Dance with the Dragon Page 3

  Someone knocked at the open door to his outer office and Adkins turned around, expecting it was his bodyguard to tell him that it was time to go home, but Rencke stood there, his red hair flying all over the place, a Red Sox baseball cap askew on his head.

  “I just heard,” Rencke said. He was gaunt looking, arms and legs too long, head impossibly big for his frame, wide green eyes and a broad forehead. He looked and acted the part of an eccentric genius, which was exactly what he was.

  “About what?” Adkins asked.

  “Louis Updegraf. One of my computer programs caught it and called me.”

  “You’re leaving on vacation.”

  “It’s the Chinese connection,” Rencke said. “I called Louise and she understands.” He began hopping foot to foot. “Oh, boy,” he said. “You oughta see the shade of lavender now.”

  PART

  ONE

  Ten days later

  FIVE

  CASEY KEY, FLORIDA

  A cold front from up north had been unable to penetrate as far as Florida’s west coast, so the summer pattern of very warm, tremendously humid air hung over Sarasota County like a damp wool blanket in a sauna.

  But it wasn’t tourist season, and the locals knew enough to stay indoors with the AC on, which suited Kirk McGarvey just fine. He had the beach all to himself for his early morning five-mile run along the water’s edge.

  His wife, Kathleen, had gotten up with him while it was still dark and brought a bottle of water to the downstairs exercise room, where he began his morning routines on a weight-training machine. She’d been in one of her patient moods, which she used whenever he was irascible and feeling cooped up. As he had been for the past few weeks.

  “Are you ready to talk about what’s eating you?” she’d asked.

  He knew the tone of voice, and he wanted to snap at her for being patronizing, but he managed a thin smile because she was right. “Pretty soon,” he said.

  He was pulling two hundred pounds behind his shoulders from above, and his body glistened with sweat. He was a couple of years over fifty and in superb physical condition because of a daily regimen of exercise that had begun more than thirty years ago when he was in the Air Force, and had continued through his years with the CIA, where he finally rose to the seventh floor as DCI, a job he hated. He was about six feet tall, with a pleasant face and gray-green eyes that never missed much. He had started and ended his career as a field officer, an assassin on the few occasions when such a black operation became absolutely necessary, and he exuded an air of supreme self-confidence. He was a man who could take care of himself. The few people who had gotten close to him, and were perceptive enough to understand what he was, felt an aura of safety around him. When Kirk was nearby, everything would work out. He would make sure of it.

  “How about right now?”

  He finished his last three reps and took the water bottle from his wife. “Have I been that bad?”

  “Yep,” she said. “You’ve been a real poop.”

  McGarvey took a drink of water, then put the bottle aside and toweled himself off, the muscles in his shoulders and back in a pleasant slow burn. He shook his head. “I wish I knew, Katy. Maybe it’s teaching again. I guess I’ve lost my taste for it.” One of his loves was the writings of the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, about whom he’d written a book that was critically acclaimed. He was teaching the subject on a part-time basis at the University of Florida’s New College in Sarasota. They were less than two months into the semester and already he was bored. Voltaire had maintained that there was nothing less common than common sense, and he was seeing the lack in many of his students, but then he supposed he was being a little hard on them because of his dark mood.

  “Quit,” she said.

  He smiled. He was a lucky man, married to a beautiful, intelligent woman whose short blond hair framed an oval face, high cheekbones, a finely formed nose, and full lips, and whose complexion was nearly flawless even without makeup. She was tall for a woman and slender, and it was impossible to guess that she was the same age as her husband. “That’s not really an option, Katy. I’m committed at least until spring.”

  She had given him an odd look that stuck with him as he ran on the beach. It was as if she knew something about him that he didn’t, which possibly had something to do with his dreams. They’d started again a couple of weeks ago, as they had from time to time over the past ten or fifteen years, and always began with the same one. He was in the catacombs beneath a castle outside Lisbon. The tunnels were flooding and it was almost totally dark. His escape would be cut off at any second, yet he could not leave until he finished what he had come to do. Before he left this place he had to kill Arkady Kurshin, a KGB intelligence officer and assassin whose operations were as brilliant as they were bloody.

  In his dreams, McGarvey could see life fading from Kurshin’s eyes in the tunnel. Then the faces of the other men, and a few women, he had killed swam into view. All of them had the same expression of surprise that they were dying. They had been bad people, some of them murderers of innocent women and children, but human beings for all that, with mothers and fathers and people who saw good in them and who loved them.

  He thought that he may have cried out in his sleep. He’d done it before when he’d had the dreams. But if Katy had heard him, she’d said nothing about it.

  A hundred yards from the path to his house across the road, McGarvey pulled up short to catch his breath and walk it off. In the distance, hull down on the horizon, a sailboat was slowly making its way south. The hurricane season was nearly done, and cruising sailors were already coming down from the north, heading for the Keys and across to the Bahamas.

  Maybe his mood was nothing more than a reaction to being cooped up, with the prospect of the entire winter—Florida’s good season—to be more of the same. But this was the life that he had chosen for himself and Katy. He was retired. He was no longer in the field. No longer on the hunt.

