Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “Welcome to the Jules Verne, monsieur et madam.”

  “Mademoiselle,” Miriam corrected him, her French accent perfect.

  “Pardon, mademoiselle.”

  “And thank God we don’t have to stand in some miserable line just for a bite to eat,” she told Najjir, not bothering to keep her voice or bitchy attitude in check.

  He’d explained the general scenario to her several times over the past two months, but she was improvising.

  “Act natural.”

  “You mean my shitty self, luv?” she’d laughed. “Won’t be a problem. Always wanted to be a stage actor.”

  In the past week or so he’d begun to think that it would almost be a shame to kill her in the end. But he was going to have to go deep, anywhere other than the home outside Riyadh he’d made for himself three years ago. And depending on how thorough or just lucky the French authorities might be, it was possible he’d be on the run until the furor died down. Possibly as long as a year, depending what his next assignment would be.

  “Something very big” was all he’d been told by his control officer.

  He’d wanted to ask: Bigger than taking down the Eiffel Tower? But he’d held that and a dozen other questions to himself. A trick he’d learned as a young boy in school in Belfast a million years ago.

  “Keep your mouth shut and maybe your balls will stay attached,” an older friend had told him. He’d been a ten-year-old, wise beyond his years, who’d been hit by a stray Catholic bullet and had bled out on the street corner before the fighting stopped and an ambulance could get to him.

  Najjir—who’d gone by the name of Patrick O’Brian—had been sent by a Saudi crown prince highly connected with the GIP to be raised as Irish, to learn to keep his wits when he was under fire, and in the end, when he received his training at the new SVR’s School 1 outside of Moscow, and afterward disappeared in the US, he was finally contacted by a series of Saudi control officers, most of them working out of the United Nations.

  He was fluent in a half dozen languages, with as many different accents, but he had no home country—not even Saudi Arabia, where he’d been born thirty-two years ago. And nowhere, not in Ireland, the US, or England, and especially Russia, did he feel comfortable. All of his life he had been a person under stress who had no place to go where he would feel a sense of belonging, feel truly safe.

  He told himself practically every day that he didn’t care. But it was a lie.

  The restaurant was nearly full when they got up to the third level, and the only two tables available were one by the hidden entry to the kitchen doors and the other in the middle of the room. Both of them were as far away as possible from the windows that gave a panoramic view of the city, and of the south pillar.

  Najjir opted for the table by the kitchen.

  “This is absolutely shit,” Miriam said, not bothering to keep her voice low.

  “If madam would like the center table,” the headwaiter who had escorted them from his stand at the elevator suggested.

  “It’s ‘mademoiselle,’” she screeched. “And maybe you could suggest seats in the loo, where we could take a piss between courses.”

  The waiter was nonplussed, but Najjir smiled. “This table will be fine, thank you,” he said.

  He held the chair for Miriam, who sat down after a hesitation.

  The waiter gave them menus and departed. Servers came with water, a bread basket, several types of butter, small plates of herbs, and a cruet of olive oil. Another came with the wine list in a thickly padded leather-bound book.

  “May I recommend a white or red wine for monsieur and mademoiselle?”

  “Tanqueray martini straight up, one olive, stirred, not shaken, just like Double-O Seven,” Miriam said.

  “I’ll have a glass of Krug,” Najjir said.

  As soon as the sommelier was out of earshot Najjir gave Miriam a harsh look. “Good job,” he said.

  “Piece of cake. I’m a natural bitch,” she said. “What’s next?”

  “I’ll let you know when.”

  * * *

  A refrigerated Mercedes transit van bearing the logo for Produit Fourquette, with the stylized painting of a field of flowers, mountains in dark blues in the distance, pulled up at the service elevator for the restaurant. Three husky men, one of them very young, in spotless white coveralls, their heads and faces closely shaved, got out, took three large plastic bins from the back of the truck, and made for the elevator.

  A police officer stopped them. “May I see your delivery order?” he asked. Things like this type of inspection had become routine over the past several years.

  The lead delivery man pulled the manifest from his vest pocket and handed it over. It showed an order for nine kilos of dressed rabbits, seven of pheasants, six of quail, and three of sweetbreads.

  “They always eat well up there,” the cop said.

  “Not today if these get warm and spoil. Ca te defrise?” Any objection?

  “Ouvrir, s’il vous plais.”

  The men lowered the boxes to the pavement and opened the lids, cold air rising as steam. Inside were individually wrapped and marked plastic packages of the birds, rabbits, and beef.

  The cop handed the delivery order back and stepped away. “Allez.”

  “D’ac,” Omar Haddad told the cop. Okay. He was the strike leader, only by virtue of the fact that his French was passable. Until recently he’d been an ISIS infiltrator for the GIP and a liaison officer for operations inside France. This was to be his last mission before he would be allowed to return home and take a desk job for the interior ministry.

  If all went well he would be long gone before the C-4 vests his two martyrs were wearing were detonated. First to a safe house in Saint-Ouen, then by stages back to Saudi Arabia.

  Haddad called the elevator with the key he’d been provided in training six weeks ago, and when the door opened the three of them piled inside and started up.

