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“We’ll see,” McGarvey said. Strong physical exercise had always helped him focus on the moment instead of his past, yet it was still hard to concentrate. As soon as he allowed his mind to drift, even a little, bin Laden’s face and that of his daughter’s swam into view.

  He came to attention and brought the hilt of his weapon momentarily to his lips in a salute. Van Buren did the same. They donned their masks, brought their left arms up in a graceful arch over their rear shoulders, and raised their weapons to the en garde position.

  On a silent signal between themselves they began. Van Buren came out first, testing for McGarvey’s response and speed of response. First a feint in four. McGarvey stepped back easily out of range and took Van Buren’s blade in a counter six, trying for the easy displacement and quick thrust for the touch. But Van Buren rode the pressure of McGarvey’s blade downward, aiming his own lightning-quick thrust to McGarvey’s leading knee, barely missing before McGarvey nimbly retreated out of range.

  They were at la Belle, a tie score, and neither of them wanted the double touch. They both wanted to win.

  McGarvey momently lowered his blade in what might have been taken as an unintended invito.

  Van Buren declined, retreating out of range himself. “It’s not going to be that easy this morning, Mr. M.,” he said.

  Before Van Buren got the entire sentence out, McGarvey made an explosive ballestra and lunge feint to Van Buren’s sword arm just above the bell guard. Surprised, Van Buren retreated again, making what he thought would be the easy parry. But McGarvey disengaged, dropping his blade beneath Van Buren’s and coming up on the outside of his opponent’s bell guard.

  Van Buren, quick as McGarvey knew he would be, parried the thrust as he retreated, but instead of coming on guard, Van Buren raised his arm slightly to start a flick.

  There it was, the foilest’s mistake in épée.

  A flick was nothing more than a deft snap of the wrist that caused the more flexible foil blade to snap like a bullwhip, the point arching gracefully over the opponent’s bell guard for the touch. An épée blade, however, was too thick and too stiff for a flick to be very effective unless the swordsman had an exceedingly strong wrist. Even so, in order to make it work the attacker sometimes cocked his swordhand slightly, leaving the under part of his wrist behind the bell guard open for just a split instant.

  McGarvey brought his point in line, angulated at a deceptively slight upward angle and held his ground. Van Buren’s arm snapped forward in a powerful flick, but before his point could make the arc, his wrist made contact with McGarvey’s waiting épée tip.

  Even as the green light came on, indicating McGarvey’s valid hit, and locking out the flick, Van Buren realized his mistake. He skipped backward, and immediately raised his left hand, acknowledging the hit.

  McGarvey took off his mask and saluted Van Buren, who did the same. They switched their masks to the crooks of their weapon arms and shook with their bare left hands.

  “You knew it was coming, didn’t you,” Van Buren said, grinning.

  McGarvey nodded. “Yeah. You were concentrating so hard on the flick that you forgot about defense for just an instant.”

  “I’ll remember that for the next time.”

  They parted and walked to the ends of the strip where they unplugged themselves from the scoring reels, and it struck McGarvey all at once that bin Laden’s attention would be taken up with his own troubles right now. Not only his illness, but the apparent trouble he was having with the NIF. If the DI analysts were correct, bin Laden would be meeting on a daily basis with his Islamic fundamentalist pals. There would be a great deal of activity at his compound. He would be traveling again, trying to explain his position, consolidate his support, trying to get the green light to proceed.

  Either that or he was busy stalling them. If that were the case he’d never leave the compound. He would stay put, letting the Islamic liberation fighters come to him. If he was stalling for time the traffic to his compound would be one-way.

  “I said that I have to drive back to the Farm this afternoon,” Van Buren said next to him.

  McGarvey turned around. “Sorry, I guess I was woolgathering. What’s happening down there?”

  “Summer session. Liz is going with me for a few days, if you can spare her. She has some field experience that I’d like her to share with the class.” Van Buren grinned. “The screwups along with the good stuff.”

