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

you with your little game,” Tarasov said. “It’s simply quid pro quo.” He took a single folded sheet of paper and a pen out of his jacket pocket and handed them to Hammond. “Please sign it and press your right thumb anywhere on the page.”

“What is this?”

“As I told you on the phone, it’s nothing more than a letter showing your intent to act as Gazprom’s agent in Western Europe.”

“It’ll never hold up in any court of law—in the States or internationally.”

“No matter. It’ll just point anyone interested in the direction of your collusion for financial gains to us.”

“Something I’ve done all my life,” Hammond said. “So what?”

“It links you with a Russian enterprise, something your President Weaver has banned under the penalty of your laws.”

“It would also link Gazprom with a plot to kill McGarvey.”

“No, it would simply link you to the plot—which in actuality is the truth. In fact, so far as anyone outside Moscow knows, Mr. Putin has a respectful if not warm relationship with Mr. McGarvey. It goes back a couple of years.”

Hammond hesitated.

“Come on, Thomas, you started this. We merely helped—for a favor, of course.”

Hammond signed the letter, adding his thumbprint. He had no other choice.

Mary called Otto’s office and told him that she was pulling the pin early and getting out. “It’s a Friday. How about taking a girl for a drink and early dinner?”

“Come on over. I’m working on a hunch, but I should have it settled by the time you get here.”

“A premo?”

“Maybe,” Otto said, and he hung up.

The problem he had been wrestling with for several days, ever since Lou had picked up the brief interview with Susan Patterson in Seattle, was Thomas Hammond. The man was a billionaire who’d made his fortune by stealing it, which meant he had connections just about everywhere in the world, and he was a man, who, by all reports Lou had been able to dig up, held a grudge.

Hammond had ruined any number of men, and three of them, during several wild market swings over the past ten or fifteen years, actually committed suicide because of it.

Barron’s and The WSJ had at one time or another labeled him one of the world’s great predators. A man who wants to win at all costs and who has earned a fortune because of it.

“Lou, I was just thinking.”

“Yes, dear?”

“Can we find a connection between Hammond and any intelligence agency?”

“Foreign or domestic?”

“All of them.”

“Of course the obvious connection has been the CIA between him and Mac and Pete during the Tower Down investigation. Plus, by extension, all of Mac’s connections. The SVR during the face-off incident. The MSS in China, North Korea’s State Security Department, Pakistan’s ISI, France’s DSGE, Germany’s BND, and some years back Britain’s MI6, and of course Chile’s Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia.”

“I was specifically asking about Hammond’s connections.”

“Hammond’s relationship with Mac has put him on the radar of all those agencies whose files include his name.”

“And Susan Patterson’s?”

“Yes. May I ask in what direction you would like me to direct my inquiries?”

“Excluding the bitcoin deal Mac offered him, are there any other reasonable explanations why Hammond would have hired assassins?”

“Mary is here,” Lou said.

A moment later, Mary came back to Otto’s inner office. “Play that last inquiry, please.”

“Excluding the bitcoin deal Mac offered him, are there any other reasonable explanations why Hammond would have hired assassins?”

“I can think of at least one,” Mary said. “Hammond’s in the middle of some business deal with a country that wants Mac eliminated, but not willing to take the blame. Quid pro quo.”

“Or vice versa,” Lou said.

THIRTY-NINE

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Mac decided it was time to take a break, and Pete agreed. They’d stashed the loaded Beretta pistols plus two spare magazines of ammunition in two guest rooms in the front, plus the master bedroom and study facing the rear of the house.

On the way downstairs, Pete had insisted on placing a loaded pistol on the first landing. “In case we’re on the run with someone right on our tail,” she’d explained.

They’d also placed pistols and magazines in the living room facing the front and in the dining room and kitchen in the rear.

“Starting now, we go nowhere without my Walther and your Glock,” McGarvey told her. “If something starts to go down, we’ll make a grab for the MP7s, one upstairs and one down here.”

“Do you think it could happen as soon as tonight?”

“It’s possible.”

“If it were you coming up against a former CIA black ops officer with a hell of a track record, what would you do?”

“Defeat Otto’s surveillance systems and come in soft and easy as quickly as possible in the middle of the night,” McGarvey said. He had thought about it for the past couple of days. “But if I could manage, I would try to come during normal hours, posing as someone we knew, who’d been here from time to time.”

Pete was a little surprised. “Someone from Langley?”

“Maybe, or possibly someone from New College.”

“Means that people we know could be in real danger right now.”

McGarvey had thought long and hard about that possibility as well. If he were the only target, it would be easier to handle than if the people he knew and loved were in the crosshairs.

He brought the last two pistols outside, one hidden by the pool and the other down in the gazebo, where he put it under one of the seats facing the water.

Pete came from the house with a decent bottle of pinot grigio from the wine cooler and a couple of glasses. She poured for them both.

“I was just thinking that if they come at us from the water, we’d best put only one of the assault rifles aboard the boat and the other right here.”

“Okay, that’s good thinking,” Mac said.

“Except the part that we’ve made this place a fortress, McGarvey, and we could be stuck here indefinitely. And that’s not like you. So what gives? Why all the