The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  Haaris suppressed a smile. “My God,” he said. “Rajput said nothing about it. Who has them, hopefully not the Taliban?”

  “As I said, General Rajput is no friend. At this point all I know is that they may be missing, but who has them is still in question. But if it is Taliban it’s not likely they have the technical knowledge to explode the things. There is that.”

  “The North Koreans would be willing to help.”

  “We’re watching for just that. Currently there are seventeen North Koreans in Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi. They are here as businessmen, but we’re keeping a very close eye on their movements.”

  “Exactly who is doing this?”

  “People in the SS Directorate personally loyal to me.”

  The ISI’s SS Directorate’s prime function was to monitor terrorist activities throughout Pakistan. It was one of the divisions inside the spy agency that Haaris had not been able to penetrate, and one that General Rajput had assured him was of little or no interest to the Americans. Of course, the general was playing both ends against the middle.

  “You’ll need to talk to President Miller and reassure her that you are in control of the nuclear arsenal.”

  “It would be a lie.”

  “Of course, but without that assurance she’ll almost certainly send in our Nuclear Energy Support Team to disable as many of your weapons as our people can get to.”

  “That would not be so easy as the bin Laden raid.”

  “No one thinks it would be. Certain of our people on her staff and in the Pentagon believe that the losses we would suffer are worth reducing the risk of your weapons falling into the wrong hands.”

  “Which may already have occurred,” Barazani said. “But why are you here? What you are telling me makes you a traitor. And just what is it that you are telling me? What’s the U.S. strategy?”

  “You need to look at the bigger picture, Farid. If the Taliban has gotten its hands on some nuclear weapons, Pakistan is finished. If President Miller does order our Nuclear Energy Support Team to neutralize what weapons they can reach, Pakistan will be doubly vulnerable—from the Taliban and also from India, which could very well mount a preemptive nuclear strike knowing that you could not retaliate.” Haaris waved his hand toward the French doors. “Then there are the people who demand that something be done.”

  “A camera has been set up outside, and my image will be shown on the Jumbotron screen at the head of the front stairs. But what do I tell them? I was waiting for something substantive from you.”

  “What they want to hear.”

  “What are you telling me, David?” Barazani asked. “That I should step down? Who would take my place? Who would want to, except for the military, or maybe Rajput himself? What are you saying?”

  “More to the point, what is the mob on Constitution Avenue demanding?”

  “They’re a mob.”

  “Pakistanis.”

  “Directed by the Taliban.”

  Haaris nodded.

  Barazani looked like a trapped man. His eyes were wide and he breathed through his mouth. His face was wet. “Is this the message you have brought me from Washington?”

  “Not exactly,” Haaris said. “I have something more specific.”

  “What?”

  Haaris got up and went to his bag. His back to Barazani he broke the diplomatic seal and took out a Glock 29 subcompact pistol, a suppressor attached to the muzzle. He turned around, walked directly back to Barazani, who reared back, and shot the president of Pakistan in the middle of the forehead.

  EIGHT

  President Barazani lay slumped to the left in his chair. Only a small amount of blood had leaked out of the wound in his forehead and dribbled into his left eye. Haaris felt the carotid artery, but there was no pulse.

  The anteroom was empty, the door to the corridor closed. Getting a one-kilogram brick of Semtex and a contact exploder from his bag, he molded the plastic explosive to the outer door and set the fuse. When someone opened the door the Semtex would explode, killing anyone in the corridor within a few meters of the door.

  He closed the inner door and molded a second brick of Semtex and an exploder to it.

  From his bag he took the trousers, long shirt and kaffiyeh he’d worn in from the airport and put them on over his khaki slacks and white shirt.

  Stuffing the pistol in his belt, he inserted the SIM card into his cell phone and called Rajput, getting him on the first ring.

  “This is Haaris. I managed to get away from the bastards.”

  “My God, David, are you hurt?”

  “No, but I’m on foot about five miles from the airport. I need to get to my airplane.”

  “The city is a mess. A big crowd has gathered in front of the Aiwan. They’re calling for Barazani to come out and speak to them. But the coward is hiding in his office.”

  “He has to do it, General. There’s no other way out for Pakistan.” Haaris let some desperation into his tone. “Can’t he see that?”

  “It’s our problem now, David. You’ve done all that you could. We’ll send someone to take you to your airplane and out of the country. Just hold tight.”

  Haaris shut off his phone and removed the SIM card.

  He took the voice-altering device out of his bag and strapped it around his neck, centering the electronic package just beneath his Adam’s apple, and readjusted the kaffiyeh to cover it and all but his eyes.

  The remote control for the outside camera was lying on the small table next to Barazani’s body. Haaris pocketed it, and finally he pulled a razor-sharp machete from his bag and went back to the president of Pakistan.

  “Now it is time, my old friend, for you to actually do something worthwhile for your country,” he said.

  He swung the blade with all of his might, easily severing the flesh of Barazani’s neck and cutting through the top of the spinal column. The president’s head fell backward, thumping onto the floor behind the chair and rolling a meter or so before coming to rest on its right side.

