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

up the lawn from the next-door house, the AR-15 in hand.

“Stop!” McGarvey shouted.

Taio brought the rifle around and, without missing a step, sprayed the corner of the house at the same time Mac fired three shots, all of them catching the man in the side of his torso, sending him sprawling.

He twitched twice and then lay still.

“Pete?” McGarvey called.

“I’m good. You?”

“My guy is down. What about the woman?”

“She’s down. Good to go.”

“Clear here,” McGarvey said, and keeping his pistol pointed ahead, he walked down to the assassin’s body.

PART

THREEEndgame

In the end, the only real hope was to send an overwhelming force to finish the thing.

FIFTY

Hammond was in the bathroom just finishing with a shower at eleven in the evening when Susan shouted something from the bedroom. He didn’t quite catch it, but she’d sounded mad. Another one of her histrionic outbursts.

He tossed his towel toward the hamper and reached for a bathrobe when Susan, still naked, came to the door, her iPad in hand, an odd, almost frightened look on her face. He immediately knew what had happened in Florida.

“They’re calling it a shoot-out on Casey Key,” she said.

Hammond didn’t know how he felt, except it wasn’t good. “McGarvey?”

She was looking at the iPad’s screen, the volume so low that Hammond couldn’t make out the words. She came forward and held it out for him, but he shook his head.

“Is the son of a bitch dead?”

“No, and neither is his wife. Not a scratch between them.”

Hammond turned away and looked at his image in the mirror. The Scorpions were supposed to be pros. They never missed. When Tarasov had suggested them, even he had seemed to be impressed. Their credentials were among the best in the business in the entire world. They’d never botched an assignment, nor had they ever been connected with any assassination. Their reputations and contact information were on no known database and came by word of mouth only to a very few people anywhere whose business was hiring talent such as that.

“Casualties?” he asked.

“A man and a woman.”

Hammond’s anger suddenly rose out of nowhere. “Killed, wounded, captured?” he shouted without turning away from the mirror.

“Presumed dead in a shoot-out with the former director of the CIA and his wife, also a former CIA employee,” Susan said, her voice flat.

Hammond turned to her. She was frightened, and he realized just then that he was frightened, too.

“So what are we supposed to do now?” she said. “We couldn’t run and hide if we wanted to; we’re fucking personalities, especially me.”

“We’re not going to run.”

“Then what?”

Hammond went to the wall phone and called downstairs for a bottle of Krug and two flutes to be brought up to the master bedroom balcony. When he hung up, he managed a slight smile. “Get dressed, sweetheart; we have some things to decide before I give Mikhail a call.”

Susan shook her head. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Probably, but it’s too late for either of us to back out now. The Canadian and South African snipers are dead, and now so are the Chinese couple, and I’ll recover everything I paid them, plus if we’re lucky and they had substantial accounts, I’ll raid them as well. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn a profit.”

“You are nuts.”

Hammond’s fear faded a little as he began to accept what would have to be done to finish the game. He’d known that McGarvey was not only good, the son of a bitch was lucky, which was a hell of a combination in anyone’s book, but he hadn’t realized until just this moment how good the man was.

“You might be right, but as you said, we can’t run and hide. We have to finish it once and for all.”

“Without being killed ourselves—or worse yet, get arrested and sent to prison somewhere.”

“McGarvey would have to find out who’s after him, which won’t happen, because we have Mikhail as our expediter,” Hammond said. “Now get dressed.”

He brushed past her, got his phone, and started for the balcony.

“You met with the Chinese couple aboard the yacht in Skagway,” Susan said.

“They’re dead.”

“You’d better hope so.”

The wine was cold, the night soft, and the lights from across the lake were pretty. Susan had put on a silk Versace kimono, and she sat across from Hammond. They hadn’t talked for nearly ten minutes after the sommelier had come and gone, content for the time being to make some sense of what had happened in Florida and figure out what to do next.

For Hammond’s part, he was torn as he had been from the moment he’d hatched the plan to have McGarvey killed, between wanting the thing to be done with or extending the game as long as possible. And now, it had come to the second option.

“We don’t have much of a choice at this point,” he said, breaking the silence.

“As long as the Chinese couple are dead, you can just quit.”

“I don’t want to.”

She wasn’t angry or surprised, as if she’d known what he’d say. “You want to play this stupid little boy’s game out?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

Hammond asked himself that same question from the beginning, and he never came up with an answer that would satisfy himself let alone her. “Because I can?”

“Because you’re bored with just making money.”

“That, too. And the circuit. New York, Davos, Cannes and Monaco, and Mallorca, and all the other little amusements and all the same faces.” He looked at the lights across the lake. “Don’t you get bored?”

She followed his gaze. “Almost always, if you want to know the God’s honest truth.”

“You’d rather be in front of the cameras.”

She nodded. “It’s a lot safer than shooting some poor dumb bastard in the side of the head.”

“Then make films.”

“I have a business to run.”

“Sell it to me for a buck, and let my management team take over.”

“Why the hell would I do something like that?”

“Happens all the time when people like us get married,” Hammond said. “We can coproduce all your