as McGarvey pulled up, they eased a semiconscious Pete out of the car and helped her up onto the gurney.
“Are you hurt, Mr. Director?” one of them asked.
He had a lot of Pete’s blood on him. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Dr. Franklin’s standing by upstairs for her. He says that you were never here. So go.”
“What about her?”
“She was never here either. So just go. And leave her car.”
They wheeled Pete inside the hospital, and McGarvey hesitated a few moments before he walked back to Louise waiting in the Toyota. So much history here, he thought. Some of it with good outcomes, but other bits not so good. He could see Todd’s shot-to-hell body lying on the stainless-steel table. Nothing he could have done to prevent it. Nothing.
PART
FOUR
That Night
SIXTY-TWO
Louise was shaking and subdued when they got back to the brownstone and Otto gave her a hug, and then held her until her shivers subsided. “You did good,” he told her.
“I’m sorry I put you through something like that,” McGarvey told her.
They were standing in the stair hall, and Louise looked at him. “Pete will be okay, won’t she?”
“She lost a bit of blood, but she’ll be fine by morning. It was nothing serious.”
Louise shook her head and then looked from McGarvey to her husband. “You two have been doing this for a lot of years.”
Otto just shrugged.
She shook her head again. “I never imagined what it was like for real, until tonight,” she said.
“Are you okay?” Otto asked.
“I just need to clean up,” she said, and she went upstairs.
“It was Kangas and Mustapha, the guys from Baghdad and early this morning in the park,” McGarvey said. “They’re both down, and so is Remington and his driver.”
“Metro D.C. cops are all over it, and so is the Bureau,” Otto said. He was excited. “But you got Remington’s flash drive from Pete?”
She had handed it to him before she passed out. McGarvey gave it to Otto and they went upstairs to his computers, where Otto plugged it into one of the machines and brought up the drive. It was encrypted as Remington had said it would be, but Otto brought up one of the decryption programs he’d devised for the CIA and National Security Agency about nine months ago and set it to work on the drive. The sensitive program had never been meant to leave either agency, but Otto backed up everything he did. Always.
“This could take awhile,” Otto said.
“How long?” McGarvey asked. “With Sandberger and Remington both down, Admin has to be hurting, and Foster and his crowd will be getting nervous about now. I want to finish this tonight.”
“Could be a matter of minutes or days. I don’t know how good his algorithms are.”
“Better than your stuff?”
Otto grinned shyly. “There’s always a first, ya know.”
McGarvey glanced at the monitor. Line after line of figures marched down the screen, the pace accelerating. “I need to take a shower and change out of these clothes. I got Pete’s blood on me putting her in the car.”
Otto’s eyes were wide. “What you told Louise is true, right? She’s gonna be okay?”
“Unless she has broken bones, or the bullet in her hip hit a major artery, she should be up and around by morning. Franklin’s a good doc.”
“The best,” Otto said, and he turned back to his computers.
McGarvey went to the room they’d set up for him, took a shower, changed into jeans, another dark pullover, and dark boat shoes. He field stripped his Wilson, cleaned it with the kit from his bag, reloaded the one magazine he’d used, and holstered the pistol at the small of his back.
All of that had taken less than fifteen minutes, and when he got back to the computer room, Otto was hopping from foot to foot, grinning ear to ear. “Am I good, or am I good? You tell me, kemo sabe.”
“You cracked it?” McGarvey asked.
“Bingo,” Otto said, and he suddenly became serious. “And you’re not going to believe this shit. Foster has everybody involved, and I mean everybody.”
“Someone else in the Company other than McCann?”
“David Whittaker, our acting DCI,” Otto said. “How about them apples?”
“It had to have been someone near the top,” McGarvey said, but still he was amazed and a little bit saddened. He’d worked with Whittaker for a number of years when the man was the assistant deputy director of operations, under McGarvey, and the head of operations when McGarvey had briefly run the Agency. When Adkins had taken over the top job