End Game (39 page)

The winds were gusting, but Roper was a pro and the landing was smooth. In five minutes they were taxiing to the hangar the navy used for its VIP flights.

“So, what now?” Pete asked.

“Nothing much for us until Otto or Bob comes up with something,” McGarvey said.

“No one left for him to kill.”

“It's not over with yet,” Alex said.

“You?” McGarvey asked.

“I think he's given up on me.”

“What then?”

“I don't know. Something.”

They pulled into the hangar, and as the engines spooled down, Maggie opened the hatch and lowered the stairs.

At that moment Otto called.

“The son of a bitch is at the Farm,” he said. “He's got Audie!”

“Get me a chopper!” McGarvey shouted to Roper.

 

SIXTY-EIGHT

McGarvey picked up the call on his sat phone as he got off the Gulfstream, Pete and Alex right behind him. “Switch the call over to me.”

“I need to stay on the line,” Otto said, just about beside himself.

Audie's little voice came on.

“It's your grampyfather. Are you okay, sweetheart?” McGarvey said, his heart aching.

“Oh yes. I'm a little tired, you know, but Uncle Tom is a nice man. He brought me some candy.”

“Where are you right now?”

“Oh, we went for a walk in the woods. I like it here.”

“Is Uncle Tom still with you?”

“Yes, I'm holding his hand.”

“Give him the phone for just a minute.”

“Okay,” Audie said.

“Good morning, Mr. Director,” Bertie Russell said pleasantly. “You have a lovely granddaughter. I hope you appreciate just how special she is.”

“You have her. Now what?”

“Why, a face-to-face meeting between us. At your earliest possible convenience. I'm sure you can arrange for a helicopter to get you down here within the hour. I think it's time you and I got to know each other a little better. There's so much I would like for you to understand.”

Roper came to the Gulfstream's door. “A Sea Ranger is being prepped for you,” he said.

“Make it fast,” McGarvey told him. He turned back to the phone. “Leave my granddaughter out of it. You got my attention. It'll be just you and me.”

“But then I'd have no leverage. Where's the percentage for me?”

“My word, Bertie. Give Audie back to her minders, and I'll make sure you'll be allowed to leave the base. When I get there, we'll talk, and no matter what comes up, you'll be free to walk. I'll even guarantee you a two-hour head start.”

“But then you will resume your pursuit.”

“Yes. But you were an NOC. Two hours should be plenty of time to go to ground.”

“Is Alex with you at this moment?”

“She'll be one of our topics of discussion. At the moment she's under arrest for the murder of a man in an apartment in Georgetown.”

“You say you have her under arrest?”

“Yes.”

“Good luck with that, Mr. Director. But I'll do as you say. There is a camping area just west of the interstate. It's called Toano. I don't think it'll be very busy at this time of the year. Your pilot can find it on the chart.”

“First I'll need to verify that Audie is back with her minders and unharmed.”

“As you wish,” Bertie said. “Oh, and leave your weapons behind.”

“Not a chance,” McGarvey said. “If need be, I will defend myself, but you have my word I'll give you two hours.”

Bertie rang off.

“I'll be airborne in a few minutes,” he told Otto. “Let me know as soon as Audie is safe.”

“Kill him,” Otto said.

“Count on it,” McGarvey said, and hung up.

“I'm going with you,” Pete said.

“Stay here with Alex.”

“I'm going back to McLean to give Otto and Louise some backup in case the bastard tries to get to them instead of waiting for you to show up,” Alex said. “Camp Peary and your granddaughter could be just a diversion.”

McGarvey stepped close to her. “Don't fuck with me, Alex. The people we're talking about mean a great deal to me. If you try anything, I will put a bullet between your eyes without a moment's hesitation, even if it takes me the rest of my life. And believe me, I'll enjoy it.”

Alex shrugged. “You gave your word to Bertie, and he trusts you. I'm giving you my word that I won't do a thing to Otto or Louise. I want this to be done even more than you do, because I've lived with it for nearly a third of my life now. And all my friends are dead.”

“You've never had friends,” Pete said.

