The Cabal

by David Hagberg

  “No.”

  “I’m in the office now, do you want me to try to reach them? Find out what’s going on?”

  “I’ll take care of it myself from here,” Remington said. “But listen, Cal, I’m putting you in total charge of Admin for the next couple of days. I’m going to be busy soothing some ruffled feathers.”

  “He hasn’t called here yet,” Boberg said, referring to Robert Foster.

  “He’s waiting for me to take care of the situation. So just sit tight.”

  “Business as usual?”

  Remington laughed despite himself. “Or the illusion thereof,” he said. “Something comes up, call me.”

  “Will do.”

  Remington called the sat phone Kangas had been using since Baghdad, and it was answered on the second ring.

  “It was a bloody fucking circus,” Kangas shouted.

  Remington could hear the sounds of people and traffic in the background. “Where the hell are you?”

  “On the Mall, in front of the Vietnam Memorial. Figured we needed to be around a lot of people. The son of a bitch is good, and we’re going to need some serious help if you still want him taken down.”

  Remington held the phone tightly to his ear, but his other hand was shaking. He hadn’t had a drink in two days, and he needed something now. “What happened?” he demanded.

  Kangas settled down and went over everything that happened from the moment McGarvey showed up and Boberg told them about the Toyota SUV. “The bitch driving stopped up in Rock Creek Park and McGarvey jumped out and ran into the woods. It was a setup.”

  “Which you must have guessed.”

  “Right. But the guy knows his stuff.”

  “Why didn’t he kill you?” Remington asked, afraid that he already knew the answer, and knew he wouldn’t like it.

  “He wanted us to take a message back to you.”

  “Me, personally?”

  “He mentioned you by name, and he also said he knew about Foster and the Friday Club. Said he was coming after everybody because of what happened to his son-in-law and wife and kid.”

  “He knows Admin was involved? That you and Ronni were the triggermen?” Remington asked, astounded.

  “He knows Admin was involved, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him what part we played,” Kangas said. “So what’s next? If you want us to go after him again, we’ll need more money, but we’ll arrange for our own extra muscle.”

  Remington’s stomach was sour. “What’s next, you pricks?” he practically shouted into the phone. “You’re fucking fired, that’s what’s next. And you’ll have more to worry about than McGarvey, because every contractor on our payroll will be gunning for you. And I’ll make goddamned sure that every other service knows how incompetent you are.”

  “Just maybe you’re our next target,” Kangas said.

  “In your dreams,” Remington shot back. But he was talking to dead air. The connection had been broken.

  He slammed the phone down, and went to the wet bar where he picked up the brandy decanter, but after an intense moment put it back. “Not now,” he muttered. “Not like this.”

  It had been the worst possible news. Sandberger, and now this. And for the first time since he’d gotten out of the service, just before he’d teamed up with Roland to start Admin, and before he’d married Colleen and her money, he felt as if his back was truly up against the wall. He imagined that his father had felt the same thing at the end. But the old man had run out of options; no place to go and no money with which to get there.

  Remington went back to his desk and sat down. It was different for him. He had set aside a fair amount of money—some of it siphoned from Admin and some of it from Colleen—and he owned a pleasant eighteenth-century villa in the south of France, just a few kilometers inland from the Med. Life could be comfortable there.

  A new life, he thought. But first he had to cover his back. Maintain the illusion that Admin was still up and running and very much on track, which would give him time to slip well clear before he was missed. Twenty-four hours, tops.

  Reluctantly he called Foster’s encrypted number, which wasn’t answered until the fourth ring.

  “I expected a call from you much sooner, Gordon. What is the current situation vis-à-vis Mr. McGarvey?”

  “I sent two shooters after him here in Washington this morning.”

  “But they failed again, is that what you’ve telephoned to tell me?” Foster asked.

