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

and accomplished assassin in his own right. Why had the man looked through the lobby windows? If it was because he thought that an assassin had been waiting for him—and the record that Slatkin had dug up indicated that numerous attempts had been made on McGarvey’s life—why had he walked up the street in plain view as if he hadn’t a care in the world?

Everyone lived by a certain code or directive, which could be put down to mere habit. Each person did their unique thing.

What was McGarvey’s? And what was the man up to?

Slatkin sat forward in his chair so that he could look through the scope. His thing now and always was perseverance.

McGarvey took the stairs up to the third floor two at a time, stopping at each landing to listen for anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. Everyone was at work or out of town.

He checked the lock at his door before he let himself in, but there was no evidence of tampering.

Just inside the living room, he moved toward the short corridor past the kitchenette, keeping well enough away from the two front windows so that he presented no clear shooting solution, only a very brief silhouette.

In the bedroom, he got his Walther PPK in the rare 9mm version, loaded a magazine in the handle, attached the suppressor onto the muzzle, and cycled a round into the firing chamber.

Stuffing the pistol into his belt at the small of his back beneath his jacket, he passed through the living room again, and downstairs, keeping well away from the door windows in the lobby, he went to the rear door into the narrow alley.

Maybe there was nothing to it. He thought there was, though he had no idea who would be gunning for him this time or why.

But he was going to find out.

FOUR

Pete, driving Mary’s Honda, the Glock 24 pistol Otto had loaned her lying on the passenger seat, crossed the Key Bridge, weaving her way through traffic, not giving a damn if a cop got on her tail for speeding. She wouldn’t mind leading the entire D.C. police force to Dumbarton. Someone was gunning for her husband, and she would take all the help she could get. Mac would be pissed, but she’d make it up to him.

Otto came on the phone. “He’s not answering.”

“Means he’s busy,” Pete said. “Leave him alone.”

“Do you want me to pull the trigger?” Otto asked. Before Pete had stormed out of the house, he had composed an urgent all-stations message that a gun battle was about to go down in Georgetown. All that was needed was for him to hit the Send key.

“I want to see what the situation is. I’ll let you know.”

“Watch your own ass,” Mary said.

“Will do,” Pete said, making a very hard right onto busy M Street NW, just missing a brown UPS van.

Six blocks later, she headed north on Wisconsin Avenue, then right on Dumbarton a little more than four blocks to their apartment, traffic back here nonexistent for the moment.

She pulled over and parked in time to see Mac coming around the near corner from their place, crossing the street and keeping close to the buildings on the right side, head toward the middle of the block.

Keeping the pistol at her side, the muzzle pointed away from her leg, she started after him on foot.

Slatkin had caught only the brief glimpse of McGarvey in the lobby door window, and a fleeting shadow of the man in his apartment window, but then nothing else. And that had been nearly ten minutes ago. He was starting to worry.

He phoned his contact, but the number warbled, and a recorded announcement said that the number was no longer in service. He’d been cut loose for some reason.

How loose, though?

Using his iPhone, he brought up his Guernsey Island bank account and entered the ten-digit password. The last blind deposit of $250,000 that had been made twenty-five days ago was still in place, making his total available balance slightly more than $1.75 million. His expediter had not withdrawn the funds. The operation, despite the misgivings he’d shared with his contact, was still on. When it was finished and the second half of the payment was made he would be nearly halfway to the $5 million he figured he’d need to retire.

He looked up and leaned forward, his eye to the scope, but at that moment, a Mercedes passed, and he caught the reflection of a woman in the rear passenger window. She was on the sidewalk just below on this side of the street.

The woman was unknown to him, and yet she seemed familiar.

With the car gone, he could no longer see her. But her image nagged at him.

He pulled up the file stored on his laptop. Part of it had been sent to him from his expediter, but a large part of it he’d gleaned from his research over the past week or so. Scrolling through it, starting with McGarvey, then moving on to Otto Rencke and his now deceased wife, Louise Horn, he came to one of the later files, which showed two images of McGarvey’s partner and his new wife, Pete Boylan.

Looking up from the two photographs—one of her coming out of the CIA’s main gate in Langley—he was 100 percent certain that the woman whose reflection he’d seen in the window of the Mercedes was she.

And if she were here, downstairs, in front of the building, it could very easily mean that McGarvey was downstairs, too. Or perhaps even inside already.

Setting the computer aside, he detached the scope from the rifle, laid it on the table next to the phone and his pistol, then removed the rifle from its tripod and stepped into the relative shadows at the narrow hallway back to the bathroom and bedroom from where he had a perfect line of sight to anyone coming through the door.

He settled his nerves and reduced his thoughts from