Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

  “Merci,” Najjir said. “We’ll be right down.” He pocketed the phone.

  “Is the driver also on your payroll?” Pete asked.

  “No, so I’ll have to insist that you behave yourself. If need be, I’ll kill both of you and take a cab to the airport.”

  “And the aircrew? Strangers too?”

  “Fortunately for me, no. So once we’re aboard and in the air you can scream your bloody head off. In fact, I’ll even remove your pacifier.”

  “Kind of you.”

  Najjir held out a hand. “Shall we go, my dear?”

  Pete got up.

  Najjir stepped aside for her. When she was at the door, he went back and moved the small coffee table away from the couch she’d been seated at. “Really quite clever of you,” he said. He scuffed out the word bourget she’d painstakingly marked with her toe in the nap of the rug.

  Her spirits sank and she considered flinging open the door and racing down to the street to scream for help. But she had no doubt she would not get that far.

  “Did you leave another clue at the église?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Well, if you did, he either didn’t see it or he’s too stupid to know what it meant.”

  Pete managed to smile. “I guess you’ll find out about it. In an up-close-and-personal way.”

  * * *

  The car waiting on the street was a black Citroën DS 5, the windows deeply tinted. The driver, a pleasant-looking Frenchman in his late fifties or early sixties, dressed in a dark business suit, opened the rear door for them.

  “Good afternoon, monsieur and mademoiselle.”

  “Good afternoon,” Najjir said pleasantly. He handed Pete into the car and got in after her, slipping his right hand into his jacket pocket.

  The driver got behind the wheel and they took off. “The airport is just a few minutes away, and your aircraft is standing by on the terminal three ramp at Signature’s facility.”

  “You’re from the FBO?” Najjir asked.

  “Yes, sir. Your flight plan for Istanbul has been filed and cleared.”

  “Very well.”

  Pete’s heart sank again. Istanbul was a city teeming with rat warrens of narrow streets and narrower back alleys. Unless Mac could somehow stop the plane before it took off, or have it met at Atatürk Airport, the chances of him finding her would be very slim.

  But then it occurred to her that Najjir wanted Mac to find them. But not until he was settled somewhere of his own choosing. He was going to pick his battlefield—something he’d likely do with great care.

  When he was set he would get word to Mac: “Here I am with your woman. Come and get her.”

  * * *

  “Saint-Ouen is a very large place,” Dominique said on the way up to the district. “And usually very busy this time of day at the Marché aux Puces.”

  She’d not called her boss, who’d probably instructed her to go along with whatever McGarvey wanted, provided he did get into another gun battle.

  “So what do you want me to do, monsieur, drive around looking for something?”

  McGarvey got Otto on the phone and put it on speaker so Dominique could listen. She might have some ideas. “Wherever they are in Saint-Ouen, it’ll only be a staging area,” he said. “They’ll either have another car to get them out of Paris or they’re booked on a train for somewhere to a private jet.”

  “C’mon, Mac,” Otto said. “Along with several thousand other people leaving Paris this afternoon, or tonight, or first thing in the morning.”

  McGarvey wanted to lash out at someone or something. At himself. He felt so goddamned incompetent. The situation at the tower had been so blatantly obvious, and yet he’d rushed off, leaving Pete behind to handle the evacuation.

  If he lost her it would be all over for him. It was as simple as that. He didn’t think he would ever be able to look at himself in a mirror again.

  “It’ll be an apartment in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood.”

  “You’re profiling,” Dominique said half under her breath, but McGarvey heard it.

  “You’re goddamned right I am,” he told her. “Either a short-term rental—starting a couple of months ago—or a place that hasn’t been occupied by the original renters for that same period.”

  “I’m feeding it to my darlings.”

  “They split up, so it’ll be the woman as a lone traveler—maybe London, considering her accent—plus the guy and Pete. Do you have an ID on either of them yet?”

  “Still working on it, Mac. But listen—”

  “I’m betting that the man is Middle Eastern, or raised somewhere in the region. Maybe Saudi Arabia, which was my first impression. So if he wants to get home with Pete in tow—and she’ll be a major pain in the ass to him every step of the way—I’m betting that he won’t try to get out of France by train. He’ll take either a car or a plane. I’m pretty sure that if it’s by air, it won’t be commercial.”

  “From Saint-Ouen, Le Bourget would be the nearest. And that airport is completely noncommercial.”

  “Is the apartment worth a try?”

  “Waste of time, and so will be the train stations,” Otto said. He had the bone in his teeth now. “Unless the son of a bitch wants to hunker down, which I seriously doubt he does, it’ll be by private jet. I’ll get back to you.”

  When McGarvey hung up, Dominique was on her cell phone, asking someone for private jet flight plans filed from Le Bourget.

  “I’m betting eastern routes,” he said.

  She glanced at him.

  “La Tour Eiffel is French, not American,” she told him.

  Dominique’s contact was back seconds before Otto. “Do you have a tail number?”

  “C H three seven three,” she repeated. “Swiss.”

  Otto came on. “It’s a Gulfstream 650, seven-thousand-mile range.”

  “Atatürk, Istanbul,” Dominique said.

