Crossfire

by David Hagberg

  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 Tehrn 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.”

  “Yes, 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.

  “Your 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 Reiker, 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.”

  “Your 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 for 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.”

  37

  “HAVE YOU SEEN NOTHING since Shahpur Naisir entered the building this morning?” Captain Hussain Peshadi asked from the open window of his car.

  The stakeout officer at the wheel of the gray Morris shook his head. “An old woman came out just after he went in. And now many of the foreigners are returning from work.”

  It was a few minutes after six in the evening. A very cool wind blew from the mountains.

  “Richard Abbas has not left his apartment since yesterday?” Peshadi asked, hardly believing what this idiot was telling him.

  As a young man, Peshadi had trained for nine months at London’s Scotland Yard. He’d learned not only police procedures, but also a streetwise cynicism that every cop develops. Nothing since had done much to soften his views.

  “That is correct, Captain.”

  “And then Naisir showed up this morning, and he, too, is still inside?”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said complacently. “As you can see, his automobile remains where he parked it.”

  “The shits that you relieved told you that Abbas had not left his apartment, and that no one else left? They saw nothing either? They were as blind as you?”

  The surveillance officer blanched. His partner on the passenger side started to speak, but Peshadi cut him off viciously.

  “Didn’t you think something was odd? Didn’t it ever occur to you to go into the building and check with your own eyes that Abbas and Naisir were still there?”

  “No, sir,” the driver said fearfully.

  “By Allah, I will have your balls if they have walked off,” Peshadi said through clenched teeth, climbing out of his car and pulling out his pistol. “Cover the back of this building,” he told the two men. “If anything moves, shoot it.” He turned back to his own driver, Sergeant Mohammed Turik. “Watch the front entrance. If I’m not out of there in five minutes, call for backup units.”

  Peshadi was a slightly built man with a wiry frame and muscles like steel cords. He’d played rugby for a short time in England, and many an opponent, badly underestimating his strength, had found himself flat on his back. After he’d sent the third man to the hospital, he was barred from the team for unnecessary roughness, but by then he was already developing his seeds of hatred for things Western.

  The elevator was out of order, so he had to take the stairs up to the fifth floor. The building was permeated with the odors of frying meat, and on the third floor he was certain he could smell the raw odor of alcohol.

  Intellectually, he understood that life without international commerce was impossible. But still his stomach turned when he thought of what Western influence had done and was doing to his country.

  He himself had been badly tainted by association. It was something he fought against every single day of his life.

  He hesitated at the fifth-floor landing, remaining around the corner, out of sight, as he studied the corridor. Nothing moved, but he could hear the sounds of music, and laughter. Ordinary sounds … Western sounds.

  Tightening the grip on his pistol, he rolled out into the corridor and went directly to Abbas’s door. He put his ear to the wood.

  There were no sounds from within. He stepped back and pounded on the door with the butt of his pistol.

  Almost immediately the music from one of the apartments down the hall stopped. A door opened and a man stuck his head out.

  “Go back!” Peshadi barked in English, and the man disappeared. The door slammed.

  Peshadi banged the butt of his pistol on the door again. The fifth floor had suddenly become very still.

  Cocking the pistol, he fired three shots into the door lock, destroying the wood around it, and the door opened a few inches, caught only on a splinter.

  Peshadi kicked it open and stepped out of the possible line of fire a
s he extended his gun hand into the apartment.

  Naisir lay on his back just within the living room. Although he was recognizable, he’d obviously been shot in the face at close range. The bullet had entered his head just below his left eye. Long strips of cut-up bed sheet lay crumpled in front of a chair situated about six inches from the wall. An electrical cord, its wires stripped at one end, snaked across the floor to an extension cord that was plugged into a wall socket behind the chair. There was an odor of human waste, and something else. Something very odd. Yet an odor that Peshadi remembered from a very long time ago. A pungent smell. Cloying, almost.

  Glue. Rubber cement.

  Within the hour the Criminal Investigation Division of SAVAK had arrived at the apartment, and its team members—most of whom had trained in the West—had begun taking the place apart under Sergeant Turik’s precise direction. Other investigators were questioning everyone in the building, and a team had been dispatched to the offices of the Compagnie General de Picarde to watch for any activity out of the ordinary.

  Peshadi was down at his car, talking to his office via radiotelephone.

  His immediate superior, Colonel Seyyed Bakhtir, snarled, “Listen to me, Captain, I want that man found within the next twelve hours. Do whatever it takes to get the job done. I’ll give you anything you need. But under no circumstances—absolutely none, do you hear me?—is that man to be allowed to leave Iran. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, sir. But may I ask why this particular one is so important?”

  “You may not,” the colonel said. “But he is important. Very important to Iran. To our national interests.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find him, Peshadi,” the colonel ordered. “You of all people understand the price of failure. Find him.”

  Peshadi replaced the handset in its bracket and went back inside. It was late, well after ten. The technicians had gotten the elevator running again, and the lights in the stairwell were back on. They had simply been switched off, as had the corridor lights. Sabotaged for some reason.