The Shadowmen (8 page)

Martine started to say something when a man halfway around the table leaned forward and looked to the left. He wore dark-framed glasses, but Kurshin recognized him at once, and he felt a little thrill of anticipation. McGarvey had found the plaque, had read the meaning of it, and had shown up. The woman wasn't with him yet, but Lestov said that she was on her way to Paris. She would be here by tomorrow evening when the real game would begin.

“Do you recognize that man?” Martine asked.

“The one with the glasses?”

“Oui.”

“I thought so, but I'm not so sure.”

“He doesn't look like much,” Martine said. “Evidently not bold.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bank is only at twenty thousand. If he were of any substance, he would have covered it.”

“Or the Saudis.”

“They're waiting for a real challenge, which won't come until later tonight, sometime after midnight.”

The banker, an old man with thick eyebrows and an unpleasantly large mouth, dealt the next set of cards. The croupier passed the player, a woman in her mid- to late twenties, not at all unattractive, her cards.

Immediately, the banker turned his cards over, this time a six and two.

“Huit,”
the croupier announced.

The woman indicated she would take another card, this one up.

The banker slid the card out of the shoe, and the croupier passed it down the table, flipping it faceup at the last moment. It was a queen, which counted as zero.

She turned her cards over, a six and a king. She lost.

The banker was given his share, minus the house cut, and he announced he would remain the banker, this time at fifty thousand euros.

“Banco,”
McGarvey said loudly, his voice slurred, the single word mispronounced.

“The man is drunk,” Martine said.

Kurshin said nothing. McGarvey would not have come here drunk, and from what he'd been told, the American was fluent in French.

The cards were dealt, and McGarvey flipped his over immediately, a nine and a jack.
“Neuf,”
he said savagely. “Nine.”

The banker checked his cards, asked for a third—which was an ace—and he turned over his down cards, which were a queen and three. A loss.

“How about them apples,” McGarvey mumbled.

12

“The man standing behind the player at the far end of the table to your left is a possibility,” Otto said in McGarvey's ear.

Mac put his hand to his mouth as if he were about to cough. “The one with the woman in white?”

“Yes. I'm running both of their photos.”

The glasses that Otto had designed were a riff on Google Glass, except they were not so obvious. Mac's view of the built-in camera and the Internet came up as a head-up display on the inside of both lenses. No one looking at him, not even close up, could spot the display, but the images were transmitted in real time to one of Otto's monitors back at Langley or to his laptop wherever he was.

The woman who'd lost got the bank for one hundred thousand euros.

“Banco,”
McGarvey said, excluding the other players around the table from making any bets.

The two young Arabs got up and sauntered off, but one of them came back and looked at McGarvey, a smirk on his lips.

Four cards were dealt down. Mac's were a seven and king.

The woman turned her cards over. A two and six.

“Huit,”
the croupier announced.

McGarvey took a long time to apparently make a decision. The croupier was about to say something when Mac motioned for another card.

The woman dealt the card facedown, and the croupier deposited it faceup in front of Mac. A two.

Mac turned his cards over.

“Neuf,”
the croupier said, and a sigh went around the table. Hoping with the ace to win was not only highly unlikely, it went against the polite conventions of the game, once again proving the American was crude. Lucky, but crude.

“How about them goddamn apples,” McGarvey said loudly enough for everyone in the salon to hear.

“I'm coming up with nothing on the man, but the woman seems interesting,” Otto said in his ear.

Mac glanced toward the end of the table, but the man and woman weren't there. He raised a hand to his mouth. “They're gone.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Follow them.”

“Might not be our man,” Otto said.

“We'll see.”

When the accounts were settled, McGarvey passed a five thousand–euro plaque to the croupier and got up, making a show of being unsteady. “Place my winnings in my account, and don't shortchange me.”

He turned, knocking his chair over, and left the salon. One of the casino managers intercepted him just at the front doors.

“Pardon, Monsieur Arouet,” he said politely. “There is the matter of your winnings.”

“Hold them; I'll be back tomorrow evening,” McGarvey said.

The manager hesitated.

McGarvey patted the man on the arm. “Sober,” he said, half under his breath.

Once he was outside and out of earshot from the doormen and valet parkers, he talked to Otto. “I'm clear.”

“You made quite an impression,” Otto said.

Traffic was picking up, and a lot of partygoers on foot crowded the Place du Casino. A police car flashed by, lights blinking but no siren. Down in the harbor, the deep-throated horn of an obviously large boat sounded a long blast, which meant it was backing out of its slip. If anything, the evening was softer than it had been earlier, but busier. Monte-Carlo was coming alive; just about every person here was a millionaire.

“I half expected him to join the game when the Arabs left,” McGarvey said, strolling slowly in the general direction of his hotel.

“If it was our man.”

“You said that you had something interesting on the woman.”

“On both of them, actually. The guy is traveling under the name Nance Kallinger, a bookshop owner in London's West End. A small bookstore.”

“Not the kind of a business that would make enough money to dress him in expensive clothes and bring him to Monaco.”

“Exactly, but it doesn't prove much, because on the surface, the woman—her work name is Martine Barineau—is loaded. Her ex is a banker in Paris, and she cashed in when they divorced.”

“Work name?”

“Yeah. Trouble is, I couldn't find any direct evidence of her divorce or the settlement. Could have been sealed, for whatever reason, but I couldn't find any traces of it. So I looked further, starting with the DGSE.” The Directorate General for External Security was France's primary intelligence agency. “Nothing there, either—at least not on the divorce. But the name Martine Barineau shows up as a person of interest, but at low priority.”

“She's not French?”

“No. DGSE thinks she's British.”

“MI6?”

“Possibly.”

“Do they have a name?”

“No, and she doesn't show up on MI6's mainframe under Barineau.”

