Retribution (9781429922593) (21 page)

“I'm part of the disguise, but what about you? You could have done something with your hair, maybe worn glasses, aged your complexion. You've done it before.”

“I want him to know that I've come, and why,” McGarvey said.

Pete turned away and looked out the window. In the distance the lights of a large city were visible. “Silly me,” she said. “I thought you'd say something like that.”

“I'm not going to dance around with this guy. We already know that he's involved with Schlueter, and that he's an ISI officer, which makes him the center of my target. I want him to come to me, and the sooner the better.”

“You're going to kill him,” Pete said.

“If need be.”

She nodded. “Once he knows you're here he'll try to do the same.”

“I hope so; it'd prove his involvement.”

“And afterward? What about Schlueter?”

*   *   *

Once through the complicated customs, which included a thorough credentials and baggage check and a pat-down, they went out to the cab stand, where a late-model Mercedes C-class sedan with a light on the roof pulled to the head of the queue. A tall, lanky driver jumped out, opened the rear door, and took their bags.

“Welcome, lady and gentleman, to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan,” he said in English marked by a thick Punjabi accent. “Please to get in my most excellent taxi, and I will take you wherever you wish to go.”

Pete hesitated, but Mac handed her into the backseat and got in behind her.

The driver, who was dressed in faded jeans and a stained sweatshirt with the Manchester United soccer team logo, closed the door, put their bags in the trunk, and got behind the wheel.

A few of the other cab drivers had begun to honk their horns because he had cut the line, and a cop started in their direction, but their cabbie pulled out and headed at breakneck speed to the highway to Islamabad, which was busy despite the hour.

Their driver kept looking in the rearview mirror until they were clear of the airport. “Did you have any trouble getting in?” he asked, in very clear English with a slight Texas drawl.

Pete was startled.

“San Antonio?” McGarvey asked.

“Corpus, actually, Mr. Director,” the driver said. He glanced in the rearview mirror again. “Looks like we haven't picked up a tail. Name's Milt Thomas. I work for Don Simmons, he's the Islamabad station chief.”

“Aren't you exposing yourself picking us up?” Pete asked.

“I'm too low in the pecking order for anyone to take much notice. In fact I'm actually part-timing with the cops looking for bad guys coming in. They send over a list every week or so, we mine it for anything we might use, and once in a while I'll send them a bone and everyone's happy.”

“Our names on the list?” McGarvey asked.

“Yours; not Ms. Boylan's.”

“Do you have a package for us?”

“Nine millimeter Walther PPKs with silencers and several extra magazines. Antiquated, if you ask me. But Don said it'd be what you wanted. Had a hell of a time digging them up. Five small bricks of Semtex and acid fuses, plus a package from Mr. Rencke. It's all in an attaché case in the trunk. Combo lock, 7534. Get it right or the entire package will melt down in a big hurry. Lid's wired with couple of hundred grams of thermite. Won't cause the Semtex to blow, but it'd cook a lot of meat standing anywhere within eight or ten feet.”

“Where are you taking us now?”

“Mind if I ask you a question, Mr. Director?”

“Friends call me Mac. What's your question?”

“Do you know anything about a guy named Poorvaj Chopra? Supposedly he's an Indian-born American working out of Karachi brokering arms deals for the Taliban.”

“Never heard the name,” McGarvey said.

“The ISI is real interested in this guy, and so are we, because the ragheads are killing our people too with IEDs that Chopra is selling them the materials for.”

“What's the connection with us?”

“We thought that maybe it was your operation. I'm taking you to the Serena Hotel, where you guys have a connecting suite with his, and I have to warn you that the ISI should be crawling all over the place. But…”

“But what?”

“We've taken a couple of passes, but there's been no sign of the guy, nor were we able to pick up any ISI activity. Strange.”

