“They showed up about fifteen minutes ago, but I haven’t heard anything.”
“Give them a call and make sure everything is okay. Something starts to go down, I want to hear about it immediately.”
“You’ve got the willies?” Otto asked.
McGarvey was about to reply when the hackles on the back of his neck rose. He turned in time to see a dark figure darting between two houses across the street on the side facing a strip of woods away from the lake, three doors down from Wiski’s place.
“Might have something,” he said softly.
He waited for a few moments to see if whoever it was showed up on the other side of the house. It was possible that one of the neighbors was out and had gone back inside.
“Mac?”
The figure darted across the open backyard to the rear of the next house.
“Looks like it’s going down now,” McGarvey said getting out of the car.
“I’ll give Pete and Wolf the heads-up. Do you want backup?”
McGarvey ran across the street and headed toward the cul-de-sac. “I’m going to try to take this guy alive. But if it starts to get noisy and someone calls the cops, let me know.”
“Will do,” Otto said.
McGarvey took out his pistol and made it to the end of the block; the neighborhood was almost deathly silent. A couple of lights were on in one of the houses behind him, but all the others were dark. Even the one streetlight was burned out.
He pulled up behind a pickup truck in the driveway of the house next door to Wiski’s and listened for a long ten seconds, until he thought he heard a quiet shuffle of footsteps on gravel.
Easing to the left, he crossed to the front of the SEAL’s little house, and at the east corner he peered around the side in time to see a man dressed in dark slacks and a dark shirt of some kind doing something to a window.
“Not this time,” McGarvey said, raising his pistol.
The man leaped to the left almost as agilely as a ballet dancer, pulled a pistol and fired two silenced shots, both of them plowing into the side of the house.
Mac fired once, aiming low for the man’s legs, but missing as the figure disappeared around the back of the house, firing a third and fourth shot over his shoulder.
Sprinting back to the opposite side of the house Mac was in time to see the figure dart between the two houses. He gave chase, stopping briefly at the rear corner to take a quick look. But the yard was empty. Nothing moved in the darkness.
“I don’t mean to kill you unless it’s necessary,” Mac said, scanning the shoreline.
Something moved behind him.
“How kind of you, Herr McGarvey,” a man said, in a heavy German accent.
Mac rolled around the side of the house an instant before a pistol was fired inches from the back of his head; the shot, even though suppressed, was very loud at such close range.
The man grunted something.
Mac rolled back around the corner, the muzzle of his silenced pistol connecting sharply with the man’s broad forehead. Engel reared back and Mac stepped forward, keeping the pistol in direct contact with the guy’s head. He got the instant impression that he was in a cage with a wild but calculating animal.
“Drop your weapon,” McGarvey said.
Engel moved his head left at the same moment that he batted McGarvey’s gun away. He raised his own pistol, firing off one snap shot at hip level, just missing McGarvey.
Mac managed to grab the German’s gun hand and, with his other in the guy’s face, forced him back against the side of the house. Except for the silenced shots this was all almost completely noiseless.
Slowly Engel slumped back, releasing his grip on his pistol, letting McGarvey take it from his hand and toss it aside.
Mac stepped back. “How did you know that I would be here tonight?” he asked, though he didn’t expect an answer that would be of any use. It wasn’t going to be that easy.
Engel was outwardly calm. He shrugged. “What now?”
“You and I are going someplace where we can have a little talk about SEAL Team Six and Frau Schlueter’s interests in them.”
“I don’t think so,” Engel said, and he produced a Glock 81 field knife, which looked something like a slimmed-down version of the U.S. Special Forces KA-BAR. Deadly in the right hands.
Mac stepped back out of range, his hands to either side. “The KSK fields some sharp operators, but of course the stupid ones like you and your pal down in Florida and the others out tonight usually riff out. That your story?”
Engel said something in German under his breath and charged, feinting first to the right. McGarvey waited for the actual thrust from the left and managed to deflect it, hooking the German’s arm under his left, and bending the man’s wrist back nearly to the point of breaking.
