the control panel.
Green was in the chart room re plotting their course to San Francisco, and Schumatz was below tending to the engines. There was no one to see him. He was alone and he could feel the power emanating from the device. The Americans had invented nuclear weapons, the other nuclear powers simply stole the secrets from them. And now that might was coming home to roost. Live by the sword, die by the sword. That was the adage Westerners foolishly liked to bandy about. But none of them really understood what they were saying.
That would change in less than thirty-six hours.
Shining the narrow beam of a penlight on the keypad Bahmad entered the ten-digit activation code, and the panel suddenly came to life.
He hesitated for several seconds, his fingers poised above the buttons. Even flow he could walk away from this insanity. He could kill the other two, rig the ship to sink and fly the helicopter to a deserted stretch of beach and make his way to Mexico City from where he could disappear. He had learned to fly helicopters courtesy of the British SIS, a fact he’d concealed from the others.
But he would go ahead with this for the same reason he had come up with the plan in the first place. The infidels had killed his parents. It was a fact that no act on earth or in heaven could erase. His parents would never return from their graves. What he had done in the name of Islam, and what he was doing now, was not his fault He’d been made to do this thing by the one senseless act the Americanbacked Israelis had carried out on innocent civilians. Now they would pay.
He sat back on his heels in the darkness for a few moments longer, contemplating exactly how long it would take him to get to the helicopter, start the engine, lift off and fly to a safe distance before the weapon exploded.
The hills would help. He could duck down behind one of them on the Sausalito side of the bridge.
He entered sixty minutes and five seconds on the keypad, and entered the start code. The panel beeped softly and the LED counter switched from 00:60:05 to 00:60:04, then 00: 60:03, 00:60:02, 00:60:01.
Bahmad pressed the interrupt button and the counter stopped at 00:60:00. He entered another series of codes that removed the nuclear weapon’s failsafes and entered in their places a series of counter-measures that would make it next to impossible to shut the bomb down.
Now simply pressing the start button would begin the countdown at sixty minutes, and nothing could stop it from happening.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The headaches were back. McGarvey got out of bed at six, quietly so as not to awaken Kathleen, and went into the bathroom. He softly closed the door, switched on the light and looked at his haggard image in the mirror. The hair on the side of his head where the surgeon had gone in with a tiny laser cauterizing tool had grown back. There was a ninety percent cure rate. But if the headaches returned it meant they’d missed a bleeder and would have to go back in. It’d mean another six weeks of convalescence.
He hadn’t had any choice in the matter the last time, but he was going to have to hang on now. Whatever was going down was going to happen very soon. All the evidence pointed to it, and his gut bunched up in knots as it did before every major mission. The biggest problem they still faced was not knowing where the attack would come. So far they hadn’t come up with a single clue.
Bin Laden and his staff were hunkered in Khartoum. There had been no definitive word on where his wives and children had gotten to, but since none of the CIA’s assets in the region had made any positive sightings, they were guessing that bin Laden’s family was with him in the compound. In some way that had been the most ominous bit of news all afternoon. Bin Laden had lost one daughter, he didn’t want to lose another child. He had brought them to his side, to the one place that he considered was safe, unassailable. They couldn’t stay there forever, of course. The situation in Khartoum was far too unstable. But for now it was where they were staying; waiting.
Bin Laden would have made plans though. He knew that he could be dead before the year was out, so he would have worked out what would happen to his family afterward. After not only his death, but after the nuclear attack on the United States. Maybe the CIA could guarantee the safety of his family in exchange for the bomb. They could try.
“Yeah, right,” he told his image in the mirror. It’d be the same kind of a deal that we’d offered him just before we’d killed his daughter.
He took a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols with-a glass of water, then rinsed his face, switched off the light and went back into the bedroom. Kathleen was up and she was putting on a robe.
“Sorry, Katy, I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, coming around the bed to her.
“It’s time to get up anyway,” she said. They kissed, and she looked at him critically. “Did you sleep all right?”
“I’ve had better nights, how about you?”
She touched his face. “Fine,” she said. “But you look tired.”
“When we get past this one, you and I are going to take a vacation. A cruise.”
She smiled warmly. “I’d like that. Why don’t you take the bathroom first, and I’ll get breakfast started.”
“Nothing heavy, Katy, this is going to be a tough one.” Kathleen gave him another smile, as if he’d just stated the obvious. He grinned sheepishly. “If I knew how to golf, I’d retire right now.”
“You could learn,” she said, and she went downstairs.
McGarvey lit a cigarette and went to the window that overlooked the golf course. The sprinklers were still on, but the first golfers would be on the course within a half hour. The windows in the house were bulletproof Lexan plastic. Eight weeks ago the doors and locks had been seriously beefed up and the CIA had installed a state-of- the-art security system around the entire property. But somebody on the fifteenth fairway could pull an RPG out of his bag and punch a hole in here like a knife through Swiss cheese.
A cheery thought to start off the day, he told himself. But he was back for the duration this time. He wasn’t going to run out in a stupid attempt to draw off the bad guys. This time when they came looking for someone to hurt, they were going to find him. His jaw tightened. One-on one That’s what he really wanted. Sorry that your daughter was killed, but you put her in harm’s way. Killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people would not bring her back.
His anger, which had percolated all night, spiked and he savagely ground out his cigarette in the ash tray. One-on one he told himself again, going into the bathroom. Him and Ali Bahmad on any field of play with any weapons he wanted. Soldier against soldier. Not soldier against women and children; especially not handicapped women and children.
When he came out of the bathroom Kathleen had laid out gray slacks, a white shirt, club tie and the blue blazer for him. Rencke had made the comment a few weeks ago that since Mrs. M. had taken over, McGarvey was starting to look pretty sharp. “Watch it,” he’d warned Rencke. “She’d love to get her hands on you.”
Rencke hopped from one foot to the other. It was a tiny moment of lightness in an otherwise bleak few months, and it made him smile now, but just for a moment because he had another big hurdle to get over this morning. Something he had put off last night. He had to finally tell Kathleen exactly what Liz was facing. He had a pretty good idea how she was going to take it because this wasn’t the first time Liz had been put in harm’s way, but at least he was no longer afraid that Katy would turn her back on him like she had done before. “We’re in this together, darling,” she was telling him now. “You and me, no matter what.”
He stopped in the middle of getting dressed. For the first time since Paris he couldn’t say that he missed working on his book about Voltaire. He’d worked on it for a long time. But at this stage of his writing he needed to be in the libraries of Europe pouring over the philosopher’s letters, reading his notes and manuscripts in their original drafts; talking with scholars. Work, he decided, that was just as real as what he was doing now; in fact possibly even more genuine than what he was doing for the CIA, and in some ways more satisfying because it was like playing detective; but work that was not as necessary as controlling evil. In that, at least, Voltaire would have agreed wholeheartedly.
Kathleen had used the spare bathroom and she looked fresh and bright, but she was troubled. She poured
