Retribution (9781429922593)

by Hagberg, David

  “I must warn you, sir—”

  Naisir stopped and gave the man a hard look.

  “I mean to say that although Mr. Chopra—the gentleman I believe you are referring to—is a guest in this hotel he has not actually been seen by either me or any of the staff since he arrived on Monday.”

  “How is that possible? He had to have checked in. Got his key, had his bags taken up.”

  “His key was sent to the VIP lounge at the airport, and his bags were delivered that afternoon.”

  “Has he slept in his bed, eaten in any of the restaurants?”

  “He may have lain down on the couch, but the housekeeping staff isn’t sure.”

  “He must be a spy,” Naisir said.

  “If you say so, sir.”

  The soaring ornately decorated lobby lounge beneath massive crystal chandeliers was open, but only one person was seated reading a newspaper and drinking a coffee at a small table. The man didn’t look up as Naisir crossed to the elevators. Nor did the desk clerk pay any attention.

  On the fifth floor Naisir turned left. At Chopra’s suite he listened at the door for a moment or two. Hearing nothing, he withdrew his pistol and screwed the silencer on the threaded barrel; then unlocked the door and stepped inside.

  The sitting room was in darkness, except for some light coming through the tall windows covered only in gauze drapes, and utterly silent.

  The king-sized bed had not been slept in, nor did it seem to Naisir’s eye that the bathroom had been used. Naisir began to realize that Chopra was nothing more than a legend created by the CIA to distract him. Divide his attention, lead him to believe that his only enemy wasn’t McGarvey. Even General Bhutani had bought in to the story.

  Unscrewing the silencer, pocketing it and holstering the pistol, he put his ear to the adjoining door but no sounds came from McGarvey’s room. It was even possible that he too was a phantom guest.

  He called the hotel operator and had him call the Sampsons’ suite. After a moment the phone in the adjoining room began to ring. McGarvey answered on the third.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby lounge at seven,” Naisir said, and he hung up.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  McGarvey went to the door and looked through the peephole just as a blurry figure passed by in the corridor. He waited a second and opened the door a crack in time to see Naisir round the corner into the elevator alcove.

  Pete came to the bedroom door, a pistol in her hand. She was wearing nothing but a nightshirt down to just above her knees, her hair tousled. “Trouble?” she asked.

  “Major Naisir tossed Chopra’s suite, just like we thought he would.”

  “Was that him on the phone?”

  “Yes. He wants to meet me in the lobby lounge at seven. Seems like he’s taken the bait.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him? We could have stashed his body in Chopra’s suite and bugged out on the first flight to anywhere. It’s why we came here, isn’t it?”

  “I want to talk to him first. And then I want to talk to Schlueter.”

  “You’re not going to get anything out of them.”

  “We won’t know that until we talk to them,” McGarvey said.

  “Okay, how do you want to play it?”

  “Get dressed; then set up your laptop.”

  Pete went back into the bedroom, and McGarvey called Otto on his cell phone. “Naisir’s taken the bait. He just left Chopra’s suite. He phoned and said he wants to meet me in the lobby lounge at seven. Gives us a couple of hours.”

  “Was he alone?”

  “He was when he passed my door.”

  “He’ll have some muscle standing by, maybe even cops. They could arrest you guys for entering the country on fake passports, even though they’re diplomatic. But he doesn’t want that. He wants you dead.”

  “That’s exactly what I want him to try, but it won’t happen this morning in the hotel. First, he wants to know what I know about the ISI’s involvement with Schuleter and the operation. He made a mistake coming after me in Berlin, and he knows it.”

  “The guy’s motivated,” Otto said. “His boss is probably putting pressure on him to get the mess he created straightened out.”

  Pete came out and set the laptop on the desk. She had put on a pair of jeans. Last night McGarvey had slept on the couch, on his insistence, and she promised not to flounce around half-naked. A sexual tension between them had begun to build the moment their plane had pushed away from the gate at Dulles.

  McGarvey switched to speaker phone. “We have the laptop set up. Can you task a bird to take a look at Naisir’s safe house?”

  “Already on it. In fact Louise set it up two days ago, one of our Jupiters. But she only uses it for three-second bursts out of every three minutes. She wants to minimize the chance that someone will notice that the bird isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. For those three seconds the digital file will only show what happened beforehand. So far there’s been no activity down there. I’ll bring it up and check the last six hours or so, and then pull up the real-time images.”

  “We’ll log on to your site,” Pete said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Otto told her.

  A few seconds later the laptop came alive, and a house and courtyard behind tall walls appeared on the screen in a series of images that included the road that passed in front. It was like watching an extremely slow stop-action film, in which cars and a few people seemed to stream by at very rapid speeds. Six hours went by in about six minutes.

  “Nothing,” Otto said. “I’m bringing it up in real time.”

  The image on screen was the same, only enhanced by infrared. Two cars and a truck flicked past, and the sampling mode went to sleep for the next three minutes, only a static view of the safe house being transmitted.

  Suddenly headlights flashed on the front gate and a car appeared.

