The Cabal Read online

  It made him the next best target. Exactly what he wanted.

  . . .

  All Saints Hospital was on a quiet side street not far from Georgetown University Hospital, in an undistinguished four-story brownstone with the emergency entrance at the rear. No sirens were ever used, and the brass plaque next to the gate in front read Private.

  Security in the main lobby was outwardly low key, one plain-looking man, who happened to be a weapons and martial arts expert, behind a desk. In the facility’s forty-plus years there’d never been any sort of an incident, nevertheless everyone—doctors, nurses, aides, security officers—were on their toes. Always.

  The two Cadillacs drove through the electrically operated gate to the back, where the security officers got out first to make sure the parking area and emergency entrance were secured before they allowed McGarvey and his wife to get out of the lead car and hustle them inside. They were met by one of the nurses, a no-nonsense, severe-looking woman.

  “Good morning, Mr. Director,” she said. “Would you like something for Mrs. McGarvey before we go up?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “We want to see our daughter.”

  “Yes, sir. She’s on the fourth floor in the waiting room.”

  McGarvey motioned for his security team to stay behind and he helped Katy back to the elevator and up to the fourth floor and the waiting room just across the corridor.

  A stricken Elizabeth, dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers sat on a couch, Rencke’s wife, Louise, holding her shoulders. She looked up when her parents appeared in the doorway, and for a moment it seemed to McGarvey that she didn’t recognize them. But then she got up, slowly, like a tired old woman and came to them.

  McGarvey folded her into his arms and held her, silently, for a long time.

  “Oh, Daddy,” Elizabeth said softly, her voice husky, all the way from the back of her throat. “He looks so bad.”

  “Where’s Audie?”

  It took Liz a few moments to answer. “At the Farm, this is no place for her.”

  Katy had come out of her trance, and she moved McGarvey aside. “Go see to him,” she said.

  “He was assassinated,” Liz said. “Was it something he was working on? Do you know, because he didn’t say anything to me? Otto said he called you. But he never left a note. I was out on a field exercise, but I could have come into town with him. Maybe if I’d been there it could have been different.”

  “It was something new, but he didn’t know anything about it until he got up here,” McGarvey said. “He was just coming up to see an old friend for lunch.”

  “Who?”

  “Josh Givens. They were friends in college.”

  The name didn’t mean anything to Liz, and she shook her head. “Is he in the business?”

  “He was an investigative reporter with the Post.”

  Liz caught the past tense and her eyes hardened. “Did they get him, too?”

  “Yeah,” McGarvey said, a sudden great weariness mixing with a deep rage that wanted to consume his sense of reason.

  Liz and Katy and Louise were all staring at him. “Get the bastards, Daddy,” Liz said, the corners of her mouth down turned; a very hard look in her eyes.

  “I willl,” he said. “In the meantime I want you to get back to the Farm. Audie needs you and you’ll be safe there.”

  “I’ll go, too,” Katy said. “Will you be coming along?”

  “Right behind you. We’ll set up the debriefing there.”

  Otto was just coming down the corridor when McGarvey left the waiting room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, his long red hair flying everywhere, his jeans tattered, and his CCCP sweatshirt dirty, sweat stains at the armpits. He’d been crying, his eyes red, his cheeks still wet.

  “I’m sorry, Mac. Honest injun, but I can’t go back in there,” he said. “The doc’s waiting for you.”

  “Bad?”

  Rencke’s eyes were downcast. “Yes.” He looked up. “We tried to stop Liz from seeing him, but couldn’t.”

  “Nothing you could have done differently,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to talk to the doctor, but in the meantime I want you to send Liz and Katy back down to the Farm with one of the teams that brought us in from Andrews. Have the other standing by, because soon as I finish here, I’m heading down. I’ll want a debriefing team standing by, and I’m going to need you to back stop me.”

  Rencke’s eyes were round. “What’ve you got in mind?”

  “The Friday Club, but first the second name on the disk I brought back from Tokyo.”

  “The Friday Club has to be a dead end. The disk was way too weird. Over the top.”

  “It’s a fake. The real stuff was on Givens’s computer, which was missing from his apartment.”

  “That means they knew what Givens was up to,” Rencke had said. “A story in the Post would have done nothing—just another conspiracy theory, background noise—but handing over shit like that to somebody like Todd was too big to ignore.”

  “Get Liz and Katy out of here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  SEVEN

  Todd’s body, covered in a white sheet stained with blood, was lying on a table in one of the operating rooms where he had been taken fifteen hours ago. As soon as it was released an autopsy would be performed downstairs in the morgue, but Elizabeth had insisted no one was to do a thing until her father showed up.

  The on-duty chief of surgery, Dr. Alan Franklin, had come upstairs when he’d been informed that the former director had arrived, and when McGarvey walked into the small well-equipped room, he turned away from the window that looked down on the rear courtyard, came over, and shook hands.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said. He was an athletically built man in his late fifties, with a hound-dog face and eyes that drooped. He’d worked on McGarvey a couple of times in the past, and he was damn good at what he did—saving the lives of CIA officers who were brought to him in serious condition.

