Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  A hearse pulled out from the rear of one of the hotels and headed south, passing Kamal, who was heading west out Sahara Avenue, where a number of used car dealers were located.

  Vegas was an anonymous town. No one wanted to know anyone else’s business. Everything was better that way.

  Kamal had done his homework on his laptop last night after flying in from Atlanta, and by nine he pulled into a scruffy car lot under the banner BIG AL’S—PURVEYOR OF FINE IRON. Most of the vehicles on the lot were older-model SUVs and a number of smaller campers and pickups with camper caps on back.

  A man dressed in jeans, a striped shirt with a string tie, cowboy boots and a Stetson came out of the sales office.

  “I called last night,” Kamal said, his accent neutral now, big, dark-framed glasses perched on his nose.

  “Tom Edwards, you’re looking for a small motor home to take you out in the desert,” the man bellowed. “And today is your lucky day.”

  Kamal had looked through the inventory online. “You have an oh-six Lexor TS, sixty-two thousand miles, sleeps two. Forty-two thousand.”

  “You don’t want that one. Too old and it’s only a touch over twenty feet. A dog, if you ask me. You want something bigger and definitely newer.”

  “Does it run?”

  “I’m telling you, I have a twelve in the same B class at eighty-two thousand, a steal. At least you’d be driving in luxury.”

  Kamal took a small leather case—one of the items he’d carried in the roll-about’s false bottom—from the car. “I’ll pay you forty-five thousand cash for the oh-six. You’ll have it gassed up and ready for me by noon. Fresh plates, insurance, liability will be sufficient, and stocked with a week’s worth of groceries, including a couple of cases of Mich Ultra.”

  The salesman smiled. What happened with someone’s winnings was no business of his. If some sucker wanted to blow an extra five or ten grand on a piece of shit, so be it.

  “Let’s step into my office, shall we?”

  * * *

  Kamal checked out of the hotel shortly before ten, even though he’d booked the room for five days. “Unfortunately my company has called me back to New York,” he explained unnecessarily to the desk clerk. “I guess they don’t want me having fun.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He had the cabbie take him to the airport, waited a few minutes and then took another cab back out to Big Al’s, where the small camper van was ready on the front lot. It had been freshly washed, and the interior, though worn and a little faded, was clean. A small galley was on the right, a head and storage on the left, and just aft a dining table with seating for four. A pull-out across the back converted from a sofa during the day to a double bed at night, beneath which was more storage.

  The rig was plain-looking, innocuous, something no one would ever pay any attention to. Just another camper on the road. Some blue-collar family’s idea of a dream vacation getaway.

  “Perfect,” he told the salesman.

  And a couple of minutes past noon he was on US 95, a decent highway running north that was divided for the first fifty miles. Mountains and deserts were all around him. The landscape looked like something on the moon; dry, lifeless and surreal, where no one in their right mind would want to be, unless they were on business. Some specific business.

  * * *

  By six Kamal pulled into the Sunrise Valley RV Park just off US 95, near the tiny town of Mina. He paid his one-night fee and parked near the back in a slot under some shade trees, away from the office. It was a weekday and not summer yet, so the park was less than half filled. In the distance the peak of some low mountain rose up out of the desert.

  He didn’t bother plugging in or connecting to the water, but he opened a couple of the windows for the cross breeze, which carried oddly spiced desert smells, and got a beer from the fridge.

  Sitting at the tiny table, he took apart his Glock Gen4 pistol and cleaned it, just for something to do. He ejected the 10mm rounds from both magazines, cleaned the bullets and oiled the springs, then reloaded.

  At eight he phoned a local number. A man answered after three rings. A baby was crying in the background and a woman was saying something.

  “What?”

  “Do you have the package?” Kamal asked.

  “Yes, and I’m telling you, pal, it wasn’t so fucking easy as I thought it would be.”

  “But you have the items?”

