The Cabal

ONE

The George was a trendy newly rebuilt art deco hotel one block from Washington’s Union Station, its restaurant busy this Wednesday noon with a few congressmen, a number of television and print journalists, and well-heeled tourists who liked to be in the middle of things.

The noise level was surprisingly low, as if what everyone was discussing was confidential. The service was as crisp as the April weather, which, after a long damp winter, was energizing. The elections were over, a new president sat in the White House, and an optimistic mood had begun to replace the pessimism since 9/11.

Seated at an upper-level table that looked down on the first floor and entryway, Todd Van Buren sat nursing a Michelob Ultra, waiting for Joshua Givens, a buddy from the University of Maryland, where they’d both majored in political science. Todd had minored in international law and languages — French, Chinese, and Russian — and had been immediately hired by the CIA, while Givens, who’d minored in journalism, had started work for the Minneapolis Star, and over the past six years had worked his way up to a well-respected, if junior, investigative journalist with the Washington Post.

When he had called this morning and left a message on Todd’s voice mail, he sounded frantic, almost frightened.

At twenty-nine, Todd was the youngest person ever to run the CIA’s training facility, known unofficially as the Farm, with his wife, Elizabeth, at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, 140 miles south of Washington on the York River. His father-in-law was Kirk McGarvey, former director of the agency. He and Liz both had a fair amount of field experience, much of it alongside Liz’s father, who’d arguably been the Company’s finest field agent, bar none. They’d practically gone to school on his tradecraft, and once their covers had been blown they’d been recruited to run the training facility. Something they’d been doing with a great deal of success for the past three years. And after the first three months no one ever questioned their ages.

Givens knew that Todd worked for the CIA, just as he knew who Todd’s father-in-law was, which made his message this morning all the more cryptic.

“Trust me on this one, Todd,” Givens had said. “Don’t tell anyone we’re meeting. No one. Not your wife, and especially not her father.”

Noon at the George, it was ten after that now, and Todd was beginning to regret driving all the way up from the Farm, and lying to his wife in the bargain, though that had been easy because she was spending the day on an exfiltration exercise with the new class. Tomorrow would be his turn, pushing the twelve field officer trainees as close to the breaking point as he could. He and Liz were hands-on administrators.

He would explain to her where he’d been when he got back. They’d been spies, but they had never lied to each other. She’d made him promise before they got married. She loved her father, but he’d been gone for almost all of her childhood because he had not been able to tell the truth to his wife, and she’d kicked him out of the house. Todd’s relationship with Liz was the most important thing in his life, not just because he loved her but because of their two-year-old daughter, Audrey. He owed both of them at least that much.

Givens appeared in the doorway from the hotel’s lobby, spotted Todd sitting upstairs, and came up. He looked out of breath and flushed, as if he had run all the way in from the Post. Unlike Todd, who was tall, solidly built with a broad, pleasant face, Givens was short and whip thin, his movements quick, almost birdlike. In college Todd had lettered two years as a running back on the football team, while Givens had lettered all four years in cross-country. He’d been incredibly fast with the endurance of an iron man, and it didn’t look as if he’d changed much.

“Thanks for coming,” Givens said, sitting down across from Todd. He laid a computer disk in a jewel case on the table and slid it across. “Don’t hold it up, don’t look at it, just put it in your pocket.”

“Okay,” Todd said. He slipped it into his jacket pocket as their waitress came over.

“Iced tea, with lemon,” Givens said. “I’m not staying for lunch.”

“So, here I am,” Todd said. “And I’m curious as hell.”

Givens glanced down at the entryway, and then at the other diners on the lower level, before he turned back. “Listen, for the past five months I’ve been investigating a power broker group called the Friday Club. And what I’m finding out is scaring the crap out of me. Everything I’ve come up with so far is on the disk.”

“Robert Foster,” Todd replied. Everyone in Washington knew of the so-called club whose ultra-conservative members called themselves American Firsters. Lobbyists, a number of high-ranking aides and advisers to some key senators and congressmen as well as at least one White House insider, and others. All men, all of them with power.

“He’s the top dog,” Givens said. “And when I started looking it didn’t take me long to find out that some of his lobbyist pals represented people like the Saudi royal family, the Venezuelan oil minister, the deputy director of Mexico’s intelligence service.”

“What were you looking for?”

Givens hesitated. “This is going to sound far-fetched. But one of the guys on the list was your deputy director of operations, Howard McCann, who got my attention when he turned up dead in the line of duty.”

Todd kept any hint of emotion from his face, but alarm bells were jangling all over the place. McCann had been a traitor who’d financed the hit on a Chinese general in Pyongyang, and before that was the moneyman behind a scheme to smuggle forty kilos of polonium-210 across the border with Mexico. When Todd’s father-in-law confronted the man in a safe house just outside Washington, the DDO had pulled out a pistol and it had been Todd who’d opened fire, killing him. There’d been a lot more to it than that, of course, but to this point they’d not been able to figure out where McCann had gotten the money. It was a puzzle.

“You have my attention, Josh,” he said carefully.

“I’m in the middle of something really big. Maybe even a shadow government. These guys have influenced elections, got federal judges removed from the bench, made sure some top banks and big financial companies got federal backing — bailouts just like what happened to Chrysler and just about everyone else a couple of years ago.”

“Planning a coup?”

Givens shook his head. “Nothing so messy or dramatic as that. I think they’ve already accomplished what they set out to do. They’re running things right now. Or at least the important stuff. Guys from the Federal Reserve are in the club, along with a couple of four stars from the Pentagon. This cuts right across the board.”

Givens looked away for a moment, apparently overwhelmed by what he was saying. When he turned back he’d come to some decision.

“What?” Todd prompted.

“Could be the bastards engineered nine/eleven.”

This was getting over the top for Todd. “Do you know how crazy that sounds? Just another conspiracy theory. Our guys deal with that kind of shit twenty-four/seven. Doesn’t get us anywhere.”

“Look what they’ve accomplished,” Givens said.

“Tell me.”

“A direct reduction of our civil liberties, for one. For Christ’s sake, libraries and bookstores are supposed to inform the FBI what fucking books we’re reading. Now you tell me who’s crazy?”

“What do your editors over at the Post have to say about it?”

Givens dismissed the question with a gesture. “These aren’t the Woodward and Bernstein days. We don’t run partial stories hoping the exposure will make other people come forward. Everyone’s gotten too smart.”

“Who have you shared this with?” Todd was having a lot of doubts. He and Givens hadn’t been close, but the guy had never seemed nutsy. And his investigative pieces in the Post had seemed first rate. But this now made no sense.

“No one. Not even my wife, Karson. Not until I have everything nailed down.”

“Okay, I’ll look at your disk,” Todd said. “Then what?”

“How did McCann die? What was he working on?”

Todd spread his hands. “Even if I knew something like that, which I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it.”

“Especially not with a reporter.”

“Something like that.”

“Give it to your father-in-law then. From what I hear he still carries some weight.” Givens looked down at the entryway again, as if he was expecting someone. “Hell, I don’t have anything solid yet. All I have are a lot of disconnected facts. Sudden changes in government policies, resignations of some key people here and there, upset elections in two dozen key states over the past couple of years. It’s all on the disk.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Todd said. “But I can’t promise anything. You’ve gotta understand that, Josh.”

“Do what you can,” Givens said. “What you think is right.”

His iced tea came, and he drank some of it then got up. “I trust you, man. I think you’re the only person in the world I can trust.”

“I’ll call you if I come up with something,” Todd said.

“Not at the paper,” Givens said. He handed Todd a business card. “Call me at home.” He gave Todd a long, hard look then turned, went downstairs, and left the restaurant.

TWO

Tim Kangas, thirty-one, medium height and build, thinning light brown hair and ordinary brown eyes, laid a twenty-dollar bill on the downstairs table after Givens hurried past and left the hotel. His partner, Ronni Mustapha, picked up the nylon sports bag on the chair between them and casually reached inside and switched off the shotgun microphone’s recording circuit. They’d heard everything.

They’d been following the Washington Post reporter for three weeks, waiting for the tipping point, which had apparently happened just minutes ago. An article in the newspaper would have meant next to nothing, but his meeting with a CIA officer, especially one with Van Buren’s connections, could possibly be devastating.

“Get the car,” Kangas said, and Mustapha, an ordinary-looking man in his late twenties with deep-set dark eyes and an easy, pleasant smile when he was in public, took the bag and left directly behind Givens.

No one would suspect he’d been born in Saudi Arabia; when he was five his parents had immigrated to Atlanta, where he’d completely assimilated, down to a soft Georgia accent. Nor would he be pegged as a CIA-trained NOC, non-official cover, field officer, the same as Kangas, who’d been born and raised in southern California. Both of them knew how to lie, how to fit in, how to fade into the woodwork, how to be anyone at anytime.

They had been picked for the program because both men had been born with a fiercely independent streak, exactly what the Company wanted. But after six years in the field, Kangas in Central America and Mustapha in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran — his parents had insisted that he learn Arabic as a child — they’d become too independent, which was all too common. And they’d also gotten fringe, over the top and in the end too brutal. Each was credited with half a dozen or more unauthorized kills of Enemies of the State and the Agency had pulled them in, offered them citations, and generous severance packages.

Kangas had left the Agency two years ago, and within five days he’d been offered a position with Washington-based Administrative Solutions — Admin — a private contracting firm second only to Xe, formerly Blackwater USA, in revenues, prestige, and the occasional missteps. S. Gordon Remington, an Admin vice president, had known just about everything in Kangas’s CIA file, which had been nearly as impressive as the six-figure salary he’d offered.

The job had been boring most of the time, guarding high-ranking businessmen in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the occasional hit when it was needed, and usually as part of a firefight, which was ridiculously easy to engineer in countries where almost every male between the ages of twelve or thirteen and forty was armed and carrying a serious grudge — usually religion-based.

Mustapha had been recruited last year, and had joined Kangas in Afghanistan where they’d become partners. Their tradecraft was similar, their ambitions were about the same — hurt people and make a lot of money doing it — and they knew how to cover each other’s back.

Van Buren was getting up, as Kangas took out his encrypted cell phone and speed-dialed a number that was answered on the first ring.

“Hello,” Remington answered, his British accent cultured.

“The meeting has taken place.”

“We’re you able to record their conversation?”

“Yes.”

“Is there damage?”

“Yes, sir. Just as you suspected, our subject handed over a disk.”

Remington was silent for several beats, and although Kangas had never had much respect for anyone, especially anyone in authority, he did now have a grudging respect for Admin’s VP. The man knew what had been coming, and he’d been prepared.

“The situation must be contained,” Remington said. “Are you clear on your mission?”

“Both of them?”

“Yes. And they must be sanitized as thoroughly and as expeditiously as possible. This afternoon, no later than this evening.”

“Give us twenty-four hours and we can cut the risk by fifty percent,” Kangas said. Running blindly into any sort of a wet operation was inherently dicey, even more so in this instance because of who Van Buren was; his background was impressive.

“This is top priority,” Remington said. “All other considerations secondary. Are we clear on that as well?”

Van Buren was coming down the stairs.

“Standby,” Kangas said, and he avoided eye contact as the CIA officer passed by and left the restaurant through the hotel lobby to the valet stand.

Kangas got up, and left by the front door, which opened on the street, just as Mustapha pulled up in a dark blue Toyota SUV with tinted windows.

“We’re in pursuit now,” he told Remington. “But with the weapons we’re carrying this won’t look like a simple robbery.”

Remington chuckled, which was rare so far as Kangas knew. “You’ve been out of the country too long to understand what the average bad guy carries.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Call when you’re finished.”

Van Buren was waiting at the curb, and as Kangas broke the connection, pocketed his phone, and got into the Toyota, a valet parker brought a soft green BMW convertible around and got out. Van Buren handed the man some money, got behind the wheel, and took off.

“Don’t lose him,” Kangas said.

Mustapha waited for a cab to pass, then he pulled out and, keeping the cab between them and Van Buren, started his tail. “Is it a go?”

“Yes, but right now this afternoon. Both of them.”

Mustapha gave him a sharp look. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“That’s what the man said. ASAP.”

THREE

Lunchtime traffic west on Constitution was even heavier than normal because of a huge art show on the Mall. Todd had to pay attention to his driving until he passed the National Museum of American History and turned south toward I-395, which would take him across the river to I-95 and the two-and-a-half-hour drive to the Farm. Because of the sunny weather, tourists seemed to be everywhere, most of them without a clue where they were going.

Across the river, the Pentagon off to the right, traffic thinned out enough for him to phone his father-in-law in Florida, but after the fourth ring he got his mother-in-law’s soft West Virginia voice on the answering machine.

“Hello. We can’t take your call now, but after the beep please leave a message and number and we’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.”

“Hi, Mom, it’s Todd. Have Dad give me a call on my cell. I came up to Washington to meet an old friend for lunch and I’m on my way back to the Farm now. It’s quarter to one.”

Ten miles later, through Alexandria, traffic thinned out even more as the highway branched off to I-95. Todd took the disk out of his jacket pocket and looked at both sides, but Givens hadn’t written anything on the disk itself or on the jewel case. Whatever was really going on had no business being in the Post, especially not any sort of a connection to McCann’s death. That was one can of worms that would probably never see the light of day. Some things were much too dark even for the Freedom of Information Act.

In any event, McCann’s death was still a part of the ongoing investigation that his father-in-law had gotten involved with last year. Already plenty of people had died because of it, and before it was over more would probably go down. If anything of what Givens had told him was true, which Todd was having a hard time believing, then shit would truly hit the fan big time.

They had never figured out what McCann had been up to or who had been directing him, and now this. Todd tossed the disk on the passenger seat and concentrated on his driving.

Forty minutes later his cell phone rang. It was his father-in-law.

“Hi, Todd, what’s up?” Kirk McGarvey asked. “Is Liz with you?”

“Nope, she was busy when I left, and I didn’t have time to mention I was coming up to Washington. This has something to do with McCann.”

McGarvey hesitated for a beat, and Todd could see him standing, probably in the kitchen of the Casey Key house on Florida’s Gulf Coast south of Sarasota, looking down at the IntraCoastal Waterway.

“Okay, you have my interest.”

“Does the name Josh Givens ring any bells?”

“Vaguely. He’s a reporter with the Post?”

“An investigative reporter, and not too bad,” Todd said. “He and I went to Maryland together, and were pals for a while. He called this morning and asked me to have lunch, he had something important for me.”

“He mentioned Howard by name?”

“He did. Said Howard had been involved with a lobbyist group called the Friday Club.”

“Robert Foster.”

“The same,” Todd said. “Josh was talking all sorts of shit about a shadow government, and a lot of disconnected stuff that was all over the place. Sounded crazy.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I don’t know. But I’m sure that he believed what he was telling me, and that he was afraid. He gave me a disk, which he said had everything on it.”

McGarvey hesitated for a moment. “Give Otto a call, see what he thinks.” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s director of special operations and the resident computer genius. He was a friend of the family and the nearest thing to a son for McGarvey and an uncle for Todd and Liz.

The Interstate cut through rolling hills, some of them heavily wooded, Fredericksburg behind him to the north and Fort A. P. Hill Military Reservation, where military units were given advanced field training, was off to the east. He and Liz had both spent six weeks there in search-and-evade training with the Green Berets.

“I’ll call him when I get back to the Farm.”

“Call him now,” McGarvey said.

That got Todd’s attention. “Do you think it’s that important?”

“If it involved Howard, then yes, it could be.”

“I’ll call him right away,” Todd said, an oddly disquieted feeling rising in his gut.

He broke the connection with his father-in-law and glanced over his left shoulder as a dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up beside him. The windows were so deeply tinted he couldn’t make out who was inside, and the SUV just hung there.

“Shit,” Todd muttered, his internal alarms ringing all over the place.

The Toyota’s passenger-side window powered down and Todd only had a split second to see that a dark-skinned man was aiming what looked like a small automatic weapon of some kind.

Todd glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his bumper and jammed on the brakes to get him back to the SUV’s rear quarter where a nudge from his left bumper would send the bigger vehicle into a spin. But the other driver anticipated the move and also jammed on his brakes.

Todd yanked the wheel hard to the right sending his car toward the ditch and the woods off the road, when something very hard slammed into his shoulder and he was thrown sideways against the seat-belt restraint, losing control of the car.

He frantically reached for the pistol holstered high on his right hip, but several rounds slammed through the sheet metal of the door like rivets through soft steel, hitting him on his left side, then in his shoulder again and finally his neck, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood, the world beginning to fuzz out as his BMW slammed into a small tree, tilting to the right over a drainage ditch before it came to a complete stop.

All he could think of were Liz and their daughter, how they were going to react to his death.

He tried to fumble for his pistol for what seemed like minutes when the face of the dark man appeared in the driver’s window and it was all Todd could do to look up into the muzzle of what he recognized was a Knight PDW, compact submachine gun, and a billion stars burst inside his head.

Mustapha lowered the weapon, and went around to the passenger side of the BMW, opened the door, and unlatched Van Buren’s seat belt, allowing the body to tumble out of the car. It took him a precious thirty seconds to search the body, taking a wallet and the pistol, but there was no disk.

Kangas had parked on the side of the highway blocking the view of anyone passing, and watching for the Virginia Highway Patrol. Their position here at this moment was precarious.

Givens had given the CIA officer a disk, and Kangas had seen Van Buren put it in his coat pocket.

The front seat was a mess of shattered glass, blood, and bone fragments, and it took a full sixty seconds before Mustapha found the disk up on the dashboard in plain sight, and the cell phone they’d seen Van Buren using wedged between the seats. He pocketed them, and tossed the disk Remington had given them inside. He wore latex gloves so he left no fingerprints.

First making certain that no one approaching on the highway could see what he was doing, he put one round into the back of the CIA officer’s head.

Insurance. That’s how you survived.

FOUR

“Where’d you go, Kirk?” Kathleen McGarvey asked her husband.

It was coming up on eight of a soft, south Florida Gulf Coast spring evening, and they were just finishing their dinner of broiled lamb chops and light salads, with a half bottle of Greek retsina wine on the pool deck of their Casey Key home. McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts and offered her a smile.

“Sorry. Wool gathering, I guess.”

“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” Katy said. She was slender, with short blond hair, a bright oval face, and smiling eyes. “Something sneaking up on us again?”

She’d hated every assignment that had not only taken McGarvey away, sometimes for weeks at a time, but that had put him in mortal danger. On more than one occasion he’d come home on a stretcher, with IV tubes dangling from his arms and an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. But even more than his injuries, she mostly hated the fact that he killed people — bad people, but human beings nevertheless — and hated herself for at least half-understanding the necessity of what he did. America had enemies, and very often he’d been this country’s last line of defense, sometimes its only viable line of defense.

Also troublesome to her was her husband’s almost preternatural awareness that something or someone was lurking just around the corner, coming their way, and he often showed this understanding by becoming moody, withdrawing into his own shell, which he realized he’d done ever since Todd’s call this afternoon.

“I don’t think so, sweetheart,” he told her, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Todd called this afternoon with something. I told him to let Otto take a look.”

“But?”

McGarvey shrugged, something tickling at the back of his head. “I thought I would have heard from one of them by now.”

“It probably wasn’t important,” Katy said, but then she frowned. “Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, for goodness sake, call them.”

They had switched the house phones off, which they often did when they wanted to have dinner undisturbed. “Pour me a little more wine,” McGarvey told her. “Be back in a minute.”

He went in to his study on the other end of the house, switched on the phones, and speed-dialed Otto’s roll-over number, which would reach him wherever in the world he was.

Rencke answered on the first ring, all out of breath, as he usually was when something big was happening or about to happen. “Oh, wow, Mac, I’ve been trying to get you for the past two hours,” he gushed. “I was gonna send someone from the Bureau in Tampa.”

“What’s wrong?” McGarvey felt hollow in his stomach. He glanced out the windows where he could just make out Katy in the reflected blue from the pool lights.

“Are you okay? You had the phones off.”

“We’re fine. What the hell’s going on, Otto?”

“Shit, shit, shit. I don’t know how…” Rencke said. “Is Mrs. M right there?”

“She’s out by the pool,” McGarvey said. A terrible sense of dread wanted to overcome him. “Is it about Todd and the disk Josh Givens gave him this morning?”

“Yeah, the cops gave it to me, and I’m running it on my laptop right now. We’re on our way down to the Farm. Louise is driving. I don’t know, it’s just too much.”

McGarvey had never heard his old friend like this. Never, not even in the worst of circumstances, and there’d been plenty of those over the years. “Tell me,” he said.

“Todd was shot to death sometime after one on I-Ninety-five just south of Fredericksburg.”

All the air left the room, and McGarvey closed his eyes. Bright strobes were popping off in his head, like old-fashioned camera flashbulbs. For just a beat he could see Todd and Liz hunched down on the dock here below the house, their two-year-old daughter Audrey in a bright yellow bikini standing between them. With an absolute clarity he could see the pride on his son-in-law’s face; I done good, he was saying.

He could see Liz the night, early in her marriage, when she’d shown up at their house in Chevy Chase after she and Todd had a terrific fight. She never cried, or never let anyone see that she cried, but tears had been streaming down her pretty cheeks that night. “I love him, Daddy,” she had blubbered. “But I don’t know what to do.”

“What happened, sweetheart?”

The strangest look crossed her face, as if she was trying to think of something to say. But then she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she’d said in a small voice, her tears drying up. “I must have forgot on the way over.”

Then Todd had shown up, anguish in his eyes, near total devastation, and he and Liz had embraced and had left together. McGarvey had never found out what they’d argued about. But he could see them now, see their faces, hear their voices as clearly as if they were standing right here in front of him.

“Has Liz been told yet?” he asked, coming out of himself.

“No. That’s why we’re headed down now. She’s going to need someone next to her when she finds out.”

“Start at the beginning and tell me everything you know,” McGarvey said, desperately pulling himself together, but it was like swimming upstream against an impossible current.

“The Bureau has taken over from the VHP. His body was found beside his car. He’d been shot several times right through the window glass and the sheet metal on the driver’s side door, probably from a car next to his. His wallet was gone, but once the tags were run, they came up with Todd’s name and the CIA security notification number. Blake downstairs called me a couple hours ago, and I had him put a total lid on it. No one is to be told anything.”

“It wasn’t a drive-by shooting or robbery,” McGarvey said.

“The Bureau’s seeing it as a professional hit.”

“Witnesses? I-Ninety-five is a busy highway that time of day.”

“None have come forward so far,” Rencke said. “But maybe later when we go public someone will make the call.”

McGarvey was starting to settle down a little, his experience kicking in. Someone had assassinated his son-in-law for so far an unknown reason or reasons that most likely had something to do with Howard McCann’s connection to Robert Foster and the Friday Club and whatever it was Givens had uncovered. “What’s on the disk?”

“Nothing believable, Mac,” Rencke said. “Honest injun. It’s like the ravings of a maniac, or someone on a bad acid trip. The Friday Club has supposedly come up with a plan to overthrow the government by force, arresting the president and his cabinet and putting them on trial for treason.”

“When?” McGarvey asked, for want of anything else to say. Rencke was right, it was crazy beyond belief, but then so had crashing airliners into tall buildings.

“That part doesn’t matter. The guy leading the army is Howard McCann in hiding somewhere nearby, gathering an elite strike force of disaffected SEALs, Delta Force, and Bureau and Company field officers.”

“McCann is dead.”

“Yeah. Which makes the disk worthless.”

“Somebody must have thought differently,” McGarvey said.

“His cell phone was missing too, and if they can crack the encryption algorithms they’ll have his phone book. Lots of important numbers.”

“My number will come up,” McGarvey said. “Todd called just before it happened.” Christ, he didn’t know how he was going to tell Katy. He didn’t know about his daughter. Hell, he didn’t even know about himself, what he would do once he caught up with Todd’s killers. But he was sure they wouldn’t live to see a court of law let alone the inside of a jail.

“One of our Gulfstreams is on the way down for you. Should be at SRQ within the hour.”

“Get Liz to All Saints. She’ll need someone with her. Maybe Louise.” All Saints was the hospital in Georgetown that the CIA and most of the other intelligence agencies in the area used. Everyone on the staff had secret or better clearances and there’d never been a leak from the place, no matter the circumstances nor how high the patient’s profile might have been. “I assume Todd was taken there.”

“Yeah,” Rencke said. “And you’ll have some muscle.”

