The Fourth Horseman

TWELVE

The Gulf water one hundred yards off Florida’s west coast was in the mid-eighties, and Kirk McGarvey, just finishing his five-mile swim for the day, was warmed up — his body heat keeping just ahead of the drag from cooler water. Sometimes like this in the mornings just after dawn, he felt that he could swim day and night forever. Across the Gulf to the Bay of Campeche if he wanted to.

He was in his early fifties with the solid build of an athlete, the stamina of a man much younger and the grace of a world-class fencer, which in fact he had once been. He was not an overly handsome man, but a certain type of woman found him very good looking because of his almost always calm demeanor even under the most trying of circumstances. When McGarvey — Mac to his friends — showed up you just knew that everything would turn out fine. It was an aura that he radiated.

After his air force days with the Office of Special Investigations, he’d been snapped up by the CIA, where at the agency’s training facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, he had gone through the field operator’s course with the highest marks ever recorded. He’d been a natural for special operations from the beginning. And he’d been groomed to think on his feet, which came naturally to him, and to kill with a variety of weapons, including sniper rifles, pistols, knives, garrotes, and if the need arose, with his hands.

A sailboat heading south toward the Keys was low on the horizon, just a couple of miles out, and McGarvey considered taking out his own forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, docked behind his house on Casey Key, about seventy miles south of Tampa. Maybe down to the Dry Tortugas, then ride the Gulf Stream up to the Bahamas, maybe spend a month or so before the hurricane season started in earnest.

It was a trip that he and his wife, Katy, had taken several times since moving down here from the Washington, DC, area. But she was gone now, assassinated with an IED meant for him. They’d been attending the funeral at Arlington for their son-in-law, Todd, a CIA officer killed in the line of duty. Mac was riding in a separate limousine from Katy and their daughter, Elizabeth, when theirs in front ran over the powerful explosive before his eyes. There’d been little or nothing left of the car, and almost nothing of Katy, Liz and their driver.

Since then he’d taken a few freelance assignments for the Company, but his heart had never really been in them, let alone the day-to-day business of enjoying life as he had before their deaths.

Nor did he think now that he was ready to solo his boat to places where people — couples — would be enjoying themselves. Laughing, playing, making love.

He would head back to his house just across the road from the beach, take a shower, have a little breakfast and then head up to his office in the philosophy department at the University of South Florida’s New College campus in Sarasota. He taught Voltaire during the fall and spring semesters to a bunch of gifted kids, who were so liberal in their views that sometimes it was all he could do to stop himself from smiling indulgently at them. But most of them were seriously bright, and they had the habit of asking some seriously difficult questions. He loved the challenge.

But before September rolled around he needed to put some work into the book he was in the middle of writing, about Voltaire’s influence not only on Western thought since the eighteenth century, but especially on the United States’ fledgling democracy. It would be a hard sell to the kids, but he’d had a personal connection with the Frenchman’s philosophy and its direct effect on the U.S., starting with the Civil War.

He was about to start back toward the beach when he glanced again at the southbound sailboat in time to spot a speedboat heading from the north almost directly toward him. It wasn’t uncommon to see boats like that coming so close to shore, especially along Casey Key, where a lot of millionaires maintained seasonal homes. Tourists who wanted to get a glimpse of someone famous sometimes came up on the beach and walked around.

McGarvey angled back toward the shore and put real effort into his swimming, his progress aided by an incoming tide and a light westerly breeze. A woman standing on the beach began waving at him. She looked vaguely familiar, but the distance was too great for him to make out more than the fact that she was a woman and that she was gesturing.

Two minutes later he could feel the buzz of the outboard motors as well as hear their high-pitched drone — two of them, he thought, maybe two-fifty or three-hundred horsepower each — capable of pushing a boat with the right hull shape to speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour.

He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the center-console boat just a dozen yards away and heading directly for him.

The water here was less than ten feet deep, and he immediately dove for the bottom, jackknifing with a powerful kick.

A couple of seconds later the boat passed over him, its propellers roiling the water and setting up a double-helix current that sent him tumbling up and then downward again, totally out of control, his shoulder slamming into the soft sand of the bottom.

Kicking off he reached the surface in time to see the speedboat making a tight turn back toward him, one man at the helm, another hanging on to a side rail on the console. But making such a tight turn was a mistake. It had cost them almost all of their speed for the sake of the distance the wide turn had taken.

He maintained his position low in the water, bobbing up and down with the residual wake.

The second man aboard pointed toward him, and the guy at the wheel gunned the engines. But they were too close for the boat to come back up on plane and gain any real speed.

As the boat reached McGarvey, its bow was high, impairing the helmsman’s sight line straight ahead.

At the last possible moment, McGarvey kicked to the right like a matador stepping aside to let the charging bull pass, allowing the bow of the boat to just brush his shoulder.

He hooked his left arm over the gunwale of the boat, just ahead of its stern, and allowed the building momentum to yank him out of the water and deposit him just aft of the transom.

Both men were dark-skinned, and Mac got the immediate impression that they were Middle Easterners — Afghanis, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis — before the lookout twisted around, a big Glock 17 in his hand.

McGarvey lurched forward and to the left, slamming his bulk into the back of the helmsman just as the lookout fired a shot that went wild.

The helmsman, shoved off balance, held on to the wheel so he wouldn’t fall. The boat turned sharply to the left and headed back toward the shore.

It was what McGarvey had expected would happen and he’d braced himself against the rail.

The lookout fired again, the second shot going wide, and in an instant McGarvey was on him, snatching the pistol out of his hand and tossing it overboard. He butted the man in the face with his forehead, then pulled him forward and down, smashing a knee in the guy’s jaw.

Shoving the man aside, Mac turned to the helmsman, who was trying to turn the boat away from the beach, which was getting alarmingly close.

With one hand on the wheel the man looked back, a Glock 17 in his left hand. Just before Mac could reach him he jogged the wheel sharply to the left and then to the right.

Mac was thrown off balance back against the rail.

The boat steadied, and the helmsman aimed at McGarvey’s chest, center mass.

At that moment a bright red spot materialized just above the bridge of the man’s nose and he fell backward against the console, blood spurting out of the bullet wound in his forehead.

Mac regained his balance at the same moment the boat’s keel lurched against the bottom, less than ten feet from the beach, the engines wide open.

He managed to leap off the boat and stay clear of the props as it reached the beach, hurtled up over the first dunes and smashed into a large palm tree, the force of the impact ripping both engines free of the transom, the dual fuel tanks going up with a bright flash and an impressive boom that echoed off the fronts of the houses just across the beach highway.

THIRTEEN

McGarvey picked himself up from the surf as the woman who had been gesturing came toward him at a run. He was a little dazed from the second impact against the ocean floor, and it took him just a moment to realize that the woman was Pete Boylan. She was dressed in jeans and a white polo shirt.

“Jesus, Mac, are you okay?” she demanded breathlessly. She was an attractive woman in her late thirties, with dark red hair, blue eyes and movie-star looks. She had started her career in the CIA as an interrogator, but by happenstance over the past couple of years she had worked on a number of assignments with McGarvey. She was holding a Wilson nine-millimeter compact tactical pistol in her left hand.

“I’ll live,” he told her, brushing the sand off his chest and shoulders. “That was a hell of a shot at a moving target at that distance. I don’t think more than a handful of people in the Company could have pulled it off. Thanks.”

She laughed more in relief than in humor. She was in love with McGarvey and she made no bones about showing it. “It was my fifth try, and I thought there was just as good a chance that I’d hit you instead. But the advantage was his. I had to try.” She looked critically at him. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. He gave her a smile. “The right time at the right place, but what are you doing here?”

“Walt Page sent me down to talk to you. But who were those guys?”

McGarvey always expected that someone out of his past — someone who’d either been partners with or the control officer of one of the people he’d taken down — would come looking for him to settle the score. It had happened a couple of times, but this one was about the closest he’d come to being taken out.

“I don’t know. Might have been Middle Easterners.”

“Pakistanis?”

McGarvey shrugged. “It’s a possibility. But with the trouble going on over there I think I’d be low on their list.” But then he had another thought and he glanced at the furiously burning wreckage of the boat. In the distance they could hear sirens.

“You wouldn’t know more unless you’d talked to Otto overnight,” Pete said. “Miller sent in our NEST people, and it was a disaster. We managed to shut down less than ninety of their nukes before all hell broke loose.”

“Casualties?”

“Out of ninety-four operators, thirteen are either KIA or wounded, but our SEALS got everybody out. The Pakis knew we were coming.”

“Miller waited too long,” McGarvey said. The woman had been a competent president to this point, dealing decisively, for the most part, with immigration, health care and employment issues. But ordering the U.S. military into harm’s way was completely different.

Pete nodded. “She did.” The look on her oval face was a combination of resignation, that what was done was done; of shame, that perhaps the CIA could have provided better, even more timely intelligence; and of something else, maybe fear.

McGarvey had learned to read her emotions, which were almost always clear in her eyes and in her body language — unless she was conducting a debriefing or an interrogation, during which times she was nothing short of efficient and even ruthless. He knew that she was in love with him, and had been for at least a year, probably longer, and he had held her off as best he could.

He’d never had any luck with the women in his life. In the beginning of his CIA career, after he had returned from an assignment in Chile, where he’d assassinated a powerful general and the man’s wife, Katy had given him an ultimatum: it was either her or the CIA.

She was sick to death of his frequent absences, not knowing where he’d gotten himself to or if he’d ever come back. She knew about the stars on the granite wall in the lobby of the Original Headquarters Building at Langley. They represented fallen field officers whose names and assignments could never be made public. They’d died in the line of duty; it was the only thing that their wives or husbands and families could ever be told. Katy didn’t want to end up as one of those widows.

That day, confused, angry and hurt, McGarvey had run away to Switzerland, where he’d hid himself in plain sight for a few years until the FBI came calling for his particular talents.

In the meantime the Swiss Federal Police had sent a woman to get close to McGarvey, which she did. But she’d also fallen in love with him.

He’d walked away from her too, but she’d followed him to Paris, where she’d been killed.

Something similar had happened not long after that, when another woman had fallen in love with him and she had been killed in a bomb blast that destroyed a restaurant in Georgetown.

Then Katy and their daughter and son-in-law had lost their lives because of him.

He couldn’t allow something like that to happen again — which in his heart of hearts he knew would. So he kept his distance. It hurt Pete, because she could sense that he had feelings for her. But it was better than identifying her body on a slab in a morgue somewhere.

“I haven’t turned on my computer, or watched much television in the past ten days.”

“And you’ve shut off your landline and cell phone. It’s why I’m here. We need your help.”

The sirens were closer now. McGarvey led Pete across the road to his house. Here the island was less than a hundred yards wide, and they were inside by the time the fire trucks and rescue squad had arrived.

They sat at a table on the lanai overlooking the pool, beyond which was the gazebo where Katy had loved to sit at dawn with her first cup of tea to watch the birds. The Island Packet was tied to the dock, behind which a small runabout sat out of the water on its lift.

“It’s pretty,” Pete said.

McGarvey felt a little odd having her here but not terribly guilty. He brought them Coronas with pieces of lime. She’d once told him that she wasn’t always a lady; sometimes she liked to drink a cold beer straight out of the bottle.

“Yes, it is,” McGarvey said. “Help with what?”

“It’s complicated,” Pete said. She quickly sketched everything that had gone on over the past twenty-four hours, including Haaris’s trip to Islamabad, his kidnapping and his escape a few hours later. “Barazani is dead — beheaded by this guy who the crowd in front of the presidential palace called ‘Messiah.’ He told them that the Taliban were no longer the enemy. That they needed to work together for a new Pakistan.”

“How about Sharif?”

“No one can reach him, and the ISI is keeping off of the radar for now. Their headquarters along with the Army’s General Headquarters have been surrounded, as have most of the government buildings in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.”

“What about the air force and navy bases?”

“No troop or ship movements,” Pete said. “For all practical purposes Pakistan’s government, military and intel services have been shut down. And for now India is biding its time. But if Pakistan so much as twitches, they promise to protect the sanctity of their borders using any and all means at their disposal.”

“That sounds like a quote.”

“A spokesman for India’s prime minister,” Pete said. “But there’s more. We’re pretty sure that at least one nuclear weapon was stolen from the air force base at Quetta last night. It was detonated about fifty miles south in an unpopulated area close to the Afghani border. Page thinks it was a demonstration by the Taliban that they not only have nukes, but that they know how to use them.”

“What else?” McGarvey asked, though he had a good idea where this was leading and why she had been sent to ask for his help.

“The hell of it is that life is going on as usual. Kids are in school, the shops are open and, from Ross’s accounts, doing a brisk business. There’ve been no further incidents of rioting or explosions or gunfire.”

“What about the Messiah?”

“The television stations keep rebroadcasting his speech and promising that he will be talking to the people again very soon, and that he has the reins of government firmly in control.”

“It was a coup, and less than twenty-four hours later the country has calmed down,” McGarvey said. “So other than the nuclear demonstration the only real problem is the Taliban and what they’ll do next.”

“Directed by the Messiah, and no one thinks it’ll develop into a ‘let’s all lie down with the lambs.’ At least not for long.”

“What about our embassy?”

“Ready for business, soon as the ambassador and his staff return.”

“Ross and his shop?”

“Hunkered down in place. He sent a field officer to Quetta to confirm the bomb, but he hasn’t been heard from so far. Other than him and Dave Haaris’s kidnapping there’ve been no aggressive acts toward Americans other than the NEST casualties.”

“So what does Page want from me this time?”

“It’s the White House. The president wants to see you right now. None of us know for sure what she’s going to ask you to do, but we think it’s a safe bet she’s going to ask you to assassinate this Messiah.”

“Otto thinks that too?”

Pete nodded. “He’s already working on something. The voice the Messiah used to speak to the people was artificial. Altered electronically. Otto’s trying to clean it up. But the question up in the air is, why would he need to change his voice? To fool whom?”

“Us,” McGarvey said. “Because we know who he is. And the guys in the boat were no coincidence.”

FOURTEEN

Haaris sat reclined in a dentist’s chair at All Saints in Georgetown. The hospital was the place where wounded intelligence agents were brought when their identities needed to remain secret. The facility, discreetly located in a three-story brownstone, was equipped with the latest medical technology and the best doctors, surgeons, dentists and nurses in the business.

Dr. Rupert Marks straightened up and lifted his clear goggles to his forehead. “Nothing terrible in there,” he said, patting Haaris on the shoulder. “Two teeth damaged, which I’ve temporarily capped for you, but that’s the worst of it, except for the bruising. You’re not going to be so terribly handsome for the next few weeks, but as soon as the procaine wears off your speech will get back to more or less normal.”

“Nothing permanent?” Haaris asked. He’d come back to DC, his CIA mission definitely not accomplished; but he had come back, nevertheless, and as a wounded hero — even better.

“No. We’ll have the permanent caps back from the lab tomorrow. Any time after that stop by and we’ll finish up. Won’t take more than twenty minutes.”

“Thank you, appreciate your expertise.”

