The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Bambridge said.

  “There were two guys in the boat. Small, dark. Almost certainly Middle Eastern.”

  “Inconclusive,” Patterson said, but without much conviction.

  “Enough for me,” McGarvey said.

  “That being the case, what do you propose?” Patterson asked.

  “Well, we’re not going to invade Pakistan. From what Otto gave me they still have thirty nuclear weapons and the means to launch them on rockets, from aircraft, from surface ships and possibly even from their Hamza submarines. The Indians know this also so it’s not likely they’ll launch a preemptive strike. And from what this Messiah character told the mob in front of the Presidential Palace, the Taliban are once again friends of Pakistan. Trained well enough, or helped by someone in Pakistan’s military—probably someone from Quetta Air Force Base—to set off one of the weapons as a demonstration.”

  “So what’s left?” Page asked, but it was a rhetorical question and everyone knew it.

  “That’s up to the president.”

  “We’ll provide any sort of backup you need. And our COS Ross Austin in Islamabad should be able to fill you in on what’s going on.”

  “I’d like to talk to Haaris before I head over to the White House, maybe get together with his team.”

  “And I might have something more for you,” Otto said.

  “I have a foolish question, my dear boy,” Patterson said. “Since you believe the attack upon your person has something to do with the Pakistan issue, would you like some help, maybe a couple of bodyguards?”

  McGarvey had to smile. “As you said, a foolish question.”

  “They could try again.”

  “I hope they do. It’d mean that I was irritating someone.”

  Bambridge couldn’t hide a slight smile. “Are you armed?”

  “I will be when I leave the building.”

  “Let us know what the president wants of you, if you would,” Page said. “If it involves what we all believe it will, we’ll need to adjust our thinking, and Ross will have to be given the heads-up.”

  “The president is going to ask me to assassinate the Messiah,” McGarvey said.

  “Indeed,” Page said.

  “I don’t know if I’ll do it.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Pete walked across the connecting walkway from the Original Headquarters Building into the new building, past the cafeteria that faced the inner courtyard with its copper statue “Kryptos,” which had recently been totally decrypted. The debriefing room was on the second floor, its windows also facing inward to the pretty courtyard with its walkways, statues and landscaping.

  Haaris was seated at the end of a small conference table for six when Pete walked in. He was faced by Don Wicklund and Darrel Richards from the Directorate of Intelligence. His product and in general his conclusions on the Pakistan issue over the past several years had been so stellar that whenever he came back in from the field he was treated with kid gloves.

  Both Wicklund and Richards were well-seasoned officers in their mid-forties who had done their stints in the field and had come in from the cold to take important administrative positions. They were respectful and pleasant. Just three friends having a little discussion. Could have been about the weather.

  They all looked up. Wicklund and Richards had expected her, but Haaris hadn’t, though he didn’t show much surprise.

  “Welcome back, Dave,” she said. “Looks like a rifle butt to your chin. Must have hurt like hell.”

  “It stung a bit.”

  Pete sat at the opposite end of the table. “I’m Pete Boylan. Mr. Page asked me to sit in on your debriefing. Just a little bird in the corner. He’s concerned not only about your well-being but about what the hell just happened over there.”

  “Miss Boylan, your reputation precedes you,” Haaris said.

  “Good, I hope.”

  “Nothing but.”

  The man was in pain, she could see that, but something else was bothering him, something deep at the back of his eyes, in the set of his mouth, in his mannerisms, which were nothing less than pleasant. No artifice that she could detect, just something bothering him.

  She had read his jacket on the way up from Florida, and the only real anomaly, the only fact that didn’t seem to fit, was his wife, Deborah nee Johnson. The woman had dropped out of recruit training at the Farm before she was flunked out. And a few months later she and Haaris were married. Haaris, the smooth, urbane, educated and worldly man. And Deb the farm girl from Iowa with a law degree, just barely, though she’d never taken or passed any bar examination in any state. The two as a couple didn’t gel in Pete’s head.

  His latest psych eval was mostly good, as were all the previous ones, and there didn’t seem to be any hint of marital troubles. He and his wife didn’t entertain much, nor did they accept many invitations, but they came across as a happily married couple.

  It just didn’t fit in Pete’s mind.

  “We have your written report that you sketched out on the flight back from Incirlik that says you weren’t aware of this Messiah nor did you see the dramatic speech he made at the Presidential Palace,” Wicklund said. He looked and acted like a professor of history.

  “Not at the time. But I did watch the recording later. The man is a maniac, assuming he killed Barazani.”

  “He tossed the president’s head over the rail.”

  “Might have been an accomplice who did the actual murder,” Haaris said. “We can’t discount any avenue of investigation.”

  “Is that the recommendation you’re going to give to your desk?”

  “I’ll give them the same recommendation that I always give: Keep an open mind. Do not jump to conclusions. Spend a little time with your thinking.”

  “They still have thirty-plus nuclear weapons at their disposal, plus the means to deliver them,” Pete said. “Do you think that time might not be on our side?”

