Without Honor

15

For forty-eight hours, while Trotter assembled the team and found a suitable safe house, McGarvey would have languished at the Sheraton-Carlton within sight of the White House and Yarnell’s office building but for a single occupation. Before their meeting had broken up he had requested from Day excerpts from the staff directories for each of the years Yarnell had been active in the Company. It was a tall order, but one with which Day nevertheless said he would be happy to comply, and did within the first eighteen hours, having the bundle delivered to the hotel by courier.

As he waited for the assembly of his army and a fortress from which he would wage his battle, McGarvey began the first steps of his oblique look down Yarnell’s path.

As he explained much later to a mystified Trotter, it wasn’t as if he were having doubts about Yarnell. On the contrary, by then he was fairly well convinced the man was a spy … or had at least been a spy. But he wanted two things: the first was proof that Yarnell had spied; and the second was the name or names of his contacts here in Washington — his non-Russian contacts, that is.

Also, during these hours when McGarvey did not leave his room, he let a certain amount of guilt wash over him. First about Janos’s death; next about his daughter and ex-wife, who were within a stone’s throw of him; and finally about Marta, whom he missed. Twice he had picked up his telephone and nearly called her in Lausanne. Each time, however, he thought better of it and hung up before he had finished dialing.

He watched television sporadically, especially the news broadcasts and news-magazine shows. In his Swiss life he had kept himself relatively isolated from world events. The country was geared to this state of isolation; in Switzerland if you didn’t want to hear what the superpowers were up to, you merely ignored Swiss Television One and any foreign newspaper. You weren’t considered odd, at least no odder than the average Swiss, for whom neutrality was not only a badge of long-standing honor but one of smug indifference to the other four billion inhabitants of the planet. (The only oddity in Switzerland was the man who didn’t read the financial section!) The isolation had spawned in him a hunger for hard news of the American television variety, even if the networks’ editorial positions were blatantly espoused. U.S. — Mexican relations were troubled again. Coincidence, he wondered as he watched the news, or was this part of some larger picture that somehow included Yarnell, the man’s ex-wife, and Baranov, the Russian everyone seemed so respectful of?

By then, however, he had developed what he called his “short list of rogue’s rogues” and Trotter had telephoned with the setup. Finally it was time for his duty call.

The address was in Chevy Chase, on a curving street that just looked over the south side of the country club. Half dozen white pillars fronted the big Colonial house that sat well back on half an acre of manicured lawn. A powder blue Mercedes 450SL convertible was parked in the driveway, and McGarvey nearly drove past, his courage flagging at the last moment. Kathleen had always wanted just this sort of house. A proper place to raise a daughter, she said. She’d be a member of the country club, which probably was where she’d met her attorney friend; there’d be bridge, debutante balls, and the dozen or so black-tie parties each year. She’d gotten a healthy part of the ranch money, but even that probably wouldn’t have been enough to support this life-style. But then she’d always been an opportunist. It was one of the reasons they’d married — he was an up-and-comer. And of course in the end they had divorced over it when he turned out to be not so much of an up-and-comer after all. He parked behind the Mercedes and got out of his rental car, hesitating only a moment before he went up the walk and rang the bell. A basket of spring flowers hung at eye level. He reached out to pick one when he heard footsteps and withdrew his hand. The door swung inward.

She was standing there — suddenly, it seemed — with one hand on the edge of the door, the other up as if in greeting. It struck McGarvey that she had not aged; in fact, if anything she had somehow learned the secret of eternal youth and become younger. She was dressed in a silk lounging suit, high heels on her feet, her hair done up, wearing only the slightest bit of makeup and a thin gold chain around her long, slender neck. She smelled of lilac; clean and fresh and new. He hadn’t remembered that her eyes were so green.

“Hello, Kathleen,” he said, finally finding his voice.

“You should have called,” she replied, her voice smoother than he remembered, well modulated, cultured. She’d definitely changed over the past five or six years. For the better.

“I’m sorry. I can come back. I was nearby …”

“You never were much on timing,” she said wryly. She looked beyond him to his car. “You’d better come in, then.”

“I can only stay for a minute,” he said, stepping past her into a large hall.

“Yes. I was just leaving. If you’d come five minutes later you would have missed me.”

She led the way into a large living room, extremely well furnished with Queen Anne furniture. A harpsichord, its sound-box lid propped open, its finish an antique lacquer, dominated one end of the room. A large oil painting of Kathleen and Elizabeth hung over a natural-stone fireplace. McGarvey walked over to it.

“Elizabeth is away at school. I’d rather you not bother her there.”

McGarvey couldn’t tear his eyes away from the portrait. His daughter was a beautiful young woman; not the little girl in braces he had left, but a young woman with straight, fine features, long lovely hair, and graceful limbs. How much like her mother had she become? The spitting image, he hoped. Yet couldn’t he see a spark of rebellion in his daughter’s eyes?

“She is a lot like you, Kirk,” Kathleen said. “I suppose I should be grateful. She’ll probably grow up to do great things. They absolutely adore her at school. And Phillip thinks the world of her. But she is tiresome at times.”

McGarvey turned. Kathleen hadn’t changed after all. “She is beautiful. Like you.”

The compliment was her due. She barely acknowledged it. “When did you return from Switzerland?”

“A few days ago.”

“Business?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. I also wanted to see you.”

“If it’s about Phillip’s letter, the alimony …” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

She was actually embarrassed by her own crude comment. “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be that, would it. But you are back in the States for good?”

“I don’t know, Kathleen. I doubt it.”

“Then what?” she asked softly. He’d known her for a couple of years before they were married, and they were married for twelve years; they’d been separated now half that long. Yet he was conscious that this was probably the very first time he had ever seen her for what she really was; merely a woman, like others, trying to find her way. He could see her now not blinded by love, nor confused by hatred. And in a small measure he felt sorry for her loneliness — though he also felt a great deal of pride that this self-sufficient, classy, and certainly tough woman had once been his to love, had once been in love with him. He could see her now through more objective eyes, however. He saw that she had indeed aged, but that the process had not been unkind to her. She’d matured, advanced along with the times; she was a modern woman in makeup, dress, life-style, and certainly in attitudes. There was no lagging for her. He saw also that she was frightened of him. Frightened that he would somehow disrupt her carefully constructed life. But perhaps also frightened that she was still vulnerable to him.

For the very first time he felt no need or desire to find out.

“I never knew what to say to you,” he said. “Is Elizabeth the same? Does she hate me?”

She softened. “I haven’t taught her that, Kirk. I promise you. She doesn’t hate you.”

He wondered why he had come here. He looked back up at the portrait over the fireplace.

“I wanted to make sure,” he said. He turned back.

“We were on a different plane, Kirk. We still are, for that matter. Nothing has changed … or if it has, it’s changed for the worse.” Her eyes glistened. “The odd part is that I never stopped loving you, Kirk. It’s just that I can’t live with you.”

She took out a handkerchief and daubed her eyes with it. She came across the room and took his arm. Her touch shocked him with its sudden tenderness. Together they looked up at the painting of their child. Theirs. The artist had only rendered what they had created with their love, with their bodies. At this moment looking at their creation, they were both proud. They could feel their pride in each other. It was something at least.

“Phillip is a good man, Kirk,” she said. “Elizabeth has a lot of respect for him.”

Of all the statements she had made that one hurt the most. “Will you marry him?”

“It’s possible. He hasn’t asked yet.” She looked into his eyes. “I plan to say yes when he does. Happiness is out there for some of us, you know.”

“He writes a nasty letter.”

She laughed. “You didn’t take it that seriously, I hope. Good Lord, Kirk, you haven’t changed that much have you? Even I might get to like you if you had, you know.”

They no longer knew each other. Maybe they never had, he thought.

He drove away wondering again why he had come out to see her. Elizabeth was away at school. He knew that, yet he had come out anyway. It was a beautiful spring day, quite different from a lot of the days he had had in Lausanne. He’d never really given Marta a chance. Another of his mistakes. She had put up with a lot of his uncertainties, which had caused him to do a lot of lashing out. At first it had been duty, she tried to tell him. “I swear it was only duty at first. Not later. I love you, Kirk.” She had pleaded with him. “I have loved you for a long time. Didn’t you know that, too?” They used to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to each other:

The Boynton Tower apartments on the corner of R and 31st streets in Georgetown, overlooked Dumbarton Oaks Park to the north and Yarnell’s fortress to the south across 32nd Street in its own little mews. McGarvey adjusted the the focus on his powerful binoculars, and the roof and top two floors of the house came into sharp focus. The attic window was dark, though as he watched a man in short sleeves, his tie loose, appeared momentarily and then disappeared. He looked bored to McGarvey. Bored but professional and very dangerous. He had seen the type before.

“Do you know him?” Trotter asked, standing at his elbow.

McGarvey looked up from the binoculars. Trotter was worn out, though here he was in his element. It was like the old days.

“No. Do you?” McGarvey asked.

“There’s another up there, too. Shorter. Black, I think. Maybe a Mexican. God only knows. We’ll run photos on them both.”

McGarvey nodded. “In two hours? By yourself?” Trotter had held the others back for just a moment or so. He wanted to get a few things straight with McGarvey first.

“They’re watching, all right. But I don’t think they’re expecting anyone, Kirk. They’re sloppy. Our advantage.”

Trotter had found them a top-floor apartment in the eight-story building; it was just tall enough for them to have a clear line of sight to Yarnell’s house and Wisconsin Avenue beyond, yet it wasn’t so far away that they couldn’t make out a reasonable amount of detail with optics. The only disadvantage was that they had no clear view of the garage behind the house where the cars were kept. The first they would know that Yarnell or anyone else was on the move would be when a car came around the corner of the house and emerged from the gate directly onto Scott Place and then 32nd Street. But by then the angle would be all wrong for them to see inside the car. Yarnell could come and go as he pleased unless they permanently stationed a man down on the street, which at best was dangerous, no matter how lax Yarnell’s people seemed to be. But if anyone showed up they would know it. And they had a clear view into at least six rooms of the house.

“We couldn’t get much closer, in all good conscience, Kirk,” Trotter explained. “I don’t want his people picking us out. He’d go to ground immediately.”

McGarvey straightened up and lit a cigarette. From here they would begin their surveillance of Yarnell. For better or worse, whether the man picked them out of the crowd or not (and McGarvey suspected he would), he wanted to see what Yarnell was up to, what his routine was. He wanted a measure of the man’s daily habits; his comings and goings; the time the electric meter reader came by; the time the postman delivered the mail; the grocery runs, the emergencies, if any. McGarvey wanted it all. Once a base had been built, then they would find the weak link in the man’s armor.

“Have you got good people for me, John? Anyone I know? Experts?”

Trotter had to smile. “You know two of them from Lausanne. They’re professionals, believe me. They’ll do the job for you.”

McGarvey glanced again out the window toward Yarnell’s fortress. Yes, he thought, there was a job to be done here. But that was only a part of it. He himself had watched Yarnell while poor Janos was being shot to death at some service station beside the highway, his body stuffed unceremoniously in a men’s room. Yarnell had his army. But was he the king … or was he merely a general?

The apartment was large and well furnished. It contained two bedrooms, an efficiency kitchen, two bathrooms, and a long living room — dining room combination in which the surveillance equipment had been set up.

“They’ll be back within the hour,” Trotter said. “I sent them away for the afternoon. I wanted to have a little chat with you before they got started. Ground rules.”

McGarvey didn’t feel like showing his old friend much mercy. “You want me to kill Yarnell for you, but you don’t want your crew to know about it.”

Trotter’s jaw tightened. “We’ve gone a long way for you, Kirk. We’ve bent over backward to accommodate your needs. Don’t push us too far.”

“Then I’ll quit and return to Switzerland.”

This time Trotter did not react the way he had before. This time McGarvey had Janos’s murder on his conscience. It was a psychological weapon Trotter was going to be using regularly from now on. McGarvey could see the entire plan, and it saddened him in a way. Nothing had changed, it seemed, in the five years he’d been out of the fold. There was no honor here, as someone at the Farm had once told him about the spy business. “We’re dealing in what is fundamentally one of the most dishonest occupations in the world; that of inducing perfectly ordinary people to betray their country, to go back on their principles and ideals. Don’t expect any honorable men in the profession,” he’d been told. “And don’t expect to keep your honor intact for very long, not if you want to be very good at your job.” But then, assassins were not to be treated with honor in any event; respect, of course, but not honor.

“Build the case for them, Kirk. Tell them all the little bits you want — of course, they already understand that a surveillance operation on our Mr. Yarnell has been ordered. Tell them, if you’d like, how you were recruited, or why, and that you’ve been brought in as an outsider to prove Yarnell’s guilt. But leave out the part about the prosecution, will you? It’s all we’re asking. Not much.”

“If I don’t?”

“They will be withdrawn.”

“By then it would be too late. If they know what might happen and it actually does, they will come forward during the investigation that will follow.”

“No they won’t, Kirk.”

Again McGarvey glanced out the window. “I won’t take that risk, John.”

“Under the circumstances I don’t think you have much choice.”

McGarvey turned back. There was an odd light in Trotter’s eyes. “What circumstances?”

Trotter puffed up a little. “We had to have our insurance, too. You must understand that. You would not be welcomed back in Switzerland, that part of your life is over with. There is simply nothing left there for you to go back to. And, from what I understand, Kathleen will probably marry Phillip Brent.”

“What are you getting at?” McGarvey asked softly.

“Do you know this man? Have you heard of him?”

“He wants to sue me for an increase in Kathleen’s alimony. Harassment …” Another chilling thought suddenly struck McGarvey. “Who is he, John? What does he have to do with this?”

“It wasn’t up to me,” Trotter said. “I mean, I knew nothing about it until after the fact.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t catch it. But then you were out of the country so long that the name couldn’t have meant anything to you. And these past couple of days have been hectic at best … confusing.”

McGarvey was having a very bad premonition about this.

“Phillip Brent is one of Darby Yarnell’s closest friends and associates. They do a lot of business together. In fact, Kathleen and Elizabeth have been frequent houseguests—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” McGarvey swore softly. “Down there?” he demanded, pointing toward Yarnell’s fortress.

“There. Yes.”

A wave of anger and disbelief washed over McGarvey. That and fear, not only for what was and had been happening, but fear for what he might do.

“How long has it been going on?” he asked.

Trotter said nothing.

“How long, John?”

“A year. Maybe a little longer.”

“My ex-wife and daughter and Phillip Brent have been pals with Darby Yarnell for more than a year?”

Trotter nodded.

McGarvey could feel his blood pressure rising. The old meanness was coming back. Only this time he felt dangerous. “Not only didn’t you mention this in Lausanne, it was the very reason you came to me in the first place, wasn’t it? Whose idea was it, yours or Leonard Day’s? The joke was on me the whole time, wasn’t it? You must have had quite a few laughs.”

“No one is laughing about this, Kirk. On that you must believe me. Yarnell was and is a very dangerous man—”

“Who is involved with my ex-wife and daughter!”

“He must be eliminated.”

“And I am the only man for the job, is that it? Can’t miss with Kirk. He has a personal stake in this.”

“If you warn her and she suddenly withdraws, Yarnell will become suspicious. It would be extremely dangerous for her, Kirk. Surely you can see that.”

“You don’t involve families, John. Don’t you remember the old score?” McGarvey was sick at heart. He realized now that he knew absolutely nothing about dishonor. He’d never really known about it.

“It’s bigger than families, can’t you understand that?” Trotter’s eyes were wide behind his glasses. He looked like a fanatical revolutionary. “The man is friends with the director of Central Intelligence, for God’s sake. He is on a first-name basis with the president of the United States. Let’s put it in perspective!”

Trotter’s team showed up later in the afternoon, all bright and full of cautious enthusiasm. Among them were Lewis Sheets, the tan mack from Lausanne, and Lorraine Hawkins, the girl with the sommersprossen. Bill Porter, the bureau’s resident electronics expert, and a Mexican second-story man, Emiliano Gonzales, rounded out the little group. McGarvey behaved himself, but he would forever remember having the feeling that they all were playacting and everyone knew it. The deception was part of the new regime. They’d watch Yarnell on his home turf. Meanwhile, the ball of string saved up all these years had to be unwound, and McGarvey thought he knew where the starting bit might be.

