Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

Otto had it. Estes, the pompous son of a bitch, was right.

  “Well?” Bambridge said.

  “Our new president made no foreign friends even before the election.”

  “Christ,” Bambridge said. “Are you talking about assassinating the president?”

  “Perhaps,” Estes said.

  “No,” Otto said. “Completely discrediting him.”

  “How?” someone asked, but Otto was lost in himself and it didn’t register who’d asked the question.

  THIRTEEN

  Kamal rolled into the San Francisco area on I-580 before noon, taking the San Rafael Bridge across the entrance to the upper part of San Francisco Bay. The morning was bright and sunny, weekday traffic heavy but steady. In his estimation California drivers were mostly crazy but were some of the best in the world on the freeways.

  Once across he took the highway south that ran down into the city itself and over the Golden Gate Bridge just as a freighter was coming in from the sea. The breeze was a little heavy on the center span, but nothing difficult for the camper loaded with explosives he’d driven across the mountains to get here.

  Where to hide a needle? In a haystack? Too easy, he’d always thought. The best place was to hide the needle where everyone would have the chance to spot it, but no one would actually see the thing. It was a childhood game from the West that his mother had taught him when he was growing up in London’s tony Knightsbridge district.

  She’d called it hide the thimble. The game was to place the thing out in plain view, on the fireplace mantel, on a windowsill, on the coffee table, and invite him to find it.

  But it had been hard at first, until he’d learned the trick of not looking for it, but to take in the entire room.

  That was before he’d made his first kill while he was still a young boy living at home.

  Just across the bridge the highway split, Interstate 280 South toward San Bruno and US 101 straight south along the Bay to a construction site at what had been the old Candlestick Park.

  Five miles later he followed the signs to San Francisco’s International Airport and then to the long-term parking garage, where he found a spot near the southwest back wall, on the third floor.

  Switching off the engine he waited for a full five minutes on the off chance that his arrival had been noticed. A couple of pickups, and many SUVs and even a few station wagons were parked in the garage, but his was the only camper.

  The blinds in the back windows were closed, so no one could look directly inside. And the explosives were packed out of sight in just about every storage area and cupboard.

  Each twenty-kilo package was equipped with an encrypted cell phone receiver and detonator. Each receiver also contained a GPS chip that was accurate to within three or four meters.

  Unless he sent the signal to detonate, all the packages would explode at the same moment when the camper reached the pre-programmed set of GPS coordinates.

  Even if he was dead or incarcerated, this explosion and the next two would happen no matter what.

  The only one he wanted to personally witness—the one he hadn’t been paid for, the one he had planned purely for his own pleasure—was at Grand Central Terminal, for the simple reason he wanted to be right there to watch it unfold. Smelling the Semtex, the blood and bodily fluids of one hundred or more innocent people; hear the screams, the cries for help, the frantic announcements on the PA system for people to immediately evacuate the terminal. And when he got out to Lexington Avenue, the ambulances, the cops, the emergency responders and SWAT teams, the media all converging for just the first of the four greatest shows this side of the Atlantic since nine/eleven, would be nothing less than mind-blowing. He almost got an erection thinking about it.

  No one had followed him this far, which was exactly what he wanted. He drove to the exit, paid his fee to the indifferent attendant, and took Highway 101 back into the city to a private garage a few blocks from St. Mary’s Cathedral. He’d found the place online and had paid for one year in advance, and had been sent the key for the padlock to his accommodations address in New York City.

  The small camper barely fit into the narrow space, which had been used for an apartment’s off-street parking. Either the apartment had been sold separately, or the owners, needing the extra money, had rented it out.

  Neither reason was important.

  He got out of the camper with his roll-about bag, put his own combination lock on the door and walked up to Geary Street to find a cab.

  His flight for Denver left at three, which would put him in a rental car heading to the massive First Congregational United Church of Christ Ministry Headquarters outside the tiny town of Colby in far-western Kansas in plenty of time for the evening service.

  The fact that McGarvey had been born and raised on a ranch not too far from there was an irony he particularly enjoyed. He almost wished that the bastard could have survived to witness the next step in the long road to America’s fall into hell.

  * * *

  The November meeting in Beijing nine months ago had been so casual and apparently open that Kamal had almost walked away even before he’d entered the hotel. There’d been no security precautions, so far as he’d been able to spot, nor had he been met in the shabby lobby or upstairs to be frisked.

  He’d merely gone up, found the room, knocked on the door and was let in by one of the three men, all of them middle-aged, all of them dressed in plain business attire, no ties, their shirt sleeves rolled up, their jackets over the backs of their chairs.

  There’d been no bodyguards, no surveillance cameras in evidence, nor were any of them armed so far as he could tell.

  And they were calm, no agitation in their eyes or in their mannerisms. No hesitation in their speech—their English nearly too perfect, as if they’d studied under precise masters. They knew who he was, who he’d worked for and the jobs he’d done. Most notably, the pencil tower project for an offshoot of Saudi intelligence.