  Shamz Naser, a nineteen-year-old kid from a small town outside of Jeddah, started to say something, but Haddad overrode him.

  “We’ll take our lunch break when we’ve made this delivery.”

  Naser wanted to say something, but Haddad glanced up at the security camera and the kid got the idea that he was to keep his mouth shut.

  The elevator opened at the end of a short pantry corridor that led to the kitchen. The cold storage locker was on the left. A man dressed in a cutaway, who Haddad guessed was the sommelier or assistant, came through the big door to the right, with a bottle of champagne in hand.

  He stopped. “We’re not expecting you,” he said.

  Haddad pulled out his silenced Glock 29SF and was on the man in three steps, pushing him back into the climate-controlled wine storage room, where he fired one 10mm round into the man’s forehead. He caught the bottle of champagne before it hit the floor.

  He stood lookout while Naser dragged the body to the back of the wine room and concealed it behind the racks. No blood had gotten on the floor, and it would take a thorough search of the dimly lit room to find the dead man.

  It was noon, and the countdown clock had started.

  FOUR

  McGarvey and Pete had reservations at the Jules Verne under Mac’s name. They went up in the private elevator to the third level, where they were shown to their table by a window looking out at the south pillar and the city spread out toward Montmartre in the haze.

  The restaurant was filled with mostly tourists, McGarvey guessed by their casual dress. Only a few other couples, including a man and woman seated near the kitchen, wore jackets and decent dresses. But he had been brought up old-school by his strict, by-the-book parents, where even on their ranch out on the western Kansas plains he and his older sister, Joanne, had been taught manners.

  “Good breeding will take you far,” their mother had told them.

  Their parents had inherited and worked the family cattle ranch, but they also worked as theoretical physicists for the government at Los Alamo
s, until their deaths in an automobile accident. The FBI had speculated, but had never been able to prove, that John and Lilly McGarvey had been assassinated by Russian agents.

  When Mac had joined the CIA and had the opportunity, he’d searched the agency’s records for anything about the accident, but he’d found nothing. Nor had Otto found much, except that the driver of the car that had forced them off the road had never been found. Nor had the Bureau ever found any forensics evidence in the car. No DNA, no fingerprints, nothing. The car had been wiped clean by experts.

  The family’s assets, other than the ranch which McGarvey inherited, had been left to Joanne, who’d married and moved to Salt Lake City. A few years later, after Mac had gotten out of the air force and went to work for the Company, he had sold the ranch and turned over the money to an investment broker—vetted by the CIA—who had done very well by him. Although he wasn’t wealthy, he’d always been comfortable.

  “The place has been in the family for three generations and you’re simply going to sell it to the highest bidder?” Joanne had berated him. “You bastard.”

  “I’m not a rancher and never will be,” McGarvey had told her. “I’ll give you the ranch, if you want it. You and Stan can move back and run it.”

  “I won’t trade my inheritance with you for the place.”

  “Not interested. You want the ranch, it’s yours. I’ll sell it to you.”

  “We don’t have the money.”

  “One dollar.”

  She’d given her brother an odd look, almost as if he were a stranger, but finally shook her head and walked away. That’d been more than twenty years ago, and they’d never been close since.

  Waiters came with their menus and bread, and McGarvey asked to have the sommelier, who had not yet appeared, to pick a nice Dom Pérignon.

  “Of course, monsieur.”

  The sun was high in the cloudless sky, but it reflected and re-reflected off the windows and even the glassware on the tables, framing Pete’s face and shoulders almost as if she were wearing a halo. McGarvey was nervous, and it was so obvious all of a sudden that Pete could see it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nice view from here.”

  “Champagne? Top-shelf digs?” she asked. She glanced at the other diners. “What gives? Camouflage? Another one of your premos?”

  “Nothing like that. We’re good here.”

  “What, then?”

  So much had happened in twenty-plus years. He’d been down so many bitter paths, had been backed into so many dark corners—situations and places where he’d sometimes not been able to tell a friend, or at least an ally, from an enemy. So many difficult choices, very often with no definite outcomes or even happy endings. His actions so many times totally against the wishes and even orders of reasonable men and women who knew what their duty was all about. Contrary to logic, to good thinking, to what was right and just under the law. Unnatural, even deeply immoral.

  “I am what I am,” he’d told a deputy director of operations years ago.

  Even then it had been too late for him to get off the path that he had stumbled onto ever since his parents’ murders—he’d believed from the beginning that their deaths had not been accidental. They’d been the lead theorists on a new type of defense weapon that the Russians wanted to delay until their own scientists could catch up.

  It had been the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new, more personal war of individual acts of terrorism—some as simple as the assassination of a political leader, others as far-reaching and complicated as 9/11.

  “Kirk?” Pete prompted.

  A man in white coveralls appeared briefly on the catwalk outside the window to the left, and then disappeared. Almost certainly a maintenance man, McGarvey figured, though it seemed odd to him that a work order or even an inspection would be scheduled during the lunch hour, when the restaurant was full.

  Unless something was wrong.

  No one else had noticed the workman outside except for the couple seated by the kitchen. The man had looked up, but the woman, her back to the window, was talking to him.

