The Fourth Horseman

by David Hagberg

  “Interesting,” Haaris had said.

  “The profile fits you, Mr. Haaris. Can you explain that?”

  “No, I cannot, except to ask if you are formally accusing me of being the Messiah?”

  “What do you suppose the Messiah’s agenda is? Simply a nuclear war between Pakistan and India?”

  “It’s what I hope to discover with my team’s input. The president will be needing a briefing from my desk sooner rather than later,” Haaris had said. “So, if you will excuse me, Miss Boylan, I will get back to work.”

  Pete said nothing until he was at the door. “You’ve made a mistake, you know.”

  He turned and smiled faintly. “Oh?”

  “You got Kirk McGarvey involved.”

  Haaris took the covered walkway past the cafeteria, the sculpture “Kryptos” outside in the courtyard, but instead of taking the second covered walkway past the library, he turned left. At the end of the corridor he scanned his pass and went outside to the parking lot and his Mercedes.

  He figured it wouldn’t take long for the bitch to realize he had left the building instead of going directly to his office, which didn’t leave much room for error.

  On the way down to the gate, he called his house from his cell phone and scanned the outside as well as every room in the house. No cars he didn’t recognize were parked anywhere in the neighborhood. The crime scene police tape had been removed from the front and back entrances, the sliding glass doors from the pool into the family room, and the garage door. The inside of the house had obviously been searched, but as far as he could tell nothing was missing except for his laptop.

  Every closet in the house had been searched with a fine hand; nothing had been pulled out and tossed aside, no holes been punched into the walls to find a safe or a hiding place.

  The bathroom where he’d killed Deborah had been cleaned by his service, and using the surveillance detection program on his phone, he could find no traces of any electronic eavesdropping devices other than his own.

  A forensics team had checked for evidence relating to Deborah’s murder but not for the supposition that he was a spy.

  The guard at the main gate didn’t bother to look up as he flashed past in the exit lane, the bar code scanner on a corner of the car’s windshield automatically registering his identity.

  Instead of turning right on the parkway and back toward the city, he turned left, to the north, merging with I-495 a few minutes later and crossing the river into Maryland.

  Following the Beltway as it merged with I-270 and heading off to the east, he kept checking his rearview mirrors for anyone keeping pace with him, and the sky for any signs of a helicopter dogging his trail. But if the alarm had been sounded no one was coming after him.

  Using one hand he removed the battery cover on the phone and took out the SIM card. Until it was back in place even Otto Rencke wouldn’t be able to trace him.

  Fifteen minutes later, still certain that he wasn’t being followed, he turned south on State Highway 295; a half mile later he pulled up at the gate of a self-storage company and entered his password. No one was around. Arranging for a storage space was done by appointment only, and there was no security except in the evenings. Five years ago when he’d begun to put his preliminary planning in place, he searched for a mostly unattended self-storage place just like this one.

  His was a large, two-car garage space, which had been another of his requirements. The lock was an old-fashioned combination, and when he had the door up, he drove inside, parking next to a five-year-old dark blue Toyota Camry, possibly the most common car in America.

  So far as he could tell nothing had been disturbed since the last time he’d checked the place the week before he’d left for London. In fact, if someone had tried to break in, the garage and most of the units for fifty feet on either side would have disappeared in a massive explosion of nearly one hundred kilos of Semtex placed in two barrels filled with roofing nails.

  He changed clothes from the trunk of the Camry, dressing in khakis with cargo pockets for three fifteen-round magazines of forty-caliber ammunition, plus an advanced Vaime silencer, and a quick-draw holster for the compact Glock 27 Gen4 pistol.

  Also pocketing a fold-up knife, several four-ounce bricks of Semtex with chemical fuses, and a thirty-two-caliber revolver in an ankle holster, he backed out of the garage.

  Included in his kit were two different sets of identification: one for Rupert Mann, from Brooklyn, and the other, complete with an Irish passport, for Pete O’Donald, from Belfast.

  When this was finally over he’d planned on disappearing. Maybe the South Seas somewhere. Maybe even Venezuela. He had enough money in various offshore accounts to buy his way into relative luxury in just about any Third World nation.

  But that had been before he’d learned he was dying. Now the money and the escape didn’t mean much to him. Only the plan did, and only because doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing except waiting around to die.

  He walked back into the garage and armed a switch that would set when the door was closed and fire when the door was opened.

  Turning around he came face-to-face with the manager of the property, along with a man in his twenties and a pretty woman of about the same age, both of them dressed in jeans, both of them smiling.

  “Mr. Dodge,” the manager said. He was a florid old Cuban in jeans and a guayabera, sandals on his feet. “I’m glad you’re here. This couple is moving and they have need of one of our largest storage units. Showing an occupied unit is better than showing them an empty one.”

  It was an irritation, nothing more, except it made no sense to Haaris, and he was suspicious. But the couple were not in the business, it was obvious, and the manager was an idiot. He stepped aside and motioned them in. “Please,” he said.

  They went inside.