Rupert smiled. “I’ll send you my bill in the morning.”

Rupert’s assistant took off Haaris’s bib and raised the chair. “You’ll sound a little lispy for a half hour or so.”

Haaris grinned. “That a real word, luv?”

“It’s my word,” she said. “Before you go, Dr. Franklin would like to see you, he’s just around the corner in his office. It’s next to the lab.”

“I’ll find my way, thanks.”

Dr. Allan Franklin, the chief surgeon and administrator of All Saints, was seated behind his desk in his tiny, book-lined office on the ground floor, just across from the security station in the lobby. The door was open.

Haaris knocked on the door frame. “You wanted to see me?” he asked.

“Come in and have a seat,” Franklin said. “And close the door.” He was a slender man, his hairline receding, his fingers long and delicate.

“Bad news about my ribs?” Haaris asked, sitting down.

“How are you feeling?”

Haaris started to shrug, but then thought better of it. “What is it?”

“We took some pictures, routine for chest injuries. We found something else. A tumor on your pericardial sac that has probably been there for some time — maybe a year or longer. Operable in itself, but the cancer appears to have spread to your spine and three of your ribs. One of the reasons they didn’t fracture. They’re too soft.”

Haaris crossed his legs and shrugged. “Prognosis?”

“We can remove the tumor, but as for the bone cancer you’ll need chemotherapy, and it won’t be pleasant.”

“I meant the overall prognosis, Doctor. Am I going to beat this and live a long-enough life to have a dozen grandchildren?”

Franklin was used to dealing with intelligence officers, most of whom were tough-minded, pragmatic people; nevertheless, his simple and direct reply gave even Haaris pause.

“No.”

“I see. Assuming I choose not to go the route of chemotherapy, how long do I have to live?”

“There’s no way to say with any degree of certainty. A year, maybe longer, maybe less.”

“Let me put it another way. I’m in the middle of something quite important. It has to do with the situation in Pakistan. And I can’t walk away from it. How much viable time do I have? Mental acuity as well as physical? I must be able to think straight.”

“Frankly, that’ll depend on your tolerance for pain.”

“I’ve been there before.”

“Six months tops, I’m afraid.”

“I see.” Haaris paused. “Thank you for telling me straight out,” he said. “Now, I don’t suppose I could convince you to withhold your diagnosis from my employer?”

“I can’t do that.”

“Maybe a delay for a week or so?”

“Marty Bambridge is here with your wife,” Franklin said. “I phoned him to come over.” Bambridge was the deputy director of the Clandestine Service, also known as the Directorate of Operations.

A moment of intense rage threatened Haaris’s sanity. For just that moment he was on the verge of coming around the desk and killing Franklin. But it vanished as quickly as it arose. “I will take care of letting my wife know. Are we perfectly clear on this, Doctor?”

“Your call, Mr. Haaris.”

“Yes, my call, as you say.”

Haaris stopped for a second just before the frosted glass door to the visitors’ lounge to gather his wits. The deputy director was a complete idiot, who’d had the solid reputation of caring more for the mission than the man, so getting past him would present no obstacle. He would be perfectly willing to keep the news to himself, so long as the job was being handled. He’d make some noise, of course, and possibly bounce it up to the seventh floor. But six months was more than enough time for Messiah to set things in motion. Payback.

The biggest problem would be Deborah. She and Haaris had been married five years, after a whirlwind romance. She’d been a student at the Farm, where he’d given a brief series of lectures on developing and using psychological profiles of the opposition’s field agents. That included the Chinese, who thought differently than Westerners, and spies sent by America’s “friends” in Canada, England, France and Germany.

She’d been an indifferent student at best, completely in awe of the CIA in general and Haaris specifically, whom she thought was the most sophisticated, kind and gentle man she’d ever met since she’d graduated from Stetson University law school in Florida.

And for his part, he was in need of a bullet-proof cover if he was ever going to be promoted to a high enough level within the Company where his opinions mattered. Single men might make for good field officers, but working at headquarters, they made a lot of people nervous. Where did their loyalties lie and all that?

The woman had been incredibly boring to him from the start. Their sex unimaginative and mechanical. Her cooking, Midwestern meat and potatoes — she was from some small town in Iowa. She lacked any practical education vis-à-vis intelligence work. And most of all, her professed unconditional love and absolute devotion and loyalty were nothing short of stifling. But anyone from the Company who’d ever met her fell totally in love at first sight. She was the quintessential American wife. From the beginning he’d thought of her as a lap dog. The CIA needed people like her for background noise.

He opened the door and went in.

“There he is at last, in one piece,” Bambridge said, getting up. The deputy director was short and slender with dark eyes that were usually angry. He always moved as if his feet were hurting him, and his expression suggested that just about everything he heard or encountered came as a surprise. “Clean bill of health and all that?”

“The doctor says I’ll live at least until the end of the year,” Haaris said. “He’d like to have a word with you.”

Bambridge gave him a searching look, but then nodded. “Are you up for your debriefing this afternoon? Say, four?”

“I’ll be there.

“Lots to tell?”

“Indeed.”

Bambridge left, and Deb, who was five-three, blond and a little on the softig side, jumped up. She was shivering, her face a study of emotions from happiness to fear. She was dressed in a short skirt, with a frilly white blouse and flats, because she’d never learned how to walk in heels.

Haaris opened his arms to her and she came to him. He winced in more pain then he actually felt when she put her arms around him, and she cried out.

“Oh, God, David, I’ve hurt you!”

“It’s all right, sweetheart. I’m just glad to be home in one piece with you.”

FIFTEEN

A car and driver were waiting for McGarvey and Pete at Joint Base Andrews when their CIA Gulfstream landed and taxied to a navy hangar. They thanked the crew and walked over to the Cadillac Escalade, where a very large man in a plain blue jacket opened the back door.

“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” he said. “Don’t know if you remember, but I used to drive you places.”

“Tony,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, sir, good to see you again.”

On the drive out to Langley, McGarvey came to the realization that he would not have answered the summons from the president if he hadn’t been attacked that morning. “How many people knew that you were coming to talk to me?” he asked Pete as they got off the Beltway and took the George Washington Parkway toward the CIA’s main entrance road.

“The president and at least some of her staff. Me, Marty, Walt Page, and Otto, of course.”

“Whose call was it?”

“I guess the president asked Walt to contact you.”

“Last night?”

“I imagine so. Marty called me about three in the morning, said you weren’t answering your phone, so he wanted me to go to Florida and talk to you. Thought you might need some convincing. “

“The guys who tried to run me over did that. Apparently someone doesn’t want me meddling in this business. Someone who has a contact either at the White House or in our shop.”

Pete nodded. “I was thinking the same thing, but it could also be someone who suspected that you might be called in and wanted to stop your involvement even before you got started.”

“That too,” McGarvey said. “But it still points to an insider.”

Haaris and his wife had a nice two-story Colonial just west of Massachusetts Avenue and within a few blocks of the Finnish and Dominican Republic embassies. She drove him home from the hospital, chatting all the way about how she hoped that he would feel better real soon. She was hoping they could fly out to see her parents in Des Moines and maybe even take them for a surprise vacation to Hawaii.

At home he took a quick shower and changed into a suit and tie, Deb dogging his every step, even sitting on the toilet seat while he dried off.

“My God, they beat you terrible,” she said. His chest was black and blue and his face was still puffed up. “We help them and how do they repay us?”

“It’s okay,” Haaris told her, and he had a little twinge of sorrow for her. She would be lost when he was dead, and he felt as if he almost cared.

“No, it’s not. And now you’re going back to work.”

“I was sent over to try to make a difference.”

“Did you?” she asked, her voice sharp, only because she was hurting for him.

“I hope so,” he said.

He kissed her on the cheek and took his Mercedes CLS500 down to West Potomac Park, where he walked over to the Vietnam Memorial wall with its fifty-thousand-plus names. It was three on a weekday afternoon, but the weather was good and a lot of people were in the park, many of them seated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

A man something over six feet tall, with the frame of a footballer, wearing jeans, a polo shirt and a Yankees baseball cap, stood at a point at the wall where several KIAs named Johnson were engraved. He was Colonel Hasan Kayani, who controlled all ISI activities in the U.S. from his offices at the UN in New York. The FBI knew him as a low-level diplomat with the Saudi delegation, but when he left the city he traveled with a British passport under the name Wasif Jones. His English was spot-on, in part because he’d always been a quick study, but in a larger measure because he, like Haaris, had been educated in the UK. And also like Haaris, had been bright enough to hide his radicalism when he had been recruited by the Pakistani intel service nine years earlier.

Haaris had been a walk-in recruit up in New York and had been feeding Kayani information about the CIA’s activities in Pakistan for the past three years. The colonel knew that Haaris had been sent to work with the ISI in Islamabad, but he did not know that Haaris was the Messiah. Only General Rajput knew that secret.

“The general said that you had received some rough treatment,” Kayani said, glancing over.

“I’ll live,” Haaris said, that old phrase of his sounding odd in his ears now.

“My God, Page will be beside himself. Your trip to Islamabad completely backfired. Have you been debriefed yet?”

“I’m on my way over.”

“What do you think of this Messiah business? Crazy, if you ask me.”

“The people in the street are behind it. And we’re finally going to have peace with the Taliban. So who knows where it’ll lead?”

“Not me. But no one else knows what to make of it either.”

“Thanks for taking care of the McGarvey business. That bastard could have created some trouble. He usually does wherever he goes.”

“The mission failed,” Kayani said. “I thought that you would have heard by now.”

Haaris forced himself to remain calm. He needed only one thing from this buffoon, and the man had screwed it up. “What happened?”

“I don’t have all of the details at this point, except that the powerboat my two people rented in Sarasota crashed on the beach and exploded. I’ve not heard from them since, so I assume they died in the crash.”

“What beach?” Haaris asked, his voice even.

“Apparently directly across the street from Mr. McGarvey’s house.”

“Send someone else to do the job.”

“Don’t you think that he will be alerted to the fact that someone is trying to kill him? The CIA will certainly take notice.”

“I want the bastard dead within the next twelve hours — twenty-four at most. And I don’t give a damn how many assets you have to burn.” Haaris turned to the man. “Have I made myself clear, Colonel? Do you understand what’s at stake?”

At stake was Haaris continuing to feed solid-gold intel to the ISI in the person of Colonel Kayani. The pipeline from the CIA had made the man’s career.

“Consider it done.”

The Cadillac SUV was passed directly through the main gate, and driving up the road through the woods to the Original Headquarters Building — the one always shown in TV and in the movies — McGarvey had the same sensation he always had coming back like this. It was part excitement to be back in the hunt, part nostalgia for days past and sometimes just, at some point way in the back of his head, the tiniest bit of fear, or more accurately, concern, that sooner or later he was going to screw up. Sooner or later he would go up against someone, or someones, better than he was.

They parked in the underground VIP garage, and Pete went up to the seventh floor with him. She left him at Page’s office. “They’re expecting you.”

“What about you?”

“They want me to sit in on Dave Haaris’s debriefing.”

McGarvey’s ears perked up, though he didn’t let it show. “They suspect him of something?”

“Good heavens, no,” Pete said. “I’ve known about the guy for a few years now, and without him we wouldn’t have a Pakistan Desk. But he was over there in the middle of it; the Taliban picked him up on the airport road, and the ISI managed to get him released. We just need the details. Might be something that could help. He’ll point the way.”

SIXTEEN

McGarvey was shown straight through by the DCI’s personal secretary. Page was sitting on one of the couches in the middle of the large office, facing Marty Bambridge and the CIA’s general counsel, Carlton Patterson, who were seated on the other. Otto was perched on the edge of Page’s desk.

“Oh, wow, Jim Forest is looking for you,” Otto said. He was a barrel-chested odd duck of a computer genius, with long red hair tied in a ponytail. He wore jeans and a KGB sweatshirt. He was McGarvey’s best friend, and they had a long history together.

“I expect he is,” McGarvey said. Forest was the chief of detectives for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, and he and McGarvey also had a history together. He would be taking the boat accident as no coincidence.

“Good afternoon,” Page said, gesturing McGarvey to an empty chair. “You weren’t injured?” he asked. He’d run IBM until the president before Miller had tapped him to take over the CIA, and the administration saw no need to replace him.

“It was close, but Miss Boylan was waiting for me on the beach, and she helped out.”

“She told me,” Bambridge said. “A pretty big chance for her to take, wouldn’t you say?”

“Don’t start, Marty, I didn’t come up here to play your games,” McGarvey said. He too had a history with the deputy director of the Clandestine Service, not much of it any good. In his estimation Bambridge was a damned good desk jockey but not much of a field officer, though he fancied he was.

“My dear boy, have you been brought up to date on the situation in Pakistan?” Patterson asked. He was a tall slender man, with thinning white hair and the patrician manners of an old-school gentleman. He’d been the Agency’s general counsel for what seemed like forever. In his early eighties, everyone in the business was much younger than he; his “dear boys” and “dear girls.”

“Miss Boylan briefed me on the flight up, and Otto sent me some material while we were still in the air. But I don’t know what the president thinks I can do about it.”

“You’re not an analyst, Mac,” Otto said. “But I think the woman is off her rocker if she’s going to send you out to do what I think she will.”

Page’s jaw tightened. Like just about everyone else on the campus he tolerated Rencke mostly because he had a great deal of respect and even awe for the computer guru. And it was once suggested to him that since it was Otto who had designed the advanced computer systems for the entire U.S. intelligence community — including the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet monitoring capabilities — he could also destroy them.

McGarvey let Otto’s comment slide for the moment. “What’s Dave Haaris recommending?”

“Nothing yet,” Bambridge said. “He’s being debriefed at the moment. Soon as he’s done he wants to get back with his people and come up with a plan. He said we’re going to need one to get ourselves out of this mess.” He hesitated.

“But?” McGarvey prompted. It wasn’t like the deputy director to hold back.

Bambridge glanced at Page, who nodded.

“The Taliban beat him up. Dislocated his jaw, broke a couple of teeth with a rifle butt. Cracked a couple of ribs. We took him to All Saints, where they fixed his teeth and took some X-rays of his chest to see how bad the damage was.” Bambridge looked away for a beat, the gesture also uncharacteristic for him. “The thing is, Franklin says Haaris has cancer, and it’s spreading. Chemo and radiation therapy would prolong his life but not by much. Anyway, Dave declined.”

“How long does he have?”

“Less than a year, six months of which he’ll be on his feet. But after that he’ll probably go downhill pretty fast.”

“It’s why he wants to get back with his people to help figure out what our response should be,” Page said. He shook his head. “It’s a damned shame, when we need him the most.”

“You gave him the option to quit?” McGarvey asked. He knew almost nothing about Haaris except for his reputation, which was as sterling as his impeccable manners.

“Of course,” Page said. “I spoke to him a half hour ago. Told me he was a little rushed for time, so he excused himself and left.”

“Extraordinary man, by all accounts,” Patterson interjected. Yet there was something in his tone of voice and the look in his eyes that didn’t sit quite right. But McGarvey let that slide as well.

