Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “Then give me my gun, and I’ll walk out the front door. I’ll be a distraction.”

  McGarvey hesitated, but then handed Echo the Beretta. He held his Walther low and to the right, his finger on the trigger. “Go.”

  Echo held his pistol low and to the left, away from his leg. He was a professional soldier. He knew what he was doing.

  * * *

  “Fact is, I’m on your side.” Echo said. He turned and went back the way they had come.

  McGarvey got on the phone to Pete. ““What’s the situation?”

  “I lost sight of him. He could be anywhere.”

  “I’m coming out the back, Echo will be coming out the front. He’s armed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  Pocketing the phone, McGarvey eased open the door and stepped outside onto the driveway. The take-out window was to his left, two Dumpsters straight ahead and just beyond that the rear of the gas station.

  * * *

  Kamal was crouched behind the Camaro when a man in khaki slacks and a blue sweater came out of the restaurant. It was not McGarvey. His hair was cropped short, and the way he held himself, he looked military.

  The man walked toward the Humvee but then stopped ten feet short. He brought his left hand away from his leg, and in the overhead lights Kamal could see that he was holding a pistol.

  None of this made any sense, except that Kamal was sure that the man with the pistol was the one McGarvey had come here to meet.

  Kamal raised up just far enough so that he was visible.

  Echo stepped back half a pace, but then he hid his pistol behind his leg again, and gestured toward the right.

  McGarvey had set a trap.

  Kamal nodded.

  Echo stuffed the pistol in a belt holster under his sweater, then went the rest of the way to the Humvee, climbed up behind the wheel, started the engine and drove slowly away.

  * * *

  McGarvey ducked out from behind the protection of the building, and keeping the Humvee between himself and the Camaro behind which Kamal had been hiding, skipped the twenty feet where the driveway turned to the street.

  A car came by, and Echo held up until it passed, before he pulled out and drove away.

  Kamal was nowhere in sight.

  Keeping low, McGarvey zigzagged in a dead run across the parking lot to a position in the shadows where he had a good sight line on the rear and passenger sides of the Camaro, more than forty feet away, and the yellow pickup truck, ten feet farther. A nearly impossible range for a pistol shot.

  The Camaro’s dome light came on.

  McGarvey raced toward the car, firing measured shots low at the front passenger window.

  The young manager came out of the restaurant, shouting something.

  The Camaro’s engine came to life, and the car accelerated forward, slamming into the manager, tossing his body back into one of the plate-glass windows, which shattered.

  McGarvey, still running, changed out his empty magazine, cycled a round into the chamber, and fired again into the front seat on the driver’s side as the car raced past him.

  But then it was out of the parking lot and screaming up the street, well out of pistol range, toward the Shell station.

  McGarvey ran after it, as fast as he could pump his peg leg, changing to his third and final mag.

  He recharged the pistol as the Camaro swerved to the right into the gas station directly toward Pete’s car in front of one of the pumps.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Pete drew her pistol and got away from her car as she realized what was happening. It was Kamal and the bastard meant to run her down.

  She began firing directly at the driver’s side when the Camaro suddenly swerved sharply to the left, missing her car, and then slammed into the next two gas pumps in a row, knocking them completely off their bases.

  McGarvey was still one hundred feet away, when the Camaro tipped over on its side and skidded fifty feet, trailing a line of sparks until it came to a stop.

  Only a small amount of gasoline had spewed from the destroyed pumps before the emergency shutdown activated, but the several gallons plus the rising fumes went off with an impressive crump.

  Almost immediately flames spread to Pete’s car and she ran behind the pumps away from the heat toward the overturned Camaro.

  A woman came out of the station. “My God, my God!” she screamed.

  “Get back!” Pete shouted.

  The woman just looked at the fire, until the front of her white T-shirt spouted blood and she collapsed onto the tarmac.

  Kamal, dressed in jeans and a dark, untucked long-sleeve shirt, had climbed out of the car and was walking directly toward where Pete stood, although it didn’t seem as if he had spotted her, his attention on the gas station’s front door.

  She raised her pistol and as she headed directly toward him began firing, one measured shot after the other. Kamal turned toward her and fired, her hand shook. He was the bastard who had held her at his house overlooking the sea in Monaco last year. He was going to rape her then kill her, and all she’d been able to do was run.

  But not this time.

  Pete took a round in the fleshy part of her right arm, and she dropped her gun.

  Kamal glanced toward the McDonald’s, then turned back as Pete took a knee and grabbed the pistol with her left hand.

  “Put it down and you might live until your boyfriend makes it this far,” he said.

  She started to bring up the gun, when he pointed his pistol directly at her head.

  “I’ll kill you now or later.”

  “Now,” Pete said at the same moment she ducked to the right and fired, but missed.

  Kamal followed her move, but then turned again toward the road.

  Pete rolled onto her right side, the pain sharp from her wounded arm, and fired two more shots, as Kamal raced around the east end of the building.

  McGarvey came around the edge of the still furiously burning gasoline just as Pete fell back on her left side. Blood soaked the right sleeve of her shirt. But she was conscious.

