Gambit Read online

  He’d stepped back, his heart nearly stopping, never so afraid for his safety until this moment as he stared at the image of Donald Hicks, the former Canadian Special Ops sniper who never missed and had also never learned to take orders from a superior, all of whom he thought were idiots.

  The man stood in front of what might have been a laptop set up on top of a chest of drawers or desk. His massive, round head was completely free of hair, and that—combined with a narrow nose, high, delicate cheekbones, and wide, dark eyes—made him look exotic, almost movie-star handsome.

  Hammond instantly had the thought that if Susan were here, she would insist they go over to the Rosewood to meet him in person. She would definitely want to fuck him.

  “Mr. Hicks, can you hear me?” Hammond asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “You have a job for me that I’m told is urgent, heh? Let’s get on with it.” His voice was soft, his Canadian accent strong.

  Hammond figured him for a man who’d been born and raised out in the sticks. An inbred bumpkin. “I want you to kill someone.”

  Hicks laughed. “Well, that’s what I do. Who is it?”

  “I’ll send you his file when we’re finished here. But I’ll warn you that he is a well-experienced former CIA officer with a lot of field time.”

  “Name?”

  “Kirk McGarvey.”

  Hicks’s expression suddenly became animated. “Finally,” he muttered.

  “What?” Hammond asked, not quite sure he’d caught what the man had said.

  “Finally someone worth the effort. I know this man.”

  Hammond was alarmed. “Personally?”

  “By reputation. He was the director of the CIA at one time. I’d say you aim high; he’s a hell of a lot more than just well experienced. He’s considered to be one of the very best shooters anywhere in the world. Christ on a cross.”

  “I’ll send you his dossier.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Will you take the job?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “One million dollars,” Hammond said.

  “Five million,” Hicks responded. “Half now, and if I’m not taken away in a body bag, the remainder within twenty-four hours after the kill.”

  “No.”

  Hicks shrugged. “I could just as well hunt you for free.”

  Tarasov leaned forward. “You don’t know who we are.”

  “I know you, Comrade Tarasov. I’m sure I could find your friend.”

  Hammond’s heart skipped a beat. Looking into the Canadian’s eyes, he could see the same expression—or lack of—that he’d seen in McGarvey’s eyes on the boat at Monaco.

  He reached forward to hit the Escape key, but Tarasov stayed his hand. “We agree to your terms, Mr. Hicks. But only if the mission is accomplished within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “That could be a problem depending on the man’s location and his situation.”

  “He’s at a small hospital just a few blocks from your present position,” Tarasov said. “The real problem, however, which is the reason you will get your five million if you succeed, is that he knows that you, or someone like you, is coming.”

  “I accept,” Hicks said. “Send me what intel you have on this place. The moment I’m notified of the deposit, I will go to work.” He reached forward, and the screen went blank.

  * * *

  Hammond sat back, and for what seemed like a very long time to him, he gathered his thoughts. He looked up at length. “You’re free with my money.”

  Tarasov shrugged.

  “Can he do it?”

  “Pay him and you’ll find out. But in the end, it’s nothing more than a rich man’s game.”

  “Plus our deal.”

  “The ball is in your court, as they say at Wimbledon.”

  Hammond brought up one of his slush fund accounts in a small bank in Bahrain. Tarasov gave him the Canadian’s account information from memory, and Hammond looked up.

  “You’ve worked with him before?”

  “Twice.”

  “He’s good?”

  “The best.”

  Hammond entered the information for the bank on Grand Cayman and hit the Send key, transferring the funds.

  FIFTEEN

  McGarvey left Starrs at his post at the rear entrance to the hospital and made the rounds of the entire building, starting downstairs and working his way up to the third floor and then the roof.

  Besides the security detail, plus the doctor and the nurses, only two intelligence officers were in adjoining rooms on the second floor. One of them had returned from an op in Afghanistan with severe burns to his legs and back after a mortar round had gone off five feet from where he stood. By all accounts, he was a very lucky man.

  The other patient was Dottie Valdez, who’d been the assistant chief of the CIA’s station in Havana, who’d been arrested on her way home and charged with prostitution. In jail, she’d been beaten and gang-raped over a thirty-six-hour period until she’d been dumped back on the streets.

  She’d somehow managed to make it back to the embassy where she’d been hustled under cover to the airport for a diplomatic transport back to the States.

  Franklin said that physically she would recover fully, but it was her mental state that he was not so sure about. “The bastards had at her.”

  The only piece of luck—if it could have been called that—was that the cops who arrested her thought she was an American tourist. They had no idea she was CIA or that she worked out of the U.S. embassy. If they had, it would have turned into a major diplomatic incident.

  Mac had looked in on her, but she’d been sound asleep, and he’d backed away and continued with his rounds.

  Standing now on the roof, dressed in jeans and a dark pullover, his pistol in a quick-draw holster at his back, he kept far enough back from the edge that he was in the shadows and could not be spotted from the street or by anyone in the buildings opposite.