“Here’s the situation as I see it. The president wants to see me. Since I shut down my phone and computer — I wanted to be left alone — Miss Boylan was sent to talk me into coming up here.”

Bambridge started to say something, but McGarvey held him off.

“Did anyone at the White House know I wasn’t taking calls?”

“Her chief of staff, Tom Broderick, I would imagine,” Page said. “It was he who phoned to ask if you were in town.”

“Who else here on campus?”

“All of us in this room — except for Carlton,” Page said.

“A couple of people on my staff, including the housekeepers who arranged the aircraft,” Bambridge said.

“Me and Louise,” Otto said. Louise was Otto’s wife, who sometimes did contract work for the Agency.

“Someone knew Miss Boylan was coming to see me, and they didn’t want that to happen,” McGarvey said. “Means two things: there’s a leak here or at the White House, and whatever the president’s going to ask me to do involves the situation in Pakistan.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Bambridge said.

“There were two guys in the boat. Small, dark. Almost certainly Middle Eastern.”

“Inconclusive,” Patterson said, but without much conviction.

“Enough for me,” McGarvey said.

“That being the case, what do you propose?” Patterson asked.

“Well, we’re not going to invade Pakistan. From what Otto gave me they still have thirty nuclear weapons and the means to launch them on rockets, from aircraft, from surface ships and possibly even from their Hamza submarines. The Indians know this also so it’s not likely they’ll launch a preemptive strike. And from what this Messiah character told the mob in front of the Presidential Palace, the Taliban are once again friends of Pakistan. Trained well enough, or helped by someone in Pakistan’s military — probably someone from Quetta Air Force Base — to set off one of the weapons as a demonstration.”

“So what’s left?” Page asked, but it was a rhetorical question and everyone knew it.

“That’s up to the president.”

“We’ll provide any sort of backup you need. And our COS Ross Austin in Islamabad should be able to fill you in on what’s going on.”

“I’d like to talk to Haaris before I head over to the White House, maybe get together with his team.”

“And I might have something more for you,” Otto said.

“I have a foolish question, my dear boy,” Patterson said. “Since you believe the attack upon your person has something to do with the Pakistan issue, would you like some help, maybe a couple of bodyguards?”

McGarvey had to smile. “As you said, a foolish question.”

“They could try again.”

“I hope they do. It’d mean that I was irritating someone.”

Bambridge couldn’t hide a slight smile. “Are you armed?”

“I will be when I leave the building.”

“Let us know what the president wants of you, if you would,” Page said. “If it involves what we all believe it will, we’ll need to adjust our thinking, and Ross will have to be given the heads-up.”

“The president is going to ask me to assassinate the Messiah,” McGarvey said.

“Indeed,” Page said.

“I don’t know if I’ll do it.”

SEVENTEEN

Pete walked across the connecting walkway from the Original Headquarters Building into the new building, past the cafeteria that faced the inner courtyard with its copper statue “Kryptos,” which had recently been totally decrypted. The debriefing room was on the second floor, its windows also facing inward to the pretty courtyard with its walkways, statues and landscaping.

Haaris was seated at the end of a small conference table for six when Pete walked in. He was faced by Don Wicklund and Darrel Richards from the Directorate of Intelligence. His product and in general his conclusions on the Pakistan issue over the past several years had been so stellar that whenever he came back in from the field he was treated with kid gloves.

Both Wicklund and Richards were well-seasoned officers in their mid-forties who had done their stints in the field and had come in from the cold to take important administrative positions. They were respectful and pleasant. Just three friends having a little discussion. Could have been about the weather.

They all looked up. Wicklund and Richards had expected her, but Haaris hadn’t, though he didn’t show much surprise.

“Welcome back, Dave,” she said. “Looks like a rifle butt to your chin. Must have hurt like hell.”

“It stung a bit.”

Pete sat at the opposite end of the table. “I’m Pete Boylan. Mr. Page asked me to sit in on your debriefing. Just a little bird in the corner. He’s concerned not only about your well-being but about what the hell just happened over there.”

“Miss Boylan, your reputation precedes you,” Haaris said.

“Good, I hope.”

“Nothing but.”

The man was in pain, she could see that, but something else was bothering him, something deep at the back of his eyes, in the set of his mouth, in his mannerisms, which were nothing less than pleasant. No artifice that she could detect, just something bothering him.

She had read his jacket on the way up from Florida, and the only real anomaly, the only fact that didn’t seem to fit, was his wife, Deborah nee Johnson. The woman had dropped out of recruit training at the Farm before she was flunked out. And a few months later she and Haaris were married. Haaris, the smooth, urbane, educated and worldly man. And Deb the farm girl from Iowa with a law degree, just barely, though she’d never taken or passed any bar examination in any state. The two as a couple didn’t gel in Pete’s head.

His latest psych eval was mostly good, as were all the previous ones, and there didn’t seem to be any hint of marital troubles. He and his wife didn’t entertain much, nor did they accept many invitations, but they came across as a happily married couple.

It just didn’t fit in Pete’s mind.

“We have your written report that you sketched out on the flight back from Incirlik that says you weren’t aware of this Messiah nor did you see the dramatic speech he made at the Presidential Palace,” Wicklund said. He looked and acted like a professor of history.

“Not at the time. But I did watch the recording later. The man is a maniac, assuming he killed Barazani.”

“He tossed the president’s head over the rail.”

“Might have been an accomplice who did the actual murder,” Haaris said. “We can’t discount any avenue of investigation.”

“Is that the recommendation you’re going to give to your desk?”

“I’ll give them the same recommendation that I always give: Keep an open mind. Do not jump to conclusions. Spend a little time with your thinking.”

“They still have thirty-plus nuclear weapons at their disposal, plus the means to deliver them,” Pete said. “Do you think that time might not be on our side?”

“Pakistan is not preparing to attack India or any other country in the near future,” Haaris said to her. “What we have witnessed is a coup d’état. A long time coming, in my estimation. And, Miss Boylan, I have given that much thought over the past several years — ever since the departure of Pervez Musharraf.”

“So where is Pakistan going?”

“I’m not sure, but it is something very high on my list of priorities.”

“Should we go to war with them?” Pete asked.

“Good heaven’s, no,” Haaris said, genuinely surprised. “No nuclear power goes to war with another nuclear power in this day and age. In this case it’s likely that India would become involved after all, and possibly even China might climb aboard ostensibly as our allies. It would give them a foothold into the region.” He looked at Wicklund and Richards. “In that direction lies only madness.”

“So your recommendation to the president would be wait and see,” Wicklund said. “Not very insightful from where I sit. But believe me, Mr. Haaris, I don’t want to come across as confrontational. We’re all just trying to come to some conclusions about the situation, and you not only had your boots on the ground there, you are the go-to person on Pakistan.”

“I understand,” Haaris said. “I’ll prepare a few notes by this evening and email them to you as soon as I have time. But for now my people are waiting to get started.”

“We may have a few further questions.”

“I think we all will,” Haaris said. “Are we finished here?”

“Of course,” Wicklund said.

Haaris got up and walked out of the conference room, and Pete caught up with him before he reached the elevators.

“Do you want to buy a girl a coffee?” she asked.

Haaris smiled. “Miss Boylan, are you coming on to me?”

Pete laughed. “Your accent drives women nuts, I hope you know that. I’d like to ask you something personal, away from the recording equipment back there.”

“I am rather busy.”

“Only take a minute, promise. We can go back to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy.”

Haaris smiled again. “I suppose that it’s an offer I can’t refuse. And tit for tat. A good-looking woman drives me nuts.”

Pete suppressed a smile.

They walked back down the corridor to the cafeteria, where she got them coffee and they sat at a table by the windows. Only a few other people were there at this hour of the afternoon.

Every window in every building on campus, even the cafeteria, was double-paned, with white noise piped in between the panes to cancel out any surveillance attempts.

“Who do you think this so-called Messiah is?” she asked. It was only an opening ploy to get him talking comfortably about a difficult subject.

“Hard to say this early.”

“Your gut feeling, if you were to be pressed.”

“Not Taliban, I think. He’s likely using them only as a tool.”

“For what?”

“It’s a coup d’état, Miss Boylan, as I’ve already stated. The Taliban hates the U.S., and hate can act as a very powerful adhesive to hold a mob together. He or someone like him was probably inevitable.”

“And an aphrodisiac,” Pete suggested. He hadn’t said that the Taliban hated “us,” but that they hated the U.S. The U.S. as a third party distinct from himself as well as the Taliban.

“That too, but I wouldn’t suspect that the average Pakistani would think of it that way.”

Pete gazed out the window, sipping her coffee, letting the silence between them grow. It was an old interrogation technique. Subjects almost always wanted to fill the void by saying something.

“So, it’s been interesting meeting you,” Haaris said, rising. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

“Something’s bothering you,” Pete said, looking up at him. “Call it woman’s intuition or whatever.”

“That’s a personal statement.”

Pete smiled. “It’s the business. Goes with the territory. And trust me, none of what’s been said here will be written down. You have my word.”

Haaris hesitated for just a second then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose, for someone else to be in on my little secret. It’s already arrived at the seventh floor.”

Pete waited.

“Fact is, I’m dying. Cancer, I’m told. And I probably have around six viable months left to me.”

Pete was taken aback. It was nothing close to what she had expected.

“Now, I must get back to my people. Time waits for no man, Miss Boylan, not even for me.”

EIGHTEEN

McGarvey went down to Otto’s third-floor suite of offices, where no one ever worked except for the special projects director. The three rooms were filled with sophisticated computer equipment: two-hundred-inch ultra-high-def flat-screen monitors on the walls, one flat-panel table about the size of a pool table in the middle of the inner room and smaller screens, keyboards, printers and several laptops and tablets scattered on various desks and worktables. In addition, several large tables were filled to overflowing with printed maps, files, books, newspapers and magazines. Most of the chairs were stacked with folders. Other books were piled just about everywhere.

“Not everything is digitized.” Otto had been saying this for years. “And probably won’t ever be, provided there’s a need for secrecy. A computer can be hacked from ten thousand miles away, but a piece of paper in some obscure file somewhere ain’t so easy to access.”

Several of the monitors showed various colors as backgrounds, ranging from light yellows and reds to deep violets, which lately meant his search programs — his little darlings, he called them — were running into something that could potentially be dangerous to the U.S.

One of the programs was working on the Messiah’s brief speech; the image was on a screen, the voice low in the background.

“Pink picked up the fact that the voice was artificially enhanced,” Otto said. “I didn’t hear it myself. But I set her to filter out the enhancement, leaving only the original. Not so easy even for her since we have no idea, not even a clue, what the original sounds like, except its Punjabi seemed to be clipped, odd vowels here and there. Maybe someone who’d learned British English.”

“About half the educated males in Pakistan,” McGarvey said.

“Eighty percent,” Otto said. He entered several commands from a keyboard. “I’m trying to translate what the guy was saying into English — the way his voice might sound if he were speaking in English.”

“Are you making any progress?”

“It’s coming, but slowly. And even if Pink does come up with a credible voice, whose will it be? Any one of millions.”

“There’s only one reason he went to the trouble to disguise his voice, and it’s because we’d recognize it. But if we could find out whether his English was Punjabi accented or not, it would give us a direction of sorts.”

“My program has a seventy-eight-percent confidence that Punjabi is his native language.”

“What about the voice-enhanced technology he used? Was it anything that you’re familiar with?”

“Nothing that stood out. You can buy the basic chips and other circuit elements at your local Radio Shack.”

McGarvey stepped right up to the monitor showing the Messiah. Nothing was visible of the man’s face — if in fact it was a man — and even the eyes were in deep shadows under his kaffiyeh; nor were his hands clearly visible, except for a brief shot of him holding Barazani’s severed head.

“His hand,” McGarvey said.

“I tried enhancing it for at least a partial print on one of the fingers, but no go. It was his left hand but I couldn’t find a wedding ring. Though I got the impression of a light band around his wrist.”

“He wore a watch or bracelet?”

“Probably. But the mark isn’t deep, so it could mean he doesn’t spend a lot of time outdoors with his sleeves rolled up.”

McGarvey stared at the image. “What’s your snap judgment?”

Otto perched on the edge of one of the desks. He liked to think on his feet, he’d said, but he also liked to relax. “It was a brilliant move on his part bringing in the Taliban, or at least offering them a place in the new government. The attacks on the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi stopped almost immediately after his speech. And commercially Pakistan went back to normal. But if you’re asking what his agenda is, I don’t have a clue. Maybe Miller knows something I don’t know.”

“We’re the ones who brief her, so if you don’t know — if the CIA doesn’t know — then she doesn’t either.”

“That’s a scary thought,” Otto said, “considering what she’ll ask you to do.”

McGarvey looked away from the screen. “Is anyone saying Pakistan has become a credible threat against us?”

“No. And from what I understand our CIA guys have shed their tails. I talked to Ross just before you came in, and he says it’s gotten spooky over there. The only trouble he’s run into is the disappearance of the guy he sent to check things out in Quetta.”

“Could be he was too close when the bomb went off.”

“That’s what Ross is worried about,” Otto said.

Someone was at the door. Otto glanced at a monitor. “It’s Pete,” he said and buzzed her in.

“Thought I’d find you here,” she said to McGarvey. “Haaris just finished with his debriefing — and it was brief — and afterwards we had a little one-on-one in the cafeteria. Franklin says he has cancer, gives him only six months on his feet.”

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

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

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

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

“Unless he has an agenda.”

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

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

“I don’t have an office here.”

“Where do you work?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?”

“What’s your thinking on the situation?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

NINETEEN

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

“Wouldn’t you be?” she asked.

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

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

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

“A penny,” Pete prompted.

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

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

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

“The calm before the storm?” Pete asked.

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

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

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

“I’ll wait out here,” Pete said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I have,” the president said coolly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s right.”

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

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

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

“Is that what your advisers are telling you?”

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

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

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

McGarvey got up.

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

“That would be much easier for me.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You.”

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

“Let the CIA know,” the president said.

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

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

TWENTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifteen minutes.”

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

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

She laughed and went back to their bedroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His image on the screen let the newspaper fall away.

“Our commerce is back to normal. We have asked the other nations to return their ambassadors and staffs so that we may all continue our peaceful coexistence.

“My dreams for Paradise here in Pakistan continue. Allah has spoken to me with his message of strength.

“Be strong of heart, for the way ahead may be difficult.

“Be strong of mind, for we will face many problems.

“Be strong of arm, for the tasks that we are faced with will seemingly be without end.”

Purely bullshit, Haaris thought. Karl Marx had written that religion was the opiate of the masses. Well, this is exactly what he was giving them.

His speech went on in the same vein for a few more minutes, until in the end he promised that he would be among them. He would be a man on the street, a simple wayfarer on the highways, in the hills, on the deserts, by the sea.

He used a translation program to render his words into Punjabi before taking the speech processor out of his sealed attaché case and downloading it to the program that changed his voice to the same one he’d used on the balcony of the Aiwan.

