Allah's Scorpion

by David Hagberg

  Their waiter brought the drinks, and as soon as he’d gone, Graham got up from the bar, a glass of what looked to be champagne in hand, and sauntered back to their table. He was dressed in a conservative dark blazer, with club tie and gray slacks, his grooming perfect, his manner supremely confident.

  McGarvey pulled out his pistol and held it under the table on his lap, the safety catch in the off position.

  Gloria noticed, but she held her cool.

  “Mr. McGarvey, we meet again,” the Brit said pleasantly. “May I join you and Ms. Ibenez?”

  “No,” McGarvey said harshly, but without raising his voice. “What do you want?”

  A momentary flash of anger passed across Graham’s eyes. But he recovered nicely and smiled. “Why, to talk, same as you.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “I’m here to kill you and bin Laden. At the moment I have a pistol aimed at you from under the table. Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you here and now.”

  “Unsporting, old—”

  “Has anyone taken notice of us?” McGarvey asked Gloria.

  She looked past Graham at the other patrons, and shook her head. “No.” “Get your purse, we’re leaving now.”

  “Wait,” Graham said, the first hint of uncertainty creeping into his demeanor. “Bin Laden’s not at Fish Harbor.”

  “I know that.”

  “But you don’t know where he’s hiding.”

  “Somewhere here in the city.”

  “So right,” Graham said. “I’ll tell you where he is, and you’ll give me forty-eight hours to make my escape.”

  “You could have escaped after Norfolk,” McGarvey said. “Yet you came back here, practically led me here. Why?”

  “Looking over my shoulder for you is bad enough. But looking over my shoulder for al-Quaida as well is too much.” Graham managed another tight smile. “Besides, you may get killed trying to get out of Pakistan. The man does have his supporters. I might bag myself a twofer.”

  “Okay,” McGarvey said. “Where is he?”

  Graham laughed. “What do you take me for?”

  “A traitor,” McGarvey said matter-of-factly. “A coward. A fucking rabid dog. Shall I go on?”

  Graham held himself in check, the strain obvious in his eyes, which narrowed slightly. “Perhaps you should kill me now, while you have the chance,” he said, his voice soft. “Because sooner or later I will kill you.”

  “It’s a thought,” McGarvey replied. He raised his pistol. “But I want bin Laden first.”

  Graham nodded. “And I’ll give him to you.”

  “How and when?”

  “Tonight. Two A.M. I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby.”

  “And take me to him?”

  Graham shook his head. “No, of course not. I’ll tell you where he’s hiding—and you’re right, he’s here in the city. You’ll suspect it’s a trap, so I’ll remain here with Ms. Ibenez. We can hold each other hostage. When you return, having got what you came for, I’ll walk out of the hotel and you’ll give me a forty-eight-hour head start.”

  “What makes you think that I won’t just kill you?” McGarvey asked.

  “You’re an American, and your sense of honor and fair play is nearly as strong as a Brit’s. If you give your word, you’ll keep it.”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  “Well?”

  “You have my word,” McGarvey said.

  “I’ll see you at two,” Graham said. He started to leave, but then turned back. “I do have connections, you know. If I find that you’ve involved the Company with anything other than the Fish Harbor operation I’ll put out the word why you’re here. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  Graham walked away, setting his champagne glass on the bar before he left the lounge.

  “It’ll be a trap,” Gloria said.

  “Yup,” McGarvey said. He put his gun away, took out his sat phone, and speed-dialed Rencke’s number. It took a few seconds to acquire, but Otto answered on the first ring.

  “Yes?”

  “He’s here in the hotel. He just left the lounge.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Graham’s new driver, Tony Sampson, leaned up against the right fender of the Mercedes S500 sedan parked in front of the Pearl Continental Hotel, smoking a cigarette as he waited for his boss. He’d been a British SAS sergeant until he was arrested for smuggling drugs out of Afghanistan. He’d come to bin Laden’s attention, who had him rescued from a convoy transporting him to the airbase at Bagram for transport back to England, and brought him here to work with Graham.