  “Listen, I’m going to need more than the five thousand. I could have a lot of shit coming my way, you know what I mean?”

  “I know exactly what you mean, my friend. How much more do you think would make things right?”

  The woman shouted something that Kamal couldn’t make out. But she sounded angry and maybe drunk. Americans never ceased to amaze him.

  “Another thousand—no, make it two.”

  “This will not be the first shipment. There’ll be others.”

  The sergeant first class, who worked at the Hawthorne Army Depot about forty miles away, hesitated. “Jesus.”

  “How about if I make it an even ten thousand? Cash. Hundred-dollar bills. One hundred of them. And to make it easy the next delivery wouldn’t be for at least two months. Another ten thousand cash. Does that sound okay?”

  “I gotta think about it.”

  “Fine, think about it. In the meantime I’ll get someone else.”

  “Wait the fuck up. I didn’t say anything like that.”

  “Midnight. Wildcat Brothel. A Lexor RV, white with black trim, will be parked in back. The doors will be unlocked. A package with your money will be left on the passenger seat. Put the stuff for me in the back on the floor and leave.”

  “There’s a lot of shit. Dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  “Place the detonators on the floor between the driver’s and passenger seats.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “The Wildcat. A nice place. I could use a little R-and-R. How’s about us meeting—”

  “No,” Kamal said. “If we ever meet face-to-face, I will kill you. Do you understand me?”

  “Listen, goddamnit, I was just talking.”

  “Are you clear, Sergeant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  NINE

  It was two in the afternoon when Otto and Louise got back to All Saints, where Pete had spent the night on the couch in the waiting room. She looked like hell, but not so stressed out as she had been yesterday.

  “How is he?” Louise asked.

  “Better, if you can believe it. Franklin says he’s seen a lot of really tough people come through here, but never anyone like Mac. He spent a good night. His blood pressure has settled down, and all his other numbers are coming back, including his cranial pressure and EKG.”

  “How long is Franklin going to keep him in a coma?” Otto asked.

  “If he continues to improve, another five or six days,” Pete said. “Beyond that he’ll start to lose muscle tone. But it’ll be a long haul before he’s at one hundred percent. If ever.”

  Otto’s darlings had come up with the answers that Louise had suggested they might find. It was one of the students by the name of Antonio Gomez who’d placed the bomb in Mac’s car. But it was under the passenger side. If it had been under the driver’s seat Mac would not have had one chance in a million of surviving.

  As it was, something had apparently spooked Mac because one of the faculty who’d witnessed the explosion said that for whatever reason, Mac had climbed over the car door and had managed to get a few feet away when the thing went off.

  “Like he’d known something was wrong,” the teacher had told police in a follow-up interview.

  Otto wanted to tell Mac about it, and get his take. Find out what he knew or suspected.

  “Maybe Franklin’s right, maybe he should think about retiring,” Louise said.

  Pete managed a slight smile. “I’d quit with him in a heartbeat, if that’s what he want
ed. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. He’s only fifty, what would he do? Sit behind a desk and tell other people how to do field work? He tried that a couple of times, as DDO and DCI, and he hated every minute of it.”

  Otto looked away for a moment. “One of these days he won’t be so lucky,” he said. He didn’t know what he would do without Mac. He had Louise and they had the baby, and he had his work, but nothing would ever be the same.

  Pete squeezed his hand. “Don’t count him out just yet. I’ll backstop him for whatever it’s worth and for however long he needs or wants me.”

  “When can you break free from here?”

  Pete was surprised. “I hadn’t thought about it. Why?”

  “I could use your help.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I just found out that a student by the name of Gomez was the one who put the bomb in Mac’s car. I’ve seen the Bureau’s preliminary forensics report—fifty-eight percent PETN and twenty-three percent RDX, plus trace amounts of a binder, a plasticizer, an antioxidant N-phenyl-2-napthylamine and a brown dye.”

  “Semtex,” Pete said.

