Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “The second guy is heading down the north stairwell. See where he goes.”

  “I’ve got him.”

  McGarvey turned the first man over on his back. His haircut looked military, and he appeared to be in very good shape, except for the fact he was dead. He carried no identification, and only three spare fifteen-round magazines of 9 × 19 Parabellum cartridges, plus a cell phone.

  Pocketing the man’s phone, he hurried to the south stairwell, where he went down to Fischer. She was dead. Two rounds had hit her in the neck just above her right shoulder and she’d taken a third to the back of her head.

  McGarvey took the phone from her shoulder bag.

  They must have known that McGarvey had come here to see her, and she’d been killed because of it. The question was which side she worked for—providing Estes was correct and there were two factions.

  Otto was back. “Get the hell out of there right now. Nine-one-one has lit up like a Christmas tree. Two rapid-response teams are already en route along with just about every cop in D.C.”

  “What about the guy in the north stairwell?”

  “A dark blue Toyota Corolla just pulled up. But I shit you not, Mac, move your ass.”

  McGarvey got one floor down, when Otto was back.

  “The second shooter just came out the stairwell door.”

  “If the cops are going to be in time they have to be warned this is an active scene.”

  “Holy shit! Someone in the backseat of the Corolla just opened fire! They killed their own man and hauled ass.”

  “What about the cops?”

  “Too late, they’re still a block out.”

  “I’m not going to have time to get clear,” McGarvey said. “Is there another way out of here?”

  “Did you get any blood on you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The mezzanine is one level down from the second floor. Get out there and walk over to the Next Whisky Bar. Pete will meet you there in ten.”

  “She was supposed to stay behind.”

  “Good luck with that in the future.”

  * * *

  It was nearly a half hour by the time she walked through the doors and came over to where McGarvey was sitting at the bar having a Heineken.

  She gave him a peck on the cheek and sat next to him. “Sorry I’m late, dear, but there’s gotta be a thousand cops out there, and I had to run the gauntlet.”

  She ordered a glass of merlot and when the bartender had served her and went to the other end of the bar, she smiled. “From what Otto told me you ran into the middle of a firestorm. You okay?”

  He briefly went over what had happened. “The point is Fischer told me that it wasn’t her group who tried to kill me in Sarasota.”

  “You believed her?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “But then her own people killed her, and one of the shooters who tried to take you out,” Pete said. She shook her head. “Killing their own people. That doesn’t make sense. Unless the shooters belonged to the other faction Estes told Otto about.”

  “It makes sense to someone,” McGarvey said.

  “You say that the guy you took out wasn’t carrying any ID,” Pete said. “Puts us back to square one.”

  “I have his cell phone along with the woman’s.”

  Pete lit up. “Otto should be able to pull something from them. Could give us a clue.”

  “More than that,” McGarvey said. “If the guy ever used the phone, we’ll have his DNA from the mouthpiece. And Otto should be able to crack Fischer’s phone to see who she talked to.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Kamal had booked a seventh-floor suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel across from the White House, and had sent his weapons and spare identity documents, secured in gold foil, ahead via FedEx. Scanners would only detect what appeared to be a half-dozen neatly folded dress shirts and ties.

  Wearing an Armani suit and Hermès tie, dressed down a little for this trip, he strode into the mahogany and gilded lobby to the registration desk, the bellman trailing with his single bag. It was two in the afternoon.

  He’d stayed here briefly last year, and the manager remembered him.

  “Welcome back, Mr. O’Neal,” the man said. “A bottle of Krug has been sent to your suite, and our concierge Ms. Hanson will personally see to your needs while you’re staying with us.”

  Kamal held out his platinum Amex card, but the manager declined it.

  “We have it on file, sir.”

  “Good. My stay here is to be completely anonymous. No visitors, no phone calls, no emails, no messages. Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “I sent a parcel by FedEx. Has it arrived?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s in your suite.”

  “Very well.”

  “Enjoy your stay, sir.”

  “I will,” Kamal said, and the bellman led him to the elevators and up to the suite, which looked out toward the White House, the Washington Monument in the near distance behind it.

  Upstairs he gave the bellman a hundred-dollar bill and as the man was leaving, a well-put-together and faintly attractive woman in a blue blazer and gray skirt came in. Her gold name tag read HANSON.

  “Welcome to the Hay-Adams, Mr. O’Neal, I’ll be your personal concierge for your stay. If there’s anything I can help you with at the moment…?”

  “Yes, my privacy.”

  “Pardon me, sir,” the woman said and she turned and left, softly closing the door.

  When she was gone, Kamal took off his jacket and loosened his tie. He opened the champagne, poured a glass, then turned on the television, the volume up a little, and went to the windows.

  He could have killed the woman and thrown her body out in the corridor. But that would have been beyond stupid. Just an irrational impulse. But this close to McGarvey his bloodlust had risen. Had been rising since he’d left Mexico.

  The bastard was unfinished business.

  He phoned his Washington contact using the encrypted phone he’d gotten from his old Saudi contractor what seemed like years ago, but before the call went through he hit the END button

  The channel on the television was CNN, and a photograph of a slender, not particularly good-looking woman was up on the screen. The announcer was saying something about Susan Fischer working for the National Security Agency.

