“Look out the window,” Haaris said.
“I am at this moment. But what if you were to be exposed as an American spy?”
“Are you getting cold feet?”
“I don’t know what you’re up to, exactly what sort of a deal you’ve made with the TTP, but I think that it has gone too far. The Taliban have never been our friends. We have used them on the Kashmir border to keep the Indian army occupied, but nothing else.”
“Just as the Americans used bin Laden and al Qaeda to keep the Russians distracted in Afghanistan. Need I remind you of that outcome?”
“You need not,” Rajput flared. “Perhaps we will take care of Mr. McGarvey, as you suggest, and then perhaps we will come for you before it’s too late.”
“You would fall with me,” Haaris said. “But if you stay the course the outcome will be more than even you could imagine.”
“That’s what worries me.”
“Your name is written all over this operation.”
“What operation?” Rajput shouted.
“To strike a blow against Pakistan’s real enemies.”
“Save me,” Rajput said after a beat. It was the same thing the mufti had said just before his death.
Haaris sat sipping tea at the desk for a full half hour, before he went back to the windows. The crowd had swelled enormously, completely filling the broad avenue for as far as he could see. At least eight or ten television vans had set up at the edges of the crowd not far from the Aiwan’s security fence. He picked out ABC, CBS, the BBC and Al-Jazeera, along with others.
The international media were here for one of the biggest shows on the planet, which to this point had not involved wholesale bloodshed. It was something unique.
Before dawn he had set up the sound system on the balcony but had not called up the technicians to drag out the Jumbotron screen. It would be enough for his people to see him in person, even if at a distance, and to hear his voice.
He went to the controls and switched on the power, then took the still-bloody machete he’d used to decapitate Barazani from the closet.
As early as six years ago, he’d advised the Pakistani government to strengthen its alliance with the Taliban but to watch them very carefully should the same thing happen as happened with al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA had gone along with him, as had the White House. It was to the Americans’ advantage to nurture Pakistan’s reliance on their military aid so that the U.S. could fight the war against the Afghani insurgents who took refuge across the border. Pakistan needed the money to fight the Taliban, which had turned on them, as Haaris had predicted they would.
“And here we are,” he said to the mufti’s corpse. “Come round full circle to the final act, which none of you in your wildest dreams could have predicted.”
He heaved the body over onto its stomach, and raising the machete nearly severed the head from the neck, the sharp blade crunching through the spinal column at the base of the skull. He had to strike two more times before he managed to cut through the cartilage and other tissue until the mufti’s head came completely free from the body.
Tossing the machete aside, he picked up the head by the hair above the base of the skull. The mufti’s black cap fell off, and Haaris awkwardly managed to put it back in place before he walked to the doors, opened them and stepped out onto the balcony.
Immediately a roar rose from the crowd.
“Messiah! Messiah! Messiah!”
Haaris raised the mufti’s head high.
A sigh swept across the mob.
“This is the face of our enemy,” he shouted. “It is they who exploded the nuclear weapon near Quetta. Their intention was to kill as many of our people as possible. But our soldiers gave their lives to make sure the death toll was small.”
An uneasy silence came over the broad avenue.
“This is just the first blow. There must be more. We need to eliminate the terrorists from our midst. We can no longer abide the murders of innocent civilians. Ordinary people like you. The killings must stop now!”
“Messiah!” a lone voice near the front cried.
“We must make a jihad against the killers of our babies.”
Several other voices joined the chorus. “Messiah!”
“But the Taliban is just a tool used by our real enemies!”
“Messiah!” The chant rose.
“The Taliban are the messengers sent to us from New Delhi!”
The cries were louder.
“Allies of America! Do not forget! Never forget!”
SIXTY-ONE
McGarvey watched from the partially open gate as the Cadillac Escalade that Austin had sent for Pete turned the corner at the end of the block. The neighborhood was strangely quiet for this time of the morning, but Otto had told him that Haaris was making another major announcement at the Aiwan. The crowds were enormous, people drawn from all around Islamabad and even down here from Rawalpindi.
“I’m not leaving Pakistan without you,” she’d told him before she got into the SUV. Austin had sent two stern-looking men to retrieve her.
“Are you coming with us, sir?” one of them asked.
“No. But whatever happens, don’t stop for anyone.”
“Good luck.”
“You too,” Mac had said.
He went back into the house to check on Thomas, who lay slumped over his wife’s body. He was dead, his hand holding hers.
A lot of sirens began to close in from the north, as Mac went outside to Thomas’s Mercedes. Two bullet holes had punctured the driver’s-side door, and a lot of blood stained the MB-Tex upholstery.
He found a prayer rug in the trunk to cover the blood, pushed the gate all the way open and drove out, just as the first of two jeeps, followed by two troop-transport trucks, rounded the corner. One of the jeeps was fitted with a rear-mounted sixty-caliber machine gun.
Mac just made it to the end of the block before the gunner opened fire, the shots going wide as he turned down a narrow side street of vendors and tiny shops. Only a few people were out and about and they scattered as he raced past, laying on the horn.
Thomas’s house was in a section called Gullistan Colony, dense with homes and small businesses, all serviced by a rat warren of streets. One neighborhood consisted of hovels, while two blocks later the houses were mostly upscale, compared to most others in the city.
He easily outran the jeeps and troop transports, but other sirens were beginning to converge from the north and east. And now they knew the car he was driving.
Suddenly he came to the end of a block, the street opening onto a broad thoroughfare across from which was what looked like parkland, trees and grassy hills but little or no traffic. It was as if the entire city had been drained of people.
A troop truck appeared around a sweeping curve a quarter mile to the north, and the jeeps and trucks that had followed him from Thomas’s house were behind him.
He accelerated directly across the highway, crashing across a drainage ditch and sliding sideways down a grassy slope, where at the bottom he just missed several trees, finally clipping one with his right front fender, taking out everything from the headlights back to the door post, and shattering that half of the windshield.
A machine gun opened fire from the highway behind him, several rounds slamming into the trunk of the Mercedes, before he came to a winding drive through the park and turned north.
The busted fender was rubbing against the tire, which within fifty yards shredded, sending him into a sharp skid to the left, off the road, through more trees and finally crashing through some thick brush and deep grass onto a golf course fairway.