Face Off--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  Pamela was silent for several seconds. She nodded. “Any chance they’ll release him?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “Any chance he could escape and make it back here?”

  It was one of Marty’s worst nightmares. “It’s possible, but not very likely.”

  Again she was silent for a beat. “If he does get free, we wouldn’t have much notice. Would that be a fair statement?”

  “Yes,” he said, the first faint glimmerings of hope rising at the back of his head.

  “You have enough experience in the business, and you’re a bright man, so I think you’ve probably already figured where we’re going to go, how we’re going to get there, and how we’re going to survive—financially.”

  Marty nodded.

  “Let’s start with where?”

  “The Caribbean.”

  Pamela smiled. “Good, I’m sick of snow,” she said, and she poured them more wine as he lit two cigarettes.

  * * *

  Bill Rodak was summoned to the Oval Office at seven in the morning, and Weaver asked him to close the door. They were alone.

  The president motioned Rodak to a chair and called his secretary. “I don’t want to be disturbed. No phone calls.”

  Rodak had learned to judge Weaver’s sometimes hair-trigger moods on the campaign trail. “Take no prisoners” was the mantra. But since then Weaver had grown into the job and had become a poker player, his moods almost always unreadable.

  “Bring me up to speed on the situation with Mr. McGarvey.”

  “The French say that he has evidently disappeared.”

  “Last I heard he was in Russia, but Putin denies it.”

  “Yes, sir. But evidently he disappeared from there as well.”

  “And his fiancée?”

  “She’s back here in Washington.”

  “Was she badly hurt in the shoot-out at our consulate?” Weaver asked.

  In Rodak’s estimation, the biggest change in Weaver since he’d been elected was the depth of his knowledge and his understanding of it.

  “I don’t know all the details, but I’m told that she’ll survive without any permanent disabilities.”

  “By whom?”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Who told you this, Bill? Who is your source at Langley? Is it still the deputy director?”

  Rodak hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

  “He would know where McGarvey is?”

  “Possibly. But I’m told that the man is unpredictable at best. A loose cannon.”

  “Ask.”

  “It could be that the CIA itself doesn’t know where he’s gotten himself to.”

  “Ask,” the president said. “I would like an answer before noon.”

  * * *

  Bambridge was in the garage, getting into his car, when Pamela came to the door.

  She looked worried. “You have a call from the White House. Bill Rodak. Shall I tell him that you’ve already left?”

  “No,” Bambridge said.

  “Trouble?” his wife asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, following his wife to the phone in the kitchen. “Good morning, Bill. I’m a little surprised to hear from you this early.”

  “The president would like to have a chat with us sometime before noon today.”

  “Concerning?”

  “Kirk McGarvey. Anyone in your shop know what’s become of him?”

  “We’re sure that the Russians have him, but at this point we don’t know if he’s dead or alive. If we come up with anything new I’ll get back to you.”

  “He wants you here, Marty.”

  Bambridge’s mind was going at nearly the speed of light. “Do we need to get Gibson involved?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “I’ll drop over first thing,” Bambridge said, and he hung up.

  “What’s going on?” Pamela asked.

  He smiled at her. “I think the president has just given us a way out.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  McGarvey’s cell door was opened a few minutes past eleven in the evening and two camo-clad Spetsnaz operators came in carrying shackles. He’d managed to get a few hours of sleep despite the bright overhead lights that had not been turned off and the noises that sounded like cement mixers, and sometimes jackhammers, just down the hall.

  He sat up, swung his bare feet to the concrete floor, and held out his wrists so that he could be bound.

  “There will be no troubles, Mr. McGarvey,” a captain just outside the door said. Like the two with the shackles, he wasn’t armed, nor was he wearing a name tag.

  “Let’s get this over with. I was on the Champs Élysées with my friend and we were sharing a bottle of Dom. I want to get back to it.”

  “That will depend on you.”

  “No, not me. Your drugs.”

  “You’ve been granted a reprieve. Only temporary, in the hope that you will begin to cooperate with us.”

  “Tell you anything you want to know.”

  The guards placed a thick leather belt around his waist and secured it at the small of his back. The shackles on his wrists and ankles were secured by chains to the belt.

  He easily could have overpowered the guards and the captain in the corridor, but he had no idea what he would be facing, except for the steel door with an electronic lock that he’d seen on the way in, beyond which was an elevated station, a guard seated behind thick glass and, around the corner, the elevator he’d come down in.

  But in order to get out he needed two things: a weapon and a high-value hostage. Sooner or later he figured he would get both.

  He shuffled out into the corridor.

  The three Spetsnaz operators were tense, but not nervous. They were experts doing a job they’d been trained to do.

  They were buzzed through the door, and past the guard station they took the elevator, but instead of going up—three floors, he figured, to ground level—they went down another three, to a featureless, well-lit corridor with white tile walls. Antiseptic looking, like a hospital ward, or a morgue.

