history together. For all practical purposes his need to know cut across almost the entire DO. Like McGarvey he was a man who hated bullshit and bureaucracy. He told it like it was. In addition he had given Trumble shooting lessons for re qualification last winter, so he had a personal stake.
“What do we know so far?” McGarvey asked, trying to keep his thoughts in order. He had been yanked from Katy’s arms back into the real world, and her feel and scent had already faded into that other place in his head.
“Looks like bin Ladden ordered it.” Yemm’s jaw visibly tightened in the rearview mirror. When he was mad he ground his teeth. “There were four of them, AK-47s. Alien wasn’t carrying, but he managed to bag one of the bad guys anyway. Hit him in the head with something. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC talked to the bastard in the ambulance before he died.”
“Do we have a solid ID on him?” McGarvey wasn’t going to telephone Adkins because his ADDO had his hands full now, but he needed more information.
“Bari Yousef. Twenty-nine, born in Cairo, came over here in ‘ninety-eight. Until two weeks ago he worked as a truck driver for Jersey City Transport, then he disappeared.”
The trucking company was under investigation. It was believed that it was one of a number of possible fronts for bin Ladden’s operations here in the States. The Bureau’s antiterrorist division had been warning for years that bin Laden was going to extend his terrorist attacks to the States. The trucking company and some other enterprises, among them a couple of banks in New Jersey, were thought to be the precursors to something big that was coming. Something that would make Oklahoma City look small. Yemm must have been within earshot in the Ops Center when the connection had been made.
The problem with being DDO was that he got to hear everything, not just the bits and pieces like Yemm. Where Dick was mad, McGarvey was frightened. If the consensus on bin Laden was correct they were going to have the biggest fight of their lives on their hands. This time they were playing with fire. Very serious fire. And a lot of people would get hurt unless the U.S. was very careful in how it responded..
“They were on vacation, boss,” Yemm said, angry and frustrated. “Minding their own business. Not hurting anybody. Christ, you know Alien; the man would go out of his way to avoid stepping on a bug.”
“Take it easy, Dick. I know how you feel,” McGarvey said. “What about the other three shooters?”
“They were driving a Chevy van, stolen in Atlanta four days ago, on a Florida plate that the owner in Tampa didn’t even know was stolen until the cops showed up at her door. Some guy and his wife saw what was going down and they called 911 on their cell phone. The van was abandoned about a half-mile from Interstate 4, and nobody else saw a thing.”
“How’d we ID Yousef?”
“Prints off his gun. The Bureau ran them and came up with a red flag. The bastard was one of bin Laden’s shooters, and he shouldn’t have been able to clear customs in the first place. The passport people at Kennedy fucked up.”
It was a common occurrence, one of the downsides of a totally free country. As one senior Immigration and Naturalization official told McGarvey, trying to stop illegals coming ashore in leaky old boats was tough enough, but checking people flying in on supposedly legitimate passports was like trying to stop a flood with your finger in the dike.
In the end it was up to the CIA’s foreign stations to come up with lists of undesirables, and for the FBI’s special units on espionage and counterterrorism to see that the bad guys who did manage to get here didn’t do any harm. The CIA and the Bureau were doing a damned fine job, most of their successes never appearing in the media, but the problem was no less impossible than Immigration’s.
Now it was starting again, McGarvey thought morosely. In the never-ending battle you won a few, but you lost some too. The Khobar Barracks, the New York Trade Towers, Oklahoma City, the Nairobi embassy, and a host of others to which Orlando would be added.
But this was just the opening move. To what, he wondered. How far would it go this time? He had a very bad feeling that they were going to find out a lot sooner than they wanted to, and once again he was going to be right in the middle of it. Coming to work for the CIA right out of college and Air Force had been just a job, like a military career. Something you did. His parents had worked for the government at Los Alamos and it had been his turn. But after his parents had been killed in the car crash he had been locked into the Company by shackles whose links he had forged himself with his own conscience and sense of fair play. President Truman had a sign on his desk that read: the buck stops here. The sign or McGarvey’s desk read:
THE BULLSHIT STOPS HERE.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was 12:25 a.m. when McGarvey, still dressed in his tuxedo, his bow tie undone, reached his office. He’d talked to Trumble five days ago, sending his Riyadh COS and his family on a two-week vacation, and now they were dead. In that time the only thing they’d accomplished was to agree to wait until Alien got back to help with the ops planning for another meeting with bin Laden. Nobody had the least inkling that Trumble was in danger, but it was something that McGarvey knew he should have considered.
But bin Laden didn’t work that way; on such a small scale, in Trumble’s words. Or at least he’d never worked that way before, and there was no logical reason for him to start now. If he’d wanted Trumble dead, he would have killed him in Khartoum, not waited until the man returned to the United States presumably to report on the meeting, and then taken the risk of killing him and his family in such a public place. Yet he had to keep reminding himself that logical reason might not apply to a man such as bin Laden. Maybe the bastard had finally gone around the bend, really gone nuts. That was a cheery thought.
Dick Adkins walked in from his adjoining office, a stricken, angry expression on his face. McGarvey had seen that kind of look before.
“It came out of left field, Mac.”
“Short of keeping them in a safe house, there’s nothing we could have done,” McGarvey said bitterly. “Hell, the Secret Service can’t even guarantee a President’s life.” He took off his jacket, tossed it on the couch and went to his desk. “I want Jeff Cook alerted to what might be coming his way in Riyadh, and then I want all of our stations and missions to get the word to button down, freeze their assets.”
“We did that as soon as we found out. And I called McCafferty over at State to alert our embassies world wide.”
“Did we notify the Pentagon?”
“Couple of hours ago.” Adkins handed McGarvey a buff colored file folder with blue edging, denoting urgent attention. “This is what we’ve come up with so far. The Bureau’s Orlando SAC, Scott Thompson, is running the show down there, but Fred Rudolph called a couple of hours ago from his office, so they’re on top of it already.” Rudolph headed the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. McGarvey had a great deal of respect for the man’s abilities and judgment. He was a straight shooter; a no-nonsense cop.
“Coffee?”
“Coming up,” Adkins said.
McGarvey quickly scanned the file, which didn’t contain much more information than he’d already gotten from Dick Yemm, except that the FBI now believed that the Jersey City Trucking Company was no longer a bin Laden front, although it was still owned and operated by Arabs, mostly Egyptians.
Adkins came back with the coffee. “I don’t think there’s any doubt who ordered the hit or why. I think the Bureau is wrong this time.”
“Maybe not,” McGarvey said. Bin Laden was on the move, or getting ready to do something spectacular; he was pretty sure of that. But no matter how he looked at it, this killing didn’t add up to a bin Laden-ordered hit. “Do we have someone watching Alien’s and Gloria’s families in Minnesota?”
“I didn’t think of that one,” Adkins said. “I’ll do it now.”
