Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  * * *

  The van turned right onto a narrow side street and McGarvey tucked in right behind them, closing the gap to less than ten feet.

  They were in Les Halles, one of the most diverse arrondissements of Paris, with its neighborhoods of Turkish and Kurdish butchers and bakers, Pakistani and Indian restaurants, African and Alsatian businesses selling everything from wigs to sauerkraut, and whores on nearly every street corner. Traffic was heavy, but not many people were on foot right here at this moment.

  Someone stuck a pistol out of the passenger side window and fired four shots in quick succession, starring the windshield inches from Mac’s head.

  He slammed the taxi hard to the right and fired the room broom with his left hand at the van’s front passenger door. He was handicapped because he couldn’t fire at the rear of the vehicle for fear of hitting Pete.

  The van jogged hard to the right, sideswiping two parked cars.

  Someone opened the sliding door and rapid-fired five shots from a pistol before ducking back.

  McGarvey jammed the gas pedal to the floor and the taxi leaped forward. He hit the van’s bumper on the left side and the driver lost control for a moment, swinging even harder right, skidding and nearly rolling, until it clipped the front end of a tourist bus coming on a green light through the intersection with the rue de Turbigo.

  The bus slowed but kept coming. Even so, the van managed to get around the front as Mac slammed on the brakes, skidding hard to the left and slamming into the side of the double-decker, which finally stopped.

  He backed up, jammed the gearshift into Drive, and floored the pedal again, but when he got around the bus the van was gone.

  People at a sidewalk café halfway down the next block had gotten up, and they backed away as McGarvey passed. Two of them were on cell phones.

  It wouldn’t be long before the cops showed up, but the guys who’d snatched Pete were professionals. The local police wouldn’t stand a chance against them.

  Back on the rue Saint-Denis, McGarvey was in time to see the van pull in behind an ancient church with twin towers and stop. Only the battered rear of the vehicle was visible.

  The street was narrow here and filled with pedestrians. Shops of all sorts lined both sides of the rue, along with sidewalk cafés, some of them beneath overhangs or broad awnings.

  McGarvey pulled up a half block from the church and left the taxi in one of the few open spots. Recharging the compact submachine gun with a fresh magazine, he concealed the weapon beneath his jacket and headed on foot to the church.

  Many of the women on the street wore scarves covering their hair, and most of the pedestrians were dark complected, a lot of the men with beards. The few Western tourists here and there stood out for their obvious differences, mostly in dress and skin tone.

  No one this far down the block seemed to have noticed the battered van or the beat-up taxi or McGarvey walking up the street. Either that or they were not paying attention on purpose. Sometimes it was for the best to keep your nose out of other people’s business and go about your own.

  ELEVEN

  The bottom of Pete’s feet were cut up by glass that had littered the pavement beneath the tower, but she hadn’t felt it until she was hustled inside the church. It was a cocked-up mess, and it was her fault for blindly stumbling into it. She’d been trained to treat situational awareness as the number one priority.

  “It’s not only your six you need to watch, but you damned well better know every other point of the compass, along with up and down, for as far as you can see,” one of the tactical instructors at Camp Peary, the CIA’s training facility, informally called the Farm, had lectured. “In an op, consider yourself inside a bubble that’s filled with possible threats to your mission as well as your personal well-being.”

  “Heads up in case someone is taking a bead on your ass,” one of the recruits had quipped.

  “Something like that.”

  It was Mac on her six, otherwise the van driver would not have taken such evasive actions. It was up to her to help him help her, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to end up on a slab in Paris’s morgue—the Institut médico-légal.

  Inside the église it was dark, the only light coming from the stained glass windows lining either side of the nave. To Pete it smelled only faintly of a church—wood polish, flowers around the altar, maybe incense—her nose was still filled with the acrid odor of the explosion, along with the sick smells of the cop’s blood and body fluids.

  The driver of the van, tall, dark, with cruel eyes and an old scar that disfigured his lower lip, was apparently the leader. He said something to his men in heavily accented Russian, and two of them stayed behind, flanking the doors, as he and the other four hurried up the aisle on the right side.

  Ducking around behind the altar, one of them threw back the iron latch and opened the short but broad wooden door. The dank odors of what she took to be a sewer rose up from the darkness down a set of narrow stairs.

  Mac was coming after her, and the two left behind had concealed themselves in the one of the pews a few rows from the entrance, waiting in ambush. If he appeared in the doorway, they wouldn’t be able to miss.

  One of the men prodded her inside, but she sidestepped him and shouldered her way past two others, back out to the side of the altar.

  “Two men waiting on the left,” she screeched.

  One of the operators grabbed her arm and yanked her off balance, forcing her back to the open door. The leader was already a couple of stairs down, and he turned back, aiming his pistol at her.

  But she pulled away again. “A door behind the altar!”

  One of the men at her side smashed the butt of his pistol into the side of her head, just above her ear, and she fuzzed out, her legs buckling.

  She was bodily dragged through the door and down the stairs.

  Moments, or perhaps minutes, later, she heard the door slam.

