The Cabal km-14

by David Hagberg

  “Did McCann’s name show up?”

  “Yeah. The Friday Club passed him eleven million dollars over a two-year period, which matches the Mexico City and Pyongyang operations.”

  “But not the reasons?”

  Otto shook his head. “Nor Foster’s ultimate aim.”

  “There has to be more than that, goddamnit,” McGarvey said, struggling with his anger. “How about other payouts? Can we match who the money went to and then work from there to see what happened?”

  “I’m on it,” Otto said. “But simply matching McCann to the money he got from the club wouldn’t have pointed toward either Mexico City or Pyongyang. We got those leads from Turov’s computer that you liberated in Tokyo.”

  McGarvey turned away for a moment. “Nothing else on the drive?”

  “No. Means Remington didn’t know what Foster was really aiming at, and Sandberger probably didn’t either.”

  “But Admin was on the payroll.”

  “Right.”

  McGarvey turned back. “To do what?” he asked. “What did Foster hire Admin to do?”

  “It’s not on the flash drive.”

  “My name didn’t show up?”

  “That’s one of the first things I looked for,” Otto said. “If we could have connected Foster with orders to have you assassinated it would have been something solid to use against him. As it stands now he can claim he was a lobbyist just doing his job. A lot of the guys in the club would take a fall, there’d be a lot of dirt stirred up, and there would be a congressional investigation, the attorney general would probably get into it, but in the end we’d be no nearer to learning what he’s really been up to than we are right now.”

  “If Remington knew what was going on he would have put it on his flash drive. He was buying himself some insurance in case he got himself into a corner. But Sandberger knew.”

  “It would have to be something big for the man to risk getting shot to death.”

  “He thought I was going to take him back to the States, and let the Bureau or the CIA or somebody interrogate him. He knew that once he got back here he’d be safe. Foster’s group would have protected him.”

  “It’s big,” Otto said. “We already figured that out. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the risk to assassinate a newspaper reporter and a CIA officer, especially not your son-in-law.”

  “They made a mistake,” McGarvey said.

  “Yes, they did,” Otto agreed.

  “And we’re going to capitalize on it. Tonight.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  Boberg passed through the town of Mount Vernon on the Potomac’s north shore a few minutes before ten in the evening. Traffic on the GW Memorial Parkway at this hour was practically nonexistent, and the moonless night was just as dark as his mood.

  On the way down from Alexandria he’d tried twice to reach Remington without luck. And just across a creek that fed into the river, he pulled up short of the driveway to Foster’s estate and parked at the side of the highway, shutting off the lights and engine.

  He was starting to get a seriously bad feeling that things were beginning to fall apart for Admin. The center could no longer hold with Sandberger down and especially not if Remington had taken a runner. Or if McGarvey had gotten to him.

  He tried the phone one more time, and it was answered on the third ring by a man’s voice he didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s calling?”

  Boberg could hear something going on in the background, footsteps, other voices. Official-sounding voices. The cops, he realized, which meant McGarvey had been there.

  He broke the connection and sat thinking. All of Admin’s phones, including everyone’s personal cell phone and the encrypted sat phones they used in the field, were untraceable, so he had no worry that his name would pop up on some computer screen. But with Remington out of the picture, if he were, the company had no future. No leadership. No contacts.

  But the company was small, much smaller than most of the other contractor services, some of which had upwards of two thousand employes. Admin had eighty-eight on the payroll until Baghdad, and now probably four or possibly five or six less than that. And although the company no longer had the State Department Baghdad contract, it still had the Friday Club.

  “Lean and mean, Cal,” Remington had preached when he offered him the job. “We can do things the bigger services can’t handle.”

  “Mobility,” Boberg remembered saying.

  “Spot on. First in, first to get the job done.”

  In that respect nothing had changed except for the company’s leadership. And since he was senior now, the job of keeping Admin up and running had fallen on his shoulders. He let a small smile curl his lips. Lean and mean it was.

  He wrote a note that he had car trouble and had gone for help, stuck it under the windshield wiper, and hefting the small shoulder-bag of extra ammuniton, a red-lensed flashlight, Steiner mil specs binoculars, and a few other things, headed through the woods up the hill parallel to the driveway and about ten yards away.

  Before driving out he’d studied the sketch diagrams of the property’s security arrangements that Sandberger had entered in Admin’s files just after they’d signed on with Foster. What had surprised him was the relative lack of surveillance and warning systems. There were no razor wire — topped electric fences, no gate guards, no dogs patrolling the estate, just the long driveway with pressure pads that reacted when a vehicle drove over them, motion sensitive lights around the house and the helipad fifty yards to the east, and a few closed-circuit cameras.

  Someone approaching on foot wouldn’t run into trouble until the last thirty yards across the clearing in which the house stood. And even then, darting from tree to tree, and keeping to the shadows of the Greek and Roman statues that dotted the lawn, it would be possible to get right up to the house without being spotted.

  It was something that McGarvey was good at. Which was why Remington wanted someone out here just in case it happened.

  “Why the hell haven’t we insisted on tighter security?” Boberg had asked a couple of months ago. “I mean, it’s our arses on the line if something goes down.”