  This was a pisshole of a city and a pisshole of a country, but it was better than Afghanistan and decidedly better than England. Anyway, Sampson had always thought of himself as a man of opportunity. And already he could see any number of possibilities working for Graham. For the moment, then, he was the loyal soldier.

  A drunk in rumpled jeans and a filthy, torn sweatshirt stumbled across the busy Club Road, horns blaring, traffic flowing around him.

  Sampson looked over his shoulder in time to see the man collapse on the pavement right behind the Mercedes. “Bleedin’ Christ,” he muttered. He tossed his cigarette away and went around to the rear of the car.

  The drunk had his hands on the molded rear bumper and was awkwardly trying to pull himself to his feet.

  “Here, what the fuck do you think you’re all about,” Sampson said. He grabbed the man’s arm, hauled him to his feet, and shoved him away. “Get the fuck out of here before I start breaking bones.”

  “Entschuldigen, mein herr,” Rencke said, bleary-eyed.

  “Fucking Kraut,” Sampson said. “Cops catch you drunk, you’ll be going to jail before you can say bitte.”

  Rencke turned and walked away, leaving Sampson with an odd feeling that something hadn’t been quite right about the encounter.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  KARACHI CITY CENTER

  Graham emerged from the hotel in a hurry and climbed into the backseat of the black Mercedes. He was torn in two directions; his intense need to kill Kirk McGarvey, and the elemental instinct of survival. Bin Laden and his fanatical al-Quaida mujahideen were right in the middle of both forces. No matter whatever else went down in the next few hours, he needed bin Laden, McGarvey, and the Ibenez woman to be dead.

  Afterwards he would make his way out of Pakistan to someplace neutral, where he would have time to figure out what would be next for him.

  “Where do you want to go, sir?” Sampson asked.

  “Back to bin Laden,” Graham said, looking at the bellmen at the front doors. “But we’ll be leaving again in a few hours, so stay on your toes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sampson said, and he pulled out into traffic.

  “And, Tony, make bloody well sure that we’re not followed.”

  Sampson glanced in the rearview mirror. “Is that a possibility tonight, sir?”

  “Oh, yes,” Graham said. “A very real possibility. I don’t want you to take anything for granted. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  Graham sat back and closed his eyes, trying hard to bring up an image of Jillian in his mind’s eye. But it was impossible tonight as it had been for some weeks. His head was filled with nothing more than thoughts of revenge; getting back at all the bastards of the world who had forced him to take a path he’d never wanted. Admiral Holmes, Osama bin Laden, and Kirk McGarvey; all men cut of the same rotten cloth.

  The admiral, who had given the order that Graham was not to be recalled from patrol, had died of cancer a few years ago, so he was out of Graham’s reach. But bin Laden and McGarvey would come together this night in a dance of death that Graham had choreographed to the last detail.

  “Will it be the Pakis or the CIA?” Sampson asked.

  Graham opened his eyes. “Is someone on our tail now?”

  “No, sir. I’d just like to know who the opposition is, that’s all.”

  Sampson was new, and Graha
m didn’t know if he should be trusted, despite bin Laden’s opinion. But he’d seen the man’s SAS record, which looked good, and his question now was a valid one.

  “Probably the CIA,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve involved the local cops or the ISI yet.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sampson said. He’d passed the National Tourist Office but instead of turning left on Abdullah Haroon Road, he’d headed straight across to Shahrah-e-Faisal toward the airport.

  This route would take them well away from the city center, and the M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre, but once they were on the airport road outside of the city with sparse traffic at this hour of the evening, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to follow them undetected. As soon as they were clear, Sampson would double back into the city center.

  Graham laid his head back and closed his eyes again, content for the moment to let his driver make the decisions. He’d been continuously on the go, it seemed, since Cabimas, with McGarvey right there over his shoulder the entire time. He was weary, and he wanted to be done with the entire business; McGarvey, al-Quaida, the jihad.