  “Semtex 2P. We need to find the kid—he’s disappeared—and we need to find out where he got the stuff.”

  “And who hired him. What about your darlings?”

  “They’re chewing on the big picture. Someone wanted Mac dead, and I’m trying to find out not only who wanted it, but why.”

  “Somebody out of his past? Just revenge?”

  “Somebody out of his past, maybe. But I don’t think it’ll be just revenge. I don’t know why, so for now don’t ask. Can you help me?”

  Pete looked down the corridor to the intensive care unit just off the operating theater. “I can’t do anything for him right now,” she said, her voice soft. She shook her head. “Christ.”

  Otto waited.

  She turned back and nodded. “I need to go home and get cleaned up first. What do you need?”

  “I’ll send you what I’ve come up with on Gomez. I want you to go out to the school and find out who he was, and where he’s gotten himself to.”

  “You’ll be at your office?”

  “I’m going there now.”

  “I’m going to stick it out here for a few hours,” Louise said. “Keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “Sure thing, sweetheart,” Otto said. “You going to be okay?”

  “Guaranteed. Now both of you get the hell out of here and catch some bad guys.”

  * * *

  Bambridge showed up at Otto’s office at three-thirty. He wasn’t as combative as usual, and in fact he was there almost hat in hand. “Any progress?”

  Otto was tweaking the work his darlings were doing, much of it displayed at nearly blinding speed on four one-hundred-inch OLED monitors on the wall, as well as a flat table monitor about the size of a door.

  “I want to meet with Page and you and anyone else with half a brain on campus who isn’t scared shitless of the White House. Six o’clock upstairs.”

  “Do I get a clue?”

  “A student on campus put what was probably a kilo of Semtex in Mac’s car. That stuff isn’t so easy to come by, which means he got it along with instructions from someone who’s connected, who has financial backing and who has a mission other than simply taking out one man.”

  “Do we know this student?”

  “Antonio Gomez. He was one of Mac’s students, but he’s disappeared. Pete’s working on it.”

  “You said a mission. What mission?”

  “For starters I don’t think it was revenge, otherwise the bastard, whoever he is, would have wanted to do it himself. He was—and is—busy with something else.”

  “Working for who? And don’t tell me it’s the Saudis again, blaming it all on ISIS. Or ISIS itself; they have their hands full in Syria. And no such connection was ever proven when the pencil tower in New York came down. It was a lone operator.”

  “I’m sure that it’s a comfort to believe something like that. A nice tidy package.”

  “The truth is sometimes tidy.”

  “What was his motive and where’d he get the money?”

  “The guy was insane, even Ms. Boylan testified to that much. And he’s rich. His house outside of Monaco was over the top.”

  “Insanity doesn’t have anything to do with being smart. But he needed a source of intel. Shit only available at the government level.”

  “Speculation.”

  “What government, Marty, if not Saudi Arabia?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Them, I think. Along with Russia, China, North Korea, Chile, Pakistan.”

  “You’re fucking certifiable.”

  “Maybe he has friends in French or German intel.”

  Bambridge waved him off, and turned to leave.

  “Maybe Japan’s PSI.” The Public Security Intelligence Agency was Japan’s counterpart to the CIA.

  Bambridge stopped at the inner door. “Are you hearing yourself?”

  “How about MI6?” Otto asked. “Kamal al-Daran. He went to Sandhurst. Maybe he still has pals with connections.”

  Bambridge had the door open and was about to step into the corridor.

  “How about right here in D.C.?” Otto said.

  Bambridge left, and Otto turned back to his darlings.

  “Or maybe all of the above,” he said to himself. An old boys’ network. A consortium. But for what purpose? To what end?

  TEN

  Pete parked the Mercedes a couple of rows beyond where Mac had parked his Porsche. Almost all of the debris had been cleaned up, but the pavement where his car had been was scorched, the leaves on several trees were missing on one side, and there was a dark stain on the nearby sidewalk that could have been oil or blood.

