The Cabal (48 page)

“I don’t know about this, Otto.”

“Piece of cake, Mr. Director, you’re doing just fine.”

“Are you going to work the China thing?”

“I’m already on it,” Otto said.

“Keep me posted.”

McGarvey held up at the side of the house until Pete disappeared into the woods. She’d been limping, and he figured that her wound had to hurt like hell. But she was dedicated; she believed in the mission in a way McGarvey wasn’t so sure still existed for a lot of people in the Agency.

“Pete’s on her way back to you,” he said. “Anything from Dick?”

“He got out with Security right on his tail,” Otto said. “But he’s clear and I’m talking him in.”

“I’m going to talk to Foster now and try to see what’s going on. But I won’t have a lot of time, because as soon as the Bureau and Marshals get out here they’re going to arrest me, and I’m not going to run or resist. We need the situation to come to a head.”

“It is, Mac,” Otto said. “Dick talked to Ron Loring who’s the Watch commander tonight. They’re monitoring a situation between Mainland China and Taiwan. All the missiles out there are being spun up, and everybody’s at Defcon two. Could get real hot any minute.”

“We knew it was going to involve China again, but there’d have to be a trigger before anyone would actually launch. Beijing’s not going to risk attacking Taiwan unless it had a good reason to do so. They’d end up the pariahs of the world. Probably slam their economy back fifty years. We’d certainly stop trading with them.”

“Maybe it’s just that simple. Maybe that’s exactly what Foster wants to happen.”

“Still wants for a trigger,” McGarvey said. “Go back to Remington’s list, and whatever you downloaded from David’s computer, and run all the names from the State Department and especially the Pentagon, see what those guys have been up to.”

“I’m on it,” Otto said, and McGarvey could hear the strain in his friend’s voice.

“We’ve come this far, we’re not backing down now.”

“Watch your back, kemo sabe, I shit you not.”

“Keep me posted,” McGarvey said and he called Whittaker’s cell phone.

“I’m listening.”

“Boberg is down, and my partner has left. It’s just me now.”

“Turn around and walk away, Mac, and you just might live to see the morning,” Whittaker said. “There’s nothing here for you now.”

“I know that the Chinese and Taiwan militaries have gone to Defcon two. Their missiles are being warmed up right now.”

Whittaker didn’t reply.

McGarvey stepped around the corner and walked to the steps leading to the veranda, his pistol in plain sight. “I’m coming to the front door. If someone is watching from inside, you’ll see that I’m tossing my pistol onto the ground.”

“Do it,” Whittaker said.

McGarvey ejected the magazine, tossed it off the porch, then ejected the single shell and tossed it and the gun away. “If you shoot an unarmed man you’ll have a tough time explaining it, no matter how many friends you think you have in high places. I just want to talk to Foster before I’m arrested.” He turned away as he pocketed the still connected cell phone.

The night was very quiet, no wind, no traffic noises, no boat horns in the river. Katy had always liked this time of the evening, just before bed. She said she’d never been afraid of the dark; in fact, she’d always felt cocooned, protected, safe, ready to dream.

It would take everything within his power not to kill them all, starting with Foster. Vengeance never solved anything, Louise had told him, but he didn’t know if he could believe it, or if he had ever believed it.

The door opened inward to a dark stair hall. “Keep your hands in plain sight and come in,” Whittaker said.

“First turn on the lights.”

“No.”

“Then you’ll just have to shoot me,” McGarvey said. “You’re a good shot, and I’m sure Sergeant Schilling is an expert marksman. The advantage is yours. And you’ll even get credit for stopping me. I just want to talk.”

A moment later the lights in the living room came on and spilled into the stair hall. Whittaker stood back from the open door, a standard military-issue 9mm Beretta in his hand, no silencer to degrade its accuracy.

There was no sign of Foster or of Sergeant Schilling.

“You wanted to talk to Mr. Foster, and he agreed,” Whittaker said. “Come in, Mac.”

“Only my friends call me that,” McGarvey said, and he walked into the stair hall and stopped just a couple of feet from Whittaker, whose gun hand was rock solid.

Foster stood just within the living room to the right, a disdainful but curious expression on his round, almost bulldog face. He had no intention of talking, and it was obvious by the way he held himself: tense, his eyes narrowed.

Sergeant Schilling stood just beyond the living room entry, in the lee of the grand staircase. He was pointing the Italian-made Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun in McGarvey’s direction. Even in the hands of an amateur the weapon was lethal out to a range of more than forty yards, and Schilling looked like anything but.

McGarvey took a step forward and to his right putting Whittaker between him and Schilling.

