Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  She looked at him. “Wouldn’t it be better if I got a hotel room after tonight?”

  “No,” McGarvey said, although it was difficult for him to let anyone inside his circle of comfort. But just now it was necessary. “I don’t know how long this will take, so for now we’ll work out of here. At some point we’ll probably go in separate directions. And this place is reasonably safe. My lease, phone, and computer accounts are all under different work names. So just keep your eyes open.”

  “Are you expecting someone?”

  He shrugged. Not a day had gone by for the last twenty years plus when he hadn’t expected someone to show up. It had been one of the overriding facts of his existence. “It depends on what we turn up and how close we get. They weren’t afraid to attack Hutchinson Island, so it’d be no stretch for them to come after us, especially if we hit a nerve.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I’m going to talk to some friends about Schlagel. In the meantime, you can get Eric and Otto pointed that way.”

  Gail was skeptical. “Do you really think he’s somehow connected?”

  “After the attack on Eve’s lab?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. But he was quick off the mark to take advantage of the Hutchinson Island, and now this. And I don’t think it’s going to end there.”

  “More to come?”

  McGarvey had been giving that idea a lot of thought. Hutchinson Island could have been much more spectacular than 9/11, and vandalism at the lab was little more than a pinprick, maybe a warning. But if another strike of some sort had been planned it would almost certainly be much stronger. After the trade towers and the Pentagon, al-Quaeda’s next target had most likely been the White House; one-two-three hammer blows at the purveyors of free trade, the planners of war and the leadership of the satan government. If Hutchinson Island and Princeton were indeed just the opening shots, whatever was coming next would depend entirely on who was behind it. “The contractor who walked away, and the engineer inside the control room were first-rate, and that sort of expertise does not come cheap.”

  “It wasn’t just another terrorist bombing, nor was Princeton unrelated.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “They have a larger plan. Had it all along.”

  “That’s a cheery thought to end the day on,” Gail said. “I’m going to get some sleep.” She picked up her bag and headed to the bedroom, but hesitated, suddenly shy for just a moment. “You don’t have to sleep out here, you know.”

  A lot of old wounds — though not all — came back at McGarvey, and he too hesitated for a moment. “No.”

  “As in not tonight, not yet, not ever?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Okay,” Gail said. “I’ll let you know when I’m out of the shower and it’s safe to come in.” And she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

  * * *

  Gail made breakfast in the morning, and it was just after nine before they were finished and went downstairs to grab separate cabs. Schlagel’s diatribe on Hutchinson Island was getting a lot of airtime on all the major networks, especially Good Morning America , whose news anchor called it “the Sermon on the Isle.” But Schlagel had planned on the publicity. Whatever could be said of the man did not include incompetence; he was the consummate showman, though so far there’d been no mention of the attack on the lab. And from what little McGarvey had noticed of the preacher’s rise to national prominence, his visits to the White House stood out like beacons. Fox News had dubbed him the spiritual adviser to the president — and the two before Howard Lord.

  “I expect you’ll be at it all day,” Gail said. “How about dinner somewhere tonight?”

  “I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and she pecked him on the cheek and then ran out to a cab that had pulled over, leaving him to wonder if it had been such a good idea after all to have her stay with him, knowing how she still felt.

  On the way into town McGarvey called Otto on his cell phone and asked him to set up a meeting with Walter Page sometime later this morning, and fending off his friend’s questions, telephoned William Callahan, who right after 9/11 had been appointed as the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism. They’d known each other briefly a couple of years ago when McGarvey had been working the operation in Mexico City. The Bureau had helped search for the missing Polonium 210 that had supposedly been smuggled into the U.S. Nothing to date had come of the investigation, but McGarvey had been impressed by Callahan’s intelligence and professionalism. He wasn’t simply a desk jockey, he was the real deal, coming up the ranks as a special agent.

  “Mac, it’s good to hear from you,” Callahan said, after his secretary had put the call through. And he sounded genuinely pleased.

  “Do you have a few minutes to spare this morning?”

  “Absolutely,” Callahan said without an instant’s hesitation. “You’re with the NNSA, so I’m assuming this has something to do with Hutchinson Island.”

  “Actually Reverend Schlagel.”

  This time Callahan did hesitate. “I see,” he said. “How soon can you be here?”

  “Twenty minutes,” McGarvey said, and he told the cabbie to take him to FBI headquarters.

  * * *

  It was a weekday and downtown Washington was as busy as usual. The receptionist in the lobby checked his identification and telephoned Callahan’s office. “Your guest is here, sir,” she said, and she directed McGarvey to wait in the visitors’ lounge. “Mr. Callahan will be with you shortly.”

  McGarvey was the only one in the nicely furnished lounge this morning, aware that he was being watched, as all visitors were, by agents behind a two-way mirror. Guests of assistant directors and above were not required to sign in nor were they subjected to the normal security checks.

