible for the attempted hijacking, but he had also had a hand in setting up the new round of threatened terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Get to Khalil soon enough, and we might be able to stop them once and for all.

“How’s mother?” Elizabeth had asked at one point.

It was around three in the morning, and McGarvey had just finished watching bin Laden’s monstrous tape for the fourth or fifth time. “She’s sleeping. But she came out of it okay.”

“Promise?”

“Scout’s honor,” McGarvey said, feeling a wave of love and protectiveness for his daughter and for his wife. Both of them, along with Elizabeth’s unborn baby, the baby her mother was carrying, were legitimate targets in bin Laden’s world.

The bastard and his henchmen were going to die. And their deaths would not be pleasant. No trumpets, no angels on gossamer wings transporting them to Paradise, only pain and then lights out.

One hour out, Katy had touched up her makeup and fixed her hair, but now as a crewman opened the forward door she still looked tired and worried. She squeezed her husband’s hand. “Will we be able to stop them before they hit us this time?” They were dressed in the Coast Guard utilities that they’d been given after they’d been rescued from the sound by the Storis.

Of all the people McGarvey wanted to reassure, his wife was at the top of the list. But he had to give her the same answer that he would have to give the president: “It’s not likely. But no matter what happens, it’s over for them now, for sure.”

Katy’s eyes filled, and she turned away momentarily to look out the window. “Nobody will trust anybody. It’ll be worse than after 9/11,” she said, a bitter edge to her voice.

McGarvey had considered that possibility, and he thought that Katy was probably right. “Once the tape is broadcast, no parent is going to feel safe anywhere, not even in their own home.”

Katy shook her head. “It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.”

“Yes, it is.”

Shaw was still sedated, but Karen gave them a hug; then she gave McGarvey a searching look. “Thank you for what you did for us. But this time let’s finish the job.”

“You can count on it,” McGarvey told her. He looked down at the SecDef lying on the stretcher. Shaw was pale, but he did not seem to be in any distress. “Take care of him; he’s a good man.”

Karen nodded, a sudden look of fierce determination on her pleasant face. “You can count on it.”

McGarvey shook hands with the medical crew, then handed over the sidearms he and Katy had borrowed in Juneau to one of the aircrew. “See that these get back to the Storis.”

He helped his wife off the aircraft, shook a few more hands, and accepted what he figured was probably just the start of a lot of tiresome congratulations for simply doing his job. Then Adkins hustled them into the backseat of the limo, after first introducing Neal Julien, McGarvey’s new bodyguard.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Julien said. He was a sturdy, chocolate-skinned man with a warm smile, a round nearly bald head, and a mellifluous voice that held a hint of a Bermudan accent. His manner was pleasant but professional.

“Watching over me has become a dangerous job,” McGarvey told him.

“Yes, it has, Mr. Director,” Julien said.

The SecDef was being carried off the aircraft when the DCI’s limo, with two vans in front and two in the rear, headed up to Chevy Chase, Julien in constant radio contact with the two dozen Office of Security operators in the four vans. They had no police escort, but McGarvey figured there would be at least one chase helicopter armed with air-to-ground missiles somewhere in the vicinity The bad guys might bag a DCI elsewhere, but it wouldn’t happen here on his home territory.

“What’s the drill this morning?” McGarvey asked his deputy director.

“I went through your list overnight, and everybody’s up to speed,” Adkins said. Since his wife died the previous year, he had no one at home, so he had thrown himself into his work. He was content to remain the DDCI, putting McGarvey’s orders into effect and sometimes smoothing over his boss’s administrative rough edges when needed. “We’ll get you home first so that you can change clothes. We’ve swept your house and grounds, and set up a solid perimeter, so Mrs. McGarvey will be okay for the time being. But I still think you should get to the safe house.”

“They weren’t after me,” McGarvey said. The last couple of times they had run to ground had not been very successful anyway.

Adkins shrugged, knowing it was the answer he would receive. “The staff meeting is set up for ten-thirty, and the full National Security Council meets at noon at the White House. We should have the NIE and Watch Report pretty well cobbled together by then.”

“What about this business in Switzerland?”

Adkins glanced pointedly at Katy but McGarvey nodded for him to continue. It had always been an unwritten understanding that what the DCI’s wife was told or not told was up to the DCI’s discretion.

“Ms. Fuelm’s call was evidently a back-burner request by Zurich for information on the prince. Otto figures they used her because of her … history with you. Anyway, Otto’s working on it, but of course he won’t tell the rest of us what he’s doing. Apparently the Swiss are interested in his comings and goings, and they put Liese Fuelm in charge of the investigation.”

Katy had caught the history reference, and she gave her husband a questioning look, which he caught.

“Liese was one of the cops, along with Marta Fredericks, watching me when I lived in Lucerne. Her people probably figured to use the contact, see if there were any sparks still smoldering somewhere.”

Sometimes when Katy was tired or particularly stressed out she became brittle, and the old, sharp-tongued, suspicious Katy emerged. Her dark moods had always been about a lack of self-confidence and a low self-esteem. “Are there?” she asked.

“I doubt it,” McGarvey told her, but secretly he wouldn’t be surprised. Liese had been in love with him, and she had fallen hard when he left, and even harder when Marta, her best friend and McGarvey’s lover, had been killed. “Why do they think I’d know anything about Prince Salman?” he asked Adkins.

“I don’t know if Otto knows, but he’s working on it.”

At the mention of Salman’s name, Katy stiffened slightly, but neither man caught her reaction. She turned and looked out the window, apparently no longer interested in the briefing.

Morning traffic was heavy on 1-95 but moved well, so it was just a couple of minutes after nine when the driver pulled up at the McGarveys’ sprawling colonial at the end of a cul-de-sac on the fifteenth fairway of the Chevy Chase Country Club. The somewhat exclusive neighborhood was quiet, except for a couple of lawn-service people at work two houses down. They were legitimate; otherwise, the Office of Security would not have let them come within five miles of the place. After the screw-up with the Spirit’s passenger and crew list, no one at Langley or the Pentagon or downtown at the FBI was taking any chances.

By this afternoon, after the president met with the National Security Council, all the major players in Washington would know about the latest bin Laden threat. And by tonight, after the president spoke to the nation, the same fear and paranoia that everyone felt after 9/11 would be back in full force.

The attempted kidnapping of the former secretary of defense wouldn’t exactly become yesterday’s news, but the story would be eclipsed by the bin Laden tape. Not many people would get much sleep tonight.

Two teams of security operators would remain on-site, the vans parked in the cul-de-sac and on Lenox. Four agents would remain inside the house, and would rotate in shifts with those stationed outside in the vans, and at several strategic locations on the golf course.

No one liked the arrangements; they were too loose, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances.The safest place for the director and his family would be the DCI’s residence at the Farm, but he was needed in Washington.

The house was quiet. The security officers were keeping watch from the upstairs front and back spare bedrooms. When McGarvey and Katy went up, they appeared briefly at the doorways like curious ghosts and then disappeared.

“This is starting to get real old,” Katy said, but before McGarvey could say anything, she touched a finger to his lips. “It’s not your fault, darling. You’re a cop, and it’s your job to deal with the bad people in the world.” She looked at him with a wave of love and admiration. “Thank God for you, and all the people you work with.”

McGarvey’s throat was suddenly a little thick. “Thank you,” he told his wife, and he took her in his arms, glad that they were here like this together. Yet another part of him was already at Langley — and wherever this business would take him.

It was after ten when they reached the sprawling CIA headquarters across the river, the parking lot full, a steady stream of traffic coming and going. Since 9/11, recruitment had risen to an all-time high. The Company was finally able to screen for the kind of people it wanted, rather than just accepting any warm body that walked in the door.

McGarvey’s secretary, Dhalia Swanson, dressed as usual in a conservative suit, her gray hair up in a customary bun, got up when McGarvey and Adkins walked in. “We didn’t expect you back so soon,” she said. She was obviously relieved. “Mrs. McGarvey is well?”

“Just fine; thanks for asking,” McGarvey said, giving her a reassuring smile. “We got lucky this time.” He walked through to his office, Ms. Swanson right behind him.

She shook her head emphatically.“Oh no, sir, luck had nothing to do with it. Your presence did.”

“I’ll start getting the staff together,” Adkins said, heading for his own office.

“Ten-thirty, sharp,” McGarvey called after him.

Ms. Swanson got McGarvey a cup of coffee. “I worked up a tentative agenda for you, not knowing until yesterday when you would be back, and of course not knowing about the bin Laden tape until early this morning. I’ve weeded out most of the mail, and rescheduled most of your routine appointments and telephone calls. The president would like to speak with you as soon as possible this morning, and Senators Harms, Bingham, Wilson, Daggert, and Stowe want to talk to you, as do all the usual media.” She looked up from her notes, a pinched look of disapproval on her narrow face. She was protective of her DCI.

“Liz and Todd?”

“They’ll finish up at the Farm this afternoon and be at the house by eight.”

For just a moment McGarvey was back in the water, swimming in the brutally cold Sound toward the woman and her child, knowing that he could not save them, and yet having to try. In his mind’s eye it was Elizabeth out there crying for help, and the baby was his grandchild.

“We’ll do the letters and calls this afternoon. The congressmen will have to wait. I’ll leave it up to Herb to set up a news conference, but I want it coordinated with Carleton’s office. We’re going to conduct this operation by the numbers.” Carleton Patterson was the CIA’s general counsel. Since the war in Iraq, anyone who had access to the media had questioned the legality of both the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction and the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Word had come directly from the White House that every move the CIA made would have to have a solid legal basis.

Or at least appear to, because it’s not possible to fight terrorists on any terms except theirs. Sometimes some laws would have to be bent. That’s just the way it is in the real world.

“Shall I call the president for you?”

“Yes,” McGarvey said, already up to speed. “Then have Otto come up. I’d like to talk to him before the staff meeting. And ask Dick to bring over the draft NIE and Watch Report. I want to see those before the meeting.”

Ms. Swanson’s eyes softened. “All those people …,” she said. She focused. “It’s not just religion, is it?”

Like everyone else in the nation, she had been trying to get a handle on the issue ever since 9/11. The Osama bin Ladens of the world, and their organizations — al — Quaida, al-Nida, Hamas, hundreds of others— were incomprehensible to the average American, who simply could not grasp the terrorist’s concept that no one was an innocent.

“It’s never had anything to do with religion,” McGarvey said. “It’s always been about money.”

TWENTY-FOUR

McGarvey wasn’t the least surprised that President Haynes was brusque on the telephone. Word had already leaked about the bin Laden tape and the latest threat to the U.S. and at least one network was attributing the leak to a senior employee within the administration. Haynes had gone through his share of major crises during his administration, and he was a president who was very dangerous to cross. He had a long memory and an even longer reach.

“I’m glad you’re back in one piece. You did a damned fine job up there. In the meantime, I assume that you’ve seen the tape. What do you think?’

“It’s authentic, if that’s what you mean, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. “But beyond that I don’t know.”

“What are you talking about?” Haynes demanded. Right now he didn’t want ambiguities, especially not from his intelligence chief.

“He’s been coming across like he’s a sick man. Like he’s dying. But I’m beginning to think that it’s been a ruse to throw us off.”

“Does the CIA have any direct evidence of that?”

“No,” McGarvey had to admit. “It’s just a gut feeling I got from watching the tape.” It wasn’t until the third time through that he had begun to notice the little signs: the forced slump of the shoulders, the moves too slow, too studied, as if the man were an amateur actor playing a difficult role. Bin Laden was no longer convincing.

President Haynes wasn’t deterred. “Unless you think his faking it affects the current situation, we’ll put it on a back burner for now. We have to deal with the bastard’s warning. Is it real or is he merely trying to shake us up? And we have to deal with the leak. I’m going to personally cut them off at the knees when I find out who did this to us. We’re already getting more than one thousand calls every hour. By this afternoon, I’m told, that number will rise one hundredfold, and I have none of the answers, because all I’ve seen is the tape. No analysis. No facts. No details.”

Sitting at his desk, looking out the window over the pleasant early fall morning toward the Potomac, McGarvey felt unsettled to hear a president of the United States speak with fear in his voice, even though he had cause to be afraid.

If bin Laden had issued a warning before 9/11 that suicide squads were going to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, nothing could have been done in the short run. Air traffic could not have been grounded, every tall building could not have been closed, and even with armed air marshals aboard at the last minute, the attacks probably couldn’t have been prevented.

There wouldn’t have been enough time.

Nor was there enough time now. The task of guarding every single home in the nation was impossible, if those were the targets that bin Laden warned al-Quaida was going to hit. Parents could not keep their children safe, so they were turning to their government to do what it had not been able to do in September 2001, and what it probably could not do now.

In a free society with relatively open borders, no thought police, no unreasonable searches and seizures, no real way of listening in on every single telephone conversation, bad things could and would happen to good people.

Until the bad guys were hunted down and shot to death like rabid animals.

McGarvey could do nothing more than his job, and that was to give his support to the president. It was all that the job of DCI had ever been. “I’ll have the NIE and Watch Report for the NSC at noon. My people are still working on the problem. But I will have some ideas and some options for you to consider.”

“I should hope so,” Haynes said. “Now what about the leak? Could somebody over there have talked to Jennings?”

The first McGarvey had heard of it was just minutes ago from the president. “It’s possible.”

“I want a full investigation immediately—”

McGarvey interrupted. “No, sir.”

Haynes was never one to bluster. When he got angry, his voice lowered in pitch and volume. He practically whispered now. “What was it you said, Mac?”

“I’m not going to hamstring my people by chasing after someone who might have shot off his mouth,” McGarvey said. “A least not right now. I don’t give a damn who leaked the warning; it was going to come out this evening in any event. My only concern is finding out when and where the attacks are going to take place — which I think is a long shot — and finding out who’s directing the show, and then getting to them.”

“Do you mean to say the CIA believes they cannot be stopped?”

“The Israelis have much tighter security than we do, and they can’t prevent terrorist attacks.”

These were things that the president did not want to hear. “This country cannot stand another 9/11,” he said coldly. “Maybe it’s time to broaden the emergency powers provisions of the Patriot Act.”

It was a chilling idea, but McGarvey thought there was a better than even chance that Haynes would get away with it. Parents wanted to make sure their children were safe. After events like the Murrah Federal Building, Columbine, and 9/11. the nation was traumatized. This latest warning from bin Laden could very well be the last bit to tip the balance even further toward a police state.

There was little or no street crime in Nazi Germany that wasn’t committed by the Brown Shirts.

“I’ll provide you with your options as the CIA sees them,” McGarvey said. “After that it’ll be up to you how we should proceed. But I am with you, Mr. President. One hundred percent. We will stop these bastards once and for all this time. You can count on it.”

The president was only slightly mollified. “I’ll hold you to that promise, Mac. We’re going all the way. There’ll be no holding back. I don’t care what Congress or the media have to say, we’re past that. When we make our attack, collateral damage will not be a consideration. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Mr. President,” McGarvey said.

Dick Adkins came over with a dark blue leatherette folder. He handed it to McGarvey with a rueful look. “The NIE and Watch Report. You’re not going to like them.”

“What’s the upshot?” McGarvey hadn’t expected that he would.

Adkins shrugged like a teacher who had been asked to explain the obvious. “Assuming bin Laden’s people are already in place, and that the attacks could come from any direction at any time, our only options are to mobilize every cop and National Guardsman in the country to take criminal-suspect profiling to new heights, and to station air marshals aboard every commercial aircraft and at every airfield private or public, at every bus station and train depot, outside every mosque, and any other place you might expect to find young Arab males.”

It was something the president would understand perfectly.

“All that’s on the FBI’s turf,” McGarvey said. “What’s our role?”

Adkins pursed his lips. “Well, if we found bin Laden and brought him to trial, the attacks would probably escalate. If we found him and put a bullet in his head, there’s no predicting what the immediate reaction would be. But it’s my guess that a significant portion of the Muslims on the planet would take up arms against us.”

Something else was on Adkins’s mind. McGarvey had worked with the man long enough to know when something was bothering him. Most of the time the DDCI was a monotone presence in his office next door. That wasn’t a negative attribute; it was just Adkins’s way of dealing with the incredibly complex real-world problems that the CIA was supposed to unravel every day. Right now though, he seemed to be preoccupied and a little agitated, as if he had jumped into a situation that was over his head. “What else have we come up with?” McGarvey asked.

“It’s not in the Watch Report,” Adkins said reluctantly. “It’s too farfetched. But one of our photo interpreters downstairs in Imagery Analysis thinks that bin Laden might be playing games with us.”

“What are you talking about? Isn’t the tape authentic?”

Adkins shook his head. “It’s real all right. Or at least we think it is. But the analyst has convinced herself that there’s something fishy about bin Laden’s appearance.”

There it was. A little chill raised the hairs at the nape of McGarvey’s neck. He’d come to the same conclusion after watching the tape, but he had not been able to put his finger on exactly what bothered him. A photo analyst had apparently seen something too.

“She thinks bin Laden is wearing makeup,” Adkins said, almost sorry he had brought it up. “It’s something we’ve not seen before. But she spotted something funny, and pulled up several of the other recent tapes he made for comparison.”

“He’s gotten vain in his old age.”

Adkins shook his head. “The makeup made him look sick. And she thinks that he’s wearing a hairpiece.”

“There were rumors that he had kidney problems. Maybe he’s developed cancer. Could be that he’s on chemotherapy and lost his hair.”

“His beard’s a fake too,” Adkins said. “Now if our analyst is right, why do you suppose that bin Laden has to dress up in stage makeup and a costume to send us a message? What’s he playing at this time?”

Adkins had just walked back into his office, leaving McGarvey to wonder exactly what it was that bin Laden was playing at, when Ms. Swanson buzzed to say that Rencke was on his way. Before McGarvey could hang up, Otto Rencke, all out of breath, his face flushed, burst into the office.

“Oh, wow, Mac, am I ever glad to see you.”

McGarvey looked up as his director of special projects bounded across the room. Rencke was all arms and legs attached to a gaunt frame. His head seemed to be too large for his body, in part because of his wide green eyes and long, out-of-control, frizzy red hair, and in part because of his long, broad forehead. He was dressed in dirty sneakers, faded jeans, and a Moscow State University sweatshirt. He was in his early forties, a Jesuit-trained mathematician, and yet he looked and acted like a college kid or, McGarvey sometimes thought, like an overwrought, exuberant puppy.

But it was obvious even to someone meeting Rencke for the first time that he was either an idiot savant or a genius. He knew more about computers, computer systems, and information gathering, collation, and analysis than did any man alive.

Adkins once said that there were only two possible places on the planet where Rencke should be: either working for the CIA, where he could be watched very closely, or buried deep underground in a cell with absolutely no access to the outside world. There was little doubt that no computer on the planet was safe from his hacking.

The saving grace was that except for his genius, Rencke was just a baby boy who wanted someone to love him. All his life he’d only ever wanted one thing: to be part of a family. And he had found one with McGarvey, Kathleen, and Liz, and with his wife, Louise Horn, who was chief of a technical means section of the National Security Agency.

Rencke had discovered his niche and he was a truly happy man, except when his people were in harm’s way and then he became a mother grizzly defending her cubs.

McGarvey had to grin when Rencke came around the desk and grabbed him in a bear hug. “Oh, wow, you’re back, and you did it again, and you saved a whole bunch of folks who would have gone down with the ship.” When he was excited, he said everything in a rush. “Kinda hard to hide a hero.”

McGarvey patted him on the back, and it brought back a poignant memory of talking with Katy a few months before their separation and divorce about having a second child, perhaps a boy.

“Glug, glug,” Rencke said straightening up. “Ya gotta take a swim if you want to find the clues, ya know. But that takes time and concentration.”

“Do you think that the hijacking was a diversion—”

“Yeah, but not the way everybody thinks.” Rencke looked off into space for a few seconds, the animation leaving his face. When he came back, he frowned. “It’s going reddish, did you know that?” He hopped up and down, one foot to the other, as he talked. “Lots of things to consider now, ya know. But they all point toward desperation with a capital D. Lastditch stand. The Titanic is going down, and the captain himself is grabbing for a life jacket.”

Years ago Rencke had figured out a way to teach a friend of his, who had been blind from birth, about color. Rencke wanted his friend to actually see the spectrum, the reds and blues and greens and yellows. He was able to do it with a series of complicated tensor calculus equations — the same mathematics that Einstein used in his theories of relativity.

And it worked because Rencke’s friend was a gifted mathematician. But the same mathematical approach could also be used to reduce concepts, so complicated they were invisible, into colors. The pastels, in Rencke’s analytical models, were akin to mild problems brewing in some distant future. The deeper colors meant trouble was just around the corner. And as Rencke would say, the baddest of all colors was red, which meant that something awful was on the verge of happening.

“Okay, tell me what you’re seeing,” McGarvey said. When Rencke got this way, he was never wrong.

“I don’t know yet, Mac. Honest Injun. Snatching Shaw was only supposed to be the opening salvo. But you put the kibosh on that plan—” He gave McGarvey an odd look, almost as if he were a drowning man desperately gazing up from the bottom of the pool toward his rescuer, and wondering what was taking so long. “Last night you said something about Khalil that got to me. And Mrs. M. said the same thing. He was in a hurry. Right?”

“He had something else on his mind; I saw that much,” McGarvey said. “He wanted to get the kidnapping over with and bug out of there as soon as possible so that he could get back to whatever it was he was really after. At the time I thought it was taking Shaw back to Pakistan to stand trial.”

“That was supposed to be a diversion,” Rencke said. “The kidnapping and trial were supposed to keep us looking in one direction while the main event was gearing up.”

“In that case, bin Laden’s tape could be just another diversion. But for what?”

Rencke stopped hopping. “The sixty-four dollar question, kemo sabe. Mighty big diversions for what he says he wants to do.”

Unless something else was going to happen. Something bigger.

“Divers are already down on the wreck to recover bodies. Soon as we get DNA results, we should be able to track some of the hijackers back to their origins. Even just one positive ID should give us a direction.”

“Saudis,” McGarvey said.

Rencke nodded solemnly. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi, and although the royal family officially denounced him and his al-Quaida followers, it was openly known that Saudi money was at the heart of a great many Islamic fundamentalist groups. But no U.S. administration had been willing to take the Saudis to task, for the simple reason of Saudi Arabian oil.

Oil dollars for lives.

“But Pakistanis too,” Rencke said. “Maybe ISI.” Interservice Intelligence was Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, which General Pervez Musharraf used to control the country. Pakistan was where bin Laden and others had set up Taliban training camps, and where al-Quaida put the finishing touches on its recruits.

“The Saudis supply most of the money,” McGarvey said.

“The man your friend Liese is watching is a Saudi prince,” Rencke said, turning away It was as if he couldn’t look McGarvey in the eye. “I did some checking. Just before every al-Quaida attack — Kenya, Riyadh, the Cole, 9/11—the prince disappeared. He and Khalil are of the same general description. And Salman has the perfect cover. He’s a megarich jet-setter. A deal maker. Who would think he’s one of the bad guys who want to pull us down?”

What Otto was saying made sense, but McGarvey wanted to make sure they weren’t snatching at straws because of the pressure to come up with answers. “Okay, assuming for the moment that you’re right, and Salman is Khalil, why are the Swiss watching him, and why do they think I’d personally know something about him?”

“I don’t know what they have on him, but they turned to you because there’s a connection between him and you and Mrs. M. That’s why they sicced Liese on you.”

McGarvey was confused. “I never met the man in my life.”

Rencke was agitated. He started hopping again. “Oh wow, Mac, you didn’t; you didn’t, honest Injun. But Salman was one of Darby Yarnell’s crowd when you and Mrs. M. were divorced. He was right there in the middle at Yarnell’s house when Mrs. M. was there and when Powers was brought down. He was one of Baranov’s recruits.”

McGarvey closed his eyes for a second, all those very bad days coming back to him in full color. General Valentin Baranov was one of the most brilliant KGB officers the Soviets produced during the entire period of the cold war. Among his most spectacular operations was one in which the equally brilliant Donald Powers, the CIA’s director at the time, was assassinated. Key to the complicated plot was a former CIA officer, Darby Yarnell, whom everybody, including McGarvey, was led to believe was a spy. In the end Yarnell was maneuvered into pulling the trigger on Powers, and McGarvey was maneuvered into killing Yarnell, drawn to the man because Katy was sleeping with him.

Katy was in Yarnell’s arms plain as day in the lens of the spotting scope they’d set up in the apartment across the street.

“There were a lot of guys like Salman in Darby’s mob,” McGarvey said. “What’s Liese trying to find out? Why from me—?” But all of a sudden he knew, and his stomach did a slow roll.

Rencke could see that McGarvey had made the connection, and his face sagged. He stopped hopping. “Bad dog, bad dog,” he said. “They probably think that Mrs. M slept with the prince, too.”

TWENTY-FIVE

When McGarvey walked across the hall to the director’s conference room, his staff was already gathered, glad to see their boss back in one piece but mad as hell that the bin Laden problem would not go away. They got to their feet when he came in, and as he went around the table to his seat he shook hands with each of them.

Besides Dick Adkins and Otto Rencke, the CIA’s senior officers included the deputy director of operations, David Whittaker, who was one of the most moral men McGarvey had ever met; the brilliant, dapperdressed deputy director of intelligence, Tommy Doyle; the Company’s equally bright but ponderous deputy director of science and technology, Jared Kraus; the deputy director of management and services, Felicia Quinones, whose warm heart was only outshone by her absolutely spoton management abilities; and the patrician general counsel, Carleton Patterson.

Over McGarvey’s two-year tenure as DCI the group had become a well-oiled machine, fiercely loyal not only to their boss but also to the organization and what it stood for. They considered themselves to be the frontline troops against America’s enemies.

“The bastards didn’t know they’d be running into a buzz saw when they tried to take that cruise ship,” Kraus smirked. He pumped his right fist. “Way to kick ass, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey gave him a sharp look. “A lot of good people lost their lives up there, including Jim Grassinger who was just doing his job.” Shaw might have been right that Americans needed a hero right now, but McGarvey wasn’t going to step up to that plate. “If there’s any celebrating to do, let’s wait until we’ve shut the bastard down once and for all.”

“As soon as Jim’s body is recovered, we’ll set funeral services at Arlington,” Felicia said. “I spoke with his wife last night; she’s holding up.”

“I’ll talk to her later today,” McGarvey said, taking his seat. “In the meantime we have a job to do, so let’s get on with it. Priority one is Project Alpha, because I think there is a very real possibility that Khalil not only put together the kidnapping attempt, but is also the mastermind behind bin Laden’s latest threat. If we can find and eliminate him, we might solve the bigger problem, because without Khalil I think al-Quaida will fold up its tents and fade away. So how do we proceed?”

“Along six lines of investigation,” Rencke was the first to answer. He had the bit in his teeth and he was impatient to begin. “First we need to find out what went wrong over at the FBI, the Department of Defense, and right here on our own turf. The entire crew and all the passengers aboard the Spirit were vetted by all three of our organizations, and yet a fair number of the crew were bad guys.”

“That’ll be my Office of Security,” Felicia said. “We’ve already set up an internal affairs team to figure out what went wrong at this end. I’ll get with the Bureau and DoD right away.”

“While you’re at it, find out how Shaw’s travel plans were leaked,” Rencke said.

“Are you looking for one source?” Felicia asked. “I mean, if that’s your thinking, we’ll have to add White House security to the list. Paul Hogue is kind of sensitive at the moment, so we’ll have to use a little finesse.”

Hogue was chief of the president’s and first family’s security operation. Less than two years earlier President Haynes, his wife, and their daughter almost lost their lives in an al-Quaida-sponsored attack in San Francisco. If it hadn’t been for McGarvey, the president and his family would be dead. Hogue had not forgotten that the Secret Service had very nearly blown it.

“Doesn’t matter,” McGarvey said. “Nothing’s off-limits for this one. If we step on toes now, we can apologize later. What next?”

