Assassin (21 page)

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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Assassin
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“How did it go?” Arkady Astimovich asked on the way over to the Leningrad Station.
“I think I'm going to be a rich man,” McGarvey replied. He sat in the front seat with the cabby. “But I'm going to need some help.”
“I told you that I've got some goddamned good connections in this city.”
“The Mafia?”
Astimovich glanced over at him, and nodded warily. “You gotta deal with them if you want to survive in this town. It'll be expensive, but damned well worth it.”
“How much are you paying?”
“Plenty,” the cabby said. He laughed. “Everybody pays. My brother-in-law is a big deal son of a bitch at the Grand Dinamo, and still I pay.”
“I don't have a problem with that. But when the time comes I don't want to deal with some kulak.”
“My brother-in-law knows what he's doing,” Astimovich said. “What kind of business are we going into, boss?”
“I'll let you know when I get back.”
“When's that?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a little longer, maybe a little sooner.”
“What do you want me to do in the meantime?”
“Keep your mouth shut.”
They pulled up in front of the busy Leningrad Station, traffic heavy as usual. The snow had finally stopped but the temperature had plunged. Everything looked dirty.
“Three weeks is a long time,” Astimovich said sullenly. “How do I know you're coming back?”
“Because we're going to make some money,” McGarvey said. He peeled
a thousand francs from a thick bundle of bills and handed it to the cabby. “Let's call this a down payment, shall we?”
“
Spasiba
,” the cabby said, pocketing the money.
“Do as I say and you'll be a rich man. Cross me and I'll kill you. I've got connections now in this town too.”
“Okay, boss. You'll see everything will be hunky-dory.”
McGarvey got his bag from the back seat of the cab and disappeared with the crowds inside the railway station. He waited by the front doors for a few minutes to make sure that Astimovich wouldn't try to follow him, then went to the stand-up restaurant and had a glass of beer and a meat pie. In three days he had learned what he needed to know about Tarankov and conditions in Russia. He felt that his odds had greatly improved from the thousand-to-one he'd told Yemlin. But there was still a long way to go, because he wouldn't go through with the assassination unless he could improve his chances to at least fifty-fifty.
His overnight train for Helsinki was scheduled to arrive in the Finnish capital shortly before 9:30 A.M., giving him ninety minutes to make his Finnair flight to Brussels where he would pick up his Avis Renault and drive back to Paris.
He was leaving Russia several thousand francs poorer, but if the million dollars had been deposited in his Channel Islands account as Yemlin promised it would be, then money would not be a problem. Nor would it have been in any event. The investments he'd made over the past twenty-five years, starting with the proceeds from the sale of his parents' ranch in Kansas, had done well. He was not a wealthy man, but he was independent. His demand for money from Yemlin had only been done to insure that the Russian was serious. Money was something they understood almost better than any other concept.
Gathering his bag, he left the restaurant and walked through the terminal to the trackside gates where he had to show his ticket and passport. Outgoing Russian customs wouldn't occur until Vyborg, but his gun was tucked safely away in his laptop computer, and Russians these days were more interested in what was being brought into the country than what was being taken out.
A
few minutes past 5:30 P.M., the Air France Concorde SST from New York, touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport with a tremendous roar, its needle nose drooping like some gigantic insect. Of the 143 passengers, Elizabeth McGarvey was one of the last off, letting her seat partner, an extremely boring attorney from New Jersey, precede her. During the four-hour flight across the Atlantic the man had done everything within his power to convince her to meet him at his hotel for drinks tonight. At first his attentions had been flattering because he was reasonably good looking. But then he'd become funny and finally annoying. But she didn't want to attract any attention so she'd quietly gone along with him, even taking down his hotel number. But she refused to ride into the city with him or even get off the plane together because her father, who was insanely protective of his daughter, would be meeting her, and she didn't want to cause a
scene, to which the lawyer agreed wholeheartedly. By the time she got off the plane she was in an extremely bitchy mood.
She taped the Elizabeth Swanson passport and identification papers to her midriff between the bottom of her bra and the top of her panties. She didn't think that even a Frenchman would dare pat her down. And unless authorities were expecting her, there'd be no reason for the customs officers to become suspicious.
“The purpose of your visit to France, Mademoiselle?” the young passport control officer asked from his booth.
“Pleasure,” Elizabeth replied curtly.
The officer stamped her passport indifferently, and she walked back to customs. She'd flown Air France, not a foreign carrier, so she'd arrived at Aerogare Two which was only for Air France and therefore uncomplicated. This evening the terminal was practically deserted.
There was no sign of her seat-mate when she picked up her bag and headed for the RIEN A DECLARER line. The customs official smiled at her and passed her through with a wave, and she was in France. It had been easy.