  “I have no interest in learning your identities,” he’d begun, but the middle one, with intensely dark hair and thin eyebrows and thin lips, motioned him to stop.

  “You would not survive your inquiries.”

  Kamal wasn’t impressed. He crossed his legs. The man had been educated in a good East Coast school; it was obvious from his cultured accent. He would be relatively easy to track down if the need arose. “You brought me here, what do you want?”

  “Within the next four to six months, you will hit three separate targets within the continental United States. We want the events to happen as simultaneously as possible. All of them within the same one-hour period at noon eastern standard time. All of them on the same day.”

  “May I know the purpose of these attacks?” Kamal said. “I only ask so that I can better judge their nature.”

  “To terrorize, of course,” the same thin-lipped man had said.

  Neither of the other two spoke, nor did they seem very interested, and Kamal had thought for a moment that he was in the middle of a badly scripted and poorly acted stage drama.

  “To terrorize, with the purpose of destabilizing the normal day-to-day routines of the population?”

  “Yes.”

  “A tall order.”

  “We believe that you are currently the best in the business.”

  The decision had been an easy one, made not so much for the money—he still had plenty—but for the thrill of the hunt, and for the prospect of killing a great number of people. And even before he’d left the hotel and had flown back to France, he’d worked out the rough methodology for each of the three.

  “I’ll take the job.”

  “You will not try to contact us ever again.”

  “Nor will you try to contact me. Once I leave this room you will have no further control over the operation, other than the timely deposits of monies into my account.”

  “Your first deposit will be made within the hour,” the thin-lipped man said. “Good day.”

  Kamal’s prepar
ations had begun the next day.

  * * *

  Kamal arrived at Denver’s International Airport late in the afternoon. Within a half hour he’d collected his one roll-about, had rented a car from Hertz, and was on Interstate 70 heading east the 175-mile drive to Colby, and his meeting with Pastor Buddy Holliday, whom he’d spoken with on the phone eight days ago.

  “I’ve come to Christ,” he’d begun, once he’d gotten through to the preacher. “And I have a pile of money to give back to the Lord’s good work!”

  His accent was Texan and it sounded in his ear a lot more authentic than Pastor Holliday’s west Kansas drawl.

  “Are we talking substantial?”

  “How does a mil grab you, Buddy?” Kamal had said. “All I want in return is someplace to lay my head when I’m in the area, get to hear your sermons in person, and figure out how to strike back at the Islamic radicals who want to take over our great country.”

  “You got it, pal.”

  Pastor Buddy was the wealthiest Baptist preacher in the U.S., with his syndicated radio and television shows, a sprawling campus with biblical schools, a children’s hospital, a ward for expectant mothers without husbands and even a ten-thousand-acre amusement park and entertainment complex.

  Plus a massive church that seated twenty thousand people.

  And yet, from what Kamal had learned, the man was little more than an ignorant hillbilly. Charismatic, but ignorant.

  FOURTEEN

  It was after eight in the evening when the night-duty intensive care nurse came down the corridor from the ICU to the waiting room where Pete was watching some stupid movie on television, trying to get her mind off everything swirling around her.

  No one but Estes had wanted to believe what Otto had tried to tell them, but Page had given him the provisional go-ahead.

  “Nothing leaves this building without my approval,” the DCI had warned. “Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Otto had promised, getting up.

  “I wonder if we could put our heads together,” Estes said.

  “Why not?” Otto said, even though he’d never particularly liked academics.

  “Twice-daily briefings, gentlemen,” Page said. “I want to know if something is coming at us, what it might be and when it might happen.”

  Pete had a sandwich and glass of wine in the CIA cafeteria, and had driven directly back to All Saints.

  She looked up when the nurse came to the door.

  “He’s awake.”

  Pete jumped up. “Oh my God. How is he?”

  “He’s asking for you and Otto.”

  Pete hurried down the corridor, where she had to use hand sanitizer and put on a mask before she was allowed inside.

  “Thirty minutes tops,” the nurse said. “If he wants something to drink there’s a glass of ice chips on the stand. I’ll be just down the hall. Dr. Franklin has been notified. He’ll be here soon.”

  McGarvey was lying flat on his stomach, his back draped in damp cloths. The artificial skin grafts had been processed practically overnight, much faster than even Franklin had thought possible, and sent down by courier.

  The lights in the compact, state-of-the-art unit were low, and McGarvey was hooked up to just about every conceivable piece of electronic medical equipment possible.

  He turned his head when Pete came in. He was pale, bruises on his face, his eyes blackened, some of the hair on the back of his head partially singed.

  Something emitted a steady low beeping sound, and the place smelled strongly of disinfectant and a number of other chemicals.

  A sheet covered him from the waist down, but it was impossible not to see that his left leg had been taken off somewhere below the knee, and Pete had just a moment when she almost lost it.

  “I don’t think I’m looking my best,” he said. His voice was harsh, as if his throat was dry.

  He was no longer on oxygen, and though he looked wan, his skin color was much better than it had been last night.

