Retribution

ONE

Atlantic coast Florida in mid-July lived up to its reputation as hot and muggy, the wind off the ocean doing nothing except increase the humidity, which Dieter Zimmer, driving north from Miami International, found almost unbearably oppressive. It was a few minutes after noon, and although he had the rental Impala’s AC cranked up to the maximum, he was sweating profusely and hating every second of it.

At around six feet, with a thick barrel chest and a broad circular face under a spectacularly bald and shiny head, he stood out. It was something every trainer he’d had in the German army and for five years starting in ’96 with the Kommando Spezialkräfte — the elite special forces — promised would make him stand out.

“You’re the first stupid son of a bitch that the enemy will shoot,” Sergeant Steigler told him the first day of training. “You’re going to die for your country.”

“No, sir, that dumb son of a bitch will be the first one I shoot. He’ll die for his country.”

“Ah, we have a General Patton amongst us,” the sergeant said, and the name had stuck, finally shortened to Patton.

He turned off I-95 at the Fort Pierce exit and on the other side of the town drove across the bascule bridge onto Hutchinson Island and headed north on A1A, the Atlantic almost ominously calm, big thunderheads off in the distance to the east. Past a spate of condominium towers right on the beach, and a mobile home park on the land side of the highway, he slowed for a driveway to the right. The sign on the fence read UDT/SEAL MUSEUM.

Parking just outside the chain-link fence, the gate onto the grounds open, he sat for a moment watching as a Mercedes sedan passed on the highway. His target, he was told, would be driving a Ford pickup, dirty green with Florida tags, and wasn’t expected to show up down here from Tampa until between one thirty and two. He was bringing something for the museum, and he definitely wanted no announcements. Since he’d gotten out of SEAL Team Six he’d supposedly wanted nothing to do with any publicity.

“I just want to get on with you, you know,” he’d said. He’d been talking to an old friend and neither of them had any idea their phone call was being recorded.

Dieter had listened to the entire conversation two months ago in a hotel room in downtown Munich with the others. They’d been in the final planning stages for the first part of the operation they were calling die Vergeltung—the Retribution.

And he was here now, the countdown clock to the start at less than minus sixty minutes.

It was a Tuesday, and the only cars were those of the two attendants inside. No maintenance was scheduled for Tuesdays or Thursdays, and the likelihood of a casual visitor dropping by was slim. But Dieter was ready for that possibility.

He’d always hated the U.S. and everything about it. The prejudice came from his father who’d been an ordinary soldier and complained constantly about the American occupation forces with boots all over Germany. Taking up valuable real estate with their bases, especially the massive one at Ramstein.

“Fucking our women. Driving fancy cars. Paying twenty-five cents — one mark — for an entire four liters of gasoline while we have to pay fifteen times as much. Eating enough meat in one meal, which they buy at their commissaries, to feed a German family for a week.”

He’d felt the esprit de corps in the KSK, which solidified his resolve, Germany for Germans, and had hoped in those end days of the cold war for the Russians just to try to come across the border. They would kick some serious ass all the way back to Moscow.

Getting out of the car, the heat slammed at him, especially at the top of his bald head. He realized that he should have worn a hat after all. Something else to be bitter about. And there was a long list in his mind.

He wore a Cuban-style guayabera shirt, yellow and a little thicker than the normal cotton ones, to hide the silenced subcompact conceal-and-carry Glock 26 with a suppressor. The pistol fired the small 9 × 19 mm round, but the magazine held ten shots, plenty for a close-order gun battle, which he intended this one to be.

Inside the gate a crushed-gravel path led through the grounds, toward the low-slung building. River patrol assault boats made of plywood and painted olive drab that had been used in Vietnam were set up on concrete stands, as were an original towed submersible that had been used in World War II to ferry the underwater demolition teams to find and blow up the mines just below the water line, a Huey chopper — also Vietnam era — and even a Mercury capsule, which had splashed down in the Pacific and was secured by a SEAL team.

A curved ramp led up the side of the museum’s main building. There used to be a huge brass globe on the roof, on which all the countries were engraved. It had symbolized the battlefields since World War II on which the UDT teams, and later the SEALs, had fought and died. A lot of them heroes, some of them Medal of Honor winners. But it was gone now and Dieter couldn’t understand why it had been removed.

Less than ten meters to the east, beach installations of the sort that had been used in World War II to repel the Allies from landing in places like Normandy — the ones the UDT guys were sent in to blow up — were on display to show what an impossible job they had. In fact this stretch of the barrier island had been used to train U.S. forces for the landing.

Dieter was a solider — or had been one — and a very large part of his thoughts were with these guys. They had balls, no doubt about it, and he had a real admiration for them. The only problem was they were Americans.

He had been taught to hate them, and yet sometimes when he tried to really examine his true feelings, he couldn’t say why his hatred had become so intense, especially in the past couple of years working with Pam Schlueter. But she was a convincing woman, with connections to big money and a track record to prove her worth among men. He thought that she was probably nuts; they all did. But all of them thought they understood why her hatred ran so deep, and none of them could find any fault with her. Anyway it was because of her that they were in the business of killing — a business that all of them loved.

At the bottom of the ramp he walked past models of a pair of World War II UDT operators in bathing trunks, fins, and round masks. Their equipment had been crude at best, but they’d gotten the job done.

Inside he went straight back to the reception area behind a glass case displaying books and patches and other souvenirs that were for sale. A stack of the book No Easy Day, written by one of the SEAL Team Six assaulters who’d taken out Usama bin Laden, was laid out on the counter next to the cash register. An old man seated behind the counter looked up from a newspaper he was reading and smiled pleasantly. He was dressed in khakis and a blue polo shirt with U.S. NAVY embroidered over the pocket.

“Did you sign in? The book is by the door.”

“I’ll catch it on the way out,” Dieter said.

“You’re German.”

“Yeah. No longer the bad guys.”

The old man’s name tag read PAVCOVICH. “Ain’t it the truth.”

Dieter figured the man was in his mideighties, maybe older, and had probably fought in the war. “You alone here today?”

“Charlie’s out back. Doing some painting this morning. We’ve got a VIP coming in today. One of the SEAL Team Six guys who blew bin Laden away.”

“I heard.”

It took a moment for the old man to understand something wasn’t right — the visit was supposed to be a secret. He started to open his mouth.

Dieter pulled out his pistol. “Let’s go back to the office.”

“You fucking kraut.”

“Now,” Dieter said, the pistol pointed directly at the old man’s face.

“Screw you.”

“If I have to kill you I will. But all I want is to duct-tape you to your chair and tape your mouth shut.”

“And then what?”

“Then I’m going to have a talk with your VIP.”

The old man got up from his stool and shuffled from behind the counter and down a corridor that led to the displays, to a small office. The door was open.

“Have a seat,” Dieter told the man.

“You don’t have any duct tape.”

“Nein,” Dieter said, and he fired one shot into the back of the man’s head.

TWO

Dieter checked to make sure that the old man was dead, careful not to get any blood on himself, then went back out into the museum, closing the office door. He quickly went through the several rooms of displays to make absolutely certain that no one else was there, sorry in a way that it was totally impossible for him see the place the way it should be seen.

Two large rooms — almost warehouse size — were in the back. One of them displayed big pieces of war machinery — like an armored Hummer — while in the second room a young woman with earbuds sat listening to music behind a counter. The room was filled with racks of souvenir hats, T-shirts, and other UDT/SEAL kitsch.

She looked up and smiled when Dieter came in. He shot her in the forehead and she fell back, the smile still on her lips.

Maybe in another time, next year or something, he would come back. But he was lying to himself, something he’d been doing ever since he was a kid growing up in a small lake village south of Munich. He’d lied to everyone at first, and so often, that he’d begun to believe his own stories, so when he discovered how to cheat on exams in school, he didn’t think of it as cheating. He was passing tests. He was telling people what they wanted to hear. He was telling himself what he needed to hear.

He holstered his pistol and checked the front door again to make sure no one had shown up. Then he let himself out the back way and followed a path to the corrugated metal shed at the rear of the property. The big service door was open. A Chevy pickup truck painted dark blue, the U.S. Navy markings blanked out but still legible, was parked just inside.

Holding up at the door he looked inside. “Charlie?” he called softly. “You around here someplace, buddy?”

No one answered, so he went in and took a quick look around. The place was a mess, but it was a fairly well-equipped machine shop, with a metal lathe, a table saw, a drill press, and other tools, including an electric welder and a portable air compressor.

Back outside he glanced at his watch. It was a little past one, which still gave him a margin of at least thirty minutes before the retired SEAL Team Six assaulter was due to show up, but he wanted to be in place well before then.

No one was in the yard within the fence with its tank traps and machine-gun installations. He started down the white shell path. Almost immediately he caught the smell of someone smoking a cigarette, and it instantly brought back memories of when he was a kid stealing his father’s Ernte 21 unfiltereds and sharing them with a couple of his friends on the way to school. He’d given up the habit once he’d joined the KSK because they’d robbed his wind. But they still smelled good to him.

He pulled up short. A bucket of red paint, a brush balanced on the rim, was set next to a log revetment about twenty feet long that protected a machine-gun nest behind a narrow slit. Barbed wire was coiled around the front and sides of the installation, and it looked to Dieter as if someone had been touching up the heads of the spikes or the bolts driven into the logs with Rust-Oleum to protect them from the corrosive salt-laden air.

The guy was nowhere to be seen, but the smell of his cigarette was strong on the very light breeze.

He’d been painting, but he’d put down his brush and had left for some reason.

“If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t,” the instructors had drilled into their heads. “Recognize when you are walking into an ambush. It only takes one determined son of a bitch to fuck up your day.”

The SEALs had a saying that incoming rounds had the right of way. It amounted to the same thing he’d been taught.

Dieter pulled out his pistol and, concealing it behind his right leg, headed to the machine-gun emplacement. The smell of smoke was fading, and for a moment he was pissed off. Both guys were supposed to be inside the museum, waiting for their VIP to show up, and he was running out of time to deal with this kind of shit.

“Mind the wet paint,” someone off to the left said.

Dieter turned in time to see a fairly short man with a large beer belly, maybe in his sixties or early seventies, with only a fringe of white hair around his ears, dressed in paint-splattered white coveralls, walking over from behind an assault boat set up on a concrete stand. He was grinning.

“You a former SEAL?”

“No, you?”

The man stopped short. “You’re German.”

Dieter shrugged deprecatingly. “Can’t help who my parents were.” The American was too far away for a decent pistol shot. “I was in the German special forces, and I’ve always wanted to get over here to see the museum.”

“KSK?”

“Right. You must be Charlie. Pavcovich said I’d find you down here somewhere.” Dieter stepped forward and raised his left hand as if he wanted to shake.

Charlie stepped back a pace. “Something wrong with your other hand?”

“Not at all,” Dieter said and he brought his pistol out. “In fact I’m a rather good shot.”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Charlie said. “We got a call a couple of days ago that someone like you might be showing up. Didn’t say who he was or who the hell you were, but he was a German too.”

“Someone like me?”

“He said to call the cops if you did.”

“Maybe you should,” Dieter said. The only Germans he thought who might have given such a warning were from the BND — the German secret service. Pam had raised the possibility — no matter now slight — that the Bundesnachrichtendienst might come snooping around at some point. But not this early. Not before they’d even started.

Charlie suddenly turned and sprinted to the open gate in the tall fence. He crossed the narrow parking lot and disappeared through the sea oats toward the beach, jigging left and right as he ran.

Dieter stepped around the machine-gun emplacement and began firing, steadying his gun hand against the top log, one measured shot after the other. On the third shot the American yelped and staggered to the left, blood on his left thigh.

The fourth shot struck the former UDT operator high in his back, just below and to the left of the base of his neck. But the man would not fall. He hobbled over the rising sand dune.

Dieter went after him.

Charlie reached the waterline on the beach and then turned and looked at Dieter, an odd expression that was mixed with pain, but no fear, on his broad face. “You’re here about our bin Laden SEAL. But why? You’re not al-Qaeda?”

“Purely business,” Dieter said, and he shot the man in the middle of the forehead at nearly point-blank range.

Charlie Saunders fell back into the water, the light rippling waves washing over his face, carrying the blood away, his arms splayed out to either side.

No boats were anywhere to be seen. Nor were there any people on the beach. Dieter reloaded his pistol as he started back up to the main building to wait for the first bin Laden SEAL he would kill. The first of twenty-two, plus the CIA translator and the one EOD tech. The dog would get a free ride.

THREE

Peter Barnes glanced over at his wife Sally, her face scrunched up in the neutral expression that meant she was bored out of her skull, wanted to be anywhere except in a ratty old pickup truck heading to Fort Pierce, and was merely going for the ride because she owed him. Which in his mind wasn’t really so.

She’d gotten sick almost to the day two years ago when he’d mustered out of the navy, and as it turned out his bone marrow was a match for hers and he’d saved her life. The problem was that their marriage had been on rocky grounds because of his three-hundred-day-per-year deployments, and nothing either of them could say or do seemed to make much difference.

Sometimes civilian life was a bitch. No one was shooting at you and you didn’t have to watch for IEDs. No one was giving you orders — sometimes shitty ones that made no sense — nor did you have the responsibilities of looking out for your guys. And that was the problem: there was nothing to prepare for, nothing to get the heart beating, no actual reason for getting up in the morning.

One of the guys from Chalk One had written a book about taking out UBL, but Barnes’s discharge after eighteen years landed him a job as a maintenance man for a condo association on St. Pete Beach. He’d thought about going to work for Xe or one of the other contractor services, but he knew that he would feel guilty as hell leaving Sally again. Yet he was drowning.

They’d come across the state through Orlando and were finally on I-95 heading south, just a few miles from the exit to Vero Beach; from there they’d take A1A south. Already they were late.

“We’ll spend a half hour there, tops. Then I’ll take you to lunch someplace,” he said.

“You coulda just mailed it,” Sally said without looking at him.

She was still pretty, still had her body because they’d never had kids — and in a way she was even more beautiful because her cancer had left her skin almost translucent.

“I want to hand it over in person,” Barnes said. The UBL book had been a big bestseller, but the journal that he’d kept was, in his mind, a hell of a lot more personal. And there was no one else right now that he could share it with except the guys who ran the museum and the people who visited every week.

“Whatever.”

He held his silence until they got off at the SR 60 exit into Vero Beach. “You okay, babe? Need to stop to take a pee?”

She shook her head.

Sometimes he felt so goddamned guilty because he wanted to get back into it, while at the same time he wanted to be there for her. He’d held friends in his arms on the battlefield and talked them through dying. He understood, he really did. And he’d been there for Sally as she nearly died.

He glanced over at her again. But looking into her eyes was different than looking into the eyes of a badly wounded SEAL. He loved her but he’d never felt the same camaraderie he felt with his teammates. And that drove him even crazier.

“We can stay at a hotel tonight. I can call and make an excuse. Nothing much is happening tomorrow. We’d be back by noon anyway.”

She finally looked over at him. “I just want to forget the years you were gone. Maybe if we’d had kids it might have been better, or maybe worse, I don’t know. It’s just that I always waited for someone to show up in a navy car, ring the bell, and tell me that you’d been killed somewhere in the mountains, or at sea, or in the middle of some fucking desert.”

Barnes tried to say he was sorry, but she went on.

“They couldn’t even tell me what you were doing. I wouldn’t know why you had died. Whether you’d thrown your life away for some bullshit political reason, you know. Someone signs an executive order and my macho husband runs off, jumps out of a plane, and gets his ass shot off.”

He had nothing to say. It was over; he was out of the navy and never going back. She was suffering from post-op depression and maybe even post-traumatic stress syndrome from waiting at home for the shoe to drop. Guys had committed suicide, but so had a lot of their wives.

“And then what?” she cried, tears welling in her eyes. “What about me? What was I supposed to do with the rest of my fucking life?”

“I’m back, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”

“What about right now?” she demanded.

It was the same argument they’d been having for the past two weeks. “It’s something I have to do. When we drive back home, it’ll be over and done with. For good.”

“But not forgotten,” she said, and she turned away.

“No,” Barnes said, and he concentrated on his driving.

It was a long way into town from the interstate, and then past the power plant on the Indian River waterway and onto the barrier island — Orchid Island here, but called Hutchinson Island south across the St. Lucie County line.

Past the condos and beach developments, they finally reached the point where A1A was less than fifty yards from the water. The Atlantic was almost flat calm this afternoon, but way out in the east thunderheads were building, some of them into anvils, the tops blown off by the jet stream seven miles or so above the surface. They would be having some nasty weather by evening, and he made the decision to drive back to Vero when they were finished at the museum and check into the Holiday Inn Express just off the interstate. Tonight they could splurge on a nice dinner at the Ocean Grill right on the beach. He would make sure that they got a window table so they could watch the storm.

Once he’d been accepted into the elite DEVGRU, which was the Naval Special Warfare Development Group — SEAL Team Six — he begun making entries into his journal every day. Sometimes he bitched about the workload, especially on the Green Team, which was the nine-month training evolution. But at other times he was excited, especially during CQB — close quarters battle — drills that were a whole lot better than any 3-D video game, and his writing showed it.

During his first deployment to Iraq his writing became closer to the bone, especially about friends dying, their bodies shot to hell, brains leaking out of their eyes or where their noses used to be; scraping bits and pieces off the dirt road after an IED went off; dragging a bullet-ridden body back to a defensible position so that the ragheads wouldn’t take it and mutilate it and hang the pieces from some roadside pole.

The journal had helped him get rid of a lot of his feelings, but sometimes at night in bed, or like now when he was driving practically on autopilot, a lot of that crap still came back in living color.

“You’re doing it again,” Sally said.

He looked up out of his thoughts. To the south were the condo towers on the beach just beyond the museum.

“I knew this was going to happen. I would have bet good money on it.”

“Sorry,” Barnes said. There was no use arguing because she was right, and she knew that he knew it.

“Yeah.”

“We’re almost there. One half hour, tops, and we’ll haul ass. Promise.”

But she did not answer.

FOUR

Wolfhardt Weisse could have been Dieter Zimmer’s older brother. Tall, broad chest, round face, intelligent eyes, and a bald head that looked as if it had been waxed and buffed. The difference was this: Zimmer was a German terrorist, while Weisse was a captain in the German intelligence service.

Driving up from Miami he had taken his time following Zimmer, whom he had traced all the way from Munich. The BND had evaluated his threat as interesting but not likely imminent. The real problem was the lack of follow-up intelligence: Zimmer was part of a suspected terror cell called the Black October Revolution, which for the past three years had been nearly impossible to penetrate.

The organization had nothing to do with any sort of a revolution. Apparently, it was a murder-for-hire group, mostly dirty ex-cops and former Bundeswehr soldiers, led, it was believed, by a woman, nationality so far unknown — maybe German, maybe American — who either had a lot of money or a well-connected banker.

The best they’d been able to do so far was to work out from wiretaps, the names of five suspected members, Dieter Zimmer among them, and their involvement in several contract killings in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly one in the U.S. But without any proof of wrongdoing on German soil they could only follow the five. Wolf had been assigned Zimmer, and no one at BND’s new headquarters in Berlin near the Reichstag had been more surprised than he when Zimmer had suddenly flown to the States. Wolf had managed to get one of their tech people down from the German embassy in Washington to meet Zimmer’s flight and place a GPS tracking beacon on the car the man had rented.

For the last twenty minutes it had been stopped at a location on a barrier island just north of the city of Fort Pierce.

The briefing he and the others had received six months ago by Oberst Hans Mueller, their project chief and liaison with the BfV, which was the domestic intelligence service, had been very specific.

“Do not crowd them until we have proof of wrongdoing. All we have now are suspicions.”

“Sorry, sir, but I’d say that’s exactly what we do to the bastards. Make them look over their shoulders twenty-four/seven,” Wolf said. “Force the fuckers to make mistakes.”

The colonel, who had come up through the ranks, smiled. “Personally I agree with you, but everybody takes orders.” His nickname was the Iron Man, because he wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty in the field.

“Even you, sir?” someone asked from the back of the briefing room.

“Especially me,” Mueller said. “Probable cause, ladies and gentlemen. It’s in the constitution.”

Which in Wolf’s estimation was a load of horseshit. He couldn’t think of any intelligence agency field officer in the world who gave much thought to probable cause. Nobody but the Americans actually talked about waterboarding and the like — enhanced interrogation methods — but everyone used them because they worked.

Ten minutes with Dieter Zimmer and they would start getting answers.

Like why the hell he had dropped everything and suddenly flown to the States, and what the hell was he doing stopped out in the middle of nowhere — lying on the beach and getting a tan?

Wolf got off the interstate at the Fort Pierce exit and headed east with the fairly heavy workday traffic, something bothersome niggling at the back of his mind.

In school, starting when he was about seven, he’d been outstanding at chess. He’d taught himself from a book of matches played by chess masters through the ages, and after one year he was his class champion, then the school’s champion and finally the all-city Baden-Württemberg champion.

He’d lost interest by then because the game and his opponents seemed too predictable. Playing became a bore.

But he’d never lost his edge — his ability to see around corners, to work out the next dozen or so moves that his opponents were likely to make and come up with the countermoves to defeat them. When he tested for the Bundeswehr they’d wanted to make him a cryptographer, but in his head working out codes was just like playing chess. He wanted to be physical — blow up things, get into hand-to-hand combat — which in the end landed him in the secret service. He could figure things out and he could kill a man if need be.

