“I’ll do it,” she said, looking back.
Mueller stared at her for a long time. “I’ll be here for you,” he said.
She shook her head. “It’s all right, Johann. I can handle it.”
“You’ll need backup. I insist on it.”
“No,” she screeched. “Don’t you understand what I am saying to you?”
“What are you saying to me?” Mueller asked softly.
“If he leaves Switzerland then it is over. You agreed to that.”
“If his brief includes an operation here …?”
“If he leaves Switzerland,” she insisted.
“If he goes without a fuss, then there will be no problem as far as I am concerned.”
“Very well,” Marta said. She rubbed her eyes and wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Mueller reached in his pocket and withdrew a pistol. It was a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson. He held it out to her, but she shrank away from it.
“Whatever you think or feel, Mati, we consider him dangerous. You will not go to him unarmed. I simply will not allow it.”
“Do you honestly think I could use it against him?” she said, aghast.
“If your survival depended on it.”
“What in God’s name do you think he is?”
“We know that, Mati. Listen to me … he is an assassin.”
“Was!” she cried. “He quit. He dropped out. He’s done with it. It’s over for him.”
“Then why did he run for his gun this morning?”
Oh, Kirk, she cried again inside. She looked from Mueller’s eyes to the gun and back again. He did not waver. She believed him. At last she reached out, took the weapon, and stuffed it in her purse.
“I want you away from here,” she said. “Do that much for me. If he’s spooked it might get difficult even for me.”
Mueller looked at her critically. He nodded. “We’ll listen on the monitors. But, Mati, at the first hint of trouble we’re coming in.”
Marta got out of the car and walked up the street without looking back. Before she got to the apartment she heard the Mercedes start up, turn around, and drive off. Only then did she look back. The street was empty.
McGarvey stood at the end of the Avenue d’Ouchy, looking up toward the Place Saint-Francois, only now the familiar scene seemed somehow strange to him. Disjointed. Alien. It could have been the first time he had ever been to this city, though he watched the traffic with a practiced eye. It was all coming back to him; the precautions and the adrenaline that gave him an edge, the tradecraft. It was as if he had never left the service. But there was nothing untoward going on here. He had expected police, perhaps some of Trotter’s team to make sure he did the right thing. Marta might have sent someone, he told himself as he crossed with the light and headed up to the bookstore. But if they were here, watching, they were well hidden. If that were the case, it would not matter what he did or didn’t do.
Darby Yarnell, according to the Cuban slimeball, had been and possibly still was a spy for the Soviet Union. He had murdered a CIA agent back in the sixties. He had been married to a young Mexican woman. And his Soviet case officer was a brilliant star named Valentin Illen Baranov.
Yarnell’s intelligence product was said to be fantastic.
It all fit, according to Trotter. Leonard Day was on his side. The big guns were lined up. There was enough evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, to make at least a prima facie argument. But there were so goddamned many holes.
McGarvey continued around the square, an almost preternatural awareness coming to him. A catalog developed in his mind of cars and vans and trucks; of an antenna half-bent, a Mercedes limousine, a window down, two kids on motorbikes, a bus. No repeats, no passenger switches, no studiously indifferent faces, no dark, mysterious figures.
At the corner he crossed with traffic and walked back to the bookstore. Through the front windows he could see Füelm speaking with an older, white-haired man. Two women were in the art section, browsing among the Degas and Rembrandt books, and a stocky, youngish woman clutched a thin book to her breasts as if it were a baby.
Inside, Fuelm looked up. “Ah, Kirk. Are you back now, for the day?”
“Only just for a moment. Can you close up this afternoon?”
“Of course,” Füelm said after the briefest of hesitations.
McGarvey took the spiral stairs up to his office and stopped a moment just inside the door to let his eyes roam critically around the room. Nothing had been touched since he had been here this morning. No one had come up searching. Looking.
He crossed the small, book-lined room to the windows and looked down on the alley. No one was there. No watchers. No lookers this time. No young girls arm-in-arm. None of Trotter’s people, nor the Swiss. He wondered where Liese was this afternoon. He hoped she would be genuinely disappointed when he was gone. She thought too much of herself.
From a small lockbox in a desk drawer, McGarvey retrieved his battered, well-used passport and an envelope containing five thousand American. His escape mechanism. His return-trip ticket. Along with the Walther, it was his only guarantee of safety.
For a minute or two he stood behind his desk looking across the room at the door, staring at nothing, smelling the musty familiar odors, hearing the familiar traffic sounds outside on the street. From below he heard the tinkle of the front door bell. Someone coming, someone leaving. Fuelm could handle it.
Much depended on Marta now. She was Swiss police after all. That one little delusion of his — the one in which he had given her the benefit of the doubt — had been shattered casually by Trotter’s people. If Marta and Liese were searching for him now, if they had sent out the alarm, run up the balloon, if they were getting nervous, then the fiction was finished in any event. With luck they would let him walk away clean. Easiest that way, he tried to tell himself. Don’t look back, you can never tell what might be gaining on you. Your heart?
That was it then. It came down to a simple yes or no. Did he love her or didn’t he? There’d be no coming back from this one. No knocking about in the field for a week or a month or two, and then settling back into the bookstore, into the old, comfortable routines. The Swiss were far too sophisticated to let that happen. Marta, he suspected, was too fragile. And, like a strip of metal that has been bent back and forth too many times, he himself was feeling the signs of fatigue. Before long he would bend once too many times and he would break.
McGarvey picked up the telephone, started to dial his apartment, but then changed his mind and hung up. She was there or she wasn’t. Calling her would neither drive her away, nor conjure her up. He wondered what he really wanted.
Before he left, he looked one last time around his office. Five years of his life was coming to an end. Easier than he thought it would be.
Füelm looked up when McGarvey came down. The young girl with the small book was gone. The other customers were still in the shop.
“Are you leaving now?” the older man asked.
McGarvey nodded. “You will be all right this afternoon?”
“This afternoon … yes.”
Of course Füelm would be in on it with his daughter and Marta. How much did they really know? McGarvey glanced up the stairs to his office door. They’d probably taken the place apart. They would know about the money, about the passport and the gun.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” McGarvey said.