Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

McGarvey wanted to say that the fight was never over; that there would always be some sonofabitch out there with a score to settle, political or religious, or sometimes both, but he raised his glass anyway, and smiled. “To us.”

  They touched glasses and drank. Her expression darkened for a moment. “I’m sorry I brought it all back for you.”

  “Don’t be. Not tonight,” McGarvey said. This time his smile was genuine because he’d managed to push the demons back one more time, and because he had his own reason for coming here tonight.

  Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  McGarvey opened his menu. “If we’re going to make the curtain we’d better order something now.”

  “Something’s going on, I can see it in your face.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McGarvey said innocently. Her father had told him once that keeping a secret from his daughter was impossible.

  “You do,” she said sternly. She had the I demand look on her face.

  The waiter came and refilled their glasses. “Would you care to order now?”

  “Not yet,” Kathleen said sharply. “Give us a few minutes.”

  “Of course, madame.”

  “What’s going on, Kirk?” she asked.

  “This may be the wrong place for this. I was going to wait until after the symphony. I thought we’d go someplace for champagne afterward.” He was suddenly enjoying himself, but he kept a straight face.

  “Is this about work?”

  No. It’s about us.”He took a ring box from his pocket and set it in front of her.

  She smiled uncertainly, almost afraid to touch it.

  “I can’t do anything about the past, Katy,” he said seriously. “Neither of us can. It’s time now to get on with it.” He looked at the little velvet box. “It was my mother’s.” His heart was in his throat.

  She slowly opened the box, and her eyes immediately misted over. She looked up, questioningly, and when he nodded, she took the ring out. It was a small diamond in an inexpensive old-fashioned setting. It was all his father had been able to afford on the salary of an engineer working at Los Alamos on the bomb in the forties. But it had meant everything to his mother, and it meant everything to him now.

  “Let’s start over again, Katy. Do it right this time. Will you marry me?”

  A tender look came over her. “I’ve always loved you, you know. I never stopped,” she said. “But I don’t think that I ever loved you more than I do right now.” She reached again for his hand. “Yes, my darling, I’ll marry you, and this time we’ll make it work … together.”

  Chevy Chase

  On the way back to Kathleen’s home after the concert, they rode very close together like young lovers in the back of the taxi. McGarvey had dismissed his car and bodyguard for the remainder of the evening, and he was glad he had done it. Tonight was personal, anonymous.

  At the house she went up the walk to open the door as McGarvey paid the cabby, and when he joined her, she’d already started up the stairs.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “Just you.”

  He locked up, turned off the hall light, and started up the stairs when the telephone rang. Kathleen answered it in the bedroom on the second ring. He could hear her muffled voice, and when he got to the head of the stairs she came to the bedroom door, a vexed look on her face.

  “They’re sending your car for you.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It was Otto. He didn’t say, except that it was worse than lavender this time.”

  His heart stopped. Rencke never exaggerated. Lavender was his code word for something very bad. Worst-case scenario.

  “I’m sorry, Katy.”

  “Kathleen,” she corrected automatically. “Be careful.”

  He took her in his arms, and kissed her deeply. “I’ll eall as soon as I can.”

  Headlights flashed in the driveway. She shook her head sadly. “You’ll never change,” she said, and when she saw the look of pain in his eyes it took her breath away. “But I will,” she told him.

  En Route to Langley

  He climbed in the back seat of the Cadillac limousine, and his driver, Dick Yemm, immediately pulled out and headed off at a high speed. “Sorry to bust in on you like this, boss. Mr. Adkins held down the fort for as long as he could until we could get a better handle on the situation.”

  “Okay, Dick what’s the story?”

  “Allen Trumble was shot to death about six, hours ago down in Orlando.” Yemm was a very small, compact man, as rigid and as tough as bar steel, but he was shaking.

  It was like a ton of bricks had fallen on McGarvey’s head, but he held himself in check. “Do we have somebody with Gloria and the kids?”

