Read Online Blood Pact (McGarvey) by David Hagberg - Free Book Online

Katy and Liz had been killed at Arlington, he’d professed that he wanted out of the business. And just a few months ago he’d said as much to Otto and his wife Louise.
    “I’m getting out,” he’d told them. “It’s over.” But Louise had disagreed.
    “What about the rest of us?” she’d demanded. “What are we supposed to do? Me and Otto?”
    He’d had no answer for her.
    “You have a gift, Kirk. Rare and terrible as it is, we need you.”
    “All the killing.”
    “All the lives you’ve saved. What about them? Or don’t they count?”
    “My wife and daughter were murdered because of my gift, as you call it,” he shot back. “I’m done.”
    “What about your grandchild? Are you just going to walk away from whatever comes her way?”
    “That’s not fair, goddamnit.”
    “No it’s not,” Louise had told him. “But it was the hand you were dealt.”
    And here he was in the middle of something again, and he knew that he could not walk away from it; it wasn’t simply because of the two students who’d been killed, it was because of who he was, who he’d always been.
    Somewhere in the distance, down on the ICW, he thought he heard the sound of a boat motor starting up, but then it moved away, north perhaps, and was lost.
    A portable phone was lying on the table beside the intercept equipment. McGarvey laid his pistol down, got a dial tone, and called Rencke, who answered on the first ring.
    “The number is blocked, are you calling from the house next door?”
    “They set up a surveillance operation. Laser aimed at my house, cameras front, back, and side, infrared detectors, what looks like telephone intercept equipment.”
    “Have you neutralized the opposition?”
    “Two, but there are at least two others.”
    “How long before you have company?”
    “Good question,” McGarvey said. “Matter of minutes, unless I have to shoot someone else.”
    “Okay, all this gear has to run by something. Could be remote. Is there any sort of a computer nearby?”
    “A laptop. Right now it’s showing four angles on my house.”
    “Have you touched it, or anything else?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t,” Rencke said. “And don’t let anyone else near it for five minutes.”
    “No guarantees,” McGarvey said, but Rencke was gone, and the split-screen images were replaced by a list of what appeared to be files, though they were in some script of squares, tiny circles, and other odd marks.
    McGarvey picked up his pistol and went to the door, but no one was in the corridor, though he was certain it wouldn’t take them long to figure out what was going on and come looking for him.
    A cursor moved quickly down the list, and back at the top the first file opened. A screen of a half-dozen photographs of McGarvey coming out of Café L’Europe on St. Armand’s Circle were quickly followed by many more screens of a dozen shots each showing McGarvey at New College, at Macy’s, swimming in the Gulf, working on his sailboat docked in the ICW behind his house. Then the images began to process so rapidly he could no longer make them out. It was clear that the CNI had not only closely monitored his movements, but they had been very professional about it. He’d never spotted them.
    The next file consisted of what appeared to be audio recordings that showed up only as spectrum readouts. Then a very large file of more than fifty gigabytes, possibly of videos, came up.
    “Still there, Mac?” Otto asked, his voice coming from the computer.
    McGarvey picked up the phone. “Yes.”
    “You don’t need the phone now. Are you still okay?”
    “So far. Did you break their encryption system?”
    “Piece of cake. It’s an old military one the Chinese developed about five years ago. But did you see the still shots in the first file?”
    “Yes. They were watching me pretty closely, but I never spotted them.”
    “They probably double- and triple-teamed you. But this doesn’t make any sense. Spain is not our