The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

The Secretariat was housed in a large stuccoed white five-story building just off Constitution Avenue near the northwest end of the Red Section. The foothills of the Himalayas rose to the east, and clouds were beginning to roll in, like an ominous gray blanket. A storm was on its way, and Mac could feel it coming in more ways than one.

  He counted more than a dozen white domes at various corners of the L-shaped building as they approached, and they reminded him of the domes and spires atop minarets across the Muslim world.

  He got the distinct feeling that peace would never come to Pakistan or places like this. He was not anti-Islam; in fact, he didn’t care one way or another for any organized religion. But the extremists in any system were always the exception to the norm—Islam, Judaism or Christianity—yet they always accounted for the highest body counts. The primary purpose of terrorism was to terrorize.

  The driver pulled up at the main gate. McGarvey rolled down his window and presented his passport to a guard, who checked the photo against his face.

  “Yes, Dr. Parks, you are expected.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  A pair of motorcycle cops escorted McGarvey’s taxi up the long driveway to a side entrance of the Secretariat. Close up the massive pile looked more like a fortress or a prison than a governmental office. It felt ancient—and menacing: Abandon hope all ye who enter these gates.

  He paid off the cabby, who was escorted back to the main gate. As he stood waiting next to an armed guard who was to take him inside, he could hear the chanting of a large crowd. He was around the side of the building, so he had no sight line down the broad avenue, but notably absent were the sounds of gunfire, which seemed always to be present at times like these.

  “Dr. Parks,” his guard prompted.

  “It sounds peaceful.”

  The guard smiled faintly. “It is the Messiah, his message is one of peace.”

  “Someone is with him.”

  “The people.”

  “I meant that someone from the Aiwan is walking with him. Someone from the Taliban.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” the guard said.

  “Sure, you do,” McGarvey told him, but he followed the man inside, where he was searched with an electronic security wand before they went down a long, marble hall and took an elevator to the top floor.

  The place was bustling with clerks and other governmental employees scurrying from office to office as if they were on missions of urgent importance, which considering who was heading this way, they were.

  The anteroom to the prime minister’s office was nearly half the size of a decent ballroom, with very high ceilings from which hung ornate chandeliers, gilded mirrors on the walls and vast Persian carpets on the wood parquet floor. An older man dressed in the morning clothes of a state functionary was seated behind the desk in the middle of the room.

  He looked up, a pleasant expression on his round face. “Good morning, Dr. Parks,” he said. “The prime minister will see you momentarily.” He motioned for the guard to leave them.

  “I imagine that he’s very busy this morning.”

  “Indeed.”

  A pair of couches flanked by large tables topped with vases of flowers were set along one wall, but there was no place else to sit other than behind the secretary’s desk. The length of time that someone wishing to see the prime minister was required to stand was related to his importance.

  The secretary picked up his buzzing telephone. “Yes, sir,” he said. “You may go in now, Dr. Parks.”

  A pair of massive ornately carved oak doors at least sixteen feet tall opened into the PM’s office, which was nothing like what McGarvey had expected; very little of anything was ornate or pretentious about it. As he walked in, a service door to the left was just closing. Rajput was standing behind his desk strewn with papers, files, a telephone console and two computer monitors. Large windows faced toward Constitution Avenue, and on the wall between them was a wide flat-screen television that showed a view down the avenue from a camera mounted on the roof. Two library tables were piled with file folders and other documents. No paintings adorned the walls and the only real concession to decoration other than the ornately carved desk was a massive Persian carpet, the twin, or at least the cousin, of the one in the anteroom. This was a place of work, not ceremony.

  Rajput motioned for McGarvey to have a seat in front of the desk. “Coming here just now, what struck you most about the demonstration out there?”

  “So far as I know, this time your Messiah hasn’t cut off anyone’s head yet.”

  “It was a brutal act, but one that may have been necessary. Pakistan was going nowhere under its former leadership. And I believe you call such actions a ‘clean sweep.’”

  “Some would call it a purge.”

  “The guns have been silent. The suicide bombers have taken off their vests. Business goes on in peace. The ambassadors are returning to their embassies—most notably your Mr. Powers—and next month we will be receiving a delegation from the Pentagon to open a new era of cooperation between us and your military.”

  Rajput wasn’t rising to the bait—yet.

  “What went wrong in Quetta?”

  “A nuclear accident, regrettable, but the location was isolated enough, there were only a very few casualties.”

  “The driver and escort were moving the weapons somewhere. But it was my understanding that in cases such as that one the weapons would have been unmated—their nuclear cores and trigger mechanisms separated.”

  “In this instance that was not in fact the case. An investigation is in progress, the results of which will be classified.”

  “But there has been very little about it in your press or on television.”

  “We do not restrict our citizens from access to foreign newspapers, television or the Internet. If truth be told, the unescorted shipment was probably attacked by a Taliban group that got more than it bargained for. Because of the Messiah we have begun steps for rapprochement with them.”

  “Instead of supplying them with weapons.”

  Rajput sat back. “What are you doing here, Dr. Parks? What do you want from Pakistan?”

