Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  “None of us is going to get hurt by the truth, Carley. Not even McGarvey. Remember that.”

  “If he’s innocent.”

  “Yeah,” Carrara said. “But if he’s guilty, playing fair won’t matter. I’ll nail the bastard myself.”

  Carley looked at him. He was an administrator, not a fieldman like McGarvey. The spark was missing from his eyes, from his bearing and stance, from his attitude. His wasn’t the kind of look you expected to see from a killer. He was tame; McGarvey was feral. There was no comparison.

  “He’s innocent,” she said.

  She opened the door for him on the first ring, and entering her apartment McGarvey got the impression that she’d been waiting for him.

  “I saw you from the window,” she said, closing the door behind him. She wore a pair of blue jeans and an old UCLA sweatshirt, and no shoes.

  “How are you, Carley?” McGarvey asked. She looked strung out and very nervous, he thought.

  “Okay,” she said.

  McGarvey went to the window and looked out. A car passed on the street below but did not stop. Nothing else moved.

  For a moment he studied Carley’s reflection in the dark windowpane. She glanced at the bedroom door, then quickly looked away.

  By your tradecraft you shall be known. The old line from the Farm came back to him. They’d been expecting him to come here. To make contact. It was the nature of the beast. His move.

  He turned back to her and unbuttoned his overcoat. His pistol was in the left pocket. “So, who’ve you got in there, Carley? A good one, or a bad one?”

  Her eyes widened. “Kirk, I—”

  The bedroom door opened and McGarvey pulled out his gun. Carrara appeared in the doorway.

  “I guess I should have known better than to try to fool you,” the DDO said.

  McGarvey slowly lowered his pistol and uncocked the hammer. He put the gun back in his pocket. “Did you trace us from Chile?”

  “We lost you after you crossed the border. The federal police in Buenos Aires have issued warrants for your arrests. Yours and Maria Schimmer’s. You knew that?”

  McGarvey nodded. “For the murder of Albert Rothmann.”

  “There are others. Steven Jones and Jorge Vallejo aboard a boat in Puerto Lobos. A hotel clerk in the town. And one of the hotel’s guests, an Italian tourist. SISMI is interested in you now. We got a twixt from Rome yesterday.”

  “We killed Vallejo in self-defense.”

  “The others?”

  “Arkady Kurshin.”

  Carrara swore, half to himself. “Are you sure? Absolutely sure, Kirk? I mean, did you actually see the man?”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said, his jaw tightening. “I saw him. There’s no doubt.”

  “He’s alive after all,” Carrara said in wonder. “But how the hell did he trace you to Buenos Aires?”

  “There’s a professor in Freiburg.”

  “Hesse. He’s dead.”

  “Right.”

  “And it was him at the embassy?” Carley asked.

  McGarvey nodded tiredly. “Almost certainly. But I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish by killing Tom Lord and the others. It makes no sense to me.”

  Carrara’s tie was loose, but he still wore his jacket. He stepped out of the bedroom doorway, and McGarvey moved back a pace, his hand going into his coat pocket.

  Carrara, startled, stopped short. “Easy, Kirk,” he said. “There are no other surprises tonight. No one else hiding in the closet.”

  “But you knew I was coming.”

  “We knew you were on the move, and I figured you’d show up here sooner or later. The general wants to talk to you.”

  “Not now,” McGarvey said. “I came to warn you about Kurshin, and have you call your dogs off me.”

  “I can’t do that. Not now.”

  There was something else. McGarvey could see it as a dangerous glint in the man’s eyes. “What?” he asked softly.

  “One of our people was killed in Buenos Aires. Kneecap first, then shot in the head. With a Walther PPK. You’re high on everyone’s list.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Looking for you and the woman. And the submarine.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “The woman?”

  McGarvey shook his head. “It would be my guess that Kurshin found out where we were from him.”

  “The man gets around,” Carrara said dryly.

