Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3)

by Hagberg, David

  For a moment he hesitated, but then shook his head. He was here now and he would see it out. Abbas should be on his way down to Bushehr, and his answering machine should have been switched on.

  He went down the corridor and put his head to Abbas's door. Did he hear something from within? Someone murmuring, perhaps. The sound of running water in the bathroom? A shuffling sound.

  Or nothing at all. Merely his imagination.

  The faint sounds stopped. Shahpur was about to knock, but then he took a key out of his pocket and let himself in. Either

  Abbas was gone, or he was in trouble. Either way, knocking on his door would do no good.

  Stepping into the apartment he was confused for a critical second or two, unable to understand exactly what it was he was seeing.

  Abbas, naked, was tied to a chair propped against the wall. But Abbas, in shirt-sleeves, stood at the bathroom door.

  "Why, hello, Shahpur," the clothed Abbas said. "Why are you here?"

  There was something wrong with Abbas's voice, and there was definitely something wrong with the question.

  All of that took no time at all. He saw the pistol in Abbas's hand at the same moment the Abbas tied to the chair cried out.

  "Run ...!"

  Shahpur raised his own pistol as a thunderclap burst in his head

  Kurshin hurried to the doorway. Nothing moved. Apparently no one had heard the single shot from his silenced pistol.

  Shahpur's body had been flung half out into the corridor. Hurriedly Kurshin dragged it into the apartment, and getting a towel from the bathroom wiped up the blood from the corridor floor. He closed and relocked the door, then turned to Abbas.

  "There is something you forgot to tell me," he said. "It has cost you your number two's life. What is it?"

  Abbas was staring at Shahpur's body.

  Kurshin went to the window and looked down at the gray sedan. It hadn't moved. A figure in black was walking away down the road. He thought it was a woman.

  Turning, he went to Abbas. "Will you tell me, or will we have to go through the same procedure as last night? Frankly I don't care one way or the other, you must understand this. But I will have your answer."

  "I understand," Abbas said, looking up at him.

  "Yes?"

  "It's the answering machine. Attached to my telephone."

  Kurshin glanced over at the machine. "What about it?"

  Again Abbas looked at Shahpur's body. "I'm supposed to be out sick for the rest of the week. I've recorded several messages on my machine. Shahpur was to telephone here this morning

  and have a conversation with me. He was supposed to call again tomorrow and on Friday morning as well. I was scheduled to be back here Sunday evening."

  "When he called this morning and there was no answer either by the machine or by you, he got suspicious."

  "Yes," Abbas said heavily.

  "By why?" Kurshin asked. "Unless you expect your telephone calls to be monitored. Is that it? Is SAVAK investigating you?"

  Abbas nodded.

  "Good," Kurshin said, nodding. "That's very good."

  phil carrara trudged down the stairs into the damp basement of the U.S. consulate on the rue St.-Florentin, his mood heavy despite the fact that the sun had come out this morning.

  He was met at the bottom by Carley Webb. "Could I have a word with you before we get started?" she asked.

  He was meeting with his abbreviated Paris staff on a twice-daily basis, at 10:00 a.m. and at 10:00 p.m. The others were already gathered in the basement conference room. It was still a few minutes before the hour.

  "What is it?" he asked coolly. He'd done nothing about what had happened at her apartment, though he could have had her arrested or, at the very least, fired. He still hadn't worked it out in his own mind, but he suspected that she had saved his life.

  "It's been a full thirty-six hours. I just checked the a.m.s. There's been no word out of Lisbon."

  "Maybe he didn't go there after all. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he hasn't gotten there yet. Maybe Don Sneade has got his hands full, or maybe he slipped by, or maybe he's wiped out the entire station single-handed."

  "Send me down there, Phil."

  Carrara looked at her closely.'To do what, Carley?"

  "Find him."

  "Warn him?"

  "No, dammit. Find him."

  "If Don hasn't run him to ground yet, what makes you so sure that you'll be able to do it? We've got a lot of people out in the field looking for him."

  "I'll just have to show up. Make myself visible. Kirk will come to me."

  "It's over between you two, or was he lying about that as well?"

  Carley's nostrils flared. "Do you want my resignation? Because if you do, I'll give it to you right now and go down to Lisbon on my own."

  Carrara turned away, but she grabbed him by his jacket sleeve and pulled him back.

  "Goddamnit, Phil, what do you think would have happened if I hadn't interfered?"

  "I never thanked you for saving my life ..."

  "No," Carley cried. "Or maybe yes. I don't know. But someone would have got hurt, I do know that. And I also know that he wouldn't have fired the first shot."

  "Then you were saving his life."

  "Yes, Phil, because he's innocent."

  "You're telling me that you believe his story about Arkady Kurshin?"

  "Why not?" she asked. "You do. You warned Sneade about it."

  Again Carrara stared at her. "No," he finally said.

  "No what?"

  "No, I don't want your resignation, and no, I'm not sending you to Lisbon."

  "What if I got down on my knees and begged you?" she said.

