Read Online Retribution (9781429922593) by David Hagberg - Free Book Online Page A

do.
    He’d actually met bin Laden a number of years ago in a cave in Afghanistan, and the man had looked him in the eye and with a straight face lectured that no one was innocent. Infidels—men, women, or children, it made no difference—were all to come to Islam, the one true faith, accept Mohammed into their souls or die.
    Mac had begun years ago as a field officer for the CIA and had risen to special black operations, which was the forerunner of the company’s elite Special Activities Division. He’d worked for a short time as deputy director of operations and had even briefly served as the agency’s director.
    But neither desk job had suited his temperament. He hated bullies; it was as simple as that. In the field he could even the odds, take down the bad guys who preyed on the innocents. Unlike bin Laden he firmly believed that just about everyone who went about their business in a peaceful way, respecting the rights of others, was an innocent.
    His father had instilled only one hard and fast rule in Mac as a child, and that was no hitting. Yet despite that golden rule his father had worked on nuclear weapons development at Los Alamos and Mac had killed bad people.
    The creek and the path crossed under the P Street NW bridge and McGarvey pushed himself. Katy once asked if by running or swimming to just this side of total exhaustion he wasn’t trying to atone for what he thought were his sins, namely, assassinating people?
    He’d had no answer for her then, nor did he think he would have one if she were alive to ask him now.
    A hundred yards later, just at the edge of the Oak Hill Cemetery, Pete Boylan, who’d been doing stretches against a park bench, turned and intercepted him. She wore spandex tights and a white T-shirt that was soaked with sweat, and she looked really good.
    â€œWant some company?” she asked.
    â€œIf you can keep up.”
    She laughed, the sound husky, all the way from deep inside, and warm. “If it gets too tough, I’ll just knock you down and sit on you.”
    They ran for a half a mile or so in silence all the way up to Massachusetts Avenue, traffic already building, where they stopped and did more stretches. Mac felt good, better than he had for the past several months, and the heat and female sweat smells coming off Pete’s body reminded him of a lot of things out of his past.
    â€œYou didn’t come down here just to get your exercise,” he said.
    â€œI work out at the gym on campus and sometimes down at the Farm. I’m here because I need your help.”
    It’s about what he’d figured, not only by her unexpected presence but by the expression on her face; she seemed puzzled and a little pissed off. “Where’d you park?”
    â€œJust off M Street.” It was a little over a mile back the way they had come. “I brought someone with me who I think you might want to talk to.”
    â€œAnyone I know?”
    â€œOtto’s met him. He was involved yesterday with a shooting at the UDT/SEAL museum in Florida.”
    â€œI suppose that you and Otto took whatever it was up to Marty and he ordered you to back off.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œYou’d better explain,” Mac said, and they started back at a slow jog as she went over everything she’d learned from Weisse and what Otto had come up with. He found that he almost had to agree with Bambridge.
    No one in the administration or inside the U.S. intelligence community trusted Pakistan, and especially not the ISI, its secret intelligence service, any further than they could throw the Washington Monument, but the Pakistanis did provide a launching point for U.S. drone strikes on al-Qaeda leaders. Government spokesmen in Islamabad complained loudly about the U.S. military’s violation of their borders, and especially their airspace, but that was all about keeping their public satisfied. In the meantime the United States continued to