Dance with the Dragon Read online

  Perry shook his head. “No.”

  Shahrzad came back and took her seat, and Toni withdrew. “Could we maybe stop and have some lunch? I’m starved.”

  “Later,” McGarvey said. “You were in love with Updegraf, so you agreed to become a spy for him.”

  “That’s right,” she replied defensively. “It’s what people who are in love do for each other. Without sacrifices there is nothing. It’s a special bond that maybe you don’t understand.” She glanced at Perry. “Well, I understood, and so did Louis.”

  It occurred to McGarvey that this little girl had no idea what love was. She was merely spouting some cliches that sounded good to her, wrapping up her feelings for a man she couldn’t have known well in a tidy little package that made sense, that gave her a sense of self-worth. If this American spy she was having sex with loved her, then she was validated as a woman.

  He had to wonder what her life had been like in Tehran with a father who as a spy had set her up with a Russian general old enough to be at least her father, and possibly her grandfather. The same thing had happened to her again in Mexico City. A man she loved was setting her up with another general, and for the same reasons.

  McGarvey felt a genuine pity for her, yet was wary. She may have been misguided, but she was playing a dangerous game that her father had taught her, and which General Baranov had perfected.

  “How did it happen?” McGarvey asked.

  “The first thing I did was quit dancing at the Wild Stallion and become Louis’s full-time girl,” Shahrzad began. She smiled wistfully, which made her appear to be all the more vulnerable.

  “But that didn’t last long.”

  She shook her head. “Just a few days. Then we made the rounds of all the clubs, mostly right there in Zona Rosa and Coyacan and Condesa, but we finally wound up at a place called the Doll House in Polanco. It was fancier than most of the others, and more expensive, so there was a better class of clientele who showed up.”

  “Heavy hitters,” Rencke suggested.

  Shahrzad smiled uncertainly. “I never heard that term before.”

  “Rich guys with lots of power.”

  She nodded. “They were mostly heavy hitters in that place. And the acts were better. You know, prettier girls, younger mostly, and white mostly, although there were a couple of cute Japanese kids. The average age was maybe fifteen or sixteen. I felt ancient.

  “The third night we were there General Liu showed up with a couple of women, and Louis got all excited. ‘It’s him,’ he told me. ‘It’s our mark.’ We were going to target the general, and once we had him we could write our own ticket. We would be the emperor and empress of the moon.”

  “What happened next?” McGarvey asked.

  “Louis said that we would have to take it easy, let the general come to me,” Shahrzad explained. “If I came on too strong he’d know he was being set up. Liu got the VIP treatment whenever he was in the club. Miguel Roaz, the owner, would personally escort the general to a table right in front of the stage where they did the dancing and the sex shows. He always drank champagne, usually Krug but sometimes Dom Pérignon, and he always had a couple of women with him. Sometimes they would go into one of the back rooms with him, and the Doll—that was Roaz’s nickname because he had a baby face—would send one of the dancers back to entertain them.”

  “And have sex?” Rencke asked.

  Shahrzad seemed embarrassed. “Sometimes. That’s the whole idea of these clubs. And there’re a lot of them in Mexico City. Clubs for gays and lesbians, for the S&M freaks, even a few clubs for men, and some women, who liked to do it with animals. Big dogs, Shetland ponies, snakes.”

  “But the Doll House was for the straight crowd,” McGarvey said.

  Shahrzad nodded. “I never liked the other sort of places. They made me nervous.”

  “I’ll bet they did,” McGarvey said, but she didn’t catch his sarcasm. “Didn’t you wonder why an important Chinese man such as the general would take the risk of going to such a club? If he were to be seen and reported to Beijing he’d be in big trouble.”

  She shook her head, and her soft lips pursed in disgust. “Anyway, in between the acts couples could dance on the floor, and sometimes it was like an orgy. The music was wild, the place was practically pitch black except for a spotlight that moved around the floor, and by the time they were ready to start the next show everyone was all but screwing their brains out.”

  “You and Louis?” McGarvey asked.

  She looked away for a moment. “He wanted me to try to seduce him, but he said everything from now on was for the general’s benefit. That night I was half naked, rubbing against Louis’s arm, when the spotlight came to us. Louis shoved me back and hit me in the mouth. I never saw it coming, and it hurt more than you can imagine. I fell down on the floor, and the next thing I knew the bouncers had grabbed Louis and were throwing him out.” Shahrzad appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I thought they were going to toss me out too, but Roaz helped me back to the table, and the waiter brought me a bottle of Krug. ‘From an admirer,’ the Doll told me. I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.”

  Perry was staring at the girl, an intent, almost admiring, look on his face. He caught McGarvey watching him, and flushed. The exchange lasted only an instant, and neither Shahrzad nor Rencke noticed, but McGarvey thought the station chief’s reaction to the girl’s story was odd. Something was out of place.

  “I tell you that it felt strange to be sitting all alone in a place like that,” she continued.

  “The admirer was General Liu, of course,” McGarvey said. “You were in.”

