Dance with the Dragon Page 2

  “I know where it is,” McCann barked. “What the hell was he doing up there that got him killed? I haven’t seen a damned thing in your operation reports.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know,” Perry admitted. “But I’m going to find out.”

  The line was silent for a long moment. “I would hope so,” McCann came back sarcastically. “What are your people at the CISN saying?”

  “They knew nothing about it, but they’ve agreed to keep it out of the media as long as possible. In the meantime I’ve sent one of my people to take the body across the border to San Antonio for an autopsy.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “I haven’t talked to her—”

  “Well you goddamned well better do it pronto. If she finds out about it from someone else, she could start screaming her head off, and we’d be up a creek. Are you clear on that?”

  “Yes … sir,” Perry said, keeping his temper in check. His estimation of McCann’s gentlemanly attributes had sharply lowered. But he needed to stay on the DDO’s good side on this one. “I’ll talk to her this afternoon and then have her brought to Washington, where we can get her a couple of babysitters until the issue is resolved.”

  “Good thinking,” McCann said, somewhat calmer. “I don’t want to interfere in your shop, but when one of my people takes a hit I need to know who, what, why, when, where, and how. I’ll expect you to get on with it.”

  “Consider it as good as done, sir.”

  “I have a better idea. I want you to bring his wife up here yourself on Saturday. Gives you three days to figure out what happened. Once you get her settled, you can brief me on what progress you’ve made. Hopefully the situation will be resolved by then.”

  Perry closed his eyes. Three days. It was impossible. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll see you on Saturday.”

  After he hung up he turned his chair so that he could look out the window toward the modernistic Torre Mayor skyscraper, which at fifty-five stories was one of the tallest buildings in Latin America. It was supposed to represent Mexican progress into the twenty-first century, and Mexican engineering. It had been designed to withstand even the strongest of earthquakes. But knowing what he knew about Mexico and Mexican engineering, Perry had long ago decided he wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the skyscraper in even a minor quake.

  In fact at this moment he didn’t want to be anywhere near Mexico, but since he couldn’t run away from this business, he would have to deal with it.

  He asked his secretary to find Gloria Ibenez and have her come to his office. Surprisingly, she was in the building for a change, and she showed up five minutes later, dressed in a very short khaki skirt, sandals with no nylons, and a white peasant blouse that left little to the imagination. He’d warned her repeatedly about dressing suggestively, but she’d completely ignored him. “If you don’t like what I’m wearing to work, don’t look,” she’d once told him, actually laughing in his face. She was a Cuban-born American, and had been with the CIA seven years. Mexico City was the perfect assignment for a Spanish-speaking woman who was beautiful, intelligent, and experienced, and had good contracts. Her father was General Ernesto Marti, who was an adviser to the CIA on Cuban affairs, and just last year she’d been involved on an assignment with Kirk McGarvey when they finally tracked down and eliminated Osama bin Laden. She was a pain in the ass, and Perry had wanted to get rid of her within the month after she’d arrived, and now he saw his chance.

  She sat down across the desk from him, a bright smile on her oval, dark face. “Good afternoon, Judge,” she said brightly, which Perry was sure she did to needle him, as if she were making fun of him. “What’s up?”

  Perry studied her for several long seconds, as if he were examining a bug under a magnifying glass, but then he shoved Updegraf’s personnel file across the desk to her. “Louis was shot to death last night up in Chihuahua.”

  Gloria had reached for the file, but she stopped, the smile fading from her lips. “My God,” she said softly. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m always serious,” Perry replied drily. “I sent Chauncy up there to take charge of the situation, and I’ve talked to the Mexican authorities, who’ve agreed to keep it out of the media for the time being.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “I’ll take care of her,” Perry said. He laid a thin buff folder stamped TOP SECRET on top of Updegraf’s dossier. “It’s what we have so far, which isn’t much. Louis’s body was dumped outside the hospital early this morning. But we don’t have any idea what he was doing up there, except it may have involved Chinese intelligence.”

  Gloria’s eyes narrowed. “Their intelligence presence isn’t very strong in Mexico. Anyway, I wasn’t aware that we were running any ops against them.”

  “Neither was I until I opened Louis’s safe this morning.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “I don’t know what it means yet, I’m still working on it,” Perry said. “But I know enough to think that he was trying to turn an embassy clerk. Someone in their communications section.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Run his background. Find out what he was doing with the clerk, and find out if he’d ever approached anyone else over there.”

  “I’ll need to see Louis’s encounter sheets so I can get the name of the clerk,” Gloria said. “That’d at least be a start. But what about Chihuahua?”

  “Chauncy is taking care of the situation up there. At least for the time being, I want you right here in Mexico City.”

  Gloria gathered the files and rose to leave.

  “I need to see something in writing on my desk no later than eighteen hundred hours Friday,” Perry told her.

  She laughed. “You’re dreaming.”

  “Eighteen hundred hours, Ms. Ibenez. Let’s see just how much of a hotshot you really are.”

