Everything came back to her in a horrible rush: McGarvey had shouted at her to get away and then had disappeared in the crowd that had been moving far too slowly. There’d been an explosion, maybe more than one.
But the Eiffel Tower had not come down.
She got shakily to her feet, the nauseous feeling nearly overwhelming her. The cop had not lost his grip on his SIG Sauer pistol, and on instinct alone she pried it from the man’s dead hand and staggered around the corner, out into the open.
Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. Blood coated the pavement in a tremendous splatter pattern that stretched at least fifty feet to the southwest, as far as some body parts had been thrown.
It was like a scene from hell, or from some B-list horror movie. It was nearly impossible for her to take it all in.
She took several steps away from the jumble of bodies nearest to the south pillar. People were still running away. Screams came from all directions. Traffic on the Quai Branly along the river had come to a stop as police cars and SWAT team trucks, sirens blaring, came from all parts of the city.
Her legs and one arm and possibly her face had been cut up by the flying debris, but she was so covered with the cop’s blood it was nearly impossible to tell how badly she’d been hurt. But she could move without much pain.
The last she’d seen of Mac he’d been running toward the west, but the smoke and haze in that direction were still too heavy for her to make out much more than ghostly moving figures.
But that’s the way he’d went, which was good enough for her.
She started after him, moving as fast as she could on the extremely slippery blood-coated pavement.
* * *
Najjir holstered his pistol beneath his jacket before the first of the SWAT team reached him and Miriam.
“There’s a man with a gun,” he shouted, pointing back toward the tower.
He grabbed Miriam’s arm and pulled her aside.
“He’s shot some people!”
The crowd had still not completely cleared the park, and though the dust and smoke were dissipating, an acrid haze lingered, especially directly around the base of the tower. A lot of people were still screaming and crying, many obviously in pain, others out of fear and panic.
One of the cops stopped, but the others didn’t slow down.
“Did you get a good look at this man? Can you give me a description?”
“My height, a little more husky, short hair, a dark jacket, I think.”
“A white man or black?”
“White.”
The cop glanced in the direction his team was heading and said something into the mike at his right shoulder.
“He was shooting? At who?”
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of a weapon?”
“A small machine gun, I think. It was very fast.”
The cop turned and sprinted after his team as he spoke into his lapel mike, his Saint-Étienne M12SD submachine gun at the ready.
* * *
Pete pulled up short, well beyond the periphery of the blood spatter and gore. Mac had been straight out toward the west, toward the avenue de Suffren, but she had lost him. For a long moment she didn’t know what to do.
People were everywhere, trying to get away from the tower and the horrific scene of death, and from the wounded people lying on the pavement, screaming for help in a dozen different languages. A few people, including a woman whose left arm had been blown off, wandered in circles.
She held the pistol behind her right leg so that it was partially concealed as a SWAT team squad, their weapons at the ready, rushed past her, and moments later another of the special operators came past her in a run. They all were dressed in black, with bloused boots, helmets, and Kevlar bulletproof vests, sidearms in holsters on their chests and submachine guns unslung.
She stepped aside, her left hand to her face.
Mac had disappeared.
Straight ahead, less than fifty feet away, she spotted the well-dressed man and woman who had caused the scene in the restaurant and had been escorted out by the police.
The man was looking at something behind him, but the woman was looking directly at her, and their eyes locked for the moment.
Four men in ordinary street clothes, jeans and pullovers, came from a windowless van that had pulled up on the avenue and went directly to the man.
The woman said something and the man turned and spotted Pete. He pointed at her.
Two of the men from the van broke off and started directly toward Pete. They were large, bigger than Mac, and she got the momentary impression that they might be from the Middle East, maybe Syria, or even as far east as Pakistan. Their skin tone was olive and their hair and eyes were dark, things she noticed even from the closing distance.
She sincerely wished that Mac had not insisted that they come into France unarmed. Anywhere unarmed, for that matter.
“We’re on vacation,” he’d told her on the flight over. “And it’s getting tougher every day to take a weapon across international borders.”
“Mark would have brought us something once we’d passed through customs.”
Mark Kraus was the second assistant chief of Paris station. It was his job to be the direct contact with the CIA’s assets in country—that included supplying their subcontractors and others with money, papers and, if need be, weapons.
He’d laughed. “Vacation means sleeping late, going to bed late, seeing the sights, eating rich food, and drinking too much. It does not include shooting people.”
For them, she thought bitterly, the fact of the matter was that they were never on vacation.
She turned to the left and feinted moving away as the first man to reach her grabbed for her arm.
Swinging back suddenly, she elbowed him in the throat, and as he staggered backwards she kneed him in the groin and brought the cop’s SIG up.
But the second man was there, and he jammed the muzzle of a large pistol—a silenced Wilson .45 caliber she thought—into the side of her head.
