Gambit Page 3

  And if she were here, downstairs, in front of the building, it could very easily mean that McGarvey was downstairs, too. Or perhaps even inside already.

  Setting the computer aside, he detached the scope from the rifle, laid it on the table next to the phone and his pistol, then removed the rifle from its tripod and stepped into the relative shadows at the narrow hallway back to the bathroom and bedroom from where he had a perfect line of sight to anyone coming through the door.

  He settled his nerves and reduced his thoughts from the past and the future into the here and now, willing to hold his position for however long it took.

  McGarvey and his wife were coming, and he would kill them both.

  * * *

  McGarvey held up short on the second stair just below the third-floor landing and cocked his ear for a long moment to listen to the sounds of the building.

  The lobby door had been opened and then immediately closed. He’d had heard the street noises, a horn somewhere off in the near distance, and maybe the slight breeze ruffling the trees in front.

  He waited for one of the downstairs apartment doors to open, but someone started up the stairs, their footfalls very light as if they were trying for stealth.

  The last thing he wanted was to involve an innocent civilian in a shoot-out, but he was caught between whoever was coming up the stairs and a possible shooter just down the hall on this floor.

  He also didn’t want to engage a shooter in a gun battle in which he didn’t have the clear advantage. He had no real fear for himself, but if he were the target for an assassination, he wanted to take the hit man alive—wounded most likely, but still living—so that he could find out who the bastard was. Who had sent him.

  His best guess right now would be the Russians for a couple of ops he’d done recently involving their people.

  Whoever was coming up the stairs stopped on the second-floor landing, but then continued up.

  Mac started down, keeping his pistol out of sight at his side.

  The person below stopped.

  Mac took one step more, and then he smelled a perfume that he recognized. Joy by Jean Patou. He had bought it for Pete when they were in Paris a couple of years ago just before they got married. It had become her favorite.

  At the turn, he came face-to-face with Pete, who’d raised her pistol, and he put a finger to his lips.

  He waited for a couple of beats for her to calm down, and then he went down the last steps to her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

  “I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun.”

  It was a typical Pete explanation, but it was too late now to send her away. “The front apartment, facing ours. Could be more than one, but I doubt it.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “You’re going to act as backstop. Anyone gets past me, take them down.”

  She started to object, but he held her off.

  “I have no real idea who wants me or why, so I want to take whoever it is alive if possible.”

  “Not at the expense of your life, goddamnit.”

  * * *

  Slatkin expected that it was the woman from outside—McGarvey’s wife—who was on the stairs. He opened the door a crack. He thought he could hear her voice. It was possible that she was talking on the phone, because there was nothing to indicate that McGarvey himself knew something was wrong.

  Evidently, his contact had been blown, which was why the man had not answered the last call. It could possibly mean that the cops were on the way here, or worse yet, a Housekeeping squad from Langley could be on the way. But if he had to guess, he suspected that McGarvey himself was still across the street in his apartment.

  Time to find out.

  He eased the door open a little farther and slipped out into the corridor in sock feet, leading with the silenced M16 on full automatic.

  FIVE

  Otto had ignored the glass of champagne at his side for the past fifteen minutes, trying with no real results to come up with some new angles for his darlings to pursue. On the assumption that the shooter across from Mac’s apartment was the South African who had, so far as they knew, used the trick of cutting a hole in a window and covering it with plastic, he’d gone looking for any other bits and pieces that would identify the man. That, of course, was assuming a shooter was in the apartment.

  So far, his programs had come up with nearly half a dozen possibilities, three of them from the Special Forces Brigade, one of the others a cop, and the fifth a paratrooper who had been discharged for being intoxicated while on duty. In fact, he had been drunk doing a dangerous HALO—high altitude, low opening—parachute jump.

  The cop was dead, the paratrooper was serving time in prison for statutory rape, but the three shooters from the Recces were still at large. The interesting part was that the three specialists were not wanted for any crime, though they were suspected of a number of assassinations—but none of them on South African soil. They were clean, because they were professionals.

  Using those last-known identities, plus a broad list of assassinations anywhere in the world other than South Africa, he went looking at offshore bank accounts in Europe and the Caribbean, matching large deposits that bracketed dates before and after each hit. He couldn’t come up with names, only the deposits.

  One had come three weeks before the hit on the Russian in Zimbabwe, and the second half—if that’s what it was—twenty-four hours after the Russian had been taken out.

  Using the same bank account in Guernsey, he looked for other before-and-after payments that matched other assassinations. He came up with five that matched, plus one for $250,000 that had been made three weeks ago.

  The date matched no assassination, because the hit had not been made yet. And Otto was convinced that the total of a half million was to take Mac down.

  All he lacked now was the name of the South African shooter and from where the payment had originated.

  * * *

  Slatkin flattened himself against the wall a few feet from the stairs and held his breath to listen for voices or any other sounds from below. But the building was deathly still.

