End Game

by David Hagberg

  After what seemed like a very long time, she turned and walked away, not bothering to look over her shoulder.

  The boys stood there for a while but then pocketed their knives and helped the others. Within a few minutes they were gone, in the opposite direction of Alex.

  “Formidable,” Bete said.

  “If you want to arrest her, you’ll have to give your people plenty of room,” McGarvey said.

  “What now, Colonel?” asked the young Sûreté officer behind the wheel.

  “We’re finished here. You may recall the drone, and give my thanks to Major Lucien.”

  “Where may I drop you, sir?”

  “That’s up to Monsieur McGarvey,” Bete said.

  Alex was heading up toward the Champs-Élysées.

  “Looks like she’s going for a walk,” McGarvey said. “Get back to the InterContinental and toss her room. I doubt if she’ll have left anything important behind, maybe a passport or two and some cash and credit cards.”

  “How delicate shall I be?”

  “Use a soft touch, but let her know someone was snooping around.”

  “What about me?” Pete asked.

  “Check us in, and try for the same floor,” McGarvey said. “I won’t be long.”

  “She’s looking for trouble,” Pete warned.

  “She knows I’m here, and she’s sent me a message.”

  “Which is?” Bete asked.

  “That she can handle herself, but that unless she’s seriously provoked, she won’t kill anyone. She’s here to meet someone, or at least get word to him.”

  “George,” Pete said, but not as a question.

  McGarvey took a last glance at the monitor, then got out of the car and started walking fast back toward the Pont de la Concorde, figuring that if Alex were intending for the Champs-Élysées, he would be in time to tuck in behind her.

  * * *

  The Place de la Concorde, with its slender obelisk, was at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, and it was alive with traffic, including pedestrians on their way to sidewalk cafés on the avenue or even the McDonald’s for their morning coffees and croissants.

  McGarvey crossed the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, dodging traffic and heading along the upper side of the avenue, paying attention to who was coming up behind him or shadowing him from the other side. Alex was the only one left from Alpha Seven, and since she hadn’t killed Schermerhorn, nor almost certainly the others, it meant she was the last target.

  But whoever the killer was had a very good source of intelligence inside the CIA. Not only good enough to pinpoint Wager, Fabry, Knight, and Schermerhorn, and Alex, but to get on and off campus without raising any alarms.

  He and Otto had suspected it might be someone working for Blankenship—or possibly even the director of security himself. But Blankenship had been in his office when Schermerhorn was murdered, and had been driving through the main gate when Knight had been attacked. Nor had he been absent from his desk when Coffin had been shot and killed on the boat in Piraeus.

  Alex’s alibis weren’t as tight—she was on a long weekend when Coffin was shot, and as an NOC in Iraq she had been an excellent marksman with the Barrett sniper rifle—and she was definitely off campus when Schermerhorn had been murdered.

  But if she thought the killer was George, and that he was somewhere here in Paris, and if he was indeed the killer, she was playing with fire, because it was possible he knew she had come to Paris.

  Two-thirds of the way to the Arc de Triomphe, he spotted her sitting at a sidewalk table at the Café George V. The waiter had just set two coffees down and was walking away.

  She was obviously expecting someone. McGarvey waited for a couple of minutes, watching her, waiting for whoever it was to show up, but when no one came, he walked over.

  “Your coffee is getting cold,” she said, looking up.

  “I thought you might be waiting for George,” McGarvey said, sitting across from her.

  She smiled. “He’s the last person I wanted to see. Tell me about Roy. Do you think he’ll survive the night?”

  “That why you ran?”

  She looked at something across the broad avenue. “That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Then why the little display in the Tuileries?”

  “Just kids out to have a little fun.”

  “They’ll think twice before they attack another woman.”

  She smiled again. “That’s the whole point, Mr. McGarvey. I can take care of myself, and I mean to do so.”

  “I found you.”

  “I let you find me. But unless you or Pete or Otto have told anyone about my movements, I figure I’ll be reasonably safe here for a few days or so.”

  “Then where?”

  “That’ll be up to you, won’t it?” she said. “If you find George, I’m home free. Relatively speaking.”

  “Otto’s decrypted the fourth panel.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “‘Let there be light.’”

  Alex laughed, the sound low from the back of her throat. “Sounds like Roy. Anything else?”

  “And there was peace.”

  She nodded wistfully. “Then you know what’s still buried over there.”

  “Schermerhorn’s dead.”

  For a long moment Alex didn’t react, but then her face fell by degrees, and she looked down. “I thought by leaving it would draw him away. I thought he’d come after me, just like I knew you would. And if my luck held, the two of you would come face-to-face.”

  She’d laid a copy of The International New York Times on the table, and a chance breeze ruffled it. She suddenly moved to the left to reach for it, when a rifle shot struck a nearby male patron in the chest, and he was slammed violently backward. He had been seated at the table just behind them.

  McGarvey rolled to the right and dropped to the sidewalk, searching the roof line across the broad boulevard in time to see a figure in a second-floor window disappear.

