Soldier of God

FORTY-NINE

McGarvey had all but resigned himself to being too late, as the FBI’s Gulfstream executive jet touched down at Washington’s Reagan Airport a few minutes before dawn, and their F/A-18 fighter/interceptor escort peeled off back to its station ten miles south.

He’d come back to the States like this, with a lot of heavy hitters lined up against him, more times than he cared to count. Yet he’d never had the mindset to simply turn his back on a problem and give up. Looking out the window now, the city across the river like an ancient Rome with its marble statues and granite monuments, he could only wonder at his own persistence.

Just run. Turn around and leave. Go. Give it up.

The city had become an armed fortress since the bin Laden tape. Any aircraft operating within the Washington terminal control area was escorted and would be shot out of the sky if the slightest thing seemed wrong. That included official aircraft.

The flight had been long, doubly so because the pair of FBI special agents who’d been sent over to bring him back to the States had refused to answer any of his questions, or allow him to use the aircraft’s comms gear.

But they had handed him a CIA briefing package that had been rushed out to Reagan just before the Bureau plane had taken off for France. The file had been released on Adkins’s signature, but it had obviously been put together by Otto Rencke. They were deferential to him, but their orders had been very specific.

“Whose orders?” McGarvey had asked at one point.

“Mr. Rudolph’s,” one of them said. “Now, sir, maybe we should all try to catch a few z’s.”

McGarvey had worked with Fred Rudolph off and on for the past ten years to narrow the gap between the Bureau and the Agency. Since 9/11 the two agencies had become even closer, especially since McGarvey had taken over as DCI and Rudolph had become the Bureau’s deputy director. Between the two of them they had done good things.

Already in the thirty-six hours since McGarvey had left, the situation on the ground had changed. Coming in on final approach to landing, he’d seen armed personnel carriers or tanks at all the major bridges and highways into the city. In the distance he’d made out even heavier concentrations of military equipment stationed at the White House and the Capitol Building.

According to the slim, leather-bound briefing book, even if al-Quaida’s attack never came, serious damage had already been done. The public’s confidence in Washington’s ability to protect them was almost nil. But instead of cowering in their homes, curtains drawn, lights out, people were at least going about their business. Schools had been closed for only one day before people began escorting their children back to classes. National Guard troops were stationed in front of the bigger schools across the country, though there weren’t nearly enough troops to do an adequate job for even ten percent of the campuses in each state.

Absenteeism in the workforce had spiked the day after bin Laden’s tape, but twenty-four hours later most people had gone back to work. But no one was spending money, and Wall Street had been thrown into a panic, both the DOW and NASDAQ losing nearly thirty percent of their values before computer-driven automatic controls dropped into place.

Though no public announcement was being made, the Fed was estimating that the U.S. economy was losing a billion dollars a day while the nation waited for the shoe to drop.

All of America’s military units and civilian police forces, from the FBI down to the one-cop stations in small towns, had been mobilized.

Nuclear submarines and guided-missile frigates — in port from Newport and Jacksonville on the East Coast to San Diego and Honolulu in the west — recalled their crews, lit off their power plants, and set out to sea, ringing the entire continental United States plus Hawaii and Alaska with a curtain of steel capable of throwing more firepower, nuclear as well as conventional, than had been fired in all sides of all the wars ever fought on the planet.

The entire array of Keyhole, Jupiter, and other eye-in-the-sky satellites in the National Reconnaissance Office’s suite of technical means were trained first on U.S. borders and areas of interests, and then on known or suspected hotbeds of terrorist activity, including training and staging areas in such places as Iran, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and even the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and parts of Montana.

No one seemed to remember, or cared to mention, the Pentagon warning shortly after 9/11, when the U.S.-led war on terrorism was being launched, that all of America’s nuclear might had been useless against the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The briefing book included a summary of a meeting with the president and his security council that had taken place sometime the previous day. Even the Department of Homeland Security, which had raised the threat level to red at the same time bin Laden’s tape had been leaked to the public, admitted to the president and the NSC that stopping an attack by a determined adversary was next to impossible, given the openness of our borders.

“Even Israel, with its stringent security measures, can’t keep its citizens safe,” Homeland Security’s new director, Peter Townsend, reminded the group. All that was left to do, beside doubling-up on air marshals on all flights over U.S. airspace, was to ignore the ACLU and other human rights organizations and take profiling to new heights.

Most terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its interests had been carried out by Arab males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. “They’re our targets,” said one of Townsend’s deputy assistants, stating the obvious.

The president was remaining in Washington, though the vice president and a significant number of congressmen were in seclusion in rural Maryland. Air Force One was ready at Andrews, with its crew on standby 24/7 to whisk the president out of the area within minutes of notification. A Marine helicopter and crew stood by on the south grounds in sight of the West Wing. And the White House Secret Service detail was tripled, and supplemented by Marines and additional radar-guided Patriot missile launchers.

“We’re facing one big problem,” Townsend’s deputy assistant warned. “We don’t know if they’re going to come at us with airliners again, or if they’re going to hit us with a nuke, or a bioweapon, or a car bomb. We just don’t know, Mr. President.”

The Gulfstream got off the main runway, followed one of the taxiways across the airport from the main terminal building and past the maintenance hangars of several airlines, and was directed by a Follow Me pickup truck to an unmarked hangar.

Watching from the window, McGarvey spotted Adkins and a pair of men standing next to a Cadillac SUV with tinted windows. The two men, who were obviously security officers, were dressed in dark blue windbreakers and baseball caps, their Heckler & Koch M8s in the compact carbine version at the ready, their heads on swivels.

Fred Rudolph climbed out of a plain gray Chevy Impala, and as the Gulfstream came to a stop and its engines began to spool down, he went over to Adkins and they shook hands. Neither of them seemed to be particularly happy to be there.

Before the aircraft door was opened, one of the guys who had come to escort McGarvey back to the States handed him a padded envelope. “Your weapon, spare magazine, and cell phone, sir,” he said. “We were instructed to give them back when we got here. Someone will grab your bags from the hold in a minute.”

“I thought I was under arrest,” McGarvey said, ripping open the envelope. He wasn’t feeling charitable.

“That was just for the benefit of the French,” the agent replied, evenly. He wasn’t enjoying the exchange, but he had a job to do and he was doing it.

“Right,” McGarvey said. He loaded his pistol, stuffed it in his belt, and pocketed his spare magazine and cell phone. He was tired and irascible. His chance to get to Khalil on Corsica had been blown. Coming back like this would be starting all over again. And he didn’t know if there was enough time.

Last night, trying to get a couple of hours sleep, he had wondered if he should go on. If he should ignore the president’s orders to back off.

The woman did not want to be rescued from the water without her baby. Her cries still pierced his heart. There had been no reason to kill them. No reason at all.

Backing off, he decided, had never been an option.

He tossed the envelope aside. “Did you guys have a surveillance set up on me?”

“No, sir. We were instructed to sit tight and wait until you got into trouble, then bail you out if we could.”

The other agent was watching from the open door, a neutral expression on his features. Like his partner he had a job to do, and he was doing it. He only wanted McGarvey to get off the airplane and his job would be over.

McGarvey softened a little. “Okay, fellas, thanks for the lift. What do you say we try to catch the bad guys before they can hit us again?”

“Yes, sir.”

McGarvey got off the airplane and walked across to where Rudolph and Adkins were waiting. “Your timing stinks, Fred.”

Rudolph didn’t offer his hand. “Nothing I could do about it, Mac. Weissman gave me no room to maneuver, and his orders came straight from the White House.” He glanced at Adkins. “We’re not screwing around here.”

“Neither am I, Fred.”

Rudolph was angry. “Goddammit, going after the Saudis won’t help. We’ll just get tangled up in money trails, nothing more.”

From the beginning Rudolph had been caught between a rock and a hard place in his dealings with the CIA. This time it was worse because he and McGarvey had become friends. McGarvey nodded. “What’s my situation? Am I under arrest?”

“The president wants you neutralized. And he’s serious about it.” Rudolph was apologetic. “Means house arrest.” He glanced at Adkins again. “Why the hell did you have to quit in the middle of this?”

“Because I don’t agree with Haynes. The Saudis were behind 9/11, and they’re right up to their necks in this one. I had a chance to stop one of them in Corsica.”

“If you’re talking about Salman, he’s not there. In fact, his jet landed at Dulles a couple of hours ago. He’s here at the Saudi Embassy. If it makes you feel any better, we’re keeping a watch on him.”

For just an instant McGarvey was taken aback. Salman coming here was the last thing he’d expected. “Well, that’s a real comfort, Fred,” McGarvey said, meanly, to cover his racing thoughts. The arrogance of the Saudi bastard was awesome.

Rudolph turned away in frustration. “I’m not the enemy,” he shouted.

McGarvey’s muscles bunched. He was in Alaska. He couldn’t get it out of his head. “Someone is,” he barked, “and unless we get off our dead asses we’re going to have another fucking 9/11 on our hands.”

Rudolph lowered his head and shook it. He was silent for a second, and when he looked up he compressed his lips. “What happened to us, Mac? What the hell happened in the past ten years to make us the bad guys? I thought it was the Russians.”

“Simpler times, Fred,” McGarvey said. He turned to Adkins. “Take me home, would you, Dick?”

“Stay there, Mac,” Rudolph said. “I don’t want to arrest you.”

FIFTY

Dennis Berndt put down the telephone, paused for a moment, then got up and went to the window that looked toward the Rose Garden. It was morning finally, after a long and difficult night. He rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath to relieve the pressure that had steadily built in his chest since he’d heard bin Laden’s tape.

When he’d come down from Harvard at Haynes’s behest to become the president’s adviser on national security affairs, he had thought of the job in academic terms. He would work in the White House. He would be among the chosen few to actually make history and not simply live it, or react to it. He would conduct national security briefings on a daily basis. He would consult with the heads of the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency. He would be among the privileged few who were privy to the nation’s secrets. He would have the ear and the trust of the president of the United States.

But now his job wasn’t so academic. He had a wife and two children, one in high school and the other at Princeton. It was his family that the bastards were targeting.

Government was no longer simply an intellectual exercise.

His secretary, who like most of the other White House staff was working 24/7, catching catnaps whenever possible, buzzed him. “The person from Langley you wanted to see is here.”

“Send him in.”

Otto Rencke, carrying a plain buff file folder, his red hair flying in all directions, his sneakers untied, his Moscow University sweatshirt stained with what might have been coffee or Coke, bounded in as if he were the March Hare with no time to spare. “Oh, wow, Mr. Berndt,” he bubbled, “thanks for agreeing to see me.”

Berndt motioned for his secretary to close the door. “Give us five minutes; I don’t want to be disturbed.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and she withdrew, closing the door behind her. This meeting was an unofficial one, and it would not be logged, except by security.

Rencke sat down cross-legged in a chair. “I thought you guys would dink around until we ran out of time. Your Homeland Security people mean well, ya know, but they’re not doing any good. No time. No time. The bad dogs are already here, so sealing borders won’t do, Jack. And blocking Washington won’t do any good either. They’re not attacking here, and they won’t use airplanes again. We’re safe. No one has to run for their hidey-holes.”

Berndt had had dealings with Rencke on several occasions, but each time, like now, the experience was something new and novel. The man was a genius, but he was probably the most eccentric individual Berndt had ever met. “Has Mac gotten back from France yet?”

“About a half hour ago.”

“Have you talked to him this morning?” Berndt asked. “About coming here?”

The crazy animation suddenly left Rencke’s face. He no longer looked like some kid high on speed. “I understand your position, Mr. Berndt. We all do. But the name of the game is stopping the bad guys before they hit us again. Mac is going to do his thing, no matter what the president orders or how hard the Bureau tries to stop him, because that’s the way he operates. In the meantime, the Company is there to serve the administration. Of which you are a senior member. Which is why I’m here.” He handed the file folder across to Berndt. “Prince Salman.”

“Mac thinks that the prince and the terrorist Khalil are one and the same man,” Berndt said. “He told us about it, but the president doesn’t share his view.”

“We have confidence that Mac might be right.”

Berndt was skating on thin ice, going directly against a presidential order that the Saudis were strictly off limits. This was realpolitick. Oil was power. Without it, the U.S. would all but cease to operate. Almost every other consideration was secondary.

But the nation could not endure another 9/11. Especially not an attack on children, who after all were one commodity that was more precious than anything pumped out of the ground.

“How high a confidence?” Berndt asked. “One hundred percent?”

Rencke shook his head without hesitation. “Eighty percent. Our data are mostly circumstantial.”

It’s what Berndt was afraid of. If he was going to make a successful case to the president for going after Salman, he wanted more than that. His career was on the line. The president had warned McGarvey that continuing on a collision course with the Saudi prince would possibly be construed as treason. Berndt would be an accessory.

“Circumstantial evidence is a hard sell,” Berndt observed.

“Not this stuff. You gotta listen, because no matter what’s the truth, Salman is here in Washington. And every time Salman shows up somewhere, Khalil is right there. Don’t ya see? It doesn’t matter if they’re the same dude; they’re practically using the same travel bureau.”

Berndt suddenly had a bad feeling that today was going to be one hundred percent worse than yesterday, which had been no picnic. “What’s he doing here? Are they going to hit us in Washington?”

Rencke shook his head. “Khalil isn’t here to direct the attack. He came to face McGarvey. Something that would have happened in Corsica if the FBI hadn’t interfered in Monaco.”

“McGarvey’s under house arrest—”

“Yeah, right,” Rencke interrupted. He got to his feet. “You’d better cross your fingers and hope he doesn’t stay home like a good boy.” At the door Rencke stopped and gave Berndt a baleful stare. “We’ve got another bloodbath coming our way, Mr. National Security Adviser. Do what you can to convince the president who’s behind it. Short of that, don’t tie our hands.”

“Good luck.”

“You, too,” Rencke said, and he left.

Berndt opened the thick file folder that Rencke had brought him and began to read. After only two pages, he picked up the phone and called Calvin Beckett, the president’s chief of staff. The call rolled over on the second ring to Beckett’s cell phone. He was in his car just coming down West Executive Avenue.

“Good morning, Dennis. Did you spend the night?”

“Yeah. I wanted to see the overnights from State as they came from our embassies,” Berndt said, tiredly. “We’re getting plenty of sympathy but no offers of assistance. No one wants to be next on the list. They don’t want to end up getting hit like they did in Madrid because they were our ally.”

“From their standpoint, it makes sense,” Beckett said, crossly. He sounded peckish. Like everyone else in the loop he was probably not getting much sleep. “What have you got?”

“McGarvey is back.”

“Good,” Beckett said. “No one was hurt, I presume. And I hope he’ll listen to the good advice he’s getting this time and stay the hell out of it.”

Berndt looked at the timetables for Prince Salman and Khalil that Rencke had laid out like a spreadsheet. “There was a shooting, but apparently it was a photographer who got in the way.” Berndt hesitated. He’d read that report from Paris at five this morning. Fred Rudolph over at the Bureau had been kind enough to fax him a copy. “But the shot wasn’t fired from McGarvey’s pistol or the gun the Swiss cop was carrying. Someone else was there.”

Beckett was suddenly very interested. “So who was it?”

“Probably Khalil. He wants revenge for Alaska.”

“Shoot-out at the OK Corral. At least it happened somewhere else—” Beckett stopped. “But that’s not why you called.”

“I’m calling a meeting for the NSC at ten. The president needs to know about this.”

“He’s coming down at seven-thirty. Tell him then,” Beckett said.

Berndt glanced out the window. It promised to be a beautiful day. At least weatherwise. “There’s a good possibility that Khalil is here in Washington. And that’s not all. I think we finally have a convincing argument that the Saudis are up to their necks in this thing.”

Beckett took a moment to answer. “When we were accused of being behind the curve on 9/11, there weren’t a whole lot of people who knew even half of it,” he said, resignedly. “We’re under the same gun now.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“Ten,” Beckett said. “I just hope that you have some concrete suggestions in addition to your dark possibilities.”

FIFTY-ONE

The elegant three-story brownstone off Thirty-second Street in Georgetown had belonged for five years to a Saudi business institute under the name Middle East Center for Advanced Studies. In the climate of Washington it had gone all but unnoticed by the FBI. In reality the house was used by Saudi intelligence for operations deemed too sensitive to be conducted out of the embassy.

Khalil got out of the Capitol City Cab a few minutes before eight and stood for a moment at the security gate savoring the idea of what was coming in the next seventy-two hours. Not only would another major blow be struck against the infidel, but Kirk McGarvey would die.

The man was everything Osama had warned him to be. Watching the life drain from McGarvey’s eyes would be a pleasure of inestimable measure.

Under martial law Washington had turned into a fortress. Yet customs at Dulles didn’t raise an eyebrow when he presented his British diplomatic passport in the name of Donald Baden Powell, nor were any questions asked. The authorities aboard the commercial flight from Hamilton and on the ground were looking for Arab males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. A tall, well-dressed diplomat from the island of Bermuda did not fit the profile.

Traffic was heavy on the main thoroughfares, but back here on Scott Place there wasn’t even pedestrian traffic for the moment. Once the cab left, he was alone, tasting the air in the enemy capital.

The house was set back fifteen meters from the street behind a tall wrought-iron fence. It was an armed camp in the middle of the infidels’ headquarters. The windows were all blank, either curtained or silvered. Nothing could be seen through them, nor was there any activity in the driveway at the front.

After this blow, the search for bin Laden would intensify again, and sooner or later all his doubles would be captured or killed, and it would finally be his turn. No man was immortal. But even that didn’t matter, Khalil thought, for the jihad had had a life of its own.

The struggle would go on despite any man’s passing, be it bin Laden or McGarvey.

Khalil switched his leather overnight bag to his left hand, took a security pass card out of his pocket, and swiped it through the reader on the electric gate. The lock buzzed, and as the gates swung open he stepped inside the compound and started across the driveway to the front door.

Someone shouted something on the speaker above the card reader behind him, and as Khalil mounted the three steps to the entryway, the door opened and a very large man dressed in a Western business suit was there.

“Good morning, brother,” Khalil said, pleasantly, in Arabic. “I’m here to see al-Kaseem.”

The security officer wasn’t impressed. He studied Khalil’s face without recognition, glanced at the bag in his hand, then glanced over his shoulder at the electric wrought-iron gate, which was swinging shut.

“There are no visitors here. How did you get in?” he demanded.

Khalil held up the pass. “Take me to al-Kaseem, please.”

The security officer reached for the pass, which was exactly what Khalil thought he might do. The fool.

Khalil moved his hand to the left, diverting the officer’s attention; took a quick look over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t being observed by someone passing on the street; then easily shouldered the man back into the stair hall and slashed the edge of the plastic card across the bridge of his nose, opening a small gash that immediately welled blood.

The guard roared something unintelligible as he struggled to regain his balance. He pulled out a boxy Glock semiautomatic, but Khalil stepped inside his reach, grabbed the man’s arm under his own, and stepped sharply to the left.

The security officer’s arm bent backward nearly to the breaking point before he dropped his pistol.

Two other security guards came up the hall from the rear of the house on the run, their pistols drawn.

“I’m going to step back,” Khalil said, loudly enough for them to hear, and they pulled up short. “I don’t want anybody to do something foolish that would make me cause further pain or suffering. I am a friend, and I come in peace. Rashid al-Kaseem will verify my identity.”

A security officer behind a short counter to the left had risen and pulled out his pistol. He was pointing it at Khalil’s head. “Take care that you do not reach for a weapon, or I will shoot you,” he called out, in a steady voice. He was a professional.

“I am unarmed,” Khalil said. He spread his arms and stepped back.

The security officer he’d damaged started for him, but someone at the head of the stairs shouted an order, and the officer stopped in his tracks.

Khalil looked up as Rashid al-Kaseem, chief of station for Washington Saudi intelligence, came down the stairs. He was a short, dapper man, dressed in a conservative British-cut tweed sport coat, gray slacks, and a club tie. He was bald except for a fringe of dark hair above his very large ears. He was only a very distant cousin in the royal family, but he had a lot of respect from the major princes. He knew things. He saw and heard things. One day he would rise to head all of Saudi intelligence, which was a very powerful position within the kingdom.

“Achmed, pick up your weapon, and see to your injury,” al-Kaseem said. “If you need stitches, someone will drive you to the embassy. The rest of you, return to your duties. And there is blood on the floor. Clean it.”

When the others were gone, he motioned for Khalil to follow him, and together they went upstairs and down the broad, expensively carpeted corridor to a small book-lined office at the rear of the building. A hum of muted conversations, a few voices raised in anger or frustration, came from behind closed doors. This place, like just about every other office in Washington, was on an emergency footing.

When they were alone, al-Kaseem turned on him. “What are you doing here, now of all times?” he demanded, harshly. He was one of very few men who knew Khalil by sight.

Khalil considered the possibility that the intelligence chief, who had entirely too high an opinion of himself, might beg for mercy as his life’s blood drained from his body. The expression in his eyes at the end would be most interesting. “I have a job to do, and I require your assistance, here and at the embassy.”

“That’s impossible—”

“I’m going to set a trap, and the timing will be delicate. I’ll need a van and at least two men plus a driver. I mean to kidnap the wife of the CIA director.”

Al-Kaseem was struck dumb.

Khalil took four fat envelopes out of his pocket and handed them to the intelligence chief. “Place these in your safe for me. And see that they are not tampered with.”

Ernst Gertner was at Zurich’s Kloten Airport when Liese arrived on a charter flight from Marseille at four o’clock in the morning. The French authorities had held her until all the ballistics reports were completed, and to finish interrogating her about her relationship with Kirk McGarvey, a man who’d always been of great interest to them.

Gertner was in a higher-than-usual state of agitation, and he kept flapping his arms as if he were an ostrich trying to take off. “Goodness gracious, what am I supposed to do when one of my star officers simply goes off into the bush without a word, against all orders to the contrary, and then gets herself involved with a shooting death?”

Liese was beyond tired, and very worried about Kirk’s reception back in Washington. He’d gone against his president’s orders. Not only that, but Khalil wasn’t finished. He would continue to go after McGarvey until one or both of them were dead.

She looked up at Gertner, almost feeling sorry for him. “Sorry, captain, I was following a lead. And we almost got Khalil.” She looked away momentarily. “It was very close.”

“The French are distressed—”

Liese turned back. “Are you going to fire me for good this time?” she asked. She felt alone and isolated, and frightened.

“As of this moment you’re on administrative leave, but I’ll expect you to stand it at the chalet.”

Liese shook her head. “He’s not guilty, you know.”

“For heaven’s sake.” Gertner puffed up. “Then explain why he left you alone in the corridor to face Khalil while he went off gallivanting around outdoors?”

FIFTY-TWO

It had only been forty-eight hours since McGarvey left for Monaco. He’d promised Katy he would come back safely, and that he would deal with Khalil. It was unsettling to return home with his work left undone, and the danger to the U.S. worse than before he’d left.

Coming up the cul-de-sac from Connecticut Avenue to his house, he could see that the security detail was gone, but he said nothing to Adkins, who had ridden beside him in silence most of the way from the airport. There was nothing to say that they hadn’t said to each other the morning McGarvey left headquarters. Adkins was directing the CIA’s efforts to track down the al-Quaida terrorists before they struck. In that administrative task he was every bit as good, if not better, a DCI than McGarvey was.

Unspoken between them was that Adkins had withdrawn the Directorate of Security detail from the house against his better judgment in order to give McGarvey the freedom to come and go without hindrance.

Adkins’s driver parked in the driveway; then he and the bodyguard grabbed the M8 carbines from their brackets on the transmission hump, got out of the limo, and did a slow three-sixty scan of the neighborhood, leaving the two men alone for a couple of moments.

“Your daughter spent the night with Kathleen,” Adkins said. “I’ve put her on administrative leave for the duration.”

“Anyone else inside?” McGarvey asked, looking up at the front bedroom window. Liz was standing there.

“No. I didn’t think you wanted anyone else. Under the circumstances.”

“This close I don’t think they’ll bother coming after Katy,” McGarvey said. “How about Todd?”

“Your son-in-law is back at the Farm helping to get the student-instructor crews out the door to work security around Washington.” Adkins was clearly unhappy. “Listen here, Mac, the White House is in an uproar over your stunt in Monaco. The French have lodged a protest against you. The Saudis are screaming bloody murder, threatening to convince OPEC to cut oil production another seven or eight percent. And half the people on the Hill think you might be guilty of treason, while the other half think that at the very least you’re a quitter. Depends on whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.”