  “He doesn’t think something like that will ever happen,” Remington had told him.

  “What, his connections, money, and reputation are going to protect him? Is that what he thinks?”

  “That’s exactly what he thinks.”

  “Christ,” Boberg had muttered, and here he was at the edge of the clearing, with a path up to the house through the shadows so easy that even an amateur second-story man would have no trouble.

  As he settled down to wait to see what might happen, he studied the house, which was lit up as if a party was going on. But the driveway was empty, so if Foster were entertaining tonight, it was only himself and his staff, unless his guests’ cars were parked out of sight in the back.

  In his early days as an SAS leftenant he and his surveillance unit of four men had been sent to the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to be on the lookout for Osama bin Laden. They and other British surveillance teams had worked in conjunction with the CIA on the top-secret mission, with orders to take the al-Quaida leader down, no questions asked, and no need for permission to go hot. They had never spotted bin Laden in the three months they’d been in the field, but they had learned patience.

  Surveillance was something Boberg neither liked nor disliked. It was nothing more than a simple job. And all jobs came to an end sooner or later.

  Waiting, he began to assess his feelings about losing Sandberger and Remington, and he found that he didn’t care. Just like his attitude toward surveillance, he was totally indifferent. It was the main reason his wife of three years had left him. According to her he’d been the coldest most distant man she’d ever met. Not cruel, not mean; he’d not been a wife beater, he’d just never been there in spirit for her. No flowers, no presents, no caresses, yet he’d been there for her financially. A Rock of Gibraltar. But as sh
e’d told him: “Who wants to love a bloody rock?”

  And when she’d left him, he’d been nearly indifferent. He was what he was.

  A noise came to him from somewhere to the northwest. Faint at first, on the slight breeze, but then louder, and he recognized it as an incoming helicopter. A light machine, definitely not military. He pushed away from the tree, all of his senses alert. He’d not expected this.

  A minute later he picked out the navigation lights and strobe of the chopper as it descended toward the helipad, which suddenly lit up. A moment later the lights around the exterior of the house came on. Any approach on foot now was next to impossible.

  It was a safe bet McGarvey wasn’t aboard, so it had to be Foster’s friend or friends coming out here in reaction to what had happened in Baghdad, or most likely what had probably happened to Remington within the past couple of hours.

  Very possibly whoever was coming to see Foster could affect Admin’s future position. And like many men in Boberg’s profession, he’d set aside enough money in offshore accounts, plus an emergency traveling kit of a few thousand dollars in cash along with three extra passports and other IDs, so that if the need ever arose he could drop everything and disappear immediately.

  The helicopter finally came into full view as it flared over the landing pad, and Boberg recognized it as an Italian-built AgustaWestland AW-139 VIP machine. The CIA had recently purchased three of them.

  He pulled the binoculars from his bag, and when the chopper came to rest on the pad he trained them on the hatch as it opened.

  A tall man wearing a dark Windbreaker and plain dark baseball cap got out, and hunching over moved away from the slowly rotating main blades.

  A golf cart came from behind the house and headed to the helipad at the same moment the man turned so that Boberg could see his face. It was David Whittaker, the interim director of the CIA.

  No real surprise there, except that McGarvey had seriously stirred the pot at the highest level, as he’d done before. And Boberg settled back to see how the evening turned out. At the very least it would be interesting, he thought.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  David Whittaker had been running on pure adrenaline ever since Admin’s shooter had taken Todd Van Buren and the Washington Post reporter down. He’d warned Foster that if McGarvey got involved, and he certainly would, the dynamics would change and there’d be no way to predict the outcome.

  Foster’s bodyguard, Sergeant Schilling, had driven out to the helipad with a golf cart and brought Whittaker over to the house, where Foster waited drinking a cognac in the living room.

  “Your visit is not totally unexpected this evening. Have you brought news? Good, I hope.”

  “Not good,” Whittaker said. “And remember, I warned you that the situation could get out of hand.”

  Foster shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be dealt with. Would you care for a drink?”

  “I don’t believe I’ll be having anything to drink until this business is resolved and we can get back on schedule. McGarvey has been a thorn in our side ever since Mexico City.”

  “We all agree, just as we all agree that he is to be dealt with, which is exactly what Administrative Solutions is doing for us at this moment.”

  “Evidently you’ve not heard the latest.”

  “Roland and some of his people were shot to death in Baghdad. Yes, I have. And the FBI has a warrant for McGarvey’s arrest. But Gordon assures me that he would not live to be taken in.”

  “Remington was shot to death in front of his house, not two hours ago,” Whittaker said, and he was satisfied to see that he’d finally gotten to Foster, whose lips tightened. “McGarvey was almost certainly involved but it’s not entirely clear how it all played out.”

  “Meaning what?” Foster asked.

  “Remington may have been gunned down by two of his own people, who were in turn shot to death on the street. His bodyguard was found shot to death inside the house.”

  Foster turned stiffly and poured another cognac. “Are you sure you won’t join me? It’s Black Pearl, brand new from Rémy Martin. Frightfully expensive, but definitely better than Rémy’s Louis XIII.”