“Come with me, madam, or I will shoot you.”
The first man recovered almost immediately. He snatched the pistol from her hand and slammed its handle into her left breast.
She stepped back, her knees weak. But what was more bothersome to her at the moment—more than the intense pain—was the look of absolute indifference in both men’s eyes. Cause her pain or kill her outright. It didn’t matter.
NINE
Mac pulled up short about twenty-five meters away from the man and woman from the restaurant as four men who’d emerged from a van swooped down on Pete and hustled her away.
He had lost himself in the middle of the crowd that was trying desperately to get away from the carnage and he had no clear shot.
The French SWAT team had disappeared toward the tower, and the man and woman were gone too.
Shoving his way through the mob, he got clear as Pete was being bodily shoved into the van’s open side door. At least one man had stayed behind and was pulling her inside, and another was behind the wheel as the four piled in the back.
He was less than twenty feet from the avenue when the van pulled away, its tires squealing. Someone in back started to close the side door when he spotted Mac. He brought up his pistol but lurched suddenly out of sight, and Mac got the fleeting impression that Pete was right there and had shoved her kidnapper out of the way, preventing him from taking the shot.
Reaching the street, Mac was in time to see the plain gray Toyota van turning to the right on the Quai Branly, against the flow of what traffic there was.
He raced out onto the avenue and headed in a dead run in the direction the van had gone, in time to see the driver turn left onto the bridge across the river.
A yellow Mercedes taxicab was pulled up at the curb.
McGarvey ran to it, pulled open the left door, and yanked the startled driver out onto the street.
Before the man could respond, McGarvey tossed the
room broom onto the passenger seat as he got behind the wheel, slammed the car into gear, and floored the pedal.
* * *
Najjir and Miriam stopped just inside the doorway to the parking garage when the man from the restaurant raced past in a taxi.
“Persistent son of a bitch,” Miriam said. “He has to be a cop.”
At the restaurant Najjir had gotten the impression that the man and woman were perhaps husband and wife, or at least lovers, and that they were Americans, by their dress, their haircuts, and their mannerisms. But they didn’t quite fit the mold, at least not in his mind, of cops. But who were they? And why the hell had they stuck their noses into the operation? It made no sense to him.
He and Miriam took the elevator up to the third level.
“What’s going to happen when he catches up with your people?” she asked.
“They’ll kill him,” Najjir said. But he wasn’t as sure of that outcome as he wanted to be.
When they reached the Peugeot he opened the driver’s side door, then popped the trunk lid.
“There are some clothes inside for us. We need to change before we take the train back to London. Someone besides the couple from the restaurant might have noticed us.”
“Whatever else you are, you do think of everything,” Miriam said, reaching inside the trunk.
No one else was in sight on this level at the moment. Najjir pulled out his pistol as he walked back to Miriam, placed it an inch from the back of her head, and pulled the trigger.
The hammer slapped on an empty firing chamber.
She turned around, a small .32-caliber revolver in her left hand. “Everything except checking the spring in the magazine.”
Najjir shrugged and holstered his pistol beneath his jacket. He could easily overpower her and take away her silly little girl’s gun, but he was more curious about who she was than concerned about the pistol she was pointing at him.
“So now what?” he asked.
“We get back to the Gare du Nord and take the train to London.”
“Why not shoot me right now, stuff my body in the trunk—the same as I intended for you—and take the train back yourself? You’ll have your money. Mission accomplished. Or nearly so.”
She lowered the gun. “Because we may have further use for you, “she said, first in English and then in Russian.
* * *
Pete’s left breast was on fire, her skirt had been torn away in the blast, leaving her bare below the waist except for some flimsy panties, and she was pissed off, but she didn’t let any of that show. Mac was somewhere back there, and with any luck at all he saw what happened.
The rear of the van was blocked off from the front, and there were no windows in the back, so she couldn’t see where they were going, except that they had made one turn to the right—if it was onto the Quai Branly, it would have been against traffic—but they made a another sharp turn, this one to the left. It had to be the bridge over the Seine.
They’d snatched her for whatever reason and on whoever’s orders—though she had a fair guess that it had been on the orders of the couple who’d made too obvious a scene in the restaurant.
What was even more ominous to her than the kidnapping was the fact that they had not covered their faces. It didn’t matter to them that if she ever got free she would be able to identify them for the police. They had no intention of letting her escape, because they were going to kill her.
But then why had they taken her, unless it was meant to flush out Mac?
She managed to wet her lips, though her mouth was as dry as parchment, and she grinned. “If it was you guys who tried to bring down the Eiffel Tower, I have to say you did a piss-poor job.”
The one who hit her in the breast with his pistol just looked at her, as if he was seeing a mildly interesting but completely harmless bug.
