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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Critical Mass
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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 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 hers.
“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—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 worst 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 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.
“They 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?
AT 8:20 A.M., THE MAN WHOSE NAMETAG READ LÉON 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.
Unlatching the lid on the long metal box he flipped it open. For a moment or two he just stared at what the case contained, but then he reached inside and ran his fingertips lovingly over the nearly four-foot-long Stinger ground-to-air missile, and smiled.

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