Traffic on the short drive over to the airport was heavier than he expected it would be. Nevertheless, he made it to the long-term parking ramp with plenty of time to completely wipe down the van and make his way to the international terminal.
His British passport under the name Nance Kallinger matched the name on his first-class Icelandair ticket, and his name came up on TSA’s list as a precheck passenger, so security was hassle-free. He was seated in the busy Air France/KLM first-class lounge that Icelandair shared, a full forty-five minutes before his flight to Paris was due to depart.
He ordered a split of Dom Pérignon from the pretty attendant, and when it came, he sat back to give some serious thought to the general’s last advice that he was sure about his reasons for going after McGarvey.
It wasn’t a matter of revenge for his brother’s death at a CIA officer’s hand — at least not completely — though as a kid, he had idolized Arkady. And it wasn’t simple boredom. He’d been trained for a deep-cover long-term assignment in England. In case of war, he was to become a saboteur. It was an outmoded project that had been a KGB leftover from the Cold War. But the operation had been on some important general’s turf, so funding had continued, and personnel had been assigned in a dozen different countries, mostly in Europe, depending upon the fluency of their language.
For cover, he ran a small bookshop in London’s West End, and his immediate supervisor, whom he had never come face-to-face with, was a contributor to a government watchdog blog. It was his supervisor who, in a series of coded messages, had officially denied Kurshin’s request for a leave of absence, but who’d also sent the brief message to drop by anytime for a cup of tea and to talk books. The word anytime meant go ahead, but let us know when you return. It was assumed that Kurshin was somewhere in country gathering intel on some new target, but no one on any of the teams really gave a damn. They were in country on lengthy paid vacations. If a war were actually to start, which was unlikely, sabotage on the ground would be meaningless. The battles would be waged in cyberspace — that, along with English, was another of his areas of expertise.
Sipping his champagne, he had to admit that he had no real reason for going after McGarvey except for the challenge of the thing. He had trained for just such a mission after he’d learned of his brother’s death, and he’d made a study of the American shadowman and the Renckes, and now of course Pete Boylan.
He was pitting himself against a killer, a beautiful woman, and two people who were arguably among the brightest on the planet. He smiled.
“That good?” a woman seated next to him said. She was dark haired and beautiful.
“I’m sorry?”
“The champagne, monsieur,” she said. “Good?”
“Yes, very good. Would you like a glass?”
“Please.”
Kurshin motioned for an attendant to bring another split and a second glass. “Are you traveling on business?” he asked the woman.
“Actually, I’m returning home after two weeks. You could call it a holiday.”
Kurshin introduced himself. “Where’s home?”
“Nice,” she said.
Her name was Martine Barineau, and Kurshin guessed she was in her midforties. “Husband and children?”
“No, just a wicked cat my housekeeper is caring for.”
“As it turns out, I’m on a brief holiday. Perhaps for a few days, in Monaco.”
“You’re a gambler,” she said, smiling.
“Only on sure things,” Kurshin told her.
Their champagne came.
6
Louise Rencke, at nearly six feet tall, was mostly arms and legs but with a narrow, pleasant face that could scarcely contain her broad smile. She came to the front door of the McLean safe house and gave McGarvey and Pete hugs.
“We’ve been worried about you guys,” she said. Before she closed the door, she looked down the street the way they had come, but the neighborhood was quiet, as it usually was.
Otto was seated at the kitchen counter, a tablet propped up in front of him. “How’d it go?”
“He took a couple of shots with what sounded like a silenced Room Broom, but he was damned good,” McGarvey said.
Louise brought Mac a Corona and Pete a glass of red wine. “Neither of you have any holes?”
“My car’s all shot to hell,” Pete said.
“We wondered who was driving up in a Ford,” Louise said. She took a Glock pistol out of the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back and laid it on the counter. She was the shooter in the family and practiced at the CIA pistol range every week.
“Either of you get a look at him?” Otto asked.
“Just a glimpse through the trees as he ran away,” Pete said. “Small guy wearing a baseball cap, so I couldn’t tell you about his hair.”
“How’d he move? Like a bear? Maybe a lame horse?”
“Like a fox leaving the henhouse pretty sure the farmer wasn’t coming after him.”
“Sounded like a Brit,” McGarvey added.
Otto made a couple of entries on his tablet that was linked to his computer system on campus. “MI6,” he said. It took him a half minute to get through a series of passwords into a secret file that contained the names and descriptions of everyone who’d gone off the reservation in the past two years.
McGarvey looked over his shoulder. None of the descriptions matched.
“Anything else?” Otto asked.
“Maybe a hint of something,” Mac said. “Could be that English wasn’t his native language.”
“I got the same impression,” Pete said. “But I’m not sure.”
“The Russians are the best at something like that.”
“You’re talking Spetsnaz sleepers,” McGarvey said.
“New Scotland Yard has been working the issue for the past five years or so, but they’ve come up empty-handed,” Otto said. “Assuming just for the moment that this guy is Russian, there’s no one left over there that you’ve crossed paths with.”
McGarvey leaned back against the counter, a dozen memories coming back at him in living color. One name especially stood out. “Arkady Kurshin,” he said.
“You killed him in Portugal.”
“Family?”
“We never found any.”
“His original control officer is dead, but what about Didenko?” McGarvey asked.
“They put him in prison for crimes against the state, but I think I saw something that came across the Russian desk a few years ago that he’d been rehabilitated. Gave him his first star but then put him out to pasture.”
“Who is this guy?” Pete asked.
“Vasili Didenko, a control officer with the KGB and then the FSB,” McGarvey said. “Kurshin had to have been his star agent.”
“So maybe he’s still carrying a grudge against you, and he’s got a new star agent.”
“Russians have long memories,” Louise said. “Pete could be right; maybe he’s settling old accounts.”
Otto was busy at his computer. “He has a dacha outside Moscow, and that’s not changed since the last time I checked a couple of years ago. He owns it, but I’m finding no trace that he lives there or even that he’s still alive, but I’ll find out.”
“He was a dangerous man in the day, right?” Pete asked. “So maybe someone is keeping an eye on him.”
“Good point,” Otto said. “Hold on a mo.”
“When’s the last time you two had something to eat?” Louise asked.
“On the flight over,” Pete said.
“How about a pizza?”
It had been Otto and Louise’s crisis meal for as long as McGarvey could remember, but he’d never liked pizza, not even as a kid growing up in a small western Kansas town. “Sounds good,” he said.