“Now that you have me, what’s next? We’re going to your hideout, where you’re going to take turns raping me?”
None of them said a thing.
They had turned right again, most likely onto the expressway along the river, because they had sped up and she could hear traffic noises.
She wanted one of them to say something. All of them looked vaguely Middle Eastern, but that covered a lot of territory.
“Give a girl a break. How about it, fellas? The condemned gets her last wish before going to the gallows?”
The one she’d shoved away from the open door as he tried to take a shot turned on her. “Shut your fucking pie hole, bitch!”
One of the others motioned for him to shut up and he turned away.
Pete sat back and tried to keep the look of surprise from her face. The son of a bitch was Russian—from one of the former Soviet republics. Her guess was Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or farther south, Turkmenistan.
“My partner will find me,” she said.
They looked at her but said nothing.
“I have a GPS chip implant.”
The one who had hit her in the breast, and who had just motioned for the one by the door to keep quiet, reached back and took a small device that looked like a cell phone out of a bag, powered it up, and waved it in her general direction.
He shook his head after a moment or two, shut it off.
Pete figured that he was the operational commander and that he and his people were either intelligence officers or possibly military special forces. Spetsnaz, perhaps. No one else had such sophisticated equipment.
But it made absolutely no sense to her.
Only a terrorist organization like ISIS or al Qaeda would have tried to pull off taking down something like the Eiffel Tower. Responsible governments didn’t do such things. The risks of blowback were simply far too great.
Even Putin with his grandiose desire to bring Russia back to the international stature of the old Soviet Union wouldn’t order such a stunt.
These guys were pros, but working for whom?
TEN
Across the river, Najjir took the rue Saint-Denis toward the Gare du Nord in the tenth. It was not the fastest way to the train station but it was in the same direction his cleanup crew had taken the woman, and the same direction the hijacked taxi had gone.
He had the driver’s window down, and even though traffic was very heavy and noisy, he could still make out sirens converging from all over the city toward the Eiffel Tower.
The operation was a failure; the tower had not come down. But people on the ground at the south pillar had been killed, and as another act of terrorism here, Parisians would not soon forget it.
“Why are we going this way?” Miriam asked.
“I want to find out what happens.”
“If you mean the American couple from the restaurant, your people will kill them. Unless they fuck up too.”
“I want to know who they are.”
“Tourists.”
“I don’t think so,” Najjir said. He phoned his team leader. “Where are you?”
“Coming up on the Forum,” Bernard, who was driving, answered. The Forum des Halles was the huge underground shopping mall and Metro station that had replaced the old market. It had opened in 1986 and was always busy, though a lot of Parisians hated it because an important part of the city’s history had been bulldozed.
The team’s plan was the ditch the van a few blocks away and take the Metro out of the city to an apartment in Saint-Ouen, just outside the Périphérique ring highway around the city proper.
From there they would change clothes—including Najjir and Miriam, who were to have been extracted from a situation gone bad—pick up new identification packages, and make their way out of France by separate routes.
“What about the woman?”
“She’s a pain in the ass.”
“Have you found out who she is?”
“No, but Karim’s guess is she’s an LE from the States. She talks the talk, and she won’t back the fuck down.” LE was law enforcement. “What do you want us to do with her?”
“Take h
er to the église, find out who’s she working for. Then kill her and get back on plan.”
The église was the thirteenth-century parish church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles in Les Halles, not far from the Forum. At this time of the day in midweek it would be a safe haven, with a rat warren of chambers below street level. They had set it up as a temporary safe haven in case something went wrong.
From a subbasement they could reach the Paris sewer system, which would provide them with a nearly foolproof escape route. It would also be a great place to dispose of a body.
“Will do,” Bernard said.
“But you have another problem coming your way,” Najjir said. “The man she was with hijacked a Mercedes cab and he’s right behind you. He’s armed with a room broom.”
“Stand by,” Bernard said.
Najjir figured that they were about ten minutes behind the van. But he had no intention of getting into the middle of a shooting situation between his extraction team and the American couple.
“I’m making a right.”
Najjir waited. Bernard—which was an operational name—was one of the better German contractors he’d worked with. From what had been Berlin’s east zone, but trained by Iran’s Republican Guard, he’d gone freelance about eight years ago. He was an extremely experienced forty and had contacts with practically everybody in the business.
“I have him.”
“Use the woman to lure him into the church, and then kill him as quickly as you can. You can get what information we need from the woman before you kill her, and then get out of there.”
“Are you joining us?”
“No need,” Najjir said. “When you’re clear, make contact through the usual channels.”
“Will there be another op?” Bernard asked.
“Yes,” Najjir said, and he switched off.
“You don’t think their being there was a coincidence?” Miriam asked.
“I don’t believe in such things.”
“Neither do I.”
Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 4