“Who gave you this assignment?”
“My section chief, Colonel Sarbans.”
The general glanced at the civilian, who merely shrugged but said nothing.
“The assignment was completely on my shoulders,” Naisir said. “In case something went wrong I was to take full responsibility. Personally.”
“There have been two attacks recently, both of which included the murders of the men’s families. Was that your doing?”
“I did not order the killing of innocent civilians, but sir, it was my doing.”
“Who is—or are—the assassins? Certainly not ours?”
“No, sir. I hired an outside contractor, who put together a team.”
The general was relieved. “Was it expensive?”
“We’ve made partial payments of around one million in U.S. dollars. More has been committed.”
“Where has this money come from?” The civilian asked.
“I have a draw on the Special Projects fund.”
“You live in a fine house near the Jinnah Park,” the civilian said. His voice was very soft, his accent southern—perhaps Karachi.
Naisir knew instantly what was going on, what he was being accused of. “My wife’s family is wealthy and generous. The transactions for the house and the two cars and our staff, are quite transparent.”
“Perhaps too transparent.”
Naisir turned back to the general. “Sir, am I being accused of stealing state money?”
“Not exactly,” Bhutani said. He took a photograph from a folder and handed it across. “Do you know this man?”
The eight-by-ten black-and-white photo date-stamped yesterday showed a slightly built man, dressed in a Western-cut business suit, coming out of the airport at Rawalpindi. He was carrying an attaché case and what appeared to be a matching leather suitcase on rollers.
“It’s not a clear shot, but I don’t think I know him. Who is he, sir?”
“He flew up from Karachi and booked a suite for six days at the Serena Hotel. Do you know this place?”
“Yes, sir,” Naisir said. He was confused. Something not good was coming his way, but he couldn’t guess what.
“Your wife’s family is wealthy. Have either of you ever stayed there, or perhaps had a meal at one of the restaurants?” the civilian asked. “The Dawat is one of the best in town. There is even music.”
“No, sir, we’ve never been.”
“The man in the picture is an Indian-born American. Emigrated with his parents when he was very young. He served in the American Army Rangers, but he was dishonorably discharged when it was found that he was having affairs with several of the top-ranking officers’ wives on base. Apparently he has an apartment in Karachi, and we think that he may be involved in a number of illegal activities, among them supplying the Taliban with the materials to make IEDs.”
“That would come under the SS directorate.”
“Normally yes,” the general said.
“If the proof is there, why hasn’t he been arrested?” Naisir asked.
“His name is Poorvaj Chopra,” the civilian said. “The thing is, no one has ever seen him coming or going from his apartment in Karachi, nor has his bed here at the Serena been slept in. It would appear that he is a mysterious man who is able to come and go without being spotted.”
“We have his photograph.”
“Supplied to us by the CIA, who’ve had him under surveillance in the United States.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I have no idea who this man is or what you think his connection to me might be.”
“He’s made three calls to your home and one to your office,” the civilian said.
Naisir was rocked. “I took no calls from this man.”
“Yes, we know. Each time he let the telephone ring once and then hung up. We think that all four calls were made from a cell phone. Four different cell phones.”
“Can you explain why this man called you?” Bhutani asked. “Why he has come to Islamabad?”
“No,” Naisir said. “Sir, am I being charged with a crime?”
“Not at this time, Major,” the civilian said. “But if Mr. Chopra does make contact with you, for whatever reason, we want to know about it.”
“Then why are you monitoring my phone?”
“We’re not,” General Bhutani said. “The CIA is, perhaps in connection with your operation against the SEAL team we were informed.”
“If that were the case they would not have shared that intelligence with you, sir,” Naisir said.
“No. But obviously something is going on. I suggest that you deal with it, Major. Perhaps if Mr. Chopra were to suddenly disappear permanently, it might be best for you. For all of us.”
THIRTY-FOUR
At this point time was not really of the essence as far as McGarvey was concerned. For the moment they figured that Schlueter’s primary target was no longer the SEALs but Mac himself. And they wanted to let Naisir stew in his own juices. Keep looking over his shoulder until he got lazy.
Otto had booked them one of the longest routes from Dulles to Atlanta and from there overnight to Warsaw via Amsterdam. They took a Polish Airways LOT flight to Frankfurt, where they picked up an Etihad flight to Abu Dhabi and from there at last to Islamabad, where they were scheduled to touch down at two thirty in the morning local, three days after leaving Washington.
They’d flown first-class on Mac’s nickel, and on most of the legs they’d had seats that folded flat, allowing them to get plenty of rest. The food had been reasonably good, and Mac had cut back his drinking so that by eight in the morning according to his watch they were less than a half hour out of Islamabad and he felt good.
A flight attendant had brought them warm moist washcloths and hand towels, along with their customs declaration forms, which Pete had filled out for both of them.
“This is a first for me,” she said.
“Filling out a customs form?”
“No, going into badland.”
“I warned you.”
She gave him a look. “I’m not frightened. I’m excited.”
