The Shadowmen

by David Hagberg

  Otto had suggested they send a decent second-story team to make a quick pass, but McGarvey had turned the offer down.

  “Whoever went through the effort is probably watching me. I want to go in relatively clean.”

  Pete had bridled, but she’d said nothing.

  “He could be double-teaming you.”

  “He’s made this personal; I don’t think he brought the cavalry with him.”

  “Question is from where,” Otto said. “If we knew that much, we’d have a start. But the chisel could have been picked up at any hardware store just about anywhere. And no one at Arlington saw a thing.”

  “Then for now, I’ll do what he wants,” McGarvey said.

  But standing here in the middle of his living room, he got the feeling that he might not be coming back soon. The FO—or Foreign Operator, as Otto had named the assailant—was playing a game of cat and mouse. He was going to play for a while.

  “Kirk?” Pete said from the corridor.

  “Just a minute,” McGarvey said. He went into his bedroom where from a small wall safe he took out his go-to-hell kit contained in a manila envelope: ten thousand dollars in cash in several currencies and three passports and a few pieces of identification to match each, plus air marshal credentials that would allow him to fly armed. He’d brought a few things from Serifos that, along with the cash and papers, gave him the autonomy to instantly jump in any direction at a moment’s notice.

  Pete knew exactly what was in the envelope, but she said nothing until they were back downstairs and driving out to Arlington. “You don’t think he’ll try to take you out when you show up at the cemetery?”

  “He might, but I don’t think he wants to make it that simple.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling.”

  She thought about it for a minute. “At least we know four things about him. He’s a he. He’s aware of who you are. And he’s probably someone out of your past, because he has a grudge against you.”

  “What’s number four?”

  “He has a big ego.”

  * * *

  It was a weekday late afternoon and already starting to get dark by the time they got out to Arlington. Washington’s spring weather was not as mild as Greece’s had been, but it was pleasant.

  Very few cars were parked along the driveways, the families or friends somewhere amid the graves, paying their respects. McGarvey had come out here every time he was in town to visit Katy and Liz and Todd. They were buried side by side, so it was easy for him to speak to them together, as they had done in the past over pizza and beers. But each time, it was harder for him to focus, harder for him to keep his anger in check for the senselessness of their deaths.

  Pete knew something of what he was thinking, because when she parked, she reached out and touched his cheek. “I’m sorry, Kirk.”

  “I know.”

  She glanced toward a copse of trees along the sloping ridge. “I’d feel a lot better about this if we came back in the morning.”

  “I want you to drive around to the other side of the hill.”

  “You think he might be up there?” she asked.

  “It’s where’d I’d be.”

  “Go easy.”

  “You too,” McGarvey said. He got out of the car and started up the grassy slope to the first row of markers as Pete took off.

  Something pinged off a headstone just a couple of feet from him. He dove to the left and hit the ground behind one of them as a second silenced shot pinged off another marker, this one closer to him.

  The shooter was high and somewhere to the left, in the line of trees, perhaps thirty meters out.

  McGarvey drew his pistol as he leaped to his feet. Sprinting to the right, he fired four shots as fast as he could pull them off and then dropped down behind a headstone, this one two rows higher up the hill.

  The shooter returned fire, this time his aim right on.

  It was a light automatic weapon. McGarvey was guessing a Heckler & Koch MP7 that could fire nine hundred–plus rounds per minute of 4.6×30mm body armor–piercing rounds. But it was a compact weapon with lousy accuracy at any distance, made worse by the suppressor tube. The fact that the shooter was getting this close was amazing. He was a pro.

  Mac reached over the top of the headstone and fired his remaining three shots.

  The shooter immediately returned fire, a half dozen rounds striking the headstone just inches from where McGarvey’s hand had been.

  “Why don’t we wait until dark so the odds will even out,” McGarvey said. He changed out magazines and recharged his pistol. “It would be more gentlemanly.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The man’s accent was British with perhaps a hint of Scottish.

  “The FBI is on the way.”

  “Not your style, McGarvey.”

  “You know my name. What’s yours?”

  The shooter laughed. “Would you like to play a game?”

  His voice had shifted somewhere to the left. McGarvey reached over the headstone again and pulled off three shots in that direction. The shooter did not return fire.

  “What game is that?”

  “Whether I kill your girlfriend this afternoon or wait until later and kill you both.”

  Three shots from what sounded like a 9mm pistol came from the other side of the hill. Pete carried a Glock26 Gen 4 subcompact, which fired the 9×19mm round.

  The shooter laughed, his voice even farther left.

  McGarvey got to his feet and pounded up the hill, zigzagging as he ran.

  Pete fired three more shots in rapid succession.

  Mac stopped short just at the edge of the trees and cocked an ear to listen for anything. In the far distance, he thought he could hear traffic noise on the Jefferson Davis Highway that connected to the south with I-395.

  A car or van started up on the other side of the hill, but to the left, and headed away.

  “Pete?”

  “Here,” she called back. “He’s gone.”

