Assassin km-6

by David Hagberg

  “If Moscow were London or Washington,” Shevardnadze said.

  “It will tear the country apart,” Yemlin said.

  “If he were killed by the army it would tear Russia apart as well,” Shevardnadze said. “But if he’s allowed to continue unchecked on his present course he will succeed. Is this what you believe?”

  Both men nodded.

  Shevardnadze looked into the fire for several long seconds as he gathered his thoughts. A weight seemed to settle on his shoulders, and he sighed as if to rid himself of an impossible burden. When he turned back his face was sad.

  “I too am a man of peace, Konstantin Nikolaevich, as I know you are. I’ve long admired your writing.”

  Sukhoruchkin nodded in acknowledgement. “If Tarankov comes to power he means to restore the old Soviet Union by whatever means are necessary,” Yemlin said.

  “We would give him trouble, but if he had the backing of the generals we couldn’t win,” Shevardnadze admitted. “The Baltics would cause him more problems.” “As would regaining Eastern Europe, but the bastard will do it, and no one will dare to stand up to him.”

  “Does he have the military behind him?”

  “He will,” Yemlin said. “There’s no doubt of it.”

  “What about the SVR?”

  “By whatever name it’s called, it’s still the KGB.”

  Again a silence fell over them as they each pondered what they were on the verge of agreeing to. It was an impossibly large step, a quantum leap, from the rule of democratic law in which they all believed, to an act of terrorism.

  “Tarankov must be assassinated,” Yemlin voiced their thought.

  “I agree,” Sukhoruchkin said with surprising firmness.

  “As do I,” Shevardnadze said. “But I know of no one in Georgia who is capable of such a thing. Nor do I suspect you’ll find anyone in Russia whom you could trust.”

  Yemlin nodded.

  “You have such a man in mind? A foreigner?”

  “Da.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An American, Mr. President. His name is Kirk McGarvey. And if he agrees to take on the job, he’ll do so for the same reasons that we want to hire him.”

  SIX

  Paris

  Spring had come early to France. Although it wasn’t the end of March, the last two weeks had been glorious. The sky was pale blue, and each morning dawned crystal clear, as if the air above the great city had been washed and hung out to dry under a warm sun. Along the river the plane trees were budding. In sunny corners of the Tuileries some flowers had already began to bloom. And parks and boulevards and sidewalk cafes were filled with Parisians who’d been cooped up all winter, and with tourists who could scarcely believe their good luck.

  Kirk Cullough McGarvey sat with Jacqueline Belleau at a window table in the Restaurant Jules Verne on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower sharing an expensive bottle of Chardonnay while they waited for their lunches to be served. Jacqueline had insisted they come here today because this was where they’d met three months ago, and she was “romantic and French.” He’d indulged her because it amused him, and he wanted to see what her next move would be. The French secret service, which was called the Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage, or SDECE for short, was usually sophisticated in its business. But sometimes, like now, they were blatantly obvious. Jacqueline had been sent by the SDECE to seduce McGarvey to find out why he was back in Paris. The French were paranoid about former CIA agents taking up residence in their country, though not so paranoid that they would deny such men a visa. “Bein, I’argent est I’argent, nest-ce pas?”

  “That’s a lascivious grin, if ever I’ve seen one,” she said, catching him in his thoughts. “How do you say it, a penny for your thoughts?”

  “I was thinking that Paris isn’t like any other city. It keeps getting better.”

  She smiled, her oval, pretty features lighting up as if she were a kid at Christmas. “And that from a crusty old bastard like you.”

  He nodded. “That from a crusty old bastard like me.” He admired her, not only for her stunning good looks-she could easily have been a runway mannequin, though not as thin as most of them were — but for her sharp intelligence and even sharper wit. She was unlike either of his ex-wives, or any other woman he’d ever been involved with. The number wasn’t a legion, but they’d all been memorable because they’d all ended in failed relationships.

