The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  “Don’t ever be sorry for asking a legitimate question. I’ve asked myself the same thing for a long time now, and the best I could come up with is revenge. Plain and simple. Get the bastards who did it.”

  Pete sat on the edge of the bed. She could feel heat coming off his body, and the sight of him so close, his chest bare, started to arouse her. Sometimes field officers who were in love backed each other up when all hell was raining down on their heads, but too often their feelings put them in danger. They dove in to save someone who could not be saved and lost their lives or their freedom.

  “Something’s not right with him. Working with Rajput and then suddenly accusing him of ordering the killing? Especially like that in public. What was he trying to accomplish?”

  “He was pushing the general to see what kind of a reaction he’d get.”

  “He got nothing, at least nothing as far as I could tell.”

  “Haaris is a professional.”

  “So am I,” Pete said. “Everything I’ve seen in his jacket gives him high marks. Page says the guy’s sophisticated. Old-world educated. Last night’s display was anything but. I want to know why.”

  “Maybe I should go in with you.”

  Pete shook her head. “Let’s keep up normal routines. It’s my job for the Company to find out what’s eating people. Your job is to sleep in, have breakfast and take your morning run. Everything as usual.”

  “I’ll come out later this morning, I need to work out a few things with Otto, and talk to Walt and probably Marty.”

  Pete looked at him in the dim illumination from the night-light in the bathroom. He seemed calm, at ease with himself, despite what he was facing. This time she didn’t think it would be quite so simple for him as going up against an assassin somewhere, or even an organization, like the group who’d tried to kill all the SEAL Team Six guys who’d taken bin Laden down. That had been a German terrorist group, all ex-military special operators who’d been hired by the ISI. This time, he would be taking on an entire nation, with just about every other person over there wanting to kill him.

  “I might have something to add,” she said.

  “Watch your back,” McGarvey said.

  “You too,” Pete told him, and she almost said “darling.”

  * * *

  A few doors down Pete looked over her shoulder. McGarvey was in the window watching her. She smiled and waved, then hurried around the corner to her car.

  She lived close and it took less than an hour to take a quick shower and change into a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse and light jacket, before she was back to where she’d parked her car.

  It was still dark, but the morning was coming alive with traffic, mostly garbage trucks, a street-sweeper machine and delivery vans for the bars and restaurants down on M Street. Nothing or no one threatening that she could detect.

  She kept Mac’s pistol in her shoulder bag but laid her Glock 27 on the passenger seat as she took the Key Bridge across the river and started up the parkway to CIA headquarters.

  In the east the sky was beginning to lighten, no clouds, and the trees and other vegetation along the side of the highway were lush. She’d read somewhere that because of various government projects in the past two hundred years there were more species of North American native trees here than anywhere else in the country. In the fall with the colors it was fabulous, but she preferred the full bloom of summer.

  She glanced in her rearview mirror as an eighteen-wheeler, black smoke belching from its twin exhaust pipes, came up and pulled left to pass her. She got the vague impression of a figure behind the wheel and perhaps another riding shotgun. They were trying to make time, and she didn’t bother to keep up or get ahead of them even though the truck would slow down for the hill coming up less than a half mile away. Haaris probably wouldn’t be on Campus this early anyway.

  The cab came even with her and she looked up into the face of a dark-skinned man with a narrow face and black hair as the truck swerved directly across the center line toward her.

  On instinct she reached for her pistol, but she was forced off the side of the pavement and onto the apron before she could reach it. In the next instant her right-side wheels dropped down onto the grass strip and suddenly she was fighting to control the car.

  The truck slammed into the side of her car again, sending her down a steep hill and across the drainage ditch ten feet lower. Before she could straighten out the wheels, the car tipped over on its side and continued rolling for forty yards until it broke through a swatch of bushes, finally smashing roof-first into the bole of a large tree.

  For a seeming eternity she could only wonder that she was still alive—or at least she thought she was, nothing seemed to hurt but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood rolling down her face and neck.

  “The fucking ISI,” she mumbled and dropped down into a dream-like state in which she was vaguely aware that she was still awake, but she couldn’t move. If the bastards who had done this wanted to come down and finish the job, she couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Too bad, Kirk.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pete’s cell phone rang once before the message came up that the call had been forwarded to an automatic message system. “It’s me, give me a call,” McGarvey said and hung up, an odd feeling between his shoulder blades that someone was taking a bead on him.

  He’d phoned her apartment with no success and had left a message at her office. The automatic bar code scanner on the main gate of the Campus had not shown her arriving.

  He called Otto. “Pete left here about an hour ago, and now I can’t reach her on her cell phone. The main gate says she hasn’t scanned in yet.”

  “You try the back gate?”

  “No reason for her to go that way.”

  “Hang on.”

  McGarvey went to the window and looked out toward the Rock Creek Park across Twenty-sixth Street. It was just dawn and already the morning joggers and bicyclers were out in full force.

  Otto was back. “She didn’t come in that way. What are you thinking?”

