The Cabal

All of that had taken less than fifteen minutes, and when he got back to the computer room, Otto was hopping from foot to foot, grinning ear to ear. “Am I good, or am I good? You tell me, kemo sabe.”

“You cracked it?” McGarvey asked.

“Bingo,” Otto said, and he suddenly became serious. “And you’re not going to believe this shit. Foster has everybody involved, and I mean everybody.”

“Someone else in the Company other than McCann?”

“David Whittaker, our acting DCI,” Otto said. “How about them apples?”

“It had to have been someone near the top,” McGarvey said, but still he was amazed and a little bit saddened. He’d worked with Whittaker for a number of years when the man was the assistant deputy director of operations, under McGarvey, and the head of operations when McGarvey had briefly run the Agency. When Adkins had taken over the top job Whittaker had become the number two man.

“Can you hack into David’s computer?”

“The one connected to the mainframe, but not his laptop unless he’s online.”

“Keep an eye out for it,” McGarvey said. “Who else is on the flash drive?”

“How about Dennis Tressel and Air Force general Albert Burnside and Dominick Stanford and Charles Meyer, and about thirty-five others? All men, and except for Whittaker, the number two or three at their respective agencies.”

“I don’t know these people.”

“Tressel is the assistant to Frank Shapiro, the president’s adviser on national security affairs; Burnside is the chief political adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Dominick Stanford is the assistant to the State Department’s deputy under secretary for economic affairs; and Meyer is one of the chief policy advisers to Senator Walter Stevens.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Nobody knows who they are. And that’s the entire point. All of them are under the radar, and yet they’re the ones who really run the show. They’re the guys who feed policy to their bosses, the ones who actually steer their agencies.”

“To do what?” McGarvey asked. “It can’t be anything like what you found on the disk that Givens supposedly gave to Todd.”

“The names are on the drive along with the financials — who was getting paid and how much, but not for what operation. That’s something Remington apparently hadn’t known.”

“Did McCann’s name show up?”

“Yeah. The Friday Club passed him eleven million dollars over a two-year period, which matches the Mexico City and Pyongyang operations.”

“But not the reasons?”

Otto shook his head. “Nor Foster’s ultimate aim.”

“There has to be more than that, goddamnit,” McGarvey said, struggling with his anger. “How about other payouts? Can we match who the money went to and then work from there to see what happened?”

“I’m on it,” Otto said. “But simply matching McCann to the money he got from the club wouldn’t have pointed toward either Mexico City or Pyongyang. We got those leads from Turov’s computer that you liberated in Tokyo.”

McGarvey turned away for a moment. “Nothing else on the drive?”

“No. Means Remington didn’t know what Foster was really aiming at, and Sandberger probably didn’t either.”

“But Admin was on the payroll.”

“Right.”

McGarvey turned back. “To do what?” he asked. “What did Foster hire Admin to do?”

“It’s not on the flash drive.”

“My name didn’t show up?”

“That’s one of the first things I looked for,” Otto said. “If we could have connected Foster with orders to have you assassinated it would have been something solid to use against him. As it stands now he can claim he was a lobbyist just doing his job. A lot of the guys in the club would take a fall, there’d be a lot of dirt stirred up, and there would be a congressional investigation, the attorney general would probably get into it, but in the end we’d be no nearer to learning what he’s really been up to than we are right now.”

“If Remington knew what was going on he would have put it on his flash drive. He was buying himself some insurance in case he got himself into a corner. But Sandberger knew.”

“It would have to be something big for the man to risk getting shot to death.”

“He thought I was going to take him back to the States, and let the Bureau or the CIA or somebody interrogate him. He knew that once he got back here he’d be safe. Foster’s group would have protected him.”

“It’s big,” Otto said. “We already figured that out. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the risk to assassinate a newspaper reporter and a CIA officer, especially not your son-in-law.”

“They made a mistake,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, they did,” Otto agreed.

“And we’re going to capitalize on it. Tonight.”

SIXTY-THREE

Boberg passed through the town of Mount Vernon on the Potomac’s north shore a few minutes before ten in the evening. Traffic on the GW Memorial Parkway at this hour was practically nonexistent, and the moonless night was just as dark as his mood.

On the way down from Alexandria he’d tried twice to reach Remington without luck. And just across a creek that fed into the river, he pulled up short of the driveway to Foster’s estate and parked at the side of the highway, shutting off the lights and engine.

He was starting to get a seriously bad feeling that things were beginning to fall apart for Admin. The center could no longer hold with Sandberger down and especially not if Remington had taken a runner. Or if McGarvey had gotten to him.

He tried the phone one more time, and it was answered on the third ring by a man’s voice he didn’t recognize.

“Who’s calling?”

Boberg could hear something going on in the background, footsteps, other voices. Official-sounding voices. The cops, he realized, which meant McGarvey had been there.

He broke the connection and sat thinking. All of Admin’s phones, including everyone’s personal cell phone and the encrypted sat phones they used in the field, were untraceable, so he had no worry that his name would pop up on some computer screen. But with Remington out of the picture, if he were, the company had no future. No leadership. No contacts.

But the company was small, much smaller than most of the other contractor services, some of which had upwards of two thousand employes. Admin had eighty-eight on the payroll until Baghdad, and now probably four or possibly five or six less than that. And although the company no longer had the State Department Baghdad contract, it still had the Friday Club.

“Lean and mean, Cal,” Remington had preached when he offered him the job. “We can do things the bigger services can’t handle.”

“Mobility,” Boberg remembered saying.

“Spot on. First in, first to get the job done.”

In that respect nothing had changed except for the company’s leadership. And since he was senior now, the job of keeping Admin up and running had fallen on his shoulders. He let a small smile curl his lips. Lean and mean it was.

He wrote a note that he had car trouble and had gone for help, stuck it under the windshield wiper, and hefting the small shoulder-bag of extra ammuniton, a red-lensed flashlight, Steiner mil specs binoculars, and a few