Free Blood Pact (McGarvey) by David Hagberg Page B

of his thoughts. It was Otto.
    “Do you know a Sarasota PD Lieutenant Jim Forest?”
    “I talked to him at the college after the car bomb. He was sniffing around, pretty sure that I was somehow involved. Why?”
    “He’s been parked down the road from your house for the past five minutes and he just now is pulling into your driveway.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I haven’t fried the CNI’s surveillance gear yet, just in case the fourth operator decides to come back. Anyway I spotted the Chevy Suburban from the camera in front of your house, and ran the tag. Thing is, it’s not a department car, it’s his own.”
    McGarvey immediately thought of the Mercedes parked next door. “Could Sarasota PD have gotten the tag number and ran it the way you did?”
    “First thing I checked, but there was nothing in their logs—leastwise not in their mainframe. Anyway, if they had anything they would have checked next door and found the mess. I can have a cleanup crew there first thing in the morning.”
    “Someone on the seventh floor might take notice,” McGarvey said. The office of the CIA’s director Walter Page was on the seventh floor in the Original Headquarters Building. The man ran a tight ship unlike a lot of previous directors who were only political appointees and not professional intelligence officers like he was.
    “We’ll see,” Rencke said. He ran the Company’s computers and he had more or less carte blanche, unless he did something totally outrageous.
    “Keep tabs on the cops—the county guys too. If it looks like they’re getting involved, I want you to back off.”
    “The Bureau has this. Sooner or later they’re going to put two and two together and come knocking at your door. How do you want to play it?”
    “Depends on who asks and what they ask.”
    “Watch your back tonight.”
    “Will do.”
    McGarvey hung up just as the doorbell chimed, and he went to answer it. He put the pistol in the drawer in the front hall table, flipped on the outside lights, and waited a few moments before he opened the door.
    “A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you?” he said. “Or is this a social call?”
    “Let’s say I’m here as a professional courtesy. Nothing official. May I come in?”
    “Why not?” McGarvey said, and he led the lieutenant through the house to the pool patio. “Drink?”
    “A beer would be okay.”
    McGarvey got a couple of bottles of Dos Equis with pieces of lime. They sat at a small table from where they could look past the gazebo to the dock and out to the ICW.
    “Nice place you have here,” Forest said. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved pullover, a puzzled look on his face. “Thing is we don’t generally get the kind of trouble we had today around here. It’s out of our league, if you want to know the truth.”
    “Has the FBI sent someone from Tampa?”
    “A couple of forensics people are going through what’s left of the Lexus. And someone will be coming down tomorrow to talk to you. Thought you might like a heads-up.”
    “I’ll be in Washington.”
    “I could hold you as a material witness.”
    “Tell Mullholland that I’ll be checking in with Bill Callahan, he’s the deputy assistant director for Counter-Terrorism.” Lloyd Mullholland was the Bureau’s special agent in charge of the Tampa office.
    Forest smiled a little. “Pulling rank?”
    “A little, but I have a couple of ideas I want to check out.”
    “Care to share them with me?”
    “Wouldn’t do you any good, believe me. Because whatever this was all about this afternoon will probably be a job for the Company, or at the very least Interpol. It’d be a waste of your time to get in the middle of it. To start with, the Bureau is going to take over.”
    “Like I said, they already have.”
    “So why are you here, Lieutenant?”
    “Name is Jim. And I know that whoever the guy was in the Lexus came to talk to you about something that got him blown up. I’d like to know what