Gambit by David Hagberg (fantasy novels to read txt) 📕

“What guarantees do I have?”

“A piece of free advice. A Bureau SWAT team is en route.”

“What do you want in return?”

“Who hired you to kill me and why?”

“I don’t have those answers.”

It struck McGarvey that the man’s accent was Canadian. “Nor would you give them to me if you did.”

“Something like that,” the shooter said. This time, he was farther to the left but definitely closer.

McGarvey eased to the right but still behind the tree, and he crouched down. “I don’t think that you’re working for any government, especially not Canada’s. So it’s not for your country, just money. Worth your life?”

“Who are you working for?”

“At this moment, myself.”

“And your wife and Otto Rencke? Do you think they will mourn your passing?”

The shooter was to the left and very close.

McGarvey rose up and rolled left.

The shooter was right there and started to turn as Mac pointed his pistol directly at the man’s head at a distance of less than five feet.

The man stopped. “Even you might miss at this range.”

“No,” Mac said. “Open your hand and drop your pistol. Any other move and I’ll fire.”

“Then what?”

“Give me the answers and you can leave. No real harm, no foul.”

“What’ll you tell the SWAT team when they show up?”

“You escaped.”

“Noble of you.”

“I’m just tired of being hunted. You’re the second shooter someone’s sent. I want to know who and why.”

This seemed to surprise the man. “I didn’t know.”

“Who hired you?”

“I don’t know that either, except that my initial contact was with a Russian. But he was merely a go-between.”

“SVR? GRU?”

“He sounded like he might have worked as an intel officer at one time, but I don’t think he was active.”

“Do you have a name or a description?”

“Never met him face-to-face.”

“How much were you promised?”

“Five million…,” the shooter said when a siren very close interrupted him. Without turning, he angled his pistol upward and fired.

At the last instant, McGarvey moved his head sharply to the left and fired his pistol, the shot catching the man in the side of his neck before he staggered a pace backward and then went down.

EIGHTEEN

Hicks was alive and conscious, but he was trying with everything in his being not to drown in his own blood that was pouring into his windpipe from the ragged wound in his neck. The bullet had hit his jaw and splintered, causing a major tear.

McGarvey was over him, kicking away the pistol that had fallen to the ground.

Hicks thought he was hearing a lot of sirens approaching from the east, though he was becoming more and more detached. The fact of the matter is he’d lost. McGarvey was good, a lot better than even his dossiers had suggested. Better than Tarasov had warned.

McGarvey grabbed Hicks’s right shoulder and turned him on his side, and immediately, blood stopped pouring into his throat.

Hicks coughed several times, deeply, the pain raging in his neck all the way to the top of his head. But he could breathe if he kept it shallow.

The sirens were much closer now, maybe at the end of the block.

McGarvey clamped a hand over the wound, applying just enough pressure to slow the bleeding, but not so much as to impede breathing.

The man was saving his life, but Hicks could think of only one reason for it. Information.

“I would have kept my word,” McGarvey said. His voice was a long ways off.

The sirens had stopped, and for a moment, Hicks thought he’d lost his hearing, but someone shouted from the street.

“Coming in!”

“Straight back, twenty yards,” McGarvey called.

“Clear?”

“Shooter’s down.”

“No malice,” Hicks managed to whisper. For some reason, he wanted to make that much clear.

“Just a job?”

“The biggest yet. I could have gone deep.”

“Who was the Russian who hired you?”

“Deep pockets. But I think he was just an expediter working for an American.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

“Description?”

“His face and voice were distorted,” Hicks said, and he was drifting, the pain gone, McGarvey’s face above him fading.

Four SWAT team officers, FBI stenciled on their vests, appeared behind and to the left and right of McGarvey and Hicks, their assault rifles at the ready.

“Mr. McGarvey?” one of them asked.

Mac nodded. “This guy’s still alive, and I want to keep him that way.”

“Medic!” the officer shouted, and within moments, another man in SWAT team incident dress appeared. He wasn’t armed but was carrying a trauma bag.

The medic got down next to Hicks.

“One round hit his jaw, then an artery in the neck,” McGarvey said.

The medic pulled a thick gauze pad from a packet and motioned for McGarvey to take his hand away from the wound, which immediately began spurting blood.

Mac backed off, picked up his pistol, holstered it, and turned to the officer who obviously was the incident commander. “You guys bring an ambulance?”

“Yes, sir. Have you been hit?”

“No. But I want to save this guy’s life, if at all possible.”

“His carotid artery has been nicked,” the medic said without looking up.

“Take him to All Saints; it’s just around the corner.”

“That’s for you guys,” the incident commander said.

“I need this man,” Mac said. “Otto?”

“Franklin’s rolling,” Otto said in his earbud.

“Send Pete over; I want her to run the interrogation if he can be stabilized and brought around.”

“She and Mary just left,” Otto said. “You okay?”

“He missed.”

By the time Hicks was stabilized, loaded into the ambulance, and brought to All Saints, Franklin was there. After a short conference with the medic, the still-unconscious man was hustled immediately upstairs to the third-floor operating theater.

McGarvey went to the restroom at the end of the hall and cleaned up as best he could. When he came out, a suit from the FBI who identified himself as Special Agent Tom Duncan was there in the waiting room.

“How’re you doing, Mr. Director?” he asked, getting to his feet. He was a tall, well-built man in his early forties, with light hair cropped short in the military fashion, a square jaw, and bright eyes. He looked like a recruiting poster for Special Forces.

“Fine,” Mac said. “And