Gambit

by David Hagberg

  “Left,” Otto radioed to Mac.

  SEVENTEEN

  Keeping to the shadows as much as possible, Hicks made his way down Volta Place toward the university campus less than two blocks away. He had taken one shot to his left side, and although he wasn’t losing too much blood, his rib cage hurt like hell. But he had to get off the street and under cover soon.

  At the corner, he glanced over his shoulder, but McGarvey had not yet appeared from the woods. The son of a bitch had gone down, but he had managed to shoot back and was in the act of getting to his feet.

  The bastard was tougher than Hicks thought any man could be, especially one who was fifty. He had definitely underestimated the former DCI, and it was a mistake he wasn’t going to make again. If he had another chance.

  Just before the corner, a cab cruised by, and Hicks almost hailed it but then shook his head.

  “Goddamnit to hell,” he swore softly, watching the cab turn left on Thirty-Fifth Street and disappear.

  The fact of the matter was he’d screwed up his last hit, but the op had been contracted under a very strict blanket of secrecy so that his failure had not turned up on anyone’s radar yet. And it was the only reason the Russian operator had recommended him for this assignment.

  But sooner or later, the fact he had failed would come to light among the people who knew about these things, and his career would be over. He needed the money to go deep at least for the next few years, to give himself the time to sanitize his profile before he could get back in the game.

  Which meant McGarvey had to die.

  He turned around and hurried back fifty feet to where the line of trees ended next to an art gallery closed at this hour, and he ducked into the woods just as his quarry came into sight.

  * * *

  McGarvey was just in time to see the figure of a man duck back into the woods about seventy yards away in the direction of the university. He couldn’t be certain that the shooter had spotted him and would be waiting in ambush. But he had to assume the worst.

  Keeping his pistol pointed down in his left hand, hiding it from anyone passing on the street, he hurried down Volta, ready at an instant to jog left into the tree line.

  “The Bureau is rolling,” Pete said. “You copy?”

  “Yes. He just went back into the woods, and it’s possible he spotted me,” McGarvey said.

  “Could he be doubling back toward the hospital?”

  “Anything’s possible,” McGarvey said. He spotted a small splatter of blood on the sidewalk. “He’s wounded.”

  “Badly?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. He picked up the pace but moved left so that he was hugging the edge of the woods. To have a clear sight line, the man would have to step out into the open.

  “Hold up there until the SWAT team arrives,” Pete said. “Let them handle it.”

  “I want him alive.”

  “No one’s going to risk their life on this guy. They’ll be on-site in under ten minutes.”

  “Let them know I’m here in the mix; I don’t want to get shot in the back,” McGarvey said.

  Switching his pistol to his right hand, he stepped off the sidewalk and made his way from tree to tree on a diagonal, which he thought might intercept the shooter if he was doubling back as Pete had suggested.

  * * *

  Hicks waited for a full two minutes before he poked his head out from behind a tree where he had a decent line of sight up the sidewalk to where he’d seen McGarvey come out of the woods. But the tenacious son of a bitch wasn’t there.

  From what he’d learned from the dossiers he’d been shown, he didn’t think that the former DCI was the type to call for help. The man had built the rep of working on his own. He was a lone wolf except for his geeky friend who still worked for the Company and his new wife, who’d been a CIA interrogator. The geek wouldn’t be coming out here, nor did he think that McGarvey would want his wife to get involved in a gun battle.

  For now, then, it was just him and McGarvey. Exactly the way he liked it.

  The former DCI was stalking him, so now it was time to turn the tables again.

  * * *

  McGarvey held up behind a tree and checked the load in his pistol, ejecting the magazine and making sure that when he’d fallen to the ground, the weapon hadn’t been fouled by dirt. It was still clean, and he reinserted the mag into the gun’s handle.

  He didn’t think the shooter would be the type to give himself over to the cops when the SWAT team showed up. And he had gone back into the woods because he hadn’t given up on his assignment.

  Who had hired the man, and why?

  Turning his head to the left to partially mask the direction of his voice, he called out, “I’m ready to make a deal if you’re willing to listen.”

  “Terms?” the shooter called. He was perhaps twenty-five yards out and slightly to the left.

  “I’ll give you a head start.”

  “What guarantees do I have?”

  “A piece of free advice. A Bureau SWAT team is en route.”

  “What do you want in return?”

  “Who hired you to kill me and why?”

  “I don’t have those answers.”

  It struck McGarvey that the man’s accent was Canadian. “Nor would you give them to me if you did.”

  “Something like that,” the shooter said. This time, he was farther to the left but definitely closer.

  McGarvey eased to the right but still behind the tree, and he crouched down. “I don’t think that you’re working for any government, especially not Canada’s. So it’s not for your country, just money. Worth your life?”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “At this moment, myself.”

  “And your wife and Otto Rencke? Do you think they will mourn your passing?”

  The shooter was to the left and very close.

  McGarvey rose up and rolled left.