“Pretty quick turnaround for someone who was a national hero three days ago,” McGarvey said. “Is there any word on where Salman is staying in Washington?”

“The Bureau had him at the embassy as of an hour ago. They promised to let us know the instant he makes a move.” Adkins looked at him. “I suppose it’d be fruitless to ask you if you knew what you were doing. You always do.” He shook his head. “But Jesus, Mac, you’re going head-to-head with the president this time.”

“How close is the Bureau watching Khalil?”

“I don’t know,” Adkins admitted. “But certainly close enough so that he won’t be able to pull off anything significant.” He glanced at the house. “Like coming here after Katy.”

McGarvey had been thinking about that very possibility from the moment he’d learned Salman was in Washington. He didn’t think Khalil would bother trying to inflict any collateral damage this late in the game, though why Salman, if he wasn’t Kahlil, had come to Washington at this moment was a puzzlement. Unless he’d come to personally lodge a complaint with the president about McGarvey’s behavior aboard his yacht. After all, the former director of the CIA had threatened to kill him.

Whatever the case the sheer arrogance of the Saudi prince was nothing short of awesome.

“It’ll all be over in the next day or two, so just keep the Company on track in the meantime,” McGarvey said.

“Unless al-Quaida postpones the hit.”

McGarvey shook his head. “They’re committed this time. If they back off, they’ll lose too much face.”

Adkins was studying him. “You’re going after Salman, aren’t you?”

“Don’t ask,” McGarvey said.

He gathered his two bags, got out of the limo, and without looking back went up to the house. The door opened and Katy was there, a worried but relieved expression on her narrow, pretty face. Dressed in a pair of designer jeans and a white tee, she looked like a model who hadn’t slept since he’d left; her hair was a little mussed and her eyes were red, but she threw her arms around him once he stepped inside and put down his bags.

“God, am I glad to see you,” she said, clinging tightly.

She felt good to McGarvey, even though he had not come in from the field yet. Only a small part of him was home with his wife in his arms. Most of his head — his concentration, and his awareness of his surroundings — was at a heightened, unnatural level. He was on the defensive, like a boxer with his guard up, while at the same time he was circling for the kill.

Katy caught this feeling immediately. She parted and looked up into his face. “Oh,” she said, “it’s not done.”

“I missed him in Monaco, and now he’s here in Washington,” McGarvey told her. “Sorry, Katy. But I’m not going to miss this time.”

“They wouldn’t tell us why they were withdrawing security from the house,” she said. “Even Dick wouldn’t say, except that they thought the threat level against me personally was down. But they left Elizabeth.”

“Hi, Daddy,” Liz said, coming down from upstairs. She was dressed in khaki slacks and a soft yellow pullover, with a Walther PPK in a quick-draw holster at her left hip.

McGarvey looked up. “Hello, sweetheart. How’re you doing?”

“Fine,” she said. “But I just got word from Neal Julien that Salman left the Saudi embassy, and he thinks that the FBI might have lost him.”

McGarvey nodded. He had been afraid of something like this. “He’ll be back. Anywhere else in Washington will get too hot for him.”

Liz’s pale green eyes narrowed as she assimilated the information. “They’re not making any real progress stopping these guys, so it looks as if it’s going to be up to the CIA to nail Khalil and make him tell us what their plans are.” She looked a little pale and drawn. Like everyone else in Washington, she’d not been getting much sleep since the bin Laden tape.

“I’ll have to get to him first.”

“Do you have any ideas, Daddy?” Liz asked. Her parents had divorced when she was just a little girl, so she had spent all of her teenage years without a father. Instead of hating him for his absence, though, she had put him in a fantasy world in which he was her knight in shining armor. Whenever she had a problem, she would ask herself what her father would do about it — what he would say, how he would react. When he’d finally come back into her life, she wasn’t disappointed; in her mind he was even better than her fantasy version of him. Her adoration of her father sometimes was a bone of contention between Todd and her. But he too looked up to McGarvey, so he could never stay angry with his wife for very long.

“Getting Salman out of the embassy is going to be easier than getting me inside,” McGarvey said. He had a couple of ideas, neither of which would make the White House happy. “If I can get him isolated, I’ll need ten minutes.”

Liz smiled wickedly. “That fast?”

McGarvey nodded. “He’s a coward. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll be fast.”

Kathleen was following all this closely. “I thought you were going to kill him,” she said, an intensity in her voice. She had seen Khalil brutally gun down innocent passengers, and had been at his side when he’d ordered the young mother and her infant child thrown overboard.

“I am,” he said gently. “But first I need to get to him, and then I need to get some answers.”

McGarvey studied the expression on her face. She had changed since Alaska. All of them had. But in her the change had taken the form of a hardness around the edges of her personality. There was a certain recklessness in her attitude, as if she was impatient to get on with things and was willing to take whatever chances had to be taken; damn the consequences despite the baby.

Or perhaps because of the baby.

“Good,” Kathleen said.

McGarvey turned back to his daughter. “Did you talk to Otto this morning?”

“He left the White House a few minutes ago. Berndt took the package, and at least agreed to look at it.”

Rencke had laid out his plan in the briefing book he’d sent over with the FBI agents who’d gone to France to fetch McGarvey. No matter what might or might not have happened in Monaco, the White House had to be convinced that at least some members of the Saudi royal family had been involved in 9/11 and were almost certainly involved in the latest bin Laden threat. Rencke had gotten that information into the hands of the one man the president trusted most.

“One thing, Kirk,” Kathleen said. “Are you sure that Salman and Khalil are the same man? Because I am. It was his eyes.”

That was another question McGarvey had wrestled with since Monaco. Half the time he was sure they were one and the same, but the other half he just couldn’t be sure. One thing was certain, he thought; ten minutes alone with the prince and he would find out.

“I think so,” he told his wife. He turned back to his daughter again. “Where do Otto and I meet?”

“Right here, at the fifteenth fairway shelter.” It was across the creek, next to the maintenance barn and access road. Liz looked at her watch. “He should be getting there in the next twenty minutes.”

“It’ll give me time to change,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime I want you two to stick it out here. Anything comes your way, call for backup. But I think you’ll be okay. It’s me he wants now.”

“What if someone calls for you?” Kathleen asked.

McGarvey grinned viciously. “Tell them I’m in the shower.”

FIFTY-THREE

Kathleen McGarvey was fifty and pregnant, in her mind a sublimely ridiculous combination, but she was not an invalid. Her husband was off trying to find a key to lure Prince Salman into the open so he could be taken down, and she had an idea that she knew where to find it.

Kirk was only one man. That was Karen Shaw’s take. And she was correct. Despite his abilities, despite his heart, he was one lone man against an organization that had brought down the World Trade Center towers. On top of that he did not have the active support of his own government.

After Kirk left to meet Otto, Kathleen had changed into a pale cream pants suit with a plain white blouse, brushed her hair, and put on some makeup. She was just finishing when Liz came to the bedroom door.

“You look nice, Mom, but what are you doing?” Liz said.

Kathleen put on a pair of small, gold hoop earrings as she watched her daughter’s reflection in the dresser mirror. Elizabeth would be the toughest hurdle “Getting ready to go out.”

“No,” Liz blurted.

Kathleen turned to face her daughter with a look of mild amusement. “What did you say?”

“Dad wants us to stay put,” Liz answered. She looked determined.

“Your father is out laying his life on the line. Once again. Your husband is helping with security. The FBI, the police, the National Guard are all out doing their duty, trying to stop the monsters.Yet you and I are simply going to sit here and do nothing?” Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t think so, sweetheart.” She smiled. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I think we should stay here,” Liz replied, with a little less certainty.

“We’re either going to be a part of the problem or a part of the solution. And I do not want to be in the former category.” What she wanted to do was right; she was convinced of it. “You weren’t on the cruise ship. You didn’t witness what those monsters are capable of doing. I did.” She got her purse and went to her daughter.

“Goddammit, Mother.”

Kathleen brushed a strand of hair off her daughter’s forehead. “Don’t swear, please; it’s ugly. I simply want you to take a drive with me into Georgetown. I want to have a quick peek at something, and we’ll come right back.”

“At what?” Liz asked, crossly.

“Get a jacket or something to cover up your gun, and I’ll tell you on the way,” Kathleen said. She gave her daughter a peck on the cheek, then brushed past her. “We’ll take my car. I’ll drive and you can ride shotgun.”

If the truth be told, Elizabeth much preferred doing something to sitting around the house guarding her mother from an attack that probably wasn’t going to happen.

In any event, providing any real security against a determined attack at the house would be impossible to do alone. One gun was simply not enough of a deterrent.

The car was a smoked silver Mercedes 560SL, which Kathleen drove fast and impatiently. “We’re going to take a quick look at Darby Yarnell’s old house,” she said.

“He’s dead,” Elizabeth said. “Somebody else owns it.” She had seen the entire file a couple of years ago when she had gone looking into her father’s past. But the business of her mother having an affair had not been included. She’d learned of it for the first time two days ago, and her gut still hadn’t recovered from knowing that her mother was not perfect after all.

They headed out of Chevy Chase on Connecticut Avenue, crossing over to Wisconsin Avenue atTenley Circle, traffic almost back to normal despite the bin Laden threat.

“Do you know who owns it?” Kathleen asked, glancing at her daughter. “The Saudi government,” she said without waiting for a reply. “It’s a think tank.”

Elizabeth had not known that part. There was no reason for her to have gone looking. But it made sense, especially if Khalil was a Saudi. And all of a sudden it dawned on her what her mother was attempting to do, and her blood ran cold.

“Turn around now, Mother,” she said. “We’re going back home.”

“No,” Kathleen said. They were passing the U.S. Naval Observatory grounds on their left. The vice president lived there, and a pair of National Guard Armored Personnel Carriers were parked on the main driveway. Directly across the avenue were the embassies of Fiji and three other small countries.

“I’m serious. We are not going to Yarnell’s old house, because I know what you want to do, and I’m not going to let you.”

Kathleen was unfazed. “If you know that much, then you know why I have to do this for your father. Khalil might not come to the house after me, but if he sees me parked outside his front door, he might try something. The second anything starts to happen, we’ll get out of there and let your father know.”

“That’s my point,” Elizabeth said, frantically. This was sheer madness. “What am I supposed to do if they come out guns blazing?”

“They wouldn’t do that in the middle of Georgetown in the middle of a sunny morning.”

“Well, if they do, you could get us both killed,” Elizabeth shouted. “All three of us,” she added, bitterly, knowing whatever she could say was going to do no good.

“Somebody has to stop him before it’s too late,” Kathleen said. “At least we have to try.”

Khalil was in the second-floor operations center, where a detailed street map of Chevy Chase was displayed on a wide-screen computer monitor, while on another, photographs of Kathleen McGarvey scrolled down the screen. With him were the four security officers who al-Kaseem had assigned to him for the kidnapping. At this moment their driver was parked in a garage around the block in a Comcast Cable truck that they would take to the McGarvey house. They would neutralize whatever security was in place and grab Kathleen McGarvey.

Key to the operation would be making sure that Kirk McGarvey wasn’t home. Khalil did not want to go up against the man again, not without the leverage that holding the man’s wife hostage would give him. They were working on the surveillance operation to do just that.

There could be no mistakes because McGarvey would move heaven and earth to protect her. He’d already demonstrated that. But if his wife were to be taken to an absolutely secure location, his effectiveness as a player in this little drama would be neutralized.

The revenge would be sweet. Especially after the attacks when Kathleen McGarvey would be returned to her husband. When her body would be returned.

The normally calm al-Kaseem appeared at the steel security door in a hurry; he was flushed. “She’s here.”

Khalil looked up. “What are you talking about?”

“Kathleen McGarvey and another woman are sitting in a Mercedes directly in front of this building. I recognized her from the photographs.”

For a moment Khalil was unsure of himself. Someone had traced him here, and the woman had the audacity to show up and challenge him. McGarvey knew!

“I’m telling you to stop this before it gets totally out of hand,” al-Kaseem said. It was an order he was not qualified to give. Khalil was of a higher rank within the royal family than al-Kaseem was. But the intelligence chief had his own orders, which were to keep a very low profile until whatever was going to happen was over with. Already more than eight hundred Saudi citizens had been airlifted back to Riyadh, where they would wait out the attack and the backlash that was expected to last a year or more. There were to be absolutely no incidents involving Saudi citizens in the U.S.

Khalil decided that whatever the reason the brave but empty-headed woman had come here, the advantage was his for the taking.

“We’ll take her now,” he said.

“You’re not bringing her into this facility,” al-Kaseem shouted.

Khalil looked at the intelligence officer as if he were an insect. “I’ll take her wherever I please.”

Elizabeth knew that this was all wrong, sitting in plain sight in front of the Saudi-owned building. Her mother’s aim was to flush Khalil out of hiding, if this is where he was, using herself as bait. After Alaska, the terrorist had a strong incentive to hit back.

The problem was that her ruse might be successful. Without backup they would be sitting ducks out here.

“You’ve made your point, Mother,” she said. She pointed to the closed-circuit cameras mounted behind the tall iron fence. “They know we’re here. So let’s go.”

Katy seemed to be disappointed. “I thought someone would have come out to find out what we wanted.”

“Be glad they didn’t,” Elizabeth said. She was getting seriously spooked.

A white panel van turned the corner on Thirty-second Street, and came up the narrow Scott Place. It moved slowly, as if the driver was looking for an address. Elizabeth could see no one in the passenger seat, but her muscles instinctively tightened. They were in a dead-end cul-de-sac with no room to maneuver. If they were cut off, they could be in trouble.

“Start the car, Mother,” she said, urgently. She unsnapped the restraining strap on her pistol.

Katy was looking at the approaching van. She nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said, and she reached for the key.

The van glided slowly past them. The driver didn’t look over, and for just a second Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief, but then she stiffened. “No,” she said. The van supposedly belonged to a cable TV company. But the driver was wearing a suit and tie. It was all wrong.

She drew her pistol and thumbed the safety catch to the off position, when her door was jerked open and the muzzle of a pistol, held by a very large, very determined man, was jammed into the side of her head.

“There is no reason for you to lose your life,” he warned. His English was heavily accented. He was a Saudi. “We want her, not her bodyguard.”

Elizabeth raged inside. Dumb. Dumb. She had been dumb. It was entirely her fault that they were in this situation. But she wasn’t going to compound the trouble by making a stupid move. So far no shots had been fired.

She nodded.

The heavyset man reached in with his free hand and took her gun. He said something in Arabic over the top of the car.

Kathleen’s door was opened by a large man in a dark business suit, a pistol in his hand. He reached in, shut off the car, took the ignition keys, and tossed them across the street. Kathleen turned to Liz and started to speak, but Liz cut her off.

“Do exactly as they say, Mrs. McGarvey. I’m sure they mean you no harm. They just want you as a hostage to neutralize your husband. Do you understand?”

For a long moment Kathleen looked as if she was on the verge of making a move against the man pointing the gun at her. But then she visibly relaxed and gave Liz a nod, a look of apology in her eyes.

The Saudi security officer checked to make sure that there was no oncoming traffic or pedestrians, no one to see what was going on; then he helped Kathleen out of the car and hustled her back to the Comcast van parked directly behind them.

“If you try to follow us or if our movements are hindered in any fashion, we will kill her,” said the officer holding the pistol on Elizabeth. “Tell your boss to go home and stay there. His wife will be returned unharmed in two days.”

There it was, Liz thought. The man had made a mistake. He knew the timetable for the attack. Two days.

FIFTY-FOUR

Whatever the outcome of the latest threat to America, McGarvey figured that he would never be welcomed back to any job in U.S. intelligence. Even if he could somehow avoid jail time, his career was over. And it felt odd to him after more than twenty-five years to be branded a pariah, and by none other than the president himself.

McGarvey didn’t want his friends to be tainted by association. In the face of martial law anyone perceived to be a threat to the nation could be shot. Yet he needed help.

“What I want to do will probably blow up in our faces,” McGarvey told Otto Rencke. They stood facing each other in the shelter hut in the woods between the fifteenth fairway and the golf-course maintenance barn. No one was on the course this morning. Some things had not gotten back to normal.

“Boy oh boy, Mac, the shit has truly hit the fan over Monaco,” Rencke hooted. He was hopping from one foot to the other. It was a little shuffle he did when he was nervous or excited.

“I know. Dick filled me in on the way back from Andrews. He told me that you managed to get to Berndt. What was his reaction?”

“He took the stuff, and he wished me good luck,” Rencke said. “It’s something, ya know. He’s a good guy. If anyone can convince the president, he can. But everybody’s coming up with zip. Nada. The bad guys are here, and we’re making arrests. But all the wrong guys.”

McGarvey had seen this coming well before 9/11. Because of skyjackings in the seventies the U.S. had put air marshals on most commercial airliners. The skyjackings finally stopped, in large measure because of the sky marshals. But instead of continuing with the program, the budget was cut, sky marshals were taken off the airlines, and 9/11 occurred. Now the sky marshals were back, and al-Quaida wasn’t going to use skyjackings again, and yet that was Homeland Security’s main area of concentration.

No one was seeing the facts for what they were. To stop the attacks we had to go to the sources of the money. Which were certain members of the Saudi royal family.

“Do you have anything new on Khalil?”

“Salman showed up at the embassy this morning. And the FBI sent a surveillance team over to keep watch. But when he left a couple of hours later, they lost him.” Rencke spread his hands in wonderment. “I don’t think their hearts were in it. Nobody believes he’s one of the bad guys.”

That too was about what McGarvey expected. “Have they found him yet?”

“Not as of a half hour ago.”

That didn’t make sense to McGarvey. Salman had come to the U.S. so that he would be in plain sight when the attacks came. For him to shake his FBI tail and disappear somewhere in Washington was just the opposite of what he had done before. But, if Salman was Khalil, he might have slipped out of sight because he had something to do concerning the attacks, perhaps send a signal that would start the clock ticking.

Or he had gone hunting.

McGarvey had left his cell phone at the house. He did not want to be traced. Not with what he was going to do, contrary to direct orders from the president. He stepped around Rencke and gazed across the fairway toward his house. He could see a corner of the roof and the chimney, but nothing else. Still there was no one else in sight. Nor were there any sounds: no lawn mowers, no barking dogs, sirens. No sounds of gunfire or cries for help. The country was holding its breath. Waiting.

Rencke was closely watching him. “What is it, Mac?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Call my house.”

“Okay,” Rencke said. He took out his cell phone and hit the speed dial. “Who do you want to talk to?”

“Whoever answers.”

“It’s ringing,” Rencke said.

McGarvey turned back, snapshots of what Khalil and his people had done on the cruise ship flashing in his head. He could still hear the mother’s screams for her infant in the freezing water.

Rencke shook his head, a frightened expression in his eyes. “It’s your answering machine. No one’s picking up.”

At that moment they both heard a car coming very fast up the gravel road to the maintenance barn. McGarvey drew his gun, flicked the safety catch off, and motioned for Rencke to drop down out of sight.

Let it be Khalil, he told himself. Let it end here and now.

Elizabeth hauled her mother’s Mercedes around the maintenance barn to the cart path leading to the fifteenth fairway and jammed on the brakes, sending gravel and loose dirt flying. She’d been continuously on the phone to the Watch officer at Langley, who’d put out an APB to Washington Metro Police and the FBI to look for the Comcast maintenance van. She gave the license number, and made sure the Watch officer understood that under no circumstances was the van to be stopped.

By the time she had retrieved the car keys, the van was long gone, so she hadn’t even tried to go after it, relying on the Watch officer to get it right.

Two minutes ago the FBI surveillance unit in front of the Saudi Embassy on New Hampshire Avenue, just off Juarez Circle, reported the van entering the parking garage at the rear of the building.

Elizabeth her heart in her throat, leaped out of the car and raced up the path through the woods to the shelter hut, hoping that she wasn’t too late to catch her father and Otto. No one was around. In fact the maintenance area was deserted. But not many people were out playing golf when the country was on red alert.

She saw the fairway and then the hut at the same moment a figure moved in the relative darkness inside. “Shit,” she said under her breath, and she reached for her pistol. Something had gone wrong here.

Before she could veer off the path and get her pistol out, her father stepped out of the hut. “Liz, what are you doing here?” He had his gun out. Otto was right behind him.

“They’ve got Mother,” she cried, reaching them. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have let her leave the house. We shouldn’t have gone to Yarnell’s. It was a set-up, like they were waiting for us.” She said it all in a rush.

McGarvey holstered his pistol, controlled anger in the set of his features. “Slow down, Liz. Who has her?”

“It was the Saudis. They had a gun to my head, and told me that she wouldn’t be hurt, provided that you stayed out of the way And they said that she’d be released in two days.”

“Oh, wow, that’s the timetable,” Rencke said.

“Were you able to follow them?” McGarvey asked, his tone still reasonable.

“They were too fast, so I had the Watch officer call DC Metro and the Bureau,” Elizabeth said. “They spotted the van going into the Saudi Embassy just a few minutes ago.” She tried to gauge her father’s mood. He was like a volcano on the verge of exploding. She’d read his missions files, and had seen him in action more than once. He never went off halfcocked, but when he moved it was awesome.

“This has to go to the president,” Rencke said. “He can put pressure on the Saudi ambassador.”

McGarvey shook his head, his jaw set. “You can try, but the Saudis will deny they have her.”

“They didn’t hurt her, Daddy,” Elizabeth said. Tears welled in her eyes. She hated to cry. It was weak. “I’m sorry. It was my fault. But I did exactly what they told me to do so that no one would get hurt. I didn’t want that.” She closed her eyes. “Oh, God.”

McGarvey took her in his arms. “Take it easy. It’s not your fault. You didn’t kidnap her. And I know you did your best.”

Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked up into her father’s face. “We’ll get her back, Daddy,” she said. “You’ll get her back, won’t you?”

“Count on it, sweetheart,” McGarvey said, his gray-green eyes already seeing beyond her.

FIFTY-FIVE

The Saudi deputy ambassador to the United States, Mamdouh Nuaimi, was deep in thought looking out the window of his office toward the Watergate Hotel complex when his secretary buzzed him. These were troubling times, and he wished that he were just about anywhere except here in Washington.

“Prince Salman has returned, Your Excellency,” the male secretary said.

Girding himself for a potentially difficult encounter Nuaimi keyed the intercom. “Please ask the prince to come in.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nuaimi got to his feet and adjusted his tie as Prince Salman, also wearing a Western business suit, with a correctly knotted silk tie, walked in, a scowl on his dark features. Nuaimi came from around his desk, and embraced the prince.

“You honor me by coming here,” Nuaimi said, his Arabic formal, as befitted a man of the prince’s wealth and position of power. “Will you have tea?”

“The honor is mine, Deputy Ambassador,” Salman responded, correctly, if somewhat brusquely. “I have no time for tea. I was summoned and here I am. What do you want?”

“It’s a matter of some delicacy that the ambassador asked me to handle,” Nuaimi said, choosing his words with care. The prince was not a man to be offended by a careless remark. And although Nuaimi, whose brother was the oil minister Ali Nuaimi, had wealth and power, it was nothing in comparison to Salman’s. “It is the troubling time we find ourselves in at the moment.”

A brief smile crossed Salman’s thick lips. “It will serve the bastards right, another 9/11 They haven’t awakened to the real world, even yet.”

“Pakistan is cooperating—”

Salman dismissed Nuaimi with a flick of his hand, as if he were shooing away an annoying but ineffectual insect. He was obviously in an extremely foul mood. “Make your point, Mr. Deputy Ambassador,” he demanded, rudely.

Nuaimi smiled, ignoring the insult. “As you wish. The ambassador would like to know if there is anything he can do to enhance your current visit, considering the difficult moment we find ourselves in. If an al-Quaida attack were to occur, there would certainly be a problematic backlash. We merely wish to provide good advice and security for our citizens.”

“You want me to leave?”

Nuaimi spread his hands in a gesture of peace and conciliation. “We understood there was an unpleasantness in Monaco between you and the former director of the CIA. You were on your way to Corsica. Perhaps you should go there now. Or perhaps return to your family in Switzerland.”

Salman flared. “Only Crown Prince Abdullah himself can order me to leave,” he shouted.

