Louise took two more photographs out of the portfolio. One was a blown-up and enhanced section of one of the satellite photos, showing the face and neck of the body in bin Laden’s arms. The second was a file photograph of a young, beautiful woman dressed in traditional garb, except that her face and hair were uncovered. They were the same woman.
“Sarah bin Laden. His daughter.”
It hit Elizabeth all at once. “My God, I know her.”
“How? Where?” Rencke demanded.
“I don’t know, but her face, it’s so familiar to me.”
“The Bern Polytechnic,” Louise said. “I checked the records, she was there one year the same time you were. I wondered if you would remember her.”
“She was younger than me, I think, but we might have had a couple of the same classes.” Elizabeth looked up in amazement. “I remember her because she always had bodyguards around her. Some of the other girls thought it was cool, but I thought it was a pain in the neck.” She looked at the photograph again. “She was sorta quiet, and very smart. But she was never allowed to go into town, or on trips with us. I remember that, because we all thought it was sad, you know. The poor little Arab rich kid.”
“Well, our missiles killed her and not bin Laden,” Louise said.
“Adkins has to see this,” Elizabeth said, a cold fist closing around her heart. Bin Laden would be insane with rage now.
Rencke’s brain was going a mile a minute. “The President has to be informed,” he said distractedly. He focused on Louise. “Good job, kiddo,” he said softly. “But you’d better stick around, there’s gonna be some questions.”
“I figured as much,” she said. “I’ll be next door in the Pit if you need me. Maybe we can come up with something else. The weather over there is still on our side.” She glanced at Elizabeth. “Too bad about his daughter.”
“He’s going to come after my father,” Elizabeth said.
“I think you’re right,” Louise replied. “But from what I understand, your dad is a pretty tough dude himself.” She smiled. “It’s not over so don’t count him out yet.” She turned back to Rencke. “When you’re ready for a break give me a call. We can go over to my apartment and I’ll fix us some supper.”
“I’ll call you,” Rencke promised, but he’d already lifted the phone to Dick Adkins.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
To Kabul
McGarvey pulled off the side of the highway and got out to check under the hood. An armored scout car was parked a couple of hundred yards away at the road to the airport.
They might be looking for a Rover, but they were expecting an American. McGarvey had taken the time to pull Panel’s clothes over his khakis and sweater. He wore a cap, and although he was clean shaven he’d wrapped a cotton scarf around his neck and chin. It might be unclear to someone passing, or to someone standing beside the road exactly who or what he was.
The trip down the valley from the bombed-out village, and the path along the river cliffs in the dark had taken him much longer than he expected. It had already been light when he’d passed Charikar. Stopped now beside the road he was seeing a lot of traffic, most of it big trucks bringing food into the city from the countryside.
By now Farid and the other mujahed would be missed. Someone else might have been sent to find out what had happened, and each hour that passed the likelihood that the Taliban in Kabul had been notified increased exponentially. It was important that he get to a place of relative safety very soon so that he could get a few hours’ rest, and hopefully something to eat and drink. He was at his extreme physical limit. He was having trouble concentrating on what he was doing, trouble keeping in focus.
He closed the Rover’s hood and got back behind the wheel. A couple of cars and a broken-down old bus passed him, none of the drivers slowing for the checkpoint. In the rearview mirror a minute later McGarvey saw what he had been looking for. A convoy of what appeared to be at least six large trucks lumbered down the highway, a cloud of blue-gray exhaust trailing behind them.
He put the car in gear and waited until the lead truck was almost upon him, then suddenly gunned the engine and pulled out in front of it. McGarvey glanced in the rearview mirror in time to see the driver shake a fist at him as the distance between them closed alarmingly fast. He stomped the gas pedal to the floor and the Rover shot out ahead, at the same moment the scout car’s turret hatch opened, and a man popped up.
He was a soldier, McGarvey could see that much as he got closer, and he was speaking into a microphone. Seventy-five yards away, the turret started to move as a plume of diesel smoke blossomed out of the exhaust stack, and the scout car lurched toward the highway.
McGarvey checked the rearview mirror again, and then slowed down so that the lead truck was once more right on his bumper. The scout car crew had spotted him and they were going to try to intercept him. But they had to know that if they fired there was a good chance they’d hit the truck right behind him too. At the very least they would cause a tremendous accident that would probably end up with a lot of casualties, ruined food supplies and a traffic jam that would be snarled for most of the morning.
Thirty yards out the muzzle of the main 14.5 mm heavy machinegun came around to point directly at him, and the scout car stopped just off the highway’s paved surface. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. There wasn’t the slightest chance that the gunner would miss. McGarvey could see that the soldier in the turret was an officer, and he was frantically speaking into his microphone while gesticulating for McGarvey to pull over.
A string of several cars and a couple of trucks was coming out of the city. The officer turned and spotted them as they were nearly on top of his position. He bent down and shouted something through the open turret. At the last possible instant the cars flashed past the scout car as McGarvey, the six trucks directly on his tail, also passed, and the moment to open fire was gone.