  A woman passing by screamed, and people in the café began to react, some of them scrambling out of their seats, trying to escape what to them had to look like the start of another terrorist attack.

  When he looked over his shoulder, Alex was gone.

  FORTY-NINE

  Alex raced through the restaurant, into the busy kitchen, and out the back door and onto a narrow lane across from the rear of the U.S. Embassy, which fronted on the Avenue Gabriel. She turned left and, walking fast, made it to the Rue de Miromesnil before she looked over her shoulder to see if McGarvey was behind her. He wasn’t.

  The shot had been fired from a high-power rifle, which to her had sounded like a Barrett, and it was only by happenstance that she’d suddenly moved to keep her newspaper from blowing away. But she’d been in time to glance up and get a quick glimpse of the shooter, who’d been in the second-floor window of the building across the avenue.

  It had been a man, she was certain of it. But she got the impression he was tall and very ruggedly built—the opposite from George. And that only made sense if George wasn’t the one doing the killings—or if he wasn’t working alone.

  At the corner, she turned around and walked back to the Champs-Élysées, half a block up from the George V. A crowd had gathered in front of the café, and two police cars had already arrived. A cop was in the middle of the street, directing traffic, as an ambulance, its siren blaring, came around the corner two blocks away.

  If McGarvey was somewhere down there, he was lost in the crowd.

  She headed up the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe, and in the next block she entered the VIP World Travel Agency, housed in a small storefront.

  A young woman seated behind the desk looked up and smiled. “Bonjour, Madame,” she said pleasantly.

  “Good morning,” Alex said in English, and the young woman switched languages.

  Alex put her real passport on the desk. “I would like to make a trip to Tel Aviv, but first I need to get a message to your director.”

 
The agent glanced at the passport but did not reach for it.

  George had told them all that if ever they got in over their heads over the business in Iraq, they were to get word to him through the travel agency either in Washington, London, Berlin, or here, in Paris. The procedure was to lay their real passport—no matter what other name they might be using—on the agent’s desk, and ask to get a message to the agency’s director before making a trip to Tel Aviv.

  The company had been set up by the Israeli Mossad in the late fifties as an elaborate front so that its agents could travel to Argentina to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel. The thinking was that if they used their own travel section, the operation might not be discovered and Eichmann would not disappear again.

  The company had remained in existence all this time because it was successful as an ordinary travel agency, and it was even expanded to Berlin, London, and Washington from its original office here in Paris. It wasn’t a very closely guarded secret—at least not from the CIA—that the occasional Mossad operator still used the company.

  “Do you have the name of our current director?” the woman asked.

  “It’s been some years.”

  “What name do you know?”

  “George.”

  The agent took Alex’s passport to a machine in one corner, made a copy of the bearer’s pages, and brought it back.

  “And when would you like to travel to Tel Aviv?”

  “As soon as George responds to my query.”

  “Are you staying in the city?”

  “Yes, but I’ll call you at noon,” Alex said.

  “What is the message?”

  “‘I’m the last. Shall I come?’”

  “Very well. It will go out within the hour. But I cannot guarantee there will be a response, or if there is one, when it will arrive.”

  “Will there be a fee?”

  “No, but I will take an impression of your credit card to make the travel arrangements,” the agent said.

  Alex handed her the Lois Wheeler credit card. The agent made a copy of it, but she said nothing that the name was different from the passport.

  “I won’t wait long,” Alex said.

  “I understand,” the agent said.

  * * *

  Alex caught a cab a half block away and ordered the driver to take her back to the InterContinental.

  McGarvey had followed her to Paris, which had been no real feat of tradecraft, not with Otto Rencke’s wizardry. And she’d known he would be right behind her, so she’d put on the little show for him in the Tuileries, and then had gone to the sidewalk café, figuring he would want to talk.

  What she hadn’t counted on was the shooter also tracing her to Paris and to the specific restaurant. Whoever it was, they had information from inside the CIA.

  It came back to George. If he was the killer, he had help this morning from the shooter across from the sidewalk café. And if it was him, he also had help inside the CIA. Someone on campus, doing his dirty work. But whoever it was had to be insane not only to kill the Alpha Seven team one by one but to mutilate those who’d been on campus.

  That last bit was the sticking point for her. George had done horrible things in Iraq—and so had she—but those had been done as acts of war. Acts to demoralize the enemy, which in fact had happened.

  This now, over the past few days, made no sense from her perspective.

  And the last bit that gave her some pause was the hotel. She’d been traced here by McGarvey and by the shooter. The hotel was no longer her safe haven. Yet she decided it was the only place for her to be. If the shooter came after her again, she would be on familiar ground, McGarvey as her backup.

  FIFTY

  McGarvey got to the river in time to see the shooter reach the bottom of the stairs from street level and head to the right, toward the Pont de l’Alma. He recognized the guy from the dark jacket and yellow shirt he wore, and the fact that his haircut was military.

  The Barrett had been left where the sniper abandoned it: leaning against the wall next to the window of what was a two-room office being remodeled. Painters’ drop cloths covered the wooden floors, and plasterwork around the crown moldings was drying. The walls had been stripped, in some places down to the bare laths, and even the light fixtures and wall outlets were still missing.