  THREE

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  Chauncy had returned from San Antonio late Thursday with the results of the autopsy on Updegraf’s body, and Gloria Ibenez had turned in her brief report exactly on time yesterday afternoon. And then the weekend had turned into an absolute disaster.

  As Perry drove out to the Building in a rental Taurus a few minutes before five on a stiflingly hot and humid afternoon, his palms were sweaty and his stomach was sour. Handling Updegraf’s widow was one of the worst jobs he’d ever had to accomplish. Even with the help of Dr. Carol Zywicki, a Company shrink who’d flown aboard a private Gulfstream IV down from Andrews Air Force Base Friday morning, the evening had been a mess until Zywicki had sedated the blubbering cow.

  “God save us from hysterical women,” Perry mumbled to himself. His own wife was no mental giant, but she’d come from good Ivy League stock—her father was a prominent Boston attorney and her mother was still a society maven—and she knew when to keep her mouth shut. Being the wife of an important CIA officer demanded her discretion, as well as an ask-no-questions-expect-no-lies attitude when it came to her husband’s extracurricular activities.

  Janet Updegraf, on the other hand, had begun screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs the moment she’d found out that her husband had been shot to death in the line of duty sometime late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning.

  “You son of a bitch!” she’d screeched. “You knew all this time and yet you didn’t have the common decency to tell me.” She’d come off the couch in their expensively furnished downtown condo and physically attacked Perry, slamming her fists into his chest and trying to slap him in the face.

  On the way up to Washington, the cow still sedated, strapped in one of the rear seats, Perry had debated putting the incident in his situation report. In the end his good sense had won out and he’d written a complete Sitrep with the recommendation that the Company be more thorough when it vetted the wives of its field officers. If she hadn’t been brought under control she could have created a potentially embarrassing incident for everyone involved.

  It was
one time in which Perry had been totally at a loss trying to figure out a way to turn a situation to his advantage. And he had to admit to himself that he was becoming concerned. If they took another hit, the situation in Mexico could very well unravel.

  A pair of babysitters from Security had met them at Andrews with an unmarked van that was set up as an ambulance, and had taken Janet Updegraf off his hands. The strange thing was that Dr. Zywicki had refused to shake his hand when they parted. It was damned odd, he thought.

  And, if dealing with Louis’s widow wasn’t enough, he had to face McCann when all he wanted to do was return to Mexico City and do his job.

  He presented his credentials at the main gate and was directed to the Visiting Employees parking lot. On the drive up he could see himself coming this way each weekday morning. Only, as the deputy director of Central Intelligence, he’d be riding in the backseat of a chauffeured Cadillac limo, and he would be dropped off inside the underground garage at the VIP elevator. It was a happy thought just now.

  He wasn’t carrying a weapon, but he was required to step through the security arch and on the other side open his attaché case for a security guard. But he didn’t mind. These sorts of routines were a comfort.

  Upstairs on the seventh floor, McCann’s secretary put him in the small conference room to wait until the DDO was finished with his afternoon briefing to the DCI. “We’d expected you much sooner, Mr. Perry,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. McCann that you’re here.”

  “Thanks,” Perry said, but the woman was already out the door. “Bitch.”

  The DDO’s conference room was furnished with a table for eight people, a credenza on which was a carafe of water and glasses, and a couple of seascapes on the walls. Perry opened his attaché case and laid out copies of Updegraf’s personnel file, Chauncy’s initial report and the autopsy results, Gloria’s one-page summary of her legwork, which contained absolutely nothing of value, and his own brief summary of the events subsequent to Updegaf’s assassination.

  Slim pickings, but it was to be expected given the delicacy of the situation in Mexico and the ridiculous time constraints he’d been given.

  He was just pouring a glass of water when the door opened and Howard McCann breezed in. The DDO was a short man, with a round face, narrow glasses, and thinning light brown hair. But he was dressing better these days, though certainly not Armani or Gucci, and he was clean-shaven even at this hour of the afternoon.

  “I had to brief the director without your report,” McCann said, taking a seat at the head of the table.

  Perry put down the glass. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I was delayed taking care of Updegraf’s widow.” He sat down to McCann’s left.

  “How is she?”

  “You were right to be concerned about her. She became hysterical—”

  “Something you should have anticipated,” McCann interrupted. “I expect my station chiefs to show some initiative.”

  “Yes, sir,” Perry replied, biting his tongue. McCann was a DDO to be admired because he ran a tight operation. But he was being unfair just now.

  “What’s going on in Mexico that got one of my people murdered?”

  Perry laid the files in front of McCann. “It’s not much yet, but it’s all there.”

  McCann didn’t bother looking down. “I’ll read these later. For now I want you to tell me what the hell is going on. Why did you send him to Chihuahua? If something important is going on up there, why didn’t you send him some backup? You know my drill, goddamn it. When you send assets into the field, you send them in pairs.”

  “I didn’t send him to Chihuahua,” Perry said. “The first I heard Louis was up there was when my assistant COS called to tell me that his body had been dumped at the emergency-room door of the hospital.”

  McCann sat back. “You’re telling me that you have no control over your people?”

