The Cabal (35 page)

He got dressed in khaki slacks, a black short-sleeved polo shirt, and a bush jacket with a lot of pockets. A nylon sports bag contained a few toiletry items, a week-old
New York Times
with an article about DI, and a fresh shirt, underwear, and socks. Hopkins was nothing more than a tired contractor going home on leave.

Hadid had disconnected the sat phone from the battery and laid it on the seat. When McGarvey was finished he switched it on. It showed a full charge but no missed calls. By now Otto would have heard about Sandberger and the others at the Ritz, but he was holding back, knowing what else had probably happened overnight.

Hadid was looking at him. “You look the same, but different. I would never have picked you out in a crowd as the same man who was Mr. Tony. Whoever arranged this disguise for you was very good. It’s subtle.”

“Let’s hope the people at the hotel, and especially the customs and passport people at Dulles, think the same thing.”

“They’ll be watching for you?”

“Absolutely.”

It was nearly nine in the evening in Washington, which put it around five in the morning in Iraq, when Remington, calling from his office just inside the Beltway in Alexandria, finally managed to reach Tim Kangas at the Baghdad airport hotel.

“What the hell happened?” he demanded.

“The son of a bitch got the drop on us, which means he must have spotters here on the ground.”

“We have big problems coming our way, tell me everything,” Remington said, and Kangas did.

“You wanted us to keep a low profile here, arm’s length from any Admin personnel other than Harry Weiss. He told us to come back here and fly out on the first available flight. Which we’re planning on doing. Leaves at six local.”

“I still want you back here as soon as possible, but everything’s changed,” Remington said. Admin was in crisis mode, and he’d required that the five office staff remain until he could fully brief them and give them orders that would make sense. First he had to gather the facts.

“What’s happened?” Kangas demanded, his voice suddenly guarded.

“Weiss is dead, shot to death by McGarvey because you failed to do your job.”

“Bastard. He’s gotta have help here on the ground.”

“That’s not all. There was a shoot-out at the Ritz last night. Alphonse and Hanson are dead, and so is Mr. Sandberger.”

The connection was silent for a long time, and when Kangas finally came back he sounded shook. “We don’t need this shit. With all due respect, Mr. Remington, we’re bailing. You can take this job and shove it.”

It was about what Remington had expected. “The contract still stands. Two million for each of you when you take McGarvey down.”

The hesitation was shorter this time. “Do you want it done here?”

“McGarvey’s probably already on his way back here, either through Kuwait or possibly across the border into Turkey. Either way you’re too late to catch him. But if you’re on the next flight back, you’ll beat him here. You know what he looks like and unless you don’t know it yet, he’s traveling under the work name Tony Watkins, as a freelance journalist. Once you’re on the ground call me, and I’ll tell you what flight he took and when to expect him.”

“We’re supposed to take him down at the airport?”

“Only if he’s not taken into custody, which is a possibility. If the FBI picks him up, you can back off. If not, you can take him just like you did his son-in-law.”

“What about equipment?”

“Something will be arranged.”

“Wait one,” Kangas said and the connection went quiet. He came back ten seconds later. “All right, we’re in. But we want our backs covered, so make damn sure he won’t have help at Dulles.”

“Don’t worry, Admin takes care of its own,” Remington said, and he broke the connection and sat back. The beauty of the situation was that neither Kangas nor Mustapha could prove that they’d been ordered to assassinate McGarvey. Their orders had been verbal. Nothing written and neither of them had been wearing a wire. And they would never allow themselves to be taken into custody. Their backgrounds were too dirty, and by the time the FBI came looking, Admin’s records would show they’d been terminated months ago.

He got up and went out to the operations room where the five office staff were waiting. They looked up with interest because they knew that something important was happening.

“I need to make one more call, and then I’ll brief you in the boardroom and you can go home and get a few hours’ sleep.”

“What’s going on Mr. R.,” Calvin Boberg, the operations manager, asked. He’d been with Admin from the beginning, and was irritated that he’d been told nothing.

Remington held up a hand. “Five minutes, please.”

Boberg wanted to argue, but he shrugged. He was tired and he and the others wanted to go home.

Remington telephoned Ivan Miller, his contact at the FBI, who worked as the acting assistant director of the Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Remington didn’t know for sure, but he was convinced the man had a connection with the Friday Club, because he had landed in Admin’s lap within one week of the Friday Club contract.

His wife called him to the phone, and he sounded guarded. “Good evening, Gordon. Not a social call, I suspect?”

“You may have heard that we ran into a spot of trouble in Baghdad.”

“Just found out about it before I left the office. Could it have involved McGarvey?”

“We have that as fact,” Remington said. “He gunned down Roland and at least three of our people. Now he’s on his way back here.”

“I’m told that a Baghdad police captain may have been involved as well?”

“I just learned about that myself, and there’s very little doubt that McGarvey was the triggerman. The captain was Admin’s liaison for security measures.”

