McGarvey left Starrs at his post at the rear entrance to the hospital and made the rounds of the entire building, starting downstairs and working his way up to the third floor and then the roof.
Besides the security detail, plus the doctor and the nurses, only two intelligence officers were in adjoining rooms on the second floor. One of them had returned from an op in Afghanistan with severe burns to his legs and back after a mortar round had gone off five feet from where he stood. By all accounts, he was a very lucky man.
The other patient was Dottie Valdez, who’d been the assistant chief of the CIA’s station in Havana, who’d been arrested on her way home and charged with prostitution. In jail, she’d been beaten and gang-raped over a thirty-six-hour period until she’d been dumped back on the streets.
She’d somehow managed to make it back to the embassy where she’d been hustled under cover to the airport for a diplomatic transport back to the States.
Franklin said that physically she would recover fully, but it was her mental state that he was not so sure about. “The bastards had at her.”
The only piece of luck—if it could have been called that—was that the cops who arrested her thought she was an American tourist. They had no idea she was CIA or that she worked out of the U.S. embassy. If they had, it would have turned into a major diplomatic incident.
Mac had looked in on her, but she’d been sound asleep, and he’d backed away and continued with his rounds.
Standing now on the roof, dressed in jeans and a dark pullover, his pistol in a quick-draw holster at his back, he kept far enough back from the edge that he was in the shadows and could not be spotted from the street or by anyone in the buildings opposite.
A taxi cruised past and turned left down toward Canal Road NW, a car horn honked in the direction of the university, and, very far in the distance toward the city, one or two fire engine sirens drifted across on a momentary breeze.
Ordinary night city sounds, the same as he’d heard dozens of times on operations in many places over the years. Lonely sounds against the backdrop of imminent danger.
Most often, he had been the hunter, and he knew how it felt. Now, however, he was the prey, and he didn’t know who was hunting him or why, though if he was wrong about someone in the White House or Pentagon, it could have been the intel services of more than a dozen countries who would consider it a job well done if he were to be eliminated.
And yet that made no real sense to him, because gunning down a former director of the CIA was filled with some serious political blowback.
He turned and silently made his way to the rear of the building, again standing well enough back from the edge that he couldn’t be spotted from below.
Five cars were parked next to the maintenance building that, among other things, housed the hospital’s emergency generator. Beyond the garage was a tall iron fence with electrified spikes placed almost invisibly at the top. Beyond the fence was a dense stand of trees.
The hospital grounds had been breached only once a number of years ago, the killer approaching the fence through the woods and making it across and into the building. Since then, infrared and motion detectors had been installed, so that anything man-size coming within ten meters of the fence would set off an alarm, and the building would go into lockdown, FBI SWAT teams immediately dispatched.
Mac phoned Otto. “Anything on your board?”
“One figure, under what looks like cardboard about twenty-five mikes out, ten degrees left. He showed up about two hours ago, hasn’t moved since. Lou’s keeping an eye on him.”
“Homeless?”
“Street’s full of them,” Otto said. “Even in Georgetown. And someone has apparently been camping here before.”
“Too obvious,” Mac wondered aloud.
“I can have the cops check it out.”
“If he’s after me and a cop shows up, it could go bad. I’ll check it out myself.”
“Could be just what he wants. Get you out of the castle keep into the open.”
“Let’s hope it’s that easy,” McGarvey said.
From his position behind the bole of a large oak, Hicks had a good sight line on the street bum passed out under the cardboard refrigerator box about thirty meters away.
Finding the stupid bastard on the street was a piece of luck, but if not that bit of good fortune, he would have found something else to use as cover. Disappear. Blend in. Improvise. Make use of whatever natural cover is available.
The bum had already been half-drunk, and when Hicks had given him a quart of Jack, the guy had been more than happy to roost for the night.
“Got a spot I use now and again,” the guy said. “In the woods.” He looked sixty but was probably in his thirties—long, scraggly white hair, a helter-skelter beard and filthy khakis, a moth-eaten sweater, and combat boots without laces. “Kinda private like.”
Hicks had spotted the guy coming from there. “Are you ex-military?”
“Army Rangers. Hooah.”
Hicks didn’t believe the bum, but it didn’t matter. He gave him a pack of Marlboros and twenty dollars. “Sweet dreams. Hooah.”
McGarvey was inside the hospital, that much he was sure of. Just as he thought it likely that the man was there because he suspected that someone would be coming after him—though how the former DCI could know or suppose such a thing was a mystery.
The logic was thin. But it was what was at hand for the moment.
“If the easy way presents itself, check first to make sure that you’re not walking into a trap, but then take advantage,” one of the old hands had told the class. “You might not get another chance.”
McGarvey left the hospital grounds by the front gate and hurried around the block past the Georgetown Recreation Center, traffic very light, nearly nonexistent at this hour. Which was just as good. If there was going to be a gun battle, he didn’t want any civilians to get into the line of fire.
If someone stumbled into the cross fire, he would have to back off. The problem would be distinguishing between an innocent bystander and an active shooter.
A low wrought iron fence separated the sidewalk from the wooded swatch. Pulling his gun, Mac eased over the fence and merged into the woods. Within ten feet, he was out of sight from anyone passing on the street.
He pulled up short and cocked an ear to listen.
Straight ahead, he could just make out bits of the hospital’s roofline, but from here, the building looked deserted, or nearly so. Only one dim light shone from an upstairs corner window, which was a supply room. Someone must have left the door open, and the light he was seeing was from the corridor.
Possibly meant as a distraction.
The cardboard box camp was off to the right between here and the hospital’s fence line. Mac couldn’t see much of anything, but there was no need for it. The bum, or others, had apparently used the place before, because a narrow path had been worn in the grass.
Mac stepped to the left of the track and started through the woods, moving tree to tree, his pistol pointed down and to the right, away from his leg.
“Mac, hold up,” Otto’s voice came softly in his earbud.
About fifteen yards out, a man, with his back to McGarvey, leaned up against a tree.
“Looks like someone behind a tree,” Otto said.
“I see him,” McGarvey replied softly.