“Was.”
Pam, still watching the unfolding situation on the street, started to say something but then looked up, her eyes narrowing suspiciously. “Was?”
“You have a new paymaster.”
“I’ve already told you that the ISI will no longer let itself be involved.”
“I’ll pay,” Ayesha said. “That is, if you still want your retribution. Because I certainly do.”
Pam was interested. “It’ll take a great deal of money. Perhaps as much as several million.”
“Euros or dollars?” Ayesha asked, though it really didn’t matter. She had access to as much as she needed. Her father, especially, would understand, as would her brothers. This now was a family affair.
“I’ll need a down payment of five hundred thousand euros. Immediately.”
“You’ll have it within twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll give you the banking numbers.”
“I already have them,” Ayesha said. She looked again at McGarvey and the woman. “Before you proceed, your first job will be to kill Mr. McGarvey if he manages to escape today. But not on Pakistani soil.”
“He won’t get out of this,” Pam replied.
“Don’t be so sure.”
FORTY-NINE
The first of the police were just around the corner when Milt Thomas’s cab parted the crowd less than ten feet from where McGarvey stood his ground, still holding Pete in his arms. As soon as the cab was clear Milt started throwing out ten-rupee notes, which immediately distracted the mob long enough for him to draw up and reach back and pop open the rear door.
McGarvey shoved Pete inside first, and as he climbed in, Milt accelerating away, he caught a glimpse of the Schlueter woman and Naisir’s wife coming out of the house next door and merging with the mob.
“Otto called, said you guys were in trouble.”
“Is that the cops or the ISI behind us?” McGarvey asked.
“The cops,” Milt said. “Someone reported an explosion and gunfire and they came running. If you still have your pistol, and especially the Semtex and fuses, toss them out the window as soon as we’re clear. For some reason security at the airport has been tightened up in the past hour or so. They’re checking everyone’s papers real close.”
“My things are back at the safe house,” Pete said.
“Doesn’t matter, I brought both of you new passports, under the names Tom and Maureen Chesson.” He handed back an envelope. “We figured that you might be on the run getting out, your old legends burned.”
The passports were diplomatic, like the ones they had come in under. To McGarvey’s eye they looked perfect, neither his nor Pete’s photos exactly matching what they looked like now, which was often a dead giveaway for forgeries. The only problem would come if they were searched. None of their others papers—driving licenses, credit cards, bank cards—matched.
Three blocks away Thomas turned down a narrow street that was bordered on the left by a refuse-littered field. Mac tossed out the Semtex, the pencil fuses, and the two extra magazines of ammunition.
“What about your gun?”
“Back at the safe house.”
“Doesn’t matter, no serial number, unless they match your DNA with whatever they might come up with from the handle. But I don’t think the cops are going to be that sophisticated or quick. And the ISI is going to want to sweep everything under the rug.”
“Major Naisir is dead,” McGarvey said.
Thomas looked at him in the rearview mirror. “That might become an issue, but not right now. It’s going to take them time to straighten out the mess, especially if the ham-handed cops go inside and look around. They’ll screw up everything.”
“But it’s over now, isn’t it, Mac?” Pete asked.
“I don’t think so. Schlueter managed to get out. I saw her with the major’s wife back there in the crowd.”
“Will the ISI still be interested in funding her?”
“No, but it’s possible she’ll find another source.”
“The major’s wife’s family is rich,” Thomas said. “And with her husband dead she has the motivation.”
“Milt’s right,” Pete said. “From what little I saw at the safe house she rules the roost. If she’s got money, she’ll step up to the plate.”
Milt looked at them in the rearview mirror. “You’re her first target,” he said to McGarvey.
“I hope so, because if we get out of here, she’ll be mine.”
“Ours,” Pete corrected.
“You have blood on your neck,” Milt told McGarvey. “You’d better clean it off before we get to the airport.”
* * *
The new airport, called Benazir Bhutto International, the same as the old one, had just opened a year ago, and security at the easiest of times was tight, especially for departing passengers.
This afternoon the lines for cars, taxis, and buses at the passenger dropoff points were not terribly heavy, but there were a lot of police and airport security personnel everywhere. Milt headed across to the separate cargo airlines terminal, where only three trucks were in the queue.
“Let me do the talking,” he said.
“Do you have a gun?” McGarvey asked.
“No, and the cab is clean.”
“How about your papers?”
“I’m a Pakistani-born American, who came home because he couldn’t stand the way of the infidel. It’s why I help the local cops whenever I can.”
A lot of CIA spies fit the same, unglamorous mold. They were foreign-born American immigrants who were fluent in their native language and who were recruited to return to their homes to spy: China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, even North Korea, which was the most dangerous assignment of them all because the leadership was so incredibly paranoid and the people brainwashed.
When it was their turn at the security checkpoint, they all handed their papers to an armed guard, while another with a long-handled mirror checked the undercarriage of the cab, and a third with a bomb-sniffing dog checked the trunk.
