“I can come pick you up.”
“Just stay there, Jacqueline,” McGarvey said, and he hung up.
Chernov was just pulling up in front of FSK headquarters after a frustrating hour spent with General Korzhakov when Petrovsky called his cell phone. McGarvey had just now telephoned the woman at the French embassy. He was calling off the kill, and he said he knew about his daughter.
“Did you trace the call?”.” Chernov asked.
“He called from a pay phone in the Lubyanka metro station. So you were right, he’s using the storm sewers to get around.”
Chernov made a tight U-turn and shot across the broad Dzerzhinsky Square, no traffic for the moment. “I’m right across the square from the station,” he shouted.
“My people are less than three minutes away.”
“Do you have a map of the subway system in front of you?”
“Da. Right here.”
“He’s using the sewers, but he has to come up through a metro station. I want your people covering every station he can get to from here in case I don’t intercept him.”
Chernov screeched to a halt in front of the metro station, and pulled out his gun, as he ran across the sidewalk and took the stairs two at a time.
“There’re four of them—” Petrovsky was saying when his signal faded and cut off.
Halfway down, Chernov heard the first sirens at the same moment he heard a gunshot from below, and he thumbed his gun’s safety to the off position.
The shattered lock gave way, and McGarvey opened the accordion gate, stepped through, then stopped. He was hearing sirens, faintly in the distance, but getting closer. And another sound.
He stepped back around the corner, and held his breath. He had heard footsteps.
“McGarvey,” someone called from above.
McGarvey held his silence. “There’s no way out for you.”
It was Chernov, McGarvey had very little doubt. His call to Jacqueline had probably been monitored and traced here. By now the Militia would be scrambling to cover every metro station and storm sewer tunnel within a radius of a mile. Every second he remained here the tighter the net would become, and Chernov knew it.
McGarvey turned and silently headed back to the platform. “If you turn yourself in your daughter will be turned over to her embassy. Unharmed.”
“Bullshit,” McGarvey said to himself, not missing a step.
“McGarvey, you have my word on it,” Chernov’s voice echoed down the platform. “My word as an officer and gentleman.”
FORTY-ONE
Director of Central Intelligence Roland Murphy showed up at Howard Ryan’s third floor office a few minutes before 6:30 p.m.” his bodyguard in tow, after first confirming that his DDO was still at his desk.
“Sorry to barge in on you like this, Howard, but the President wants to see us,” he said.
Ryan looked up in surprise and pleasure. “Both of us? Right now?”
“Yes,” Murphy said, masking his contempt. “We’ll take my car, and I’ll brief you on the way over.”
Ryan put on his coat. “I don’t have the day’s summary ready, but I can bring my notes, and a few documents.”
“That won’t be necessary. All the President wants from us is the … truth.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you mean, Roland?”
Since Rencke’s disturbing telephone call, and the files he’d sent over, Murphy had done some checking on his own, first with Ryan’s assistant, Tom Moore, who had defended his boss’s action.
“The idea was merely to send her over to help the French find her father. We wanted to get a message to him, nothing more. At least that was the initial parameters we gave her.”
“But it didn’t happen that way.”
“No, Mr. Director, unfortunately. it did not. Apparently she’s more like her father than we first suspected. I’m recommending that her services be terminated, once she returns.”
“I see,” Murphy said coolly.
Next he called Elizabeth’s old boss, Bratislav Toivich in the DI’s Russian Division.
“Pardon me, Mr. Director, but you wouldn’t be asking me about the girl unless she was in trouble.”
“What do you know about her assignment?” Murphy asked directly.
“More than I should,” Toivich replied, in just as direct a manner.
“She’s in Moscow, and we think Tarankov’s people may have kidnapped her.”
“What are we doing about it?”
“I’m taking this to the President once I have all the facts. He can take it up with Kabatov. I need to know if Ms. McGarvey contacted you at any time.”
“She called from Paris worried that she and a young French woman working for the SDECE were being pressured into going to Moscow. I told her not to do it.”
“Did she have any contact with a man by the name Rencke?”
“She was looking for him there in Paris, and I gave her a couple of hints,” Toivich said. “Did she find him, General? Is that how you found out about this? Has Otto called you?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Listen to him,” Toivich said. “He’s the only one I know who has the combination of brains and honesty. If Otto tells you something, you can take it to the bank.”
“We’ll get her back.”
“See that you do, General. She’s quite a young woman, and I’d hate to be in your shoes if something happens to her, and somehow her father makes it back to Washington.”
Finally he telephoned SDECE Director General Jean Baillot, who confirmed that Jacqueline Belleau had been sent to Moscow in an effort to misdirect the efforts of Bykov’s special police commission long enough to find out where Mademoiselle McGarvey was being held, and possibly get a message to the girl’s father. “Pardon, General, but it was not a good decision to set the young woman to find her father,” Baillot said quietly.
“You’re right, Jean. And now it’s up to me to get her back. Keep me informed night or day if you hear anything further.”
“Mais oui. Good luck.”
“The truth, Howard,” Murphy said to Ryan. “About why we sent Elizabeth McGarvey to Paris to find her father.”
Ryan’s lower lip curled. “She’s joined him in Moscow, you know. Like father like daughter.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s self-evident, Roland. She met him in Riga, and together they entered Russia where she’s probably going to help him kill Tarankov.” Ryan shook his head in amazement. “You have to admit that the bastard is smooth. He’s even enlisted the aid of his French girlfriend to spy for him on the Russian special police commission.”
Murphy wondered how he could have been so blind for so long about Ryan, except that the man knew his way around the Hill. Relations between Congress and the CIA had never been better. They had half the Senate practically eating out of their hands. All of it attributable to Ryan’s skills. But at what price, Murphy asked himself. At what terrible price?
“You shouldn’t have used her.”
“You’re right, Roland,” Ryan admitted. “I know that now. But at the time it was the only way I could see we had even a remote chance of finding him.” Ryan spread his hands. “Mea culpa, Roland. Mea culpa, what else can I say?”
Murphy wanted to take a poke at the smug bastard, but knowing the New York lawyer, he’d probably
