24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella Read online

  When Liz had been killed, she’d left behind her daughter, Audrey Rose, a precocious child—McGarvey’s granddaughter—whom Otto and Louise had adopted and taken as their own without question, just with a totally unconditional love.

  This night, alone for the first time in a couple of months, McGarvey was having the same nightmare as always. Someone was coming. Someone dark, lurking around some corner, hiding in the shadows, was ready to pounce. No matter how fast he tried to run, he couldn’t get away. But when he turned around to face the danger, someone had stepped into the line of fire. It was a woman.

  Nothing bad happened every time he had the dream, but just about every time something bad did happen, he’d had the dream first. Or at least he thought he had.

  He got out of bed and padded into the bathroom, where he peed and splashed some water on his face, craggy now this early morning, his eyes grayish green as they usually were when he was about to go into hyperdrive when he became almost preternaturally aware of his surroundings.

  He had no real idea what had gotten to him, except that something or someone was out there.

  It was after three when he went to the living room window that looked at Rock Creek Park, where he ran most mornings when he was in town. A car came up the parkway and disappeared around the bend to where P Street NW crossed the creek.

  Walt Page, the director of the CIA, had called him to come up from Florida to participate in a conference on ISIS. The organization continued to lose ground in Syria and Iraq, and it was the consensus among the mostly high-ranking directors from the National Security Agency, the FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency that the terrorists might be planning some last-ditch strike. Something spectacular.

  “You people are administrators. Send your division chiefs and operational planners over here to hash it out,” McGarvey had suggested.

  The NSA’s director, Air Force General Thomas Armistad, objected. “We’re discussing policy, not details.”

  “Policy dictated by politics.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The operators in the field don’t give a damn about politics. Didn’t you know that?” McGarvey hammered the man. “All they want is to complete the mission without getting their asses shot off. Send us your field personnel, and we’ll figure out how to take down Daesh’s leadership. And then we’ll do it.”

  He’d not made any friends yesterday, but he’d never been in that business.

  A few years ago, he’d told a similar gathering at Langley that we had the bad habit of reacting like we’d been hit in the knee by a doctor’s hammer. We got hit, and our leg jerked.

  “We’re attacked by airplanes, so we tighten up airport security, neglecting stricter passport control and background checks, until someone opens fire in a crowded theater or street corner. So we try to stiffen up our regulations, but profiling is not politically correct. We even back off from delving too deeply into who’s supporting whom on the social media websites.”

  There’d been the usual objections, of course.

  “Get your heads out, ladies and gentlemen, because it will happen again. Guaranteed.”

  McGarvey’s phone rang, and he got it from the coffee table. It was Walt Page.

  “Something’s come up; we need you out here as soon as possible.”

  “What is it?”

  “The president’s daughter was kidnapped less than two hours ago.”

  “Have they made any demands?”

  “Yes, and that could be the biggest problem of all,” Page said. “The president is on his way out here by chopper, and I’m ten minutes out. A car is on its way for you—should be there any minute now.”

  McGarvey went back to the window as a Cadillac SUV pulled up and double-parked. “It’s here.”

  “In my office,” Page said.

  “Has anyone called Otto?”

  “He never left the building.”

  “Right.”

  McGarvey threw on a pair of jeans and a light sweater. Holstering his Walther PPK at the small of his back, he pulled on a light jacket and took a couple of spare magazines of 9mm ammunition.

  On the way downstairs, he thought about leaving word for Pete, but it was late in California, and there wasn’t much she could do from there in any event.

  * * *

  Two minders from housekeeping had come for him. The man riding shotgun opened the rear door. “Morning, Mr. Director,” he said.

  “Morning,” McGarvey said, and even before they had pulled away from the curb, he got on the phone to Otto, who answered on the first ring, all out of breath as he usually was when something big was going down.

  “I would have called, but I knew Walt was sending someone for you.”

  “Someone apparently took the president’s daughter, but that’s all Walt told me, except that whatever they’re demanding could be a problem. Do you have anything?”

  “She’s in the Lauinger Library, third floor, but she’s not moved for the past forty-five minutes.”

  “That’s too obvious, unless they mean to make a stand.”

  “I have a half dozen names I’m going through, friends of hers. The guy she’s supposedly in love with is a seminary student, but my guess is that he’s a front. She’s been lying to her father and probably to her detail. Her real friends are supposedly metalheads.”

  “Translate.”

  “Antiestablishment. Death-metal music geeks, grindcore, Viking metal, industrial metal. Hippies with attitude. And they all have names. The president’s daughter’s is Trap Queen.”

  “I said translate.”

  “Her detail knows most of them, but until now, they’ve been considered harmless. Listening to music in someone’s apartment, smoking a little grass, nothing out of hand.”

  “The president?”

  “For the most part doesn’t want to know. He just wants her kept safe. At any rate, they’re being interviewed right now, or at least as many of them as can be rounded up.”

  “Have your machines been coming up with any indicators?”