“For the time being,” McGarvey replied, a little distantly now that he was ramping up to go back into the field. “Send somebody over to pick up Givens. Give it to the Bureau for now, but I want him brought out to the Campus and secured.” The Campus was the cluster of buildings, above- and belowground, at the Agency’s Langley headquarters.

“Pushing a Washington Post reporter around could get a little dicey, kemo sabe.”

“Do it,” McGarvey said. “We’ll see you at the hospital.”

“Right,” Rencke said and broke the connection.

McGarvey looked out the window but Katy was gone, and when he turned around she was standing in the doorway a stricken look on her features.

“Who’s going to All Saints?” she asked.

“Liz,” McGarvey said and he started toward his wife, but she held up a hand.

“How bad is she?”

“It’s not her.”

Katy’s eyes narrowed. “Not Audie. Is it Todd? Has there been an accident?”

He had dreaded this moment for his entire career, but it was the nature of the business that casualties would occur. It was war, us against them. Only when the star that would be put up in the lobby of the Old Headquarters Building, anonymous, no name, representing a fallen agent you were close to, was the burden next to unbearable.

“Todd was shot to death this afternoon.”

Katy went pale. “Dear God in heaven,” she said softly, and she looked deeply into her husband’s eyes. “Assassinated?”

“Yes.”

“Has Elizabeth been told yet?”

“Otto and Louise are driving down to the Farm right now. He called me from the car. They’ll be there for her, and they’ll chopper up to the hospital. Todd’s body is there.”

“Why?” Katy asked, her voice plaintive, pleading.

“I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out.”

Katy hesitated for just a beat. “I’ll pack if you’ll clear the table,” she said, and she turned and left.

And so it begins, McGarvey thought, rage already building up inside of him.

FIVE

Givens’s town house was in Berwyn Heights, northeast, just within the Beltway, in a pleasant brick and redwood complex, with a pool, clubhouse, and playground for the kids. Thousand Oaks was home to mostly young, upwardly mobile couples, near to a good private prep school, shopping malls, and a couple of decent restaurants. His town house was a three-bedroom — one for him and his wife, one for their only child, Larry, four, and one for an office where he was trying to work on a novel.

The dark blue Toyota SUV backed into a parking spot just at eight, and Kangas doused the headlights and shut off the engine. They would have made the hit earlier, on the road as they had with Van Buren, but their instructions had been to contain the situation. It meant they needed access to the newspaperman’s personal computer, so they’d waited until Givens had left the Post and had driven home.

They watched as he went up the walk and entered his apartment.

It was a matter of timing. It was unlikely that the CIA would have allowed news of the assassination of one of its officers to go public, at least until it was known why the kill had been made. That meant Givens would not know that the man he’d met for lunch was dead, and that he was likely to be next.

But sooner or later the Company, probably through the FBI, would be sending someone over here to have a word with the Post reporter, even though approaching someone in the media in that fashion was considered extremely risky.

“Let’s do it,” Kangas said.

He and Mustapha, dressed in jeans and dark Windbreakers, got out of the SUV, crossed the parking area, careful to stay out of the direct spill of the streetlight, and went directly to Givens’s town house. No one else was around, though traffic on University Boulevard/Highway 193, below, was steady. Nor did it appear that anyone was sitting on one of the balconies, or looking out a window.

At the door, Mustapha pulled on latex gloves, drew his silenced 9mm Austrian-made Steyr GB, and stepped aside as Kangas put on his gloves then rang the doorbell.

A few seconds later Givens answered the intercom. “Yes?”

Kangas held a CIA identification card in a leather wallet directly in front of the peephole. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but Mr. Van Buren sent me. It’s about your meeting this noon, and the disk. He has a question.”

“I told him to phone.”

“Yes, sir. But considering the nature of the information, he thought it might be safer this way.”

“Oh, all right,” Givens said, and a shadow moved away from the peephole. Moments later the deadbolt snapped back and the door started to open.

Kangas pushed hard, bulling his way into the town house, shoving Givens back against the hall closet door, and charging the rest of the way into the apartment.

“What the fuck—” Givens shouted.

Mustapha stepped into the apartment, closed the door behind him, and fired one shot into the middle of Givens’s forehead at point-blank range.

A young, attractive woman in shorts and a T-shirt, her feet bare, was at the kitchen counter when Kangas, a pistol in his hand, appeared in the doorway. She was looking up, surprise and fear in her eyes, her mouth pursed, as he fired one shot, catching her in the bridge of her nose, driving her back against the stove, where she crumpled to the floor.

A small, slightly built boy with tousled brown hair came around the corner, and before he could comprehend what was happening Kangas shot him in the head, killing him instantly and driving his body back out of the kitchen, blood splattering on the wall.

Mustapha came in from the living room and glanced indifferently at the bodies of the woman and boy. “I have his BlackBerry. I’ll take the study,” he said.

Kangas nodded. Mustapha was the computer expert, and the clock was clicking. Time was precious.

Careful not to step in the blood, Kangas went down the corridor to the master bedroom furnished nicely in Danish modern, and quickly searched the closet, where he found an old military .45 autoloader, but nothing in any of the clothing; then he checked the chest of drawers, rifling through the shirts and shorts and a small box with a few pieces of cheap jewelry, the armoire, again checking pockets and finally the two nightstands and the drawers beneath the bed, which contained only extra blankets, pillows, and sheets.

The framed pictures on the walls looked like family photos, and quickly taking them apart revealed nothing hidden. Nor did his search of the master bathroom, or of the child’s messy bedroom at the back of the town house, turn up anything useful.

Mustapha was buttoning up a laptop computer when Kangas came back. He looked up. “Anything?”

“No. You?”

“Everything’s in his computer,” Mustapha said. “Names, dates, places, transcripts of interviews, and lots of photographs.”

The study had been taken apart, books down from the shelves, drawers opened and emptied, framed photographs and certificates taken apart. It looked as if the place had been randomly searched, which was their intention.

“Nothing else?” Kangas asked.

Mustapha shook his head.

Kangas took out a plastic envelope that held a dozen strips of sticky tape each holding a fingerprint or partial print and transferred the prints around the apartment — doorknobs, countertops, and the woman’s purse and Givens’s wallet, which were first emptied of money and credit cards.

The entire operation had taken them less than seven minutes before they cracked the door to make sure that nothing moved in the parking lot, and then calmly walked back to the SUV and drove off, Mustapha behind the wheel this time as Kangas got on the cell phone.

Remington answered on the first ring. “Yes.”

“The problem has been taken care of.”

“Both problems?”

The question was more than rude, putting in doubt his ability and judgment, and Kangas bridled, but he held back a sharp answer. Remington might not have proper manners, he was a Brit after all, but he did know what he was doing, and the pay was good. The problem was Kangas had never much cared for taking orders. And he certainly never liked smug bastards who didn’t show proper respect. It was one of the reasons he’d left the Company, which was about little more than suits giving orders, many of which never made any sense because the bastards giving them either didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, or they’d had their noses so far up someone’s ass they couldn’t come up for air.

“Yes, sir, both problems,” he said after a brief hesitation.

They were back out on University heading toward the Beltway, traffic very light, when a pair of unmarked cars moving very fast passed them and pulled into the driveway of the apartment complex.

FBI, Kangas figured, and he glanced at Mustapha. They had cut it close this time.

“Do you have a delivery?” Remington asked.

“Yes,” Kangas said. “When?”

“Morning. Seven o’clock.”

Kangas wanted to ask why the delay if the operation had been important, but again he held back from the question. “As you wish,” he said.

“Make damn sure you come in clean,” Remington ordered brusquely. “No fuckups.”

The day would come, Kangas promised himself, when Remington would apologize for his incredible rudeness and lack of respect. It would be the last thing he did before he died.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

SIX

It was four a.m. in Washington when the CIA’s executive Gulfstream touched down at Andrews Air Force Base and quickly taxied over to a hangar well away from operations, and then inside, where its engines spooled down.

Katy had taken a light sedative just after they’d left Sarasota, but she hadn’t managed to get much sleep, and now she looked like hell, her hair a mess, her makeup smeared, and her eyes red and puffy. But she didn’t seem to care about her appearance or anything else, and McGarvey was worried about her.

“We’re here, sweetheart,” he said; she looked up at him but didn’t say anything.

A half-dozen Company security officers in dark blue Windbreakers were waiting with a pair of Cadillac Escalade SUVs inside the hangar. One of them was speaking into his lapel mike when the flight attendant opened the hatch, and McGarvey helped Katy to the steps.

“Thank you,” he told the young woman, who’d been solicitous but not intrusive on the flight.

A ground crewman opened the cargo bay hatch and took out the McGarveys’ hanging bag and overnight case, which one of the security officers took and placed in the back of the lead car.

It had been fifteen years ago, maybe twenty, when McGarvey had returned from an assignment that had gone bad in Chile, when Katy had given him her ultimatum: either me or the CIA. It hadn’t mattered that he had assassinated a woman — the wife of a general — who he’d thought was innocent, that he had blood on his hands, that he was battered physically and emotionally; he hadn’t been given the time to explain and ask for help. So he’d walked out and had run to Switzerland, throwing away his marriage and young daughter. Because he had been too proud, and because he’d had nothing to give at that moment.

But now it was his turn. Katy was battered beyond anything he’d ever endured in his life, and she needed him more than he’d ever imagined anyone could need someone.

“Easy now,” he said, taking her arm and helping her down the boarding stairs.

One of the security officers came over, while the others, their heads on swivels, stood in a half-circle between the aircraft and the hangar’s open doors.

“Karl Tomlinson, Mr. Director, we’re here to get you to All Saints.”

“Is my daughter there yet?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, sir, along with Mr. and Mrs. Rencke.”

They crossed to the lead SUV and McGarvey helped Katy step up and into the backseat. She was like a zombie, moving only when he helped her to move.

As soon as they were strapped in, the driver, with Tomlinson riding shotgun, took off and headed at a high rate of speed across the ramp to the main gate, where they were waved through, then directly up to Suitland Parkway and into Washington proper. At this time of the morning traffic was very light, and the driver only slowed for red lights, the chase car right on their tail.

“Anything new as of the last few hours?” McGarvey asked. Katy was staring out the window, apparently with little awareness of what was going on around her, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked the question.

Tomlinson looked over his shoulder, a hard expression on his square, solid face. “It was no drive-by shooting, sir. They were professionals.”

“They?”

“Someone called in, said they saw a man come around from Mr. Van Buren’s BMW and get into the passenger seat of a dark-colored SUV — possibly a Toyota or Nissan — a second man was behind the wheel.” Tomlinson glanced at Katy for a reaction, but she didn’t look up. “No descriptions or tag number, but it was a professional hit. Todd had apparently reached for his pistol, but never managed to draw it.”

Knives were stabbing into McGarvey’s skull; he kept seeing images of Todd and Liz and the baby, and of Todd in action. The kid had been damned good. Steady, reliable, and the hell of it was that he hadn’t needed the job. His parents had been wealthy and he’d inherited a lot of money and a big house. He’d come to work for the CIA out of ordinary patriotism, something that was a lot less rare, even in these times, than the average American realized.

“Did the Bureau pick up Josh Givens, the Post reporter?”

“He and his wife and child were shot to death in their apartment, a few minutes after eight last night,” Tomlinson said. His accent was East Coast, maybe Connecticut or New Hampshire, and crisp. He was a professional in the middle of an assignment he found distasteful. “It was meant to look like a robbery. Money and credit cards missing.”

“Not likely,” McGarvey said, trying to see a reason. The stuff on the disk that Givens had handed over to Todd made absolutely no sense, and yet Todd and Givens had both been assassinated. The only common thread was the disk.

“We’re cooperating with the Bureau. They’ve agreed to keep a lid on it, and Mr. Adkins has agreed.”

Dick Adkins had been the deputy director of the CIA when McGarvey had been the DCI, and now he ran the show. He was a good administrator but not much of a spy.

Another thought suddenly struck McGarvey. “Was there a computer in the apartment?” he asked. “Maybe a laptop?”

“It wasn’t mentioned, sir,” Tomlinson said.

“Find out.”

Tomlinson turned away and said something into his lapel mike. It took a couple of minutes for the reply before he turned back. “No computer.”

“The disk in Todd’s car was not the one Givens handed him in the restaurant,” McGarvey said, at least one part of the assassination of his son-in-law and the reporter clear. “It was a fake. It’s why they had to get the computer.”

“I’ll pass that to the Bureau—”

“Not yet,” McGarvey said, his mind still spinning. If the disk was a fake, it meant the assassins may have been at the restaurant and witnessed the hand over. But it also meant that whoever had directed the hit had to know what Givens had been working on; had to know enough to manufacture the bogus disk so that it could be planted in Todd’s car after he’d been murdered.

Not only did they have the original disk and Givens’s computer that contained whatever it was the reporter had gathered about the Friday Club, but they had Todd’s cell phone from which they would have found out that his last call just before the murder had been to his father-in-law.

It made him the next best target. Exactly what he wanted.

All Saints Hospital was on a quiet side street not far from Georgetown University Hospital, in an undistinguished four-story brownstone with the emergency entrance at the rear. No sirens were ever used, and the brass plaque next to the gate in front read Private.

Security in the main lobby was outwardly low key, one plain-looking man, who happened to be a weapons and martial arts expert, behind a desk. In the facility’s forty-plus years there’d never been any sort of an incident, nevertheless everyone — doctors, nurses, aides, security officers — were on their toes. Always.

The two Cadillacs drove through the electrically operated gate to the back, where the security officers got out first to make sure the parking area and emergency entrance were secured before they allowed McGarvey and his wife to get out of the lead car and hustle them inside. They were met by one of the nurses, a no-nonsense, severe-looking woman.

“Good morning, Mr. Director,” she said. “Would you like something for Mrs. McGarvey before we go up?”

“No,” McGarvey said. “We want to see our daughter.”

“Yes, sir. She’s on the fourth floor in the waiting room.”

McGarvey motioned for his security team to stay behind and he helped Katy back to the elevator and up to the fourth floor and the waiting room just across the corridor.

A stricken Elizabeth, dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers sat on a couch, Rencke’s wife, Louise, holding her shoulders. She looked up when her parents appeared in the doorway, and for a moment it seemed to McGarvey that she didn’t recognize them. But then she got up, slowly, like a tired old woman and came to them.

McGarvey folded her into his arms and held her, silently, for a long time.

“Oh, Daddy,” Elizabeth said softly, her voice husky, all the way from the back of her throat. “He looks so bad.”

“Where’s Audie?”

It took Liz a few moments to answer. “At the Farm, this is no place for her.”

Katy had come out of her trance, and she moved McGarvey aside. “Go see to him,” she said.

“He was assassinated,” Liz said. “Was it something he was working on? Do you know, because he didn’t say anything to me? Otto said he called you. But he never left a note. I was out on a field exercise, but I could have come into town with him. Maybe if I’d been there it could have been different.”

“It was something new, but he didn’t know anything about it until he got up here,” McGarvey said. “He was just coming up to see an old friend for lunch.”

“Who?”

“Josh Givens. They were friends in college.”

The name didn’t mean anything to Liz, and she shook her head. “Is he in the business?”

“He was an investigative reporter with the Post.”

Liz caught the past tense and her eyes hardened. “Did they get him, too?”

“Yeah,” McGarvey said, a sudden great weariness mixing with a deep rage that wanted to consume his sense of reason.

Liz and Katy and Louise were all staring at him. “Get the bastards, Daddy,” Liz said, the corners of her mouth down turned; a very hard look in her eyes.

“I willl,” he said. “In the meantime I want you to get back to the Farm. Audie needs you and you’ll be safe there.”

“I’ll go, too,” Katy said. “Will you be coming along?”

“Right behind you. We’ll set up the debriefing there.”

Otto was just coming down the corridor when McGarvey left the waiting room. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days, his long red hair flying everywhere, his jeans tattered, and his CCCP sweatshirt dirty, sweat stains at the armpits. He’d been crying, his eyes red, his cheeks still wet.

“I’m sorry, Mac. Honest injun, but I can’t go back in there,” he said. “The doc’s waiting for you.”

“Bad?”

Rencke’s eyes were downcast. “Yes.” He looked up. “We tried to stop Liz from seeing him, but couldn’t.”

“Nothing you could have done differently,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to talk to the doctor, but in the meantime I want you to send Liz and Katy back down to the Farm with one of the teams that brought us in from Andrews. Have the other standing by, because soon as I finish here, I’m heading down. I’ll want a debriefing team standing by, and I’m going to need you to back stop me.”

Rencke’s eyes were round. “What’ve you got in mind?”

“The Friday Club, but first the second name on the disk I brought back from Tokyo.”

“The Friday Club has to be a dead end. The disk was way too weird. Over the top.”

“It’s a fake. The real stuff was on Givens’s computer, which was missing from his apartment.”

“That means they knew what Givens was up to,” Rencke had said. “A story in the Post would have done nothing — just another conspiracy theory, background noise — but handing over shit like that to somebody like Todd was too big to ignore.”

“Get Liz and Katy out of here, I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

SEVEN

Todd’s body, covered in a white sheet stained with blood, was lying on a table in one of the operating rooms where he had been taken fifteen hours ago. As soon as it was released an autopsy would be performed downstairs in the morgue, but Elizabeth had insisted no one was to do a thing until her father showed up.

The on-duty chief of surgery, Dr. Alan Franklin, had come upstairs when he’d been informed that the former director had arrived, and when McGarvey walked into the small well-equipped room, he turned away from the window that looked down on the rear courtyard, came over, and shook hands.

“Good evening, sir,” he said. He was an athletically built man in his late fifties, with a hound-dog face and eyes that drooped. He’d worked on McGarvey a couple of times in the past, and he was damn good at what he did — saving the lives of CIA officers who were brought to him in serious condition.

“Was he DOA?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes. But even if we’d been right there, we couldn’t have done a thing for him. He’d been shot several times in the upper body, once in the left leg, and again in the left side of his neck. The bullet severed his carotid artery and he’d probably been very close to bleeding out when he took a bullet to his forehead.” The doctor glanced at Todd’s shrouded body. “But that wasn’t enough. Your son-in-law was dead, lying on his face on the grass beside the car, when they put a final round into the back of his head at point-blank range.”

“Insurance,” McGarvey muttered. His killers were professionals who’d been ordered to make the hit, and before they walked away they had made sure that their mission had been accomplished.

“I’d like his body released for autopsy, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey nodded, thinking about the first time he’d met Todd. Liz had been shy about bringing him to the house until she’d introduced him to her father — in the CIA’s Starbucks on the first floor of the Old Headquarters Building. A less intimate setting, though she’d learned later that for Todd the meeting had been the toughest thing he’d ever done; meeting the legendary CIA agent who’d risen to the directorship on the seventh floor had been way over the top, even for a young man as self-assured and in love as Todd had been.

“Let me see him.”

The doctor went around to the opposite side of the table from McGarvey and pulled the sheet away, revealing Todd’s marble white face. The wounds in the forehead and neck were massive, either one in themselves totally devastating, without a doubt lethal.

“All of him,” McGarvey said softly. He was distressed to the core that Liz had insisted on seeing her husband like this, but he understood her need for closure.

The doctor pulled the sheet all the way off Todd’s body, and even McGarvey, who was hardened to seeing death, was momentarily taken aback. This man was his son-in-law, the father of his grandchild, not just a dedicated, capable CIA officer who’d been shot to death in the line of duty.

McGarvey looked away. “Okay,” he said. “It’ll be a closed-coffin funeral unless his wife says differently.”

“Do you want to see the autopsy report?”

“Not unless you come up with something that doesn’t fit.”

“Yes, sir,” Dr. Franklin said. “Get the bastards who did this, Mr. Director.”

McGarvey looked him in the eye and nodded, then turned and went back down the hall to the empty waiting room. He sat down on the couch, an old western on the television, but the sound had been turned off.

After the debriefing, which would take place at the Farm, Dick Adkins would want him to come up to Langley to personally warn him from getting involved. Since it was possible that this somehow included some powerful men in Washington, McGarvey would have to be careful with what he said. He couldn’t afford to go head-to-head with the Company or with the Bureau, too much was at stake. He needed a free hand. Yet he needed the incident to be out in the open. I’m coming for you, and he wanted the message to be crystal clear.

It was at least a fair bet that whatever Givens had uncovered that had led him to call Todd to a private meeting not only had something to do with the Friday Club, but to the Mexican polonium thing and the Pyongyang assassination, and whatever else was coming next. To this point, according to Otto, neither the CIA nor the Bureau had come up with anything solid in their investigations. It had taken a Washington Post reporter to do that.

The hospital was quiet at this hour, though he thought that he could hear the murmur of voices somewhere down the corridor, but then that faded away, and the only sounds were from some machinery somewhere. The problem was that he had been alone with his innermost thoughts for most of his life, or certainly all of his career with the CIA, and he’d lost much of the normal ability to share his feelings. Sometimes even with himself.

But just now, here at this time and place, he was able to see his hate and rage, and in a way it frightened him more than anything or anyone had ever frightened him.

Seeing his daughter’s face and then seeing Todd’s body had scraped away some last vestige of civilized behavior; erased that bit of humanity in him that sometimes made him hesitate to pull the trigger when there was just a hint of ambiguity. Shoot a suspect in the kneecap to disable him, not in the head to end his life — though that had very often been necessary.

This time ambiguity meant nothing. He was going after whoever was behind this, one by one, no matter who they were, no matter who ordered him to stop, no matter if his actions would be against all reason, all sanity, no matter the consequences to him.

He got up and went back out into the corridor when Todd’s body was rolled out of the operating room and to the elevator. The autopsy would take place in the basement morgue, and afterward his remains would be zippered in a rubber bag and placed in a refrigerated chamber until it was transferred to a mortuary for preparation before the Arlington burial.

McGarvey could see all of that, every step of the way.

The two attendants rolling the gurney didn’t look up until the elevator doors closed, and then they avoided McGarvey’s eyes. This was no normal killed-in-the-line-of-duty, if such a thing was ever normal, this involved the son-in-law of the former DCI, a man who was admired by most and feared by many.

The fourth floor settled down again, leaving McGarvey with his dark thoughts until ten minutes later Rencke came back up, and sat down across from him.

“They’re off,” he said.

“What about Louise?”

“I sent her back to work. I think she’ll be more useful to us on the job. That way we won’t have any trouble getting satellite time if we need it.”

“Did you tell them I would be right behind them?” McGarvey asked.

Rencke nodded. “The Bureau is working on it, and so is the Virginia Highway Patrol, but except for the one call no one’s heard a thing.”

“Todd told me that Givens apparently had proof that Howard was connected with the Friday Club,” McGarvey said. “Which makes Foster and that crowd one of my best bets.”

“Lots of heavy hitters, Mac.”

“They’ll have a weak point. Someone on the edge, someone new, maybe someone’s whipping boy, someone with a grudge, someone in trouble who might be willing to make a trade.”

Rencke nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime do you want me to come down to the Farm with you?”

“No, I want you at the Campus. Before this is over I’m going to need some serious backup.”

Rencke looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and he looked as if he were on the verge of tears, but he nodded. “How do you want to start?”

McGarvey had thought about it. Going up against Foster and the others in the Friday Club would be dicey at best. One word from them and he’d be in trouble. The Bureau would almost certainly try to come after him, which would slow him down. Something he didn’t want to happen. When he went up against them he would be looking for reactions, but not until he was ready. For that he needed more information.

“I’m going to need whatever you can come up with for the second name on Turov’s computer, Roland Sandberger. His deep background, his associates, his connections, money trails, that sort of thing, as well as a list of his current contracts.”

“He’s president of Administrative Solutions, but you knew that. Former Army Delta Force operator who was on the front lines in both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. Got out four years ago as a bird colonel and started his contractor company. He pays his people very well — too well — which means his troops are super-loyal, but which also means he started with bags of money. Source unknown at this point. He gets the best people, he gets the best results, and he gets the best contracts.”

“Find out if he has any connection with the Friday Club. I’m betting he does,” McGarvey said. “Could be one of his sources for contracts.”

“That shouldn’t be too tough to find out,” Rencke said.

“And I want a running tab on his itinerary. I want to know where he is right now, and where he’s going, when he’s going, and who he’s going with or to meet. Tap his phones, hack into his computer, whatever it takes. When I go after him I want to know what I’m up against.”

Rencke nodded uncertainly.

“I especially want to know when he’s out of the country.”

“Shit,” Rencke said softly.

EIGHT

It was just getting light when McGarvey went downstairs and got into the car with Tomlinson and the driver who had brought him in from Andrews. Work traffic had started up across the Key Bridge, then south down the Jefferson Davis Highway where, past the Pentagon, they picked up I-395.

