High Flight

ONE Kirk Collough McGarvey knew that someone was coming for him again. Wishful thinking or not, he's had the feeling all through the fall semester where he taught eighteenth-century literature at Milford College on Delaware's east coast. At the odd moment he would stop in mid-sentence and glance at the door, half expecting to see someone there. Or he would pick up the telephone in his apartment, certain that it had rung, but there'd only be the dial tone. It had been three and a half years since he'd last had any contact with the CIA, or with anyone from official Washington, and nearly that long since he'd spoken with his ex-wife, Kathleen, although their only daughter, Elizabeth, now twenty-one, came down from New York several times a year to see him. "What's the matter, Daddy?" she asked at Thanksgiving. But he had no answer for her. Nervousness? Simple boredom? Once a field man always a field man, that was the drill, wasn't it? Pushing fifty, he wasn't over the hill yet. He was a tall, muscularly built man, with a thick shock of brown hair starting to turn gray at the temples, and wide, honest eyes, sometimes green, at other times gray. He ran ten miles and swam five every day, rain or shine. He worked out with the college's fencing team to maintain his coordination. And once a month he spent an afternoon at a local gun club's firing range. He'd not lost his edge, but as the CIA's general counsel, Howard Ryan, told him in Murphy's office three and a half years ago, he was an anachronism. "You're a man who has outlived his usefulness," the lawyer said. "The Soviet Union is no more. The bad guys have packed up and quit. Time for the professional administrators and negotiators to take over and straighten out the mess. Thanks for a job well done, but we no longer need shooters." Bad times, he thought, getting out of his car He headed over the sand dunes to Slaughter Beach on the bay. It was a few minutes alter three, the day cold and blustery. At the top of the last rise he stopped to watch the whitecaps march down the bay in regular rows. The wind was gusting to thirty-five knots. Spits of snow drove out of a leaden sky, and he could pick out the shape of a southbound container ship well into the bay heading for warmer climes. More years ago than he wanted to remember the Company had sent him to Santiago to kill a general who'd been responsible for hundreds of deaths in and around the capital. But his orders had been changed in midstream without his knowing about it. After the kill he'd returned to Washington a pariah. He'd run then to Switzerland until he'd been called out of retirement for a brief but particularly nasty assignment. No one thanked him. There were no welcome-home parades, no presentations at the White House. He was paid and went to ground next in Paris until his call to arms had come again, as he knew it would. Ryan was just as wrong three and a half years ago as he was now. The world may have become a much safer place with the demise of the Soviet Union as a superpower, but there was still a need for a man willing to kill. A man, McGarvey sometimes thought of himself, without a past. Or, more accurately, a man driven by a past from which he was trying to escape. Looking back toward the highway he watched until the blue Ford Taurus pulled onto the beach access road, then he headed the rest of the way down to the water's edge. The beach was deserted, as he knew it would be, and as soon as he was out of sight of the parking area, he transferred his Walther PPK automatic from the holster at the small of his back to his jacket pocket. It was possible that someone had come from Langley to offer him anHagberg, David is the author of 'High Flight ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780765357427 and ISBN 0765357429.