Gambit Read online

  Mary’s blue Honda Civic was parked in the driveway when Pete’s cab dropped her off. She paid the fare and walked up to the door.

  “Good morning, Pete,” Lou’s AI-constructed voice from one of Otto’s darlings came from midair about face level.

  It was always startling. “Good morning,” Pete said.

  The door opened. “Otto and Mary are in the kitchen.”

  Pete went inside, put her overnight bag down, and walked straight back to the kitchen, where Mary—all five feet two of her—was cooking something at the stove, and Otto was sitting at the counter speaking softly as if to himself, a bottle of Dom Pérignon in an ice bucket beside him, an empty flute next to it.

  Mary turned around and smiled. “Just champers for now,” she said. “Good flight?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Linguine with white clam sauce, and some Dungeness crab legs. Okay?”

  “Perfect,” Pete said. She sat down and poured a glass of Dom.

  Otto picked up his flute without missing a beat, and they clinked glasses.

  “What’s he working on?” Pete asked.

  “Whenever your hubby gets a premo, Otto goes into high gear,” Mary said over her shoulder. She gave a little deprecating shrug, which had become her signature gesture whenever she didn’t have any real answer.

  “Has he gotten anything?”

  “Nada,” Otto said. “Lots of crap going down all over the place, as usual, but nothing that would directly affect Mac.”

  It was good news. “Is he at the apartment?”

  “He had the cab drop him off at the end of the street.”

  Pete knew exactly what he was thinking. It was one of the lessons the recruits at the Farm were given. “It’s almost always better to be safe than sorry.”

  Almost always one of the trainees at the CIA’s boot camp made some quip to the effect that they were in the wrong business to think about staying safe. And no one offered an argument.

  * * *

  Slatkin’s hobby when he had been a kid in Jo’burg was magic. He’d begun when he was six by putting on shows for his parents, grandmother, and two cousins, who all lived in the one-bedroom shack of a house just down from the prison complex on Constitution Hill.

  Later, when he’d perfected some of his sleight of hand illusions, he put on shows during assemblies at school. And he’d become quite good. Plus, the talent had stuck with him.

  Let them see the truth but direct their attention to something else.

  He checked the sight picture through the assault rifle scope again; it was never wrong to recheck everything as often as possible. Perfection was the difference between success and failure. The target reticle was centered on the window across the street at about the height of a man’s chest.

  McGarvey would approach his apartment building with caution because something had evidently spooked him. Or he would turn away and possibly alert the authorities. But alert them to what?

  Slatkin got up and went to his attaché case lying on the table in front of the couch and took out a roll of plastic tape, three inches wide, along with a glass cutter and suction cup on a short handle.

  These he took back to the window, where he laid the tape on the sill and, first checking to make sure that no one was out on the street, attached the suction cup to the window at the spot directly in line with the muzzle of the M16 and cut out a piece of glass two inches tall and as wide.

  Quickly laying the glass aside, he pulled off a piece of clear tape and covered the opening.

  From outside, especially at the distance from the street and from the front entrance to McGarvey’s building, the plastic covering the hole in the window would be all but invisible. You looked up and saw a window, nothing more.

  Settling down in the chair, he put his eye to the scope. He could not detect the plastic tape. But now, the bullet would not have to pass through glass, which could possibly—though not likely—deflect its path, making it necessary to fire a second shot.

  A bit of sleight of hand to nudge up the accuracy.

  Slatkin had considered all the options almost from the beginning of the assignment and especially when he had delved into McGarvey’s background.

  * * *

  McGarvey’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. It was Otto.

  “Are you still in place?”

  “There’s nothing here. I’m getting set to go in. Has Pete showed up?”

  “Yeah. You want to talk to her? She’s sitting right next to me.”

  “No.”

  “My darlings are showing nothing. No tints.”

  Otto’s programs, which displayed results on whatever monitor he was using, would change color depending on immediate threats. Lavender was the worst. No color meant nothing imminent was about to come down around them.

  “Okay.”

  “Kirk,” Pete broke in. “Make a one-eighty and take a cab back here. I’ll call Housekeeping to make a sweep of the neighborhood.”

  Housekeeping was the general term for the CIA’s off-campus security teams. Sometimes they were sent out to sanitize a shot-up or damaged scene of a battle, something at which they were especially good. At other times, they would consist of a team of three or four operators, who would go into a locale to check for threats. They might come as plumbers or air-conditioning specialists, or sometimes as deliverymen—FedEx, USPS, a florist.

  The point of the teams was not only to ensure the safety of a principal operator if need be but to keep an incident or possible incident out of the hands of local law enforcement.

  “Not yet,” Mac said. “I’m going to drop my bag off and get a few things at the apartment and I’ll come over. I thought you and Mary were working on the wedding details.”

  “They have it covered.”

  “Anyway, Otto’s cooperating for a change,” Mary said. “We’re doing it here tomorrow. Our chaplain is coming over at nine.”

  “Audie?”