  “Pakistan is not preparing to attack India or any other country in the near future,” Haaris said to her. “What we have witnessed is a coup d’état. A long time coming, in my estimation. And, Miss Boylan, I have given that much thought over the past several years—ever since the departure of Pervez Musharraf.”

  “So where is Pakistan going?”

  “I’m not sure, but it is something very high on my list of priorities.”

  “Should we go to war with them?” Pete asked.

  “Good heaven’s, no,” Haaris said, genuinely surprised. “No nuclear power goes to war with another nuclear power in this day and age. In this case it’s likely that India would become involved after all, and possibly even China might climb aboard ostensibly as our allies. It would give them a foothold into the region.” He looked at Wicklund and Richards. “In that direction lies only madness.”

  “So your recommendation to the president would be wait and see,” Wicklund said. “Not very insightful from where I sit. But believe me, Mr. Haaris, I don’t want to come across as confrontational. We’re all just trying to come to some conclusions about the situation, and you not only had your boots on the ground there, you are the go-to person on Pakistan.”

  “I understand,” Haaris said. “I’ll prepare a few notes by this evening and email them to you as soon as I have time. But for now my people are waiting to get started.”

  “We may have a few further questions.”

  “I think we all will,” Haaris said. “Are we finished here?”

  “Of course,” Wicklund said.

  Haaris got up and walked out of the conference room, and Pete caught up with him before he reached the elevators.

  “Do you want to buy a girl a coffee?” she asked.

  Haaris smiled. “Miss Boylan, are you coming on to me?”

  Pete laughed. “Your accent drives women nuts, I hope you know that. I’d like to ask you something personal, away from the recording equipment back there.”

  “I am rather busy.”


  “Only take a minute, promise. We can go back to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy.”

  Haaris smiled again. “I suppose that it’s an offer I can’t refuse. And tit for tat. A good-looking woman drives me nuts.”

  Pete suppressed a smile.

  They walked back down the corridor to the cafeteria, where she got them coffee and they sat at a table by the windows. Only a few other people were there at this hour of the afternoon.

  Every window in every building on campus, even the cafeteria, was double-paned, with white noise piped in between the panes to cancel out any surveillance attempts.

  “Who do you think this so-called Messiah is?” she asked. It was only an opening ploy to get him talking comfortably about a difficult subject.

  “Hard to say this early.”

  “Your gut feeling, if you were to be pressed.”

  “Not Taliban, I think. He’s likely using them only as a tool.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s a coup d’état, Miss Boylan, as I’ve already stated. The Taliban hates the U.S., and hate can act as a very powerful adhesive to hold a mob together. He or someone like him was probably inevitable.”

  “And an aphrodisiac,” Pete suggested. He hadn’t said that the Taliban hated “us,” but that they hated the U.S. The U.S. as a third party distinct from himself as well as the Taliban.

  “That too, but I wouldn’t suspect that the average Pakistani would think of it that way.”

  Pete gazed out the window, sipping her coffee, letting the silence between them grow. It was an old interrogation technique. Subjects almost always wanted to fill the void by saying something.

  “So, it’s been interesting meeting you,” Haaris said, rising. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  “Something’s bothering you,” Pete said, looking up at him. “Call it woman’s intuition or whatever.”

  “That’s a personal statement.”

  Pete smiled. “It’s the business. Goes with the territory. And trust me, none of what’s been said here will be written down. You have my word.”

  Haaris hesitated for just a second then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, I suppose, for someone else to be in on my little secret. It’s already arrived at the seventh floor.”

  Pete waited.

  “Fact is, I’m dying. Cancer, I’m told. And I probably have around six viable months left to me.”

  Pete was taken aback. It was nothing close to what she had expected.

  “Now, I must get back to my people. Time waits for no man, Miss Boylan, not even for me.”

  EIGHTEEN

  McGarvey went down to Otto’s third-floor suite of offices, where no one ever worked except for the special projects director. The three rooms were filled with sophisticated computer equipment: two-hundred-inch ultra-high-def flat-screen monitors on the walls, one flat-panel table about the size of a pool table in the middle of the inner room and smaller screens, keyboards, printers and several laptops and tablets scattered on various desks and worktables. In addition, several large tables were filled to overflowing with printed maps, files, books, newspapers and magazines. Most of the chairs were stacked with folders. Other books were piled just about everywhere.

  “Not everything is digitized.” Otto had been saying this for years. “And probably won’t ever be, provided there’s a need for secrecy. A computer can be hacked from ten thousand miles away, but a piece of paper in some obscure file somewhere ain’t so easy to access.”

  Several of the monitors showed various colors as backgrounds, ranging from light yellows and reds to deep violets, which lately meant his search programs—his little darlings, he called them—were running into something that could potentially be dangerous to the U.S.

  One of the programs was working on the Messiah’s brief speech; the image was on a screen, the voice low in the background.

  “Pink picked up the fact that the voice was artificially enhanced,” Otto said. “I didn’t hear it myself. But I set her to filter out the enhancement, leaving only the original. Not so easy even for her since we have no idea, not even a clue, what the original sounds like, except its Punjabi seemed to be clipped, odd vowels here and there. Maybe someone who’d learned British English.”

