24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella

by David Hagberg

  Two Days Later

  McGarvey and Pete drove over to Otto and Louise’s house in McLean a few minutes after seven in the evening. They were having dinner, and this time Otto was cooking, but he’d refused to tell them what it was.

  “I can’t leave for a couple of days and trouble finds you,” Pete said.

  She looked fabulous to Mac. “How’s your brother?” he asked.

  “He’s okay. But how about you? Your face is plastered across just about every newspaper and television screen in the world. So much for anonymity.”

  “Maybe it’s time to retire.” He’d thought about it lately.

  “You’re only fifty, and that’s still too young. Anyway, you don’t play golf, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And trouble does have a habit of finding you.”

  She’d almost said us. He’d heard the slight hesitation.

  “Maybe we’ll catch a break for a while,” he said. “We could take up golf together.”

  * * *

  They were having the French duck cassoulet, which was notoriously hard to make well and took forever.

  “I put the duck on to render the fat soon as you tossed the vest and it exploded,” Otto said. His long red hair was tied back in a ponytail, and his polo shirt and jeans were clean and pressed for a change.

  Everything was fabulous, and McGarvey told him so. The only downside was his granddaughter, Audie, whom Otto and Louise had adopted. Whenever Mac was called into action, she was sent down to the Farm, the CIA training facility on the York River outside Williamsburg. The four of them were driving down tomorrow to bring her back.

  “The problem is that Fathi Amadi and his people weren’t in the van, and they’ve disappeared,” Louise said. She was sometimes their moral compass and the one who argued for conservatism. Slow and easy. One step at a time.

  “Every cop in the country is looking for them,” Pete said. “Interpol has Europe covered, and the Saudis have promised to be on the lookout for them. They’ll make a mistake sooner or later. People like them always do.”

  “Yeah, but a lot of times not until after they’ve done their damage.”

  Otto had bought a couple of bottles of Dom Pérignon, and he refilled their glasses.

  “Where’d you get the baguettes?” Pete asked.

  “I made them,” he said.

  “The onion soup?”

  “Ditto.”

  McGarvey raised his glass. “And the champagne?”

  “After dinner, I’ll take you down to see my fermenting barrels in the basement.”

  A woman’s voice came from a hidden speaker. “Sorry to bother you, Otto, but one car is pulling into your driveway, and another is parking across the street.”

  “What is the estimated threat level?” Otto asked, getting up and taking a Glock pistol from a drawer in the buffet.

  “Low. The license tags are of the Secret Service series.”

  “Show me.”

  A painting over the buffet cleared and became a flat-screen monitor. Two men in suits were getting out of the car in the driveway, and four others got out of the car on the street.

  The president’s daughter—dressed in jeans and a fur-lined parka, the hood down—jumped out of the car and came to the door. Her Secret Service detail was armed with what looked to Mac like the Belgium-made FN P90 submachine guns, and every head was on a swivel.

  Louise let her in and brought her back to the dining room.

  “They’ll only let me stay for a minute,” she said. She was scrubbed and clean, almost unrecognizable as the same girl from two days ago. “I’m surprised your dad let you out so soon,” McGarvey said.

  “He wasn’t the problem—they were,” she said, inclining her head back the way she had come. “Anyway, they’ll be sending you a formal apology—you were right and they were wrong and all that crap … stuff.”

  “You’re in one piece, and that’s all that matters,” McGarvey said.

  She hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered in his ear.

  A lot of gunfire suddenly erupted out on the street, some of it from the Secret Service weapons but some from Kalashnikov assault rifles, the rattle distinctive.

  McGarvey shoved Dot to the floor. “Stay down.”

  “There are two men carrying Kalashnikov rifles coming across the rear yard,” Otto’s surveillance system announced.

  Otto tossed the Glock to Mac.

  “One is attaching what appears to be an explosive device on the rear door.”

  “Open the door now,” McGarvey said, heading into the kitchen, beyond which was the laundry room and a short corridor to the mudroom and rear door.

  “Do it,” Otto told his system.

  Pete was right behind McGarvey. She had come armed and had her subcompact Gen4 Glock out. They ducked down behind the counter as the back door opened.

  A moment or two later, someone came through the laundry room and opened fire, spraying everything in the kitchen left to right.

  The instant the gunfire stopped, Mac and Pete rose up and fired first at the man in the doorway and then the man right behind them before either of them could shoot again. Both of them went down hard and stayed unmoving.

  The gunfire from out front had ceased, and someone came to the back door and shouted McGarvey’s name.

  “Clear,” Mac answered. “Check on Dot,” he told Pete, and she went back into the dining room, her pistol in both hands but pointed down and to the right.

  A Secret Service agent came through the mudroom and, while holding his pistol on the two downed terrorists, kicked their long guns away.

  “Fox?” he asked.

  “Pete?” McGarvey called.

  “We’re good,” she called back, and McGarvey stood down.

  The agent said something into his lapel mic, and he lowered his pistol. “The threat has been neutralized, Mr. Director,” he said. “Good job, again.”

