Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

  “What’d I miss?” she asked.

  “Sir Edmund Hanson, MI6,” McGarvey said. “He’s been chief liaison officer with us since I was DCI. Good man. We gave him a quick précis of what’s going on, and the name of the service’s military logistics planner from Otto’s list.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “Skeptical, like the others, but he said he’d do a follow-up.”

  Pete glanced at the clock. “It’s five in the morning in London. He couldn’t have been very happy to get your call.”

  “He was already at his desk.”

  “Who’s next?” Pete asked.

  “We’ve saved the best two for last,” Otto said. “Ready?”

  McGarvey nodded, and Otto put through a call to the private number of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It was two in the afternoon in Pyongyang. Like the other calls it was on speakerphone; the conversations fed into several voice-analysis programs that confirmed the identity of the person as well as their level of stress.

  After two rings the man answered in Korean, “Ye.” Yes.

  “Good afternoon, Supreme Leader. My name is Kirk McGarvey and I’m calling from Washington, D.C.”

  If Kim was flustered it wasn’t apparent. “My father spoke kindly of you,” he said in reasonable English. “Tell me the reason for your unexpected call.”

  “It concerns our new president and one of your intelligence officers, Choe Jang-yop.”

  “I don’t know this name.”

  “He is part of a consortium of mid-level intelligence officers around the globe who mean to discredit our president by reporting false preparations for military action to force him into making mistakes. Including orders you supposedly gave to invade the South very soon.”

  “Although the thought continues to cross our mind, I gave no such order.”

  “We didn’t think so.”

  “This consortium has American officers involved?”

  “Yes, sir. At this moment they are in custody.”

  “You are speaking about treason.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And the other governments?”

  “All have been informed except for Russia.”

  “They have agreed to cooperate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then so shall I,” Kim said. “The war may very well be forced upon us, but not soon and not in this manner.”

  “Thank you, sir,” McGarvey said, but Kim had already broken the connection.

  * * *

  It was just past eight in the morning in Moscow when General Leonid Zotov, deputy chairman of the SVR, answered his telephone. He too was already at his office on the Ring Road outside the city.

  During McGarvey’s tenure as deputy director of operations, and as the DCI, Zotov had been a rising star, and he and McGarvey had become, if not friends, at least amicable enemies. On a trip to Moscow he and Mac had met face-to-face for the first and only time, and had struck up an agreement that if everything was going to hell, they would talk and try to defuse the situation.

  “We are the fail-safes,” Zotov had toasted at dinner.

  “Let’s hope we never have to act,” McGarvey had said.

  “I was expecting your call, Mr. Director,” Zotov said. “And before you ask, we have placed Major Rankov and one of his co-conspirators in the Spetsnaz under arrest. And we are definitely not going to attack Hungary, as you may have heard. It was ludicrous from the start.”

  “How did you know about it?”

  “From an associate, but there is a complication, my friend. Rankov and the others he worked with were planning on having you assassinated. But it was not them who planted a bomb in your car in Florida. It was another group who wants you dead. And presumably still does.”

  “That’s also my understanding,” McGarvey said.

  “Then good hunting.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  The limo driver dropped Kamal off in front of an expensive apartment building on Lexington just above East 47th Street. Pastor Buddy’s jet had landed at Teterboro Airport across the river in New Jersey just after midnight, forty-five minutes ago, and the limo had been waiting for him.

  The driver took Kamal’s roll-about and laptop bag from the trunk. “I hope you have a key, sir, no doorman here this late.”

  “I have friends expecting me,” Kamal said and he handed the man a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Thank you, sir. Will you be needing my services over the weekend?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The driver gave him a business card. “I’m available twenty-four/seven.”

  “I’ll keep you in mind.”

  Kamal shouldered Tepping’s laptop case and took his bag to the front door, where he looked directly into the security camera and rang the buzzer for the condominiums 15 A and B.

  The madam, whose only name was Kiko, answered on the first ring. “Good evening, Mr. O’Neal, welcome back.”

  “Can you accommodate me for a couple days?”

  “Certainly. And Sushi is here now. She’ll be very happy to see you, if she is your desire?”

  “She’ll do fine.”

  The door lock buzzed and Kamal went inside and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, where an attractive Japanese woman in her midforties was waiting at a door, dressed in a brightly patterned silk kimono.

  She stepped aside to let him into a large, plushly decorated suite of rooms that included a sauna, several Jacuzzis, a couple of small but comfortable lounges and a half-dozen bedrooms where the clients were serviced by Kiko’s staff of four girls, all of them in their twenties, all of them beautiful, even exotic, and all of them extremely well trained in all of the sexual arts. Next to Pastor Buddy’s girls, Kiko’s women were from a completely different planet.

  “I received your generous fee along with the package sent for you,” Kiko said.

  Kamal had wired $10,000 U.S. into her account. “I’ll expect complete discretion, as before,” he said.

  “Anything else would be impossible.”

  “First I’ll need a bath, then a massage. Afterwards I’ll want a bottle of Krug—very cold—some Beluga, and perhaps pickles and a good dark bread.”

