Without Honor

1

Flight 451 left Miami International Airport at two-fifty in the afternoon. On time. It was Tuesday, October 13. The weather was warm, in the high eighties, under clear blue skies with a gentle wind from the southeast. Signs were posted here and there throughout the busy airport warning that it was a federal offense even to joke about air disasters or hijackings. But it had been months since any incident had happened anywhere in the world, and even longer for Miami, so there was only a simple, relaxed watchfulness among the security people.

By three the DC-10 had climbed out over the Florida peninsula, the sun glinting on its silvery tail and wings, the cocktail cart beginning to move up the long aisle.

There were only ten persons in first class, among them two Mexican government employees returning from vacation; a professor of languages from the University of Mexico who had come to Miami to attend a conference on ancient cultures; three businessmen from AT&T (one of them of Mexican descent) on their way to talk some sense into the Mexican minister of communications about joint funding of a new satellite that would improve telephone service between the two countries; and two American couples on their way to Mexico City on assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which had gotten a new start six months earlier.

They were served by two stews. One of them, Maria Gonzales, a pretty young girl from La Paz, clearly remembered the American couples because they seemed to be in such high spirits. They joked and laughed across the aisle with each other. And Senor Arthur Jules, the older of the two men, tall, husky, balding, was telling the most outrageous jokes about American-Mexican relations, which even the somewhat taciturn language professor seemed to find amusing.

No, she had not actually been close enough at any time to hear exactly what was being said by Senor Jules (he and his wife, Bernice, were seated in 3A and 3B), or by the other AID employee, Ted Asher (he and his wife, Janice, were seated across the aisle in 3C and 3D), but overall her impression of the two American couples was that they seemed pleasant, very aware, and apparently genuinely interested not only in each other, but in the other passengers in first class, especially the Mexican gentlemen.

Had she any idea why the two Americans in first class had been singled out by the hijackers? She would not even venture an opinion. The very same question was, of course, also asked of the other passengers, most of whom had not even the slightest awareness of the goings-on in first class.

There were three couples from Des Moines, Iowa, who had been vacationing together for the past four days in Miami and Key West, and were on their way to Mexico City on a lark. They had never done anything like this in their entire lives. Howard S. Morgan, the farm implement dealer in Saylorville (a suburb to the north of Des Moines) had come up with the idea in a bar in Key West the night before. They knew nothing about the happenings in first-class. None of them had ever gone first class in their lives and had no interest in ever doing so, but they all saw the killing.

Marjory Dillard, a woman from Duluth on her way to see her son in Mexico City, sat one row behind and across the aisle from one of the hijackers. Throughout the first part of the incident, she had been busy taking photographs with her Instamatic. The flash unit on the camera did not work, but technicians were able to produce images from the film nevertheless, which proved to be of inestimable value. She never gave first class a thought, and later she was so frightened that one of the two men who had taken over the aircraft would find out what she had done and kill her that everything seemed to pass her by in a blur.

Donna Anderson, just forward of the smoking section, who also saw the killing, was traveling with her two young children on the second leg of her trip to Acapulco, where her estranged husband was said to be living on company funds he had stolen. She was going to him, with the children, in an effort to make him see the light of day and return home to Tallahassee with her. The company was willing to forgive, if not forget, should he return of his own accord and promise to make restitution. Throughout most of the hijacking she was so concerned about the safety of her children that she, too, had little or no awareness of anything or anyone outside her own personal sphere.

Of the others, all of them were naturally aware that they had been hijacked, but only half of them actually saw the shooting take place twenty-five yards from the plane on the runway outside Havana.

By four that afternoon, while flight 451 was still fifteen minutes away from landing at Havana, the FBI Miami office had secured the passenger and crew list from the airline (via computer) and had immediately transmitted the list to its headquarters and archives in Washington, D.C. Who aboard the hijacked aircraft could be the hijacker … or hijackers (it still was not known how many were involved)?

A scant fourteen minutes later, as the DC-10 was on its final approach, the passenger list had made its way from FBI Headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building to the State Department on 21st and C streets. This transfer of information was done for two reasons. First, many of the passengers aboard the Aeromexico flight were foreign nationals: did State have anything on any of them? Second, two of the American passengers, Arthur David Jules and Theodore Alvin Asher, were employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development, a State Department operation.

Both men’s names were flagged in State’s computer. It was true, in a technical sense, that they worked for AID: But that simply was their cover. In actuality both Jules and Asher were field operatives for the Central Intelligence Agency.

During those first few critical moments it very nearly leaked that the two Americans were undercover. However a bright supervisor of some years experience at State, whose name was never mentioned on any report, picked up the telephone and called his friend Robert LeGrande, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division of Operations at Langley, to advise him that a couple of “friends” were involved as passengers in a hijacking. Even as they spoke, the State Department supervisor was deleting the flags from the operatives’ names, assuring their anonymity at least for the moment. State would continue to make all the appropriate noises as if the two were in fact AID employees, but the CIA would take their debriefing in hand if and when they were returned, which of course never happened because they were murdered.

Stewart Burger, a junior AID official working out of the Miami office, was immediately dispatched to the airport to take charge of Bernice Jules and Janice Asher. He knew nothing other than that they were the wives of the two murdered AID employees, although Albert Thompson, a CIA operations man who happened to be in Atlanta that afternoon, was flown by military jet to Miami where he tagged along, unobtrusively, to ensure nothing was said by either woman.

By early evening of that same day, a special investigative unit of the FBI was set up under the direction of John Lyman Trotter, Jr., who was acting assistant director of the bureau’s Special Investigative Division. Trotter was a fairly rare breed in that he not only had the slick political savvy necessary for survival in Washington, but he had genuine talent as well, though over the past few years he had found himself bending his own principles with increasing frequency in order to satisfy an insatiable bureaucracy. He was tall and thin (almost cadaverous), and anything but good-looking, behind thick, wire-rimmed glasses perched atop a huge, misshapen nose. By way of compensation for his looks he had very early on become good at what he did … which was finding out things that had to be found out. His wife, who had killed herself three years ago (or so the rumor went) had done so because she could not bear the strain of living with such a highly charged man. He literally drove her crazy, which in some odd, perverse way, had increased his reputation as a power in Washington; as a man with such a devout, all-consuming singleness of purpose that not even his private life came before his work.

Trotter drove immediately from his home in Arlington to his office, where he began gathering his staff, who in turn began feeding him the first bits and pieces, just as they came in.

“Don’t worry about analysis, or any sort of sophistication. I want, I need, details. Now!”

The media had gotten on to the business, of course, and already the networks were not only reporting the hijacking and the mysterious killing of two Americans, they were all trying to analyze what this meant in terms of the very complex U.S. relationship with Cuba.

Trotter was of no mind for such nonsense. He had begun his investigative career some years ago in the CIA, transferring to the bureau during the shake-up in the Carter years, when pragmatism was a dirty word. He had a very good idea, early on, that Jules and Asher could very well be Company men using AID as their cover. Two telephone calls to the State Department, including one to a very angry under secretary, produced the grudging admission that Jules and Asher may have been more than anyone was being told. A third call, this one to Lawrence Danielle, deputy director of operations at Langley, verified the fact that Jules and Asher were indeed Company operatives who had been on their way to Mexico City where they were to have taken up AID posts at the embassy.

“Is there a connection between their identities and their murders?” Trotter asked. “I just want to know that much, Larry, because it looks goddamned suspicious to me.”

“We’re working on it, John, believe me. Donald has got this place secured like a fortress. We’re at war here. Can you understand that?” Danielle said it as if he were out of breath.

“Apparently the Cubans themselves shot them down right on the runway. Them, as well as the hijackers. What the hell was going on down there?”

“We had no indications, I assure you. Otherwise we would have made different arrangements to get them to Mexico City.”

Trotter sighed deeply. “I’m taking charge of this investigation from here. Personal charge. You and I will have to liaise on this.”

“Don’t go charging off in all directions. Donald is going to want to talk to you,” Danielle said hastily. Until Donald Suthland Powers had been appointed director of Central Intelligence by the president, Danielle had been acting director. There was universal agreement in Washington (in itself a rare thing) that Powers was the right man for the job at the right time. Things were getting done.

“We’ll have to set up a common ground,” Trotter said.

“It’ll be on your turf. We have to keep the investigation out of our corner. At least for the time being,” Danielle said. “I’ll talk to Donald now.”

The anonymous little man from across the river showed up that night. He was given clearance and a security badge, over Trotter’s signature, and the nonpublicized collaboration between the FBI and the CIA began its intense, eight-day run. Trotter was in charge, with the help of his “expert,” as Danielle came to be known, and if anyone could produce results it would be such a team. Within the first twenty-four hours they had brought together most of the facts, leaving the refinements and their ramifications to be worked out on the run.

In one sense, the hijacking could not have happened at a more propitious time for the United States. We had bungled the Bay of Pigs business in the sixties; we had muffed the rescue of our POWs from the hellish prison camp outside Hanoi in the seventies; and of course the Iranian hostage situation was still painfully fresh in everyone’s minds. But America was on the road back. The Reagan administration had taken a hard-line stand with a hostile world. Had the Iranians grabbed our embassy in 1985, the hostages would have been freed within twenty-four hours; probably over a lot of dead bodies, but freed nevertheless. We were beginning to stand tall, and this incident seemed tailor-made to show our new strength of purpose. In another, larger sense, however (certainly no one could have predicted this), the hijacking ultimately resulted in arguably the most sinister and certainly most tragic of consequences.

The actual hijacking itself was an incident whose moment-by-moment details few of the passengers seemed able to agree upon. The consensus collated from the testimony of everyone on board did, however, allow investigators to come to a number of generalized conclusions and quite a few reasonable assumptions.

It went smoothly. All seemed to agree on at least that singular fact.

“We didn’t really know anything was happening, at first,” and variations on that theme were quite common statements.

The woman with the Instamatic shot one frame of the hijacker who had been seated near her. It showed him with a large, ugly-looking automatic in his left hand. Analysts later were able to identify the gun as a Graz Buyra, the KGB’s weapon of assassination. But it was eight days before they realized how the two hijackers got their weapons on board, information which was, of course, never made public. An Aeromexico employee, Manuel Garcia Lopez, had brought the guns onto the aircraft the day before, while it was down for maintenance in Mexico City, stashing them in the waste paper-disposal compartment in the aft, port-side head. Lopez was never apprehended. It was believed he made his way to Cuba the very evening of the hijacking.

The most serious conclusion, at least in the early days, was that the two hijackers had had help. Organization. Backing. Planning. One of them had been tentatively identified (from the woman’s photographs) as Eduardo Cristobal Valejo, a small-time hood who had overseen a wide variety of illicit transactions out of Mexico City … anything from smuggling a few grams of cocaine to an occasional truckload of marijuana across the border at Piedras Negras into Texas. This hijacking was too big for him to have planned it. And how did a small-time hoodlum come to possess a Soviet assassination device in the first place? The other man was never identified. The woman’s photographs of him were unclear and showed only the back of his head. Nor were the Ident-a-kit drawings made from descriptions by the crew of any help. So, for a time before the investigation began to be overshadowed by other, larger concerns, the second hijacker came to be known simply as the mystery man, a title that perhaps did him too much justice, for almost certainly he, too, was a small-time hood and not some international terrorist.

The actual time of the hijacking was one of the few facts that was nailed down solidly. At exactly 3:23 P.M., when flight 451 had flown nearly a hundred miles out over the Gulf of Mexico off Florida’s west coast, the two hijackers (who had already retrieved their weapons) got to their feet.

Valejo, seated near the rear of the plane, walked to the aft galley where he showed his automatic to the two stews there, telling them the flight would be diverted to Havana. There was no noise, no fuss or bother, and none of the passengers, at that point, suspected anything untoward was happening.

At the very same moment, the second hijacker, the mystery man, got up from his seat, moved carefully through the first-class section, and opened the door onto the flight deck. The door had been left unlocked in flight, contrary to regulation. He closed and properly locked the door, pulled out his weapon, and announced in clear English but with a Mexican accent that this plane was being taken over and would head immediately for Havana’s José Marti International Airport.

In the retelling the crew on the flight deck were quite clear and concise. They were professionals, trained for such an eventuality, so that at no time did they attempt to do anything that would create any further danger. They treated the hijacker with the utmost respect and regard, they told investigators.

Captain Vincent May (the only non-Mexican member of the crew) immediately radioed Miami Flight Control, advising them that they had been hijacked and were being diverted to Havana. No mention was made of a bomb, or of weapons, or of the number of hijackers on board. The Miami controller who took the call turned all his flights over to other controllers so that he was free to handle only this flight … standard operating procedure. His supervisor immediately telephoned Havana Air Traffic Control to advise them of the incoming hijacked flight, and then in quick order he telephoned the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Miami, the Mexican Air Control Authority, the Aeromexico representatives at both airports, and finally Miami International Airport security.

The subsequent events seemed to gather their own terrible momentum. At the very same moment that Lawrence Danielle marched up to the seventh floor to inform the DCI of the event, flight 451 rolled to a stop on the far side of the terminal at José Marti International Airport. Within seconds the plane was surrounded by a dozen military vehicles from which emerged more than a hundred soldiers and civil police officers, all armed, all at the ready.

It was like a dream after that, Maria Gonzales, the first-class stew, told investigators. The forward hatch of the aircraft was opened, boarding stairs brought up, and she clearly remembered the thick, damp odors of the warm, tropical day, intermingled with the harsher odor of burnt jet fuel. The hijacker who had stationed himself in the aft galley hurried forward, the big automatic in his left hand raised so that everyone would be sure to see it and therefore try nothing silly. He was met in the first-class compartment by the hijacker who had issued the orders from the flight deck.

There was a bit of confusion at this point. Maria Gonzales told investigators that the hijacker who had been aft pointed his gun at the two Americans — Senors Jules and Asher — and motioned for them to get to their feet, which they did without a fuss. Janice Asher, who had been hysterical all through the incident, nevertheless gave her version in which her husband had leaped up in an attempt to disarm the hijacker, who struck her husband in the head with the weapon. Asher had to be helped off the aircraft. Bernice Jules, on the other hand, told authorities that the hijacker who had emerged from the flight deck had pointed his gun directly at her, right between her eyes from a distance of less than fifteen feet, and motioned for her husband to get to his feet, which he naturally did. She could not remember if Ted Asher had gotten up or not. Of course, he had to have, because he was shot down on the tarmac.

From that point on, the consensus from the passengers and crew was that the two hijackers and the two Americans got off the plane, started away, and at some point one or all of them were seen making a dash for one of the civilian cars that had pulled up, followed by several seconds of intense gunfire in which all four were killed.

It sounded like corn popping in another room, Marjory Dillard said. She did not actually see the shooting, but those passengers on the port side of the aircraft who were able to witness the terrifying event recoiled in horror. About that she was quite clear.

Within the hour the bodies had been taken away in four ambulances, and the Cuban authorities came aboard to begin their preliminary questioning. The wives of the two slain Americans went crazy. They wanted to be with their husbands. The crew only got them calmed down after a long time, Maria Gonzales said. She and first officer Hernando Prañdo managed to administer Valium from the aircraft’s first aid locker, and when they got back to the States the next day they were placed in Miami’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. The following day they were flown to George Washington University Hospital, and by that evening they were home with their families: Bernice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and Janice in Georgetown, away from the press so that an agency psychologist, Charles Ruff, could have the time and the privacy for a proper debriefing.

Each of the other passengers was questioned by the authorities through the following two days. They all stayed at the Miami Airport Hilton at Aeromexico’s expense but under FBI supervision.

Everyone agreed that the Cuban authorities had treated them with the utmost kindness and understanding during their twenty-four-hour stay at a nearby hotel. The questions were routine, the food passable, and their hosts polite.

Now back in Miami, the DC-10 was literally stripped in an effort to find out how the weapons were brought on board. The crew was thoroughly questioned, and in Washington files on every single person aboard (so far as such files were available) were gone through with a fine-toothed comb. It wasn’t until the beginning of the second week, however, that it was discovered how Manuel Lopez, the Aeromexico maintenance employee, had brought the weapons onto the plane. But by then he was long gone. It was theorized that the very evening of the hijacking he had made his way to Cuba. Someone thought they recognized him in Havana, but it was another dead end. One of many for Trotter’s team, such as the origin of the Soviet assassination devices both men carried.

By this time the hijacking was old news. Mines had been placed in the Strait of Hormuz, the Israelis were talking seriously about going back into Lebanon to stop, once and for all, terrorist strikes on their settlements. And there were new rounds of talks with the Russians about the Star Wars defensive measures which Reagan was asking Congress to support with billions in research funds.

Through all of this Trotter became a very dissatisfied man. He did not like loose ends, and although he was forced by the press of other important business to order most of his investigative team to stand down from the hijacking and to spend more and more of his own time on an ever-increasing work load, hardly an hour went by when he did not give serious thought to Lawrence Danielle and what his old friend had not told him. Jules and Asher were agency operatives on their way to assignment in Mexico City. That much Danielle would verify. But beyond that there was nothing as to the nature of their assignment, or if they were killed because of it. Trotter was enough of an old hand to know when to stand down, when not to poke his nose into areas closed to the bureau, but it galled him nevertheless that he had been used to take all the heat away from Langley. His career hadn’t really suffered for not having brought the hijackers’ real motives to light, but there was a blemish on his record. And if there was anything Trotter despised, it was lack of precision.

The last of the hijacking business, at least as far as concerned the bureau, came late on Friday, November 15, a full thirty-three days after the hijacking, in the form of a meeting of the minds, in a manner of speaking. It was a meeting that nevertheless was on an informal basis and was therefore never recorded. Lawrence Danielle, who had become quite aloof from the FBI’s investigation after the first few days’ flush of information and speculation, showed up at the Alexandria home of an angry Trotter who was willing, able, and just about ready to bring pressure to bear on the agency through Justice Department channels.

“I resent being toyed with like this, Lawrence,” he cried at the beginning. “You of all people surely understand that to be a policeman … an effective policeman … one needs adequate information. No source must be sacred.”

It had been a rather constant theme of his, almost from the first, when he began to realize that there was more to this business than met the eye. (Actually from the moment the woman’s photographs had revealed the type of weapons the hijackers carried.)

A Mahler symphony was playing softly on the stereo in the large, pleasant living room. Trotter had fixed them each a drink, and they sat by the fireplace. It was nearing Thanksgiving and was quite chilly. Danielle had thrown his overcoat carelessly over the back of a chair and had taken up a position on a corner of the couch. His actions and manner were irritating just then.

“There’s nothing we can do, publicly, that would help us,” Danielle began. His voice was soft. Hoarse. He sounded worn out. “In fact there are certain … shall we say, delicate matters on the burner now.”

“Christ, their shooters were signatures chiseled in stone on the cave walls for the entire world to see,” Trotter shouted. His blood pressure was rising. He could feel it. His face was flushed. “Someone is bound to make the connection.”

“That is certainly possible,” Danielle said.

“Then what do you expect of me?” Trotter said. Much later he recalled that at that moment he felt as if he were rushing headlong down a narrow, darkly blind alley. At the far end was danger. He knew it. Could feel it. Yet he could not stop himself.

“We don’t expect anything more of you than what you’ve already done, John. Just your very best effort. It is appreciated.”

Trotter rolled his eyes. He could not believe his old friend had said that. “Save that for the virgins. Just save it for the kids.”

Danielle, who at fifty-five was ten years Trotter’s senior, sat forward, his drink cradled in his small, delicate hands. “The agency is out of this investigation as of now.”

“I’m left holding the bag. Is that what you’ve come all the way out here to tell me?”

“Let this business run its natural course—”

“Unnatural, if you ask me,” Trotter interrupted.

“The hijackers are dead, the maintenance man who supplied the weapons is gone, and the two fine Americans killed in the heat of the moment have been buried. Passions were high. Havana has apologized. Leave it at that.”

“State is pressing.”

“Let them press, John. It will pass.”

“Herbert Danson was by today, actually came by my office, sat me down like a schoolchild, and gave me my ABCs.” It still rankled. “The New York Times is pressing them for more information. It somehow leaked that there were photographs.”

Apparently unperturbed by this news, Danielle nodded. “I know,” he said. “Donald asked me to stop by tonight to have a little chat with you.”

This was the payoff then, Trotter thought. They were bloody well trying to buy him off. Christ. “Then have your chat and get the hell out of here.”

Danielle looked genuinely pained.

“I have an investigation petering out here with holes in it large enough for a Mack truck. Meanwhile, you sit over there in your palace with all the answers. At least point me in the right direction.”

Danielle nodded sadly, finished his drink, and set the glass down.

“Another?” Trotter asked, but Danielle shook his head. He seemed to be weighing his words with care.

“Norma will have dinner waiting.” He stood up and got his overcoat.

Trotter got to his feet. He felt very frustrated, yet here was an old friend whom he had wounded. “Listen, Larry, I’m sorry.”

Danielle waved off the apology. “No need for that, John, I understand. Believe me, I do.”

Trotter nodded.

Danielle was staring at him. “If there was one question …” he said.

“What?”

“If there was one question for which you had an answer, our very best answer mind you … would that help?”

Trotter would forever retain the impression that he was being manipulated at that moment by a man who knew exactly what he was doing and had known all along that their meeting would come exactly to this point. But he could not help himself. The offer was too tempting.

“They carried Soviet weapons. Where did they come from? Who supplied them with the hardware?”

“CESTA.”

The word meant nothing to Trotter, though he had a visceral feeling he knew what was coming next. “KGB?”

“More than that. The Soviets have their networks in the Caribbean. Banco de Sur, El Rodeo. But CESTA is more than that.” Danielle spoke very slowly, precisely, each word measured carefully, a rare and precious substance to be handled with the utmost respect. “CESTA is composed of the intelligence-gathering systems of all the Warsaw Pact nations, sharing responsibilities as well as product.”

“Based in Mexico City.”

Danielle nodded.

“And who runs this super organization? Who is the man in charge? The brains?”

At this Danielle shook his head. “That’s all, John. As it is, I’ve overstepped my charter.”

The symphony on the stereo was over. The silence held an ominous note.“Then let’s go after them, Larry. You and I.”

“Stay out of it, John. As one friend to another, I’m telling you to stay clear. There’ll be a lot of fallout in the months to come. The man with the clean hands and clear conscience will come out on top.”

Before Danielle turned and walked out of the room, Trotter suddenly realized that there was something about his old friend just then that he had never seen before. The way the older man held himself, the set of his shoulders, the hooded expression in his eyes, the tightening of his jaw. It took a moment, though, before Trotter recognized just what it was he had seen, and the effect on him was profound, deeper than any mere words could adequately describe. But forever afterward Trotter would swear that at that moment in time he had seen fear written all over the deputy director of Central Intelligence Agency operations.

That very night, Donald Suthland Powers stood alone at the window in his office on the seventh floor of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Langley complex, trying to see into the future. He was short, somewhat stoop shouldered and slight of build, with a squarish, scholarly face, thick eyebrows, and absolutely the most penetrating, intelligent blue eyes that had ever peered across the DCI’s desk. At fifty-six he wasn’t so terribly old that he had slowed down, yet he was of the age when he could begin looking back at his youth, to a time when the future was a bright penny still untarnished. Since the president had appointed him DCI a year ago, his goals had seemed very clear. At least they had until this night. Terrible goals in the sense that he was a general waging a war in which casualties were being incurred, but exciting in that the endeavor was right: his president and his nation were behind him.

He had spent most of his life in service to his government in one capacity or another, but never from such an awesome position of responsibility and never with such a strong, clearly defined mandate. For the first time, though, the future wasn’t clear to him.

“Perhaps you should speak with Trotter,” Danielle had suggested. “He’ll stand down. He’ll give us the room.”

Powers was frightened. He needed time. Use the considerable Powers charm, he counseled himself. The power of this office, of your experience and charisma. There would be a lot of fallout. Jules and Asher were only the first. They had been lost in the opening salvo. There would be more, many more. Could he stand it?

God knew he had tried to get out of the agency after his father died. For a year in Hartford, operating the Political Action Think Tank, he had very nearly succeeded. But when the president called him back to arms, he had not been surprised or very saddened. Here was where he would wage his battles. From this very fortress was where he would expiate the sins of deadly competition, nuclear confrontation, and, on a smaller but much more intensely personal scale, the murders of Jules and Asher. They would be the cry to arms. The point around which all of them would rally.

Powers had allowed himself in the years past, rising in the ranks of the agency to deputy director of intelligence before his short-lived retirement, to play the game according to the rules: to honor the status quo. Push a little in Turkey, or Iran or Lebanon, but give a little in Afghanistan, in Poland, and in the Caribbean Basin. But it was over. The honeymoon had ended. The opening shots had been fired in a war that could no longer be denied.

Kennedy had held his Cuban missile crisis. Here now was another crisis. Much subtler, perhaps, but none the less deadly for its obscurity.

Powers turned away from the window. In appearance as well as in intellect, he was reminiscent of William F. Buckley, Jr., with perhaps a bit of William Colby thrown in. He listened now to the ghosts of ten thousand decisions made from this office and wondered if, indeed, he was the right man for the job.

“Baranov,” Powers said softly, no longer able to hold the memory in check. They had done battle before, and it was said he was back in Mexico City. Back at the helm of CESTA. They said he was just an agent runner. A network man, not another Andropov, but Powers knew differently.

