The Cabal Read online

  THE

  CABAL

  BY DAVID HAGBERG

  Twister

  The Capsule

  Last Come the Children

  Heartland

  Heroes

  Without Honor*

  Countdown*

  Crossfire*

  Critical Mass*

  Desert Fire

  High Flight*

  Assassin*

  White House*

  Joshua’s Hammer*

  Eden’s Gate

  The Kill Zone*

  By Dawn’s Early Light

  Soldier of God*

  Allah’s Scorpion*

  Dance with the Dragon*

  The Expediter*

  Burned

  NONFICTION BY DAVID HAGBERG

  AND BORIS GINDIN

  Mutiny!

  * Kirk McGarvey adventures

  THE

  CABAL

  DAVID HAGBERG

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One Six Months Later

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Part Two The Following Days

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Part Three The Next Day

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Part Four That Night

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Part Five Thirty-six Hours Later

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Epilogue

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,

  and events portrayed in this novel are either products of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE CABAL

  Copyright © 2010 by David Hagberg

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2020-9

  First Edition: July 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is for Lorrel.

  At the end of days in the Roman Empire, foreign influences and lobbyists took practical control of the government, leaving the senators to do little more than snipe at each other, much like Washington today.

  PROLOGUE

  Fall

  It was well past midnight when the cab dropped Kirk McGarvey off in front of the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Square from the White House, and one of the doormen met him. “Good evening, sir.”

  McGarvey, the former director of the CIA, hesitated. He was dead tired. It seemed like months since he’d slept last; now in his early fifties, he didn’t bounce back as quickly as he used to. Yet his mind was alive with a thousand separate possibilities and desperate situations.

  He was tall, with the build and moves of a rugby player. His hair was thick, brown but graying at the sides, and he had a wide honest face that his wife, Kathleen, had always found attractive, and deep eyes that, depending on his mood, were either green when he was at peace with the world, or gray when he was in the field and operating at top speed. He had done things, and seen things, that most people couldn’t know or understand. He had killed people.

  And he was just coming off an assignment in which even more people had died at his hands, which he felt would never come clean no matter how often he scrubbed them. For a long time now he had wanted it to end. He had come out of the field into an uneasy retirement that never lasted for more than a few months at a stretch, and he was getting tired of the game.

  So far the FBI had been unable to find the forty kilos of polonium-210 that had been smuggled across the border from Mexico. The news that the situation had been arranged by a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer was never made public, but the fact that the highly radioactive poison hadn’t shown up anywhere had the White House puzzled. Perhaps it had never existed in the first place.

  And over the past days another Chinese situation had come up when one of their high-ranking officers had been assassinated in North Korea. A nuclear war had very nearly been touched off, until the blame was traced to a former Russian KGB officer by the name of Alexander Turov, living in Tokyo, with a connection to Howard McCann, who, until Mac’s son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, shot him to death, had been financing the Russian.

  The problem was that no one knew where McCann, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, had gotten the money to finance the polonium or the assassinations.

  But McGarvey had a start, provided to him by Turov’s laptop courtesy of Otto Rencke, the Company’s resident wizard. Two names, one of them McCann’s. McGarvey had not brought them up during his meeting at the White House with the president. He’d wanted to give the CIA a head start before the administration got all over it.

  “I have to take a walk, first,” he told the doorman.

  “It may not be safe at this time of the evening, sir.”

  “That’s okay, he knows how to take care of himself,” Mac’s wife, Kathleen, said, coming out of the lobby. She linked her arm with her husband’s and they headed down the driveway and crossed the street to the park, the White House lit up like a jewel.

  “Is
it over, Kirk?” she asked.

  “The dangerous parts.”

  “No war?”

  “No war,” McGarvey said.

  They stopped under a light and she studied his broad, honest face. “But there’s more, isn’t there.”

  “There’s always more, sweetheart,” McGarvey told her.

  PART

  ONE

  Six Months Later

  ONE

  The George was a trendy newly rebuilt art deco hotel one block from Washington’s Union Station, its restaurant busy this Wednesday noon with a few congressmen, a number of television and print journalists, and well-heeled tourists who liked to be in the middle of things.