“What is your business here?” the guard with their papers demanded in Punjabi first and then English.
“I am taking my passengers to the TCS Courier hanger. They are leaving on the London-Heathrow flight.”
“They’re too late. That plane is leaving sooner than scheduled. Any minute now.”
“It’s being held for them,” Thomas said.
“It’s not possible,” the guard said. “Anyway you’re just a simple taxi driver. What would you know of these things?”
“I’m sorry. I only do as I am instructed.”
The guard returned McGarvey’s and Pete’s passports. “You will have to arrange for another flight,” he said.
McGarvey put a hundred-dollar bill in his passport and held it out the window for the guard, who was closely examining Thomas’s papers, including a national identity card and his taxi license.
“Perhaps you would care to examine my passport again,” McGarvey said.
The guard opened it, looked up at McGarvey and Pete, pocketed the money, and handed the passport back.
“I’ll hold your papers,” he told Thomas. “Take your passengers to the terminal, and when you return I will have a number of questions for you.”
“As you wish,” Thomas said.
* * *
The TCS Boeing 737 configured as a cargo aircraft was waiting on the tarmac, its engines already spooling. Stairs to the open hatch just aft of the cockpit were in place, a ground crew waiting to remove them.
Thomas pulled up next to the ground crew’s pickup truck. “Good luck to both of you,” he said.
“What was all that at the checkpoint?” Pete asked.
“Happens from time to time. No big deal.”
“If you’re connected with what happened at the safe house, you could be in trouble,” she persisted. “Mac, tell him.”
“If I don’t go back, they’ll never let this plane get out of Pakistan’s airspace. Now get the h
ell out of here and let me do my job.”
“Good luck,” McGarvey said, and they shook hands.
“Piece of cake.”
McGarvey had to help Pete up the stairs and inside, where they took the last two seats. The others were occupied by a half-dozen contractors, one of them a medic who even before they had taken off put Pete’s knee to rights by popping the kneecap back in place.
“That helps,” she said gratefully.
“What happened?” he asked. He was a man in his late thirties or early forties, mild-mannered with a southern accent.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” she said.
McGarvey phoned Otto, who answered on the first ring. He’d been standing by for the call. “We’re on the way out.”
“How’d it go?”
“Could have been better. But Milt might be in some sort of trouble.”
“The embassy is working on it. They’re getting him out of Islamabad tonight. We’re just waiting till your flight clears Pakistani airspace. A company plane will be standing by for you at Heathrow.”
“I’ll tell you all about it once we’re over the Atlantic.”
“But it’s not over?”
“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said.
Germany
Pam Schlueter got back to Berlin a day and a half later, bone-tired and a little bit discouraged because of her abject failure in Pakistan and the death of her paymaster. She didn’t think for one minute that Ayesha Naisir would ever make good on her promise to pick up the tab for the rest of the project. And all that was left in her mind was her own revenge, first against McGarvey and second against her ex-husband—a job of work she should have accomplished long ago.
It was early evening under a cloudless sky when she emerged from the Air Berlin arrivals gate at Tegel Airport, and went through customs carrying only her passport and a single carry-on bag containing a couple of items of clothing, all of which she had purchased in Islamabad.
She had half-expected to be questioned by the airport immigration people, but she was passed through without comment. Outside, she held back for a few moments to watch the area around the taxi stand, again expecting to spot a cop or BND officer waiting for her. Those guys almost always stood out.
But again no one had come for her. It was as if Rawalpindi never happened; not the kidnapping of a CIA officer and not the shootout with the former DCI. It was surreal, and all the way to her apartment in the city she had a hard time controlling her jitters.
She had the cabbie pull up a block away. After he was gone she walked the rest of the way, passing her building and suddenly turning around at the end of the block to see if she was being followed. But no one was there, and no car or truck out of the ordinary. Only normal traffic for this time of the night, mostly Turks, Greeks, and a few Muslims, mostly from Africa.
She took the stairs to the third floor and listened with her ear to the door for several long beats, but all was quiet, except for some sort of wailing music from the apartment below, sounded Oriental to her, and voices from the apartment just above hers.
The entire building smelled of leaking sewer pipes, boiled lentils and chickpeas, and the ever-present garlic. The irony of it all for her was that she was a millionaire now. Even if she cut and ran, dropping everything, she could retire comfortably somewhere, and if she lived carefully the money she’d already accumulated would last a lifetime.
But she couldn’t. What was coming next would be her retribution.
Inside her tiny one-room apartment, she tossed her bag on the narrow bed, turned on the small table lamp, and found her loaded Glock 26 pistol and silencer in the small Schrank that held her few clothes. For the first time since leaving Pakistan she felt reasonably safe. If someone came here wanting to arrest her, they would pay dearly with their lives.
She took off her light khaki jacket and hung it up at the same moment someone tapped lightly on her door.
Pistol in hand she stood to one side. “Yes?” she said.
“It’s me,” a woman responded.