  A waste of resources, it came to her. Leaving two men behind.

  * * *

  The double doors to the church had been left partially open, probably as an invitation for him to come inside. But Mac had heard everything that Pete had shouted.

  The narrow plaza around the front and sides of the church was empty. Parisians had become accustomed to acts of terrorism in the past few years, and at the first sign of trouble they scattered. A battered van and taxi, plus men dragging a woman into the church and another carrying a submachine gun, were more than enough.

  “Hang on,” Mac shouted, and he slammed the left door open with his foot and stepped aside.

  A half dozen rapid-fire shots each from two pistols smacked into the door and door frame.

  McGarvey waited for the lull, then thrust the H&K room broom around the corner and emptied the magazine.

  Tossing the weapon aside, he ducked into the church, below the level of the solid wood seat backs angled to the right.

  He caught the brief impression of one man sprawled backwards in a pew a few rows away and a second fumbling to reload his pistol.

  Leaping up, he jumped over the seat back as if he were a high hurdler, and as the man was bringing up his pistol, Mac hit him high on the torso, shoving him backwards with such force that his spine broke with an audible pop.

  Mac recovered his balance, snatched the pistol from where the dying man had dropped it, and raced toward the altar and the door behind it. The gun was a heavy-duty Glock 20 Gen 4 that fired 10mm rounds from a fifteen-round magazine, which the shooter had just reloaded.

  McGarvey eased the door open a few inches and listened.

  Someone was on the stairs below, but at least two levels down.

  “Your friends are dead,” McGarvey said.

  Someone whispered something and Mac eased back, just out of the line of direct fire.

  “The woman is my wife. Send her back up and we’ll call it even. We’ll leave and won’t interfere with your escape.”

  No one answered, but the movement
below had stopped.

  “If you harm her, I promise that I will find you and kill you.”

  “Who are you?” a man asked. His accent sounded German to McGarvey.

  “I used to be a US Navy SEAL close quarters combat instructor. I retired several years ago, but believe me, I haven’t lost my edge. Send her up.”

  The darkness below was silent.

  “We know about the couple in the tower restaurant. And we know about the bombers—all of them dead now. And of course the tower still stands. At this point you have nothing to gain by harming my wife, and only the possibility that I might get lucky and kill more of you.”

  * * *

  In the very dim light coming from several low-wattage bulbs spaced at long intervals down the long stone tunnel, the four operators on the recovery team were all but lost in the shadows as they pointed their weapons toward the stairs.

  The woman was still dazed, but she was already coming around. She was a tough bitch, but what bothered Bernard the most was the confidence in her voice and in the voice of her husband or partner or whoever he was.

  They were professionals, but he didn’t think the man was a retired SEAL instructor. The pizda was more than that.

  At the very least the American was a fucking liar. And he was going to die down here this afternoon.

  * * *

  Pete became aware that she was in a small room with stone walls. An open door led out to the narrow, very dimly lit corridor.

  She was on her tiptoes, her wrists bound together by a strap of some sort, tied to a pipe or perhaps an electrical conduit on the low ceiling.

  Her breast still ached. She was sick at her stomach, her ears rang, and her vision was blurry from the blow she’d taken to the side of her head. Her mouth was dry and her tongue felt thick.

  “All in all, not a good day,” she muttered.

  “What was that, my dear?” the man she took to be the lead operator asked from a dark corner. “A little louder, please, so that your friend can hear.”

  “You and your people are so fucked,” she said.

  TWELVE

  Bernard walked farther along the tunnel and around the corner that led, ten meters away, to a second set of stairs down. His cell phone showed only one bar but his call to his control officer went through.

  “We’re in the first basement of the église. The woman is secure, but two of my people may be dead, and the man is here. He says that he’s the woman’s husband.”

  “Who are they?” Najjir demanded. “American FBI?”

  “He claims to be a retired SEAL combat instructor.”

  “Yes?”

  “He may be lying. But the situation is fluid. I suggest we kill the woman and get out of here.”

  “We’re less than a block from your position. What are the chances that you can take the man alive?”

  “Is he that important?”

  “Possibly not, but I want to make sure,” Najjir said.

  “What about the woman?”

  “I don’t care about her.”

  “Then our chances are fair,” Bernard said. It would be a relief to finally shut her up. “What about the conditions topsides?”

  “No police yet. All their assets are at or en route to the tower.”

  “As you wish,” Bernard said, and he broke the connection and pocketed the phone as he walked back around the corner.

  He motioned for two of his people to take up positions on either side of the stairs. If it came to a gun battle, they would have the advantage of catching the bastard in a cross fire.

  “What do I call you?” he asked, raising his voice.

  “Your worst nightmare,” McGarvey said. “Send her up to me and we’ll leave.”

  “Fuck you,” Bernard said. He went back into the room where the woman was hanging by her wrists from a water pipe in the ceiling and slammed his fist into her injured breast.

  She bit off a scream and looked into his eyes. “How about untying me and let’s try that on an even footing?”

