Assassin km-6 Read online

  Images and numbers and bright white lights blossomed over a map of the entire world, faster and faster, until it was impossible to follow.

  Suddenly the screen went blank, and turned a rich hue of lavender.

  Rencke sat back in his chair. “My telephone here is secure. I’ve set up a backscatter encryption device that’ll work both ways. Whatever telephone you use will be encrypted as well.”

  It was starting again as McGarvey knew it would. There were always alternatives to war, to acts of terrorism, to assassinations. Problem was nobody thought of them until afterwards.

  “I haven’t played fair with you, Mac,” Rencke said. “I knew that you’d met with, and I knew that you would be coming out here to see me.”

  “How?” McGarvey asked.

  Rencke brought up another program. “You’re my friend, so I keep track of you. When your name pops up somewhere, my snoopy systems take note.”

  The CIA’s logo appeared on the screen, followed by the Directorate of Operations designator, and then Paris Station.

  The text of a message sent to Langley from Tom Lynch came up.

  “They know that you met with Yemlin,” Rencke said, as McGarvey stared with disbelief at the name of the addressee. “The SDECE managed to pick up a portion of your conversation, and they handed it over to Lynch. They knew that you were asked to assassinate someone for the Russians. They don’t know who. Their only concern is that it doesn’t happen on French soil.” “Is this a fucking joke?” McGarvey demanded.

  “What?” Rencke asked confused.

  McGarvey stabbed a blunt finger at the screen. “Howard Ryan is the deputy director of operations?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  McGarvey stepped back a pace. It was like the old Santiago days all over again. Everything changed, yet nothing changed.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” he said at last.

  “I’ll be here, Mac,” Rencke said. “Just watch yourself, will ya. But it’s really good news about your parents.”

  TEN

  Paris

  McGarvey returned his rental car to the agency downtown, and walked a few blocks over to the Gare St-Lazare where he got a cab. The early evening was still pleasantly warm and the parks and sidewalk cafes were jammed with people. Under normal circumstances he and Jacqueline would have gone out to dinner this evening. Thinking about it deepened his already dark mood.

  Howard Ryan was a pompous ass, who nevertheless had done a good job for the CIA as its general counsel. He knew his way around political Washington, and during his tenure the Agency maintained the best relationship it’d ever had with the Congress.

  But as a spy he was a meddling fool who didn’t know what he was doing. Eighteen months ago he’d nearly gotten himself killed by an East German gunman because he’d barged into a situation he knew nothing about. McGarvey had even saved his life after Ryan had shot him in the side.

  Afterward Roland Murphy had actually apologized for the man, but McGarvey never dreamed that Ryan would be promoted to deputy director of operations. It was insanity, and he felt sorry for the poor bastards who had to work for him.” Their lives were in danger. He wondered how many of them would have to be killed before someone finally saw the light and sent the lawyer back to New York. It was a chilling thought.

  Another part of McGarvey was already beginning to work out the logistics of assassinating Tarankov, however. The odds “against success were not very good. Maybe even worse than a thousand-to-one.

  Killing someone was very easy, even someone as heavily guarded as a political figure. Rabin’s assassin had simply walked up to the Israeli leader and pumped three bullets into his back, and one of the best security services in the world had been unable to prevent it.

  The hard part was getting away afterward.

  He paid off his cabby a block from his apartment and went the rest of the way on foot as he usually did. Out of long habit he scrutinized the traffic, studied the parked cars and scanned the roof lines for a sign that someone was interested in him. But there was nothing out of the ordinary tonight.

  tights were burning in his apartment windows. He stopped in the shadow of ‘a doorway across the street and watched to see if he could detect any movements. Jacqueline had not officially moved in with him yet, but often she spent nights at his apartment. A few of her things were hanging in the armoire, and in the bathroom. Had their relationship continued to develop it would only have been a matter of time before she gave up her apartment. She’d been hinting about it for the last week or so.

