Katy answered it, and her smile faded. “Of course,” she said, and hung up. She looked at Mac. “Otto’s just pulling into our driveway. Says it’s urgent.”
It had to be about Graham. Rencke had been working the problem around the clock ever since he’d come down to Sarasota to ask Mac to take the job.
“I’ll try to make it short,” McGarvey told his wife, then went to the front door to let the CIA’s director of Special Projects in.
Rencke had brought a young, good-looking woman with him. “Gloria Ibenez,” he introduced her. “She’s one of our field officers working the bin Laden search. And, oh boy, you just gotta hear what she came up with.”
She shook hands with McGarvey. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, sir.” She glanced at the boxes stacked in the stair hall. “You’re leaving?”
“In a few days,” McGarvey said. He ushered them into his study, where the walls and shelves had been stripped bare, and shut the door. All the chairs had been boxed, so there was nowhere to sit.
“It’s not over, Mac,” Otto gushed. He hopped from one foot to the other, his face animated. “It fact it’s just starting. The canal gig was bonus time; it wasn’t the real Allah’s Scorpion.”
“What are you talking about?” McGarvey asked. He’d had the feeling from the moment he knew Graham’s target was the canal and not someplace in the United States that there would be more.
“I finally got Graham’s navy file. The full file. His wife died while he was at sea on patrol, and his boss never notified him. Pissed him off and he went all to hell. Drinking, making really bad decisions that put his crew’s lives in jeopardy, that kinda shit.”
“We figured as much,” McGarvey said.
“But here’s the kicker, Mac, and, honest injun, this is the big one. Guess what Graham’s job was in the navy. Just guess.”
“What?”
“He was a Perisher graduate,” Otto gushed. “Top of his class.”
“Submarines,” McGarvey said in wonder.
“Bingo!” Otto cried. “He was a sub driver, and a damned good one from his early fitreps.” He glanced at Gloria. “But it’s even better than that.”
“I was in Guantanamo Bay last week, interrogating prisoners,” she said. “My partner and I stumbled into the middle of a prison break. We think it was al-Quaida trying to spring five guys. Iranians. When they were cornered they killed themselves rather than risk being recaptured.”
“Her partner was killed too,” Otto said gently.
“The five guys they were trying to grab were all ex-Iranian navy,” Gloria said. “And for some reason, which no one down there wanted to talk about, they weren’t in Camp Delta. They were in the minimum-security lockup for prisoners ready to be released back to their home countries.”
“Al-Quaida is planning to grab a sub somewhere, and hit us hard,” Otto said. “They’ve got the captain, and they’re searching for a crew.”
McGarvey had been watching Gloria’s eyes. There was a sadness there, and something else. “Sorry about your partner,” he said. “But are you trying to tell me that al-Quaida had help down there? Someone on our side?”
“I think so,” Gloria said. “It would mean that someone in the organization has a direct pipeline to the camp. I want to go back and find out. It could very well lead us to bin Laden himself.”
“I’m going with you,” McGarvey said. Gitmo would probably be difficult, he thought, but nowhere near as difficult as it was going to be when he told Katy.
“Yes, sir,” Gloria said, obviously impressed and pleased.
“I’ll come out to the Building first thing in the morning,” McGarvey told Otto. “See if you can come up with the names of any other of the prisoners who might have navy backgrounds.”
“Will do.”
“And put together everything you got not only on Graham, but on bin Laden.”
“Oh, boy,” Otto said, hopping from one foot to the other, and clapping his hands. “The bad guys are going down.”
PART TWO
TWENTY-FIVE
Rupert Graham reached Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport via Paris around eight in the evening aboard a battered Pakistan International Airlines 727 that had to have been thirty years old. As they came in for the landing, most of the Muslim passengers aboard took out their prayer beads and closed their eyes. A good many of them believed that their prayers were all that kept PIA’s aging fleet in the air.
Except for security concerns, Graham had been all but mindless of his surroundings since he’d left San José yesterday morning. He was seething inside because of his failure, and now arriving in Pakistan he was beginning to feel like a junior ensign being called before the skipper for a Captain’s Mast disciplinary action.
Yet something of what bin Laden had said during their brief telephone conversation kept repeating in his head, booming like a drum calling him to battle. Allah’s Scorpion. Something much better, something more suitable to your training.
Graham, dressed in a charcoal-gray business suit, his hair and eyebrows light again, the soft brown contacts gone, the lift shoes discarded, shuffled down the corridor with the other passengers to immigration, where he showed his Australian passport, which identified him as forty-one-year-old Talbot Barry, from Sydney, here to write a piece for a travel magazine.
He was passed through without question, but when he retrieved his single hanging bag and presented it at customs, two armed officers and a drug-sniffing dog conducted a thorough search not only of the bag, but of his body. Through it all he kept his composure, cooperating completely, and even smiling.
Pakistan had been granted the most favored nation status by the United States and was getting a lot of aid. As a result, Islamabad was doing everything in its power to keep up the illusion that it was actively seeking out terrorists, especially the remnants of the Taliban, as well as al-Quaida and specifically bin Laden, who was supposedly hiding out in the mountains of the far northwest.
When his bag was finally stamped and he was given an entry pass, he marched through the busy terminal and outside, where a dark Mercedes S500 with tinted windows pulled up to the curb. Graham got into the backseat and the driver, a bulky dark-complected man in a business suit, pulled smoothly out into traffic and without a word headed into the city.
“Were you followed?” the driver asked, in English, his voice low, menacing. He was one of bin Laden’s chief bodyguards and gofers.
It was an extremely rude question, but one that Graham could philosophically understand because of his failure in Panama. “I was not.”
It was a weekday and the traffic volume was heavy the nearer they got to downtown, especially in the broad band of slums they had to pass through. But Graham was again lost in thought, only subliminally noticing his surroundings.
He’d been born and raised in the Collyhurst slum of Manchester, his father a collier and his mother a laundress. Early on he’d learned to defend himself from the other boys, because he was small for his age.
There was never enough money, and yet he showed an early promise in grammar school, so on the advice of the schoolmaster, and a scholarship, they managed to scrape together enough money to let him finish through college prep.
Of course college was completely out of the question, financially, so Graham had joined the Royal Navy and was sent to Dounreay in Scotland to learn nuclear engineering, graduating number five in his class of fifty.
From there he received his primary submarine officer’s training, graduating first in his class, and was sent out into the fleet.