  “Yes, sir. But it’s worse than that. Apparently McGarvey not only knows that Admin engineered the deaths of his son-in-law, wife, and daughter, but all of it was at the behest of the Friday Club. At your behest.” Remington hoped the bastard was squirming. That all of them in the man’s little group of tin-pot lobbyists were. None of them had any class that only centuries of English breeding could produce.

  “How could he know such things unless someone from your staff said something. How about your two shooters?”

  “They don’t know that you are a client. Only Roland and me and a few key people know about it.”

  “It’s possible somehow they found Givens’s real CD and it’s also possible that Roland opened his mouth to try to save his life,” Foster said. “But it doesn’t really matter at this stage, because Mr. McGarvey has no proof. Couldn’t possibly have.”

  “Perhaps you should see that the FBI takes a more active interest in arresting him. Maybe there could be an unfortunate shoot-out.”

  “No,” Foster said flatly. “Your firm was hired to take care of just this sort of thing, and will continue to do so. Whatever it takes, no matter how much money you need, no matter how many Admin personnel it takes, I want McGarvey eliminated.”

  “That may be messy.”

  “Handle it.”

  “McGarvey will almost certainly come after you, and quite soon I would think. Probably tonight. I’ll be sending Cal Boberg out to your place. He’s one of our best. He’ll handle it, as you say.”

  “I’ll be expecting him,” Foster said. “But Gordon, I have my own security measures out here. Make sure he’s forewarned. His only mission will be to provide an outer layer of defense should McGarvey be foolish enough to come all this way.”

  “Yes, sir,” Remington said.

  After he hung up, he thought about his next moves. He would be out of here no later than midnight and on his way first to Atlanta aboard the company jet, as a diversion, and then off to Paris, commercial, and his new life. Long before his rose garden bloomed he would be eating clementine oranges from his own trees.

  He telephoned Boberg at the office. “A change of plans, Cal. I have a new assignment for you.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  On the way back to the Renckes’ brownstone in Georgetown Louise was silent, almost as if she were afraid to ask the one question that had been on her lips the moment she’d seen him waiting by the side of Rock Creek Road.

  And he was glad for it, because he felt battered, physically as well as emotionally. Admin had killed just about everyone he truly loved on the orders of the Friday Club. Robert Foster’s orders. S. Gordon Remington’s orders. Roland Sandberger’s orders.

  But just before Louise pulled into the driveway back to the garage in what once upon a time had been a mews of carriage houses with apartments above, she glanced at him. “Are you okay?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been better,” he said. He felt that a great weariness was falling on him because of what he knew, and because of what would have to happen next.

  “Did you kill those two guys?”

  “No need for it,” he told her. “I wanted information and they gave it to me. It was a part of the bargain, so I had them toss their weapons and let them drive away.”

  “Will they come back?”

  “Maybe,” McGarvey said. “And if they do I’ll kill them.”

  Louise said nothing, just shook her head and parked the car. They went inside together and Otto came to the head of the stairs. His operation
al headquarters, as he called one of the front bedrooms filled with computer equipment, was on the second floor. He’d spent most of his days and nights up there since Todd’s funeral and the explosion afterward.

  “How’d it go,” he asked.

  “He didn’t kill them,” Louise said. “Anybody hungry for breakfast?”

  “Sure,” McGarvey said. “Then I’ll need to borrow your car.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Wherever Gordon Remington is holed up. Because if the two contractors at Rock Creek report in, he’ll go to ground. Might run anyway because of Baghdad, and I definitely want to catch him before he gets too far.”

  Louise looked up at her husband. “You’d better tell him,” she said, and she went down the hall to the kitchen.

  “Tell me what?” McGarvey asked, going upstairs.

  Pete Boylan stood at the open door to Otto’s workroom. She was dressed in jeans and a light sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up, and even though her face was bruised, and she had a bandage on her left arm, she still looked fetching. “You’re a popular guy, Mr. Director,” she said. “You might think about hanging out here until after dark, less chance of you being spotted.”

