The music was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. It came to Schermerhorn all of a sudden, and he knew who the Cynic was. But like the others, he didn’t know why. And he couldn’t understand how this was happening in broad daylight.
“Despite your faults, all of you were so lovely. Maybe not so young, some of you, but naive.”
The day they’d all feared had finally come.
“In the end you guys were extra clever: you illuminated the new cache, and I wanted to know the GPS coordinates and the password, but that will have to wait for Alex.”
Schermerhorn was weak. He couldn’t exactly make out what the Cynic was saying to him, but he could still hear the music, maybe coming from a small player in the man’s breast pocket.
And then the Cynic began to eat his face, starting with his lips, and though Schermerhorn could still feel pain, he couldn’t cry out, nor could he even try to push back away from the horror of it.
PART
THREE
And God said, lwet trher be light.…
FORTY-SIX
It was early evening, Washington time, and Maggie Jones, their flight attendant, came back and touched McGarvey on the shoulder. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep.
He looked up. “Yes?”
Pete was curled up in one of the wide leather seats near the back of the cabin, wrapped in a blanket, a pillow under her head.
“There is a call for you. The captain says you may use the aircraft’s phone system; it’s in your console.”
“Thanks.”
“May I get you something, Mr. Director?”
“How far are we from landing?”
“One hour.”
“You might wake Ms. Boylan and see if you can come up with something to eat—I suppose breakfast would be best.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was Otto on the phone, and as soon as McGarvey picked up, he switched on his backscatter encryption program.
“Schermerhorn was killed less than two hours ago. I just got off the phone with Blankenship. The entire campus is in a serious uproar this time. Somehow the White House finally got wind of what’s been happening, and the president has sent for Walt.”
“Tell me,” McGarvey said.
Pete had been awakened by the tone of McGarvey’s voice. She came forward and sat down across from him.
McGarvey put the call on speakerphone.
Otto relayed everything Blankenship had told him, including the business with the three flash bang grenades hidden in the woods, either timed to go off at three-minute intervals or remotely detonated.
“Could be the bastard set the grenades and got into the house hours ago—maybe right after Alex left and you and Pete went after her.”
“She didn’t double back, so it wasn’t her,” McGarvey said.
“George?” Pete suggested. “Could be she’s led us on a wild goose chase so George would have an open field.”
“Blankenship said he had four of his guys on the outside and another two in the house,” Otto said. “Makes him damned good.”
“And when the first grenade went off, no one thought to go upstairs to check on Schermerhorn,” McGarvey said.
“They were focused outside,” Otto said. “And after he made the kill—there was blood everywhere—he apparently took a shower and changed clothes.”
“Find out who passed through the gate after that time; maybe something will pop out.”
“Already did it. Nada. The bastard could still be on campus.”
McGarvey glanced at Pete. She shrugged.
“She could have run to save her own life because she knew George would be coming after her and Schermerhorn,” he said. “But why specifically Paris?”
“Good city to get lost in,” Otto said. “Obviously, she wanted to draw you out. Maybe she knew your background in France and counted on the DGSE to slow you down.”
“But not to meet George, unless she knew he was going to kill Schermerhorn and she was going to Paris to wait for him to join her. Drawing me and Pete off helped.”
“Or unless it was someone else,” Otto said. “Someone we don’t know about. Another Alpha Seven member. Someone connected with the mission. Someone who is desperate enough to make sure that whatever was buried in Iraq stays hidden.”
“Back where we started from,” Pete said.
“We still have Alex,” McGarvey said. “And if there is a third person, we also have George.”
“A Frenchman?”
“At this point I’m betting Mossad.”
“It would fit with what I’m thinking,” Otto said. “But at this point, only Alex and George know what’s buried out there and where it’s buried.”
“Schermerhorn knew,” Pete said.
“So did everyone else on the team. It’s what got them killed. Someone wants to keep it a secret at all costs.”
“Who’s directing it?” Pete asked. “Who’s pulling the strings? Because if you guys are suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, it has to be someone who was either in the White House during that time period, or someone very high in the Pentagon.”
“Colin Powell,” McGarvey said.
Pete was surprised. “I’m not going to buy anything like that,” she said.
“Not him, but there had to have been people on his staff when he was at the UN who liaised with the White House and the Pentagon. Maybe someone on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or on the security council.”
“You’re talking about a fall guy in case something went wrong,” Pete said. “If that’s the case, he or she has to be pretty nervous by now.”
“I’ll see what I can come up with,” Otto said. “In the meantime, what are you going to tell the DGSE if they show up? And I’m betting they will.”
“Depends on who they send,” McGarvey said.
“But not the truth.”
“Some of it, but not all.”
* * *
Charles de Gaulle ground control directed them to a hangar well away from the commercial gates, near an Air France maintenance facility not occupied.
