The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  “We’ll have your weapon,” Thomas said.

  “No,” McGarvey said.

  The man stepped forward. “We were instructed to take it, sir.”

  “I don’t think you guys really want to have an incident here and now. Lots of people out there would take notice.”

  A dozen foreign service officers were backed up in the aisle waiting to get off, but none of them said a word, waiting for the little drama to play out.

  The limo carrying Powers and two of his top aides pulled away, escorted by two Hummers in the lead and two in the rear filled with armed Pakistani Special Forces troops.

  “What say we just hitch a ride to the embassy,” McGarvey said. “I’m carrying a personal message for Ross from the director. And once he has it I’ll be out of your hair. No trouble. Promise.”

  “Yes, sir,” the taller of the two said. “We’ll hold you to your word.”

  * * *

  The run into the diplomatic section of Islamabad went without incident. Life in the city had gone back to normal. No evidence of the disturbances over the past week were visible, nor were angry crowds lining the highway with protest signs. Traffic was heavy, but no one seemed to be in a hurry, no one seemed to be angry. No one honked their horn.

  “It’s almost spooky,” one of the FSOs commented.

  “Like the city is holding its breath waiting for the shoe to drop,” another one said.

  “How long has it been like this?” McGarvey asked his minders.

  “Ever since the Messiah took over,” Thomas said. “The place was under martial law until the parliament named General Rajput as acting PM and he lifted it.” He glanced at McGarvey. “It looks peaceful, but no one thinks it’s going to last. It’s why Mr. Austin didn’t want someone from Langley coming over here with an attitude, and carrying.”

  “They invited us back.”

  “The diplomats. Not us. Ever since Lundgren went missing we’ve been keeping a low profile.”

  “Was he the one caught in the nuclear incident?”

  “He was out there, and we haven’t heard from him since.”

  “What about you guys? Is the ISI dogging you? Or are you being left alone?”

  Thomas hesitated for just a moment. “If they were on us, I’d understand it; we’ve always had our rat packs. Twenty-four/seven, usually four teams rotating. In and out of the embassy, to and from our quarters, restaurants. Christ, even if we had to take a dump someone was always watching. But not in the past couple of days. Same with the British embassy staff, the French, Germans, Italians, everyone.”

  “Unless they got better and no one has made them,” McGarvey suggested.

  “I wish it was that simple,” Thomas said. “At least we’d know what to expect. But trust me, Parks, no one is following us. It’s one of the reasons Mr. Austin wants you to go back home. If you create an incident there’s no telling what the ISI will do. It’s like walking across a field of broken glass with bare feet: the wrong move and it’ll be a bloody mess.”

  * * *

  Powers was already inside the embassy, his limo and the four military escort vehicles gone when the five vans pulled up and their escorts left. Two marine guards at the main entrance stayed out of sight as much as possible, only opening the gate electrically when the drivers radioed ahead.

  Thomas and the other escort brought McGarvey into the embassy past the security desk and up to the third-floor rear, where the CIA maintained a suite of offices under the guise of the American Information and Cultural Exchange Section.

  Chief of Station, Pakistan, Ross Austin, alerted that they were on the way up, was waiting at the open door to his office, his jacket off, his collar open, his tie loose, sleeves rolled up: the pose of a man, who looked like a Packers’ linebacker, obviously deeply at work. He was a career intelligence officer who hoped one day to raise to at least a deputy director slot. His mentor was Marty Bambridge and at forty Austin fashioned himself after the DDO—pinch-nosed, disapproving, feigning surprise whenever something was set before him. But despite all of that the scuttlebutt was that he was a damned fine COS.

  But, and it was a very large but, in McGarvey’s thinking, Ross Austin, like many chiefs of station, was the CIA in Pakistan. He was not only bright, he knew Pakistan and its government and especially its secret intelligence services better than just about anyone—other than Dave Haaris. At the very least he deserved the truth.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” he told Thomas and the other officer, and motioned for McGarvey to join him.

  Austin’s office was a mess of files, maps, newspapers and the translations of dozens of Pakistani magazines and television and radio broadcasts. He went behind his desk and McGarvey sat across from him.

  “I talked to Walt Page last night, and he asked me to at least hear you out before I sent you away. I have an aircraft standing by to take you to Turkey—Incirlik—right now. Talk to me, Parks.”

  McGarvey had met Austin twice before, once at the Farm and once at Langley. The first time McGarvey had been deputy director of operations, and the second time he’d been the DCI. In each instance the meeting had not been one-on-one.

  “I’m leaving the embassy within the hour, but I am not leaving Pakistan. I have a job to do here.”

  “No.”

  “There’s not much you can say about it, Ross.”

  “Where the hell do you get off addressing me by my first name? Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “My name is Kirk McGarvey. I’m here to assassinate the Messiah and I’ve just put my life in your hands.” He took out his pistol and laid it on the desk.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  McGarvey left the embassy on foot shortly before noon and walked down the driveway and out the gate past the two marine guards, who watched but said nothing. The streets here in what was known as the diplomatic enclave of the city were as safe as any streets could be right now in Pakistan, but McGarvey still felt naked without his pistol, though he understood the theater of leaving it with Austin. An unarmed McGarvey was no immediate threat. It was what he wanted the COS to believe.

