Even Marquand had known about poor Mati. Everyone had, and somehow she was being used as the key, or as a lever to pry him loose from… what?
He was out of the business. He’d told them that a dozen times. He had nothing left to give. He was, like the Cold War, an anachronism. A man whose time had passed.
An idea that no longer fit. An ism that had become too dangerous in what was being called the “new world order.”
McGarvey paid off his driver and went directly through the terminal to the Swissair boarding area. He’d made his reservations yesterday at the airline’s downtown office under his real name, giving the opposition, if there was any, time enough to react.
Tom Lynch was waiting for him across from the gate, and he pulled McGarvey into the cocktail lounge that was half-filled with travelers. They got a table where they could watch the boarding.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the Paris chief of station asked. “We’ve turned this town upside down looking for you.”
“I’m going to Lausanne,” McGarvey answered, watching Lynch’s eyes. The COS was an organization man. He put the Agency before personal feelings.
“The Swiss will kick you out,” Lynch said, betraying nothing.
“I’m going to pay my respects, Tom. Any other reason I’d be going there?”
“I don’t know. But Murphy is screaming bloody murder for you. He’ll have your head on a platter if you don’t show up in Washington.”
“He doesn’t have the authority.”
Lynch looked at him with a smirk. “You’ve been around long enough to know better than that, McGarvey. The man has a long reach.”
McGarvey leaned forward. They were calling his flight. “So do I, Tom.”
“Are you threatening me?” Lynch demanded.
“I had a friend aboard that flight. I’m going to Lausanne, as I said, to pay my respects.
Afterward I’ll go to Washington to see Murphy. I was leaving Paris in any event.”
“Yes, I know. We’ve been to your apartment. Your concierge said you gave it up. She also said the police had been there.”
McGarvey waited.
“Marquand is suddenly unavailable. Did you happen to see him, by chance?”
McGarvey nodded. “He told me to get out of Paris.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I was leaving this morning.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
McGarvey’s flight was called again.
“I didn’t tell him much, Tom, other than about my relationship with one of the passengers.”
“And about me? About our little talk?”
“No.”
“It would be too bad if I found out differently.”
“What about the pair you sent to Geneva? Care to comment?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lynch said with a straight face.
“That shooter wasn’t gunning for Marta. My guess is that he was after your people.”
“What’ll I tell the general?”
“Tell him that I’ll drop by in the next couple of days,” McGarvey said getting to his feet. “Soon as I’m finished with my business in… Lausanne.”
The COS flinched, but the reaction was too slight to draw any conclusions from. McGarvey suspected, however, that the general would know he was on his way to Switzerland probably before his flight cleared the Paris Terminal Control Area.
Had Mati not been aboard flight 145, McGarvey knew he could have turned his back on the situation. But Marquand, the man’s cynicism notwithstanding, had read him correctly: McGarvey’s actions had betrayed him.
McGarvey’s flight touched down just before 10:00 a.m. at Geneva’s busy Cointrin Airport, and he was among the first passengers to deplane and pass through customs. No one bothered to check his bag, in which he had hidden his disassembled pistol in his toiletries kit. Passengers traveling under U.S. documents were almost never checked.
It was a long-standing tradition in Switzerland, probably because of the billions of American dollars on deposit in Swiss banks.
It would not take very long, however, before his name on the passenger manifest rang some alarm bells and the Federal Police would begin looking for him. Before that he definitely wanted to show his face. And Lausanne was as good as any city to show it in.
He rented a Ford Taurus from the Hertz counter and within the hour he had cleared Geneva and was heading the thirty-five miles on N1 along the north shore of Lake Geneva, the morning bright and warm.
It had been a long time since he’d last been here, and coming back like this was dredging up a lot of memories, some pleasant, and others not quite so pleasant. And now his daughter Elizabeth was in country, attending school outside of Bern. He wanted to see her, or at least telephone, but if he was being watched she would be endangered.
“The business has ruined our lives,” Kathleen had told him at the divorce hearing eight years ago. “I’ve got to get out, Kirk, before it completely swallows Elizabeth and me.”
By that time the CIA had already fired him, and he’d had every intention of getting out. But he’d not protested the divorce, and it hadn’t been too long afterward that Trotter had come to Lausanne looking for him, asking him for help. “We can’t do it without you, Kirk,” he’d said. “Believe me, if there’d been another way, we would have taken it.”
And so it had began, again, for him. And, he supposed, it would never stop until he got a bullet in his head.
He pulled into a wayside park along the lake shore between Nyon and Rolle, about halfway to Lausanne, shortly before noon and reassembled his Walther PPK. Apparently no one had followed him from Paris, though he suspected Marquand’s people would be somewhere nearby. Nor were the Swiss on his tail yet. At least not outwardly.
But, if the French intelligence officer had been correct in his assessment of the ex-STASI organization, they might have already spotted him. He did not want to become a sitting duck for some fanatic still fighting the Cold War.
If someone shot at him, he was definitely going to shoot back. If, on the other hand, the Swiss Police caught up with him first, they would deport him immediately whether or not he was armed.
Lausanne was a city of some quarter-million people, and the traffic was horrendous, partly because of the narrowness of the streets, and partly because at all times it seemed that the city was being torn down and rebuilt.
McGarvey locked his bag in the trunk and had the Lausanne-Prince Hotel valet downtown park his car, before heading the two blocks over to the Place Saint-Francois on foot.
He stopped at the news kiosk and bought a newspaper and the latest copy of Stern, the German newsmagazine. A photograph of the downed Airbus was on the cover.
Across the square his old bookstore, International Booksellers, still occupied the same two-story yellow brick building. Marta had told him that his former Swiss partner, Dortmund Fuelm, to whom he’d sold the store, still ran the place. Fuelm had been one of the Federal Police watchdogs assigned to him, but when McGarvey had left, Fuelm had retired, and stayed on at the store.
No one had followed him from Geneva, and no one in the busy square seemed to be paying him or the bookstore any special attention, so, folding the newspaper and magazine and stuffing them under his arm, McGarvey crossed with traffic and went inside.
Fuelm, an old man, stooped and white-haired, was at the back of the small shop, speaking with two men about an expensive ^rt book. He looked up, spotted McGarvey and did a double take, his eyes growing wide.
He hurried over. “Gott in Himmel, I can scarcely believe my senses,” he cried, and he and McGarvey
