Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  Bambridge touched her shoulder. “He’s tough, and right now he’s in the best hospital in the world. On top of that the media is buying the fiction that he’s dead. Means whoever did it has gone to ground, and won’t be showing up for the foreseeable future.”

  Pete nodded, and Bambridge turned back to Otto.

  “The Watch had nothing, how about your threat board?”

  “Nada at this point, but my darlings are working the issue. My snap guess was one of his enemies came gunning for him. The Bureau sent a team down from Tampa to take a look, and their preliminaries should be showing up on the overnights.”

  “The guy who took down the pencil tower in Manhattan? He’s still at large.”

  “Could be, but there’s no real reason for him to come after Mac.”

  “Unless it’s a vendetta.”

  “Or something else,” Otto said.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Otto shrugged.

  “Talk to me, goddamnit. If something is coming our way, and trying to kill McGarvey was the opening shot, we need to know about it.”

  Otto hesitated.

  “What?” Pete asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have a guess. It’s Mac lying in there.”

  “Misdirection.”

  “Explain,” Bambridge demanded.

  Otto looked down the corridor toward the operating room doors. “No real reason for someone to kill him that way.”

  “Revenge,” Bambridge said. “Makes sense.”

  “Too easy.”

  “They want us to concentrate on Mac,” Pete said. “While we’re taking care of him, something else is going to happen. So it really doesn’t matter if he lives or dies, mission accomplished.”

  “No, that’s not it either. They wanted him dead. The chances of him surviving a car bomb were small. Means whatever they’re trying to do, they need to get Mac out of it. He’s the key.”

  “He’s been given no assignment,” Bambridge said. “He’s not working on anything for us.”

  Otto took a couple of steps down toward the operating room doors.

  Bambridge started after him, but Pete put out an arm to stop him.

  After a long minute Otto turned back. “Something is going to turn up in the next day or so, maybe as long as a month. Something we’d need Mac to look into.”

  “We have a veritable army of operators.”

  “None of whom are willing to cross any political lines. It’s coming and we’d damned well better be prepared because it’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  SIX

  Kamal, hair salt-and-pepper in a military cut, wearing a dark blue blazer, khakis and an open collar white shirt, registered at the Grand Hyatt Hotel under the name Paul O’Neal, from San Francisco. He was given a room facing 42nd Street, and he tipped the bellman well but not extravagantly.

  His fiction with the hotel clerk in Atlanta that he was flying to Chicago hadn’t been necessary, but it was one extra layer of cover.

  It was one in the afternoon as he stood looking down at the busy traffic; every other car, it seemed, was a yellow cab. New York had always been too frenetic for his tastes. Even frantic at times. Like London, or even more like Berlin. But after his attack on the pencil tower on East Fifty-seventh the city had gotten back to normal. After nine/eleven New Yorkers had gotten used to the disasters.

  He liked the calm quiet of France. The countryside just west of Dijon suited him well. He had set up as an upscale Australian by the name of Harris Frampton who’d retired early. He had a housekeeper and a cook, but lived a completely ordinary life, even participating in church services and acting on the board of directors of a support group for Médecins Sans Frontières.

  In the year he’d been in place, he’d gained the respect of just about all the locals.

  Once a month he took the train to Paris, where from an apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement near the Bois de Boulogne he maintained an internet website under the address SpecialServices.com.

  “Any undertaking of an international nature, to right wrongs committed by establishment powers, for a fee. Results guaranteed.”

  He’d gotten a few queries, most of which were extremely minor: a wife hinting that she wished her husband would vanish. A request for a missing persons search in Syria. Another simply wishing help blowing up shit.

  Until nine months ago when he was asked to meet someone in Beijing. The request specified that the meeting was to be a private one, and that the gentlemen involved were not Chinese nor were they representatives of the Chinese government.

  Assassinating McGarvey was job one, and his bank account in Guernsey had been credited with five hundred thousand euros as a down payment.

  The remainder of the assignment had taken the entire nine months to this point merely to rough out the plans, and to make his preparations.

  Today would be the first of his dress rehearsals.

  His pistol, silencer, spare magazines, ammunition and a package containing several sets of identification, including credit cards, were concealed in the false bottom of his roll-about suitcase. Thin sheets of gold foil stamped with images of clothing and toiletries lined the compartment. Airport scanners would see only the items etched on the foil, along with the actual pieces of clothing in the rest of the bag.

  This little piece of engineering he’d commissioned from an international diamond smuggler had gotten him through airports with no trouble.

  Kamal changed his blazer and shirt for a light sweater, and put a pair of thick-rimmed glasses in his pocket. He took the elevator down to the mezzanine, and from there the stairs to the lobby, and then another set to the Lexington Avenue level. At the end of a short corridor he came to an unmarked glass door that led to a tunnel that came out in Grand Central Terminal in what was called the Lexington Passage, and the Grand Central Market, busy at this hour.

  More than two dozen shops, selling everything from specialty foods and stationery, eyeglasses and cosmetics, and odds and ends were packed with shoppers on late lunch hours.