Wordlessly Engel tried to smash his fist into the side of Mac’s head, but each time Mac slipped the blow and increased the pressure on the man’s knife hand, forcing him back against the side of the house again.
“A jail cell is better than a pauper’s grave, don’t you think?” Mac said.
Engel hooked a leg around McGarvey’s and they went down, Mac on the bottom. Engel slowly brought the tip of the knife around so that it was inches away from Mac’s throat.
For a long beat or two, McGarvey resisted, but then all at once he caved in, rolling left as the knife came down. This time he snatched the blade out of the German’s hand, flipped it end over end, and rapped the heavy pommel sharply against the man’s forehead, momentarily dazing him.
Getting out from underneath, McGarvey pulled the syringe kit out of his pocket and injected a few cc’s of methohexital directly into the side of Engel’s neck. He needed the man docile for what came next. The German was struggling out of his momentary daze, but the powerful sedative took hold almost immediately and he lay back, his body going slack except for the rise and fall of his chest.
McGarvey found both pistols and pocketed them, then quickly searched the German, coming up with a cell phone.
The neighborhood remained quiet.
He hit the speed dial and a woman answered immediately. “Steffen?”
“I have your man. Call the other two off and go home, Ms. Schlueter. It’s over for tonight.”
The woman was silent for a long time. When she spoke it sounded as if she was talking in her sleep, her voice dreamy and distant. “For tonight,” she said and she was gone.
Mac phoned Otto and told him what had happened. “Nothing from Pete or Wolf yet?”
“No. You okay?”
“Fine. Have them meet me at Landmark and have the crew standing by for immediate takeoff.”
“Do you want me to call Martinez?”
“I’ll do it,” McGarvey said. “We dodged a bullet this time, but it’s not over.”
“It never is, kemo sabe,” Otto said.
Engel was heavy, but not impossibly so. McGarvey managed to heave him off the ground into a fireman’s carry and headed back to where he had parked his car.
TWENTY-SIX
Raul Martinez was waiting for them at a government hangar on the side of Miami International Airport opposite the civilian terminal. The morning sun was not up yet; the airport just starting to come alive with the first commercial flights out.
On the way down from Norfolk, Wolf had identified their prisoner as Steffen Engel, a former KSK hand-to-hand instructor, one of the serious badasses in the Kommados who’d been kicked out for excessive force.
“Definitely one of Schlueter’s handpicked shooters,” Wolf said. “But there’s little or no chance he’ll cooperate with us, no matter how persuasive you think you are. At least not here in the States. Maybe the Saudis would have better luck.”
McGarvey glanced at Pete, who had a little sad smile on her lips. She’d told him once that sometimes she might not like the method, but if the reasons were strong enough she’d have no problem.
“It’s the real world,” he’d told her.
/> “Shitty.”
Martinez, who was the CIA’s chief of operations in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood around the Calle Ocho, was a slender dark man who knew just about everyone in south Florida and the Keys, along with most of their secrets. But Cuba was fast becoming a cause of the past. Fidel was dead, his brother retired, and the exiles were getting old; memories were fading, becoming less urgent each year.
He’d arrived with two husky Cubanos in coveralls in a light gray panel van with FROSTPROOF AC SERVICE and a Hialeah logo on the sides. When McGarvey came down the stairs Martinez gave him a hug.
“Otto said that you were bringing someone special.”
“Nothing to do with Cuba this time,” Mac said.
“Nothing much does anymore, comp,” Martinez said. “We lost the revolution, could be we’re losing the peace. Who’d you bring?”
McGarvey explained about Engel and Schlueter and SEAL Team Six. “Last night was just a temporary fix.”
“The bastards just keep coming, and yet they expect us to treat them like they’ve got civil rights,” Martinez said with disgust.
Pete, who Martinez knew, came down the stairs with Wolf. Mac introduced the German BND officer.
