Dance with the Dragon Page 8

  “Will you help me?” Shahrzad asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” McGarvey said. “I need to find out a couple of things first.”

  “I’ll do anything you ask, just find out who killed Louis and why.”

  “Did he ever tell you what the big score was? Or what he thought the Chinese were up to in Mexico that would be so important to us?”

  “No. But he was plenty scared, just like me. And he promised that when he had his proof we could write our own ticket.”

  Toni appeared in the doorway and Shahrzad got to her feet. “Please, Mr. McGarvey. Just consider it.”

  When they were gone Perry sat down at the table. “It’s simply too fantastic a story to believe.”

  “Why’s that?” McGarvey asked.

  “High-ranking Chinese intelligence officers don’t involve themselves with the drug trade.”

  “It’s been done before,” Rencke said. “But I think there’s the possibility that whatever General Liu is doing in Mexico has nothing to do with Beijing.”

  “Are you saying that he’s a rogue?” Perry demanded. “Working on his own?”

  “He’s done that before too.”

  “I should have been told that he was there,” Perry said. He focused on McGarvey. “What do you think?”

  “I think that we should find out what Liu is doing in Mexico, for starters.”

  “I’ll get my people on it immediately,” Perry said. “What about the girl?”

  “Who knows that she’s here?”

  “Dick Adkins; Tom Burns, who’s our new chief of security; and us,” Rencke said.

  “How about in Mexico City?” McGarvey asked the station chief. “What’d you tell your staff when you left with the girl?”

  “Nothing,” Perry said. “It was none of their business. But my question remains, do you believe her story?”

  McGarvey had asked himself the same question. “Some of it,” he said. “But I don’t know why she got involved in the first place. I understand how and why Updegraf recruited her, but I don’t see why she accepted so willingly.”

  “Maybe she actually did fall in love with him,” Rencke suggested. “Things like that do happen to people, even in this business.”

  “There’s more,” McGarvey said. He glanced at Perry. “Keep the girl here for the time being. Toni can watch over her. I want you to go back to Mexico City and continue investigating Updegraf’s assassination as if you’d never heard this story. Your man was working on something in Chihuahua that you knew nothing about. Let the Mexican Federal Police help you. Keep it out of the media, but make a few waves. Maybe you’ll turn up something.”

  “How do I reach you?” Perry asked.

  “Through me,” Rencke said.

  FIFTEEN

  SARASOTA

  It was past three in the afternoon by the time McGarvey and Rencke headed back to New College across the bay on the mainland. St. Armand’s Circle was even busier with tourists than it had been when they’d come out to the island before lunch.

  McGarvey was deep in thought, and neither of them spoke until they reached the Ringling Bridge.

  “Something’s going on,” Rencke said, breaking the silence. “Perry was lying to us.”

  “Yes, what was that all about?”

  “He told us that he didn’t know Updegraf was fluent in Mandarin. But he had to know, it’s in the man’s personnel file. There was even a joke about it when he got reassigned to Mexico. Someone in Ops included a note in the transfer file that it was a good thing Updegraf didn’t speak Spanish, or he probably would have been sent to China.”

  “Why would he lie about something like that?” McGarvey asked. “He’d have to know that we’d find out.”

  “Maybe he’s running scared, just like Shahrzad.”

  “Of what?” McGarvey asked.

  “Now that’s the sixty-four-dollar question, kemosabe. So what’re you going to do about it?”

  “I’m not sure,” McGarvey said, and he was trying to mean it, at least for Katy’s sake, but he was intrigued despite himself. “Liu is up to something. But why Mexico? Has there been anything in the NIEs or Watch Reports about China’s involvement?”

  “That’s one of the first things I checked when Liu’s name popped up on one of our Beijing telephone intercepts. A couple of my search programs started getting into the lavender range over the past few months. There’ve been some serious shake-ups in the military high command, as well as the government. When that happens it usually means there’s some kind of a serious argument going on that’s polarized everyone. Survival of the fittest. The weak guys get the boot.