  “Do you wish to be alone for your meal?”

  “No. I’d like Sushi to stay with me for the rest of this evening and tomorrow. But I’ll be going out sometime during the day, for how long I don’t know. When I return I would like something very nice for an early dinner. Something French, I think. But I’ll let you decide.”

  * * *

  The bath was hot, the champagne was cold, the caviar outstanding and Sushi outdid herself. He sent her away sometime before three, took a shower, then got a few hours of sleep.

  He was up by seven, when he got dressed in a pair of light gray slacks, and a shoulder holster over a white shirt. He inspected his Glock subcompact pistol, but before he holstered it he had the thought that if he got into a gunfight his Grand Central op would have to be canceled.

  But without a means of self-defense he could be subject to arrest. It was something he simply would not allow, even if it meant he had to give up his life to avoid it.

  He holstered the pistol, then opened the package that had been sent to him from the madrassa in west Texas. Besides the two kilos of Semtex and a detonator, the imam Shadid had acquired and included a set of New York City credentials that Kamal inspected and then pocketed.

  He put on a black blazer, let himself out and walked over to Park Avenue, where he got a cab to take him out to JFK.

  “What airline, sir?” the cabby asked.

  “Air France, arrivals. I’m meeting someone. I have to be there by ten.”

  The morning was brightening, and traffic leaving the city was light.

  Both Air France and Delta had flights coming in from Paris at a quarter after ten, which would be perfect for his operation. He had a decent chance of getting back to the city by noon, if he got lucky with his dry run this morning. And he hoped for the same luck tomorro
w morning.

  The driver let him off at Terminal 1 at five after ten, and Kamal tipped him well but not extravagantly. Big tippers and cheap tippers were always remembered the most accurately.

  Air France flight 22 had landed almost fifteen minutes early, and Delta 1022 was due on time at ten-sixteen.

  The first-class Air France passengers began to straggle in after clearing customs. Most of them were businessmen, but there were several couples and two lone women. But not who he wanted.

  The business class were next, with the same results, but a few minutes later a woman pushing a baby carriage came through the doors, and eight passengers later a man and a woman pushing a baby carriage showed up.

  It was enough for him.

  He went down to where the Delta passengers would show up for ground transportation, but this time there was no one pushing a baby carriage.

  By eleven he was in a cab heading back into the city.

  Both aircraft would be serviced and would turn around for their flights back to Paris at seven in the evening, and then return Sunday morning after ten. It was a never-ending cycle that was only interrupted by weather or by an act of terrorism.

  The cabby dropped him off at the New York Public Library, where he used a computer to check on the weather over the Atlantic for the next twenty-four hours. There were some high cirrus clouds and some precipitation at a lower altitude around thirty degrees east longitude—halfway between Paris and New York—and some intermittent weather just south of Labrador. But nothing was predicted that would interfere with transatlantic flights.

  He walked the four blocks to Grand Central Station, where he had a light lunch of raw oysters, toast points and a half bottle of inexpensive but fairly decent Joseph Drouhin Vaudon Chablis in the Oyster Bar.

  One of the two policewomen sitting at the kiosk just down the corridor from the 42nd Street entrance had smiled and winked at him as he passed. “Have a good day now,” she said.

  “You too, hon,” Kamal had replied, returning her wink. Gross pig, he’d thought.

  Had he not been dressed well, had he not shaved in the past several days, had he looked down or away and had not smiled and returned the cop’s greeting, he might have been stopped. American cops profiled every person they saw, day or night, anywhere, anytime. It was a fact of law enforcement procedure, because it worked.

  By the same token, it was ridiculously easy to defeat. Shave, dress decently, smile, make eye contact. Even make a joke or a pleasantry from time to time.

  Kamal was an assassin here to walk through the murder not only of an innocent child in a stroller, but if his luck held, perhaps as many as fifty or one hundred travelers going to or coming from their trains.

  After lunch he walked out into the main hall, then upstairs to the Lexington Avenue exit. He took his time strolling around the corner and down the block to the Grand Hyatt, where he had a drink at the lounge two levels above the street.

  He’d stayed at this hotel a number of times over the past couple of years, and it amused him to return—for the last time—on the chance someone might recognize him. Someone on the staff he’d tipped well. Maybe someone at the front desk, or maybe even McGarvey himself.

  He was tempting fate, of course. Perhaps he would have to kill one of them. Just for the pleasure of it.

  He would never come back to the States. He would either retire in France or somewhere else, maybe Thailand.

  Or he would be dead within twenty-four hours.

  The thing of it—which surprised him—was that he really didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  McGarvey and Pete spent the morning in Otto’s office searching for any loose ends, but everything seemed to be in order. All of the possible flash point problems had been taken care of, even the one between the DPRK and South Korea. But they were still missing something, and Mac said so.

  “Zotov told me that someone else was gunning for me,” he said.

  “We know that,” Otto replied. “Which is why you and Page are going to see the president at one.”

