Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 5

  The room had been tossed, probably by the Bureau guys, but it looked like a simple pass. Gomez had been at the scene, but nothing linked him to the actual bombing, so at this point he was considered to be only a possible witness.

  She closed the door behind her and simply looked from where she stood.

  Two single beds flanked the window. The one on the left had apparently belonged to the roommate. It had been stripped of its blankets and pillow. The desk and tiny combined closet/chest of drawers on that side were empty too.

  But on the right Gomez’s bed was made up. His closet and drawers were open and held a few items of clothing. Nothing outwardly indicated that he was leaving any time soon. If he had a laptop, he’d taken it with him; most students took them to class.

  A large FedEx box was lying on the floor next to a trash can on the roommate’s side. A cardboard box that could have been big enough to hold a pair of boots was open on the desk. Several half-empty packages of candy and cookies were scattered on the desk, the floor beside it and on the bed. A couple of Spanish-language magazines and a Sunday edition of a newspaper called Bionero were lying on the chair.

  Gomez had apparently gotten a care package from home.

  Something, Pete didn’t know exactly what, bothered her.

  She went to the desk and looked at the box. The bottom was filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts. They’d been pushed aside. Whoever had searched the room wanted to see if anything was left in the box. But there was only the peanuts.

  She took a handful and smelled them. Something was odd to her. Vinegar.… Semtex.

  She got the FedEx box from beside the roommate’s trash can. The address label had been mostly torn off, but a shipping code was partially intact.

  She put the cover on the box that had held the cookies and candies—and whatever else that had been packed in the peanuts—and put it in the FedEx box. It was a perfect fit.

  She called Otto as she headed out the door in a run. She knew.

  He answered by the time she’d raced downstairs, the box in hand, and was heading toward where she’d parked the car.

  “A FedEx shipping code,” she shouted, and she read it off.

  “Stand by.”

  Halfway down the block Otto came back. “Atlanta,” he said.

  “That’s where Gomez went. Check the airport. I’m on my way back.”

  ELEVEN

  When Otto was a little boy, about five, Leonard, the man his mother had married the year before, was trying to repair the rocking horse that some aunt had sent as a gift. Even then it wasn’t something Otto was interested in.

  The four legs were suspended by two wire struts connected to the four upright posts in the frame. The screws had loosened and they’d come out of their brackets. The horse was upside down on the back porch, the wire struts in the air.

  But Otto could see that the geometry was wrong. Once the struts were screwed in place and the rocking horse turned upright, the legs would not swing down into position.

  “It’s not going to work that way,” he said.

  Leonard ignored him. When he’d set the last screw, he turned the rocking horse over and the struts hung up on the uprights.

  Otto had laughed. He didn’t understand at that point that Leonard wasn’t a bright man, but at least he had tried to fix the rocking horse.

  “I told you.”

  Leonard turned and backhanded Otto.

  It was the first of many times his stepfather had beaten him. No one liked to be thought of as stupid. And since then he’d at least learned a little diplomacy—though not much, until Louise had come into his life and cleaned up his act the best she could.

  * * *

  It was a quarter to six, and he stood in the back room of his suite of offices staring at one of his darlings. He knew just about everything with about an 85 percent level of confidence except for the one last detail.

  But he had all but nailed the man who’d tried to kill Mac.

  Pete had the key card to get her past the first barrier into Otto’s office. The most important barrier was facial recognition.

  “Ms. Boylan is here,” his security program announced. The voice was Louise’s.

  He glanced at the surveillance monitor in the corridor. “Let her in, please.”

  Pete came back to his inner office. She looked haggard. “Anything on Atlanta?”

  “Take a look at this,” Otto said, and he brought up the Atlanta PD’s preliminary report on the homicide of a white male whose body was found in Atlanta’s central parking ramp.

  “Antonio Gomez,” Pete said. “Our boy.”

  “He took the eight o’clock Delta up to Atlanta, but he was a no-show for his flight to Mexico City.

  “He was the bomber. But who hired him and who killed him?”

  “Read the rest,” Otto said.

  After a moment or two Pete looked at him. “The kid was probably dead, shot in the heart. But he’d been shot in the side of the head.”

  “Postmortem.”

  “An insurance shot. Kamal al-Daran.”

  “I’m assuming it wasn’t simple revenge for how Mac stopped him in New York last year,” Otto said.

  Kamal had been given the job to take down two skyscrapers in Manhattan’s Midtown. It was supposed to look like an ISIS attack—just like the one al-Qaeda had done on nine/eleven. In this case a Saudi prince had engineered the plan in an attempt to cause the U.S. to ramp up its attacks against the Islamic terrorist organization—thus taking pressure off the Saudi border.

  Mac had stopped the worst part of the operation—the part where more than two thousand children could have been killed.

  “Why that assumption?”

  “We’ve gone over that before.”

  “Humor me,” Pete pressed.

  “He’d have no need to spend the money or take the risk, unless something else was on the table.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He’s gone to ground, and has done a damned good job of it. Says to me that he wants to stay deep, maybe enjoy the rest of his life, or at least for a few years until the dust from his last op has settled. Which it hasn’t.”

