“How many others at the news conference do you suppose share your suspicions?”
“Just about all of them,” she said. “If we’re right you’re a marked man. Why else do you think they didn’t follow you outside?”
“But you did,” McGarvey said. “And I came with you to find out what you thought you knew. Trust me on this one, Miss Anderson, stay as far away from me as you possibly can. I’m going to lean on some important people who aren’t going to like it very much. They’ll push back.”
“You’re here to find the Messiah.”
“Yes.”
“But there’s more. You want to find out who he is, because it’s a safe bet that he didn’t show up as some sort of an Islamic savior. He’s not here to save Pakistan. He has another agenda, and you want to know what it is.”
“Something like that.”
“Fine, it’s the same thing I want. Same as just about every reporter over here wants to know.”
The waiter came with their drinks.
“We’ll order later,” Judith told him, her eyes never leaving McGarvey’s. She sat forward. “My people in New York tell me that this guy’s voice was probably altered by some electronic device. They’re trying to decrypt it now. But you already know this.”
“Stay away from me,” McGarvey said, getting to his feet. He’d learned what he needed to know, and it wasn’t going to make his job any easier. Once the Messiah came out into the open, if he ever did, he would be surrounded not only by palace guards but by the same horde of news people as were at the Aiwan.
“Look, we can collaborate. In fact I’d rather share my sources with someone from the CIA than I would with another reporter.”
“Someone will either try to kill me or have me arrested.”
“And it’s the first option that you want. I can help.”
“No,” McGarvey said. “And if you try to follow me, I’ll have you deported.”
“It’s not so easy to push around a reporter.”
McGarvey walked out of the hotel and headed down one of the side streets that eventually wound up back on Constitution Avenue in the direction of the Aiwan. The moment he had emerged, he knew that he’d picked up a tail. Two men in a yellow Fiat 500, not making much effort to hide the fact that they were following him.
Two blocks away, through heavy traffic, he sprinted across the street and entered a narrow alley, the second stories hanging over the pavement, the shops here mostly silversmiths and rug merchants, plus a CVS pharmacy, and next door an outdoor barbershop.
He waited until the Fiat turned the corner before he entered a tobacco shop so narrow that if he stretched out his arms he’d touch both walls, and walked straight back and out the rear door, which opened onto an interior courtyard filthy with garbage and the carcass of a dog that had been dead for at least a month.
The only way in or out was through the tobacconist’s shop or above through the second-story windows of what were apparently apartments. Laundry hung drying from lines that stretched from building to building. No one was in sight.
McGarvey stepped to the side as two men, both of them wearing jeans and khaki shirts, came out of the tobacco shop.
They stopped short, McGarvey leaning against the wall behind them.
“Looking for me, gentlemen?” he asked.
Both of them turned at the same time, and the taller of the two pulled a pistol from a belt holster under his shirt.
McGarvey was on him in an instant, grabbing the big Sig-Sauer, a long suppressor tube on the barrel, out of his hand, and smashing the butt of the gun into the bridge of his nose, knocking him backward.
The second man was just reaching for his pistol when McGarvey jammed the muzzle of the silencer into his forehead.
“Who sent you?”
The man had his pistol out and he was raising it, when McGarvey fired one shot. Before the man crumpled to the dirt, the first officer had recovered enough to press his attack, a crazy, failure-is-not-an-option look in his eyes.
“Who are you?” McGarvey demanded, but the guy kept coming, and McGarvey fired another shot, catching him in the bridge of his bloody nose, and he went down hard.
“Shit,” a woman said from just inside the tobacco shop.
McGarvey spun around, bringing the pistol to bear.
Judith Anderson stepped back half a pace, her empty right hand coming up.
THIRTY-EIGHT
McGarvey lowered the pistol. “I told you to stay away from me.”
“Saying something like that to a journalist hot on a story is like throwing petrol on an open fire,” Judith said. She stood flatfooted, her eyes wide, her mouth half open. She looked vulnerable.
In the not-too-far distance they heard sirens. She looked over her shoulder. “Someone must have reported this. We have to get out of here.”
McGarvey stuck the pistol in his belt under his jacket. He turned one of the bodies over and came up with a wallet in the man’s back pocket. The ISI card, with its wreath and crescent moon emblem, and the service’s motto, “Faith, Unity Discipline,” identified the officer as Kaleem Babar. The other ISI officer was Raza Davi.
“ISI?” Judith asked.
“Yes,” McGarvey said.
The sirens were a lot closer. “The stupid bastards left their keys in the Fiat. And unless you know the city better than I do, I’ll drive. But right now, the last place you want to be is in an interrogation cell in Rawalpindi.”
McGarvey followed her through the tobacconist’s shop to the narrow street where the yellow Fiat was parked, its engine idling. No one was in the immediate vicinity, though traffic one block away seemed to be flowing normally.
Within a minute Judith had driven to the corner and tucked behind a three-wheeled truck and other traffic heading in the opposite direction of the Aiwan. The day was bright and hot, the air polluted with a combination of dust, charcoal smoke and something else with a pungent smell.
The ISI had always been in firm control of the government here, and if something, anything happened that displeased the military intelligence service it reacted. In McGarvey’s estimation a few pointed remarks from an American journalist rated an expulsion order. But the two ISI officers who had followed him into the dead-end corridor had been ordered to kill him, not arrest him. And the main problem at the moment was staying alive until the Messiah showed up and then somehow getting close enough to put a bullet in his brain.
Ambassador Powers was at the U.S. embassy, and Prime Minister Rajput was at his post. Both of them primary movers and shakers. If anyone knew when the Messiah would show, and where, they would.
“You’re not just another blogger,” Judith said. She was driving them out of the diplomatic sector, the traffic even heavier here. Mopeds competed with cars and with trucks and buses of all sizes, no one obeying traffic laws or the white-gloved cops standing at busier intersections.
Again McGarvey got the strong impression that the country — or at least the capital — was at peace with itself. The riots of just a few days ago were completely forgotten, and if anyone was making any noise about the nuclear event in the northwest, it was below the background level of business as usual.
“Those guys were trained intelligence officers. Taking you out should have been easy as pie. But you disarmed one of them and killed them both without a moment’s hesitation. Says to me my first impression was right.”
“Where are you taking me?” McGarvey finally asked.
“A reporter friend of mine has an apartment here in the city. The AP’s bureau chief. He’s still up in Quetta trying to interview someone at the military base where we think the nuke must have come from. There’ve been no reports of any recent Taliban activity up there, so it could mean the government moved one of the weapons for some reason. It’s Randy’s theory that the nuclear depot has been infiltrated, but by whom is anyone’s guess.”