The Cabal (16 page)

“I’ll try,” Liz said and she was gone, leaving McGarvey holding for
a long time before he pushed the end button and laid the phone down on the dining room table.

A minute later his interrogators came in, Pete apologetic, Dan Green a little angry.

“We didn’t listen in, Mr. Director,” Pete said. “On that you have my word.”

“It doesn’t matter,” McGarvey said, suddenly more than tired; he was weary, mentally as well as physically. And tomorrow loomed large in his mind, because he would not be able to do anything until after his son-in-law had been buried. What made tomorrow even worse for him was the thought of leaving Katy and Liz again, just as he had done for more than twenty years.

“Can we get you anything else before we pick up where we left off. The North Korean intelligence officer come for a chat with you.”

“No,” McGarvey said, getting up. “We’re done for the night. I’m tired.”

“The hell we are,” Green said. “You have a lot to answer for.”

“Yes, I do,” McGarvey said and he turned to leave when Green started to step in front of him.

“Leave it, Dan,” Pete cautioned. “We’re all tired.”

Green stepped aside but said nothing.

“You’ll continue to cooperate this evening, Mr. Director?” she asked. “Can we have your word on it?”

“Yes, for tonight,” McGarvey said.

“What about tomorrow?”

“That’ll depend.”

“You’re charged with treason,” Green said angrily, and McGarvey got the impression that the man’s anger wasn’t real, it was a part of his and Pete’s dog and pony show.

“If that were the case, they would have put me someplace a hell of a lot more secure than here, don’t you think?” he said.

He walked out into the stair hall and Pete came to the door. “How did Sandberger react when you showed up?” she asked.

“He wasn’t happy,” McGarvey said.

“I would have given anything to have been a little bird in the corner,” Pete admitted. “We’ll be with you tomorrow.”

“Who else?”

“Federal marshals in the car with you and nearby. Just in case Todd’s assassination wasn’t a random act.”

First thing in the morning Kangas and Mustapha parked their untraceable Buick LeSabre near the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, and walked a quarter of a mile back down the hill in the general direction of the South Gate, crossing Porter, Miles, and then Grant drives. A few people were out and about, but not many; a hush seemed to hang over the place.

Neither man had ever wanted to be buried here, even though they’d been career government employees, because neither of them saw themselves dying in service of their country. It was an old line from Patton, something like: Let the other son of a bitch die for his country. They considered themselves to be too professional to be killed because of stupidity.

“Nice day for a funeral,” Mustapha said.

“For someone else,” Kangas replied, and he laughed.

They reached a spot from where they had a decent line of sight to the driveway that opened to Southgate Road, that in turn led to Columbia Pike or South Joyce Street away from the cemetery. After the funeral, which would start in a few hours, the procession would pass through the gate, according to Remington’s intel, which had never been wrong before. The guy might be a prick, but he knew what he was doing.

Right on time a blue-and-white panel van without windows, marked Fairfax County Highway Department, pulled up about twenty feet down the driveway from the gate and parked in the middle of the road, almost on top of a storm sewer lid. Two men, dressed in blue coveralls and wearing hardhats, got out of the truck and placed a few traffic cones blocking the lane that led out of the cemetery. No one from the gate came down to ask what was going on.

“Considering what’s been happening, and who’s going to be here soon, you’d think security would be tighter,” Kangas said.

“Makes you wonder about the Bureau,” Mustapha agreed. “And Homeland Security.”

“And the Company. The Van Buren kid was one of theirs.”

The men were Islamic jihadists from the Ramila Mosque, Abu al-Amush who’d been born and raised in Baghdad, and Richard Hamadi, who’d come over to Detroit with his parents when he was a child. Al-Amush had been radicalized during the tail end of the Saddam Hussein regime and then in the war with the Americans, learning to hate whatever side was in power. And he had brought his message first to Detroit where he’d recruited workers from the auto assembly lines, and finally here two years ago, bringing Hamadi with him, when he’d been lured by the Ramila’s imam, to carry the message of hatred to the young men raising money for the cause.

And carry out the occasional assignment.

Mustapha had been the lead contact man with the mosque, which had been moved in secret from its storefront months ago, leaving behind only the shell that had been destroyed in the explosion after the deaths of Van Buren and Givens. And convincing the imam and his followers had been relatively easy; they were all fanatics whose attention was totally focused on only two things: hatred and money. Kangas was the influential American businessman with deep pockets who’d been taken in by Mustapha, a true believer and a dedicated jihadist himself.

This assignment today, for a further contribution of ten thousand dollars to the cause, was right up al-Amush’s alley, who’d learned all
there was to know about IEDs, especially cell phone controlled IEDs, in Baghdad so that he could have written an instruction manual on the subject, except that he was practically illiterate, as were many of the so-called freedom fighters.

Kangas and Mustapha moved to a grave site a little closer to the driveway, from where they could watch the maintenance workers without appearing to be paying any attention.

