Kirk Cullough McGarvey, Mac to his friends, ran along the river in Georgetown’s Rock Creek Park just at sunrise. He was a man of about fifty, in superb physical condition from years of heavy workouts, long swims, weight training, and fencing at épée with the Annapolis navy team when he was in town. A little under six feet, a little under two hundred pounds, he could still move as gracefully as a ballet dancer if the need arose. Which it often had during a long career with the CIA.
A few other joggers, some walkers, and other folks on bicycles used the park just about every decent morning, and several of them recognizing McGarvey waved or simply nodded, but he was otherwise occupied, thinking about his wife, Katy, and their daughter, Liz, who had been brutally murdered just a couple of years ago.
He thought about them every day. But lately he was sometimes having trouble seeing Katy’s face, though her scent was still strong in his mind. And every day, just like this morning, he wanted to lash out, hit back at all the darkness in the world that thought taking lives was the right thing to do.
He’d actually met bin Laden a number of years ago in a cave in Afghanistan, and the man had looked him in the eye and with a straight face lectured that no one was innocent. Infidels—men, women, or children, it made no difference—were all to come to Islam, the one true faith, accept Mohammed into their souls or die.
Mac had begun years ago as a field officer for the CIA and had risen to special black operations, which was the forerunner of the company’s elite Special Activities Division. He’d worked for a short time as deputy director of operations and had even briefly served as the agency’s director.
But neither desk job had suited his temperament. He hated bullies; it was as simple as that. In the field he could even the odds, take down the bad guys who preyed on the innocents. Unlike bin Laden he firmly believed that just about everyone who went about their business in a peaceful way, respecting the rights of others, was an innocent.
His father had instilled only one hard and fast rule in Mac as a child, and that was no hitting. Yet despite that golden rule his father had worked on nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos and Mac had killed bad people.
The creek and the path crossed under the P Street NW bridge and McGarvey pushed himself. Katy once asked if by running or swimming to just this side of total exhaustion he wasn’t trying to atone for what he thought were his sins, namely, assassinating people?
He’d had no answer for her then, nor did he think he would have one if she were alive to ask him now.
A hundred yards later, just at the edge of the Oak Hill Cemetery, Pete Boylan, who’d been doing stretches against a park bench, turned and intercepted him. She wore spandex tights and a white T-shirt that was soaked with sweat, and she looked really good.
“Want some company?” she asked.
“If you can keep up.”
She laughed, the sound husky, all the way from deep inside, and warm. “If it gets too tough, I’ll just knock you down and sit on you.”
They ran for a half a mile or so in silence all the way up to Massachusetts Avenue, traffic already building, where they stopped and did more stretches. Mac felt good, better than he had for the past several months, and the heat and female sweat smells coming off Pete’s body reminded him of a lot of things out of his past.
“You didn’t come down here just to get your exercise,” he said.
“I work out at the gym on campus and sometimes down at the Farm. I’m here because I need your help.”
It’s about what he’d figured, not only by her unexpected presence but by the expression on her face; she seemed puzzled and a little pissed off. “Where’d you park?”
“Just off M Street.” It was a little over a mile back the way they had come. “I brought someone with me who I think you might want to talk to.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Otto’s met him. He was involved yesterday with a shooting at the UDT/SEAL museum in Florida.”
“I suppose that you and Otto took whatever it was up to Marty and he ordered you to back off.”
“Yeah.”
“You’d better explain,” Mac said, and they started back at a slow jog as she went over everything she’d learned from Weisse and what Otto had come up with. He found that he almost had to agree with Bambridge.
No one in the administration or inside the U.S. intelligence community trusted Pakistan, and especially not the ISI, its secret intelligence service, any further than they could throw the Washington Monument, but the Pakistanis did provide a launching point for U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaeda leaders. Government spokesmen in Islamabad complained loudly about the U.S. military’s violation of their borders, and especially their airspace, but that was all about keeping their public satisfied. In the meantime the United States continued to subsidize their military—in a delicate balancing act with India—for the right to continue operations.
He told Pete as much.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “But this is different. I think that someone in the ISI—someone high on the food chain—is funneling money to the Schlueter woman to field assassins to kill the key SEAL Team Six guys who took out bin Laden.”
“Why?” Mac asked, though he knew the answer.
“Because we embarrassed the hell out of them.”
“What would killing the shooters—or maybe all twenty-four of them who went on the raid—accomplish? Washington would sure as hell sit up and take notice. So would the Pentagon, so would Walt Page, so would the FBI, so would the State Department. Think of it: killing all those guys—even if it could be done, because they’re damned good at close order battle—would cause a firestorm to fall on Islamabad. Or at least on the ISI.”
“Not if it were an arms-length operation. It would give the government plausible deniability. Could be someone they intend to throw under the bus if something goes wrong.”
“They’d have more ways to lose than gain,” Mac said. He was playing devil’s advocate and they both knew it. But the first rule of operational planning was to poke holes in every detail and keep filling them until they all disappeared. And even then it was the unknown that always seemed to jump up and bite you in the ass—like the crash of the SEAL’s Chalk One helicopter.
“They want to save face,” Pete said. “They want retribution.”
* * *
Wolf was sitting at a picnic table smoking a cigarette. When Mac and Pete showed up he got to his feet and tossed the cigarette into the creek. Pete introduced them, and after they shook hands they sat down.
“I understand that you’ve been ordered home,” Mac said.
“I’m supposed to be on the way to Reagan.”
“I’m driving him over,” Pete said. “But we don’t have a lot of time.”
“We can dig out what we need to know about the Black October Revolution, and Pete tells me that Otto’s already started a file on the Schlueter woman, but it’s not completely clear to me why you followed the shooter out of Germany.”
“We think that Schlueter has hired a team of five men and one woman—most of them ex–special services—to work as assassins for hire.”
“KSK,” Mac said. They had a good reputation.
Wolf nodded. “We think we can connect the team to at least four killings, all of them off German soil. One of them in Atlanta. Plus the SEAL in Florida, who I was assigned to follow, his wife and the docents.”
“Do you have minders on the others as well?”
“We didn’t think that it was necessary. But this hit came as a total surprise to us. To this point the team has targeted only high-profile people. Barnes hardly fit that description. And his wife definitely did not.”
“She was collateral damage, as were the docents in the museum,” Mac said. “Pete thinks the group might have a contract from the ISI to take out the SEAL Team Six guys who brought bin Laden down.”
“That’s what she and Otto came up with, but I don’t know if I can sell it to my colonel. We have our own operations in Pakistan. Certainly much more limited than yours, of course, but Berlin would be put in the same position as your government if we actively went after them.”
“It’s either that or they take out those guys one by one,” Pete said. “The least we can do is warn them.”
“I can just hear what the navy would say, and what the White House would do,” Mac said.
“We can’t turn our backs on this thing,” Pete said.
“Of course not. One of Schlueter’s people is dead. Can we get the files on anyone else associated with her? Without making noise?”
Wolf nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “But maybe you should come to Berlin to speak with the director.”
Mac glanced at Pete, who shrugged. “Marty has closed us down, so we’re not going to get any help from the agency. Not unless we come up with something concrete.”
“Will your colonel agree to talk to me?”
“As long as it’s not official,” Wolf said. “I can arrange the meeting.”