Already it had been a long day and even longer night, and McGarvey laid his head back with his dark thoughts, unable to close his eyes let alone get some sleep. He kept seeing Todd’s body. His death — the manner of his death — had been more than an assassination, it had been a message: Don’t fuck with us; we’re capable of and willing to strike back to protect our interests.

Administrative Solutions certainly had the manpower and the expertise for a hit like that. It wasn’t clear if they had the motive, the name of the contracting firm’s founder and president had been in Turov’s computer, and that was a start.

It was certainly possible that the Friday Club had hired Admin; there had been a link between Howard McCann and the club, and McCann, through Turov, with the company. But it did not mean that the Friday Club had ordered Todd’s assassination and the murders of Givens and his family. The links were there, but they weren’t strong enough to take to the Bureau or for McGarvey to take any action.

Yet.

“Have my wife and daughter reached the Farm?” he asked.

“They’re about five miles out,” Tomlinson said.

“No troubles?”

“No, sir. Would you like to talk to Mrs. McGarvey?”

“That’s not necessary,” McGarvey said. “Just make damn sure that the perimeter is clear and stays that way.”

“Yes, sir,” the Company security officer said, and he began relaying the orders via his comms unit.

The interstate south was in fairly good shape, most traffic was heading into the city, not out, and by the time they reached the large wooded reserve of Quantico that was home to a Marine Corps Unit, a cemetery, and the FBI’s training center, McGarvey had finally been able to shut down enough to close his eyes and drift into a restless sleep.

His cell phone vibrated against his hip, waking him instantly. He sat up and looked out the window not immediately recognizing where they were, except traffic had increased and they were obviously on the outskirts of a fairly big city. Probably Richmond, he thought, which was only a half-hour from the Farm.

He answered on the second ring. “Yes.”

“Mrs. M and Liz got there okay,” Rencke said. “Where are you?”

“Outside Richmond, I think,” McGarvey said, the cobwebs clearing. “What do you have for me?”

“Foster and his Friday Club are big, kemo sabe. I mean really big. The White House has been using the group to float new policy issues. Don Hestern, he’s Frank Shapiro’s assistant, is one of the regulars.” Shapiro was the president’s new adviser on national security affairs.

“Anyone from the Company since McCann?”

“Not that I’ve found out so far, except I’m sure it’s not Dick. I’ve got his Fridays covered since McCann went south. But considering Foster’s reach I wouldn’t be surprised if we had somebody over there.”

“Give it to security, see what they can find out.”

“I don’t think that’s such a hot idea, Mac,” Rencke said. “Look, if Adkins or Whittaker or someone else upstairs gets wind that we’ve started an internal investigation — a rogue investigation — a lot of shit’s going to hit the fan. And it’ll point toward you, something I don’t think you want right now.”

Rencke was correct. “Then you’ll have to look down everyone’s track on your own. But if someone stepped in for McCann, it’ll have to be one of the top people in either Operations or Intelligence.”

“Or someone on Dick’s staff,” Rencke said. “Someone close enough to the DCI’s office to know policy developments.” Rencke was silent for a moment. “And you know what that would mean.”

“That McCann had the cooperation of someone else inside the Company,” McGarvey said. “The point is what the hell do they want?” McGarvey said.

“Foster is pushing the conservative movement. After Bush it’s become an uphill battle. So these guys are serious.”

“Yeah, but to what end?” Mac said. “What the hell are they after that’s so important they’d gun down a CIA officer in broad daylight on a major highway? And what about Mexico City and the polonium, and the Pyongyang assassination? Because if there’s a pattern in there I don’t see it.”

“Neither do I,” Rencke said heavily. “Neither does anyone else. But killing Todd for whatever was on the real disk Givens gave him is connected.”

“Who else is involved with Foster?”

“Everyone, Mac, honest injun. Their fingers are in just about every pie — Treasury, Justice, DoD, Interior, Homeland Security, you name it. Not only that, but some of those guys have been accused of illegal shit, like fund-raising, influence peddling, even tampering with elections all the way down to the county and local levels in some of the key states.”

“Garden variety Beltway white-collar crooks,” McGarvey said, even more bothered than before Rencke had called. “But not terrorists. Not assassins. Which leaves us with Administrative Solutions and Roland Sandberger. Where is he right now?”

“Baghdad, I think. Admin has a big contract bid coming up, personal security for our embassy people and other civilians, Halliburton and the like, and I suspect he’d want to be on the ground over there.”

“Find out,” McGarvey said, unable to keep a hard edge from his voice. “Who’s running the offices stateside?”

“His VP and chief of operations. A Brit by the name of S. Gordon Remington. I’ve dug out a few basic facts on him, and so far he comes up clean. I’ll keep digging, but something curious is going on with everyone in the company — contractors in the field as well as the front-office people. I’ve had no problem getting names and addresses, dates and places of birth, marriages, kids, that kind of stuff. Even social security and passport numbers, but if I had to write a résumé for Sandberger or Remington I’d draw a blank. Both of them served in the military — Sandberger in our Delta Forces; Remington in the British SAS — but I can’t come up with their service records.”

“Encrypted?”

“No, just blank,” Rencke said. “I mean, SAS has a record that Remington served for fourteen years, and was honorably discharged as a lieutenant colonel two years ago, but there’s nothing on where he served, or even what he did for them. And it’s the same with Sandberger. Someone erased their pasts.”

“Convenient,” McGarvey said. “But you’re talking about computer records, right?”

“Right.”

“Find somebody they served with and see if they can tell us anything.”

“That’s my next step. And I’m also looking a little closer at Admin’s personnel. There has to be somebody who’s got a grudge about something. A pissed-off contractor who quit or got fired, who might be willing to talk.”

“How’re you going to find them?”

“Tax records. One year’s return shows an income from Administrative Solutions, and the next year it doesn’t. Easy.”

“Let me know if you come up with something,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime, have there been any rumbles from the seventh floor?”

“Not a word,” Rencke said. “I think they’re waiting to see how it goes with the debriefers, and what you’ll do next.”

“Who are they sending?”

“Dan Green and Pete Boylan.”

McGarvey knew them both. “Good people,” he said.

“They’ll be fair.”

NINE

Rock Creek Park cut a broad diagonal across the northwestern section of Washington, separating Georgetown from the rest of the capital city. Joggers, hikers, Rollerbladers, and bicyclers were almost always present, lending the area an anonymity. It was Washington’s Central Park, with trails, a golf course, an amphitheater, a nature center, and picnic areas with tables and grills dotted here and there, a lot of them along Beach Drive, which more or less followed the winding course of the creek until it emptied into the Potomac.

The dark blue Toyota SUV pulled off to the side of the road just after it crossed to the east bank of the creek above the golf course and Kangas cut the engine. It was seven and still fairly early, but the park was unusually empty, though two young women in jogging outfits passed by; a few moments later, a deep blue Bentley Arnage pulled up and parked a few yards away.

“We play it straight. Money’s still good,” Kangas said to Mustapha. “Agreed?”

“For now,” Mustapha conceded, but he was of the same temperament as Kangas. Neither man liked taking orders, especially orders they thought were stupid, which was one of the many reasons both men were single. Women were for screwing not for living with. And while they both had a great deal of respect for Remington, they also agreed that something was going on with Admin that did not bode well. The center was beginning to fall apart.

The two men got out of the SUV, Kangas carrying a small canvas bag with Givens’s laptop and BlackBerry from the apartment, and the disk and cell phone Mustapha had taken from Van Buren’s car, plus the recording of the conversation in the George restaurant, and they walked over to the Bentley and got in the backseat.

S. Gordon Remington, solidly built, rugged shoulders, a refined but bulldog face with thick bushy eyebrows and a Sandhurst drill-sergeant mustache, sat in the far corner of the car, up against the driver’s side rear door, an unreadable expression in his slate gray eyes. The smoked glass partition over the rear of the front seat was closed and nothing could be seen of the driver/bodyguard.

“Good morning, sir,” Kangas said, laying the things on the floor between them.

Mustapha closed the door. “Sir,” he said.

“Tell me,” Remington said without preamble.

“The situation has been sanitized but at some risk,” Kangas began. “Van Buren is dead and the disk was replaced with the one you supplied us. We took it and his cell phone from the BMW.”

Remington said nothing, and Kangas held his temper in check. Push came to shove they would go over to Executive Services no matter what confidentiality agreement they’d signed. The money might not be as good, but word in the industry was that Tony Hawkins ran a tight ship and protected his people. Of course they would first have to do a little cleanup work on their background jackets, but that wouldn’t be impossible.

“The disk wasn’t a problem, sir,” Mustapha said. “But Van Buren’s cell phone might be. He made a call just before our hit. To Casey Key, Florida. To Kirk McGarvey, his father-in-law.”

“Was there a record device on the phone?” Remington asked, a flicker of interest in his eyes, his voice soft, refined, upper-class British.

“No, sir,” Mustapha said. “There is no way we can know the substance of their conversation, but considering Mr. McGarvey’s background it’s a safe bet they discussed the meeting with Givens and the fact he’d been given a disk.”

“Which by now the CIA undoubtedly has, and has read, and pronounced utter nonsense. Exactly as planned.” Remington looked at them. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes, sir,” Kangas said. “Mr. McGarvey and his freak friend in the Company are likely to suspect the disk is a fake.”

“You’re referring to Otto Rencke, the Company’s resident odd-duck genius.”

“They have a formidable history together.”

“Look, Mr. Remington, if McGarvey gets involved we could be in some deep shit,” Mustapha said, but Kangas held him off.

“Won’t be easy, but it’s nothing we can’t handle, sir. It’ll just take time and finesse and maybe some force.”

Remington looked out the window at the creek for several moments, and when he turned back he smiled. “For the moment Mr. McGarvey is my problem, and no concern of yours. Tell me about Mr. Givens and his family.”

“They’ve been eliminated,” Kangas said. “We took his laptop and BlackBerry and left behind the trace evidence you suggested. There’ll be no repercussions except for the connection between Givens and Van Buren, which McGarvey will almost certainly look into.”

“As I said, Mr. McGarvey is not your problem, for the moment,” Remington repeated. “In fact, I’d hoped that Mr. Van Buren would get his father-in-law involved. It makes the next step that much easier.”

“Sir?” Kangas asked. He was sure that despite Remington’s high-profile American wife, the man had to be a faggot. All the signs were there; the soft, dreamy speech patterns, his dress, his manners.

“Mr. McGarvey will be taken care of, trust me, gentlemen. You’ve done a fine job, and you will be suitably rewarded. But stay close, there’ll most likely be more to do.”

“We’d rather be back in the field,” Kangas said. He was uncomfortable with these kinds of assignments. The ethics and especially the freedom of the battlefield, where skill and tactics counted more than finesse, more than screwing around with civilian targets, were more to his liking.

Remington pursed his lips. “Are we clear on this, gentlemen?” he asked, his voice gentle.

“Yes, sir,” Kangas said. Bastard.

“Yes, sir,” Mustapha agreed.

When they had driven off in their SUV, Remington powered down the divider. “Let’s go to the office, Sarge.”

“Full day, sir?” Robert Randall replied, his accent Cockney. He’d been a top sergeant at Sandhurst and in fact had been one of Remington’s chief instructors in the old days with the SAS. They had their own history, and Remington had a great deal of respect for the sergeant.

“Nothing more than the usual,” Remington said, glancing down at the laptop and other things Kangas and Mustapha had collected. They were becoming a problem, just as Roland had predicted they would.

“Think of them as a disposable tool,” Sandberger had told Remington. “Use them once or twice and then dispose of them.” He had smiled faintly, and now, sitting in the back of his car, Remington had remembered that conversation in full detail.

“They could give us considerable trouble.”

“Of course they could, and will,” Sandbergber had agreed. “So we put them where we wouldn’t put anyone else. In the shitholes where the air is bad and the odds are stacked against them. If they succeed, all well and good, we’ll give them a bonus. If they fail…” Sandberger had shrugged indifferently. “They’re history.”

Remington had seen the logic, and just now they were the perfect pair for not only what had already transpired, but for what would probably develop over the coming days.

The serious problem at hand, the one Roland had assigned to him, because in his words S. Gordon had the finesse to pull it off, was the issue with the Friday Club and Admin’s contract with Foster, vis-à-vis Kirk McGarvey.

And the ultimate solution was mostly Sandberger’s, but partly Remington’s, who understood true British virtue, that truth was far less important than perception, something they’d perfected in their colonial days.

Certainly not Foster himself, but Admin would suggest that certain members of the Friday Club begin a quiet campaign to accuse Kirk McGarvey of treason. The charge had been made in the past but had never managed to stick for reasons unknown, except that the man had the reputation of being physically dangerous. But that was exactly the quality in a man that Admin most understood, and admired, and that the firm knew how to manipulate.

President Langdon had been elected on a platform of trust — the revitalization of American values — and chief among his goals was the transformation of U.S. intelligence gathering methods. Places like Guantánamo and the old Abu Ghraib — now Baghdad Central Prison — were to be dismantled, and dinosaurs like McGarvey were to be finally retired for the good of the nation. Torture and interrogation under drugs were to be eliminated, and terrorists and religious fanatics were to be given the civilian rights of private citizens under the aegis of a recognized national governments.

So much bullshit, Remington thought. In his estimation only a complete idiot would stick to methods of honor when his enemy was sending airliners into buildings or children into the streets with explosives strapped to their frail bodies. Washington did not have the stomach to fight the real war; it’s why companies such as Administrative Solutions were hired to do the tough bits, the morally ambiguous actions. And it was for that very reason that the Friday Club was not only necessary but owed its existence.

Kirk McGarvey had been marginally useful to the nation for a portion of his career, but he could no longer be trusted. He was a madman who had to be eliminated or at the very least be kept behind bars for the remainder of his life.

The death of his son-in-law had unhinged him. Made him mentally unstable. Made him extremely dangerous.

TEN

McGarvey was housed in the visiting VIP wing of the BOQ across the yard from the two-story brick-fronted headquarters building. It was assumed that his debriefing would run through the afternoon, perhaps longer, and he would stay at the Farm overnight at the very least to keep him out of harm’s way until the situation could be stabilized. No one knew what might be coming next.

Tomlinson and Bob Dingle, the other security officer who’d driven down here with him from Washington, had been assigned as his bodyguards. They waited at the Charge of Quarters station in the front hall while Mac splashed some water on his face, and joined them. It was a few minutes before noon.

“They’re waiting for us, Mr. Director,” Tomlinson said. He was cool; everyone had a great deal of respect for McGarvey, but the Company was under siege. A CIA officer had been gunned down in broad daylight and his father-in-law knew something about it.

“How about my wife and daughter?” McGarvey asked.

“Mrs. McGarvey was given a sedative, and she’s resting now in the infirmary. Mrs. Van Buren is in the conference room. She won’t start without you.”

“I see,” McGarvey said, his heart torn between wanting to go to Katy to make sure she was okay, and being with Liz to get the debriefing over with as soon as possible, and with as little additional emotional damage to his daughter as was possible under the circumstances.

The Farm was in lockdown for the remainder of the day and all of tomorrow until a new sitrep was prepared; no one was in the Yard when McGarvey and his bodyguards walked across past the center circle, the flag at half-staff, over to headquarters and upstairs to the camp commandant’s briefing room on the third floor.

Double-paned windows, with electronic white noise continuously transmitted in the gap between the glass panels, looked down the hill through the woods toward the York River, the firing range, and the starting block of the confidence course, deserted now.

Elizabeth sat hunched in a chair on one side of the conference table that had places for fourteen people, her head down, her hands clasped between her knees. She was still dressed in the same jeans and plain sweatshirt she’d worn to the hospital and the mop of short blond hair on her head was a mess.

The debriefers, Dan Green, a little person shorter than four-six, with a broad head, hawklike nose, wide, soft brown understanding eyes, and oddly shaped hands and distorted fingers sat across from her, next to his partner Pete Boylan, who was a vivacious woman in her early thirties, short dark hair, vividly blue eyes, and a voluptuous figure that could have landed her a place in Hollywood. Everyone back at Langley was afraid to approach her; the men because she was beautiful and they figured they wouldn’t have a chance, the women because they felt they would appear frumpy next to her, and the clients whom she debriefed because they instinctively felt she would know when they were lying. But she had a reputation of being friendly not aloof, and kind not harsh. She and her partner were people who understood things, and were sympathetic.

“Mr. Director,” she said, looking up when McGarvey came into the room.

Green simply smiled sadly, an expression of near absolute devastation on his face. Their method was simple: Pete was the interrogator and Dan was, in the end, the priest to whom you confessed.

Liz looked up at her father and managed a weak smile. She’d finished crying, and now she seemed determined, the beginning of anger and raw hate starting to show up in the set of her mouth and eyes.

McGarvey sat down next to her. “I don’t think my daughter knows anything that might be of use at this point.”

“Yes, sir,” Pete agreed. “But she asked if she could remain.”

“I want to know what’s going on,” Liz said. “No one’s told me why he went to Washington, except to see a friend who you told me had been killed. But why?”

“We don’t know yet, sweetheart,” McGarvey said.

“Have you had a chance to take a look at the material on the disk that was found in Mr. Van Buren’s car?” Pete asked.

“His name was Todd,” Liz said sharply. “Let’s just start there, okay?”

Pete nodded, her eyes not leaving McGarvey’s.

“I’ve not seen it, but Otto Rencke filled me in.”

“What do you think?”

“Nonsense, of course.”

“Of course,” Pete said. “Not worth killing a CIA officer for. But your son-in-law, Todd, telephoned you from his car apparently less than a minute before the incident. What did he say to you?”

“That he had a meeting with Josh Givens in Washington, a friend of his from college, about some sort of conspiracy involving the Friday Club.”

“Did he say how he felt about the information he’d been given?”

“He thought it was unlikely, but he told me that Givens apparently believed it.”

“What was your advice to him?” Pete asked.

“I told him to discuss the situation with Mr. Rencke.”

“Was there any urgency in your instruction, Mr. Director,” Dan Green asked, gently, as if he was hesitant to interrupt. “I mean to say, was Todd to return to the Farm and, say, mail the disk to Langley, or perhaps send it by courier, or perhaps encrypted e-mail?”

“I told him to call Otto immediately.”

“Why was that, Mr. Director? Why the urgency?”

McGarvey had thought about that very thing after he’d hung up from Todd’s phone call. “I thought that Mr. Givens was a respected member of the press, with a good reputation, and I didn’t suspect that he would waste his time chasing after nonsense, nor would he have called on a friendship with someone inside the CIA with Todd’s…”

“Connections?” Pete asked.

“Yes, with my son-in-law’s connections unless he thought it was important. Todd said that Givens was deeply frightened.”

“By the Friday Club?”

“Yes.”

“But the disk was mostly nonsense, something a man of Mr. Givens’s experience would have understood,” Pete said. “How do you see that?”

McGarvey glanced at his daughter, who was hanging on his every word. The expression of feral anger in her eyes was something new, and disturbing to McGarvey. He’d seen the look before in the eyes of field officers who’d been caught out and were in a fight for their lives — kill or be killed — but such an emotion in his daughter’s eyes wasn’t right, and there was nothing he could say here and now to help her.

“The disk found in his car was a fake. His killers took the real one.”

Green nodded thoughtfully. “That would have to mean whoever was behind this had been closely monitoring Mr. Givens’s activities for a period of time long enough to suspect what might be on the disk he passed to your son… to Todd.”

Green exchanged a sympathetic glance with his partner, who pursed her lips. It was obvious that they were being cautious, perhaps overly so, for reasons McGarvey could not know. But he suspected that some instructions had been passed from Dick Adkins on the seventh floor. Whatever the hell you do, don’t provoke the son of a bitch.

“I’d think it would have to be more than one man; an organization large enough to conduct a decent surveillance operation,” McGarvey suggested.

“A government organization?” Pete asked pointedly. She was being leading, and making it obvious. Left hanging in the air: the CIA?

“I don’t think so.”

“Or, don’t hope so?”

“That, too,” McGarvey said, not willing to be drawn in, and yet wanting to help because he couldn’t cover everything even with Otto’s help. He wanted the Company to follow some leads, just not the same ones he was going to chase.

“You’re aware, of course, Mr. Director, that Mr. Givens, his wife, and small son were murdered last night,” Green said, his voice soft, sympathetic. “But you might not be aware that several sets of fingerprints were found linking two known felons who’ve done time for breaking and entering, strong-arm, drug trafficking and use, activities of that nature.”

“Found on Mrs. Givens’s purse, Mr. Givens’s wallet, perhaps places around their apartment where money or something worth money might have been hidden?”

Green conceded with a gesture.

“The place was searched.”

“Yes,” Green said, leading McGarvey down the path he’d chosen, leading McGarvey to make the conclusions.

“Trashed?”

“No, the apartment wasn’t trashed in particular.”

“Professionals leaving behind fingerprint evidence, but probably no DNA traces.”

Pete glanced at her partner as if to say: I told you so. “The Bureau did find traces of talcum powder in a few spots,” she said.

“Rubber gloves. Is that how you see it?”

“It’s likely.”

“Nothing useful was found in Todd’s car.”

“No,” Pete said, and this time she glanced at Elizabeth who’d closely followed the exchange.

“I know about the bullet to the back of his head after he was already dead,” Liz said. “So we’re all agreed these were professional hits. By whom and for what purpose?” But before she waited for an answer from anyone, she added: “By what Agency?”

“We don’t know that, sweetheart,” McGarvey said.

“But you do, Daddy,” she shot back. “You goddamned well have a good idea. Connected with Mexico City and Pyongyang? Is that it?”

She had caught all of them flat-footed, especially McGarvey. Officially Liz hadn’t been in the need-to-know loop for either operation. But her father had not only been the DCI, he had been involved in both, and the closest friend of the family was Otto Rencke, the Company’s director of special operations. If she wanted to she could learn just about anything she wanted to learn.

“Would you care to explain, Mr. Director?” Pete asked.

“You’ll have to get that from Mr. Adkins.”

Pete nodded. “Will you be staying here this evening?” she asked. “I mean to say that we will have a few more questions, and in any event since Todd’s telephone was taken, we have to assume that his killers know he spoke to you last, presumably about his meeting with Mr. Givens and the disk. Makes you a prime target.”

“I’ll stay until morning.”

“And then what, sir?” Green asked, his eyes drooping as if he just heard the saddest thing in his life. “Will you give us a heads up, because frankly we’re at a loss as to what is happening, or as Mrs. Van Buren rightly demands: why and by whom and for what end purpose?”

“Of course,” McGarvey said, and everyone, including the distraught Elizabeth, knew he was lying.

ELEVEN

Remington’s Empire-style house with white Romanesque columns was on Whitehaven Street between the Danish and Italian embassies. Its furnishings were straight out of an Architectural Digest article on how the British gentry lived. The money for almost everything, including the Bentley, came from his wife, Colleen, of the New York Moons, whose fortune though slightly smaller than Donald Trump’s was of longer duration; she was the great-granddaughter of one of the turn-of-the-century robber barons.

She’d married her husband because of his British title — his father had been the ninth Earl of Paxton — and because of his accent, which she considered pure class. And he had married her because of her money; his father had squandered on gambling what little money the family had left, losing the country mansion finally to back taxes when Gordon was ten. He’d been sent to an uncle in London and had been forced to work his way through Oxford, mostly by a series of illegal but brilliant scams, including a numbers racket, the details of which he’d learned from watching old American gangster movies. If anything, he’d always been a quick study.

It was shortly before five in the afternoon when he emerged from his bedroom suite in his brocaded dressing gown to find his wife heading out the door. She came back and pecked him on the cheek.

“Don’t wait cocktails for me, I’ll be in town.”

“Kennedy Center?” he asked indifferently. Because of her family she was on several boards, including the Kennedy Center Foundation, which was the money-raising arm of the center. Tall, for a woman, slender with a narrow face but wide, chocolate eyes like Audrey Hepburn’s, she had conquered the Washington social scene within the year after she and Roland had married and moved down from New York.

She nodded with just as much indifference. “Don’t forget we’re at Senator Worley’s reception at eight and afterward we need to pop in at the Chinese embassy, their new ambassador has arrived.”

Her unspoken message was for Gordon to behave himself and stay at least reasonably sober. At fifty he was already beginning to develop one of the vices that had led to his father’s downfall; drinking every day, starting usually around noon, sometimes earlier, but normally not to such an extent that he was falling down drunk. Not yet anyway.

