Flash Points: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  Everything inside him, everything he’d ever stood for, nearly an entire lifetime, seemed to be on the edge of some precipice. He shook his head.

  “Makes you think, doesn’t it? My control officer got me out of badland, so I owe him at least something. You know how it is.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I forget.”

  McGarvey lowered his gun.

  “I didn’t kill you when I had the chance—more than one chance—so now you owe me a least a head start. I have enough money put away that I can go to ground permanently. And I’m pretty good at shit like that,” Kyung-won said.

  “Where were you recruited?”

  “Pyongyang. At Outstanding Leader’s compound.”

  “I was there a few years ago when his dad was Dear Leader. It’s a wonder you got away with your head.”

  “The Chinese can be persuasive,” Kyung-won said. “And now I’m getting out of here before the muscle Otto sent shows up. All I need is fifteen minutes.” He nodded to Pete, then turned and started to walk away, still rubbing his chest with his right hand.

  “You’re not going to let him go, are you?”

  “No,” McGarvey said.

  Kyung-won, suddenly turned around as if he had had a change of heart. In his hand was a Wilson X-TAC Elite Compact pistol.

  McGarvey turned sideways and fired three evenly spaced shots, one hitting the man in the upper chest, one in the throat and the third in his face just to the left of his nose.

  PART

  FOUR

  Flash Points

  The next afternoon

  SIXTY-ONE

  McGarvey and Pete didn’t leave his apartment until well before noon, somewhat rested, though neither of them had gotten much sleep. Twice before dawn she had awakened to find Mac standing at the front window looking down at the street where the Caddy Escalade with two minders who’d been sent out from Langley were parked.

  “Larry is dead and I thought you said that al-Daran had gone to ground and the GIP wouldn’t be sending anyone else from New York,” she said.

  “Old habits die hard,” he’d told her. “Go back to bed, I’ll be in shortly.”

  She’d gone to him and put an arm around his shoulders. “We’re both light sleepers. And I can’t get much these days without a warm body beside me. Give a girl a break?”

  “I haven’t got it figured out yet. There’s something just around the edges that doesn’t make sense.”

  “You thought that two tracks were in play. One out of the White House, and one involving the old-boys list that Otto came up with.”

  “That’s the sticking point. The old-boys thing—which includes Echo—wants to discredit Weaver. Get him impeached.”

  “For what? He hasn’t done anything wrong that would rise to that level. At least nothing we know about.”

  “It’s a soft coup.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it’ll have to be dangerous,” Pete said. “Another WikiLeaks? Maybe Weaver’s been sharing classified emails with his staff that Hillary Clinton was accused of doing. If something like that were to get out it could hurt him.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” McGarvey replied, almost distantly. Something just at the edge, he thought again. Softly scratching at the door of his understanding. Not getting it was maddening.

  “What then?”

  “I think it’s going to be worse,” McGarvey said. “Larry killed Grace at the Farm and the housekeeper who’d come with him from campus. And was willing to kill me if we couldn’t come to a deal, presumably on orders from his control officer who worked for Chinese intel.”

  “Do you think he was part of Echo’s deal? We can see if one of the names on Otto’s list works for the Guoanbu. I assume that we have people in Pyongyang who might know if that guy—whoever it is—showed up anytime in the past few months. Wouldn’t be any sort of proof but it might shed some light.”

  “That’s only half of it,” McGarvey said.

  “Yeah, al-Daran. If it was the GIP that hired him to take you out, what else are they planning?”

  “And who’s directing them?” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  The minders followed them out to Langley, where at the security gate McGarvey’s VIP visitor’s badge was given to him.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Director,” the guard said. “Good to see you back in one piece.”

  “A few stitches and a little glue holding things together,” McGarvey said.

  They parked in the underground garage and took the elevator up to Otto’s suite of offices on the third floor, where they were buzzed in.

  “How’s Audie?” McGarvey asked soon as they walked in.

  “I talked to Louise last night, they’re fine,” Otto said. He’d only been on his own for a little more than twenty-four hours, but he hadn’t gone home in that time, and he had reverted to his usual mess: coffee or some other stains on his CCCP sweatshirt, his jeans rumpled and his sneakers unlaced. But he was on the hunt; he had that faraway look in his eyes.

  “Where are they?”

  “She didn’t say and I didn’t ask, or trace the call.”

  “It’s coming to a head.”

  “I think so too,” Otto agreed and he led them into his inner sanctum. All of his big-screen high-def monitors were showing violet and lavender backgrounds, as was his horizontal table-size interactive monitor on which were displayed photographs of fifteen men and three women.

  “These are the people Echo’s been talking to?” McGarvey asked.

  “All mid-level intel.”

  Several of the photos were of Asian-looking men.

  “Any Guoanbu officer in the mix?”

  Otto pulled one of the photographs closer, and with a thumb and forefinger increased its size. “Recognize him?”

  “No.”