  “Extraordinary things have been happening over the past days; I just want clarity for my readers on a number of issues that seem to have eluded the foreign press to this point.”

  “The nuclear incident in Quetta has been discussed with your government.”

  “It’s my understanding that you stonewalled President Miller, which was why she ordered teams to disable as many weapons in your nuclear arsenal as they could reach. There’ve been no reports that I’ve seen on the effectiveness of those raids or of the casualties on both sides.”

  Rajput said nothing.

  “How has that affected Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S?”

  “There has been no effect.”

  “How many weapons remain in your arsenal?”

  Rajput smiled.

  “What I meant to ask, does your military still present a credible enough threat to India that it will not make a preemptive strike?”

  “It would be a mistake on their part.”

  McGarvey made a point to look up at the big monitor on the wall between the windows. The crowds had grown. Haaris and the Taliban representative were not visible, but there was a center to the mass that moved steadily up the broad avenue.

  “What do you want here, Dr. Parks? I’m still not clear.”

  “An in-depth one-on-one interview with the Messiah. My readers want to know who he is and what his agenda might be.”

  “Even I do not know that yet.”

  “Then we’ll ask him together when he gets here.”

  “But what is your agenda?”

  McGarvey suppressed a grin. It was like fishing: hook, line and sinker. “To get a story.”

  “Do you know Ross Austin?” Rajput asked out of the blue.

  “No.”

  “You’re lying. He knows you and he knows why you’re here.”

  McGarvey mai
ntained his composure.

  “Mr. Austin is in fact the chief of station for the CIA’s activities here in Pakistan. And he is concerned about you. In fact he wants me to have you arrested and turned over to Ambassador Powers immediately.”

  “We have a little thing called the First Amendment.”

  “He says that until recently you were an analyst with the CIA. He says that you fancy yourself as the next Edward Snowden, and that you have come to Pakistan seeking asylum in exchange for information.”

  FORTY-SIX

  It was well after eleven in the evening when Otto Rencke left his office and took the elevator up to the seventh floor. The DCI had called fifteen minutes earlier to say that he was coming to Campus and wanted a meeting, not at all surprised to find Otto still at work.

  Louise had gone home a couple of hours before, totally wasted after working nearly nonstop for the past thirty-six hours. She was just as worried as her husband was over the chances of Mac getting out of Pakistan alive, let alone finishing what he’d gone there to do, yet Otto expected the situation was harder on her in part because she didn’t have the same history with Mac’s abilities, and she wasn’t at the center of CIA activities.

  Page had just arrived by helicopter when Otto reached his office. Already there were Marty Bambridge and Carlton Patterson, whom Otto had come to think of as the DCI’s unlikely war council.

  “Don’t you ever get tired, dear boy?” Patterson asked, though he looked just as beat as everyone else. He was an old man, in his late seventies, and yet he had energy because, he’d once explained, his job was at least interesting if not exciting.

  “No time for it,” Otto said, taking a seat next to him on one of the couches in the middle of the room.

  The DCI’s office was laid out much like the Oval Office because Page often found it more comfortable to have discussions with his people not across his desk, and not around a long table in a conference room, but up close and personal.

  Bambridge, who’d been down the hall in the Watch since late afternoon, looked sullen as usual, but Otto detected a hint of fear in his eyes. It was unusual even for the DDO.

  “There’ve been some developments in the past hour or so that all of you might not be aware of,” Page told them. “First off, the TTP’s representative Shahidullah Shahid has disappeared.”

  “The Messiah and a Taliban mouthpiece, apparently the mufti Fahad, had a brief meeting this morning at the Presidential Palace before they set out on foot toward the Secretariat, presumably to meet with Prime Minister Rajput,” Bambridge added.

  “Yes, we know that much,” Otto said.

  “Then you also know that the blogger who identifies himself as Travis Parks is none other than Kirk McGarvey.”

  Otto looked to Page. “That was supposed to be kept secret, for his own safety.”

  Bambridge was puffed up. “Be that as it may, for whatever reason he revealed himself to my chief of station out there, who, duty-bound, reported it to me.”

  “And what did you do about it?” Otto asked.

  “I told Ross not to get himself or his station personnel involved except to monitor the situation as closely as practicable and report anything of interest directly to me.”

  “Has he?”

  “McGarvey’s apparently already gotten into trouble. Ross thinks that he killed two ISI officers and was responsible for the death of a third—a woman—whose body is being transported from Pakistan by a team of SEAL Team Six operators out of Jalalabad.”

  “Did you know about this?” Page asked Otto.

  “I arranged it.”

  “The White House didn’t and the president’s national security adviser wants the mission scrubbed. She wants McGarvey recalled.”

  “I tried to make him get out,” Otto said. “But he’s not going to back off. We have confirmation that the man who we thought was Dave Haaris in London was in fact an imposter, which makes it even more likely that the Messiah is Dave.”

  “Not likely at all,” Patterson said, surprising them all. “Before he took his wife’s ashes to London he confided in me that he was tired, that he needed a vacation. Said he was going to disappear for five days, and that if something should come up about his whereabouts to inform everyone that there was nothing to worry about.”