“Sure,” he said. “See you in a couple of hours.”

She nodded then left.

Remington stood in the vestibule for a long moment, alone as in reality he’d always been since his father’s death, listening to nothing. The cook and housekeeper did not live in the house and were off for the evening and he had two hours alone now to invent some sort of strategy for the next stage of the damage control, the tone of which would depend on what was in Givens’s computer.

He headed back to his study, hesitating for just a moment at the wet bar in the alcove between the kitchen and living room. Today, or at least this afternoon until he talked to Roland, he needed his wits about him. All his wits.

The primary parts of the problem — Josh Givens and Todd Van Buren — had been taken care of in a totally satisfactory manner, which had given him some much needed time. Today at the office his day had been consumed by the Baghdad contracts, which Roland was on site to finalize, so he’d had no chance until this moment to look at the things Kangas and Mustapha had brought him.

Sitting down at the antique Rosewood desk that his mother had liberated from the estate and from whom he’d liberated it after she’d been placed in a public dole nursing home outside London, he unlocked a bottom file drawer and took out the Washington Post reporter’s laptop and BlackBerry, plus the CIA officer’s cell phone and the disk Givens had handed over at the hotel, as well as the digital recording of the conversation between the two men.

He began with the recorded conversation at the hotel, sitting back and listening to it several times to make sure he missed nothing, especially not the reactions of the young CIA officer.

If nothing else Administrative Solutions under Sandberger had the well-deserved reputation for thoroughness. No messy shoot-outs in which innocent bystanders were gunned down. No trips to the Hill to answer intrusive questions by some congressional subcommittee. No tax audits by the IRS. No complaints from any foreign government. And damned few disaffected employees walking out the door threatening to tell all. In fact, Admin had remained beneath the radar of the media. Until now.

He’d argued against taking on Foster’s Friday Club as a client, but Roland had been adamant to do just that, arguing that the club’s powerful members and connections would lead to a lot of lucrative contracts.

“We can’t lose,” he’d promised.

Except that the media was all over the club and Admin was starting to come into the reflected glare. Something they didn’t want or need. Look what all the media attention had done for Ron Hachette and his company Task Force One. Some of his people had been brought under indictment for murdering supposedly innocent civilians in Baghdad. And Hachette himself was still under intense security by Justice.

What Givens had told Van Buren at the restaurant was as bad as they thought it would be, based on the information they figured the reporter had managed to gather over the past several months.

But Remington felt the first sense of buoyancy listening to the young CIA officer’s reaction. Van Buren had been, at the very least, skeptical, as he had every right to be. What Givens had told him was nothing short of fanciful — except of course for the fact that everything he’d said, plus much, much more, was true. He’d not yet stumbled upon the most important aspects of the Friday Club’s activities, especially not the reasons for what had been done and what was being done, nor the ultimate goals.

Science fiction, had been Remington’s initial reaction when Sandberger had brought him into the Friday Club’s fold. And even at that Remington suspected that he hadn’t been told the half of it.

Setting the recorder aside, he fiddled with the reporter’s BlackBerry, but after a few minutes finding only a long list of telephone numbers with nothing more than cryptic notations after each, along with several dozen Web sites, which he didn’t want to bother looking up at this point, he moved on to the laptop.

It was a high-end Toshiba, slim, lightweight, and wide open. After booting up, then hitting the file manager, Remington’s mouth dropped open. He was inside with no encryption program, not even a simple password to block access, which told him that Givens was either a man highly confident in the power he wielded as a newspaper reporter, or incredibly naïve, or terribly stupid, or all three.

Out of more than three hundred documents, fully one third of them had the notation “FC” in front of them: FC: Foster; FC: Weitman; FC: DoD; FC: Pentagon; FC: Homeland Security; FC: Atlanta — which Remington realized were files that involved the Friday Club and its members and associations.

Opening the FC: McCann file, he was struck dumb after the first page or so and he sat back in his chair to catch his breath. Givens had somehow stumbled onto payments made to the now deceased CIA deputy director of operations by the club to a Cayman Islands account from something called Littoral Associates, Ltd., which had been suggested by Sandberger two years ago.

The FC: Pentagon file contained similar lists of payments to several important generals in various accounts, mostly in Switzerland.

The FC: Atlanta file contained a detailed account of a highly complex and still ongoing program of gerrymandering that to this point had resulted in swinging seven of Georgia’s districts from solid Democrat to Republican. The manipulations had not helped in the last presidential election, but there was little doubt in Remington’s mind that given time the political climate in the state would change. It was about the long term, something Remington and Sandberger had not discussed in any detail. Admin’s job, vis-à-vis the Friday Club, was to provide security. Keep the media at bay. Keep the walls unbreached.

Keep a lid on investigators like Givens and his friend Van Buren.

But this now, this information in the reporter’s computer went beyond the pale. Givens had gotten far too close.

Remington telephoned Sandberger’s sat phone, which was answered on the second ring.

“Yes.”

“It’s Gordon, we need to talk.”

“Trouble?” Sandberger asked without hesitation.

“It has the potential.”

“I’ll be at the Steigenberger, first thing in the morning.”

“See you then,” Remington said, and he phoned his night office number to arrange for his travel to Frankfurt in such a way that he would not miss Senator Worley’s reception or the do at the Chinese embassy.

TWELVE

It was ten in the evening when McGarvey’s cell phone vibrated silently in his pocket. Katy had been transferred to one of the rooms in the visiting VIP building and he’d been sitting next to her bed for the past three hours watching her troubled sleep. He wanted to reach out to her with more than just a touch; he wanted to let her inside his soul so that she could see exactly who he was. No artifice, no hiding of any truth no matter how ugly, just his real self with all the complexities and contradictions of a man who had lived the life he had.

He went out into the corridor and answered the call, the ID was blank but he knew that it was Otto. “What do you have for me?”

“How’re Mrs. M and Elizabeth?”

“Both sleeping.”

“How about you?” Otto asked, an edginess to his voice. He was worried, just as everyone was, which way McGarvey was going to jump. Because Mac was going to jump and everybody knew it.

“Impatient,” McGarvey said. He was being short with his friend, but he couldn’t wait around down here much longer. He was on the verge of exploding, and yet he knew that he had to hang on; when the shit started to happen it would have to be done right. He wasn’t going to lose his life because he had blinders on and was rushing things.

“Sandberger’s in Baghdad, but his pilot filed a flight plan for Frankfurt. Apparently it’s a layover, because no flight plan has been filed beyond that.”

“Any idea where he’ll be staying? Or for how long?”

“He’s been to Frankfurt four times in the past two years. Twice he’s disappeared into the city, apparently staying someplace other than a hotel, and the other two times he’s stayed at the Steigenberger Airport Hotel, each time for one night only.”

“Bodyguards?”

“He almost always travels with muscle, and over the past eighteen months or so it’s been the same two. Carl Alphonse, who was a New York City SWAT team commander until he retired to go to work for Admin, and Brody Hanson, who was kicked out of Delta Forces for reason or reasons unknown, except that he was discharged an E-7 under other than honorable conditions. Both men had the highest grades for marksmanship, hand-to-hand, infiltration, and exfiltration — about what you’d expect from guys like these.”

“Any idea why he’s flying out to Germany all of a sudden?” McGarvey asked. “Meeting someone?”

“My guess would be Remington, but I’m not coming up with any air reservations yet,” Otto said.

“How about flight plans?”

“Admin has only the one Gulfstream. So if it’s Remington he’ll be traveling commercial. Maybe under an assumed name. Anyway my babies are chewing on it.” Rencke’s babies were his computers and some of the most sophisticated programs on the planet.

Now that it was beginning, now that he was preparing to go back into the field, he began to calm down; his nerves had been jumping all over the place since he’d gotten word of Todd’s assassination, but now they were steadying out. He held out his right hand, palm down, his fingers spread, and he was rock solid.

“I need to get over there by morning, at least before noon. Noncommercial. A clean diplomatic passport, no questions asked by anyone on the seventh floor, at least not until I’m finished. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

“To do what, Mac?” Otto asked. “Lean on Sandberger? The guy’s a tough son of a bitch. And if the German federales catch you carrying — or worse, if you shoot someone — it’ll get back to Adkins at the speed of light.”

“And he’d have to sit up and take notice,” McGarvey said. “We’re talking about the murder of my son-in-law. The son-in-law of a former CIA director. That carries some weight.”

“Yes, it does,” Rencke said. “From both sides of the fence. Your shooting days are supposed to be over. You’re too personally involved this time. It’s expected that you’ll back off and let the Bureau handle it.”

“I’ve always been personally involved,” McGarvey said, bitterly. “All my life.” And he knew that he should be asking himself if it was worth it, but at this moment the question was moot.

Rencke was silent for a long time, and when he came back he sounded sad, resigned, as if he knew that no matter what McGarvey did, no matter what action his old friend took, he would be there for him, as he had been for years now. Mac was family, and except for his wife, Louise, his only family.

“A Gulfstream and crew will be ready at Andrews within the hour. Your passport will be aboard. What else do you need?”

“Give me one hour on the ground in Frankfurt, then call Dave Whittaker and tell him I might need some backup.” Whittaker, who was a stand-up guy, was the deputy director of operations when Mac was the DCI. Now, under Adkins, he’d become the deputy director of the agency. His was a steady if stern hand, and although he’d never completely approved of McGarvey’s tradecraft, he’d always supported his boss one hundred ten percent.

“Shit, Mac,” Rencke said after a long moment. “You’re not thinking straight. Honest injun.”

“You’re probably right,” McGarvey agreed. “But I didn’t create the situation.” The hard edge was back in his voice, and in his heart.

He shook his head, and the only thing he could think of were the bastards, the dirty rotten bastards. And he could see the son of a bitch putting the insurance round into the back of Todd’s head.

“I didn’t start it,” he said bleakly.

“I’ll be here for you.”

“Thank you,” McGarvey said and he broke the connection. And for a long time he stood in the semidark corridor, the only light coming from the exit sign at the door to the stairs, and thought frankly about his life, about his contributions to the safety of the United States. Thinking about his career that way seemed almost filled with hubris, and yet he was proud of what he had done — or most of what he had done. And now he was back at it, only this time his motives were a whole hell of a lot more personal.

Katy was still sleeping when he went back into the room, took a small leather satchel, about the size of a dopp kit, out of their luggage, and went across the hall to one of the empty rooms where he switched on a nightstand light after he’d closed the door.

She had watched him open the floor safe in their bedroom back in Florida as she was packing and pull out a 9mm Wilson semiautomatic pistol with custom grips and sight, three spare magazines of ammunition, and a suppressor.

He holstered the pistol at the small of his back and, turning out the light, went back across the hall and returned the kit to their luggage.

For a long time he stood near the bed, watching his wife’s sleeping face. She didn’t look exactly at peace, but she was finally getting some rest. He hoped she wasn’t dreaming.

Leaning down he kissed her lightly on the cheek, took his small overnight bag from the closet, and went downstairs.

Liz was waiting in the darkened dayroom, sitting in the corner smoking a cigarette, something she hadn’t done for a long time.

McGarvey held up across the room from her. “What are you doing, sweetheart?” he asked.

“Waiting for you,” she said.

“What about Pete and Dan Green?”

“I sent them back to Langley. They were done here and they knew it. So I didn’t get any argument.” Liz stubbed out her cigarette. “Anyway, you don’t have to keep watching over your shoulder for them. They won’t be there. They understand the score, and in fact Pete said to wish you good luck.”

McGarvey put down his bag by the door and went across to her. “I’m so sorry. I wish—”

Liz looked up at him with so much anguish and such total devastation written all over her face that she took his breath away. “When we raised our right hands and took the oath, we understood the risks,” she said. “You know this probably better than anyone else.” She didn’t avert her eyes. “How did you handle it?”

“Sometimes not very well,” McGarvey replied, thinking back to the day Katy had given him her ultimatum — me or the CIA — and he had run away.

She looked away for just a moment, finally, maybe seeing some of the anguish and devastation on his face. “Do you know what’s keeping me on track? The only thing?”

“Audie?”

She looked up at her father and a brief smile passed her mouth. “Her too. But it’s you, Daddy. And Mother.” She shook her head. “Christ, there never was such a couple, or ever will be.”

McGarvey had no idea what to say. But he leaned over and brushed a kiss on her cheek.

“The gray Chevy van, government plates, out front. No one will notice. Keys are in it.”

McGarvey nodded. “Keep your head down, sweetheart, this is bound to get ugly.”

Her eyes tightened. “Oh, I hope so.”

And McGarvey left.

THIRTEEN

The airport shuttle dropped Remington off under the sweeping portico of the five-star Frankfurt Steigenberger Hotel around two in the afternoon. Although he had slept reasonably well in first class on the Lufthansa flight over, he’d been restive, worried about what was coming next.

With Kirk McGarvey now in the mix, the assassinations of Van Buren and Givens would have to be explained to the satisfaction of the FBI, and of course the CIA, which was one of the objects of the exercise in addition to silencing the nosy reporter. And he needed to impress on Roland what was at stake for both of them, for Admin’s continued existence, even for their personal freedom. He had no desire to end up in a federal prison somewhere because Roland refused to keep his eye on the ball.

He carried only a small overnight bag with a clean shirt and underwear and his toiletries — because he was only staying the night, taking the morning flight back — plus his laptop with all the material from Givens’s computer and a BlackBerry, encrypted. He figured there would be little danger crossing borders with the material; he was just an ordinary businessman who’d popped across the pond for a meeting. No one bothered with commerce.

He spotted Sandberger seated across the lobby, reading a newspaper, but went directly over to the front desk where he checked in and sent his overnight bag up to his suite with a bellman, whom he tipped well, but not so well that the man would remember him.

The hotel wasn’t terribly busy at this hour, though more guests were checking in than out, and heading across the expansive lobby he spotted Roland’s bodyguards, sitting fifteen feet away from their boss; Alphonse with his back to the elevators, and Hanson with his back to the lobby doors. Their attention constantly shifted, though not so noticeably unless you were looking for it. Nor did they stand out physically. Both men were of average build, with pleasant faces, neatly trimmed hair, expensive if casual European-cut clothing — open-necked shirts, khakis, and double-vented sport coats — but they were well-trained killers. They were among Admin’s best and highest paid operators, and therefore the most loyal.

Sandberger, too, was a deceptive man, with narrow shoulders, slight build, sparkling blue eyes, ash blond hair, and a pleasant small-town smile and demeanor. But he was a steely-eyed businessman with an astute understanding not only of the American political scene but of international affairs. And like his bodyguards he was a killer.

Remington had been with him two years ago in Kabul to interview three local recruits, all of whom had served as President Hamid Karzai’s personal bodyguards, but were looking for fatter paychecks — or so they’d claimed.

They were supposed to meet in a tea shop in the area known as the Wazir Akbar Kahn a few blocks from the National Bank of Pakistan, across the street from an alley with rug, silver, and copper merchants, but Sandberger was spooked and he told the three that the shop was not acceptable, that they would have to meet tomorrow in another place, to be specified.

Almost immediately Remington sensed something was wrong, not only from Sandberger’s body language but from the sudden rise in tension in the three men, and he stepped back, his hand automatically going under his jacket for his Beretta 92F.

“If this all works out for us, you’ll have a nice future right here in Kabul, if that’s what you want,” Sandberger said, pleasantly, his voice betraying nothing of what Remington damned well knew was about to go down.

They hadn’t taken their seats yet and were standing around the small wrought-iron table under the striped awning, traffic busy on the anonymous street. The three were flustered, and one of them — Remington couldn’t remember his name except that he was a tough-looking bastard who wasn’t to be trusted for all the tea in China — glanced to the left toward the merchant’s alley, and it was at that moment Sandberger moved, lightning fast, decisive, and final.

Before Remington or the three Afghans could move, Sandberger had whipped out his razor sharp KA-BAR, slit the nearest man’s throat ear-to-ear with an almost casual backhand swipe, pivoted lightly on his heel to plunge the broad combat blade into the second man’s right eye socket, burying the weapon to the hilt, and even before the first man had crumpled to the dusty floor stuck the knife into the heart of the third man.

Remington, who was fully combat trained, had never seen anything like it in his life, not even in the Sandhurst training films, or from visualizing the field ops his sergeant had told him about. And he’d always considered his reflexes reasonably good, but at that moment he knew that neither his reflexes nor his killer instinct were up to Sandberger’s.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sandberger had said, calmly as if he were suggesting they go catch a bus.

He wiped the blood from his knife on a paper napkin, sheathed it, and, smiling pleasantly at the horrified tea shop patrons, sauntered up the street to where they had parked their Range Rover.

Remington at his side — then as now.

Sandberger looked up from the Hochster Kreisbatt newspaper, a big, friendly grin on his pleasant face, his eyes lit up as if he were seeing an old friend for the first time in years, and it was always the same with him. “Gordon, good of you to fly over on such short notice.”

“We needed to talk,” Remington said, taking the chair across the broad coffee table from his boss. Very often, when they met away from the office like this, Sandberger chose hotel lobbies for their anonymity, or if he were stateside they would meet at Admin’s training camp in the low mountains of northern New Mexico.

“Would you like some tea or coffee?” Sandberger, always the gentleman, asked.

“No.” Remington booted up his laptop and when he’d opened the FC files, turned the computer around and pushed it across the table. “Take a look at this first. This is how far Givens managed to get.”

Sandberger gazed at Remington, almost paternally. “I know now why I chose you as my partner. You’re the detail man, something I’ve never been, as you well know. I like field action, and you like keeping all the balls up in the air. Never a misstep, right?”

“You need to keep your eye on this ball, Roland, before it jumps up and bites us on the arse.”

Sandberger chuckled. “Mixed metaphor, old man,” he said, but then he drew the laptop closer and started going through the files.

Remington glanced over at Alphonse who was staring directly at him. The bodyguard was Sandberger’s, not Admin’s, personal pit bull, as was Hanson, and he had no doubt that if he made any sort of an untoward move they would be all over him in an instant. Alphonse smiled pleasantly, and Remington got the impression that he was looking into the eyes of a cobra, swaying, distracting its enemy before pouncing.

Good men Roland had recruited and continued to recruit. Classy, like their boss.

Sandberger had gone through several of Givens’s FC files and he looked up. “Is the rest of this stuff more of the same?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“You haven’t shared this with Robert or any of the others, have you?” Sandberger asked, referring to Robert Foster and members of the Friday Club.

“I wanted to talk to you first, give you the heads up. But they will have to be warned. No telling what’ll happen next with McGarvey on the loose.”

“All in good time, but it’s exactly how we planned it, Gordon. McGarvey is considered to be a loose cannon by the CIA, the Bureau, and any number of congressmen — actually, the sort of man I’d like to hire.”

“He’ll make a move, and it’s bound to be dramatic.”

“The more dramatic the better.” Sandberger glanced at the computer screen. “He doesn’t have this material, thanks to your quick action.” He smiled. “Actually, you were brilliant, you know. But there’s more.”

“You still want to go through with it?” Remington asked. “We’ll have to kill him and there will be repercussions.”

“Indeed.”

Remington had no real idea why he’d come over here, except that he thought he had more respect for McGarvey than Roland did. They’d read the same files on the man’s impressive career, and had come to the same conclusion that he would have to be neutralized in such a way that he would be no further threat to the Friday Club. That had been Foster’s demand. McGarvey had already caused them enough grief — even though he probably wasn’t aware of it — and Foster wanted the man to be muzzled. Permanently.

“We can’t just shoot him down in public,” Remington had argued. “It wouldn’t be easy. He was the DCI, for goodness sake, and he’s sharp as a tack. As good or better than any two of our people.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. He’s in his fifties. A bit long of tooth for the lightning-quick reaction. Killing him could be done.”

Remington looked away for a moment. He had a great deal of respect for Roland, but he often had feelings about things. Hunches. A tickling of the hairs at the back of his neck, warning him that something was coming his way. But Roland was a straight-forward, stand-up guy who relied on three things: his own intellect, his own experience, and the collective intelligence and experience of the people he surrounded himself with. Admin’s staff at the Washington office as well as out in the field numbered nearly two hundred. And every single one of them, from Remington to the data-entry clerks, had an open door to the boss, 24/7. Sandberger formed his own opinions, but he listened to everyone.

“Now give me a précis of everything you know,” Sandberger said. “And hold nothing back.”

FOURTEEN

The CIA’s Gulfstream had flown east across the Atlantic at thirty-four thousand feet, the ride smooth enough for McGarvey, whose mind was seething with possibilities, to actually get a few hours’ sleep. When he’d finally opened his eyes the former Northwest Airlines attendant Debbie Miller was there pouring a cup of coffee from a carafe and adding a dollop of a good Napoleon brandy.

He smiled wanly. “Evidently my reputation has preceded me.”

“We were instructed to take very good care of you, Mr. Director,” she said, her smile radiant. “Would you care for something to eat? Breakfast?”

“What time is it?”

“Just coming up on eight-thirty in the morning in Washington, and two-thirty in the afternoon in Frankfurt.”

McGarvey glanced out the window. He could see what looked like farmland interspersed by wooded areas. They were descending, he could feel it in his ears. “How far out are we?”

“Less than twenty minutes.”

He held up his coffee cup. “This’ll do for now. And thank the flight crew for a smooth ride.”

“Our pleasure, Mr. Director,” she said and she went forward to the galley, as McGarvey looked out the window at the German countryside.

He’d been here, many times before, but the Germany of his youth was different from the combined Germanys now, deeply into the worldwide recession, Berlin looking inward rather than global, more concerned about the economy than some hot or cold war with the Russians.

That was in a much simpler, if more deadly past. Now the major threats to much of Europe from Germany east, and especially northeast, were the encroachments by Muslims who by and large refused to assimilate into whatever culture they landed in the middle of. Holland and Denmark and Germany were supposed to change their centuries-old traditions and mind-sets to accommodate the immigrants from the east; upheaval and insensitivity were the new watchwords.

Against that background noise, McGarvey was fighting his own battles that most recently had begun in Mexico City, then Pyongyang, and now Washington.

Two names had been on Turov’s laptop; McCann, who Todd had shot to death and who had very probably been connected to the Friday Club, possibly financially, and Sandberger, whose Admin perhaps only supplied security.

Mac intended to push the man in public, because men of Sandberger’s persona very often reacted badly under that sort of pressure, and how they reacted could say reams about their real agendas.

If he was correct in his thinking, Givens had been assassinated because he’d gotten too close to Foster and the Friday Club, and Todd had been murdered in part because of his contact with the newspaperman, but also because of his father-in-law. They were trying to neutralize a thorn in their side. Of course that logic only worked if there was a connection between Mexico City, Pyongyang, and now this.

And that connection eluded him.

His sat phone burred softly in the pocket of his jacket, hung up forward. Debbie brought it back to him on the third ring and retreated as he answered.

“You gotta be close,” Rencke said.

“Fifteen minutes. Did you find out where Sandberger’s staying?”

“He’s back at the Steigenberger, just for the one day and night,” Rencke said. “His crew filed a flight plan back to Baghdad for first thing in the morning. And Remington is there, too, staying for just the night. Got in late on a Lufthansa flight that was supposed to touch down at eleven-forty, but didn’t actually get there until around one-thirty.”

“Anyone with him?”

“No. And I woulda found out sooner, except he’s traveling under a work name — Donald Higgs — on a damned fine Canadian passport. First-class work. I was impressed, and I’m looking down a couple of tracks to see how he managed, ’cause there’s really a Don Higgs in Ottawa, a lawyer, same description, similar UK background.”

“So it’s just Remington and Sandberger and two bodyguards.”

“Right.”

“One hour on the ground then call Whittaker,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection and laid the phone on the seat next to him.

He wasn’t going to shoot anyone this time, unless he was given no other choice, nor did he want to damage the four men. That would come later. He was counting on the eventual need for it. For now he just wanted to get their attention, and hopefully the attention of the German Federal Police. Make it official so it would be tough for his coming to Germany to be swept under the rug later.

It was a starting point, an important one, because for once in his career he had absolutely no idea where this was headed. But no power on earth could turn him away from taking it to the finish.

They touched down at Frankfurt and taxied over to the terminal routinely used for state visits by members of foreign governments, and McGarvey hesitated at the open hatch. The pilot and copilot were looking at him.

“If you don’t hear from me within two hours, go back to Washington,” he told them.

“We can wait here for as long as you want, Mr. Director,” the pilot said.

“I appreciate that, Captain. But if I’m not back aboard by then, it’ll mean I’m probably in jail.”

