“Now I want you to turn off the bedroom lights, and sit down in the corner so you can see the bedroom door.” “I don’t understand ”
“Just do it, Kathleen,” McGarvey ordered. “Then stay there until I get home.
If anyone comes through the door, I don’t care who, besides me, I want you to point the gun at them and pull the trigger. And keep pulling the trigger.” “Hurry,” she said. “I’m frightened.” “We’re only a few blocks away,” McGarvey said. Yemm took the Mac 10 submachine gun from its holder on the transmission hump, took his left hand off the steering wheel long enough to yank back the cocking handle on top of the receiver, then powered down the passenger-side window. “I’ll make one quick pass,” he said. “Concentrate on the Mercedes, I’ll watch the van,” McGarvey said, powering down his window. “Kirk, are you talking to me?” Kathleen asked. “No, sweetheart, I’m talking to Dick. Hang on.”
Yemm slowed down as they passed the golf course, and he turned down Country Club Drive. The house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. The van was parked in front, but there was no sign of the Mercedes. Nor was there any sign of the girls or of Parker or Hernandez. “We must have just missed them,” Yemm said. “Katy, are you okay? No one has tried to come into the house?” “I’m okay, Kirk. All the doors are locked.”
“Sit tight, we’re right outside.” Yemm raised the Mac 10 as he drove slowly past the van. There was no movement. The van’s windows were all closed, and they couldn’t see anyone inside. It simply looked like a vehicle parked on the side of the street. They drove around the circle and stopped in the middle of the street just behind and to the left of the van. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the neighborhood. The snowfall was heavier than it had been at Langley, and already whatever tire marks or footprints there might have been had completely filled in. “Stay here, Mr. Director,” Yemm said, getting out of the car. “Yeah, right,” McGarvey replied. He climbed out of the limo on the opposite side from the van, behind Yemm. “Goddammit-“
“I’ll cover your back, Dick,” McGarvey said. “But take it nice and easy.” Yemm decided not to argue. He moved around the front of the limo. McGarvey slid into place behind him so that he had a clear sight line over the long hood. Keeping the Mac 10 trained on the driver’s side window, Yemm gingerly approached the van. He bent down and looked under the vehicle, then studied the area around it before he cautiously looked through the window. For several long seconds he just stood there, but then he lowered his gun and looked over his shoulder.
“They’re all in the back.” The hairs prickled on McGarvey’s neck. He knew what Yemm was going to say next. “There’s a lot of blood. I think they’re all dead.” “Christ.” McGarvey turned and looked at the house. “Wait for the backup,” he shouted, and he sprinted across the street and up the driveway to his house. On the porch he fumbled his keys out of his pocket, hurriedly unlocked the front door and shoved it open with his foot. He slid left, out of the firing line from anyone in the stair hall
There was nothing. No movement. No sound. Not even the alarm.
Kathleen had forgotten to turn it back on. “Katy?” he shouted. He’d left his phone in the car. “Kirk?” she called from upstairs. “It’s me. Are you okay?” “Oh, Kirk, thank God,” Kathleen cried. She appeared at the head of the stairs, the pistol still in her hand, pointed toward the open front door. “Put the gun down, Katy.
Everything’s fine now ” A tremendous explosion shattered the night air, flashing like a strobe light off the thickly blowing snow, the noise hammering off the fronts of the houses in the cul-de-sac. McGarvey fell through the doorway and turned in time to see a huge fireball, blown ragged by the wind, rising into the sky from where the van and Yemm had been.
THIRTY-THREE
MAC HAD GIVEN HIM THE LEGITIMACY THAT HE HAD SEARCHED FOR ALL OF HIS LIFE. RENCKE HAD A PLACE.
Arkady Aleksandrovich Kurshin was the only man ever to have nearly bested McGarvey. Looking up from the covering file for Operation Countdown, Rencke wondered how he could have forgotten the Russian assassin’s name. Baranov had been the manipulator behind Kurshin’s delicate, even balletic, but deadly moves. And yet it was Kurshin who had stolen a nuclear missile from a U.S. storage bunker in what was then West Germany. It was Kurshin who had managed to hijack a U.S. Los Angeles class nuclear submarine and kill its entire crew. It was Kurshin who had nearly embroiled the entire Middle East, including most of the oil-producing nations, in a nuclear confrontation with Israel.
And it had been Kurshin who had finally led McGarvey to his face-to-face confrontation with Baranov. McGarvey had been maneuvered to the meeting with the KGB spymaster in a Soviet safe house outside of East Berlin. But the purpose of the meeting was never made clear. It was possible that Baranov simply wanted to kill McGarvey. It was equally possible, maybe even likely, that Baranov thought he could somehow turn McGarvey as he had turned Yarnell and Evita Perez and Artime Basulto and even John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” McGarvey’s friend in the CIA. It would have been a coup. A triumph of epic proportions.
Like turning Luke Skywalker to the dark side in the Star Wars movies.
It didn’t happen, of course. In fact, Baranov’s wild gamble had turned against him. McGarvey assassinated him, and then back in West Berlin, where Trotter had been waiting for word from Baranov, McGarvey killed his old friend. Trotter had been a Baranov man. Seduced by the Georgian’s delicate touch; by the sheer brilliance of his personality.
Rencke closed his eyes. Baranov’s had been a siren song to just about every one of his targets. Those he could not convert, like Powers and McGarvey, he marked for elimination; Powers when he had become DCI, and McGarvey once in East Germany and again now. On a separate level, McGarvey’s confrontation with Arkady Kurshin came about a year after East Berlin, in the tunnels beneath the ruins of a castle in Portugal.
Rencke had read that chilling report. The two assassins, McGarvey and Kurshin, each at the height of their powers, had come head-to-head in a tunnel filled with Nazi gold and the bodies of some dead Jews. There was an explosion, darkness, the tunnel filling with water. Rencke shook his head. He felt claustrophobic each time he thought about it.
That had been a close call; one that by McGarvey’s own admission, could have gone either way. He’d been lucky. There had been other operations. Baranov was at least fifteen years older than McGarvey.
He’d had fifteen years more experience. Fifteen more years to develop his tradecraft. But it should have been all over in the East Berlin safe house. And in the tunnel in Portugal. Rencke got up and went out to the central corridor. There were forty men and women working here, and yet the vast cavern seemed to be deserted. The answers, if there were any after all these years, were here somewhere. But he still could not make sense of what he knew. There were common threads.
Points of similarity and even contact between all of Baranov’s players.
Between Yarnell and Powers. Between Kurshin and McGarvey. Even between Evita and Basulto. Bridges that linked them together, with Baranov as their center span.
Someone was trying to assassinate McGarvey because he had become boss of the CIA. It was a Baranov operation that had been put in place as long as twenty years ago. One that had recently been triggered.
Nikolayev was one of the keys. One of BaranoVs players. Who else?