McGarvey stepped closer. “Tell me or I will kill you. My wife died on 9/11, and it will be so easy for me to pull this trigger that you cannot imagine.”
“They were in the navy!” bin Ramdi cried.
“We know that. But what did they do?”
“Sir, Commander Weiss is coming through the front gate,” Lieutenant Albritton said from the doorway. “He orders you to back off. Right now, or you will be placed under arrest.”
“Al saheeh,” McGarvey said. He took a step forward.
“Submarines,” bin Ramdi whispered.
It was the answer that McGarvey had expected, but the Saudi knew more. It was in his eyes, there was a certain craftiness there, as if he felt that he had succeeded in evading something even more important than what the five escapees had done in the navy.
“What else?” McGarvey demanded harshly.
“There is nothing else.”
McGarvey took another step closer, so that he was only three feet away from the prisoner, and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty firing chamber with a loud snap.
Bin Ramdi flinched so badly he almost lost his balance.
“Shit,” McGarvey muttered. He cycled the ejector slide, charging the pistol, and once again pointed the muzzle directly at the Saudi’s head.
Bin Ramdi pissed in his jumpsuit.
“I want the rest of it. Why were those five men broken out of here?”
“I don’t know, I swear it!” bin Ramdi cried. His eyes were glued on McGarvey’s trigger finger.
McGarvey started to pull.
“They were transferred to Camp Echo that night,” bin Ramdi blurted, nearly incoherently. “But I don’t know why, except that Osama wanted them.”
It was not the answer McGarvey had expected, but it made sense if Gloria’s suspicion that there was a traitor inside Camp Delta was correct.
There was a sudden commotion in the common room behind McGarvey.
“Sir, I tried to stop him,” Lieutenant Albritton said.
“Shoot him,” Weiss ordered.
“Sir?” the MP asked.
McGarvey held bin Ramdi’s eyes for just a second longer, but there was no longer any guile, only relief.
“Shoot him!” Weiss shouted.
“It won’t be necessary,” McGarvey said. He lowered his pistol, de-cocked it, and holstered it as he turned around. “We’re finished here.”
The confused MP had unslung his M8 carbine, but the muzzle was pointed at the floor and his finger was alongside the trigger guard.
Weiss, dressed in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, was directly behind the MP. He shoved the young man aside and fumbled for the Beretta in his shoulder holster. He was muttering something.
Gloria moved in from his right, batted his hand away from the pistol, and grabbed it out of the holster. She stepped back a pace. “Let’s all calm down here, before this shit gets out of hand,” she said.
Weiss was beside himself with rage. “You bitch,” he growled. He backhanded Gloria in the face, snapping her head back, and sending her bouncing off the wall, the pistol falling to the floor.
Before McGarvey could move to interfere, Weiss came after Gloria, shoving her back against the wall again. But this time she was expecting it. She rolled to the side, grabbed Weiss’s right wrist, and slammed his forearm against the door frame, both bones breaking with an audible pop.
Weiss screamed and staggered away from her, trying to cradle his broken arm against his chest.
The MP was stunned.
Gloria stepped forward, slammed the heel of her right hand into Weiss’s nose, breaking it, blood gushing out both nostrils, then hit his left kneecap with her right instep, dislocating the man’s knee.
Weiss collapsed on the floor and Gloria was about to go after him when McGarvey was at her side.
“That’s all,” he said softly.
She looked at him, her nostrils flared, her eyes wild.
“Come down, Gloria, it’s done. We’re out of here.”
Slowly she came back, and nodded.
Weiss was curled up, whimpering in pain.
“Someone call an ambulance for Mr. Weiss,” McGarvey said.
Lieutenant Albritton had moved well out of range and he kept looking from Weiss to Gloria and then to McGarvey. But he didn’t say anything.
McGarvey looked at bin Ramdi, who had shrunk back into a corner of the interrogation room, a mostly unreadable expression on his face. But it was obvious he was impressed by what he’d just witnessed, and extremely wary.
“You sons of bitches are going to fucking jail!” Weiss shouted.
McGarvey looked down at him and shook his head. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to hit women?”
“Evidently not,” the MP said, half under his breath. “But he sure got told this time.”
THIRTY-TWO
They’d not been interfered with as they left Camp Delta and drove across base down to the ferry landing. Nor were they stopped from reaching their Gulfstream, even though it was very likely that by then General Maddox had been informed about what had happened.
In this case McGarvey thought that it was probably for the best that it wasn’t a prisoner who’d been roughed up, though by the time they reached Washington he was pretty sure that McCann would try to bring Gloria up on charges.
It was morning, the sun just rising above the Atlantic horizon as they approached the U.S. East Coast. Gloria had been far too keyed-up to sleep on the fourteen-hundred-mile trip back to D.C., but she hadn’t wanted to talk about what had happened.
She came forward from the head where she had splashed some water on her face, and straightened out her hair and touched up her makeup. She sat down in the big leather seat facing McGarvey, a resolute expression on her round face; she had screwed up and she was ready now to face her punishment.
“I jeopardized the mission,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“He had it coming.”
Gloria smiled tightly, and nodded. “I might have killed him if you hadn’t stopped me.”
“The paperwork would have been endless,” McGarvey said. “Ask me, I know.”
Without averting her gaze, Gloria began to cry silently, tears welling in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.
McGarvey’s heart suddenly went out to her. She’d had a difficult life, losing her mother and then her husband, so she was seasoned to pain. But she wasn’t much older than his daughter Elizabeth. And she had the same sort of tough exterior that was a cover for a sometimes confused and frightened little girl who wasn’t sure if she was ready to be an adult.
He reached out and touched her knee. “You did a good job down there. Because of you and your partner we found out what Allah’s Scorpion is, and now we’ve got a good shot at shutting it down.”
“I got Bob killed.”
“It wasn’t you who killed him, it was the bad guys,” McGarvey told her. “You’d better understand that, otherwise you’re not going to be much help to me.”
Her dark eyes widened slightly. “I thought I would be pulled out of the field after this.”
“Are you kidding?” McGarvey asked. “Why do you think Weiss came after you?”
Gloria’s jaw tightened. “Because he’s dirty, and he knows that I suspect him.” She shook her head. “But I don’t have any proof, and Howard’ll go ballistic as soon as Weiss starts making noises.”
“Which might not happen,” McGarvey said. “He’s gotten rid of us, and I think Maddox is going to order him to take his lumps and shut his mouth.”
“I don’t get it, Mac, why would somebody like Weiss work for al-Quaida? It doesn’t make sense. I mean he’s an asshole, but he’s apparently got a good career going for him. Why would he take the risk?”