“No, I cannot, except to ask if you are formally accusing me of being the Messiah?”
“What do you suppose the Messiah’s agenda is? Simply a nuclear war between Pakistan and India?”
“It’s what I hope to discover with my team’s input. The president will be needing a briefing from my desk sooner rather than later,” Haaris had said. “So, if you will excuse me, Miss Boylan, I will get back to work.”
Pete said nothing until he was at the door. “You’ve made a mistake, you know.”
He turned and smiled faintly. “Oh?”
“You got Kirk McGarvey involved.”
Haaris took the covered walkway past the cafeteria, the sculpture “Kryptos” outside in the courtyard, but instead of taking the second covered walkway past the library, he turned left. At the end of the corridor he scanned his pass and went outside to the parking lot and his Mercedes.
He figured it wouldn’t take long for the bitch to realize he had left the building instead of going directly to his office, which didn’t leave much room for error.
On the way down to the gate, he called his house from his cell phone and scanned the outside as well as every room in the house. No cars he didn’t recognize were parked anywhere in the neighborhood. The crime scene police tape had been removed from the front and back entrances, the sliding glass doors from the pool into the family room, and the garage door. The inside of the house had obviously been searched, but as far as he could tell nothing was missing except for his laptop.
Every closet in the house had been searched with a fine hand; nothing had been pulled out and tossed aside, no holes been punched into the walls to find a safe or a hiding place.
The bathroom where he’d killed Deborah had been cleaned by his service, and using the surveillance detection program on his phone, he could find no traces of any electronic eavesdropping devices other than his own.
A forensics team had checked for evidence relating to Deborah’s murder but not for the supposition that he was a spy.
The guard at the main gate didn’t bother to look up as he flashed past in the exit lane, the bar code scanner on a corner of the car’s windshield automatically registering his identity.
Instead of turning right on the parkway and back toward the city, he turned left, to the north, merging with I-495 a few minutes later and crossing the river into Maryland.
Following the Beltway as it merged with I-270 and heading off to the east, he kept checking his rearview mirrors for anyone keeping pace with him, and the sky for any signs of a helicopter dogging his trail. But if the alarm had been sounded no one was coming after him.
Using one hand he removed the battery cover on the phone and took out the SIM card. Until it was back in place even Otto Rencke wouldn’t be able to trace him.
Fifteen minutes later, still certain that he wasn’t being followed, he turned south on State Highway 295; a half mile later he pulled up at the gate of a self-storage company and entered his password. No one was around. Arranging for a storage space was done by appointment only, and there was no security except in the evenings. Five years ago when he’d begun to put his preliminary planning in place, he searched for a mostly unattended self-storage place just like this one.
His was a large, two-car garage space, which had been another of his requirements. The lock was an old-fashioned combination, and when he had the door up, he drove inside, parking next to a five-year-old dark blue Toyota Camry, possibly the most common car in America.
So far as he could tell nothing had been disturbed since the last time he’d checked the place the week before he’d left for London. In fact, if someone had tried to break in, the garage and most of the units for fifty feet on either side would have disappeared in a massive explosion of nearly one hundred kilos of Semtex placed in two barrels filled with roofing nails.
He changed clothes from the trunk of the Camry, dressing in khakis with cargo pockets for three fifteen-round magazines of forty-caliber ammunition, plus an advanced Vaime silencer, and a quick-draw holster for the compact Glock 27 Gen4 pistol.
Also pocketing a fold-up knife, several four-ounce bricks of Semtex with chemical fuses, and a thirty-two-caliber revolver in an ankle holster, he backed out of the garage.
Included in his kit were two different sets of identification: one for Rupert Mann, from Brooklyn, and the other, complete with an Irish passport, for Pete O’Donald, from Belfast.
When this was finally over he’d planned on disappearing. Maybe the South Seas somewhere. Maybe even Venezuela. He had enough money in various offshore accounts to buy his way into relative luxury in just about any Third World nation.
But that had been before he’d learned he was dying. Now the money and the escape didn’t mean much to him. Only the plan did, and only because doing something was infinitely better than doing nothing except waiting around to die.
He walked back into the garage and armed a switch that would set when the door was closed and fire when the door was opened.
Turning around he came face-to-face with the manager of the property, along with a man in his twenties and a pretty woman of about the same age, both of them dressed in jeans, both of them smiling.
“Mr. Dodge,” the manager said. He was a florid old Cuban in jeans and a guayabera, sandals on his feet. “I’m glad you’re here. This couple is moving and they have need of one of our largest storage units. Showing an occupied unit is better than showing them an empty one.”
It was an irritation, nothing more, except it made no sense to Haaris, and he was suspicious. But the couple were not in the business, it was obvious, and the manager was an idiot. He stepped aside and motioned them in. “Please,” he said.
They went inside.
Haaris quickly screwed the silencer on the Glock’s muzzle. No one else was around. The couples’ car had to be parked in front. He fired three shots, dropping them. And then walked back inside and fired one shot into the backs of each of their heads.
Closing the door, which armed the explosives, he shoved the padlock home and drove away. Sooner or later the young couple would be reported missing and their car discovered here, but there would be nothing to link him to the place.
Unless McGarvey put it together. But time was running out. And no matter what else happened Haaris had the number in his cell phone.
As soon as the call went through the three nuclear devices would explode wherever they happened to be.
He wanted them in New York, Washington, DC, and London.
It was the last stage of his plan.
SIXTY-NINE
In the kitchen at Rencke’s safe house McGarvey sat staring out the window at the swing set in the backyard. He and Louise had sent Audi down to the Farm, where she would be safe until the trouble blew over. And there’d been so many incidents in the past couple of years that she had started to grow up there and was the mascot of the training facility. Everyone doted on her. It wouldn’t be long before children’s toys like swing sets would be far too tame for her.
Louise came in from outside. “My Toyota is in the driveway. When you leave, take it. The staff car stays in the garage till we get past this. Haaris will know it’s someone from the Company, namely, you.”
“You shouldn’t be involved.”
“Don’t be silly. You saved my husband’s life in Cuba. What would you have me do?”
McGarvey’s cell phone rang. It was Pete. He put it on speakerphone.
“I’m on a secure phone in Otto’s office. Haaris left the Campus almost forty-five minutes ago, but we didn’t catch it until one of his staffers called Marty’s office to complain that his debriefing was taking too long.”