“Where is she now?”
“Sitting in your gazebo with her head in her hands.”
“What’s Lou’s evaluation?”
“Not enough data; she’s given it only a 28 percent probability that the woman and her husband are the ones gunning for you. Their creds check out as valid, and the screen grabs of her face we took from the surveillance cameras don’t show up on any database we have access to.”
“Did she try to contact anyone after she got to shore?” Pete asked.
“She was wearing a beach jacket of some sort, but she lost it in the water. All she’s wearing now is a very skimpy bikini, no place to hide a phone or a weapon.”
“Yes, there is, if she’s determined enough,” Pete said.
“And it’s possible she’ll find the Beretta I taped under a seat in the gazebo,” McGarvey added.
“If they’re the shooters,” Otto said, “what do you want me to do? At least call Jim?”
“Does it look like she’s in any physical trouble?”
“No.”
“Then she won’t need medical help,” McGarvey said. “We’re turning around and going back to the house.”
“If they’re the ones after you, the wife showed up to lure you back, and the husband who you passed on the ICW is waiting for you to do just that so he can take his shot.”
“Any sign of him?” Pete asked.
“No, but he could be waiting just outside the perimeter.”
“Which would make them smart.”
* * *
Taio laid the rifle down and tried to phone Li, but after four rings, he gave up. Either she’d lost her phone, had her hands full driving the Jet Ski—which in any case would be too loud for her to hear the ring—or she had gone ashore and was in the house already.
If the latter were the case, the McGarveys would be turning around and heading back.
It could take as long as forty-five minutes or even an hour before they got to this point. But he was a patient man.
He crawled out from under the canvas on the shore side, got his bottle of water from the Jet Ski, and went back inside, where he took a drink. Easing the canvas cover up a few inches so he had a clear view of the boats passing on the waterway, he picked up the rifle, switched the safety off, and settled down to wait.
* * *
McGarvey slowed to just above idle as they approached the Crow’s Nest restaurant and marina, the channel out into the Gulf a couple of hundred feet dead ahead. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said.
“I’m all ears.”
“If they’re the ones gunning for us, the husband is waiting for us somewhere near the house, but we won’t know which side of the channel he’s hiding until he takes a shot. And if he’s any good, he won’t miss.”
“One of us could go up the mast; he might be concentrating on the cockpit.”
“Whoever’s up top would be an easy target. And hunkering down below the coaming in the cockpit wouldn’t do us any good either. If he brought a long rifle in the umbrella bag, the rounds could penetrate the hull.”
“I could take the dinghy ashore once we get a little closer and come up from behind him,” Pete suggested. “Catch him from behind.”
“We still don’t know which side of the channel he’s on,” McGarvey said.
He shoved the throttle forward, and the Whitby surged toward the jetties. Then he got on the phone and called Otto.
“We’re going out into the Gulf, anchoring offshore from the house, and taking the dinghy in. Keep an eye on the woman, and let us know what she’s doing.”
FORTY-NINE
The early evening was soft, a light breeze coming off the lake through the open sliders in the bedroom of the villa ruffling the gauze curtains. Susan and Hammond had made love and were lying in each other’s arms.
“When will we know?” she murmured.
“When I get notice that the second half of the payment was made into their account,” Hammond said.
He was still torn two ways. One part of him wanted it to be over, and the other wanted the game to continue. It was nuts, but he was also torn between excitement and being more frightened than he had been since his biggest deal in the middle of the dot-com that had netted him his first billion and ruined the poor bastard who’d gone up against him.
“I have a better idea,” Susan said. She got up and padded out of the bedroom.
“Where the hell are you going?” he called after her.
“Just a sec,” she said.
She came back with her iPad, and, sitting cross-legged beside him on the bed, she powered up the machine and then googled Sarasota area news outlets.
Almost immediately, a list of local television and radio stations and newspapers came up on the screen. She chose WWSB, the ABC affiliate in Sarasota.
“If the former director of the CIA and his wifey get into a gun battle, it’ll hit the news almost immediately,” she said. “We just have to sit back and wait.”
Hammond had to smile despite himself and despite what he had put into motion. “In the meantime, we’ll just have to amuse ourselves any way we can.”
“I can think of a couple of things,” Susan said, setting the iPad aside.
* * *
Taio checked his watch. Traffic on the ICW came in spurts. At times, the waterway was busy, almost crowded, but then for stretches of time, no boats passed. But if Li had made it to the house and the surveillance system had picked up her presence and the McGarveys had been notified, they should have turned around and come this far by now.
He tried her cell phone again, letting it ring ten times before he hung up.
The only thing left at this point was to salvage whatever he could to get them the hell out of harm’s way.
Switching the AR-15’s safety on and taking out the magazine so that the gun would fit into the umbrella bag, he got off the pontoon boat, untied his Jet Ski, and headed back out to the ICW, keeping his eye for the Whitby in case his timing was off.
