They walked arm in arm like lovers out for an evening stroll, but even at a distance of more than one hundred meters in the imperfect light, Khalil was convinced there was something familiar about the man. The certainty that he knew who it was continued to grow, until just across the street the man glanced up.
Khalil’s heart bumped, and a slow smile spread across his face.
It was McGarvey returning to the hotel, with a young, beautiful woman. He was typically Western after all, a man who professed love and devotion for his wife, while in a foreign city having no compunction against picking up a whore for the evening.
It is righteous to slay the infidel, the sinner, the unbeliever of Muhammad’s teachings, and all those who have sinned with him.
Khalil picked up his pistol from the reading table next to the chair, cocked the hammer, and concentrated on settling his nerves. He was somewhat irritated with himself that he was having an attack of the jitters, like an anxious schoolboy. But since Alaska, he’d come to have a much better understanding of — and respect for — McGarvey. Osama’s warnings were not overstated, as Khalil had first believed.
If it had not been for the tip from an informant that McGarvey had come to Monaco the day before, he would not have this chance.
The kill tonight would be beautiful.
FORTY-SEVEN
The situation was beginning to feel wrong to McGarvey.
Too many people knew that he was here. Liese knew, Salman knew, and now even the photographer knew. Not only that, but there’d been no activity aboard Salman’s yacht. No parties. No people on the sundeck other than the one young woman. Yet Salman had the reputation as an international bon vivant. A party boy. According to the press, he never went anywhere without a crowd. Yet here in Monaco he’d been alone.
As the elevator stopped at the second floor and the door started to open, McGarvey drew his pistol, concealing it behind his right leg.
Liese was alarmed. “What is it?” she asked, softly.
No one was in the corridor. Directly across from the elevator was a gilt-framed mirror, beneath which was a Louis XIV table flanked by two chairs. The house phone, plain white without a keypad, was on the table.
“Something’s not right,” McGarvey said. He held the elevator door open with his left hand and stuck his head out, all of his senses alert for something, anything that might be out of place. He stood in rapt concentration for several seconds. So far as he could see, none of the room doors were ajar, nor was the emergency stairwell door at the end partially open as if someone were standing there ready to take a shot at anyone getting off the elevator.
“Do you think he’s here?” Liese asked. She’d taken her pistol out of her purse. She thumbed the safety catch to the off position.
“Maybe,” McGarvey said. There’d been no one out on the streets tailing him, and yet according to Liese somebody was feeding information back to her boss. Somebody had to be looking over his shoulder. The photographer downstairs could have been a distraction. And the girl at the casino last night with Salman and this morning aboard the yacht could have been a distraction too.
“What do you want to do?”
“Hold the elevator, but keep an eye on the stairwell door,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be just a minute.” He stepped off the elevator and went to the house phone, where he called the concierge.
Liese stood half in and half out of the elevator, holding the door from closing with her hip, her head on a swivel watching the corridor in both directions. Her pistol pointed down and to her right, her trigger finger flat against the trigger guard. Very professional.
The same woman who’d helped McGarvey earlier with the flowers answered the phone. “Concierge.”
“Good evening. I’m Robert Brewster. I received a telephone message this afternoon from Lucerne. Have there been any other messages or telephone calls since that one?”
“I’ll be happy to check for you, Monsieur.”
“Kirk,” Liese called softly to him. “Someone is calling for the elevator.”
“Ignore it,” McGarvey said. A moment later the concierge was back.
“There was one further telephone call, from outside the hotel, at 20:05 but no message was left.”
“Do you know where the call originated from?”
“No, sir. But apparently it was from outside Monaco.”
“Was a name or number given?”
“Malheureusement, non.”
“Merci,” McGarvey said, and he hung up. Someone had tried to reach him from a blind number, to talk, or merely to confirm that he was a registered guest of the hotel. But the call had come from outside Monaco less than an hour ago. If it was Khalil and he meant to come here to get revenge for Alaska, he could have been calling from almost anywhere. It was a reasonable assumption, however, that he would not have reached Monaco in such a sort time. If he were planning on a hit, it would probably come in the middle of the night.
Anyone else, such as Katy back home, would have left a message. That it was a blind number that did not show up on the hotel’s telephone system pointed toward Otto or perhaps Adkins at Langley.
It did not point toward Salman, unless the yacht was equipped with the electronics to make blind calls. It was a trick that U.S. intelligence had not seen any evidence of in al-Quaida intercepts.
“Who tried to call you?” Liese asked.
“The hotel doesn’t know, but it came from outside Monaco,” McGarvey said. He dragged one of the armchairs from beside the table across the corridor and placed it in the path of the elevator door. “I don’t want anyone coming up behind us for the moment.”
“Don’t you trust the concierge?” Liese asked.
“I don’t trust anyone,” McGarvey replied, tightly. He’d seen Khalil’s handiwork up close and personal. He knew what the man was capable of doing, because whatever else the man might be, he was very smart and very ruthless.
He nodded toward the end of the corridor. “Check the stairwell,” he said. “I’ll cover you from here. But be careful.”
Liese hurried to the end of the corridor as McGarvey walked three doors to his suite. They had been lucky so far that a housekeeping maid or room-service waiter hadn’t shown up to find two people scurrying around the corridor with guns drawn. But he didn’t expect their luck to hold much longer.
He listened at his door for a sound from within the suite as he watched Liese cautiously approach the stairwell door. He heard nothing. Liese turned the door handle, and keeping to the side, eased the door open a few inches with her foot. She took a quick look, glanced back at McGarvey, then pushed the door the rest of the way open and rolled into the stairwell, leading with her pistol in both hands.
A couple of seconds later she was back, shaking her head as she hurried up the corridor to him. “Someone is below, maybe on the ground floor,” she reported, careful to keep her voice low. “Talking. A man and a woman.”
McGarvey nodded. He was probably being paranoid, but over the years he’d learned to trust his instincts. Larry Danielle, who’d risen to deputy director of the CIA starting out as a young man with the OSS in World War II, had been McGarvey’s mentor in the early days. “A dead field man is an operator who doesn’t listen to his inner voice,” he’d advised. “Develop your instincts, and then, for heaven’s sake, trust them.”
Danielle was long dead, but his words of wisdom were etched in the brain of every field officer he’d ever trained. The live ones.
The door opened inward to the left. McGarvey positioned Liese on the right, ran his key card through the slot, and when the light blinked green, eased the door open just a crack, keeping out of the way to the left.