The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  Haaris couldn’t hide his surprise. “I wasn’t told.”

  “No reason. You and Rajput own this part of Pakistan, we own the north. Even you cannot imagine our reach.”

  “There have been no suspicions?”

  “The packages are radiologically sealed and hidden in boxes marked hazardous. No one will touch them until they reach their destinations in a few days.”

  Haaris nodded. Even McGarvey was helpless to stop them.

  “And now it’s time for me to talk to my people again. Tell them who is really to blame for their woes.”

  “You mean our people,” the mufti said.

  “My people,” Haaris said. He took out a silenced Glock and shot the mufti in the middle of the forehead.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Thomas sunk to his knees next to his wife’s body and arranged her clothing to cover her nakedness. Tears streamed down his face. The bullet wound in his back was merely oozing now. He had lost a lot of blood; his complexion was milky white.

  “Is there someplace else for you to go?” McGarvey asked. “They know about you.”

  “It’s not what you think. The ISI didn’t do this. It is our neighbors, the men from the teahouse at the corner. They resent my marriage to Wafa. I’m not a Pakistani. They’ve taught me a lesson.”

  “Do you want us to go after them?” Pete asked.

  “It wouldn’t bring her back.”

  “You won’t be safe here,” Pete said.

  “I won’t be safe from myself anywhere,” Thomas said. He pulled out his pistol. He looked up. “Both of you need to get out of here. If you can get to the Marriott, call Austin, he’ll arrange for the the airlift across the border.”

  “We’re not leaving you,” Pete said. She looked to McGarvey. “Tell him, Mac.”

  “Don’t be stupid. There’s not a fucking thing you can do here for either of us. You’re on a mission,” said Thomas.

  “Goddamnit,” Pete cursed.

  “He’s right,” McGarvey said. “The two days are nearly up; whatever’s supposed to happen will go down today.”

  “We can’t just leave him.”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said.

  He took Pete’s sat phone, called Otto and explained the situation.

  “Sit tight, I’ll have Austin send somebody for you,” Rencke said. “You’ll be safe waiting at the embassy. The chopper can pick you guys up there after midnight.”

  “Pete and Thomas are going to hole up at the embassy; I have something else to finish,” McGarvey said. He had a fair idea what was going to happen sometime this morning, sometime soon, but something else nagged at him. Something he was missing, something they were all missing, had been from the beginning, and it was driving him nuts.

  “What are you talking about, kemo sabe? Every gun in town is looking for you. And by now Haaris has probably figured out who’s screwing with the ISI’s mainframe, and once he figures out that it’s me, he’ll have to know who you are.”

  “They’ll expect me to take refuge in the embassy,” McGarvey said. “They won’t bother about Pete as long as she’s not with me. But they’ll keep watch until I show up. Every car, truck, delivery van, anyone showing up on foot, will be searched.”

  “I’m not going to leave you,” Pete said.

  “Haaris is going to make another announcement, first on radio and TV, and then he’s going to make an appearance on the front balcony of the Aiwan.”

  “The announcement was made five minutes ago,” Otto said. “He’s going to speak to the people in person and reveal Pakistan’s true enemies.”

  “Enemies, plural?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The crazy bastard’s engineered another nine-eleven.”

  “There’s more. One of my darlings picked up a brief mention in the ISI’s mainframe about weapons inventories. We took out eighty-seven of their nukes and we know where most of the rest are depoted, but four are missing from Quetta’s list. The Taliban detonated one, so that leaves three unaccounted for. If the inventory is accurate.”

  “London’s on the list. He’s got an ax to grind because of how they treated him as a kid.”

  “That’d make him insane as well as brilliant,” Otto said. “A bad combination.”

  “Tell Page what we think might be coming our way and have him inform Sir John.” Sir John Notesworthy was head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

  “What about the president?”

  “That’s her call,” McGarvey said. “But I don’t think this’ll wait for a diplomatic solution.”

  “You’re going ahead with the op,” Otto said. “You’re going to show up at the Aiwan and try to take him out. With what? You don’t have a sniper rifle, so it’ll have to be a pistol shot, which means short range.”

  “It has to be that way.”

  “Goddamnit, why, Mac? You might get close enough to him to pull it off, but afterwards you’ll never get out of there. The mob will tear you apart.”

  “He’s almost certainly compartmentalized the entire thing, which means he’s the only one who knows all the details.”

  “He won’t talk to you,” Otto said.

  “I think he will,” McGarvey said. “Now get on it, but, listen, Otto, keep everything low-key. I suspect that he still has a go-to on Campus.”

  “Your name or the op haven’t been mentioned. The list is very tight.”

  “I know, but if word gets out that we’re taking a special interest in incoming flights and ships, especially to DC, New York and London—and if I can’t get to him in time—his plans will change. He could postpone everything for a week or a month, even a year. We couldn’t keep up the tightened security posture forever.”

  Otto was silent for a long time, and Pete looked stricken.

  “I’m getting word to Austin,” Otto finally said. “I don’t like this, Mac.”

  “Do you think I do?” McGarvey asked.

