and Danny could go fishing, or maybe even sailing on the Chesapeake, he’d always wanted to try that.
He heard a car coming up behind them, and he turned as a dark gray van headed way too fast directly at them.
Trumble shoved Danny aside, between parked cars and he raised his hand for the driver to slow down as he tried to reach Gloria and Julie twenty feet back. The van was right on top of them as its side door came open, and he got the impression of a man crouched in the back with a large gun. It was a Kalashnikov, the thought registered on his brain, and an instant later he heard the distinctive clatter of the Russian assault rifle on full automatic.
Gloria and Julie were shoved violently backward, blood spraying on the mini lids and rear windows of several cars from a dozen wounds. He simply could not believe what he was witnessing. Not now. Not here. It was impossible!
“No!” Trumble cried out. He spun around and threw Danny to the pavement, shielding his son’s body with his own. Some people in the next row stopped short, and a woman screamed. Bullets slammed into the cars, sending glass flying everywhere.
The van screeched to a halt about twenty yards down the row and immediately started back, tires squealing.
Trumble hauled Danny to his feet. “Get out of here, Danny! Run!” He shoved his son toward the next row, then scrambled around the front of the car, blocked for the moment from the direct line of fire. He was moving purely on instinct now, adrenalin pumping through his body, his mind numb by what was happening. This was America. Disney World, the safest place on earth. They were home.
All he could think of were Gloria and Julie. He had to get to them now.
He heard the van screech to a halt directly behind the car he was crouched in front of, and he moved to the left fender where he could see the front of the van. A man sat behind the wheel, looking around wildly as if he expected the police to show up at any moment. Another man ran past the car. Trumble could see him through the windows, a deep, black, sick anger welling up inside his gut. They had come after his family all the way from Saudi Arabia. The bastards! The fucking bastards!
“Dad! Dad!” a little boy shouted in desperation, and in his present state it took Trumble a second before he realized that it — was Daniel.
He scrambled back around the front of the car to the other side just as a second man came down the row. He was dark, probably Arab, Trumble thought. The man suddenly crouched down and opened fire with the Kalashnikov, cutting Danny’s cries off. None of this was happening. It was all some sort of a terribly bad joke, yet he knew it wasn’t so.
The gunman started to swivel around as Trumble leaped up and swung the heavy plastic shopping bag with Danny’s snow globes, connecting solidly with a satisfying thump on the side of the man’s head. The bag broke open sending the glass globes flying. The gunman’s head cracked open like a soft-boiled egg in a spray of blood, and he was slammed forcefully against the side of the other car, dropping his rifle and collapsing in a heap.
Daniel was down on his back and not moving between the parked cars. The front of his tee shirt was bright red, and a shockingly large pool of blood was spreading out on the pavement. Up the row Trumble could see the bodies of his wife and daughter, and still it made no sense to him. For a heartbeat he was torn between going to them, who he knew without a doubt were dead, or picking up the Kalashnikov and going after the monsters who had done this to his family; now after they had finally begun to work things out.
He turned to the downed gunman as another man ran up from the van, raising his rifle as he came. Trumble knew with utter finality that he had lost, but still he made a try for the rifle lying on the pavement. Something like a freight train slammed into his chest, and an instant later a billion stars burst inside his head as a 7.62mm standard Russian military round plowed through his forehead into his brain.
CHAPTER THREE
Jake’s was a glittering restaurant that had just reopened after a terrorist bomb had destroyed it last year, and the al fresco dining area fronting busy Canal Street was even better than before with firstclass food, an extensive wine list and French waiters. It was Kathleen who insisted that they have an early dinner here before the symphony at the Kennedy Center, and sitting across from her, McGarvey, ruggedly handsome in his tuxedo, could only marvel at his fantastic good fortune. They had divorced twenty years ago because she could not stand being married to a CIA case officer, but they had finally realized that they could no longer live apart because they loved each other. Being here tonight was going to be a closure, and he hoped a beginning, for both of them. He wanted this to work with everything in his being; and maybe he even needed it for his sanity.
Watching her as the waiter poured their wine, his chest swelled. At fifty she was more beautiful in his eyes than she’d ever been. She wore a black, off-the-shoulder Given chy evening dress, a string of pearls around her long, delicately formed neck, her blond hair up in back, and the cheap diamond tennis bracelet he’d given her for their first Christmas on her left wrist. On her it looked as if it had come from Tiffany’s. She was aristocratic, and when they’d come in everyone had looked at her.
She smiled and raised her glass. “You look gorgeous tonight, Kirk. I think I like you dressed up like this.”
He laughed and raised his glass. “That was supposed to be my line. You’re beautiful.”
She sipped her pi not grig io then looked at the traffic on the street. McGarvey’s car and bodyguard were parked down the block. It was just 6:00 P.M.” and still light out, and warm, but she shivered. “I hope you don’t mind coming back here.”
He put his glass down. “Are you okay, Katy?” He knew exactly what she was thinking, and why she’d wanted to come here. She was trying to erase at least a part of his violent past, which of course was impossible, but maybe being here with him, safe, secure, would help ease some of her fears.
She turned back, a serious expression on her narrow,
finely formed face. “You never told me the whole story. About Jacqueline, I mean. Were you in love with her?”
The question hurt a little, but it was an honest one, and it was something he figured she had to know if they were to put this business behind them. “I thought I was, at least for a little while, but I was sending her back to Paris.”
“Why?” she asked, studying his eyes.
“Because I knew that it wasn’t going to work,” he said softly. “She wasn’t going to leave her home, her family, for me, and I wasn’t going to leave the Company. Not like that.” That drew an almost sympathetic look from her.
“Elizabeth said that she was a good person.”
McGarvey smiled sadly. “They got to be friends, but Liz had a tough time of it when we got back to the States.”
“She wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I knew that the situation was bothering her.”
“She wanted you and I to get back together.”
Kathleen looked at her hands. She still wore their wedding ring. Even in the bad days, right after their divorce, when she hated him, she’d not taken it off. “I think that our daughter still feels a little guilty about that day, Kirk. But I can’t help her unless I know what happened.” She was frustrated.
“It’s been a year.”
“You’ve not forgotten. You never will. You never forget anything.” She’d almost said forgive, and McGarvey caught it.
“Jacqueline wanted to get married. I was supposed to quit the CIA, and go back to teaching somewhere.”
Kathleen’s chin raised a little. “But you were afraid that she was going to get hurt, being around you. That was it, wasn’t it? You did that thing for a long time.”
“That I did,” McGarvey said. He’d been a CIA field officer for twenty-five years, and he’d killed people in the line of duty. A legion of them, whose faces he saw nearly every night in his dreams. There were a lot of grudges out