  Haaris wiped the machete on Barazani’s shirt and laid it aside before he switched on the outside camera, picked up the severed head by its hair and walked to the door.

  * * *

  The radio in Lieutenant Jura’s car came to life. “Special unit one.”

  He answered it. “Unit one.”

  “Get out of there right now. The situation is about to go explosive.”

  The only one who could use this channel was the directorate’s dispatcher, under the personal control of General Rajput.

  “What about my passenger? He’s still inside.”

  “He’s no longer your concern. Leave now, Lieutenant. That is an order.”

  “Roger,” Jura said. He started the car and headed back past the residences to the rear gate. He had no idea what was going on, but he was relieved to be out of it. All hell was about to break loose; it was thick in the air and at this moment, he could think only of himself, and the hell with the bloody Americans.

  As he approached the gate, he could hear a helicopter coming in from the south, but then three armed guards came out of the darkness and blocked the driveway.

  “Halt,” one of them shouted.

  For some inexplicable reason the iron gate stood open just beyond the guards.

  “Stop now!” the guard shouted.

  Jura slammed the gas pedal to the floor and the Fiat surged forward, striking one of the guards before the others opened fire.

  * * *

  Haaris switched on the voice-altering device, opened the French doors and walked out onto the balcony. At the balustrade he raised Barazani’s head to show the crowd.

  For a seeming eternity the mob fell almost silent. In the distance to the south the ISI helicopter was arriving. The time for long speeches was past.

  “This man was an instrument of our enemies in the West,” Haaris shouted in Punjabi, the language that nearly 50 percent of the people spoke.

  “But we have friends with us
now. The Students.” He used the Pashto word for “students” which was taliban. “Our only way to liberation is with them. They will help guide us when the Americans attack, which they will very soon, possibly even before dawn. But we will not allow another Abbottabad. The shame will not be ours to bear.”

  The crowd reacted with a low, ugly roar that slowly rose to cheers.

  “I have come here to guide you. I am not a Student, but follow me, I will show you the way.”

  His image was on the huge Jumbotron, the head in grisly color, his altered voice amplified so that it rolled over the mob, seeming to fill every molecule of air on Constitution Avenue.

  “Pakistan’s leaders have been nothing more than puppets of the American regime. They in Washington are friends of New Delhi. It must not continue this way. Pakistan needs at long last to declare its independence. We are a sovereign nation, we are a sovereign people.”

  The mob roared but without anger. They were hearing something they needed to hear, something they had yearned to hear for years, but especially since the SEAL team raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

  The unmarked helicopter, showing no lights, passed to the west of the Presidential Palace, but few people in the crowd seemed to notice.

  “I have come with a message for you. A message that I was given by Allah in a waking dream.”

  The mob released a collective sigh.

  “We do not have to wait for Paradise because it is here now, within all of us. We need only strength: strong arms to do what is needed, strong resolve to stay the course, strong hearts and strong love to know for certain that what we do is right and just.”

  Someone close to the front of the crowd shouted, “Messiah!”

  At first it seemed like no one had heard, but then someone farther back in the mob repeated it: “Messiah!”

  Then a woman screamed, her voice shrill, “My Messiah!”

  “Look to each other for strength.”

  The chant, Messiah! grew.

  “Look to your families, your friends, your neighbors for strength.”

  “Messiah!”

  “Look to strangers for strength.”

  “Messiah!”

  “Look to me, for I will be your right arm of justice,” Haaris told them.

  The helicopter came from the north, very low, flared suddenly just high enough to set down on the roof behind and eight meters above the balcony.

  “I will leave you now in person but not in spirit,” Haaris shouted. “Love Pakistan, love your neighbors, have strength. There will be more messages from me.”

  The mob was momentarily subdued.

  “Allah be with you. Allah be with us. Allah be with Pakistan!”

  He threw the head over the edge of the balcony at the same moment the Semtex charge on the corridor door exploded with a sharp bang.

  NINE

  President Miller watched in stunned disbelief as the man the mob on Constitution Avenue was calling “Messiah” tossed the severed head off the balcony. Moments later the image they were intercepting from the Jumbotron broadcast went blank.

  “My God, who was that?” she asked.

  “If you mean the head, I’m pretty sure it was Barazani’s,” Secretary of State Fay said. “I met him twice last year. But if you mean the one who tossed it, I haven’t the faintest.”

  Miller called Page, who was still at the Watch. His image came up on one of the big monitors. “Do we have a positive ID on whose head that was?” she demanded.

  “Photo interp gives it a ninety-eight-percent match, plus or minus nothing, Madam President. It’s Barazani.”

  “What about the man who tossed it?”

  “Taliban, probably. We’re getting a lot of signals out of ISI and they’re just as surprised as we were. But I do have a bit of good news. We think that Dave Haaris may have escaped. The ISI is trying to reach him so they can get him out to the airport.”

  “As soon as he’s airborne I want to talk to him. He was right in the middle of it, he should have picked up something. But what about the man the crowd called ‘Messiah’?”