“Does this have anything to do with your son-in-law?”

“Everything to do with it.”

“Then good hunting, sir,” Debbie said.

Two stern-faced customs officers in uniform were waiting for him just inside the terminal, that just now was empty, and they scrutinized his diplomatic passport that identified him by his actual name. “Can you tell us the nature of your visit, Mr. McGarvey?” the older of the two asked.

“It’s routine State Department,” McGarvey said. “I’ve come over to have a word with the president of an American contractor firm doing business in Baghdad. Administrative Solutions. Guy’s name is Roland Sandberger.”

Both customs officers stiffened, their change in attitude barely perceptible, but there nonetheless. “Do you expect any difficulty?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Where and when will this meeting take place?”

“At the Steigenberger as soon as I can get a cab over,” McGarvey said.

“The shuttle will take you. Will you be staying the night?”

McGarvey had left his overnight bag aboard the aircraft. “No. Just an hour, perhaps less.”

It was perfectly clear that the customs officers were nervous, especially the older one, who probably had more field experience than his partner, and perhaps because he knew McGarvey by reputation. The one action they could not take, because of his diplomatic immunity, was search him for a weapon.

His passport was returned to him, and the officers stepped aside. “The shuttle is just in front. We hope your visit is as productive as it is dull.”

“Me too,” McGarvey said, and he went outside and got into the Steigenberger van, which headed immediately for the hotel.

On the short ride over from the VIP terminal he’d made a conscious effort to get out of his head the image of Todd’s shot-to-hell body lying on the gurney in All Saints. He wanted to go into this meeting with clear eyes, and steady nerves, or else it would be next to impossible for him not to take someone apart.

The lobby was not particularly large, though well appointed, and not very busy at this hour. The front desk and concierge services were to the left, and pausing for just a moment, he spotted Sandberger and another man he took to be Remington seated across a broad coffee table from each other. Sandberger’s muscle were seated a short distance away, left and right, in positions to cover the front desk and elevators from one direction, and the main doors to the portico from the other.

The one facing the doors said something, and Sandberger looked up, startled for just a moment, but then his expression and manner turned wary, but curious, as McGarvey walked over. Remington looked as if he were a deer caught in headlights, but for just a brief instant, recovering nearly as fast as his boss had. He, too, was guarded.

One of the bodyguards started to rise, but Sandberger motioned him back.

“Good afternoon,” McGarvey said.

“You come as something of a surprise, Mr. Director,” Sandberger said pleasantly, but cautiously. “No coincidence, I suspect.”

By now the customs officers had contacted their superiors, who would be querying the Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, as to what the former director of the CIA was doing in the country on a diplomatic passport. And what information did they have on the American contractor company Administrative Solutions, and what one or more of its officers were doing here.

“No,” McGarvey said. He sat down in one of the easy chairs facing the two men, as well as the front entrance. He was wearing a kahki sport coat and he made a show of unbuttoning it, in part to convey the message that he was armed and ready to use his weapon, and in part to distract himself for a second so that he didn’t just jump up and take all four of them apart.

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I want to know who killed my son-in-law.”

Sandberger and Remington exchanged a quizzical look and Sandberger spread his hands. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if you’ve lost someone in your family, I’m sorry. Was he in the business?”

“A Washington Post investigative reporter and his family were also murdered, after he’d spoken to my son-in-law.”

Sandberger did not respond.

“It had to do with an investigation of the Friday Club. I’d like to know what connection you and your company has with Robert Foster.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a liar, of course,” McGarvey said, letting a sharp edge into his tone. “And a murderer.”

Sandberger had been drinking coffee. He leaned forward, picked up his cup with a steady hand, and eyed McGarvey as he took a sip. “You’re retired, aren’t you? A little old to be running around accusing people of things. One of these days your reflexes will go bad, be a little off, and something will jump up and bite you in the ass.”

“How about Alexander Turov? That name ring a bell?”

Sandberger said nothing, and Remington was holding himself in check.

“He knew your name,” McGarvey said. “I took it from his laptop after I killed him in Tokyo.”

Sandberger just shook his head, but it was obvious to McGarvey that Turov’s name was familiar to him.

“The Russian was an interesting man. He was an expediter, nothing more, while your firm fields some of the shooters.” McGarvey looked pointedly at the bodyguards. “I killed him because it was my job, nothing more than that. But when I find out who assassinated my son-in-law, it’ll be more than a job.”

Remington started to say something but Sandberger held him off with a gesture.

“Thanks for the warning, if that’s what it was. But I had nothing to do with your son-in-law’s tragic death.”

A pair of husky, Teutonic-looking men, square, solidly chiseled features, one of them completely bald, both of them wearing suits cut a little large in the middle to conceal the bulges made by weapons carried in shoulder holsters, came in from the portico. They were obviously federal cops.

“Watch your backs, gentlemen,” McGarvey said. “Every time you look over your shoulders I’ll be there, until one of you fucks up and then I’ll kill you.”

As the BND officers started over, McGarvey took out his sat phone, snapped photographs of Sandberger, Remington, and Sandberger’s muscle, then hit speed dial for Rencke’s number.

The cops were five feet away when the connection was made and McGarvey transmitted the photos. “Call Dave,” he said, and he laid the phone on the coffee table, stood up and spread his arms and legs, all the while smiling at Sandberger.

FIFTEEN

“That won’t be necessary, Herr McGarvey,” the bald officer said, his English accented but good. He offered his ID booklet, which identified him as Hans Mueller, Bundesnachrichtendienst embossed around a stylized eagle.

He was a desk jockey and not an actual spy, or shooter, and McGarvey relaxed. “What can I do for you?”

“Just a few questions,” Mueller said. He glanced at Sandberger and the others. “I assume that none of you have carried weapons into Germany.”

Sandberger shook his head.

“I’m armed,” McGarvey said, and the cops zeroed in on him. He had their attention.

“Will you surrender your weapon at this time?”

“Of course,” McGarvey said pleasantly. He took his Wilson from its holster at the small of his back, ejected the magazine and carefully levered the one round out of the firing chamber, and handed the pistol over handle-first, then the magazine and bullet.

Mueller glanced at the weapon. “You know that you have broken German law by bringing this here.”

“You might want these, too,” McGarvey said, glancing at Sandberger, as he took the spare magazine and suppressor out of his jacket pocket and handed them over along with his sat phone.

Mueller wasn’t happy, but the other cop acted as if he were confused, and neither one of them seemed to know what to do with the pistol and especially not the silencer.

For a seeming eternity no one moved, and McGarvey kept asking himself why these idiots weren’t taking the next step, and frisking Sandberger and Remington and especially Sandberger’s bodyguards. The fact that Sandberger’s muscle were shooters stood out like a neon sign. Stupid lapses like that could get a field man killed in a hurry; it was why they were desk jockeys. Most BND officers McGarvey had met were damned good.

He glanced over at Sandberger and the others and he could see that they were thinking the same thing.

But the moment ended when Mueller handed his partner the pistol, ammunition, and silencer. “You’ll have to come with us now. Your diplomatic passport does not cover this.”

“No, I suppose not,” McGarvey said.

“You’re not going to cause trouble, sir?” Mueller said.

“You have my gun,” McGarvey said, and he turned again to Sandberger. “As I said, watch your backs, because I’ll be there.”

McGarvey rode in the backseat of a slate gray Mercedes C350, the younger BND officer driving, traffic heavy as they skirted downtown and headed up to the north side of the city.

Mueller turned and looked back. “What is your relationship with those four men in the hotel lobby, Herr McGarvey?”

“I came over to ask them a few questions.”

“Concerning what?”

“The assassination of my son-in-law, who was a CIA officer. He and my daughter ran the CIA’s training center.”

Mueller’s eyebrows rose. “The Farm. Yes, I know of this place in Virginia. And we know that he was shot to death outside Washington. And you came to Germany because you think Herr Sandberger’s company had something to do with it?”

McGarvey’s opinion of the BND desk jockeys went up a notch. They might not have been field officers, but they had done their homework before coming over to the Steigenberger to find out why the former chief of the CIA had come to Germany on what was likely a fake diplomatic passport.

“It’s possible they might have information I need.”

The cop digested this for a moment. “And what exactly was meant by your comment for those men to watch their backs, you’ll be there.”

McGarvey looked out the window. They’d left the skyscrapers behind and had turned off the busy autobahn into a pleasant area of apartment buildings, some new and some old probably dating back to before the war. “Did you know that two of his men were probably armed?”

“I asked you a question.”

McGarvey turned back. “So did I, and that’ll be ‘sir’ to you.” They were leaning and he was leaning back. He had wanted to make two points here: one was putting Sandberger on notice, and the second was to place his suspicions into the record of at least one government’s law enforcement or intelligence apparatus so that when he came into the CIA’s spotlight, dealing with him would no longer be a simple matter of the dismissal of a grief-stricken father-in-law.

A bleak expression came into Mueller’s eyes, as if his hopes of an easy assignment had just been dashed, and he turned around to face forward.

They finally turned down Homberger Landstrasse, another reasonably pleasant tree-lined street of some apartment buildings, and what might have been small government installations or military barracks, called Kaserne, but of the old-fashioned sort, and McGarvey suddenly knew where they were taking him.

“I didn’t know the BND was using the Drake Kaserne,” he said. The series of mostly low buildings behind a tall iron fence had first been occupied in 1930 by the German army. After the war, from 1956 to 1992, the U.S. Third Armored Division had headquartered here, until the German government took it back using it to house various agencies, including the customs unit of the Federal Border Police.

He’d been here once, before the Germanys were reunited, when he had stalked a Russian KGB general hiding out in East Berlin. It was a bad period, which he didn’t care to remember, except that it had stuck in his mind then as now that Germans, at least at the governmental level, were still trying to live down the Nazi era, and never knew quite how.

“Yes, you were here, I saw that in your record,” Mueller said. “So, you have a very good memory, which will be excellent for our purposes.”

They pulled up to a gate at the Kaserne, which was opened by a uniformed civilian guard with a sidearm under the watchful eye of another guard just at the doorway to the security office.

“May I call my consulate here in Frankfurt?”

“I’m sure that whoever you sent those photographs to will have already notified your people,” Mueller said. “And we’ll find out who you called.”

McGarvey couldn’t help himself, and he smiled. “I don’t think so.”

“We have some pretty good people on this side of the pond, too, you know, you arrogant bastard.”

Another little bit of the puzzle dropped in place for McGarvey. “What exactly is it that Administrative Solutions does for the German government? Can you at least give me a hint?”

But Mueller said nothing, until they stopped at a nondescript, one-story building near the rear of the installation, and he and his partner got out and Mueller opened the rear door.

McGarvey got out and went into the building, which looked very much like a military interrogation and holding center, and was led down the corridor to a small room furnished only with a metal table and two chairs. The walls were bare concrete, the floor plainly tiled, with a single dim lightbulb set into the ceiling and covered with wire mesh.

He sat down at the table and Mueller sat across from him; his partner leaned against the wall beside the door.

“Shall we begin with why you came to Germany under a false passport, but aboard a CIA aircraft?” Mueller said.

“To talk to Roland Sandberger, as I’ve told you.”

“Why did you bring a pistol?”

“I always travel armed. Have for years.”

“And what about the silencer?” Mueller asked. “Were you planning on killing Herr Sandberger?”

McGarvey shrugged. “Only if I felt that it was necessary.”

“What would have constituted a necessity?”

McGarvey took a moment to answer. “I had a reasonable expectation that either he or his bodyguards would have tried to assassinate me.”

Mueller glanced over his shoulder at his partner then turned back. “I see. And now what are your expectations, Herr McGarvey?”

“That you’ve just run out of questions. That you’ll be reporting this to your superiors in Pullach. That you will not interfere with the movements of Sandberger or his employees. That this incident has been reported to the consul general here in Frankfurt, and most likely via some old-boy connection to Langley. And that sometime tomorrow someone will show up to fetch me.”

Mueller was not happy.

“Have I left something out?”

“Fuck you,” Mueller said, and he and his partner left the interrogation cell.

“And the horse you rode in on,” McGarvey added.

SIXTEEN

It was around two the next afternoon when David Whittaker, the deputy director of the CIA, showed up at the Drake Kaserne and McGarvey was fetched from his VIP guest suite.

Since he’d not brought an overnight kit, he’d been supplied with pajamas and toiletries, had been fed a good wiener schnitzel with boiled potatoes and several bottles of dark Lowenbrau for dinner, and an equally good breakfast and lunch. Other than that he’d been left alone, though the morning English edition of the International Herald-Tribune had shown up at his door, and he’d had a television to watch, but no telephone.

Whittaker was dressed, as usual, in an old-fashioned three-piece suit, bow tie, and wingtips; his eyes wide behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He was the most moral man McGarvey had ever known, and stern because of it. His was just about the last of the old-school East Coast Presbyterians, the kind who had ruled the roost since the OSS days of World War II.

“You’ve become something of a problem,” he said when McGarvey was brought to the dayroom, and they shook hands.

“I always have been,” McGarvey said. When Mac was the DCI, Whittaker ran the Directorate of Operations, and had done a fine job. Now he had risen to his highest level in the Company; it wasn’t likely that he would ever become the DCI, because he was too low key, not political enough. The U.S. was one of the few countries in which the top spy wasn’t a professional intelligence officer, only an appointed, well-connected amateur, and for a long time morale at the CIA had been low. Especially these days when more than fifty percent of the Agency’s employees had less than five years’ experience.

“The Germans have released you into my custody,” Whittaker said. “As you might guess a lot of strings had to be pulled at the highest levels.”

“Thanks.”

Whittaker gave him a bleak look. “So far this incident has not reached the White House. At least not officially—”

“Which incident is that, Dave?” McGarvey interrupted sharply. “My arrest here or Todd’s assassination?”

“The Bureau has identified Todd’s killers. They were Muslim extremists, members of one of al-Quaida’s splinter cells in Laurel, Maryland.”

“Bullshit,” McGarvey said. He was trying to put a cap on his almost blind anger, and it was taking everything in his power.

Whittaker overrode him. “They were targeting CIA officers. It was the same group who made the hit just outside our main gate a few years back. Todd just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Arrests are expected any time now?”

“No,” Whittaker said. “One of their bomb makers apparently screwed up yesterday and blew up the storefront mosque where they were at afternoon prayers. The rubble is being sifted for clues as to who was directing them.”

“What about Givens?”

“He and his wife and child were killed in a home invasion, a simple robbery.”

McGarvey tried to interrupt, but Whittaker held up a hand. “Two pairs of fingerprints were found in the apartment and the suspects are already in custody.”

“They admitted it?”

“Not yet.”

“They have alibis?”

Whittaker conceded the point. “It was to be expected. But they’ll eventually come around.”

“Unless they die under mysterious circumstances,” McGarvey said. “Maybe they’ll hang themselves in their cells.” He shook his head. It was worse than he expected. “Christ.”

“Todd’s funeral is the day after tomorrow at Arlington. You’ll be allowed to attend, of course, but before and afterward you’ll be kept in custody.”

“What am I being charged with?”

“Treason,” Whittaker said, solemnly. “And that comes from the Justice Department.”

McGarvey almost laughed.

“I’m told that President Haynes tried to hold you back; he even warned you. More than once. And he liked you. The new president does not.” Whittaker shook his head. “Sorry, Mac, it’s out of my hands.”

“Are we talking about North Korea?” McGarvey asked. Last year a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer had been assassinated, apparently by North Korean police in Pyongyang. China was threatening to attack, and Kim Jong Il was promising to launch three of his twelve nuclear weapons on Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo. Millions of people would have died.

In desperation a North Korean intelligence officer had been smuggled into the U.S. where he’d come to ask for McGarvey’s help proving that North Korea didn’t order the assassination. And McGarvey had done just that, despite warnings from the White House not to get involved.

Whittaker nodded. “You made a lot of enemies.”

“I stopped a war.”

“That’s up to the diplomats. It was felt at the time, and still is, that had you not interfered, our position in the region would have been strengthened.”

“They were willing to risk a nuclear war for the sake of points?”

“Some of the president’s advisers made a case for it.”

McGarvey nodded after a long moment. “At least I’ll get my day in court.”

“In camera with no jury because of the sensitive nature of the material.”

“What about Katy and Liz?”

“They’re safe at the Farm,” Whittaker said.

“Safe from who, Dave,” McGarvey shot back. “Todd’s killers were blown up, and the guys who killed Givens and his family are in jail. Who’s left?”

Whittaker sidestepped the question. It was clear that he was extremely uncomfortable. He was doing his duty; he didn’t have to like it. “Otto and his wife have disappeared; nobody knows where they are.”

Somewhere in or near Washington, McGarvey guessed. With his laptop and a secure access to the web. Otto would want to stick around in case Mac needed help.

“Did you bring someone from housekeeping with you?” McGarvey asked, his anger rising. “Do you want to take me back in cuffs and shackles?”

Whittaker almost stepped back. “No,” he said.

“They’ll never prove treason against me, and you know it. In the meantime we still have a problem that’s somehow connected between Mexico City and Pyongyang.”

“The material on the disk we found in Todd’s car was simply too fantastic to believe. You saw it; you can’t tell me that you put any validity to what Givens was claiming.”

“It wasn’t the disk Givens gave my son-in-law.”

“That would admit a conspiracy—”

“Right,” McGarvey said, but suddenly he was tired, and he didn’t give a damn. All he wanted now was to get back to Washington for Todd’s funeral, to be with Katy and their daughter, Liz, and with their granddaughter, Audie.

It was obvious that Whittaker felt essentially the same; he, too, was tired of this assignment, which probably seemed to him to be a waste of time.

“If it’s any consolation, the Company will do everything within its power to defend you. I’m behind you, and so is most of the senior staff.”

McGarvey nodded. “What does Carleton think about my chances?” Carleton Patterson was the CIA’s general counsel and had held that position for at least ten years. His was always a reasoned opinion.

Whittaker shook his head. “Not good.”

Left unsaid was that this was a hell of a way to end a distinguished career.

SEVENTEEN

At Andrews Air Force Base the CIA’s Gulfstream with the same crew that had brought McGarvey over to Frankfurt in the first place taxied over to the government hangar and inside and the engines spooled down.

“Good luck, Mr. Director,” Debbie said as McGarvey hesitated for just a moment at the hatch.

He nodded to the pilot and copilot and winked at the girl, then went down where a pair of U.S. marshals was waiting for him, badges hanging out of the lapel pockets of their suit coats. They were large men, alert, their jackets unbuttoned, earpiece comms units and sleeve mics.

For an awkward second or two the four of them, including Whittaker, stood at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t every day that a former director of the CIA was taken into custody, and especially not a man of McGarvey’s experience and reputation, and everyone was taking this seriously.

The larger of the two — square-jawed, with a no-nonsense look about him — stepped forward. “Mr. Director, I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Ansel.” He nodded toward his partner. “Deputy Marshal Mellinger. Sir, at this time we are placing you under arrest on a federal warrant on a charge of treason. Do you want your Miranda rights explained to you?”

“No.”

“If you’ll give us your word that you’ll cooperate, there’ll be no need for handcuffs.”

“You have my word. Where are you taking me?”

“To the D.C. Superior Courthouse annex for booking,” Ansel said. “Afterward you’ll be transported to Langley until your trial.”

“We need to finish your debriefing,” Whittaker explained.

And it was about what McGarvey figured. He would be treated with kid gloves until after the funeral, everyone knew that he wouldn’t make a move until then. “Whatever I tell you will be used against me at my trial. That about it, David?”

“You know the drill, Mac. You’ve been in these sorts of situations before. The more you tell us the easier your life will be.”

“I don’t think you’re going to like what I tell you. And it’s not very likely Dick will pass my version along to the White House. It’s something none of them will want to hear.”

He and Whittaker had spoken only a few words on the long flight back from Germany, amounting to little more than conveying the entire Company’s sympathies about Todd’s death.

“He was a good man, Mac.”

“Too good,” McGarvey had said, and after a moment Whittaker had turned away to stare out the window at nothing.

After a dinner of lobster, a light salad, and French bread with a good pino grigio, and coffee and brandy, McGarvey had gotten a few hours of sleep, waking only briefly when they’d landed at Prestwick, Scotland, to refuel, the sun chasing them as they headed west.

Standing now in the hangar at Andrews, McGarvey turned to tell Whittaker that none of this was the CIA’s fault, but the DDCI had walked away to an armored Cadillac limousine, at least in a symbolic way washing his hands of the entire affair for the moment.

“Sir?” Ansel said, politely.

McGarvey went with the two deputy marshals and got into the backseat of a Cadillac Escalade SUV, with no access to the door locks, which snapped into place once they headed out.

The base was fairly busy this afternoon, and Air Force One had been trundled out to the apron, where people were beginning to gather. Mellinger was driving and he stayed well away from the security zone around the blue and white 747.

“Where’s the president heading off to?” McGarvey asked.

Ansel half-turned in his seat and looked back. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. But then he shook his head, his face long as if he’d just thought of something disturbing. “Some of us had a lot of faith in you.”

“Maybe the charges against me are wrong.”

“Personally, I hope so. But the consensus is otherwise.”

“Guilty till proved innocent, that it?” McGarvey asked. He was on the verge of lashing out, but he held himself in check. Consensus was almost always more important than just about anything else. It was the basis for nearly all the principles of a democratic government. Except that an important lawyer of the sixties and seventies once said that the Constitution hadn’t been written to protect the masses from the individual, be he a criminal or not, but to protect the individual from the masses.

“We’re just doing our jobs,” Ansel said, and turned forward.

And that was the problem, McGarvey thought, too many people just doing their jobs and nothing more. It was a philosophy he’d never understood. It was, in his estimation, a coward’s way out.

They were admitted through the sublevel sally port into the booking and holding area of the courthouse, where McGarvey was taken directly into a small room where a technician took his fingerprints with an electronic reader under the watchful eyes of Ansel and Mellinger who were behind a bulletproof window.

Afterward he was stood against a wall with inches and feet marked on a scale and photographed in right profile, face on, and left profile.

In an adjacent room he turned out his pockets onto a counter where a uniformed clerk inventoried his things — wallet, watch, some money, and a compact, razor-sharp knife in an ankle holster, which the Germans had not caught, and which raised an eyebrow here. His things were bagged in a large manila envelope, but instead of being logged into the property room the bag was turned over to Ansel.

“Anything else we should know about?” the deputy marshal asked.

“I gave you my word, and that’ll have to be enough, unless you want to do a full cavity search,” McGarvey said.

“No, sir,” Ansel said, but he was wary and it was obvious he wanted nothing better than to get rid of his prisoner.

Mellinger had stood to one side through all this, his hand inside his jacket.

McGarvey looked over at him. “Tell your partner to take his hand off his pistol. It makes me nervous.” He looked into Ansel’s eyes.

“Listen here, pal—” Mellinger said, but Ansel cut him short.

“We don’t want any trouble, believe me.”

“No, you don’t.”

Twenty minutes after they arrived, they were back downtown and headed across the Roosevelt Bridge and north up the busy Parkway toward the entrance to the CIA campus.

“What have you heard?” McGarvey asked, breaking the silence once they were across the river.

“Treason,” Ansel said. “Something to do with an incident in North Korea a few months ago. Apparently you went head-to-head with President Haynes over it, and he may have backed down, but President Langdon doesn’t agree.”

“No, I didn’t expect he would,” McGarvey said. “What else?”

“The word on the street is that your people are going to the mat for you.”

“You mean the CIA?”

“Yes, sir,” Ansel said. “We were given word that you were to be treated with kid gloves, and that was at the request of Langley. Specially Mr. Adkins.”

Dick Adkins had been promoted to DCI by President Haynes after McGarvey had left, and he’d been kept on an interim basis by the new president until a replacement could be found. In the past six months no one suitable had been named. And in fact a lot of high-level staff positions in Washington had yet to be filled.

“It’s shaping up to be a fight between the CIA and the White House.”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “And we know who’ll win that one.”

They were stopped at the main gate where the CIA’s general counsel Carleton Patterson was waiting in the parking lot with his white Mercedes S550. He got out when the U.S. marshals pulled up, and walked over.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said. He’d been the Company top legal beagle for almost ten years, coming down to Washington from a prestigious New York law firm to help out three presidents ago, strictly on a temporary basis. He was tall, slender, silver-haired, and as well put together as one would expect for a man in his position. He and McGarvey had respect, if not friendship, toward each other.

“Good luck,” Ansel said.

