Retribution (9781429922593) (29 page)

But again no one had come for her. It was as if Rawalpindi never happened; not the kidnapping of a CIA officer and not the shootout with the former DCI. It was surreal, and all the way to her apartment in the city she had a hard time controlling her jitters.

She had the cabbie pull up a block away. After he was gone she walked the rest of the way, passing her building and suddenly turning around at the end of the block to see if she was being followed. But no one was there, and no car or truck out of the ordinary. Only normal traffic for this time of the night, mostly Turks, Greeks, and a few Muslims, mostly from Africa.

She took the stairs to the third floor and listened with her ear to the door for several long beats, but all was quiet, except for some sort of wailing music from the apartment below, sounded Oriental to her, and voices from the apartment just above hers.

The entire building smelled of leaking sewer pipes, boiled lentils and chickpeas, and the ever-present garlic. The irony of it all for her was that she was a millionaire now. Even if she cut and ran, dropping everything, she could retire comfortably somewhere, and if she lived carefully the money she'd already accumulated would last a lifetime.

But she couldn't. What was coming next would be her retribution.

Inside her tiny one-room apartment, she tossed her bag on the narrow bed, turned on the small table lamp, and found her loaded Glock 26 pistol and silencer in the small
Schrank
that held her few clothes. For the first time since leaving Pakistan she felt reasonably safe. If someone came here wanting to arrest her, they would pay dearly with their lives.

She took off her light khaki jacket and hung it up at the same moment someone tapped lightly on her door.

Pistol in hand she stood to one side. “Yes?” she said.

“It's me,” a woman responded.

For just an instant Pam wasn't sure whether her hearing was playing tricks on her. She knew the voice. Holding the pistol out of sight behind her back, she opened the door.

Gloria, her U.S. contact, stood there, an awkward smile on her plain oval face. The woman was shorter than Pam, and a little on the dumpy side, but like the only other time they'd met, she seemed happy and relieved all at once.

“I found out about the trouble in Paki land, but then nothing else,” the woman gushed. “Christ, I didn't know if you were dead or what. I had to come personally and wait for you.”

Pam stepped aside to let the woman in. “It wasn't necessary for you to come all this way. To take the risk.”

“No risk, believe me,” Gloria said. Her voice was nasal and a little high-pitched, and her eyes darted all over the place as if she was afraid that something was going to jump out of the shadows and bite her. “You can't image how much we depend on you.”

Pam laid her pistol on the small table, and then took Gloria's coat and large shoulder bag and set them aside.

The woman's eyes were round, looking at the pistol. “Were you expecting more trouble?”

“Trouble, yes. But not you. What the hell are you doing here?”

“I had to make sure that you weren't dead.”

“You've already said that.”

“The others suggested that I come. My sources. But they don't know the reality. To them it's just a game we play.”

Pam had suspected from the start that Gloria had her sources. In her position it had always been impossible for her to know everything she knew without help. But she'd always thought that “the others” were just friends, acquaintances, someone in Gloria's social network, even though she'd known intellectually that such a simple explanation wasn't likely. But “sources” implied a network with structure. And yet she was here, and she was suggesting that the others—almost certainly bored housewives of important government officials—were in it as a game. To them it wasn't real.

“The others?”

“They're all over Washington, inside the Pentagon, you wouldn't believe.” Gloria stopped. “I can't give you their names. You have to understand.”

“I do,” Pam said. “You, I understand; we have a bond. But what about your friends in high places?”

Gloria shook her head. “Just next to men in high places.”

“All women?”

Gloria nodded.

“Battered women?”

Again Gloria nodded, a real sadness coming into her eyes. “And jilted women, and trivialized women, and ignored women. And after I tell them about you, how you're fighting back, they don't have one bit of trouble helping with little bits of information now and then. They figure—just like I do—that if you can make it on your own, so could they.”

Pam had understood Gloria almost from the beginning when they had accidentally met in Washington. But she'd never been able to figure out how the woman got her information, some of it startlingly secret, until now. And she understood the risk involved, the least of which would be prison.

She reached out and Gloria came into her arms; They held each other close for a long time.

“It's all right,” Pam said softly. She brushed a kiss on Gloria's cheek. “It'll be okay now, I promise.”

Gloria looked up. She was crying.

Pam kissed her on the lips, and Gloria responded, shuddering and passionately kissing back.

They undressed each other and went to bed, where they made love very slowly but with a huge, pumped-up passion that seemed as if it had been building forever. At one point Gloria cried out, but softly, all the way from the back of her throat.

When they were done, Pam covered them up and they held each other closely, finally going to sleep, both of them exhausted.

*   *   *

Sometime just after three in the morning, Pam woke up, her heart pounding. She disentangled herself from Gloria and got out of bed. At the window she looked down at the street, which was completely devoid of traffic at this hour. No suspicious cars or vans were parked half up on the sidewalks. No one was lurking in the shadows as far as she could tell.

After a while she got a bottle of schnapps and a small glass from the cupboard, and then powered up her laptop. While it was booting up she poured a drink, tossed it back, and poured another.

She checked her in-box but there were no messages from any of her operators; they were laying low for the time being. Next she checked the half-dozen banks she maintained as close as Luxembourg and as far as the Cayman Islands. When she came to her account with Haddad Commercial Bank Offshore on Jersey in the Channel Islands, she sat back. Five hundred thousand euros had been deposited last night, shortly after she had left Pakistan.

She stared at the screen for a very long time. Then she shut off the machine, finished her second glass of schnapps and went back to bed. In the morning she would tell Gloria exactly what she needed.

 

PART

THREE

The Next Five Days

 

FIFTY

Otto had arranged for one of the CIA's Gulfstream VIP jets to pick them up at Heathrow and take them across the Atlantic. They landed at Joint Base Andrews in the middle of the night and taxied over to the navy hangar the company used.

