Joshua's Hammer

by David Hagberg

  She was thirty-four, divorced, no children, parents dead, no brothers or sisters. Her entire life revolved around her job. So much so, in fact, that she was already beginning to have bad dreams about the day a new. President and First Family replaced the Hayneses. She expected that everyone else on her detail should share the same enthusiasm. They did not, of course, and it was a never-ending source of vexation for her.

  The best deal today was that Deborah was staying put. The President and First Lady had left early this morning for a breakfast fundraiser, and were at this moment attending a thousand-dollar-a-plate luncheon at the San Diego Hilton. They had left Deborah here at the La Jolla estate of their old friend and campaign contributor, the real estate multimillionaire Gordon Wedell and his wife Evelyn. The Wedells, currently in Europe, had loaned the house to the President and his family, as they had on several other occasions. Wedell liked the arrangement because when it came time to sell the place its value would be greatly enhanced by its famous guests. The Secret Service liked it because the house was perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific and was easy to secure. The President and Mrs. Haynes liked it because it was comfortable, and Deborah loved it because they had horses, an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and racketball courts, and a place for her to run, all in perfect safety.

  Chenna got out of the jeep across from the horse barn and raised her binoculars. Deborah Haynes, dressed in gray sweats, her long blond hair streaming behind her, was coming around the far turn of the one-mile oval horse track. Terri Lundgren, her coach, astride an ATV, paced her on the outside just a few feet away. Even from here Chenna could see the pure, unadulterated joy on Deborah’s face as she loped, rather than ran flat-out. She was turning in respectable eight-minute miles at the start, and from what Chenna had seen over the past couple of years since Terri Lundgren had come aboard, the girl could continue at that pace all day.

  Directly behind her, and a few yards back, agent Bruce Hansen took up the rear astride his own souped-up version of an ATV. If anything started to go bad he could get to Deborah within seconds, and if need be he could get her out of there at speeds ranging up to eighty miles per hour.

  Chenna turned her chin slightly so that her lapel mike would pick up her voice and activate the VOX. “Hey, you’re lookin’ good out there, Romeo One. But I thought that you were going to start running with her instead of riding.”

  “I’m out of breath just watching her. She’s getting too good for me. Do you want to try?”

  Hansen, who was one of Chenna’s favorites, had been an Olympic sprinter eight years ago. He’d not won any medals, but he’d come close. And the main thing was that he had made the U.S. Olympic team. Everyone on the detail was proud of him.

  “I wouldn’t make it one lap,” Chenna radioed. “Bring her in, cook’s got lunch ready to go.”

  “Roger that,” Hansen said. He sped up alongside Lundgren, who broke off and angled over to Deborah.

  The President’s daughter slowed down, and seemed to stumble as if she had trouble concentrating on talking and running at the same time. But then she looked over to where Chenna was standing, gave a wave, and bounded across the track, this time running flat-out.

  Chenna was used to the girl’s athletic abilities; she’d watched them develop. But someone seeing the President’s daughter for the first time would have reason to be nervous. Deborah had Down syndrome, and like many people with that handicap she was double-jointed. Watching her run was like watching a Raggedy Anne doll; her arms and legs flew in every direction as if she was going to crash and land in a jumbled heap. But she never did. She was as surefooted as a young gazelle, and under Lundgren’s tutelage she had become a world-class athlete. She was expected to win Saturday’s half-marathon, or at least place in the top three or four out of a field of fifteen hundred runners.

  Charlie McGivern, the horse master, came out of the barn and lit his pipe. Chenna caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and turned slightly to see who it was as her right hand headed automatically toward her pistol in a shoulder holster.

  He was used to Secret Service agents around the place. He waved.

  Chenna grinned and waved back. Charlie was one of the good ones. His wife had died a few years ago and he had nobody, so he doted on the President’s daughter whenever she came to visit. He’d even made a special saddle for her with her initials carved into the left and right fenders.

