Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “We’ll take you to the American embassy and turn you over to the chief of station.”

  “You mean Mr. Pickett? Harley Pickett? I think the CIA hired the wrong man to head up operations, and everyone knows it.”

  “You’ll be safe with him until we can decide what to do with you. There are some questions about Russian policy we’d like answered.”

  “I’m not Russian.”

  “Like what happened to the nuke that has turned up missing. Maybe the ZBV3? Light enough for a couple of tough guys to handle.” It was the Russian designation for a tactical nuclear weapon fitted to a self-propelled artillery shell. Ordnance security was still a big problem for the Russians.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Bernard said. “But actually you’re in no position at the moment to dictate terms.”

  “Behind you,” Pete cried.

  Something very hard, like the butt of a rifle, slammed into the back of McGarvey’s head, and he went down to his knees, dazed but not out.

  The pistol was taken out of his hands, and he fumbled to the left to reach the gun he’d laid on the floor, but a woman was right there, and she shoved it aside with her foot.

  * * *

  “How did you manage all this, you idiot?” Miriam demanded. She took off her shoes and removed her panty hose and gave them to Najjir as he holstered his gun.

  “Help me, before he comes around,” he ordered.

  He and Bernard manhandled McGarvey over onto his back, secured his wrists over his head with the waist of the panty hose, and dragged him across the small room. With Miriam’s help they managed to hoist him so that his feet were just off the floor, and she tied the stocking legs to a three-inch sewer drain line that came out of the wall near the ceiling.

  “He claims they work for the CIA,” Bernard said. “But it was you who called me for extraction. He must have been on your tail.”

  “Since the Jules Verne in the Eiffel Tower,” Pete said. “They bungled it. Fucking amateurs.”

  Najjir walked over to the woman, took her jaw in his hand, and forced her to face him. “Are you CIA spies after all?” he asked, his tone pleasant.

  “Actually I work for J. C. Penney and my hubby works for Sears. Makes for some interesting dinner conversations with our eleven kids who prefer to shop online. But you know how it is.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “We checked the reservations list. Your names were on our hit parade.”

  “Is that how you knew about the missing nuclear weapon?” Miriam asked. She eased Bernard aside and gently ran the fingernails of her right hand down Pete’s face, to her neck and then to her battered breast.

  “Dyke,” Pete said.

  Miriam smiled. “You can’t imagine the half of it, sweetheart. But let’s get back to the weapon.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “But your friend does. So I’m betting you do too.”

  “The offer still stands. We’ll get you to our embassy and you’ll be safe.”

  “Safe, like in Guantanamo?”

  “Beats hell of what’ll happen if the DGSE catches up with you,” Pete said. “After what you guys tried to do at the tower, those guys are seriously pissed off.”

  Miriam turned away. “They can be made to talk, of course. Everyone does at some point. But they’re good, so it’d take more time than we have. And I sure as hell don’t want to drag them along with us.”

  “What about the nuclear weapon?” Najjir asked. “Is it true?”

  “There’ve been rumors.”

  Najjir picked up one of the pistols near the door. He had the almost overwhelming urge to kill Miriam and the extraction team leader and make his way to the safe house at Saint-Ouen and from there disappear.

  The money was important, of course, as were any future assignments, but his life was more important. This situation had been well planned, but it had fallen apart because of the CIA. And now he was being told about a Russian nuclear weapon that might have gone missing.

  He’d been lied to by his control officer outside Riyadh. Directly about Miriam. And by omission about the weapon, if it was somehow relevant.

  “Whatever you want us to do will have to be done soon,” Bernard said. “We made quite an entrance getting here with that son of a bitch on our tail. The cops can’t be too far behind.”

  Bernard and his team had been assigned to the operation in case things started to go south, which they had. And Najjir was grateful for the man’s help. But he’d lost six of his supposedly well-trained operatives who knew the business—to one man. The only person he’d managed to control was the woman, whose smart mouth had to be an irritation to anyone.