These days the only people he played chess with were his ex-wife Renate and their two boys, Jared and Eric, and just for fun — though Eric at six was already showing an inventiveness.

Zimmer had most likely come here to meet someone. But it was apparently a rendezvous in the middle of nowhere, perhaps with the woman who was possibly an American.

The middle of nowhere. The one piece of the puzzle that made no sense.

He phoned his contact at the German embassy in Washington, and when he had identified himself he was put through instead to Gottfried Lenz, chief of the BND’s Washington station.

“I’m glad you called, Captain, because I don’t like being in the dark, and I especially don’t like you co-opting my assets.”

“Yes, sir. If you wish to call Oberst Mueller to verify my orders, I’ll wait. But I need a piece of information.”

“I don’t give a shit what you need. But I’ll call Mueller and find out what this is all about.”

Just now relations with the United States were on the tight side, because of the continuing debt crises over the euro. Germany wanted to let Greece, Spain, and several other members who were in serious trouble because of mismanagement opt out. Sink or swim. Wall Street was in a minor tailspin because the American bankers feared the move would spark a recession in Europe, which would naturally spill over to the States. The White House was putting pressure on Merkel to back down. No one wanted to add to the tense relations.

And Lenz had the reputation of being a hidebound bureaucrat who always followed orders to the letter. He wanted no ripples in his operation.

Wolf called the embassy again, this time asking for the travel and tourism section. A young woman answered. Speaking in German, Wolf identified himself as a tourist on the way up from Miami to Orlando.

“I’m just passing Fort Pierce now and I thought I’d drive out onto the barrier island and take the highway north. I have all day and I was wondering if there might be something to see other than the ocean and some sand.”

“I’m not personally familiar with the area, but one moment please and I’ll bring it up.”

“Fine.”

She was back after just a few moments. “Did you serve in the military, sir?”

“Years ago,” Wolf said. It was an odd question.

“Then you have probably heard of the U.S. Navy SEALS. They’re a corps of special operations soldiers. Commandos. Their museum is just north of the city on the barrier island highway A1A.”

“Thank you very much, it sounds interesting. Do you have an exact address?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, and she gave it to him. “Will there be anything else I can help you with?”

“No,” Wolf said, and he broke the connection. He plugged the museum’s address into his GPS and the location came up with a match for Zimmer’s car, which made even less sense.

The man hadn’t suddenly flown to the States simply to visit a museum. A military museum. A SEAL museum.

A few years ago the SEALs had become world-famous when they’d swooped across the Afghan border into Pakistan and killed Usama bin Laden and flew off with his body. At the time he remembered thinking that the operation sounded like something the Israelis might have pulled off. It was a lot more daring, with a lot more political risk than most American presidents were willing to sanction. Jimmy Carter had taught his successors that lesson with the botched raid to free the American embassy hostages being held in Iran.

He passed through the downtown area and turned east again over a bascule bridge onto the barrier island when his cell phone chirped. It was Lenz from Washington. He ignored the call.

Zimmer had served in the KSK, getting out on an other-than-honorable discharge. Wolf had seen the man’s jacket. He’d not been guilty of anything terribly wrong. He had no court-martial on his record, only a series of bad fitness reports because he couldn’t follow orders. He was a big mouth — a braggart, according to one of his supervisors. Very unpopular with his fellow operators. Not a team player. But his marks for CQB drills were all superior. He knew how to fight. His attitude was his only problem.

The man had disappeared for several years, until he’d shown up as a name on a series of random cell phone intercepts. A file had been started on him and eventually the four others, plus the woman, and now he’d come here to a SEAL museum in an obscure corner of Florida.

Why?

To assassinate someone?

Wolf sped up.

FIVE

A battered old Ford F-150 pickup turned onto the gravel driveway and parked next to the red Impala. From his vantage point on the roof Dieter watched a man dressed in khaki shorts and a black T-shirt get out on the driver’s side.

He reached back inside and took out what looked like a thick manila envelope and said something to a woman on the passenger side.

Because of the angle of the sun it was almost impossible to make out any of the woman’s features except that it was a woman. Almost certainly Barnes’s wife.

Barnes turned away, closed the door, and started toward the open gate, but then he turned and went back to the truck and opened the door again.

At first Dieter wasn’t sure if this was the right guy. Most of the photographs he’d seen of the SEAL Team Six operator showed a man with long scraggly hair and a week’s worth of beard, dressed in the usual tan patterned Crye Precision uniform. This one’s hair was a buzz cut, and he was clean-shaven. Which was to be expected considering the condo association he worked for now. The man was no longer a killer. Now he made sure that the lawns were mowed, the palm trees trimmed, the pool cleaned, and everything that needed to be painted was painted. Hinges did not squeak, cracks in sidewalks and walkways were filled, window screens were repaired, and no light in a public place ever stayed burned out for long.

Barnes did not seem happy. It was clear even at this distance that he and his wife were having an argument.

He turned away, then back again, said something else, then slammed the door and marched through the gate and up the gravel path.

Dieter moved a little farther back until Barnes was out of sight below; then he went down the ramp.

From where it was parked the pickup truck was not visible from the front door of the museum. Nevertheless Dieter glanced once over his shoulder as he headed in an even stride down the path, as if he were in no hurry. Just a man leaving the museum on a fine summer afternoon.

Sally Barnes had rolled down her window and was staring off toward the sea oats and other grasses along the dunes in front of the beach. She didn’t notice Dieter until he came around to her side of the truck. She looked angry.

“If you want to shake my husband’s hand he’s inside,” she said. Her voice was high and thin. Dieter got the impression that she was sick, or had been recently.

He smiled. “Actually it’s you I came to see,” he said.

She scowled. “What?”

No one was passing on the highway. Dieter looked over his shoulder again to make sure that Barnes wasn’t coming back, then he pulled out his pistol and shot her in the forehead, driving her head back against the window.

The 9 × 19 mm load was light enough that, combined with the effects of the suppressor, the bullet did not exit from the rear of her head, making a mess. She slumped over in the seat, her eyes still open.

Holstering the pistol, he opened the door, and shoved her body down onto the floor so that it would be out of sight to anyone walking by. Then he closed the door and headed back to the museum.

The woman had been unexpected. Had she stayed home she would have lived to mourn her husband. But it was of little consequence to Dieter. She was his fourth kill for the organization; her husband would be the fifth. For the moment he was actually enjoying the heat of the day, with no thoughts about returning to Germany to plan for the next phase.

Today was just a warning. It was foolish, he and the others had agreed, but Pam had insisted.

“I want the bastards to squirm,” she told them in her sharply clipped German.

“They’ll go to ground once they realize what is happening,” Rolf Woedding, the first man she’d hired, suggested languidly. He was from Hamburg. He’d been a major in the Bundeswehr and had won a couple of medals in Iraq.

He’d been accused, though never convicted, of the slaughter of a dozen civilians, after which he had quietly taken his discharge. For two years he’d worked as a contractor back in Iraq and Afghanistan, but his methods had become even harsher, and his contract guarding Afghan government officials had been terminated.

And he came to the attention of Pam Schlueter.

“No,” she’d disagreed. “They’re arrogant, all of them. I know these Americans, who they are, how they react.”

“Their capabilities?”

“Will be their undoing. They work as teams. They don’t know how to operate on their own.”

“Once we’ve taken out the first few, won’t the rest coalesce?” Woedding had pressed. “Some of them are still in the service; they’ll just as likely return to their bases where we can’t get to them.”

“They’ll come out when we start killing their families,” Pam said. “Or don’t you have the stomach for such things now?”

Woedding had merely smiled, and Dieter remembered thinking at the time that the man’s expression was that of a cobra waiting patiently to strike.

No one else said a thing. Woedding outranked them all, and he was almost certainly the most out-of-control son of a bitch in the group. Everyone respected him, but more than that, all of them except Pam were afraid of him.

Just inside the front door, Dieter took out his pistol again and stopped to listen. He happened to glance at the sign-in book where Barnes had written his name and the date, when he heard someone toward the rear of the museum say something.

The words were indistinct, but the tone of voice was clear. Barnes had discovered Pavcovich’s body in the office.

Moving to the end of the short corridor, Dieter stopped at the point where he could see the glass case in the reception area. At that moment Barnes came around the corner, his head down as he punched numbers into a cell phone.

He looked up, his eyes widening, and moved to the left the instant before Dieter fired, the shot smashing into a framed photograph of a SEAL Medal of Honor winner.

Dieter fired again, but Barnes disappeared around a corner into one of the display areas.

In any sort of action scenario Dieter’s heart rate actually dropped. He became as calm as a man strolling along a beach without a care in the world, though he was capable of moving incredibly fast if need be. Afterward he’d always been able to tell his debriefers details that he never remembered noticing. He had an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings.

It was not likely that the ex-SEAL Team Six assaulter was armed; nevertheless Dieter moved with caution down the corridor to the entrance into the first display room when he heard the sound of breaking glass. For just a moment he was confused. There were no windows in the front of the building through which Barnes could escape. But then it struck him: he was inside a museum of specialized warfare, with weapons on display. Certainly not loaded, but some of the stuff in here would be deadly in the right hands.

Dieter cautiously peered around the corner as the lights at the far end of the room went out behind one of the display counters. He fired one shot in that general direction, merely to see if he could get a reaction, but Barnes did not respond.

It was possible that the man was trying to reach the back door, which was farther down the corridor beyond the office. Dieter turned to head him off, but Barnes was right there with a World War II M1 Garand rifle, the bayonet fixed.

For just an instant Dieter stood looking into the ex-SEAL’s eyes, and for just that instant his resolve weakened. The son of a bitch was a killer, and he was in the zone.

Barnes lunged from just a couple of feet away, but instead of stepping out of the way, Dieter moved forward, batting the tip of the blade away with his left hand. He fired the Glock into the man’s neck, just below his chin, the round plowing upward into his brain.

SIX

Wolf had come through U.S. customs on a diplomatic passport, his one check-on bag sealed. He pulled into a condo parking lot less than fifty meters from the SEAL museum’s fence, unlocked the bag in the trunk and took out his big SIG Sauer P226. He loaded it with a fresh magazine of 9mm hollow points, screwed the suppressor barrel on the end, and jacked a round into the firing chamber.

Back behind the wheel of his rental Camry, the pistol on the seat next to him, he watched the main gate and building in the rearview mirror. Zimmer’s Chevrolet was parked next to a green Ford pickup truck with a Florida plate. The gate in the tall chain-link fence was open, but no one was about. The yard was deserted.

If they were right about Zimmer and the others working as contract killers, then it was very possible whatever was going on here today could be something more than a meeting. Wolf got a hollow feeling in his stomach.

He’d spent time in the hills of Afghanistan and in Iran’s mountains helping set up suites of electronic surveillance equipment that could intercept military transmissions and relay them to an orbiting ComSatBw-2 satellite, which, combined with synthetic aperture radar images from the SAR-Lupe satellite monitoring the region, would give German military intelligence a lot of real-time information.

The problem came the night an Iranian patrol stumbled on their position. In the intense firefight that followed, all six Iranian commandos plus two of Wolf’s people were killed.

Finishing their mission that night they had loaded all the bodies in the back of a pickup truck and driven eighty kilometers out into the desert, where they dumped the Iranians. They made their rendezvous point another one hundred plus kilometers to the north near the town of Babol near the Caspian Sea. When they were picked up by the patrol boat, the crew thought they were all mortally wounded because of their bloody uniforms.

He’d had a strong gut feeling just before the attack, and it was that feeling that saved most of his squad. Ever since then he listened.

Waiting until an AC service van heading north passed, Wolf drove to the SEAL parking lot and slowly passed the pickup truck and the Chevy to the end of the chain-link fence.

He turned around and drove back, parking behind the Impala, so that if Zimmer managed to get past him he would not be able to make his escape, at least not by car.

Grabbing the pistol he got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s side of the Chevy and took a quick look through the window. The car was empty, no bag or anything else, no key in the ignition.

He looked across toward the museum to make sure no one was coming up the path; then he glanced inside the pickup. A woman lay on her side on the floor; a little blood from a bullet wound in her forehead had dribbled down the side of her nose.

But her death made absolutely no sense. As far as they’d been able to determine the organization Zimmer belonged to probably specialized in assassinations of high-profile targets, not some woman in an old pickup truck. Not unless she was someone important, or the mistress or wife of someone important, and the truck was merely a disguise.

The plate on the back was Hillsborough County, Florida. Moving cautiously toward the open gate, completely focused on what he might be walking into, scanning the roofline, the edges of the building and the corners of the boats and other things on display in the yard, Wolf almost missed the plate on the front of the truck.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure that somehow Zimmer hadn’t come around on his six, when he spotted the circular emblem of the U.S. Navy Special Warfare Development Group. SEAL Team Six. The ones who had taken out bin Laden a few years ago.

One of them had apparently driven here with his wife or girlfriend and had gone inside. Zimmer’s target? Which made even less sense unless the group was working for al-Qaeda. But there was no money there. The only effective cells still able to function were in backwaters like Somalia and, lately, Ethiopia and Sudan. But they were poorly equipped and had no real connections outside of their little groups. The leaders of the other larger, more important units, mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had been killed by U.S. drone strikes.

Wolf made his way off the path between the boats and the Huey chopper, until he had a sight line on the front door. Everything from here looked normal.

The problem was Zimmer. They wanted him alive, if possible. If he could be taken, Wolf was to call his operations handler in Berlin, who would in turn make contact with the FBI. From there the situation — except for a debriefing — would be out of his hands. Mission accomplished. Or at least his part of it done. It would be up to the intelligence directorate to put all the pieces together.

He sprinted the last fifteen meters to the front door and flattened himself against the wall next to it. It was summer, and Florida’s low season. It was possible that someone from the nearby condos might spot a man running around the museum yard with a pistol in his hand, but unlikely. Most of the people on islands like these were snowbirds — they came down from the snow in the northern states during the winter months and went back home in the summer.

In any event he had Interpol credentials and a permit to carry his weapon across the borders of member states. By agreement, deadly force was to be used only to protect his own life or the lives of innocent bystanders.

He’d been too late to protect the woman in the truck, and almost certainly the docents inside the museum, but he suspected that Zimmer would find dealing with a SEAL Team Six operator was an entirely different matter.

Wolf took a quick glance through the glass door. Nothing moved inside, nor were there any obvious signs of violence. But the short corridor that led maybe eight or ten meters back to a glass display case was a killing field. No place for someone coming through the door to take cover.

He turned and went to the east corner of the building, the scents of the sea at low tide strong on a chance breeze, the day easily as hot and humid as the lowlands along the Tigris River in Iraq. Moving fast and low, he made his way to the rear corner, where once again he held up for just a moment before chancing a quick look.

A man was running flat out, heading down a narrow path through a back gate in the tall fence directly toward the ocean. He was large and bald, and he was wearing a yellow shirt. The same man from the plane.

He disappeared over a rise, and Wolf headed after him at the same moment he heard the first siren from a long ways off. Someone had called the police. But if they were local cops, they wouldn’t have a chance against Zimmer.

Near the top of the low dune, Wolf hunched down and cautiously took a look at what appeared to be a beach bunker of some sort. Big logs, barbed wire, of the sort the Japanese had used in the South Pacific during the war.

But there was no sign of Zimmer.

Rising up, he sprinted the rest of the way down to the bunker, at the same moment Zimmer appeared around the corner, his pistol pointed directly at Wolf’s chest.

The siren was closer now, and in the distance there were more.

“Who the hell are you?” Zimmer asked in English.

“BND,” Wolf said. His pistol was away from his side, pointed down.

Zimmer reacted, but his aim didn’t waver.

“Put down your weapon and you might live out the afternoon. I followed you from Munich, and we have surveillance operations on the rest of your group. I’m only sorry that I wasn’t in time to save the poor woman in the pickup truck. Was killing her really necessary?”

“You’ll never know,” Zimmer said in German.

He raised his pistol.

“Killing a SEAL. That why you came all this way?”

“You can’t guess the half of it,” Zimmer said, and he fired two shots.

Wolf staggered back, both rounds hitting him in the chest. As his legs went out from under him he managed to bring his pistol up and pull off one snap shot that hit Zimmer in the face just below his nose.

SEVEN

Wolf was sitting up trying to catch his breath from the impact of the two rounds on his Kevlar vest. He’d holstered his weapon and held up his Interpol credentials when the first cop came over the rise.

“Drop your weapon, put your hands together at the back of your head,” the cop shouted. He was young and nervous.

“I’m a police officer,” Wolf said. “Interpol.”

“Put your hands together at the back of your head.”

Wolf dropped his ID wallet and did as he was told. “There is a woman dead in the pickup truck, and at least two more dead inside the museum. This is the man who committed the murders.”

The cop came down the slope and placed handcuffs on Wolf’s wrist. But he was clumsy — it would have been child’s play to take his weapon and shoot him.

He radioed something that Wolf didn’t quite catch, and a minute later two more cops came over the rise. A lot more sirens were close now.

The young cop stood aside as one of the others picked up Wolf’s ID, while the second kicked the pistol away from Zimmer’s body.

“Are you armed?” the cop with his ID asked.

“Yes. Holster under my shirt on the left.”

One of the new cops took his pistol. “You’ve been shot.”

“I’m wearing,” Wolf said. “Can you get these things off me?”

“In a minute,” the cop said. His name tag read Fischer; he was a sergeant. He stepped a few yards away and spoke into a lapel mic.

“The man is Dieter Zimmer,” Wolf said. “He’s a German citizen I was following. We think that he works for a terror cell of killers for hire.”

Two more cops showed up, but Fischer held them back and came over to Wolf.

“Passport?”

“Back pocket, right.”

Fischer took it and read the number into his lapel mic.

Another set of sirens came from the south, their tones more high-pitched than the police cruisers. Wolf figured them to be ambulances.

“Take off the man’s cuffs,” Fischer said at length.

The younger cop did it and helped Wolf to his feet.

“Do you need a doctor, Captain Weisse?” Fischer asked. He was a short black man, his face glistened with sweat.

“No. But I need to contact my office in Berlin. They’ll want to know what’s happened here.”

“My lieutenant is speaking with someone; they want to know if you’re okay. Your embassy is being contacted.”

“Good. May I have my things?”

Fischer handed over his passport and credentials wallet. “I’ll hold the weapon for just a bit.”

Wolf pocketed his ID and passport and went to search Zimmer’s body, but one of the cops stepped in the way. “Sorry, sir, but for now he’s our dead guy.”

“I’d suggest that you get one of your ordinance disposal people down here. These guys are known to sometimes wear explosives, booby-trapped to go off if a first responder isn’t careful.”

The cop stepped back.

“Go ahead and deal with it,” Fischer said from a respectful distance.

Wolf bent over Zimmer’s body and carefully probed the areas of the armpits and groin. But he found nothing. He checked the pockets, coming up with about one hundred U.S. dollars, car keys for the Chevy, and a wallet with a driver’s license and credit cards and a German passport, all of them in the name of Rheinhardt Schey.

“The passport is a fake. We’ll provide you with the proper identification, and I’m sure that the BND or someone will want to claim the body. This is an ongoing investigation.”

“Into what?”

“He was an assassin.”

“There are two people dead up in the museum. One of them is a docent, the other is a younger man, we’re working on his ID.”

“He was a navy SEAL.”

“I saw the front plate,” Fischer said, and he cocked his head and stepped away, apparently listening to something in his earbud.

One of the cops had walked around to the other side of the machine-gun bunker. “We’ve got another one down here,” he called up.

There were now six cops on the dune, and Fischer motioned for one of them to check it out. He was still talking into his lapel mic.

Wolf couldn’t make out what he was saying, but the guy seemed a little surprised. None of this made sense to any of them. The killings were not random; Zimmer had gone through a lot of trouble to come all this way to kill a SEAL Team Six operator. Somehow he’d known that the man would be here at this particular moment in time, which meant the Black October Revolution had pretty sophisticated intelligence contacts here.

He stood staring at Zimmer’s body, when Fischer came over and handed him the SIG.

“Any ideas?”

“His group is called the Black October Revolution, contract killers of high-profile targets — the four hits we know about were businessmen who weren’t in the EU. The hits happened off German soil, one of them, in fact, in Atlanta. Tony Aldrich, who was a big player in the real estate market in Spain and in Monaco.”

“Last year,” Fischer said. “It was in the news. There’ve been no arrests, but his girlfriend was a suspect. They have a penthouse in Palm Beach, so there was a Florida connection.” He glanced at Zimmer’s body. “You think it was this guy?”

“I don’t know, but we think it was the same organization.”

“Motive?”

“Money.”

“Killing a navy SEAL doesn’t fit the profile.”

“No,” Wolf said.

Fischer looked at him. “Your English is good.”

“I spent a couple of years at UC Berkeley a while back.”

“Party time?”

Wolf had to smile, remembering how different it was there than at Kaiserslautern or even Heidelberg. “Yes.”

“I’ve never been anywhere except a couple of cruises to the Caribbean with my wife.”

“Come to Berlin and my wife and I will show you around. Professional courtesy.”

“Sounds good,” Fischer said. “Your embassy wants you in D.C. They’ve booked a flight for you on American Airlines, leaves a little after five. Someone will meet you at the gate.”