“Fucking rag heads,” Kangas muttered.

“At least they have a cause,” Mustapha said. “Something we don’t.”

Kangas looked over in surprise. “Give me a break.” He nodded down toward the two men who’d pried the storm sewer lip up and were rolling it back to the truck. “Tell me about them. What service do you suppose they’re providing?”

“At least they think they know who their enemies are. We’ve been over there, we know the drill on the streets. They get their heads so filled with shit in the mosques that they practically think they can walk on water. They look forward to dying.”

“Which leaves us, contracting to protect the good guys,” Kangas said.

“Up until now, Tim. ’Cause I’m telling you that this shit just ain’t right, and you know it as well as I do. Bagging bad guys in the field is one thing, this is something different, and I don’t know if this is why I signed on.”

“The money’s goddamned good.”

“Fuck the money.”

“I’ll take your share,” Kangas kidded, worried for the first time. He wasn’t about to walk away from Admin, not until shit began to happen, not until the center started to fail, which wasn’t quite happening yet. But he’d never had an inkling until now that Ronni might be developing a conscience.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

The maintenance workers loaded the heavy forged iron sewer lid into the van, waited a few moments as a car came up from Southgate Road, the driver steering around the cones and stopping at the gate, then unloaded another sewer lid, this one six inches thicker, with an
unusual starfruit shape on the underside. They quickly manhandled it the short distance and carefully placed it over the two-foot diameter opening in the road.

By the way they handled the replacement lid it was obvious even at a distance that it was much heavier than the original. But their movements had been masked by the van from anyone at the gate, and in the short interval the new lid had been visible from anyone on the road below the gate, or from inside the cemetery where Kangas and Mustapha watched, no one had shown up. It was the one bit of luck they’d counted on.

The contingency plan had been to blow the IED now.

Kangas withdrew his hand from the cell phone in his jacket pocket, and the maintenance workers removed the traffic cones, got in their van, did a U-turn, and drove off.

When the correct car approached the sewer lid, Kangas would key a telephone number into his cell phone, omitting the last digit until just before the front bumper of the car reached the lid. It would only be a matter of a second before the call was connected, and a signal sent to the IED attached to the underside of the lid. It was a shaped charge, and the new sewer lid had been ground down in such a way that when the Semtex went off the blast would send a firestorm of lethal shrapnel and super hot gases upward, blowing apart anything directly above. No one would survive, even if they were riding in an armored limousine.

It was only a few hours now until the funeral.

They turned and headed back up to the LeSabre. “There’s more here than we’re being told,” Mustapha said. “You’ve figured that out, haven’t you?”

“I don’t give a shit,” Kangas said. “I’m given an assignment and I do my job. Just like I did in the Company.”

That wasn’t entirely true and both men knew it, but Mustapha said nothing.

“Look, you don’t want to do this shit with me, I’ll take care of it myself.”

“Mustapha shook his head. “No. We’re in this together, just like
from the beginning. We’re a team. Doesn’t mean I have to like what we’ve been handed.”

“I don’t much like it either, and it doesn’t have anything to do with wiping out a couple of incidentals, whoever’s with him in the car. It’s McGarvey I’m worried about. If we don’t take him out this afternoon we could be in a world of shit.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure we do the job right.”

The afternoon was almost too bright, the sky too clear, the air too balmy for a funeral, as McGarvey walked out to the same Cadillac Escalade that had brought him over from Andrews. He’d been handcuffed, at the request of the federal marshals—it was standard procedure—his sport coat over his shoulders, and Pete and Dan Green were on either side of him.

Steve Ansel and Doug Mellinger were waiting at the SUV, all four doors open, their jackets unbuttoned. No one wanted trouble today.

“Just a minute,” Pete said, and she produced the key for the handcuffs. “No trouble, Mr. Director?” she asked. “Your word?”

“My word,” McGarvey said.

“This is bullshit, Pete,” Green objected.

“It’s his son-in-law’s funeral, goddamnit,” Pete said and she glanced at the federal marshals. “Any objections?”

Ansel shrugged. “You drive. We’ll sit in the back with Mr. McGarvey, just to make sure.”

“Afterward we’re coming back here. We’re not finished with the debriefing.”

“You have him for as long as you want,” Ansel said. “That was the interagency understanding.”

Only a part of McGarvey had listened to the exchange, but it had registered with him; he understood the bureaucratic bullshit-speak that was a separate language not only in the District of Columbia and most of the Beltway, but for the isolated center here and there, like the CIA, or Quantico, or Fort A. P. Hill and the Farm, of course. But he’d been a part of the establishment, or sometimes on the fringes, for so long that he understood not only what was being said, but what was meant between the lines. Unofficially the CIA and just about every other intelligence or law enforcement agency had been at odds for years, not sharing intel, not really cooperating, and now a pair of federal marshals had most likely been ordered to give the Company enough rope to hang itself—or at least cause an embarrassment.