Alex raced through the restaurant, into the busy kitchen, and out the back door and onto a narrow lane across from the rear of the U.S. Embassy, which fronted on the Avenue Gabriel. She turned left and, walking fast, made it to the Rue de Miromesnil before she looked over her shoulder to see if McGarvey was behind her. He wasn’t.
The shot had been fired from a high-power rifle, which to her had sounded like a Barrett, and it was only by happenstance that she’d suddenly moved to keep her newspaper from blowing away. But she’d been in time to glance up and get a quick glimpse of the shooter, who’d been in the second-floor window of the building across the avenue.
It had been a man, she was certain of it. But she got the impression he was tall and very ruggedly built—the opposite from George. And that only made sense if George wasn’t the one doing the killings—or if he wasn’t working alone.
At the corner, she turned around and walked back to the Champs-Élysées, half a block up from the George V. A crowd had gathered in front of the café, and two police cars had already arrived. A cop was in the middle of the street, directing traffic, as an ambulance, its siren blaring, came around the corner two blocks away.
If McGarvey was somewhere down there, he was lost in the crowd.
She headed up the avenue toward the Arc de Triomphe, and in the next block she entered the VIP World Travel Agency, housed in a small storefront.
A young woman seated behind the desk looked up and smiled. “Bonjour, Madame,” she said pleasantly.
“Good morning,” Alex said in English, and the young woman switched languages.
Alex put her real passport on the desk. “I would like to make a trip to Tel Aviv, but first I need to get a message to your director.”
The agent glanced at the passport but did not reach for it.
George had told them all that if ever they got in over their heads over the business in Iraq, they were to get word to him through the travel agency either in Washington, London, Berlin, or here, in Paris. The procedure was to lay their real passport—no matter what other name they might be using—on the agent’s desk, and ask to get a message to the agency’s director before making a trip to Tel Aviv.
The company had been set up by the Israeli Mossad in the late fifties as an elaborate front so that its agents could travel to Argentina to capture Adolf Eichmann and bring him back to Israel. The thinking was that if they used their own travel section, the operation might not be discovered and Eichmann would not disappear again.
The company had remained in existence all this time because it was successful as an ordinary travel agency, and it was even expanded to Berlin, London, and Washington from its original office here in Paris. It wasn’t a very closely guarded secret—at least not from the CIA—that the occasional Mossad operator still used the company.
“Do you have the name of our current director?” the woman asked.
“It’s been some years.”
“What name do you know?”
“George.”
The agent took Alex’s passport to a machine in one corner, made a copy of the bearer’s pages, and brought it back.
“And when would you like to travel to Tel Aviv?”
“As soon as George responds to my query.”
“Are you staying in the city?”
“Yes, but I’ll call you at noon,” Alex said.
“What is the message?”
“‘I’m the last. Shall I come?’”
“Very well. It will go out within the hour. But I cannot guarantee there will be a response, or if there is one, when it will arrive.”
“Will there be a fee?”
“No, but I will take an impression of your credit card to make the travel arrangements,” the agent said.
Alex handed her the Lois Wheeler credit card. The agent made a copy of it, but she said nothing that the name was different from the passport.
“I won’t wait long,” Alex said.
“I understand,” the agent said.
* * *
Alex caught a cab a half block away and ordered the driver to take her back to the InterContinental.
McGarvey had followed her to Paris, which had been no real feat of tradecraft, not with Otto Rencke’s wizardry. And she’d known he would be right behind her, so she’d put on the little show for him in the Tuileries, and then had gone to the sidewalk café, figuring he would want to talk.
What she hadn’t counted on was the shooter also tracing her to Paris and to the specific restaurant. Whoever it was, they had information from inside the CIA.
It came back to George. If he was the killer, he had help this morning from the shooter across from the sidewalk café. And if it was him, he also had help inside the CIA. Someone on campus, doing his dirty work. But whoever it was had to be insane not only to kill the Alpha Seven team one by one but to mutilate those who’d been on campus.
That last bit was the sticking point for her. George had done horrible things in Iraq—and so had she—but those had been done as acts of war. Acts to demoralize the enemy, which in fact had happened.
This now, over the past few days, made no sense from her perspective.
And the last bit that gave her some pause was the hotel. She’d been traced here by McGarvey and by the shooter. The hotel was no longer her safe haven. Yet she decided it was the only place for her to be. If the shooter came after her again, she would be on familiar ground, McGarvey as her backup.