Dance with the Dragon Page 9

  “Any hint where you’re going?”

  He shook his head.

  “How long you’ll be gone?”

  “With any luck only a few days,” McGarvey told her.

  “And without any luck?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, Katy. Could be a week, maybe longer. Maybe even a lot longer.”

  “Goddamn it to hell!” Katy shouted. She jumped up, threw her glass away, shattering it against the railing, wine flying everywhere, and stormed out of the gazebo and down the thirty yards to the wooden dock.

  It wasn’t often she had these outbursts because of his profession, but he’d learned the hard way that when she did it was best to let her work it out on her own. She would calm down, and they could talk it out.

  Early in their marriage he’d been sent to Santiago, Chile, to assassinate a general who’d been responsible for the torture and deaths of thousands of people, and who, if he had lived, would possibly have become president of Chile and would have killed even more of his people.

  When he’d come back to Washington he’d learned that the operation had been called off at the last moment, but it had been too late to stop him. It had been a setup to get rid of him, and he’d been fired from the Company.

  That afternoon when he walked through the front door of his house, bag in hand, Katy had been there in the stair hall with an ultimatum. She’d had no idea where he’d been or what he had been doing, but she’d had enough of him running around the world at a moment’s notice, leaving her to sit at home half out of her mind with worry and fear. It was her or the CIA. He would have to make the choice.

  He’d been mentally fried at that moment. Not only had he killed the general, he’d been forced to kill the man’s wife, putting a bullet in her head when she and her husband were in the act of making love, lest she sound the alarm and bring the guards down on him. It didn’t matter when he stood just inside the door facing Katy that the general’s wife had been just as responsible for the killing and torture as her husband, because he didn’t know it then. All he knew was that he had gunned down two people, one of them a woman, in cold blood, he’d been fired from his job, and the one person on earth whom he desperately needed to make it right was treating him as if he were a criminal who needed to change his ways or get out.

  His marriage was new enough that he hadn’t learned how to react when his wife threw a tantrum. He’d turned around without a word and walked out the door. By the next morning he was on an Air France flight to Paris, and then to Switzerland.

  He and Katy had been separated for a lot of years as their only daughter was growing up. And looking back, those wasted years made no sense to him. They had always loved each other; they’d just not been able to keep in step. They hadn’t learned how.

  After a few minutes he went down to the dock and stood beside her, watching a snowy egret fishing for its dinner on the opposite bank.

  She looked up and smiled wistfully. “I was thinking about the time when you came home after one of your … trips, and I told you it was me or the CIA.”

  “I was thinking about it too,” McGarvey said. “We were pretty stupid.”

  “I’m not that dumb anymore, Kirk,” she said, turning to him.

  “Neither am I,” McGarvey said, and he took her in his arms.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Katy looked deeply into his eyes, and after a moment she nodded. “I wonder what would happen if I threw down the gauntlet now?”

  “I’d probably turn down the trip,” McGarvey told her.

  “Thank you for that much,” she said. “Please be careful and come back to me.”

  SEVENTEEN

  MEXICO CITY

  McGarvey had booked a pair of first-class seats on a United Airbus A320, leaving Dulles at 3:00 p.m., just forty minutes after his flight from Sarasota had touched down. His diplomatic passport identifying him as Thomas Higby had not been given a second glance, and he’d been allowed to step around the security arch with his leather bag in hand. At the counter he’d checked one hanging bag with his clothes, which was tagged with a diplomatic status, and since he’d booked two seats he wasn’t bothered with a neighbor.

  As soon as they were in the air and had reached cruising altitude the captain turned off the Fasten Seat Belt sign and announced that portable electronic devices including cell phones would be okay to use. McGarvey ordered a Martell cognac neat from the stewardess, and after she’d brought it he took out Rencke’s DVD and powered it up.