  He figured that she’d be worried about him now, and would be watching the street. But she didn’t come to the window, and after five minutes McGarvey went up.

  Only one light was on in the living room, and the bedroom door was ajar, the television playing inside. The air smelled of mentholated spirits.

  “Jacqueline?” McGarvey called softly, as he moved across the room taking care to stay out of a sight line through the window.

  “In here,” she answered, her voice husky.

  McGarvey pushed open the door and went in. Jacqueline was propped up in bed, a bottle of mineral water and some medicine bottles on the nightstand. “Are you okay?”

  “No,” she said. “I feel like merde. I’ve got a fever, my head is about to explode and every bone in my body aches. Anyway, where have you been all day, I’ve been worried about you.”

  McGarvey went to her side and felt her forehead. Her skin felt clammy. “You are sick,” he said. He picked up the medicine bottles, which contained French over the-counter cold and flu drugs. “Have you been here all day?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I wanted some sympathy. Where were you?”

  “Shopping,” he said, giving her a wistful smile.

  “Oh? What’d you buy?”

  “Nothing much. Too many people, and I wasn’t much in the mood.”

  “Are you still in your black ass from the weekend?” she asked. “If you are, I wish you’d get out of it. You’re not very much fun to be around when you’re like this.”

  McGarvey went to the writing desk, and inspected his failsafes on the cabinet beside it. They’d not been tampered with. He could feel Jacqueline’s eyes on his back. “Printemps was very busy today,” he said. He unlocked the cabinet and took out his Voltaire manuscript.

  “What time were you there?” she asked.

  “About two-thirty.” McGarvey brought the manuscript back to the bed and handed it to her. “Unless you’re a Voltaire fan this may be a little dry.”

  She was watching him, trying to gauge his mood.

  “I saw a couple of people I knew.”

  “Who’s that?” she asked calmly.

  “You, of course. And Colonel Galan. I didn’t know that he was an agent runner, I thought he was a desk jockey running R-Seven.”

  She set the manuscript aside. “How long have you known?”

  “I suspected something from the beginning,” he said.

  “Yet you let me make a fool of myself,” she flared. She tossed the covers back and got out of bed. She was wearing nothing but one of his shirts.

  “At first it didn’t matter, but then I started to care for you and I didn’t want you to go.”

  She’d started toward the bathroom, but she stopped. “Is that why you followed me today?”

  “Something’s come up…”

  “You met with the Russians on Saturday and they want you to kill someone for them,” she blurted. She’d expected him to react, but when he didn’t her eyes narrowed. “You know about that too?”

  He nodded.

  “How?”

  “It’s what I do, Jacqueline. It’s my business.”

  She nodded warily. “Don’t fool around, Kirk. Colonel Galan is a tough man. The Service doesn’t care what you do outside France as long as it doesn’t involve one of our citizens. But we take a very harsh stand on criminal acts inside the country.”

  She was a pretty woman, and bright. He was go
ing to miss her even more than he first thought he would.

  “You could be brought in for questioning,” she said.

  “Yes, I could,” he replied evenly.

  “I don’t think Langley would interfere.”

  “Probably not.”

  “You’d be kicked out of France. Permanently.”

  “I’ve done. nothing wrong.”

  “Man cut!” Jacqueline swore. She ripped off his shirt, tossed it at him, and making no effort to hide her nakedness, strode across the bedroom to where she’d laid her clothes and got dressed.

  “Don’t forget your things in the bathroom,” McGarvey said.

  “Are you kicking me out?” she demanded.

  “No, but you’re leaving.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes glistening, then went into the bathroom, tossed her perfumes and lotions into a cosmetics bag, and came out. “What shall I tell Colonel Galan?”

  “Whatever you’d like. But tell him the truth because he’s heard everything.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “There are three bugs. One in the living room, one in the bathroom and one in the wall over the bed.”