  “Li Zhang Wei. A mid-level financial planner who’s been on the team trying to help North Korea out of its monetary mess. His specialty is finding ways to come up with trade goods that can be sent out of the country. In itself not such an easy job. His main directive, of course, is to find and recruit Westerners in country to go home and spy for the Guoanbu.”

  “Larry,” McGarvey said.

  “Almost certainly.”

  “Okay, so the Chinese are involved,” Pete said. “Why recruit someone to come home and assassinate Mac?”

  “For the same reason as always. Someone figures that Mac is willing to work extrajudicially.”

  “That would imply that someone like Echo is working out of the Pentagon, and that someone like Hatchett is working out of the White House,” Pete said. “Neither of those guys is above the law, but they’re pretty much untouchable because of their positions.”

  “Unless you caught them with their flies unzipped,” Otto said.

  McGarvey had been thinking about both possibilities. If Otto was right, the two men would have to be pushed into making a mistake.

  “I have something else, though it’ll probably not help much,” Otto said. “I’ve got the DNA analysis back from the phone you picked up in the Watergate after the Fischer woman was shot to death, and her killers taken out. No identification, of course, but the guy in the stairwell was definitely Middle Eastern. Sixty-seven-percent probability he was Saudi. Some Syrian, some Pakistani and eight percent Brit.”

  “GIP,” Pete said.

  “Still leaves us with who killed Fischer and why?”

  McGarvey had that part. It was the only thing at this point that made any sense to him. “Jen Chambeau.”

  “Echo’s sister?” Pete asked. “But why?”

  “Her husband was fucking Fischer.”

  “I’ll check their phone logs and the Watergate security cameras for the past year,” Otto said. “But what you’re saying is that the Fischer woman was killed out of simple jealousy?”

  “I think that she got herself in the middle of something other than just her affair with Chambeau. She was killed for her affair, but
her killers’ killers were taken out because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  They were standing around the tabletop monitor and Pete put out a hand to steady herself. Her eyes were puffy, her complexion wan. She looked all in. “What a mess.”

  None of them said anything for a long moment, until Otto broke the silence.

  “So what’s next, Kemo Sabe?”

  “I’ll go upstairs and talk to Walt,” McGarvey said.

  “And Marty and Carleton,” Otto said. “If you’re going to tell them what I think you’re going to tell them.”

  “What am I missing?” Pete asked.

  “This one you’re going to stay out of,” McGarvey told her.

  “Like hell!”

  “Mac’s going to challenge the president of the United States again.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  Kamal came instantly awake with the late-morning Kansas sun shining directly in his second-floor window. Someone was at his door and he reached for the Glock under his pillow as one of Pastor Buddy’s girls came in with a tray.

  “I brought coffee, some fruit and a few rolls,” the girl said.

  She was the Asian, named Mio, and she wore only a very short kimono. She was bright, and she was good in bed. Pastor Buddy had called her his right arm.

  She set the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch, and as she bent over, her bare ass was exposed.

  “Not this morning, darling,” Kamal told her.

  She turned, inclined her head and came over to the side of the bed. “The pastor wanted to personally thank you not only for your latest, most generous financial contribution, but for the two very hard workers you sent us. Jacks-of-all-trades, apparently, because they weren’t here more than two hours before they unloaded their tools and began work in the chapel.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Kamal said.

  He and Baz had discussed which people would be sent to the three targets. A white, middle-class-American-looking boy and girl to fetch the van in San Francisco and drive it to the bridge. Two redneck men who were originally from a small town in southwestern Oklahoma, and who were proficient with explosives, to mine the dikes in New Orleans. And these two guys who had been born and raised in Aleppo but whose Spanish was good enough so that they could pose as Venezuelans.

  They had been the hardest talents to come up with, according to the camp commandant. “But you can’t imagine the sorts of people who join the online chat rooms,” Baz had said. “From schoolteachers to schizophrenic out-of-work truck drivers, to kids next door and everyone in between.”

  “I hope they’re behaving themselves,” Kamal told the girl.

  “They’re actually sweet,” she said. “And quiet. Juan actually said he was looking forward to Sunday.”

  It suddenly struck Kamal that the bitch was toying with him, most likely on Pastor Buddy’s orders. She was working too hard at playing the dumb broad. Which meant that the pastor was shrewder than he let on, and suspected that something was going on he needed to know about. But quietly. Without disrupting the money flow.

  “Actually, I’m not very hungry,” Kamal said.

  Mio took off her kimono as Kamal threw back the covers and she slipped into bed beside him.

  She lay on her side, one leg over his, and brushed her fingertips across his cheek, then his lips.

  “I’m glad that the boys are working out here,” he said. “They needed a safe haven, and I suggested that this would be a good place for them. At least for now. And they jumped at it.”

  “Venezuelans?”

  “They went up to Maracaibo a few years ago to lay low, working as roustabouts on the oil rigs in the lake. That’s where I came across them.”

  “I had no idea that you were involved in the oil business.”

  “Just around the edges. Actually, I was down there gathering information for an old friend, and I hired them to do some inside work for him.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that they came to the attention of the local SEBIN office—the oil business belongs to the government—and I had to get them out of town as quickly and as quietly as possible.”

