“No missiles. I want to know about the traffic patterns over the past couple of months. Has bin Laden or anyone else from the compound been going visiting, or has all the traffic been incoming?”
“Are you talking about the DI report this morning?”
“It got me thinking that bin Laden might be stalling for time.”
“It would help explain why there’s been only the one phone call between bin Laden and Bahmad. If they were sticking to their original timetable, bin Laden wouldn’t have to do anything except lie around biding his time until it happened.”
“Something like that,” McGarvey said.
“But Bahmad might have already left,” Rencke suggested. “Maybe he was here just long enough to set everything into motion. There were only two guys in the van at Chevy Chase that day. Both of them were bin Laden’s people, we know at least that much. If Bahmad had wanted to come after Liz he would have been there himself. Instead he just sends the two goons. He could be gone.”
“We never found the gun that killed Mike Larsen,” McGarvey said. “It could mean that there was a third person in the van. Somebody that nobody saw.”
Rencke stared at the computer screen for a long time. “There’s probably a couple of thousand satellite photographs of the compound over the past sixty days, I’ll check them all. But we need their timetable. And we need it right now.” Rencke looked up again, his eyes round, his face serious. “This weekend the President’s daughter is going to take part in the International Special Olympics in San Francisco. If the bomb went off there it’d sure as hell make a big statement.”
“It’s crazy,” McGarvey said.
“You could say that, but this President’s not gonna back down for anything. You gotta admire him just a little.”
“But he’s putting his own daughter at risk.”
“And himself too,” Rencke said. “He’s doing the opening ceremonies.”
“Okay, I want everything you’ve got on the games ASAP. We’ll take another look at them.”
“All right. But we’ve got one thing going for us though. A bunch of those people are Muslims. He might not want to kill his own people.”
“That didn’t stop him in Riyadh or Africa,” McGarvey shot back sharply. “If San Francisco is their target the bomb is already there, and so is Bahmad.” He couldn’t believe he had missed it. Where was his head? “I’ll get our people started, and then send the heads-up to the Bureau. In the meantime I’ll try to convince the general to talk some sense into the President.”
“What about Liz?”
“She’s supposed to go down to the Farm with Van Buren this afternoon, but I’m going to keep her here. I’m calling a staff meeting at two and I want everything you can come up with on bin Laden by then. I want to know if he’s still there, I want to know if he’s done any traveling over the past two months, and I want to know who’s come to see him.”
“Are you going after him?”
“Let’s take care of this weekend first. If we can get to Monday in one piece we’ll take the next step.” McGarvey’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tired of screwing around, Otto. One way or the other we will deal with bin Laden once and for all. He’s fucked with us for the last time.”
San Francisco
“This could be a nightmare,” the FBI’s San Francisco Special Agent in Charge Charles Fellman said. It was very windy on the Golden Gate Bridge, and some of his words were blown away, but everyone knew what he was saying, and everybody agreed.
“It’s our job to see that it doesn’t get that far,” Jay Villiard replied. He was a short, intense man who had been a gold shield detective in Manhattan’s Midtown precinct until going to work for the U.S. Secret Service. He was an advance man for major presidential trips. His job was to convince the local law enforcement agencies to do things his way. “Tried and tested, ladies and gentlemen, tried and tested,” he liked to say in response to objections. “The Coast Guard has sent the Notice to Mariners on the five-mile bridge restrictions. But what about ferry traffic?” Beth Oreck asked. She headed the San Francisco Harbor Authority.
“All traffic.”
Beth was a large-boned woman with a broad face. She looked at him over the glasses perched on the end of her nose. “In that case we have a problem.”
Villiard focused on her. “Yes?”
“Pilot boats. They take the harbor pilots out to incoming ships. If they’re held in port we won’t be able to start getting shipping back to normal for three or four hours after the restriction is lifted.”
“Send the pilots out before the restriction takes effect. They can wait aboard their assigned ships until the bridge is cleared.” Villiard waited only a moment for any further objections from her before he looked up at the bridge towers that soared 746 feet above the water. “I want people up there watching the roadway from both directions.”
“We’re already on it,” David Rogan assured Villiard. He was chief of the San Francisco Police Antiterrorism Unit. “I’m putting pairs of my SWAT teams guys on each side of the roadway, on both sides of the bridge.”
“I agree,” Villiard said. “The bridge will be searched Friday night twelve hours before the event, and again Saturday morning two hours before the start.”
No one offered any objections.
Villiard walked over to the rail and looked out over the harbor back toward Alcatraz Island. After a moment Charles Fellman joined him. The others stayed at the two vans that had taken them from Candlestick Park over the route that the presidential motorcade and Special Olympians would take.
“This is about bin Laden, isn’t it?”
Villiard looked at him, his lips compressed, and he nodded. “Nothing in two months. The CIA says he’s holed up in Khartoum, and they haven’t come up with a single shred of evidence that he’ll strike here and now.” Villiard shook his head. “There’ll be runners from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Iran. He’d be a fool to try anything. But I’ve got a terrible feeling about this weekend.”
Fellman, who’d worked with him before, nodded. “I know what you mean. But you have the same feeling before every event.”