16

He watched from the window of the Long Island Airways Piper Navajo as they came up from the southeast, parallel to the beaches of Long Island. It was nearly noon, and after the strain of Washington and the hustle-bustle of LaGuardia Airport, the barrier islands, broad beaches, and tree-studded communities below seemed peaceful, idyllic. Ahead just off Highway 27 lay the airport in East Hampton, the hills and sand dunes flattened at this altitude, the big Atlantic combers breaking all the way from Ireland, tame. Even the vast ocean distances were softened by the haze that obscured the horizon. He’d not been around these parts in years, not since Elizabeth was a little girl. The Hamptons in those days had been Kathleen’s idea of “arrived.” She met a lot of people, made a lot of friends up here. For a time she even attempted to affect a Hampton accent. Their house back in Alexandria in those days was filled with Long Island bric-a-brac, as if they were tourists back from Mexico or Morocco, somewhere where the vendors were as thick as flies and one had to buy souvenirs. But then, he was using his memories as a shield against his bleak thoughts about John Trotter, Oliver Leonard Day, and all that they hadn’t told him — which was a legion.

He’d driven up to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport to pick up his flight to New York, watching behind him for anyone from the bureau’s team on his tail. But he’d come away clean as far as he had been able to determine. Of course, again at LaGuardia he had gone through the switchbacks, the feints, the over-the-shoulder routines, and in the end, climbing aboard the tiny prop-driven executive aircraft out to Long Island, he’d even looked to the observation platform, half expecting someone to be up there even then, watching him, reporting back. By then Trotter would have been able to put two and two together and would have figured out who he was coming to see. But there’d been no one.

The cab, which was an old Chevrolet station wagon, took him to the house, which was located on the beach three-quarters of a mile north of town. The road wound down through dunes and tall grasses that were permanently bent toward the land because of the nearly constant sea wind. They drove past an old storm fence that was half-buried in the sand, a No Soliciting sign knocked down. It hadn’t taken much to find the place from the files Day had sent over. A couple of telephone calls to a folksy local tax assessor and he’d had his directions. The house was a lot larger-than he had expected it would be. Tall dormers, a widow’s walk, weather-beaten shingles, a broad screened porch that looked out to sea, a large stone chimney — which was smoking a little now because it was chilly and old men were almost always cold, especially in the spring — were all punctuated by dark, unblinking windows. On a sand hummock below the front steps a picnic table with one leg broken leaned forlornly into the salt breeze. Big rolls of brownish foam scudded along the beach beneath an overcast sky. Way out to sea a large container ship headed south.

He’d brought a leather shoulder bag packed with a few last-minute things. After the cabbie left, he shouldered the bag, walked up the sand path, mounted the steps, and let himself onto the screened porch. The place smelled musty and dead and very old. He knocked on the door with the heel of his right hand, the entire front wall of the house shivering under the blows. The house would be considered a disgrace in the Hamptons, he mused. Raze the place and don’t look back, Kathleen would have said. But then there never had been too many rich spies and almost never any old rich spies.

The door opened and a very old man with watery, pale green eyes, wispy white hair, and a few days’ growth of white whiskers on his chin stood looking out. He was dressed in a thick wool sweater with the tall collar turned up, steel gray wool slacks, and thick carpet slippers. His skin seemed parchment thin, and his lips, his bony cheeks, and the arches above his eyes were blue-white and veined. His right hand, raised as if in greeting, shook slightly from a palsy.

“Mr. Owens?” McGarvey asked. He didn’t know if he should shout. “Darrel Owens?”

“Who the hell are you?” the old man asked, looking beyond McGarvey down toward the driveway. His voice was soft, precise, and cultured. McGarvey felt just a little like an idiot. He smiled.

“Kirk McGarvey, sir,” He held out his hand.

“Is something funny, for Christ’s sake?” the old man demanded looking McGarvey in the eye.

“No, sir.”

“What do you want?”

“I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“About what?”

According to his jacket Owens had had a reputation for being a tough bastard. McGarvey had little doubt this old man was him. He’d cut his teeth during the Second World War in the OSS, and had been one of the shakers and movers when the agency was established in 1947. His name, along with Donovan’s, Bill Casey’s, and a very few others were a legend. He was seventy.

“Darby Yarnell,” McGarvey said with just a little trepidation. After all, Owens had been Yarnell’s boss for much of the man’s career in the CIA. “Just a few questions. I won’t take up much of your time.”

“You don’t look Russian. And your name does seem to ring a bell in the distance.”

“Russian?” McGarvey asked.

This time Owens chuckled. “We’ve all got our enemies, what? Russians. You’ve heard of them? They’re supposed to be the bad guys.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” McGarvey said, softening his tone even further.

The old man lowered his head and looked up at McGarvey as if through the tops of bifocals. “I’m not senile, you sonofabitch. Old, but I’ve still got most of my marbles. You came to ask about Darby Yarnell. We called him a prick, do you know why?”

McGarvey shook his head, not knowing what to expect.

Owens laughed. “Because he had such a perfect head.”

“I don’t know …”

“You have questions, son? I’ve at least got the time, if not all the answers.” Owens stepped back into the house. He beckoned. “I always figured Yarnell was too big for his britches. What’s the sonofabitch supposed to have done?”

“I don’t know if he’s done anything. But that’s just it.” McGarvey came into the house and closed the door. He dropped his bag in the vestibule and followed the old man back into the hall, which smelled of must and age, of medicine and faintly of backed-up toilets, over all of which was the odor of wood burning in a fireplace. Masculine odors. Together, not so terribly unpleasant.

A very large, very old dog raised its head from where it lay in front of the fireplace and looked up at McGarvey. It wagged just the tip of its tail, yawned deeply, and then laid its head back down. The remnants of lunch — soup, some bread, and a bottle of beer — remained on a broad oak coffee table. Photographs of dozens of foreign places, each with Owens and sometimes others in them, adorned the walls. The room was dimly lit and very warm from the fire. McGarvey suspected that Owens lived alone here.

“You with the Company, then?” the old man asked. “One of the new regime? A Powers man? Hear he’s doing good things. About time, I suspect, what?”

“Ex-Company. I was fired a few years ago.”

Owens stared at him through eyes suddenly shrewd. “Knew I’d remembered the name. You’re the hit man who got canned over the Chile thing. A Carter regime casualty.”

McGarvey nodded.

“Who are you working for now? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for answers.”

“You going to kill him? Is that it? Is this an old vendetta? Are you settling an old score? You’re on intimate terms with the bad guys, then?” McGarvey had the feeling that the old man was enjoying this, even though he was skeptical and mistrustful. It probably got very lonely out here on the beach. Especially in the winter when the winds blew the weather in. With spring came hope. He could see it written on the man’s face.

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“He hadn’t planned on it,” the old man hooted. He turned to the dog who looked up again from its sleep. “Hear that, he hadn’t planned on it. Maybe it’ll just happen, then. Moscow Center rules and all? I suppose he’s packing a piece. Probably a Makarov … light, accurate, reliable. Maybe even a Graz Buyra, the heavyweight. Do the job right. Final.”

“Are you familiar with Oliver Leonard Day?”

Owens’s eyes narrowed. “Justice?”

“He would accept a telephone call from you. If you needed any kind of a confirmation he would make it, though he wouldn’t necessarily like it. I can give you his number if you have a phone out here.”

“I’m capable of looking up a telephone number,” the old man said. He shook his head. “I’m truly sorry you are here, you know, though I suspected someone like you would be showing up on my doorstep sooner or later. Part of the business, I guess. Though one could always hope.” Again he shook his head. “Justice.”

McGarvey didn’t know if he was referring to Justice the department, or justice the noun.

Owens stacked the dishes on his tray and picked it up. “Would you like something to eat?”

“No thanks.”

“A beer?”

“If it’s not so cold,” McGarvey said off-handedly.

Owens grinned. “Been in Europe for a while, then. Make yourself comfortable.” He left the room.

McGarvey took off his jacket and dropped it over the back of the chair. The crackle of the fireplace was real. Nothing else seemed to be. On a table was a stack of magazines: Central Intelligence Retirees Association Newsletter. They went back a number of years. Over the mantle were photographs showing Owens with Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and finally Ford. All of them were signed best wishes or with similar sentiments except for Kennedy’s, which made mention of Cuba: Cuba libre — next year, Darrel. The date on the photograph was more startling, however. It was November 21, 1963—the day before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

“Washington was called Camelot in those days, remember?” Owens said coming in from the hall. He’d brought a couple of beers.

“I was in the service, stationed in Germany. I remember the day Kennedy was shot perfectly,” McGarvey said.

“Everyone remembers that day.” Owens handed McGarvey his beer. It was cellar-cool. “I was convinced a shooting war was imminent. After the Bay of Pigs, and the missile crisis, there wasn’t much left except for an all out exchange of ICBMs.” Owens looked up at the photograph, his eyes moist. “He wasn’t such a hot president, you know. But he cleaned up nice, and his wife was a looker. Our country was young — we weren’t even two hundred yet — and so was our president. Hell, we could lick the world, or at least show them the way into the twenty-first century. We were going to the moon!”

A ways off they could hear the horn of some very large ship, the sound blown onto the shore by the breeze. Then it faded as the breeze momentarily died.

“Will you trust the memory of an old man?” Owens asked softly. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the Kennedy photograph. “Could be faulty.”

“As long as no one has tampered with it, such as is done with paper records, I’ll be satisfied.”

Now Owens looked at McGarvey. “You’ve got a bone in your teeth, haven’t you, lad,” he said. “You’ve got the look about you. Oh, boy, have you ever got the look.”

Owens was married for forty years. His wife had been dead now for nearly ten. McGarvey figured the man could write the book on loneliness.

“Yarnell played double for the Bay of Pigs,” Owens began with no preamble. “It was his first real field assignment. We knew the Russians were getting themselves involved in a big way down there, so we decided to throw Yarnell into the equation. We wanted to see if we couldn’t hold them off. Provide a little diversion, if you catch my drift. Misdirect them. By then it was too little, too late. It was one of the few projects at which Darby Yarnell ever failed. But then, it wasn’t his fault. The conception was all wrong.”

McGarvey hadn’t thought the man would begin with an apologia for Yarnell, but then it was Owens’s story and he’d tell it in his own fashion. Only if he got off the track, McGarvey decided, only if the old man wandered too far afield, as old men are wont to do, would he bring him back. McGarvey settled down with his beer to listen and listen closely, because if there was one lesson he’d learned well from the early days, it was that more than half of any story was between the lines. So pay attention, boyo, and you just might learn something.

In those days, Owens explained, the agency was very young. They were still learning their lessons from the NKVD straight out of Moscow and still trying to assimilate everything their own OSS had taught them. Overlap as a conceptual term became the bane of their existence. The organizational chart had gaps a mile wide in some places, and even worse, crossovers wider. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians was the watch phrase. Their pariah was the man who tried to play both ends against the middle, and they were loaded with the type. It gave just a hint of the troubles they were having and would continue to have in the years to come.

“In the midst of all this came Darby Yarnell, the bright young MBA directly out of Harvard. Oh, what a force he was in those days. But how ready we were for him. Let me tell you,” Owens said.

He was recruited in the spring of his senior year right there at the school. It was before the Vietnam era when the mention of an agency recruitment team on a campus was cause for a major riot. In the late fifties there was still a lot of idealism around. The recruiting teams consisted mostly of a grade-one clerk, a regional desk officer, and as often as possible a field man home for debriefings. The clerk covered the entry-level possibilities, the desk jock talked about the advancement, the good pay, and the intellectual challenges of the Company, and of course the field man bespoke the James Bond romance of the job.

“I don’t remember who we sent up there that year, but the young Yarnell nearly talked every one of them out of the Company, convincing them that they were wasting their time, that theirs was an immoral task, and furthermore, that someday they’d be remembered by their children as no better than Gestapo thugs, mindless wretches for whom 1984 had already become reality.”

Of course, Yarnell had overwhelmed them with his intelligence, his breeding, and the sheer force of his personality. Who could resist such a combination in those days? Who could resist such a combination in any age? Pharaohs and czars had fallen for less. The man was possessed of that rare combination: charm and intelligence.

“Our team came back with their tails between their legs, ready to give up on everything they’d ever learned. We didn’t have the Farm down in Williamsburg like we do now. No place really to send them to get their heads back on straight. Yarnell did it for us. He came traipsing down to Washington, innocent as all get out, ready, willing, and able to give his all for the cause. Gabriel couldn’t have done better with his horn.”

Owens chuckled with the memory.

“He must have been the wunderkind,” McGarvey suggested.

“Oh, yes, the wunderkind,” Owens hooted. “Someone’s exact words, I’m sure. I was working the Latin American desk in those days, and I saw Yarnell as the perfect catch. He’d not only learned Spanish — and learned it well — in college, he’d spent time in Spain and he actually understood the bastards. Not simply their language, mind you. Any high school kid can master Spanish in a few semesters. I’m talking their souls. Their esencia. Yarnell knew what he was talking about, no question about it. He was exactly what we thought we needed at the time.”

Yarnell went through his training at the speed of light, soaking up information sometimes faster than the instructors could feed it to him, which started his prowling days.

“We weren’t so compartmentalized then, you know. Should have been though. The Abwehr had taught us a big lesson … I mean, Canaris did pay the ultimate price for knowing too much, having too many feelings …. And the NKVD was years ahead of us, too, but then we’d never had a Dzerzhinsky or a Beria. Still …”

Owens was starting to wander, so McGarvey brought him back on track. “Prowling days? I don’t understand.”

“He became an alley cat. Any handout was welcome, didn’t care which hand fed him. Went from office to office, section to section, finding out what was up. Often as not he’d drop in with a bottle of French brandy or a box of Cuban cigars, and by the time he’d left they’d all be on a first-name basis and he’d have made three suggestions in seven different directions as to how they could improve their operation.”

Again Owens stopped a moment to think back.

“The damndest thing about him, though — and this part I remember directly — was that no one ever took offense with Yarnell’s meddling because, quite simply, it wasn’t meddling. You always got the feeling in those days that he was genuinely interested in helping you out. He was sincerely concerned that the CIA should become the very best intelligence agency the world had ever seen. He wanted breeding in the service. Knowledge. Sensibilities for the arts. Spying to the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.”

“So he went to Mexico?” McGarvey asked.

Owens looked up. “After his training, after a stint with me overseeing him on the Latin American desk, we sent him down to our embassy in Mexico City.”

“Mexico was our southern neighbor and in many ways our ally, but the Russians ruled supreme in the diplomatic and intelligence circles in Mexico City. They’d adopted our philosophy there from day one: If you want to run the show, throw a lot of money into it. And they did. Their embassy was bigger and better equipped than ours. They cultivated more people within and outside of the Mexican government than we did. They threw more parties, offered more clandestine aid to almost any cause in the bush, and had consulates in more outback cities than we thought was necessary.

“For forty miles beyond our border along Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California we were king. Beyond that there was — and still is from what I’m told — a definite Russian presence. The proletarian uprising may not have gained any kind of a foothold in the desert hinterland, but democratic capitalism certainly doesn’t hold sway either. In that, rural Mexico is very much like rural Spain; the poor are concerned with their government only in as much as it has the capability of feeding their families.

“Yarnell understood all of this long before any of the rest of us did. Some of it instinctually, some of it intellectually, and the remainder experientially. He was a very fast learner.”

“It was ’57 when he went down there?”

“No, more like late ‘58, maybe even the spring of ’59. I remember that he hadn’t been down there very long before we began gearing up for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then of course he got married in the midst of the CESTA investigation and the whole ball game with the Junta de Liberación Latinoamericana. You know, revolution was coming to Latin America once and for all, and look out Western Hemisphere because the downfall wasn’t going to be exactly pretty.”

As Owens went on talking, McGarvey could begin to envision a young, arrogant, well-educated Yarnell first taking over the fledgling CIA and then transferring his efforts and considerable talents to the Russian presence in Mexico City. God, how it must have galled mere mortals like Basulto’s case officer, Roger Harris. How much, he wondered, of Harris’s pushing was simple paranoia? Harris had wanted to be king, or at least in the top ten. He had to work for it, whereas a man like Yarnell could simply snap his fingers and the service, collectively, would come running. Men like Yarnell became presidents or senators or at least DCIs. Men like Harris had to work for every single scrap that came their way, and they often resented those for whom success seemed to come so naturally. Maybe he was chasing after a very old vendetta after all, McGarvey thought.

