Katy had been kidnapped and she was here. So was Salman.
McGarvey motioned with his pistol toward the corridor that led to the back of the house. “Move.”
Salman stepped back a pace and shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said, haughtily. “You think that I’m a terrorist, and you’re not bluffing. You are going to kill me. Well, I’m not going to the slaughter like a lamb. If you want to do it, you’ll have to shoot me in the back.”
Salman glanced at the closed-circuit monitors behind the counter, one showing the front entrance, and the other, Katy in her cell. He looked back at McGarvey. His eyes had narrowed, and a crafty, calculating expression had come into his face.
“We’re going downstairs to get her,” McGarvey said. “And then the three of us will leave here together.”
“I didn’t do this,” Salman protested. But his words didn’t ring true.
“I’m not going to kill you, as much as I want to, but you are coming with me,” McGarvey said. “I’ll turn you over to the FBI and let them deal with you. Either that or you’ll die right here.”
Salman seemed to think about it, but he shook his head again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re here and so is your wife, which means you probably know what this place really is. No use me trying to lie about it. Fact is I came here looking for help to get you off my back. The chief of intelligence operations is a family friend.”
“Where are they?” McGarvey asked.
A moment of uncertainty crossed Salman’s features. “Most likely waiting for you to come to your senses and leave without bloodshed.”
“Not without my wife or you,” McGarvey said. “Nobody’s coming to rescue you, because you’re an embarrassment to the royal family.”
“You’re insane.”
“You got caught, and when you tell us what targets al-Quaida will hit in two days, your own government will cut you loose the same as they did to bin Laden.”
Salman laughed disdainfully. “You are a naive man for the director of Central Intelligence — or should I have said, former director? But in case you didn’t already know it, President Haynes is a close personal friend. So are a number of your key officials.”
“They’ll be disappointed,” McGarvey said. “Get going now, or I’ll shoot you.”
“Harm me and you’ll go to jail.”
This was not what he expected. None of it. This place was most likely a Saudi intelligence operational center, and Khalil’s capture here of all places would be a serious embarrassment to the royal family. So would Katy’s kidnapping and imprisonment here create a major international incident. U.S.-Saudi relations would probably never be the same, oil money or not.
But no one was coming to stop what could turn into a major disaster for Riyadh.
The only way in which any of this made sense was if someone very high in the royal family had finally decided to cut its recent losses and totally withdraw its support for the terrorists, just as Libya’s Qaddafi had done. McGarvey didn’t believe it, but in the face of bin Laden’s new threat, maybe Crown Prince Abdullah had finally had enough.
Whatever was going on, he needed to get Katy out of here right now.
McGarvey crossed the stair hall in four strides. Salman grabbed for the telephone behind the counter, but before he could reach it McGarvey shoved him back against the door frame and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into the side of the man’s head.
“Give me the slightest excuse to put a bullet into your brain and I’ll do it, I swear to Christ,” McGarvey said.
“I’ll enjoy coming to your trial for treason,” Salman said, immediately giving up the struggle. His face was inches from McGarvey’s. He smiled. “Let’s go fetch your wife, if that’s what you want. And if we’re allowed to leave, I’ll go with you to the FBI. I won’t cause you any further trouble.”
McGarvey backed off, and glanced up at the second-floor corridor. No one was there, and everything in his being told him he was walking into a trap. But he had no other choice. “Lead the way.”
Salman shook his head. “As I told you, I’ve never been here. I don’t know where she is.”
McGarvey roughly shoved him toward the corridor. Together they headed toward the back of the house, past the open door of what in Yarnell’s day had been the library, but that was now a large functional room jammed with a half dozen desks and file cabinets. Heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, but the lights had not been switched off. It looked as if whoever had been working in here had suddenly dropped what he was doing and scurried off somewhere to hole up. On one long wall was a large map of the world with Arabic markings and lines drawn in red. This was probably where their analysts worked.
The door to the basement was across from the pantry where McGarvey had come in. He directed Salman to open it. Dim lights illuminated the stairway and the corridor below.
McGarvey glanced over his shoulder at the closed-circuit television camera mounted on the wall just below the ceiling. Its red light was on, indicating it was functioning, and it was tracking them.
Someone was watching. But what were they waiting for?
Salman started down the stairs first, McGarvey directly behind him. From what he remembered, there was no way in or out of the basement except for this door. It’s not a cellar; it’s a redoubt, Otto had remarked at the time. Kept the philistines from stealing Darby’s wine.
Every nerve end in McGarvey’s body tingled. The basement corridor could very well turn into a shooting range. It would all hinge on the timing.
They held up at the bottom. Four doors opened off the narrow corridor that ran only thirty feet from the back of the house toward the front. The end door led to Yarnell’s wine cellar, which had taken up nearly onefourth of the entire basement, extending from one side of the house to the other. The other doors opened onto storerooms and the big area where the furnace and utilities were located. Katy was being held in the last room next to the wine cellar. Its door, unlike the others, was made of steel.
All the doors were closed, but the television camera on the ceiling had swiveled from the spot McGarvey had observed upstairs at the monitor, to the stairs. Trouble, McGarvey decided, would come from the kitchen above, unless they actually meant to allow him to leave in peace with his wife now that he had Salman.
“What now?” Salman asked.
McGarvey pulled out his stiletto, reached up over his shoulder with his free hand, and cut the wires to the camera. Its red light went out.
“Won’t matter,” Salman said. “If they don’t want you to leave, they’ll just wait upstairs, and there’ll be no way of getting past them.”
“In that case we’ll find out how good a negotiator you really are,” McGarvey said. He prodded the prince in the back. “At the end.”
Two small bulbs in the ceiling provided the only illumination except for the light that filtered down from the open pantry hall door. Except for McGarvey’s and Salman’s footfalls on the bare concrete floor, there were no noises. No machinery running, no water in the pipes, no traffic outside, nothing. The house and the entire neighborhood could have been deserted.
When they reached the steel door to Katy’s cell, McGarvey tried the latch, but it was locked. He directed Salman to go another ten feet to the very end of the corridor. “Sit down and cover your head; I’m going to blow the door.”
“Very dramatic,” Salman said, languidly. But he shrugged and did as he was told.
When the prince was safely out of harm’s reach, McGarvey slid the cover away from the small viewing port in the door. Katy was still seated on the cot, her knees hunched up.