  Some color came to her cheeks. “Take care of yourself, Kirk.”

  McGarvey nodded. “You too, Jacqueline. Je t’embrasse.”

  “Je te J’aussi.”

  After she was gone, McGarvey sat by the window in the living room while he smoked a cigarette and looked down at the busy street. For the most part he’d managed to put thoughts about his parents in the compartment of his mind that he rarely visited. The pain was very great; at times so great he couldn’t stand it. If what Yemlin had told him was true, he would be relieved of a burden he’d carried with him all of his adult life”. After his parents had died in an automobile accident he’d discovered what he thought was proof that they’d spied for the Russians. It had nearly killed him. But now he was being given a reprieve.

  A bus lumbered by on the street below, trailing a cloud of blue exhaust. He’d wanted to talk about this with Jacqueline, but of course that was impossible, considering what she was. A relationship, any sort of a relationship, was the bane of a spy’s existence. A woman was excess baggage, and he’d always thought of them in that vein, which he supposed was one of the main reasons he’d never been able to sustain a relationship. It was an either/or situation, and he seemed incapable of giving up his profession. At least for now.

  When he finished the cigarette” he turned off the television and switched on the stereo to Radio Luxembourg which beamed popular music all over Europe. He turned the volume up so that he could hear it in the kitchen while he fixed a three-egg cheese omelet and made some toast in the oven. He took his time, setting’ a place at the small table and opening a bottle of white wine. He hadn’t eaten much all day, and the food tasted good. When he was finished he read the morning’s Le Figaro, then washed up and put away the clean dishes.

  Jacqueline’s case officer would have notified Colonel Galan as soon as McGarvey returned to the apartment. He would also have notified the colonel when Jacqueline left.

  McGarvey glanced at his watch. If they were going to bring him in fpr questioning tonight they’d be showing up within the next hour or so.

  Starting in the living room he cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, making no effort to mask the noises of what he was doing. In effect he was cleansing the place of Jacqueline’s presence. He’d found out she was a SDECE spy sent to watch him, and he was ridding himself of her.

  In the bedroom he tossed out the few remaining traces of her, including the mineral water and medicines on the nightstand. He did the same in the bathroom, scrubbing out the shower and the toilet, and cleaning the sink and mirrors.

  When he was finished he took the garbage downstairs and stuffed it in one of the cans in the back alley.

  Back in the apartment he sat by the window again and had another cigarette and glass of wine, cleansing his mind, as he had his apartment, of her. In effect she was a prostitute. Her pimp was the French Secret Service, and her John was McGarvey. He’d known that from the start. But as with Marta Fredricks, his watchdog in Switzerland a few years ago, he’d come to have a genuine feeling for Jacqueline despite himself. A feeling, he told himself firmly, that could go nowhere.

  Marta had lost her life chasing after him. He was glad now to be rid of Jacqueline, at least in mat respect. She would be a lot safer away from him.

  Nobody was coming tonight, he decided finally. They weren’t going to arrest him, they were simply going to watch him.

  He went in the bathroom and urinated. When he was done he got up on the edge of the tub and carefully lifted the mechanism and false bottom out of the overhead gravity tank, causing the toilet to flush. He pulled out a flat, plastic-wrapped package from inside, and as the last of the water ran out of the tank, replaced the mechanism so that the tank would refill normally.

  He opened the package on the bed and took out his Walther PPK, two spare magazines of ammunition, a silencer disguised to look like a small flashlight, ten thousand dollars cash in American dollars, British pounds and Swiss francs, a spare set of identity papers, a small plastic squeeze bottle containing hair coloring, and a set of light blue-contact lenses.

  These last he took back into the bathroom, where he cut his hair short with his electric razor, careful to rinse all the hair down the sink, then colored it a light gray. He put in the contact lenses, and when he was finished he looked like a somewhat older man, which matched the photographs in his false papers.

