The Cabal

by David Hagberg

  “What was your advice to him?” Pete asked.

  “I told him to discuss the situation with Mr. Rencke.”

  “Was there any urgency in your instruction, Mr. Director,” Dan Green asked, gently, as if he was hesitant to interrupt. “I mean to say, was Todd to return to the Farm and, say, mail the disk to Langley, or perhaps send it by courier, or perhaps encrypted e-mail?”

  “I told him to call Otto immediately.”

  “Why was that, Mr. Director? Why the urgency?”

  McGarvey had thought about that very thing after he’d hung up from Todd’s phone call. “I thought that Mr. Givens was a respected member of the press, with a good reputation, and I didn’t suspect that he would waste his time chasing after nonsense, nor would he have called on a friendship with someone inside the CIA with Todd’s . . .”

  “Connections?” Pete asked.

  “Yes, with my son-in-law’s connections unless he thought it was important. Todd said that Givens was deeply frightened.”

  “By the Friday Club?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the disk was mostly nonsense, something a man of Mr. Givens’s experience would have understood,” Pete said. “How do you see that?”

  McGarvey glanced at his daughter, who was hanging on his every word. The expression of feral anger in her eyes was something new, and disturbing to McGarvey. He’d seen the look before in the eyes of field officers who’d been caught out and were in a fight for their lives—kill or be killed—but such an emotion in his daughter’s eyes wasn’t right, and there was nothing he could say here and now to help her.

  “The disk found in his car was a fake. His killers took the real one.”

  Green nodded thoughtfully. “That would have to mean whoever was behind this had been closely monitoring Mr. Givens’s activities for a period of time long enough to suspect what might be on the disk he passed to your son . . . to Todd.”

  Green exchanged a sympathetic glance with his partner, who pursed her lips. It was obvious that they were being cautious, perhaps overly so, for reasons McGarvey could not know. But he suspected that some instructions had been passed from Dick Adkins on the seventh floor. Whatever the hell you do, don’t provoke the son of a bitch.

  “I’d think it would have to be more than one man; an organization large enough to conduct a decent surveillance operation,” McGarvey suggested.

  “A government organization?” Pete asked pointedly. She was being leading, and making it obvious. Left hanging in the air: the CIA?

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or, don’t hope so?”

  “That, too,” McGarvey said, not willing to be drawn in, and yet wanting to help because he couldn’t cover everything even with Otto’s help. He wanted the Company to follow some leads, just not the same ones he was going to chase.

  “You’re aware, of course, Mr. Director, that Mr. Givens, his wife, and small son were murdered last night,” Green said, his voice soft, sympathetic. “But you might not be aware that several sets of fingerprints were found linking two known felons who’ve done time for breaking and entering, strong-arm, drug trafficking and use, activities of that nature.”

  “Found on Mrs. Givens’s purse, Mr. Givens’s wallet, perhaps places around their apartment where money or something worth money might have been hidden?”

  Green conceded with a gesture.

  “The place was searched.”

  “Yes,” Green said, leading McGarvey down the path he’d chosen, leading McGarvey to make the conclusions.

  “Trashed?”

  “No, the apartment wasn’t trashed in particular.”

  “Professionals leaving behind fingerprint evidence, but probably no DNA traces.”

  Pete glanced at her partner as if to say: I told you so. “The Bureau did find traces of talcum powder in a few spots,” she said.

  “Rubber gloves. Is that how you see it?”

  “It’s likely.”

  “Nothing useful was found in Todd’s car.”

  “No,” Pete said, and this time she glanced at Elizabeth who’d closely followed the exchange.

  “I know about the bullet to the back of his head after he was already dead,” Liz said. “So we’re all agreed these were professional hits. By whom and for what purpose?” But before she waited for an answer from anyone, she added: “By what Agency?”

  “We don’t know that, sweetheart,” McGarvey said.