  “How about accidents between here and the Campus?”

  “Is she still driving the three-hundred Beemer?”

  “Dark green, convertible. DC plates: P-two-thirty-eight-five-seven.”

  “I’m checking,” Otto said. “Was she armed?”

  “I gave her one of my pistols before she left here. Presumably she still has it, and possibly the Glock from her apartment.”

  “A half-dozen fender benders in the city and one accident with injuries on the Beltway down by Alexandria, but nothing on the parkway heading up here. Could be she just stopped somewhere for breakfast.”

  “She wouldn’t have shut off her phone. It’s not like her.”

  “Maybe she has something on her mind. Wants a little room to think it out.”

  “Maybe,” McGarvey said. But that wasn’t like Pete either. If she had something to say, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Just like last night and this morning.

  “Do you want me to give it to Security?”

  “Just keep checking. I’m going for my run, and I’ll come out around ten. I want to talk to Walt.”

  “You’re going to do it?”

  “I don’t know how many other choices we have, after the obvious stage play last night,” McGarvey said. “How about Haaris?”

  “He’s been with his gang all night.”

  “If there was any doubt in Islamabad what our position is, he gave it away.”

  “I’ll keep trying to find Pete, but watch yourself, I shit you not. Your being at the embassy last night makes you even more of a target than you were in Casey Key. Somebody figured that you might get involved so they thought they’d take you out, just in case. But now that they know you’ve jumped in, it’s not likely they’ll give it up. They’ll keep sending people until they get lucky.”

  “I’m counting on it. But she was with me, so she’s a target too.”

  McGarvey put on
a Kevlar vest under his sleeveless sweatshirt, stuffed his Walther in his belt at the small of his back and his cell phone in his pocket, and left his apartment. He waited for a break in traffic then jogged across Twenty-sixth Street and into Rock Creek Park, which ran from the Potomac up to Oak Hill Cemetery, where it blended with Montrose Park and finally the National Zoological Park.

  This was a favorite place for him. In Florida he swam in the Gulf and ran on the beach. Here he jogged every morning he possibly could in the park. It was his habit, his routine. Anyone who had him under surveillance for even a short length of time knew it.

  More than once in the past few years he’d been attacked while he ran along the river. It was like going fishing. He tossed in the bait and waited for the strike. And just like real fish, the guys wanting to take him out never seemed to learn from each other’s mistakes.

  But Otto was right: Sooner or later they’d either send enough people to make the odds overwhelming. Or a decent sniper hiding somewhere across the creek would get lucky with a head shot.

  Once he was on the path he took a fighter’s stance, bobbing and weaving as he ran, air boxing, ducking left and right, slipping punches. This too was sometimes part of his routine. It kept him loose. Other joggers had their own styles, and no one thought anyone else was odd. They were all out here for the same thing, to stay healthy. Though he figured that this morning no one else but him would be a target for some hitman.

  He crossed under the Rock Creek Parkway so that he could take the path along the creek. A few hundred yards north he came to the P Street Bridge, where he pulled up and shadowboxed in place.

  For a moment he stopped moving. Cocking his head he listened to the sounds of the building traffic, under which was the soft gurgle of water over rocks, and somewhere a dog barking, a horn tapping twice.

  No one had followed him nor had there been anyone obviously keeping just ahead of him. Nor had he spotted anyone seated at one of the picnic benches or lurking in the trees.

  A shot from a rooftop to the west in Georgetown was certainly possible. But if a sniper had been set up there waiting for him to come out of his apartment, he could have taken the shot almost immediately. To the east toward Dupont Circle most of the sight lines to his position were partially blocked by trees.

  If he was going to do it, he would be somewhere in the park, or in a car or van driving along the parkway. But traffic was still not heavy, and McGarvey had not spotted anyone suspicious passing by.

  He turned and started back. It was possible that a sharp ISI analyst had worked out the likelihood that he would actually come to Islamabad. He’d been there before. They knew him, they knew what he looked like, how he moved.

  Taking him out here would be chancy. Florida was easier. Running him over in the water could be defended as an accident. Inexperienced boaters not spotting a head in the waves; accidents like that had happened before.

  And that same analyst could also have come to the conclusion that if McGarvey was running in the park, after the incident in Florida, he would be offering himself as a target in order to catch the gunman. A possibly no-win outcome if the shooter missed, because despite opposition to what the Company called enhanced methods of interrogation, such methods were still used when necessary. If McGarvey captured an ISI contractor, the truth would come out.

  Still weaving and bobbing as he ran, McGarvey reached the parkway when his cell phone rang. It was Otto.

  “I found her. She’s banged up but not seriously. They’re taking her to All Saints right now.”

  A cool, dispassionate anger came over him. “What happened?”

  “I sent a chopper up to find her. Looks like she was forced off the road a few miles south of our front gate. She rolled down the hill and up against a tree. No one could see her from the parkway because of the heavy brush.”

  McGarvey jogged across the road. “Is she conscious?”

