Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 13

  Baz had laughed. They were just to the west of the sand dune where Stinger missiles had been fired. “The craziest of all. But then, I have my reasons.”

  “As we all do.”

  “What about you? An unhappy childhood? A jilted love? A wrong done to you by the Americans?”

  “All of the above, none of the above,” Kamal said. “Most men have their reasons.”

  “You’re a Saudi, like me. But educated elsewhere. Probably England.”

  Kamal considered where, but more important, if he would kill the camp commandant. The man was a loose end—he knew too much and he was a drunk.

  The kids who had volunteered for the three missions wouldn’t be coming back, but even if they were somehow intercepted before they blew themselves up and taken into custody they would only be able to provide Kamal’s description as he looked now.

  The only direct link back to him was the Gang of Three in Beijing, but Baz could cause trouble.

  “It’s better not to ask questions,” he said.

  Baz shrugged. “All soldiers die sooner or later. That includes us.”

  Kamal laughed “Later is better, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Baz offered him a smoke but Kamal declined. “You have your targets and your soldiers but you have not mentioned a timetable.”

  “Soon.”

  “It’s important for our planning. I’ll need at least five days, perhaps six or seven, to get my people and the weapons across the border and into position, especially because you want the three strikes to take place simultaneously,” Baz said.

  “How will your people get to the targets?” Kamal asked.

  “They will drive in pairs. Three separate cars.”

  “Will they have papers to cross the border with the cars?”

  “They’ll take separate buses across,” Baz said. “The weapons will be put in place separately. We have safe houses in Los Angeles where they’ll pick up the cars and the Stingers.”

  “I’ve decided against the missiles,” Kamal said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s not important that the targets be completely destroyed, only that they are hit.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Neither had it made much sense to Kamal when he had been given his instructions in Beijing. But his first payment had been prompt, and to satisfy his own bloodlust he had planned to hit Grand Central Station. The four attacks would be linked. And the message would come across loud and clear. The American president was an incompetent.

  “Unless you’re worried that my people will survive and lead the authorities back here and to you.”

  “That’s exactly what I want to prevent. The van in San Francisco will blow up in the middle of the bridge. Your two people will die. As will the four wearing vests on the dikes, and the two in Kansas. There will be plenty of casualties.”

  “To what end, for what cause?” Baz asked.

  “That’s no concern of yours. You provide the soldiers and I provide the targets.”

  “You son of a bitch!” Baz shouted. “You may think of them merely as cannon fodder, but they are real people who believe in the cause.”

  “You’ve come to care for them, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than your wife and two children?”

  Baz stepped back a pace. He shook his head, sadness all over his face, in his eyes. “You bastard,” he said, and he’d walked away.

  * * *

  Kamal stopped and looked back at the camp. Only a few lights were visible from ground level, but absolutely none from above. The next satellite overpass wasn’t due for thirteen days; nevertheless he looked skyward, but nothing moved. Only the stars, unblinking in the clear, dry air, and a gibbous moon, blood orange, very low on the horizon.

  This place at this exact time brought back an image of himself as a young boy with his grandfather, who’d always fancied himself a descendant of the desert Bedouin people. They were on the way from Riyadh to Jeddah on the coast, and in was night like now when his grandfather stopped the car at the side of the highway.

  “Learn to appreciate this,” the old man had said.

  They got out and walked a few meters into the desert.

  “Smell it, feel it, listen to your ancestors. Your heritage is important, never let it go from your soul.”

  Kamal was six or seven and he remembered thinking that the old man had been silly.

  But now he understood the poetry of belonging. Only it was too late for him.

  He made a call on his satphone to a number in Washington that the major had given him. It had been for his intelligence source, either in the American Defense Intelligence Agency or possibly in the National Security Agency.

  The number rang twice before a woman answered. She sounded drunk.

  “What?”

  Kamal hesitated for a moment. “Do you know who this is?” he asked.

  The phone was silent and he thought the woman had hung up.

  “I thought that you had gone to ground.”

  “I thought this number had been taken down.”

  “Evidently we’re both wrong. What do you want?’

  “Information I can trust.”

  “About what?”

  “Kirk McGarvey.”

  Again the woman remained silent for the longest time, and Kamal almost hung up before she answered.

  “Son of a bitch, are you involved again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is your controller?”

  “I can’t say, except that there are three of them and we met in Beijing. What about Kirk McGarvey?”

  “He’s still very much alive, and if he finds out that you’ve shown up he’ll stop at nothing to kill you.”

  “It’s why I called. I need your help.”

  “I’ll find out what I can. It seems as if we’re fighting the same enemy again.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Otto was no spy. But he’d played the part for the past twenty-four hours and he thought that he was doing a pretty good job of it.

  He sat in a dark green Chevy Impala that he’d rented yesterday afternoon from Hertz at Dulles. He was parked across from the Next Whisky Bar entrance in the Watergate complex, where General Walter Echo, in civilian clothes, had shown up five minutes ago.