But Mellinger shook his head. “Prick,” he said half under his breath, and Ansel shot him a dirty look but said nothing, and the two of them got back in the Escalade and drove off.

“I don’t think he likes me,” McGarvey said, getting in Patterson’s car.

“A lot of people in this town don’t care for you,” Patterson said. “You’re old school. Hell, you even approved of Guantánamo.”

“I even participated,” McGarvey said. “We gave them a better chance than they gave us on nine/eleven.”

They were waved through the gate and headed up the drive in the direction of the Old Headquarters Building, but turned off before they reached the OHB’s circular drive and parking lot.

“Say that in front of a judge and you’ll be dead in the water,” Patterson said, eyeing him.

“If it gets that far,” McGarvey said. “You putting me up in a safe house here on the Campus?”

Patterson hesitated a moment. “If you promise not to run. Green and Boylan want to finish your debriefing, and Dick would like to have a word.”

“My son-in-law’s funeral is tomorrow. I’m going nowhere.”

Until afterward, was the unspoken finish to the sentence, but McGarvey didn’t amplify and Patterson thought it better not to pursue the matter. McGarvey was cooperating, and for now that was enough.

EIGHTEEN

The safe house was a small, two-story colonial in the woods away from the OHB, the white paint on the exterior peeling in places, and some weeds growing in spots in the gravel driveway indicating either that the place hadn’t seen much use lately, or that even the Company was lacking in nonessential maintenance tasks because of the economy. McGarvey expected both.

“Will I have minders?” McGarvey asked when they pulled up.

“Green and Boylan will be bunking with you for the time being,” Patterson said, and as he said it Pete opened the front door of the house, and smiled.

“Pretty girl,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, she is. And bright.” Patterson turned to him. “They have your jacket, your entire file from day one, so it won’t do any good to try to hide some of your… more disagreeable… outcomes.”

McGarvey got out of the car but hung back for a moment. “They were called assignments, and the outcomes were what I had been ordered to accomplish. You might want to get that idea straight in your head, Carleton. Could be important. Soon.”

Carleton gave him a bleak look, and started to say something, but then thought better of it and drove off.

“Mr. Director,” Pete said. “They sent your things over from the airport, and we brought some spare clothes for you from your suitcase at the Farm. We want you to be comfortable.”

“How are my wife and daughter?” McGarvey asked on the broad porch.

Pete stepped aside to let him go into the house, then followed him and closed the door, making a show of not locking it, which wouldn’t have mattered in any case. “As well as can be expected, sir.”

“May I call them?”

“We’d appreciate it if you would hold off. Just until tonight. Dr. Sampson is with them this afternoon.”

Leonard Sampson was the company’s chief shrink, a bright, dedicated man. McGarvey couldn’t think of many people he’d rather have with Katy and Liz just now. “Anything from Otto yet?”

Pete’s eyebrows knitted. “We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on his whereabouts.”

“I’ve been out of the country.”

“Yes, sir,” Pete said not pushing the query.

The house was in much better shape inside than out, with nice furnishings, but it smelled unused and musty, closed in for a long time. To the left was a living room with a river rock fireplace that someone had stupidly painted white, an enlarged inauguration photograph of President Langdon above the mantel, surprisingly with no halo. A dining room to the right was furnished with a cherrywood table, seating eight, and a breakfront filled with nice stemware. A number of thick files had been placed at the head of the table. Beyond the dining room, McGarvey assumed, was the kitchen through swinging half-doors. A guest bathroom was tucked into the stair hall that led back to perhaps the den.

Dan Green showed up at the head of the stairs and came down, a curious expression on his face, as if he had just heard something that he’d never even guessed at, likely something he’d read in McGarvey’s file that he was having a little trouble reconciling with what he’d thought he’d known.

“Good afternoon, Mr. McGarvey,” he said, and shook hands. “I trust you had a reasonably pleasant flight back. A spot of trouble in Frankfurt, or so I heard.”

“Nothing much,” McGarvey said.

Green’s left eyebrow rose, and he was about to speak, when Pete stepped in.

“Well, would you like some coffee, before we begin, Mr. Director,” she asked. “Are you hungry? Maybe you’d like to get a couple hours of sleep. Flying through time zones can wear a person to a frazzle.”

“Let’s just get started.”

“A beer?” Green asked.

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he followed Pete into the dining room as Green went back to the kitchen.

“Would you like to clean up, splash some water on your face?” she asked. “Your things are in the front bedroom upstairs, first door on the left.”

“No,” McGarvey said. He took off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and sat down at the opposite end of the table from Pete and the stack of files.

She hesitated for just a beat, but then sat down. Like Green she was dressed in jeans and a light pullover. They could have been coordinated, but the look was meant to be relaxing, not intimidating: “Hey, we’re just ordinary people who’ve dropped in for a chat. No reason to be intimidated by us. Really.”

Green came back with the beer but no glass, again an old pal over for a barbecue in the backyard, and did a slight double take when he saw that McGarvey had chosen to put as much distance between himself and his interrogators.

He handed McGarvey the beer, and went to the window where he looked out at the driveway and the wooded hill in the distance on top of which one could see the antennas and satellite dishes on the roof of the OHB.

“Could we begin with the circumstances that led you to accept a job of work for North Korean intelligence?” Pete said. “It’s not quite clear from the incident file you provided us.”

“I’m under indictment for treason,” McGarvey said, but Pete waved him off, a horrified expression on her pleasantly round face.

“Heaven forbid, Mr. Director, it’s nothing like that at all. You’ve been charged, but certainly not indicted. This is merely a fact-finding session. I mean, we have most of the details, we’re simply trying to put everything into some sort of perspective. You understand.”

“No, I don’t,” McGarvey said. “Because whatever I have to say to you, will end up on the seventh floor, and by the time it gets to Justice, or the White House, it’ll all be sanitized to fit whatever the current preconception is.”

Dan Green turned around, a scowl on his oddly proportioned face. “Is that what you think this is all about?” he demanded. “We’re to accept your spin, and none of the rest of us have any other opinion?”

McGarvey looked at him. “Your opinions don’t count, Dan. Only mine do. That’s the drill they want to use to hang me.”

“Who?” Pete asked. “Who wants to hang you?”

“And why?” Green added in his quiet manner, all traces of his previous hostility gone, replaced by an oddly out of place neutrality. Studied. Scripted.

“The disk found in Todd’s car was not the one Givens handed over to him in town.”

“You’ve already said that.”

“Nor was his murder a random act. Nor were Givens and his family murdered in a home invasion gone bad.”

“You’ve also said that,” Green continued. “Assuming you’re correct, who murdered them and why?”

“Very likely by someone working for Administrative Solutions, under the orders of the Friday Club, probably through an intermediary. It’s why I went to Frankfurt to confront Roland Sandberger, tell him what I knew and get German intelligence involved, officially.”

“I don’t get that part,” Pete said, genuinely puzzled. “Come to us with your suspicions, why the Germans? Specifically. What’s the BND’s involvement?”

“In your opinion,” Green added.

McGarvey thought that he could dislike the little man, but it was just a job. “It has nothing to do with the Germans.”

“Now I’m confused,” Pete said.

“If he’d been in the UK I would have involved the SIS, if it had been in Pakistan, the ISI. Didn’t matter where I confronted him, I just wanted the local intelligence apparatus to sit up and take notice.”

“Good heavens, whatever for?” Pete asked, still puzzled.

“Don’t you trust your own government?” Green asked.

McGarvey shook his head. “No.”

NINETEEN

Remington sank down on the bench in Rock Creek Park, weary from his trip to Frankfurt. He’d expected the German authorities to ask them about McGarvey, but Sandberger had seemed indifferent, talking instead about the Baghdad contracts, which in the end would be worth millions — tens of millions, now that Task Force One was out.

That evening they’d had a good dinner at the hotel, and Sandberger had left around midnight to return to Iraq, leaving Remington to stew in his own juices until his afternoon flight back to Washington.

Last night at home hadn’t been much better for him. He and Colleen had a social engagement at the British embassy, that she insisted they keep, but he had begged off and she’d left angry. He’d slept in the guest bedroom last night, and she’d been gone before he’d gotten up this morning.

Sandberger called on the encrypted number shortly before noon, and he was abrupt.

“He’s back in the States, under house arrest, but he hasn’t been indicted yet. Do you understand?”

“It’s only a matter of time,” Remington had replied, trying to work out what Sandberger wanted him to understand, while full well knowing what the next step would be. They had discussed his last, extreme measure at some length.

“The funeral is tomorrow. Make it happen.”

“Is it necessary?” Remington had asked. He wasn’t exactly squeamish, but McGarvey had tracked them down to Frankfurt, armed, and if they missed he would come after them.

“Yes,” Sandberger said. “For Christ’s sake he actually came after us in Frankfurt.”

Remington had looked out the window at the river. “Let’s not underestimate this man.”

The line had been silent for a long moment, and when he came back Sandberger was cool at best. “Don’t underestimate me, Gordon.”

“Of course not,” Remington had assured his boss, and the connection had been broken, leaving him to seriously wonder what the hell they’d gotten into with the Friday Club.

He had stewed about Roland’s call the rest of the day, and even now he had to wonder where the hell they were headed, and if they were going in a direction that made the same sense that Admin had made to him when he had joined.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” his father had told him when the last of the family’s fortune had been gambled and drank away. The pater had been a fatalist; whatever happened was supposed to happen. It was life. A man’s future was determined at birth. Before birth. But Gordon had not believed in it; look what that sort of belief had done to the old man.

Remington glanced at his watch, which showed a minute before four, as Kangas and Mustapha in jogging outfits came around the curve in the Parkway just south of the Massachusetts Bridge.

They stopped a few feet away and did their stretching exercises. Other people were using the park, and the air smelled of charcoal grilles and was filled with the sounds of laughter and children’s cries. Normalcy in a world Remington figured had been going mad for as long as he could remember. It’s how he made his living.

“You handled the situation with the CIA officer and Givens very well and Mr. Sandberger is pleased, especially with how you covered your tracks. He’s approved a healthy bonus for you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Mustapha said. “Did you want us here this afternoon to tell us that? Or is there more?”

Remington held his temper in check. He and Sandberger had discussed what would eventually have to happen to them, and he felt the sooner the better.

“It’s become necessary to go to the next stage,” he said. “The funeral is tomorrow at Arlington. Can you be ready by then?”

“Of course,” Mustapha said. “But this will be even more dangerous than the other day. Much more dangerous.”

“I agree,” Remington said. “But this project has the personal interest of Mr. Sandberger, and he’s the guy who signs your checks.”

Mustapha straightened up and looked directly at him. “We appreciate that, but we’d like to make a suggestion.”

“Are you getting cold feet?”

“Not at all,” Mustapha said. “But taking him out will be tough.”

“Your point being?”

“We’d like to use an IED. In the road. After the funeral. Easier to blame on the ragheads.”

Remington had considered it, and had even discussed the issue with Roland. McGarvey was truly dangerous, taking him out with long guns would be preferable to taking a chance that he would survive an explosive device. And Sandberger had agreed.

He took out an electronic security detector, about the size of a flip phone, pointed it first at Kangas then at Mustapha. If they’d been wearing a wire or any sort of recording device the ESD would have picked it up. But they were clean and he pocketed the device.

“If you have the chance, take it,” he said. “But only if you can get out clean. Absolutely clean. Because if you don’t, Mr. Sandberger’s next order will be to have you eliminated.”

Both men nodded.

“Are we absolutely clear on this point?”

“Yes, sir,” Mustapha said.

“And on the further point that we never had this discussion?”

“Right,” Mustapha said.

Remington got up and headed to where he’d parked his car without looking back. It either ended tomorrow, or it would just be getting started.

TWENTY

After an early dinner of pizza and beer, Dan Green and Pete wanted to continue with the debriefing, but McGarvey refused. They’d gotten to the part when a North Korean intelligence officer had shown up at McGarvey’s home in Casey Key, and Mac’s decision to help. The going was slow because they’d wanted every detail: the time of day, what everyone was wearing, what, if anything, Mac’s wife had overheard, or what he had told her, the make and model of the North Korean’s car — presumably a rental — and its tag numbers, even its general condition.

“No dents, or scuffs, or perhaps mud around the wheel wells?” Green had nitpicked. “We just want to get a sense of this colonel’s fastidiousness, his attention to details, if you will. Little lapses like those might translate into what sort of an officer he was: sloppy or neat, a dreamer or an itemizer.”

“Paranoid or assured,” Pete added.

“Later,” McGarvey told them. “I want to call the Farm.”

“We’ll be at it until late tonight,” Green said a little crossly. They were in their element doing this sort of thing, and they had just hit their stride and didn’t want to quit.

“Whatever. But first I’ll have a word with my wife and daughter. I want to find out how they’re doing.”

Pete shrugged. “We have a lot of ground still to cover,” she said. She took a cell phone out of her jeans, handed it to McGarvey and motioned for Green to leave the kitchen with her. “We’ll give Mr. McGarvey his privacy.”

“It’s on record in any event,” McGarvey said, and he dialed his daughter’s number in her private quarters as his debriefers left.

Liz answered after three rings, and she sounded all out of breath, as if she had been crying all afternoon, which she probably had been. “Yes.”

“Hi, sweetheart, it’s me. How are you and your mother doing?”

“I think it’s just starting to sink in,” she said. “But it’s so unreal. I even thought that maybe you were Todd finally calling, and I was all set to be pissed off at him for being late and not letting me know.” She hesitated. “I was worried.”

“I know. I feel almost the same thing.”

The kitchen was modern, with new appliances and bright wallpaper, homey, a place that was meant to seem comfortable. No threats here. Just friends in a pleasant situation talking about old times. No need for secrets. And it was true, he almost expected Todd to be coming through the front door to find out what the hell all the fuss was about.

“How are you doing, Daddy? Any progress?”

“Some, but it’s still early going,” McGarvey said. “I’m beginning to put a few things into place.”

“Anything you can talk about?”

“We’re being monitored.”

“Of course,” Liz said after a brief hesitation, and McGarvey could see the field officer in his daughter kicking in, checking all the angles, looking in all the corners, considering all the possibilities.

“How’s Audie?”

“She was a little fussy earlier, but she’s in bed—” Liz stopped short. “Mom’s right here. We’re outside having a cup of tea. I’ll put her on.”

A moment later Katy came on, her voice nearly unrecognizable. “Kirk?” she said. “Can you come get us?”

“Not tonight. But I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Katy hesitated. “Oh, at Arlington.”

“Yes. And afterward I’ll take you home.”

“I’ll stay here until you’re done. You’re not finished yet, are you?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll stay here,” Katy said. “I think I hear the baby crying. I’m putting Elizabeth back on.”

Liz came back. “Mother’s staying here for the time being, but I don’t know how much help I can be for you.”

“Stay with your mother, and tomorrow — I know it’ll be almost impossible — keep your eyes open. And whatever you do, don’t make a move without your minders.”

“I understand.”

“Try to get some sleep, sweetheart,” McGarvey said.

“I’ll try,” Liz said and she was gone, leaving McGarvey holding for a long time before he pushed the end button and laid the phone down on the dining room table.

A minute later his interrogators came in, Pete apologetic, Dan Green a little angry.

“We didn’t listen in, Mr. Director,” Pete said. “On that you have my word.”

“It doesn’t matter,” McGarvey said, suddenly more than tired; he was weary, mentally as well as physically. And tomorrow loomed large in his mind, because he would not be able to do anything until after his son-in-law had been buried. What made tomorrow even worse for him was the thought of leaving Katy and Liz again, just as he had done for more than twenty years.

“Can we get you anything else before we pick up where we left off. The North Korean intelligence officer come for a chat with you.”

“No,” McGarvey said, getting up. “We’re done for the night. I’m tired.”

“The hell we are,” Green said. “You have a lot to answer for.”

“Yes, I do,” McGarvey said and he turned to leave when Green started to step in front of him.

“Leave it, Dan,” Pete cautioned. “We’re all tired.”

Green stepped aside but said nothing.

“You’ll continue to cooperate this evening, Mr. Director?” she asked. “Can we have your word on it?”

“Yes, for tonight,” McGarvey said.

“What about tomorrow?”

“That’ll depend.”

“You’re charged with treason,” Green said angrily, and McGarvey got the impression that the man’s anger wasn’t real, it was a part of his and Pete’s dog and pony show.

“If that were the case, they would have put me someplace a hell of a lot more secure than here, don’t you think?” he said.

He walked out into the stair hall and Pete came to the door. “How did Sandberger react when you showed up?” she asked.

“He wasn’t happy,” McGarvey said.

“I would have given anything to have been a little bird in the corner,” Pete admitted. “We’ll be with you tomorrow.”

“Who else?”

“Federal marshals in the car with you and nearby. Just in case Todd’s assassination wasn’t a random act.”

TWENTY-ONE

First thing in the morning Kangas and Mustapha parked their untraceable Buick LeSabre near the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, and walked a quarter of a mile back down the hill in the general direction of the South Gate, crossing Porter, Miles, and then Grant drives. A few people were out and about, but not many; a hush seemed to hang over the place.

Neither man had ever wanted to be buried here, even though they’d been career government employees, because neither of them saw themselves dying in service of their country. It was an old line from Patton, something like: Let the other son of a bitch die for his country. They considered themselves to be too professional to be killed because of stupidity.

“Nice day for a funeral,” Mustapha said.

“For someone else,” Kangas replied, and he laughed.

They reached a spot from where they had a decent line of sight to the driveway that opened to Southgate Road, that in turn led to Columbia Pike or South Joyce Street away from the cemetery. After the funeral, which would start in a few hours, the procession would pass through the gate, according to Remington’s intel, which had never been wrong before. The guy might be a prick, but he knew what he was doing.

Right on time a blue-and-white panel van without windows, marked Fairfax County Highway Department, pulled up about twenty feet down the driveway from the gate and parked in the middle of the road, almost on top of a storm sewer lid. Two men, dressed in blue coveralls and wearing hardhats, got out of the truck and placed a few traffic cones blocking the lane that led out of the cemetery. No one from the gate came down to ask what was going on.

“Considering what’s been happening, and who’s going to be here soon, you’d think security would be tighter,” Kangas said.

“Makes you wonder about the Bureau,” Mustapha agreed. “And Homeland Security.”

“And the Company. The Van Buren kid was one of theirs.”

The men were Islamic jihadists from the Ramila Mosque, Abu al-Amush who’d been born and raised in Baghdad, and Richard Hamadi, who’d come over to Detroit with his parents when he was a child. Al-Amush had been radicalized during the tail end of the Saddam Hussein regime and then in the war with the Americans, learning to hate whatever side was in power. And he had brought his message first to Detroit where he’d recruited workers from the auto assembly lines, and finally here two years ago, bringing Hamadi with him, when he’d been lured by the Ramila’s imam, to carry the message of hatred to the young men raising money for the cause.

And carry out the occasional assignment.

Mustapha had been the lead contact man with the mosque, which had been moved in secret from its storefront months ago, leaving behind only the shell that had been destroyed in the explosion after the deaths of Van Buren and Givens. And convincing the imam and his followers had been relatively easy; they were all fanatics whose attention was totally focused on only two things: hatred and money. Kangas was the influential American businessman with deep pockets who’d been taken in by Mustapha, a true believer and a dedicated jihadist himself.

This assignment today, for a further contribution of ten thousand dollars to the cause, was right up al-Amush’s alley, who’d learned all there was to know about IEDs, especially cell phone controlled IEDs, in Baghdad so that he could have written an instruction manual on the subject, except that he was practically illiterate, as were many of the so-called freedom fighters.

Kangas and Mustapha moved to a grave site a little closer to the driveway, from where they could watch the maintenance workers without appearing to be paying any attention.

“Fucking rag heads,” Kangas muttered.

“At least they have a cause,” Mustapha said. “Something we don’t.”

Kangas looked over in surprise. “Give me a break.” He nodded down toward the two men who’d pried the storm sewer lip up and were rolling it back to the truck. “Tell me about them. What service do you suppose they’re providing?”

“At least they think they know who their enemies are. We’ve been over there, we know the drill on the streets. They get their heads so filled with shit in the mosques that they practically think they can walk on water. They look forward to dying.”

“Which leaves us, contracting to protect the good guys,” Kangas said.

“Up until now, Tim. ’Cause I’m telling you that this shit just ain’t right, and you know it as well as I do. Bagging bad guys in the field is one thing, this is something different, and I don’t know if this is why I signed on.”

“The money’s goddamned good.”

“Fuck the money.”

“I’ll take your share,” Kangas kidded, worried for the first time. He wasn’t about to walk away from Admin, not until shit began to happen, not until the center started to fail, which wasn’t quite happening yet. But he’d never had an inkling until now that Ronni might be developing a conscience.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

The maintenance workers loaded the heavy forged iron sewer lid into the van, waited a few moments as a car came up from Southgate Road, the driver steering around the cones and stopping at the gate, then unloaded another sewer lid, this one six inches thicker, with an unusual starfruit shape on the underside. They quickly manhandled it the short distance and carefully placed it over the two-foot diameter opening in the road.

By the way they handled the replacement lid it was obvious even at a distance that it was much heavier than the original. But their movements had been masked by the van from anyone at the gate, and in the short interval the new lid had been visible from anyone on the road below the gate, or from inside the cemetery where Kangas and Mustapha watched, no one had shown up. It was the one bit of luck they’d counted on.

The contingency plan had been to blow the IED now.

Kangas withdrew his hand from the cell phone in his jacket pocket, and the maintenance workers removed the traffic cones, got in their van, did a U-turn, and drove off.

When the correct car approached the sewer lid, Kangas would key a telephone number into his cell phone, omitting the last digit until just before the front bumper of the car reached the lid. It would only be a matter of a second before the call was connected, and a signal sent to the IED attached to the underside of the lid. It was a shaped charge, and the new sewer lid had been ground down in such a way that when the Semtex went off the blast would send a firestorm of lethal shrapnel and super hot gases upward, blowing apart anything directly above. No one would survive, even if they were riding in an armored limousine.

It was only a few hours now until the funeral.

They turned and headed back up to the LeSabre. “There’s more here than we’re being told,” Mustapha said. “You’ve figured that out, haven’t you?”

“I don’t give a shit,” Kangas said. “I’m given an assignment and I do my job. Just like I did in the Company.”

That wasn’t entirely true and both men knew it, but Mustapha said nothing.

“Look, you don’t want to do this shit with me, I’ll take care of it myself.”

“Mustapha shook his head. “No. We’re in this together, just like from the beginning. We’re a team. Doesn’t mean I have to like what we’ve been handed.”

“I don’t much like it either, and it doesn’t have anything to do with wiping out a couple of incidentals, whoever’s with him in the car. It’s McGarvey I’m worried about. If we don’t take him out this afternoon we could be in a world of shit.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure we do the job right.”

TWENTY-TWO

The afternoon was almost too bright, the sky too clear, the air too balmy for a funeral, as McGarvey walked out to the same Cadillac Escalade that had brought him over from Andrews. He’d been handcuffed, at the request of the federal marshals — it was standard procedure — his sport coat over his shoulders, and Pete and Dan Green were on either side of him.

Steve Ansel and Doug Mellinger were waiting at the SUV, all four doors open, their jackets unbuttoned. No one wanted trouble today.

“Just a minute,” Pete said, and she produced the key for the handcuffs. “No trouble, Mr. Director?” she asked. “Your word?”

“My word,” McGarvey said.

“This is bullshit, Pete,” Green objected.

“It’s his son-in-law’s funeral, goddamnit,” Pete said and she glanced at the federal marshals. “Any objections?”

Ansel shrugged. “You drive. We’ll sit in the back with Mr. McGarvey, just to make sure.”

“Afterward we’re coming back here. We’re not finished with the debriefing.”

“You have him for as long as you want,” Ansel said. “That was the interagency understanding.”

Only a part of McGarvey had listened to the exchange, but it had registered with him; he understood the bureaucratic bullshit-speak that was a separate language not only in the District of Columbia and most of the Beltway, but for the isolated center here and there, like the CIA, or Quantico, or Fort A. P. Hill and the Farm, of course. But he’d been a part of the establishment, or sometimes on the fringes, for so long that he understood not only what was being said, but what was meant between the lines. Unofficially the CIA and just about every other intelligence or law enforcement agency had been at odds for years, not sharing intel, not really cooperating, and now a pair of federal marshals had most likely been ordered to give the Company enough rope to hang itself — or at least cause an embarrassment.

