sure it was just superficial, though her butt and upper leg were numb.
The two men from the Taurus who’d opened fire were somewhere in the road, maybe behind their own car. Evidently they’d been taken by surprise when she had returned fire. But a Glock 19 compact pistol was no match for a pair of automatic weapons. She didn’t recognize the sound, but the guns were effective.
She ducked down so she could see the street from beneath her undercarriage, but nothing was there except for the ford. No feet on ankles.
“They’ve gotta be close, so watch yourself,” she said softly.
“Keep down, I’m right on top of you,” McGarvey told her.
Suddenly she heard a car coming up the street at a high rate of speed, and someone firing what had to be a nine-millimeter pistol.
She pulled herself up to a crouch so she could see over the hood of her car. One of the shooters hidden behind the Taurus was aiming his weapon at the oncoming car when Pete fired one shot catching him in the side, knocking him down.
To her left the Toyota screeched rubber, braking to a halt, and she had just a split second to see a dark figure jump out of the passenger side and disappear behind a line of parked cars ten yards away, when the shooter down behind the Taurus opened fire.
She turned and fired two shots, the first ricocheting off the pavement, the second catching him in the side of the head or throat, and he fell back and was motionless.
“One down—” she said, when a figure came running out of the darkness to her right.
“Bitch,” he shouted, practically on top of her.
“Damn,” she said, turning, trying to bring her pistol to bear, but she was too late and she knew it.
Her hip gave out and she lurched against the hood of her car and began to fall as someone behind her fired three shots, all of them connecting with the man who fell backward, almost in slow motion, his silenced weapon discharging a volley of shots in an arc up in the air.
All of a sudden she was sitting on her butt on the curb, the night silent, her head buzzing, a pool of blood slowly gathering under her.
McGarvey loomed above her. “You’re hit,” he said, and she could hear his voice coming from his lips as well as in her earpiece.
“Not bad, I think,” she mumbled.
McGarvey holstered his pistol then rolled over on her side. He undid her jeans and pulled them down around her hips then yanked off his jacket, balled it up and pressed it against the wound in her hip. “Hold this in place,” he said, guiding her hand to it.
He opened the door of the Mustang, then picked her up and gently put her in the passenger seat.
“I’m taking Pete to All Saints. Tell them we’re coming in. I’m driving Pete’s car.”
“How bad is she?”
“She’s losing a fair bit of blood.”
“They might tip off the Bureau that you’re on the way,” Otto said.
“I’ll take the chance,” McGarvey said. “Have Louise follow us.”
Pete was hearing all of this and when McGarvey got behind the wheel she wanted to tell him that she would get there herself, but her focus went soft gray and nothing was making sense.
At All Saints Hospital the gate opened for them and they drove inside and around back where a pair of nurses waited with a gurney. As soon as McGarvey pulled up, they eased a semiconscious Pete out of the car and helped her up onto the gurney.
“Are you hurt, Mr. Director?” one of them asked.
He had a lot of Pete’s blood on him. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Dr. Franklin’s standing by upstairs for her. He says that you were never here. So go.”
“What about her?”
“She was never here either. So just go. And leave her car.”
They wheeled Pete inside the hospital, and McGarvey hesitated a few moments before he walked back to Louise waiting in the Toyota. So much history here, he thought. Some of it with good outcomes, but other bits not so good. He could see Todd’s shot-to-hell body lying on the stainless-steel table. Nothing he could have done to prevent it. Nothing.
PART FOUR
That Night
SIXTY-TWO
Louise was shaking and subdued when they got back to the brownstone and Otto gave her a hug, and then held her until her shivers subsided. “You did good,” he told her.
“I’m sorry I put you through something like that,” McGarvey told her.
They were standing in the stair hall, and Louise looked at him. “Pete will be okay, won’t she?”
“She lost a bit of blood, but she’ll be fine by morning. It was nothing serious.”
Louise shook her head and then looked from McGarvey to her husband. “You two have been doing this for a lot of years.”
Otto just shrugged.
She shook her head again. “I never imagined what it was like for real, until tonight,” she said.
“Are you okay?” Otto asked.
“I just need to clean up,” she said, and she went upstairs.
“It was Kangas and Mustapha, the guys from Baghdad and early this morning in the park,” McGarvey said. “They’re both down, and so is Remington and his driver.”
“Metro D.C. cops are all over it, and so is the Bureau,” Otto said. He was excited. “But you got Remington’s flash drive from Pete?”
She had handed it to him before she passed out. McGarvey gave it to Otto and they went upstairs to his computers, where Otto plugged it into one of the machines and brought up the drive. It was encrypted as Remington had said it would be, but Otto brought up one of the decryption programs he’d devised for the CIA and National Security Agency about nine months ago and set it to work on the drive. The sensitive program had never been meant to leave either agency, but Otto backed up everything he did. Always.
“This could take awhile,” Otto said.
“How long?” McGarvey asked. “With Sandberger and Remington both down, Admin has to be hurting, and Foster and his crowd will be getting nervous about now. I want to finish this tonight.”
“Could be a matter of minutes or days. I don’t know how good his algorithms are.”
“Better than your stuff?”
Otto grinned shyly. “There’s always a first, ya know.”
McGarvey glanced at the monitor. Line after line of figures marched down the screen, the pace accelerating. “I need to take a shower and change out of these clothes. I got Pete’s blood on me putting her in the car.”
Otto’s eyes were wide. “What you told Louise is true, right? She’s gonna be okay?”
“Unless she has broken bones, or the bullet in her hip hit a major artery, she should be up and around by morning. Franklin’s a good doc.”
“The best,” Otto said, and he turned back to his computers.
McGarvey went to the room they’d set up for him, took a shower, changed into jeans, another dark pullover, and dark boat shoes. He field stripped his Wilson, cleaned it with the kit from his bag, reloaded the one magazine he’d used, and holstered the pistol at the small of his back.