“Please, no one is ordering you to do anything against your will.” Nuaimi said. “Not I, not the ambassador. We are merely suggesting that for your personal safety you might wish to leave the U.S. as soon as possible.”

“My safety is exactly why I’m here,” Salman said. “The madman threatened to kill me.”

It was in the dispatch the ambassador had received from Monaco. Saudi intelligence had an agent aboard the prince’s yacht. “That’s fantastic, Your Excellency. But why would he make such a threat against you?”

“As I said, he’s mad, and I’ll take this to the president—”

“No,” Nuaimi said, flatly. He’d been warned that the prince might want to do exactly that, and it wasn’t to be allowed under any circumstances. But since Salman was such a powerful man, one that even Crown Prince Abdullah did not want to cross, the job of stopping the man fell on Nuaimi’s shoulders. If Salman retaliated, the only man to be damaged would be the deputy ambassador, which was a perfectly acceptable loss under the circumstances.

“What did you say to me?” Salman demanded, his voice scarcely above a whisper.

“You will not attempt to contact anyone within the U.S. government at this time, not without the express approval of this embassy,” Nuaimi said. He was thinking about his wives and children, whom he’d sent back to Riyadh yesterday. He was glad they were gone. “I will need your word of honor on the issue, or else, regrettably, I will have to place you under arrest until your return to Riyadh can be arranged.”

“You don’t have the authority.”

“In this, I assure you that I do, Your Excellency,” Nuaimi said. For an instant he thought Salman was actually going to lay hands on him, do him physical harm. But then it passed. “Do I have your word, sir?”

Salman continued to glare at Nuaimi for a long second or two, then turned on his heel and left the office.

Nuaimi considered calling security to prevent the prince from leaving the embassy, but decided against it. Dealing with the royal family was always fraught with danger, for the simple reason, in his estimation, that most of them were insane or on the edge of insanity.

Kathleen sat on the edge of a narrow cot in a small windowless room, feeling despondent that she had been so stupid. Because of her insistence on playing amateur sleuth, people were going to get hurt. She’d not only put herself in danger, but she’d endangered the lives of her daughter and her husband. Elizabeth had been allowed to go unharmed. By now she would have told her father what had happened, and Kirk would be going into action.

A hood had been placed ever Kathleen’s head as soon as they’d turned the corner on Thirty-second Street, so she had no idea where they had taken her. Nor was there any clue in the room as to her whereabouts, which could only ever have but one use — as a jail cell. There was a toilet without seat or lid, and a small, stainless steel sink with only a coldwater tap. There were no mirrors, no covering on the bare concrete floor, and only a single dim light in a ceiling recess, protected by steel mesh.

Besides her stupidity, the other thing that bothered her the more she thought about it was the stains on the concrete floor. They looked like rust, but she suspected they might be blood.

For the first time since Alaska, she was truly and deeply frightened.

Two days, her captors had told her, and then she would be released provided her husband cooperated and stayed out of it.

But if Khalil was here and had engineered her kidnapping, she did not think she would get out of this one unscathed no matter what Kirk did or didn’t do.

Someone was at the door, turning the lock. The tiny viewing window was blocked so Kathleen could not see who was coming, but she knew who it was, and she shuddered in anticipation.

The door opened and a tall man came in; he was wearing an expensive, dove-gray business suit, a white silk shirt and tie, and a bland expression, one almost of indifference, on his long handsome face. He looked at Kathleen for a few seconds, as if he were studying some interesting specimen in a test tube, then gently closed the door.

Kathleen’s throat constricted, and she was sick to her stomach. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t be sure. She wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction of seeing her terror. “I thought that I detected your unpleasant odor. You couldn’t beat my husband, so now you’ve come to take your revenge on me.” She laughed. “Is that it?”

Khalil smiled faintly. He took off his suit coat and hung it on the doorknob. “Why yes,” he said, his voice gentle, as if he were talking to an animal or a small child and didn’t want to spook it.

Kathleen’s heart skipped a beat. She recognized the voice from Alaska.

Khalil loosened his tie, then rolled up his shirtsleeves.

Kathleen realized with an intensely sick feeling that the man was insane, and that he meant to hurt her. “I don’t care as much for my own safety right now, as I do for the baby that I’m carrying,” she said.

He shrugged indifferently and started for her.

Kathleen leaped up from the cot, doubled up her fist, and smashed it into his face with every ounce of her strength. His head rocked back, but then he punched her in her stomach just below her rib cage, sending her sprawling backward on the cot, her head smashing into the concrete wall.

She saw spots in front of her eyes, and bile burned at the back of her throat, making her gag.

Khalil was right there, over her. He grabbed her by the front of her blouse, dragging her to her feet and ripping the thin material to shreds. Holding her arm with his left hand, he backhanded her in the face with his other. Her nose gushed blood, but the cobwebs suddenly lifted from her brain.

“Bastard,” she cried, as she drove her knee into his groin.

He grunted in pain, but continued to hold her with one hand while slapping her with the other.

She tried to knee him again, but he deflected her blow with his leg. He looked into her eyes, still with a frighteningly bland expression on his face, doubled up his fist, and struck her very hard in her left breast.

The pain was instant and incredible. Her knees buckled, and the room went hot and dim.

Khalil struck her again in her breast, then in her stomach, and he slammed his knee into her groin.

She could not fight back, nor could she feel more than a dull pain throughout her entire body. But she felt a wetness in her panties, and she despaired that she would lose Elizabeth’s baby.

There had been so much suffering in their family. So much loss. Not this, she cried inside. Please, God, not this.

The last thing she was aware of was Kahlil’s fist connecting with her face.

FIFTY-SIX

McGarvey stood beside the front bedroom window looking down at the cul-de-sac as Liz, driving her mother’s Mercedes, pulled into the driveway; Otto, in his battered Mercedes diesel sedan, was right behind her.

McGarvey had trotted over from the fifteenth fairway and entered the house through the pool-deck door to make sure that neither the Bureau nor anyone else had shown up to look for him. Sooner or later they would be coming in response to Kathleen’s kidnapping. But he figured there was still time for him to make his preparations.

He was not angry. He was beyond that. At this point he was in his hunt-find-kill mode, and no power on earth could stop him from doing what he was going to do to find his wife and damage her captors.

Khalil had been at Yarnell’s old house, possibly hoping that McGarvey would make the connection and come looking for him. Instead it had been Kathleen, and the Saudi terrorist had taken her.

She was the bait that would draw McGarvey into a trap. What Kahlil could not guess was just how eager McGarvey was to comply.

What made no sense to McGarvey were the Saudi ambassador and embassy staff. The royal family was walking a tightrope, continuing to sell oil to the U.S. while funding and even encouraging terrorism. Kidnapping the wife of an important American government figure and then holding her hostage at the embassy was risky.

Too risky for the Saudis? Or was he missing something?

He went to the closet, where he stripped off his shirt and khaki trousers, changing into dark slacks, dark blue sneakers, and a black pullover that covered the pistol holstered at the small of his back. He also donned a lightweight reversal windbreaker — dark on one side and white on the other — that had several zippered pockets.

“Dad?” Elizabeth called from the front hall.

“It’s okay; I’m changing,” he called back. “Be right down.” He opened a secret compartment in the floor of the closet, which contained his escape kit: six clean passports under six different names from the U.S., Great Britain, Australia, and Canada; credit cards and other bits of identification to match; twenty-five thousand dollars in cash, mostly in U.S. currency, but some in British pounds and a fair amount in euros; hair dyes; lock picks; a spare Walther PPK with several magazines of 9mm ammunition; a custom-made Austrian silencer; a stiletto; several small bundles, each the size of a package of cigarettes, that contained blocks of Semtex explosives and securely protected acid fuses; and a few other odds and ends.

The cache was an old habit of his. Whenever he landed somewhere, one of his first tasks was to establish an escape kit against the day he might be required to step outside the establishment and suddenly go to ground.

Like now, he thought. On his own for the most part. Beholden to no one, following no orders other than his own, on a single-purpose mission.

He taped the spare Walther to his left calf, strapped the stiletto in its leather sheath to his chest beneath his windbreaker, and pocketed a small mag light with red and white lenses, two spare magazines, the silencer, and three of the Semtex packages.

He left everything else. He had no need for the passports or the money, because when this was over he wasn’t going to run. And he decided he wouldn’t need the lock picks. What he was going to do would not require stealth. He had the Semtex for any locked gate or door he might encounter.

For just a moment he stood over the compartment staring at the envelope of cash and identification documents. His first instinct had always been to run. It was a survival tactic he had learned in the jungles of Vietnam. Plus he’d always wanted to distance himself from the people he loved so that they would not come into harm’s way because of him.

No running this time, he thought, closing and securing the compartment. Not now. Never again.

Downstairs Elizabeth was in the kitchen drinking from a bottle of Evian. When McGarvey came in, her eyes were round and worried and still apologetic for a situation she felt was largely her fault.

“Where’s Otto?” McGarvey asked.

“In your study. He’s trying to get to Dennis Berndt, to tell him about mother.” Elizabeth hung her head. “The dirty bastards. I pretended to be her bodyguard. If they’d known I was her daughter, they would have taken me too.” She looked up at her father. “But I didn’t know what else to do, Daddy.”

“You did the right thing, sweetheart,” McGarvey assured her. In all likelihood they might have killed her and left her body to be identified. It would have been an even more powerful incentive for McGarvey to rush into the trap, blinded not only by fear for his wife’s safety, but also by grief over his child’s death.

“You’re going after her, but how are you going to get in?” Elizabeth asked. “The Saudis aren’t just going to let you come up to the gate and invite you in.”

“You and Otto are going to create a diversion,” he said. “But not until tonight, after midnight. And in the meantime we’ve got a lot to do. I want to make them nervous. Maybe the Saudi ambassador will put pressure on Khalil to give it up, at least release your mother. Stranger things have happened, and I don’t think they want that kind of political trouble, especially not right now.” Something else suddenly occurred to him, and he looked away.

“Daddy?” Elizabeth asked. “What is it?”

Men like bin Laden and Khalil and their followers firmly believed they were in a war for their very existence, and they believed that there were no innocents in the war. Every Christian and Jewish man, woman, and child was not only fair game in the jihad, they were also the prime targets. It was a view 180 degrees out of sync with what McGarvey had always believed. Minimize the risk to the noncombatants. Minimize the collateral damage.

The woman desperately screamed for her baby, but there’d been no hope. Khalil had known it, as he had known McGarvey would try to save them anyway. The dark water aft of the cruise liner had become a killing ground, the woman and child the bait.

Just as Katy was the bait. And just as Kahlil had picked out another killing ground.

Rencke came from the study. “I got to Berndt, and he’s agreed to take this to the president—” He looked from McGarvey to Liz. “What’ve I missed?”

“I just thought of something,” McGarvey said. “But I’m going to need an untraceable cell phone. Is that possible?”

Rencke shrugged. “Sure. Where’s yours?”

“Out on the hall table.”

Rencke went to fetch it, and when he came back he was entering a series of numbers. He pressed the pound key, and then Send. A code came up, and he entered a second series of long numbers and letters, pressing the pound key and Send again. Another code appeared on the display, and Rencke looked up, grinning. “You’ll keep the same number, but all your calls in and out will be routed through a redialer in Amsterdam.” He handed the phone to McGarvey. “It’ll drive anybody monitoring you nuts trying to figure out how you got outta Dodge so fast.”

“What are you going to do?” Elizabeth asked.

“Play Khalil at his own game.” McGarvey said, pulling up a number from his cell phone’s memory. He pressed Send. “Give him something that he’ll understand.”

It was after lunch and Liese Fuelm was getting ready to pull the pin and head back to her apartment in town when her cell phone vibrated at her hip. She was accomplishing nothing out here on the lake. They had learned that Salman was in Washington, probably stalking Kirk, but that’s all she’d been told. Gertner wanted her here, where keeping an eye on her would be easy. The hell with him.

The caller ID showed a U.S. area code and number, but the call was coming from Amsterdam. “Oui?”

“Hello, Liese, is your phone being monitored?” McGarvey asked.

Liese’s stomach gave a little lurch. Ziegler was upstairs getting some sleep, and LeFevre was in the kitchen finishing his lunch. For the moment no one was seated at the equipment table. “Just a minute.” She went over to the recording machines and pressed the Pause button. “It’s okay now, Kirk. Are you really in Amsterdam?”

“No. I want you to do something for me.”

Liese was thrilled. “Yes, of course. Anything.”

“Don’t be so fast to agree. What I’m asking will be dangerous. Could get you hurt, and at the very least get you fired.”

“I don’t care—” Liese protested. The man she was in love with had asked for her help. There could be only one answer.

“You’re still in love with me, aren’t you?”

Liese closed her eyes. She nodded. “I’ve never stopped loving you, Kirk.”

“Nothing can ever come of it,” McGarvey said, gently.

“I know.”

“Khalil is here and he’s kidnapped my wife, and what I want you to do for me might help to save her life, and possibly stop the terrorists before they hit us.”

“My God, I’m sorry,” Liese said, and she was sincere. She wanted Kirk, but not that way. Not at the expense of his wife’s life. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

There was a short silence. “Will your badge get you into Prince Salman’s compound sometime today?”

Liese was startled. “Of course. There’s a house staff over there, including bodyguards, but they wouldn’t turn away a Swiss Federal cop. Getting in would be easy, but the instant I approach the gate my surveillance crew will pick up on it and inform Gertner.”

This time when he spoke, McGarvey sounded cautious. “Are you able to monitor conversations inside the house?”

“Yes. At least in most of the apartments,” Liese said. She could hear LeFevre rattling around in the kitchen. “Whatever I say or do once I’m in will be recorded here.”

“Good. Then there’ll be no mistakes. No one will rush in with guns blazing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want you to get inside the compound, and hold Salman’s wife at gunpoint.”

A jolt of electricity shot through Liese’s body. “She’s not involved in any of this. I’m not going to hurt an innocent woman.”

“Listen to me, Liese. I don’t want anybody hurt. If something doesn’t go right, then get the hell out of there. Or put your pistol on the floor and raise your hands. Your people will bail you out. No matter what happens, there’ll be no shooting.”

All at once Liese understood what Kirk was trying to do. By taking Salman’s wife hostage, a possible trade could be made for Kathleen McGarvey. That was crystal clear, and it might work if nothing went wrong here. But what was also perfectly clear in Liese’s mind was just how deeply Kirk loved his wife. There was no hope after all. Liese closed her eyes again to squeeze away the tears. “When do you want me to do it?” she asked.

“Within the next few hours,” McGarvey said. “Call me when you’re in.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going after Khalil.”

“Kirk—”

“Yes?”

“Be careful,” she whispered. My darling.

McGarvey’s voice softened. “You too.”

“Oh, wow,” Rencke said, hopping back and forth. “Do you think she’ll pull it off? Do it, ya know?”

McGarvey was looking at his daughter, who had an odd, hurt expression on her face. “I think so.”

“If somebody gets hurt, especially the man’s wife or his kids, we’re going to be the bad guys.”

He didn’t know how he could live with himself if something did happen. But he didn’t know anything else that would get to a man such as Khalil, except by threatening his family. It was a universal language, the one point of commonality between the terrorists and us. Except that the terrorists were perfectly willing to target innocent women and children, while up until now the Americans were not.

“Were you in love with her?” Elizabeth asked. She was obviously having trouble saying the words.

McGarvey understood his daughter’s fear. He had left her once, and she didn’t want to lose him again. He shook his head. “No, I was never in love with any woman except your mother. Then or now,” he added.

Elizabeth took several seconds to digest her father’s answer. “Okay, Daddy, what do you want us to do?”

“Three things. First, I want a major surveillance operation on the Saudi Embassy started as soon as possible. Vans, cars, foot patrols, choppers, the whole works. I want to saturate the entire area one block out from the building, and I want them to know that we’re doing it.”

Rencke’s eyes narrowed. “The Bureau will want to know what’s going on, and the Saudis will start screaming bloody murder the moment they spot us,” he warned. “Won’t take long till someone over at the White House orders us to pull the pin.”

“Communications will be very bad this afternoon and tonight,” McGarvey said. “I’ll need just a few more hours, no longer. And as for the Saudis, I want them to start making noises as soon as possible. Maybe even create an incident. Maybe DC Metro would have to be called in, especially if there’s trouble on the streets outside Saudi territory.”

“I’ll call Todd; he can bring some people out from the Farm,” Elizabeth said. “What next?”

“I want you and Otto to find a way to get into the place. Maybe there’s a storm-sewer tunnel under the building, something that opens inside the compound. Maybe a cable and heating conduit. When you get it figured out, I want you to fax the information to me here at the house.”

Rencke caught on to McGarvey’s plan; it was plain by his expression, but Elizabeth was confused.

“We’ll have to sweep the phones first,” she said. “Make sure they’re secure. Hasn’t been done since before you left for Alaska.”

“Oh, boy, let’s hope that they’re dirty,” Rencke said. He was excited. “And even if there isn’t a way to get inside, I’ll make one up and fax the plans here.” He grinned. “Soon as you give me word, we’ll cut all the utilities to the building. Electricity, water, phones, and cable.”

Elizabeth objected. “They’ll lock that place up tighter than a drum,” she said. “They’ll know they’re under attack, and they’ll shoot at anything that moves.”

“That’s right,” Rencke said. He suddenly stopped hopping. “Mrs. M isn’t there, and neither will your father be.”

“But the Comcast van was spotted going into the embassy compound.”

“That’s right, sweetheart,” McGarvey told his daughter. “Exactly what Khalil wanted us to see. It’s why his people didn’t take you with them. They wanted you to yell bloody murder so that someone would look for the van. But it took time to organize the search. No one picked up the van until it showed up at the Saudi Embassy. Nobody actually followed it from Georgetown. It could have gone someplace else first, dropped your mother off, and then headed over to the embassy.”

Elizabeth saw it all at once. “She could be almost anywhere in the city.” Suddenly her eyes lit up. “Darby Yarnell’s old house. My God, they doubled back after I’d left.”

McGarvey nodded. He was seeing Khalil’s hands on Katy. He could see the man’s gun pointed at her head, and his jaw tightened.

“They don’t have diplomatic immunity over there,” Elizabeth said. “We can get a search warrant and let the Bureau handle it—”

“They might kill her first,” Rencke suggested, softly.

“No search warrant,” McGarvey said, and he shivered inside at the depth of his anger and resolve to take the fight to Khalil on the man’s own terms. “I’m going in. No one else. Just me.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

As Berndt headed for the Oval Office, the West Wing was a beehive of activity, even more than it usually was on a weekday morning. Rencke’s telephone call coming so close on the heels of his earlier visit was frightening. He clutched the CIA file close to his chest, as if he expected someone to grab the explosive material from him.

Kathleen McGarvey had been kidnapped and was being held hostage. By the Saudis.

At first Berndt had not wanted to believe Rencke. The implications were too stunning for him to take the story seriously. But the more he thought about it, the more it made a kind of twisted sense. McGarvey was the only man in town who believed Kahlil and Prince Salman were the same man. They had kidnapped McGarvey’s wife in an attempt to make him stop his pursuit.

But they had no idea of what McGarvey was capable of doing to them. And at stake now was more than bin Laden’s threat, or the safety of the ex-CIA director’s wife. At issue was the stability of the entire Middle East and all the oil there; it could make the difference between an America that continued to be strong and prosperous and an oil-poor America that could sink to the level of a third world nation.

Before that was allowed to come to pass, we would go to war, Berndt thought. And fighting to take control of Saudi Arabia would be one hundred times the nightmare that Iraq had been. All of the Middle East would be against us.

Berndt entered the Oval Office, as the president, standing behind his desk, was on the phone. Secretaries and staffers came and went in a continuous stream. The four television sets were tuned to the three major networks plus CNN. “We have a problem, Mr. President.”

Haynes looked at him. “I’ll get back to you,” he said, and he put down the telephone. “What is it, Dennis?”

“It’s Khalil and the Saudis,” Berndt said. He was sick at heart thinking about what they faced. Nothing like this had been on his mind when he’d accepted the president’s call to become the NSA.

The president’s chief of staff, Calvin Beckett, walked in. “What have I missed?”

“Get everybody out of here,” Haynes ordered, his eyes not leaving Berndt’s. “Give us a couple of minutes.”

“Shall I stay?” Beckett asked.

“You’d better,” Berndt said before the president could speak.

Haynes nodded after a beat, but said nothing until Beckett had ushered out the other staffers and closed the door. “Okay, what about Khalil and the Saudis?”

“We have the timetable for the attack. It happens in two days.”

“You have my attention,” the president said. “Do you know this for a fact? What’s your source?” He eyed the buff folder with orange diagonal stripes that the CIA used to hold classified documents with a Q rating, which was a step higher than top secret.

When Berndt was growing up in the midwest and involved with school politics and the history and social sciences clubs, it was the last era in which becoming president of the United States was considered to be a noble, worthy goal. That was no longer the case, he thought, sadly. Anyone wanting the job immediately came under the same close public scrutiny as a career criminal might. Something was wrong with you if you wanted to be president.

“Kirk McGarvey’s wife was kidnapped this morning at gunpoint and taken to the Saudi Embassy. The men who did it told her daughter they’d hold her mother for only two days, if Kirk were to withdraw from his investigation of Khalil.”

Haynes sat down. “God in heaven,” he said, at a momentary loss. But then he looked up, anger coloring his face. “That’s insane. Do you believe her?”

“Actually I got it from Otto Rencke, he’s McGarvey’s chief of Special Operations—”

“I know who he is,” the president interjected, angrily. “Is that his report?”

Berndt decided that no matter how this crisis turned out, he would leave Washington and return to academia. Working in this place could kill a man. “There’s more,” he said. He handed the folder to the president. “Rencke brought this over to me a couple of hours ago. Pretty well nails Khalil and Prince Salman as being the same man.” Berndt glanced over at Beckett, who looked skeptical. In this town it was usually the bearer of the bad news who was the first to fall. “From what I can gather, the evidence is mostly circumstantial — there’re no DNA matches or anything like that — but there’s a lot of it. And what they’ve come up with seems convincing.”

“Goddammit, I won’t have this,” the president shouted. “I warned him to stay out of it.”

Berndt girded himself. “Whatever we might have believed about the Saudis has changed. They took Kathleen McGarvey against her will, and they’re holding her in their embassy. Mr. President, we might be able to ignore the circumstantial evidence that the CIA has gathered on Khalil and the prince, but we cannot ignore this.”

“Where was she when they grabbed her?” Beckett asked. Like the president, he seemed to be having a hard time getting a handle on this latest development. “Not at home?”

Berndt shook his head. Rencke hadn’t been exactly clear where the kidnapping took place, just that it had happened. “Somewhere in Georgetown, I think. The men were driving a Comcast Cable TV van. Her daughter got the tag number and immediately called the Bureau and DC Metro. But by the time they found the van it was just going into the Saudi Embassy, so they had to back off.”

“Where’s McGarvey?” Beckett asked.

Berndt had asked Rencke the same question. “At home for the time being,” he said. But he didn’t believe it for one minute.

“Bring him in,” the president told Berndt. He managed a wry smile. “Ask him to come in.” He called his secretary. “I want to speak to Prince Bandar bin Sultan.” Prince Sultan, the son of the Saudi defense minister, was the ambassador to the U.S., and had been since 1983. He was a moderate.

The call went through to the embassy, and the president put it on the speakerphone “Prince?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, this is Mamdouh Nuaimi. The prince is out of the country at the moment. May I be of some assistance?”

“When do you expect the prince’s return?” Haynes said.

“Not for several days, I’m very sorry to report, Mr. President,” the deputy ambassador said. “Now, sir, is there something I may deal with?”

“Have the prince call me as soon as possible,” the president said, and he broke the connection. He got his secretary again. “I want to speak with Crown Prince Abdullah, and I don’t care what time it is in Riyadh.”

Beckett got on another phone and had his secretary dial McGarvey’s home.

“Tell him that we’ve been informed about his wife, and that I want to see him this morning,” Haynes told his chief of staff. He gave Berndt a bleak, angry look. “This could turn out very bad for us.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Berndt agreed.

Much worse than 9/11, with further reaching consequences. If they kept hitting us, sooner or later we could lose our national will to fight back. It had happened in Vietnam, and if the liberals had their way, we would get out of Iraq and step away from everything we’d worked for.

