Joshua`s Hammer (4 page)

Gloria and Julie were shoved violently backward, blood

spraying on the mini lids and rear windows of several cars from a dozen wounds. He simply could not believe what he was witnessing. Not now. Not here. It was impossible!

"No!" Trumble cried out. He spun around and threw Danny to the pavement, shielding his son's body with his own. Some people in the next row stopped short, and a woman screamed. Bullets slammed into the cars, sending glass flying everywhere.

The van screeched to a halt about twenty yards down the row and immediately started back, tires squealing.

Trumble hauled Danny to his feet. "Get out of here, Danny! Run!" He shoved his son toward the next row, then scrambled around the front of the car, blocked for the moment from the direct line of fire. He was moving purely on instinct now, adrenalin pumping through his body, his mind numb by what was happening. This was America. Disney World, the safest place on earth. They were home.

All he could think of were Gloria and Julie. He had to get to them now.

He heard the van screech to a halt directly behind the car he was crouched in front of, and he moved to the left fender where he could see the front of the van. A man sat behind the wheel, looking around wildly as if he expected the police to show up at any moment. Another man ran past the car. Trumble could see him through the windows, a deep, black, sick anger welling up inside his gut. They had come after his family all the way from Saudi Arabia. The bastards! The fucking bastards!

"Dad! Dad!" a little boy shouted in desperation, and in his present state it took Trumble a second before he realized that it -was Daniel.

He scrambled back around the front of the car to the other side just as a second man came down the row. He was dark, probably Arab, Trumble thought. The man suddenly crouched down and opened fire with the Kalashnikov, cutting Danny's cries off. None of this was happening. It was all some sort of a terribly bad joke, yet he knew it wasn't so.

The gunman started to swivel around as Trumble leaped

up and swung the heavy plastic shopping bag with Danny's snow globes, connecting solidly with a satisfying thump on the side of the man's head. The bag broke open sending the glass globes flying. The gunman's head cracked open like a soft-boiled egg in a spray of blood, and he was slammed forcefully against the side of the other car, dropping his rifle and collapsing in a heap.

Daniel was down on his back and not moving between the parked cars. The front of his tee shirt was bright red, and a shockingly large pool of blood was spreading out on the pavement. Up the row Trumble could see the bodies of his wife and daughter, and still it made no sense to him. For a heartbeat he was torn between going to them, who he knew without a doubt were dead, or picking up the Kalashnikov and going after the monsters who had done this to his family; now after they had finally begun to work things out.

He turned to the downed gunman as another man ran up from the van, raising his rifle as he came. Trumble knew with utter finality that he had lost, but still he made a try for the rifle lying on the pavement. Something like a freight train slammed into his chest, and an instant later a billion stars burst inside his head as a 7.62mm standard Russian military round plowed through his forehead into his brain.

CHAPTER THREE

Georgetown

Jake's was a glittering restaurant that had just reopened after a terrorist bomb had destroyed it last year, and the al fresco dining area fronting busy Canal Street was even better than before with firstclass

food, an extensive wine list and French waiters. It was Kathleen who insisted that they have an early dinner here before the symphony at the Kennedy Center, and sitting across from her, McGarvey, ruggedly handsome in his tuxedo, could only marvel at his fantastic good fortune. They had divorced twenty years ago because she could not stand being married to a CIA case officer, but they had finally realized that they could no longer live apart because they loved each other. Being here tonight was going to be a closure, and he hoped a beginning, for both of them. He wanted this to work with everything in his being; and maybe he even needed it for his sanity.

Watching her as the waiter poured their wine, his chest swelled. At fifty she was more beautiful in his eyes than she'd ever been. She wore a black, off-the-shoulder Given chy evening dress, a string of pearls around her long, delicately formed neck, her blond hair up in back, and the cheap diamond tennis bracelet he'd given her for their first Christmas on her left wrist. On her it looked as if it had come from Tiffany's. She was aristocratic, and when they'd come in everyone had looked at her.