  “But you do, Daddy,” she shot back. “You goddamned well have a good idea. Connected with Mexico City and Pyongyang? Is that it?”

  She had caught all of them flat-footed, especially McGarvey. Officially Liz hadn’t been in the need-to-know loop for either operation. But her father had not only been the DCI, he had been involved in both, and the closest friend of the family was Otto Rencke, the Company’s director of special operations. If she wanted to she could learn just about anything she wanted to learn.

  “Would you care to explain, Mr. Director?” Pete asked.

  “You’ll have to get that from Mr. Adkins.”

  Pete nodded. “Will you be staying here this evening?” she asked. “I mean to say that we will have a few more questions, and in any event since Todd’s telephone was taken, we have to assume that his killers know he spoke to you last, presumably about his meeting with Mr. Givens and the disk. Makes you a prime target.”

  “I’ll stay until morning.”

  “And then what, sir?” Green asked, his eyes drooping as if he just heard the saddest thing in his life. “Will you give us a heads up, because frankly we’re at a loss as to what is happening, or as Mrs. Van Buren rightly demands: why and by whom and for what end purpose?”

  “Of course,” McGarvey said, and everyone, including the distraught Elizabeth, knew he was lying.

  ELEVEN

  Remington’s Empire-style house with white Romanesque columns was on Whitehaven Street between the Danish and Italian embassies. Its furnishings were straight out of an Architectural Digest article on how the British gentry lived. The money for almost everything, including the Bentley, came from his wife, Colleen, of the New York Moons, whose fortune though slightly smaller than Donald Trump’s was of longer duration; she was the great-granddaughter of one of the turn-of-the-century robber barons.

  She’d married her husband because of his British title—his father had been the ninth Earl of Paxton—and because of his accent, which she considered pure class. And he had married her because of her money; his father had squandered on gambling what little money the family had left, losing the country mansion finally to back taxes when Gordon was ten. He’d been sent to an uncle in London and had been forced to work his way through Oxford, mostly by a series of illegal but brilliant scams, including a numbers racket, the details of which he’d learned from watching old American gangster movies. If anything, he’d always been a quick study.

  It was shortly before five in the afternoon when he emerged from his bedroom suite in his brocaded dressing gown to find his wife heading out the door. She came back and pecked him on the cheek.

  “Don’t wait cocktails for me, I’ll be in town.”

  “Kennedy Center?” he asked indifferently. Because of her family she was on several boards, including the Kennedy Center Foundation, which was the money-raising arm of the center. Tall, for a woman, slender with a narrow face but wide, chocolate eyes like Audrey Hepburn’s, she had conquered the Washington social scene within the year after she and Roland had married and moved down from New York.

  She nodded with just as much indifference. “Don’t forget we’re at Senator Worley’s reception at eight and afterward we need to pop in at the Chinese embassy, their new ambassador has arrived.”

  Her unspoken message was for Gordon to behave himself and stay at least reasonably sober. At fifty he was already beginning to develop one of the vices that had led to his father’s downfall; drinking every day, starting usually around noon, sometimes earlier, but normally not to such an extent that
he was falling down drunk. Not yet anyway.

  “Sure,” he said. “See you in a couple of hours.”

  She nodded then left.

  Remington stood in the vestibule for a long moment, alone as in reality he’d always been since his father’s death, listening to nothing. The cook and housekeeper did not live in the house and were off for the evening and he had two hours alone now to invent some sort of strategy for the next stage of the damage control, the tone of which would depend on what was in Givens’s computer.

  He headed back to his study, hesitating for just a moment at the wet bar in the alcove between the kitchen and living room. Today, or at least this afternoon until he talked to Roland, he needed his wits about him. All his wits.

  The primary parts of the problem—Josh Givens and Todd Van Buren—had been taken care of in a totally satisfactory manner, which had given him some much needed time. Today at the office his day had been consumed by the Baghdad contracts, which Roland was on site to finalize, so he’d had no chance until this moment to look at the things Kangas and Mustapha had brought him.

