Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

  He was slow and steady. Balanced on his feet, on all of his directorate’s positions.

  “The rumor is out that the original plan didn’t materialize as we had hoped.”

  It was the worst possible news Rankov could be told. The plan was Kirk McGarvey, and he was supposed to be dead. They had to talk in generalities because of the American National Security Agency’s telephone intercept program.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, goddamnit. For now it’s just speculation, but you needed to be given the heads-up in case it’s true, and our future shipments must either be changed or canceled.”

  “That may not be possible.”

  “Work on it. We all know what’s at stake.”

  “Everything,” Rankov said bitterly. His position, the dacha, almost certainly his life and Tania’s. “But listen to me, it simply may not be possible to back away. I was given the task, and it is expected that I will succeed. That we’ll succeed. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t try to throw me under the bus, you son of a bitch. My neck is out a mile.”

  Rankov only vaguely understood the Americanisms, but he understood fear when he heard it. His network contact in the National Security Agency was running scared. “Nothing is going to happen on vague rumors.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “Too much is at stake to stop now.”

  “You don’t understand. None of you sons of bitches ever understood, except for one.”

  “Enough,” Rankov said. “If and when you have something definitive for me, call again, otherwise we will continue as planned. Even Riyadh is still on board, and they have the most to lose.”

  “I’ll call the others, you limp-dicked cocksucker.”

  “Don’t call me again with speculation,” Rankov said. “Only with facts.” He hung up.

  For a long time he stood staring out the window. It was still cold in Moscow. Spring was coming late. But nothing could be as cold as the feeling in his heart.

  What they were doing was monstrous, even though it had the tacit approval of just about every government official in both hemispheres. Nothing like this had ever been done in history. Hadn’t even been contemplated, to his knowledge.

  He leaned his forehead against the cool window glass.

  “Vasha,” Tania said from the bedroom door. “Is everything okay?”

  He turned and managed a smile. “I was dreaming about the future.”

  She shook her head. “It’s only a dacha. It’s not the end of the world.”

  * * *

  Air Force Brigadier General Walter Echo changed into a civilian blazer and khaki slacks before he left his office on the Pentagon’s D Ring a few minutes after five in the afternoon, and got in his car and drove over to the Watergate’s Next Whisky Bar.

  The word was circulating that McGarvey might not be dead after all and it was the most frightening thing he’d ever heard since Lieutenant Colonel Moses Chambeau had come to him in August last year with his just-speculating scenario.

  Chambeau, who worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst, was one of the people assessing not only strength, orders of battle and deployments of foreign military forces, but the civilian and military leaderships’ willingness to commit to engagement.

  He was married to Echo’s sister, Jen, a certified bitch who’d always been a thorn in the family’s side. And Echo had gone out of his way to give thanks to the hapless bastard who’d taken her off everyone’s hands.

  In addition, Chambeau was bright: Harvard-educated with a PhD in the works for the past five years.

  “The problem is our new president,” Chambeau had said at their August meeting.

  “We have three months.”

  “The bastard’s going to win, and everyone knows it.”

  Echo had spread his hands. They were in his office just before lunch. “Your point?”

  “My threat board is lighting up like a fucking Christmas tree. No one wants the bastard to become our president. No one.”

  “A few tens of millions of Americans might disagree with them—whoever the them are.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Walt.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “When he’s elected we need to be ready for the consequences.”

  Echo remembered that precise moment.

  He would always remember it, because it was the instant that he had become, if nothing else, a complicit traitor. He’d not had his brother-in-law arrested on the spot. “What consequences?”

  “The military consequences,” Chambeau said. “And we need to be prepared.”

  * * *

  It was just the start of the cocktail hour, and the Next Whisky Bar was filling up. Susan Fischer, who was a signals intelligence supervisor with the National Security Agency, was working on her first martini when Echo showed up.

  “Hi, Walt,” she said. “You seen the latest?”

  Echo sat next to her and ordered them both another martini. She was a friend of his brother-in-law’s and probably sleeping with him. She was a lush but she was bright. “No, what?”

  “Merkel has canceled her Washington trip to meet with Weaver.”

  “Happens.”

  “You don’t understand. Weaver personally called Deutsche Welle and asked who the hell needs her. Called her the most weak-in-the-knees leader in Germany’s history. Couldn’t make up her mind on the immigration issue.” Susan shook her head. “Christ, he called her a ‘typical cunt.’”

  “Your point is?” Echo asked, even though he knew exactly what point she was making.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. We can’t stop now, or do you have cold feet?”

  “You’re talking about treason.”

  The woman shook her head. “Not me, Walt. Us.”

  PART

  TWO

  Leak

  April

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was drizzling when McGarvey showed up at the front gate of Camp Peary, the CIA training facility near Williamsburg, and presented his pass and ID. He was driving a battered old Toyota SUV that Pete had come up with, and was dressed in faded jeans, an old sweatshirt, a dirty black nylon jacket and a baseball cap to hide the nearly bald patch on the back of his head.

