Odeah was suddenly uncomfortable. He glanced nervously at al-Turabi. “He was a great hero. When he died he took more than two thousand infidels with him. Not a handful attending a funeral.”
“Pray that you die so usefully,” al-Turabi replied, no longer angry.
“Do you mean to kill us then?”
“If our deaths serve the jihad, yes.”
THIRTY
Adkins sat behind his desk, looking out the bulletproof windows across the woods behind the Building, enjoying the rare moment when he was alone, no telephones, no one seated across from him, no secretary, no pressing commitments to a National Intelligence Estimate or Watch Report. It was a few minutes after seven in the evening and all that was done for today.
But his desk was piled high with reports that would need his attention first thing in the morning, and with letters yet to be written, others to be signed, and a brutally grinding schedule of appointments that wouldn’t end until well after seven.
He’d decided that when this business was done, he was going to resign — retire, actually — like McGarvey, only his retirement was going to be permanent. He’d never been a spy, in the classical, Cold War sense, he’d been more of an administrator. He could keep the gears well oiled, the machinery moving, but he’d never had those sudden flashes of inspiration or intuition that came so naturally to men such as McGarvey. They thrived on the game, as so many of them thought of the business. For them it was a black-and-white issue, us versus the bad guys. Administration meant nothing. Neither did realpolitik.
Von Clausewitz had written something to the effect that war was a political instrument. Adkins’s poli-sci professor at the University of Indiana had vehemently disagreed. Of course he was a raging knee-jerk liberal, as Adkins had been at the time. But now everything was different. Maybe the old German had been right all along, but it was a philosophy that Adkins could not bring himself to embrace.
His secretary, Dhalia Swanson, had left for the evening, as had Dave Whittaker and most of the other senior staff. The Watch down in DO was manned 24/7 as was the NRO’s photo interp shop, but most of the Building was quiet.
The inner door to his office was open, and he saw Otto Rencke’s reflection in the window glass. Adkins turned around as the Special Projects director came in, his long frizzy red hair flying out from beneath a baseball cap with the sword and shield logo of the old KGB. His short-sleeved sweatshirt was from Moscow State University. He figured that his outfit was a good joke here at CIA headquarters.
“I thought you’d be gone by now,” Adkins said, girding himself for bad news. Rencke had the look.
“The lavender is getting really deep, Mr. Director, I had to let you know right away. Mac doesn’t want me to bother him at Gitmo, and you probably gotta do some stuff before he gets back.”
“Why aren’t you supposed to call him?”
Rencke shrugged. “He and Gloria are probably in the middle of some serious shit, ya know.”
Adkins supposed that one of the core reasons he hated this job was that lives were on the line. He’d lost some good people in Afghanistan, several in Iraq, and then Talarico last week. Gloria had been wrong; Bob’s death wasn’t her fault, that burden was the DCI’s, who had given the orders to send people into harm’s way.
“Okay, Otto, what have you come up with and what stuff do I have to do?”
“We may have caught a break, ’cause José Martinez, one of our guys in Mexico City, thought he spotted Graham, or someone close enough he could’ve been a clone, at the airport’s international terminal two days ago.”
“Why’d he wait so long to get that up to us?” Adkins demanded. His stomach was sour.
“He wasn’t sure until just now,” Rencke said.
“Is he one of McCann’s people?”
“He’s a Mexican national we burned eighteen months ago,” Rencke said, sidestepping the question. “Works airport security. He was the one who spotted Graham heading down to Venezuela.”
Mexico City had always been a big center for intelligence-gathering. The Soviets, and these days the Russians, fielded more intelligence officers from their embassy than from any other embassy in the world, including here in Washington. Some of the networks such as Banco del Sur and CESTA had been in continuous operation, spying not only on the United States, but on Mexico and all of Central America as well, since the early fifties.
McGarvey had come back from a delicate operation down there more than ten years ago, in which a lot of people had lost their lives, including Donald Suthland Powers, possibly the most effective DCI in the Company’s history. Adkins remembered it well, because he had been a senior Watch officer under Jon Lyman Trotter, who’d turned out to be the mole that Jim Angleton had been searching for all along.
“Continue,” Adkins prompted.
“Graham was moving fast and he was in disguise each time, but Martinez managed to get reasonably clear headshots. The first time he sent them up to us for the match with Graham. This time he wasn’t so sure of himself, so he did the work himself.”
“Graham?” Adkins asked.
“I sent his stuff over to Louise and she has a ninety-three percent confidence that both guys are Graham.” Louise Horn was chief of the National Reconnaissance Office’s Photographic Interpretation Center. She was almost as brilliant and as odd as Otto, and she was his wife.
“That’s good enough for me,” Adkins said. “He wasn’t heading back to Maracaibo to try again, was he?”
“Pakistan,” Rencke said.
“He’s on his way to bin Laden,” Adkins said, molten lead in his stomach. “Allah’s Scorpion. It’s really going to happen, and it wasn’t the canal after all.”
Rencke started to hop from one foot to the other. “Bingo,” he said and he clapped his hands together.
“What about at that end?”
“I sent the package to Dave Coddington, but we were way too late,” Rencke said. Coddington was chief of Karachi Station, one of the CIA’s toughest postings anywhere in the world.
“He could be anywhere by now,” Adkins said. If they could have picked up the man’s trail he might have led them to bin Laden — the big prize. But this job had almost never been that easy.
“Yes, he could,” Rencke agreed.
“Like a needle in a haystack,” Adkins mumbled.
“Mac would let the president know about this,” Rencke suggested. “We need to shift our assets into finding a Kilo sub, because that’s what they’ll probably use. The Pentagon has the resources to help us out, if they can be convinced to cooperate.”
Adkins was mildly surprised. “I would’ve expected that you would just hack their system.”
Rencke smiled. “Unfortunately not everything is loaded into a database. We might need Humint this time. Pete Gregory is a naval historian. If we could get to him, he might be able to tell us where a stray Kilo for sale might be located. I’ve got my own list, but I don’t think Graham will go to the most obvious places.”
“A submarine alone won’t do them much good,” Adkins pointed out. “They’ll need a weapon.”
“I’m working on that too.” Rencke nodded. And that’s probably going to be the worst of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the deep lavender, Mr. Director,” Rencke said. “A lot of Kilos are capable of launching cruise missiles while submerged. Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.”
The president and his national security adviser, Dennis Berndt, agreed to see Adkins immediately. It was eight by the time the DCI arrived at the White House. His limousine was passed through the West Gate, he signed in with the Secret Service detail, and was brought back to the Oval Office.