Marty Bambridge was leaning against a big Cadillac Escalade, a scowl on his face. Two men in dark Windbreakers stood nearby, and two others were waiting at a second Cadillac.

“Looks like we have a welcome home committee,” Pete said from her window seat. “And Marty doesn't look happy.”

“Has he ever been?” McGarvey asked. He'd figured the sort of reception they'd get, especially if Bhutani, the ISI's director general, complained to Page. But the DCI's private phone line was one area where Otto never hacked. It was a point of honor.

“We may have had some certifiable idiots on the seventh floor, but they were patriots doing the best they knew how,” he'd explained once.

They thanked the pilot and crew, who had treated them to a late breakfast last night then left them alone so that they could get some rest.

McGarvey went down the stairs first. Pete, whose knee still bothered her, hobbled after him. She'd refused his arm.

“I won't give the bastard the satisfaction,” she'd said.

Marty came over to them. “I'm not going to start anything with you two this morning, except to tell you that you're staying on campus in one of the safe houses. You'll be debriefed after breakfast, after which it will be decided what the hell to do with you.”

“By you?” Pete asked.

“That will be way above my pay grade, but the White House has been made aware of your little escapade, and no one over there or on the seventh floor is particularly pleased.”

“Has the media gotten hold of it yet?” McGarvey asked. In this case he couldn't blame the deputy director of operations for being angry. The man was caught between a rock and a hard place.

“Thank God, no. But no one expects that to last much longer.”

“No one's linked the two dead SEALs with the bin Laden operation?”

“The navy has, of course, but apparently there are some other complications.”

“I expect there have been,” McGarvey said. Captain Cole was one of them, and the SEAL Team Six guys were the other. They were cutting off their noses to spite their faces. It was crazy, and yet Mac could see it from their perspective. They were proud, they were tough, they were DEVGRU operators, the meanest sons of bitches on the planet.

“I hope you're not going to be difficult tonight. It's too late and I'm too tired to put up with your shit.”

“We'll go along for now,” McGarvey said.

“Good,” Bambridge said. “You'll ride with me. Ms. Boylan will ride in the second car.”

“No. And we won't be separated at the safe house.”

Bambridge's anger immediately deepened. “I don't want to force the issue, goddamnit.”

“No, you don't, Marty. And neither do we. We'll sit still for the debriefing, and then we'll get out of the company's way. But you have to know that the problem hasn't gone away, even though I was personally responsible for the deaths of an ISI officer and three of the four dacoits he'd hired to kill Pete and me. That was after they'd kidnapped her and tried to rape her.”

“I killed the bastard,” Pete said.

Bambridge shook his head. “God save us all,” he said. “Backseat in my car for the both of you.”

One of the security officers opened the door for them. “Welcome back, Mr. Director. Rough op?”

“It had its moments. Davis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How are your wife and son?”

“Just fine, sir. Thanks for asking. But we've added a girl.”

“Congratulations.”

“Jesus,” Bambridge muttered.

*   *   *

The safe house, one of several on campus, had once been someone's home out in the Virginia woods just up the hill from the Potomac. Three bedrooms upstairs under low-hanging eaves, and downstairs a kitchen, living room, and the dining room, which had been converted into a soft interrogation or debriefing conference space, with a table for six. A flip of the light switch turned on an electronic suite of equipment: everything said or done in the room was recorded by six cameras and several sensitive microphones mounted in full view on the walls and ceiling. In addition, body temperatures of everyone in the room were continuously monitored, as were facial expressions, which were measured against a series of parameters that Otto had designed to detect stress. The equipment was more reliable than a lie detector apparatus.

The entire house was in a Faraday cage—wire mesh inside the walls and ceiling that made cell phones or any sort of Wi-Fi equipment useless.

They had been left alone, on their word that they wouldn't run off. Shortly after dawn a company chef came over and fixed them coffee and a full breakfast of eggs Benedict, hash browns, and orange juice.

Toiletries and fresh clothes in their sizes had been brought over—jeans, polo shirts, and underwear.

At eight sharp, Bambridge, along with Pete's former partner, Dan Green, showed up. As a team they had been the CIA's most effective interrogators, until she had been bounced over to the National Clandestine Service. She hadn't been given a field assignment after she had joined forces with McGarvey a couple of years ago on an operation here in the Washington area. For that reason, among others, she'd been out of favor with the DDO.

Green who was a short little man, under five feet, with a head too large for his slight body, and wide, soft brown eyes that seemed to understand and completely sympathize with everyone, came into the front hall with a big smile. He and Pete embraced.

“I heard that you and Mr. McGarvey were back in town and I had to come over to at least say hi,” he said.

“I'm glad it's you,” Pete said. “We can get this over with in an hour.”

“Don't be so sure,” Bambridge said.

“Ms. Boylan doesn't know how to lie, sir,” Green said.

The four of them went into the dining room, and Bambridge made a show of flipping the switch. When they were settled around the table, Green began.

“Mr. McGarvey, let's start, shall we, with a simple narrative outline of the facts, the times and places, the casualties, the circumstances. The to-and-fro details. We'll fill in the blanks later, if you don't mind.”

“It didn't turn out the way we wanted it to,” McGarvey said.

“These sorts of things never do, do they?”

McGarvey ran through everything, including the business in Norfolk and the interrogation of Steffen Engel, which led them to Pakistan and the business at Naisir's safe house. It took less than ten minutes.

Bambridge was obviously uncomfortable, but he kept his agitation to himself and said nothing.

“Anything to add or subtract?” Green asked Pete.

“Only that the bastard major ordered one of his goons to rape me. But I killed him instead.” She looked pointedly at Bambridge. “I'm pretty sure that wasn't in the ISI's playbook.”