“Fine,” Pete said, and they all got into the SUV, with her behind the wheel, and headed down the hill and along the long sweeping curve past the OHB, the front parking lot nearly full.

They passed through the front gate and headed down to Washington. Traffic was light, nevertheless the pair of deputy marshals in the back with McGarvey had their heads on swivels. No one wanted an incident, but Mac did have a reputation; wherever he went trouble seemed to materialize.

Pete glanced in the rearview mirror. “It’s not being made public that Mr. McGarvey has been charged with anything, or is under arrest.”

Neither marshal commented, and McGarvey got the impression that they couldn’t care less. A pair of LE officers simply doing their duty, doing what they’d been tasked to do.

“In any event it’s our call,” Pete said. “If this became public there’d be a firestorm. The media would come down on us like a ton of bricks. Nobody wants that. The fact a former DCI is in custody for treason is spectacular. It’s not every day something like that happens.”

It came to McGarvey that Pete was up to something, and he could see that Dan Green was wondering the same thing, because he was giving her an odd look. But Ansel and Mellinger weren’t getting it, or didn’t give a damn.

“Do you think there’ll be a trial?” McGarvey asked, and Pete glanced at his image in the rearview mirror and their eyes met.

“That depends on what you give to us over the next few days or weeks,” she said, and her partner gave her a double take. “We’ll have to keep you in isolation to run down all the facts here. But no one wants to rush into anything blindly, right?”

Ansel glanced at McGarvey and then at the back of Pete’s head. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, it’s classified for now, I’m afraid,” Pete said. “Need to know, and all that. You understand. And trust me we appreciate your help. Taking responsibility for Mr. McGarvey’s security as well as his safety. It takes the burden off us.”

Ansel was getting angry. “What the hell are you going on about?”

Pete glanced over her shoulder. “Hey, listen, we’re just following orders like you guys. Doesn’t mean we have to like it. Right?”

Mellinger said something like She’s fucking with us, or at least that’s what it sounded like to McGarvey and he gave Pete a brief smile. She’d just told him that she was going to cut him some slack.

“Actually it’s about Administrative Solutions,” McGarvey said. “The contracting company that took over from Task Force One in Iraq. They’re probably working for someone right here in D.C., and I’ve probably gotten a little too close.”

McGarvey was a well-built man in obviously good shape, but Ansel and Mellinger were like fullbacks while he was like an aging, former college quarterback. They weren’t taking him seriously, and were making no bones about it.

“We don’t need your bullshit, Mr. McGarvey,” Ansel said. “As soon as we can get you back to the Farm, we’ll be out of your hair. And I don’t give a shit what happens after that.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do.”

“What was that?” the deputy federal marshal asked, angrily.

“You’re just doing your job.”

Ansel hesitated a second. “Right. But I’m warning you not to try anything stupid. If you do I’ll personally come down on you hard. I don’t like traitors.”

“Accused traitor,” McGarvey corrected him. “No trial yet.”

He glanced up at the rearview mirror and Pete was watching him, a quizzical expression in her eyes. She’d given him an opening, but she had no idea what he had just done with it.

Ansel was rising to the bait, and it was clear he wanted to say something else, but Mellinger gave him a knowing shrug — this shit doesn’t matter — and Ansel settled down. But the exchange would end up in the reports they would file later this afternoon, and would become a part of the official McGarvey File, just as the encounter he’d had with Sandberger and Remington in Frankfurt was.

They came down the GWM Parkway passing Theodore Roosevelt Island on their left, the afternoon now even brighter than it had been up at the CIA, and got off at Arlington Memorial Drive, and it struck McGarvey again why he was coming to this place, his mood deepening.

Todd had once told him in confidence that in some ways he was intimidated by his wife. “Sometimes she’s more macho than I am. So what the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know what to say, how to react when she gets like that.”

“It’s a defense mechanism,” he’d advised his son-in-law. “I wasn’t around when she was growing up, and she built up this heavy-duty fantasy in her head about me as a superman. Something she figured she had to live up to as best she could. There were a few years there in grade school and junior high that she was getting into fights just about every day. She wanted to be just like her father. Katy told me that the worst thing any of the kids at school could call her was feminine, or girly girl. And she’s probably still fighting that chip on her shoulder.”

“She’s in competition with me now?”

“Yeah,” McGarvey’d said smiling. “You just inherited the problem.”

“What the hell do I say to her?”

McGarvey remembered laughing out loud, even though his son-in-law had seemed so forlorn. “Tell her that you love her, and make sure you mean it. It’ll take the wind out of her sails.”

Apparently that tactic had worked, because McGarvey had never heard another complaint from Todd. And now his son-in-law was gone, and Liz had no one to compete with on her level.

TWENTY-THREE

Kangas pulled into the parking area at the Tomb of the Unknowns from where they would be able to watch Todd Van Buren’s funeral procession arrive and depart. “You okay?” he asked Mustapha.

“I’m steady, I just don’t have to like it. But if we can take McGarvey down it’ll make my day. Give me the phone.”

Kangas considered for a moment, but then handed his partner the cell phone they would use to trigger the IED. Mustapha was more of an explosives expert than he was anyway, and the logical choice as point man, and for now, at least, he seemed to have all of his shit in one sock.

Scuttlebutt during their old CIA days was that McGarvey had started his career as a serious kick-ass black ops officer, who’d probably been responsible for more field actions that had resulted in eliminations than any other officer back to, and including, the OSS during the big war. And even though he was an old man now, in his early fifties, he was still a formidable force. Someone to be seriously reckoned with.

If you take a shot at the bastard, whatever you do, don’t miss. He’d heard that before, too.

The funeral was due to begin at two, and the front-end loader the gravediggers had used to open up the plot on the other side of Porter Drive headed away around one, a pair of groundsmen covering the mound of dirt with a tarp and setting up the electric device that would lower the coffin. A few minutes later a small flatbed truck showed up and four workmen set up several rows of chairs on the opposite side of the grave from where an Army chaplain would conduct the service.

A number of people came to visit the Tomb of the Unknowns, some of them taking a few pictures and then heading off, while others lingered. A few glanced down at the funeral preparations, but then turned away. The reminders of death were everywhere here, of course, but no one wanted to be reminded of any sense of immediacy. Whoever was going into the ground down there had died very recently. It was difficult to think about.

For a while after the chairs had been set up, and the workmen had driven away, only the occasional visitor passed on the road in front of the open grave, until fifteen minutes before the hearse with Van Buren’s body was due to arrive. At two, a plain blue Chevy pulled up and the chaplain, in uniform, showed up and walked down the hill to the grave site.

Others started arriving in singles and pairs, at least a dozen and a half cars, most of them civilian, until a Lincoln limousine showed up, and Kangas and Mustapha sharpened up. A pair of large men dressed in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, got out of the limo, and looked around for several long seconds before one of them opened the rear door, and a slightly built man with thinning hair, also dressed in a dark business suit, got out, and the three of them joined the others waiting at the side of the road.

“All the big dogs will be here,” Kangas said. The man from the limo was Dick Adkins, director of the CIA, and supposedly close with McGarvey.

“Maybe we should take them all down.”

“What’re you crazy?” Kangas said. “Christ, what the fuck’s the matter with you, man?”

“I’m steady, so just take it easy.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, then?”

“Just a thought, don’t have a fit,” Mustapha said. “The Company screwed us. Payback works for me. I mean, if we’re here and we’ve got the hardware, why not do a little something extra for ourselves?”

“Then what?”

Mustapha was gazing at the people gathered down the hill from them, a crazy look in his eyes that worried Kangas, who’d seen the same shit-faced expression on a kid in Baghdad a couple of years ago, just before the bomb went off, killing twenty Iraqi police recruits. Like the kid, and now Ronni, was seeing the face of Allah, or something. Paradise. It was all nuts.

“I don’t know,” Mustapha said, and he relaxed a little. “Maybe I’m just yanking your chain.”

“You’re a crazy son of a bitch.”

Mustapha laughed. “And you aren’t?”

For a second Kangas wanted to say something, thought he should say something, but then he turned away and shook his head. Just then the funeral procession, led by the long black hearse, came past on Memorial Drive. A few people turned to stare, but most turned away.

“Okay, here we go,” he said.

Following the hearse, a black Lincoln limousine pulled up above the grave site, a pair of bodyguards got out and helped two women out of the backseat. From photographs Kangas recognized them as McGarvey’s wife and their daughter — the wife of the CIA officer they’d taken out.

Four other cars pulled up, and people got out and joined the two women, and Kangas felt a brief pang that the funeral party was so small. But then he figured that his own wouldn’t be any larger, because besides Ronni there weren’t a whole hell of a lot of people who gave a damn. He hadn’t spoken with his ex-wife in nearly five years, they’d had no children, his mother was dead, his stepfather didn’t give a shit, he had no siblings and only a handful of aunts, uncles, and cousins, none of whom he’d spoken to for a long time.

“No McGarvey,” Mustapha said.

“Not yet,” Kangas said, and a Cadillac Escalade with government plates came down the hill and pulled up at the end of the line. The windows were so heavily tinted that Kangas couldn’t make out who was inside, but then a woman got out from behind the wheel, and a very short man got out from the other side.

They stood there for a moment or two, looking at the group gathered near the hearse. The rear doors opened and a pair of large men got out, one from either side, followed by Kirk McGarvey, on the passenger side.

“Bingo,” Kangas said, half under his breath. Yet he was a little disappointed, because the former DCI didn’t look like much after all.

TWENTY-FOUR

Liz had insisted that there be no church or chapel service, Todd would not have wanted it. What ceremonies were to be performed and what words were to be said, would take place graveside. She’d also insisted that his name as a CIA officer not be placed in the public record, instead she wanted only the anonymous star on the marble wall in the lobby of the OHB at Langley.

“He belongs there with those heroes,” she’d instructed. “He was one of them. He’d feel at home there.”

Nor had she wanted a big crowd, though all the instructors at the Farm and many students of Todd’s wanted to pay their respects today. She hadn’t wanted to share her grief or theirs with them.

“Stay here, please,” McGarvey told the deputy marshals and his CIA minders. “You have my word I won’t try to run.”

Ansel and Mellinger didn’t like it, but they nodded, and McGarvey walked past the line of cars to where Katy and Liz were standing near the hearse. The chaplain had walked back up the hill, but stepped discreetly aside.

Katy was holding on to their daughter, and she looked awful, her hair and makeup a mess. He’d never seen his wife this way, but Liz was practically catatonic with grief.

“It wasn’t just a robbery, was it?” Katy asked, her voice trembling, and barely audible.

“No,” McGarvey said, kissing his wife on the cheek. “Where’s the baby?”

“At the Farm.”

Liz suddenly focused, and she looked from her father to the hearse where the funeral director and his assistant had opened the rear door and withdrew the flag-draped coffin out onto a wheeled stand, and she almost collapsed.

“Easy, sweetheart,” McGarvey said, taking her arm.

“It’s not real,” she whispered. “This is not real.”

She was trembling, but not crying, and McGarvey’s heart broke not only for Todd, but because he couldn’t do a damn thing for his daughter when she needed him more than she’d ever needed him.

“Is it someone we can find and punish, Daddy?” she asked, her grip tightening on his arm.

“Yes,” he said close to her. “I’ll find them, I promise you.”

“No trial.”

“No trial,” he said.

Six men who’d come up from the Farm to represent everyone there, took up positions on either side of the coffin as pallbearers, and Liz turned to look at the people gathered on the side of the road, waiting to follow the coffin down the hill.

“We have to wait,” she said. “Otto and Louise aren’t here.”

McGarvey looked around, but she was right, and a tiny worry began to nag at the back of his head. “They’re probably hung up in traffic. They’ll get here, but we need to start now.”

Liz glanced at the people waiting, then up into her father’s face. “Okay, Daddy,” she said.

McGarvey nodded at the pallbearers, who gently lifted the coffin off the trolley, and with the chaplain in the lead they started down the hill, Liz’s and Katy’s bodyguards nearby, reminding everyone that this business was far from over.

Dick Adkins and Dave Whittaker held back, even though it would be up to Dick to present Todd’s widow with the flag, and McGarvey suspected they wanted to distance themselves from him until they saw which way he would jump. After Germany they were treating him like something volatile, nitroglycerin ready to explode at the slightest mishandling.

When the mourners were seated, and the coffin placed on the lift’s framework over the open grave, the chaplain began, and when he spoke Todd’s name out loud, Liz squeezed her eyes shut. Todd’s parents were dead, and only a few distant relatives had shown up. He’d once explained to McGarvey that his family was filled with odd ducks. They had sacks of money, but no one much cared for one another. It was one of the reasons he’d fallen for Liz. For as long as he could remember he’d wanted a wife and children, loads of kids and in laws and people who cared.

The chaplain was speaking about service above self, love of country, dedication, bravery, and finally the ultimate sacrifice of a man in his prime; platitudes, but comforting, except McGarvey was having a tough time settling down.

He glanced over at the two bodyguards from the Farm, and they acted nervous, too, their heads on swivels as if they expected something to happen at any moment. Adkins and some of the others seemed ill at ease, though Whittaker was apparently paying attention to the service.

None of this made any sense to McGarvey; not Todd’s death, not the obviously fake disk, not the murders of the Washington Post reporter and his family, not Sandberger and Administrative Solutions, especially not the Friday Club, because if there was a pattern he wasn’t seeing it. Yet everything within him, all of his senses, all of his experiences, his entire hunch-mechanism, if that’s what it could be called, were singing. Trouble was here and now, and he wasn’t armed.

The funeral was short, and after Adkins presented Liz with the folded flag he and Whittaker, who’d avoided eye contact with McGarvey, headed back up the hill to their limo, Dick’s bodyguards preceding them. The chaplain came over and shook hands with Liz and Katy and McGarvey and he, too, left, the other mourners stepping over to where Liz and Katy were seated to pay their respects.

Neither Katy, nor especially Liz, was engaged in any of it; they were in a different world, which made McGarvey feel all the more helpless. Senseless; so goddamned senseless, and yet there was a reason for Todd’s assassination.

When the last of the people were finally gone, McGarvey helped Liz and Katy to their feet, and walked back up the hill with them, their bodyguards never more than a few feet away.

At the road, he helped them into the CIA limo that would take them back to the Farm until the situation was resolved one way or the other, or until in McGarvey’s estimation it was safe for Katy to take their daughter, with bodyguards, back down to their home on Casey Key.

McGarvey stood at the open door, and touched his wife’s cheek. She was looking up at him, her eyes large and moist. She hadn’t cried during the service, she’d already shed her tears, and there would be more to come, but for now she was holding on.

“I can’t go with you now,” he told her, and she nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “And I know it’s foolish for me to say it, but be careful.”

“I will.”

“Hurry back to me, darling,” she said. “I miss you terribly.”

He reached in and kissed her. Liz looked at him. “Take care of Audie,” he said. “For now, that’s what’s important.” But she didn’t respond.

No one said a thing to McGarvey when he walked back to the SUV and got in the backseat, Ansel and Mellinger beside him, and Pete behind the wheel with Green riding shotgun. They were subdued, and the deputy federal marshals knew enough to keep their peace, and McGarvey was happy for it. He didn’t want to start any trouble, but the funeral, and being with his grief-stricken wife and daughter, had put him right at the edge.

The hearse had left immediately after the coffin had been carried down to the grave, and the chaplain and mourners were all gone now, leaving only the CIA’s Lincoln limousine a half-dozen car lengths up the road.

Pete started to pull out, but McGarvey stopped her.

“Let’s follow them,” he said. “I want to make sure they get out of here okay.”

“Yes, sir,” Pete said, and although the marshals didn’t like the delay they continued to hold their silence.

Something heavy was in the air, McGarvey could feel it, feel that something wasn’t right. He powered down the window and looked out, but except for the Tomb of the Unknowns up the hill no one was at any of the other graves or monuments within sight.

“That’s bulletproof glass, Mr. Director,” Ansel said, but McGarvey ignored him.

It was nothing but an imagination that was severely overworked, he told himself, as the Lincoln started down to the South Gate, and Pete fell in behind.

“They’ll be okay,” Pete said. “They have good minders who know their business. And once they reach the Farm no one will be able to touch them.”

“They have to get there first.”

Pete glanced over her shoulder. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “I want to follow them down to the Farm.”

“No way,” Ansel said, but Dan Green looked over his shoulder at McGarvey.

“I think it’s a good idea, Mr. Director,” Green said. “Just to be on the safe side.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The limo with the two women followed by McGarvey’s Cadillac SUV headed down Miles Drive that connected with Grant and then Clayton to the South Gate, at the same time Kangas got behind the wheel of the Taurus, Mustapha riding shotgun with the mobile phone detonator, a dreamy expression on his face. They had switched from the LeSabre, they had used before as an ordinary tradecraft precaution.

“Watch the delay,” Kangas said, pulling out of the parking area onto Memorial Drive, heading as quickly as was prudent in the direction McGarvey and his women had gone.

“The numbers are in,” Mustapha said. “All it wants is the nine.”

Kangas suddenly had a sharp premonition of doom, almost like the battlefield hunches that your time was numbered. He was spooked, in part because he’d temporarily lost sight of the two CIA cars around the curve, and in part because although McGarvey hadn’t looked like much in person, the man’s reputation was nothing short of fearsome.

“There they are,” Mustapha said, and Kangas saw the SUV through the trees below and to the left.

He started to turn onto McPherson Drive, which led straight down to Grant, when a Toyota SUV with a man behind the wheel and a woman riding in the passenger seat suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and he had to brake hard to avoid a collision. When the Toyota passed he pulled in behind it, but they were going too slow, and he was conscious only of the possibility that if they missed McGarvey this afternoon they’d have to try again. It was a prospect he did not relish, especially if someone discovered the IED under the storm sewer lid. McGarvey would put it together and realize that someone was gunning for him.

“Get around them,” Mustapha said. “We won’t make it in time.”

“We don’t want to get stopped.”

At the bottom of the hill where Grant met Clayton Drive, Kangas spotted the limo and McGarvey’s SUV through the trees approaching the South Gate. They’d run out of time. Except for some blind stupid bad luck they would have been in perfect position by now.

Mustapha was fingering the cell phone’s keypad. “What do you want to do?”

It was a matter of seconds before the two cars would go through the gate and pass over the IED.

“We’ll have to take the shot from here,” Kangas said, making the only decision that was possible.

The car they were following turned onto Clayton, evidently heading to the South Gate, and just past the intersection Kangas slowed nearly to a halt, no cars behind them or ahead of them at that moment.

Their view of the gate, and especially the driveway beyond it leading to Southgate Road, was mostly obscured by a line of trees. But it was the best they were going to do for now.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Mustapha demanded. “I can’t see a fucking thing.”

“Get ready with the nine,” Kangas said. “I’ll tell you when.”

“Goddamnit…”

“Stand by,” Kangas said as the limo passed through the gate. “Okay.” With a two-second delay from the time the last number was entered and the signal went to the IED, the timing would be tight. But they had no other choice.

He could just make out the hood of McGarvey’s SUV passing the gate.

“Now,” he said sharply.

Mustapha pressed the nine, but almost instantly a large explosion hammered the quiet afternoon, blowing branches off several trees directly in their line of sight.

No delay, the single thought flitted across Kangas’s mind.

TWENTY-SIX

One moment Katy’s limousine was there and in the next instant it was replaced by a bright flash, followed immediately by an overpowering bang and a millisecond later a concussion that knocked all the air out of McGarvey’s lungs.

Glass seemed to be flying everywhere inside the SUV, which swerved sharply to the left, slammed into the ditch at the side of the driveway, and stopped at an odd angle, its front bumper stuck in the upslope of the swale, throwing everyone inside forward against their restraints.

The front airbags had deployed but a large piece of smoldering metal had blasted through the windshield on the passenger side, slicing the airbag and decapitating Dan Green in a spray of blood that splashed McGarvey and the two federal marshals.

Pete Boylan had been shoved back by the airbag, and she was pawing at the material, but she seemed to be in a fog, not really aware of what had just happened.

McGarvey could just make out what remained of the Company limo, the wreckage lying on its side. Nothing was left of it except the engine block and some twisted lengths of metal attached to the badly distorted frame, which couldn’t be recognized as being a part of a car just a moment ago. Very little of the cabin was intact, nor were any bodies visible, though four people had been inside the car. Flames and dark, greasy smoke rose from the wreck.

All of that came to McGarvey in the first second or two after the explosion, the horrible thought crystallizing in his mind that his wife and daughter had been killed right in front of his eyes. Not twenty feet away from him.

Every part of his body ached; it felt as if he’d been run over by a truck, and sounds were distorted. It was as if he were in a dream state where he couldn’t make his arms and legs function.

Ansel on his left had pulled himself up and he was saying something impossible to understand. And Mellinger had been shoved aside, and lay doubled over on the floor up against the right rear door.

McGarvey managed to reach over him and yank the door handle, but the car’s frame was bent and the door jammed. He braced his back against Ansel, who was struggling to come to his senses, and kicked at the door, once, twice, and on the third time it screeched open.

Ansel was trying to grab for him, but McGarvey scrambled over Mellinger, who was starting to come around, and tumbled out into the ditch.

He got to his feet and for another second stood, drunkenly swaying, until he was able to climb up onto the driveway and totter toward the burning wreck. But the intense heat and thick black smoke stopped him from getting close.

And it hit him, fully hit him, Katy and Liz were dead. There would be no bringing them back, nor would there be much of anything left to bury.

He raised his right hand to shield his eyes against the brightness of the flames, wanting to see his wife and daughter, their remains, but nothing was there. The blast had come up from the road, blowing out the bottom of the limo that had apparently been an ordinary VIP vehicle, and therefore unarmored.

In the far distance he thought he might be hearing a siren, but then it was gone, and he wasn’t sure he’d heard anything.

In pieces now it was really hitting what had just happened, and more than that, why it had happened, and he focused on two names: the Friday Club and Administrative Solutions.

He saw the expressions on Sandberger’s and Remington’s faces in Germany.

He heard Todd’s voice on the cell phone.

He felt his wife’s body against his as he’d hugged her before the funeral, and saw the devastated look in Liz’s eyes.

And Otto and Louise not showing up.

Nothing was making any sense to him, and it was driving him nuts.

He paced a few feet to the left, and then to the right, like a caged animal seeing its freedom just beyond a fence. For this moment he was hammered into inaction, if not submission, so overwhelmed by what had happened even he was having trouble fully comprehending the situation. The fear that his family would someday pay the price for what he was had always preyed on his mind; in fact, he had left Katy early in their marriage in what he’d come to believe was a false hope of saving her, or removing her from danger.

And now he asked himself if he’d been right to come back, and that burden was the most terrible thing he’d ever faced in his entire life. He was mad at himself and afraid for what might happen next. What he might do. What self-control remained after Todd’s assassination had been erased.

Someone was shouting his name, and he turned in time to see Ansel coming across the driveway, his pistol drawn, Mellinger just a few paces behind. For a split second he had no idea what they wanted, and what Ansel was shouting, but then it came to him in nearly the same force as the explosion, that he was their prisoner, and they were going to take him into custody.

Todd’s death had been hard enough on him, but this, now, was devastating, and there was no telling what a former black ops officer, an assassin, might do next. The safest thing would be to get him someplace safe, under lock and key until he could be calmed down and this mess sorted out.

“On the ground,” Ansel shouted. “On the ground now!”

McGarvey watched the big man charging across the driveway, his pistol coming up.

“On the ground,” the federal marshal shouted again.

Mellinger had drawn his pistol, but he looked a little shaky.

At the last moment, McGarvey stepped aside out of the line of fire, kicked the side of Ansel’s left knee, which caused the man to stumble, and twisted the Glock 22 out of his grip.

Ansel reached out and tried to break his fall, but McGarvey shoved him aside with his knee, and turned to face Mellinger, pointing the pistol at the federal marshal’s face.

Mellinger pulled up short eight or ten feet away, almost losing his balance. He was still shaky and he knew it.

“Throw your gun away and get on the ground.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Director.”

“I don’t want to shoot you, but I will,” McGarvey said, conscious that he was running out of time here. He could definitely hear sirens in the distance now, and there was no way he was going to give himself up.

“You’re under arrest for…”

“You saw what just happened here, goddamnit!”

“Mr. Director, you are my prisoner,” Mellinger said doggedly. “And I am taking you in.” He started to raise his pistol.

“I’m sorry,” McGarvey said, and he shot the man once in the left thigh, knocking him to the pavement, and before the federal marshal could react McGarvey was on him kicking his pistol away.