  On instinct alone, Kamal took the battery and SIM card out of the phone, and sat down on the end of the bed as the announcer recapped the breaking story. The woman had apparently been gunned down by at least two men, both of whom had been in turn shot to death by an unknown assailant or assailants.

  The woman’s body was found in a stairwell of the Watergate apartments just below the floor of her apartment. One of the suspected gunmen’s bodies was found in the opposite stairwell, while a second, still unidentified man was found shot to death on the second level of the parking garage. Each man was armed with what were described as automatic weapons of a law-enforcement or military type.

  “Fischer was believed to be employed by the NSA as an analyst in what was said to be a highly sensitive position.

  “So far there are no suspects in the killings, though it was possible that a third armed man may have been seen by a witness on the eighth floor.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Moses Chambeau, a spokesman for the agency, declined to comment or confirm that Ms. Fischer was an employee. However, an informed source with the FBI, who declined to be cited, said that the method of Ms. Fischer’s death appeared to be the work of professional assassins. In other news…”

  The coincidence was too great for Kamal. As before, he was getting the distinct feeling that something else was going on. Something the Gang of Three in Beijing had not warned him about.

  He phoned the concierge desk and Ms. Hanson answered.

  “On second thought, you can be of service.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want a decent laptop, as quickly as it can be sent up.”

&n
bsp; “Immediately, Mr. O’Neal. I’ll bring it up personally.”

  Kamal poured another glass of champagne and went to the windows again as he waited. McGarvey was going to die within the next twenty-four hours, if not sooner, but first he needed to have more information. He felt as if he were being manipulated, backed into a corner. And he didn’t like it, and needed to find out enough to tip the situation back in his favor.

  * * *

  The woman was at his door within ten minutes with an Apple laptop and a portable printer, which she set up on the desk.

  “Would you like me to go through the basics?”

  “No,” Kamal said, and he handed her five hundred dollars, which she placed in her pocket with a nod.

  At the door she turned back. “You would like your privacy. So let me suggest that you use HayAdams.com, and my password, 23PPQXR9.”

  “Generous.”

  “Shall I write it down for you?”

  “No. But my business is of a confidential nature. It would be unfortunate if someone else were to read my emails.”

  “The password is mine alone, Mr. O’Neal. And when you are finished it will be changed. Let me assure you that no one will be reading your mail, least of all me. This is the Hay-Adams.”

  Pouring his third glass of wine, Kamal sat down at the computer and when it had booted up he got onto the concierge’s personal account, and from there pulled up Runet, the Russian internet.

  When he was on, he entered the search engine called EDWARD SNOWDEN, which was run by the SVR, and not the American himself, but had been built upon Snowden’s original database of U.S. surveillance secrets and methodologies.

  He had used the site before but always from a computer untraceable to him. This time, even if the NSA picked up on it, the track would lead back to the Hay-Adams’s concierge. But by then he would be long gone.

  He entered Susan Fischer’s name and her position with the NSA.

  Almost immediately her biography came up. She was born in Colorado Springs, her father a U.S. Air Force instructor at the academy, her mother a writer who’d published several nonfiction books on mathematics. Both were deceased. Yesterday’s death of their forty-three-year-old daughter hadn’t been entered yet.

  The brief article identified her as a mid-level analyst with the National Security Agency; her boss was Lieutenant Colonel Moses Chambeau. An SVR sidebar indicated that Ms. Fischer was a possible resource, as was her boss, who it turned out was her lover.

  Her current medical history, financial information and her Social Security number, along with her D.C. driving license and passport photos and numbers, plus the address of her Watergate apartment, were also listed.

  Under Chambeau he got the same information, including an address in Alexandria, and the fact that he was married to Jennifer Echo, the sister of Brigadier General Walter Echo, who was a deputy chief of logistics at the Pentagon.

  Echo’s page contained the same personal information, including an address in Fairfax.

  The largest surprise was that like Fischer, the SVR had evaluated the two men as possible resources.

  But McGarvey’s page was password protected.

  Kamal sat back, the glimmer of an idea that had come to him watching the CNN newscast about the murder of the Fischer woman emerging about the so far unidentified armed man whom a witness had seen on the eighth floor of the Watergate apartment building.

  He went back to Fischer’s page. Her Watergate address was an apartment on the eighth floor.

  McGarvey.

  The bastard had been there in the middle of it. Fischer was a clue he was running down, until she was shot to death by someone with military-style weapons, then her assassins shot to death by someone else, also using military weapons.

  Covering up what?

  THIRTY-NINE

  A little before three, McGarvey, driving the BMW, Pete beside him, was passed through the main gate at the CIA’s campus, and took the curving driveway up to the Old Headquarters Building.

  Otto had called all out of breath forty-five minutes earlier. “Come,” he’d said.

  “I’m starting to get a little sick of this place,” Pete said. “Every time we show up, a ton of trouble drops out of the sky right on top of us.”