  “If she thinks that she can spare the time, then go ahead,” McGarvey said. “She’s a handful, isn’t she?”

  “That she is.”

  “Don’t underestimate her, Todd.” McGarvey gave him a hard stare, playing his role as father now. “She’s my daughter, don’t forget it.”

  Van Buren suddenly got very serious. “No, sir,” he said.

  McGarvey clapped him on the shoulder. “Save the flick for foil, unless you want to use the preparation as an invito.”

  “You would have found another weakness, wouldn’t you, sir?”

  “I would have looked for one,” McGarvey agreed. He gathered up his equipment and went into the locker room to take a shower and change clothes while Van Buren put away the scoring machine. He was finished in ten minutes and on his way up to Rencke’s office on the third floor, no longer depressed. He had the bit in his teeth now.

  “I want to see everything we’ve come up with on bin Laden’s Khartoum compound over the past two months,” he said, coming down the narrow aisle between computer equipment.

  Rencke looked up from his monitor and broke out into a big smile. “Just what the docs ordered, beating the kids at something they do good. It’s that thing he does with the flick, isn’t it?”

  “How the hell did you know about that?”

  Rencke scooted his chair to an adjacent monitor and brought up a series of stop action frames on a split screen; one side showing the bout that McGarvey and Van Buren had just finished, and the other showing stick figures fighting the same bout, their every action and reaction analyzed and tagged with vector diagrams. “When the boss is in the dumper everybody wants to know what to do. So I got elected.”

  “Don’t ever take up fencing, Otto.”

  “Have someone coming at me with sharp, pointy objects? Not a chance, Mac.” Rencke scooted back to his primary monitor, cleared the screen and brought up a satellite view of bin Laden’s Khartoum compound. There were several Mercedes and three Humvees parked inside the gates, but there was no sign of people. “Take a look at this. We just got our satellite back.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “There’s activity, so I suspect he’s there.” Rencke looked up. “Are we thinking about another cruise missile strike? There’s a children’s hospital right behind it, and a Catholic school next door. Great propaganda stuff.”

  “No missiles. I want to know about the traffic patterns over the past couple of months. Has bin Laden or anyone else from the compound been going visiting, or has all the traffic been incoming?”

  “Are you talking about the DI report this morning?”

  “It got me thinking that bin Laden might be stalling for time.”

  “It would help explain why there’s been only the one phone call between bin Laden and Bahmad. If they were sticking to their original timetable, bin Laden wouldn’t have to do anything except lie around biding his time until it happened.”

  “Something like that,” McGarvey said.

  “But Bahmad might have already left,” Rencke suggested. “Maybe he was here just long enough to set everything into motion. There were only two guys in the van at Chevy Chase that day. Both of them were bin Laden’s people, we know at least that much. If Bahmad had wanted to come after Liz he would have been there himself. Instead he just sends the two goons. He could be gone.”

  “We never found the gun that killed Mike Larsen,” McGarvey said. “It could mean that there was a third person in the van. Somebody that nobody saw.”

  Rencke stared at the computer screen for a long ti
me. “There’s probably a couple of thousand satellite photographs of the compound over the past sixty days, I’ll check them all. But we need their timetable. And we need it right now.” Rencke looked up again, his eyes round, his face serious. “This weekend the President’s daughter is going to take part in the International Special Olympics in San Francisco. If the bomb went off there it’d sure as hell make a big statement.”

  “It’s crazy,” McGarvey said.

  “You could say that, but this President’s not gonna back down for anything. You gotta admire him just a little.”

  “But he’s putting his own daughter at risk.”

  “And himself too,” Rencke said. “He’s doing the opening ceremonies.”

  “Okay, I want everything you’ve got on the games ASAP. We’ll take another look at them.”

  “All right. But we’ve got one thing going for us though. A bunch of those people are Muslims. He might not want to kill his own people.”