  Pete glanced at the screens. “Okay, your darlings have come up with that scenario.”

  “Because I pointed them that way in the first place.”

  “If not simple revenge, then why kill Mac?”

  * * *

  Otto had come up with something like this as early as last March, before the elections, and he’d flown down to Florida, making sure that no one in the Company knew that he was gone, and that Pete was still in Washington.

  But Mac hadn’t been very much surprised with what Otto had suggested.

  “No one inside the Beltway will want to believe it,” McGarvey had said.

  “Not a chance.”

  “What’s Louise’s take?”

  “She suggested I talk to you.”

  “How about Pete?”

  “That’d be your call,” Otto said. They were drinking a beer sitting in the gazebo on the Intracoastal Waterway behind Mac’s Casey Key house. The weather was warm, only a slight breeze off the Gulf.

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Trouble is I don’t have a concrete leg to stand on,” Otto said. “Only a gut feeling.”

  “I know,” McGarvey said. “The problem is, even if we’re right—and I hope to Christ we’re not—there’s not a thing we can do to get ready.”

  “Page might listen if you were to sign off.”

  “Listen to what? What are you going to tell him? What can we say that would make any difference? The problem—and you and I both know it—is that something has to happen first.”

  The sun was setting behind them, the light on the palm trees along the waterway red and gold and pink, and even green. Soft, like the weather, but in Technicolor. Peaceful. Nothing bad happening here. For the moment.

  “Even after it happens—if it does—no one will want to believe it,” Otto said. “I m
ean, how long did it take after nine/eleven for us to nail bin Laden? And he wasn’t even directly responsible. Not really. It was only his philosophy.”

  McGarvey went to get them another beer.

  A Gulfstream G650 was waiting at Dolphin Aviation up at Sarasota to take Otto back to Andrews. The bogus flight plan was for London, with a return sometime tomorrow. Otto’s name was on the manifest, but that record would get all but buried, at least for the time being. But it had given him all the time he needed to get down here and hide his movements. At this point he wanted no questions for which he had no answers.

  McGarvey came back with the Heinekens. “Do you want to stay the night?”

  “I have to get back.”

  “Louise?”

  “No. Pete. She needs to know what I’m thinking. If you’re called up, she’ll want to be right there. Wouldn’t be fair to keep her out in the cold until the last minute.”

  “My call.”

  Otto shook his head. He’d known this was coming. “Insulating her won’t help. She’s at the Farm training the newbies on interrogation techniques. She has to be ready if and when the shit hits the fan. Anyway, she’s just an employee of the CIA. She’s not your wife.”

  McGarvey started to say something, but then merely nodded.

  * * *

  Otto had a clear memory of the look on his friend’s face last year. It was the first time he’d ever seen fear in Mac’s eyes. Not for himself, of course, but for Pete. He didn’t want any harm to come to her. He didn’t even want her to worry.

  Impossible wishes, of course, for someone in the business. But Mac had a track record that he didn’t want to continue.

  Pete sat across from Otto in his office in the Old Headquarters Building.

  “Even if you were right before the election, what does Mac have to do with it? Why kill him?”

  “Because he could be the key,” Otto said.

  “To what?” she asked with obvious bitterness.

  “Let’s go lay it out for Page and the others.”

  “They’re not going to like it.”

  TWELVE

  The DCI’s secretary, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a sharp individual, showed them to the director’s private conference room next door.

  Walter Page, a former CEO of IBM who had tried twice to resign as director of the CIA, but who’d been denied by two successive presidents because he was doing a good job, was waiting at the head of the small table when Otto and Pete walked in.

  Carleton Patterson, the eighty-year-old general counsel for the agency, along with Bambridge and Ursula Olson, the new head of the Directorate of Analysis—which had started out as the Directorate of Intelligence—and a man in a flannel suit with leather patches at the elbows whom Otto didn’t recognize looked up.

  “How is Kirk doing?” Page asked.

  “Better than Dr. Franklin thought he would,” Pete said.

  “We’re all glad to hear it.”

  “But I need the fiction of his death to remain in place for everyone outside this room,” Otto said as he and Pete took their places.

  The conference room, which also served as the DCI’s private dining room, was electronically and mechanically secure. It was a fairly small, windowless space with a couple of Wyeth originals on the walls, but institutional green carpet on the floor.

  “The president will have to be told.”

  “Especially not the president.”

  Bambridge started to say something, but Page held him off. “You’ll tell us why.”

  “Excuse me,” Pete said. “But could you introduce us to the gentleman at the end of the table?”

  “Dr. Harold Estes has come to us from Harvard to help make some sense of what we’ll be facing in the next four years plus if our new president is reelected,” Ursula Olson said. She was a small slender woman who in the first year with the Company had proven her intelligence and clear thinking to everyone, including Otto.

  “I’m studying the new geopolitical dynamic,” Estes said, his accent British.

  “Oxford?” Otto asked.

  “Actually, yes. How’d you guess?”