McGarvey called Otto. “Alex is coming to stay with you guys in case Tom decides to make an end run on you. Are you okay with that?”

“Wouldn't do her any good to take us out,” Otto said. He was a lot calmer now. “Send her over. Anyway, Audie's safe, and Calder is already on his way off base.”

A gray Chevy Equinox with navy markings came to the hangar door. McGarvey tossed Alex the keys to his Porsche, and he and Pete rode in the Chevy, he in the front and Pete in back, over to the helicopter, its engines warming up.

The pilot was a young navy lieutenant, and he found the campground on his chart. “I grew up in Norfolk, so I know the area,” he said.

“How quickly can you get us down there?” McGarvey asked.

“We cruise at a hundred and twenty knots, but I can push it to one thirty if it's urgent.”

“It's urgent.”

“Under one hour.”

“Let's go. I'll tell you what I have in mind on the way down,” McGarvey said.

*   *   *

Bertie, driving just five miles per hour over the speed limit on I-64, passed the Toano exit at mile marker 227, and continued back to Washington, the day gorgeous, traffic light, his mood lifting.

All his life, especially since as a five-year-old kid learning chess by studying the games of the masters, he had come to appreciate most of all the end game. The opening moves were critical. And the middle game, when the majority of the strategy was concentrated on controlling the center of the board, was intense. But it was the end, when the player who reached the jugular vein first—usually the one who lured the opposition's queen into a trap, maybe from a trade, a bishop for a queen—that he'd enjoyed the most.

Nothing had changed in the intervening years. The preparations and training for an op were interesting, and even the opening moves and first contacts were intense. But it was at the end that he soared.

He phoned Admiral Matthew Koratich's private number at the Pentagon. Koratich was assistant chief of air operations for the Atlantic area, who Bertie, as Tom Calder, had befriended a number of years ago.

They'd met at an Army-Navy game a year after Bertie's wife had died of cancer, and they had hit it off immediately. Their politics were the same brand of the conservative “America first” ideal, and it wasn't long before Bertie was passing him hard intel about Russian satellite surveillance systems the CIA hadn't been sharing with the military at the time. It had to do with not compromising the US's sources in Moscow, and Koratich's star had risen based on some shrewd decisions he'd made.

His secretary put Bertie's call through.

“Tom, haven't heard from you in a while,” Koratich said. “Rumors are you guys are having some trouble over there.”

“We have some nut case running around, causing us a world of shit, but it's nothing we can't handle,” Bertie said. “But I need to ask you for a favor.”

“Anything,” Koratich said without hesitation.

“I need to get to Baghdad ASAP. I mean, like, right now.”

“CIA has access to a lot of aircraft.”

“I know, but this has to be on the q.t. Could be the guy we're looking for over there has some serious intel linked to a couple of Saddam's people still in hiding. I'd also need a car and a driver. But someone anonymous. Civilian.”

“I can work something out,” Koratich said. “How soon? Like, today?”

“I'm about two hours away from Andrews.”

“Stand by,” Koratich said.

Bertie reached into his shirt pocket and switched on his MP3 player, the music coming from a Bluetooth earpiece also in his pocket. Bach's Toccata and Fugue. Serious music for serious business. Precise, mathematical, and therefore beautiful. It was the remastered performance by Albert Schweitzer in 1935. Always had been his favorite.

Koratich came back. “I have a Gulfstream, just landed an hour ago. She's being refueled. I can have a new crew out there by the time you show up. How long will they have to stand by?”

“No time at all, Matt. Soon as they drop me off, they can refuel and head home.”

“Happy to lend a hand,” Koratich said. “I hope you find what you're looking for.”

 

SIXTY-NINE

They flew low southeast of Richmond, following a slow-moving creek that didn't start to widen out until the campground and ten miles farther, where it emptied into the James River. Their pilot, Lieutenant Billy Cox, knew his business, his touch light on the controls, sometimes just skimming the creek, the trees close in on both sides.

Otto called when they were just a few minutes from Toano. “He left his car in the short-term parking lot at Dulles. He made reservations for a flight to Paris this evening under the name Walt Wager.”