Beckett looked up and shook his head. “I got his answering machine. Either he’s not home or he’s not picking up.”

“Goddammit,” Haynes said, through clenched teeth. “Get Dick Adkins over at Langley, and find out what the hell McGarvey thinks he’s doing.”

The president’s secretary buzzed him, and Haynes put the call on the speakerphone. “Crown Prince Abdullah, good afternoon.”

“Mr. President, I am the crown prince’s personal secretary,” a man said. His English was heavily accented. “Unfortunately, His Excellency is in meetings. But he will be informed of your important call, and I am quite certain that he will arrange to speak with you at the first opportunity.”

The president hesitated, and it struck Berndt as an ominous sign from a man who was known for his decisiveness.

“Very well, I’ll wait for his call,” Haynes said, and broke the connection.

He sat back, looking at his national security adviser as if he were waiting for some advice. But for once Berndt was at a loss.

“There’s not much we can do about them,” the president said. “Not unless somebody finds us a new source of oil, pronto.” He shook his head. “God help the bastards if these attacks actually happen and if we can prove that Saudi Arabia was involved.” His jaw tightened. “I would ask Congress for a formal declaration of war.”

Berndt let out the breath he was holding. “In the meantime we still have to deal with the issue of McGarvey’s wife. He will try to rescue her, and as you say, Mr. President, God help the poor bastards who try to stand in his way.”

Beckett had his hand over the phone. “Mr. Adkins is in a staff meeting. Do you want me to call him out of it?”

“Yes,” Haynes said. “I want him here within the hour. Then get Herb Weissman and Frank Hoover.” Hoover was chief of DC police. “Between the three of them I want to know what the hell we can do to get the Saudis to release McGarvey’s wife before he blows up the place and starts a war all by himself.”

If she was inside the Saudi Embassy, there wasn’t much that any of them could do, except try to hold McGarvey back and wait it out, Berndt thought. And neither was a very good option at the moment.

FIFTY-EIGHT

“Am I going to lose the baby?” Kathleen asked the young Saudi doctor who’d come to tend to her injuries. He’d given her an injection for the terrible pain, and she wanted to float. But she was still frightened to the core. “Please tell me.”

The doctor looked like a teenager, with a long, narrow, sad face, and a heavy six o’clock shadow. He listened to her heart. And when he was finished he sat back. “I do not know,” he told her. “You have a broken rib, and there will be much bruising.” He shook his head. “Beyond that we would need to see X-rays, and you would need a gynecological exam. Very soon.”

He had brought a pair of dark cotton pajamas for her and a Kotex pad, as well as soap, a washcloth, and a towel so she could clean up. But he had stepped outside while she changed, and he’d refused to give her more than a cursory examination.

Not out of some religious modesty that forbade him to see a naked woman who was not his wife, Kathleen reasoned. It was because he was frightened of getting involved. If he treated her and she died, it would be on his head.

And that was the most frightening part. She knew that she could die here for lack of medical attention. The bleeding from her vagina hadn’t worsened, but it had not stopped.

“I’m still bleeding.”

“How far are you along?” he asked.

“Four weeks.”

The tight expression around his eyes softened a little. “Sometimes there is bleeding in the first month. It may mean nothing—”

“Nothing?” Kathleen screeched. “The bastard beat me unconscious. What kind of fucking monsters are you people? You’re in the goddamned Stone Age.” She felt what little control she had slipping away from her. She was on pain medication, but she felt as if she were going insane. “Do you have a wife? Is this how you would like a man to treat her?”

Kathleen half rose from the cot, and the doctor gently helped her to sit back. “Please, madam. It will do no good for you to become hysterical.”

She slowly came back from the brink. She could see that the doctor was nearly as frightened as she was. “So far, being reasonable hasn’t seemed to work for me. What else do you suggest?”

“That you cooperate with these people,” the young doctor recommended, in a reasonable tone. He was dressed in a shirt and tie, with khaki slacks but no jacket, as if he had been hastily summoned from a clinic somewhere. He’d brought the few things for her along with his doctor’s bag, but nothing else.

“That man means to kill me,” Kathleen said, her own words sending a chill through her body. She shivered involuntarily. “Then God help you, because my husband will surely come down on you like the hand of God, and destroy you all.”

The doctor’s eyes had grown wide. He hastily stuffed his stethoscope in his bag and went to the door. “Do as they say, madam. And you will come out of this alive. It’s your only hope.”

“Remember what has happened here, doctor,” Kathleen said, foggily. “If I should manage to survive, I will not forget you.”

Someone was out in the corridor. When the doctor left, Khalil and another man, who carried a video camera, came into the cell. Kathleen shrank back against the concrete wall, her fear spiking.

“The doctor gave you good advice,” Khalil said.

She didn’t think she could stand another beating. She decided that if he tried to hit her again, she would gouge his eyes out with her fingers or rip his throat apart with her teeth. Anything to stop the monster.

“Your husband doesn’t know where you are,” Khalil said, “but even if he should figure out where you are, it will be too late for you. You’re going to make a statement for the six o’clock news.”

“Or else what?” Kathleen asked. “You’re going to kill me?” She was surprised at how steady her voice sounded. She had no spit left.

“If it comes to that,” Khalil said, shrugging. He held out a sheet of paper to her. “You’re going to read this aloud.”

“What is it?” Kathleen asked, trying to shrink back even farther, but there was no place in which to retreat, except to think about Kirk. Especially his eyes: kind, understanding, patient, confident.

A faint smile crossed Khalil’s full lips. “I believe you call such a thing a propaganda statement. Harmless, but it’s part of the dance.”

Kathleen shook her head. The pain medication was taking her down. “If it’s harmless, then you don’t need me to read it.”

Khalil seemed to consider her refusal. He nodded. “Perhaps I could offer you an inducement,” he said, blandly.

“Fuck you.”

“I could call the doctor back. He’s a loyal servant who does as he is told. He has the instruments and the skill to perform a simple procedure on you. An abortion.”

There had been so much pain in their lives. This thing that she had done for Elizabeth had been meant to set the scale back into balance. To bring some small measure of joy and happiness to them.

As children we’d been led to believe that monsters didn’t really exist. But 9/11 had changed that. And bin Laden’s al-Quaida wanted to do it to us again.

She reached up and took the single sheet of paper on which was typed perhaps twenty lines in fairly large print. But it took Kathleen a few seconds to get her eyes to focus so that she could make sense of what she was supposed to read for the video camera.

She read it once, and then a second time. The message was as simple as it was chilling, because it was nothing more than a repetition of the same demands bin Laden had been making all along for something that was impossible. Al-Quaida freedom fighters wanted Saudi Arabia. They wanted every westerner off the peninsula, they wanted the dissolution of the Saudi royal family as a ruling power, and they wanted control of the oil fields. Oil would be for friends of Dar al-Islam.

It is no different than in 1776 when the valiant American freedom fighters forced their oppressive masters off the land. And today America and England are partners.

All of a sudden it struck her. She looked up into Khalil’s eyes. On the cruise ship he’d worn a balaclava to hide his features. He didn’t want his face known.

But here he had allowed her to see him.

She would not leave this place alive.

From the first he had planned on killing her. The tape was to be nothing more than a goad for Kirk to walk into a trap.

She didn’t know what to do.

FITTY-NINE

It was noon by the time the cabby dropped McGarvey off at the corner of Thirty-second and Q streets in Georgetown and he made the rest of his way on foot to the Boynton Towers apartments. The place had been modern ten years ago, but though it had aged, the eight-story building was still an elegant address and the apartment rents had skyrocketed.

He took the elevator to the top floor, and using the lock pick set he’d taken after all, he spent a half minute opening the door to 8B, and let himself in.

The small, neatly furnished apartment smelled slightly musty. The CIA had owned it for ten years, using it first in a surveillance operation against DarbyYarnell, and since then as a safe house for the occasional clandestine meeting.

So far as Otto Rencke had been able to find out, the place hadn’t been used for nearly thirteen months. Nobody had been here to clean or to check on the place. The rent was paid on time every month by housekeeping at Langley, and so far as the neighbors were concerned the renter was likely a government employee of some sort, off on another long foreign posting.

McGarvey moved slowly across the living room and down the corridor to the back bedroom. The window blinds were partially drawn allowing sunlight to cast stripes on the pale gray carpeted floor. Keeping to one side, he eased one of the slats upward and peered across at Yarnell’s old house. An instant rush of memories came back at him.

Lorraine, the field officer with the Sommersprosse who’d been on the team that had come for him in Lausanne, had been up here. So had a couple of Trotter’s people, a man whose name might have been Sheets, or something like that, and another named Gonzales. They thought that Yarnell was a spy for the Soviet government, and they were watching the comings and goings at his house.

The apartment had been filled with surveillance equipment, including a big Starlight scope on a sturdy tripod.

Tell them I came, and no one answered, that I kept my word.

It was the same bit of de la Mare that had come to him then. The listeners, waiting for the lone rider to bang on the door, find that no one was home and then leave again.

Gonzales had been on the Starlight. “Maybe you want to take a look; maybe you don’t.” He nodded toward the scope. “But it’s something.”

A man and a woman stood locked in an embrace next to a four-poster bed in an upstairs bedroom. The man’s back was toward the window. When they parted, McGarvey was looking into Kathleen’s face. She was flushed. Then the man half turned, giving McGarvey a clear view of him. Yarnell.

Oh, Kathleen! he’d thought then and now. She’d always played dangerous games, but she hadn’t known just how precarious her position really was. And here she was again.

The street below was quiet, and there were no sounds in the apartment. It was as if this part of the capital city was holding its collective breath, which in a way it was.

The waiting had always been the hardest part. And now it was made infinitely more difficult because it was Katy over there again.

McGarvey slowly lowered the slat back into place, and then adjusted the blinds so that he could see outside. Taking off his jacket, he laid it on the bed, then took the small lamp off the nightstand and pulled the little table over to the window. He pulled the easy chair from the corner and positioned it next to the table so that when he was seated he could look out the window and see the street and front entrance to Yarnell’s old house.

Katy would be frightened but defiant. By now Khalil would be figuring out how to let McGarvey know where he had her. That would take time, during which Katy would be relatively safe.

Hold on, darling, he thought.

He used his cell phone to call Liese in Switzerland. She answered out of breath on the first ring.

“Oui.”

“Are you ready?”

“Very nearly,” she answered. “Within the hour.”

“Be careful,” McGarvey said. He broke the connection and called Rencke, who also answered on the first ring as if he too had been expecting the call.

“There’s a storm sewer that opens at the rear of the embassy. You can get into the tunnel on G Street just off Juarez Circle.”

“Have you faxed that on an open line to my house yet?” McGarvey asked.

“It’s set to go by fax and by unencrypted e-mail to the house,” Rencke said. “I want to make it real easy for them.”

“Do it,” McGarvey said. “Then keep your head down; there’ll be a lot of heat.”

Rencke laughed, but it sounded vicious. “They don’t know what heat is if they hurt Mrs. M.”

“Nobody knows where I am.”

“Right,” Rencke said.

A Mercedes pulled up in front of Yarnell’s old house. A slightly built man in a shirt and tie but no jacket, carrying what looked to be a small briefcase, came out of the Arab Center, passed through the gate, and got into the car, which immediately departed.

McGarvey got the impression that the briefcase might have been a doctor’s bag, but he didn’t want to take that thought any further. For the moment he was doing everything he could.

He telephoned his daughter, and she answered immediately.

“Daddy, are you ready?” she asked. There were traffic sounds in the background.

“I’m in position,” McGarvey told her. “Where are you?”

“In front of the embassy, and there are a lot of nervous-looking people over there. Soon as I pulled up and started taking pictures, three guards came out. They’re there right now, taking pictures of me.”

It was what McGarvey had expected would happen. Now he wanted to ratchet up the pressure. “How many people have you got over there?”

“Just me for now,” Elizabeth said. “But Todd is on the way with three surveillance teams and vans. They should be here any minute, and we’ll hit them with everything we’ve got.”

“No gunplay,” McGarvey warned. “If it seems to be heading that way, call DC Metro and get the hell out of there.”

“Soon as Mom’s free.”

“What about their utilities?”

“Their water goes off in about five minutes, and Otto gave me a computer program to cut electricity. Soon as you give me the word, it’s a done deal.”

Down on the street another black Mercedes passed in front of the Arab Center, but did not stop.

“Thirty minutes, sweetheart,” McGarvey told his daughter. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“No,” she promised. “We’re just going to make the bastards real nervous.”

McGarvey broke the connection, laid the telephone on the small table, then unholstered his pistol, placed it next to the phone, and sat back to wait.

SIXTY

Inside the embassy an extremely nervous Nuaimi finished his difficult phone call to Riyadh. Neither the ambassador nor Crown Prince Abdullah had offered to help with what was escalating into an impossible situation. They were leaving the problem to him.

No matter what happened he would take the blame. In the end he would be recalled home in disgrace.

His telephone rang, but it was Ali bin Besharati, chief of embassy security. “In addition to the car there are now four vans across the street. They are bombarding us with electronic and laser pulses.”

“Get rid of them,” Nuaimi shouted.

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. They are on a public street and are breaking no American laws. I can direct one of my people to walk over and ask them to leave.”

Nuaimi tried to get himself together. He lowered his voice. “No, that’s not advisable. Just have your people hold their posts. No one is to be allowed in or out of the building for the time being.”

“I understand,” bin Besharati said.

You don’t understand anything, you fool. “See to it.”

“Yes, Your Excellency. But there is another problem, and it may be somehow related.”

“What is it?” Nuaimi demanded, impatiently.

“Our water has stopped flowing.”

“What are you talking about?” Nuaimi practically shouted. What was happening? His entire career was blowing away like a bit of cloth in a wind.

“All the water faucets and toilets in the building have ceased to function. Our engineer believes that there may be a problem with the water main out on the street.”

“Get it fixed—” Nuaimi said, but then stopped. His eyes went to the lamp on his desk. He flipped the switch and it came on. Whatever U.S. agency was outside spying on them — probably the FBI — had not shut off the utilities to isolate the embassy. The water was just an annoying problem. “Call the city or whatever agency supplies our water service, and report the problem.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” bin Besharati said.

Nuaimi buzzed his secretary. “Where is al-Kaseem?”

“I don’t know, Your Excellency. Shall I find him for you?”

“Yes, immediately.”

“Prince Salman has returned, sir. He would like just a moment of your time.”

For a fleeting moment Nuaimi wondered if the prince’s trouble in Monaco with the former director of the CIA was connected to what was happening across the street. But then he dismissed the notion as melodramatic. Americans were cowboys, but the government did not operate in such a fashion.

“Send him in, but as soon as you locate al-Kaseem I want to speak with him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nuaimi had risen to the post of deputy ambassador to the most important nation on earth not because of his family name, but because he was a skilled diplomat. He had worked in various capacities at embassies around the world, from Moscow to London and from Damascus to Tokyo, where he’d learned the business. In this situation, with another bin Laden attack against the U.S. on the verge of happening, he was in the most precarious position of his career. If he did nothing he would be finished. Which, he begin to realize, actually gave him the power to do whatever he wanted. Within reason.

One small step at a time. That was the diplomat’s credo, Nuaimi thought, as prince Salman came in. And perhaps the prince could be the first step.

“I’ve reconsidered,” Salman said. “I don’t think Washington is the place for me to be at this moment. So I’m going home.”

Nuaimi’s spirits sank. He’d had the vague thought of using the prince as an emissary to the White House. At the very least he might be able to learn why the embassy had become the target of a surveillance operation. “Perhaps I was being too hasty, suggesting you leave.”

Salman was amused. “Not at all,” he said. “Is your telephone secure?”

Nuaimi was confused by the question. “Normally I would say yes, but considering what is happening across the street, I could not guarantee it.”

“Good,” Salman said. “In that case I would like to use it to let my staff in Lucerne know that I am returning. I want to make sure that when I walk out the front door I will be expected. Considering the climate in Washington, it would not do to make a sudden, unexpected move.” He gave Nuaimi a sly look. “I don’t think my presence here is wanted. Calling from your desk might be worth something for you.”

“Of course,” Nuaimi said, and he sat back as Salman came around the desk and direct-dialed his compound on the Swiss lake.

He spoke for only a half minute, informing his people that he would be returning no later than sometime the next day, his work here nearly finished.

“Thank you,” he told Nuaimi after he’d hung up. “When I return, I’ll speak to my uncle about you.”

“That is very kind, Your Excellency,” Nuaimi said, and Salman walked out. What work had he come here to do that was nearly finished? Nuaimi wondered.

His secretary called. “Mr. al-Kaseem does not answer his page, sir. No one has seen him since earlier this morning.”

Nuaimi felt a sense of fatalism. He was the deputy ambassador. He was a diplomat. It was time to live up to his position, because he no longer had anything to lose. “Get me the White House. I wish to speak to President Haynes about why we are being surveilled contrary to international conventions.”

Khalil and the cameraman had left the cell to give Kathleen time to think over the threat to abort the baby, but in the fifteen minutes since they left she was no closer to making a decision. She was frightened, and she didn’t know what to do.

She sat on the cot, her back against the wall, tightly hugging herself for warmth and to stop from shaking. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come, and her mouth was still dry. It was as if her entire body was drying out. Even the bleeding seemed to have diminished. Nor was she in much pain now that the injection the doctor had given her had kicked in.

She didn’t want to die. Not here, not like this, without ever having a chance to see Kirk again. Just one more time she wanted to look into his face, feel his arms around her.

It had been a stupid act of vanity driving down here and showing herself in front of Yarnell’s old house. Elizabeth would have told her father by now, and God only knew what Kirk was in the act of doing. People were probably going to die because of her stupid pride. She was the wife of the former director of the CIA, one of the Company’s top agents ever. News of her kidnapping had probably reached the White House by now. It was another bit of trouble in an already deeply troubling time.

It had been her plan to find out if Khalil was staying at the Arab Center by driving up and parking across the street. If he was inside and he spotted her sitting there, he might worry that Kirk would be coming after him and Khalil would do something foolish, like bolt. But she realized now that she’d never had the real measure of the man. After his failure in Alaska, he’d become like a cornered animal, fighting for its life.

Kathleen looked up, another thought coming to the forefront. She was alive. They hadn’t killed her yet. And just like in Alaska, on the fantail of the cruise ship, in the cold and dark when she didn’t think she would survive, something happened. Kirk happened. Lovely, strong, impossible man.

She owed him now. For Kirk and the baby and Elizabeth and Todd, she had to remain alive, had to keep the baby safe.

She got shakily to her feet and staggered to the door. She pounded on it. “Hey,” she shouted, her voice weak. “Hey. I’ll make the tape. Come back.”

Someone was outside the door. She stepped well back, and then straightened her pajama top and fluffed her hair as best she could without a mirror.

The door opened, and the cameraman, short, thick-necked, was there. “What is it?” he demanded. His accent was harsh.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Kathleen said, careful to keep her voice steady. “I’ll read the statement.”

“I’ll tell him,” the cameraman said, and he started to close the door.

“Wait!” Kathleen shouted. “May I have a glass of water, please?”

The man laughed and closed the door.

Kathleen closed her eyes for a moment. I will be strong. I will survive. She went back to the cot and picked up the script Khalil had given her. She didn’t know for sure where she was, but she thought it was possible they’d brought her to the Saudi Embassy. As she read the message she was supposed to read for the camera, she tried to figure out a way to indicate where she was. She didn’t know Morse code, so she couldn’t blink out a message, but there had to be a way, and she was determined to figure it out.

The door opened again and Khalil came in. “You have decided to cooperate?”

She looked into his cobra eyes, and the words stuck in her throat. She nodded.

SIXTY-ONE

There was no traffic on the lake road, the sun low behind the mountains to the west, and Liese drove recklessly, on her way into a situation that would not only get her fired, but could also send her to jail or even to her grave. Her eyes were full and her heart ached, but she felt no fear.

This was for Kirk, even though she finally knew that she would never have him.

Prince Salman’s call to the compound had come up on one of the monitors, and Ziegler had recorded it along with Sergeant Hoenecker’s simultaneous translation just as Liese was getting set to head out. She had no idea what it meant that Salman was suddenly leaving Washington. It made no sense if he’d gone there in the first place to confront McGarvey, and if he had kidnapped Kirk’s wife.

But the prince was returning to Switzerland, and before Liese had left the chalet, Hoenecker was on the phone to Gertner, the one man that Liese did not want to speak to.

Her telephone buzzed against her hip. It was Gertner already trying to reach her. She had told no one she was leaving, or where she was going. She had just slipped out of the chalet and driven off.

She let the call roll over to the answering machine in her apartment. They wouldn’t have long to wait before they found out where she had gone, and then the clock would start. It was possible she would not be able to get in, and it was equally possible that seeing what she was up to, Gertner might order a raid on the compound. Not to rescue her, but to arrest her.

Liese wanted to pull over to the side of the road and close her eyes and her mind to the world around her. But that had become impossible on the very first day she had laid eyes on Kirk, and had instantly fallen head over heels in love. Marta had called it a schoolgirl crush, an infatuation, but now more than ten years later she still felt the same. She was miserable.

Taking her pistol out of her purse, she stuck it in the waistband of her jeans and pulled her jacket down so that it was hidden. Any time a weapon was introduced into a situation, there was a danger that someone would get hurt. But she was a professional, and so were the security people at the prince’s compound, which reduced the odds of an accident. The last thing she wanted was to hurt the prince’s wife or his children. He might be a terrorist, but they were innocent.

Do it now, she thought, before Gertner sends someone.

A cool breeze came down from the mountain passes, and the sailing fleet was back on the lake, the spinnakers ballooned out as they raced toward the downwind mark. She caught glimpses of them through the trees as she drove around the bay and then headed back up the private road to the Salman compound at the end of the narrow peninsula jutting out into the lake.

Peaceful. It was the only word Liese could think of. And it stuck in her mind how far away this place was from America, which was facing another 9/11. The Swiss had always been the neutrals. But not this time, she thought.

And for that there would be a scapegoat.

Prince Salman’s compound consisted of the main sprawling chalet with two separate living wings one for the prince and the other for his wife and children. There were several outbuildings, including two garages, living quarters for the security and house staff, a maintenance shed, a boathouse, and a long dock at the foot of the shallow hill.

Most of the year it was only the wife and the staff who were in residence. The children were normally away at boarding school, and the prince himself came home only a few times each year, usually to stay no longer than a week or two.

Except during the major terrorist strikes. Each time he withdrew his children from school and hunkered down with his family for a month or more. They would play on the lake aboard one of several powerboats and sailboats, or go into town to the theater or to dinner. Sometimes they even left the compound to take trips up into the mountain resort towns, just like ordinary tourists.

Not a terrorist and his family Not a monster who the world feared and loathed. Not bin Laden’s number-one lieutenant and killer.

A couple of hundred meters down from the house, which was hidden from view by the trees, the road was blocked by a security gate with a closed-circuit television camera and intercom system. Liese pulled up, took her police wallet with badge and ID card out of her purse, lowered her window, and pushed the intercom button. She held up the open wallet to the camera.

Almost immediately a man’s voice, speaking heavily accented French, came from the grille. “Good afternoon, Officer Fuelm. What is the business of the Swiss police here?”

“I have a message for Mrs. Salman,” Liese said. She could imagine the confusion now among her colleagues across the bay. Hoenecker would be on the phone to Gertner.

“Give me the message. I will make sure that madam receives it.”

“I don’t know who you are, though I’m assuming that you’re one of her security people. But this message is for her alone, and I have been instructed to give it only to her.” The only chance she had of pulling this off in the time Kirk wanted was to get through the gate and up to the house. If this failed, her only other option would be to come back tonight after dark and either breach the perimeter fence, or approach the compound from the water. Kirk would understand.

“That’s quite impossible, Sergeant. The Madam is not at home—”

“She’s not only at home, but her children were recalled from school and are there with her. In addition, her husband, the prince, will very soon be en route from Washington. I must speak with her right now.”

The security staff personnel were all Saudi private contractors, exmilitary or intelligence officers, who understood that their presence on Swiss soil with weapons was strictly illegal. The authorities turned a blind eye to this disregard for Swiss law because of Prince Salman’s political and financial importance, and only so long as there were no incidents. They also understood now, if they didn’t know before, that the comings and goings at the compound were being monitored.