  “He went around the other side!” she shouted

  McGarvey dropped down next to her, put his pistol on the ground, took hers and had her clamp her left hand over the wound.

  “I’ll be back,” he told her, a rage building inside of him. Al-Daran had hurt her once in Monaco, and had left her for dead after shooting her in the pencil tower in New York.

  He reached for his pistol, when an engine roared to life at the rear of the station. He jumped up and headed that way in a dead run.

  A tow truck came around the corner, accelerating, its engine screaming, belching black diesel smoke.

  McGarvey got off only one shot before the truck suddenly turned sharply left and headed directly toward him and Pete lying on the tarmac.

  He spun on his heel, scooped Pete off the ground, and dove toward the front wall of the building, just making it out of the way as the truck passed, missing them by inches.

  McGarvey dropped her, turned and managed to hook his left arm on the edge of the truck’s retracted ramp.

  * * *

  Kamal swerved out onto the road, sideswiping a car, sending it skidding into an oncoming delivery van.

  Someone would have reported the fire and shootings, and it wouldn’t be long before the police started showing up in force. Considering everything that had gone on in the past year or so, law enforcement people just about everywhere were on high alert.

  McGarvey had been right there, and he’d almost had the bastard trying to save his girlfriend. The rage that Kamal had been scarcely able to control during his sabbatical in France had risen in his head to such a point that he was nearly out of his mind. It was the main reason he’d agreed to take on the assignment that the Gang of Three in Beijing had given him. He didn’t care about anything else on their agenda; just killing McGarvey had been more than enough.

  Even now it was a wonder to him that he hadn’t a
cted before.

  And this time around he’d already failed twice. It was almost more than he could bear.

  He came to a red light but barreled through it directly into the side of an SUV coming from a residential neighborhood on the left. He got a brief impression of a woman in the passenger seat, a man driving, when he hit, blood exploding from the car along with shattered window glass.

  Downshifting, Kamal pushed the destroyed SUV away and continued north, the entrance to the Army and Navy Club in the woods to the right.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror in time to see McGarvey right there at the back window, just a couple of feet away, blood and glass all over his face from where he must have been thrown forward in the crash.

  But it was impossible.

  Kamal swerved sharply to the right, then left, traffic frantically scattering out of his way.

  He pulled out his pistol and half turned in his seat, but the son of a bitch was gone.

  Checking the big door-mounted rearview mirrors he looked to see if the bastard had been thrown off the truck, but he wasn’t on the side of the road.

  As he turned back the passenger door was flung open and McGarvey swung into the cab, feet first, his peg leg catching Kamal in the chest, making him drop the pistol and nearly run off the road.

  Kamal slammed on the brakes, sending McGarvey forward into the dashboard, his head slamming into the windshield, starring the glass.

  Now. Kill the bastard here and now. Finally get it over with, and leave the field of action while there was still a chance.

  Fuck the Gang of Three and their political insanity, or whatever their motive was.

  He hauled the truck off to the side, blocking all lanes of traffic, but McGarvey came at him with both fists, and he could do nothing else except shove open his door and bail out, even while the truck was slowing to a crawl.

  * * *

  McGarvey, blood streaming down his cut-up face, at least a couple of ribs on his left side broken from when he’d swung up into the bed of the truck, recovered almost instantly.

  Scrambling out the driver’s-side door, he was in time to see Kamal thirty feet away, hauling a driver out of a dark green car, jumping in behind the wheel and speeding away.

  He bent over, his hands on his knees, blood splashing on the pavement. A dark rage blotted out nearly everything, except the thought that he had missed again, and that Pete was wounded, lying on the ground in front of the gas station.

  It was a mess. A fucking mess, and it was all his fault because he had lost his edge.

  FORTY-NINE

  Kamal, keeping to the speed limit, was back on I-66 in less than five minutes, and two miles later merging with the traffic on the Beltway heading north. It wouldn’t take the police long to start their search for this specific car.

  Driving away he’d seen McGarvey get to his feet and raise something to his ear, no doubt a cell phone.

  On top of that the bitch had gotten lucky with one shot, grazing him in the left leg just below his buttock. The wound had bled just a little, but it felt as if his entire side from the waist down was on fire.

  He had to get off the highway and under cover very soon before the cops put up a helicopter and began expanding their search from where he’d hijacked the car.

  The solution came to him almost immediately as he passed a sign for Dulles International Airport exit in two miles.

  * * *

  McGarvey had finished on the phone with Pete to make sure that she was okay, and had just reached Otto when the first police cruiser, its siren blaring, lights flashing, showed up.

  A cop, his pistol out, came forward. “Put it down, put your hands up and turn toward me!”

  “I’m on it,” Otto said.

  McGarvey put up his hands and turned around. “The perp is driving a green Chevy, later model, I’m guessing an Impala, heading north. I didn’t catch the plate, but he’ll go to ground unless you call for air support right now.”

  The cop said something into his lapel mic, but never took his eyes or his pistol off McGarvey.

  “He’s a white male, about six feet tall, dark hair and eyes, muscular build. He’s a professional assassin and very good at it, so warn your people to approach him with extreme caution.”

