24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella

by David Hagberg

  “Yaman would never do such a thing to a woman.”

  “Then maybe he can help us. I can talk to my father and tell him that the situation is desperate. I’m in very big trouble here; he’ll agree to anything you guys want. Trust me. My mom is dead, and I’m the only child. He doesn’t have anyone else. Even Grandma and Grandfather are gone.” She raised a hand to him.

  She was talking too much, but she couldn’t stop.

  Tarek was moved. “I’ll do what I can, but Fathi is very angry. This was the test for him. After this, he was going to the council.”

  Dot didn’t ask what that was. “I can help.”

  Tarek paused at the door. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, but can I have another Coke?” she asked. She didn’t think that her stomach could handle anything else for now.

  “I’ll see,” he said, and he left.

  * * *

  Dot lay curled up in the bed, her knees to her chest, listening to the sounds. She couldn’t hear anyone talking now, but she could hear the traffic on the highway, and at one point, she heard a siren. Her hopes rose, only to fade as the siren was lost in the distance. They weren’t coming for her.

  She drifted in and out of a half sleep, her thoughts flashing back and forth between her metalhead gang, including Sue Moran, who’d become her lover last month, and her mom and dad on vacation in Disney World. She had been eight or nine, wanting to be sophisticated, but she’d not been able to help herself from having fun. Those had been the very best days of her life.

  She remembered her mother dying and how she had to be grown up, whatever that meant. She was fourteen and ashamed of the braces still on her teeth, and her breasts, a subject totally off limits to her dad, because they were stupid and they hurt and itched at the same time.

  She started to cry into the dirty pillow, sorry for herself, sorry for every stupid thing she’d ever done, sorry for putting her dad through hell again.

  The door opened, and she looked up.

  Hour 11

  After leaving Professor Hamsi, McGarvey had spent the better part of forty-five minutes slowly driving around campus. He’d stopped at the complex of buildings on Reservoir Road NW that held many of the science and research classrooms and labs, where the school’s most seriously bright people congregated each day.

  The campus had come alive between classes and fifteen minutes later became almost deserted.

  But no one seemed to be in any panic. The president’s daughter had been kidnapped, but either word had not spread or no one cared enough to disrupt their schedules. He hoped the first was the case.

  Just before eleven, he drove back to Wolfington Hall and parked where Coffey and Kelley had let the president’s daughter off. He had no idea what to expect, except that he was looking for the anomalies, for the out-of-place bits and pieces that seemed to stick out if you didn’t exactly focus on them.

  Maybe a spot on one of the roofs where a lookout could have waited for Dorothy and her minders to show up. Maybe a sight line between Wolfington and O’Donovan Hall next door from where someone had kept watch for the girl and to act as a backup in case Coffey and Kelley got too close. Long guns for the distant shots, or silenced pistols for closer work.

  He tried to think how he would have pulled it off. And he wondered if her captors had expected her to remain in the residence hall and go upstairs to see Tony Byers. They would have stationed someone inside the building, someone who wouldn’t stick out. Someone who looked like he belonged there. A seminary student.

  Or had they been taken by surprise when she’d passed directly through the building and tried to go … where? She was out to meet someone, but here on campus somewhere, or in the city?

  Every bit of it returned to the White House—either someone on the Secret Service detail or someone close enough to the president and his daughter to know their movements. To know their habits. Someone who tampered with the surveillance cameras.

  Nearly five hundred staffers and senior administration worked in the House every day. Many of them had unlimited access to the building 24-7. The problem was finding the one with the right motivation, someone who’d sold out to the kidnappers for money perhaps.

  The CIA’s take on why people became traitors against their country was summed up in four letters: MICE. Money, ideology, conscience, or ego.

  Money was easy to find out about. Someone making seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars a year didn’t drive around in new Mercedes S-Class cars or live in upscale houses or condos. They didn’t take vacations to the Riviera, traveling first class.

  Of the other reasons, ideology was the most difficult to detect, especially if the traitor was careful.

  * * *

  Tony Byers came around the corner from the residence hall and walked directly over to McGarvey’s car and tapped on the passenger-side window.

  Mac reached over and opened the door, and the kid got in.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking, and when I saw you parked out here, I knew that I was right,” Byers said. “Am I still a suspect?”

  “A person of interest.”

  “That sounds ominous, but I might be able to help you find her metalhead friends. I think they have a hangout just off campus. I don’t have the physical address, but I do have one of their e-mail accounts, or at least that’s what I think it is.”

  Byers took a slip of notepaper out of his jacket pocket and gave it to McGarvey.

  Someone had written an e-mail address in small crabbed handwriting. But the notepaper was headed: FROM THE DESK OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “In one of my copies of the Ordinations in my dorm room. It’s Dot’s handwriting. She leaves notes for me to find. Puzzles sometimes. It’s actually how she told me that she was gay.”

  “Always on her dad’s stationery?”

  Byers nodded. “She’s proud of him.”

  “How long have you had this one?”