  “We sent her down to the Farm for a day or two,” Mary said.

  The Farm was the CIA training facility outside of Williamsburg, where they sent her if trouble was brewing.

  “So grab your things and get over here. I bought four bottles of champers, and we need some help dealing with it.”

  “And watch your ass,” Pete added.

  * * *

  McGarvey walked back up to where Dumbarton dead-ended just past Twenty-Seventh Street NW, where he waited for a light gray Caddy SUV just passing his apartment to turn right, and then he went across.

  It was a weekday, so most people who lived here were at work, and the street was almost empty of parked cars. By long-ingrained habit, he scanned the cars that were at the curbs out of the corner of his eye, looking for something, anything that seemed out of the ordinary—the rooftops and windows of all the buildings, especially those across the street from his apartment.

  But there was nothing. And he felt as if he should settle down. Nothing at the airport. Nothing on the way in. Nothing here on the street.

  Yet every one of his senses was jangling as if he had been connected to a sharp electrical current.

  THREE

  Slatkin instinctively sat back when he spotted McGarvey walking up the street as if he hadn’t a care in the world, looking neither left nor right, just straight ahead. Yet he had gotten out of the cab at the end of the street and had waited for something, or someone.

  The expediter had promised an eye in the sky, which Slatkin had taken to mean a directable surveillance camera on the roof of one of the buildings in the neighborhood. In the past several days, he had spotted three possibilities, but it had been more than sufficient that his contact had had real-time intel from the beginning.

  Using a second burner phone, he called the contact number, which was answered on the first ring as usual. “Yes.”

  “He just showed up.”

  “Has he spotted you?”

  “No.”

  “Wait for your shot.”

  “Of co
urse. Otherwise, the police would arrive possibly too quickly for me to get clear. I will wait as planned for him to appear at his window. The shot will be silenced, and it will be thirty minutes or more before his wife or friends become concerned.”

  “There will be no second payment for failure.”

  “Naturally. Have you been able to crack the encryption algorithm on his phone?”

  “Unfortunately not, but we’re keeping clear for the time being.”

  “Why?” Slatkin demanded. “The intelligence could be extremely helpful.”

  “It would appear to be the work of the CIA,” the expediter said. “Can you do this simple job for us?”

  McGarvey had reached his building, and he was unlocking the lobby door.

  The possibility that the man’s telephone was equipped with an encryption program designed by the CIA came as no real surprise. At one time, he had been the director of the Company, and his best friend was the leading computer expert on the planet.

  One good circumstance had come as a pleasant surprise. McGarvey and his wife had left Dulles in separate cabs. The assignment was to assassinate only McGarvey. The man’s wife was a highly trained and well-experienced intelligence operator in her own right. Taking her out at the same time as her husband would have upped the difficulty by more than double.

  “Of course I can,” he said, and he hung up.

  * * *

  The lobby door was framed by two narrow strips of glass. McGarvey stood to one side and glanced out at the building across the street. As he had walked up the street, he had noticed something not right out of the corner of his eye. The reflections in the two windows of the third floor were not the same. One of them appeared to have a small flat spot about halfway up from the sill.

  From this vantage point, however, he couldn’t make out the difference. It had been noticeable only from the oblique angle down the street.

  But he’d seen it, and he had a pretty fair idea what it might be.

  His phone vibrated, and he answered it. “Yes.”

  “You’re in,” Otto said. “No one took a potshot at you?”

  “Something’s wrong with one of the windows in the third-floor apartment across the street. Might be nothing. But it could be something I’ve seen once before. I’m going to check it out.”

  “What something?” Pete asked.

  “Could be a hole in the window with a piece of plastic covering it. Reflects the light differently than glass. Saw it in Mutoko when I was still in the air force. It was rumored that a Soviet military attack was going to take place during a meeting in one of the hotels. The Premier, maybe. Anyway, the shooter was stationed across the street. He cut a hole in his window and covered it with Saran Wrap so no one would notice it from the street. When he took the shot, the bullet’s trajectory hadn’t been degraded by going through glass.”

  “Got it,” Otto said. “Colonel Vasili Didenko. He was there in secret to offer training to the South African Air Force. The rumor was that the shooter was a South African. Something internal.”

  “Someone didn’t want Zimbabwe playing with the Russians,” Mary said.

  “The hit was a success, and the shooter was never found,” Otto said. “But there’s nothing here about a hole in the window.”

  “I was there with three other guys bird-dogging the meeting. It was one of those little odd bits that showed up as a one-liner in our after-action report. And it showed up again eight or nine years later in a training exercise at the Farm. It’s the only reason I remember it now.”

  “So what the hell does some South African shooter want with you now?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” McGarvey said.

  “I had a feeling you were going to say that,” Pete said. “I don’t suppose you’d stay put until I get there?”

  “It’ll be over by then.”

  “I thought you’d say that, too. Keep your ass down, sweetheart.”

  * * *

  The image of McGarvey’s head at the narrow window beside the door appeared briefly in Slatkin’s scope. His finger tightened on the trigger, but the American was gone.