*   *   *

Their passports under the name Sampson raised no eyebrows at the front desk, and they were taken up to their suite immediately. The rooms were very well furnished, the walls and especially the ceilings were replica works of ancient Islamic art. The huge bathroom was world-class, as was the sitting room. But there was only one bedroom, equipped with a walk-in closet, a flat-screen television, ornate chests, a seating area next to the tall windows, and a single king-size bed.

“Cozy,” Pete said at the door.

“Right,” McGarvey said.

He opened the attaché case on the bed, took out the pistols, the magazines—three each—and the suppressors. He and Pete field-stripped the weapons, checked the actions, and loaded them.

He set aside the blocks of Semtex and fuses and took the manila envelope into the sitting room, where he got a beer from the minibar and sat down on the couch to see what Otto had sent.

Several photographs, including an official portrait used for internal records, showed the man that McGarvey had briefly met in the parking garage in Berlin. He was handsome, with large dark eyes, and a fine-featured face. In one he was coming out of a restaurant with a very good-looking woman of slender build on his arm. They were laughing about something and they seemed very happy.

She was Ayesha, his wife. Her family was wealthy, while his relatives were comparatively poor. But he had been well-educated at several state schools, including the military academy, and from what Otto had managed to gather, he had a fine service record.

He and his wife—there were no children—lived in a house in an upscale neighborhood near the Fatima Jinnah Park. The place, their two cars—a Fiat and a BMW—plus a small staff were way over the top for a major's pay, but they had been subsidized from the start by his wife's family.

Just as McGarvey had suspected, Naisir maintained a safe house in Rawalpindi where he met from time to time with his deep-cover field officers. The only reason Otto had been able to find out anything about it was because the place was financed by the ISI as a line item in the directorate's black budget.

Otto had included Google Maps images of and driving directions to both places.

“What do we do now?” Pete asked.

McGarvey handed her the package. “We stay here till eight to see if ISI has taken any notice of us, then we rent a car and drive down to Rawalpindi.”

“To do what?”

“Apply a little pressure.”

 

THIRTY-FIVE

Pam Schlueter sat by the window in her one-room apartment in the immigrant neighborhood of Kreuzberg drinking schnapps and worrying about her next move. She wanted the money for taking McGarvey down, but more importantly she didn't want him or some ISI goon to come up behind her one night and put a bullet in her brain.

Once you started these kinds of operations, you could never back out, not until they were finished. Only this time she'd managed to grab a tiger by the tail, and she still wasn't quite sure exactly how she was going to eliminate him.

Certainly not by any frontal assault, with her four remaining operatives coming at him in force, all at once, guns blazing. From what she'd managed to learn about the man, he'd survived plenty of fights where the odds were overwhelmingly stacked against him.

Nor did she think she could trust any of them to do the job one-on-one. Steffen was one of the best, and he'd had a lot of respect from the others, but he was gone, evidently taken out by McGarvey—the fifty-year-old they all thought would be easy.

Yet as she turned that notion over she decided that one-on-one would be the only way of getting to him. With a woman's touch.

Someone knocked softly at her door. She snatched her Glock 26 from the table and went barefoot across the room. She was dressed only in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, no bra.

“
Wer ist es?”
Who is it, she said, just above a whisper.

Someone downstairs was playing American country-and-western music, and the couple on the right were having their usual nightly row, but other than that the building was quiet.

“Felix,” a man said.

Felix Volker, one of her shooters—the crazy one. She recognized his voice.

She opened the door and let him in, locking it behind him. He had been drinking, his face a little flushed.

“Did you know that someone has been sitting in a VW across the street since twenty-one hundred hours?”

She turned and started for the front window.

“He just left,” Volker said. “But I think it was that BND officer who's been sniffing around for the past few months.”

“The bastard who killed Dieter in Florida?”

“Maybe.”

