“No, he’s in Riga. But in a few minutes he’s going to make the biggest mistake in his life when he tries to call Yemlin. Yemlin’s line is bugged. When Mac calls, the Russians will know where he’s calling from and Chernov will come after him.”
“The Latvians will never allow it.”
“Chernov might convince them somehow.”
“But that’ll take time,” Elizabeth cried. “You can warn him first.”
“There’s no way to get through by phone and I’ve got to stay here in case he tries to call me.”
“Jacqueline and I will fly up there.”
“The French are watching you.”
“Not now. They think we’re at a dead end. They’ve written us off, Otto. Give me his address, we’ll get there in time, I promise you.”
“Put Mademoiselle Belleau on the line.”
“I’m here,” Jacqueline said.
“If I give you Mac’s address will you turn it over to your people?”
“Only if I think that there is no other way in which to save Kirk’s life.”
“If you betray him, I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t worry, Monsieur Rencke, I love him just as much as you do.”
“Liz, are you there?” Rencke said, hesitating.
“Yes. Where is he?”
“He has an apartment in Riga,” Rencke said. He gave her the address. “I don’t know which unit he’s in, but he called me from a pay phone in the building.”
Elizabeth’s heart sank. Her father could just as well have called from a building across the city from wherever he was holed up. But she didn’t say anything. For the moment it was their only lead.
“Are you sure that you guys aren’t being followed?” Otto asked.
“They want to send us to Moscow,” Jacqueline said. “Until we agree to go — and they don’t think we will- they’re leaving us to our own devices.”
“Standby,” Rencke said.
Elizabeth had been holding everything in. She sat back and looked into Jacqueline’s eyes. “You weren’t lying to Otto … or to me, were you?”
“Won, ma cherie. In this you must believe me.”
“I do,” Elizabeth said. She could see how he was going to do it. Tarankov would be standing on the reviewing balcony on Lenin’s Tomb in Red Square, and her father would be somewhere within a hundred yards or so with a sniper rifle. At the right moment Tarankov would fall, and her father would melt away into the crowds in a very clever disguise. She’d read his file. She knew what he was capable of.
Rencke came back. “Can you be at Orly by five this morning?”
“Orly by five?” Elizabeth said. Jacqueline nodded. “Yes.” “You’re both booked on RI AIR flight 57 to Riga, first class. It wasn’t cheap, but I figured that Ryan could afford it, so I put the tickets on his Mastercard.”
Elizabeth laughed despite herself. “He’ll hang you.”
“It’d be the biggest blunder of his life,” Rencke replied viciously. “By the time I got done with his computer track, he’d never again qualify for a driver’s license, he wouldn’t be able to afford to buy a stick of gum, and the IRS would probably want to put him away for life.” He calmed down. “You guys be careful out there.” He gave Elizabeth his telephone number. “Let me know what’s going on, will ya?”
“We will,” Elizabeth said.
“I’ll keep a two-way dialogue going between us on the net. If it’s being watched they’ll think you guys are still in the apartment.”
Elizabeth hung up and looked at Jacqueline.
“We’ll go out the back way,” the older woman said. “Just in case.”
Chernov finally got the break he’d been waiting for a few minutes before three when Major Gresko called from FSK headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. He was sitting in the darkness sipping a glass of white wine wondering what else he could have done when the phone rang. Every cop in Russia was looking for McGarvey, as were the forces of the CIA and SDECE. But it was as if McGarvey had simply dropped off the face of the earth. He’d gone to ground, and there was nothing they could do until he surfaced again, or made a mistake.
The FSK team assigned to watch had learned from their source inside the SVR that he’d received an encrypted call from somewhere outside Russia an hour earlier. Fifty-five minutes after that call, a pay phone in a kiosk near the Metro station a couple of blocks from Yemlin’s apartment rang. It was one of the telephones that the FSK monitored at Colonel Bykov’s request. Yemlin was nowhere in the vicinity, so after two rings an FSK operator answered.
“Da?”
“Viktor?” a man said.
So as not to make the caller suspicious the FSK operator told a half-truth. “Nyet. This is Nikolai, and there’s no one else around. The metro station across the street is empty.”
“Yeb was,” the man said, and he hung up. “If it was McGarvey he called from a simplex instrument in Riga,” Gresko said. “But I can’t imagine anyone else calling a phone booth so near to Yemlin’s apartment, and so soon after the call to his office.”
“I agree,” Chernov said.
“It’s a safe bet those bastards won’t cooperate with us. They’ll give us the runaround if we leVel with them. No love lost up there, in fact if they knew the whole truth they’d probably do everything they could to help McGarvey.”
Chernov thought for a moment.
“But we’re not chasing an assassin. The man we’re after is a mass murderer, whose specialty is little boys. Who knows, maybe it’s become too hot for him here in Russia, and he may take his grim pleasures somewhere else. Like Latvia.”
“That might work,” Gresko said.
“Do you have an address on the trace?”
“It’s an apartment building near the main railway station,” Gresko said. “Could be that he’s not living there. Maybe he just used the phone.”
“If he called from there once, maybe he’ll call from there again,” Chernov said. “Get the file over to the Militia, and have Petrovsky make contact with the Riga police. Have him send a copy of McGarvey’s photograph under the name Kisnelkov. In the meantime I’ll arrange for an airplane to take us up there. I want to catch him just before dawn when people, even men like him, tend to be the slowest and most fuddle-headed.”
THIRTY-FOUR
McGarvey awoke shortly after 5 a.m. in a cold sweat, his heart racing, his muscles bunched up. It was the same dream he often had in which he saw the light fading from the eyes of his victims. Only this time he’d been unable to focus on the face, except that whoever it was they were laughing at him. Mocking his life’s work, everything he’d fought for, everything he’d stood for.
He got up and went to the window. A delivery van passed below, and at the corner a truck rumbled through the intersection. The city was coming alive with the morning. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
A persistent voice at the back of head gave warning like the blare of a distant fire alarm, but he wasn’t at all sure it was for him. Sometimes in his dreams a part of his subconscious tried to warn his victims to get out, to get away before he came to kill them. A psychologist friend at Langley said the dreams were — nothing more than his conscience.
“Proves you’re just as sane as the rest of us,” the company shrink said. “Only a true sociopath can kill without remorse.”
