The Cabal

by David Hagberg

  “Considering what’s been happening, and who’s going to be here soon, you’d think security would be tighter,” Kangas said.

  “Makes you wonder about the Bureau,” Mustapha agreed. “And Homeland Security.”

  “And the Company. The Van Buren kid was one of theirs.”

  The men were Islamic jihadists from the Ramila Mosque, Abu al-Amush who’d been born and raised in Baghdad, and Richard Hamadi, who’d come over to Detroit with his parents when he was a child. Al-Amush had been radicalized during the tail end of the Saddam Hussein regime and then in the war with the Americans, learning to hate whatever side was in power. And he had brought his message first to Detroit where he’d recruited workers from the auto assembly lines, and finally here two years ago, bringing Hamadi with him, when he’d been lured by the Ramila’s imam, to carry the message of hatred to the young men raising money for the cause.

  And carry out the occasional assignment.

  Mustapha had been the lead contact man with the mosque, which had been moved in secret from its storefront months ago, leaving behind only the shell that had been destroyed in the explosion after the deaths of Van Buren and Givens. And convincing the imam and his followers had been relatively easy; they were all fanatics whose attention was totally focused on only two things: hatred and money. Kangas was the influential American businessman with deep pockets who’d been taken in by Mustapha, a true believer and a dedicated jihadist himself.

  This assignment today, for a further contribution of ten thousand dollars to the cause, was right up al-Amush’s alley, who’d learned all there was to know about IEDs, especially cell phone controlled IEDs, in Baghdad so that he could have written an instruction manual on the subject, except that he was practically illiterate, as were many of the so-called freedom fighters.

  Kangas and Mustapha moved to a grave site a little closer to the driveway, from where they could watch the maintenance workers without appearing to be paying any attention.

  “Fucking rag heads,” Kangas muttered.

  “At least they have a cause,” Mustapha said. “Something we don’t.”

  Kangas looked over in surprise. “Give me a break.” He nodded down toward the two men who’d pried the storm sewer lip up and were rolling it back to the truck. “Tell me about them. What service do you suppose they’re providing?”

  “At least they think they know who their enemies are. We’ve been over there, we know the drill on the streets. They get their heads so filled with shit in the mosques that they practically think they can walk on water. They look forward to dying.”

  “Which leaves us, contracting to protect the good guys,” Kangas said.

  “Up until now, Tim. ’Cause I’m telling you that this shit just ain’t right, and you know it as well as I do. Bagging bad guys in the field is one thing, this is something different, and I don’t know if this is why I signed on.”

  “The money’s goddamned good.”

  “Fuck the money.”

  “I’ll take your share,” Kangas kidded, worried for the first time. He wasn’t about to walk away from Admin, not until shit began to happen, not until the center started to fail, which wasn’t quite happening yet. But he’d never had an inkling until now that Ronni might be developing a conscience.

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  The maintenance workers loaded the heavy forged iron sewer lid into the van, waited a few moments as a car came up from Southgate Road, the driver steering around the cones and stopping at the gate, then unloaded another sewer lid, this one six inches thicker, with an unusual starfruit shape on the underside. They quickly manhandled it the short distance and carefully placed it over the two-foot diameter opening in the road.

  By the way they handled the replacement lid it was obvious even at a distance that it was much heavier than the original. But their movements had been masked by the van from anyone at the gate, and in the short interval the new lid had been visible from anyone on the road below the gate, or from inside the cemetery where Kangas and Mustapha watched, no one had shown up. It was the one bit of luck they’d counted on.

  The contingency plan had been to blow the IED now.

  Kangas withdrew his hand from the cell phone in his jacket pocket, and the maintenance workers removed the traffic cones, got in their van, did a U-turn, and drove off.

  When the correct car approached the sewer lid, Kangas would key a telephone number into his cell phone, omitting the last digit until just before the front bumper of the car reached the lid. It would only be a matter of a second before the call was connected, and a signal sent to the IED attached to the underside of the lid. It was a shaped charge, and the new sewer lid had been ground down in such a way that when the Semtex went off the blast would send a firestorm of lethal shrapnel and super hot gases upward, blowing apart anything directly above. No one would survive, even if they were riding in an armored limousine.

  It was only a few hours now until the funeral.

  They turned and headed back up to the LeSabre. “There’s more here than we’re being told,” Mustapha said. “You’ve figured that out, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Kangas said. “I’m given an assignment and I do my job. Just like I did in the Company.”

  That wasn’t entirely true and both men knew it, but Mustapha said nothing.

  “Look, you don’t want to do this shit with me, I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “Mustapha shook his head. “No. We’re in this together, just like from the beginning. We’re a team. Doesn’t mean I have to like what we’ve been handed.”

  “I don’t much like it either, and it doesn’t have anything to do with wiping out a couple of incidentals, whoever’s with him in the car. It’s McGarvey I’m worried about. If we don’t take him out this afternoon we could be in a world of shit.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure we do the job right.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The afternoon was almost too bright, the sky too clear, the air too balmy for a funeral, as McGarvey walked out to the same Cadillac Escalade that had brought him over from Andrews. He’d been handcuffed, at the request of the federal marshals—it was standard procedure—his sport coat over his shoulders, and Pete and Dan Green were on either side of him.