  “That didn’t stop him in Riyadh or Africa,” McGarvey shot back sharply. “If San Francisco is their target the bomb is already there, and so is Bahmad.” He couldn’t believe he had missed it. Where was his head? “I’ll get our people started, and then send the heads-up to the Bureau. In the meantime I’ll try to convince the general to talk some sense into the President.”

  “What about Liz?”

  “She’s supposed to go down to the Farm with Van Buren this afternoon, but I’m going to keep her here. I’m calling a staff meeting at two and I want everything you can come up with on bin Laden by then. I want to know if he’s still there, I want to know if he’s done any traveling over the past two months, and I want to know who’s come to see him.”

  “Are you going after him?”

  “Let’s take care of this weekend first. If we can get to Monday in one piece we’ll take the next step.” McGarvey’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tired of screwing around, Otto. One way or the other we will deal with bin Laden once and for all. He’s fucked with us for the last time.”

  San Francisco

  “This could be a nightmare,” the FBI’s San Francisco Special Agent in Charge Charles Fellman said. It was very windy on the Golden Gate Bridge, and some of his words were blown away, but everyone knew what he was saying, and everybody agreed.

  “It’s our job to see that it doesn’t get that far,” Jay Villiard replied. He was a short, intense man who had been a gold shield detective in Manhattan’s Midtown precinct until going to work for the U.S. Secret Service. He was an advance man for major presidential trips. His job was to convince the local law enforcement agencies to do things his way. “Tried and tested, ladies and gentlemen, tried and tested,” he liked to say in response to objections.

  “The Coast Guard has sent the Notice to Mariners on the five-mile bridge restrictions. But what about ferry traffic?” Beth Oreck asked. She headed the San Francisco Harbor Authority.

  “All traffic.”

  Beth was a large-boned woman with a broad face. She looked at him over the glasses perched on the end of her nose. “In that case we have a problem.”

  Villiard focused on her. “Yes?”

  “Pilot boats. They take the harbor pilots out to incoming ships. If they’re held in port we won’t be able to start getting shipping back to normal for three or four hours after the restriction is lifted.”

  “Send the pilots out before the restriction takes effect. They can wait aboard their assigned ships until the bridge is cleared.” Villiard waited only a moment for any further objections from her before he looked up at the bridge towers that soared 746 feet above the water. “I want people up there watching the roadway from both directions.”

  “We’re already on it,” David Rogan assured Villiard. He was chief of the San Francisco Police Antiterrorism Unit. “I’m putting pairs of my SWAT teams guys on each side of the roadway, on both sides of the bridge.”

  “I agree,” Villiard said. “The bridge will be searched Friday night twelve hours before the event, and again Saturday morning two hours before the start.”

  No one offered any objections.

  Villiard walked over to the rail and looked out over the harbor back toward Alcatraz Island. After a moment Charles Fellman joined him. The others stayed at the two vans that had taken them from Candlestick Park over the route that the presidential motorcade and Special Olympians would take.

  “This is about bin Laden, isn’t it?”

  Villiard looked at him, his lips compressed, and he nodded. “Nothing in two months. The CIA says he’s holed up in Khartoum, and they haven’t come up with a single shred of evidence that he’ll strike here and now.” Villiard shook his head. “There’ll be runners from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Iran. He’d be a fool to try anything. But I’ve got a terrible feeling about this weekend.”

  Fellman, who’d worked with him before, nodded. “I know what you mean. But you have the same feeling before every event.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So we redouble our efforts. Push the exclusion zone back to ten miles; hell, fifteen.”

  Villiard shook his head. “The goddamned bomb is the size of a suitcase, Chuck. How the hell do you find something like that hidden in something like this?” He swept his arm to include the entire bridge, and perhaps the entire bay area.

  “You don’t,” Fellman admitted after a few seconds.

  “But you keep trying,” Villiard said. “There’s no other choice this time. We keep doing the same things; tried and tested.”

  CIA Headquarters

  “Nothing is going to happen this weekend, Mac, and you know it as well as I do,” Murphy said.