  The timing struck Otto. “That was two days ago,” he said.

  “So he’ll be gone another three days,” Patterson said. “There’s no reason to suspect that he was lying, especially dealing with the grief of losing his wife so tragically. And learning that he has an inoperable cancer.”

  “Pete Boylan confronted his imposter in London, who told her that his contract was for two more days only.”

  “Tommy Boyle told me that he arranged an RAF flight to Islamabad for her,” Bambridge said. “I ordered him to have it recalled but he couldn’t without burning a favor, something neither of us wanted to do. She’ll be on the ground in the next few hours.”

  “That’s not the point,” Otto said. “Whatever Dave’s planned will presumably happen in two days.”

  “It’s actually a moot point, because McGarvey will be under arrest and on his way home before then,” Bambridge said.

  Otto’s temper spiked, but he held himself from lunging across the coffee table between them and breaking the stupid bastard’s neck. “What have you done?”

  “I authorized it with Sue Kalley’s blessing, who thought it was a brilliant way out of the situation,” Page said. “The fallout from any more killings over there will be far too costly for us, but outing Mac as a whistle-blower who we wanted returned immediately was something that could be handled politically.”

  Otto didn’t want to believe what he was hearing. “Mac is either on his way to meet with Rajput or he’s already there in the Secretariat.”

  “Yes, we know,” Bambridge said.

  “Don’t tell me that you actually identified Mac?” Otto asked, surprised by his control.

  “Of course not. What do you take me for?” Bambridge said. “Austin told Rajput that Travis Parks worked for us, but that he fancied himself to be another Snowden, seeking asylum in exchange for information on this agency’s top operations. Ambassador Powers has an appointment with Rajput later today to demand that Parks be turned over to us. On the line will be a significant portion of our continued military aid.”

  Otto got to his feet.

  “Sit down, please,” Page said. “We’re not done here yet.”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going, mister?” Bambridge shouted, jumping up.

  “To try to undo the damage you’ve done before it’s too late.”

  “I’ll have Security up here before you get halfway down the hall.”

  Otto shrugged. “Marty, you little prick, you cannot in your wildest nightmares imagine the rain of shit that is a hair’s breadth away from falling on you—on this entire agency.”

  “Mr. Director!” Bambridge shouted.

  “Before you go any further, ask yourself how much Kirk McGarvey has given this country and how much he’s lost for it. He’s in badland at the president’s behest to try to stop something terrible from happening. With no interference from you his chances for survival were next to nothing. He knew it going in, and yet he thought the risk was worth taking. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some work to do catching up.”

  Otto headed for the door.

  “Goddamnit, come back here,” Bambridge said.

  “Be careful that your political ambitions don’t rise up and bite you in the arse one of these days, Marty,” Otto said, and he left.

  * * *

  Page’s phone call came as Otto got to his office. “Can you repair the damage?”

  “I don’t know, but first I’ll try to save his life.”

  “This came from the White House.”

  “From the president herself?” Otto asked.

  “Not directly,” Page admitted.

  “Just under
stand, Mr. Director, that Bambridge and Susan Kalley are best buds. Talk to the president.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  In the last hundred meters before the ceremonial front gate to the Secretariat, Haaris felt like Jesus Christ himself—or more like Lawrence of Arabia strutting in his costume. Arms outstretched to either side, he picked up the pace, so that he and the mufti were practically running. The crowd fell mostly silent and those in front respectfully parted for them.

  Two armed guards swung open the iron gates at the foot of a shallow rise up which a paved driveway made its way through a stand of trees to the Secretariat’s main entrance.

  Haaris suddenly stopped and turned to face the crowd that stretched down Constitution Avenue for as far as the eye could see. Now there were absolutely no sounds.

  “My dear people,” he shouted theatrically, though only the people at the head of the mob could possibly hear him. He felt strong, even invincible.

  All of America’s nuclear might had not stopped the 9/11 attacks from happening. Nor would her awesome power be able to stop him in time.

  “The TTP’s mufti has come with me to this place to form Pakistan’s new government. A government of peace. A government to serve the people. A government to feed the poor, to heal the sick.”

  Haaris was aware that the mood of the mufti beside him and the crowd stretched in front had immediately begun to change. Some of the people seemed confused. He looked at the mufti and smiled, then he turned back to the crowd.

  “We will be a government of Islami qanun,” he shouted—sharia law, which meant actual legislation that dealt with everything from crime, to economics, to politics, as well as hygiene, diet, prayer, etiquette, even fasting and sex. All of it based on a strict interpretation of God’s infallible laws versus the laws of men.

  Sharia was the real reason many Muslims gave for the jihad against the West. Until sharia was universal there could be no peace with the infidels.

  Haaris meant to give it to them—or at least the promise of it—for the next two days. In his estimation the righteous attacks of 9/11, in which fewer than three thousand people had died, had not gone far enough. If they had, the backlash would have been even more severe than it had been. More terrible than the killing of bin Laden.