  The shooter’s intel had been spot-on. So much so that he had even picked the one empty room within shooting range of a sidewalk café where he somehow knew Alex would be. Even if he had insider information from the CIA, more was going on here than made sense.

  But from Schermerhorn’s and Alex’s descriptions of George, the shooter was too big and too young to be the same man. Either someone else was gunning for her, or George had help—damned good help.

  Some of it pointed to the Mossad, and that made a certain kind of logic to McGarvey’s thinking. But other bits didn’t fit. They were still missing something, because it made no sense that Schermerhorn and Alex had both been so circumspect about who was coming after them and why, even though their lives were on the line.

  McGarvey reached the bottom of the stairs at river level, and started after the shooter. A fair number of people, many of them couples, hand in hand, strolled along the river walk. A Bateaux-Mouches less than half full passed, going downriver, and McGarvey could still hear sirens in the distance, up toward the Champs-Élysées.

  The man was taking his time, and McGarvey easily came up behind him before he reached the bridge. He was a head taller and perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, with a military bearing and stride to match his haircut.

  It did not appear he was carrying a pistol. His jacket was snug fitting, and there was no telltale bulge at his waist or under his arm.

  “You left your rifle behind,” McGarvey said.

  If the man was startled, he didn’t show it. He merely glanced over his shoulder. “Beg your pardon?”

  “The Barrett. Though how you could miss at that range is beyond understanding for a man of your training. I’m sure George will be disappointed when you get back to Tel Aviv.”

  The shooter stopped and faced McGarvey. “I have no idea what you are talking about, Monsieur. Shall I call the police?”

  “If you’d like, although the DGSE has taken an interest in this business.”

  The man’s eyes were dark, a five-o’clock shadow on his broad chin. He looked dangerous. “Stay out of this, Mr. McGarvey. We have no ill will toward you.”

  “By we, do you mean the Mossad?”

  The man glanced up as a couple pushing a baby carriage passed by. They were laughing and talking. The morning was perfect, nothing to worry about.

  “Was it you in Piraeus? The Greeks found the Barrett where it was left. No fingerprints of course. And that shot was a good one. Fifteen hundred meters. But then Coffin’s head was framed by the open porthole. Made a good sight pattern.”

  “You’re not here officially,” the shooter said, and the comment didn’t really come as a surprise to McGarvey. “You followed Alex from Langley and actually sat down to have a cup of coffee and a friendly chat with her. Strange.”

  “She’s looking for George. She thought he’d be here. And until you took the shot, he was our best suspect in the killings. But if he and you are Mossad, the problem becomes even more interesting.”

  “I suggest you stop right now and go home. Perhaps it’s time you visit with your granddaughter. We understand she’s a lovely child.”

  “I think the DGSE will be interested in having a word. You killed an innocent civilian this morning.”

  The shooter backed up a step, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes narrowed, his legs slightly bent at the knees. “No way to prove it.”

  “I think there might be. The French don’t have the same aversion to waterboarding as my people do. Who knows what information you might be willing to give up if a deal were put on the table?”

  There were more sirens in the distance, but none of them wer
e getting any closer.

  “Or you can talk to me,” McGarvey said.

  “Get away from here while you still can, old man.”

  “Whatever happened to interservice cooperation, or just plain politeness?

  The shooter came at him, swinging a roundhouse punch, but McGarvey sidestepped it at the last instant, grabbed the shooter’s wrist and arm, and levered the man forward to his knees.

  He bounded up and came back again, moving fast, swiveling to the left and taking two karate chops, which Mac easily deflected.

  The shooter moved like a ballet dancer, up on the toes of his left foot as he swung his right leg in a long arc.

  McGarvey caught the leg and flipped the man onto his back.

  A couple of young guys had stopped to watch, and they applauded and said something McGarvey couldn’t quite catch. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that several people, including the couple with the baby carriage, had turned around to watch the spectacle.

  The shooter was on his feet in an instant, charging and swinging blow after blow that McGarvey batted aside as he retreated a few meters.

  Suddenly the man bent down and pulled a small pistol, almost certainly a subcompact carry-and-conceal Glock, from an ankle holster under his khaki trousers.

  McGarvey stepped forward and a little to the left, and snatched the pistol out of the man’s hand. “You’ve already done enough collateral damage for the day, you stupid bastard.”

  The growing crowd all applauded. They thought they were watching a couple of street entertainers doing a skit. It was common on the river walk.

  McGarvey ejected the magazine and tossed it into the river, levered the round out of the firing chamber and field-stripped the pistol, tossing the pieces over the edge.

  “You’re unarmed now—no Barrett, no Glock. You’re obviously not much of a street fighter, though you’ve been trained somewhere—by the IDF, I suspect.”

  The shooter came in, head down, butting McGarvey in the chest, and knocking him backward on his ass.

  Before he could turn and run away, McGarvey hooked a foot around the man’s leg, bringing him down.

  The man was up on his feet in a flash, and McGarvey had to roll left to avoid a kick to his head, and he sprung to his feet.