  Otto’s machines, what he called his darlings, were a series of powerful computer programs that compared the 24-7 happenings just about everywhere in the world to come up with possible threat scenarios.

  “My guess would be ISIS. But homegrown.”

  Hour 4

  The meeting was held in the DCI’s main conference room on the seventh floor of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building. President Young sat in the middle on one side of the long table; the other eight people, including Page and Marty Bambridge, who was the director of the Company’s National Clandestine Service, sat across from him.

  McGarvey met Otto—who was dressed as usual in faded jeans, down-at-the-heels sneakers, and a KGB sweatshirt, his long red hair tied back in a ponytail—on the elevator, and they were the last to arrive.

  “Sorry we’re late, Mr. President,” McGarvey said. It was just four A.M. He and Otto took seats at the far end of the table, down from Page and Bambridge.

  “There is no need to recapitulate, Mr. President; my people are all up to speed so far as we understood the situation to a half hour ago,” Page said.

  “What about my daughter?” Young asked. It was difficult to tell what his mood was, except that he didn’t seem cowed.

  “She’s in the library, third floor, northeast corner,” Alan Bernstein said. With his square jaw, close-cropped hair, dark suit, and properly knotted tie, even at this hour, he looked like a poster image for the service. “But we’re taking it very slowly.”

  “Is she alone?” McGarvey asked.

  “Probably not, but it’s unknown at this point. She’s not moving.”

  The president visibly winced.

  “Which could mean nothing more than the fact she’s been tied up, or is sitting at gunpoint,” Bernstein said. “We’ve made two drone passes, but only the emergency lights at the stairwells are illuminated, so visibility is very poor. We’ve spotted nothing.”

  “Infrared?”
McGarvey asked.

  “Nothing shows up. She could be behind the stacks or even lying on the floor.”

  “Or under a space blanket,” Otto put in absently.

  Everyone in the room knew who and what he was, and they looked at him almost as if they expected him to pull the answer out of his hat.

  “Or not even there. Which’d be my guess.”

  It was something new to McGarvey, but he understood immediately what Otto meant. “They removed her chip?”

  “It’s right there in the alcove, but eight feet above the floor.”

  “They stuffed her in the crawl space above the ceiling?” Bernstein demanded.

  “The ceilings are twelve feet. I think you’ll find the chip buried in a book on the shelves. Greek history in that section.”

  The president had paled. “The bastards cut it out of her shoulder?”

  “It’s possible,” Otto said.

  Everyone let the implication of that comment sink in.

  “We need to interview her friends, and especially the guys on her detail,” McGarvey said. “Someone must have seen or heard something.” He paused. “Or done something.”

  Bernstein bridled. “We all know what you’ve done, Mr. Director, but there are no traitors on my detail. I’d guarantee that with my life.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Christ.”

  Page held up a hand. “Mr. President, you said that a letter had been delivered to you.”

  Young nodded. “I made a copy; the bureau has the original, and they promised me a fast turnaround.”

  “Pardon me, Mr. President, but how was it delivered to you?” McGarvey asked.

  Bernstein was uncomfortable.

  “I found it on the desk in my study off the Oval Office. It hadn’t been there when I went upstairs around eleven. Someone put it there between then and when I went down a little after one.”

  “Surveillance videos?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The recordings are clear,” Bernstein said.

  Otto was doing something on his iPad. He looked up. “You guys need to harden your systems. I can help.”

  “What’d you come up with?” McGarvey asked.

  “A twenty-four-second loop at 11:45. The image of the Oval Office and the president’s study showed the same recording. Nada.”

  “You can’t hack our system,” Bernstein said.

  Otto passed the iPad down the table. “Your mainframe leaks. Try beefing up the modems. All of them.”

  “Who was in the West Wing at that time?” McGarvey asked.

  “A lot of people. Some of them mine, some of them Reidel’s working in the Situation Room.”

  “Janitorial staff?”

  “We’ll check, but it may be already too late to catch them inside,” Bernstein said. “Whoever it was probably left already. We’ll find out who it was.”

  Maybe, McGarvey thought, but he didn’t say anything.

  Otto caught it and nodded slightly. He would put a temporary patch on the system in case there was another letter.

  “That may not be soon enough,” the president said, taking out the letter. “It was dated midnight our time.” For a moment, he held his silence. But he’d come here for help; it was his call.

  “‘We have your daughter. If you wish her returned alive, this is what you must do. You have twenty-four hours. You will order your armed forces already gathered in the region to make immediate ground attacks on the city of Al-Mawsil in Iraq and Ar-Raqqah, Hamah, and Damascus in Syria.’”

  “Is there more?” Bambridge asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s implied that you’ll make no mention of your daughter’s situation.”

  “I came here first, rather than the Pentagon, because I need your help,” Young said. “From where I sit, this makes absolutely no sense. It can’t be ISIS who took Dot. Who, then?”

