The Shadowmen Read online

“You won’t be sanctioned.”

  It was Nikolai’s turn to laugh. “That doesn’t matter. But I’m going to play with him. I’m going to make him feel pain, like my brother must have in the sea off Cyprus and in the tunnel in Portugal. I’m going to become his shadow. Wherever he goes, I will be right there, and in the end, he will die.”

  “We called your brother the Chameleon, but his real work name was the Shadowman. He was always there right out in the open, right next to his prey—but no one recognized the danger, because a shadow is as natural as the light of the sun or the moon.”

  “Then I’ll become Kirk McGarvey’s shadowman,” Nikolai said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I can. Because I want to. Because it amuses me to take on an old man.”

  Didenko stared at him for a long time. “Think before you start this; you’d better be a lot more sure of your reasons than that.”

  2

  “If nothing but the truth and only the truth were written down, all our university libraries would be housed in tiny little buildings. The thing is, however, we would know a lot more than we ever did, and we would understand it better,” Voltaire had written.

  Kirk Cullough McGarvey looked up from the screen of his laptop and shivered. A cold wind had suddenly passed through him, leaving behind a vague sense of foreboding. Someone or something was coming his way again. On top of that, he didn’t know if he believed Voltaire any longer. Too much had passed—too may lies, too much deceit to believe or even understand much of anything.

  He was a solidly built man around fifty, with broad shoulders but narrow in the waist because of a strict regimen of exercises that included swimming or running every day. He had pleasant features and eyes that were green on some days and gray on others, often depending on his mood. Today, they were gray.

  The view out the third-floor window of his converted lighthouse on the Greek island of Serifos was stunning, especially this morning because of the early spring weather that was perfect—low humidity, pleasant shirtsleeve temperatures, only a few puffy clouds in a brilliantly blue sky, and almost no tourists.

  After the last business with Pakistan, which had very nearly ended up badly, he’d come back here to his retreat—his safe haven—to finish his second book on the philosophy of Voltaire, especially as it pertained to government. After the CIA, and between freelance assignments for the Company, he taught philosophy at New College in Sarasota, part of the State University System of Florida. It was a liberal arts school and one of the best small schools in the country.

  “You like teaching, I think,” his friend and sometimes lover Pete Boylan said.

  That had been a couple of years ago, after they’d gotten back from Paris and he was getting set to return to school. At thirty-seven, Pete was a lot younger than he, but she admitted more than once that she was madly in love with him, and no matter what he did or didn’t do or say, her feelings wouldn’t change. The point is she was a lot closer politically to the kids than he was.

  “Teaching makes you think,” he’d told her.

  Sometimes he’d take his class outside to the water’s edge on Sarasota Bay, and they would continue their discussion of some point in minute detail, often at the tops of their lungs, everyone talking at once. It was fantastic.

  Voltaire had taught, among other things, that common sense wasn’t so common, after all. That the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman. That men used thought only to justify their wrongdoings and speech only to conceal their thoughts. And one of Mac’s favorites:

  I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.

  It was getting close to lunchtime. Mac saved the page and went downstairs to the tiny kitchen, where he poured a glass of ice-cold Retsina wine and went out to the stone patio.

  Writing about someone else’s life—someone he admired—often made him reflective of his own past. A lot of water under the bridge, his old friend Otto Rencke would say. More people killed in the line of duty, often for some presidential directive or national objective, or sometimes for something as minor as greed or even ego. The CIA’s old acronym for why people became defectors was MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Eego. In actuality, the reasons people became traitors to their own countries were a lot more complicated than that.

  But what was even more complicated, even for McGarvey, was why people stood with their toes to the line, ready and even willing to give their lives for their countries. For some cause, sometimes for words, sometimes for leaders, sometimes for ideals.

  He’d never had his own answers, at least none that were satisfactory, beyond the facts that by chance he’d been born in the U.S. and that ever since he was a kid, he’d hated bullies.

  But those sentiments had cost him dearly. Just about every woman he’d ever been involved with had been assassinated because of who he was and what he’d been doing at the moment, including his wife, Katy, and their grown daughter, Elizabeth.

  Liz’s husband, who had been a CIA operative, had been shot to death in the line of duty. Mac, Katy, and their daughter, all of them devastated, had gone to the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, the girls had ridden in a separate limo, Mac in the Lincoln just behind them.

  Staring down across the rocky valley and the path that led up and over the next hill and down to the ferry dock in town, the day at Arlington stood out in vivid detail in his mind. The afternoon was too bright, too clear, the weather too mild for a funeral.

  “Hurry back to me,” Katy had said to him. He was in the middle of a mission that was going sour.

  He reached inside and kissed her, but Liz said nothing.

  Watching them drive away, he remembered feeling that something heavy was in the air. At the time, he put it down as nothing more than his own grief, his overactive imagination.

  * * *

  Pete was riding with him in the second limo. “They’ll be okay,” she’d said. Because of Todd’s murder, Katy and Liz had been assigned CIA minders. “Once they get to the Farm, no one will be able to touch them.”

  “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 mean
s,” 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.