The Cabal km-14

by David Hagberg

  “Maryland plates,” he shouted, as the Toyota sped away as if the driver had been there just to pick up McGarvey and get him away. But that made no sense.

  “Did you get a number?” Mustapha asked.

  The few other cars that had been coming down either Clayton, Jessup, or Patton drives had all made hasty U-turns moments after the explosion and were speeding away. No one wanted to be in the middle of what obviously was some sort of terrorist attack.

  “Niner-two-peter, two-romeo-peter.”

  “Get us the hell out of here,” Mustapha said, writing the number on a scrap of paper.

  Kangas headed up Jessup, which would take him to the cemetery’s main exit on Memorial Drive and then across the river back into the city in the opposite direction that the authorities would be coming. But he figured it would be only a matter of a few minutes before somebody wised up and stationed squad cars at all the gates.

  “Son of a bitch, that was close,” Mustapha said.

  Kangas glanced at him. “You missed.”

  “I didn’t have a clear line of sight.”

  “Well we’re in some deep shit now. And we’re going to have to clean the mess ourselves before it gets totally out of hand.”

  Mustapha was silent for a moment but then he shook his head as if he’d come to some decision. “Either that or we bug out and take our chances somewhere else.”

  “We’re going to finish this, Ronni.”

  “Did you see that bastard take those two guys down? It was a walk in the park for him.”

  “They weren’t expecting him to come at them like that.”

  “Bullshit. They drew their pieces.”

  “Now we know what to expect,” Kangas said. “We won’t make the same mistake they did. Anyway he didn’t kill them. Which means they’re probably Company security, or maybe Bureau muscle or federal marshals.”

  “It looked like he was in custody.”

  “But why?” Kangas said.

  They reached the exit on Memorial Drive, traffic panicky as it came out of the cemetery, and when they got to the bridge across the river Kangas speed-dialed Remington’s encrypted number. It was a call he didn’t want to make, but if they weren’t going to bug out, as Mustapha had suggested, they’d have to come clean.

  Remington answered on the first ring as if he’d had his cell phone in hand and was waiting for the call. “Yes?”

  “There’s a problem.”

  “Tell me,” Remington said.

  “We got hung up behind some traffic on the way out after the funeral and had to guess when to push the button. We got it wrong. McGarvey survived but his wife and daughter were killed outright.”

  “What happened next?” Remington asked, and it didn’t sound as if he were the least bit concerned.

  “McGarvey was like a crazy man. He took down two armed men — probably CIA security or maybe federal LEs — shot one of them in the leg and then jumped in the backseat of a dark Toyota SUV and took off. We got the Maryland tag number. You can run it.”

  “Give it to me.”

  Kangas repeated the number.

  “Did you manage to get away clean?”

  “Yes. There was a lot of confusion. Nobody was paying attention to anything except getting the hell away.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Just getting off the Arlington Memorial Bridge,” Kangas said. “I’m going up to Rock Creek Park in case you need to meet up.”

  “No,” Remington said. “I want you to go to ground for now, until I can figure out something.”

  “Sorry, sir. But if we’d been given more time to plan—”

  “I don’t want to hear excuses,” Remington shot back. “This isn’t over, nor is your involvement. McGarvey is still a problem. He’s still your problem. But for now you’re to keep out of sight until I can work out what comes next.”

  “Mr. Sandberger—” Kangas said, but again Remington cut him off.

  “Will not be bothered with this for the moment.”

  “Can you tell me if McGarvey was under arrest, because the two guys on his ass sure didn’t act like bodyguards?”

  “He’s been charged with treason.”

  It wasn’t what Kangas had expected to hear. “Holy shit,” he said half under his breath. “Why not let the FBI do our work for us? At the worst he’ll go to prison, at best he’ll get shot to death trying to escape.”

  “There are other considerations,” Remington said. “None of which are any of your business at this juncture. For now keep your heads down, but keep in touch. There’ll be more.”

  “Treason for what?” Kangas asked. “If we’re going to continue to put our asses on the line and either get arrested or taken down by the crazy son of a bitch, we ought to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “What you’re dealing with is a million-dollar bonus. For each of you.”

  Kangas’s breath was taken away. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’re going to ground.”

  “Good man.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The house on Whitehaven was quiet, Colleen had gone to a meeting of one of her charity events and the cook and cleaning lady had the afternoon off. Remington had poured himself a large snifter of a good Napoleon brandy after the call from Kangas and he stood now at the window of his study turning over the possibilities in his mind.

  He would have to call Roland with this, of course, but before he did so he needed to think things through. Kangas and Mustapha had screwed up, that much was clear, and there was no question now that they had become expendable. In fact, they might even have become liabilities, depending if anyone had seen them near the scene.

  But beyond that they would have to deal with a man who couldn’t be more highly motivated to strike back at whoever he suspected had killed his wife and child. He’d come to Frankfurt to confront Roland, whose name he’d told them was on Alexandar Turov’s computer in Tokyo, which meant the former CIA director had at least part of the puzzle, and it meant that he would probably come after Admin, especially Roland.

