“But you don’t think so.”
“No.”
“Shit,” Forest said. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, take care of yourself, Mac.”
“I’ll try.”
Someone knocked.
“It’s open,” McGarvey said. He snatched his pistol, got up and moved quickly across the room so that when the door opened he would be behind it.
“It’s me, so don’t shoot,” Pete said softly. She opened the door and stepped in.
“Are you alone?” McGarvey asked. He could see the hallway through the crack at the edge. It was empty.
“Yes,” she said and came the rest of the way in.
Pointing his pistol down and away, McGarvey reached around her and locked the door.
“How about some light?” she said.
“Were you followed?”
“I don’t think so.”
At the window McGarvey carefully parted the curtains and looked out. Nothing moved on the street below; the same cars that were parked there earlier were still there. “Where’s your car?”
“I left it down on Dumbarton a couple of blocks away,” she said. “I knew that you were lying the minute you came out of the White House. Why didn’t you at least tell me or Otto?”
McGarvey laid his pistol on the table and switched on the small reading lamp. “I didn’t want to get either of you involved. Especially not Otto, he’s a terrible liar. And I needed the illusion to hold for at least until tomorrow.”
Pete stood flatfooted, her blue eyes wide. “I’m a pretty good liar. And not so bad at covering your ass. I have a vested interest that I want to protect, you know.”
A number of years ago McGarvey had been shot up pretty badly and had lost one of his kidneys. Then during an incident that had gone bad a few months earlier, McGarvey had lost his remaining kidney, and Pete, who by happenstance was a close enough match, donated hers without hesitation.
“They won’t take the bait now.”
“Would have been stupid if they had, anyway,” she said. “Otto wants to talk to you, but your phone is off and he didn’t want to turn it on in case you were in the middle of something. But he knew that you were here or at least that your phone was here.”
“So he sent you?”
“I volunteered,” Pete said. “The Messiah came on PTV in Islamabad. When Otto couldn’t reach you he sent the recording to me. But he said he thinks something was wrong with it.”
“What, exactly?”
“Something about the newspaper. He was holding up this morning’s Washington Post, but Otto says it was dubbed.”
McGarvey turned on his encrypted cell phone and called Otto, who answered on the first ring. McGarvey put the call on speaker.
“Pete’s okay?”
“She’s here. What have you come up with? She says something about the Post was wrong?”
“It was this morning’s early edition, but the bottom right edge didn’t line up. You won’t be able to see it on a small phone screen, but one of my programs picked up on it, and when I put it up on the table it was there. The message was recorded sometime in the past. But how long ago I don’t know.”
“Did he have anything significant to say?”
“Just that he wanted peace, and he invited everyone to send their embassy staffs back. Business as normal.”
“With thirty-plus nuclear weapons still on the loose,” McGarvey said, piecing it together. “He probably said something like he’ll be around, but he wouldn’t be making any public appearances.”
“He said that he’s going to be the invisible man on the street, in the hills, out in the desert. Anonymous.”
“How about the voice?”
“We’re working that,” Otto said. “The spectrum analyzer I’m using says it’s a match with the speech he made at the Aiwan. But it’s too perfect a match.”
“Do you have a confidence level? Eighty or ninety percent would be good enough.”
“Just gut instinct, but something else came up in the past few minutes that I just don’t know what to make of. The timing is all wrong, unless the same people who want to shut you up want to get to Haaris.”
“What else?” Pete asked.
“Haaris’s wife slipped and fell in their shower. Hit her head, and by the time a paramedic crew got there she was dead.”
“Was he there when it happened?” McGarvey asked.
“Apparently he’d just gotten home and found her,” Otto said, then hesitated.
McGarvey picked up on it. “And?”
“Maybe I’m getting to be an old lady hearing rats in the attic, but I got the real funny feeling that Dave Haaris might just be the Messiah.”
Two minutes later, McGarvey’s phone rang. It was Otto again. “Dr. Franklin just called. Haaris had his wife’s body brought to All Saints. You might want to go over there.”
TWENTY-TWO
A distraught, angry Haaris charged out of the waiting room when they came in. “The sons of bitches murdered her just to get at me,” he said. “I want both of you in on this, because no matter what I said before, my advice to the president is different now.” His clothes were still wet.
“How do you know someone killed her?” McGarvey asked.
“Dr. Franklin figured it out. And if it really is Messiah’s people who did it to keep me off balance there’s no possible way the political situation will ever get back to normal in Islamabad. That’s clear to me. The bastards. The dirty bastards. She never hurt a soul in her life. She was incapable of doing anything mean. To anyone.”
Dr. Franklin, his jacket off, his shirt collar open, got off the elevator from the second-floor operating theater, a long look on his face. “Good morning, Mac, Miss Boylan. I assume that David has filled you in.”
“Did you find what I asked you to look for?” Haaris said, a little more in control of his emotions.
“I’m sorry I missed it earlier. She could have fallen with enough force to cause the damage to her skull. But you were correct in assuming that someone was in the shower with her. I found a displacement of her left ankle. Whoever the killer was probably grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand and the back of her head with the other, and kicked her legs out from under her, forcing her down.”
“My God,” Pete said. “Could it have been someone she knew?”
Haaris’s face colored. “She wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you meant to imply.”
“I’m sorry, I was just looking for options. It would have been a very big deal for someone to send killers after your wife, unless they were specifically looking for you, and she got in the way.”
“There’s no accounting for stupidity.”
“You and your think tank are our reigning experts,” McGarvey said. He’d been watching for any signs that Haaris was faking his emotions, but he couldn’t see it.
“We can see trends, possibilities, likelihoods. But for whole systems. One rogue operator changes everything. People are unpredictable, nations usually aren’t. They’re too ponderous, too slow to react or change in any fundamental way.”
“The Messiah is fundamental.”
Haaris stopped for a beat.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Dr. Franklin said. “It’s been a very long day and I’m going home to bed now.”
Haaris shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for confirming something I’d already suspected.”
“I’m terribly sorry, David. For everything.”
“I appreciate it.”
Franklin left down the hallway to the rear parking area.
Pete touched Haaris’s wrist. “I’m truly sorry too,” she said. “We all are. As hard as an accident is to accept, something like this is a million times worse.”