  McGarvey crested the rise, and on the other side of the hill, Pete stood next to her car where she had evidently taken cover, the driver’s-side door open. She was there to cover the shooter’s back door. Both tires on the passenger side were flat, and a line of bullet holes went from the rear fender to the front.

  “You okay?” he said, reaching her.

  “Fine,” she said. “How about you?”

  “Good,” McGarvey said. He safetied his pistol and holstered it at the small of his back. “He wants to play a game.”

  “I heard,” Pete said. “But he was good. I think he could have killed me if he’d wanted to.”

  Mac glanced back toward the line of trees where the shooter had waited for them. “Phone Otto; have him send a cleanup crew. Tell them to bring lights and a couple of metal detectors.”

  “What are we looking for other than MP7 shell casings?”

  “Be my guess he left me another clue.”

  5

  Nikolai Kurshin parked the van at the rear of the Marriott Airport hotel and went inside, where he quickly changed clothes. He had just over two hours to make it in time to go through security at the international terminal. He was about ten minutes ahead of schedule.

  In the bathroom, he used a pair of small scissors from his dopp kit to cut his passport and other IDs into small pieces that he flushed down the toilet.

  Using a hand towel, he began wiping down every surface that he had touched since he had checked in yesterday. He’d done the same thing before he’d left the Hay Adams across from the White House and before that the Grand Hyatt in New York where he’d waited after chiseling McGarvey’s name off the dead wife’s headstone.

  Cleaning up after himself was mindless work that he’d perfected in the Spetsnaz special unit he’d been assigned to after his initial training.

  “It’s the small details that will save your life,” his one-on-one instructor had tried to impress upon him.

&nb
sp; “My fingerprints and DNA are in no database outside the unit’s. They’d be worthless to the police,” Kurshin had countered. He was young and brash, while his instructor at forty was a has-been who could only teach but not do.

  “But not to MI6 or the German BND or CIA.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you think that we might have penetration agents in those organizations?”

  “I’m sure we do. So what?”

  The instructor had waited for several beats, giving Kurshin time to draw a conclusion, which he finally did.

  “Have we been penetrated?”

  The old man had laughed. “There are no virgins in this business. So pay attention, and you might survive long enough to come in out of the field and teach some snot-nosed kid how you did it.”

  Thinking that the Spetsnaz itself might be compromised had been sobering. For a while, he had become paranoid, like just about everyone else in the unit who’d been given the same lecture. If their identities were known even before they got out in the field, they would have a zero percent chance of surviving even the first twenty-four hours. It’d be the same as trying to work as an undercover cop with your photograph plastered all over town.

  But he’d finally settled down. Paying attention to the smallest details made sense just in case. It couldn’t hurt.

  “Leave no nondeliberate evidence behind,” the instructor had warned.

  He paused for just a moment at his third-story window as a big jetliner rose at a nearly impossibly steep angle and in no time at all disappeared in the clouds to the east. It had been two months since he’d spoken with Didenko, whose last piece of advice still resonated: Be sure of your reasons for going after McGarvey.

  “Because I can,” he’d told the general. “Because I want to. Because it amuses me to take on an old man.”

  At the cemetery, he’d had a couple of decent sight lines, but only for brief instants. It was as if McGarvey had been able to sense where the next shots would hit, and his return pistol fire had been far too accurate for comfort. The man hadn’t been terribly fast on his feet, but he moved much better than Kurshin had figured he would.

  One important thing had come out of the encounter, and that was McGarvey’s concern for the woman. Killing her would have been relatively simple—though she wasn’t a bad pistol shot herself—but he’d quickly realized that she was going to be his most important asset in the coming days. She would become a force multiplier in their little pas de trois.

  He made a final pass around the room, especially the bathroom, and then, bag in hand, he let himself out, using his handkerchief on the door handle.

  No one was on the stairs, and no one was around to notice him drive off in the van. He would not be reported checked out until tomorrow when the maid came to clean the room. No one would look for him, because his credit card under the name Kandes would be valid for another twenty-four hours, plenty of time for the bill to be paid before any trace of it remained. It was a little trick about phantom credit cards he’d learned from one of his FSB instructors who’d started his career with the KGB.

  “Remain legitimate only for as long as necessary so no one will have any reason to come looking for you. Afterward, your disappearance will be a moot point.”

  * * *

  Traffic on the short drive over to the airport was heavier than he expected it would be. Nevertheless, he made it to the long-term parking ramp with plenty of time to completely wipe down the van and make his way to the international terminal.

  His British passport under the name Nance Kallinger matched the name on his first-class Icelandair ticket, and his name came up on TSA’s list as a precheck passenger, so security was hassle-free. He was seated in the busy Air France/KLM first-class lounge that Icelandair shared, a full forty-five minutes before his flight to Paris was due to depart.

  He ordered a split of Dom Pérignon from the pretty attendant, and when it came, he sat back to give some serious thought to the general’s last advice that he was sure about his reasons for going after McGarvey.

