Assassin

by David Hagberg

  But they’d found nothing. That evening they went to an art film, had a light supper and a couple of glasses of wine afterwards and then had returned to the apartment where they’d talked until nearly dawn.

  Elizabeth doubled back through the park a half-block from her father’s apartment, and pulled up short in a line of trees across the street from the sidewalk cafe. A few people were seated outside, drinking coffee and reading newspapers. One man in particular looked familiar and her heart began to pound. It was her father, she was certain of it, because she wanted to be certain of it.

  She moved silently from tree to tree in order to get a better look, but the man’s face was blocked by the newspaper he was reading.

  So far as she could determine no one was watching him. But she knew enough not to rush across the street, because if the French were following her she would tip her hand. But she had to warn him.

  Moving to a position directly across the street she tried to figure out the best way of approaching the cafe. The man put his newspaper down and reached for his coffee. She got a good look at his face, and her heart sank. It wasn’t her father after all. The man was far too young, his hair black, his eyebrows too thick. She leaned against the tree and lowered her head, tears coming to her eyes.

  She and Jacqueline had tried everything, even placing a want ad in the personals section of Le Figaro: Liz loves you, daddy. I’m waiting at the apartment. So far there’d been no response.

  They’d gone to a number of his old haunts, sidewalk cafes, parks, bistros, the Eiffel Tower, that he’d mentioned.

  They’d even driven out to the farmhouse Otto Rencke had rented outside Bonnières. But workmen were renovating the house, and none of them had ever heard of Rencke or McGarvey.

  They’d tried at a half-dozen private computer schools in Paris on the off chance that Rencke might have shown up there, again without avail.

  And they’d tried the private gun clubs and the French National fencing team’s practice gymnasium where McGarvey had often worked out.

  She looked up. The man at the cafe had raised the newspaper in front of his face again. Elizabeth couldn’t see how she’d mistaken the man for her father. It wasn’t even close, except that she was a stupid kid working way out of her league. Jacqueline wouldn’t have made the mistake, and she’d only known Kirk for a few months.

  She headed back to the apartment disconsolately. Her father had gone to ground, and she was kidding herself thinking that she could find him when Langley’s best people couldn’t do the job. Come home, get married and have babies, her mother would tell her. She could almost hear the words. But it just wasn’t fair.

  A dark blue Citröen was parked down the block from her father’s apartment but she didn’t spot it until she mounted the steps to the building and one of Colonel Galan’s people opened the door for her. She stepped back and looked over her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Mademoiselle. Mr. Lynch is waiting upstairs for you with Colonel Galan and Jacqueline.”

  “Have you found my father?”

  “Please, Mademoiselle, they will explain everything,” the older man said gently.

  Elizabeth studied his face for a hint, but she saw nothing except friendly concern.

  Jacqueline, dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt, her feet bare, her hair a mess, sat perched on the edge of the couch in the living room, smoking a cigarette. Tom Lynch sat opposite her and Galan stood next to the window. They looked up when Elizabeth came in.

  Jacqueline’s face was white. Elizabeth went immediately to her.

  “Have they found him? Has he been hurt?”

  Jacqueline took her hand. “He’s been to Moscow, but we don’t know anything beyond that. He may have come back.”

  “Did you spot anything out there this morning?” Lynch asked. He seemed almost embarrassed.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. “What’s going on?”

  Lynch and Galan exchanged a glance.

  “The Russians know that your father has been hired to assassinate Yevgenni Tarankov, and a special police commission has been formed to stop him,” Galan said.

  “How did they find out?” Elizabeth demanded sharply.

  “Apparently Viktor Yemlin talked.”

  “Oh, God.” Elizabeth turned to Jacqueline, who looked as frightened as she felt.

  “The Russians have asked for our help,” Lynch said. “And that of the French. No one wants to see your father killed. But now that they know he’s coming and what he plans to do, that’s exactly what will happen unless we find him first.”

  “How do you know that he was in Russia?”

  “He was spotted in Moscow.”

  “But they didn’t catch him,” Elizabeth said triumphantly. “Because he’s too good. If he’s set out to kill Tarankov, then that’s what he’ll do, and there’s nothing that we or the Russians can do about it.”

  “He can’t fight the entire Russian police and intelligence forces,” Lynch shot back.

  “Then why aren’t we helping my father instead of the fucking Russians?” Elizabeth screeched.

  “Getting hysterical isn’t going to help,” Galan tried to calm her.

  “Don’t patronize me you son of a bitch! Your service is supposed to be one of the best intelligence agencies in the world, and all you can think to do is send his daughter and his whore to find—”

  Elizabeth stopped short. She and Jacqueline still held hands. Slowly she turned and looked into the older woman’s glistening eyes.

  “It’s all right, ma p’tite,” Jacqueline said. “The truth isn’t supposed to be bad.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth said softly. “It’s my big mouth. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Jacqueline drew Elizabeth close and held her for a long time. “Listen, what you said was true in the beginning,” she whispered. “But not now. You must believe me.”

  Elizabeth clung more tightly. “I’m sorry, Jacqueline,” she cried. She wished her mother and father were here and together now, like the old days. Like they still were sometimes in her fantasies. “I believe you.”