  The noise level was surprisingly low, as if what everyone was discussing was confidential. The service was as crisp as the April weather, which, after a long damp winter, was energizing. The elections were over, a new president sat in the White House, and an optimistic mood had begun to replace the pessimism since 9/11.

  Seated at an upper-level table that looked down on the first floor and entryway, Todd Van Buren sat nursing a Michelob Ultra, waiting for Joshua Givens, a buddy from the University of Maryland, where they’d both majored in political science. Todd had minored in international law and languages—French, Chinese, and Russian—and had been immediately hired by the CIA, while Givens, who’d minored in journalism, had started work for the Minneapolis Star, and over the past six years had worked his way up to a well-respected, if junior, investigative journalist with the Washington Post.

  When he had called this morning and left a message on Todd’s voice mail, he sounded frantic, almost frightened.

  At twenty-nine, Todd was the youngest person ever to run the CIA’s training facility, known unofficially as the Farm, with his wife, Elizabeth, at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, 140 miles south of Washington on the York River. His father-in-law was Kirk McGarvey, former director of the agency. He and Liz both had a fair amount of field experience, much of it alongside Liz’s father, who’d arguably been the Company’s finest field agent, bar none. They’d practically gone to school on his tradecraft, and once their covers had been blown they’d been recruited to run the training facility. Something they’d been doing with a great deal of success for the past three years. And after the first three months no one ever questioned their ages.

  Givens knew that Todd worked for the CIA, just as he knew who Todd’s father-in-law was, which made his message this morning all the more cryptic.

  “Trust me on this one, Todd,” Givens had said. “Don’t tell anyone we’re meeting. No one. Not your wife, and especially not her father.”

  Noon at the George, it was ten after that now, and Todd was beginning to regret driving all the way up from the Farm, and lying to his wife in the bargain, though that had been easy because she was spending the day on an exfiltration exercise with the new class. Tomorrow would be his turn, pushing the twelve field officer trainees as close to the breaking point as he could. He and Liz were hands-on administrators.

  He would explain to her where he’d been when he got back. They’d been spies, but they had never lied to each other. She’d made him promise before they got married. She loved her father, but he’d been gone for almost all of her childhood because he had not been able to tell the truth to his wife, and she’d kicked him out of the house. Todd’s relationship with Liz was the most important thing in his life, not just because he loved her but because of their two-year-old daughter, Audrey. He owed both of them at least that much.

  Givens appeared in the doorway from the hotel’s lobby, spotted Todd sitting upstairs, and came up. He looked out of breath and flushed, as if he had run all the way in from the Post. Unlike Todd, who was tall, solidly built with a broad, pleasant face, Givens was short and whip thin, his movements quick, almost birdlike. In college Todd had lettered two years as a running back on the football team, while Givens had lettered all four years in cross-country. He’d been incredibly fast with the endurance of an iron man, and it didn’t look as if he’d changed much.

  “Thanks for coming,” Givens said, sitting down across from Todd. He laid a computer disk in a jewel case on the table and slid it across. “Don’t hold it up, don’t look at it, just put it in your pocket.”

  “Okay,” Todd said. He slipped it into his jacket pocket as their waitress came over.

  “Iced tea, with lemon,” Givens said. “I’m not staying for lunch.”

  “So, here I am,” Todd said. “And I’m curious as hell.”

  Givens glanced down at the entryway, and then at the other diners on the lower level, before he turned back. “Listen, for the past five months I’ve been investigating a power broker group called the Friday Club. And what I’m finding out is scaring the crap out of me. Everything I’ve come up with so far is on the disk.”

  “Robert Foster,” Todd replied. Everyone in Washington knew of the so-called club whose ultra-conservative members called themselves American Firsters. Lobbyists, a number of high-ranking aides and advisers to some key senators and congressmen as well as at least one White House insider, and others. All men, all of them with power.

  “He’s the top dog,” Givens said. “And when I started looking it didn’t take me long to find out that some of his lobbyist pals represented people like the Saudi royal family, the Venezuelan oil minister, the deputy director of Mexico’s intelligence service.”