  “I heard that. But what the Frogs might not know yet is that the aircraft is registered to Awadi bin Abdulaziz, the Saudi minister of foreign finance and communications.”

  “It’s rolling,” Dominique said.

  “Can you stop it?” McGarvey asked.

  “Not without creating an international incident. No, sir.”

  NINETEEN

  Dominique drove them over to the Signature Flight Support facility at Le Bourget and showed her government ID to the girl at the front desk, who telephoned for the general manager.

  A short, beefy man without a suit coat, his tie loose, came from a back office. “Claude Renet,” he introduced himself, examining Dominique’s ID. “How may I be of service?”

  “A Gulfstream with a Swiss registration left for Atatürk just a few minutes ago,” Dominique said.

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “I would like to see a crew, passenger, and luggage manifest.”

  Renet sneered. “Come back when you have a court order.”

  McGarvey grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt front and bodily shoved him back against the counter. “I’m not here to fuck with you, monsieur,” he said in French. “But unless you answer the lady’s question I will hurt you very badly. Am I clear?”

  “Who the hell are you? You’re not French.”

  “Actually he’s an American CIA officer who is being kicked out of France for murdering at least five men,” Dominique said. “But he’s not leaving until later this afternoon. If he happens to kill another one, he’s still being kicked out.”

  “Merde,” Renet said, but he nodded. “A man and a woman. No baggage or packages.”

  McGarvey let go. “Didn’t you think that odd? Two people on their way to Turkey with no luggage?”

  “My job is to run this FBO by serving the needs of our obviously upscale clientele, who do not take kindly to questions.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  “The man was taller than you, dark features. The woman was much shorter, she had red hair, and it looked lik
e she might have been in an accident.”

  “Names?” Dominique asked.

  “The man identified himself as Giles Worley.”

  “The woman?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You didn’t check their passports?” Dominique asked.

  “Not my job. That’ll be up to the Turkish customs authorities.”

  “Thank you,” Dominique said.

  “I’ll file a complaint,” Renet said.

  “It is your right.”

  “Did they list Istanbul as their final destination?” McGarvey asked.

  The girl behind the counter was studying her computer screen. “Oui,” she said, looking up.

  “Thanks for your help,” McGarvey said, and he and Dominique started to leave, but he turned back. “I was a little rough, but I needed some answers. The woman with the red hair is very important to me.”

  “I’m still going to file a complaint,” Renet said.

  McGarvey nodded. “I would if I were you. Goddamn Americans.”

  “Salopard,” the FBO manager said half under his breath.

  “For your information, the people this man killed were terrorists trying to destroy la Tour Eiffel,” Dominique said. “He and the woman, who is being kidnapped, were the ones who saved the tower for us. You might give that some thought.”

  * * *

  “It’s couple of thousand kilometers to Istanbul, so time is on our side,” Dominique said on the way back to DGSE headquarters. “We can have authorities waiting for them when they land.”

  “And hold them?” McGarvey asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Thanks for sticking up for me in there.”

  “But?”

  “They might not stop at Istanbul. It’s possible they’ll be returning to Saudi Arabia. You heard who owns the airplane.”

  “We can have people meet them at King Khalid Airport.”

  “They won’t be landing in Riyadh either. It’ll be a private strip somewhere.”

  “One with a long enough runway to accommodate such a jet,” Dominique said. “Narrows the list.”

  “Not enough,” McGarvey said. “I have to go there.”

  “Once you return to Washington you will be free to go wherever you’d like, as long as it’s not back to France.”

  “There’s no time,” McGarvey said. It was taking everything within his power to control himself, to stop from disabling the young woman, dumping her somewhere, and making his way back to Le Bourget to hijack a plane and crew.

  It was crazy, of course, but he’d never felt so goddamned helpless, his back against the wall, just about all of his options gone, as he did right at this moment. The image of Pete, nearly naked, strung up like a farm animal ready for slaughter, would not leave his head.

  As they passed under the Périphérique he phoned Otto again and brought him up to speed. “I have to get to Istanbul, and possibly Riyadh, ASAP. Have we got anything here in France or nearby that I can borrow?”

  “Nothing. I’ve already checked. That includes Ramstein. But you’re right about the Saudi connections. The guy is probably Karim Najjir. Used to work in special operations for the GIP before he was kicked out for excessive force. I’m still working on getting the whole story, but if the Saudis cut him loose it must have been bad.”

  “What’s your confidence level?”

  “Seventy-five percent, give or take. But if it’s him, he’s had a lot of plastic surgery,” Otto said. “But listen, kemo sabe, the big deal with this guy—and it may end up being one of the reasons he was kicked out—is that he’s been in bed with the SVR.”

  “The Russians?”

  “Yeah, makes you think. Anyway, if it’s our guy he sometimes travels under the British work name of Worley.”

  “Giles Worley,” McGarvey said. “It’s the name he used to charter the Gulfstream at Signature. What about the woman at the tower with him?”

  “Nothing so far. She might have been just a one-off hire for the op. But I’m still working with the DGSE to come up with IDs on the bombers at the tower, and the guys you took down in the church.”