“This wasn’t what I expected,” Wolf said, glancing up the dune toward the museum.

“You didn’t pull the trigger.”

“No, but if I had got here a little quicker, I might have prevented the woman’s death. No reason for her.”

“We might need you for the coroner’s inquest,” Fischer said. “Anyway, good hunting.”

EIGHT

The flight was early, around quarter to seven when they arrived at the terminal. Walking down the Jetway, Wolf was struck by the fact that Washington was even hotter and more humid than Florida. He could never live here.

A trim attractive woman in her early twenties with short dark hair met him just beyond the counter in the arrivals gate. She introduced herself as Lise Meitner, his BND embassy contact.

“Do you have a checked bag, sir?” she asked.

“Just one. My weapon.”

“Yes, sir.”

He followed her through the busy terminal down to the baggage arrival hall, where they didn’t talk while they waited. Five minutes later his leather overnight bag showed up, once again sealed with diplomatic tape, and they went across to the parking garage and up to the third floor.

“Lenz is not very happy with you,” she said, as they get into a plain gray Ford Taurus four-door. She was grinning. “He even raised hell with the Fremdenverkehr girl who gave you directions.”

“I’ll see if I can make it up to her.”

“Herr Ritter was informed, and he had a little chat with Lenz.” Hans Ritter was the ambassador.

“He won’t like what I’m going to tell him either,” Wolf said.

“I’m not taking you to the embassy. Colonel Mueller set up a meeting for you at the CIA. Apparently he’s been working with someone over there ever since the thing in Atlanta, and they’re interested in what happened this time in Florida.”

Wolf looked at her. Traffic was heavy leaving the airport, and on the parkway heading north to Langley, but she was a good driver, easily pacing her movements. “What’s your position here?”

“Scientific liaison. My namesake was my great-grandmother, the Austrian nuclear physicist, and the knack runs in the family. I’m the only one in three generations who hasn’t become a scientist or a science teacher, and no one is happy I ended up with the BND.”

Scientific liaison was intel-speak for industrial spying. “How’s it going?”

She shrugged. “I don’t have to shoot anybody, if that’s what you mean.”

“Right,” Wolf said, and he suddenly realized how tired he was. He’d been on the go for thirty-six hours. He’d never been able to sleep on airplanes, especially not heading into a situation.

Lise glanced over at him. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that I don’t like spying on a friendly country, and I know I sure as hell would never want to face someone with a pistol.”

“No one in their right mind wants to, trust me.”

“I suppose not,” she said after a beat.

They drove again for a while in silence, and Wolf tried to piece together something that would make sense to whomever he was supposed to meet with at the CIA. He hadn’t been involved in the Atlanta operation, so he hadn’t been required to work with the agency — that had fallen to Mueller who had friends over here. But he had worked with a number of their field officers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the one mission inside Iran. The ones he’d met had seemed steady, if a little arrogant around the edges, though not as cocky as some of the Mossad officers he’d known.

Zimmer’s last words had been bothersome, and Wolf had thought about them on the plane all the way up. The man hadn’t been the least concerned that he’d killed an innocent woman, and that he’d come all the way from Germany simply to murder an American who’d served in the U.S. Navy. You can’t guess the half of it, he’d said.

Half of what?

The only connection Wolf was making was the bin Laden raid, which continued to make no sense.

They turned off the parkway and followed a road through the woods to a visitors center with two lanes, one on the left for credentialed employees and the other for nonemployees. They had to show their passports and were given a visitor’s pass for the dashboard.

“You may drive Mr. Weisse to the drop-off point in front of the OHB, after which you will return here. Do not go beyond that point, ma’am. You will be timed.”

“May I wait for him?”

“Back here once you have turned in your visitor’s pass.”

On the way up the winding road the seven-story original headquarters building appeared through the woods. The parking lot in front was full this afternoon.

“I’ve never been out here before,” Lise said. “But it looks just like in the movies.”

“I don’t know how long I’ll be, so there’s no need for you to wait.”

“Lenz told me to stick with you.”

“Well, you can’t come inside, so tell him that,” Wolf said. She was a sharp girl, but naïve. “Tell him I gave you a direct order.”

She pulled up in front. “Are you going to come to the embassy afterward?”

He had to laugh. “No, but don’t tell him that. He’ll probably have a heart attack.”

“I wish,” she said.

“Drop my bag off at the gatehouse, if you would,” Wolf said, and he went up the broad stairs and into the big marble lobby, the CIA’s logo in the floor.

A very attractive woman in her mid- to late thirties, short dark hair, blue eyes, and a voluptuous movie-star figure came across to him. She was dressed in khaki slacks, a white blouse, and a dark blue blazer. “I’m Pete Boylan. You must be Wolfhardt Weisse.”

“I am,” Wolf said and they shook hands. Hers was tiny compared to his, but it was cool and her grip was firm. High marks in his estimation.

She handed him a visitor’s pass on a lanyard. “You look like you could use some sleep.”

“I don’t get much on airplanes.”

“I’ll make this as brief as possible, but there might be someone else who wants to have a word with you.”

They went through the security arches, past the Starbucks and down the broad corridor that served as the agency’s museum, with displays of equipment starting with the OSS during World War II. Radios, weapons, explosives, hidden cameras, and miniature tape recorders, as well as insects about the size of a man’s thumb that were actually remote-controlled drones equipped with tiny cameras.

“Makes us think that we’re actually James Bonds around here,” she said.

They took an elevator up to the sixth floor and walked down to a small conference room pleasantly furnished with a table for a half dozen people, some pretty pictures on the walls of places like the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House, Niagara Falls.

Pete flipped a wall switch. “We’re recording audio and video — is that okay with you?”

“Fine.”

“You were involved in a shooting in Florida. Walk me through it.”

“We’ve been monitoring an organization that we think may be an assassination-for-hire operation specifically targeting high-profile people.”

“We have the summary from Colonel Mueller. But the thing in Fort Pierce doesn’t seem to fit the profile.”

“No. And the only way it makes even remote sense to me would be if the SEAL Team Six guy he took out had been on the bin Laden operation.”

“He was,” Pete said.

“Anything special about him?”

“Nothing except that he was one of the men up the stairs who actually fired shots to make sure of the kill. But the group the BND is investigating hardly seems the type to be working with al-Qaeda.”

“No,” Wolf said.

“But?”

“Something Zimmer said to me just before I shot him. I asked why the guy and his wife? He said I’d never guess the half of it.”

Pete picked up the phone and made a call. “Otto, I want to bring Captain Weisse down to have a chat. Are you decent?” She nodded. “We’re on our way.”

NINE

Pete’s key card wasn’t programmed for Otto Rencke’s security lock, so she had to buzz. Very few key cards other than the director’s and deputy director’s gained entrance to what most people on campus considered the holiest of computer inner sanctums. Fact was that most people who even knew about Otto and his “darlings,” as he called his search and analysis programs, were frightened out of their wits thinking what harm he could do to the entire U.S. cyberstructure if he had a mind to.

Wolf had heard stories about the CIA’s resident computer genius and the man’s long-term friendship with Kirk McGarvey, a former DCI and a legend in the intel business himself, but he was not prepared for the tall, somewhat ascetic-looking man who opened the door for them.

“Oh, wow, I’ve been working the problem all afternoon, and you guys aren’t going to believe what shit I’m coming up with.”

“Otto Rencke, Captain Wolfhardt Weisse, BND,” Pete said, and the two men shook hands.

Rencke’s long red hair was tied in a short pony tail. He was dressed in ragged jeans and an old KGB sweatshirt “Bad business down there, involving a man’s wife — believe me, I could write the book on shit like that — but what’d you think Zimmer was up to?”

They went into Rencke’s suite of offices, a space he shared with no one that was filled with wide-screen computer monitors, some of them as big as one hundred inches, hanging on the walls, other smaller ones at a dozen workstations, and in the middle of the innermost office a horizontal touch screen as long and as wide as a conference table for sixteen people.

“We had no idea,” Wolf admitted. “But I was assigned to keep track of him. Maybe he was meeting someone. We just didn’t know.”

“Not even a glimmer when you got to the SEAL museum?”

“It wasn’t making any sense to me, and whenever that happens I get nervous.”

“Good instincts,” Otto said.

Most of the monitors were blank, showing only colors: white, blue, red — even a couple of violets. Otto led Pete and Wolf to the tabletop, on which were displayed several dozen photographs of three men and one women.

“The name Pam Schlueter mean anything to you?”

“We think she may be either the director or the power broker for a group based in Munich that calls itself the Black October Revolution. Assassination for hire.”

Otto moved the two photographs of her to the center of the screen. One showed her sitting on a blanket on a beach, with what appeared to be an aircraft carrier in the distance.

“That’s her in Virginia about fifteen years ago. Photo was taken by her husband, Dick Cole, who is now a captain, acting chief of staff with JSOC — Joint Special Operations Command in Virginia.”

“We weren’t aware that she was married to an American naval officer.”

“Not now. They met twenty years ago in Munich when he was a youngish lieutenant commander and she was a poli-sci student at the Ludwig Maximilian University. She was doing a paper on military liaisons between Germany and other NATO countries, and at some point she ran into Cole, who even then was in JSOC. They apparently hit it off, because they got married within six months. A year after that he was rotated back to the Pentagon and she followed.”

“We knew none of this. Much of her background has been wiped clean.”

“In Germany,” Otto said. “But over here it’s easy. Anyway, their marriage went bad, and about the time they moved to Virginia Beach they got a divorce. She took her maiden name and moved back to Germany. I came across a couple of civilian police reports of domestic violence. From what I could piece together he wasn’t a very nice guy. Lots of physical violence, on both their parts. She broke his arm in one fight.”

“Tough lady,” Pete said.

“Apparently she’s developed a thing for Americans,” Otto said.

“SEALs in particular?” Wolf asked.

Otto smiled and shrugged. “If she was calling the orders on this one, it would seem so.”

“Revenge against an ex-husband? How likely is that?”

“More likely than you might think, Captain,” Pete said.

“Friends call me Wolf.”

The other photograph of her, dressed in plain desert camos, showed her coming out of a building. The shot had been taken from across a busy street. “Pakistan’s intelligence service headquarters in Islamabad,” Otto said.

Wolf was taken aback. As far as he knew the BND had none of this. “When?”

“September fifteenth, three years ago. It’s the only shot of her, taken by chance because we were looking for someone else. We don’t know why she was there, who she spoke to, or the subject of their meeting.”

“But you came up with her ID.”

Otto gazed at the photograph. “It’s the stray bits that sometimes make the most sense.” He looked up. “I went searching for connections with SEAL Team Six after I was told about your shooter, and one of my darlings came up with her. And you know her name. Nails it, don’t you think?”

“Nails what?” Wolf asked.

“Her group’s target this time is the SEAL Team Six that took out bin Laden.”

“Al-Qaeda doesn’t have the money.”

“Pakistan does. The three guys are Pakistani intel — ISI.”

“Definitely makes it our problem,” Pete said.

“If I’m right,” Otto said.

“Have you ever not been right?” she asked. She picked up a phone and called Marty Bambridge, who was the deputy director of operations and told him that she and Otto were coming up to his office with the BND officer.

Wolf stepped closer to the table and stared at the two photographs of the woman. The one on the beach showed Pam Schlueter, somewhat reminiscent of a young Judi Dench, the British actor. She was smiling, apparently still happy with her husband, who had most likely taken the picture.

But in the second photograph, the determined, angry expression on her face, clear even though the photograph had been taken from a distance, was the same as in the photos the BND had managed to come up with.

In the first she was a happy young woman, but she had changed. Somehow in the past fifteen years she had become radicalized, and Wolf felt that it had taken more than an abusive husband to do it.

TEN

The DDO’s secretary announced them and Bambridge told her to send them in. He was an officious little man, with narrow shoulders and a nearly permanent look of surprise on his dark face. Backroom gossip was that despite his name, he behaved more like a Sicilian and therefore was probably connected with the Mob. His temper was legendary, but he was a good organizer, though almost always by the book.

He rose from his desk as they came in. “I’m sorry that your colonel’s courtesy call came too late; otherwise we might have been able to help out.”

“The captain was on a surveillance mission,” Pete said. “The assassination of a former SEAL came as a surprise.”

“I should have known better,” Wolf said.

“Yes,” Bambridge said, and they all sat down. “What brings you up here at this hour? I was getting set to finally go home.”

For as long as she could remember Pete had wanted to slap the officious bastard in the mouth. And a couple of years ago she’d said as much to McGarvey, who’d laughed.

“No one would blame you, but the man does a nice job pushing papers. Stay on his good side and you’ll get promoted. One of these days he’ll be gone.”

“Walt loves him, and he’s got a couple of intelligence oversight committee members on his side. Maybe he’ll end up as DDCI, or even DCI, God forbid.” Walter Page was the director of central intelligence.

“Won’t happen,” Mac had assured her.

That was last year, but now she wasn’t so sure. Rumor was that Page was considering him for the deputy directorship, which was only a heartbeat from the DCI’s chair, at least on a temporary basis.

“Otto has come up with a couple of interesting connections,” she said.

“No doubt interesting,” Bambridge said. He’d had a troubled relationship with McGarvey over the last few years. Otto and Mac were longtime friends, and therefore in Bambridge’s mind, Otto was also a wild card.

“The guy Captain Weisse was following shot and killed a former SEAL Team Six operator who was on the operation to take out bin Laden,” Otto said. “He’d written a memoir of his time in the navy and was bringing it to the UDT/SEAL museum.”

“How do we know that?”

“The police found it inside the museum,” Wolf said.

“Any of it in the media? Was he hyping for a book contract or something?”

“Not that we know of,” Otto said. “But the fact that the shooter knew that Barnes would be there at that exact time means the group that hired him has some damned good intel contacts here in the States.”

“Who, for instance?”

“I don’t know that part yet, but my guess would be somewhere within the Pentagon, or perhaps inside JSOC at Fort Bragg or down in Virginia. I’m digging into Barnes’s phone and travel records to see if he still has some buddies up there. Maybe someone with a grudge or someone in financial trouble.”

Bambridge turned back to Wolf. “Who did he work for?”

“A group calling itself the Black October Revolution, specializing, we think, in the assassinations of high-profile targets for some fairly serious money. It’s run by a woman who was actually married to an American naval officer.”

“Ended in divorce,” Otto said.

“The SEAL in Fort Pierce was hardly a high-profile target,” Bambridge said. “So why is it I have a funny feeling that you’re going to tell me this woman’s ex is or was a SEAL himself and this assassination was just for revenge.”

“He’s a captain now in JSOC — DEVGRU, Virginia Beach.”

“And the connection is what?”

“Not really a connection, not yet,” Otto said. “Let’s call it a coincidence, like having a photograph coming out of ISI headquarters in Islamabad a few years go — just after the bin Laden raid.”

Bambridge’s eyes narrowed, and he held up a hand. “This stops right now. Unless Captain Weisse has been buried underground in one of the old bunkers in Berlin, he, like you, should be perfectly aware that Pakistan is our chief ally fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Without them we’d be dead in the water, wide open for another nine-eleven.”

“Come on, Marty, Pakistan is no ally,” Pete said, her anger coming to the surface as she’d known it would even before she’d stepped into his office. But he was the DDO and he needed to know what was going on, even though he was an asshole. “Anyway most of those people were Saudis. Pakistan is helping us because they need our military aid, without which India would steamroller them.”

“That’s a good bit of analysis for an interrogator from housekeeping.”

“I have photographs of three ISI officers who were seen entering the ISI building at the same time she was inside,” Otto said.

“A lot of people work there. What’s your point? Another coincidence?”

“All three of those officers were very vocal at that time in their anger over the bin Laden raid right under their noses.”

“So were a lot of them,” Bambridge said. “So what?”

“The day after the woman was seen leaving, their complaints stopped,” Otto said. “Another coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Coincidences do happen,” Bambridge said, and Pete started to object, but he held her off. “Any supposed link to the ISI or to any person in specific — any Pakistani — is a nonissue as of this moment. And that is a standing order from the top. In the meantime, several murders were committed on U.S. soil, two of which Captain Weisse has himself admitted to. The local police have already requested help from the FBI, and a team has been in place since late this afternoon.”

“I imagine they will want to interview me,” Weisse said.

“You have been ordered home. Your embassy has made the arrangements.”

“There’ll at least be a coroner’s inquest,” Pete said. “And Captain Weisse has told me that he is willing to share his file on the Schlueter woman.”

“The Black October Revolution and its aims are of no concern to this agency at this time.”

“For Christ’s sake, Marty, one of their people killed several U.S. citizens, including a decorated war hero — and we’re not interested?”

“Naval intelligence has been notified, and they are on the case as well, though it’s my understanding that Barnes was no longer on active duty. Captain Weisse will be deposed at home, and that comes directly from his Colonel Mueller.”

Pete suddenly realized that Bambridge was frightened. She almost called him out but thought better of it. Someone above him, either the DCI himself or Robert Bensen, the deputy director, had given the order to back off, and Marty was a team player to the end. He followed orders even if they stank.

“Okay, Marty, you want us to drop it, we will.”

Otto was clearly surprised.

“The situation is being handled,” Bambridge. “Is there anything else that I need to know at this time?”

“No,” Pete said, and they all got up.

Bambridge shook hands with Weisse. “Give my regards to your colonel. I’m sorry for your agency’s sake that things didn’t work out as you might have hoped they would.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wolf said.

“What the hell was that all about?” Otto asked in the elevator on the way down to his office. “The silly bastard was lying out his ass.”

“You’re damned right he was,” Pete said. “Someone got to him, someone high enough up the food chain to scare him witless.”

“Someone from across the river? The White House?”

“Or the Pentagon. Someone on the SecDef’s staff.”

“Should I be hearing any of this?” Wolf said. “I’ll have to report it to my boss.”

“You might as well, because we’re not done with you and your investigation of the Schlueter woman and her group.”

“Isn’t the man we just talked with your boss?”

“Yup, but Otto’s going to let his computer programs loose while I go talk to an old friend, who’ll probably contact you at some point.”

“Off the grid?”

Pete and Otto laughed. “Definitely off the grid.”

“Who’s the old friend?”

“Kirk McGarvey. Can you delay going back? I think he’s going to want to talk to you?”

“Twenty-four hours?”

“Plenty of time.”

“I’ll give you my encrypted cell phone number.”

“I already have it,” Otto said.

ELEVEN

Kirk Cullough McGarvey, Mac to his friends, ran along the river in Georgetown’s Rock Creek Park just at sunrise. He was a man of about fifty, in superb physical condition from years of heavy workouts, long swims, weight training, and fencing at épée with the Annapolis navy team when he was in town. A little under six feet, a little under two hundred pounds, he could still move as gracefully as a ballet dancer if the need arose. Which it often had during a long career with the CIA.

A few other joggers, some walkers, and other folks on bicycles used the park just about every decent morning, and several of them recognizing McGarvey waved or simply nodded, but he was otherwise occupied, thinking about his wife, Katy, and their daughter, Liz, who had been brutally murdered just a couple of years ago.

He thought about them every day. But lately he was sometimes having trouble seeing Katy’s face, though her scent was still strong in his mind. And every day, just like this morning, he wanted to lash out, hit back at all the darkness in the world that thought taking lives was the right thing to do.

He’d actually met bin Laden a number of years ago in a cave in Afghanistan, and the man had looked him in the eye and with a straight face lectured that no one was innocent. Infidels — men, women, or children, it made no difference — were all to come to Islam, the one true faith, accept Mohammed into their souls or die.

Mac had begun years ago as a field officer for the CIA and had risen to special black operations, which was the forerunner of the company’s elite Special Activities Division. He’d worked for a short time as deputy director of operations and had even briefly served as the agency’s director.

But neither desk job had suited his temperament. He hated bullies; it was as simple as that. In the field he could even the odds, take down the bad guys who preyed on the innocents. Unlike bin Laden he firmly believed that just about everyone who went about their business in a peaceful way, respecting the rights of others, was an innocent.

His father had instilled only one hard and fast rule in Mac as a child, and that was no hitting. Yet despite that golden rule his father had worked on nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos and Mac had killed bad people.

The creek and the path crossed under the P Street NW bridge and McGarvey pushed himself. Katy once asked if by running or swimming to just this side of total exhaustion he wasn’t trying to atone for what he thought were his sins, namely, assassinating people?

He’d had no answer for her then, nor did he think he would have one if she were alive to ask him now.

A hundred yards later, just at the edge of the Oak Hill Cemetery, Pete Boylan, who’d been doing stretches against a park bench, turned and intercepted him. She wore spandex tights and a white T-shirt that was soaked with sweat, and she looked really good.

“Want some company?” she asked.

“If you can keep up.”

She laughed, the sound husky, all the way from deep inside, and warm. “If it gets too tough, I’ll just knock you down and sit on you.”

They ran for a half a mile or so in silence all the way up to Massachusetts Avenue, traffic already building, where they stopped and did more stretches. Mac felt good, better than he had for the past several months, and the heat and female sweat smells coming off Pete’s body reminded him of a lot of things out of his past.

“You didn’t come down here just to get your exercise,” he said.

“I work out at the gym on campus and sometimes down at the Farm. I’m here because I need your help.”

