Saturday morning two hours before the start.”
No one offered any objections.
Villiard walked over to the rail and looked out over the harbor back toward Alcatraz Island. After a moment Charles Fellman joined him. The others stayed at the two vans that had taken them from Candlestick Park over the route that the presidential motorcade and Special Olympians would take.
“This is about bin Laden, isn’t it?”
Villiard looked at him, his lips compressed, and he nodded. “Nothing in two months. The CIA says he’s holed up in Khartoum, and they haven’t come up with a single shred of evidence that he’ll strike here and now.” Villiard shook his head. “There’ll be runners from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, even Iran. He’d be a fool to try anything. But I’ve got a terrible feeling about this weekend.”
Fellman, who’d worked with him before, nodded. “I know what you mean. But you have the same feeling before every event.”
“You’re right.”
“So we redouble our efforts. Push the exclusion zone back to ten miles; hell, fifteen.”
Villiard shook his head. “The god damned bomb is the size of a suitcase, Chuck. How the hell do you find something like that hidden in something like this?” He swept his arm to include the entire bridge, and perhaps the entire bay area.
“You don’t,” Fellman admitted after a few seconds.
“But you keep trying,” Villiard said. “There’s no other choice this time. We keep doing the same things; tried and tested.”
“Nothing is going to happen this weekend, Mac, and you know it as well as I do,” Murphy said.
McGarvey had to agree intellectually. He knew all the reasons bin Laden would not strike the President’s daughter in the midst of hundreds of his own people. Yet he could not shake the feeling that had come to him downstairs in the gym. Bin Laden was so desperate to win before he died that he was going to make a foolish move; like Van Buren had with his inappropriate flick. It would be an all-out thrust that he knew could have the consequences of causing his own destruction, but he was willing to take the risk. He had seen it in the man’s eyes and in his voice at the Afghanistan meeting, as well as on the phone call. The effective blast radius of the bomb was more than a mile. Parked in the middle of the Olympic Village it would wipe out all the athletes plus a lot of the surrounding neighborhoods. Hidden somewhere in Candlestick Park stadium, so long as it wasn’t shielded by too much concrete and steel, the nuclear explosion would kill everyone in attendance including the President’s daughter who would be down on the field, and the President and First Lady on the speakers’ platform during the opening ceremonies. Hidden somewhere on the Golden Gate Bridge, anywhere between the two towers, the bomb would serve the exact purpose it was designed for, taking out large bridges. The center span would drop into the bay and no one would survive. That included the President and his wife who would be in the convoy of cars leading the half-marathon from Candlestick Park to Sausalito — Deborah Haynes somewhere in the pack.
“I hope you’re right,” he told Murphy. They were in the DCI’s office, the sun streaming through the tall windows.
“I’m not trying to say that we’re out of the woods. But I don’t think San Francisco is his target.”
McGarvey thought again about bin Laden’s voice on the phone call that NSA intercepted; he was a changed man from the one who had negotiated a bomb for his family’s freedom. Even harder and more desperate than he had been in the cave. “I want you to try to get to the President again. One more time, General, try to convince him to pull his daughter out of the games and come home.”
Murphy shook his head. It was obvious that he had tried more than once and failed. “Not a chance,” he said, and before McGarvey could object he held up his hand. “He’s read all the transcripts and listened to the phone conversation. He knows the risk he’s taking, but he also knows the risk he’d be taking if he packed it up and hid in a bomb shelter until we found it. He told me to tell you that he knows you must be faced with a similar problem allowing your daughter to remain working for the CIA, and not sending her away somewhere out of harm’s way until the monster is caught.” McGarvey wanted a cigarette, but he felt like hell as it was. He’d known the answer that Murphy would give him. He’d merely been trying to delay the inevitable decision that he was going to have to make.
“I’ve called a staff meeting for two,” he said looking up. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“Here we go again,” Murphy replied heavily. He turned away momentarily unable to meet McGarvey’s eyes.
“Nothing’s changed, has it?” McGarvey thought about his past, about everything that he’d done in his twenty-five years with the Company. Had he made a difference? He sometimes doubted it. Leastways nothing had changed because of him in the long run. “We don’t have the luxury of time, so it could end up being messy. I want everybody to know that from the beginning. Another missile strike is out, for humanitarian as well as political reasons. Nor do I think it would be a good idea to send in the marines, and Khartoum is too far inland for any kind of an effective SEAL operation. It’s going to have to be one-on-one.”
“Do we have anybody on the ground out there?”
“Not the kind of an operative that we need,” McGarvey said. “I’ll set up a forward headquarters in Riyadh. It’s just possible that we can flush bin Laden out of his compound by setting up a meeting somewhere. Something he could not afford to miss. Maybe just across the border in Yemen.”
“But you’re not going out on the mission, Mac,” Murphy said firmly. “You’re not going to try to kill bin Laden yourself.”
“It doesn’t matter who kills him, General, he has to die.”
Serafini’s view was a much narrower one. Killing bin Laden would solve only one of her problems. He was just one of dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands of crazies out there who would like to do harm to the President and his family. Her job, one that she was proud of and took very seriously, was to stop them, with her own life if necessary. More specifically she was the lead officer on the detail to protect Raindrop, the code name for the President’s daughter.
She was thirty-four, divorced, no children, parents dead, no brothers or sisters. Her entire life revolved around her job. So much so, in fact, that she was already beginning to have bad dreams about the day a new President and First Family replaced the Hayneses. She expected that everyone else on her detail should share the same enthusiasm. They did not, of course, and it was a never-ending source of vexation for her.
The best deal today was that Deborah was staying put. The President and First Lady had left early this morning for a breakfast fundraiser, and were at this moment attending a thousand-dollar-a-plate luncheon at the San Diego Hilton. They had left Deborah here at the La Jolla estate of their old friend and campaign contributor, the real estate multimillionaire Gordon Wedell and his wife Evelyn. The Wedells, currently in Europe, had loaned the house to the President and his family, as they had on several other occasions. Wedell liked the arrangement because when it came time to sell the place its value would be greatly enhanced by its famous guests. The Secret Service liked it because the house was perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific and was easy to secure. The President and Mrs. Haynes liked it because it was comfortable, and Deborah loved it because they had horses, an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and racket ball courts, and a place for her to run, all in perfect safety.
Chenna got out of the jeep across from the horse barn and raised her binoculars. Deborah Haynes, dressed in gray sweats, her long blond hair streaming behind her, was coming around the far turn of the one-mile oval horse track. Terri Lundgren, her coach, astride an ATV, paced her on the outside just a few feet away. Even from here Chenna could see the pure, unadulterated joy on Deborah’s face as she loped, rather than ran flat-out. She was turning in respectable eight-minute miles at the start, and from what Chenna had seen over the past couple of years since Terri Lundgren had come aboard, the girl could continue at that pace all day.
Directly behind her, and a few yards back, agent Bruce Hansen took up the rear astride his own souped-up version of an ATV. If anything started to go bad he could get to Deborah within seconds, and if need be he could get her out of there at speeds ranging up to eighty miles per hour.
Chenna turned her chin slightly so that her lapel mike would pick up her voice and activate the VOX. “Hey, you’re lookin’ good out there, Romeo One. But I thought that you were going to start running with her instead of riding.” “I’m out of breath just watching her. She’s getting too good for me. Do you want to try?”
Hansen, who was one of Chenna’s favorites, had been an Olympic sprinter eight years ago. He’d not won any
