End Game (28 page)

Two possibilities, she thought. Either he would try to arrest her, in which case her best immediate defense was to always surround herself with innocent civilians. Or he wanted her to lead him to George, in which case he might show himself but would leave her alone.

Coming here to the deserted park at this hour of the morning would test the second possibility. That, and she was feeling irascible again, and she wanted someone to try something with her.

The Jardin was one of the more highly structured parks in the city, with rows of flowers and trees and a couple of ponds. From just about anywhere inside the park, Paris was highly visible, unlike much of Central Park, which in many places hid from the city. And yet Alex felt a sense of isolation here, as she had even in times past when the place was busy with old couples resting on benches, or young fathers pushing baby carriages, or children running and playing—almost too quiet, as French children often were.

Maybe if her life had been different as a child, if she'd had a normal upbringing, a normal father, she might have turned out differently. Maybe she would have gotten married—a lot of NOCs did. They had their careers
and
their partners.

A half dozen kids—two of them girls, all of them in their early teens—suddenly appeared on the path to her left. They had wild haircuts, Mohawks and the like, tattoos, piercings in their ears and noses and lips and eyebrows, and they were either drunk or high.

One of the boys pulled out a knife and, holding it low, swooped in toward her, swinging the blade at her midsection.

At the last moment she stepped aside, took his wrist and, using his momentum, yanked his arm up and sharply backward, dislocating his shoulder and tearing his rotator cuff.

He skipped out of the way, howling in pain.

The others, all of them with knives in hand, circled her. No one except the kid with the screwed-up arm said a word, and he only muttered something dark Alex couldn't quite catch.

Coming to the Jardin against the advice of the night manager and getting into the middle of something like this was exactly what she had wanted in some perverse way. Maybe to prove that after too many years of sitting behind a desk, she still had some moves left.

One of the girls came in from the right, while at the same moment a tall-drink-of-water boy who might have been sixteen or seventeen ran at her from her left.

Alex turned, grabbed the boy's wrist and elbow, and spun him around so his knife rammed into the shoulder of the girl, directly above her right breast.

The others moved in at the same time.

 

FORTY-EIGHT

McGarvey and Pete sat in the back of a Police Nationale Citroën parked on the Rue de Rivoli, watching images on a laptop computer. A nearly silent camera-equipped drone had been circling overhead ever since Alex had left the InterContinental and strolled into the Jardin as if she were a woman without a care in the world.

Bete, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, watched the images from the drone on another laptop. “She is an impressive woman,
hein
?”

“That she is,” McGarvey agreed.

“Shall we send someone to help her?”

“Not unless you want to save the kids from themselves. She knows I've followed her, and she's staged this thing, figuring I would get involved.”

“To save the children.”

“Something like that. But she won't kill them.”

All of it, the stealth helicopter that had followed her cab from de Gaulle, the use of Sûreté officers and the air force drone, had been put into play within minutes after the colonel had signed on. But only after McGarvey had explained what he thought was going on.

“Your government might not be so pleased if you uncover their little secret,” Bete had said on the Gulfstream.

“The reaction of my government is not my concern right now. I'm trying to solve a murder mystery. I know the likely why of it now, but not the who.”

“Not her?” Bete asked.

“No. She's here to try to avoid being the next victim.”

Two more kids went down with dislocated kneecaps, and the last two boys stood in front of her, panting because of their exertions, and pissed off but obviously wary. Alex was a slightly built woman. An ancient in their minds. An obviously easy mark for a little fun—a rape for sure, and maybe even a few euros if she had any on her, or jewelry. Maybe a watch. But all of it for fun plus a little drug money.

The angle of the camera was wrong, so the expression on her face wasn't clear on the monitors, but the way she held herself, nonchalant, just about hipshot, arms at her sides, waiting for the boys to come in at her, was of a woman without concern for her safety.

After what seemed like a very long time, she turned and walked away, not bothering to look over her shoulder.

The boys stood there for a while but then pocketed their knives and helped the others. Within a few minutes they were gone, in the opposite direction of Alex.

“Formidable,” Bete said.

“If you want to arrest her, you'll have to give your people plenty of room,” McGarvey said.

“What now, Colonel?” asked the young Sûreté officer behind the wheel.

“We're finished here. You may recall the drone, and give my thanks to Major Lucien.”

“Where may I drop you, sir?”

“That's up to Monsieur McGarvey,” Bete said.

Alex was heading up toward the Champs-Élysées.

“Looks like she's going for a walk,” McGarvey said. “Get back to the InterContinental and toss her room. I doubt if she'll have left anything important behind, maybe a passport or two and some cash and credit cards.”

“How delicate shall I be?”

“Use a soft touch, but let her know someone was snooping around.”

“What about me?” Pete asked.

“Check us in, and try for the same floor,” McGarvey said. “I won't be long.”

“She's looking for trouble,” Pete warned.

“She knows I'm here, and she's sent me a message.”

“Which is?” Bete asked.

“That she can handle herself, but that unless she's seriously provoked, she won't kill anyone. She's here to meet someone, or at least get word to him.”

“George,” Pete said, but not as a question.

McGarvey took a last glance at the monitor, then got out of the car and started walking fast back toward the Pont de la Concorde, figuring that if Alex were intending for the Champs-Élysées, he would be in time to tuck in behind her.

*   *   *

The Place de la Concorde, with its slender obelisk, was at the foot of the Champs-Élysées, and it was alive with traffic, including pedestrians on their way to sidewalk cafés on the avenue or even the McDonald's for their morning coffees and croissants.