  “They got them too, along with a couple of innocent bystanders.” Yemm viciously cut a driver off and ran a stop sign. “Sonofabitch, boss. Sonofabitch.”

  The news was simply unbelievable, impossible to digest; it was a random act of violence, like a lightning bolt. Except he knew that it hadn’t been random. “What took us so long?” he demanded.

  “The Bureau didn’t find out that Allen worked for us until after eight, and by the time the duty office made contact with Mr. Adkins it was late. Nobody could believe it. We thought it was some stupid mistake.”

  Already they were out of Chevy Chase on Western Avenue, their speed topping one hundred miles per hour. Luckily traffic was light. Yemm radioed his position to the duty dispatcher. “Hammerhead is en route. ETA about twenty.”

  Although Yemm was only a driver/bodyguard, he was the DDO’s bodyguard and he kept his ears open. It didn’t hurt that he was smart in addition to being tough. He was an ex-SEAL, and he and McGarvey had a lot of history together. For all practical purposes his need to know cut across almost the entire DO. Like McGarvey he was a man who hated bullshit and bureaucracy. He told it like it was. In addition he had given Trumble shooting lessons for requalification last winter, so he had a personal stake.

  “What do we know so far?” McGarvey asked, trying to keep his thoughts in order. He had been yanked from Katy’s arms back into the real world, and her feel and scent had already faded into that other place in his head.

  “Looks like bin Laden ordered it.” Yemm’s jaw visibly tightened in the rearview mirror. When he was mad he ground his teeth. “There were four of them, AK-47s. Allen wasn’t carrying, but he managed to bag one of the bad guys anyway. Hit him in the head with something. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC talked to the bastard in the ambulance before he died.”

  “Do we have a solid ID on him?” McGarvey wasn’t going to telephone Adkins because his ADDO had his hands full now, but he needed more information.

  “Bari Yousef. Twenty-nine, born in Cairo, came over here in ’ninety-eight. Until two weeks ago he worked as a truck driver for Jersey City Transport, then he disappeared.”

  The trucking company was under investigation. It was believed that it was one of a number of possible fronts for bin Laden’s operations here in the States. The Bureau’s antiterrorist division had been warning for years that bin Laden was going to extend his terrorist attacks to the States. The trucking company and some other enterprises, among them a couple of banks in New Jersey, were thought to be the precursors to something big that was coming. Something that would make Oklahoma City look small. Yemm must have been within earshot in the Ops Center when the connection had been made.

  The problem with being DDO was that he got to hear everything, not just the bits and pieces like Yemm. Where Dick was mad, McGarvey was frightened. If the consensus on bin Laden was correct they were going to have the biggest fight of their lives on their hands. This time they were playing with fire. Very serious fire. And a lot of people would get hurt unless the U.S. was very careful in how it responded.

  “They were on vacation, boss,” Yemm said, angry and frustrated. “Minding their own business. Not hurting anybody. Christ, you know Allen; the m
an would go out of his way to avoid stepping on a bug.”

  “Take it easy, Dick. I know how you feel,” McGarvey said. “What about the other three shooters?”

  “They were driving a Chevy van, stolen in Atlanta four days ago, on a Florida plate that the owner in Tampa didn’t even know was stolen until the cops showed up at her door. Some guy and his wife saw what was going down and they called 911 on their cell phone. The van was abandoned about a half-mile from Interstate 4, and nobody else saw a thing.”

  “How’d we ID Yousef?”

  “Prints off his gun. The Bureau ran them and came up with a red flag. The bastard was one of bin Laden’s shooters, and he shouldn’t have been able to clear customs in the first place. The passport people at Kennedy fucked up.”

  It was a common occurrence, one of the downsides of a totally free country. As one senior Immigration and Naturalization official told McGarvey, trying to stop illegals coming ashore in leaky old boats was tough enough, but checking people flying in on supposedly legitimate passports was like trying to stop a flood with your finger in the dike.

