Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “For you?”

  “For anyone wanting to get across. And I was damned lucky.”

  “Thanks,” Otto said. “I’ll get out of your hair now.”

  “My turn,” Kyung-won said. “What’s going on in North Korea?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  The NOC started to object, but Otto overrode him.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think something pretty big is going on in a number of places,” he said.

  “Let me guess. Russia, China, Pakistan. The list isn’t endless but it’s big.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Bullshit. It’s likely and you guys are scared shitless.”

  Otto looked at the man for a long moment or two. “Just a suggestion, Larry, but you might want to keep that sort of speculation under your cap for now.”

  Kyung-won glanced at the open door. He switched on the TV sound with the remote and turned the volume up. “I can be out of here in five or six days. Do I need to disappear?”

  Otto hesitated. The agent had damned near nailed it—or at least as far as anyone else had dared to take it to this point. Even Estes, who for all practical purposes was fairly bulletproof behind the walls of academia, hadn’t gone any further. He could always plead that he was merely engaged in a philosophical exercise and walk away reasonably clean.

  But everyone else was right on the edge of the firing line.

  “Maybe not.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Maybe we can use your help,” Otto said.

  “I’m listening,” Kyung-won said after a beat.

  “Do you know who’s in the room next to you?”

  “No. But a VIP by the way everyone is pussyfooting around.”

  “Kirk McGarvey,” Otto said.

  “No shit?”

  “Someone tried to kill him, and damn near succeeded. Far as the media is concerned he’s dead for now.”

  The NOC thought it over. He nodded. “If it’s what I think it is—”

  “It is.”

  “Count me in.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Franklin’s order to McGarvey was simple: Mac was to remain on his stomach for seven days until the skin grafts on his back had a chance to take.

  “It’s already starting to itch,” Mac had said irritably that afternoon.

  “That’s a good sign. But if you screw it up, we’ll have to start from scratch and keep you totally isolated to guard against infection.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’ve told Pete, Otto and Louise the same thing.”

  “So I’m screwed.”

  Franklin managed a slight grin. “Totally, Mr. Director,” he’d said and went to the door. “The anesthetic is gone from your system. If you behave you can have a beer—one beer—with your dinner.”

  A mirror had been set up at the head of Mac’s bed, so that he could see what was going on without having to roll over. Pete had been with him since dinnertime, and they had mostly avoided talking about anything except for the car bomb, the body of the kid in Atlanta and who al-Daran, if that’s who had directed the attack, was working for this time.

  They’d only skirted around the why of it, the bigger picture.

  Otto and Louise came in.

  “How are you two getting along?” Otto asked.

  “Franklin let him have a Heineken with his dinner,” Pete said.

  “Through a straw,” McGarvey said.

  Otto looked serious, his jaw set, his eyes squinty. “Estes and Ray Pitken have been closeted with the dream team pretty much all day and they don’t like what they’re coming up with.”

  “The same as your darlings?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Did you share with them?” Mac asked.

  “Yeah. And I told them about you. We need them, and they promised to keep their mouths shut except when they’re in one of their brainstorms.”

  McGarvey understood where Otto was coming from—the more heads in the mix on an issue, the more likely the outcome would be a good one—but the sessions were always recorded and could be leaked. He said as much to Otto.

  “I left a bug behind. My darlings will shut down anything electronic leaving the room. Won’t stop someone from the team having a chat with someone outside the group. But for now it’s the best I can do.”

  Lying in bed, even with Pete sitting next to him, McGarvey had been unable to pull his mind away from what he thought was becoming an inevitable conclusion. The trouble was no matter what scenario he came up with, he could see no favorable endgame.

  And for the first time that he could remember he was truly afraid, and it was the same look he was seeing on Otto’s face now. They were possibly going into something much greater than the both of them.

  “If it is al-Daran again he’s gotta be working for someone way high up on the food chain,” Otto said, but with no conviction.

  “Why?” Mac asked.

  “There’re just too many coincidences piling up, so many similarities leading to a common thread that even my programs are having a hard time digesting them.”

  “Maybe we’re all wrong.”

  “I don’t think so,” Otto said. “Do you?”

  McGarvey had searched his soul from the moment he’d woken up out of his coma in this bed, and the first startling bit he’d come up with was that he’d been working the issue even before he’d woken up.

  Franklin had admitted that patients in a coma could not only hear things but that it was even possible their brains were in a sort of dream state in which some of the logic pathways might still work.

  “If you’ve done a lot of reading all your life, it’s possible that your brain will recall entire passages or even whole pages from some long-ago book,” he’d said.

  Or operational details from times past. The anomalies which for McGarvey had always seemed to point to the truth of a thing.

  “No,” McGarvey told them. “But I’m have trouble wrapping my head around it.”

  “Hang on, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Otto said.

  He left and came back almost immediately with the NOC from the next room.

  “I was just outside listening to you guys,” Kyung-won said. “Bad habit of mine.”

  Otto introduced him. “He was shot getting out of North Korea.”

