A dirty yellow Mercedes panel van shot off the down ramp, its headlights flashing as the the driver hauled the wheel left and accelerated the van directly toward McGarvey.
At the last moment he stepped to the side, expecting the driver to run him down, smash his body against the pillar, but the van skidded to a halt, the side door opened, and three very large men leapt out.
They were dressed in dark clothing, their faces bare, not worried that their descriptions might given to the police. But they were not armed, or at least they had not drawn weapons, which meant this was going to look like a simple assault and robbery.
The guy McGarvey had followed from the hotel was gone, his part of the operation finished.
“You gentlemen might want to get back in your van and drive away,” Mac said, stepping out in the open. “That is, if you’re smart enough.”
The three of them spread out, one left, one right, and one directly facing McGarvey. They were dark like the man from the Mercedes but their features where rough. Working class, possibly Albanians, maybe Turks, a lot of whom had immigrated to Germany for good-paying jobs. But these three were bullyboys, someone’s enforcers. And though they were big men, they were light on their feet, like professional boxers.
“You should have stayed home and minded your own business, you fucker,” the one in the middle said, his accent thick.
The three of them advanced. But instead of retreating, Mac strode directly toward the one in the middle, but at the last moment he shifted right and slammed the second man backward into the concrete column.
The middle man leapt forward, saying something under his breath, and McGarvey turned toward him, ducking a roundhouse punch and smashing his fist three times into the guy’s chest, just over his heart.
He skipped to one side as the third man rushed forward. Grabbing the guy’s coat sleeve he propelled him into the one who’d pushed away from the pillar, blood streaming down the side of his face.
The middle man was trying to catch his breath, when McGarvey turned back, got behind him and twisted his head sharply to the left, breaking his neck.
Turning on his heel he was in time to see both men fumble under their jackets, bringing out pistols—what looked like older Glocks.
He was on the first man. Grabbing the guy’s gun hand he pulled the Turk around and, using him as a shield, he snatched the pistol and fired two rounds at the other man, hitting him center mass and dropping him to the deck.
Mac shoved the Turk away and pointed the pistol directly at his face. “Who hired you?”
The man said something unintelligible.
With a squeal of tires the van shot backward, turned left, and raced to the down ramp, careening off the concrete wall with a hail of sparks before it disappeared.
“Just you and me now, and I have a gun,” Mac said. “You can tell me who sent you, in which case I let you walk away. Or you can refuse and I’ll kill you, in which case it’ll be me who walks away.”
“You’ll shoot me anyway.”
“No need,” McGarvey said. He ejected the pistol’s magazine, tossed it aside, ejected the round in the firing chamber and let it fall to the deck, and threw the gun away. “Who hired you?”
The Turk glanced at the two bodies. “I don’t know. It was a blind number, as usual. Money always shows up the next day at a drop box in a whorehouse not far from here.”
“Who was the man who set up the ambush?”
“I never got a clear look at his face.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” McGarvey said.
The Turk turned and headed for the ramp.
“How much to take me out?” McGarvey called after him.
“Five hundred euros,” the Turk said. “Each.” He disappeared down the ramp.
Mac gave the man a full five minutes to get clear, then he walked down the up ramp to the still busy street and headed back to his hotel. He would have bet just about anything that the guy from the Mercedes was a Pakistani; the English they learned was British, and the best field officers spoke it with a proper upper-class accent. And he would have bet just about the same amount that the three guys he’d come up against were Turks hired by someone—most likely ISI—from the embassy.
The two-tone dee-dah of police sirens sounded not too far away. Mac crossed the street with the light so that he was on the same side as the Bristol and picked up the pace. The Pakistani from the Mercedes had probably called the police for insurance in case the muscle he’d hired wasn’t successful. At the very least Mac would be taken into police custody and held for a time.
SIXTEEN
Brian Ridder missed SEAL Team Six, the camaraderie, the bullshit practical jokes, the nearly constant ragging on each other, the adrenaline high coming off a successful op with all your pieces in the right places, no holes leaking. At five eleven and a hundred and seventy pounds, he was still in good shape, but a lot of the time his head wasn’t straight.
But he was glad that he was finally out, because his knees hurt most mornings, his back gave him such hell that even a half dozen extrastrength aspirins every day didn’t do much but dull the pain back to a near-constant Niagara Falls roar, and because he was finally a full-time husband and dad of three boys.
It was two in the morning in Virginia Beach. Brian was sitting up in bed, his body drenched with sweat, his sheets so wet again that his wife Cindy was going to accuse him of pissing himself, and they would have another of their ferocious arguments. He thought that he was losing his mind, but he was more frightened these days than he’d ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of a dozen hot spots where he’d been dropped. Usually into the middle of some serious shit.
The hell of it all was that he thought he missed the action, and yet he knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that he loved his wife, and yet a lot of a time lately he couldn’t stand her. And the boys; he loved them with every fiber of his being, and yet a lot of the time they got on his nerves so badly that he wanted to smash the little bastards in the face.