  The personnel files on Gil Perry and the people working for him out of the embassy didn’t contain much of any interest besides what Rencke had told him, and from what he’d gathered from Perry himself and from the woman. The entire station seemed to be composed of field officers who had their own agendas. Everyone was looking for the “big score,” as Updegraf had called it. Perry was looking to make his mark so he could take the next step toward becoming DDCI. Chauncy wanted his own station, and he was willing to push Perry at every opportunity, hoping that his boss would make a career-busting mistake. Updegraf had been up to something that no one else knew about. And the only reason Gloria Ibenez had apparently made no splash was because Perry hated her for some reason.

  It was one piece of the puzzle that McGarvey didn’t quite understand. The Gloria he knew was an extremely ambitious woman, who had never let anyone or anything stand in her way. She wanted big things for herself—though what exactly those were wasn’t quite clear—so why she wasn’t demanding a transfer out of a station she had to know was a dead end for her was puzzling, unless, like Chauncy, she was pushing Perry into making a big mistake. It was possible that she was hoping for a COS whom she could work to her advantage.

  The dossiers on General Liu and Shahrzad contained almost nothing of any use beyond what McGarvey had already learned at the Longboat Key interview, except that the FBI had twice reported its suspicions of the general to the government in Beijing through the Chinese embassy in Washington. The first time was in New York, when Liu had been working with the Chinese delegation to the UN. Within a few days he had been recalled to China, only to surface one year later in Washington at the Chinese embassy. The Bureau again sent a warning to Beijing that Liu was suspected of being a murderer. This time the general left the U.S. apparently without being recalled.

  McGarvey looked up from a photograph of the general displayed on the tiny screen. It made no sense. If the Bureau had twice suspected Liu of being a murderer, and both times had been able to convince the State Department that there was enough of a case that a warning should be transmitted to Beijing, why hadn’t Liu been declared persona non grata and kicked out of the country? The balance-of-trade issue had been on the table, and it was possible that the White House had not wanted to add any fuel to the firestorm over something so relatively minor as a suspected killer. Liu hadn’t actually been proved guilty of anything.

  Updegraf had probably been assassinated by the Mexicans on Liu’s orders. It was also likely that Updegraf had found out something about the general and what he was doing in Mexico. It was this last business that apparently worried Adkins enough to send Rencke to Florida to ask for McGarvey’s help. Perry and his crowd were evidently incapable of finding out what was going on, and if Adkins sent a flying team down there to help out, even a half-blind man watching our embassy would know something big was in the wind.

  McGarvey stared at Liu’s image on the small screen for a long time. Shahrzad had seen him and Updegraf together at the compound in Chihuahua, and more than anything else that had frightened her enough to bail out, leaving her hard-won money behind. He had to wonder what she’d expected to say to Updegaf when they met again.

  He skipped back to the beginning of the disk, but the files had been erased and the screen stayed blank.

  “Would you like another drink, sir?” the pretty flight attendant asked at his shoulder.

  He glanced up at her. “Sure, why not,” he said.
He had a feeling he was going to be away from home a lot longer than he’d first guessed.

  * * *

  Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez was a madhouse when McGarvey cleared passport control a few minutes after seven in the evening local. Mexicans referred to their capital city as D.F., Distrito Federal, just as many Americans referred to theirs as D.C., and the main airport was every bit as busy as Dulles usually was on an early weekday evening. Once he retrieved his check-through bag, he paid his cab fare at the teller window just outside the customs area, and took his receipt out to the sitio at curbside, where he climbed in the backseat of the lead cab.

  “Hotel Four Seasons,” he told the driver, and settled back for the ride into the city. He had some serious history here with Russian KGB General Valentin Baranov. Although that had been more than fifteen years ago, nothing seemed to have changed; there were still the same cardboard and shipping-container slums to pass through on the half-hour trip into the city; the same burned-out hulks of cars and trucks lying along the road; the same frenetic pace; and nearly the same pall of exhaust and smoke of burning garbage thick in the air.