Yarnell took over our embassy in Mexico City just as he had taken over the agency itself back home. The State Department, which even in those days raised objections about the CIA, never said an unkind word about Yarnell, but their universal sentiment was that he was wasted in the agency; he’d fit in so much better at State. He would have become an ambassador. It was a foregone conclusion. He had the feel for the job. He had the look, the flair. But for Yarnell in those days there was nothing but the agency.

“Operation Limelight, it was called,” Owens continued telling his story. “From the beginning it was Yarnell’s brainchild. In fact, it was he who suggested the program in the first place.”

“Program?” McGarvey asked. It was an odd choice of terminology, he thought.

“It was more than a project. Yarnell figured to put a permanent mechanism in place that would counteract the inroads the CESTA network had made. The Russians certainly would never quit the region so it was up to us to neutralize their effect.” Owens was remembering everything now. “CESTA was more than simply Russians, of course. There were East Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Bulgarians, and naturally the odd lot of Spanish Communists. Their product was said to be the best, though there was a lot of natural animosity between the Mexicans and the true Spaniards. But then a lot of money was being spent down there. Nothing was too good for CESTA. Nothing was too good for the cause; the best equipment, the cream of the crop from NKVD’s Intelligence School One outside of Moscow, the old Eastern European hands. And above all, one of the most sophisticated banking systems anywhere in the world.”

“He must have had the help of the Mexicans themselves,” McGarvey suggested. He could envision Yarnell as a force, but even a superman doesn’t work in a vacuum.

“He could have been president of Mexico, for all I know,” Owens said, cross that his story had been interrupted. “He arrived in Mexico and promptly took over the capital. In those days he didn’t spend much time at the embassy. Of course it was exactly what we wanted, but no one figured that Yarnell was so dedicated to the cause that he’d actually go out and get married to a native just to ingratiate himself to the country.”

Yarnell had had his detractors in those days, too, Owens stopped a moment to explain. There were a few early voices who thought he was too big for his britches, that he was going too far too fast, and that when the fall came Yarnell, for all his youthful enthusiasm and foolishness, would take a lot of good people with him. When he married this young girl, a member of a good family, his critics claimed he had finally gone too far. The girl was just a baby, still in her teens! What could he be thinking?

“But then none of us really knew Yarnell’s measure then, not yet, and none of us had met Evita. If Darby Yarnell was a force to be reckoned with, if he was the sun, then Evita Yarnell was a super nova. All of Mexico City was at their feet.”

CESTA was pals with bureaucrats at every level of the Mexican government. Yarnell’s Operation Limelight was the counteraction; our answer to something that had been in place since the forties. Not so easy a task. His first step was to gain the love and respect of the Mexican people, which had been hurried along by his marriage, and then he could come in with his sweeping gestures to capture the hearts of the men who ran the country.

Owens was a natural storyteller, but he was an old, lonely man who was happy for the company and meant to string out every little detail for as long as he could get away with it. McGarvey had no real objections, for often the kernel of truth you were looking for came in the offhand remarks of some garrulous storyteller. But he wanted the man to at least stay within the main framework of the story — Yarnell’s life.

“I still don’t get a sense of what Yarnell’s program was all about,” McGarvey said. “I understand what he was trying to do, and I certainly understand why, but I’m not quite sure I see the how.”

“Yarnell has always had money. He was raised by his grandparents, as I recall, and they died when he was quite young, leaving him a bundle in trust, which came under his sole control when he turned twenty-five. He hasn’t lost money, from what I heard.”

Yarnell bought himself a house on the outskirts of Mexico City … possibly one of the largest, finest palaces in the capital. He staffed it with a lot of his friends — God knows how he got them so quickly, but he was always surrounded by them — and he began to throw parties.

“I saw the house only once,” Owens said, smiling at the memory. “Let me tell you, McGarvey, the place was a palace. He had one of everything there and perhaps two of some things.”

“Who were his targets in those days? I mean, how were they picked out of the crowd?” McGarvey asked.

“He had a governmental directory, of course. He went through it with a red pencil for everyone he figured was committed to CESTA, and a blue pencil for everyone committed to us. In those days the reds outnumbered the blues two to one.”

“He invited the unmarked … uncommitted ones to his house?”

“To his house, to a hunting lodge he rented, to a little retreat on the ocean. He bought them presents, gave them weekends with beautiful women if need be, but mostly he gave himself; his free, helpful advice on how to solve any problem they might have, from love to engineering, from business to bureaucracy. He became their banker as well as their father confessor. For the entire government.”

“CESTA had more money than Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “Even rich Americans couldn’t possibly compete with an entire governmental network …. From what you’re telling me CESTA was the entire Warsaw Pact’s organization.”

“Of course there was no competition, at least not for money. But CESTA was indiscriminate. They went in for quantity, while Darby Yarnell went for quality. CESTA, for example, might manage to turn five out of the six men running the water utility for Mexico City. But Yarnell would pick the one man on whom the department was most dependent. The one indispensable man. He’d put that man into the limelight so that the entire world could see that he was numero uno, that he loved Mexico above all other nations, that his loyalty could never come into question, and that there would never be another man half as good as he for the job.

“Yarnell knew how to make a man feel good about himself, but he also knew how to make everyone else feel the same way about that man. It was an art.

“But then the Bay of Pigs fiasco came along, Yarnell was assigned to the planning team in Guatemala City, and when it all fell apart he was lucky to get off the beach alive.”

17

Houses seemed to take on the personality of those who lived in them, McGarvey had always heard. He wondered, mightn’t it also work the other way around? After lunch Owens said it was his custom to walk along the beach every afternoon. Kept his mind fresh, he explained, his juices flowing, and demon constipation, the absolute bane of an old man’s existence, from rearing its ugly head. Looking back now as they walked at water’s edge, McGarvey could see that the house was a lot like its master; old, a bit on the worn side, but with a grace and wisdom that pressed you to come back again and again. That part, McGarvey suspected, Owens had inherited from the building, which was comforting in a Victorian way, yet demanding of nearly constant attention and care lest the entire fabric of its structure unravel because of careless handling. Clouds had begun to form out to sea, but they didn’t look very threatening although McGarvey could tell there was wind in them because already the surf was up from when he had first arrived. Owens wore an old navy pea coat, its broad round collar up around his blue-tinged ears, and a woolen watch cap on the back of his head, a few strands of wispy white hair sticking out in back. His hands were stuffed deeply in his pockets as they walked, and from time to time he would spit into the water. They headed up the beach at a fairly good pace. No one else was in sight in either direction.

“Does the name Roger Harris ring any bells with you, Mr. Owens?” McGarvey asked, keeping up.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“He was stationed in Havana until Castro took over. In the fifties.”

“He might have been one of them in charge of the recruitment medical exams down in Miami. If he’s the same one.”

“Was he a medical doctor?”

“No, just another idiot with ambitions like the rest of us.” Owens looked back without breaking stride. “Wasn’t he one of the ones who bought it in Girón?”

“Yes, sir,” McGarvey said. “And I think there is a very real possibility that Darby Yarnell murdered him.”

This time Owens did stop. He studied McGarvey’s face. “Are you trying to pull my goddamned leg, or what?”

“No.”

“Where the hell did you come up with such a notion as that? Did someone feed you that line of crap? Is that why you’re here? Was Harris something to you, then?” Owens came a little closer. “That was a long time ago, mister. I suspect you weren’t even out of college by then.”

“High school.”

Owens laughed. “I don’t think you know shit-from-Shineola. You’re guessing.”

“But you’re not. It’s why I came here like this.”

“For what? For whom?”

“I wanted to know about Yarnell. You called him a prick; you couldn’t have liked him.”

“I’ve got no ax to grind,” Owens said. He turned as if to continue up the beach but then came back. “People could get themselves dead, dredging up old business. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. You should know.” He looked out to sea. “Dark clouds on the horizon,” he muttered. “When the grim reaper is standing next to you, it makes you want to think out your next moves pretty carefully, if you catch my drift.”

“Maybe he keeps doing it. Maybe—”

“I watch the television. I read the newspapers,” Owens interrupted. “I have a question for you, McGarvey. Does the name Plónski ring a chime with you? Janos Plónski.”

“A very old friend,” McGarvey replied softly.

“Did you kill him?”

The question was startling. McGarvey hadn’t known quite what to expect, but he had not expected that. Owens was looking at his eyes.

“He was working for me,” McGarvey said. “Doing me a favor. I should have warned him. Watched him. Anything.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know. Yet.”

“Yarnell?”

“Not him, at least not him directly. I was watching him when it happened.”

“Yarnell always had his followers, his entourage, wherever he went. Not always visible all of the time, mind you, but they were never far. His mob, he used to call them. Different ones all the time, but after a while all the faces seemed to be the same one. Do you know what I mean?”

McGarvey nodded.

“Maybe I’m one of his mob, had you considered that?”

“No, at least not seriously,” McGarvey said.

Owens blew air out of his mouth all at once, as if he had just run a mile. He looked back toward the house. “You’re an arrogant sonofabitch, too. But, what the hell, it makes the world go round.” Again he looked into McGarvey’s eyes. “At one time I would have called you a liar and a damned fool. Yarnell was tops in my book, and in the books of a great many people who counted. But that was then.”

They started again up the beach, this time walking at a much more leisurely pace. The fight, or more accurately the spunk, seemed to have diminished in Owens. McGarvey was sorry for it, but he couldn’t stop now.

“What made you change your mind about him?”

“I don’t know if I ever changed my mind about him,” Owens said over his shoulder. “Maybe not until this very minute, you know. But I’d always had my doubts. Then, which one of us doesn’t have his doubts about his fellow man? ‘Everyone is crazed ’cept thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.’ Bastardized Shakespeare, maybe, but pretty valid on the whole, I’d say. From day one you had to wonder just what the kid was trying to prove, scrambling the brains of the very people we had sent up there to recruit him. It wasn’t just a little joke, though a lot of people did take it that way. Nor was Mexico City such a light and easy lot. Real people’s lives were in the balance, and Yarnell was in many ways the fulcrum and the motivator all at the same time. By the time he brought his bride up to Washington she was starting to fall apart at the seams, and it wasn’t a very pretty sight. Of course, we all thought that once Darby finished down south he’d come home and put her back together. He had that power. But he never did. From that day on, Yarnell became a possessed man, a driven spirit.”

It was thought that the shock of the failure of the Bay of Pigs had set Yarnell over the edge. He had put his all into the project. Once he had his wife settled in Washington (settled in the sense that he had an adequate house and staff for her), he returned to Mexico City where he began feeding the Russians all sorts of wild stories about Cuba. At least once a week he would fly down to Guatemala City, though he never did spend the amount of time there at the training base that everyone thought he should. But they were confusing times. Americans were just learning to flex their muscles, and no one was very sophisticated about it.

“He was at the Bay of Pigs? He went ashore?” McGarvey asked. He wanted absolutely no mistake about it.

“Yes, he was there. At Girón. But so were a lot of others, including a lot of angry Cuban regular army who were shooting at our people. Anyone could have killed your Roger Harris.”

They walked for a long time in silence. It was a couple of miles up the beach to the Marine Museum at Amagansett. For a bit McGarvey figured they were going to walk all the way, which was fine with him. Owens had told him a lot, but McGarvey figured he had much more to tell. In fact, the important parts were yet to come, and although he wanted to keep the old man on track, he did not want to push him out of his cooperative mood. He didn’t think the chance would come again. It was just a feeling.

After a while Owens stopped and looked back as if he had suddenly awakened to realize he had gone a lot farther than he had intended. He glanced up at McGarvey.

“Let’s go back,” he said.

“Sure.”

Evita Perez Yarnell could have been the hit of Washington, Owens said. But she kept pretty much to herself, with her staff. A sister came up for a time, and of course her mother visited whenever possible. But Evita was not the same woman she had been in Mexico City. Whether Yarnell had taken her spirit from her, or she was just out of her element in Washington, no one knew at the time. Everyone felt sorry for her, but no one knew what to do about it. In the meantime Yarnell’s product coming out of Mexico City was fabulous. The sun and the moon wouldn’t have been enough payment for what Yarnell was sending back. Not only was he gathering intelligence about the Mexicans, but about the entire CESTA network as well. Yarnell had managed to turn some of the CESTA agents as doubles. It was his moment of glory.

But it didn’t last forever, of course. Nothing ever does. It was in the late spring of ’62 that Yarnell came home in triumph.

“He could have had anything he wanted. Any assignment. Practically any job. All of Washington was kissing his ass, and I was one of them. I was right there standing in line with everyone else. The only thing that bothered me at the time was how that wife of his was turning out. But then it takes two to tango. No such thing as a one-sided argument — like clapping only one hand.”

“He moved back in with her, I assume,” McGarvey said, but he didn’t know why. Yarnell’s marital status really had no bearing on whether or not he was a traitor. But after having met her, he was curious.

“Sure he did. And nine months later she had Juanita, their only child. A very pretty girl. Had her mother’s beauty and her father’s brains.”

McGarvey thought it was likely she was the one he had seen leaving Yarnell’s house. “She’s living with her father?”

“That’s what I heard,” Owens said dryly.

By that time Owens had been bumped up to assistant deputy director of intelligence, they had moved into the newly constructed building across the river in Langley on what was called the Bureau of Public Roads Research Station, and Yarnell contented himself to take over the Latin American desk, running the entire Caribbean Basin show. “And he was nothing short of brilliant, let me tell you. I had been nothing but a technician during my tenure in that hot seat, whereas Yarnell was the concert master.” Owens smiled wanly with recollection now that the story was becoming more personal to him. “It also marked the beginning of the period when Darby and I worked with each other on the same turf. Even though I was right there all along, I could never quite figure out exactly how he did what he did. It was like witchcraft following in his footsteps, legerdemain. But damn, he was good.”

On the way back McGarvey was on the seaward side, where the sand was packed a little more tightly and the going was much easier. Owens had slowed way down. McGarvey wanted to reach out a hand for him, but he didn’t think the old man would have accepted it. He was too proud. Little by little as the story progressed McGarvey began to build up a picture in his mind of the relationship that had existed between Yarnell and Owens in those days. Owens was in awe of Yarnell, or had been, and yet he had also felt a small measure of resentment for the cavalier way in which the younger man dealt with the world in general, with the co-workers around him on a day-to-day basis, and in particular with his wife.

“I used to see him around town with his women,” Owens said, a little bitterness creeping into his voice. “They were nothing more than a part of his mob scene, he used to tell me. Mostly they were the wives and mistresses of the foreign diplomats assigned to the missions in town. He got a lot of gossip that way, but it was tough on his marriage.”

Owens was a puritan. He had married his high school sweetheart and had never strayed, not once, though he admitted he had been tempted plenty. In this day and age he was a refreshing anachronism, and McGarvey found that he had a lot of respect and admiration for the man.

“Of course he made his mistakes. Rarely, but the construction of missile bases in Cuba escaped his people until six hours after the first photos were brought in from our U-2 overflights. The first conclusive photos. Yarnell was in a rage for months afterward. He drove his people mercilessly. We had a pretty high attrition rate there for a while because of it. But Yarnell wanted only the best around him. He wasn’t going to let something like that happen again.”

“Then the president was assassinated,” McGarvey said softly.

Owens looked up at him, his lips compressed. He nodded. “The bastards killed Jack Kennedy. I’ll never forget that day, not as long as I live. None of us will. We all thought it was the end of Yarnell, he took it so badly. He blamed himself.”

The remark was startling. “How so?”

“He was convinced that it was Castro’s people who arranged it. Something about the Mafia being paid off by Cuban Intelligence to do it. Twenty-five million dollars. For six months he tried to prove it. He should have known, he should have forseen it, he kept saying. But it never happened for him, and following so closely on the heels of the missile thing, he figured he was done on the Latin American desk. Said he wanted no part of it any longer. He wanted to work on something else, something more civilized, anything that did not involve spics. He started drinking, too, and he moved out. Took an apartment in town and left his wife to herself. She finally went back to Mexico City for a couple of years, but even her home had been ruined for her. She felt like an outcast, so she came back to the States, put the child in a boarding school, and moved to New York.”

Something very large dropped into place for McGarvey, who had been listening to Owens’s narrative and picking up an extra beat between the lines. Owens knew and was disturbed by Evita Perez Yarnell, yet he was in love with his own wife. There was only one other possibility for his depth of knowledge and obvious emotional attachment.

“Darby Yarnell was your protégé.”

“Wasn’t so terribly difficult to guess, was it?” Owens said sadly.