  Sitting down at the antique Rosewood desk that his mother had liberated from the estate and from whom he’d liberated it after she’d been placed in a public dole nursing home outside London, he unlocked a bottom file drawer and took out the Washington Post reporter’s laptop and BlackBerry, plus the CIA officer’s cell phone and the disk Givens had handed over at the hotel, as well as the digital recording of the conversation between the two men.

  He began with the recorded conversation at the hotel, sitting back and listening to it several times to make sure he missed nothing, especially not the reactions of the young CIA officer.

  If nothing else Administrative Solutions under Sandberger had the well-deserved reputation for thoroughness. No messy shoot-outs in which innocent bystanders were gunned down. No trips to the Hill to answer intrusive questions by some congressional subcommittee. No tax audits by the IRS. No complaints from any foreign government. And damned few disaffected employees walking out the door threatening to tell all. In fact, Admin had remained beneath the radar of the media. Until now.

  He’d argued against taking on Foster’s Friday Club as a client, but Roland had been adamant to do just that, arguing that the club’s powerful members and connections would lead to a lot of lucrative contracts.

  “We can’t lose,” he’d promised.

  Except that the media was all over the club and Admin was starting to come into the reflected glare. Something they didn’t want or need. Look what all the media attention had done for Ron Hachette and his company Task Force One. Some of his people had been brought under indictment for murdering supposedly innocent civilians in Baghdad. And Hachette himself was still under intense security by Justice.

  What Givens had told Van Buren at the restaurant was as bad as they thought it would be, based on the information they figured the reporter had managed to gather over the past several months.

  But Remington felt the first sense of buoyancy listening to the young CIA officer’s reaction. Van Buren had been, at the very least, skeptical, as he had every right to be. What Givens had told him was nothing short of fanciful—except of course for the fact that everything he’d said, plus much, much more, was true. He’d not yet stumbled upon the most important aspects of the Friday Club’s activities, especially not the reasons for what had been done and what was being done, nor the ultimate goals.

  Science fiction, had been Remington’s initial reaction when Sandberger had brought him into the Friday Club’s fold. And even at that Remington suspected that he hadn’t been told the half of it.

  Setting the recorder aside, he fiddled with the reporter’s BlackBerry, but after a few minutes finding only a long list of telephone numbers with nothing more than cryptic notations after each, along with several dozen Web sites, which he didn’t want to bother looking up at this point, he moved on to the laptop.

  It was a high-end Toshiba, slim, lightweight, and wide open. After booting up, then hitting the file manager, Remington’s mouth dropped open. He was inside with no encryption program, not even a simple password to block access, which told him that Givens was either a man highly confident in the power he wielded as a newspaper reporter, or incredibly naïve, or terribly stupid, or all three.

  Out of more than three hundred documents, fully one third of them had the notation “FC” in front of them: FC: Foster; FC: Weitman; FC: DoD; FC: Pentagon; FC: Homeland Security; FC: Atlanta—which Remington realized were files that involved the Friday Club and its members and associations.

  Opening the FC: McCann file, he was struck dumb after the first page or so and he sat back in his chair to catch his breath. Givens had somehow stumbled onto payments made to the now deceased CIA deputy director of operations by the club to a Cayman Islands account from something called Littoral Associates, Ltd., which had been suggested by Sandberger two years ago.

  The FC: Pentagon file contained similar lists of payments to several important generals in various accounts, mostly in Switzerland.

  The FC: Atlanta file contained a detailed account of a highly complex and still ongoing program of gerrymandering that to this point had resulted in swinging seven of Georgia’s districts from solid Democrat to Republican. The manipulations had not helped in the last presidential election, but there was little doubt in Remington’s mind that given time the political climate in the state would change. It was about the long term, something Remington and Sandberger had not discussed in any detail. Admin’s job, vis-à-vis the Friday Club, was to provide security. Keep the media at bay. Keep the walls unbreached.