  “The biggest thing from the China desk, other than the trade issue, is their space race, but my programs were getting twitchy, so I played around a little. When we picked up Liu’s call on the Beijing circuit we found out it had probably originated in Mexico City. It was encrypted—pretty good algorithm too—and he used a sat phone, so it was tough to track. Took me a few days of sniffing around until I caught a couple of high-res shots from one of our KH14s. It was Liu all right, in Mexico City, looking right up at the camera as if he were posing for the birdy.”

  “Maybe he was,” McGarvey suggested.

  “That’s what we thought,” Rencke said. “It’s got Dick pretty worried. He wanted to call you, but he held off because you’re retired. And he really respects that, ya know. But when Shahrzad showed up on Perry’s doorstep and asked for you by name, he didn’t have a choice, so he had the girl brought here and sent me down to talk to you.”

  “Lavender?” McGarvey asked.

  Rencke nodded. “Pretty solid, and getting a shade deeper every day.”

  “No mistakes?”

  “I don’t think so, Mac. Not this time.”

  McGarvey had to ask himself how many times he’d been at this same juncture over the past twenty-five years. More times than he wanted to count. And in each instance blood had been shed, sometimes a lot of it. His operations were the reasons for the nightmares he sometimes had. But he was already putting those thoughts away and getting ready to go back into the field, where everything other than the task in hand had to be blotted out of his conscious mind. It was more than a matter of tradecraft; it very often became a matter of survival.

  “I’ll need to see the personnel files for everyone at the embassy, including Perry’s.”

  “I brought them with me,” Rencke said. “When are you leaving?”

  “As soon as I can convince Katy not to shoot both of us.”

  Rencke smiled, but it faded as quickly as it came. “Gloria Ibenez is in Mexico City,” he said.

  McGarvey had not kept track of her, but he knew that she’d been assigned to the station in Mexico City, where Cuban intelligence maintained a large presence. It would have been a waste of her Spanish language skills to send her anywhere else. She was a good field officer, inventive, steady under fire, and very bright. She’d had a serious crush on him last year, which was the only blemish on what had turned out to be one of the more satisfying operations of his career. He had tracked down Osama bin Laden and killed the al-Qaida leader. But there’d been very little fallout throughout the Arab world. Bin Laden was dead, and just about everyone knew it, yet just about everyone accepted the bin Laden double who’d sent the occasional taped message to al-Jazeera.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Perry wants to get rid of her. Thinks she’s a pain in the ass. His OPRs won’t win her any promotions.”

  Another thought suddenly crossed McGarvey’s mind, and he nearly dismissed it out of hand, but he couldn’t. It had glue. “Has Perry involved her in investigating Updegraf’s murder?”

  Rencke nodded. “He’s got her looking down Updegraf’s path. Supposedly he was working as a code clerk in the Chinese embassy, but no one else knew about it.”

  “Who’s up in Chihuahua?”

  “Nobody right now. But Perry sent Tom Chauncy, his assistant COS, to claim Updegraf’s body and get it a
cross the border for an autopsy at the Air Force hospital in San Antonio. But apparently he’s back in Mexico City, and Perry hasn’t told us how he’s deployed his people.”

  “Sounds like a mess,” McGarvey said.

  “A cluster fuck,” Rencke agreed.

  “What do we know about Perry’s background?”

  “Old-money East Coast family, ambitious—wants to be DDCI someday—pretty much does everything by the book.”

  “Is he any good?”

  “There’ve been no official complaints, so far as I could find,” Rencke said. “But I talked to a couple of people who’ve worked for him. It was no lovefest.”

  McGarvey had seen a lot of guys like that in the Agency, pompous, arrogant three-piece-suit assholes who very often did land the promotions to a big desk at the Building even though they were lousy field officers, because they were good administrators.