“Have you ever been involved with this type of interrogation?” Martinez asked.
“No,” Wolf admitted.
The Cubanos went aboard and brought Engel out between them, the man’s feet dragging on the ground, and loaded him into the van.
“We can find you a secure hotel. Might be best for your career all around if you don’t get involved, you know what I mean?”
“It’s too late for that, I think,” Wolf said.
Martinez shook his head. “Where the hell do you find these people, Mac?” he asked, but there was no answer, because none of them knew if he was talking about Engel or Wolf.
* * *
Little Torch Key, about one hundred miles from Miami, was a series of low mangrove islets that extended northward up into the Gulf. Isolated, lightly inhabited, and nearly impossible to reach by road or water without detection, Government 312 was a listening post for Cuban radio and television broadcasts. It had figured big during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but ever since then it had languished.
Outwardly. But before and since the Bay of Pigs the tiny facility—only three concrete block buildings, a generator shed, and a diesel tank on stilts behind a tall razor wire fence—had in fact been used as an enhanced interrogation outpost. Far from the prying eyes of the media or other governmental agencies, the CIA, which denied its existence, had from time to time made use of the place. Completely extrajudicially.
It was broad daylight when they showed up, the morning steamy, already in the nineties. The Cubanos brought Engel inside one of the windowless block buildings furnished only with a leather-covered interrogation bench complete with straps. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and a hose was connected to a faucet in one corner. In the middle of the floor directly beneath the bench was a drain hole covered by a grate.
The Cubanos laid Engel on the bench and secured the straps around his legs, hips, and torso so that that he couldn’t move to defend himself.
Martinez went out and started the generator and the light came on. He brought back a thin towel and a bucket, as Engel was starting to come around.
“You guys might want to wait outside,” he told his Cubanos, and they left without a word. “You too,” he told Pete.
“This guy would have killed two of our people and their families if Mac hadn’t stopped him,” she said. “And there would have been even more deaths tonight.” She looked at Engel and the others. “I’ll stay.”
Mac closed the door; almost instantly the room became stifling.
Martinez filled the bucket with water, and Pete went to Engel’s side. “I’ll do this,” she told Mac and the others.
McGarvey stepped aside with Wolf. Pete’s reputation inside the CIA was beauty and brains. Only a handful of fellow officers who’d watched her in action during interrogations realized that she was much more than that. She was fierce enough that no one felt right about giving her a nickname. She made most people who knew her nervous. But not McGarvey because he of all people understood that what she was giving up for her country was every bit as dear as what the SEAL Team Six guys had given up.
She patted Engel on the cheek a couple of times. “Hey, Steffen, can you hear me?” she asked gently.
Engel’s eyes were open, fixed on hers.
“You were given a sedative. It’s wearing off now. Do you understand?”
After several moments he nodded. He turned his head as far as the restraints would allow and looked at McGarvey and Wolf, and then at Martinez.
“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Pete said, her tone still reasonable. “If you cooperate this will be easy. You’ll be transferred to a federal cell somewhere in the D.C. area where you’ll be held until your trial for attempted murder and acts of terrorism.”
Engel looked at her again, the expression in his eyes and face one of utter contempt.
Pete patted him on the shoulder. “But it’s not going to be easy, is it?” she said. “Let’s start with your name, please.”
Engel said nothing.
“Give me just that much, okay?”
He looked away.
“So here’s the deal. We’re going to waterboard you, which you understand will not be pleasant. In some cases subjects have actually died. At the very least you will be faced with pain, of course, but also possible damage to your lungs, some brain damage because of oxygen deprivation, and perhaps even a few broken bones as you struggle against your restraints.”
Her tone was sad, her voice apologetic, low, even sexy. She understood what he was about to experience, and she conveyed the feeling that she was genuinely sorry for him, even afraid.
“What is it we want to know?” she asked, not turning away from Engel.