  He didn’t want to be a part of that life any longer. Or did he?

  He stopped a moment to consider realistically his present mood and his options. This now was almost like it had been when he’d run to Switzerland to hide from a past that had already begun to catch up with him. It was about that time that his dreams had started. He and Katy were getting a divorce, for reasons that he could no longer understand, and Marta Fredricks, the Swiss cop who’d been sent to keep a watch on him, noticed his volatile mood swings. By then she had fallen in love with him, and in the end her feelings had gotten her killed.

  The newspaper had finally come; he picked it up, entered the house from the garage, and tossed it on the counter. He got a bottle of water from the fridge and headed upstairs to take his shower and get dressed. The house had long overhangs and a broad veranda around all four sides. From the bedroom French doors he could look across their backyard to the gazebo and dock on the Intracoastal Waterway. Katy was sitting in the gazebo having her morning cup of tea. It was her retreat when she was troubled about something, where she could watch the sparse boat traffic at this hour, listen to the birds, and smell the incredibly fragrant subtropical air. She especially liked to sit out there alone when her husband was running on the beach, and wait for him to finish. When he came out to her they would talk.

  McGarvey took a quick shower, then got dressed in white linen trousers, a short-sleeved Izod, and boat shoes without socks. Down in the kitchen he made a thermos of Earl Grey and took a cup for himself and went out to her.

  “Truce?” he asked, kissing her on the cheek.

  “I didn’t think we were fighting,” she said.

  He poured tea for her, and sat down. “We weren’t, but you’re right, I’ve been a shit lately. Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” she said. “How about taking a break for a couple of weeks? Your students can get along without you for that long, can’t they?”

  He nodded. “What do you have in mind?”

  “We can fly u
p to Washington and visit the kids and Audie. Maybe see a few old friends.” Their twenty-four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, was married to Todd VanBuren. Both of them were CIA field officers, and for the last year or so they had been running the Farm, which was the Company’s training facility on the York River outside Williamsburg. They had one child, Audrey Kathleen, who was just two and who had her parents and grandparents wrapped around her little finger.

  “We’re going up for Thanksgiving, remember?”

  “We could take the boat down to Key West, maybe out to the Dry Tortugas if the weather holds—which it’s supposed to do. Late mornings in isolated little spots, short day sails, maybe tuck into a gunkhole for a swim, an early dinner on the grill, and whatever else might come up when the stars are out.”

  Six months ago they had taken delivery on a forty-two-foot Island Packet sailboat, which they kept in downtown Sarasota at Marina Jack. The boat had been Katy’s idea, and McGarvey had named it the Kathleen. So far they had taken only day sails, mostly around Sarasota and Tampa Bay, but now with the better late-fall and early winter weather just around the corner they had planned on much longer trips.

  But something nagged at the back of McGarvey’s mind. It was as if something had gotten into his brain with a feather and was stirring around. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he had a fair idea, and he didn’t like it. Years ago a Company shrink had told him that he had a soul filled with demons, and only he could drive them out. But only if he wanted to.

  They were still there, usually buried where he didn’t have to think about them, but coming to the surface when he began having his dreams. Or because he was having the dreams.

  “We’re about two weeks early in the season. I don’t want to push it.”

  “We could grab our passports, pack a few things, and fly over to Paris. The weather’s been good lately.”

  McGarvey looked up as a man and a young boy in a small outboard-powered boat passed by. “Too many memories.”

  “Maybe take one of the canal cruises on a barge. Eat four French meals a day and get fat.”

  “Maybe in the spring,” McGarvey said absently.

  “Well then, how about Vladivostok? I hear it’s lovely this time of year.”

  McGarvey looked at her and smiled. “Go ahead and buy the tickets.” He got up and gave her a kiss. “We’ll leave first thing in the morning. Promise.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “The college. I have to get a book.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  “How about meeting me for lunch on the Circle. Crab and Fin?”

  Katy looked up at him, her eyes wide and filled with concern. “Will you be there?”

  “Guaranteed,” McGarvey said. “Noon?”

  “I meant all of you,” she said to his retreating figure.

  SIX

  USF, NEW COLLEGE

  SARASOTA

  From the window of his small, cramped office on the second floor of the Humanities Center McGarvey could look across the campus and just see Sarasota Bay one block away. The school was quiet today, not many students or staff out and about, and the heavily planted grounds looked like a scene from a deserted tropical island. Watching a V formation of a half dozen pelicans gliding just above the tops of the palm trees heightened his sense of isolation.

  He’d been in the business far too long to ignore his intuition, yet everything within him wanted to turn away from whatever was coming. Maybe take Katy to Paris, or to Vladivostok. He had to smile. He had caught her little joke, but at that moment he hadn’t had the energy to give her an answer that made any sense to him.

  McGarvey spotted Otto Rencke coming up the walk from the front parking lot at the same moment his telephone rang. His home phone number came up on the caller ID. He knew what had happened. He picked up the phone. “Otto’s in town. Did he call you?”

  “Yes,” Katy said a little breathlessly. “I told him you were at the college. Is he there already?”

  “He’s on his way up.”