“Okay, assuming the French are right and she is a Brit, what is she doing here, and why do they give her a low priority? It makes no sense.”

“My darlings will keep on it. In the meantime, I'm looking at the Place du Casino webcam. They're just entering Le Bar Americain
.
” The bar was in McGarvey's hotel.

“Back up the image to when they came out of the casino,” McGarvey said.

“What are we looking for?” Otto asked.

“I'm not sure,” McGarvey said. He sat down on a park bench framed with bougainvillea in full flower. “Send it to my glasses.”

A moment later, the images, taken from the webcams that showed at fifteen-second intervals everything going on in the Place 24-7, appeared in McGarvey's glasses. The focus was at about twelve inches, the same distance for reading something on a printed page, yet the real world in front of him was also in clear focus.

The man and woman came out of the casino and had a brief conversation before they headed away.

“Can one of your programs read their lips?”

“A second out of every fifteen,” Otto said. “Maybe come up with a word or a snatch of a word.”

“Go ahead with the playback,” McGarvey said.

A young couple passed, arm in arm, laughing, completely unaware of someone dressed in a tuxedo sitting on a bench in the middle of the night apparently talking to himself.

At one point, the man made a call on a cell phone.

“That was three minutes ago,” Otto said. “I'm on it.”

The woman said something to him, but they continued walking, and a minute and a half later, the man pocketed the phone.

“It's the new quantum effects encryption algorithm that just showed up about two months ago. I'm making progress with it, but we not there yet.”

“Whose is it?”

“The Russians'.”

“Bingo,” McGarvey said. “That's just too big a coincidence for him not to be our guy.”

“Question is, who did he call, and why?” Otto said. “And what the hell is he doing with a British woman operating under a work name?”

“Something I'm going to ask them,” McGarvey said.

13

A black S-Class Mercedes pulled up across the road from where McGarvey was seated, and two fit-looking men dressed alike in dark blazers, white shirts, and jeans hopped out of the back. They had to wait for a break in the traffic before they could cross.

Mac got up and headed back the way he had come. He glanced over at the two as they angled toward him, dodging traffic.

“I have company,” he said. “Run the plate.” The image of the car's rear plate enlarged for an instant and then zoomed back to normal.

“Give me a couple of seconds,” Otto said. “These guys don't look so happy.”

Just before the casino, McGarvey turned down a narrow driveway that led back to a rear service entrance where deliveries were made. The place was deserted.

“The car is owned by Sergev Imports, Marseilles,” Otto said. “I captured the guys' images, and I'm running through the portions of the FSB personnel files I can access, but nothing's popped up yet.”

“They sure as hell didn't make it all the way in response to any call tonight.”

“They were standing by someplace close waiting for you to come out of the casino. It nails the Russian connection.”

“Still leaves the woman.”

“I have a friend in MI6 who might be able to help out.”

“Call him.”

“Her,” Otto said.

“I'll see if I can get anything out of these guys,” Mac said.

“They might be armed.”

“If they wanted to shoot me, they would have made it a drive-by.”

A pair of Dumpsters were lined up against a brick wall. McGarvey flipped open the lid of one of them, and it landed with a loud bang. He turned as the two men came around the corner.

“Going someplace, then?” the larger of the two asked, his French accent thick. Both of them were dark, the bigger one with a thin mustache and thick black hair.

Mac took them to be Corsicans, street hoods. “Waiting to find out why you two
salopards
were following me. Stupid, actually, to corner someone in a back alley with no way out.”

“He opened the Dumpster—saves us the trouble of getting rid of the shit,” the slightly leaner one said in gutter French.

“Not only stupid bastards but
nullisime
to boot,” Mac answered in street French. It roughly translated to
totally worthless
.

“I'll take care of this piece of garbage,” the larger man said. He pulled a steel ASP, which was a collapsible police baton, out of his belt and flipped it to its full length of twenty-one inches.

Cops all over the world used it, in one variation or another, because in the right hands it was an effective close-quarters battle weapon. A man hit in the back of the leg at about midthigh would immediately fall to the ground. A hit to the upper arm or collarbone would paralyze that side of the body. Raising an arm or a hand to deflect the blow would only result in broken bones.

“Sorry. I don't want to break these,” McGarvey said, and he pocketed the glasses.

“I'll break more than those, you son of a bitch,” the big man said as he charged.

Mac stood his ground, a slight smile on his lips until the Corsican was on top of him, the ASP coming down. He stepped to the side and grabbed the man's wrist with one hand while at the same time driving the side of his shoe into the guy's left kneecap, which popped out of place. As the man went down, Mac twisted the baton out of his grasp and stepped away.

The other Corsican pulled a Beretta semiautomatic pistol out of a shoulder holster, but before he could bring it to bear, Mac was on him, slamming the baton into his gun arm, paralyzing that side, the pistol falling to the pavement.

McGarvey kicked the pistol away and stepped to the left so that he could keep an eye on both of them.

“Now, gentlemen, who sent you to kill me?” McGarvey asked.

The men didn't reply. The bigger one was on the ground, his back against the Dumpster.

The other one had backed off and was favoring his right arm.

“If need be, I'll beat both of you to death with this thing. I'm very good at it.”

“We weren't sent here to kill you, just rough you up,” the Corsican by the Dumpster said.

“Who sent you?”

“We don't know. Our company does contract work for a number of businesses and individuals. We were simply sent your photograph and told to hang around the casino until you came out.”

“Why the gun?”

The smaller man suddenly grinned.

Mac turned and in one smooth motion threw the ASP at the man sitting against the Dumpster. He had a Glock in his hand. The steel baton hit him in the side of the head, knocking him senseless for just a moment, the pistol firing with a loud pop, the round ricocheting off the corner of the casino.