daughter. She’s still in school outside Bern, isn’t she?”
“She’ll be home for Thanksgiving. I’ll see her then.”
“What are you telling me now, Kirk? That you’re going back to your ex-wife? I thought she was going to marry her lawyer, the one who was always suing you.”
“Stay out of it.”
“She dumped you once because of the business. Are your-hands any cleaner now?” An hysterical edge was beginning to creep into Marta’s voice. She’d changed over the past few years. She’d lost some of her old control.
“Let it rest, Mati,” he said gently.
“Then why did you let me move in with you? To make a fool of myself?”
“Could I have stopped you?”
She started to reply, but the words died on her lips. He was right, and she suddenly knew it. Just as she knew that indeed it was over between them. He could see how the light and passion faded from her eyes, and she slumped back.
“What will you do with yourself in Washington?” she asked after a couple of minutes.
“Maybe I’ll open another bookstore. Maybe teach at a small university somewhere.”
“You’ll get bored.”
“All the bad guys are gone, remember?”
She looked at him again. “Somehow I think you’ll manage to find some. Or they’ll find you.”
“I’ll leave that to cops like you.”
The cabbie pulled up at Orly’s Departing Passengers entrance for Swissair, and McGarvey helped Marta out with her single carryon bag. The day was warm and humid, and out here the air smelled of car and bus exhaust, and burned jet fuel.
“I’ll leave you here, Mati. I hate long goodbyes.”
Marta looked at her watch. It was past eight. “My plane leaves in fifteen minutes.
You can give me that much time, can’t you? After all, it’ll probably be years before I see you again.”
McGarvey shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll pay the driver and catch up with you.”
“Don’t stand me up.”
“I’ll be right in,” McGarvey said, and he watched as she crossed the sidewalk and went into the terminal. He turned, and as he was paying the cabbie he noticed a brown Peugeot parked across the way. The diplomatic plates were of the series used by the U.S. Embassy. He’d had lunch with Tom Lynch, the Paris chief of station, last week, and Lynch had been driving a car with the same series.
“Merci, monsieur,” the driver said, but McGarvey just nodded and went inside where he caught up with Marta. What the hell was the CIA doing out here this morning, he wondered?
Chapter 3
At 8:20 a.m., the man whose nametag read Leon got out of the bogus Air Service van and studied the distant airport terminal through a set of powerful binoculars. The end of this morning’s active runway was a little more than a half mile to the east. The wind, light but steady, was coming almost directly out of the west. Swissair flight 145 would be taking off directly toward him.
In the past eighteen minutes, five jet airliners had taken off or landed. Orly was busy this morning, as usual at this time of year. None of them had been the flight he was interested in. He knew that for a certainty because he could see the Swissair jetliner parked at its boarding gate in the distance.
Leon was not his real name. In fact he was Karl Boorsch, who had been employed by STASI, the East German secret service, until late in 1989 when the Communist Party in Eastern Europe had begun to fall apart. He had managed to get out of the Horst Wessel Barracks in East Berlin just minutes before a crowd of angry demonstrators had broken in and started tearing up the place.
Most of the others had been rounded up in the next few months, but Boorsch went to ground, not lifting his head even to sniff the air until the first call had come from Monaco in the form of a brief advertisement for H.W. to come home, all was forgiven.
He smiled, recalling that day. Since then there had been plenty of work for all of them. Especially over the last year when they’d started the project.
Old alliances, he thought, were the best. Or in this case certainly the most interesting and rewarding. And when the project was completed, there would be other work. A lot of work.
He tossed the binoculars in on the seat of the van, then went around to the back and opened the door. Climbing in, he had to crawl over the second French cop, getting a little blood on the side of one of his boots. It didn’t bother him. He’d seen enough blood in his ten years with STASI, since his eighteenth birthday right out of Gymnasium, to be totally inured to it.
Pushing the first cop’s body out of the way, he pulled the long metal case back to the open door. The box was heavy, and it took an effort to drag it that far.
He jumped down and looked back the way he had come, and then toward the active runway.
Nothing moved along the dirt access road, but what looked like a French Air Inter jetliner had pulled away from the terminal and was moving slowly along a taxiway.
That would be flight seventeen. It and one other were scheduled for takeoff before the Swissair flight left for Geneva.
Around front he studied the taxiing plane through binoculars to make sure he’d identified it correctly. He had. Next he got the secure walkie-talkie from beside the seat and keyed the READY TO TALK button.
“One,” he said. He pressed the TRANSMIT button and his digitally recorded word was encrypted, compressed into a one-microsecond burst and transmitted. The on-air duration of the transmission was so short that even automatic recording equipment picked up nothing, not even a brief burst of static.
“Clear,” the man watching the highway turnoff to the access road responded.
“Two.”
“In place,” the second man replied. He was somewhere within sight of the terminal’s front entrance.
“Three.”
“Quiet,” the third man answered. He was on the N7 somewhere between here and Paris, monitoring the French Police frequencies for any unusual traffic. There was none.
Replacing the walkie-talkie, Boorsch again studied the jetliner, which had reached the end of the runway and was slowly turning. Seconds later the big aircraft seemed to lurch forward as if the pilot had suddenly let up on the brakes, and it started its takeoff roll.
Boorsch watched a couple of seconds longer, then put the binoculars down and stood back as the American built DC-10 thundered directly at him, its nose finally rotating, its main landing gear lifting off the pavement, and suddenly the huge bird was passing directly overhead, the noise so loud rational thought was all but impossible.
He thought he caught a glimpse of a few passengers looking down at him from the tiny windows, but then the plane was climbing, seemingly straight up into the blue, cloudless sky, the sounds from its engines fading in the distance.
Already Air France flight 248 was bumping down the taxiway, the last before the Swissair flight.
Boorsch watched as it reached the end of the runway, hesitate for a moment, and then turn, accelerating even before it was completely lined up.
This was an A-320 Airbus, the same type of aircraft as Swissair 145, and Boorsch watched it with critical interest as it lumbered heavily down the runway toward him.
Its nose gear rose from the pavement, and the big airliner seemed to hang there like that for a long time before the mains lifted off, and then it was roaring overhead and climbing.
Boorsch turned and watched as its landing gear retracted, and when it was only a tiny speck in the sky he glanced back toward the distant terminal-the Swissair jetliner was still at the boarding gate-before he went to the rear of the van.