  He held the M16 loosely in both hands, the muzzle of the suppressor pointed up toward the ceiling. Breathing deeply to calm himself, he was about to swivel on his heel while bringing the assault rifle to bear on anything that moved below, when he smelled a woman’s perfume and held up.

  * * *

  Mary came around the counter and refreshed Otto’s glass as she looked over his shoulder at the laptop screen. “What are you into?”

  “I’m trying to match the dates of assassinations worldwide with before-and-after payments made to a dozen different Swiss and offshore accounts. I came up with one set of payments to a bank in Guernsey, the last one made three weeks ago, but it’s still open.”

  “No second payment?”

  “Right,” Otto said.

  “Who’s the shooter? Mac’s South African?”

  “It’s possible, but I’m not sure yet.”

  “No name yet?”

  “No.”

  “Because you can’t gain access to the account details, only the raw income stream,” Mary said. “And in the meantime, Pete and Mac are in harm’s way right now, or on the verge of it.”

  Otto looked up. “What are you thinking?”

  “This guy’s got to be on someone’s radar.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ve been concentrating on income to that account. How about expenditures? What’s he spending his money on?”

  “And how much does he have?” Otto said.

  “My guess is that he’s building himself a nest egg so that he can retire. The question is where.”

  “He already knows where,” Otto said, excited now.

  “Right, and he’s made a down payment on his little beach hut in the sun,” Mary said. “But Mac and Pete might be able to use some help right now.”

  “I’m on it.”

  * * *


  Pete stood next to Mac and one stair tread down, her pistol pointed past him toward the head of the stairs.

  Mac leaned down to her so that he could whisper in her ear. “Start downstairs when I nod, and make some noise.”

  She looked skeptically at him.

  “I want to draw him out.”

  Pete’s phone vibrated, and Mary came on the speakerphone.

  “Your shooter is South African. The Recces. He’s the one who took out the Russian military attaché in Mutoko. The same window glass trick Mac spotted. Thing is, we have his Guernsey account, which he’s stocking to finance his retirement. And he’s already paid a hundred thousand down on a beach-front condo in Saint Martin—the Dutch side.”

  McGarvey pointed a finger at his chest and shook his head, then crouched down and raised his pistol in a two-hand grip aimed at the head of the stairs.

  “Do you have a name?” Pete asked.

  “We’re working on it. Otto’s into the Fifth Special Forces Regiment database now. We have him narrowed down to one of three Recces operators.”

  “Okay, no need for a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Mac’s watching from our apartment; I’m going over there now to let him know what we’ve got. Maybe we can talk this guy down. Find out who financed him this time. We might be able to make some sort of a deal.”

  “Watch your back,” Otto came on. “This guy probably has no stomach for a face-to-face match. He’ll want to shoot you from behind. He’s a fucking coward. All of his stripe are.”

  * * *

  Slatkin was doing his best to control his rage. The bloody bastards knew! And at this point, he no longer had the backup of his contact. Everything he had worked for: the risks he had taken; the isolation from the few comrades-in-arms whom he had considered his friends; the one girl he had fallen in love with, and who he had planned on looking up once he was settled on Saint Martin, were gone. All of it.

  He no longer had patience.

  His only option now was to kill the woman and hunt down the man so that he could get his final payment and go to ground somewhere else.

  But if they had somehow gotten to his Guernsey account, it was possible they could seize it, and everything would be gone.

  He heard the woman on the stairs, and he swiveled around, bringing the assault rifle to bear when McGarvey was there.

  Before he could pull the trigger, McGarvey fired and kept firing.

  The first two shots hit Slatkin in his right knee and hip, sending him backward off-balance. By reflex alone, he fired a long burst, but the muzzle was pointed upward, the bullets plowing into the plaster ceiling.

  The next shot hit his groin, spiraling upward into his abdomen with an incredible burst of pain, and his lights went out, his last conscious thought about Elena.

  SIX

  Thomas Bell, who was Slatkin’s contact for the entire project, called the Hay-Adams room service and had a bottle of Dom Pérignon and four ounces of beluga caviar delivered to his room, posthaste. He was in a mood to celebrate.

  If all had gone as expected, he would be flying to Athens this evening, top shelf, of course, on his mysterious employer’s nickel to set up the second stage of THE OP, as he had come to think of it, in all-capital letters.

  Until two months ago, he had been the number-two manager of the Palais d’Amour, the newest, most luxurious of all the casinos in Las Vegas. His specialty was making things happen for the high rollers. Women, of course, but also accommodations, transportation day or night to or from anyplace on the planet, private parties, food, drink, anything, even the outrageous—such as a trained female llama to room 2127 last year.

  He’d never known his father, but his doting mother had been the madame of an upscale bordello in the Hamptons, and from her, he had learned the art of immediate and unquestioning service.

  His champagne and caviar came. After he’d tipped the waiter, he phoned his contact, a woman with a sexy French accent. It sounded as if a party were in full swing in the background.

