“This is what the President meant in his speech,” Rudolph said softly, but McGarvey heard him. “It would have been helpful to our investigation if we had known all the facts.”
“National security concerns—” McGarvey said.
“Come on, Mac, we can’t do this in the dark,” Rudolph pressed. He was stunned, he was angry and he was frightened. They all were. “If we had known the score before Alien Trumble and his family were gunned down we might have been able to do something to prevent it. To prevent all of this. And then afterwards we were kept in the dark again about the raid. Why?”
“It was to protect my life,” McGarvey said. He paused a moment to let that sink in. “We thought that Alien Trumble and his family were killed by a faction who did not agree with bin Laden. Someone who wanted to use the bomb against us, even though bin Laden himself was apparently getting cold feet and wanted to talk to us.”
“Are you saying that you went over there and met with him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then why the missile attack?” Rudolph asked.
“It was a mistake.”
The auditorium was suddenly very quiet. McGarvey could see that they were evaluating the situation through the various perspectives of their own positions and experience. It was exactly what he wanted them to do. They were all coming more or less to the same conclusions: Either someone had made a colossal blunder bordering on the criminal, or McGarvey was lying to them to protect his own job. There wasn’t a person in the group who believed the latter.
“It’s on the way here,” Rudolph said.
“We’re going to have to assume that it is,” McGarvey said. “All of you have extensive files on bin Laden so I’m not going over his background except that before you leave you’ll each be given a diskette containing the CIA’s entire file. Nothing will be held back. We can’t afford the luxury. But I will tell you something that you most likely don’t know, and that’s not yet in the files. Bin Laden is probably dying of cancer and very possibly he doesn’t have much time left. It’s one of the reasons he agreed to meet with me, and now it’s all the more reason for him to hurry this last attack.”
“Maybe he’ll make a mistake,” someone said.
“Let’s hope he does, but don’t count on it,” McGarvey said. “He spent thirty million to get the bomb, and he means to use it. Which means he has a carefully worked out plan and a timetable. Neither of which we know.”
“We’ll have to keep this from the public to avoid a panic,” the State Department representative said.
“I agree,” Rudolph said. “But if we’re going to have any chance of heading this off before it gets here we’re going to have to pool our resources. All our resources.”
“Agreed,” McGarvey said.
The door at the rear of the auditorium opened and Rencke came in. He was pushing an aluminum case loaded onto a handcart. Elizabeth came in right behind him and took a seat in the back row as he started to the front.
McGarvey turned up the lights. “Dick Adkins will coordinate the operation from our crisis center. Besides the usual computer links we’ll maintain a twenty-four per-day hotline, and I would like each of your departments to do the same.”
“This has to be a two-way street in more than name only,” Rudolph said.
“You have my word on it,” McGarvey promised. “Are there any questions?”
Rencke had reached the stage. He lifted the aluminum case off the cart with some difficulty, and brought it up on the stage where he set it down on the table to the left of the podium.
“I have a question,” Rudolph said. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes, it is,” McGarvey said.
Rencke keyed the five-digit combinations on the two locks, released the latches and opened the lid of the case, which was about the size of a large suitcase. Next he activated the keypad and entered an eleven-digit code. Immediately an LED counter across the top of the keypad began to count down by the hundredth of a second from ten minutes.
“This is one of our nuclear demolition weapons,” McGarvey said. “But it’s almost identical in design and operation with the Russian version. Before you leave this morning I’d like you to come up and take a look at what you’re going to be dealing with.”
Rudolph was the first on the stage, and he looked up nervously from the keypad. “This thing is running,” he said. “The physics package in this one is a dummy,” McGarvey said.
“What does it do when it hits zero?” Don Marsden, from the State Department’s special unit on counterterrorism asked.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey admitted. He turned to Rencke.
“I don’t have a clue either,” Rencke said. “But it might be interesting to stick around and find out.”
Marsden grinned nervously. “I’d like to, but I have to get back to my office.”
“Me too,” Rudolph said.
McGarvey stayed to answer a few more questions, but everyone went with Adkins to get their briefing diskettes by the time the counter on the dummy bomb hit zero. McGarvey was staring at it, but nothing happened. It hit zero and the keypad went blank.
Rencke relocked the case and loaded it on the handcart. “The army wasn’t happy about admitting they had this, let alone letting us use it,” he said. “But it impressed the hell out of everybody.”
“I hope so,” McGarvey said tiredly. He just couldn’t seem to get his act together. It was as if he was a couple of paces behind himself, and couldn’t catch up, and he found himself being distracted by stray, disconnected thoughts that had nothing to do with the present moment.
Elizabeth came from the back of the auditorium and gave her father a critical look. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. “Maybe you should go over to Bethesda after all and let the doctors look at you. Then go home, at least until morning.”
“I’m making an early night of it, I promised your mother. But I still have work to do, and the general and I are briefing the President this afternoon.”
