Gambit Read online

  “How long does he have without?” McGarvey asked.

  “I’ve stopped the bleeding, but I’d give him only hours, unless you tell me you need more time.”

  “Is he awake?”

  “Quite frankly, he’ll probably die before the anesthetic fully wears off.”

  “Can you give him something?”

  “For the pain?” Franklin asked. “He’s not feeling anything.”

  “I meant to wake him up. He came here to assassinate me. I want to know who hired him and why.”

  Franklin looked away. “When I raised my hand and recited the oath, it was to save lives, not take them.”

  “Mine was the same,” McGarvey said. “Only it was to protect innocent lives, American lives.”

  “Yes, I know. But that very often has entailed taking lives,” Franklin said. He nodded toward the doors to the operating room down the hall. “Like that poor bastard’s, who I could save given the go-ahead.”

  “Then what?” Pete asked, a bleak note in her eyes and voice.

  “Put him and whoever hired him on trial for attempted murder. It’s the way we’re supposed to do things in this country.”

  “He wasn’t going to give Mac a trial.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I know how things work. And I’ve patched up your husband more than once.”

  “And me,” Pete said. “But what if it was the Russian government who hired him?”

  “Then we turn it over to the diplomats.”

  McGarvey shook his head. “We need to talk to him, Doc. Wake him up.”

  Franklin nodded, a heavy look in his eyes. “This guy was just the start, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “It’s one of the things we want to ask him,” McGarvey said.

  “Ten minutes,” Franklin said. He turned to go, but Pete stopped him.

  “What will you use?” she asked.

  “Midazolam.”

  “Try flunitrazepam.”

  “Could cause a heart arrhythmia. Possibly fatal.”

  Pete said nothing.

  “Ten minutes,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  Slatkin had been wheeled into the adjacent recovery room where he lay on a gurney, a blanket up to his chest. He was hooked to several monitors, including one for his heart that showed a steady but weak rhythm, plus oxygen and an IV bottle.

  Helen Berliner, one of the nurses who had taken care of both Mac and Pete on more than one occasion, was there when they came in. “Doctor says I can stay with you if you need me.”

  “No reason for you to get your hands dirty,” McGarvey said.

  She glanced at the patient. “It was another close call for you, wasn’t it, Mr. Director?”

  “He’s lying there this time, not one of us, Helen.”

  “Just as well. I’ll be right outside if you need me.”

  “When will he come around?” Pete asked.

  Helen looked at Slatkin. “He’s awake now,” she said, and she left.

  “I’ll go first,” Pete said. She went to the bed and gently caressed the South African’s pale cheek with her fingertips.

  Slatkin’s eyes opened.

  “You’ve been shot, and you’re in a hospital now. Do you understand me?”

  The lights in the room were not so bright that he couldn’t see McGarvey just behind Pete. His eyes widened slightly, but then focused again on Pete. “Yes,” he croaked, his voice very weak and ragged.

  “We found your account in Guernsey; we know about the payment of $250,000. What we don’t know yet is who made the payment. Will you tell me?”

  Slatkin said nothing.

  “You need a new kidney, and your liver has been damaged. But the doctor believes that he can save your life.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what doctors do.”

  “I mean, why bother,” Slatkin said. He looked past her at McGarvey. “I missed. And if I walked out of here, your husband would find me and kill me. It’s the way he’s always worked.”

  “You read the wrong files, or you didn’t pay attention to what you were looking at. When he’s shot at, he shoots back.”

  “Everyone who’s come up against him has died.”

  “He’s a very good shot. Maybe you’ll be the exception. Help us and we’ll help you. You have my word.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “No reason, except you’ll die without us.”

  Slatkin managed a weak smile. “I’d die anyway. My expediter would make sure of it. We only talked once, but I could hear it in her voice. She has more money than God, and she’s always gotten what she wants.”

  McGarvey held his silence. It was the first decent clue they’d come up with.

  “That what they taught you at the Recces?” Pete asked.

  “Bitch,” Slatkin said, and he turned his head away.

  “We can protect you if you’ll help us. Whoever your expediter is, she doesn’t have more money than we do.”

  “When’s the last time you met her?” McGarvey asked.

  “Never did.”

  “Then how do you know she’s a woman? And rich?”

  “My contact made a mistake.”

  “Tell me about it,” Pete said.

  “That’s all I know.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Leonard.”

  “Sampson?” Pete asked.

  “Slatkin.”

  “Why did you leave the Recces?”

  “I fucked an officer’s daughter.”

  “Why didn’t they put you in jail?”

  “It wasn’t rape,” Slatkin said. “She was twenty. A bitch, like all of you.” He suddenly tore at the oxygen tube and IV and managed to raise himself up to a sitting position and reached for Pete.

  She pushed his hand away and tried to ease him back on the gurney, but he fought her.

  Blood suddenly began to spread on the blanket at waist level, and he began coughing up a lot of blood. He swung his fists wildly, his eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets.

  “Fuck you all,” he whispered, and he fell back, his mouth open as if he were trying to take a deep breath, but his chest fell still.