  “What were you looking for?”

  Givens hesitated. “This is going to sound far-fetched. But one of the guys on the list was your deputy director of operations, Howard McCann, who got my attention when he turned up dead in the line of duty.”

  Todd kept any hint of emotion from his face, but alarm bells were jangling all over the place. McCann had been a traitor who’d financed the hit on a Chinese general in Pyongyang, and before that was the moneyman behind a scheme to smuggle forty kilos of polonium-210 across the border with Mexico. When Todd’s father-in-law confronted the man in a safe house just outside Washington, the DDO had pulled out a pistol and it had been Todd who’d opened fire, killing him. There’d been a lot more to it than that, of course, but to this point they’d not been able to figure out where McCann had gotten the money. It was a puzzle.

  “You have my attention, Josh,” he said carefully.

  “I’m in the middle of something really big. Maybe even a shadow government. These guys have influenced elections, got federal judges removed from the bench, made sure some top banks and big financial companies got federal backing—bailouts just like what happened to Chrysler and just about everyone else a couple of years ago.”

  “Planning a coup?”

  Givens shook his head. “Nothing so messy or dramatic as that. I think they’ve already accomplished what they set out to do. They’re running things right now. Or at least the important stuff. Guys from the Federal Reserve are in the club, along with a couple of four stars from the Pentagon. This cuts right across the board.”

  Givens looked away for a moment, apparently overwhelmed by what he was saying. When he turned back he’d come to some decision.

  “What?” Todd prompted.

  “Could be the bastards engineered nine/eleven.”

  This was getting over the top for Todd. “Do you know how crazy that sounds? Just another conspiracy theory. Our guys deal with that kind of shit twenty-four/seven. Doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  “Look what they’ve accomplished,” Givens said.

  “Tell me.”

  “A direct reduction of our civil liberties, for one. For Christ’s sake, libraries and bookstores are supposed to inform the FBI what fucking books we’re reading. Now you tell me who’s crazy?”

  “What do your editors over at the Post have to say about it?”

  Givens dismissed the question with a gesture. “These aren’t the Woodward and Bernstein days. We don’t run partial stories hoping the exposure will make other people come forward. Everyone’s gotten too smart.”

  “Who have you shared t
his with?” Todd was having a lot of doubts. He and Givens hadn’t been close, but the guy had never seemed nutsy. And his investigative pieces in the Post had seemed first rate. But this now made no sense.

  “No one. Not even my wife, Karson. Not until I have everything nailed down.”

  “Okay, I’ll look at your disk,” Todd said. “Then what?”

  “How did McCann die? What was he working on?”

  Todd spread his hands. “Even if I knew something like that, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.”

  “Especially not with a reporter.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Give it to your father-in-law then. From what I hear he still carries some weight.” Givens looked down at the entryway again, as if he was expecting someone. “Hell, I don’t have anything solid yet. All I have are a lot of disconnected facts. Sudden changes in government policies, resignations of some key people here and there, upset elections in two dozen key states over the past couple of years. It’s all on the disk.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Todd said. “But I can’t promise anything. You’ve gotta understand that, Josh.”

  “Do what you can,” Givens said. “What you think is right.”

  His iced tea came, and he drank some of it then got up. “I trust you, man. I think you’re the only person in the world I can trust.”

  “I’ll call you if I come up with something,” Todd said.

  “Not at the paper,” Givens said. He handed Todd a business card. “Call me at home.” He gave Todd a long, hard look then turned, went downstairs, and left the restaurant.

  TWO

  Tim Kangas, thirty-one, medium height and build, thinning light brown hair and ordinary brown eyes, laid a twenty-dollar bill on the downstairs table after Givens hurried past and left the hotel. His partner, Ronni Mustapha, picked up the nylon sports bag on the chair between them and casually reached inside and switched off the shotgun microphone’s recording circuit. They’d heard everything.

  They’d been following the Washington Post reporter for three weeks, waiting for the tipping point, which had apparently happened just minutes ago. An article in the newspaper would have meant next to nothing, but his meeting with a CIA officer, especially one with Van Buren’s connections, could possibly be devastating.