  “It’s being treated as an accident with the tourist bus. The metro flics are on it.”

  “How can you be sure?” Bernard demanded. At six two, he towered over Najjir, and he was seriously angry at the moment.

  “Look at this,” Miriam said. “You let a cripple get the better of you and six of your operators.” She had raised McGarvey’s left pants leg. He was wearing a prosthetic leg from just below the knee.

  Najjir was suddenly not so sure of himself and the operation. “I know this man,” he said. “Unless I’m very much mistaken, his name is Kirk McGarvey. He was the director of the CIA a few years ago.”

  It was clear that Bernard had heard the name and knew the reputation. “Kill him and the woman now, and let’s get the hell out of here while we can.”

  McGarvey’s head lolled forward, his breath shallow.

  Najjir stared at him for a longish moment.

  “I agree,” Miriam said. “I don’t want this bastard coming after us. And he will.”

  “We’ll have to answer for our failure.”

  “Your failure,” Bernard said.

  “You can use him as a bargaining chip,” Pete said.

  “Bargain for what and with whom?” Bernard asked.

  “With our government, for your lives, you fucking imbecile,” Pete said.

  FOURTEEN

  Najjir considered his options. The Eiffel Tower had not come down, and he would be going back to face his control officer as a failure. Unless he brought something of value.

  McGarvey was still mostly out of it, possibly with a concussion from the blow to the back of his head with the stock of the H&K. It was possible he would never recover, and if he did he would become a formidable piece of baggage to get out of France.

  The woman, on the other hand, would be relatively easy to control, though she had a smart mouth. The urge to kill them both here and now was strong.

  “Get the woman down, I’m taking her with us,” he told Bernard.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Miriam asked.

  “You’re going back home, but I’m taking her with me.”

  “How, for bleeding sake? The first flic you come across she’ll start screaming her bloody head off.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She’s right,” Bernard said.

  Najjir came close to the woman. “You’ll promise to behave, won’t you, sweetheart.”

  “Take it to the bank,” Pete said, grinning.

  Najjir brushed the tips of his fingers across her lips. “You will, in exchange for Mr. McGarvey’s life.”

  “You’re nuts,” Miriam said. “He’ll come after us.”

  “He’ll come after me, so you have nothing to worry about. But by the time someone comes down here and finds him, and by the time he explains to the cops all the dead bodies upstairs and down here—his fingerprints are all over the murder weapons—the three of us will be long gone.”

  “He’ll move heaven and earth to find the woman.”

  “I think he will,” Najjir said. “He might even be willing to make a pact with the devil to save her. Might be interesting.”

  “When he catches up with us he’ll kill you,” Pete said, but it was obvious in her eyes and the tightness in her lips and how she
spoke that she was more than a little concerned.

  “He’ll try,” Najjir said. “In the meantime, McGarvey’s life for your cooperation.”

  Pete didn’t hesitate. “If you keep your word, I’ll keep mine, because both of us know that once he gets out of here he will move heaven and earth to find me.”

  “He sure as hell will,” Miriam said.

  “And we’ll take him alive on the ground of my choosing,” Najjir said. “Cut her down.”

  Bernard and Miriam got her down from where her wrists had been tied to the electrical conduit and she stumbled toward McGarvey, but Bernard stopped her.

  “Your cooperation, my dear,” Najjir said. “Your complete cooperation.”

  Pete looked up at McGarvey’s face, but he was still out of it. She turned back and nodded. “It’s the worst mistake of your life,” she said.

  “Once we get you to our safe house, we’ll get you something decent to wear,” Najjir said. “Take her up to the car. I’ll be right behind you,” he told Miriam.

  “We go together, including this asshole,” Pete said, nodding at Bernard.

  “No more bargaining,” Najjir said. “Get her out of here.”

  “Goddamnit,” Pete said.