He looked again at the window, but this time he focused on his own reflection in the glass. He looked haggard. Worn-out. His daughter Sissy told him he wasn’t eating his Wheaties. But Katy Moss, his secretary, and Lawrence Danielle both knew the trouble … or thought they did. When you’re frightened, push ahead; it’s the only cure. Whoever had said that never sat behind this desk, Powers decided. And through the entire season he would stop at odd moments to think back to this very evening. To the beginning.

2

A frigid winter had given way to a nasty spring in Lausanne, Switzerland. Kirk Collough McGarvey, an expatriate American in his early forties, lay awake in bed on an early April morning, morosely listening to the hiss of the rain against the windows and the breakfast sounds of Marta Fredricks in the kitchen. Tall, husky, he was the archetypical form of the disgruntled American living overseas: his hair was too long; he wore an unkempt beard; and his clothes always seemed a bit too shabby, ill-fitting, and hastily chosen. In the several years he had lived here he had taken on the manner of a somewhat bemused scholar whose concentration on his studies left little time for the more mundane day-to-day routines of modern life. In his role, he would have fit in well in the intellectual community of any university or exclusive English boarding school for gifted scholars. But it was nothing more than a role, a protective barrier against a world he figured had gone quite mad; a role that was beginning to wear quite thin, however.

Last night he had been cruel again. He and Marta had argued bitterly, and he had said some things he wished he hadn’t, no matter their truth. She had stood her ground and taken every bit of it, which had increased his blind rage.

“Fight back, for Christ’s sake,” he bellowed. “Don’t stand there taking the bullshit.” God, how he despised meek compliance. Namby-pamby subservience. Downtrodden acceptance of whatever any asshole wished to dish out.

Yesterday had been a bitch of a day. It had begun at the bookstore when a haughty Swiss customer pretended that she could not understand his French. He had turned her over to his partner, Dortmund Fuelm, whose French was nearly nonexistent. The woman, confronted with a gentleman of her own nationality, suddenly blossomed like a wilted rose having been given a fresh spray of cool water. The post had come around noon and included a longish, nasty letter from his ex-wife’s lawyer in Washington, D.C., saying that it was once again time for him to increase the amount of his alimony and child-support payments. If need be, the attorney hinted, the matter could be brought into the Swiss courts, which probably would not be effective in jarring loose money, but it would certainly be an embarrassment to him. The between-the-lines message was that the attorney was sleeping with Kathleen and was taking McGarvey’s intransigence personally. He was probably a Washington up-and-comer who deserved Kathleen, though McGarvey wondered if the poor sod understood that he was being used by a woman who was probably the most self-centered bitch in a town devoted to self-service. That very afternoon he had whipped off a particularly scathing letter, but better sense stayed him from posting it until he could calm himself down. He walked over to the Lausanne Palace Hotel for a late lunch on the terrace with its magnificent view. But his peace did not last. Dortmund’s beautiful though bratty twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Liese, had followed him and now barged right up to his table.

“Aren’t you going to ask me to join you? Buy me some lunch?” she said. She worked for an engineering firm nearby. “Or wouldn’t Marta approve?”

Instead of the leisurely filet of sole and half bottle of pouilly-fuissé he had contemplated, the two hours seemed to drag interminably with the egocentric kid prattling on about how he should dump Marta and move in with her.

“Daddy adores you, of course, but if you didn’t want him to know, it could be our little secret.”

“No secrets.”

“Fine,” she said, brightening even more. “Then we’ll tell him that …”

“We’ll tell him nothing, Liese, because nothing will happen.”

Finally managing to disentangle himself by three o’clock, he walked up to the library to continue the research he had begun six weeks ago on Voltaire, who had lived and worked for a time in Lausanne. But he found that his concentration had been shot to hell; reading a rare edition (with notes in the margin) of Candide, his mind bounced back and forth between Kathleen, Liese Füelm, and Marta, so he gave it up and was back home by four-thirty.

“Bad day?” Marta asked innocently when he came in. She was ten years younger than he but looked even younger than that, and had a glow about her. She was tall, not unattractive, with long dark hair, wide eyes, and sensitive lips. She carried herself with an athletic grace. In the winter she skied, in the summer she swam, and year-round she jogged five miles each morning, rain or shine, after which they would have breakfast and then often make love.

“Kathleen has sent a lawyer after me, and Liese is up to her old tricks again,” he said, throwing off his coat, and opening a beer.

Marta smiled. She was fixing their dinner. “There’s nothing your ex can do to you in Switzerland. As far as concerns Liese, why don’t you jump her bones. She’ll back off fast enough. She’s only flirting, you know.”

“Fucking. That’s your goddamned answer for everything, isn’t it?” McGarvey snapped. “Christ on a cross!”

She looked up, her eyes bright. “I’m sorry, Kirk …”

“Yes, you are.”

She had started to cry then, which really set him off, so he had proceeded to take her apart, piece by piece, bit by bit, attacking her eating habits, her physical fitness insanity (as he called it), her sense of clothing style or lack of it, her constant prattling about totally inconsequential shit, and her sex-solves-everything juvenile attitude. And she stood and took every bit of it. Had it been him on the receiving end of such a tirade, he would have lashed out. She had not, which made him even angrier.

It was his turn to be sorry this morning, though he knew it didn’t really matter. He suspected he could say or do almost anything to her, and she would remain. Out of love, or loyalty, or for some other, darker reason?

“You awake in there?” she called from the kitchen.

He reached over to the night table, got himself a cigarette, and lit it before he answered. “Just coffee, Mati. It’s all I can stand.”

He could hear her laughing. It was a musical sound.

She appeared in the doorway with a cup of coffee in hand, a big grin on her face. Her hair was pinned up, and she had changed out of her jogging suit into a thick robe.

“You were a real shit last night, you know,” she said.

“I know,” he said, turning away. It was hard to face her. He had drunk too much, and this morning he had a splitting headache. So why couldn’t he tell her he was sorry?

Her grin faded and she came the rest of the way into the bedroom, setting the coffee down and perching on the edge of the bed. She reached out and touched his knee beneath the covers. “What is it, Kirk?”

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

“It worries me when you get like this,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Liese?”

McGarvey laughed, though there was no pleasure in it. “It’s not that.”

She studied his face. “What then, boredom?”

“Yes, that.”

“You’re forty-four and your life is passing you by. You’re no longer in the fray, is that it?”

McGarvey said nothing. It seemed like years since his life had even had a semblance of real purpose. Yet in the seventies when he worked for the Company he had been just as frustrated: only it was in a different way. The Carter administration had ended it for him. A dozen places, a hundred faces all passed through his mind’s eye with the speed of light. Santiago, Chile, had been the end. Afterward he had been recalled, and within six months he had been dumped. Overexuberance. Taking matters into his own hands. Operating outside his sanctions. Failure to keep a grasp on the world political climate.

“I talk in my sleep. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“All the time,” she said.

“Do you write it all down, Mati? Have you got a little black book?”

She started to rise, but he sat forward and grabbed her arm.

“I want to know.”

“Why are you doing this, Kirk? Haven’t you had enough? Do you forget what you were like when you got here? You were a wreck.”

“And you were Joan of Arc riding in on your white charger, your armor all polished, your sword sharp, raised to do battle. Are you telling me that, Mati?”

Her nostrils flared and there was a momentary spark in her eyes, but her control was marvelous, and she ended her little battle by merely shaking her head. “We can’t go on. Not like this.”

McGarvey released her arm and lay back on the bed. Christ, he felt rotten. Marta was almost certainly a watchdog of the Swiss federal police, sent to his side so that they could keep track of him. Former Central Intelligence Agency operatives made a lot of people nervous, especially the Swiss, who valued their clandestine CIA banking operations above all personal considerations.

Was she his watchdog? Or was it love he saw in her eyes?

“No, we can’t,” he said.

She got up from the edge of the bed and went back into the kitchen.

He sometimes thought of that part of his past as the glory days. And they were that, weren’t they? he asked himself. Ruefully he had to admit a certain nostalgia, even though he understood that the reality wasn’t anywhere near as exciting or interesting as his memory of it.

Why did he get out in the first place? The end was coming long before they kicked him out. He could have changed things to prevent it. Only he was too blind, too stupid, to see it. Stewart had made a great show of fighting for him. Yet, later, after Alvin had bought it in Geneva, McGarvey had heard that Stewart had bad-mouthed him all over the agency. It was Washington. It was the power that had corrupted them all. The ends justified the means, didn’t they? By then Phillipi was out, Mason had been killed short of the runway at Andrews, and like the meek inheriting the earth, the quiet but sly Danielle had been bounced upstairs.

McGarvey threw back the covers, got out of bed, and padded into the bathroom, where he looked at himself in the mirror. Already there was a lot of gray creeping into his hair, flecks of it throughout his beard. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the beginnings of a paunch were showing, though his legs and arms still had something left to them.

It occurred to him that his life had happened in three quantum jumps, each more debilitating to him than the last. The first stage was his childhood and youth, which ended with the death of his parents in a car crash. His sister was given their cash, their stocks, and their bonds, but he was given the ranch in western Kansas which he sold for something under three quarters of a million dollars. Living on the interest, he had enjoyed a certain financial independence from that moment on, but the loss of his parents and the harsh disapproval of his sister, who had wanted the ranch kept in the family, had left him out in a spiritual wasteland. The second devastation had come with his dismissal from the Central Intelligence Agency because he had killed a tinpot general in Santiago on orders that had changed, unbeknownst to him, in midstream. Now this, his retirement to ostensibly the most neutral place in the world, was the third stage. He had the feeling it was also coming to an end, and when the finish came the results would be catastrophic for him, as had the ends of the first two stages of his life.

Marta came to the doorway. “I can’t help if you close up on me,” she said softly.

He looked at her reflection beyond his in the mirror. He was afraid of her. Afraid that after all she was nothing more than a Swiss police watchdog sent to keep track of him. And even more afraid that she was not pretending that she loved him.

His sister said he could not understand what a commitment was … what it meant. “Do us all a favor, Kirk, and grow up.”

“Like you and Al?”

“Why do you think the ranch was left to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mom and Dad hoped it would change you. Settle you down.”

McGarvey focused on Marta. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

3

“Boredom.” He spoke the word aloud as he turned the corner in the rain and trudged down the stairs below his apartment block. Perhaps Marta was right. Or perhaps he missed the States. It had been five years since he’d been back. Not the McDonald’s, or the Three’s Company, or the jostling machinations of an upwardly mobile population — those weren’t things to be missed — rather it was the feel of the country, of her cities. Telephone operators who honestly understood English, little things like that. A decent martini. Supermarkets. Sears. Penney’s.

Two young girls sharing an umbrella came up the stairs. McGarvey had to step aside to let them pass. He turned up his coat collar and at the bottom hesitated a moment to look down at the lake before he continued. Before too long it would be summer.

He and Marta had a small sailboat. Perhaps they’d take a trip across the lake to Evian on the French side. Last summer had gotten away from them, as had the summer before and the winters in between.

He stopped short. That was it. Time was passing like a wide, slow-moving river, deceiving in its flow. You never realized the volume of time that was going by until moments such as these when you suddenly awoke, face to face with your own mortality.

A trip back to the States was certainly possible. Füelm was capable of running the shop. It would get him away from Liese’s games (which he actually found flattering when he would admit it to himself). It would be a book-buying trip. It was time he saw his sister and his nephews in Salt Lake City. On the way out he would stop by and see the ranch. Visit his parents’ graves. And then there was this business with Kathleen and her attorney friend. He smiled inwardly. It would give him a certain perverse pleasure to show up on their doorstep, tell her in no uncertain terms what he thought, and then kick the attorney’s ass up around his shoulders. His daughter was a teenager now; young, delicate. How much like her mother had she become? It was something he needed to know. It was time, he decided, that Elizabeth found out her father wasn’t some ogre, some hippie living in a commune in Europe. It made him angry to think of the things Kathleen would be teaching her.

Marta would understand. It would give her a much-needed vacation.

Turning these thoughts over in his mind, McGarvey continued downtown, the city coming alive with the morning. Lausanne was a wonderful town, filled with contrasts of which the Swiss were inordinately proud but which tourists often found disconcerting. Rising from Lac Léman (here never Lake Geneva), the city hastened up into the hills in tiers on which the old and the new were situated in sharp defiance of any sort of convention. An eighteen-story modern skyscraper on a low tier might compete with a lovely Georgian cathedral perched on a hilltop. Old shops and homes, within rabbit warrens of narrow twisting streets and alleys, were being gutted in one section of the city to make way for the new, while all around the Notre Dame, the selfsame architectural style was being faithfully restored. It was a city of footpaths, of quaint bridges and overpasses, yet the din of heavy (at times even crazy) traffic was nearly constant.

He arrived at the busy Place Saint-Francois across from which his bookstore was located. As he did every morning, he stopped at the news kiosk and picked up a copy of the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune. When he arrived here five years ago he had been a basket case. His nerves were shot to hell. Around every corner, in every doorway, under every overhang, in every shadow lurked some dark figure from his past. Perhaps friends of the Chilean general he had assassinated. They believed in vendettas. Perhaps the KGB, perhaps the Bulgarians who had been so active just recently, according to the newspapers. Perhaps any of dozens of people he had crossed could have come here to watch for him, to wait for the one moment of weakness, the moment when he would be vulnerable. As he had been doing since he had come here, McGarvey stood a few moments beneath the kiosk’s awning, pretending to look at the headlines of the other papers on display while he scanned the large square and his approaches to the bookshop.

An exercise in futility, nothing more, he thought, although to adequately cover the square would require several teams, some of them stationary, at least one mobile. They’d stand out, especially here given the Swiss penchant for routine. He shook his head and started to turn. All a moot point. He himself had fallen into the bad practice of routine; up at the same time each morning, the walk along the same route, the newspaper, the quick scan, and then off to the store. Even an amateur could nail him after a few days’ observation.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a dark blue van pulling up across the square. A tall man in a dark overcoat materialized out of the crowd, hopped into the passenger side of the van, and a moment later another figure, this one dressed in a tan mackintosh and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, stepped away and walked off in the opposite direction. The van took off, merged with traffic, and disappeared around the corner toward the Regina. McGarvey held himself in check against the instinct to look directly across. Instead, he stuffed the newspaper in his sodden jacket pocket and headed around the square along his usual route.

There was no way of knowing for sure, of course, but he decided that he would bet his next six months’ income that the two from the van were not Swiss. They did not have the look.

McGarvey had to hold up for a break in traffic before he was able to cross, and then he hurried, head bent low, apparently in deep concentration. The man in the tan mack was fifty yards beyond the bookstore pretending to take refuge from the rain in a shop doorway.

Across the square he spotted the van coming up from the lake. Two legmen, one van. They were amateurs. Lookers. No hit men here.

The tan mack looked directly his way, then stepped out of the doorway and hurried off in the opposite direction. The Ford van came around the square, and it headed again toward the Regina Hotel. As it passed, McGarvey saw the driver and the man in the dark overcoat riding shotgun, both studiously watching traffic. The plates were Swiss, but it was a rental.

Americans? He got the impression they might be. They had the look. But what did they want? Why the hell had they come after all these years? He was no threat. He wasn’t writing a tell-all book like so many expatriate Company men had done … were doing. He had no ax to grind. Not now. He was merely trying to live his life here, out of the fray.

His store, International Booksellers, was a two-story yellow brick affair, rare books and the office on the top floor, the main body of the store on the first. It was nestled between a tobacconist and a perfume shop. McGarvey stepped across the sidewalk, dodging the heavy pedestrian traffic, and went into the shop. Several customers were browsing. Füelm, a short, scholarly-looking man with white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, was on his hands and knees, holding his glasses up with one hand as he myopically searched the spines of a row of books on the bottom shelf.

He looked up. “Good morning, Kirk, is it still raining?”

“Cats and dogs,” McGarvey said, hurrying up the iron spiral stairs off to one side.

At the front window he looked down on the busy street for a minute or two, but the blue van did not make another swing, although he thought he saw the tan mack round the corner across the way.

Why had they come now? Marta would say he was imagining things. He knew better.

He turned away from the window and hurried back to his office where he closed and locked the door, then unlocked the big bottom drawer of his old oak desk. Reaching underneath he slipped the wooden stop and pulled the drawer all the way out, setting it aside. From beneath the main pedestal he withdrew a small bundle wrapped in oilcloth, which he quickly opened. Inside was a well-used, well-oiled Walther PPK automatic, loaded, two extra clips with it. The compact weapon had been his companion in the old days. On more than one occasion it had saved his life, and at times he thought of it as an old friend. He handled it with great respect now, wiping off the excess oil with his handkerchief, then working the slide back and forth, pumping out several shells. He released the clip from the automatic’s butt, reinserted the rounds, and reloaded the gun.

Possibly they were Americans, he thought, stuffing the gun and spare clips in his coat pocket. Possibly they were the opposition here with an ax to grind. He put the drawer back in his desk, locked it, then left his office and went downstairs.

Fuelm was at the bottom of the stairs. “I was just coming up.”

McGarvey hesitated on the bottom tread. Outside, the blue van passed on the street.

“Kirk?” Füelm said softly. “Are you feeling well this morning?”

“Just fine, Dortmund. What was it you needed?”

Füelm eyed his wet jacket. “Are you going back out?”

“An errand to run. Was there something you wanted to ask?”

“I can’t quite seem to put my hands on the Oxford Aquinas.”

“Upstairs on my desk. There’s a hold on it for Herr Bergmann. He said he’d be in later this week for it.”

“That explains the mystery,” Füelm said, stepping aside to let McGarvey pass. “Everything is fine with you?”

McGarvey looked at him. “Marta telephoned?”

Füelm nodded. “She was worried.”

McGarvey patted him on the arm. “It’s all right, believe me, Dortmund, it’s all right. But just now I have to run.”

“When will you be back …?” Füelm called, but McGarvey had spun on his heel and hurried to the back of the shop, into a tiny storeroom and book-repair area. He opened the alley door and looked outside. A delivery truck was parked near the east end, but in the opposite direction he was in time to see two young girls with the umbrella whom he had passed on the stairs below his apartment, coming up from the corner. They spotted him and immediately turned and disappeared back the way they had come.

There was more than one team! It meant they had been at his house. They had been watching him, without him detecting it. For how long? Long enough to have a handle on his routine.

He stepped out of the doorway and raced down the alley, the cobblestones slippery in the rain. He reached the narrow side street that led to the broad Avenue d’Ouchy. The girls were just crossing the street and he had to hurry not to lose them in the heavy traffic, nearly getting run over by a bus as he crossed.

He caught up with them as they waited for the light to change on the Avenue de la Gare across from the Victoria Hotel. He put his hand in his coat pocket, his fingers curling around the Walther’s grip.

At a distance the girls had seemed very young. Close up he could see that they were at least in their late twenties. For a moment or two they just looked at him without saying a word. He felt silly. He was on a fool’s errand. He was tired, hung over, and was still feeling a lot of guilt about what he had done last night to Marta. He was chasing after hobgoblins now.

He turned and looked the way he had come as the man in the tan mack came around the corner. The van came up behind him and slowed down.

McGarvey turned back, suddenly angry. It had not been his imagination. The girls were staring at him. Across the avenue the man with the dark coat was watching them. His right hand was in his pocket.

“We mean you no harm, Mr. McGarvey,” one of the girls said. Her face was round, her nose tiny, her eyes a pretty blue.

There were a lot of pedestrians around them, waiting for the light to change, indifferent to everything except the nasty weather and getting to where they were going.

“Please. We wanted contact with you, without alerting the Swiss authorities.”

“For what purpose?” McGarvey asked. His adrenaline was pumping, he could feel his heightened awareness, the tensing of his muscles. The tan mack was holding back. The van passed through the intersection, then pulled into a parking space in front of the hotel.

“There is someone who wishes to speak with you. We have gone through great effort,” the other girl said. The hair sticking out from beneath her scarf was red. Her eyes were wide, and there were freckles on her nose and cheeks. For some reason McGarvey thought of the German word for freckles … sommersprossen.

“I don’t understand,” he said. If they meant to harm him, he was cornered on three sides. But they had left him an escape route: east along the Avenue de la Gare. If they were driving him, the assassin would be waiting somewhere out ahead. The erratic behavior of a field man apparently on the run will tumble the best laid plans. Wasn’t that the drill? But it had been a lot of years.

He glanced again at the tan mack. That’d be the direction. Through the back door.

“Please, sir,” the blue-eyed girl said. “Just listen, that’s all. It’s Mr. Trotter. John Trotter. You were old friends.”

A bus rattled by, exhaust fumes rising up into the cold drizzle. The freckled girl was getting nervous. Trotter, here? Why?

“We can’t stand here like this,” Freckles said.

“Mr. Trotter is waiting in the van in front of the hotel,” the other girl said.

“Why didn’t he telephone?”

“Your girlfriend is Swiss police, didn’t you know?”

“He could have called at the store …” McGarvey started, but he had an idea what was coming next.

“Liese Fuelm is also Swiss police, assigned to watch you.”

Christ, he thought. He glanced across the avenue to where the van was parked. Someone in a light raincoat had gotten out. He was tall and very thin. He wore no hat. From here McGarvey could see the glasses, the very large nose. There was no mistaking who it was. But why here, like this? What did they want?

He was coming down, his anxiety that he was finally being flushed turning to anger. “I’m out of the business,” he snapped.

“He would just like to talk to you, sir,” the one with the freckles said.

The light was changing. McGarvey suddenly pivoted to the right and skipped across the street, traffic surging angrily behind him, momentarily cutting off the two girls and leaving the tan mack on the opposite side of the street.

Trotter raised his hand, as if in greeting, and McGarvey had the feeling he was back ten years. Trotter had been pretty good at what he did in operations, and although they had never worked directly with each other they had liaised from time to time.

McGarvey glanced back. The girls were gone, as were the tan mack and the man in the dark raincoat. He pulled up short.

“Hello, Kirk,” Trotter said.

“What do you want?”

“We’ll stop so that you can telephone the bookstore and Marta. I don’t want them looking for you,” Trotter said. He seemed somewhat agitated. “You’ll be back in time for dinner.”

Trotter had changed a lot. There was gray in his hair, and his glasses seemed thicker. He used to worry about losing his eyesight. But more than that was the change in his face. He was a different man. Older than his years. Worry. Stress. It was all there.

“Are you back with the Company?”

“The bureau. We need your help, Kirk.”

McGarvey shook his head. “I’m out of the business, you know that. Coming here was a waste of your time.”

“Just listen to us, it’s all we want. No strings attached. I absolutely promise it. You have my word. On my honor.”

“Who is the ‘we’?”

“Someone from Justice, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He wasn’t much of a power when you were around. Name of Len Day. He’s a deputy attorney general.”

“Here in Switzerland to see me?”

Trotter nodded. “Honestly, Kirk, we do need your help. You can turn it down after you’ve listened, but at least give us that much.”

“Who suggested me?”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Trotter looked away, his eyes narrowed. He took off his glasses, which were dripping with rain, and rubbed his eyes. “It’s getting strange out there, Kirk,” he said, as if he were taking great care with his words. He put his glasses on and turned back. “I know you can be trusted. In fact, it’s why you got the ax. You were too damned honest.”

“That was then. How do you know what I’ve become in the meantime?” McGarvey asked. This was all so odd. He felt as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope at his life.

Trotter smiled. Shook his head. “Oh, no, Kirk, you haven’t changed. Of that, at least, I am certain.”

4

They had stopped at a gas station outside fashionable du Mont Blanc on the scenic route to Morges, so that McGarvey could telephone Füelm at the bookstore and Marta at the apartment. Fuelm was understanding, but Marta was hurt that he wanted to go off by himself for the day. He could tell from her voice that she thought he was still angry from last night. But in the end she accepted his explanation that he simply wanted to be alone with his own thoughts, to work out his problem his own way without the pressure of the shop and so that he wouldn’t be able to hurt her again. In any event, McGarvey thought, she was in no position to come after him. Short of turning out the federal police and issuing an all-points bulletin, what could she do? He and Trotter sat in the back of the van while the taciturn driver concentrated on traffic. Most of the others on Trotter’s team would make their way down to the airport in Geneva. Now that McGarvey was in the bag, they were done and could return home. Trotter couldn’t explain how he came to know Marta and Liese were Swiss police, and for a while McGarvey toyed with the idea that he was under arrest for the business in Chile. But something about his old friend didn’t seem to gel, and he began to get the feeling that something was about to happen that he wasn’t going to like.

“I never knew what happened to you,” he said, lighting himself a cigarette. “After I left the Company, I was out of touch with the old crowd.”

“They were pretty worried about you there for a while. Thought you would go sour on them.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t come after me. I’ve been watching for it.”

Trotter laughed. “That was the Carter administration, remember, boy? You were bounced because you followed orders too well. They thought we were getting a bit too much like the Russkies. Mokrie dela … wet affairs … spilling of blood … Department Victor, and all that.”

McGarvey remembered how it had been after he had returned from Santiago. Operations was in a shambles, field agents were streaming in from all over the place, and every day it seemed there was something in the New York Times naming one deep-cover operative or another in Portugal, in Mexico, in East Germany or Czechoslovakia. The Company was being reduced to satellite surveillance of target countries, and on a much broader scale, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (which was administered directly by the deputy director of intelligence, to whose analysts the product was funneled) reigned supreme for a time. It was a huge, thankless task — listening to foreign broadcasts; reading foreign newspapers, magazines, and books; translating the material; and picking out the significant details. Every field station had its cadre of readers for translation, most of them locals, and in places such as Okinawa, Bangkok, the U.K., and Key West, receiving stations were manned around the clock to monitor broadcasts. It was a factory operation. The translated data was collated into a daily unanalyzed summary which was transmitted to Langley for the desk jocks to pick apart and put together in whatever the reigning pattern was.

