Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  When he came out of the bathroom Kathleen had laid out gray slacks, a white shirt, club tie and the blue blazer for him. Rencke had made the comment a few weeks ago that since Mrs. M. had taken over, McGarvey was starting to look pretty sharp. “Watch it,” he’d warned Rencke. “She’d love to get her hands on you.”

  Rencke hopped from one foot to the other. It was a tiny moment of lightness in an otherwise bleak few months, and it made him smile now, but just for a moment because he had another big hurdle to get over this morning. Something he had put off last night. He had to finally tell Kathleen exactly what Liz was facing. He had a pretty good idea how she was going to take it because this wasn’t the first time Liz had been put in harm’s way, but at least he was no longer afraid that Katy would turn her back on him like she had done before. “We’re in this together, darling,” she was telling him now. “You and me, no matter what.”

  He stopped in the middle of getting dressed. For the first time since Paris he couldn’t say that he missed working on his book about Voltaire. He’d worked on it for a long time. But at this stage of his writing he needed to be in the libraries of Europe pouring over the philosopher’s letters, reading his notes and manuscripts in their original drafts; talking with scholars. Work, he decided, that was just as real as what he was doing now; in fact possibly even more genuine than what he was doing for the CIA, and in some ways more satisfying because it was like playing detective; but work that was not as necessary as controlling evil. In that, at least, Voltaire would have agreed wholeheartedly.

  Kathleen had used the spare bathroom and she looked fresh and bright, but she was troubled. She poured McGarvey a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter. “You look nice,” she said distantly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Otto called. He wants you to call him right back. And your car is here.”

  “Sorry, Katy,” McGarvey said. He phoned Rencke’s direct line. “What have you got?”

  “There was a murder aboard a yacht in New York City less than forty-eight hours ago,” Rencke said excitedly. “It looks like the work of Bahmad.”

  “Call Fred Rudolph, and then let the President’s Secret Service detail know about it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “The FBI is already on it. I’ll talk to Villiard. We’re close, Mac.”

  McGarvey went back to the counter and got his coffee. “Gotta go, Katy. This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”

  Kathleen was on the other side of the counter, a funny look on her face. “I figured as much, that’s why I didn’t make breakfast. Where’s Elizabeth?”

  It was the hurdle. McGarvey girded himself. “She’s working.”

  “There’s no answer at Todd’s and the locator wouldn’t even take a message.”

  “I sent them to San Francisco.”

  She assimilated that information for a moment. “The President’s daughter is running in the Special Olympics. Do you think that bin Laden will try to harm her?”

  “We thought so, Katy, but we might have been wrong.”

  “But you sent our daughter there.”

  “To be with the President’s daughter.”

  She held herself very still, very erect, until finally she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She came around to him and straightened his tie. “I’m having a hard time with this, Kirk. But I swear to God that I’m trying.”

  “It’s never easy, Katy.”

  “Whose idea was it to send Todd with her?”

  “Mine.”

  “Good,” Kathleen said. She patted his lapels. “Be careful, Kirk.”

  “Will do,” he promised and kissed her. Dick Yemm was waiting in the driveway with his car, the morning absolutely beautiful.

  CIA Headquarters

  “Could somebody else have come aboard the yacht and killed the captain?” McGarvey asked Rencke.

  Adkins came over and he looked almost as strung out as Rencke. They’d both been pulling a lot of overnighters.

  “Not likely, if you’re thinking robbery,” Rencke said. “The only thing missing is an aluminum case that the girl said had been delivered to the yacht here in Washington two months ago.”

  “Looks as if the captain came to the yacht searching for it when he was interrupted,” Adkins said. “That’s what the police are saying. It could have been the bomb.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” McGarvey said. “They took a big risk by just bringing it into the States. Why would they take it out to Bermuda and then back again? Why triple their risk?”

  “There are lots of hiding places on a yacht that size,” Adkins pointed out. “Fred Rudolph has sent a Bureau counterespionage team up there. If there’s anything to be found they’ll find it. But for now it looks as if Bahmad came back to the yacht to pick up the case, walked in on the captain who was searching his cabin and killed the man. He’s somewhere in New York. Wall Street maybe. Or maybe the top of the Empire State Building right in the middle of midtown. If it were to blow at noon, let’s say on a Monday, it’d kill a lot of people.”

  McGarvey turned away and walked to the end of the row of computer racks. Rencke had all but taken over the DO’s main computer center as his personal domain. It was large, the equivalent of a half-dozen supercomputers, fanning out from a central area that contained a dozen monitor consoles. The morning shift computer operators were starting to drift in, but they stayed respectfully out of the way.

  After Washington, Papa’s Fancy had sailed off to Bermuda where Bahmad and the crew partied. To kill time. Not just to wait for the dust from the Chevy Chase attack to settle, but to wait for a specific date. Back to New York Bahmad dismisses the crew and disappears for ten days. To wait a little longer? Why not in Bermuda? Because the plans may have changed and he needed new instructions. Then he shows up at the yacht at the very same moment the captain is there. Perhaps the captain searched the yacht on the owner’s instructions. But there were way too many coincidences for McGarvey, all of them starting with the failed attack in Chevy Chase, and ending presumably at any moment with the detonation of the nuclear weapon.