“Did you tell him that you were disappointed in the way he was treating his wife?”

“Not my place.”

“He was turning out badly …”

Owens flared. “Just listen here, his product always had been, and at that point still was, without reproach. The very best. The way I figured it, if his home life wasn’t going exactly the way it could have, or even should have, who was I, or anyone else for that matter, to say anything? I wasn’t a preacher, and we weren’t running a Sunday school down there. This is the big, grown-up world in which nuclear missiles are aimed at you from ninety miles away, and where presidents get shot down. This is a crazy, goddamned world, McGarvey. If a man isn’t exactly as devoted to his wife as he’s supposed to be, then we know that he’s just like everyone else — not perfect.”

“But it hurt,” McGarvey suggested gently.

“He was so goddamned good it was a crying shame. A lot of us looked up to that kid.”

Including your wife, McGarvey wanted to say, but he could not. It would have been too cruel, true or not. He had a strong suspicion, though, that Yarnell was a man who never left anything to chance.

They walked on for a time in silence. Clouds continued to build out to sea, and the surf continued to rise. A salt mist drifted on the air so that a hundred yards down the beach it seemed as if the fog was coming in. The air smelled wonderful though. It brought McGarvey back again to the Hamptons with Kathleen and Elizabeth. It struck him as odd that he had not known a single soul who had escaped at least one such emotional disaster in their lives. Even his sister’s marriage was rocky at times. Christ, where were the devoted people? Where was sincerity and openness? Perhaps Owens was the only one in the world who had had a good marriage. But then it had ended tragically with her death long before his.

“We were doing a lot of building in those days. The intelligence directorate, for instance, consisted of only half a dozen departments. But within the next few years that number was doubled: operations, strategic research, the U.S. Information Bureau, the Intelligence Requirements Service, central reference, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, imagery analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center. The list went on and on. Every day it seemed as if we were being asked to provide another type of product to a host of new customers.”

“You were busy.”

“Yes,” Owens said dryly. “Too busy to give a damn about another man’s problems.” He looked over at McGarvey. “I had my own bad luck there for a year or so, too. I was working twelve and eighteen hours a day. Some nights I wouldn’t even go home. My marriage nearly went on the rocks. It was never quite the same afterward.”

McGarvey didn’t want to hear it. Not that. “Did Yarnell get off the Latin American desk?”

Owens blinked. “Right into operations the first part of ’64. Worked for the deputy director until he started up the new Missions and Programs section. Pulled half a dozen of our very best people right out of the field, put them in a think-tank environment, and told them they were to come up with a world-wide missions and programs plan that was based on their direct experience.” Owens grinned at the memory. “All hell broke loose there for a bit. Yarnell had apparently emasculated our foreign intelligence operation. But in the end the seventh floor recognized the wisdom of his action and gave him the gold star. An A for effort.”

“Funny they didn’t give him operations.”

“He was offered the assistant deputy directorship, but he turned it down from what I heard.”

“He had something else in mind?”

“Oh yes, and so did I, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

“Within operations?”

“Foreign intelligence,” Owens said. “He sent himself out to help replace the people he had pulled in. He said he needed the field experience. So long away from Mexico, it was time for him to put his hand back in. None of us was getting any younger, and he was always worried that time was passing him by much faster than it was for other people. In a way I suppose it was. He seemed always to be living his life on half a dozen different levels all at the same time, and all at breakneck speed. He was like a flame in pure oxygen, someone said. A lot of people in the Company thought he’d burn himself out one day soon. In the meantime, though, he was the brightest star in the sky.”

“Where did they send him?”

“Why, Moscow, of course. Right into the heart of the lion’s den.”

McGarvey wasn’t surprised. Of course he had known some of this already from the background Trotter and Day had given him. But it was the timing that he found so fascinating now.

“That was in what year?”

“The summer of 1965.”

“They sent him out as chief of the Moscow station?”

“Assistant chief of station,” Owens said. “He was very good, the best, but he was still pretty young. Besides, there is something you have to understand about Darby Yarnell. He never gave a damn about titles. He was more interested in getting the product, analyzing it, and then satisfying our customers with it. ‘The end results are what counts,’ he used to say. ‘We’re in the business to provide enough information that our political leaders can make the very best of choices for us, Darrel,’ he would say. It was his pet philosophy.”

“Who was chief of station during his tenure, then?”

Owens laughed. “I was given the job exactly one month after Yarnell was sent over. We worked together in Moscow for twenty-eight months, until the Russians finally kicked him out.”

They reached the house, but before they went in, Owens took a cigarette from McGarvey and they sat on the porch steps, smoking and looking into the wind at a cold sea filled with white horses. McGarvey, of course, had seen Yarnell in a different light than Owens. If Yarnell had been a Soviet agent he might have known about the missile bases on Cuba, and only when they had been discovered by another section within the agency did he “discover” them himself. To throw suspicion off himself, he drove his people hard, probably causing the best of his field men to quit in disgust, while secretly rewarding the inept operatives. Yarnell’s little stunt of pulling some of the Company’s best field men into head up a missions and planning department was nothing short of brilliant. He had emasculated our foreign intelligence service, evidently just as it was about to make some major discovery harmful to the Soviets. And pulling Owens with him out to Moscow was a stroke of genius. With his mentor running the operation, Yarnell would have had a totally free hand to do whatever he wanted. It made McGarvey sick to think how Yarnell had used Owens, and even sicker to think how wide open our embassy had to have been in those days.

But then, he thought, it was the nature of the business.

18

“Why did the Russians kick him out of Moscow?” McGarvey asked. “Seems to me he would have charmed them just as well as he had the Mexicans, unless the Russians were sore at him for his successes against CESTA.”

They’d gone inside where Owens had straightened out the kitchen and opened them each another beer before they settled back in the living room. The fire had died down a bit so the room wasn’t as hot as it had been before. The dog had not moved from its spot on the rug. McGarvey wondered if it was dead.

“He killed a man,” Owens said holding his beer bottle in both hands. His cheeks were rosy from the wind and chill air outside.

“In Moscow?” McGarvey asked, startled.

“In Moscow. He was one of ours. Darby just gunned him down. It wasn’t very pretty.”

“So the Russians kicked him out.”

Owens nodded. “I left a few months later.”

“In disgrace?”

“What?”

“I mean because of what Yarnell had done. You were his mentor, his chief of station.”

Owens laughed. “I don’t think you understand, McGarvey. Killing the kid was the culmination of a first-rate operation. Darby went home a hero and so did I. The only reason I stuck around was to pick up the few loose ends. And let me tell you, there were damned few of those. Darby ran a tight ship.”

McGarvey was amazed. He didn’t quite know what to say. “Yarnell was in his element.”

“You can say that again. He hadn’t been there thirty days when I arrived, and already he had developed half a dozen stringers, was having dinner and weekends on a regular basis with a couple of generals and a deputy on the Presidium staff, and he and our ambassador were on a first-name basis.”

“You would have been disappointed with anything less,” McGarvey suggested mildly.

“But it never ceased to amaze me. Remember, I’d been reading Darby’s field reports from Mexico all along, but this was the very first time I had ever been in the field with him. It’s one thing to read about it, it’s an entirely different matter to actually see it.”

McGarvey lit them both another cigarette. Owens seemed grateful for it. He started off in another direction.

“Those twenty-eight months we were together went by quicker than any two years plus I’ve spent, before or since. I was chief of station, but it was as if I were in school, at the feet of a master. Our product was brilliant. Beyond compare, that’s how they described our dailies in Langley. And I got most of the credit.”

True to form, Yarnell took a nice apartment near Moscow University, in a section of the city called Lenin Hills, though how he managed to get approval from the Soviet authorities to move up there was beyond most of the embassy staff. (To McGarvey’s question at this point as to why no one had become suspicious of Yarnell, Owens not only couldn’t provide an answer, he had no idea what McGarvey had implied.) There were a lot of comings and goings from his apartment at all hours of the day and night. Russians are great ones for having very late dinners, and then staying up half the night drinking spiced vodka and eating snacks and listening to music or poetry or dancing, or just talking. This was Yarnell’s sort of life, exactly, because he was a highly social animal. He was in his glory. Living life to the hilt.

Then came Operation Hellgate, which right from the beginning everyone realized was a horse of an entirely different stripe. This time Yarnell seemed somehow vicious. Mean. It was as if he were trying to get back at someone for something very terrible.

The business was something new, something disturbing, according to Owens. “Up to this point, Darby Yarnell had been the sort of a man who was able to clearly see both sides of any issue no matter its emotional content. He was a man who understood the little foibles and failings we’re all loaded with. But this time, McGarvey, it was different.”

In those days any major operation had to be first outlined in some detail and then sent to Langley for approval. Of course Yarnell’s projects always went through without a hitch.

“With Operation Hellgate, I sent him back to Washington to present his side of the issue in person,” Owens said.

“You were against it?”

Owens nodded.

“But in your estimation it was important.”

Owens looked up. “It was that—” He stopped a moment, apparently at a loss for the correct word. “It was that indecent.”

McGarvey was surprised at the choice. “He got his approval from Langley, I take it.”

“He was back within the week. And yes, he was given the green light. It was the only time I ever disagreed with him about a project. But I was overruled.” Owens shook his head sadly at the memory. “We talked about the operation, at least we did at first, until it actually got underway. Then we were very busy. He said that he agreed with me that it was a bad business, but that we hadn’t made the choice. It wasn’t either of us who was the traitor. But since it was staring us in the face—‘An opportunity of tarnished gold,’ he called it — we would be remiss in our duty if we didn’t go ahead. It was the basis on which, I suppose, Langley went along with him.”

Classified communications were taken care of by the air force and the National Security Agency, which loaned the embassy the operators and technicians and the cryptographic equipment. This was before the days when satellite communications were common. All long line, then. Classified information was sent via encrypted teletype to Washington. The Russians could and did intercept our encrypted messages all day long, but with the equipment we were using then, the codes were literally impossible to break. (It still held true today.) The days of the one-time cipher pad for anything other than confidential material were all but gone. An electronically-produced, totally random signal was mixed with the text, producing a signal that had no rhythm or meter, hidden or otherwise. Only a receiver in perfect synchronization with the transmitter could possibly reproduce the clear text. The system was called KW-26.

The equipment was foolproof, but its operators and technicians were not; they were only human after all. “Yarnell fingered one of the technicians, Staff Sergeant Barry Innes, as being on the KGB’s payroll. To this day I don’t know how he got his information, but the proof was there.”

Yarnell prepared several dummy messages out to Langley that consisted of information of potentially great interest to the Soviet Union’s delegation to the UN in New York. Within days of the transmission of the messages — transmissions done only during the time when Innes was on duty — the information was showing up on the Security Council in New York.

“We had a traitor in the embassy. A kid in the air force, clean shaven, wife and a small child living somewhere in California. I wanted to arrest him, send him home. He was young enough, I figured, he might have gotten out of prison with time enough left for some sort of a life.”

Innes, along with the other air force operators and technicians, as well as the marine guards, had quarters within the embassy itself. The rule was that single men and women resided automatically in the embassy — that is, military people, of course, not civilians — while married personnel had a choice. If they brought their spouses with them to Moscow, the assignment was for three years and they lived in town. If they came alone, leaving their mates at home, or if they were unmarried, Moscow was a remote assignment for only eighteen months, and they lived in the embassy. Innes came alone.

Within three months of his arrival, Yarnell had him cold, Owens said.

It was around Christmas that Yarnell proposed Hellgate, and he got back to Moscow a day before the twenty-fifth, leaving his wife all alone back in the States. By then, of course, she wasn’t quite as big an issue as she had been earlier. Too many other much greater things were happening in Moscow and elsewhere around the world for them to worry about someone’s wife, who, after all, was living a life of relative splendor and luxury at home. Who could feel sorry for a poor little rich girl?

“So you had your traitor cold,” McGarvey said. “Why wasn’t he arrested and sent home for trial? Operation Hellgate was a success.”

“You don’t understand,” Owens said. “Just proving that the kid was a traitor wasn’t what Darby had proposed. Not at all. Operation Hellgate was a hell of a lot more than that.”

“What then?”

“The Russians had turned one of our people; Darby wanted to get back at them. He wanted to send it back to them in spades. He wanted to send them a great big bomb that they’d take into their midst and that would blow up in their faces, causing them not only the maximum damage, but the greatest embarrassment as well.”

“Innes was the key.”

“He was our carrier,” Owens said. “And from day one it was Darby’s baby. No one — and I do mean no one, not even the ambassador — got in his way.”

The idea in conception was rather simple, as all good ideas are, but in execution it was damned difficult, according to Owens. The notion was that if the Russians had successfully turned Innes, and if our knowledge of it could be kept secret, Innes could prove to be of inestimable value to us. Yarnell’s plan was to give Innes a promotion to technical sergeant, put him in charge of CIA communications, and then begin pumping him with information so stunning that when he passed it over to his Soviet control officer, the man would be mesmerized, he would take whatever we wanted to give him. He would be ours.

“We set about to make poor sergeant Innes a superstar,” Owens said. “Within a month he was working directly for Darby, and within a few weeks we were pumping him with information.”

There were two classes of data fed to Innes, Owens explained. The first class was absolutely true things useful to the Russians. We had to mix the good with the bad in order to present a convincing front. The second, of course, was disinformation. On Mondays the select committee at the embassy — me as chief of station, Darby as Innes’s control officer, the charge d’affaires, usually an analyst or two, and at least the Military attache — would get together to work up the product we would force-feed the kid. During the remainder of the week, Yarnell would give it to Innes. Worked like a charm.”

“So Sergeant Innes actually passed good information across?”

“Yes.”

“A lot of information? Damaging information?”

“A big volume, yes. But most of it was pretty mild by comparison.”

“By comparison with what?” McGarvey asked.

“By comparison with some of the other stuff we fed him, as well as all the bogus shit Darby was coming up with. And some of that was very wild, believe me.”

“So, no matter what happened or didn’t happen, Sergeant Innes actually did pass along some valid intelligence to the KGB.”

“Only on Langley’s specific approval.”

McGarvey could understand at least the first part of the operation, and he could appreciate its boldness. He was, however, having a little trouble visualizing the actual method. He asked Owens about it.

“For the most part that was Darby’s province,” Owens admitted. “Sergeant Innes worked directly for Darby, so most of his briefings were done in private. It built up a barrier of trust. A barrier in the sense that Innes had eyes and ears only for Yarnell. It was the old charm all over again. Yarnell had totally taken over the kid, whom he began to refer to as ‘the Zombie’ during our Monday jam sessions.”

“You didn’t much like that?” McGarvey asked.

“It was enough that we were using the kid without calling him names behind his back.”

“How long did this go on?”

“Months.”

“Three months?” McGarvey asked. “Six? Seven?”

“Maybe a year. It was a long time. Darby wanted everything to be just right. He wanted the complete trust not only of Sergeant Innes, but of Innes’s Russian control officer as well. He wanted them eating out of his hand.”

“And they did?”

“They did.”

“How did Yarnell know this? I mean, did he give it twelve months exactly, and then after that time had passed he said now we make our move? What?”

“It was easier than that,” Owens said. “Yarnell figured he would have them by the balls on the day Innes came back with a specific question.”

“A question from his control officer?”

“Presumably.”

“Did he ask you, or did he ask Yarnell?”

“Darby was handling it on a personal basis, I’ve already told you that,” Owens flared.

“Then you don’t know what this important question might have been?”

“Goddamnit, I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at, McGarvey. Of course I knew.”

“How?”

“Darby told me, of course …” Owens suddenly trailed off, realizing what he was saying, at long last understanding what it was McGarvey had been getting at all along. “It was documented … I mean a lot of what we were feeding the kid was showing up …”

“You went on Yarnell’s word alone?” McGarvey asked as gently as he could, though the question itself belied any gentleness.

“He was a friend,” Owens replied. “Darby was the CIA in Moscow. I’d sooner have questioned the president.”

“What was the question?”

Owens took a moment to reply. He focused on McGarvey, then shook his head. “Hell, I don’t remember. It seemed important at the time. Something about satellites, I suppose, but for the life of me I can’t remember it now.”

“But it was Yarnell’s signal that the first phase of his operation was done.”

Owens averted his eyes. “After that it began to get nasty. Sergeant Innes, as well as his control officer, had bought the program, hook, line, and sinker—”

“According to Yarnell,” McGarvey interjected.