McGarvey breathed a sigh of relief, and allowed himself to relax for just a minute. The first problem, getting past the airport checkpoint, was solved, but now he was faced with the even larger problems of getting into the city, ditching the car and making it on foot to the ambassador’s old residence compound. Then he would have to get inside past any guards that the Taliban might have posted because of the riots, and somehow deal with the two caretakers. They were there to protect American property so he could not harm them. Yet they were in fact employees of the Taliban government so they wouldn’t hesitate to try to arrest him, which might end up becoming his biggest problem this morning. But he needed food and drink and rest, and he needed it very soon.
He gradually sped up, putting more distance between himself and the convoy of trucks. He kept a sharp eye for military vehicles, and he kept checking the sky to make sure they hadn’t sent a helicopter gunship after him. If they did that he wouldn’t stand a chance out here in the open.
He couldn’t help but think about Sarah bin Laden. In another time and place she could have gone to London for her education, and could have eventually taken over the family’s business interests. He had no doubt that she would have been good at it, because she was bright and she had proved how adaptable she was by existing in Afghanistan disguised as a mujahed. He could see her in a private jet flitting from one world capital to another, attending high level business meetings; informing her business opponents, with an arched eyebrow, that they had no conception of what truly difficult negotiations could be like. She’d been there, seen that, done that.
The city gradually enfolded him like a dirty pair of trousers. Low, mud-brick buildings on either side of the highway gave way to larger and thicker concentrations of walled compounds, and rat warrens of hovels rising up from the floor of the river valley into the arid, treeless hills overlooking the city.
Unlike the day he came in from the airport when the streets were all but devoid of life, traffic this morning was fairly heavy, and the marketplaces, as he approached the city center, were filled with shoppers. Out
this early, he suspected, to beat the summer heat.
As best he could remember from studying the maps and files he’d brought with him in his laptop, the ambassador’s residence was not too far from the old embassy, which was on Ansari Wat in the northeastern part of the city called Wzir Akbar Khan Mena. He’d seen the embassy on the way in from the airport and he had a fuzzy idea how to get from it to the residence. But Otto warned him that the anti American rioting was concentrating around the old embassy. No one would expect him to walk into the middle of a demonstration, but it might be his safest bet for now.
In the distance ahead he spotted a roadblock. Several army trucks and jeeps, and at least one armored car blocked the main road. He slowed down. The officer at the airport checkpoint would have radioed that the Rover had passed him and was on the way into the city. They were waiting for him, and he looked for someplace to ditch the car.
The main street was filled with people, and as McGarvey got even closer he realized that the roadblock had been set up not to catch him, but to allow the crowd to get across. Off to the right, in the direction the people were moving, was the old American embassy. What he was seeing was more people being directed toward the demonstration. Like most of these riots it was being choreographed by the government, and they had their hands full. It gave him the advantage for the moment.
A block away he pulled into a narrow side street that wound its way past a series of shops, a lot of them closed, and some three-and four-story European-style structures that looked like apartment buildings.
He came to a large park ringed by apartment buildings. At one end of the park was a mosque, its minaret rising into the cloudless, pale blue sky. The traffic was very light now, and what few people were on foot seemed to be heading up toward the embassy.
McGarvey drove slowly down an alley between buildings and found a parking spot beside an old Mercedes and a small Flat delivery van. He got out and walked back down the alley to the street, then crossed the park, pulling the scarf over his mouth so that only his nose and eyes were left uncovered.
When they found the Rover they would have no idea where he had gotten himself to. It was unlikely that they would believe he had headed into the crowd around the old embassy. They might think that he was trying to make it to another embassy, or even out to the airport, anywhere but toward the heart of the anti-American disturbance.
A block beyond the park, down a pleasant, treelined street of upscale private homes, all of them protected behind tall brick walls, he heard the noise of a crowd and he guessed that he was getting close to the embassy. There were no street signs back here, and the only people he saw was a band of young men a couple of blocks away down an intersecting avenue.
He stopped to get his bearings.
He figured that he had to be within a half-mile of the embassy, which put him somewhere in the vicinity of the ambassador’s residence. If he had his laptop finding the place would be easy. But he remembered that it was at the end of a short dead-end street, behind which was a two-block square neighborhood of weavers’ workshops and retail stores. Before the Taliban had taken over, and even before the Russians had started their war here, the area had been a busy one, catering mostly to foreigners with money. Afghan rugs and carpets had been one of the major cottage industries in the city. Dealers from all over the world had come here to pick up bargains for resale in their stores in all the major Western cities. All that was a thing of the past, but the workshops were still in business, or at least some of them were according to the State Department report he’d read. And some carpets still found their way out of the country. He headed to the right, away from the noise of the crowd.