  It wasn’t a matter of revenge for his brother’s death at a CIA officer’s hand—at least not completely—though as a kid, he had idolized Arkady. And it wasn’t simple boredom. He’d been trained for a deep-cover long-term assignment in England. In case of war, he was to become a saboteur. It was an outmoded project that had been a KGB leftover from the Cold War. But the operation had been on some important general’s turf, so funding had continued, and personnel had been assigned in a dozen different countries, mostly in Europe, depending upon the fluency of their language.

  For cover, he ran a small bookshop in London’s West End, and his immediate supervisor, whom he had never come face-to-face with, was a contributor to a government watchdog blog. It was his supervisor who, in a series of coded messages, had officially denied Kurshin’s request for a leave of absence, but who’d also sent the brief message to drop by anytime for a cup of tea and to talk books. The word anytime meant go ahead, but let us know when you return. It was assumed that Kurshin was somewhere in country gathering intel on some new target, but no one on any of the teams really gave a damn. They were in country on lengthy paid vacations. If a war were actually to start, which was unlikely, sabotage on the ground would be meaningless. The battles would be waged in cyberspace—that, along with English, was another of his areas of expertise.

  Sipping his champagne, he had to admit that he had no real reason for going after McGarvey except for the challenge of the thing. He had trained for just such a mission after he’d learned of his brother’s death, and he’d made a study of the American shadowman and the Renckes, and now of course Pete Boylan.

  He was pitting himself against a killer, a beautiful woman, and two people who were arguably among the brightest on the planet. He smiled.

  “That good?” a woman seated next to him said. She was dark haired and beautiful.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The champagne, monsieur,” she said. “Good?”

  “Yes, very good. Would you like a glass?”

  “Please.”

  Kurshin motioned for an attendant to bring another split and a second glass. “Are you traveling on business?” he asked the woman.

  “Actually, I’m returning home after two weeks. You could call it a holiday.”

  Kurshin introduced himself. “Where’s home?”

  “Nice,” she said.

  Her name was Martine Barineau, and Kurshin guessed she was in her midforties. “Husband and children?”

  “No, just a wicked cat my housekeeper is caring for.”

  “As it turns out, I’m on a brief holiday. Perhaps for a few days, in Monaco.”

  “You’re a gambler,” she said, smiling.

  “Only on sure things,” Kurshin told her.

  Their champagne came.

  6

  Louise Rencke, at nearly six feet tall, was mostly arms and legs but with a narrow, pleasant face that could scarcely contain her broad smile. She came to the front door of the McLean safe house and gave McGarvey and Pete hugs.

  “We’ve been worried about you guys,” she said. Before she closed the door, she looked down the street the way they had come, but the neighborhood was quiet, as it usually was.

  Otto was seated at the kitchen counter, a tablet propped up in front of him. “How’d it go?”

  “He took a couple of shots with what sounded like a silenced Room Broom, but he was damned good,” McGarvey said.

  Louise brought Mac a Corona and Pete a glass of red wine. “Neither of you have any holes?”

  “My car’s all shot to hell,” Pete said.

  “We wondered who was driving up in a Ford,” Louise said. She took a Glock pistol out of the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back and laid it on the counter. She was the shooter in the family and practiced at the CIA pistol range every week.

  “Either of you get a look at him?” Otto asked.

  “Just a glimpse through
the trees as he ran away,” Pete said. “Small guy wearing a baseball cap, so I couldn’t tell you about his hair.”

  “How’d he move? Like a bear? Maybe a lame horse?”

  “Like a fox leaving the henhouse pretty sure the farmer wasn’t coming after him.”

  “Sounded like a Brit,” McGarvey added.

  Otto made a couple of entries on his tablet that was linked to his computer system on campus. “MI6,” he said. It took him a half minute to get through a series of passwords into a secret file that contained the names and descriptions of everyone who’d gone off the reservation in the past two years.

  McGarvey looked over his shoulder. None of the descriptions matched.

  “Anything else?” Otto asked.

  “Maybe a hint of something,” Mac said. “Could be that English wasn’t his native language.”

  “I got the same impression,” Pete said. “But I’m not sure.”

  “The Russians are the best at something like that.”

  “You’re talking Spetsnaz sleepers,” McGarvey said.

  “New Scotland Yard has been working the issue for the past five years or so, but they’ve come up empty-handed,” Otto said. “Assuming just for the moment that this guy is Russian, there’s no one left over there that you’ve crossed paths with.”

  McGarvey leaned back against the counter, a dozen memories coming back at him in living color. One name especially stood out. “Arkady Kurshin,” he said.

  “You killed him in Portugal.”

  “Family?”

  “We never found any.”

  “His original control officer is dead, but what about Didenko?” McGarvey asked.

  “They put him in prison for crimes against the state, but I think I saw something that came across the Russian desk a few years ago that he’d been rehabilitated. Gave him his first star but then put him out to pasture.”

  “Who is this guy?” Pete asked.

  “Vasili Didenko, a control officer with the KGB and then the FSB,” McGarvey said. “Kurshin had to have been his star agent.”

  “So maybe he’s still carrying a grudge against you, and he’s got a new star agent.”

  “Russians have long memories,” Louise said. “Pete could be right; maybe he’s settling old accounts.”