The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  Haaris crossed his legs and shrugged. “Prognosis?”

  “We can remove the tumor, but as for the bone cancer you’ll need chemotherapy, and it won’t be pleasant.”

  “I meant the overall prognosis, Doctor. Am I going to beat this and live a long-enough life to have a dozen grandchildren?”

  Franklin was used to dealing with intelligence officers, most of whom were tough-minded, pragmatic people; nevertheless, his simple and direct reply gave even Haaris pause.

  “No.”

  “I see. Assuming I choose not to go the route of chemotherapy, how long do I have to live?”

  “There’s no way to say with any degree of certainty. A year, maybe longer, maybe less.”

  “Let me put it another way. I’m in the middle of something quite important. It has to do with the situation in Pakistan. And I can’t walk away from it. How much viable time do I have? Mental acuity as well as physical? I must be able to think straight.”

  “Frankly, that’ll depend on your tolerance for pain.”

  “I’ve been there before.”

  “Six months tops, I’m afraid.”

  “I see.” Haaris paused. “Thank you for telling me straight out,” he said. “Now, I don’t suppose I could convince you to withhold your diagnosis from my employer?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Maybe a delay for a week or so?”

  “Marty Bambridge is here with your wife,” Franklin said. “I phoned him to come over.” Bambridge was the deputy director of the Clandestine Service, also known as the Directorate of Operations.

  A moment of intense rage threatened Haaris’s sanity. For just that moment he was on the verge of coming around the desk and killing Franklin. But it vanished as quickly as it arose. “I will take care of letting my wife know. Are we perfectly clear on this, Doctor?”

  “Your call, Mr. Haaris.”

  “Yes, my call, as you say.”

  * * *

  Haaris stopped for a second just before the frosted glass door to the visitors’ lounge to gather his wits. The deputy director was a complete idiot, who’d had the solid reputation of caring more for the mission than the man, so getting past him would present no obstacle. He would be perfectly willing to keep the news to himself, so long as the job was being handled. He’d make some noise, of course, and possibly bounce it up to the seventh floor. But six months was more than enough time for Messiah to set things in motion. Payback.

  The biggest problem would be Deborah. She and Haaris had been married five years, after a whirlwind romance. She’d been a student at the Farm, where he’d given a brief series of lectures on developing and using psychological profiles of the opposition’s field agents. That included the Chinese, who thought differently than Westerners, and spies sent by America’s “friends” in Canada, England, France and Germany.

  She’d been an indifferent student at best, completely in awe of the CIA in general and Haaris specifically, whom she thought was the most sophisticated, kind and gentle man she’d ever met since she’d graduated from Stetson University law school in Florida.

  And for his part, he was in need of a bullet-proof cover if he was ever going to be promoted to a high enough level within the Company where his opinions mattered. Single men might make for good field officers, but working at headquarters, they made a lot of people nervous. Where did their loyalties lie and all that?

  The woman had been incredibly boring to him from the start. Their sex unimaginative and mechanical. Her cooking, Midwestern meat and potatoes—she was from some small town in Iowa. She lacked any practical education vis-à-vis intelligence work. And most of all, her professed unconditional love and absolute devotion and loyalty were nothing short of stifling. But anyone from the Company who’d ever met her fell totally in love at first sight. She was the quintessential American wife. From the beginning he’d thought of her as a lap dog. The CIA needed people like her for background noise.

  He opened the door and went in.

  “There he is at last, in one piece,” Bambridge said, getting up. The deputy director was short and slender with dark eyes that were usually angry. He always moved as if his feet were hurting him, and his expression suggested that just about everything he heard or encountered came as a surprise. “Clean bill of health and all that?”

  “The doctor says I’ll live at least until the end of the year,” Haaris said. “He’d like to have a word with you.”

  Bambridge gave him a searching look, but then nodded. “Are you up for your debriefing this afternoon? Say, four?”

  “I’ll be there.

  “Lots to tell?”

  “Indeed.”

  Bambridge left, and Deb, who was five-three, blond and a little on the softig side, jumped up. She was shivering, her face a study of emotions from happiness to fear. She was dressed in a short skirt, with a frilly white blouse and flats, because she’d never learned how to walk in heels.

  Haaris opened his arms to her and she came to him. He winced in more pain then he actually felt when she put her arms around him, and she cried out.

  “Oh, God, David, I’ve hurt you!”

  “It’s all right, sweetheart. I’m just glad to be home in one piece with you.”

  FIFTEEN

  A car and driver were waiting for McGarvey and Pete at Joint Base Andrews when their CIA Gulfstream landed and taxied to a navy hangar. They thanked the crew and walked over to the Cadillac Escalade, where a very large man in a plain blue jacket opened the back door.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Director,” he said. “Don’t know if you remember, but I used to drive you places.”

  “Tony,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes, sir, good to see you again.”

  On the drive out to Langley, McGarvey came to the realization that he would not have answered the summons from the president if he hadn’t been attacked that morning. “How many people knew that you were coming to talk to me?” he asked Pete as they got off the Beltway and took the George Washington Parkway toward the CIA’s main entrance road.