Two blocks later he came to the dead-end street. There was a Russian jeep parked in front of the compound’s main gate. Two men in uniform were lounging back, their feet propped up on the open doors. Nothing was happening here and they were obviously bored and inattentive. McGarvey stepped back out of sight around the corner. Behind the walls a Georgian mansion rose four stories, its windows shuttered. The house could have been directly transplanted from a fashionable London neighborhood. It looked out of place, which was typical of a lot of American installations around the world. Most U.S. ambassadors did not speak the language of their assigned country, and many of their embassies and residences stuck out like sore thumbs. It was a holdover from a more arrogant colonial period.
He turned around and walked to the last intersecting street he had passed and followed it, coming to the rug weavers’ district. The streets were quite narrow, as they were in the other traditional working class areas of the city. Not a single person was about, and all the shops and houses were closed, some of them boarded up. The neighborhood had the feel of abandonment, fallen on hard times.
McGarvey made his way to a small, boarded-up shop that he figured was directly behind the ambassador’s compound. Nothing, not even a dog or a scrap of paper, moved on the street, nor did he spot anyone looking out a window or a doorway at him.
The scraps of wood nailed over the door were mostly rotten, and came away easily. McGarvey stacked them on a nearby pile of trash, then, checking one last time to make sure that he wasn’t being observed, kicked the door in, the old, soft metal lock disintegrating with the first blow.
He slipped inside and closed the door. The light filtering in from outside was enough for him to see that he was in an empty shop. Piles of trash and scraps of lumber were scattered about. Beyond the front room, he could see directly to the back of the shop where sunlight streamed in through the cracks in a boarded-up window.
McGarvey jammed a piece of scrap wood against the door, which would hold it shut unless someone else put their back into it, then went to the rear of the shop and looked out through the cracks in the window boards. A narrow, garbage-strewn alley separated the rear of the buildings from the brick wall of the ambassador’s compound. There were no guards in sight.
The back door was beneath a set of narrow stairs, and was secured only by a flimsy bolt. He slipped it off and stepped out into the alley, the stench from the open sewage ditch instantly assailing his nostrils. Human waste lay in piles, and the almost completely decomposed body of a dog or some other small animal lay half-buried under a slimy mass of rotting garbage. It was all he could do in his present condition to keep from throwing up what little he had in his stomach.
The wall ran at least thirty or forty yards in either direction, and was ten feet tall. But some of the bricks were missing and a lot of the mortar had fallen out of the joints so that scaling it would present no problem. He picked his way carefully across the filthy alley, and climbed to the top of the wall so that he could see inside the compound. The house was toward the front of the property, and back here was a five-car garage, a lot of trees, an overgrown tennis court, the net gone and big holes in the wire fence, and what probably had once been a large vegetable garden. There was no sign that anyone had been in residence for a long time. Everything was run-down and gone to weed. All the rear windows of the house were shuttered, and there were no tire marks in the driveway leading from the front. Nor was there any trash. If there were caretakers here now, he decided, they were uncommonly tidy for Afghanis.
With the last of his strength he levered himself up over the top of the wall, and dropped down into the garden on the other side.
It was silent. He could not even hear the noise from the demonstration. For the moment he felt that he was as safe here as he could be anywhere in Kabul, and he let a little of the tension drain away as he crossed behind the tennis court and made his way to the back of the mansion.
There were several doors, one of them obviously leading down into a basement, another for deliveries into what was most likely the kitchen and pantry area and another from a broad porch. McGarvey tried the delivery door. It was locked as he expected it would be. He put an ear to the door and held his breath to listen. There were no sounds from within. Not even the sounds of running machinery such as a refrigerator or freezer mot
or. The house was dead.
He took his jacket off, wrapped it around his pistol, then averted his face and fired one round into the lock. It jammed when he tried it, but then came free in his hand, and he let himself inside.
He found himself in what had been the laundry room. There were hookups for two washers and dryers, but the appliances were gone, and the cabinets on the walls were empty. All the cupboards and shelves in the large pantry beyond it were also empty, as were the walk-in cooler and freezer in the adjoining kitchen. Nor did the kitchen sinks work. Everything, including water had been shut off.
There was nothing here. The Taliban caretakers had stripped the place bare of just about everything useful. The chairs and table were gone, and even the spot where a large industrial range had stood was bare.
Very little light came through the shutters, so that the interior was mostly in shadows. It was somehow eerie. The dining room was empty, and standing in the spacious stair hall he could see that the living room and library had been stripped too. He leaned against the stair rail and lowered his head for a moment to catch his breath. There was nothing here for him other than a relatively safe haven for as long as he could last.
There was a mouthful of tepid water left in the canteen. He drank it and then went upstairs. All the rooms were bare. Even the pictures on the walls and the rugs on the floors had been taken. In a rear bedroom on the top floor, he sat down with his back to the wall, laid his gun on the floor beside him and took off the filthy scarf and cap.
McGarvey felt drained. What anger he had toward bin Laden had faded into the background for the moment. He wanted to lay his head back and sleep. He touched his side where the chip had been cut and his fingers came away bloody. He had to get back to Washington. Too many people were depending on him. He wasn’t going to simply give up here and wait to pass out from weakness, or for some bright Taliban officer to send soldiers here to find him. He wasn’t built that way.
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