“Canada,” Rencke said. “We need to find out how Khalil and the men who left the Spirit with him got out of the country without leaving a trace, other than the sportfishing boat that was found last night washed up on one of the small islands in the sound.”

“I’m working with RCMP’s Secret Intelligence Service chief for western Canada,” Adkins said. “At least some of the terrorists flew a DeHavilland Otter out of Kake, just north of where the cruise ship went down. No trace has been found of the aircraft.”

“What about the pilot?” McGarvey asked.

“He’s missing too, but so far as the RCMP knows, the guy’s a longtime local. Our Coast Guard is working with the Canadian Coast Guard and a private salvage company from Seattle hired by Cruise West to bring up whatever they can from the wreck. The bodies have top priority, of course, in addition to any forensic evidence. I passed along your incident report so the salvors would have something to shoot for.”

It would be cold and dark, the current swift, the wreck possibly unstable and dangerous. And there would be many bodies. Too many bodies.

“Lean on them, Dick,” McGarvey said. “We’re going to need whatever they can come up with — anything — as soon as possible.” This was not going to get away from them like 9/11. “I don’t think we have much time.”

“I think you’re right,” Tommy Doyle agreed. It was one of his analysts who had come up with the notion that bin Laden was wearing a disguise. “His warnings in the past have always been vague, but this time he’s being a lot more specific, almost as if he’s taunting us.” Doyle fiddled with his tie, a gesture of his when he was nervous. “Hell, they don’t have to do anything else, and they’ve already won. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange was suspended ten minutes ago, because the market was taking a nosedive. Airlines are canceling flights in nearly every market because people are afraid to fly and are simply not showing up at the airports. Just before I left my office, I got the news that GM was declaring a holiday at its Detroit headquarters. Two-thirds of all their junior and midlevel managers called in sick. No one’s left to run the company.” Doyle looked away as if he hated to be the bearer of such bad news. “That’s just the start. By tonight the entire country will be all but shut down, unless the president makes one hell of a good speech at eight.”

“It’s up to us to give the man what he needs,” McGarvey said.

“Bin Laden’s head on a platter,” Whittaker stated the obvious. “Because even if we do nail this Khalil character, bin Laden is going to find another chief planner.You can count on it. Some very bright people over there are standing in line for the job.”

“Killing Khalil would at least buy us some time,” Rencke said. “Look, guys, if Uncle Osama is faking being sick, it has to mean that somebody was getting too close for comfort. He’s come down out of the mountains like Moses, and he’s living right in the middle of his tribes.” He looked to the others for support, but no one said a word.

“What are you thinking?” McGarvey asked him.

“My guess is that he’s hiding out in the open, maybe Riyadh, maybe Karachi, maybe Tehran, posing as an ordinary businessman, like he’s done before, ya know” Rencke was getting agitated because no one was catching his drift.

“We have a twenty-five-million-dollar reward on his head,” Adkins said. “Do you think if he’s out in the open now somebody is going to lead us to him?”

“Exactamundo, kemo sabe. And we even know who’s going to do it!” Rencke waved his hands as if he were trying to pull the others along. “Khalil, who just might be a Saudi prince by the name of Abdul Hasim ibn Salman. He’s going to be the super rat fink.”

Tommy Doyle sat forward, scowling. “We’ve not come up with anything other than a string of concidences to tie the two men together.” He turned to McGarvey. “We’ve got no DNA, no fingerprints, not even a voiceprint of Khalil. There’s nothing linking them. And the prince is such a big name internationally that he can’t kiss a woman’s hand in Paris without the tabloids picking up on it.” Doyle shook his head, completely dismissing the idea. “Salman is a member of the Saudi royal family, and lest we forget, bin Laden and the royal family aren’t exactly on friendly terms. The man wants to overthrow the government, for Christ’s sake.”

“Being an international playboy is pretty poor cover for someone who doesn’t want his true identity known,” Whittaker suggested.

“Bzzz. Wrong answer, recruit. What about James Bond?” Rencke demanded. “He did okay.”

McGarvey thought it would be the ultimate irony if Khalil and Salman were one and the same. It conjured up images of one of General Baranov’s old operations. Brilliant, deadly, and loaded with unexpected twists and turns. “Okay, Salman is apparently living in Switzerland at the moment, and the Federal Police are taking a look at him for some reason they haven’t shared with us yet. They’ve asked for our help.”

Whittaker looked confused. “I haven’t heard anything about this. Did it come through my COS in Zurich?”

McGarvey shook his head. “It came as a personal request from an old friend of mine. I want a records search done ASAP to see what we have on him.” He did not elaborate any further. At the moment there was no need. “In the meantime we might get lucky with something from the wreck of the Spirit or the sportfisherman they used to make their escape. For now I want a complete search of every database anywhere in the world for anything and everything on Khalil: his past operations, eyewitness reports including mine and my wife’s, along with all the other crew and passengers who had contact with him. Send someone to interview Secretary Shaw and his wife, and I want two of our people up in Juneau right now to work with the Bureau. Khalil and at least some of his people got aboard the Spirit in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t simply materialize out of thin air. I want to know how they got to Frederick Sound from the Middle East. Someone, somewhere, saw something, and I want to know about it.”

“We’re grabbing at straws,” Carleton Patterson mused. He was a lawyer and a pessimist by nature. He had hired on as the CIA’s temporary general counsel six years ago and had not gotten around to leaving yet. He thought of himself as a voice of reason in a nuthouse.

“You’re right, but it’s all we have at the moment,” McGarvey said. “Khalil has made a mistake somewhere in his past, and we will find it.”

“Why haven’t we done so earlier?”

“We weren’t looking hard enough,” McGarvey said.

In the few short hours since the message on bin Laden’s latest tape had been leaked to the public, Washington had become a city under siege. Riding over to the White House in his Cadillac limousine, the first thing McGarvey noticed was how much emptier the streets were than normal. People were staying home, glued to their television sets to find out what was going on, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Police or National Guard units were stationed at every major intersection from the Roosevelt Bridge all the way up to the White House. Air Force fighter/interceptor jets circled overhead, and Air Force One was crewed and powered up at Andrews in case the president needed to be evacuated from the city.

The Pentagon had declared a DEFCON Three, which placed all U.S. forces anywhere in the world on a heightened state of alert, and the Department of Homeland Security was expected to issue a red alert after the president’s address to the nation tonight.

Unlike bin Laden’s other warning messages, this one had gotten to Americans. The majority of the country was frightened that another 9/11 was about to happen and that no one in Washington knew what to do.

Tommy Doyle was right. Even if there was no attack, bin Laden had already won an important victory. If the role of a terrorist was to terrorize, the deed had been accomplished.

But it would not go unpunished. Khalil would die and then so would Osama bin Laden. No delays this time. No excuses. No mistakes. No international deal making to put together a coalition. Just a bullet in each man’s brain.

McGarvey called his house on his cell phone. “How are you holding up?” he asked when Katy answered.

“I’m watching television. It’s like 9/11 all over again.” Katy’s voice sounded strained. She hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since the hijacking, but she was holding together. “How about you?”

“I’m too busy to worry,” he told her, which was a lie. He couldn’t get out of his mind Otto’s conjecture that Prince Salman and Khalil were one and the same, which was why the Swiss had resorted to using Liese Fuelm to get personal information from him.

“Will you be home at a reasonable hour? Elizabeth andTodd are coming over.”

McGarvey had a feeling that tonight might be one of his last early nights at home until this business was settled once and for all. After the ordeal in Alaska, Katy deserved at least that much. “I’d like a bourbon and water, one cube, on the kitchen counter at precisely seven.”

“Aye, aye, skipper,” Katy said warmly. “Love.”

“Love,” McGarvey responded.

The president’s press secretary, Lucille Rugowski, met McGarvey at the security post just inside the west portico. She was a short, sturdy brunette from Gary, Indiana, who the media loved to hate. She was fair but extremely tough. In the nine months she’d been on the job, she’d developed a reputation for being one of the brightest people ever to hold the pressure-cooker job. On top of that she was married and had four children, all of whom were strictly off-limits. It was her aloofness that had early on earned her the nickname “the Snob.”

“You’ll be joining the president for a brief ceremony and a photo op in the Rose Garden, Mr. Director,” she said, as they headed to the Oval Office. “The NSC will meet directly afterward in the Cabinet Room.”

She had caught McGarvey flat-footed, though he should have suspected that something like this would happen. Shaw had warned him that the nation needed a hero. But he didn’t have to like it. “I’d like to have a word with the president first.”

Rugowski shook her head. “He thought you might say that. But he’s not going to give you the chance to try to talk your way out of it.” She gave him a faint smile. “When’s the last time the media considered a CIA director to be a great guy? Just go with the flow, Mr. McGarvey, and it’ll be over in a few minutes.”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“It’s the president’s idea, and he would like your cooperation,” Rugowski said. “What you did up there — saving lives, stopping the kidnapping — was nothing short of magnificent. He wants to thank you publicly.”

TWENTY-SIX

Liese Fuelm watched out the chalet’s window a few minutes past one in the afternoon as the black Mercedes sped up the driveway. She was trying desperately to get control of her emotions.

The last twenty-four hours had passed in a blur. Kirk had actually been aboard the Alaskan cruise liner when the terrorist Khalil had tried to kidnap the former American secretary of defense. He was being hailed as a hero, his face plastered on every newspaper and television screen in the world. And then came the fantastic warning by bin Laden, a man whom Kirk had come face-to-face with a couple of years before 9/11.

There were too many coincidences, too many improbabilities, one piling atop the other, coming faster and faster, centering on Kirk McGarvey, a man suspect in the eyes of the Swiss Federal Police, to be ignored any longer.

Captain Gertner had been on the verge of firing Liese after she had failed to record her telephone conversation with Otto Rencke at the CIA, and in fact she had expected to be drummed out of the service and blocked from ever working in Swiss law enforcement ever again. But then the kidnapping occurred and right on its heels the bin Laden tape.

“Everything has changed,” Gertner said on the telephone a few hours ago. “You can see that, finally, can’t you, Liebchen?”

She was off-balance, and she felt stupid. “He was a hero.”

“Surely you can appreciate the absurdity of what you are trying to maintain.” Gertner was practically shouting. His legendary temper could be incendiary. “One man against what apparently was a well-organized force? And why wasn’t the terrorist Khalil unmasked as Prince Salman? Why is it your McGarvey maintains his silence?”

Liese felt battered. What Gertner was suggesting simply could not be true. Kirk McGarvey was not a traitor. “I don’t know,” she said weakly.

“For heaven’s sake, why hasn’t he returned your call?” Gertner shouted. She imagined his spittle flying all over the place. “For heaven’s sake, you two were practically lovers. Even now, if you put your heart into it, I can imagine you seducing the man.”

She could imagine such a thing. In fact, that’s all she had been imagining for the past forty-eight hours.

“We would be doing the world a favor,” Gertner said, suddenly calm, even friendly. “Think about it, Liebchen, with your head and not your heart. McGarvey single-handedly stops a terrorist attack on the Golden Gate Bridge that would have killed his president, and yet he fails to notice terrorists being trained to hijack four airliners and crash them into buildings. Under his direction the CIA has failed to find bin Laden, and yet he just happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop a spectacular kidnapping attempt?”

Liese could not raise her voice above a whisper. “If he’s a traitor, who does he work for? What is his purpose?”

“Why, that’s simple. Kirk McGarvey has not changed one whit since his days here in bed with poor Marta. Now, as then, he works for himself. Now, as then, he was a bitter man who was turned out of his own country for merely doing what he thought was his job. Now, as then, his agenda is his alone, and it is revenge.”

“No—”

“Listen to me, Liese. Your Herr McGarvey is an assassin who has never bothered with a license for his killing sprees. He is possibly the most dangerous man in America.”

Liese closed her eyes and laid her head against the wall. “It’s silly—”

“Not silly, Liebchen. And you and I will expose him for what he really is, once and for all, because we finally have the means at hand. Prince Salman is his tool, and you, my dear, will once again become his weakness.”

Liese watched as the Mercedes pulled up next to her car. Two men got out and came around to the side entrance. One of them was Gertner, and the other much larger man she thought she might have seen at the Nidwalden headquarters the previous week, but she didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know what to do, except that she couldn’t leave the investigation to men such as Gertner who were not looking for the truth, but simply looking for facts that would fit their own personal theories.

Nor was Gertner doing this for simple justice. She was convinced that there was more than simple justice to his desire to expose Kirk McGarvey as a traitor. The Swiss never did favors for anyone, especially not the U.S.

Gertner’s was one of the faces Liese remembered from Marta’s funeral.There’d been two dozen Federal Polizei in attendance, but Gertner stood out in her memory because he was the only man there with tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Look sharp, gentlemen,” she told Tomas Ziegler and Claude LeFevre, who were pulling duty with her again this afternoon. “Himself has arrived with reinforcements. Heads could roll.” One part of her wished it were so. She wanted out.

“We’re with you, Sergeant,” Ziegler said, looking up from the spotting scope. He gave her the thumbs-up. “Besides, as long as they think you have the inside track at the CIA, they won’t get rid of you.”

LeFevre opened the door for Gertner and the other man, who brushed past him and stormed into the chalet’s great room.

“Has he arrived yet?” Gertner shouted.

LeFevre was right behind him. “Has who arrived, Captain? Unless you mean the children, in which case they’re over there.”

Gertner gave him a withering look and, without glancing in Liese’s direction, went across to the scope and motioned Ziegler aside. “The prince landed in Bern over an hour ago.” He bent down and peered through the powerful scope that was trained on the big house across the lagoon. The afternoon was cloudy. One or two dim lights were on inside, and several security lights illuminated the front gate and the area of the dock and boathouse. But there didn’t seem to be anyone out or about.

For a moment Liese entertained the idea of demanding why the hell Gertner had put her in charge up here if he was going to barge in and take over when the supposed subject of their surveillance operation was apparently on the verge of showing up. But such an outburst wouldn’t accomplish much. McGarvey didn’t need her to defend him from the ravings of a lunatic Swiss cop. She was just thinking through her heart instead of her head.

“The last arrival was a delivery van from a dry-cleaning service at eight this morning,” Liese said. “Perhaps the prince has business in the city?”

Gertner looked up. “No, he’s on his way here. But I wasn’t informed until forty minutes ago.” He motioned for the other man to sit down at the sound and electronic surveillance equipment. “I brought Sergeant Hoenecker, who is an Arab speaker, with me since Corporal Miller is not available.”

Willi Miller was the only person on Liese’s team who understood Arabic. She’d been out sick since the previous morning, and Liese’s call to Gertner asking for an immediate replacement had gone unanswered until now.

Liese put a lid on her anger. “It was good of you to personally drive my replacement translator out here, Captain.”

“There is a car approaching the compound’s gate,” LeFevre announced. He was watching across the lagoon through a pair of binoculars.

An expression that looked like fear to Liese briefly crossed Gertner’s face. He glanced at her for just a moment, but it was long enough to know that he was frightened. All at once she realized what was happening. Gertner had been in love with Marta Fredericks, and it must have torn his heart out when she’d fallen in love with Kirk McGarvey. After McGarvey left Switzerland, and Marta was killed following him to Paris in an effort to win him back, Gertner’s heartbreak had transformed itself into hate, hate for the American assassin who had stolen the woman he loved. But it wasn’t until now, with his fantastic theory, that he saw a way of getting revenge.

But the stakes were very high. Gertner’s career rested on at least casting a shadow of doubt on McGarvey. That much would be enough because very few people in Bern had any love lost for the director of the CIA, who, in the government’s estimation, had never been a friend of Switzerland.

Since Liese had been and was still in love with Kirk McGarvey, she was a part of Gertner’s plot whether she wanted to be or not. He would not fire her, nor would she be allowed to quit.

Lights started to come on throughout the prince’s compound and inside the house. Even to the naked eye it was clear that something was going on over there. The car passed through the gate and headed up the long driveway, its headlights flashing through the gloomy trees, until it disappeared around the front of the house.

“Put the entry hall on the loudspeaker,” Gertner ordered.

Ziegler reached past Sergeant Hoenecker, typed a brief command on the electronic surveillance computer keyboard, and suddenly they were hearing what was going on inside the prince’s house.

Every piece of electrical and electronic equipment inside the Salman compound — everything from the electrical wiring itself, the lamps and other fixtures, the microwave, the telephones, the television, and of course the computers — had been compromised in one fashion or another over the past few years since the prince and his family had taken up residence.

The entire compound was targeted by ultraviolet and infrared laser beams, which could pick up minute vibrations of the windows, walls, and even the roof tiles caused by any noise inside. If someone walked across a room, the sounds would be detected, washed through a sophisticated series of computer-directed filters, and identified for whose footfalls were being heard. If someone spoke, the exceedingly faint mechanical vibrations that the sound waves made on windows or doors were picked up, amplified, filtered, and sent over to the surveillance equipment.

Liese had always known that her countrymen were paranoid. She was that way herself, to an extent. But she’d not realized just what a national mania it was until she’d become a cop. Nobody really trusted anyone.

The sounds of someone walking across the tile floor in the entry hall came over the speakers. “Two men, heavy,” Ziegler said. “House-security. There’re six of them over there.”

Hoenecker held up a hand for silence as the front door was opened. A man spoke in Arabic, and Hoenecker translated.

“Welcome home, ya Hagg.”

Ziegler cocked his head. “That’s one of the guards.”

There was something that sounded like a confused shuffling in the hall, but then a different man said something. He sounded tired, and perhaps angry

“Everything is in order here?” Hoenecker translated.

“There have been no disturbances. The children arrived yesterday afternoon. Shall we summon madam?”

“No, do not disturb her yet,” Prince Salman said. “My bags are in the car. Bring them to my quarters, please; then put the car away and make double sure that our perimeter is secure. I have some work to attend to.”

“Pardon me, sir, but may we know how long you plan to be in residence?” one of the guards asked, politely.

The prince had apparently started up the stairs because his voice was distorted, echoing off the ceiling and perhaps the walls in the corridor above. “Three days.”

“Shall we make plans to move the family home?”

“Not this time—” Salman’s voice trailed off. He said something else, and Hoenecker shook his head. “I didn’t catch it.”

Ziegler backed up the digital recording, adjusted the filters, and replayed the snippet of voice.

“Not this time,” Hoenecker said. “I won’t be as long.”

Liese was suddenly galvanized with fear. “Follow him,” she told Ziegler. “No, stay with the guards,” Gertner countermanded her order. “They might say something that we can use.”

“Don’t lose him, Tomas,” Liese said urgently. “Stay on him.”

“You forget who is in charge here, Sergeant,” Gertner shouted.

Liese wanted to throttle the bastard. She turned on him. “Don’t be as stupid as you usually are. If the prince is Khalil, it means that he’s just flown halfway around the world after botching a mission in which half his men were killed. He’ll be angry, disappointed, and tired. If he’s going to make a mistake, it’ll be right now, when he thinks that he’s safe in his own home in the middle of what he and the rest of the world believe is a neutral nation. Didn’t you hear him? He said he has some work to attend to. I think he’s going to phone someone.”

She turned back to Ziegler, who pulled up a chair next to the translator and shifted the computer’s search-and-recognize program to the upper corridor, and then more specifically the prince’s private apartment on the southeast end of the house. His wife and children occupied a separate suite of rooms in another wing.

“We might miss something important,” Gertner said. He completely ignored the gross insult.

“Everything that goes on over there is recorded,” Liese told him. “We can come back to the guards later.”

The computer was picking up the very faint sounds of Arabic music playing somewhere in the house, over the noise of Salman’s muffled footfalls on the carpeted floor in the upper corridor. The prince would also be hearing the music, and Liese briefly wondered if he preferred that kind of music over Western tunes. He was an international playboy. Or at least that’s the role he played. He went to operas and concerts.

A man said something, and Prince Salman replied. “Shukran.”

“The first was one of the security people, I think,” Ziegler said.

“He welcomed the prince home, and Salman thanked him,” Hoenecker translated.

Salman entered his apartment, and Ziegler made sure that the computer stayed with him. Salman sighed deeply, as any man might after returning home from a tiring trip. He went into the bathroom where he relieved himself, then washed his hands before going across to his office, which occupied a very large room overlooking the lake toward the towns of Weggis and Brunnen on the far shore.

There were no sounds for a long time, perhaps three minutes. Liese imagined that the prince was standing in front of the windows looking out across the lake. A dozen small sailboats were in the middle of a club race, and their colorful spinnakers looked like exotic birds skimming the surface of the water.

Someone knocked once at the corridor door, and the computer picked up the steps of one of the guards, who set two items down, perhaps on a stand or possibly a low table. It was the luggage. The man called out to the prince.

“Shall I unpack for you, sir?” Hoenecker translated.

“La’,” the prince replied. No.

The guard left. A half minute later the computer picked up the first of a series of soft tones, and immediately a box dropped down on a monitor showing that the prince was using a cell phone to make a call. Their sensors were picking it off the Lucerne-west-seven tower a few kilometers north.

The first three digits were 966, the country code for Saudia Arabia; the second two were 01, the area code for Riyadh; and the final seven were the phone number itself. As the call went through and the connection was made, the computer searched its databases for an identification, but came up blank.

After two rings a man answered. “Ahlan!” Hello.

“Good afternoon, cousin, I trust Allah that you are well.” Hoenecker translated Salman’s words.

“I am very well, praise God. And thou art well?”

“I’m back in Lucerne, but I will be in Monaco on Friday.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know yet,” Salman said. “It will depend on the events of the coming week. Afterward I might have to go to Washington.”

The prince’s cousin in Riyadh was silent for a moment, and Liese was worried that somehow he had detected that the call was being monitored. “We live again in a dangerous period.”

“’Aywa,” Salman replied. Yes.

Again there was a longish silence. When Salman’s cousin spoke, he sounded sad, as if he was resigned to the likelihood that something bad was going to happen and there was nothing he could do about it. “Go with God.”

“You as well.”

The connection was broken, and Gertner clapped his hands in delight. “That’s it then.”

Liese was suddenly angry. “Their conversation proved nothing.”

“For once I agree with you, Liebchen.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“The prince is merely half of the equation. Your Mr. McGarvey is the other half.” He looked to the other officers to make sure they got his point. “Would anyone care to hazard a guess where Mr. McGarvey will be three days from now?”

“You’re crazy,” Liese said, her stomach hollow now with fear. “Kirk McGarvey is anything but a traitor.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

McGarvey got home at seven on the dot, because he’d promised Katy he’d be home on time, despite the work left to be done. The CIA was on a 24/7 emergency footing now until the latest bin Laden threat was dealt with. Everyone was putting in long hours. After tonight that would include the DCI.

All the way in from Langley, McGarvey was lost in his thoughts in the backseat of the armored limousine. Even though he was distracted, he was aware that traffic on the Beltway was sparse compared to what it normally was at this hour on a weekday. The president would be on television at eight, and the uncertain nation was at home waiting by their TV sets, as they had been after the 9/11 attacks and every other disaster.

Otto’s theory that Khalil and the Saudi multimillionaire deal maker Prince Abdul Salman were the same man would answer a number of questions about how the Saudis funneled money into organizations such as al-Quaida, and why they were doing it when bin Laden was targeting his own country as well as the U.S. It was just possible that the Salman branch of the royal family wanted to take the crown. The prince was using al-Quaida and bin Laden’s name to act as a kingmaker.

All afternoon McGarvey had been trying to pick the idea apart; find its inconsistencies, the impossibilities; find out that when the prince was attending some public function, Khalil could be positively placed elsewhere. So far, Otto’s search had produced nothing but the opposite, though proving that the two men were never seen at the same time did not prove they were the same person.

Security at McGarvey’s house was obvious but not blatant. A van with silvered windows was parked at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, a second van was parked at the curb across the street from the house, and as the limo approached the driveway Julien checked with the detail inside to make sure it was safe to come in.

“Is everything okay?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, it is, Mr. Director,” Julien said, pulling into the driveway. He stopped. “Just one moment, sir.” He took the MAC-10 submachine gun from its bracket in front of the center console and got out of the limo. He was speaking to someone via radio as he did a three-sixty, looking for something or someone who shouldn’t be there. But the neighborhood could have been abandoned.

He came back and opened the door, and McGarvey got out.

“Will you be needing me tonight?” Julien asked.

“Not unless something comes up,” McGarvey told him. “Wish your wife happy birthday from me.”

Julien looked startled for just a moment, but then he grinned. “Your secretary is a sharp lady.”

“That she is,” McGarvey said. “See you in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

McGarvey let himself into the house, resetting the code on the security keypad in the front hall. One of his stern rules was that any security detail inside was to be as unobtrusive as possible. They were CIA Office of Security experts, not upstairs maids or butlers.

There were no sounds.

For just an instant McGarvey thought about reaching for his pistol. He’d drawn a 9mm version of the Walther PPK from the armory to replace the one that had gone down with the Spirit. It was comfortable in the quick-draw holster beneath his jacket at the small of his back.

But then one of the security officers appeared at the head of the stairs. “Everything okay, then, Mr. McGarvey?” he asked. He looked like a Marine — young, square jaw, short hair, a big Heckler & Koch SOCOM pistol in a shoulder holster.

“Just fine. Where’s my wife?”

“Downstairs, sir.”

“Here,” Kathleen said, from McGarvey’s right. She was in the study at the front windows, an odd expression on her face. She’d evidently seen Julien get out of the limo and do a three-sixty with his weapon before letting Mac get out.

The guard melted away, and McGarvey went to Katy and took her in his arms. “Get any sleep?”

“Couple of hours,” she said. She was shivering, but it wasn’t from cold. “Should you be at work?”

“Yes, but my people are working on the problem. We’ve got a shot at stopping them.”

She pulled away and searched his eyes to make sure he was telling the truth. She was just like the rest of the country, looking to someone in charge to tell her that everything would be okay. “Honest Injun?”

McGarvey smiled at her. “Been thinking about Otto?”

“I asked Louise and him to come for dinner tonight. She’s working, but he’ll try. Do you mind terribly?”

McGarvey knew that Katy wanted to gather her family around her, as any mother would when her world was being threatened. “No,” he said. “It’s probably a good idea anyway, because it’s going to get hectic after the president’s speech tonight.”

“Do you know what he’s going to say?”

McGarvey had a fair idea what Haynes was going to tell the nation, but he wasn’t at all sure it would do any good.

“Is he going to tell us not to worry?” Katy asked, breathlessly. “We won’t have to endure another 9/11?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

Her lips compressed.

“He’s going to say that everything possible is being done. This time bin Laden and his people are not going to get away. No matter what it takes, we will get them.”

“That means you,” Katy said.

McGarvey nodded. The president was going to say a lot more than that. He was going to tell the American people that a lot of their civil liberties would have to be curtailed until all the bad guys were destroyed. What he wouldn’t tell them was how many of those rights, such as Miranda, speedy trials, writs of habeas corpus, search and seizure, wiretapping, mail intercepts, or computer monitoring without court orders, would be waived. Nor would he be able to say how long the Constitution would be all but suspended.

Desperate measures for desperate times.

And who was to say that if some of those measures had been put in place before 9/11 the attacks might have been prevented?

The CIA, under his watch, had been asleep at the switch. In no small measure 9/11 had been as much McGarvey’s fault as anyone’s.

Katy smiled. “Bourbon and water, one rock, will be on the kitchen counter as soon as you grab a quick shower.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Liese straightened up from where she’d been leaning against the porch rail at the side of the veranda as Gertner came from around back. She’d come out to get some air, away from the stifling man-smells. “Has the prince made another telephone call?”

“No. It would appear that he is settling in for a day with his wife and kiddies,” Gertner said. “Domestic bliss and all of that.”

“There’s something to be said for that,” Liese replied. Her parents were divorced when she was a child. She went to live with her father, who was a drunk and a womanizer, but he was a respected barrister so he was very busy and spent little time at home. Liese had been forced to endure a miserable, lonely childhood. Mac had a wife and child, Gertner had his family, and even the prince was married. “You want to speak to me?”