  “Not quite. He didn’t speak to me that night, which Louis said would probably be the case. So I was to ask the Doll for a job dancing in the show. But he just laughed at me, at first. Said I was too old and the wrong color. Unless I had what he called ‘special talents.’”

  “Which were?”

  She hesitated.

  “He wanted to know if you were good in bed, and willing to service perhaps the admirer who’d sent you the champagne.”

  She held her silence.

  “That’s why Louis seduced you, to see if you were any good. And when he found out that you were, he made you fall in love with him so that you’d do whatever he wanted you to do.”

  “You can’t make someone fall in love with you,” Shahrzad flared.

  “But you fell in love with Louis, and he asked you to seduce General Liu. He asked you to become his whore, and you agreed.”

  “It was important,” she said weakly. Now her eyes were filling with tears.

  “How long did it take before the general asked you to his table?”

  “It was the second week,” she said. She shook her head. “I just wanted someone to love me. Is that so terrible a thing?”

  TWELVE

  LONGBOAT KEY

  They had talked for nearly an hour and a half when the woman on the house staff wheeled in a serving cart laden with Cuban sandwiches, black bean soup, and small salads, along with iced tea. McGarvey asked for a beer, and while the others were serving themselves he stepped to the edge of the veranda and looked out to the horizon. The sky was cloudless, the day was warm, but the humidity had dropped. It was what the locals called chamber of commerce weather.

  He could hear Rencke behind him talking to the woman in quieting tones about her early days in Iran when she was just a little child, how happy she must have been. Gardens surrounded their house, she said. Fruit trees, flowers, a topiary where she would play hide-and-seek with her older siblings. And tall grasses grew along a winding creek that was cool in the summer. Rencke was trying to calm her nerves so that she would better be able to face up to the next part, which would probably be difficult.

  Updegraf had apparently done his homework on General Liu, figuring that the general’s weakness was women. But if Updegraf had done all his homework he would also have learned that Liu had been suspected of brutally murdering several women in New Yo
rk and Washington and possibly again in Mexico City. He was sending the woman he professed to love to become his whore so that she could seduce the general and then spy on him, and for that there was a very good chance she would be murdered.

  For this job, Updegraf had been paying her, with the promise that if she was a success he would guarantee her a U.S. visa and the prospect of a future in which she would not have to worry about money. The sad part was that if Updegraf had done a proper job of his due diligence he would have realized that merely loving the girl would have been enough.

  It was the one statement she’d made that McGarvey believed wholeheartedly. All she wanted was for someone to love her. It’s all she’d wanted ever since her father had sent her to General Baranov’s bed.

  After her father had been assassinated and her mother had fled to Paris, there had been no place for Shahrzad to go. Her family would have rejected her because in places like Iran, women were always blamed as seductresses. If a young girl was raped, she would be held responsible. In some not very remote villages, she would even be put to death for her crime. It was almost never the man’s fault.

  The woman came with his beer. McGarvey thanked her, went back to the table, and sat down. Shahrzad was to be pitied. But she wore the diamond ring that Baranov had given her as a mark of accomplishment, not a brand of shame. And it was she who had sought out Louis Updegraf; it was she who had willingly agreed to be his whore and seduce General Liu. At least on the surface just about everything she’d told them so far seemed to be a lie. And yet there was something there, something in her eyes and in her mannerisms, that McGarvey couldn’t quite get a handle on.

  “Tell me about your contact procedures with Updegraf,” McGarvey said. “You were dealing with a high-ranking ministry officer, so I assume you were told to be careful.”

  “The general was the new generation. A real modern guy, according to Louis. So we were going to use old-fashioned tradecraft.”

  McGarvey’s anger spiked. The girl knew the terminology. He had to wonder if it had been her father who’d taught her how to be a spy, or if it had been Updegraf. He could not fathom such men. Yet his own daughter had followed in his footsteps, though not at his urging.

  “There was a telephone kiosk two blocks from my apartment in Zona Rosa that I had to pass by whenever I went to the market for groceries. Louis gave me two pieces of chalk, one white, one black. If I had something for him, I was to make a white mark, and he would meet me in the park across the street from my building. I sometimes went there to run.”

  “The black was if you were in trouble,” McGarvey said.

  She nodded. “If I used the black chalk I was to wait for him at the market and he would come for me right away.”

  “Did you ever have to use the black chalk?”

  “Once,” she said softly. “Everything was out of control by then. I mean totally out of control, and I was frightened. I wanted out.”

  “Did he come for you?”

  “No.”

  “By then Louis was dead,” Perry said. “Shot to death.”

  Shahrzad lowered her head, tears coming to her wide, dark eyes again. “I didn’t know yet. I thought he’d just abandoned me. I waited for three days and nights in a hotel, hoping that I was wrong about him and that he would come for me. But he never did. So I went to the U.S. embassy.”

  Through all of her telling, including her tears, she had continued to wolf down her lunch as if it were her first meal in a week. As sad as the memory was of her assassinated lover, her appetite had not been affected. McGarvey didn’t know what it meant, except that perhaps there was something even worse she hadn’t come to yet.

  “Let’s go back to the beginning,” McGarvey said. “Louis sets you up at the club where you catch General Liu’s eye. After the first week he invites you over to his table for some champagne, and finally he takes you to his bed.”