  “Okay. All right, I’m sending you back to Washington on the first flight,” Lynch said. “I’m not going to have this on my conscience.”

  Elizabeth pulled away from Jacqueline. “This has nothing to do with your conscience,” she said, back in control of herself. She felt like a little fool. “And you’re going to need every bit of help you can get. Jacqueline and I are still your best bets.”

  “You haven’t found him.”

  “Neither have you,” Elizabeth countered. “Who’s running this Russian police commission? And what are their chances?”

  “His name is Yuri Bykov, ex-KGB,” Galan said. “We’re told he’s very good, but we don’t have anything on him.”

  “Neither do we,” Lynch said.

  “As for the commission’s chances, I’d say they were quite good, because they know what your father is trying to do, but your father doesn’t know that his mission has been compromised,” Galan said. “We thought about sending you and Jacqueline to Moscow to help out. It’s possible that your father might find out and back off.”

  “You bastard,” Jacqueline said.

  Galan spread his hands. “It was just a thought. But it’s up to you. I won’t order you to do it. If McGarvey is going to kill Tarankov it’ll happen by the June elections. Gives us nine weeks and a few days.”

  “At least we have a timetable,” Elizabeth said. “Is there anything else we have to know this morning?”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Lynch said, but Elizabeth cut him off with a look.

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  The Polish Border

  By the time Galan and Lynch had left the apartment, McGarvey was already northeast of Berlin, the heaviest traffic behind him. The Mercedes’s tank was filled with gasoline, as were the spare gas cans in the back, and the morning was bright, making driving conditions on the new autobahn from Berlin
to Szczecin very good. Once the Wall had come down the first order of business for the German government was reconstructing the entire infrastructure of the old GDR. New roads, factories and apartment buildings were coming into existence at breakneck speed. McGarvey took advantage of the excellent road, pushing the Mercedes to one hundred miles per hour, the big engine barely straining.

  It was less than seventy miles to the Polish border at Kolbaskowo, and although he was slowed by heavier traffic, mostly trucks, funneling into the checkpoint, he made it before 11:00 A.M.

  He had to stop briefly on the German side of the border so that his export papers could be checked and stamped. Before he took such a car out of Germany the authorities had to make certain that the proper taxes had been paid. Beyond that they didn’t care who he was or what else he was bringing across. Reconstructing an entire country was an expensive business.

  On the Polish side, his passport and the in-transit papers for the car were briefly examined, and within a few minutes he was on his way, again pushing the car to nearly one hundred miles per hour. Although the highways in Poland were not nearly so good as those in Germany, the traffic was much lighter, so that as the afternoon wore on he made better time than he thought he would.

  From Szczecin it was nearly five hundred miles along the Baltic coast to the border with a seventy-five-mile-wide strip of territory that still belonged to Russia. Sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, the region’s only major city was Kaliningrad. The Russians had held onto it because it was a major seaport.

  The Intercontinental in Leipzig had made him an excellent picnic lunch of bread, sausages, cheese, potato salad, bread and several bottles of beer, plus a couple of bottles of mineral water, so he did not have to stop to eat. But he pulled into an Esso station on the outskirts of Gdansk where he filled the gas tank around five in the evening, and took a break in the wayside to relieve his cramped muscles.

  It was a mistake, because by the time he got on the road again he was caught in the middle of rush-hour traffic as factory and shipyard workers clogged the highways on their way home.

  He’d hoped to have reached the border with Russia at Braniewo around seven in the evening, and when traffic might still be reasonably heavy, and the customs officers too busy to check him thoroughly. Instead he arrived at the frontier a few minutes before 10:00 P.M., his the only car within sight in either direction.

  On the Polish side the customs officials stamped his in-transit papers, and waved him through. On the Russian side, however, the armed FSK security officer motioned him to a parking area a few yards from the roadway. A customs officer in the dark blue uniform of a Militia cop, came out of the customs shed, and took his papers.

  “Good evening,” the official said indifferently, as he studied McGarvey’s passport.

  “Good evening,” McGarvey replied in fractured Russian.

  “Did you drive this automobile all the way from Brussels?”

  “I bought it in Leipzig.”

  A second FSK security officer came out of the customs shed, a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. He walked over to the car, touched the hood, examined the knobby tires, and ran his fingers along the passenger side door. He stopped in back.

  McGarvey glanced in the rearview mirror as the soldier studied the spare tire on the rack, and then shined a flashlight inside at the second spare tire and the gas cans.

  “Why are you coming to Russia?” the customs official asked.

  “I’m in transit to Riga.”

  “Will you be staying in Kaliningrad tonight?”

  “No. I’d like to reach Latvia by morning if the roads are okay and the weather continues to cooperate.”

  “There is nothing wrong with Russian roads,” the official said sharply. He examined the car’s papers, lingering over the German export and Latvian import licenses. “Do you have a buyer for this pussy wagon in Riga?”

  “I hope so.”

  The official laughed. “No one up there has any money these days, except for a certain class of … businessmen.”

  McGarvey shrugged but said nothing.