“According to Darby, all right.”

“So the question was asked, and presumably Yarnell gave him an answer to take back to his control officer. What then? Did it continue? I mean, did you give them more and more?”

“No,” Owens said. “It was time for the change.”

“For the next phase?” McGarvey prompted after a moment. Owens suddenly seemed less than eager to continue now that they had gotten this far. McGarvey lit them both another cigarette and then went into the kitchen, where he opened them each another beer. When he came back into the living room, the old man was sitting back in his overstuffed chair, his eyes closed. McGarvey stopped just inside the doorway and stared at the man. He could not see Owens’s chest rising or falling. For a terrible moment or so, he thought Owens was dead. But then the old man opened his eyes and looked over.

“I usually take a nap this time of the afternoon,” he apologized. “The beer and all makes me sleepy.”

“Go ahead,” McGarvey said, coming the rest of the way in and setting the beer down on the big oak coffee table. “I have plenty of time.”

Owens shook his head. “I’d just as soon go on. Get it over with.”

McGarvey figured what the old man meant was he wanted to finish the story so McGarvey would get the hell out of his house and leave him alone. It was just as well. McGarvey sat down and put his feet up.

“The next phase of the operation?” he prompted again.

“Darby wanted everything to be one hundred percent,” Owens picked it up. “He figured that the kid, no matter how good he and his control officer had become as a team, could not have passed over more than twenty-five or thirty percent of the material he had been given. It left a hell of a lot of fantastic misinformation rattling around in Innes’s head. Darby was crazy to get the entire bundle across. It was like fishing, he told me. ‘Getting nibbles is fun and all, watching the bobber going up and down gets the blood pumping, but I want the big strike, I want the bloody marlin, the sailfish, a whale.’ He changed his tactics from that point on. Sergeant Innes had been his pal, and now Darby set out to manufacture an enemy instead. It was something to watch how Darby used the same old charm, only now in reverse, to get the sergeant to understand that he was no longer trusted. It was subtle at first. So subtle, in fact, I don’t think Innes had any inkling for the first few weeks. But then we started to see it on the kid’s face, in the way he acted, in the things he said. Or didn’t say. I suspect he lost a lot of sleep in those days. I don’t think I could have taken it as long or as well as he did.”

“How did Yarnell manage to accomplish this, exactly?” McGarvey asked.

Owens shrugged. “It was nothing obvious at first. Darby just stopped sending some of the agency’s traffic through Innes. He began using some of the other operators. A few here and there at first, more and more as time went on.”

“He was counting on the other operators to mention it to Innes, I imagine. Make him think about it, worry about it.”

“Exactly,” Owens said. “And of course it worked. We all watched as Sergeant Innes disintegrated. That in itself wasn’t such a pretty sight.”

“But there was more.”

“Much more,” Owens said tiredly. “The most important parts were yet to come.”

The wind had started to blow in earnest now. McGarvey wondered if the return flight scheduled for eight that evening would be able to take off. Of course, if it did not, he could rent a car and drive back down to the city or stay in a motel here. Actually it did not matter one way or the other to him if he rested up here at this end or back in Washington. He had a feeling he knew what was coming in Owens’s story and what he would have to do about it ultimately, yet he wanted to stay to hear it to the end. And afterward, he wondered as he listened to the wind howl around the eaves … well, afterward he would just have to see.

“Did Sergeant Innes ever come to you or anyone other than Yarnell for advice or help?” McGarvey asked. “Did he ever once question why he was being cut off from the job he had been trained for and promoted to? For a year the kid was a superstar, now all of a sudden he’d developed a social disease.”

“He never said a word.”

“What about his mail to his wife? Was it monitored?”

“We opened his mail,” Owens said. “But he never mentioned a single thing about his work. Mostly he wrote about Moscow, the people, the weather, and the food — and about how much he missed her.”

“Not traitor talk,” McGarvey suggested gently, looking at his shoes.

“He was a cool customer. He was playing it close. I’d have done the same thing had I been in his place. At least I would have tried.”

McGarvey thought about himself and Kathleen in the early days. He’d never told his wife any secrets, of course, and yet a lot of his job had come home with him, had seeped into his relationship (enough to cause the divorce), seeped into his telephone calls when he was away, and into his letters, some of which had to be voluntarily censored. He was a professional. Sergeant Innes had supposedly begun as an amateur and had learned his tradecraft on the run from his Russian case officer. It did not make a lot of sense to McGarvey, the kid’s sudden professionalism, unless he was a cold fish after all, a young man with nerves of steel or without a conscience. But even then, when things apparently began to go sour at the embassy, he would have mentioned something in his letters, let some clue drop; at the very least he might hint to his wife that he no longer enjoyed Moscow, that he was homesick, that he was counting the days until he came home. An eighteen month assignment, Owens had said. By that time Sergeant Innes was getting to be a shorttimer. He said as much to Owens.

“Oh sure, by then Innes only had a few months to go. We discussed that very thing during our Monday planning sessions. It came down to two choices: either we could extend Innes, tack some extra time onto his assignment — which we figured would have made him and his case officer skittish — or we could push him into doing what Yarnell wanted from the beginning.”

“Which was?”

“For the kid to jump,” Owens said.

“Why?”

“To legitimize him, for one, and so that he would bring the rest of his disinformation over with him.”

They had their timetable then; it was some eighty-five or eighty-six days before Innes was to ship out. So Yarnell stepped up his efforts to convince the kid that his arrest was not only possible, but was indeed likely and imminent. More and more, Innes was isolated from the cryptographic section on little errands around the embassy. For two weeks he worked in the consular section processing visa applications. For nearly a month he worked keeping track of visiting American tourists of the VIP variety. Boring work for Innes.

The coup de grace came when Innes had barely a month to go. “Darby had made up this message to the DDO back at Langley. It was supposedly sent out over my signature. The flimsy was sitting on Darby’s desk when young Innes was brought upstairs. Darby contrived to have himself called out for a moment, leaving Innes plenty of time to go snooping and find the thing laying there out in the open. And we made sure he took the bait. Darby was watching from the next office through a peephole. He wasn’t going to go back in there until Innes read it. But it didn’t take very long, let me tell you. Of course, by that time Innes was getting pretty gun-shy. He was trying to cover his ass seven ways to Sunday. He picked up on that message within ten seconds of the moment Yarnell stepped out.”

“So he jumped,” McGarvey said.

“That night. I don’t know exactly how he did it on such short notice. Might have simply taken a bus over to the Lubyanka and knocked on the door. He may have had an emergency setup with his control officer. But by morning when he didn’t show up for work we knew he had gone over.”

“You mean to tell me after all of that you didn’t follow him to make sure?”

“Of course not, McGarvey. We were trying to legitimize him. If there had been so much as a hint of a tail on him, that night of all nights, and his Russian control officer had gotten wind of it, the jig would have been up. They would have shot him themselves.”

“What was your posture at the embassy?” McGarvey asked. “How was this handled, in the open I mean?”

“We went through all the moves, if that’s what you mean. Conducted our own little search, of course. Then we contacted the Moscow city militia, the police, and told them one of our people was missing, and that we suspected foul play. We had to go through the maneuvers. We had to make it seem as if we were worried about him and that his disappearance had come out of the blue.”

“What did that produce?”

“Nothing, not a damned thing,” Owens said. He was looking inward, his thoughts traveling backward in time. “It struck me as a little odd, though. That one aspect.” He looked up. “If the kid was going over, I would have thought he’d have asked for political asylum. The Russians would have made a big hoopla. They would have crowed about it. Shown him off on television. But there wasn’t a damned thing.”

“Maybe they weren’t so sure of him themselves.”

Owens nodded. “Darby suggested the same thing. Said we would have to continue making some noises, but that for the most part we were going to have to keep our mouths shut. He wanted us to go on an emergency footing, call in our field people across the entire Eastern Bloc because as soon as Innes started to talk in detail, the Russians would expect it of us.”

“Did we pull our people in?”

“No. Langley overruled that.”

“Was Yarnell angry?”

“Not angry, worried. He didn’t care who got the credit when something went right, or who got the blame if things fell apart, he just didn’t want to see any blood shed.” Owens saw the sudden intense look of incredulity on McGarvey’s face. “He didn’t want to see any innocent blood shed.”

“Was there?”

“No more than normal attrition. Innes only had bogus information for the most part.”

“What happened next?” McGarvey asked. Owens was beginning to wind down. McGarvey suspected that the story was nearly finished.

“We spent a few days looking as if we were licking our wounds, and then we began making serious noises about getting him back.”

“How?”

Owens chuckled. “I picked up the telephone and called the centre. Lubyanka. Identified myself and told them we wanted Sergeant Innes returned or we were going to make a very large stink. Kidnapping, since Innes had not yet asked for political asylum.”

“You didn’t get through to anyone, did you?”

“No one important. But our message had been received. Their incomings, just like ours, are automatically taped. And the telephone numbers are no great secret. We figured by then that the Russians might be getting skeptical of the kid’s information. We wanted to make absolutely sure they believed him. If we treated him as if he were real, it would go a long way toward convincing them.”

“Did it work?”

“Not right off the bat. It did eventually, of course. We made enough noises so that the Russians finally agreed to a trade. Sergeant Innes for Yuri Suslev, a spy we had nicked in Washington four months earlier.” Owens seemed a little pale. The flush from the wind had faded. He got to his feet, stretched, and went to a window where he looked outside across the porch toward the rising waves pounding the beach below. There was a wistful set to his shoulders, as if he had gone as far with his story as he wanted to go because the telling had drawn him back to an earlier age when he was active. He had come face-to-face, via an unpleasant memory, with his own age.

McGarvey got to his feet, too, and threw another log on the fire, poking the dying flames to life. “Who was Innes’s control officer, did you ever find that out?”

“A young man, coincidentally the same one who had run CESTA,” Owens said.

McGarvey turned away from the fire to look at the old man. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten a little thin. “Baranov?” he asked.

Owens turned. “As a matter of fact, yes, that’s the one. A real sharp cookie. I suppose there was some kind of a vendetta between him and Yarnell for Mexico City. So Innes became a special case for both of them.”

19

It was nearly time to leave. There was little or no doubt in McGarvey’s mind what was coming next. Owens had come back to his chair so that he could be nearer to the fire. The wind in the flue sounded cold; it made the room a little smoky.

“Did you ever meet him? Baranov?” McGarvey asked.

“I saw photographs of him. Never actually came face-to-face with the man, though.”

“Had Yarnell?”

Owens looked up. “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. I suppose he might have in Mexico City.”

“But not in Moscow?”

“I don’t know.”

“They were enemies though?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?” Owens flared. “Of course they were enemies.”

“Yet the Russians let Yarnell come to Moscow. They knew he was a spy. They knew he had worked wonders in Mexico. They even knew that he had been involved in the Bay of Pigs, and in at least some measure with the Cuban missile crisis, yet they let him accept an assignment in Moscow.”

“That’s not so unusual. You should know that. If you have a good operative spotted, you can do one of two things; bar him from your country, in which case he might drop out of sight and then God only knows what mischief he’ll get himself into, or you can keep him out in the open, in plain sight, where you can watch him. KGB has a sophisticated setup in Moscow, as you might suspect.”

McGarvey offered a nod of understanding. “Yuri Suslev was brought to Moscow for the trade?”

“No. He was being held in Maryland. The plan was to bring him to Washington, where we would hand him over to representatives from the Soviet embassy. They could provide him with his transportation home. Meanwhile, KGB would be handing Sergeant Innes over to us on our front doorstep.”

“Where?”

“In front of our embassy.”

“During the day?”

“No. Everyone agreed that would be too risky. No one wanted any publicity about this. Suslev had been a damned effective spy—”

“Whose brains we had picked clean,” McGarvey interrupted.

“Naturally,” Owens said. “They picked Innes clean.”

“Of disinformation.”

“Suslev didn’t fall into our hands with any guarantees. It’s a game. You know about it.”

“What were the safety signals?” McGarvey asked. “I mean, how were we to know in Washington, for instance, when exactly to turn Suslev over to his people?”

“We set up a radio link. Actually it was pretty sophisticated. Both ends of Tchaikovsky Street within a block of the embassy had been blocked off all day for construction. The switch was to take place at four in the morning, our time. In Washington it was eight in the evening, so the switch took place in the parking lot of the Marriott Twin Bridges. Our people brought Suslev over by car, and the Russians brought Innes to us the same way. The embassies were in communication with the drivers and bodyguards in both places and with each other on trans-Atlantic links.”

“Yarnell was in on the switch? I mean, he was actually down there on the street in front of our embassy?”

“Yes,” Owens said. “Our people got out of the car with Suslev, and the message was radioed to us and to the Russians on Tchaikovsky Street. Two of them got out of their limo with Innes between them. I was watching through binoculars. The sergeant looked pretty rough. He’d apparently had a hard time of it.”

“Drugged?”

“As it turns out, yes. At the time it was hard to tell at that distance and in that light, but he didn’t look like himself. He looked as if he had aged a couple of hundred years.”

“Then what?” McGarvey asked, envisioning the early morning scene.

“We let Suslev go. Our people simply got back into their car, and Suslev started to walk toward his people. Again a radio message was sent, and Sergeant Innes’s guards climbed back into their car. Innes just stood there for the longest time. I still remember it. ‘Come on, kid,’ I said out loud. I thought one of us was going to have to go to him and help him back. But I think one of the Russians said something to him, because he looked back and a moment later started for us.”

“What about Yarnell?”

“He got out of the car on the opposite side from me so I didn’t really see what he was doing. Not until it was too late. I got out when the sergeant was about halfway, and as soon as he saw me, he stopped. ‘Sergeant Innes,’ I called to him. ‘Barry,’ I said. ‘Come on. We’re waiting for you.’ But he just stood there. Close up he looked like a zombie. He was dirty, bruised. I remember thinking that we were probably giving them Suslev in a hell of a lot better condition.”

“Then?” McGarvey prompted.

“Innes turned around and started back, Darby stepped around from the side of the car and fired four shots, every one of them hitting the kid in the back, one of them taking off half his head. And that was the end of that. The Russians turned around in the middle of the street and drove off, leaving us to pick up the pieces.”

“Did he give you any explanation?”

Owens looked away from the fire. “Darby? None was needed. It was obviously a double cross. The kid had lured us into exchanging him for Suslev, and once he figured Suslev was safe, he tried to make it back to his pals. I didn’t agree with how it had been set up, but Darby did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Operation Hellgate absolutely depended on it. You have to realize that we gave Innes a lot of important bogus material, along with the good. Material we wanted the Russians to swallow. Innes had to be legitimized. And he was.”

What would you have done under the circumstances? Owens wanted to know, but McGarvey had no comment. He was listening to the wind, to the sound of the crackling fire, to the sounds of the house and the surf on the beach; and he was listening to some inner voice that was telling him to proceed with care. There was something else here. Something else was going on.

When they stepped out it was cold on the porch. The clouds had come and rain was beginning to fall in fits and starts. Lightning flashed in the distance out to sea. It wouldn’t be long, McGarvey figured, before the full brunt of the storm came ashore. He had called a cab. It would be along soon. He didn’t want to hold the old man out here very long. He had gotten most of what he needed in any event. There were only a couple of things he was still curious about. Among them, Owens’s attitude at the beginning of their conversation.

“I’m a little confused.”

“Aren’t we all, McGarvey, aren’t we all?”

“When we started, you said that Yarnell was too big for his britches. You asked me what the sonofabitch had done.”

“He could have killed your Roger Harris. But that’s a long time ago. Could have is a whole hell of a long ways from did.”

“You spoke of Yarnell as your friend.”

Owens had been looking down at the waves. He turned to McGarvey. “Let me put it this way, I had a lot of admiration for the man. It started out at nearly one hundred percent, but as time went on it became less and less. Sort of got eaten away, if you know what I mean.”

“Because of how he treated his wife?”

“That and some other things. Little day-to-day piss ant things that didn’t amount to a hill of beans by themselves but taken together were arrogant. The company he kept, the presumptions he made going in and out of everyone’s lives and work.”

“And then Moscow?”

“Yeah,” Owens said, nodding. “Then Moscow. Hellgate had all the numbers, you know, all the right moves, all the right results.”

“But it was too expensive for your tastes,” McGarvey put in, taking a guess. He’d hit the mark. He saw it in Owens’s eyes.

