Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “Good.”

  * * *

  Rowe, a tall, very large man with an olive complexion and dark hair, dressed in a Western shirt, string tie, jeans, and Tony Lama cowboy boots, was waiting at the FBO ramp with a dark blue Toyota Camry when McGarvey thanked the crew for a good ride and got off the plane.

  “Mr. Director,” he said, “welcome to Istanbul.”

  “Thanks, I’m told you have something for me?”

  “Three things actually. First, if you’re carrying a bag it won’t have to go through customs.”

  “I’m traveling light.”

  “Second, the car is yours. Registered to Regis Pharmaceutical Distributors, GmbH. And third, there is a package on the front passenger seat.”

  “Will you need a lift back to the consulate?”

  “No,” Rowe said. “And for whatever reason you came here, good hunting. And I sincerely mean that. But watch your six, sir, this is the Wild West.”

  “You’re a Texas man?”

  Rowe grinned. “Hell no, sir. This is just a clown suit to misdirect the opposition. I’m actually a seventh-generation Connecticut Yankee.” He turned around and went back inside.

  * * *

  Otto was on the phone when McGarvey got into the car.

  “I’ve programmed the address into the car’s nav system,” he said. “But listen to me. We can bump this up to the ambassador through State. He can take it to the Turkish authorities. Tell them that a diplomatic representative of the US government has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom.”

  “They won’t do anything about it, at least not until the White House puts some pressure on them.”

  “We won’t ask them to do anything like that. Just cordon off the neighborhood until our negotiator—you—can get on the scene. Might stabilize the situation long enough for you to get inside.”

  “It’s me they want.”

  “And it’s you they’ll get.”

  “I have to do this alone. Najjir spots Turkish soldiers moving into place, he’ll call it a day and bug out.”

  “Then I don’t know what the hell you want, Mac,” Otto shouted. “Goddamnit, what are you going to do?”

  “Exactly what the bastard wants me to do. Turn myself over.”

  “Once he has you, he’ll kill Pete—she won’t be of any further value to him, and you’ll be screwed.”

  “Things have a way of working themselves out,” McGarvey said. He started the car’s engine. “I’m going over to the hotel first, to see if Pete managed to leave something behind again.”

  * * *

  Pete was awake, but in pain, when they stopped, and she couldn’t see a thing because the scarf was over her eyes.

  Miriam got out of the car and Pete heard what sounded like a rusty gate being opened. A moment later the car moved forward a few feet, stopped again, and Najjir shut off the engine.

  The gate was closed, then Miriam pulled Pete out of the car and they marched somewhere for what seemed like a long distance, up some stairs and down a corridor, the wooden floors creaking as they walked.

  Pete let her feet drag as if she were still only semiconscious, but she had come around enough to take some stock of her surroundings.

  They were on the second floor of some very old building. It smelled of mildew and backed-up toilets and maybe machine oil or something else that could mean they were in a machine shop or factory of some sort.

  In the distance the Muslim call to prayers echoed over the city; it had to be sunset.

  Closer, she could hear a baby crying, two people with high-pitched voices arguing in what sounded like Arabic, and a small motorcycle or moped roaring past on the street downstairs. A cobblestone street, she thought.

  They came into a room through what sounded to Pete like a metal door, and there were men here. At least two of them. They smelled like garlic and something else unpleasant, plus strong body odors.

  “Tie her to a chair for now,” Najjir said.

  Kirk, Pete muttered to herself. His strong face, clear eyes, and smile came into her head and she almost cried.

  He was coming. It was all she had to hang on to.

  PART

  TWO

  Istanbul

  TWENTY-SIX

  McGarvey drove over to the Ritz Hotel, the blue lights on the Bosphorus Bridge across the Golden Horn hanging like a necklace above a laden freighter heading inbound to the Black Sea. Traffic was still very heavy and he had to concentrate on his driving lest he get into an accident or be stopped by a cop.

  Rowe’s package had contained five thousand euros—from some Company slush fund at the consulate—a well-used Walther PPK in the rare heavy version, of which only two thousand were ever manufactured, and three magazines of 9 × 18mm Ultra PP Super cartridges—one in the handle and two spares.

  Otto didn’t think that a new passport and false papers were necessary; Najjir knew who he was, knew that he was coming and had left a clear message for him. There was no need for stealth.

  He reached the hotel a few minutes after nine, left the car with the valet, and went directly up to the suite booked under the Worley name.

  The bastard had buried Pete in Istanbul, but he knew that Mac would have to come here first, on some off chance that Pete had left a clue. It was also possible that he and the woman had returned and were waiting in ambush. Force the battle here and now.

  The corridor was deserted, and listening at the door, the gun in his right hand, Mac could hear very faint voices that might have been from a television, possibly a newscast in English. The cadences and intonations were wrong for ordinary conversation.

  A door halfway down the corridor was open and an older man in a bellman’s uniform emerged. “May I help you, sir,” he asked, approaching.

  “I forgot my key,” McGarvey said.

