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

“Yeah. And it’s about all we can do here in D.C. Time to go home.”

“Casey Key or Serifos?”

“Florida for now.”

“And wait for the next shoe to drop,” Pete said, glancing at him. “Which it will.”

THIRTY-ONE

By the time they got back to their duplex on Repulse Bay, the twelve and a half million euros in gold had been deposited in their Swiss account as Li had predicted it would be. They had talked about it in roundabout terms on the long flight from Dulles, and Taio had expressed his doubt.

Now in midafternoon, standing on the broad balcony, he turned as Li brought out a bottle of Cristal and two flutes. It was something they always did at the very beginning of each operation. After the wine this afternoon, neither of them would touch a drop of alcohol until they were finished and the final payment made.

“I could see it in his eyes,” Li said, pouring for them. She handed Taio his.

“All I could see was fear.”

“He would be a fool not to be afraid. We know about Mr. McGarvey, and I’m sure that Hammond has his resources.”

They touched glasses. The wine was very good and very cold, and Taio savored it. “That is one of my main concerns,” he said.

“Hammond or his sources?”

“His sources. I’d like to know who they are.”

“Because?”

“Because we may be forced to deal with them in the end,” Taio said.

Li started to say something but then checked it for just a moment, until something suddenly dawned on her and she nodded. “Hammond may have used his sources to find us, and of course he’ll report hiring us.”

“Exactly.”

“I see your point. We don’t need to keep looking over our shoulders to see who is watching us. The question is, how do we find out, short of going back to Hammond?”

“We don’t want to do that. He could withdraw his payment.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“We start by sanitizing our appearance, as usual, and then going deep, but leaving a back door open just a crack. If his source is any good, they’ll find us, and we’ll be waiting. If not, it won’t matter.”

Li’s highly modified iPhone lying on the table triple chimed, which meant the incoming call was encrypted. Only her friend Phenix Zhe, who worked in the Technical Surveillance Department of the People’s Liberation Army general staff in Beijing, knew the number and had access to the sophisticated encryption algorithm. They’d known each other since childhood in primary school.

Li answered the call, switching to speaker mode. “Hello, friend.”

“You two are off on another operation, and I just thought that you should be warned about your client Thomas Hammond.”

It was no secret between them that Zhe had access to their Swiss account from which she was paid small sums from time to time for intel that was generally only available to agencies at the governmental level.

“Hello, Zhe, I’m listening as well,” Taio said.

“Your target is a man by the name of Kirk McGarvey, who once served as the director of the American CIA.”

“How do you know this?”

“We happen to have a friendly set of ears on his yacht in Alaska, who spotted you two coming aboard, but staying only briefly.”

“Can we have his name, perhaps to reward him?” Taio asked.

“No need at this time. But I called to tell you that Hammond and his lady friend, Susan Patterson, who is a Hollywood celebrity, are not as they seem to be.”

“Shi de.” Yes. “We’ve already gathered that from meeting him.”

“Did he tell you that he wants Mr. McGarvey dead mostly for the sport of it?”

“And for money he didn’t lose, but didn’t gain having to do with a cryptocurrency.”

“Did he also tell you that he hired two other assassins who both failed?”

“No,” Li said, exchanging glances with her husband. “Were either of these operators known to us?”

“They were mostly local players in a very small pond—much smaller than your milieu. Both of them ex-military disgraced by minor infractions.”

“Should we decline the operation?” Li asked.

“That’s up to you two, but I would say that eliminating such a man as McGarvey would propel your reputations in the business to stellar levels.”

“If we don’t fail,” Taio said.

“Do you have his file?” Zhe asked.

“We have a file.”

“I’ll send you ours. And if you decide to proceed, I wish you very much luck.”

McGarvey’s file was extensive, running to more than two hundred pages, covering his life as a boy on a ranch in western Kansas, through his service in the air force’s Office of Special Investigation, then his recruitment and training by the CIA as a black ops player.

His first assignments had been merely as a financial bagman into places such as Moscow, and even once into Beijing, though Chinese intelligence never knew about it until several years after the fact.

His first wet assignment had been to take out a general in Chile who’d been responsible for the torture and executions of more than one thousand dissidents. In that assignment, McGarvey had also eliminated the general’s wife.

Li had transferred the massive file to both their laptops, which they studied for the rest of the day, through dinner, and into the evening and bed, finally finishing around the same time just after three in the morning.

Taio made a pot of tea just as Li was stirring, then went out to the patio to watch the lights of the city and to think about what he had learned. The fact that McGarvey was a formidable opponent had come as no surprise, though what was striking was the man’s apparent soft underbelly. He was a scholar of Voltaire, taught at a small, prestigious liberal arts college in Florida, and had even written a book about the French philosopher.

“What’s not so common,” Voltaire had written, “is common sense.”

But apparently the quote most important to McGarvey, because it had turned up in so many places in his file, was the one about how it was better to free a guilty man than convict an