* * *
They had lowered the dinghy into the water on the way up from Venice and, because the seas were mostly calm, towed it on a fairly short tether. The Kawasaki was barely moving on dead idle, and as they slowed down and approached it, McGarvey called Otto.
“We’re just offshore. What’s the situation at the house?”
“Nothing’s changed. The woman is still sitting in the gazebo.”
“Waiting for her husband?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Has she found the Beretta?”
“No,” Otto said. “But it’s within arm’s reach, so when you go in, take care.”
McGarvey rang off. “Get down in the dinghy, and I’ll get you close to the Jet Ski,” he told Pete. “See if she left anything behind.”
Pete hung off the transom and pulled the little boat close aboard, and as soon as she was in, McGarvey maneuvered the Whitby over to the Jet Ski.
Pete reached over and pulled something from one of the compartments. “A cell phone in a plastic bag.”
“Stand by. We’re going in,” McGarvey said.
He went forward and lowered the Danforth anchor. The water here was only twenty feet deep, so he let out one hundred feet of line, cleated it, then went back to the helm and put the ketch in reverse until the anchor bit. He shut down the engine and pocketed the key.
Pete was waiting in the dinghy. He handed her pistol down, shoved his in the waistband of his shorts at the small of his back, and climbed down into the dinghy, and they headed to the beach.
* * *
Taio maneuvered slowly past the boats waiting for the Blackburn Point Bridge and crossed beneath the low span and through the several boats waiting on that side, careful to make no wake, which would make people angry at him. Angry people remembered those who did something to them.
When he was clear, he sped up and came within sight of the McGarveys’ house and the empty dock, and he throttled down again and made his way slowly ashore
, all of his senses alert. The situation had gotten completely out of hand. All he wanted now was to collect Li and get the hell out.
Easing the Jet Ski behind the dock of the house two doors down from the McGarveys’, he tied it off, got the AR-15 from the bag, loaded it, and headed off.
* * *
Li thought she’d heard the distinctive growl of the Jet Ski that Taio was driving, but then it stopped. It had been very close, perhaps less than a hundred meters to the south. Whoever was monitoring the house surveillance system knew that she was here, but it was unlikely that they were aware she’d spotted the pistol taped under the seat just in front of her.
It was a race now. Either Taio got here first or the McGarveys would.
* * *
Pete ran the bow of the dinghy up on the beach and cut the engine as Mac jumped out, his Walther in hand.
A car passed on the road above, and Pete was right behind him as he went across the low sand dune and held up.
He called Otto. “Has anything changed?”
“Yes. The other Kawasaki pulled up at the Parkers’ house two doors down from you. A man carrying an AR-15 got off and is heading your way. ETA maybe three minutes tops.”
McGarvey pocketed the phone. “Company’s coming,” he said to Pete over his shoulder and hurried across the road.
He didn’t bother with the front door, but both of them went around back to the rear of the house, where they pulled up.
The woman was seated in the gazebo her back to them. She was bent over again, her head down as if she were frightened or in pain.
“Get to your feet with your hands up!” McGarvey shouted.
The woman rolled to the left onto a knee as if she were startled out of her mind and was collapsing. At the same time, her right arm came around.
She had the Beretta in hand and started firing, the rounds smacking into the side of the house inches from where McGarvey had been standing.
“Keep her busy, but try not to kill her,” Mac told Pete, and he raced to the front of the house, and, rounding the corner, ran to the to the south side and toward the rear.
He could hear Pete firing back, her shots measured, but the Beretta was finally silent, the fifteen-round magazine dry—either that or the woman was down.
“Li!” a man shouted at the same time Mac reached the back of the house and cautiously peered around the corner.
The same one from the Kawasaki that had passed them on the ICW was rushing up the lawn from the next-door house, the AR-15 in hand.
“Stop!” McGarvey shouted.
Taio brought the rifle around and, without missing a step, sprayed the corner of the house at the same time Mac fired three shots, all of them catching the man in the side of his torso, sending him sprawling.
He twitched twice and then lay still.
“Pete?” McGarvey called.
“I’m good. You?”
“My guy is down. What about the woman?”
“She’s down. Good to go.”
“Clear here,” McGarvey said, and keeping his pistol pointed ahead, he walked down to the assassin’s body.
PART
THREE
Endgame
In the end, the only real hope was to send an overwhelming force to finish the thing.
FIFTY
Hammond was in the bathroom just finishing with a shower at eleven in the evening when Susan shouted something from the bedroom. He didn’t quite catch it, but she’d sounded mad. Another one of her histrionic outbursts.
He tossed his towel toward the hamper and reached for a bathrobe when Susan, still naked, came to the door, her iPad in hand, an odd, almost frightened look on her face. He immediately knew what had happened in Florida.
“They’re calling it a shoot-out on Casey Key,” she said.