Ten minutes after sitting down at his desk, he attached the speech to an e-mail — also sent through the remailers to the PTV, Pakistan Television Corporation, the main government-controlled network of stations throughout the country. Within minutes it would be broadcast as a flash bulletin and be rebroadcast dozens of times over the coming days.

Haaris sat back. “The Messiah has spoken again.”

“I don’t understand,” Deb said at the door.

Haaris controlled himself not to overreact. He turned to her and smiled. “I thought you had gone to bed.”

“What was that all about?” she asked.

He couldn’t see any anger, just confusion. He got up and went to her. “I wish I could tell you, but it’s stuff for work. We’re doing a disinformation operation, trying to sow a few seeds of doubt about this guy calling himself the Messiah.”

“That was you on the computer.”

“Yes, it was. My idea.”

She looked up at him, searching his eyes for the truth of what he was telling her. “What about the shower you mentioned?” she asked.

To the outside world looking in at them, their marriage must have seemed odd. They were mismatched. And yet it had to be obvious that they were very much in love. Deb believed it. And now it was coming to an end as all things must.

He slipped off his shoes and led her back to their bedroom suite, where in the bathroom he took off her T-shirt and kissed the nipples of her breasts.

“I’d like the water hot,” he said.

“I love you.”

“And I love you too.”

She stepped into the shower and started the water.

He waited for just a second or two then got in with her. She started to laugh because he had not undressed. He kicked her feet out from under her, grabbed her shoulders and slammed her face down onto the raised lip of the shower stall with every ounce of his strength. The side of her head cracked like an eggshelll, blood poured out of the wound and her legs jerked several times before they were still.

When he was certain that she was dead, he went into the bedroom and phoned 911.

“My God, my wife fell in the shower and hit her head,” he cried. “She’s not breathing! I don’t know what to do!”

“Who is calling?”

“Please hurry,” Haaris sobbed. He gave the address then left the phone off the hook, turned on the front porch light and unlocked the door, then went back to his wife.

TWENTY-ONE

It was late when McGarvey heard a soft sound on the stairs outside his Georgetown apartment. He unlocked the door then sat down in the dark in his living room, a cognac at hand, his Walther PPK in the nine-millimeter version on the small table beside him.

After he’d left the White House, he phoned Walt Page’s office and left a message for the director as well as for Bambridge that he’d turned down the president. He told them that he would stick around Washington for the next day or two and then head back to Florida.

He’d not answered Pete’s calls and had dinner alone at a small place a few blocks away down on M Street. Afterward he made a show of drinking too much at the bar before he staggered back home to his third-floor apartment in a brownstone across from Rock Creek Park.

But he hadn’t been drunk then, nor was he drunk now.

He’d phoned Jim Forest at the detective’s home. “How are things going?”

“I was wondering when you were going to call,” Forest said.

He and McGavey weren’t exactly friends, but they did have a mutual respect. Mac thought the kid was a good cop, though sometimes a little too earnest.

“I wanted to give you time to get the autopsy results.”

“You got out of Dodge before I could get to you. A Gulfstream left SRQ for Andrews. I assumed that you were aboard and that you were definitely involved. But the one guy had a forty-five-caliber slug in his head, and you carry a Walther. Mind telling me what the hell you’re involved with this time and who was helping you?”

“I can’t tell you a lot, except those two guys came to kill me, and I think they may be Pakistanis.”

“Holy shit,” Forest said softly. “They rented the boat at Marina Jack up in Sarasota under the name Walter Smith. One of them showed a New York driver’s license and left a deposit with an American Express gold card in the same name. But the rental agent said neither guy’s English was very good.”

“Anything show up in their dental work?”

“Nothing yet. But a coroner’s jury wants to talk to you.”

“Later, once I get something settled.”

Forest was silent for a beat. “Is this about what’s going on right now in Pakistan?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Just tell me that you’re not bringing any more shit down here. I have my hands full as it is. The chief knows that I know you, and he’s asking some very pointed questions. You come back to Sarasota and bring another shooting war with you, we’ll probably both end up in jail.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. A lot depends upon what happens here in DC over the next twenty-four hours or so. Could be it’ll all blow away.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No.”

“Shit,” Forest said. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, take care of yourself, Mac.”

“I’ll try.”

Someone knocked.

“It’s open,” McGarvey said. He snatched his pistol, got up and moved quickly across the room so that when the door opened he would be behind it.

“It’s me, so don’t shoot,” Pete said softly. She opened the door and stepped in.

“Are you alone?” McGarvey asked. He could see the hallway through the crack at the edge. It was empty.

“Yes,” she said and came the rest of the way in.

Pointing his pistol down and away, McGarvey reached around her and locked the door.

“How about some light?” she said.

“Were you followed?”

“I don’t think so.”

At the window McGarvey carefully parted the curtains and looked out. Nothing moved on the street below; the same cars that were parked there earlier were still there. “Where’s your car?”

“I left it down on Dumbarton a couple of blocks away,” she said. “I knew that you were lying the minute you came out of the White House. Why didn’t you at least tell me or Otto?”

McGarvey laid his pistol on the table and switched on the small reading lamp. “I didn’t want to get either of you involved. Especially not Otto, he’s a terrible liar. And I needed the illusion to hold for at least until tomorrow.”

Pete stood flatfooted, her blue eyes wide. “I’m a pretty good liar. And not so bad at covering your ass. I have a vested interest that I want to protect, you know.”

A number of years ago McGarvey had been shot up pretty badly and had lost one of his kidneys. Then during an incident that had gone bad a few months earlier, McGarvey had lost his remaining kidney, and Pete, who by happenstance was a close enough match, donated hers without hesitation.

“They won’t take the bait now.”

“Would have been stupid if they had, anyway,” she said. “Otto wants to talk to you, but your phone is off and he didn’t want to turn it on in case you were in the middle of something. But he knew that you were here or at least that your phone was here.”

“So he sent you?”

“I volunteered,” Pete said. “The Messiah came on PTV in Islamabad. When Otto couldn’t reach you he sent the recording to me. But he said he thinks something was wrong with it.”

“What, exactly?”

“Something about the newspaper. He was holding up this morning’s Washington Post, but Otto says it was dubbed.”

McGarvey turned on his encrypted cell phone and called Otto, who answered on the first ring. McGarvey put the call on speaker.

“Pete’s okay?”

“She’s here. What have you come up with? She says something about the Post was wrong?”

“It was this morning’s early edition, but the bottom right edge didn’t line up. You won’t be able to see it on a small phone screen, but one of my programs picked up on it, and when I put it up on the table it was there. The message was recorded sometime in the past. But how long ago I don’t know.”

“Did he have anything significant to say?”

“Just that he wanted peace, and he invited everyone to send their embassy staffs back. Business as normal.”

“With thirty-plus nuclear weapons still on the loose,” McGarvey said, piecing it together. “He probably said something like he’ll be around, but he wouldn’t be making any public appearances.”

“He said that he’s going to be the invisible man on the street, in the hills, out in the desert. Anonymous.”

“How about the voice?”

“We’re working that,” Otto said. “The spectrum analyzer I’m using says it’s a match with the speech he made at the Aiwan. But it’s too perfect a match.”

“Do you have a confidence level? Eighty or ninety percent would be good enough.”

“Just gut instinct, but something else came up in the past few minutes that I just don’t know what to make of. The timing is all wrong, unless the same people who want to shut you up want to get to Haaris.”

“What else?” Pete asked.

“Haaris’s wife slipped and fell in their shower. Hit her head, and by the time a paramedic crew got there she was dead.”

“Was he there when it happened?” McGarvey asked.

“Apparently he’d just gotten home and found her,” Otto said, then hesitated.

McGarvey picked up on it. “And?”

“Maybe I’m getting to be an old lady hearing rats in the attic, but I got the real funny feeling that Dave Haaris might just be the Messiah.”

Two minutes later, McGarvey’s phone rang. It was Otto again. “Dr. Franklin just called. Haaris had his wife’s body brought to All Saints. You might want to go over there.”

TWENTY-TWO

A distraught, angry Haaris charged out of the waiting room when they came in. “The sons of bitches murdered her just to get at me,” he said. “I want both of you in on this, because no matter what I said before, my advice to the president is different now.” His clothes were still wet.

“How do you know someone killed her?” McGarvey asked.

“Dr. Franklin figured it out. And if it really is Messiah’s people who did it to keep me off balance there’s no possible way the political situation will ever get back to normal in Islamabad. That’s clear to me. The bastards. The dirty bastards. She never hurt a soul in her life. She was incapable of doing anything mean. To anyone.”

Dr. Franklin, his jacket off, his shirt collar open, got off the elevator from the second-floor operating theater, a long look on his face. “Good morning, Mac, Miss Boylan. I assume that David has filled you in.”

“Did you find what I asked you to look for?” Haaris said, a little more in control of his emotions.

“I’m sorry I missed it earlier. She could have fallen with enough force to cause the damage to her skull. But you were correct in assuming that someone was in the shower with her. I found a displacement of her left ankle. Whoever the killer was probably grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand and the back of her head with the other, and kicked her legs out from under her, forcing her down.”

“My God,” Pete said. “Could it have been someone she knew?”

Haaris’s face colored. “She wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you meant to imply.”

“I’m sorry, I was just looking for options. It would have been a very big deal for someone to send killers after your wife, unless they were specifically looking for you, and she got in the way.”

“There’s no accounting for stupidity.”

“You and your think tank are our reigning experts,” McGarvey said. He’d been watching for any signs that Haaris was faking his emotions, but he couldn’t see it.

“We can see trends, possibilities, likelihoods. But for whole systems. One rogue operator changes everything. People are unpredictable, nations usually aren’t. They’re too ponderous, too slow to react or change in any fundamental way.”

“The Messiah is fundamental.”

Haaris stopped for a beat.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Dr. Franklin said. “It’s been a very long day and I’m going home to bed now.”

Haaris shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for confirming something I’d already suspected.”

“I’m terribly sorry, David. For everything.”

“I appreciate it.”

Franklin left down the hallway to the rear parking area.

Pete touched Haaris’s wrist. “I’m truly sorry too,” she said. “We all are. As hard as an accident is to accept, something like this is a million times worse.”

Haaris nodded.

“What’s next?”

Haaris gave her a look. “If you mean what’s next vis-à-vis Pakistan, I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”

“Anything that you’d care to share?” McGarvey asked.

“The president asked you to assassinate the Messiah, and the word is you turned her down.”

“I may rethink it.”

“Because of my wife?”

Again McGarvey tried to read the man, but he came up blank. Haaris was either a consummate liar. Or he was filled with genuine hate. “In part.”

“And the rest?”

McGarvey shrugged. “From all accounts your wife was a gentle soul. Whoever killed her was a bully. And I don’t like bullies.”

“The world is full of them, didn’t you know? Or are you a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills?”

“Something like that,” McGarvey said, letting it hang there.

“I’m going now,” Haaris said.

“Home?” Pete asked.

“No, the office, I recalled my team,” Haaris said. “We need to revise our position for the president this morning.” He started down the hall the same way Dr. Franklin had left.

“What’s next?” Pete called after him.

“A reception for diplomats at the Pakistani embassy this evening,” Haaris responded without looking back. “I’m going to stick it to them, see who reacts.”

It was coming up on six, and McGarvey was tired.

“How about some breakfast?” Pete asked.

“Sure.”

They walked outside from the rear exit, where Pete’s car was parked. “This isn’t the end of it,” she said.

“It’s just started,” McGarvey said, mulling over the entire situation. The ISI killing Haaris’s wife made no sense, unless they had stumbled on her while waiting for Haaris to show up. But if that had been the case the operation had been incredibly sloppy, unlike the one off Casey Key. It was an anomaly, something he neither trusted nor liked, except that anomalies usually pointed to something, some direction no one expected.

They drove over to a Panera Bread restaurant.

“He wasn’t distraught,” Pete said before they got out of the car.

“They wanted him, but they took out his wife instead.”

On the surface it made no sense. The situation was almost the same as one he’d encountered on his first wet assignment for the CIA at the beginning of his career. He’d been sent to Chile to kill a general who’d ordered the murders of thousands of innocent civilians. But when he got to the general’s compound in the middle of the night, the general was making love to his wife. The alarm had been sounded and McGarvey had only seconds to react. Out of necessity he had assassinated both of them.

Later he had beaten himself up thinking about the woman, until he’d learned that she’d fancied herself a devotee of Joseph Mengele’s wife — the Nazi who’d personally butchered thousands of Jews. Mengeles’s wife had many of the victims’ skin removed, had tanned the pieces — most often taken from their backs — and had painted pictures on some of them and made lampshades from others. She was as monstrous as her husband. As was the wife of the Chilean general, and she’d deserved to die. But McGarvey had never gotten over it.

“I held his hand for a few seconds,” Pete said. “I could feel his pulse. It should have been fast, but it wasn’t. His heart rate was that of a man at peace with himself. What do you make of that?”

McGarvey went back to Pete’s apartment with her, where he sacked out on the couch for a few hours. It was against his better wishes to get her involved, but she’d at least had a half night’s sleep and she kept watch.

Otto called at a little after eleven as Pete was fixing them an early light lunch. He took the call at a window of her second-floor apartment from which he could look down at the street. But the traffic seemed normal. No one lurking in a doorway or on a rooftop with the glint of sunlight off the lens of a scope.

“Page has been trying to get in touch with you all morning and so has Marty. Broderick has been putting a lot of pressure on us. They want you to act right now. The situation in Islamabad is starting to spin out of control. None of the EU countries are in any hurry to return their embassy staffs, and from what Austin is sending us, it looks as if Taliban committees are being set up at all the key governmental offices, and more importantly, at all the major air force and navy bases. The bases where nuclear weapons are being mated for deployment.”

“Has Haaris briefed the president yet?”

“He went over there around ten, And so far as I know he hasn’t returned,” Otto said. “The metro cops were all over his wife’s murder, but he knows someone at the Bureau who took over the case. And he’s agreed to be interviewed, but only briefly, so that he can get on with his work.”

“Anything new from your analysis of the Messiah’s voice?”

“It was the same guy who spoke at the Presidential Palace. But my darlings are having a tough time re-creating the original voice. Whatever equipment he used was well above the over-the-counter Radio Shack lash-up. Professional-grade stuff. Shit that only a government is likely to come up with.”

“The Pakistani embassy is hosting a cocktail party for diplomats tonight. Get me a pass for it.”

Pete had come to the kitchen door in time to hear McGarvey’s request. “Me too,” she said.

McGarvey started to object, but Otto overheard her.

“She’ll be good cover,” he said. “Anyway, two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. And they’ve promised to have the new prime minister there. He’s flying in this afternoon.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.”

“Will Page be there?”

“No, but Fay and his wife will be.”

“Black tie, I assume,” Pete said after McGarvey hung up.

“Of course.”

“I can hardly wait.”

TWENTY-THREE

The main reception hall of the Pakistani embassy was packed with more than 250 people, a significant portion of the top diplomats in the city, almost all from nations that did regular business with Islamabad. A long buffet table was spread out along one side of the large circular room. White-coated waiters moved through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres, sweet mint tea in small cups and glasses of Dom Pérignon.

