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

was nothing. And he felt as if he should settle down. Nothing at the airport. Nothing on the way in. Nothing here on the street.

Yet every one of his senses was jangling as if he had been connected to a sharp electrical current.

THREE

Slatkin instinctively sat back when he spotted McGarvey walking up the street as if he hadn’t a care in the world, looking neither left nor right, just straight ahead. Yet he had gotten out of the cab at the end of the street and had waited for something, or someone.

The expediter had promised an eye in the sky, which Slatkin had taken to mean a directable surveillance camera on the roof of one of the buildings in the neighborhood. In the past several days, he had spotted three possibilities, but it had been more than sufficient that his contact had had real-time intel from the beginning.

Using a second burner phone, he called the contact number, which was answered on the first ring as usual. “Yes.”

“He just showed up.”

“Has he spotted you?”

“No.”

“Wait for your shot.”

“Of course. Otherwise, the police would arrive possibly too quickly for me to get clear. I will wait as planned for him to appear at his window. The shot will be silenced, and it will be thirty minutes or more before his wife or friends become concerned.”

“There will be no second payment for failure.”

“Naturally. Have you been able to crack the encryption algorithm on his phone?”

“Unfortunately not, but we’re keeping clear for the time being.”

“Why?” Slatkin demanded. “The intelligence could be extremely helpful.”

“It would appear to be the work of the CIA,” the expediter said. “Can you do this simple job for us?”

McGarvey had reached his building, and he was unlocking the lobby door.

The possibility that the man’s telephone was equipped with an encryption program designed by the CIA came as no real surprise. At one time, he had been the director of the Company, and his best friend was the leading computer expert on the planet.

One good circumstance had come as a pleasant surprise. McGarvey and his wife had left Dulles in separate cabs. The assignment was to assassinate only McGarvey. The man’s wife was a highly trained and well-experienced intelligence operator in her own right. Taking her out at the same time as her husband would have upped the difficulty by more than double.

“Of course I can,” he said, and he hung up.

The lobby door was framed by two narrow strips of glass. McGarvey stood to one side and glanced out at the building across the street. As he had walked up the street, he had noticed something not right out of the corner of his eye. The reflections in the two windows of the third floor were not the same. One of them appeared to have a small flat spot about halfway up from the sill.

From this vantage point, however, he couldn’t make out the difference. It had been noticeable only from the oblique angle down the street.

But he’d seen it, and he had a pretty fair idea what it might be.

His phone vibrated, and he answered it. “Yes.”

“You’re in,” Otto said. “No one took a potshot at you?”

“Something’s wrong with one of the windows in the third-floor apartment across the street. Might be nothing. But it could be something I’ve seen once before. I’m going to check it out.”

“What something?” Pete asked.

“Could be a hole in the window with a piece of plastic covering it. Reflects the light differently than glass. Saw it in Mutoko when I was still in the air force. It was rumored that a Soviet military attack was going to take place during a meeting in one of the hotels. The Premier, maybe. Anyway, the shooter was stationed across the street. He cut a hole in his window and covered it with Saran Wrap so no one would notice it from the street. When he took the shot, the bullet’s trajectory hadn’t been degraded by going through glass.”

“Got it,” Otto said. “Colonel Vasili Didenko. He was there in secret to offer training to the South African Air Force. The rumor was that the shooter was a South African. Something internal.”

“Someone didn’t want Zimbabwe playing with the Russians,” Mary said.

“The hit was a success, and the shooter was never found,” Otto said. “But there’s nothing here about a hole in the window.”

“I was there with three other guys bird-dogging the meeting. It was one of those little odd bits that showed up as a one-liner in our after-action report. And it showed up again eight or nine years later in a training exercise at the Farm. It’s the only reason I remember it now.”

“So what the hell does some South African shooter want with you now?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out,” McGarvey said.

“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” Pete said. “I don’t suppose you’d stay put until I get there?”

“It’ll be over by then.”

“I thought you’d say that, too. Keep your ass down, sweetheart.”

The image of McGarvey’s head at the narrow window beside the door appeared briefly in Slatkin’s scope. His finger tightened on the trigger, but the American was gone.

After several moments, he re-aimed the rifle so that it was once again pointed at the left of the two third-story windows across the street, and he sat back.

Besides his magic, Slatkin was blessed with a much higher tolerance for conditions outside his control, which had always manifested itself in an extraordinary amount of patience. He could sit on point, waiting for a subject to appear in his sniper scope for hours without looking away.

He had no idea where that inner resolve had come from; it had been inside of him for as long as he could remember. In fact, he was often surprised when he learned that the subject he was facing wasn’t also made of the same stuff.

But the question at hand now was McGarvey, no ordinary man by any account, and a highly competent