Roper came to the Gulfstream’s door. “A Sea Ranger is being prepped for you,” he said.
“Make it fast,” McGarvey told him. He turned back to the phone. “Leave my granddaughter out of it. You got my attention. It’ll be just you and me.”
“But then I’d have no leverage. Where’s the percentage for me?”
“My word, Bertie. Give Audie back to her minders, and I’ll make sure you’ll be allowed to leave the base. When I get there, we’ll talk, and no matter what comes up, you’ll be free to walk. I’ll even guarantee you a two-hour head start.”
“But then you will resume your pursuit.”
“Yes. But you were an NOC. Two hours should be plenty of time to go to ground.”
“Is Alex with you at this moment?”
“She’ll be one of our topics of discussion. At the moment she’s under arrest for the murder of a man in an apartment in Georgetown.”
“You say you have her under arrest?”
“Yes.”
“Good luck with that, Mr. Director. But I’ll do as you say. There is a camping area just west of the interstate. It’s called Toano. I don’t think it’ll be very busy at this time of the year. Your pilot can find it on the chart.”
“First I’ll need to verify that Audie is back with her minders and unharmed.”
“As you wish,” Bertie said. “Oh, and leave your weapons behind.”
“Not a chance,” McGarvey said. “If need be, I will defend myself, but you have my word I’ll give you two hours.”
Bertie rang off.
“I’ll be airborne in a few minutes,” he told Otto. “Let me know as soon as Audie is safe.”
“Kill him,” Otto said.
“Count on it,” McGarvey said, and hung up.
“I’m going with you,” Pete said.
“Stay here with Alex.”
“I’m going back to McLean to give Otto and Louise some backup in case the bastard tries to get to them instead of waiting for you to show up,” Alex said. “Camp Peary and your granddaughter could be just a diversion.”
McGarvey stepped close to her. “Don’t fuck with me, Alex. The people we’re talking about mean a great deal to me. If you try anything, I will put a bullet between your eyes without a moment’s hesitation, even if it takes me the rest of my life. And believe me, I’ll enjoy it.”
Alex shrugged. “You gave your word to Bertie, and he trusts you. I’m giving you my word that I won’t do a thing to Otto or Louise. I want this to be done even more than you do, because I’ve lived with it for nearly a third of my life now. And all my friends are dead.”
“You’ve never had friends,” Pete said.
McGarvey called Otto. “Alex is coming to stay with you guys in case Tom decides to make an end run on you. Are you okay with that?”
“Wouldn’t do her any good to take us out,” Otto said. He was a lot calmer now. “Send her over. Anyway, Audie’s safe, and Calder is already on his way off base.”
A gray Chevy Equinox with navy markings came to the hangar door. McGarvey tossed Alex the keys to his Porsche, and he and Pete rode in the Chevy, he in the front and Pete in back, over to the helicopter, its engines warming up.
The pilot was a young navy lieutenant, and he found the campground on his chart. “I grew up in Norfolk, so I know the area,” he said.
“How quickly can you get us down there?” McGarvey asked.
“We cruise at a hundred and twenty knots, but I can push it to one thirty if it’s urgent.”
“It’s urgent.”
“Under one hour.”
“Let’s go. I’ll tell you what I have in mind on the way down,” McGarvey said.
Bertie, driving just five miles per hour over the speed limit on I-64, passed the Toano exit at mile marker 227, and continued back to Washington, the day gorgeous, traffic light, his mood lifting.
All his life, especially since as a five-year-old kid learning chess by studying the games of the masters, he had come to appreciate most of all the end game. The opening moves were critical. And the middle game, when the majority of the strategy was concentrated on controlling the center of the board, was intense. But it was the end, when the player who reached the jugular vein first — usually the one who lured the opposition’s queen into a trap, maybe from a trade, a bishop for a queen — that he’d enjoyed the most.
Nothing had changed in the intervening years. The preparations and training for an op were interesting, and even the opening moves and first contacts were intense. But it was at the end that he soared.
He phoned Admiral Matthew Koratich’s private number at the Pentagon. Koratich was assistant chief of air operations for the Atlantic area, who Bertie, as Tom Calder, had befriended a number of years ago.
They’d met at an Army-Navy game a year after Bertie’s wife had died of cancer, and they had hit it off immediately. Their politics were the same brand of the conservative “America first” ideal, and it wasn’t long before Bertie was passing him hard intel about Russian satellite surveillance systems the CIA hadn’t been sharing with the military at the time. It had to do with not compromising the US’s sources in Moscow, and Koratich’s star had risen based on some shrewd decisions he’d made.
His secretary put Bertie’s call through.
“Tom, haven’t heard from you in a while,” Koratich said. “Rumors are you guys are having some trouble over there.”
“We have some nut case running around, causing us a world of shit, but it’s nothing we can’t handle,” Bertie said. “But I need to ask you for a favor.”
“Anything,” Koratich said without hesitation.
“I need to get to Baghdad ASAP. I mean, like, right now.”
“CIA has access to a lot of aircraft.”
“I know, but this has to be on the q.t. Could be the guy we’re looking for over there has some serious intel linked to a couple of Saddam’s people still in hiding. I’d also need a car and a driver. But someone anonymous. Civilian.”
“I can work something out,” Koratich said. “How soon? Like, today?”
“I’m about two hours away from Andrews.”
“Stand by,” Koratich said.
Bertie reached into his shirt pocket and switched on his MP3 player, the music coming from a Bluetooth earpiece also in his pocket. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. Serious music for serious business. Precise, mathematical, and therefore beautiful. It was the remastered performance by Albert Schweitzer in 1935. Always had been his favorite.
Koratich came back. “I have a Gulfstream, just landed an hour ago. She’s being refueled. I can have a new crew out there by the time you show up. How long will they have to stand by?”
“No time at all, Matt. Soon as they drop me off, they can refuel and head home.”
“Happy to lend a hand,” Koratich said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
SIXTY-NINE
They flew low southeast of Richmond, following a slow-moving creek that didn’t start to widen out until the campground and ten miles farther, where it emptied into the James River. Their pilot, Lieutenant Billy Cox, knew his business, his touch light on the controls, sometimes just skimming the creek, the trees close in on both sides.
Otto called when they were just a few minutes from Toano. “He left his car in the short-term parking lot at Dulles. He made reservations for a flight to Paris this evening under the name Walt Wager.”
“He has a sense of humor,” McGarvey said.
“But I also came up with reservations for Istvan Fabry out of Baltimore, Larry Coffin from LaGuardia, and Roy Schermerhorn from O’Hare. I’m sure I’ll find reservations — all of them for Paris — under the names of the other Alpha Seven operators. But security at the Farm said he was driving a Chevy Impala. I checked Dulles again, and a guy matching his description rented the car from Hertz for six days.”