"I see," the imposter said, smiling. "But I suppose you boys will be here all night."
Danberg shook his head. "No, sir. We get off in a couple of minutes ourselves."
"Well, you'd better bundle up good. It's not very nice out there now."
'Tes, sir."
The man turned and walked across the big hall, his shoes making no sound on the marble floor. No one was around. The building seemed deserted. Halfway down the long corridor on the right, he passed a flight of stairs, exactly where he knew it would be from the blueprints he'd studied. At the end of the
corridor, he knocked once at the door with a frosted glass window, and went in.
A counter ran the width of the room. Behind it was a large office with a half dozen desks, all but one of which were empty. An attractive woman in a red knit dress, a white scarf around her neck, her plastic security badge clipped beneath it, was speaking on the telephone. She looked up, did a double take, and then put a hand over the mouthpiece.
"Yes, sir, may I help you with something?" she asked. There was no one else in the office. Her red coat and her purse were lying on a chair in front of her desk.
"It's my passport," the imposter said carefully. Something was wrong here, but it was a calculated risk he'd had to take. "It's going to have to be renewed."
"Is it urgent?"
"Not yet," the man said. "I could come back tomorrow if it would be better."
"It would."
"First thing?"
"Nineish."
"Very good," the man said. "See you then." He turned and left the office. No one was around to see him hurry to the stairs and go up. He pulled off his gloves and overcoat, and before he reached the first-floor landing, he had clipped a security badge just like the woman's in the consular office to the lapel of his brown jacket. The badge identified him as a special assistant to the ambassador.
The title and his name, of course, were not real. And had the woman known who he actually was, she would have run for her life.
Inside the consular office, Carley Webb put down the telephone, and gathered her coat and purse. Before she went out she scrawled a note about the man with the passport problem and left it on Cedric Evans's desk.
There had been something oddly familiar about the man's face that had startled her for just a moment. So much so that she'd forgotten to get his name, but he'd be returning in the morning, so it didn't matter. In any event, it wasn't her job. Her work in the consular section was merely a cover for her assignment with the Central Intelligence Agency's Paris sta-
tion, a position she had fought hard to get, and one she relished.
There were many women on the staff, but no others were full-fledged case officers. Most of them worked as secretaries, or cipher clerks, or in a few instances as translators. The Paris station was the Company's largest operation in Europe, even bigger than Bonn, because this was the central clearinghouse for all information funneling back to Langley. She was resented by some of the women because of what she did, and partly because of her looks. At thirty-three she had lost her innocent little-girlishness and had developed into a sophisticated, even beautiful woman. In the right light she could have been mistaken for a young Audrey Hepburn, with her long delicate neck, small angular face, wide dark eyes, and slender frame.
Just now she was finishing the developmental stages of new network that had been code-named SPARKLE. Contact had been made and was firmly established with two high-ranking officers in the Soviet embassy, one of them the third assistant to the KGB's Paris rezident, and the other the second assistant to the Soviet's military attache. Both of them were men, both of them had a crush on her, which of course she encouraged, but neither of them knew about the other. Each man thought he was working alone with her. The value of this particular network, aside from the obvious benefits of having such assets in the Soviet embassy, was that by working them both, she had a continual check on the veracity of the information they were providing her.
"The day will come, Carley, when they will want to make love to you," Thomas Lord, chief of station, had warned her.
It hadn't happened yet, but with Vladimir Rudichev, the KGB officer, the moment was fast approaching.
"I'll deal with it when the time comes," she'd told Lord.
"Perhaps we should begin weaning you out. Stewart can gradually begin to take over."
"Not yet, Tom. Please. Just give me a little longer."
Lord had been like a brother, or even a father, to her from the moment she'd been transferred from Langley. He smiled. "Just be careful, kid. Will you at least do that much for me?"
"Sure," she'd promised. It was pride, of course. She'd come this far on her own; she didn't want to drop out just as the gold seam of information was beginning to produce results.
Besides, she told herself, pulling on her eoat as she headed down the corridor, Rudichev and Guryanov were not her only problem. She was going to have to make another decision, and in some respects an even larger one, very soon. Maybe even tonight.
Nearly everyone had left early that afternoon because of the weather, though she supposed Lord would still be upstairs in his office. The afternoon summaries went out via encrypted burst transmission at seven, and he almost always stuck around to make last-minute additions or deletions. Fine tuning, he called it.
She crossed the main hall and turned in her security badge to the Marines.
"Good night, Miss Webb," they said.
" 'Night," she replied, starting for the door, but then she changed her mind and came back. "There was a tall, good-looking man in to see me about renewing his passport a few minutes ago. Did you get his name?" Because of terrorist attacks, U.S. embassies worldwide logged in visitors, carefully scrutinizing their parcels and papers.
"We just came on duty ourselves, ma'am," one of the Marines said. "Must have missed him."
The other Marine had turned the registration book around so that he could read the last entries. "Here he is, last one in. Name is Kirk McGarvey."
"Kirk, here?" she said. "I didn't see him."