  He walked back. “How do we know it was Bahmad?”

  “All the descriptions the Bureau has gotten so far are a match,” Rencke said. “They’ve talked to three of the crew from the yacht and the staff here in Washington at the Corinithian Yacht Club. Everything adds up, and it’ll be the same in Bermuda.”

  “What about the owner?”

  “Alois Richter, Jersey City. Until a couple of years ago he was involved with a company called Tele/Resources, which—surprise, surprise—is an agent for the bin Laden family. He left the day before yesterday on business in Europe. No one knows where he is at the moment.”

  “How about the marina in New York?”

  “No one noticed him,” Rencke said. “But all the better hotels in the city are being checked. No one thinks they’ll come up with anything, but they’re trying.”

  “Airlines?”

  “Those are being checked too. But the hairs that were found in Bahmad’s bathroom had been died gray. He’s changed his appearance.”

  Rencke was an absolute mess; his clothing was filthy, his long red hair totally out of control, and his complexion sallow from spending almost no time out of doors. But his eyes were bright and an electric current seemed to surround him. He had the bit in his teeth.

  “It’s very soon, isn’t it, Mac?” he said reverently.

  “It looks like it.”

  “So what do we do next?” Adkins asked.

  “Keep looking for him and the bomb on the assumption we’re wrong about New York, and the bomb was never aboard the yacht. I’m going up there. It’s probably a waste of time, but I want to see the yacht.”

  Los Angeles

  Tony Lang came in with Henry Kolesnik a couple of minutes before 6:00 A.M. The President looked up from his breakfast alone in the living room of the Century City Plaza Hotel’s presidential suite, his nerves giving a start. Something had
happened.

  “Good morning, Mr. President,” his chief of staff said brightly. “We have some good news, I think.”

  Whenever possible, especially if they were on the road, the President liked to have his breakfast in private with his wife and daughter. But it had been a late night and the girls were leaving for San Francisco later this morning, so they were sleeping in.

  “What is it?” the President asked, quelling his irritation.

  “The CIA called two hours ago,” Kolesnik said. “Ali Bahmad, the guy we think bin Laden sent over with the bomb, has been placed in New York City, and he’s apparently been there for a while. The FBI is looking for him, but now we’ve got a decent description.”

  The President’s eyes narrowed. “Am I missing something, Tony?”

  “We just might be off the hook in San Francisco,” Lang said. “The Bureau thinks that the bomb may have been aboard a private yacht in a New York marina two days ago.”

  The President understood what they were getting at, but he didn’t think they did. “San Francisco has been under a microscope for the past seventy-two hours. If the bomb isn’t already in place, it’s not coming. It wouldn’t get through. Is that about right, Henry?”

  “Yes, sir. You were right all along, Mr. President. San Francisco never was his target.”

  “Well, I am relieved to hear that,” the President said sharply. He got up, nearly knocking his chair over.

  “Yes, sir,” Kolesnik said uncertainly.

  “We don’t have to worry about a nuclear device being detonated in San Francisco killing me, my wife and my daughter, and maybe tens of thousands of other people.”

  Lang saw it, and he backpedaled. “We didn’t mean it that way, sir.”

  “If I were president of California that indeed would be good news. But of course that’s not the case. I’m President of the entire United States, which includes New York City, which is, I think you’re telling me, the target for the largest terrorist attack ever planned in all of recorded history.”

  “I see your point, Mr. President,” Kolesnik said. He was a professional, not a politician, so he didn’t back off. “The Bureau and the CIA are handling the investigation on the East Coast. In the meantime my job is to protect you and your family. From my standpoint learning that New York City may be the target rather than the Special Olympics is good news.”

  The President’s stomach was sour. Breakfast was over, and his day was about to begin. In situations like these he sometimes asked himself that if he knew then what he knew now, would he have quit campaigning for the White House and gone home. The answer was of course no. Most of the time the job was interesting; not much different than being the CEO of a very large and complicated corporation. But at other times, like now, he felt like a father driving a car, his family asleep, trusting him to do a good job in a blizzard at night on a very dangerous road. His decisions could mean life or death. And he was completely alone to make them.

  New York City

  McGarvey and Dick Yemm took the CIA’s Gulfstream bizjet to LaGuardia. From there they choppered across to the West Thirtieth Street Heliport near the Penn Central Yards. A car was waiting for them, and Yemm drove him to the marina. He had to show his credentials to a cop at the Papa’s Fancy boarding ladder before he was allowed to go aboard. Yemm waited on the dock.

  The yacht was a mess. The main saloon had been all but dismantled; the furniture had been cut apart; the bar and cabinets reduced to pieces; ceiling tiles removed, wall panels taken off and set aside and the carpeting and padding pulled up to show the bare metal of the deck.

  “We didn’t find a thing,” a man in shirtsleeves said coming from the forward passageway. He looked like a ward politician, or a Teamsters boss. Tough and gnarly. “You McGarvey?”

  “Yeah,” McGarvey said. They shook hands.