  Miriam took her arm. “You can take a nice hot bath when we get there, if you behave yourself.”

  “Christ,” Pete said, but then she went with the woman.

  “Right behind you,” Najjir said, and as soon as they were out of earshot, he turned to Bernard. “Give us five minutes to get clear, then kill the bastard and get the hell out of here.”

  “You’re going to the safe house?” Bernard asked.

  “We need the get the bitch ready to travel.”

  “What about Miriam? She knows too much.”

  “Yes, she does. But she won’t be a problem much longer.”

  * * *

  As soon as Najjir was gone, his footfalls lost at the end of the tunnel, McGarvey opened his eyes.

  Bernard, a Glock in hand, stepped back a pace, startled.

  “What’s it worth to you?” McGarvey asked. His ears were ringing, his vision was slightly blurred in his left eye, and he had a mother of all headaches.

  Bernard pointed the gun at McGarvey’s head. “For me not to kill you?” he asked.

  “Whoever ordered the downing of the tower has to be pissed off right about now. Those kinds of people usually don’t take kindly to failure.”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Unless you go deep they’ll find you, and once they do you’ll end up dead.”

  “I think bagging a former CIA boss might be worth a few points.”

  “You guys fucked up today.”

  “Our job was extraction, in case something went wrong.”

  “Which it did.”

  “Because of you.”

  McGarvey laughed. “He had to blame someone. With me dead, you’ll be next. Guys like that always have a way out. You oughta know that.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Bernard said, and his aim steadied on McGarvey’s head.

  “One million dollars.”

  “What?”

  “If you have a cell phone I can transfer the money into any account you want.”

  Bernard’s eyes narrowed. “So you can trace me. Yeah, right.”

  “It’s a Chase account. I can give you an account number that you can use at any Chase bank in the world. Just walk in, give them the number, and walk out with one million US—or any currency you’d like—in cash.”

  Bernard hesitated.

  McGarvey lowered his voice. “I can transfer it to a De Beers outlet and you can pick up a million US in diamonds.”

  “Someone would be waiting for me to show up.”

  McGarvey softened his voice even more. “Any Chase or De Beers office in the world.”

  “What?” Bernard asked, and he stepped closer so that he could hear.

  McGarvey suddenly reared up, kicked the pistol away, and wrapped his legs around the man’s neck. Before Bernard could recover, Mac twisted sharply to the left, using his body weight as a powerful lever to break the man’s neck.

  Bernard collapsed, his eyes open, his face turning red.

  McGarvey swung around so that he faced the wall and, raising both feet above his shoulders, pressed with every pound of his body mass and every ounce of his strength against the restraints around his wrists.

  The tough fabric of the panty hose did not give, but the knots the woman had used to tie the legs around the sewer piped slipped loose, and McGarvey fell back, his head bouncing hard on the stone floor.

  He saw stars again, and fuzzed out for a moment or two.

  Rolling over, he got to his hands and knees and remained in that position for another moment or two before his head cleared and he was able to remove the panty hose tied around his wrists.

  He snatched the Glock from the dying man’s hands, got to his feet, leaped out into the tunnel, and raced up the stairs to the nave.

  The church was quiet, but sirens outside were very close.

  The son of a bitch had Pete, which was the dumbest thing anyone had ever done. The bastard was a dead man walking.

  Barely able to contain his rage, McGarvey raced up the aisle and burst out the main doors into the church’s courtyard, into the nearly blinding sunlight.

  A dozen French SWAT team cops were in positions behind two armored vehicles and a couple of squad cars.

  “Jetez vos arme,” a cop ordered by bullhorn. “Jetez vos arme, ou on fair feu.” Drop your weapon or you will be shot.

  FIFTEEN

  Pete sat in the backseat of the Peugeot with Miriam while Najjir headed up the rue de Clichy, driving with the general flow of traffic, which in Paris always seemed to be at a manic pace.