“We have half of the equation. Now we need the other half.”

Liese looked across the lake. All the little sailboats were heading back to their docks a few kilometers away at the yacht club in Horw. “He’s in Washington, a national hero. Waiting there like everyone for the president’s speech.”

“But not us. We have other work to do, and we have less than seventy-two hours in which to prepare.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think that I have to spell it out for you like a schoolmaster for his student. The prince is leaving for Monaco in three days, where he will remain for some already predetermined time, after which he may have to go to Washington.”

“Go ahead and spell it out for me, sir.”

Gertner ignored her sarcastic tone. “The prince came back to make certain that his family was secure, and to get himself noticed. Out in the open. Nice and tidy. He’ll do the same in Monaco. Play his role as international playboy in plain view of the entire world. At some point, while he is there gambling and womanizing, al-Quaida will make its strike, after which his presence will be required in Washington to once again make certain that nothing stands in the way of U.S.-Saudi relations.”

“The same as he did in September 2001,” Liese said. She’d read the prince’s file that Gertner had sent down.

“September fifteenth. He was in Paris on the eleventh. And so was Mr. McGarvey.”

Liese looked out across the lake again. There were only a few gailycolored spinnakers up now; the rest had been doused. The crews would have a party tonight. Prizes would be handed out. Some of them would get too drunk to drive, but they would be important men, and the traffic cops would look the other way. It was so damned unfair. The entire bloody world was so damned unfair. She turned back. “What do you want me to do, Captain?”

The expression on Gertner’s face softened for just a second. Almost, Liese thought, as if he had a soul. “I think you know, Liebchen. I’ll give your Mr. McGarvey twenty-four hours to telephone you about the prince. After that, if he hasn’t called, you will place another telephone call to him. At his home. We need to know when he will be coming to Monaco.”

“Why should I do that?” She looked up. “Is that an order?” she asked defiantly.

“If you wish it to be,” Gertner said. “But you will call him because you must. Heavens, you are in love with the man.”

TWENTY-NINE

McGarvey’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband Todd had already arrived and were in the kitchen when he came down from his shower. He could hear them talking with Katy. He stopped just around the corner from the kitchen door to gird himself for the inevitable spate of questions about Alaska and about bin Laden’s latest threat.

In his mind the time for talk was done. If they could prove that Khalil and prince Salman were one and the same man, McGarvey would find him and kill him. It was all that mattered at this moment. It was all he was focused on.

The president’s Rose Garden photo op that afternoon and all the media requests for interviews with America’s latest hero could do nothing but slow him down. And even now he was reverting to an old mindset in which his family would hinder him too.

Excess baggage was the bane of the special operator, and most especially of the assassin.

That was a role he had played for almost all of his life in the service, a role he had tried without luck to quit over and over again. Since the Soviet Union had disintegrated, threats to Americans had popped up all over a world that had once been held in a delicate balance between the two superpowers, but was now fractured into hundreds if not thousands of factions all with one common enemy: the United States.

Neither the war in Afghanistan nor the war in Iraq put a stop to bin Laden’s al-Quaida. And until this moment the administration had only paid lip service to the goal of finding and killing the man. Now the country was on the verge of paying again for that lack of resolve.

And it was just as much the CIA’s and McGarvey’s fault that the U.S. hadn’t run the man to ground.

That was going to change. Once again he was going to pick up his gun and go hunting, no matter what the cost.

He put all that at the back of his mind, smiled, and went into the kitchen. Katy was putting a basket of cut potatoes into the deep fryer, Todd was grinding pepper onto a platter of thick steaks, and Liz was tearing lettuce into a large wooden salad bowl.

For just a moment they didn’t notice him standing in the doorway. They seemed happy to be here together, despite what had happened in the past couple of days and the new bin Laden threat. At twenty-four, Liz was the spitting image of her mother at that age: long graceful body, tiny oval face, wide, beautiful green eyes, and a frank, direct manner that had been only slightly clouded by the fact she could never carry a child. The same sadness rode on Todd’s sturdy shoulders like the world on Hercules’, but it was something he never talked about with anyone. He simply went about his job with his usual steady-handed competence, but minus some small little spark that in the old days had showed up in his eyes or at the corners of his mouth when he thought something was funny. A little bit of his lightness had gone out.

Liz looked up first. Her face lit up. “Daddy,” she said, and she came around the counter into his arms, holding him tightly and burrowing her face into his neck like she’d done ever since she was a child.

McGarvey patted her back, and when she looked up he kissed her forehead. “How’re you doing, sweetheart?”

“Fine.” She studied his eyes. “Was it bad up there?”

McGarvey nodded. “A lot of good people lost their lives.”

“There would have been more if it hadn’t been for you,” Liz said.

“Mother told us all about it.” She shook her head, a look of adoration mixed with amazement on her face. In her eyes her father could never do wrong. He was the most important man in her life, which was another of the unspoken issues between her and her husband. “But you had such a terrible scowl on your face when the president was thanking you in the Rose Garden.”

“Makes me glad I never ran for office,” McGarvey said.

Katy was grinning, like she did lately whenever she and Liz had one of their mother-daughter talks. “It would have made for some interesting campaigns, especially when you started shooting at your opponents.”

Todd chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “Good work up there, Mac. Was it Khalil? Are we sure this time?”

“Ninety-nine percent.”

Todd nodded, and glanced at Liz and her mother. “Someone will have to go after him.”

All the joy left the room, even though all of them knew what was coming, as surely as they knew the sun would rise in the morning. It’s what McGarvey did. It was, or had been, his job. And at the moment there was no one in the Company better qualified to go after the terrorist.

“Maybe not,” Liz said, and she looked away almost as if she were ashamed of suggesting that her father not go back into the field. “It’s getting weird out there. Driving over, there was almost no one else on the roads. Even the radio shock jocks are being nice. Howard Stern was talking about Pearl Harbor and 9/11, wondering how the people who died would have turned out. Maybe there were some artists, or scientists, or poets.”

“I’m pretty sure that the Shaw thing was just supposed to be a diversion for the main act,” McGarvey said. “If they had pulled it off, we would have had our hands full trying to rescue him. And then right in the middle of that op, they would have hit us with this warning. It would have been worse than it is right now.”

“So why did bin Laden release the tape?” Todd asked.

McGarvey figured there were two reasons. The first was to keep us off-balance, to prove to the world that no matter what happened in Alaska, al-Quaida was still a power to be reckoned with. That the jihad against America was still in full swing. But the second, more subtle, reason was that there might be a power struggle going on between bin Laden and Khalil. Bin Laden went public with his threat because he hoped it would force McGarvey into leaving Langley to personally hunt for Khalil. Alaska was an embarrassment, and McGarvey had been a thorn in bin Laden’s side since before 9/11. No matter the outcome of a confrontation between McGarvey and Khalil, bin Laden would come out the winner.

In the meantime, the new threat, even if it was never carried out, was already having the desired effect. America was in a collective terror. “Could be he’s just taunting us.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you, Mac?” Todd asked.

McGarvey shook his head.

“You came head-to-head with Khalil, and now they’re daring you to come out and face him again.”

“That’s a possibility.” McGarvey went to the counter and got his drink from Katy. They looked at each other for just an instant, and he could see that she understood completely what he was setting himself to do. And she was okay with it finally, because of Alaska and more importantly because of the continuing aftermath of 9/11. To have it happen all over again would be a horror beyond imagining.

“It would take you away from Langley just when you’re needed the most,” Todd said. But he was just playing devil’s advocate. “Maybe you need to send somebody else.”

The problem with being a spy, especially a spymaster, was that the job came with its own set of vulnerabilities. Give a spy a good puzzle, and he would be compelled to chase after it like a mouse after cheese in a trap. This time the spymaster was none other than the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and the bait was Khalil, the number two terrormaster behind Osama bin Laden himself. At risk were the lives of innocent American men, women, and this time, children.

“I might have a personal stake in this,” McGarvey said. He took a drink, then held the cool glass against his forehead. It had been a very long day, and it wasn’t over yet. “There’s a possibility that Khalil might be a Saudi prince who I had a brief contact with during an op about eight or ten years ago.”

“Who is it?” Liz asked.

“His name is Salman. He’s rich, well connected; in fact, he’s stayed at the White House. He’s one of the Saudis we rely on to broker some pretty big deals, holding OPEC in line, keeping an open channel with Tehran, shipping us extra oil when we’re faced with a crunch. He was one of the people behind convincing Riyadh to allow us basing privileges during the first GulfWar.”

“Doesn’t sound like a terrorist,” Todd said.

“No, he doesn’t,” McGarvey said, but then neither had Carlos in the seventies and eighties. He too had been a rich international playboy. His flamboyant life out in the open had provided him with the perfect cover.

“Can we prove it?” Todd asked.

“Otto’s working on it, and the Swiss government is investigating him. He’s got some banking interests there, and his wife and children live in Lucerne. Someone over there is trying to make the connection between him and Khalil.”

Katy winced, but no one except Mac noticed. There was nothing he could do to help ease her painful memories, except be here for her.

Todd was having trouble accepting the possibility. “I hate to say this, Mac, but are we talking wishful thinking?” He looked to his wife for support, but she shrugged. She had no idea where he was going. “It’s counterintuitive to think that a Saudi prince would be working against his own government. Bin Laden’s been after the royals since right after Afghanistan. And there’s just too much money at stake for a man like Salman to risk it all. For what?”

If Otto could nail the connection, it was one of the questions McGarvey wanted to ask the prince in person.

“Ego,” Katy said, quietly.

“That was Khalil, in Alaska,” Todd said. “I still don’t see a guy like Salman risking his life working as a terrorist.”

“I’m talking about Abdul Salman,” Katy said. “I knew him.”

Liz was bewildered. “When? From where?”

McGarvey shook his head, but Katy gave him her “It’s okay” look.

“It was a few years ago, when your father and I were still divorced. The prince was doing something big here in Washington for his government, although none of us knew exactly what it was, but he was suddenly on everybody’s A-list. He was popping up all over the place, especially the embassy parties. His English was perfect, his manners and dress were impeccable, and he knew his way around a wine list every bit as well as Darby did.”

“Still sounds like a playboy and not a terrorist,” Todd said. If he or Liz caught the significance of the name Darby or the fact that Katy did not elaborate, they gave no sign of it. “I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble buying the likelihood that Salman and Khalil are the same man.”

“It sounds absurd, I know.” Katy hesitated for a moment. She gave Mac a little shrug. “But trust me, Todd, I got to know the prince well enough to know for certain that there were very few men that he could work for. At the time it was a Russian KGB general, and now it’s bin Laden.”

Now Liz and Todd were on the same page. They knew about Baranov and Darby Yarnell and the operation that had ended with the deaths of Yarnell and Donald Powers, the director of the CIA at the time. They also understood how incredibly difficult it was for Katy to speak up.

Katy looked as if she wanted to crawl into a hole and bury herself. But she squared her shoulders. “There was something about Khalil aboard the ship that bothered me. But it hasn’t struck me until now. He and the prince are the same man, and I know it for a fact.”

“But how, Mother?” Liz blurted.

Katy did not lower her eyes. “Because I had an affair with him.”

THIRTY

Liz’s mouth dropped open. She looked at her father, trying to gauge his reaction, then turned back to her mother. It was obvious that she wanted to be angry, but she was too stunned. “Mother?”

Katy lowered her eyes. “Sorry, but none of us is ever as perfect as you think.”

McGarvey nodded. “We were divorced, and I was living with a woman in Lucerne.”

He gave his wife a reassuring look. “We knew about each other’s lives, and it made our own that much tougher because we still loved each other.”

“Do the Swiss know about this?” Todd asked.

“Probably. Otto took a call from one of the federal cops who watched after me when I lived over there. They wanted to know if there was still a connection between Salman and me.”

“What’d you tell them, Daddy?” Liz asked.

McGarvey wanted to help his daughter understand. But there were some things that were better left unexplained. “Nothing yet, but the Swiss might be sitting on something that we need. I’ll call in the morning.”

One of the security people appeared at the kitchen door. “Mr. Rencke is here, Mr. Director,” he said. He was listening to something in his earpiece. “Copy,” he said softly. “He’s alone, sir.”

“We’re expecting him for dinner,” Katy said.

McGarvey nodded, and the agent turned and disappeared down the hall. He glanced at the clock in the microwave. It was nearly 7:30 P.M. “Put the steaks on, Todd. We have a half hour before the president comes on. I’ll be just a minute.” He put his drink down and went out to the front stair hall just as Otto was coming in.

His special projects director pulled up short; his eyes were wide, his frizzy long red hair in even more disarray than usual, and his sweatshirt with the KGB sword and shield emblem filthy dirty. He’d brought a laptop with him. “Oh boy, Mac, this is the big enchilada this time,” he gushed. He hopped from one foot to the other, something he did only when he was excited. “We can get the bastard.”

“When have you been home last?”

Rencke stopped all of a sudden, the idiot look leaving his face. “Mrs. M. will make me clean up before supper, but right now you gotta look at something.”

They went into the study and closed the door. The room was electronically swept every twelve hours, so it was reasonably secure. Otto put the laptop on the desk and booted it up. Two columns of dates and places appeared on the screen. One was headed Khalil, the other Salman. They were nearly a perfect match, date for date, place for place.

“These go back eight and a half years,” Otto said. “Now even you’ve gotta admit that this shit goes way beyond coincidence.”

McGarvey had already seen some of this, and he had to agree with Rencke. “Are there any mismatches? Any times when Khalil and Salman weren’t at the same place and time?”

Rencke thought about the question for a split second. “No way of telling for sure, ’cause most of the Khalil sightings are inferences. He’s only been nailed solid four times, including your encounter three days ago.”

“Where was Salman this last time?”

An evil grin spread across Rencke’s face. “Victoria, BC, in a private meeting with Thomas Malcovich, the Canadian oil minister. After which he picked up a leased Gulfstream in Vancouver under the name Thomas Powers, which took him to London, where he promptly disappeared for twenty-four hours. He just showed up in Switzerland a couple hours ago.”

“Why the cover name?”

“Salman has used it at least twice before when he brokered deals in secret. Once in 1997 between Moscow and Tehran over maintenance contracts for their Kilo subs, and again in June 2000 between Pyongyang and Beijing over high-pressure pumps, presumably for their nuclear program.”

McGarvey wanted as solid a case as possible before he went into the field. “Okay, so we’ve got Salman and Khalil in the same part of the world on the same days. Not proof enough. Not even with all the other coincidences. What else?”

“I worked out their most logical escape route,” Otto said. He pulled up a map of coastal Alaska and Canada from Juneau to Vancouver on the laptop’s screen. Overlaid were several red lines. “You said that Khalil left with somewhere between five and ten of his operators aboard a small sportfisherman. Canadian Coast Guard found the boat abandoned on Kupreanof Island a half mile from the airport at the town of Kake. That’s less than thirty miles from where the Spirit went down. The boat belonged to a family who ran a fishing resort a few miles farther south. Their bodies were found this morning. And there was evidence that a dozen or more people had been at the resort for as long as five days. They even did target practice.” Rencke looked up, his eyes owlish. “Nine-millimeter rounds, according to the Canadians. Fits with what weapons you say they carried.”

“Polish-made RAKs and Steyr GBs,” McGarvey said. “Old-fashioned but effective.”

“They had some of their people on the cruise ship, probably as early as Seattle, and the rest of them took over the fishing resort a few days ahead of time. They used one of the boats from the resort to rendezvous with the Spirit, and when you screwed up their plans they went to the airport at Kake, where they left aboard a twin Otto floatplane.” Rencke highlighted one of the red lines that reached out into the Pacific from Kake. “If they had snatched Shaw, they were going to ditch the Otter at sea and a cargo ship was going to pick them up. There are three possibilities, all of them Liberian registry. Our Coast Guard is heading out to them right now.”

“Okay.”

Rencke highlighted a spot four hundred miles south of Kake on the northeast coast of Graham Island just across Hecate Strait from the town of Prince Rupert on the mainland. “A fishing crew spotted what they thought was a small explosion in midair about the time the Coast Guard was rescuing you and the survivors. A Canadian search-and-rescue team finally found the wreckage of the Otter three hours ago. At least six bodies, possibly one or two more. One of them has already been identified as Rupert Thompson, a contract pilot working for Airways North. All of the others were male, and none of them carried any identification, though at least two of them were armed with Steyr pistols.”

“What were they doing so far south?” McGarvey asked.

“The same question I asked myself,” Rencke said. “The times of Salman’s meetings with the Canadian oil minister are all before the hijacking. Several days before. After which Powers disappeared, as if he flew back to Switzerland. But of course he didn’t show up anywhere outside of Canada until after the hijacking.”

“There weren’t supposed to be any survivors from the Spirit,” McGarvey said.

“That’s right,” Rencke said. “But with you in the picture Khalil had to figure that someone would have made it off the ship before it went down, and then it’d be just a matter of time before we put it together and boarded every cargo ship in the vicinity. So he had the pilot take him down to Vancouver or some out-of-the-way spot nearby, and he sent his people back. But he somehow sabotaged the plane to blow up hopefully over the open water, and voilà, he disappeared back into the limelight as Prince Salman, and all the evidence aboard the Otter was supposed to disappear into the sea.”

McGarvey wanted to believe it, because if Salman and Khalil were the same man, it would unravel a ten-year-old mystery of how the international terrorist had been able to move around under the noses of every law enforcement and intelligence agency in the world and never be caught. The world was focused on Prince Salman and never saw Khalil.

But it was too easy. The answers were too pat.

“Did you know that the Bureau investigated Salman after 9/11?” Rencke said. “He was one of the Saudis who took flight training in Florida the year before, and then in June he went up to Minneapolis where he did flight simulator time on the 747.”

McGarvey smiled grimly. “Let me guess. The investigation was dropped because Salman was a friend of the White House.”

Rencke clapped his hands together in glee. “Give that man the Kewpie doll. But it’s not just the White House and not just this administration, Mac; it’s everybody who’s anybody inside the Beltway. Salman is a Saudi, the Saudis give us oil, and the prince is the chief broker of some of the most important deals around. He’s a holy cow.”

“Maybe he’s just that,” McGarvey said, softly. “A holy cow. A megarich prima donna who’s innocent of everything except being a wheeler-dealer.”

Rencke was suddenly subdued. He averted his eyes. “What about Mrs. M?” he asked, hesitantly. “She knows.”

They’d been through so much. So many heartaches. So many troubles. They didn’t need this.

“Maybe she’s mistaken.”

Rencke looked at him, his long face sad. He shook his head. “She’s not.”

Down in Washington the president of the United States was going over the finishing touches of the speech he would give to the nation in a few minutes. He still wasn’t one hundred percent sure what he was going to propose. But he could think of no other course of action that made any sense. Nor had his advisers been much help. God help us all, he thought. And God help the Republic.

THIRTY-ONE

Liese stood in the deeper shadows beside the large window that looked across the bay toward the Salman compound, lit now only by the outside lights. The prince had spent the last two hours with his wife and children in the east wing of the main house, but a couple of minutes ago he had returned to his own quarters, where he turned on a television set. It was one in the morning here, but eight in the evening in Washington.

Almost every person on the planet would be watching or listening to president Haynes’s speech to his people.

Tomas Ziegler had plugged in a portable television set under Gertner’s instructions, and he switched it to CNN. A pair of news analysts, one a man and the other a pretty brunette, were in the middle of discussing the president’s upcoming speech.

At that moment, the same audio came from the surveillance microphone in Salman’s quarters. The prince was tuned to the same television channel. “It would seem that the good prince is also interested in what Haynes will have to say,” Gertner said.

“Filter out as much of the television audio as you can,” Liese told Ziegler. “Salman might be the type who talks back to his television set. I want to hear what he has to say.”

The telephone in the prince’s apartment rang. Ziegler was on it immediately. “It’s from out of the country.”

The telephone rang a second time.

“Saudi Arabia,” Ziegler said, excitedly. “Riyadh.”

Salman answered on the third ring. “Oui?”

A man said something in Arabic, and Hoenecker translated. “Will you watch the president, nephew?”

“I have the television on now, my esteemed uncle.” Hoenecker translated Salman’s words.

Ziegler looked up from his monitor. “It’s the royal palace. That’s Crown Prince Abdullah.”

“Turn it off,” Gertner ordered.

“Why?” Liese demanded. “If Prince Salman and Khalil are one and the same man, this could mean that the Saudi royals, all the way to the top, are in the terror business.”

Gertner shot her a bleak look. “That’s exactly why, Liebchen. We don’t need that trouble, you and I. Turn it off.”

At that moment it was five in the morning in Karachi, Pakistan, and a thirteen-inch black-and-white television set on a small table in a featureless room was tuned to Al Jazeera. Osama bin Laden came in, turned the sound up, settled down on a Persian rug, and leaned casually on a large brocaded pillow. His English was good so he did not have to wait for the words of the commentators in Washington to be translated.

The picture cut to an image of a podium with the great seal of the U.S. “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

Lawrence Haynes entered the East Room and went to the podium. He’d not brought his speech or any notes. His adviser on national security affairs, Dennis Berndt; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Paul Wilcox; and the director of the FBI, Herbert Weissman, took positions on either side of him.

“Good evening,” the president began, his famous smile missing this evening. This was a president come to tell his nation something serious. “Directly following my comments tonight we will show you the latest taped message from the terrorist Osama bin Laden. Many of you have already seen the tape. Many of you have unfortunately have already assumed the worst, that once again an unspeakable evil will be unleashed by monsters on America.”

The president slowly shook his head. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Even now units of our naval and air forces are on standby to strike at the very heart of the terrorist’s operations. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaged in a massive worldwide manhunt, using every asset and technical means at its command, as are the National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office. At home I have instructed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to coordinate a nationwide search not only for the henchmen of bin Laden’s al-Quaida organization, but also for any group or individual planning to do us harm.”

The president’s lips compressed as he seemed to gird himself for what he would say next. “We will capture bin Laden and his lieutenants just as we captured Saddam Hussein and his staff. There will not be another tragic day such as September eleventh! But in order to effectively carry on with our work of eliminating the evil that would attempt to destroy our freedom, our very way of life, drastic measures must and will be taken.”

A slow smile spread across bin Laden’s harsh features.

“Effective immediately, and to last until we can confirm the capture or the death of Osama bin Laden and his principal lieutenant, the terrorist known as Khalil, I am declaring that a state of martial law exists in the United States and our territories and protectorates.”

Bin Laden rose languorously to his feet, no longer interested in the president’s feeble speech, then switched off the television set and went to compose a personal letter to each of the four boys who would soon be entering the gates of Paradise as martyrs.

THIRTY-TWO

McGarvey had Julien take him directly over to the White House first thing in the morning. On the way over he called Calvin Beckett, the president’s chief of staff, to see if he could be fit in early. The morning’s national intelligence briefing was usually held at 9 A.M., but McGarvey was an hour early.

“Do you have something for us already?” Beckett asked, hopefully. The man had left a job as head of IBM’s legal department to join the administration shortly after Haynes took office. He was an avid skier, skydiver, and acrobatic pilot, who was not afraid to take chances. Decisions came easily for him, and as a result he and McGarvey had developed a good working relationship.

“We might have an identification on Khalil,” McGarvey said, “but I don’t think your boss is going to like it.”

“Can we get to him?”

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

“Then I don’t care if he’s the pope. If the CIA knows who he is and where we can get him, the president will order it. I can practically guarantee it, Mac,” Beckett said. “You heard his speech last night. There won’t be another 9/11. Whatever it takes, we’re going to nail the bastards this time before they hit us. If your people have a lead, he’s going to give you the green light for any action that you want to take.”

Beckett hesitated, and McGarvey could almost hear him weighing his next words. Their telephone conversation was encrypted, but in Washington once a thought was spoken it could never be taken back. And the wrong kinds of words could take on a life of their own, which had the power to devastate even a solid career.

“The president doesn’t want to negotiate this time.”

McGarvey knew exactly what Beckett was going to say. He’d heard other men skirt around the very same issue with him more times than he’d care to count. He wasn’t going to make it easy by assuring Beckett that he knew what he was supposed to do. He wanted the administration to tell him.

“There’ll be no trial, understand?” Beckett said. “If you can get to Khalil, kill him. The same goes for bin Laden.”

The White House, McGarvey figured, was operating under the same siege mentality that the rest of Washington was struggling with. Bin Laden’s threat was already having a serious effect on the nation. People across the country were calling in sick, keeping their children home from school, all but barricading themselves in their houses with what Fox News was calling the “9/11 flu.”

Any building over four or five stories tall was all but deserted. Almost every office in Washington was operating with a skeleton staff. The DOW and NASDAQ were sharply down. And traffic on the interstate system, even the normally crammed-to-capacity 1-95 along the eastern seaboard, had less volume than on an average Sunday.

Americans were frightened.

“That’s what I’m coming to talk about,” McGarvey said.

Beckett sounded relieved. “The president will be glad to hear that, Mr. Director. I’ll clear the deck for you. This is priority one. Nothing is more important.”

McGarvey looked out the window as they crossed K Street and skirted the greenery of Farragut Square just a couple of blocks from the White House.

“The president is taking a lot of heat over his martial law decision. He’ll be meeting with a bipartisan group from the Hill at ten, and we just found out that they’re bringing Emmet Sampson with them.” Sampson had taken over the ACLU in the aftermath of 9/11, and he had become the most vocal critic of the White House and especially of the Justice Department and Homeland Security.

McGarvey could just guess what the California Democrat would say to Haynes. “There are going to be a lot of people who’ll agree with him.”

Beckett was suddenly cool. “We want you with us on this one, Mac. The president needs all his people to stand up and be counted.”

McGarvey hated bullshit in any variety. “I know. I got a taste of it in the Rose Garden yesterday.”

His limo crossed H Street on the light and headed past the Renwick Gallery and Blair House to the west gate. Almost no one was on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House’s iron fence. McGarvey almost expected to hear air-raid sirens. The street reminded him of the scene outside the Presidential Palace in Santiago the morning after he’d assassinated army general August Pinar and his wife at their coastal retreat near San Francisco. All of Chile had been thrown on the defensive. It was generally known that the CIA had made the hit, and if a towering figure such as Pinar could be reached, then everybody was vulnerable.

September eleventh had proved that America was not an invulnerable island nation.

“That was a very necessary ceremony that has nothing to do with the problem staring us in the face now,” Beckett said.

The president’s chief of staff wanted to be belligerent, McGarvey thought, because no one over there knew what to do. We’d been caught flat-footed by just about every act of terrorism ever committed against us, including the Murrah Federal Building, the USS Cole, and both attacks on the World Trade Center. And it was happening again.

Declaring martial law wouldn’t do a thing to stop whatever bin Laden was going to do. The only sure cure was finding and killing the men responsible, like we should have done long before 9/11.

Assassination.

“I wouldn’t have advised martial law,” McGarvey said.

“You weren’t asked, Mr. Director,” Beckett said, bleakly.

McGarvey broke the connection as his limo was passed through the west gate. He hadn’t been at all sure how the president was going to react, and after talking with Beckett he was even less sure. Becoming president did not make a man immune from fear. For a lot of them, from the moment they took up residence in the White House until the day they left, they never got a decent night’s sleep. And a frightened man who wasn’t sleeping well could make some very bad decisions. Like Truman had when he’d given away our nuclear advantage by promising the world we would never again be the first to drop the bomb. Or like Kennedy, ordering the Bay of Pigs fiasco, then later promising the Russians we would never again attack the island. Or like Nixon, denying he knew anything about the Watergate break-in. And now Haynes declaring martial law.

McGarvey felt a great foreboding as he got out of the car and entered the west wing. Beckett was waiting for him, and wordlessly they walked down the corridor to the Oval Office.

