Traitor: A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

Traitor is the final explosive adventure in the thrilling Kirk McGarvey series from New York Times bestselling author David Hagberg—perfect for fans of Jason Bourne!

When McGarvey’s best friend, Otto, is charged with treason, Mac and his wife, Petey, set out on a desperate odyssey to clear Otto’s name. Crossing oceans and continents, their journey will take them from Japan to the US to Pakistan to Russia. Caught in a Kremlin crossfire between two warring intel agencies, Mac and Petey must fight for their lives every step of the way.

And the stakes could not be higher.

 

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Release date: April 26, 2022

Publisher: Vibrance Press

Sample

One

Otto Rencke, chief of electronic intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency, parked his aging Mercedes sedan at his spot in the VIP garage beneath the Original Headquarters Building at the George Bush Center for Intelligence, and headed for the elevators to his third-floor suite of offices. It was just eight in the morning, a Friday, and he was worried about his wife, Mary, who’d been running a fever, but insisted that he get to work though he wanted to stay with her.

“I’m going to the Quick Care Clinic, honest injun,” she’d promised, using one of her husband’s phrases.

At five two and only a bit more than one hundred pounds, with a slight figure, she was almost the exact opposite of Otto, who, at nearly six feet, with a barrel chest, towered over her. Her hair was short and honey blond, while his was reddish brown and long, tied in a ponytail. She was a neatnik, but despite her friendly nagging, he was basically a slob, dressing mostly in sloppy jeans and ragged sweatshirts with either the old KGB sword and shield logo or the CCCP initials of the former Soviet Union.

“Call me soon as you see the doc,” he’d said, and he reached down to give her a kiss, but she reared back.

“Do you want to catch whatever it is I’ve got? Just get out of here.”

He’d thought about her on the way up from their house just a few miles away in McLean, and just now as he stepped off the elevator on the third floor he felt a sense of loneliness. Since they’d been married, last year, they had been side by side almost 24/7, and it felt unnatural to be without her.

She’d come over from her office in the New Headquarters Building, where she’d worked as a senior analyst, and joined her husband in his digs, known by just about everyone as the Wolf’s Den. The unwritten sign above the door said: Beware of the vicious beast within.

Among senior officials in the Agency and elsewhere in Washington, and in most of the major intelligence agencies worldwide, Otto was known as an enfant terrible. His above-genius-level knowledge of computers and their advanced algorithms made him either a friend or a foe depending on which side of the fence you found yourself on. But everyone who knew anything about him both respected and feared him. Except for his friend Kirk McGarvey, who was the former director of the CIA, and Mac’s new wife, the former Pete Boylan, who’d been the Company’s chief of interrogations.

“Good morning, dear,” an AI voice said from about eye level in midair as he got to his door.

“Good morning, Lou,” he said. The lock buzzed, and he let himself in to his lair, which consisted of three offices that had once been used by a team that developed legends—background stories—for agents going out into the cold.

Lou was the interface between him and the advanced computer systems he’d once called his darlings, that sampled the databases of just about every major computer anywhere on the planet, looking for what he called anomalies. They were the bits and pieces of intelligence information that were outside the normal day-to-day flow of data.

If there was a gunfight in Syria, routine intel would detail the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces, along with the orders of battle, casualties, and other obvious details. An anomaly could be the presence of a high-ranking officer, under very deep cover, from Russia, or perhaps North Korea, or China. Someone who should not have been there, and whose purpose was unknown.

Linking a series of anomalies together, his programs would come up with an assessment of risks for the U.S. and its allies. The greater the risk, the deeper the color lavender would appear on the many flat-panel monitors.

“How is Mary this morning?” Lou asked.

“She’s going to see a doc and she promised to call.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“A slight fever and cough, probably just a cold.”

“Good,” the program said.

Louise Horn had been Otto’s first wife, but she had been killed in a shoot-out during an operation a couple of years ago. When he’d managed to bring himself back to reality, he reconfigured his darlings, upgrading them to a near-AI level and giving them his dead wife’s personality and voice. Mary hadn’t minded, and in fact she and Louise had known each other, and she and the program were friends. They shared the mission of keeping Otto on track and in touch with the day-to-day bits and pieces of real life beyond his work.

The first room contained three desks, and a number of file cabinets and map cases, filled with printed matter that had never been scanned into any database. The middle room was Mary’s lair, with her computer interfaces. The inner sanctum was Otto’s, with no keyboards, only a one-hundred-inch ultra-high-definition monitor on the wall, and a tabletop monitor about the size of a large pool table. Both surfaces were busy with streams of data, but the background color was only faintly lavender. For the moment all was well with the world.

Otto perched on the edge of the monitor table. “Anything I need to know about?” he asked.