“It’s different now, you know,” Trotter said.

“The press seems to be in love with the Company. Is Powers that good?”

“Absolute tops. I mean it. We worked together on the United Nations thing back in the mid-seventies. He was assistant DDO at the time, but he took the case under his wing. I tagged along as a legman. And I’m telling you, Kirk, the man is everything anyone has said about him and more. Absolutely brilliant. First class. A real force.”

McGarvey had been cold; he was warm now, and he opened his coat. He had never actually worked with Powers. But he’d never met a man in the Company who had disliked him. Unanimously, Powers was considered the man with the right stuff. His appointment to DCI had surprised no one and had pleased a great many people.

“So what’s the rub?”

“When you’re in, you’re solid. When you’re out, you’re cold. There’s no real cooperation anymore. The CIA runs its show and we run ours, with very little contact in between.”

“Sounds like sour grapes to me,” McGarvey said, getting a bad feeling that they might be trying to catch him up in some interservice struggle.

“It’s nothing like that, Kirk, believe me when I tell you this. We’ve done some work with the Company, of course. Passed a little information back and forth, but not much. Not enough and especially not lately. The lines of communication across the river are closing, and it’s become … ominous.”

“And now you’re here in Switzerland, outside your charter,” McGarvey said, not wanting to get involved but curious nevertheless.

This was the sort of thing Marta was watching out for. He had visions of Trotter and the one from Justice asking him to use his connections to ferret out the Swiss bank account number of some nefarious character they were after. Only he didn’t have any connections. Not here. They passed through the yachting town of Morges and the rain began to let up. Back toward Lausanne, the sun even tried to peek out from under the clouds.

“There’s probably nothing I can do for you,” McGarvey said.

“We just want you to listen, Kirk,” Trotter said softly. “Nothing more. Afterward we’ll talk. You’ll see.”

They passed through Saint Prex, Allaman, and Rolle, all little villages along the choppy, gray lake, finally turning inland up into the hills, the snow-covered slopes of Noirmont, ten miles away on the French border, wreathed in a halo of clouds. A large chalet rose at a sheer angle from the roadside; it had a short, narrow driveway to the garage on the ground floor. They turned in and stopped. The driver got out, opened the garage door, then came back and drove them inside.

Anonymous here in the hills above Lake Geneva, simply another lodge in a region of similar retreats; it was a safe house.

McGarvey followed Trotter up from the garage into a short corridor that opened into a large entryway. The house was gloomy, with polished dark woods and thick beams. The massive banisters in the stairhall were hand carved in ornate patterns, with intertwined stag horns and leaping fish in bas-relief. They passed through the hall into the living room, which was a long, narrow chamber that ran the length of the house and overlooked the road. Stained glass windows flanked a massive, natural stone fireplace in which three very large birch logs were burning. To the left, along the inner wall, were bookcases looking down on a grand piano, on the other side of which were a library table with a Tiffany lamp and several chairs. To the right were two huge, overstuffed sofas, several armchairs, and a square oak coffee table that looked as if it weighed a ton. The floors were highly polished wood covered in two places by large oriental rugs. Paintings adorned the walls. This was the chalet of a very wealthy Swiss. Probably a banker who came here on weekends.

“Mr. McGarvey, I’m so glad that you could come down here to talk with us,” Oliver Leonard Day, associate deputy attorney general for criminal justice, said, bounding in from the hallway.

McGarvey didn’t know Day, but he knew his kind: career bureaucrat who had married the right woman, ran in the right circles, and dined at the right places. He was probably in his mid-to-late fifties, but looked years younger. His eyes were baby blue, his complexion tan, and his thinning hair boyishly sun bleached. He was part of the California health-nut crowd that had invaded Washington on Reagan’s coattails. Marta would probably have a lot in common with him.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be of any help,” McGarvey said.

“John told you we only want you to listen,” Day boomed, eyeing McGarvey’s long hair and beard.

McGarvey nodded.

“We want you to meet someone, listen to his story.”

Day seemed to be in constant motion. His eyes darted back and forth; he spoke with his hands like an Italian, or like someone who was very nervous; and he had a habit of shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he were a boxer ready to dodge any blow that might come his way.

“You don’t know this person, Kirk,” Trotter interjected. “It’s not someone out of your past.” He turned to Day. “I think Kirk may have gotten the impression that this was going to be some sort of an interagency squabble. Dredging up old issues from the past.”

“Heavens, no,” Day nearly exploded with sincerity. “Good grief, we can’t have you thinking that. You can’t possibly think we brought you here for that.”

Trotter stepped into the breach. “You do agree at least to listen, don’t you, Kirk?” he asked.

McGarvey nodded. They had gotten him this far, he might as well stay for the main attraction.

“No obligations, McGarvey. I want you to understand that right up front,” Day said. He stopped his fidgeting and peered more closely at McGarvey, who got the impression that the man needed glasses but was too vain to wear them. “You do, don’t you … understand?”

“No, I don’t,” McGarvey said pointedly. “I don’t understand at all. But I’m here. I’ll listen to whatever it is you’re about to tell me, afterward we’ll discuss whatever it is you want to discuss, and then I’ll be back in Lausanne in time for dinner.” He turned to Trotter. “That was the deal, wasn’t it, John?”

“Absolutely.”

They stood just inside the doorway. The room seemed peaceful, as if it didn’t belong here, as if it belonged to another, less complicated time.

“Why don’t we just have a seat,” Day said, motioning toward the couches, “while John fetches our other guest.”

“Yes, sir,” Trotter said. “Care for some coffee, Kirk?”

“Cognac would be better, I think, with the head I’ve got.” He was starting to feel mean again.

Day sniffed his disapproval but said nothing. Trotter left the room. McGarvey could hear him going up the main stairs. He had absolutely no idea what to expect. But they had gone through a great deal of trouble to get him here, Trotter seemed on edge, and a high-ranking U.S. Justice Department bureaucrat had come along, presumably to lend his weight to the proceedings. That worried McGarvey the most. What was Trotter up to that he needed to legitimize his efforts?

“I understand you have lived here in Switzerland for five years now,” Day said conversationally as they sat down, McGarvey in an easy chair beneath one of the windows.

“Since ’82.”

“Family back in the States?”

“An ex-wife in D.C., and a sister and a couple of nephews in Utah.”

Day seemed distracted. He was watching the entryway. Upstairs they heard a door close, and seconds later someone was coming downstairs. There were two of them. Day sat straighter and looked at McGarvey.

“This will be hard for you to believe.”

McGarvey managed a slight smile. “Do you believe it?”

Day started to shrug, but then he nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do, God help me.”

Trotter appeared in the doorway with another man. Day jumped to his feet. “The staff is occupied?” he said.

“They’ll leave us alone,” Trotter said, coming the rest of the way into the room.

The other man was half a head shorter than Trotter and very slender. His complexion was olive, his hair jet black and shiny with hair lotion. He wore a long, thin mustache, and when he grinned McGarvey saw that two of his teeth were gold. McGarvey guessed him to be in his late forties, although he was dressed youthfully in baggy trousers with pleats in the front, a gaudy sport shirt open to the navel, and some sort of nearly collarless sportcoat, the sleeves of which had been pushed up to just below his elbows. His shoes were narrow and extremely pointed. He was a Latino. There was no mistaking it.

“You don’t know each other?” Day asked McGarvey. “I’d like to establish that right off the bat.”

“Never seen him before in my life.”

“Good,” Day said. “Francisco Artimé Basulto, most recently a guest of the Dade County Jail in Miami, before that a resident of Havana, and before that an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The Cuban grinned, his gold teeth flashing as he came jauntily around the couch, sticking out his hand. His fingernails were long and well manicured. He smelled of bay rum and whatever lotion was on his greasy hair.

McGarvey didn’t bother to stand, nor did he shake Basulto’s hand. He had seen this type before. He could almost hear the story the little man was going to tell. It was going to be some sort of a shakedown, no doubt. McGarvey was surprised Trotter had fallen for it.

“I don’t give a shit if you shake my hand, see?” Basulto spat, his accent heavy. “You think I care? As long as you came to help, why give a shit?” He swiveled on Trotter, who had taken on a suddenly hard expression.

“Sit down,” Trotter snapped.

Basulto stepped back, wounded, but then he sat down with a flourish, crossed his legs, and lit a very long, thin cigar.

“I’ll get the cognac,” Trotter said, and he left. Day took his seat and Basulto stared defiantly across at McGarvey.

It was a time for remembering. Twenty-five, thirty years ago, at the end of Batista’s Cuba. Trotter brought them back and McGarvey had to wonder what was so important about those days. Since then we’d lived through the riots of the sixties, the Vietnam War, the horror of assassinations, Watergate.

Roger Harris, a CIA case officer working out of the embassy in Havana as a third secretary for economic affairs, was beating the bushes for recruits when he came across Basulto, an angry young man looking for a savior. Castro’s name was on everyone’s lips, and had Harris come three months later Basulto almost certainly would have taken to the hills.

He was brought to Havana, and before he could get himself into any trouble, he was flown up to Miami where he spent two weeks in a southside safe house learning the entire wealth of what the agency had got from its OSS heritage and quite a few new things it had invented on its own. Weapons, hand-to-hand combat, radio communications, secret writing, letter drops, tails — anything that would help keep him alive and useful when he was returned.

Basulto was a natural back in Havana, running with the high rollers down from the States. With his flash and gift of gab, the agency training he had received, and with Roger Harris running the plays in for him, he was a hit. He became the lapdog of the rich and famous who haunted such places as the Copa, the Lido, and the Paris Revu.

Through his rich American connections, Basulto was invited to the kind of parties attended by Batista’s cabinet ministers and other high-ranking government and military leaders … along with their wives and girlfriends. For a couple of years, until Batista’s fall, Basulto’s product was said to have been the best they had ever seen.

At the end of 1958, when the government finally collapsed, Batista left the country, and Castro came triumphantly down from the hills, Basulto took off his glad rags and went home to the farm. The U.S. embassy was closed and sealed, our concerns in Cuba being looked after by the scanty American Affairs Interest Section in the Swiss embassy, and our agency operations severely curtailed.

“Our friend here would have been burned in any event, had the end not come when it did,” Trotter said.

Basulto said nothing. He seemed to be waiting.

The wife of a certain colonel in Batista’s defense planning establishment apparently lost her heart to Basulto. The colonel understood what was going on, but he actually encouraged it because Basulto was ostensibly supplying the Cubans with intelligence he supposedly gathered from his American contacts.

“And for all we know, he probably did give them hard intelligence,” Trotter snapped.

Basulto sat forward, an angry glint in his eyes. “I never told those bastards anything except what Roger told me to tell them. I love the U.S.A., I swear to Christ!” He crossed himself and raised his right hand. There was a heavy gold chain on his wrist, a gold-cased Rolex on the other.

From what Trotter could gather, Harris did not leave when the other Americans left. He hung around for a time, laying very low of course, until things became too difficult, and he had to pull out. He was forced into it.

But an odd thing happened. Harris brought Basulto out of Cuba and pointed him in the direction of Mexico City. It was a definite no-no because Harris apparently was working on his own.

The name Roger Harris meant nothing to McGarvey, but he knew the type. They were almost a legend in the Company. The agency was fairly new at the time, and a lot of bright young case officers, many of them recently out of the military service, some of them transferred from the State Department, were trying their best to carve niches for themselves. The heights never loomed so brightly for the right young man as they had in those days.

“I loved that man,” Basulto said softly. “I want you to know that Roger Harris was absolutely first rate in my book … the very tops … a real man.”

5

“They left Cuba in early June of 1959,” Trotter said. “Harris returned to Washington, but our friend here got a car and drove out to San Diego, where he entered Mexico at Tijuana.”

“It wasn’t so easy getting out of Havana,” Basulto said. “Uncle Fidel hated Americans. He was telling everyone that Batista was an American puppet.”

“Our friend here was on the hit list, of course,” Trotter interjected. “He had supplied Batista with information.”

“That was playacting.”

“He couldn’t have lasted very long. Perhaps Harris felt he owed it to him,” Trotter said. He shook his head. “No way of knowing for sure. But Harris got back to the Latin American desk and our little scumbag here was on the loose.”

“I don’t have to take that!” Basulto cried. “Goddamnit, Mr. Day, I don’t have to sit and listen to that kind of talk, do I?”

Day leaned his head back on the couch and closed his eyes. He crossed his legs. “Sorry we had to bother you like this, Mr. McGarvey,” he said apologetically. “John, I want you to take Mr. McGarvey back home, and then I want this scumbag on the very next flight back to Dade County. I don’t ever want to see his miserable face again.”

“Yes, sir,” Trotter said.

“No,” Basulto cried in real terror. “Goddamnit, listen to me. I’m not kidding around here.”

McGarvey admired the technique, but he wondered what it was for.

“Then stop your nonsense,” Day said equably.

“I put my life on the line for this. They all think I’m ratting about the coke train. They don’t know. My life is on the line if I go back.”

“Your life is on the line here,” Day replied.

Basulto’s nostrils were flared, his eyes wild. He was panting. “All right,” he said, holding out his hand. “I just don’t like being called names. Especially when I’m with friends.”

Everyone looked at him. The man was amazing. Hope springs eternal, McGarvey thought, and sat forward.

“Excuse me, may I ask a question here?”

Basulto eyed him warily, but Trotter nodded.

“When the end came, you went home. What happened next? Did Harris drive down and pick you up? Telephone you? What?”

“I had a wireless. He told me to come.”

“He told you to come to him. Told you: ‘Come along to Havana, Artimé, I am taking you away from all the bad things.’ Is that it?” McGarvey asked.

Basulto seemed at a loss for words.

“I just want to get this early stuff straight. I want to get the picture very clear.” McGarvey could hear the mean edge in his voice.

“There was a code word,” Basulto said weakly. “We had a regular schedule.”

“Christ,” McGarvey said, shaking his head. “You lying bastard.”

“Goddamn you, you sonofabitch,” Basulto cried, jumping up, his fists clenched, his knuckles white.

“Sit down,” Trotter shouted.

“You were going to burn Harris, weren’t you,” McGarvey continued calmly. “You were going to trade your case officer’s safety for your own!”

“I loved that man!”

“I’m sure you did, once you were back in Miami with him,” McGarvey said. “The wonder of it all is that Harris went along with you. If it had been me, I would have shot your miserable ass.”

“I couldn’t stay in San Luis … sonofabitch. They would have come after me. Any day. I was dead meat for sure. It was just a matter of time.”

“You radioed Harris you wanted out?” McGarvey asked.

“I tried, but there was no answer,” Basulto admitted. “He had apparently shut down the station. I buried my radio and went up to Havana.”

“In June,” Trotter interjected. “Is that right?”

Basulto nodded. “I knew where he was staying. I went to him. He was easy. Told him I wanted out. Told him I’d do anything for him. Anything.”

McGarvey held his silence.

“We drove down to Matanzas that afternoon and flew out that night.”

Day opened his eyes and sat up. “Why didn’t Harris just leave him?”

Trotter explained it. “The bastard didn’t have to say a thing to Harris, don’t you see? He could act the innocent and get away with it. He knew he was being followed. Harris knew it as well. So he had to get them both out.”

A car, moving very fast, passed outside on the road. They could hear the driver changing gears somewhere farther up the hill, and then it faded.

Basulto grinned, his sudden mood swing dramatic. He sat down with a flourish and crossed his legs. McGarvey had the urge to get up and smash out his teeth.

“I’ll tell you, Roger was a good man. I did what I had to do. You would have done the same. I got no apologies to make. Without me you’d still be in the jungle with your pants down.”

“He must have been an embarrassment to Harris,” McGarvey said.

“He had a job for me,” Basulto was saying. “Wanted me to go to Mexico City for him. I told him no problem, I would do anything for him. Anything!”

“I don’t care,” McGarvey said. He was tired. It was time to go. He started to get up.

“Wait,” Trotter said sharply. “Please, Kirk, just let’s finish this. Then you can decide.”

“You can’t believe this miserable bastard.”

“Maybe not in all the details. But if we send him back he’s dead, and he knows it. He’ll tell the truth from now on.”

“Absolutely—” Basulto started, but McGarvey cut him off.

“What’d Harris tell you in Miami?”

Basulto blinked. “He was mad at me. Said he had saved my ass, and now I was going to have to save his. I remember it as if it happened two days ago.”

“What’d he hold over your head?”

“Nothing … I swear on my mother’s grave!”

McGarvey just waited.

“There was this assignment,” Basulto blurted. “There’d be money and girls and action. Mexico City is a big place.”

“He gave you money? Bought you a car?”

Basulto nodded. “And papers, too. I was an American.”

“In exchange for what?” McGarvey asked. “What exactly was it you were to do for him in Mexico City?”

“There was a place on Morelos Avenue called the Ateneo Español. I was to set up shop any way I wanted and just see what I could see.”

“What was this place?”

Basulto shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. There were a lot of Communists there.”

“Cubans? Mexicans? What?”

“Them. And Russians, too.”

“How were you supposed to report to Harris?”

“There was a café I was supposed to go to on Wednesdays at noon if I had anything. I could leave it in cipher with the waiter.”

“If there was an emergency?”

“There was a number in San Antonio, Texas. I was to call long distance.”

“Harris’s sister,” Trotter offered.

“He was working outside his charter?” McGarvey asked.

“Apparently.”

Basulto set himself up in a small apartment just off the Plaza de la Constitución y Parroquia de San Agustin de le Cuevas, in an area called Tlalpan on the south side of Mexico City. The forboding walls of Morelos Prison were a couple of blocks away on the Avenida San Fernando, and even though it was no longer used as a lockup, it gave him the creeps.

“I could just see the place from my apartment. And it made me so goddamned nervous, I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

“It made you think how you owed your freedom to Roger Harris,” McGarvey suggested. He couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge from his voice.

Basulto didn’t bother to reply. He glanced at Day, who seemed indifferent.

“Let’s just get on with it,” Trotter said impatiently. “You told us you could see the Ateneo Espanol from your apartment.”

“There was a lot of activity going on,” the Cuban said. “People coming and going, you know. At night they would hold meetings on the second floor. The windows were open, and if you walked past you could hear them arguing like crazy people about the future of Latin America, about the people’s revolution that would someday come to the U.S. But I didn’t believe any of it.”

McGarvey raised an eyebrow.

“It was all bullshit,” Basulto argued. “It was a cover. The real work was going on somewhere else within the building.”

“White noise,” Trotter mumbled.

There was no big deal about Basulto’s presence in Mexico City at the time. Strangers were coming and going all the time. One more was hardly noticeable. There was the café a block away where his contact worked, but after the first week he only went there to pass on his reports, figuring he’d probably be in the city for a long time and he was going to have to conserve his money. Of all the statements Basulto had made so far, that to McGarvey was the wildest.

He went fishing then, he said. Looking for a hook that might lead him to bigger things, just as he had been taught in Miami.

Basulto had taken a couple of dry runs past the building, which looked more like an ordinary cultural club than a hotbed of revolutionaries. Such places were very popular at the time. But in Miami, Harris had taught him that repetitious activity would almost certainly be noticed. Besides, he had been given the warning that whatever was happening down here was damned important, not only to Harris but to them all.

He purchased a set of powerful binoculars, which he taped to the top of an ordinary photographer’s tripod, and set up the rig in the window of his living room so that he could see the front entrance to the Ateneo Espanol.

“I ate my meals and slept by that window,” Basulto said with a touch of pride in his voice. “I’ll tell you, I even dreamed by that window. Thought about everything right there. It was my salvation up there as I watched the world go by. Looking … always looking. Two o’clock in the morning a dozen people might show up, see. The lights would go on upstairs and the meeting would begin.”

“What were you looking for?” McGarvey asked. “Harris must have given you some idea. You were watching for someone specific? Back in Miami he told you that he had saved your ass, and now it was your turn to save his.”

A wild look came into Basulto’s dark eyes. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow. He sat forward fast. “If he had been more honest with me, I could have saved his life!” he cried.

“Roger Harris was murdered?” McGarvey snapped.

Trotter nodded glumly. “But he’s getting ahead of himself,” he said.

“We’re chasing a murder mystery, John?”

Trotter waved it off. “Nothing like that, Kirk, believe me. Just hear what this little bastard has to say.”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Basulto said defensively. “Goddamnit. He just sent me down there to watch and to report back to him.”

“Every Wednesday at noon you were to give your report, in cipher to the waiter at the café?” McGarvey asked. “That was the drill?”

“Yes.”

“He gave you the pad?”

Basulto shook his head. “We used a book, a novela: For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was funny because the guy was very big in Cuba.”

McGarvey digested this for a moment. There were so many loose ends. Why did he bother? Why him, the thought hammered insistently in his head.

“That was for routine reporting. The San Antonio number was for emergencies.”

Basulto nodded, but then realizing where McGarvey was leading him, froze.

“Emergencies,” McGarvey said sharply. “He must have told you back in Miami what constituted an emergency.”

Again Basulto looked elsewhere for some assistance, some moral support. He was obviously a man on the edge of a very dangerous precipice; he was looking for help. But Day was suddenly quite aloof from the proceedings.

“We told you that we would give you protection,” Trotter said.

“I don’t know him!” Basulto cried, barely glancing toward McGarvey.

“I do.”

Basulto looked away for a long moment, then he lit another cigar with shaking hands, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke out through his nostrils. He seemed to be calming himself; McGarvey had the impression that it might be an act.

“He told me I would know an emergency when I saw one.”

“Get on with it,” Trotter prompted.

“Nothing much happened in the first few weeks,” Basulto picked it up again. “I watched the people come, I watched the people go. Really rough characters. But from where I was sitting they could have been anyone, you know. Mexicans, Cubans, Guatemalans … but all Latinos, all of them third-rate revolutionaries who preferred to stay behind and talk while Uncle Fidel went home and won the war.”

After a while, Basulto said, he fell into a routine of catching catnaps during the daylight hours when there didn’t seem to be as much activity. Around seven or eight in the evening, things usually stepped up at the Ateneo Español. Most of them came in by foot, a few of them had motorcycles, and very few came by car. It got to the point where he began to identify some of them. The midget, the fat man, the greaser who always wore dirty white shirts (he looked Panamanian), the two women who came hand-in-hand. They were an odd lot, and he began to make up stories for each of them. The midget was with the Peruvian circus. The fat one was a pimp. The girls, of course, were dykes, and the one he swore was Panamanian was a mad bomber who killed children.

One night in the fourth week, very late — probably around two or three in the morning — a large American car pulled up and parked just across the street from Basulto’s apartment building. He had not been looking through the binoculars because no one had come to the Ateneo for the last hour, though there was quite a crowd over there that evening. It was very hot, and all the windows were open. He remembered hearing a lot of shouting and laughing and even a radio playing loud music. It was all background noise. All cover.

Two men got out of the car. (Basulto recalled thinking it was a Chevrolet or a Buick — long, with a lot of chrome and very big, flashy bumpers.) One of the men was short, on the husky side, with thick, dark hair. The other was tall, good-looking and very well dressed. Obviously an American. He stood out a mile. Together they walked down the street and entered the Ateneo, Basulto watching them all the way, now through the glasses.

“It was a change. It was something different. And it scared hell out of me. Here was an American and another man coming to the headquarters for Communist revolutionaries for all of Latin America. Something very big was going on.”

“Did you know either of them?” McGarvey asked.

Basulto shook his head. “I watched the place all night, but it wasn’t until morning — just about dawn — when they came out, walked back up the street, got in their car, and left.”

“Who drove?”

“Not the American. The other one.”

“Any sense of who he was? Another American?”

“No, he was no American. He was a Russian,” Basulto said, positive. “A big man.”

“How did you know he was Russian?” McGarvey said in wonder. He glanced at Trotter, whose eyes were bright.

Basulto wet his lips. “I didn’t know at the time, see. But I could have known it. The way he dressed, the way he looked. I was used to dealing with them. They were all over the place in Havana.”

“Did you get the license number? Did you try to follow them?”

“I didn’t know what to do. Roger told me not to make waves. I was supposed to be the invisible man. His eyes and ears.”

“Had he mentioned this American or the Russian to you in Miami?” McGarvey asked. “Were they your targets?”

“No,” Basulto snapped, but then he corrected himself. “There were no targets at first. That came later.”

For a moment no one said a thing.

“Get on with it,” Trotter said. “What happened next?”

“I was goddamned scared, like I told you,” Basulto said. “I took the bus downtown to the post office and telephoned the San Antonio number Roger gave me.”

“He told Roger to come,” Day said, sitting up. Like Trotter’s, Day’s eyes were bright. It seemed they were on the verge of something very big.

6

“I didn’t know what to expect, but after the call I felt relieved, you know. Roger was coming and he’d know what to do. I was even afraid to go back to my apartment that morning. Revolutionaries are one thing, but a Russian and an American together, that was something else.”

McGarvey was brought back in his mind to his old days in the field. To his own tradecraft, which had been considered very good. “After the San Antonio number answered, what’d you say? Were you given instructions?”

“No instructions, nothing like that,” Basulto said. “We worked it all out ahead of time in Miami. I called the number he gave me and a woman answered. I told her I was alpha. That’s all. Then she hung up.”