Upstairs in the main terminal she got a couple of thousand francs from the ATM using her mother's credit card, then went back downstairs again and outside to the cab ranks.
“Good evening, Mademoiselle,” the cabby said.
“
L‘Hôtel Marronniers sur la Rue Jacob dans la Rive Gauche, s'il vous plait,”
she said, sitting back.
“
Oui, Mademoiselle
,” the driver replied respectfully.
As they pulled away from the curb, Elizabeth took a cigarette out of her purse, lit it, then cracked the window by a couple of inches.
“
Pas d'fumer, Mademoiselle
,” the driver said sternly over his shoulder.
Elizabeth ignored him.
“Mademoiselle, please no smoking,” he said, looking at her reflection in the rearview mirror.
She stared out the window, totally ignoring him, as she slowly uncrossed her legs giving him a good view up her short skirt, and then sat back even farther so that her skirt hiked almost up to her panty line.
The driver stopped complaining, but from time to time he glanced in the rearview mirror, and she rewarded him with a couple more looks up her skirt, which seemed to make him happy.
She and her mother had spent a few days at the small, but pleasant Hôtel Marronniers on the Left Bank a few years ago after she'd finished school in Bern. She thought it unlikely that anyone on the staff would remember her, but even if they did it wouldn't matter, because she wasn't here illegally, nor had she committed any crime on French soil.
Her father was here someplace, she thought as they crossed the river and got off the ring highway at the Quai Marcel Boyer above the Pont National. Paris was his home of choice, he'd explained to her, because for the most
part the people were civilized, they minded their own business, and their food and wine were the best in the world. Besides, where else would a Voltaire scholar feel more at home than in France?
Rush-hour traffic was thinning out by the time the cabby dropped her off in front of the hotel that was hidden behind a courtyard. She went inside, showed her passport and booked a room for a week, and paid for it with her own credit card. It would take twenty-four to thirty-six hours for her presence to be known in Paris from her hotel registration. By then she would have either found her father or she would have checked in with Tom Lynch, so hiding her trail was no longer as important as it had been on the shuttle from Dulles to Kennedy, and the Concorde flight over.
She thought she recognized the old concierge behind his desk, but if he remembered her he gave no hint of it. The bellman helped her upstairs with her bag, and after she tipped him and he was gone, she flung open the windows and breathed the Paris air. No other city in the world smelled quite like this one, she thought. And especially this time, because she was in Paris on a secret mission. It was better than the movies, because it was real.
She took a quick shower, dried her hair, then dressed in a pair of blue jeans, a pretty white V-neck light sweater and a pair of black flats that matched her shoulder bag. She hid her Elizabeth Swanson papers under the bed, then went out.
It was dinner time, and she was famished. She sat down at a sidewalk cafe a couple of blocks from her hotel, where she had a half-bottle of Chardonnay, a small salad, a cheese omelette with pommes frittes and a cafe express afterwards.
She'd been on her own since college, first in New York, and for the past few months in Washington. But being here in Paris like this, was different. Vastly different.
The address of her father's apartment was across the river near the gares du Nord and de l'Est, in what until recently had been a rough workingman's neighborhood. But Paris was undergoing a renovation, and cruising past his building in a taxi Elizabeth could see why he liked this part of town. It was anonymous, with an easy egress from the city on the main Avenue Jean Jaures, plus the two railway stations. There was a small park across the street from a pleasant looking cafe a half-block from his apartment.
She had the cabby cruise around the neighborhood, explaining that she wasn't quite certain of the correct address, while she looked for signs that her father's place was under surveillance: someone loitering across the street, a van with too many antennas parked on the street, the chance reflection of binocular lenses in a second story window. But if they were there, she couldn't spot them, and she had the cabby drop her off in front of the cafe.
Although the evening was starting to get cool, Elizabeth sat at an outside table where she had a coffee while she watched the neighborhood. Her father's apartment was on the third floor front, and the windows were dark. She hadn't expected to simply take a cab out to his apartment, knock on
his door and find him at home. But seeing his darkened windows gave her a chill. She felt not so much on her own now, as she did alone, abandoned again like she'd been when she was a child.
She'd become spoiled over the past few years, having him a car-ride away when he lived outside Washington, or a telephone call away when he lived here. And she'd forgotten what it had been like without him for most of her childhood. She'd bounced from missing him so badly that she ached, to hating him so deeply that she dreamed once of shooting him in the head with a gun, then cutting off his arms and legs with a machete and using his parts to feed the sharks. The next morning she'd been so ashamed of her dream that she'd thrown up and managed to produce a fever so that her mother kept her home from school. She just couldn't face her classmates, almost all of whom had both parents at home.
