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

the players circuit, a little too flashy, but nearly there. Heads turned when they walked into a lobby or bar.

Upstairs, they tipped the bellman well and ordered a bottle of Krug from room service. When it came, they each had a couple of sips, and then Li poured the remainder of the bottle down the bathroom sink.

Taio took a pair of matching shoulder bags from one of their suitcases, and they packed them with jeans, a light pullover sweater and boat shoes for him, a chambray shirt, spangly jeans, and pink Sketchers for her, plus two sets of American passports and driver’s licenses for each of them in the names Frank and Judy Kane from Waltham, Massachusetts, and George and Carolyn Schilling from Minneapolis, Minnesota, that they’d hidden in the lining of the suitcase, along with a little over five thousand euros and ten thousand American dollars.

They had not brought firearms with them, nor would they attempt to take any through customs in the U.S. Almost everywhere they’d ever operated, they armed themselves with whatever weapons they needed from local sources.

“Time to go to work,” he told Li, and they left the hotel with only the shoulder bags. Everything else would be left behind.

In just about every major city in the world, there were experts of one sort or another for clandestine hire. In Amsterdam and Paris, hackers were predominant. In London and Zurich, there were financial wizards who knew everything there was to know about money laundering. In Beijing and Seattle, the best internet device designers and plunderers had set up shop. Long rifles and handguns were easy to get in New York and Chicago despite tough gun laws. Man-launched missiles were for sale in Las Vegas. Surveillance equipment, a lot of it Russian designed but pirated from Cuba, was available in Miami. And in Billings, Montana, and Fargo, North Dakota, explosives were for sale in just about every back alley. If you knew where to look and who to call, you could get just about anything for a price.

Here in Geneva were a handful of the best plastic surgeons and disguise geniuses in the world, outside the CIA and the Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies.

Once they were clear of the hotel but still on foot, Taio phoned Dr. Wolfhardt Buerger, a man they’d worked with once several years ago. The doctor was a seventy-two-year-old coke addict, wife beater, and child molester. But he was the best in the business.

“Unless you have a lot of fucking money, leave me alone,” the man said in English.

“More money than you can spend in the rest of your miserable life,” Taio answered.

Buerger laughed. “I recognize that limey bastard accent anywhere. Whatever it’s to be this time will cost you twice as much as last.”

“Are you at the same place?”

“I moved last year to Vieille Ville.” It was the historic district of the city, some buildings dating back to the fourteenth century. He gave them a number not far from the Bourg-de-Four, which was a large public square filled with elegant cafés.

“We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“He’s come up in the world,” Li said when Taio hung up.

“In part because of us. But I think we’ll also be his last.”

Li was troubled. “What is it?”

“I think he is on the verge of becoming a serious problem.”

“The cocaine?”

“His attitude. He sounded invincible.”

“Do you think he’s being watched?”

It was something Taio had considered. “We’ll make sure before we go in. But when he’s finished, we’ll dispose of him.”

Li put a hand on her husband’s arm, stopping him. “There are others in the business who can help us.”

“None as good.”

“We don’t need this job. Return the money, and let’s walk away.”

“I don’t want to do that.”

Understanding dawned in Li’s eyes. “You want this assignment. You admire McGarvey.”

“Shi de.”

“Careful you don’t get us killed.”

THIRTY-FIVE

McGarvey rented a Toyota SUV with deeply tinted windows from Hertz at the airport up in Sarasota using a set of ID creds under the name of Isaac Rogers from his go-to-hell kit.

Outside, he picked up Pete, who’d parked the restored Porsche Speedster in the short-term lot, and they headed up to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, fifty miles north.

Home to a number of units, MacDill also hosted the U.S. Central Command, USCENTCOM, that planned the wars in Iraq. Real-time intelligence was of vital importance to the unit; thus from the beginning, there’d been a very close bond with the CIA.

Yesterday, McGarvey had called Otto and outlined the plan for bunkering in on Casey Key, with the alternate of the Whitby out in the Gulf. Aside from a Glock 20 and two Walther PPKs in the rare 9mm version, plus Pete’s subcompact Glock 29 Gen4 and the Very pistol aboard the boat, they had no other weapons.

“I know what you need, and I can get the hardware from MacDill,” Otto had said. “But do you want anything heavy? Semtex, maybe, or even a man-held missile launcher?”

“No. First of all, I don’t want to make a major splash, unless they come after us by air when we’re out on the boat, in which case, a long gun will do. And if at all feasible, I want to take whoever they send us as undamaged as possible.”

“You’ll need pistols for several locations in the house, by the pool and in the gazebo, the standard Beretta 9mm, plus plenty of ammunition for each. Nothing fancy, but reliable with decent stopping power at short range.”

“One for the boat as well.”

“Hang on; I’m looking at the armory inventory,” Otto said.

They were in the gazebo, Mac’s phone on speaker mode, the volume down. Otto had beefed up security in and outside the house out to a radius of two hundred meters, which included out into the Gulf and across the Intracoastal Waterway.

Otto was back. “Okay, I’m getting you a couple of Heckler & Koch MP7A1 submachine guns, one for each of you to carry around. These will be the 4.6mm×30 iterations, with a lot more stopping