McGarvey crossed the Rue Boissy d'Anglas, dodging traffic and heading along the upper side of the avenue, paying attention to who was coming up behind him or shadowing him from the other side. Alex was the only one left from Alpha Seven, and since she hadn't killed Schermerhorn, nor almost certainly the others, it meant she was the last target.

But whoever the killer was had a very good source of intelligence inside the CIA. Not only good enough to pinpoint Wager, Fabry, Knight, and Schermerhorn, and Alex, but to get on and off campus without raising any alarms.

He and Otto had suspected it might be someone working for Blankenship—or possibly even the director of security himself. But Blankenship had been in his office when Schermerhorn was murdered, and had been driving through the main gate when Knight had been attacked. Nor had he been absent from his desk when Coffin had been shot and killed on the boat in Piraeus.

Alex's alibis weren't as tight—she was on a long weekend when Coffin was shot, and as an NOC in Iraq she had been an excellent marksman with the Barrett sniper rifle—and she was definitely off campus when Schermerhorn had been murdered.

But if she thought the killer was George, and that he was somewhere here in Paris, and if he was indeed the killer, she was playing with fire, because it was possible he knew she had come to Paris.

Two-thirds of the way to the Arc de Triomphe, he spotted her sitting at a sidewalk table at the Café George V. The waiter had just set two coffees down and was walking away.

She was obviously expecting someone. McGarvey waited for a couple of minutes, watching her, waiting for whoever it was to show up, but when no one came, he walked over.

“Your coffee is getting cold,” she said, looking up.

“I thought you might be waiting for George,” McGarvey said, sitting across from her.

She smiled. “He's the last person I wanted to see. Tell me about Roy. Do you think he'll survive the night?”

“That why you ran?”

She looked at something across the broad avenue. “That's obvious, isn't it?”

“Then why the little display in the Tuileries?”

“Just kids out to have a little fun.”

“They'll think twice before they attack another woman.”

She smiled again. “That's the whole point, Mr. McGarvey. I can take care of myself, and I mean to do so.”

“I found you.”

“I let you find me. But unless you or Pete or Otto have told anyone about my movements, I figure I'll be reasonably safe here for a few days or so.”

“Then where?”

“That'll be up to you, won't it?” she said. “If you find George, I'm home free. Relatively speaking.”

“Otto's decrypted the fourth panel.”

“What'd it say?”

“‘Let there be light.'”

Alex laughed, the sound low from the back of her throat. “Sounds like Roy. Anything else?”

“And there was peace.”

She nodded wistfully. “Then you know what's still buried over there.”

“Schermerhorn's dead.”

For a long moment Alex didn't react, but then her face fell by degrees, and she looked down. “I thought by leaving it would draw him away. I thought he'd come after me, just like I knew you would. And if my luck held, the two of you would come face-to-face.”

She'd laid a copy of
The
International New York Times
on the table, and a chance breeze ruffled it. She suddenly moved to the left to reach for it, when a rifle shot struck a nearby male patron in the chest, and he was slammed violently backward. He had been seated at the table just behind them.

McGarvey rolled to the right and dropped to the sidewalk, searching the roof line across the broad boulevard in time to see a figure in a second-floor window disappear.

A woman passing by screamed, and people in the café began to react, some of them scrambling out of their seats, trying to escape what to them had to look like the start of another terrorist attack.

When he looked over his shoulder, Alex was gone.

 

FORTY-NINE

Alex raced through the restaurant, into the busy kitchen, and out the back door and onto a narrow lane across from the rear of the U.S. Embassy, which fronted on the Avenue Gabriel. She turned left and, walking fast, made it to the Rue de Miromesnil before she looked over her shoulder to see if McGarvey was behind her. He wasn't.

The shot had been fired from a high-power rifle, which to her had sounded like a Barrett, and it was only by happenstance that she'd suddenly moved to keep her newspaper from blowing away. But she'd been in time to glance up and get a quick glimpse of the shooter, who'd been in the second-floor window of the building across the avenue.

It had been a man, she was certain of it. But she got the impression he was tall and very ruggedly built—the opposite from George. And that only made sense if George wasn't the one doing the killings—or if he wasn't working alone.

At the corner, she turned around and walked back to the Champs-Élysées, half a block up from the George V. A crowd had gathered in front of the café, and two police cars had already arrived. A cop was in the middle of the street, directing traffic, as an ambulance, its siren blaring, came around the corner two blocks away.

If McGarvey was somewhere down there, he was lost in the crowd.

She headed up the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe, and in the next block she entered the VIP World Travel Agency, housed in a small storefront.

A young woman seated behind the desk looked up and smiled.
“Bonjour, Madame,”
she said pleasantly.

“Good morning,” Alex said in English, and the young woman switched languages.

Alex put her real passport on the desk. “I would like to make a trip to Tel Aviv, but first I need to get a message to your director.”

The agent glanced at the passport but did not reach for it.

George had told them all that if ever they got in over their heads over the business in Iraq, they were to get word to him through the travel agency either in Washington, London, Berlin, or here, in Paris. The procedure was to lay their real passport—no matter what other name they might be using—on the agent's desk, and ask to get a message to the agency's director before making a trip to Tel Aviv.

The company had been set up by the Israeli Mossad in the late fifties as an elaborate front so that its agents could travel to Argentina to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel. The thinking was that if they used their own travel section, the operation might not be discovered and Eichmann would not disappear again.

The company had remained in existence all this time because it was successful as an ordinary travel agency, and it was even expanded to Berlin, London, and Washington from its original office here in Paris. It wasn't a very closely guarded secret—at least not from the CIA—that the occasional Mossad operator still used the company.

“Do you have the name of our current director?” the woman asked.

“It's been some years.”

“What name do you know?”