  Two doors down to the left Mac was taken into a brightly lit, clean room with a reclining chair equipped with restraints for the head, chest, wrists, and ankles. Two stainless steel rolling cabinets, along with two stools on wheels, of the sort used in doctors’ examining rooms, were positioned against a wall.

  His shackles and belt were removed and he was placed in the chair and the restraints were locked in place.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Raya said from the door. “You may leave us now.”

  The captain and two operators left, and Raya, still dressed in Spetsnaz camos, came in. She was followed by very slightly built man—almost a midget—in camos, over which he wore a white lab coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck. His glasses were so thick that his eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. But he had a warm smile.

  “Good morning, Mr. Director,” he said, in excellent English. “My name is Dimitri Nazarov. I’ll be your attending physician for this morning’s session. And I sincerely hope that my services will not be required.”

  “Probably not today,” Raya said. “Depending, of course, on Mr. McGarvey.”

  “My offer still stands,” Mac said.

  “Which is?”

  “Fly me back to Istanbul and I won’t have to kill you or anyone else on base when I escape.”

  The doctor opened McGarvey’s shirt and checked his heart and lungs, then hooked EKG pads to his chest, arms, and right leg, connecting them to a small machine on one of the rolling cabinets. “When did you lose your leg?”

  “A while back,” Mac said, not breaking eye contact with Raya. Something in her expression, in the way she held herself, was different than earlier. But he couldn’t put a finger on it.

  “It has been recently damaged. A gunshot?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were lucky. Had it been your actual limb, you would have gone down.”

&n
bsp; Mac didn’t bother answering.

  Raya closed the door. “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live.”

  She smiled. “One of your famous lines that has seemed to work to this point.”

  The doctor stepped away, and Raya brought one of the stools around to the foot of the chair and sat down so that she was looking up at McGarvey’s face. “The proceedings here are being recorded, visually as well as audibly. For the record I am Raya Kuzin, special adviser to the Kremlin, here on the advice of President Vladimir Putin.”

  “Do you wish for medical assistance?” the doctor asked. His comment was also for the record.

  “Not at this time,” Raya said. “You served as director of the US Central Intelligence Agency for a period of less than two years. It was a position that you hated, and yet under your leadership the agency thrived like it hadn’t since the former intelligence operatives from the Great Patriotic War were tasked by President Truman with forming it.”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  “Can you explain to me how you could be so good doing something you disliked to do?”

  “I listened to people.”

  “Yes, expand please.”

  “That, and I have a sensitive built-in detector.”

  “Of lies?”

  “Of bullshit,” McGarvey said. “Like now.”

  Raya smiled. “Could you explain?”

  “Here I am, and you don’t know what to do with me. If you let me go, you’ll have to explain why the hell you got me and why. If not, you’ll have to either kill me or stick me in some prison somewhere and hope to Christ my whereabouts never leaks. The blowback for your people, all the way to the top, would be nothing short of nuclear. In fact the best you can hope for is that I do try to escape, for which you would have a legitimate reason to shoot me.”

  “And in such a case how would we explain ourselves?”

  “I fell into your laps—because of Paris—and before you could say no, I ended up here. And now you’re screwed.”

  “Damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.”

  “Something like that,” Mac said.

  “So what do we do?”

  “You won’t get anything useful under drugs, and you’ll run the very real risk of damaging me permanently. Gets you back to the same corner that killing me and trying to hide the fact would put you in.”

  “Continue.”

  “Explain to me why you agreed to take me from the Saudi operative who we know as Karim Najjir, in exchange for what?”

  “I personally don’t know the answer to that question.”

  “What was the SVR’s involvement with Paris?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Has the SVR ever contracted with Najjir before?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I suggest that you get answers to those questions before you start asking me about shit I did as a DCI years ago.”

  “I could, but I sincerely doubt I would get any answers that we could use to bargain in good faith for your life.”

  “Then try this one for size,” McGarvey said. “What did the attack on the Eiffel Tower have to do with a tactical nuclear weapon that has gone missing from one of your Saratov sites?”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Almost immediately after the Gulfstream’s forward hatch was opened, the heat of the Saudi Arabian desert slammed into the cabin.

  “Son of a bitch,” Miriam said half under her breath.

  “Hold it together and we might just make it out of here alive,” Najjir told her.

  Neither the stew nor the captain and copilot even looked at them as they got their single bags and got off the aircraft, which was parked in a hangar across the field from the main terminal and equally far from the air force operations center.

  A chauffeur in a Western-style suit got out of a deep-metallic-green Bentley convertible with white leather upholstery, its top down, and opened the door on the passenger side.

  “Sir and madam, I’ve been instructed to take you to the prince.”

  “We’d like to check into a hotel and freshen up first,” Najjir said.

  “I’ll just take your bags and place them in the boot, if you will get in the car.”

  “It’s ‘miss,’” Miriam practically shouted.

  Najjir touched her hand. “May we have the top up?”

  “No, sir,” the chauffeur said.

  He took care of their bags as they got in the car, and in moments they were out in the direct heat, the sun like a blast furnace.