Hammond didn’t know how he felt, except it wasn’t good. “McGarvey?”
She was looking at the iPad’s screen, the volume so low that Hammond couldn’t make out the words. She came forward and held it out for him, but he shook his head.
“Is the son of a bitch dead?”
“No, and neither is his wife. Not a scratch between them.”
Hammond turned away and looked at his image in the mirror. The Scorpions were supposed to be pros. They never missed. When Tarasov had suggested them, even he had seemed to be impressed. Their credentials were among the best in the business in the entire world. They’d never botched an assignment, nor had they ever been connected with any assassination. Their reputations and contact information were on no known database and came by word of mouth only to a very few people anywhere whose business was hiring talent such as that.
“Casualties?” he asked.
“A man and a woman.”
Hammond’s anger suddenly rose out of nowhere. “Killed, wounded, captured?” he shouted without turning away from the mirror.
“Presumed dead in a shoot-out with the former director of the CIA and his wife, also a former CIA employee,” Susan said, her voice flat.
Hammond turned to her. She was frightened, and he realized just then that he was frightened, too.
“So what are we supposed to do now?” she said. “We couldn’t run and hide if we wanted to; we’re fucking personalities, especially me.”
“We’re not going to run.”
“Then what?”
Hammond went to the wall phone and called downstairs for a bottle of Krug and two flutes to be brought up to the master bedroom balcony. When he hung up, he managed a slight smile. “Get dressed, sweetheart; we have some things to decide before I give Mikhail a call.”
Susan shook her head. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Probably, but it’s too late for either of us to back out now. The Canadian and South African snipers are dead, and now so are the Chinese couple, and I’ll recover everything I paid them, plus if we’re lucky and they had substantial accounts, I’ll raid them as well. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn a profit.”
“You are nuts.”
Hammond’s fear faded a little as he began to accept what would have to be done to finish the game. He’d known that McGarvey was not only good, the son of a bitch was lucky, which was a hell of a combination in anyone’s book, but he hadn’t realized until just this moment how good the man was.
“You might be right, but as you said, we can’t run and hide. We have to finish it once and for all.”
“Without being killed ourselves—or worse yet, get arrested and sent to prison somewhere.”
“McGarvey would have to find out who’s after him, which won’t happen, because we have Mikhail as our expediter,” Hammond said. “Now get dressed.”
He brushed past her, got his phone, and started for the balcony.
“You met with the Chinese couple aboard the yacht in Skagway,” Susan said.
“They’re dead.”
“You’d better hope so.”
* * *
The wine was cold, the night soft, and the lights from across the lake were pretty. Susan had put on a silk Versace kimono, and she sat across from Hammond. They hadn’t talked for nearly ten minutes after the sommelier had come and gone, content for the time being to make some sense of what had happened in Florida and figure out what to do next.
For Hammond’s part, he was torn as he had been from the moment he’d hatched the plan to have McGarvey killed, between wanting the thing to be done with or extending the game as long as possible. And now, it had come to the second option.
“We don’t have much of a choice at this point,” he said, breaking the silence.
“As long as the Chinese couple are dead, you can just quit.”
“I don’t want to.”
She wasn’t angry or surprised, as if she’d known what he’d say. “You want to play this stupid little boy’s game out?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why?”
Hammond asked himself that same question from the beginning, and he never came up with an answer that would
satisfy himself let alone her. “Because I can?”
“Because you’re bored with just making money.”
“That, too. And the circuit. New York, Davos, Cannes and Monaco, and Mallorca, and all the other little amusements and all the same faces.” He looked at the lights across the lake. “Don’t you get bored?”
She followed his gaze. “Almost always, if you want to know the God’s honest truth.”
“You’d rather be in front of the cameras.”
She nodded. “It’s a lot safer than shooting some poor dumb bastard in the side of the head.”
“Then make films.”
“I have a business to run.”
“Sell it to me for a buck, and let my management team take over.”
“Why the hell would I do something like that?”
“Happens all the time when people like us get married,” Hammond said. “We can coproduce all your films and get the best writers adapting the best novels we can acquire. We can afford to hire the best costars for you and start snapping up every screen we can find anywhere in the world. Plus, we could afford to build state-of-the-art theaters just about everywhere.”
Susan was looking at him, her lips parted.
“Even if you made a movie every year, the principal shooting would only take eight or ten weeks. The rest of the time, we could play. Wouldn’t be a bad life for the two of us.”
“I’m too old,” Susan said.
“Bullshit. I can name a dozen actors a hell of a lot older than you still up there on the screen.”
She smiled. “I meant to get married.”
“Nothing could be further from the truth.”
“People who marry are usually in love.”
This time, Hammond smiled. “You are a gigantic pain in the ass sometimes, but I do love you, and I guess I have loved you for a very long time. Plus, you’re better than most of the other girls I’ve been with.”
Gambit Page 21
