The Shadowmen Read Online Free

you’re going, you won’t be so beat up.”
    McGarvey had a Remy and Pete a glass of red wine, but they didn’t say much until they were in the air and at altitude.
    â€œIs it the Pakistanis coming after you because of the ST Six op?” Pete asked.
    Pakistan’s military intelligence service had hired a group of German mercs to come to the U.S. and kill all twenty-four of the SEAL Team Six operators who’d taken out Osama bin Laden. McGarvey had stopped them with Pete’s help and with the help of a German intelligence service field officer.
    And there had been another op against Pakistan since then, one that had involved several nuclear weapons that had gone missing. Once again, Pete had been right at his side in the thick of it.
    â€œThat might make sense if someone were coming up on my six,” McGarvey told her.
    â€œNothing that we noticed. But you were the point man; hell, they even had you in prison, and I’m sure heads rolled when you escaped.”
    McGarvey had thought about just that all afternoon, but it didn’t fit with what had been going on in Pakistan over the past several months. The war between the Taliban and the government had intensified, especially since several ISIS advisers had become involved, and the situation in Afghanistan had once again fallen into chaos. The U.S. had stepped in with more military aid and a 500 percent increase in its use of drone strikes.
    â€œIt’s not them.”
    â€œDo you have any prime candidates in mind?”
    McGarvey almost had to laugh despite himself. “A long list of them.”
    â€œOtto had the same thought, and before I left, he had already started to take a look. But most of those people are dead.”
    â€œTheir agencies have survived in one form or another, as have some of their paymasters or their successors.”
    â€œWhoever it is, he’s a sick bastard,” Pete said.
    â€œBut clever,” McGarvey said. “He wanted my attention, and he got it. If he wanted to take me down, he could have found out about Serifos and simply shown up there with a Barrett or some other sniper rifle and do it the easy way. Either that or wait until I got back to Florida.”
    â€œWhy Kathleen’s grave? Why Arlington?”
    â€œIt’s someone who knows my past and knows where I’m vulnerable.”
    â€œBut your wife is beyond his reach.”
    â€œYes,” he said. But you’re not , he thought.
    *   *   *
    Passing through the security checkpoint at Langley and coming up the long, sweeping driveway to the Original Headquarters Building on the CIA’s campus, it struck McGarvey that his life had devolved into three locations—start points as well as end points. Serifos was one, his place in Florida another, and here was the third, in no particular order.
    It seemed like a couple of lifetimes ago since he’d gotten out of the air force and had been recruited by the CIA. Despite his four years with the service’s Office of Special Investigations, he’d been required to take the six-month training evolution at the Farm. Simpler times , he thought. And every now and then, he had to wonder if he’d known then what was ahead of him whether he would have stuck it out. He couldn’t answer the question, of course, except he was who he was. The die had been cast, he supposed, when he was kid growing up in western Kansas. For whatever reason, whatever luck of the genetic draw, he’d been born with a deep sense of fair play and a fierce hate for bullies, traits he’d never outgrown.
    Pete parked in one of the visiting VIP spaces in the executive garage, and they went up to Otto’s suite of offices on the third floor. The three rooms were jammed with state-of-the-art computer equipment—two hundred–inch flat-panel OLED monitors and a table, the glass top of which was a computer screen and across which all sorts of files,