McGarvey in a tux and Pete in a simple black over-one-shoulder cocktail dress and a tasteful diamond necklace stood to one side of the entry, sipping champagne. Neither of them was armed.

“I haven’t spotted Haaris yet,” Pete said.

“It’s going to be interesting to see Haaris’s reaction if and when he does show up,” McGarvey said. “Especially if he publicly pins the blame for his wife’s murder on the ISI.”

“It still doesn’t make sense to me that he could think the ISI was behind it. Otto has the recordings of him talking with General Rajput, and they seemed like old friends, or at least allies. And it was the ISI who supposedly rescued him from his Taliban captors.”

“He changed his tune this morning.”

“A strange man,” Pete said. “Did you know that he was born in Pakistan?”

“Otto said something about it. His parents were killed when he was very young, and a rug-merchant uncle brought him to London and put him in the best schools, including Eton.”

“When he came to us he was a British citizen. But what’s most curious to me is that he was willing to share what he learned with the British Secret Intelligence Service. Technically made him a traitor.”

“I’ve not seen his entire jacket yet.”

“I have and you need to look at it soon,” Pete said. “Read between the lines. The guy is filled with hate for what they did to him as a kid in school.”

“British public schools are notorious, but they’ve graduated some pretty substantial people.”

Pete looked up at him. “You’re playing devil’s advocate again.”

“I guess I am. I don’t trust him either, but just because he was used hard as a kid in school, and he’s filled with hate, as you say, doesn’t make him bad. Nor does the fact that he was born in Pakistan, and raised by an uncle, make him suspect.”

“But?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. And he really didn’t. “But before I pack my bags I’m going to press him. Maybe Otto’s right about him.”

“My God, you’re not seriously thinking about going over there to take out the Messiah?”

“I don’t think that even a SEAL Team Six unit with all the right intel and a lot of luck could do it. And get back out.”

“That’s not what I asked, Mac,” Pete pressed. She took his arm. “No screwing around now. What the president wants you to do is crazy.”

“Less crazy than sending troops over there.”

John Fay and his wife came over. “Mr. McGarvey, your name came up again in a strategy session this afternoon,” the secretary of state said. He was of the old school of diplomats, among the last of a certain class defined by breeding, refinement and intelligence.

“I imagine it did,” McGarvey said, and he introduced Pete as a CIA special projects officer.

“A serious title,” Jeanne Fay said. “If it implies what I expect it must.”

“There’ve been interesting moments,” Pete said, smiling pleasantly.

“Excuse us, ladies, but I’d like to take Mr. McGarvey aside for just a minute or two,” Fay said.

“Miss Boylan is privy to everything that I’ve done or have been asked to do over the past couple of years,” McGarvey said.

Fay was just a little vexed, but he didn’t press. “Have you come to a decision? The president is running out of viable options.”

“Like the situation when Russia invaded the Ukraine?” Pete asked.

“Worse. Kiev had no nuclear weapons and not much of a military.”

“They’re not going to start a nuclear war,” McGarvey said.

“Did you see the Messiah’s latest broadcast?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think?”

“I was surprised that he was inviting everyone back — especially us,” McGarvey said. “Our taking out a significant portion of their weapons had to be viewed as an act of war.”

“Yet there has been no mention of it, officially or unofficially,” Fay said. “What do you make of that?”

“I’m not a political analyst, Mr. Secretary. Just a tool.”

“At this point a very important tool. The question is, will you do it?”

It dawned on McGarvey that Fay was frightened, but it was impossible to tell if the secretary of state was more frightened of the situation in Pakistan or of the president’s decision to have an assassin kill the Messiah. “Do what?”

“Don’t be crude, Mr. McGarvey. The order was put on the table, and you are a volunteer. You can either carry it out or simply turn your back and walk away. Though from what I understand happened in Florida, the latter might not be an option for you.”

“Do you think something like that will happen again if Mr. McGarvey turns down the assignment?” Pete asked.

“You don’t think that it’s a good idea?”

“I think it’s stupid.”

Fay smiled faintly. “As a matter of fact, so do I. To this point Pakistan has shown no aggression towards us.”

“They want our financial support,” McGarvey said. He was fascinated with the secretary’s verbal maneuvering.

“Shahid has called for a continued cease-fire, in this instance with no time limits.” Shahidullah Shahid was the primary spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the organization of militants in the country.

“I would think that’s good news. Are we sending Powers back to Islamabad?”

“He leaves in the next day or two.”

“What’s his brief?”

“To open a dialogue with the new prime minister, whoever he turns out to be,” Fay said.

“Will Powers be here tonight?” Pete asked.

“No, Miss Boylan, for reasons that should be obvious to you and Mr. McGarvey.”

Pete started to say something, but McGarvey held her off. “Has he been told what the president suggested?”

Fay hesitated. “No.”

McGarvey had never considered himself a political animal, but he’d seen equal amounts of what he took to be brilliance and sheer idiocy coming from just about every office in Washington and the Beltway, including the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House.

“Every time we’ve had one agenda for an ambassador and another either for our military or intelligence services, it’s almost always turned out for the worse. I would have thought that you guys understood that by now. Especially after Benghazi and the aftermath.”

“One mistake.”

“Supplying bin Laden and his fighters with Stinger missiles to use against the Taliban — after which they were and still are used against us. Going into Iraq with no intention of rebuilding their infrastructure. Getting bogged down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. The list isn’t endless, Mr. Secretary, but it’s long.”

Fay took a moment to answer. “Mistakes have been made, but we do what we can do. Have you never made an error?”

“Plenty,” McGarvey said.

There was a flurry across the room. The Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Idrees Burki, came to the middle of the room and held up a hand. The guests fell silent. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present to you the new prime minister of Pakistan, General Hasan Rajput.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Rajput, dressed in a British-cut dove-gray suit, with a blue dress shirt of horizontal white stripes and a plain gray tie, shook hands with Ambassador Burki and then turned to face the crowd, his eyes lingering one by one on the guests.

McGarvey stepped to one side so that Fay wasn’t blocking his line of sight to Rajput, and the new PM spotted him, with no hint of recognition.

“Who is he?” Fay asked.

“Until two days ago he was the general in charge of the ISI’s Covert Operations Division,” McGarvey said.

“I’ll be damned,” Fay replied, and he started forward, but McGarvey laid a hand on his arm.

“Just a minute, Mr. Secretary. What are you going to say to him?”

“I’ll merely introduce myself. It’s customary in these circumstances.”

Other diplomats approached Rajput and the Pakistani ambassador, forming what amounted to a receiving line.

“You have a little time yet. And considering what our SEAL teams did to their weapons, and the loss of lives on both sides — none of which has been made public — it might be better if you didn’t get to him first.”

“I thought that you weren’t a political animal.”

“I’m not, but first I want to see if Dave Haaris shows up.”

Fay gave him a sharp look. “He blames the ISI for murdering his wife. He wouldn’t dare show his face here.”

“Well, he just walked in the door,” Pete said.

Haaris, perfectly dressed in what was obviously an expensive tuxedo, an unreadable expression on his face though his lips were set in a tight smile, stopped to get a glass of champagne from a waiter then headed across the room to where the receiving line was forming.

He passed McGarvey and Pete without acknowledging them but nodded to the secretary of state and his wife. “Mr. Secretary, good to see you here this evening,” he said without pausing.

“Stay here, Mr. Secretary,” McGarvey said, and he headed after Haaris, Pete at his side.

“What are you going to say to him?” she asked.

“Depends on what he says to Rajput. But no matter what, I want the new PM to get a good look at my face.”

“He’s probably read your file.”

“Yeah, but I want him to see me in person,” McGarvey said.

Pete stopped him. “You’re going through with it.”

“I don’t know yet,” McGarvey said, though that wasn’t exactly the truth.

He hurried to catch up as Haaris walked straight to Rajput and the ambassador, bypassing the line. Both men looked up with interest.

“David, I didn’t expect to see you here this evening,” Rajput said. He introduced Haaris to the ambassador, who offered his hand, but Haaris ignored it.

“I thought not, considering that your people tried to have me killed last night.”

A hush spread across the big room. McGarvey and Pete stood only a couple of feet behind Haaris.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Rajput said.

The ambassador said something to the new PM that McGarvey didn’t quite catch. The look of puzzlement on Rajput’s face turned to sadness.

“But that’s terrible news about your wife. You’ve often spoken to me about her. But I can give you my word of honor that I knew nothing about such an attack. And I’m in a position to know about such things.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Pete whispered in McGarvey’s ear.

“So far as he knows it.”

“You’re a liar,” Haaris said. Shock rippled across the room.

The look on Rajput’s face didn’t change. “You’re distraught, David. You don’t know what you’re saying.” He reached out a hand but Haaris batted it aside.

“But you’ve made a terrible mistake, General. I have the president’s ear, and she agrees with me that the Messiah is an ISI creation, and that Pakistan is surely sliding toward nuclear war.”

“Insanity.”

“Yes, it is, only this time Pakistan has miscalculated my country’s intentions.”

Fay struggled through the crowd, elbowing past McGarvey and Pete. “Pardon me, Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Ambassador, but Mr. Haaris does not speak for the president.”

Haaris turned on him. “Pakistan is no friend of the United States. And it’s time that the president understands it.”

“If you rightly remember it was under my direction that you were rescued from the Taliban,” Rajput said.

“More of your intrigue, General.”

“Why in Allah’s name would I want to cause your death? You’re making no sense.”

Haaris stepped closer. “I can guarantee you, General, that the United States will do more to your regime under this dictator you call the Messiah than simply neutralize most of your nuclear weapons. Perhaps I’ll be flying to New Delhi in the very near future.”

The ambassador motioned to someone and almost instantly two large men in plain Western business suits arrived.

“Mr. Haaris was just leaving,” the ambassador said. “Please show him out.”

“He was just leaving with us,” McGarvey said.

The entire room was silent.

“I will of course lodge a formal protest,” the ambassador told Fay.

“I understand,” Fay said.

“Time to go,” McGarvey prompted.

Haaris glared at Rajput, but then turned and stalked across the room, the crowd parting for him.

“Someone tried to kill me too, Mr. Prime Minister,” McGarvey said. “Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“We all have enemies.”

“Yes, and you should keep it in mind.”

Fay started to say something, but McGarvey nodded pleasantly. “Mr. Secretary. Gentlemen.”

Haaris was waiting for the valet parker to bring his car when McGarvey and Pete came out.

“I didn’t expect to see you two here,” he said. He had a grim set to his features.

“We were waiting for you to show up,” McGarvey said.

“I don’t think I made Fay happy. I’ll be surprised if I keep my job.”

“Walt Page will probably want to have a word with you first thing in the morning. He’ll need an explanation.”

“I thought that would be obvious. I was provoking the bastard.”

“He was your friend,” Pete said.

“No, but I was mining him.”

“A two-way street,” McGarvey said.

“You know how the game is played. I’ve fed him some hand-crafted disinformation and he’s done the same for me.”

“A zero-sum game,” Pete said. “No one wins.”

A faint smile played at the corners of Haaris’s mouth. “Ah, but I’m smarter than he is. That’s how the game is played in the majors.”

His S-class Mercedes arrived, and he tipped the valet and drove off.

“The entire thing was staged,” McGarvey said.

“How do you mean?”

“The PM and ambassador spoke English the entire time for our benefit.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Pete had parked her car around the corner from McGarvey’s brownstone, and when they reached it she hesitated. The night was early and there was a fair amount of traffic, but nothing suspicious, just the usual weekday flow.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she said.

She’d been quiet ever since they’d left the Pakistani embassy. “What’s the matter?”

“The willies, I guess,” she said. “I keep looking over my shoulder expecting to see someone gaining on me.”

“No one on our tail tonight.”

She smiled. “I meant it metaphorically.”

They were double-parked, and a cabby passing them honked his horn.

“Do you want me to follow you home?”

“Only if you’ll come up with me and spend the night,” she said. “But I have to warn you that my fridge is mostly empty, so we’d have to eat out.”

“You can stay with me. I’ll take the couch and you can have the bed.”

“Switch the sleeping arrangements and it’s a deal.”

McGarvey drove around the block and found a spot two doors down from his apartment. Something of Pete’s willies had transferred to him, and he was especially careful with his tradecraft. His apartment was swept every week, but after the incident at the embassy he figured that both he and Haaris were fair game. It was exactly what he wanted. This time when someone came calling he would do everything in his power to take him alive.

Upstairs Pete took off her cocktail dress and put on one of McGarvey’s long-sleeved shirts. While he was changing out of his tuxedo she made them bacon and eggs and toast, and opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge. They sat at the small table in the kitchen.

“I’ve haven’t cooked for a man in a long time,” Pete said.

“You were married, weren’t you?”

She smiled a little. “It didn’t work out the way I thought it would. Probably because I was too much of a romantic. Still am, I suppose.” She sipped her wine. “Fairy tales. Ride off into the sunset, all of that. Just like the end of An Officer and Gentleman.”

“Katy loved the movie too,” McGarvey said. She’d made him watch it one Sunday afternoon at their place on Casey Key. Afterward they made love, a sea breeze coming in from the Gulf. Happy times.

“From what I know of her, I expect she did.”

McGarvey looked away.

Pete reached across the table and laid a hand on his. “It wasn’t your fault, Kirk. I read the file. They wanted to stop you and they were willing to do whatever it took.”

“I understood Todd’s death. He got involved with something and they killed him for it. In the line of duty. He understood it when he held up his hand and took the oath. But Katy and our daughter were senseless. The only reason they died was because of me. Not because of something they were involved with, just me.”

“So you’re still beating yourself up?”

“No. I evened the score for them, but it’s happened before. Too often.”

“And you’re afraid that I’m next?”

“I know you are,” McGarvey said.

“My tradecraft is pretty fair. And I’m a good shot.”

“I know that too.”

“You let me tag along to the embassy tonight. So what’s your point? Do you want me involved, or do you want to keep me locked up somewhere until this business is finished? I’m a field officer. If you don’t want me in this thing that’s your prerogative. But if you don’t want me to be involved with you, you’re out of luck. Fact of the matter is, I love you, and I have a feeling that if you would admit it for just a New York minute you’d realize that you were in love with me.”

But he didn’t have a New York minute. He wouldn’t allow himself the introspection, even though he had to admit that he would have been in big trouble off Casey Key if she hadn’t taken the shot. “Not yet.”

“You mean not this time. But you’re going to Pakistan, and if you survive there’ll be another time. And another. It’s what you do, who you are. One of the reasons I fell in love with you in the first place.”

“Leave it be, Pete.”

“I can’t. So now it comes down to, am I going to Pakistan with you, or am I staying here in Washington?”

McGarvey had given that question a lot of thought over the past day or so, in part because he hadn’t entirely made up his mind to take what would be the most impossible assignment of his life, but also because he knew that he would have to give Pete an answer that made sense to her.

“If I go, Otto will have to backstop me, and the ISI will know it. To stop me they’ll go after Louise, and Otto will have to jump in and they’ll get him too. I’ll need you here to ride shotgun for both of them.”