“We know that you and the others were hired by Pam Schlueter to kill the SEAL Team Six guys who took out bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “We want to know who hired her. Who is her paymaster? Who is her contact?”
“You heard, so I don’t need to repeat the question,” she told Engel. “A name is all Mr. McGarvey needs, and then it’ll be off to a jail cell—pleasant compared to your present circumstances.”
Engel stared at her but said nothing.
“No?” Pete said. “Too bad for you.”
She took a towel from Martinez and draped it over Engel’s face. He flinched.
“One name, Steffen. It’s all that we ask of you.”
Martinez placed a strap across Engel’s forehead; despite the man’s struggles he managed to tighten it down, holding the assassin’s head firmly in the face-up position. He began pouring water directly onto the towel covering Engel’s face. Slowly, but in a steady stream.
The German lay perfectly motionless for nearly fifteen seconds, his training and control perfect, until suddenly his chest spasmed and he bucked violently against the leather straps.
Pete, her mouth set, motioned for Martinez to continue pouring water on the towel, and Engel convulsed more violently. His brain was telling him that he was drowning, and he could no longer control his body, which had dropped into a primal defense mode.
Mac, who had been waterboarded himself, knew what it was like, what was at stake, and he felt the man’s pain. But he didn’t give a good goddamn. Engel was an assassin for hire. A freelance. Not for a country or a religion or even for an ideal, but simply for money.
Martinez stepped back and Pete pulled the towel off Engel’s face.
“Here we are at the start of a long road. Are you ready?”
Engel was working to catch his breath.
“Steffen?”
“Fuck you,” Engel said.
Pete replaced the towel, and Martinez, who had refilled the bucket, poured the water again, with the same results.
“A name,” Pete said when she’d removed the towel for the
second time.
Engel tried to say something, but Pete draped the towel over his face again. This time she got the hose, turned it on to an even flow, and held it a couple of inches above his mouth and nose. She held it there, seemingly forever, until Engel’s movements began to subside as he lost consciousness.
Tossing the hose aside, Pete ripped the towel off the German’s face and got close. “Last time, Steffen. A name, or I set the hose on you again and walk away.”
Wolf stepped forward, but McGarvey held him back.
“Sprechen zu mir, Kommando!” Pete said. Speak to me! “A name. Just that.”
The sound of the running water falling on the concrete floor, and just then an osprey or some other hunting bird flying overhead, dropping for a kill, seemed suddenly loud in the close confines. Even louder than the noise of the diesel generator, and of Engel’s desperate gasps for breath.
“Steffen,” Pete whispered close to his ear.
“Naisir,” Engel croaked, his voice barely audible, scarcely understandable.
“Naisir who?”
“Major Naisir. ISI. In Berlin, Warsaw. Guernsey.”
Pakistan
Ali Naisir had led a charmed life up until August 2008 when Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign from the presidency of Pakistan and leave the country because of death threats from the Taliban, and other political considerations.
Naisir was a lieutenant in an ISI special detail tasked with protecting Musharraf not only from the Taliban and the angry mobs outside parliament, but from himself and his own ambitions as well.
“The general has done Pakistan a great and honorable service, but it is time for him to step aside,” Colonel Akhtar Ahmed told him. Ahmed was director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, which was responsible for collecting political intelligence inside and outside the country.
Naisir had been called to the colonel’s office at headquarters in Islamabad, though he had no earthly idea why. “Yes, sir.”
“In fact he means to leave this very night, and already various parties want to stop him from going. By any means.”
“I can arrange for a military detail to escort him every step of the way, sir. He still has many friends at the PMA and NDU.” The PMA at Kakul was Pakistan’s military academy and the NDU—the National Defense University—in Islamabad was where officers learned strategy, leadership, and statecraft. Nearly all the powerful officers in the military and the ISI were graduates of both institutions. Naisir was in his fourth year at the NDU and was considered one of its rising stars—which was why he’d been given the important job of seeing to the overall welfare of a president.
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