  In the end it was up to the CIA’s foreign stations to come up with lists of undesirables, and for the FBI’s special units on espionage and counterterrorism to see that the bad guys who did manage to get here didn’t do any harm. The CIA and the Bureau were doing a damned fine job, most of their successes never appearing in the media, but the problem was no less impossible than Immigration’s.

  Now it was starting again, McGarvey thought morosely. In the never-ending battle you won a few, but you lost some too. The Khobar Barracks, the New York Trade Towers, Oklahoma City, the Nairobi embassy, and a host of others to which Orlando would be added.

  But this was just the opening move. To what, he wondered. How far would it go this time? He had a very bad feeling that they were going to find out a lot sooner than they wanted to, and once again he was going to be right in the middle of it. Coming to work for the CIA right out of college and Air Force had been just a job, like a military career. Something you did. His parents had worked for the government at Los Alamos and it had been his turn. But after his parents had been killed in the car crash he had been locked into the Company by shackles whose links he had forged himself with his own conscience and sense of fair play. President Truman had a sign on his desk that read: THE BUCK STOPS HERE. The sign on McGarvey’s desk read: THE BULLSHTT STOPS HERE.

  FOUR

  CIA Headquarters

  It was 12:25 A.M. when McGarvey, still dressed in his tuxedo, his bow tie undone, reached his office. He’d talked to Trumble five days ago, sending his Riyadh COS and his family on a two-week vacation, and now they were dead. In that time the only thing they’d accomplished was to agree to wait until Allen got back to help with the ops planning for another meeting with bin Laden. Nobody had the least inkling that Trumble was in danger, but it was something that McGarvey knew he should have considered.

  But bin Laden didn’t work that way; on such a small scale, in Trumble’s words. Or at least he’d never worked that way before, and there was no logical reason for him to start now. If he’d wanted Trumble dead, he would have killed him in Khartoum, not waited until the man returned to the United States presumably to report on the meeting, and then taken the risk of killing him and his family in such a public place. Yet he had to keep reminding himself that logical reason might not apply to a man such as bin Laden. Maybe the bastard had finally gone around the bend, really gone nuts. That was a cheery thought.

  Dick Adkins walked in from his adjoining office, a stricken, angry expression on his face. McGarvey had seen that kind of look before.

  “It came out of left field, Mac.”

  “Short of keeping them in a safe house, there’s nothing we could have done,” McGarvey said bitterly. “Hell, the Secret Service can’t even guarantee a President’s life.” He took off his jacket, tossed it on the couch and went to his desk. “I want Jeff Cook alerted to what might be coming his way in Riyadh, and then I want all of our stations and missions to get the word to button down, freeze their assets.”

  “We did that as soon as we found out. And I called McCafferty over at State to alert our embassies world wide.”

  “Did we notify the Pentagon?”

  “Couple of hours ago.” Adkins handed McGarvey a buff-colored file folder with blue edging, denoting urgent attention. “This is what we’ve come up with so far. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC, Scott Thompson, is running the show down there, but Fred Rudolph called a couple of hours ago from his office, so they’re on top of it already.” Rudolph headed the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. McGarvey had a great deal of respect for the man’s abilities and judgment. He was a straight shooter; a no-nonsense cop.

  “Coffee?”

  “Coming up,” Adkins said.

  McGarvey quickly scanned the file, which didn’t contain much more information than he’d already gotten from Dick Yemm, except that the FBI now believed that the Jersey City Trucking Company was no longer a bin Laden front, although it was still owned and operated by Arabs, mostly Egyptians.

  Adkins came back with the coffee. “I don’t think there’s any doubt who ordered the hit or why. I think the Bureau is wrong this time.”

  “Maybe not,” McGarvey said. Bin Laden was on the move, or getting ready to do something spectacular; he was pretty sure of that. But no matter how he looked at it, this killing didn’t add up to a bin Laden-ordered hit. “Do we have someone watching Allen’s and Gloria’s families in Minnesota?”