“Man up, for Christ’s sake,” he’d shouted in his sleep a couple of nights ago, and Cindy had grilled him about what he meant.
“Are you losing your fucking mind or what? she’d screeched. “Because if you aren’t, I sure the fuck am.”
Besides his being wigged out half the time, money was their biggest problem. He’d gotten out of the navy after seventeen years—three years short of his pension. No monthly payments, no base exchange privileges, and even worse, no medical or dental. Larry, their youngest, needed braces they couldn’t afford. Cindy’s teeth were giving her fits, and the dentist she’d gone to wanted fifteen thousand to put her mouth right. But there was absolutely no money for any of that.
He had no real trouble getting jobs—he’d driven a bus for the city, had worked on a road-repaving crew, had even done some rough construction, mostly framing for garages and other small buildings. But he’d trained all of his career to be stealthy. Hide in broad daylight. He’d practiced swimming five miles in the open ocean, jumping out of aircraft flying at thirty-five thousand feet, and free-falling down to a couple of thousand feet before opening his chute. And he’d been trained to blow up shit, and to kill people with a variety of weapons, including his bare hands.
He had skills that didn’t translate into civilian jobs, because he didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut when he figured something was wrong.
For a few months he thought about applying with one of the major contracting companies to go back out in the field. Afghanistan, Iraq—there were high-paying jobs out there. But he could not think about picking up a gun again. Ever again.
He got out of bed and took a pee without turning on the bathroom light. Cindy had rolled over, but if she was awake she didn’t say anything. He went down the hall to check on the boys, all of them sleeping soundly, and then padded into the kitchen, where he got a gallon bottle of milk from the fridge and took a deep drink. It was another of Cindy’s pet peeves, his drinking out of the bottle like
that. Now the boys were doing it. And leaving the toilet lid up, not picking up after themselves, never bothering to put their dirty clothes in the hamper or their dirty dishes in the sink.
The kitchen looked out on the small backyard, where he’d planted a couple of apple trees a few years ago when he was on leave. They were big now, and in the summer they were great for shade.
He started to go back to bed when he thought he saw something moving near the eight-foot-tall wooden fence that separated his yard from the Digbys’, who were on vacation. Their five kids—three girls and two boys—liked to come over, especially on weekends, so he and Roland had put in a gate. It was ajar now, or at least it looked like it, and his anger spiked.
A couple of months ago Cindy had told him that she was sure she’d seen some guy in their backyard. A Peeping Tom. It hadn’t been Roland, but whoever it was had come through the gate.
She’d wanted him to call the police, but he’d told her that she’d been dreaming, and that had started another terrific fight.
He went to the window and, keeping to one side so that he wouldn’t be so easy to spot, looked out across the yard. If anyone had been there, he was gone now. But the gate was still half open and that was bothersome. Either the guy had left and not bothered to close the gate, or he’d come around to the north side of the house, where he could look into the bedroom windows.
“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. He debated for just a split second whether he should warn Cindy and call the cops or take care of it himself.
He went through the hall and into the laundry room, where he unlocked the back door, eased it open, and poked his head outside for just an instant. Nothing moved, so he slipped outside and headed past the kitchen windows to the corner of the house.
Someone was tapping on something. For just an instant it almost sounded like Morse code, but it dawned on him that what he was hearing was someone tapping on a window. With a piece of metal. The muzzle of a pistol.
Time slowed down, and his heart, which had been pounding, settled into an even rhythm as it did when he was about to walk into a close-quarters battle somewhere in Badland.
He peeked around the corner. A tall man dressed in dark clothes stood at the bedroom window. He was tapping the muzzle of what even in the darkness at a distance of twenty-five feet Brian recognized was a silencer tube.
The bastard was trying to wake up Cindy and he meant to shoot her.
Keeping low, Brian stepped around the corner and raced silently toward the guy, who at the same moment fired two shots through the window.
“No,” Brian shouted at the last instant.
The shooter turned and fired once directly into Brian’s chest, and then stepped aside.
Brian’s knees gave out and as he fell his momentum carried him forward and onto his side, at the shooter’s feet. The man’s eyes were lifeless, no expression in them whatsoever. The pistol was a 9mm subcompact Glock 26. A toy, but deadly in the right hands. And the son of a bitch had shot Cindy with it.
Breathing was getting tough, but all he could think about was the SEAL’s dark humor: incoming rounds have the right of way and sucking chest wounds were nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
“Why?” he managed to croak.
“For Usama.”
Everyone on the assault team that night in Abbottabad knew something like this was possible. A couple of days ago Pete Barnes and his wife had been shot to death in Florida. But his old boss over on the base coming up on his thirtieth year, told him that the word from the top was that the hit in Florida was an anomaly: “Some son of a bitch redneck with a grudge against the world opened fire at the museum. If he’d been targeting you guys he wouldn’t have taken out Pete’s wife.” Taking revenge on the assaulters was one thing, but killing the wives was stupid.
The shooter pointed his pistol at Brian’s head.