  “Oui?”

  “It’s done.”

  “The outcome was as we’d hoped?”

  “McGarvey entered the building first, and his wife came a few minutes later. Her being there was an unexpected bonus. Two for one. Considering the firepower Leonard had and the fact he was on high ground, they never had a chance.”

  “It’s not exactly how we wanted it, but it’ll do,” the woman said.

  Something about her voice was familiar, but Bell had nailed her attitude from the first time they’d talked. She was ultrarich and accustomed to getting exactly what she wanted, when she wanted it. He knew the type. But he also expected that she was just an intermediary like him.

  “I’ll play it closer to the scenario that you ordered the next time,” he said.

  “Yes, you will,” she said, and she rang off.

  Bell sat back and considered if he should turn on his monitor to see if the police had arrived on scene yet, but he decided against it.

  * * *

  McGarvey had looked through the unconscious man’s pockets, finding only a hundred dollars in American bills, a wallet with a New York driver’s license in the name of Leonard Sampson, and nothing else.

  Inside the apartment, he was examining the piece of clear plastic covering the opening in the window when the four men got out of the van.

  “Incoming,” Pete called from the corridor.

  He went to the doorway. “Housekeeping?” he called down as the four started up.

  “Blakely and my crew, Mr. Director,” a man replied.

  “Come.”

  Pete holstered her pistol as Blakely appeared.

  McGarvey remembered him. “Bill, you guys got the jump on this situation.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Rencke gave us the heads-up, told us what to expect.” Blakely bent over the body and placed two fingers on the right-side carotid artery for a couple of moments, then spoke into a lapel mic. “Unit one. Need an ambulance stat, this location.”

  “I thought he was dead,” McGarvey said.

  Blakely looked up. “Almost, but not quite. I think you’ll have a couple of questions for him if we can bring him around.”

  The other three came up the stairs and assessed the situation.

  “Is there anything else, Mr. Director?” Blakely asked.

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll get to it. Have this place right as rain in thirty minutes. Easier that no one was in the building.”

  * * *

  McGarvey and Pete went across the street to their apartment, and as she got a couple of beers from the fridge, Mac stood at the windows, staring across at the other building.

  He had no idea why he had expected someone was coming after him, but now that the man had been taken out, he felt no relief. In fact, he was beginning to get the notion that today had been just the opening move.

  “Penny,” Pete said, bringing his beer.

  “It’s not over.”

  “He’s dead, or damned near. It’s over.”

  “Just the start.”

  “Okay, you have my attention, Mac. What’s eating you?”

  “Otto’s darlings have come up with nothing, yet here the bastard was. He knew where we lived, he knew we were out of town and when we were coming back.”

  “That’s a stretch.”

  “He wasn’t camped out. No food in the fridge. No dirty dishes. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Towels in the bathroom clean, none in the hamper. He got there this morning and waited for me to show up. He had eyes on our place.”

  “One of the rooftop surveillance cameras. His, or an assistant’s?”

  “I got his iPhone. Otto will probably find at least some of the answers.”

  “But?” Pete asked.

  “Takes money. If he turns out to be the South African contractor Otto thinks he is, whoever hired him has deep pockets.”

  “So who hired him? The Russians?”

  “Right now, I’m more interested in the why,” McGarvey said
.

  * * *

  Otto plugged Slatkin’s iPhone into his laptop. It had shut down automatically at some point, but one of his programs got past that switch and into the phone’s memory.

  “We’re in,” he said when the phone’s screen died. “Shit.”

  “What?” Mary asked at his side.

  A couple of line fragments, bits of code, appeared briefly on the laptop and then disappeared. Otto sat back and after a moment looked up at his wife-to-be. “The damned thing’s been erased. And it wasn’t a civilian program.”

  “No,” Mary said. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean this was a government assassination operation.”

  “What then?” Pete asked.

  “Either someone with connections or with a lot of money,” McGarvey said. They were gathered back in McLean at Otto’s safe house.

  “Or both,” Mary said.

  “Lou, let’s start a search following the parameters just now discussed.”

  “The obvious start point would be the SVR or GRU,” Lou’s AI voice said out of thin air just across the counter from them.

  Mary started to say something, but McGarvey interrupted.

  “Maybe not the Russians,” he said.

  Everyone turned to him. “Who, then?” Mary asked.

  “The Pentagon first, and then the White House.”

  SEVEN

  Slatkin had been taken to All Saints, the small, state-of-the-art-equipped private hospital that catered exclusively to wounded intelligence agents and in some cases high-value individuals.

  It was two in the morning when Dr. Alan Franklin, the chief medico for the three-story unit located in Georgetown just a few blocks from the McGarveys’ apartment, came out of the newly remodeled operating room on the third floor and down the hall to the waiting room where Mac and Pete were waiting.

  “He needs a new kidney and liver.”