She smiled warmly. “Never happen.”
Jake’s was a trendy new sidewalk cafe on Canal Street much frequented by the younger set of Washington’s movers and shakers. Traffic was heavy by the time McGarvey and his daughter arrived a few minutes before four. They found a parking place a block away and walked back to the crowded restaurant.
Liz hadn’t said anything else about Jacqueline, but it hadn’t been difficult to figure out what was going on from her odd mood. The two of them had been doing a lot of talking over the past couple of weeks. Jacqueline had even driven down to Williamsburg to take Liz to dinner. And at the odd moment Mac’s old teaching position at Delaware’s Milford College had come up. Jacqueline had even reread his partially finished book on Voltaire and had made a few suggestions, from a Frenchwoman’s perspective.
They had to wait for the light to change before they could cross at the corner. Jacqueline was seated at a sidewalk table near the entrance, and when she spotted them she waved gaily. She was wearing the pale blue Hermés scarf McGarvey had given her in Paris. It was like a wedding ring to her, a mark of possession.
Time finally to settle down? he asked himself, crossing the street. He was afraid of it.
She was Mediterranean classic. With a pretty oval face, dark eyes, a flawless olive complexion and rich, sensuous lips. She had the earthy look of Sophia Loren. Like the actress, she was aging beautifully, and would continue to do so. But whatever else she was besides that, she was an intelligent and very capable French secret service officer.
She raised her face to him, and McGarvey kissed her before he sat down.
“Liz has a secret which she refuses to share with me,” McGarvey said. “Girl talk.”
Elizabeth pecked Jacqueline on the cheek, then rolled her eyes. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. Be back in five.” She gave her father a significant look then was gone.
“She’s a wonderful girl,” Jacqueline said, watching her thread her way between the tables. She turned back. “Like you in many ways.”
“Stubborn.”
Jacqueline nodded. “And a little bit difficult.” She averted her eyes. “Lonely.”
“That’s one of the reasons I want her to get out of the business.”
“It won’t happen unless she wants it. I don’t think even you could force her to leave.”
The waiter came. Jacqueline was drinking a kir, and she ordered another. McGarvey ordered a cognac neat; he figured he was going to need it.
“She’s been talking about her mother. What does she have to say about all this?”
“Katy doesn’t want her to follow in my footsteps.”
“Neither would I, if I were her mother,” Jacqueline said.
McGarvey studied her troubled face. He’d been against her coming back to Washington with him. There were still too many issues unresolved from his past. Dangerous issues which could hurt her. But she wouldn’t listen to him, or to her control officer in Paris. She’d resigned, but the DGSE had simply placed her on an extended leave of absence.
“Is that what these past couple of weeks have been all about, Jacqueline?” he asked. “You want me to get out of the business and take my old job at Milford? Finish the book? The two of us settle down in a little cottage by the Chesapeake? Happy forever after?”
His remark hurt her, which is what he’d intended, because he was frightened again for her safety. “You’re a real shit,” she flared, suddenly angry, her French accent thicker than usual. “Who do you think you are, Candide? Wandering through life an innocent. No blood ever sticks to your hands?” She shook her head in frustration. “Merde. Who made you God anyway? Judge, juror, executioner? You kill anyone you want and nothing happens to you. It slides off your back because you’ve convinced yourself that what you’re doing makes for a better world. Well, killing never solved anything. Don’t you understand? Can’t you get that through your head? You can’t fix the world with a gun! Salopard!”
It was as if she had plunged a knife into his chest, directly into his beating heart. “Go back to Paris,” he said softly.
She said nothing, and he waited. When he’d lived in Lausanne, the Swiss police had sent Marta Fredricks to watch over him. Like Jacqueline she’d fallen in love with him, and like Jacqueline she’d followed him after a particularly bad assignment. It had gotten her killed. He was desperately afraid for Jacqueline. As he was for his daughter. The only one finally clear was his ex-wife, Kathleen. She was safe. It was one of the few constants in his life.
“I love you, Kirk,” Jacqueline finally said, reaching for him.
“I know,” McGarvey said. He kept his hands folded on the table in front of him.
Her face dropped again. “I must know if you have any feelings for me.”
“You want me to make a decision so you can tell it to Paris,” McGarvey said hurtfully. “So you can justify your decision not to return.”
Jacqueline was fighting back tears. This moment had been coming for a long time. “I want you to be safe.”
“You want me to marry you. But first I have to give you my word that I’m out of the business, permanently, otherwise you’d never be able to return to France, even for a visit.”
It was the reason for Liz’s bittersweet mood. She liked Jacqueline, but she still held the faint hope, almost a fairy-tale hope, that somehow her mother and father would get back together. If he married Jacqueline, Liz’s impossible dream would fade even farther into the background.
Jacqueline met his eyes and nodded.
“Return to Paris, Jacqueline,” he said. “You have a life back there, a home, roots, family. I can’t give any of that to you.”
“But I love you,” she said defiantly.
“That will fade,” McGarvey said, hating himself for what he was doing to her. But he’d known it would come to this from the beginning, and yet he’d been selfish enough, lonely enough, not to end it before it had begun.
Jacqueline studied his face for a very long time, her eyes filling. “It’s eating you alive, my darling,” she said very softly, almost a whisper. “Get out while you still can, if for no one’s sake except your own.”
She gathered her purse, got up and headed for the exit as Elizabeth returned from the bathroom.
“Jacqueline?” Liz called out.
McGarvey was about to turn back to his daughter, his mood dark, his emotions rubbed raw by what he had just done, when he noticed a black Mercedes E320 darting through traffic on Canal Street toward them at a high rate of speed and accelerating. There was a man in the front passenger seat and one in the backseat, the windows down. Assassins, something in his gut told him. They were meant for him. Somehow they knew that he would be seated outside this restaurant at this moment.
Jacqueline started to turn back at the same moment the Mercedes passed the restaurant entrance and the man in the backseat tossed something out the window.
“Bomb!” McGarvey shouted. He shoved the heavy wrought-iron patio table over on its side as he jumped up and reached for Elizabeth.
The package fell short at Jacqueline’s feet.
McGarvey caught Elizabeth’s wrist and dragged her to the floor as the bomb went off with a tremendous flash and bang, glass and metal fragments tearing through the fifty or sixty restaurant patrons who’d had no time to react. People screamed in terror and agony even as glass shards continued to fall around them.
The patio table McGarvey had pushed over had saved him from the brunt of the blast, which had taken out the front of the restaurant, the wrought-iron fence and striped awnings. Traffic had come to a complete halt, several cars nearest to the restaurant damaged by the explosion.