“Sergeant Innes was just a young kid who had gotten himself off the track somehow.”

McGarvey thought it was very likely that Sergeant Innes had been completely innocent. He had been nothing more than Yarnell’s dupe, a stooge whom Yarnell had used to pass along real information to his own Soviet control officer, Baranov. And when the operation was over with, he had gunned the kid down.

“He should have been sent home,” McGarvey suggested.

“He shouldn’t have been killed. It didn’t have to get to that point,” Owens said. But there was even more that bothered him. “It was the look on his face,” he said, turning away, unable for the moment to face McGarvey.

“Innes? I thought you said he was walking away from you when he got shot.”

“I’m talking about Darby. The look on his face. I was just across the hood of the car from him. The light was right. I could see everything.” Owens hesitated even then. He shook his head again. “Darby enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed killing the kid. The sonofabitch was smiling. He looked at me and he was proud. I didn’t know him, finally. I just didn’t know him any longer.”

The telephone rang in the house. Owens looked over his shoulder.

“I won’t keep you, Mr. Owens,” McGarvey said. “Thank you for your help.”

The phone rang again.

“I hope it was a help,” Owens said.

“What happened after that? After Yarnell went home and you finally went back to the States?”

“Darby got out of the agency. Became a U.S. Senator.”

The telephone rang a third time.

“Did you and he have any contact afterward?”

“None.”

“Never?”

“Come to think of it, I did run into him once, several years later …” The phone rang a fourth time. “Hang on,” he said, and he hurried back into the house.

McGarvey heard him catch it on the fifth ring, and he could hear him talking, though he could not hear what was being said. A couple of seconds later Owens was back.

“Must have been a wrong number,” he said, irritated. “I was having lunch at the Rive Gauche on Wisconsin Avenue when Darby walked in with Anne Sutton on his arm. God, what a vision. She was more beautiful in person than on the screen. Stopped the place dead.”

“The movie actress?”

“Marilyn Monroe’s pal. One of the crowd that hung around the Kennedy fringes, at least that’s what I heard. He spotted me and came over to my table, introduced her, and told me that I was looking good.”

“Was he?”

“Like a million bucks. He was tan, and this was in the middle of winter, so I figured he and the Sutton woman had been off somewhere. Probably the Caribbean.”

“Seen him since?”

“Not in person,” Owens said, regretfully. “On the television, in the newspapers. But do you think you can prove he killed this Roger Harris in Cuba? Prove it so that it’ll stick?”

McGarvey shrugged.

“Are you going to kill him, McGarvey? Is that why you came to me? For ammunition?”

The cab came down the road and beeped its horn twice. It was the same one as before. McGarvey could see the old driver waiting impatiently.

He smiled, and offered his hand. Owens took it. “Thank you for your help.”

“Just be careful, McGarvey. I’m telling you. Yarnell was a sharp operator. I don’t think anything has happened to change anything. On the contrary, he’s probably a lot wiser and sharper, and from what I hear out here he still surrounds himself with a mob wherever he goes.”

“Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it in mind,” McGarvey said. He stepped down off the porch into the wind, bent low, and hurried up to the waiting cab. Before he got in he looked back, but Owens was gone. A moment later sparks came out of the stone chimney.

Because it was the off-season, the nearest comfortable motel was a Best Western at Riverhead, nearly twenty-five miles down the island. The evening flights had been canceled and in the end McGarvey hadn’t felt much like renting a car and driving all the way down to LaGuardia just to catch a late plane back to Washington. Morning would be soon enough. He took a shower and changed clothes, then had an early dinner in the motel’s adequate dining room. Afterward he went back up to his room where he ordered a bottle of brandy from room service. When it came he poured himself a stiff drink and sat by the window, the room lights out, watching the wind and the rain kicking up whitecaps on an inlet of Great Peconic Bay.

There was very little doubt left in his mind that Yarnell had been a traitor to his country, and probably still was one. Nor was there much doubt that the Russian called Baranov was his control officer. McGarvey’s only concern now was the possibility that Yarnell had not worked alone — was still not working alone — that he had had, either then or now, one or more Americans on his payroll. His specialty in Mexico had been turning Mexicans, there was no reason to suspect he hadn’t done the same thing with his own countrymen.

He thought back to his own years in the Company, to the things he had done in the name of loyalty, to the projects he’d seen other case officers do, and he remembered that almost any single act in the business could be construed seventeen different ways. It was such an inherently clandestine business that no one could have all the answers all of the time, not even the DCI himself.

Sipping his drink, he found himself thinking about the earliest days he had spent at the Farm outside Williamsburg. Where had the idealism gone, he wondered. It had been bled away by a dozen assignments in which the entire truth would never be known; it had been sapped by thousands of lies told by hundreds of liars; it had been drained by the uncounted double crosses by the legion of men without honor; and in the end, for him, it had been destroyed by assassination. With the first man he had murdered had gone something indefinable within him. It was something, some force, some emotion, he supposed, that became invisible if he tried to examine it too closely, but became a bright, even hurtful beacon when he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye.

He had been different after that. Changed. Frightened. It had marked the beginning of the end of his marriage, and, he supposed, the long slide down the far side of his career. When assassination becomes a necessary expedient, it was wise to put the very best man into it. But afterward the taint on him would be terrible: oh, the stain makes it impossible to get very near such a man. Use him, then, for as long as he can be stomached and then get rid of him. It’s the only way. At times like this, McGarvey was truly surprised that they hadn’t simply put a bullet through the back of his head. It would have been so much easier for them in the long run — though the problem would have been technical; reduced to the question of who kills the killer? He’d given a lot for his country, he thought morosely; his livelihood, his self-respect, his marriage, and in the end his honor. All the while he had never questioned if it was worth it. He’d always thought so, of course. But now he wasn’t so sure. He could not change, could he? None of us could in the end.

Yarnell would feel nothing, he suspected, turning his thoughts to the other concern. Men such as him never did. They accomplished their given tasks, lived their lives, married their women, had their children, even endured their divorces, all barely ruffling a feather. The Yarnells of the world were the self-assured ones. You could pick them out of a crowd, standing head and shoulders above the competition. (Actually there was little competition for men such as Yarnell, except for the projects they were involved with, and the manner in which they worked their particular magic.) The Einsteins ran the sciences, the Barrymores the stage and screen, and the Yarnells the world of the spy.

At ten he got up from his chair, stiff from sitting so long, his throat raw from too many cigarettes, but his mind clear despite his lack of rest and the brandy he had drunk. He’d been missing something all along. It had bothered him during the afternoon he had spent with Owens, and it had nagged at him tonight. It was something he had meant to ask out there but had not. Owens would know. He had been there at the end, back to the States after Moscow. McGarvey wanted to know why Yarnell had quit the CIA. What excuse had he given? What projects had he left behind? And even more importantly, who had he left behind to fill his spot? In a broader sense, McGarvey wanted to know who Yarnell had worked with and for in Mexico and back in the States besides Owens himself. Who was their boss? Who had been next up the chain of command? Especially at the end. He knew that he could have it looked up for him, but Owens had been there. He wanted to hear it from the man’s lips.

Owens had made no attempt to hide his presence on Long Island from anyone. His name was listed in the telephone book. McGarvey got an outside line and dialed the number. It was likely that Owens would be in bed asleep by now and would resent being awakened to answer even more questions. Couldn’t it have waited until morning, Owens would ask.

The connection was made, and the telephone in Owens’s ramshackle beach house began to ring. McGarvey leaned back against the nightstand as he listened to the burr of the distant instrument. He counted the rings as he stared out the window at the still rising wind and rain, an uneasiness mounting. After ten rings he broke the connection and tried again with the same results. He dialed for the operator and had her try. Still there was no answer.

“I’m sorry, sir, the line does seem to be in order, but there is no answer.”

The town’s three off-season cabs had quit running for the night. It took McGarvey less than fifteen minutes to get dressed and then convince a startled night clerk to rent out his car for a couple of hours. Driving as fast as he possibly dared on unfamiliar roads, wind and rain blowing in long, spiteful gusts, McGarvey kept telling himself that Owens was hard of hearing, he was asleep in his bed and he had simply not heard the telephone. Or at night he shut off his telephone so that he would not be disturbed by damn fool callers and wrong numbers.

It was this last that bothered him the most on the drive out. Wrong numbers. Who was it who had telephoned as he was leaving? A legitimate wrong number, or someone calling to check that Owens was there? Alone.

At another time he might have missed the turnoff in the darkness and rain, but not this night. Despite the storm he could see the flames rising from Owens’s house more than a mile away. Whipped by the wind into long, ragged plumes, sparks shot a hundred feet or more into the sky. Closer he could see flashing red lights of the emergency vehicles along the unpaved track in the sand. There was little left of Owens’s house. Nor, McGarvey suspected, driving past without stopping, would there be anything left of Owens.

20

Warren Nicols crossed the Texas border at Big Bend National Park and entered Mexico a few minutes after ten in the evening. He had no problem fording the shallow Rio Grande, which here barely came up to his chest. Pushing the dirt bike on its inflated raft was a snap. On the far side he deflated the bag, buried it in the sand, shouldered his MAC-10 machine pistol and kit bag — containing a Handie-Talkie capable of transmitting and receiving via the CIA’s communications satellite, his night-vision spotting binoculars and high-speed camera, and his provisions — and headed away from the river.

There were no roads here. The nearest paved highway was more than twenty miles to the east, across the low Sierra de la Encantada mountains. Overhead the stars shone as brilliant, hard points in the crystal clear desert air. Nicols concentrated on driving without lights. To have a serious spill here on the open desert would almost certainly mean death. He would not be listed as missing for a full seventy-two hours, though his first transmission via satellite to Langley was scheduled in barely six hours.

He had spent the past four days camped in the park with a Boy Scout troop from Joliet, Illinois. They were background noise. No one would officially miss him for the next three days. Nor would anyone from the campsite miss him until breakfast in the morning. By then, however, if everything went as planned, he would be back.

The 75-cc dirt bike with long-range tanks, a specially designed engine shroud and hi-tech muffler to minimize noise, and a highly sophisticated satellite-navigation system by which he could pinpoint his location anywhere on earth within ten meters, was capable of open-road speeds in excess of seventy miles per hour and nearly the same across open country provided the track was reasonably smooth and the driver had the guts and stamina to hang on. Nicols had both.

He followed a general line along the base of the mountains, which according to the analysts and planners would make him hard to spot either from direct surveillance or from the ground scatter radar the Russians probably employed in the region. If he painted at all, he might look like a wind devil, a fast-moving desert hare or perhaps even a low-flying bird.

Nicols was a large man, over six feet tall without boots and two hundred pounds. He had returned three months ago from Afghanistan, where he had distinguished himself in the field not only because of his strength, stamina, and courage, but because of his intelligence and understanding. At forty he wasn’t a spring chicken, but what he might lack in youthful zeal he more than made up for in experience and reliability. He was married and had three children who all adored him because he was a kind and gentle man.

He had spent the past two weeks at the Farm outside Williamsburg preparing for this assignment. Nothing the instructors or planners had come up with, they had finally decided, could work effectively for him as a cover story. Americans armed with equipment such as he had simply had no business in the Mexican desert — except to spy. At the last they had allowed him to pick whatever weapon he wanted. The MAC-10 seemed correct. It was light, reliable, and deadly. In addition, he carried a World War II bayonet in a sheath taped to his chest beneath his shirt. It had been his father’s. He was an expert with it.

For the first few miles he ran on underinflated tires because of the loose sand and sand dunes which rose and fell like swells on the open ocean. Farther away, however, the desert smoothed out to a hardpan. He stopped long enough to inflate the dirt bike’s tires and then continued, pushing harder, driving at times at an almost reckless forty miles per hour, yet in the next instant having to slow to a bare crawl because of rocks, in a few places ancient lava flows, and in eight places in one mile washouts from desert flash floods.

In one long stretch of at least five miles, the going was comparatively easy and Nicols was able to engage in the luxury of thinking. As had been the case over the past few weeks, his thoughts automatically went to the briefing he had been given by the DCI himself.

“The Soviets have armed Siberia to threaten our northernmost borders. They tried in the south to arm Cuba with offensive weapons and failed, and now we think they are trying again in northern Mexico.”

Nicols had been stunned. It wasn’t possible. Mexico was our friend. He was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to being fluent in Russian and Chinese (from college), he was also fluent in the romance languages (from his boyhood chums) — Spanish, French, and Italian. It was a facility of his, languages.

“But we are not sure, Warren. Not one hundred percent certain,” Powers had admitted. They were alone, seated across a coffee table from each other in the DCI’s office.

“What can I do, Mr. Director?” he’d asked.

“Someone has to go across the border and see them firsthand. Take some photographs from the ground.”

“Of the installation?” Nicols said naively.

“Of the installation, yes, that too. Ideally we’d like to have photographs of the missiles themselves. Their serial numbers.”

Nicols had smiled. He suddenly saw the entire operation and beyond, like a long, clear highway out to the horizon. “We can invent a satellite-surveillance photograph, but not a serial number, sir.”

Powers laughed out loud, but then he suddenly sat forward, an intense look in his eyes. “I don’t want you to get yourself shot up or captured, Warren. If someone — I don’t care who — should happen to get in your way, it’ll be too bad for them. Whatever happens, whatever you do, you will have my personal backing. Is that perfectly clear?”

It had been perfectly clear then, and it was clear now. The situation was not the fault of the Mexicans. They’d been taken in just as so many other poor nations had been. Soviet influence was like quicksand he’d been told over and over again by the Afghan rebel leaders. Get your leg caught in it and you have troubles. Jump in or slip in with both feet — no matter which — and you’re dead.

As he drove he began to think about what would happen within the next few hours. He began to hope that he would run into someone. A guard. An engineer. An officer. His fingers tightened on the handle grips.

He slowly picked his way across a dry riverbed and on the other side maneuvered the bike to the top of a rise, where he stopped a moment to check his position. Far to the south he thought he caught a glimpse of a light, but then he wasn’t sure. It had to be over the horizon from him, at least fifteen miles away. The SatNav gave his position in grid coordinates. He opened the panel, flipped a couple of switches, then compared the readings with a plasticized chart he carried in a leg pocket of his black coveralls. The suspected Soviet-built missile installation was directly south of him, about eighteen miles away.

The land flattened out on the other side of the rise, and as far as he could tell no one had come this way for a very long time. There were no tracks anywhere. He had studied the satellite surveillance photographs that had been overlaid onto a topographical map of the region. The missile installation, which was still under construction but apparently nearing completion, was nestled between parallel ridges in the mountains, the rises about three miles apart. The land in between was perfectly flat, forming a natural amphitheater with good protection on three sides, open only to the southwest toward the open desert. The construction was meant to look as if a large oil exploration project was underway. It had not fooled the agency’s analysts, nor would it fool anyone who came for a closer look, except perhaps for the farmers in the area. But they would be of no bother. They were very poor. A few pesos would guarantee their complete cooperation.

He covered two-thirds of the distance in less than twenty minutes before he stopped again. This time he shut off the bike’s engine, took out his night-vision binoculars, and trained them on the hills rising to the east, beyond which lay the construction site. At first he saw nothing. He looked specifically for lights, any kind of lights, as well as for fences, movements such as patrols might make in jeeps, on horseback, or on foot, or any kind of a track in the sand.

A thin white light flashed in the sky just above a cut in the hills, probably an arroyo. For a second he thought it might have been a spotlight of some kind, but then the light bounced into the sky again, and he realized what he was seeing. The light had moved from right to left. A couple of seconds later he saw a much smaller red light wink on, then off, and then there was a pair of them. Taillights, he thought. A patrol vehicle was working its way along the ridge, which offered views down the one side into the valley where the missile base lay, and down the other across the open desert to where Nicols crouched beside his dirt bike.

They were obviously expecting intruders, or at the very least they were prepared for such a possibility. Let them be Russians, Nicols told himself mounting his bike and starting it. Not Mexicans. Let them be Russians, please God. After Afghanistan he had a few old scores to settle.

He cut straight across the desert now, directly for the northern edge of the arroyo, the last place he had seen the lights of the patrol vehicle. Whatever their schedule might be, he did not think they would be making a pass by any one spot more than once or twice each night. He would be relatively safe up to that point for the next few hours, he figured. From there he would descend into the valley on the other side, make his way onto the base, take his photographs, and then get the hell out. God help the man who got in his way. Especially if he was Russian. Here on this continent! Christ, it made his blood boil.