Pete wanted to object, but she couldn’t and it was obvious from her expression. She nodded.

McGarvey telephoned Otto and brought him up to date.

“Interesting choice for PM.”

“Dave Haaris showed up.”

“I expected he would,” Otto said. “Was he surprised by Rajput? They worked together for the past couple of years.”

“He didn’t seem to be; in fact he publicly accused the ISI of murdering his wife.”

“Let me guess, he even told them that he was going to change his policy advice on Pakistan.”

“Something like that. Anyway, the ambassador tossed him out, and John Fay made his apologies.”

“What about you?” Otto asked.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not like you, Mac.”

“I’m still figuring out how to find this Messiah, whoever the hell he is, and then get the hell out with my hide intact.”

“Are you coming over in the morning?”

“I’m going to stick it out here, take a run in the park, and pack a few things for Casey Key.”

“With a big target painted on your back.”

Pete took a shower first and over McGarvey’s objections made up the couch. “I’ll get out of here first thing in the morning,” she said. “I want to have a little talk with Haaris.”

“Do you want me to drive over with you?”

“I’m a big girl, but thanks for putting me up for the night.”

After his shower he took a turn at the front window for a few minutes to make sure no one was out there. Pete was apparently already sleeping, because she didn’t look up. And ten minutes later he was just drifting off, when she came to the bedroom door.

“It’s me,” she said softly, as he automatically reached for the pistol on the nightstand.

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sleeping alone tonight,” she said. She took off the shirt and slipped into bed with him. “Don’t send me away.”

She came into his arms, and her softness, her breasts, the feel of her legs against his, her breath on his face as she kissed him, were as good as he’d imagined they would be. And they made love, slowly, elegantly, even though he could feel the same urgency in her as he felt in himself. And in the end he almost lost his fear for her life.

TWENTY-SIX

Pete got up shortly before dawn and after she got dressed she went back into the bedroom, where McGarvey was lying awake. “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said. She’d not slept well the entire night, worrying about him going into badland.

“I’m usually up by now.”

“Not at five in the morning, liar.”

“Do you want me to follow you back to your place?”

“No, but I’m going to borrow one of your guns, just in case. I want to get to the Campus before Dave Haaris does.”

McGarvey sat up and handed her the Walther he usually kept by his bedside. “Watch the corners.”

“Yeah,” she said, stuffing the small pistol into her purse. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for last night, Kirk.”

“It was a two-way street,” he said. “Why the hurry to talk to Haaris this morning?”

“I want to know why a man like him is so eager to get back to work even before his wife is in the ground.” The instant the words left her lips she realized what she had just said and to whom she had said them. “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ever be sorry for asking a legitimate question. I’ve asked myself the same thing for a long time now, and the best I could come up with is revenge. Plain and simple. Get the bastards who did it.”

Pete sat on the edge of the bed. She could feel heat coming off his body, and the sight of him so close, his chest bare, started to arouse her. Sometimes field officers who were in love backed each other up when all hell was raining down on their heads, but too often their feelings put them in danger. They dove in to save someone who could not be saved and lost their lives or their freedom.

“Something’s not right with him. Working with Rajput and then suddenly accusing him of ordering the killing? Especially like that in public. What was he trying to accomplish?”

“He was pushing the general to see what kind of a reaction he’d get.”

“He got nothing, at least nothing as far as I could tell.”

“Haaris is a professional.”

“So am I,” Pete said. “Everything I’ve seen in his jacket gives him high marks. Page says the guy’s sophisticated. Old-world educated. Last night’s display was anything but. I want to know why.”

“Maybe I should go in with you.”

Pete shook her head. “Let’s keep up normal routines. It’s my job for the Company to find out what’s eating people. Your job is to sleep in, have breakfast and take your morning run. Everything as usual.”

“I’ll come out later this morning, I need to work out a few things with Otto, and talk to Walt and probably Marty.”

Pete looked at him in the dim illumination from the night-light in the bathroom. He seemed calm, at ease with himself, despite what he was facing. This time she didn’t think it would be quite so simple for him as going up against an assassin somewhere, or even an organization, like the group who’d tried to kill all the SEAL Team Six guys who’d taken bin Laden down. That had been a German terrorist group, all ex-military special operators who’d been hired by the ISI. This time, he would be taking on an entire nation, with just about every other person over there wanting to kill him.

“I might have something to add,” she said.

“Watch your back,” McGarvey said.

“You too,” Pete told him, and she almost said “darling.”

A few doors down Pete looked over her shoulder. McGarvey was in the window watching her. She smiled and waved, then hurried around the corner to her car.

She lived close and it took less than an hour to take a quick shower and change into a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse and light jacket, before she was back to where she’d parked her car.

It was still dark, but the morning was coming alive with traffic, mostly garbage trucks, a street-sweeper machine and delivery vans for the bars and restaurants down on M Street. Nothing or no one threatening that she could detect.

She kept Mac’s pistol in her shoulder bag but laid her Glock 27 on the passenger seat as she took the Key Bridge across the river and started up the parkway to CIA headquarters.

In the east the sky was beginning to lighten, no clouds, and the trees and other vegetation along the side of the highway were lush. She’d read somewhere that because of various government projects in the past two hundred years there were more species of North American native trees here than anywhere else in the country. In the fall with the colors it was fabulous, but she preferred the full bloom of summer.

She glanced in her rearview mirror as an eighteen-wheeler, black smoke belching from its twin exhaust pipes, came up and pulled left to pass her. She got the vague impression of a figure behind the wheel and perhaps another riding shotgun. They were trying to make time, and she didn’t bother to keep up or get ahead of them even though the truck would slow down for the hill coming up less than a half mile away. Haaris probably wouldn’t be on Campus this early anyway.

The cab came even with her and she looked up into the face of a dark-skinned man with a narrow face and black hair as the truck swerved directly across the center line toward her.

On instinct she reached for her pistol, but she was forced off the side of the pavement and onto the apron before she could reach it. In the next instant her right-side wheels dropped down onto the grass strip and suddenly she was fighting to control the car.

The truck slammed into the side of her car again, sending her down a steep hill and across the drainage ditch ten feet lower. Before she could straighten out the wheels, the car tipped over on its side and continued rolling for forty yards until it broke through a swatch of bushes, finally smashing roof-first into the bole of a large tree.

For a seeming eternity she could only wonder that she was still alive — or at least she thought she was, nothing seemed to hurt but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood rolling down her face and neck.

“The fucking ISI,” she mumbled and dropped down into a dream-like state in which she was vaguely aware that she was still awake, but she couldn’t move. If the bastards who had done this wanted to come down and finish the job, she couldn’t do a thing about it.

Too bad, Kirk.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Pete’s cell phone rang once before the message came up that the call had been forwarded to an automatic message system. “It’s me, give me a call,” McGarvey said and hung up, an odd feeling between his shoulder blades that someone was taking a bead on him.

He’d phoned her apartment with no success and had left a message at her office. The automatic bar code scanner on the main gate of the Campus had not shown her arriving.

He called Otto. “Pete left here about an hour ago, and now I can’t reach her on her cell phone. The main gate says she hasn’t scanned in yet.”

“You try the back gate?”

“No reason for her to go that way.”

“Hang on.”

McGarvey went to the window and looked out toward the Rock Creek Park across Twenty-sixth Street. It was just dawn and already the morning joggers and bicyclers were out in full force.

Otto was back. “She didn’t come in that way. What are you thinking?”

“How about accidents between here and the Campus?”

“Is she still driving the three-hundred Beemer?”

“Dark green, convertible. DC plates: P-two-thirty-eight-five-seven.”

“I’m checking,” Otto said. “Was she armed?”

“I gave her one of my pistols before she left here. Presumably she still has it, and possibly the Glock from her apartment.”

“A half-dozen fender benders in the city and one accident with injuries on the Beltway down by Alexandria, but nothing on the parkway heading up here. Could be she just stopped somewhere for breakfast.”

“She wouldn’t have shut off her phone. It’s not like her.”

“Maybe she has something on her mind. Wants a little room to think it out.”

“Maybe,” McGarvey said. But that wasn’t like Pete either. If she had something to say, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Just like last night and this morning.

“Do you want me to give it to Security?”

“Just keep checking. I’m going for my run, and I’ll come out around ten. I want to talk to Walt.”

“You’re going to do it?”

“I don’t know how many other choices we have, after the obvious stage play last night,” McGarvey said. “How about Haaris?”

“He’s been with his gang all night.”

“If there was any doubt in Islamabad what our position is, he gave it away.”

“I’ll keep trying to find Pete, but watch yourself, I shit you not. Your being at the embassy last night makes you even more of a target than you were in Casey Key. Somebody figured that you might get involved so they thought they’d take you out, just in case. But now that they know you’ve jumped in, it’s not likely they’ll give it up. They’ll keep sending people until they get lucky.”

“I’m counting on it. But she was with me, so she’s a target too.”

McGarvey put on a Kevlar vest under his sleeveless sweatshirt, stuffed his Walther in his belt at the small of his back and his cell phone in his pocket, and left his apartment. He waited for a break in traffic then jogged across Twenty-sixth Street and into Rock Creek Park, which ran from the Potomac up to Oak Hill Cemetery, where it blended with Montrose Park and finally the National Zoological Park.

This was a favorite place for him. In Florida he swam in the Gulf and ran on the beach. Here he jogged every morning he possibly could in the park. It was his habit, his routine. Anyone who had him under surveillance for even a short length of time knew it.

More than once in the past few years he’d been attacked while he ran along the river. It was like going fishing. He tossed in the bait and waited for the strike. And just like real fish, the guys wanting to take him out never seemed to learn from each other’s mistakes.

But Otto was right: Sooner or later they’d either send enough people to make the odds overwhelming. Or a decent sniper hiding somewhere across the creek would get lucky with a head shot.

Once he was on the path he took a fighter’s stance, bobbing and weaving as he ran, air boxing, ducking left and right, slipping punches. This too was sometimes part of his routine. It kept him loose. Other joggers had their own styles, and no one thought anyone else was odd. They were all out here for the same thing, to stay healthy. Though he figured that this morning no one else but him would be a target for some hitman.

He crossed under the Rock Creek Parkway so that he could take the path along the creek. A few hundred yards north he came to the P Street Bridge, where he pulled up and shadowboxed in place.

For a moment he stopped moving. Cocking his head he listened to the sounds of the building traffic, under which was the soft gurgle of water over rocks, and somewhere a dog barking, a horn tapping twice.

No one had followed him nor had there been anyone obviously keeping just ahead of him. Nor had he spotted anyone seated at one of the picnic benches or lurking in the trees.

A shot from a rooftop to the west in Georgetown was certainly possible. But if a sniper had been set up there waiting for him to come out of his apartment, he could have taken the shot almost immediately. To the east toward Dupont Circle most of the sight lines to his position were partially blocked by trees.

If he was going to do it, he would be somewhere in the park, or in a car or van driving along the parkway. But traffic was still not heavy, and McGarvey had not spotted anyone suspicious passing by.

He turned and started back. It was possible that a sharp ISI analyst had worked out the likelihood that he would actually come to Islamabad. He’d been there before. They knew him, they knew what he looked like, how he moved.

Taking him out here would be chancy. Florida was easier. Running him over in the water could be defended as an accident. Inexperienced boaters not spotting a head in the waves; accidents like that had happened before.

And that same analyst could also have come to the conclusion that if McGarvey was running in the park, after the incident in Florida, he would be offering himself as a target in order to catch the gunman. A possibly no-win outcome if the shooter missed, because despite opposition to what the Company called enhanced methods of interrogation, such methods were still used when necessary. If McGarvey captured an ISI contractor, the truth would come out.

Still weaving and bobbing as he ran, McGarvey reached the parkway when his cell phone rang. It was Otto.

“I found her. She’s banged up but not seriously. They’re taking her to All Saints right now.”

A cool, dispassionate anger came over him. “What happened?”

“I sent a chopper up to find her. Looks like she was forced off the road a few miles south of our front gate. She rolled down the hill and up against a tree. No one could see her from the parkway because of the heavy brush.”

McGarvey jogged across the road. “Is she conscious?”

“Our guys who got to her first said she was in and out. Lots of blood but it looked like superficial scalp wounds. Could be a concussion but we won’t know until Franklin takes a look at her.”

“I’m going to change clothes and get over there. Tell Page I’m taking the president’s assignment.”

“The ISI will spot you the minute you get off the plane.”

“No. they won’t,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

It was after ten by the time Franklin came out of the operating theater on the second floor and walked down to talk to McGarvey in the waiting room at the end of the hall.

“She’ll have a couple of black eyes and a lot of bruising on her legs and thighs, but there were no broken bones nor any brain trauma.”

“She’s hardheaded.”

Franklin shook his head. “You all are,” he said. “How’s Dave Haaris doing?”

“He’s back at work.”

“Too bad about his wife on top of his own problem.” Franklin shook his head again. “I don’t see how you guys do it. Patching you up is a hell of a lot easier job.”

“When can I see her?”

“They’re cleaning her up now. She wants to go home, but I’m keeping her overnight just to be on the safe side. You can try to talk some sense into her as soon as they get her up to her room. I don’t want her getting dressed and walking out of here.”

McGarvey went up to Pete’s room on the third floor as soon as she was wheeled up from the operating theater. Her smile was lopsided but she was as glad to see him as he was to see her. He kissed her lightly on her cheek.

“Franklin says you’ll be okay, but he’s keeping you overnight.”

“Not a chance in hell,” Pete said, her voice a little slurred.

“I’m taking your old clothes, they’re a mess, and bringing you some clean clothes and some other stuff in the morning. You’ll be staying on Campus for the time being. They tried to take you out to make me think twice.”

“You’ve decided?”

“No other choice,” McGarvey said, and an expression he couldn’t read came over Pete’s face.

TWENTY-EIGHT

McGarvey passed the spot where Pete’s car was forced off the road, broad furrows cut in the grassy slope all the way down into the bush and trees that no passing motorist had spotted. The ISI — and now he was almost 100 percent certain it was they — had tried to kill her to get to him. And from their point of view it had been the right thing to do, given his history. But if they had meant to distract him by a repeat performance of something that had happened to him three times before — killing someone very close to him — they were dead wrong.

Vengeance hadn’t worked for them when they’d sent a German assassination squad to the U.S. to kill all the SEAL Team Six operators who had taken out bin Laden. But here and now for McGarvey, vengeance was a powerful motivator.

He was given a VIP pass at the main gate and he drove up to the Old Headquarters Building and parked in the basement garage. The elevator stopped at the security station on the first floor, where he had to surrender his weapon before he was issued a pass that allowed him access to just about every office on the entire campus. Many former DCI’s retained that badging privilege because they often worked in unpublicized advisory capacities. And every time McGarvey walked through the door, the security people welcomed him back.

He’d phoned ahead and Walt Page was waiting for him upstairs on the seventh floor. The DCI’s secretary passed him straight through. No one else was present. It was just the two of them, as McGarvey had insisted be the case.