A pair of Marines, dressed in BDUs and armed with Colt Commando assault rifles, were stationed just inside the entrance. They had replaced the usual White House security detail. September eleventh had changed everyone, just as Pearl Harbor had, only this time the changes were happening even before the next event.

A harried Lawrence Haynes stood at his desk talking to someone on the telephone, while aides and advisers scurried in and out. This was the beginning of an extremely busy day, typical of any before it except for the threat hanging over the nation. As McGarvey followed Beckett in, he wondered why anyone in his right mind would want the job, because in the final analysis being president had nothing whatsoever to do with power. It had to do with administration, organization, politics, and most of all stamina and the ability to make decisions and to truly believe that they were the best ones possible under the circumstances.

Haynes looked presidential this morning. It was something about him that the American public loved. When the nation needed a leader he was there. Two years ago he and his wife and daughter had almost been assassinated. He’d come out of the ordeal as the most popular president since FDR. His jacket was off, his tie already loose, his shirtsleeves rolled up. Here was a president getting down to the business of leading his country through a difficult time.

He looked over at McGarvey with something akin to relief, then turned away. Whoever he was talking to wasn’t an ally. The president did not sound pleased. He had his detractors who were waiting in the wings ready to pounce the moment he made a mistake. The martial law thing could very well lose him the next election, and everyone in Washington was already taking sides.

It was politics in its rawest form.

Beckett herded everyone else out, then motioned for McGarvey to have a seat on the couch. “Coffee?”

“I won’t be that long,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to lay out what we’ve come up with, and the president will have to make a decision. The ball’s in his court.”

“Yes, it is.”

Beckett called Dennis Berndt to come over, and the national security adviser showed up a minute later just as Haynes was hanging up. Like Beckett and the president he looked hopeful when he saw that McGarvey was here.

“Mr. Director,” Berndt said. He glanced over at Haynes.

“Good morning, Dennis,” McGarvey said. “Mr. President. I think we know who Khalil is.”

Haynes was direct and to the point. He was obviously in no mood to play games. “Can we get to him?”

It was the same question Beckett had asked. Anybody could be got, if that was the sole consideration. But at what price? That was the second, unasked, half of the question. “I don’t think there’ll be a problem getting close to him. In fact, we’ll have to do that first before we can be one hundred percent sure we’re right about who he is.”

Haynes nodded with satisfaction. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“But it won’t be that easy killing him,” McGarvey warned. “He’s masquerading as an important figure.”

“I don’t care who it is,” Haynes countered. “He damned near snatched Don Shaw, and in the process he murdered nearly fifty innocent people. Most likely he was the brains behind 9/11, and he’s probably behind this new threat.” Haynes looked at Berndt and Beckett for backup, then shook his head. “I don’t give a damn who he is. You find him, prove you’re right, then take him down. If you want, I’ll put that in writing.”

“He’s a member of the Saudi royal family,” McGarvey told them. “Prince Abdul Hasim ibn Salman.”

Haynes exchanged a look with his NSA and chief of staff; then his eyes narrowed in anger. “That’s not possible.”

It was the reaction McGarvey had expected. He had considered going after the prince first and explaining the CIA’s suspicions to the White House later, but this president deserved the unvarnished truth, especially now. Until recently the CIA, like a lot of other agencies in Washington, tended to tell the administration it served only what the administration wanted to hear, even if it didn’t square with reality. More than one president had made a bad call because of faulty intelligence.

“We’ve come up with credible evidence linking the two men,” McGarvey said, “including at least one eyewitness.”

Haynes shook his head. “A man such as Salman has enemies. Witnesses lie.”

“Not this one,” McGarvey countered, a little too sharply.

“For Christ’s sake, Mac—” Beckett warned, but the president held him off with a gesture.

“Just a minute ago you said you wanted to get close to him first because you weren’t one hundred percent sure.”

In his heart of hearts McGarvey didn’t want Salman, the man who had once made love to his wife, to be the terrorist Khalil, because he would not be able to separate revenge from justice. “Not sure enough to put a bullet in his brain.”

“You want to set up a surveillance operation to watch him, is that it?” Haynes demanded. “But that’ll take time, which we don’t have.”

“I got within twenty feet of the man aboard the cruise ship. I talked to him. If I get close again, I’ll know it’s him.”

The president was beyond anger; he was puzzled. “I can’t believe it, Mac. The fact of the matter is that Prince Salman is an important member of the Saudi royal family. The fact of the matter is that the Saudis still allow us to maintain a military presence there. The fact of the matter — the real fact of the matter — is that Saudi Arabia sits on one trillion dollars in oil reserves. And until we become a hydrogen economy, which I’m told won’t happen for at least another twenty years, we need that oil.” He shook his head. “The prince is a very important friend to American business. Like Adnan Khashoggi before him, he’s brokered a bunch of international deals that we’ve needed. Some of them critical. Goodwill for us at a time we badly need it.”

“I know, Mr. President.”

The president’s anger was returning. “What would he have to gain by attacking us? He’d be cutting his own throat. It doesn’t make any sense from the standpoint of business.”

“He’s made deals with other countries.”

“Yes, Canada,” Beckett said, angrily. “At the same time he was supposedly trying to kidnap Don Shaw.”

“The times match,” McGarvey shot back. “And he’s also brokered deals with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and China, sometimes with money from us and the British, and at other times with Saudi money.” McGarvey hesitated. “The Saudis want to sell their trillion dollars of oil to us, but at their own pace, because once their oil reserves run dry they’ll have nothing. So if they can keep us seriously off-balance with attacks like 9/11, or with military actions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, maybe it’ll take us longer to get off the fossil-fuel bandwagon. It’s going to take a president willing to go out on a limb, like Kennedy did by putting an American on the moon, to fire up the nation to make the switch to hydrogen.”

“Continue.”

“With all due respect, Mr. President, that’s not likely to happen very soon because too much money is being made from oil. And it’s people like Salman, if he is Khalil, who are doing whatever it takes to keep us off-balance.” One of the reasons the CIA had tended to tell the administration what it wanted to hear was that presidents often got angry if they were proved to be mistaken. So instead of telling Lyndon Johnson that bombing Haiphong wouldn’t work, the CIA helped the Air Force work out targets. “We have all the evidence we need to suggest that Saudi money is behind al-Quaida and more than two dozen other Islamic fundamentalist and terrorist groups.”

“The Saudis have their dissident factions, just as we do,” Haynes conceded. “But men such as Salman, whose family is an integral part of the government, do not become terrorists. What sense does it make?”

“Salman’s family were Bedouins,” McGarvey said.

Haynes brushed it off. “So what?”

“They want Saudi Arabia cleared of everyone except true believers. If they had their way, all the oil wells would be shut down, and the country would revert to the old ways. The same thing the Taliban tried in Afghanistan.”

“They failed miserably,” Beckett said.

McGarvey shrugged. “It’s not finished yet.”

Beckett started to protest, but the president held him off again. “All right, Mac, give me proof that the prince and Khalil are the same man, and we will take action,” he said. “But the CIA will not, must not, allow the Saudi government, the prince himself, or anyone else for that matter to get so much of a hint that such suspicions exist. Are you clear on this point?”

It was exactly opposite of what McGarvey wanted to try. Khalil was an arrogant man who had not hesitated to kill anyone who got in his way — men, women, children, it apparently did not matter to him. If he and the prince were the same man, then putting pressure on Salman might force him to make a mistake and reveal his true identity.

“Yes, sir.”

“In the meantime, the CIA needs to work with the FBI and the military to come up with a solid plan to make sure that the transition into martial law goes without a hitch. The whole idea is to make attacking us a very risky proposition. Once we have the bastards, then we can get back to the rightful business of the nation. I want to know what the CIA will do.”

It was the wrong thing to do, McGarvey thought. But he couldn’t really blame the president and his advisers for reacting this way. Saudi Arabia was very important to U.S. interests. Gas lines hadn’t been all that long ago, and the American public hadn’t forgotten them. And more than ever before, we depended upon foreign oil. Without it America would all but grind to a halt. On the other hand, the president had to do something about al-Quaida’s latest threat. September eleventh was still very fresh in everyone’s mind.

“All our stations and missions have been buttoned up, and every reliable asset is being pushed to the limit for information,” McGarvey replied. “But there isn’t much we can do domestically, except continue to provide INS and the Bureau with warnings about people trying to get in who we believe have ties to terrorist groups. The same as we’ve been doing all along.”

“Very well. What about bin Laden himself?”

“We have nothing new about his whereabouts, but we have come up with something that might be helpful. It’s possible that he was wearing a disguise in his latest video.”

“What do you mean?” Berndt asked.

“His beard may have been fake, and he may have been wearing makeup to make us think that he’s sick. If that’s the case, it could mean he’s not in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. He could be almost anywhere.”

“That’s just great,” President Haynes grumbled. “What you’re saying is that we may never find him.”

“Not without finding Khalil first.”

Haynes’s eyes locked onto McGarvey’s. “That’ll have to wait. For now we need to do whatever it takes to stop the next attack.” He shook his head. “That does not include going after innocent people.”

The past couple of years had been something of a journey of discovery for McGarvey. He had discovered what was most important to him, and it was not worrying about the past; it was about helping people. Making things right, as simple as that sounded. Stopping the bad guys from hurting the innocents. When he met bin Laden face-to-face in the mountains of Afghanistan, before 9/11, the man maintained that there were no innocents in this war. It was the same garbage that spewed out of Khalil’s mouth when he killed the woman and her infant child.

But there were innocents, and they had to be protected at all costs.That was what civilization was all about.

“I’ll send a courier over this afternoon with my letter of resignation,” McGarvey said. “I suggest you appoint Dick Adkins as acting DCI; he’s done the job before, and he’s a good man.”

The president stepped back as if he had been physically staggered by what he’d just heard. “What are you talking about?”

“I quit.”

Haynes shook his head. “I won’t accept your resignation. This country needs you. I need you.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President; I truly am. But it’s time for me to take care of my family. It’s a duty I’ve neglected for too long.”

“You can’t be serious, Mac,” Beckett said. “If you want out, okay, no one blames you. But wait until we get past this mess we’re in. You can’t bail out now.”

McGarvey had no idea this would happen this morning. But it seemed to be the only move he could make. As director of the CIA he was too visible a presence. He had no real freedom of movement. Too many people were answerable to him. If being president had more to do with administration and grand visions than with power, then being DCI had more to do with administration and less with spying. Spies, by their very nature, had to be under the radar.

Assassins had to be chameleons, invisible to what they really were.

“Martial law is not the answer, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. “We won’t stop them that way.”

The president’s face was hard. “As a private citizen you will not pursue your investigation of Prince Salman. That, Mr. McGarvey, is a direct order from me. One that I shall put into writing. If you take it upon yourself to continue despite my warning, you will be arrested and prosecuted for treason. Are you clear on this?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. He was in pain. He’d given his entire life in service to his government, and now he was defying the president.

Treason was a powerful concept to McGarvey. But the murder of innocents was worse.

He nodded to the president and the others, then turned and left the Oval Office, his mind already on the steps he would have to take to protect his family, to ensure that the CIA did not miss a beat by his departure, and then to find Khalil and bin Laden and kill them.

Berndt was the first to recover, although the resignation of Kirk McGarvey now, of all times, had hit him like a pistol shot between the eyes. It would be interpreted by the public as cowardice, yet no one could possibly accuse Mac of treason. Overstepping his charter. Disregard of direct orders. Arrogance. Conceit. All those, but not treason.

“What do you want to do, Mr. President?” he asked.

Haynes gave his NSA a bleak look. “Get Herb Weissman over here on the double.”

THIRTY-THREE

The Lake Lucerne chalet had two small bedrooms and a bathroom in the loft over the kitchen and master bedroom. Liese had taken the east bedroom for herself because of its skylight that looked toward Salman’s compound. She’d only managed to get a few hours sleep in the past forty-eight, but she was so keyed up that each time she lay down and closed her eyes she saw Kirk McGarvey in a Swiss jail cell, pacing back and forth like a caged wild animal. The vision was so intolerable that she couldn’t sleep.

She was supposedly chief of this operation, which meant that she needed to oversee her mission staff. It did not mean she had to remain here 24/7, though in practical terms either she stayed or the operation would be taken away from her.

It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and Liese was lying fully clothed on the narrow daybed, trying to get some rest when Gertner came to the door, his face puffy and red. Ever since President Haynes’s martial law speech the night before, Gertner had been beside himself. They’re all cowboys. The lot of them.

“Liebchen, it’s him. He’s on the phone for you.”

Liese’s heart skipped a beat. Shakily she opened her eyes and sat up in bed. “Who is it?”

“Your Herr McGarvey.”

Liese got up, slipped on her shoes, and followed Gertner down to the great room where LeFevre handed her a cup of tea, black with lemon just as she preferred it. She hated that all of a sudden they were treating her with kid gloves, but Gertner was afraid of her. They all were. The trouble was that she was just as frightened of what Gertner and the people in Bern were capable of doing. They had finally backed her into a trap that she didn’t know how to evade.

Ziegler seemed impressed as he held out the chalet’s encrypted phone to her. “He asked for an encrypted channel.”

“He knows what we’re doing here,” Liese said. She took the phone, then turned away and looked out the window toward the Salman compound across the narrow bay. The weather was overcast and too windy for sailboats today. “Hello, Kirk. Thanks for calling—” She almost said, “my darling.”

“Hello, Liese, it’s good to hear your voice again,” McGarvey said, and she could hear the stress in his voice. “How are you?”

“It’s I who should be asking you that, after Alaska and then President Haynes’s speech last night. It’s happening again for you.” She could see Gertner’s reflection in the window glass. He was wearing a headset, listening to every word. What Kirk could not say was that he was going to be in Monaco, because the only way he had of knowing that Salman would be there in two days was if they were working together, as Gertner was mad to prove. It was Gertner’s stupid contention that McGarvey would try to throw off the Swiss investigation into Salman’s activities. Almost anything he said now would be twisted in one way or another to prove the case. But Monaco would practically be the coup de grace.

“My people told me that you called while I was away,” McGarvey said, no warmth whatsoever in his voice. “You wanted whatever we had on Abdul Salman. Why?”

Liese’s heart was breaking. This was nothing more than the director of American intelligence wanting to know what the hell a Swiss cop was doing bothering him. But there was nothing for Gertner to use. “We’re investigating the prince—”

“For what?”

“I can’t say at this moment, except that it has to do with national security.”

“Swiss national security,” Kirk responded, sharply. “But you mentioned Darby Yarnell, which tells me that someone in Bern has gotten to you. Why, Liese? Because you were once in love with me?”

Liese turned and looked at Gertner, who had the good grace to at least lower his eyes. “Something like that,” she told McGarvey. “But it was my superiors who came up with the connection, not me. They thought that you would remember me as a … friend.”

“Is he there now?”

“Yes.”

“Liese, this is important. Was he there all last week?”

Liese got an immediate lift. If Kirk had to ask about Salman’s whereabouts last week, then he could not be working with the man. But her spirits immediately sank when she realized that Gertner would simply take Kirk’s question as a sign that the CIA director was trying to throw them off.

“No, he wasn’t here,” she said. “As a matter of fact he’s been gone for the better part of three months. We wanted to know if the CIA had been tracking his movements.”

“Why, Liese?”

Liese shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m not authorized to say. This is nothing more than a personal request.”

“I’m coming over. I can be there first thing in the morning.” Gertner frowned. He shook his head.

“You wouldn’t be allowed to enter the country.”

“Okay, I’ll send my daughter. She works for us.”

Liese was frustrated and frightened. She didn’t know what to do or what to ask him, because whatever he was going to say would be damning in Gertner’s eyes. “What do you want here, Kirk?” she asked in desperation. “What is the prince to you?”

“We have a very high confidence that Salman is the al-Quaida terrorist Khalil. He was in Alaska to grab Shaw, and now we think he’s behind bin Laden’s latest threat.”

A look of triumph crossed Gertner’s face. He motioned for Liese to cover the phone.

“Just a moment,” she said, and she held a shaky hand over the phone.

“Tell him that there has been a change in policy that you just learned about. He can come here after all.”

“So that you can arrest him?” she demanded, shrilly. She shook her head. “This proves nothing.” She turned back to the phone. “We think you might be right,” she blurted. “But sending your daughter here would be a moot point. Salman is leaving for Monaco the day after—”

The connection was cut.

Love or loyalty?

She had asked herself the same question ten years ago when Kirk was here in Switzerland and she had fallen in love with him while working as a Swiss undercover cop whose duty it was to spy on him. Her answer now was the same as it had been then.

THIRTY-FOUR

McGarvey walked into the director’s conference room at 10 A.M., and took his place at the head of the long mahogany table. All seven of his senior staff had already gathered, and Dick Adkins had started the Special National Intelligence Estimate briefing that would be ready to transmit to the White House by four this afternoon. The nation was in crisis. The CIA was on emergency footing and would stay that way 24/7 until the threat level dropped from red. For the duration, SNIEs would be generated every eight hours to keep the president and his advisers up to speed on the situation.

After his unsettling talk with Liese Fuelm, McGarvey had written his letter of resignation, printed it, and sealed it in an envelope. It would go by courier to the White House this afternoon sometime after lunch. But he’d not been able to get Liese out of his mind. It was obvious that she was still in love with him after all these years. And it was equally obvious that someone was using her feelings to get to him. The only reason he could think of was that the Swiss also suspected Prince Salman of doing something wrong, probably breaking Swiss banking laws, and they wanted the CIA’s input. They could have simply asked through normal channels. The CIA often worked with the Swiss Bureau of Federal Police and their department of external affairs, which operated as an intelligence service.

But they had sent Liese to make contact because of the connection between the prince and the CIA director’s wife. It was through the back alley, so very typically Swiss.

He felt a sense of urgency. The countdown to disaster had started, and they had very little time to stop the madness from occurring again.

Adkins handed McGarvey a buff file folder with a pair of diagonal orange stripes indicating that the material it contained was top secret. “This is the latest from Fort Meade on the bin Laden tape. I thought we’d start there.”

McGarvey, sitting with his staff around him, could see that all of them were ready to point their directorates, on his orders, in whatever direction was necessary to counter the bin Laden threat. But less than two hours ago the president of the United States had all but called him a traitor. No one person, no matter how dedicated, could be placed above the interests of the nation. Yet in this case McGarvey was convinced that we were selling our safety for the sake of Saudi oil. If that made him a traitor, then so be it. But it was a burden that only he would carry. It was the reason he’d resigned so abruptly, with no notice to give the president time to appoint his successor.

This was a working meeting. Everyone had open file folders or bound reports in front of them. Photographs and maps were spread out over the long table, along with current satellite and other technical schedules and positions, and the location and battle readiness of every asset in the armed forces, along with the current status of the military units of all our allies. Everyone was concentrating on the materials in front of them, except for Rencke, who was staring at McGarvey.

“It’s bin Laden’s voice all right, but NSA’s analysts are just as convinced as ours are that he’s wearing a disguise,” Adkins said. He was in shirtsleeves, his collar open, his tie loose. “His beard is fake, and he’s wearing stage makeup.” Like the others, Adkins hadn’t been getting much sleep the last few days, and although he was animated, he looked and sounded tired.

“Osama’s probably gotten tired of hiding out in the mountains, with the Pakistanis after him,” McGarvey said. “Do we have anything on the whereabouts of his wives and children?” He wanted to get them headed in the right direction before he sprung his news.

“We think they might be in Khartoum,” Adkins said. He turned to the CIA’s general counsel. “Carleton has something on that.”

“I got a call this morning from Raul Himanez, an old friend of mine from the Third Judicial Circuit who’s teaching law at Harvard now,” Carleton Patterson said. “He got a request from a lawyer in the Sudan who has handled bin Laden family matters in the past, about a point of international law concerning repatriation of the families of criminals convicted in absentia.” Patterson, who never took off his suit coat or loosened his tie, smiled. “Raul thought I would be interested since the point the lawyer was most interested in concerned Saudi Arabian law.”

“Could be that bin Laden is trying to get his family back into the good graces of the Saudi royal family,” Adkins said.

“I’ve asked Jeff Cook to beat the bushes in Riyadh to see if he can pick up anything at all,” David Whittaker said. He was the deputy director of operations, a stern, upright man who could have played the part of a Presbyterian minister on any pulpit and be convincing. “But that might take a day or two.”

“Keep on it,” Adkins said. “In the meantime, we’ll have to beef up our liaison staff with the FBI and INS. We can pull them from Security, but they should be Ops people. Any odd bods you can spare, Dave?”

“We’re stretched to the limit as it is,” Whittaker said. “Except for trainees.”

“We could put the Farm on hold, and use the instructors,” Adkins suggested, looking to McGarvey for approval since the move would involve the DCI’s daughter and son-in-law.

McGarvey nodded. They were good people, and they deserved the truth from him every bit as much as he demanded it from them. Yet he could not involve his people in what the White House might consider a personal vendetta. An operation strictly forbidden by the president himself. “Pair a couple of trainees with each instructor, and if you need more, pull them from Management and Security. But I’ll be assigning my daughter and her husband to a special operation.”

Rencke, who had not said a word, suddenly sat up straight as if something had just occurred to him. “Oh wow, Mac, you quit,” he blurted.

McGarvey was almost glad that Rencke had guessed the truth and had brought it up first. It would save time. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I told the president this morning, and I’m telling all of you now. My resignation is effective immediately. This morning.”

There was a stunned silence around the table. No one knew what to say. What McGarvey had sprung on them was unthinkable under the circumstances.

“There’ll be no media releases from here. That’ll be up to the White House. In the interim, Dick will take over as DCI, and Dave can double up as his number two.”

“Bullshit,” Adkins said. “You’re not just walking out, not now of all times. What’s going on?”

“You don’t want to know—”

“You’re going hunting,” Rencke interrupted. “Bang-bang, shot in the head. Bang-bang, you’re dead. Look out Mr. Khalil.”

Everyone started talking at once, and McGarvey let their voices roll around him. Their reactions were the same as the president’s. It was as if the general decided to quit in the middle of a crucial battle. He was letting his people down. It was something they would never forget, or forgive him for.

Adkins held up a hand for silence, and the clamor died down. “Is Otto right? Are you going after Khalil?”

McGarvey tried to think of a way out for his people. He owed them that much. But he also could not lie. It was a fine line. “I don’t want the Company involved. What I’m going to do will be as a private citizen. Do you understand?”

“No, I don’t,” Adkins replied angrily. “None of us do. But if you’ve identified Khalil and you mean to grab your pistol and go back out in the field after him, one-on-one, mano a mano, I’m telling you that you’re wasting your time and talents. You’re needed right here. If we know who the bastard is, we have any number of teams we can send after him. If you don’t want him arrested because of what he did to your wife in Alaska, we’ll understand—” Adkins looked to the others for approval. “We won’t even try to arrest him. We’ll find him and kill him on the spot.” Adkins spread his hands. “Whatever you want, Mac. You call the shots, and we’re here for you.” Again he looked to the others for approval, and they all were nodding. They were behind their director no matter what. “But you can’t walk out the door on a personal vendetta. You can’t.”

McGarvey took a good look around the table. It seemed as if he’d spent half his life turning his back on the people who most needed him, but this time was different, he told himself. This time his departure was necessary. He closed the bin Laden folder, shoved it across the table to Adkins, and got up.

“I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it for me. I’m assigning my daughter and son-in-law to help take care of my wife for the next few days. I don’t think the situation will last much longer. I’ll keep in contact as much as possible through Rencke’s office, but I don’t want anyone trying to track my movements. I’ve had my GPS tracker removed.”

Adkins was beside himself with anger. “For Christ’s sake, Mac, don’t do this to us.”

“The president will want to see you this afternoon. Try to stall him until morning if you can; I’ll be clear by then. But don’t put your neck on the block. He’ll want to know where I’ve gone, and you won’t have to lie to him about not knowing. He may ask you to find me, and that decision will be up to you. But the Company has its hands full. Your top priority still is to find bin Laden.”

McGarvey reflected for a moment on what else he could say to his people to ease their burden before he walked out the door. But there was nothing that he could tell them, except that he had changed his mind and would stay on as DCI. That was no longer a possibility. He was going after Khalil, and nothing on this earth could stop him.

He turned to Rencke. “Have you come up with anything new?”

Rencke shook his head. “Not since last night.”

“I’ll keep in touch then,” he told them. “Work the problem, people. It’s what you do.”

He left the conference room and went back to his office to break the news to his secretary.

THIRTY-FIVE

McGarvey could sense the change within himself as he rode home in the back of the DCI’s limousine. His staff’s reaction had been troublesome — they felt he was deserting them — but his secretary had not seemed surprised that he was quitting as DCI so he could have the freedom of movement to return to the field. He’d told his staff to work the problem because that’s what they did. His secretary understood his decision because, in her words, It was what he did.

National Guard troops were stationed at the Beltway’s entrance and exit ramps. A national hysteria was tightening its hold on Americans. Nobody wanted another 9/11, and they were willing to accept whatever it took to stop the terrorists once and for all.

Already he was transforming from a deskbound administrator/politician to a field officer. A greatly heightened sense of perceptions. Accepting the possibility that every situation he found himself in had the potential to be deadly. Trusting no one. Carrying no excess baggage. Accepting that in the end it would be only his finger on the trigger.

The limo pulled into McGarvey’s driveway a couple minutes before noon. Julien came around and opened the back door. “We’re home, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey looked up at his bodyguard, and he had a fleeting thought about Jim Grassinger, whose funeral he would miss, and about Dick Yemm before him, who was killed out on the street just a few yards from here.

His heart slowly emptied of nearly every emotion except the almost overwhelming drive to kill the terrorist Kahlil.

It had been the same when he’d been hunting VC officers in the jungles of South Vietnam.

Outside Santiago when he killed the Butcher of Chile and his wife.

Again in the flooding tunnels beneath a castle in Portugal.

In Japan.

In Moscow.

In San Francisco.

Even here in Washington.

“Are you going back to the office this afternoon, sir?” Julien asked.

“Should I stick around?”

“No, I won’t be needing you today,” McGarvey said, getting out. “In fact, you’re being reassigned. I expect Dick Adkins will be needing you. As of now he’s the new DCI.”

Julien nodded tightly; his round face and serious eyes displayed no surprise. “It’s true then; you’ve resigned?”

McGarvey wasn’t surprised either. “It’s a hell of a note if even the CIA can’t keep a secret.”

“Yes, sir,” Julien said. He cracked a slight smile. “Good hunting, Mr. Director.”

“Thanks,” McGarvey told him. They shook hands, and he looked his bodyguard in the eye. “Be careful over the next few days about who you mention that to. Some serious shit is probably going to come down around our heads.”

Julien nodded again. “Like I said, Mr. Director, good hunting. We’ll take care of the shop for you while you’re gone.”

The chief of security had notified the house detail of McGarvey’s new status, so no one was surprised when he showed up at home early, least of all Kathleen. She came to the head of the stairs when he walked in and reset the alarm. He looked up at her. She seemed brittle.

“I’ve started to pack for you, but I need to know where you’re jetting off to before I can finish,” she said, sharply. “Switzerland, for starters, I’m assuming.”

McGarvey hadn’t expected this coolness from her. She’d been moody during her pregnancy, but never sharp-tongued like in the old days. But suddenly it connected in his mind. His leaving all of a sudden and possibly going to Switzerland. She had admitted that she’d had an affair with Prince Salman, the man her husband suspected of being a terrorist. And now he was rushing off to Switzerland to be with a woman from the old days who had been in love with him. Rekindling an old flame? He’d even asked himself that same question last night. How far would he go to track down Khalil?

All the way, he’d decided. And Katy had evidently sensed something of that resolution in him. This morning she was jealous.

“I suppose it’s only fair,” Katy said. “Or is it just a part of the business that husbands don’t discuss with their wives?”