“That was your emergency signal? Just alpha?”

Basulto nodded.

“Then Roger Harris must have had some idea of what you might run into. I mean, without any sense of your emergency, just on the strength of that one code word, he was going to drop everything and come to you? Was there a time limit on his arrival?”

“Twenty-four hours. He’d meet me at La Alameda, a park downtown on the south side. Juárez Avenue. At noon.”

“He’d just be standing there, big as brass. No fallbacks?”

“If he was wearing a suit and tie, it would mean he was clean, and I was to walk around the park in a clockwise direction. He’d follow to make sure I hadn’t been made.”

“He thought there was a chance someone would be there watching him as well as you?” McGarvey asked. He was trying to make sense of this. “I mean, as early as Miami he set up these precautions?”

“I was just following his instructions!” Basulto shouted in frustration.

“But you liked it. This was exciting.”

“I tell you it wasn’t what I expected. Nothing was like I figured it would be in Mexico City. There were a lot of angry people there. Big things were happening.”

“Yes,” McGarvey said dryly. “Did you stay on the streets all night?”

“I went back to the apartment that afternoon. I figured I’d better lay low.”

“What was going on at the Ateneo?”

“Nothing. Not a goddamned thing. It was spooky as hell. It looked as if the entire operation had been shut down. The American and the Russian show up and bang! — the very next day everything cools off. Nothing happened all that night. I know. I couldn’t sleep. I was awake the whole night, watching. But there was nothing.”

“Harris showed up on schedule?”

“Just like he said he would. He was wearing his suit and tie, and he looked goddamned beautiful to me. I practically ran around the park. He caught up with me in front of the Hotel del Prado, which was right on the corner. He told me to calm down and took me upstairs to his room on the third floor. It looked out onto the street. He told me to calm down, and he was nervous and crazy. I thought he was on something and I made a little joke, but he practically exploded. ‘This isn’t some kind of a goddamned game,’ he shouted. He said it was my graduation exercise. After this was done, I’d be able to write my own ticket. We’d both be able to call the shots. This was the Company talking, you know, Mr. McGarvey. I mean, if it hadn’t been for Roger I’d be dog meat back home. He asked me to do something for him, and I did it. We were going to have a long association together. ‘Profitable,’ he kept saying. And goddamnit, I believed him.”

“But it didn’t work out that way,” McGarvey said softly.

“It wasn’t my fault, goddamnit. I mean, Christ, how was I to know—”

“Roger Harris was evidently in over his head,” Trotter interrupted. “As far as we can tell he made no contact with the Mexico City chief of station. He was working this on his own. It led to his downfall.”

McGarvey glanced up. “That was July of 1959?”

“Closer to August,” Trotter said.

“Roger sat me down and went through everything I had done, everything I had seen and heard, step by step from the moment I had left him in Miami. I told him about selling the car in Hermosillo, and about my new identification in Guadalajara, and about my apartment. He was mad at first that I hadn’t done exactly what he told me to do, but then when he thought about it, he admitted that I had probably done the right thing. He was a good man, I mean it. A big man. He could admit his mistakes. I don’t think I liked him better than that morning.” Basulto looked from McGarvey to Trotter and then to Day for emphasis. “I was just a kid then. What the hell did I know. Roger was everything.”

“Harris, among other things, was his bank,” Trotter said dryly. “If I know my man here, he probably held out for more money.”

“That’s a goddamned filthy lie!” Basulto cried. “We’ve gone over this ground already. I told you, I loved that man. I wouldn’t have done a thing to hurt him.”

Harris had probably been blind, McGarvey figured. He had seen it in others. The man was working way outside his charter. Looking for the big coup that would give him his battlefield commission.

“Don’t be tiresome,” Day said softly. “Your neck is still on the line here.”

“I told Roger what I had seen the night before,” Basulto plunged on. “I told him that the Ateneo had all but closed down. I had to go over and over it again, ten times for him. He wanted every single detail. The color and make of the car. What kind of clothes they were wearing. How they parted their hair, for Christ’s sake. Were they clean shaven or not? I could see a lot through those glasses, but they weren’t that good. So then he brought out the photographs. And there the Russian was. There was a picture of him getting out of the car. One of him standing in front of a hotel. One as he was coming from an airplane with a group of people. But there was no mistaking him. No mistake at all. It was in his eyes.”

“As best as we can gather, they were surveillance photos probably taken right there in Mexico City two years earlier,” Trotter said.

“KGB?” McGarvey asked.

Trotter nodded. “A very sharp individual. One of the very best, bar none. Name of Valentin Illen Baranov.”

“How about the other one?”

“That came later. We’re assuming — only assuming, mind you — that it was the American for whom Harris was looking. And he was probably the one who killed Harris.”

“I know he was,” Basulto said sullenly.

McGarvey jerked forward. “What—”

Trotter interrupted again. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Kirk. Believe me, I want you to hear the entire story in chronological order. It’s essential that you understand the timing. I want you to be perfectly clear.”

Nothing, of course, was ever perfectly clear for McGarvey. He had built a career in the Company on seeing beyond the obvious in supposedly “clear” operations. He had listened to the sages lecture at the Farm outside Williamsburg. They had called such things “anomalies.” Look for the glitches in the fabric of any operation, and there you will find an anomaly that more often than not will lead to the core of the situation. To the truth.

Basulto was watching them with a strange, expectant look in his eyes, as if he were a condemned man, knowing the ax was going to fall and waiting for its coming.

“There was no photograph of the American?” McGarvey asked.

“No, but Roger had an idea who it was, I think,” Basulto said.

“But he wasn’t sure.”

“No. He had a camera with a very long lens and high-speed film. He showed me how to use it, and the next time they showed up I was to take as many pictures as I could.”

“And in the meantime?”

Basulto didn’t catch McGarvey’s meaning.

“You were to return to the apartment and take some pictures. Meanwhile, what was Harris going to do? Come along with you? Stay there at the del Prado? Go home? What?”

“He was going to stay there for forty-eight hours. If something turned up, I was to come back to him. Eight, noon, then eight again at the park. First the east side, then the north, and finally the west.”

“If nothing came up in that time?”

“It didn’t. Nothing happened. The Ateneo was a closed shop. And Roger went home.”

“You met with him a last time, though?”

“Sunday night at eight o’clock. We went back to his hotel, and I told him that no one had shown up.”

“And how was Harris then? I mean, was he disappointed? What?”

“Nervous,” Basulto said. “He told me that I would probably be pulled out of Mexico City before too long. He hinted that something very big was happening.”

“But he wanted you to stick around at least a little while longer?”

Basulto nodded. “He said we still had a real shot at breaking this thing. If only I could get a clear photograph, we could write our own tickets. He kept saying that. It was a very big thing for him.”

“But it scared him.”

“Scared him silly, Mr. McGarvey.”

“He never told you who you were after … I mean other than Baranov?”

Basulto shook his head. “He said the Russian was a very big cookie. He kept saying how Baranov was so young, and yet he was running the entire Soviet system of networks in the Caribbean. He took over everything that Oumansky set up in the forties.”

“Constantine Oumansky,” Trotter interjected. “He was the Soviet ambassador to Mexico. Killed in 1943 in a plane crash. He set up the entire Carib. network.”

“Which was still going strong under this Baranov in the late fifties?” McGarvey asked.

“It’s still going strong now, from what we gather,” Trotter said.

“There is a connection … then to now? A bridge?” McGarvey asked incredulously.

“The Golden Gate,” Day chirped.

They waited for Basulto to continue.

“I was to call the San Antonio number from different telephones around the city every day. When it was time to leave I would be given the word.”

“And then where were you to go?” McGarvey said. “Back to Miami?”

“Guatemala City.”

Again McGarvey was startled. It showed on his face because Trotter sat forward, his eyes bright.

“They were starting to train for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A camp had been set up on a coffee plantation at Helvetia.”

“He must have been among the first to arrive.”

“Harris was involved from the beginning because of his operations in Cuba under Batista. He pulled Basulto into it to provide them with the local knowledge they’d need,” Trotter said.

7

The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had begun to peek out from under the clouds. From where he sat, McGarvey could look out the window, across the road at the trees growing up along the wall of the valley. The branches were dripping, the leaves glistening in the light. Marta would be at the apartment, worried about him. Or perhaps she had gone shopping. She would stop at the odd moment to cock her head (it was a characteristic gesture of hers that he found attractive) and think about him. Or at least he hoped that was the case. He hoped she wasn’t looking for him. It would make it that much more difficult when he came home this afternoon.

Trotter had gone into the kitchen to get more coffee, and Day had jumped up and was grazing among the books on the shelves, leaving Basulto and McGarvey alone for just a moment.

“You weren’t too unhappy about leaving Mexico City?” McGarvey asked softly.

Basulto poured some cognac into his cold coffee. He raised his head. “No, but I wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of going to Guatemala. They’re a bunch of farmers down there. They don’t know anything.”

“About Mexico City. Did you ever get the feeling that someone was watching you? That someone down at the Ateneo knew what you were doing?”

Basulto smiled. “You could be Roger’s twin, you know, Mr. McGarvey. He asked me the very same question. He was worried that I’d be tumbled sooner or later.”

“But you weren’t?”

“Worried?” Basulto laughed harshly. “I was worried the entire time I was there. Let me tell you, they were some desperate characters.”

“How do you know that?”

Basulto’s eyes narrowed. “You could see it just by looking at them. Roger told me to be very careful of this Russian. He said the man had eyes and ears everywhere.”

“Did you believe him?”

“What’s this?” Day said, bounding back across the room. “Getting acquainted, are we?’”

“Just waiting for the coffee so we can get on with it,” McGarvey said.

Something flickered in Basulto’s eyes. Cunning? Fear?

Day turned. “Trotter, for God’s sake, let’s speed it up here,” he shouted.

Moments later Trotter appeared in the doorway with another carafe of coffee. He hurried in, poured more for Day, Basulto, and himself, and then settled down.

“Helvetia,” he said, out of breath, starting them off again. “Harris was there waiting for his boy to show up. But there was no further debriefing. No words. Nothing about the Ateneo Español. It was taboo. Here was Basulto, one of Harris’s experts from the Cuban days, down to help out with the big project.”

“Didn’t you find that odd?” McGarvey asked, directing his question to the Cuban. “In Mexico City he was excited. All of a sudden it’s over?”

Basulto shrugged. “There was the American working hand-in-hand with Baranov. I figured him for a double. I didn’t think Roger wanted that spread around. And I didn’t know who to trust.”

McGarvey was barely able to keep from making a sarcastic remark about trust coming from the lips of such a blatantly untrustworthy opportunist.

At first the remote training camp up in the Guatemalan mountains was nothing more than a collection of shacks at which a handful of Cuban radio operators were being trained. But throughout that year, and all through 1960, people kept streaming in. Eventually more than fourteen hundred recruits were in combat and infiltration training, and a big airstrip was carved out of the hillside. Basulto spent most of his time briefing the combat troops on the terrain and the waters around the Bahía de Cochinos (the Bay of Pigs) southeast of Havana. In the old days he had run a number of operations in the region for Harris, so he knew the bay fairly well.

“The best place on the entire base was the pilots’ quarters,” Basulto said. “Very nice, I’m telling you, at least by comparison to how the others lived. They used to call it the Hilton. They had their own showers, their own mess.”

“Harris was there the entire time?”

“No. He would come and go. Sometimes he’d stay for a few days, but never any longer than that, until the very end.”

“He was running the recruiting station in Miami at the time,” Trotter said. “They had quite a setup. Doctors, nurses, the whole nine yards. It was an open secret.”

“It was a big joke,” Basulto said. “We used to laugh about it.”

“Who was your boss when Harris wasn’t around?” McGarvey asked.

“Pepe San Roman was the top man, but Erneido Oliva was the deputy commander. If there were any problems, he was the one we went to first.”

“But there were other Americans there, CIA people?”

“Coming and going all the time, especially after the runway was finished,” Basulto said.

He stayed at the camp for a very long time, and every few months Basulto would get so frustrated with the isolation he would slip down to Guatemala City to raise a little serious hell. Sometimes he’d go alone, sometimes he’d take a few friends from the Hilton along for the ride. They’d start at one end of the town and work their way to the other, through all the bars and whorehouses, going strong twenty-four hours a day until they couldn’t take any more. Sated, they’d head back to the base where they would get back to work.

“No one ever missed us, they were so disorganized,” he said.

“Did you ever run into anyone in Guatemala City during your forays?” McGarvey asked.

“Sir?”

“Baranov or his crowd, or perhaps the American you’d seen him with in Mexico City.”

Basulto shook his head.

After a short pause, McGarvey took another sip of his drink. “Then came the invasion.”

“It got really crazy around there in the last couple of months. No one was allowed off base. They started to watch us pretty closely.”

“What was your job to be? You were expected to go with them, back to Cuba, weren’t you?”

“You bet, even though I didn’t want to go back. I knew damned well it was going to fail. But Roger was there. He was coming along.”

Green Beach was east, Red Beach was back up into the bay at Playa Larga, and Blue Beach was just east of the town of Girón. Basulto came ashore at Blue Beach, along with Roger Harris and a heavy contingent of Cuban exile troops who had been trained in Helvetia. The fighting had already begun.

“It was a mess, let me tell you,” Basulto said, lighting another thin cigar. His hand shook. “There was a lot of shooting, parachutes were coming down, aircraft buzzing all over the place. We heard later that at least two of our ships had been sunk … one right off our own beach and the other up the bay somewhere. One of our planes went down too, up by Jagüey Grande. We didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. We were too damned busy trying not to be killed.”

Basulto paused for a long moment. He turned and looked at the fire. His skin seemed to be stretched taut around his mouth and across his cheeks. Day had his legs crossed, his coffee cup balanced on one knee. Trotter sat forward. He was staring at Basulto.

“It was very strange, Mr. McGarvey, let me tell you,” the Cuban picked it up without turning back. “All hell was breaking loose. A lot of our paratroopers were going down north of Girón, but there was nothing but swamps up there. Christ, if I told them once, I told them a thousand times, they would have to watch the wind. They’d have to pinpoint their landing. Someone was supposed to have gone out to the airstrip to lay out the signals, but they never showed up. Roger was mad as hell, but he kept saying he had a job to do, and we’d do our part.”

They were called the brigade, and Basulto said their first operational headquarters were set up within the tiny town of Girón, several hundred yards inland from the resort cottages near the beaches. In town, but closer to the beach, a medical station was set up for the wounded, and directly across the street was the radio post.

“They were intercepting a lot of our traffic, but there wasn’t a goddamned thing we could do about it. There wasn’t a lot of time for coding and decoding. It was all happening so fast.” Basulto turned back, a strange, haunted look in his eyes. “And then I saw him.” He shook his head in wonder. “I turned around and there he was by the door of the radio shack. He was talking with Roger, just like they were long-lost friends. I mean, he was wearing battle fatigues, just like the rest of us, with a Thompson slung over his shoulder. He said he had just come down from the rotunda up on Red Beach. There was a lot of fighting going on. They were going to need some help.”

“Just a minute,” McGarvey said. “Who are you talking about here?”

“The American … the one from Mexico City who was pals with Baranov. Who the hell did you think I was talking about? What the hell do you think I’ve been talking about all fucking morning?”

“Easy now,” Trotter cautioned.

“Harris knew him?” McGarvey asked.

“Presumably,” Trotter replied.

“Did he know it was the one from Mexico City?”

“No, goddamnit,” Basulto shouted. Then he shrugged. “At least I don’t think so. He didn’t act as if he knew it was the same one. But I was goddamned scared. Here he was, the double agent. It was real.”

“You’re sure it was the same one?”

“Damned sure, Mr. McGarvey. It’s a face I’d never forget.”

“Who was he?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t know that until six months ago.”

“Havana?” McGarvey asked, holding himself in check. It was coming now. The part they had brought him here to listen to was coming.

“Miami,” Basulto said, looking at his hands.

“Wait up,” Day interjected. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves again.”

“He killed Roger,” Basulto said defiantly. “And there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Roger just took off with the bastard before I could say jack shit. Bam! He was gone.”

“What happened then?” McGarvey asked carefully. “Did you follow them?”

“You’re goddamned right I followed them, but it was too late,” Basulto said, and in this it seemed as if he were appealing for their belief and support. “It was less than five minutes from the time Roger left with him until I found a jeep and took off. But it was too late.”

Roger Harris was shot to death. At close range, two soft-nosed bullets into his face. Basulto found his body lying beside the jeep about ten miles north of Girón alongside the beach road.

“There was a lot of traffic all up and down the road. Aircraft overhead. It was a zoo, but no one stopped. No one gave a damn.”

“You’re sure it was Harris?” McGarvey asked. “You said his face was shot away. Could you be sure?”

Basulto threw up his hands. “What kind of a question is that? I knew it was Roger. I just knew it!”

“No sign of the other one?”

Basulto shook his head. “I was really scared then, you know. I figured if Roger could be taken in by the bastard, I wouldn’t have a chance. There was no one I could trust. I mean, who was I supposed to take my story to? The so-called invasion was falling on its ass. And I’d be a sitting duck.”

“So he ran,” Trotter said.

“So, I got smart.”

“Where? Where did you run?”

“Up to Santa Clara that night,” Basulto said. “I took the jeep, stole some ID off a dead government soldier, and drove up there.”

“In the American jeep?”

“They all had Cuban markings. Besides, I ditched it a few miles outside of town. I just got out of there on a bus down to Holguín, and from there to Santiago de Cuba.”

“I thought you were dead meat in Cuba.”

“I was dead meat anywhere,” Basulto replied. “At least it was home. I knew my way around. I still had a lot of friends. Not everyone was in love with Uncle Fidel. Not then, not now.”

McGarvey shook his head. There were holes a mile wide in his story. There was a hell of a lot more to it than Basulto was telling.

“I don’t give a shit if you believe me or not, see!” the Cuban cried, clenching his fists. He was shaking. “The bastard killed Roger … the only good man I ever knew. And it was his own people who did it. I didn’t know what to do except keep my ass down. I couldn’t play their games any longer.” Basulto pulled up short.

There was a longish silence then, in which Trotter and Day seemed literally to be holding their breath. Another car passed on the road, and from out in the hall a clock chimed the hour. It was one o’clock in the afternoon already.

“That was twenty-five years ago,” McGarvey said, appealing directly to Trotter.

“Within a year he had a marijuana operation going, from what he tells us. They ran the stuff up into the Florida keys. By the time the Cuban authorities got around to him — remember, they had their hands full at the time — they decided he was doing them a service and left him alone.”

It was too loose. There were too many unanswered questions. A man who had worked for the CIA, and who had participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, suddenly makes a success of himself in the drug business in Castro’s Cuba?

“He was arrested about seven months ago in Miami by a DEA team and was jailed pending trial,” Trotter said. “That’s when he began making noises.”

“Darby Yarnell,” Basulto blurted. “In jail, I saw him on the television. It nearly knocked me over.”

McGarvey sat forward very fast. “What about him?” Yarnell was a power in Washington politics. Even from afar, McGarvey had heard the name.

“He was the one working with Baranov in Mexico City. He killed Roger Harris. He’s a goddamned Russian agent.”

8

Basulto was scheduled to leave with Day for the airport, but once there they’d separate, two of Trotter’s babysitters picking up the burden of getting the Cuban back to Miami.

“We’re keeping him on ice there. Less conspicuous,” Trotter said. “The question is, will you be able to help us?”

“With what?” McGarvey snapped. He glanced at Basulto. “He’s just trying to save his own ass with this story. You can’t actually want me to run off half-cocked chasing goblins … twenty-five year old goblins.”

A sudden intensity came to Trotter. “Kirk, we did the preliminary checks. Darby Yarnell worked for the CIA in the late fifties and early sixties. He was stationed in Mexico City at our embassy. He was involved in the Bay of Pigs business.”

“Then send the Company after him. It’s in their bailiwick.”

Day and Trotter exchanged glances.

“Yarnell and Powers are … friends. They worked together in the old days. They still see each other occasionally, on a social level.”

“What the hell are you trying to tell me, John? Yarnell worked for this Russian. Are you saying Powers is a double as well?”

“Good God, no,” Trotter blurted, rearing back as if what McGarvey had just said was blasphemy.

Basulto laughed out loud and rubbed his hands together. Day paled.

“If there is anyone in this mess who’s clean, it is Donald Powers,” Trotter went on. “And we want to keep it that way. The scandal … if it got out, would wreck the agency. Simply wreck it!”

“Powers has fought the Russians for his entire career, from what I understand,” Day interjected. “He’s hurt them too badly, too many times, for him to be suspect in this.”

“Of that I can personally vouch,” Trotter said. “I worked with him. We all know his reputation.”

“Kim Philby had a wonderful reputation with the British, too.”

“Come now, McGarvey, you can’t possibly compare the two,” Day said.

“No,” McGarvey said, sitting back. “But what do we know about Yarnell?”

“That’s just it, Kirk,” Trotter said earnestly. “Superficially Yarnell’s past is an open book. But on closer examination, the man is something of a mystery. One moment he is working as trade adviser out of the Mexican embassy, and the next he’s in Helvetia training a contingent of the Cuban invasion force. In between, we suspect, he made a number of trips to Washington. For what? To see whom? There are no easy answers.”

“If you can’t unravel his past, how the hell do you expect me to do it?”

“We can’t get too close to him,” Trotter said. “Not without him finding out. He has his finger in nearly every Washington pot.”

“Including the bureau, John?”

Trotter nodded. “Including the bureau. And the agency. If word got back to Powers that we were investigating his friend, he would naturally get involved himself.”

“There cannot be a hint of scandal, I won’t allow it,” Day said.

“Which is why I went to see Leonard,” Trotter said, nodding toward Day. “Personally.”

McGarvey nodded toward the Cuban. “How about this one? How reliable is his story? How reliable is he?”

“Not at all,” Trotter said. “But his life is on the line. All we have to do is throw him back on the streets and he’s a dead man.”

“I’m not shitting you here,” Basulto cried. “I’ve got my own life to consider. It’s a trade I’m offering you, see.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” McGarvey snapped. “Trade for what?”

“He wants a new identity, a new track, new town, a job …” Trotter said.

“In trade for what?” McGarvey asked incredulously.

“Yarnell’s head on a platter …”

“Hold on. All we have here is an accusation. Nothing more.” McGarvey wasn’t buying this at all. He looked at his watch. It was time to be getting back. Perhaps he’d take Marta out for dinner tonight. To make up for last night.

“We think there is sufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation,” Trotter said softly.

“I’m convinced,” Day added.

“On the strength of this …”

“Directly after the Bay of Pigs business, Yarnell was assigned to the embassy in Moscow.”

“So what?”

“His product was said to be fantastic. Never been beat.”

McGarvey held a sharp reply in check.

“Baranov, the Russian he was seen with in Mexico City, was reassigned back to the centre in Moscow at exactly the same time.”

“Circumstantial.”

“In the early seventies, when Yarnell was assistant DDO at Langley, the Company went into its slump. The lean years, remember? Then in 1978 Yarnell was elected senator from New York. That was your era, Kirk. Who do you suppose pulled the plug on Chile?”

“It was within the Company.”

“Directed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence …”

“Of which Senator Darby Yarnell was a member,” Day put in.

“It all fits, Kirk,” Trotter said. “Circumstantial perhaps, but just because someone the likes of Basulto makes the accusation, if it turns out to be true it doesn’t matter.”

McGarvey turned back to the Cuban. “Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut in Miami and take your fall like a good boy? The worst that could have happened was deportation to Cuba. You would have been back in business within a week or two.”

“I was getting tired of it.”

“Of making money?”

“He saw a better opportunity,” Trotter said. “A chance for a new start in the States. Even with money, Cuba is no place to live.”

“Sooner or later the big connections will get you. Make a little mistake and it’s all over,” Basulto said.

“He was losing his nerve,” Trotter said.

It wasn’t fitting, goddamnit. None of the pieces were in any kind of logical order. Too many holes. When this went sour — and McGarvey was certain it would — someone would be left holding the bag, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

Day had gotten to his feet, and he motioned for Basulto to get up. “We’re leaving now, Mr. McGarvey. I sincerely hope you’re with us.”

“To do what?” McGarvey said, looking up.

“John will explain our thinking to you. Something will be set up for you in D.C., and this one here will be on call in Miami. Anytime you want him he’s yours for the duration.”

“Get the bastard,” Basulto said with much feeling.

“Why, because he killed your case officer?”

Basulto grinned, his teeth perfectly white and straight. “Maybe you and I will become partners. We will become famous.”

“Get that sonofabitch out of here,” McGarvey growled.

The grin faded from the Cuban’s face. “Goddamnit, you think I’m fooling around here, just trying to make a buck …”

“Yes, well …” Day said.

McGarvey got to his feet, and he and Day shook hands.

“As I said, I hope you are with us, Mr. McGarvey. I sincerely hope so,” Day said. He and Trotter nodded to each other, and then he left with Basulto.

“Another cognac?” Trotter asked.

McGarvey shook his head. “I should be getting back.” He listened and moments later heard the garage door swing open below; the van started up and left.

“As soon as they return, we’ll get you back to Lausanne. Shouldn’t be more than an hour,” Trotter said.

