Be detached. It will be your armor. This is a jihad for Allah not for man.
But this now was very much a personal thing for Khalil.
The only man he ever loved and respected was Osama bin Laden.
The only man he truly hated, besides his father, was Kirk McGarvey. Khalil had killed his father more than thirty years ago, and this evening he would kill McGarvey.
He brought up the Web site for the Hotel de Paris, then broke through its pitifully simple security system into the guest registry, which showed not only names, but also passport and credit card numbers. He eliminated all the European names, reducing the list of 205 guests to thirty-seven. He saved this list to a file, then opened a search engine that found passport numbers and matched them to names, dates, and places of birth.
McGarvey was possibly fifty, and he spoke with a flat midwestern accent, which Khalil placed somewhere in Kansas, Missouri, or Nebraska. He eliminated all the obvious mismatches, reducing the list to nineteen names. Of these he picked five likely possibilities, based mostly on instinct. McGarvey would be traveling under a work name that would be rock solid. Like the man himself.
Khalil connected with the U.S. State Department in Washington and hacked into the main passport database. The security blocks for this system were far more sophisticated than the hotel’s. He had only a few seconds before various telltales would pop up and ask for additional passwords. He quickly ran the five passport numbers, immediately coming up with the information that three of the passports had been applied for at the passport agency in New Orleans, the fourth in New York, and the fifth in Washington.
He backed out of the program and went to the issuing agency in Washington, where he ran the single number. A copy of the actual passport came up, showing the photograph of a slender-faced man with blond hair.
Khalil considered the photo, but rejected it. Even with a good disguise McGarvey could not be made to look like the man in the photo.
Next he entered one of the numbers from the New Orleans agency, and when the record came up he was looking at a photograph of Kirk McGarvey, under the name Richard A. Brewster, Tampa, Florida.
Khalil quickly backed out of that program, and returned to the hotel’s Web site, hacking into the switchboard. Next he used his cell phone to call the front desk.
“Bonsoir, Hotel de Paris. How may I direct your call?”
“I say, be a doll and connect me with Dick Brewster’s room, would you?”
“Moment, s’il vous plaît,” the operator said.
A couple of seconds later, the call came up on Khalil’s computer screen at the same time he heard it ring over his cell phone. McGarvey was in suite 204.
The number rang five times, and the operator came back on. “Monsieur Brewster does not answer. Would you care to leave a message?”
“No, that’s okay, darlin’, I’ll try later.” Khalil broke the connection, and brought up the hotel switchboard’s automated message service, which recorded all messages and telephone calls to or from numbers outside the hotel for which charges were levied.
McGarvey had received only one call since noon, and it was from a number in Lucerne.
Khalil brought up the recorded message. It was from a woman. She sounded young, and perhaps even frightened.
Tell him that Liese telephoned and would like to talk to him about an old friend.
Khalil raised his eyes and looked past the gaily lit pool and fountain toward the hotel. Besides the motor traffic, couples were strolling hand in hand in the balmy early evening air. There was always a sense of excitement in Monaco, yet with its grand promenades, the splendid hotels and restaurants, the magnificent palace, and the yacht-filled harbor, this was also a city for lovers. Was it as simple as the possibility that McGarvey had a mistress from Switzerland with whom he was having a rendezvous?
After the events aboard the Alaskan cruise ship, Khalil would have thought that McGarvey was a man singularly dedicated to his wife. He had certainly gone to great lengths to come to her rescue.
The important fact at this moment, however, was that McGarvey was not in his suite.
Khalil shut down his computer, finished his Pernod, and paid the tab with a few coins. Then he got up and started across the Place to rent a room at the hotel, his computer case in one hand and a small leather overnight bag in the other.
No one noticed the tall, somewhat overweight man wearing a poorly cut, dark suit that looked as if it had been slept in, his dark hair mussed and his eyes red behind bottle-thick glasses, even though he moved with the fluid grace of a dancer — or perhaps a jungle animal on the hunt.
FORTY-THREE
McGarvey encountered no one in the corridor or in the emergency stairwell, which he took to the service level one floor below the lobby. This area of the hotel was busy with white-coated waiters, some pushing serving carts for room-service suppers; maids in black with white frills; and supervisors in formal cutaways scurrying along the broad, unadorned corridors and using the several service elevators, some of them speaking urgently on walkie-talkies as the evening began to ramp up.
He had kept himself alive all these years in part because of his tradecraft, but in a large measure because he trusted almost no one. If someone had been monitoring Liese’s call, they might be waiting for him to emerge from the hotel’s front doors. He would make an easy target.
He buttoned his jacket and stepped out of the stairwell. No one gave him a second look as he walked back to the large kitchen and passed directly to the pantry and delivery area that opened outside to the loading dock. The area behind the hotel was slightly below the level of the central plaza, and it was concealed from the street by a row of palm trees and a concrete wall on which grew a profusion of bougainvillea and other flowering vines.
He walked up the ramp, paused at the top as a cab sped past, then walked around to the Place and blended with the early evening crowd, all of his senses alert for any sign that something was out of place. If Liese was right about Salman extending an invitation to sail to Corsica, then McGarvey figured that the white Mercedes would be parked in front. But when he came around the corner the car wasn’t there.
Crossing the street, he made a pass in front of the hotel and the sidewalk café where Liese was supposed to be waiting. He didn’t spot her at first — she was seated two tables from the sidewalk in relative darkness.
At the corner he waited for a break in the heavy traffic, and then skipped across the street, coming back to the café from the direction opposite to the one he would have come from had he left the hotel from the front.
Liese was sipping a glass of wine, her attention directed toward the hotel. She was wearing a black leather jacket over a white tee, her purse on the table in front of her. In profile her face was narrow, with high cheekbones and a delicately upturned nose; her blond hair was stylishly short and on just about any other woman would look masculine. But the past decade had been very kind to her. When McGarvey had left Switzerland for the last time, Liese had been a kid in her mid-twenties, with a big mouth, and the skin-and-bones figure of a runway model. From what he could see from where he stood twenty feet away, she had matured into a beautiful woman.
McGarvey studied the street scene for another moment or two, but he couldn’t detect anyone lingering in front of the hotel; no one was seated in a parked car, no windowless van was in position.
When he turned back, Liese was staring at him, her face an expression of relief mixed with fear and something else. She nodded her head very slightly toward the hotel, asking if he thought he was being followed, and he shook his head no.