The Cabal

by David Hagberg

  “Get the car,” Kangas said, and Mustapha, an ordinary-looking man in his late twenties with deep-set dark eyes and an easy, pleasant smile when he was in public, took the bag and left directly behind Givens.

  No one would suspect he’d been born in Saudi Arabia; when he was five his parents had immigrated to Atlanta, where he’d completely assimilated, down to a soft Georgia accent. Nor would he be pegged as a CIA-trained NOC, non-official cover, field officer, the same as Kangas, who’d been born and raised in southern California. Both of them knew how to lie, how to fit in, how to fade into the woodwork, how to be anyone at anytime.

  They had been picked for the program because both men had been born with a fiercely independent streak, exactly what the Company wanted. But after six years in the field, Kangas in Central America and Mustapha in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—his parents had insisted that he learn Arabic as a child—they’d become too independent, which was all too common. And they’d also gotten fringe, over the top and in the end too brutal. Each was credited with half a dozen or more unauthorized kills of Enemies of the State and the Agency had pulled them in, offered them citations, and generous severance packages.

  Kangas had left the Agency two years ago, and within five days he’d been offered a position with Washington-based Administrative Solutions—Admin—a private contracting firm second only to Xe, formerly Blackwater USA, in revenues, prestige, and the occasional missteps. S. Gordon Remington, an Admin vice president, had known just about everything in Kangas’s CIA file, which had been nearly as impressive as the six-figure salary he’d offered.

  The job had been boring most of the time, guarding high-ranking businessmen in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the occasional hit when it was needed, and usually as part of a firefight, which was ridiculously easy to engineer in countries where almost every male between the ages of twelve or thirteen and forty was armed and carrying a serious grudge—usually religion-based.

  Mustapha had been recruited last year, and had joined Kangas in Afghanistan where they’d become partners. Their tradecraft was similar, their ambitions were about the same—hurt people and make a lot of money doing it—and they knew how to cover each other’s back.

  Van Buren was getting up, as Kangas took out his encrypted cell phone and speed-dialed a number that was answered on the first ring.

  “Hello,” Remington answered, his British accent cultured.

  “The meeting has taken place.”

  “We’re you able to record their conversation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there damage?”

  “Yes, sir. Just as you suspected, our subject handed over a disk.”

  Remington was silent for several beats, and although Kangas had never had much respect for anyone, especially anyone in authority, he did now have a grudging respect for Admin’s VP. The man knew what had been coming, and he’d been prepared.

  “The situation must be contained,” Remington said. “Are you clear on your mission?”

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes. And they must be sanitized as thoroughly and as expeditiously as possible. This afternoon, no later than this evening.”

  “Give us twenty-four hours and we can cut the risk by fifty percent,” Kangas said. Running blindly into any sort of a wet operation was inherently dicey, even more so in this instance because of who Van Buren was; his background was impressive.

  “This is top priority,” Remington said. “All other considerations secondary. Are we clear on that as well?”

  Van Buren was coming down the stairs.

  “Standby,” Kangas said, and he avoided eye contact as the CIA officer passed by and left the restaurant through the hotel lobby to the valet stand.

  Kangas got up, and left by the front door, which opened on the street, just as Mustapha pulled up in a dark blue Toyota SUV with tinted windows.

  “We’re in pursuit now,” he told Remington. “But with the weapons we’re carrying this won’t look like a simple robbery.”

  Remington chuckled, which was rare so far as Kangas knew. “You’ve been out of the country too long to understand what the average bad guy carries.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call when you’re finished.”

  Van Buren was waiting at the curb, and as Kangas broke the connection, pocketed his phone, and got into the Toyota, a valet parker brought a soft green BMW convertible around and got out. Van Buren handed the man some money, got behind the wheel, and took off.

  “Don’t lose him,” Kangas said.

  Mustapha waited for a cab to pass, then he pulled out and, keeping the cab between them and Van Buren, started his tail. “Is it a go?”

  “Yes, but right now this afternoon. Both of them.”

  Mustapha gave him a sharp look. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “That’s what the man said. ASAP.”

  THREE

  Lunchtime traffic west on Constitution was even heavier than normal because of a huge art show on the Mall. Todd had to pay attention to his driving until he passed the National Museum of American History and turned south toward I-395, which would take him across the river to I-95 and the two-and-a-half-hour drive to the Farm. Because of the sunny weather, tourists seemed to be everywhere, most of them without a clue where they were going.

  Across the river, the Pentagon off to the right, traffic thinned out enough for him to phone his father-in-law in Florida, but after the fourth ring he got his mother-in-law’s soft West Virginia voice on the answering machine.

  “Hello. We can’t take your call now, but after the beep please leave a message and number and we’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.”

  “Hi, Mom, it’s Todd. Have Dad give me a call on my cell. I came up to Washington to meet an old friend for lunch and I’m on my way back to the Farm now. It’s quarter to one.”

