Murphy gave McGarvey a sharp look. “But you don’t believe that.”
“Doesn’t matter. We have a situation in front of us now, and we have to deal with it. Nothing else is important” The recriminations and finger-pointing would come later, McGarvey thought. Right now it was a question of motivation, dedication. “How are you feeling, Roland?”
Murphy smiled wanly. “That’s supposed to be my question to you.”
“I’ve felt worse. But when this is over I’m going to take a long vacation. Someplace without a mountain view.”
“Next time send someone else out into the field, okay? I want my DDO running the show, not becoming the star attraction.”
“No one likes the thought of getting old,” McGarvey said.
“No,” Murphy agreed. When McGarvey was gone a snatch of something started running around in the back of his head. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the line had something to do with dancing on a grave. It was disturbing, all the more so because his memory was imperfect, and because he wondered if it was a portent.
McGarvey entered the CIA’s main auditorium at 11:00 A.M. sharp and went directly to the podium on the small stage. A table was set next to it. He felt like hell, but he did not let it show. There were nearly a hundred people hastily assembled, all of them law enforcement or intelligence-gathering officials, and most of them experts in counterterrorism. Adkins and his own staff took up the back rows, along with Tommy Doyle and some of his people from the Directorate of Intelligence. Rencke was held up downstairs with Jared Kraus in Technical Services, and Elizabeth was with him.
“Thank you for coming out on such short notice this morning. My name is Kirk McGarvey and for those of you who don’t know me, I’m the deputy director of Operations. I’ve called this meeting because the CIA believes that the United States is facing the worst threat of terrorism in its history. And we’re going to have to work together to try to stop it.” He dimmed the lights and clicked on the projection unit.
The slide showed the engineering diagram of the Russian nuclear bomb. “This information comes to us from Department of Defense and Department of Energy files,” McGarvey said. “The device on the screen is a Russian nuclear demolitions weapon which they call atvartka, or screwdriver. It has a nominal yield of one kiloton, it fits into a package about the size of a large suitcase, and detonation-ready it weighs between eighty and ninety pounds.
“It does not leak radiation, so Geiger counters cannot detect it and our conventional NEST forces will not work. Its conventional explosives are so well sealed that bomb-sniffing dogs are of no use. It’s shockproof, heatproof, waterproof and so extremely simple to operate that it does not require a trained technician to fire it. In short, ladies and gentlemen, the perfect terrorist’s weapon.”
McGarvey had their attention. He switched to the next slide, which showed a photograph of the actual device with a serial number next to it. “The nuclear weapon with this serial number was stored, until recently, at the Yavan Depot outside of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Because of the decaying political situation in many of the former Soviet Union’s breakaway republics, security for and accountability of such equipment is lax at the very best.”
He clicked to the next slide, showing two Russian officers. “Colonel Vladislav Drankov and Captain Vadim Per-minov, who were in charge of security at the depot, were found guilty of dereliction of duty and theft by a military court. They were executed yesterday.”
The next slide came up. It showed a map of the region between Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan. Several routes through the mountains were marked in red. “We believe that these two Russian officers sold the nuclear weapon for thirty million U.S. dollars in cash to Osama bin Laden, who brought it by horseback through rebel-held territory to his base outside of Charikar as early as three months ago.”
“How the hell long has the CIA known about this?” the FBI’s Fred Rudolph demanded. He and McGarvey had worked together before. They had a great deal of respect for each other. But now Rudolph was mad. And he was clearly shook up, everyone in the audience was.
“About eight weeks, Fred,” McGarvey replied. “But we were not sitting on our hands. We had an operation in progress.”
“Evidently it wasn’t a success, or you wouldn’t have called us here,” Rudolph said. “The missile raid was an exercise in futility. Are you going to tell us that bin Laden survived?”
“It’s worse than that,” McGarvey said. He brought up the next image on the screen which showed the satellite shot of bin Laden carrying his daughter’s body. “This was taken from one of our Keyhole satellites within minutes after the missile attack on bin Laden’s mountain camp was completed. The figure at the lower left of the photograph is Osama bin Laden. As you can see, he survived. Subsequent photographs show that he was apparently not hurt.” McGarvey looked up at the screen. “He’s carrying someone who did not survive the attack, however.”
He clicked to the next picture, this one the file photograph of Sarah. “This is Osama bin Laden’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. It is her body he is carrying. It was she, along with at least eighteen of his mujahedeen, who was killed in the attack.”
“Oh, shit,” someone in the audience said.
“As you may expect, bin Laden is now well motivated, and he will attempt to bring the nuclear weapon into the United States sometime in the very near future—although we don’t know when—to hit a target that will inflict the maximum damage on us in retaliation for the death of his child. It’s up to us to stop him.”
“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 Allen 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 Allen 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 Allen 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 seatbacks 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.
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 the superstructure, carrying away anything that wasn’t tied down. Schumatz and three of his deck crew were down there now rerigging 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 roo
m 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?”
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