“How’s Miss Boylan?” Page asked.

“Banged up but not serious. Franklin’s keeping her overnight to make sure. I’m going to bring her out here soon as she’s released, have Security keep an eye on her.”

“Good idea.”

“Were you told what happened at the Pakistani embassy last night?”

“John Fay filled me in. Said that you and Miss Boylan were there too. Are you going to tell me that the attack on her this morning had something to do with what went on there?”

“I think that the ISI wants to keep me out of the mix. It’s why they tried to kill me in Florida, and it’s why they went after Pete — to distract me. Have you seen Dave this morning?”

“I wanted to talk to you first. Susan Kalley called from the White House, wanting to know what the hell happened. The president is ready to discount just about everything Dave’s told her. And she’s pulling the records of every meeting he had with her, even during her campaign.”

“What’ll she find?”

“Nothing but solid advice, so far as I know. But his wife’s murder has hit him very hard. I’m thinking about putting him on administrative leave.”

“Might not be a bad idea, but give it a day or so. I’m going to talk to him this morning.”

“You don’t trust him.”

“No,” McGarvey said. Both he and Pete had got the strong impression that Haaris’s performance last night had been staged, and he said as much to Page.

“You and Otto think that he might be the Messiah,” the director said. “But it could be that you’re cherry-picking him. Focusing on every little bit that supports your notion while discounting everything else. Suppose it was an intruder, a burglar, who his wife surprised, and not a hitman sent by the ISI?”

“The ISI didn’t kill her, nor did a burglar.”

“Who then?”

“He did it.”

Page sat back. “Good Lord almighty. Do you have proof?”

“No, but their marriage could have been a front all along. Could be she walked in on something he was doing or saying that she wasn’t suppose to know about. He wouldn’t have had much of a choice.”

Page’s secretary buzzed him. He picked up the phone. “Not now.” But then he looked at McGarvey. “Dave Haaris would like to have a word with you as soon as possible.”

“Five minutes,” McGarvey said.

Page gave his secretary the message and hung up.

“As soon as Dave Haaris disappears I think the Messiah will show up. But it won’t happen until the staff at the Presidential Palace has been purged of everyone who supported Barazani, including just about everyone in the compound.”

“It’s not been in the news yet, but the purge has already started. Quietly, but it won’t be long before word of it gets out.”

“I’m going down to talk to him now.” McGarvey got up and went to the door. “When does our ambassador and his staff leave for Islamabad?”

“Two days.”

“You’re a friend of Fay’s. Have him include me in the delegation.”

“Not a chance they’d take you. And even if they did you’d be recognized the moment you got off the plane.”

“I’ll be an assistant to the military attaché. Different name, different appearance. No one will recognize me.”

“Once you’re there, then what?”

“I’m going to kill the Messiah.”

A haggard-looking Dave Haaris was alone in his office reading a summary report on the developing situation in Islamabad that had been sent down to him from the Watch, when McGarvey was buzzed through.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” Haaris said. “I want to apologize to you personally for my behavior last night. I wasn’t myself.”

“No need to apologize to me, but you might want to have a word with the Pakistani ambassador and with your old friend Rajput, who’s filed a formal complaint with the White House.”

“I’m rather afraid that I’ve lost the ear of the president.”

“What was the point of confronting Rajput so publicly?” McGarvey asked. “What sort of a reaction were you looking for?”

Haaris took a moment to answer. “The general has never been a friend of mine, old or new, but I have met with him a sufficient number of times to have made a measure of the man. And there’ve been the odd psych reports, which contained some nuggets. But I didn’t get what I was looking for. Either he’s a better liar than I thought he was or he truly knows nothing about my wife’s assassination.”

“So now what?”

“Deborah is being cremated this afternoon, and I’m taking her ashes to London. She thought it would be elegant if her remains were to be spread on the Thames. Actually, she’d always thought it would be both of us. Mine because she thought I wanted to go home, and hers because she wanted to be with me.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tonight. Since I’m no longer required to be at the White House, I thought I’d see some old friends at the SIS and get their take on the situation. Pass it along to my people here.”

“What about the Messiah?”

“What about him?” Haaris asked.

“The president has asked me to assassinate him.”

Haaris was taken aback. “How extraordinary.”

“The same order was given for bin Laden.”

“I meant how extraordinary that you would tell me such a thing, unless you firmly believe that I’m the Messiah.”

“Where did you hear that?”

Haaris smiled. “Good heavens, you were the director of Central Intelligence once upon a time. Didn’t you learn as DCI that there are more leaks here on Campus than there are in a peasant’s roof?”

“I could ask you who you heard it from.”

“I don’t recall, but perhaps it was from Miss Boylan. We had a chat a couple of days ago, she might have mentioned it. I understand that she was involved in an automobile accident this morning. How is she?”

“Dead,” McGarvey said.

TWENTY-NINE

McGarvey went back up to Page’s office, where he briefed the director on his conversation with Haaris.

“I’ll have Tommy Boyle put a tail on him,” Page said. Boyle was the CIA’s London chief of station and a friend of Haaris’s. “But I don’t understand the part about Miss Boylan.”

“As long as most everyone thinks she’s dead, she’ll stop being a target,” McGarvey said.

“If Marty’s in on it he’ll want to use her as an asset.”

“I don’t want to worry about her, so keep Marty out of it.”

“I understand how you feel,” Page said. “But she’s a capable field officer who’s proved her worth on more than one occasion. From what I understand she was of some assistance to you in Florida a few days ago.”

“Have our media people pass it along to the Virginia Highway Patrol. They can make the announcement that one of our officers was killed in a car crash on the parkway. It was an unfortunate accident.”

“I’ll do it, but you’re the only one who’ll be able to convince her to lie low.”

“Have you talked to Fay yet?”

“I was waiting until you spoke with Haaris. You still mean to go through with the president’s request?”

“Like I said, Walt, I don’t think we have much of a choice.”

“You understand that this won’t be like the bin Laden op. You’ll be totally on your own. If you’re captured or taken out, we’ll deny your orders. And I got that directly from Kalley. Not in so many words, of course, but her meaning was clear.”

“I’ll have Otto send up a passport name, photo and number later today or first thing in the morning. You can tell Fay to tell the ambassador that I’m a CIA officer, but I’ll be tagging along purely as an observer.”

“What about our station staff at the embassy?”

“I don’t want to interact with them unless it becomes necessary. If this thing goes south I want Austin to stay in the clear.”

“I suppose if I briefed Carlton he would say that you had finally gone completely out of your mind,” Page said. “And I’d have to agree with him.” Carlton Patterson was a longtime admirer of McGarvey’s.

“You’re right, so don’t bother him,” McGarvey said.

“One of these days when you walk out of this office you won’t come back.”

“You’re almost certainly right about that too. But it’s what I signed up for at the beginning.”

“Take care of yourself, Mac.”

Otto was in his office monitoring the same feeds from Pakistan that the Watch was receiving when McGarvey showed up.

“Louise has been bugging me about Pete. How’s she doing?” Louise and Pete had become fast friends over the past couple of years.

“She’ll be okay. I’m bringing her out here first thing in the morning as soon as Franklin releases her.”

Otto had to laugh. “Do you think she’s going to stand for it — putting her on ice so you don’t have to worry about the pretty little woman? I can just hear what she’ll say about that move. Even Louise will think you’re nuts.”

On the feed was the image of a stern-looking man in traditional Punjabi dress, seated behind a desk, the national flag behind him, the translation of what he was saying in a crawl across the bottom of the monitor.

“Shahidullah Shahid,” Otto said, “official spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. He’s been speaking for the past hour and a half about unity. But it’s not so important who he is but where he is.”

“Could be anywhere.”

“The Aiwan,” Otto said. “In fact he’s seated at the president’s desk.”

“The ISI has finished its purge.”

“Mostly a bloodless coup so far, except for Barazani.”

“Any sign of the Messiah?”

“Not yet, and Shahid hasn’t even mentioned him, at least not by name. But he admits that he’s not the only man in charge of the government. And if Haaris is the Messiah, all we have to do is keep a tight rein on him, which shouldn’t be so tough so long as he stays in Washington.”

“He’s taking his wife’s ashes to London tonight. Says that she wanted them to be spread on the Thames. Page will have Tommy Boyle put someone on him.”

“Okay, same difference. As long as we can see him anywhere but Islamabad he won’t be able to get into much mischief.”

“I need a new ID set — driver’s license, credit cards, passport, family photos, medical insurance card. I don’t want to use ones I’ve already fielded.”

“By when?”

“In the morning at the latest. Page is going to get me a slot on Power’s team when they return to Islamabad. Should be tomorrow or the day after.”

“Everybody knows your face, so we’ll need to change it. Saul Landesberg over in Technical Services is about the best around. I’ll give him the heads-up. When do you want to do it?”

“Now. I want to see how it plays here first, because if it doesn’t I’ll have to find another way.”

Otto gave him a long, odd look but picked up the phone and called Technical Services. “Saul, Otto. I have a job for an old friend. But this would have to be totally off the grid. And quick. Like right now.”

Landesberg was a short, slightly built man with thinning fair hair and wide, serious eyes, who seemed to have a perpetual broad smile plastered on his wide face. He’d cleared the two technicians from his small studio before McGarvey and Otto showed up.

“Judging from Otto’s call, I thought it might be you, Mr. Director, but I didn’t breathe a word to anyone. Where are we off to?”

McGarvey had never actually met the man, but he’d heard of him. He’d been named by a number of NOCs as the “Artist.”

“Pakistan, in a couple of days,” McGarvey said.

“Good Lord, not as a Paki? You’re too damned big.”

“No, I’m going in with our embassy staff as an observer.”

“So everyone will know that you work for the CIA but as a wonk, not a spook. An intellectual. An academic. Maybe Harvard or some such on contract to the Intelligence Directorate.”

He had McGarvey take off his jacket and shirt, and sat him down in a swiveling salon chair in front of a bank of mirrors, some of them reflecting close-up views of McGarvey’s face, neck and upper torso.

“Do we have a name?” he said, brushing his fingers though McGarvey’s hair. Feeling the structure of his forehead, cheeks, nose, chin. Peering into his eyes.

“Travis Parks.”

“Dr. Parks. Cultural anthropology, but only as the first layer of your cover. It’s a subject almost nobody knows anything about. Your real specialty, of course, is government studies. You’re on board to take a close look at what’s really happening in Islamabad. Friend or foe.”

Landesberg shut off the lights in the mirrors so that they went blank. “We’ll make you a little older, gray at the sides, shorter hair. Do you tolerate contacts?”

“I don’t want to fuzz out if I’m in the middle of a shooting situation,” McGarvey said.

“No contacts. Gray green it is. A little broader nose, thicker eyebrows, heavier cheeks, maybe a jutting chin. Sallow complexion. A little sagging of your jowls, a few wrinkles on your neck, same complexion on your chest and back, gray hair. Nothing over the top, but cumulatively the effect should be enough that your own mother wouldn’t recognize you, and yet you’ll have complete mobility.” Landesberg laughed. “Won’t run or fall off. You’ll even be able to take a cozy shower for two.”

THIRTY

Haaris never had trouble adjusting to time zone changes. His body clock was on U.S. eastern, where it was one in the morning, while it was six in the morning when he arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport. He’d only napped for an hour or so, but walking through the concourse to Immigration Control he was alert.

Several international flights had arrived at about the same time and the terminal was very busy; even so he spotted his tail within twenty-five feet of his gate.

He presented his U.S. passport to the agent at one of the windows.

“Good morning, Mr. Haaris. What is the purpose of your visit to Great Britain?”

“I’ve brought my wife’s ashes over, she wanted to be buried here.”

The uniformed agent looked up, startled. It was an answer she’d not often heard. “I’m terribly sorry, sir. Was she a British citizen?”

“No. But she loved everything here, especially the countryside in spring and summer.”

“You might need a permit, sir.”

“Actually, no, unless you want to scatter them on private property or in a public park.”

The woman stamped the passport and handed it over. “Do you have friends here?”

“Yes,” Haaris said, and he pocketed his passport as he moved down the hall to Baggage Claim and Customs.

Deborah’s ashes were in a small cardboard carton that he had packed into a zippered nylon bag. The only other luggage he’d brought over was a wheeled bag. When it was his turn at one of the counters, he handed over his passport and customs declaration.

“Anything to claim, sir?” the agent asked. “Tobacco, spirits, plant matter?

“Only my personal belongings plus my wife’s cremated remains.”

“May I see?”

Haaris opened the nylon bag. The box had been sealed in Washington with tape from the funeral parlor. He handed the agent the death certificate.

“Sorry to do this, sir, hope you understand,” the agent said. He handed the box to another agent, who stepped across to a baggage scanner and ran it through. A few moments later he brought it back.

The customs agent cleared both bags. Haaris walked out into the main terminal and headed toward the ground transportation exit, where the man in the dark blue blazer and open-collared white shirt who’d tailed him from the gate unobtrusively fell in behind him.

Just at the doors to the cab queue, Harris suddenly turned and walked up to the agent. “I assume that Tommy Boyle has sent you to watch over me.”

The CIA officer, caught out, smiled and shrugged. “Mr. Boyle thought you might spot me, sir. But considering what happened to Mrs. Haaris, he thought it might be wise to watch your back.”

“Good enough. I assume you have a car?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you can save me the cab fare and drive me into town. I’m staying at the Connaught, actually, just around the corner from our embassy.”

“Yes, sir, I know it.”

Haaris arched an eyebrow. “You do?”

Caught out again the young officer could only smile. “I meant to say I know where it is.”

The officer’s car was a white Ultima, and he was a good driver. The traffic was heavy on the M4 into the city center, and they didn’t speak much except about the weather in London versus Washington.

At the hotel a uniformed bellman opened the door for Haaris while another opened the boot and took out the two pieces of luggage.

Haaris looked back through the open door. “Tell Tommy that I’m sorry but I don’t want any company this time around. But if he wants to keep a tail on me, stay out of sight. He’ll understand.”

The young officer didn’t know what to say.

Haaris had made reservations for five days in a corner suite, and after check-in he ordered a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He took off his jacket and tie and laid them on the bed. When the wine came he sat by the window looking out of one eye down on Mayfair toward Buckingham Palace and out of the other toward the nylon bag with his wife’s remains.

He’d felt no remorse, killing her. It had been a necessity. Nor had he ever felt any love for her. She had been another necessity for his cover. The union had been perceived as odd by others, which was exactly the sentiment he’d wanted to promote. Looking too closely at something unusual diverted attention from reality.

Things like that, people’s perceptions of him, were another thing he’d hated about the West — especially Great Britain and even more so the U.S. Narrow-minded, provincial bastards, all of them, who couldn’t see past their own self-perceived superiority. The white man was the world’s salvation. Always had been.

Of course life wasn’t any better in Pakistan, or India, or China or even the new Russia with its oligarchs. But he’d worked all of his adult life to pit the East against the West. Pakistan against the U.S., who was the real enemy, not India. The ISI against the CIA. The man on the street in Rawalpindi or Lahore against the man from West Point or Des Moines.