  “I didn’t think of that one,” Adkins said. “I’ll do it now.”

  “Then call Otto in.”

  “He’s been here all night.”

  “Okay, send him up.” McGarvey picked up the phone and hit the speed dial button for Fred Rudolph’s office over at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. “Is everyone else in and up to speed?”

  “Since eight,” Adkins said, heading for the door.

  “Staff meeting in thirty minutes.”

  “You got it, Mac.”

  The call was answered on the first ring. “Fred Rudolph.” His voice sounded strained. He had graduated summa cum laude with a law degree from Fordham, and had worked for a couple of years with the army’s Staff Judge Advocate’s office as a special investigator. He’d done the same thing as a civilian for the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Justice until he’d signed on with the FBI about six years ago.

  “Good morning, Fred. I read your 22:30 fax, anything new since then?”

  “You just get in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a bitch, isn’t it?” Rudolph said. Sometimes he wished he’d been a banker instead of a cop. “As soon as we got a positive on Yousef we woke up a federal judge and got a search warrant. My people are tossing his apartment right now. We should have something in the next couple of hours or so. But they had a head start, Mac. So unless they get stupid we might come up empty.”

  The first twenty-four hours, and especially the first six hours of these kinds of investigations were the most crucial. After that they were just picking up the pieces, because if the shooters were professionals they would be long gone by then.

  “What’s your best guess?”

  “Probably Cuba. There were two flights to Havana direct out of Orlando that they could have taken. Scott Thompson’s people are looking over the passenger lists, and talking with the baggage handlers and ticket clerks, but both flights are already on the ground in Havana, and won’t turn around until morning. As soon as they get back he’ll talk to them unless your people can get to them down there.”

  “We’ll work on it,” McGarvey promised. “What about the weapon?”

  “Except for prints it was clean. No serial number, so it could have been purchased almost anywhere. Ballistics is still working on it.”

  “How about the van?”

  “We lifted some pretty good prints, including Yousef’s, but we’ve come up with nothing on the others yet. Same with hair sa
mples. We’re running DNA indentification tests now, but they won’t do us any good unless we can get an arrest out of this.” Rudolph did not sound optimistic. “What about your shop? Can you tell me what Trumble was up to that made him and his family a target?”

  “I can’t give you the details, but it involved bin Laden. What can you tell me about Jersey City Trucking?”

  “We thought there was a connection, but we ran that operation through a ringer and came up clean last week. There’s just nothing there tying it to any of bin Laden’s other suspected business interests. Not even remotely.”

  “I thought they had some kind of a financial arrangement with one of bin Laden’s banks.”

  “For about two months, and that was over five years ago. It’s another dead end. Everything about the place stinks, we’ll probably close them down under the RICO Act eventually, but there are no terrorists there.”

  “Except for Bari Yousef.”

  “We’re going to toss the business again, but unless we find something tying Yousef directly to bin Laden through the company, it’ll be another dead end. We have to play by the rules even if they don’t,” he said angrily. “This guy could have been working on his own for some reason, or for somebody else close to bin Laden. It’s happened before.” Rudolph was silent for a moment. “You would know more about that than me.”

  “Anything new from INS?” McGarvey asked, sidestepping the comment. It was hard to focus while blaming himself.

  “Nothing other than what I’ve already sent you. Yousef got by them, and so did the other three. It’s another angle we’re working on. We’ll try to find out if anyone else beside him is missing from the business.” Again Rudolph hesitated for a moment. “It would be helpful if we could come up with a motive. I mean, are you laying this on bin Laden’s doorstep?”

  McGarvey looked up as Otto walked in. He waved his special operations officer to a chair. “I just don’t know, Fred. On the surface it looks like it, but there’s no reason for him to have ordered the hit. If anything it’s counterproductive for him. Crazy.”