Gambit by David Hagberg (manga ereader .txt) 📗

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FOR LORREL, AS ALWAYS

AND FOR MY BEST FRIENDS IN ALL THE WORLD: MY LONGTIME PUBLISHER, TOM DOHERTY, AND HIS WIFE, TANYA. MY EDITOR, BOB GLEASON, AND MY AGENT, HIS WIFE, SUSAN GLEASON.

I LOVE YOU ALL!

My apologies to the city of Georgetown.

I switched a few details to suit the flow of my tale.

No disrespect was intended.

GAMBIT: A maneuver in which a player seeks to gain an advantage by sacrificing one or more pieces.

PART

ONEOpening Moves

Can one man, no matter how good,

stand up to unlimited resources

against him?

ONE

Leonard Slatkin had never worked through an expediter in his three years in the business, nor had he ever been paid $500,000 for the assassination of a single individual.

Although the intelligence he’d been given was spot-on, it had taken him nearly two weeks to arrange for the second-floor apartment in Georgetown, and another ten days of nearly around-the-clock surveillance of the windows in the third-floor apartment slightly kitty-corner across the street and the front door to the brownstone before he was sure that he would have a clear shot.

He came and went at normal times, in a business suit, an attaché case in hand, walking to the end of the block, and taking a bus into Washington, where he spent most of his days in Union Station working on his iPhone to gather as much information on his subject as he could. He was of medium height and build, with a totally unremarkable face and outward attitude.

By the second day, he had begun to wonder if a half a million was too small a sum. Too little by a very substantial margin. But he had no idea of the name of his primary employer, nor did he have access to the expediter. He was on his own.

Sitting in the dark now at the window in his apartment, the ordinary .223-caliber M16 military assault rifle resting on a tripod well enough inside the living room to be invisible to anyone outside, he waited patiently, just as he had the past three days since his preparations had been completed for Kirk McGarvey to return from Florida at the start of spring break and show himself at his window, five hundred feet away as the bullet flies.

The late afternoon was as bittersweet for Kirk McGarvey as it was for his wife, Pete. They hadn’t talked much on the flight to Dulles from Sarasota, where he taught Voltaire at New College for one dollar per year. His passion had always been philosophy, but his life had been the CIA since he’d been in his midtwenties right out of the air force.

“Hard to believe,” Pete said as they headed toward the ground transportation exit.

She was much shorter that McGarvey’s six feet, and slightly built next to him. But she was voluptuous with a movie star’s physique, and pretty oval face, with wide eyes and a mouth like Julia Roberts’s—a little too large—but her ready smile making her perfect.

“That Otto’s happy?” McGarvey asked.

“That Louise is gone.”

It was all about history. After the air force when McGarvey had worked as an investigator for the OSI, he had been recruited by the CIA, where, after an extensive series of psychological examinations, he had been placed in the Company’s black ops division—a unit that never existed on paper.

And he was good, a natural-born killer—an operator, in the parlance. After a couple of field runs, mostly as a bagman bringing operational funds into a badland, he’d been assigned his first kill in Chile, where he took down a general who had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent men and women.

He’d been married by then, and his wife objected to his too-often unexplained absences. After the Chilean op, she had given him the ultimatum: her or the Company. Psychologically battered by what he had just gone through, he chose neither. Instead, he quit the CIA and his wife and went to ground in Switzerland until, a couple of years later, the Company came looking for him with a new assignment, a thing that had to be done extrajudicially. The CIA had to be held blameless if the operation went bad. At all costs, Washington had to be kept completely out of the mix. The only fall guy would be McGarvey.

And at the time, he had become so irascible in his self-imposed isolation that he had practically jumped at the chance.

So it had begun, one impossible assignment after another, stretching back more years than he wanted to remember. Now at fifty, he wanted to step off the merry-go-round at last. He’d endured too many losses over the years—every woman he’d ever loved, including his first wife and their daughter—had been killed because of who he was.

Friends dead, isolation for long stretches, a kidney lost, bullet wounds, skin grafts on his back from a car bomb meant to kill him that had taken his left leg from below the knee.

Yet he was still in superb physical condition, some of it because of the luck of the genetic draw, but in a large measure because he willed it.