Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  She’d managed to wriggle one hand from the length of rope holding it to a bed leg and quickly untie her other hand and ankles.

  The steel mesh covering the window had been so rusty that she had managed to pull one corner loose and was certain she could get a second corner undone. From that point she figured it would be fairly easy to pull the mesh far enough away that she could open the window, or at least break the glass, crawl outside, and make it down to the street.

  One of the barely housebroken baboons, about the size of a small house, had come in at that moment, batted her in the side of the head, and slammed her down on the bed. He’d had her trousers down around her knees when the woman had shown up and shoved him aside.

  She had feigned semiconsciousness, so that when the bitch had put the handcuffs on her it was fairly easy to bunch up her muscles so that her hands, wrists, and lower arms had increased just enough in size that now she was reasonably sure she could wriggle her hands free, as she had done with the rope ties.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Otto was at one of his monitors, trying to track Bambridge, who had left his office two minutes ago. He called Mac’s mobile but it rang four times before it was answered. “Are you in a position to hold up for a few minutes?”

  “I’m in Taksim Park, next to a statue.”

  “You could have trouble coming your way. Rowe is right behind you. Evidently he’s been following you since the airport.”

  “I don’t know who’s the chief of Istanbul station, but have him order the son of a bitch off my back.”

  “There’s more, kemo sabe, and you’re not going to like it.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “He’s working for Marty.”

  “Christ.”

  “I intercepted a phone call he made to Rowe. Ordered him to stick with you, no matter what.”

  “If they call for help, this thing will go south and they’ll kill Pete and bail out. Did you tell that to Marty?”

  “He left his office as soon as he talked to Mark. I’m working on finding him. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Soon as.”

  “Right,” Otto said.

  He’d programmed one of his darlings to search the building by sampling conversations with a reverse search algorithm. The Company’s entire campus was shielded from any sort of eavesdropping from outside—mechanical, electronic, or by laser beams sampling windowpanes for vibrations made by conversations inside all of the hundreds of offices, even the library, the Starbucks on the first floor, and the cafeteria in one of the covered walkways.

  No one discussed classified information outside any of the buildings—not even in the interior courtyards—so picking up conversations with a parabolic dish would yield nothing. Every building on campus was shielded from the inside by Faraday cages, which blocked electronic signals from coming in or going out. And every window was doubled, with white noise pumped between the panes.

  The outer layer of glass in each office did not vibrate, but the inner panes did, which Otto’s program monitored.

  Marty was talking to someone named Oscar in a second-floor office of the George H. W. Bush Center for Intelligence, in what was known as the New Headquarters Building.

  Otto pulled up a directory. Oscar was Oscar Cowen, the liaison officer from the Department of State. He tapped into the office as Cowen was offering Marty coffee.

  “Later, but thanks for agreeing to see me on such short notice,” Marty said.

  Otto phoned Mac who answered immediately. “Yes.”

  “Is your situation holding?”

  “For now,” Mac said.

  “Marty just showed up in State’s liaison office. I’ll switch it over so you can listen in.”

  “… situation is developing about the way I thought it would,” Bambridge said. “The son of a bitch is predictable.”

  “Do you want me to go ahead then?” Cowen asked.

  “You have someone you can call?”

  “I set it up as soon as you asked for my help. Army Major Aydin Yilmaz.”

  “How soon can he get his troops over there?”

  “They’ve done a number of raids in the district over the past several months. He promised that he could have his people mobilized and in place within twenty minutes.”

  “He understands the situation?”

  “Completely.”

  “Do it.”

  “Can you patch me in to Cowen’s speakerphone?” McGarvey asked.

  Otto made an entry. “You’re on.”

  “Mr. Cowen, if you call for help from the Turkish army it will result in the death of someone very close to me,” McGarvey said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Marty swore. “Rencke, you bastard!”

  “Do not call for an army raid. If Ms. Boylan is harmed I will come for both of you.”

  “Is that a threat?” the State Department liaison demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Marty interjected.

  Otto hurriedly found the password for Cowen’s computer and hacked into his system. He turned on the monitor’s camera as Marty finished writing something on a pad of paper and passed it across the desk, into clear view.

  DO IT ANYWAY. WE’LL DENY IT.

  “Marty passed Cowen a note to go ahead with the raid anyway,” Otto said. “They’ll deny it later.”

  “You’re a fucking dead man, Bambridge,” McGarvey said, and the connection was broken.

  “He’s gone,” Otto told them.

  “Have your major go in and take the bastards down, rescue Ms. Boylan, and take McGarvey into custody, by force if necessary,” Bambridge said. “I want him back here.”

  “Bad idea, Marty,” Otto said.

  “Mr. Rencke, you’re terminated. You no longer worker for the CIA. You’ll surrender your identification and badges to security, who will escort you off campus.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  * * *

  Otto entered a seventeen-character alphanumeric code into the system that rode herd on all of his darlings, then walked out of his office and got to the stairwell as a pair security personnel from housekeeping showed up on the elevator.