  The customs officer gave him a hard, bleak stare, then handed back his passport. He wrote something on the Russian transit permit. “There is an additional transit fee of five hundred deutchmarks. Do you have this money with you? It says here you didn’t pay it in Leipzig.”

  It was a bribe, of course.

  “It was an oversight,” McGarvey said. He counted out the money and handed it over without protest. He was being perceived as one of “those businessmen,” which meant Latvian Mafia, which was giving the Russians still living in the country a horrible time. It was exactly the image he wanted to portray.

  “Don’t stay long in Russia,” the official ordered. He stepped back, and waved the FSK security guard to raise the barricade.

  An hour and a half later McGarvey was crossing the much friendlier border into Lithuania where the customs officials joked and smiled, and waved at him as he left.

  Moscow

  “He’s disappeared and nobody can find him,” Chernov told General Yuryn at breakfast in the Dzerzhinsky Square headquarters of the FSK shortly after eight in the morning. “We’ll have to wait until he contacts Yemlin, or makes a mistake.”

  “Maybe he’s given up.”

  “That’s not likely.”

  “President Kabatov has to be told something.”

  Chernov looked at him coldly. He despised weakness of any kind, and he took Yuryn’s obesity to be a sign of a lack of self control. But Tarankov needed the general, at least until after the elections. Then many things would change in Moscow.

  “Sorry, General, but we’ve been working around the clock, and I’m getting tired.”

  Yuryn laughed because the remark was so obviously disingenuous. “I’ll pass your complaint along to him.”

  “Tell him that we’re working on it. McGarvey will not succeed. I guarantee it.”

  Paris

  Elizabeth had slept poorly, and as a result she had a difficult time getting started. She didn’t leave the apartment until nearly 7:00 A.M., and her heart wasn’t in her jogging. She’d come to enjoy the mornings, as she was sure her father had, in part because by doing the same things he did she felt closer to him. But not this morning because she was frightened and confused. For the first time she was beginning to doubt that even a man such as her father could succeed with the deck so stacked against him.

  A half-dozen blocks from the apartment, she stopped at a telephone kiosk, and using her credit card called a number in Alexandria, across the river from Washington. It was one in the morning over there, but she didn’t care. She’d wake up the dead if she thought that it would help.

  Her old boss Bratislav Toivich answered his home phone on the first ring as if he’d been expecting the call. “Hullo.”

  “Mr. B, it’s Liz. I’m in Paris.”

  “You’re up early.”

  “I’m jogging the same route my father takes. But we haven’t found a thing. And I don’t know what to do next.”

  “I haven’t heard much here either, little devochka. Maybe it’s time for you to come home.”

  “They want to send me and Jacqueline to Moscow to act as bait. But I’m afraid of what my father might do if he finds out.”

  “That bastard,” Toivich said with much feeling. “Don’t you do it, Elizabeth. Don’t you let them bully you into going over there. You know the situation in Moscow. Anything can happen. You and Ms. Belleau could be swallowed up and no one would ever hear from you again.”

  “The Russians know what my father is planning to do, and they’re waiting for him. He doesn’t have a chance, Mr. B. He’s walking into a trap, unless we can warn him first. But I don’t know what to do anymore. We’ve tried just about everything.”

  “Have you tried reaching him through his friend, Otto Rencke?”

  “He’s disappeared too.”

  “He’s a computer genius. The machines are his entire life.”
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  “We’ve tried the computer schools here in Paris but no one has heard from him.”

  “You’re young, Elizabeth. You were raised in the computer age, so think like a computer genius.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Rencke is probably helping your father. But that wouldn’t take him twenty-four hours a day. He has to amuse himself somehow in the off hours. So what would a man like that do with himself?”

  THIRTY

  Riga

  McGarvey crossed the Daugava River that ran through the heart of the Latvian capital around eight o’clock in the morning, his eyes gritty and his stomach rumbling. The traffic-clogged streets were in terrible repair, the drivers even more reckless than in France, so he had to watch his own driving.

  Using the Latvian guide book and maps he’d picked up at a truck stop this morning, he found his way to the main Telephone and Telegraph office on Brvbas Boulevard. The Mercedes attracted some attention, but nobody bothered him.

  Inside, he gave one of the clerks at the counter a Paris number and she directed him to one of the booths. By the time he closed the door the number was ringing.

  “Hiya,” Rencke answered.

  “Have you heard from my daughter?” McGarvey asked.

  “She called and everything is fine,” Rencke replied breathlessly. “Oh boy, Mac, it’s a good thing you called because the heat’s been turned up a notch. I can’t get a trace on you because of my backscatter encryption program. So where are you calling from?”

  “I’m in Riga. What’s happening?”

  “You’re not calling from a hotel phone are you? Because if you are you’d better get out of there. My stuff can’t protect past a hotel switchboard, and there might be bugs.”

  “I’m at the main telephone office. What’s going on, Otto?”

  “Ryan is being cagey as hell, but I picked up a reference to a special commission in Moscow that the Russians have put together to find you. It’s in the SVR’s system now, so there’s no doubt that they know who you are and why you’re coming. Ever hear the name Yuri Bykov? Ex-KGB?”