Dance with the Dragon Page 10

  It was one of the reasons McGarvey had come here. He needed someone who was grounded in the D.F. He instinctively distrusted Perry, who, if there was any justice, wouldn’t rise any further in the CIA, and he didn’t think he could go to Chauncy, who had his own agenda—which left Gloria, the odd duck out.

  But there was a darker reason he’d come seeking her help, one that he had skirted in his mind as Shahrzad was telling her story. But the thought had coalesced the moment Otto had told him that Gloria was here in the D.F.

  He was startled out of his dark thoughts when a jet-black Porsche Carrera roared up the driveway and pulled into the carport. A handsome young man and attractive woman got out and went hand in hand to one of the second-floor apartments, their laughter trailing behind them. They were obviously very happy.

  A deep sadness came over McGarvey all of a sudden, and he almost started the car and drove back to the hotel. He could get a flight to Tampa first thing in the morning and Katy could come up from Sarasota to get him, and he could return to being a retired sometime college instructor, sometime sailor, and full-time husband. He didn’t belong here, because in order to unravel the mess Updegraf had left them, he was going to have to seriously meddle in some people’s lives. When he was finished nothing would ever be the same for them again. They might never be happy again.

  But there were too many things that weren’t adding up in his mind, and the list kept growing. Like right now. Shahrzad was an Iranian, and Gloria’s apartment was perched above the Iranian embassy. Coincidence? He didn’t believe in them. Never had.

  He got out of the car and took the path down to Gloria’s apartment. But still he hesitated for just a moment before he rang the bell. He had a dozen questions in his mind, none of which he could ask her.

  She came to the door barefoot but still in her khaki skirt and blouse, something in her hand behind her back. A host of emotions crossed her face in the space of an eye blink: total surprise, happiness, and for just the briefest of instants, perhaps fear.

  “Hello,” McGarvey said.

  “My God, was it you in the gray Toyota?”

  McGarvey was a little surprised. “You spotted me.” He said it as a statement not a question.

  She nodded, this time in plain wonderment. “Don’t just stand there. Come inside.” She stepped back to let him pass and reached up with her free hand to touch his shoulder.

  Her apartment was open and very modern, with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors opening to a long veranda that looked down toward the city. Some good Picasso reproductions were hung on the wall, and several bookcases were filled with what looked like a mixture of Spanish novels and law books. The furniture was Danish modern teak, with thick faux fur rugs in white. A large flat-panel television was perched on a low stand that held several pieces of electronic equipment including a satellite receiver, DVD player, and surround sound.

  “I saw you when I came out of the embassy.” She smiled. “I thought I had lost you a couple of times, so I stopped at the mall to see who you were and what you’d do. But the windows were tinted so I couldn’t make out your face.”

  “That was damned good work in that traffic. Were you expecting somebody?”

  She nodded. She took her hand away from the small of her back to reveal a 9 mm Beretta. “We’ve all been on edge since Louis bought it. We still don’t know why he was killed, or if one of us will be next.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” McGarvey told her.

  “Thank God,” Gloria said. She laid the pistol on the counter separating the kitchen from the main room. “Does Perry know you’re here?”

  “No, and we’re going to keep it that way for now.”

  “Thank you for small favors. The man’s a complete idiot, and Tom Chauncy has got his nose so far up Perry’s ass it’s a wonder he ever comes up for air. Louis was the only halfway decent officer we had down here.”

  She suddenly stopped talking and threw her arms around him, holding him very tightly, her face buried in his chest.

  For just a second McGarvey felt an almost overwhelming sense of disgust with himself for what he was going to ask her to do, but then he put his arms around her and held her.

  “My God, it’s so good to see you again,” looking up at him. “Will you please kiss me?”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  She smiled. “I guess not. Just hold me for now. It’s enough.”

  NINETEEN

  COLONIA LOMAS ALTAS

  McGarvey sat at the kitchen counter while Gloria opened a bottle of Don Julio Anejo tequila and made them margaritas with a lot of ice in tall salt-rimmed glasses. “While in Rome do as the Romans do,” she said, looking at him from across the counter as she raised her glass.

  “Good,” McGarvey said, taking a drink.

  “So, exactly what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Updegraf was working someone in the Chinese embassy that probably got him killed. We want to know why.”

  Gloria shrugged. “He was just a code clerk. The Chinese connection probably doesn’t mean a thing,” she said. “But what I want to know is what are you doing here at my apartment?”

  “I need your help.”

  Her face lit up, but there was a hint of wariness in her eyes. “Okay,” she said carefully. “But no one else at the embassy is supposed to know about it. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re not here on your own. You’re supposed to be retired, which means they sent Otto to ask you to come back, and he had a good reason. Who was it, Mr. Adkins?”

  “You don’t need to know that yet,” McGarvey said. “In fact, you might never need to know. I want your help, no questions asked.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “It got Updegraf killed.”

  She nodded without hesitation, her eyes bright, a half smile on her full lips. “But you knew I’d say yes before you asked me,” she said, half teasing. “And what do I get out of it?”

