The Expediter (40 page)

“And you found some matches,” McGarvey said.

“Bingo, but just one. Moscow, Beijing, Kabul, Seoul, and Tokyo. He was at all those places the same time as Boyko.”

“Don’t tell me that it’s Howard?”

“Correcto mundo,” Rencke said. “Howard McCann, our own Deputy Director of Operations. How about them apples? But how did you know?”

“Just a guess, but I knew he’d been stationed in Kabul and Beijing, because he never stopped talking about it, and his product was always consistently good—not great, but good. But what abut the money? He doesn’t have it, and you said it wasn’t showing up in the black budgets.”

“Unknown,” Rencke admitted. “But if he comes out here tonight like you suspect he will we can ask him. Wherever it’s coming from and however it’s being transferred to Boyko’s accounts, it’s a slick operation because I haven’t found even a tickle yet.”

“Howard has to be working for somebody,” McGarvey said. “He’s not dealing on his own.”

“Not unless he’s a raving lunatic. I mean who the hell would try to start a nuclear war?”

Todd came back in a hurry. “I saw headlights coming from the highway,” he said.

McGarvey switched on the hall light. “It’ll be McCann,” he said. “Turn on the light over the wing back chairs in the study and get into the dark corner by the desk. And you’d better open the French doors in case this thing goes down while he’s here and we need to make some room for ourselves in a hurry. He’ll be armed, he’s come out here to kill me, but he probably doesn’t know that Turov or his people will be coming our way too.”

“Could get real interesting around here,” Todd said.

“That it could,” McGarvey agreed.

“Do you want to call for backup once he gets here?”

“I want him to open up first.”

Todd went back to the study that faced the rear of the house and
switched on the light. It would put them at the disadvantage if the attack were to start now, but McGarvey wanted to give McCann a false sense of security at first.

“Liz, we’ve got company coming from the highway,” he called up to his daughter.

“I’ll keep the back covered,” she responded.

Kim stood in the shadows behind them. “Give me a weapon.”

“Not yet,” McGarvey told her.

“He’s come here to kill me too.”

“I want you upstairs with Otto for now.”

“Goddamnit, I want a gun!”

“If something develops I’ll think about it,” McGarvey said, and he motioned for Rencke to take her upstairs. “Keep your head down, and try to keep her quiet.”

“What if she doesn’t cooperate?”

“Do you have a gun?”

“Yup.”

“Shoot her.”

As soon as Rencke and Kim were upstairs, McGarvey went into the dark living room and watched from one of the windows as headlights flashed along the driveway in the woods beyond the clearing. If it was McCann he was driving slowly, probably nervous about what he’d come out here to do.

Unlike Otto he was surprised that the traitor was the DDO. He’d never particularly liked the man. McGarvey had always thought McCann
was an officious little bureaucrat with a tight rein over the National Clandestine Service, which was the official name for Operations, but he’d never thought that the bastard had the imagination or the guts to play the role of a double.

There’d been others who’d seemed equally bland, unimaginative, and ordinary until after they’d been outed; the FBI’s John Hanssen a few years ago, a couple of years before that their own Aldrich Ames, and earlier John Trotter. And when the last day finally came everyone was surprised. Everyone had the same question: Why?

The CIA had an acronym for the reasons most intelligence officers turned against their own countries. It was MICE, which stood for money, ideology, conscience, and ego. Hanssen had played the game because his ego led him to believe that he was better than everyone else. Ames had done it for the money, nearly five million dollars from the KGB. And back in the fifties, the British spy Kim Philby had spied for the Russians because he truly believed that the Soviet system was better than Western democracies. He had been an ideologue. Others had become traitors, usually when their nations were at war, because some warped sense of conscience affected their understanding of what was morally right or wrong.

A dark Lexus SUV came into the clearing and made its way to the house, pulling up where Rencke had parked, and the headlights went out. McGarvey couldn’t make out the driver until he opened the door and the dome light came on. It was McCann, and now there were almost no doubts left except where the DDO was getting his money, and what the long-range agenda was.

McCann got out of the car and as he came around front he absently patted his right coat pocket. He was wearing a lightweight pin-striped suit and despite the warm weather a vest, and his thinning light hair was mussed as if he had driven out from the city with the windows down.

He stopped and looked up at the mostly dark windows, then made his way up to the porch and hesitated a moment longer before he rang the doorbell.

McGarvey waited long enough for McCann to ring the bell again before he went out into the hall and opened the door.

“What the hell are you doing out here, Howard?” McGarvey demanded. He looked beyond McCann. “Are you alone?”

McCann was as indignant as he usually was. “I’m alone, and I’m here because I heard you’d brought one of the Pyongyang shooters with you. Is it true?”

“Yes, she’s here, but you’d better come in and get out of sight.”

“Are you expecting trouble?” McCann asked, coming into the stair hall.

“Yes,” McGarvey said, closing and locking the door. “I’m using the girl as bait.”

“Who do you expect is coming after her?”

“The man who hired her. Ex-KGB living in Tokyo under the name Alexandar Turov. Otto’s working on finding out who he really is, might be a guy named Boyko but we’re not sure yet.”