  Two blocks away, he got a cab in front of the Canadian embassy and directed the driver to take him to the Marriott Hotel near the Aiwan and the prime minister’s residence. A lot of foreign businessmen and journalists stayed there, and with its double walls and bomb-proof entrance gate, it was among the most secure spots in the city.

  Otto had made the reservations for five nights. “It’ll be a reasonable jumping-off place for you, but you might run into a problem right from the start. They scan people’s luggage at the gate. If they find your gun, they’ll hold you until the cops get there. But the good news is they profile. And you don’t fit the image of a suicide bomber.”

  “I’ll leave it at the embassy until I need it,” McGarvey had said.

  “You’ll have to let Austin in on your plans.”

  “He’s a good man. He won’t want me there, but if Page tells him that I’m staying, he’ll wash his hands of the op but he won’t do anything stupid to put me in harm’s way.”

  “Just being in Pakistan puts you in harm’s way.”

  “Keep an eye on Pete for me.”

  “Louise wants her to stay with us.”

  It went against McGarvey’s better judgment, but he’d agreed. “Make sure that she stays out of sight, she’s supposed to be dead.”

  Passing the Aiwan on Constitution Avenue he saw no signs of the mass demonstration that had taken place only a few days before. Traffic was normal. Like the FSO in the van had said: it was spooky.

  The nation was waiting for the Messiah to show up, to tell the people what to do next. Haaris had said that he was betting that the man was going to push Pakistan into war with India, which was in itself a bizarre position for him to announce so openly if he was in fact the Messiah. Something was missing. But Haaris was probably insane because his advice to the president was to make preemptive strikes on Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

  “Cu
t the head off and the monster will die,” he’d said.

  The president was certain that Pakistan wouldn’t dare start anything. With their reduced nuclear arsenal, they’d lose.

  Neither Rajput nor anyone else in the government had made any mention of the U.S. strikes against their weapons. Not even the international press corps had broken the story, though there were plenty of witnesses on the ground. Nearly everyone’s attention was still focused on the nuclear incident near Quetta, for which no one in the government had offered an explanation.

  Security at the Marriott’s front gate was tight. One of the uniformed security officers led a bomb-sniffing dog around the cab, while another checked McGarvey’s diplomatic passport and a third looked inside the trunk.

  “If you want to check my luggage I have no objection,” McGarvey told the officer.

  “It is not necessary, Dr. Parks,” the officer said.

  The busy lobby was sleek and new, and the check-in went smoothly. He was given a suite on the fourth floor that looked out toward the Margalla Hills. which at night would be alive with the lights of homes.

  As soon as the bellman left, McGarvey used his encrypted phone to call Otto. “I’m in. Has Powers scheduled a news conference yet?”

  “One-thirty local, you’ll have just enough time to get over there. How’d it go with Austin?”

  “He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t about to go head to head with me. Did he call Page?”

  “No. But what’d you tell him?”

  “Everything.”

  “Jesus,” Otto said softly. “You just unzipped your fly. Care to tell me why?”

  “Haaris has been Austin’s chief adviser.”

  “I’ll check the embassy’s phone records, see if he’s called the Connaught in London. But it might not prove anything.”

  “It’d prove that Haaris is still there,” McGarvey said. “But I have a hunch that whoever Doyle’s people are watching is a double, and that Haaris is already here or will be soon. Everyone is waiting for the Messiah to show up.”

  “Including you.”

  “Including me,” McGarvey said. “Where’s the news conference being held?”

  “At the Aiwan with Rajput. And I’ve worked out your secondary cover, including a seven-month back story. You’re a geopolitical blogger on a site called PIP—‘Parks’s International Perspective.’ Right-wing, hawkish. Your basic tenant is that since the Second World War the U.S. has stepped into the role of the world’s benevolent police force. It’s something you believe anyway. I’ve posted almost one hundred articles.”

  “No one at the news conference will have heard of the site.”

  “They do now. Last night when I finished setting it up, I inserted nearly one million hits. An hour ago the number had gone up by two hundred thousand, and it’s still climbing because of your most recent posts on the Messiah wanting to go to war with India. The journalists in the room might never have heard of you until now, but none of them will admit it. Especially not to each other. Not for a while, anyway.”

  “Anybody making any significant comments?”

  “If you mean Dave Haaris, no. But I’m pretty sure that our people here on Campus are aware of the site. I have a filter on it to screen for anyone interesting. But the only posts against you are coming from unknowns or people who didn’t care to identify themselves. I’m working on tracing some of them back to their sources, but nothing much is coming up.”

  “How do I get to it?”

  “Google ‘PIP.’ You’d better read the last half dozen or so posts to get yourself up to speed. But like I said, I didn’t put any words in your mouth that you haven’t already spoken at one time or the other.”

  McGarvey had to smile. “Have I always been that obvious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep an eye on Pete. I don’t trust her.”

  Otto evaded the comment. “I can have a pistol sent in a diplomatic pouch from Jalalabad. Be there by dinnertime.”

