The Fourth Horseman Read online

“Shit,” Forest said. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, take care of yourself, Mac.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Someone knocked.

  “It’s open,” McGarvey said. He snatched his pistol, got up and moved quickly across the room so that when the door opened he would be behind it.

  “It’s me, so don’t shoot,” Pete said softly. She opened the door and stepped in.

  “Are you alone?” McGarvey asked. He could see the hallway through the crack at the edge. It was empty.

  “Yes,” she said and came the rest of the way in.

  Pointing his pistol down and away, McGarvey reached around her and locked the door.

  “How about some light?” she said.

  “Were you followed?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  At the window McGarvey carefully parted the curtains and looked out. Nothing moved on the street below; the same cars that were parked there earlier were still there. “Where’s your car?”

  “I left it down on Dumbarton a couple of blocks away,” she said. “I knew that you were lying the minute you came out of the White House. Why didn’t you at least tell me or Otto?”

  McGarvey laid his pistol on the table and switched on the small reading lamp. “I didn’t want to get either of you involved. Especially not Otto, he’s a terrible liar. And I needed the illusion to hold for at least until tomorrow.”

  Pete stood flatfooted, her blue eyes wide. “I’m a pretty good liar. And not so bad at covering your ass. I have a vested interest that I want to protect, you know.”

  A number of years ago McGarvey had been shot up pretty badly and had lost one of his kidneys. Then during an incident that had gone bad a few months earlier, McGarvey had lost his remaining kidney, and Pete, who by happenstance was a close enough match, donated hers without hesitation.

  “They won’t take the bait now.”

  “Would have been stupid if they had, anyway,” she said. “Otto wants to talk to you, but your phone is off and he didn’t want to turn it on in case you were in the middle of something. But he knew that you were here or at least that your phone was here.”

  “So he sent you?”

  “I volunteered,” Pete said. “The Messiah came on PTV in Islamabad. When Otto couldn’t reach you he sent the recording to me. But he said he thinks something was wrong with it.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “Something about the newspaper. He was holding up this morning’s Washington Post, but Otto says it was dubbed.”

  McGarvey turned on his encrypted cell phone and called Otto, who answered on the first ring. McGarvey put the call on speaker.

  “Pete’s okay?”

  “She’s here. What have you come up with? She says something about the Post was wrong?”

  “It was this morning’s early edition, but the bottom right edge didn’t line up. You won’t be able to see it on a small phone screen, but one of my programs picked up on it, and when I put it up on the table it was there. The message was recorded sometime in the past. But how long ago I don’t know.”

  “Did he have anything significant to say?”

  “Just that he wanted peace, and he invited everyone to send their embassy staffs back. Business as normal.”

  “With thirty-plus nuclear weapons still on the loose,” McGarvey said, piecing it together. “He probably said something like he’ll be around, but he wouldn’t be making any public appearances.”

  “He said that he’s going to be the invisible man on the street, in the hills, out in the desert. Anonymous.”

  “How about the voice?”

  “We’re working that,” Otto said. “The spectrum analyzer I’m using says it’s a match with the speech he made at the Aiwan. But it’s too perfect a match.”

  “Do you have a confidence level? Eighty or ninety percent would be good enough.”

  “Just gut instinct, but something else came up in the past few minutes that I just don’t know what to make of. The timing is all wrong, unless the same people who want to shut you up want to get to Haaris.”

  * * *

  “What else?” Pete asked.

  “Haaris’s wife slipped and fell in their shower. Hit her head, and by the time a paramedic crew got there she was dead.”

  “Was he there when it happened?” McGarvey asked.

  “Apparently he’d just gotten home and found her,” Otto said, then hesitated.

  McGarvey picked up on it. “And?”

  “Maybe I’m getting to be an old lady hearing rats in the attic, but I got the real funny feeling that Dave Haaris might just be the Messiah.”

  Two minutes later, McGarvey’s phone rang. It was Otto again. “Dr. Franklin just called. Haaris had his wife’s body brought to All Saints. You might want to go over there.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  A distraught, angry Haaris charged out of the waiting room when they came in. “The sons of bitches murdered her just to get at me,” he said. “I want both of you in on this, because no matter what I said before, my advice to the president is different now.” His clothes were still wet.

  “How do you know someone killed her?” McGarvey asked.

  “Dr. Franklin figured it out. And if it really is Messiah’s people who did it to keep me off balance there’s no possible way the political situation will ever get back to normal in Islamabad. That’s clear to me. The bastards. The dirty bastards. She never hurt a soul in her life. She was incapable of doing anything mean. To anyone.”

  Dr. Franklin, his jacket off, his shirt collar open, got off the elevator from the second-floor operating theater, a long look on his face. “Good morning, Mac, Miss Boylan. I assume that David has filled you in.”

  “Did you find what I asked you to look for?” Haaris said, a little more in control of his emotions.

  “I’m sorry I missed it earlier. She could have fallen with enough force to cause the damage to her skull. But you were correct in assuming that someone was in the shower with her. I found a displacement of her left ankle. Whoever the killer was probably grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand and the back of her head with the other, and kicked her legs out from under her, forcing her down.”