  Two days ago his darlings had begun picking up hints of someone here in the States involved in what Otto was thinking of as a consortium. There had been some traffic among several of the key names from the French, German and British intelligence services to an office in the Pentagon.

  Routine stuff, mostly, troop and equipment inventories on the ISIS battlefields in Syria and Iraq. Logistics, with only a confidential classification.

  He’d almost ignored the connection. His programs were giving it only a 10 percent probability of a match with the main search parameters he’d set up, that of nailing every player in the possible consortium—whose real purpose to this point was unknown.

  But then an NSA intercept of an encrypted call to the same Pentagon number from someone in Riyadh piqued his darlings’ interest, upping the probability to more than 25 percent.

  From that point it had taken less than ten minutes to identify the officer as Walter Echo, who was deputy chief of air force logistics, and when Otto fed that information into the program, the probability that the general was involved with the consortium rose to 78 percent.

  It was then that he has kissed Louise good night, and told her not to worry. Mac was at the Farm, and this was something easy.

  “Why you?” she’d asked.

  “Because I’m not sure that my darlings aren’t barking up a wrong tree.”

  “Goddamnit, you’re not a field officer, and you hate dogs.”

  “Twenty-four hours, and I’m not going much farther than the Beltway. Honest injun.”

  “Take a gun,” she’d told him.

  “Won’t need it.”

  * * *

  A half-dozen people including two couples ha
d shown up in the time since Echo had gone inside. From where Otto had parked he’d managed to get good head shots of all of them, which he’d sent back to the main face-recognition program that he’d designed and installed on the Company’s mainframe two years ago.

  Nothing had come back yet. None of the faces were in the program.

  A man of medium height, wearing an obviously expensive suit, showed up in a Maserati Quattroporte, which he handed over to the valet, and went inside.

  Otto snapped a couple of pictures and sent them to the program, which came back in less than thirty seconds with a hit. Lieutenant Colonel Moses Chambeau worked as an analyst in the Defense Intelligence Agency. His office handled deployments of allied troops in the ISIS battle.

  But the man was a Harvard puke, who had written a position paper on the willingness of the civilian leaders in a dozen countries to send boots on the ground to the war. And one of the customers was General Echo’s office, and another was Ronald F. Hatchett, the deputy adviser on national security affairs to the president.

  Sending all of the new information to his darlings, they picked up the fact that Chambeau was married to Echo’s sister, Jennifer.

  The only curiosity about Hatchett—in Otto’s mind—was that the man had spent two days in Beijing last month, meeting with what were called “top Chinese officials.”

  He had his darlings do a quick media search, but nothing showed up on Hatchett’s visit. Nor was there anything on the websites of either the state or defense departments.

  It had the earmarks of an important trip, but no other details were available.

  Otto got out of his car and walked across to the Next Whisky Bar entrance. He was dressed in boat shoes, starched and crisply pressed jeans, a white dress shirt, his ponytail tucked into the collar in the back, and a blue blazer. Louise had picked it out for him last year, and it was the same outfit that Mac sometimes wore.

  The bar was three-quarters full, and the minute he walked in he spotted Echo and Chambeau seated at a table across the room from where they could watch the entrance, their backs facing the wall.

  Otto took a seat at the bar from where he could see the reflection of the two men in the mirror. He ordered a Heineken. When his beer came he took out his cell phone, pointed it at the mirror, and pretended that he was talking to someone.

  He only had to adjust the direction he was pointing the phone when their images came up on the screen, and their voices became audible.

  “… this is getting totally out of hand just like I warned you and the others it would,” one of them said. The voice, bounced off the mirror, was distorted, but Otto’s program cleaned it up so it was understandable.

  Otto thought it was Chambeau’s.

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Yes, but Grace is dead and the Bureau was all over the place until about two hours ago.”

  Echo turned away and apparently said something though Otto’s phone didn’t catch it.

  “She was a goddamned dyke,” Chambeau said. “In over her head.”

  “Was it McGarvey?”

  “No. Someone else was apparently out on the course and figured it out. And before you ask, we don’t know if his being there was coincidental, or if he’s working for someone, who the hell it is. I have someone looking into it. But quietly.”

  “Well, you’d better fucking well find out because this is the second time McGarvey has come up clean. Sarasota wasn’t ours. And whoever gunned down Grace wasn’t ours either.”

  “Maybe—” Chambeau said, but he was cut off.

  The bartender was there, blocking the line of sight to the mirror. “Would you like to see a bar menu, sir?” she asked.

  For a moment the words didn’t compute and Otto shook his head.

  “Something to eat, sir?”

  “No.”

  The bartender moved away.

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” Echo was saying.

  “We’d better start. McGarvey is job one; we’ve all agreed on at least that much. But until that happens the flash point probes will have to wait.”

  Both men were silent for several long beats. And Otto wasn’t sure if something was wrong with his program. But then Echo was back.