  EIGHT

  Thomas Bell was aboard the British Airways 747–400 to Athens thirty minutes before its departure time, a glass of Krug in hand. Eighty-two C on the upper deck was a flatbed configuration. His partner in the window seat was a vaguely familiar middle-aged American woman by the name of Carol Grace who was flying to Athens to star in an English version of the stage play Cabaret.

  The thought of sleeping so close to her on the long flight across the pond was enticing, though nothing could possibly happen, but the thought was there nevertheless, and it pushed his good mood even higher.

  “Thing is, I hate to fly,” she told him as the aircraft was closed up and they pushed away from the gate. “Always have.”

  “You’ll sleep through most of it,” Bell said. At a bit over six feet with a movie star’s face and physique to match, he turned heads wherever he went. It’s one of the reasons he’d been hired at the Palais.

  She smiled nervously. “Oh no,” she said. “I never sleep on these things. What if it crashes? They do sometimes.”

  “Well, you’ll be a hell of a lot safer on this flight than you were in the cab out from the city. Pardon the language.”

  She laughed, the sound music to Bell’s ears.

  It seemed like ages since he’d been with a woman. The past three months had been nothing but business since the German Dottie Hauskelter had shown up at the high roller baccarat room and had bedded him that night and offered him a job that would pay one hundred times his salary, commissions, and tips.

  He’d taken the job as the contact man for an assassin. He’d been taken aback at first by the nature of his job, but he had shrugged it off. The money was fabulous, and there was the promise that Dottie would return from Berlin from time to time to renew their acquaintances, as she’d put it.


  Sex and money, not necessarily in that order, had always been Bell’s main preoccupation. And here he was now flying top shelf after a successful mission and sitting next to a beautiful woman.

  “Where are you staying in Athens?” he asked.

  “The Electra. I always stay there. My treat to myself whenever I have to fly.”

  “The Metropolis?”

  “Yes, you know it?” she asked.

  “As it turns out, I’ll be staying there for a few days. Maybe we could have drinks and dinner?”

  “I’d love to. I have two days off before rehearsals start.”

  “Won’t you be missed?”

  “By the other actors?” she laughed. “Most of this crowd are more interested in looking at themselves in the mirror and reading their fabulous reviews.”

  “Can’t be all that bad.”

  “Worse,” she said. “You’ll be a breath of fresh air. Believe me.”

  They turned onto the active runway, and in moments, the big jet accelerated.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Carol said, and she reached over and clutched Bell’s hand in a death grip.

  He had to smile.

  “Sure, you can laugh because you’re not crapping in your pants,” she said.

  * * *

  “Like I said, I have a couple of days before rehearsals start,” Carol told Bell at a late lunch the next day in the dining room looking toward the Parthenon.

  “Lots to see in the city. I’ve only ever been here twice before, so I’m sure I’ve missed a lot.”

  “In that case, I’ll be the girl guide. We can start on foot, but we’ll have to rent a car at some point to catch some neat places outside the city.”

  “A lot of history here.”

  “Yeah, and it’s still being made,” Carol said. “Game?”

  “I’m all yours.”

  They had adjoining suites, which Bell had thought was a fantastic stroke of luck. They’d touched down just before seven last night, and by the time they’d cabbed it to the hotel in the city and unpacked, Bell had figured she would go straight to bed. But she’d knocked on his door just before ten.

  “Care for some company?” she asked. She was wearing only a white hotel robe.

  “I’m all yours.”

  “I’d hoped you’d say that.”

  * * *

  Actually, as far as the woman who was playing the part of Carol Grace was concerned, all of life was in reality an unreality. Everyone was an actor onstage, playing whatever part they’d learned as children. The face—or, more accurately, the persona—that we presented to the world was only one half of the truth. The remainder was buried sometimes so deeply in a person’s head that they often could never tell the difference between truth and fiction. Not that it mattered, if you managed to keep your stories straight.

  Carol was a well-preserved forty-eight instead of the thirty-five she played, because of a few hundred thousand dollars in face-lifts, dental work, tummy tucks, liposuction, breast enhancements, and leg and thigh shaping.

  The only bits and pieces that hadn’t been worked on were those involved in lovemaking, which was an art that, along with others, she had perfected years ago. She looked good, she spoke well, and she was dynamite in bed. Plus, she knew how to make money. Which was the point.

  Only one man in her entire life had ever gotten the best of her, along with a very close friend, financially. And the two of them were going to even the score.

  Revenge was petty, she’d read somewhere. But sweet nonetheless. And no one would get in their way.

  The Acropolis was first on their list, but the tourists were so thick it was hard to see or do anything, and in less than an hour, Carol took Bell aside.

  “I love people and all that, but this is nuts. Do you want to get off the beaten path?”

  “I’m game as long as it’s with you.”

  She smiled and took his arm. Downtown just off Syntagma Square, they found an Avis rental place, leased a Peugeot Allure SUV for the day, and headed east out of the center of the city through a working-class neighborhood.