  Callahan, a large, fit-looking man in his midforties with salt-and-pepper hair and broad shoulders, showed up a couple of minutes later. He’d played tight end for the Green Bay Packers for two years right out of college, but had been sidelined with a torn rotator cuff and had gone back to school to get his MA in criminal justice, and from there had been hired by the Bureau. He was a seriously steady man, with a wife and a couple of kids, who nevertheless liked to crack jokes. This morning he wasn’t smiling, though his greeting and handshake were friendly.

  “Joan and I were very sad about your loss. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a good year.”

  Even though Callahan was only in charge of one section of the Bureau’s Division of Counter Terrorism, and technically was only a deputy assistant director, he was senior in line for that promotion when the current division assistant director was bumped farther up the ladder, therefore his ID pass had the gold background of an associate director with all the privileges.

  When they were settled in Callahan’s unimpressive office on the ninth floor in the rear part of the building McGarvey came straight to the point about his suspicions.

  “I see your point,” Callahan said. “But so far we’ve come up with nothing that would make a possible link between him and Hutchinson Island or Princeton.”

  “He’s using Hutchinson Island as his soapbox.”

  “I’ll give you that much, but I think it’d be a stretch to believe that he would have funded something like that merely to create an issue that he could use. The man wants to be president, and he’s smart enough to understand that if he did run he would be subject to more scrutiny than anyone could imagine. Every eye in the world would be looking his way. Every investigative reporter worth his or her salt would be taking his background apart. Every move he ever made since childhood would be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. And a lot of that would happen even before he got the nomination. And he certainly wouldn’t have directed an attack on Dr. Larsen’s lab.”

  “It got her attention.”

  “It accomplished nothing.”

  Callahan was right, of course. Yet McGarvey couldn’t shake t
he premonition that Schlagel was somehow involved. “I assume that you’ve seen the material that we’ve come up with,” he said.

  “On the contractor who walked away?” Callahan asked. “We don’t have him in any of our files, nor do I think you have any solid evidence he was involved.”

  “He killed the teacher in San Francisco to use his identity to take a tour of the facility.”

  “Sorry, but any defense lawyer would throw that out as circumstantial evidence. He’d be stuck with a suspicion of murder, but not an act of terrorism.”

  “I agree,” McGarvey said. “But assuming the man who walked away from the tour was the pro who was hired along with the control room engineer, you’d have to admit that he’s damned good. You have no record of him, and neither does the Company. Hell, even Rencke is having a tough time finding anything.”

  “Could mean he’s innocent,” Callahan suggested. He was playing devil’s advocate; disprove all the possibilities you could, until you were left with one ironclad lead.

  “Innocent men leave tracks. Passports, driver’s licenses, bank accounts, things like that. But we’re all coming up with blanks. This guy simply doesn’t exist. Add his behavior at the power plant and that makes him my prime suspect.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Callahan said. “We’ve certainly begun investigations on slimmer leads. But where does it lead if you can’t find him, can’t even learn who he is?”

  “If he was the contractor, we at least know that he’s a pro. He’d have to be to leave absolutely no trace.”

  “Interpol, MI5, MI6, BND, anybody?”

  “All blanks so far.”

  Callahan spread his hands. “Okay, you’re here, Mac, and you put the reverend’s name on the table. Where are you going with this? You certainly don’t think he’d be involved in the Princeton thing?”

  “No, that’s a separate issue. Almost certainly Schlagel’s crazies. For an operation like Hutchinson Island a pro, like our contractor, would not come cheap. Whoever hired him had deep pockets.”

  “According to your people al-Quaeda was behind educating the engineer.”

  “But we think it’s possible that someone else got the engineer into contact with the contractor who then managed to get him to the States and inside the plant,” McGarvey said. “More money. A lot more.”

  “And you don’t think the New al-Quaeda is that well-heeled these days?”

  “We have to ask who’s got that kind of money — millions — to spend on an act of terrorism, and who has the reason for it — something to gain, something worth the money and the risk?”

  Callahan sat back and shook his head. “Schlagel has the motive, and we think he probably has the means, but going after him could be dicey. He has a lot of powerful friends, including some in the White House, he has a very large and at times fanatical following, he has a media empire three times the size of Pat Robertson’s, and he has some top-notch lawyers, and I mean first-class lawyers, who’ve managed to create a wall of nearly impenetrable interlocking organizations, a lot of them supposed charities, plus at least three dozen corporations, most of them offshore.”

  “So he has the means and the motive,” McGarvey said. “And a lot of guys like that think that they’re invincible, above the law, nobody’s smart enough to catch them. Makes him a suspect. And he sure came out of the chute in big hurry with his antinuclear movement.”

  Callahan hesitated for just a second, and he shook his head again. “Knowing what you’re capable of doing, I’m not sure if I should tell you the rest of it.”

  “We won’t catch these guys keeping shit from each other,” McGarvey said. “Those are the old days. No interagency rivalry now. Won’t do us any good.”

  “It’d be nice if that were actually the truth, but nothing much has changed,” Callahan said. “Look, it’s possible that Schlagel may have some connection with Anne Marie Marinaccio and her financial group out of Dubai. We’ve had her under investigation ever since the dot-com boom days, but we couldn’t prove a thing that would hold up in a court of law. She’s damned good, and at that time she had a half-dozen senators in her pocket one way or another. When she got out of the technology stocks she wound up in real estate, mostly Florida and California, and when she walked she took several billions of dollars with her and set up in the UAE, which took her in with open arms.”