  A lot more sirens were coming in, mostly from the east, but at least one or two from in town.

  “Drop the phone!” the cop shouted. He was an older man with buzz-cut gray hair.

  “I’m on with someone at the CIA.”

  “I said, drop the phone!” the cop shouted again, then stopped. “Say again?” he spoke into his lapel mic.

  McGarvey lowered the phone.

  All traffic had come to a complete standstill. Several people had abandoned their cars and were scattering on foot either into the woods toward the Army and Navy Club or across the street into the neighborhoods.

  “Who were you talking to?” the cop demanded.

  “Otto Rencke. My name is Kirk McGarvey.”

  The cop lowered his pistol. “Do you need an ambulance, sir?”

  “No. But two women have been shot at the Shell station about a mile back.”

  “We’re on that one, sir. And we’ll have at least one chopper in the air within the next few minutes.”

  McGarvey turned in the direction Kamal had gone. They were going to be too late.

  Otto was back. “You okay?”

  * * *

  Kamal got a ticket from the automatic dispenser at the Dulles Airport long-term parking garage and drove up to the first floor, where he slowly cruised each lane as if he were looking for a parking spot.

  Not finding what he wanted, he took the ramp up to the next floor.

  He was under cover now, but he didn’t think it would take McGarvey long to figure out that he might try to use the airport as a gateway either out of the area, or back into the city by taxi or shuttle bus. The bastard had gotten a decent look at the Chevy, and the driver would give them the tag number. He had maybe a ten-minute window before airport security began looking for the car.

  On the third level he found exactly what he was looking for. A man, nearly his own height and build, dressed in a business suit, carrying a leather bag slung over his shoulder and wheeling a suitcase, got off the elevator and headed down the C row.

  For the moment he was the only one in sight.

  Kamal found a parking spot one row over, and checking to make sure that no one else was around, reached the man just as he stopped at a C-class Mercedes and popped the trunk.

  He looked up at the last moment, uncertain what was happening.

  Kamal was on him, twisting his head sharply to the left, the man’s neck breaking with a crunch.

  Still no one was coming, and as the man’s legs began to give out beneath him, Kamal rolled the poor bastard into the trunk. Bad timing, was all. The unfortunate luck of the draw. It was something that had been drummed into their heads at Sandhurst.

  “Be constantly on alert for the unexpected opportunity to arise,” one of the instructors had told them. “Some to your advantage, some to your disadvantage. Recognize each one, create a plan, and execute without a moment’s hesitation.”

  RPE; one of the students had come up with the abbreviation.

  “Yes,” the instructor had said. “Recognize, Plan, Execute and repeat as needed.”

  Kamal put the suitcase into the trunk, took the key from the dying man’s hand and closed the lid as a man and woman got off the elevator and started down an adjacent row.

  He got behind the wheel, just as the couple walked past, neither of them even glancing toward him.

  When they had driven off, Kamal went back to the trunk and took a pair of slacks and a shirt from the suitcase The man was dead, his face almost purple, his eyes bulging.

  Kamal rolled him over and took the wallet from his back pocket, closed the trunk and at the open driver’s-side door, again making sure that no one was coming, removed the things from his pockets, took off his slacks and t
hen his shirt, which he wadded up and held against the flesh wound in his right thigh, before he put on the dead man’s slacks and shirt.

  The fit was a little snug, but not bad.

  At the trunk again he tossed in his bloody clothes, wrestled the suit coat from the man’s body and put it on.

  Making sure that he’d gotten no blood on himself, he took the suitcase and the leather bag from the man’s shoulder, closed the trunk, locked up the car and headed to the elevators as three men got off and headed to their cars.

  None of them noticed him as he got aboard and pressed the button for Baggage and Ground Transportation.

  * * *

  The first EMT on the scene taped up McGarvey’s ribs and put several butterfly bandages on his facial cuts.

  “You need a couple of stitches, sir. But I’d have your doctor take a couple of X-rays of your left side. I don’t think your ribs are broken but they’re probably bruised. You might want to make sure.”

  They were less than ten miles by air from Langley, and Otto had sent a Company helicopter out.

  “Pete’ll be okay,” Otto said. “She’s en route to All Saints right now.”

  “What about the other woman at the gas station?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Damn,” McGarvey said, his dark mood worsening. “Any word on the green Chevy?”

  “It hasn’t been spotted, but LE has three birds up looking.”

  “Try Dulles. I think he probably went there.”

  “I’m searching for last-minute ticket purchases, but nothing’s come up so far.”

  “He’s not leaving town,” McGarvey said. “Not until he’s finished here.”

  FIFTY

  The helicopter that Otto sent dropped McGarvey off near the river in Georgetown, and a waiting car and two minders from the Company drove him up to All Saints.

  “I hope the other guy is in worse shape,” one of the men said.

  “He got away,” McGarvey said, his morose mood riding heavy.

  They went the rest of the way in silence, and inside the hospital the nurse wanted to take him to one of the treatment rooms immediately so that she could clean up his facial lacerations and stitch whatever needed stitching.