24 Hours: A Kirk McGarvey Novella

by David Hagberg

  Bambridge tried to think of some reason he wouldn’t have to go out. At forty-three, he had become soft. He’d never actually served as a field officer, though he did two five-year stints as assistant to the chief of station, one in Ottawa and the other in Canberra, neither of them hot spots under any stretch of the imagination. He’d never humped his butt in Iraq or Afghanistan like many of the officers who’d worked for him had, so he’d never formed a bond— especially not with the NOCs who he’d always considered to be prima donnas. Just like Wager. “Turn out the light,” his wife said.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he told the security officer. “Touch nothing.”

  He got up and flipped on the lights in the bathroom and the closet. His wife buried her head deeper into the covers. If she had been a thoughtful woman, Marty mused, she would have gotten up and had the coffee on by now.

  It was just one more brick in his wall of frustration and anger.

  * * *

  They had a nice two-story colonial on Davis Street NW near the Naval Observatory, and Bambridge had crossed the Key Bridge and was heading north on the GW Parkway to Langley before one thirty. Traffic was very light, the October morning cool, even crisp after a steamy summer, but he felt a heaviness in his chest he’d never felt before. And he was a little worried. His wife sometimes called him a hypochondriac, but over the past few months, and especially this morning, he’d seriously begun to get concerned he was developing heart troubles. It was the stress of the job, he told himself. Lately the stress of losing his job. And just now a murder inside the CIA’s campus. It was unbelievable, and the only other word he could think of was incompetence. Heads would roll, he would make sure of it.

  The security officers at the main gate looked up as Bambridge’s BMW breezed through the employee lane; a bar code in the windshield along with a photograph of the driver’s face recognized the car and the DDO even before the rear bumper cleared.

  Up at the OHB, which was the first of several buildings on campus, Bambridge’s bar code allowed him access to the underground VIP parking garage, and three minutes later he was getting off the elevator on the third floor—having passed his badge through the security reader in the basement and submitted to a retinal scan.

  Bambridge was a narrow, slope-shouldered man whose acquaintances described him as almost always surprised, but whose friends described him as seriously intent. His features were dark; some French Canadian blood a couple of generations ago, according to his mother, who still lived in northern Minnesota. He harbored the more romantic notion that a Sicilian had gotten in there somewhere, which gave him a penchant for mysteriousness and a touch of violence.

  Blankenship, a much taller, broader man in his early fifties, who wore a ridiculous military buzz cut, had been notified of the DDO’s arrival and was waiting for him.

  “I hope you haven’t had breakfast yet, sir,” he said.

  “No. Let’s get this over with so I can.”

  At least a dozen security officers in short-sleeved shirts, khaki trousers, badges, and pistols in hip holsters filled the corridor around an open door just three down from the elevator.

  “We’ve taken all the photographs we need, and I’ve had our techs dust for fingerprints and collect whatever DNA evidence they could find,” Blankenship said. “We’re also looking at the hard disk on Walt’s computer, along with his phone records for the past three months.”

  “I want his entire contact sheet—computer, phone, and face-to-face—for as far back as you can dig it up,” Bambridge replied.

  “Yes, sir,” the security officer said. “Can you think of any enemies Mr. Wager might have had?”

  The guy had to be kidding. Bambridge gave him a look. “North Koreans, Cubans, Iraqis, Iranians, some Russians, Afghanis. Shall I go on?”

  “Sorry, sir. I meant here on campus.”

  “He’s only been back less than a year. I don’t think Walt even had enough time to make friends, let alone enemies.”

  Another security officer was leaning against the wall just before the open door. He looked a little green. When Bambridge and Blankenship approached, he straightened up.

  Around the corner, just inside the tiny office, Bambridge pulled up short. The stench of fecal matter, and of something sweet, hit him all at once, at the same time he caught sight of the blood pooled on the floor. But then he came full face on with the ruined remains of what he could only vaguely describe as a human being. His stomach did a very sharp roll.

  Wager, if that was who it was, had been destroyed from the neck up. Something had bitten or chewed out the entire side of his neck on the left side, blood all down the front and side of his white shirt. His face had been massively damaged as well, as if a pack of wild animals had had at him. His nose was mostly gone, his eyebrows shredded, his lips missing, his teeth obscenely white.

  Bambridge stepped back a pace, a sickness rising in his throat. “My God,” he whispered.

  Wager’s body lay on its side in front of a small desk. The chair had been pushed to one side, up against a file cabinet. The back of his trousers was completely covered in fecal matter. He’d lost control of his bowels either at the time of his death or shortly before. If there had been any sign of horror or pain or surprise on his face, it was completely gone. His features had either been eaten away or were covered in blood and tissue—human meat.

  It was the most awful thing Bambridge had ever seen or imagined.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I could not have described this to you,” Blankenship said.

