portly man with a slight comb-over. "He would have run to Kennedy and you would have never gotten your investigation off the ground."
"What does it matter? They're going to pull the rug out from under me tomorrow. They're going to transfer my ass to the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity or some other BS post. Shit, I'll be lucky if I have a job when they're done."
"Now . . . now," Ferris said in a caring voice. "You need to gather yourself and remember that while you may have stepped on a few toes, you're still right. You have uncovered a massive fraud. Millions of dollars in funds that have been stolen by a corrupt and out-of-control CIA."
"You don't need to convince me, it's them - my bosses."
"Hargrave, really. Director Miller would stand behind you if things weren't already so muddied."
"So you think I'm screwed."
"I didn't say that. I think you're in a tough spot, but I've seen worse." Ferris shifted the dog and said, "The key is for you to state your case tomorrow. You have the affidavit from the banker. You have the bank records. I don't know how they can ignore that kind of information."
"For starters, they're going to want to know how I came by all of this evidence, and they are not going to like my answers. This is the CIA we're talking about."
"I understand that," Ferris said with a trace of impatience. "Evidence is evidence. It will simply have to see the light of day. People will understand just how serious things are then."
Wilson cocked his head to the side and said, "Are you suggesting that I leak this information to the press, because if you are, I'll be the one to have my ass thrown in jail."
"Calm down," Ferris said sternly. "I said no such thing. I know you have certain rules you must follow. The key is for you to get them to see that by not letting you proceed, it will open the FBI up to allegations of a cover-up."
Wilson liked the sound of that. That was the kind of thing that could scare the crap out of any high-level bureaucrat. "You know if I dropped your name and mentioned that the Judiciary Committee was keeping an eye on this it might be enough to get them to back off."
The senator's expression soured. "For now you need to minimize our relationship. Trust me on this. We haven't reached the point yet where I'm ready to get involved, but I promise you, when the time is right, I will jump on them like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla."
"And until then I'm just going to get my ass kicked."
Ferris sighed. "Don't be so melodramatic. It's very unbecoming in a man who carries a badge and a gun."
Chapter 43
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
GENERAL Durrani was sitting in the rear passenger seat of his armored Mercedes sedan. Two identical black Mercedes E350 sedans followed. The cars were indistinguishable from one another, and tinted windows made it impossible to see who was inside the vehicles. Durrani preferred that his car take the lead, as bombers more often than not assumed their target was in the middle sedan. Truth be known, however, Durrani didn't worry much about being blown up. The people who did that type of stuff, the militants, were all in his back pocket.
The motorcade pulled up to the main security post of his gated community, Bahria Town, on the outskirts of Islamabad. Durrani had helped the developer get his forty-five-thousand-acre gated community off the ground - evicting tenants and intimidating reluctant landowners into selling. In addition to making sure the right people were bribed or threatened, Durrani had also made sure that the private security force was composed of former army personnel who were entirely loyal to him. In exchange for his help, he was given his own compound, nestled on a very private palm-tree-lined lot. The compound was surrounded by ten-foot walls that protected an eight-thousand-square-foot main house, two guesthouses, a pool house, and an eight-car garage with rooms for his servants and bodyguards. Durrani was filled with a sense of bliss every time he entered the gated community. Only in his beloved Pakistan could you work this hard and be rewarded with such opulence.
The cars sped down a wide, tree-lined boulevard. Unlike the rest of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, here there wasn't a speck of garbage in sight. The gate to the compound was open, and two of Durrani's military bodyguards were standing next to the large