  Miriam wanted to say something, but Najjir held her off. The prince was punishing them for something, which he figured could only mean that this royal had been directly involved in the Paris operation. If that was true it could possibly mean that the Saudis were working with the Russians. But for what purpose he could not divine, except that he smelled a possible way out for them.

  If the Russians were satisfied to make the trade—McGarvey for the Paris failure—perhaps the prince would be open to a bargain of some sort, though what that might be, Najjir hadn’t the foggiest. Yet.

  He gave Miriam a little smile and she shook her head in wonderment.

  Leaning over, he brushed a kiss on her cheek and whispered in her ear. “Follow my lead.”

  * * *

  On the other side of the city, traffic very heavy this morning, they took Highway 65 out into the desert to the north, toward Huraymila, about fifty miles away. The Saudi capital had become so large in the last twenty years or so that places that had been little more than outposts were now practically suburbs.

  A pair of F-15 fighter/interceptor jets, with the same markings as the ones that had escorted the Gulfstream, flashed a few hundred feet overhead, screaming to the northwest in the general direction of Kuwait. Along with the increase in traffic, foreign workers, and new construction everywhere, the Saudi military, especially its air force, supported by the US, had grown almost exponentially ever since the sharp rise of ISIS and the other troubles in the region, with Iraq and Syria.

  The country had become, for all practical purposes, a heavily armed American frontline base. The royal family hated the arrangement, but in practical terms bowing to Washington’s will was the only way the country could remain safe.

  Its only other choices were either to sever its ties with the US and ask Russia for help or to develop its own nuclear capabilities, as Iran had tried to do.

  Neither was a palatable solution.

  But worst of all, the royals had come to the point where they simply did not know what to do, and the entire country had been on a diplomatic slow simmer for a half dozen years, and recently the heat was rising.

  * * *

  Prince Awadi’s walled compound was five miles outside Huraymila, the main entrance secured by tall iron gates. A pair of uniformed guards in desert camos, armed with M16s, came out of the main post as the gates swung open and the chauffeur pulled through and stopped.

  “The prince expected you sooner,” one of the guards said. He was narrow shouldered and dark complected with deep-set black eyes.

  Najjir thought the man looked like a ferret. Dangerous and unpredictable.

  “Then let’s delay no further,” the driver said.

  “Have they been checked for arms?”

  “At the airport.”

  The guard received a message in his earbud and he stepped back. “You may proceed.”

  * * *

  The main house was a sprawling whitewashed structure, some portions of it two stories, with turrets, minarets, and gold leaf scrollwork around the windows and roofs. Gaudy was the first thought that came to Najjir’s mind.

  The prince’s private secretary met them at the front door. “The prince will speak with you on the south patio,” he told Najjir. “Madam will be attended to.”

  This time Miriam held her tongue, for which Najjir was grateful. Prince Awadi had the reputation of being a dangerous nutcase, only indulged by the family because of his American connections,
which flowed from his wife, who had been sent out of Saudi Arabia to New York, where she got her degree in US history at Columbia. She was of royal blood and had money of her own, from her father, and she had attracted a lot of admirers in New York and Washington during her four years in the States.

  Awadi, dressed in a bright orange golfing outfit of matching trousers, tight-fitting Spandex shirt, and baseball cap, complete with orange golf shoes, was seated at a glass table, drinking champagne, the Krug in a gold ice bucket next to him. His nose was prominent, his eyes hooded, and his complexion dark. But the expression in his eyes was neutral as Najjir was escorted in and the secretary withdrew.

  “Good morning, sir,” Najjir said, taking a seat across from Awadi, without being asked. “May I have a glass of wine? The drive up was parching.”

  Awadi said nothing for several beats, but then nodded.

  A servant instantly appeared with a glass, filled it and set it in front of Najjir, then left.

  Najjir drank it down and offered his glass for more.

  The instant he’d seen the prince sitting at the table in his silly costume, he understood that subservience would be exactly the wrong tack. Awadi wanted something, it was written all over his face. And he was frightened.

  Najjir held his glass steady, and after another beat Awadi got the champagne and filled it.

  “You want to know about Paris, about Kirk McGarvey, and about the Russians.”

  “Yes, but before you begin, consider this: I may have an assignment for you. But if you lie to me, or if you leave anything out, including your opinions, I will have you and your woman executed this very day.”

  “I was hired to bring down the Eiffel Tower, using three ISIS kids, by what amounts to a double-blind control officer. Someone in the GIP, I suspected. Perhaps even directed by yourself.”

  Awadi said nothing, nor did his expression change.

  “Kirk McGarvey and a woman by the name of Boylan, who is an officer with the CIA, happened to be at the Jules Verne and interfered in the operation. I do not believe they were there by chance, though I can’t say who might have directed them, or how they came by their knowledge.”

  Najjir sipped his wine.

  “I had a backup team standing by in case of trouble, and with their help we managed to capture the woman, which drew McGarvey to us in Istanbul. She was killed in a shoot-out, but we managed to capture McGarvey and turn him over to the Russians.”