24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella Page 4

  “A lot of ground to cover,” McGarvey said absently. Some of the answers were right here.

  “I’m feeling a but.”

  “I assume that the president is bunkered in.”

  “He won’t be leaving the White House until this is over, if that’s what you mean. But his daily schedule will not change. He has his morning staff meeting an hour from now, and the usual daily press briefing. Lunch with the prez and VP of the NRA. This afternoon, he’s pinning medals of honor on two guys for action they took almost a year ago—long overdue in my estimation—and at four, the prime minister of Israel is landing at Andrews.”

  “Young’s not going out there.”

  “No, and we’re working on an explanation that’ll satisfy the Israelis as well as the media.”

  “He’s on a conference call with Putin and Assad.”

  “That’ll work,” Bernstein said. “Whenever you want to come out of semiretirement, call me; I’ll put you to work.”

  “I thought that’s what I’ve been doing this morning.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I want to talk to Dorothy’s minders.”

  “They’re still in the van across the street.”

  “Not there. I want to take a walk.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Yeah. People have a tendency to tell the truth when they’re uncomfortable.”

  “Goddamnit, these are good people. They’ve been in the Service more than ten years.”

  “They lost the president’s daughter.”

  * * *

  Bernstein introduced them, and they shook hands with McGarvey. Coffey was built like a linebacker, but the woman was lean and looked mean. Neither of them were happy.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” McGarvey said.

  They headed across Thirty-Seventh Street and started up the Copley and Healy lawns, which more or less served as the school’s mall. Students were heading for the dining hall, and others to the library and research buildings. Traffic had begun to pick up on O Street NW, through the north and south gatehouses.

  “It’s cold out here,” Coffey said.

  “I live in south Florida, and this is pure crap to me,” McGarvey said.

  “Why’s the CIA involved, sir?” Kelley asked.

  “Your protectee was kidnapped on your watch, but what you may not know is that ISIS probably took her, and they want the president to declare a state of war in Syria.”

  “Jesus,” Kelley said.

  “Take me through it.”

  “She was going to see her boyfriend, Tony Byers,” Coffey said. “It’s something she’s been doing for several months now. The kid checks out, so we dropped her off at the rear of the residence.”

  “He’s gay—did you know that?” McGarvey asked.

  “No.”

  “According to him, the president’s daughter is a lesbian.”

  Coffey started to say something, but Kelley held him off. “We didn’t know about him, but I pretty well thought that at the least she was AC/DC,” she said. “But that’s not what you want to know. How was it we lost her tracker?”

  “Something like that.”

  “When you find her, you’ll probably find a Band-Aid with a folded-up piece of tinfoil in her pocket, or maybe somewhere here on campus where it was dropped when they cut out her chip.”

  “She’s done something like before?”

  “Once. But we threatened to tell her father, who would have grounded her, so she promised never to do it again.”

  “The drop has to have shown up at the locators in the House,” Coffey said.

  “Soon as it went offline, we rolled,” Kelley said. “But she had disappeared.”

  “Did you see anyone? Anything? A car, truck, van, bus, something?”

  “Nothing,” Coffey said.

  Kelley stopped. “We were really intent on trying to catch up with her. She’d done shit like this before. Just like Barbara, one of the Bush twins.”

  “And?”

  “There could have been an entire fucking parade down N Street and we would have missed it.”

  “Shit.”

  “They want us downtown.”

  “Later,” McGarvey said. “You’re still on your protectee’s detail.” He phoned Otto.

  “Yes.”

  “I need to know what was on campus around midnight. Taxis, maintenance vehicles, street sweepers, garbage trucks, delivery vans. Whatever. Then I want to know if they’re all accounted for.”

  “I’m on it. Southeast corner?”

  “For starters. But if need be, include the entire campus and then the surrounding neighborhoods.”

  “My darlings are working on it; give me just a mo. But what are you thinking?”

  “She may have taped a patch of tinfoil over her chip so she could ditch her detail. But if she’d been grabbed within minutes, and her chip cut out of her arm, she could have been hustled off campus. In the meantime, whoever had taken the chip hauled ass to the library.”

  “Clever girl,” Otto said.

  “Too clever,” McGarvey said.

  He and Dorothy’s minders headed back to the van where Bernstein was waiting for them.

  “Is it going to be that simple?” Kelley asked.

  “That part might be, but we still have to find her before she becomes more of a liability than an asset.”

  “The people ISIS attracts are supposed to be the dumb ones,” Coffey said.

  “Don’t count on it.”

  * * *

  Otto called when McGarvey was explaining to Bernstein what he thought might have happened. McGarvey put it on speaker, and all of them, including the two techs manning the communications gear, looked up.

  “Five vehicles, including the detail’s Taurus. Four are accounted for. Leaves the fifth, a DPW garbage truck that was due to check in a half hour ago.”

  “Do you have its route?”

  “Sending it.”

  “It’s how they got the president’s daughter off campus,” McGarvey told Coffey and Kelley. “Find it, and then call the bureau’s forensics people back. They might come up with something.”

