His image was on the huge Jumbotron, the head in grisly color, his altered voice amplified so that it rolled over the mob, seeming to fill every molecule of air on Constitution Avenue.
“Pakistan’s leaders have been nothing more than puppets of the American regime. They in Washington are friends of New Delhi. It must not continue this way. Pakistan needs at long last to declare its independence. We are a sovereign nation, we are a sovereign people.”
The mob roared but without anger. They were hearing something they needed to hear, something they had yearned to hear for years, but especially since the SEAL team raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.
The unmarked helicopter, showing no lights, passed to the west of the Presidential Palace, but few people in the crowd seemed to notice.
“I have come with a message for you. A message that I was given by Allah in a waking dream.”
The mob released a collective sigh.
“We do not have to wait for Paradise because it is here now, within all of us. We need only strength: strong arms to do what is needed, strong resolve to stay the course, strong hearts and strong love to know for certain that what we do is right and just.”
Someone close to the front of the crowd shouted, “Messiah!”
At first it seemed like no one had heard, but then someone farther back in the mob repeated it: “Messiah!”
Then a woman screamed, her voice shrill, “My Messiah!”
“Look to each other for strength.”
The chant, Messiah! grew.
“Look to your families, your friends, your neighbors for strength.”
“Messiah!”
“Look to strangers for strength.”
“Messiah!”
“Look to me, for I will be your right arm of justice,” Haaris told them.
The helicopter came from the north, very low, flared suddenly just high enough to set down on the roof behind and eight meters above the balcony.
“I will leave you now in person but not in spirit,” Haaris shouted. “Love Pakistan, love your neighbors, have strength. There will be more messages from me.”
The mob was momentarily subdued.
“Allah be with you. Allah be with us. Allah be with Pakistan!”
He threw the head over the edge of the balcony at the same moment the Semtex charge on the corridor door exploded with a sharp bang.
NINE
President Miller watched in stunned disbelief as the man the mob on Constitution Avenue was calling “Messiah” tossed the severed head off the balcony. Moments later the image they were intercepting from the Jumbotron broadcast went blank.
“My God, who was that?” she asked.
“If you mean the head, I’m pretty sure it was Barazani’s,” Secretary of State Fay said. “I met him twice last year. But if you mean the one who tossed it, I haven’t the faintest.”
Miller called Page, who was still at the Watch. His image came up on one of the big monitors. “Do we have a positive ID on whose head that was?” she demanded.
“Photo interp gives it a ninety-eight-percent match, plus or minus nothing, Madam President. It’s Barazani.”
“What about the man who tossed it?”
“Taliban, probably. We’re getting a lot of signals out of ISI and they’re just as surprised as we were. But I do have a bit of good news. We think that Dave Haaris may have escaped. The ISI is trying to reach him so they can get him out to the airport.”
“As soon as he’s airborne I want to talk to him. He was right in the middle of it, he should have picked up something. But what about the man the crowd called ‘Messiah’?”
“We don’t have an ID, but one of our technical people is sure the voice was artificial.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks the man’s voice was computer enhanced. He’s trying to re-create the real voice.”
“We can do that?” Kalley asked.
“Otto Rencke’s on it.”
It was the second piece of good news, and the president said so. “We’ll soon have an answer if he’s as good as everyone says he is.”
“He is,” Page said. “But the bigger issue is why would he go through the trouble of disguising his voice in the first place? I’m told that his Punjabi was perfect.”
“Excuse me, Madam President, but Mr. Page is correct,” the White House translator, still on the Situation Room screen, interjected. “The Punjabi the man was speaking was educated. He’s someone from an urban population center. I’d guess Lahore.”
“That jibes with what my people are telling me,” Page said.
“Have there been any hints about someone like that on the way up?” Miller asked. “He doesn’t sound like run-of-the-mill Taliban.”
“There are always rumors, but nothing that we’ve been able to substantiate. I spoke with Ross a few minutes ago and he’s just as mystified as the rest of us. But we are working on it.”
Kalley sat forward. “Was that an explosion we heard just before the signal was cut off?”
“We think so. Our best guess is that the president’s personal security people blew the office door to get in.”
“What about the Messiah?” Miller asked. “Do they have him?”
“Our spy bird picked up the image of an Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter landing on the roof of the Presidential Palace. It’s just twenty-five feet above the balcony.”
“Jesus, are the Russians somehow involved in this?”
“It’s not likely. The angle was for the Jumbotron. We did some enhanced imagery and couldn’t come up with any markings. But we think the speaker may have made his way to the roof and boarded the helicopter, which took off toward the south, where we lost it.”
“Goddamnit, don’t tell me what we can’t do, tell me how,” the president said in frustration.
“I’m sorry, Madam President, but current economic policy has tied our hands in some critical areas. Like the launching of new reconnaissance satellites.”
“What did we do before the age of satellites?” Miller shot back.
“We had more personnel on the ground,” Page said, not backing down. His message was clear: You get what you pay for.
“What resources do we have to send to help Ross?”
“Rencke suggests that we ask McGarvey for a hand.”
Miller personally had never liked or trusted maverick operators such as McGarvey. But when she’d gone to the White House just before Christmas, a couple of weeks before she was inaugurated, the outgoing president had briefed her on highly classified assets she could count on if nothing else was working. Kirk McGarvey, the legendary operator who for a brief period had actually been director of the CIA, was one of them.
“He won’t want to work for you, but if he does, never ask him a question for which you think you already know the answer,” the president had told her. “The man has the bad habit of telling you the truth, no matter how much you don’t want to hear it.”
She’d started to object, but the president held her off.
“He’s likely to do things his own way, not yours, and he’s just as likely to ignore the law. Hell, I even had him arrested and put in jail. Lasted less than twenty-four hours before the shit hit the fan and I had to let him get at it. And through all of it, I had the impression he let himself be arrested just to make his point.”
“Isn’t he getting too old to be running around shooting people?”
“No,” the president said flatly. “And don’t ever question his loyalty or his motivation. He’s been severely wounded several times in the line of duty. And he lost his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law to the cause.”
“What cause is that?” Miller had asked. It was the last time she tried to be sarcastic when it came to discussing McGarvey. She had gotten over it that afternoon.