Gambit by David Hagberg (manga ereader .txt) 📗

“What can I do this time?”

“I’m thinking about a team effort. Maybe ex-Spetsnaz shooters. If you can round up a half a dozen men to hit him all at once, he couldn’t possibly survive.”

“That’s an intriguing thought. But the question is where would this have to happen? Not in the Washington area—way too sensitive. And Florida is out because McGarvey isn’t likely to stay there either.”

“Why not?” Hammond asked.

“Too much media attention, for one. And by now, he’s rock-solid certain that someone is determined to see him go down and probably won’t stop until the job is done.”

“Should we wait until he settles down?”

“No. But he’s his own worst enemy right now. He won’t stay in Florida or Washington for the simple reason he knows another attack is coming, and he’ll want it to be on a ground of his choosing, and someplace where the chance of collateral damage is at a comparative minimum.”

“Where?” Hammond asked.

“I have a couple of ideas, but don’t worry, he’ll let us know.”

Li woke slowly from the effects of the anesthesia, and as she did, her entire body seemed like it was on fire, especially her left side below her ribs and her right hip.

She became aware that she was in a hospital room and that she had been operated on to repair the bullet wounds she’d received at the McGarveys’ property.

Taio was dead, she was certain of it. Before she’d gone down, she’d heard a lot of shooting from the south side of the house, some of it rapid fire from the AR-15 down by the water, but then it had stopped. And McGarvey had shouted something, his wife replying.

She and Taio had finally lost, and the more awake she became, the more resigned she felt. Without her husband, without the beautiful retirement they’d talked about, life for her was not worth living. Especially not if it resulted in a jail cell.

Sooner or later, someone would be coming to interrogate her. It would be simple at first, but even wounded, she was strong. The one thing she could not stand up to would be drugs.

She pushed the sheet covering her aside, and with an extreme effort to get beyond the pain, managed to sit up and get her legs over the side of the bed.

A wave of nausea washed over her, causing a cold sweat to break out all over her tiny body.

She pushed through that as well and got her feet onto the cool tile floor and stood up, falling back immediately, the pain in her hip threatening to blow the top of her skull away.

Again she stood up and this time managed to stay on her feet. Pulling the IV tube from her arm and wires attached to monitors, she went around the bed to a chair and somehow dragged it into the bathroom and closed the door.

Someone would be coming to find out why the monitors had gone blank.

She jammed the metal frame at the top of the chair’s seat back under the door handle. They’d get past that fairly quickly, even if they had to remove the hinges, so she had to hurry.

Turning to the mirror over the sink, she doubled up a first and struck it with every gram of her strength. But nothing happened. The mirror didn’t break.

People were at the door, a woman shouting something that Li couldn’t make out, because now she was thinking in Mandarin.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She wanted Taio to be with her. She was lost without him. She would be lost for the rest of her life.

A man was at the door shouting something incomprehensible to her.

“Taio,” Li whispered to her image, and she bit her tongue with all of her strength, blood immediately filling her mouth and the back of her throat.

She sank to the floor and laid her head back on the toilet seat, gushing blood making it impossible to breathe.

FIFTY-TWO

First thing in the morning, Taft’s small conference room on the seventh floor of the OHB adjacent to his office was crowded. McGarvey and Pete along with Carleton Patterson sat at one end of the table, facing the DCI, while Thomas Waksberg, the Company’s deputy director of clandestine services, sat to their right. Harold Kallek, the director of the FBI, and a whip-thin, stern-looking Clarke Bender, who headed the Bureau’s Directorate of Intelligence, sat to their left.

No one was smiling, and Patterson had warned McGarvey that this incident teetered on the edge of criminal prosecution for needlessly endangering the lives of innocent civilians. They had gone over in detail all three attacks—the two in Georgetown and the one in Florida.

“The fact of the matter is you were aware that you and your wife were targets for assassination, and yet you refused to surrender to protective custody,” Bender said. He was a Harvard lawyer, and he acted like one. Either Harvard or Yale or you were a blue collar. “Why?”

“I wasn’t going to jail for something I didn’t do,” McGarvey shot back. “And even if I had—even if my wife and I had—how long would it have been for?”

“As long as it took to find who were your attackers and arrest them.”

“The Bureau has been on this for a couple of weeks since the first attack. How close are you guys to finding out who they were?”

Bender started to say something, but Kallek held him off.

“Not close at all, mostly because you haven’t cooperated with us. Perhaps if you let us help.”

“Sorry, Mr. Kallek, your people are very good, just as Mr. Taft’s people are, but whoever is directing the players coming after us are better.”

“You arrogant son of a bitch,” Bender said. “Are you saying that you’re better than all of us combined?”

This time, Patterson held McGarvey off.

“Yes, and he’s proven it on numerous occasions, evident even if you’ve only glanced at his redacted file. The issue on the table here is not to penalize Mr. McGarvey for merely protecting