  The man took a cell phone from his pocket, but before he could call anyone, Mac snatched it from his hand.

  “I need to get inside. A friend of mine was here, and she may have left something for me.”

  The bellman stepped back and glanced over Mac’s shoulder at the elevators down the hall.

  Mac raised the pistol from where it was concealed behind his leg and stuck it in the man’s face. “Open the door, please.”

  The bellman shook his head.

  “Right now, or I will shoot you.”

  Still the man hesitated. At any moment someone could show up on one of the elevators, or emerge from one of the rooms, and it would be game over. The police would be called, and he would be on the run.

  Mac pulled back the hammer, an unnecessary action, but the soft click impressed the man.

  He whipped out his universal key and unlocked the door. His eyes were wide, his mouth half open.

  “Go,” McGarvey said softly, and the man took off in a run down the corridor, toward the stairs.

  The door to the suite was only ajar an inch or so. Leading with his gun hand, Mac pushed it open the rest of the way and ducked into the entry vestibule and then into the sitting room, moving low and fast to the right, sweeping his pistol right to left.

  He ended in a half crouch

  Large wall-to-wall windows looked toward the illuminated bridge, and doors left and right opened to separate bedrooms—one with glass doors to a balcony facing the city, the other with doors opening onto a balcony overlooking Maçka Park.

  No one was here. Straightening up he lowered the pistol, muzzle off to the side, tossed the bellman’s cell phone on the couch, and went into the bedroom on the left.

  The panties Pete had been wearing when they’d left the hotel for the tower, torn, a little blood on the waistband on the right side, were lying on the bed. He stared at them for a long moment, trying to work out the significance of the message Najjir had sent.

  We have your friend, and she is under our control. Our total control. Come get her if you can.

  But there was more.

  Mac holstered the pistol and picked up the panties. Maybe she’d
been raped, either by Najjir or one of his people. Maybe they’d made a show of it. To infuriate him so hard that he would not be thinking straight. They wanted him to come barging in blindly, gun blazing.

  They’d set a trap and the panties were part of the bait, like the first in a trail of bread crumbs leading where they wanted him to come.

  Pocketing the panties he went back into the sitting room as a short, thickly built man with deep-set black eyes, a dark complexion, and black hair appeared in the doorway from the corridor. He was wearing a neatly pressed gray linen suit, the jacket unbuttoned, the bulge of a pistol on the left side obvious.

  “I expect that you are Mr. McGarvey, here seeking the whereabouts of your friend, who was recently a guest with Mr. Worley and another woman.”

  “I was looking to see if they left anything behind.”

  “I understand perfectly, but you must also understand that we cannot tolerate a display of weapons, and especially not the threat against an innocent employee who was merely doing his duty.”

  “I meant no harm,” McGarvey said. “But I have to leave now.”

  The man was pained. “Unfortunately that is not possible. The authorities have been called and have asked that I detain you until they arrive.”

  “You’re the house cop?”

  The man nodded. “My name is Mehmet Demir. And you are the former director of the American Central Intelligence Agency, for which you have my utmost respect, sir.”

  “The easy way would be for you to step aside and allow me to leave.”

  “I am truly sorry.”

  McGarvey pulled his gun, but did not point it at the house cop.

  Demir smiled and spread his hands. “Do you actually mean to shoot me?”

  “One of the women is my fiancée.”

  “Congratulations, sir.”

  McGarvey holstered his pistol and held out his right hand as he went across the room to the cop. Demir raised a hand to shake, but McGarvey reached inside the cop’s jacket, snatched his gun, and stepped back.

  “Now you have two guns with which to shoot me. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you understand my situation?”

  “Perfectly,” Demir said. “But do you understand mine and that of the hotel?”

  “An impasse, then,” McGarvey said. He holstered his Walther and returned the house cop’s pistol. “Will you shoot me in the back if I leave?”

  Demir inclined his head. “No, not a man in love.” He stepped aside. “The public elevators are locked, but the stairs will be faster than the service elevator. But first, hit me, please.”

  “I won’t hit a man who helped,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  Mac took the stairs down eight flights to the service level one floor below the lobby. The laundry area was off to the right, down a broad corridor from two service elevators, and straight back was the receiving area where deliveries such as food, wine, and other items, including twice-daily mail deliveries, were made to three loading docks.

  He made his way to one of the overhead doors, then outside onto the dock, from where he jumped down to the driveway. The few employees in sight at the moment paid him no attention, nor was anyone looking from the second-floor office windows.

  Up on the street level he turned left and walked directly away from the hotel’s main entrance. A block and a half away he hailed a cab and directed the driver to take him to Taksim Square.

  The driver, an old man with a gray beard, wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap, looked in the rearview mirror. “This is very bad place. Beyoğlu. Do you understand?”

  McGarvey handed a hundred-euro note to the driver.

  “Is impossible.”

  McGarvey handed over a second note. A moment later, a third.

  The driver finally took them. “Your funeral,” he said, the expression very American.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Najjir stepped off the freight elevator on the third floor of the ramshackle building that had once held the Allied Tin Manufactory Co-op of Beyoğlu and went to a door with a frosted glass window, at the end of the broad corridor.