McGarvey didn’t reply. He walked over to the window and looked down into the steep valley across the road. Switzerland was coming to an end for him. He knew it. He had known it for some time now. All the signs had been there for months: his interrupted sleep, his boredom, his sudden fits of anger, his drinking. This time he had hoped it wouldn’t happen. Coming to Switzerland five years ago, he had sincerely hoped he’d be able to settle down.

The service is like a narcotic, someone once told him. Years ago it had been, and although he remembered the effect the words had had on him, for the life of him he could not remember who told them to him.

No matter. Perhaps it was time for another fix. But Christ, it was … what? Juvenile?

He turned back. “What exactly is it you want me to do for you, John?”

“Go after Yarnell. Prove that he worked for the Russians.”

“Is it so important … all those years ago …?”

“Yarnell had lunch with the president last week. He was at a party at the German embassy with Donald Powers a couple of days ago.”

“You think he’s still active, then?”

“I don’t see any reason for him not to be.”

McGarvey thought about that for a moment. This was different now. He glanced toward the doorway. They had pulled Basulto out of here before coming up with this new tack.

“How about the Russian … Baranov?”

“We don’t know where he is, for sure. Probably Moscow, but he could be anywhere.”

“As Yarnell’s case officer?”

Trotter shrugged. But there was something in his eyes. Something that was causing him a lot of trouble.

“What is it, John? You want me to return to the States and find out if Yarnell is still active? Then what?”

Trotter turned away. He poured himself a stiff cognac, and drained the glass. When he looked back, his lower lip was trembling.

“There can’t be a trial, Kirk,” Trotter said. “It would be ten thousand times worse than Watergate. It would tear the country apart. The CIA would go down the tubes, and even the president would suffer. We’d be years recuperating. Perhaps we’d never fully recover.”

“Then what, John? What’s the alternative? Send him packing to Moscow? Why not go to the president with this?”

“That’s the entire point, isn’t it? It’s why we decided to come to you.”

“What am I missing here?”

“Yarnell almost certainly suspects he’s being investigated.”

“How do you know that?”

“We’ve had a tail on him. Routine surveillance. Twice he’s ditched them. Naturally we had to back off.”

“You told me no one else was in on this business except you and Day.”

“I have my leg men, of course. I can’t work in a vacuum. It was to be a routine background investigation.”

“You botched it, and now you want me to pick up the pieces.”

“You’re the unknown element.”

“Yarnell has already gone to Powers and to the president with this?”

Trotter nodded glumly. “I’m sure he hasn’t come right out and said he was being investigated as a spy. But he’s almost certainly worked himself in solid with them. He’ll begin digging in now. But, Kirk, listen to me, the man has his Achilles’ heel. He has a weak side.”

“Don’t we all,” McGarvey muttered.

“Yarnell was married back in the late fifties to a girl in Mexico. Very young, very pretty.”

“I thought he was a bachelor.”

“They divorced a long time ago. She’s living in New York City these days. Her name is Evita Perez. She has a club. In SoHo, I think.”

“Christ,” McGarvey said softly.

Trotter suddenly turned away again. “We’re asking a lot of you, Kirk. I know it; Leonard knows it.”

The house grew very quiet. It was all coming to McGarvey now, and he felt very fragile, as if he were a delicate crystal vase that would shatter at the slightest vibration.

“There cannot be a trial; you can’t or won’t go to the president with this; he’s Powers’s friend; you’re not sure of the bureau. So what, we send him back to Moscow? Is that it, John?”

Trotter shook his head.

“No, it would be another Kim Philby. They’d crow about it for years. The effect would be worse than a trial, wouldn’t it?”

A lot of thoughts came tumbling, one over the other, into McGarvey’s head. The business in Chile was uppermost in his mind. It was still an active file. He could still be prosecuted for murder. Were they holding that over him?

“We’re talking about murder, here, John, aren’t we? About the assassination of a former U.S. senator, one of the most influential men in Washington.”

Trotter held himself very still.

“Does Leonard Day know about this? Has he approved this plan?”

“We didn’t talk about it … not in so many words.”

“But the implication was there between you, goddamnit, wasn’t it?”

Trotter nodded.

God, he couldn’t believe any of this. “What if I do kill him, John? What then? Where would that leave me? No official sanction from the agency, certainly none from the bureau or Justice. We just don’t do those sorts of things, do we? What happens if I’m caught?” He couldn’t believe any of this.

“You would have Leonard’s personal help, as well as mine, all the way.”

“You would take the fall with me if I was arrested?” McGarvey said. “Turn around, for Christ’s sake, and look at me!”

Trotter turned. He was pale. Sweat lined his brow and his upper lip. “I’ve thought the possibility through. Believe me, I have. If that were to happen, we would go to Powers and to the president and lay it out for them piece by piece. Make them understand.”

“If you are willing to do that in extremis, why not now? Go to them now!”

“We’re not sure!” Trotter cried.

“I’m to make sure, first, is that it? I’m to suck after his ex-wife, dig through his dirty laundry. I’m to make sure and then kill the bastard. No trial. Nothing!” McGarvey wanted very much to hit something.

“We didn’t know who else to turn to,” Trotter said miserably.

“American justice has broken down,” McGarvey said quietly. “Will I get a medal when it’s over? Or will I be the next embarrassment? You have someone in the wings to put a bullet in the back of my head?”

Trotter’s eyes went wide. “Good God, what do you take us for, Kirk?”

“We’ve already established that, John. Now it’s just a question of degree. Nothing more.”

The young girl with the sommersprossen drove McGarvey back up to Lausanne in the blue van while Trotter remained behind to close down the house. She knew nothing of the real reason for the Swiss trip or McGarvey’s part in it, and he was of no mind to enlighten her. Instead he sank down within his own dark thoughts, quite oblivious to the lovely scenery, unaware that the day had become nice.

He could run. Paris. London, perhaps. Maybe the coast of Spain, or the Greek isles. But then, in the end, he would just be running away from himself. And that was impossible, wasn’t it?

Like an old football injury, his sudden call to arms had come to him with a hurtful intensity. He became aware of his old wounds, both mental and physical; the cold fear that clutched at his gut whenever he was in the field rising strong.

Once a spy always a spy? But God in heaven he couldn’t think of himself as a murderer. Not that. When they were married Kathleen used to tell him: “Plunge forward, it’s the only direction.” But she never had an inkling of exactly what it was that bothered him.

He had a very sharp vision of the man he killed in Chile. He had been close enough to see the look of fear in the general’s face. The abject terror in the man’s eyes. It was a vision that haunted him and would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

There had been others, too. Not many. Not in the numbers a combat soldier would experience, but for him they were a dark, dreadful legion.

“It is war,” Alvin Stewart had told him in the old days. “Our survival or theirs. Simple.”

War, yes. But it wasn’t simple.

There are a million crossroads in our lives. At each intersection we have a choice that will forever determine the rest of our existence. How many wrong paths had he taken? Kathleen hadn’t understood, neither had his sister, yet they both instinctively understood fear and how it worked its changes. They were experts at it, while it was his master.

Trotter had given him a Washington telephone number. Nothing else. It was the beginning.

9

The nondescript gray Mercedes 240D clattered up the switchback above the lake and finally pulled over just before the long flight of stairs that connected the terraced roadways. Marta Fredricks, wearing a white sweater, dark slacks, and a gray raincoat, sat on the passenger side. She felt as if she had been kicked in the gut by a friend; the pain was there but it was hard to believe.

Swiss Federal Police Supervisor Johann Mueller switched off the engine and turned to her. He was like a father to Marta. She had worked for him even before this assignment.

“He is a dangerous man, Mati,” Mueller said.

Marta looked up sharply, almost resentful that he was using that name … now. “If he leaves Switzerland?”

“Then that would be the end of it as far as concerns us. But there are no guarantees. You knew that from the beginning. From the very beginning.”

She turned away.

Mueller reached across her and, with his fingertips at her chin, gently turned her face back to him. “Listen to me now, young lady. If your father were alive, he would be proud of you.”

“But it hurts,” she cried.

“Yes, oh yes, I am sure it does. But do you think you are the only one who has ever made a sacrifice for Switzerland? I could tell you …”

She tossed her head and turned away from him again. The day had turned lovely, though the wind off the lake was still very cold. Oh, Kirk, she cried inside. She’d always known it would come. Eventually. But, God, she had not counted on the pain. Nothing at the school in Worb, outside of Bern, had prepared her for this. Not the confidence course. Not the tradecraft lectures, certainly nothing to do with the law, Swiss or international, had forewarned of this.

The surveillance had been spotted two days ago. Then this morning Kirk had been run down off the square. They had followed him to a house about an hour south.

He had taken his gun. It was the one damning bit of evidence against him.

“Men of his ilk don’t rush for their guns unless they mean to use them,” Mueller had said.

But she had been so proud of him, until his recent bout of restlessness. Liese had been trying to get him into bed for the past year and a half without results. Only just lately she had come to think … to dream that he loved her. That she could tell him everything and that they could run. But to where?

Marta could feel her eyes filling. It was still another thing they had not prepared her for at Worb. Big girls don’t cry, that was how it went in the song, wasn’t it?

“You either believe in your heritage or you don’t,” Mueller was saying gently.

He was like a Jew with his guilt. But she knew what was coming next.

“It should never have gone on this long. I should never have let you talk me into continuing. I should have seen the signs.” Mueller sighed, almost theatrically, although Marta knew it was for real. “If you can’t do this, tell me. Other arrangements will be made.”

A sudden panic rose in her breast. She spun around. “No!” she cried. “You don’t understand.”

“I think I do. Perhaps more than you want me to. But he must be neutralized. We cannot have an operation going on under our noses. He has a gun. He has been given his brief, apparently, and we must — Marta, I have to emphasize must—consider him a danger to Swiss law and order. To our peace.”

If he meant by “a danger” that he was angry, then yes. Angry and dangerous. Kirk was all that and more. But dangerous to the precious Swiss law and order? No, she could not believe that, although there had definitely been something bothering him lately.

There had been a time, she thought, when they spent most of their waking hours together in bed. In fact, they used to share a joke: Why rent an apartment when all they needed is their bed and a closet large enough for their clothes? Then they’d laugh. Who needed clothes?

In the summer when it got warm, they wouldn’t stop. Sometimes they’d crawl out of bed and look back at the outlines their bodies had left in sweat on the sheets after hours of lovemaking.

But it wasn’t all sex, was it? Liese with her antics proved that. She certainly was a beautiful and desirable young woman, but Kirk had never once even hinted that he might want to take her up on her propositions.

“I know what you’re doing,” Mueller said sympathetically. “But you’re a professional.”

A young couple came up the stairway hand-in-hand and hiked off in the opposite direction. Marta watched them until they disappeared around the corner. Then she glanced up at the apartment she had shared with Kirk for nearly five years.

An entire period in her life was coming to an end now, and she didn’t know if she was going to have the courage to see it through.

Mueller had suggested someone else handle it. Kirk could be arrested and then deported back to the States. But in his present state of mind, that would be a very dangerous operation. There was no telling what he might do. Marta was convinced that he would never surrender. He would run. She could see, in her mind’s eye, what that might lead to. In that, at least, he was a danger to Swiss law and order.

“I’ll do it,” she said, looking back.

Mueller stared at her for a long time. “I’ll be here for you,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s all right, Johann. I can handle it.”

“You’ll need backup. I insist on it.”

“No,” she screeched. “Don’t you understand what I am saying to you?”

“What are you saying to me?” Mueller asked softly.

“If he leaves Switzerland then it is over. You agreed to that.”

“If his brief includes an operation here …?”

“If he leaves Switzerland,” she insisted.

“If he goes without a fuss, then there will be no problem as far as I am concerned.”

“Very well,” Marta said. She rubbed her eyes and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

Mueller reached in his pocket and withdrew a pistol. It was a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson. He held it out to her, but she shrank away from it.

“Whatever you think or feel, Mati, we consider him dangerous. You will not go to him unarmed. I simply will not allow it.”

“Do you honestly think I could use it against him?” she said, aghast.

“If your survival depended on it.”

“What in God’s name do you think he is?”

“We know that, Mati. Listen to me … he is an assassin.”

“Was!” she cried. “He quit. He dropped out. He’s done with it. It’s over for him.”

“Then why did he run for his gun this morning?”

Oh, Kirk, she cried again inside. She looked from Mueller’s eyes to the gun and back again. He did not waver. She believed him. At last she reached out, took the weapon, and stuffed it in her purse.

“I want you away from here,” she said. “Do that much for me. If he’s spooked it might get difficult even for me.”

Mueller looked at her critically. He nodded. “We’ll listen on the monitors. But, Mati, at the first hint of trouble we’re coming in.”

Marta got out of the car and walked up the street without looking back. Before she got to the apartment she heard the Mercedes start up, turn around, and drive off. Only then did she look back. The street was empty.

McGarvey stood at the end of the Avenue d’Ouchy, looking up toward the Place Saint-Francois, only now the familiar scene seemed somehow strange to him. Disjointed. Alien. It could have been the first time he had ever been to this city, though he watched the traffic with a practiced eye. It was all coming back to him; the precautions and the adrenaline that gave him an edge, the tradecraft. It was as if he had never left the service. But there was nothing untoward going on here. He had expected police, perhaps some of Trotter’s team to make sure he did the right thing. Marta might have sent someone, he told himself as he crossed with the light and headed up to the bookstore. But if they were here, watching, they were well hidden. If that were the case, it would not matter what he did or didn’t do.

Darby Yarnell, according to the Cuban slimeball, had been and possibly still was a spy for the Soviet Union. He had murdered a CIA agent back in the sixties. He had been married to a young Mexican woman. And his Soviet case officer was a brilliant star named Valentin Illen Baranov.

Yarnell’s intelligence product was said to be fantastic.

It all fit, according to Trotter. Leonard Day was on his side. The big guns were lined up. There was enough evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, to make at least a prima facie argument. But there were so goddamned many holes.

McGarvey continued around the square, an almost preternatural awareness coming to him. A catalog developed in his mind of cars and vans and trucks; of an antenna half-bent, a Mercedes limousine, a window down, two kids on motorbikes, a bus. No repeats, no passenger switches, no studiously indifferent faces, no dark, mysterious figures.

At the corner he crossed with traffic and walked back to the bookstore. Through the front windows he could see Füelm speaking with an older, white-haired man. Two women were in the art section, browsing among the Degas and Rembrandt books, and a stocky, youngish woman clutched a thin book to her breasts as if it were a baby.

Inside, Fuelm looked up. “Ah, Kirk. Are you back now, for the day?”

“Only just for a moment. Can you close up this afternoon?”

“Of course,” Füelm said after the briefest of hesitations.

McGarvey took the spiral stairs up to his office and stopped a moment just inside the door to let his eyes roam critically around the room. Nothing had been touched since he had been here this morning. No one had come up searching. Looking.

He crossed the small, book-lined room to the windows and looked down on the alley. No one was there. No watchers. No lookers this time. No young girls arm-in-arm. None of Trotter’s people, nor the Swiss. He wondered where Liese was this afternoon. He hoped she would be genuinely disappointed when he was gone. She thought too much of herself.

From a small lockbox in a desk drawer, McGarvey retrieved his battered, well-used passport and an envelope containing five thousand American. His escape mechanism. His return-trip ticket. Along with the Walther, it was his only guarantee of safety.

For a minute or two he stood behind his desk looking across the room at the door, staring at nothing, smelling the musty familiar odors, hearing the familiar traffic sounds outside on the street. From below he heard the tinkle of the front door bell. Someone coming, someone leaving. Fuelm could handle it.

Much depended on Marta now. She was Swiss police after all. That one little delusion of his — the one in which he had given her the benefit of the doubt — had been shattered casually by Trotter’s people. If Marta and Liese were searching for him now, if they had sent out the alarm, run up the balloon, if they were getting nervous, then the fiction was finished in any event. With luck they would let him walk away clean. Easiest that way, he tried to tell himself. Don’t look back, you can never tell what might be gaining on you. Your heart?

That was it then. It came down to a simple yes or no. Did he love her or didn’t he? There’d be no coming back from this one. No knocking about in the field for a week or a month or two, and then settling back into the bookstore, into the old, comfortable routines. The Swiss were far too sophisticated to let that happen. Marta, he suspected, was too fragile. And, like a strip of metal that has been bent back and forth too many times, he himself was feeling the signs of fatigue. Before long he would bend once too many times and he would break.

McGarvey picked up the telephone, started to dial his apartment, but then changed his mind and hung up. She was there or she wasn’t. Calling her would neither drive her away, nor conjure her up. He wondered what he really wanted.

Before he left, he looked one last time around his office. Five years of his life was coming to an end. Easier than he thought it would be.

Füelm looked up when McGarvey came down. The young girl with the small book was gone. The other customers were still in the shop.

“Are you leaving now?” the older man asked.

McGarvey nodded. “You will be all right this afternoon?”

“This afternoon … yes.”

Of course Füelm would be in on it with his daughter and Marta. How much did they really know? McGarvey glanced up the stairs to his office door. They’d probably taken the place apart. They would know about the money, about the passport and the gun.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” McGarvey said.

“Ja, geht mit Gott, Kirk,” Füelm replied gently.

Somehow the simple act of walking out of the shop became difficult. But McGarvey forced himself not to look back. He crossed the square at the news kiosk, then hurried up the hill, his hands stuffed deeply in his pockets, his thoughts black…

Fuelm was bad enough. But Marta was going to be many times more difficult.

On the way up the hill McGarvey avoided the issue of good-byes by working out his first steps once he got clear of Switzerland. Trotter and Day had both assured him that his track would be clean. Entering the States would create no notice — not by the Company and certainly not by Yarnell. Trotter did suggest, however, that McGarvey limit his visibility as much as possible when he got to D.C. There were still a lot of people around who remembered him. And Washington was not such a large metropolis that a chance meeting of some old crony was out of the question. Nothing would probably come of such a meeting, but why tempt fate? Why spit in the face of the gods? Trotter had muttered.

Evita Perez, Yarnell’s ex-wife who lived in New York City, would be his first, most obvious target. But there were other issues he wanted to address; issues that were none of Trotter’s or Day’s business … at least not for the moment.

One of the old hands in the Company in the early days when there seemed to be genuine purpose to most things (or was McGarvey just younger then?) had talked earnestly about excess baggage. Not the kind carried through airports, but the kind all of us carried in the form of relationships — wives, friends, associates. The man who comes up clean of baggage, is the man you’ll most likely see alive at the end. Entanglements can be fatal. Travel light.

Sound advice, wasn’t it? Hurtful at times, but then so was the amputation of a gangrenous leg in order to save the body.

They’re all enemies, don’t kid yourself. Just as if they held a gun to your head … wives, lovers.

But he had already seen it was time to leave, hadn’t he? He’d already made that decision, even before he had seen and spoken with Trotter.

He went to the end of the terraced street and turned the corner, climbing up to the next row of houses perched on the side of the hill so that he could avoid the stairs to his place. From the top he could look down at his building, as well as at the road, the stairs, and even a portion of the street below.

Nothing moved. No cars were staked out. No one waited around the corners, under the eaves, in doorways. He considered turning away and simply leaving. He would buy a few things in Geneva before his plane left. Get away clean. Paris first. Then New York. Paris would be his buffer zone. By the time they realized he had skipped, it would be too late for them to do anything about it. But Marta was one of them. It made him angry, this vacillation. A lack of commitment, his sister would say. She was right. Bucking up his shoulders, he tossed away the cigarette he’d been smoking and trudged back down the hill and around the corner to his place. On the stairs he suddenly could hear the radio playing above, and he could smell Marta’s perfume, a clean, lilac odor. His stomach felt hollow. The door opened. She stood there in a pretty skirt and blouse. She had been crying.

“You didn’t think to pick up some bread, did you?” she asked. “We’re almost out.”

“No. Sorry,” McGarvey said. At the head of the stairs, she stepped aside for him. He hesitated for just a moment but then went in, taking off his coat and laying it on the side of the couch. Now he felt like a stranger here with her.

“Are you hungry? Did you have lunch?” she asked, coming in and closing the door.

“I’m going away, Marta,” he said. “I came back to get some things.”

“Away? A long time? A long distance?”

“Out of Switzerland.”

Marta sagged a little with relief. “Back to the United States? Has something happened? Can I help? Kirk?”

McGarvey had gone to the bedroom door. He felt terrible. He turned back. “Listen, Marta, I know.”

She nodded.

“I know that you and Liese work for the federal police.”

“How long?” she asked.

McGarvey shrugged. “I guess I always suspected. I always knew that you were here with me because you were ordered to be here. Because I was a CIA … operative.” He’d almost said killer.

“At first, Kirk,” she said queerly. “I swear it was only at first. Not later.” Her eyes begin to fill again.

“Don’t …”

“I love you, Kirk. I have for a long time now. Don’t you know that, too?”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I’ll come with you.”

McGarvey shook his head. “It’s not possible.”

She took a step closer. “You were followed, you know, from the square to the store, where you picked up your gun, and then to the safe house above the lake.”

McGarvey wasn’t really surprised about that. “Have you been ordered now to stop me, Marta?”

“No one cares, darling, so long as whatever it is you’ve been given to do does not occur on Swiss soil.”

“I’m leaving the country. Tonight.”

“Take me with you.”

“No.”

“Then I will wait for you. When this thing you are going to do is finished, I will come to you. Wherever you are.”

“But not back here.”

She shook her head. “They won’t let you return.”

McGarvey looked at her. It had been a mistake coming back. He hadn’t counted on it being this hard. He wanted now to take her into his arms and hold her close. Make love. The hell with Trotter and Day and their problems. The hell with Yarnell and the Cuban slimeball. The hell with it all. But he simply could not do it. Something deep inside of him, in some little dark corner, anchored his soul as if by a chain wrapped around a bloody great rock. If it ever broke loose, he suspected he would founder and drown.

He turned and went into the bathroom where he got a pair of scissors and his disused shaving things. The photograph in his passport showed a clean-shaven man.

“It must mean something to you, these five years,” Marta said at the doorway. “Us.”

“I can’t change,” McGarvey said looking at her reflection in the mirror over the sink. “You can’t. None of us can.”

“I know what you do … what you did. I don’t care.”

“It’s over, Marta. You know it.”

She sighed. “Ah … Kirk. It hurts, damnit. It bloody well hurts. Do you know that?”

McGarvey nodded, but Marta turned and left. He could hear her in the kitchen putting on the tea water. He paused with the scissors before he began to cut his beard. It wasn’t too late, he told himself. Or was it?

Marta stayed in the kitchen while he finished shaving and trimming his hair. In the bedroom he changed into a pair of slacks, a clean shirt, and a sport coat, then packed a single suitcase and a leather overnight bag. When he was ready he telephoned a taxi service to bring him to the bus station. A direct service was operated between Lausanne and the Geneva airport. He brought his bags downstairs to the outside door, then went back up to the apartment. Marta sat at the kitchen table, a cup of tea cradled between her hands, a bottle of cognac open in front of her. A snub-nosed .38 revolver lay on the table. He’d never seen the gun before. He looked at her eyes. She had stopped crying. She seemed distant. For a moment or two, McGarvey stood in the doorway watching her; he thought just at that moment that she looked very brave and strong and wonderful. He waited until she looked up at him, but her eyes were the eyes of a stranger, so he turned and left the apartment.

At Cointrin Airport, he bought a one-way ticket to Paris on the early evening flight, then sat at the bar in the Plein Ciel drinking a whiskey, smoking a cigarette, and trying to fix in his mind exactly how Marta had looked. The restaurant was very busy, and more than once he imagined that the Swiss police had stationed someone here to make sure he actually left. He had disassembled his gun and packed it with his toilet kit in his checked-through luggage so that there would be no problem with airport security. Customs could be a problem, but if he ran into trouble he could call the Washington number Trotter had given him.

Yarnell was assistant DDO at Langley when the Company went into its slump. The lean years, remember? … That was your era, Kirk. Who do you suppose pulled the plug on Chile?

10

McGarvey arrived in New York City after his five year hiatus with little or no fanfare. It was early afternoon on a chilly spring Friday. He took a cab into Manhattan, watching from the back seat as the great city showed itself from across the river. He had forgotten just how big and dirty and exciting New York was. He had forgotten about the billboards, about the derelict cars along the sides of the roads, not even worth the scrap. He had forgotten about the traffic and the city smells and the feeling of tense excitement here. Out of habit he took a room in a Forty-second Street hotel just around the corner from the United Nations, had a quick shower, retrieved his gun from his luggage, and then went for a walk. The city was alive in a different way than were cities in Europe. There was a roughness here that seemed to exist side-by-side with elegance very easily. Street people competed with limousines for the right of way. What was uniquely American, in McGarvey’s view, was that both belonged, both had the same right to be wherever they wanted to be, and no one seemed to notice, let alone dispute the fact. As a young man growing up on the plains of the Midwest, New York had been his Mecca. His escape from a humdrum existence. His salvation. Yet Washington had snagged him, and anyway he had actually spent more years in Europe and in South America than here in the States. So it was good to be back. If there was one spot in the world that was uniquely American — large, brash, contradictory, free — it had to be New York City, and he reveled in the fact that he had come home, no matter the reason.