  McGarvey, nearing fifty, was tall and muscularly built but with the coordination of a ballet dancer. He had thick brown hair that was turning gray at the temples, a wide, honest face, and penetrating eyes, sometimes green, at other times gray. He ran ten miles every day, rain or shine, from his apartment off the Rue La Fayette in the tenth arrondissement out the Avenue Jean Jaures along the Canal de 1”Ourcq. He swam five miles every afternoon at the Club American downtown, and as often as possible worked out at the Ecole Militaire Annexe with the French national fencing team.

  Although he’d known plenty of women, he’d been a loner most of his life, partly out of choice, but mostly out of circumstance. In the parlance of the secret service, he’d been a shooter. A killer. An assassin. And every night he saw the faces of every person he’d ever killed. He saw the light fading from their eyes, the animation draining from their faces as they realized that they were dying. Each of them, even the very bad ones, had died the same way: surprised. That sort of a profession tended to be hard on a relationship, any relationship.

  After graduating from Kansas State University with masters degrees in literature (his specialty had been Voltaire) and languages, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a translator and analyst. But the Cold War was in high gear and the Company needed talent because a lot of its agents were getting burned. They saw something in McGarvey that even he didn’t know existed. His instinct for survival and self-preservation was a hundred times stronger than in the very best field agents. Combined with his physique, his facility for languages, his intelligence, and the results of a battery of psychological tests which showed him to be extremely pragmatic and under the correct circumstances even cold, he’d been offered the job as a field agent. But a very special agent. His training and purpose so black that only a handful of men in the agency and on the Hill knew anything about him.

  Bad times, he thought now, studying Jacqueline’s pretty face. She was forty, and from Nice, and was aging as only the Mediterraneans did. Like Sophia Loren she would become even more beautiful as she got older.

  “Such deep, dramatic thoughts for such a lovely Saturday,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand.

  He raised hers and kissed it, tenderly and with a little sadness, because when this one was gone he knew he would miss her. “It’s my day to feel a little lugubrious. Sometimes spring in this city does that.”

  “Hemingway,” Jacqueline said. “I thought you were a fan of Voltaire.”

  He managed a slight smile. He’d never told her that, which meant her SDECE briefing had been very complete. It was one of the little inconsistencies he’d spotted from the beginning.

  In the end the Company had sent him to Santiago to kill a general who’d massacred hundreds of people in and around the capital. But the orders had been changed in mid-stream without his knowledge, and after the kill McGarvey was out.

  He’d run to Switzerland where for a few years he’d made a life for himself, operating a rare-book store in Lausanne. There, like here, the secret service worried about his presence and had sent a woman to his bed to keep tabs on him, though how they’d found out he once worked for the CIA was a mystery. When the CIA called him out of retirement for a particularly bad assignment they couldn’t handle, he’d left her. The call to arms had been stronger than his love for her.

  Greece, Paris, even back to the States for awhile, the CIA kept coming for him, and he kept losing the women in his life, and kept running from his demons. And now he was getting the odd, twitchy feeling between his shoulde
r blades that it was about to happen again. Lately he’d been thinking about returning to New York to see the only woman he’d ever loved unreservedly, and the only one who’d loved him back the same way. His daughter Elizabeth, now twenty-three and working as a translator and analyst for the United Nations. He smiled, thinking about her.

  “That’s better,” Jacqueline said.

  “I’ll try to smile more often if it has that effect on you,” McGarvey said.

  “That too,” she said. “But I meant here comes our lunch and I’m starved.”

  “You’re not a cheap date.”

  She laughed. “You can afford it. Besides, there’s something I haven’t told you about myself.”

  He waited, an indulgent smile on his lips.

  The waiter served their filet of sole and tournedos of beef plat du your expertly, then refilled their wine glasses.

  “What’s that?” McGarvey asked.

  “Whenever I have a good meal like this I get homey as hell. I’ll show you when we get home.”