  “The president and at least some of her staff. Me, Marty, Walt Page, and Otto, of course.”

  “Whose call was it?”

  “I guess the president asked Walt to contact you.”

  “Last night?”

  “I imagine so. Marty called me about three in the morning, said you weren’t answering your phone, so he wanted me to go to Florida and talk to you. Thought you might need some convincing. “

  “The guys who tried to run me over did that. Apparently someone doesn’t want me meddling in this business. Someone who has a contact either at the White House or in our shop.”

  Pete nodded. “I was thinking the same thing, but it could also be someone who suspected that you might be called in and wanted to stop your involvement even before you got started.”

  “That too,” McGarvey said. “But it still points to an insider.”

  * * *

  Haaris and his wife had a nice two-story Colonial just west of Massachusetts Avenue and within a few blocks of the Finnish and Dominican Republic embassies. She drove him home from the hospital, chatting all the way about how she hoped that he would feel better real soon. She was hoping they could fly out to see her parents in Des Moines and maybe even take them for a surprise vacation to Hawaii.

  At home he took a quick shower and changed into a suit and tie, Deb dogging his every step, even sitting on the toilet seat while he dried off.

  “My God, they beat you terrible,” she said. His chest was black and blue and his face was still puffed up. “We help them and how do they repay us?”

  “It’s okay,” Haaris told her, and he had a little twinge of sorrow for her. She would be lost when he was dead, and he felt as if he almost cared.

  “No, it’s not. And now you’re going back to work.”

  “I was sent over to try to make a difference.”

  “Did you?” she asked, her voice sharp, only because she was hurting for him.
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br />   “I hope so,” he said.

  He kissed her on the cheek and took his Mercedes CLS500 down to West Potomac Park, where he walked over to the Vietnam Memorial wall with its fifty-thousand-plus names. It was three on a weekday afternoon, but the weather was good and a lot of people were in the park, many of them seated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  A man something over six feet tall, with the frame of a footballer, wearing jeans, a polo shirt and a Yankees baseball cap, stood at a point at the wall where several KIAs named Johnson were engraved. He was Colonel Hasan Kayani, who controlled all ISI activities in the U.S. from his offices at the UN in New York. The FBI knew him as a low-level diplomat with the Saudi delegation, but when he left the city he traveled with a British passport under the name Wasif Jones. His English was spot-on, in part because he’d always been a quick study, but in a larger measure because he, like Haaris, had been educated in the UK. And also like Haaris, had been bright enough to hide his radicalism when he had been recruited by the Pakistani intel service nine years earlier.

  Haaris had been a walk-in recruit up in New York and had been feeding Kayani information about the CIA’s activities in Pakistan for the past three years. The colonel knew that Haaris had been sent to work with the ISI in Islamabad, but he did not know that Haaris was the Messiah. Only General Rajput knew that secret.

  “The general said that you had received some rough treatment,” Kayani said, glancing over.

  “I’ll live,” Haaris said, that old phrase of his sounding odd in his ears now.

  “My God, Page will be beside himself. Your trip to Islamabad completely backfired. Have you been debriefed yet?”

  “I’m on my way over.”

  “What do you think of this Messiah business? Crazy, if you ask me.”

  “The people in the street are behind it. And we’re finally going to have peace with the Taliban. So who knows where it’ll lead?”

  “Not me. But no one else knows what to make of it either.”

  “Thanks for taking care of the McGarvey business. That bastard could have created some trouble. He usually does wherever he goes.”

  “The mission failed,” Kayani said. “I thought that you would have heard by now.”

  Haaris forced himself to remain calm. He needed only one thing from this buffoon, and the man had screwed it up. “What happened?”

  “I don’t have all of the details at this point, except that the powerboat my two people rented in Sarasota crashed on the beach and exploded. I’ve not heard from them since, so I assume they died in the crash.”

  “What beach?” Haaris asked, his voice even.

  “Apparently directly across the street from Mr. McGarvey’s house.”

  “Send someone else to do the job.”

  “Don’t you think that he will be alerted to the fact that someone is trying to kill him? The CIA will certainly take notice.”

  “I want the bastard dead within the next twelve hours—twenty-four at most. And I don’t give a damn how many assets you have to burn.” Haaris turned to the man. “Have I made myself clear, Colonel? Do you understand what’s at stake?”

  At stake was Haaris continuing to feed solid-gold intel to the ISI in the person of Colonel Kayani. The pipeline from the CIA had made the man’s career.

  “Consider it done.”

  * * *

  The Cadillac SUV was passed directly through the main gate, and driving up the road through the woods to the Original Headquarters Building—the one always shown in TV and in the movies—McGarvey had the same sensation he always had coming back like this. It was part excitement to be back in the hunt, part nostalgia for days past and sometimes just, at some point way in the back of his head, the tiniest bit of fear, or more accurately, concern, that sooner or later he was going to screw up. Sooner or later he would go up against someone, or someones, better than he was.

  They parked in the underground VIP garage, and Pete went up to the seventh floor with him. She left him at Page’s office. “They’re expecting you.”

  “What about you?”

  “They want me to sit in on Dave Haaris’s debriefing.”

