“They have to get there first,” he’d said.
One moment, Katy’s limousine was there, just approaching the rear gate, and in the next instant, it was replaced by a bright flash followed immediately by an overpowering bang and a millisecond later a concussion that knocked all the air out of McGarvey’s lungs.
Nothing was left of the car except for the engine block and some twisted lengths of metal attached to a badly distorted frame. There was nothing recognizable as a body or even a body part.
What was eventually found was buried next to Todd at Arlington. But for the life of him, he could not clearly remember that funeral.
Pete came over the hill. Even from a distance, he recognized her short red hair, but mostly how she carried herself, how she walked straight forward, almost like a runway model, one foot directly in front of the other.
For a moment, he was vexed. He’d made it clear that he needed to get away without distractions so that he could finish his book. Yet he was glad to see her. It had started to get lonely up here.
He went into the kitchen and got her a Coke and himself another Retsina. By the time he brought it out to the patio, she was coming up the steps.
They embraced. “I’m surprised to see you here,” he said. She didn’t look happy.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“Audie?” McGarvey asked, his stomach suddenly hollow. Liz and Todd had a child, and when they had been assassinated, Otto Rencke and his wife, Louise, had adopted her. Whenever trouble came up, they would send her for safekeeping down to the Farm, which was the CIA’s training facility outside Colonial Williamsburg.
“No, she’s fine.”
“What then?”
Pete looked away for a second. She was shorter than McGarvey, with a compact body and a round, pretty face. “I don’t know how to tell you this, let alone what it means,” she said. “We got word late yesterday from security at Arlington.”
Mac had absolutely no idea where this was going.
“Your wife’s grave — Katy’s grave — has been desecrated. Not Elizabeth’s, not Todd’s, just hers.”
The pleasant breeze died, and for just a moment, a chill passed over them as if someone had opened the heavy door to a deep freeze.
“Only Katy’s last name, your name, was chiseled away.”
The only people in McGarvey’s life he truly cared for were Otto and Louise and Audie, plus Pete. Everyone else had been killed. They were beyond his worry. Nothing more could be done to them. They were finally safe. Only the living were at risk.
Pete held her silence, letting him work it out. He could see the love and concern and patience in her eyes.
“I’ve suspected for a long time now that someone would be coming for Otto, Louise, and Audie,” he said. “And you. This time, it’s me.”
“That’s what we think,” Pete said.
“Have Otto’s darlings been twitching?”
Otto’s darlings were his computer programs that constantly scanned just about every scrap of data that came into the CIA and NSA, plus the Pentagon, looking for threats against the U.S. that might be just below the radar — bits and pieces that alone might mean nothing but taken as a whole could be significant. The assassination of a party leader in some remote Russian province. The promotion of a lieutenant colonel in the Chinese intelligence agency. The falling price of wheat in Nebraska because of a ban on exports to Saudi Arabia, any of a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million pieces of information.
“Nothing,” Pete said.
McGarvey finished his wine. “I’ll pack.”
3
Pete had chartered a helicopter for the seventy-five-mile trip up to Athens’ airport where, after a late lunch, they boarded the Air France flight for Dulles just after 4:30 P.M., scheduled for touchdown a little after three in the afternoon.
Otto had booked them first class, as usual. “Less hassle and more comfort, so that when you get to where you’re going, you won’t be so beat up.”
McGarvey had a Remy and Pete a glass of red wine, but they didn’t say much until they were in the air and at altitude.
“Is it the Pakistanis coming after you because of the ST Six op?” Pete asked.
Pakistan’s military intelligence service had hired a group of German mercs to come to the U.S. and kill all twenty-four of the SEAL Team Six operators who’d taken out Osama bin Laden. McGarvey had stopped them with Pete’s help and with the help of a German intelligence service field officer.
And there had been another op against Pakistan since then, one that had involved several nuclear weapons that had gone missing. Once again, Pete had been right at his side in the thick of it.
“That might make sense if someone were coming up on my six,” McGarvey told her.
“Nothing that we noticed. But you were the point man; hell, they even had you in prison, and I’m sure heads rolled when you escaped.”
McGarvey had thought about just that all afternoon, but it didn’t fit with what had been going on in Pakistan over the past several months. The war between the Taliban and the government had intensified, especially since several ISIS advisers had become involved, and the situation in Afghanistan had once again fallen into chaos. The U.S. had stepped in with more military aid and a 500 percent increase in its use of drone strikes.
“It’s not them.”
“Do you have any prime candidates in mind?”
McGarvey almost had to laugh despite himself. “A long list of them.”
“Otto had the same thought, and before I left, he had already started to take a look. But most of those people are dead.”
“Their agencies have survived in one form or another, as have some of their paymasters or their successors.”
“Whoever it is, he’s a sick bastard,” Pete said.
“But clever,” McGarvey said. “He wanted my attention, and he got it. If he wanted to take me down, he could have found out about Serifos and simply shown up there with a Barrett or some other sniper rifle and do it the easy way. Either that or wait until I got back to Florida.”
“Why Kathleen’s grave? Why Arlington?”
“It’s someone who knows my past and knows where I’m vulnerable.”
“But your wife is beyond his reach.”
“Yes,” he said. But you’re not, he thought.
Passing through the security checkpoint at Langley and coming up the long, sweeping driveway to the Original Headquarters Building on the CIA’s campus, it struck McGarvey that his life had devolved into three locations — start points as well as end points. Serifos was one, his place in Florida another, and here was the third, in no particular order.
It seemed like a couple of lifetimes ago since he’d gotten out of the air force and had been recruited by the CIA. Despite his four years with the service’s Office of Special Investigations, he’d been required to take the six-month training evolution at the Farm. Simpler times, he thought. And every now and then, he had to wonder if he’d known then what was ahead of him whether he would have stuck it out. He couldn’t answer the question, of course, except he was who he was. The die had been cast, he supposed, when he was kid growing up in western Kansas. For whatever reason, whatever luck of the genetic draw, he’d been born with a deep sense of fair play and a fierce hate for bullies, traits he’d never outgrown.
Pete parked in one of the visiting VIP spaces in the executive garage, and they went up to Otto’s suite of offices on the third floor. The three rooms were jammed with state-of-the-art computer equipment — two hundred — inch flat-panel OLED monitors and a table, the glass top of which was a computer screen and across which all sorts of files, newspapers, maps, and 3-D images — that didn’t require viewing glasses — of places, things, and even people could be manipulated by a wave of the hand. Keyboards had once been placed just about everywhere, but lately, nearly everything was done by voice recognition.