  “Was he DOA?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes. But even if we’d been right there, we couldn’t have done a thing for him. He’d been shot several times in the upper body, once in the left leg, and again in the left side of his neck. The bullet severed his carotid artery and he’d probably been very close to bleeding out when he took a bullet to his forehead.” The doctor glanced at Todd’s shrouded body. “But that wasn’t enough. Your son-in-law was dead, lying on his face on the grass beside the car, when they put a final round into the back of his head at point-blank range.”

  “Insurance,” McGarvey muttered. His killers were professionals who’d been ordered to make the hit, and before they walked away they had made sure that their mission had been accomplished.

  “I’d like his body released for autopsy, Mr. Director.”

  McGarvey nodded, thinking about the first time he’d met Todd. Liz had been shy about bringing him to the house until she’d introduced him to her father—in the CIA’s Starbucks on the first floor of the Old Headquarters Building. A less intimate setting, though she’d learned later that for Todd the meeting had been the toughest thing he’d ever done; meeting the legendary CIA agent who’d risen to the directorship on the seventh floor had been way over the top, even for a young man as self-assured and in love as Todd had been.

  “Let me see him.”

  The doctor went around to the opposite side of the table from McGarvey and pulled the sheet away, revealing Todd’s marble white face. The wounds in the forehead and neck were massive, either one in themselves totally devastating, without a doubt lethal.

  “All of him,” McGarvey said softly. He was distressed to the core that Liz had insisted on seeing her husband like this, but he understood her need for closure.

  The doctor pulled the sheet all the way off Todd’s body, and even McGarvey, who was hardened to seeing death, was momentarily taken aback. This man was his son-in-law, the father of his grandchild, not just a dedicated, capable CIA officer who’d been shot to death in the lin
e of duty.

  McGarvey looked away. “Okay,” he said. “It’ll be a closed-coffin funeral unless his wife says differently.”

  “Do you want to see the autopsy report?”

  “Not unless you come up with something that doesn’t fit.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dr. Franklin said. “Get the bastards who did this, Mr. Director.”

  McGarvey looked him in the eye and nodded, then turned and went back down the hall to the empty waiting room. He sat down on the couch, an old western on the television, but the sound had been turned off.

  After the debriefing, which would take place at the Farm, Dick Adkins would want him to come up to Langley to personally warn him from getting involved. Since it was possible that this somehow included some powerful men in Washington, McGarvey would have to be careful with what he said. He couldn’t afford to go head-to-head with the Company or with the Bureau, too much was at stake. He needed a free hand. Yet he needed the incident to be out in the open. I’m coming for you, and he wanted the message to be crystal clear.

  It was at least a fair bet that whatever Givens had uncovered that had led him to call Todd to a private meeting not only had something to do with the Friday Club, but to the Mexican polonium thing and the Pyongyang assassination, and whatever else was coming next. To this point, according to Otto, neither the CIA nor the Bureau had come up with anything solid in their investigations. It had taken a Washington Post reporter to do that.

  The hospital was quiet at this hour, though he thought that he could hear the murmur of voices somewhere down the corridor, but then that faded away, and the only sounds were from some machinery somewhere. The problem was that he had been alone with his innermost thoughts for most of his life, or certainly all of his career with the CIA, and he’d lost much of the normal ability to share his feelings. Sometimes even with himself.

  But just now, here at this time and place, he was able to see his hate and rage, and in a way it frightened him more than anything or anyone had ever frightened him.

  Seeing his daughter’s face and then seeing Todd’s body had scraped away some last vestige of civilized behavior; erased that bit of humanity in him that sometimes made him hesitate to pull the trigger when there was just a hint of ambiguity. Shoot a suspect in the kneecap to disable him, not in the head to end his life—though that had very often been necessary.

  This time ambiguity meant nothing. He was going after whoever was behind this, one by one, no matter who they were, no matter who ordered him to stop, no matter if his actions would be against all reason, all sanity, no matter the consequences to him.

  He got up and went back out into the corridor when Todd’s body was rolled out of the operating room and to the elevator. The autopsy would take place in the basement morgue, and afterward his remains would be zippered in a rubber bag and placed in a refrigerated chamber until it was transferred to a mortuary for preparation before the Arlington burial.

  McGarvey could see all of that, every step of the way.

  The two attendants rolling the gurney didn’t look up until the elevator doors closed, and then they avoided McGarvey’s eyes. This was no normal killed-in-the-line-of-duty, if such a thing was ever normal, this involved the son-in-law of the former DCI, a man who was admired by most and feared by many.

  The fourth floor settled down again, leaving McGarvey with his dark thoughts until ten minutes later Rencke came back up, and sat down across from him.

  “They’re off,” he said.

  “What about Louise?”

  “I sent her back to work. I think she’ll be more useful to us on the job. That way we won’t have any trouble getting satellite time if we need it.”

  “Did you tell them I would be right behind them?” McGarvey asked.

  Rencke nodded. “The Bureau is working on it, and so is the Virginia Highway Patrol, but except for the one call no one’s heard a thing.”

