McGarvey hesitated for a moment. “Give Otto a call, see what he thinks.” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s director of special operations and the resident computer genius. He was a friend of the family and the nearest thing to a son for McGarvey and an uncle for Todd and Liz.
The Interstate cut through rolling hills, some of them heavily wooded, Fredericksburg behind him to the north and Fort A. P. Hill Military Reservation, where military units were given advanced field training, was off to the east. He and Liz had both spent six weeks there in search-and-evade training with the Green Berets.
“I’ll call him when I get back to the Farm.”
“Call him now,” McGarvey said.
That got Todd’s attention. “Do you think it’s that important?”
“If it involved Howard, then yes, it could be.”
“I’ll call him right away,” Todd said, an oddly disquieted feeling rising in his gut.
He broke the connection with his father-in-law and glanced over his left shoulder as a dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up beside him. The windows were so deeply tinted he couldn’t make out who was inside, and the SUV just hung there.
“Shit,” Todd muttered, his internal alarms ringing all over the place.
The Toyota’s passenger-side window powered down and Todd only had a split second to see that a dark- skinned man was aiming what looked like a small automatic weapon of some kind.
Todd glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his bumper and jammed on the brakes to get him back to the SUV’s rear quarter where a nudge from his left bumper would send the bigger vehicle into a spin. But the other driver anticipated the move and also jammed on his brakes.
Todd yanked the wheel hard to the right sending his car toward the ditch and the woods off the road, when something very hard slammed into his shoulder and he was thrown sideways against the seat-belt restraint, losing control of the car.
He frantically reached for the pistol holstered high on his right hip, but several rounds slammed through the sheet metal of the door like rivets through soft steel, hitting him on his left side, then in his shoulder again and finally his neck, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood, the world beginning to fuzz out as his BMW slammed into a small tree, tilting to the right over a drainage ditch before it came to a complete stop.
All he could think of were Liz and their daughter, how they were going to react to his death.
He tried to fumble for his pistol for what seemed like minutes when the face of the dark man appeared in the driver’s window and it was all Todd could do to look up into the muzzle of what he recognized was a Knight PDW, compact submachine gun, and a billion stars burst inside his head.
Mustapha lowered the weapon, and went around to the passenger side of the BMW, opened the door, and unlatched Van Buren’s seat belt, allowing the body to tumble out of the car. It took him a precious thirty seconds to search the body, taking a wallet and the pistol, but there was no disk.
Kangas had parked on the side of the highway blocking the view of anyone passing, and watching for the Virginia Highway Patrol. Their position here at this moment was precarious.
Givens had given the CIA officer a disk, and Kangas had seen Van Buren put it in his coat pocket.
The front seat was a mess of shattered glass, blood, and bone fragments, and it took a full sixty seconds before Mustapha found the disk up on the dashboard in plain sight, and the cell phone they’d seen Van Buren using wedged between the seats. He pocketed them, and tossed the disk Remington had given them inside. He wore latex gloves so he left no fingerprints.
First making certain that no one approaching on the highway could see what he was doing, he put one round into the back of the CIA officer’s head.
Insurance. That’s how you survived.
FOUR
“Where’d you go, Kirk?” Kathleen McGarvey asked her husband.
It was coming up on eight of a soft, south Florida Gulf Coast spring evening, and they were just finishing their dinner of broiled lamb chops and light salads, with a half bottle of Greek retsina wine on the pool deck of their Casey Key home. McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts and offered her a smile.
“Sorry. Wool gathering, I guess.”
“You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” Katy said. She was slender, with short blond hair, a bright oval face, and smiling eyes. “Something sneaking up on us again?”
She’d hated every assignment that had not only taken McGarvey away, sometimes for weeks at a time, but that had put him in mortal danger. On more than one occasion he’d come home on a stretcher, with IV tubes dangling from his arms and an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. But even more than his injuries, she mostly hated the fact that he killed people — bad people, but human beings nevertheless — and hated herself for at least half-understanding the necessity of what he did. America had enemies, and very often he’d been this country’s last line of defense, sometimes its
Also troublesome to her was her husband’s almost preternatural awareness that something or someone was lurking just around the corner, coming their way, and he often showed this understanding by becoming moody, withdrawing into his own shell, which he realized he’d done ever since Todd’s call this afternoon.
“I don’t think so, sweetheart,” he told her, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Todd called this afternoon with something. I told him to let Otto take a look.”
“But?”
McGarvey shrugged, something tickling at the back of his head. “I thought I would have heard from one of them by now.”
“It probably wasn’t important,” Katy said, but then she frowned. “Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, for goodness sake, call them.”
They had switched the house phones off, which they often did when they wanted to have dinner undisturbed. “Pour me a little more wine,” McGarvey told her. “Be back in a minute.”
He went in to his study on the other end of the house, switched on the phones, and speed-dialed Otto’s roll-over number, which would reach him wherever in the world he was.
Rencke answered on the first ring, all out of breath, as he usually was when something big was happening or about to happen. “Oh, wow, Mac, I’ve been trying to get you for the past two hours,” he gushed. “I was gonna send someone from the Bureau in Tampa.”
“What’s wrong?” McGarvey felt hollow in his stomach. He glanced out the windows where he could just make out Katy in the reflected blue from the pool lights.
“Are you okay? You had the phones off.”
“We’re fine. What the hell’s going on, Otto?”
“Shit, shit, shit. I don’t know how…” Rencke said. “Is Mrs. M right there?”
“She’s out by the pool,” McGarvey said. A terrible sense of dread wanted to overcome him. “Is it about Todd and the disk Josh Givens gave him this morning?”
“Yeah, the cops gave it to me, and I’m running it on my laptop right now. We’re on our way down to the Farm. Louise is driving. I don’t know, it’s just too much.”
McGarvey had never heard his old friend like this. Never, not even in the worst of circumstances, and there’d been plenty of those over the years. “Tell me,” he said.
“Todd was shot to death sometime after one on I-Ninety-five just south of Fredericksburg.”
All the air left the room, and McGarvey closed his eyes. Bright strobes were popping off in his head, like old- fashioned camera flashbulbs. For just a beat he could see Todd and Liz hunched down on the dock here below the house, their two-year-old daughter Audrey in a bright yellow bikini standing between them. With an absolute clarity he could see the pride on his son-in-law’s face; I done good, he was saying.
He could see Liz the night, early in her marriage, when she’d shown up at their house in Chevy Chase after she and Todd had a terrific fight. She never cried, or never let anyone see that she cried, but tears had been