“You’re right.”
“So we redouble our efforts. Push the exclusion zone back to ten miles; hell, fifteen.”
Villiard shook his head. “The god damned bomb is the size of a suitcase, Chuck. How the hell do you find something like that hidden in something like this?” He swept his arm to include the entire bridge, and perhaps the entire bay area.
“You don’t,” Fellman admitted after a few seconds.
“But you keep trying,” Villiard said. “There’s no other choice this time. We keep doing the same things; tried and tested.”
CIA Headquarters
“Nothing is going to happen this weekend, Mac, and you know it as well as I do,” Murphy said.
McGarvey had to agree intellectually. He knew all the reasons bin Laden would not strike the President’s daughter in the midst of hundreds of his own people. Yet he could not shake the feeling that had come to him downstairs in the gym. Bin Laden was so desperate to win before he died that he was going to make a foolish move; like Van Buren had with his inappropriate flick. It would be an all-out thrust that he knew could have the consequences of causing his own destruction, but he was willing to take the risk. He had seen it in the man’s eyes and in his voice at the Afghanistan meeting, as well as on the phone call. The effective blast radius of the bomb was more than a mile. Parked in the middle of the Olympic Village it would wipe out all the athletes plus a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods. Hidden somewhere in Candlestick Park stadium, so long as it wasn’t shielded by too much concrete and steel, the nuclear explosion would kill everyone in attendance including the President’s daughter who would be down on the field, and the President and First Lady on the speakers’ platform during the opening ceremonies. Hidden somewhere on the Golden Gate Bridge, anywhere between the two towers, the bomb would serve the exact purpose it was designed for, tak
ing out large bridges. The center span would drop into the bay and no one would survive. That included the President and his wife who would be in the convoy of cars leading the half-marathon from Candlestick Park to Sausalito — Deborah Haynes somewhere in the pack.
“I hope you’re right,” he told Murphy. They were in the DCI’s office, the sun streaming through the tall windows.
“I’m not trying to say that we’re out of the woods. But I don’t think San Francisco is his target.”
McGarvey thought again about bin Laden’s voice on the phone call that NSA intercepted; he was a changed man from the one who had negotiated a bomb for his family’s freedom. Even harder and more desperate than he had been in the cave. “I want you to try to get to the President again. One more time, General, try to convince him to pull his daughter out of the games and come home.”
Murphy shook his head. It was obvious that he had tried more than once and failed. “Not a chance,” he said, and before McGarvey could object he held up his hand. “He’s read all the transcripts and listened to the phone conversation. He knows the risk he’s taking, but he also knows the risk he’d be taking if he packed it up and hid in a bomb shelter until we found it. He told me to tell you that he knows you must be faced with a similar problem allowing your daughter to remain working for the CIA, and not sending her away somewhere out of harm’s way until the monster is caught.” McGarvey wanted a cigarette, but he felt like hell as it was. He’d known the answer that Murphy would give him. He’d merely been trying to delay the inevitable decision that he was going to have to make.
“I’ve called a staff meeting for two,” he said looking up. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“Here we go again,” Murphy replied heavily. He turned away momentarily unable to meet McGarvey’s eyes.
“Nothing’s changed, has it?” McGarvey thought about his past, about everything that he’d done in his twenty-five years with the Company. Had he made a difference? He sometimes doubted it. Leastways nothing had changed because of him in the long run. “We don’t have the luxury of time, so it could end up being messy. I want everybody to know that from the beginning. Another missile strike is out, for humanitarian as well as political reasons. Nor do I think it would be a good idea to send in the marines, and Khartoum is too far inland for any kind of an effective SEAL operation. It’s going to have to be one-on-one.”
“Do we have anybody on the ground out there?”
“Not the kind of an operative that we need,” McGarvey said. “I’ll set up a forward headquarters in Riyadh. It’s just possible that we can flush bin Laden out of his compound by setting up a meeting somewhere. Something he could not afford to miss. Maybe just across the border in Yemen.”
“But you’re not going out on the mission, Mac,” Murphy said firmly. “You’re not going to try to kill bin Laden yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter who kills him, General, he has to die.”
La Jolla Chenna
Serafini’s view was a much narrower one. Killing bin Laden would solve only one of her problems. He was just one of dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of crazies out there who would like to do harm to the President and his family. Her job, one that she was proud of and took very seriously, was to stop them, with her own life if necessary. More specifically she was the lead officer on the detail to protect Raindrop, the code name for the President’s daughter.
She was thirty-four, divorced, no children, parents dead, no brothers or sisters. Her entire life revolved around her job. So much so, in fact, that she was already beginning to have bad dreams about the day a new President and First Family replaced the Hayneses. She expected that everyone else on her detail should share the same enthusiasm. They did not, of course, and it was a never-ending source of vexation for her.