It’s about what he’d figured, not only by her unexpected presence but by the expression on her face; she seemed puzzled and a little pissed off. “Where’d you park?”

“Just off M Street.” It was a little over a mile back the way they had come. “I brought someone with me who I think you might want to talk to.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Otto’s met him. He was involved yesterday with a shooting at the UDT/SEAL museum in Florida.”

“I suppose that you and Otto took whatever it was up to Marty and he ordered you to back off.”

“Yeah.”

“You’d better explain,” Mac said, and they started back at a slow jog as she went over everything she’d learned from Weisse and what Otto had come up with. He found that he almost had to agree with Bambridge.

No one in the administration or inside the U.S. intelligence community trusted Pakistan, and especially not the ISI, its secret intelligence service, any further than they could throw the Washington Monument, but the Pakistanis did provide a launching point for U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaeda leaders. Government spokesmen in Islamabad complained loudly about the U.S. military’s violation of their borders, and especially their airspace, but that was all about keeping their public satisfied. In the meantime the United States continued to subsidize their military — in a delicate balancing act with India — for the right to continue operations.

He told Pete as much.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But this is different. I think that someone in the ISI — someone high on the food chain — is funneling money to the Schlueter woman to field assassins to kill the key SEAL Team Six guys who took out bin Laden.”

“Why?” Mac asked, though he knew the answer.

“Because we embarrassed the hell out of them.”

“What would killing the shooters — or maybe all twenty-four of them who went on the raid — accomplish? Washington would sure as hell sit up and take notice. So would the Pentagon, so would Walt Page, so would the FBI, so would the State Department. Think of it: killing all those guys — even if it could be done, because they’re damned good at close order battle — would cause a firestorm to fall on Islamabad. Or at least on the ISI.”

“Not if it were an arms-length operation. It would give the government plausible deniability. Could be someone they intend to throw under the bus if something goes wrong.”

“They’d have more ways to lose than gain,” Mac said. He was playing devil’s advocate and they both knew it. But the first rule of operational planning was to poke holes in every detail and keep filling them until they all disappeared. And even then it was the unknown that always seemed to jump up and bite you in the ass — like the crash of the SEAL’s Chalk One helicopter.

“They want to save face,” Pete said. “They want retribution.”

Wolf was sitting at a picnic table smoking a cigarette. When Mac and Pete showed up he got to his feet and tossed the cigarette into the creek. Pete introduced them, and after they shook hands they sat down.

“I understand that you’ve been ordered home,” Mac said.

“I’m supposed to be on the way to Reagan.”

“I’m driving him over,” Pete said. “But we don’t have a lot of time.”

“We can dig out what we need to know about the Black October Revolution, and Pete tells me that Otto’s already started a file on the Schlueter woman, but it’s not completely clear to me why you followed the shooter out of Germany.”

“We think that Schlueter has hired a team of five men and one woman — most of them ex — special services — to work as assassins for hire.”

“KSK,” Mac said. They had a good reputation.

Wolf nodded. “We think we can connect the team to at least four killings, all of them off German soil. One of them in Atlanta. Plus the SEAL in Florida, who I was assigned to follow, his wife and the docents.”

“Do you have minders on the others as well?”

“We didn’t think that it was necessary. But this hit came as a total surprise to us. To this point the team has targeted only high-profile people. Barnes hardly fit that description. And his wife definitely did not.”

“She was collateral damage, as were the docents in the museum,” Mac said. “Pete thinks the group might have a contract from the ISI to take out the SEAL Team Six guys who brought bin Laden down.”

“That’s what she and Otto came up with, but I don’t know if I can sell it to my colonel. We have our own operations in Pakistan. Certainly much more limited than yours, of course, but Berlin would be put in the same position as your government if we actively went after them.”

“It’s either that or they take out those guys one by one,” Pete said. “The least we can do is warn them.”

“I can just hear what the navy would say, and what the White House would do,” Mac said.

“We can’t turn our backs on this thing,” Pete said.

“Of course not. One of Schlueter’s people is dead. Can we get the files on anyone else associated with her? Without making noise?”

Wolf nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But maybe you should come to Berlin to speak with the director.”

Mac glanced at Pete, who shrugged. “Marty has closed us down, so we’re not going to get any help from the agency. Not unless we come up with something concrete.”

“Will your colonel agree to talk to me?”

“As long as it’s not official,” Wolf said. “I can arrange the meeting.”

TWELVE

Warsaw’s Zoological Garden was situated on the Vistula River almost directly across from the Royal Castle, the old Market Square, and other attractions including churches and museums in the ancient part of the sprawling city. The early summer evening was lovely; a lot of people were out and about. The zoo was anonymous.

Pam Schlueter was a somewhat husky woman in her late thirties, with a pleasant round face, a short no-nonsense pixie haircut, and expressive eyes that, like the set of her mouth, showed her anger and impatience. She was dressed plainly in a short-sleeved yellow shirt, jeans, and Nikes, a brown leather bag over her left shoulder, leaving her right hand free to withdraw her subcompact Glock 26 pistol, the same weapon as everyone on her team carried.

She’d left Berlin this morning before lunch for the four-hundred-mile drive, taking a great deal of care to make certain that she wasn’t being followed. Twice she’d gotten off the E30, once to fill up the tank of her Volvo and the second to have a beer at a small Gasthaus and look over her shoulder. But if she had a tail they were very good. Coming into the city she made several abrupt turns, but each time she came back on her original track she’d detected no one following her. Which in itself was disturbing after the mess Zimmer had made in Florida.

She made her way directly back to the Hippopotamus House where ISI Major Ali Naisir was standing in front of the glass wall, watching two of the big animals swimming underwater. He was a short, slightly built man of about forty, dark with a thick mustache, dressed in khaki slacks, a white shirt buttoned at the collar, and a dark jacket. As she walked up to him she could see that he was watching her reflection in the glass.

That he had come here to Warsaw and had asked for the meeting in public was extraordinary in itself, but when he turned, gave her a big smile, and pecked her on the cheek before offering his arm, she was blown away. In the months Naisir had been her handler, he’d never smiled at her, nor had he ever made any physical contact, not even a handshake.

“Congratulations in Florida,” he said as he led her out of the house and down the broad walkway in the general direction of the elephant exhibit.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was a disaster. My operator was shot to death.”

“Yes, but he managed to achieve his objective.”

“At a very high cost.”

“The cost doesn’t matter,” Naisir said, looking at her. “It’s the same with collateral damage. If he had used a bomb to wipe out the entire museum and every living soul within a half-mile radius, still the price would not have been too high.”

There was nothing to say in reply. It was one of the many things she did not understand about the Pakistani males, especially those who could trace their lineage back to the Pashtuns, primarily from Afghanistan. They were an ancient people who loved poetry and dance above everything else. But they were short of temper, never forgave a sin against them, and would go to the ends of the earth for retribution. Their potential for cruelty was all out of any normal proportion. A perceived slight at a wedding ceremony could result in the deaths of the entire party.

“Negotiating terms was not the reason I called you here,” he said. “You must hurry with the rest of the assignment. The timetable must be moved up.”

“Mistakes are bound to be made.”

“We’re aware of that possibility.”

“Likelihood.”

They stopped. “Are you saying that you cannot do this for us?” he asked.

“No. What I’m trying to tell you, Major, is that when the U.S. Navy realizes that a coordinated attack is being made against the Neptune Spear people, our chances for success will drop like a rock.” Neptune Spear was the SEAL Team Six code name for the bin Laden raid.

“That may already be the case, Ms. Schlueter. We believe that Captain Weisse, who is a field officer for the BND officer, was the man who shot Mr. Zimmer to death. He was released by the police and flown to Washington, where we think he was debriefed by the CIA. But that’s not all.”

The news was nothing short of stunning to her. She’d known, of course, that the BND had been snooping around her organization, but to have sent a field officer on a specific assignment — this specific assignment — was stellar. It put the entire operation in extreme jeopardy.

She managed to focus on Naisir. “What else?” she asked.

“He met this morning with Kirk McGarvey, who at one time was the director of the agency.”

“Former DCI. It would make him an old man now. Old and soft.”

“Anything but,” Naisir said. “We’ve dealt with the man and we know something about him. What we don’t know is why he met with Captain Weisse and why the meeting was held at a public park. But shortly afterward, a woman who we’re certain works for the CIA, drove the captain to the airport, where he flew back to Berlin.”

Pam tried to work it out, to make some sense out of what Naisir was telling her. The BND was snooping around, but if she was being warned now that the German spy agency knew about her and the shooters she had hired, then it was probably time to make a one-eighty and close down the operation.

But even as she had that thought she knew damned well it was simply impossible for her to do so. Like the Pashtuns, she had been done wrong, and nothing on earth would stop her from getting revenge.

The abuse her husband had thrown at her had begun within months after they’d gotten married, and years later she had to wonder what had possessed her to stay with him when he was rotated back to the States for duty at the Pentagon. It was in a pleasant ranch-style house in Temple Hills just across the river from Washington where his abuse had turned from emotional to physical.

At first it was watching porn with him, much of it S & M, and he would make her reenact it while he videotaped the “action,” as he called it. When his promotions slowed to a crawl he began seriously beating her with sopping wet bath towels and lengths of rubber hose. But it was always on her body and upper thighs so that no marks were visible when she was dressed.

The abuse had progressed so slowly, and with what she thought was even some innocence on his part — he said he loved her and that he wanted only pleasure for both of them — that she’d gone along with it.

But then there were water hoses up her vagina and rectum, and broom handles, and electric shocks to her nipples, and she’d finally had enough. After an entire weekend of abuse that seemed as if it would never end. She got a knife from a kitchen drawer and tried to stab him to death. But he was a lot bigger than her, and quicker and stronger, and she was weak from her injuries. He took the knife away and calmly beat her into unconsciousness even though she’d managed to break his arm.

The final straw came on Monday afternoon when he telephoned from his office and asked if she wanted to go out for a bite somewhere and then a movie. It was as if nothing had happened. Within a couple of hours she was packed and checked into a motel near Dulles Airport. Two days later she was on a plane back to Munich, and he never looked for her, never tried to contact her, never even bothered with a divorce. And her deep-seated anger began to grow, first against him and then against the navy and finally everyone and everything American.

The last she’d heard he was with DEVGRU. She’d hatched the plan to kill the SEAL Team Six members who’d taken part in Neptune Spear and approached Pakistan’s intelligence for the funds to get retribution for both herself and them.

But at arm’s length. After her first meeting in Islamabad, Major Naisir had been her only contact.

They had reached the elephant exhibit, where two of the females were standing near one of the pools. Two children had purchased elephant food from a dispenser and were throwing the pellets over the fence, but the animals were ignoring them.

“I’m going to need some spot-on intelligence if there’s any hope of pulling this off,” Pam told her handler. “The exact locations of every one of those guys.”

“For now we want you to limit your efforts to the other ten operators who actually entered the main house where Usama was living with his family. Most of them are retired, and we think that at least two of them are currently on some form of federal assistance.”

“They’re still well-trained killers.”

“You will send overwhelming force where it is needed,” Naisir said. “In the meantime I will personally see to silencing Captain Weisse.”

“If you assassinate him it’ll prove to the BND that something is actually going on and they’ll come after us with everything they’ve got.”

“He’ll be beaten to death by hoodlums on the street. Another act of random violence that Berlin has always been so famous for.”

Pam nodded. The killing would be senseless, and she said as much.

“This goes back to the captain’s meeting with McGarvey. Depending upon what was said McGarvey could very well become a major problem.”

“We’ll kill him as well,” Pam said.

“That might not be as easy as you think.”

“Everyone is vulnerable; businessmen, SEALs, presidents, even former CIA directors,” Pam said. “We’ll start immediately. But I’ll want a bonus.”

Naisir nodded. “For McGarvey alone we will pay you an extra one million euros. Will that do?”

“Nicely,” she said.

THIRTEEN

McGarvey came down to the lobby from his room in the old but fashionable Bristol Hotel Kempinski on the Ku’damm in the middle of Berlin. It was just before nine in the evening and Wolf was waiting for him.

“Did you have a good flight over?”

“Not bad,” McGarvey said.

“I figured that you would come in under a false passport, so I didn’t bother trying to find you at Tegel. I thought I’d wait until you called.”

“Colonel Mueller has agreed to talk to me?”

“He has a place on Oranienstrasse, right on top of where the wall used to be. I think it’s a point of pride with him. He had family stuck on the east side.”

“Wife and kids?”

“They went to Munich for a holiday. We’ll be quite secure.”

Driving over to Mueller’s apartment the city was alive with traffic, people out on the streets, in the shops and restaurants and sidewalk cafés. The last couple of times Mac had been here the city had seemed dark, even ominous. There’d been a lot of financial problems and readjustment issues when the wall came down. Just trying to come up with a reasonable match for the two standards of living had at times seemed insurmountable. East Germans, especially East Berliners, were needy. It seemed like the West was pouring marks down a bottomless rat hole. Everyone had been tense.

Oberst Mueller met them at the front door of a heavily rebuilt three-story brownstone and took them back to a small book-lined study that overlooked a rear courtyard that had once been bisected by the wall. Now rose bushes blossomed where the concrete sections had stood.

The colonel was a tall man, something over six feet, with an unremarkable build and face that marked him as anything but a military officer and high-ranking member of Germany’s secret intelligence service. He was dressed in corduroy trousers and a khaki shirt, the sleeves buttoned up above the elbows. The room smelled of pipe tobacco.

“Thanks for agreeing to see me,” McGarvey said.

“Captain Weisse tells me that you may have come up with something disturbing that might make some sense after the incident in Florida and you could use some help. I’m all ears.”

“This would be a nonofficial request.”

“I understand.”

“The situation between us and Pakistan is delicate, and my government doesn’t want to increase the strain if at all possible.”

“But you personally have a situation. And considering what I know about your background, it could mean that you’re going to become involved in something violent. Something that neither my government nor yours wants to happen.”

McGarvey wasn’t sure that he liked Mueller, though the man had agreed to hear him out. “Captain Weisse came to the United States and gunned down a man you suspected of being a terrorist. First blood was shed on our soil by your agency, not the other way around.”

“Point taken. Did the captain brief you on our ongoing investigation?”

“Yes. And until Florida it seemed that the group you’ve been investigating was nothing more than assassins for hire, targeting non-Germans off German soil. Not pretty, but considering everything else the BND is faced with, not a high priority.”

“Killing the ex-SEAL was an anomaly,” Mueller suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Mac said. “In fact I think that someone hired the organization to assassinate all the SEAL Team Six people who took part in the raid on bin Laden.”

“Al-Qaeda no longer has the money or the influence it once had.”

“No.”

“There are, however, wealthy Islamists in the United States, and of course in Saudi Arabia, who might want to retaliate.”

“They would have nothing to gain.”

“Which leaves Pakistan,” the colonel said heavily, as if it had been a foregone conclusion of his from the very beginning. He got up and turned to the window. “As you pointed out, the situation between your government and that of Pakistan’s is delicate. The balance of power — of nuclear power — between Pakistan and India is disturbing to us as well. That said, Islamabad would have absolutely nothing to gain by carrying out such a monstrous plot, which could only end in failure.”

“Retribution,” McGarvey said.

The colonel turned back. “For an extrajudicial assassination. I can see their justification, can’t you?”

“We did not attack civilian targets in their country. Nine-eleven is significant for us.”

“Just as the firebombing of Dresden was for us.”

“Yes, and just as the London blitz was for the British,” McGarvey shot back, tired of the game.

“The Nazis are gone,” Mueller said sharply.

“Will you help?”

“Operationally, no.”

“With information, nothing more.”

“We would expect a quid pro quo.”

“Of course,” McGarvey said. “I’d like a copy of your files on the Schlueter woman, along with the Black October Revolution and its members.”

Mueller considered it for a moment. “In return for what?”

“Our file on her, and on the twenty-four SEAL Team Six operators who took part in the raid.”

“The file on the SEALs is of no interest to us.”

“It will be once you come to accept what the Schlueter woman’s mission is and why she went to the ISI for backing.”

This caught Mueller’s attention.

“We have a photograph of her coming out of ISI headquarters. Until the incident in Florida we had no idea who she was or what she was doing in Islamabad, but now we think we know the connection.”

“Go to your navy. Tell them to take those people into protective custody.”

“That’s not going to happen,” McGarvey said. “At least not for now.”

“Just what are you suggesting?” Mueller asked.

“Schlueter and her organization are creating trouble for Germany as well as for the United States. Share the files and I will eliminate it.”

Mueller shook his head. “My government will not allow you to run around Germany shooting people. Point them out, get the proof, and we will arrest them.”

“I would be operating on my own, without the sanction of Berlin or Washington.”

“You will have your files, Herr McGarvey. But once you leave this apartment you will be totally on your own. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If you commit a crime on German soil you will be arrested and prosecuted. Is this in any way unclear?”

“No.”

“I’ll take you back to your hotel and bring the files over as soon as I can arrange copies,” Wolf said. “Probably not till morning.”

FOURTEEN

Major Naisir sat in a C-class Mercedes across the street from the Bristol Hotel watching the front entrance. It was a little after ten in the evening, and traffic was heavy. Berliners were gearing up for another night on the town, for which the Ku’damm had always been famous. Personally, he found the city to be garish, some parts of it even revolting.

“It grows on you,” Hamid Jatyal, the ISI chief of Berlin Station, had confessed in his office at the embassy on Schaperstrasse not far from the hotel. But then the man was a Punjabi, a tribe in Naisir’s estimation never to be trusted.

“Have you taken care of the little job I asked you to do for me?”

“Yes, the BND captain,” Jatyal said, handing over a slim folder. “As a matter of ordinary routine we keep a loose watch on the BND’s headquarters, and we picked up Captain Weisse coming into the building from a rear entrance this morning a few minutes after eight, as you can see in the report. He left for lunch with a friend at the Hansa-haus Bierstube a few blocks away, after which he returned to his office.”

“Has he left for home yet?” Naisir asked. That was forty minutes ago.

“He left the office at approximately eight o’clock, but he went to the Bristol Hotel, where he was inside for a brief period before he emerged with a gentleman whose identity we don’t know.”

“Were photographs taken, I hope?”

“Of course. I’ll bring them up,” Jatyal said. He opened a program on his desktop. In the first frame Wolf was coming out of the hotel with a somewhat husky man in a dark blue blazer and jeans. In the second shot the man had turned so that he was directly facing the camera. Naisir was shaken, though he did not let his reaction show. It was McGarvey, here in Berlin with the man who had followed one of Schlueter’s operators to the States and killed him.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

“To an apartment building on Oranienstrasse that we believe is occupied by a BND colonel. They went inside, and as of five minutes ago were still there.”

“Have your team report to me as soon as they leave the apartment building,” Naisir said.

He’d tried to reach Schlueter, but the number he had was no longer answering. She had changed it again as a precaution, which was sensible. She would contact him when she thought it would be safe.

Sitting in the car Naisir thought about the mission, and the extra task he had given to her to assassinate McGarvey for an additional one million euros. It might be possible to accomplish the task tonight and save the money, he decided.

The same older model Audi A6 as in the photographs pulled up in front of the hotel, and McGarvey got out. He said something to Wolf behind the wheel and then closed the car door. But instead of going directly inside he waited until the BND officer drove off and looked across the street directly at Naisir.

The windows of the Mercedes were tinted enough that it was impossible for McGarvey to see inside, yet Naisir shrank back. The American’s reputation was legendary. He was a killer, and by all accounts very good at what he did. Or had been once upon a time.

McGarvey walked down the driveway to the curb and waited for a break in traffic as if he were about to cross the street.

The little prick was challenging him. Naisir, powered down his window and looked directly across the street for a long second before he slammed the car in gear and took off, just making the light at the corner and turning right. His last glimpse in the rearview mirror showed McGarvey still at the curb, watching.

Two blocks from his embassy he pulled into a parking garage and drove to the top level. He called Jatyal’s cell phone. The COS answered on the first ring. “Yes.”

“I need two men tonight within the hour,” Naisir said.

“Our field officers? I think I can accommodate you.”

“Not countrymen. This has to be a totally deniable operation. Germans.”

“What exactly do you have in mind?” Jatyal asked.

Naisir told him. “I want this to look like an ordinary street crime. Robbery leading to the unfortunate murder of an American citizen.”

“The American from the photograph with Captain Weisse?”

“Exactly.”

“He has been identified as Kirk McGarvey, a former director of the CIA. Killing him will send shock waves to the highest levels.”

“That’s why this can never be traced back to Islamabad.”

The phone was silent for several long beats. Naisir could almost hear the man’s brain furiously working out all of the ramifications — not for the operation itself but for his own career.

“I’m not going to do it without authorization from the ambassador,” Jatyal said at length.

“He is not to be involved under any circumstances, and that is a direct order,” Naisir said. “You work for the ISI, not the ambassador. And if you refuse to carry out my orders, I shall have General Bhutani telephone you in the next fifteen minutes.” Lt. General Tariq Bhutani was the director general of the agency.

“My God, it’s after two in the morning there.”

“Yes, it is.”

This time Jatyal did not hesitate. “It won’t be Germans. I’ll send Turks. Four of them.”

“So many?”

“For this job, yes. How do you want to arrange it?”

Naisir told him the location of the garage. “Have them park on the fifth level, in the northeast corner.” It was one level down. “How will I know what they’re driving?”

