A drunk in rumpled jeans and a filthy, torn sweatshirt stumbled across the busy Club Road, horns blaring, traffic flowing around him.
Sampson looked over his shoulder in time to see the man collapse on the pavement right behind the Mercedes. “Bleedin’ Christ,” he muttered. He tossed his cigarette away and went around to the rear of the car.
The drunk had his hands on the molded rear bumper and was awkwardly trying to pull himself to his feet.
“Here, what the fuck do you think you’re all about,” Sampson said. He grabbed the man’s arm, hauled him to his feet, and shoved him away. “Get the fuck out of here before I start breaking bones.”
“Entschuldigen, mein herr,” Rencke said, bleary-eyed.
“Fucking Kraut,” Sampson said. “Cops catch you drunk, you’ll be going to jail before you can say bitte.”
Rencke turned and walked away, leaving Sampson with an odd feeling that something hadn’t been quite right about the encounter.
SEVENTY-THREE
Graham emerged from the hotel in a hurry and climbed into the backseat of the black Mercedes. He was torn in two directions; his intense need to kill Kirk McGarvey, and the elemental instinct of survival. Bin Laden and his fanatical al-Quaida mujahideen were right in the middle of both forces. No matter whatever else went down in the next few hours, he needed bin Laden, McGarvey, and the Ibenez woman to be dead.
Afterwards he would make his way out of Pakistan to someplace neutral, where he would have time to figure out what would be next for him.
“Where do you want to go, sir?” Sampson asked.
“Back to bin Laden,” Graham said, looking at the bellmen at the front doors. “But we’ll be leaving again in a few hours, so stay on your toes.”
“Yes, sir,” Sampson said, and he pulled out into traffic.
“And, Tony, make bloody well sure that we’re not followed.”
Sampson glanced in the rearview mirror. “Is that a possibility tonight, sir?”
“Oh, yes,” Graham said. “A very real possibility. I don’t want you to take anything for granted. Do you understand?”
“Yes, of course, sir.”
Graham sat back and closed his eyes, trying hard to bring up an image of Jillian in his mind’s eye. But it was impossible tonight as it had been for some weeks. His head was filled with nothing more than thoughts of revenge; getting back at all the bastards of the world who had forced him to take a path he’d never wanted. Admiral Holmes, Osama bin Laden, and Kirk McGarvey; all men cut of the same rotten cloth.
The admiral, who had given the order that Graham was not to be recalled from patrol, had died of cancer a few years ago, so he was out of Graham’s reach. But bin Laden and McGarvey would come together this night in a dance of death that Graham had choreographed to the last detail.
“Will it be the Pakis or the CIA?” Sampson asked.
Graham opened his eyes. “Is someone on our tail now?”
“No, sir. I’d just like to know who the opposition is, that’s all.”
Sampson was new, and Graham didn’t know if he should be trusted, despite bin Laden’s opinion. But he’d seen the man’s SAS record, which looked good, and his question now was a valid one.
“Probably the CIA,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve involved the local cops or the ISI yet.”
“Yes, sir,” Sampson said. He’d passed the National Tourist Office but instead of turning left on Abdullah Haroon Road, he’d headed straight across to Shahrah-e-Faisal toward the airport.
This route would take them well away from the city center, and the M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre, but once they were on the airport road outside of the city with sparse traffic at this hour of the evening, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to follow them undetected. As soon as they were clear, Sampson would double back into the city center.
Graham laid his head back and closed his eyes again, content for the moment to let his driver make the decisions. He’d been continuously on the go, it seemed, since Cabimas, with McGarvey right there over his shoulder the entire time. He was weary, and he wanted to be done with the entire business; McGarvey, al-Quaida, the jihad.
He’d come up with a notion for continuing the fight on his own, but over the past few days, with his thoughts focused almost exclusively on McGarvey and bin Laden, another idea had begun to niggle at the back of his mind: Why? Why bother going on, when nothing he’d ever done or ever could, would bring his wife back from the grave?
Jillian was dead, and that was more of an immutable truth than all the gods, Jahweh, Christ, and Allah included. Every man, woman, and child on earth was some religion’s infidel. Killing them all wouldn’t bring back his wife.
Graham let his mind drift to the Panama Canal operation where he’d come face-to-face with McGarvey, then to the York River where once again McGarvey had shown up, and finally tonight at the hotel where the arrogant bastard had been waiting with his girlfriend.
He could not simply walk away as he had in Panama and the York River. Not again tonight.
“We’re clear,” Sampson said.
Graham opened his eyes. They were back downtown. “You’re certain?” he asked, sitting up.
“Yes, sir.”
A couple of blocks later they turned onto A. R. Kayani Road, and entered the underground parking garage of the M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre. The steel mesh security gate opened for them with a code card. Sampson drove all the way down to the fifth level where he pulled up at the private elevator for the twenty-fifth floor.
“I want you back here at one thirty,” Graham told his driver. “We have a lot to do this morning, and I’m going to need your help.”
Sampson nodded tightly, and Graham got out of the car and took the elevator up to the twenty-fifth floor.
Sometime after two this morning, when McGarvey showed up, the security system for entry to the parking garage would be disabled, as would the closed-circuit television cameras protecting bin Laden’s lair, and his personal bodyguards would be sent on a wild-goose chase.
McGarvey would make it far enough to kill bin Laden, but he wouldn’t leave the building alive. Because by then his girlfriend would be dead, and Graham and Sampson would be waiting in the parking garage for him to descend from the twenty-fifth floor.
“What the hell kept you?” McGarvey asked, letting Rencke into the hotel room.
“Trying to keep myself from being arrested,” Rencke said, going directly across to the desk and setting up his laptop computer to the WiFi network.
“Did you get the tracker attached?”
“Yeah, that was a piece of cake,” Rencke said. He brought up a GPS program that displayed a map of downtown Karachi on the monitor. “But I had to bug out for a while. It was probably one of the bellmen who spotted me behind Graham’s car and called the cops. Before I could make it around back, they were all over the place.”
“Did you get back here clean?” McGarvey asked.
“I think so,” Rencke said.
Gloria was at the window looking down at the street. “It’s quiet,” she said.
Rencke had come over to Riyadh on the Aurora, and from there on a diplomatic passport flying a Gulfstream bizjet. He had stationed himself across the street from the hotel with a laptop and WiFi equipment that could hack into the hotel’s switchboard as well as McGarvey’s cell phone and sat phone. If and when Graham made the phone call Rencke could trace it. But he was also in a position to attach a tracking device to Graham’s car in case the man showed up in person.