“We’re not sure!” Trotter cried.
“I’m to make sure, first, is that it? I’m to suck after his ex-wife, dig through his dirty laundry. I’m to make sure and then kill the bastard. No trial. Nothing!” McGarvey wanted very much to hit something.
“We didn’t know who else to turn to,” Trotter said miserably.
“American justice has broken down,” McGarvey said quietly. “Will I get a medal when it’s over? Or will I be the next embarrassment? You have someone in the wings to put a bullet in the back of my head?”
Trotter’s eyes went wide. “Good God, what do you take us for, Kirk?”
“We’ve already established that, John. Now it’s just a question of degree. Nothing more.”
The young girl with the sommersprossen drove McGarvey back up to Lausanne in the blue van while Trotter remained behind to close down the house. She knew nothing of the real reason for the Swiss trip or McGarvey’s part in it, and he was of no mind to enlighten her. Instead he sank down within his own dark thoughts, quite oblivious to the lovely scenery, unaware that the day had become nice.
He could run. Paris. London, perhaps. Maybe the coast of Spain, or the Greek isles. But then, in the end, he would just be running away from himself. And that was impossible, wasn’t it?
Like an old football injury, his sudden call to arms had come to him with a hurtful intensity. He became aware of his old wounds, both mental and physical; the cold fear that clutched at his gut whenever he was in the field rising strong.
Once a spy always a spy? But God in heaven he couldn’t think of himself as a murderer. Not that. When they were married Kathleen used to tell him: “Plunge forward, it’s the only direction.” But she never had an inkling of exactly what it was that bothered him.
He had a very sharp vision of the man he killed in Chile. He had been close enough to see the look of fear in the general’s face. The abject terror in the man’s eyes. It was a vision that haunted him and would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.
There had been others, too. Not many. Not in the numbers a combat soldier would experience, but for him they were a dark, dreadful legion.
“It is war,” Alvin Stewart had told him in the old days. “Our survival or theirs. Simple.”
War, yes. But it wasn’t simple.
There are a million crossroads in our lives. At each intersection we have a choice that will forever determine the rest of our existence. How many wrong paths had he taken? Kathleen hadn’t understood, neither had his sister, yet they both instinctively understood fear and how it worked its changes. They were experts at it, while it was his master.
Trotter had given him a Washington telephone number. Nothing else. It was the beginning.
9
The nondescript gray Mercedes 240D clattered up the switchback above the lake and finally pulled over just before the long flight of stairs that connected the terraced roadways. Marta Fredricks, wearing a white sweater, dark slacks, and a gray raincoat, sat on the passenger side. She felt as if she had been kicked in the gut by a friend; the pain was there but it was hard to believe.
Swiss Federal Police Supervisor Johann Mueller switched off the engine and turned to her. He was like a father to Marta. She had worked for him even before this assignment.
“He is a dangerous man, Mati,” Mueller said.
Marta looked up sharply, almost resentful that he was using that name … now. “If he leaves Switzerland?”
“Then that would be the end of it as far as concerns us. But there are no guarantees. You knew that from the beginning. From the very beginning.”
She turned away.
Mueller reached across her and, with his fingertips at her chin, gently turned her face back to him. “Listen to me now, young lady. If your father were alive, he would be proud of you.”
“But it hurts,” she cried.
“Yes, oh yes, I am sure it does. But do you think you are the only one who has ever made a sacrifice for Switzerland? I could tell you …”
She tossed her head and turned away from him again. The day had turned lovely, though the wind off the lake was still very cold. Oh, Kirk, she cried inside. She’d always known it would come. Eventually. But, God, she had not counted on the pain. Nothing at the school in Worb, outside of Bern, had prepared her for this. Not the confidence course. Not the tradecraft lectures, certainly nothing to do with the law, Swiss or international, had forewarned of this.
The surveillance had been spotted two days ago. Then this morning Kirk had been run down off the square. They had followed him to a house about an hour south.
He had taken his gun. It was the one damning bit of evidence against him.
“Men of his ilk don’t rush for their guns unless they mean to use them,” Mueller had said.
But she had been so proud of him, until his recent bout of restlessness. Liese had been trying to get him into bed for the past year and a half without results. Only just lately she had come to think … to dream that he loved her. That she could tell him everything and that they could run. But to where?
Marta could feel her eyes filling. It was still another thing they had not prepared her for at Worb. Big girls don’t cry, that was how it went in the song, wasn’t it?
“You either believe in your heritage or you don’t,” Mueller was saying gently.
He was like a Jew with his guilt. But she knew what was coming next.
“It should never have gone on this long. I should never have let you talk me into continuing. I should have seen the signs.” Mueller sighed, almost theatrically, although Marta knew it was for real. “If you can’t do this, tell me. Other arrangements will be made.”
A sudden panic rose in her breast. She spun around. “No!” she cried. “You don’t understand.”
“I think I do. Perhaps more than you want me to. But he must be neutralized. We cannot have an operation going on under our noses. He has a gun. He has been given his brief, apparently, and we must — Marta, I have to emphasize must—consider him a danger to Swiss law and order. To our peace.”
If he meant by “a danger” that he was angry, then yes. Angry and dangerous. Kirk was all that and more. But dangerous to the precious Swiss law and order? No, she could not believe that, although there had definitely been something bothering him lately.
There had been a time, she thought, when they spent most of their waking hours together in bed. In fact, they used to share a joke: Why rent an apartment when all they needed is their bed and a closet large enough for their clothes? Then they’d laugh. Who needed clothes?
In the summer when it got warm, they wouldn’t stop. Sometimes they’d crawl out of bed and look back at the outlines their bodies had left in sweat on the sheets after hours of lovemaking.
But it wasn’t all sex, was it? Liese with her antics proved that. She certainly was a beautiful and desirable young woman, but Kirk had never once even hinted that he might want to take her up on her propositions.
“I know what you’re doing,” Mueller said sympathetically. “But you’re a professional.”
A young couple came up the stairway hand-in-hand and hiked off in the opposite direction. Marta watched them until they disappeared around the corner. Then she glanced up at the apartment she had shared with Kirk for nearly five years.
An entire period in her life was coming to an end now, and she didn’t know if she was going to have the courage to see it through.
Mueller had suggested someone else handle it. Kirk could be arrested and then deported back to the States. But in his present state of mind, that would be a very dangerous operation. There was no telling what he might do. Marta was convinced that he would never surrender. He would run. She could see, in her mind’s eye, what that might lead to. In that, at least, he was a danger to Swiss law and order.