“As soon as I arrange it I’ll call and let you know. But you mustn’t let yourself be seen by them. This cannot come back to the embassy under any circumstances.”

“It won’t. Just see that you send me four capable men who are not afraid to get their hands dirty.”

“The ones I have in mind are already so filthy it’s probable they have never been clean in their lives. After all, they’re nothing more than Turks who’re involved in the drug trade and bringing young girls from Romania and Bulgaria. Enforcers.”

“Have you used them before?”

“These four yes, once.”

“Will five hundred euros each be enough?”

“Yes, but don’t identify yourself.”

FIFTEEN

In his room at the Bristol, McGarvey was sipping a snifter of very good Napoleon brandy — his first for the evening — as he talked to Otto and Pete back in Langley. Despite the hour they were still at the OHB.

“Sounds like Mueller gave you enough rope to hang yourself,” Pete said.

“At least they didn’t kick me out, and Weisse is going to get me copies of their files on the Schlueter woman and her organization. Might be something for us.”

“Tonight?” Otto asked. “Send the stuff to me and I’ll get started.”

“Probably not till morning. In the meantime something else has come up.”

“The Schuleter woman’s people?” Pete asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mac said. He told them about the Mercedes across the street from the hotel. “The guy rolled down his window and looked right at me before he took off. Dark complexion, black hair, mustache. Definitely not German.”

“Pakistani?”

“Be my guess. Which means the ISI knows I’ve taken an interest.”

“If it’s the Pakistanis,” Pete cautioned. She was a charming woman, and among the best interrogators the CIA had ever known, because she was not only patient and kind with her Johns, as she called her subjects, but she was skeptical without letting it show during the typical interview. She gave the outward appearance of being positive about everything, while in reality she trusted nothing — especially anything that seemed like a sure bet.

“Point taken,” Mac said. “But whoever it was had a definite interest in me, and I’d like to know why.”

“Are you coming back in the morning, kemo sabe?” Otto asked. “I think I might be able to come up with something that makes sense.”

“I’ll get out of here as soon as Wolf brings me the files.”

“Do you think this guy will show up again tonight” Pete asked, and it sounded as if she already knew the answer.

Mac’s suite was on the fifth floor, the windows looking down on the Ku’damm. He was watching the heavy traffic as the Mercedes pulled into a parking spot across the street and a slender man in a dark jacket and jeans got out.

“He just got out of his car.”

“It’s a trap.”

“Almost certainly.”

“Are you armed?” Pete asked.

“No,” McGarvey said, and before she or Otto could object he hung up.

He got his black blazer and went downstairs. The lobby bar was busy. The hour was coming up on midnight by the time he got outside.

The man from the Mercedes had already started away on foot when McGarvey crossed the street and looked inside the car. But the doors were locked, and nothing was on the passenger seat in front or in the back.

The Pakistani, or whoever he was, had just made it to the end of the block when McGarvey hurried after him. He wanted to crowd the man. That he was being led into a trap was a foregone conclusion — he wanted to see what might happen if the guy knew that he was being pressed.

In the next block McGarvey had closed the gap to less than thirty meters. The zoo was not far, and though it was closed at this hour of the night, it would make a perfect place for an ambush. But the Pakistani turned left and entered a parking garage.

Mac was just a few seconds behind; inside he stopped for a moment to listen. From somewhere on the ramp above he heard faint footfalls. The guy had left his Mercedes parked in front of the hotel, so he hadn’t come here to retrieve a parked car. Someone was waiting for the hare to lead the hound to slaughter.

Turning, he sprinted across to the down ramp and headed to the second level, making as little noise as possible. The garage was mostly dark; the concrete pillars cast long shadows. And it was quiet, the only noise coming from traffic on the Ku’damm.

Just at the top Mac quickly crossed to one of the pillars, where he stopped.

The Pakistani was about twenty meters away, just around the corner from the up ramp, obviously waiting for McGarvey to appear. After several seconds, he took a quick look over the barrier before he ducked back.

McGarvey stepped around the pillar. “Looking for me?” he asked.

Startled, the man turned and stood flat-footed for just a moment, like a deer caught in the headlights. But then he reached inside his pocket.

Mac moved back, ready to duck behind the pillar again.

But the man pulled a cell phone out and spoke briefly to someone, before he put it back in his pocket. “Clever of you, but not clever enough,” the man said. He spoke with a British accent.

“You’re a long ways from Islamabad, but then I would have thought that you would have arranged a meeting with Pam Schlueter on neutral ground somewhere outside of Germany.”

A car started up from the next level above, and tires squealed on the concrete floor.

McGarvey walked over to the next concrete support column, and Naisir warily stepped back into the deeper shadows.

A dirty yellow Mercedes panel van shot off the down ramp, its headlights flashing as the the driver hauled the wheel left and accelerated the van directly toward McGarvey.

At the last moment he stepped to the side, expecting the driver to run him down, smash his body against the pillar, but the van skidded to a halt, the side door opened, and three very large men leapt out.

They were dressed in dark clothing, their faces bare, not worried that their descriptions might given to the police. But they were not armed, or at least they had not drawn weapons, which meant this was going to look like a simple assault and robbery.

The guy McGarvey had followed from the hotel was gone, his part of the operation finished.

“You gentlemen might want to get back in your van and drive away,” Mac said, stepping out in the open. “That is, if you’re smart enough.”

The three of them spread out, one left, one right, and one directly facing McGarvey. They were dark like the man from the Mercedes but their features where rough. Working class, possibly Albanians, maybe Turks, a lot of whom had immigrated to Germany for good-paying jobs. But these three were bullyboys, someone’s enforcers. And though they were big men, they were light on their feet, like professional boxers.

“You should have stayed home and minded your own business, you fucker,” the one in the middle said, his accent thick.

The three of them advanced. But instead of retreating, Mac strode directly toward the one in the middle, but at the last moment he shifted right and slammed the second man backward into the concrete column.

The middle man leapt forward, saying something under his breath, and McGarvey turned toward him, ducking a roundhouse punch and smashing his fist three times into the guy’s chest, just over his heart.

He skipped to one side as the third man rushed forward. Grabbing the guy’s coat sleeve he propelled him into the one who’d pushed away from the pillar, blood streaming down the side of his face.

The middle man was trying to catch his breath, when McGarvey turned back, got behind him and twisted his head sharply to the left, breaking his neck.

Turning on his heel he was in time to see both men fumble under their jackets, bringing out pistols — what looked like older Glocks.

He was on the first man. Grabbing the guy’s gun hand he pulled the Turk around and, using him as a shield, he snatched the pistol and fired two rounds at the other man, hitting him center mass and dropping him to the deck.

Mac shoved the Turk away and pointed the pistol directly at his face. “Who hired you?”

The man said something unintelligible.

With a squeal of tires the van shot backward, turned left, and raced to the down ramp, careening off the concrete wall with a hail of sparks before it disappeared.

“Just you and me now, and I have a gun,” Mac said. “You can tell me who sent you, in which case I let you walk away. Or you can refuse and I’ll kill you, in which case it’ll be me who walks away.”

“You’ll shoot me anyway.”

“No need,” McGarvey said. He ejected the pistol’s magazine, tossed it aside, ejected the round in the firing chamber and let it fall to the deck, and threw the gun away. “Who hired you?”

The Turk glanced at the two bodies. “I don’t know. It was a blind number, as usual. Money always shows up the next day at a drop box in a whorehouse not far from here.”

“Who was the man who set up the ambush?”

“I never got a clear look at his face.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” McGarvey said.

The Turk turned and headed for the ramp.

“How much to take me out?” McGarvey called after him.

“Five hundred euros,” the Turk said. “Each.” He disappeared down the ramp.

Mac gave the man a full five minutes to get clear, then he walked down the up ramp to the still busy street and headed back to his hotel. He would have bet just about anything that the guy from the Mercedes was a Pakistani; the English they learned was British, and the best field officers spoke it with a proper upper-class accent. And he would have bet just about the same amount that the three guys he’d come up against were Turks hired by someone — most likely ISI — from the embassy.

The two-tone dee-dah of police sirens sounded not too far away. Mac crossed the street with the light so that he was on the same side as the Bristol and picked up the pace. The Pakistani from the Mercedes had probably called the police for insurance in case the muscle he’d hired wasn’t successful. At the very least Mac would be taken into police custody and held for a time.

SIXTEEN

Brian Ridder missed SEAL Team Six, the camaraderie, the bullshit practical jokes, the nearly constant ragging on each other, the adrenaline high coming off a successful op with all your pieces in the right places, no holes leaking. At five eleven and a hundred and seventy pounds, he was still in good shape, but a lot of the time his head wasn’t straight.

But he was glad that he was finally out, because his knees hurt most mornings, his back gave him such hell that even a half dozen extrastrength aspirins every day didn’t do much but dull the pain back to a near-constant Niagara Falls roar, and because he was finally a full-time husband and dad of three boys.

It was two in the morning in Virginia Beach. Brian was sitting up in bed, his body drenched with sweat, his sheets so wet again that his wife Cindy was going to accuse him of pissing himself, and they would have another of their ferocious arguments. He thought that he was losing his mind, but he was more frightened these days than he’d ever been in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of a dozen hot spots where he’d been dropped. Usually into the middle of some serious shit.

The hell of it all was that he thought he missed the action, and yet he knew that he shouldn’t. He knew that he loved his wife, and yet a lot of a time lately he couldn’t stand her. And the boys; he loved them with every fiber of his being, and yet a lot of the time they got on his nerves so badly that he wanted to smash the little bastards in the face.

“Man up, for Christ’s sake,” he’d shouted in his sleep a couple of nights ago, and Cindy had grilled him about what he meant.

“Are you losing your fucking mind or what? she’d screeched. “Because if you aren’t, I sure the fuck am.”

Besides his being wigged out half the time, money was their biggest problem. He’d gotten out of the navy after seventeen years — three years short of his pension. No monthly payments, no base exchange privileges, and even worse, no medical or dental. Larry, their youngest, needed braces they couldn’t afford. Cindy’s teeth were giving her fits, and the dentist she’d gone to wanted fifteen thousand to put her mouth right. But there was absolutely no money for any of that.

He had no real trouble getting jobs — he’d driven a bus for the city, had worked on a road-repaving crew, had even done some rough construction, mostly framing for garages and other small buildings. But he’d trained all of his career to be stealthy. Hide in broad daylight. He’d practiced swimming five miles in the open ocean, jumping out of aircraft flying at thirty-five thousand feet, and free-falling down to a couple of thousand feet before opening his chute. And he’d been trained to blow up shit, and to kill people with a variety of weapons, including his bare hands.

He had skills that didn’t translate into civilian jobs, because he didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut when he figured something was wrong.

For a few months he thought about applying with one of the major contracting companies to go back out in the field. Afghanistan, Iraq — there were high-paying jobs out there. But he could not think about picking up a gun again. Ever again.

He got out of bed and took a pee without turning on the bathroom light. Cindy had rolled over, but if she was awake she didn’t say anything. He went down the hall to check on the boys, all of them sleeping soundly, and then padded into the kitchen, where he got a gallon bottle of milk from the fridge and took a deep drink. It was another of Cindy’s pet peeves, his drinking out of the bottle like that. Now the boys were doing it. And leaving the toilet lid up, not picking up after themselves, never bothering to put their dirty clothes in the hamper or their dirty dishes in the sink.

The kitchen looked out on the small backyard, where he’d planted a couple of apple trees a few years ago when he was on leave. They were big now, and in the summer they were great for shade.

He started to go back to bed when he thought he saw something moving near the eight-foot-tall wooden fence that separated his yard from the Digbys’, who were on vacation. Their five kids — three girls and two boys — liked to come over, especially on weekends, so he and Roland had put in a gate. It was ajar now, or at least it looked like it, and his anger spiked.

A couple of months ago Cindy had told him that she was sure she’d seen some guy in their backyard. A Peeping Tom. It hadn’t been Roland, but whoever it was had come through the gate.

She’d wanted him to call the police, but he’d told her that she’d been dreaming, and that had started another terrific fight.

He went to the window and, keeping to one side so that he wouldn’t be so easy to spot, looked out across the yard. If anyone had been there, he was gone now. But the gate was still half open and that was bothersome. Either the guy had left and not bothered to close the gate, or he’d come around to the north side of the house, where he could look into the bedroom windows.

“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. He debated for just a split second whether he should warn Cindy and call the cops or take care of it himself.

He went through the hall and into the laundry room, where he unlocked the back door, eased it open, and poked his head outside for just an instant. Nothing moved, so he slipped outside and headed past the kitchen windows to the corner of the house.

Someone was tapping on something. For just an instant it almost sounded like Morse code, but it dawned on him that what he was hearing was someone tapping on a window. With a piece of metal. The muzzle of a pistol.

Time slowed down, and his heart, which had been pounding, settled into an even rhythm as it did when he was about to walk into a close-quarters battle somewhere in Badland.

He peeked around the corner. A tall man dressed in dark clothes stood at the bedroom window. He was tapping the muzzle of what even in the darkness at a distance of twenty-five feet Brian recognized was a silencer tube.

The bastard was trying to wake up Cindy and he meant to shoot her.

Keeping low, Brian stepped around the corner and raced silently toward the guy, who at the same moment fired two shots through the window.

“No,” Brian shouted at the last instant.

The shooter turned and fired once directly into Brian’s chest, and then stepped aside.

Brian’s knees gave out and as he fell his momentum carried him forward and onto his side, at the shooter’s feet. The man’s eyes were lifeless, no expression in them whatsoever. The pistol was a 9mm subcompact Glock 26. A toy, but deadly in the right hands. And the son of a bitch had shot Cindy with it.

Breathing was getting tough, but all he could think about was the SEAL’s dark humor: incoming rounds have the right of way and sucking chest wounds were nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

“Why?” he managed to croak.

“For Usama.”

Everyone on the assault team that night in Abbottabad knew something like this was possible. A couple of days ago Pete Barnes and his wife had been shot to death in Florida. But his old boss over on the base coming up on his thirtieth year, told him that the word from the top was that the hit in Florida was an anomaly: “Some son of a bitch redneck with a grudge against the world opened fire at the museum. If he’d been targeting you guys he wouldn’t have taken out Pete’s wife.” Taking revenge on the assaulters was one thing, but killing the wives was stupid.

The shooter pointed his pistol at Brian’s head.

“Why our wives?”

“Not just the wives,” the shooter said. His English had an odd accent that Brian couldn’t quite place. Maybe German. This guy wasn’t a redneck with a grudge. He was a pro.

But then what he had just said suddenly registered. Not just the wives.

Brian started to roll over so that he could reach the bastard’s legs and bring him down, stop him from hurting the boys, when a thunderclap burst inside his head.

SEVENTEEN

McGarvey met Weisse for breakfast at eight in the Bristol’s smaller dining room. It was a weekday and the place was filled with businessmen, making it an anonymous venue. But the German BND officer seemed ill at ease.

“There was a bit of excitement last night at a parking ramp a few blocks from here,” Weisse said. “Two Turkish gentlemen who the Berlin police believe were involved in the drug and prostitution trade were found murdered. One had his neck broken. The other was shot to death, and his pistol was unloaded and field-stripped.”

Their waiter came and took their orders.

“I think that someone has taken notice that I’m here,” McGarvey said.

“It was your work?”

“Yeah. But what puzzles me is, why me? Why now? I don’t see the connection.”

“I’m investigating the murder in Florida, and you’ve come to meet with me. Someone’s watching.”

It’s exactly what McGarvey figured Weisse would say. “Home-grown terrorist organizations usually don’t have the wherewithal to keep tabs on intelligence officers.”

“But governments do. Pakistan?”

“I haven’t been able to convince the DDO at Langley. Maybe you’ll do a better job of it with your colonel.”

“Not without concrete proof, which the director says he needs before he can make his recommendations,” Weisse said. “You and I are in the same boat. But what the hell were you doing in that parking ramp?”

McGarvey told him about the dark-complected man across the street from the hotel. “I’m just about certain he was a Pakistani.”

“But you can’t prove it.”

“No, but I think he was an ISI officer.”

“We have photos of just about everyone who works at their embassy. Would you mind looking at them?”

“He won’t be there. Unless I miss my guess he came to Germany specifically to take me out.”

Weisse looked away for a moment. “He would have to have some good intelligence from your side of the pond. Who knew that you were coming here?”

“You,” McGarvey said.

“But I didn’t know your work name, or where you were staying, until you phoned.”

“You did know that I was coming. If the leak came from your shop they could have posted a team with my photograph at the airport.”

“Did you spot anyone?”

“I wasn’t really looking,” Mac said. “Anyway, if they’d doubled or tripled me they would have been hard to pick out.”

“How about at the CIA?”

“Only two people, both of whom I would trust with my life. And have in the past.”

Weisse nodded. “The only other possibility that I can see is that you became a target from the start, in which case you could have come under surveillance in Washington.”

McGarvey conceded the point.

“What’s your next move?” the German asked him.

“Have the police been given my name?”

“No. As far as anyone is concerned it was good riddance to scum.”

“Then if you’ll give me the files, I’ll go back to Washington and see what I can piece together. My flight leaves around noon.”

Weisse took a CD jewel case out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. “We’re stepping up our investigation of Schlueter and the people we’ve already identified in her organization. But once again our hands are tied without hard evidence. None of which we’ve been able to come up with yet, except for the incident in Florida. And we haven’t been able to find any clear chain of evidence tying Schlueter to the kill.”

“But he worked for her organization.”

“We think so, but again there’s no evidence that his act wasn’t rogue.”

McGarvey’s cell phone rang. It was Otto.

“Can you talk?”

“I’m with Captain Weisse.”

“It’s happened again, this morning in Virginia Beach. A shooter or shooters unknown killed Brian Ridder — he was one of assaulters at Abbottabad. Also shot his wife to death and killed their three boys.”

“No witnesses?”

“No one’s come forward so far.”

“What’s Marty saying?”

“Not a word.”

“How about the navy?”

“Nothing. Both Barnes and Ridder were out of the service. No longer the navy’s problem.”

“The other twenty-two guys need to be warned.”

“I was given strict orders twenty minutes ago to stay out of it. Came from State.”

McGarvey gave him his Air France flight number, which got to Dulles around 6:30 P.M. “Have someone pick me up. I think this time we’ll meet at your place. But tell whoever you send to watch their back. They came after me last night.”

“You okay?”

“Yes. I’ll give you the details when I get back, but someone is definitely taking notice. And I have a feeling they’re going to speed up their timetable now that I’m in the mix.”

“I’ll try a guy I know at JSOC,” Otto said, and he rang off.

“Another one?” Weisse asked.

“Yeah, along with his wife and three kids.”

“Doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if you look at it from the ISI’s viewpoint. They were embarrassed by the raid on bin Laden but they couldn’t do a thing about it for fear we’d cut off their military aid. This operation is the next best thing.”

“Retribution.”

“It’s looking more like it every day. I need you guys to put some pressure on Schlueter and her gang.”

“I’ll have to pull some strings.”

“Pull them, Wolf, before it’s too late.”

Pete was waiting for him just outside the customs and passport control area, a serious look on her pretty face. “As best as I could tell I came in clear,” she said. “Otto’s already at his house waiting for us.”

“Audie?”

“They sent her back to the Farm.”

Audie was McGarvey’s granddaughter; Otto and his wife Louise had adopted her after Mac’s daughter and son-in-law were assassinated. It had been a staggeringly horrible time in his life, and in the lives of Otto and Louise; as a result, everyone doted on the girl, who still wasn’t old enough to start kindergarten. Her go-to place when the bad guys were out and about was the Farm, which was the CIA’s training facility on the York River, south of Washington.

They went outside to where Pete had parked her Nissan Altima in the arrivals area, a metro police card on the dash. On the way out to Otto’s safe house in McLean, McGarvey adjusted his door mirror so that he could watch for a tail. But if anyone was back there he couldn’t make them out.

“Otto said that you ran into a little trouble in Berlin.”

“The Pakistanis are definitely involved. But whether it’s an independent group working with Schlueter or an ISI-sanctioned operation I don’t know yet.”

“But your guess is ISI.”

“At arm’s length. Plausible deniability and all that.”

“So if we catch the bastards with their hands in the cookie jar, it won’t go any further.”

“Something like that.”

Pete glanced at him. “Doesn’t matter to you either way.”

“Twenty-two guys are still on the line. They’ve done their part; now it’s time for us to do ours.”

EIGHTEEN

Louise, tall, all arms and skinny legs, had a good cognac waiting for Mac at the McLean house, and they all sat around the kitchen table looking out over the backyard filled with a swing set and slide and other kid’s toys. They’d tried to spoil Audie, but she never changed. She was a combination of her mother and grandmother — sweet and gentle most of the time, unless she was putting her foot down because she thought she was being treated like a baby.

“The guy you followed to the parking garage was Pakistani — you’re sure of it?” Otto asked.

“His accent was right, and as far as I can see, the Pakistanis are the only ones with a vested interest in taking out the SEAL Team Six assaulters.”

“What about the Schlueter woman?” Otto asked.

“Probably financial, but she has her own ax to grind,” Mac said. He handed Otto the disk from Wolf. “The Germans know that she was married to an American naval officer stationed as a military liaison to the BND in Munich. Apparently they don’t know the details, except that it turned out badly for her, and she could be looking to settle old scores.”