  “Our guys who got to her first said she was in and out. Lots of blood but it looked like superficial scalp wounds. Could be a concussion but we won’t know until Franklin takes a look at her.”

  “I’m going to change clothes and get over there. Tell Page I’m taking the president’s assignment.”

  “The ISI will spot you the minute you get off the plane.”

  “No. they won’t,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

  * * *

  It was after ten by the time Franklin came out of the operating theater on the second floor and walked down to talk to McGarvey in the waiting room at the end of the hall.

  “She’ll have a couple of black eyes and a lot of bruising on her legs and thighs, but there were no broken bones nor any brain trauma.”

  “She’s hardheaded.”

  Franklin shook his head. “You all are,” he said. “How’s Dave Haaris doing?”

  “He’s back at work.”

  “Too bad about his wife on top of his own problem.” Franklin shook his head again. “I don’t see how you guys do it. Patching you up is a hell of a lot easier job.”

  “When can I see her?”

  “They’re cleaning her up now. She wants to go home, but I’m keeping her overnight just to be on the safe side. You can try to talk some sense into her as soon as they get her up to her room. I don’t want her getting dressed and walking out of here.”

  McGarvey went up to Pete’s room on the third floor as soon as she was wheeled up from the operating theater. Her smile was lopsided but she was as glad to see him as he was to see her. He kissed her lightly on her cheek.

  “Franklin says you’ll be okay, but he’s keeping you overnight.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” Pete said, her voice a little slurred.

  “I’m taking your old clothes, they’re a mess, and bringing you some clean clothes and some other stuff in the morning. You’ll be staying on Campus for the time being. They tried to take you out to make me think twice.”

  “You’ve decided?”

  “No other choice,” McGarvey said, and an expression he couldn’t read came over Pete’s face.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  McGarvey passed the spot where Pete’s car was forced off the road, broad furrows cut in the grassy slope all the way down into the bush and trees that no passing motorist had spotted. The ISI—and now he was almost 100 percent certain it was they—had tried to kill her to get to him. And from their point of view it had been the right thing to do, given his history. But if they had meant to distract him by a repeat performance of something that had happened to him three times before—killing someone very close to him—they were dead wrong.

  Vengeance hadn’t worked for them when they’d sent a German assassination squad to the U.S. to kill all the SEAL Team Six operators who had taken out bin Laden. But here and now for McGarvey, vengeance was a powerful motivator.

  He was given a VIP pass at the main gate and he drove up to the Old Headquarters Building and parked in the basement garage. The elevator stopped at the security station on the first floor, where he had to surrender his weapon before he was issued a pass that allowed him access to just about every office on the entire campus. Many former DCI’s retained that badging privilege because they often worked in unpublicized advisory capacities. And every time McGarvey walked through the door, the security people welcomed him back.

  He’d phoned ahead and Walt Page was waiting for him upstairs on the seventh floor. The DCI’s secretary passed him straight through. No one else was present. It was just the two of them, as McGarvey had insisted be the case.

  “How’s Miss Boylan?” Page asked.

  “Banged up but not serious. Franklin’s keeping her overnight to make sure. I’m going to bring her out here soon as she’s released, have Security keep an eye on her.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Were you told what happened at the Pakistani embassy last night?”

  “John Fay filled me in. Said that you and Miss Boylan were there too. Are you going to tell me that the attack
on her this morning had something to do with what went on there?”

  “I think that the ISI wants to keep me out of the mix. It’s why they tried to kill me in Florida, and it’s why they went after Pete—to distract me. Have you seen Dave this morning?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first. Susan Kalley called from the White House, wanting to know what the hell happened. The president is ready to discount just about everything Dave’s told her. And she’s pulling the records of every meeting he had with her, even during her campaign.”

  “What’ll she find?”

  “Nothing but solid advice, so far as I know. But his wife’s murder has hit him very hard. I’m thinking about putting him on administrative leave.”

  “Might not be a bad idea, but give it a day or so. I’m going to talk to him this morning.”

  “You don’t trust him.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. Both he and Pete had got the strong impression that Haaris’s performance last night had been staged, and he said as much to Page.

  “You and Otto think that he might be the Messiah,” the director said. “But it could be that you’re cherry-picking him. Focusing on every little bit that supports your notion while discounting everything else. Suppose it was an intruder, a burglar, who his wife surprised, and not a hitman sent by the ISI?”

  “The ISI didn’t kill her, nor did a burglar.”

  “Who then?”

  “He did it.”

  Page sat back. “Good Lord almighty. Do you have proof?”

  “No, but their marriage could have been a front all along. Could be she walked in on something he was doing or saying that she wasn’t suppose to know about. He wouldn’t have had much of a choice.”

  Page’s secretary buzzed him. He picked up the phone. “Not now.” But then he looked at McGarvey. “Dave Haaris would like to have a word with you as soon as possible.”

  “Five minutes,” McGarvey said.

  Page gave his secretary the message and hung up.