  He hadn’t shaved or cut his hair since the assassination attempt and he looked like a street bum, but his papers were in order.

  “Just a minute, sir, I don’t have you on my list,” the civilian guard said. He went into the gatehouse, while another security officer, also dressed in BDUs, stood to one side, his hand on a Heckler & Koch compact submachine gun slung over his shoulder.

  McGarvey’s papers identified him as Damon West, an unassigned officer in the Clandestine Service, Marty Bambridge’s signature forged. He was an NOC come out of the cold.

  “I need to get back in shape,” he’d told Pete two days ago.

  She and Louise thought it was way too soon.

  “The time is right,” Otto said. “Everyone’s gone to ground for now.”

  “Maybe they quit,” Louise suggested.

  “They’re waiting for me to show up or waiting for someone to finally come up with the proof I’m dead,” McGarvey had said.

  He’d felt increasingly irascible in the hospital, especially in the past eight or ten days. He’d wanted out, but Franklin had held him back. And so had Pete. And more than once he had almost lashed out at them.

  “Well, you’re not going to show up,” Pete had told him two days ago, once he was out. “At least not right now. Otto’s handling everything as if it were a cyber crime.”

  “It won’t be that easy,” McGarvey had shot back.

  “You’re not ready.”

  “Nor will I ever be sitting here on my ass.”

  They were meeting for pizzas and beer at Otto’s safe house in McLean. Larry Kyung-won and Estes had joined them.

  “I’m surprised Franklin let you off the reservation,” Kyung-won said.
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  “He didn’t,” McGarvey said. “What about you? I’d have thought Marty would have snagged you for something?”

  “Training officer at the Farm.”

  “When do you start?”

  “Last week,” Kyung-won said. “And I know exactly what you’re going to say next. But you won’t be given any recognition nor will anyone cut you any slack.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Pete demanded.

  “I’m going to the Farm to get my edge back,” McGarvey said.

  “Franklin won’t approve it.”

  “He’ll have to find me first.”

  “Why, goddamnit?”

  “Because this won’t stop unless we do something,” Estes said. He’d just come from Langley after thirty-six hours straight and he looked pale, his eyes bloodshot, like he’d been cramming for a difficult final.

  Pete had looked away, and McGarvey had touched her hand. “When it’s over we’ll take a vacation.”

  “No place will be safe,” she said bitterly.

  “Not until we make it safe,” McGarvey had said, and sitting at the gate waiting for his credentials and pass to be checked, he realized again how silly he’d actually sounded.

  His wife, Katy, in a frustrated moment, had called him a Don Quixote. And he supposed in a large measure she was right. But it’s what he was—what he’d become in the past twenty years.

  The guard came out of the gatehouse and handed McGarvey’s papers back to him. “Mr. Salem is waiting for you up at Admin. Would you like an escort, or do you know the way?”

  “Big building, flag in front.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The gate opened and McGarvey drove up through the woods toward the administrative area called the Hill, where the offices, dorms, dispensary, dining hall, supply and weapons maintenance facilities, plus the classrooms and mock prisons for interrogations, including waterboarding, were clustered.

  The physical training portions of the facility were sprawled throughout the mostly heavily wooded tracts along the York River. Firing ranges for a wide variety of weapons including simulated ground-to-air man-held missiles, like the U.S. Stinger, the U.K. Javelin and the Russian Grail; sniper rifles, like the Barrett; more than three dozen different handguns, long guns, submachine guns; and even compact missile throwers—such as ultra-lightweight compound bows—were scattered here and there.

  Other areas were used for hand-to-hand-combat training, day-and-night infiltration and ex-filtration exercises, explosives from flash-bang grenades to the latest iterations of Semtex as well as homemade explosives, including a number using various off-the-shelf fertilizers.

  A mock town was used for urban exercises.

  A Boeing 747 was used for hijacking situations—both the prevention and the commission of.

  A series of very small clearings were used for HALO—High Altitude Low Opening—precision parachute drops.

  Sections of the river were used for surface and subsurface operations.

  And the entire facility was crisscrossed with confidence trails, from those that could be completed in a leisurely half-hour walk, to others that could take an entire evening. And one, the Ball Buster, that was only ever completed by less than 10 percent of those who tried. It was so bad that failure carried no shame, while simply trying was a badge of honor.

  Salem, who’d retired early to take the job running the Farm, had been a Navy SEAL captain who’d never quite been able to come in from field operations despite more than a dozen reprimands from his superior officers.

  “High ranks belong behind desks,” he’d been told more than once. “You’re too fucking valuable to have your ass shot off.”

  He was the only one at the camp, other than Kyung-won, who knew Mac’s real identity, and he had promised no special favors. Plus he was not aware that Kyung-won and McGarvey knew each other.

  “You’ll train when we train, eat when we eat, sleep when we sleep,” Salem had said last night on the phone.

  “And shit when we shit,” McGarvey said. “I know.”

  “You’re an NOC in from the cold, here for retraining.”

  “I need one week, and I’ll be using a secure phone.”

  “Fine with me, so long as Otto sets it up.”