  Putting on his glasses, he took the stairs up to the main concourse and without hesitating he walked across to the stairs leading up to the west balcony.

  A lot people were coming and going from the lower levels, possibly as many as a thousand. Security officers, most of them in uniforms, patrolled the vast space. But no one paid any attention to the balconies, or the windows under the domed ceiling.

  He’d never been here before but he’d studied photographs and a couple of videos. The terminal reminded him of places in Europe—the size of it, the grandness, the magnificent architecture, yet no one seemed to be paying any attention, intent on getting to wherever they were going as quickly as possible.

  A man in a business suit gave him a passing glance, but then looked away.

  Plainclothes security, Kamal thought. The man had the look. Scanning the people for something, anything: a touch of fear, some nervousness, furtive looks at the uniformed officers, maybe even a hint of fatalism—this was to be their last day on earth before they set off their vest explosives.

  But they were so obvious it almost seemed ludicrous to him. The American expression was the same as the English one: like shooting fish in a barrel.

  “We want to send a clear message,” he’d been told in Beijing.

  There were three of them and they met him in an absolute shithole of a hotel just off Tiananmen Square called Dong Jiao Min Xiang, which he didn’t think any Westerner would have ever stayed in, unless they were totally down on their luck.

  The men didn’t identify themselves, but Kamal had taken them for Westerners by their English. He didn’t think they were connected with ISIS. They seemed too mainstream. And yet they handed him a slip of paper with three locations where terrorist attacks were to take place: San Francisco, New Orleans and Colby, Kansas, a place he’d never heard of. A specific target and date and time—noon EST—was listed for each location.

  “What y
ou ask will be dangerous, perhaps even impossible,” he’d told them. “In any event it will be very expensive.”

  “Name your price, Mr. al-Daran,” one of them said. All three were dressed in ordinary Western business suits. But they had connections. They knew his real name. It was bothersome.

  “When it’s over I will have to go to ground permanently. I’ll never be able to work again.”

  They simply looked at him.

  “One million euros to kill McGarvey. One million five for each of the other three events.”

  “Five point five million euros total. An impressive sum.”

  “It will send the message you want to send, for whatever your reasons are,” Kamal said. “Reasons I’m not interested in.”

  “How do you wish to be paid?”

  “One million in full for McGarvey,” Kamal said. “Half in advance, and when it is a confirmed kill I’ll require the second half, and one-third of the remaining balance after each successful operation.” He wrote his account number and password on a slip of paper and handed it across the table. The room stank of something disagreeable, and he wanted to be gone as quickly as possible. “How do I contact you?”

  “After today you do not,” the one who’d done most of the talking said.

  “I’ll need a source of intelligence information.”

  “That will be your concern.”

  It had been as easy as that, except for the last part.

  * * *

  Kamal took the stairs up to the west balcony to the Italian restaurant Cipriani Dolci. The place was mostly full with the late lunch crowd; nevertheless he managed to get a table at the railing looking down on the main concourse.

  “Some bread, olive oil and a bottle of Dom Pérignon,” he told the waiter. “Very cold, please.”

  The concourse was still busy. Dropping or throwing a package over the railing into the concourse from here would be a simple thing. Especially if it were disguised to look like something not dangerous. Something that would cause the crowd to converge rather than run away.

  It would take some thought.

  His bread and oil with herbs came first, followed by his wine in an ice bucket.

  “Will someone be joining you, sir?” the waiter asked.

  “One glass will be sufficient.”

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter said. He opened the bottle and poured a small tasting amount.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Kamal said.

  The waiter filled the glass and left.

  Kamal was taking his first sip when a young woman with an infant in a stroller came in and the waiter sat her.

  Problem solved, he thought.

  SEVEN

  The sun was coming up when Otto, bone tired, arrived home. Louise was waiting for him at the kitchen door as he parked the car in the garage, a concerned expression on her long, narrow face.

  She’d shown up at All Saints around ten in the evening, and had waited for Mac to come through his second of three surgeries.

  Dr. Franklin, his mask around his neck, his gloves off, came down the corridor to the waiting room as he pulled off his surgical cap. Otto couldn’t read anything from his neutral expression.

  “He’ll live.”

  “Thank God,” Pete said. She was almost on the verge of collapse.

  “But he’s not out of the woods yet. He’s going to need skin grafts on his back. I have some friends up in Toronto who’re doing some cutting-edge research on three-D printing. We’ll be sending some of Mac’s skin cells by courier tonight.”

  “Any brain trauma?” Pete had asked.

  “I’d say no, but we’ll have to wait until he comes around to evaluate him.”

  “How long?”

  “We’re going to keep him under for at least two weeks.”

  Pete half turned away, and looked at Otto and Louise and Marty. “Shit,” she’d said.

  “Maybe you’d better try to convince him to retire,” Franklin had said.

  “Not him,” Pete had said bleakly.

  * * *

  Otto had left Pete at the hospital and had driven back out to his darlings in his office. She was planning on spending the night. Bambridge had gone home, and so had Louise.