The Company shrink, Dr. Norman Stenzel, once told McGarvey that the divorce rate among CIA field officers was the highest of any profession. What spouse could hope to compete with a mate who kept odd hours, had questionable friends, and lied every day as a matter of course. It was hard on everybody, especially the wives who sooner or later developed inferiority complexes; low self-esteem made normally reasonable people sometimes say and do horrific things. The suicide rate among agents and their spouses was nineteen times the national average. Much higher even than among cops. “Don’t do this now, Katy …”

“Your tradecraft was a trifle weak,” Katy said. “Her name is Liese Fuelm. She called you when we were on the cruise, but Otto picked it up and talked to her. Of course, you know all that. The problem is Otto wasn’t quick enough, because the entire conversation was recorded on the machine in your study. It was actually quite sweet, her calling you at home instead of your office. She’s obviously concerned about you.”

McGarvey had listened to Otto’s recording of the brief conversation, and he too had heard the concern in her voice. But like Otto he’d also heard Liese’s anger and frustration. Her people were using her friendship, and possibly even love, for the CIA director to get information they thought they wouldn’t otherwise get because the prince had been a good and useful friend to the last three administrations. But in the aftermath of the kidnapping attempt and then the bin Laden tape, McGarvey had forgotten to check his answering machine.

Katy’s voice was rising. “She said to say hello. Give you a hug. How sweet is that? But she mentioned Darby and the old days.”

McGarvey started up the stairs to her.

“Goodness gracious, I’m beginning to wonder how many people don’t know about Darby and the prince and … me.” She stepped back, as if she wanted to distance herself from her husband. She looked frightened and angry and ashamed all at once.

McGarvey reached the head of the stairs and gathered her in his arms. For just a moment she resisted, but then she melted into him. “It’s not like that, Katy,” he said, stroking her hair. “It never was.”

“She sounded young.”

“She is. And she was in love with me, or thought she was. And she might still be in love with me, which the Swiss police are using to make her come to me for help.”

Katy looked up into his eyes. It was clear that she wanted to believe him, but she was frightened. She was pregnant, and she did not want to be alone again.

“Otto picked up on it, from how she sounded. You must have heard it too.”

“I sent you out of my life once; I won’t allow it to happen again.”

McGarvey wanted to turn his back on everything and simply run away with her. He’d lived for a short while on the Greek island of Serifos; he could easily live there again. He and Katy could have a simple life, happy together, in peace.

“I’m afraid, Kirk. Alaska was nothing compared to this.” She shook her head. “I don’t know how it can turn out for us … for everybody.”

“I’m not going to Switzerland. At least not now.”

“But you are leaving?”

“I’m going to Monaco.”

Katy studied his face. “He’ll be there, and you’re going to confront him. Is that it?” Her mouth twisted into a grimace. “You’re going to find him and kill him. Is that what you’re going to do?” She glanced down the hall toward the front bedroom where their security detail had set up its operational center. “You resigned and they weren’t surprised. And they’re not going away.” She turned back. “How did you find out he’d be in Monaco?”

“The Swiss are investigating him. I talked to Liese this morning. She told me where he’d be.”

Katy flared again. “Two spies exchanging secrets, or was it chums catching up on the good old days?”

There was nothing McGarvey could say.

Katy started to cry. “Well, get your story straight, because your daughter called a half hour ago all upset, wanting to know what the hell was going on. You’ll have to tell her something. She and Todd are coming for dinner again. Unless you’re leaving this afternoon.”

“Not until morning.”

“That’s something, at least.”

“I’m reassigning them to watch you,” McGarvey said. “If I miss the prince, there’s a good chance he’ll come after you again.”

Her mood suddenly swung the other way, and she almost laughed out loud. “There’s not much chance of you missing him, is there? I saw you in action on the boat.” She shook her head. “Oh no, darling, you’ll get him.”

He brushed a kiss on her cheek. “Let me help you pack. I’ll need my tux—”

“I’ll finish it,” Katy said. “Go get yourself a drink, and then gather up whatever else you’re going to need.”

“You won’t be able to reach me, so don’t try,” McGarvey told her. “If something comes up that Liz orTodd can’t handle, go to Otto; he’ll know how to get to me.”

She suddenly looked like a deer caught in some headlights. “You’re getting a second chance, Kirk. And I think this might be the most important thing you’ve ever had to do. So go … do it, and when it’s over come back to me in one piece.”

It was after midnight and the house was quiet, though lying in bed McGarvey could sense the presence of the four-man security team, awake, watchful, ready for whatever trouble might happen. Liz and Todd had agreed to move out of their carriage house and bunk here for the duration, though Liz wanted to go to Monaco with her father.

“You’re awake,” Kathleen said softly beside him. “Can’t you sleep?”

McGarvey turned his head to look at her. “I was just about to drop off.”

She smiled. “Liar.” She reached over and brushed her fingertips lightly across his eyes, his nose, and his lips. “Make love to me, Kirk.”

THIRTY-SIX

There should have been no reason for him to come here.

Khalil was irritated as he fell in line with the passengers departing the Palma-Algiers ferryboat the MV Pierre Égout, the night air heavy with the odors of rotting garbage, broken sewers, and bunker oil from the numerous cargo ships in the filthy harbor. But there were times when the firm hand of a strong leader was required.

The operation was so close now that any loose end could not be tolerated.

From a distance the harborfront and downtown Algiers looked like any normal port city. But once off the ferry and away from the sounds of the boat’s diesel engines, the noise of traffic was punctuated with the not-so-distant sounds of gunfire. All of Algeria was a nation at war with itself. At least three hundred thousand people had been slaughtered in just the last ten years. More had died before that, and more were dying every day.

It was a perfect place for al-Quaida’s primary training camps; Afghanistan and western Pakistan had become too hot. By comparison to Algiers, those countries were peaceful paradises on earth, with coalition patrols penetrating even the most remote mountain strongholds. The move had been made necessary in the aftermath of 9/11, and Khalil had little doubt that al-Quaida would be on the move again after the next attack.

After he’d cleared customs and immigration on an Algerian passport, he gathered his robes around him and stopped just inside the terminal exit, out of the flow of pedestrian traffic coming off the ferry, to study the situation on the street. Two buses, one of them the airport shuttle, were parked directly in front. Several taxicabs were lined up at the stand to the left, and across the departing/arriving passenger lanes was a black Mercedes SUV with the DGSN national police emblem on its door and a lightbar on the roof. One man in uniform was seated behind the wheel, staring straight ahead.

The message had come to him in code on the old Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) Web site maintained by Al Hayat, a Saudi newspaper in London.

We have a leak. But he is probably SDECE.Advise. It was the French intelligence service. After their difficulties with the U.S. over the Iraq War, they had become anxious to prove they were friends.

Will arrive, Khalil had responded, with instructions. Now he walked outside and went across to the Mercedes.

Like the days before 9/11, they were on a path that had a life of its own and could no longer be controlled by mortal man.

Insha’allah. God’s will.

He reached the Mercedes, opened the door, and climbed up into the passenger seat.

The driver, camp commandant Ziad Amar, turned to him and, after a beat, smiled. “Welcome, my brother,” he said in Arabic. “I am truly blessed that thou art here.” He was nervous.

“As I am, my brother,” Khalil responded, though his mind was elsewhere.

Since 1830, when the French began their conquest of the country, Algeria had become a killing ground. Nothing had changed in the interim. People were still dying in droves, and the country attracted killers. Abdelkader, who was a sherif, which meant he was a descendant of Muhammed, had fought the French for nearly sixteen years before his defeat. Ever since then the mountain passes and desert sands of Algeria had run red with blood. With a dozen different terrorist groups, not all of them sympathetic to Osama bin Laden’s al-Quaida, and with bandits mostly in the south, charismatic leaders seemed to lurk around every bend.

Except for the motorized traffic and electric lights, Algiers had not changed in principle for two hundred years. As they headed away from the ferryboat terminal, Kahlil felt a connection with all the warrior chiefs before and since Abdelkader. He had come here on a matter of blood honor. He would leave with a clear conscience.

Insha’allah.

“You had a good trip?” Amar asked respectfully. He was a slightly built man, with narrow sloping shoulders, long effeminate fingers, and when he was bulding bombs, a steady nerve.

“What is the specific trouble that you are evidently incapable of dealing with on your own?” Khalil asked, his manner mild.

“Under normal cicumstances we would have killed the man.”

“What’s stopping you? He’s a traitor; deal with him as you deal with all traitors.”

“He’s probably been sending information about our operation back to Paris for months. Since they know where we are, and yet have not moved against us, it can only mean that they do not consider us a threat to French security. Or at least not enough of a threat to send a strike force or launch missiles.”

He had a point, Khalil thought. If they killed the spy, the French might reconsider the value of the camp and launch an attack.

As they headed directly south out of the city on the Medea Highway and up into the Hatatba Mountains, Khalil considered all the options. He’d been against bin Laden releasing the tape so soon after the failure to capture Shaw. Trying to rescue the former secretary of defense would have split the American forces, making it much more difficult for them to deal with the threat of another 9/11. As it was, they were even more highly motivated now, especially the CIA, and more acutely focused. Martial law in a country as vast and as open as the U.S. was mostly a joke, but no matter how slightly, it was increasing the risk that the martyrs for Allah would be caught.

Perhaps they needed a diversion, he thought. Something to refocus the French counterterrorism efforts and therefore make the Americans blink. Amar was dispensable, as were the thirty or forty mujahideen instructors and trainees at the old headquarters of the GIA that al-Quaida had taken over a couple of years ago. But the timing would have to be absolutely correct. If the French moved too late, as late as the same day of the attack of the martyrs in the U.S., the diversion would be useless. And if the attack came too soon, the French might realize it had been nothing more than a diversion.

“Tell me more about your French traitor. How did you first come to suspect him?”

“We found his satellite phone two days ago. Such devices are strictly forbidden, of course. But rather than confront the man, we watched him. He telephoned last night, and in French he gave a very complete report on all of our training activities for the previous twenty-four hours. That is when I sent the e-mail to you.”

“At what time did he make his call?”

“Midnight. He was on guard duty; one of the instructors overhead him talking and managed to get close enough to hear everything.”

“Will he be on guard duty again this evening?”

“Yes.”

Khalil smiled. “You did the correct thing after all, my brother. We will turn the situation to our advantage tonight.”

Amar was relieved. He shot a nervous glance at Khalil. “Will you interrogate him?”

Khalil shook his head dreamily. He was no longer irritated. He was looking forward to the pleasure of the kill. “It won’t be necessary.”

“He doesn’t suspect that we’re onto him—”

Khalil dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand. “That doesn’t matter either, my friend.” He smiled again, his eyes half-closed. “You’ll see.”

Was it not said that for the man who could bend like the willow in the wind would come victory?

French Service 5 Operative François Brousseau entered his contact number on the satellite phone’s keypad with a shaking hand and waited for his call to Paris to go through. He stood on a rise behind the camp, looking down toward the Medea Highway in the distance. It was midnight, and there had been no lights on the highway for the past hour, which heightened his sense of isolation. For six weeks this place had operated as nothing more than a mujahideen training camp. Hand-to-hand combat, Stinger-missile dry-fire exercises, AK-47 live-fire practice, bomb making, infiltration and exfiltration lectures, and five times daily the prayers to Mecca.

Amar had driven away this evening, and three hours later he’d returned with Khalil himself. The second biggest prize of all behind bin Laden.

His call was answered. “Oui.”

“Ici Hasni,” he spoke softly, giving his code name. “Something new has developed. The king of spades—”

A dark presence loomed up behind him, and before Brousseau could react, something horribly sharp sliced deeply into the base of his neck where it attached to his right shoulder. His arm went instantly numb, and he dropped the phone.

Khalil pushed the French spy, stumbling nearly off-balance. “Bonsoir, Monsieur Le Traître; maintenant, il est les temps pour votre mort,” he said, and then he came at the man with the razor-sharp knife as if he were a hunter skinning the pelt from a wild animal, with no one to hear or care about the screams of the dying man.

THIRTY-SEVEN

McGarvey walked across the Place du Casino from his hotel and entered the soaring, marble-columned atrium of the Casino de Monte-Carlo a few minutes before ten on a balmy evening. The odor of money mingled in the air with cigarette smoke and expensive perfume.

He’d been in the principality since noon, but had kept a relatively low profile, waiting to see if his arrival had been noticed. But no one followed him when he took a walking tour around the harbor, nor had his room been searched while he was gone.

He found it odd that bin Laden’s warning and the president’s declaration of martial law were going all but unnoticed here. But as a waiter at a terrace café told him with a Gallic shrug, the world saw what America did after 9/11; this time, if it happens again, nothing will be different.

Nightlife was just getting into full swing, the streets packed with every style, from blue jeans and tee shirts off to play the slots; to micromini skirts and stiletto heels off to the discos; to jackets and demure cocktail dresses going to the roulette tables, international and English; and to people like McGarvey, dressed in evening clothes and heading for one-of-the-two Salles Privées, where only the well-heeled went to play mostly chemin de fer.

The newly remodeled casino had been brought back to all its Old-World magnificence, with soaring, ornately decorated ceilings from which hung massive crystal chandeliers; gold inlaid mahogany walls; rare paintings, sculptures, and other artwork, ranking the casino as an important gallery; handwoven, intricately patterned carpeting; and gilt mirrors in which patrons could admire themselves. But there were no clocks to remind them that it might be getting late.

There was no other gambling establishment like it anywhere in the world for sheer elegance. Even the best of Las Vegas or London couldn’t compare. With four main gaming rooms in two wings — the Salon de l’Europe, Salle Blanche, SalleTouzet, and the Salle Medecin — plus the two Salles Privées on a good evening when American movie stars came up from the film festival at Cannes or Arab oil sheiks were in town, tens of millions of euros would switch hands.

This evening, however, the only excitement was the presence of Prince Abdul Salman, whose 428-foot yacht MV Bedouin Wanderer had been brought by her crew up from Palma on the big island of Mallorca earlier in the day. Whenever that happened, it signaled that the prince was planning on making a miniseason on the Cote d’Azur, and this meant action, because money always attracted money and beautiful women. The combination was glittering.

McGarvey stopped at the caisse to confirm that CitiBank had followed up on his instructions to establish a line of credit with the casino under his work name of Robert Brewster in the amount of one million dollars. Rencke had suggested using CIA funds, but this was personal and McGarvey was no longer on the payroll.

The head caissier, all discreet smiles, had been expecting him. “Oui, Monsieur Brewster. Everything is in order. Do you wish to make a withdrawal?”

“Ten thousand,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be in the Salles Privées.”

The caissier passed ten one-thousand-euro plaques across. “Naturellement, Monsieur. Bonne fortune.”

McGarvey pocketed his plaques, then sauntered across the atrium and into the Salon de l’Europe, very busy with gamblers at the roulette wheels and the trente et quarante tables. This was the very end of the European vacation season, and most of the casino patrons were dressed in blue jeans and sneakers or sandals. Someone hit their number at one of the roulette wheels, and a cheer went up.

Passing through the Salle Blanche with its noisy slot machines and video poker games, into the Salle Touzet with its raucous craps tables and relatively subdued blackjack games, he came to the much more discreet Salle Médecin, which until the remodeling had been the old Salle Privée, where the big money played.

This room was in the east wing of the building, and McGarvey stopped just inside the doorway for a moment before he angled across to the entrance into the two private gaming rooms. A velvet rope blocked the opening. A security officer dressed in a tuxedo smiled as McGarvey walked up.

“Good evening, Monsieur Brewster,” he said, pleasantly, as he unhooked the rope and stood aside. “Bon fortune.”

“Merci,” McGarvey said, passing through directly into an ornately gilded and mirrored small room that could have been the interior of a jewel box.

The Salles Privées were arranged to the left and right, and they were busy this evening. A muted hum seemed to stay within the confines of the two rooms, as if the privileged class here did not want anyone outside their circle to hear what they were saying.

McGarvey caught a glimpse of Prince Salman seated at one of the chemin de fer tables in the left room. His pistol had come across in a sealed diplomatic package, which he hadn’t opened until he’d arrived at the Hotel de Paris across the Place from the casino. Now that he’d confirmed Salman was here, he fought the urge to return to his hotel, get his gun, and come back to wait until the prince left the casino to take him out.

It would be easy. It would be swift and sure and, most of all, clean.

The patrons were dressed in evening clothes, most of the women young, very beautiful, and bedecked in diamonds and haute couture. All but two of the ten players seated around the prince’s tableau were men, and there were no vacant seats.

McGarvey fixed a slight smile on his face, walked in, and took his place behind the brass rail at the fringe of the crowd. A waitress carrying a tray of champagne came by, and he took a glass as Salman said something and a murmur of approval arose from the onlookers.

“La banque est cent mille,” Salman announced. As the banker for the moment, the dealing shoe was in front of him. He had just announced that he would be the bank for one hundred thousand euros, about $125,000.

Twenty years ago, at the height of the Arab oil stranglehold on the world, such a bet would have been very conservative in a place like this. But nowadays even in the Salles Privées, bets above fifty thousand were increasingly rare, except at the very height of the season.

The game was played at a kidney-shaped table, the players seated on the outside rim across from the croupier, who raked in the cards. Seated behind him on a tall chair was the chef de parti, or umpire.

Salman had offered to play anyone or any combination of players around the table for up to the full amount of the bank. If someone wanted a piece of the action, he or she might push a pile of betting plaques forward. If a player wanted the entire bank, he or she would announce, “Banco.” If it was too rich a bet, that hand would be canceled and a smaller bank offered.

An expectant hush fell over the table.

Salman was seated with his back to the door. A young woman wearing a dazzling white off-the-shoulder evening dress, a dozen carats of diamonds around her long slender neck and a matching bracelet around one wrist, stood behind him, one hand delicately placed on his shoulder. She bent down and whispered something in his ear; he looked up and she kissed the side of his face.

McGarvey put his champagne glass aside and moved past the onlookers and through the opening in the rail at the opposite end of the table from Salman. “Banco,” he said. He nodded pleasantly to the chef de parti. “That is, if someone would relinquish a seat for me.”

An older American woman, seated in the number two position next to a man who was probably her husband, looked up at McGarvey with a rueful smile. She was slender and put together as if she might have been a model sometime in the past. She had a very small stack of black plaques, which were worth a thousand euros each. She scooped them up. “Take my place,” she offered. “The prince is just as lucky as he is charming.”

“Thank you,” McGarvey said, holding her chair, and when she got up he kissed her hand.

“Kill the smug bastard,” she whispered in McGarvey’s ear. Her husband started to get up too, but she waved him back. “Stick around; I’m just going to the ladies’.”

McGarvey turned to face the prince for the first time, and for what seemed like a very long moment he had no idea who he was looking at. Salman had Khalil’s eyes; though the prince’s were pale brown and the terrorist’s were jet black, they were the same shape, as were their faces and general build. Beyond that, McGarvey couldn’t be sure that they were the same man.

The way Salman held himself, his attitude and the expression in his eyes and on his mouth were that of a Saudi royal: he expressed a vague, indifferent amusement, as if he considered himself at the center of the world and only those important enough to be noticed by him understood it. With a slackness that was almost effete, perhaps effeminate, he was the epitome of an ultrarich, bored playboy. The attitude was a studied one, but it was a badge of honor among a certain class.

Khalil had been intense, his movements and actions quick, precise, and sure. There’d been nothing vague about him. Nothing indifferent. The only attitude he’d seemed to share with the prince was the expectation that whoever he faced knew who was the center of the world, knew who was the superior intellect and the superior force.

All that passed through McGarvey’s head in an instant, as he nodded pleasantly to Salman and then took the plushy upholstered seat still warm from the American woman.

“Good evening, Mr … Brewster,” Salman said, languidly. “Did I hear you correctly — you have offered banco?”

McGarvey nodded, though he knew that his one-million-dollar line of credit would not pose any serious threat to the Saudi prince. At some point one flip of the cards could end it. This would have to be more a game of psychology than of cards. McGarvey turned to the chef de parti. “May I assume that the gentleman banker is good for the money?”

A gasp rose from the players and the onlookers who’d heard the gauche remark. McGarvey had been less than polite; he’d been insulting.

Salman’s mouth tightened. “It is I who should be asking you the question.”

“My credit is on file with the caissier. I don’t believe anyone in Monaco would question my character or my honesty.”

“You are an honest American here in Monaco then, doing what?”

“Hunting down rabid animals,” McGarvey replied, sharply.

The chef de parti intervened before Salman could say anything else and thus escalate what already seemed to be unacceptable behavior for the salle. “Both gentlemen have sufficient funds to cover the bet. May we proceed?”

Salman slid four cards in quick succession from the shoe, slapping them on the table and turning them over for everyone to see. They were the discards: a king, a ten, a natural nine, and a three.

The croupier raked in the cards and placed them in a tray.

Salman slid two cards out of the shoe, which the croupier raked across to McGarvey, and then dealt himself two cards.

McGarvey glanced at his cards, then looked up at Salman and snorted derisively. “Neuf,” he said, flipping his cards face up. They were a jack and a nine, which was a natural win unless the banker also had a nine.

Salman turned his cards up. They were a five and a three.

McGarvey laughed again. “Close, but no cigar,” he said boorishly. “Too bad.”

The croupier raked in the cards, then started to slide ten plaques, each worth ten thousand euros, across the table, but McGarvey made a brushing motion with his hand. “Let’s double it — that is, if the prince has the courage of his Bedouin ancestors.”

Already word had begun to spread through the casino that something was going on in one of the Salles Privées, and the room was completely filled. Someone brought McGarvey a glass of champagne, but he ignored it, his eyes locked on Salman’s, goading the man, and yet he still wasn’t sure that the prince was Khalil.

Normally, the shoe would have passed to the player on the banker’s right, but the chef de parti offered no objections when Salman passed it across to McGarvey.

“Deux cents milles,” McGarvey said.

“Banco,” Salman replied, immediately.

McGarvey slid two cards out of the shoe, which the croupier raked to Salman, then dealt himself two cards.

Salman smiled and flipped his cards over. They were a pair of fours, a natural eight that could be beaten only by a nine.

McGarvey flipped his cards over without taking his eyes off Salman. “They were a six and a deuce. A tie.”

“Quatre cents milles,” McGarvey announced even before the croupier had raked in the cards.

“Banco,” Salman said. He gave McGarvey a forced smile. “It’s a dangerous game you are playing, Mr. Brewster.”

“Yes, it is,” McGarvey agreed. “Someone could get hurt.” Without looking down at the shoe, he dealt out two cards for Salman and two for himself.

McGarvey looked at his cards. He’d dealt himself a queen and a seven.

Salman looked at his cards, and shrugged. “Carte,” he said, which meant his hand totaled five or less.

McGarvey dealt the prince the six of hearts faceup.

Salman shrugged again, and he flipped his down cards over to show a jack and a king. His hand totaled six.

McGarvey threw his head back and laughed, then gave Salman a vicious look of satisfaction as he turned his cards over. “Sept,” he said. “I win, you lose.” He laughed. “Again.”

The young woman with Salman reached down to kiss him on the cheek, but he brushed her away like she was an annoying insect. “Eight hundred thousand?” He directed his question to the chef de parti.

McGarvey shook his head, and slid the shoe to the man on his right. “I came looking for a challenge, not a slaughter.”

Salman turned, his eyes narrow, a slight sardonic smile on his thin lips. “Perhaps another time, then? Another, more interesting game?”

“I’m looking forward to it.” McGarvey got up, tossed two black plaques to the croupier and chef de parti, and walked out, the crowd parting respectfully for him.

The opening shot had been fired, and walking back to his hotel McGarvey found that he was actually looking forward to whatever came next. He wasn’t yet certain that Salman and Khalil were one and the same, but he was certain that he would kill the man, and do it very soon.

THIRTY-EIGHT

McGarvey was having a late breakfast on the balcony in his suite when Salman’s secretary telephoned at nine. “The prince would like you to join him aboard the yacht this morning to continue your conversation, then perhaps take a short cruise this afternoon.”

McGarvey smiled. Salman was reacting exactly the way a man with an overinflated ego would act. “What time should I be there?”

“A car and driver are at the front door of your hotel now.”

“Tell the prince I’d be happy to join him,” McGarvey said, and he hung up the phone.

From where he sat, he could see Salman’s yacht docked at the outer pier just inside the breakwater across the bay in La Condamine. A French Alouette helicopter was parked on the ship’s afterdeck, but the distance was too great for McGarvey to make out much detail, except that the ship was very large and all her flags were flying as if the prince was celebrating something.

Which, McGarvey mused, he was if he was the terrorist Khalil.

McGarvey took his time finishing his coffee and croissants and the Herald Tribune before he took a leisurely shower and got dressed in white slacks, a soft yellow, light, V-neck sweater, and tasseled loafers without socks. He debated arming himself, but decided against it. This invitation to the yacht was too open and public a move for anything untoward to happen, unless it was an accident, for which a pistol would be no defense.

The car was a pearl-white Mercedes S500 with Spanish plates, and if the very large German driver was impatient for having been kept waiting, he did not show it as he opened the rear door.

“There was a pretty girl with the prince at the casino last night. Tall, blonde. Will she be aboard this morning?” McGarvey asked.

The driver nodded. “That would be Inge Poulsen, the prince’s social secretary.”

McGarvey snapped his fingers, as he’d forgotten something. “Give me a minute,” he said, and he walked back into the hotel.

He went to the concierge, an attractive young woman in a light blue blazer with the hotel’s crest on the breast pocket. She looked up, smiling. “Good morning, Monsieur Brewster. How may I be of service?”

“How soon can you have a dozen roses delivered to Prince Salman’s yacht?”

“How soon would you like them delivered?”

“Within fifteen minutes.”

Her smile broadened only slightly. “That won’t be a problem, sir.” She took a card from a drawer, and handed it and a pen across to McGarvey.

“They’re to be delivered in person to Mademoiselle Inge Poulsen,” McGarvey said. He wrote on the card as the concierge dialed a number. From an admirer. Kirk.

She said something into the phone, then nodded and hung up. “The flowers will be delivered to the yacht within fifteen minutes.”

McGarvey handed her the card and a one-hundred-euro note, then put on his sunglasses and went back out to the car and driver Salman had sent for him. The docks were less than one thousand meters as the crow flies, but they had to skirt the bay, and traffic was heavy, so it took nearly ten minutes to get to the yacht.

The morning was warm. Only a slight breeze fluttered the flags that had been run up on halyards along the port and starboard and from the bow to the masthead above the bridge deck. The yacht was a Feadship, built in Holland. At 428 feet on deck, she was sleek, with a long tapering bow, a sharply sloping superstructure with sweeping curved lines, until the stern, where a wide sundeck overlooked an even wider helipad.

In the bright sunlight the brilliant white hull sparkled like a precious stone under a jeweler’s lamp. No other yacht in the harbor came close to the splendor of the Bedouin Wanderer, and in fact, Salman’s ship was larger than Adnan Khashoggi’s before him, and even larger than the yacht on which Aristotle Onassis had hosted parties with his wife Jacqueline.

A ship’s officer, dressed in an immaculate white uniform shirt and shorts, waited at the head of the boarding ladder, but McGarvey ignored him and sauntered down the dock to the stern of the yacht for a better look at the helicopter. It looked new, its registration numbers were Spanish, and although the rotors were still tied down, the windshield was not covered and the engine air intake ports were not blocked. Nor were the tips of the rotors sheathed, as they would be if the ship was preparing to sail this afternoon with the chopper on deck.

A florist’s van pulled up behind the Mercedes, and the delivery boy brought a long flower box across to the yacht. He said something to the officer, who gave McGarvey a questioning look, and then led the boy aft and up to the sundeck above the helipad.

After a moment or two the delivery boy followed the officer back to the main deck and left the ship. In the meantime, Inge Poulsen, the beautiful woman from the night before, came to the rail of the sundeck. She wore only the thong bottom of a white bikini. Her breasts were small, her shoulders and neck narrow, her face tiny with high cheekbones, and when she lifted her sunglasses, McGarvey could see that her eyes were very large.

