In his room at the Bristol, McGarvey was sipping a snifter of very good Napoleon brandy—his first for the evening—as he talked to Otto and Pete back in Langley. Despite the hour they were still at the OHB.
“Sounds like Mueller gave you enough rope to hang yourself,” Pete said.
“At least they didn’t kick me out, and Weisse is going to get me copies of their files on the Schlueter woman and her organization. Might be something for us.”
“Tonight?” Otto asked. “Send the stuff to me and I’ll get started.”
“Probably not till morning. In the meantime something else has come up.”
“The Schuleter woman’s people?” Pete asked.
“I’m not sure,” Mac said. He told them about the Mercedes across the street from the hotel. “The guy rolled down his window and looked right at me before he took off. Dark complexion, black hair, mustache. Definitely not German.”
“Pakistani?”
“Be my guess. Which means the ISI knows I’ve taken an interest.”
“If it’s the Pakistanis,” Pete cautioned. She was a charming woman, and among the best interrogators the CIA had ever known, because she was not only patient and kind with her Johns, as she called her subjects, but she was skeptical without letting it show during the typical interview. She gave the outward appearance of being positive about everything, while in reality she trusted nothing—especially anything that seemed like a sure bet.
“Point taken,” Mac said. “But whoever it was had a definite interest in me, and I’d like to know why.”
“Are you coming back in the morning, kemo sabe?” Otto asked. “I think I might be able to come up with something that makes sense.”
“I’ll get out of here as soon as Wolf brings me the files.”
“Do you think this guy will show up again tonight” Pete asked, and it sounded as if she already knew the answer.
Mac’s suite was on the fifth floor, the windows looking down on the Ku’damm. He was watching the heavy traffic as the Mercedes pulled into a parking spot across the street and a slender man in a dark jacket and jeans got out.
“He just got out of his car.”
“It’s a trap.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Are you armed?” Pete asked.
“No,” McGarvey said, and before she or Otto could object he hung up.
He got his black blazer and went downstairs. The lobby bar was busy. The hour was coming up on midnight by the time he got outside.
The man from the Mercedes had already started away on foot when McGarvey crossed the street and looked inside the car. But the doors were locked, and nothing was on the passenger seat in front or in the back.
The Pakistani, or whoever he was, had just made it to the end of the block when McGarvey hurried after him. He wanted to crowd the man. That he was being led into a trap was a foregone conclusion—he wanted to see what might happen if the guy knew that he was being pressed.
In the next block McGarvey had closed the gap to less than thirty meters. The zoo was not far, and though it was closed at this hour of the night, it would make a perfect place for an ambush. But the Pakistani turned left and entered a parking garage.
Mac was just a few seconds behind; inside he stopped for a moment to listen. From somewhere on the ramp above he heard faint footfalls. The guy had left his Mercedes parked in front of the hotel, so he hadn’t come here to retrieve a parked car. Someone was waiting for the hare to lead the hound to slaughter.
Turning, he sprinted across to the down ramp and headed to the second level, making as little noise as possible. The garage was mostly dark; the concrete pillars cast long shadows. And it was quiet, the only noise coming from traffic on the Ku’damm.
Just at the top Mac quickly crossed to one of the pillars, where he stopped.
The Pakistani was about twenty meters away, just around the corner from the up ramp, obviously waiting for McGarvey to appear. After several seconds, he took a quick look over the barrier before he ducked back.
McGarvey stepped around the pillar. “Looking for me?” he asked.
Startled, the man turned and stood flat-footed for just a moment, like a deer caught in the headlights. But then he reached inside his pocket.
Mac moved back, ready to duck behind the pillar again.
But the man pulled a cell phone out and spoke briefly to someone, before he put it back in his pocket. “Clever of you, but not clever enough,” the man said. He spoke with a British accent.
“You’re a long ways from Islamabad, but then I would have thought that you would have arranged a meeting with Pam Schlueter on neutral ground somewhere outside of Germany.”