  McGarvey nodded and went back into the dining room, where two of the agents from out front had come in.

  “Casualties?”

  “None of us, Mr. Director,” one of them said.

  The girl took off her black wig, revealing short blond hair. “My real name is Ursula Prentiss, Mr. Director. Sorry for the ruse, but Mr. Bernstein figured that these guys weren’t done. We wanted to give them something other than Fox to shoot at, and we were waiting for them.”

  “Brave girl,” Louise said. “How about some dinner?”

  “No, ma’am. Our cleanup crew will be here momentarily to put things right tonight.”

  “How about the president’s daughter?” McGarvey asked.

  Ursula smiled, and one of the agents sniggered. “Pissed that she couldn’t come here herself. But she asked that I give you the hug and the kiss from her.”

  McGarvey gave the agent a kiss on the cheek. “Tell her that’s from me,” he said.

  fin

  Read on for a preview of

  End Game

  David Hagberg

  Available in September 2016 from Tom Doherty Associates

  Order End Game today!

  A Forge Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7653-3462-6

  Copyright © 2016 by David Hagberg

  ONE

  Walter Wager heaved himself off the floor, using the edge of his desk for leverage, blood running down the collar of his white shirt from a ragged wound in the side of his neck. He was an old man, even older than his fifty-four, because of the life he’d led as a deep-cover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  He was no longer a NOC, and he’d struggled for the last year, sitting behind a desk, in a tiny office buried on the third floor of the Original Headquarters Building, trying to lead a normal life, trying to fit in with the normal day-to-day routine without the nearly constant danger he’d faced for thirty-five years.

  The beginning of the end for him had come eight years ago when his wife, Sandee, had been shot to death during a situation that had gone terribl
y bad in Caracas. They were meeting with a cryptanalyst from SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, who’d promised to hand over the latest data encryption algorithms his science directorate had devised. It was late at night in the warehouse district when the transfer of money for a disk had just taken place, and the headlights of a half dozen police vehicles came on, illuminating the three of them.

  Sandee slammed her shoulder into the cryptanalyst’s chest, knocking him backward. “Run!” she shouted.

  Wager reached for her arm, the same time the police opened fire, hitting her in the back and in her head, and she went down hard.

  Something very hot plucked at Wager’s left elbow, and on instinct alone he jogged to the left, away from the headlights, and with bullets slamming into the pavement all around him and singing past his head, he managed to make it into one of the abandoned buildings.

  Several cars started up, someone shouted something, and police came after him. But he was running for his life, the adrenaline high in his system. And somehow he managed to escape back into the city to the safe house he’d set up in the first days after his arrival. Sandee had called it: refuge.

  “Let’s hope we never have to use it,” she’d said the first time he’d brought her there.

  He’d never forgotten her words or the sight of her falling forward, bullets ripping into her body. And no day had gone by since then when her face, the feel of her body, her breath on his cheek, didn’t come to him in the middle of the night.

  He was dying now, and of all things, what he would miss the most would be his dreams.

  Calling for help would do no good. It was well past midnight, and all the offices on this floor were empty. No one would hear him. But security was just a phone call away. And even if they couldn’t get here in time to save his life, he would be able to tell them who his killer was.

  Though not why.

  “Don’t touch the phone, Walter,” warned the man behind him.

  Wager’s heart pounded in his ears as he reached for the phone on his desk. He felt no real pain, only weakness from the terrible blood loss, and an absolute incredulity not at what was happening but how it was happening.

  The face of his attacker was that of a stranger, but the voice was familiar. From years ago, maybe just before the second Iraq war. In the mountains outside of Kirkuk they were looking for WMDs that a lot of people in the Company knew didn’t exist. All that was required were a few photographs, something with a serial number or any sort of markings the analysts at Langley could use.

  There’d been seven of them spread out over a twenty-five-mile line, and he remembered the guy they called the Cynic, who’d called himself a realist: the only sane man in a world gone completely bat shit.

  The man took Wager by the arm and gently turned him around so they were facing each other. The Cynic, if that was who he was, had a lot of blood around his mouth.

  “It’s too late to call anyone.”

  Wager was hearing music from somewhere, very low but very close. Church organ music, complicated.

  “You never had culture, Walter. Too bad,” the man said. His voice was soft, with maybe a British accent. But high-class.

  “Why?”

  “Why what? Why am I here? Why have I decided to kill you? Why like this?” The Cynic turned away, his eyes half closed, a dreamy expression on his bloody face.

  The music was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Wager couldn’t say why he’d dredged that up out of some distant memory, but he was sure of it, and it was coming from a small player in the breast pocket of the Cynic’s dark blue blazer.

  “Yes, why?” Wager asked, his voice ragged and distant even in his own ears. He felt cold and weak, barely able to stay on his feet.

  “Sandee was such a lovely girl. Was from the beginning, She never belonged with a bore like you.”