  He watched Deborah run for a moment or two, Lundgren and Hansen following her, shook his head and went back into the barn. Chenna knew what he was thinking, and sometimes she had to agree with him. Being a sitting President’s daughter had to be tough. It was no life for a kid, and yet Deborah thrived. She had friends who loved her and she was protected every single moment of every single day.

  “Chenna,” she cried with total joy, her arms wide open. She grabbed Chenna, who was short but solidly built, on the run with a tremendous hug and easily lifted her off the ground. Everything the girl did was with overflowing enthusiasm. It was one of the reasons that Chenna loved her assignment.

  “You’re getting strong,” Chenna said, laughing.

  “I eat my Wheaties,” Deborah bubbled. “Did you see me running?”

  “I did, and I can’t get over the improvement. You’re really getting fast.”

  “I can’t keep up with her,” Hansen admitted. “And that’s a fact.”

  “I’m very proud of her,” Lundgren agreed. “But the best part is that she’s got even more potential. Look out, Ferrari!”

  Deborah giggled in pure joy and clapped her hands. It was a daily ritual they went through, but none of them minded because of the utter happiness it gave her.

  “Okay, gotta run some more now,” she said, jumping up and down to keep loose. Sweat covered her face, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Lunch first,” Lundgren said, handing Deborah a towel. “Then we’re going to do a little resistance training in the gym, and afterwards laps in the pool.”

  “Can I run later?”

  Lundgren looked to Chenna for approval.

  “Maybe for an hour,” Chenna said. “But then you’ll have to get ready for dinner. You’re going to be with your parents tonight in town.”

  Deborah immediately calmed down. “I think I’ll wear the blue dress tonight. And the black heels and pearls.”

  Chenna, who was a tomboy, shook her head. “That’s going to be up to your mom.”

  Deborah smiled knowingly and nodded. “I think it’ll be the blue dress,” she said with confidence. “And right now lunch sounds good.”

  CIA Headquarters

  McGarvey walked across the hall to the DO’s conference room at two in the afternoon. He had managed to pull together what information they had so far on bin Laden’s compound and his probable movements in the past two months since he’d left Afghanistan. But if they were going to mount an operation to take him out they would have to know a lot more. For instance: They knew that he was never without guards, but almost nothing was known about them; how they were selected, where they came from. If they were going to find a way to get to bin Laden it might have to be through one of his guards. They also had to know more about his communications; who he talked with and how. They needed to know who was coming to see him on a regular basis, and what they were probably talking about. It was possible that he and the NIF had had a falling out, and maybe he could be gotten to through the Sudanese government. They needed to know where his wives and children were staying; who shopped for his groceries and who prepared his meals; where his water came from, and if there was a possibility of poisoning it. Assassinations were not always accomplished with a bullet to the brain.

  It was a far cry from teaching at Milford, he told himself. Voltaire would probably have understood what he was trying to do, though the philosopher would have wondered what might become of a man who tried to stamp out evil by doing evil deeds himself. McGarvey had been asking that question all of his life.

  “Go
od afternoon, Dick,” McGarvey said. Surprisingly Adkins was the only one here so far.

  “I told everybody else two-fifteen. I wanted to talk to you first,” Adkins explained.

  “I should have brought you in this earlier, sorry about that, but I had a lot of thinking to do. The general’s not real happy, but he can’t see any other way out either.”

  “Well, you’ve got everybody’s attention. Considering the information you’ve been asking for, the word is already out. But nobody is disagreeing with you—at least not in principle,” Adkins assured him. “The problem is going to be the trigger man.”

  “I’m going to set up shop in Riyadh,” McGarvey said.

  “Right,” Adkins said. “I can’t imagine that the general went along with that.”

  “I’m just going out there to make sure that Jeff Cook gets the word. He knows what resources he has on the ground.”

  Adkins gave him a wan smile and shook his head. “Somehow I find that hard to believe. So will everyone else. Beating Van Buren on the fencing strip is one thing, but going back out in the field banged up the way you are is another.”