  Pete turned in the same direction he was looking. “Okay, now I’m nervous. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “Nothing.”

  “It’s something, for Christ’s sake.”

  He forced a smile. “You’re right. It’s the real reason we came to Paris and I booked us a table here.”

  Pete’s eyes were suddenly very bright.

  Mac felt like a kid. It was stupid.

  “Spit it out, unless you’re all of a sudden a coward.”

  “Marry me?”

  “Say again?”

  “I’m not getting down on one knee,” McGarvey said. “If that’s what you want.”

  “No, but after everything that’s happened over the past couple of years I’m going to stretch it out for as long as I can.”

  The man seated with the woman by the kitchen entrance got to his feet. McGarvey caught the motion out of the corner of his eye and he glanced over.

  The woman, medium height, slender, and very well put together—though in Mac’s mind there was something not quite right about her appearance or her manner—jumped up, tipping her chair over backwards.

  “You son of a bitch,” she brayed at the top of her lungs.

  The soft murmurs in the restaurant stopped as the other diners turned toward the couple.

  The man said something to the woman, but his words didn’t calm her down.

  “Fuck you,” she screamed. “If I had a fucking gun right now I’d shoot you in your fucking head, you miserable cocksucker.”

  “Not only lunch and champers, but you arranged the entertainment package,” Pete said. “Nice.”

  The man came around the table and tried to take the woman’s arm, but she pulled away.

  McGarvey thought that the guy was holding something in his left hand. Down at his side. Like a gun.

  The woman screeched something unintelligible and snatched a butter knife from the table.

  A pair of uniformed cops came from the stairway next to the elevators, and the maître d’ from the ground level stood aside.

  “I’m pregnant, you motherfucker,” the woman screeched.

  The man glanced toward the oncoming cops, then raised what looked like a cell phone, said something, and then quickly pocketed it.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” he shouted, and the cops were on them, hustling them out of the restaurant.

  FIVE

  The cops took Najjir and Miriam around the corner from the restaurant entrance, away from the still growing crowds. But they’d not pulled out their handcuffs or drawn their pistols. If anything, they looked amused and just a little vexed.

  It was exactly what Najjir had wanted to happen. He’d sent the electronic signal to the military grade explosives his three operatives had strapped to their bodies beneath their coveralls, and from this point nothing could alter the upcoming course of events. In twenty minutes the nearly ninety kilos of C-4 would explode and the Eiffel Tower would come twisting and crashing to the ground.

  “Passports, please,” the lead cop, whose name tag identified him as Guyot, said.

  Najjir took his out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. It took a moment for Miriam to find hers in her purse.

  The cop studied them, comparing their faces to the photos. “What are you two doing here?”

  “A few days’ holiday,” Najjir said.

  “I meant upstairs, disturbing the people trying to enjoy their meals?”

  “I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “But I’m preggers and the son of a bitch won’t do a thing about it.”

  “Take your troubles elsewhere,” the other, younger cop, whose name tag identified him as Lemaire, said.

  “I wanted to embarrass him.”

  Guyot smiled. “It didn’t seem to work.”

  “Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?” Miriam demanded, her voice rising.
>
  “In the first place, calm yourself, mademoiselle, or we will take you into custody for disturbing the public order and you can spend the night in jail waiting for a judge to listen to your story.”

  “Fine, as long as he’s locked up as well.”

  “Just you, mademoiselle.”

  Miriam started to protest, but Najjir took her by the elbow. “Let’s go for a walk, darling, and I promise we’ll work it out.”

  “In a pig’s eye.”

  “Trust me.”

  “All men are bastards,” she said, raising her voice.

  “A la noix,” Lemaire said. Useless.

  “I’ll marry you,” Najjir said.

  Miriam looked up, her eyes wide. “No shit?”

  “Bonne chance,” Lemaire said half under his breath.

  “I promise,” Najjir said. It was going to be too bad to kill her. She was such a superb actress, he could think of a lot of scenarios where she would come in handy as a misdirection, a smoke screen, like upstairs in the dining room, and right here, right now. “Anyway, I didn’t know that you were pregnant.”

  Najjir turned to the cops and shrugged. “My apologies to you, the restaurant staff, and the other diners.”

  “Settle your difference elsewhere, in private,” Guyot said. “Preferably out of France.”

  He and the other cop stepped back.

  Najjir took Miriam’s arm and they headed back toward the parking ramp where they’d left the car. When they were lost in the crowd and out of earshot of the cops, Najjir put his arm around her waist.

  “You were nothing short of perfect,” he said.

  “I thought I was pretty good,” she agreed. She looked up at him. “So now what?”

  “We go home.”

  “Back to London?”

  “Sure,” Najjir said.

  Miriam looked over her shoulder at the tower. “It’s coming down, no shit?”

  “No shit,” Najjir assured her. “In about fifteen minutes.”

  “Then let’s get the fuck out of here, okay?”

  * * *

  Haddad joined the others in the equipment room between the kitchen and the delivery and storage corridor. The restaurant had its own air-conditioning, heating plant, and emergency generator equipment, the control panels for which were all located in this space.