  “It was getting bad up there. No one was safe. Kim Jong-un is nuts, everyone in country knows it, but it got a whole lot worse in the past few months. Everybody went crazy and it happened almost overnight.”

  “When did it start?” McGarvey asked.

  “Late fall. Early winter, maybe.”

  “November, sometime after the second Tuesday?”

  “Could have been,” Kyung-won said, but then he suddenly stopped. “You’re shitting me, right?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “So North Korea is on board, I can understand that,” Otto said. “But I don’t think they’ve got the wherewithal or the balls to go beyond their usual bombast. Certainly not to hire an assassin to take you out.”

  “I have a history with his father.”

  “But why take you out?” Otto demanded. He was frustrated. “Why now, goddamnit?”

  “Not just them,” Mac said. “We need to take a hard look at the others.”

  “I already have,” Otto said, his face falling even further. He explained the lavender that had begun to seriously deepen by the time he got to the number fours in just about every intelligence agency from Britain to Japan, and from Pakistan to North Korea.

  “They wanted to take Mac out, which makes him the common thread,” Pete responded.

  “But a common thread for what?” Louise asked the same question they were all thinking.

  “Because Mr. McGarvey is the only one with the background and the balls to figure it out,” Kyung-won said.

  “Figure out what?” Louise demanded, but McGarvey could see that Otto and the NOC had it.

  “November,” Pete said. “The elec
tion of T. Wallace Weaver as our president.”

  McGarvey let her finish it for the rest of them.

  “During the campaign he promised to nuke Pyongyang if they continued to develop missiles to reach our West Coast. Shut Iran down if they didn’t cooperate with us. Stop all aid to Pakistan if they couldn’t control their own nuclear weapons. Walk away from Iraq and Afghanistan if they didn’t play ball. Stop all aid to Israel if they didn’t solve their Palestine problem.”

  “Finish the Mexican wall,” Louise said.

  “Blow Assad out of the water if he didn’t get his head out,” Kyung-won said.

  “Stop every Muslim at our borders,” Pete said. “Ship every illegal immigrant home.”

  “Then we start seeing fifty-dollar-a-head lettuce,” Louise griped.

  “A consortium of medium-ranking intel officers from a lot of countries Weaver has pissed off,” Otto said. “But not to assassinate the president, just to discredit him so badly he’d have to be impeached.”

  McGarvey held his silence.

  “A consortium needs a comptroller,” Otto said. “An expediter, whose job one was to eliminate Mac.”

  “We need to find him,” Louise said.

  “Yes,” Pete said. “But what’s job two?”

  NINETEEN

  The stewardess Pastor Buddy had sent to see to Kamal’s needs on the short flight to Memphis came aft a few minutes after twelve local. She was an exotic-looking young woman, possibly Persian with sloping eyes and a wide, sensuous mouth, dressed in a sheer blouse and miniskirt.

  “Skipper says we’ll be touching down in fifteen minutes. Is there anything else I can get for you, sir? Or do?”

  “Not for the moment, thanks, luv. But perhaps on another, longer flight?”

  She smiled. “It would be my pleasure. Pastor Buddy’s top priority is taking care of his honored guests every way possible.”

  “I’m sure,” Kamal said. She went forward and strapped in.

  She could have been a clone of the two women who’d come to his luxurious quarters last night. They’d brought a decent bottle of Krug with them, and some Indian Kama Sutra positions that even he’d never experienced.

  “Pastor Buddy’s top priority is taking care of his guests, in every way possible,” one of the girls had told him, apparently the standard line among Holliday’s people. And it was almost dawn before he’d sent them away and managed to get a few hours sleep.

  A limo had taken him to the private airstrip after breakfast where the pastor’s fully decked out Gulfstream G280 was waiting to take him anywhere he wanted to go.

  “We’ll get your rental car back to Denver for you,” Buddy told him. “We aim to please our best friends.”

  “I’ll have the first of my security teams to you within a month,” Kamal said.

  Buddy was startled. “You won’t need anybody like that out here. We’re perfectly safe.”

  “After Paris and Brussels and Athens and Tokyo and Orlando and Las Vegas, can you say that anywhere is safe these days?”

  “Terrible times.”

  “I’ll feel better sending my financial team in, with more cash, by the way, once their security—and yours and your peoples’—is assured.”

  “It’s not what I expected.”

  Kamal clapped him on the shoulder. “Trust me, I’m not trying to take over anything of yours. I want to invest in a good bet, is all. And you’re the best thing coming down the pike I’ve seen ever since the dot-com boom.”

  “You were in on that?”

  “I was just a kid, but trust me, I made a killing, an absolute killing, just like I plan to do for both of us here.”

  Buddy had smiled and nodded and clapped Kamal on the back, for which Kamal almost broke his neck on the spot.

  “I’m looking forward to working with you and your people,” Buddy said. “Believe me, in Christ’s name.”

  * * *

  Kamal never bothered to get the Gulfstream crew’s names, nor did he bother leaving a tip or even saying thanks or goodbye. They were nothings in his mind. Like the cows who’d come to his room last night, and Pastor Buddy and his staff—just about every one of them drooling at the prospect of fleecing another sucker.

