“Are you feeling any better?”
McGarvey managed to smile. “I’ll live, but I don’t know if that’s such a great idea. How about you?”
Arnette shook his head. “Oh, I never sleep on airplanes,” he said. “But I usually get a lot of reading done.” He held up a paperback novel.
The flight attendant came back with a glass of orange juice and a couple of pills. “Tylenol Extra Strength,” he said, handing them to McGarvey. “You had a rough night, I figured these might help.”
“Thanks,” McGarvey said. He took the pills and drank the juice. He’d spent a lot of bad nights, but just lately they had piled up.
“Check your belt please, sir, we’ll be on the ground in a couple of minutes.”
“Yeah.” McGarvey thought about the work he was facing, and the probability that they would fail. “Tell the pilot good flight.”
“Yes, sir,” the attendant said, and he went forward to his jump seat.
McGarvey turned back to Arnette. “You might as well ride out to Langley with me.”
“Thanks, but Dave Whittaker said he’d be sending somebody for me, and they’re taking you out to Bethesda, the docs want to check you out.”
“I’ve had enough hospital for this week,” McGarvey grumbled and he looked outside as they came in for a landing. There would be plenty of time for hospitals later. For the moment he had a war to fight, a war that he wasn’t at all sure they could win given the rules they had to fight by.
The Gulfstream taxied past the terminal and parked in an empty hangar. McGarvey got up as the door was opened and the stairs lowered. Several armed air force cops surrounded the airplane even before the engines had spooled completely down. Dick Yemm was waiting with McGarvey’s limousine. It was a beautiful warm morning but muggy after the Afghani desert and mountains. McGarvey shook hands with Arnette while Yemm opened the limo’s rear passenger door.
“Are you sure I can’t give you a lift?” McGarvey asked.
“No, sir, my ride’ll be along shortly,” Arnette said. “You know, maybe you should consider leaving the field work to the kids next time.”
“That’s a thought,” McGarvey said. “Thanks for your help.”
“Hey, no sweat. It’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
McGarvey walked over to the limo and shook hands with his driver bodyguard “Welcome home, boss,” Yemm said.
“It’s good to be back, Dick. Let’s see how fast you can get me over to Langley.”
Yemm hesitated for a moment. “We’re supposed to take you over to Bethesda ASAP.”
“Later,” McGarvey said tersely. He ducked down to climb in the back seat and saw Elizabeth sitting in the corner, a big smile on her face.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said in a small voice, her excitement and concern for him barely suppressed.
He was stopped for just a moment. “Hi, Liz,” he said. He got the rest of the way in and grunted with pain. Elizabeth reached out a hand to help him.
“Daddy, what’s the matter?”
“I’m still a little stiff from climbing mountains,” McGarvey said, masking his pain and sudden dizziness. “Thanks for coming out to pick me up. How’s your mother?”
“Happy that you were coming back in one piece,” Elizabeth said looking at him critically to make sure that he was really all right. “I told her to stay home this morning because you’d have to be debriefed. She understood, but she’d like you to call her as soon as you get a chance.”
Yemm got behind the wheel. “How about it, boss, Bethesda or Langley?”
“My office, Dick.”
“They wanted to check you out first,” Elizabeth said.
“The office,” McGarvey repeated to his driver, and as they headed out, he turned his attention back to his daughter. “Okay, sweetheart, what’s the story? We have a problem, it’s written all over your face.”
“Bin Laden survived,” Elizabeth said, girding herself. She’d always hated being the bearer of bad news. Her father’s major fault, in her estimation, was wanting to protect everybody around him no matter what the cost was to his relationship with them, even leaving them. Her biggest problem, by contrast, was wanting to make everybody around her happy while still trying to somehow juggle her fierce independence into the mix. It couldn’t always work that way, and as a child she lied a lot; varnished the truth, as her father would say. But now in the real world in which people could and did get hurt without the absolute truth, that was no longer possible.
“Tom Arnette told me on the way over. He must have left the camp by now. Do we have any idea where he went?”
“He’s probably gone to ground in Khartoum, but we’re not sure yet. Otto’s working with Louise Horn over at NRO.” She smiled a little. “They’re quite a team.”
“Bin Laden’s going to come after us and we’re going to have to be ready for him.”
They passed through the main gate, the air force policeman snapping them a crisp salute, and then got on the Capital Beltway, the morning rush hour traffic horrendous.
“Was it bad over there?” Elizabeth asked.
“We could have had a deal,” McGarvey said heavily. “I think that he’s dying of cancer, and he wanted to make sure that his family would be taken care of.” He shrugged. “But he does know how to run a war, and his people are behind him one hundred percent.”
“I went to school in Switzerland with his daughter, Sarah. What did you think of her?”
“She’s a bright girl—” McGarvey stopped suddenly, realizing that she was trying to tell him something. “What?”
“The NRO got some really good high-angle frames of the camp during the raid and a few minutes on either side of it. We figured that Sarah left the camp about the same time as you did, and maybe she helped escort you part of the way back.”
“Did she get caught in the attack?”
Elizabeth’s lips compressed, and she nodded. “She was killed.” She reached for her father’s hand and squeezed it. “I saw the file photo we have of her and remembered her from that school outside of Bern. She’s younger than me,
and she was only there for a year, but I still remember her because of the bodyguards.” Liz looked away. “Now she’s dead.”
“What’s our confidence level on this?”
“Very high,” Elizabeth said. “We got some very good enhanced images of bin Laden with his daughter’s body in his arms.”
“Christ,” McGarvey said shaking his head. “There’ll be no reasoning with him now.” “It wasn’t your fault,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe he’d still listen to you if you could reach him.”
McGarvey looked at his daughter with a sudden overwhelming love and fear. He’d gotten inside bin Laden’s skin for a few minutes up there in his mountain cave. Or at least he thought he had. But just now, just at this moment, looking at his daughter, he was sure that he really understood bin Laden. Understood a father’s anguish.
“If his people had killed you I wouldn’t listen to him,” McGarvey said softly. “He’s coming after us now with everything he has. And it’s going to hurt.”
Fanaticism is a monster that could tear a society apart, Voltaire wrote two hundred fifty years ago, and it was just as true now as it had been then. “The fanatic is under the influence of a madness which is constantly goading him on.”
A daughter’s death at the hands of the infidels was the ultimate goad.
CIA Headquarters
McGarvey walked into his office a few minutes before eight. His daughter accompanied him. Now that he was back and he had found out about Sarah’s death, he had an unreasoning fear for Elizabeth’s safety even here in the building. His secretary wasn’t here yet, and he had a full plate so he could justify keeping her by his side, even though her job was in Rencke’s section.
He took off the blue jacket the air force had loaned him, tossed it on the couch and went to his desk, which was loaded with memos, telephone messages and mail.