The young man shrugged. "That's what it says, Miss Webb. Logged in for the Consular Section at 1758 hours, briefcase checked."
"That was only a few minutes ago," Carley said, her mind going to a dozen different possibilities but rejecting them all. "Who else came in, just before McGarvey?"
"Henri Perigord, also for the Consular Section. But that was much earlier, ma'am, 1527 hours."
Carley remembered him. "No one else in between?"
"No, ma'am. Is something wrong?"
"I don't know," Carley said. "But the man who logged in at six wasn't the Kirk McGarvey I know."
"Someone impersonating him?"
"Possibly," she said, glancing toward the elevators. "He said he'd be back in the morning. I'll check it out myself."
"Anything else we can do in the meantime?"
Carley had glanced at the registration book. Beside Mc-Garvey's name, the Marine had written his passport number. It was something. She looked up. "If he returns tonight, give me a call. I'll be on my beeper."
"Will do," the Marine said, and Carley turned and left the embassy. It was possible that the Marine who had logged the man in had made a mistake about his name. But she couldn't see how.
It nagged at her as she hurried, head bent low against the wind, to catch a cab on the avenue Gabriel. But the man was gone. There was nothing to be done about it until morning.
The embassy's second-floor corridor was empty, but the im-poster could hear the high-pitched whining sounds of a computer printer coming from somewhere above. He held up for a second or two just within the landing.
Most of the diplomats and other embassy personnel would be gone already. But the CIA's communications center on the third floor would be fully manned, and some of the Agency's high-ranking officers would probably still be there, getting their seven o'clock summaries ready for transmission to the States.
It was a bit of insider informat
ion that not many people knew; not secret, just not publicly known.
"What we need, Arkasha, is a diversion," the general had told him at their last meeting in Tripoli. "You are to be my chosen one for this work. I'm putting your skills to use again. Just like the old days. Only this time no one will know that it is you. It's rich—they all believe you to be dead."
General Didenko was a tall bear of a Russian, with thick black hair, Brezhnev-like eyebrows, a broad Siberian forehead, and a swarthy complexion. He continued, "Paris, I should think, would be a good start. Then Rome, perhaps Bonn. Lisbon, then Brussels." The general smiled, but not in friendship. "But I will leave the exact details up to you. As and when you need information, your contact will be standing by in each city. Paris to begin with."
They were walking along a beach east of the city, Didenko's bodyguards trailing out of earshot behind them. The breeze off the Mediterranean was cool but not unpleasant.
"Are you up to this assignment?" the general asked. There
was a rumor that his position in Moscow was in serious trouble. If it was, however, the trouble was not reflected in his face or in his manner, which was confident.
"A diversion for what?" the man who was posing as McGarvey asked, his voice soft, even gentle.
"Are you capable of this?" the general demanded, ignoring the question for the moment.
The imposter nodded. "Yes, I am capable, but first you will tell me what your real plans are, Comrade General. You are no Baranov."
"No," Didenko said. "Nor are you his tool any longer. Now you belong to me." He smiled again and took the man's arm. "But come, Arkasha, and I will tell you everything you wish to know. Simply everything. Then you will see why I have picked you."
The imposter stepped out of the stairwell, hurried across the corridor, and let himself into one of the offices, closing and locking the door behind him.
CIA operations were, for the most part, conducted one floor above, where security, both electronic and physical, was tight. There would be Agency people in the corridor at the stairwell doors and elevator. Armed. In the early planning stages it had been a bothersome detail. It would do him no good to simply shoot his way onto the floor. Even if he successfully penetrated the station, he'd probably not get out of the building alive, and certainly not without being spotted and followed.
Laying his coat and gloves on the desk in the tiny office, he took off his suit jacket and tie, putting them aside as well. Next he took his pistol, a Walther PPK, out of his shoulder holster, screwed the silencer tube on the end of the barrel, set it on the desk, and then took off the holster and began unbuttoning his shirt.
The communications center was directly above this office. At this moment there would be at least a dozen technicians and operators up there, perhaps more, as well as a few million dollars' worth of sensitive communications and cryptographic equipment.
On the far side of the building, but still one floor above, were the secure briefing rooms and the offices of Chief of Station Thom?s Lord and Assistant Chief of Station Bob Graves. Both were highly capable men, absolutely vital to the Paris operation.
Without them, CIA operations would suffer in all of Europe for a long time to come.
Someone was at the door, trying the knob. The imposter snatched his pistol and switched the safety off as he stepped into the deep shadows in the corner. The only light in the room came from outside.
Moments later a key grated in the lock, and the door opened. An old man, stoop-shouldered with a heavy paunch and white hair, came in and flipped on the light. He was alone.
For a moment the old man didn't understand what he was seeing: the clothing on the desk, the man in the corner. But then he started to step back, his left hand coming up as if to ward off a blow, and the Russian shot him in the face, the bullet destroying his left eye, flinging him backward, half out into the corridor.
No one was supposed to come down here. The man had had no business being on the second floor at this hour.