  The only noise here this evening was the badly warped wooden floor that creaked under his footfalls.

  Miriam, wearing jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt, several pieces of rope in hand, came out of the room that had once been the office of the co-op’s bookkeeper. She looked tired. “Do you mean to starve us, or did you come to tell me that dinner is served?”

  “Downstairs. But no alcohol. I want everyone sharp.”

  Miriam shrugged. “Do you think he’s stupid enough to actually come for her?”

  “He hasn’t called for help.”

  “But someone from the American consulate met his plane.”

  “Almost certainly a CIA officer by the name of Mark Rowe. But he drove himself to the hotel, where he apparently pulled a gun on a bellman and the house cop. The metro police are there now, but he managed to slip away.”

  “If they’re looking for him, and trace him here, we’d have trouble explaining what the fuck we’re doing.”

  “The cops are treating it as nothing more than a simple assault. No one is making any serious effort to find him.”

  Miriam nodded, but it was clear she was worried. “I’d just as soon kill her right now and get the hell out of here,” she said.

  “Soon enough. But for now she’s the bait for McGarvey. And you know what bringing him in would mean for us.”

  “Hate to be a stickler for details, love, but you were the incident commander for the bloody tower op. You fucked up, not me. So if I make a quick fade into the woodwork, no one will come looking for me. At least not in the short term.”

  “Your career would be over.”

  “Better than getting my nine ounces,” she said. It was the old KGB euphemism for a 9mm bullet to the back of the head.

  Najjir was truly fed up with the slut. He’d warned his control officer from the beginning that hiring amateur help was a bad idea. Of course he’d not been told that she was a Russian intel officer, only that in the end she would be expendable. In fact, eliminating her would be the most desirable outcome. The details had been left to him. He only had to wonder what instructions she had been given about his own expendability.

  For now, however, she was riding herd on the woman, something that was becoming more difficult by the hour. But once they had McGarvey in hand, it would be his pleasure to kill both women.

  “Maybe in the end it’ll be me coming for you,” Najjir said. “But for now I need your help with her. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

  “Your American is showing. Won’t play so well back in the Rodina,” Miriam said. She held up the short pieces of rope they’d used to tie Pete to the four legs of the metal cot that one of the shooters had found somewhere and brought up. “She managed to get loose, and I caught her trying to pry open the window.”

  Najjir stepped around her and looked inside the room. Pete’s hands, raised above her head in what appeared to be an extremely uncomfortable position, were handcuffed to the crossbar at the end of the metal cot.

  She was awake and she glared at him and Miriam, but said nothing.

  She was still wearing the slacks and blouse that Miriam had dressed her in, and a fair amount of blood had run down from her mouth onto her right shoulder. Her face was red and badly swollen, as was her right eye. She had to be in a lot of pain, but she wasn’t showing it.

  “Where’d you get the cuffs?”

  “From one of your goons,” Miriam said. “They’re police issue, but I didn’t ask how he came by them.”

  “Best not to ask too many questions. All of them are a little jumpy. The army has done a lot of sweep-and-clear operations down here.”

  “Christ, you didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Nothing in the past ten days.”

  “Not to say they won’t start up again at any minute.”

  “We’ll be out of here before morning,”
Najjir said.

  “We’d better be,” Miriam said. “Now let’s eat.”

  “What about something for her?” Najjir asked, just to see what her reaction would be.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Her attitude was exactly what he’d thought it would be. She had a total lack of humanity. Which made her as perfect an operative as a dangerous one.

  * * *

  Mark Rowe pulled up and parked a battered dark blue Toyota Corolla a half a block behind where the cabby had dropped off McGarvey at the edge of Taksim Square.

  He’d almost lost the former DCI, who by happenstance he’d spotted walking down the street, away from the hotel, at the same time the Turkish National Police had shown up in front. Something apparently had happened inside the hotel—almost certainly McGarvey’s doing—and the TNP had sent two radio units, with two cops in each car.

  It was after ten in the evening, and the park and most of the streets around it were all but deserted. Most families were barricaded inside their mean apartments for the night, while the bad guys for the most part wouldn’t be out and about until after midnight. Oddly enough, this time of the evening, when the small sidewalk cafés and other businesses were closed or closing, was just about the safest time of the day or night.

  His mobile rang, and he recognized the number. “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you lost him?” DDCI Marty Bambridge demanded.

  “He just got out of a cab on the south side of Taksim Park. It’s in the Beyoğlu District.”

  “I know where the fucking park is located. No matter what, you need to stick with him, am I perfectly clear?”

  “I’ll need help, sir. This definitely is the wrong side of Istanbul’s tracks.”

  “You’re on your own. Just don’t lose him.”

  * * *

  Pete waited until the door was closed and the sound of their footfalls faded down the corridor before she pulled her shackled hands down far enough so that when she craned her head upward she could make out the cuffs, the holes for the key and, more importantly, her slender wrists.