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Louise said. “Is this guy still around. Do we know who he is?”

“Dick Cole. He’s acting chief of staff for DEVGRU down in Oceana, Virginia.”

Louise made a sour face. “DEVGRU is SEAL Team Six, and I don’t think I’m liking this very much. Are you suggesting this guy is helping his ex in some way?”

“The BND doesn’t think so. I went through the stuff on the disk at an Air France biz center at Tegel, and it looked to me like the connection with Schlueter and her ex was nothing more than a motivator. Evidently, she not only hates her ex, but she hates Americans in general. The SEAL Team Six thing is just her way of earning a big payday from the Pakistanis.”

“You don’t think it’s coincidental, her going after the SEAL Team Six guys with or without the ISI’s help and her ex’s connection?”

“I don’t know, but it’s something I’m going to ask her the first time I get the chance. As far as I’m concerned, the connection stinks, but to believe that her ex is somehow working with her is a stretch.”

“Maybe you should ask him,” Pete suggested. “At the very least he might be able to tell us something about her that we can use.”

“If he’ll talk to me,” McGarvey said. “But someone higher up the food chain may have put a muzzle on him and everyone else having anything to do with the team.”

“Well, it is about money,” Otto said. “I’ve found that much out. Schlueter has collected two million euros over the past several months, paid into half a dozen accounts in places as far away from Germany as the Caymans and as close as Warsaw. The problem so far is the source. I’m coming up with blanks, which tells me that the encryption and remote remailers her paymasters are using are damned good.”

“Government grade good?” Mac asked.

“Yeah, but new. Could be one of those hackers from Amsterdam. Some of those kids were pretty good. State-of-the-art shit.”

“The ones who hacked into our power grid?”

“Could be. But I’ll find them, and if there’s a connection back to Islamabad I’ll nail it too.”

“If we can cut off the lady’s funds, maybe she’ll back off,” Pete said.

“Don’t count on it,” Louise said.

“In the meantime I’m going over to see Walt, and get his take,” McGarvey said. “If someone is putting on the brakes, he’ll at least tell me who it is.”

“Do you want me to tag along?” Otto asked.

“For now I want you to stick with the money trail. But see what else you can dig up on Captain Cole. Check his financials.”

“Tread lightly, Mac,” Pete said. “He might have been a son of a bitch and a wife beater, but it doesn’t mean he’s a traitor.”

Walter Page, the DCI, had a young guy in a white polo shirt and jeans waiting for McGarvey in the lobby of the OHB to escort him up to the seventh floor. He introduced himself as Dr. Steve Ellerin who’d been brought over from Harvard to help work out a political and intelligence scenario that made any sense for our future with Saudi Arabia.

“I’ve been given an office and a staff — better than mine at Harvard — and the run of the place, but for some reason they won’t trust me with a gun,” he said grinning.

“Welcome to the club. They don’t trust anyone else around here with guns, except for the security people.”

They were alone on the elevator up and Ellerin kept looking at McGarvey. “I’ve heard about you,” he said, just before they reached the seventh.

“Any of it good?”

Ellerin chuckled. “All of it interesting. You ever think about writing a book?”

“Not about this,” McGarvey said as the doors opened.

They went down to the DCI’s suite where the Harvard doc left him. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

Page’s secretary announced him and he went in. Page sat behind his big desk. Carleton Patterson, the CIA’s general counsel who’d been with the company for as long as anyone could remember, sat across from him.

“I take it that you’ve already heard about the second killing,” Page said. “Police have it down as a robbery gone bad.”

“Bullshit,” McGarvey said, and he sat down next to Patterson.

“It would seem so, after the Florida incident,” the lawyer said dryly.

Page was angry. “I understand that you went to Germany to meet with an officer in the BND, and that there was an incident in which two men were killed. Were you involved?”

“Yes. It was a setup — four of them sent to take me down. Turks with connections to the drug trade.”

“And you let two live?” Patterson asked.

“I wanted them to take a message back to the people who hired them.”

“The bureau wants your passport,” Page said.

“Which one, Walt?”

Page sat back. He was clearly frustrated. “Why did you come to see me? What do you want?”

“Two of the twenty-four SEALs who took part in the raid on bin Laden are dead, along with their families. The one in Florida was murdered by a German who most likely works with a group of professional assassins for hire. The second one had nothing to do with a robbery.”

“Is this what the BND believes to be true?”

“Officially no. But they did send one of their officers to follow the Florida shooter. And we’ve learned that in the past several months two million euros have been paid into bank accounts belonging to the leader of this group.”

“It’s up to the Germans to arrest her.”

“Not without proof. And possibly for the same reason that Marty ordered Pete Boylan to back away from the investigation.”

“What reason is that?” Page asked.

“The two million came from the ISI.”

Page held up a hand. “This stops now, Mac, and I mean it. No more of your running around on your own shooting anyone who gets in your way.”

“Who ordered you to leave Pakistan out of it?”

“This conversation ends now,” Page said. “Someone from the bureau will want to interview you, and I suggest that you cooperate this time.” He got to his feet, but McGarvey remained seated.

“Can you tell me what the navy is doing? Has the ONI at least given the other guys the heads up?”

“The Office of Naval Intelligence is not this agency’s business.”

“Christ, what if I’m right? How many other assassinations are going to have to happen before you get your head out of your ass?”

“Get out of here.”

McGarvey got to his feet. “Have I ever steered you or this agency wrong?”

“A piece of advice?” Patterson asked.

“Sure,” Mac said. He hadn’t thought that he would get very far this morning, but he was glad he’d come; the company was on notice.

“Whatever you do, stay as far away as possible from the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“Anyone in particular?” McGarvey asked. There were fifteen members on the committee.

“I think you know the two or three I’m talking about.”

McGarvey nodded. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Director,” he said to Page, and walked out.

NINETEEN

At the Alt-Collner Schankstuben restaurant Pam Schlueter took one of the small tables on the sidewalk and ordered a Martini & Rossi red vermouth with an orange peel. It was the signal that she’d come in clear, which just now was a great puzzle to her. One of several she was faced with.

About a month ago she’d noticed that someone was following her, and it didn’t take long to figure out that her minders — there were three on single shifts — were almost certainly BND officers. It was a BND officer who’d followed Dieter to Florida and gunned him down on the beach outside the UDT/SEAL museum. And Friedrich Heiser had had to lose another BND officer before he made the hit on the Ridder SEAL and his family.

And as of yesterday she was still being followed. But all of a sudden this afternoon, when she’d taken a test run to the Marx-Engels Plaza in preparation for tonight’s meeting, she realized that her minders were gone.

For a couple of hours she wandered all over the city, sometimes on foot, sometimes by bus or taxi but no one was behind her. She’d even become so obvious as to suddenly stop and reverse direction or walk into a shop and go out the back way. But still nothing. Nor had there been anyone in front of the apartment she was using for the past several weeks or anyone to follow her here tonight.

Only a few diners were in the pub, and the small table next to hers had a reserved sign on it. Naisir came around the corner and sat down at the reserved table. “You had no trouble this evening?” he asked conversationally.

“No. But what the hell are you doing here?” Pam demanded, keeping her voice low. His calling her for this meeting was another of the puzzles.

A waiter came out and Naisir ordered a grilled ham sandwich and a beer.

“I can’t eat like this in Islamabad,” the ISI officer said. “I’ve come to warn you that I arranged to have Mr. McGarvey taken out but the idiots who were to have done the job failed. In fact, McGarvey actually killed two of them.”

Pam had seen the back-page newspaper article about a disturbance in a parking garage just off the Ku’damm. The police had called it a robbery attempt, which was common these days. “I had the contract, I was waiting for you to tell me where he could be found, and now you’re saying that he was here in Berlin?”

“Yes. It was thought to save you the trouble so that you could concentrate on your primary assignment. How are you progressing?”

“I still have Heiser and four other operators in the States, all of them in the Norfolk area.”

Naisir frowned. “If they’re working together, they’re bound to be noticed.”

“For now none of them knows of the existence of the others. They’re each working independently. In fact, one of the DEVGRU operators and his family have already been eliminated.”

“Yes, I’d assumed that was your work. What about the others? There’s been nothing in the news over the past twenty-four hours. You’ve not run into any trouble you’re not telling me about?”

When Pam had realized that she was no longer being tailed by the BND she had debated keeping Naisir in the dark. But she depended upon him for up-to-the-minute intelligence, and of course for the money — one million euros up front, plus five hundred thousand for each SEAL assaulter taken down, plus an additional bonus if all twenty-four of them were eliminated.

“The BND is no longer following me,” she said.

“They’re very good. You can’t be certain.”

“But I am,” she said, and she told him about her activities this afternoon and evening.

Naisir’s sandwich and beer came, and Pam ordered another vermouth. When her drink came and the waiter left, Naisir was actually smiling.

“Perhaps it’s better that we let Mr. McGarvey return home unharmed after all,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you see, my dear, the man has actually helped us — you in particular.”

“No, I don’t see.”

“Why he became involved no longer matters. But he is, and his first step was to come here to talk to the BND officer who took your Herr Zimmer out. But the meeting took place at the private residence of Weisse’s control officer, not at headquarters. Afterwards, the team tailing you was ordered to stand down. The same thing is happening at this moment in the United States. Only the local police are involved in the murders, but not the FBI or the CIA.”

“I’m still not following you,” Pam said.

“Mr. McGarvey has convinced the German intelligence service as well as his own CIA that the attacks on the SEAL Team Six assaulters is being orchestrated by us. By the government of Pakistan. To exact retribution.”

“Which is the truth.”

“Of course it is. But neither Berlin nor Washington could ever admit to something so monstrous. We provide the United States, and to a lesser extent the coalition forces, including Germany, with the right to do battle with the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership. Of course we condemn the attacks publically, but we allow them.”

“Including the raid on bin Laden’s compound?”

“Especially that one,” Naisir said. “And in return we are given money to help fund and equip our military.”

Pam understood perfectly. “India is a friend of the United States. So we’re talking about a delicate balance.”

“An extremely delicate balance, one that neither Washington nor Berlin wishes to upset.”

“Stupid that they would allow their war heroes to be assassinated.”

“The actual reason for the balance is to prevent a nuclear war between us and India — a war that would almost certainly spread, perhaps to something totally out of control.”

“It’s still stupid,” Pam said. Even through her deep hatred she could see it — a country not protecting the soldiers who served it.

“I agree. But they have McGarvey. He won’t get any official help, but he’s bound to come after your assassins and eventually you.”

“I thought you said that he’s helped us.”

“Yes, he has. But just remember he will come after you, and when he does, you’d best be prepared to deal with him.”

“Unlike your clumsy effort.”

“I agree,” Naisir said. “Even I underestimated the man. Don’t you make the same mistake.”

“When the time comes he will be eliminated for an additional fee.”

“Yes, one million.”

“Two million.”

“Agreed,” Naisir said without hesitation.

“Then the next step is to kill the remaining twenty-two SEALS.”

TWENTY

A young ensign in desert tan Crye Precision battle dress was waiting for McGarvey at the front gate of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group — DEVGRU — at Virginia Beach. He wore no name tag, only his insignia of rank and the SEAL Team Six patch. Slight of build, with long hair tied in a ponytail, he had the thousand-yard stare of the warrior who has seen close-quarters battle.

“Mr. Director, welcome to DEVGRU, I’m Ensign Mader. Captain Cole asked that I bring you up to his office.”

McGarvey parked his car in the visitor’s lot outside the main gate and then got into a navy Hummer, with Mader at the wheel.

On the way up, the windows were down. Mac heard two sharp explosions and then a lot of small-arms fire in the distance through the woods, “Busy day.”

“Yes, sir.”

They stopped at an intersection to allow a pair of armored personnel carriers to pass. Seconds later a Black Hawk helicopter roared low overhead and disappeared toward the sound of the shooting to the east.

A few blocks later they passed the post exchange and the cluster of buildings normally associated with a military installation, finally pulling up and parking in front of a three-story building with a small signboard and an American flag in a grassy area.

“I’m surprised that your flag isn’t at half mast because of the two operators you lost,” McGarvey said.

“That takes a presidential directive and we’ve received none,” Mader said sharply.

Inside they bypassed the elevator and took the stairs up to an office on the third floor, where a young clerk, also dressed in Cryes, picked up the phone. “The gentleman from Washington is here, sir.” He hung up. “Captain Cole will see you now, sir,” he said.

Cole’s corner office looked down a long grassy slope to what appeared to be an urban setting of several two- and three-story concrete block buildings. Several battered cars and a couple of pickup trucks were parked on the street. Two men were spraying foam on one of the cars, which was on fire.

The captain, dressed in Cryes like everyone else McGarvey had seen this afternoon, got up from behind his desk. “Glad to finally meet you, Mr. Director,” he said, though his attitude and inflection said differently.

“I won’t take up much of your time. I expect you’re a busy man.”

“That I am,” Cole said, motioning to a seat. He was half a head shorter than McGarvey and lean, with a scar that ran down the left side of his weather-beaten face from just below his ear to the bottom of his chin. His eyes were narrow, as if he was getting ready either for bad news or for an attack.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“No. I’ll get directly to my reason for wanting to see you. It’s about your ex-wife, Pamela Schlueter. Have you had any contact with her in the past few months?”

Cole got to his feet, furious. “Get the hell out of my office.”

“If need be I’ll have you ordered to Washington, and we can conduct this in an ONI facility.”

Cole reached for the phone.

“I don’t much care for men who beat up on their wives. Especially a man with your training.”

“Unproven allegations.”

“But not your presence on any number of porn sites,” McGarvey said. Otto had dug that up last night. “At least you have the good sense never to use government computers.”

“You can’t prove a thing,” Cole said, no longer so sure of himself.

“I think you know I can.”

Cole sat down.

“Thing is, you’re doing a damned good job down here. Five to go for your thirty years, though you’ve been passed up twice for your star. It’s possible that a recommendation from the CIA might help the next time around. Especially if we prove that your ex is involved with the people who murdered the two SEAL Team Six operators.”

“Can’t be her,” Cole said.

“Why not?”

“She was from Bad Aibling, a small town outside of Munich. She was a village girl when I met her and still a village girl when I brought her back to the States. I had a job at the Pentagon and she never fit in. Bitched all the time about the weather, the food, the traffic, the people. Nothing was right for her.”

“Including you?”

“Especially me.”

“Which is why you got rough with her?”

“Actually it was the other way around. She was a farm girl, no sisters, only four older brothers who she roughhoused with from the time she could walk. At least that’s how she explained it to me.”

“The SPs were called to your quarters more than once.”

“Believe me, McGarvey, I could have killed her, so I was very careful not to let her take things too far. In the end in Washington she’d gotten so aggressive that one night I had to let her break my arm. The next day I moved over to the BOQ on Andrews and sent her home. She filed for a divorce from Germany.”

“Was watching porn her idea too?”

“It was mine, something we did together. And that’s as far as I’ll take that issue. But if you think that Pam was somehow behind the murders of those two DEVGRU operators and their families, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“You say she was aggressive. Was she crazy?”

“Clinically nuts?” Cole asked. He shook his head. “I’m no shrink, but at the end she was having some pretty big mood swings. I put it down to her being pissed off living in the States. She never made friends, not one, never even tried.”

“Would you know if she might have played around, maybe had an affair?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Wasn’t her style.”

“While you were married, did she ever go home, visit old friends or family?”

“Twice.”

“Has she still got people in Bad Aibling?”

“Her parents and one of her brothers are dead. The other three are married, living in Munich I think, but I’m not sure,” Cole said. He sat forward. “I’m more motivated than you to figure out who killed two of our people, but my hands are tied. If they’d been on active duty it would have been different.”

“Were you given direct orders not to try to find out what happened?”

“No,” Cole said, and McGarvey thought he was lying.

“Of the other twenty-two operators, only three are still on active duty, and all of them are stationed here.”

“What twenty-two?”

“The others on the Neptune Spear raid. I think that all of them have been targeted by a group led by your ex-wife and financed by the government of Pakistan.”

“What brought you to that conclusion?”

“The guy and his wife in Florida were murdered by a German, who was being followed by a BND officer. They got into a shootout, and the BND officer killed the assassin. When I went to Germany to talk to the BND, someone tried to take me down. I think that it was a Pakistani who arranged it.”

“What’s the connection with Pam?”

“The BND believes she’s the head of an organization that hires out as assassins.”

“Bullshit,” Cole said, getting to his feet. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Would you know how to reach her if need be? A phone number, an e-mail address, something like that?”

“With all due respect, Mr. Director, you don’t work for the CIA any longer, so whatever the hell you’re doing here has no official sanction.”

McGarvey got up. At the door he turned back. “It’d be too bad if I found out that you were still in contact with your ex-wife.”

“If that’s a threat, I would suggest that you tread with care. I’ve recorded this conversation.”

Otto had warned about that as well. He had given McGarvey a device that looked like an ordinary cell phone, but one that broadcast the equivalent of a white noise signal, which made recordings impossible. “Keep him guessing after you leave and he tries to play it back,” Otto had said.

“We’ll keep in touch,” McGarvey said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Count on it.”

TWENTY-ONE

Pete had come over to the Renckes’ safe house in McLean, and after they’d finished lamb chops, a very good potato galette, and a nice salad that Otto had learned to make from online recipes, she asked McGarvey what was bothering him. “You’ve been quiet ever since you got here. Something troubling you?”

“Cole’s reaction wasn’t what I thought it would be,” Mac said. “He’s absolutely sure that his ex-wife couldn’t be behind the killings.”

“Maybe he’s a liar.”

“Not that good.”

“How’d he react when you told him that you knew he was doing porn on the web?” Otto asked.

“He didn’t deny it.”

“The question is, did he agree to either call the other nineteen ex-SEALS back to base for their own protection or at least convince the ONI to get involved?” Louise asked.

“They’re no longer on active duty. Not his problem.”

“None of them did their full twenty,” Otto said. “As far as the navy is concerned they’re on their own. Every one of them on the raid was over thirty at the time — all of them with beaucoup experience. The trouble is that just about every one of them have screwed-up backs, blown-out knees, and serious rotator cuff problems because of crap they had to do not only in the field but during training. A lot of them are suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress syndrome, their hearing is shot from the constant firing of weapons and use of explosives, and their eyesight is crap because of hours looking though night vision oculars. But they can’t use the navy’s medical service because they weren’t wounded or disabled, and they can’t get any decent health-care insurance that they can afford because of their disabilities.”

“What about VA hospitals”

“From what I’ve learned, those guys are way too proud to stand in line.”

“Hell of a way to treat our war heroes,” Louise said. “Can’t we get the bureau or at least the local cops involved?”

“They’re investigating the two attacks, but no crimes have been committed against the others, nor have the guys gotten any threatening letters or e-mails or phone calls,” Otto said. “Their hands are tied.”

McGarvey had thought about exactly that problem on the drive up from Virginia Beach — that and the likelihood that the United States and Germany had backed away from making any waves that might implicate the government of Pakistan in the killings.

“Has Marty or Walt Page made any noise to make me back off?” he asked.

“Not a word,” Otto said. “I think they want you to get involved. Have from the start. Means they’re willing to stand aside, but they won’t offer you any help. Neither will the bureau.”

“That’s about what I figured.”

Pete was staring at him. “There’s something else,” she said.

“I picked up a tail just north of Williamsburg. A white Lexus SUV, so far as I could tell, only the driver. He was good, matching my speeds, keeping at least three cars behind me. I got off the interstate at Richmond and drove around town. Three times I pulled into parking lots in tough neighborhoods and got out of my car. Come get me. But each time the guy in the Lexus didn’t take the bait. And each time when I got back on the highway he was there. So I just lost the bastard.”

“How?” Pete asked.

When he was at his apartment in Georgetown, McGarvey drove a modified Porsche Cayenne SUV; the computer code that limited a car’s top speed in the United States to 130 miles per hour had been removed. The machine could do in excess of 180 on its Y-rated racing tires.

“He couldn’t keep up.”

Pete grinned. “You’ll have to take me for a ride one of these days.”

“Any idea who it was?” Otto asked.

“Picking up a tail coming out of the meeting with Cole was no coincidence, or at least I don’t think it was. It’s something I’m going to find out tonight.”

“How?”

“I’m going to drive back to Georgetown and wait for him to show up.”

“I’ll come with you,” Pete said.

“I want you to hold down the fort here for at least tonight. As soon as I get this issue settled I’m going down to Norfolk to be near where most of the nineteen guys are living. In the meantime Otto is going to give all of them the heads-up. If something starts to go down I want them be on their toes, and if all else fails push the panic button.”

“You’re not keeping me out of that show,” Pete said. “Not a chance in hell.”

“I’d hoped you say that,” McGarvey said.

“Watch yourselves tonight,” Louise told them.

McGarvey headed straight across to the CIA campus before he picked up the GWM Parkway. Within a couple of miles the white Lexus was in his rearview mirror; he took his time, finally crossing the river into Georgetown on the Key Bridge.

His apartment was on the third floor of a brownstone that overlooked Rock Creek Park. He parked his Porsche in the first available spot on N Street Northwest, about a block out, and walked the rest of the way.

Traffic was light, mostly concentrated several blocks south on M Street, where all the bars and restaurants and shops that drew the tourists and locals were located. At Twenty-seventh Street, instead of turning left to his apartment, he waited for a delivery van to pass, then crossed the street to the park.