  “Don’t do it. I’d have to ditch it every time I came back to the hotel,” McGarvey said. “And if I get into a situation where I’d need a weapon, it’d probably be worthless to me.”

  On the short drive over to the Presidential Palace McGarvey brought the PIP site up on his phone and scrolled backward through several days of articles before the Messiah had made his first appearance. Pakistan, according to what Otto had written, had never been a U.S. friend. Nor had the U.S. been theirs.

  The United States had provided their military with billions in aid so that the U.S. would be allowed to make air strikes on al-Qaeda positions in the rugged mountains on the border with Afghanistan. All the while the ISI gave rock-solid assurances that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were perfectly safe under the protection of the Strategic Plans Division—a separate security service whose sole purpose was guarding the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

  But he argued that the same high-ranking officers in the ISI who had promised nuclear security had also promised that they had no idea of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, even though the man’s compound was less than one mile from Pakistan’s main military academy.

  The military had not officially reacted to the raid on bin Laden’s compound, prompting a lot of text messages to the effect that: if you honk your horn, do so lightly, because the Pakistani army is asleep. The ISI, however—even though it was military intelligence—had worked an under-the-table agreement with a German assassins-for-hire group to kill all the SEAL Team Six operators who’d participated in the raid. And it had very nearly succeeded.

  Into this mix had come the Messiah.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Pete took care to make as little noise as possible as she got dressed in a pair of jeans, loose untucked blue button-up shirt and boat shoes. She went to the window and looked down at the backyard that bordered on some woods.

  The night sky was clear, the moon full, and so far as she could tell nothing moved below. She’d half expected Marty to send some minders from the Campus to watch over her, but last night Otto had assured her that no one had put her on any sort of a leash. He had promised Marty that she wouldn’t do anything dumb.

  “Define ‘dumb,’” she’d asked, but Otto had just laughed.

  The last word she’d been given was that Haaris was holed up at the Connaught in London and Mac had arrived in Pakistan and had checked in at the Marriott. Which put Haaris—if he was the Messiah—at Mac’s six o’clock. And that was totally unacceptable.

  Walking was difficult for her. Her thighs were deeply bruised from the knees up, and just pulling on her jeans had been painful. In addition she had headaches that came and went; sometimes they were so intense that she had to close her eyes and sit down, lest she fall.

  At the moment her head was clear, Mac’s image bright in her mind. Even with his disguise she’d recognized him immediately at the hospital. It was his eyes; everything that was inside him was there to read like an open book. A window into his soul, some poet had written. Her soul.

  She turned to get her overnight bag and purse. Louise, in one of Otto’s floppy KGB T-shirts, her legs bare, one of her quirky smiles on her long, narrow face, stood at the open door.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I’ve been reading,” Louise said.

  “Otto asked you to keep an eye on me?”

  “He talked to Mac and so far everything is going okay, and last we’ve heard Haaris is still in London, but you know that.”

  “So I’m busted, now what?” Pete asked. “You know I can’t just sit on my hands here.”

  “Otto figured you’d want to go to London first, to make sure it’s really Haaris and not some imposter. Boyle has been ordered to personally stay out of it. If it is Haaris, Tommy might get himself killed. Or at the very least he would change the dynamic and force Haaris to do something unexpected.”

  “What’s expected?”

  “We think Haaris is either already in Pakistan or on his way. It’s something Mac need
s to know.”

  “I think so too,” Pete said.

  Louise smiled again. “He’s really going to be pissed off when you show up in Islamabad.”

  “He’ll get over it.”

  “Driven men are not easy to love. I could write a book on the subject. But they’re worth every pound of trouble. In Mac’s case it has to be doubly hard because of what he’s already lost. And now he’s frightened out of his head about losing you.”

  Pete was at a loss for words.

  “He’s in love with you, that’s obvious to the most casual observer, so he wants to keep you in a cotton-batten lined box, tucked out of harm’s way.”

  “He’s wrong about keeping me locked up.”

  “Of course he is,” Louise said. “But good luck trying to argue with him. Just keep your ass down and your eyes peeled. Come downstairs, Otto sent something over for you and I’ll put on the coffee.”

  It was three in the morning. “I want to get to Dulles as early as possible.”

  “No rush, your flight doesn’t leave till nine-thirty. Otto’s booked you a business-class seat on Lufthansa. You’ll get to Heathrow around eleven this evening.”

  Pete wasn’t really surprised, but something must have shown on her face, because Louise laughed.

  “You think being in love with a field operator is tough, you oughta try being in love with a genius. Sometimes it’s downright scary.”

  Pete brought her overnight bag and purse down to the front hall. Louise handed her a small leather bag with a diplomatic seal.

  “Your Glock, a couple of magazines of ammunition and a silencer. The seal will get you through Customs in London.” She handed Pete a manila envelope. “Your tickets, confirmation number at the Connaught for three days, a new passport and other papers, plus air marshal creds, which you’ll need to carry your weapon aboard for the flight to Islamabad. What happens once you get there could be another story, but you’ll just have to take it a step at a time. In the meantime I suggest you take a look at everything—your work name will be Doris Day, and your home address, Hollywood.”