“Why our wives?”
“Not just the wives,” the shooter said. His English had an odd accent that Brian couldn’t quite place. Maybe German. This guy wasn’t a redneck with a grudge. He was a pro.
But then what he had just said suddenly registered. Not just the wives.
Brian started to roll over so that he could reach the bastard’s legs and bring him down, stop him from hurting the boys, when a thunderclap burst inside his head.
SEVENTEEN
McGarvey met Weisse for breakfast at eight in the Bristol’s smaller dining room. It was a weekday and the place was filled with businessmen, making it an anonymous venue. But the German BND officer seemed ill at ease.
“There was a bit of excitement last night at a parking ramp a few blocks from here,” Weisse said. “Two Turkish gentlemen who the Berlin police believe were involved in the drug and prostitution trade were found murdered. One had his neck broken. The other was shot to death, and his pistol was unloaded and field-stripped.”
Their waiter came and took their orders.
“I think that someone has taken notice that I’m here,” McGarvey said.
“It was your work?”
“Yeah. But what puzzles me is, why me? Why now? I don’t see the connection.”
“I’m investigating the murder in Florida, and you’ve come to meet with me. Someone’s watching.”
It’s exactly what McGarvey figured Weisse would say. “Home-grown terrorist organizations usually don’t have the wherewithal to keep tabs on intelligence officers.”
“But governments do. Pakistan?”
“I haven’t been able to convince the DDO at Langley. Maybe you’ll do a better job of it with your colonel.”
“Not without concrete proof, which the director says he needs before he can make his recommendations,” Weisse said. “You and I are in the same boat. But what the hell were you doing in that parking ramp?”
McGarvey told him about the dark-complected man across the street from the hotel. “I’m just about certain he was a Pakistani.”
“But you can’t prove it.”
“No, but I think he was an ISI officer.”
“We have photos of just about everyone who works at their embassy. Would you mind looking at them?”
“He won’t be there. Unless I miss my guess he came to Germany specifically to take me out.”
Weisse looked away for a moment. “He would have to have some good intelligence from your side of the pond. Who knew that you were coming here?”
“You,” McGarvey said.
“But I didn’t know your work name, or where you were staying, until you phoned.”
“You did know that I was coming. If the leak came from your shop they could have posted a team with my photograph at the airport.”
“Did you spot anyone?”
“I wasn’t really looking,” Mac said. “Anyway, if they’d doubled or tripled me they would have been hard to pick out.”
“How about at the CIA?”
“Only two people, both of whom I would trust with my life. And have in the past.”
Weisse nodded. “The only other possibility that I can see is that you became a target from the start, in which case you could have come under surveillance in Washington.”
McGarvey conceded the point.
“What’s your next move?” the German asked him.
“Have the police been given my name?”
“No. As far as anyone is concerned it was good riddance to scum.”
“Then if you’ll give me the files, I’ll go back to Washington and see what I can piece together. My flight leaves around noon.”
Weisse took a CD jewel case out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. “We’re stepping up our investigation of Schlueter and the people we’ve already identified in her organization. But once again our hands are tied without hard evidence. None of which we’ve been able to come up with yet, except for the incident in Florida. And we haven’t been able to find any clear chain of evidence tying Schlueter to the kill.”
“But he worked for her organization.”
McGarvey’s cell phone rang. It was Otto.
“Can you talk?”
“I’m with Captain Weisse.”
“It’s happened again, this morning in Virginia Beach. A shooter or shooters unknown killed Brian Ridder—he was one of assaulters at Abbottabad. Also shot his wife to death and killed their three boys.”
“No witnesses?”
“No one’s come forward so far.”
“What’s Marty saying?”
“Not a word.”
“How about the navy?”
“Nothing. Both Barnes and Ridder were out of the service. No longer the navy’s problem.”
“The other twenty-two guys need to be warned.”
“I was given strict orders twenty minutes ago to stay out of it. Came from State.”
McGarvey gave him his Air France flight number, which got to Dulles around 6:30 P.M. “Have someone pick me up. I think this time we’ll meet at your place. But tell whoever you send to watch their back. They came after me last night.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. I’ll give you the details when I get back, but someone is definitely taking notice. And I have a feeling they’re going to speed up their timetable now that I’m in the mix.”
“I’ll try a guy I know at JSOC,” Otto said, and he rang off.
“Another one?” Weisse asked.
“Yeah, along with his wife and three kids.”
“Doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if you look at it from the ISI’s viewpoint. They were embarrassed by the raid on bin Laden but they couldn’t do a thing about it for fear we’d cut off their military aid. This operation is the next best thing.”
“Retribution.”
“It’s looking more like it every day. I need you guys to put some pressure on Schlueter and her gang.”
“I’ll have to pull some strings.”
“Pull them, Wolf, before it’s too late.”
* * *
Pete was waiting for him just outside the customs and passport control area, a serious look on her pretty face. “As best as I could tell I came in clear,” she said. “Otto’s already at his house waiting for us.”
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