  “We might not have to send any of our own people,” McGarvey said. He knew that this was the kind of reaction he would get. “If we can lure him to a meeting somewhere in Yemen, just across the border, Saudi intelligence can put up an operation to grab him.”

  “That might work,” Adkins said after a moment’s thought. “But he’s survived for too long to fall for anything easy. Whatever the meeting is about, and especially whoever it’s with, will have to be damned convincing.”

  “I agree,” McGarvey said. “Assuming that Turabi and the NIF are having some sort of a dispute with bin Laden it could be about the bomb. I mean that’s not such a leap of imagination. Maybe they think it’s over the top. Too extreme right now, especially with the moderates in Iran.”

  “Okay,” Adkins agreed with some uncertainty.

  “We’re guessing that the bomb went through Pakistan, possibly out of Karachi, maybe by ship or by plane.”

  “That’s a possibility we’ve looked at, Mac. But we haven’t come up with a thing. Hell, we don’t really have anything here except speculation.”

  “But it’s possible,” McGarvey pressed the point.

  Adkins nodded.

  “Okay, so Pakistan has its own troubles with us right now over the nuclear question and over their new military government, so they can’t afford to upset us. If the ISI asks for the meeting on neutral ground in Yemen to promise bin Laden that they’ll give him anything he wants providing he turns over the bomb to them, he’ll come.” ISI, or Interservice Intelligence, was the Pakistani intelligence agency.

  “What’s to stop him from picking up the telephone and calling them, besides his paranoia?”

  “We do, from Riyadh. We’ll leak the word that we’ve redirected our southern India Jupiter satellite into position over the Sudan.” Jupiter was the program to closely monitor Indian and Pakistani communications because they had gone nuclear.

  “Do you think that if he’s in custody or dead, that it’ll stop Bahmad from going ahead with whatever plan they hatched?”

  “I don’t know, Dick,” McGarvey said. He sat down. “We’ve had no luck finding him or the bomb, and assuming we can get through this weekend in one piece, maybe an end run will be the only practical thing to do.”

  “That’s assuming the Saudis will want to announce that they’ve finally caught bin Laden,” Adkins pointed out. “There’d be a lot of repercussions against them and us. Most of the Islamic world would be up in arms.”

  “They are anyway, Dick.” McGarvey shook his head. “No matter how this thing turns out we’re going to end up being the bad guys. And that’s just the way it is.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Los Angeles

  It was a few minutes past 10:30 A.M. when Bahmad entered the Frémont Building just off Pershing Square. He was dressed conservatively in a blazer, gray slacks and club tie, and carried a thin attaché case. He’d recolored his hair salt-and-pepper gray.

  He took the elevator to the eighteenth floor offices of Omni Resource Financing, Ltd. “Gordon Guthrie to see Mr. Sanchez,” he told the pretty receptionist. He handed her his card.

  “Do you have an appointment this morning, sir?” the young woman asked cooly. “Mr. Sanchez is in conference at the moment.”

  “No appointment, luv,” Bahmad said. “But if you’ll just give him my card, he’ll see me.”

  The receptionist picked up the telephone and pressed a button. “Luis,” she said and she hung up. A moment later a young Hispanic man, very sharply dressed, came out, took the card, glanced at Bahmad and went back inside.

  Bahmad smiled. “Have you worked for Mr. Sanchez very long?”

  “Yes, sir. Would you care for a cup of coffee?”

  “No thank you. I won’t need more than a minute or two of his time.”