A dark, vaguely familiar figure came around the corner, hesitated for a few moments, and then came across.

McGarvey lingered in plain sight long enough for the man to spot him; then he turned and hurried down to the parkway, where he lost himself in the deeper trees near the river’s edge. No joggers or strollers were out here at this hour, which was the main reason Mac had led his quarry to the park. If there was to be a shootout he wanted the action to be isolated so that no innocent bystander would be involved.

But he did not want to kill whoever it was who’d followed him from Virginia Beach unless it was absolutely necessary. He needed some answers, not another body.

For a full two minutes the night was nearly silent. The man had disappeared.

Edging around the trunk of a tree, Mac took out his pistol and cocked his ear to listen for something, anything, some sound that did not belong here. Something other than the gentle burbling of the slow-moving creek and the distant traffic. A twig breaking, the rustle of a branch as someone passed, footfalls on gravel.

He caught a slight noise off to the left, upstream, and moved five yards to the trunk of another tree where he held up. Someone was ahead, perhaps twenty yards away, but closer to the creek.

Mac angled back toward the road to a spot he figured was just above where he’d heard the last noise. He stood absolutely still. After several moments he picked out the outline of a man in dark clothing, one hand on the trunk of a tree. The man was facing downstream, less than fifteen feet away. He had something in his free hand that was likely a pistol.

Raising his own gun, Mac stepped out from behind the tree. “If you are very careful you just might survive this night,” he said.

“McGarvey?” the man said, his voice soft, his accent German.

Mac knew the voice. “Let your gun fall to the ground.”

“I’m not armed,” the man said. He raised his right hand and switched on a flashlight, the red beam pointed downstream.

“Captain Weisse?” McGarvey asked.

Wolf turned. “I came to warn you that Pam Schlueter has disappeared and her next target is almost certainly you.”

McGarvey holstered his pistol at the small of his back and walked down to Wolf. “Why like this? Why not a phone call or an e-mail? Why come here and follow me?”

“I’ve been suspended and all my wireless accounts are being monitored. I had a hell of a time getting out of Germany and then here.”

“Same question: why?”

“Because we both know that Pakistan’s government, or at least the ISI, wants to take out all the SEAL Team Six guys who hit bin Laden. But I’ve been ordered to cease and desist. So here I am.”

McGarvey smiled. “You’ll probably end up in jail.”

“We’ll see,” Wolf shrugged. “In the meantime I’ve come to help. What’s our next move?”

TWENTY-TWO

Flying in over Washington and banking sharply to come in for a landing at Washington’s Reagan National Airport just after noon, was déjà vu for Pam Schlueter; her skin prickled and the hair at the nape of her neck stood on end.

Getting off the plane and passing through customs under a Canadian passport in the name of Monica DeLand she had to control her blinding anger, everything she’d gone through here coming back to her in vivid Technicolor.

As an officer’s wife ten years ago she should have been flown military to Andrews, but instead she’d been stuffed into the economy section of a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to National and had to catch a cab to their temporary apartment on base. There’d been a hassle at the main gate before she was allowed through, and when she arrived at the married officer’s quarters she’d been appalled at how filthy the place was.

Dick had not come home until nearly midnight, drunk; he’d flopped on the couch and gone to sleep even before she could come out of the bedroom to say hi. In the morning he was up and gone before she woke up and it wasn’t until the weekend when he was free that they went apartment hunting together.

But he’d had time Friday night for his little S & M games that they’d begun in Munich, and that whole week and weekend had been the beginning of the end for them, though she didn’t know it at the time.

The easier solution would have been to assassinate him and be done with it. But even that small an operation took planning, and especially money, of which she had very little. Until she’d contacted the ISI she’d worked as an editor for a number neo-fascist underground newspapers. Most of them spread the anti-Turk and anti-Muslim message, but one called for the wall to be put back up. West Germany could once again be the Germany, while the sponges and leeches in the East could form their own government and go back to doing what they did best: live off the dole.

Working around people like that did little to help her bank account but a lot to fuel her anger. She’d become a sharply honed woman of devious intent. She got to know the disaffected Germans. The ones with permanent grudges. The ones filled with hatred like hers.

At one of the shops in the terminal she picked up a prepaid cell phone before she went down to the Hertz counter and rented a Chevy SUV. Within thirty minutes of landing she was on Highway 50 heading southeast to I-95 and Norfolk.

Naisir had warned her never to have all of her operators in one place at the same time. It was common intel tradecraft that deep-cover field officers usually never knew of the others’ presence, and especially never met face-to-face.

But these were not normal circumstances in part because of the enormity of the operation — killing a lot of SEALs within forty-eight hours or less — and because of Kirk McGarvey, the loose cannon that none of them had expected. Killing him for the two million euro bonus did not seem as attractive as it had at first, yet there was no doubt in her mind that he would have to be dealt with.

In fact he had become priority one in her mind: hence the meeting with her five operators who had flown over from Paris, London, Rome, and Madrid separately and were already in place at the Sheraton Waterside in Norfolk.

She had initially contacted the four men, plus Zimmer, to work for her under the Black October Revolution banner. Their job was to take on fairly high-profile assassinations for large, though fair, sums of money for those kinds of things. Finding the six men had been easy because of her underground contacts, and finding the assignments even easier. The business world, especially in Europe and especially in these times of global financial meltdown, needed pruning from time to time. And her people — all German KSK-trained — were eager not only to earn some money but to kill people. It had been their specialty in the Kommandos, and as civilians they had felt useless until Pam came along.

Once her reputation was solid, the ISI had jumped at the chance for retribution. And her Kommandos had also signed on, but with some reservations. American SEALs were in a sense their comrades-in-arms. Yet the challenge of going up against men as well trained as they were was too interesting to pass up. And in the end they were willing to do anything that their paymistress wanted them to do.

She pulled into a rest stop outside of Fredericksburg to use a pay phone to activate her new cell phone. She was back on the highway in less than ten minutes.

By the time she had driven another twenty miles south on the interstate she had telephoned each of her five operators, giving them the same message. She was to meet with them in her suite at seven sharp.

Pam pulled up to the valet parker at the Sheraton Waterside in Norfolk just before six. A bellman took her bag and inside she checked in under the DeLand name paying for four nights in the presidential suite with a platinum American Express card that had been arranged for her by the ISI.

“A package was to be delivered to me this afternoon. Has it arrived?”

“Yes, madam. It has been placed in your suite.”

It was a large leather case that had been sent down from the Pakistani embassy by courier. It contained six Glock 26s with suppressors, six magazines of ammunition for each pistol, and $100,000 in one-hundred-dollar bills, plus six new U.S. passports and supporting documents including driving licenses, family photographs, AAA memberships, and credit cards.

When she was finished at the desk, and her suitcase was sent up, she walked across to the concierge.

“I will be having a meeting with five business partners in my suite at seven this evening,” she told the young man. “I want water and soft drinks, plus sandwiches and other snacks sent up no later than six forty-five. Will there be a problem?”

“Of course not, ma’am. Would you also like beer and wine? The hotel maintains an excellent cellar.”

“No alcohol.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She handed him a hundred-dollar bill, the same amount she had tipped the desk clerk and the bellman, and headed to the elevators. Tipping was so incredibly stupid, but it was expected, especially in the United States. Another on a very long list of things she hated.

TWENTY-THREE

Otto arranged for a CIA Gulfstream VIP jet to get them down to Norfolk’s international airport. Once they were airborne, McGarvey brought Pete and Wolf up to speed.

“Of the nineteen remaining SEALs, fifteen live in the Norfolk — Virginia Beach area, close to the base where they were trained. Three are still on active duty, presumably on base, but Otto hasn’t been able to find out if they’ve been deployed somewhere. Two others are in the San Diego area, one is down in Tallahassee, and the last one is running a small hotel in the Virgin Islands. St. Thomas.”

“The police still won’t help?” Wolf asked.

“Otto keeps trying, but unless there’s a legitimate threat, which there hasn’t been so far, their hands are tied.”

“But two of them, plus their families were gunned down in cold blood.”

“Your people in Berlin aren’t cooperating with Interpol, so our cops still don’t have a positive ID on the guy you shot and killed in Florida.”

“Insanity,” Wolf said.

“Welcome to the club,” Pete told him.

“It’ll be impossible to keep watch on all of them — even the fifteen in Norfolk — without help,” Wolf said.

“Otto caught us a little break,” McGarvey told them, though Pete already knew. “He convinced all of them that trouble was coming their way right now, and eight agreed to call nine-one-one if something came up.”

“Leaves us seven,” Wolf said.

“Three cars will be waiting for us at the airport. Two of the guys — Dan Lundien and Barry McDougal — live within a couple of miles of each other on Sandbridge Road. You and Pete will keep a watch on them.”

“For how long?” Wolf said. “Twelve hours, twenty-four, thirty-six? We can’t keep it up forever. And these guys probably won’t stay barricaded in their houses. Kids have to go to school. Wives have to go to the grocery store.”

“It’s going down tonight,” Mac said.

“How the hell did you come to that conclusion?”

“I’d do it tonight, just in case someone like us convinces the ONI or the bureau or at least the local cops to keep a heads-up.”

“What about the other two?”

“Sam Wiski and Jayson Wonder — Double Shot and Wonder Bread — are next-door neighbors. Wiski lives with his wife and two teenage daughters, but Otto thinks it’s likely that Wonder is in the middle of a divorce. His wife and son are out in Seattle.”

“If this goes down tonight, like you think it will, how many shooters do you think the woman has sent?” Pete asked.

“We think that there were five of them,” Wolf said. “Four now, unless there are others we know nothing about, which is certainly possible.”

“They must have good papers.”

“Zimmer did. First-class.”

“So for now let’s assume there are at least four guys, plenty to take out the fifteen if no one gets in their way,” McGarvey said.

“It gives us one-in-three odds that someone will come gunning for the four we’re going to shepherd,” Pete said. “But if any of them start elsewhere and one of the guys pushes the panic button, or maybe starts shooting back, it could slow them down a bit.”

“Could be there’ll be more than four of them,” Wolf said. “And these guys are pros.”

Pete suddenly got it. “He’s right. If someone calls nine-one-one, whatever cop shows up could be running into a buzz saw without a clue what he’s dealing with.”

McGarvey got on the aircraft phone and called Otto, who was working from his house. “Pete came up with something we need to think about. If one of these guys actually dials nine-one-one, the first responder won’t have a clue what he could be up against.”

“Got it covered, Mac,” Otto said. “One of my darlings is watching the nine-one-one systems for the entire area. If a call comes in from any of the fifteen numbers, I’ll let you guys know and I’ll give the cops the heads-up.”

“Let the bureau and the SPs on base know if something starts to go down.”

“You’re sure it’s going to happen tonight?” Otto asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s something else that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Wolf said when McGarvey hung up. “I was a Kommando, and I bought into the esprit de corps ethic. I work with guys from my old unit — or at least I did until yesterday. And I’m telling you that if someone started coming after me, my old unit would activate in a heartbeat.”

“The KSK fields some tough guys, there’s no disputing it,” McGarvey said. “But it’s different on this side of the pond. I know, because I worked with a couple of their teams a few years ago.”

“Your SEALs are tough; they have the reputation. I’m not arguing that point.”

“But the guys who hit bin Laden weren’t ordinary SEALs. They were DEVGRU — SEAL Team Six — the cream of the crop. They’re recruited from the pool of regular SEALs to train for eight or nine months with what they call the Green Team. A lot of them wash out and are sent back to their old units because they can’t make it. And there’s no shame attached because everyone in the regular SEALs knows just how impossible it is to graduate.”

“What’s your point?”

“By the time those guys make it through their initial training and do the first couple of ops in the field they’re the most competent and confident guys in any special ops unit anywhere in the world. They’re deployed on average three hundred days a year, and between missions they constantly train. After a while most of them start to believe that they’re invincible. On top of all that the guys we’re dealing with were all in their thirties when the bin Laden raid went down. Every one of them were seasoned pros. Every one of them came back from the op. One two three, just like clockwork, even though one of their helicopters crashed. That team just jumped to the ground, between the still spinning main rotor, and stayed on mission.”

“They worked as a team.”

“That’s right. And right now not one of them can conceive of anyone coming after all of them.”

They taxied over to the private terminal operated by Landmark Aviation. Clifford Blum, the night manager who’d arranged for the three rental cars to be brought over, was waiting for them on the tarmac.

McGarvey told the crew to get some rest but stand by to take off again within an hour’s notice, possibly less. “We could be in a hurry.”

“We’ll refuel immediately,” the pilot said. “Are we going back to Washington?”

“If I’m lucky, we’ll fly down to Miami with an extra passenger.”

The pilot glanced at the black leather bag that contained a sedation kit used to calm reluctant passengers. Otto had it sent over. And it was obvious that the crew knew what it was.

“We’ll be here, Mr. Director.”

“Stay frosty,” McGarvey said, and he went down the stairs.

Blum shook his hand. “May I log your flight, sir?” he asked. The aircraft’s markings were navy, and the Landmark manager had to be curious about what a navy aircraft was doing landing at a civilian field, but he didn’t press it.

“No,” McGarvey said. “Our crew will need to refuel tonight.”

“Will they need help with weather or flight planning?”

“Won’t be necessary,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, sir,” Blum said, but he didn’t sound disappointed, and he practically ran back inside.

“At least he was convinced to stay out of it,” Pete said.

“All the better,” McGarvey agreed. “Don’t take any stupid chances tonight. If it looks as if you’re getting in over your head, do a one-eighty and let Otto know. He’ll have an open line with all of us, and he’ll call whoever he needs to call. If you need to talk to each other or to me, tell Otto and he’ll make it happen.”

“These bastards aren’t going to get away with it,” Pete said with feeling.

McGarvey gave her a smile. “Watch yourself.”

TWENTY-FOUR

The last of the five to arrive at Pam’s suite was Steffen Engel, the only one to have been court-martialed out of the KSK — because he’d killed three recruits during CQB drills. Though it was never proved to be deliberate murder, he was cashiered because it had been his obligation as a drill instructor to make sure no serious harm came to his trainees.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.

“I brought your weapons, papers, and walking-around cash,” Pam said. “And I brought something else.”

Like the others on the team, Engel stood under six feet, and except for an almost permanent scowl on his square face and deep-set eyes under thick dark hair, he was unremarkable-looking. He easily passed for everyman wherever he went, and he was just enough of a chameleon to smile pleasantly whenever the need arose. But like a lion he lived for the kill, and even Pam understood that he was a force to be handled with care. It was the main reason she’d picked him from the applicants whose résumés she’d read on Soldier of Fortune. If anyone could finish an op no matter the trouble, it was Engel. She didn’t like him, but he was perfect for her kind of wet work.

“The operation is on?”

“Yes, come meet the others you’ll be working with. They’re in the dining area.”

The other four were seated around the table large enough for six: Rolf Woedding, the first she’d hired and the most ruthless; Friedrich Heiser, at twenty-four the youngest of the team; Klaus Bruns, whose mother was Russian and father was East German; and Felix Volker, five eight, the most heavily built of the men, and, in Pam’s estimation, completely insane. He actually believed that he was Hitler and Eva Braun’s grandson. She never disputed the belief with him.

Volker looked up. “Steffen, I thought I caught a whiff of something rotten coming through the door.”

Engel scowled; it was obvious that he was surprised. “Fuck you too, and the rest of you as well.”

“This is the team,” Pam said, from the head of the table. “I don’t much care if you get along on your own time, but for now pay attention because the most important mission of our op is on for tonight.”

“It’s a definite go, then?” Engel asked.

“Yes,” Pam said. She passed each of them an iPhone. “Programmed are the names, addresses, and brief bios of your targets. You’ll each do three tonight. They’re all in the immediate Norfolk — Virginia Beach area and I’ve grouped them in the general vicinity of each other to minimize your travel time. Once you’ve eliminated one target you will immediately go to the next, erasing the first from the phone on the way.”

“Fifteen in one night will create a hell of a stir,” Volker said, the happiest anyone had seen him in a while.

Pam passed out their new passports and other papers, as well as tickets on separate airlines for destinations ranging from Mexico City to Caracas. They were to make their own arrangements for getting to San Diego for the next phase. “You’ll be leaving first thing in the morning, and I’ll send word when I expect you to be in California. But the delay will not be very long.”

No one objected.

She passed out bundles of cash, $15,000 to each of them, along with the Glock pistols, silencers, and ammunition.

All of them checked the pistols’ actions and loads before they looked at the passports, papers, travel documents, and cash. The KSK had trained them to be thorough. First priority: make sure of your tools.

“Fifteen tonight — if nothing goes wrong — which makes seventeen,” Heiser said. “Leaves seven more? From the original team.”

“Plus one.”

They all looked up.

“Kirk McGarvey,” Pam said. “Anyone heard of him?”

“Former CIA director,” Volker said. “Supposed to be some kind of badass. But I’d heard that he bought the farm down in Cuba a while back.”

“You heard wrong. And he’s gotten himself involved in trying to save some lives. He might even be here in Norfolk tonight, the white knight in shining armor.”

“Could be a problem.”

“Whoever takes him down gets a bonus — four hundred thousand euros.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting the gentleman,” Bruns said.

“Good to know, Klaus. But you’ll have to earn the bonus before you spend it.”

“The bastard is ancient.”

“Fifty.”

“Leicht,” Bruns said. Easy.

“I hope you’re right. It’d be the best bonus I’ve ever paid.”

“Do you think this man will be a problem?” Volker asked.

“It’s a real possibility,” Pam said. “One that we have to consider. But think on this: the man did serve as the CIA’s director, but before that and since then, he’s been involved in what they call ‘special projects.’ Black ops.”

Volker nodded. “The man is an assassin.”

“A very good one.”

“I understand. He’s just like us.”

Pam nodded. From what Naisir had told her, McGarvey was nothing like her operators. The man was a killer, for sure. Like a James Bond. But he worked for his country, not for money.

“Of course one can never be certain about that aspect, because the man is wealthy in his own right,” Naisir had said. “Worth at least several millions.”

“Yet according to you he teaches philosophy at some small college in Florida. How much sense does that make?”

“From our way of thinking, not much. But be very careful, Ms Schlueter, that his study of Voltaire does not blind you to his formidable abilities.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Wiski and Wonder lived next door to each other in matching one-story bungalows, with carports, ratty little lawns, and roofs that needed repairs in a Norfolk neighborhood called Hollywood Homes, which was a subdivision of Lake Edwards. Their houses were at the end of a dead-end street within sight of the lake.

The neighborhood was quiet, lights on in almost all of the houses, but no traffic, no one outside, quiet except for someone’s stereo playing in one of the houses.

It was two when McGarvey showed up, backing his dark blue rental Taurus in the driveway of a house with a FOR SALE sign on the lawn.

No cars were parked on the street; though many of the carports were filled with junk, the cars, and in two cases pickup trucks, were parked in the driveways or on the lawns. Even in the dark the neighborhood looked unkempt, and he thought that it was a hell of a place for people who had served their country, especially at the level these guys had, to end up.

He lowered the window and sat back low so that only the top of his head would show and settled down to wait.

A dog barked somewhere. He sat up ten minutes later when he heard two pistol shots from the apartment complex across the lake. He waited a full five minutes listening for sirens, but if the police were ever summoned they weren’t responding.

His cell phone vibrated. It was Otto.

“I picked up a nine-one-one call from one of our guys south of Naval Air Station Oceana four minutes ago and gave the cops the heads-up. Turned out to be a false alarm; one of the neighbors came over with a six-pack.”

“Did they ask who you were and how you hacked into their system?”

“I didn’t give them the chance, and there’s no way they’ll trace my call. But so far the rest of the numbers have been quiet. How about you?”

“Someone across the lake fired a couple of shots, sounded like a pistol — nine or ten millimeter — a few minutes ago.”

“Nothing showing on any of the police channels in your area.”

“Maybe the neighbors over there are used to it,” McGarvey said. “Anything from Pete or Wolf?”

“They showed up about fifteen minutes ago, but I haven’t heard anything.”

“Give them a call and make sure everything is okay. Something starts to go down, I want to hear about it immediately.”

“You’ve got the willies?” Otto asked.

McGarvey was about to reply when the hackles on the back of his neck rose. He turned in time to see a dark figure darting between two houses across the street on the side facing a strip of woods away from the lake, three doors down from Wiski’s place.

“Might have something,” he said softly.

He waited for a few moments to see if whoever it was showed up on the other side of the house. It was possible that one of the neighbors was out and had gone back inside.

“Mac?”

The figure darted across the open backyard to the rear of the next house.

“Looks like it’s going down now,” McGarvey said getting out of the car.

“I’ll give Pete and Wolf the heads-up. Do you want backup?”

McGarvey ran across the street and headed toward the cul-de-sac. “I’m going to try to take this guy alive. But if it starts to get noisy and someone calls the cops, let me know.”

“Will do,” Otto said.

McGarvey took out his pistol and made it to the end of the block; the neighborhood was almost deathly silent. A couple of lights were on in one of the houses behind him, but all the others were dark. Even the one streetlight was burned out.

He pulled up behind a pickup truck in the driveway of the house next door to Wiski’s and listened for a long ten seconds, until he thought he heard a quiet shuffle of footsteps on gravel.

