David Hagberg
The Cabal
DEDICATION
This book is for Lorrel.
At the end of days in the Roman Empire, foreign influences and lobbyists took practical control of the government, leaving the senators to do little more than snipe at each other, much like Washington today.
PROLOGUE
Fall
It was well past midnight when the cab dropped Kirk McGarvey off in front of the Hay-Adams Hotel across Lafayette Square from the White House, and one of the doormen met him. “Good evening, sir.”
McGarvey, the former director of the CIA, hesitated. He was dead tired. It seemed like months since he’d slept last; now in his early fifties, he didn’t bounce back as quickly as he used to. Yet his mind was alive with a thousand separate possibilities and desperate situations.
He was tall, with the build and moves of a rugby player. His hair was thick, brown but graying at the sides, and he had a wide honest face that his wife, Kathleen, had always found attractive, and deep eyes that, depending on his mood, were either green when he was at peace with the world, or gray when he was in the field and operating at top speed. He had done things, and seen things, that most people couldn’t know or understand. He had killed people.
And he was just coming off an assignment in which even more people had died at his hands, which he felt would never come clean no matter how often he scrubbed them. For a long time now he had wanted it to end. He had come out of the field into an uneasy retirement that never lasted for more than a few months at a stretch, and he was getting tired of the game.
So far the FBI had been unable to find the forty kilos of polonium-210 that had been smuggled across the border from Mexico. The news that the situation had been arranged by a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer was never made public, but the fact that the highly radioactive poison hadn’t shown up anywhere had the White House puzzled. Perhaps it had never existed in the first place.
And over the past days another Chinese situation had come up when one of their high-ranking officers had been assassinated in North Korea. A nuclear war had very nearly been touched off, until the blame was traced to a former Russian KGB officer by the name of Alexander Turov, living in Tokyo, with a connection to Howard McCann, who, until Mac’s son-in-law, Todd Van Buren, shot him to death, had been financing the Russian.
The problem was that no one knew where McCann, the CIA’s deputy director of operations, had gotten the money to finance the polonium or the assassinations.
But McGarvey had a start, provided to him by Turov’s laptop courtesy of Otto Rencke, the Company’s resident wizard. Two names, one of them McCann’s. McGarvey had not brought them up during his meeting at the White House with the president. He’d wanted to give the CIA a head start before the administration got all over it.
“I have to take a walk, first,” he told the doorman.
“It may not be safe at this time of the evening, sir.”
“That’s okay, he knows how to take care of himself,” Mac’s wife, Kathleen, said, coming out of the lobby. She linked her arm with her husband’s and they headed down the driveway and crossed the street to the park, the White House lit up like a jewel.
“Is it over, Kirk?” she asked.
“The dangerous parts.”
“No war?”
“No war,” McGarvey said.
They stopped under a light and she studied his broad, honest face. “But there’s more, isn’t there.”
“There’s always more, sweetheart,” McGarvey told her.
PART ONE
Six Months Later
ONE
The George was a trendy newly rebuilt art deco hotel one block from Washington’s Union Station, its restaurant busy this Wednesday noon with a few congressmen, a number of television and print journalists, and well-heeled tourists who liked to be in the middle of things.
The noise level was surprisingly low, as if what everyone was discussing was confidential. The service was as crisp as the April weather, which, after a long damp winter, was energizing. The elections were over, a new president sat in the White House, and an optimistic mood had begun to replace the pessimism since 9/11.
Seated at an upper-level table that looked down on the first floor and entryway, Todd Van Buren sat nursing a Michelob Ultra, waiting for Joshua Givens, a buddy from the University of Maryland, where they’d both majored in political science. Todd had minored in international law and languages — French, Chinese, and Russian — and had been immediately hired by the CIA, while Givens, who’d minored in journalism, had started work for the
When he had called this morning and left a message on Todd’s voice mail, he sounded frantic, almost frightened.
At twenty-nine, Todd was the youngest person ever to run the CIA’s training facility, known unofficially as the Farm, with his wife, Elizabeth, at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, 140 miles south of Washington on the York River. His father-in-law was Kirk McGarvey, former director of the agency. He and Liz both had a fair amount of field experience, much of it alongside Liz’s father, who’d arguably been the Company’s finest field agent, bar none. They’d practically gone to school on his tradecraft, and once their covers had been blown they’d been recruited to run the training facility. Something they’d been doing with a great deal of success for the past three years. And after the first three months no one ever questioned their ages.
Givens knew that Todd worked for the CIA, just as he knew who Todd’s father-in-law was, which made his message this morning all the more cryptic.
“Trust me on this one, Todd,” Givens had said. “Don’t tell anyone we’re meeting. No one. Not your wife, and especially not her father.”
Noon at the George, it was ten after that now, and Todd was beginning to regret driving all the way up from the Farm, and lying to his wife in the bargain, though that had been easy because she was spending the day on an exfiltration exercise with the new class. Tomorrow would be his turn, pushing the twelve field officer trainees as close to the breaking point as he could. He and Liz were hands-on administrators.
He would explain to her where he’d been when he got back. They’d been spies, but they had never lied to each other. She’d made him promise before they got married. She loved her father, but he’d been gone for almost all of her childhood because he had not been able to tell the truth to his wife, and she’d kicked him out of the house.