  He’d come up with a notion for continuing the fight on his own, but over the past few days, with his thoughts focused almost exclusively on McGarvey and bin Laden, another idea had begun to niggle at the back of his mind: Why? Why bother going on, when nothing he’d ever done or ever could, would bring his wife back from the grave?

  Jillian was dead, and that was more of an immutable truth than all the gods, Jahweh, Christ, and Allah included. Every man, woman, and child on earth was some religion’s infidel. Killing them all wouldn’t bring back his wife.

  Graham let his mind drift to the Panama Canal operation where he’d come face-to-face with McGarvey, then to the York River where once again McGarvey had shown up, and finally tonight at the hotel where the arrogant bastard had been waiting with his girlfriend.

  He could not simply walk away as he had in Panama and the York River. Not again tonight.

  “We’re clear,” Sampson said.

  Graham opened his eyes. They were back downtown. “You’re certain?” he asked, sitting up.

  “Yes, sir.”

  A couple of blocks later they turned onto A. R. Kayani Road, and entered the underground parking garage of the M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre. The steel mesh security gate opened for them with a code card. Sampson drove all the way down to the fifth level where he pulled up at the private elevator for the twenty-fifth floor.

  “I want you back here at one thirty,” Graham told his driver. “We have a lot to do this morning, and I’m going to need your help.”

  Sampson nodded tightly, and Graham got out of the car and took the elevator up to the twenty-fifth floor.

  Sometime after two this morning, when McGarvey showed up, the security system for entry to the parking garage would be disabled, as would the closed-circuit television cameras protecting bin Laden’s lair, and his personal bodyguards would be sent on a wild-goose chase.

  McGarvey would make it far enough to kill bin Laden, but he wouldn’t leave the building alive. Because by then his girlfriend would be dead, and Graham and Sampson would be waiting in the parking garage for him to descend from the twenty-fifth floor.

  PEARL CONTINENTAL

  “What the hell kept you?” McGarvey asked, letting Rencke into the hotel room.

  “Trying to keep myself from being arrested,” Rencke said, going directly across to the desk and setting up his laptop computer to the WiFi network.

  “Did you get the tracker attached?”

  “Yeah, that was a piece of cake,” Rencke said. He brought up a GPS program that displayed a map of downtown Karachi on the monitor. “But I had to bug out for a while. It was probably one of the bellmen who spotted me behind Graham’s car and called the cops. Before I could make it around back, they were all over the place.”

  “Did you get back here clean?” McGarvey asked.

  “I think so,” Rencke said.

  Gloria was at the window looking down at the street. “It’s quiet,” she said.

  Rencke had come over to Riyadh on the Aurora, and from there on a diplomatic passport flying a Gulfstream bizjet. He had stationed himself across the street from the hotel with a laptop and WiFi equipment that could hack into the hotel’s switchboard as well as McGarvey’s cell phone and sat phone. If and when Graham made the phone call Rencke could trace it. But he was also in a position to attach a tracking device to Graham’s car in case the man showed up in person.

  “I never thought he’d have the guts to face you,” Rencke said, his fingers flying over the keyboard.

  “What’s the tracker’s range?” McGarvey asked. He tried to keep himself in check. They were close now, and he could almost feel bin Laden’s presence.

  “It’s uplinked to one of our Jupiters. Anywhere on earth from eighty degrees north to eighty south.”

  The map display shifted to a much narrower area of downtown within just a few blocks from the hotel. A small red dot appeared near the center of the display, a blinking cursor next to it.

  “The unit’s shielded,” Rencke called out.

  McGarvey was looking over Otto’s shoulder. “Have we lost him?”

  “I don’t think so.” Rencke centered the search area directly adjacent to the red dot and cursor, which showed the last location within one meter where the uplink was lost. He overlaid the street map with a satellite view of that specific downtown block which showed a tall building on A. R. Kayani Street.