Steffen's name came into her head. It was possible that he wasn't dead. It was possible that the CIA had made him talk. But if that had been the case, and the CIA had passed the information to the BND, the agency wouldn't have simply sent one man down here merely to watch her. More likely he'd come to check out one of the Turkish or Greek immigrant families who lived in the neighborhood. They'd been causing a lot of problems over the past year and a half; that, along with the Muslim issue, was driving the government crazy.

“Did he spot you?” Pam asked.

“I don't think so. But I think you better get the hell out of here tonight before he comes back. You can stay with me.”

Pam laughed. “You talk as fucking nuts as you look,” she said. “Get the hell out of here.” She turned away, but Volker grabbed her by the arm.

“When are we going to finish the job,” he demanded.

She tried to smash the butt of the small pistol into the side of his head, but he deflected the blow and grabbed her by the neck, squeezing hard.

Bringing the pistol around again, she jammed the muzzle into his temple and started to squeeze the trigger.

He released his grip and laughed. “Here we are, then, an impasse, when all I wanted was the green light to finish the operation, and maybe to fuck you.”

“I don't like men.”

“I don't like you,” he said. This time his laugh was low, but wild, crazy, and completely out of control. “But a piece of ass is a piece of ass. Even you.”

She lowered the pistol and laid it on the small table beside the door.

Volker tried to kiss her; his breath smelled of garlic and beer. She turned away and went to the small bed across from the window, took off her T-shirt, her back to him, then pulled off her jeans and panties and lay down.

“You want it, let's get it over with, pig.”

“Fucking whore,” Volker said. He took off his trousers and shorts, but didn't bother with his shoes or shirt.

She spread her legs for him, and they had sex, just about as rough as it had been with her ex, and just about as pleasurable. When he was done he got up and looked down at her.

“I'm sorry that I called you a whore,” he said. “At least they fake liking it.” He got dressed and at the door he looked back at her. “When do we go operational?”

“Soon,” Pam said, and he left.

She lay there for five minutes, a little sore, but not at all unhappy because she didn't think Volker would give her any further trouble. Men were almost always so easy that way. It had been a hard lesson for her to learn when she was young.

Her encrypted cell phone rang. It was Gloria, her U.S. eyes and ears, and the only woman in the world with whom she had a real and lasting connection. They were sisters in a very large way, and depended on each other: Pam for information, and Gloria for what Pam promised she would do when the time was right.

“McGarvey has shown up in Islamabad.”

“How do you know?”

“We have someone on the ground—you know that. But there's something else going on that no one can get a handle on. Someone else is already there, and the CIA and ONI and just about everyone else wants to know what the hell he's doing there.”

“You're not making any sense.”

“He's an arms dealer by the name of Poorvaj Chopra, works out of Karachi. But he flew to Islamabad a few days ago and booked a suite at the Serena Hotel. Thing is, no one has actually seen the guy. Driving everybody nuts.”

“What's your point?”

“McGarvey showed up a little while ago with a woman who we think is a CIA operative. They checked into the Serena under the name Sampson and took a suite adjoining Chopra's.”

As amazing as the extent of Gloria's connections and her knowledge was, Pam found the gaps frustrating. It was like looking through a window partially covered by venetian blinds. She'd once explained that she was just one small part of a girls club mostly of frustrated wives: “We know lots of stuff, but not everything.”

“What else?”

“Another thing that doesn't make any sense to me. McGarvey and the woman—I still haven't found out her real name—took about the longest way possible to get to Islamabad. Three days from Washington. Not only that: they flew first-class all the way and the CIA didn't pay for it; McGarvey did. It's almost as if he wanted just about anyone who was interested to know he was on his way, and give them plenty of time to think about it.”

That's exactly what he was up to. Pam saw it in a flash. “I have to go, luv, but keep me posted. Especially about this Chopra character. My guess is, he's another CIA NOC in place over there to help McGarvey.”

“Have you done any more thinking about what I'm going through over here?”

“All the time, believe me. And as soon as I get this project straightened out you're next on the list—and you know the reason.”