The imposter rushed to the doorway and looked out into the corridor. No one was there. Apparently no one had heard a thing. No alarms were sounding.
Hurriedly he dragged the man's body back into the office. Using his handkerchief, he wiped up the blood and cranial fluid that had leaked from the wound in case someone else came this way in the next minute or two.
He closed and relocked the door, flipped off the light, and took a deep breath to ease the tension in his chest.
It had been a stupid mistake, one that might well cost him the mission. Now someone would come looking for the man. It was time to hurry.
The Russian smiled grimly to himself as he took off his shirt and peeled the tape away from the eleven pounds of C4 plastique around his chest and flanks.
the bar at the Hotel Inter-Continental, near the Place de la Concorde, was full, but it was still early, so there weren't many tables occupied in the adjacent grillroom. Three men sat at one table in the corner, sharing a bottle of wine as they waited for their dinner. The waiter hovered at a respectful distance.
Horst Hoehner, at sixty-eight, was by far the oldest of the three men. He had flown up from Vienna on the weekend and had spent the past two days exchanging information about Mueller Leitner, a Nazi concentration camp guard believed by Simon Wiesenthal's people to be living in retirement in Paris.
Hoehner was completely hairless over his entire body. This condition had to do with chemical experiments he had been subjected to from 1941 until 1943 at Dachau. Since he had no hair in his nostrils, he always had cotton stuffed in his nose to
filter out dust. And since he had no eyelashes, he was constantly blinking his eyes to keep them clean. His lack of eyebrows and his obvious wig lent him a bizarre appearance.
But his mind was sharp, and his experience at the hands of the Nazis had not made him bitter as it had so many others. He had become instead an extremely determined man.
"We must move with care this time, Horst," his French host, Maurice Gavalet, cautioned. It had been the same since yesterday.
"It does not matter to me that Leitner—or Mann, as he has called himself since the war—may have become important to France. His good deeds cannot erase the crimes against humanity he committed at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Crimes, I think I have proved to your satisfaction, that were in some cases committed against Frenchmen. And they were not necessarily Jews. Some of them were members of the Resistance."
Gavalet was with the Deuxieme Bureau, and had been handed the assignment of dealing with the Wiesenthal group whenever the Nazi hunters' efforts brought them onto French soil. He'd worked with Hoehner on several other occasions, some of which had not turned out so well for the French government. But he respected the Austrian not only for his tenacity, but for his obvious high intelligence and old-world charm.
"It's not that, my old friend. It is, as I have said from the beginning, a matter of firm identification."
"Mann is Leitner," Hoehner declared.
"I'm not so sure," Gavalet replied gently.
The third man at the table, younger than the other two, was Carleton Reid, an American from the embassy, whose official title was chief of security. But Gavalet and Hoehner both understood that in reality he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. He had been asked to help because the man Hoehner believed to be Leitner had worked in the United States from 1946 until sometime in the early sixties, when he had emmi-grated to France. By then he was a multimillionaire real estate developer who had begun to share his wealth with hospitals and universities.
"There's no way of telling for certain merely from studying old records," Reid said. He had been a college football standout. He still maintained the build and the somewhat boyish com-
petitive attitude. "They could have been altered. Would you want to put that kind of a brand on an innocent man?"
Hoehner liked Americans for the same reasons most Europeans found them difficult to take: it was their brashness and, he supposed, their naivete. They t
hought they could fix everything, and often did. In some ways he'd been like that as a child ... before the world caught on fire. But this time he felt a certain resentment toward Reid. "There were many innocent men and women and children in the camps," he said slowly.
"There is a way to make sure," Reid continued. "As you say, Leitner fathered at least a dozen children with women in the camps."
"Those records are confidential—"
"Just listen to him, Horst," Gavalet interrupted. "Please."
"Some of those children must have survived, and we think that your people might know where they are now."
"To what point, Mr. Reid? Do you expect them to step forward and somehow identify their father?"
'Tes, as a matter of fact I do."
Hoehner was startled. "What in God's name do you mean to say?"
"All we need is a blood sample from any of them. Just one of Leitner's offspring."
"You mean to match blood samples with Mann's to see if he is really Leitner? It will prove nothing."
"Not blood types," Reid explained. "But DNA matches from the blood. No mistakes. One hundred percent certain."
Hoehner said nothing. It was the new science. Perhaps his wife was correct. Perhaps it was time to forget, or at least retire. He managed a thin smile.
"We want to cooperate with you, Horst," Gavalet said. "Believe me when I tell you that this is the new way, the only way to make absolutely certain that we would not be sending a good and innocent man to prison."
And there she was again. At the door. Hoehner could hardly believe his eyes. He groaned and shook his head.
"What is it, Horst?" Gavalet asked, alarmed. "Are you ill? What's wrong?"
"It's her," Hoehner said. "Evidently she's followed me from Vienna."
Gavalet and Reid turned in the direction he was staring in time to see an intense-looking woman dressed in a raincoat, a white sweater tucked into a long dark skirt, and tall black boots start across the dining room toward them.
Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3) Page 2