After a dozen or so blocks he found that he had circled around to the United Nations complex. He crossed First Avenue, trudged up the few steps past the guards, and walked the broad footpath down to the East River overlook where he leaned on the broad rail. The wind was cool here, but he didn’t mind. After Chile, Kathleen had come up here to straighten herself out (while she was seeing her attorney friend). They had met right here for the last time out of court, and she had told him that she was through with him. It had been spring then, too. She looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her, though she had already begun to hold herself differently; prim, proper, a little disdain showing. She couldn’t go on like this any longer, she said. The uncertainty and fear had become debilitating. For a moment there he thought she was worried sick out of love for him. But she dashed that hope. Her life was no longer hers to control; too many sleepless nights, mistrustful friends (what few she still had), and ugly rumors she was having a hard time keeping from their daughter. Just what was it, after all, that he did do for a living? Could he just tell her that once and for all? They could not go on.

McGarvey looked up from his thoughts. He would have quit for her then and there. The Company fired him a few weeks later in any event. But already it was too late for them. Too late for him.

He had an early lunch at the Howard Johnson’s across from Grand Central Station (he was still on Swiss time), then entered the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where he used a public phone to call the Washington number Trotter had given him. It was his first request for assistance and thus the signal that he had accepted his assignment and had actually begun. When he was finished he felt dirty. He went back to his hotel, stripped, and stayed in the shower for a very long time.

The day of the starving artist or writer was all but finished in SoHo and Greenwich Village. St. Christopher’s was a large, exclusive, four-story nightclub-cum-salon with apartments above on Broome Street, which never had (in its new life, at least) nor ever would see anyone starving. Tucked between an art gallery and an antique shop, it once had been a sweatshop factory of some sort. On its facade a plaster shield near the roofline was carved with lions and the date 1907. The windows had once been bricked over. They were open now and looked stainless steel and new. It was just past nine-thirty. From inside came the sounds of music and laughter. McGarvey went to the doorman, as he had been instructed to do, and gave his name as Peter Glynn. He was let inside and into a small vestibule where he paid a twenty-five-dollar cover charge to a lovely young woman wearing a colorful off-the-shoulder peasant dress. A big bullfight poster from Mexico City was framed on one wall. Hung on another was an Aztec sun calendar. Now he could hear that the music was Mexican; several guitars competed with a flat trumpet. He signed the guest register.

“Welcome to St. Christopher’s, Mr. Glynn,” the young woman said, glancing at what he had written. “Have you been here before?”

“No. This is my first time.”

“I’m sure you will enjoy yourself.”

“I was told Ms. Perez might be here this evening.”

“Yes, of course. Shall I say who is asking for her?”

“Tell her an old friend,” McGarvey said. “From Mexico City. In the old days.”

“Certainly,” the young woman said, inclining her head. She picked up her telephone as McGarvey went through the frosted glass doors into a large, crowded room that had been designed to look as if it were a Mexican village on the edge of a lagoon across from which a large volcano spewed smoke and fire. A mariachi band played on a tiny stage at the base of the volcano.

A young woman, scantily dressed in what appeared to be nothing more than crepe paper, escorted him to a small table off to one side, where she took his drink order of bourbon and water, and then left. Across the room on a slightly raised platform couples crowded around a long bar; some also sat at tables on the main floor. He thought he recognized a few of the faces from television or movies. At one large table, half a dozen older men (with the unmistakable look of politicians) were seated with six young, very good-looking women (with the unmistakable look of high-priced call girls).

His waitress came back with his drink as he was lighting a cigarette. “Will you be dining with us this evening?”

“Perhaps later,” McGarvey said, looking up.

“Do you wish to be alone … for the evening, Mr. Glynn?” The girl was smooth, but very young.

McGarvey smiled. “It is being taken care of, thanks.”

“Of course.”

It was fitting, he supposed. Yarnell was selling himself to the Russians. The man’s ex-wife was apparently selling herself to everyone else. McGarvey leaned back, then forward, as if he were a weary traveler stretching his back. He reached beneath the table and with his fingertips explored the base of the support. He felt a tiny loop of wire which emerged from the tabletop and disappeared into the base. It explained why the girl had used his name; for identification on the tape recording.

More people kept coming in, but no one was leaving. There was a lot of smoke from the volcano and from people’s cigarettes. When the band stopped playing between sets McGarvey could hear the sounds of running water even over the babble of dozens of simultaneous conversations. Then the ragged trumpet would blare, the guitars would take up the beat, and the noise would begin to echo off the walls.

The voice on the telephone had not been Trotter’s. McGarvey had not been surprised by that fact, but he had been irritated, not only by the man himself, but by his insinuating tone. In addition to Trotter and Day — and the Cuban — knowing that McGarvey was involved, now there was Trotter’s buffer service. It was necessary, at least for the moment, for his old friend to keep him at arm’s length, but it was beginning to gall McGarvey that too many people over whom he had no control knew of his interest in Yarnell. Even if the mesh is fine, the bigger the sieve, the more that leaks out.

The music died again, the house lights dimmed, and a spot illuminated the tiny stage as the trumpet player stepped up to the microphone with a flourish. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried in a comic Mexican accent. “Miss Evita Perez!”

Applause swelled, the bandleader stepped back, a drum rolled, and a slender woman with midback-length shimmering black hair bounced out onto the stage, her arms akimbo, her hips and shoulders in constant motion, her breasts nearly bursting from her low-cut sequined gown, which was slit all the way up to her hip. She was laughing and trilling. The band picked it up as she began to sing “La Paloma,” sensuously coo-cooing into the microphone as she continued to move around the stage.

McGarvey was too far away to be able to tell much about her except that she had a great deal of energy, a modicum of talent, and that she could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty depending on the skill of her makeup artist. He figured that she would have to be at least in her early forties to have been married to Yarnell in the early sixties, but she looked good from where he sat.

Her audience loved her. Between songs she called out names and joked with them, telling little supposedly intimate stories that she wasn’t supposed to be telling and then pretending coquettishly to be the naughty little girl who kissed and told.

As he watched her, McGarvey began to get glimpses of a great sadness in her; and of fear that she was being laughed at and not laughed with. At times she became too strident, too shrill, and sensing this fault in herself, she pulled back from the brink … of what he wondered. At other moments she was cool and sophisticated, a talented woman very much in charge not only of herself but of the room. This was her command performance. She had the crowd eating out of her hand.

Near the end of her forty-five-minute show, her age began to show on her. McGarvey sat forward. The spots were skillfully softened, yet it was obvious that Evita was wearing down. Her dancing became a little forced, as did her stories and, in the end, even her singing. Sweat glistened on her face and upper chest, ruining her makeup, but if anything the audience loved her even more for this effort. She went above and beyond the normal role of the performer. But it was sad; as if she were a marionette doomed to dance as long as her audience demanded; or as if she were the street dancer, holding out her tin cup for spare change.

Then it was over and she was bowing deeply to thunderous applause, catcalls, and whistles. McGarvey lit a cigarette, and moments after Evita had left the stage his waitress came back to his table.

“Mr. Glynn, Miss Perez will see you now.”

McGarvey rose and followed the young woman across the floor as the guitarist in the band on stage began a sad, haunting classical melody. The nightclub became hushed. It was a change of pace, a breather, and the audience was appreciative.

“Just up the stairs, sir,” the waitress said.

Evita Perez’s apartment occupied most of the second floor. The salon itself, where she apparently held her parties, was huge, with a sunken conversation area, a large area for dancing, extremely long, plushly upholstered couches, and broad rugs of white fur. A fake fire burned in a Mexican tiled fireplace in the center of the room. Sculptures in wood, stone, and metal were scattered around the place as if it were a museum. The indirect lighting was soft, lending a curiously intimate effect to the large, open spaces. Evita, dressed in a short terry cloth robe, her hair up in a towel and her feet bare, breezed into the room. She stopped when she saw McGarvey, a sudden puzzled look coming to her narrow, sharply defined features. He decided she looked a lot better without all the garish makeup.

“Well,” she said. “You’re a hell of a lot younger than I pictured you.” Her Mexican accent was all but gone.

McGarvey smiled. “You don’t look so bad yourself.”

She returned the smile. “I think you and I are going to get along just fine,” she said. She motioned him to the couch in front of the fireplace. “What are you drinking?”

“Bourbon and water.”

She mixed his drink at a buffet near one of the windows, then poured herself some white wine in a long-stemmed glass. “Have you got a cigarette?” she asked, returning. She sat down next to him, her feet tucked up under her.

McGarvey lit one for her. This close, he could see a few flecks of gray in the loose strands of hair that escaped from beneath the towel. She had crow’s feet around the corners of her eyes and they were starting at the base of her nose. Her olive skin was beginning to go slack beneath and around her tiny jaw. She was definitely in her forties.

“So, what brings you to see me, Mr. Glynn … or whoever the hell you are?”

“I’m trying to get some information about a couple of people. Richard Harris and Artimé Basulto,” McGarvey said.

“Never heard of them. Should I have?”

“I thought you might’ve.”

Evita held her silence for a long time before she spoke again. She stared at McGarvey, who noticed that her eyes were circled with tiny green specks. It made her look like a cat or some other night animal.

“Are you a cop?”

“No,” McGarvey said.

“CIA?” she asked softly.

“I used to be. Now I work on my own. I listen, I watch, I ask a few questions here and there. You know how it is.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought you might have heard of them. Harris was an agency man in the old days. Basulto worked for him.”

“So what?” Evita asked defensively. “What does this have to do with me?” The ash from her cigarette dropped on the front of her robe. She didn’t notice.

“Artimé has gotten himself in a bit of a jam with the DEA down in Florida. Something about running coke with the help of the Cuban government.”

“You said you were looking for him.”

“I am, in a way.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Evita said. “You are a cop. So what are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

“I wondered if you had ever heard of Artimé Basulto. He might lead me back to Harris.”

She shook her head, her eyes narrow. “And then what?”

This time McGarvey took his time answering. The delay made Evita nervous. The room was warm. McGarvey sipped his bourbon. He felt like a heel with her. She was obviously in a fragile state for all of her bravado and energy on stage. He decided that Yarnell had probably hurt her very badly at one time, and she still hadn’t recovered.

“It has to do with a long time ago, actually,” he said. “Mexico City in the old days. The late fifties, early sixties.”

“I was just a little girl then,” she said wistfully. “What can any of this possibly have to do with me? Please, I am very busy tonight. I have another act to do in less than an hour, and afterward there will be a lot of people up here. Already I’m tired.”

“They were doing some very important work for the agency in Mexico City,” McGarvey said.

“I don’t know …”

“Harris is dead. Someone killed him. I want to know who, and more important, why.”

Evita reached forward with a shaking hand and stubbed out her cigarette. She got to her feet, drained her wineglass, looked at McGarvey for a long second, then went to the buffet where she poured herself another glass. She stared out the window down at the street, her back to McGarvey.

“Why did you come here like this, Mr. Glynn?” she asked. “Why tonight?”

“You were born and raised in Mexico City.”

She laughed. “So were a lot of people.”

“You were there in those years.”

“It is a big place, I assure you.”

“Your husband worked for the Company. He was stationed there.”

McGarvey could see her reflection in the dark glass. She had closed her eyes.

“Was this Harris working out of the embassy?” she asked. “If he was I never knew it.”

“You remember some of the others, then?”

She turned around. She was frightened. “It was a long time ago. I was just a young girl, barely out of my teens. What did I know about anything? Ask yourself that, Mr. Glynn. What did I know? My eyes were filled with wedding veils.”

“I came to help,” McGarvey said softly.

At first it didn’t seem as if she had heard him. She looked toward the fireplace, her shoulders sagging. Idly she reached up with one hand, undid the towel around her head, and let it drop to the floor. She shook out her long, glistening black hair, then focused on McGarvey.

“Help with what?” she asked, her voice husky. “What are you doing here? Who was this Harris to you?”

“Harris was nothing to me. Just a name. But whoever killed him is now after Basulto and will be coming after anyone who knew what happened in those days.”

“Those days …” She shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

“The Ateneo Español. Does that mean anything to you?”

Her eyes widened just a bit. He could see her fighting for control. If she hadn’t heard about Harris or Basulto, she certainly had heard of the Ateneo Español.

“You have been to this place?” she asked, holding herself together.

“No.”

“It is not there any longer, I don’t think.”

“It was important when Harris and Basulto were there. I think you know it now, and I think you knew it at the time.”

Her lips parted. “And what do you expect me to tell you? I’m no spy, all right? It is dirty work. My hands are clean. I don’t want anything to do with it. All of it, everything, is finished.”

McGarvey held his silence. What the hell was she telling him now?

Evita leaned back against the buffet and looked up toward the ceiling. “Virgin mother,” she whispered. “Someone is filling your head with stories. This Harris you say is dead. So who sent you to me? This drug runner friend of yours?”

“Just Company files.”

She looked at him. “What?”

“I went through the agency’s files to see who was stationed in Mexico City during those years. I wanted to find out who was active.”

“Then why are you here? Why don’t you talk to Darby?”

“He won’t talk to me,” McGarvey said, holding his triumph in check. She had admitted she knew her ex-husband was active.

She laughed. “He’s a real prima donna, that one.”

“A prima donna?”

“My ex-husband has always been an important man. Sometimes a little more important in his own eyes than for the rest of the world. But he has always done big things.”

“You were active in Mexico City?”

“That is a filthy lie,” she snapped. “Who told you such a thing?”

“How often does he come up here to see you?” McGarvey asked.

Her face turned pale. She dropped her wineglass on the fur carpet, then reached back to the buffet for support. “What are you talking about?”

“Your husband.” He wanted to keep her off balance. “Has he been up here to see you? Do you have any contact with each other?”

She was shaking her head as if she didn’t understand a word he had said.

“Evita?” he said softly. Something was drastically wrong, but he did not want to break her delicate mood. She wanted to tell him something.

“You don’t know …”

“I don’t know what?” he prompted softly.

She shook her head. She seemed puzzled. “Get away from here,” she said. “Please, just get away from here. I don’t want to think about …”

“About what?”

“Go!” she screeched. “Mother of Christ, go! Get out of here you sonofabitch!”

“I have to know, Evita …”

Suddenly she snapped. She reached behind her, grabbed a half-full wine bottle from the buffet, and threw it toward McGarvey. Her aim was very bad and the bottle crashed against the side of the fireplace. Her robe came open, exposing her large, perfectly formed breasts, her slightly rounded stomach, and the narrow swatch of dark hair at her pubis.

McGarvey got to his feet as she snatched up another bottle. He reached her before she could throw it, and he took it out of her hand. She came after him then like an insane woman, biting and scratching and kicking, all the while screaming obscenities. For a few intense moments McGarvey had all he could do to keep from getting injured. She was very quick and strong despite her slight frame.

He got her away from the buffet and up against the wall where he pressed his body against her, immobilizing her as he held both her wrists over her head.

Her face was screwed up in rage, her eyes narrow with hate, her nostrils flared, bright red blotches on her cheeks and forehead.

“You bastard! You bastard,” she cried.

“I didn’t come here to hurt you. Evita, listen to me! I came here to help.” McGarvey was conscious of the press of her breasts against his chest. It was oddly disturbing.

Very slowly the fight began to drain out of her. She began to loosen up beneath him. He relaxed his grip and stepped back.

For a long time she remained against the wall, her robe open, her legs slightly spread, her eyes locked into McGarvey’s. Finally she looked down at herself. She pulled her robe tightly closed and shivered.

“Just go away now, Mr. Glynn. Please.”

“Harris was a good man.”

She looked up. She was on the verge of tears. “They were all good men. Young. Not so smart as now. Pretty boys.”

“Who?”

“All of them.”

“At the embassy?”

“Them, too,” Evita said. “The ones who came and went.”

They could hear music from downstairs now as the mariachi band started up again. Evita cocked her head as if to listen to it.

“Can’t we sit down and talk? I need your help,” McGarvey said gently.

She looked at him again. “It’s been a terribly long road. I’m finished with all of that now.”

“You could be arrested.”

She smiled wanly. “That would never happen, Mr. Glynn. Don’t you know that?”

“You won’t help?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. She stepped around the buffet, crossed the room and, without looking back, disappeared through the rear door.

McGarvey stared at the door for a very long time. In a way he was sorry he had come here. She was a sad lady. Nothing good was going to come from this business, he decided. Nothing good at all.

He walked over to Lafayette Street and headed north, catching a cab around Astor Place. It was a long time before he got to sleep. When he woke in the morning, the television set was still on and he felt a ravenous hunger not only for food, but for the real world. On the way out to the airport, though, he began to get the terrible feeling that he would never know such a world. His sister had warned him when he sold the ranch that he was forfeiting his heritage. Maybe she’d been right.

11

Georgetown is a lovely section of pretty streets, beautiful old wood-beam and brick homes, the university, and numerous parks. Dumbarton Oaks and Montrose Park that morning were deserted of all but a few tourists and the occasional nanny pushing a baby carriage. Lovers Lane, a pleasantly broad walkway, separated the two, opening at its south end onto R Street.

McGarvey had come directly from the Holiday Inn accross from the Naval Observatory, sure that no one had noticed his arrival in town. It had felt strange to be back in New York, but Washington seemed somehow even more distant for him. He felt as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope; it was all so familiar to him, yet everything was out of kilter. He could have been looking at a model of the city, instead of the real thing.

This was Yarnell’s city, McGarvey thought, looking out from the park exit up toward 31 st and 32nd streets with their fancy houses, many of which had limousines parked in front of them. The man had worked as deputy director of operations out of headquarters at Langley. He had served as a U.S. senator from New York, working out of the Capitol. Now he directed Yarnell, Pearson & Darien, one of the largest, most prestigious lobbying firms in the city. Among his friends he counted the president, congressmen, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, the Joint Chiefs, journalists … the power base of the entire country. It was frightening to think not only of the power he had, but of the inroads to sensitive information he possessed.

McGarvey crossed R Street and started up toward 32nd. Yarnell’s house was at the end of a narrow lane that led back into a mew. Trotter had described the place as a fortress; impossible to approach without being seen. The man could stop you in your tracks before you got within a hundred feet of his front door. He has to feel safe back there, McGarvey thought. Protected in his little cocoon. Perhaps safe enough to be lulled into a false sense of security? Perhaps safe enough to get careless?

In the park he had strolled at a leisurely pace. Here he walked faster so as not to attract attention. It was midmorning on a weekday. People were supposed to be in a hurry. Busy. A delivery van rumbled by, followed closely by a Mercedes limo driven by a clearly impatient uniformed chauffeur. The car’s windows were dark so it was impossible for McGarvey to see if anyone was in the backseat. But the limo had to belong to someone important. The car passed through the intersection at 31 st Street and kept going. Perhaps to the White House. Maybe the Pentagon.

McGarvey had to think back to why he ever left. Why he had run to the imagined safety of Switzerland. It was because of the Yarnells of the world, wasn’t it? At least he used to tell himself that. Now he was back again, and the same old gut-wrenching fear was beginning to climb up from his bowels; the same old quickness of breath, the supersensitivity to anything and everything around him.

If you’re not careful, you’ll think that you can see and understand everything. Every car, every truck or bus, every person standing on a street corner, every window up or down, every bit of trash lying in an alley, every chalk mark on every fence post. You can’t, of course, know everything. Drive yourself crazy trying to. So you damned well better learn to be selective if you want to survive.

He crossed with the light at 31st Street and continued up to 32nd, where he turned away from the park and started past Scott Place, on which Yarnell’s citadel was situated. There was a smell of flowers and cut grass and trees from the park, made more noticeable now that he was away from it. This was definitely not the lower end of Georgetown’s socioeconomic scale. Even the street was swept and washed, the cars parked along it all polished, chrome gleaming.

A second, narrower lane led left off Scott Place. McGarvey stopped a moment with his foot up on a fire hydrant to tie his shoelaces. Yarnell’s home was behind a tall brick wall, so that the first floor windows couldn’t be seen. It was a large, three-story European-looking house with several chimneys, dormers across the front, and a steeply pitched roof. It sat at an angle to 32nd Street. A window in what would probably be the attic was open. It caught McGarvey’s eye. The room behind it was dark, but he got the curious impression that someone was there, watching. As he straightened up, he glanced over his shoulder, back the way he had come, following a line from the window back out to R Street. He looked up again. From that window an observer could see the entire neighborhood, north-to-south, along 32nd Street as well as both parks. It would be difficult if not nearly impossible to mount any sort of a serious surveillance operation, at least from this side. Assuming Yarnell had the usual equipment up there — microwave, audio dishes, infrared, electronic monitoring — this side would not provide a safe vantage point.

A small Toyota Celica came out of the lane as McGarvey reached Q Street. He had to wait for it to pass before he could cross. He got a momentary glimpse of a good-looking young woman, with dark hair and an olive complexion, well dressed, alone. She had seemed very intent, as if she were in a big hurry to get someplace important. Again out of old habit he looked at the license plate. It was a D.C. tag. He memorized the number, murmuring a mnemonic as he crossed.

Just around the corner, another narrow lane led back at an oblique angle toward the park. McGarvey stepped down the cobblestoned path, and within fifty feet he could see the back of Yarnell’s house, protected as in front by a tall brick wall. The twin of the front attic window was open, affording a view of Wisconsin Avenue and the other east-to-west approaches.

Yarnell was paranoid, McGarvey told himself backing off. Paranoid men were wont to make mistakes. But more importantly, paranoid men in this business usually had something very concrete about which to feel paranoid. An Achilles’ heel, as Trotter had described Evita Perez. Yarnell had made a dreadful mistake marrying her. What other mistakes had he made? What mistakes might he be making right at this moment? The thought was intriguing.

Once again on the corner, McGarvey could look down the narrow lane as well as down 32nd Street as they diverged. This one spot, and fifty feet or so up either leg of the angle, constituted a blind spot in Yarnell’s surveillance. It was not much, he decided, but it was something.

He walked up to Wisconsin Avenue, which was busy with traffic, and got a taxi within a few minutes, telling the driver the Holiday Inn, which was less than ten blocks away.

It was time for him to get to work now. If he was going to do this thing for Trotter and Day, he would need more information and he would have to start taking some precautions.

McGarvey had lunch in his hotel, then went into town to do the sights. With the weather warming and the cherry blossoms starting to bloom, Washington was filling with tourists. Traffic was terrible, though it still wasn’t quite as bad as Lausanne in the summer. The cabbie left him off at the end of Bacon Drive between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. He dawdled for more than an hour looking at the long, polished black stone tablets on which were engraved the names of those who died in the Vietnam War, stopping and starting, hanging his head as if he were in deep sorrow … which in a way he was. It was impossible not to feel something standing in front of such an overwhelmingly tragic reminder of a world somehow gone wrong. As his heart overflowed, his motions naturally became erratic. Twice he thought he might have picked out someone. A pink sweater in the crowd. A torn field jacket across the walkway. But then they were gone, in opposite directions, one by bus, the other on foot. He strolled up to the Lincoln Memorial, where he circled the building with its thirty-six columns, then headed on foot at a brisk pace back up to Constitution Avenue.

He was wearing his tweed sport coat, and a shirt and tie; Washington was warm after Switzerland, and he was sweating. He took a bus to Union Station, where he mingled with the crowds inside for a while; buying a newspaper at a stand, making a phone call to his room at the hotel, getting a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup and drinking it while he read the newspaper as he had his shoes shined.

It was nearly four in the afternoon by the time McGarvey emerged from the station. He was moving fast now. If anyone had tailed him to this point, he decided they were damned good. He hadn’t spotted a thing. But he had to give it one last chance. He took a cab out to National Airport on the river south of the Pentagon, rented a plain Chevrolet Caprice, and headed north along the parkway, sometimes going ten miles per hour faster than the flow of traffic, sometimes ten miles per hour slower.

By five-thirty he was a long way up into the Maryland countryside, but he was finally satisfied that no one could possibly be behind him. Extraordinary lengths, they might say at the Farm in Williamsburg. But when your life depended on it, you’d go to any lengths … to the moon if need be.

He turned and headed south again, back across the river into Virginia; Annendale Acres with its Pine Crest Golf Club, A&P Supermarkets, Ace Hardware, green rolling hills and curving streets with cute names along which were mile after mile of contemporary houses, some in brick, some with shake roofs, some with split-rail fences, but all of them depressingly neat and similar. The neighborhood was twenty years old, and showed it.

It was dark by the time McGarvey finally parked across the street from a split-level ranch with attached garage and a lot of new trees and bushes. It had been a long time for him. Nothing much had changed. The garage door was up. Two cars were parked inside; one older and a little beat up, the other a new Ford station wagon. A basketball hoop and backboard were centered over the open door. The house was lit up. He went up the walk, hesitated a moment, then rang the doorbell. He could hear it chime inside. A dog barked. Someone shouted … one of the kids? And the porch light came on. A woman wearing blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, opened the door. Behind her, carpeted stairs led up to the living room and down to the finished basement.

“Pat? It’s me. Kirk,” he said.

She looked at him for a very long time, a range of emotions playing across her broad, pleasant features; surprise, disbelief, uncertainty and sadness, and then just a little fear.

“Good Lord, where did you come from?” she asked softly.

“Is Janos here?”

She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook her head. “He’s out. They sent him up to New York ….”

“Like the old days?”

“Yeah, like the old days ….”

A big shaggy dog appeared on the stairs from the basement, its tail wagging, Janos right behind it.

“Pat? Who’s at the door?”

“No one,” she said wryly, looking into McGarvey’s eyes.

The dog sniffed at McGarvey’s shoes. He reached down and scratched behind the animal’s ears. Janos had stopped halfway up the stairs.

“Hello, Janos,” McGarvey said. “Long time no see.”