  Ten miles later, through Alexandria, traffic thinned out even more as the highway branched off to I-95. Todd took the disk out of his jacket pocket and looked at both sides, but Givens hadn’t written anything on the disk itself or on the jewel case. Whatever was really going on had no business being in the Post, especially not any sort of a connection to McCann’s death. That was one can of worms that would probably never see the light of day. Some things were much too dark even for the Freedom of Information Act.

  In any event, McCann’s death was still a part of the ongoing investigation that his father-in-law had gotten involved with last year. Already plenty of people had died because of it, and before it was over more would probably go down. If anything of what Givens had told him was true, which Todd was having a hard time believing, then shit would truly hit the fan big time.

  They had never figured out what McCann had been up to or who had been directing him, and now this. Todd tossed the disk on the passenger seat and concentrated on his driving.

  Forty minutes later his cell phone rang. It was his father-in-law.

  “Hi, Todd, what’s up?” Kirk McGarvey asked. “Is Liz with you?”

  “Nope, she was busy when I left, and I didn’t have time to mention I was coming up to Washington. This has something to do with McCann.”

  McGarvey hesitated for a beat, and Todd could see him standing, probably in the kitchen of the Casey Key house on Florida’s Gulf Coast south of Sarasota, looking down at the IntraCoastal Waterway.

  “Okay, you have my interest.”

  “Does the name Josh Givens ring any bells?”

  “Vaguely. He’s a reporter with the Post?”

  “An investigative reporter, and not too bad,” Todd said. “He and I went to Maryland together, and were pals for a while. He called this morning and asked me to have lunch, he had something important for me.”

  “He mentioned Howard by name?”

  “He did. Said Howard had been involved with a lobbyist group called the Friday Club.”

  “Robert Foster.”

  “The same,” Todd said. “Josh was talking all sorts of shit about a shado
w government, and a lot of disconnected stuff that was all over the place. Sounded crazy.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure that he believed what he was telling me, and that he was afraid. He gave me a disk, which he said had everything on it.”

  McGarvey hesitated for a moment. “Give Otto a call, see what he thinks.” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s director of special operations and the resident computer genius. He was a friend of the family and the nearest thing to a son for McGarvey and an uncle for Todd and Liz.

  The Interstate cut through rolling hills, some of them heavily wooded, Fredericksburg behind him to the north and Fort A. P. Hill Military Reservation, where military units were given advanced field training, was off to the east. He and Liz had both spent six weeks there in search-and-evade training with the Green Berets.

  “I’ll call him when I get back to the Farm.”

  “Call him now,” McGarvey said.

  That got Todd’s attention. “Do you think it’s that important?”

  “If it involved Howard, then yes, it could be.”

  “I’ll call him right away,” Todd said, an oddly disquieted feeling rising in his gut.

  He broke the connection with his father-in-law and glanced over his left shoulder as a dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up beside him. The windows were so deeply tinted he couldn’t make out who was inside, and the SUV just hung there.

  “Shit,” Todd muttered, his internal alarms ringing all over the place.

  The Toyota’s passenger-side window powered down and Todd only had a split second to see that a dark-skinned man was aiming what looked like a small automatic weapon of some kind.

  Todd glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his bumper and jammed on the brakes to get him back to the SUV’s rear quarter where a nudge from his left bumper would send the bigger vehicle into a spin. But the other driver anticipated the move and also jammed on his brakes.

  Todd yanked the wheel hard to the right sending his car toward the ditch and the woods off the road, when something very hard slammed into his shoulder and he was thrown sideways against the seat-belt restraint, losing control of the car.

  He frantically reached for the pistol holstered high on his right hip, but several rounds slammed through the sheet metal of the door like rivets through soft steel, hitting him on his left side, then in his shoulder again and finally his neck, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood, the world beginning to fuzz out as his BMW slammed into a small tree, tilting to the right over a drainage ditch before it came to a complete stop.

  All he could think of were Liz and their daughter, how they were going to react to his death.

  He tried to fumble for his pistol for what seemed like minutes when the face of the dark man appeared in the driver’s window and it was all Todd could do to look up into the muzzle of what he recognized was a Knight PDW, compact submachine gun, and a billion stars burst inside his head.

  Mustapha lowered the weapon, and went around to the passenger side of the BMW, opened the door, and unlatched Van Buren’s seat belt, allowing the body to tumble out of the car. It took him a precious thirty seconds to search the body, taking a wallet and the pistol, but there was no disk.

  Kangas had parked on the side of the highway blocking the view of anyone passing, and watching for the Virginia Highway Patrol. Their position here at this moment was precarious.

  Givens had given the CIA officer a disk, and Kangas had seen Van Buren put it in his coat pocket.

  The front seat was a mess of shattered glass, blood, and bone fragments, and it took a full sixty seconds before Mustapha found the disk up on the dashboard in plain sight, and the cell phone they’d seen Van Buren using wedged between the seats. He pocketed them, and tossed the disk Remington had given them inside. He wore latex gloves so he left no fingerprints.