  “Do you want to quit?” McGarvey asked. He’d been feeling the same thing lately. But each time he’d resolved to back away, something did seem to fall out of the sky for him. For both of them now.

  “Can we?”

  “Not until this thing is done. I take exceptions to people trying to kill me.”

  “Me too. But what about afterwards?”

  McGarvey had been thinking about just that lately. He didn’t feel too old for the business, nor did he think that having a peg leg slowed him down. Yet he wondered if all that was just some sort of a defense mechanism. Maybe he was too old; maybe hobbling around on a prosthetic leg took away whatever physical edge he once had.

  “At least a long vacation.”

  “That’d be nice,” Pete said, but it was obvious she didn’t really believe it.

  McGarvey still had VIP parking privileges but no security badges, so Otto came down on the elevator to escort them up to his third-floor suite of offices. He looked worn out, as if he’d worked overnight, but he also seemed excited. Once again he had a bone in his teeth, something he couldn’t walk away from if he’d wanted to.

  They held their silence until they were safely inside Otto’s special security bubble. All the screens were deeply lavender.

  “You’re not going to believe the shit I came up with from the two phones,” Otto said.

  “Did you get DNA back from the shooter I took down in the stairwell already?” McGarvey asked.

  “Not yet. But I finally cracked the security codes, and they’re the same algorithm I came up with last year. Fischer and the guy were using the same encryption protocol, with the identification signature I put in before I farmed it out of this office.”

  “I don’t understand,” Pete said.

  “I gave the program to five separate entities: our Clandestine Services and our Directorate of Intel, along with the National Security Agency and the DIA. Each had a different marker code. Just like nuclear bomb materials—plutonium and U235. Each manufacturing facility leaves a signature code in the stuff. If a nuke is exploded the residue it leaves behind contains the manufacturer’s stamp.”

  “You said five users—who’s the fifth?”

  “The White House.”

  “Jesus,” Pete said.

  “Secure comms between the president and his staff and his Secret Service detail.”

  “Let’s start with Fischer’s phone,” McGarvey said.

  “It has the NSA’s marker, of course. But the odd part is that she very seldom used it. I’m assuming that she made most of her calls from another phone. You just got lucky picking the right one from her purse.”

  “It’s the first one I found.”

  “Her calls go back a whole year. Her received calls. The earliest are from some place in Monaco.”

  “Did you retrieve a number?”

  “Someone modified the program, so I’m only picking up the country and city codes,” Otto said. “But that’s a fairly easy modification that some decent techie could figure out. Just blocking the caller ID.”

  “Is this leading where I think it is?”

  “The timing is right for your last op. Just before those calls, one came from Riyadh, and then there was nothing for almost eight months.”

  “Let me guess, sometime just after the second Tuesday in November?”

  “Yeah. Several here in the D.C. area. I think I can crack the ID block later today or maybe by tomorrow. My darlings are working on it. But there are a few trillion lines of code to process.”

  “The Monaco calls could have been from Kamal, and the one from Riyadh, his GIP control officer,” McGarvey said.

  “If it is the same guy who took down the pencil tower AtEighth in New York, and tried for
the one up the block from the UN, he might be back in business. Three days ago someone called Fischer from a spot in Mexico out in the middle of nowhere, about a hundred miles south of El Paso.”

  “What’s there?”

  “We have a satellite that makes an occasional pass over the area. Looking for cartel operations. But nothing has shown up in the past year.”

  “No one’s paying much attention,” McGarvey said. “Could be anything or nothing. What about the Mexican army, have they shown any interest?”

  Otto was hesitant. “Nothing they’re talking about. But it’d be prime real estate for just about anything. Maybe a training camp.”

  “Are you talking about ISIS?” Pete asked.

  “Or the Saudis. Al-Daran was working for them, if it was him again.”

  “Fischer was his intel source,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes. And her pals want you dead. Could be they hired al-Daran to try to take you out again.”

  “If it’s him—and that’s a big if at this point—could be he’s heading back to wherever he went to ground after Monaco,” Pete said.

  “He’s on his way here,” Otto told them. “He knows his first attempt to kill Mac in Sarasota failed, so my guess is that he wants to finish the job.”

  “But that’s not all, is it?” McGarvey said.

  “Fischer used the same phone to make several other calls in D.C., and several just across the river to a seven-oh-three area code. I’m betting the Pentagon. To General Echo.”

  “Who else would she use that phone to call?”

  “Two-oh-two? My guess would be the White House,” Otto said. “Hatchett. She and Echo and Chambeau are conspirators.”

  “Conspirators in what?” Pete said. “None of this makes any sense. Especially not if you’re telling me that Hatchett—the White House—wants Mac dead.”

  “Echo was one of the Pentagon people who mouthed off about not following any orders that Weaver would issue as president,” Pete said. “A soft coup.”

  “That’s a far cry from hiring an assassin to kill the former director of the CIA,” Otto said. He looked and sounded as if he were on the verge of a meltdown. “The problem as I see it is that Estes could be right, there are two groups with at least one common goal—killing Mac. One could be somehow connected with the DIA, NSA and the White House—as far-fetched as that sounds.”