  After several moments, he re-aimed the rifle so that it was once again pointed at the left of the two third-story windows across the street, and he sat back.

  Besides his magic, Slatkin was blessed with a much higher tolerance for conditions outside his control, which had always manifested itself in an extraordinary amount of patience. He could sit on point, waiting for a subject to appear in his sniper scope for hours without looking away.

  He had no idea where that inner resolve had come from; it had been inside of him for as long as he could remember. In fact, he was often surprised when he learned that the subject he was facing wasn’t also made of the same stuff.

  But the question at hand now was McGarvey, no ordinary man by any account, and a highly competent and accomplished assassin in his own right. Why had the man looked through the lobby windows? If it was because he thought that an assassin had been waiting for him—and the record that Slatkin had dug up indicated that numerous attempts had been made on McGarvey’s life—why had he walked up the street in plain view as if he hadn’t a care in the world?

  Everyone lived by a certain code or directive, which could be put down to mere habit. Each person did their unique thing.

  What was McGarvey’s? And what was the man up to?

  Slatkin sat forward in his chair so that he could look through the scope. His thing now and always was perseverance.

  * * *

  McGarvey took the stairs up to the third floor two at a time, stopping at each landing to listen for anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. Everyone was at work or out of town.

  He checked the lock at his door before he let himself in, but there was no evidence of tampering.

  Just inside the living room, he moved toward the short corridor past the kitchenette, keeping well enough away from the two front windows so that he presented no clear shooting solution, only a very brief silhouette.

  In the bedroom, he got his Walther PPK in the rare 9mm version, loaded a magazine in the handle, attached the suppressor onto the muzzle, and cycled a round into the firing chamber.

  Stuffing the pistol into his belt at the small of his back beneath his jacket, he passed through the living room again, and downstairs, keeping well away from the door windows in the lobby, he went to the rear door into the narrow alley.

  Maybe there was nothing to it. He thought there was, though he had no idea who would be gunning for him this time or why.

  But he was going to find out.

  FOUR

  Pete, driving Mary’s Honda, the Glock 24 pistol Otto had loaned her lying on the passenger seat, crossed the Key Bridge, weaving her way through traffic, not giving a damn if a cop got on her tail for speeding. She wouldn’t mind leading the entire D.C. police force to Dumbarton. Someone was gunning for her husband, and she would take all the help she could get. Mac would be pissed, but she’d make it up to him.

  Otto came on the phone. “He’s not answering.”

  “Means he’s busy,” Pete said. “Leave him alone.”

  “Do you want me to pull the trigger?” Otto asked. Before Pete had stormed out of the house, he had composed an urgent all-stations message that a gun battle was about to go down in Georgetown. All that was needed was for him to hit the Send key.

  “I want to see what the situation is. I’ll let you know.”

  “Watch your own ass,” Mary said.

  “Will do,” Pete said, making a very hard right onto busy M Street NW, just missing a brown UPS van.

  Six blocks later, she headed north on Wisconsin Avenue, then right on Dumbarton a little more than four blocks to their apartment, traffic back here nonexistent for the moment.

  She pulled over and parked in time to see Mac coming around the near corner from their place, crossing the street and keeping close to the buildings on the right side, head toward the middle
of the block.

  Keeping the pistol at her side, the muzzle pointed away from her leg, she started after him on foot.

  * * *

  Slatkin had caught only the brief glimpse of McGarvey in the lobby door window, and a fleeting shadow of the man in his apartment window, but then nothing else. And that had been nearly ten minutes ago. He was starting to worry.

  He phoned his contact, but the number warbled, and a recorded announcement said that the number was no longer in service. He’d been cut loose for some reason.

  How loose, though?

  Using his iPhone, he brought up his Guernsey Island bank account and entered the ten-digit password. The last blind deposit of $250,000 that had been made twenty-five days ago was still in place, making his total available balance slightly more than $1.75 million. His expediter had not withdrawn the funds. The operation, despite the misgivings he’d shared with his contact, was still on. When it was finished and the second half of the payment was made he would be nearly halfway to the $5 million he figured he’d need to retire.

  He looked up and leaned forward, his eye to the scope, but at that moment, a Mercedes passed, and he caught the reflection of a woman in the rear passenger window. She was on the sidewalk just below on this side of the street.

  The woman was unknown to him, and yet she seemed familiar.

  With the car gone, he could no longer see her. But her image nagged at him.

  He pulled up the file stored on his laptop. Part of it had been sent to him from his expediter, but a large part of it he’d gleaned from his research over the past week or so. Scrolling through it, starting with McGarvey, then moving on to Otto Rencke and his now deceased wife, Louise Horn, he came to one of the later files, which showed two images of McGarvey’s partner and his new wife, Pete Boylan.

  Looking up from the two photographs—one of her coming out of the CIA’s main gate in Langley—he was 100 percent certain that the woman whose reflection he’d seen in the window of the Mercedes was she.