The desert dipped down toward the base of the first hills, then rose on an alluvial fan that spread out beneath the broad cut above. Leaning into the pitch of the hill, Nicols gunned the little bike, rocks and sand spitting out behind him and clattering down the hill as he spurted up. He was making too much noise, and he knew it. But he wanted to gain the first rise in the series of hills below the main crest. He figured he would find a spot to conceal the bike somewhere there and then make it the rest of the way on foot. If he was lucky the patrol vehicle he had seen earlier would be a long distance off by now. He did not think they would have installed any other kind of short-range surveillance equipment out here; heat sensors, motion detectors, pressure grids buried just beneath the surface. At least he hoped they hadn’t.

His luck ran out just at the top of the lower ridge. The headlights of at least half a dozen jeeps suddenly came on, catching him in a blinding glare. He tried to spin the bike around so that he could take off back down the hill the way he had come, but the rear wheel got away from him on the loose sand and gravel and he went down.

Moving purely on instinct, Nicols rolled left, away from the still sliding bike as he grabbed his MAC-10, yanked the bolt back, thumbed off the safety, and came around on his belly into a shooting position.

He fired one short burst at the nearest jeep to his left, and as the headlights suddenly were extinguished and a man cried out, he rolled left again.

A split instant before a withering rain of automatic weapons fire slammed into Nicols’s body, he heard someone shouting “Left! He has gone left!” at the top of his lungs. In Russian. They were the last words he ever heard.

It was two in the morning, a time that Donald Suthland Powers had always found the most enchanting, the most mysterious, a time when things always seemed to go bad. If you could somehow get past three A.M., the rest would naturally fall into place. Or at least anything that might happen afterward would be manageable. Like many of his predecessors, Powers had developed the habit of staying at his office during crucial operations when lives were on the line; lives of men and women he had personally sent out into the field. It was a part of the business that he had never become accustomed to. Here in his office on the seventh floor of the headquarters building at Langley, he felt more secure than he did at home, more in control, as if he were a direct part of whatever operation was in progress. As if his mere presence here would lend strength to the battles on distant fields. There was no one at his home in any event. Sissy was away at school, the housekeeper had taken the week off, and how many years had it been since Janet? More than he cared to count. It was at times like these he missed her the most. The nest was empty. This was home.

Danielle, his DDO, felt the same way although for different reasons. He sat across the desk from Powers, and they both looked up as they heard someone running up the corridor outside the open door. Stuart Flagler, Powers’s bodyguard, was sitting in the anteroom. He jumped up, his hand automatically reaching for his weapon.

Powers stiffened. He had had a premonition of disaster since this afternoon. Was this it, then? he wondered. “Stuart, see who that is,” he called.

“Yes, sir,” Flagler answered over his shoulder as he stepped to the outer door.

Danielle got to his feet as Tom Josten, one of his young staffers out of operations, appeared, out of breath.

“Mr. Danielle,” he called past Flagler.

“It’s all right, Stuart,” Powers said.

The big bodyguard stepped aside and the young man rushed in. He brought with him a half a dozen computer-enhanced and printed photographs from their surveillance satellite. They were infrared tracings. “There’s trouble with Banyan Tree, sir,” Josten said, spreading the photos on Powers’s desk. Banyan Tree was the code name of Warren Nicols’s operation.

“What have we got here, son?” Powers asked, bending over the stark photographs.

“These were sent down from Big Bird Four at 0517 Zulu — that would have been 1117 central time last night. I have the grid coordinates here ….”

“Banyan Base?” Danielle asked.

“Just outside it, sir. About four miles to the west. We overlaid it on the topo. It would have put the action at the first ridge just below the west wall.” Josten pointed to the first two prints, which showed a ragged red streak about three inches long. “This would be the exhaust-heat trace from Nicols’s bike. He was going up the hill at a pretty good clip.” Josten pointed to the next several prints, which showed a U-shaped ring of lights, and a fifth and sixth print showing pinpoints of light that bloomed into long red streaks. “They were waiting for him. Looks like headlights to Scotty downstairs. I’d have to agree. We’ll know once spectral analysis is done.”

“And these are gun bursts,” Danielle said.

“Yes, sir. A lot of them.”

Powers had picked up a magnifying glass, he bent low over one of the photos and looked at a series of pinpricks, and several streaks facing inward, toward the headlights. He looked up. “Nicols got off a few shots?”

Josten smiled unhappily. “Yes, sir. It would appear so. But we don’t think it did him much good. We counted at least twenty-three separate weapons locations, every one of them trained on and just to the left of where Nicols had fired. He didn’t have a chance in hell, sir. Not a chance.”

Powers put down his magnifying glass and exchanged glances with Danielle. “Nothing from him? No emergency signal?”

“No, sir.”

“I want his frequency monitored for the next seventy-two hours, no matter what this may look like.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re not giving up on him. Not yet.”

“Yes, sir,” Josten said.

Powers sighed deeply. He was tired. He nodded. “Thanks for coming up here, but let’s not give in so easily. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Can we do that?”

“Of course, sir,” Josten said glumly. He nodded, then turned and left the office. They watched him go. In the anteroom, Flagler settled back to his magazine.

Powers came around his desk, crossed his huge office, and from a sideboard behind a bookcase, he poured two stiff shots of brandy.

“A little water in mine, Mr. Director,” Danielle said.

Powers poured water in both and brought them back to his desk. They looked at each other as they drank. Powers put down his glass and went back behind his desk.

“I think we should call the president,” Danielle said softly.

Powers nodded. He leaned his weight into his fists, which were bunched up on the desktop. “Nicols is scheduled to transmit his first status report in an hour or so.”

“Give it up. You can’t believe he survived that.” Danielle gestured at the infrared satellite photos.

“We’ve been in this business long enough, Lawrence, to know not to jump at the obvious. This could have been a snoopy rancher straying someplace he didn’t belong. A drug runner looking for someplace to stash a future load. It would be a perfect place for a drug operation; close to our border, flat ground for a landing strip, the protection of the mountains, almost no population center anywhere nearby.”

“You’re clutching at straws, if you permit me to say so.”

Powers thrust his hands into his pockets, as if the action would stay him from picking up the telephone. The pieces were beginning to fall into some kind of a pattern, though he still could not recognize it. This had the earmarks of a Baranov operation. That much he did recognize. It had begun last October with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami and the assassination of Jules and Asher on the taxiway at Havana. They had been on their way into place in Mexico, and it was very possible they would have uncovered the incoming Soviet construction equipment and missile-base supplies, which would have alerted us to the situation when there could have been time for a political solution. Baranov had known. He was smart. And he was back in Mexico. Powers could feel the man’s presence as a powerful, electromagnetic force that caused his hair to stand on end.

“We’re not going to have time to send another man down there,” Danielle was saying. “And this time is different from Cuba. Back then we had time for a blockade. This time all six of their installations are nearly operational.”

“I should have seen it,” Powers mumbled, his mind still on Baranov, the charmer, Baranov, the magic man, the Houdini.

“You’re talking about Jules and Asher last year? We’ve gone over it before, but I just don’t see the connection. It’s too farfetched. He’d have to have someone here. Someone either within the agency or certainly here in Washington with top-level sources.” Danielle had said it all before. “Trotter found nothing in the hijacking to suggest a larger plan. And he’s a damned good man. One of the best. Something would have shown up. We would have gotten at least a glimmer in Mexico City.”

That in itself was the most surprising, Powers thought. An operation this big would have had some fallout somewhere. Too many people would have to be involved for no leaks to occur. But where were they? No one had yet invented an airtight operation. But there’d been nothing. Not so much as a hint except for Jules and Asher. And except for the fact that eighteen months ago Baranov had allowed himself to be seen. Just once, in public. And Powers thought of it as “allowed” because Baranov never made mistakes. He was incapable of that kind of error. No, something else was missing. Powers could feel it. The battle was mounting, but he still had no idea what the final weapons might be, or even where the battlefield would be located except that an ugly dark cloud seemed to be rising in the south. Christ, Baranov had never, not ever, been as obvious as he was being now. There was more. But what did he want?

“Donald?” Danielle said gently.

Powers looked up and nodded. “I’ll see the president first thing in the morning. I want to get past Nicols’s broadcast schedule and then I want to see what the KH-10 picks up at dawn before I rush off half-cocked.”

“We know what will show up.”

“Yes, we do, Lawrence. And I’m afraid it’s going to get a lot worse than even we can imagine.”

21

Washington seemed empty and somehow very dangerous now to McGarvey. Dangerous for himself, dangerous for his ex-wife and daughter, dangerous in fact for anyone connected with this business. It was midafternoon by the time he arrived, rented a car at National Airport, and then fetched his few things from the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in the lee of Yarnell’s office building. Driving back across the river he could see the Capitol on the hill in his rearview mirror. The buildings, he thought, were fine and sturdy, but the institution — despite the fact it had survived for more than two hundred years — was in fact nearly as fragile as its weakest link. The thought gave him very little confidence about what might be coming. But, he tried to console himself, we had survived the Kennedy years, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban missile crisis; we’d even survived Nixon’s downfall.

He checked into the huge Marriott Hotel directly across from the Pentagon, where he took a shower, changed his clothes, and had a quick meal in the dining room. He kept seeing Owens’s palsied, thin hands, kept hearing the old man’s voice, kept smelling the rising sea wind; and finally he could see clearly in his mind’s eye the flames and sparks rising into the night sky.

Plónski and Owens were dead. Who would be next? And why? There was someone else involved here in Washington other than Yarnell. McGarvey could feel it. A sixth sense, a premonition, whatever.

The night was dark. A chill rain was falling. He had taken a taxi down to Arlington and had walked from St. Mary’s Academy in Monticello Park, watching over his shoulder, making absolutely certain that he was not being tailed. Since Long Island he had become very jumpy. There was absolutely no pedestrian traffic tonight on these streets which made him somewhat conspicuous. But so, too, would be a follower.

Reaching a curved avenue in Braddock Heights, he stayed well away from the streetlights, keeping as far into the shadows of the tall shrubberies and thick trees as possible. A car came up the street and turned into a driveway halfway up the block, the garage doors opening silently. He hung back until the car was inside and the garage doors closed before he continued. He heard a television playing in one of the houses and voices raised in anger. A window was open, or perhaps a door was ajar; he couldn’t see in the darkness.

A carriage light illuminated the driveway to number 224. It was a large, two-story brick house set well back from the street, and most of the ground-floor windows were lit up. McGarvey stopped a moment to make sure he wasn’t being observed, then he crossed the lawn and pushed open a gate in the tall wooden fence, following a walkway that led around back. Once inside he felt a lot safer. It wasn’t likely he’d be seen back here. The patio was bricked, the rear door was Dutch, with curtained windows in the upper half. He pushed the bell. From inside he could hear a chime. A moment later the patio lights came on.

The door opened and Trotter stood there peering out into the night. McGarvey stepped back a little, directly under the light so that there would be absolutely no mistaking who it was. He thought about double agents, about traitors, about murders, and liars, but Trotter, he thought, was the one person in the world he felt he could trust. Completely. At times the man was a fool, but he was honest.

“Kirk,” he said, opening the door wide and moving back. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here? Has something gone wrong?”

McGarvey stepped inside, and Trotter closed and locked the door.

Trotter was still wearing his tie. He’d exchanged his suit coat for a shawl-collared sweater, however, and his shoes for slippers. He smelled of brandy. From the front of the house music was playing; it sounded like Mahler to McGarvey, who was feeling jumpy. The kitchen was large and very modern. Trotter and his wife had been famous in the Washington area for their dinner parties here in this house. The spotless kitchen somehow seemed like a mausoleum.

“What’s wrong, Kirk?” Trotter asked again. “What are you doing here? Is it still raining out there? You look as if you’ve walked five miles.”

“Are you alone tonight, John?”

Trotter sucked a deep breath all at once as if he’d just had a very sharp pain. He let it out slowly. “I’m alone.”

“There’s been another killing. And you’re next … or me, or Leonard Day. It won’t stop.”

“Goddamn you,” Trotter said softly. His lips were red. Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead. McGarvey thought the man’s eyes were suddenly larger than normal. It made his old friend seem vulnerable somehow.

McGarvey unbuttoned his sodden overcoat and took it off. He looked for a place to hang it, then laid it on top of one of the tiled counters. Trotter was watching him as if he were from Mars. He didn’t want to become contaminated by some outer-space bug.

“Who was it this time?”

“Darrel Owens.”

“Yarnell’s supervisor from the old days?” Trotter asked. “Retired to upstate New York somewhere. Maybe Long Island. We looked at him, of course. But he was clean as far as we could tell.”

“I went to see him. Asked him about Yarnell. Told him I thought Yarnell had killed Roger Harris and was probably working for the Russians.”

“Bloody hell.”

“He wasn’t shocked. Called Yarnell a prick, in fact. And now he’s dead.”

“Did you see it, Kirk? Were you actually there? Did you see the body?”

“His house burned down.” McGarvey once again saw Owens standing at the door, walking up the beach, stopping and turning back, his eyes wide, his slight frame bent as if against a terrible wind. McGarvey wondered what he himself would look like at seventy, if he lived that long.

“You’re sure he was in the house? You’re absolutely sure he didn’t get out?”

“Yarnell is not working alone here.”

“The arrogant bastard.”

“He has help, John. Here in Washington. He knows too much. He’s too many places all at the same time, without moving from his spot.”

“What are.you saying to me? Just what is it you’re trying to tell me?”

“He knows about me. He knew I’d gone up to see Owens.”

“He has his army here, Kirk, you know that,” Trotter said quietly. “You were warned.”

“I wasn’t followed.”

“Can you be so certain?”

McGarvey nodded.

“How then? Even I didn’t know where you had gone off to. Leonard didn’t either. We’re not following you, Kirk. We’re not watching you. You have my word on it.”

“I know, John. It’s why I came to you like this. But you and Day both know what it is I’m after. Who else knows?”

Trotter drew himself up. “What are you getting at? Exactly, now.”

“Who else is in on this besides you, Day, and whoever you have manning your emergency switchboard?”

“He doesn’t know anything.”

“Who else, then? The bureau’s director? Do you report to him?”

“No one in the bureau.”

“What about Day? Who is he reporting to?”

“I don’t know. But even if he was reporting everything to the attorney general, and I’m not saying he is, Kirk, remember that; but even if he was, no one knew you were going to see Owens. We keep coming back to that.”

“If it had gotten back to the Company, someone there could have put it together.” McGarvey had figured it out on the flight down. “If anyone inside knew that I was going after Yarnell, and had an idea why, they could be second guessing me all the way, keeping an eye on my likely targets. Owens, as Yarnell’s boss from the old days, would have been one of the logical choices.”

Trotter saw it, too. It was written in his eyes. “And Plónski,” he said, as if he were afraid of the name. “Another logical choice.” He turned away. “But that would mean …”

“It means someone is working with Yarnell here in Washington. Someone besides Baranov, his Soviet control officer. Someone active within the CIA.”

“It would have to be someone high up. At least within operations.”

“Someone with an unlimited, unquestioned access to records, as well as operational plans and programs.”

Trotter finally turned back. His eyes were round and moist. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. He looked naked. “I’d have no idea who to trust over there, Kirk. Everyone I know, everyone I work with, is at high levels and therefore suspect.” Another thought struck him. “Christ, he might even have the ear of Powers himself.”

“Day is the conduit.”

“He’s not a spy, for God’s sake, Kirk. Not Day.”

“An unwitting source. This whole thing has him scared shitless. It’s only logical he’d be trying to cover his own ass.”

“So what can we do?”

“Lock him out. This is between you and me from this moment on, until I get my operation lined up.”

Trotter put on his glasses and peered myopically at McGarvey. He was shook. “You’re ready to … move?” His reticence just then was boyish.

“Not quite. But listen to me; when it comes, it may not be quite what you thought it would be.”

Trotter nodded his understanding. “You’re going after Yarnell’s source within the CIA as well.”

“That too.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s more here, John. Something else is going on, too. I have a feeling that whatever is happening at the moment with Yarnell and his Company source is part of an operation that we’ve either stumbled onto or that was set up just for our benefit.”

“What makes you say that? Christ, Kirk.” This was getting to be too much even for Trotter, but then he’d been thinking about Yarnell’s assassination; McGarvey was thinking about something else.

“Yarnell is still active, you know that.”

