Retribution

EPILOGUE

McGarvey had been alone again long enough now on his island retreat that he no longer saw any value in it. Pete had stayed with him for the first few weeks, but he’d sent her back to her job at Langley to keep her ear to the ground.

He ran every day across the rugged hilly terrain, along cliffs that plunged into the Aegean, up steep stairs that the Greeks and then the Romans had carved to their temples, and back down to the town, where he sometimes had lunch and a half bottle of good retsina. He was up to five miles a day now, and sometimes he swam in the sea for an hour or so, pushing himself as he always had.

A couple of days each week he hiked up from where he stayed in the lighthouse that had been converted into a comfortable apartment. He shot his pistol at small targets, bottles, bits of newspapers or magazines, even a cigarette pack he’d picked up in town. His accuracy with the Walther became very good up to three hundred inches.

He sat this noon at the tavern by the ferry dock as the boat from the mainland pulled up and the passengers, mostly tourists at this time of early fall, disembarked.

Time to go home, the idle thought crossed his mind. Physically he was back to nearly one hundred percent, and he was beginning to chafe at the bit sitting around here. And as was often the case with him, he was beginning to feel that something was coming his way.

Not Pam Schlueter, or the ISI — but something or someone else. Something just beyond his ken.

Louise said that it was an instinct for survival honed after a lot of years in the field, and Otto agreed. But he thought it more likely that every time he got bored he looked for something to do. Some nut to crack. He’d been doing it for so long, and he’d lost so much, that it was a way of life. His life.

“It’s what I am,” he’d once told a DDO who’d tried to figure him out.

“An anachronism,” the deputy director had called him.

But the man had been gunned down when he’d stupidly stuck his nose in the middle of an operation.

He raised his wine glass, but then stopped. Pete was getting off the ferry, trailed by Marty Bambridge, who looked anxious even from this distance.

They walked across the quay to the line of waiting taxis, but while Marty was negotiating with a cabbie Pete scanned the waterfront cafés, finding McGarvey sitting alone at a sidewalk table.

She smiled and nodded, and then said something to Bambridge, who did a double take before he too spotted McGarvey. They had to wait for a break in traffic before they could cross the street.

“At least we don’t have to climb all the way up the godforsaken hill to your lighthouse,” Bambridge said by way of greeting.

“Hi, Mac, you okay?” Pete said.

He got up and they embraced. “A little lonely.”

“Me too.”

They all sat down, and when the waiter came over Pete ordered a retsina while the DDO asked for a Coke.

“We have a developing problem,” Bambridge said. “It’s why we came over to talk to you.”

“I thought that I was persona non grata in Washington,” McGarvey said, though he didn’t really know why he was being so irascible, except that he was still tired from dealing with the political bullshit. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way. But it was never that simple.

“There’s a serial killer loose inside the CIA headquarters campus,” Pete said. “We need your help.”