Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  This was the third time Kurshin had been here, and he knew the layout of the apartment by heart. At the window he checked the street, careful not to expose himself to view by anyone below. There was almost no traffic at this hour, and no sign that McGarvey was on the way up, which gave him at least a few minutes.

  From beside the writing table in the bedroom Kurshin pulled out a leather case similar to the one he carried, unzipped it, and took out a Smith-Corona portable typewriter he had put there the week before. From his case he took out McGarvey’s typewriter, its twin, and put it in McGarvey’s case, which he zipped closed and replaced next to the writing table. Then he put his own typewriter into the case he’d brought up.

  Setting the typewriter by the door in the living room, he again checked the street. Still there was no sign of McGarvey.

  In the bathroom, he pulled several hairs from the hairbrush on the shelf above the sink, placing them in one of the small plastic envelopes he’d brought.

  Moving into the kitchen, he found two wineglasses and another glass that still contained a small amount of bourbon. He held up each of the three glasses, examining them under the beam of his penlight, fingerprints showing up clearly on all three. On one of the wineglasses, the fingerprints were narrow and delicate. A woman’s. On the other wineglass and the bourbon glass the fingerprints were much larger, a man’s. McGarvey’s.

  Peeling the leather glove off his right hand, he took a flat plastic envelope from his jacket pocket, then carefully slit the seal and removed the single thin rubber glove, much like the gloves worn by surgeons. Delicately, he pulled on the rubber glove, careful not to touch its fingertips, which had been prepared with a special glue.

  He picked up the bourbon glass again, this time with his right hand, matching his fingertips with McGarvey’s prints. The sticky surface of the glove neatly lifted McGarvey’s prints off the glass.

  He pulled off the rubber glove, replaced it in its plastic bag, and slipped on his leather glove.

  Back in the bathroom, he stood on the toilet seat and placed a small piece of plastic in the flush tank mounted high up on the wall. The plastic had been torn from the wrapping of the plastique explosives. A simple chemical analysis would reveal what it had once contained.

  He had been inside McGarvey’s apartment for less than three minutes, and he was finished. Hurriedly he checked each room to make absolutely certain nothing was out of place, that he had left no outward sign that he had been there, and then listened at the door for a moment before he unlocked and opened it.

  In the corridor he relocked the door, then started down the stairs. The ground-floor door opened and someone came in. He froze, holding his breath to listen.

  He could hear footsteps. The stairwell was open all the way down, and sounds carried well.

  The timed hall lights suddenly came on, and Kurshin reared back, flattening himself against the wall. The person who had come in started up the stairs.

  Kurshin turned and went back up to the third floor, stopped to listen again—the person was still climbing the stairs—and hurried soundlessly to the shadowed end of the far corridor.

  The door to the rear apartment was locked, and there was no time now to open it. He put down his typewriter case and pulled out his gun again, thumbing the safety catch to the off position.

  The person on the stairs passed the second floor and continued up. He did not want a confrontation with McGarvey here and now, like this, but he was not going to back away from it.

  He watched the opposite end of the corridor, his grip tightening on the gun, as a figure came around the corner from the stairs.

  It was a woman. For an instant Kurshin was confused. He knew her, yet he couldn’t imagine from where, and then he had it. She was the one from the embassy. The woman in the Consular Section. The familiar perfume.

  She reached McGarvey’s apartment and knocked on the door. After a beat she knocked again, a little louder. “Kirk?” she called.

  Evidently she knew McGarvey. Well enough to have seen through the vague latex mask Kurshin had worn when he’d faced her?

  She knocked again. “Kirk, it’s me,” she called. The timed corridor lights went out. “Shit,” she swore softly.

  Kurshin could dimly make out her figure in the scant light filtering up from downstairs. She was hesitating. After a moment, however, she turned and went back the way she had come.

  He listened until she got downstairs. When the front door closed, he cautiously made his own way downstairs and out into the night.

  13

  MCGARVEY HAD JUST FINISHED in the shower when the telephone rang. He didn’t bother to answer it. Instead he went into the kitchen, where he rinsed out his bourbon glass and poured himself another drink. Tom Lord had been a good man, one of the best, and it was hard to believe he was dead.

  The telephone rang for the tenth time as he drank the whiskey and poured another. He went into the living room.

  It was probably Carley calling to apologize or, worse yet, to ask for help. If he didn’t talk to her now, she would almost certainly come over here again.

  He picked it up on the sixteenth ring, and he immediately knew it wasn’t her. He could hear the hiss and hollow pops of a long-distance connection. “Hello?”

  “Kirk? Phil Carrara. I’m calling from Washington.”

  McGarvey sat down and closed his eyes. It was starting again, he could feel it. He supposed he had some sixth sense, almost an ESP, for these things. Each time he began to get itchy feet, something came up. In Switzerland and here in Paris, it had been John Trotter who’d come over to ask for help. Now Trotter was dead, and apparently his heir, Phil Carrara, either didn’t believe in travel or was in too much of a hurry to make the trip.

  “Kirk?” Carrara asked after a beat.

  “This is an open line,” McGarvey warned.