As soon as they were parked and the jet’s engines spooled down, Maggie opened the hatch and lowered the stairs. She stepped aside and ducked into the cockpit as an older man with thick gray hair came aboard.
McGarvey recognized him at once. “Captain Bete,” he said, rising.
“Actually, its colonel now, and no one calls me bête noire any longer.” Bete was French for a “beast” or an “animal,” and a bête noire was a bugbear. Twenty years ago he’d resented the play on his name.
McGarvey introduced him to Pete, and they shook hands and sat down across from each other.
“I will come directly to the point, Monsieur le Directeur. Why have you come back to France? Your presence is making a number of people nervous, as you can well imagine.”
“Your service might be aware of a disturbance at the CIA.”
“There have been rumors.”
“We have a serial killer on the campus who has already murdered four people at Langley and another two in Athens. We’ve followed a woman we think may know something about it.”
Colonel Bete sat back in his seat. “You are a dangerous man, and violence seems to find you. But you have never been a liar. Is yours an official service-to-service request for assistance?”
“No.”
“I thought not,” Bete said. “Who is this woman?”
“Her actual name is Alex Unroth, though she’s traveling under the name Lois Wheeler, coming in on an Air France flight from Dulles in an hour or so.”
“Who is she, exactly? Dangerous?”
“Extremely. She was an NOC, and very good at killing.”
“Do you want us to arrest her?”
“No. She’s come here to meet someone. I want to know who it is. And when the meeting actually takes place, I’ll make the decision either to take her into custody or continue to follow her.”
“An action she will resist.”
“Yes
.”
“With force.”
“Yes,” McGarvey said.
FORTY-SEVEN
Air France 9039 pulled up to the gate ten minutes early, and Alex was among the first off. She’d been exhausted, and had slept in the wide first-class seat that converted into a flat bed, not staying awake for the afternoon meal or complimentary champagne.
At this point she was awake if not refreshed, and she took care with her tradecraft after she was passed through immigration and had picked up her overnight bag and attaché case. Making her way through the main concourse, which was busy, she kept within groups of passengers so far as it was possible.
Twice she darted into a ladies’ room, the first time lingering in one of the stalls to see if anyone suspicious came in—but no one did. And the second time, walking in, turning around immediately, and heading back to the gate she had landed at.
A number of the passengers seemed somewhat suspicious to her, but then they either passed by or went to the ticket agent at a gate.
Airport cops were everywhere, mostly traveling in pairs, but in this day and age their presence wasn’t unusual, and not one of them paid her the slightest attention.
As she headed down the escalator to the ground transportation exits, she paused for a moment to wonder if no one paying her any attention was in itself significant. She was still an attractive woman, and just about everywhere she went she turned male heads. But then this was Paris—the city of well-put-together women.
The only things she could not gauge were the overhead cameras, but she kept her head lowered as much as possible.
Outside, she got a cab and asked the driver, in French, to take her to the InterContinental. “The one on Avenue Marceau.”
By the time they left the airport and got on the ring road traffic was heavy and until she got to the hotel, it would be impossible for her to make sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d considered taking the cab to the vicinity of a train station, and from there another cab to a metro entrance, and from there eventually back to the hotel. But she had decided against it. It wasn’t likely she had been followed this far this soon.
She had picked the InterContinental as a sort of a message to McGarvey: Here I am. Do you want to talk on neutral ground?
Of course he would not, and in fact, he would probably try to take her into custody. But she had read enough about him in his Agency files that although he was a dangerous man, he was principled. He was a man of high morals for whom collateral damage of any sort was completely out of the question.
If it came to a stand-up fight in the hotel, or on a crowed street—the Champs-Élysées was just around the corner—he would hesitate. It would be enough for her to escape.
The only dark cloud was the poor bastard she’d killed in Georgetown. She had no idea why she had done it, except that it had been a release for all the tension she had been under since Walt and the others had been murdered on campus. She knew George was coming after all of them, her included, to keep them quiet. It had only been their superinflated egos concerning their abilities that had stopped them from coming forward with what they knew. That, and the likelihood that if they were to blow the whistle, they could very well be signing their own death warrants.
Either George was going to kill them, or someone else would—so it was up to them to go deep.
But it had not worked for Walt and the others on campus. Or for Joseph or even Larry in Athens. Nor for her in the DCI’s office.
All that was left was coming face-to-face one last time with George and hopefully leading McGarvey to him. If George told what he knew, she figured she would have a shot at guaranteeing her own life and maybe her freedom.
Except for the guy in Georgetown.
The cabby dropped her off at the hotel, and a liveried doorman in a blue morning coat came out to help her with her bags.
“Bonjour, Madame,” he said, and followed her to the front desk, where the night manager stood.
“Madame Wheeler?”
“Mademoiselle,” Alex said, graciously smiling. She handed over her credit card and passport.