  Three minutes later the car was parked in the courtyard and a figure in dark clothes was at the door.

  In the next three-second burst, one of the windows in the house was lit up.

  They watched for another fifteen minutes, but nothing changed.

  “Go back to the image of the person at the door and freeze it,” Pete said.

  Otto brought it back and began enhancing it, first by centering on the person, then by enlarging it, and finally by adjusting the light scales, though it was difficult in the satellite’s infrared mode.

  “It’s a person,” Pete said. “But I can’t tell much more than that.”

  “Let’s see what one of my darlings can tell us,” Otto said. His darlings were his special analytical programs that he had developed over the past ten years or so. No one in the company really understood their algorithms; nevertheless many of its programs were at the heart of the agency’s computer system.

  A series of markers on the figure showed up, followed by a series of alphanumeric strings along the right side of the screen.

  “We’re pretty sure that it’s a slightly built woman. Height about one hundred seventy centimeters—makes her about five feet six.”

  “Or a very small man,” Pete suggested.

  “We can model the heat distribution,” Otto said. The figure of a person showed up on the screen. Its hips were somewhat prominent as well as its chest area.

  “A butt and boobs,” Pete said. “Not much smaller than me and definitely a female. But who, and what the hell is she doing there?”

  “Naisir’s wife. I got a grab of the rear license plate. Car’s registered in her name. She drove down to open up the place for her husband and possibly set some sort of a trap for you.”

  “It had to have taken her a half hour to get there, which means he sent her down even before he came to the hotel,” McGarvey said. “He must have known that the Chopra legend was a ruse.”

  “It also means that he’s expecting you to show up down there at some point,” Otto said.

  “Not until sometime after our mee
ting at seven,” McGarvey said.

  “I’ll get dressed,” Pete said and she went back into the bedroom.

  “Keep an eye on the place. The moment anything changes let Pete know first, then me.”

  “Take it easy, kemo sabe.”

  “If this fully develops by the time Schlueter gets here, we may have to make a run for it.”

  “I’ll work on it. But goddamnit, watch your ass.”

  * * *

  They took one of the service elevators down to the basement laundry room, and McGarvey went with Pete out the back way. She was going to walk past the loading dock, and once she was a block or so away from the hotel she would get a cab back to the airport, where she would rent another car.

  “No fooling around,” McGarvey warned her. “If something doesn’t look right, get the hell out of there.

  Pete nodded. “I’m a big girl.”

  “Yes, you are. But this is badland, so watch your ass.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Naisir went to the hotel’s business center on the mezzanine floor, empty at this hour of the morning, and telephoned a man he only knew by the Punjabi name of Gakhar, who was a dacoit, one of the more lucrative part-time jobs in Pakistan. By day most of them held ordinary positions as shopkeepers or taxi drivers or construction workers. During their off-hours, however, they moonlighted as professional bandits or enforcers.

  He’d never actually met the man, or any of the dacoits, but Gakhar ran a string of part-timers, and Naisir called on him from time to time for jobs that the ISI or local cops didn’t want to handle.

  The call was answered on the first ring. “Yes.”

  “Do you know who this is?”

  “Of course.”

  “I need four bullyboys who have some brains.”

  “When and for how long?”

  “They would have to be in place within the next hour and remain possibly overnight. Will this be a problem?”

  “None whatsoever, except for the price. I have four specialists in mind. Very strong, very good. They have no limits. What is the nature of the assignment?”

  “It concerns one man and one woman, both of them professionals.”

  “Professional what?”

  “Let’s just say they are contractors who work for the CIA. Armed and very dangerous.”

  “Is this to be a public execution, or can a place of privacy be arranged? The price will vary with the conditions, you understand this.”

  “Of course,” Naisir said. As much as he would have liked to gun down McGarvey and the woman right here inside the hotel, or just outside on the street, in full view of dozens of witnesses to make a statement to the arrogant American government, he did not want to endanger his own position, nor did he want to jeopardize Retribution. “It will be at a place of complete privacy.”

  “Tell me,” Gakhar said.

  Naisir explained about the safe house in Rawalpindi. “I think that I can guarantee at least one of them will be there sometime within the next few hours. Probably the man, who in any case is our prime target.”

  “And if it’s the woman instead? Shall we kill her?”

  “I’d leave that to your discretion. She could be useful as a lure for the man.”

  The phone was silent for several beats. “One hundred thousand U.S.”

  “The bodies will have to be disposed of.”

  “One hundred twenty-five thousand.”

  “There will be no payment if it is just the woman alone.”

  “One last thing, I must know who these people are, exactly.”

  “I don’t know who the woman is, except that she works for the CIA.”

  “But you know the man.”

  “His name is Kirk McGarvey.”

  “The former director of the CIA?” Gakhar demanded. He sounded impressed.

  “Can you handle the job?”

  “Yes, of course. The bodies will have to be taken to friends in the northwest, where their beheading will be taped for television. But there will be repercussions; you must also understand as much. The Americans will stop at nothing to find their murderers. There will be drone strikes up there, many of my friends will lose their lives. And if your involvement were to come out, even your life would be forfeit. So you will have to pay not only for the deed but for the collateral damage, as well as my discretion.”

