Unspoken between them was that Adkins had withdrawn the Directorate of Security detail from the house against his better judgment in order to give McGarvey the freedom to come and go without hindrance.
Adkins’s driver parked in the driveway; then he and the bodyguard grabbed the M8 carbines from their brackets on the transmission hump, got out of the limo, and did a slow three-sixty scan of the neighborhood, leaving the two men alone for a couple of moments.
“Your daughter spent the night with Kathleen,” Adkins said. “I’ve put her on administrative leave for the duration.”
“Anyone else inside?” McGarvey asked, looking up at the front bedroom window. Liz was standing there.
“No. I didn’t think you wanted anyone else. Under the circumstances.”
“This close I don’t think they’ll bother coming after Katy,” McGarvey said. “How about Todd?”
“Your son-in-law is back at the Farm helping to get the student-instructor crews out the door to work security around Washington.” Adkins was clearly unhappy. “Listen here, Mac, the White House is in an uproar over your stunt in Monaco. The French have lodged a protest against you. The Saudis are screaming bloody murder, threatening to convince OPEC to cut oil production another seven or eight percent. And half the people on the Hill think you might be guilty of treason, while the other half think that at the very least you’re a quitter. Depends on whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.”
“Pretty quick turnaround for someone who was a national hero three days ago,” McGarvey said. “Is there any word on where Salman is staying in Washington?”
“The Bureau had him at the embassy as of an hour ago. They promised to let us know the instant he makes a move.” Adkins looked at him. “I suppose it’d be fruitless to ask you if you knew what you were doing. You always do.” He shook his head. “But Jesus, Mac, you’re going head-to-head with the president this time.”
“How close is the Bureau watching Khalil?”
“I don’t know,” Adkins admitted. “But certainly close enough so that he won’t be able to pull off anything significant.” He glanced at the house. “Like coming here after Katy.”
McGarvey had been thinking about that very possibility from the moment he’d learned Salman was in Washington. He didn’t think Khalil would bother trying to inflict any collateral damage this late in the game, though why Salman, if he wasn’t Kahlil, had come to Washington at this moment was a puzzlement. Unless he’d come to personally lodge a complaint with the president about McGarvey’s behavior aboard his yacht. After all, the former director of the CIA had threatened to kill him.
Whatever the case the sheer arrogance of the Saudi prince was nothing short of awesome.
“It’ll all be over in the next day or two, so just keep the Company on track in the meantime,” McGarvey said.
“Unless al-Quaida postpones the hit.”
McGarvey shook his head. “They’re committed this time. If they back off, they’ll lose too much face.”
Adkins was studying him. “You’re going after Salman, aren’t you?”
“Don’t ask,” McGarvey said.
He gathered his two bags, got out of the limo, and without looking back went up to the house. The door opened and Katy was there, a worried but relieved expression on her narrow, pretty face. Dressed in a pair of designer jeans and a white tee, she looked like a model who hadn’t slept since he’d left; her hair was a little mussed and her eyes were red, but she threw her arms around him once he stepped inside and put down his bags.
“God, am I glad to see you,” she said, clinging tightly.
She felt good to McGarvey, even though he had not come in from the field yet. Only a small part of him was home with his wife in his arms. Most of his head — his concentration, and his awareness of his surroundings — was at a heightened, unnatural level. He was on the defensive, like a boxer with his guard up, while at the same time he was circling for the kill.
Katy caught this feeling immediately. She parted and looked up into his face. “Oh,” she said, “it’s not done.”
“I missed him in Monaco, and now he’s here in Washington,” McGarvey told her. “Sorry, Katy. But I’m not going to miss this time.”
“They wouldn’t tell us why they were withdrawing security from the house,” she said. “Even Dick wouldn’t say, except that they thought the threat level against me personally was down. But they left Elizabeth.”
“Hi, Daddy,” Liz said, coming down from upstairs. She was dressed in khaki slacks and a soft yellow pullover, with a Walther PPK in a quick-draw holster at her left hip.
McGarvey looked up. “Hello, sweetheart. How’re you doing?”
“Fine,” she said. “But I just got word from Neal Julien that Salman left the Saudi embassy, and he thinks that the FBI might have lost him.”
McGarvey nodded. He had been afraid of something like this. “He’ll be back. Anywhere else in Washington will get too hot for him.”
Liz’s pale green eyes narrowed as she assimilated the information. “They’re not making any real progress stopping these guys, so it looks as if it’s going to be up to the CIA to nail Khalil and make him tell us what their plans are.” She looked a little pale and drawn. Like everyone else in Washington, she’d not been getting much sleep since the bin Laden tape.
“I’ll have to get to him first.”
“Do you have any ideas, Daddy?” Liz asked. Her parents had divorced when she was just a little girl, so she had spent all of her teenage years without a father. Instead of hating him for his absence, though, she had put him in a fantasy world in which he was her knight in shining armor. Whenever she had a problem, she would ask herself what her father would do about it — what he would say, how he would react. When he’d finally come back into her life, she wasn’t disappointed; in her mind he was even better than her fantasy version of him. Her adoration of her father sometimes was a bone of contention between Todd and her. But he too looked up to McGarvey, so he could never stay angry with his wife for very long.
“Getting Salman out of the embassy is going to be easier than getting me inside,” McGarvey said. He had a couple of ideas, neither of which would make the White House happy. “If I can get him isolated, I’ll need ten minutes.”
Liz smiled wickedly. “That fast?”
McGarvey nodded. “He’s a coward. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll be fast.”
Kathleen was following all this closely. “I thought you were going to kill him,” she said, an intensity in her voice. She had seen Khalil brutally gun down innocent passengers, and had been at his side when he’d ordered the young mother and her infant child thrown overboard.
“I am,” he said gently. “But first I need to get to him, and then I need to get some answers.”
McGarvey studied the expression on her face. She had changed since Alaska. All of them had. But in her the change had taken the form of a hardness around the edges of her personality. There was a certain recklessness in her attitude, as if she was impatient to get on with things and was willing to take whatever chances had to be taken; damn the consequences despite the baby.
Or perhaps because of the baby.
“Good,” Kathleen said.
McGarvey turned back to his daughter. “Did you talk to Otto this morning?”
“He left the White House a few minutes ago. Berndt took the package, and at least agreed to look at it.”
Rencke had laid out his plan in the briefing book he’d sent over with the FBI agents who’d gone to France to fetch McGarvey. No matter what might or might not have happened in Monaco, the White House had to be convinced that at least some members of the Saudi royal family had been involved in 9/11 and were almost certainly involved in the latest bin Laden threat. Rencke had gotten that information into the hands of the one man the president trusted most.