In the past there had been no trouble, and the staff had very probably been ordered to be cooperative. Liese was counting on it. Just as she was counting on them not to make any show of force. Most of the staff would be out of sight.

The speaker grille was silent for several seconds.

“Very well,” the security officer said. “The princess will receive you.”

“I will need to see the children as well,” Liese said. “This is a matter concerning the school.”

There was another brief pause.

“Very well. Do not stop or deviate from the road, s’il vous plaît.”

The electric gate swung inward, and Liese started up the driveway to the house, her gut tied in a knot. This situation had all the earmarks of a disaster in the making. But she had come this far and she would see it through. And considering what Kirk was facing in Washington and what the entire U.S. was staring down the barrel at, this move could work to avert another tremendous disaster.

As the road came out of the woods and the main house came into view, Liese glanced across the bay. LeFevre would be at the spotter scope looking at her face. She tried to will him a message not to let Gertner do anything stupid. All she needed was a few minutes. Once she was in and had control of the situation, there was little any of them could do.

Kirk had promised that he would need only a few hours. It would be up to her to hold out that long, and make sure that no one got hurt.

She pulled up directly in front of the main house, in plain view not only of someone inside, but of LeFevre and the others. As she got out of the car and walked up, the chalet’s front door opened, and a very large man stood there, in black slacks and a dark short-sleeved pullover that was tight across his thick shoulders. If he was carrying, it was not obvious.

“The princess and the children will be down momentarily,” the security officer said. His thick accent was the same as that of the man she’d spoken to over the intercom. He wasn’t smiling. He held out his hand. “Your identification.”

She opened her ID wallet and held it up for him to see.

He took it, and carefully inspected the badge and then the photograph, comparing it to her face. He grunted. “I’ll keep this until you leave.”

This was the first test of who would be controlling the situation. Liese shook her head and held out her hand. “No,” she said, emphatically.

The security officer scowled. But he handed over the wallet, which she put back in her purse.

“Are you armed?”

Liese looked up, returning his scowl. “Most Swiss Federal Polizei do not carry firearms. They do not see the necessity. What is your name and position here?”

The security officer didn’t flinch. “My name is Sayyid Salah. I am the butler.”

Liese stifled a laugh. “Very well, Mr. Salah. The sooner I can speak with the princess and children, the sooner I’ll be gone.”

The security officer stepped aside to allow Liese to enter, and then he directed her through the short entry hall, with its heavily carved wooden coat rack and mirror, into the great room, just as Salman’s wife, the Princess Sofia, came down the stairs, followed by four children. The princess was a diminutive woman, with a tiny round face and very large, very dark eyes. She was not dressed in traditional Muslim garb. Like her three girls and one boy she wore blue jeans, a tee shirt, and sneakers. The children ranged in age from seven to thirteen, and except for their dark coloration and Semitic noses they could have been typical Swiss kids. They smiled uncertainly.

Liese felt absolutely rotten for being here like this. She could understand Mac’s reasoning, and yet this was all wrong in her mind. She wasn’t going to harm them, but they would not know it. Once she pulled out her pistol they would be terrified.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle,” the princess said. Her voice was mellifluous, her French accent good. “I am Sofia Salman, and these are my children.”

Liese wanted to apologize, say there had been a mistake, and get the hell out of there. But beyond doing this for Kirk, she had a clear vision of the television images from 9/11 in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. Especially the World Trade Center towers coming down. Of couples hand in hand leaping to their deaths from the buildings to escape the horrible flames.

Bin Laden had been the spiritual leader for that horrible day, but Khalil had been the major planner, the guiding force. The concept for the attacks had come from his warped brain. And so had whatever was going to happen in America next. More people would die, unless he was stopped. This time bin Laden promised to strike at children.

“Mademoiselle?” the princess prompted.

They stood in tableau for a second, the princess and her children at the foot of the sweeping staircase that led to the upper floor, the security officer at the entry hall three meters behind Liese’s left shoulder.

“Je suis desolée, Madame,” Liese said. She pulled out her pistol, as she turned left toward the security officer to present less of herself as a target.

The man reached for something at the small of his back.

“Do not go for your weapon,” Liese ordered, sharply. “I mean the princess and her children no harm, but I will shoot you!”

The security officer hesitated for just a second, then slowly brought both hands up and away from his body. There was a calculating look in his eyes. He was a pro. He would be patient and wait for her to make a mistake.

Liese glanced at the princess, who had gathered her girls, but the ten-year-old boy stood defiantly in front of his mother and sisters, ready like a good Bedouin man to defend his womenfolk. Liese felt horrible.

The security officer had begun to lower his right hand.

“Goddamn you son of a bitch, I’ll blow your fucking head off if you don’t turn this instant and get out of here,” Liese shouted.

Another man, dressed in a Western business suit, appeared from the back of the house from the opposite side of the great room, and stopped. His hands were in plain sight, but Liese was now caught in the middle of the two men. From a defensive stance she was in a very bad position. She could not cover both of them.

She switched her aim to the princess. “Do nothing foolish and we’ll all walk away from this. I mean nobody any harm. I promise you.” She tried to make the princess and her children see that she was telling the truth, but it was not possible. A crazy woman was holding a gun on them.

“Lower your weapon, and you will be allowed to leave here,” the man from the far end of the room told her, reasonably. “No one will interfere with you.”

“I can’t do that,” Liese replied. “I want both of you out of here now.”

“What do you want here, Sergeant Fuelm?” the security officer in the suit asked. “Or should we telephone your superiors and let them talk to you?”

“I wouldn’t advise that,” Liese said. “I’m only going to need a few hours.”

“Why shouldn’t we inform your superiors?”

“Because then the Kantonpolizei would officially know that Prince Salman’s actual identity is that of the terrorist we call Khalil.”

The princess gasped. She said something to the security officer in the business suit.

“I don’t know what fantasy you have deduced that from, but you are wrong, Mademoiselle,” the security officer said. “Your error could very well cost you your life before this day is done.” The man was maddeningly calm. He could have been discussing the weather. “You have one last opportunity to lower your weapon and leave in peace. If you do not, we will be forced to kill you.”

“Insha’allah,” Liese said.

The boy started to say something, but Liese looked directly into the princess’s eyes and drew back the Walther’s hammer. The princess pulled her son to her.

“Very well,” the security officer said. “We will get out of your way. And we will do as you wish and not call your superiors — though by now I suspect you must understand that because of Prince Salman’s position within the royal family we will have to inform Riyadh. What might happen after that will be out of my control.”

“Leave,” Liese told him, “and nobody gets hurt.”

“As you wish.” The security officer said something to the princess, and then he and the man who’d answered the door withdrew.

“What do you want with us?” the princess said. “You’re crazy if you think my husband is a terrorist. He is a playboy, not a murderer.”

Liese nodded. “I sincerely hope that you’re right.” She motioned toward the grouping of furniture in front of the huge, freestanding fireplace. “Sit down, please. If you’d like, call someone to bring you something to drink, eat.”

The princess straightened up. “We will sit as you order, since it is you holding a weapon pointed at me and my children. But we will not eat or drink, nor will you be given refreshments.” The woman’s left eyebrow arched. “Unless, of course, you mean to slaughter us all for a glass of water.”

What had happened to them all in the past ten years? The Soviet Union had disintegrated. The cold war had been won by the West. Then the world had begun sinking into utter chaos.

The princess herded her children to the modernistic white leather couch, and the youngest girl, with long dark hair and big eyes just like her mother, began to cry. Her mother said something to her and then gathered her up.

Keeping her pistol trained on the princess, Liese took her cell phone out of her purse and speed-dialed McGarvey’s number. It answered on the first ring.

“Are you in?”

“Yes.”

“Has anyone been hurt?” McGarvey asked, and Liese could hear the genuine concern in his voice. It was reassuring.

“Everyone is fine. Frightened, but okay,” she said. “But this is bad, Kirk.”

“I know,” he said, “but we didn’t create the situation. They did. Just give me a couple of hours. I’ll call when we’re set here with the answers.”

“Kirk? They deny it.”

McGarvey hesitated. “They might not know, Liese. They’re innocents.” He hesitated again. “That’s the difference between us. It’ll always be the difference. We don’t harm innocent people to make political statements.”

Except now, Liese thought.

SIXTY-TWO

Sitting in her mother’s car directly across the tree-lined street from the front entrance to the Saudi Embassy, Elizabeth waited for the signal from her husband that the street from the Watergate Hotel and apartments had been blocked to traffic. So far they’d not been interfered with. Though by now DC Metro would have been informed that something was going on down here. And the Bureau would be getting into the act soon because somebody from the embassy was probably raising hell.

Besides Elizabeth’s car, CIA surveillance teams were working from four vans — one parked directly behind her, one at each end of the street, and one at the rear of the Saudi compound across from the loading ramp, which led down into the basement parking garage. In the past ten minutes two limos with smoked windows had left the embassy.

Todd’s voice came into her earpiece. “We’re in place. Nobody else is leaving for now.”

“Copy,” Elizabeth spoke into her lapel mike. “Any sign of the cops or the federales at your end?”

“Not yet, Liz. But they’re coming.”

Elizabeth looked in her door mirror. She could see the tail end of Todd’s van, but there didn’t seem to be any activity up there. “Have you picked up something on DC Metro’s Tac One?” It was the FM radio channel that police dispatch used to communicate with its units on the streets.

“No. But Adkins called my cell phone and wanted to know what the hell we were doing, and was your dad down here with us.”

“What’d you tell him?” Elizabeth demanded.

“That we were putting pressure on the embassy to flush your mother out. That your dad wasn’t here and so far as we knew he was at home where he should be.”

“Did he buy it?” Elizabeth asked. All her father wanted was a couple of hours.

Todd chuckled. “No way But he didn’t press me. He just warned me that Fred Rudolph was raising holy hell, and that the Bureau was probably coming our way.”

“It’s going to get real interesting around here with DC Metro and the Bureau trying to figure out what we’re up to.”

“That’ll take at least a couple of hours, don’t you think, darling?” Todd asked.

Elizabeth smiled wickedly. “At least,” she said. “Okay, boys and girls, stand by. It’s showtime.” Her laptop was connected to the CIA’s mainframe via the Internet. The program she was tapped into had been created less than an hour ago by Rencke; it could take control of the electrical power grid for the entire city and the surrounding areas out to, but not including, Dulles International. Otto had isolated the area of the Saudi Embassy.

Elizabeth clicked on that line. When it was highlighted, she hit Enter.

It would take ten seconds for the proper relays to be opened, and then the lights would go out. After that it was anyone’s guess what would happen. But the pressure would be on.

She speed-dialed her father’s cell phone. He answered immediately.

“Yes.”

“Less than ten seconds,” she told him.

“Anything from the Bureau yet?”

“No, but they’re on the way. Rudolph is putting the squeeze on Adkins.”

There was a pause for just a moment.

“Okay, sweetheart, nobody gets hurt down there,” McGarvey said. “Do you understand what I’m saying? If there’s even a hint of trouble coming your way, I want you and the others to immediately bail out. No grandstanding. Your mother’s not in the embassy in any event. All you guys are doing is providing me with a diversion.”

But Elizabeth knew that people were going to get hurt, probably killed, though not here at the embassy. “When are you going in?”

“I have one phone call to make that could put an end to this business right now,” McGarvey said. “It’s worth a try.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes for a second. She had read her father’s file. The complete file. She knew what he was capable of, just as she knew that like any really good soldier or field officer, he always did everything in his power to avoid conflict.

She opened her eyes as electricity to the entire block went off. The red lights on the security cameras in front of the embassy winked out, and the traffic signals at the end of the street went dead.

“The power’s off,” she told her father.

“Stall them as long as you can, sweetheart,” McGarvey said.

“Good luck, Daddy,” Elizabeth said, but her father was already gone, and in the distance she could hear the first of the police sirens.

Across the street in his fifth-floor office, Nuaimi had just gotten through to Dennis Berndt over at the White House when his telephone went dead. At first he thought that, as incredible as it seemed, the president’s national security adviser had actually hung up on him. But when he tried to buzz his secretary to call again, he realized that the buttons on his phone console were all dead.

He slammed down the phone and switched on his light. But it too was dead. The faulty plumbing was not an isolated incident after all. Someone had cut their water, and now the electricity was off.

Pushing away from his desk, Nuaimi went to the door and threw it open. His secretary, startled, looked up. “The electricity has failed, Your Excellency.”

“Get me Besharati—” Nuaimi said, just as his chief of security walked through the door.

“The water was no coincidence,” the man said. He was tall, and lean as a greyhound, and he made most people he came into contact with nervous. Nuaimi thought of him as a Nazi, but he was very capable at his job. “Apparently we’re under assault. I’d suggest that you place a call to the secretary of state and demand an explanation.”

“The phones are dead.”

Besharati handed him a cell phone. “Make the call now, Your Excellency, before the situation gets out of hand.” His attitude was demeaning, and peremptory.

Nuaimi took immediate offense because he stupidly had not thought of using a cell phone. “Who do you think you are?” he demanded, sharply.

“I’m sorry, Your Excellency. I was merely trying to assist you—”

“Then take a dozen of your men, with arms, and surround this building as a show of force.”

Besharati looked amused. “I do not think that is advisable—”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Nuaimi said. “I gave you an order, and I expect that you will carry it out immediately.”

Besharati lowered his eyes and nodded. “As you wish, Your Excellency.” He turned and walked out, leaving Nuaimi wondering what in Allah’s name bin Laden’s people could be thinking. It was common knowledge that members of the Saudi royal family had been supplying the terrorist with money all along. But after the terrible attacks of 9/11, he thought Crown Prince Abdullah might have reined them in.

Apparently not.

SIXTY-THREE

It was ten o’clock in the evening in Riyadh when McGarvey reached the direct line to Prince Muhamed bin Abdul Aziz, head of the Saudi Secret Intelligence Service. The number was known to only a few members of the Royal family as well as the heads of a number of friendly intelligence agencies around the world. The CIA was one of them.

“This cannot be Richard Adkins calling from Amsterdam. So it must be Kirk McGarvey calling from a redialer service,” Prince Muhamed said. “Good evening.”

“I’ll get right to the point,” McGarvey said. “You have a lot of trouble heading your way that can be avoided if we can come to an understanding.” He had worked with the prince on several occasions, but he’d never been able to read the man behind the dark glasses and flowing robes.

“Yes, the situation is very delicate,” Prince Muhamed replied. He sounded like a man without a care in the world, but it was the attitude he always projected. No one in the West had ever witnessed his anger. “But under the circumstances I have nothing to gain by talking with you.”

“Are you aware of the present situation here in Washington?” McGarvey asked.

“I am aware of many situations.”

“Let’s cut the bullshit, Muhamed,” McGarvey shot back. “You know we’re facing another attack, and it’s due to happen in less than forty-eight hours. You also know that I resigned as DCI, and I’m on my own. So I’m not going to screw around with you. I called you merely as a courtesy. Maybe you and I can avoid a serious amount of bloodshed. If you’ll cooperate this time.”

The line was silent for a moment.

By now McGarvey figured that the prince had rolled the call over to his technical services to try to identify the redialer server so that they could pinpoint McGarvey’s location. But Rencke had set it up so Saudi intelligence was wasting its time and resources.

“I’m listening, Mr. McGarvey,” Prince Muhamed said.

“The CIA has gathered a reasonable amount of evidence to suggest that Prince Abdul Salman and the al-Quaida terrorist Khalil are the same man.”

Prince Muhamed laughed softly “Yes, I understand that may have precipitated your resignation, and was the reason you drove the poor man out of Monaco. But you are wrong, of course.”

McGarvey hadn’t expected any other answer at this point. “It’s what you would have to say out of loyalty to the family. But there’s more.”

“Of course there is.”

“The prince is here in Washington,” McGarvey said.

“He thought it would provide him a safe haven, being close to President Haynes, two men with mutual respect and admiration for each other.”

“Khalil is here as well.”

“If he is, then it must be a coincidence,” Prince Muhamed said. “We have no connection with al-Quaida, a fact that must be apparent. Goodness, we have suffered our share of casualties. Their attacks are not confined to your country.” The prince’s voice had not risen at all, though McGarvey could hear his anger. “How much blood must we shed, and how much oil must we pump to supply your love of SUVs, for you to finally understand that Saudi Arabia is a friend to the U.S. and always has been? Without our oil your country would be nothing.”

“Without our money, you would all go back to living on the desert in tents. Without our technical help even your water would stop flowing. And without our military you would have been invaded years ago by the Soviets, or maybe Saddam Hussein would have gone directly from Kuwait City to Riyadh.”

The prince was silent again.

“Was it also a coincidence that when Khalil was attempting to kidnap our former secretary of defense from a cruise ship in Canadian waters that Prince Salman was in Canada? The west coast of Canada?”

“I know the prince personally,” Prince Muhamed said. “In fact, we are related. Distantly. He is a deal maker and a playboy, arrogant and headstrong, a gambler and a womanizer. But he is not a terrorist. I give you my word, Mr. McGarvey.”

“He has kidnapped my wife, and I have arranged the kidnapping of his family in Switzerland. Right now they’re being held as hostages.”

“It was you,” the prince said, and this time he sounded shook. “What are you trying to do, get an innocent woman and her children harmed? Prince Salman’s chief of security called me from Lucerne with the wild story that a Swiss Federal Police officer barged in, gun drawn, and took Princess Sofia and her four children.”

“I believe you call such acts collateral damage,” McGarvey said, coldly.

“This is monstrous—”

“So were the 9/11 attacks on our people,” McGarvey interrupted.

“Tell your friend to walk away from the prince’s home without causing any harm to the princess and her children, and she will be allowed to leave the compound alive,” Prince Muhamed said. “Otherwise I will authorize the use of deadly force. The women and her children are innocents—”

“There are no innocents,” McGarvey interrupted again, coming down hard on the prince. “I got that directly from bin Laden himself.”

“We are not involved with al-Quaida,” the prince shouted.

“Bullshit!” McGarvey shouted back. “Pure, unadulterated bullshit. Now, you listen to me, Muhamed. You’re a bright man, and you have connections and influence. One, I want the immediate withdrawal of the terrorists here in my country. Two, I want an immediate exchange of hostages, my wife for Prince Salman’s wife and children.”

“Do you actually believe that your wife is being held at our embassy? Is that why it’s under siege?”

“Do it now, Muhamed, and no one need get hurt. Except for Khalil. He’s mine,” McGarvey said. “I want your word.”

“I cannot give my word for something outside my abilities,” Prince Muhamed replied, heavily. “This is a very bad business between us. Your attack on our embassy will not be perceived well in the Arab world. And should some harm come to a member of the royal family, relations between our two countries will be strained even further. Perhaps to the breaking point.”

“Where was the outrage in the Arab world over 9/11?” McGarvey asked. He had hoped to gain something from the prince, but he wasn’t surprised that he’d been stonewalled. “The princess and her children will be released in two hours. Tell the security people there not to do anything foolish in the meantime.”

“It is you who is being the fool,” Prince Muhamed said.

“Continue to attack us and we will strike back,” McGarvey said. “Afghanistan and Iraq were just the first.” He broke the connection.

Pocketing his cell phone, McGarvey hoped he had at least bought Liese some time. Prince Muhamed was a powerful man within the royal family, and he would have a great deal of influence on the security people at Salman’s Lucerne compound. McGarvey got up, holstered his pistol, and checked out the window. There was no activity across the street, and only the occasional car driving past.

He checked the blocks of Semtex and fuses, pulled on his jacket, and left the apartment, taking the elevator all the way down to the basement where he could leave the building from the loading area in the rear.

If he could reach the back entrance to Yarnell’s old house without being detected, he would have the advantage of surprise for the first several seconds. Enough, he thought, to get him inside.

For Katy. For the woman and child they’d tossed off the cruise ship. For 9/11. For every other horror men like bin Laden and his fanatical followers had done and were threatening to do.

Payback time started now.

SIXTY-FOUR

Khalil had just reached the communications room with the video disk of Kathleen McGarvey’s statement when al-Kaseem, out of breath and with an angry scowl on his bland features, caught up with him. Khalil thought the man looked ill, on the verge of a stroke.

Definitely the wrong sort to head up Saudi intelligence’s U.S. operations.

“I just got off the satellite phone with Prince Muhamed,” al-Kaseem practically shouted. “A friend of McGarvey’s is holding Princess Sofia and the children at gunpoint outside Lucerne.”

Khalil considered this news for a moment, then shrugged. “If they die, they will become martyrs.”

Al-Kaseem’s eyes widened. “You cold bastard, you don’t know what you’ve started.”

“I know very well.”

“I demand that you leave immediately.”

“You don’t have that authority,” Khalil told him, contemptuously. “But in any event you’ll get your wish soon. Less than forty-eight hours.”

Al-Kaseem threw up his hands, a very rude gesture for an Arab. “The situation here will not last that long, you idiot.”

The man had gone too far. Khalil shoved him up against the wall, pulled out his stiletto, and brought the blade to al-Kaseem’s face, the razor-sharp point less than an inch from the intelligence chief’s left eye. “I find your lack of respect and bad manners irritating.”

Al-Kaseem was not cowed. “McGarvey called Prince Muhamed a few minutes ago. Offered to trade his wife for the princess and the children.”

It was something new. Khalil had not thought men of McGarvey’s ilk were capable of such interesting, and certainly logical, acts, not with all their foolish talk about innocents. “What else did he tell the prince?”

“He said he was coming after you. No one else need get hurt, except for you.” Al-Kaseem reached up and eased the stiletto blade away from his face. “He’s very close, because he promised Prince Muhamed that the princess and children would be released in two hours.”

They were in the third-story corridor on the southwest side of the building, directly below the west-facing satellite dish on the roof. Khalil cocked an ear to listen. The building seemed quieter than it had earlier in the day. Al-Kaseem was watching him, a mixture of disgust and even contempt in his eyes.

“If he finds out where you are, he’ll come after you,” al-Kaseem said.

“I think he already has it figured out,” Khalil said. “How many people are left in the building besides us?”

“Everyone’s here. We’ve just suspended most operations until the situation is resolved.”

Khalil nodded toward the door to the communications room. “Have you shut down the satellite feed as well?”

“Not yet,” al-Kaseem said.

“Good, I have a video to send.” Khalil released his hold on the chief of station, then sheathed his stiletto.

“What video? Where are you sending it?”

“You’ll see,” Khalil said. He opened the communication center’s door with an electronic key card and went in.

The equipment-filled room was small, not much larger than a master bedroom in a large house. Two technicians were seated at computer terminals, the monitors blank. They looked up, surprised. The communications and computer center was the most classified section of the building, and very few people were authorized entry. Khalil wasn’t one of them.

One of the technicians reached for a pistol in a drawer, when al-Kaseem came in and waved him off. “He’s here on my authorization.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man said.

“In fact, I want both of you to leave us. Get a cup of tea. We’ll only be a few minutes.”

The two men got up and left.

Al-Kaseem held out his hand for the video disk. “I assume this is McGarvey’s wife. Where are you sending it?”

“Al Jazeera,” Khalil said.

Al-Kaseem shook his head. “I’ll say it again: You’re a cold bastard. You’ll get us all killed. If McGarvey can’t get to you today, he won’t ever stop once he sees whatever it is you’ve made her say.”

“In two days it won’t matter,” Khalil said.

Al-Kaseem gave him a hard look. “You and the woman need to be long gone from here before then. I will take this to Crown Prince Abdullah. There is much more at stake here than you can know. Political stakes.”

Khalil gave the disk to al-Kaseem, who put it in the CD tray of one of the computers, brought that drive up, and double-clicked the Video icon. The image showed Kathleen, dressed in the same type of cotton pajamas that the Afghani and Iraqi prisoners of war had been made to wear, seated on the edge of a narrow cot, her hands folded together in her lap.

The camera zoomed forward, her face filling the screen. She had been beaten. Her eyes were already blackening, and the right side of her jaw was red and swollen. For all that, al-Kaseem thought she was a strikingly handsome woman, for whom her husband would commit murder.

“My name is Kathleen McGarvey, and I have a message for all the mothers and fathers of all the children in the great Satan nation, the United States.”

“How long is this recording?” al-Kaseem asked.

“Two minutes. It was enough.”