  She gave him a smirk and turned back to a pile of mail that she had been sorting. Bahmad drifted over to a very nice Picasso print on the textured wall, but when he got closer he saw that it wasn’t a print after all, it was an original. He looked around the large, very well furnished reception area. Six other paintings ranging from a Gainsborough to a Warhol, all originals, hung on the walls with absolutely no sense of coordination or theme. But then he supposed it was to be expected. Emilio Sanchez had no class but he headed the largest Mexican heroin/cocaine cartel in history so he had plenty of money. Unlike the Colombian drug lords who operated out of jungle fortresses and seldom took the chance to travel far from their safe havens because they were afraid of being captured, Sanchez conducted his affairs out in the open here in Los Angeles as a respected, if flashy, businessman. He had his financial fingers into everything from real estate to offshore oil exploration, and from Silicon Valley high-tech companies to portfolios of blue chip stocks.

  All of it was a front for a highly sophisticated money laundering operation that no government in the world had uncovered yet. Sanchez himself had been nothing more than a small-time gangster in Mexico City until eight years ago when bin Laden’s people had sniffed him out, and set him up in business here.

  Since then he’d become a godless, arrogant bastard filled with self-importance, but he was getting the job done. In the last three years alone more than two and a half billion dollars had passed through Omni Resource Financing, and the next three years had promised to bring more of the same. Until now, Bahmad thought. In a few days everything would change, and there would be no going back for any of them.

  “Mr. Guthrie,” the receptionist called.

  Bahmad turned and gave her another smile. “Yes?” Luis stood respectfully at the open door, and the receptionist’s demeanor had changed from one of dismissal to one of respect.

  “Mr. Sanchez will see you now, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Bahmad said. He followed the young man down a broad, thickly carpeted hall, more originals on the walls, past several large offices in which a lot of people were very busy at work, to a palatial corner suite of beautifully furnished offices with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded a magnificent view looking east across the city toward the San Gabriel Mountains.

  Emilio Sanchez, dark and dangerous looking, sat scowling on a leather couch by the windows, two men seated in chairs across a broad coffee table from him. One of them got up and came across the room, smiling.

  “Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Guthrie,” he said. “I’m Francisco Galvez, chief of corporate security.” He looked like a cop, with dark eyes that seemed to miss nothing, square shoulders and a firm grip. The other man was very thin, almost emaciated, with a heavily pockmarked face. He wore thick glasses. He was smoking a cigarette and the ashtray in front of him was nearly half full. He seemed very nervous. Sanchez, on the other hand, was short, going bald, somewhat paunchy and seemed surpremely confident.

  “You might be just the man I came to see,” Bahmad said pleasantly.

  Galvez who only k
new that Bahmad worked for bin Laden, gave him a searching look, then brought him across the room where he introduced the thin man as their CFO Juan Zumarraga, and then Sanchez. Neither of them rose to shake Bahmad’s hand, nor was he offered a seat.

  “What can we do for you?” Galvez asked directly.

  Good, Bahmad thought, there was to be no time for pleasantries. “I’ll take just a moment of your time,” he said, smiling politely. “Since this has nothing to do with your financial operations, Mr. Zumarraga can get the fuck out of here, and somebody can get me a beer.” He glared at them. “Now.”

  He sat down in Galvez’s chair, opened his attaché case and took out a map of the west coast of Baja California.

  After a moment Sanchez nodded. Galvez went off to get the beer and Zumarraga got up and left. Bahmad marked the approximate position of the Margo on the map and handed it across the table to Sanchez. They had been told to expect him, but that had been a couple of months ago, before the missile raid on bin Laden’s camp. A lot of attitudes had changed since then.

  “She’s a cargo ship northbound. I have to get aboard her sometime within the next twenty-four hours. Preferably tonight.”

  Sanchez glanced at the map, then handed it to Galvez who’d come back with the beer. “What’s in it for us?” he asked.

  Bahmad considered the question for a moment. “Your continued employment,” he said. “You’re doing an acceptable job, and we would like to keep it that way.”

  Sanchez was amused. “Things have changed. Maybe I will simply continue on my own. I have connections.”

  Bahmad considered that for a moment too, and then shrugged. He put the beer aside, took the map from Galvez and put it back in his attaché case. “Someone will be sent to assassinate you and your family. That will include your wife and children, as well as your mother and your young sister, Juanita.”