  “Todd told me that Givens apparently had proof that Howard was connected with the Friday Club,” McGarvey said. “Which makes Foster and that crowd one of my best bets.”

  “Lots of heavy hitters, Mac.”

  “They’ll have a weak point. Someone on the edge, someone new, maybe someone’s whipping boy, someone with a grudge, someone in trouble who might be willing to make a trade.”

  Rencke nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime do you want me to come down to the Farm with you?”

  “No, I want you at the Campus. Before this is over I’m going to need some serious backup.”

  Rencke looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and he looked as if he were on the verge of tears, but he nodded. “How do you want to start?”

  McGarvey had thought about it. Going up against Foster and the others in the Friday Club would be dicey at best. One word from them and he’d be in trouble. The Bureau would almost certainly try to come after him, which would slow him down. Something he didn’t want to happen. When he went up against them he would be looking for reactions, but not until he was ready. For that he needed more information.

  “I’m going to need whatever you can come up with for the second name on Turov’s computer, Roland Sandberger. His deep background, his associates, his connections, money trails, that sort of thing, as well as a list of his current contracts.”

  “He’s president of Administrative Solutions, but you knew that. Former Army Delta Force operator who was on the front lines in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. Got out four years ago as a bird colonel and started his contractor company. He pays his people very well—too well—which means his troops are super-loyal, but which also means he started with bags of money. Source unknown at this point. He gets the best people, he gets the best results, and he gets the best contracts.”

  “Find out if he has any connection with the Friday Club. I’m betting he does,” McGarvey said. “Could be one of his sources for contracts.”

  “That shouldn’t be too tough to find out,” Rencke said.

  “And I want a running tab on his itinerary. I want to know where he is right now, and where he’s going, when he’s going, and who he’s going with or to meet. Tap his phones, hack into his computer, whatever it takes. When I go after him I want to know what I’m up against.”

  Rencke nodded uncertainly.

  “I especially want to know when he’s out of the country.”

  “Shit,” Rencke said softly.

  EIGHT

  It was just getting light when McGarvey went downstairs and got into the car with Tomlinson and the driver who had brought him in from Andrews. Work traffic had started up across the Key Bridge, then south down the Jefferson Davis Highway where, past the Pentagon, they picked up I-395.

  Already it had been a long day and even longer night, and McGarvey laid his head back with his dark thoughts, unable to close his eyes let alone get some sleep. He kept seeing Todd’s body. His death—the manner of his death—had been more than an assassination, it had been a message: Don’t fuck with us; we’re capable of and willing to strike back to protect our interests.

  Administrative Solutions certainly had the manpower and the expertise for a hit like that. It wasn’t clear if they had the motive, the name of the contracting firm’s founder and president had been in Turov’s computer, and that was a start.

  It was certainly possible that the Friday Club had hired Admin; there had been a link between Howard McCann and the club, and McCann, through Turov, with the company. But it did not mean that the Friday Club had ordered Todd’s assassination and the murders of Givens and his family. The links were there, but they weren’t strong enough to take to the Bureau or for McGarvey to take any action.

  Yet.

  “Have my wife and daughter reached the Farm?” he asked.

  “They’re about five miles out,” Tomlinson said.

  “No troubles?”

  “No, sir. Would you like to talk to Mrs. McGarvey?”

  “That’s not necessary,” McGarvey said. “Just make damn sure that the perim
eter is clear and stays that way.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Company security officer said, and he began relaying the orders via his comms unit.

  The interstate south was in fairly good shape, most traffic was heading into the city, not out, and by the time they reached the large wooded reserve of Quantico that was home to a Marine Corps Unit, a cemetery, and the FBI’s training center, McGarvey had finally been able to shut down enough to close his eyes and drift into a restless sleep.

  His cell phone vibrated against his hip, waking him instantly. He sat up and looked out the window not immediately recognizing where they were, except traffic had increased and they were obviously on the outskirts of a fairly big city. Probably Richmond, he thought, which was only a half-hour from the Farm.

  He answered on the second ring. “Yes.”

  “Mrs. M and Liz got there okay,” Rencke said. “Where are you?”

  “Outside Richmond, I think,” McGarvey said, the cobwebs clearing. “What do you have for me?”

  “Foster and his Friday Club are big, kemo sabe. I mean really big. The White House has been using the group to float new policy issues. Don Hestern, he’s Frank Shapiro’s assistant, is one of the regulars.” Shapiro was the president’s new adviser on national security affairs.

  “Anyone from the Company since McCann?”

  “Not that I’ve found out so far, except I’m sure it’s not Dick. I’ve got his Fridays covered since McCann went south. But considering Foster’s reach I wouldn’t be surprised if we had somebody over there.”

  “Give it to security, see what they can find out.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a hot idea, Mac,” Rencke said. “Look, if Adkins or Whittaker or someone else upstairs gets wind that we’ve started an internal investigation—a rogue investigation—a lot of shit’s going to hit the fan. And it’ll point toward you, something I don’t think you want right now.”

  Rencke was correct. “Then you’ll have to look down everyone’s track on your own. But if someone stepped in for McCann, it’ll have to be one of the top people in either Operations or Intelligence.”