medals, but he’d come close. And the main thing was that he had made the U.S. Olympic team. Everyone on the detail was proud of him.
“I wouldn’t make it one lap,” Chenna radioed. “Bring her in, cook’s got lunch ready to go.”
“Roger that,” Hansen said. He sped up alongside Lundgren, who broke off and angled over to Deborah.
The President’s daughter slowed down, and seemed to stumble as if she had trouble concentrating on talking and running at the same time. But then she looked over to where Chenna was standing, gave a wave, and bounded across the track, this time running flat out.
Chenna was used to the girl’s athletic abilities; she’d watched them develop. But someone seeing the President’s daughter for the first time would have reason to be nervous. Deborah had Down syndrome, and like many people with that handicap she was double-jointed. Watching her run was like watching a Raggedy Anne doll; her arms and legs flew in every direction as if she was going to crash and land in a jumbled heap. But she never did. She was as surefooted as a young gazelle, and under Lundgren’s tutelage she had become a world-class athlete. She was expected to win Saturday’s half-marathon, or at least place in the top three or four out of a field of fifteen hundred runners.
Charlie McGivern, the horse master, came out of the barn and lit his pipe. Chenna caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and turned slightly to see who it was as her right hand headed automatically toward her pistol in a shoulder holster.
He was used to Secret Service agents around the place. He waved.
Chenna grinned and waved back. Charlie was one of the good ones. His wife had died a few years ago and he had nobody, so he doted on the President’s daughter whenever she came to visit. He’d even made a special saddle for her with her initials carved into the left and right fenders.
He watched Deborah run for a moment or two, Lundgren and Hansen following her, shook his head and went back into the barn. Chenna knew what he was thinking, and sometimes she had to agree with him. Being a sitting President’s daughter had to be tough. It was no life for a kid, and yet Deborah thrived. She had friends who loved her and she was protected every single moment of every single day.
“Chenna,” she cried with total joy, her arms wide open. She grabbed Chenna, who was short but solidly built, on the run with a tremendous hug and easily lifted her off the ground. Everything the girl did was with overflowing enthusiasm. It was one of the reasons that Chenna loved her assignment.
“You’re getting strong,” Chenna said, laughing.
“I eat my Wheaties,” Deborah bubbled. “Did you see me running?”
“I did, and I can’t get over the improvement. You’re really getting fast.”
“I can’t keep up with her,” Hansen admitted. “And that’s a fact.” “I’m very proud of her,” Lundgren agreed. “But the best part is that she’s got even more potential. Look out, Ferrari!”
Deborah giggled in pure joy and clapped her hands. It was a daily ritual they went through, but none of them minded because of the utter happiness it gave her.
“Okay, gotta run some more now,” she said, jumping up and down to keep loose. Sweat covered her face, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“Lunch first,” Lundgren said, handing Deborah a towel. “Then we’re going to do a little resistance training in the gym, and afterwards laps in the pool.”
“Can I run later?”
Lundgren looked to Chenna for approval.
“Maybe for an hour,” Chenna said. “But then you’ll have to get ready for dinner. You’re going to be with your parents tonight in town.” Deborah immediately calmed down. “I think I’ll wear the blue dress tonight. And the black heels and pearls.”
Chenna, who was a tomboy, shook her head. “That’s going to be up to your mom.”
Deborah smiled knowingly and nodded. “I think it’ll be the blue dress,” she said with confidence. “And right now lunch sounds good.”
McGarvey walked across the hall to the DO’s conference room at two in the afternoon. He had managed to pull together what information they had so far on bin Laden’s compound and his probable movements in the past two months since he’d left Afghanistan. But if they were going to mount an operation to take him out they would have to know a lot more. For instance: They knew that he was never without guards, but almost nothing was known about them; how they were selected, where they came from. If they were going to find a way to get to bin Laden it might have to be through one of his guards. They also had to know more about his communications; who he talked with and how. They needed to know who was coming to see him on a regular basis, and what they were probably talking about. It was possible that he and the NIF had had a falling out, and maybe he could be gotten to through the Sudanese government. They needed to know where his wives and children were staying; who shopped for his groceries and who prepared his meals; where his water came from, and if there was a possibility of poisoning it. Assassinations were not always accomplished with a bullet to the brain.
It was a far cry from teaching at Milford, he told himself. Voltaire would probably have understood what he was trying to do, though the philosopher would have wondered what might become of a man who tried to stamp out evil by doing evil deeds himself. McGarvey had been asking that question all of his life.
“Good afternoon, Dick,” McGarvey said. Surprisingly Adkins was the only one here so far.
“I told everybody else two-fifteen. I wanted to talk to you first,” Adkins explained.
“I should have brought you in this earlier, sorry about that, but I had a lot of thinking to do. The general’s not real happy, but he can’t see any other way out either.”
“Well, you’ve got everybody’s attention. Considering the information you’ve been asking for, the word is already out. But nobody is disagreeing with you — at least not in principle,” Adkins assured him. “The problem is going to be the trigger man.”
“I’m going to set up shop in Riyadh,” McGarvey said.
“Right,” Adkins said. “I can’t imagine that the general went along with that.”
“I’m just going out there to make sure that Jeff Cook gets the word. He knows what resources he has on the ground.”
Adkins gave him a wan smile and shook his head. “Somehow I find that hard to believe. So will everyone else. Beating Van Buren on the fencing strip is one thing, but going back out in the field banged up the way you are is another.”
“We might not have to send any of our own people,” McGarvey said. He knew that this was the kind of reaction he would get. “If we can lure him to a meeting somewhere in Yemen, just across the border, Saudi intelligence can put up an operation to grab him.”
“That might work,” Adkins said after a moment’s thought. “But he’s survived for too long to fall for anything easy. Whatever the meeting is about, and especially whoever it’s with, will have to be damned convincing.”
“I agree,” McGarvey said. “Assuming that Turabi and the NIF are having some sort of a dispute with bin Laden it could be about the bomb. I mean that’s not such a leap of imagination. Maybe they think it’s over the top. Too extreme right now, especially with the moderates in Iran.”
“Okay,” Adkins agreed with some uncertainty.
“We’re guessing that the bomb went through Pakistan, possibly out of Karachi, maybe by ship or by plane.”
“That’s a possibility we’ve looked at, Mac. But we haven’t come up with a thing. Hell, we don’t really have anything here except speculation.”
“But it’s possible,” McGarvey pressed the point.
Adkins nodded.
“Okay, so Pakistan has its own troubles with us right now over the nuclear question an dover their new military government, so they can’t afford to upset us. If the ISI asks for the meeting on neutral ground in Yemen to promise bin Laden that they’ll give him anything he wants providing he turns over the bomb to them, he’ll come.” ISI, or Interservice Intelligence, was the Pakistani intelligence agency.
“What’s to stop him from picking up the telephone and calling them, besides his paranoia?”
“We do, from Riyadh. We’ll leak the word that we’ve redirected our southern India Jupiter satellite into position over the Sudan.” Jupiter was the program to closely monitor Indian and Pakistani communications because they had gone nuclear.