Miller hesitated for a moment, and Remington could hear music playing in the background, and maybe the sound of young voices. Miller had two teenaged children at home. “What can I do for you, Gordon?”

“This time it’s what Admin can do for the Bureau.”

“I’m listening.”

“McGarvey is definitely coming home. But you might not know he’s traveling on false papers and with a pretty fair disguise. It’s possible he could walk right past your Homeland Security TSA people.”

“Tell me,” Miller said.

“He’s traveling as a freelance journalist under a U.S. passport in the name of Tony Watkins.”

“How do you know this?”

“Two of our people had contact with him but managed to get away undamaged.”

“Lucky.”

Remington gave him the Tony Watkins description. “I think Admin can give the Bureau convincing evidence of McGarvey’s involvement with the shootings.”

“Roland was more than a partner, he was a personal friend from what I understand,” Miller said. “You must be shocked.”

“Devastated,” Remington said. “Do us a favor and pick him up. Or, better yet, shoot the man as he tries to escape.”

“You’d like that.”

“We all would,” Remington replied.

Boberg, Admin’s secretary Sigurd Larsen, the firm’s equipment specialist Roger Lewis, their computer expert David Thoms, and their in-house travel agent Gina Ballinger sat around the table in the conference room. They looked up with interest and a certain amount of concern when Remington walked in.

“Mr. Sandberger along with two of his bodyguards and Harry Weiss were shot to death last night in Baghdad.”

“My God,” Sigurd gasped. “Insurgents?”

“No. It was a man named Kirk McGarvey.”

“Son of a bitch,” Boberg said. He was a short, narrow-hipped man who was hard as bar steel. Remington had personally recruited him from the British SAS. “Have we got someone on the ground to take him down?”

“He’s on his way back here, and I have two angles covered,” Remington said. He explained about Kangas and Mustapha and about the FBI that would have agents in place to grab McGarvey traveling as Watkins the moment he stepped off the jetway. “But there still could be a mistake, so I’ll need a spotter out there.”

“Harry was a good friend,” Boberg said. “I’ll take care of it myself. Just in case.”

“If he’s taken into custody he’ll likely face treason charges. But he mustn’t be allowed to make it away from the airport and go to ground. At all costs.”

“Understood,” Boberg said, softly.

Despite the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the end of organized fighting in the north, the Kuwaiti military maintained a strong presence on the border with Iraq, mostly to intercept insurgents who might want to send suicide bombers across.

A few kilometers north of the Iraqi town of Safwan, which was on the main north-south highway, Hadid pulled off the paved road, doused the headlights, and headed east into the desert toward the even smaller town of Umm Qash.

“I have a cousin there,” Hadid said. “He and his two brothers and one cousin, my wife’s nephew, all work in the oil fields across the border.”

“Are we going to cross with them?” McGarvey asked.

Hadid shook his head. “Too dangerous for them, and I promised they wouldn’t become involved. But I know this border area. The crossing will be easy.”

The two towns were only twenty-five kilometers apart and yet after fifteen minutes of driving fairly fast, there were no signs of lights out ahead, though to the south waste gas fires from wellheads lit up the night sky with an eerie glow. This place was otherworldly and had been ever since the first Gulf War, when the invading Iraqi army had set most of those wells on fire. The air tasted of crude oil.

At one point the rough track dipped down into a shallow valley and Hadid stopped. “We’ll bury your weapon and old papers here, but you may keep your satellite telephone.”

He took a small shovel and a Kuwaiti Gulfmart Supermarket plastic bag from the back of the Range Rover, and dug a shallow hole in the
sand a few feet away. He put McGarvey’s things into the bag, tied it shut, and buried it.

“Will you come back for at least the pistol?” McGarvey asked.

“No need, Mr. James. Guns are plentiful here.” He grinned in the darkness. “Maybe in five thousand years an archaeologist will dig it up and it will be placed in a museum of antiquities.” He laughed.

It struck McGarvey that Hadid was trying very hard to find something to laugh about after having lost his wife and son. But there was nothing more to say, and he couldn’t find the will yet to look for humor in his own life. But then he didn’t have Hadid’s faith in a Paradise.

Back in the car, they waited with the engine running. Ten minutes later Hadid glanced at his watch, and two minutes after that they spotted the glow of a pair of headlights traveling east to west in the general direction of Safwan.

“That is the Kuwait Army patrol,” Hadid said. “Five minutes late.”

They waited another full five minutes, before Hadid put the Range Rover in gear and they continued down the valley for about five or six kilometers until a hundred meters from an oil rig they bumped up onto a dirt road and turned west toward the highway back down to Kuwait City, reaching the pavement ten minutes later.

McGarvey powered up the sat phone and when it had acquired a bird, phoned Otto, who answered on the second ring. The man never slept. “You made it across the border.”