  “Makes you wonder why Updegraf took the chance of hiring an outside gun when he could have partnered with Gloria to go after Liu,” McGarvey said.

  Rencke was a bit shocked. “I didn’t think she’s that kind of a woman.”

  “I don’t mean go to bed with Liu and the others the general was spying on, but she could have gotten into the club scene, and when Liu picked her up—which he would have—she could have played hard to get. He could have had someone else as his whore, and Gloria would have been one of the hangers-on.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Rencke admitted.

  They pulled into the New College parking lot and Rencke drove over to where McGarvey had parked his Nissan Pathfinder.

  “Apparently neither did Updegraf,” McGarvey said. “What do we know about him?”

  “He and Perry had to be like oil and water. Perry comes from a well-to-do family, while Updegraf was Midwest blue collar, Wisconsin, but he was just as ambitious as his boss. I talked to an old friend of his who’s working the Middle East desk, said Updegraf fancied himself as the new James Bond. They were stationed together in Riyadh a few years ago, and eighteen months into the assignment Updegraf had to boogie out of Dodge in the middle of the night because he’d been caught in flagrante delicto with one of the wives of a prince he was trying to burn.”

  “A lady’s man.”

  “Yeah,” Rencke said. He took a small DVD player out of the glove compartment and gave it to McGarvey. “The personnel records of Perry and the people in his shop, plus everything we could dig up about Shahrzad, and what little we know about General Liu’s presence in Mexico City. It’s a one-play-only disk that erases itself as you watch it. It’ll also erase automatically if someone tries to play it without the password, which is your Social Security number backward, every third digit deleted.”

  McGarvey had to grin despite the situation. “Who dreams up this stuff?”

  “I did this one,” Rencke admitted, a big smile on his face, his red hair even wilder than normal. “Do you want us to take care of your travel arrangements? Perry could have someone meet you at the airport. We could fly you down military.”

  “I don’t want anybody except for you to know that I’m in Mexico,” McGarvey said. “At least not for the moment. Not Dick, not McCann, and not Perry. Especially not McCann or Perry. And keep the housekeepers out of it too.” Housekeeping, which was part of the Directorate of Operations, kept track of everyone working in the field with or for the CIA. It was an extremely sensitive section that had been completely devastated by Angleton a number of years ago. In its new form no one person had control over the entire list. Still, McGarvey did not want some suit in Langley looking over his shoulder.

  “You going to carry, or do you want me to arrange something down there?”

  “I’m going in on a diplomatic courier passport with a sealed pouch,” McGarvey said. “If Katy calls, tell her what you can without worrying her too badly.”

  “Do you have a time frame?”

  Once he had decided to go down there and take a look, he had asked himself the same question. He shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “Take care,” Rencke said.

  “In the meantime I want you to dig as deeply as you can into whatever MOIS database you can hack. I want to know if there’s even a hint that the woman might be a double. Her story has so many holes, it’s bound to be at least partly true. I want your best guess.”

  “Anything specific you want me to look for?”

  “She left her money behind,” McGarvey said. “After everything she went through it’s kind of odd, unless she doesn’t need it. Maybe she’s rich after all.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. The other guy with Liu and Updegraf. Whoever he was scared the hell out of her. See if you can come up with any connection between Liu and someone who knew Shahrzad or her family.”

  “You’re thinking about an Iranian connection down there, too?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  SIXTEEN

  CASEY KEY

  Katy wasn’t in the house when McGarvey got back from town, but when he went up to their bedroom he spotted her through the window. She was sitting reading a book in the gazebo, waiting for him. He watched her for a minute, marveling at his fantastic luck for having her in his life.

  She had picked the wrong man to marry, though to hear her tell it she’d never had a moment of doubt. She was proud of him for what he had accomplished, even though in her heart of hearts she wanted to disagree with a world in which violence was sometimes a necessary evil with which to combat an even larger, mindless evil.