  “Goddamnit, Bob, you’re not listening to me,” Whittaker shouted. “This has the potential to ruin everything we’ve worked for.”

  “Don’t raise your voice, David,” Foster warned. “Nothing will be ruined. We had Mexico City and Pyongyang, despite Mr. McGarvey’s interference. And our last step, the Taiwan initiative, will go as planned. China will take the fall. The United States will not be brought down by a nation of rice-eating peasants who are merely clever at flooding the market with cheap products.”

  Whittaker had heard all of this many times before; it had been Foster’s mantra from the very beginning eight years ago when the Friday Club first came into prominence. The United States had only two enemies: the old Soviet Union, which lost the economic race because of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and now China, which seemed to be winning. Something had to be done before being American became synonymous with being a second-class citizen. Spain, Portugal, Great Britain all had their empires, and now it was America’s rightful time in history.

  We had the nuclear weapons, the missiles, the submarines, the aircraft carriers — more aircraft carriers in our fleet than every other nation combined. But even more than that, Foster argued, the U.S. had the industrial might, the resources, the facilities, and the most highly skilled workers in the world. It was something the Japanese hadn’t fully understood in 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbor. The sleeping giant had indeed been awakened.

  And it would happen again. Given the right conditions, the right push in the right direction, China would fall by the wayside as the last real enemy of the United States.

  But after eight years, Whittaker wasn’t so sure that he believed in the message as strongly as he had at the beginning. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to help with the business of empire building. That tack had nearly embroiled the country in a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union, in part because of Kennedy’s stand over the Cuban missile business.

  And now China had an even more potent weapon to use against us: money. Beijing didn’t need bombs and rockets because it practically owned us. Besides the growing trade deficit, we were nearly one trillion dollars in debt to China. That was more than four times the money we owed all the oil exporters in the world.

  What China held were mostly Treasury securities, which they could call due or simply dump. Either way the U.S. economy would take the biggest hit it had ever taken — much bigger than the Great Depression — and it would literally bring us to our knees. Factory closings; bankruptcies, for which there would be no money available for help; unemployment lines, for which there were no jobs and no unemployment checks.

  “Worst-case scenario,” Foster had pounded home his point. “Social Security and Medicare would fail. That cannot be allowed to happen. At all costs.”

  All true, Whittaker agreed. Especially now when the U.S. was in the midst of the biggest bailout in history. Something had to be done.

  “McGarvey could stop us,” he said, but Foster shook his head.

  “One man, David.”

  “Look what he’s done to us already.”

  Sergeant Schilling came to the door. “Admin’s man has shown up, sir,” he said.

  “Where is he at this moment?”

  “Just within the woods about ten meters west of the driveway.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “Surveillance, I would imagine, sir. Waiting. I have his cell phone number, shall I make contact?”

  “Yes, tell him we know he’s here,” Foster said. “It’s possible that Mr. McGarvey may show up tonight. Mr. Boberg can watch from outside, and you can monitor the situation from inside. Shouldn’t be too difficult to catch him in a cross fire.”

  “Yes, sir. Shall I prepare your safe room?”

  “Not necessary,” Foster said, and the sergeant left.
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  “A safe room wouldn’t do you any good, because if McGarvey somehow gets his hands on the proof of what we’ve been doing, even a shred of proof, all of us will take the fall.”

  “But there’s no proof to be had, David. It simply doesn’t exist. We don’t have a manifesto, nothing has been written. All we have is an agreement among gentlemen that something needs to be done to save America. What fault can be found with that?”

  “No manifesto, I agree,” Whittaker said. “But what if he actually manages to get to you, and holds a pistol to your head, will you take a bullet to defend your idealism?”

  “It won’t come to that.”

  “It’s why I flew down here tonight. I have a CIA jet standing by at Andrews to fly you to a safe house on La Croix in the U.S. Virgins. And you’ll have plenty of people down there to take care of you until McGarvey is resolved.”

  Foster looked amused. “While I’m scurrying off to the tropics, where will you be?”

  “At home tonight, and in my office first thing in the morning as usual. He has no reason to suspect that I’m involved in any of this. We’ll let the FBI and the U.S. Marshal Service take care of him.”

  Foster sipped his cognac. “Are you carrying a pistol tonight?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Good. Then stay with me. If McGarvey does get this far, you can shoot him dead. You’ll be a national hero. I’ll see to it, personally.”

  Whittaker shook his head. “I’m not getting into a shooting match with that man. You have no idea what he’s capable of doing.”

  But Foster merely smiled. “You have no choice, David. Call your helicopter pilot and tell him to leave.”

  “I’ll tell him to stand by.”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  McGarvey and Louise stood looking over Otto’s shoulder as he hacked into the CIA’s feed from the latest generation of Keyhole surveillance satellite systems, this one the KH-15, designated Romulus, with a full range of optical abilities from infrared to near ultraviolet with a resolution under good conditions of less than 0.04 meters, in the range of less than one hundredth of an inch, about the thickness of a piece of paper.