  “Has she been indicted?”

  “No, but we’ve classified her as a person of interest who we’d very much like to talk to. And there’s more.”

  “There always is,” McGarvey said. He’d been down this path many times before, gathering information, gearing up for the opening moves. He sometimes thought of his work as an elaborate dance, in which very often one or more of the partners ended up dead.

  “Marinnacio may have a connection to the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which is almost certainly involved in the funding of a number of terrorist organizations, funneling money from dozens if not hundreds of charities around the world, including here in the States.”

  “Don’t tell me that Schlagel is connected?”

  “We don’t know about any ties with IBC, but he’s almost certainly done business with the Marinaccio Group.”

  “Put it to a grand jury,” McGarvey said, but Callahan shook his head.

  “Wouldn’t fly, Mac. We don’t have the proof.”

  “Maybe I can help,” McGarvey said. “I’ve been given a free hand to take a closer look, see where this all leads.”

  “For God’s sake don’t shoot the man.”

  McGarvey had to smile despite himself. “Leastways not immediately. But I think there’s more coming.”

  Callahan escorted him back downstairs to the lobby. “Keep me posted,” he said before they parted.

  McGarvey nodded. “It’s a two-way street.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  McGarvey had turned off his cell phone at the FBI, and outside he switched it back on to find that Otto had sent him a message. He called back. “What do you have?”

  “Page will see you anytime you want,” Otto said. “The sooner the better. He’s got something on his mind.”

  “I’ll bet he does.”

  “You get anything from Callahan?”

  Switching off the cell phone hadn’t disabled the GPS memory, but all the sensitive areas in the J. Edgar Hoover Building were shielded from any kind of electronic transmissions. Callahan was just a guess on Rencke’s part, typical of his genius at figuring things out.

  “The Bureau’s going to help.”

  “That’s a comfort,” Rencke said with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Looking a little closer at the Reverend Schlagel and his possible ties to the UAEIBC.”

  “Yeah, Eric called a little while ago. We both got a strong tie between Schlagel and the bank, and possibly to a derivative fund’s manager setup in Dubai.”

  “The Marinaccio Group.”

  “Callahan give that to you?”

  “Yes, he did, but he thinks it’s a stretch that Schlagel had anything to do with Hutchinson Island. Maybe his people at Princeton, but not Florida.”

  “Run it by Page,” Otto said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”

  * * *

  Word had been left at the front gate that McGarvey was coming in, and the cabbie was given a dashboard pass that allowed him to drive up to the Old Headquarters Building and drop off his passenger. But he had to return immediately and hand in the pass, which was date and time stamped.

  Each time McGarvey came back like this, he was sharply reminded of his history there, some of it extremely painful, but most of what he had done in the name of his country had been necessary. Or at least it’d always been so in his mind. And now he was in the middle of it again, something he’d been expecting for months. He’d been getting the old sensations at the nape of his neck and somewhere deep in his head that something was heading his way. Something out of the darkness, something that he would have to deal with. And it was at time
s like these over the past few years when he’d become a little tired of the game. Yet that’s who he was; it’s who he’d always been.

  Marty Bambridge met McGarvey in the main hall to escort him up to the director’s office on the seventh floor. He was an odd-looking man with a hawk nose that hung over a large mouth, and thinning black hair that he combed straight back, held in place by a lot of hair spray. He was dressed in a sloppy suit and tie, and although he didn’t seem to take any care with his appearance he was reputed to be an outstanding DDO with a lot of imagination and a great deal of empathy for his people, both on campus and out in the field, including his NOCs.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Director,” he said, giving McGarvey a VIP visitor’s pass. “Mr. Page is expecting you.” They shook hands.

  “My friends call me Mac.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bambridge said.

  Page was waiting for them in his office along with Carleton Patterson, now in his early seventies, who had been the Company’s general counsel during McGarvey’s days, a post he still held. Where Page seemed nondescript, Patterson was tall, slender, and patrician-looking. Before he’d taken the temporary post with the CIA, he’d been a top-flight corporate attorney in New York.

  They all shook hands and sat down on the couch and a couple of easy chairs grouped around a large coffee table. The room hadn’t changed much since McGarvey had sat behind the desk.

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” McGarvey said.

  “I was going to ask you to come over in any event,” Page said. “And may I assume you want to discuss the Hutchinson Island event? I’m told that Mr. Rencke has been providing you with some assistance, and I approve.”

  McGarvey couldn’t decide if he liked or trusted the man. But according to Otto, morale at the Agency had picked up since his appointment; among the reasons were Page’s ability to handle Congress, where he’d developed some real bipartisan support. He’d built a reputation as a straight shooter by freely admitting, when it was necessary, that certain of the CIA’s operations had to be withheld from the public for security reasons, delicately sidestepping the fact that Congress, especially the House, sometimes ran a little fast and loose with classified information that had some political benefit.