  A black Mercedes S550 was waiting for him at the Wilson Air Center across the Memphis airport from the main terminal, courtesy of Pastor Holliday. He only had to show his U.S. driver’s license and sign for the car under his Watson identification.

  “I may not be able to return the car here,” he’d told the accommodating clerk.

  “No problem, sir. Let us know where and when, and we’ll send a driver.”

  “Houston. I’ll call with the hotel.”

  All it took was money, something he’d never been without since his parents had moved from Saudi Arabia to Knightsbridge, the upscale area of London. He’d gone to some fine prep schools and then Sandhurst for his military training.

  After he’d faked his death, changed his identity and went out on his own as an underground freelancer, it had taken less than eighteen months to make his first million. More came quickly. But not in the dot-com boom as he’d told Pastor Holliday, but by killing people.

  Important people, like Bernhardt Schey, the German minister of finance who had almost singlehandedly blocked a major Autobahn rebuilding project. He died when his Audi had mysteriously exploded while he was coming back from the apartment of his mistress.

  The project went ahead as planned.

  Or the number two man in the DGI, Cuba’s intelligence service, who was blackmailing a finance minister trying to block the lucrative U.S. tourist trade. He was shot to death walking along the Malecón with his girlfriend by someone speeding by in a van. The murder was never solved, but the tourist trade deals continued without opposition.

  Or bringing down one of the pencil towers in New York, killing a couple dozen billionaires in the building and others on the ground. ISIS had taken the blame for that one, but Kamal—in his one and only failure to date—had been stopped from bringing down a second tower and killing even more people.

  Kirk McGarvey, briefly a director of the CIA, but now a shooter for the Company, had been behind that debacle.

  The man would not interfere again. Ever.

  * * *

  He made the Loews New Orleans Hotel, across the street from Harrah’s Casino, in plenty of time to check in to a suite facing the river, have an early dinner of something called blackened redfish with wild rice—odd, but not bad—with a couple of bottles of extra-cold Pilsner Urquell beer, and get his car back from the valet.

  He’d spent some time studying maps and engineering details of the dikes of New Orleans, especially the ones in the southeast side of the Industrial Canal. When the two between Florida and Claiborne avenues had failed during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, most of the Lower Ninth Ward had been devastated.

  The London Avenue Canal, the Seventeenth Street Canal and the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet Canal had been breached in more than twenty places.

  Pumping stations too had suffered major breakdowns, including the Duncan and Bonnabel facilities, as well as all of those in Jefferson and Orleans parishes, which caused the extensive flooding to get even worse.

  The destruction of the city had been massive—and even now New Orleans was not back a hundred percent. But the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for the building and maintenance of the dikes and pumping stations, promised that such a catastrophe would never happen again.

  He drove over to the Intracoastal Waterway where State Road 39 crossed over toward St. Bernard Parish, then worked his way back along the south bank of the river on Fifth Street then Fourth and across to the north side on the Huey P. Long Bridge, and past Audubon Park, the Children’s Hospital and finally, under I-10 and back into the French Quarter.

  The weather was mild, the city was alive, the residents, but especially the tourists, seemed to be optimistic. Cars stopped for people crossing the street. Jazz bands played on corners, and eve
n a funeral procession with about twenty mourners, all on foot following a hearse decorated with flowers, played music and danced and sang.

  He had heard about this place, but he’d never experienced anything like it in his life. Despite everything, despite all the calamities the people had suffered—everyone was happy.

  But not for long, he told himself back at his hotel. Not much longer at all.

  TWENTY

  In Moscow it was one in the morning when the bedside telephone of SVR Major Vasili Rankov rang, breaking him out of a dream of the dacha up near Dmitrov he and his wife, Tania, were in the process of buying.

  He was the fourth-ranking officer in the intelligence service’s Directorate S, a descendant of the old KGB’s Directorate One, which planned and directed terrorist and sabotage operations around the world. His division concentrated on North America; Canada and Mexico but especially the U.S.

  Catching the phone on the third ring, just as Tania was starting to come awake, he went into the living room of their decent apartment just two blocks from the Bolshoi.

  The caller ID was blocked. “Da,” he said cautiously.

  “We may have a problem,” the person said in English. But the voice was electronically distorted.

  “Tell me,” Rankov said, going to the window and looking down at the sparse traffic on the street. There were no obvious surveillance vehicles parked at the curb.

  “The primary problem we thought had been solved may still be on the table.”

  Rankov was a slightly built man for a Russian; his hair was blond and his eyes, which Tania had loved from the first time they’d met, were blue. “I think a Swede got in there before your father,” she’d teased.

  He didn’t care for the joke, nor for some of the others he endured at Moscow University, where he’d studied foreign relations with an emphasis on English-speaking countries. “How do we know you won’t turn out defecting to the States?” was one of the common lines.

  When he’d been hired by the SVR and enrolled in the Academy of Foreign Intelligence, which was housed in the Science Directorate, everything had changed for the better. He wasn’t a rising superstar, but he was on his way up, eventually to a position as an assistant director.