  “Mount Ymittos,” Carol said. “One of Athens’s more closely guarded secrets.”

  They parked near the ruins of what she said was an ancient Byzantine monastery and got out of the car.

  They were above the city, the thickly forested mountain sloping up and away.

  “I’m not much for churches,” Bell said, but she took his arm, and they headed toward a walking path.

  “Neither am I, but if you’re game for a twenty-minute walk, I’ll show you the best view of Athens from above, and a little spot in the trees off the path, where we can be alone.”

  “As I said earlier, I’m all yours.”

  “I’d hoped you’d say that.”

  * * *

  About fifteen minutes later, they found the narrow track off the path that she’d been looking for and followed it down about one hundred meters to a very small glen, no more than a dozen paces in length and half that in width.

  From here, they had a lovely view of the city below, and closer at hand, a grassy depression about the size of a pair of king-size beds.

  Bell smiled. “Perfect,” he said.

  “Actually, you fucked up, and we can’t tolerate mistakes,” Carol said behind and above him.

  Bell started to turn as she took a pistol out of her purse and fired into the side of his head.

  He never heard nor felt the shot that killed him.

  NINE

  Ever since Mary Sullivan and Otto had gotten together, Mary had become point man for him and for Mac and Pete whenever something came up. Like Louise Horn, she was not only bright, she was an organizer.

  She had called Housekeeping into action as soon as she and Otto understood what was going down at the Georgetown apartment, and it was she who arranged the meeting with the top brass at Langley for the following morning.

  She met McGarvey and Pete with their temporary security badges at the elevator in the VIP garage below the Old Headquarters Building a few minutes before ten. Neither of them were CIA employees any longer, and even though he had been the director, he still needed a badge.

  “Sorry about your wedding,” Pete told her.

  “It’s just a piece of paper,” Mary said on the way up in the elevator. “We’ll take care of it when this blows over. In the meantime, we have a half hour before Taft wants to see us in his office, and Otto wants to talk to you guys first.”

  They got off on the busy third floor and walked down the corridor to Otto’s suite of offices that had originally been meant for a team of six people who had at one time coordinated cover stories and arrangements for operators going overseas on missions. Now the three rooms belonged solely to Otto and his machines, including a pool table–size horizontal monitor that could show a dozen files, photos, and videos simultaneously.

  But not every piece of information was digitized, even in this day and age. Strewn around his office were stacks of older books—a lot of them biographies of obscure people whom Otto had found interesting at one time or another, old newspapers and magazines, maps and ocean charts, drawings—some of them as old as the 1500s—in a dozen languages.

  “Good morning, Mary,” Lou’s voice greeted them at the door, which clicked open. “Otto is expecting you.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said, the expression on her face unchanged.

  Pete had asked her a month or so ago if she minded having the voice of Otto’s deceased wife as the voice of his darlings, but she had smiled and shook her head. “We’re friends.”

  Otto was in the back office, his inner sanctum, standing over the horizontal monitor that was alive with charts, diagrams, and lists of people.

  “According to what I’m looking at, no government agency on the planet is gunning for you,” he said, looking up. “And that includes us inside and outside the beltway.”

  “Doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Pete said.

  “He wasn’t a lone wolf,” M
cGarvey said. He’d thought about it all night after he and Pete had gone back to their apartment to get a few hours’ sleep. “He said he worked for an expediter. And he had some pretty good intel. He knew where we lived and that we were coming up from Florida.”

  “And he had plenty of advance notice,” Mary said. “Housekeeping’s preliminary after-action report said that he’d probably been living in the apartment for a week, maybe longer.”

  “Fingerprints? DNA?”

  “Both. We have rock-solid confirmation that he’s Leonard Slatkin. But he was kicked out of the service six years ago. Whoever he was freelancing for, it wasn’t them.”

  “His spotter was good,” Otto said. “Our guys found a surveillance camera on the roof of the building across the street from yours. It was feeding to a burner phone that’s since been disconnected.”

  “Housekeeping looked at it,” Mary added. “No forensic evidence. And apparently, no one in the building knew when it was installed or by whom.”

  “Whoever it was, they knew what they were doing,” McGarvey said. “And their only mistake I can see was the piece of plastic on the window.”

  “But that’s just the point, Mac,” Mary said. “Against impossible odds—only the angle you were at to the window as you walked up the street allowed you to spot it. But why? What were you looking for? What got your hackles up? There was no reason for it.”

  McGarvey had asked himself the same question yesterday before they’d even gotten off the flight from Florida, and outside baggage claim when he had scanned the vehicles and the faces. And again on the way into the city, and when he’d had the cabbie drop him off at the end of the block.

  Something had been tickling at him maybe for a few days, even a week. Maybe something he’d seen on a TV news show, or in one of the half-dozen newspapers he read every morning, especially The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, or the magazines he subscribed to, among them Jane’s Defense Weekly.

  But nothing specific came to mind, except that he was on edge, and respecting that feeling—even though he didn’t always know the why of it—had saved his life on more than one occasion.