  A taxi cruised past and turned left down toward Canal Road NW, a car horn honked in the direction of the university, and, very far in the distance toward the city, one or two fire engine sirens drifted across on a momentary breeze.

  Ordinary night city sounds, the same as he’d heard dozens of times on operations in many places over the years. Lonely sounds against the backdrop of imminent danger.

  Most often, he had been the hunter, and he knew how it felt. Now, however, he was the prey, and he didn’t know who was hunting him or why, though if he was wrong about someone in the White House or Pentagon, it could have been the intel services of more than a dozen countries who would consider it a job well done if he were to be eliminated.

  And yet that made no real sense to him, because gunning down a former director of the CIA was filled with some serious political blowback.

  He turned and silently made his way to the rear of the building, again standing well enough back from the edge that he couldn’t be spotted from below.

  Five cars were parked next to the maintenance building that, among other things, housed the hospital’s emergency generator. Beyond the garage was a tall iron fence with electrified spikes placed almost invisibly at the top. Beyond the fence was a dense stand of trees.

  The hospital grounds had been breached only once a number of years ago, the killer approaching the fence through the woods and making it across and into the building. Since then, infrared and motion detectors had been installed, so that anything man-size coming within ten meters of the fence would set off an alarm, and the building would go into lockdown, FBI SWAT teams immediately dispatched.

  Mac phoned Otto. “Anything on your board?”

  “One figure, under what looks like cardboard about twenty-five mikes out, ten degrees left. He showed up about two hours ago, hasn’t moved since. Lou’s keeping an eye on him.”

  “Homeless?”

  “Street’s full of them,” Otto said. “Even in Georgetown. And someone has apparently been camping here before.”
>
  “Too obvious,” Mac wondered aloud.

  “I can have the cops check it out.”

  “If he’s after me and a cop shows up, it could go bad. I’ll check it out myself.”

  “Could be just what he wants. Get you out of the castle keep into the open.”

  “Let’s hope it’s that easy,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  From his position behind the bole of a large oak, Hicks had a good sight line on the street bum passed out under the cardboard refrigerator box about thirty meters away.

  Finding the stupid bastard on the street was a piece of luck, but if not that bit of good fortune, he would have found something else to use as cover. Disappear. Blend in. Improvise. Make use of whatever natural cover is available.

  The bum had already been half-drunk, and when Hicks had given him a quart of Jack, the guy had been more than happy to roost for the night.

  “Got a spot I use now and again,” the guy said. “In the woods.” He looked sixty but was probably in his thirties—long, scraggly white hair, a helter-skelter beard and filthy khakis, a moth-eaten sweater, and combat boots without laces. “Kinda private like.”

  Hicks had spotted the guy coming from there. “Are you ex-military?”

  “Army Rangers. Hooah.”

  Hicks didn’t believe the bum, but it didn’t matter. He gave him a pack of Marlboros and twenty dollars. “Sweet dreams. Hooah.”

  McGarvey was inside the hospital, that much he was sure of. Just as he thought it likely that the man was there because he suspected that someone would be coming after him—though how the former DCI could know or suppose such a thing was a mystery.

  The logic was thin. But it was what was at hand for the moment.

  “If the easy way presents itself, check first to make sure that you’re not walking into a trap, but then take advantage,” one of the old hands had told the class. “You might not get another chance.”

  * * *

  McGarvey left the hospital grounds by the front gate and hurried around the block past the Georgetown Recreation Center, traffic very light, nearly nonexistent at this hour. Which was just as good. If there was going to be a gun battle, he didn’t want any civilians to get into the line of fire.

  If someone stumbled into the cross fire, he would have to back off. The problem would be distinguishing between an innocent bystander and an active shooter.

  A low wrought iron fence separated the sidewalk from the wooded swatch. Pulling his gun, Mac eased over the fence and merged into the woods. Within ten feet, he was out of sight from anyone passing on the street.

  He pulled up short and cocked an ear to listen.

  Straight ahead, he could just make out bits of the hospital’s roofline, but from here, the building looked deserted, or nearly so. Only one dim light shone from an upstairs corner window, which was a supply room. Someone must have left the door open, and the light he was seeing was from the corridor.

  Possibly meant as a distraction.

  The cardboard box camp was off to the right between here and the hospital’s fence line. Mac couldn’t see much of anything, but there was no need for it. The bum, or others, had apparently used the place before, because a narrow path had been worn in the grass.

  Mac stepped to the left of the track and started through the woods, moving tree to tree, his pistol pointed down and to the right, away from his leg.

  “Mac, hold up,” Otto’s voice came softly in his earbud.

  About fifteen yards out, a man, with his back to McGarvey, leaned up against a tree.

  “Looks like someone behind a tree,” Otto said.

  “I see him,” McGarvey replied softly.

  SIXTEEN

  It was coming up on midnight, and Hammond stood at his window in the Hay-Adams, looking down toward Lafayette Park and what little traffic there was at this hour. Tarasov had left shortly after the deal had been made with Hicks, which left nothing but to wait.