“You might want to rethink that, Pete. A little fear goes a long way. Makes you aware of what’s going on around you. Makes you a little sharper.”
“Naisir will be waiting for us?”
“He knows my face, but it’s been three days since Otto planted the Chopra legend, and he may not have made any connection yet. No reason for him to be watching for me to show up. In any event he won’t be expecting you.”
“I’m part of the disguise, but what about you? You could have done something with your hair, maybe worn glasses, aged your complexion. You’ve done it before.”
“I want him to know that I’ve come, and why,” McGarvey said.
Pete turned away and looked out the window. In the distance the lights of a large city were visible. “Silly me,” she said. “I thought you’d say something like that.”
“I’m not going to dance around with this guy. We already know that he’s involved with Schlueter, and that he’s an ISI officer, which makes him the center of my target. I want him to come to me, and the sooner the better.”
“You’re going to kill him,” Pete said.
“If need be.”
She nodded. “Once he knows you’re here he’ll try to do the same.”
“I hope so; it’d prove his involvement.”
“And afterward? What about Schlueter?”
* * *
Once through the complicated customs, which included a thorough credentials and baggage check and a pat-down, they went out to the cab stand, where a late-model Mercedes C-class sedan with a light on the roof pulled to the head of the queue. A tall, lanky driver jumped out, opened the rear door, and took their bags.
“Welcome, lady and gentleman, to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” he said in English marked by a thick Punjabi accent. “Please to get in my most excellent taxi, and I will take you wherever you wish to go.”
Pete hesitated, but M
ac handed her into the backseat and got in behind her.
The driver, who was dressed in faded jeans and a stained sweatshirt with the Manchester United soccer team logo, closed the door, put their bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel.
A few of the other cab drivers had begun to honk their horns because he had cut the line, and a cop started in their direction, but their cabbie pulled out and headed at breakneck speed to the highway to Islamabad, which was busy despite the hour.
Their driver kept looking in the rearview mirror until they were clear of the airport. “Did you have any trouble getting in?” he asked, in very clear English with a slight Texas drawl.
Pete was startled.
“San Antonio?” McGarvey asked.
“Corpus, actually, Mr. Director,” the driver said. He glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Looks like we haven’t picked up a tail. Name’s Milt Thomas. I work for Don Simmons, he’s the Islamabad station chief.”
“Aren’t you exposing yourself picking us up?” Pete asked.
“I’m too low in the pecking order for anyone to take much notice. In fact I’m actually part-timing with the cops looking for bad guys coming in. They send over a list every week or so, we mine it for anything we might use, and once in a while I’ll send them a bone and everyone’s happy.”
“Our names on the list?” McGarvey asked.
“Yours; not Ms. Boylan’s.”
“Do you have a package for us?”
“Nine millimeter Walther PPKs with silencers and several extra magazines. Antiquated, if you ask me. But Don said it’d be what you wanted. Had a hell of a time digging them up. Five small bricks of Semtex and acid fuses, plus a package from Mr. Rencke. It’s all in an attaché case in the trunk. Combo lock, 7534. Get it right or the entire package will melt down in a big hurry. Lid’s wired with couple of hundred grams of thermite. Won’t cause the Semtex to blow, but it’d cook a lot of meat standing anywhere within eight or ten feet.”
“Where are you taking us now?”
“Mind if I ask you a question, Mr. Director?”
“Friends call me Mac. What’s your question?”
“Do you know anything about a guy named Poorvaj Chopra? Supposedly he’s an Indian-born American working out of Karachi brokering arms deals for the Taliban.”
“Never heard the name,” McGarvey said.
“The ISI is real interested in this guy, and so are we, because the ragheads are killing our people too with IEDs that Chopra is selling them the materials for.”
“What’s the connection with us?”
“We thought that maybe it was your operation. I’m taking you to the Serena Hotel, where you guys have a connecting suite with his, and I have to warn you that the ISI should be crawling all over the place. But…”
“But what?”
“We’ve taken a couple of passes, but there’s been no sign of the guy, nor were we able to pick up any ISI activity. Strange.”
* * *
Their passports under the name Sampson raised no eyebrows at the front desk, and they were taken up to their suite immediately. The rooms were very well furnished, the walls and especially the ceilings were replica works of ancient Islamic art. The huge bathroom was world-class, as was the sitting room. But there was only one bedroom, equipped with a walk-in closet, a flat-screen television, ornate chests, a seating area next to the tall windows, and a single king-size bed.
“Cozy,” Pete said at the door.
“Right,” McGarvey said.
He opened the attaché case on the bed, took out the pistols, the magazines—three each—and the suppressors. He and Pete field-stripped the weapons, checked the actions, and loaded them.
He set aside the blocks of Semtex and fuses and took the manila envelope into the sitting room, where he got a beer from the minibar and sat down on the couch to see what Otto had sent.
Several photographs, including an official portrait used for internal records, showed the man that McGarvey had briefly met in the parking garage in Berlin. He was handsome, with large dark eyes, and a fine-featured face. In one he was coming out of a restaurant with a very good-looking woman of slender build on his arm. They were laughing about something and they seemed very happy.