  “The director wants to speak to you. I’ve been trying to reach you for the past hour.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I’ll let him tell you.”

  “What does he want, Phil?” McGarvey said evenly. He would listen, but he wouldn’t lose his temper.

  “It’s Arkady Kurshin. He wants to ask you about the Russians.”

  Something clutched at McGarvey’s heart. “Have we picked up something out of Moscow?”

  “Nothing concrete,” Carrara said. “But Carley said you brought up his name.”

  “I was mistaken.”

  “She’s worried about you, Kirk. For good reason.”

  “No.”

  “Whoever was responsible for blowing hell out of our embassy and killing all those people used your name and your passport number. That’s significant. And it’s Kurshin’s style.”

  “He’s dead, Phil. I killed him.”

  “I agree with you,” Carrara said. “But his body has never been found.”

  “Stop chasing ghosts.”

  “The director disagrees. It’s why he wants to talk to you.”

  “I don’t think so. Not this time. Tell him—”

  “Tell him yourself.” Roland Murphy’s gruff voice came over the line. “Or have you lost your backbone in the past year?”

  “What do you want, General?”

  “Your cooperation. If Kurshin has come back to haunt us, you’re the man to go after him for more than the obvious reason that he’s got a grudge against you.”

  “Yes? Then why else?”

  “Because you’re cut out of the same material, McGarvey. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you’re a killer, and you’re very good. Whatever my personal opinion of you might be, you are good.”

  “Kurshin is dead.”

  “Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

  “How’s Lorraine Abbott?” McGarvey asked. The question apparently caught Murphy off-guard, because he hesitated for a moment.

  “She’s retired,” he said finally.

  “If Kurshin is back, and he’s coming after me as you’re apparently
suggesting, then he might decide to go after her as well. She was part of his downfall. His and Baranov’s.”

  “She’s being watched,” Murphy said.

  “Would you be willing to bet your life he couldn’t get to her if he wanted to?”

  “No, which is one of the reasons I called you. We need your help, and you’ll do it if there’s anything decent left in you. If for no other reason than for Lorraine’s sake.”

  “He’s dead, General. I killed him. I watched his body go over the rail into the sea. The people who attacked our embassy were French terrorists.”

  “He could have swum to shore.”

  “It was too far.”

  “My people say that with the currents he could have been swept to shore if he remained afloat for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Not an impossible task.”

  “He was wounded. He’d lost too much blood.”

  “But it’s not impossible he survived.”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  “With Kurshin there’d be more than one objective. He’d be after something else besides you.”

  “There’ve been no indications that he was active.”

  “Tom Lord received a death threat twelve days ago.”

  “It happens all the time.”

  “Yes, but the letter writers don’t usually follow through on their threats. This time they did. Our Paris operation is in shambles. We’re going to have to start all over again.”

  “The Russians are no longer our enemies—isn’t that the word these days?”

  “Maybe not our enemies, McGarvey, but they’re certainly not our friends. Not yet. Perhaps never.”

  He could feel himself inexorably being drawn into it, as if he were a wood chip caught in a whirlpool. “He has no control officer. Baranov is dead. That we do know for certain.”

  “General Vasili Didenko,” Murphy said. “Baranov’s number two man.”

  Again McGarvey held his silence.

  “He’s still around. In fact he’s been consolidating his power ever since Baranov’s fall.”

  “Gorbachev won’t allow it. Didenko is old guard.”

  “The man is too powerful to topple, from what I’m told. Gorbachev has taken an end run by cutting the KGB’s above the line budget. Almost in half, down to a little more than three quarters of a billion dollars. And he’s cut the Komitet’s supply of foreign-currency operating funds. Didenko’s been hamstrung, which suggests he might be trying to pull off something spectacular enough so that even under perestroika and glasnost he’ll be given a free reign.”

  “The Russian threat is over.”

  “That’s not true,” Murphy said. “Nor do you believe it. The same thing was bandied about during the days of detente, remember? The threat has simply changed, that’s all. The issues are still the same.”

  “Yes?”

  “Survival, ours versus theirs.”

  “And mine,” McGarvey said. “I’m out of the business. For good. Chase your own bogeymen, General. I’m retired.”

  “McGarvey—!” the DCI shouted.

  McGarvey hung up, waited a couple of seconds for the connection to be broken, and then picked up the receiver and laid it on the table.

  There were no bogeymen. All the monsters were dead. The only ones left were those of the imagination.

  He laid his head back, cradling the drink on his lap, and tried to shut down his brain as he waited for the dawn. It was time to leave, before his own monsters rose up and blotted out his sanity. But Kurshin had been good, the very best.

  It had grown much colder in the early-morning hours. Paris lay under a thin blanket of snow when McGarvey emerged from his apartment. He decided against taking his car. Traffic the night before had been snarled because of the weather, and it would be even worse this morning with everyone trying to get to work. Like New York, Paris was better suited for delivery drivers and cabbies than for amateur drivers.

  He walked up to the rue La Fayette, where he hailed a cab and ordered the driver to take him to the Hotel Roblin on the rue Chauveau-Legarde.