  “I’m Kevin O’Brien, FBI Counter-espionage. Mr. Rudolph said you wanted to come up and take a look.” He glanced around the saloon and shrugged. “We took it down to bare metal and didn’t find a thing other than what’s on the amended police report, so I sent everybody home.”

  “No radiation?”

  O’Brien shook his head. “Nada. That would have been a bad sign anyway. Would have meant that the device was leaking, which would have given us a whole host of other problems.”

  McGarvey pegged O’Brien as a former street cop. Probably from right here in New York. He’d be a good man to have at your back in a crisis. “There was supposed to be an aluminum case here. Any sign of it?”

  “We found some indentations on the carpet beside the bed in the master suite. Traces of aluminum oxide. It could have contained the device. The package was just about large enough, and our forensics people estimated it weighed between fifty and eighty pounds, from the depth of the indentations.” O’Brien shrugged again. “Makes you wonder though, just how cool and collected the sonofabitch would have to be in order to lie down and go to sleep next to a nuclear weapon.”

  “If he’s who we think he is, he’s cool enough to push the button,” McGarvey said. This had been a waste of time after all. He was picking up no sense whatsoever that Bahmad was ever here, let alone why he chose a yacht as his base of operations. Nor was he any further ahead in trying to work out the man’s tradecraft.

  “Well, he’s had a two-day head start and he left nothing behind. He could be just about anywhere.”

  McGarvey started to turn away when what the FBI Counterespionage agent just said struck him. Bahmad didn’t have a two-day head start. He had an eight-week head start. The bomb was never aboard the yacht. There was no reason for it to be here. The aluminum case contained Bahmad’s equipment for the strike: weapons, explosives, maybe lock picking sets and surveillance devices. Things that he might need in order to set up the attack and then get away afterward. Maybe a remote detonator for the bomb.

  “Did you find any weapons?”

  “A Ruger Mini-14 in stainless and a couple of Beretta 9mm pistols in the captain’s quarters. A couple of boxes of ammunition. About what you’d expect to find on a boat like this.”

  “No explosives?”

  “You mean like Semtex?” O’Brien shook his head. “Nada.”

  “Was the captain armed?”

  “He had nothing on him when the gold shields showed up.”

  “Was he carrying any keys?”

  “He had a key to get in, and the key locker in his cabin was open.”

  “The bulk of his fingerprints were found in the master stateroom?”

  “That’s right,” O’Brien said. “What are you getting at, Mr. McGarvey?”

  “I think that the captain was ordered to search the master stateroom. Probably for the aluminum case.”

  “Right. And this guy kills him because of it.”

  “Maybe,” McGarvey said. “Or maybe the captain had already gotten rid of it and was killed to keep his mouth shut. Get a diver over here, I want to find out what’s at the bottom of this slip.”

  M/V Margo Southwest of San Diego

  They had turned north around dawn and were making fifteen knots on their new course of 340 degrees which would close slowly with the U.S. mainland when the Coast Guard helicopter came at them out of the sun.

  Bahmad was in the chartroom going through the ship’s documents and memorizing the captain’s papers and company orders when Green came to the doorway.

  “It’s the goddamned Coast Guard,” he said, out of breath. Bahmad looked up calmly. Green was pale.

  “Have they attempted to make contact with us? Is it a shiµ?”

  “It’s a helicopter, a Sea King, and it’s heading right at us.”

  Bahmad put down the dividers and followed Green onto the bridge. The helicopter was at about eye level just off to the starboard and pacing them. Bahmad found that he wasn’t surprised by its presence, nor was he going to allow himself to become distressed. If the Coast Guard was on a drug interdiction mission they would have sent a cutter with a boarding party, but t
here were no ships on the radar. He was going to play it cool for now because he had no other choice. If the Coast Guard actually put someone aboard the mission would be over.

  Bahmad picked up the VHF radio handset and keyed it. “Good morning, Coast Guard, this is the Margo. Would you care to come aboard for some fresh coffee and doughnuts?”

  “Thanks for the invite Margo, but it’d be a little tough setting down. Switch to twenty-two and identify yourself please, sir.”

  Bahmad switched from channel 16 to the Coast Guard frequency. “I’m George Panagiotopolous, the master.”

  “What is your cargo and destination, sir?”

  “We’re carrying twenty-seven containers of Italian tile, fifteen containers of teak furniture, three hundred seventeen containers of Nike shoes, and the remainder, four hundred eighteen containers of marine life rafts, plus one helicopter on the afterdeck bound for San Francisco.”

  “Looks like a Russian chopper.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know a thing about such machines, except that this one is inoperable and it’s heading for a museum.”

  “How many POBs, skipper?”

  Bahmad held his hand over the mouthpiece and gave Green a questioning look.

  “Persons-on-board,” Green whispered.

  Bahmad turned back to the radio. “In addition to myself, we are sixteen men and officers, no passengers.”

  “When was your last course or speed change?”

  “About thirty-six hours ago,” Bahmad said. “What brings you gentlemen all the way out here this fine morning?” If they were looking for drugs they would have already asked the Margo to heave to.

  “We received a possible distress call last night about seventy miles southwest of here. Did you pick up anything, skipper?”