The Cabal (4 page)

“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.

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.”