  “I walked right past the two Bureau agents at the airport.”

  “Yeah, and they’re mad as hell,” Otto said, and he led McGarvey back to his workroom. Two long tables filled with large wide-screen computer monitors, keyboards, and several pieces of equipment that prevented electronic eavesdropping, prevented virus infections, and allowed an undetectable wireless connection through the system at a Starbucks half a block away had been set up in a long V shape.

  “You need to take a look at something,” Pete said. She sat down at one of the keyboards and pulled up the FBI’s For-Internal-Use-Only Persons of Interest page. The first name on the list was McGarvey’s. Included was a lengthy file with photographs of him in various disguises and in various locals including Frankfurt, and most recently Baghdad—but none showing him at any crime scene.

  “They know you were there,” Pete said. “But take a look at this.”

  She brought up the rest of his file, including his bio and a fairly complete rendering of his CIA jacket from day one right up to the Mexico City and Pyongyang incidents.

  “All classified top secret or above,” Pete said.

  “I’ve been looking, Mac, but I have no idea how that stuff got to the Bureau,” Otto said. “No traces were left behind in any of the Company’s computer systems. So if someone hacked our mainframe they were better than me.”

  “It was probably done the old-fashioned way,” Pete said.

  And McGarvey saw it before Otto, who was too tied into his computer world to think along a parallel line. “Someone copied the paper files and hand-carried them across.”

  “Someone with access,” Pete said. “Someone on the seventh floor.”

  Otto saw it, too. “This proves it,” he said. “We thought McCann was working with someone else in the company,” he explained to Pete. “Maybe someone he was reporting to.”

  “Well, he’s still there, and he’s trying to bring you down, Mr. Director,” Pete said.

  “Show him the rest.”

  “Okay, so the Bureau is looking for you, but so is the U.S. Marshal’s Service.” She brought up the Service’s internal-use files and came up with the same dossier on McGarvey. “And the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, D.C.’s Metro Police, and just about every law enforcement agency—state, county, and municipal—in a several-hundred-mile radius. Homeland Security has you on its watch list. And just this morning Baghdad police were seriously looking for you, and Iraq’s ambassador to the U.S. filed a formal complaint.”

  Nothing was a surprise to McGarvey except the speed at which everything was happening. “Foster must be getting nervous to go to these lengths,” he said.

  “I came over last night and Otto briefed me,” Pete said. “But we still don’t have enough proof that Foster’s Friday Club has anything to do with this, or with the Mexico City or Pyongyang incidents. Leastways nothing we can take to the Justice Department.”

  “How’d you find this place?” McGarvey asked.

  “I sent an e-mail to Otto’s home account and he answered me within ninety seconds.”

  “Untraceable,” Otto said.

  “Most of the people I talked to on Campus think someone is gunning for you, but their hands are tied. They’re afraid for their jobs. It’s scary over there. Morale has never been so low.”

  “Technically makes you a traitor,” McGarvey said.

  She smiled. “Just doing my job, Mr. Director.”

  “Might be easier if you started calling me Mac. My friends do. The ones in this house at least.”

  “You’d be surprised how many friends you have in this town,” she said.

  “And just now too many enemies,” McGarvey said. “But you’re wrong about proof, I’ve got all I need.” And he told them about Kangas and Mustapha in Baghdad and again in Rock Creek Park this morning. “Admin is right in the middle of it.”

  “On the Friday Club’s orders,” Otto said. “But the stuff on the disk they found in Todd’s car is worthless. So right now all we have is your word that a couple of Admin contractors at gunpoint told you everything.” Otto shook his head. “We need more than that to convince just about everyone in Washington including the president’s staff that you’re no traitor.”

  “We can go after these two guys,” Pete said. “Present them as material witnesses.”

  “They’re just shooters, not planners. They heard stuff, but they probably had no direct contact with Foster and his group,” McGarvey said. “It’s why I went to Baghdad, to see what Sandberger had to say. But he was willing to take a bullet rather than tell me anything. Which leaves us Remington.”