  “My God,” Pete said. “Could it have been someone she knew?”

  Haaris’s face colored. “She wasn’t having an affair, if that’s what you meant to imply.”

  “I’m sorry, I was just looking for options. It would have been a very big deal for someone to send killers after your wife, unless they were specifically looking for you, and she got in the way.”

  “There’s no accounting for stupidity.”

  “You and your think tank are our reigning experts,” McGarvey said. He’d been watching for any signs that Haaris was faking his emotions, but he couldn’t see it.

  “We can see trends, possibilities, likelihoods. But for whole systems. One rogue operator changes everything. People are unpredictable, nations usually aren’t. They’re too ponderous, too slow to react or change in any fundamental way.”

  “The Messiah is fundamental.”

  Haaris stopped for a beat.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Dr. Franklin said. “It’s been a very long day and I’m going home to bed now.”

  Haaris shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for confirming something I’d already suspected.”

  “I’m terribly sorry, David. For everything.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Franklin left down the hallway to the rear parking area.

  Pete touched Haaris’s wrist. “I’m truly sorry too,” she said. “We all are. As hard as an accident is to accept, something like this is a million times worse.”

  Haaris nodded.

  “What’s next?”

  Haaris gave her a look. “If you mean what’s next vis-à-vis Pakistan, I don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”

  “Anything that you’d care to share?” McGarvey asked.

  “The president asked you to assassinate the Messiah, an
d the word is you turned her down.”

  “I may rethink it.”

  “Because of my wife?”

  Again McGarvey tried to read the man, but he came up blank. Haaris was either a consummate liar. Or he was filled with genuine hate. “In part.”

  “And the rest?”

  McGarvey shrugged. “From all accounts your wife was a gentle soul. Whoever killed her was a bully. And I don’t like bullies.”

  “The world is full of them, didn’t you know? Or are you a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills?”

  “Something like that,” McGarvey said, letting it hang there.

  “I’m going now,” Haaris said.

  “Home?” Pete asked.

  “No, the office, I recalled my team,” Haaris said. “We need to revise our position for the president this morning.” He started down the hall the same way Dr. Franklin had left.

  “What’s next?” Pete called after him.

  “A reception for diplomats at the Pakistani embassy this evening,” Haaris responded without looking back. “I’m going to stick it to them, see who reacts.”

  It was coming up on six, and McGarvey was tired.

  “How about some breakfast?” Pete asked.

  “Sure.”

  They walked outside from the rear exit, where Pete’s car was parked. “This isn’t the end of it,” she said.

  “It’s just started,” McGarvey said, mulling over the entire situation. The ISI killing Haaris’s wife made no sense, unless they had stumbled on her while waiting for Haaris to show up. But if that had been the case the operation had been incredibly sloppy, unlike the one off Casey Key. It was an anomaly, something he neither trusted nor liked, except that anomalies usually pointed to something, some direction no one expected.

  They drove over to a Panera Bread restaurant.

  “He wasn’t distraught,” Pete said before they got out of the car.

  “They wanted him, but they took out his wife instead.”

  On the surface it made no sense. The situation was almost the same as one he’d encountered on his first wet assignment for the CIA at the beginning of his career. He’d been sent to Chile to kill a general who’d ordered the murders of thousands of innocent civilians. But when he got to the general’s compound in the middle of the night, the general was making love to his wife. The alarm had been sounded and McGarvey had only seconds to react. Out of necessity he had assassinated both of them.

  Later he had beaten himself up thinking about the woman, until he’d learned that she’d fancied herself a devotee of Joseph Mengele’s wife—the Nazi who’d personally butchered thousands of Jews. Mengeles’s wife had many of the victims’ skin removed, had tanned the pieces—most often taken from their backs—and had painted pictures on some of them and made lampshades from others. She was as monstrous as her husband. As was the wife of the Chilean general, and she’d deserved to die. But McGarvey had never gotten over it.

  “I held his hand for a few seconds,” Pete said. “I could feel his pulse. It should have been fast, but it wasn’t. His heart rate was that of a man at peace with himself. What do you make of that?”

  * * *

  McGarvey went back to Pete’s apartment with her, where he sacked out on the couch for a few hours. It was against his better wishes to get her involved, but she’d at least had a half night’s sleep and she kept watch.

  Otto called at a little after eleven as Pete was fixing them an early light lunch. He took the call at a window of her second-floor apartment from which he could look down at the street. But the traffic seemed normal. No one lurking in a doorway or on a rooftop with the glint of sunlight off the lens of a scope.

  “Page has been trying to get in touch with you all morning and so has Marty. Broderick has been putting a lot of pressure on us. They want you to act right now. The situation in Islamabad is starting to spin out of control. None of the EU countries are in any hurry to return their embassy staffs, and from what Austin is sending us, it looks as if Taliban committees are being set up at all the key governmental offices, and more importantly, at all the major air force and navy bases. The bases where nuclear weapons are being mated for deployment.”