“Beyond background noises, and the usual inquiries, in the past twenty-four hours mostly from State concerning North Korea’s probable continuation of its nuclear program, and the attack on our embassy in Pyongyang, there is nothing of any real significance.”

“Something will come up,” Otto said.

He’d started smoking a couple of months ago, but when Mary had found out, she’d made him quit. He wished he had a cigarette right now.

“It usually does.”

“Where’re Mac and Pete?”

“They are currently on the island of Yakushima.”

“Japan?”

“Yes. Fifty miles south of Kyushu.”

“House shopping?”

“My confidence level is ninety-three percent.”

“I thought they were on Nassau.”

“They are on Yakushima.”

“When did they leave the Bahamas?”

“Seventy-seven hours ago.”

“It’s only ten in the evening there, let me talk to him.”

“Just a moment, dear,” Lou said.

“What is it?”

“There is a message for you from Mr. Taft.” Harold Taft was the director of the CIA.

“Is he on the phone?”

“No. Message is: ‘Mr. Rencke please come to my office at your earliest convenience.’”

“Did he say why?”

“No. Shall I repeat the message for you, dear?”

“Thank you, Lou, but that won’t be necessary,” Otto said, pushing away from the table. “I’ll go now.”

He left his inner sanctum, but at the outer door he stopped. “Did you detect any stress in the director’s voice?”

“It was a text message.”

“My phone didn’t ring.”

“The message was sent directly to me.”

Otto thought it was odd. Not Taft’s style. He walked back to his office. “Show me the message on the monitor, please.”

The text came up, letter perfect. Taft had always been a clumsy typist. “He didn’t send it.”

“No, but it originated in his office.”

“Can you tell me who else is there?”

“Mr. Waksberg and Mr. Kallek.”

Thomas Waksberg was the deputy director of operations, and Harold Kallek was the director of the FBI.

“Can you monitor their conversations?”

“No.”

“You’re being blocked?”

“No one is currently speaking.”

Two

Kirk McGarvey and Pete strolled down the tree-lined path from the Sankara Hotel and Spa to the cabanas overlooking the sea toward the nearby island of Tanegashima, from which the Tanegashima Space Center launched rockets into space. The late September evening was soft, in the midseventies, and only a slight breeze came from the Vincennes Strait separating the two islands.

McGarvey, Mac to his friends, was tall, athletically built, and extremely fit for a man of fifty. His brown hair was thick, his face honest, and his eyes, sometimes gray and at other times green depending on his circumstances, never seemed to miss a thing, which in his line of work as a fixer for the CIA was a definite plus. He was an expert with a wide range of weapons, including his old and trusted friend, the Walther PPK in the rare 9mm version, plus explosives and hand-to-hand combat.

“A penny,” Pete said. Like Mac, she was dressed in resort wear, linen slacks and a light top.

“Serifos felt more like home, but this place could work,” he said. He’d been moody for most of the afternoon, missing something that he couldn’t really get a handle on, though it wasn’t the converted lighthouse on the Greek island that he’d used as a refuge between operations, which most often ended in violence, and casualties at his hand.

After a recent incident that resulted in the deaths of six Spetsnaz operators who’d been sent to assassinate him and Pete, the Greek National Intelligence Service had politely asked them to leave and not return.

They’d compensated him for the cost of the lighthouse and the improvements he’d made—which amounted to nearly $1 million U.S.—and gave the two of them twenty-four hours to pack up and go, leaving the Greek military to clean up the mess.

“Are you asking or telling me?” Pete asked.

He had to smile, though he was getting the odd feeling that someone or something was gaining on them. And still he could not shake his fear for Pete. Every woman he’d ever been involved with, including his wife Katy and their daughter, Liz, had been killed because of who he was, what he did.

He’d started with the CIA just after getting out of the air force, more years ago than he wanted to remember, and after a long psychological workup by some of the best shrinks on the planet, he’d been offered the job as a black operator, an assassin, a program the Company steadfastly insisted did not exist.

And he’d been good, almost too good, and he’d quit the Company. But trouble seemed to follow him wherever he went, starting in Switzerland, where he’d run to hide after an incident in Chile that had gone bad for him. The CIA needed his help, the country needed his help. And he’d come back into the fold as a freelance operator.

“A little of both,” he told her.

“Okay, so what’s eating you? Another premo?”

McGarvey’s premonitions—premos, Otto called them—had almost always come true. The Company shrinks had early on labeled him to be almost preternatural. He had a sixth sense of a sort that made him feel things that other people couldn’t. It wasn’t ESP, but rather an acute awareness of his surroundings, and especially everything in his past—good and bad—that warned him when trouble was brewing somewhere that might come his way.

“I can’t put a finger on it.”

Pete pulled up short. “Now you’re starting to worry me.”