  The waiter nearly dropped the wine bottle. “Excusez moi,” he muttered, and he left.

  “That wasn’t very fair,” McGarvey said.

  “Paris waiters are all shits. Nobody dislikes them worse than a Parisian. Maybe next time he won’t eavesdrop.” “I think you ‘re becoming a crusty bastard from being around me so much.”

  “Anatomically impossible,” she said airily as she broke off a piece of bread and buttered it. “Crusty bitch, not bastard.”

  McGarvey raised his wine glass to her. “Salut,” he said.

  She raised her glass. “Salut, man cher.”

  After lunch they took the elevator to the observation deck a thousand feet above the Seine, and looked out across the city. From here they could see people strolling through the park, and along the river. It was the most famous view of Paris from the city’s most famous monument, and McGarvey felt at home here as he always had.

  “When are you going to let me read your book?” she asked. McGarvey was a hundred pages into a personal look into the life of the writer, philosopher Francois — Marie Arouet, whose pen name was Voltaire. His working title was The Voltaire I Knew, but the SDECE almost certainly believed that he was writing his memoirs, a book that no one wanted written. He wrote longhand, and kept the manuscript and most of his notes under lock and key. So far his failsafes had not been tampered with.

  “When I’m finished with it,” he said. “How about an after lunch drink at Lipps?”

  “You are a Hemingway fan,” she laughed. “Let’s walk along the river first. Then afterward we’re going home.”

  “Sounds good,” McGarvey said, and she turned to go, but he stopped her. “Are you happy, Jacqueline?” A startled look crossed her face. “That’s an odd question.”

  “Are you?” McGarvey studied her eyes.

  It took her a moment to answer, but she nodded. “Yes, I am.”

  She was telling the truth, he decided.

  They took the elevator back to street level, and headed past the sidewalk vendors and jugglers to the busy Quai Branly where they could cross to the river. Out of habit he scanned the quay; the pedestrians, the traffic, the taxis lines up at the cab ranks and the cars parked at the curb. His gaze slipped past a dark blue Citroen parked behind a yellow Renault, a man seated behind the wheel, and then came back. His stomach tightened, but he did not vary his pace, nor change his expression in the slightest. Jacqueline, holding his arm, detected nothing.

  He turned left toward the taxis, and Jacqueline looked up at him.

  “Aren’t we crossing here?” she asked.

  “I want you to take a cab back to my apartment. There’s an errand I have to run.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you,” she said.

  “Don‘1 be so snoopy, or you’ll spoil my surprise.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I want you to wait for me at home. I won’t be long, and when I get back you’ll know what I meant.”

  “Why can’t I wait here?”

  “Because I don’t want you to.”

  “Are you a macho pig?”

  He laughed. “Not so long ago someone else called me that same thing. But right now you can either wait for me at my apartment, or go back to your own place and stay there. I have something to do.”

  She was torn by indecision, he could see it in her eyes. But finally she nodded. “Don’t be long.”

  “Come on, I’ll get you a cab.”

  “I can manage,” she said, pulling away from him. She searched his face for a clue, then walked over to a cab, climbed in the back, and the taxi headed away. As it passed she looked straight ahead.

  McGarvey waited until the cab was out of sight, then went back to the tower, where he bought another ticket for the fourth floor.

  Upstairs, he leaned against the rail in front of the windows and lit a cigarette. The observation deck was busy. A few minutes later the man from the Citroen joined him.

  “She is a very pretty woman,” he said.

  McGarvey focused on the man’s reflection in. the glass. “Hello, Viktor Pavlovich. Yes, she is.”

  “French secret service?” Yemlin asked.

  “Probably.”

  “I figured that was why you sent her away when you spotted me. She’ll wonder why.”

  “Will it matter if the French know that we’ve met?”

  Yemlin thought for a moment. “Yes, it will matter very much. It will be a question of your safety.”