  “I’m telling you, Mr. Deputy Director, that I have no control over a field officer who has his own agenda. Perhaps if he had been better vetted before he was sent—”

  “He was your man, and you got him killed,” McCann interrupted.

  “Yes … sir.”

  “Are you one hundred percent confident that Updegraf didn’t commit suicide?”

  “The Air Force doctor who performed the autopsy said the entry wound was at an impossible angle to be self-inflicted.”

  “Continue,” McCann said after a moment.

  “We still don’t know what he was doing in Chihuahua the night he was killed, but we think that he may have been running an operation to burn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy.”

  “Where’s the connection?”

  Perry spread his hands. “We don’t know yet. But my people are backtracking Louis’s movements for the past ninety days, although his encounter sheets are turning out to be almost useless. He was lying to us.”

  “Why?” McCann demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Perry said. “I think he was trying to make a mark for himself. The big score. He wanted my job.”

  “Is anyone else on your staff working a Chinese connection?” McCann asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Perry said evenly. “Unless it’s another rogue operation.”

  McCann pursed his lips, but then nodded. “I suggest that you return to your station and find out,” he said. He got up, gathered the files, and left the conference room without another word.

  For a long minute or two Perry sat stock still, staring across the room at nothing in particular. The big score. That’s what it was all about, what it had always been about.

  Finally he closed his attaché case and left the room to catch a commercial flight back to Mexico City. First class.

  FOUR

  OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  It was seven o’clock and dark as Richard Adkins stood slump-shouldered at the floor-to-ceiling Lexan windows in his seventh-floor office looking out at the lights toward the Potomac. He was stumped, and the problem was that he didn’t know anyone to call for help. The only man who might have the answers, or know how to get them, was finally retired with his wife in Florida, and had promised in no uncertain terms: “Retired means retired!”

  Something was coming at them, he was sure of at least that much. Perhaps another 9/11, perhaps something even bigger, but all the signs were there. Otto Rencke, the director of Special Operations, was talking lavender, which in the CIA’s resident genius’s lexicon meant that we were on the verge of taking a major hit.

  At fifty-four, Adkins was a slightly built man with a pale complexion, small blue eyes, and wispy light hair. He’d lost his wife to cancer a few years ago, and since that time he’d thrown himself into his job first as deputy director of Central Intelligence under Kirk McGarvey, and then as DCI when McGarvey had retired. His Senate confirmation hearings had taken only two days, and had been the least rancorous of any nomination in recent history. It had been anything but a lovefest, but the media had dubbed the proceedings the “Senate Sleep-in of the Decade.”

  He’d done nothing of note when he’d served as number two under McGarvey, and he’d done nothing of note since then. Even the media, which post-9/11 had practically camped out in the press officer’s briefing room, rarely showed up now. The Company was quietly going about its business, there were no new wars or crises looming on the horizon, and for once the CIA was not being blamed for doing nothing.

  Rencke was a flake, but he was never wrong. This time his lavender had to do with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Guojia Anquan Bu, Guoanbu for short, especially with one of its senior intelligence officers, who had been spotted in Mexico City recently. Rencke had only stumbled across a hint that the man had been recorded making a telephone call to Beijing from the Chinese embassy.

  There’d been nothing in the daily reports from the CIA’s station down there, which Rencke had found odd because Army General Liu Hung was one of China’s most important intelligence experts on Western affairs. Over
the past few years General Liu had conducted operations from the UN and from the Chinese embassy in Washington, and it was believed that under his leadership the Chinese had practically gone on a military-technology shopping spree right under the noses of the FBI.

  He had dropped out of sight for more than a year, presumably back to Beijing, until he’d shown up in Mexico City. Rencke had confirmed it four days before by repositioning a KH14 satellite to watch the Chinese embassy, where he caught a clear, face-up shot of Liu getting into a Mercedes limousine at the rear of the compound. Two days later the satellite caught another shot, this time of Liu standing on a rear balcony of the embassy.

  This too had been a clear picture, with Liu looking directly up as the satellite passed overhead. “Like the guy knew when our bird would be there, and went out to look up and say, ‘Hiya, guys, I’m here,’” Rencke said. He had been hopping one foot to the other, something he did whenever he was excited and had a bone in his teeth.

  “Any doubt that it’s Liu?” Adkins had asked hopefully.

  “Nada,” Rencke said. “How about giving Perry the heads-up? He’s got some pretty neat people down there. Someone could take a quick pass.”

  “That’s exactly what we’re gong to do, but first I want some more information. Anything you can dig up on Liu. They wouldn’t have put one of their best people into an embassy operation unless something important is going on.”

  “Bingo,” Rencke said. “The sixty-four-dollar question: What are the Chinese doing in Mexico?”

  That had been four days ago, and this afternoon Gil Perry had flown up with the widow of one of his officers who had been trying to turn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy and had gotten himself shot to death in Chihuahua.

  Rencke had gone home early. He and his wife, Louise Horn, who was director of photo analysis for the National Security Agency, were leaving on vacation in the morning, the first either of them had taken in years, and Adkins hadn’t the heart to call him back with the latest news.