  “We don’t have an ID, but one of our technical people is sure the voice was artificial.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He thinks the man’s voice was computer enhanced. He’s trying to re-create the real voice.”

  “We can do that?” Kalley asked.

  “Otto Rencke’s on it.”

  It was the second piece of good news, and the president said so. “We’ll soon have an answer if he’s as good as everyone says he is.”

  “He is,” Page said. “But the bigger issue is why would he go through the trouble of disguising his voice in the first place? I’m told that his Punjabi was perfect.”

  “Excuse me, Madam President, but Mr. Page is correct,” the White House translator, still on the Situation Room screen, interjected. “The Punjabi the man was speaking was educated. He’s someone from an urban population center. I’d guess Lahore.”

  “That jibes with what my people are telling me,” Page said.

  “Have there been any hints about someone like that on the way up?” Miller asked. “He doesn’t sound like run-of-the-mill Taliban.”

  “There are always rumors, but nothing that we’ve been able to substantiate. I spoke with Ross a few minutes ago and he’s just as mystified as the rest of us. But we are working on it.”

  Kalley sat forward. “Was that an explosion we heard just before the signal was cut off?”

  “We think so. Our best guess is that the president’s personal security people blew the office door to get in.”

  “What about the Messiah?” Miller asked. “Do they have him?”

  “Our spy bird picked up the image of an Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter landing on the roof of the Presidential Palace. It’s just twenty-five feet above the balcony.”

  “Jesus, are the Russians somehow involved in this?”

  “It’s not likely. The angle was for the Jumbotron. We did some enhanced imagery and couldn’t come up with any markings. But we think the speaker may have made his way to the roof and boarded the helicopter, which took off toward the south, where we lost it.”

  “Goddamnit, don’t tell me what we can’t do, tell me how,” the president said in frustration.

  “I’m sorry, Madam President, but current economic policy has tied our hands in some critical areas. Like the launching of new reconnaissance satellites.”

  “What did we do before the age of satellites?” Miller shot back.

  “We had more personnel on the ground,” Page said, not backing down. His message was clear: You get what you pay for.

  “What resources do we have to send to help Ross?”

  “Rencke suggests that we ask McGarvey for a hand.”

  Miller personally had never liked or trusted maverick operators such as McGarvey. But when she’d gone to the White House just before Christmas, a couple of weeks before she was inaugurated, the outgoing president had briefed her on highly classified assets she could count on if nothing else was working. Kirk McGarvey, the legendary operator who for a brief period had actually been director of the CIA, was one of them.

  “He won’t want to work for you, but if he does, never ask him a question for which you think you already know the answer,” the president had told her. “The man has the bad habit of telling you the truth, no matter how much you don’t want to hear it.”

  She’d started to object, but the president held her off.

  “He’s likely to do things his own way, not yours, and he’s just as likely to ignore the law. Hell, I even had him arrested and put in jail. Lasted less than twenty-four hours before the shit hit the fan and I had to let him get at it. And through all of it, I had the impression he let himself be arrested just to make his point.”

  “Isn’t he getting too old to be running around shooting people?”

  “No,” the president said flatly. “And don’t ever question his loyalty or his motivation. H
e’s been severely wounded several times in the line of duty. And he lost his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law to the cause.”

  “What cause is that?” Miller had asked. It was the last time she tried to be sarcastic when it came to discussing McGarvey. She had gotten over it that afternoon.

  “His country and for what it stands. Jingoistic, even schmaltzy, but true nevertheless. Don’t forget it, Charlene.”

  Miller focused on Page’s image. “We’re not quite there yet, Walter. First I’ll decide if we’ll send our nuclear response teams before the situation gets totally out of hand. Keep in contact. And let me know as soon as Haaris shows up.”

  “Will do,” Page said, and the president shut down the connection.

  For the longest moment, no one said anything.

  “Discussion,” the president said.

  “I don’t think that there’s any question that we send in our nuclear response teams,” Admiral Altman said. “But we will suffer casualties.”

  “We didn’t when we took out bin Laden.”

  “They didn’t know we were coming. This time they’ll be expecting us.”

  “I don’t know if I can completely agree. They’ve got their hands full trying to defend their military bases against attacks by the Taliban.”

  “People listening to what the Messiah told them might have bought into it,” Kalley suggested.

  “That the Taliban is suddenly the friend of Pakistan?” Miller asked sharply. The use of the word Messiah was bothersome to her.

  “Yes.”

  “And we can only guarantee to neutralize ninety of their nuclear weapons,” the admiral said. “And that’s the best-case scenario. It would leave them with thirty workable weapons—including the ones that went missing in the last twenty-four hours. Could turn into an all-out war.”

  “Our response teams would create enough of a cause célèbre for them to declare war,” Secretary of State Fay said.

  “Not against us,” Miller said.

  “Against Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai is no friend of Pakistan.”

  “We still have people on the ground over there,” Kalley said. “It could turn into an unholy mess. But I agree with Admiral Altman. We don’t have any choice but to send in the teams. We just have to be prepared for the blowback.”