  Steve Ansel and Doug Mellinger were waiting at the SUV, all four doors open, their jackets unbuttoned. No one wanted trouble today.

  “Just a minute,” Pete said, and she produced the key for the handcuffs. “No trouble, Mr. Director?” she asked. “Your word?”

  “My word,” McGarvey said.

  “This is bullshit, Pete,” Green objected.

  “It’s his son-in-law’s funeral, goddamnit,” Pete said and she glanced at the federal marshals. “Any objections?”

  Ansel shrugged. “You drive. We’ll sit in the back with Mr. McGarvey, just to make sure.”

  “Afterward we’re coming back here. We’re not finished with the debriefing.”

  “You have him for as long as you want,” Ansel said. “That was the interagency understanding.”

  Only a part of McGarvey had listened to the exchange, but it had registered with him; he understood the bureaucratic bullshit-speak that was a separate language not only in the District of Columbia and most of the Beltway, but for the isolated center here and there, like the CIA, or Quantico, or Fort A. P. Hill and the Farm, of course. But he’d been a part of the establishment, or sometimes on the fringes, for so long that he understood not only what was being said, but what was meant between the lines. Unofficially the CIA and just about every other intelligence or law enforcement agency had been at odds for years, not sharing intel, not really cooperating, and now a pair of federal marshals had most likely been ordered to give the Company enough rope to hang itself—or at least cause an embarrassment.

  “Fine,” Pete said, and they all got into the SUV, with her behind the wheel, and headed down the hill and along the long sweeping curve past the OHB, the
front parking lot nearly full.

  They passed through the front gate and headed down to Washington. Traffic was light, nevertheless the pair of deputy marshals in the back with McGarvey had their heads on swivels. No one wanted an incident, but Mac did have a reputation; wherever he went trouble seemed to materialize.

  Pete glanced in the rearview mirror. “It’s not being made public that Mr. McGarvey has been charged with anything, or is under arrest.”

  Neither marshal commented, and McGarvey got the impression that they couldn’t care less. A pair of LE officers simply doing their duty, doing what they’d been tasked to do.

  “In any event it’s our call,” Pete said. “If this became public there’d be a firestorm. The media would come down on us like a ton of bricks. Nobody wants that. The fact a former DCI is in custody for treason is spectacular. It’s not every day something like that happens.”

  It came to McGarvey that Pete was up to something, and he could see that Dan Green was wondering the same thing, because he was giving her an odd look. But Ansel and Mellinger weren’t getting it, or didn’t give a damn.

  “Do you think there’ll be a trial?” McGarvey asked, and Pete glanced at his image in the rearview mirror and their eyes met.

  “That depends on what you give to us over the next few days or weeks,” she said, and her partner gave her a double take. “We’ll have to keep you in isolation to run down all the facts here. But no one wants to rush into anything blindly, right?”

  Ansel glanced at McGarvey and then at the back of Pete’s head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s classified for now, I’m afraid,” Pete said. “Need to know, and all that. You understand. And trust me we appreciate your help. Taking responsibility for Mr. McGarvey’s security as well as his safety. It takes the burden off us.”

  Ansel was getting angry. “What the hell are you going on about?”

  Pete glanced over her shoulder. “Hey, listen, we’re just following orders like you guys. Doesn’t mean we have to like it. Right?”

  Mellinger said something like She’s fucking with us, or at least that’s what it sounded like to McGarvey and he gave Pete a brief smile. She’d just told him that she was going to cut him some slack.

  “Actually it’s about Administrative Solutions,” McGarvey said. “The contracting company that took over from Task Force One in Iraq. They’re probably working for someone right here in D.C., and I’ve probably gotten a little too close.”

  McGarvey was a well-built man in obviously good shape, but Ansel and Mellinger were like fullbacks while he was like an aging, former college quarterback. They weren’t taking him seriously, and were making no bones about it.

  “We don’t need your bullshit, Mr. McGarvey,” Ansel said. “As soon as we can get you back to the Farm, we’ll be out of your hair. And I don’t give a shit what happens after that.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do.”

  “What was that?” the deputy federal marshal asked, angrily.

  “You’re just doing your job.”

  Ansel hesitated a second. “Right. But I’m warning you not to try anything stupid. If you do I’ll personally come down on you hard. I don’t like traitors.”

  “Accused traitor,” McGarvey corrected him. “No trial yet.”

  He glanced up at the rearview mirror and Pete was watching him, a quizzical expression in her eyes. She’d given him an opening, but she had no idea what he had just done with it.

  Ansel was rising to the bait, and it was clear he wanted to say something else, but Mellinger gave him a knowing shrug—this shit doesn’t matter—and Ansel settled down. But the exchange would end up in the reports they would file later this afternoon, and would become a part of the official McGarvey File, just as the encounter he’d had with Sandberger and Remington in Frankfurt was.

