“I never thought he’d have the guts to face you,” Rencke said, his fingers flying over the keyboard.
“What’s the tracker’s range?” McGarvey asked. He tried to keep himself in check. They were close now, and he could almost feel bin Laden’s presence.
“It’s uplinked to one of our Jupiters. Anywhere on earth from eighty degrees north to eighty south.”
The map display shifted to a much narrower area of downtown within just a few blocks from the hotel. A small red dot appeared near the center of the display, a blinking cursor next to it.
“The unit’s shielded,” Rencke called out.
McGarvey was looking over Otto’s shoulder. “Have we lost him?”
“I don’t think so.” Rencke centered the search area directly adjacent to the red dot and cursor, which showed the last location within one meter where the uplink was lost. He overlaid the street map with a satellite view of that specific downtown block which showed a tall building on A. R. Kayani Street.
“Underground parking?” McGarvey asked.
“Probably,” Rencke said absently. He brought up a Principal Places of Interest directory, and overlaid it on the double display. “Bingo,” he said, looking up. He clicked on the building, and an info box popped up with M. A. Jinnah Commercial Centre, an address, and a brief description.
“Can you get more?” McGarvey asked. He looked up. Gloria was watching him from the window, her eyes bright. She was excited for him, and yet it was obvious she was a little frightened. If they had actually found out where bin Laden was hiding, it meant McGarvey would be going after him sometime before two this morning when Graham was supposed to come back to the hotel. Almost anything could happen.
“I don’t know if they’ve gone digital yet,” Rencke mumbled, his fingers once again flying over the keyboard. The street map overlaid with the satellite image disappeared and a logo that looked like the Masons’ symbol came up with an Arabic inscription around a compass rose. “City Engineer’s office,” Rencke said.
He pulled up an Arabic-to-English translation program, went to the City Engineer’s home page, and from there, a directory of major buildings and structures within the city proper. Scrolling down a dozen pages, he came to the M.A. Jinnah Commercial Centre. He looked up with a big grin. “Am I good, or what, kimo sabe?”
“You’re good,” McGarvey agreed.
Rencke clicked on the blueprint icon. A page came up asking for a password. He took a CD from his laptop bag, loaded it, and a few seconds later an enable icon came up onscreen. He clicked on it and his program bypassed the password block. Moments later a directory of blueprint pages came up. “Okay, if he’s in there, he wouldn’t have his name painted on the door. How do you want to do this?”
“Floor by floor. First let’s see what we can eliminate.”
Gloria came over to watch. “This could take a while,” she said. “We’ve only got a little more than three hours before Graham comes back.”
“It’ll be something obvious,” McGarvey said. “Something you can look at a thousand times and still not see.”
Rencke started with the ground floor that housed a security post at the front entrance, as well as a monitoring command post. A large atrium was bounded by shops, a travel agency, a storefront banking service, rest rooms, and a first-aid station. At the rear of the building were the service entrances and loading docks.
The second floor contained mostly attorneys’ offices, along with a small consulting service that apparently helped promote foreign investments, especially those from eastern Europe.
The third, fourth, and fifth floors were taken up by something called PHI Telecommunications Co., LLC, the sixth and seventh by Hassan Aly Publications, and the eighth through eleventh, businesses that were involved with port of Karachi operations and the shipping industry.
There were other consulting firms, doctors’ offices, financial advisers, and investment counselors, plus a number of other businesses whose purposes couldn’t be guessed from their names. One of them, Amin House, which took up more than half of the twentieth floor, looked promising. Rencke minimized the City Engineer’s site, and pulled up the City Directory, which listed Amin House as the private investment service center for Naimat Amin, who apparently was a Pakistani multimillionaire.
Rencke looked up. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “Bin Laden could be using it as a conduit for funds from his Saudi Arabian pals.”
“So far as I know most of that money is going through Prague,” McGarvey said. “But if we don’t find anything else, we’ll come back to it.”
Fifteen minutes later they came to the twenty-fifth floor, and Rencke sat up. There was no listing for the entire floor. The twenty-fourth contained an investment house, as did the twenty-sixth, but the twenty-fifth was blank.
There was no other information in any of the building’s directories, or in the City Directory, Karachi Utilities, or Karachi City District Taxing Authority. The twenty-fifth floor simply did not exist.
“He’s there,” McGarvey said.
“How can you be so sure?” Gloria asked.
Rencke was going through the directory for the remaining twenty-three floors, and when he was finished he looked up. “If bin Laden is in that building, he’s on the twenty-fifth. How’re you going to get through security? They know you’re here, and if Graham is setting you up you could be walking into a trap.”
“Not until two,” McGarvey said. He pulled out his cell phone.
“Who’re you calling?” Rencke asked.
“Joe Bernstein. I’m going to need a few things.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
It was one in the morning. Osama bin Laden sat alone in his sanctuary, a well-worn copy of the Qur’an open to Al-Nisa in chapter four to his right, and the Kalashnikov rifle he’d taken from the hands of a dead Russian soldier in Afghanistan to his left.
If they turn away from Allah, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them.
He was weary from the long struggle, especially after the attacks on Manhattan and Washington, which hadn’t really worked the way they’d hoped. The American people had not risen up against their government as they had to end the war in Vietnam.
His engineering advisers had been correct about bringing down the World Trade Center towers, but his political advisers had been wrong about everything else.
He had been wrong then about the aftermath of the attacks, as he was now about Rupert Graham, his infidel sword, his Allah’s scorpion. His man at the Pearl Continental had telephoned him an hour ago with the disturbing news that Graham had met with Kirk McGarvey and a woman presumed either to be his wife or perhaps a mistress. The meeting in the tenth-floor lounge had been brief, and what had been said was unknown, but immediately after Graham walked off, McGarvey and the woman had returned to their hotel room.
Possibly the most disturbing news was an event that occurred in front of the hotel when a man, apparently intoxicated, had an encounter with Graham’s driver. An hour later, the same man showed up at the hotel and had gone directly to McGarvey’s suite.
The CIA had some devilishly clever people working for it, and some of the technology they were able to come up with was truly frightening, making secure cell phone use impossible, and even the Internet unsafe.
It was only a matter of time before the infidels found him. Even with the help of a number of key ministers in the Pakistani government and its intelligence service, the ISI, that he been getting all along, the U.S. government’s financial and military aid packages to Musharraf were siren songs, impossible to resist.