McCann was obviously shook. “Well, for heaven’s sake, you should have let me in on your secret, we could have sent some muscle out here to help out. Haven’t you even told your daughter and her husband? I’m sure they would have dropped everything to come out. In fact we should call them right now.” McCann reached for his right pocket, but McGarvey held him off.

“I don’t want my family involved. Not until we get through this.”

McCann looked up toward the head of the stairs. “She up there?”

McGarvey nodded. “Keeping watch. It was she who spotted your car coming up from the highway and I thought it might be starting already. But I don’t think it’ll happen until just before dawn.”

“You’re probably right,” McCann agreed. “Which gives us time to get both of you out of here and to someplace safe.” He stopped, an odd expression coming into his eyes as something else occurred to him. “What makes you believe this Russian knows you’re out here?”

“I think there’s a better than even chance he has a contact inside the Company. Someone with access to either the DO or housekeeping.”

The same odd look came into McCann’s eyes as if he were trying to
figure the odds of pulling out his pistol and having a shoot-out here and now in the stair hall. “I think that’s far-fetched. But do you have any idea who it might be?”

“A couple of possibilities,” McGarvey said. “I have something back in the study I want to show you.” He stepped aside to let McCann go first, which the DDO did reluctantly.

When they reached the study he went to the desk, his back to McCann.

“It’s just here,” he said.

“Take your hand out of your pocket, Mr. McCann,” Todd said. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to.”

McGarvey turned around. McCann had reached into his pocket for a pistol and he stood perfectly still, the color gone from his face.

“Is that why you came out here tonight, Howard?” McGarvey asked. “To kill me?” He walked over to McCann and took the Russian-made 5.45 mm PSM pistol out of the man’s pocket. It was the sort of pistol that Kim would have used. “A woman’s gun, but pretty effective at close range. Make it look as if the girl shot me. You’d probably use my gun to shoot her. Neat and tidy.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McCann blustered.

“Did Boyko have something on you from your days when you two were stationed in the same cities? Is that it, Howard?”

McCann held his silence.

“If it wasn’t blackmail, what then?” McGarvey pressed, his tone reasonable. “Not money, you’re not a rich man. So tell us why.”

At the edge of the woods, one hundred meters west of the house, Minoru held up a hand for Lavrov to stop. They were dressed in black slacks and pullovers. A couple of lights were on downstairs, one in the front and the other in the back. A dark SUV was parked in front.

“They’ve got company,” Lavrov said.

“It’s Daniel, the colonel’s contact inside the CIA,” Minoru told him.

He’d sent Lavrov’s four operators up the dirt track to a point where they could come down the hill and approach the house from the rear. McGarvey would be expecting an attack sometime later tonight or early morning and might have set the woman to watch the back. He wanted to be in place before the shooting began.

“How do you want to play this?”

Minoru pointed to the lights from the French doors at the side of the house near the back. They could see shadows moving through the curtains. “I want to take a look. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Daniel will do the job for us.”

Lavrov grinned.

“Find out if your people are in place yet.”

Lavrov spoke into his lapel mike. “Oleg, have you reached the clearing yet?”

“
Nyet
, but we’re close.”

Minoru heard the transmission in his own headset, but he preferred that Lavrov give them the orders. They had worked with him before and they trusted his judgment. “As soon as they’re in position tell them to hold up until you give them the word to go in.”

Lavrov relayed the message.

“Will do.”

Minoru waited for a moment, blackened his face with camouflage salve, then took his pistol out of his pocket. “No one leaves here alive tonight.”

“Except us,” Lavrov said, blackening his face and taking out his gun.

“That’s right, so take care where you shoot.”

“That’s goes for you as well. I want to live not only to spend my money, but to earn more from Alexandar. I’ll do whatever it takes to become a multimillionaire.”

“You’ll be one after we’re done here,” Minoru promised, and they moved out of the woods and trotted toward the house.

The evening was very nearly silent, only the far-off screech of some night hunting bird, and their own soft footfalls on the grass to disturb the peace for the moment. But that would soon change, and Minoru found that he was looking forward to the coming action. He had always been a man of supreme patience. Like Turov he practiced Bushido, which taught endurance of mind and body. But when the time came to kill, the blood in his veins sang and he was truly alive.

Following the colonel’s briefing he expected that Kirk McGarvey was a man of a similar stripe, and that fact would make tonight’s work all the more enjoyable.

They made their way past the back of the empty horse barn, and had started the last forty meters to the house when Oleg’s voice came over the headset.

“We’re above the house just now.”

“Hold up there,” Lavrov ordered.

“Is something wrong?”

“
Nyet.
We’re checking something out on the west side of the house. I’ll tell you when you can come in.”

“If they’ve posted a lookout in one of the upstairs rooms we’ll be spotted the instant we move out into the open, unless you’ve started your diversion.”

Lavrov glanced at Minoru who nodded.

“That’s exactly what we’re up to. Standby.”

“Roger.”

A few meters from the house, Minoru could see that the French doors were slightly ajar, the billowy curtains moving in the slight breeze, and he heard voices, one of them a man’s raised in anger.

He motioned for Lavrov to go around to the front of the house to cover the SUV and the main entrance while he cautiously approached the French doors. Before he opened fire he wanted to know who was inside and what they were talking about.