  * * *

  McGarvey borrowed a pair of loose trousers and a knee-length shirt from Thomas, and armed with Pete’s Glock and a spare magazine of ammunition he came back downstairs to where she was finishing bandaging Thomas’s wound.

  “Good luck, pal,” Thomas said, his voice strong. He was holding up well. Hate was a powerful motivator.

  “Nothing I can do for you unless you go to the embassy with Pete.”

  “They’d think I was you, and we wouldn’t get within a block of the place. Then both of us would be in the shit.”

  “I’ll have somebody come back for you after it’s settled,” Pete said.

  Thomas actually smiled. “Sounds good.”

  Pete came outside with McGarvey. “I understand what you’re doing, though I can’t approve. Your chances are slim to none, and you know it.”

  McGarvey shrugged. “I’ve faced worse odds.”

  “I want you to know something first.”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Nothing you can do to stop me, Kirk. But the fact of the matter is that I love you.”

  McGarvey didn’t want to hear it, not from Pete, not from any woman. At night when he dreamed it was always of Katy. On the sailboat at anchor; at home in her gazebo on the Intracoastal Waterway on Casey Key; in Washington, Paris, Berlin, Toyko, once even Moscow and another time, Beijing. She’d wanted to see some of the places he’d been.

  “So long as no one is shooting at us,” she’d said.

  But it hadn’t lasted, of course. There’d been the of course almost from the beginning. All the women he had loved, including his daughter, had been taken from him because of what he did, because of who he was, who he had always been.

  “I know that you feel something for me,” Pete said.

  McGarvey looked away.

  “I want to hear you say it. Just once.”

  “No.”

  “Even if you don’t mean it, Kirk.”

  He looked at her. “Not yet,” he said. “It’s the best I can do for now.”

  She smiled. “It’
ll do,” she said.

  SIXTY

  Haaris, in his full regalia, including the voice-altering collar, sat behind the president’s desk watching a replay on a laptop of his canned announcement, which was being broadcast through just about every media outlet in the world.

  The building’s staff was at a bare minimum, most of them security officers forbidden to come above the ground floor. No real work of government was being done from here; Rajput handled the day-to-day business of the country, and he was doing a reasonable job, considering the difficult circumstances.

  Except for the business with Kirk McGarvey.

  “We have come to a new juncture in Pakistan’s future, you and I,” his image on the monitor was saying. “One that I must apologize for not seeing. The signs were there for me to see even in my blindness.”

  Haaris smiled. Politics was theater. Even, certainly, American presidents had always known it, especially Reagan, who’d been the consummate White House actor. But his had been an excellent presidency because of it. First, he had known how to hire bright people. Second, he had listened to them. And third, he played well on television.

  “I have a way forward for us. Not with guns but with hope. With understanding.”

  The mufti’s body lay where it had fallen, on its back, very little blood from the head shot, its arms splayed, one leg over the other.

  “For us there will be no Shiite-Sunni war. We will not become another Iraq, dominated by the U.S. Our future is what we will make of it. And I promise that our future will be a bright one, beginning today.”

  He got up and went to the double doors to the balcony. Already people were streaming onto Constitution Avenue. Many were coming from the direction of the parliament building, the National Library and the Supreme Court to the south, as well as the Secretariat to the north. But many came from the west, starting to choke rush hour traffic on Jinnah Avenue,

  This time the crowd would be bigger than for his first public appearance. They wanted answers, and he would give them what they wanted.

  He phoned Rajput. “Have you found him?”

  “We think that he’s gone to ground in Rawalpindi at the house of one of our police informers, who works for the CIA but for us as well. We’ve tolerated the man because he’s given us good intel from time to time and we handed him bits of disinformation that we know got back to Austin’s people.”

  “Do not try to take him into custody; this is very important, General. Kill him on sight. Am I clear?”

  “Now that we know who he really is, he could be invaluable.”

  “Am I clear?”

  “Despite your clever speech this morning, you are not running this country. You are nothing more than a traitor—three times removed. First against Pakistan, the country of your birth. Second, against Great Britain, the country that educated you. And third, the U.S., the country that gave you employment and listened to your advice. Now where does your loyalty lie?”

  “Look out the window,” Haaris said.

  “I am at this moment. But what if you were to be exposed as an American spy?”

  “Are you getting cold feet?”

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, exactly what sort of a deal you’ve made with the TTP, but I think that it has gone too far. The Taliban have never been our friends. We have used them on the Kashmir border to keep the Indian army occupied, but nothing else.”

  “Just as the Americans used bin Laden and al Qaeda to keep the Russians distracted in Afghanistan. Need I remind you of that outcome?”

  “You need not,” Rajput flared. “Perhaps we will take care of Mr. McGarvey, as you suggest, and then perhaps we will come for you before it’s too late.”

  “You would fall with me,” Haaris said. “But if you stay the course the outcome will be more than even you could imagine.”

  “That’s what worries me.”

  “Your name is written all over this operation.”

  “What operation?” Rajput shouted.

  “To strike a blow against Pakistan’s real enemies.”