  Haaris quickly screwed the silencer on the Glock’s muzzle. No one else was around. The couples’ car had to be parked in front. He fired three shots, dropping them. And then walked back inside and fired one shot into the backs of each of their heads.

  Closing the door, which armed the explosives, he shoved the padlock home and drove away. Sooner or later the young couple would be reported missing and their car discovered here, but there would be nothing to link him to the place.

  Unless McGarvey put it together. But time was running out. And no matter what else happened Haaris had the number in his cell phone.

  As soon as the call went through the three nuclear devices would explode wherever they happened to be.

  He wanted them in New York, Washington, DC, and London.

  It was the last stage of his plan.

  SIXTY-NINE

  In the kitchen at Rencke’s safe house McGarvey sat staring out the window at the swing set in the backyard. He and Louise had sent Audi down to the Farm, where she would be safe until the trouble blew over. And there’d been so many incidents in the past couple of years that she had started to grow up there and was the mascot of the training facility. Everyone doted on her. It wouldn’t be long before children’s toys like swing sets would be far too tame for her.

  Louise came in from outside. “My Toyota is in the driveway. When you leave, take it. The staff car stays in the garage till we get past this. Haaris will know it’s someone from the Company, namely, you.”

  “You shouldn’t be involved.”

  “Don’t be silly. You saved my husband’s life in Cuba. What would you have me do?”

  McGarvey’s cell phone rang. It was Pete. He put it on speakerphone.

  “I’m on a secure phone in Otto’s office. Haaris left the Campus almost forty-five minutes ago, but we didn’t catch it until one of his staffers called Marty’s office to complain that his debriefing was taking too long.”

  “He could be practically anywhere by now. Check Dulles, Reagan and Baltimore.”

  “That’s the first thing we tried, but if he’s booked on any international flight there’ve been no la
st-minute additions.”

  “Expand the search to domestic flights. But he’ll need documents, money and a clean credit card or two. We either missed his go-to-hell kit at his house, or he’s got a stash somewhere else. A storage locker.”

  “How about an APB on his car?”

  “He’ll have switched cars by now, and I want to keep the cops at arm’s length. Anyone approaches him is probably going to die.”

  “SWAT teams?”

  “We need the man alive, Pete. Three nuclear weapons are missing from Quetta, and I think we have to consider the possibility that they’re already here in the country. Only he can tell us where they are and when they’ll be detonated. The man has a timetable, and he’s going to stick with it no matter what.”

  “Could be he has a team. Someone local, unless he imported three suicide bombers willing to push a button and sacrifice their lives for Allah. It’s not likely he’d be willing to die himself.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” McGarvey said. “He only has a few months to live, so he has nothing to lose.”

  “Something else has come up. There’s a federal warrant for your arrest. Came from the White House. The president’s national security adviser.”

  “Kalley.”

  “That’s right. You’re to be considered armed and dangerous. Which was stupid, actually, because a lot of people in the Bureau and the Secret Service know who you are, and know damned well that you would not open fire on any cop doing their duty.”

  Otto broke in, and he sounded excited as he always did when he was on to something.

  “Haaris made one call from his cell phone to his house, and pulled up the ADT alarms and monitors. We made sure that the police tapes were gone and no one was watching the place. Soon as he was finished with that call he pulled the SIM card, so I lost him. At least at first.

  “I hacked into his house system and went through the recordings from the time he pulled the SIM card until ten minutes ago. But he never showed up. It’s telling me that wherever he’s stashed his walking papers, they’re not there.”

  “Why did he go through the bother of doing a surveillance search?” McGarvey asked. “Unless it was to keep you busy.”

  “Bingo. But it backfired.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He had his escape well planned, I’ll have to give him that. I figured that he would need not only papers, but he’d need new wheels. Renting a car somewhere was too obvious, so I started a search within a thirty-mile radius of Campus for self-storage facilities that had units large enough for two cars.”

  “Why two?” Pete asked.

  “Because he didn’t want to screw around pulling one car out and then parking his Mercedes inside. Might attract too much attention. Just one little detail he figured would help with his margin,” Otto said.

  “He would have wanted a place that had no onsite security, other than fences and a surveillance system. Mounted cameras.”

  “Right, but he made a mistake. For whatever reason he missed the cameras and at least three people paid for it with their lives.”

  “Did someone stumble on to him?” McGarvey asked.

  “The manager and two people looking at units. They parked their car up front, and I hacked into the surveillance system and saw it all. He’s driving a five-year-old Toyota Camry, dark blue, with Maryland tags.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “We’ll have to put something in the air to find out,” Otto said. “But he lured the three people into the garage, shot them all, then locked up and drove off. Five minutes later it exploded, taking out twenty other units. He either set the explosion, or maybe his aim was lousy and one of them survived and tried to open the door, which was wired.”

  “I can retask Flybaby Prime to find him,” Louise said.

  The designator actually included a constellation of four Jupiter satellites in moderate Earth orbits, just above the International Space Station, arrayed in such a way that at any given time, twenty-four/seven, one would be above Washington, DC. The program, which had been put in place in the aftermath of 9/11, was classified Top Secret/Flybaby Prime access. It would take practically an act of Congress to retask any one of the birds. But Louise had been one of the designers and first administrators of the system.