Later when she'd come to learn at least in general terms what her father did for a living, she'd become so proud that she couldn't stop talking about him. Finally the school principal had called her mother in to ask her to stop Elizabeth's fantastical stories. They frightened the other students, and some of the teachers and parents. At any rate if her father really was a spy, Elizabeth shouldn't be so open about it. Her mother had been deeply embarrassed and for several months afterward Elizabeth was not allowed to speak her father's name.
A half-block away the Rue La Fayette was busy, but on this side street only a few cars and few pedestrians moved. It was a week night and most French families were at home eating dinner and watching television. Some new plane trees had been planted along both sides of the street, and although they were small, and their branches mostly bare, there were a few green buds on some of them. In ten or fifteen years this would be an extremely pleasant, and therefore expensive neighborhood.
Certain now that no one was watching her father's apartment building, Elizabeth paid for her coffee, and made the first pass on foot, looking through the windows into the empty ground floor vestibule. She crossed the street at the corner, and returned. She had to wait for a taxi to pass before she could cross back and she ducked inside the apartment building.
Her father's name was listed on a white card on the mailbox for 3A, and for a few seconds she hoped that she was on a wild goose chase. A radio or television was playing somewhere within the building, and she heard a woman's voice raised in what sounded like anger. A man barked a sharp reply, and the woman fell silent. She took the stairs at the back of the hall two at a time to the third floor where she held up for a full minute. This floor was quiet. No light shone from under either the front or rear apartment doors. Even the air smelled neutral, only a faint mustiness indicated the building was old. Again she hoped she was on a wild goose chase, and her father would come up the stairs behind her and be flabbergasted when he saw her standing in the darkness. But no one came up. She stepped out of
the stairway to her father's apartment, hesitated a second longer, then rang the bell.
The door to the opposite apartment behind her opened, and she turned, catching the impression of a bulky man in shirtsleeves standing there with a gun in his hand.
The thought that she'd made a dreadful mistake coming here flashed through her head like a bolt of lightning. Moving on instinct she charged into the stairway and raced downstairs without a sound. If she could make it outside she had a fair chance of losing herself in the night. Among her talents were the 220 and 440-yard dashes for which she'd won trophies in high school and college. One of her coaches had even suggested training for the Olympics, but she hadn't been interested.
She reached the ground floor as the front door slammed open and several men in dark windbreakers barged into the narrow vestibule.
Turning, she started back up the stairs when the man from the third floor suddenly appeared, blocking the way.
Elizabeth turned again, this time into the muzzles of two very large pistols. She stopped and her entire body sagged.
“Shit,” she said.
The flashing blue lights of several police cars were gathered on the street, along with a growing number of onlookers.
“Give me your purse, Mademoiselle,” one of the gunmen said.
“Je suis le fille de Monsieur Kirk McGarvey
,” Elizabeth said, carefully handing her purse to the surprised plain clothes officer.
“What are you doing here, Mademoiselle McGarvey?” one of the other plain clothes officers asked. He was heavyset and very dark and dangerous looking.
“I came to see my father, naturally,” Elizabeth replied. “Is this how you treat all your visitors to France?”
The heavyset man searched her purse, and examined her passport. “Your father is not at home.”
“Evidently not.”
“Where is he?”
“I thought he was here.”
“Was he expecting you?”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “Now if that's all, I'd like my purse and I'll go.”
“I would like to ask you a few questions, if you'll come downtown with us. With no trouble, please.”
“First I'd like to call my embassy.”
“In due time, Mademoiselle,” the heavyset man said. “If you cooperate we will not handcuff you.”
Elizabeth stepped up to him. He towered a full head over her, and he looked dangerous, more like a street thug than a cop. “What am I being charged with, and who the hell are you?”
“You're being charged with nothing, yet. As for my name, I am Colonel Guy de Galan.” He stepped aside for her. “Now, if you please, Mademoiselle?”
Elizabeth hesitated a moment longer. She still had twenty-four hours before Tom Lynch was expecting her. The French were looking for her father, but with luck they might buy her story and let her go, providing they did not find out what hotel she was staying at and search her room.
Out in the street several dozen people had gathered to watch what was going on. She searched the crowd for a familiar face, either her father's or Tom Lynch's whom she was sure she would recognize from the photographs she'd seen. But they were all strangers hoping to catch some interesting action.
Getting in the back of Colonel Galan's car she glanced up at her father's apartment, a bitter taste in her mouth. In less than forty-eight hours working for Ryan she'd managed to get herself arrested. It wouldn't look so good in her personnel file, but she didn't think that the Deputy Director of Operations would be very surprised.

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