  “Could a guard dog have gotten in here?” Bambridge asked. It was the only thing he could think to ask.

  “No, sir. They’re all accounted for. Anyway, none of our dogs would have done something like this.”

  “A wild animal?”

  “Maybe, but then someone with the proper badges to get into this building, onto this floor, and into this office would have had to let it in.”

  “No one saw or heard a thing?”

  “No, sir.”

  A few splotches of blood had stained the desktop inches from the phone.

  “Did he manage to call someone?”

  “No.”

  Bambridge tore his eyes away from the horrible thing on the floor, gagging as the smell, associated with what he was seeing, fully hit him. He walked out into the clean air of the corridor, where he leaned his back against the wall.

  Blankenship joined him. “What’re your orders, sir?”

  “Are your people finished?”

  “Just about.”

  “When they are, call the police. I want the body out of here and the mess cleaned up before the morning shift.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bambridge looked at him. “I’ll be back later, but right now I’m going home. I need a shower.”

  “I understand.”

  THREE

  Istvan Fabry at fifty felt like an old man, though he would never admit it to Fanni, his American-born wife, or his sons, Richard and Mark, but Iraq, and later Afghanistan, had worn him to the bone.

  He left the Bubble, which was the CIA’s auditorium, and drove his three-year-old Fusion over to the Scattergood-Thorne house just off the GW Parkway, but still on the CIA’s campus. It was very late, just a bit before 2 A.M., but he’d always been an extremely light sleeper. Eight hours a night meant a person would be, for all practical purposes, dead for one-third of his life. It wasn’t for Istvan.

  The DCI was hosting a dozen influential congressmen plus a like number of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals from the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intel and LE agencies to discuss plans for the top-down reorganization of America’s approach to nontraditional warfare. Fabry was front man for the setup, and he wanted to be well ahead of the curve before the 0800 start.

  The Bubble’s projection equipment was loaded with the proper Power-Point and video programs, mostly of his own creation, and once the presentation was done, the VIPs would be bused o
ver to the house for the actual conference.

  Parking in front of the large colonial that sat partially concealed in the woods just off the GW Parkway, he got out of the car and stopped to listen to the nearly absolute silence. Only a light breeze in the treetops, mournful and a little lonely in a way, and a truck passing on the highway, heading into the city or perhaps to Dulles.

  But it was safe here, something his wife, who’d been raised in a reasonably upscale environment as the only daughter of a corporate lawyer in Chicago, could never understand. By instinct, at times like this, alone with just his own thoughts, he would catch himself listening for other sounds. Some distant, some very close. The whine of a drone’s engine, or of a Russian Hind helicopter gunship. The clank of metal on metal as a troop of Taliban fighters or Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers approached up a mountain pass. The snick of an AK-47 slide being pulled back and released. Footfalls on loose gravel. Someone or something rising up behind him, carrying a knife or a wire garrote.

  Suddenly spooked, he turned and looked down the gravel road toward the Bubble, and then did a careful scan of the woods surrounding the house that had been a private residence until the CIA had taken it over in 1987. But nothing moved. He was absolutely alone, and not in a place where harm was likely to come his way. Of any spot in the world, here was the safest place for him to be, and not a day went by that he didn’t bless his good fortune for surviving Hungary’s turbulence when he was a kid growing up in Rabahidveg, close to the Austrian border.

  Two uncles had been shot to death by KGB border patrol pricks, and his father had been taken into custody for reasons they’d never been told. There he’d been tortured day and night for more than a week. Afterward he’d been a broken man, unable even to feed himself or use the toilet without help.

  Then Hungary was free, in a large measure because of America’s diplomacy and the harsh realities of a Soviet system that simply could not support its own weight. Istvan had specialized in English in school, and when he was nineteen, he went to the U.S. and joined the army, where he was first made a translator—in addition to Hungarian and English, he was also fluent in Russian— and then into INSCOM, which was the army’s intelligence and security command, where he became a spy.

  The transition to the CIA had been easy at first, until he’d been selected to become a NOC and had been sent first to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. Then the nightmares started, and they’d become so bad that, by the time he’d slipped home on a short leave, Fanni, who he’d known from college at Northwestern while he was in the army, almost left him.

  They were sleeping together, and after his second morning back, she’d slipped out of bed to make them coffee. She brought the coffee and a plate of sweet rolls on a tray that she set on her side of the bed, then went around to him and bent down to brush a kiss onto his lips.

  He suddenly reared up out of a deep sleep and smashed his fist into her face, breaking several of her teeth, dislocating her jaw, and sending her sprawling onto the floor.

  They were both in shock.

  After a trip to the emergency room, where her jaw was sent in place and she’d been given pain pills, they went back to the apartment. But she wasn’t fearful of him; instead she was puzzled and angry.