  "Don't make me fire you," Carrara replied coldly. He stepped

  a little closer to her and lowered his voice. "I hope to God it wasn't Tom Lord who put you up to sleeping with McGarvey. I hope it was your idea alone. But since it's happened, and you've admitted that you're in love with him, don't get hysterical on us. It's bad for business, yours as well as ours."

  She said nothing, but her eyes were beginning to glisten.

  "If you do your job properly, you might get out of this hole you've dug for yourself. But do us all a favor, Carley, and confine your sex life to your own hours."

  "You bastard," she said, and she slapped his face, the noise almost as loud as a pistol shot in the narrow corridor.

  Mike Wood, the interim chief of Paris station, came to the door. "Carley?" he said.

  She turned on her heel and stormed up the stairs. They all heard the door slam at the top.

  "What is it?" Wood asked.

  Carrara turned to him. "I blew it," he said heavily.

  "Do you want me to send someone after her?"

  Carrara shook his head. "I'll go myself. Be right back."

  "No, sir," Wood said. "The director is on the line from Langley for you. I had it transferred next door."

  Carrara glanced up the stairs. "All right," he sighed.

  "Before you take the call, there's something else you'd better know. It's at the top of this morning's agenda. It's about Tehran station."

  Something clutched at Carrara's gut. "What's happened out there?"

  "No one seems to know, except that Dick Abbas and Shahpur Naisir seem to have disappeared. No one's been able to raise them. Ghfari is getting damned worried."

  "Christ," Carrara said softly. "Send someone after Carley. I want her down here, no matter what it takes. And put the meeting on hold. I'll be right back."

  He went into the secured office next to the conference room and picked up the telephone. "This is Carrara," he said.

  "I have your call, sir," the operator in the communications center upstairs answered, and a moment later the DCI's gruff voice was on the line.

  "Phil, what the hell is going on out there? I'm told that McGarvey was in Paris and you let him slip through your fingers."

  Carrara had filed a highly amended report on what had happened that night. "Nothing
I could do about it, General, short of engaging in a shoot-out. Some innocent people would have been hurt."

  "Where is he now?"

  "Lisbon. We're working on it. But we've got another, more serious problem developing in Iran."

  "What is it?"

  "My chief of station, Dick Abbas, and his number two are missing."

  "Dick was supposed to monitor the shipment from Bushehr."

  "That's right. We're going to have to insert someone over there, and right away."

  "Spell it out for me."

  "McGarvey has been on a wild-goose chase with the Argentinian woman."

  'Tes, and the son of a bitch killed one of our people," Murphy bellowed.

  "I don't think so. I don't know. McGarvey is convinced Arkady Kurshin is behind all of this. He said he came face-to-face with the man."

  "Kurshin is dead."

  "Perhaps not. You said yourself that the KGB is being hamstrung because of a limited budget. Especially its sources of Western currencies."

  "What are you telling me?"

  "I think Kurshin has been reined in, and has been redirected to Iran. I think he's after the gold. If General Didenko can pull off this coup, no one will be able to dislodge him. We'll have another Baranov on our hands."

  "Go on."

  "I want to send McGarvey after Kurshin."

  Hate rode like a cancerous tumor on McGarvey's shoulders, weighing him down, causing a great weariness to descend on him. But it was like a powerful engine, driving him forward, no matter the costs.

  It was just noon when he and Maria arrived at the Lisboa Penta, Lisbon's largest hotel. It had taken them a full day and a half from Paris, first by train to Madrid, and then overnight by

  rental car. McGarvey had wanted to come into the city clean. He wanted to pick his own sight lines before it was too late, before the cross hairs of some gunsight were centered on him.

  "Give me your passport,'' he told Maria as the hotel doorman approached their car.

  She looked sharply at him, but dug out the U.S. passport she'd been traveling on since Santiago. It identified her as Margaret Sampson. She gave it to him, and he slipped it into his pocket.

  "We're here for your gold," he said. "I promised you that much. But you're going to have to do this my way. Arkady Kurshin will show up sooner or later, and my own people may be gunning for me."

  "What happened in Paris?" she asked.

  The doorman had stopped a few yards away, and stood respectfully waiting for them to finish their conversation.

  "You're going to have to keep your head down," McGarvey said. He decided that he felt numb. Maybe his sister had been right all these years; perhaps he wasn't a full-time member of the human race. Once in a fit of anger she'd told him that whatever made a person good and decent and caring was dead in him. He had called her a name, but her words had hurt. And still did.

  "I don't care," Maria said. She looked away. "I'll do whatever you say. But I'll hold you to your promise." She turned back. "It's all I've got now."

  Carley would be in trouble because of what she'd done. But every woman he'd ever been close to got into trouble because of him. It was as inevitable as the death of a moth circling an open flame.

  "We're going to register under our own names and use our real passports. One room. Less ground to defend."

  "They'll find us."

  "Probably." He got out of the car, the doorman smiling profusely as he rushed to the other side of the car to help Maria out.

  The hotel was huge, but the rooms were small. Theirs was on the eleventh floor in the back, looking down through the glass ceiling of the solarium. In the distance was the airport, and nearby was the Gulbenkian Foundation's art museum.

  A pleasantly warm breeze ruffled the curtains. Maria waited on the tiny terrace as McGarvey signed for the wine from room service. He brought a glass out to her.