“Another blow for freedom will soon be struck against our children, but it need not happen. President Haynes must go before the United Nations today, and make the following declarations before the world. All U.S. and allied forces will make immediate preparations to leave Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Korea. In addition, all U.S. military forces, as well as all Christians, must immediately leave the Arabian Peninsula.”

“That will never happen as long as they need our oil,” al-Kaseem said. “No matter how many blows are struck against them. They learned their lesson from Vietnam.”

A faint smile crossed Khalil’s lips. He sincerely hoped that the demands were not met in his lifetime. This struggle was the very thing he had been born for. The only thing for which he lived. Without it he would be nothing.

“It is no different than in 1776 when the valiant American freedom fighters forced their oppressive masters off the land,” Kathleen continued. “And today America and England are partners.”

Watching the video, Khalil was struck again by the woman’s strength, and once again he resolved to bring her back to the Saudi desert with him, no matter how impossible that idea was. He wanted first to kill her husband, and then he wanted to spend time with this woman. He wanted to teach her humility. He wanted to see her crawl on her knees to him, to beg his forgiveness, to grovel like an animal in the dust in front of him. He smiled inwardly. She would wash his feet before each prayer, and then prepare and serve his meals.

Her death, he decided, would be a particularly fruitful event.

Kathleen continued to read the words that Khalil had written for her, but he was no longer listening. There had to be a way to get her out of the country before the attacks, because afterward the U.S. borders would be sealed tight. The only other alternative was to find a place inside the country where he could be safe until the initial furor died down. Oklahoma City, perhaps. There was a very active al-Quaida cell there.

Al-Kaseem was looking at him. “If you order me to send this video to Al Jazeera, I’ll do it. But then you will have to leave within twenty-four hours.”

Khalil decided not to kill the man yet. But it was going to give him pleasure when he did. The chief of station had lived for too long in the West. He had practically become one of them.

“Send it,” Khalil said. “I’ll leave tonight.”

Al-Kaseem hesitated for a moment, his jaw set, but then he nodded. “As you wish.” He sat down at the computer, brought up the Internet, went to the Al Jazeera Web site, and attached the video file. He glanced up at Khalil, then turned back and hit the Send Now icon.

At that moment there was a small explosion somewhere directly below them.

“McGarvey,” the chief of station said. “He’s here already. The embassy attack was just a ruse.”

Khalil headed for the door. “No one is to kill him. He’s mine.”

“What shall we do?” al-Kaseem demanded.

“Let him find his wife, of course.”

SIXTY-FIVE

Dennis Berndt had attended numerous National Security Council meetings and other crisis gatherings, but never before had he seen a roomful of people with so much fear, anger, and confusion on their faces.

Herb Weissman was the first to arrive at the White House from his office in the J. Edgar Hoover Building, followed by Dick Adkins from Langley, Frank Hoover from downtown, and Crawford Anderson, from his office in the Old Executive Office Building. He was chief of DC operations for Homeland Security.

They gathered in the basement situation room, and Berndt was in charge until the president, running late, came down with his chief of staff.

“We need to figure out what we can do, and we don’t have much time to come up with a recommendation,” Berndt told them. There had been no need to go over the specifics with any of them; they were all in the loop. They’d had the better part of an hour to ponder the facts.

“Has anybody located McGarvey?” Weissman asked. “Fred Rudolph is in charge over at the embassy. As of fifteen minutes ago McGarvey had not surfaced, and his daughter isn’t talking.” He glanced at Adkins. “It’s your surveillance teams over there who started all this, for God’s sake. They won’t back down.”

“They won’t until Mac’s wife is released,” Adkins said.

“If they’re ordered, will they disobey?” Berndt asked, although he expected that he already knew the answer. All of them in the room did. As young as she was, Elizabeth Van Buren had already gained the reputation as a tough, capable field officer who in many respects was following in her father’s footsteps. It was possible that if she continued on her present path, she would someday become deputy director of operations, a position no other woman had ever risen to.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t want to give the order, Dennis.”

Berndt was instantly angry. “We’re in a no-win situation here, Dick. If the president orders them to stand down and they refuse, they would be subject to arrest. All of them.”

Adkins shook his head. “You know better than that.”

“I wouldn’t care to send my people to do it,” Weissman said. “Somebody could get hurt, and anyway we’d be playing right into the Saudis’ hands. If they’ve got McGarvey’s wife over there, they don’t have a moral or diplomatic leg to stand on. If we start fighting among ourselves, they can claim anything they want.” He looked around the table. “Hell, they could even admit they have her, but are concerned about her safety.” He smiled ironically. “Fact is, she might be in the safest place in Washington right now.”

The others agreed. “Which leaves us with McGarvey, because we sure as hell can’t storm into somebody’s embassy with the National Guard, guns drawn, and demand they turn over someone they may or may not be holding prisoner,” Berndt said. “Where is he, Dick?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Well, somebody does,” President Haynes said, entering the room. He moved fast, reaching the center chair around the table and sitting down before everyone else could get to their feet. He was clearly seething with anger.

“Mr. President, we were just—”

“Never mind that for the moment,” Haynes said. He fixed each of them with a baleful look. “I’m late because Crown Prince Abdullah finally called me about two situations. The one at the embassy angers him the most.” The president’s jaw tightened. “The son of a bitch actually threatened to cut off oil shipments to us for thirty days if I didn’t do something immediately.”

Berndt had been afraid of just this from the moment he’d been informed about the developing situation at the Saudi Embassy. As the president’s adviser on national security affairs, he should have been in on the call.

Haynes anticipated Berndt’s concern. “I was just leaving the Oval Office when his call came through. Sorry, Dennis, you were already down here and there was no time to get you back upstairs.” The president seemed to look inward for a moment, as if he was girding himself for some difficult decisions. “He flatly denied that Kathleen McGarvey was being held prisoner at the embassy.” The president looked pointedly at Adkins. “He gave me his word, Dick.” Haynes shook his head. “I couldn’t very well call him a liar.”

“No, Mr. President,” Adkins said.

Thank God for that much, Berndt thought. “I don’t believe that Saudi Arabia can afford to cut off our oil, Mr. President. They’re in desperate need of money, and our surveilling their embassy, no matter how vigorously, would not give them sufficient cause.”

“Exactly,” the president shot back. “But there was a second situation he wanted to know about, the one that puzzles him most, happening at this moment outside Lucerne. A Swiss federal cop by the name of Liese Fuelm has taken Prince Salman’s wife and four children hostage in their own home.” Again he directed his attention to Adkins. “Does that name ring any bells?”

Adkins nodded. “Kirk knows her.”

It was obviously the answer Haynes expected to hear. “Despite my warning, he’s directing a full-scale assault on the prince, who, so far as I know, is at the embassy now, and on his family in Switzerland. A neutral country.”

“The Saudis kidnapped McGarvey’s wife, Mr. President,” Berndt suggested, as gingerly as he could. “In his mind he has cause.”

“Do you know this for a fact, Dennis?” the president demanded.

“I got it from Otto Rencke, his special projects director, who got it from Mac’s daughter,” Berndt said. “She was in Georgetown when they grabbed her mother. The kidnappers told her that they would keep Mrs. McGarvey for two days, and nothing would happen to her if Mac backed off. They drove off in a cable television van, which the DC police spotted entering the Saudi Embassy parking garage beneath the building.”

“We’re using that as our operational timetable, Mr. President,” Anderson, the Homeland Security DC chief said, but the president held up a hand, cutting him off. “I know who can reach him,” Haynes said.

Berndt knew as well. “He might have his hands full,” he said.

But Haynes was having none of it. “Get Rencke on the speakerphone now,” he ordered. “I’m going to end this standoff so that we can concentrate on stopping the bastards from hitting us again.”

Which was exactly what McGarvey was trying to do, Berndt thought. But he didn’t give voice to it.

“We’ve got forty-eight hours, give or take,” the president said. “We ought to be able to find them by then.” It was wishful thinking.

Using the president’s telephone console, Berndt dialed the emergency number Rencke had left for him. It was answered on the first ring.

“Oh wow, Mr. Berndt, am I glad you called. I’ve got some good dope on the Saudis. I’m following their financial trails. At least one line of money goes from several Swiss accounts into one in Trinidad. And you’ll never guess who the payer and the payee are. You’ll never guess, not in a zillion years!”

Berndt looked at the president, who nodded for him to go ahead. “No, Mr. Rencke, who?” he asked.

“The Swiss accounts belong to none other than our old friend Prince Abdul Salman,” Rencke gushed, excitedly, “and the Trinidad account belongs to him as well.” Rencke laughed. “But do you guys want to hear the kicker, Mr. President, do ya?”

Berndt looked at the president again. Rencke was a frightening man. Somehow he was able to trace a supposedly untraceable telephone circuit to the console in the White House situation room. The president was very likely to be there in this time of national crisis.

“Yes, Mr. Rencke, I would like to hear the kicker,” Haynes said.

“A businessman by the name of Thomas Isherwood arrived at the Juneau airport from Vancouver two days before Shaw almost went down. He took a cab to an air charter company where he had booked a flight to a fishing resort on Kuiu Island on the Inside Passage.” Rencke suddenly dropped the little-boy enthusiasm from his voice. Now he was a professional intelligence officer passing crucial information to the president of the United States. “He was supposed to stay for a week, fishing with friends. But when the charter pilot flew back for the pickup, no one was there.” Rencke paused for a second. “No one alive. The resort owner, his wife, and his daughter had all been gunned down.”

“We know most of that, Otto,” Adkins said. “What else have you come up with?”

“Oh wow, Mr. Adkins. Guess where Thomas Isherwood was from? Port of Spain, Trinidad.”

No one said anything.

“Do you get it, Mr. President? Saudi royal family money — Prince Salman’s money — has been transferred on a regular basis to Trinidad. The man traveling from Trinidad to Juneau via Vancouver was the terrorist Khalil. And at that very same moment Prince Salman himself was in Vancouver, supposedly on business.” Rencke laughed. “Bingo!”

“Good work, Mr. Rencke,” Haynes said. “I’ll want you to carry your investigation as far as you can. In the meantime I want to speak with Mr. McGarvey. I suspect that you know where he is at the moment.”

“But Mr. President, there can’t be any doubt that Khalil and the prince are the same guy. Gosh—”

“It’s an order, Mr. Rencke,” the president said. “I’m trying to save lives — his, his wife’s, and possibly a lot of innocent Americans. The attack is coming in less than two days. We don’t have much time to stop it.”

“No, sir, we do not,” Rencke said. “But it’s too late to reach Mac.”

Berndt’s stomach did a slow roll. “Why, Otto?” he asked. “Why is it too late?”

“He’s already inside.”

“That’s impossible,” Weissman sputtered. “We’re watching the place along with your people.”

“Nevertheless it’s true,” Rencke said. “I saw him go in just a couple of minutes—” Rencke stopped in midsentence.

For a moment Berndt thought that they’d lost the connection. But sounds were coming from the speakerphone. A woman’s voice perhaps, and then a man’s. But Berndt couldn’t make out any of the words.

“Otto?” Berndt prompted.

Still there was nothing.

“Mr. Rencke,” Haynes said.

“Power up your monitor, Mr. President; I’ll send you something that I’ve just picked up from one of our satellite intercept programs,” Rencke said. His voice sounded strangled, as if he had swallowed something bad.

A flat-panel computer monitor in front of the president’s position was already on, the image of some Hawaiian beach on its screen wallpaper. Haynes turned it so that the others could see the screen. “Go ahead, Mr. Rencke; we’re ready.”

The image of a battered Kathleen McGarvey came up. Dressed in what looked like cotton pajamas, she was sitting on the edge of a cot. Her face was bruised, and it was obvious she had been beaten. But she seemed to be alert and even defiant.

God help the sorry bastard who did this when McGarvey finds out, Berndt thought. He shuddered.

“My name is Kathleen McGarvey, and I have a message for all the mothers and fathers of all the children in the great Satan nation, the United States.”

“Where did it come from?” Adkins asked.

“It’s from a Saudi intel transmitter here in town,” Rencke said.

“Where did they send it?” Berndt asked.

“Al Jazeera’s main studio in Doha,” Rencke said. He was choked up, as they all were, watching McGarvey’s wife read from a prepared statement.

Her eyes were flitting all over the place, and Berndt suspected she was trying to tell them something, but for the life of him he didn’t know what it might be. “Otto, is she trying to signal us?”

“It looks like it, but it ain’t Morse code,” Rencke said over her voice. “But I’m on it.” The telephone connection was broken.

“There’s not a damned thing we can do now, except storm the embassy,” the president said, his eyes glued to the monitor. “And we definitely can’t do that.”

SIXTY-SIX

His pistol in hand, McGarvey held up just inside what had been a pantry beyond the mudroom down a short corridor from the rear entrance. It had taken him less than two minutes to blow the lock on the rear security gate, cross the narrow parking area filled with a half dozen cars, and let himself in.

He’d been prepared to blow the rear door or take down anyone who came to investigate, but the door had been unlocked and no one had shown up.

The storeroom was dark and smelled musty. It was filled with locked file cabinets, and shelves holding hundreds of what appeared to be U.S. government bulletins, documents, and at least five years’ worth of the Congressional Record pulp publication.

This was a trap. All his senses were superalert. No one had come to investigate the explosion at the back security gate, nor had the loading-entrance door been locked.

Where were the security people?

There were closed-circuit television cameras on the gate, outside the back door, and where the corridor opened into the large kitchen. They knew that he was in the building. Yet no one was rushing to intercept the intruder. It was very much unlike any Saudi operation he’d ever seen. Even their think tanks had tighter security.

Khalil wanted him to come here.

This was a large building with more than two dozen rooms. McGarvey had spent some of the morning trying to remember the layout. He’d only ever been inside once, after Yarnell’s death, and he supposed that the Saudis might have changed things around to suit their purposes. But Katy could be anywhere, and even without interference it might take a long time to find her. No matter what Khalil’s purpose was, the Saudis weren’t about to let an American stay here very long.

Khalil was here, though, he was sure of it. He could almost smell the man’s scent. “Here I am,” he murmured. “I’m coming.”

No one was in the industrial kitchen, nor did it look as if it had been used to cook a meal in a long time. There didn’t appear to be any foodstuffs, and the three gas stoves were pristine; there weren’t any pots or pans hanging on the hooks, nor plates or glasses on the shelves.

McGarvey stopped again and cocked an ear to listen. The house was dead quiet. Yet people were here.

A pair of swinging doors led to what had been a dining room large enough to seat thirty people. McGarvey eased one of the doors open and cautiously peered through the crack.

Nobody was there.

The large table was still in place, but it was laid out with glasses, water carafes, and lined tablets and pens at each position. At one end was a complicated-looking, multiline telephone console, and beside it a red phone without push buttons. The room was apparently used for conferences.

But this wasn’t the headquarters of any Middle Eastern trade association. The Bureau had long suspected that Saudi intelligence was operating out of a safe house somewhere in the city that was independent of the embassy. McGarvey had a hunch that he’d just stumbled onto it.

The closed-circuit television camera mounted high on the wall on the other side of the room came to life and tracked McGarvey as he left the kitchen, hurried around the table, and made his way to the tall, ornately paneled sliding doors, which opened, as he remembered, directly onto the main stair hall.

If there was a security detail here, someone would be stationed in the front hall to screen incoming staff and visitors.

McGarvey put his ear to the doors, but there were no sounds. He eased one of them open slightly and looked out.

The large hall was empty, as was the railed second-floor corridor leading from the head of the stairs. Middle Eastern paintings and tapestries and long, curving scimitars decorated the walls. Persian rugs were scattered on the highly polished wooden floor. To the right a heavy wooden door with an oval, etched glass window led to a small vestibule. Directly across from the dining room was a counter about eight feet long. It was the security post. He could see the reflection of a monitor screen in the door glass.

McGarvey looked over his shoulder, but the way behind was clear. He was being led into a trap, but he had no options that he wanted to consider. Katy and Kahlil were here, and he was going to find both of them.

What bothered him most was not that Khalil had snatched Katy, but why he had not taken Liz as well and disappeared into the woodwork with both of them. If he were one of the al-Quaida leaders, he would be hunkering down now until the attack, and probably for the long haul. They had to know that the pressure to find them would be ten times what it had been after 9/11.

But Khalil had allowed Liz to leave, even telling her the timetable for the attacks.

For just a moment McGarvey felt a flash of self-doubt. Perhaps the cable television van transporting Katy had not doubled back here to drop her off before showing up at the Saudi Embassy. It was possible she was over there and not here after all.

He shook his head.

It was Khalil’s ego driving him now. After his failure in Alaska, he was willing to go to any lengths, take any risks to hit back. His actions had nothing to do with al-Quaida or striking a blow against the West; this was personal between them.

They were watching his every move. Khalil wouldn’t want to kill him at first, just disable him, bring him down. For that McGarvey would have to come out into the open where they could have a clear shot at him.

Which was exactly what he was going to give them.

He started to turn around, as if he had decided against continuing, but then he flung the doors open and darted out into the stair hall, sweeping his pistol left to right, covering the corners and then the upstairs landing for any sign of movement.

He was across the hall in a few long strides, where he levered himself over the counter and ducked down behind it.

He was somewhat exposed to anyone on the upstairs landing, but it couldn’t be helped. In any event he planned only staying long enough to find Katy.

Keeping one eye toward the landing, he quickly studied the security board. In addition to a telephone console and what appeared to be the controls for the front and back gates, there were two monitors. One of them showed the corridor between the kitchen and the rear entrance. The other was an outside view, at the front gate.

Beneath each monitor was a double row of switches that controlled which camera was displayed. And lying on the console was a floor plan of the building, the camera positions marked and numbered.

McGarvey glanced at the upstairs landing, then flipped the first switch. The view in that monitor changed from the kitchen corridor, to the rear gate.

Katy could be anywhere in the house, possibly in an upstairs bedroom, but more likely she was somewhere in the basement, where there were no windows from which she might attempt to escape, or signal for help.

He started with the cameras in the basement rooms. The first showed a view down a dimly lit corridor. The second and third showed empty rooms, both of which could have been used as interrogation cells.

He found Katy in the fourth, a room at the end of the corridor, and his heart leapt into his throat. She was seated on a narrow cot, her knees drawn up to her chest. He couldn’t see her face very clearly, but by the way she held herself he knew that she had been hurt.

For a second a monstrous dark rage welled up inside of him, threatening to block out all sanity. He looked up at the second-floor corridor, everything in his soul wishing for Kahlil to be there. Right now. Just the two of them.

But then he came down.

Katy was alone in the cell, and she didn’t appear to be in any immediate danger. He found the room location on the floor plan. The entrance to the basement was just off the rear corridor the way he had come in.

His eyes went to the monitor showing the front gate. A black Mercedes with heavily smoked windows had pulled up. The rear door opened and a man stepped out.

He looked familiar.

McGarvey checked the upstairs landing again, and when he turned back to the monitor the man from the limo was at the front gate, pressing the buzzer, looking up at the television camera.

Suddenly McGarvey was no longer sure of anything. He was looking into the face of a man who should not have been outside this building. Katy was here, and so should this man have been. Unless everything he believed was wrong.

Or unless something else was going on. Something to do with the al-Quaida attacks in less than two days.

And he was afraid for Liese’s safety because he had sent her on a dangerous wild-goose chase.

“Let me in at once.” The voice of Prince Salman came from the speaker next to the monitor, and McGarvey pressed the button to open the gate.

SIXTY-SEVEN

The large living room of Prince Salman’s chalet was silent and getting dark because storm clouds had blown in from the west, covering the late afternoon sky. Liese sat with her knees together, pistol in hand, across from Princess Sofia and the children.

She laid the gun on her lap, and brushed a strand of hair off her forehead. She hadn’t even gotten through the first hour, and yet it seemed as if she had been here forever. But Kirk would call when he was in the clear, so she would have to hold on until then.

The first few minutes had been the worst, because she’d expected the security guards to try to take her by surprise. She’d been startled by every little sound, by every movement the princess or one of the children made. At one point a phone rang in another room, and for a couple of seconds she had the silly notion that it might be Kirk calling the security staff to let her go.

But no one came to talk to her, and gradually the house settled down until there were no noises. She wished she was almost anywhere else but here. In Kirk’s arms, she daydreamed, even though she knew that would never be possible.

“Sergeant, my daughter has to use the WC,” Princess Sofia said. The youngest girl had been fidgeting for the past five minutes.

Liese shook her head. “It will only be another hour. I’m sorry, but she’ll have to wait.”

The little girl’s eyes were very wide, coal black, her complexion a beautiful olive, her long dark hair in a single braid. She sat nearest to her mother, her tiny hands in her lap. Her tee shirt had Minnie Mouse embroidered on the front, from Euro Disney outside Paris.

“She’s only seven; she doesn’t understand these things,” the princess said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you have children, Sergeant?”

The question was like a sharp dagger in an open, festering wound. Liese’s breath momentarily caught in her throat. She shook her head again. “I’m not married.”

The princess laughed disdainfully. “Of course you’re not. You’re Swiss, and you’re too efficient to understand about having a husband who gives you children.”

At least the man I’m in love with is not an assassin, Liese wanted to say. But even that wasn’t true. Was hers a life wasted? she often asked herself. At this particular moment she was more confused than she’d ever been, and she had no idea what the answer was, or if she knew how to find it.

“Can she go alone?” Liese asked.

“Yes, of course,” Princes Sofia said. “Anyway you’ll still have me and the other three under the barrel of your gun.” She said something in Arabic to the little girl, who hesitated for a moment, then climbed off the couch, and keeping a wary eye on Liese, left the room.

“She is a very pretty child,” Liese said, in an effort to be pleasant.

Princess Sofia flared. “You have no right to say that to me. Keep your stupid, meaningless compliments to yourself. Better yet, put away that ridiculous gun and get out of my house.”

“Your Highness, no one believes that you are involved in any way. And I have not come here to offer you any harm. You have my word as a Swiss officer of the law on that.”

The princess was about to say something, when she looked beyond Liese to the left in the direction her daughter had gone and her eyes widened slightly.

“What—” Liese said, turning. A man stood on the other side of the stairs, some sort of a short-barreled rifle in his hand. Liese thought it might be an M 16, she wasn’t sure. But the laser sight targeted her left eye.

Oh, Kirk, the fleeting thought crossed her mind. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

She managed to turn her head and start to move left, when a tremendous thunderclap burst inside her skull and the lights went out.

SIXTY-EIGHT

Khalil waited in the second-floor operations center directly across the corridor from the stairs, watching a bank of television monitors, an overwhelming fury threatening to blot out his self-control. The stupid, arrogant bastard coming here, now of all times and completely out in the open, was beyond belief.

Most of the twenty-two intelligence staffers were gathered here on al-Kaseem’s orders, to stay out of the way until the situation resolved itself. This was one of the few rooms in the building without a closed-circuit television camera. They sat around the big table, at desks and on chairs pulled from other offices.

From the moment they’d heard the explosion at the rear gate until now, McGarvey had done exactly what Khalil had wanted him to do. He’d made his way to the ground-floor security post, had figured out the monitoring system from the floor plan that had been left for him, and had located his wife in her cell. Next he should have gone to her, which would have been his death sentence.

The downstairs corridor was narrow, ill lit, and very confined. When Darby Yarnell owned the house, that basement corridor had led back to his extensive wine cellar. It would have been a perfect place to corner the man. There was nowhere for him to run and hide, no room in which to maneuver.

Al-Kaseem walked over to where Khalil was standing, just out of earshot from most of the others. “This tears everything,” he said, seething with anger. “Did you know he was coming here?”

“No, of course not,” Khalil said, taking care to keep his voice even. He switched one of the monitors to Kathleen McGarvey’s cell. She sat huddled on the cot, hugging her knees to her chest. Then he switched to the basement corridor.

“What are you going to do, damn you?” al-Kaseem demanded. “Your coming here like this will likely shut down our entire North American operation. All because you wanted revenge for your botched operation in Alaska.”

“What are you talking about?”

“McGarvey, you fool. He didn’t break in here without a plan for getting back out.”

Khalil’s eyes were on the monitors showing the view outside and the view inside the stair hall; he was fascinated despite the problem the man’s presence created. McGarvey was good, but he was only one man, and he would now have the handicap not only of his wife, but also of the prince.

Prince Salman had gotten through the gate and was marching up to the front door. McGarvey had come back over the counter, and stood in the shadows beside the stairs, his pistol still in hand.