Janos Plónski, majordomo of all things recorded in the archives at the CIA’s Langley headquarters, was a big, barrel-chested bear of a man with a face so ugly that even a mother would have a hard time warming up to him. When he was little he lost his hair to scarlet fever and one year later had a severe case of chicken pox that left permanent scars. He didn’t care, and his wife and two children, Barney and Elizabeth, all adored him. He was born in Owicim, forty miles west of Kraków, Poland, in 1935, and lived there through the war and concentration-camp days (Auschwitz was just outside of town), while his father collaborated with the Nazis. Just before the war’s end, his mother shot his father to death and managed to make her way completely across Europe, all the way to England, with her ten-year-old son in tow. She joined a Polish émigré group that during the war had fought Nazis and afterward fought Communists. By the time he was twenty, Janos had completed his college studies at Oxford (he was something of a hero because of his mother), immigrated to the United States, and joined the army as a translator and intelligence analyst. His career afterward was spectacular. He was dropped into Poland on at least half a dozen occasions; he did work in East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, and then he gave it all up when his young wife became pregnant with their first child.

“Running the show in the basement may not be the most exciting job in the world, Kirk,” he once told McGarvey. “But it makes Pat happy and me, too. This way I can be at home in bed with her every night. And I like her cooking.”

Janos pulled McGarvey inside, and they sat on stools in front of a long workbench in the basement. Pat brought them beers and then shooed the children away from the stairs, shutting the basement door. No one had asked him to stay for supper, though he could smell it cooking upstairs. Of course he was out, Janos was in. The association would have to be considered dangerous, no matter the closeness of the friendship.

“So, Kirk, my old friend, what has brought you back? It was my understanding you were tucked away somewhere … Switzerland?”

“Lausanne. I had a little bookstore there. An apartment. Not much.”

Janos smiled appreciatively. He was very proud of what he had in the way not only of material possessions, but of his position with the Company as well as within the community.

“You’re here for a visit? Is that it?”

McGarvey looked at him for a moment. He was glad Pat had gone upstairs. She’d always been the tough negotiator. She was English. Cockney. She understood real poverty even more than Janos did. And she didn’t want to go back.

“Not really,” McGarvey answered softly. He took a swallow of his beer. “I’m doing a job, actually.”

Janos seemed pained. He sat forward. “For who, Kirk? Who are you working for? Not the Company; I would have heard.”

The implication was obvious. By answering it, McGarvey would be dropping to Janos’s level. But then it had always been that way. Despite his experience, Janos was one of the most naive, direct men he’d ever known. Once, at a party, Pat confessed it was that very innocence that caused her to fall in love with him in the first place.

“I came all this way, Janos, to be practically turned away at the door, and then to be insulted by my friend?”

Janos sat back, his beer between his big paws. “I’m sorry, Kirk, really I am.”

“How have Pat and the kids been?”

“Very good, actually. The tops. We’re a happy family here, you know that. At least in that, nothing has changed.”

“I thought about you a lot over the years.”

Janos shrugged. “We missed you, too, Kirk. You and Kathleen.”

“It’s over between us. You knew that.”

Again Janos shrugged. “Yes, we both knew it. And it saddened us. But she is still Elizabeth’s godmother. Will she ever come back to us?”

“I doubt it,” McGarvey said. He felt like hell. She was only in Alexandria. Christ, it seemed like a million miles.

Janos sensed something of that. “Does she know you’re back?”

“No,” McGarvey said softly. “How are things in the Company these days?”

Janos brightened cautiously. “A lot better, Kirk. Believe me, under Reagan and Powers there is no comparison to the old days.”

“Danielle is running ops now?”

“He’s doing a good job, Kirk, even if he is a little mouse. We have a lot of respect now, you know. It didn’t used to be that way. Of course cross-Atlantic operations have shifted from Eastern Europe to the Eastern Med. But even I am getting used to it.”

“You don’t miss the field?”

Janos started to shake his head, but then he laughed self-deprecatingly. “I could never lie to you. Yes, of course I miss it. But only sometimes. It is like smoking, Kirk. When you first give it up, it’s hell. But then the urge finally begins to go away. It doesn’t ever disappear, sometimes it gets very bad, even for me, but by then you know that you have it licked. I’m just fine.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Sincerely, my friend.”

Janos nodded solemnly. “You have come as a very large surprise.”

“Pleasant, I hope.”

“Pat is frightened.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Barney and Elizabeth will want to see you before you go.” Janos stopped. “Are you back in Washington for good?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“No,” Janos said. “But you did not tell me who has engaged you. It is important.”

“I can’t, Janos. It’s very sensitive,” McGarvey looked into his eyes. “But it’s legitimate. In this you must believe me.”

“I do.”

McGarvey leaned forward. “I’m going to need your help.”

“My charter—”

“I don’t care about your charter,” McGarvey interrupted sharply. Janos had to be handled this way sometimes. “Your mother never cared about charters. No one does. Just listen and then if your heart tells you no, you can walk away with a clear conscience.”

“You are a friend, but I have my position here!” Janos said, raising his voice. “I signed the Secrets Act. For me it is a very important thing. They could easily send me back to England. And from there you know where — straight back to Poland.”

“I signed the same act. And there is no way in hell they’d send you back to Poland unless you shot the president or something.”

The color drained from Plónski’s face. “Don’t even joke like that, Kirk. For God’s sake.”

“I need help, Janos. Some information out of your machines. Nothing terrible or bad. Nothing about anyone who makes any difference in this world.”

Janos looked down at his beer. “We all make a difference. I don’t think you ever understood that.”

“His name is Artime Basulto. Used to work for us in the very early days. Fifties, early sixties.”

“Cuban?”

“He worked out of Havana watching Batista. Got in on the Bay of Pigs thing, then dropped out.”

“He’d be in the old records down in Lynchburg. Army. But what about him, Kirk? Is this an old vendetta? Are you writing a book?”

“He’s been running cocaine out of Matanzas.”

Janos brightened. “You’re working for the DEA?”

“I didn’t say that,” McGarvey replied quickly.

Janos chuckled. “You want his track?”

“I want to know everything.”

“Of course.”

“No, Janos, listen to me. I want to know everything. From day one. What he did, how much he was paid for it, his day sheets, who he worked for. Everything, do you understand?”

“I understand, Kirk,” Janos said, happy now that he believed McGarvey was working on a legitimate operation. “But this could have come through channels.”

McGarvey put his beer down. He looked at his old friend. “Listen very carefully this time. Very closely. I want you to pay real close attention. This Cuban we’re talking about worked for the Company a long time ago. He might still be working for the Company.”

Janos sat back as if he had been slapped. “For who?”

“I don’t know. But open inquiries might cause trouble, if you see what I mean.”

“Oh, I understand,” Janos said.

“I’m sure you do, Janos.”

“I love this country, Kirk. I want you to know that.”

12

If Janos Plónski wasn’t particularly proud of his job as deputy director of records at Langley, he was at least proud of his own past record, and of the renewed strength the Company was enjoying since its emasculation by the Carter administration. Of the old hands he was one of the very few to have come out of that dark era unscathed. His wife, Pat, understood his moods of depression when he sometimes thought about the old friends who died in Eastern European operations, or were scalped like McGarvey. But Janos had kept his nose clean, hadn’t he? And that counted for something in this day and age. That, and his wife and children, for whom he would do anything, were his world.

Janos had become the star of archives. Who better than an operations type — an ex-field hound — to understand the practical side of an intelligence service’s record-keeping system? The college grads were mainly interested in the historical perspective. The computer whiz kids tinkered with their machines. Administration had always been, and always would be, dedicated to following the financial trail of all operations … fitting each little budget line into the whole picture. And the bookworms, who were a class all to themselves, gave a damn only about order versus chaos. Janos knew better. The only reason for the existence of an archives in this business was to provide operations planners and field men with the accurate and timely information they needed when and as they needed it. No excuses about perspective or downed data links or administrative holds on jackets. Somewhere in the great bloody pile of facts and figures is the needed bit, get it now, Janos.

He was, in nearly everyone’s eyes upstairs, a magician. Operations was pleased with his work, but so were administration and personnel and intelligence. “How do you do it, Janos, old boy? Must be a juggling game down there, keeping everyone going all at the same time. Like wagging both ends of the tail at the same time.”

His somewhat spartan office was at the rear of the exposed basement, with one large window that overlooked the construction of the new section of the building. He had spent the first hour of the morning in a staff meeting upstairs, in which the effects of the recent budget cuts were hotly debated. Everything but Central American and Libyan operations would have to bear the burden of the cuts. He told the bad news to his chief of computers, who had for the third year in a row pleaded for an updating of peripherals. Then he informed his secretary that he would be leaving his office for the entire day. At ten, having cleared the last of the morning’s business off his desk, he telephoned Ft. McGillis Army Depot outside Lynchburg and asked for Captain Leonard Treitman, Special Records Section.

“Good morning, Leonard, this is Janos.”

“Hello, Janos. I was just on my way out. Staff meeting. What can I do for you?”

“I’m driving down. Be there a little after lunchtime.”

“Damn. I won’t be here. Sam wants me at the Pentagon at two. Can yours hold till tomorrow?”

Janos looked at his watch. He was beginning to feel tight. “No, actually I’ll be tied up for the rest of the week. It’s routine anyway, unless you’re locking the doors.”

Treitman chuckled. “Sounds like another inspection to me.”

“I’d like to run a few tracks. The budget reared its ugly head again this morning. Next thing they’ll be down here fussing about our efficiency.”

“I’ll tell Charlie and the others that you’re on your way down …”

“No, don’t do that, Leonard,” Janos said a little too quickly. He covered himself, though. “I want this as routine as possible. I just called you as a courtesy. It really doesn’t matter if you’re there or not.”

“I see,” Treitman said, a bit of disappointment in his voice. He was one of the bookworms who didn’t care for someone else playing amongst the bits and pieces in his inner sanctum. “Do me the courtesy of a follow-up report.”

“Of course, Leonard. It goes without saying.”

“I know, but do it anyway.”

On the way out, Charlene, his secretary, chalked him out on the status board for an inspection visit to the Lynchburg facility. She was new from the pool. “Shall I transfer your calls down there, sir?” she asked.

“Unless the Russians invade Poland, make my excuses until morning,” Janos said. It had been his standard joke for years. She didn’t crack a smile. McGarvey had told him to watch himself. Not to trust anyone. Anyone at all. They’d be working under the old rules on this one. Janos figured Charlene was high on his list of those not to trust.

He got his car from the parking lot, drove off the agency’s grounds, then took the George Washington Parkway over to the Beltway and down to Interstate 66. The day was pleasant. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette, and turned the car radio up. They were playing Tchaikovsky, one of the few things Russian Janos could honestly enjoy, though over the past few years even that passion had begun to abate. To say it was Russian wasn’t to make it automatically bad in his mind.

He thought about Pat. She said they were becoming comfortable. He agreed with her, though for him it wasn’t a point of pride, as it was for her. She liked McGarvey, but this morning before Janos left the house she had come out to the garage in her robe and slippers to face him eye-to-eye. “Janos, tell me you are not going back into the field for Kirk, or for anyone else.” He had lied to his wife, the thought lingered on the long trip south, but as he entered Ft. McGillis the old feelings of excitement and self-preservation had begun to sharpen his wits. He was glad to be back in the field.

“Oh shit,” the officer of the day, Lieutenant Charles Guthrie, said, jumping up as Janos walked in. “Captain Treitman isn’t here this afternoon, Mr. Plónski.”

“I know, but that doesn’t really matter, does it.” On the way down Janos had mentally prepared for his inspection tour. The safest place to conceal a snowflake, after all, is in a blizzard. “We’ll just do a few line items, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Yes, sir,” the young lieutenant groaned.

The entire small post was nestled in a heavily wooded area of rolling hills. Lynchburg itself was a few miles to the south, and Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant to end the Civil War, was not too far to the east. Most of the installation’s buildings were constructed of red brick with white Colonial wood trim. From the standpoint of a record-keeping facility, the post was inefficient. The records themselves were kept in a dozen warehouse-type buildings in cardboard bins on steel shelving that rose almost twenty feet toward the very high ceilings. Here, there was no such thing as electronic retrieval. It was thought that the files, as sensitive as they still might be, had aged sufficiently so that their rapid retrieval wasn’t necessary. Since Janos became director of records, that had changed. Now, unlike the old days when a few antiquated clerks ran the entire post, there were a dozen young administration types who were constantly being drilled to keep on their toes. The solution, of course, was to reduce the material to computer memory. But the amount of data was so vast, so complicated, and so sensitive that no one dared suggest such an undertaking. Some things were better left undone. The funds that such a project would drain were better spent elsewhere. The main administration building contained a couple of offices; incoming-records processing, in which arriving cartons of material were opened, sorted, graded, and cataloged according to their national security sensitivity and classification, given a retrieval code, and finally placed on the appropriate shelf in the appropriate warehouse; and the reading room, which contained the brains of the system.

Janos followed the lieutenant down the corridor that opened onto the reading room, which stretched across the entire rear of the building. Fully half the large room was taken up by rows of chest-high oak cabinets in which were contained the heart of the retrieval and cross-referencing systems. Laid out much like a library’s card catalog, the filed information was given a number akin to a Dewey decimal system classification in which each document or file was located by building, shelf, and slot, and was also referenced to dates, subjects, and case officers. A few chairs and tables were grouped at one end of the room, and at the back was a short counter from which the runners were dispatched to the various warehouses.

It was fairly quiet this afternoon. Only a couple of tables were occupied. Case officers doing their homework for the DDO, who was a stickler for details during planning. Janos knew neither of them, though he’d seen them around. He knew the type. They were the same as him … or at least the same as he used to be. One of them looked up and nodded as he passed, the other was buried in his files.

“Is there something specific you’ll be wanting this afternoon, sir?” Guthrie asked.

They had come to an empty table. Janos put down his briefcase. He smiled as Mary Prentiss, the chief duty clerk, came from behind the counter. She was one of four capable civilians Janos had hired. He’d got her from the staff of an angry U.S. senator.

“I’m going to pick out a few random case histories for your people to track down,” he said to Guthrie. “Nothing important.”

“What nasty tricks have you got up your sleeve today?” Mary said, smiling. She was in her thirties, somewhat too athletically built to be pretty, and was married, though no one had actually ever seen her husband.

“Leonard is gone for the day …” Guthrie started.

“Well, I think we can manage for Mr. Plónski,” Mary said, ignoring him. “Is there anything specific you need, Janos, to make you come all the way down here?”

In many ways she reminded Janos of his own wife. They both were capable women who sometimes displayed a hard edge. He’d learned early on to relax around them, let them do the work, not fight them. In the end he usually got what he wanted.

“I like to watch you work, Mary,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe we’ll look at a few case histories. Maybe we’ll see how well you’ve taken care of the jackets. Maybe we’ll see how fast your crew can perform for you.”

“You won’t be needing me, then, sir?” the lieutenant asked hopefully.

“No,” Mary said to him before Janos had a chance to reply. “We’ll handle it.”

The lieutenant went back to the front office. Treitman didn’t like civilians messing around on his turf. He’d get a full report from Guthrie.

“He’s okay as long as he’s shuffling army forms around. Back here he’s a disaster,” Mary said.

At least, Janos thought, the lieutenant didn’t actually believe he owned the base, as Treitman did, or the records, as Mary did. She was good, but she was worse than the bookworms; she felt she had a proprietary interest in every scrap of paper here. She would be behind the same counter twenty years from now, he figured. A fixture.

“Let’s get started, then,” Janos said, opening his briefcase. He took out a legal-size tablet and a pen, but before he closed the lid he made sure she had gotten a good look inside at the several fat case files he had purposely brought with him. Two of them were marked with a diagonal orange stripe, indicating they contained secret material.

“Anything for me in there?” she asked.

Janos looked up. “No.” He locked his briefcase, then moved directly across to the first row of the card catalogs under Case Officers, A — C.

Mary came up next to him as he opened the first drawer and at random picked out a card for Albright, Edward J. Three terse lines gave a clinical history of his life; date of birth, place of birth, education, service record, employment covers, and finally date of death, in this case April 19, 1959. The body of the card contained the code names of the operations in which Albright had been involved, followed by a three-digit building number, a three-digit row number, and a two-letter three-digit address for each particular jacket. The card was nearly filled on both sides. Albright, it seemed, had been a very busy man.

Janos jotted down three of the file numbers, then looked over his shoulder at Mary, who was hovering just behind him. “Do you want to bring me some pink slips?”

“I’ll do them for you, Janos,” she said. “It’ll speed things up.”

She went back to her counter as Janos moved to another drawer, this time selecting the card of Aumann, Dieter K., born in 1909 in Hamburg, Germany, ending his career, it seemed, with the BND (the West German intelligence service) in 1957. He jotted down a pair of addresses.

Mary returned with a bundle of pink retrieval slips. Each was supposed to be filled out with the name or subject of the requested file and its archives address, as well as the date and time and the name of the requesting officer, whose signature was also required.

“What have you come up with here?” she asked.

Janos tore off the top sheet of his tablet and gave it to her. “I’m going in for misfiles. Dig these up by address alone. When they come in I’ll match them against name and operation.”

“You won’t find any in there,” she said.

“None?” Janos chided.

She grinned. “Not one.”

As she began filling out the slips, Janos quickly moved to the Bs, where he found Basulto’s name in the second drawer. He glanced at Mary, who was still busy writing, then back at Basulto’s card. There were only three reference files under his name. One was listed as Operation Sweep, another Operation Box Cars, and the last was Operation White Out. McGarvey had worried that there would be no references to Basulto in the files, or at least none under his own name. The alternate source would have been Roger Harris. After that it could have been anyone’s guess. Only they had gotten lucky on the first try. Janos jotted down the three addresses and then as Mary came toward him he closed the drawer and tore off the paper for her. She gave him a half a dozen pink slips to date and sign. As he was signing them he was conscious that she was studying him. He looked up when he was finished.

“How many more?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A few more maybe.”

“I’ll just get started with these.”

Janos pulled out a stopwatch, made a show of setting it to zero, then clicked the start button. “You’re off, then,” he said, stepping around her and moving over to the next row.

McGarvey had been a surprise last night. Not so pleasant for Pat, though she had finally asked him to stay for dinner. The children loved him. He was Uncle Kirk, Daddy’s best friend. Only five years ago when the witch-hunters had been in full stride, daddy hadn’t done much to help his friend. His mother told him once that people do most things out of guilt. It was easy to see in others, but not so easy in yourself. Today part was guilt, but another part was … what? Larceny? McGarvey’s warning that Basulto could still be working for someone within the Company rang in his ears. In a way the old adrenaline felt good.

In ten minutes Janos had picked out a dozen more files, as the first of the runners came back. He set himself up at one of the tables, his briefcase unlocked and open beside him, his stopwatch beside him, a fresh tablet and several sharp pencils at the ready. Mary brought him the first of the jackets, and then a coffee, black, as he started to work.

The case histories themselves were contained in thick buff-colored envelopes with accordion bottoms and tie flaps. He opened the first of the Albright cases marked with its address and, in gray type, CONFIDENTIAL: OPERATION HAT RACK. All case files were the same. Just inside was a slip on which was marked the date of each withdrawal and the initials of the withdrawing officer. On the first page of the main body of the file was a summary of the jacket’s contents: work sheets, budget items, justification data, authorization documents, planning and analysis, actual details of the operation, follow-up analysis, and references, if any, to other files. Hat Rack was an operation that had taken place in East Berlin in January of 1948. Albright, along with a half-dozen Americans and some British agents, were to organize as many cells as possible of unhappy East Germans who would be willing to conduct a rumor campaign of an impending Russian drive to round up petty criminals and low-ranking Nazis for work in the mines in Poland. The operation had apparently meant to stir up unrest in the Russian sector. There was a lot of that sort of thing going around in those days. The Russians to this day maintained it was just because of that kind of Western operation that they were forced into building the Berlin Wall.

During his reading Janos made a great fuss of making frequent references to the various files he carried in his briefcase. After half an hour, when the remainder of the jackets had been brought to him, his files were intermingled with the ones from Archives. It would be no problem switching the contents of the Basulto jackets to three of his own.

For a while he stayed away from the Basulto files. Twice he went to the card catalogs where he pretended to make reference to the files, and after a short time his paper shuffling and trips back and forth became so commonplace that not even Mary paid much attention to him.

At one point he sat back, stretched his legs under the table, and sighed deeply as if he were a man weary from his labors. Actually his chest had begun to feel tight, his mouth dry, and the old heartburn had returned. It was a part of the business. It burned out a lot of agents, but he had been weaned on such feelings.

Mary turned away as he pulled the first of Basulto’s files to him and looked at the slip on the inside cover. The file had been signed out three times in 1959, seven times in 1960, three in 1961, and then once in 1964. It had not been signed out since then. The first times the withdrawing officer’s initials were R.H. — probably McGarvey’s Roger Harris. Whoever had signed out the file in 1964, however, had signed his or her initials in a tiny, illegible scrawl. Impossible to make out.

Turning next to the contents, Janos pulled out the first page. For a long moment he simply stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was nothing. Just a page from an encyclopedia. Euphrates to Euripides. The first page should have been the summary. But this was nothing. Someone had tampered with the bloody file. Janos could feel the tightness building in his chest. McGarvey had warned him. He glanced up toward the counter. Mary was still talking with one of the clerks. He took the rest of the thick sheath of papers and documents out of the jacket and began thumbing through them. They were nothing. It was almost too incredible for him to believe. Here in Archives! Basulto’s file — at least this one — contained nothing more than encyclopedia pages, telephone directory pages, and some blank papers. Nothing of any significance. No underlined messages. Nothing with a date such as a newspaper or magazine page.

In 1964, this file was still up at Langley. Nothing had been moved down here yet. Almost anyone could have had access. But Christ, why? he asked himself.

Mary was looking at him. He forced himself to smile. Lean forward. Casually, Janos, he told himself. After a moment or two, Mary went back to her work.

He pulled the second Basulto file over, this one marked SECRET: OPERATION BOX CARS. Inside, the withdrawal slip showed some activity in the late fifties and early sixties with the last action coming on the same date in 1964. For a few terrible seconds Janos could not bring himself to look through the jacket. He knew what he was going to find, but he did not want it to be so. He could feel himself being drawn into McGarvey’s operation against his will. He should have listened to Pat. She had known. She had seen it in Kirk’s eyes.

He glanced again at the withdrawal slip, June 14, 1964. Then he thumbed through the main body of the file, which like the first contained nothing but book pages, telephone directory pages, some blank pages, a few ruled sheets, also blank. The third file, titled OPERATION: WHITE OUT, was the same.

Slowly he retied the jackets and stacked them with the others ready to be sent back. Someone had concealed Basulto’s activities back in 1964, in anticipation that he would be under a drug investigation twenty-three years later? Or, he asked himself, had the files been tampered with more recently than that and simply not been signed for?

Each question raised a dozen more. Each possibility admitted a thousand dark avenues down any one of which was some unknown danger.

I want you to pay real close attention. This Cuban we’re talking about worked for the Company a long time ago. He might still be working for the Company.

For whom, Kirk? he wanted to ask. The back door was wide open, and no one was there covering it for him. The next time he was going to get more information before he went off half-cocked.

For the next half hour he made himself work through the remainder of the files he had requested, going through all the motions of checking them against the card catalog. When he was finished, he bundled up his own files and put them back in his briefcase along with his tablets and pencils. Mary came over from the counter.

“Well, how’d we do this time, Janos?” she asked. She did not seemed worried, nor did it seem to him that she could see he was upset.

“You were a little slow on 201,” he said casually. “But it was within limits. I’m not a hardass here, Mary.” He got up. His legs felt a little weak. It was from sitting in the car, and then here at the table.

She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” She glanced at her watch. “Are we done here? Can I get these back to the roost?”

“Sure. You did a good job here, Mary, as usual. All of you did.” He locked his briefcase and hefted it.

“Are you heading back to Langley?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I thought I’d buy you a drink at the club. Something I’d like to talk to you about.”

He looked guiltily down at the files. Had she found him out? She was sharp. Christ, she could have looked in each jacket before bringing them over to him. She could have seen what Basulto’s contained. Now she wanted to find out from him why he hadn’t said anything about it. And that was the least of it. At this moment there should have been a four-alarm fire beneath the tail of every man, woman, and child on this post. Or, she could be working for whoever was still running the Cuban.

“Janos?”

“Another time, Mary,” he blurted. Careful, Janos he cautioned himself. “I’ve really got to get back.”

Disappointment showed on her face. “How about later this week, then? I could drive up to your office. I’d really like to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Maybe I’d like to apply for another position.”

“What?” he asked stupidly. He felt dense.

“At Langley. In computers.”

Then he understood, and he laughed in relief. “Sure,” he said. “Sure thing, Mary. But I’ve got to go now. Call me later this week. Better yet, next week. I need a … I’m busy this week. Next week we’ll talk.”

“Thanks,” Mary said.

In the front office, Lieutenant Guthrie had stepped out. Janos signed himself out, then headed north again, sweat making his shirt stick to his back. This time he had no stomach for music, Russian or otherwise. He could only think what a disappointment McGarvey had been. He was an old friend and yet he hadn’t warned Janos — at least, he hadn’t made his warning clear enough. Be careful, Janos, he could have said. I mean be really careful, Janos. I don’t want you to get hurt. You are a good friend. I want to protect you. Right now there could be a lot of trouble coming down — for all of them. It was all right for Kirk, the man had resilience; he was like a rubber ball. When he was knocked down, he always seemed to come back up with just as much strength as before. But for Janos, who felt as if he were a man out on a very long, shaky, and dangerous limb, it wasn’t all right.