She smiled and raised her glass. "You look gorgeous tonight, Kirk. I think I like you dressed up like this."

He laughed and raised his glass. "That was supposed to be my line. You're beautiful."

She sipped her pi not grig io then looked at the traffic on the street. McGarvey's car and bodyguard were parked down the block. It was just 6:00 P.M." and still light out, and warm, but she shivered. "I hope you don't mind coming back here."

He put his glass down. "Are you okay, Katy?" He knew exactly what she was thinking, and why she'd wanted to come here. She was trying to erase at least a part of his violent past, which of course was impossible, but maybe being here with him, safe, secure, would help ease some of her fears.

She turned back, a serious expression on her narrow,

finely formed face. "You never told me the whole story. About Jacqueline, I mean. Were you in love with her?"

The question hurt a little, but it was an honest one, and it was something he figured she had to know if they were to put this business behind them. "I thought I was, at least for a little while, but I was sending her back to Paris."

"Why?" she asked, studying his eyes.

"Because I knew that it wasn't going to work," he said softly. "She wasn't going to leave her home, her family, for me, and I wasn't going to leave the Company. Not like that." That drew an almost sympathetic look from her.

"Elizabeth said that she was a good person."

McGarvey smiled sadly. "They got to be friends, but Liz had a tough time of it when we got back to the States."

"She wouldn't talk to me about it, but I knew that the situation was bothering her."

"She wanted you and I to get back together."

Kathleen looked at her hands. She still wore their wedding ring. Even in the bad days, right after their divorce, when she hated him, she'd not taken it off. "I think that our daughter still feels a little guilty about that day, Kirk. But I can't help her unless I know what happened." She was frustrated.

"It's been a year."

"You've not forgotten. You never will. You never forget anything." She'd almost said forgive, and McGarvey caught it.

"Jacqueline wanted to get married. I was supposed to quit the CIA, and go back to teaching somewhere."

Kathleen's chin raised a little. "But you were afraid that she was going to get hurt, being around you. That was it, wasn't it? You did that thing for a long time."

"That I did," McGarvey said. He'd been a CIA field officer for twenty-five years, and he'd killed people in the line of duty. A legion of them, whose faces he saw nearly every night in his dreams. There were a lot of grudges out there looking for a place to happen, so he'd pushed the people he cared about away from him; out of harm's way,

he'd always hoped. But it had never worked, and it certainly hadn't worked with Jacqueline.

They'd been sitting here almost at this exact spot, having drinks, when he told her that it was no good. That she might as well return to Paris, because it was never going to work out for them. She'd started to cry, and McGarvey clearly remembered holding himself back with everything in his power from reaching out for her hand, and apologizing for being such a bastard. It was for the best, her going home. There was no future here for her. She was a French intelligence officer who'd been sent to keep an eye on McGarvey while he lived in Paris, and she'd fallen in love with him. Too bad for her, too bad for all of them, because she'd followed him back to the States and had gotten herself killed.

McGarvey glanced out at the street. Jacqueline had been on the way out of the restaurant when the black Mercedes came barreling around the corner. Something, some sixth sense, had warned him just in time to hit the deck when the bomb had been tossed out the back window of the car, landing right at Jacqueline's feet. He closed his eyes.

Kathleen reached out and laid a hand on his, her touch gentle.

"There was nothing left of her, Katy. Not a god dammed thing. Nothing even remotely recognizable as human." Elizabeth had come up from the Farm with him, and they were all supposed to go out to dinner somewhere that night. She'd been returning from the bathroom when the bomb was tossed, and McGarvey had managed to pull her behind a table where she escaped the. brunt of the massive explosion. Two dozen people had been killed, and twice that many hurt. The visions would not go away.

Kathleen was watching the play of emotions on his face. "You saved our daughter's life, my darling. And you got the people who did that horrible thing, and in the process you saved a lot of other lives. That counts for something, even if you don't want to take the credit."

McGarvey couldn't trust himself to speak. She hadn't

insisted on coming here for herself, she'd pushed him into coming back so that he could deal with it for himself.