  They'd bought a few things to supplement their meager wardrobes in Paris and more in Madrid, some on his credit cards— by the time the charges could be traced back to him, he figured this operation would be long over—and some with Maria's money.

  She wore dark slacks and a fisherman's sweater. The knit was bulky and made her look tiny, almost frail; her long dark hair and olive complexion were in high contrast to the off-white of the wool.

  "I've written down the four names I remember, and parts of three others," she said.

  'Tour Nazis."

  She looked up at him. "Yes."

  "Are these from the Amt Sechster Anbau, or are we dealing with a new group this time? Perhaps the 'Council,' the twelve old men you told me about in Buenos Aires? What?"

  Maria said nothing.

  "A reunited Germany, I think, had you the most worried. We're going to keep these riches out of their hands. Or was it your father—stepfather?—the Jew killer whose memory you want to expunge? Maybe it's some permutation or combination of all those? Maybe Hitler is still alive. What? Are you ready to tell me?"

  She didn't look away from him, nor did she flinch or show any reaction, but he could tell that his words were hurting her.

  "We'll start now. This afternoon," he said. "We'll try the newspapers, the tax records, property deeds. If they're still alive and here in the Lisbon area, their names will show up in some document somewhere."

  "I was seven years old the first time I was raped," Maria said, no inflection in her voice. She could have been making a statement about the weather. "My father, my real father, Rolph Rei-ker, had been gone for nearly a week. When he came back that night, he brought a half-dozen of his friends with him. They sent the housekeeper and my nanny away and started drinking. They made me bring them their wine and whiskey."

  "Were they ex-Nazis, all these men?" McGarvey asked, though he didn't know what difference it made.

  "Most of them. One of them was a general in Argentina's army. He was an old man, with white hair and a huge belly. I remember he smelled of cigars and whiskey. I was dressed only in my nightshirt and he kept watching me."

  At some point, she went on, the other men noticed the general's interest in Maria and started making jokes about it. As she passed, one of them even grabbed at her nightgown, and another of the men pawed her chest. "Nothing there, Juan," someone said, and they all laughed.

  But the general wasn't going to be put off. He liked little girls.

  "So my father held an auction," Maria said evenly. "I was to go to the highest bidder. Of course no one else wanted me, I was just a baby, but they all knew that the general did, and they wanted to have a little fun at his expense."

  When the bidding got to a certain point, her father made her take off all of her clothes and stand in front of the men.

  "That fat man actually licked his lips," Maria said. "He made me turn around slowly. Once, twice, and then a third time. He doubled his bid. And won."

  Maria finally looked away, out across the rooftops of the city bathed in the afternoon sun. A thin haze had settled in, and smelled of the sea.

  "My father told me to do whatever the general wanted, and if I did I would be rewarded. If I did not cooperate, then I would be punished. He would lock me into the small room in the dark basement."

  Her shoulders sagged a little.

  "There were rats in the basement. I hated rats. I was more afraid of the darkness and of the rats than I was of that fat man."

  'Tour father used you like that from then on," McGarvey said.

  "Yes. Of course in a few years, when I began to develop, I was more in demand. My father even slept with me in the beginning. I got pregnant three times before I was sixteen. My last abortion ruined my ability to bear children."

  "I'm sorry," McGarvey said, and he meant it. In a small measure he was beginning to understand her.

  "So from that moment on I was not only sterile of body, I became sterile of mind," she said. "Except for one thing, and that was the gold. My grandfather brought the submarine from Germany, and my father killed Major Roebling out of revenge, and f
or the gold. It was all he could talk about for years. I

  remember it from when I was a small child. It was my father's dream. But he was frightened of another group who wanted the gold. He said that they would stop at nothing to get it."

  "Who were they?"

  "I don't know. I don't know whether my father ever knew for sure, but they were probably the same people Dr. Hesse spoke about. The ones who had done the killings."

  "What happened?"

  "When I was sixteen my father came to me drunk, demanding that I sleep with him. But I could no longer do it, so I killed him."

  "What about your stepfather, Schimmer?"

  "Not my stepfather, although I tell people he was," Maria said. "My husband. He was one of my father's friends. We were married when I was seventeen, and two years later I poisoned him."

  "He had money."

  "And connections, all of which fell to me, naturally. Since then I've been looking for the gold, as one by one the old men have died off."

  "Did you kill them?"

  "No."

  "Not even the fat general?"

  She shook her head. "He was dead by then. Died in bed with his wife, a much respected man in Argentina."

  McGarvey thought about what she'd told him. He did not think this story was a lie. And he also understood why she had done the things she had.

  "What about the gold? What happens if and when you find it?"

  "I don't know, Kirk," she admitted. "I've never let myself think beyond that point. But I know one thing: for some reason everyone is frightened out of their minds about it. I think that when we find the gold, and find out exactly why it has caused so much fear, I'll have an idea what to do."

  "Then let's start now," McGarvey said.

  "I need to rest now," Maria said. "We'll begin tomorrow."

  "have you seen nothing since Shahpur Naisir entered the building this morning?" Captain Hussain Peshadi asked from the open window of his car.