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

Mary turned around and smiled. “Just champers for now,” she said. “Good flight?”

“Not bad.”

“Linguine with white clam sauce, and some Dungeness crab legs. Okay?”

“Perfect,” Pete said. She sat down and poured a glass of Dom.

Otto picked up his flute without missing a beat, and they clinked glasses.

“What’s he working on?” Pete asked.

“Whenever your hubby gets a premo, Otto goes into high gear,” Mary said over her shoulder. She gave a little deprecating shrug, which had become her signature gesture whenever she didn’t have any real answer.

“Has he gotten anything?”

“Nada,” Otto said. “Lots of crap going down all over the place, as usual, but nothing that would directly affect Mac.”

It was good news. “Is he at the apartment?”

“He had the cab drop him off at the end of the street.”

Pete knew exactly what he was thinking. It was one of the lessons the recruits at the Farm were given. “It’s almost always better to be safe than sorry.”

Almost always one of the trainees at the CIA’s boot camp made some quip to the effect that they were in the wrong business to think about staying safe. And no one offered an argument.

Slatkin’s hobby when he had been a kid in Jo’burg was magic. He’d begun when he was six by putting on shows for his parents, grandmother, and two cousins, who all lived in the one-bedroom shack of a house just down from the prison complex on Constitution Hill.

Later, when he’d perfected some of his sleight of hand illusions, he put on shows during assemblies at school. And he’d become quite good. Plus, the talent had stuck with him.

Let them see the truth but direct their attention to something else.

He checked the sight picture through the assault rifle scope again; it was never wrong to recheck everything as often as possible. Perfection was the difference between success and failure. The target reticle was centered on the window across the street at about the height of a man’s chest.

McGarvey would approach his apartment building with caution because something had evidently spooked him. Or he would turn away and possibly alert the authorities. But alert them to what?

Slatkin got up and went to his attaché case lying on the table in front of the couch and took out a roll of plastic tape, three inches wide, along with a glass cutter and suction cup on a short handle.

These he took back to the window, where he laid the tape on the sill and, first checking to make sure that no one was out on the street, attached the suction cup to the window at the spot directly in line with the muzzle of the M16 and cut out a piece of glass two inches tall and as wide.

Quickly laying the glass aside, he pulled off a piece of clear tape and covered the opening.

From outside, especially at the distance from the street and from the front entrance to McGarvey’s building, the plastic covering the hole in the window would be all but invisible. You looked up and saw a window, nothing more.

Settling down in the chair, he put his eye to the scope. He could not detect the plastic tape. But now, the bullet would not have to pass through glass, which could possibly—though not likely—deflect its path, making it necessary to fire a second shot.

A bit of sleight of hand to nudge up the accuracy.

Slatkin had considered all the options almost from the beginning of the assignment and especially when he had delved into McGarvey’s background.

McGarvey’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. It was Otto.

“Are you still in place?”

“There’s nothing here. I’m getting set to go in. Has Pete showed up?”

“Yeah. You want to talk to her? She’s sitting right next to me.”

“No.”

“My darlings are showing nothing. No tints.”

Otto’s programs, which displayed results on whatever monitor he was using, would change color depending on immediate threats. Lavender was the worst. No color meant nothing imminent was about to come down around them.

“Okay.”

“Kirk,” Pete broke in. “Make a one-eighty and take a cab back here. I’ll call Housekeeping to make a sweep of the neighborhood.”

Housekeeping was the general term for the CIA’s off-campus security teams. Sometimes they were sent out to sanitize a shot-up or damaged scene of a battle, something at which they were especially good. At other times, they would consist of a team of three or four operators, who would go into a locale to check for threats. They might come as plumbers or air-conditioning specialists, or sometimes as deliverymen—FedEx, USPS, a florist.

The point of the teams was not only to ensure the safety of a principal operator if need be but to keep an incident or possible incident out of the hands of local law enforcement.

“Not yet,” Mac said. “I’m going to drop my bag off and get a few things at the apartment and I’ll come over. I thought you and Mary were working on the wedding details.”

“They have it covered.”

“Anyway, Otto’s cooperating for a change,” Mary said. “We’re doing it here tomorrow. Our chaplain is coming over at nine.”

“Audie?”

“We sent her down to the Farm for a day or two,” Mary said.

The Farm was the CIA training facility outside of Williamsburg, where they sent her if trouble was brewing.

“So grab your things and get over here. I bought four bottles of champers, and we need some help dealing with it.”

“And watch your ass,” Pete added.

McGarvey walked back up to where Dumbarton dead-ended just past Twenty-Seventh Street NW, where he waited for a light gray Caddy SUV just passing his apartment to turn right, and then he went across.

It was a weekday, so most people who lived here were at work, and the street was almost empty of parked cars. By long-ingrained habit, he scanned the cars that were at the curbs out of the corner of his eye, looking for something, anything that seemed out of the ordinary—the rooftops and windows of all the buildings, especially those across the street from his apartment.

But there