  The shooter was right there and started to turn as Mac pointed his pistol directly at the man’s head at a distance of less than five feet.

  The man stopped. “Even you might miss at this range.”

  “No,” Mac said. “Open your hand and drop your pistol. Any other move and I’ll fire.”

  “Then what?”

  “Give me the answers and you can leave. No real harm, no foul.”

  “What’ll you tell the SWAT team when they show up?”

  “You escaped.”

  “Noble of you.”

  “I’m just tired of being hunted. You’re the second shooter someone’s sent. I want to know who and why.”

  This seemed to surprise the man. “I didn’t know.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “I don’t know that either, except that my initial contact was with a Russian. But he was merely a go-between.”

  “SVR? GRU?”

  “He sounded like he might have worked as an intel officer at one time, but I don’t think he was active.”

  “Do you have a name or a description?”

  “Never met him face-to-face.”

  “How much were you promised?”

  “Five million…,” the shooter said when a siren very close interrupted him. Without turning, he angled his pistol upward and fired.

  At the last instant, McGarvey moved his head sharply to the left and fired his pistol, the shot catching the man in the side of his neck before he staggered a pace backward and then went down.

  EIGHTEEN

  Hicks was alive and conscious, but he was trying with everything in his being not to drown in his own blood that was pouring into his windpipe from the ragged wound in his neck. The bullet had hit his jaw and splintered, causing a major tear.

  McGarvey was over him, kicking away the pistol that had fallen to the ground.

  Hicks thought he was hearing a lot of sirens approaching from the east, though he was becoming more and more detached. The fact of the matter is he’d lost. McGarvey was good, a lot better than even his dossiers had su
ggested. Better than Tarasov had warned.

  McGarvey grabbed Hicks’s right shoulder and turned him on his side, and immediately, blood stopped pouring into his throat.

  Hicks coughed several times, deeply, the pain raging in his neck all the way to the top of his head. But he could breathe if he kept it shallow.

  The sirens were much closer now, maybe at the end of the block.

  McGarvey clamped a hand over the wound, applying just enough pressure to slow the bleeding, but not so much as to impede breathing.

  The man was saving his life, but Hicks could think of only one reason for it. Information.

  “I would have kept my word,” McGarvey said. His voice was a long ways off.

  The sirens had stopped, and for a moment, Hicks thought he’d lost his hearing, but someone shouted from the street.

  “Coming in!”

  “Straight back, twenty yards,” McGarvey called.

  “Clear?”

  “Shooter’s down.”

  “No malice,” Hicks managed to whisper. For some reason, he wanted to make that much clear.

  “Just a job?”

  “The biggest yet. I could have gone deep.”

  “Who was the Russian who hired you?”

  “Deep pockets. But I think he was just an expediter working for an American.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “No.”

  “Description?”

  “His face and voice were distorted,” Hicks said, and he was drifting, the pain gone, McGarvey’s face above him fading.

  * * *

  Four SWAT team officers, FBI stenciled on their vests, appeared behind and to the left and right of McGarvey and Hicks, their assault rifles at the ready.

  “Mr. McGarvey?” one of them asked.

  Mac nodded. “This guy’s still alive, and I want to keep him that way.”

  “Medic!” the officer shouted, and within moments, another man in SWAT team incident dress appeared. He wasn’t armed but was carrying a trauma bag.

  The medic got down next to Hicks.

  “One round hit his jaw, then an artery in the neck,” McGarvey said.

  The medic pulled a thick gauze pad from a packet and motioned for McGarvey to take his hand away from the wound, which immediately began spurting blood.

  Mac backed off, picked up his pistol, holstered it, and turned to the officer who obviously was the incident commander. “You guys bring an ambulance?”

  “Yes, sir. Have you been hit?”

  “No. But I want to save this guy’s life, if at all possible.”

  “His carotid artery has been nicked,” the medic said without looking up.

  “Take him to All Saints; it’s just around the corner.”

  “That’s for you guys,” the incident commander said.

  “I need this man,” Mac said. “Otto?”

  “Franklin’s rolling,” Otto said in his earbud.

  “Send Pete over; I want her to run the interrogation if he can be stabilized and brought around.”

  “She and Mary just left,” Otto said. “You okay?”

  “He missed.”

  * * *

  By the time Hicks was stabilized, loaded into the ambulance, and brought to All Saints, Franklin was there. After a short conference with the medic, the still-unconscious man was hustled immediately upstairs to the third-floor operating theater.

  McGarvey went to the restroom at the end of the hall and cleaned up as best he could. When he came out, a suit from the FBI who identified himself as Special Agent Tom Duncan was there in the waiting room.

  “How’re you doing, Mr. Director?” he asked, getting to his feet. He was a tall, well-built man in his early forties, with light hair cropped short in the military fashion, a square jaw, and bright eyes. He looked like a recruiting poster for Special Forces.

  “Fine,” Mac said. “And thanks for the Bureau’s quick response. You might have saved his life.”

