A few doors down Pete looked over her shoulder. McGarvey was in the window watching her. She smiled and waved, then hurried around the corner to her car.
She lived close and it took less than an hour to take a quick shower and change into a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse and light jacket, before she was back to where she’d parked her car.
It was still dark, but the morning was coming alive with traffic, mostly garbage trucks, a street-sweeper machine and delivery vans for the bars and restaurants down on M Street. Nothing or no one threatening that she could detect.
She kept Mac’s pistol in her shoulder bag but laid her Glock 27 on the passenger seat as she took the Key Bridge across the river and started up the parkway to CIA headquarters.
In the east the sky was beginning to lighten, no clouds, and the trees and other vegetation along the side of the highway were lush. She’d read somewhere that because of various government projects in the past two hundred years there were more species of North American native trees here than anywhere else in the country. In the fall with the colors it was fabulous, but she preferred the full bloom of summer.
She glanced in her rearview mirror as an eighteen-wheeler, black smoke belching from its twin exhaust pipes, came up and pulled left to pass her. She got the vague impression of a figure behind the wheel and perhaps another riding shotgun. They were trying to make time, and she didn’t bother to keep up or get ahead of them even though the truck would slow down for the hill coming up less than a half mile away. Haaris probably wouldn’t be on Campus this early anyway.
The cab came even with her and she looked up into the face of a dark-skinned man with a narrow face and black hair as the truck swerved directly across the center line toward her.
On instinct she reached for her pistol, but she was forced off the side of the pavement and onto the apron before she could reach it. In the next instant her right-side wheels dropped down onto the grass strip and suddenly she was fighting to control the car.
The truck slammed into the side of her car again, sending her down a steep hill and across the drainage ditch ten feet lower. Before she could straighten out the wheels, the car tipped over on its side and continued rolling for forty yards until it broke through a swatch of bushes, finally smashing roof-first into the bole of a large tree.
For a seeming eternity she could only wonder that she was still alive — or at least she thought she was, nothing seemed to hurt but there seemed to be an awful lot of blood rolling down her face and neck.
“The fucking ISI,” she mumbled and dropped down into a dream-like state in which she was vaguely aware that she was still awake, but she couldn’t move. If the bastards who had done this wanted to come down and finish the job, she couldn’t do a thing about it.
Too bad, Kirk.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Pete’s cell phone rang once before the message came up that the call had been forwarded to an automatic message system. “It’s me, give me a call,” McGarvey said and hung up, an odd feeling between his shoulder blades that someone was taking a bead on him.
He’d phoned her apartment with no success and had left a message at her office. The automatic bar code scanner on the main gate of the Campus had not shown her arriving.
He called Otto. “Pete left here about an hour ago, and now I can’t reach her on her cell phone. The main gate says she hasn’t scanned in yet.”
“You try the back gate?”
“No reason for her to go that way.”
“Hang on.”
McGarvey went to the window and looked out toward the Rock Creek Park across Twenty-sixth Street. It was just dawn and already the morning joggers and bicyclers were out in full force.
Otto was back. “She didn’t come in that way. What are you thinking?”
“How about accidents between here and the Campus?”
“Is she still driving the three-hundred Beemer?”
“Dark green, convertible. DC plates: P-two-thirty-eight-five-seven.”
“I’m checking,” Otto said. “Was she armed?”
“I gave her one of my pistols before she left here. Presumably she still has it, and possibly the Glock from her apartment.”
“A half-dozen fender benders in the city and one accident with injuries on the Beltway down by Alexandria, but nothing on the parkway heading up here. Could be she just stopped somewhere for breakfast.”
“She wouldn’t have shut off her phone. It’s not like her.”
“Maybe she has something on her mind. Wants a little room to think it out.”
“Maybe,” McGarvey said. But that wasn’t like Pete either. If she had something to say, she wouldn’t be shy about it. Just like last night and this morning.
“Do you want me to give it to Security?”
“Just keep checking. I’m going for my run, and I’ll come out around ten. I want to talk to Walt.”
“You’re going to do it?”
“I don’t know how many other choices we have, after the obvious stage play last night,” McGarvey said. “How about Haaris?”
“He’s been with his gang all night.”
“If there was any doubt in Islamabad what our position is, he gave it away.”
“I’ll keep trying to find Pete, but watch yourself, I shit you not. Your being at the embassy last night makes you even more of a target than you were in Casey Key. Somebody figured that you might get involved so they thought they’d take you out, just in case. But now that they know you’ve jumped in, it’s not likely they’ll give it up. They’ll keep sending people until they get lucky.”
“I’m counting on it. But she was with me, so she’s a target too.”
McGarvey put on a Kevlar vest under his sleeveless sweatshirt, stuffed his Walther in his belt at the small of his back and his cell phone in his pocket, and left his apartment. He waited for a break in traffic then jogged across Twenty-sixth Street and into Rock Creek Park, which ran from the Potomac up to Oak Hill Cemetery, where it blended with Montrose Park and finally the National Zoological Park.
This was a favorite place for him. In Florida he swam in the Gulf and ran on the beach. Here he jogged every morning he possibly could in the park. It was his habit, his routine. Anyone who had him under surveillance for even a short length of time knew it.
More than once in the past few years he’d been attacked while he ran along the river. It was like going fishing. He tossed in the bait and waited for the strike. And just like real fish, the guys wanting to take him out never seemed to learn from each other’s mistakes.
But Otto was right: Sooner or later they’d either send enough people to make the odds overwhelming. Or a decent sniper hiding somewhere across the creek would get lucky with a head shot.
Once he was on the path he took a fighter’s stance, bobbing and weaving as he ran, air boxing, ducking left and right, slipping punches. This too was sometimes part of his routine. It kept him loose. Other joggers had their own styles, and no one thought anyone else was odd. They were all out here for the same thing, to stay healthy. Though he figured that this morning no one else but him would be a target for some hitman.
He crossed under the Rock Creek Parkway so that he could take the path along the creek. A few hundred yards north he came to the P Street Bridge, where he pulled up and shadowboxed in place.
For a moment he stopped moving. Cocking his head he listened to the sounds of the building traffic, under which was the soft gurgle of water over rocks, and somewhere a dog barking, a horn tapping twice.
No one had followed him nor had there been anyone obviously keeping just ahead of him. Nor had he spotted anyone seated at one of the picnic benches or lurking in the trees.