  Bernard raised his fist to hit her again.

  “Fucking coward,” she whispered.

  He grabbed her throat with his left hand and squeezed, constricting her carotid arteries.

  * * *

  McGarvey stepped through the doorway and paused. Only a dim light showed from below, and the smells were definitely from the sewer. Their escape route.

  It was a trap, of course. It was possible they’d taken Pete away, leaving behind one or two men, almost certainly at the base of the stairs, in the shadows, if there was room to conceal themselves.

  He started down the stairs, making as little noise as possible.

  Something moved directly below him and he stopped.

  It was quiet again.

  He looked back over his shoulder, realizing that he was outlined by the light coming from the altar door. He went back up, slammed the door shut, and then raced down the stairs, firing two shots at the ceiling near the bottom as a distraction.

  A man popped up on the left and McGarvey fired one shot, hitting him in the face, and he turned as a second man rose up out of the darkness less than three feet away on the right.

  McGarvey stepped directly toward the shooter, batting his gun hand away, and fired three shots in rapid succession into the man’s chest.

  Even before the bastard’s body had hit the floor, McGarvey was off the stairs and down the tunnel in four quick steps, pulling up short at the doorway, just out of sight of anyone inside, flattening himself against the brick wall.

  * * *

  Bernard released his grip on the woman’s throat. Her head lolled to the right and her eyes fluttered. She had lost consciousness, but he’d not held on long enough to kill her or cause her any brain damage because of the lack of oxygen.

  But she was mercifully quiet for the moment.

  He had to assume that his two operators at the base of the stairs were dead. It left only the last two of his crew, stationed now on either side of the doorway.

  Bernard slapped Pete on the cheek, gently, only to rouse her.

  Her head came up and she whimpered. “Kirk.”

  Bernard placed the muzzle of his Glock to the side of her head.

  She moaned again, this time more loudly as she started to come fully awake.

  “Won’t you join us, sir?” Bernard said, his tone reasonable. He smiled.

  The man the woman had just called Kirk came around the corner of the door frame, moving low and fast, a Glock pistol in his hand.

  Bernard’s remaining two operators were right there on either side of the man. “Drop your gun and your woman may survive the day,” he said.

  The man pulled up short.

  He was a professional, that much was certain. But he wasn’t a young man, and he favored his right leg.

  “I’m sorry,” Pete said.

  The man was clearly evaluating his chances, but he finally bent down and laid the pistol on the stone floor, then straightened up.

  “Your call, but we have people who know the situation,” he said. “You might consider your position before you do something foolish.”

  “I’m listening,” Bernard said, but only because it amused him. His control officer would be here shortly, and the responsibility would shift to him, though it was his inclination to kill both the man and the woman and get on with their plan of escape.

  “My wife and I are contractors working for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  It wasn’t exactly what Bernard had expected, but he wasn’t terribly surprised.

  “Your attack on the Eiffel Tower failed, which might be your salvation, providing you and your operators put down your weapons and release my partner before the French police arrive. I don’t think they’ll be so understanding.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “A trade.”

  “For what?”

  “Your counterintelligence value,” Mac said.

  Bernard almost laughed. “I’m not a terror
ist. I had nothing to do with the attack.”

  “Bullshit,” the man said. “Or didn’t they teach you that word at School One in Moscow? Or was it with the ministry’s spy school outside Tehran? We hear that a lot of disaffected operators from East Germany—where I’m guessing you came from—end up across that southern border.” The Ministry of Intelligence—the MOIS—was Iran’s elite secret intelligence service.

  Bernard was shaken, but he didn’t show it. “Actually I think that your counterintelligence value might be of more importance to my people than the other way ’round.”

  The man shrugged. “Have you ever been to New York City?” he asked.

  The question was meaningless at the moment, and Bernard shrugged.

  “Washington? Boston? Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles?”

  Bernard knew where the bastard was going. “Spare me…”

  “You people don’t have a fucking clue.”

  Bernard nodded and the two men flanking the American closed in.

  THIRTEEN

  Bernard raised his free hand and his two operators held up.

  “No need for that,” he said. “If the gentleman persists, his wife will die first and then I’ll shoot him.”

  Pete whipped her head backwards, away from the muzzle of the terrorist’s pistol.

  McGarvey grabbed the man on his left by the gun hand, spun him around as a shield, the pistol pointed directly at the one to the right, and yanked off three shots center mass.

  Bernard grabbed Pete by the hair and jammed the muzzle of his gun against the side of her head, above her ear. “I’m not going to fuck with you any longer. Step away or I’ll pull the trigger.”

  “No you won’t,” McGarvey said. He twisted the man’s gun hand inward, snatched the weapon from his hand, and yanked off two shots, both of them hitting the operator in the left side.

  The man collapsed on the floor.

  McGarvey raised the Glock and pointed it directly at the man holding the gun to Pete’s head. “Same deal. Lower the gun and step away from my wife and I promise I’ll keep you out of the hands of the French police.”

  Bernard’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Then what? You’ll shoot me?”