“I expect I will have to kill all three of them,” Khalil said. “You can make the arrangements to dispose of their bodies. In two days they’ll simply become additional casualties in the attack.”

None of the staff could hear their conversation, but a number of them watched the outside monitor and took furtive glances toward Khalil.

“What about my people?” al-Kaseem whispered, urgently. “They’ve seen you. They’re making the connection.”

Prince Salman had reached the front door and was coming into the building.

Khalil turned his hooded eyes to al-Kaseem. “If you cannot control your officers, I can.”

Al-Kaseem stepped back, struck dumb for the moment. He glanced at the monitor. “This has to end, or we’re all dead,” he said.

The prince had entered the vestibule, and he was opening the inner door.

SIXTY-NINE

As Prince Salman came through the door, McGarvey stood well back beside the soaring stairs so that he was hidden from anyone upstairs. It took everything within his power not to immediately shoot the man dead.

The arrogant bastard had been driving around Washington as if he were immune from the consequences of his actions.

Salman stopped at the counter and looked at the television monitors. He looked up toward the head of the stairs, but then he spotted McGarvey standing in the shadows, and he reared back. “You.”

“You should not have come back here,” McGarvey said. His gun hand was shaking with the effort not to pull the trigger. A small bead of sweat appeared on his forehead.

“What do you mean, come back here?” Salman demanded. “I’ve never been to this place in my life.” He glanced toward the head of the stairs again. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You kidnapped my wife, you son of a bitch,” McGarvey said. It was becoming increasingly difficult to stay on track. They had stripped Katy, making her change into pajamas. And they had hurt her. “You wanted me to come here.”

Salman was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“You put your hands on her, like you did in Alaska, and I warned you then that I would kill you.”

Sudden understanding dawned in the prince’s eyes. “It’s your people in front of our embassy.” He stepped back. “You’re crazy; do you know that? I think you deserve another 9/11.”

It was the same voice that McGarvey had heard in Alaska. Or was it? After hearing Salman’s voice in Monaco, his exact memory of how Khalil had sounded on the cruise liner was blurred. But Otto’s evidence was nearly overwhelming. Whenever a terrorist attack had taken place in the past ten years in which Khalil could be placed in the vicinity, Salman was there as well. That was more than mere coincidence.

Katy had been kidnapped and she was here. So was Salman.

McGarvey motioned with his pistol toward the corridor that led to the back of the house. “Move.”

Salman stepped back a pace and shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said, haughtily. “You think that I’m a terrorist, and you’re not bluffing. You are going to kill me. Well, I’m not going to the slaughter like a lamb. If you want to do it, you’ll have to shoot me in the back.”

Salman glanced at the closed-circuit monitors behind the counter, one showing the front entrance, and the other, Katy in her cell. He looked back at McGarvey. His eyes had narrowed, and a crafty, calculating expression had come into his face.

“We’re going downstairs to get her,” McGarvey said. “And then the three of us will leave here together.”

“I didn’t do this,” Salman protested. But his words didn’t ring true.

“I’m not going to kill you, as much as I want to, but you are coming with me,” McGarvey said. “I’ll turn you over to the FBI and let them deal with you. Either that or you’ll die right here.”

Salman seemed to think about it, but he shook his head again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re here and so is your wife, which means you probably know what this place really is. No use me trying to lie about it. Fact is I came here looking for help to get you off my back. The chief of intelligence operations is a family friend.”

“Where are they?” McGarvey asked.

A moment of uncertainty crossed Salman’s features. “Most likely waiting for you to come to your senses and leave without bloodshed.”

“Not without my wife or you,” McGarvey said. “Nobody’s coming to rescue you, because you’re an embarrassment to the royal family.”

“You’re insane.”

“You got caught, and when you tell us what targets al-Quaida will hit in two days, your own government will cut you loose the same as they did to bin Laden.”

Salman laughed disdainfully. “You are a naive man for the director of Central Intelligence — or should I have said, former director? But in case you didn’t already know it, President Haynes is a close personal friend. So are a number of your key officials.”

“They’ll be disappointed,” McGarvey said. “Get going now, or I’ll shoot you.”

“Harm me and you’ll go to jail.”

This was not what he expected. None of it. This place was most likely a Saudi intelligence operational center, and Khalil’s capture here of all places would be a serious embarrassment to the royal family. So would Katy’s kidnapping and imprisonment here create a major international incident. U.S.-Saudi relations would probably never be the same, oil money or not.

But no one was coming to stop what could turn into a major disaster for Riyadh.

The only way in which any of this made sense was if someone very high in the royal family had finally decided to cut its recent losses and totally withdraw its support for the terrorists, just as Libya’s Qaddafi had done. McGarvey didn’t believe it, but in the face of bin Laden’s new threat, maybe Crown Prince Abdullah had finally had enough.

Whatever was going on, he needed to get Katy out of here right now.

McGarvey crossed the stair hall in four strides. Salman grabbed for the telephone behind the counter, but before he could reach it McGarvey shoved him back against the door frame and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into the side of the man’s head.

“Give me the slightest excuse to put a bullet into your brain and I’ll do it, I swear to Christ,” McGarvey said.

“I’ll enjoy coming to your trial for treason,” Salman said, immediately giving up the struggle. His face was inches from McGarvey’s. He smiled. “Let’s go fetch your wife, if that’s what you want. And if we’re allowed to leave, I’ll go with you to the FBI. I won’t cause you any further trouble.”

McGarvey backed off, and glanced up at the second-floor corridor. No one was there, and everything in his being told him he was walking into a trap. But he had no other choice. “Lead the way.”

Salman shook his head. “As I told you, I’ve never been here. I don’t know where she is.”

McGarvey roughly shoved him toward the corridor. Together they headed toward the back of the house, past the open door of what in Yarnell’s day had been the library, but that was now a large functional room jammed with a half dozen desks and file cabinets. Heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, but the lights had not been switched off. It looked as if whoever had been working in here had suddenly dropped what he was doing and scurried off somewhere to hole up. On one long wall was a large map of the world with Arabic markings and lines drawn in red. This was probably where their analysts worked.

The door to the basement was across from the pantry where McGarvey had come in. He directed Salman to open it. Dim lights illuminated the stairway and the corridor below.

McGarvey glanced over his shoulder at the closed-circuit television camera mounted on the wall just below the ceiling. Its red light was on, indicating it was functioning, and it was tracking them.

Someone was watching. But what were they waiting for?

Salman started down the stairs first, McGarvey directly behind him. From what he remembered, there was no way in or out of the basement except for this door. It’s not a cellar; it’s a redoubt, Otto had remarked at the time. Kept the philistines from stealing Darby’s wine.

Every nerve end in McGarvey’s body tingled. The basement corridor could very well turn into a shooting range. It would all hinge on the timing.

They held up at the bottom. Four doors opened off the narrow corridor that ran only thirty feet from the back of the house toward the front. The end door led to Yarnell’s wine cellar, which had taken up nearly onefourth of the entire basement, extending from one side of the house to the other. The other doors opened onto storerooms and the big area where the furnace and utilities were located. Katy was being held in the last room next to the wine cellar. Its door, unlike the others, was made of steel.

All the doors were closed, but the television camera on the ceiling had swiveled from the spot McGarvey had observed upstairs at the monitor, to the stairs. Trouble, McGarvey decided, would come from the kitchen above, unless they actually meant to allow him to leave in peace with his wife now that he had Salman.

“What now?” Salman asked.

McGarvey pulled out his stiletto, reached up over his shoulder with his free hand, and cut the wires to the camera. Its red light went out.

“Won’t matter,” Salman said. “If they don’t want you to leave, they’ll just wait upstairs, and there’ll be no way of getting past them.”

“In that case we’ll find out how good a negotiator you really are,” McGarvey said. He prodded the prince in the back. “At the end.”

Two small bulbs in the ceiling provided the only illumination except for the light that filtered down from the open pantry hall door. Except for McGarvey’s and Salman’s footfalls on the bare concrete floor, there were no noises. No machinery running, no water in the pipes, no traffic outside, nothing. The house and the entire neighborhood could have been deserted.

When they reached the steel door to Katy’s cell, McGarvey tried the latch, but it was locked. He directed Salman to go another ten feet to the very end of the corridor. “Sit down and cover your head; I’m going to blow the door.”

“Very dramatic,” Salman said, languidly. But he shrugged and did as he was told.

When the prince was safely out of harm’s reach, McGarvey slid the cover away from the small viewing port in the door. Katy was still seated on the cot, her knees hunched up.

“Katy,” he called to her.

Her head snapped up and her eyes went wide. “Kirk? My God, is that you?”

“It’s me, sweetheart. Are you okay?”

Katy got up and hobbled to the door. She was obviously in a great deal of pain. The side of her face was swollen and bruised, and there was some blood on her pajama bottoms. “I’m afraid for the baby,” she cried. “Get me out of here, darling. Please.”

McGarvey looked at Salman, who was watching him with an inscrutable expression in his hooded eyes. It took every ounce of will in McGarvey’s body not to put one round into the man’s forehead. End it here and now, so that no matter what else happened the bastard would be dead.

But in less than forty-eight hours al-Quaida would hit us again.

Only Khalil knew exactly when and where the strike or strikes were going to take place.

He turned back to the viewing port. “Listen to me, Katy. I have to blow the door. I want you to turn the cot over on its side and get behind the mattress. When you’re set, I’ll do it.”

“Okay,” she said, and she turned away.

“I did not kidnap your wife,” Salman said. “I was at my embassy the entire time, and I can prove it.”

McGarvey stuffed his pistol in his belt. “Move and I will shoot you,” he said. He took out a Semtex packet, and quickly molded the small block of plastic explosive around the door lock and latch handle, while keeping a cautious eye on the prince.

The fuse was set for five seconds from the moment he cracked the acid cylinder.

He looked through the viewing port. Katy had the cot over on its side, and she was huddling down behind the mattress. “Are you ready?” he called to her.

She looked up over the edge of the cot. “Yes,” she shouted.

“Keep your head down,” McGarvey said. He cracked the fuse, then stepped a few feet away from the door, flattening himself against the wall and turning his face away.

The Semtex went off with an impressive bang, an eight-inch-wide piece of the door and its latch clattering off the corridor wall.

McGarvey pulled out his pistol, went back to Katy’s cell, and pulled the door open. “It’s okay now; you can come out,” he told her.

Salman raised his head. “May I get up?”

“Just a minute,” McGarvey told him. Katy was having trouble getting out from under the cot. “Stay put,” he warned Salman. He went into the cell, pulled the cot and mattress away, and helped his wife to her feet.

Katy came into his arms, shivering. He wanted nothing more than to hold her until she calmed down, but there was no time.

“We have to get out of here right now,” he told her. “Can you walk?”

She looked up into his eyes, and nodded. “Yes, I think so.”

“On your feet,” McGarvey called out to Salman as he helped Katy to the door.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Kahlil, the bastard who did this to you.”

At the door Katy looked at Salman as he got to his feet. Then she turned back to her husband. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“What do you mean, Katy?” McGarvey asked. “It’s him. The man from the cruise ship, the one who brought you here, did this—”

Katy was shaking her head. She looked at Salman again. “Darling, I recognize the man, of course. He’s Prince Salman. He could practically be Khalil’s twin. But he’s not the one who beat me up. The one from Alaska. I know it for a fact, because he was just here not more than an hour ago.”

At that moment McGarvey realized the enormity of the trap he had walked into, because of nothing more than his ego, pitted against that of another man.

SEVENTY

Across the street in the CIA’s Boynton Towers safe house, Otto Rencke was on the phone with Elizabeth and Todd, who were racing over from the Saudi Embassy. He had called them the moment Prince Salman had driven up in the Mercedes and gone inside.

None of them knew what it meant, except that there was a very real possibility that he and Khalil were not the same person after all.

“What else is going on over there?” Liz shouted.

Rencke was having trouble grasping how he could have been so wrong. The data he’d gathered had been circumstantial, but there’d been so much of it. There’d been a long-term consistency.

“Nothing,” he said. He’d watched the front of the house through the standard-issue, mil specs, Steiner binoculars he’d drawn from one of the Covert Ops guys, who’d known better than to ask the special projects director any questions.

Except for Prince Salman’s arrival, there had been no activity over there. The window curtains were drawn, and there was no sign of any security guards within the gated area, yet by now the Saudis inside knew that McGarvey had gotten in.

The silence combined with his confusion put him off-balance.

“Have you tried my dad’s cell phone?” Liz asked, and Rencke could hear the traffic noises in the background.

“The Saudis have the building shielded. Nothing will get through.”

“Are you sure he got inside?”

Rencke swung the binoculars to the narrow side street that ran to the rear of the house, but he was unable to see the rear entrance from here. “I’m pretty sure; otherwise he would have come back here by now.”

“Then he’s got some kind of plan to get back out. But he’s been in there too long. I think he needs help.”

“I think so too.”

“Just a minute,” Liz shouted. Todd was saying something to her.

Rencke had loitered at the end of the block, waiting for McGarvey to emerge from the apartment building, and then had come up to keep watch. If something went wrong across the street or if Rencke figured McGarvey was taking too long, he was going to call for help.

“Otto, I need to know if my dad still carries the cigarette lighter my mother gave to him,” Liz said.

Rencke lowered the binoculars. McGarvey had quit smoking several years ago, so he had no need for a flame. But maybe he’d kept Katy’s present. Rencke tried to remember if he’d seen Mac with it recently. Maybe taking it out of his pocket and looking at it. Playing with it. “I think so, Liz, but I’m not one hundred percent sure.”

“That’s good enough,” Liz said. “I didn’t think he’d toss it in a drawer someplace.” She said something away from the phone, her voice muffled, then she came back. “Do you have your laptop with you?”

“Sure.”

“Can you tap into whatever computer controls the electricity over there, just like you did with the embassy?”

“Yeah, no problem,” Rencke said. “Do you want me to shut them off?”

“Yes, but give us five minutes to get over there,” Liz said. “Then call the fire department; tell them there’s a major blaze and a lot of people are trapped inside and are going to burn to death.”

Rencke caught her idea immediately. She was Mac’s daughter, and she was getting good at seeing into her father’s tradecraft. They were going to send McGarvey a signal that they were here to back him up.

Unless it was already too late.

SEVENTY-ONE

Khalil stood at the head of the basement stairs, with the Heckler & Koch M8 compact NATO carbine he’d gotten from the security people upstairs in hand. A long silencer was screwed to the end of the barrel. Although he wanted to take the woman with him, there would be a certain symmetry to killing her and her husband together.

What was most vexing, however, was Prince Salman’s barging in. He was going to have to die here today, shot to death by McGarvey. Afterward it would be up to al-Kaseem’s people to clean up the mess.

There were other Prince Salmans in the royal family. Playboys who were willing to fund al-Quaida in the hope that when the Islamic revolution finally hit Saudi Arabia with full force, there would be a place for them in the new government.

As he’d done with Salman, Khalil would change his appearance and time his moves to match those of his new prince. The cover had worked for a very long time, and from the beginning he’d only hoped to have a few years, moving in Salman’s shadow. But he’d picked well, and Western intelligence agencies had inadvertently helped by concentrating on the prince. They had bought into the fiction, and yet had been unable to do much of anything because of Salman’s relationship with the last three White House administrations.

But it had to be done now, before al-Kaseem finally mustered the courage to do something foolish.

“McGarvey,” Khalil called down to the basement. “You must know by now that you have made a mistake. Would you like to make a deal?”

“Thank Allah you’ve finally come,” Prince Salman shouted. “He’s armed with a pistol and a knife.”

Khalil wondered how the fiction had held up for so long with such an idiot. Even more amazing was Salman’s friendship with the past three American presidents. But it was about to end. “Yes, I know, which is why I am making him this offer.”

“I’m listening,” McGarvey said.

“You are a very inventive, persistent man,” Khalil said. “Is Prince Salman unharmed?”

“Yes, so far.”

“Then release him, and I will allow him to leave the building,” Khalil said. “He is an innocent man, of no use to either of us. Although after Monaco he cannot be your friend.”

“He stays,” McGarvey said.

Khalil’s gorge rose. “He’s nothing more than a playboy.”

“At the very least he probably supplies you with money, and you’ve been masking your movements behind his for years. You wanted us to believe that he was a terrorist. The FBI will be interested in him.”

Khalil was momentarily taken aback. How could they know that? Unless Salman had talked about the Trinidad banking connection. All the careful planning was beginning to unravel because of one man. And they were so close to something that would be an even bigger blow to Americans than 9/11. “As you wish, keep him. But you must realize that there is no way out for you. You’re going to die down there.”

“Sorry, pal, but you’ve got it wrong,” McGarvey called from the basement, his voice maddeningly calm. “You’re going to die for what you did in Alaska, and for what you did to my wife down here. And your death won’t be a pleasant one.”

Khalil’s nerves were jumping all over the place. He wanted to open up with the M8 and spray the corridor. Maybe he would get lucky and at least hit one of them with shrapnel. But suddenly a calmness descended upon him like a soothing mist. Al-Kaseem was wrong. McGarvey had no plan. He’d just bulled his way into the building with only one thought in his head: to rescue his wife.

“Just you and me, then,” he said. “You can keep Salman or kill him, whatever you want to do. But at least let your wife leave. I suspect she needs medical attention.”

McGarvey’s wife said something. Although Khalil couldn’t make out the words, he could detect the urgency in her voice.

“You’d have to kill her,” McGarvey said. “At this point you don’t have any choice. She’s seen your face.”

“I give you my word as a Saudi prince that I will allow her to leave this place unharmed—”

McGarvey laughed. “Why don’t you come down here where I can see you? Then we’ll let both of them go.”

“You would shoot me the moment I reached the bottom of the stairs.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” McGarvey said. “I give you my word as an American gentlemen.”

Khalil shivered in anticipation. The killing was going to be very good.

Khalil reached into his pocket for one of the stun grenades he’d gotten from the Security section’s armory, when al-Kaseem hurried down the corridor from the front hall, a determined look on his face. “We heard an explosion, but the monitor is out so we couldn’t see a thing.”

“He’s rescued his wife,” Khalil said. “From her cell. But they won’t get out of the basement alive. And neither will the prince. Now leave me to finish the job.”

“I talked to the deputy ambassador on his cell phone and outlined what was going on over here,” al-Kaseem said.

Khalil smiled inwardly, though he was irritated. He’d always considered al-Kaseem to be at least competent. But the man was buckling under the pressure. Making stupid mistakes. “Was that wise? Talking on an unencrypted line?”

“I didn’t have to go into detail,” al-Kaseem said. “He understands the situation that you have put us in. We won’t participate in another 9/11. The retributions will be much worse.”

“I agree,” Khalil said. “This will be much worse than 9/11. So it’s up to us to clean up this particular mess, no matter whose fault it is.”

“He’s going to speak with Crown Prince Abdullah—”

“Abdullah will not be in for his call. Nor will Prince Bandar.” Khalil was tiring of the arguments. “Nuaimi is to be the scapegoat. His career is dead. And when he returns to Riyadh in the aftermath of the attacks, he will probably be shot. Take care that you do not join him.”

“First you need to get out of this building, and then out of Washington,” al-Kaseem said, angrily. “Take care that I don’t withdraw my support. You would find that your escape would be much more difficult without me.”

Khalil looked at him as a snake might look at a mouse. “Rashid, are you threatening me?”

“I’m trying to talk some sense into you.”

“Leave me to attend to this business, and I will soon be gone.”

“Perhaps I’ll shoot you myself and turn your body and the letters in my safe over to the FBI,” al-Kaseem said. “I could end this madness.”

“Yes, you could,” Khalil said. He casually raised his carbine, thumbed the safety selector to semiautomatic, and squeezed off two rounds, the first catching the intelligence officer in his neck, destroying his windpipe, and the second entering beneath his chin, the round spiraling up into his brain and exiting the back of his head in a spray of blood and tissue.

He looked up at the camera. “I am in charge for now,” he said in Arabic. “Leave me alone and none of you need die.”

He turned back to the stairway. “Listen to me, Mr. McGarvey. It is just us now. There will be no further interference. I’m giving you one last chance to send your wife and Salman out of there. Otherwise all three of you will die.”

Another sharp explosion came from the corridor below.

“McGarvey!” Khalil shouted. He pulled one of the British flash-bang grenades out of his pocket, yanked the pin, and tossed it down the stairs.

SEVENTY-TWO

Rencke’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he hacked his way into the Potomac Electric Power Company’s mainframe computer on Pennsylvania Avenue. The only way in which to shut off an individual building’s electricity was to physically pull the plug at the meter. With the computer the entire block would have to go down, which would include power to the Boynton Towers and its elevators.

The system controlling the area around the Saudi Embassy, the Watergate Hotel, and the Kennedy Center had been modernized, but the system for most of Georgetown was still of the old style. So although he got in with ease, it took him several minutes to figure out the antiquated system.

He was frustrated with himself not only because of the precious minutes he was wasting chasing after old computer codes, but because he had been so terribly wrong about Khalil and Salman. “Bad, bad, bad dog,” he muttered. He wished his wife were here. She would understand his frustration, and help him through it.

The apartment door burst open, and he heard Liz and Todd racing down the hall, but he was almost there with the right computer line so he didn’t look up.

Suddenly Liz was over his shoulder. “Did you shut it off?” she demanded, out of breath.

Todd grabbed the binoculars and went to the window.

“I’m on it,” Rencke told her.

“Did you call the fire department?”

“Not until I find the right line—” Rencke said. Then it came up: the cross-reference that isolated Scott Place off Thirty-second “I got it. Call them.”

Elizabeth dialed 911. “How long will it take?” she asked Rencke.

“I don’t know. Thirty seconds, maybe longer.”

“Do it,” Liz said. “I want to report a fire,” she told the emergency operator.

Rencke highlighted the line and hit Enter. Soon power to the entire block would shut down; then it would be up to Mac.

“It’s the Middle East Center for Advanced Studies,” Elizabeth said. “Just off Thirty-second Street in Georgetown. Scott Place.” She went over to the window. “Anything yet?” she asked her husband.

“Nothing,” Todd said.

“There’s not much smoke, but there are a lot of people who might be trapped inside, so hurry,” she told the operator. She broke the connection and speed-dialed another number. “Call our guys at the embassy and get them over here,” she told Rencke. “I’m calling the Bureau. And get DC Metro too.”

“I’m on it,” Rencke said. He speed-dialed The Watch, which was the operations center over at Langley. When the shit started hitting the fan, they would need all the help they could get.

And all the witnesses.

SEVENTY-THREE

There were no bottles left in Yarnell’s old wine cellar, but the racks that had held several thousand different vintages in a climate-controlled environment were still in rows and columns like shelves in a library. The four-inch-thick, solid oak door had held up well under the small Semtex charge, but the modern electronic lock had not.

McGarvey’s ears were still ringing from what he figured was a flash-bang grenade that had gone off about halfway up the corridor. He’d been last through the door into the old wine cellar behind Katy and the prince, so he had taken the brunt of the blast. But for the moment they were safe here.

“What’s he trying to do?” Salman demanded, shrilly. “Kill us all?” He wasn’t so arrogant now.

“That’s exactly what he means to do,” McGarvey said. Katy had stumbled when he shoved her through the open door, and he had to help her to her feet. She was shaky on her legs, and she held her gut with one hand while steadying herself against her husband with the other.

“If you mean to get us out of here, darling, right now would be as good a time as any,” she said.

McGarvey was frightened. “Is it the baby?”

She looked up at him, her eyes round and bright in the dim light from the corridor. She appeared frail and vulnerable. She nodded. “Maybe,” she said. “He hit me in the stomach, and I was bleeding for a while.”

For a second he was almost as afraid for his own sanity as he was for Katy and the baby. Afraid that he would do something in a stupid rage that would get them all killed. But he’d never lost his head before, and it wasn’t about to happen now. This was no longer only about Khalil.

He and Katy were on one side of the open door, while Salman was crouched in the darkness on the other side. “You stupid American bastard,” the prince said, his voice low, menacing. He looked like a wild animal ready to spring. “You brought this down on yourself. You all did.” He took a quick look out into the corridor.

“Go out there and he’ll kill you,” McGarvey warned.

“It’s never been personal. But with you it’s different. Ever since you disgraced Osama and blasphemed the name of Allah.”