She was Ayesha, his wife. Her family was wealthy, while his relatives were comparatively poor. But he had been well-educated at several state schools, including the military academy, and from what Otto had managed to gather, he had a fine service record.
He and his wife—there were no children—lived in a house in an upscale neighborhood near the Fatima Jinnah Park. The place, their two cars—a Fiat and a BMW—plus a small staff were way over the top for a major’s pay, but they had been subsidized from the start by his wife’s family.
Just as McGarvey had suspected, Naisir maintained a safe house in Rawalpindi where he met from time to time with his deep-cover field officers. The only reason Otto had been able to find out anything about it was because the place was financed by the ISI as a line item in the directorate’s black budget.
Otto had included Google Maps images of and driving directions to both places.
“What do we do now?” Pete asked.
McGarvey handed her the package. “We stay here till eight to see if ISI has taken any notice of us, then we rent a car and drive down to Rawalpindi.”
“To do what?”
“Apply a little pressure.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Pam Schlueter sat by the window in her one-room apartment in the immigrant neighborhood of Kreuzberg drinking schnapps and worrying about her next move. She wanted the money for taking McGarvey down, but more importantly she didn’t want him or some ISI goon to come up behind her one night and put a bullet in her brain.
Once you started these kinds of operations, you could never back out, not until they were finished. Only this time she’d managed to grab a tiger by the tail, and she still wasn’t quite sure exactly how she was going to eliminate him.
Certainly not by any frontal assault, with her four remaining operatives coming at him in force, all at once, guns blazing. From what she’d managed to learn about the man, he’d survived plenty of fights where the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against him.
Nor did she think she could trust any of them to do the job one-on-one. Steffen was one of the best, and he’d had a lot of respect from the others, but he was gone, evidently taken out by McGarvey—the fifty-year-old they all thought would be easy.
Yet as she turned that notion over she decided that one-on-one would be the only way of getting to him. With a woman’s touch.
Someone knocked softly at her door. She snatched her Glock 26 from the table and went barefoot across the room. She was dressed only in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, no bra.
“Wer ist es?” Who is it, she said, just above a whisper.
Someone downstairs was playing American country-and-western music, and the couple on the right were having their usual nightly row, but other than that the building was quiet.
“Felix,” a man said.
Felix Volker, one of her shooters—the crazy one. She recognized his voice.
She opened the door and let him in, locking it behind him. He had been drinking, his face a little flushed.
“Did you know that someone has been sitting in a VW across the street since twenty-one hundred hours?”
She turned and started for the front window.
“He just left,” Volker said. “But I think it was that BND officer who’s been sniffing around for the past few months.”
“The bastard who killed Dieter in Florida?”
“Maybe.”
Steffen’s name came into her head. It was possible that he wasn’t dead. It was possible that the CIA had made him talk. But if that had been the case, and the CIA had passed the information to the BND, the agency wouldn’t have simply sent one man down here merely to watch her. More likely he’d come to check out one of the Turkish or Greek immigrant families who lived in th
e neighborhood. They’d been causing a lot of problems over the past year and a half; that, along with the Muslim issue, was driving the government crazy.
“Did he spot you?” Pam asked.
“I don’t think so. But I think you better get the hell out of here tonight before he comes back. You can stay with me.”
Pam laughed. “You talk as fucking nuts as you look,” she said. “Get the hell out of here.” She turned away, but Volker grabbed her by the arm.
“When are we going to finish the job,” he demanded.
She tried to smash the butt of the small pistol into the side of his head, but he deflected the blow and grabbed her by the neck, squeezing hard.
Bringing the pistol around again, she jammed the muzzle into his temple and started to squeeze the trigger.
He released his grip and laughed. “Here we are, then, an impasse, when all I wanted was the green light to finish the operation, and maybe to fuck you.”
“I don’t like men.”
“I don’t like you,” he said. This time his laugh was low, but wild, crazy, and completely out of control. “But a piece of ass is a piece of ass. Even you.”
She lowered the pistol and laid it on the small table beside the door.
Volker tried to kiss her; his breath smelled of garlic and beer. She turned away and went to the small bed across from the window, took off her T-shirt, her back to him, then pulled off her jeans and panties and lay down.
“You want it, let’s get it over with, pig.”
“Fucking whore,” Volker said. He took off his trousers and shorts, but didn’t bother with his shoes or shirt.
She spread her legs for him, and they had sex, just about as rough as it had been with her ex, and just about as pleasurable. When he was done he got up and looked down at her.
“I’m sorry that I called you a whore,” he said. “At least they fake liking it.” He got dressed and at the door he looked back at her. “When do we go operational?”
“Soon,” Pam said, and he left.
She lay there for five minutes, a little sore, but not at all unhappy because she didn’t think Volker would give her any further trouble. Men were almost always so easy that way. It had been a hard lesson for her to learn when she was young.
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