  He took a long, hot shower, made certain that the bathroom was clean, then got dressed in a nondescript pair of slacks, turtleneck and leather jacket. He stuffed the plastic package and half-full hair coloring bottle, his laptop computer and a few extra items of clothing into an overnight bag which he set by the front door. He quickly checked the apartment one last time to make sure everything was shut off, then let himself out, silently closing and locking the door behind him.

  He took the stairs two at a time to the top floor, where from a window at the end of the corridor he studied the shadows in the alley.

  Five minutes later, certain that no one was down there, he climbed out onto the fire escape, and scrambled down to the alley and headed away, not at all sure when or if he’d ever be back.

  Paris

  The Left Bank

  The Hotel Trois Freres was a half-block off the Rue Vaugirad near the Gare Montparnasse. It was small, but clean, and catered mostly to European travelers on a budget who wanted peace and quiet in the middle of Paris for a reasonable price. The back rooms looked down on a pleasant terrace with a small fountain that ran all night. In the morning the hotel served a continental breakfast next door at a patisserie. It served wine in the evening from six until seven. Everyone, staff and guests, was polite but reserved. Europeans were not as a rule as snoopy as Americans.

  McGarvey checked in under the name Pierre Allain, a political writer from Spa, Belgium, with the spare passport and credit cards he kept in reserve.

  A lot depended on Jacqueline, her control officer and Colonel Galan. Galan had asked for help from the CIA. But when Ryan started to push there was no telling how the French would react. They wanted information, but they might resent interference. The French were sometimes touchy on the subject. Officially the CIA did not maintain a presence in France. It was a fiction that every body could live with. Unless somebody started to get too aggressive.

  The SVR, which was the foreign intelligence gathering arm of the new Russian secret service, also maintained a station here. McGarvey was not a hundred percent convinced that Yemlin had been able to mask his true purpose for coming to France. So it was possible that the Russians would be looking for him as well.

  Before he went to bed for a troubled night of sleep, he disassembled his gun, wiped it down, then reassembled and loaded it.

  For better or worse, he was back in the field, no longer a civilian. Anyone could be gunning for him.


  In the morning over breakfast he scoured Le Figaro for any mention that the police were looking for him, then walked a dozen blocks over to the Boulevard St. Michel on the east side of the Jardin du Luxembourg where he called his apartment from a pay phone. When his answering machine kicked in, he entered the code to retrieve any messages. There were none. Next he entered a three digit code which monitored noises in the apartment for thirty seconds. The place was silent. They weren’t coming after him yet. But they would be if for no other reason than to ask him some questions.

  He spent the next few hours before lunch shopping at the big department store, BHV, across from the Hotel de Ville, where he bought a sport coat, a couple of shirts, a couple of pairs of slacks, and a few other items.

  Dropping his purchases back at his hotel, he had a light lunch at a sidewalk cafe, then went over to the Bon Marche, the left bank’s only department store, where he’ picked up a sturdy leather suitcase. He paid for his clothing with the Allain credit card, but paid cash for the suitcase. A visitor from Belgium might buy a sport coat and slacks in Paris, but it was less likely that he would buy a suitcase. It would be presumed he came with one.

  Before he went back to his hotel, he called his apartment again. Jacqueline was on his answering machine.

  “Don’t hang up, Kirk. I want to talk to you. Hit five six and your call will be rolled over to me—”

  McGarvey hung up. He’d made the opening move, and they were countering. The next few days would see how serious they were.

  He went back to the hotel, where the desk clerk, a pleasant looking woman in her early forties, flashed him a smile.

  “Monsieur Allain, it is rare to see a man who enjoys shopping as much as you do.”

  The woman was fluting with him, he decided. “Not really, Madame, it is necessary. For the children, you know. And for my wife. They expect me to send them something from Paris.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Do you travel much, then?”

  “Too much. I miss them.”

  The woman’s eyes went to his left hand, and she smiled. He wore no ring. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”