  “Any idea who he is?”

  “A Canadian, I think, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was special ops at one time.”

  “What’d he want with you?”

  “He wanted me dead.”

  Duncan pursed his lips. He looked skeptical. “Any relationship to the dead man in the building across the street from your apartment?”

  “They weren’t brothers, if that’s what you mean,” Mac said sharply, and he immediately regretted it. “Sorry, but I don’t care much for being hunted.”

  “Which is what both of these guys were doing, hunting you. But why? What’s the connection between the two of them?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’m assuming for right now that they were hired by the same people, possibly the Russians.”

  Duncan was startled. “The SVR or GRU?”

  “It’s a thought.”

  “From what I understand, they would have cause. But why not send one of their own? Why hire outsiders?”

  “Lots going on right now between the White House and the Kremlin, and taking out a former DCI would carry with it some serious blowback.”

  “Do you think that there’s a connection between President Weaver’s and Putin’s talks and taking you down?”

  McGarvey nodded toward the operating theater. “It’s one of the questions I want to ask him if he makes it.”

  “Keep us informed.”

  * * *

  Pete and Mary showed up five minutes after Duncan left. Mac was still in the waiting room having a cup of coffee, and when they came in, Pete gave him a sharply appraising look.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’ll live.”

  Franklin, still in his operating scrubs, came down the corridor. He didn’t look happy. “I lost him,” he said. “Just too much damage to his carotid artery. And there were several bullet fragments in his right temporal lobe that we didn’t catch until we had the bleeding under control.”

  “We’ll get his fingerprints, dental records, and samples of his blood, saliva, and hair for a DNA analysis,” Mary said. “Same as the South African. Something matching the two of them might turn up.”

  Franklin nodded. “Unless you’re going to send me someone else this evening, I’m going home,” he said, and he walked away.

  NINETEEN

  Hammond and Susan were having a late breakfast in the suite after an energetic night of lovemaking. She was nearly ten years younger than he was and had more stamina. Plus, she was almost always completely absorbed in herself, and there were times that he felt he was getting tired of her.

  “Typical Hollywood,” she’d once explained. “A leopard can’t change its spots, and an actor sometimes doesn’t know who the real person is.”

  They’d been on his yacht anchored off Cannes a few years ago. It was morning, and they were having breakfast like now.

  “I don’t want you to change,” he’d told her, and he’d meant it.

  “You’ll get tired of me sooner or later. It’s another Hollywood flaw, or plus, depending on your point of view. Jump in bed for a good fuck with someone new. Marry them eventually, and within a year, you decide someone else might be more interesting, and you drift apart to start it all over again.”

  “So let’s be different and never get married to each other.”

  She’d smiled and nodded. “Freedom. I like that.”

  “Me, too,” Hammond had said.

  She took her coffee and went to the window looking toward the White House. “We should have heard something by now,” she mused.

  Hammond agreed. “He might have missed, or something may have come up.”

  “He’ll want the second payment, and he’ll want to keep you from getting nervous. Maybe you’ll pull the first half from his account.”

  “Can’t be done.”

  “My people tell me that anything can be done, if the incentive is there.”

  It was the first thing Hammond had thought of when he’d awakened this morning. But he’d decided to give it a little time.<
br />
  He picked up his phone and called Tarasov’s private number. It rang four times, but instead of rolling over to a voicemail option, the call was canceled. He hit the End button.

  Susan had watched. “No one home?”

  “No.”

  She came across, took the phone from him, entered a number, and put it on speaker mode. It rang twice before a woman answered. “Department of Justice, how may I direct your call?”

  “Bob Perkins, please.”

  “Robert Perkins’s office. Who is calling?” another woman answered.

  “Susan Patterson. I just need a moment of Bobby’s time, if he’s fit company this morning.”

  “One moment.”

  Susan put her hand over the phone. “He’s an assistant director of the DOJ’s Domestic Intelligence Division. He’s a fan, and we’re old pals.”

  “Good morning, Susan. Surprised to hear from you,” Perkins said. He sounded breathless as if he’d just run up a flight of stairs, or just excited that a movie star had called. “It’s been a while. Are you in town?”

  “I am. And I want to know what kind of an operation you guys are running here. A girl can’t come to D.C. and feel safe on the streets?”

  “My God, what happened? Are you okay?”

  “I was at a party in Georgetown last night. And all of a sudden, it was like World War III was starting. I mean, sirens everywhere. And maybe even some shooting? I’m telling you, I was frightened out of my mind. I thought it was another Pulse incident.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she covered the phone again.

  “After midnight?” Hammond said.

  Susan took her hand away. “Sometime after midnight, maybe.”

  “Hold on,” Perkins said.

  Susan held out her coffee cup for a refill, and Hammond poured.

  Perkins came back, and he sounded cautious. “There was a shooting up near the university, but I’m told it was a drunk with a gun threatening to kill his wife,” Perkins said. “Where was the party?”