This far from the hotel’s main building, the only light came from low-power lanterns that lined the sand path. Away from the large cities, especially Tokyo, Japan had always been about serenity. Yakushima and the Sankara epitomized this philosophy.

Someone was behind them. Mac could feel it more than hear any specific thing.

He pushed Pete aside and as he turned around reached for the pistol usually holstered at the small of his back.

A slightly built Japanese man, dressed for the city, his tie loose and his suit coat draped over his arm, came out of the darkness and stopped short. “You cannot be armed, Mr. McGarvey, unless you somehow smuggled your Walther through customs at Narita. Of course, that isn’t the case, nor did you meet with anyone who could have given you a pistol.”

McGarvey let himself relax a little.

The man was a cop or an intelligence agency officer, he had the look, but he smiled as he took out an identification wallet and opened it.

“I am Enki Fumiko,” he said. “Officially I’m badged with the prefectural police department’s security bureau.”

“In reality you work for the Cabinet Secretariat, I assume?”

“Actually, military intelligence. I’m Colonel Enki and I was sent down from Tokyo to have a chat with you and Mrs. McGarvey, but only after it became apparent that you were looking at properties to buy here on Yakushima.”

“Which is uncomfortably close to Tanegashima,” McGarvey said.

“That does not concern us. Serifos does. May we talk?”

“Here or back at the hotel?”

“Let’s walk along the beach, no one is there at the moment, and I won’t take up much of your time.”

McGarvey exchanged a glance with Pete, whose expression was neutral, and they headed the rest of the way down the path, which led to a spectacular beach with open cabanas under thatched roofs.

“This is a beautiful island, Mr. Enki, will we be allowed to buy property here?” Pete asked.

“At this point I can give you only a provisional yes, that will depend greatly on your cooperation this evening.”

“What do you need?”

“What happened on Serifos to cause the government to ask you to leave?”

“Someone tried to assassinate us twice in Georgetown, and once at our home in Florida, so we tried to get out of the way on the island,” Pete said.

“Who and why?”

“It was a personal vendetta,” McGarvey said.

Enki pulled up short. “A Russian? North Korean? Pakistani?”

“Actually an American with a serious amount of money who was probably playing a game,” McGarvey said.

“‘The Most Dangerous Game,’ I read the short story in English class when I was ten,” Enki said. “And you hoped that island would eliminate any possible collateral damage.”

“The Greek government didn’t see it that way,” Pete said.

“Neither would we have.”

“Which is why you came here to interview us.”

“We would like a reasonable assurance that such an incident wouldn’t take place on this island. We value our serenity, especially in places such as this. Can you guarantee such a thing?”

“From the same man who attacked us?” McGarvey asked.

“For a start.”

“Then yes, I can give you my word that he wouldn’t be coming after us here or anywhere else for that matter.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because we know who he is, and he knows that we know.”

“Then arrest him.”

“We don’t have the proof,” Pete said. “Yet.”

Enki was troubled, but he nodded. “I’ll take your word that this particular man would be no further threat. But trouble does seem to follow in your footsteps, Mr. Director.”

“That’s something I can’t help,” McGarvey said, and he was about to say that they would be leaving Japan first thing in the morning, but Pete interrupted.

“It’s something that we can’t help, Mr. Enki. If you want assurances that trouble won’t follow us here, we can’t give it to you. But if another assignment comes up, it will almost certainly not involve Japan. Can you give us your assurance that no one in Japan will be gunning for us? Because we value serenity as much as you do. It’s one of the reasons we’re here.”

“And the other reasons?”

Pete smiled. “It’s beautiful, the people are friendly, and the food is terrific.”

“Like Serifos?” Enki asked.

“Better.”

“More isolated, fewer tourists, and therefore easier for us to keep a close eye on who comes here,” Enki said. “I sincerely hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Three

Otto did not go directly up to the director’s office. Instead he went across the enclosed walkway, past the Kryptos sculpture in the courtyard, to Mary’s old office in the New Headquarters Building.

Lately she’d been paying visits with her analytical group. “Working on something you might find interesting,” she’d told him a couple of weeks ago.

His ex-wife had been very smart, one of the leading experts on satellite intelligence gathering and data interpretation, but Mary was even brighter. The way she approached a difficult problem, how she broke it into pieces manageable enough to be understood, was even better than most computers. And over the months they’d been married he’d come to rely on her.

Toni Mulholland, who’d been Mary’s number two and had been promoted to chief analyst, came from the bullpen where the team of five foreign intelligence service eggheads met once or twice a day to hash out whatever issue was pressing at the moment. She was an attractive curvy woman in her midthirties.

She was startled. “Is it Mary?” she asked.

“She’s got a bug, but it’s nothing serious,” Otto said. “I just stopped by to see what you guys were working on. She pestered me this morning to find out.”

