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

He ran and swam nearly every day. Several times a year, he spent a few days to a week at the Company’s training facility—the Farm—south of Washington along the York River, where he pushed himself to the limits. And never did he let himself merely laze away a weekend, not even a day.

“Sometimes you’re like a monk in a monastery,” more than one woman had told him. “Ease up a little.”

His stock answer had always been: “I don’t know how.” The real answer was that his life had very often depended upon keeping sharp.

And now there was Pete, and he was just as afraid for her safety has he had been for the other women in his life, although she was herself a highly trained and very capable field officer who had more than once fought at his side and had even saved his life. They had become partners in every sense of the word. Able to read each other, able to sense each other’s moods, anticipate each other’s moves.

They’d brought only carry-on bags with them, so they had no need to wait for the luggage carousel. Outside, they got into the taxi queue. Pete was going directly out to Otto’s McLean house, where Mary Sullivan was waiting for her, and Mac was going to their Georgetown apartment.

It was Thursday, and Otto and Mary were getting married in a civil ceremony at the house tomorrow morning, with only Mac and Pete and Mac’s three-year-old granddaughter, Audrey, who had been adopted by Otto and his late wife, Louise, after Mac’s daughter and her husband—both CIA employees—had been assassinated.

“Memories,” Pete said. “Sometimes I think that’s all we’ll ever be left with.”

“All anyone’s ever left with,” McGarvey said a little too sharply. He’d been feeling on edge for the past couple of days, even a little morose at times. Yet he couldn’t believe that it was because his only true friend in the world had fallen in love and was getting married so soon after his wife’s murder.

Pete looked up in surprise. “Nothing stays the same, that it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But everyone’s happy.”

Out of old ingrained habits, Mac watched an airport cop talking to a driver who’d pulled up in a dark green Tahoe in a no-parking zone. A windowless van passed slowly, and one hundred feet away across the several lanes of traffic, a man carrying a duffel bag was waiting at a crosswalk. In the farther distance was the possible glint of sunlight on a lens of what could have been a sniper scope.

Pete touched his shoulder. “What is it, Kirk?”

“I don’t know.”

She followed his gaze. “Okay, you have my attention, sweetheart. Is this one of your premos?”

Mac’s premonitions—premos, as Otto called them—were feelings almost at the subliminal level that he’d developed over the past years as a defense mechanism. Something he’d picked up in a daily report, something he’d read in a newspaper or heard on television or online, some disconnected bits and pieces here and there that somehow made patterns inside his head, brought his awareness almost to the preternatural level. Hunches, they were sometimes called. Feelings. Inklings. Notions. Intuitions. Premos.

He turned to her, smiled, and shook his head. “Just putting myself in Otto’s shoes. He sounded nervous yesterday on the phone.”

“This is me you’re talking to,” Pete said. “Something coming our way?”

“Otto’s darlings have been clear all last week.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Otto Rencke was the CIA’s ranking computer expert. His darlings were a set of advanced programs that mined billions of data sources looking for anomalies—bits and pieces that didn’t seem to belong. Things that more often than not led to nothing. But every now and then, something buried deep rose a little above the background noise and fit with perhaps a half dozen or more other anomalies to mean something.

“I don’t know,” Mac said, because he didn’t.

McGarvey had the cabby drop him off at the corner of Dumbarton Avenue NW where it dead-ended at Rock Creek Park a half block from his apartment. It was a Thursday, and Otto had said that he was going to work, leaving Mary and Pete to work out the last-minute arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding.

“Cold feet?” Mac had asked him last night on the phone.

“You’re damned right. But second thoughts? No way.”

The late-afternoon traffic was light even on the parkway along the creek behind him, and standing alone with his bag in hand as the cab drove away, he listened to the sounds of a siren a long ways off back toward the city. Somewhere closer, a horn beeped once, and church bells rang from the university campus. Normal sounds. But nothing felt normal to him, and he didn’t know why except that he was spooked.

Neither he nor Pete had brought firearms with them on the flight. They had weapons in the apartment, but there hadn’t seemed to be the need just now to carry. They were coming for the weekend, a wedding, nothing more.

Nothing moved on his street. He stood for just a moment, then turned and went around the barrier and made his way down the shallow grassy slope toward the parkway, on the other side of which was the creek, holding up by a tree ten feet from the rail.

He phoned Otto, who answered on the first ring, out of breath as he often got when he was excited. The man was a genius with all the oddities and complexities that went with that level of intelligence.

“Oh, wow, Pete just called, worried about you.”

“What’d she say?”

“Wanted to know what my darlings were up to. And I told her plenty, but nothing bearing down on us. Anyway, I’m the one who’s supposed to be getting nervous, not you.”

“How’s Mary?”

“I don’t know what I’d do without her,” Otto said, stumbling just a little over the last two words. “I’ll always love Lou; don’t ever think I won’t. But she’s gone, and Mary’s here.”

Tall, gangly Louise Horn, all arms and legs akimbo, narrow, angular face, and a million-watt smile, had come over