  Her biggest complaint was his leaving her. She once told him that it was at times like those when she thought she might be losing her mind with worry. She’d been around long enough as the wife of a CIA officer to read about and attend more funerals than she ever wanted to. “One of these days it might be me wearing black with someone like Dick Adkins holding my elbow at graveside,” she said. They were having after-dinner drinks at a trendy Georgetown restaurant. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t look good in black.”

  He remembered that particular conversation just at this moment because of his answer. He’d been on the trail of an al-Qaida agent who’d planed a terrorist strike on the U.S., and at that moment he was fairly certain of what and whom he was up against, and of how he wanted the operation to play out. “No black for you this time, Katy,” he said.

  “Kathleen,” she replied, a hint of crossness in her voice. But then she forced herself to relax. “Hell, I’ve just got the vapors seeing you off again.”

  He reached across the table for her hand. “I won’t tell you not to worry. But I’ll be back. Promise.”

  “I’ll hold you to it,” she said.

  This time around, however, McGarvey wasn’t as sure of what he was getting himself into. They’d already lost one man down there, and there was no knowing at this stage just how entrenched Liu and the Guoanbu were. There was a great possibility that whoever went up against the Chinese next could be running into a buzz saw.

  And there was something else. Something that McGarvey couldn’t quite get a handle on. Yet it was there, just over the horizon, watching, waiting, expecting someone like him to come.

  Katy suddenly looked up, then turned and spotted him in the window. She waved, put the book down, and started to get to her feet, but he opened the French doors and went out onto the veranda.

  “Stay there,” he called to her. “I’ll be right down.”

  She shaded her eyes. “Okay.”

  “Do you want anything?”

  “Just a good explanation why I missed lunch,” she replied, a touch of wariness in her voice.

  He went across the room to his walk-in closet, slid a set of hinged drawers aside, and opened the small floor safe, from which he took a small black leather bag of the type diplomatic couriers usually carried strapped to their wrists aboard commercial air flights. It was his field operations bag, what in the old days he’d called his “go-to-hell kit.” Inside were several passports, U.S., Canadian, an
d French, all identifying him under work names as a diplomatic representative. The bag also held ten thousand dollars in cash, in U.S. dollars and euros; credit cards to match the passports; and his pistol, a Walther PPK in the 9 mm version, two spare magazines of ammunition, and a quick-draw holster that could be worn at the small of his back or at the inside of his left ankle.

  On the inside of the satchel, a fine mesh lead alloy screen had been sewn between the fabric lining and the leather, which made airport screening devices useless. In most instances traveling under a diplomatic passport excused him from body and baggage searches. The mesh was just another precaution.

  He took the case down to the garage, where he added the DVD player Rencke had given him, locked it, and put it in the backseat of his Nissan. The he got a bottle of good Pinot Grigio from the wine safe in the kitchen pantry, opened it, got two glasses, and went down to the gazebo.

  She’d put her book aside, and when she saw her husband coming with the bottle of wine and glasses, she looked away for a second, vexed. “Whenever you show up down here with wine and that look, I know something’s up that I won’t like.”

  “Am I that obvious?” McGarvey asked. He kissed her upturned cheek, and poured a glass of wine for her.

  “Transparent,” she said.

  “Sorry about lunch, sweetheart,” he said. “Couldn’t be helped.”

  Her lips compressed and she nodded. “When are you leaving?”

  “In the morning.”

  “Maybe I should fly up with you,” she suggested hopefully. “While you’re out at Langley doing your thing I could see Audie, and take Elizabeth shopping or something. Afterward you could join us and we could make a nice minivacation out of it. What do you say?”

  McGarvey shook his head. “Not this time, sweetheart.”

  Her face fell. “Washington is just a way point.”

  He nodded.

  “You promised that you wouldn’t get involved with anything unless it was important to both of us. Is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. But his gut feeling was as strong as ever, and Rencke’s programs were lavender and deepening. “I’m just going to take a closer look, and maybe turn around and come home.”