“I want you to get me an interview with Rajput in his office.”
“Are you nuts?”
“I don’t care how you do it, but I want him to want to see me immediately, before Haaris and whoever’s with him — and I’m betting that it’s someone from the Taliban — get there.”
“They’ll shoot you on sight.”
“I don’t think so. Tell him that I know about the missing nuclear weapons at Quetta and the explosion, plus the disabling of most of their arsenal by our people. I’ll make a deal with him for an exclusive interview with the Messiah and his Taliban friend. I think that Rajput will want to know what Travis Parks knows and how he came by his information.”
“I can’t go through the normal media channels; you’re the competition, they wouldn’t agree to help even if you offered to become a pool reporter. In that case you’d have to take along one of their cameramen. It wouldn’t work.”
“Goddamnit, Otto, I need this. Haaris is here and on the move; this is my chance, maybe my only chance.”
“To do what, kemo sabe, kill him with your bare hands in the prime minister of Pakistan’s office?”
“The bastard has a plan, and if I can push him hard enough maybe he’ll give me a clue.”
“He’s smarter than that.”
“He’s vain. Whatever he came to do will be big, and he needs an audience.”
Otto was silent for several beats.
“We’re running out of time,” McGarvey said. He could feel Otto’s anguish and fear, almost like the roar of a distant waterfall. “This isn’t a suicide mission, there’ll be too many witnesses.”
“Even if you get inside and interview them, once you leave you’d be a walking dead man.”
“They’d want me to file my story first. Haaris would. And then they’d have to find me.”
Again Otto was silent for a moment or two, but when he came back he sounded resigned. “Getting the media involved would open a can of worms nobody wants opened, especially not Page or Bill Myers.” Air Force General C. William Myers was director of the National Security Agency. “Not to mention the White House. The blowback would be immense. We need to find another way.”
McGarvey had considered another possibility, if the situation were to come to this point. It was the main reason he’d confided his real identity to Ross Austin. But it was last-ditch. “Austin knows who I am.”
“He’s pressed Walt to pull you out immediately.”
“Have Page call Ross, right now, and tell him that I may have gone rogue. Have Austin convince Powers to tell Rajput that I could be another Snowden with information potentially damaging not only to the U.S. but to Pakistan’s security.”
“Rajput will have you arrested on the spot.”
“He’ll want to find out what I know. Putin gave Snowden asylum, maybe Rajput’ll do the same for me.”
“That’s crazy, Mac.”
“You’re right. But just now crazy is my only option.”
“It was your only option from the get-go.”
“You have about twenty minutes to make it happen,” McGarvey said, and he ended the call.
He sat nursing his coffee for a while, before he laid down a few coins and walked down the block until a taxi came and pulled over for him. The driver, an old man, seemed excited.
“I do not think I can take you to Constitution Avenue, sir,” the driver said. “There are too many people. The Messiah has finally come to us, praise Allah.”
“The Secretariat.”
The driver stopped and looked in the rearview mirror. “You’re American. I knew it. But you must know that this is a wondrous time for all of Pakistan.”
“The Secretariat,” McGarvey said. “They are expecting me.”
The Secretariat was housed in a large stuccoed white five-story building just off Constitution Avenue near the northwest end of the Red Section. The foothills of the Himalayas rose to the east, and clouds were beginning to roll in, like an ominous gray blanket. A storm was on its way, and Mac could feel it coming in more ways than one.
He counted more than a dozen white domes at various corners of the L-shaped building as they approached, and they reminded him of the domes and spires atop minarets across the Muslim world.
He got the distinct feeling that peace would never come to Pakistan or places like this. He was not anti-Islam; in fact, he didn’t care one way or another for any organized religion. But the extremists in any system were always the exception to the norm — Islam, Judaism or Christianity — yet they always accounted for the highest body counts. The primary purpose of terrorism was to terrorize.
The driver pulled up at the main gate. McGarvey rolled down his window and presented his passport to a guard, who checked the photo against his face.
“Yes, Dr. Parks, you are expected.”
FORTY-FIVE
A pair of motorcycle cops escorted McGarvey’s taxi up the long driveway to a side entrance of the Secretariat. Close up the massive pile looked more like a fortress or a prison than a governmental office. It felt ancient — and menacing: Abandon hope all ye who enter these gates.
He paid off the cabby, who was escorted back to the main gate. As he stood waiting next to an armed guard who was to take him inside, he could hear the chanting of a large crowd. He was around the side of the building, so he had no sight line down the broad avenue, but notably absent were the sounds of gunfire, which seemed always to be present at times like these.
“Dr. Parks,” his guard prompted.
“It sounds peaceful.”
The guard smiled faintly. “It is the Messiah, his message is one of peace.”
“Someone is with him.”
“The people.”
“I meant that someone from the Aiwan is walking with him. Someone from the Taliban.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the guard said.
“Sure, you do,” McGarvey told him, but he followed the man inside, where he was searched with an electronic security wand before they went down a long, marble hall and took an elevator to the top floor.
The place was bustling with clerks and other governmental employees scurrying from office to office as if they were on missions of urgent importance, which considering who was heading this way, they were.
The anteroom to the prime minister’s office was nearly half the size of a decent ballroom, with very high ceilings from which hung ornate chandeliers, gilded mirrors on the walls and vast Persian carpets on the wood parquet floor. An older man dressed in the morning clothes of a state functionary was seated behind the desk in the middle of the room.
He looked up, a pleasant expression on his round face. “Good morning, Dr. Parks,” he said. “The prime minister will see you momentarily.” He motioned for the guard to leave them.
“I imagine that he’s very busy this morning.”
“Indeed.”
A pair of couches flanked by large tables topped with vases of flowers were set along one wall, but there was no place else to sit other than behind the secretary’s desk. The length of time that someone wishing to see the prime minister was required to stand was related to his importance.
The secretary picked up his buzzing telephone. “Yes, sir,” he said. “You may go in now, Dr. Parks.”
A pair of massive ornately carved oak doors at least sixteen feet tall opened into the PM’s office, which was nothing like what McGarvey had expected; very little of anything was ornate or pretentious about it. As he walked in, a service door to the left was just closing. Rajput was standing behind his desk strewn with papers, files, a telephone console and two computer monitors. Large windows faced toward Constitution Avenue, and on the wall between them was a wide flat-screen television that showed a view down the avenue from a camera mounted on the roof. Two library tables were piled with file folders and other documents. No paintings adorned the walls and the only real concession to decoration other than the ornately carved desk was a massive Persian carpet, the twin, or at least the cousin, of the one in the anteroom. This was a place of work, not ceremony.