  “It shows. But it’s good that you’re here, because you’re probably the only one other than Ms. Boylan and myself who might see the sense of what I’ve come to warn you about.”

  “This will not be a lecture,” Bambridge said.

  “No, a discussion after I lay out my points.”

  “Is there a valid reason for keeping Kirk dead?” Patterson asked. “Many people in this organization are shook up. He was a rock to many of them. Someone steady.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then continue, my dear boy, we’re all ears.”

  “A young Mexican national by the name of Antonio Gomez, who posed as a student at New College, placed the bomb in Mac’s car. The Bureau estimates a full kilo of Semtex. He took an eight o’clock flight to Atlanta, where he was picked up and driven to a parking garage in the city. He was shot in the heart, which caused his immediate death, but then was shot again in the side of the head at close range.”

  “After he was already dead?” Ursula asked.

  “Yes.”

  “On that one fact alone you’re assuming that the shooter was the same man who took down the pencil tower in New York last year,” Bambridge said.

  “It’s a signature move, rare these days.”

  “If it was the terrorist we’ve identified as Kamal al-Daran, then it was revenge,” Page said.

  “No need for it. He’s gone to ground, completely off the radar. Could mean he retired and has the money to do so.”

  “Could mean,” Bambridge said. “And I know where you’re going with this.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Continue,” Page said.

  “He hired Gomez to take out Mac, but not for the reason that Mac was the one who stopped him last year from taking down a second pencil tower that would have killed two thousand kids.”

  “Granted,” Page said. “So if not for revenge, then what?”

  “Kamal has been hired to take on another assignment. But job one for him was to get Mac out of the way.”

  “No,” Bambridge said. “You’re making another assumption, one that discounts every other law enforcement and intel officer, that only McGarvey can figure out what’s coming our way, if anything is coming our way. My bet is still on revenge.”

  “No one, even the engineers, wanted to believe that someone could take down a pencil tower without using an airliner or a lot of explosives. No one wanted to listen to Mac, so he had to do it outside the established wisdom, with just Ms. Boylan’s help.”

  “And Otto’s and Louise’s,” Pete said. “The point is that sometimes when all else fails his unorthodox methods are the only things that work. And that scares you people, but you don’t want to admit it. And I hate to tell you this, but we’re there again, and you’d just better hope that Mac’s being publicly dead will give the rest of us the advantage. We need it.”

  “Flash points,” Otto said.

  “What do you mean?” Bambridge asked.

  “Russia, with Putin’s almost pathological necessity to bring his country back to the old days of the Soviet Union. China and the issue not only of Taiwan, but the modernization of her military, and having to walk a thin line to keep us happy as a trading partner.

  “North Korea and her nuclear and missile programs. She needs to keep us distracted enough with bluster and with misinformation until she’s ready to confront us with a viable threat—at least to our West Coast. They’ve sent satellites into orbit, and they’ve weaponized their nukes to the degree that they can be attached to their missiles.

  “Pakistan is no friend of ours, especially after Mac took down their supposed messiah and put a cap—a temporary cap—on their nuclear stockpile. If something breaks out between them and India, the entire hemisphere could be in a serious world of shit. We’d be pulled into it, of course.

  “No
t to mention Chile. Some hardliners remember Mac’s taking out one of their generals. Maybe Saudi Arabia again. Maybe Syria, Iran, hell, just about every Arabic-speaking country—Shiite or Sunni. We’ve made a lot of enemies.”

  “Points taken,” Page said. “And for a long time McGarvey has been a man with a target painted on his back. So who hired Kamal and why?”

  “Let me finish. Mac had a run-in with Israel a number of years ago. He’s been an on again/off again persona non grata of France, Switzerland and, of course, Germany, for operations outside of their laws. Japan over his handling of the expediter issue.”

  “He has enemies, that’s already been established,” Bambridge said, exasperated. “His own doing.”

  “Working for us.”

  “Very often, no.”

  “Working for our best interests, then, or do you want to argue that point as well, Marty?”

  “Maybe he has enemies right here at home,” Pete said.

  “We all do,” Page said.

  “My real point is that I think Kamal has an ironclad source of intel. He’s been told what’s coming down the pike, and perhaps he’s even been hired to take part in whatever it is. His first job was to eliminate McGarvey.”

  “We’re back to why,” Page said. “What’s coming at us that would make McGarvey the key?”

  “I have some ideas but I’m not sure yet.”

  “What would make all of those countries cooperate with each other? What’s the common thread? And who’s the ringleader?”

  “The ringleader is some Saudi royal, who’s probably insane, and is carrying a grudge for us. Maybe he thinks he can make some sort of a mark for himself,” Estes said. “Only, none of this is happening at the leadership level—though it’s the unspoken desire. Handpicked individuals in each of the intelligence services of those and perhaps other countries were the ones who’ve hatched a plot, if indeed there is a plot. A consortium, if you will, with a common goal. If it goes south because of something or someone—perhaps McGarvey—no one would take the blame.”

  “The common thread?” Page asked.