For just an instant Pam wasn’t sure whether her hearing was playing tricks on her. She knew the voice. Holding the pistol out of sight behind her back, she opened the door.
Gloria, her U.S. contact, stood there, an awkward smile on her plain oval face. The woman was shorter than Pam, and a little on the dumpy side, but like the only other time they’d met, she seemed happy and relieved all at once.
“I found out about the trouble in Paki land, but then nothing else,” the woman gushed. “Christ, I didn’t know if you were dead or what. I had to come personally and wait for you.”
Pam stepped aside to let the woman in. “It wasn’t necessary for you to come all this way. To take the risk.”
“No risk, believe me,” Gloria said. Her voice was nasal and a little high-pitched, and her eyes darted all over the place as if she was afraid that something was going to jump out of the shadows and bite her. “You can’t image how much we depend on you.”
Pam laid her pistol on the small table, and then took Gloria’s coat and large shoulder bag and set them aside.
The woman’s eyes were round, looking at the pistol. “Were you expecting more trouble?”
“Trouble, yes. But not you. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I had to make sure that you weren’t dead.”
“You’ve already said that.”
“The others suggested that I come. My sources. But they don’t know the reality. To them it’s just a game we play.”
Pam had suspected from the start that Gloria had her sources. In her position it had always been impossible for her to know everything she knew without help. But she’d always thought that “the others” were just friends, acquaintances, someone in Gloria’s social network, even though she’d known intellectually that such a simple explanation wasn’t likely. But “sources” implied a network with structure. And yet she was here, and she was suggesting that the others—almost certainly bored housewives of important government officials—were in it as a game. To them it wasn’t real.
“The others?”
“They’re all over Washington, inside the Pentagon, you wouldn’t believe.” Gloria stopped. “I can’t give you their names. You have to understand.”
“I do,” Pam said. “You, I understand; we have a bond. But what about your friends in high places?”
Gloria shook her head. “Just next to men in high places.”
“All women?”
Gloria nodded.
“Battered women?”
Again Gloria nodded, a real sadness coming into her eyes. “And jilted women, and trivialized women, and ignored women. And after I tell them about you, how you’re fighting back, they don’t have one bit of trouble helping with little bits of information now and then. They figure—just like I do—that if you can make it on your own, so could they.”
Pam had understood Gloria almost from the beginning when they had accidentally met in Washington. But she’d never been able to figure out how the woman got her information, some of it startlingly secret, until now. And she understood the risk involved, the least of which would be prison.
She reached out and Gloria came into her arms; They held each other close for a long time.
“It’s all right,” Pam said softly. She brushed a kiss on Gloria’s cheek. “It’ll be okay now, I promise.”
Gloria looked up. She was crying.
Pam kissed her on the lips, and Gloria responded, shuddering and passionately kissing back.
They undressed each other and went to bed, where they made love very slowly but with a huge, pumped-up passion that seemed as if it had been building forever. At one point Gloria cried out, but softly, all the way from the back of her throat.
When they were done, Pam covered them up and they held each other closely, finally going to sleep, both of them exhausted.
* * *
Sometime just after three in the morning, Pam woke up, her heart pounding. Sh
e disentangled herself from Gloria and got out of bed. At the window she looked down at the street, which was completely devoid of traffic at this hour. No suspicious cars or vans were parked half up on the sidewalks. No one was lurking in the shadows as far as she could tell.
After a while she got a bottle of schnapps and a small glass from the cupboard, and then powered up her laptop. While it was booting up she poured a drink, tossed it back, and poured another.
She checked her in-box but there were no messages from any of her operators; they were laying low for the time being. Next she checked the half-dozen banks she maintained as close as Luxembourg and as far as the Cayman Islands. When she came to her account with Haddad Commercial Bank Offshore on Jersey in the Channel Islands, she sat back. Five hundred thousand euros had been deposited last night, shortly after she had left Pakistan.
She stared at the screen for a very long time. Then she shut off the machine, finished her second glass of schnapps and went back to bed. In the morning she would tell Gloria exactly what she needed.
PART
THREE
The Next Five Days
FIFTY
Otto had arranged for one of the CIA’s Gulfstream VIP jets to pick them up at Heathrow and take them across the Atlantic. They landed at Joint Base Andrews in the middle of the night and taxied over to the navy hangar the company used.
Marty Bambridge was leaning against a big Cadillac Escalade, a scowl on his face. Two men in dark Windbreakers stood nearby, and two others were waiting at a second Cadillac.
“Looks like we have a welcome home committee,” Pete said from her window seat. “And Marty doesn’t look happy.”
“Has he ever been?” McGarvey asked. He’d figured the sort of reception they’d get, especially if Bhutani, the ISI’s director general, complained to Page. But the DCI’s private phone line was one area where Otto never hacked. It was a point of honor.
“We may have had some certifiable idiots on the seventh floor, but they were patriots doing the best they knew how,” he’d explained once.
They thanked the pilot and crew, who had treated them to a late breakfast last night then left them alone so that they could get some rest.
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