“Al-Quaida wants to get rid of your government, and yet you people help them,” McGarvey said.

“You don’t get it,” Salman practically shouted. “The Arabian Peninsula is for Arabians. Not infidels.”

“Then tell us to leave.”

“Not until the oil is gone,” Khalil shouted from the end of the corridor.

McGarvey grabbed Katy’s arm and fell back with her, away from the doorway, shielding her with his body an instant before Khalil sprayed the corridor with automatic weapon fire. Bullets slammed through the empty wine racks, ricocheting off the concrete walls, fragments flying everywhere.

McGarvey was hit low in the left shoulder. He grunted with the shock of impact.

“Kirk, my God, you’re hit,” Katy cried.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, urgently. He shoved her away and went to the doorway, where he stuck his gun around the corner and fired six shots into the corridor before he pulled back. He ejected the spent magazine, slapped another in its place, and cycled the slide.

Salman was watching him, wide-eyed.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Khalil taunted. He fired a second short burst, but then the lights went out, plunging them into nearly complete darkness.

The basement was utterly silent for just a moment, until something moved across from McGarvey. It was Salman.

“It’s me,” he shouted. “I’m coming out. Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

“Don’t do it,” McGarvey shouted, but it was too late. The light was too dim to see anything, but he heard the prince bolting out the door and into the corridor.

Khalil let him get only a few steps outside the wine cellar before he fired. Salman’s body was flung back into the wine cellar, crashing into one of the wine racks.

McGarvey immediately stuck his gun around the door frame and fired four shots as fast as he could pull them off. He thought he heard a muffled cry of pain, but he couldn’t be sure.

“One down, two to go.” Khalil’s voice came out of the darkness. “Unless, of course, you want to send your wife out. It’ll just be you and me. I promise I won’t hurt her — again.”

McGarvey figured that the terrorist was in one of the rooms off the corridor, out of the line of fire. “Turn the lights back on, and I’ll send her out,” he called.

Katy whimpered something, but he reached back with his free hand and touched her cheek. She quieted immediately.

“I didn’t turn the lights—” Khalil cut himself off in midsentence. He had made a mistake.

McGarvey seized on it immediately. Otto was across the street. He had sent a message. Liz was probably over there too. She would have been the one to figure out his plan of escape, which depended for its success on Darby Yarnell’s paranoia about his wine collection. The man had installed not only climate-control equipment down here, but he had also installed an alarm system.

And a fire suppression system. Sprinklers.

McGarvey thought he heard a siren very faintly, but it was there. If the fire department had already been called, they wouldn’t come inside unless an alarm in the building went off.

He reached around the door frame, fired off a couple of shots, then grabbed Katy and hauled her farther away from the door.

Khalil did not return the fire.

McGarvey took out his cigarette lighter, lit the flame, and held it up toward the ceiling, providing a small circle of light.

Katy was alarmed. “What are you doing?” she demanded. Her eyes darted to the doorway. “He can see us.”

McGarvey found one of the sprinkler heads. He moved over to it and held the lighter’s flame directly beneath the heat sensor. “The fire department is outside. I’m giving them a reason to break in and rescue us.”

Something metallic clattered on the concrete floor just outside the doorway and rolled into the wine cellar at the same moment the sprinkler system went off, spraying water everywhere.

McGarvey extinguished his lighter and tossed it aside. In one smooth motion he gathered his wife and bodily propelled her farther into the room, putting two solid-oak wine-storage racks between them and the doorway before he shoved her to the floor and laid on top of her.

He knew he had hurt her, but before she had a chance to cry out, the grenade that Khalil had tossed down the corridor went off with a tremendous bang, sending thousands of coil-spring fragments flying in a thirty-foot radius.

McGarvey was hit in his legs and in the soles of his feet, the razor-sharp pieces of wire slicing easily through the leather of his shoes.

He rolled off Katy and painfully scrambled up on one knee, his pistol trained in the general direction of the open door, though in the darkness and with the noise of spraying water it would be nearly impossible to hear or see anything.

Suddenly the building’s battery-backup fire-alarm system came on with a deafening shriek, and a red emergency lantern lit up at the end of corridor.

“Stay here; help is coming,” McGarvey told his wife.

Kathleen grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t leave me,” she cried, in desperation.

“You’ll be okay here for now,” he told her. “But I can’t let him escape again.”

“It doesn’t matter what he did to me—”

“He knows where the terrorists are going to hit us,” McGarvey tried to explain. “I have to get to him before it’s too late.” He looked into his wife’s eyes, willing her to understand what he had to do. “This is our last chance, Katy.”

She was struggling with herself; McGarvey could see it in her face. But she finally released his sleeve and nodded uncertainly. “Go. Do it,” she said. “Stop him once and for all.”

McGarvey brushed a kiss on her cheek, then got up. He fell to his knees before he took one step, the sharp pain from the fragments embedded in his feet impossible to bear.

“Kirk,” Katy cried.

Not this. Not now. He wasn’t going to let the bastard get away.

With Kathleen clutching at him, he laid his pistol down and tore off his shredded shoes and socks. The bottoms of his feet looked like hamburgerpatty pincushions, with a dozen or more wire fragments sticking out. Blood splattered everywhere under the spray from the sprinkler head just above them.

Keeping one eye on the doorway lest Khalil was ignoring the fire alarm and would press his attack, McGarvey started pulling bits of wire out of his feet. Katy, seeing what he was doing, helped him, her tears mingling with the sprinkler water.

It took less than a minute before he picked up his gun and got back to his feet with Katy’s help. The pain was bad, but it was bearable.

“No matter what happens, stay here. Hide somewhere until either I come for you or someone from the fire rescue team gets down here. They’ll be searching the building.”

“Oh, God,” Katy said. Blood was everywhere around McGarvey’s chewed-up feet. “Can you walk?”

He gave her a thin smile and nodded. “It looks worse than it is,” he told her. “Now find someplace to hide.”

He turned and headed for the corridor door, painfully crawling over the shattered remains of several wine racks that the grenade had destroyed.

Nothing on the face of the earth would stop him this time. Khalil was going to die.

SEVENTY-FOUR

Khalil reached the front stair hall in a black rage.

He’d had absolutely no idea that McGarvey would come up with such a move. Water flew everywhere, soaking carpets and paintings. Fifteen or twenty security analysts, translators, and communications people were scrambling down the stairs and across the hall to the front door to get away from a nonexistent fire.

Fools. They were like sheep being led to the slaughter.

For just a second he was stopped in his tracks. Unless McGarvey had been killed or seriously hurt in the blast, he would have been coming up from the basement when he realized that the attack had been abandoned. He was a resourceful man, for whom Khalil had finally developed a healthy respect.

There was a great deal of commotion outside the front gate. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances jammed the street. A crowd was already gathering. It would be the same in the back.

It suddenly struck Khalil that the fire department had been called before McGarvey had set off the sprinkler system. By a CIA team somewhere nearby. The same team that had cut the electricity to the building as a signal to McGarvey.

He had to admire the ingenuity. But the letters to the families of the four martyrs had to be saved, or destroyed, at all costs.

Which left him two problems: getting into al-Kaseem’s safe, and then making his escape before McGarvey caught up with him.

The first staffers had reached the front gate and opened it, allowing the firefighters into the compound. At least two civilians, one of them a woman, were right there with them.

They were CIA; there was little doubt in Khalil’s mind. But he was out of time now.

Khalil glanced over his shoulder to make sure that McGarvey wasn’t there, then sprinted across the stair hall and pushed past the last few of al-Kaseem’s staffers coming down the stairs.

No one tried to stop Khalil as he raced to the head of the stairs and rushed down the corridor to al-Kaseem’s office at the rear of the building. The door was open, and two security officers were hastily shredding documents from the safe.

They looked up when Khalil appeared in the doorway. One of them reached for his pistol, but before he could get it out of his shoulder holster, Khalil raised the M8 and fired two shots, both hitting the man in the chest and knocking him back from the shredder, where he collapsed in a bloody heap.

The other security officer stood clear of the safe and spread his hands away from his sides. The sprinkler head in this room was not working. In a fire, Saudi intelligence wanted any stray documents left out — to be burned up.

“We don’t have much time before the American authorities reach this room,” he told Khalil, with some urgency. “I must be allowed to finish—”

“I gave Rashid four envelopes to keep in his safe. Have they been destroyed yet?” There were a great many people in the stair hall downstairs.

The security officer glanced at the desk. The four thick manila envelopes — each containing a death letter, a personal note from bin Laden himself, and fifty thousand in U.S. hundred-dollar bills — were in a neat stack. Out in the open. The bastard had not safeguarded them. Al-Kaseem’s intention all along was to hinder the operation, not help it.

Khalil’s rage spiked. He fired four shots into the security officer’s chest, driving the man against the wall.

SEVENTY-FIVE

McGarvey cautiously peered around the door frame into the pantry hall, his pistol at the ready. Water cascaded down the stairs into the basement, and even through the din of the fire alarm he could hear a commotion at the front of the house. The fire department had arrived.

A body of a man was sprawled on its side in the corner. He had been shot under his chin, the back of his head half blown away. McGarvey had no idea who it was, but he was pretty sure who had killed him.

The man had gotten in Khalil’s way and had lost his life for the mistake. It was possible that the terrorist had slipped out of the building and in the confusion had made his escape. But McGarvey doubted he’d had the time. And Liz and Otto would have been watching for just that. Everyone who was evacuated from the building would be held until they could be identified.

Elizabeth came down the corridor in a dead run, her gun drawn. She spotted her father through the spray, and immediately brought her pistol up as she pulled up short and dropped into a shooter’s stance.

“It’s me,” McGarvey shouted.

For a second she held her position, covering the pantry hall, but then she eased up, raising her pistol. “Daddy?” she called.

McGarvey came up the last step into the hall and showed himself. “Did Todd come with you?” He was running out of time if he wanted to catch Kahlil one-on-one. He had to hurry.

Elizabeth’s shoulders sagged in relief. She said something into her lapel mike, but then she saw that he was wounded, and she gave a little cry and went to him. “You’re hurt.”

“Never mind that,” McGarvey said. “Is Todd with you?”

“Yes, he’s in the front hall making sure all the Saudis are getting out. Otto told us to watch for Salman or anyone who looked like him. But we haven’t seen him.” She glanced at the body. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know, but Khalil probably killed the poor bastard, and I think there’s a good chance he’s still in the building somewhere,” McGarvey said. “I want the fire department out of here right now. Tell them it was a false alarm, anything, but no one else is to get out of here.”

“We set up a perimeter. The Bureau and some of our people are on it,” Elizabeth said. “What about Mother?” she demanded, and McGarvey could see the fear in her eyes as she girded herself for bad news.

“She’s downstairs in the room at the end of the hall. As soon as you get the building secured, I want you to get her out.” His jaw tightened thinking of Katy huddled in a corner in the dark. But he didn’t want her moved until he was sure it was safe to do so. Khalil could spring up around any corner.

“Is she okay?”

“He beat her up,” McGarvey said, tight-lipped. “She needs to get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

“The dirty bastard,” Elizabeth said. “She would have told him that she was pregnant. But it didn’t make any difference.”

Looking into his daughter’s angry eyes, he realized that this had nothing to do with revenge. Or it should not. It would give him a great deal of pleasure to kill the terrorist for what he had done in Alaska and here, and for all the 9/ 11s in the past and yet to come.

McGarvey wanted to see the expression on the man’s face when he knew that he was dying. Would he be defiant, angry, frightened, remorseful?

But Khalil had to be captured alive if at all possible, no matter how badly McGarvey wanted to kill him, because he was the key to stopping al-Quaida’s attack in less than forty-eight hours.

McGarvey touched his daughter’s cheek in the downpour. “Get Todd on it, and then get your mother out of here. I won’t be much longer,” he told her.

“Be careful, Daddy,” Elizabeth said.

At that moment the sprinkler system shut down, followed by the fire alarm. In the sudden silence, McGarvey started for the stair hall, all of his senses alert for Khalil’s presence. Behind him, Elizabeth was urgently issuing orders to her husband to clear the building, and then she went down into the basement.

Soon there would be nobody left except him and Kahlil.

It was exactly what he wanted.

Upstairs, Khalil came to the door as the water stopped and the fire alarm was silenced. Two firemen had just reached the head of the stairs, and he pulled back.

Killing them would be meaningless, though Kahlil had to admit to himself that he wanted to lash out at this moment, hurt someone, damage their confidence by his savagery. Firemen had been the heroes of 9/11. There would be a certain symmetry to destroying these two men.

He had his letters. He would leave now, evacuated with the others. Once outside he could slip away.

But he wanted McGarvey, which meant he would have to remain in the building a little longer, no matter how dangerous for him it would be.

But suddenly he knew the solution, as simple as it was satisfying.

Khalil leaned the M8 up against the wall, took out his stiletto, and holding it out of sight behind his leg, stepped out into the corridor. The two firemen were heading back to the stairs. “Don’t go,” he called to them. He allowed a note of desperation in his voice.

They turned, startled. He couldn’t see their faces behind their masks, which was exactly how he wanted it.

“Get out of there,” one of them said, gesturing for Khalil to come. “The building’s being evacuated.”

“I can’t,” Khalil said softly, as if he were afraid. “My friends—” He looked back in al-Kaseem’s office. “They’re hurt. I need help. Please.”

The firemen hurried back, and Khalil stepped aside to let them enter the office.

The first one pulled up short when he saw the bodies of the two security officers and all the blood. Khalil swiveled into the second fireman, and slipped the stiletto under the lip of his helmet, driving it into the base of the man’s skull, killing him instantly.

As the fireman collapsed, Khalil withdrew his stiletto and turned to the first man, who had spun on his heel and was pawing at the microphone on his shoulder. But he was too late. Khalil yanked the fireman’s air mask off his face, and drove the stiletto up under his chin, angling it inward, burying it in his brain.

The fireman reared back in horror, a terrible gagging noise at the back of his throat, but then his eyes slowly went blank, and he sank to the floor as if he had been deflated.

For just a moment Khalil savored the man’s death. It was a pleasure to watch. Almost sexual.

It was the ultimate expression of intimacy between two men, between the killer and his victim, and Khalil never wanted to rush the climax.

But this time had to be different if he was going to escape.

He bent over the second fireman and fumbled with the straps holding the compressed-air cylinder on the man’s body. But the buckles had become tangled, so he sliced the harness away and pulled the tank off.

The house had become silent again, though as he hurriedly removed the fireman’s helmet, then his coat, boots, and fire trousers, he could hear a great deal of commotion outside — more sirens, police radios, engines on the ladder trucks, and the many voices of the crowd that had gathered.

In the confusion he would simply be another fireman whom no one would notice. His only regret was his unfinished business with McGarvey and the man’s wife. She was fascinating, a woman unlike any other he’d ever met. He would have enjoyed teaching her humility, and especially watching her eyes as her life faded.

Khalil pulled on the fireman’s trousers and boots, then stuffed the four manila envelopes into the bib of the coveralls. He donned the heavy yellow coat, but not the gloves. He wanted his hands free in case there was to be a fight.

In a rush now, anxious to be away, he took the seventeen-round Glock from one of the dead security officers, checked to make sure the magazine was full, then stuffed it in his coat pocket.

He cut the hose from the tank, strapped the air mask on his face, then put on the helmet. There was no way now that anyone would recognize him. He pocketed the stiletto.

And who could say for certain what events would conspire to bring McGarvey and him together one last time? It was a day to look forward to.

McGarvey reached the head of the stairs as a fireman came out of a doorway at the end of the corridor.

His wounds and loss of blood had sapped his strength more than he realized, and he was winded from just coming up the stairs. There was a great deal of activity outside on the street. Todd and Otto were out there, watching for someone to come out of the building. Him or Khalil.

But he had not counted on a fireman still being here. He concealed the pistol behind his leg. “Is there anyone else up here on this floor?”

“No,” the fireman said, advancing down the corridor. “And you don’t belong here. Get out.” His voice was oddly strangled.

Something was wrong. Out of place. But it seemed as if a fog was starting to engulf McGarvey’s brain. He shook his head. The approaching fireman seemed to waver out of focus.

“You’re hurt,” the man said. His voice was distant. Yet it was somehow familiar.

“Someone might still be in the building,” McGarvey argued. The words were thick in his mouth. “The third floor. Has anyone checked up there?”

The fireman spotted the pistol in McGarvey’s hand. He stopped a couple of yards away. “Who is it that you think you’re going to shoot?”

“Is there anyone on the third floor?” McGarvey demanded. Every second spent here was a second longer for Khalil to make his escape. But it wasn’t going to happen this time. Not like in Alaska. Not after what he’d done to Katy. The terrorist had laid his hands on her. He had hurt her. Inflicted pain on her. Frightened her.

Khalil would pay for his crimes on this day.

The fireman glanced down at the empty stair hall. His radio came to life. “Donnelly, Lee, where are you guys?” He turned back to McGarvey and hesitated for a long moment.

There was something about the man that McGarvey couldn’t put a finger on. A familiarity that was just out of his grasp in the fog. Something else. There was something wrong. He should know what it was.

The fireman put his right hand in his coat pocket, but then hesitated. He shook his head. “I’m not going to deal with an armed man,” he said. “Stay and search the whole building if you must.” He brushed past and started down the stairs.

McGarvey turned to watch the retreating figure. The name stenciled on the back of the fireman’s coat was Donnelly. But he hadn’t answered the radio call. He wasn’t wearing gloves. And although he was wearing a breathing mask, he was not carrying an air tank, and the hose dangled over his shoulder.

The fireman stopped halfway down the stairs, and looked back up.

McGarvey started to raise his pistol, his arm impossibly heavy. “Khalil,” he said.

Khalil pulled a bloody stiletto out of his pocket, and in one smooth powerful motion threw it underhanded.

The razor-sharp blade sliced into McGarvey’s right shoulder just below his collarbone, the pain immediate and intense. His entire right side went numb, and as he fell back, a tremendous wave of nausea overcoming him, he dropped his pistol.

Not like this, the single thought crystallized in his brain.

Khalil reached in the same pocket and was pulling out a pistol, when McGarvey yanked the stiletto out of his shoulder and launched himself down on top of the terrorist.

He hit Khalil in the chest, and together they crashed down the stairs into the hall, the terrorist’s gun going off with a huge boom next to McGarvey’s ear.

A great many people were right outside. Someone was shouting something, and McGarvey thought it might be Liz’s voice, but he was focused on Khalil, who had lost his air mask.

McGarvey was looking directly into the killer’s black eyes, bottomless, cold, indifferent, completely without emotion even now.

Blood pumped from the wound in his shoulder, and McGarvey knew that he would not remain conscious much longer.

There was something wrong with Khalil’s left arm, but he grabbed McGarvey by the throat with his right hand, and his powerful fingers began to clamp down.

“Bastard!” The single thought crossed McGarvey’s brain as his world started to go dim. With the last of his strength he raised the bloody stiletto to Khalil’s face, and before the terrorist could deflect the blade, he drove it to the hilt into the man’s right eye.

The terrorist’s body convulsed once, and then lay still, the light going out of his other eye.

A great tiredness overcame McGarvey, and he let himself go with it, only vaguely aware that his daughter and wife were at his side, calling his name, until his world went dark.

THE JIHAD

The morning was chilly, with thick dew on the grass as Muhamed Abdallah got out of the dark blue Toyota SUV two blocks from Rocky Mountain High School. Workday traffic was normal for this hour. No one was armed, none of the storefronts in the city were boarded up, there were no bars on windows, nor were there police or soldiers stationed at the intersections.

The laxity was nothing sort of amazing to him. But after today no one would ever ignore the fatwahs of Osama bin Laden again.

Ever since he’d gotten word, a gentle peace had come over him, descending like the veils of Muhammad’s wives. It was a blasphemous thought, one that he did not share with his hosts Seyoum and Mustafa, but it was comforting.

Paradise will soon be mine. Even now my black-eyed wife awaits me.

“Are you okay?” Seyoum asked, respectfully, through the open passenger window.

Muhamed opened his eyes to him and to Mustafa sitting behind the wheel, and his heart suddenly filled with love for them. Rejoice, 0 my brothers, for I go first to heaven to prepare the way. He nodded, but he could not trust himself to speak. All his spit had dried up.

“Then you know the way? It is only two blocks—”

Muhamed turned and walked off. He would never see his two brothers on earth again, but that did not matter. He smiled. He was finally on his jihad, and no power on earth could stay his hand.

Insha’allah.

I profess that there is no God but the One God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

Rising before dawn this morning, Muhamed had bathed and had taken great care with his shaving. Like many young Muslim men, he preferred to maintain a four- or five-day growth; it was a matter of style. But not here. High school students in the U.S. were generally clean-shaven.

He began taping the twenty kilos of plastic explosives to his naked body at 5 A.M., molding the puttylike material first to his legs, then around his abdomen and his chest, even his back, though that had been extremely awkward to do. Finally he’d taped long slender strips of the Semtex to his arms from a few centimeters above his wrists to his shoulders.

He left his feet, his knees, and his elbows free so he would be able to walk and gesture normally, but Semtex was taped to every other square centimeter of his body that would be covered by his jeans and LA Lakers sweatshirt.

In the mirror he looked like some otherworldly monster whose hide seemed to be made of large gray scales.

Finished by 7 A.M., he took great care to connect the electrical wires that would send a current to the firing pins in each block of Semtex. When he got dressed, the wires would lead from a hole in his jeans pocket to the detonator that had been fashioned from a cell phone.

At the right moment, after he was inside the school, perhaps in the cafeteria or in the central corridor between class periods, he would reach in his pocket and press any key.

He would wait then, long enough for a brief prayer, and then press any second key, which would send the current.

“You will feel no pain,” his recruiter in Nablus had promised him, although no suicide bomber had ever returned to give witness to the claim. “One moment you will be of this earth, and in the next you will be in Paradise.”

“Insha’allah,” Muhamed whispered, lost in his thoughts as he turned the corner onto Rocky Mountain Avenue, one block from the school.

The morning was suddenly deathly still. Where before the traffic flowed along Swallow, nothing moved here.

Muhamed pulled up short, realizing that something was wrong. He looked around. There was no traffic. No trucks or cars on the street. Not one person on the sidewalks. No kids in front of the school. No school buses.

He was alone, and suddenly conscious of how difficult it was to walk with twenty kilos of Semtex strapped to his body.

Even the McDonald’s across the street seemed to be deserted. At this time of day the drive-in lane should have been filled.

It came to him all at once that he had failed.

A pair of police cars appeared at the end of the street and stopped in the middle of the intersection. Their lights were flashing but there were no sirens.

Muhamed stepped back and turned around. Police cars, lights flashing, were blocking the way he had come.

The Qur’an says that for every people there is a messenger. Muhamed knew the words well. His messenger had come for him, but the issue between them could not be justly determined now. Somehow the authorities had found out he was coming here.

He put his hand in his right pocket and pressed a key on the cell phone, and then held his breath, waiting for bullets to slam into his body.

No shots were fired.

He turned back in time to see at least a dozen sharpshooters suddenly appear on the high school’s roof. They were dressed in the same kind of camos that the Israeli soldiers wore when they came into the camps on hit-and-run operations.

It came to him that they had also failed, and he breathed a little easier. If their mission was to stop him from detonating his bomb, they were too late. His finger was on the key. Even if they shot him, he would press it as his life left his body.

None of the infidels would be hurt. But Osama’s message that America still was not safe, that al-Quaida and its brave mujahideen and brave Muslims everywhere were willing to give their lives for the cause of justice, would be made perfectly clear.

A heavily armored bomb-disposal truck lumbered from behind the school and headed across the parking lot toward him, stopping about fifty meters away.

Muhamed was no longer frightened. Even without success he knew that his path to Paradise was assured, for wasn’t he promised that every son or daughter of the one true faith who lost their lives in the jihad were of the pure of spirit?

“Lay face down on the street,” an amplified voice boomed from a speaker on the bomb disposal unit.

Muhamed took a step forward, surprised at how steady his legs had become.

“Thou must lie face down on the street.” The order came again, but this time it was in Arabic.

Muhamed took another step forward.

One of the sharpshooters on the roof rose up.

Muhamed closed his eyes. He could see his mother’s precious, loving face. Scolding him sometimes, but always with love.

“Allah O Akbar,” he whispered, God is great, and he pressed the key.