“You son of a bitch,” Mellinger shouted.

“I didn’t kill you or your partner, remember that,” McGarvey told the federal marshal.

He backed away and looked again at the remains of the Company limo, a black rage threatening to consume him. All he could think about was getting away from here. The sirens were getting much closer now.

He turned as a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV pulled up, and raising his pistol he hurried across to the driver’s side.

The window powered down, and Otto was there, dressed in a black suit, the tie correctly knotted, his long normally out of control hair neatly brushed. He was gripping the wheel with both hands, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he was trying to talk, but couldn’t.

His wife, Louise, leaned over from the passenger side. “Get in the car, Kirk,” she shouted.

He hesitated for just a second, not sure how he could go on. But then he knew how he was going to do it, and he knew why, and he yanked open the rear door and jumped in.

TWENTY-SEVEN

On Jessup Drive, above the South Gate, Kangas had seen everything, pulling up just after the explosion. He hoped to see McGarvey’s car destroyed, but instead the limo bearing the man’s wife and daughter had gone up in a flash, with no possibility that anyone inside could have survived.

McGarvey had jumped out of the Escalade and had taken down two men, both of them armed, and had even shot one of them in the leg, before he’d commandeered the Toyota SUV.

“Maryland plates,” he shouted, as the Toyota sped away as if the driver had been there just to pick up McGarvey and get him away. But that made no sense.

“Did you get a number?” Mustapha asked.

The few other cars that had been coming down either Clayton, Jessup, or Patton drives had all made hasty U-turns moments after the explosion and were speeding away. No one wanted to be in the middle of what obviously was some sort of terrorist attack.

“Niner-two-peter, two-romeo-peter.”

“Get us the hell out of here,” Mustapha said, writing the number on a scrap of paper.

Kangas headed up Jessup, which would take him to the cemetery’s main exit on Memorial Drive and then across the river back into the city in the opposite direction that the authorities would be coming. But he figured it would be only a matter of a few minutes before somebody wised up and stationed squad cars at all the gates.

“Son of a bitch, that was close,” Mustapha said.

Kangas glanced at him. “You missed.”

“I didn’t have a clear line of sight.”

“Well we’re in some deep shit now. And we’re going to have to clean the mess ourselves before it gets totally out of hand.”

Mustapha was silent for a moment but then he shook his head as if he’d come to some decision. “Either that or we bug out and take our chances somewhere else.”

“We’re going to finish this, Ronni.”

“Did you see that bastard take those two guys down? It was a walk in the park for him.”

“They weren’t expecting him to come at them like that.”

“Bullshit. They drew their pieces.”

“Now we know what to expect,” Kangas said. “We won’t make the same mistake they did. Anyway he didn’t kill them. Which means they’re probably Company security, or maybe Bureau muscle or federal marshals.”

“It looked like he was in custody.”

“But why?” Kangas said.

They reached the exit on Memorial Drive, traffic panicky as it came out of the cemetery, and when they got to the bridge across the river Kangas speed-dialed Remington’s encrypted number. It was a call he didn’t want to make, but if they weren’t going to bug out, as Mustapha had suggested, they’d have to come clean.

Remington answered on the first ring as if he’d had his cell phone in hand and was waiting for the call. “Yes?”

“There’s a problem.”

“Tell me,” Remington said.

“We got hung up behind some traffic on the way out after the funeral and had to guess when to push the button. We got it wrong. McGarvey survived but his wife and daughter were killed outright.”

“What happened next?” Remington asked, and it didn’t sound as if he were the least bit concerned.

“McGarvey was like a crazy man. He took down two armed men — probably CIA security or maybe federal LEs — shot one of them in the leg and then jumped in the backseat of a dark Toyota SUV and took off. We got the Maryland tag number. You can run it.”

“Give it to me.”

Kangas repeated the number.

“Did you manage to get away clean?”

“Yes. There was a lot of confusion. Nobody was paying attention to anything except getting the hell away.”

“Where are you now?”

“Just getting off the Arlington Memorial Bridge,” Kangas said. “I’m going up to Rock Creek Park in case you need to meet up.”

“No,” Remington said. “I want you to go to ground for now, until I can figure out something.”

“Sorry, sir. But if we’d been given more time to plan—”

“I don’t want to hear excuses,” Remington shot back. “This isn’t over, nor is your involvement. McGarvey is still a problem. He’s still your problem. But for now you’re to keep out of sight until I can work out what comes next.”

“Mr. Sandberger—” Kangas said, but again Remington cut him off.

“Will not be bothered with this for the moment.”

“Can you tell me if McGarvey was under arrest, because the two guys on his ass sure didn’t act like bodyguards?”

“He’s been charged with treason.”

It wasn’t what Kangas had expected to hear. “Holy shit,” he said half under his breath. “Why not let the FBI do our work for us? At the worst he’ll go to prison, at best he’ll get shot to death trying to escape.”

“There are other considerations,” Remington said. “None of which are any of your business at this juncture. For now keep your heads down, but keep in touch. There’ll be more.”

“Treason for what?” Kangas asked. “If we’re going to continue to put our asses on the line and either get arrested or taken down by the crazy son of a bitch, we ought to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

“What you’re dealing with is a million-dollar bonus. For each of you.”

Kangas’s breath was taken away. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’re going to ground.”

“Good man.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

The house on Whitehaven was quiet, Colleen had gone to a meeting of one of her charity events and the cook and cleaning lady had the afternoon off. Remington had poured himself a large snifter of a good Napoleon brandy after the call from Kangas and he stood now at the window of his study turning over the possibilities in his mind.

He would have to call Roland with this, of course, but before he did so he needed to think things through. Kangas and Mustapha had screwed up, that much was clear, and there was no question now that they had become expendable. In fact, they might even have become liabilities, depending if anyone had seen them near the scene.

But beyond that they would have to deal with a man who couldn’t be more highly motivated to strike back at whoever he suspected had killed his wife and child. He’d come to Frankfurt to confront Roland, whose name he’d told them was on Alexandar Turov’s computer in Tokyo, which meant the former CIA director had at least part of the puzzle, and it meant that he would probably come after Admin, especially Roland.

And he turned that over in his mind. It was possible that McGarvey would even manage to take Roland out, leaving Admin without a CEO, which was a role Remington had always seen himself filling.

But this had to be done carefully, subtly, because Roland was nobody’s fool. McGarvey as a tool, as a weapon, was a difficult, interesting possibility.

Remington drained the last of the brandy, and at his desk brought up a nationwide LE search engine, and entered the Maryland tag number Kangas had given him. The vehicle came up as a 2008 dark blue Toyota SUV, registered to Pierre Alain, MD, with an address up in Baltimore, with no wants or prior violations.

The Baltimore address turned out to belong to a UPS package service and the American Medical Association had two Alains, one Rudolph and the other Michael, neither of them with practices on the East Coast.

Following a hunch about the name, Remington tried the French National Medical Association directory, and came up with Pierre Alain, a GP with Medicins Sans Frontiers, present location unknown. But when he checked the Doctors Without Borders directory, no Pierre Alain was on the roles.

The name Otto Rencke came to Remington’s mind, McGarvey’s computer freak friend in the CIA. He would have the wherewithal to fake an identity with little or no problem, especially one that would be bulletproof. Which meant with Rencke’s help McGarvey would be safe from rearrest for the moment.

But a man like that would not go to ground for very long, especially not with his motivation, and especially not if he were offered an enticing target. Something that might show up on Admin’s Website, and something that Rencke would be sure to see.

It was two in the afternoon here but eleven-thirty in the evening in Baghdad when Remington poured another brandy then got through to Sandberger’s encrypted satellite phone. It had been less than one hour since the botched assassination in Arlington, but nothing had shown up on any of the online news sites, except that an explosion of unknown origin had taken place at the cemetery’s South Gate, casualties were likely. To this point no witnesses had come forward, though an unnamed source suggested a pair of federal government vehicles may have been targeted.

“I take it that the explosion at Arlington I’m hearing about involved our boys,” Sandberger said, and Remington thought he was hearing music in the background, and perhaps a woman’s laughter.

“Yes, but there was a mistake.”

“Is McGarvey dead?”

“No, and he’s on the loose,” Remington said.

Sandberger said something away from the phone, and the woman stopped laughing and a moment later the music stopped. “Tell me everything.”

Which Remington did, leaving out nothing but his speculations about Otto Rencke getting word to McGarvey that Sandberger was back in Baghdad, sections of which were essentially still lawless. In his present frame of mind it was no stretch to expect that McGarvey would go to Iraq to try to take Roland out.

“Killing his wife and daughter, as you say, in front of his eyes certainly gives the man the motivation to come after us. But why didn’t Kangas and Mustapha finish the job? That was damned sloppy on their part; when this business is done with I want them eliminated. Erased from the face of the earth as if they’d never existed. Clear?”

“Clear. But trying to take McGarvey down just then would have put them in extreme jeopardy, and not simply from McGarvey himself. If they’d been taken into custody at the scene, the fact that they were Admin contractors would have come out. In fact, they probably did the right thing getting out of there before the authorities arrived.”

“Failure is never the right thing, Gordon,” Sandberger said harshly. “I want you to find out who actually owns the Toyota that picked up McGarvey. It’ll give us a lead as to where the man’s gone to ground. Once you have that I want him taken down, no matter the cost of the resources. Am I clear on that as well?”

“Perfectly,” Remington said. “But there may be another possibility you might want to consider.”

“I’m listening,” Sandberger said, coldly.

“Too many things have been happening here in the Washington area. We need to allow things to cool down before this comes back to us, especially to you, from someone other than McGarvey.”

“If you’re talking about my name and McCann’s on Turov’s laptop, if the CIA had any proof of my involvement don’t you think they would have come after me by now?”

“But if a connection is also made between you and the Friday Club, Foster might send someone after you.”

“Bullshit, Gordon. We’re Foster’s personal contractor service. Do you think the bastard would dare try to hire another service to take us down? We have safeguards, and he knows it. Something happens to Admin and the backlash would end up in his lap.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Admin, Roland. I was thinking about you personally.”

Sandberger fell silent for a few seconds. “You’re even more of a devious son of a bitch than I thought, and I like it. What do you have in mind?”

“One other consideration. Back to Foster and why he hired us in the first place. I don’t really care what sort of a deal you signed up for, what I’m more interested in is what Foster did before he came to us. Before he felt the need to come to us. Do you see what I’m driving at?”

“Perfectly. But the only deal, as you put it, was simply that he felt someone in the media might be putting together a hatchet job on him and his pals and that might make it to the Bureau, and he wanted us to find out what was going on, and if the rumors were true nip it in the bud. But none of us thought it would involve the CIA.”

“There was McCann, and I think it’s a safe bet that he wasn’t killed in the line of duty, but because of his affiliation with Turov. Another safe bet would be that McGarvey was somehow involved, and when it was over he handed it to someone inside the Company and walked away.”

“You’re probably right again. So taking out his son-in-law might not have been the right thing to do. But I don’t see that we had any other choice.”

“Neither do I. But now he’s become our problem, and we have to deal with him. But not here in Washington. Maybe if he turns up back in Florida, or somewhere out of the country.”

Sandberger laughed. “Maybe he’ll come here,” he said. “It would be the perfect solution.”

“You’d want that?” Remington asked, smiling. Maneuvering Sandberger was getting easier with each try.

“Absolutely.”

“How much longer will you be in Baghdad?”

“A few days, maybe a week.”

“Let me see what I can put together. I’ll give you the heads up.”

“Yes, do that,” Sandberger said.

TWENTY-NINE

At the brownstone in Georgetown McGarvey paced up and down in the kitchen, stopping from time to time to look out the window at the little garden in back that Louise had planted. But he wasn’t actually seeing anything except for Katy’s face in the back of the funeral car, looking up at him with trust and love, and then the terrible flash. And it was over.

Louise came over to him, her eyes still wet. “Can I fix you something to eat? Maybe a drink?”

He looked up at her. “I’ll have to do something for Audie.”

Louise’s voice caught in her throat. She was a tall, slender woman, whose hair was normally just as out of control as her husband’s. And though she wasn’t as smart as Otto, she was a genius in her own right. And sweet, kind, thoughtful, considerate, and Otto and everyone else who’d ever come in contact with her, including McGarvey, thought the world of her. Katy and Liz had loved her.

Otto had come in from parking the Toyota in the back. “We’re taking her,” he said. “Louise and I can’t have children of our own, so we’ll adopt her, if it’s okay with you.”

A look of wonderment and pure joy came into Louise’s round face, and her eyebrows shot up, as she looked from her husband back to McGarvey. “Is it possible, Kirk?” she asked. “I mean, Otto and I haven’t discussed it or anything — there was no need for it — but I think it’s a fabulous idea. I know it’s way too soon—”

McGarvey had seen the logic and the love in Otto’s offer the moment the words came out of his friend’s mouth. And he could see that Louise was so happy she was frightened. They wanted children.

He nodded. “Liz would have liked that,” he said, a tremendous burden, one of many on his shoulders, lifted. “So would have Todd.”

“She’ll stay at the Farm for now,” Otto said. He’d poured McGarvey a snifter of cognac and brought it over. “Sit down now and drink this. We have a lot to talk about. Somebody wants you dead, because sure as hell that was no accident, nor were Mrs. M. and Elizabeth the targets. You were. Which means someone was shitting enough Twinkies they thought they could get away with assassinating not only a CIA officer and a newspaper reporter, but a former director of the Company. A man who’ll probably come under indictment for treason over the Pyongyang thing.”

McGarvey leaned back against the counter and took a drink. Too soon, he wanted to say. Time to run, this time for good. Maybe back to Greece. Bury himself so that he could start to heal.

He didn’t know if he could stay here now and yet he knew damned well it was too late for him to turn away. It had been too late after the polonium thing in Mexico, and far too late when he had killed Turov in Tokyo and when Todd had put a bullet in McCann’s head at the safe house up near Cabin John. All that had happened over the past year, and yet it seemed like a century ago.

And here he was, and it still wasn’t over.

His grip tightened on the brandy snifter and he looked down at what he was doing, his knuckles white, and with the most supreme effort of his life, he loosened up, took another drink, and put the glass down with a steady hand.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Otto exchanged a relieved glance with his wife. “We bought it about six months ago, just after the incident with Turov and Howard. I wasn’t picking up anything solid about what had been going on, but I thought there was a possibility that more would be coming down the pike. So I figured one of these days we might need a safe house off the Company’s books. Totally untraceable as are the utilities and taxes and the car. Sort of a hideout but right in the middle of things, you know what I mean?”

“Why weren’t you at the funeral?” McGarvey asked. “Liz asked about both of you.”

“Otto had a hunch that if something were to happen, Arlington would have been a good place for it,” Louise said. “I’ve learned to trust his instincts.”

“Why not more security officers?” McGarvey asked.

“I don’t know who to trust, Mac,” Otto said. “Honest injun, I can’t find anything, but I know something’s there. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. We didn’t know about the IED.”

“Someone had to be within a sightline to push the button. Did you see anything, did anyone see something?”

“There were lots of cars, and all of them got out of there in a big hurry after the blast. The shooters would have probably been among them.” Otto spread his hands. “I don’t know yet if any security cameras picked up something, but I’ll check on it this afternoon.”

“I’m not turning myself in,” McGarvey said. “Not until this is resolved.”

Otto nodded. “What do you want to do?”

“I’m going after Roland Sandberger, this time for real.”

“That’s wrong, Kirk,” Louise said. “There’s no proof he ordered this thing. You’ve killed people, like a soldier on the battlefield. But not this. Not execution style.”

McGarvey ignored her, his grief changing into a black rage he was having trouble controlling. “I want to know where he is right now.”

“After Frankfurt he went back to Baghdad, and Remington came home,” Rencke said. “But Louise is right, we have no proof that Admin was involved.”

“I’ll get the proof just before I kill him.”

Again Rencke exchanged a look with his wife, and spread his hands. “He always travels with two bodyguards. Tough guys. Well trained and highly motivated to keep the guy who signs their paychecks alive. They won’t be easy. And Baghdad’s still a dangerous place. Accidents happen all the time.”

“Works both ways,” McGarvey said, his bitterness barely below the surface.

“What happened to Dan Green and Pete Boylan?” Louise asked, trying to defuse McGarvey’s anger.

“Dan is dead, but I’m not sure about Pete. I think her airbag might have deployed in time to save here. I don’t know.”

“We should check on her,” Louise told her husband.

“I’ll need a weapon, whatever air marshals are carrying these days, probably Glock twenty-threes, and a Galco shoulder holster, some clothes, an ID, and a couple hundred dollars cash. And a sat phone. Encrypted.”

“You’re not getting to Baghdad like that,” Rencke said.

“Orlando, and I’ll need a rental car there.”

“You’re going home,” Rencke said. “But you don’t have to do anything like that. I can get everything you need from here.”

“I don’t want you and Louise involved more than you already are.”

“No shit, Mac, don’t do that to me — to us. You can’t just turn your back.”

“Goddamnit, I don’t want anyone else to get hurt!” McGarvey shouted coming away from the counter. “It’s enough. It’s… enough.”

Rencke nodded. “Okay, kemo sabe. I’ll get you to Orlando, but you gotta know that the federal marshals or at least the Bureau probably have someone watching your house.”

“I’ll deal with it.”

“You’re not going to hurt our own people,” Louise said, angrily.

“No,” McGarvey said. “Not badly.”

“When do you want to leave?” Rencke asked after a beat.

“Tomorrow afternoon. First I have to get some rest.”

“In the meantime what about me?”

“Find a connection between Sandberger, McCann, and the Friday Club. Someone funded the polonium-210 in Mexico and the hit in Pyongyang. Find the money trail, and maybe we’ll find out the why.”

THIRTY

The director of Central Intelligence Dick Adkins sat in the backseat of his armored Cadillac limousine heading up 17th Street to the White House wondering what the hell he was going to tell the new president that made any sense. Except for the fact he’d once worked with and then for McGarvey before becoming DCI himself, this briefing would have landed in the lap of Madeline Bible the director of National Intelligence.

But President Joseph Langdon had asked specifically for Adkins, and although he’d been in office six months no one in Washington had really taken his measure yet. Everyone, including the media, was still being cautious, and Adkins wasn’t looking forward to the meeting.

At five-eight with a slender build, thinning sand-colored hair, and a pleasant if anonymous face, Adkins had never aspired to run the CIA. Unlike McGarvey he was more of an administrator than a spy, and unlike most of his other predecessors he’d never been politically connected. He’d just inherited a job that no one seemed to want when McGarvey left the Agency. He’d been stuck with it through the previous administration, though he had the feeling his tenure was about to come to an abrupt end.

They went up West Executive Avenue and stopped at the guardhouse, but were immediately waved through; Adkins’s face was a familiar one. The president’s national security adviser Frank Shapiro, a hawk-nosed ultra-liberal, met him at the West Entrance, a sour expression on his narrow face.

“You’re late, Mr. Director.”

“Unavoidable,” Adkins said, not rising to the bait. Within ten days after the new administration was in place, he and Shapiro had gone head-to-head over a National Intelligence Estimate in which Adkins had argued for the retention of the prisoner and interrogation facility at Guantánamo Bay.

“Over my dead body,” Shapiro had said flatly, and Adkins remembered wishing for just that.

They headed to the Oval Office, the West Wing bustling with activity this afternoon, and Adkins girded himself for what he knew was coming.

“You didn’t bring any briefing materials with you?” Shapiro asked. “The president has a number of serious issues he wants to discuss.”

“No, I brought nothing.”

“Top of the list is Kirk McGarvey. The man has become a menace, and the president wants him brought in.”

“Not such an easy job.”

“The CIA won’t be asked to handle it, we’re leaving it to the Bureau. But the president will want to have your advice. You know the man better than I do.”

Adkins almost called him a prick. “I wasn’t aware that you’d met him.”

“I never did,” Shapiro said. “But you know what I mean.”

Maybe asshole would have been a better word, Adkins decided.

President Joseph Langdon, a tall, ruggedly built man with features and mannerisms reminiscent of Lyndon Johnson, was seated at his desk in shirtsleeves, his tie loose, the directors of the FBI Benjamin Caffery and the National Security Agency Air Force Major General Warren E. Reed across from him. He looked up, a stern set to his mouth.

“I’m glad you’re here, finally. Now we can get started.” He nodded for Shapiro to join the meeting and to close the door.

No other chair had been set in front of the president’s desk, so Adkins was forced to remain standing. It was an insult.

“I want to know why better control wasn’t kept of McGarvey?”

“That was up to the Federal Marshals Service, Mr. President.”

“But he was in the custody of the CIA at Langley for debriefing. And prisoners accused of high crimes against the nation are generally not permitted to attend funerals. Especially uncuffed.”

“It was his son-in-law’s funeral.”

“It’s unfortunate. I’m told that Mr. Van Buren was an outstanding officer. But it changes nothing.”

“McGarvey is not guilty of treason.”

“Justice informs me otherwise,” the president said. “He will be brought in, and he will be prosecuted. Which is why you’re here. We want your input. You’ve worked for and with him for a number of years. Where has he gone? What will he do next?”

“I don’t know,” Adkins said. And he didn’t, though he had a fair idea that wherever he’d gone to ground it involved Otto Rencke, who’d also disappeared.

“Who killed his wife and daughter?” Caffery asked. He was a large man, with a round face and a WWII haircut, who in his six short months as the FBI’s director had already begun to develop the reputation of a man you never wanted to cross. A modern-day J. Edgar Hoover.

“Muslim extremists,” Shapiro answered for Adkins. “Roadside bombings have finally come to America. Although I don’t think anyone believes the target at Arlington was anyone other than McGarvey himself.”

“I agree, Frank,” Adkins said. “But it brings up the interesting question of just why your Muslim extremists wanted Kirk McGarvey dead?”

“Any number of reasons,” Shapiro shot back. “But the CIA would know more about that than I do. What’s the man been up to lately? I’ve seen no reports on his recent activities.”

“He was retired.”

Shapiro wanted to press the argument but Langdon held him off. “I’m sorry for Mr. McGarvey’s loss, but he’s brought many of his problems onto himself by his reckless actions.”

“In service of his country, Mr. President,” Adkins said, his voice rising. “Have you read his record, sir? His entire record?”

“You forget yourself,” Shapiro practically shouted.

“Do you people understand what sacrifices he’s made for his country?”

The president eyed him coldly then turned to Caffery. “How soon will you have McGarvey in custody?”

“It’s hard to give you an exact time table, Mr. President, but it will be soon. We believe he’s still in the Washington area. All public transportation venues are being watched twenty-four/seven, as are car rental companies. His photograph has been sent to every law enforcement agency within a one-hundred-mile radius of Arlington, and all of his known friends and associates are being tailed. We’ve requested wiretaps for a few of his acquaintances here and in Florida, which we should have within a few hours. We’ll bring him in.”

“Someone is bound to get hurt,” the president said.

“That’s a possibility we’ve considered, but when we have him located, we’ll go in with an overwhelming force.”

Adkins couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “His wife and daughter were killed in front of his eyes, for Christ’s sake. But he didn’t kill the marshals who wanted to take him in.”

“No,” Caffery said. “But he knocked one of the men to the ground and stole his weapon and used it to shoot the other marshal in the leg.”

“But not in the head, Benjamin,” Adkins said. “And believe me a head shot would have been easier for him than you can possibly imagine.”

Langdon gazed at Adkins as if he were seeing his DCI for the first time. He nodded. “Mr. Adkins, you’re fired. Your deputy director will take over on an interim basis.”

This hadn’t come as a surprise to any of them, but of the men in the room, Shapiro seemed to be the most smug.

“Leave us now. Clean out your personal items from your office, return your laptop and secure telephone and security badges and any files or other documents you might have in your possession.”

“It’s already been taken care of, Mr. President.”

“A release document under the Secrets Act is ready for your signature. Mr. Whittaker has it for you,” Langdon said. He got to his feet and extended his hand. “On behalf of a grateful nation—”

But Adkins just looked at him. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. President, but you have no idea who you’re dealing with or the serious nature of the problem he’s been trying to work out for his country.”

“If it’s found that you’ve withheld information, you will be prosecuted,” Shapiro told him.

“You haven’t a clue, do you,” Adkins said. “Well, neither do I. But I think if you press him people will get hurt.”

“If he contacts you we want to know,” Caffery said.

“I’m sure you’ll be monitoring my phone lines.”

“Of course,” General Reed said.

“God help you all,” Adkins said, and he turned and walked out of the Oval Office.