  McGarvey waited. Using a mark’s fantasies against him or her was one of the oldest bits of tradecraft in the field officer’s handbook. The shrinks called it transference, when the mark’s fear of being discovered as a traitor turned into love for her handler. He became the savior.

  Gloria had studied the book, but her knowledge was no defense. Her smile faded and she nodded again. “Okay.”

  “What did Updegraf tell you about the code clerk he was trying to burn?”

  “I didn’t know anything about it until Gil handed me the file with Louis’s encounter sheets. But the guy wasn’t worth any real effort. It’s still bothering me. Louis shouldn’t have been going after some small fry like that.”

  “He never said anything to you about it, about going to the clubs?”

  Gloria’s brow knitted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What clubs?”

  “The sex clubs. Did he ever mention a place called the Wild Stallion?”

  Gloria stifled a small laugh. “No,” she said. “But I know about them, of course. Half the guys in the embassy, especially the married ones, hang out downtown. Usually in the Zona Rosa or Polanco.”

  “You’ve never been?”

  She laughed out loud. “Of course not.”

  “What do you do for entertainment?”

  “I certainly don’t hang out at those kinds of places,” she shot back. “The symphony orchestra here is world-class, and the ballet and theaters are first-rate. All in Spanish, of course.”

  “Dates?”

  “Sometimes,” she replied warily. “But if you’re asking if I’m seeing anyone special, the answer is no.” She started to say something else, but bit it off.

  McGarvey looked away for just a moment, unable to take the next step with her. But if the notion he’d come up with had any chance of working, Gloria would have to become one leg of a dicey triangle that would be as disgusting as it was delicate.

  “The code clerk is the key,” he said, turning back to h
er.

  “I told you that he’s a small fry.”

  “You’re probably right, but I think Updegraf wanted to burn him in order to get to a much bigger prize.”

  “Did you come up with something already?”

  “He was meeting the guy at the Wild Stallion, probably buying him women.”

  “None of that was in the encounter file that Gil gave to me,” Gloria said. “I’m supposed to be looking down Louis’s track here in the D.F., but there isn’t much to go on. According to his file he was meeting the clerk at a wireless coffee shop a block and a half from the Chinese embassy, but I haven’t been able to confirm that. And Louis’s wife went back to the States, so I got to toss his apartment, but I came up empty there too.”

  “The club is the next step.”

  “You want me to go to that place?”

  “We’ll go together. Tonight.”

  “And look for what?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey admitted. “Maybe a reaction?”

  COLONIA ZONA ROSA

  From the carved oak front door, the Club Wild Stallion could have been the office of a group of high-priced lawyers, or a boutique selling haute couture to fashionable women, not a sex club. A very small brass plaque engraved with a plain CWS above a stylized stallion reared up on its hind legs and the number 84 was the only indication that the elegant three-story brown brick building was anything other than what it was.

  They had driven over from Gloria’s apartment in McGarvey’s Toyota, and when they pulled up in front of the club a valet in a red vest came out to park their car.

  “Do you think you’ll see anybody you know here?” McGarvey asked her.

  She had changed into a short black dress with almost no back and a plunging neckline. “It’s possible someone from the embassy will be here.”

  “Perry or Chauncy?”

  She laughed. “Not those two.”

  “Welcome to the Club Wild Stallion,” the valet parker said. He gave McGarvey a ticket.

  Just inside the door McGarvey paid a one-hundred-dollar club membership to a pretty receptionist seated at a desk. “This will be good for one year, sir,” she said pleasantly. She was young, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, and she was Oriental, probably Japanese.

  Through an inner door, they found themselves in a large, dimly lit room, with a long bar to the right, and small tables facing a stage across from a fairly good-sized dance floor. The hum of conversations from perhaps fifty or sixty people, most of them at the tables, nearly half of them scantily clad girls and women, was a low, underlying drone.

  A pretty Mexican waitress in a topless costume and spike heels showed them to a table near the dance floor. “Welcome to the Wild Stallion,” she said. “Our next show begins any minute. Maybe I bring you a drink?”

  “Champagne,” McGarvey said. “Dom Pérignon. A good year.”

  “Yes, sir,” the waitress said, and she left.

  “Do you see the age of most of these girls?” Gloria asked. “They’re just kids. Let’s get out of here, Kirk.”

  Most of the men were middle-aged or older, and although the majority of them were probably Mexicans, there were a fair number of gringos. All of them seemed to be prosperous. But the girls were mostly in their teens. It reminded McGarvey of some of the clubs in Taiwan where well-to-do Europeans went to have sex with young girls. The look on the men’s faces was sickening.

  “Have you spotted anyone you know?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Gloria said. “What the hell are we doing here?”

  McGarvey leaned closer. “This is one of the places Updegraf hung out. I want to see what goes on and who shows up, so keep your eyes open.”

  “You think Perry or Chauncy might come through the door?”