She had taken the roses out of the box and held them to her nose.

McGarvey raised his sunglasses. “Bon matin, Mademoiselle. Le parfum c’est agreable?”

“Très bien, merci. Mais vous êtes trop aimable.”

“Not at all,” McGarvey said. He nodded to her, then walked back to the gangway and boarded the yacht. “I believe that I’m expected,” he told the officer who looked nervous, as if he was expecting trouble.

“The prince has been awaiting your arrival, sir. Are you familiar with the yacht?”

McGarvey glanced through the big windows into the main saloon, and shook his head. “Never been here before.” He looked at the officer. “Where is everybody?”

“There are no guests this morning,” the officer said. He pointed the way aft. “The prince is in the salle de gym. I’ll show you.”

McGarvey almost laughed. On a boat such as this, owned by a man such as Salman, there would not simply be an exercise room. He followed the officer beneath the stairs that led up to the helipad and sundeck, through a door, and down a short, plushly carpeted and expensively decorated passageway to a second door.

“Just here, Monsieur,” the officer said, opening the door and stepping aside to allow McGarvey to pass.

Two figures dressed in white jackets and knickers, mesh masks covering their faces, were fencing in the large gymnasium that was located directly beneath the helipad. The port, starboard, and forward bulkheads were mirrored floor-to-ceiling, but the aft bulkhead was a solid sheet of floor-to-ceiling tinted glass that curved across the entire stern. Fencing blades and masks and other equipment were lined up on a rack against one wall, and state-of-the-art exercise equipment trimmed in gold was scattered here and there around the room, except for on the fencing strip that was two meters wide and ran the length of the gym. The effect was stunning; it was a hedonist’s pleasure palace, like the yacht’s exterior, very expensively done, but gaudy and without taste.

The taller, much bulkier fencer, who McGarvey took to be Salman, was much better than his opponent; his footwork was superior, his hand speed dazzling, and his technique of the blade very strong, very aggressive.

Twice the smaller fencer was forced backward under Salman’s onslaught, the second time stumbling and almost falling to the deck when Salman moved in with a counter six, viciously disarming his opponent and sending the épée clattering into a stationary bike.

Salman ripped off his mask and tossed it aside. His face was screwed up into a state of extreme disdain and anger, as if the person he’d just beaten was nothing more than an insignificant insect who’d had the audacity to challenge him. He said something sharp and harsh in Arabic.

His opponent stumbled back another step under the verbal onslaught, then slowly removed her mask to reveal that she was just a round-faced girl, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen. Her eyes filled with tears. She spotted McGarvey, and immediately turned away in embarrassment. She said something to Salman that sounded like an apology, then hurried away through a door on the opposite side of the gym.

The prince studied McGarvey’s reflection in the mirrors, then turned, a wry smile on his handsome face, the épée held loosely in his right hand. “I expected you sooner.”

McGarvey shrugged. “I was engaged, doing my sums.”

The prince’s smile widened. “It was only money.”

Khalil wasn’t a man who expected to lose, and McGarvey figured that was another point of similarity between the two men — if they were two. “There was that too.” He nodded toward the door the young girl had left by. “Do you treat all your women that way?”

Salman’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing in Monaco undercover, Mr. McGarvey?”

McGarvey shrugged again. “Looking for some action, like last night.”

Salman was amused. “Your luck would have turned, and you would have lost your million dollars.”

“I don’t think so. I’m not some young girl you can slap around and intimidate.” McGarvey grinned, trying to goad the man. “I fight back.”

Salman was like a chameleon; none of the anger directed at the girl remained. His color had returned to normal, and his composure was nearly perfect, except that his fingers tightened on the épée handle. “If you must know, Sofia is my daughter. I am raising her to be strong.”

McGarvey knew Salman had no daughter that age. “The Bedouin way with their girls, is that it? Raise them to be strong, or else leave them exposed in the desert to die. Better six weakling sons than one daughter, no matter how able.”

Salman’s jaw clenched very slightly. “I would have thought that a man of your position … and talents … would have remained on the job in Washington after what happened in Alaska, and then bin Laden’s warning to your country.”

“Perhaps I’m still on the job.”

The prince snorted derisively. “You’re desperate for our oil, and yet you continue to accuse us of financing terrorism. I’ve heard it all before, and frankly little men like you are becoming tiresome. I can understand why Haynes fired you.”

For just a second McGarvey could almost believe that Salman was innocent. A man didn’t have to be a gentleman to be not guilty. But all of the evidence that Otto had collected on Khalil and Salman’s movements was too much to be nothing more than a fantastic run of coincidences. And looking into the man’s eyes, talking to him now, seeing the slip in his self-control when he’d been angry with the young girl, his bearing and conceit, the way he held himself, the way he spoke, his words, his tone of voice — all of it was Khalil.

Yet McGarvey could not be certain his belief that Salman was Khalil was not just the product of his wishing it to be so.

Alaska weighed heavily on his mind. He could not erase the images of the young mother and her infant dying in the water, and of Khalil’s hands on Katy.

“Actually I resigned,” McGarvey said, realizing that he would have to push the prince into making a mistake before he could be sure.

Salman’s expression darkened. He seemed to be on edge, his mood brittle. “You think that bin Laden is getting his money from Saudi Arabia, and that I’m brokering his connections?”

“He’s run through his own fortune, and his family has cut him off. He’s getting money from someone.”

Salman nodded. “There are a lot of wealthy Arabs who aren’t in love with America. Bin Laden has no lack of admirers. If he’s still alive. But then your FBI has already identified many of his banking connections. So that can’t be the real reason you’ve targeted me. So what could it be? Why are you here?”

“I’d have thought you would have figured that out by now,” McGarvey said easily. “I’m here to kill you.”

THIRTY-NINE

A look of wonderment crossed Salman’s face. But the change of expression did not erase his arrogance or his amusement. “You have quite a reputation, but you’re not armed at the moment, so unless you mean to tear me limb from limb with your bare hands, how do you propose doing it?”

“I can think of any number of methods,” McGarvey said, his voice hard and flat. “A bullet in your brain tonight would work.”

“Because you think I’m brokering money for bin Laden?”

“Because I think that you’re the terrorist Khalil.”

Salman turned suddenly and walked a few paces away toward the opposite end of the strip, his movements smooth, almost balletic. He tapped the point of his épée on the floor, making a small menacing noise like a creature scratching to get in, or the warning rattles of a diamondback. “I would have thought the man, if he exists and if he’s still alive, would be in hiding with bin Laden in the Afghan mountains for the moment, considering their warning to America.” He laughed. “But that’s not the real reason you’re here. To find a terrorist. You’re here for revenge, aren’t you?” He turned back. “You might as well admit it, you know. I had you figured out the moment you showed up at the casino last night and challenged my bank, then insulted me in front of my friends.” He shook his head ruefully. “This is all about Washington — what was it, ten or twelve years ago when I made love to your wife?”

“You worked for the Russians then,” McGarvey said, conversationally, though he wanted to rip the bastard’s throat out. He walked over to the rack of fencing equipment and selected one of the épées. “KGB General Baranov,” he said, over his shoulder. “An interesting man.”

“He made love to your wife too,” Salman said, matter-of-factly.

McGarvey had feared that one thing for a very long time, until he’d come to the conclusion that either it wasn’t true, or if it was, it no longer mattered. “No,” he said, turning back. “Just you and Darby.” He flicked the blade with a strong motion of his wrist, as if the weapon were a steel bullwhip. It had a solid feel. An Olympic-class weapon. He looked up. Salman was watching him warily.

“Are you so sure?”

McGarvey nodded, “Yes. But you got part of why I’m here right.” He walked back to the strip. “Revenge.” He came to attention, his left foot at a ninety-degree angle directly behind his right foot, his left hand at his side, the épée pointed at the floor to his right.

Salman was mildly amused and it showed on his face. “Do you mean to fence me in street shoes?” he asked. He had a slight smile at the corners of his broad mouth. “No masks? Could be a dangerous game, if this is how you mean to kill me. I’m quite a good fencer.”

McGarvey wasn’t surprised that Salman was keeping up his act. He’d have to be good to have eluded detection all these years. “Actually my wife was in love with Darby Yarnell, or thought she was, and I suspect that you took advantage of her like you probably do with all your women. What do you prefer: booze, drugs, intimidation, rape?”

Salman’s face darkened with a sudden anger that passed as quickly as it formed. He laughed. “You’re trying to get me mad by insulting me.” He shrugged. “That’s a valid approach. Some fencers might fall for it. Get mad, make a mistake. But look here, are you sure that you don’t want to at least put on some decent shoes? I’m sure we have your size.”

McGarvey brought his épée straight up, the shiny bell guard just in front of his mouth, and then with a crisp movement snapped it to the right in the traditional salute before a bout. “I’m curious about how much your uncle, the crown prince, knows. The family has to be walking a very fine line between supplying us with oil while funding the terrorists trying to bring us down. If they go too easy on us, their neighbors will hate them, but they openly support scumbags like bin Laden. Riyadh might become our next Baghdad.”

Salman returned the salute. “What do you have?” he asked. “Where’s your proof?”

McGarvey moved his left foot back a half step, flexed his knees slightly, and brought his épée loosely on guard. “I know you. We faced each other when you tried to kidnap Don Shaw.”

“I’ve never been to Alaska in my life,” Salman said. He too came on guard, his stance relaxed, almost nonchalant.

“You were in Vancouver.” McGarvey moved forward, feinting to the left. Salman moved back easily, not accepting the feint so when McGarvey presented his blade in six, Salman parried it lightly, not bothering to riposte.

“If you know that much, you must also know that all of my time was accounted for.”

“There were gaps,” McGarvey said. He leaped forward explosively in a perfectly executed advance ballestra, taking Salman’s blade in a counter six. When the prince disengaged, he returned with a strong opposition in four in order to open a line of attack, but then retreated out of distance when Salman disengaged again with lightning speed.

Salman didn’t bother to follow up with a counterattack. It was obvious that he was the superior fencer, or thought he was, because he was toying with McGarvey, not really taking the bout seriously.

“When I was in bed asleep,” Salman said.

McGarvey moved to the left edge of the strip and lowered the tip of his blade as if he were angling for an attack to the foot, leaving his own unprotected face open. The épée tips were equipped with buttons that, when pressed against a target would close an electrical circuit, thus registering a score. The tips were not sharp, but they were small enough in area that the blades would easily penetrate an eyeball and stab a fatal wound six inches inside the brain. Or, with enough pressure, the tip could be forced through an unprotected throat.

“There were longer periods than that when you were unaccounted for.”

“What am I accused of doing?” Salman asked mildly. “Sneaking out the back exit of my hotel, flying up to Alaska, perhaps parachuting down to the boat to face a couple hundred crew and passengers, plus you, and then when it was all over somehow fly back to Vancouver, sneak up to my hotel room, and order breakfast?”

With lightning fast speed, moving nothing but his hand and arm, he thrust his point at McGarvey’s face, leaving his own left flank open, figuring that it wouldn’t matter because even an extremely hard touch there would do him little or no harm.

It was exactly what McGarvey had hoped the superior fencer’s arrogance would lead him to do. At the last possible moment, the épée less than an inch from his right eye, McGarvey reached up with his left hand, slapped the blade away, and drove his own épée upward to Salman’s exposed neck, stopping just short of a penetrating thrust.

For several long moments the two men stood in tableau, neither moving, until finally Salman let his épée drop to the floor and slowly spread his hands. “It would seem that the director of Central Intelligence does not play by the rules. But what now? His hand is stayed. Why?”

McGarvey was back on the stern deck of the Spirit, and he could hear Khalil talking to Katy. You will look good in black, madam.

He’d been too formal, as if he hadn’t known her, or hadn’t remembered.

His voice had been different.

McGarvey stepped back, studied Salman’s amused expression for a second, then saluted.

He wanted this. For the young mother and infant, for the other passengers and crew, for what had been done to Katy aboard the cruise ship and twelve years ago in Washington.

But he couldn’t be sure.

Salman’s sardonic grin widened. “What is it, Mr. McGarvey? Has your taste for blood left you? Or were the tales of your adventures in the Alaska wilds, coming to the rescue of women and children, mere public relations?”

“I owe you an apology,” McGarvey said.

Salman laughed. “Get off my boat while you’re still able. If ever we meet again, my hand will not be stayed. I will kill you.”

McGarvey tossed his épée aside, and walked out the way he had come in, conscious that Salman had come to the door to watch him leave.

He couldn’t be sure. Not one hundred percent.

Inge Poulsen, now wearing a sarong, a rose in her hair, waltzed down from the sundeck, her pretty face lit up in a bright smile that immediately faded when she spotted McGarvey at the gangway. “Arrêtez. You can’t leave yet. I must know about the flowers.”

McGarvey could see Salman at the door to the aft passageway, but the young woman could not. “Je suis désolé, Mademoiselle. But I must go.”

“Non—” she protested, but Salman cut her off almost as if he were mildly reprimanding a naughty child.

“The monsieur is leaving, Inge. Now I want you to return to your cabin, like a good girl, or I’ll have you tossed overboard tonight.”

McGarvey turned slowly to look at Salman standing in the doorway. Toss the woman and child overboard. They were Khalil’s words aboard the cruise ship. And now they were Salman’s words. Same inflection, same voice.

FORTY

Day or night no longer had any significance for Liese, so that even now driving toward the chalet in the bright early afternoon, she was having trouble coming away from the erotic dreams she’d been having about Kirk. She could feel his body next to hers, hear his voice in her ear, feel his breath on her neck. She felt disconnected from reality.

The small boats with their brightly colored spinnakers were back on the lake, and as she came up the gravel driveway she spotted Gertner’s car along with several others parked beside the chalet. It looked as if someone was throwing a party, or a conference, and the worry that something had happened to Kirk spiked.

Gertner’s call had come a few minutes before noon while she has having lunch in her apartment. McGarvey was in Monaco. He and the prince had actually come face-to-face at the casino, where McGarvey publicly insulted the man. And this morning McGarvey was actually aboard the prince’s yacht.

“How do you know this?” Liese had asked.

“The French are keeping an eye on things. As a favor.”

“Then you have what you wanted,” Liese said, tiredly. Gertner had fired her after her warning to Kirk, and she had gone home to try to divorce herself from caring. But that was impossible, and that’s when the erotic dreams had begun in earnest. “It no longer concerns me.”

“But it does,” Gertner cried. “We need your help out here.” He lowered his voice as if he was sharing a secret with her. “Liebchen, listen, I know that we’ve had our differences. It’s only natural, with two strongwilled and … I admit it … bull-headed individuals to clash swords. But I need you, Liebchen. Kirk needs you.”

“Has something happened to him?” Liese had demanded, but Gertner would tell her nothing further, except that she was back on the job. She had a second chance, which was a favor Gertner did not hand out every day.

She drove around to the south side of the chalet, out of sight from the Salman compound across the bay, and pulled up behind a Bureau of Technical Services van, the roof of which bristled with high-frequency communications antennae. In the past two days Gertner had called up a lot of support. This was important to him, and as he had explained to her ad nauseam, to Switzerland.

Ziegler was waiting for her at the kitchen door, his thick brown hair disheveled, his eyes red. He looked exhausted. “Thank God you’re here. Maybe you can get him to calm down,” he said, stepping aside for her.

“Has something happened to McGarvey? He wouldn’t say on the phone.”

Ziegler shook his head. “That’s what he wants you to find out. But he keeps saying that we’ve finally got the bastard.”

The kitchen was a filthy mess of dirty dishes and filled garbage bags stacked in a corner. The great room smelled of sweat, schnapps, and sweet pipe tobacco. Besides Gertner, LeFevre, and the translator, there were four other men she didn’t recognize. And there was more electronic equipment stacked on the long table, on top of aluminum carrying cases, and on the odd chair placed here and there. Wires connecting the equipment with several computers crisscrossed the floor.

Gertner sat at one of the computer terminals, intently listening to something on headphones. One of the technicians motioned toward the door. Gertner turned, and when he spotted Liese in the hall, he tore off his headphones and jumped up. “What took you so long? You’re not being followed, for heaven’s sake, are you?”

Liese tried to gauge his mood, which seemed more mercurial than normal. He looked tired, as did Ziegler. They’d all apparently been going at it around the clock since she’d been kicked out two days earlier. But Gertner looked worried too, as if not everything was going his way. He had set himself to go up against Kirk McGarvey, using Prince Salman as bait. What he had not counted on was McGarvey’s strength and the prince’s apparent deviousness. Gertner had been in over his head from the beginning, and he was finally starting to realize it.

The translator, Sergeant Hoenecker, looked at Liese with a mild smirk, as if he’d known all along that she couldn’t help herself from coming back any time Gertner snapped his fingers, because she was in love with Kirk McGarvey. It was a power that all of them held over her. And the bastards were right: she couldn’t help herself, as stupid as it was.

“No, I’m not being followed,” Liese said, stepping carefully over the wires. “What’s going on here? What’s the TMS van doing out back?”

“That was our big break,” Gertner said. “I can tell you with all modesty that had I not thought of a satellite intercept, we wouldn’t be at this point.” He looked to the others for approval. Hoenecker gave him a nod.

“I’m here, like you asked. What piece of intelligence vital to Swiss national security have you turned up? And has something happened to McGarvey?”

“So far as we know, he and his friend are just dandy,” Gertner said. “But I want you to know that I’m willing to bury the hatchet here. Let bygones be bygones. We have work to do, you and I, and yes, it is vital to Swiss national security.” He shook his head as if he were saddened by the naughtiness of a little girl. “You are a capable police officer, Liebchen, but if you don’t mind one piece of advice from an older, more experienced man to a rising, but impetuous star, you need to get in control of your emotions.”

Liese winced inside. He was such a smarmy bastard, she could hardly stand to be in the same room with him, let alone have him for a boss. But she needed him if she was going to help Kirk. “It’s a feminine thing,” she said.

“Of course it is.” Gertner agreed, wholeheartedly, as if he was relieved that she was finally beginning to see reason. “I’m glad you’re here, because we need your help. It’s a delicate situation.”

Liese looked at the headphones Gertner was holding. “Is it another telephone intercept?”

“Yes, it is,” Gertner said. “The prince is in Monaco, and so is your Mr. McGarvey, which you saw fit to insure. What you might not appreciate is that the prince is staying aboard his quite ostentatious yacht, and McGarvey has been there to visit.”

“The Americans suspect that the prince might be the terrorist Khalil,” Liese said. “McGarvey is there to investigate him.”

Gertner smiled indulgently. “In what capacity? Certainly not as the director of Central Intelligence. Men in that lofty position do not carry on in the field. But of course he resigned or was fired, and yet he’s aboard the prince’s yacht. Curious, no?”

“Kirk is there to kill him.”

Gertner gave her a wary nod, as if that idea had already occurred to him, but he wanted to see where she would take it.

“What about this call?” She asked.

“There were actually two of them from the yacht in the Monaco harbor within one minute of each other. The first was to his chief of security here at the lake house, informing his people that he might be gone longer than he had expected. In fact, he’s sailing tonight for his house in Corsica. On the south shore near the village of Bonifacio. There was mention of his estates in the file I sent you.”

“Did he mention Kirk?” Liese asked.

“Not by name. But he tells his contact that he may be entertaining an interesting guest.” Gertner was perplexed. He shook his head. “The prince was being coy, and for the life of us we cannot fathom why Nor can we fathom his next remarks.” Gertner picked up a printout of the telephone intercept. “‘Have the compound made ready,’” Gertner read. “That’s the prince talking. ‘Have the compound made ready. Fully ready.’” He looked up. “What do you suppose he meant by that last part?”

Liese’s head was spinning. McGarvey was stalking Salman. He had traveled to Monaco to put a bullet in the man’s brain. Apparently the prince knew about it and was setting up a trap at his Bonifacio compound. “The guest he’s talking about may not be McGarvey.”

“Perhaps not, unless you consider the possibility that McGarvey intends to go to Bonifacio with the prince, where the two of them will hunker down until this bin Laden insanity unfolds itself.”

“He would expose himself as a traitor,” Liese shot back. “Whatever you think of him, he is not stupid.”

“Anything but,” Gertner agreed. “After the attack on America, McGarvey could emerge a lone patriot who valiantly tried to stop the terrorists, but who failed in his mission.”

“But why?” Liese practically screamed.

Gertner smiled. “That, Liebchen, is exactly what I want you to ask your Mr. McGarvey.”

Ziegeler came over and handed Liese a cell phone. “He’s staying at the Hotel de Paris under the name Robert Brewster. His number will dial automatically if you press one.”

“Call him, Liebchen,” Gertner prompted. “Perhaps you could suggest a visit. You know, old friends talking over old times. He respects you. Trusts you. After all, it was you who tipped him off about the prince coming to Monaco.”

Now that she was clear in her mind about what Kirk was doing, she wasn’t about to hinder him. Yet she was a Swiss federal cop, and she had responsibilities to her family, most of whom still lived down in Morges, near Lausanne. Her mother and sister didn’t understand her, but her father and grandfather did. She was the first woman in the family to do something with her life other than have babies and maintain a household. Watch your tongue scheibelpuf, and you’ll stay out of trouble, her father told her when she went off to the police academy in Bern. He was proud of her. And always remember first and foremost that you are Swiss.

She started to raise the phone when Gertner held her off.

“Understand something, Sergeant Fuelm. Should you take it upon yourself to favor this man over your duties, should you warn him that he is under investigation by this department, you will be subject to immediate arrest and prosecution under the Secrets Act.”

Liese pressed “one” on the keypad, surprised at how frightened Gertner was. Proving Kirk was a traitor to his own country would make Gertner’s career, and would satisfy his revenge for what happened to poor Marta, but if he was wrong he would lose everything. He would be guilty of poor judgment, a characteristic that the Swiss did not admire.

The call went through to the front desk of the hotel, and Liese asked to be connected to Monsieur Brewster’s room. After a few seconds the operator came back.

“I am sorry, Mademoiselle, Monsieur Brewster does not answer his telephone. Would you care to leave a message?”

Gertner held one cup of the headset to an ear. He was monitoring the call. He gave Liese a warning look.

“Tell him that Liese telephoned and would like to talk to him about an old friend.”

“Oui, Mademoiselle.”

Liese disconnected and handed the cell phone to Ziegler, knowing that if Salman were leaving, Kirk would follow him. Monaco was far too public a venue, and the Monegasque police were famed for their ruthless efficiency with anyone breaking the sanctity of the principality. But Corsica was a different story. A man could fall to his death off one of the cliffs, and it might be days before the body was discovered. She turned to leave.

“What was that about an old friend?” Gertner demanded.

Liese turned back. “I was talking about Marta. He was in love with her, you know.”

“Where are you going?”

Liese hoped that Kirk would understand her warning, but it was all she could do for him from here. “I’ll be back in the morning. But for now you know where Kirk is.”

Halfway back to her apartment in Lucerne, Liese used her cell phone to place a call to Emile Lescourt, an old friend in Bern. She had worked with him a few years ago when he was a young detective with the Kantonpolizei doing a brief stint in Lucerne. They were both single, he was good-looking, and they had naturally fallen in together.

They’d had a brief, interesting affair, and some of the best nights she remembered were not spent lovemaking but flying. Lescourt was an excellent pilot. He belonged to the Club Aeronautique Bern and had the use of any of the club’s five lightplanes.

They were still the best of friends, even though he was now a police lieutenant and outranked her. He had married, but he got a nasty divorce after only three years, and from time to time he and Liese got together to fly and afterward make love. There was no longer anything frantic about their relationship, just mutual comfort.

It was his private number, and Lescourt answered on the first ring. “Oui.”

“Emile, c’est moi, Liese,” she said, keeping her voice light. “Bonjour.”

“Ah, Liese, m’petite,” he replied. “I was just thinking about you. I hope this isn’t an official call.” He sounded hopeful, and Liese figured he was going through another one of his lonely stages.

“I called because I need your help. I have to meet a friend of mine in Monaco as soon as possible. Could you fly me to Nice?”

Lescourt’s tone was suddenly guarded. “What, this afternoon?”

“Yes. I could be at the airport in about an hour.”

“Considering what I’ve heard you’re doing up there, I have to ask if this is an official request, Liese. Because if it is, I’ll have to hand it back to Gertner for his approval, but if it’s not, I’ll hang up and forget that you called.”

“Wait, Emile, please. I beg you,” Liese cried. She hated to do this to him, but driving to Monaco was out of the question, and taking a commercial flight, if one was still available this afternoon, would be far too public. Gertner would be on her before she buckled her seat belt. “I’m asking you as a woman who shares your bed, and your sadnesses. I’ve been there for you. Now I need your help.”

Lescourt hesitated. For a second or two Liese thought he’d hung up. “Merde,” he said. “I’ll fly you there, but I will not wait. You will have to return home on your own.”

“Thank you, Emile.”

“And Liese,” he said, solemnly, “this will end it between us.”

FORTY-ONE

McGarvey slowly replaced the telephone on its cradle after listening to Liese’s odd message. She had not traced him to this hotel to talk about Marta, the only mutual friend they’d ever shared. She had called to warn him about something. But that was five hours ago.

The clock was ticking on bin Laden’s message, and he felt as if he was running out of time and running out of options.

He walked back to the balcony and looked out toward La Condamine. It was getting dark, and the prince’s yacht was bathed in lights. Though he couldn’t make out much detail at this distance, it did seem as if there was some activity on the dock. He could make out at least two delivery vans, and the white Mercedes.

His tuxedo had been sponged and pressed, ready for another evening in the casino, where he expected Salman to come for another chance at chemin de fer after his beating last night, and especially after what had happened this morning aboard the yacht.

It’s what a man such as Khalil would do.

Liese had told him that Salman would come to Monaco.

She knew that McGarvey would come here too.

And she had called to warn him about what? Something she might have learned from her surveillance operation in Lucerne? The “old friend” was obviously a reference to Salman, made that way because someone was listening over her shoulder.

Shortly after 2:30, McGarvey had rented a BMW Z3, and he drove down to Nice for drinks and a late lunch at Hotel Negresco, watching his back to see if he was being followed.

But the prince had sent no one.

When he got back to Monte Carlo, he turned the car in, and then took a leisurely stroll over to the Rainier Palace on the Rock. From there he descended through the medieval alleys past the cathedral and finally to the Musée Océanographique, which at one time had been directed by Jacques Cousteau.

He’d stopped often to study a piece of architecture or to take in the view. Several times he turned around abruptly as if he had suddenly remembered something, or as if he’d suddenly realized that he was lost, and retraced his steps.

When he passed shop windows, he watched for the reflection of someone behind him, or across the street. It was old tradecraft — cold war stuff — but effective.

He saw no one out of place in the fairly crowded streets and sidewalks. Even if he was being double- or triple-teamed, with shadows in vehicles as well as on foot, there would have been patterns. The same colored shirt, the same taxi or delivery van or plain dark sedan.

But there was nothing.

Nor could he spot anyone with binoculars or perhaps a small scope watching from any of the apartment balconies. All the rooflines he scanned as he walked through the principality were free of movement.

There should have been someone. After McGarvey’s threat, Salman should have done something more than toss him off the yacht.

After the museum he even hiked over to the marina and walked out to where Salman’s yacht was tied to the largest of the docks.

Here I am. What are you going to do about it?

The gangway was still down, but the white Mercedes was gone, and there didn’t seem to be any activity on deck, nor could he see anyone topside on the bridge. No one came out to tell him to leave.

Not only that, but something was out of place. It was only a feeling, but looking at the yacht McGarvey thought he was missing something that was right there in front of him.

Now, coming back to the hotel and hearing Liese’s warning, he suddenly knew what he’d missed.

The helicopter’s air intake vents had been blocked, and the windshield and side windows covered. The yacht was being prepared for departure. Salman wasn’t coming to the casino; he was leaving tonight.

McGarvey had pushed, but the prince had not pushed back.

Yet.