  “Call when you’re finished,” she’d told her husband.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” he said.

  “I know.”

  First he had pulled up every scrap of information on every single op Mac had ever been involved with. And that included his stint as deputy director of operations, as well as his even shorter tenure as temporary director of the Company.

  The number of countries that had grudges against him serious enough to order his assassination was long; Chile, North Korea, China, Japan, and Russia, plus France, Germany and Switzerland, whose intel agencies had all but officially listed him as a persona non grata.

  Pakistan was at the top of the list, as were any number of organizations such as AQAP—al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—the Taliban in Afghanistan and, in the past year or so, ISIS.

  But the number of individuals who would want revenge was fairly small, for the simple reason that when Mac had come up against them—one on one—he’d killed them.

  Otto set his darlings to work just after midnight, and by eight, when he was sure that they had grasped the problem of what he wanted to know, he’d finally gone home. When something showed up he would be notified.

  * * *

  “Bed or something to eat first?” Louise asked.

  “I think I’m hungry.”

  “Take a shower, it’ll be ready when you are.”

  In the shower Otto kept trying to work out the timing of the thing. It’d been a year since the attack on the pencil towers, so if the assassin had been the guy behind it, who managed to escape in the end, why the delay?

  His darlings had done a database search of every airline and car rental company from Atlanta to Tampa and Sarasota, looking for someone who might even remotely fit the profile, coming up with nothing.

  Before he’d left he expanded the search out five hundred miles from Sarasota.

  He’d also set his machines to search for cell phone calls and especially cell phone photos and videos taken on the New College campus. For that task he’d hacked into the National Security Agency’s mainframe, but with the billions of calls and trillions of key phrases monitored on a daily basis, even his specially crafted algorithms would take time to come up with anything useful.

  Drying off he could feel something closing in on them. One of McGarvey’s premos. It had rubbed off on him.

  Back what seemed like a million years ago he’d been biding his time in France, outside Paris, where he’d gone to ground. Back home he was a freak. A mess. Always unkempt with his long hair; his clothing raggedy and dirty, no laces in his sneakers.

  On top of that he was a genius—an odd duck—whom most people were either disgusted with or afraid of. He had the bad habit of laughing at people who didn’t “get it.” He did partial differential equations, including tensor analysis, or matrix calculus—the stuff of Einstein—in his head, and couldn’t fathom the person who wasn’t able to do the same.

  “Are you slow or just stupid?” he’d ask.

  Until Mac, with his own brand of intelligence, and his sense of fair play, showed up and asked for his help. That was the day he’d realized that he didn’t know everything, and it also was the first day of his life.

  * * *

  Louise had eggs with cream slowly scrambled in the French fashion, bacon, an English muffin and black tea waiting for him.

  He sat at the kitchen counter and she watched him with love, respect for who he was and concern for his almost all-consuming worry about Mac, his only friend in the entire world except for her.

  “Good,” Otto said, hungrier than he’d thought he was.

  “Any progress?” Louise prompted.

  “They’re working the problem.”

  “Tell me.”

  Otto ran throu
gh everything he’d sent his computer programs to look for, including cell phone records. “NSA’s got data coming out its Fort Meade rectum. So much shit they don’t know what to do with it all.”

  “They upgraded.”

  “They still don’t have the processing power they need for what they’re trying to do.”

  “Why not piggyback with them? Add your two cents.”

  “I’m on it,” Otto said. He was frustrated. “But it’s still going to take time. We need quantum algorithms, and the machines to handle them, right now.”

  Louise turned away and made herself a cup of tea. She used lemon in it. “Maybe you’re going at it bass ackward.”

  Otto laughed, but it wasn’t funny. “Explain.”

  “Someone put a bomb in Mac’s car. At New College.”

  “Right.”

  “Why did it have to be our bad guy?”

  “Who else?”

  “I mean, why him in person? Your darlings are checking all the airline and rental car records trying to come up with someone who might fit a set of your parameters. But couldn’t he, or she, have hired a local, maybe a student, to drop a package into the car?”

  Otto slammed down his fork. “Fuck fuck, fuck, I’m stupid!” He started to get up.

  “Don’t you dare,” Louise shouted him down. “I’ll set your darlings to work the issue. In the meantime you’re going to finish eating and then get a few hours of z’s. I shit you not.”

  EIGHT

  The morning was impossibly bright but chilly when Kamal left the Bellagio Hotel in the Mini Cooper he’d rented through the concierge. Vegas was billed as a 24/7 city, where whatever happened there stayed there, but mostly it was a night place.

  Only a few drunks were out and about, but the bulk of the sparse weekday traffic was service workers: liquor and food vendors, janitorial and other casino employees on the overnight shift heading home, armored-truck drivers picking up overnight receipts and trundling off to the various banks in town, and hookers heading for breakfast after a long night’s work.

  On Friday night the college girls, and some boys, from L.A. would be showing up in town to meet with their pimps and start the long weekend gigs that earned their tuition and a lot more. They wouldn’t be leaving until sometime Sunday morning.