“No.”
“Then you’ll just have to shoot me,” McGarvey said. “You’re a good shot, and I’m sure Sergeant Schilling is an expert marksman. The advantage is yours. And you’ll even get credit for stopping me. I just want to talk.”
A moment later the lights in the living room came on and spilled into the stair hall. Whittaker stood back from the open door, a standard military-issue 9mm Beretta in his hand, no silencer to degrade its accuracy.
There was no sign of Foster or of Sergeant Schilling.
“You wanted to talk to Mr. Foster, and he agreed,” Whittaker said. “Come in, Mac.”
“Only my friends call me that,” McGarvey said, and he walked into the stair hall and stopped just a couple of feet from Whittaker, whose gun hand was rock solid.
Foster stood just within the living room to the right, a disdainful but curious expression on his round, almost bulldog face. He had no intention of talking, and it was obvious by the way he held himself: tense, his eyes narrowed.
Sergeant Schilling stood just beyond the living room entry, in the lee of the grand staircase. He was pointing the Italian-made Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun in McGarvey’s direction. Even in the hands of an amateur the weapon was lethal out to a range of more than forty yards, and Schilling looked like anything but.
McGarvey took a step forward and to his right putting Whittaker between him and Schilling.
“You should have left when you had the chance,” Whittaker said.
“You knew I couldn’t leave it.”
“The hell of it is that I always liked you. All of us did when you were the DCI.”
“But why Arlington, David? Can you just tell me that much?”
“We never meant to hurt Kathleen or Elizabeth. The IED was meant for you.”
McGarvey nodded, because he knew that Whittaker was telling the truth. “What about China?”
“Enough,” Foster said.
Whittaker raised his pistol so that it was pointed directly at McGarvey’s face.
“I’m wearing a wire,” McGarvey said softly. “Otto’s recorded everything including our telephone conversations, and the two calls made from the house phone to the Bureau and the Marshals. Maybe you want to make a deal before it’s too late.”
“He’s lying,” Foster said.
Whittaker shook his head, a sick look on his face. “No, he’s not.”
“Anything new?” McGarvey said.
“One of our B-525 made an emergency landing at Hsinchu Air Base about six hours ago,” Otto came back.
“Who’s he talking to?” Foster demanded.
“Hsinchu Air Base, Taiwan,” McGarvey said. “Ring a bell?”
Whittaker went visibly pale. “Christ.”
“The crew off-loaded something into one of the 499th Tactical Fighter wing’s hangars,” Otto said. “Could have been missiles.”
“Is it possible that Chinese intelligence saw what was going on?” McGarvey asked.
“That’d be as close to a hundred percent as you could get.”
“Otto has found out about the B-525 emergency landing out there. Whatever the crew off-loaded could have been nuclear missiles, or at least that’s what Beijing probably believes.”
“Enough,” Foster roared. “Get that thing from him!”
Whittaker stepped forward and Schilling shouted something, but McGarvey moved left, away from the Beretta’s muzzle and snatched the pistol from the acting DCI’s hand.
Schilling fired three shots, the lead pellets shredding Whittaker’s back, destroying most of his spine, and violently shoving him forward.
McGarvey fell back, using Whittaker’s body as a shield, as Schilling fired at least six more times; a few of the pellets hit McGarvey’s left shoulder and arm before he managed to fire two snap shots, one going wide, the other hitting the sergeant in center mass.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Pete had just about reached the highway where she’d parked Louise’s SUV when she heard the gunshots, including what sounded like an automatic shotgun, and she pulled up short and looked back.
The night was suddenly very silent, and she swayed on her feet trying to come to a decision. Mac could be down; in an unknown situation inside the house the odds stacked against him. And leaving him like this wasn’t an option. She’d lost one partner she didn’t want to lose this one.
She took two steps back the way she had come, but stopped.
“Goddamnit,” she muttered. This was bad, had been from the get-go. The man had lost his entire family; saw them murdered right in front of his eyes. And now she was supposed to turn her back on him?
She turned around again and ran the rest of the way through the woods to the Toyota, where she got her cell phone from her purse and called Otto.
“He made me leave, but there was gunfire,” she blurted.
“Mac’s okay for now,” Otto said. “He took out Foster’s bodyguard, and Whittaker is down. No one else is at the house.”
“Does he need help?”
“No. But the Bureau and Marshals are on their way, so you’ve got to beat feet right now. Please tell me that you’re in the car, or close to it, and not still up at the house. We don’t know where you are. Louise had to switch the satellite back to the ship, someone was getting snoopy.”
“I’m in the car,” Pete said.
“Then get back here as fast as you can.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Otto said. “Some really bad shit is just about ready to happen. Maybe a shooting war between China and Taiwan.”
SEVENTY-FIVE
McGarvey disentangled himself from Whittaker’s ravaged body, got to his feet, and, throwing Foster a quick glance to make sure the man wasn’t armed, cautiously approached Schilling’s inert form, and kicked the shotgun away.
“He’s dead,” Foster said. “Both of them are.”
McGarvey safetied the Beretta and laid it on the hall table. “You must have expected casualties, otherwise why did you hire Administrative Solutions?”
“I underestimated you, Mr. McGarvey. We all did, except for poor David. But he was in over his head, and I think he was probably getting cold feet at the last minute.”
The front door was still half open and in the far distance McGarvey heard sirens, and perhaps the rhythmic thump of helicopter rotors.
“China,” McGarvey said.
“It’s too late to be stopped, you know,” Foster said. “Has been since before Mexico City.” He was dressed in a natty blue blazer, khaki slacks, and an open-neck white silk shirt. He’d been drinking, his square-jawed face flushed. “In any event, what’s about to happen has been inevitable, actually, for a number of years. When the Soviet Union disintegrated under the weight of historical pressure, China was next. Always had been next.”
“Why? To what point do you risk innocent people, perhaps millions, or tens of millions?”
“There are no innocents.”
McGarvey had to wonder about Foster and his type, because Osama bin Laden had told him the very same