  Hour 9

  The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies was located on the second floor of the Edward S. Bunn building on Thirty-Seventh just above O Street, within walking distance from where the Secret Service van had been parked.

  Bernstein had gone back to the White House, while Coffey and Kelley Loring were chasing down the garbage truck.

  McGarvey waited in the ground-floor reception area after he showed his CIA credentials to the young girl behind the desk and asked for Professor Sayid Hamsi. She’d not been able to hide her anger and a little fear.

  “We’re not the bad guys, you know,” he told her, though he didn’t know why except that she reminded him of his daughter, Liz.

  It was a couple of minutes after nine, the building alive by the time the Arabic and Islamic studies professor showed up. The receptionist stopped him. He was a slightly built man in a down jacket, open in front, shirt and tie underneath, jeans and high-top hiking shoes. His hair was mostly white and over his collar. He perched his glasses on the end of his nose as he came over.

  “Mr. Director, I am Sayid Hamsi,” he said. His voice was soft, almost to the point of a whisper. They shook hands.

  “Do we know each other?” McGarvey asked. Otto had only told him that Sayid taught Muslim-Christian studies and that he was the imam of the Muslim Prayer Room on campus.

  “I taught Arabic relations at the Farm a few years ago. We never met, but you were already a legend down there.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  The professor smiled. “That you were a legend?”

  McGarvey had to laugh. “That you had taught there.”

  Hamsi shifted his briefcase into his left arm and linked his right with McGarvey’s. “Now that we have broken the ice, let’s go up to my office, and you can explain to me what all the fuss has been on campus this morning and what I
can do to help.”

  * * *

  Hamsi’s office, on the second floor of the building, was not much larger than a small walk-in closet. Every available inch on the three bookcases, on the floor behind and beside his desk, on top of the three file cabinets, and on the broad window ledge was crammed with books and magazines and newspapers. Books were stacked shoulder high even in the corners.

  Otto would have been at home here.

  But the professor’s desk was organized. A large-screen computer, a desktop calendar, two old-fashioned Rolodexes, and a stack of a half dozen legal-sized ruled tablets, plus a wooden tray that held eight fountain pens, were all neatly arranged.

  When the door was closed and they were seated across from each other, McGarvey started. “I’m pressed for time, so I’ll get to the point. The president’s daughter has been kidnapped.”

  Hamsi was clearly moved. “Dear God,” he muttered. “From here on campus? The rumor is that she has a boyfriend here.”

  “A little after midnight.”

  “Has there been a ransom note found?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you came to me, so it is suspected that Islamic terrorists are behind it. ISIS, perhaps?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  Hamsi sat back. “I’m the voice of Islam here on campus. And you’re here to ask if I know of any radicalized students who might have been behind such a crime. Of course even if I knew, I would hesitate to tell you. I would counsel the student, but I wouldn’t turn him or her over to you or the FBI. You must understand this.”

  “Religious freedom.”

  “The law of the land. My land as well as yours.”

  “You read the newspapers; you know what the CIA does.”

  “What you try to do—sometimes very badly.”

  “I’m sorry to have bothered you this morning, Professor,” McGarvey said, and he started to rise.

  “Many of the youngsters press the issues with me and the other staff. They could sound radical to some outsiders, but they are children trying to find their way with the help of Allah and us. And this is a university, where freedom to think and to ask are the norm.”

  “Or should be.”

  Hamsi smiled. “Flattery, but we fight the fight wherever and as best we can. Here on campus as well as at your Farm.”

  “There was a ransom note,” McGarvey said. He handed his iPhone, on which he had brought up the letter, across the desk.

  Hamsi read it, then read it again before he handed the phone back. “It makes sense from the point of the Daesh’s leadership.” Daesh was the insulting slang word in Arabic for ISIS. “Involving us in a ground war that we could not possibly win would be a perfect recruiting tool.”

  “You admire them?” McGarvey asked, even though he thought he knew the answer. He was just playing devil’s advocate. Ironic here.

  “I admire brilliance,” Hamsi said. “And of course the president’s advisers are telling him the same thing.” He looked away momentarily. “But to have a daughter taken this way … it must be anguish.”

  “Can you help?”

  “Was this letter delivered personally to the president?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “It was left on his desk in his private study.”

  “Off the Oval Office. But that sanctum of all sanctums must be under constant video surveillance.”

  “There was a problem.”

  “Then it is someone inside the White House,” Hamsi said. “Why did you come to me?”

  “Who else knew that the president’s daughter would be here this morning?”

  Hamsi smiled in sadness. “Now that is a question I think you had to ask me. The real reason that you’re here.”

  “I need your help.”

  “I can’t help you. Not that I won’t, but I cannot. Many people here knew that the girl was seeing a seminary student. In fact, it has become something of a joke: Will she sway him from the faith, or will he make a nun of her? But the real, the more serious, campus joke is that she has used the boy as a legerdemain. A sleight of hand for her real purpose, which was to deceive her father.”

  “That she’s a metalhead and has friends who she wants to keep to herself.”