  “What are you saying, Phil?” McGarvey asked, his voice flat. Carley recognized the tone, and she stiffened. Carrara did not.

  “The general wants to talk to you, as I’ve already said. But I have a feeling that if I tried to take you by force, you’d prevent it.”

  McGarvey nodded.

  “Perhaps it was the same with Ken Bellows in Buenos Aires.”

  “No,” McGarvey said. “I wouldn’t have come back here like this.”

  “For Carley’s sake,” Carrara suggested.

  A pained look crossed her face.

  McGarvey shook his head. “No. Not for Carley’s sake. Whatever there was between us is over with, Phil. I returned to warn you that Arkady Kurshin is on the loose. He’s on his way to Lisbon, I think, and I’ll be waiting for him. But there’s no telling what the man will do to get there. If your people get in his way, he’ll kill them. I think he’s already demonstrated that ability, and willingness.”

  “Why Lisbon?” Carrara asked.

  McGarvey just looked at him.

  “If it has something to do with gold or artwork or whatever from the war, I think we know what he’s after.”

  “It’s gold,” McGarvey said. “At least I’ve been led to believe it is.”

  “A lot of gold?”

  “Yes.”

  “The KGB is in big trouble. Its budget has been deeply cut. Gorbachev is controlling it that way, especially by limiting its foreign currency. If they can get their hands on money, or something that can be easily converted, they’ll go after it.”

  “Who’s Kurshin’s runner?”

  “A man by the name of Vasili Didenko.”

  “General Didenko,” McGarvey said. “Baranov’s number two man in the old days.”

  “The same.”

  “Still takes us back to the embassy attack, Phil. Makes no sense from where I stand.”

  “It might,” Carrara replied, and before McGarvey could ask he continued, “The general will explain it to you. I’m not authorized. But there might be a pattern to his movements.”

  “Is it anything that would stop Kurshin from coming after me in Lisbon?”

  “A few days ago I might have said yes. But now … I don’t know.”

  “Then Lisbon it is.”

  “I can’t let you leave,” Carrara said. “I will stop you, Kirk.”

  “I don’t think so,” McGarvey said. He turned and walked to the door.

  “You’ll have to kill me, then,” Carrara said.

  McGarvey looked back in time to see the DDO pull out a pistol.

  “No!” Carley screamed, leaping between the two men. She wrapped her arms around Carrara and wrestled him back against the bedroom doorjamb before he could make a move. “Run!”

  McGarvey hesitated for just a second, then slipped out the door and down the stairs, and out into the snowstorm.

  33

  TEHRN WAS A DANGEROUS PLACE, and Richard Abbas had known for some time now that his days here were numbered. SAVAK, the secret police from the shah’s era that still survived under the ayatollahs, was on to him again.

  As director of the CIA’s front organization, the Compagnie General de Picarde, S. A., he expected to come under daily surveillance. And did. They sold computers and computer software, which the Iranians badly needed, but they were Westerners, and not to be trusted.

  But over the past few months SAVAK had stepped up its surveillance. Now they watched him almost continuously, tapping his telephones, opening most of his mail, and staking
out his apartment almost every night.

  Then there had been the threat on his life. He’d received assurances from Langley via high-speed satellite burst transmissions that he was safe. Yet he had the over-the-shoulder feeling that the threat was still valid. It was the same feeling that all good operatives developed … or at least the ones who survived very long in the field did.

  Getting ready to leave the office, he called in his number two, Shahpur Naisir. “Is everything set?” he asked in French. It was six in the evening.

  Abbas was a well-built man of six feet two, towering over the much smaller, much slighter Shahpur.

  His assistant COS nodded, glancing pointedly at the telephone. They’d discovered the new SAVAK bug three days ago during a normal sweep. Abbas had personally taken care of it.

  “We’re clean,” Abbas said.

  “Your gear is in the car,” Shahpur said. He was still very tense. Everyone in the office was tense.

  “Has the City of Tallahassee entered the Gulf of Oman yet?”