The manager was a younger man with a short haircut. He was impeccably dressed in a tasteful blue blazer and vest, white shirt, correctly knotted tie. The InterContinental under new management had transformed from the iconic former mansion of the Comte de Breteuil, used as a stuffy hotel, into a hip boutique hotel. She had to wonder if McGarvey had been back since the change.
She signed the card. “Have my things brought up, and in two hours have my bed turned down and draw me a very hot bath. First I’m going to take a walk.”
“Of course.”
Alex smiled again. “Thank you.”
“May I suggest that if you walk, stay away from the Jardin. It is sometimes dangerous at this hour of the morning.”
* * *
Alex walked out of the hotel and headed down to the Jardin des Tuileries, the morning pleasantly cool after Washington’s humidity. She didn’t bother with her tradecraft for the moment. If McGarvey had traced her this far already, she wanted to see if he could be induced to approach her. Away from people, away from any danger of collateral damage.
She was betting, however, that if he had followed her to Paris and had not tried to stop her from leaving the campus or getting on the flight, it was because he figured she was on her way to meet George.
Two possibilities, she thought. Either he would try to arrest her, in which case her best immediate defense was to always surround herself with innocent civilians. Or he wanted her to lead him to George, in which case he might show himself but would leave her alone.
Coming here to the deserted park at this hour of the morning would test the second possibility. That, and she was feeling irascible again, and she wanted someone to try something with her.
The Jardin was one of the more highly structured parks in the city, with rows of flowers and trees and a couple of ponds. From just about anywhere inside the park, Paris was highly visible, unlike much of Central Park, which in many places hid from the city. And yet Alex felt a sense of isolation here, as she had even in times past when the place was busy with old couples resting on benches, or young fathers pushing baby carriages, or children running and playing—almost too quiet, as French children often were.
Maybe if her life had been different as a child, if she’d had a normal upbringing, a normal father, she might have turned out differently. Maybe she would have gotten married—a lot of NOCs did. They had their careers and their partners.
A half dozen kids—two of them girls, all of them in their early teens—suddenly appeared on the path to her left. They had wild haircuts, Mohawks and the like, tattoos, piercings in their ears and noses and lips and eyebrows, and they were either drunk or high.
One of the boys pulled out a knife and, holding it low, swooped in toward her, swinging the blade at her midsection.
At the last moment she stepped aside, took his wrist and, using his momentum, yanked his arm up and sharply backward, dislocating his shoulder and tearing his rotator cuff.
He skipped out of the way, howling in pain.
The others, all of them with knives in hand, circled her. No one except the kid with the screwed-up arm said a word, and he only muttered something dark Alex couldn’t quite catch.
Coming to the Jardin against the advice of the night manager and getting into the middle of something like this was exactly what she had wanted in some perverse way. Maybe to prove that after too many years of sitting behind a desk, she still had some moves left.
One of the girls came in from the right, while at the same moment a tall-drink-of-water boy who might have been sixteen or seventeen ran at her from her left.
Alex turned, grabbed the boy’s wrist and elbow, and spun him around so his knife rammed into the shoulder of the girl, directly above her right breast.
The others moved in at the same time.
FORTY-EIGHT
McGarvey and Pete sat in the back of a Police Natio
nale Citroën parked on the Rue de Rivoli, watching images on a laptop computer. A nearly silent camera-equipped drone had been circling overhead ever since Alex had left the InterContinental and strolled into the Jardin as if she were a woman without a care in the world.
Bete, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, watched the images from the drone on another laptop. “She is an impressive woman, hein?”
“That she is,” McGarvey agreed.
“Shall we send someone to help her?”
“Not unless you want to save the kids from themselves. She knows I’ve followed her, and she’s staged this thing, figuring I would get involved.”
“To save the children.”
“Something like that. But she won’t kill them.”
All of it, the stealth helicopter that had followed her cab from de Gaulle, the use of Sûreté officers and the air force drone, had been put into play within minutes after the colonel had signed on. But only after McGarvey had explained what he thought was going on.
“Your government might not be so pleased if you uncover their little secret,” Bete had said on the Gulfstream.
“The reaction of my government is not my concern right now. I’m trying to solve a murder mystery. I know the likely why of it now, but not the who.”
“Not her?” Bete asked.
“No. She’s here to try to avoid being the next victim.”
Two more kids went down with dislocated kneecaps, and the last two boys stood in front of her, panting because of their exertions, and pissed off but obviously wary. Alex was a slightly built woman. An ancient in their minds. An obviously easy mark for a little fun—a rape for sure, and maybe even a few euros if she had any on her, or jewelry. Maybe a watch. But all of it for fun plus a little drug money.
The angle of the camera was wrong, so the expression on her face wasn’t clear on the monitors, but the way she held herself, nonchalant, just about hipshot, arms at her sides, waiting for the boys to come in at her, was of a woman without concern for her safety.
End Game Page 21