  She put down her spoon and dabbed the cloth napkin to her lips, a sudden wild, even insane expression coming into her eyes, as if she’d just remembered something that was so surreal she didn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

  “It took ten days,” she began. “I did as Louis told me, and let the general seduce me. He would have expected the honey trap otherwise. I was supposed to play hard to get.” She shrugged. “And it worked. He was the perfect gentleman, at first.”

  “Did he know who your father was?” McGarvey asked.

  “There was no reason for him to know. But I tell you that I was plenty scared at first.”

  “You did wind up in his bed after all,” Perry said.

  Shahrzad looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Yes,” she said. “At first I just sat with him, drank champagne, and watched the shows. Then sometimes we would dance. And it was great, he really knew what he was doing.”

  “Were the other women with him at the club?” McGarvey asked.

  She nodded. “At first, but one night he came alone, and he never brought them back.”

  “Did you ever see them again?” Perry asked. “Could you identify them?”

  “Sure. They were part of his crowd at the house. And at the compound.”

  “We’ll get to that,” McGarvey said. “You had sex with the general. Was it at the club? Did he pay you?”

  “We went to one of the rooms in back and I danced for him. This time he asked me to do the raqs sharqi.”

  “That’s the traditional belly dance,” Perry interrupted unnecessarily.

  McGarvey let it go.

  Shahrzad nodded. “When I was finished he took my costume off and laid me down on the cushions.” She was looking inward, the almost maniacal expression on her face again. “It was hot in that place, but I was shivering. I didn’t know what to expect.”

  “Oh I think you did—” Perry said, but this time McGarvey cut him off.

  “Shut up.”

  Perry was startled, but he held his silence.

  “He got undressed then, and I almost laughed at him.” Shahrzad was blushing. “He wasn’t a man … down there. He was just a boy. He couldn’t get it up, and I didn’t know what to do.” She looked up at McGarvey, willing him to understand her predicament. “He had seen me completely naked onstage before, I had just done the dance, and I was lying on the cushions waiting for him.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Continue.”

  “That was all,” she said.

  “You didn’t have sex with him?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean?” Perry blurted.

  Shahrzad turned to him, acutely embarrassed that she needed to practically draw him a picture. “He lay on top of me, did a couple of bumps, and came on my thigh.”

  Perry looked away, embarrassed. “Oh,” he said in a small voice.

  “What was Liu’s attitude afterward?” McGarvey asked. “Was he embarrassed?”

  “That was the scary part,” Shahrzad said. “He was mad as hell for a couple of minutes, maybe less. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that I thought he was going to kill me.”

  “Did he hit you?” McGarvey said.

  “No. In fact when he calmed down he made some little jokes while I was cleaning up and getting dressed. And before I left he gave me five hundred dollars, which he said I could keep for myself, he would take care of the Doll. And he said that he was busy tomorrow, but that he would see me on Friday.”

  “The next day you went to the market, left a white chalk mark by the telephone, and met Louis in the park,” McGarvey said. “Did you tell him about the money?”

  “That wasn’t important—”

  “It must have given you some satisfaction,” Perry suggested. “Here it was, two men paying you, with one of them promising to get you to the States. You were on the fast track to get everything you’d wanted.”

  “The general was crazy in the head. Some of the other girls heard there were rumors that he’d killed a girl in New Y
ork. He liked to strangle them during sex. They were only rumors, Louis told me, but I was just about out of my mind. I wanted to quit. All the money in the world wasn’t worth the risk I was taking.”

  “But you went back,” McGarvey said.

  “You don’t understand what it’s like to be in love,” Shahrzad said, her voice rising. “Of course I went back, and about a week and a half later the general invited me to move out to his house, and Louis agreed.”

  “Let me explain about General Liu’s house,” Perry cut in. “It’s really a palace with its own lake and floating gardens down in Xochimilco, about fifteen miles south of the city. Apparently he holds big parties for all the heavy hitters, most of them high-ranking Mexican politicians and military officers.”

  “Were reports made to Langley?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes, finally,” Perry said. “As soon as Ms. Shadmand walked in and gave us a few bits and pieces that we could verify. I sent two of my best people out there on a surveillance operation and we hit pay dirt the very first night.”

  “That was just a few days ago?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Perry admitted.

  “Nobody down here was given the heads-up,” Rencke said. “It was Dick’s call. He wanted a little more information before we mounted any sort of an operation.”

  Perry perked up. “Here, what are you talking about?” he demanded. “Heads-up about what? Were you aware of General Liu’s presence in Mexico City?”

  “We caught him in a couple of satellite shots,” Rencke said.

  “Why wasn’t I informed?”

  “We’ll discuss it later,” McGarvey promised.

  Perry wanted to say something, but he thought better of it, and slumped back.

  “Roaz was out there most of the time,” Shahrzad said. “Sometimes before things heated up downtown, everyone would come down to the general’s house and we’d all go to the club together. And almost every night, after the clubs closed, there’d be a crowd until dawn. There were a lot of drugs that Roaz was supplying. And everything was free.”