The Cabal Read Free Page B

like rivets through soft steel, hitting him on his left side, then in his shoulder again and finally his neck, and suddenly he was drowning in his own blood, the world beginning to fuzz out as his BMWslammed into a small tree, tilting to the right over a drainage ditch before it came to a complete stop.
    All he could think of were Liz and their daughter, how they were going to react to his death.
    He tried to fumble for his pistol for what seemed like minutes when the face of the dark man appeared in the driver’s window and it was all Todd could do to look up into the muzzle of what he recognized was a Knight PDW, compact submachine gun, and a billion stars burst inside his head.
    Mustapha lowered the weapon, and went around to the passenger side of the BMW, opened the door, and unlatched Van Buren’s seat belt, allowing the body to tumble out of the car. It took him a precious thirty seconds to search the body, taking a wallet and the pistol, but there was no disk.
    Kangas had parked on the side of the highway blocking the view of anyone passing, and watching for the Virginia Highway Patrol. Their position here at this moment was precarious.
    Givens had given the CIA officer a disk, and Kangas had seen Van Buren put it in his coat pocket.
    The front seat was a mess of shattered glass, blood, and bone fragments, and it took a full sixty seconds before Mustapha found the disk up on the dashboard in plain sight, and the cell phone they’d seen Van Buren using wedged between the seats. He pocketed them, and tossed the disk Remington had given them inside. He wore latex gloves so he left no fingerprints.
    First making certain that no one approaching on the highway could see what he was doing, he put one round into the back of the CIA officer’s head.
    Insurance. That’s how you survived.

FOUR

    “Where’d you go, Kirk?” Kathleen McGarvey asked her husband.
    It was coming up on eight of a soft, south Florida Gulf Coast spring evening, and they were just finishing their dinner of broiled lamb chops and light salads, with a half bottle of Greek retsina wine on the pool deck of their Casey Key home. McGarvey looked up out of his thoughts and offered her a smile.
    “Sorry. Wool gathering, I guess.”
    “You’ve been doing that a lot lately,” Katy said. She was slender, with short blond hair, a bright oval face, and smiling eyes. “Something sneaking up on us again?”
    She’d hated every assignment that had not only taken McGarvey away, sometimes for weeks at a time, but that had put him in mortal danger. On more than one occasion he’d come home on a stretcher, with IV tubes dangling from his arms and an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose. But even more than his injuries, she mostly hated the fact that he killed people—bad people, but human beings nevertheless—and hated herself for at least half-understanding the necessity of what he did. America had enemies, and very often he’d been this country’s last line of defense, sometimes its
only
viable line of defense.
    Also troublesome to her was her husband’s almost preternatural awareness that something or someone was lurking just around the corner, coming their way, and he often showed this understanding by becoming moody, withdrawing into his own shell, which he realized he’d done ever since Todd’s call this afternoon.
    “I don’t think so, sweetheart,” he told her, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Todd called this afternoon with something. I told him to let Otto take a look.”
    “But?”
    McGarvey shrugged, something tickling at the back of his head. “I thought I would have heard from one of them by now.”
    “It probably wasn’t important,” Katy said, but then she frowned. “Don’t you think?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, for goodness sake, call them.”
    They had switched the house phones off, which they often did when they wanted to have dinner undisturbed. “Pour me a little more wine,” McGarvey