  “Maybe we should take advantage of the situation. Step back and let whoever else is gunning for the bastard finish the job. Maybe even help them along.”

  Chambeau said nothing for a long time. “You might be right. I don’t think any of us ever had a true measure of the man.”

  “We were warned.”

  “I know,” Chambeau said. “But we can afford to wait.”

  “I hope that you’re right,” Echo said. He finished his drink, got up and walked past Otto on his way out of the bar.

  Chambeau waited for the bill to come, paid it with a credit card and followed Echo out the door.

  Otto phoned Louise. “Where are you?” he asked when she answered.

  “All Saints.”

  “How’s Mac?”

  “Franklin’s springing him in the morning. But we all want to know where you are and what’s going on.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Otto said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Pete and Louise were in McGarvey’s room when Otto showed up all out of breath, as he usually was when he had a bone in his teeth. Louise went to him immediately and gave him a hug.

  “We were worried sick about you,” she said. “And the next time you try to run off on your own I’m going to sit on you until you come to your senses. What were you thinking?”

  “No one’s gunning for me. I was a fly in the corner. All but invisible.”

  McGarvey was sitting up in bed. They had taken his leg to make some adjustments, but Franklin had promised he would have it back in the morning, and he could discharge himself from the hospital if that’s what he wanted. “Louise is right.”

  “Otto explained to them about the hypothetical consortium. It’s bigger than just a few mid-level intel officers,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s homegrown. And their job one is getting rid of you.”

  “What else have you got?”

  “Plenty, and you’re not going to like it,” Otto said. He quickly went over the theory that if there was a consortium, a sort of old-boys network, it had to include someone in the States. He’d monitored incoming calls from the mid-level intel officers his darlings had already identified first to the CIA—which was a bust to this point—and next to the Pentagon, where he’d come up with General Echo’s name.

  “Why the Pentagon?” Pete asked.

  “If this has something to do with the war on ISIS, someone in military planning could be involved,” McGarvey said, and he was glad to this point it didn’t seem as if anyone in the Company was a part of it. “Continue.”

  “One of the calls to Echo’s office came from an officer in the SVR—one of the names my darlings had picked up along with the others. I plugged Echo’s name into the main search engine and bingo, there were connections between him and just about every other officer on my list, including the Saudis.”

  “Enough to bring him in for questioning?” Pete asked.

  “Depends on what Echo’s Pentagon job is,” McGarvey said.

  “Deputy chief of air force logistics,” Otto said.

  “Then on the surface he’s just doing his job coordinating equipment movements with the battlefield requirements in Syria and Iraq. There’s been at least low-level communications between us and the Russians almost from the beginning. It’s safer for all of us in the long run if we can talk to each other. Keep out of each other’s way.”

  “I began to wonder if he was alone here in the States or if he was working with someone. But not by email or phone; in person, face-to-face.”

  “So you decided to follow him,” Louise said.

  Otto grinned and nodded.

  “Dear God, he could have killed you.”

  “It’s Mac they want, not me,” Ot
to said. “Anyway, there’s a lot more.”

  From the beginning McGarvey had gotten the feeling that whatever was going on wouldn’t turn out to be so simple as someone with a grudge gunning for him.

  “He left work, got some gas at a Shell station, stopped at a 7-Eleven, and from there went straight home to Fairfax around eight. I parked down the street from where I could watch the house, and monitor anything electronic coming in or leaving. His wife got a couple of calls from friends—no connections with our business that I could find. They watched TV—a movie, We Were Soldiers—and settled down for the night. No kids, no one staying at the house with them.”

  “Did you spend the night there?” Louise asked.

  “I brought something to eat,” Otto said. “Anyway, he left the house at seven, drove straight to the Pentagon and stayed there until six-thirty, when he drove to the Watergate.”

  “Where did you park all day?” Louise asked.

  “Mostly in Arlington Cemetery, but I moved around. He was busy on his phone and computer pretty much most of the day. But when he left work he took the Roosevelt Bridge across the river instead of heading home.”

  “How did you know when he left or where he was going?” Louise asked.

  “He put a bug on Echo’s car,” McGarvey said. “The gas station or the 7-Eleven?”

  “7-Eleven,” Otto said. “He went to the bar and a few minutes later a DIA light colonel by the name of Moses Chambeau showed up. I figured the coincidence had to be too great for two guys like that to show up at the same place in civvies within a few minutes of each other so I went inside and sat at the bar where I could eavesdrop.”

  “There’s more,” McGarvey said. He could see that Otto was holding something back, something that he thought was over the top.

  “Before I went in I took a picture of Chambeau and sent it to the new facial-recognition program, and then to my darlings, and all sorts of cool shit came back. Like his job as an analyst in the DIA. Like the fact he’s married to Echo’s sister. And the fact his position papers—especially one three months ago on how willing our allies were to send troops to Syria and Iraq—ended up not only on Echo’s desk, but on the desk of Ron Hatchett, the deputy NSA in the White House.”