  In a measure, he was nervous—lives were on the line here, conceivably even his own. But he was also excited. He’d played games for most of his life, and certainly for all of his adult life. And he’d often think of some of his financial deals—especially during the dot-com boom when he’d made the bulk of his fortune—as killings.

  Destroying another man or a woman—the gender didn’t matter to him—was the name of the game. The homework, the pursuit, and the final deal in which his opponent was ruined financially were everything.

  Twice in the last eleven years, two of the men who had considered themselves financial wizards had killed themselves after losing to Hammond. Those events had been sort of a rush for him.

  But this game now that he was playing, for no other reason than boredom he admitted to Susan last month when he’d first come up with the plan, was the biggest high he’d ever been on.

  It wasn’t just McGarvey’s life that was at stake; it was the assassins who would go up against him. Already one of them was dead, and tonight an even better killer was hunting the former CIA director.

  Hammond wanted the Canadian sniper to win, and yet he didn’t want the game to end so soon, so easily.

  The house phone rang, and Hammond went over and picked it up. “Yes?”

  “I need some company,” Susan said.

  Hammond was startled, but not displeased. “Are you here?”

  “At the lobby bar.”

  He gave her his room number.

  “I’ll bring the champers,” she said.

  * * *

  Otto, seated at the kitchen counter watching McGarvey approach the figure of a man leaning up against the tree, began to realize that something was wrong.

  “Lou.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Give me a record of thermal scans of the man I’m currently looking at.”

  “The man’s temperature is dropping.”

  “It’s a dead body,” Pete said from behind Otto.

  “Scan the entire park for any heat signatures other than Mac’s.”

  “I’m currently showing none.”

  “What about the man under the cardboard?”

  “He is no longer there.”

  “No one else in the park?”

  “Other than Mac, I’m seeing nothing,” Lou said.

  “What is your confidence?”

  “Ninety percent.”

  “Why not one hundred?” Pete interjected.

  “There are ways to defeat the imaging systems, such as a thermally opaque foil-lined jacket.”

  “Shit, shit,” Otto said. “Give me low-lux eyes on the place.”

  Three cameras covering the rear perimeter of the hospital came on the monitor. One showed McGarvey and something else just behind him to the right.

  * * *

  Susan knocked once at the door, and Hammond let her into the suite. She was dressed in white silk trousers widely flared at the bottom and a sheer, almost transparent blouse with no bra. She was slightly tipsy, a big grin on her Botoxed lips. a slight flush on her cheeks.

  It was hard to tell if she was acting or not, because she was almost always playing a role, but she smelled of alcohol.

  “How’s our new man doing?” she asked. “Has he made the kill yet? The lion to the prey, the gorilla down from the trees, the hawk on the downdraft, and all that crap?”

  “I haven’t heard.”

  “So, Tommy boy, are your nipples hard with anticipation? Mine sure the hell are.”

  * * *

  The man propped up against the tree was a street bum, and he was dead. This close up, it was obvious to McGarvey that his neck had been broken.

  Someone was at arm’s length coming up fast behind him.

  Otto’s voice was in his earbud. “To your right, behind you.”

  McGarvey was already dropping low and reaching for his pistol as he swiveled sharply into the approaching man, catching him in the right hip with his shoulder and knocking him off his feet.

  A large-caliber pistol went off just o
ver Mac’s head, the bullet plowing into the dead street bum’s back, the sound muffled by a suppressor on the end of the barrel.

  The much larger man grunted something and tried to kick his way free, but Mac was on him, batting his gun hand away.

  The advantage was only momentary, and before McGarvey could bring his own pistol up and fire, the shooter managed to smash the butt of his pistol into the side of Mac’s head, and he fuzzed out for just a moment.

  “Son of a bitch,” the man swore, his English flat and oddly accented.

  He scrambled away on his butt and once again brought his gun around and fired a shot that went wide, and before he pulled off another, Mac brought his Walther up and fired two rounds, one missing, the second hitting the man somewhere on the left side.

  The man kicked out with a booted foot, catching McGarvey squarely in the face, knocking him flat on his back.

  Mac recovered groggily and fired two more shots, not knowing if they had hit, but the man scrambled away, disappearing into the darkness.

  * * *

  Otto, Pete, and Mary watched all of it, even the low-lux cameras, losing contact with the shooter.

  “Are you okay?” Pete asked. She was beside herself with fear. If the shooter came back now, Mac would be vulnerable.

  “Where is he?”

  “Headed back toward Volta Place,” Otto said.

  “The bastard is big,” McGarvey grunted, and he hauled himself to his feet and stood there for a long moment or two. “See if there are any surveillance cameras. I need to know which way he went and if he has a ride.”

  “Stay there. We’re calling the Bureau,” Otto said.

  “No time,” Mac said, and he started after the shooter.

  Mary was on the phone with one of her contacts at the FBI. “We have a situation,” she said.

  McGarvey’s image was finally lost on the low-lux cameras on the hospital’s roof, and Otto was hurriedly scanning for surveillance cameras on Volta Place or anywhere else in the vicinity.

  Lou picked up one on the rec center just as the shooter emerged from the woods and turned left toward the university.