Free Assassin by David Hagberg

Jean Jaures along the Canal de l’Ourcq. He swam five miles every afternoon at the Club American downtown, and as often as possible worked out at the Ecole Militaire Annexe with the French national fencing team.
    Although he’d known plenty of women, he’d been a loner most of his life, partly out of choice, but mostly out of circumstance. In the parlance of the secret service, he’d been a shooter. A killer. An assassin. And every night he saw the faces of every person he’d ever killed. He saw the light fading from their eyes, the animation draining from their faces as they realized that they were dying. Each of them, even the very bad ones, had died the same way: surprised. That sort of a profession tended to be hard on a relationship, any relationship.
    After graduating from Kansas State University with masters degrees in literature (his specialty had been Voltaire) and languages, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency as a translator and analyst. But the Cold War was in high gear and the Company needed talent because a lot of its agents were getting burned. They saw something in McGarvey that even he didn’t know existed. His instinct for survival and self-preservation was a hundred times stronger than in the very best field agents. Combined with his physique, his facility for languages, his intelligence, and the results of a battery of psychological
tests which showed him to be extremely pragmatic and under the correct circumstances even cold, he’d been offered the job as a field agent. But a very special agent. His training and purpose so black that only a handful of men in the agency and on the Hill knew anything about him.
    Bad times, he thought now, studying Jacqueline’s pretty face. She was forty, and from Nice, and was aging as only the Mediterraneans did. Like Sophia Loren she would become even more beautiful as she got older.
    â€œSuch deep, dramatic thoughts for such a lovely Saturday,” she said, reaching across the table for his hand.
    He raised hers and kissed it, tenderly and with a little sadness, because when this one was gone he knew he would miss her. “It’s my day to feel a little lugubrious. Sometimes spring in this city does that.”
    â€œHemingway,” Jacqueline said. “I thought you were a fan of Voltaire.”
    He managed a slight smile. He’d never told her that, which meant her SDECE briefing had been very complete. It was one of the little inconsistencies he’d spotted from the beginning.
    In the end the Company had sent him to Santiago to kill a general who’d massacred hundreds of people in and around the capital. But the orders had been changed in mid-stream without his knowledge, and after the kill McGarvey was out.
    He’d run to Switzerland where for a few years he’d made a life for himself, operating a rare-book store in Lausanne. There, like here, the secret service worried about his presence and had sent a woman to his bed to keep tabs on him, though how they’d found out he once worked for the CIA was a mystery. When the CIA called him out of retirement for a particularly bad assignment they couldn’t handle, he’d left her. The call to arms had been stronger than his love for her.
    Greece, Paris, even back to the States for awhile, the CIA kept coming for him, and he kept losing the women in his life, and kept running from his demons. And now he was getting the odd, twitchy feeling between his shoulder blades that it was about to happen again. Lately he’d been thinking about returning to New York to see the only woman he’d ever loved unreservedly, and the only one who’d loved him back the same way. His daughter Elizabeth, now twenty-three and working as a translator and analyst for the United Nations. He smiled, thinking about her.
    â€œThat’s better,” Jacqueline said.
    â€œI’ll try to smile more often if it has that effect on you,” McGarvey