Kathleen straightened up. "Time to put it behind you. It's over now." She picked up her wine glass. "To us," she said.

McGarvey wanted to say that the fight was never over; that there would always be some sonofabitch out there with a score to settle, political or religious, or sometimes both, but he raised his glass anyway, and smiled. "To us."

They touched glasses and drank. Her expression darkened for a moment. "I'm sorry I brought it all back for you."

"Don't be. Not tonight," McGarvey said. This time his smile was genuine because he'd managed to push the demons back one more time, and because he had his own reason for coming here tonight.

Her eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

McGarvey opened his menu. "If we're going to make the curtain we'd better order something now."

"Something's going on, I can see it in your face."

"I don't know what you're talking about," McGarvey said innocently. Her father had told him once that keeping a secret from his daughter was impossible.

"You do," she said sternly. She had the / demand look on her face.

The waiter came and refilled their glasses. "Would you care to order now?"

"Not yet," Kathleen said sharply. "Give us a few minutes."

"Of course, madame."

"What's going on, Kirk?" she asked.

"This may be the wrong place for this. I was going to wait until after the symphony. I thought we'd go someplace for champagne afterward." He was suddenly enjoying himself, but he kept a straight face.

"Is this about work?"

No, It's about us." He took a ring box from his pocket and set it in front of her.

She smiled uncertainly, almost afraid to touch it.

"I can't do anything about the past, Katy," he said seriously. "Neither of us can. It's time now to get on with it." He looked at the little velvet box. "It was my mother's." His heart was in his throat.

She slowly opened the box, and her eyes immediately misted over. She looked up, questioningly, and when he nodded, she took the ring out. It was a small diamond in an inexpensive old-fashioned setting. It was all his father had been able to afford on the salary of an engineer working at Los Alamos on the bomb in the forties. But it had meant everything to his mother, and it meant everything to him now.

"Let's start over again, Katy. Do it right this time. Will you marry me?"

A tender look came over her. "I've always loved you, you know. I never stopped," she said. "But I don't think that I ever loved you more than I do right now." She reached again for his hand. "Yes, my darling, I'll marry you, and this time we'll make it work ... together."

Chevy Chase

On the way back to Kathleen's home after the concert, they rode very close together like young lovers in the back of the taxi. McGarvey had dismissed his car and bodyguard for the remainder of the evening, and he was glad he had done it. Tonight was personal, anonymous.

At the house she went up the -walk to open the door as McGarvey paid the cabby, and when he joined her, she'd already started up the stairs.

"Would you like a glass of wine?" he asked.

"No," she said. "Just you."

He locked up, turned off the hall light, and started up the stairs when the telephone rang. Kathleen answered it in the bedroom on the second ring. He could hear her muffled voice, and when he got to the head of the stairs she came

to the bedroom door, a vexed look on her face.

"They're sending your car for you."

"What's happened?"

"It was Otto. He didn't say, except that it was worse than lavender this time."

His heart stopped. Rencke never exaggerated. Lavender was his code word for something very bad. Worst-case scenario.

"I'm sorry, Katy."

"Kathleen," she corrected automatically. "Be careful."

He took her in his arms, and kissed her deeply. "I'll call as soon as I can."

Headlights flashed in the driveway. She shook her head sadly. "You'll never change," she said, and when she saw the look of pain in his eyes it took her breath away. "But I will," she told him.

EnRoute to Langley

He climbed in the back seat of the Cadillac limousine, and his driver, Dick Yemm, immediately pulled out and headed off at a high speed. "Sorry to bust in on you like this, boss. Mr. Adkins held down the fort for as long as he could until we could get a better handle on the situation."

"Okay, Dick what's the story?"

"Alien Trumble was shot to death about six hours ago down in Orlando." Yemm was a very small, compact man, as rigid and as tough as bar steel, but he was shaking.

It was like a ton of bricks had fallen on McGarvey's head, but he held himself in check. "Do we have somebody with Gloria and the kids?"