  “She was reported past Ras al Hadd two hours ago. And I got that from the horse’s mouth. The KH-11 pass couldn’t have been timed more perfectly.”

  “She’s on schedule, then.”

  Shahpur nodded. “She’ll make the Strait of Hormuz in another twenty-two or twenty-three hours, and dock at Bushehr twenty-six hours later.”

  “Escort?”

  “Our navy, of course, until she actually enters the Persian Gulf, then the Iranians take over. But if someone is going to hijack that gold, it won’t be at sea, I think. The navy is all right. It’s the army that has me worried.”

  “Me, too,” Abbas said. “But it’s a fool’s mission we’re on.”

  “Yes” Shahpur agreed.

  Like Abbas, he’d been born and raised in Tehrn. He had left at the age of fifteen in 1978 shortly before the fall of the shah. He, too, had been recruited by the CIA in the early eighties and now considered himself to be an American, as Abbas did. Here, however, they presented themselves as French, as did the other key employees in Picarde.

  “The government won’t thank us for saving the gold, if it comes to that,” Abbas said.

  “Most certainly not. But if you’re caught out there in the desert, they won’t hesitate to kill you. Not the army, and certainly not Captain Peshadi.”

  Hussain Peshadi, an officer in SAVAK, had a personal vendetta against Americans. His older sister had been having an affair with an American consular officer. When the embassy had been stormed, she’d been caught inside. She’d been executed immediately following her five-minute trial by the People’s Court.

  The Americans had caused her downfall, and Peshadi, who’d been one of the men responsible for holding the hostages in the embassy, had vowed death to Americans. Death to all Americans.

  It was he and his people who had stepped up the surveillance on Abbas.

  “I won’t leave Tehrn until I shake him,” Abbas said.

  “Will you try tonight?”

  “Midnight. If all goes well, I should be on the coast sometime tomorrow afternoon. It’ll give me plenty of time to get set up before the ship docks and they start unloading the gold.”

  “Don’t forget to activate the telephone-answering equipment in your apartment.”

  “No,” Abbas said. “As of tomorrow morning when you telephone me, you’ll hear a definitely under-the-weather Frenchman.”

  Shahpur nodded. “Take care, then, Richard.”

  “You, too,” Abbas said.

  Although they both considered themselves to be Americans, their upbringing still made them maintain a certain polite distance. It was extremely impolite and rude to do otherwise.

  They neither embraced nor shook hands. Instead, Shahpur lowered his eyes, turned, and left. Abbas followed him out a few minutes later, retrieving his Renault from the locked parking area behind the building, and headed across town to his apartment near the Mehrabad International Airport.

  He picked up a two-man tail almost immediately, but he did nothing to avoid them, or lead them to believe that he’d detected their presence. He was an innocent Frenchman, after all. He had no reason to suspect that he was being followed.

  He stopped at a druggist’s shop near the university where he purchased several over-the-counter cold remedies, and then continued home. They would check out the shop, and the minor subterfuge would help maintain the fiction that he was ill.

  With any luck he would be finished with his baby-sitting business sometime on Sunday, when the gold was safely in the vaults of the Bank of Iran, and he’d be able to slip back into his apartment that night.

  It wouldn’t be a restful weekend, but he’d not signed on with the Company for rest and relaxation. He’d joined the CIA for the simple reason that he believed then, and still did, that the Americans were right, while very nearly everyone else was wrong.

  His American wife, Sandra, believed the same. But she was no spy, so he had kept her at home in Alexandria with their seven-year-old son.

  Six months, he told himself as he parked behind his apartment building, and he would be back in the States. This, he’d been assured, was to be his last posting to Iran. He would be assigned to the Iranian desk at Langley. A boring job, but a safe one.

  The elevator was out of order again, as were the lights in the stairwell, so he had to trudge up to the fifth floor in the dark.

  At forty-two he was getting old for field work. At least that was what his wife said. And sometimes he felt that way himself.