  “Assuming just for a minute that the Russians are involved, what would make them try such a stupid trick as bringing down the Eiffel Tower? The blowback would be strong enough to topple even Putin.”

  “If we find the proof, which I suspect we won’t,” Otto said. “And if we try to accuse them of having a hand in it, they and the Saudis will claim that it was a rogue operation.”

  McGarvey glanced over at Dominique, who was watching him out of the corner of her eye as she drove. In a distant way, at that moment, she reminded him of his daughter, Elizabeth. She and her husband had been CIA agents. They’d been killed in the line of duty, and their daughter, Audrey, was being raised by Otto and his wife, Louise.

  He didn’t know how much more he could take. But to make matters far worse, each time he tried to bring up his wife, Katy’s, image—she’d been killed in a car bomb explosion meant for him—he couldn’t do it. And even when looking at photographs of her he had a hard time recalling the good moments they’d had together. Sitting in the gazebo behind their house on Casey Key on Florida’s south Gulf Coast. Sailing in the Bahamas. Concerts at the Kennedy Center and other places in Washington and New York. Katy loved ballet, but he liked symphonies, and some opera, especially Italian—Aida, Madame Butterfly, and Turandot. Ballet was too stylized for him, and those operas were too sad for her. But they had made the compromise, and it had been easy.

  “I need to get out of here,” he told Otto. “One way or the other.”

  “I’ll take it upstairs right now,” Otto said.

  TWENTY

  Otto phoned Alice Jenkins, who was Marty Bambridge’s secretary, to ask for a meeting with the deputy director of Central Intelligence. Marty had always been a pompous ass, though there were times when he’d acted almost human, even when McGarvey’s name came up. Alice, on the other hand, was an older woman—actually a grandmother of three—who was an experienced hand in the Company and had fond memories of working for Mac.

  “He’s been expecting your call,” she said. “And he’s in a mood.”

  “He knows, then?”

  “He got a call from Lacoste an hour ago.”

  Claude Lacoste was the deputy director of the DGSE—the man to whom Marty had given his word that neither McGarvey nor Pete would enter France with sidearms.

  “On my way.”

  “Have you talked to Mac?”

  “Just got off the phone with him.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Serious,” Otto said.

  * * *

  Marty’s office was on the seventh floor, adjacent to the director’s suite, a small private conference room between them. This floor in the Original Headquarters Building was never bustling. It’d always seemed to Otto to be more like a church on any day but Sunday rather than the executive floor of America’s primary intelligence service.

  Alice passed him straight through with a smile for good luck. She was one of Otto’s favorite people in the Company, because she was completely without guile. She was who she presented herself to be, nothing more and nothing less.

  Bambridge, who’d always been an officious little man who never seemed to smile and who always seemed to be worried about something, looked up from behind his desk when Otto walked in.

  “I hope that you’re bringing good news and not another update on the body count.”

  “What’d Lacoste tell you?” Otto asked, sitting down. He was dressed in his usual tattered jeans and his CCCP sweatshirt with the sword-and-shield logo of the old KGB. He dressed that way at work, over his wife’s objections, because he wanted to make an antiestablishment statement. Though in deference to Louise his hair was tied in a neat ponytail.

  “Only that McGarvey and Ms. Boylan were right in the middle of a terrorist attempt on the Eiffel Tower. Both of them were armed and McGarvey’s being sent back in a couple of hours.”
r />   “What did he tell you about Pete?”

  “Nothing.”

  “She’s been kidnapped, and there’s a good chance that she’s being taken to somewhere in Istanbul on the way to Saudi Arabia.”

  Marty said back. “I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Bring me up to date, please. I need to know where we’re at before I take it to Gibson.”

  Edward Gibson, who’d retired as a Marine Corps four star, had been appointed by the new president as director of the CIA. In part it had been because the president wanted someone with a strong hand to run the agency, and hopefully to heal the rift that had occurred shortly before the president had taken office. The man was tough—inside the Company he was being called Ironsides—but he was fair. He wanted action and results but he was willing to listen to all sides of an issue. There wasn’t an ounce of touchy-feely in the man. If you took something to him, you’d best have all your ducks in a row.

  Otto quickly ran through everything that he’d learned from his darlings, and from Mac himself, including the probable identity of Karim Najjir, who almost certainly had ties with the Russians.

  “Gibson certainly won’t give much credence to a Saudi–Russian alliance.”

  “They’ve agreed on more than one occasion to limit oil production.”

  “Different matter completely,” Marty said. “And you know damned well that no one in their right minds—not the Saudis and definitely not the Russians—would attack something like the Eiffel Tower.”

  “The Saudis almost certainly had something to do with our Nine Eleven, and just last year the downing of the pencil tower in New York.”

  “Altogether different.”

  “The Gulfstream taking Pete to Saudi Arabia is owned by Awadi bin Abdulaziz, the deputy minister of foreign finance and communications.”

  Marty tried to dismiss the fact with a wave.

  “Mac wants to go after her.”

  “To Saudi Arabia?” Marty shouted, nearly coming out of his seat. “Are you out of your mind? Because I sure as hell am not going to march next door and try to tell the director that this is what the agency should do.”