  “He said he wasn’t here on vacation. He wants to talk business. You’re not going back, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey answered, and it was the truth. “But I don’t think so.” Otto Rencke was truly a friend, and even more than that, he was practically a part of the family. A few years ago, during an operation that had gone bad, Otto had saved Katy’s life. It was a debt that was impossible to repay except by friendship. And on top of that, McGarvey had a great deal of respect for his friend’s big heart and vast intelligence. Rencke was an eccentric genius, but a good and loyal man.

  “Right,” Katy said, and McGarvey could hear the resignation in his wife’s voice.

  “I mean it.”

  “Well at least promise me that you won’t do anything until we talk about it. Okay?”

  “I’m just going to listen to what he has to say,” McGarvey told her. “Honest to God, sweetheart.”

  “It has to be something worth your while, you know,” she said. “Worth our while.”

  “Lunch is still on, but Otto will probably tag along.”

  “Call and let me know when you’re done.”

  “Will do,” McGarvey promised. He hung up the phone, and took the stairs down to the front entrance just as Rencke was coming through the door.

  The Company’s director of special operations was a mess as usual. His long red hair flew in every direction, his high-top sneakers had no laces, his jeans were faded and ripped, and the logo on his dirty T-shirt was the hammer and sickle under the letters CCCP. But he was smiling. “Hiya, Mac,” he said. He gave McGarvey a large bear hug. “Nice to see you, ya know.”

  “Katy said you called the house. She’s worried that you’ve come down here to ask me back.”

  Rencke’s eyes widened. “Honest injun, nobody’s wanting you to go back into the field.” He raised his right hand with three fingers up. “We just want you to meet someone, listen to what she has to say.”

  “Let’s go for a walk,” McGarvey said, and they went outside and headed down one of the paths that meandered through the campus and toward the bay.

  A boy and a girl were sitting on a blanket under a tree, and they waved. McGarvey waved back and managed a smile even though he was troubled. Rencke had the look written all over him.

  “Maybe I should come down here and teach,” Rencke said.

  “What color is it?” McGarvey asked.

  Rencke gave him a sharp look. “Oh, wow, it’s lavender, and it’s gotten a lot deeper in the past few days, ya know,” he gushed. He was a mathematical and computer genius, at least on a par with guys like England’s Stephen Hawking, but he had chosen to stay away from academia for a lot of not so savory reasons out of his past, including a dalliance with a dean’s wife.

  But he was a good man too. A number of years ago he had tried to explain color to a blind mathematician friend of his from the Sorbonne in Paris. Using a series of tensor calculus equations, the same mathematics that Einstein had used for relativity, he had managed to convey the entire range of sensory perceptions and emotions that a human saw and felt for every color from just above infrared to just below ultraviolet.

  Shortly after he had come to work for McGarvey at the CIA, he had developed a second use for his equations. Using a set of sophisticated search engines that scanned the continuous streams of data coming into dozens of computers, from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as from the CIA’s own mainframe, he was able to come up with very accurate threat assessments that showed up as colors. Toward the infrared range, the particular threat level was low, the world was at peace; toward the ultraviolet it was high, the U.S. was on the verge of an all-out thermonuclear war.

  Lavender was about as bad as it ever got; it had been the same color in the weeks leading up to 9/11. But it hadn’t been until after 9/11 that the CIA took Rencke’s threat assessments seriously.

/>   Something clutched at McGarvey’s gut. “Is it the Middle East again? Saudi Arabia?” Last year McGarvey had gotten close enough to Osama bin Laden to put a bullet into the man’s brain. Since then the terror organization al-Qaida had been relatively quiet. But he’d never thought the peace would last. The next step, he’d always believed, would come from Saudi Arabia, where some members of the royal family were siphoning money out of the country to finance Islamic militants and terrorists around the world. And that problem would be a tough nut to crack, nowhere as easy as Afghanistan or even Iraq had been.

  “That’s coming, I think, but this time it’s Mexico,” Rencke said. “We’ve got a problem down there that we’d like you to take a look at.”

  “I’m retired, Otto, remember?” McGarvey said. John and Mabel Ringling’s mansion Ca d’Zan was off to their left, on the bayshore, and as they got closer to the water the morning breeze was noticeably cooler.

  “Dick’s not asking you to come back, I already told you. He just wants you to listen and give us your opinion.”

  They walked for a while in silence, an operation he’d been involved with in and around Mexico City about ten years ago coming back to McGarvey in living color. A KGB general by the name of Valentin Baranov had set up an exquisitely complex plot out of the Russian embassy down there that had resulted in the deaths of a former U.S. senator and of Donald Suthland Powers, who was arguably the best director that the CIA had known before or since. The senator, Darby Yarnell, had killed Powers, and McGarvey had killed Yarnell. It had been one of the worst hits that the CIA had ever taken, even worse than James Jesus Angleton’s devastating witch hunt.

  “Is it the Russians again?” McGarvey asked.

  Rencke shook his head. “It’s the Chinese, if you can believe it, and they’ve all but shut down our operations. The chief of station is in over his head, one of his people was assassinated, and McCann is screaming bloody murder. He wants to run a full-court press, but for now Dick has managed to hold him off.”