“Something happened to him and he just collapsed,” Leon said, excitedly. “Maybe it’s his heart. Do you know CPR?”
“He has nothing the matter with his heart.”
“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. He just fell down.”
“Eugene,” Capretz called and stepped closer. There was something on the side of Gallimard’s head, but the interior of the van was in relative darkness and Capretz couldn’t make it out. But he understood that he was going to have to call for help somehow.
He turned to ask the Air Service man if there was a two-way radio in the van in time to see a large pistol suddenly materialize in the man’s hand. The first shot hit him in the right arm, driving him nearly off his feet. He started to bring the Uzi around, when a thunderclap burst in his head.
Shoving the pistol in the belt of his coveralls, Leon safetied the Uzi, laid it in the back of the van and then hefted the security guard’s body in the back as well.
Closing the door, he scuffed dirt over the bloodstains on the road so that if anyone came along they would not notice that anything had happened here.
Around front he raised the road barrier, then went into the hut where he took the phone off the hook, listened, then replaced it. He wore thin leather gloves so that he would leave no fingerprints, and the patterns in the soles of his boots were common.
He’d purchased the boots at Prisunic, a discount store in Paris, five days ago. They were untraceable, as was the van which was nevertheless legitimately registered to Air Service here at the airport, though the company did not own it.
He drove beyond the barrier, then went back and lowered it.
Behind the wheel he checked his watch before he headed the rest of the way to the ILS installation just off the end of the main east-west runway. He had twenty-eight minutes to go.
Chapter 2
Kirk Cullough McGarvey had always had bad luck with women, especially saying goodbye to them. This instance was no different, except that it was the second time he was saying goodbye to Marta Fredricks.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just come back to Lausanne with me now,” she said.
They sat together in the back seat of a taxi heading out of Paris to Orly Airport.
She was tall, athletically thin and wore her dark hair long, nearly to the center of her back.
“I have a few more things to take care of here first,” he said. “And I think it’ll be better all the way around if you pave the way.”
She looked into his eyes and smiled. “You’re probably right. And then?”
They’d avoided that subject for the week she’d been with him in Paris. And then what, he asked himself. He was quitting Europe, and returning to his ex-wife Kathleen in Washington, D.C. Or at least he and she were going to give it a try.
Tall and husky, McGarvey was a good-looking man with wide, honest eyes that sometimes were green and other times gray. He was in his mid-forties and had lived in Europe for a number of years, including a time in Lausanne where he’d run a small bookshop as a cover. He’d been in hiding then, as he supposed he still was. Once a spy, always a spy.
He’d been a loner for the most part, though in Switzerland he 17 and Marta had lived together. Ex-CIA assassins made the Swiss nervous, and Marta, who worked for the Swiss Federal Bureau of Police, had been assigned to watch him.
“Watch you, not fall in love with you,” she told him once. “That I did all on my own.”
She was looking at the passing scenery, and he studied her profile. A blood vessel was throbbing in the side of her long, delicate neck. She’d come as a complete surprise, showing up on his doorstep last week.
“I heard you were in Paris. Thought I’d drop by to say hello while I was in town.”
She’d moved in with him, of course. They’d had no discussion about that, because she was still in love with him.
But she had brought, besides her presence, a flood of memories for him. Some of them good, or at least tolerable, but most of them difficult. What spy looks back on his past with any joy? Or what soldier, for that matter, looks back at past battles with any fondness? They had been at war. And he had killed in the fight. Not a day went by without some thought for the people whose lives he’d ended. Sometimes he’d been close enough to see the expressions on their faces when they realized they were dying.
Pain and fear, of course, but most often their last emotion had been surprise.
He especially remembered the face of the general he’d been sent to kill in Santiago, Chile. The man had been responsible for thousands of deaths, and the only solution was his elimination. But McGarvey’s orders had been changed in midstream without him knowing about it. He returned to Langley not a hero but a pariah, and the CIA had released him from his contract.
Switzerland had come next, and then Paris when the Agency had called him out of retirement for a “job of work” as his old friend John Lyman Trotter, Jr., had once called an assignment.
More death, more destruction, more pain and heartache. He’d lost a kidney in the war. He’d nearly lost his life. He’d lost his wife, and the loneliness, that at times was nearly crushing, rode on his shoulder like the world on Atlas’s. He figured he could write the book on the subject.
“Good thoughts or bad,” Marta asked, breaking him out of his morose thoughts.
He focused on her. She was studying his face, a bemused expression on her’s.
“I think I’ll miss Paris.”
“You’re leaving for good, aren’t you,” she said. “And somehow I don’t think you’ll be resettling in Lausanne.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” he lied, and he managed a smile. “Besides, I don’t think your boss would be very happy having me on his turf again.”
“Something could be arranged.”
“Maybe I’d get called up.”
She shook her head in irritation. “You’re getting too old for war games, Kirk. And you must have noticed by now that the Russians have gone home. The Wall is down, the Warsaw Pact has been dismantled-they’re holding free elections in
Poland, for God’s sake-and all the bad guys are in jail.”
“No fool like an old fool.”
“The CIA can’t afford you,” she said. “Maybe it never could.” She searched his eyes earnestly. “Didn’t Portugal teach you anything?”
“How did you hear about that?”
“I’m a cop, remember? I see things, I read things. People confide in me.”
“Is that why you came to Paris, Mati? To save my life?”
“And your soul.”
“It’s not for sale. Maybe it never was.” Every spy has his own worse nightmare. Arkady Kurshin had been his. But the Russian was dead. He’d seen the man’s body just before it was lowered into a pauper’s grave outside of Lisbon seven months ago.
“I love you, Kirk, doesn’t that count for something?”
It had been his fault, of course, allowing her to set up housekeeping in his apartment.
But the excuse he’d made to himself was that he was tired, gun-shy, rubbed raw, vulnerable, even, and he needed her warmth and comfort just then.
“It counts for a lot, Mati. But maybe it would be best if I didn’t come to Lausanne after all. You’re right, I have no intention of staying there, or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter.”
“You’re going home?”
“For awhile.”
Marta was silent for a moment. “But I thought you might want to come to Switzerland at least to visit your