“My search engines are all in gear. If there’s anything out there we’ll find it,” Rencke said. “In the meantime if you’re up to it I want to run some eyes and voices past you. I might be able to come up with an IdentiKit portrait of bin Laden’s chief of staff from what Alien was able to tell me, and what you can come up with. At least it might narrow down the search.”
“Run a parallel search with my background plugged in,” McGarvey said.
“Do you think that you’ve met this guy before?” Rencke asked excitedly.
“Maybe, but I just can’t put my finger on where, or in what context. He sounded English, but I don’t think he was.”
“What makes you think that?” Elizabeth asked.
“I don’t know, sweetheart, just something in my gut.” He was feeling disconnected again, and he looked up to make sure that the room lights hadn’t gone out because his vision was starting to get dark. He followed Rencke and Elizabeth up the aisle and out of the auditorium, his left hand trailing on the seat backs for balance. Bits and pieces of Voltaire were running around in a jumble in his head, but they made no sense. For the first time since he could remember he truly felt afraid.
CHAPTER TWENTy-TWO
Arabian Sea
The M/V Margo smashed directly into the increasing waves. By the time the crew had finished checking the cargo integrity in the seven holds the storm had fully developed. The weather report from Karachi was wrong. By now the winds had passed the predicted maximum of forty-five knots and were gusting at times to more than seventy knots. Almost a category-one typhoon. Captain Panagiotopolous was confident that his ship could handle the storm, but he wasn’t so sure about some of his crew, many of whom were inexperienced, or about the two hundred-plus containers chained to the cargo deck, some of which had already started to come loose.
He stood on the bridge looking down at the floodlit deck. Rain swept horizontally, and each time the bows came crashing down, seawater inundated the ship back to t
he superstructure, carrying away anything that wasn’t tied down. Schumatz and three of his deck crew were down there now re rigging the chains holding a stack of forty-foot containers, six high and four wide. The captain had thought about turning the Margo downwind to give the crewmen a dry deck, but the roll would be worse and the chances for an accident sharply increased. If one of the truck-sized containers came loose it could start a chain reaction that could sweep every container off the deck and possibly even cause enough damage to the ship to disable or sink her.
The irony would be superb, he kept telling himself. One third of the deck cargo consisted of Chinese-made life rafts packed into fiberglass containers bound for San Francisco. His walkie-talkie squawked.
He keyed it. “This is the captain.”
“We got the bastard,” Schumatz shouted over the shrieking wind.
“This blow is likely to last another twenty-four hours.”
“A link in one of the chains shattered. I’m telling you that it was a one-in-a-million chance. There must have been a void or a crack in the sonofabitch bar stock.” “Check all the others.” “That’ll take half the goddamn night.”
“All the chain came from the same chandler. You know what it means if a container comes loose.”
A white-faced First Officer Green was looking at him. Panagiotopolous gave him a reassuring nod.
He keyed the walkie-talkie. “Do you copy that?” “I hear you,” Schumatz shouted. “Do you want some more help?”
“No, goddammit. Just keep this bastard as steady as you can.”
“The conditions will probably get worse so check the inner stacks first.”
“Run the bridge, Panagiotopolous, and let me do my job,” Schumatz shouted.
The captain bit back an angry retort because his deck officer was correct. He looked out the window as Schumatz appeared from behind one of the stacks. Schumatz had to brace himself against one of the containers to keep his footing as he looked up at the bridge. He stood like that for a moment to make the point that the decks were his territory, and then disappeared again.
The crew’s comfort and happiness were always second to the safety of the ship. Always. And Captain Panagiotopolous was damned if he was going to lose either in a bullshit little blow like this one.
Arlington, Virginia
McGarvey was sitting on a table in an examining room at Urgent Care West, a medical clinic just off the parkway in Arlington. He came here whenever he wanted to see a doctor without the CIA knowing about it. The trauma medicine specialist, Mike Mattice, who’d just finished examining him was writing something in McGarvey’s file. “Am I going to live?” McGarvey asked.
Mattice, a large man with very broad shoulders and a pleasant, almost gentle smile, looked up seriously. “If what’s going on inside your skull is what I think it is, you could be in some serious trouble.” They’d developed a friendship over the past ten years, and Mattice had treated him for everything from the flu to gunshot wounds. He told it like it was, never pulling any punches.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Hairline skull fracture, probably a subdural hematoma. It means that you have a little arterial bleeder in there under the left temple. Unequal pupils, occasional blurring of your vision.” Mattice was sitting on a stool next to a table. He was all business. “I’m sending you up to see a friend of mine at University Hospital in Georgetown. You’re going to have a CAT scan and he’s going to read it.”
McGarvey started to object, he didn’t have the time, but Mattice held him off.
“He’ll keep his mouth shut, if that’s what you still want. But this time it’s serious, nothing to fool around with. There could be a lot of bad stuff going on inside of your head, could end up making you permanently blind, maybe paralyzed, probably scramble your brains.” He gave McGarvey a critical look. “Have you had any dizziness?”
“No,” McGarvey lied.
“Darkening of your vision?”
