McGarvey a cup of coffee at the kitchen counter. “You look nice,” she said distantly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Otto called. He wants you to call him right back. And your car is here.”
“Sorry, Katy,” McGarvey said. He phoned Rencke’s direct line. “What have you got?”
“There was a murder aboard a yacht in New York City less than forty-eight hours ago,” Rencke said excitedly. “It looks like the work of Bahmad.”
“Call Fred Rudolph, and then let the President’s Secret Service detail know about it. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“The FBI is already on it. I’ll talk to Villiard. We’re close, Mac.” McGarvey went back to the counter and got his coffee. “Gotta go, Katy. This could be the break we’ve been waiting for.”
Kathleen was on the other side of the counter, a funny look on her face. “I figured as much, that’s why I didn’t make breakfast. Where’s Elizabeth?”
It was the hurdle. McGarvey girded himself. “She’s working.”
“There’s no answer at Todd’s and the locator wouldn’t even take a message.”
“I sent them to San Francisco.”
She assimilated that information for a moment. “The President’s daughter is running in the Special Olympics. Do you think that bin Laden will try to harm her?”
“We thought so, Katy, but we might have been wrong.”
“But you sent our daughter there.”
“To be with the President’s daughter.”
She held herself very still, very erect, until finally she nodded. “Okay,” she said. She came around to him and straightened his tie. “I’m having a hard time with this, Kirk. But I swear to God that I’m trying.”
“It’s never easy, Katy.”
“Whose idea was it to send Todd with her?”
“Mine.”
“Good,” Kathleen said. She patted his lapels. “Be careful, Kirk.”
“Will do,” he promised and kissed her. Dick Yemm was waiting in the driveway with his car, the morning absolutely beautiful.
“Could somebody else have come aboard the yacht and killed the captain?” McGarvey asked Rencke.
Adkins came over and he looked almost as strung out as Rencke. They’d both been pulling a lot of overnighters.
“Not likely, if you’re thinking robbery,” Rencke said. “The only thing missing is an aluminum case that the girl said had been delivered to the yacht here in Washington two months ago.” “Looks as if the captain came to the yacht searching for it when he was interrupted,” Adkins said. “That’s what the police are saying. It could have been the bomb.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” McGarvey said. “They took a big risk by just bringing it into the States. Why would they take it out to Bermuda and then back again? Why triple their risk?”
“There are lots of hiding places on a yacht that size,” Adkins pointed out. “Fred Rudolph has sent a Bureau counterespionage team up there. If there’s anything to be found they’ll find it. But for now it looks as if Bahmad came back to the yacht to pick up the case, walked in on the captain who was searching his cabin and killed the man. He’s somewhere in New York. Wall Street maybe. Or maybe the top of the Empire State Building right in the middle of midtown. If it were to blow at noon, let’s say on a Monday, it’d kill a lot of people.”
McGarvey turned away and walked to the end of the row of computer racks. Rencke had all but taken over the DO’s main computer center as his personal domain. It was large, the equivalent of a halfdozen supercomputers, fanning out from a central area that contained a dozen monitor consoles. The morning shift computer operators were starting to drift in, but they stayed respectfully out of the way.
After Washington, Papa’s Fancy had sailed off to Bermuda where Bahmad and the crew partied. To kill time. Not just to wait for the dust from the Chevy Chase attack to settle, but to wait for a specific date. Back to New York Bahmad dismisses the crew and disappears for ten days. To wait a little longer? Why not in Bermuda? Because the plans may have changed and he needed new instructions. Then he shows up at the yacht at the very same moment the captain is there. Perhaps the captain searched the yacht on the owner’s instructions. But there were way too many coincidences for McGarvey, all of them starting with the failed attack in Chevy Chase, and ending presumably at any moment with the detonation of the nuclear weapon.
He walked back. “How do we know it was Bahmad?”
“All the descriptions the Bureau has gotten so far are a match,” Rencke said. “They’ve talked to three of the crew from the yacht and the staff here in Washington at the Cor inithian Yacht Club. Everything adds up, and it’ll be the same in Bermuda.”
“What about the owner?”
“Alois Richter, Jersey City. Until a couple of years ago he was involved with a company called Tele/ Resources which — surprise, surprise — is an agent for the bin Laden family. He left the day before yesterday on business in Europe. No one knows where he is at the moment.”
“How about the marina in New York?”
“No one noticed him,” Rencke said. “But all the better hotels in the city are being checked. No one thinks they’ll come up with anything, but they’re trying.”
“Airlines?”
“Those are being checked too. But the hairs that were found in Bahmad’s bathroom had been dyed gray. He’s changed his appearance.”
Rencke was an absolute mess; his clothing was filthy, his long red hair totally out of control, and his complexion sallow from spending almost no time out of doors. But his eyes were bright and an electric current seemed to surround him. He had the bit in his teeth.
“It’s very soon, isn’t it, Mac?” he said reverently.
“It looks like it.”
“So what do we do next?” Adkins asked.
“Keep looking for him and the bomb on the assumption we’re wrong about New York, and the bomb was never aboard the yacht. I’m going up there. It’s probably a waste of time, but I want to see the yacht.”
Tony Lang came in with Henry Kolesnik a couple of minutes before 6:00 a.m. The President looked up from his breakfast alone in the living room of the Century City Plaza Hotel’s presidential suite, his nerves giving a start. Something had happened.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” his chief of staff said brightly. “We have some good news, I think.”
Whenever possible especially if they were on the road, the President liked to have his breakfast in private with his wife and daughter. But it had been a late night and the girls were leaving for San Francisco later this morning, so they were sleeping in.
“What is it?” the President asked, quelling his irritation.
“The CIA called two hours ago,” Kolesnik said. “Ali Bahmad, the guy we think bin Laden sent over with the bomb, has been placed in New York City, and he’s apparently been there for a while. The FBI is looking for him, but now we’ve got a decent description.”
The President’s eyes narrowed. “Am I missing something, Tony?”
“We just might be off the hook in San Francisco,” Lang said. “The Bureau thinks that the bomb may have been aboard a private yacht in a New York marina two days ago.”
The President understood what they were getting at, but he didn’t think they did. “San Francisco has been under a microscope for the past seventy-two hours. If the bomb isn’t already in place, it’s not coming. It wouldn’t get through. Is that about right, Henry?”
“Yes, sir. You were right all along, Mr. President. San Francisco never was his target.”
“Well, I am relieved to hear that,” the President said sharply. He got up, nearly knocking his chair over.
“Yes, sir,” Kolesnik said uncertainly.
“We don’t have to worry about a nuclear device being detonated in San Francisco killing me, my wife and my daughter, and maybe tens of thousands of other people.”