  Police tape was strung around a fifty-foot radius of the blast.

  She stopped a few feet away, unable to approach the spot, her heart racing, her breath short. It had been close this time. She could almost feel the heat from the explosion. A kilo of Semtex was way over the top, enough to easily take down an airplane, derail a train, even take out an entire floor of a building.

  Whoever had come gunning for Mac not only wanted to make sure of the kill, but also wanted to make a statement.

  Kamal al-Daran. His face, and even the scent of his cologne, was etched in her mind. She could hear his cultured, upper-class British accent, see the set of his mouth when he was pleased with something, and the downturn of his lips when he was angry or vexed.

  He’d kidnapped her in Monaco in an effort to lure Mac in for the kill, and he had almost succeeded.

  The son of a bitch was insane, but he was brilliant, and as Otto said, he was well connected to a good source of intelligence. A source almost certainly at the government level. Saudi Arabia’s GIP, or General Intelligence Presidency—in Arabic, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah—had been Otto’s best guess last year.

  But the man had simply vanished. Gone to ground somewhere. Not back to Monaco; the French DGSI had kept an eye on Kamal’s house as a courtesy. But totally under anyone’s radar, which was in itself no mean feat in this electronically connected age.

  Otto was certain this was something Kamal could have engineered. But Pete had not been completely convinced until just this moment, though she couldn’t point to any single reason. She just felt it. Otto was almost never wrong.

  Kamal wanted Mac dead. The question was: Why? If it wasn’t simple revenge, who was the bastard working for this time?

  And for what purpose? What were they preparing to do that was so important they had to take Mac out of the picture first?

  She walked across the lot and across College Street to the campus police headquarters, housed in a low one-story building not much bigger than a mobile home. A woman in uniform sat behind a desk just inside the front door. Her name tag read: MOLINARI.

  “May I help you?”

  Pete showed the woman her CIA identification. “I’m doing a follow-up, and I could use you
r help.”

  “We’ve pretty well covered everything with the SPD and Bureau people from Tampa. I don’t know if there’s much else I can tell you.”

  “I’m looking for a student by the name of Antonio Gomez. If possible I’d like to see his jacket. Talk to his roommate, maybe some of his instructors.”

  “Two witnesses put him at the scene, but he’s disappeared,” Molinari said.

  “Anyone know where he went?”

  “No. But nothing we’ve come up with ties him to putting something in Mr. M’s car. We think he just got scared and took off.”

  “I’d like to have access to his dorm room.”

  “Look, the kid checks out. You have to know that we had another car bomb incident last year, almost exactly on the same spot. And Mr. M was a witness. A lot of the students and faculty are still a little spooked.”

  “I’d still like to take a look at his room.”

  Molinari was hesitant. “I’ll have to get authorization, and that won’t be until Monday.”

  “We’re pretty sure Gomez was hired by someone to plant the bomb. I’m looking for a clue, even something insignificant, anything at all that might tell us where he went.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Mr. M, as you call him, was a close personal friend. Very close. In fact he and I were talking about getting married. But he’s dead, and I have a personal stake in catching the bastard who killed him.”

  Molinari lowered her eyes. “We weren’t sure if his wounds were fatal.”

  “I assume that you saw his car. No one could have survived. One kilo of Semtex packs a very big punch.”

  Molinari brought something up on her computer screen. “Dort Residence Hall across the Trail. You can take the pedestrian bridge, easier than driving over. Two twenty-five.”

  A plastic key card came out of a reader.

  “It’s only good for twenty-four hours, so you can toss it. But just so you know, his roommate was moved, and the police put tape on the door.”

  * * *

  Four students were seated around a table in the lobby when Pete came in. But they didn’t pay any attention to her. Upstairs she found Gomez’s room, pulled the yellow DO NOT CROSS tape off the door and let herself in.