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.
“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.”