Now it appeared as if he was leaving town.

McGarvey turned, his gray-green eyes narrowed in thought. Liese was part of a Swiss investigation of Prince Salman. But she had been included on the case because of her connection with the director of the CIA. Whatever they were investigating was so explosive, so sensitive, that an official request for information through diplomatic channels could not be made.

The Swiss might suspect that because of his tenuous connection with Salman a dozen years ago, there might still be a connection. It wasn’t that farfetched to believe that the director of the CIA was working with Saudi intelligence, and through them he was possibly working with al-Quaida in a roundabout way. In the eighties the CIA had supplied money and weapons, most notably Stinger handheld missiles, to bin Laden and his mujahideen, who were fighting to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan.

There were even a small number of political analysts who believed the Israeli Mossad had engineered 9/11 in order to mobilize America against Islam. And the CIA and Mossad had a very close relationship.

There were all sorts of theories.

From the Swiss point of view, McGarvey’s actions in Alaska could have been a diversion, turning the CIA’s attention away from bin Laden’s announcement. Then McGarvey had come to Monaco and had made contact with Salman.

And Liese had called McGarvey to warn him about something. But her superiors would be watching over her shoulder, listening to her conversations, analyzing every word, depending on her emotions to control her, so he could not return her call to find out more.

She was in love with McGarvey, but she would not have taken the risk unless she felt that he was in grave danger. Which possibly meant that Salman was planning on hitting back sometime tonight and then sailing away aboard his yacht.

A narrow, cruel smile played at the corners of McGarvey’s mouth. If that were the case, maybe he would make it easier for the prince by going back to the yacht and somehow getting aboard. If there was to be a fight, taking it out to sea would be much cleaner, with less backlash. Fifty miles off shore there would be no witnesses if the prince were to meet with an unfortunate accident. After all, he seemed to be fond of tossing people overboard. Maybe it was time for him to see how it felt.

He took his Walther out and checked the action, then slipped it back in the slim profile holster at the small of his back. He made certain that he had an extra magazine of ammunition, and donning the gray tweed jacket he’d worn on his tour this afternoon, he was headed for the door when the telephone rang.

The only people who knew that he was here under a work name were Liese and her people, and the prince. To everyone else he was Robert Brewster, a rich, ill-mannered American who was lucky at cards and who tipped to excess.

He went back and picked up the phone on the third ring. “Oui?”

“Kirk, thank God I’m in time. Has the prince invited you back to his yacht tonight?”

McGarvey’s fingers tightened on the phone. It was Liese. She sounded out of breath, as if she had just run up a flight of stairs. But she was probably taking a very big risk calling him again, unless she was using a clean line. “Are you sure that you’re not being monitored?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “I’m calling from a house phone downstairs. Has the prince invited you back to his yacht tonight?”

It had taken no feat of rocket science to trace him here, but for her to leave Switzerland to come here in person could only mean that she was convinced he was in grave danger. He didn’t think that she was setting him up. The Liese he’d known didn’t operate that way. “No. As a matter of fact I think he’s getting ready to sail.”

“Yes, he is — to his compound on Corsica. I think he’s going to invite you to go with him, and he’ll kill you down there. Maybe make it look like an accident.”

“How do you know all this?”

“We’ve been watching this guy for a couple of years. Even before 9/11. Kirk, he’s Khalil; we’re sure of it. May I come up?”

For now McGarvey wanted to maintain an arm’s-length distance from Liese, if for no other reason than to reduce the trouble she was probably already in with her people. “No, stay where you are; I’ll be right down. Better yet, there’s a sidewalk café just to the left as you walk out the front doors. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

Liese’s voice was suddenly guarded. “Bring your pistol. I think that you are in a great deal of danger here in Monaco, and right now. He might not wait to take you in Corsica.”

FORTY-TWO

Khalil sat in the shadows at a sidewalk café across from the Hotel de Paris, sipping a milky Pernod et eau minérale as he watched the passersby. The Place de Casino was particularly busy this evening, even as the European holiday season wound down. Limousines, taxis, and tour buses came in a steady stream.

The lights and glitter were worlds apart from the calm serenity of the desert, but Monte Carlo, which was actually one of his favorite small towns, was as good a place for a righteous kill as any other place on earth. The British had discovered oil in Saudi Arabia, the Americans had exploited it, and as a result the Arabs had discovered and were exploiting the principality.

In time the oil would be pumped dry, the money would disappear, and the time of true Dar el Islam would return. In the meantime, there was the jihad.

Insha’allah.

Opening his laptop on the table, he switched it on and calmly waited until it booted up; then he established a wireless Internet connection. He wanted to be finished with his business and gone from the principality sometime tonight, preferably before midnight, which was less than four hours from now. And he felt a rising excitement even though Osama had taught him never to take his work personally.

Be detached. It will be your armor. This is a jihad for Allah not for man.

But this now was very much a personal thing for Khalil.

The only man he ever loved and respected was Osama bin Laden.

The only man he truly hated, besides his father, was Kirk McGarvey. Khalil had killed his father more than thirty years ago, and this evening he would kill McGarvey.

He brought up the Web site for the Hotel de Paris, then broke through its pitifully simple security system into the guest registry, which showed not only names, but also passport and credit card numbers. He eliminated all the European names, reducing the list of 205 guests to thirty-seven. He saved this list to a file, then opened a search engine that found passport numbers and matched them to names, dates, and places of birth.

McGarvey was possibly fifty, and he spoke with a flat midwestern accent, which Khalil placed somewhere in Kansas, Missouri, or Nebraska. He eliminated all the obvious mismatches, reducing the list to nineteen names. Of these he picked five likely possibilities, based mostly on instinct. McGarvey would be traveling under a work name that would be rock solid. Like the man himself.

Khalil connected with the U.S. State Department in Washington and hacked into the main passport database. The security blocks for this system were far more sophisticated than the hotel’s. He had only a few seconds before various telltales would pop up and ask for additional passwords. He quickly ran the five passport numbers, immediately coming up with the information that three of the passports had been applied for at the passport agency in New Orleans, the fourth in New York, and the fifth in Washington.

He backed out of the program and went to the issuing agency in Washington, where he ran the single number. A copy of the actual passport came up, showing the photograph of a slender-faced man with blond hair.

Khalil considered the photo, but rejected it. Even with a good disguise McGarvey could not be made to look like the man in the photo.

Next he entered one of the numbers from the New Orleans agency, and when the record came up he was looking at a photograph of Kirk McGarvey, under the name Richard A. Brewster, Tampa, Florida.

Khalil quickly backed out of that program, and returned to the hotel’s Web site, hacking into the switchboard. Next he used his cell phone to call the front desk.

“Bonsoir, Hotel de Paris. How may I direct your call?”

“I say, be a doll and connect me with Dick Brewster’s room, would you?”

“Moment, s’il vous plaît,” the operator said.

A couple of seconds later, the call came up on Khalil’s computer screen at the same time he heard it ring over his cell phone. McGarvey was in suite 204.

The number rang five times, and the operator came back on. “Monsieur Brewster does not answer. Would you care to leave a message?”

“No, that’s okay, darlin’, I’ll try later.” Khalil broke the connection, and brought up the hotel switchboard’s automated message service, which recorded all messages and telephone calls to or from numbers outside the hotel for which charges were levied.

McGarvey had received only one call since noon, and it was from a number in Lucerne.

Khalil brought up the recorded message. It was from a woman. She sounded young, and perhaps even frightened.

Tell him that Liese telephoned and would like to talk to him about an old friend.

Khalil raised his eyes and looked past the gaily lit pool and fountain toward the hotel. Besides the motor traffic, couples were strolling hand in hand in the balmy early evening air. There was always a sense of excitement in Monaco, yet with its grand promenades, the splendid hotels and restaurants, the magnificent palace, and the yacht-filled harbor, this was also a city for lovers. Was it as simple as the possibility that McGarvey had a mistress from Switzerland with whom he was having a rendezvous?

After the events aboard the Alaskan cruise ship, Khalil would have thought that McGarvey was a man singularly dedicated to his wife. He had certainly gone to great lengths to come to her rescue.

The important fact at this moment, however, was that McGarvey was not in his suite.

Khalil shut down his computer, finished his Pernod, and paid the tab with a few coins. Then he got up and started across the Place to rent a room at the hotel, his computer case in one hand and a small leather overnight bag in the other.

No one noticed the tall, somewhat overweight man wearing a poorly cut, dark suit that looked as if it had been slept in, his dark hair mussed and his eyes red behind bottle-thick glasses, even though he moved with the fluid grace of a dancer — or perhaps a jungle animal on the hunt.

FORTY-THREE

McGarvey encountered no one in the corridor or in the emergency stairwell, which he took to the service level one floor below the lobby. This area of the hotel was busy with white-coated waiters, some pushing serving carts for room-service suppers; maids in black with white frills; and supervisors in formal cutaways scurrying along the broad, unadorned corridors and using the several service elevators, some of them speaking urgently on walkie-talkies as the evening began to ramp up.

He had kept himself alive all these years in part because of his tradecraft, but in a large measure because he trusted almost no one. If someone had been monitoring Liese’s call, they might be waiting for him to emerge from the hotel’s front doors. He would make an easy target.

He buttoned his jacket and stepped out of the stairwell. No one gave him a second look as he walked back to the large kitchen and passed directly to the pantry and delivery area that opened outside to the loading dock. The area behind the hotel was slightly below the level of the central plaza, and it was concealed from the street by a row of palm trees and a concrete wall on which grew a profusion of bougainvillea and other flowering vines.

He walked up the ramp, paused at the top as a cab sped past, then walked around to the Place and blended with the early evening crowd, all of his senses alert for any sign that something was out of place. If Liese was right about Salman extending an invitation to sail to Corsica, then McGarvey figured that the white Mercedes would be parked in front. But when he came around the corner the car wasn’t there.

Crossing the street, he made a pass in front of the hotel and the sidewalk café where Liese was supposed to be waiting. He didn’t spot her at first — she was seated two tables from the sidewalk in relative darkness.

At the corner he waited for a break in the heavy traffic, and then skipped across the street, coming back to the café from the direction opposite to the one he would have come from had he left the hotel from the front.

Liese was sipping a glass of wine, her attention directed toward the hotel. She was wearing a black leather jacket over a white tee, her purse on the table in front of her. In profile her face was narrow, with high cheekbones and a delicately upturned nose; her blond hair was stylishly short and on just about any other woman would look masculine. But the past decade had been very kind to her. When McGarvey had left Switzerland for the last time, Liese had been a kid in her mid-twenties, with a big mouth, and the skin-and-bones figure of a runway model. From what he could see from where he stood twenty feet away, she had matured into a beautiful woman.

McGarvey studied the street scene for another moment or two, but he couldn’t detect anyone lingering in front of the hotel; no one was seated in a parked car, no windowless van was in position.

When he turned back, Liese was staring at him, her face an expression of relief mixed with fear and something else. She nodded her head very slightly toward the hotel, asking if he thought he was being followed, and he shook his head no.

She half rose from her seat and raised her lips to him as McGarvey reached her. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and sat down next to her, his back to the interior of the café. Her scent was the same as it had been ten years ago, and it brought back instant memories of the young Liese Fuelm who’d thrown herself at him from the moment she’d been assigned by the Swiss Federal Police to keep watch on him. She’d never made it a secret that she was madly in love with him, and wanted nothing more in life than to have him make love to her.

At the time McGarvey had been living with Marta Fredericks, another Swiss watchdog sent to find out why a former CIA assassin had come to Switzerland. And even Marta had once suggested that the best thing might be for Mac to sleep with Liese. Maybe it would cure the girl of her puppy love.

McGarvey hadn’t taken Marta up on the suggestion, and shortly after that he’d left Switzerland, and a year later Marta was dead. But looking into Liese’s eyes now, he could see that nothing had changed; she was still in love with him, her feelings open and easy to read, her disappointment that he had merely kissed her on the cheek obvious.

“It’s good to see you again, Kirk,” Liese said. She touched his hand, and again it was as if the past ten years had never happened.

McGarvey withdrew his hand. “What are you doing here? You didn’t come in an official capacity. And by now you have to know that I resigned, so I’m not here officially.”

Liese couldn’t hide her disappointment. “I’ve come to warn you that Prince Salman means to kill you.”

“What do you think I’m doing here?”

“Obviously you believe that the prince and Khalil are the same man, and you’ve come here to prove that, then to kill him not only for what he did in Alaska, but also because he’s almost certainly involved with the new bin Laden threat.” The waiter came. McGarvey ordered a café express, and Liese ordered another glass of vin blanc ordinaire. “But there are people in Switzerland who don’t believe it’s that simple.”

McGarvey wasn’t surprised. “Because of the Saudi oil connection.”

Liese glanced over toward the hotel, and McGarvey followed her gaze. But he still couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She was waiting for someone or something.

She looked back at him. “That, and the fact you missed in Alaska. You don’t have many friends in Switzerland, but everybody respects your abilities. And some of them are afraid of you.”

“That’s nothing I don’t already know, Liese. Otto said that you called while I was out of Washington, wanting to talk to me about Salman. You’re running a surveillance operation on him. Your people think that he’s Khalil. But that was before Alaska. Why did you try to reach me?”

“Because it’s not only the prince who we’re investigating. You’re a part of it.”

“Yes, because we need oil and the Saudis have it.”

Liese’s mouth compressed. She was frightened. “It’s my immediate superior, Ernst Gertner. He’s nothing more than a Kantonpolizei director, but he has powerful friends and he considers you his enemy. He means to destroy you any way he can.”

This wasn’t making any sense. McGarvey had never heard the name. “Why does he have a beef with me?”

Liese lowered her eyes. “He was in love with Marta when you and she were living together in Lausanne. He thought that when it was over he would be there to pick up the pieces for her.”

“But she came running after me in Paris and got herself killed,” McGarvey said. “Is that it, Liese? He thinks I was responsible and now he’s gunning for me?”

Liese nodded. Her eyes were moist. It was obvious she was frightened, and that she wanted McGarvey to take her into his arms and tell her everything would be fine. “That’s part of it, but there’s more.” The waiter came with their order, and when he was gone, she squared her shoulders as if she had made a difficult decision. “He thinks he has proof that you and Salman are actually working together.”

McGarvey was irritated. She was going around in circles. “The Saudi thing, you’ve already said that.”

“I don’t mean Salman as a Saudi royal; I mean Salman as Khalil the terrorist.”

McGarvey had to laugh. “He can’t be that stupid.”

“Salman slept with your wife ten years ago, and yet you’ve done nothing about it,” Liese blurted. “He thinks it’s proof enough that you’re protecting him. You didn’t kill him in Alaska, and there are people from the cruise ship who said you could have done it at the end. And here you are now in Monaco. And you even went aboard his yacht this morning.”

McGarvey’s mind recoiled. He had to wonder how many people didn’t know about his wife and Salman all those years ago. But that wasn’t as important as the fact that Liese knew he’d been to the yacht. “How many people do you have here watching me?”

“I don’t know. Probably none of our people. Gertner has a lot of friends with Interpol and the Sûreté. So it’s probably the local cops on your tail.”

“That’s just great,” McGarvey said. Because of the Swiss interference his hands were effectively tied here in Monaco and anywhere in France. He wasn’t exactly a welcome guest of the French, who considered him a dangerous man. And any enemy of France was automatically an enemy of Monaco. As long as he was here under a work name and as long as he caused no trouble, his presence would be tolerated. But the moment he so much as sneezed in public without first covering his mouth, he would be arrested and put on the next flight back to the States. “How do you know Salman is going to Corsica?”

“We’re monitoring his telephone calls. We’ve got a pretty good decryption team and Arab speakers. He’s been talking to someone — we can’t figure out who, just yet — in the royal palace in Riyadh. This morning he told his contact that he was going to his compound at Bonifacio. And he wanted it made fully ready. His words.”

“Your boss is convinced that if I show up in Corsica it’ll prove that Salman and I are working together?”

Liese nodded. “That’s why I had to come here to warn you in person. Nobody thinks that bin Laden’s threat is an empty warning. Al-Quaida will try to hit you just like 9/11, and not too long from now.” She looked away for a moment. “That’s the other reason I came.” She turned back to face McGarvey, a defiant, resolute expression on her face. “I’ll help you kill him. No one can say that both of us were here to protect him.”

It was about what McGarvey figured she would say. He shook his head. “Not a chance, because nothing’s going to happen here in Monaco. I’ll take the ferry from Nice in the morning, and you’re returning to Lucerne.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Don’t be stupid, Liese. Gertner assigned you to investigate Salman and me, because you and I have a history. And you can bet that if Gertner has people watching me here, they’ve already told him that you showed up.”

“He believes that I’m still in love with you. He’ll think I’m here to throw myself at you.”

“Then that’s exactly what you’re going to do,” McGarvey said. He laid some money on the table to cover their drinks, then leaned over and kissed Liese on the lips. “We’re leaving.”

Liese’s eyes were wide, her face flushed with pleasure. A dream for her had suddenly come true. “Where?”

“The hotel. You’re staying with me tonight.”

FORTY-FOUR

Khalil had hacked into the hotel’s computer and downloaded the key code to McGarvey’s suite onto the electronic card key he’d been issued for his own room on the third floor. Standing now at the door to room 204, the corridor empty for the moment, he reached inside his jacket for the handle of his SIG Sauer P226 pistol with his right hand, while with his left he slid the key card through the slot. The mechanism flashed green, and the lock released with an audible click.

If you come face-to-face with the man, kill him. He will not give you a second chance. Osama had been very specific. And very respectful.

Nothing stirred inside the suite as he eased the door open with his toe, nor were there any lights, except the lights from outside on the brightly lit Place filtering through the floor-to-ceiling French doors covered with diaphanous sheers.

The security chain wasn’t in place, but a man such as McGarvey might not feel he needed the extra protection.

“Service de chambre,” Khalil called, pleasantly.

He waited for a moment, and when there was no reply from within, he checked over his shoulder to make sure no one had gotten off the elevator. Then he drew his pistol, pushed the door the rest of the way open, and stepped inside.

He checked behind the door, then closed it. To the right was a small half bath for guests. Straight ahead, past an elaborate wet bar on the left, the chamber opened to a large, expensively furnished sitting room. Moving through the shadows without noise, he crossed the sitting room and checked the equally expansive bedroom, dressing area, palatial bathroom with a sunken Jacuzzi on a raised platform, and separate shower-stall bathroom.

McGarvey’s shaving things were laid out at the double sinks, and his tuxedo was neatly pressed and ready on the bed.

Khalil studied the arrangement for a second or two. McGarvey was planning on going to the casino tonight. But not until later. For some reason he’d left his room, perhaps to have a drink at the bar or an early supper, but he would be back to dress.

The tension that Khalil had initially felt — that somehow McGarvey knew that he was coming and had set a trap of his own — subsided. Walking back into the sitting room, he was slightly irritated with his foolish fears. McGarvey was simply one man. An imaginative and capable fighter, especially when he was defending his wife or trying to save women and children — people who Americans almost universally thought of as innocents—but for all of that one man who would be entering a killing chamber when he walked through the door.

He went to the double French doors, and careful to keep out of sight of anyone looking up from the Place, parted the curtains and studied the busy street scene. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. Mostly tourists were going about their business; some of them he expected were Americans, enjoying themselves while Mohammed’s sword once again hung over their country.

It amused him to wonder if any of them would feel the least bit of guilt for being here when the attacks happened in a few days. There’d been little or no media coverage about the Americans who’d been vacationing when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit. Yet nearly every human being on the planet knew exactly where they were and what they had been doing that day.

They would remember again.

The French doors opened onto a narrow balustraded balcony. From this point there was no view of the street directly below because a palm tree came up almost even with the balcony, and the broad fronds were in the way.

He unlocked the doors and eased one of them open a crack. The sheers immediately billowed into the room, and he could hear the street sounds and smell the night sea air. He took a very brief look outside before he ducked back out of sight. The balconies off the rooms adjoining this suite were about two meters apart, a manageable distance. The hotel’s stonework had joints that were deep enough and well placed so that a man, even in a hurry, could easily climb up to the floor above or even to the roof, if need be. And the palm tree was within reaching distance.

He closed the French doors, but left them unlocked.

He walked across the sitting room to the corridor door, then turned and looked into the room, seeing what McGarvey would see when he first walked in. Like anyone standing in front of the French doors, McGarvey would be silhouetted by the light from outside for just a moment before he reached for the light switch.

Khalil turned and examined the wall between the corridor door and the door to the half bath. There was a panel with three switches. One of them probably controlled the bathroom light, while the other two were for the entry hall light and probably one or more of the table lamps inside the sitting room.

McGarvey would come in, see or hear nothing out of the ordinary, then half turn to his right to turn on the lights.

At that point Khalil would shoot him dead from the shadows beside the French doors. It was a distance of perhaps twelve or fifteen meters. Not a difficult shot, especially since the target would be well lit.

Once McGarvey was down, Khalil would have two avenues of escape, the primary one being through the corridor, downstairs, and then out of the hotel. But if someone were in the corridor, he would leave via the balcony and make his escape either left, right, up, or down. The overnight bag he’d left in his room was empty, and he had sanitized his computer, trashing the hard disk and wiping the entire unit down for fingerprints, so there was nothing to go back for.

Khalil took the pistol out of his shoulder holster, and as he walked back to the French doors, he took the Vaime silencer from his jacket pocket and screwed it on the end of the Sig’s threaded barrel.

Below on the Place the traffic was increasing. It was well after eight o’clock, and by ten, when the serious gambling and partying got into full swing, it would be like a carnival on the streets.

No one would hear or see a thing. And certainly no one would notice the pudgy man in the cheap dark suit going about his business, probably a minor functionary at the hotel on his way home after his shift.

FORTY-FIVE

Away from the sidewalk café, McGarvey led Liese across the street into the Place in the opposite direction from the hotel. She did not offer any objections or question the direction they were going. She was openly happy and content to be with him, even with the danger they both faced. They passed shops selling Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint-Laurent, Gucci, and Givenchy. Traffic was increasing, and every second car, it seemed, was a Rolls-Royce, Bentley, or Ferrari. Yet most of the people on foot wore casual clothes, some even shorts and sandals.

He wanted to put some time and distance away from the café before they headed back to the hotel in order to spot anyone tailing them. Now he was watching not only for someone on Salman’s payroll, but also perhaps someone working for the Swiss.

Nothing had changed in the past ten years as far as Liese’s infatuation with McGarvey went. If anything, he thought, her love had deepened, even though they had not seen or even spoken with each other until just a couple of days ago. It wasn’t rational. “Look, nothing is going to happen tonight,” he said.

Liese made it a point not to turn and look at him. But she looped her arm in his, as if they were lovers out for a stroll. “I know. Just let me indulge my fantasy for a little while.”

It wasn’t what McGarvey meant. “I’m not talking about what’s not going to happen in my room tonight.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re not going to make love, if that’s what you’re expecting. But I’m talking about Salman. He’s not going to invite me to go to Corsica with him, and so far, unless his people are damned good, he’s sent no one to follow me.”

She shook her head and looked up at him. “I wouldn’t count on it, Kirk. After all, he did have you aboard his yacht this morning.”

“Only because I beat him at cards last night and then insulted him. According to him, he wanted to find out what the hell I was up to.”

“He was the same guy you faced in Alaska, wasn’t he?” Liese asked. “You did establish that?”

McGarvey had been asking himself the same question ever since he’d walked away from the yacht. He’d been sure then, but now he was having second thoughts. “What makes the Swiss Federal Police think that Salman is Khalil?”

“I’m not sure how it started, but it was one of Gertner’s pet projects. He wants to become the director general someday and he’s trying to make a name for himself. It started right after 9/11. The prince had apparently been traveling all over the place, but then he disappeared, the attacks occurred, and he suddenly showed up at his house in Lucerne and went into seclusion for the next few months.”

It was one of the bits of circumstantial evidence that Otto had come up with. “A lot of Saudis ducked for cover. Osama bin Laden himself had cousins in Florida and Maryland. They went back to Riyadh, where they figured they’d be safe until things cooled down.”

She shook her head. “That’s the same argument I used when he first came to me. But Salman has disappeared just before almost every single act of al-Quaida terrorism. Everything from the first attack on the World Trade Center, to the Cole, to the embassies in Africa, and even the Khobar barracks right there in Riyadh. Gertner has the entire file.”

“How’d he get onto you?”

“He had friends on the team that was keeping track of you.” She looked down, obviously in pain. “It was pretty much an open secret that I was in love with you. Which was fine with Gertner. He figured that if I could seduce you away from Marta, he’d get her.” She shook her head again. “Of course, it didn’t work out that way.”

“He sounds like a charmer,” McGarvey said. They had reached the entrance to the casino just as a stretch Mercedes limo pulled up. A dozen paparazzi were there, roughly jostling into position, their cameras flashing as the driver came around and opened the rear door for a young, very thin, very beautiful blond woman. She waved to the photographers as a man dressed in a tuxedo got out behind her, and the two of them went inside.

It was nothing more than a moment of Riviera glitter, which McGarvey forgot as he and Liese headed back around to the hotel.

“You have to believe me, Kirk. I think he’s convinced a lot of people that you and Salman have a long history. And if he can prove that Salman is Khalil, that would tie you to 9/11. Even the suspicion would be enough to bring you down.”

McGarvey felt sorry for her. She had fallen for a man she could never have, and she was being manipulated because of it. The world was full of bastards. Not just the Osama bin Ladens and the Khalils, but ordinary bastards like Liese’s boss who was willing to ruin her life to further his own ambitions. “All the more reason for you to go home tomorrow before you totally screw up your career.”

She stopped, her eyes narrow, her lips puckered into a stubborn pout. “I’m not going back.”

“If you want to help me, you can go home and keep Gertner busy. And you can keep Otto up to date.” She was digging in her heels, and McGarvey was getting irritated. “Look, Liese, we don’t have a lot of time here. I’m going after Salman in the morning, and it would be a good thing if someone was helping watch my back in case I don’t make it. If he is Khalil, he’ll be expecting me to come down there.”

A look of incredulity came over her face. “If?” she said. “Are you saying that you’re still not sure?”

“Not sure enough to put a bullet in his brain.”

“Merde. What the hell did you talk about aboard his yacht? The weather?”

“I told him I had come to kill him. And he tossed me off his yacht. If he really was Khalil, I figured he would come after me. But so far that hasn’t happened.” McGarvey shrugged. “So I’m left with the same question as before, and less time in which to get it answered.” He took Liese’s arm and they started walking again. “That’s why I’m following him to Corsica and you’re going home.”

They walked the rest of the way across the Place back to the hotel in silence, McGarvey trying to figure out how to insure that Liese actually went back to Switzerland in the morning. He wouldn’t put it past her to follow him down to Corsica, which would all but tie his hands. He’d always tried to work alone, responsible for no one’s safety but his own. With Liese in Corsica he would be looking over his shoulder. Distractions like that could get them both killed.

He didn’t think that Salman would try anything tonight. He’d know by now that McGarvey was aware of his plans, and he would wait in Corsica for the former DCI to show up. Like a spider spinning a web and waiting for its prey to get entangled.

They crossed the street to the front entrance of the hotel and were about to go inside when a small Peugeot pulled up to a screeching halt in the driveway behind them. They turned as a tall, lanky man with several cameras around his neck leaped out of the car and came running toward them.

McGarvey, working on pure instinct, disentangled his arm from Liese’s, shoved her aside, and turned sideways to offer less of a target as he reached for his pistol.

The photographer pulled up short and began furiously snapping pictures, first of McGarvey and then of Liese.

McGarvey stayed his gun hand. He recognized the photographer as one of the paparazzi who had been at the casino entrance just a couple of minutes ago. Any assassin that Khalil might send would not act in such an open, brash manner. Heads were turning because of the commotion, something neither a gunman nor a French cop here to check up on McGarvey would want to happen.

