Haaris nodded.
“What’s next?”
Haaris gave her a look. “If you mean what’s next vis-à-vis Pakistan, I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”
“Anything that you’d care to share?” McGarvey asked.
“The president asked you to assassinate the Messiah, and the word is you turned her down.”
“I may rethink it.”
“Because of my wife?”
Again McGarvey tried to read the man, but he came up blank. Haaris was either a consummate liar. Or he was filled with genuine hate. “In part.”
“And the rest?”
McGarvey shrugged. “From all accounts your wife was a gentle soul. Whoever killed her was a bully. And I don’t like bullies.”
“The world is full of them, didn’t you know? Or are you a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills?”
“Something like that,” McGarvey said, letting it hang there.
“I’m going now,” Haaris said.
“Home?” Pete asked.
“No, the office, I recalled my team,” Haaris said. “We need to revise our position for the president this morning.” He started down the hall the same way Dr. Franklin had left.
“What’s next?” Pete called after him.
“A reception for diplomats at the Pakistani embassy this evening,” Haaris responded without looking back. “I’m going to stick it to them, see who reacts.”
It was coming up on six, and McGarvey was tired.
“How about some breakfast?” Pete asked.
“Sure.”
They walked outside from the rear exit, where Pete’s car was parked. “This isn’t the end of it,” she said.
“It’s just started,” McGarvey said, mulling over the entire situation. The ISI killing Haaris’s wife made no sense, unless they had stumbled on her while waiting for Haaris to show up. But if that had been the case the operation had been incredibly sloppy, unlike the one off Casey Key. It was an anomaly, something he neither trusted nor liked, except that anomalies usually pointed to something, some direction no one expected.
They drove over to a Panera Bread restaurant.
“He wasn’t distraught,” Pete said before they got out of the car.
“They wanted him, but they took out his wife instead.”
On the surface it made no sense. The situation was almost the same as one he’d encountered on his first wet assignment for the CIA at the beginning of his career. He’d been sent to Chile to kill a general who’d ordered the murders of thousands of innocent civilians. But when he got to the general’s compound in the middle of the night, the general was making love to his wife. The alarm had been sounded and McGarvey had only seconds to react. Out of necessity he had assassinated both of them.
Later he had beaten himself up thinking about the woman, until he’d learned that she’d fancied herself a devotee of Joseph Mengele’s wife — the Nazi who’d personally butchered thousands of Jews. Mengeles’s wife had many of the victims’ skin removed, had tanned the pieces — most often taken from their backs — and had painted pictures on some of them and made lampshades from others. She was as monstrous as her husband. As was the wife of the Chilean general, and she’d deserved to die. But McGarvey had never gotten over it.
“I held his hand for a few seconds,” Pete said. “I could feel his pulse. It should have been fast, but it wasn’t. His heart rate was that of a man at peace with himself. What do you make of that?”
McGarvey went back to Pete’s apartment with her, where he sacked out on the couch for a few hours. It was against his better wishes to get her involved, but she’d at least had a half night’s sleep and she kept watch.
Otto called at a little after eleven as Pete was fixing them an early light lunch. He took the call at a window of her second-floor apartment from which he could look down at the street. But the traffic seemed normal. No one lurking in a doorway or on a rooftop with the glint of sunlight off the lens of a scope.
“Page has been trying to get in touch with you all morning and so has Marty. Broderick has been putting a lot of pressure on us. They want you to act right now. The situation in Islamabad is starting to spin out of control. None of the EU countries are in any hurry to return their embassy staffs, and from what Austin is sending us, it looks as if Taliban committees are being set up at all the key governmental offices, and more importantly, at all the major air force and navy bases. The bases where nuclear weapons are being mated for deployment.”
“Has Haaris briefed the president yet?”
“He went over there around ten, And so far as I know he hasn’t returned,” Otto said. “The metro cops were all over his wife’s murder, but he knows someone at the Bureau who took over the case. And he’s agreed to be interviewed, but only briefly, so that he can get on with his work.”
“Anything new from your analysis of the Messiah’s voice?”
“It was the same guy who spoke at the Presidential Palace. But my darlings are having a tough time re-creating the original voice. Whatever equipment he used was well above the over-the-counter Radio Shack lash-up. Professional-grade stuff. Shit that only a government is likely to come up with.”
“The Pakistani embassy is hosting a cocktail party for diplomats tonight. Get me a pass for it.”
Pete had come to the kitchen door in time to hear McGarvey’s request. “Me too,” she said.
McGarvey started to object, but Otto overheard her.
“She’ll be good cover,” he said. “Anyway, two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. And they’ve promised to have the new prime minister there. He’s flying in this afternoon.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.”
“Will Page be there?”
“No, but Fay and his wife will be.”
“Black tie, I assume,” Pete said after McGarvey hung up.
“Of course.”
“I can hardly wait.”
TWENTY-THREE
The main reception hall of the Pakistani embassy was packed with more than 250 people, a significant portion of the top diplomats in the city, almost all from nations that did regular business with Islamabad. A long buffet table was spread out along one side of the large circular room. White-coated waiters moved through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres, sweet mint tea in small cups and glasses of Dom Pérignon.
McGarvey in a tux and Pete in a simple black over-one-shoulder cocktail dress and a tasteful diamond necklace stood to one side of the entry, sipping champagne. Neither of them was armed.
“I haven’t spotted Haaris yet,” Pete said.
“It’s going to be interesting to see Haaris’s reaction if and when he does show up,” McGarvey said. “Especially if he publicly pins the blame for his wife’s murder on the ISI.”
“It still doesn’t make sense to me that he could think the ISI was behind it. Otto has the recordings of him talking with General Rajput, and they seemed like old friends, or at least allies. And it was the ISI who supposedly rescued him from his Taliban captors.”
“He changed his tune this morning.”
“A strange man,” Pete said. “Did you know that he was born in Pakistan?”
“Otto said something about it. His parents were killed when he was very young, and a rug-merchant uncle brought him to London and put him in the best schools, including Eton.”
“When he came to us he was a British citizen. But what’s most curious to me is that he was willing to share what he learned with the British Secret Intelligence Service. Technically made him a traitor.”
“I’ve not seen his entire jacket yet.”
“I have and you need to look at it soon,” Pete said. “Read between the lines. The guy is filled with hate for what they did to him as a kid in school.”