  Despite the cab’s air-conditioning McGarvey felt a little tickle at the back of his throat from the foul air, and a shortness of breath from the altitude. Twenty-two million people lived in the D.F., which sprawled across a dry lake bed above seven thousand feet and was ringed by snowcapped mountains, which tended to keep the pollution in place. The locals never seemed to notice, but most visitors did. At some tourist spots around town there were vending machines that sold a couple of minutes of oxygen for a few pesos.

  At the hotel, McGarvey gave the driver a small tip, and checked in under his own passport. The arrival of another courier traveling under a diplomatic passport wouldn’t be flagged, but if he’d checked into a hotel instead of going straight to the embassy a few eyebrows might have been raised.

  He was given a small suite on the hotel’s eighth floor that looked down into a pleasant inner courtyard with a fountain. From here he was only a few blocks from the American embassy in the city’s historical downtown district.

  When he was settled in, he took a quick shower, changed clothes, and went back downstairs, where outside the bellman summoned him a cab.

  “Where would you like to be taken, sir?”

  “I want to take a look at a house up in Tizapan San Angel,” McGarvey told the bellman. “I want to make sure it’s in a good neighborhood before I meet the agent tomorrow.”

  “That’s a very nice neighborhood, señor,” the bellman said as a taxi pulled up. He opened the door. “Do you have an address?”

  “It’s just off the Avenida Rio Magdalena,” McGarvey said, giving the man a tip. “I’ll direct the driver.”

  The bellman said something to the driver, and closed the door.

  The cabbie merged with traffic, and a couple blocks later passed the modernistic U.S. embassy. Thirty minutes later they came to an area of graceful hillside homes in the Spanish hacienda style, many of them behind tall stucco walls, with winding cobblestoned side streets and far less traffic. The Chinese embassy occupied one of these upscale houses: four stories behind a tall stucco wall topped with iron spikes and secured by a tall wrought-iron gate.

  “Slow down,” McGarvey told the driver. “I think it’s somewhere around here.”

  The cabbie did as he was told and they passed the embassy at a crawl. The roof of the main building bristled with antennae and satellite dishes. Lights were on in most of the windows, and perhaps two dozen cars were parked along the curb on both sides of the street. Evidently there was something going on inside, a diplomatic reception or party.

  Passing the gate, McGarvey could see a second, much smaller, building to the right of the main house, and the edge of another, perhaps a garage, around back. A man dressed in dark clothing stood just inside the gate, and he raised something in his hand to point at the cab. McGarvey got the impression it might have been a camera or perhaps a Starlight Scope, because the man held it to his eyes.

  McGarvey turned his face away from the window. “I was mistaken,” he told the driver. “I’ll just have to wait until morning. Take me back to the hotel.”

  “As you wish, señor,” the cabbie said, and at the next corner he made a U-turn.

  * * *

  Back in his suite McGarvey ordered a light dinner and a couple bottles of Dos Equis beer from room service. While he waited he used his sat phone to call Rencke.

  “I’m at 805 at the Four Seasons. I need you to send me a few things.”

  “Dick wants to know what you think about the girl,” Rencke said.

  “Does anybody know I’m here?”

  “No.”

  “Tell Dick I’m still working on it,” McGarvey said. “I’ll get back to him in a couple of days. Are you and Perry still in Florida?”

  “Perry left a half hour after you did, and I got home last night,” Rencke said. “Toni knows what she’s doing.”

  “Okay, this is what I want sent down here.”

  EIGHTEEN

  D. F., COLONIA CUAUHTÉMOC

  The D.F. was divided into sixteen areas called delegaciones, and four hundred neighborhoods called colonias. The U.S. embassy was on Paseo de la Reforma in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc, which was in the heart of the modern skyscraper and business district downtown.

  McGarvey had spent the day arranging for a rental Toyota SUV and finding his way around the huge city, going to the Wild Stallion and some of the other clubs Shahrzad had mentioned, including the Doll House, where she had danced for General Liu.

  Driving, especially downtown, was mostly a matter of nerves. Mexican drivers didn’t understand or respect the notion of right of way, and most of them apparently believed they were immortal.