  McGarvey’s ears perked up, though he didn’t let it show. “They suspect him of something?”

  “Good heavens, no,” Pete said. “I’ve known about the guy for a few years now, and without him we wouldn’t have a Pakistan Desk. But he was over there in the middle of it; the Taliban picked him up on the airport road, and the ISI managed to get him released. We just need the details. Might be something that could help. He’ll point the way.”

  SIXTEEN

  McGarvey was shown straight through by the DCI’s personal secretary. Page was sitting on one of the couches in the middle of the large office, facing Marty Bambridge and the CIA’s general counsel, Carlton Patterson, who were seated on the other. Otto was perched on the edge of Page’s desk.

  “Oh, wow, Jim Forest is looking for you,” Otto said. He was a barrel-chested odd duck of a computer genius, with long red hair tied in a ponytail. He wore jeans and a KGB sweatshirt. He was McGarvey’s best friend, and they had a long history together.

  “I expect he is,” McGarvey said. Forest was the chief of detectives for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, and he and McGarvey also had a history together. He would be taking the boat accident as no coincidence.

  “Good afternoon,” Page said, gesturing McGarvey to an empty chair. “You weren’t injured?” he asked. He’d run IBM until the president before Miller had tapped him to take over the CIA, and the administration saw no need to replace him.

  “It was close, but Miss Boylan was waiting for me on the beach, and she helped out.”

  “She told me,” Bambridge said. “A pretty big chance for her to take, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Don’t start, Marty, I didn’t come up here to play your games,” McGarvey said. He too had a history with the deputy director of the Clandestine Service, not much of it any good. In his estimation Bambridge was a damned good desk jockey but not much of a field officer, though he fancied he was.

  “My dear boy, have you been brought up to date on the situation in Pakistan?” Patterson asked. He was a tall slender man, with thinning white hair and the patrician manners of an old-school gentleman. He’d been the Agency’s general counsel for what seemed like forever. In his early eighties, everyone in the business was much younger than he; his “dear boys” and “dear girls.”

  “Miss Boylan briefed me on the flight up, and Otto sent me some material while we were still in the air. But I don’t know what the president thinks I can do about it.”

  “You’re not an analyst, Mac,” Otto said. “But I think the woman is off her rocker if she’s going to send you out to do what I think she will.”

  Page’s jaw tightened. Like just about everyone else on the campus he tolerated Rencke mostly because he had a great deal of respect and even awe for the computer guru. And it was once suggested to him that since it was Otto who had designed the advanced computer systems for the entire U.S. intelligence community—including the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet monitoring capabilities—he could also destroy them.

  McGarvey let Otto’s comment slide for the moment. “What’s Dave Haaris recommending?”

  “Nothing yet,” Bambridge said. “He’s being debriefed at the moment. Soon as he’s done he wants to get back with his people and come up with a plan. He said we’re going to need one to get ourselves out of this mess.” He hesitated.

  “But?” McGarvey prompted. It wasn’t like the deputy director to hold back.

  Bambridge glanced at Page, who nodded.

  “The Taliban beat him up. Dislocated his jaw, broke a couple of teeth with a rifle butt. Cracked a couple of ribs. We took him to All Saints, where they fixed his teeth and took some X-rays of his chest to see how bad the damage was.” Bambridge looked away for a beat, the gesture also uncharacteristic for him. “The thing is, Franklin says Haaris has cancer, and it’s s
preading. Chemo and radiation therapy would prolong his life but not by much. Anyway, Dave declined.”

  “How long does he have?”

  “Less than a year, six months of which he’ll be on his feet. But after that he’ll probably go downhill pretty fast.”

  “It’s why he wants to get back with his people to help figure out what our response should be,” Page said. He shook his head. “It’s a damned shame, when we need him the most.”

  “You gave him the option to quit?” McGarvey asked. He knew almost nothing about Haaris except for his reputation, which was as sterling as his impeccable manners.

  “Of course,” Page said. “I spoke to him a half hour ago. Told me he was a little rushed for time, so he excused himself and left.”

  “Extraordinary man, by all accounts,” Patterson interjected. Yet there was something in his tone of voice and the look in his eyes that didn’t sit quite right. But McGarvey let that slide as well.

  “Here’s the situation as I see it. The president wants to see me. Since I shut down my phone and computer—I wanted to be left alone—Miss Boylan was sent to talk me into coming up here.”

  Bambridge started to say something, but McGarvey held him off.

  “Did anyone at the White House know I wasn’t taking calls?”

  “Her chief of staff, Tom Broderick, I would imagine,” Page said. “It was he who phoned to ask if you were in town.”

  “Who else here on campus?”

  “All of us in this room—except for Carlton,” Page said.

  “A couple of people on my staff, including the housekeepers who arranged the aircraft,” Bambridge said.

  “Me and Louise,” Otto said. Louise was Otto’s wife, who sometimes did contract work for the Agency.

  “Someone knew Miss Boylan was coming to see me, and they didn’t want that to happen,” McGarvey said. “Means two things: there’s a leak here or at the White House, and whatever the president’s going to ask me to do involves the situation in Pakistan.”