  He managed to duck through the doorway before they spotted him, and hurried up four floors to the seventh, where he had to use his special security pass to gain entry.

  The director’s office was halfway on the right down the long corridor, and Otto barged in.

  “Mr. Rencke, the general is busy at the moment,” Gibson’s secretary said, half rising.

  But Otto charged straight through without stopping.

  Marty Bambridge was just coming through the connecting door from his office, and he pulled up short, his face red. “I just fired him, Mr. Director.”

  “In thirty minutes the mainframes of all fourteen intel agencies in town, including ours, will freeze up for ten seconds. Thirty minutes after that they’ll go down for twenty seconds, and at every thirty-minute interval they’ll go down for double the previous time.”

  Bambridge went to Gibson’s desk and reached for a telephone, but the DCI held up a hand for him to stop.

  “Unless?”

  “Unless I ask my programs to hold off.”

  “For what ransom? Your job? You’ll not lose it as long as this is my office. Or is this about McGarvey again?”

  “You’re goddamned right it’s about McGarvey,” Bambridge shouted, but again Gibson held up a hand and Marty shut his mouth.

  Otto quickly explained McGarvey’s situation and what Bambridge and Oscar Cowen had decided to put into action.

  “Mr. McGarvey believes that this would be the wrong thing to do at the moment?” the DCI asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gibson picked up the phone and buzzed his secretary. “Telephone General Daichi Osman in Ankara, with my compliments and apologies for the lateness of the hour, but I have a matter of some urgency to discuss.”

 
Osman was in charge of the Turkish Joint Chief of Staff Intelligence Bureau, which controlled all sensitive military intel operations in the country.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Najjir sat with Miriam at one of the tables on the first floor in what had served as the factory’s break room. A half dozen of the fifteen contractors were there playing cards and smoking. The room stank of unwashed bodies and something greasy that had burned in a pot on the stove.

  The nine others—four of them snipers—were set up on the roof, with clear sight lines in every direction that McGarvey might approach from, as well as on the ground floor, watching Tatli Badem, where it was likely McGarvey would make his initial recon approach. Their strict orders were shoot to disable, not to kill.

  Miriam had found a couple bottles of beer in the fridge along with a Styrofoam carton that held an untouched order of ground lamb koftes someone had picked up earlier from a small bakery around the corner. They ate directly from the carton with plastic forks while the contractors kept to themselves across the room.

  Najjir switched his phone to the walkie-talkie mode. “Unit one, base.”

  “Base, unit one,” Nikolai Turkin responded from the roof facing Taksim Square. He was a former Russian Spetsnaz operator who’d officially resigned from the service in order to gather contractors for unsanctioned missions—such as capturing a former director of the CIA.

  “Give me a sit rep.”

  “Clear.”

  “He should be close now.”

  “We’re frosty,” Turkin replied.

  A number of years ago, when he was still a serving lieutenant, his Spetsnaz platoon participated in a joint training mission with an American SEAL Team 6 unit in Libya. They’d worked, ate, and slept together for two weeks, and he’d picked up a number of American battlefield expressions. Among them were “Incoming rounds have the right-of-way”; “If everything seems to be going well, you’re probably running into an ambush”; and “A sucking chest wound is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.”

  “I want him alive,” Najjir reminded.

  Turkin didn’t bother to reply, which was only slightly bothersome. The man was damned good, one of the best in the business, and he’d never screwed up. Yet Najjir couldn’t keep himself from muttering, “But.”

  Miriam gave him a sharp look. “Trouble?”

  “I don’t think so,” Najjir said, but he had a definite feeling between his shoulders that the bastard was out there, about to do something completely unexpected.

  * * *

  Najjir sent Miriam back upstairs on the freight elevator to check on the woman. “I’m going to look around outside.”

  “Something’s bothering you. What is it?” she asked. “You’re starting to worry me.”

  “The man has a reputation, which includes leaving a trail of bodies behind. At least that’s the warning that comes up in his file.”

  “Do you want to share it with me, for Christ’s sake? He’s only one man and there’re seventeen of us.”

  “He’s apparently faced worse odds.”

  “So let’s kill the broad and cut and run,” Miriam said. “Whatever his intel value might be, it’s simply not worth our lives. If you think he’s a superman, what’s the bloody point?”

  “The Eiffel Tower,” Najjir said. “I won’t report in with two failures.”

  Miriam looked at him. “Is it really as simple as all that for you?”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  * * *

  Pete had been working for a full fifteen minutes trying to get free of the handcuffs, but they were tighter than she’d thought they would be, and she was stuck just at the base of her right thumb.

  The building had been quiet for the past half hour or so, and at one point she thought that she’d heard a siren far off in the distance. She’d held her breath, listening, hoping it was coming this way, but the sound slowly faded and was finally lost, and she’d sunk into despair.

  Kirk was across the table from her in the Eiffel Tower before the shit had hit the fan. She’d almost laughed out loud, just about certain what he was going to say next, but not helping him. She’d liked the look of fear in his eyes. Not fear of some force that he thought was overwhelming—she didn’t think he’d ever felt something like that—but a genuine fear of what he was about to say and of all the consequences.