  “Are the French after you for some reason?” “No, but they wouldn’t be so happy if they knew why I’d come to see you,” Yemlin said. He stared down at the street and the river.

  “I’m retired,” McGarvey said. “Anyway you’d be the last person I’d help. We go back too long on opposite sides of the fence for me to so easily forget.”

  “Eighteen months ago you came to me to ask a favor. And I did it for you, Kirk. Gladly. And as it turns out you did very well because of the information I provided you. All I’m asking now is that you hear me out.”

  McGarvey turned to look at the Russian. In eighteen months he’d aged ten years. He no longer seemed to be the dangerous adversary he’d once been when he’d headed the Illegals Directorate of the KGB, and later when he’d headed Department Viktor, the Russian assassination and terrorist division.

  He’d been fighting capitalism, he’d told McGarvey. Fighting to save the Rodina — the Motherland — as they’d all been in those days. But there had been hundreds, even thousands of deaths. Tens of millions of deaths counting the ones Stalin massacred.

  But who was innocent, McGarvey asked himself now as he had then. He had his share of blood on his hands. More than his share. Was fighting to save democracy any less noble for an American, than fighting to save socialism was for a Russian? He didn’t have the answer.

  “All right, Viktor, I’ll listen to you. But that’s all. I promise you that I’m out of the business.”

  “What about the woman?”

  “I’ll make my excuses. It’ll be okay.”

  Yemlin glanced out the windows. “Let’s walk in the park. Heights make me dizzy.”

  They took the elevator back down, then crossed Quai Branly and descended to the river walk where McGarvey and Jacqueline had been heading. An odd state of affairs, McGarvey thought. But then his entire life had been a series of odd affairs.

  Traffic on the river, as on the streets, was heavy. The weather was bringing everybody outdoors. The river walk too was crowded, which was better for their purposes. It gave them anonymity.

  “The situation is becoming very bad in Russia,” Yemlin said.

  “I know,” McGarvey replied. “Have you caught Yeltsin’s assassin yet, or did he get out of the city and return to Tarankov’s protection?”

  “President Yeltsin died of a heart attack—”

  “That’s not true. Nor do your security people carry any type of ordnance in their chase cars that would explode li
ke that. The public may have bought it, but there isn’t a professional in the business in the West who believes the story. The question is, why did you people make it up? Are you that concerned about Tarankov?”

  “I don’t agree with you, Kirk,” Yemlin said. “The signals we’re getting back from the CIA and SIS indicate they believe what we’re telling them.”

  “What else can they do? Nobody wants to hammer you guys into the ground anymore. Fact is most of the world feels sorry for you. Your people are going hungry, you’ve polluted the entire country, your factories are falling apart, and nobody in their right mind wants to travel around Moscow or St. Petersburg without bodyguards. So Langley is saying, okay we’ll go along with whatever they want to tell us for the moment. Let’s see what shakes out. Let’s see how they handle it. Armed revolution, anarchy, or a Warren Commission that nobody will believe, but that everybody will respect.”

  “You have no proof of that.”

  “Come on, Viktor, don’t shit the troops,” McGarvey said sharply. “You want to talk to me, go ahead and talk. But don’t lie. Tell it like it is, or go back to Moscow. Who knows, it might get better.”

  Yemlin’s shoulders sagged. He shook his head. “It won’t get better. It can only get worse.”

  “Is Kabatov really in charge like the wire services are reporting?”

  “Nobody else wants the job, and for the moment at least his is the most decisive voice in Moscow. But nobody thinks that the situation will remain stable until the June elections. At the very least what little order is left will totally break down, and the anarchy that the west has been predicting for us all these years will finally come to pass.”

  “What about the military? How are they handling Yeltsin’s death?”

  “Wait and see.”

  “No threat of a coup?” “That depends on what happens between now and the elections. But it’s certainly another very real possibility, Kirk. Our situation is desperate.”

  “Will the Duma elect an interim president?