David Hagberg: End Game

Before each of those assignments, he had gotten the feeling as if a target had been painted on his back and someone was taking a bead on him.

He stopped on the crest of a hill that looked down at the lighthouse. No one was around. Sometimes tourists hiked up here, and he usually treated them nicely, though he’d always turned down their requests for a tour.

Someone from the Company had come to him twice before — last time it was Marty Bambridge, the deputy director of operations. And then as now he’d been emotionally banged up. He’d come here to recuperate, get his brain rewired, so that he could rejoin the civilized world without finding the need to constantly look over his shoulder.

This time he’d run here for two reasons. The first was his last assignment, in which he’d battled a team of terrorists from Germany hired to kill all the SEAL Team Six guys who had gone to Abbottabad to take out bin Laden. And the second was Pete Boylan, a former CIA interrogator who’d moved up to clandestine services, where she’d helped with two of his assignments.

A couple of years ago his wife and daughter had been assassinated right in front of his eyes, and he’d never fully recovered from the trauma. He’d been rubbed totally raw, his emotions naked on the surface. And then Pete had come along — vivacious, talented, no nonsense whatsoever, and dedicated to the same ideals he’d been dedicated to all his life: defending the U.S. and, in fact, defending anyone or any idea from the bullies of the world. From the bin Ladens and the extremists of any stripe.

The fact was that he’d become emotionally attached to her. He’d begun to fall in love, so he had run here. Every woman in his life — including his wife — had lost their lives because of him. Because of what he did, who he was.

He didn’t want it to happen to Pete.

If the two who’d gotten off the chopper had come to see him, it would take them at least a half hour to get up here. Only a narrow dirt path rose up from the town, much too narrow and rocky for a jeep or just about anything else to make it up, unless it was a motorcycle. Most people who came up here made their way on foot.

At the lighthouse he went up to the second level that had been fitted out as a small bedroom suite, and took a shower, changing into a pair of jeans, a light T-shirt, and moccasins. He checked the load on his Walther PPK, in the 9-mm version, stuck it in the waistband of the slacks at the small of his back, and went downstairs.

He opened a bottle of ice-cold Retsina wine, then brought it and three glasses out to the patio. There he could watch the path from town. He settled down to wait.

A long time ago, when he was an air force second lieutenant in the OSI, a colonel told him he would burn out before he was thirty, because he was too angry. He had a chip on his shoulder. Years later, after the Cold War was pretty much over with, a DDO had called him an anachronism. His kind of dedication to what he’d called McGarvey’s Superman complex — truth, justice, and the American way — was sadly out-of-date.

“Fact of the matter is, McGarvey, there’s no room for you any longer. We don’t need you.”

But that was long before 9/11, and as it turned out, the DDO was the one who was no longer needed.

A figure appeared over the crest of the hill about two hundred yards away, stopped for a few moments, and then started down the path.

McGarvey shaded his eyes, but he could not make out who it was — even if it was a man or a woman — though from the way the person moved, he figured she was a woman. And even before she got close enough for him to recognize who it was, he knew it was Pete, and that the other person who’d gotten off the helicopter was probably Otto, and that something serious was going down, or about to happen.

Although he hadn’t brought a laptop or iPad with him, nor had he activated his cell phone, he did walk down to Livadi for lunch at least once a week, if for no other reason than to watch an hour or so of CNN. Over the past several weeks nothing much had been going on in the world he figured he should get involved with. The Euro troubles in Athens and Madrid had not filtered down here; the Snowden case was back in the news, linked with another NSA whistle-blower, and the CIA had come under congressional scrutiny for its domestic operations contrary to law. Egypt was still on fire, as were Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Korea, with the deaths of several top generals — supposedly at the hands of South Korean assassins. And Paris and Brussels.

Floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, a very active tornado season, and three strong earthquakes along the San Andreas fault dominated U.S. news. But none of it rose to the level of sending Pete and Otto all this way to talk to him.

He found that not only was he curious, but he was looking forward to seeing them. Except for a few people in town and the occasional tourist, he’d spoken to no one in three months.

Pete Boylan, in her late thirties, about five-five, wearing a light shirt with sleeves rolled up above her elbows, and baggy khaki trousers that did nothing much to hide her figure, stopped a few feet out. Her pretty, round face was dominated by her vivid blue eyes that were wide and expressive, framed by short dark hair cut almost boyishly, and rich lips that were formed into a dazzling smile.

“Hi, Kirk,” she said, smiling. Her voice was soft, her accent slightly Southern, though she was a California girl.

“Why didn’t Otto come up with you?”

“I asked him to give me twenty minutes before we got to business,” she said. “How are you?”

“Good. You?”

“Wanting to see you, but giving you space. No one likes to be crowded.”

McGarvey got up and she came to him, almost hesitantly at first, not sure of her reception until her took her into his arms and held her close for a long time.

“How are you really?” he asked.

“Lonely as hell, but we have a problem Otto hopes you can help with.”

Otto gave them less than ten minutes before he topped the rise and started down the other side to the lighthouse. “He’s got the bit in his teeth, and nothing’s going to stop him from talking to you,” Pete said.

They’d not had the chance to cover what had been happening over the past few months since McGarvey had left Washington, nor had she brought up the reason she and Otto had made the trip.

She’d been doing mostly office work, catching up on the reports dealing with the SEAL Team Six assignment. The only bright light had been a two-week stint at Camp Peary. She’d engaged in learning urban infiltration tactics, and had given a few lessons in hand-to-hand combat.

“Bruised a few tender male egos, I think,” she said. “Some of the kids took me for granted.”

McGarvey had to laugh, which was a first for him in a long time. It felt good to be with her, even like this, like now.

Otto took his time getting down to them, even though he was in good enough shape these days to have sprinted from town. “Hiya, Mac,” he said, sitting down.

McGarvey poured a glass of wine, which Otto downed in a couple of swallows. He held out his glass for more.

“How you doing out here? Getting bored yet?”

“I was thinking about coming back to Florida to open the house, maybe take a trip on the boat,” McGarvey said.

He had a place on Casey Key south of Tampa on the Gulf Coast, and a forty-two-foot Island Packet ketch, which he and Katy had used to sail to the Keys and twice out to the Bahamas. When he was in for the season, he taught Voltaire at the University of South Florida’s New College in Sarasota, but last semester the dean had suggested he might take a year or two sabbatical. There’d been some trouble connected to him, trouble in which a car had exploded in a campus parking lot, killing not only the driver but two innocent students who’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.