  McGarvey had to agree intellectually. He knew all the reasons bin Laden would not strike the President’s daughter in the midst of hundreds of his own people. Yet he could not shake the feeling that had come to him downstairs in the gym. Bin Laden was so desperate to win before he died that he was going to make a foolish move; like Van Buren had with his inappropriate flick. It would be an all-out thrust that he knew could have the consequences of causing his own destruction, but he was willing to take the risk. He had seen it in the man’s eyes and in his voice at the Afghanistan meeting, as well as on the phone call.

  The effective blast radius of the bomb was more than a mile. Parked in the middle of the Olympic Village it would wipe out all the athletes plus a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods. Hidden somewhere in Candlestick Park stadium, so long as it wasn’t shielded by too much concrete and steel, the nuclear explosion would kill everyone in attendance including the President’s daughter who would be down on the field, and the President and First Lady on the speakers’ platform during the opening ceremonies. Hidden somewhere on the Golden Gate Bridge, anywhere between the two towers, the bomb would serve the exact purpose it was designed for, taking out large bridges. The center span would drop into the bay and no one would survive. That included the President and his wife who would be in the convoy of cars leading the half-marathon from Candlestick Park to Sausalito—Deborah Haynes somewhere in the pack.

  “I hope you’re right,” he told Murphy. They were in the DCI’s office, the sun streaming through the tall windows.

  “I’m not trying to say that we’re out of the woods. But I don’t think San Francisco is his target.”

  McGarvey thought again about bin Laden’s voice on the phone call that NSA intercepted; he was a changed man from the one who had negotiated a bomb for his family’s freedom. Even harder and more desperate than he had been in the cave. “I want you to try to get to the President again. One more time, General, try to convince him to pull his daughter out of the games and come home.”

  Murphy shook his head. It was obvious that he had tried more than once and failed. “Not a chance,” he said, and before McGarvey could object he held up his hand. “He’s read all the transcripts and listened to the phone conversation. He knows the risk he’s taking, but he also knows the risk he’d be taking if he packed it up and hid in a bomb shel
ter until we found it. He told me to tell you that he knows you must be faced with a similar problem allowing your daughter to remain working for the CIA, and not sending her away somewhere out of harm’s way until the monster is caught.”

  McGarvey wanted a cigarette, but he felt like hell as it was. He’d known the answer that Murphy would give him. He’d merely been trying to delay the inevitable decision that he was going to have to make.

  “I’ve called a staff meeting for two,” he said looking up. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Here we go again,” Murphy replied heavily. He turned away momentarily unable to meet McGarvey’s eyes.

  “Nothing’s changed, has it?” McGarvey thought about his past, about everything that he’d done in his twenty-five years with the Company. Had he made a difference? He sometimes doubted it. Leastways nothing had changed because of him in the long run. “We don’t have the luxury of time, so it could end up being messy. I want everybody to know that from the beginning. Another missile strike is out, for humanitarian as well as political reasons. Nor do I think it would be a good idea to send in the marines, and Khartoum is too far inland for any kind of an effective SEAL operation. It’s going to have to be one-on-one.”

  “Do we have anybody on the ground out there?”

  “Not the kind of an operative that we need,” McGarvey said. “I’ll set up a forward headquarters in Riyadh. It’s just possible that we can flush bin Laden out of his compound by setting up a meeting somewhere. Something he could not afford to miss. Maybe just across the border in Yemen.”

  “But you’re not going out on the mission, Mac,” Murphy said firmly. “You’re not going to try to kill bin Laden yourself.”

  “It doesn’t matter who kills him, General, he has to die.”

  La Jolla

  Chenna Serafini’s view was a much narrower one. Killing bin Laden would solve only one of her problems. He was just one of dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of crazies out there who would like to do harm to the President and his family. Her job, one that she was proud of and took very seriously, was to stop them, with her own life if necessary. More specifically she was the lead officer on the detail to protect Raindrop, the code name for the President’s daughter.