  “About half the educated males in Pakistan,” McGarvey said.

  “Eighty percent,” Otto said. He entered several commands from a keyboard. “I’m trying to translate what the guy was saying into English—the way his voice might sound if he were speaking in English.”

  “Are you making any progress?”

  “It’s coming, but slowly. And even if Pink does come up with a credible voice, whose will it be? Any one of millions.”

  “There’s only one reason he went to the trouble to disguise his voice, and it’s because we’d recognize it. But if we could find out whether his English was Punjabi accented or not, it would give us a direction of sorts.”

  “My program has a seventy-eight-percent confidence that Punjabi is his native language.”

  “What about the voice-enhanced technology he used? Was it anything that you’re familiar with?”

  “Nothing that stood out. You can buy the basic chips and other circuit elements at your local Radio Shack.”

  McGarvey stepped right up to the monitor showing the Messiah. Nothing was visible of the man’s face—if in fact it was a man—and even the eyes were in deep shadows under his kaffiyeh; nor were his hands clearly visible, except for a brief shot of him holding Barazani’s severed head.

  “His hand,” McGarvey said.

  “I tried enhancing it for at least a partial print on one of the fingers, but no go. It was his left hand but I couldn’t find a wedding ring. Though I got the impression of a light band around his wrist.”

  “He wore a watch or bracelet?”

  “Probably. But the mark isn’t deep, so it could mean he doesn’t spend a lot of time outdoors with his sleeves rolled up.”

  McGarvey stared at the image. “What’s your snap judgment?”

  Otto perched on the edge of one of the desks. He liked to think on his feet, he’d said, but he also liked to relax. “It was a brilliant move on his part bringing in the Taliban, or at least offering them a place in the new government. The attacks on the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi stopped almost immediately after his speech. And commercially Pakistan went back to normal. But if you’re asking what his agenda is, I don’t have a clue. Maybe Miller knows something I don’t know.”

  “We’re the ones who brief her, so if you don’t know—if the CIA doesn’t know—then she doesn’t either.”

  “That’s a scary thought,” Otto said, “considering what she’ll ask you to do.”

  McGarvey looked away from the screen. “Is anyone saying Pakistan has become a credible threat against us?”

  “No. And from what I understand our CIA guys have shed their tails. I talked to Ross just before you came in, and he says it’s gotten spooky over there. The only trouble he’s run into is the disappearance of the guy he sent to check things out in Quetta.”

  “Could be he was too close when the bomb went off.”

  “That’s what Ross is worried about,” Otto said.

  Someone was at the door. Otto glanced at a monitor. “It’s Pete,” he said and buzzed her in.

  “Thought I’d find you here,” she said to McGarvey. “Haaris just finished with his debriefing—and it was brief—and afterwards we had a little one-on-one in the cafeteria. Franklin says he has cancer, gives him only six months on his feet.”

  “Marty told us that much,” McGarvey said. “How was he handling it?”

  “He’s dedicated. Said that time waited for no man, not even him. So he scurried back to his people.”

  “Too dedicated?” McGarvey asked. He’d never liked things that didn’t add up.

  “I guess if I were in his place I’d want to spend my last months with someone I loved, maybe lying on a beach somewhere, drinking piña coladas. Listening to some good reggae
. Or maybe eating and drinking my way through Paris.”

  “Unless he has an agenda.”

  “Love or hate, your choice, Mac,” she said. “I’ll give you a lift over to the White House.”

  “I want to have a word with Haaris first. I’ll meet you in your office.”

  “I don’t have an office here.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I have a place in Georgetown. Not too far from your apartment. I’ll wait for you in the cafeteria.”

  * * *

  The Pakistan Desk consisted mostly of a dozen cubicles, each with a specialist, surrounding a central meeting space that doubled as a library and tripled as a computer work center. Haaris’s office was behind a glass wall on the side of the room opposite the door.

  McGarvey had been given a blue badge, which gave him access to every office on the entire campus. When he walked in, Haaris was seated in the middle of the meeting space with his staff—most of them young men, along with an older woman, her gray hair up in a bun.

  Haaris looked up with a scowl. “We’re in the middle of something,” he said.

  “Sorry to barge in,” McGarvey apologized. “But I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “Well?”

  “What’s your thinking on the situation?”

  “We’re discussing it, as you may well expect.”

  “I’ve been called to the White House. They want my opinion. I want yours. What’s going to happen in the next twenty-four hours? Forty-eight? Seventy-two? One week? One month?”

  “The million-dollar question, Mr. McGarvey. What do you think will happen?”

  “Depends on whether something were to happen to the Messiah, and if it were to be blamed on us.”

  Haaris laughed, though it was obvious his mouth hurt. “We were crude in Vietnam, were crude in Afghanistan and Iraq, so it wouldn’t surprise me if we botched this as well. We’ll have a position paper for the president first thing in the morning. In the meantime you may tell her, if you wish, that you are exactly the wrong sort to get involved.”

  “I’ll do that,” McGarvey said. “Because I happen to agree with you.”