“No problem,” McGarvey said. “I’ll need a ride back to my apartment.”
“We have a car waiting just outside,” Adams said, producing the two French documents.
McGarvey signed them both, then followed Adams through security and outside. No one even bothered to look up as he left.
Tom Lynch was waiting in the back seat of the car. “Trouble seems to have a habit of following you around, McGarvey,” he said.
“So it would seem,” McGarvey replied, getting in.
“Who was the shooter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody said he recognized you just before Bellus shot him to death.”
McGarvey looked at the CIA chief of Paris station with a straight face, but said nothing.
Chapter 11
It was a few minutes before eight in the morning, Washington time, when CIA Deputy Director of Operations Phillip Carrara answered the phone on his desk.
“Yes,” he said sharply. It had been a long night.
“He’s here, are you ready?” Lawrence Danielle asked in his soft voice. Danielle was the deputy director of the CIA.
“No, but I’ll be right up, Larry. How’s his mood?”
“What do you think?”
“I’ll be right up.”
Carrara replaced his phone, and cinching up his tie went to the door. His secretary Mildred Anderson was at the copy machine. “Are you about finished, Millie?”
“By the time you roll down your sleeves and put on your coat, I will be,” she said without turning around.
She’d been here since 4:00 a.m.
in response to the emergency call, and would probably be here until midnight, as would most of the others on the European desk. Gathering a crisis management team had never been a problem for Carrara. He was a well-liked DDO, despite the fact he was tough. “An Hispanic has to work three times as hard as a WASP to achieve the same rate of advancement. And that’s a fact of life you cannot sidestep.” He would tell that to anyone who asked, though he was not a proselytizer, nor was he bitter.
He was, however, diligent, and he expected nothing less from his staff.
Cuffs buttoned and coat on, Carrara took the half-dozen copies of the hastily prepared report his secretary had readied up to the seventh floor where he was immediately ushered into the director’s large, well-appointed office. Big windows looked out onto the rolling Virginia countryside.
The DCI, Roland Murphy, was seated behind his desk watching the morning news programs from the three major U.S. networks plus CNN on a bank of monitors to his left. A retired Army major general, he was a large man, with a bull neck, hamhock arms, and thick Brezhnev eyebrows over deep-set eyes. He was one of the toughest, most decisive men to have sat behind that desk since Dulles. And when the general barked, his people jumped.
With him were the Company’s general counsel Howard Ryan and the Deputy Director of Intelligence Thomas Doyle as well as Danielle.
Danielle was a small, pinched man, just the opposite of Murphy. He’d been with the Company for twenty-five years, and had even served briefly as interim DCI a few years ago. Ryan, who had come over from the National Security Agency at Murphy’s request a couple of years ago, was a precise man whose father ran one of New York’s top law firms. No one in the Agency had ever seen him dressed in anything but three-piece suits. Doyle, on the other hand, looked like a rumpled bed, but he was probably the smartest man in the room. He and Carrara, who’d also never paid much attention to his clothing, were good friends.
Murphy and the others looked up when Carrara came in. All four television monitors were showing pictures of the downed Airbus.
“I hope you know more than these jokers,” Murphy said sharply. “Because no two of them can even agree on the number of people killed.”
“One hundred fifty-seven,” Carrara said. “Including six French security officers-three on the field and three in the terminal-a female employee in the Orly Public Relations department, and two other innocent civilians-one in the men’s room at the airport, and the other standing in a crowd on the mezzanine level. Plus, of course, the terrorist himself.”
Carrara handed the copies of his report around, then poured himself a cup of coffee from the sideboard before he took his seat across from the DCI.
As they were reading, Carrara’s eyes strayed to the CNN monitor. He’d been working with Tom Lynch and their people in Paris since early this morning, but this was the first opportunity he’d had to see actual pictures of the crashed airliner. He didn’t like to fly, and seeing the news reports live and in color did nothing to dispel his fears.
Ryan looked up sharply from his reading, and moments later Murphy did the same, slamming his open palm on the desk top. “McGarvey?” he roared.
“At this point it looks as if his presence at Orly was purely coincidental,” Carrara said, expecting the reaction. Neither the DCI nor Ryan had any love lost for McGarvey, though for completely different reasons. “But if you will read on, General, you’ll learn that he was instrumental in catching up with one of the terrorists.”
“Who is dead, no doubt,” Ryan said.
Carrara nodded, but before he could continue Ryan turned to the DCI.
“Our Mr. McGarvey strikes again, conveniently eliminating everyone in his path. But I’m willing to bet that it was no coincidence, his being there.”
“I’m sorry, Howard, but I disagree. Carrara cut in. McGarvey was apparently saying goodbye to an old friend of his.”
“Who?”
“A woman by the name of Marta Fredricks.”
Danielle looked up from his reading. “Wasn’t she the Swiss cop who lived with him in Lausanne a few years back?”
“Yes… Carrara said, but again Ryan interrupted.
“Need more be said?”
“That’s a little pat, don’t you think?” Danielle asked.
“On the surface, yes,” Carrara admitted. “But McGarvey did not kill the terrorist, the chief of Orly security did that. And at this point he seems willing to cooperate with us and the French authorities.”
“I mean about Lausanne, that connection. It’s where DuVerlie was leading us. Same city, same flight.” Danielle glanced at the report. “And you say here that minutes before the flight McGarvey telephoned Orly security to ask about our people. On the surface, as you put it, Phil, couldn’t it be construed that McGarvey wanted to make sure they were actually aboard one-four-five?”
“He’s gun-shy,” Carrara said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ryan asked.
“It means that everytime he spots our people hanging around we come to him with one of our dirty little insoluble problems. And each time he agrees to help, it nearly costs him his life. He wanted to find out what was going on. In his mind our people being there was the coincidence.”
“What do the Swiss authorities say?” Danielle asked.
“They haven’t replied to our query about Miss Fredricks, except to confirm that she is a Federal Police officer.”
“On assignment to Paris?”
“Unknown at this point,” Carrara said.
“Which brings us back to our original problem,” Murphy said. “DuVerlie’s fantastic story.”
“It would seem that he was telling the truth after all,” Danielle put in.
“Have the French identified the terrorist?”
“Not yet,” Carrara said. “But they’re working on it. He was carrying no identification.”
“What about the rocket he used to bring down the airliner?”
“One of ours, a Stinger. I just received the serial number of the launching device.
My people are checking it out, but I don’t think it’ll get us much. The Stinger is a fairly common item on the open market. But we might have another lead. Orly security found some kind of a walkie-talkie in the back of the van the terrorist used to get out to the end of the runway. Which means he may have been communicating with someone.”