  McGarvey shrugged. But it wouldn’t have surprised him if either man had been there. His primary target, though, was General Liu. If Shahrzad had been telling the truth, this was one of the places the man liked to frequent.

  Their champagne came, a minute later all the lights went out, and suddenly Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” began to play from a piano somewhere to the left, and a soft red light illuminated the stage. A large bed had been set up in the middle of the stage, a mirror suspended above it at an angle so the audience would have no trouble seeing what would be happening.

  A short, slender Japanese girl who could have been the twin of the receptionist came out onstage. She was dressed in a clinging silk nightgown that fluoresced in the dim light. She looked out at the audience and held out her hand as if she was lost and was asking for help.

  After a beat, a man who looked as if he could be a gymnast, dressed only in a pair of tight-fitting jeans, his chest bare, came out onstage, spotted the girl, and went to her. She turned, hesitated for a moment before she gave the audience a big smile, and then fell into the gymnast’s arms.

  They embraced for what seemed a long time, and when they parted the gymnast ripped the nightgown off the woman’s body with a flourish, shoved her back onto the bed, then pulled off his jeans to reveal an almost impossibly large erect penis.

  Some of the girls in the audience cheered and a few of the men laughed and clapped as the gymnast mounted the Japanese girl and began to have intercourse, slowly at first, then with increasing speed and force.

  “Do you think this is sexy?” Gloria asked across the table.

  “No, not at all,” McGarvey said. He was of mixed feelings thinking about Shahrzad in this place, doing these things. Her father had tossed her into the ring with Baranov when she was only fifteen, and ever since that time she’d apparently been used by a series of men, so that now she was probably hardened to such things. Yet she could have walked away long before she’d met and fallen in love with a CIA officer. For Updegraf, however, his feelings were anything but mixed. On the surface, at least, the man had been a son of a bitch, and quite possibly had deserved what he got.

  But there was so much more that they didn’t know. Whispers around the edges, coming from dark places with hidden meanings. Nothing was as it seemed to be.

  One of the men from the audience got up and led a girl across the dance floor and through a door to the right of the stage, as the couple on the bed continued to have sex, and the woman began to moan.

  “Louis was a bastard just like every other man,” Gloria said under her breath. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had enough.”

  TWENTY

  COLONIA LOMAS ALTAS

  On the way back to Gloria’s apartment she sat hunched in the corner silently watching the traffic, which had started to pick up. Mexicans usually started late: drinks around eight in the evening, dinner around ten, and then the clubs really came alive around midnight. It wasn’t even ten when McGarvey drove up the hill to her apartment above the Iranian embassy and parked in one of the guest spots.

  “I’d invite you in, but I know you’d refuse,” Gloria said. She was subdued. “Let’s go for a walk. There’s a jogging path that runs just below the road. Nice view.”

  “Okay.”

  She slipped out of her heels and took McGarvey’s arm, and they headed past the apartment buildings and started down a blacktop path that wound its way around the hills a few meters below the road. Every so often there was a park bench, and sometimes the glittering night view of the city stretched out below was fabulous.

  “I’ve never met your wife,” she said. “But if your daughter Elizabeth is any indication, she must be lovely.”

  “She is,” McGarvey told her.

  “Lucky lady.”

  They walked for a while in silence, but the evening was getting chilly, so McGarvey took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She stopped. “Look, I’m not sorry, you know.”

  “For what?”

  “For falling in love with you. That’ll never change. But I promise to stop throwing myself at you.”

  McGarvey smiled despite t
he situation, despite what he wanted her to do. Updegraf had nothing on him. “I was flattered,” he admitted to her. “But this way is going to be a lot easier on both of us.”

  She laughed lightly, but then became serious again. “Growing up in Cuba my poor mother never knew what to do with me. She tried to teach me the proper manners for a lady, when all I wanted to do was fight with the boys. When I was twelve or thirteen, she took me to a beauty salon downtown where I got my first do. My hair had only been trimmed, never cut, so by then it was most of the way down my back. When we got home that afternoon, my father told me how beautiful I looked. He said I’d been transformed from a tomboy to a young lady.”

  Gloria looked across the valley toward the lights of the skyscrapers downtown.

  “The next morning I got up early, before my mother, took a pair of scissors into the bathroom, and cut my hair so it was as short as a boy’s. When I showed up at the breakfast table wearing jeans and a T-shirt, my mother almost fainted, but she didn’t say a word about my hair. She never said anything about it, and after that I let it grow, started to wear makeup, and even went on chaperoned dates.”

  “But it was never the same after that, was it,” McGarvey said. He’d had the same sort of falling-out with his sister. When their parents died, he inherited the ranch in western Kansas, which he sold over his sister’s objections. They never spoke about it again; in fact, they hadn’t spoken at all in years.

  “A few months later the situation between my father and Castro had become intolerable, so my father stole a light plane and took me and my mother to Key West. Only we ran out of gas and the plane crashed in the strait just offshore. My mother drowned.” Gloria’s eyes were filling. “I never got to tell her how sorry I was that I’d disappointed her.”