The best deal today was that Deborah was staying put. The President and First Lady had left early this morning for a breakfast fundraiser, and were at this moment attending a thousand-dollar-a-plate luncheon at the San Diego Hilton. They had left Deborah here at the La Jolla estate of their old friend and campaign contributor, the real estate multimillionaire Gordon Wedell and his wife Evelyn. The Wedells, currently in Europe, had loaned the house to the President and his family, as they had on several other occasions. Wedell liked the arrangement because when it came time to sell the place its value would be greatly enhanced by its famous guests. The Secret Service liked it because the house was perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific and was easy to secure. The President and Mrs. Haynes liked it because it was comfortable, and Deborah loved it because they had horses, an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and racket ball courts, and a place for her to run, all in perfect safety.
Chenna got out of the jeep across from the horse barn and raised her binoculars. Deborah Haynes, dressed in gray sweats, her long blond hair streaming behind her, was coming around the far turn of the one-mile oval horse track. Terri Lundgren, her coach, astride an ATV, paced her on the outside just a few feet away. Even from here Chenna could see the pure, unadulterated joy on Deborah’s face as she loped, rather than ran flat-out. She was turning in respectable eight-minute miles at the start, and from what Chenna had seen over the past couple of years since Terri Lundgren had come aboard, the girl could continue at that pace all day.
Directly behind her, and a few yards back, agent Bruce Hansen took up the rear astride his own souped-up version of an ATV. If anything started to go bad he could get to Deborah within seconds, and if need be he could get her out of there at speeds ranging up to eighty miles per hour.
Chenna turned her chin slightly so that her lapel mike would pick up her voice and activate the VOX. “Hey, you’re lookin’ good out there, Romeo One. But I thought that you were going to start running with her instead of riding.” “I’m out of breath just watching her. She’s getting too good for me. Do you want to try?”
Hansen, who was one of Chenna’s favorites, had been an Olympic sprinter eight years ago. He’d not won any medals, but he’d come close. And the main thing was that he had made the U.S. Olympic team. Everyone on the detail was proud of him.
“I wouldn’t make it one lap,” Chenna radioed. “Bring her in, cook’s got lunch ready to go.”
“Roger that,” Hansen said. He sped up alongside Lundgren, who broke off and angled over to Deborah.
The President’s daughter slowed down, and seemed to stumble as if she had trouble concentrating on talking and running at the same time. But then she looked over to where Chenna was standing, gave a wave, and bounded across the track, this time running flat out.
Chenna was used to the girl’s athletic abilities; she’d watched them develop. But someone seeing the President’s daughter for the first time would have reason to be nervous. Deborah had Down syndrome, and like many people with that handicap she was double-jointed. Watching her run was like watching a Raggedy Anne doll; her arms and legs flew in every direction as if she was going to crash and land in a jumbled heap. But she never did. She was as surefooted as a young gazelle, and under Lundgren’s tutelage she had become a world-class athlete. She was expected to win Saturday’s half-marathon, or at least place in the top three or four out of a field of fifteen hundred runners.
Charlie McGivern, the horse master, came out of the barn and lit his pipe. Chenna caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and turned slightly to see who it was as her right hand headed automatically toward her pistol in a shoulder holster.
He was used to Secret Service agents around the place. He waved.
Chenna grinned and waved back. Charlie was one of the good ones. His wife had died a few years ago and he had nobody, so he doted on the President’s daughter whenever she came to visit. He’d even made a special saddle for her with her initials carved into the left and right fenders.
He watched Deborah run for a moment or two, Lundgren and Hansen following her, shook his head and went back into the barn. Chenna knew what he was thinking, and sometimes she had to agree with him.
Being a sitting President’s daughter had to be tough. It was no life for a kid, and yet Deborah thrived. She had friends who loved her and she was protected every single moment of every single day.
“Chenna,” she cried with total joy, her arms wide open. She grabbed Chenna, who was short but solidly built, on the run with a tremendous hug and easily lifted her off the ground. Everything the girl did was with overflowing enthusiasm. It was one of the reasons that Chenna loved her assignment.
“You’re getting strong,” Chenna said, laughing.
“I eat my Wheaties,” Deborah bubbled. “Did you see me running?”
“I did, and I can’t get over the improvement. You’re really getting fast.”
“I can’t keep up with her,” Hansen admitted. “And that’s a fact.” “I’m very proud of her,” Lundgren agreed. “But the best part is that she’s got even more potential. Look out, Ferrari!”
Deborah giggled in pure joy and clapped her hands. It was a daily ritual they went through, but none of them minded because of the utter happiness it gave her.
“Okay, gotta run some more now,” she said, jumping up and down to keep loose. Sweat covered her face, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Lunch first,” Lundgren said, handing Deborah a towel. “Then we’re going to do a little resistance training in the gym, and afterwards laps in the pool.”
“Can I run later?”
Lundgren looked to Chenna for approval.
“Maybe for an hour,” Chenna said. “But then you’ll have to get ready for dinner. You’re going to be with your parents tonight in town.” Deborah immediately calmed down. “I think I’ll wear the blue dress tonight. And the black heels and pearls.”
Chenna, who was a tomboy, shook her head. “That’s going to be up to your mom.”
Deborah smiled knowingly and nodded. “I think it’ll be the blue dress,” she said with confidence. “And right now lunch sounds good.”
CIA Headquarters
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