  Salem was waiting in the day room and he brought Mac back to his office without a word. He was a slightly built, mild-looking man, in his midforties. Bright blue eyes, short cropped hair, very neat; a long way from how he looked as a SEAL in the field.

  “Appreciate the help, Bob,” Mac said.

  “Franklin know that you’re here?”

  “Not yet. Neither does Marty, and I want to keep it that way as long as possible.”

  They sat across Salem’s desk from each other.

  “Okay, Mac, I don’t know what this is all about, and I don’t want to know beyond the likelihood it has something to do with whoever tried to kill you. That and you look like shit.”

  “That’ll be useful,” Mac said. “I’m for retraining. But I’m a sanctimonious prick who needs to be brought down a peg.”

  Salem had to laugh. “Old enough to be a grandfather to most of these kids. And once they find out that you were an NOC they’ll want to take a shot at you.”

  McGarvey took out the satphone Otto had set up for him, punched in a seven-character alphanumeric code, hit TALK and set it on the desk. “This is defeating any eavesdropping attempts.”

  “We’re clean in here.”

  “I wanted to make sure because there’s probably a leak somewhere in the Company. Possibly here.”

  Salem was impressed. “Do you think they’ll try to hit you again?”

  McGarvey nodded. “It’s the real reason I’m here.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Pastor Buddy’s Gulfstream touched down at the private airfield outside Kerrville, Texas, just before three in the afternoon. Kamal thanked the crew, got his single bag and walked across to the terminal.

  Even before he went inside, the jet had turned around and was trundling toward the end of the runway for immediate takeoff to Kansas City for its annual inspection and scheduled maintenance.

  The additional $150,000 Kamal had handed over to the pastor three weeks ago had given him practically free rein over the aircraft and his own expansive condo and staff—this time three Asian girls. More important, the money, with promises of much more to come, had guaranteed his anonymity.

  For the last thirty days Kamal had holed up at the church, attending services, which were like crude farces to him, and occasionally going into the amusement park, which was even worse, with mindless mommies and daddies and kiddies herded from one attraction to the other like cattle. But between endless dinners and drunken orgies he had spent a lot of late evenings and early mornings on the computer dividing his time between a half-dozen hacker sites.

  But the information he was coming up with was to this point anything but comforting. It was possible that McGarvey was not dead.

  He’d let his beard and hair grow, and dressed now in jeans and a white shirt and a blazer he looked like a college professor, an academic.

  “Mr. Watson.” A clean-shaven, slender man dressed in shorts, a white T-shirt and baseball cap came over, his hand extended. He was smiling. “Welcome.”

  The waiting room was empty except for a woman behind the counter, and two men in an office behind glass.

  Kamal was surprised, but he shook hands. “Mr. Shadid?”

  “Friends call me Joe. I’m sure that I don’t look like you thought I would.”

  “No.”

  “But then this is Texas and one of my jobs is publicity director for the center—which these days is a tough sell.”

  Shadid took Kamal’s bag and outside they got into a white van, Shadid behind the wheel. The logo on the side read THE KERRVILLE CENTER FOR ISLAMIC STUDIES.

  “Quite an advertisement.”

  “Nothing we could do about it. The locals don’t want us here, though we’ve never been bothered
. But we have to let them know who we are. Thank Allah we don’t have to use the term madrassa, or we’d be in a serious world of shit.”

  Kamal thought he’d made a mistake coming here like this, even though his homework six months ago had led him to believe that he’d find what he was looking for. Out here, in the open, anyone taking a look saw no artifice. Nothing obvious. Just a school for Muslims.

  “Do you like country and western?” Shadid asked as they pulled away.

  “No.”

  Shadid turned on the CD player, music suddenly blasting from the speakers. “Random white noise in the background,” he shouted. “Defeats their surveillance equipment.”

  “Who’s watching you?”

  “The FBI out of San Antonio, of course. Homeland Security. County mounties. Local cops. Just about every son of a bitch out here with a Bible and a rifle—which includes just about every white male.”

  For the first time in his life Kamal was at a loss for words. He was always in charge. But this wasn’t what he’d expected. He had made a very large mistake. This place was a dead end, as was Pastor Buddy’s operation. By tonight he would be long gone from here, and within twenty-four hours he would go deep to rethink everything that had been contaminated.

  “It’s not what you’re thinking,” Shadid said, glancing at him.

  They headed out into the hill country toward the west—away from the town, and from the busy interstate highway.

  “You’re the fourth man with facial hair I’ve picked up at the airport in the past two days. The other three brought their sons, but perhaps you’re here to visit yours.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re just another visitor.”

  Kamal didn’t reply.

  “Does the name Major Sa’ad al-Sakr mean anything to you?”

  “No,” Kamal said, hiding his shock. He’d thought of himself as a professional. It was one of the only reasons he was still alive or not behind bars somewhere. But he’d been caught now.

  “He said that you or someone like you might show up one of these days. So that when you got onto our website we weren’t surprised. In fact we looked forward to your coming.”