  And he turned that over in his mind. It was possible that McGarvey would even manage to take Roland out, leaving Admin without a CEO, which was a role Remington had always seen himself filling.

  But this had to be done carefully, subtly, because Roland was nobody’s fool. McGarvey as a tool, as a weapon, was a difficult, interesting possibility.

  Remington drained the last of the brandy, and at his desk brought up a nationwide LE search engine, and entered the Maryland tag number Kangas had given him. The vehicle came up as a 2008 dark blue Toyota SUV, registered to Pierre Alain, MD, with an address up in Baltimore, with no wants or prior violations.

  The Baltimore address turned out to belong to a UPS package service and the American Medical Association had two Alains, one Rudolph and the other Michael, neither of them with practices on the East Coast.

  Following a hunch about the name, Remington tried the French National Medical Association directory, and came up with Pierre Alain, a GP with Medicins Sans Frontiers, present location unknown. But when he checked the Doctors Without Borders directory, no Pierre Alain was on the roles.

  The name Otto Rencke came to Remington’s mind, McGarvey’s computer freak friend in the CIA. He would have the wherewithal to fake an identity with little or no problem, especially one that would be bulletproof. Which meant with Rencke’s help McGarvey would be safe from rearrest for the moment.

  But a man like that would not go to ground for very long, especially not with his motivation, and especially not if he were offered an enticing target. Something that might show up on Admin’s Website, and something that Rencke would be sure to see.

  It was two in the afternoon here but eleven-thirty in the evening in Baghdad when Remington poured another brandy then got through to Sandberger’s encrypted satellite phone. It had been less than one hour since the botched assassination in Arlington, but nothing had shown up on any of the online news sites, except that an expl
osion of unknown origin had taken place at the cemetery’s South Gate, casualties were likely. To this point no witnesses had come forward, though an unnamed source suggested a pair of federal government vehicles may have been targeted.

  “I take it that the explosion at Arlington I’m hearing about involved our boys,” Sandberger said, and Remington thought he was hearing music in the background, and perhaps a woman’s laughter.

  “Yes, but there was a mistake.”

  “Is McGarvey dead?”

  “No, and he’s on the loose,” Remington said.

  Sandberger said something away from the phone, and the woman stopped laughing and a moment later the music stopped. “Tell me everything.”

  Which Remington did, leaving out nothing but his speculations about Otto Rencke getting word to McGarvey that Sandberger was back in Baghdad, sections of which were essentially still lawless. In his present frame of mind it was no stretch to expect that McGarvey would go to Iraq to try to take Roland out.

  “Killing his wife and daughter, as you say, in front of his eyes certainly gives the man the motivation to come after us. But why didn’t Kangas and Mustapha finish the job? That was damned sloppy on their part; when this business is done with I want them eliminated. Erased from the face of the earth as if they’d never existed. Clear?”

  “Clear. But trying to take McGarvey down just then would have put them in extreme jeopardy, and not simply from McGarvey himself. If they’d been taken into custody at the scene, the fact that they were Admin contractors would have come out. In fact, they probably did the right thing getting out of there before the authorities arrived.”

  “Failure is never the right thing, Gordon,” Sandberger said harshly. “I want you to find out who actually owns the Toyota that picked up McGarvey. It’ll give us a lead as to where the man’s gone to ground. Once you have that I want him taken down, no matter the cost of the resources. Am I clear on that as well?”

  “Perfectly,” Remington said. “But there may be another possibility you might want to consider.”

  “I’m listening,” Sandberger said, coldly.

  “Too many things have been happening here in the Washington area. We need to allow things to cool down before this comes back to us, especially to you, from someone other than McGarvey.”

  “If you’re talking about my name and McCann’s on Turov’s laptop, if the CIA had any proof of my involvement don’t you think they would have come after me by now?”

  “But if a connection is also made between you and the Friday Club, Foster might send someone after you.”

  “Bullshit, Gordon. We’re Foster’s personal contractor service. Do you think the bastard would dare try to hire another service to take us down? We have safeguards, and he knows it. Something happens to Admin and the backlash would end up in his lap.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about Admin, Roland. I was thinking about you personally.”

  Sandberger fell silent for a few seconds. “You’re even more of a devious son of a bitch than I thought, and I like it. What do you have in mind?”

  “One other consideration. Back to Foster and why he hired us in the first place. I don’t really care what sort of a deal you signed up for, what I’m more interested in is what Foster did before he came to us. Before he felt the need to come to us. Do you see what I’m driving at?”

  “Perfectly. But the only deal, as you put it, was simply that he felt someone in the media might be putting together a hatchet job on him and his pals and that might make it to the Bureau, and he wanted us to find out what was going on, and if the rumors were true nip it in the bud. But none of us thought it would involve the CIA.”

  “There was McCann, and I think it’s a safe bet that he wasn’t killed in the line of duty, but because of his affiliation with Turov. Another safe bet would be that McGarvey was somehow involved, and when it was over he handed it to someone inside the Company and walked away.”

  “You’re probably right again. So taking out his son-in-law might not have been the right thing to do. But I don’t see that we had any other choice.”