  They came down the GWM Parkway passing Theodore Roosevelt Island on their left, the afternoon now even brighter than it had been up at the CIA, and got off at Arlington Memorial Drive, and it struck McGarvey again why he was coming to this place, his mood deepening.

  Todd had once told him in confidence that in some ways he was intimidated by his wife. “Sometimes she’s more macho than I am. So what the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to say, how to react when she gets like that.”

  “It’s a defense mechanism,” he’d advised his son-in-law. “I wasn’t around when she was growing up, and she built up this heavy-duty fantasy in her head about me as a superman. Something she figured she had to live up to as best she could. There were a few years there in grade school and junior high that she was getting into fights just about every day. She wanted to be just like her father. Katy told me that the worst thing any of the kids at school could call her was feminine, or girly girl. And she’s probably still fighting that chip on her shoulder.”

  “She’s in competition with me now?”

  “Yeah,” McGarvey’d said smiling. “You just inherited the problem.”

  “What the hell do I say to her?”

  McGarvey remembered laughing out loud, even though his son-in-law had seemed so forlorn. “Tell her that you love her, and make sure you mean it. It’ll take the wind out of her sails.”

  Apparently that tactic had worked, because McGarvey had never heard another complaint from Todd. And now his son-in-law was gone, and Liz had no one to compete with on her level.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Kangas pulled into the parking area at the Tomb of the Unknowns from where they would be able to watch Todd Van Buren’s funeral procession arrive and depart. “You okay?” he asked Mustapha.

  “I’m steady, I just don’t have to like it. But if we can take McGarvey down it’ll make my day. Give me the phone.”

  Kangas considered for a moment, but then handed his partner the cell phone they would use to trigger the IED. Mustapha was more of an explosives expert than he was anyway, and the logical choice as point man, and for now, at least, he seemed to have all of his shit in one sock.

  Scuttlebutt during their old CIA days was that McGarvey had started his career as a serious kick-ass black ops officer, who’d probably been responsible for more field actions that had resulted in eliminations than any other officer back to, and including, the OSS during the big war. And even though he was an old man now, in his early fifties, he was still a formidable force. Someone to be seriously reckoned with.

  If you take a shot at the bastard, whatever you do, don’t miss. He’d heard that before, too.

  The funeral was due to begin at two, and the front-end loader the gravediggers had used to open up the plot on the other side of Porter Drive headed away around one, a pair of groundsmen covering the mound of dirt with a tarp and setting up the electric device that would lower the coffin. A few minutes later a small flatbed truck showed up and four workmen set up several rows of chairs on the opposite side of the grave from where an Army chaplain would conduct the service.

  A number of people came to visit the Tomb of the Unknowns, some of them taking a few pictures and then heading off, while others lingered. A few glanced down at the funeral preparations, but then turned away. The reminders of death were everywhere here, of course, but no one wanted to be reminded of any sense of immediacy. Whoever was going into the ground down there had died very recently. It was difficult to think about.

  For a while after the chairs had been set up, and the workmen had driven away, only the occasional visitor passed on the road in front of the open grave, until fifteen minutes before the hearse with Van Buren’s body was due to arrive. At two, a plain blue Chevy pulled up and the chaplain, in uniform, showed up and walked down the hill to the grave site.

  Others started arriving in singles and pairs, at least a dozen and a half cars, most of them civilian, until a Lincoln limousine showed up, and Kangas and Mustapha sharpened up. A pair of large men dressed in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, got out of the limo, and looked around for several long seconds before one of the
m opened the rear door, and a slightly built man with thinning hair, also dressed in a dark business suit, got out, and the three of them joined the others waiting at the side of the road.

  “All the big dogs will be here,” Kangas said. The man from the limo was Dick Adkins, director of the CIA, and supposedly close with McGarvey.

  “Maybe we should take them all down.”

  “What’re you crazy?” Kangas said. “Christ, what the fuck’s the matter with you, man?”

  “I’m steady, so just take it easy.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, then?”

  “Just a thought, don’t have a fit,” Mustapha said. “The Company screwed us. Payback works for me. I mean, if we’re here and we’ve got the hardware, why not do a little something extra for ourselves?”

  “Then what?”

  Mustapha was gazing at the people gathered down the hill from them, a crazy look in his eyes that worried Kangas, who’d seen the same shit-faced expression on a kid in Baghdad a couple of years ago, just before the bomb went off, killing twenty Iraqi police recruits. Like the kid, and now Ronni, was seeing the face of Allah, or something. Paradise. It was all nuts.

  “I don’t know,” Mustapha said, and he relaxed a little. “Maybe I’m just yanking your chain.”

  “You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

  Mustapha laughed. “And you aren’t?”

  For a second Kangas wanted to say something, thought he should say something, but then he turned away and shook his head. Just then the funeral procession, led by the long black hearse, came past on Memorial Drive. A few people turned to stare, but most turned away.

  “Okay, here we go,” he said.

  Following the hearse, a black Lincoln limousine pulled up above the grave site, a pair of bodyguards got out and helped two women out of the backseat. From photographs Kangas recognized them as McGarvey’s wife and their daughter—the wife of the CIA officer they’d taken out.