The Shadowmen (3 page)

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.

“Oh, wow,” Otto said when he'd buzzed them in. As usual, he was dressed in faded jeans, sneakers—the laces untied—and a ratty old sweatshirt with the shield-and-dagger logo of the old KGB. His long hair, now a little bit gray, was contained in a ponytail, and since he and Louise were married several years ago, he'd dropped twenty-five pounds and had kept it off. Almost from the start, she'd broken him of most of his bad habits, including eating Twinkies and washing them down with heavy cream or at least half-and-half.

It had only been a couple of months since Mac had gone out to Serifos to work on his book, but Otto wore his feelings on his sleeve. Every meeting was a reunion.

“How're Louise and Audie?” Mac asked.

“Missing you,” Otto told him. “Did Pete brief you?”

“On the way back. Have you come up with anything new in the meantime?”

“Nada. I sent one of our forensics teams out there to see if the creep might have left some DNA traces. I was hoping he might have cut himself with the chisel or maybe smashed a thumb. But no such luck.”

“Let me see it.”

Otto nodded. “Bring up the recent Arlington file on three, please.”

A sweeping 3-D image of a gently sloping hillside mostly filled with neat rows and columns of white headstones came up on one of the large monitors.

“I thought that he might have left footprints or maybe dropped something from a pocket,” Otto said. “Advance, please.”

The image moved slowly up the hill where near the top it slid left along one of the rows of grave sites.

“I left the headstone as it was but had it covered.”

The view stopped at Katy's marker, a black plastic bag duct-taped to it.

“Clear, please,” Otto said.

The bag disappeared, and a dozen emotions and countless memories tumbled over each other in McGarvey's head. He'd come back from his blackest op, the one in Chile, and Katy, sick with worry, had given him an ultimatum: Her and their infant daughter, Liz, or the CIA. He'd been young then and stupidly headstrong, so he'd not taken either. He'd turned his back on her, quit the CIA, and moved to Switzerland. Years lost that could never be regained, though he'd gotten them back finally when Liz had grown to be a young woman.

Kathleen's name had been left intact, but her married name had been chiseled off, as had the inscription
LOVING WIFE OF KIRK MCGARVEY
.

“He used a two-inch chisel, almost certainly brand new, because the chips showed sharp edges,” Otto said.

“Can we be sure that a man did this?” Pete asked. “Why not a woman?”

“A woman would have erased Katy's name too,” McGarvey said. He wasn't sure how he knew such a thing; he just did. “Did he touch Liz's stone or Todd's?”

“No.”

“I'll have another one made.”

“Already done.”

McGarvey stared at the image for a long time. It didn't matter who did the thing or why, but the message was clear: I am coming after you; I just wanted you know.

“I have to go out there to take a look first.”

“Could be it's exactly what he wants you to do,” Otto said.

“I hope so.”

“You didn't bring a gun,” Pete said.

“I'm doing this alone,” McGarvey told her.

“The hell you are. Someone needs to cover your back, and anyway, by your own admission, you think that I could be next, so I have two vested interests.”

4

They stopped at McGarvey's apartment in Georgetown, where he picked up his Walther PPK and three magazines of 9×18mm Ultra rounds. They had approached the building with a great deal of care, and at the door to his place, he checked his fail-safes before he went inside. Pete remained in the narrow corridor, her Glock in hand.

For a longish moment, he stood in the middle of the tiny living room trying to sense anything, any little out-of-place bit that might indicate someone had been here. But nothing came to his attention.

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.”