  He was parked across the street from the chancellery at a quarter till five in the afternoon, as the first of the day-shift cars emerged from the embassy grounds through the tall iron gate manned 24/7 by armed security guards in black uniforms with bloused boots. But it wasn’t until nearly seven thirty that Gloria Ibenez, driving a bright yellow Mini Cooper, roared through the gate, tossed a cheery wave at the guards, darted across three lanes of traffic, and flew up toward the Zona Rosa.

  McGarvey managed to keep up with her, while staying two or three cars back, as she threaded through traffic, sometimes slowing down so that she would just make a light before it changed red, other times turning off the main boulevard for a few blocks before returning to it.

  She was obviously trying to shake a tail, although McGarvey was pretty sure that she hadn’t spotted him; there was just too much after-work traffic, and every other car seemed to be a gunmetal gray SUV of one Japanese make or another. But she was using tradecraft, which meant she was concerned that someone might be following her.

  Gloria’s apartment was in Lomas Altas, not far from downtown, but instead of going directly home, she pulled in to a small shopping center and parked in front of a supermarket.

  McGarvey pulled in a few rows back, but left the engine running as he waited. The shopping center could have been in any city in the U.S. The Sumesa supermarket was flanked by a dry cleaners, a Postal Mart, a florist, a liquor store, a pharmacy, a martial arts studio, and a Hallmark card shop. On the corner, but detached from the mall itself, was a McDonald’s. The shops were busy at this hour, men and women in business attire stopping after work.

  The hill rose steeply behind the mall, and perched above were several modern-looking three-story garden apartment buildings that were surrounded by a riot of flowers and trees and vines. The balconies all faced back toward the city center, and McGarvey suspected the view was very good.

  Gloria came back to her car fifteen minutes later with two bags of groceries. She was dressed in a very short khaki skirt with a white, scoop-necked T-shirt and sandals, her dark hair up in a bun at the back. She looked very fit: lithe, like an athlete or a dancer, with long, shapely muscular legs and well-defined arms from working out. She wore
some sort of a heavy gold chain around her long neck that contrasted well with her dark skin.

  She was a Cuban-born American who’d defected with her father and mother from Havana when she was only thirteen. Her mother had been killed in the escape and she’d been raised by her father, a former Cuban Air Force general, and then by an aunt and uncle in Miami. Her father had gone to work as a consultant for the CIA, the FBI, and several other governmental agencies, and after Gloria had graduated from law school and done a stint with the Navy’s Judge Advocate’s Office, she’d been recruited by the CIA.

  Two years later, she met and married another Cuban-born American CIA officer, and they’d been stationed under deep cover in Havana. Six months into their assignment, her husband had been captured by Cuban intelligence and tortured to death. She’d managed to escape, but at thirty-three she still had not remarried.

  She put her groceries in her car, and when she got behind the wheel McGarvey caught a lingering glimpse of her thigh under the lights, and it came to him that she was posing for someone. Deliberately using her sex as a distraction. But so far as he could tell no one else had followed her here, so he wondered whom she was posing for, unless it was just a habit she’d gotten herself into.

  Out of the parking lot she merged with traffic, and one block later she passed a large house situated behind a tall stucco wall, its driveway guarded by heavy iron gates. The writing on a brass plaque beside the gates was in Arabic and Roman script. The place was the Iranian embassy, and at the next corner Gloria turned to the right on a narrow road that wound its way up into the hill above the embassy and the shopping center to the garden apartments. She parked in one of the carports and took her groceries down a steep path to one of the first-floor apartments with an entry on an open walkway, and went inside as McGarvey pulled into the visitors’ parking lot and shut off the engine.

  By all accounts Gloria had stopped playing by the rules the day her husband had been killed. She was branded a troublemaker, who did not know how to work as a team player, but her father, General Marti, still had some influence in Washington, and she was good at her job. She’d been back to Cuba twice, at great personal risk, and last year she’d helped McGarvey find and kill Osama bin Laden. The Company owed her some slack, though Perry couldn’t agree.