A car started up from the next level above, and tires squealed on the concrete floor.
McGarvey walked over to the next concrete support column, and Naisir warily stepped back into the deeper shadows.
A dirty yellow Mercedes panel van shot off the down ramp, its headlights flashing as the the driver hauled the wheel left and accelerated the van directly toward McGarvey.
At the last moment he stepped to the side, expecting the driver to run him down, smash his body against the pillar, but the van skidded to a halt, the side door opened, and three very large men leapt out.
They were dressed in dark clothing, their faces bare, not worried that their descriptions might given to the police. But they were not armed, or at least they had not drawn weapons, which meant this was going to look like a simple assault and robbery.
The guy McGarvey had followed from the hotel was gone, his part of the operation finished.
“You gentlemen might want to get back in your van and drive away,” Mac said, stepping out in the open. “That is, if you’re smart enough.”
The three of them spread out, one left, one right, and one directly facing McGarvey. They were dark like the man from the Mercedes but their features where rough. Working class, possibly Albanians, maybe Turks, a lot of whom had immigrated to Germany for good-paying jobs. But these three were bullyboys, someone’s enforcers. And though they were big men, they were light on their feet, like professional boxers.
“You should have stayed home and minded your own business, you fucker,” the one in the middle said, his accent thick.
The three of them advanced. But instead of retreating, Mac strode directly toward the one in the middle, but at the last moment he shifted right and slammed the second man backward into the concrete column.
The middle man leapt forward, saying something under his breath, and McGarvey turned toward him, ducking a roundhouse punch and smashing his fist three times into the guy’s chest, just over his heart.
He skipped to one side as the third man rushed forward. Grabbing the guy’s coat sleeve he propelled him into the one who’d pushed away from the pillar, blood streaming down the side of his face.
The middle man was trying to catch his breath, when McGarvey turned back, got behind him and twisted his head sharply to the left, breaking his neck.
Turning on his heel he was in time to see both men fumble under their jackets, bringing out pistols—what looked like older Glocks.
He was on the first man. Grabbing the guy’s gun hand he pulled the Turk around and, using him as a shield, he snatched the pistol and fired two rounds at the other man, hitting him center mass and dropping him to the deck.
Mac shoved the Turk away and pointed the pistol directly at his face. “Who hired you?”
The man said something unintelligible.
With a squeal of tires the van shot backward, turned left, and raced to the down ramp, careening off the concrete wall with a hail of sparks before it disappeared.
“Just you and me now, and I have a gun,” Mac said. “You can tell me who sent you, in which case I let you walk away. Or you can refuse and I’ll kill you, in which case it’ll be me who walks away.”
“You’ll shoot me anyway.”
“No need,” McGarvey said. He ejected the pistol’s magazine, tossed it aside, ejected the round in the firing chamber and let it fall to the deck, and threw the gun away. “Who hired you?”
The Turk glanced at the two bodies. “I don’t know. It was a blind number, as usual. Money always shows up the next day at a drop box in a whorehouse not far from here.”
“Who was the man who set up the ambush?”
“I never got a clear look at his face.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” McGarvey said.
The Turk turned and headed for the ramp.
“How much to take me out?” McGarvey called after him.
“Five hundred euros,” the Turk said. “Each.” He disappeared down the ramp.
Mac gave the man a full five minutes to get clear, then he walked down the up ramp to the still busy street and headed back to his hotel. He would have bet just about anything that the guy from the Mercedes was a Pakistani; the English they learned was British, and the best field officers spoke it with a proper upper-class accent. And he would have bet just about the same amount that the three guys he’d come up against were Turks hired by someone—most likely ISI—from the embassy.
The two-tone dee-dah of police sirens sounded not too far away. Mac crossed the street with the light so that he was on the same side as the Bristol and picked up the pace. The Pakistani from the Mercedes had probably called the police for insurance in case the muscle he’d hired wasn’t successful. At the very least Mac would be taken into police custody and held for a time.