  “I don’t know; it could have been there for days, maybe even weeks. It’s an old book that Father Mike at Saint Olaf’s in Minneapolis gave me the year I was accepted here. I used it at first, but then I wanted to preserve it—a keepsake, I guess—so I put it away. But in plain sight. She knew about the book, and I think she probably knew that I opened it from time to time. For inspiration, you know. Some of the classes here are pretty tough.”

  “Have you tried to get online with them?”

  “No. I just found it this morning, and I was going to try to get ahold of you and let you know what I had.”

  “Thanks. This might help,” McGarvey said.

  “Okay, but not for the reason you’re thinking. These kids she hung out with aren’t kidnappers. They’re not ISIS sympathizers. I think most of them are either too dumb or too stoned most of the time to form a political opinion about anything.”

  “Then why’d she leave you the note?”

  “She was asking for me to help her, and she put it in the one place she knew I would go when I was troubled.”

  “She wanted out.”

  “I think I saw it coming. But I don’t know why, except she might have thought that she was getting in over her head. The drugs and stuff.”

  “But she used you to fool her Secret Service detail.”

  “She’s not a bad person, Mr. McGarvey. Just a little screwed up. Maybe younger than her age. Maybe she couldn’t handle her situation.”

  McGarvey studied the note for a moment or two. “How long have you been getting these notes?”

  “Since second semester last year.”

  “Anybody else know about them?”

  “No.”

  “How’d you meet her?”

  “At the library. Her dad was making a presentation to the dean. Federal money for scholarships to minorities. Inner-city blacks. It’s one of his favorite crusades. Anyway, Dot was there, and she came over and started to talking to me afterward.” Byers smiled. “Wanted to know if I’d h
ear her confession. Or if I’d at least agree to be her friend.”

  “You felt sorry for her.”

  Byers nodded. “Still do. Find her.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  When Byers was gone, McGarvey phoned Otto and gave him the e-mail address. “Could be nothing, but it’s worth a try. If you can find out where they hang out, maybe I’ll go over and have a talk with them.”

  “If it comes to that, better I go see them,” Otto said. “You’re way too establishment. They wouldn’t give you the time of day, even if they were aware of it themselves.”

  “Let me know.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going to take a walk. Something I want to find.”

  “Are you coming back here?”

  “The White House first. I need to talk to the president.”

  * * *

  McGarvey went down to the residence hall. A corridor led to the front doors, but he took his time with it. Right now, the ground floor was empty, but a lot of foot traffic had passed in the last several hours. Enough so that something that might have been thrown on the floor might have been kicked to the side.

  This was the path that Dot had taken. Straight through the building and then outside to meet someone. Maybe to walk off campus and take a bus somewhere. Her eyes over her shoulder to make sure that her detail wasn’t on her six.

  But she’d put a piece of tape with aluminum foil over her GPS chip to mask her movements. For how long?

  McGarvey found the answer outside halfway to O’Donovan Hall in the brown grass just a couple of feet off the sidewalk. A Band-Aid tossed aside. A small piece of wadded-up foil still stuck to it.

  Her kidnappers had taken her here.

  But how had they known that she was going to be here and at that precise moment?

  Hour 12

  Canal Road became M Street NW and then Pennsylvania Avenue once it crossed Rock Creek. Traffic was heavy, and McGarvey hadn’t reached Washington Circle when Otto called back all out of breath.

  “Jackpot,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The e-mail account you gave me is nothing less than a domestic recruitment site for ISIS. But it comes through a remailer in Guiyang. Chinese hackers we’ve been following for several years now. They’re the same guys who’ve bugged our power grid. Probably government funded or at least sanctioned from Beijing.”

  “What the hell does the Chinese government have to do with ISIS?”

  “Nothing. These guys do outside work for hire. Any work for anyone. And they’re damned good.”

  “Can you shut them down?”

  “Maybe, but it’ll take some doing.”

  “Then we’re back to square one, except that it nails the ISIS connection. Maybe they were trying to recruit the president’s daughter.”

  “Keeping tabs on her, I’ll agree, but recruiting her? I don’t think she was that dumb. Anyway, we’re not at square one. I traced the bank account used to pay the Guiyang guys to a blind number in Riyadh. It’s not government, or at least it doesn’t look like it at this point, but some of the funds are funneled there to three accounts in Venezuela, Chile, and Ecuador, from where Western Union money orders are sent to three different addresses here in the States. One in Miami’s Calle Ocho, one in Austin, Texas, and the other here in the DC area. S Street, a few blocks up from the Anacostia River, in sight of the Frederick Douglass Bridge.”

  “I’m on my way. Get the bureau and Metro cops rolling, and call Bernstein to have his people down there. But quietly, no sirens; we can’t let this spin out of control, turn into a shootout—or worse yet, a standoff. If these guys think they’ve got no way out, they’ll blow themselves up and take the president’s daughter with them.”

  Just beating a red light, McGarvey took the turn down Twenty-Fourth Street NW but kept his speed reasonable. The last thing he wanted was to be pulled over by some cop.

  “What’s the place look like?” he asked.