“You should have left when you had the chance,” Whittaker said.

“You knew I couldn’t leave it.”

“The hell of it is that I always liked you. All of us did when you were the DCI.”

“But why Arlington, David? Can you just tell me that much?”

“We never meant to hurt Kathleen or Elizabeth. The IED was meant for you.”

McGarvey nodded, because he knew that Whittaker was telling the truth. “What about China?”

“Enough,” Foster said.

Whittaker raised his pistol so that it was pointed directly at McGarvey’s face.

“I’m wearing a wire,” McGarvey said softly. “Otto’s recorded everything including our telephone conversations, and the two calls made from the house phone to the Bureau and the Marshals. Maybe you want to make a deal before it’s too late.”

“He’s lying,” Foster said.

Whittaker shook his head, a sick look on his face. “No, he’s not.”

“Anything new?” McGarvey said.

“One of our B-525 made an emergency landing at Hsinchu Air Base about six hours ago,” Otto came back.

“Who’s he talking to?” Foster demanded.

“Hsinchu Air Base, Taiwan,” McGarvey said. “Ring a bell?”

Whittaker went visibly pale. “Christ.”

“The crew off-loaded something into one of the 499th Tactical Fighter wing’s hangars,” Otto said. “Could have been missiles.”

“Is it possible that Chinese intelligence saw what was going on?” McGarvey asked.

“That’d be as close to a hundred percent as you could get.”

“Otto has found out about the B-525 emergency landing out there. Whatever the crew off-loaded could have been nuclear missiles, or at least that’s what Beijing probably believes.”

“Enough,” Foster roared. “Get that thing from him!”

Whittaker stepped forward and Schilling shouted something, but McGarvey moved left, away from the Beretta’s muzzle and snatched the pistol from the acting DCI’s hand.

Schilling fired three shots, the lead pellets shredding Whittaker’s back, destroying most of his spine, and violently shoving him forward.

McGarvey fell back, using Whittaker’s body as a shield, as Schilling
fired at least six more times; a few of the pellets hit McGarvey’s left shoulder and arm before he managed to fire two snap shots, one going wide, the other hitting the sergeant in center mass.

Pete had just about reached the highway where she’d parked Louise’s SUV when she heard the gunshots, including what sounded like an automatic shotgun, and she pulled up short and looked back.

The night was suddenly very silent, and she swayed on her feet trying to come to a decision. Mac could be down; in an unknown situation inside the house the odds stacked against him. And leaving him like this wasn’t an option. She’d lost one partner she didn’t want to lose this one.

She took two steps back the way she had come, but stopped.

“Goddamnit,” she muttered. This was bad, had been from the get-go. The man had lost his entire family; saw them murdered right in front of his eyes. And now she was supposed to turn her back on him?

She turned around again and ran the rest of the way through the woods to the Toyota, where she got her cell phone from her purse and called Otto.

“He made me leave, but there was gunfire,” she blurted.

“Mac’s okay for now,” Otto said. “He took out Foster’s bodyguard, and Whittaker is down. No one else is at the house.”

“Does he need help?”

“No. But the Bureau and Marshals are on their way, so you’ve got
to beat feet right now. Please tell me that you’re in the car, or close to it, and not still up at the house. We don’t know where you are. Louise had to switch the satellite back to the ship, someone was getting snoopy.”

“I’m in the car,” Pete said.

“Then get back here as fast as you can.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Otto said. “Some really bad shit is just about ready to happen. Maybe a shooting war between China and Taiwan.”

McGarvey disentangled himself from Whittaker’s ravaged body, got to his feet, and, throwing Foster a quick glance to make sure the man wasn’t armed, cautiously approached Schilling’s inert form, and kicked the shotgun away.

“He’s dead,” Foster said. “Both of them are.”

McGarvey safetied the Beretta and laid it on the hall table. “You must have expected casualties, otherwise why did you hire Administrative Solutions?”

“I underestimated you, Mr. McGarvey. We all did, except for poor David. But he was in over his head, and I think he was probably getting cold feet at the last minute.”

The front door was still half open and in the far distance McGarvey heard sirens, and perhaps the rhythmic thump of helicopter rotors.

“China,” McGarvey said.

“It’s too late to be stopped, you know,” Foster said. “Has been
since before Mexico City.” He was dressed in a natty blue blazer, khaki slacks, and an open-neck white silk shirt. He’d been drinking, his square-jawed face flushed. “In any event, what’s about to happen has been inevitable, actually, for a number of years. When the Soviet Union disintegrated under the weight of historical pressure, China was next. Always had been next.”