  “I don’t care how it’s done, but do understand me, Mr. Gakhar. My reach is longer than yours.”

  “One million dollars.”

  The amount took Naisir’s breath away. He had access to such amounts from the same black ops fund—ironically money from the Pentagon—that he was using to pay Schlueter. But questions would be asked, especially when the United States began its retaliatory raids, which were inevitable unless McGarvey and the woman were simply to disappear and Chopra was the one to have his head chopped off. The man was nothing more than a CIA legend, after all. His death would be the supreme irony.

  “Agreed,” Naisir said. “But I have another idea.”

  “I’m listening.”

  And Naisir told him.

  * * *

  It was only a few minutes after six when Naisir, watching from the mezzanine balcony, spotted McGarvey getting off the elevator, crossing the now-busy lobby, and heading out the front doors. The woman wasn’t with him, but Naisir waited to see if she was covering his back. After a full minute when she didn’t show up, McGarvey appeared in the door and looked up to the mezzanine balcony.

  Even at this distance, Naisir got the same shock of recognition he’d had in Germany. The man standing just inside the doors was a dangerous animal, far more deadly than anyone Naisir had ever met, or even knew of. And he instantly had the thought that no matter how many bullyboys Gakhar sent, they would be not enough.

  McGarvey headed across to the lobby lounge, and Naisir took the stairs down, reaching the table just as McGarvey was ordering a coffee.

  “You’re early,” Naisir said, sitting across from the American. He ordered a coffee, sweet.

  “So are you, but then it pays to be cautious in our line of work.”

  Naisir almost asked, what line of work, but he didn’t. “What are you doing in Pakistan?”

  “I came to try to talk some sense into you. We know that you work for the ISI, of course, and that the twenty-four SEAL Team Six operators and their families have been targeted for assassination because of the raid in Abbottabad. And I want you to call it off before your involvement goes public and the White House is forced to react.”

  “None of that is true, of course,” Naisir said evenly. He had the almost overpowering urge to pull out his pistol and shoot the smug bastard in the head here and now.

  “You didn’t pull the trigger, of course, though you tried to have me taken out in Berlin. But your subcontractor, Pam Schlueter, has hired a team of specialists to do the job for you. We know this for a fact because we have one of them in custody, and he provided us with her name. And yours. So here I am.”

  “Speculation.”

  “I don’t work on speculation, Major,” McGarvey said. “So what’s next for us?”

  “I reiterate that I am in no way involved in any attack against your military personnel in any theater, and demand that you and the woman you came here with leave Pakistan at once or I will have you both arrested.”

  “I don’t think so. You were in Mr. Chopra’s suite a little while ago, so you know by now that he is a phantom. But your superiors still want you to bring him in, or more likely have him killed. Arresting or killing a former director of the CIA would be another thing. Something your government could not allow to happen.”

  Naisir continued to hold himself in check. He hated this man more than he had hated any other man or thing, and he promised himself that he would make every effort to piss on the corpse after Gakhar’s men were finished and before they took it up north. “Leave within the next twenty-four hours or you’ll never get out of here alive.”

  “That’ll give us plenty
of time to meet Ms. Schlueter when she arrives. I’d like to have a little chat with her as well.”

  Naisir jumped up, his heart pumping hard. “I can promise you one thing, you son of a bitch.”

  McGarvey looked up at him. “Yes?”

  “You will rot in hell,” was all Naisir could think to say, and he turned on his heel and stalked away, certain that the bastard American was laughing at his back.

  FORTY

  Naisir’s safe house was a plain two-story cinder block building that had once been painted white. It was protected by a tall wall, also of cinder block access through which was an iron gate off the street. This was a middle-class neighborhood of cab drivers, people who worked in shops or factories, people who made rugs, hammered silver, or worked construction. At this hour of the morning the narrow street was devoid of all but the occasional delivery van or bus.

  Pete took one pass in the blue Chevy Aveo she’d rented at the airport and parked just around the corner in a spot where she could watch the front gate with the passenger side–door mirror.

  She phoned Otto. “I’m in place.”

  “Is that you in the Aveo at the corner?”

  “Yes. Is the wife still inside?”

  “She hasn’t moved, but she’s made three phone calls in the past hour. A pretty fair encryption system, Chinese I think, but I’ll have it shortly.”

  “Any idea who she called?”

  “No, but I’ll have that too.”

  Pete checked the load on her pistol. She would have preferred something a little heavier, perhaps a Glock or a SIG, but the Walther in the 9mm version had some decent stopping power, even if fired with the suppressor attached. “Anything I should know about before I go calling?”

  “It looks clear from my vantage point, but we don’t know much about the wife, except that she comes from a wealthy family.”

  “Besides her husband’s connections she’ll have some of her own. But I want to know what she’s doing here.”

  “Naisir just left the hotel, so he might be on his way down. But I think he sent her ahead to get the place ready.”

  “For what?” Pete asked, even though she thought she knew the answer.