“No, a little blurring, but that’s all.”
“Disconnected thoughts, mood swings, memory loss?”
McGarvey shook his head, and Mattice shrugged skeptically.
“Maybe we’re lucky and I’m wrong. But I want to see the CAT scan.”
“What if you’re not wrong?”
“Your condition will get worse, like I told you.”
“How soon?”
“What the hell aren’t you telling me?” Mattice demanded.
“How long, Mike?”
“From the onset of the first serious symptoms maybe a few days, a week. There’s no way of telling until we get some pictures.”
“Assuming the worse, what then?” McGarvey asked. He’d known that something was seriously wrong with him, but there was too much at stake now for him to simply walk away from his job unless his own situation was desperate.
“We go in, fix the bleeder, drain the blood and put you back together.”
“How long would I be out of commission?”
“Six weeks,” Mattice said evenly. He glanced at the wall clock. “I want you up there by three. Do you have someone who can go with you?”
McGarvey hopped off the table. “Not this afternoon, maybe later in the week.”
“Not good enough—”
“I’m briefing the President on something at three, and there’s no way in hell I can miss it. We’re facing too much shit right now.”
“I could call your boss.”
“And violate doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Hell, I’m a good Catholic but I’d lie to the Pope to save a patient,” Mattice said with a rueful smile.
“It’s going to have to wait for a couple of days, Mike.”
“Dammit.”
“That’s the way it has to be.”
Mattice got up and helped McGarvey with his jacket. “The first sign of dizziness or darkening of vision, I want you back here. And I want your word on it.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
Mattice started to object, but McGarvey held him off again.
“If you’re right, it’s my life on the line, and I won’t screw around by taking unnecessary risks. But something bigger than you want to know about is going on right now and I can’t back away from it.”
A mask of professional indifference suddenly dropped over Mattice’s eyes. “It’s your choice,” he said, brusquely. “Do you want something for the headaches?”
“They’re not that bad.”
Mattice picked up McGarvey’s chart. “When you’re ready for the CAT scan, call the desk and they’ll set it up for you. In the meantime take care of yourself.” He shook his head and walked out.
The White House
McGarvey managed to get back to CIA headquarters in time to ride with Murphy in the DCI’s limousine to the White House. He’d driven himself over to the clinic and unless he’d been followed no one knew where he’d gone.
“It’s going to be no use pointing fingers or jumping down Dennis Berndt’s throat,” Murphy said tiredly. “The situation is what we have and it’s up to us to deal with it as best we can.”
“I agree,” McGarvey said distantly. In the morning he would sit down with Adkins and Rencke and go over the entire mission to find out how the bomb was getting here and how to stop it. Even if he did have the operation immediately, and was put out of commission for six weeks, he would at least be able to make some decisions during that time, unless his brain was permanently scrambled.
“I was informed that your briefing this morning was a good one.”
“I told them what was coming their way, and what we needed to do to stop it.”
“The President will want nothing less.”
McGarvey looked over at Murphy. “He’s going to get more than that, General, because bin Laden may be going after him specifically. Maybe his family too.”
“The man’s not that crazy,” Murphy said, clearly disturbed.
“We were,” McGarvey said.
“That
was different.”
McGarvey held back a sharp reply, the words almost immediately escaping him. The day had gotten dark, and his stomach was turning over. He laid his head back and closed his eyes, a bad feeling under his tongue, and his body suddenly in a cold sweat. He was seeing the dreamy, distant expression on bin Laden’s face in the high mountain cave. The man was ill, and McGarvey could feel the sickness in his own body; the pain, the fear and the frustration that life was even more fragile and fleeting than you ever imagined it was.
“I said, what we did was different,” Murphy repeated, but then he trailed off.
McGarvey was hearing the words through the noise of a waterfall, but for thirty or forty seconds he was unable to respond. He couldn’t even think of what to say, nor could he move. Gradually the noise faded, however, and it seemed as if his thoughts came back into focus by degrees until he could open his eyes and sit up.
They had come to the west gate of the White House and the security people passed them through.
“Are you feeling up to this, Mac?” Murphy asked.
“I’m going to make it short, and then I’m going over to Katy’s house for a stiff drink, some dinner and ten or twelve hours of sleep. I just can’t seem to catch up.”
“I know the feeling,” Murphy said. “And if you want my advice, turn off the phones.”
“I will.”
By the time they pulled up to the west portico, and Murphy’s bodyguard opened the limo door for them, McGarvey had recovered sufficiently to get out of the car and follow the DCI inside. His legs felt like rubber and he was still queasy, but he figured that he would get through this okay.
They were ushered into the Oval Office at three o’clock on the dot. The President was seated at his desk. With him, besides Dennis Berndt, were the Director of the U.S. Secret Service Arthur Ridgeway and the Director of Protective Forces Henry Kolesnik. Kolesnik had been at this morning’s threat assessment briefing. His was the Secret Service division that watched over the President and his family.
“Welcome home, Mr. McGarvey,” President Haynes said, rising and extending his hand.
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