  The man was sharp, she thought. He did not stick out, even though cops seemed to be everywhere, on foot at street corners, speaking into lapel mikes, some in patrol cars or SWAT vans, sirens blaring as they raced past, and in helicopters coming in from the north, possibly from the airfield at Le Bourget.

  Paris was astir as if someone had poked a hornet’s nest, and there wasn’t a damned thing she could do now to be of any help to Mac.

  “You’re goddamned lucky, you know,” Miriam said.

  Pete looked at her. “Funny, but I was just thinking the same thing about you,” she said.

  The woman was well put together, slender with a pleasant oval face and nice eyes. But her English seemed odd; she’d turned her cockney accent on and off, like an actress. And some of her gestures, especially the way she positioned her lips just before she spoke, as if she was about to say lines that she had memorized. And the set of her chin, the tilt of her head. None of it rang true for Pete. But she couldn’t put her finger on why she was bothered.

  “If it was up to me I would have killed both of you,” Miriam said.

  “I know the feeling, because if the tables were reversed—which they will be sooner or later—I’d kill both of you in a heartbeat.”

  They passed a cemetery off to the right, and Najjir called someone on his cell phone. Apparently no one answered, and he hung up.

  Pete caught Najjir looking at her in the rearview mirror. It struck her that he had received bad news.

  “You guys screwed up at the tower,” she said. “But what I can’t figure out is why the hell you took the chance of being right there in the middle of it. You don’t strike me as the martyr types.”

  Neither of them responded.

  “Unless you weren’t sure that your idiots would actually go through with it. Maybe at the last minute they’d figure out that dying wasn’t such a hot idea after all.”

  Najjir was watching the road, but Miriam was looking at her.

  “Let me take a wild guess. You’re starting to have a little trouble recruiting soldiers willing to die for Allah. That it?”

  “Shut the fuck up, would you?” Miriam said. “Or maybe I’ll help you.”

  Pete rested her hands on her
bare knees. “Anytime, sweetheart,” she said. She felt as if she had been hit by a battering ram, and it took an effort to nod her head and smile. “Take your best shot.”

  “Stand down. I need her intact,” Najjir said.

  “Good idea,” Pete said. “Otherwise she might have a hard time getting back to London. Or, wherever.”

  “He meant you,” Miriam said.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Something passed in Miriam’s eyes, only for a moment, but long enough for Pete to catch it. Her main job with the Company, before she and Mac had begun working as a team, had been as an interrogator. And she had been very good at it, because of a natural ability to read people by their gestures. It had been more about their silences than their confessions. During waterboarding, anyone would say just about anything that their interrogator wanted to hear. But it was when the prisoner wasn’t saying a word that their inner secrets became most evident.

  Miriam was troubled, and the way the woman had looked at the back of Najjir’s head spoke volumes.

  * * *

  They crossed under the busy Boulevard Périphérique into an area of Paris that Pete knew absolutely nothing about, except that the place was even busier than it had been around the Eiffel Tower. They passed through what looked like a rat warren of shops and stalls, vendors selling anything and everything. A lot of the merchandise looked used to Pete, and she figured out they were in the middle of a gigantic flea market.

  The entire place was filled with shoppers apparently unaware yet of what had happened at the Eiffel Tower, which struck her as odd, considering the instant news on smartphones.

  Najjir turned down a narrow side street, and a block later pulled half up on the narrow sidewalk in front of a three-story apartment building and shut off the engine.

  There were no shops back here, not even a sidewalk café, and the street was deserted of people and vehicles in either direction.

  Otherworldly, the unbidden thought came to Pete. Bad things happened in places like this.

  Najjir got out, opened the rear door on Pete’s side, and took her arm to help her out.

  She jerked her arm away, got out of the car on her own. and looked up at the roofline, as Mac had taught her to do first off in hostile territory. Look for a shooter on the roof, the glint of a sniper rifle scope.