  “Save me,” Rajput said after a beat. It was the same thing the mufti had said just before his death.

  * * *

  Haaris sat sipping tea at the desk for a full half hour, before he went back to the windows. The crowd had swelled enormously, completely filling the broad avenue for as far as he could see. At least eight or ten television vans had set up at the edges of the crowd not far from the Aiwan’s security fence. He picked out ABC, CBS, the BBC and Al-Jazeera, along with others.

  The international media were here for one of the biggest shows on the planet, which to this point had not involved wholesale bloodshed. It was something unique.

  Before dawn he had set up the sound system on the balcony but had not called up the technicians to drag out the Jumbotron screen. It would be enough for his people to see him in person, even if at a distance, and to hear his voice.

  He went to the controls and switched on the power, then took the still-bloody machete he’d used to decapitate Barazani from the closet.

  As early as six years ago, he’d advised the Pakistani government to strengthen its alliance with the Taliban but to watch them very carefully should the same thing happen as happened with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA had gone along with him, as had the White House. It was to the Americans’ advantage to nurture Pakistan’s reliance on their military aid so that the U.S. could fight the war against the Afghani insurgents who took refuge across the border. Pakistan needed the money to fight the Taliban, which had turned on them, as Haaris had predicted they would.

  “And here we are,” he said to the mufti’s corpse. “Come round full circle to the final act, which none of you in your wildest dreams could have predicted.”

  He heaved the body over onto its stomach, and raising the machete nearly severed the head from the neck, the sharp blade crunching through the spinal column at the base of the skull. He had to strike two more times before he managed to cut through the cartilage and other tissue until the mufti’s head came completely free from the body.

  Tossing the machete aside, he picked up the head by the hair above the base of the skull. The mufti’s black cap fell off, and Haaris awkwardly managed to put it back in place before he walked to the doors, opened them and stepped out onto the balcony.

  Immediately a roar rose from the crowd.

  “Messiah! Messiah! Messiah!”

  Haaris raised the mufti’s head high.

  A sigh swept across the mob.

  “This is the face of our enemy,” he shouted. “It is they who exploded the nuclear weapon near Quetta. Their intention was to kill as many of our people as possible. But our soldiers gave their lives to make sure the death toll was small.”

  An uneasy silence came over the broad avenue.

  “This is just the first blow. There must be more. We need to eliminate the terrorists from our midst. We can no longer abide the murders of innocent civilians. Ordinary people like you. The killings must stop now!”

  “Messiah!” a lone voice near the front cried.

  “We must make a jihad against the killers of our babies.”

  Several other voices joined the chorus. “Messiah!”

  “But the Taliban is just a tool used by our real enemies!”

  “Messiah!” The chant rose.

  “The Taliban are the messengers sent to us from New Delhi!”

  The cries were louder.

  “Allies of America! Do not forget! Never forget!”

  SIXTY-ONE

  McGarvey watched from the partially open gate as the Cadillac Escalade that Austin had sent for Pete turned the corner at the end of the block. The neighborhood was strangely quiet for this time of the morning, but Otto had told him that Haaris was making another major announcement at the Aiwan. The crowds were enormous, people drawn from all around Islamabad and even down here from Rawalpindi.

  “I’m not leaving Pakistan without you,” she’d told him before she got into t
he SUV. Austin had sent two stern-looking men to retrieve her.

  “Are you coming with us, sir?” one of them asked.

  “No. But whatever happens, don’t stop for anyone.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You too,” Mac had said.

  He went back into the house to check on Thomas, who lay slumped over his wife’s body. He was dead, his hand holding hers.

  A lot of sirens began to close in from the north, as Mac went outside to Thomas’s Mercedes. Two bullet holes had punctured the driver’s-side door, and a lot of blood stained the MB-Tex upholstery.

  He found a prayer rug in the trunk to cover the blood, pushed the gate all the way open and drove out, just as the first of two jeeps, followed by two troop-transport trucks, rounded the corner. One of the jeeps was fitted with a rear-mounted sixty-caliber machine gun.

  Mac just made it to the end of the block before the gunner opened fire, the shots going wide as he turned down a narrow side street of vendors and tiny shops. Only a few people were out and about and they scattered as he raced past, laying on the horn.

  Thomas’s house was in a section called Gullistan Colony, dense with homes and small businesses, all serviced by a rat warren of streets. One neighborhood consisted of hovels, while two blocks later the houses were mostly upscale, compared to most others in the city.

  He easily outran the jeeps and troop transports, but other sirens were beginning to converge from the north and east. And now they knew the car he was driving.

  Suddenly he came to the end of a block, the street opening onto a broad thoroughfare across from which was what looked like parkland, trees and grassy hills but little or no traffic. It was as if the entire city had been drained of people.

  A troop truck appeared around a sweeping curve a quarter mile to the north, and the jeeps and trucks that had followed him from Thomas’s house were behind him.

  He accelerated directly across the highway, crashing across a drainage ditch and sliding sideways down a grassy slope, where at the bottom he just missed several trees, finally clipping one with his right front fender, taking out everything from the headlights back to the door post, and shattering that half of the windshield.