“He has a sense of humor,” McGarvey said.

“But I also came up with reservations for Istvan Fabry out of Baltimore, Larry Coffin from LaGuardia, and Roy Schermerhorn from O'Hare. I'm sure I'll find reservations—all of them for Paris—under the names of the other Alpha Seven operators. But security at the Farm said he was driving a Chevy Impala. I checked Dulles again, and a guy matching his description rented the car from Hertz for six days.”

“Hang on,” McGarvey said. He tapped Cox on the shoulder. “We're looking for a black Chevy Impala.”

“The campground is just around the next bend. Sixty seconds.”

“We're just about there,” McGarvey told Otto. “Is Alex behaving herself?”

“She never showed up.”

“Shit,” McGarvey said. “Get us the hell out of here!” he shouted to the pilot.

At that same instant, Cox was already hauling the chopper in an almost impossibly tight turn to the left. “We have an incoming missile,” he said calmly.

“The son of a bitch led us into a trap,” McGarvey told Otto. “We're being fired on. He and Alex were working together all the time.”

“Hang on. This will be close,” Cox said. He could have been discussing the weather.

“Find them,” he told Otto, and rang off.

Flying just off the surface of the creek, Cox jinked farther left toward the highway at the last moment, into an opening in the trees just a few feet wider than the diameter of the main rotor's blades.

A second later the man-launched missile that had been fired exploded in the trees so close to them, Cox nearly lost control of the chopper.

But then they were out and over a clearing.

“Someone down there doesn't like you, Mr. Director,” Cox said. “That was a Stinger.”

“Circle around. I want you to put me down at the edge of the woods,” McGarvey said. “I'll go the rest of the way on foot.”

“Pardon me, sir, but shouldn't we get the hell out of here, or at least call for backup?”

“Drop me off and go,” McGarvey said.

Cox hauled the chopper around and into another tight turn, setting them down with a flourish at the edge of the clearing.

McGarvey popped the hatch and jumped out, but before he could close it, Pete, pistol in hand, jumped out beside him.

“They were shooting at me, too,” she said before he could object.

McGarvey hesitated for just a moment before he closed the hatch. He and Pete, keeping low, headed into the woods and in the direction of the campground as the Sea Ranger lifted off and headed northwest, in the clearing and below the level of the treetops.

In a few minutes they got to a point where the woods abruptly thinned out, beyond which was what looked like a parking area, and they held up.

Behind them on the other side of the clearing was the interstate highway, and ahead, just beyond the parking area, was the creek. A plain white windowless van was parked off to the right. Nothing else was out there that McGarvey could see, but he smelled the characteristic odor of burnt solid fuel, almost like Fourth of July fireworks. The Stinger had been fired from somewhere along the edge of the creek.

“It's not Tom,” Pete said, her voice barely a whisper.

“He sent someone,” McGarvey told her. “Camp Peary was just a diversion to get me down here.”

“Alex warned us.”

“Yes, she did.”

“How many?”

“At least two, a shooter and a spotter.”

“They must have figured out by now that the chopper dropped us off,” Pete said. She was mostly hidden behind the bole of a tree.

A piece of the thick trunk just at her chest level suddenly exploded, shoving her backward off her feet, and an instant later they heard the whipcrack of what sounded to McGarvey like an M16.

He dropped to his knees and scrambled over to where Pete lay on her side. Blood soaked the side of her polo shirt from a gash just above her left collarbone. She was in pain but conscious. No major blood vessel had been hit.

“That felt like a freight train,” she said, grunting.

McGarvey felt her forehead; it was cool but not clammy. “They know you're down, but they'll want to know where I am. Pretend like you're in shock.”

“That won't be so tough.”

“God damn it, Pete, hang in there,” McGarvey said. He wanted to pick her up and get her the hell out of harm's way.

“I'll be okay, honest injun', darling.”

“I know,” he said. He checked over his shoulder toward the parking area, where he figured the shot had come from, but there was no movement. “I'll be close.”