  “Her Secret Service detail must know.”

  “That’s why she came here this morning. She wanted to ditch them.”

  “And she was taken. It’s someone in the White House or on the Secret Service detail. Someone who has access to the president’s study, the surveillance system, and the president’s daughter’s movements. The list cannot be large.”

  “No.”

  “And therefore all the more disturbing.”

  McGarvey got up. “Thank you, Professor.”

  “And thank you, Mr. Director,” Hamsi said, also rising.

  “For what?”

  “For not automatically thinking that we’re radicalizing kids in our mosque. The bad ones are foreigners coming to our shores.”

  “Or foreigners directing homegrowns,” McGarvey said. “There are radicalized American-born bad people willing to step up to the plate. Believe me, they’re all around us and have been for a very long time.”

  Hour 10

  Dot had drifted off to sleep at some point, and when she awoke, light was filtering in around the edges of the heavy plastic curtains. Her jaw was swollen, and she had a splitting headache and roaring thirst. She also had to use the bathroom again, this time for more than just a pee. She was alone in the room, but she thought she was hearing muffled voices, perhaps out in the corridor or possibly in an adjacent room.

  As she got out of bed, her legs nearly collapsed beneath her, and she had to hold a hand against the wall to steady herself until her head stopped spinning. She had to throw up again, but she had nothing in her stomach.

  She lurched over to the window and drew one edge of the curtain back just a crack. She thought that it was morning, though she had no idea of the time. A lot of cars were on a highway on the other side of a frontage road. A Shell gas station was off to the right with several cars getting gas, and a McDonald’s with cars in the parking lot was to the left.

  The parking lot below her window was empty, and some windblown trash had piled up against the light stanchions. From her vantage point, she suspected the place was closed. No other guests here except her and her captors. No staff, no curious housekeeper to knock on her door, no one to come find out what the girl in the second-floor room facing the highway was doing still in bed at this hour.

  But she didn’t recognize where she was. Buildings, what looked like rows of five- or six-story apartment blocks, were on the other side of the highway, but there was nothing in the distance other than more of the same. There was no sun, and the morning looked cold; everything she could see out the window was gray and drab.

  She let the curtain fall back in place and tried the telephone again, but still there was no dial tone.

  The people who had taken her were Middle Easterners—she was sure of at least that much. But they didn’t dress the part. Especially not the two women who’d worn no head coverings. They wanted to blend in.

  Dot went into the bathroom, softly closed the door, and sat down on the toilet. She could no longer hear someone talking.

  She remembered that they’d parked at the rear of Wolfington and that she’d taped up her chip—a really stupid move—and boogied out the front door.

  Two figures had come out of nowhere, and as they had hustled her across the street, one of them had clamped a sickly sweet wet rag over her mouth and nose. She only vaguely remembered some sort of a truck, and then she was here with Tarek.

  They were ISIS, the bleak realization came to her.

  They had taken her for ransom.

  They wanted her father to do something that was probably totally impossible even for a president to do.

  Which meant that she was most likely totally screwed, because if the Service hadn’t found her by now—she figured it had to
be at least six, maybe eight hours since she’d been grabbed—they probably had no idea where to look.

  She finished, then washed her hands and splashed some cold water on her face. The only towel was a dirty rag. She wiped her hands on her trousers.

  Studying her image in the mirror, she looked like shit. One side of her mouth was swollen almost to the size of a grapefruit, and two of her upper teeth on that side were missing. Besides that, her spiked black hair was a total mess—almost too goth, she thought. And her blouse was ruined from the Coke she’d thrown up.

  And her nipples inverted like they did whenever she was cold. They’d been exposed to Tarek and the son of a bitch who’d hit her. All but bare from the time she’d been grabbed, and that single thought was just about the worst thing she could imagine at this moment.

  She listened at the bathroom door, but the room was quiet. No one had come back yet. She went out and stripped the thin blanket from the bed, throwing it over her shoulders and with one hand clutched it to her chest.

  Someone just outside in the corridor shouted something. It was the bastard who’d hit her, almost certainly the man running the operation. He sounded angry.

  A woman said something, her voice conciliatory to Dot’s ears. But the man shouted again, and the woman cried out.

  Someone was at the door, and Dot scrambled backward, hitting the bed and sitting down abruptly as the door opened and Tarek came in. He was frightened.

  “You’re awake,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. He closed the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There is big trouble. Your father is not cooperating, and Fathi now has to call our unit leader to ask for guidance.”

  Dot felt a little thrill of triumph—her father was sticking it to the bastards—and yet she was frightened to the core for her own survival. “Is Fathi the one who hit me?”

  “Awya.”

  It meant yes; Dot understood at least that much. “What do you guys want? Maybe I can help.”

  Tarek shook his head. “It’s not possible now. He wants to kill you and leave, but my brother is against it.”

  “Your brother is here?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t the one who did this?” Dot asked, touching a finger to her swollen cheek. She wanted to keep the kid talking, make him a friend. She figured they had to be nearly the same age.