  Otto was clearly worried. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Find out where he lives, find out what security measures he has in place, and if he has bodyguards, and then I’ll go over to see him.”

  “And if he’s willing to take a bullet the same as Sandberger, that’ll leave us with squat,” Otto said. “Admin killed Todd and Katy and Liz. We already had that pretty well figured out. But as bad as it is you gotta calm down and think it through. Honest injun.”

  “Goddamnit, I’m not going to walk away,” McGarvey said, his entire body numb. Killing Sandberger had been satisfying. Too satisfying, and yet Otto was right, killing Remington would do nothing for them.

  “Okay, so if you get nothing out of Remington, what next? Foster?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after him you’d be gunning for some top people in this town,” Otto said. “Think it out. Where does it end? And more important than that, where’s the connection between Mexico City, Pyongyang, and now? Because I don’t see it.”

  “You still need material witnesses,” Pete broke in. “One material witness who would be willing to testify against Foster to save his butt. S. Gordon Remington.”

  “That’s right,” McGarvey said.

  “To save his butt from you,” she said quietly. “There’s no way you can run around Washington on your own—especially not during the day—no matter how good your disguise is.”

  Louise was at the door. “She’s right. I recognized you because we’re friends. Could happen again if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Otto can check out Remington’s house and security measures and I’ll go over there myself later, around dinnertime, and ring the doorbell,” Pete said. “I’m not very threatening-looking, and he wouldn’t be expecting someone like me to show up.”

  “He’s ex-SAS,” McGarvey said. “Sandhurst.”

  “No offense, Mac, but he’s an old guy who probably hasn’t been on a field assignment in years. And I’m pretty good. I think I can take him down, and bring him back here, and we’ll have our foot in the Friday Club’s front door.”

  It made sense but McGarvey didn’t like it
. “That puts you on the firing line.”

  “I didn’t lose a child or a spouse, but I did lose a partner who was my friend. And I’ve been on the firing line before.”

  “You can’t go on a field ops with an empty stomach,” Louise said. “Breakfast is ready.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  Pete Boylan had wanted to be a tomboy all her life, but her good looks had made that nearly impossible, and at thirty-three she was just as frustrated as she’d ever been. Men tended to fall into two groups: those who were intimidated by her and those who trivialized her. Neither type of man had ever interested her, so she was still single, and hating that, too, which sometimes, like this evening, lent her a mean streak. She wanted to hit someone.

  She cruised slowly along Whitehaven Street in her personal car, a red Mustang convertible, top up, past the Danish embassy and then the Italian embassy, Remington’s upscale house with the tall iron gate at the front entrance sat between them.

  Otto had set her up with a one-piece voice-operated wire that looked like an in-the-ear-canal hearing aide. “Just drove past his house,” she said softly.

  “Any visible activity?” McGarvey’s voice was soft but understandable in her ear.

  “Lights on upstairs and downstairs, and a Bentley parked in the driveway, trunk lid open, no trunk light.” It was past eight and dark already.

  “He’s going someplace.”

  “Looks like it,” Pete said. “I’m at Massachusetts Avenue now. Soon as the light changes I’ll drive up to Thirtieth and make a U-turn.”

  “How’s traffic?”

  “Not bad,” Pete said. The light changed and she made a left then almost immediately a right, and made a sharp U-turn in somebody’s driveway. Two minutes later she was across Massachusetts Avenue and heading back to Remington’s house.

  She missed Dan, and wished he were here with her right now. He was bright, kind, and above all understanding, just like her father had been in Palo Alto when she was growing up, especially when she’d gone through her teen years. But he’d had a heart attack when she was in her first year of pre-law at USC, and by the time she’d made it home he was gone. There wasn’t a day when she didn’t think of him, and it would be the same with Dan for the rest of her life.