  “I’m sending you a Google view. Mostly row houses, in pretty good shape. At night, there’s drug activity, but you could say that for about three-quarters of DC proper. A lower-than-average number of arrests. Neighbors apparently see nothing and report nothing. Healthier that way.”

  McGarvey pulled up the images on his phone. The two-story brick house Otto had highlighted seemed no different from the houses on either side. The images had been taken in daylight, though it was impossible to tell at what time. Only a few cars, most of them older models with a lot of wear, were parked on the street. Either the people were mostly too poor to afford a car, or it was a weekday and most of them were at work somewhere.

  “Is anyone aware that you’re in their e-mail account?”

  “Stand by one, Mac,” Otto said.

  McGarvey got lucky with the lights and made the E Street Expressway just as Otto came back.

  “Metro didn’t want to roll on another false alarm, not knowing who the possible hostage is supposed to be, but Bernstein got his people and the bureau’s on the move. No one likes the Company messing with domestic LE situations, but Metro will have to jump in so that they won’t look like fools if this pans out.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “There’s been no activity on that account for the past twenty-four hours. They could have skipped town with her right away and be most of the way across the Atlantic by now. Eight private charter jets are heading east, two of them to Paris, two to London, one each to Berlin, Rome, and Nice, and one scheduled to refuel in Rabat en route to Riyadh.”

  “Is it on the ground in Morocco yet?”

  “Thirty minutes out.”

  “Have someone meet the plane. Call it an agricultural inspection, whatever, but find out who’s aboard.”

  “I’m on it. What about you?”

  “I’m going to walk up and say hi,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  McGarvey reached I-395 and got off at Randall Playground; traffic was very heavy. A few blocks before the bridge, he took Potomac Avenue SW to R Street and then Second to the corner of S, where he parked his car.

  All the streets in this area were pretty much the same. Not terribly shabby, but certainly not uptown.

  No one was out or about, but the taxi came down the street and a few blocks farther went into Fort McNair, which primarily was home to the National Defense University, along with the Inter-American Defense College and the U.S. Army Center of Military History. Soldier-academics, fairly well insulated from the Greenleaf Point neighborhood.

  Otto called. “DC Metro is eight minutes out. No sirens. The bureau and Bernstein’s people are a few minutes back.”

  “I’m parked on the corner of Second and S. I’m going in on foot. Tell them to mind my six.”

  “Will do,” Otto said. “What’s your immediate take?”

  “The street is quiet,” McGarvey said, starting down the street on the opposite side.

  The row house was a half block in, an old transit van parked in front. McGarvey gave Otto the DC tag number.

  He scanned the rooflines, as well as the windows in every house he approached and passed. If anyone was at home and had noticed the stranger taking his time walking down the block, he saw no indication.

  The place was dead. If there were people here, they were bunkered, which gave him an exceedingly odd feeling at the middle of his back, as if someone was taking a bead on him. He’d seen the before-and-after photographs of a .50-inch Barrett sniper rifle hit on a human body. He didn’t want his photo to be included in the statistical file.

  He stopped at a diagonal across the street from the target house. All the windows in the two-story house were curtained. The white paint on the front door was faded and chipped. The bricks were gray with dirt, just like most of the other houses on the block. Years of accumulated grime, though at the moment the crisp air had no strong odors other than something not completely savory from the river.

  Trash cans had been set out in front of
most of the houses, but not the target house. It was garbage day, but not for everyone.

  McGarvey crossed the street, hesitated a moment at the walk, then went up on the narrow porch and rang the doorbell.

  He could hear it inside the house, but there were no other sounds.

  Otto was back. “The plates are from a Chevy Suburban reported stolen two weeks ago.”

  “Who owns the Chevy?”

  “William S. Randall, at a number in Suitland.”

  Tall, narrow windows flanked the door. McGarvey looked through one of them into a front hall. The wooden floors were scuffed and coated in dust and dirt tracked with footprints. Someone had lived here recently.

  He took out his pistol and, holding it to one side, rang the doorbell again.

  “They’re gone,” an old black woman said from the porch of the house next door.

  McGarvey turned to her. She was small and stooped, wearing an old faded housedress, her gray hair in a messy bun.

  “They left two days ago, in the middle of the night,” she said. “Without a word. But they were that way since they moved in three months ago. Didn’t talk to anyone. Foreigners.”

  McGarvey holstered his pistol at the small of his back and moved to the porch rail. “Did you get a name?”

  “Nobody has names here like before. They come, they go in the middle of the night.”

  “How many of them?”

  “Five, if you include the boy.”

  “Girls, women?”

  “Two.”

  “Do you remember if they were wearing headscarves?”

  “They weren’t Arabs, if that’s what you mean. But dark, like niggers. Maybe Indians. Up to no good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They had guns,” the old woman said. “Just like you.”

  Hour 13

  The president’s daughter put her ear to the door. She could hear muffled conversations as she had earlier, but only the tones were understandable, not the words. Two men, maybe three, were talking, but they didn’t seem to be arguing. Their voices were low.