  “Neither do I. But now he’s become our problem, and we have to deal with him. But not here in Washington. Maybe if he turns up back in Florida, or somewhere out of the country.”

  Sandberger laughed. “Maybe he’ll come here,” he said. “It would be the perfect solution.”

  “You’d want that?” Remington asked, smiling. Maneuvering Sandberger was getting easier with each try.

  “Absolutely.”

  “How much longer will you be in Baghdad?”

  “A few days, maybe a week.”

  “Let me see what I can put together. I’ll give you the heads up.”

  “Yes, do that,” Sandberger said.

  TWENTY-NINE

  At the brownstone in Georgetown McGarvey paced up and down in the kitchen, stopping from time to time to look out the window at the little garden in back that Louise had planted. But he wasn’t actually seeing anything except for Katy’s face in the back of the funeral car, looking up at him with trust and love, and then the terrible flash. And it was over.

  Louise came over to him, her eyes still wet. “Can I fix you something to eat? Maybe a drink?”

  He looked up at her. “I’ll have to do something for Audie.”

  Louise’s voice caught in her throat. She was a tall, slender woman, whose hair was normally just as out of control as her husband’s. And though she wasn’t as smart as Otto, she was a genius in her own right. And sweet, kind, thoughtful, considerate, and Otto and everyone else who’d ever come in contact with her, including McGarvey, thought the world of her. Katy and Liz had loved her.

  Otto had come in from parking the Toyota in the back. “We’re taking her,” he said. “Louise and I can’t have children of our own, so we’ll adopt her, if it’s okay with you.”

  A look of wonderment and pure joy came into Louise’s round face, and her eyebrows shot up, as she looked from her husband back to McGarvey. “Is it possible, Kirk?” she asked. “I mean, Otto and I haven’t discussed it or anything — there was no need for it — but I think it’s a fabulous idea. I know it’s way too soon—”

  McGarvey had seen the logic and the love in Otto’s offer the moment the words came out of his friend’s mouth. And he could see that Louise was so happy she was frightened. They wanted children.

  He nodded. “Liz would have liked that,” he said, a tremendous burden, one of many on his shoulders, lifted. “So would have Todd.”

  “She’ll stay at the Farm for now,” Otto said. He’d poured McGarvey a snifter of cognac and brought it over. “Sit down now and drink this. We have a lot to talk about. Somebody wants you dead, because sure as hell that was no accident, nor were Mrs. M. and Elizabeth the targets. You were. Which means someone was shitting enough Twinkies they thought they could get away with assassinating not only a CIA officer and a newspaper reporter, but a former director of the Company. A man who’ll probably come under indictment for treason over the Pyongyang thing.”

  McGarvey leaned back against the counter and took a drink. Too soon, he wanted to say. Time to run, this time for good. Maybe back to Greece. Bury himself so that he could start to heal.

  He didn’t know if he could stay here now and yet he knew damned well it was too late for him to turn away. It had been too late after the polonium thing in Mexico, and far too late when he had killed Turov in Tokyo and when Todd had put a bullet in McCann’s head at the safe house up near Cabin John. All that had happened over the past year, and yet it seemed like a century ago.

  And here he was, and it still wasn’t over.

  His grip tightened on the brandy snifter and he looked down at what he was doing, his knuckles white, and with the most supreme effort of his life, he loosened up, took another drink, and put the glass down with a steady hand.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  Otto exchanged a relieved glance with his wife. “We bought it about six months ago, jus
t after the incident with Turov and Howard. I wasn’t picking up anything solid about what had been going on, but I thought there was a possibility that more would be coming down the pike. So I figured one of these days we might need a safe house off the Company’s books. Totally untraceable as are the utilities and taxes and the car. Sort of a hideout but right in the middle of things, you know what I mean?”

  “Why weren’t you at the funeral?” McGarvey asked. “Liz asked about both of you.”

  “Otto had a hunch that if something were to happen, Arlington would have been a good place for it,” Louise said. “I’ve learned to trust his instincts.”

  “Why not more security officers?” McGarvey asked.

  “I don’t know who to trust, Mac,” Otto said. “Honest injun, I can’t find anything, but I know something’s there. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. We didn’t know about the IED.”

  “Someone had to be within a sightline to push the button. Did you see anything, did anyone see something?”

  “There were lots of cars, and all of them got out of there in a big hurry after the blast. The shooters would have probably been among them.” Otto spread his hands. “I don’t know yet if any security cameras picked up something, but I’ll check on it this afternoon.”

  “I’m not turning myself in,” McGarvey said. “Not until this is resolved.”

  Otto nodded. “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m going after Roland Sandberger, this time for real.”

  “That’s wrong, Kirk,” Louise said. “There’s no proof he ordered this thing. You’ve killed people, like a soldier on the battlefield. But not this. Not execution style.”

  McGarvey ignored her, his grief changing into a black rage he was having trouble controlling. “I want to know where he is right now.”

  “After Frankfurt he went back to Baghdad, and Remington came home,” Rencke said. “But Louise is right, we have no proof that Admin was involved.”

  “I’ll get the proof just before I kill him.”