Liese had opened her purse and was reaching for her pistol, but McGarvey turned back and took her arm, and together they started into the hotel.

“Mr. McGarvey,” the cameraman shouted after them. His accent was French. “For the Agence France. What is the director of the CIA doing away from his desk in Washington? Why are you here?”

“Are you sure he’s legitimate?” Liese whispered, urgently, as they entered the hotel.

“He was in the pack in front of the casino,” McGarvey told her.

The photographer was right behind them, snapping pictures. The lobby was fairly busy at this hour of the evening, and everyone was looking at them trying to figure out who they were and what was going on.

“Mr. McGarvey,” the cameraman shouted.

McGarvey and Liese angled directly across the lobby to the elevators. A car had just arrived, and they stepped aboard, the cameraman right on their heels.

McGarvey turned and gave the photographer a stern look. “Stay away from me.”

The man started to say something, but then evidently thought better of it. As the elevator door closed, he raised his camera and snapped several shots.

FORTY-SIX

Khalil, his heart rate up, moved away from the French doors, where he had been watching the Place off and on for the past half hour, and took his position in the dark corner.

He had moved an easy chair one meter to the left and had unplugged the floor lamp. It gave him a perfectly dark spot with an excellent sight line to the door from which to make the kill.

His attention had been drawn to the casino entrance directly across from the hotel, where a commotion had erupted with the arrival of someone in a limousine. Cameras flashed, and for thirty seconds or so a mob of paparazzi flitted like flies around carrion. He’d almost turned away, but there was something about a couple walking away from the casino that piqued his curiosity.

They walked arm in arm like lovers out for an evening stroll, but even at a distance of more than one hundred meters in the imperfect light, Khalil was convinced there was something familiar about the man. The certainty that he knew who it was continued to grow, until just across the street the man glanced up.

Khalil’s heart bumped, and a slow smile spread across his face.

It was McGarvey returning to the hotel, with a young, beautiful woman. He was typically Western after all, a man who professed love and devotion for his wife, while in a foreign city having no compunction against picking up a whore for the evening.

It is righteous to slay the infidel, the sinner, the unbeliever of Muhammad’s teachings, and all those who have sinned with him.

Khalil picked up his pistol from the reading table next to the chair, cocked the hammer, and concentrated on settling his nerves. He was somewhat irritated with himself that he was having an attack of the jitters, like an anxious schoolboy. But since Alaska, he’d come to have a much better understanding of — and respect for — McGarvey. Osama’s warnings were not overstated, as Khalil had first believed.

If it had not been for the tip from an informant that McGarvey had come to Monaco the day before, he would not have this chance.

The kill tonight would be beautiful.

FORTY-SEVEN

The situation was beginning to feel wrong to McGarvey.

Too many people knew that he was here. Liese knew, Salman knew, and now even the photographer knew. Not only that, but there’d been no activity aboard Salman’s yacht. No parties. No people on the sundeck other than the one young woman. Yet Salman had the reputation as an international bon vivant. A party boy. According to the press, he never went anywhere without a crowd. Yet here in Monaco he’d been alone.

As the elevator stopped at the second floor and the door started to open, McGarvey drew his pistol, concealing it behind his right leg.

Liese was alarmed. “What is it?” she asked, softly.

No one was in the corridor. Directly across from the elevator was a gilt-framed mirror, beneath which was a Louis XIV table flanked by two chairs. The house phone, plain white without a keypad, was on the table.

“Something’s not right,” McGarvey said. He held the elevator door open with his left hand and stuck his head out, all of his senses alert for something, anything that might be out of place. He stood in rapt concentration for several seconds. So far as he could see, none of the room doors were ajar, nor was the emergency stairwell door at the end partially open as if someone were standing there ready to take a shot at anyone getting off the elevator.

“Do you think he’s here?” Liese asked. She’d taken her pistol out of her purse. She thumbed the safety catch to the off position.

“Maybe,” McGarvey said. There’d been no one out on the streets tailing him, and yet according to Liese somebody was feeding information back to her boss. Somebody had to be looking over his shoulder. The photographer downstairs could have been a distraction. And the girl at the casino last night with Salman and this morning aboard the yacht could have been a distraction too.

“What do you want to do?”

“Hold the elevator, but keep an eye on the stairwell door,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be just a minute.” He stepped off the elevator and went to the house phone, where he called the concierge.

Liese stood half in and half out of the elevator, holding the door from closing with her hip, her head on a swivel watching the corridor in both directions. Her pistol pointed down and to her right, her trigger finger flat against the trigger guard. Very professional.

The same woman who’d helped McGarvey earlier with the flowers answered the phone. “Concierge.”

“Good evening. I’m Robert Brewster. I received a telephone message this afternoon from Lucerne. Have there been any other messages or telephone calls since that one?”

“I’ll be happy to check for you, Monsieur.”

“Kirk,” Liese called softly to him. “Someone is calling for the elevator.”

“Ignore it,” McGarvey said. A moment later the concierge was back.

“There was one further telephone call, from outside the hotel, at 20:05 but no message was left.”

“Do you know where the call originated from?”

“No, sir. But apparently it was from outside Monaco.”

“Was a name or number given?”

“Malheureusement, non.”

“Merci,” McGarvey said, and he hung up. Someone had tried to reach him from a blind number, to talk, or merely to confirm that he was a registered guest of the hotel. But the call had come from outside Monaco less than an hour ago. If it was Khalil and he meant to come here to get revenge for Alaska, he could have been calling from almost anywhere. It was a reasonable assumption, however, that he would not have reached Monaco in such a sort time. If he were planning on a hit, it would probably come in the middle of the night.

Anyone else, such as Katy back home, would have left a message. That it was a blind number that did not show up on the hotel’s telephone system pointed toward Otto or perhaps Adkins at Langley.

It did not point toward Salman, unless the yacht was equipped with the electronics to make blind calls. It was a trick that U.S. intelligence had not seen any evidence of in al-Quaida intercepts.

“Who tried to call you?” Liese asked.

“The hotel doesn’t know, but it came from outside Monaco,” McGarvey said. He dragged one of the armchairs from beside the table across the corridor and placed it in the path of the elevator door. “I don’t want anyone coming up behind us for the moment.”

“Don’t you trust the concierge?” Liese asked.

“I don’t trust anyone,” McGarvey replied, tightly. He’d seen Khalil’s handiwork up close and personal. He knew what the man was capable of doing, because whatever else the man might be, he was very smart and very ruthless.

He nodded toward the end of the corridor. “Check the stairwell,” he said. “I’ll cover you from here. But be careful.”

Liese hurried to the end of the corridor as McGarvey walked three doors to his suite. They had been lucky so far that a housekeeping maid or room-service waiter hadn’t shown up to find two people scurrying around the corridor with guns drawn. But he didn’t expect their luck to hold much longer.

He listened at his door for a sound from within the suite as he watched Liese cautiously approach the stairwell door. He heard nothing. Liese turned the door handle, and keeping to the side, eased the door open a few inches with her foot. She took a quick look, glanced back at McGarvey, then pushed the door the rest of the way open and rolled into the stairwell, leading with her pistol in both hands.

A couple of seconds later she was back, shaking her head as she hurried up the corridor to him. “Someone is below, maybe on the ground floor,” she reported, careful to keep her voice low. “Talking. A man and a woman.”

McGarvey nodded. He was probably being paranoid, but over the years he’d learned to trust his instincts. Larry Danielle, who’d risen to deputy director of the CIA starting out as a young man with the OSS in World War II, had been McGarvey’s mentor in the early days. “A dead field man is an operator who doesn’t listen to his inner voice,” he’d advised. “Develop your instincts, and then, for heaven’s sake, trust them.”

Danielle was long dead, but his words of wisdom were etched in the brain of every field officer he’d ever trained. The live ones.

The door opened inward to the left. McGarvey positioned Liese on the right, ran his key card through the slot, and when the light blinked green, eased the door open just a crack, keeping out of the way to the left.

He waited for a couple of seconds, then shoved the door the rest of the way open.

There was no sound or movement from inside the suite, but alarms were jangling all through McGarvey’s nerves.

Something. He was missing something.

Cloves. Katy said the one odd thing she clearly remembered about Salman was the odor of the Indian clove cigarettes he smoked. It had been an offhand comment two days before, and now McGarvey thought he was smelling something from within the suite.

Something out of place. Something that hadn’t been there earlier.

Liese gave him a questioning look.

He motioned to her that he was going in and she was to back him up, when he caught a movement outside the French doors. Out on the balcony. A momentary shadow blocking the light from the Place.

The bastard had come after all. He meant to wait in ambush outside, make the kill after McGarvey was in bed or had his back turned to the windows, and then leave before the body was found. After what had happened on the cruise ship and then this morning aboard his yacht, he had lost his stomach for a stand-up fight.

His only mistake was not keeping out of sight. He’d seen the corridor door opened, and when no one came through the door he apparently got spooked.

Liese had her pistol up at the ready, waiting for him to charge into the room.

“He’s out on the balcony,” McGarvey told her in a whisper.

“Did you see him?”

“I saw something. I want you to stay out here in the corridor. If anyone comes through the window, shoot him. But don’t take any chances.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going outside so I can get behind him. I don’t think he’ll want to risk a shootout in plain sight of half of Monte Carlo. I’m betting he’ll try to get past you.”

Liese nodded, a grim, expectant look in her eyes.

“Watch yourself,” McGarvey warned her. “He won’t give you a second chance.”

She nodded again, and McGarvey turned on his heel, sprinted down the corridor to the stairwell door, and took the stairs two at a time to the ground. He had no intention of giving Khalil the chance to escape. The public be damned for the moment. The instant he had a clear ID on the man and a good sight line, he would take his shot.

He safetied his pistol and stuffed it in the waistband of his trousers before he burst out of the stairwell and raced across the busy lobby. Several heads turned his way, and the concierge got to her feet. She started to call out something to him, but he was out the door before she got it out.

Traffic was definitely beginning to pick up. In addition to several taxis and a limousine parked in front of the hotel, a Principality Police cruiser had just pulled up, and four uniformed cops were getting out.

McGarvey slowed his pace to a walk until he was away from the bright lights beneath the entryway. Making sure that he hadn’t been noticed yet, he sprinted the rest of the way down the street until he was just below the balcony outside his room.

The fronds of the palm tree blocked much of his view, but after a moment he spotted a figure crouched in the relative darkness just to the left of the French doors.

McGarvey checked over his shoulder to make sure the cops hadn’t spotted him. But they had gone into the hotel, and for the moment he hadn’t attracted any notice.

He pulled out his pistol, thumbed the safety catch to the off position, and moved closer.

The man on the balcony was motionless. He back was turned to the street. But even with the bad angle and uncertain light, McGarvey began to get the feeling that the man was not Khalil. He was too slightly built. Khalil was much larger.

McGarvey raised his pistol. “You,” he shouted up.

The figure jerked as if he had been startled, and he turned around. All at once, McGarvey could see the cameras hanging by straps around his neck. He was the photographer who’d accosted them in front of the hotel just a few minutes earlier.

It struck him suddenly that the odd smell upstairs was cloves after all. Khalil was in the suite, and the advantage was his because Liese thought he was outside on the balcony.

“Don’t move,” McGarvey shouted to the cameraman, but it was too late.

The man straightened up and stepped directly in front of the French doors. Almost immediately he was thrown forward, as if punched from behind. His chest erupted in a spray of blood, and he was pitched over the rail, shot from behind. But there’d not been the sound of a gunshot. Whoever had fired was using a silencer. It wasn’t Liese.

McGarvey headed back up the street in a dead run even before the cameraman’s body had reached the ground.

Apparently no one in the Place had seen or heard a thing. No one stopped or looked over to where the cameraman had fallen from the second-floor balcony.

McGarvey had made a bad decision leaving Liese alone outside the suite. The smart move would have been to call the police, and make sure that Khalil did not get out of there before the cops came.

But it had become personal aboard the cruise liner. Khalil had murdered innocent people, including the mother and her infant child. And he had laid his hands on Katy.

McGarvey reached the front entrance as two police cruisers, their blue lights flashing, sirens blaring, screeched to a halt.

They were in a big hurry, and McGarvey was getting the feeling that he’d been set up to take a fall. It was probably Gertner’s friends here in Monaco reacting to Liese’s chasing after him.

He pulled up short, stuffed the pistol back into his waistband, and as calmly as possible walked into the hotel lobby. He couldn’t afford to be stopped now with Liese upstairs on her own. In no way was she a match for Khalil. She might hesitate to take the shot, but Khalil wouldn’t.

The lobby was a scene of confusion. The cops who’d shown up as McGarvey had left the hotel were talking with the concierge and a large man dressed in a dark suit, probably hotel security.

McGarvey tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, angling across to the stairway before someone looked over and recognized him.

There was a sudden commotion at the entry behind him.

“Arrêtez!” a man shouted.

McGarvey took two more steps as the cops standing with the concierge and security man turned his way.

“Arrêtez” one of the cops behind him shouted even more urgently.

McGarvey turned and raised his hands in plain sight. Several of the cops had drawn their pistols. Some of the hotel guests and staff, realizing that something dangerous was happening, were scrambling for cover. The situation was on the verge of exploding into an uncontrolled shootout in which innocent people would get hurt.

“There’s a Swiss Federal cop and a killer on the second floor.” McGarvey said, loudly, in French, so that there would be absolutely no misunderstanding.

At that moment everyone heard two gunshots from somewhere upstairs.

FORTY-EIGHT

Khalil slumped in a kneeling position beside the chair he had pushed aside, his head lolling on the chair seat, his eyes open and fixed on the corridor door, as if he were dead.

The situation was rapidly becoming critical for him, and he seethed with a barely controlled rage. He’d heard the police sirens outside, and if they had heard the two unsilenced shots they would be on their way now. It’s why he had momentarily stepped into view to draw fire and then had pretended to be wounded. He wanted to lure the shooter in the corridor to show herself.

The woman whom McGarvey had come up with was in the corridor. She had to figure that her two shots had hit their mark. From her position she would be able to see him, unmoving.

She was hiding behind the door frame, taking only brief glimpses at him and then ducking back. She was obviously a cop or an intelligence officer, and not a prostitute as Khalil had first thought.

It was a stupid mistake on his part, just as shooting the idiot cameraman on the balcony had been a less than ideal move because of the attention it had apparently attracted. But having one of his critical avenues of escape denied him was totally unacceptable.

Khalil was almost sure that McGarvey had spotted the photographer in the windows, mistook him for an assassin, and had gone down to the street to catch him from behind.

Now he was in a bad situation. Unless the woman made her move before the police came up to investigate the shots or surrounded the hotel, he would not be able to make his escape.

His pistol was in his right hand, on the floor between his torso and the side of the chair. He had to raise it only a centimeter or two to have a clear shot at anyone coming through the doorway. Or if she came close enough, he could reach for his belt-buckle knife.

It would give him a great deal of pleasure to watch life leave her eyes as her blood pumped out of her body with each diminishing beat of her fading heart.

Khalil fluttered his eyes and took a big, blubbering breath as if he were gasping for air, fighting for his life. He had seen his victims do the same thing countless times. He was an excellent mimic.

The woman stepped into clear view, her pistol extended in both hands in front of her, her elbows slightly bent.

Khalil could not see her face clearly because she was backlit from the lights in the corridor, but he got the impression that she was probably pretty, and young. She held herself like a cop, though her mistake was exposing herself and not simply waiting for the police to show up. And he thought with amusement, she didn’t know the proper narrow-profile sideways stance for approaching a downed, but possibly dangerous, assailant.

If there was more time, there were so many things that he could teach her. Women needed to be guided with a firm hand. Especially Western women who did not know their place in the historical sense.

She stood in the doorway, hesitating with indecision.

He could see that from the way she held herself. She was waiting for McGarvey to return. But she had enough respect for the man she thought she had shot and wounded to keep her distance.

Khalil raised his pistol very slowly, ready to take a snap shot if she spotted his movement.

But she remained in place, her gun pointed into the room.

Khalil’s finger began to squeeze on the Sig’s trigger.

The stairwell door at the end of the corridor opened with a tremendous bang. Liese turned her head toward the noise as uniformed cops, their guns drawn, burst through the door and immediately began to spread out.

“Mademoiselle, put your weapon down now, and step back!” one of them shouted, in French.

Liese hesitated. She glanced at the figure crumpled against the chair inside the suite. His movements had stopped. In all likelihood he was dead. Kirk was not going to be happy, because he had counted on capturing Khalil. He’d wanted to force the man into telling him about bin Laden’s threat. The Americans were in desperate need of immediate information.

“There will be no further warning!” the cop shouted.

Liese had to wonder how Gertner was going to take the news that she’d been arrested in Monaco for shooting to death a Saudi prince she was supposed to be investigating.

Moving very slowly, she bent down, placed her pistol on the floor, then straightened up. Raising her hands above her head, she stepped away from the doorway.

“Un terroriste du al-Quaida est ici,” she said. She nodded toward the suite. “Là,” she said. “Il est mort.” He’s dead.

More cops emerged from the stairwell as two rushed down the corridor to Liese. One of them kicked her weapon away, his pistol never leaving her, while the other turned her around, brought her hands behind her back, and cuffed her.

She didn’t resist. She knew better than to give them any provocation, even though the one handcuffing her ran a hand over her ass. Anyway, it was finished. Khalil was dead. He wouldn’t provide them any information, but there was one less very bad man on the streets. He would not kill again.

Even more cops had arrived on the scene, and suddenly Kirk came through the door, his hands cuffed behind him.

“He’s dead,” Liese called to him in English. “I shot him.”

The cop, who had handcuffed her, moved her down the corridor, as two other cops, wearing vests, their weapons at the ready, flanked the door to the suite.

On signal, one of them rolled inside the room, sweeping his pistol left to right. A moment later the second cop entered the suite, while two others took up positions on either side of the door.

Someone took the chair away from the elevator, and the car started down. Other cops came from the opposite end of the corridor, guns drawn, but none of the hotel’s guests had dared to open their doors to see what all the commotion was about. The two unsilenced shots had been enough to keep them inside. It was just as well, Liese thought. Khalil had shot the photographer on the balcony, and he would not have hesitated to kill anyone else who got in his way.

“Are you sure he’s down—” McGarvey said, but a slightly built Frenchman in crumpled civilian clothes came through the door at that moment. His long narrow face and dark eyes were a blank slate, as if he were in the middle of a poker game and was hiding his emotions. He took a quick look at the scene in the corridor, then held his ID wallet in front of McGarvey’s face.

“I am Lieutenant of Police Maurice Capretz. Why have you come to Monaco, Monsieur McGarvey? Why aren’t you at home attending to your duties? Basking in the adulation of your countrymen who believe you are a hero?”

“I came to find the man who was responsible for the deaths in Alaska.”

Capretz nodded, as if it was what he knew McGarvey was going to say. “Oui, Prince Salman is your prime suspect.” He glanced at Liese. “And you are Sergeant Fuelm. We were warned about you as well. And here you are in the flesh, apparently having just done mischief.”

One of the uniformed cops appeared at the suite’s doorway. He had holstered his weapon. He shook his head. “Lieutenant, there is no body.”

“But I shot him!” Liese shouted. This was all wrong. She’d seen him react to her two shots. He’d gone down. He was dead.

“No body, no blood,” the cop said. “No one was there, though there are bullet holes in the windows.”

“Perhaps you shot a fantôme, Mademoiselle,” Capretz said. He seemed relieved. “But it is perhaps for the best. Had you actually shot and killed someone, you would not be returning to Switzerland quite as rapidement as you would like.”

McGarvey had a resigned look on his face. Liese shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. She had let him down when he’d counted on her.

“But there is a body,” McGarvey said. “Just below on the street. I think that you’ll discover he was shot with a silenced pistol. Probably a large caliber from the effect of the impact.”

Capretz nodded to one of his men to check it out, but his eyes never left McGarvey’s. “No doubt you are telling the truth. France has always had a great respect for you, though you will never be welcomed back. Would you care to explain to me what you are talking about, because I certainly hope that someone hasn’t shot the prince. There would be no end to the political repercussions.”

“He was a photographer trying to get a picture of Sergeant Fuelm and me, together. He tried to take our photo down on the street when we came back to the hotel earlier, but I sent him away. Apparently he found out what room I was in, and climbed up to my balcony. It cost him his life.”

“The phantom in your suite shot him?”

“Someone did,” McGarvey said. “I think your ballistics people will confirm that the bullet didn’t come from either of our weapons. Which will leave you with something of a problem, compounded by the fact you’re allowing an al-Quaida killer, who probably climbed down the tree outside my room, to walk away.”

Capretz wasn’t impressed. “Are you aware that the prince’s yacht suddenly left La Condamine one hour ago?”

“Was Salman aboard?”

“I don’t know,” Capretz admitted.

“Then I think I would like to contact my government.”

The police lieutenant’s cell phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and answered the call. “Oui,” he said. He glanced at Liese and then back at McGarvey, and nodded. “Bon. Merci.”

Liese stared at McGarvey, trying to gauge his mood. Unless the French meant to put him in jail, he wasn’t finished. He would continue going after the prince until one or the other of them was dead.

Bin Laden’s threat was real. No one believed any differently. And the attack would happen very soon. No one had any doubt of that either. Nor was there any question that the strike would be every bit as big as 9/ 11.

Liese knew her career was almost certainly on the edge of disaster.

Capretz broke the connection and put the phone in his pocket. He turned to the cop who’d brought McGarvey up. “Did you examine his gun to see if it has been fired recently?”

“It did not appear to have been fired, sir. The magazine is full, and there is a round still in the chamber.”

Capretz turned his attention back to Liese. “But you fired two shots — at your phantom. Can you explain why there is no body and no blood? Are you that terrible a marksman, Mademoiselle?”

Liese felt lightheaded. “I must have missed,” she replied, evenly.

Capretz shrugged. “We’ll see,” he said. Once again he looked at McGarvey. “A representative from your Federal Bureau of Investigation is waiting downstairs.You will be turned over to him. There is a warrant for your arrest.” He grunted. “Unless, of course, you wish to fight extradition.”

McGarvey shook his head. “That was fast work,” he said. “What about Sergeant Fuelm?”

Capretz shrugged. “A representative from her service is here as well. As soon as we finish our ballistics test to ensure that her weapon was not used in a crime of bodily injury, she will be returned to Switzerland.”

“I suppose it would be useless to ask for help from Action?” McGarvey said.

Capretz shrugged again. “Totalement.”

Liese felt miserable. It was obvious that she would have to do whatever she could to help Kirk, even if it meant first returning to Switzerland without creating a fuss to somehow make amends.

Looking at him, her resolve hardened.

Whatever it took, even if it meant sleeping with Gertner.

THE COUNTDOWN

Muhamed Abdallah sat on a plastic chair in the screened patio behind the trailer, letting his nerves wind down in the cool evening mountain air. Working with explosives was a tricky business. The Polish-made Semtex was in itself not unstable. In fact, the dead gray, puttylike substance could be thrown against a wall, struck with a hammer, or even put into a fire, and yet it would not explode.

It was the triggering mechanisms that were extremely delicate and dangerous.

A wrong move at this stage — when he was wiring the twenty kilos of bricks to a single trigger so that at the proper time the entire mass would explode at the same instant — would be disastrous.

He extended his right arm and raised his hand in front of his face so that it blocked a section of the not-so-distant mountains. When he spread his fingers, he could see strips of the highest, snowcapped peaks.

Mountains were power. Dear Osama had a perfect understanding of this when he first went to Afghanistan to drive the infidel Russians from the righteous land.

The jihad had taken ten long years. But what was that compared to the eternity of Paradise?

When the word came, the attack would take place in seventy-two hours. It would be a second blow against the Satan America. More important even than 9/11, as it was explained to Muhamed. This time they would strike at the heart of the people.

“It will be much the same as the Israeli attacks on our refugee camps in which our children are targeted,” the man from Pakistan told them at the Nablus meeting.

He said his name was Ghulam, after the secretary to the former defense minister Aftab Mirani. No one believed it, of course, but it didn’t matter. He had come to offer them certain salvation as soldiers of God.

“Take me,” Muhamed had cried, his enthusiasm bubbling over. “I must go for my mother,” he added, shyly.

No one in the small courtyard apartment in one of the few buildings that hadn’t been damaged or destroyed by rocket attacks laughed. And Ghulam was patient with him.

“But you don’t know what the mission is,” the Pakistani mujahideen said, not unkindly. “It may be too difficult. Too terrible for you to contemplate, let alone carry out.”

His eyes were kind and understanding. Much the same as Muhamed imagined Osama’s eyes were. They had seen unimaginably horrible things, and yet al-Quaida’s resolve was strong because the jihad was just and the men at the core were strong.

“What can be more terrible than what the Israelis are doing to us?” Muhamed said to the other young men gathered in the apartment. “They kill our soliders and old men, and now they even kill our children.” Muhamed looked back to Ghulam. “What can be worse than that to contemplate?”

“Killing the infidel’s children,” the al-Quaida recruiter answered, quietly.

Muhamed was shaken. But just for a moment. He shook his head. “There can be no innocents in the battle for the will of Allah.” He looked at the others now, none of their enthusiasm damped. “Insha’allah.” He looked Ghulam directly in the eye, his own gaze steady. “Tell me what I can do for the jihad. My life for the cause.”

They had driven north that night out of the West Bank and all the way across the border into Lebanon, passing through the Israeli checkpoints on the strength of Ghulam’s credentials almost as if they were ghosts. During the two hundred-kilometer drive to Beirut, Muhamed learned that in return for his giving his life to Allah’s cause, his parents would receive fifty thousand American dollars when the mission was completed. He was also told that his sacrifice would not take place in Israel or Palestine. In fact, he would never see those places again, nor would he see his family until they joined him in Paradise. But that would be as if only an eyeblink in time.

In Beirut, Muhamed was placed aboard a Liberian-registered freighter, where he was confined to his tiny cabin in the bowels of the ship for five days and nights until he was finally taken ashore in a small boat in the middle of the night.

“Welcome to Algeria, my brother,” his guide welcomed him. “It is here that you will begin your journey.”

His journey to Paradise.

Gazing up now at the Front Range above the college town of Fort Collins, Muhamed could feel his anxiety subsiding. His hands no longer shook. Nor did he suffer from the despair that had gripped him for many weeks after he had learned the true nature of his mission here in the U.S. He knew that he was not alone, that there were others who would be carrying out similar attacks at exactly the same moment.

But that knowledge had never given him any comfort.

Even now they would be doing the same things he was doing. They had seen their targets. They were preparing their explosives, which they would strap to their bodies. And they were preparing their minds for their deaths.

Muhamed had made lists in his mind of the things he would miss. His mother. His father and his brothers. A future in which he would be married and have beautiful sons of his own. Especially a future in which he and his family would live in a free Palestine.

He even allowed certain silly things to occupy his list. But only for a short time. Drinking cha and listening to the men talk while they played dominoes in the sidewalk cafés. Playing soccer with his friends. Someday seeing movies. Tasting ice cream. New clothes, especially white shirts.

Seyoum Noufal came out to the patio, a strange pinched expression on his long sad face. “Muhamed,” he whispered, as if he were afraid that their nearest neighbor several hundred meters away might overhear him.

Muhamed looked up at him, and he knew what he had come out to say. “The message has come?”

“Yes.”

Muhamed turned his gaze back to the vista of the mountains, the details washing out with the gathering dusk.

The Qur’an says that for every people there is a messenger; when their messenger comes, the issue between them is justly determined and they are not wronged.

His messenger had come, and he would not be wronged, for he had a passage to Paradise.

In three days, freshly shaved, the Semtex strapped to his body beneath his schoolboy clothes, he would enter Rocky Mountain High School as a student. At the very same moment others across the country were doing the same thing in similar small-town high schools, he would place himself in the middle of the school and activate the detonator.

It would be a blow against the infidel, worse in horror than 9/11.

Infinitely worse.

Insha’allah.