“This is about Osama bin Laden again, isn’t it?” McGarvey said.
Rencke nodded. “Ultimately,” he said. “We’re on the hunt for him, just like you suggested, but we’ve stumbled on something else. Maybe even bigger than 9/11 or the suicide bombers you stopped last year.”
It felt odd to McGarvey to be back on solid land after two weeks, but not odd to be talking to an old friend about the business. Katy understood him better than he did.
“Who sent you, or did you come down here on your own?”
“Adkins. But no one was sure that you’d come back, or even agree to listen to me. He thought it was worth a shot, and so did I.”
They got off the path and walked down to an empty picnic table at the water’s edge.
“It’s nice here,” McGarvey said. He looked at his friend. “I’ve got a job teaching Voltaire at New College, starting this fall. Did you know that?”
Rencke nodded glumly. “Good school,” he said. “But you know that they’d like you to take over at the Farm. You could make a lot of difference for the kids coming in.”
“I’ve heard the offer,” McGarvey said. “Now get on with it, Otto. What’d you bring for me?”
“Nine months ago NSA began picking up references to something called Allah’s Scorpion, buried in a couple of Islamic Internet sites. Nobody knew what it meant, but we started to get the idea that it might refer to another al-Quaida strike. Possibly here in the United States, possibly elsewhere.”
“We’ve been getting those kinds of signals for a long time,” McGarvey said. “But there’s been no way of quantifying any of them; telling which one is real and which one is pure fantasy.”
“But the chatter has been pretty consistent, Mac,” Otto said. He was starting to vibrate. “Over the past few months the talk has spread to just about every Islamic Web site, sat phone, and courier network that we’ve got handles on. Allah’s Scorpion is al-Quaida, we’re pretty sure of that. And we think it’ll be another sea operation. They might try to hijack a ship, take on a cargo and hit us, or our interests, somewhere in the world.”
“Come on, Otto, you guys know that the real key is bin Laden,” McGarvey said. When he’d been DCI he’d gone over the same argument with the White House almost on a daily basis. The president had agreed, in principle, but the Company had never been given real marching orders. Find bin Laden, but don’t make waves; we have enough on our plate in the Arab world as it is.
Otto’s head bobbed up and down. “We’re looking for him, Mac. Big-time. Honest injun. But right now we’ve got this problem to deal with, and we think it’s become immediate.”
“They’d need a crew.”
“Two days ago an al-Quaida strike force broke into Camp Delta down at Gitmo, and tried to spring five Iranian prisoners,” Otto said. “They didn’t get out of there, in fact when they knew they were cornered, the al-Quaida guys killed the Iranians, and then blew themselves up.”
“Navy?”
“Bingo,” Otto said. “But they would need a captain. Someone who really knew what he was doing. And the good news is that there just ain’t that many guys out there, on the loose, or buyable, who’d go to work for bin Laden.”
“Have you come up with a short list?”
“As of yesterday morning, six guys,” Otto said. He was excited. “But on the way down I narrowed it to one strong possibility. Guy by the name of Rupert Graham, ex — British Royal Navy, till he got kicked out over some issues stemming from his wife’s death. Abuse of power. Excessive use of force. Poor judgment, leading to several international incidents that were embarrassing to the government.”
“Continue.”
“Until eighteen months ago we think he was pirating in the South China Sea,” Otto said. “And doing a bang-up job of it. Of course that’s mostly speculation, nothing could ever be proved against him.” Otto got up on the tabletop and sat on his legs, something he did when he was superexcited. “He dropped almost totally out of sight, but the Brits, who’ve got him on a watch list, may have spotted him in Karachi eight months ago, and Islamabad two months after that.”
“Bin Laden?”
“It’s a thought, Mac,” Otto said. “But best of all Graham might have been seen in Mexico City last week. One of our guys, spotting flights to and from Havana, shared the pictures with Gordon Guthrie, the MI6 chief of station there. Looked like a match.”
“So Mr. Graham gets around,” McGarvey said.
“You don’t get it, Mac,” Otto said. “He flew down to Maracaibo three days ago.”
“Oil tankers,” McGarvey said.
“Security is pretty tight in the lake. It’d be tough for an imposter to talk his way aboard a ship, and then convince the crew to sail it out of there for him. But the Venezuelan currency has taken a dump. Could be he’s shopping for a crew.”
“Has Venezuelan intelligence been notified?” McGarvey asked.
“On the back burner,” Otto said. “They’ve tightened security, but that’s about it. Al-Quaida isn’t their fight.”
How many times had he been called to arms like this? Dozens, and yet he could remember each and every incident as if it was the only one.
“You’d have limited cooperation down there from their Central Intelligence Division,” Otto went on. “They made it very clear to me that they didn’t want to get involved, but they won’t get in your way. In fact, your passport won’t even be stamped. You’ll never have been there.”
No coastal city on the planet would be safe. And it came down to one man — as it almost always had.
“Find him for us, Mac,” Otto said. “Take him out. We’ve got no one else who can do the job. If a guy like Graham gets his hands on a ship, even with a minimum crew, he could get to within spitting distance of New York, Washington, Miami, anywhere, and set off a dirty nuclear weapon, or even lob a missile into the heart of downtown.” Otto shrugged. “Could be done, ya know.”
The difficult part would be explaining to Katy why he had to do it. Only this time he was going to finish the job once and for all. He would stop Graham, but afterwards he would find bin Laden and put a bullet in the man’s brain.
EIGHT
Alone in his quarters Rupert Graham replaced the slide on his Steyr GB, clicking it home, and pressing the muzzle cap against its spring until it latched in place. With the pistol cleaned and reassembled, he methodically reloaded three magazines of ammunition, slid one into the handle of the gun, and the other two into the pocket of his dark jacket hanging in the closet.
“There must never be mercy for the infidel until our jihad is finished,” bin Laden said to him in the beginning. “It is something you might not understand.”
“But I’m an infidel,” Graham had responded. Eighteen months ago he did not care if he lived or died. “Does that mean I shall be killed?”
“We all die when Allah wants us,” bin Laden said indulgently. “For now you are an instrument of His Messenger.”
It was a lot of bleeding bullshit, only now that he was in the middle of a mission, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to continue with the fight; stick it to the bastards, and keep sticking it to them. He lowered his head and closed his eyes for a moment.
It was shortly after one in the afternoon. He had disassembled his weapons, spreading the parts out on his bed; cleaned them, reassembled them, and reloaded them, getting ready for tonight’s killing.