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

room. Someone must have left the door open, and the light he was seeing was from the corridor.

Possibly meant as a distraction.

The cardboard box camp was off to the right between here and the hospital’s fence line. Mac couldn’t see much of anything, but there was no need for it. The bum, or others, had apparently used the place before, because a narrow path had been worn in the grass.

Mac stepped to the left of the track and started through the woods, moving tree to tree, his pistol pointed down and to the right, away from his leg.

“Mac, hold up,” Otto’s voice came softly in his earbud.

About fifteen yards out, a man, with his back to McGarvey, leaned up against a tree.

“Looks like someone behind a tree,” Otto said.

“I see him,” McGarvey replied softly.

SIXTEEN

It was coming up on midnight, and Hammond stood at his window in the Hay-Adams, looking down toward Lafayette Park and what little traffic there was at this hour. Tarasov had left shortly after the deal had been made with Hicks, which left nothing but to wait.

In a measure, he was nervous—lives were on the line here, conceivably even his own. But he was also excited. He’d played games for most of his life, and certainly for all of his adult life. And he’d often think of some of his financial deals—especially during the dot-com boom when he’d made the bulk of his fortune—as killings.

Destroying another man or a woman—the gender didn’t matter to him—was the name of the game. The homework, the pursuit, and the final deal in which his opponent was ruined financially were everything.

Twice in the last eleven years, two of the men who had considered themselves financial wizards had killed themselves after losing to Hammond. Those events had been sort of a rush for him.

But this game now that he was playing, for no other reason than boredom he admitted to Susan last month when he’d first come up with the plan, was the biggest high he’d ever been on.

It wasn’t just McGarvey’s life that was at stake; it was the assassins who would go up against him. Already one of them was dead, and tonight an even better killer was hunting the former CIA director.

Hammond wanted the Canadian sniper to win, and yet he didn’t want the game to end so soon, so easily.

The house phone rang, and Hammond went over and picked it up. “Yes?”

“I need some company,” Susan said.

Hammond was startled, but not displeased. “Are you here?”

“At the lobby bar.”

He gave her his room number.

“I’ll bring the champers,” she said.

Otto, seated at the kitchen counter watching McGarvey approach the figure of a man leaning up against the tree, began to realize that something was wrong.

“Lou.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Give me a record of thermal scans of the man I’m currently looking at.”

“The man’s temperature is dropping.”

“It’s a dead body,” Pete said from behind Otto.

“Scan the entire park for any heat signatures other than Mac’s.”

“I’m currently showing none.”

“What about the man under the cardboard?”

“He is no longer there.”

“No one else in the park?”

“Other than Mac, I’m seeing nothing,” Lou said.

“What is your confidence?”

“Ninety percent.”

“Why not one hundred?” Pete interjected.

“There are ways to defeat the imaging systems, such as a thermally opaque foil-lined jacket.”

“Shit, shit,” Otto said. “Give me low-lux eyes on the place.”

Three cameras covering the rear perimeter of the hospital came on the monitor. One showed McGarvey and something else just behind him to the right.

Susan knocked once at the door, and Hammond let her into the suite. She was dressed in white silk trousers widely flared at the bottom and a sheer, almost transparent blouse with no bra. She was slightly tipsy, a big grin on her Botoxed lips. a slight flush on her cheeks.

It was hard to tell if she was acting or not, because she was almost always playing a role, but she smelled of alcohol.

“How’s our new man doing?” she asked. “Has he made the kill yet? The lion to the prey, the gorilla down from the trees, the hawk on the downdraft, and all that crap?”

“I haven’t heard.”

“So, Tommy boy, are your nipples hard with anticipation? Mine sure the hell are.”

The man propped up against the tree was a street bum, and he was dead. This close up, it was obvious to McGarvey that his neck had been broken.

Someone was at arm’s length coming up fast behind him.

Otto’s voice was in his earbud. “To your right, behind you.”

McGarvey was already dropping low and reaching for his pistol as he swiveled sharply into the approaching man, catching him in the right hip with his shoulder and knocking him off his feet.

A large-caliber pistol went off just over Mac’s head, the bullet plowing into the dead street bum’s back, the sound muffled by a suppressor on the end of the barrel.

The much larger man grunted something and tried to kick his way free, but Mac was on him, batting his gun hand away.

The advantage was only momentary, and before McGarvey could bring his own pistol up and fire, the shooter managed to smash the butt of his pistol into the side of Mac’s head, and he fuzzed out for just a moment.

“Son of a bitch,” the man swore, his English flat and oddly accented.

He scrambled away on his butt and once again brought his gun around and fired a shot that went wide, and before he pulled off another, Mac brought his Walther up and fired two rounds, one missing, the second hitting the man somewhere on the left side.

The man kicked out with a booted foot, catching McGarvey squarely in the face, knocking him flat on his back.

Mac recovered groggily and fired two more shots, not knowing if they had hit, but the man scrambled away, disappearing into the darkness.

Otto, Pete, and Mary watched all of it, even the low-lux cameras, losing contact with the shooter.

“Are you okay?” Pete asked. She was beside herself with fear. If the shooter came back now, Mac