  The lights in the fifth-floor corridor were off as well. He swore to himself as he fumbled his key into the lock. Inside, he shut the door and flipped on the light switch, but nothing happened. The electricity to the entire building was apparently out.

  “Goddamnit,” he said out loud.

  “Not a very French thing to say,” someone said in the darkness.

  Abbas reached for his pistol, but the beam of a flashlight was switched on in his face.

  “If you touch your pistol I will kill you,” the man warned. He spoke English with what Abbas took to be a non-American but definitely cultured accent.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Who I am is of no matter,” Arkady Kurshin said. “But what I want is your help.”

  “With what?”

  “Why, with the gold, of course. What else?”

  Kurshin laughed, the sound low and menacing, and Abbas knew that he was in mortal danger.

  34

  KURSHIN REPLACED THE BREAKERS in the circuit box in the front closet, and the lights came on in the apartment. The lights in the corridor would remain out.

  He’d forced Abbas to strip naked and then had tied him securely to a straight-backed chair that he tipped up on two legs against the wall. He didn’t bother taping the man’s mouth. The American would not call for help because of his illegal status in the country.

  Back in the living room he pulled up another chair and set it in front of Abbas. He sat down and smiled pleasantly.

  “Time for a little chat now, I should think,” he said.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” Abbas growled.

  “Well, we have a long night ahead of us. The gold isn’t due at Bushehr for nearly forty-eight hours. We have lots of time.”

  “You’re not Iranian,” Abbas said. “Which means time is on my side. SAVAK will nail your ass to the wall the instant you try to pull me out of this apartment. They’re a nervous lot.”

  “Ah, then that’s who followed you here. Means you’re doing a sloppy job. You know, the Iranians still don’t like Americans very much. It would be a pity if something were to happen to the gold … and then it was blamed on you.”

  Kurshin got up and went to the window where he carefully parted the curtains and looked down. The same gray sedan that had followed Abbas into the parking lot was still in front.

  He’d worked with pricks like them before. Their field officers never had any imagination. If they’d been told to stake
out the front of this apartment building, they would do exactly that, never thinking about the back way out. Losing them would be child’s play. And that in itself would be another nail in the American’s coffin.

  In the bedroom he retrieved the long extension cord he’d found earlier, and out in the living room plugged it into a wall socket behind Abbas.

  The CIA station chief watched him through half-closed eyes. If he had any idea what was about to happen, he didn’t show it. Kurshin admired him for at least that much.

  “The mains here in Iran are at two hundred twenty volts,” Kurshin said. “Dangerous sometimes.” He unplugged a table lamp and ripped the cord from its base. Setting the lamp aside, he used a pocket knife to strip the insulation from the first six inches of the cord.

  Abbas’s eyes were wider now.

  Kurshin sat down in front of him and gently wrapped one of the bare wires around his flaccid penis.

  “Son of a bitch, don’t do this,” Abbas said, trying desperately to struggle away.

  Kurshin straddled the chair, holding it in place with his body weight, and managed to wrap the other bare wire around the American’s testicles.

  “There’s nothing I’m going to tell you,” Abbas said breathlessly. He was choking on his own words, and his chest was heaving.

  Kurshin sat down again, pushing his chair back a little bit. He picked up the extension cord and brought its plug and the lamp cord plug nearly together.

  “Don’t do this,” Abbas pleaded, his voice rising.

  “If you make too much noise, they’ll arrest you. And they will kill you.”

  Abbas was breathing heavily through his mouth.

  “Your name is Richard Abbas and you are the chief of station for Central Intelligence Agency activities here in Iran. I know this. I would simply like to hear you admit it.”

  Abbas said nothing, his eyes fixed on the two plugs.

  Kurshin touched them together for just an instant. Abbas’s body spasmed so violently that the chair he was tied to crashed to the floor. But he did not cry out. The only sound to escape him was a low, animal moan from the back of his throat.