  The Cynic had a round, perfectly normal face, small ears, thin sand-colored hair, a slight build. Everyman. Someone you would never pick out of a crowd, someone you would never remember. Perfect in the role of a NOC. The accent was a fake, of course, because if he was the man Wager was remembering, he was from somewhere in the Midwest. But how he knew Sandee—who was a big city San Francisco girl—was beyond comprehension just at this moment.

  “I knew her,” the Cynic said. “And I was fucking her before Caracas.”

  A blind rage rose up, blotting out Wager’s weakness, and he lurched forward, but the Cynic merely pushed him back against the desk, grabbing his arm so he wouldn’t fall down.

  “I wanted to get your attention, and I have it now. Maybe briefly, but I have it.”

  Wager’s head was swimming.

  “You illuminated the spot with an encrypted GPS marker. I need to know the password.”

  He was the Cynic from Iraq, but Wager could not dredge up a name—though it would have been a work name, it would have been a start. “It’s gone.”

  “The password or the stash?”

  “Is this about money?”

  The Cynic laughed softly, the sound from the back of his throat. “Come on, Walter. Is there anything more important?”

  Wager could think of a lot of things more important than money in whatever forms it came.

  “The password, probably both. The country has been overrun. Holes in the sand dug just about everywhere.”

  “They didn’t find the bio weapons labs. What makes you think they found the cache?”

  “Because the weapons never existed. Nor was there any heroin. And you didn’t fuck my wife.”

  “Ah, but I did. She had a small mole on her left thigh, just below her pussy. Remember?”

  Wager leaned back against the desk for support, and he tried to hide his effort to reach the phone, but the Cynic pulled him away, a broad smile on his bloody lips. Even his teeth were red, and Wager thought that a bit of flesh was hanging from the side of the man’s mouth.

  “The password, please.”

  “I don’t have it,” Wager said, and it came to him that the Cynic wasn’t lying: he had fucked Sandee. But then, in those days, everybody was fucking everybody else. Wives, girlfriends, sisters, even mothers. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment. It was the game from the get-go, so the stories went. From the beginning of the Agency, and even before that in the WWII OSS. Fucking was not only the ultimate aphrodisiac; it was a powerful tool.

  Wager thought that the happiest time of his entire life had been during training at the CIA’s base on Camp Peary in Virginia—south of DC. It was called the Farm because it grew agents. They were young and naïve. Anxious for the future, but dedicated. “Truth, justice, and the American way,” a former DCI had supposedly once said. They were supermen and women. It was where he had first met Sandee, who was two years older than he was. But they’d been a natural pair from the beginning, though at first he’d thought she’d been working him, been given him as an assignment. But then he fell in love—and he’d always thought she had too—and nothing else mattered.

  “Too bad for you,” the Cynic said. “But there are others.”

  Wager started to shake his head, if for nothing else but to ward off what he knew was coming next. But it didn’t help.

  Grinning like a madman, the Cynic took Wager into his arms and began to eat his face, starting at the nose, powerful teeth shredding flesh and cartilage.

  TWO

  Marty Bambridge, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, was awakened by his wife, who kept pushing at his shoulder. He was in a foul mood: too much red wine last night at dinner, from which nothing was left but a son-of-a-bitch headache and a crappy taste in his mouth. Along with that was the rumor floating around campus that the DCI Walt Page was on his way out, and there was talk of a clean sweep. All the old brass was going with him.

  Which meant the heads of each directorate—intelligence, science and technology, management and services, and operations, formerly the directorate of national clandestine service.

  Bambridge was a spy master, a j
ob he knew he’d been meant for, when as a kid studying law and foreign relations at the University of Minnesota he’d read and reread every espionage novel he could get his hands on—especially the James Bond stories. But never in his dreams in those days did he believe he would actually get to run the CIA’s spies.

  If it was actually coming to an end for him, he had no earthly idea what he would do with himself. He was helpless and frightened, which made him angry.

  He growled at his wife. “What?”

  “Phone,” she mumbled. She handed it to him, then rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “Bambridge,” he said, sitting up.

  “This is Bob Blankenship, campus security, sir. We have a problem.”

  “Write me a memo, for Christ’s sake. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”

  “No, sir. Mr. Page has been informed, and he specifically wants you involved. There’s been a murder here on the third floor of the OHB. One of your people. A former field officer.”

  Bambridge was suddenly wide-awake. He turned on the nightstand light. It was after 1 A.M. “Who is it?”

  “The security pass we found on the body identified him as Walter Wager. He worked as a mid-level operational planner on your staff.”

  “I know him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You said murder? How?”

  “I think it would be best if you came in and took a look yourself. Mr. Page did not want the authorities notified before you had a chance to get here. Nor are we moving the body.”

  “Shit, shit,” Bambridge said under his breath. “Any witnesses?”

  “He was alone on the floor.”

  “Surveillance videos?”

  “No, sir.”

  “God damn it. One of the cameras in the corridor must have picked up something.”

  “They were disabled.”

  “Who the hell was monitoring?”

  “A loop was inserted into the recording unit for the entire floor. Shows the same images over and over.”