  “First of all, you can go to jail for the rest of your life, and if Washington is one of Haaris’s targets, you’d be leaving the city unprotected,” Pete said. She was clearly playing devil’s advocate.

  “Ten-second snapshots every sixty,” Louise said. “I’ll send the feed to Otto, and he can insert a loop showing just before and just after the ten seconds that the bird would be off task.”

  “Make them one second every fifteen, and there’ll be no need for a loop,” Otto said. “I’m working on a recognition program now. My darlings will pick out every dark blue Camry in the bird’s line of sight and read the tag number.”

  Louise had already taken her laptop from the kitchen desk, opened it on the counter and turned it on.

  “We’ll need to hustle, sweetheart,” Otto said. “We don’t have that wide an angle. If he gets more than a hundred miles out, there’s a good chance we’ll miss him.”

  “Don’t wait for me, I’m on it,” Louise said.

  Her computer finished booting, and within twenty seconds she had gotten into the NSA’s highest security programs’ mainframe, had entered all the passwords and was in the Flybaby Prime control program.

  “Gotcha,” she said. She looked up. “Your call, Kirk. Which way is he heading?”

  “Box the compass,” McGarvey said. “North first.”

  “Ready, Bear?” Louise asked. Teddy Bear, or usually just Bear, was her pet name for Otto.

  “Go,” he said.

  Louise expanded the satellite’s view and changed its direction to the north for one second, then brought it back to its original parameters.

  “Searching,” Otto said. “You can’t believe the number of dark blue Camrys on the highways. We should send this to Toyota for a commercial.” Two seconds later he was back. “No.”

  Louise reprogrammed the satellite to look east, took the one second-snapshot and brought it back.

  “Shit,” Otto said.

  “What?”

  “Dark blue Camry, Maryland tags; it’s our man. He’s heading east on U.S. Fifty just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into Delaware.”

  McGarvey had it all at once. “Dover Air Force Base.”

  “Yes,” Pete said. “He had to get the weapons out of Pakistan. They were put aboard military transports to Dover.”

  “From there at least one made it to Washington,” Otto said. “A second to New York. And the third?”

  “I’m going to ask him just that,” McGarvey said. “We still don’t know how he’s going to get them out. I don’t think he’ll simply trigger them in place.”

  “We can get a NEST team in the air within fifteen minutes,” Louise said.

  “If he finds out he’ll push the button,” McGarvey said. “Keep looking for his cell phone. I’ll need to know the second he replaces the SIM card.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Pete said.

  “I need you on Campus to back me up in case this thing goes south,” McGarvey said.

  “Goddamnit, Kirk.”

  “If there’s going to be any future for us, you’ll have to start listening to me. At least every now and then.” He could hear her draw a breath. It was dirty pool, but she hadn’t left him any other choice.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  SEVENTY

  Haaris parked at the Dover Mall just past lunchtime and walked directly into Macy’s department store. It was a weekday and the place was almost empty. By now if McGarvey had enlisted Rencke’s help, they could know about the incident at the storage center, including the car and its Maryland tags. If Rencke’s wife had also become involved it was possible, though unlikely, in his estimation, that she could hav
e retasked one of the Flybaby satellites to follow him.

  But that led to a number of other unlikely, though disturbing, possibilities. They knew that three nuclear warheads were missing from Quetta. And if they had traced him here they might have figured out that the weapons had arrived from Pakistan.

  A host of what ifs.

  He had passed the entrance to Dover Air Force Base just off Delaware Route 1 a couple of miles back, but there hadn’t been any unusual activity. No helicopters circling. No police cars or military cops parked alongside the road leading to the main gate.

  In any event, if he was cornered with no way out he wouldn’t hesitate to replace the SIM card in his phone and make the call. It would be a waste of five years, but once again people in the U.S., and this time in Great Britain also, would feel the same sense of vulnerability that they’d felt after 9/11. No place would ever seem safe again.

  He went to the men’s department, where he bought a light-colored poplin jacket, and in another section a Nike baseball cap.

  In a stall in the public restroom at the opposite end of the mall, he removed the tags and put the jacket on, zipping it all the way up.

  Stuffing the hat inside the jacket he walked down the broad mall corridor to the Sears store, where he found an old-fashioned pay phone, called the number from memory of the City Cab Company and asked to be picked up outside JCPenney and taken to the Dover Downs Casino.

  He walked back through the mall to JCPenney, and when the cab pulled up, he put on the cap and walked outside.

  The man who had arrived in the Camry had disappeared, as had the man who’d walked through the mall wearing a jacket but no hat.

  * * *

  At Langley, Pete was with Otto in his suite of offices, when the satellite feed Louise had been sending them suddenly shut down. The phone rang, and it was she.

  “The system’s malfunction alarm came up, so I had to pull out,” she said. “Is it Dover?”

  “Yes, Mac was right,” Otto said. “He parked in front of Macy’s at a mall a couple of miles north of the base. We were waiting for him to come out.”