The Cabal Read Free Page A

for the Freedom of Information Act.
    In any event, McCann’s death was still a part of the ongoing investigation that his father-in-law had gotten involved with last year. Already plenty of people had died because of it, and before it was overmore would probably go down. If anything of what Givens had told him was true, which Todd was having a hard time believing, then shit would truly hit the fan big time.
    They had never figured out what McCann had been up to or who had been directing him, and now this. Todd tossed the disk on the passenger seat and concentrated on his driving.
    Forty minutes later his cell phone rang. It was his father-in-law.
    “Hi, Todd, what’s up?” Kirk McGarvey asked. “Is Liz with you?”
    “Nope, she was busy when I left, and I didn’t have time to mention I was coming up to Washington. This has something to do with McCann.”
    McGarvey hesitated for a beat, and Todd could see him standing, probably in the kitchen of the Casey Key house on Florida’s Gulf Coast south of Sarasota, looking down at the IntraCoastal Waterway.
    “Okay, you have my interest.”
    “Does the name Josh Givens ring any bells?”
    “Vaguely. He’s a reporter with the
Post
?”
    “An investigative reporter, and not too bad,” Todd said. “He and I went to Maryland together, and were pals for a while. He called this morning and asked me to have lunch, he had something important for me.”
    “He mentioned Howard by name?”
    “He did. Said Howard had been involved with a lobbyist group called the Friday Club.”
    “Robert Foster.”
    “The same,” Todd said. “Josh was talking all sorts of shit about a shadow government, and a lot of disconnected stuff that was all over the place. Sounded crazy.”
    “Did you believe him?”
    “I don’t know. But I’m sure that he believed what he was telling me, and that he was afraid. He gave me a disk, which he said had everything on it.”
    McGarvey hesitated for a moment. “Give Otto a call, see what he thinks.” Otto Rencke was the CIA’s director of special operations and the resident computer genius. He was a friend of the family and the nearest thing to a son for McGarvey and an uncle for Todd and Liz.
    The Interstate cut through rolling hills, some of them heavily wooded, Fredericksburg behind him to the north and Fort A. P. Hill Military Reservation, where military units were given advanced field training, was off to the east. He and Liz had both spent six weeks there in search-and-evade training with the Green Berets.
    “I’ll call him when I get back to the Farm.”
    “Call him now,” McGarvey said.
    That got Todd’s attention. “Do you think it’s that important?”
    “If it involved Howard, then yes, it could be.”
    “I’ll call him right away,” Todd said, an oddly disquieted feeling rising in his gut.
    He broke the connection with his father-in-law and glanced over his left shoulder as a dark blue Toyota SUV pulled up beside him. The windows were so deeply tinted he couldn’t make out who was inside, and the SUV just hung there.
    “Shit,” Todd muttered, his internal alarms ringing all over the place.
    The Toyota’s passenger-side window powered down and Todd only had a split second to see that a dark-skinned man was aiming what looked like a small automatic weapon of some kind.
    Todd glanced in his rearview mirror to make sure no one was on his bumper and jammed on the brakes to get him back to the SUV’s rear quarter where a nudge from his left bumper would send the bigger vehicle into a spin. But the other driver anticipated the move and also jammed on his brakes.
    Todd yanked the wheel hard to the right sending his car toward the ditch and the woods off the road, when something very hard slammed into his shoulder and he was thrown sideways against the seat-belt restraint, losing control of the car.
    He frantically reached for the pistol holstered high on his right hip, but several rounds slammed through the sheet metal of the door