  Keep a lid on investigators like Givens and his friend Van Buren.

  But this now, this information in the reporter’s computer went beyond the pale. Givens had gotten far too close.

  Remington telephoned Sandberger’s sat phone, which was answered on the second ring.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Gordon, we need to talk.”

  “Trouble?” Sandberger asked without hesitation.

  “It has the potential.”

  “I’ll be at the Steigenberger, first thing in the morning.”

  “See you then,” Remington said, and he phoned his night office number to arrange for his travel to Frankfurt in such a way that he would not miss Senator Worley’s reception or the do at the Chinese embassy.

  TWELVE

  It was ten in the evening when McGarvey’s cell phone vibrated silently in his pocket. Katy had been transferred to one of the rooms in the visiting VIP building and he’d been sitting next to her bed for the past three hours watching her troubled sleep. He wanted to reach out to her with more than just a touch; he wanted to let her inside his soul so that she could see exactly who he was. No artifice, no hiding of any truth no matter how ugly, just his real self with all the complexities and contradictions of a man who had lived the life he had.

  He went out into the corridor and answered the call, the ID was blank but he knew that it was Otto. “What do you have for me?”

  “How’re Mrs. M and Elizabeth?”

  “Both sleeping.”

  “How about you?” Otto asked, an edginess to his voice. He was worried, just as everyone was, which way McGarvey was going to jump. Because Mac was going to jump and everybody knew it.

  “Impatient,” McGarvey said. He was being short with his friend, but he couldn’t wait around down here much longer. He was on the verge of exploding, and yet he knew that he had to hang on; when the shit started to happen it would have to be done right. He wasn’t going to lose his life because he had blinders on and was rushing things.

  “Sandberger’s in Baghdad, but his pilot filed a flight plan for Frankfurt. Apparently it’s a layover, because no flight plan has been filed beyond that.”

  “Any idea where he’ll be staying? Or for how long?”

  “He’s been to Frankfurt four times in the past two years. Twice he’s disappeared into the city, apparently staying someplace
other than a hotel, and the other two times he’s stayed at the Steigenberger Airport Hotel, each time for one night only.”

  “Bodyguards?”

  “He almost always travels with muscle, and over the past eighteen months or so it’s been the same two. Carl Alphonse, who was a New York City SWAT team commander until he retired to go to work for Admin, and Brody Hanson, who was kicked out of Delta Forces for reason or reasons unknown, except that he was discharged an E-7 under other than honorable conditions. Both men had the highest grades for marksmanship, hand-to-hand, infiltration, and exfiltration—about what you’d expect from guys like these.”

  “Any idea why he’s flying out to Germany all of a sudden?” McGarvey asked. “Meeting someone?”

  “My guess would be Remington, but I’m not coming up with any air reservations yet,” Otto said.

  “How about flight plans?”

  “Admin has only the one Gulfstream. So if it’s Remington he’ll be traveling commercial. Maybe under an assumed name. Anyway my babies are chewing on it.” Rencke’s babies were his computers and some of the most sophisticated programs on the planet.

  Now that it was beginning, now that he was preparing to go back into the field, he began to calm down; his nerves had been jumping all over the place since he’d gotten word of Todd’s assassination, but now they were steadying out. He held out his right hand, palm down, his fingers spread, and he was rock solid.

  “I need to get over there by morning, at least before noon. Noncommercial. A clean diplomatic passport, no questions asked by anyone on the seventh floor, at least not until I’m finished. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

  “To do what, Mac?” Otto asked. “Lean on Sandberger? The guy’s a tough son of a bitch. And if the German federales catch you carrying—or worse, if you shoot someone—it’ll get back to Adkins at the speed of light.”

  “And he’d have to sit up and take notice,” McGarvey said. “We’re talking about the murder of my son-in-law. The son-in-law of a former CIA director. That carries some weight.”