  First making certain that no one approaching on the highway could see what he was doing, he put one round into the back of the CIA officer’s head.

  Insurance. That’s how you survived.

  FOUR

  “Where’d you go, Kirk?” Kathleen McGarvey asked her husband.

  It was coming up on eight of a soft, south Florida Gulf Coast spring evening, and they were just finishing their dinner of broiled lamb chops and light salads, with a half bottle of Greek retsina wine on the pool deck of their Casey Key home. McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts and offered her a smile.

  “Sorry. Wool gathering, I guess.”

  “You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” Katy said. She was slender, with short blond hair, a bright oval face, and smiling eyes. “Something sneaking up on us again?”

  She’d hated every assignment that had not only taken McGarvey away, sometimes for weeks at a time, but that had put him in mortal danger. On more than one occasion he’d come home on a stretcher, with IV tubes dangling from his arms and an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. But even more than his injuries, she mostly hated the fact that he killed people—bad people, but human beings nevertheless—and hated herself for at least half-understanding the necessity of what he did. America had enemies, and very often he’d been this country’s last line of defense, sometimes its only viable line of defense.

  Also troublesome to her was her husband’s almost preternatural awareness that something or someone was lurking just around the corner, coming their way, and he often showed this understanding by becoming moody, withdrawing into his own shell, which he realized he’d done ever since Todd’s call this afternoon.

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” he told her, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Todd called this afternoon with something. I told him to let Otto take a look.”

  “But?”

  McGarvey shrugged, something tickling at the back of his head. “I thought I would have heard from one of them by now.”

  “It probably wasn’t important,” Katy said, but then she frowned. “Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, for goodness sake, call them.”

  They had switched the house phones off, which they often did when they wanted to have dinner undisturbed. “Pour me a little more wine,” McGarvey told her. “Be back in a minute.”

  He went in to his study on the other end of the house, switched on the phones, and speed-dialed Otto’s roll-over number, which would reach him wherever in the world he was.

  Rencke answered on the first ring, all out of breath, as he usually was when something big was happening or about to happen. “Oh, wow, Mac, I’ve been trying to get you for the past two hours,” he gushed. “I was gonna send someone from the Bureau in Tampa.”

  “What’s wrong?” McGarvey felt hollow in his stomach. He glanced out the windows where he could just make out Katy in the reflected blue from the pool lights.

  “Are you okay? You had the phones off.”

  “We’re fine. What the hell’s going on, Otto?”

  “Shit, shit, shit. I don’t know how . . .” Rencke said. “Is Mrs. M right there?”

  “She’s out by the pool,” McGarvey said. A terrible sense of dread wanted to overcome him. “Is it about Todd and the disk Josh Givens gave him this morning?”

  “Yeah, the cops gave it to me, and I’m running it on my laptop right now. We’re on our way down to the Farm. Louise is driving. I don’t know, it’s just too much.”

  McGarvey had never heard his old friend like this. Never, not even in the worst of circumstances, and there’d been plenty of those over the years. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Todd was shot to death sometime after one on I-Ninety-five just south of Fredericksburg.”

  All the air left the room, and McGarvey closed his eyes. Bright strobes were popping off in his head, like old-fashioned camera flashbulbs. For just a beat he could see Todd and Liz hunched down on the dock here below the house, their two-year-old daughter Audrey in a bright yellow bikini standing between them. With an absolute clarity
he could see the pride on his son-in-law’s face; I done good, he was saying.

  He could see Liz the night, early in her marriage, when she’d shown up at their house in Chevy Chase after she and Todd had a terrific fight. She never cried, or never let anyone see that she cried, but tears had been streaming down her pretty cheeks that night. “I love him, Daddy,” she had blubbered. “But I don’t know what to do.”

  “What happened, sweetheart?”

  The strangest look crossed her face, as if she was trying to think of something to say. But then she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she’d said in a small voice, her tears drying up. “I must have forgot on the way over.”

  Then Todd had shown up, anguish in his eyes, near total devastation, and he and Liz had embraced and had left together. McGarvey had never found out what they’d argued about. But he could see them now, see their faces, hear their voices as clearly as if they were standing right here in front of him.

  “Has Liz been told yet?” he asked, coming out of himself.

  “No. That’s why we’re headed down now. She’s going to need someone next to her when she finds out.”

  “Start at the beginning and tell me everything you know,” McGarvey said, desperately pulling himself together, but it was like swimming upstream against an impossible current.

  “The Bureau has taken over from the VHP. His body was found beside his car. He’d been shot several times right through the window glass and the sheet metal on the driver’s side door, probably from a car next to his. His wallet was gone, but once the tags were run, they came up with Todd’s name and the CIA security notification number. Blake downstairs called me a couple hours ago, and I had him put a total lid on it. No one is to be told anything.”

  “It wasn’t a drive-by shooting or robbery,” McGarvey said.