McGarvey found one of the sprinkler heads. He moved over to it and held the lighter’s flame directly beneath the heat sensor. “The fire department is outside. I’m giving them a reason to break in and rescue us.”
Something metallic clattered on the concrete floor just outside the doorway and rolled into the wine cellar at the same moment the sprinkler system went off, spraying water everywhere.
McGarvey extinguished his lighter and tossed it aside. In one smooth motion he gathered his wife and bodily propelled her farther into the room, putting two solid-oak wine-storage racks between them and the doorway before he shoved her to the floor and laid on top of her.
He knew he had hurt her, but before she had a chance to cry out, the grenade that Khalil had tossed down the corridor went off with a tremendous bang, sending thousands of coil-spring fragments flying in a thirty-foot radius.
McGarvey was hit in his legs and in the soles of his feet, the razor-sharp pieces of wire slicing easily through the leather of his shoes.
He rolled off Katy and painfully scrambled up on one knee, his pistol trained in the general direction of the open door, though in the darkness and with the noise of spraying water it would be nearly impossible to hear or see anything.
Suddenly the building’s battery-backup fire-alarm system came on with a deafening shriek, and a red emergency lantern lit up at the end of corridor.
“Stay here; help is coming,” McGarvey told his wife.
Kathleen grabbed his sleeve. “Don’t leave me,” she cried, in desperation.
“You’ll be okay here for now,” he told her. “But I can’t let him escape again.”
“It doesn’t matter what he did to me—”
“He knows where the terrorists are going to hit us,” McGarvey tried to explain. “I have to get to him before it’s too late.” He looked into his wife’s eyes, willing her to understand what he had to do. “This is our last chance, Katy.”
She was struggling with herself; McGarvey could see it in her face. But she finally released his sleeve and nodded uncertainly. “Go. Do it,” she said. “Stop him once and for all.”
McGarvey brushed a kiss on her cheek, then got up. He fell to his knees before he took one step, the sharp pain from the fragments embedded in his feet impossible to bear.
“Kirk,” Katy cried.
Not this. Not now. He wasn’t going to let the bastard get away.
With Kathleen clutching at him, he laid his pistol down and tore off his shredded shoes and socks. The bottoms of his feet looked like hamburgerpatty pincushions, with a dozen or more wire fragments sticking out. Blood splattered everywhere under the spray from the sprinkler head just above them.
Keeping one eye on the doorway lest Khalil was ignoring the fire alarm and would press his attack, McGarvey started pulling bits of wire out of his feet. Katy, seeing what he was doing, helped him, her tears mingling with the sprinkler water.
It took less than a minute before he picked up his gun and got back to his feet with Katy’s help. The pain was bad, but it was bearable.
“No matter what happens, stay here. Hide somewhere until either I come for you or someone from the fire rescue team gets down here. They’ll be searching the building.”
“Oh, God,” Katy said. Blood was everywhere around McGarvey’s chewed-up feet. “Can you walk?”
He gave her a thin smile and nodded. “It looks worse than it is,” he told her. “Now find someplace to hide.”
He turned and headed for the corridor door, painfully crawling over the shattered remains of several wine racks that the grenade had destroyed.
Nothing on the face of the earth would stop him this time. Khalil was going to die.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Khalil reached the front stair hall in a black rage.
He’d had absolutely no idea that McGarvey would come up with such a move. Water flew everywhere, soaking carpets and paintings. Fifteen or twenty security analysts, translators, and communications people were scrambling down the stairs and across the hall to the front door to get away from a nonexistent fire.
Fools. They were like sheep being led to the slaughter.
For just a second he was stopped in his tracks. Unless McGarvey had been killed or seriously hurt in the blast, he would have been coming up from the basement when he realized that the attack had been abandoned. He was a resourceful man, for whom Khalil had finally developed a healthy respect.
There was a great deal of commotion outside the front gate. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances jammed the street. A crowd was already gathering. It would be the same in the back.
It suddenly struck Khalil that the fire department had been called before McGarvey had set off the sprinkler system. By a CIA team somewhere nearby. The same team that had cut the electricity to the building as a signal to McGarvey.
He had to admire the ingenuity. But the letters to the families of the four martyrs had to be saved, or destroyed, at all costs.
Which left him two problems: getting into al-Kaseem’s safe, and then making his escape before McGarvey caught up with him.
The first staffers had reached the front gate and opened it, allowing the firefighters into the compound. At least two civilians, one of them a woman, were right there with them.
They were CIA; there was little doubt in Khalil’s mind. But he was out of time now.
Khalil glanced over his shoulder to make sure that McGarvey wasn’t there, then sprinted across the stair hall and pushed past the last few of al-Kaseem’s staffers coming down the stairs.
No one tried to stop Khalil as he raced to the head of the stairs and rushed down the corridor to al-Kaseem’s office at the rear of the building. The door was open, and two security officers were hastily shredding documents from the safe.
They looked up when Khalil appeared in the doorway. One of them reached for his pistol, but before he could get it out of his shoulder holster, Khalil raised the M8 and fired two shots, both hitting the man in the chest and knocking him back from the shredder, where he collapsed in a bloody heap.
The other security officer stood clear of the safe and spread his hands away from his sides. The sprinkler head in this room was not working. In a fire, Saudi intelligence wanted any stray documents left out — to be burned up.
“We don’t have much time before the American authorities reach this room,” he told Khalil, with some urgency. “I must be allowed to finish—”
“I gave Rashid four envelopes to keep in his safe. Have they been destroyed yet?” There were a great many people in the stair hall downstairs.
The security officer glanced at the desk. The four thick manila envelopes — each containing a death letter, a personal note from bin Laden himself, and fifty thousand in U.S. hundred-dollar bills — were in a neat stack. Out in the open. The bastard had not safeguarded them. Al-Kaseem’s intention all along was to hinder the operation, not help it.
Khalil’s rage spiked. He fired four shots into the security officer’s chest, driving the man against the wall.
SEVENTY-FIVE
McGarvey cautiously peered around the door frame into the pantry hall, his pistol at the ready. Water cascaded down the stairs into the basement, and even through the din of the fire alarm he could hear a commotion at the front of the house. The fire department had arrived.
A body of a man was sprawled on its side in the corner. He had been shot under his chin, the back of his head half blown away. McGarvey had no idea who it was, but he was pretty sure who had killed him.