  “You didn’t do it on purpose, Isty; you did it purely on instinct,” she told him. “For survival.”

  They were sitting across from each other at the tiny kitchen table, and he had a hard time looking her in the eye. Her jaw was red and swollen, and she spoke with a lisp because of the missing teeth.

  “For survival from what? Have you been on a battlefield somewhere?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?” she demanded, her voice rising.

  “Can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Orders—”

  “Bullshit. I want the truth!”

  “My life and yours could depend on your not knowing what I do.”

  “Are you a spy, then? Is that what you’ve become? A traitor, spying for the Russians or maybe the Chinese?”

  “I’m not a traitor, Fanni,” Istvan said. “You have to believe me.” His heart was aching.

  She jumped to her feet, the chair falling over. “I won’t live with you. Not like this.”

  “I’m not a traitor.”

  “Of course you’re not. I know it. But if you were a spy, you would never be able to tell me where you were, what you were doing. I’d never know when you would come back to me—if you were coming back.”

  “I’ll always come back.”

  “I can’t be sure. Tell me how I can be sure!”

  “Because I love you,” Istvan said.

  In the end it had been enough for her, and they’d both somehow survived his long absences until he had come out of the field to work as an analyst and mission planner in the Directorate of Operations and he’d been able to tell her he had indeed been a spy. But all that was past. He was home for good.

  He took a portable handcart from the trunk, and when he had it unfolded, he loaded four cartons of agendas, briefing books, copies of the presentation disks, and lined legal pads and pens, and took them inside, where he laid them out in the large conference room. The fit would be tight, but there was room for every one. The main topic for review would be the threat the U.S. faced right now from cyberterrorism.

  State-sponsored cyberterrorism.

  It was something Istvan had become an expert in since he’d come home. He had a knack for it and had been a fast learner—his mentor at the end was Special Projects Director Otto Rencke, the smartest, and oddest, man he’d ever known. But a good man, with an equally odd-duck wife and a lovely child.

  He’d come to his office in the OHB’s fourth-floor science and technology operations center, where some of the gadgets and ideas that had been created and already evaluated as useful were placed in planning cycles for manufacture and then distribution to stations around the world. After he’d loaded his car, he’d driven over to the Bubble and then here.

  Time enough to go home for some breakfast, but he would have to rush to make it back before the guests began to arrive. Anyway, after the field rations he’d eaten over the years, even the cafeteria adjacent to the New Headquarters Building wasn’t half bad.

  He went outside, where he refolded the handcart and loaded it into the trunk and then got behind the wheel.

  Something smelled odd to him, slightly off. At that moment he heard a Bach organ piece and turned around in surprise as the figure of a man who he did not know rose up from the backseat, blood all over his face and lips.

  Before Istvan could react, the Cynic yanked Istvan’s head backward, breaking his neck. Before he died, he realized that the side of his neck was literally being eaten.

  By David Hagberg

  Twister

  The Capsule

  Last Come the Children

  Heartland

  Heroes

  Without Honor*

  Countdown*

  Crossfire*

  Critical Mass*

  Desert Fire

  High Flight*

  Assassin*

  White House*

  Joshua’s Hammer*

  Eden’s Gate

  The Kill Zone*

  By Dawn’s Early Light

  Soldier of God*

  Allah’s Scorpion*

  Dance with the Dragon*

  The Expediter*

  The Cabal*

  Abyss*

  Castro’s Daughter*

  Burned

  Blood Pact*

  Retribution*

  The Fourth Horseman*

  The Shadowmen*+

  Writing as Sean Flannery

  The Kremlin Conspiracy

  Eagles Fly

  The Trinity Factor

  The Hollow Men

  Broken Idols

  Gulag

  Moscow Crossing

  The Zebra Network

  Crossed Swords

 
; Moving Targets

  Winner Take All

  Kilo Option

  Achilles’ Heel

  With Byron Dorgan

  Blowout

  Gridlock

  Nonfiction with Boris Ginden

  Mutiny!

  *Kirk McGarvey adventures

  +e-book original

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Hagberg is a former U.S. Air Force cryptographer who has traveled extensively in Europe, the Arctic, and the Caribbean, and has spoken at CIA functions. He has published more than eighty novels of suspense, including Castro’s Daughter, Blood Pact, and Retribution. He makes his home in Sarasota, Florida. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Hour 1

  Hour 2

  Hour 3

  Hour 4

  Hour 5

  Hour 6

  Hour 7

  Hour 8

  Hour 9

  Hour 10

  Hour 11

  Hour 12

  Hour 13

  Hour 14

  Hour 15

  Hour 16

  Hour 17

  Hour 18

  Hour 19

  Hour 20

  Hour 21

  Hour 22

  Hour 23

  Hour 24

  Two Days Later

  End Game excerpt

  By David Hagberg from Tom Doherty Associates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.