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

the past and the future into the here and now, willing to hold his position for however long it took.

McGarvey and his wife were coming, and he would kill them both.

McGarvey held up short on the second stair just below the third-floor landing and cocked his ear for a long moment to listen to the sounds of the building.

The lobby door had been opened and then immediately closed. He’d had heard the street noises, a horn somewhere off in the near distance, and maybe the slight breeze ruffling the trees in front.

He waited for one of the downstairs apartment doors to open, but someone started up the stairs, their footfalls very light as if they were trying for stealth.

The last thing he wanted was to involve an innocent civilian in a shoot-out, but he was caught between whoever was coming up the stairs and a possible shooter just down the hall on this floor.

He also didn’t want to engage a shooter in a gun battle in which he didn’t have the clear advantage. He had no real fear for himself, but if he were the target for an assassination, he wanted to take the hit man alive—wounded most likely, but still living—so that he could find out who the bastard was. Who had sent him.

His best guess right now would be the Russians for a couple of ops he’d done recently involving their people.

Whoever was coming up the stairs stopped on the second-floor landing, but then continued up.

Mac started down, keeping his pistol out of sight at his side.

The person below stopped.

Mac took one step more, and then he smelled a perfume that he recognized. Joy by Jean Patou. He had bought it for Pete when they were in Paris a couple of years ago just before they got married. It had become her favorite.

At the turn, he came face-to-face with Pete, who’d raised her pistol, and he put a finger to his lips.

He waited for a couple of beats for her to calm down, and then he went down the last steps to her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun.”

It was a typical Pete explanation, but it was too late now to send her away. “The front apartment, facing ours. Could be more than one, but I doubt it.”

“What’s the plan?”

“You’re going to act as backstop. Anyone gets past me, take them down.”

She started to object, but he held her off.

“I have no real idea who wants me or why, so I want to take whoever it is alive if possible.”

“Not at the expense of your life, goddamnit.”

Slatkin expected that it was the woman from outside—McGarvey’s wife—who was on the stairs. He opened the door a crack. He thought he could hear her voice. It was possible that she was talking on the phone, because there was nothing to indicate that McGarvey himself knew something was wrong.

Evidently, his contact had been blown, which was why the man had not answered the last call. It could possibly mean that the cops were on the way here, or worse yet, a Housekeeping squad from Langley could be on the way. But if he had to guess, he suspected that McGarvey himself was still across the street in his apartment.

Time to find out.

He eased the door open a little farther and slipped out into the corridor in sock feet, leading with the silenced M16 on full automatic.

FIVE

Otto had ignored the glass of champagne at his side for the past fifteen minutes, trying with no real results to come up with some new angles for his darlings to pursue. On the assumption that the shooter across from Mac’s apartment was the South African who had, so far as they knew, used the trick of cutting a hole in a window and covering it with plastic, he’d gone looking for any other bits and pieces that would identify the man. That, of course, was assuming a shooter was in the apartment.

So far, his programs had come up with nearly half a dozen possibilities, three of them from the Special Forces Brigade, one of the others a cop, and the fifth a paratrooper who had been discharged for being intoxicated while on duty. In fact, he had been drunk doing a dangerous HALO—high altitude, low opening—parachute jump.

The cop was dead, the paratrooper was serving time in prison for statutory rape, but the three shooters from the Recces were still at large. The interesting part was that the three specialists were not wanted for any crime, though they were suspected of a number of assassinations—but none of them on South African soil. They were clean, because they were professionals.

Using those last-known identities, plus a broad list of assassinations anywhere in the world other than South Africa, he went looking at offshore bank accounts in Europe and the Caribbean, matching large deposits that bracketed dates before and after each hit. He couldn’t come up with names, only the deposits.

One had come three weeks before the hit on the Russian in Zimbabwe, and the second half—if that’s what it was—twenty-four hours after the Russian had been taken out.

Using the same bank account in Guernsey, he looked for other before-and-after payments that matched other assassinations. He came up with five that matched, plus one for $250,000 that had been made three weeks ago.

The date matched no assassination, because the hit had not been made yet. And Otto was convinced that the total of a half million was to take Mac down.

All he lacked now was the name of the South African shooter and from where the payment had originated.

Slatkin flattened himself against the wall a few feet from the stairs and held his breath to listen for voices or any other sounds from below. But the building was deathly still.

He held the M16 loosely in both hands, the muzzle of the suppressor pointed up toward the ceiling. Breathing deeply to calm himself, he was