It had always been a grand game for him. Revenge. Making England and the ISI the sparring partners for his game was far too tame. But antagonizing the U.S., which still held out hopes that by sending massive amounts of military aid to Islamabad that Pakistan would actually be a moderating influence on the Taliban and the dozens of other terrorist societies in country, was actually sweet.

Washington had never learned the folly of its ways. The Pentagon supplied bin Laden and al Qaeda with Stinger missiles and other weapons to kick the Russians out of Afghanistan, apparently never really understanding the first principle of blowback. The generals never dreamed, or never wanted to admit, that someday those same Stinger missiles would be used against its own forces.

Just as they could not see that all the military aid to Pakistan would one day come back and bite them in the arse.

Payback time was coming, and Haaris had a front-row seat for the most over-the-top game on earth: revenge for all the shit he had taken since his uncle had brought him to England.

Sitting now drinking his wine he understood that he’d never really considered the possibility that he was insane. Stark raving mad, as one of his teachers at Eton had railed. “All wogs are barking mad. Happens at birth.”

It was the same when he was eight and nine, and being raped by the older boys. No matter that his grades were in the top 5 percentile, he was a wog. A thing. An object to be used.

And he’d bided his time.

He took a shower and changed into a pair of khaki slacks, a light yellow V-neck sweater and a comfortable pair of walking shoes. He arranged for a rental Mini to be brought to the hotel and took the nylon bag with Deb’s ashes downstairs.

Ten minutes later he drove off, all the way down to Pulham, where he parked in the lee of the Putney railroad bridge and dumped Deborah’s ashes in the river. They floated on the surface and spread out as scum, along with the oil slicks and other industrial flotsam. It was several minutes before the broad patch disappeared downstream.

One of Boyle’s minders, driving a shiny gray Vauxhall had pulled over fifty yards away, and when Haaris got back in his Mini and drove off the CIA officer pulled in behind him, staying three or four cars behind.

For a time Haaris drove around south London as if he were merely trying to escape the memory of tossing his wife’s ashes in the Thames, but then he drove back to the Connaught, where he turned in the car and went up to his suite.

A man who could have been his twin, dressed in khakis and a yellow V-neck sweater, was sitting on the bed, and when Haaris walked in he got up without a word and walked to the window, where he sat down and poured a glass of champagne.

Haaris changed into a pair of jeans and a blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves that buttoned into place. He left his passport, other IDs and money on the dresser, and without a word left the suite. Taking the service elevator down to the basement level he left the hotel via the loading dock. A dark blue Mercedes S500 with deeply tinted windows was waiting for him, the rear door open.

He got in, closed the door and the driver headed away.

THIRTY-ONE

McGarvey rode with Otto out the back Campus gate at three in the morning, and they drove directly over to Haaris’s house in Embassy Row just off Massachusetts Avenue, in light traffic. They’d managed to get out of the OHB without being spotted by anyone who knew Mac, and the gate guards hadn’t paid much attention to who was driving. Their main brief was to vet everyone coming onto the Campus.

After Landesberg had finished, around one-thirty, he’d turned on the lights in the big mirrors and swiveled McGarvey’s chair around. The effect was nothing less than stunning, and even for someone who’d used disguises before, a little disorienting.

“Tamp down your west Kansas drawl, Mr. Director, and your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

Otto had gone over to the cafeteria for some coffee and doughnuts, and when he’d come back he’d almost dropped the lot, a large grin animating his face. “You’re a genius, my man,” he’d said to Landesberg.

“What do you think, Mr. Director?”

“I have to agree with Otto,” McGarvey said. “It’s me, but it isn’t.”

“That’s the point.”

Otto had phoned Louise to meet them at All Saints at seven sharp, and when she’d pressed he told her that he was with Mac on the Pakistani thing.

Crime scene tape still blocked the front door of Haaris’s place, but not the driveway, when they pulled up. The houses in the neighborhood were all dark, except for the carriage lights out front. And before they’d come around the corner Otto had pulled over and brought up the security systems, including cameras and motion detectors, in every house, shutting them down with a universal password of his own design. The security services would show that the systems were operating as normal, but the view from the eaves-mounted cameras would show only a street with no traffic.

Otto followed McGarvey around to the rear of the house, where Mac picked the lock to the kitchen hall in under twenty seconds, and they were in. They’d checked with London Station earlier and were assured that Haaris had arrived in the morning, had spread his wife’s ashes in an industrial section of the Thames and had returned to the Connaught, where he remained.

“Find his computer. I’ll take the master bedroom,” McGarvey said.

Otto went to the study, while McGarvey found his way to the master suite. The curtains were tightly drawn so he switched on a light in one of the bathrooms.

The bed had been made up, and Deb Haaris’s walk-in closet, crammed with clothing and maybe two hundred or more pairs of shoes and boots, was a total mess. Clothes were piled on an upholstered chair, lying in heaps on the floor and stuffed in jumbled, sloppily folded piles on the shelves.

Haaris’s closet, on the other hand, was precisely organized. Slacks were hung in order of color right to left, shirts the same, the fronts all facing left, as were the sport coats and blazers, first, a dozen suits and two tuxedos next. Shoes were on low shelves. Racks held belts and ties; drawers, socks, or underwear. Nothing seemed to be missing.

McGarvey was not able to find a wall safe or floor safe or any other place to hide something in either closet, in the separate bathrooms or the bedroom itself.

Otto was just coming out of the study when McGarvey passed through the living room.

“Anything?”

“Nada,” Otto said. “He’s a careful man.”

“What about his computer?”

“Empty.”

“Even if he erased the hard drive, you can retrieve some of it, can’t you?”

“You don’t understand, Mac. His computer is empty. The hard drive is missing as are the RAM chips. Nothing left but a keyboard, screen and hard-frame wiring.”

McGarvey looked toward the front windows at the neighborhood, still asleep. “He did tell us one thing at least.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s not coming home. At least not soon.”

They stopped at an all-night McDonald’s not too far from the old Columbia Hospital for Women just off Pennsylvania Avenue. A few people were having early morning breakfast and coffee. Several of them were outside smoking at the picnic tables.

“We’ve come a long ways together, you and I,” Otto said.

“Yes, we have,” McGarvey said, not really hearing yet what his friend was trying to say.

“There was a time in France when I didn’t think I was going to make it. No one knew what hacking was all about then, but I was really on the verge of being one of the true assholes. Doing that kind of shit out of pure spite. Boredom, maybe. I was pissed off at the world and really didn’t know why. Then you showed up on my doorstep one day and gave me my purpose.”

“It was a two-way street. I was having my own troubles then, before Katy and I got back together.”

“But then the two of you did.”

“Not for long enough.”

“But you had each other,” Otto said, looking away momentarily. “I was really jealous of you, until Louise. Mostly because I didn’t understand what it was like to…”

“To be in love?”

“Yeah. And here we are again, on the actual brink, you and I. We can’t do it alone, Mac. Never could. Of all people I thought that you would understand most.”

Suddenly McGarvey understood what his old friend was getting at. “Two things,” he said, maybe a little too sharply. “Don’t write me off just yet, and second of all, leave Pete out of it.”

Otto managed a smile. “I haven’t on the first, and I won’t on the second.”

Louise was already at All Saints when they arrived. Breakfast was being served to the half-dozen patients on the third and fourth floors, but Franklin hadn’t arrived yet. It was he who signed all release orders. Pete wasn’t going anywhere, no matter how much she protested, until the doctor said so.

Last night Louise had stopped by Pete’s apartment to pack a couple of bags for at least a few days, maybe as long as a week, on Campus. “If she needs anything else in the interim, I’ll get them,” she told McGarvey.

She was waiting upstairs in the second-floor visitors’ lounge, watching Good Morning America, when McGarvey and Otto got off the elevator and came down the corridor.

“Is Pete awake yet?” Otto asked.

“Awake, dressed and pissed off,” Louise said. “She wants out now.” She turned to McGarvey. “And who are you?”

McGarvey and Otto exchanged a glance.

“Travis Parks,” Otto told his wife. “He’s been assigned to act as Pete’s minder.”

Louise guffawed. “Lots of luck, Parks.”

McGarvey smiled. “Maybe I can take her by surprise for a change,” he said, reverting to his Kansas drawl.

Louise’s expression changed by degrees. “My God, it’s you,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes, but I didn’t notice at first.”

“That’s a good thing,” McGarvey said.

He went down the hall to Pete’s room. The door was open and he knocked on the frame before he walked in.

Pete was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of her bed, her breakfast tray untouched. She looked up. And for just a moment her mouth pursed in irritation, but suddenly she brightened.

“Kirk, you look worse than I feel.”

THIRTY-TWO

McGarvey showed up at Joint Base Andrews in a CIA Cadillac Escalade with civilian plates and was dropped off on the tarmac where a C-32A military VIP transport aircraft was boarding the Islamabad embassy staff for the overnight flight. The twin-engine jet was the military version of the Boeing 757, which the vice president and sometimes even the president used. In this case it was meant as a show of the U.S. commitment to diplomacy with Pakistan.

A pair of embassy security officers in civilian clothes were checking the passengers according to a boarding list.

“Travis Parks,” McGarvey told the men. He handed one of them his passport.

“We understand your mission, Mr. Parks, but Ambassador Powers isn’t particularly pleased that you’re along for the ride,” the officer said. He checked McGarvey’s well-traveled passport closely before handing it back. “Will you be a part of our detail?”

“I’m just going over as an observer. I’ll try to stay out of everyone’s hair.”

“Do that,” the officer said.

Hefting his single bag McGarvey went up the stairs and inside the plane a steward directed him to a rear section of the cabin that contained general business-class seating for thirty-two staffers. Most of the seats were taken and the staffers looked up with curiosity, some with a little animosity as he stowed his bag in an overhead bin and took a seat in the last row across from the galley.

No one said anything to him, and once he was seated the other passengers went back to their conversations or to their laptops or telephones.

He phoned Otto. “I’m aboard, but it’s a little frosty.”

“Powers talked to you yet?”

“Probably not till we’re airborne.”

“I suppose it would be stupid of me to tell you not to annoy the man. He could send you back, no matter what Fay has to say about it. When he gets to his embassy he’s the boss.”

“I’ll go in the front door and right out the back soon as we get there.”

“To the Presidential Palace?”

McGarvey had thought quite a bit about what his first moves would be once he got in country. His target was the Messiah, but first getting to General Rajput and the Shahid of the TTP who’d taken up residence in the palace would probably be necessary.

“What’s the latest on Haaris?”

“As of an hour ago he was still in London.”

“In the hotel?”

“He had lunch at a pub in Notting Hill and then drove down to Charing Cross, where he parked in the station lot, and from what I was just told he’s taking a leisurely stroll along the river. But he’s being very careful with his tradecraft, almost as if he were trying to hide in plain sight even though he’s already been made.”

“Whatever moves he makes, tell Boyle to stay out of his way.”

“He already burned one of Boyle’s people at the airport, and in fact had the agent drive him to his hotel.”

“Whatever happens I want Tommy himself to stay away from Haaris. They’re old friends and I don’t want anything to interfere with Dave’s plans. And tell Boyle that if Haaris makes contact and wants to get together to beg off. I want to give him all the room in the world.”

“Sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, kemo sabe: what if we’re wrong, and Dave Haaris is not the Messiah?”

“Then we’re wrong. Still leaves the Messiah, whoever the hell he is,” McGarvey said. “Are your programs making any progress identifying the voice?”

“Sometimes they’re going around in circles. It’s almost as if the speaker disguised his voice that was inputted to the device. Maybe like adding a Southern accent, or an Indian accent, that was then altered. We may get to the false accent he used, but it might not tell us anything we can use. Could be he’s smarter than us.”

“Or thinks he is.”

They departed around four in the afternoon. The flight plan would take them to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany for refueling, and a layover, before they started their second leg to Islamabad. Touchdown was scheduled for eight in the morning.

A half hour later a steward came back with the drink cart, and McGarvey was told that there would be no alcohol service on the flight in respect for the Muslim tradition. He had a coffee instead. Still no one else bothered to speak to him or even look his way.

At six when they were well out over the Atlantic the same steward came back. “Ambassador Powers would like to see you in conference section,” he said.

McGarvey went forward to where Powers was seated at a small table. No one else was with him, and when the steward withdrew he pulled the curtain.

The ambassador, unlike his namesake father, was a short, stoop-shouldered man, slight of build. His face was square, his eyes deep-set, and he looked like a scholar, like a professor of history in some Northeastern school. He motioned for McGarvey to sit down.

“I argued against taking you along. The CIA chief of station is a capable man and runs a very tight operation. We don’t need a rogue operation out of the embassy. Not now, not under the present circumstances.”

“You mean of course the beheading of Pakistan’s president, the detonation of a nuclear device and the top Taliban terrorist in the Aiwan.”

Powers was vexed. “Don’t presume to tell me my job, Mr. Parks.”

“Nor should you try to tell me mine, Mr. Ambassador. We both have difficult assignments.”

“What exactly is yours?”

“To observe.”

“You work for the CIA, therefore in Pakistan you work for Mr. Austin. I want no mistake about that.”

McGarvey took out his sat phone and called Walt Page’s private number.

“You can’t use a telephone while we’re in the air,” Powers said.

McGarvey put it on speakerphone when Page answered.

“You must be in the air now, and I assume that you’re sitting across from Ambassador Powers, who has read you the riot act.”

“Something like that. He wants to put me under Austin’s umbrella.”

“Actually I want your Dr. Parks to leave my delegation as soon as we touch down at Ramstein,” Powers said. “We don’t need another spy just now. Diplomacy is the best defense for a situation that has spun nearly out of control.”

“I can call John Fay.”

“Secretary Fay is not in charge on the ground, I am.”

“You’re absolutely right, Mr. Ambassador,” Page said. “I’ll telephone the White House. Dr. Parks is working on a presidential mandate. I’ll call back.”

Powers sat forward. “For goodness’ sake, wait just a minute now,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason to take this any further.”

“I’ll stay out of your way, Mr. Ambassador. You have my word on it,” McGarvey said. “I fact I won’t even be staying at the embassy.”

“In heaven’s name, where do you expect to go? I need to know what my staff is up to.”

“I’m not on your staff.”

Powers blustered for a moment or two.

“What’s your pleasure, Travis?” Page asked.

“I think that Ambassador Powers and I will come to an understanding, Mr. Director,” McGarvey said. He ended the call and got up. “I’m just hitching a ride to Islamabad. Once we’re there I’ll disappear. It will give you plausible deniability. You never knew who I was or even why I was on your flight.”

Before Powers could reply, McGarvey went back to the aft section, where he stopped at the galley to talk to the stewards. He did not raise his voice nor did he whisper.

“I’ll have a cognac. I think a nice Rémy will do. And with whatever you’re serving I’ll take a split of Dom if you have it, Veuve Clicquot if need be. But it damned well better be cold.”

McGarvey turned to go.

“Sir, we have our orders,” one of the stewards said.

“Am I going to have to shoot you?” He smiled.