  She went to his side, not sure what she could touch, but he raised his right hand a couple of inches off the bed and she took it. His squeeze was weak, his fingers cool but not cold.

  “You look good to me,” she said. “In fact you look fabulous.”

  McGarvey smiled. “Liar.”

  She had to laugh to keep from crying. “Everybody who knows is pulling for you. Otto and Louise send their love.”

  “I hope the list is small,” he said. “I’m supposed to be dead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve heard most everything from just before we touched down at Andrews. I could hear the pilot talking to the tower, and the paramedics getting me ready for the ambulance.”

  “You were unconscious. And Franklin put you in a coma.”

  “I was gone for stretches, but I heard him warn someone to watch what they were saying around me, because even people on the operating table under anesthesia can sometimes be aware.”

  Pete didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  She got the Styrofoam cup of chips from the stand and put it to his lips. He couldn’t lift his head high enough so she had to hand-feed him.

  When he’d had enough he actually laughed. “I was thinking more along the lines of an ice-cold Heineken,” he said.

  “That’ll come.”

  He was silent for a longish minute. “One of the students put the bomb in my car. Semtex, I could smell it. But they got it on the wrong side, only reason I got out in one piece.”

  Again Pete was at a loss for words, but just for the moment. “Not in one piece, darling,” she said.

  “My leg, I know. I heard them talking about it. Thing is, the bottom of that foot itches, but I’ll get used to it.”

  “Goddamnit to hell,” Pete said, lowering her head.

  McGarvey gave her hand another squeeze. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But it is what it is, and we’ll deal with it. Right now I want to know what Otto’s come up with. Who targeted me and why?”

  “We think it was al-Daran. Antonio Gomez was the student who placed the Semtex in your car and was on a flight to Atlanta within a couple of hours. They found his body in a parking garage downtown. Shot in the heart, and again in the side of the head after he was dead.”

  “Insurance. No guarantee it’s him.”

  “Otto has it at eighty-seven percent confidence.”

  “That’s high. Revenge?”

  “Everyone but Otto thinks so.”

  “He’s right. Al-Daran has gone to ground, and from his past performance he’ll be comfortable, he has the money. Only a project that interested him would make him surface. Otto have any ideas?”

  “One, but it’s over the top.”

  McGarvey smiled. “Give me the short version for now.”

  “More terrorist attacks, like Paris, Brussels, Tokyo and New York.”

  “Otto thinks he’s back working for the Saudis? We never proved it.”

  “Possibly worse than that. He’s called them flash points.”

  “China–Taiwan, Pakistan–India, North and South Korea, Putin and Ukraine, for starts.”

  “Among others.”

  “What’s the common thread?”

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  “Because there’s no way in hell all of those countries could possibly agree to any sort of an alliance. It makes no sense, except that Otto’s apparently got a bug up his ass.”

  Pete let him work out the next step.

  “The common thread is me. He was hired to take me out of the picture because of something I know, or something I can do.” McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment. “But I know all of those countries. I’ve been on operations in every one of them. I’m no friend.”

  “You know their intel people and methods.”

  “I know MI6, DGSE and the BND; doesn’t mean Britain, France and Germany are plotting something against us.”

  “No, but they might want
to provide some back-burner help, as long as it would never lead to anything like Paris or Brussels.”

  Mac raised his head to look at her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “We had a meeting upstairs with Walt, Marty, Carleton, Ursula and some PhD from Harvard a few hours ago. But before we went upstairs Otto told me that he was worried about what he called a soft coup d’état.”

  “Because of our new president?” Mac said.

  Before the election there had been some talk at the Pentagon that a couple of the generals might have to think twice about following the orders of a president who, in their estimation, didn’t have a grasp of how the real world works. But it was just talk.

  “It’s possible.”

  “That makes no sense,” Mac said softly.

  “No. But it scares the shit out of me.”

  FIFTEEN

  Western Kansas near the Colorado border was nothing but vast tracts of rolling grasslands, the interstate highway cutting through them like the prow of an ocean liner through the waves. The feeling for Kamal was lonely, feral, almost to the point of a throwback to historic times; no civilization, no people, nothing but the dots of cattle grazing in the far distance.

  The prairie was completely opposite of places like London and New York and Paris and even the Côte d’Azur.

  Then came the big billboard showing Pastor Holliday, his hands raised in supplication, which stood in front of his vast complex, the biggest building of which was fronted by a massive white cross at least two hundred feet tall. Beyond the church were a roller coaster, a gigantic, four-tiered carousel—supposedly the largest in all of North America—and dozens of other rides and attractions, including a replica of Noah’s Ark and the crucifixion site of Jesus. Vast crowds of smiling, ordinary people—moms and dads and happy children—were everywhere.

  Off to the left were a series of buildings—one of them the children’s hospital, others dormitories, administrative buildings, a television and communications center, and next to it a fenced-in space bristling with satellite dishes and a couple of microwave towers, and a complete village of houses and cottages and even a town square with businesses.