  “Underground parking?” McGarvey asked.

  “Probably,” Rencke said absently. He brought up a Principal Places of Interest directory, and overlaid it on the double display. “Bingo,” he said, looking up. He clicked on the building, and an info box popped up with M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre, an address, and a brief description.

  “Can you get more?” McGarvey asked. He looked up. Gloria was watching him from the window, her eyes bright. She was excited for him, and yet it was obvious she was a little frightened. If they had actually found out where bin Laden was hiding, it meant McGarvey would be going after him sometime before two this morning when Graham was supposed to come back to the hotel. Almost anything could happen.

  “I don’t know if they’ve gone digital yet,” Rencke mumbled, his fingers once again flying over the keyboard. The street map overlaid with the satellite image disappeared and a logo that looked like the Masons’ symbol came up with an Arabic inscription around a compass rose. “City Engineer’s office,” Rencke said.

  He pulled up an Arabic-to-English translation program, went to the City Engineer’s home page, and from there, a directory of major buildings and structures within the city proper. Scrolling down a dozen pages, he came to the M.A. Jinnah Commercial Centre. He looked up with a big grin. “Am I good, or what, kimo sabe?”

  “You’re good,” McGarvey agreed.

  Rencke clicked on the blueprint icon. A page came up asking for a password. He took a CD from his laptop bag, loaded it, and a few seconds later an enable icon came up onscreen. He clicked on it and his program bypassed the password block. Moments later a directory of blueprint pages came up. “Okay, if he’s in there, he wouldn’t have his name painted on the door. How do you want to do this?”

  “Floor by floor. First let’s see what we can eliminate.”

  Gloria came over to watch. “This could take a while,” she said. “We’ve only got a little more than three hours before Graham comes back.”

  “It’ll be something obvious,” McGarvey said. “Something you can look at a thousand times and still not see.”

  Rencke started with the ground floor that housed a security post at the front entrance, as well as a monitoring command post. A large atrium was bounded by shops, a travel agency, a storefront banking service, rest rooms, and a first-aid station. At the rear of the building were the service entrances and loading docks.

  The second floor contained mostly attorneys’ offices, along with a small consulting service
that apparently helped promote foreign investments, especially those from eastern Europe.

  The third, fourth, and fifth floors were taken up by something called PHI Telecommunications Co., LLC, the sixth and seventh by Hassan Aly Publications, and the eighth through eleventh, businesses that were involved with port of Karachi operations and the shipping industry.

  There were other consulting firms, doctors’ offices, financial advisers, and investment counselors, plus a number of other businesses whose purposes couldn’t be guessed from their names. One of them, Amin House, which took up more than half of the twentieth floor, looked promising. Rencke minimized the City Engineer’s site, and pulled up the City Directory, which listed Amin House as the private investment service center for Naimat Amin, who apparently was a Pakistani multimillionaire.

  Rencke looked up. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “Bin Laden could be using it as a conduit for funds from his Saudi Arabian pals.”

  “So far as I know most of that money is going through Prague,” McGarvey said. “But if we don’t find anything else, we’ll come back to it.”

  Fifteen minutes later they came to the twenty-fifth floor, and Rencke sat up. There was no listing for the entire floor. The twenty-fourth contained an investment house, as did the twenty-sixth, but the twenty-fifth was blank.

  There was no other information in any of the building’s directories, or in the City Directory, Karachi Utilities, or Karachi City District Taxing Authority. The twenty-fifth floor simply did not exist.

  “He’s there,” McGarvey said.

  “How can you be so sure?” Gloria asked.

  Rencke was going through the directory for the remaining twenty-three floors, and when he was finished he looked up. “If bin Laden is in that building, he’s on the twenty-fifth. How’re you going to get through security? They know you’re here, and if Graham is setting you up you could be walking into a trap.”

  “Not until two,” McGarvey said. He pulled out his cell phone.