  McGarvey sat back, letting the heated conversations flow around him for the moment. He taught the French philosopher Voltaire to some seriously bright liberal arts majors at New College of Florida in Sarasota. When the weather was nice, which it almost always was, he’d take his class of ten or twelve students out to the water’s edge on Sarasota Bay and play devil’s advocate. His philosophy was that if you threw a stick into a pack of dogs, the one that got hit would yelp. Voltaire had been fond of saying that common sense wasn’t so common after all. And his students, all of them younger than their calendar ages, were naïve. Most of them had never experienced the real world of rough edges and gnarly choices, none of which were ever completely right.

  If you’re sure that you understand the situation, you’ve probably missed something.

  It was the same as one of SEAL Team Six’s Murphy’s Laws: If everything is going good, you’re probably running into an ambush. And those guys were seriously experienced.

  Think out of the box, he told his kids. Don’t restrict yourself to the obvious. Look for the anomalies. The bits and pieces that don’t seem to fit. You might find an answer that isn’t as comfortable as you want it to be.

  The discussions that followed were almost the high point to his one-dollar-per-year visiting professorship.

  He looked up. “It’s ISIS.”

  Page stopped in midsentence. They all turned to him.

  “They want a ground war.”

  “One they can’t possibly win,” Joyce Trammell, the president’s adviser on security affairs, said flatly.

  “If you mean do they believe that they can gain ground, no. But if you mean the hearts and minds of the disaffected Muslims around the world, then yes, they will. We’d be marching into quicksand with no way out.”

  “We’d blow them away,” Bambridge said. “And that’s a fact.”

  “How? With nuclear weapons? First we’d have to separate the innocent civilians from the fighters embedded with them. Impossible. The North Vietnamese beat us because they were defending their homeland. If we let them, ISIS will win because they’re defending their idea of the faith.”

  “What, then?” Young asked.

  “We find your daughter,” McGarvey said. “And we have twenty hours to do it.”

  Hour 5

  The president’s daughter came awake in stages. First she became aware of a sharp pain in her right arm, just below her shoulder. Next she was thirstier than she’d ever been even after coming down from a coke high, and her head was splitting open. She had to pee, she thought she might have already wet her pants, and someone nearby was talking, though she couldn’t make out the meaning of the words.

  “Ah, thaealab is awake,” a man said.

  His English had a foreign accent. Arabic, Dorothy thought, but Southern too—maybe Georgia or Texas, someplace like that.

  She opened her eyes. A slender man, maybe not much older than she was, came across the room to her bed. He stuffed a cell phone in his back pocket, then helped her sit up and gave her a can of Coke.

  “The drug makes you thirsty,” he said pleasantly. He was dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt. His face was narrow, his complexion dark, and he wore a small beard.

  Dot noticed his very large dark eyes and that his fingers were long and slender, like a piano player’s. She drained most of the can of soda, and her stomach heaved so that she almost threw up. But she fought it.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Where am I?”

  “Safe now,” the kid said. “And no harm will come to you, this I promise.”

  The room was no shabbier than some of the places where her friends lived. The bed she was lying in was against the wall, across from a dresser on which stood a small, old-fashioned TV, the screen blank.

  To the right, the bathroom door was open, a dim night-light the only illumination in the room.

  It came to her that this was some cheap motel somewhere. The double windows were covered by heavy drapes that looked like plastic.

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Y
es, of course,” the kid said. He took the soda can from her, set it on the floor, and helped her out of bed.

  Her legs were wobbly, but she managed to make it to the bathroom. The kid was right behind her, and he wouldn’t let her close the door.

  “It’s okay. I have sisters,” he told her.

  “Fuck you,” Dot said. She pulled down her pants and squatted on the toilet, the relief sweet. When she was finished, she looked at him watching her.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you escape,” he said.

  Dot figured that he couldn’t be twenty yet, and he wasn’t bad looking. “Do you know who I am?”

  He brightened. “You are the daughter of the president of the United States. We have kidnapped you, but you will not be harmed. I promise.”

  Dot had to laugh. “You have to be shitting me. Every Secret Service agent and cop in the entire country is looking for me. And once they show up, you and whoever your pals are will be dead meat. Do you get it, dickhead?”

  The kid said nothing.

  Dot washed her hands, then pushed past him and started across the room to what she figured had to be the door to the corridor, but he got there first and blocked it.

  “Please, I don’t want any trouble. The others will be back at any minute.”

  “Then get out of my way and let me leave. Save you and your pals a world of hurt.”

  “I have orders.”

  “Whose orders, asshole?” Dot shouted, and she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  The kid looked at her like she was something from another planet.

  They were alone here, and she began to think that she might be in some serious trouble. Stupid, actually, it came to her, kidnapping the daughter of the most famous man on the planet. Unless what they wanted was some serious shit.

  She backed down. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Tarek,” the kid said.

  “A fucking rag head. I should have known.”

  “That is offensive to me.”

  “News flash, jerk-off, being kidnapped is offensive to me,” Dot said. She turned and went to the window to pull back the drapes, but once again Tarek stopped her.