  “Has Haaris briefed the president yet?”

  “He went over there around ten, And so far as I know he hasn’t returned,” Otto said. “The metro cops were all over his wife’s murder, but he knows someone at the Bureau who took over the case. And he’s agreed to be interviewed, but only briefly, so that he can get on with his work.”

  “Anything new from your analysis of the Messiah’s voice?”

  “It was the same guy who spoke at the Presidential Palace. But my darlings are having a tough time re-creating the original voice. Whatever equipment he used was well above the over-the-counter Radio Shack lash-up. Professional-grade stuff. Shit that only a government is likely to come up with.”

  “The Pakistani embassy is hosting a cocktail party for diplomats tonight. Get me a pass for it.”

  Pete had come to the kitchen door in time to hear McGarvey’s request. “Me too,” she said.

  McGarvey started to object, but Otto overheard her.

  “She’ll be good cover,” he said. “Anyway, two sets of eyes and ears are better than one. And they’ve promised to have the new prime minister there. He’s flying in this afternoon.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Will Page be there?”

  “No, but Fay and his wife will be.”

  “Black tie, I assume,” Pete said after McGarvey hung up.

  “Of course.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The main reception hall of the Pakistani embassy was packed with more than 250 people, a significant portion of the top diplomats in the city, almost all from nations that did regular business with Islamabad. A long buffet table was spread out along one side of the large circular room. White-coated waiters moved through the crowd with trays of hors d’oeuvres, sweet mint tea in small cups and glasses of Dom Pérignon.

  McGarvey in a tux and Pete in a simple black over-one-shoulder cocktail dress and a tasteful diamond necklace stood to one side of the entry, sipping champagne. Neither of them was armed.

  “I haven’t spotted Haaris yet,” Pete said.

  “It’s going to be interesting to see Haaris’s reaction if and when he does show up,” McGarvey said. “Especially if he publicly pins the blame for his wife’s murder on the ISI.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me that he could think the ISI was behind it. Otto has the recordings of him talking with General Rajput, and they seemed like old friends, or at least allies. And it was the ISI who supposedly rescued him from his Taliban captors.”

  “He changed his tune this morning.”

  “A strange man,” Pete said. “Did you know that he was born in Pakistan?”

  “Otto said something about it. His parents were killed when he was very young, and a rug-merchant uncle brought him to London and put him in the best schools, including Eton.”

  “When he came to us he was a British citizen. But what’s most curious to me is that he was willing to share what he learned with the British Secret Intelligence Service. Technically made him a traitor.”

  “I’ve not seen his entire jacket yet.”

  “I have and you need to look at it soon,” Pete said. “Read between the lines. The guy is filled with hate for what they did to him as a kid in school.”

  “British public schools are notorious, but they’ve graduated some pretty substantial people.”

  Pete looked up at him. “You’re playing devil’s advocate again.”

  “I guess I am. I don’t trust him either, but just because he was used hard as a kid in school, and he’s filled with hate, as you say, doesn’t make him bad. Nor does the fact that he was born in Pakistan, and raised by an uncle, make him suspect.”

  “But?”

  “I don�
��t know,” McGarvey said. And he really didn’t. “But before I pack my bags I’m going to press him. Maybe Otto’s right about him.”

  “My God, you’re not seriously thinking about going over there to take out the Messiah?”

  “I don’t think that even a SEAL Team Six unit with all the right intel and a lot of luck could do it. And get back out.”

  “That’s not what I asked, Mac,” Pete pressed. She took his arm. “No screwing around now. What the president wants you to do is crazy.”

  “Less crazy than sending troops over there.”

  John Fay and his wife came over. “Mr. McGarvey, your name came up again in a strategy session this afternoon,” the secretary of state said. He was of the old school of diplomats, among the last of a certain class defined by breeding, refinement and intelligence.

  “I imagine it did,” McGarvey said, and he introduced Pete as a CIA special projects officer.

  “A serious title,” Jeanne Fay said. “If it implies what I expect it must.”

  “There’ve been interesting moments,” Pete said, smiling pleasantly.

  “Excuse us, ladies, but I’d like to take Mr. McGarvey aside for just a minute or two,” Fay said.

  “Miss Boylan is privy to everything that I’ve done or have been asked to do over the past couple of years,” McGarvey said.

  Fay was just a little vexed, but he didn’t press. “Have you come to a decision? The president is running out of viable options.”

  “Like the situation when Russia invaded the Ukraine?” Pete asked.

  “Worse. Kiev had no nuclear weapons and not much of a military.”

  “They’re not going to start a nuclear war,” McGarvey said.

  “Did you see the Messiah’s latest broadcast?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I was surprised that he was inviting everyone back—especially us,” McGarvey said. “Our taking out a significant portion of their weapons had to be viewed as an act of war.”

  “Yet there has been no mention of it, officially or unofficially,” Fay said. “What do you make of that?”

  “I’m not a political analyst, Mr. Secretary. Just a tool.”

  “At this point a very important tool. The question is, will you do it?”