  She could feel her face against his chest, feel his body against hers in bed, and an almost overwhelming sense of love and security with it. Kirk was at her side and he would always be there for her. You and me. Together.

  The metal bracelet cut into her right hand, tearing the flesh. Blood began to well up and suddenly her hand was out.

  She pulled the empty cuff free of the bed frame, and lubricating her left wrist with blood was able to pull it free.

  Jumping up from the cot, she went to the door and opened it just a crack. One of the goons was at the end of the corridor, about thirty feet away, where the freight elevator opened, his back to her, a shoulder up against the wall.

  She shut the door and, careful to make no noise, went to the window and started work again on the rusty steel mesh.

  She suddenly stopped and looked over her shoulder. The service elevator had just arrived at the end of the corridor.

  * * *

  Miriam crashed open the service elevator gates and stepped out into the corridor. One of Najjir’s operators leaned insolently against the wall, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from his fat lips.

  The look on his broad Slavic face was bothersome to her for some reason. Najjir was okay, even urbane, though much of the time he was an arrogant prick and a pain in the ass. And Turkin, the group leader, was okay, but the rest of them were barely human.

  “When’s the last time you checked on the woman?” she asked in Russian.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” Dimitri said. His accent was Far East—from somewhere in or around Vladivostok. Those guys were only half a step away from being uneducated nomadic Siberians.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  He shrugged indifferently and took a pull from his cigarette.

  Miriam slapped it from his lips. “Come to attention, you pizda,” she said. It roughly meant “pussy.”

  Dimitri reached inside his jacket for a pistol as he pushed forward. But Miriam had her Glock out first and jammed the muzzle into the man’s left cheek, forcing him back against the wall.

  “The American coming here will probably manage to kill several of you stupid bastards before he’s taken down. If you choose instead to die here and now, it will make no difference.”

  Dimitri glared at her.

  “No one will weep at your graveside.”

  “Or yours.”

  Miriam withdrew her pistol. “And I wouldn’t want it,” she said. “Come with me; we’ll check on the woman. Who knows, maybe she’s trying to escape and we’ll have to shoot her.”

  Dimitri cracked a slight smile.

  A muted twang, almost as if an out-of-tune bass string had been plucked, came from one of the rooms down the corridor.

  Miriam and Dimitri raced down to the room, but Pete was gone, the screen pulled back, the window open.

  THIRTY

  Directly ahead of McGarvey’s position was the shattered ruins of an apartment building, next door to which was a complex of five-story buildings that looked as if they might have been the site of a factory at one time. He’d been given the address of the apartment building, but he was almost certain the shooter would be in and around the complex.

  No lights shone from the windows or openings of either place, but if he had mounted the operation he would have put his people on the roof and at several positions on the ground floor of the factory.

  They had Pete and they knew that he would come for her. They also had probably guessed that his likely approach from the hotel would be through the park. A couple of shooters in the shadows on street level and a couple of snipers with night vision scopes on the roof would
be plenty.

  But to the left, and a full block from the factory, was a nightclub, a dim red light just within the recess of a doorway marking it for what it was. The seedier sections of Istanbul, according to what he’d read on the flight from Paris, were studded with clip joints that were called pavions, or glitter bars, where gullible tourists looking for some action would be hosted by good-looking women drinking watered-down cocktails for huge prices, while the tourist would be served full-strength liquors. The idea was to bilk the guy—or in some cases the woman—out of a lot of money with the vague promise of sex later. Of course, the sex never came, and the tourist was kicked out of the place once they were tapped out.

  In some instances the tourist would be mugged once they left, but only if it seemed like a worthwhile risk to take, and if the cops on duty in the district that evening had been paid off.

  Keeping to the shadows, McGarvey worked his way back into the park, where he was definitely out of sight of anyone on the roof of the factory, before he crossed the street to the club. A small sign over the door in German and English said “Seligkeit and Ecstasy,” which was a typical name for this kind of a place, as was the fact the signs were not in Turkish, which would have been deeply offensive to the Muslim population.

  The club was less than half full at this early hour, but as soon as he walked in, a good-looking young woman wearing a sheer white blouse and a skirt slit up to the curve of her butt approached him. She had an oriental cast and a broad smile.

  “Good evening, welcome to Ecstasy,” she said, her accent French. “You’re American?”

  McGarvey grinned. “Does it show, sweetheart?”

  “Yes, but in a good way.”

  Fifteen or twenty tables for two and four were arranged around a dance floor. A small jazz combo was playing something soft on the small stage, and three couples were dancing to the music.

  “I am Sophie. What may I call you?”

  “Dicky.”

  The girl laughed. “Not your name, but I get the joke.”

  They sat at a table on the left side of the dance floor just as the combo was taking a break. The three musicians disappeared through a door at the rear of the stage, giving Mac a glimpse of a short corridor, at the end of which was an EXIT sign.