Easing to the left, he crossed to the front of the SEAL’s little house, and at the east corner he peered around the side in time to see a man dressed in dark slacks and a dark shirt of some kind doing something to a window.

“Not this time,” McGarvey said, raising his pistol.

The man leaped to the left almost as agilely as a ballet dancer, pulled a pistol and fired two silenced shots, both of them plowing into the side of the house.

Mac fired once, aiming low for the man’s legs, but missing as the figure disappeared around the back of the house, firing a third and fourth shot over his shoulder.

Sprinting back to the opposite side of the house Mac was in time to see the figure dart between the two houses. He gave chase, stopping briefly at the rear corner to take a quick look. But the yard was empty. Nothing moved in the darkness.

“I don’t mean to kill you unless it’s necessary,” Mac said, scanning the shoreline.

Something moved behind him.

“How kind of you, Herr McGarvey,” a man said, in a heavy German accent.

Mac rolled around the side of the house an instant before a pistol was fired inches from the back of his head; the shot, even though suppressed, was very loud at such close range.

The man grunted something.

Mac rolled back around the corner, the muzzle of his silenced pistol connecting sharply with the man’s broad forehead. Engel reared back and Mac stepped forward, keeping the pistol in direct contact with the guy’s head. He got the instant impression that he was in a cage with a wild but calculating animal.

“Drop your weapon,” McGarvey said.

Engel moved his head left at the same moment that he batted McGarvey’s gun away. He raised his own pistol, firing off one snap shot at hip level, just missing McGarvey.

Mac managed to grab the German’s gun hand and, with his other in the guy’s face, forced him back against the side of the house. Except for the silenced shots this was all almost completely noiseless.

Slowly Engel slumped back, releasing his grip on his pistol, letting McGarvey take it from his hand and toss it aside.

Mac stepped back. “How did you know that I would be here tonight?” he asked, though he didn’t expect an answer that would be of any use. It wasn’t going to be that easy.

Engel was outwardly calm. He shrugged. “What now?”

“You and I are going someplace where we can have a little talk about SEAL Team Six and Frau Schlueter’s interests in them.”

“I don’t think so,” Engel said, and he produced a Glock 81 field knife, which looked something like a slimmed-down version of the U.S. Special Forces KA-BAR. Deadly in the right hands.

Mac stepped back out of range, his hands to either side. “The KSK fields some sharp operators, but of course the stupid ones like you and your pal down in Florida and the others out tonight usually riff out. That your story?”

Engel said something in German under his breath and charged, feinting first to the right. McGarvey waited for the actual thrust from the left and managed to deflect it, hooking the German’s arm under his left, and bending the man’s wrist back nearly to the point of breaking.

Wordlessly Engel tried to smash his fist into the side of Mac’s head, but each time Mac slipped the blow and increased the pressure on the man’s knife hand, forcing him back against the side of the house again.

“A jail cell is better than a pauper’s grave, don’t you think?” Mac said.

Engel hooked a leg around McGarvey’s and they went down, Mac on the bottom. Engel slowly brought the tip of the knife around so that it was inches away from Mac’s throat.

For a long beat or two, McGarvey resisted, but then all at once he caved in, rolling left as the knife came down. This time he snatched the blade out of the German’s hand, flipped it end over end, and rapped the heavy pommel sharply against the man’s forehead, momentarily dazing him.

Getting out from underneath, McGarvey pulled the syringe kit out of his pocket and injected a few cc’s of methohexital directly into the side of Engel’s neck. He needed the man docile for what came next. The German was struggling out of his momentary daze, but the powerful sedative took hold almost immediately and he lay back, his body going slack except for the rise and fall of his chest.

McGarvey found both pistols and pocketed them, then quickly searched the German, coming up with a cell phone.

The neighborhood remained quiet.

He hit the speed dial and a woman answered immediately. “Steffen?”

“I have your man. Call the other two off and go home, Ms. Schlueter. It’s over for tonight.”

The woman was silent for a long time. When she spoke it sounded as if she was talking in her sleep, her voice dreamy and distant. “For tonight,” she said and she was gone.

Mac phoned Otto and told him what had happened. “Nothing from Pete or Wolf yet?”

“No. You okay?”

“Fine. Have them meet me at Landmark and have the crew standing by for immediate takeoff.”

“Do you want me to call Martinez?”

“I’ll do it,” McGarvey said. “We dodged a bullet this time, but it’s not over.”

“It never is, kemo sabe,” Otto said.

Engel was heavy, but not impossibly so. McGarvey managed to heave him off the ground into a fireman’s carry and headed back to where he had parked his car.

TWENTY-SIX

Raul Martinez was waiting for them at a government hangar on the side of Miami International Airport opposite the civilian terminal. The morning sun was not up yet; the airport just starting to come alive with the first commercial flights out.

On the way down from Norfolk, Wolf had identified their prisoner as Steffen Engel, a former KSK hand-to-hand instructor, one of the serious badasses in the Kommados who’d been kicked out for excessive force.

“Definitely one of Schlueter’s handpicked shooters,” Wolf said. “But there’s little or no chance he’ll cooperate with us, no matter how persuasive you think you are. At least not here in the States. Maybe the Saudis would have better luck.”

McGarvey glanced at Pete, who had a little sad smile on her lips. She’d told him once that sometimes she might not like the method, but if the reasons were strong enough she’d have no problem.

“It’s the real world,” he’d told her.

“Shitty.”

Martinez, who was the CIA’s chief of operations in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood around the Calle Ocho, was a slender dark man who knew just about everyone in south Florida and the Keys, along with most of their secrets. But Cuba was fast becoming a cause of the past. Fidel was dead, his brother retired, and the exiles were getting old; memories were fading, becoming less urgent each year.

He’d arrived with two husky Cubanos in coveralls in a light gray panel van with FROSTPROOF AC SERVICE and a Hialeah logo on the sides. When McGarvey came down the stairs Martinez gave him a hug.

“Otto said that you were bringing someone special.”

“Nothing to do with Cuba this time,” Mac said.

“Nothing much does anymore, comp,” Martinez said. “We lost the revolution, could be we’re losing the peace. Who’d you bring?”

McGarvey explained about Engel and Schlueter and SEAL Team Six. “Last night was just a temporary fix.”

“The bastards just keep coming, and yet they expect us to treat them like they’ve got civil rights,” Martinez said with disgust.

Pete, who Martinez knew, came down the stairs with Wolf. Mac introduced the German BND officer.

“Have you ever been involved with this type of interrogation?” Martinez asked.

“No,” Wolf admitted.

The Cubanos went aboard and brought Engel out between them, the man’s feet dragging on the ground, and loaded him into the van.

“We can find you a secure hotel. Might be best for your career all around if you don’t get involved, you know what I mean?”

“It’s too late for that, I think,” Wolf said.

Martinez shook his head. “Where the hell do you find these people, Mac?” he asked, but there was no answer, because none of them knew if he was talking about Engel or Wolf.

Little Torch Key, about one hundred miles from Miami, was a series of low mangrove islets that extended northward up into the Gulf. Isolated, lightly inhabited, and nearly impossible to reach by road or water without detection, Government 312 was a listening post for Cuban radio and television broadcasts. It had figured big during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but ever since then it had languished.

Outwardly. But before and since the Bay of Pigs the tiny facility — only three concrete block buildings, a generator shed, and a diesel tank on stilts behind a tall razor wire fence — had in fact been used as an enhanced interrogation outpost. Far from the prying eyes of the media or other governmental agencies, the CIA, which denied its existence, had from time to time made use of the place. Completely extrajudicially.

It was broad daylight when they showed up, the morning steamy, already in the nineties. The Cubanos brought Engel inside one of the windowless block buildings furnished only with a leather-covered interrogation bench complete with straps. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and a hose was connected to a faucet in one corner. In the middle of the floor directly beneath the bench was a drain hole covered by a grate.

The Cubanos laid Engel on the bench and secured the straps around his legs, hips, and torso so that that he couldn’t move to defend himself.

Martinez went out and started the generator and the light came on. He brought back a thin towel and a bucket, as Engel was starting to come around.

“You guys might want to wait outside,” he told his Cubanos, and they left without a word. “You too,” he told Pete.

“This guy would have killed two of our people and their families if Mac hadn’t stopped him,” she said. “And there would have been even more deaths tonight.” She looked at Engel and the others. “I’ll stay.”

Mac closed the door; almost instantly the room became stifling.

Martinez filled the bucket with water, and Pete went to Engel’s side. “I’ll do this,” she told Mac and the others.

McGarvey stepped aside with Wolf. Pete’s reputation inside the CIA was beauty and brains. Only a handful of fellow officers who’d watched her in action during interrogations realized that she was much more than that. She was fierce enough that no one felt right about giving her a nickname. She made most people who knew her nervous. But not McGarvey because he of all people understood that what she was giving up for her country was every bit as dear as what the SEAL Team Six guys had given up.

She patted Engel on the cheek a couple of times. “Hey, Steffen, can you hear me?” she asked gently.

Engel’s eyes were open, fixed on hers.

“You were given a sedative. It’s wearing off now. Do you understand?”

After several moments he nodded. He turned his head as far as the restraints would allow and looked at McGarvey and Wolf, and then at Martinez.

“I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Pete said, her tone still reasonable. “If you cooperate this will be easy. You’ll be transferred to a federal cell somewhere in the D.C. area where you’ll be held until your trial for attempted murder and acts of terrorism.”

Engel looked at her again, the expression in his eyes and face one of utter contempt.

Pete patted him on the shoulder. “But it’s not going to be easy, is it?” she said. “Let’s start with your name, please.”

Engel said nothing.

“Give me just that much, okay?”

He looked away.

“So here’s the deal. We’re going to waterboard you, which you understand will not be pleasant. In some cases subjects have actually died. At the very least you will be faced with pain, of course, but also possible damage to your lungs, some brain damage because of oxygen deprivation, and perhaps even a few broken bones as you struggle against your restraints.”

Her tone was sad, her voice apologetic, low, even sexy. She understood what he was about to experience, and she conveyed the feeling that she was genuinely sorry for him, even afraid.

“What is it we want to know?” she asked, not turning away from Engel.

“We know that you and the others were hired by Pam Schlueter to kill the SEAL Team Six guys who took out bin Laden,” McGarvey said. “We want to know who hired her. Who is her paymaster? Who is her contact?”

“You heard, so I don’t need to repeat the question,” she told Engel. “A name is all Mr. McGarvey needs, and then it’ll be off to a jail cell — pleasant compared to your present circumstances.”

Engel stared at her but said nothing.

“No?” Pete said. “Too bad for you.”

She took a towel from Martinez and draped it over Engel’s face. He flinched.

“One name, Steffen. It’s all that we ask of you.”

Martinez placed a strap across Engel’s forehead; despite the man’s struggles he managed to tighten it down, holding the assassin’s head firmly in the face-up position. He began pouring water directly onto the towel covering Engel’s face. Slowly, but in a steady stream.

The German lay perfectly motionless for nearly fifteen seconds, his training and control perfect, until suddenly his chest spasmed and he bucked violently against the leather straps.

Pete, her mouth set, motioned for Martinez to continue pouring water on the towel, and Engel convulsed more violently. His brain was telling him that he was drowning, and he could no longer control his body, which had dropped into a primal defense mode.

Mac, who had been waterboarded himself, knew what it was like, what was at stake, and he felt the man’s pain. But he didn’t give a good goddamn. Engel was an assassin for hire. A freelance. Not for a country or a religion or even for an ideal, but simply for money.

Martinez stepped back and Pete pulled the towel off Engel’s face.

“Here we are at the start of a long road. Are you ready?”

Engel was working to catch his breath.

“Steffen?”

“Fuck you,” Engel said.

Pete replaced the towel, and Martinez, who had refilled the bucket, poured the water again, with the same results.

“A name,” Pete said when she’d removed the towel for the second time.

Engel tried to say something, but Pete draped the towel over his face again. This time she got the hose, turned it on to an even flow, and held it a couple of inches above his mouth and nose. She held it there, seemingly forever, until Engel’s movements began to subside as he lost consciousness.

Tossing the hose aside, Pete ripped the towel off the German’s face and got close. “Last time, Steffen. A name, or I set the hose on you again and walk away.”

Wolf stepped forward, but McGarvey held him back.

“Sprechen zu mir, Kommando!” Pete said. Speak to me! “A name. Just that.”

The sound of the running water falling on the concrete floor, and just then an osprey or some other hunting bird flying overhead, dropping for a kill, seemed suddenly loud in the close confines. Even louder than the noise of the diesel generator, and of Engel’s desperate gasps for breath.

“Steffen,” Pete whispered close to his ear.

“Naisir,” Engel croaked, his voice barely audible, scarcely understandable.

“Naisir who?”

“Major Naisir. ISI. In Berlin, Warsaw. Guernsey.”

Ali Naisir had led a charmed life up until August 2008 when Pervez Musharraf was forced to resign from the presidency of Pakistan and leave the country because of death threats from the Taliban, and other political considerations.

Naisir was a lieutenant in an ISI special detail tasked with protecting Musharraf not only from the Taliban and the angry mobs outside parliament, but from himself and his own ambitions as well.

“The general has done Pakistan a great and honorable service, but it is time for him to step aside,” Colonel Akhtar Ahmed told him. Ahmed was director of the Joint Intelligence Bureau, which was responsible for collecting political intelligence inside and outside the country.

Naisir had been called to the colonel’s office at headquarters in Islamabad, though he had no earthly idea why. “Yes, sir.”

“In fact he means to leave this very night, and already various parties want to stop him from going. By any means.”

“I can arrange for a military detail to escort him every step of the way, sir. He still has many friends at the PMA and NDU.” The PMA at Kakul was Pakistan’s military academy and the NDU — the National Defense University — in Islamabad was where officers learned strategy, leadership, and statecraft. Nearly all the powerful officers in the military and the ISI were graduates of both institutions. Naisir was in his fourth year at the NDU and was considered one of its rising stars — which was why he’d been given the important job of seeing to the overall welfare of a president.

Ahmed waved his response aside. “That would call too much attention to him. He wants to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and you will see that he makes it safely to the border, at which point your obligation will be completed. Is this clear, Lieutenant?”

“A private flight—”

“Would be shot down within sight of the airport. He’ll be expected by friends in Jalalabad.”

“A convoy?” Naisir suggested, though he knew what the colonel would say and why.

Ahmed shook his head. “You’ll leave under darkness tonight. Just you and a couple of men, no fanfare, no special precautions.”

Through Peshawar, which was a hundred and fifty kilometers from Islamabad, it was another one hundred plus klicks over the mountains to the relative safety of the Afghan town — the highway in many spots nearly impassable and almost always choked with truck traffic.

It had dawned on Naisir that he was never expected to cross the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, let alone reach Jalalabad. And when his body was found with Musharraf’s, he would be branded as a traitor.

“Do you understand, Lieutenant?”

“Perfectly,” Naisir had said. He got to his feet, crashed his boot heels together, and saluted in the British fashion — palm out.

“Understand something else. In this case the mission is as important as the man. What happens in the next twenty-four hours will have a great effect on the future of our country, and on yours.”

Naisir drove a Range Rover, an indifferent even aloof Musharraf alone in the backseat, while three enlisted men rode behind in a Toyota pickup truck, one of them in the back manning a machine gun on a swivel mount.

Their departure from Islamabad shortly before midnight had gone without incident and although Naisir had been extremely nervous on the run west to Peshawar, the last big town before the mountains along the Afghan border, the drive was a nonevent.

To that point traffic had been reasonable, but then the highway began its climb up to the pass which at a bit more than three thousand feet was one of the most heavily traveled highways in the world — and had been since the days of the ancient Silk Road — and everything slowed to a crawl.

Trucks were backed up as far as the eye could see in either direction. Those heading into Afganistan were transporting fuel and other supplies for the American war effort, while the trucks heading into Pakistan were empty, returning for supplies.

The Taliban had controlled much of the highway over the past several years, sometimes closing it for days at a time, despite the Pakistani military presence.

Naisir figured that if they were going to run into any sort of trouble it would be on the last stretch before the actual summit, which was about three miles inside Pakistan. Once across the border, the highway was controlled by American forces and would be relatively safe.

The mountains rose steeply on the other side of the road. Around one switchback Naisir caught a glimpse of the big stone gate that straddled the highway; a short distance to the right was one of the squat towers that the Khyber rifle detail used as a lookout.

Most of the trucks were pulled over and parked just on this side of the gateway, but Naisir could not make out any people; no truck drivers nor the soldiers who manned the border were anywhere in sight. His inner radar came alive.

He got on the walkie-talkie to warn Sergeant Brahami that something might be coming their way. “Unit Two, copy?”

“This is Two.”

“Something odd is going on at the border. Keep alert.”

The pickup was ten yards back, and behind it the line of supply trucks had begun to slow down and spread out. Naisir had the strong feeling that they were heading into a trap.

“I see it, Lieutenant,” Brahami radioed back. “What do you want to do?”

Naisir had never worked with the sergeant or the other three men in the pickup. They had been assigned to him for this detail at the last minute with written orders.

He glanced at Musharraf in the rearview mirror. “There may be some trouble at the border crossing, Mr. President. Are you armed?”

“No. Should I be?”

Musharraf had had a distinguished career in the military, even winning the Imtiazi Sanad medal for gallantry because of his battlefield conduct in the second Kashmir war of 1965. He was an officer who, when given an order to hold his position, did so no matter the odds. After that he’d joined the Special Service Group, which was Pakistan’s elite special forces unit, where he again showed his bravery under fire.

“Yes, sir,” Naisir said, and he handed back his 9mm Steyr GB pistol as they came around the last switchback, less than fifty yards from the gate. “It’s possible that someone is waiting to assassinate you.”

“What do you propose?”

“I’m not going to stop until we reach the border. If need be we’ll shoot our way across the summit.”

“It won’t do your career much good,” Musharraf said. He rolled down the windows on both sides.

Naisir got back on the walkie-talkie. “I’m not stopping for the summit.”

Brahami didn’t answer.

“Sergeant, copy?”

They were coming up on the gate. No one was anywhere in sight. The trucks and a few cars, sitting idly off the side of the road, were surreal in the harsh overhead lights.

Naisir picked up the 9mm Ingram MAC 10 from beside him on the seat and turned the cocking handle ninety degrees to unlock the bolt; then he slammed the pedal to the floor and the Range Rover surged ahead.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at the same moment the pickup truck went up in a fireball, almost certainly hit by an RPG fired from above and to the right, the explosion completely destroying it.

Four men armed with AK-47s, dressed in the leggings and long shirts of Taliban fighters, came around from behind the gate and stood shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the road.

Musharraf started firing, one measured shot at a time, hitting two of the Taliban shooters as Naisir closed the distance to less than ten yards, holding on to the steering wheel with his right hand, while firing out the window with his left.

The men opened fire, blowing out the Range Rover’s windshield but directing their aim at Musharraf, who weaved and ducked as he continue to fire his pistol one shot at a time.

At the last possible moment, with only one of the Taliban left standing, Naisir plowed into him, his body slamming up onto the hood of the SUV, still alive but bleeding heavily from wounds in his forehead and neck.

Naisir tapped the brakes hard. The Taliban rocketed off the hood, and Naisir ran over his body, the Range Rover nearly rocking out of control, until they were on the other side and descending into the valley toward the border crossing.

Three days later, Naisir reported as ordered to Colonel Ahmed’s office. He had been relieved from duty without explanation the morning he’d returned from Jalalabad, and he had remained confined to his quarters in the bachelor officer’s wing at the school.

“You exceeded your orders, Lieutenant,” Ahmed shouted. “And in doing so you got the three men under your command shot to death.”

“It was an RPG, Colonel, fired I’m certain by Taliban forces — the same ones who attacked my vehicle in an attempt to assassinate President Musharraf.”

“It does not matter who attacked. What matters is that you violated two sovereign borders — ours and Afghanistan’s. And now we have the Americans breathing down our backs once again.”

“What would you have had me do, Colonel? Die on the highway?”

“It would have been for the best,” Ahmed blurted angrily before he realized what he was saying.

“I was ordered to get the president safely out of Pakistan, which I did. I’ll accept a court-martial on the issue, sir.”

“Get out of my sight, Lieutenant.”

“No, sir. Not until my position has been clarified. Am I to be returned to my unit and be allowed to finish my degree, or am I to be discharged from the service? I have a right to know which, sir.”

Ahmed sat back and toyed with a thin file folder on the desk on front of him. “If you wish to resign you will be allowed to do so. Without prejudice.”

“I do not wish to resign.”

“You are relieved of your present position and will devote yourself to completing your education, at which time — if you graduate — you will be assigned to Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous, at the rank of captain.”

Naisir held himself in check. That directorate of the ISI was responsible for espionage operations, including offensive intel missions in other countries. The crème de la crème.

Brilliant careers could be made in the field, but men’s careers could also come to fiery ends.

Problem officers were sent to that directorate, where they either shone like bright stars or crashed like meteors.

Naisir understood the risks, but he could not foresee what was to happen in the coming years. Then again, no one could.

“Thank you, Colonel,” he said, forcing his expression to remain neutral.

Ahmed hand him the file folder. “Your orders, Lieutenant. And don’t be so quick to thank me; you may change your mind before long.”