  “Hatchett wasn’t in Beijing to stir up trouble between China and Taiwan,” McGarvey said. “Chunwang would have mentioned him.” Xu Chungwang was a deputy chief of Guoanbu’s Military Intelligence Directorate.

  During McGarvey’s brief tenure as DCI, the man had been number three in the Chinese agency’s North American Directorate. They’d never been friends, but they sometimes shared carefully scripted intel that could have an impact on both countries.

  They’d often been in the position of having to withhold information, but they’d never lied to each other.

  “We never thought that he was,” Pete said. “Your guess that he was trying to stir up some other sort of trouble here in the States, that Weaver would take care of, making him look presidential, still holds.”

  “And it’s a good bet he hired al-Daran to arrange whatever,” Otto said.

  “And to assassinate Mac.”

  “It’s the whatever that bothers me,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  Page’s secretary called to have McGarvey meet for lunch at eleven in the small conference room next to the DCI’s office. Otto and Pete had not been invited, but Carleton Patterson was there.

  “Weaver is bound to have some heavy guns with him; so will you,” Page said when McGarvey came in and sat down.

  “I’m going to push him, so maybe you and Carleton should let me go it alone.”

  “Presidents have a habit of being touchy when pushed,” Carleton said. “But they tend to behave themselves if there are enough witnesses at hand.”

  Page was looking at McGarvey. “You tried to warn him at Camp David and according to you he practically went ballistic. The famous Weaver temper. And if I’ve got this correct, you plan on hitting him with the same charge. What do you think will be any different this time? Do you have anything new?”

  McGarvey shook his head. “Just a hunch that whatever is going to happen will go down very soon.”

  “But according to you, my dear boy, whoever planned these—let’s call them dirty tricks for the sake of argument—have plans to stop them and give the credit to the president’s sharp thinking.”

  And that was the one thing that had bothered McGarvey almost from the beginning. Only now he had it. He slapped his palm on the table. “Son of a bitch.”

  The server bringing lunch stopped at the door, and Page waved him away.

  “What?”

  “They hired al Nassr to kill me so that I wouldn’t figure out what Hatchett and whoever is with him were planning to do. But they also hired the man to set up whatever dirty tricks they had cooked up.”

  “It’d give them some plausible deniability,” Page said. “They could claim that al-Daran was working alone to get his revenge against you because of what happened in New York. And if what you’re saying is true, they gave him a strict timetable. It was the only way that they would have enough control over the operation to stop it.”

  “And he knows it,” McGarvey said. “He won’t stick with their timetable.”

  * * *

  The meeting was in the Oval Office. The president, his jacket off, tie loose, stood perched against the front of his desk, his expression unreadable.

  With him, seated on one of the Queen Anne couches facing the coffee table, were his chief of staff Martha Draper, a stern-looking woman in a three-piece suit, and his personal lawyer, Leonard Berliner, a tall slender man with white hair, also dressed in a three-piece suit. Seated on the other couch across from them were the president’s adviser on national security affairs, Chester Watts, in a jacket, no tie, and his deputy, Ron Hatchett, a husky man with the look of old money and the Ivy League: boat shoes, jeans and a blazer with some crest on the breast pocket.

  There were no places for McGarvey, Page and Patterson to sit.

  “Good afternoon, Leonard,” Patterson said.

  “Afternoon, Carleton, I thought you’d be retired by now
.”

  “Me too.”

  “We’ll make this meeting very brief,” the president said. “When we’re done here I’ll expect your resignation, Walt.”

  “You can have it now, Mr. President,” Page said.

  “And charges of interfering with the duties of the president of the United States and his staff will be filed against you, Mr. McGarvey.”

  “Fine,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime, Mr. President, let’s try to save some lives.”

  “Proceed,” Weaver said tightly

  “Two officers in the Pentagon have been in contact since November with middle-ranking officers from more than a dozen intelligence agencies around the world. Many of them our allies, but some, like the Russians and North Koreans, no friends of ours. The plan they developed was to create a series of disinformation operations that would give credence to serious problems at various flash points around the world. Between China and Taiwan. Pakistan and India. Israel and most of her Arab neighbors. North and South Korea. Major ISIS attacks in Germany, France, England and Turkey.”

  Hatchett was clearly uncomfortable, but the president was unmoved.

  “The point of the exercise was to blindside you with so many problems, most likely all of them coming within a twenty-four- to thirty-six-hour window, that there would be nothing you could do that would turn out to be the right thing.”

  Still Weaver said nothing.

  “They wanted to make you look so incompetent that Congress would have no other recourse than to start impeachment proceedings.”

  “Who are these fucking … these bastards?” Weaver demanded.

  “The two officers were arrested by the FBI,” McGarvey said. “They’ll be charged with treason. That situation has been defused.”

  “We’ll need what evidence you’ve gathered,” Berliner said.

  “It’s being sent via courier to your office as we speak,” Patterson said. “The AG has copies as well.”

  “Then we’re finished?” the president’s chief of staff asked.

  “No, sir,” McGarvey said. He turned to Hatchett. “You recently took a secret trip to Beijing, but it was not under the president’s orders, nor did you meet with any Chinese government official.”