Gambit, David Hagberg [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

“It’s just a piece of paper,” Mary said on the way up in the elevator. “We’ll take care of it when this blows over. In the meantime, we have a half hour before Taft wants to see us in his office, and Otto wants to talk to you guys first.”

They got off on the busy third floor and walked down the corridor to Otto’s suite of offices that had originally been meant for a team of six people who had at one time coordinated cover stories and arrangements for operators going overseas on missions. Now the three rooms belonged solely to Otto and his machines, including a pool table–size horizontal monitor that could show a dozen files, photos, and videos simultaneously.

But not every piece of information was digitized, even in this day and age. Strewn around his office were stacks of older books—a lot of them biographies of obscure people whom Otto had found interesting at one time or another, old newspapers and magazines, maps and ocean charts, drawings—some of them as old as the 1500s—in a dozen languages.

“Good morning, Mary,” Lou’s voice greeted them at the door, which clicked open. “Otto is expecting you.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, the expression on her face unchanged.

Pete had asked her a month or so ago if she minded having the voice of Otto’s deceased wife as the voice of his darlings, but she had smiled and shook her head. “We’re friends.”

Otto was in the back office, his inner sanctum, standing over the horizontal monitor that was alive with charts, diagrams, and lists of people.

“According to what I’m looking at, no government agency on the planet is gunning for you,” he said, looking up. “And that includes us inside and outside the beltway.”

“Doesn’t exactly narrow it down,” Pete said.

“He wasn’t a lone wolf,” McGarvey said. He’d thought about it all night after he and Pete had gone back to their apartment to get a few hours’ sleep. “He said he worked for an expediter. And he had some pretty good intel. He knew where we lived and that we were coming up from Florida.”

“And he had plenty of advance notice,” Mary said. “Housekeeping’s preliminary after-action report said that he’d probably been living in the apartment for a week, maybe longer.”

“Fingerprints? DNA?”

“Both. We have rock-solid confirmation that he’s Leonard Slatkin. But he was kicked out of the service six years ago. Whoever he was freelancing for, it wasn’t them.”

“His spotter was good,” Otto said. “Our guys found a surveillance camera on the roof of the building across the street from yours. It was feeding to a burner phone that’s since been disconnected.”

“Housekeeping looked at it,” Mary added. “No forensic evidence. And apparently, no one in the building knew when it was installed or by whom.”

“Whoever it was, they knew what they were doing,” McGarvey said. “And their only mistake I can see was the piece of plastic on the window.”

“But that’s just the point, Mac,” Mary said. “Against impossible odds—only the angle you were at to the window as you walked up the street allowed you to spot it. But why? What were you looking for? What got your hackles up? There was no reason for it.”

McGarvey had asked himself the same question yesterday before they’d even gotten off the flight from Florida, and outside baggage claim when he had scanned the vehicles and the faces. And again on the way into the city, and when he’d had the cabbie drop him off at the end of the block.

Something had been tickling at him maybe for a few days, even a week. Maybe something he’d seen on a TV news show, or in one of the half-dozen newspapers he read every morning, especially The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, or the magazines he subscribed to, among them Jane’s Defense Weekly.

But nothing specific came to mind, except that he was on edge, and respecting that feeling—even though he didn’t always know the why of it—had saved his life on more than one occasion.

“I don’t know,” he told them.

Upstairs on the seventh floor, they were shown into the director’s office, where Harold Taft, the DCI, and his deputy director of operations, formerly known as the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Thomas Waksberg, were waiting for them.

“I’m not sure if it’s a good thing seeing you again,” Taft said, “but I understand that you were in a spot of trouble again yesterday.”

He was a short, slender man with the military bearing of the navy four-star he’d been until President Weaver had tapped him to head the CIA. In everyone’s estimation, including McGarvey’s, he was one of the better DCIs in a long time, because he was not only a no-nonsense man, he had experience. During his tenure in the navy, he had revamped all five military intelligence operations, including those of the Coast Guard, plus the DoD’s Central Security Service.

Waksberg, on the other hand, was an obese civilian who’d been a chief of police in a medium-size Texas city, had worked as a district attorney in Dallas–Fort Worth, and moved to Washington during the Weaver campaign to work as the new president’s legal consul. He had no intel background, but he was a bright man, and not so prejudiced as his predecessor, Marty Bambridge, who’d in the end turned out to be a traitor.

They all sat down, and Taft nodded to McGarvey. “Ball’s in your court, but I understand there was one casualty.”

“Yes,” Otto answered. “We identified him as a former South African Special Forces operator who evidently turned freelance. He was paid $250,000, probably as a down payment, to assassinate Mac.”

Taft turned to his DDO. “Do you have anything?”

“He was in our files as someone of minimal interest.”

Taft waited.

“As far as we know, he’s never operated on U.S. soil until now.”

“Do you have any beef with South Africa?” Taft asked McGarvey.

“No.”

The DCI almost smiled. “At least there’s one nation’s intelligence service you haven’t crossed swords with at one time or another. So why was this