The normally calm al-Kaseem appeared at the steel security door in a hurry; he was flushed. “She’s here.”
Khalil looked up. “What are you talking about?”
“Kathleen McGarvey and another woman are sitting in a Mercedes directly in front of this building. I recognized her from the photographs.”
For a moment Khalil was unsure of himself. Someone had traced him here, and the woman had the audacity to show up and challenge him. McGarvey knew!
“I’m telling you to stop this before it gets totally out of hand,” al-Kaseem said. It was an order he was not qualified to give. Khalil was of a higher rank within the royal family than al-Kaseem was. But the intelligence chief had his own orders, which were to keep a very low profile until whatever was going to happen was over with. Already more than eight hundred Saudi citizens had been airlifted back to Riyadh, where they would wait out the attack and the backlash that was expected to last a year or more. There were to be absolutely no incidents involving Saudi citizens in the U.S.
Khalil decided that whatever the reason the brave but empty-headed woman had come here, the advantage was his for the taking.
“We’ll take her now,” he said.
“You’re not bringing her into this facility,” al-Kaseem shouted.
Khalil looked at the intelligence officer as if he were an insect. “I’ll take her wherever I please.”
Elizabeth knew that this was all wrong, sitting in plain sight in front of the Saudi-owned building. Her mother’s aim was to flush Khalil out of hiding, if this is where he was, using herself as bait. After Alaska, the terrorist had a strong incentive to hit back.
The problem was that her ruse might be successful. Without backup they would be sitting ducks out here.
“You’ve made your point, Mother,” she said. She pointed to the closed-circuit cameras mounted behind the tall iron fence. “They know we’re here. So let’s go.”
Katy seemed to be disappointed. “I thought someone would have come out to find out what we wanted.”
“Be glad they didn’t,” Elizabeth said. She was getting seriously spooked.
A white panel van turned the corner on Thirty-second Street, and came up the narrow Scott Place. It moved slowly, as if the driver was looking for an address. Elizabeth could see no one in the passenger seat, but her muscles instinctively tightened. They were in a dead-end cul-de-sac with no room to maneuver. If they were cut off, they could be in trouble.
“Start the car, Mother,” she said, urgently. She unsnapped the restraining strap on her pistol.
Katy was looking at the approaching van. She nodded. “I think you’re right,” she said, and she reached for the key.
The van glided slowly past them. The driver didn’t look over, and for just a second Elizabeth breathed a sigh of relief, but then she stiffened. “No,” she said. The van supposedly belonged to a cable TV company. But the driver was wearing a suit and tie. It was all wrong.
She drew her pistol and thumbed the safety catch to the off position, when her door was jerked open and the muzzle of a pistol, held by a very large, very determined man, was jammed into the side of her head.
“There is no reason for you to lose your life,” he warned. His English was heavily accented. He was a Saudi. “We want her, not her bodyguard.”
Elizabeth raged inside. Dumb. Dumb. She had been dumb. It was entirely her fault that they were in this situation. But she wasn’t going to compound the trouble by making a stupid move. So far no shots had been fired.
She nodded.
The heavyset man reached in with his free hand and took her gun. He said something in Arabic over the top of the car.
Kathleen’s door was opened by a large man in a dark business suit, a pistol in his hand. He reached in, shut off the car, took the ignition keys, and tossed them across the street. Kathleen turned to Liz and started to speak, but Liz cut her off.
“Do exactly as they say, Mrs. McGarvey. I’m sure they mean you no harm. They just want you as a hostage to neutralize your husband. Do you understand?”
For a long moment Kathleen looked as if she was on the verge of making a move against the man pointing the gun at her. But then she visibly relaxed and gave Liz a nod, a look of apology in her eyes.
The Saudi security officer checked to make sure that there was no oncoming traffic or pedestrians, no one to see what was going on; then he helped Kathleen out of the car and hustled her back to the Comcast van parked directly behind them.
“If you try to follow us or if our movements are hindered in any fashion, we will kill her,” said the officer holding the pistol on Elizabeth. “Tell your boss to go home and stay there. His wife will be returned unharmed in two days.”
There it was, Liz thought. The man had made a mistake. He knew the timetable for the attack. Two days.
FIFTY-FOUR
Whatever the outcome of the latest threat to America, McGarvey figured that he would never be welcomed back to any job in U.S. intelligence. Even if he could somehow avoid jail time, his career was over. And it felt odd to him after more than twenty-five years to be branded a pariah, and by none other than the president himself.
McGarvey didn’t want his friends to be tainted by association. In the face of martial law anyone perceived to be a threat to the nation could be shot. Yet he needed help.
“What I want to do will probably blow up in our faces,” McGarvey told Otto Rencke. They stood facing each other in the shelter hut in the woods between the fifteenth fairway and the golf-course maintenance barn. No one was on the course this morning. Some things had not gotten back to normal.
“Boy oh boy, Mac, the shit has truly hit the fan over Monaco,” Rencke hooted. He was hopping from one foot to the other. It was a little shuffle he did when he was nervous or excited.
“I know. Dick filled me in on the way back from Andrews. He told me that you managed to get to Berndt. What was his reaction?”
“He took the stuff, and he wished me good luck,” Rencke said. “It’s something, ya know. He’s a good guy. If anyone can convince the president, he can. But everybody’s coming up with zip. Nada. The bad guys are here, and we’re making arrests. But all the wrong guys.”
McGarvey had seen this coming well before 9/11. Because of skyjackings in the seventies the U.S. had put air marshals on most commercial airliners. The skyjackings finally stopped, in large measure because of the sky marshals. But instead of continuing with the program, the budget was cut, sky marshals were taken off the airlines, and 9/11 occurred. Now the sky marshals were back, and al-Quaida wasn’t going to use skyjackings again, and yet that was Homeland Security’s main area of concentration.
No one was seeing the facts for what they were. To stop the attacks we had to go to the sources of the money. Which were certain members of the Saudi royal family.
“Do you have anything new on Khalil?”
“Salman showed up at the embassy this morning. And the FBI sent a surveillance team over to keep watch. But when he left a couple of hours later, they lost him.” Rencke spread his hands in wonderment. “I don’t think their hearts were in it. Nobody believes he’s one of the bad guys.”
That too was about what McGarvey expected. “Have they found him yet?”
“Not as of a half hour ago.”
That didn’t make sense to McGarvey. Salman had come to the U.S. so that he would be in plain sight when the attacks came. For him to shake his FBI tail and disappear somewhere in Washington was just the opposite of what he had done before. But, if Salman was Khalil, he might have slipped out of sight because he had something to do concerning the attacks, perhaps send a signal that would start the clock ticking.