  They’d gone barely a half-dozen blocks when McGarvey noticed that the cabbie kept glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “Is someone following us?” he asked.

  “I want no trouble, monsieur,” the cabbie said nervously. “Is it the police?”

  “I am the police,” McGarvey said. “What sort of car is it?”

  “A brown Peugeot, with two men inside. They made a U-turn after I picked you up, and they have been behind us ever since. Look for yourself, monsieur, if you do not believe me.”

  “I believe you,” McGarvey said, without turning around.

  “Where is it you wish to go?”

  “The Hotel Roblin, of course,” McGarvey said. “And if you are asked later, you may say that I did not hesitate in my choice of destination.”

  The cabbie shrugged.

  A couple of minutes later they pulled up in front of the small but fairly expensive hotel just behind the Place de la Madeleine. McGarvey paid the driver and, without looking back, walked to the rue Tronchet, turned left, and headed toward Au Printemps, the huge department store, a few blocks away.

  The brown Peugeot passed him in the next block and pulled down a side street. The plates were diplomatic, of the series used by U.S. embassy personnel. Carley had set watchdogs to keep tabs on him, probably at Carrara’s suggestion. They were afraid that Kurshin had come back from the grave.

  As soon as the car was out of sight, McGarvey turned and hurried back the way he had come, reaching the corner of Chauveau-Legarde just as his watchdogs came down from the boulevard Haussmann. They did not spot him, and they slowed to a crawl as they searched the doorways on either side of the rue Tronchet.

  He walked the last half block to the hotel and went inside to the desk. The clerk looked up.

  “I’d like to leave a message for Maria Schimmer,” McGarvey said. He jotted a brief note on hotel stationery, asking that she telephone him as soon as possible, folded it, and handed it to the clerk. “See that she gets that.”

  “Bien sûr, monsieur,” the clerk said.

  Hotels in Europe are reluctant to give information about their guests, especially their room numbers, preferring instead to pass along messages.

  McGarvey hesitated a moment as the clerk turned and slipped the folded paper into the slot for room 315. Then he went into the tiny bar and grillroom across the lobby.

  The bar wasn’t open this early, though the grillroom was still serving breakfast. McGarvey lingered just within the doorway for a few minutes until the desk clerk went into his office. Then he stepped around the corner, hurried across the lobby, and took the stairs up.

  Her room was at the end of the corridor, in the back. He listened at the door. The shower was running. It stopped a minute later, and he knocked.

  After a few moments Maria Schimmer called “Oui?”

  “It’s Kirk McGarvey.”

  There was absolute silence from within the room.

  “From the embassy,” he said. “I’m the one who dug you out.”

  “What do you want?” Maria asked hesitantly.

  “I came for that drink you promised me.”

  Again there was silence from within the room until the lock snapped and the door opened. Maria Schimmer, wearing a white terry-cloth robe, her hair wrapped in a bath towel, looked up at him, her eyes very large and very dark. He thought she was beautiful.

  “You look a hell of a lot better than you did last night,” McGarvey said, smiling. He looked at her bandaged hands. “How are they?”

  “Sore,” she replied. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes, and no one sent me, if that’s what you’re worried about, although there are some people from the embassy who’d like to have a word with you.”

  “I told those people everything I know,” she said, her eyes flashing.

  “Reid is dead, you know.”

  She nodded. “I figured as much.” She moved away from
the door, and McGarvey stepped inside.

  The room was small but well furnished. A window looked down into a courtyard. The bathroom light was on, and the television was playing, but the sound had been turned off. The woman’s suitcase lay open on the bed. She was in the middle of packing.

  “They want to know what connection you had with him,” McGarvey said.

  “There was no connection.”

  McGarvey’s right eyebrow rose.

  “He was with another man I’d come to see at the Inter-Continental.”

  “About what?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “What were you doing at the embassy?”

  “I was going to ask Mr. Reid for his help.”

  “With what?”

  “Did you tell your friends the name of this hotel?” Maria asked.

  “Not yet,” McGarvey said. “But the Marine on the embassy stairs heard when you gave it to me.”

  Again her eyes flashed. “Thank you for saving my life, Mr. McGarvey, but I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Then you shouldn’t mind talking with Carleton Reid’s people.”

  “I’m leaving Paris.”

  McGarvey shook his head. “You don’t seem to understand what’s going on here, Senorita Schimmer. Someone killed a lot of people, and our embassy is destroyed. At this point you may be a suspect. At the very least they want to know what you were doing there.”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Maria flared. “I was at the Inter-Continental when it happened, and I have witnesses who can verify it.”

  “Then you should have no problem,” McGarvey said. He went to the phone and picked it up. “This is Three-fifteen. Give me an outside line, please. I wish to make a local call.”

  “Wait,” Maria said.

  McGarvey just looked at her. When he had the dial tone he dialed his own number.

  “I cannot be delayed here,” she said. “I’ll answer your questions.”

  The connection was made and the telephone in his apartment began to ring. “Hello,” he said. “This is McGarvey. Let me talk to the chief of security.”