Toni’s left eyebrow rose. “Bullshit, Otto. This is me you’re talking to. What’s up?”

Sometimes Otto was so wrapped up in his own world that he forgot a lot of people in the Company were seriously smart. In fact, there were more Ph.D.s per capita on this campus than at Harvard. He bobbed his head. “Taft asked me to come up to his office. Tom Waksberg and Kallek are with him.”

“They’ve probably got a problem they want you to sort out. What’d Lou have to say?”

“Nothing.”

“She didn’t know?” Toni said. “That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s why I came here to talk to you first.”

“She hasn’t developed a glitch, has she?”

“No, but I have a feeling that some of her inputs have been blocked.”

“Have her run a diagnostic.”

“If she’s blocked, it wouldn’t matter right now,” Otto said. “Whatever’s going on, and I have a feeling something is going on, will be humint, and out of the dataverse.” “Humint” was CIAspeak for human intelligence—face-to-face intel methods—versus intel information in the data universe.

“What’s going on that’s made you come over here before you go upstairs?”

“Do you have anything tickling your fancy on the threat board? Anything that catches your eye? Something odd?”

“Other than the usual crap with the DPRK, Iran, Pakistan, the Ukraine, and the shitstorm going down in Venezuela, nothing unexpected,” Toni said. “What’s your color?”

“Barely lavender.”

“But something has you worried. Have you talked to Mac?”

“He and Pete are over in Japan looking for something to buy. I didn’t want to bother them because you’re probably right, Taft has a problem he needs help with.”

“Tom is there, which could mean we have an internal problem. But if the FBI’s involved it’s more than us. Maybe something to do with Mac?”

“I have nothing from the Serifos aftermath, but a couple of Bureau people got caught up in the middle of it, and one of them was shot to death.”

“I haven’t picked up any complaints from the Greeks other than Mac and Pete’s expulsion,” Toni said. “But maybe Kallek wants to have a face-to-face and he’s afraid that Mac would tell him to screw himself, or something to that effect. And they want your help to rein him in.”

It was the Marty Bambridge effect. Bambridge had been the deputy director of operations, sometimes called clandestine services, and he and McGarvey had gone seriously head-to-head on more than one occasion. In the end, Bambridge had been involved in a plot to bring down the president, and had died in a shoot-out when the operation went bad. Because of McGarvey and Pete. And now many of the upper-echelon officers in the CIA and over at the FBI walked with care lest they cross McGarvey. No one wanted to end up in McGarvey’s gunsights like Bambridge had.

Otto was troubled. “Probably.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I’ll find out,” Otto said.

Toni stopped him at the door before he went out. “Look, you’re the one guy in this organization that no one is going to screw with. Everyone’s afraid of the havoc that you and Lou could wreak.”

“Your lips to God’s ears,” Otto said, but he wasn’t sure.

On the way back across to the OHB, he thought about stopping at his office first to reinforce Lou’s passwords, just in case, but they were already strong. He’d once worked out that even a Cray working full-time would take a half century to break in. And that was assuming Lou wouldn’t fight back to protect herself.

---

Taft’s secretary looked frightened when Otto walked in. But she nodded toward the door to the DCI’s office. “They’re waiting for you.”

Taft’s office was not terribly big, but the windows gave a nice view of the woods behind the OHB. The director was seated on a couch in front of a coffee table on the other side of which Waksberg and Kallek sat on a matching couch—almost the twins of the ones in the Oval Office across the river.

A side chair was placed at the end of the coffee table facing the three men, who looked stern, even a little frightened, Otto thought.

Taft motioned for him to take a seat.

“Do we have a problem, Mr. Director?” Otto asked, sitting down.

“Are you armed, Mr. Rencke?” Kallek asked. He was a stern-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair, who looked and acted the part of a high-end New York banker.

“No. Are you?”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t the answer Otto had hoped for, but seeing the looks on their faces, especially Taft’s, he wasn’t surprised. “Lou?” he said.

There was no answer.

He took out his cell phone and tried to connect with his office, but the call wouldn’t go through.

“This room has been shielded,” Waksberg said. He was a portly man whose clothes never seemed to fit. “We had some good people figure out at least that much. And now that you’re here, power to your offices has been cut. You’re on your own, Mr. Rencke.”

“We’ll see how long that’ll last. But in the meantime, are you guys going to tell me what this is all about, or do I have to guess?”

“Give me your phone, please,” Waksberg said.

“Fuck you,” Otto said, and he started to rise, but Taft motioned him back.

“Believe me, this isn’t easy for any of us,” the DCI said. “But I promise you that you’ll have a full hearing.”

“On what?” Otto asked, sitting down.

“We’re in the early stages of the investigation, and we have a long way to go,” Waksberg said. “How long will depend entirely on how willing you are to cooperate with us and with the Bureau that has taken the lead, ...