Ten miles north of Charlottesville, he pulled off at a Mobil station, where from a pay phone near the men’s room, he telephoned a number McGarvey had given him. It was answered on the second ring by a gruff male voice. “Yeah?”

Janos could hear a lot of talking and laughter in the background. It sounded like a bar.

“Is Mack Kirtland there?” he asked.

“Who’s calling?” the man demanded.

“His mother,” Janos snapped. The man laughed. Janos glanced out at his car. The attendant was washing the windows.

“Hello, mother,” McGarvey came on the line.

“Three jackets. Nothing in any of them. Someone was there first.”

“Easy now,” McGarvey said soothingly. “You’re calling from a secure phone?”

“Absolutely, Kirk. I swear it.” Trucks were rumbling by on the highway.

“Tell me what happened, then, Janos. Everything.”

Janos told him everything he had found and exactly how he had gone about it. He also share his speculation that the files could have been cleaned out at any time after the date in June 1964, and before the archives had been moved down to McGillis.

“But I’m mad, Kirk, that you didn’t give me a better warning.”

“Nothing has happened yet, Janos,” McGarvey said. “But if it’s any consolation, I had no idea someone would have wiped out his files. There wasn’t a thing?”

“Nothing, Kirk. Now what happens?”

The line was silent for a second or so. When McGarvey came back his voice sounded strange. “Go home, Janos. Just go home, now, and forget about it.”

“What’s going on?”

McGarvey hung up.

A dark blue Mercedes had come into the gas station, and two men got out as Janos hung up the telephone. He stood by the telephone for a moment or two as one of them came across from the island.

“Through with the telephone, sir?” the man said.

Janos looked at him. He was short, thin beneath a well-tailored blue pinstriped suit. But there was something about his eyes, something dark and cruel, something Janos had seen before.

The man suddenly had a large handgun in his right hand. It was an automatic, but it was silenced. In a fleeting. instant before he was shot and killed, Janos realized that he not only recognized the gun, he understood exactly what was happening. He never heard the shots that killed him.

13

Until this day McGarvey had had a fairly clear sense of his own past and at least some idea what possibilities the future might hold. He was not proud of his past, nor did he hold much real hope for the future. But they were his, nonetheless. He’d always thought, for instance, that despite his previous bad luck with women he would eventually settle down with a good one. He could see himself at a ripe old age, finally understood. Now he wasn’t so sure.

Up to this point he had not really committed himself to Trotter and Day. Oh, he’d gone through the motions all right. He had left Switzerland, hadn’t he? No matter. The end there had been inevitable. And once back he had gone to see Yarnell’s ex-wife, though how much of that had been out of idle curiosity and not his duty was a moot point. And he had come here to Washington to take a run past Yarnell and a brief look see down Basulto’s track. He wanted to do his preliminary sums before he got himself totally committed. A lot of what they had told him in the mountain safe house an age ago didn’t seem to make sense; the twos and fours were coming out nines and thirteens. “After the Bay of Pigs business, Yarnell was assigned to the embassy in Moscow,” was how Trotter had begun to build his case. After that he became assistant DDO, then a U.S. senator, and now he was one of the most influential men in Washington. This morning McGarvey had driven over to Yarnell’s house, where he waited around the corner up on Wisconsin Avenue out of sight of the attic windows, and at ten when Yarnell had emerged, he had followed him over to an office building on 16th, a couple of blocks from the Sheraton-Carlton. The entire day had been a waste. Yarnell had not moved. Once in the first hour, twice in the second, and six times every hour after that, McGarvey had said the hell with it and had started away. Each time something drew him back. Like iron filings to a magnet, or more like a hungry bear to a cache of tender meat, McGarvey returned. At four Yarnell went on the move, and by 4:20 McGarvey had gotten his reward.

He telephoned from a booth in the International Visitors Information Center across the street from Lafayette Park and within sight of the White House entrance. “I need to talk to Trotter,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but that’s not possible,” the same voice from before replied calmly. “If you would give me your message …”

“Listen, you sonofabitch, I want Trotter. I’ll call again in five minutes. He’d better be there or I’ll run down to the Washington Post and tell them everything. Loudly.”

McGarvey hung up and went outside where he lit a cigarette, then crossed the street into the park. From where he strolled he could see through the Pennsylvania Avenue fence to the north portico of the White House where Yarnell’s car was parked. He’d shown the guards a pass, McGarvey had seen that. And he’d been met at the door. The man was there as a friend of the president’s.

Someone in uniform came out of the White House, got behind the wheel, and drove off with Yarnell’s car. McGarvey watched until the car disappeared around the back. He threw his cigarette down, turned and went back across the park, crossed the street, and entered the Visitors Center. The five minutes were up. He dialed the number.

Trotter answered it on the first ring. “Yes.”

“It’s me.”

“Where are you?” Trotter demanded. He sounded all out of breath.

“Across the street from the White House.”

“What the hell are you doing there? You must leave immediately. But not back to your hotel. Check into another one and then call me here.”

“Wait a minute,” McGarvey snapped. A clerk was looking at him. He smiled, then turned away and lowered his voice. “Yarnell just drove up. He’s in the bloody White House right this moment. But he didn’t come alone. He’s with a young, good looking woman. I saw her coming from his house yesterday.”

“Probably his daughter. But don’t worry about her. You must get away from there now, Kirk. It’s very important.”

McGarvey realized the urgency in Trotter’s voice. “What’s happened, John?”

“Everything has changed. We’re going to have to meet with Leonard. Now. Tonight.”

“What’s happened?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I just don’t know any longer, Kirk, in this you must believe me. I am holding nothing back. Nothing. But it’s … simply too coincidental. Everything is. Believe me, you must get out of there, we’ll talk tonight.”

“Don’t hang up on me, goddamnit. I want to know.”

The line was quiet. McGarvey tried to hear any stray noises from the other end, anything that might give him a clue where the number was located. But there was nothing.

“This may be simply a coincidence, Kirk. Believe me, I hope it is. I just received word that an agency officer was killed somewhere in Virginia. At some gas station along the highway.”

McGarvey was cold. He looked toward the window that overlooked the park. He was just able to see a portion of busy Pennsylvania Avenue and the edge of the gate house past which Yarnell had driven. “Anyone we know, John?” he asked softly. “Anyone I would know?”

“You knew him from the old days …” Trotter started, but then he stopped. “Kirk? Christ. It was Janos. Janos Plónski. Was he doing something for you? Did you make contact with him?”

“How did it happen?” McGarvey asked, his voice choked. It wasn’t possible. It had happened far too fast. He had the terrible urge to throw down the telephone, race across to the White House and put a bullet in Yarnell’s brain. No mercy. No more questions. How in God’s name was he going to face Pat and the children? He should have provided Janos with a backup. It was the least he could have done for an old friend. But then he hadn’t believed any of this nonsense until now; he hadn’t believed Basulto, he hadn’t believed Day or even Trotter. None of it.

“He was calling on the telephone and they shot him. No one saw it, no one saw a thing, Kirk. His prints were lifted off the phone. An attendant found his body in the men’s room. I repeat, Kirk, was he doing something for you?”

“He was working for me. Yes,” McGarvey said. “He was looking down Basulto’s track. The records must have been flagged or something. Maybe they followed him down, I don’t know. But I’ll call you within the next two hours. Set up a meeting with Day, I need some answers.”

“You had no authorization to approach anyone at the Company, Kirk. Why the hell did you do it …?”

McGarvey hung up and left. A lot of people had been trusting him lately, and it was getting to be dangerous.

14

McGarvey took his time driving out of the city. Cherry blossoms seemed to have appeared overnight; they were everywhere, along with the blossoming tourist traffic. Washington had become somehow garish since he had last been here. Or had he gotten used to a different standard? There seemed to be more people in smaller spaces and more buildings rising vertically in dozens of contrasting and certainly not complimentary architectural styles. He had crossed the district. line into Maryland on Rhode Island Avenue and then headed up through Riverdale toward the University of Maryland’s College Park. In distance it wasn’t very far. But in style it was forever.

“We’ll meet at Leonard Day’s house on Lake Artemesia. It’s near College Park. Do you know it?” Trotter had said excitedly on the telephone. “Seven o’clock. But for heaven’s sake, make sure you’re not followed.”

“Anything further about Janos?”

“Leonard is upset. And I can’t say as I blame him, Kirk. You may have jeopardized this entire project. Or, at least you could have.”

“What?”

“It may not have had a thing to do with … you after all,” Trotter said softly. “A Polish activist group has been operating here in the area for the past few months. We’ve been watching them. Apparently they think they’d like to settle some old scores, though they’d all have to be in their fifties or sixties in order to have any memories at all. It’s possible they may have killed him.”

“I don’t understand, John.”

“It was his mother. I don’t know if you knew it. She was an activist during the war and then afterward in England.”

“It’s been years.”

“What can I say? There are fanatics out there. You wouldn’t believe …”

“There certainly are,” McGarvey said, letting out his breath.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” McGarvey said tiredly. He was looking out the window of his hotel at Yarnell’s office building. He had checked in to a hotel this close to it as a joke. It was beginning to pale now for him. “I’ll be there at seven sharp. And, John …?”

“Yes?” Trotter replied hesitantly.

“My ass is now on the line for sure. I’ll be wanting some answers.”

“Remember who hired whom, Kirk.”

“I think you’re running scared, John. You and Day. I think you need me now more than ever before. Janos was killed because of this. Don’t kid yourself into believing otherwise. And you know what I think?”

“What?”

“There’s more going on here than even you or Day can guess. I won’t be followed, just make damned sure you aren’t.”

The sun was low over the rolling green hills of the university and reflected as a blood red ball in the waters of the tiny lake around which were a few lovely English- and Colonial-style homes that were not quite large enough to be considered mansions but were certainly much too large to belong simply to the upper-middle class. Two men in an aluminum fishing boat were in the middle of the lake just across from the stone entrance to Day’s property. In the distance McGarvey could make out the high roof, dormers, and chimneys above the darkening line of trees. The house disappeared into the woods as he drove up, then suddenly appeared across a broad lawn so well tended it looked as if it were a giant putting green on a championship golf course. It made McGarvey think about croquet in Kansas as a child.

McGarvey parked behind two other cars near a side entrance under a broad overhang. By the time he had shut off the ignition, got out, and mounted the two stairs, Trotter had already come to the door. He was still in a business suit, but his tie was loose and his collar undone. He looked frazzled.

“Were you followed, Kirk?” he asked, stepping aside.

“If I was it’s certainly too late now, don’t you think?” McGarvey said, brushing past him. He was beginning to feel mean again. He was lashing out because of Janos and because of his own mistakes.

“Christ,” Trotter swore, hanging by the door a second longer; then he closed it and motioned McGarvey through the mudroom, down a broad corridor, and across the front hall into a huge study with floor-to-ceiling bookcases around which an oak ladder ran on a track. Dominating the far wall was a huge cherrywood desk, to the left of which was a teak buffet and to the right of which was a grouping of mahogany-and-leather furniture. The combination of woods and styles was worse than downtown Washington.

“Leonard will be with us in just a moment,” Trotter said. “Care for a drink?”

“Bourbon,” McGarvey said, crossing the room. “Who else is here?”

Trotter was pouring drinks at the buffet. “What?”

“There was a second car out there. Besides yours.”

“I didn’t notice.”

McGarvey went to the tall windows. He pulled back the drapes and looked outside. From here he could see the front driveway and the road down to the lake. He knew that Trotter was watching him; he could feel the man’s eyes on his back. Who spies on the spy? the old adage went. It was odd though, being here like this; even odder that he hadn’t had as great a reaction to Janos’s murder as he thought he should have.

“Did you really go see him last night?” Trotter asked. “Here’s your drink.”

“Do you suppose Yarnell had him killed?” McGarvey asked, remaining at the window. It was pretty here.

“If he was looking down Basulto’s track, it’s a possibility.”

“That would mean he has people within the Company. At least in records. But the timing would have been tight. It bothers me.”

“You could have been followed, you know.”

“I don’t think so, John,” McGarvey said. He heard a door slam somewhere in the house, and then he heard a car starting.

“Come away from that window.”

McGarvey didn’t move. “Yarnell is at the White House. He has a pass. They even parked his car for him.”

“He’s a powerful man.”

The blue Chevrolet sedan — one of the two cars parked at the side of the house — came around from the back and headed quickly down the long road to the lake. It had flashed by, but not so quickly that McGarvey hadn’t gotten a good look at the man behind the wheel. He watched the car disappear into the trees as the road dipped into a valley and curved left.

“What is so fascinating out there?” Trotter complained.

McGarvey let the drapes fall back into place, then turned and accepted the drink from Trotter. They sat down in leather chairs across a massive mahogany coffee table from each other. Trotter had lost some weight even since Lausanne. His nose seemed more prominent, hawkish. His complexion seemed pale. It was obvious he was under a great strain.

“You owe us an explanation, you know,” Trotter said, breaking the uneasy silence between them.

“And you owe me the truth, John. At least that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

McGarvey looked at the door. It opened a moment later and Leonard Day appeared, out of breath, but fresh looking in a sport coat, open-collared shirt, and tan slacks that just touched his boating shoes. He looked as if he had just stepped off the set of a commercial for after-shave.

“Kirk’s just arrived,” Trotter said unnecessarily.

“Yes, I can see that. And I think we have a lot to get straightened out between us,” Day said, fairly bounding across the room to the buffet. He poured himself a drink. “Anyone for bumps?”

“I’m sorry that Lawrence couldn’t stay,” McGarvey said softly.

“Lawrence?” Day piped without turning around.

“Danielle. I just saw him leaving. Anything to do with our little plot?”

“Whatever gave you such an idea?” Day asked, turning at last. “We’re old friends. He came for a visit.”

Day’s voice had changed. The difference was subtle, but it was there. He was disturbed. “You have some explaining to do, mister. You are in town barely a day and the killing begins. A little extreme I’d say.”

“Do you think I killed him?”

“Heavens no!” Trotter blurted.

“It isn’t a coincidence, despite what John has to say about it.” Day came across the room and flopped down on the edge of the couch. His movements were studied, McGarvey thought.

“Yarnell was at the White House this afternoon,” Trotter volunteered.

“The president is having an impromptu meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Powers will be there, I suspect. I’m not surprised our little spy wrangled an invitation as well, the bastard!”

“He’s not working alone,” McGarvey said. He thought he was at a sideshow here.

“Of course not. He has his control officer. Baranov, perhaps. Who knows? They’re like a cancer. Cut them out, ruthlessly. It’s the only answer.”

“I meant here in the States. Most likely in the Company. Maybe in the bureau. Maybe even in Justice.”

At this last suggestion, Day flinched, but he didn’t move from his perch on the arm of the couch, nor did his outward manner or expression change. But the barb had hit home; McGarvey could see it in the way Day held himself.

“Because of this Polish DP who ran the agency’s archives?”

“The Polish activists didn’t kill him.”

“Oh?” Day said, his right eyebrow rising. “I see. Who did then, Yarnell himself?”

“I think there is a lot here you haven’t told me. I’m out in the cold.” McGarvey decided in midstride that he did not like nor trust Day. The man wanted to be president. It was written all over him. Next there’d be Secret Service bodyguards crawling all over the place. He expected Day to put out his hand at any moment for him to shake.

“I think you’re forgetting your place, Mr. McGarvey.”

“This isn’t helping anything,” Trotter tried to interject.

“We found you rotting away in some Swiss bookstore. Remember? We should have left you there.”

“Yes, you should have. But now that I’m here, how about cutting the bullshit and telling me what’s really going on.”

“We’re not getting anywhere this way, Kirk,” Trotter said a little more forcefully. “Please. This is counterproductive.”

McGarvey’s eyes had not left Day’s. “Just what is it you want from me, Mr. Day?”

Day slowly stood. He looked across at McGarvey for a long time, then he threw back his drink. Not a sideshow, McGarvey thought, more like a bloody circus or a B movie.

“You are an assassin, Mr. McGarvey. We have hired you to assassinate Darby Yarnell.”

McGarvey grinned and sat back with his drink. He hadn’t thought Day would actually commit himself like that. “You don’t want an investigation, then?”

Trotter jumped up too. “Good God, what are you trying to imply, Kirk? What do you take us for?”

“You’ve already asked that question once, John. But Mr. Day hasn’t answered mine.”

Day stared through hooded eyes. He must have to jog at least five miles a day to look so fit at his age. Probably around the lake every morning before a breakfast of whole-wheat toast, guava juice, and wheat germ on everything.

“Yes, an investigation, but not at the expense of innocent people.” Day could have been lecturing. “It is the innocent who must be protected. That’s why we are in business. Too often the little man gets in the way and instead of our kind making the proper considerations, he gets steamrollered.”

From his chair Trotter voiced his agreement. “Poor Janos Plónski, case in point.”

“Then you are convinced he is guilty. No trial. The man is a spy. I’m simply to walk up to him some dark evening and put a bullet into his brain. That it?”

“Don’t be tiresome, McGarvey. I don’t care about the details. It must be done. He’s murdered one of your own, by your own account. What more do you want?”

“The truth.”

“What do you mean by that?” Day asked indignantly. He played the role well. “Exactly.”

“Who else is Yarnell working with, besides the Russians? You?”

A dangerous silence came over the study. Even Trotter was moved to keep his peace, apparently because of the monstrousness of the question. Chile had taught McGarvey a painful lesson: Nothing is ever the way it seems, especially not in this business. Connections within connections, plots within plots, there never were any simple or rational answers. Janos’s world as a field man had been relatively simple by comparison. Kill or be killed. The real perfidy was at the upper echelons of the business. That treachery had gotten Janos killed in the end; McGarvey’s sloppiness after five years of inactivity was a contributing factor. Knowing this didn’t make him feel particularly secure.

“Perhaps you don’t fully appreciate the measure of Darby Yarnell,” Day said at last. He was wounded. He was letting them all know now that he was too big a man to let such a snipe stop him cold, but that he was sensitive enough to be hurt. He went back to the buffet, where he poured himself a second drink. “Besides friends,” he said over his shoulder, “he has quite an extensive organization of his own.”

“His firm?”

“More than that. You’ve seen his house; it’s Fortress Yarnell. He has similar bastions elsewhere: Paris, Monaco, Austria, I’m told, though I don’t actually know for a fact about that last. He has cooks and house staff at each place, of course. He has his drivers, his bodyguards. He has his secretaries, even a Learjet for God’s sake, complete with a full-time crew, though I’m told he’s a pretty fair pilot in his own right.”

“An accomplished man.”

Day turned back, his right eyebrow arching. “Indeed.” He came back with his drink. “He does have his friends, as you say, within the bureau, certainly within the Company, Powers included, and no doubt he has his crowd even within my bailiwick. Unwitting helpers, I’d say. Pass the innocent bit of information back and forth. Good heavens, the man is a friend of the president himself. Doesn’t make him an accomplice, now does it?”

Day looked to Trotter for confirmation. “Of course not.”

“Enough friends for him to know by now that I am here?” McGarvey asked softly. “Why I am here?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Day replied. “If it wasn’t the Polacks who did in your friend, and it was Darby Yarnell’s gang, the implications are somewhat sticky.”

“If Darby Yarnell were to meet with an accident, what would become of his organization?” McGarvey said, trying a new tack.

“I don’t catch your drift,” Day said. His expressions were sophomoric.

“Pearson and Darien, his partners in the firm. Mightn’t they take over the spy business if their boss departs?”

Day turned again to Trotter. “That’s your turf, John. Anything on them?”

“They’re clean as far as we can tell.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd,” McGarvey said.

Trotter shrugged. “If he has help, they’ll dry up once he’s gone.”

“All on the say-so of a Cuban drug dealer,” McGarvey said, half to himself. “That’s what I meant, you know.”

Day wanted to pace. A muscle twitched beneath his left eye. “We’ve gone over all of that. Don’t be tedious.”

“I haven’t begun to get tedious, believe me. We have a long ways to go.”

“What exactly is it you want?” Day snapped irritably.

“Your signatures on a piece of paper.”

Day laughed out loud. Trotter reared back until he, too, realized it had only been a joke. He didn’t seem amused by it.

“Access to bureau and Justice files,” McGarvey said. “For a start.”

“Only on matters pertaining to this business,” Day said. He glanced at Trotter. “John?” Trotter nodded.

“Now that I no longer have Janos Plónski, I’ll need someone with the Company. Lawrence Danielle, for instance.”

Day laughed again. “I’ll work on it.”

“I don’t want a direct link with him; in fact, it would be better if I dealt exclusively through you.”

“Whatever.” Day shrugged.

“What was he doing here today?”

“I’ve already told you—”

“The truth this time.”

A strand of hair had boyishly fallen down on Day’s forehead. He brushed it aside. “If I were to promise you that Lawrence’s visit here had absolutely nothing to do with why you are here, would that be enough?”

McGarvey was thinking ahead. He nodded and then sat forward. “If at some later date I discover you have lied to me on this point, Mr. Day, held back on me, thus making my position over the coming days more dangerous or difficult, you’ll regret it.”

“I don’t take kindly to threats,” Day said evenly.

“Not a threat. I am merely telling you that if I find I’ve been lied to, all bets are off. I’ll go to the Post as well as the New York Times with the entire story. Names, dates, and exactly what I was hired to do.”

Trotter started to protest, but Day held him off with a gesture. “Fair enough. What else?”

“I’ll need a safe house somewhere in the city. Close to Yarnell without being obvious.”

“I can arrange that,” Trotter volunteered.

“I’ll need four or five of your top legmen assigned to me, John. Someone who knows electronics and will bring along the entire kit. Computers. Cameras. Second-story people. No one squeamish.”

“What are you planning?” Day demanded.

“Getting away with my own skin intact.”

“They cannot be involved in the … actual operation,” Trotter said. “Even so it will be difficult breaking them loose from the bureau. Questions will be asked.”

“Have you someone in mind?”

Trotter nodded.

“They’ll have to be told the truth. All of it. And they’ll be working directly for me. No middleman, not even yourself. If I find monitoring devices or tapes or any kind of bugs of our surveillance, the deal is off.”

“When would you need them?” Trotter asked.

“Immediately.”

Again Trotter looked to Day, who nodded his sage approval. “All right, Kirk, we’ll do as you say.”

Day leaned forward. “Now, we would like something from you in return. Only fair, wouldn’t you say?”

McGarvey inclined his head. Trotter had come a long way down since they’d last known and worked with each other, he thought. Now he took orders not only from the director of the bureau, but apparently he took orders from a tinhorn bureaucrat as well.

“I would like you to check in with us through the telephone number John provided you. Every six hours, I think.”

McGarvey had to smile. Day was a wheeler-dealer. “Forty-eight.”

“Twelve,” Day said.

“Thirty-six.”

“Eighteen.”

“That’s reasonable, Kirk,” Trotter interjected. He was worried.

“Twenty-four,” McGarvey said. He got to his feet. “With a twenty-four hour fallback.”

“Fallback? What’s this? I’m not familiar with the term.”

“I’ll check in every twenty-four hours unless I’m tied up, in which case I don’t want you doing a thing — nothing — for another twenty-four hours.”

Day laughed. “You got your forty-eight hours in any event. Agreed.”

Yes he had, McGarvey thought. But he wondered if in the end it would be enough for him, or for anyone else for that matter.

Donald Suthland Powers’s Cadillac limousine was passed immediately through the east gate of the White House grounds, where it was met by a uniformed guard. Only a handful of men within the government had instant access, day or night, to the president; among them was the DCI. It was a privilege Powers had never abused.

Powers felt no sense of victory knowing he had predicted this day nearly six months ago. He had been watching the happenings to the south, had personally studied the KH-10 satellite photos, and had felt a mounting sense of frustation and finally fear with what he understood was probably happening at half a dozen places along our southern border.

The Mexican ambassador had been making his president’s warning clear over the past months, not only here in Washington but through their delegation to the United Nations. A new relationship had to be negotiated between the United States and Mexico. Now. Falling oil prices, unjust drug accusations against Mexican government officials, immigration disputes, another Mexico City earthquake, and a failing economy were contributing to a general malaise among his people. Hunger had finally become a major political issue; with it, socialism of the Soviet Russian variety was rearing its ugly head.

For the first time in a very long time, Powers was frightened; not merely concerned, but deeply and utterly convinced that unless something was done — immediately and decisively — a shooting war was about to begin.

He took the stairs up to the office in the West Wing. The president was meeting with some members of the Senate and a few other people in his study down the hall. He promised to return in five minutes.

Powers opened his briefcase and began spreading computer-enhanced satellite photographs on the desk. The president came in. He was alone, though Powers caught a glimpse of his press secretary outside.

“What’s got you so het up, Donald?” the president said, his voice betraying a deep weariness.

“These, Mr. President. Something has to be done.”

The president looked at Powers, then bent over the photos laid out on his desk. He studied them, one at a time, for a long time before he finally straightened up. He leaned back, his hands at the small of his back.

“Well, are you going to tell me what I’m looking at, or am I going to have to guess.”

“Those are photographs of six regions of Mexico, some of them within twenty-five miles of our border …”

“Yes?”

“I think the Mexican government, with the help of the Soviet Union, is constructing bases for the launching of nuclear missiles.”

“Christ,” the president swore. “Oh Christ.”