  “SEBIN?”

  “Venezuela’s intelligence agency.”

  “They’re fugitives?”

  “No one outside of Venezuela is looking for them. And while they’re here they’ll do just about anything Buddy wants them to do.”

  She smiled. “Anything?”

  He rolled over and kissed the nipple of her right breast. “Anything.” he said.

  * * *

  After the girl left, Kamal took a shower and got dressed in a pair of off-white linen slacks, a yellow guayabera shirt and brown loafers, the last of his civilian clothes he hadn’t worn recently.

  His time in the States, on this operation, was coming to an end. And he found that he was looking forward to his country life in France, providing that he could get back to it intact. If not, he had a number of other possibilities in mind, one of them near Bangkok, where his money and anonymity would go much further than in France.

  The three operations he’d been hired for in Beijing would take place on Sunday at noon. The one he’d planned for himself at Grand Central Station would happen at exactly the same time.

  Originally Grand Central had been little more for him than frosting on a sweet. But in the past weeks it had become something more. Something that McGarvey would have to react to.

  He’d come to think of it as a final confrontation between the two of them.

  An end cap to his career—to his career and McGarvey’s life.

  He studied his image in the bathroom mirror. Not handsome in any Western movie star sort of way. Not Saudi. No trace of his Arabic genes. A well-put-together American, perhaps. Certainly a Westerner. British, if he wanted. Or French, German, even Swiss.

  Drying his hands, he holstered his pistol beneath his shirt at the small of his back and went downstairs and outside to a cool, sunny morning.

  It was a Friday and the amusement park wasn’t due to open for another hour, at ten, but the huge church was open. He walked down the flower-lined path to the rear service entrance and up onto the loading dock where workmen were unloading a couple dozen wheelchairs and three times as many walkers, which would be brought out during the service.

  Some of Pastor Buddy’s people were out and about—a few in business suits, but most of them in jeans and polo shirts. A few of them nodded, but most of them had no idea who he was. Just another believer who’d shown up in their midst.

  Inside, he walked past the dressing rooms, the control centers for the television and radio operations, and at the far end of the broad corridor a suite of big rooms where printed materials were manufactured—the weekly newspapers, the pamphlets and brochures such as “Nine Steps To Salvation,” “Let God Into Your Life,” “He’s Waiting,” “Heaven Is Not Just a Word.”

  Pastor Buddy had admitted that he was looking to expand his operation to include the manufacture and distribution of books, not only his, but other religious tomes, under the imprint of God’s Workshop.

  Obedh and Juan Castillo were touching up the paint at the back of the stage in the main hall when Kamal walked out through the double doors.

  For a minute they were not aware he’d come onstage.

  The auditorium was vast, rows of seats going back so far that recognizing anyone even halfway to the main doors would be completely impossible. Four tiers of balconies rose from the floor. And dropping from the ceiling were vast crystal chandeliers, along with television cameras and microphones on moveable booms. Huge flat-screen monitors the size of Jumbotrons hung from above the main stage as well as along the walls. Every move, every word and every facial gesture that Pastor Buddy made was broadcast on the screens and speakers, here in the auditorium as well as over his television network, broadcast by satellite all over the world.

  The buffoon had built an empire potentially touching one-t
hird of the entire planet’s population.

  The end, when it came on Sunday, would be nothing short of spectacular.

  Kamal headed over to where the two ISIS suicide bombers were painting, to reassure them that Allah was watching them even in this den of evil, and was waiting to reward them.

  SIXTY-THREE

  Page was not very happy when McGarvey showed up. The DCI was behind his desk, Marty Bambridge and Carleton Patterson seated across from him.

  It almost looked to McGarvey like a pretrial hearing, which in effect he supposed it was. No one, not even Carleton, who had a long, warm history with Mac, was going to like what he was going to tell them.

  “Pete and I had a spot of trouble last night,” McGarvey said, sitting down.

  “We read your report and listened to Otto’s recording of your conversation.” Page said.

  “Larry was one of our best operatives,” Marty said. “Took a lot of chances, but he always managed to pull through. Especially getting out of badland.”

  “He had help,” McGarvey said.

  “Apparently all along,” Marty replied. “We’re working on backtracking his missions.”

  “How about Grace Metal?”

  “She was clean. A casualty of war.”

  “But that’s not why you came to see us, my dear boy,” Patterson said. He was an old man but still one of the sharpest general counsels the CIA ever had.

  “I only have a few things to work out yet, but I’ve already pretty well pieced everything together. Should have it wrapped up later today or by morning at the latest.”

  “What few things?” Marty asked.

  “I’m going to call some of my old contacts from when this was my office, and then I’m going to have a chat with a general and lieutenant colonel who work at the Pentagon.”

  “And then what?” Carleton asked.

  “And then I’ll know for sure what I’ve already figured out.”

  Marty was impatient. “We’re listening.”

  “Two things are going on, both of them having to do with the president.”