“It’s obvious …”

“But he hasn’t come after me. Just Janos, and then Owens. Nor is my ex-wife’s involvement simply happenstance.”

“That’s been going on for more than a year,” Trotter protested.

McGarvey nodded, a sour knot in his stomach. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, just how deeply they planned this thing. Whose idea was it, John, to hire me?”

“Mine.”

“Yours alone? Day had no say in it?”

Trotter was about to reply, but he held himself off. Thinking back to his conversations with Day. He shook his head after a moment. “Leonard suggested an outsider, but someone who knew the business intimately. Someone who wouldn’t be afraid to act. Someone we could trust.”

“So my name came up.”

“I brought it up, Kirk.”

“But Day approved your choice.”

“Yes,” Trotter said glumly. “Wholeheartedly.”

“Keep him insulated, John,” McGarvey said grabbing his coat.

“Where will you be?”

“Around. I’ll let you know when I have everything set up.” At the door McGarvey turned back. “One last thing. Have you any idea where Yarnell’s control officer, Baranov, is keeping himself these days? Moscow, perhaps?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could you find out for me without making waves, and without going through Day?”

“I’ll try, Kirk. But, Christ, be careful. This entire thing could blow up in our faces. I don’t want you jumping at shadows.”

“CESTA is no shadow.”

An odd expression came across Trotter’s features. “CESTA?” he asked.

“Baranov’s old network. Used to run it out of Mexico City. It’s where he and Yarnell presumably first met.”

Trotter nodded.

“Anyway, shadows don’t kill people, John.”

“No,” Trotter said absently. “No, I suppose they don’t.”

22

A low overcast sky hung over Manhattan, threatening a cold rain at any time; traffic was frantic even for a weekday. This was McGarvey’s third trip back to New York since he’d returned from Switzerland, and this time he had even fewer illusions in his sparse kit after talking with Owens and then Trotter. He had taken a cab directly in from La Guardia Airport, crossing beneath the East River through the Midtown Tunnel and taking the FDR Drive down to Houston Street before heading across town. It was much quieter in the Village. Two young men wearing unlaced combat boots, dirty blue jeans, and leather jackets, their hair cut extremely short, walked arm-in-arm along Houston toward Broadway. He had spent a restless night at the Marriott Twin Bridges and then had taken the shuttle up. Before he left he had called Trotter at his office without giving his name. Trotter had not been happy, but he had understood what McGarvey wanted. “Mexico City,” he said, and McGarvey hung up, pleased with the fast work. Evidently he’d finally gotten to his old friend; Trotter finally was beginning to understand the real problem. Yarnell had been a Soviet agent in Mexico City in the old days. There was little doubt of it. And he had probably murdered Roger Harris in Cuba. There wasn’t much doubt about that either. But Trotter had begun to understand that Yarnell was most likely still active, and that besides his control officer, Baranov, who now apparently had returned to the helm of CESTA in Mexico City, Yarnell had someone else working with him in the States. Most likely in Washington. Merely killing him would do little more than ruffle a few feathers in Moscow; it certainly would not end the network.

Broome Street was quiet. McGarvey paid the cabbie when they got to West Broadway and Grand, and walked back. He’d brought his shoulder bag, which he had checked through on the flight so that he could take his pistol. On the way in the cab he had taken it out of his bag. It felt heavy, but comforting now. A greengrocer’s truck was parked in front of St. Christopher’s. A thick-chested man chewing a cigar and wearing a long dirty apron was loading boxes of lettuce and tomatoes for the club onto a hand truck. The front door was propped open. McGarvey hesitated a moment across the street. The club looked very quiet. No one was around except for the delivery man. Upstairs in Evita’s salon, the curtains were open, but he could see nothing of the inside. He crossed the street and entered the club. The vestibule was open, but no one was around. From within, though, he thought he heard someone talking, a second later a piano started up. It took a moment before he recognized the tune, Stardust. Whoever was playing was very good and played with a lot of emotion and sadness. He went through the frosted-glass doors into the cabaret. Two women sat at the bar; they were eating something. A maintenance man was atop a very tall stepladder doing something to one of the big ceiling fans. He climbed down. Evita Perez, dressed in a pair of baggy shorts, an old sweatshirt, no shoes on her feet, was on the tiny stage playing the piano. Owens had thought she had a lot of talent. Evidently he had meant it literally as well as figuratively.

No one paid any attention to him as he crossed the main floor, dropped his bag on one of the chairs, and perched on the edge of a table just below the stage. He lit a cigarette while she finished playing. She looked pretty good even in the daylight, he decided. Her hair was up, exposing her long, delicate neck. A few lines marked the sides of her cheeks and she had developed just a hint of a double chin, but her arms and legs were still very slim and her feet were surprisingly small and nicely formed. A glass of champagne was sitting on the piano, and the half-empty bottle was next to it.

“Hello, Evita,” he called softly to her when she was finished.

She turned to him. Her eyes were very large, but there was no surprise in them. “What are you doing here?” she asked quietly.

“I wanted to finish our talk while you had the time for it,” he said. “There were a lot of things I wanted to ask you. A lot of ground to cover. I wasn’t sure about some of what you told me.”

“There is no time for you here. I can telephone the police, or I can call for Harry. He’s a man you wouldn’t want to know.”

“I need your help.”

She nodded. “So do the starving kids in Ethiopia. Nothing I can do for them, or for you.”

“Maybe if you’d listen to what I have to say, you’d change your mind.”

“I don’t think so. Get the hell out of here, would you? Now.”

“An old man by the name of Owens was murdered two nights ago. He was Darby’s old boss.”

Evita was holding onto the edge of the piano bench so tightly her knuckles were turning white.

“I talked to him. He told me about Mexico City and about you. And he told me about Darby’s days afterward, in Washington and then in Moscow. He was afraid of your husband. I think Darby was sleeping with his wife.”

“Christ,” Evita swore in disgust. She jumped up. “Harry!” she shouted. “Harry!”

McGarvey glanced over his shoulder just as a huge black man, his shoulders bursting out of a white T-shirt, stepped around from behind the bar. The two women had turned and were looking over.

“Yo,” he called out in a deep baritone voice.

McGarvey tried his last card. He didn’t want a fight with Harry, who looked as if he could tear down a large house with his bare hands. “Did you know that Baranov is back in Mexico City?” he asked Evita. “I have that for a fact.” He glanced again toward the bar. The big man was clenching his fists. He looked like a small Sherman tank painted chocolate brown.

Evita was suddenly trembling as if she had just stepped out of a very cold bath directly in front of an open window.

“A lot of innocent people have already been hurt,” McGarvey said.

She looked down at him, her lips pursed. She shook her head. “There are no innocent people, don’t you know that?” She looked up. “Hold my calls, Harry,” she shouted. “I’m going to be in conference for the rest of the morning.”

“You got it,” her bouncer said. He went back behind the bar. The two women went back to their breakfast.

Evita came down from the stage. “Where did you hear this, about Baranov?”

“I have my sources. But it’s true.”

She studied his eyes for a long time, then turned away as if she were resigning herself to some very bad news. “I knew he was going back down there. I saw him. Here, in New York, you know. Maybe nine or ten months ago.”

McGarvey suppressed his excitement. He had inadvertently stumbled onto another aspect of this business; her relationship with the Russian. Yarnell was at the center of this mess, of course, and he apparently had help at high levels in Washington, but Baranov was the key; at least he was as far as concerned Evita Perez. His was more than the name of a Russian spymaster to her. He could see her involvement written all over her face, in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders, in the way she held herself as if she were reliving the pain of a very old, very deep injury.

“We’d better go upstairs,” she said at length.

McGarvey picked up his overnight bag, followed her across the cabaret floor, and went up the stairs to her apartment-salon. At the top she closed and locked the door.

“Fix yourself a drink,” she said. “I’ll take champagne.” She turned and disappeared into the back.

McGarvey dropped his bag at the end of one of the couches, took off his overcoat, laying it aside, and went to the bar. He mixed himself a bourbon and water, and found a split of Mumms for her, which he uncorked and poured. When she came back she had changed into a thin yellow cotton dress, let her hair down, and put on a little makeup. The change was startling. She looked almost beautiful and certainly very seductive. He could clearly see the shape of her nipples through the material of the dress. She sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace, tucked her legs up beneath her, and accepted the glass of champagne. There was some expectation in her eyes, but he could see that she had girded herself for a difficult time ahead. Difficult but necessary.

“You’re out to get Hizzoner, Darby,” Evita said.

“I think your husband was and is a spy,” McGarvey said.

“Ex-husband, let’s keep that part straight right from the beginning, shall we?”

“His Soviet control officer has been and still is Valentin Baranov.”

Evita laughed disparagingly. “You think you know so fucking much. You don’t know a thing. Nothing.”

“I’ve come to you for help,” McGarvey said, quite calmly. “I’d hate like hell, you know, to see you deported back to Mexico. Baranov is there. He’d take over.”

“Who are you trying to kid?”

McGarvey measured his next words. He watched her carefully, especially her eyes and her hands as they gripped the champagne glass. He was looking for her vulnerable spot.

“You’d probably never see your daughter again if you were sent away,” he said. “I saw her in Washington a few days ago. She’s living with her father. Quite a beautiful young woman. A lot like you.”

“You sonofabitch,” Evita swore. “You bastard.”

She wanted to speak Spanish. McGarvey could hear it in the way she chopped her words. English was far too slow for her, yet she must have figured Spanish would be lost on him.

“I came here trying to avoid all of this,” McGarvey said sitting forward. “Believe me. I think Darby has used every person he’s ever come in contact with. Including you. Including your daughter.”

It was a heavy thought for her. The weight of it seemed to press down upon her, causing her shoulders to sag, her back to bend a little; even the weight of the champagne glass became too much for her and she rested it on her lap.

“Is she a pretty girl, do you think? I haven’t seen her in so long. She doesn’t know me any longer. Whatever Darby tells her is true. She has stars in her eyes.” Evita shook her head, looking inward. “Who wouldn’t? I don’t know anyone who could resist him. His charm. He’s so damned self-assured, no matter what he says you have to believe him. You know?”

“Is he still working for the Russians?” McGarvey asked gently. “For Baranov?”

Evita looked up. “Have you met my … have you met Darby? Have you come face-to-face with him? Have you spent a few minutes listening to him?”

“No.”

“I thought not. You don’t talk as if you were one of his initiates.” She drank her champagne nervously. “I don’t know what you’re doing here.”

“When is the last time you saw him?”

“A long time ago. Not long enough …”

“You mentioned that Baranov had come here. You saw him? You met with him?”

“How can you think you know Darby without meeting him?” Evita asked. “I want to know that. I don’t think you know a goddamned thing about him, see. I think you’re guessing.”

“I’m guessing, you’re right about that much. But I think he killed a very good friend of mine. Or at least I think he had my friend killed. I don’t suspect there is a lot more that I want to know about him, except for his relationship with Baranov.”

“You really think Darby is a spy?”

“Yes.”

“You think he is a murderer? You think he was working for Valentin?”

“Yes. I think he’s still working for him.”

She laughed again. “Listen to me. Darby doesn’t have, nor has he ever had, enough dedication to anything or anyone other than himself to become a spy,” she explained. “You say he worked for Valentin? It’s true, you know, in the old days. But it was also true that he turned in absolutely top-rate intelligence to his own people. To your people, you know. The agency. The Company. Our Father who art in Langley …”

“But he worked for Baranov.”

“He was in love with Valentin. We all were.”

“Still?”

“What do you want?”

“You told me downstairs that Baranov had come here nine or ten months ago. What did he want?”

“Old times …”

“What’d he want?” McGarvey insisted. “You were in love with him, too. Did he come here to …”

“Yes!” she asked defiantly, her head up.

“Did you and he make love? For old times’ sake?”

“What kind of a fucked up question is that?” Evita jumped up, flinging her champagne glass toward the fireplace. “What did you come here for? What do you want? I don’t care what you think, you know. Darby gave himself and then he gave me. But that’s all there is to it. There’s where you don’t understand anything. He never gave a damn about anything or anyone. Not about me, not really about Baranov, not about his bosses in Langley. None of it. It was nothing more than a big game to him. He was playing chess, only it was with real people. But he didn’t care.” …

McGarvey understood what frightened her now, and the sudden understanding did nothing for his dour mood, nor for his satisfaction.

“Get out of here,” she said, turning away from him. She went to the window, where the bar was set up on a sideboard. She looked outside, but he didn’t think she was really seeing anything. She was looking inward again. “Just … just go away,” she said.

“Baranov came here ten months ago looking for something, Ms. Perez,” McGarvey said softly. “Now you think it’s a real possibility that Darby is going to give him your daughter.”

Evita said something very fast in Spanish, but the only word McGarvey caught was amor, which means love, and she hung her head and began to weep, her back bent, her head bowed, big racking sobs shaking her narrow shoulders. There was nothing he could do for her; he supposed she was crying not only for her daughter but for her own lost youth, and for the golden days, as Owens had described them, when she and Darby Yarnell were the hottest item in Mexico City. But that was ten thousand years ago, and now she probably thought of herself as an old lady. Her daughter was apparently next on the sacrificial altar Darby had built with the blood and tears of those nearest to him. McGarvey could not leave now, though. He’d come this far, and so had Evita. They would have to share the entire story, for better or for worse.

Evita had come back to the couch. She sat erect, her knees primly together as if she were a schoolgirl prepared to recite her lessons. The room was quiet and McGarvey could hear the vagrant noises of the building: an elevator rising, someone laughing in the distance, a door slamming. Ordinary sounds that punctuated an extraordinary situation. As she talked, she watched the flames in the fireplace.

“I was just twenty, and he was the finest man I had ever seen or even imagined could exist,” she said. “My parents loved him, my friends were jealous of me — they secretly adored him — and we had dinner at the President’s Palace at least once a month. It was a dream.”

“You were much younger than he.”

She smiled in remembrance. “In Mexico in those days that did not matter.” The x in Mexico was silent. As she continued she began to revert more and more into Spanish pronunciations.

It was a traditional courtship, she said. Darby had never tried to rush it, although she got the feeling at the time that she was racing headlong down a slick but wonderful toy slide. They were the feted guests wherever they appeared; he knew more people in Mexico than did her parents: Her mother was the third daughter of the governor of the State of Hidalgo, northwest of Mexico City, and her father was the assistant secretary of finance for the federal government. After their honeymoon, though, they seldom spent a quiet evening at home together. Either they went out or there was a crowd at their palatial home outside the city. Sometimes they went to the mountains, sometimes to the seaside, but wherever they went after that there was always a crowd around them. Darby, she said, called them his mob.

“One month later Baranov came into our lives,” Evita said. “But I think he and Darby were already old friends by that time.”

If her husband was a charming man, she said, Valentin Illen Baranov was a simply bewitching human being. He was short and powerfully built, with a thick, square head and dark, bushy eyebrows. But after five minutes of conversation with the man you would forget his physical person and seem to see through to his soul. He was a power, a force, an adrenaline in even the most casual of encounters.

“When was that, exactly?” McGarvey asked. “Late ’59? Maybe 1960.”

“I don’t know, but it was in the winter, I think. Around Christmas. I came into Darby’s study and they were having drinks together. Filthy vodka. ‘A peasant’s drink,’ Valentin called it.” She raised her eyes, a small smile on her moist lips. “He always said he was a peasant, and when it was time for him to retire, if he lived that long, he would go back to the land. Somewhere in the Urals. He made it sound lovely.”

Darby was a little put out that she had barged in, she said. But Baranov was a charmer; jumping up, bowing, kissing her hand. “Oh, yes, Darby, you do have a lovely wife indeed,” he’d said. The words were sticky sweet, but Evita said she always got the impression he meant everything he said. Every single word. He insisted that she stay. It was nothing more than the conversation of two old friends getting to know each other a little better. He wouldn’t let Evita drink vodka, though, or any other hard liquor for that matter. Champagne was her drink. Sweet for in the morning, a little dryer for afternoon, and the Sahara Desert of champagnes — as only the French truly know how to make them — for the evenings.

They all went out that evening. Baranov insisted on showing them off. He’d heard a lot of good things about Evita, of course, and now that he had seen for his own eyes that what he’d heard was not an exaggeration, he wanted a little of her glitter to rub off on him.

“We always had a lot of friends in those days,” Evita said. “Mostly Mexican government officials at first. But shortly after Valentin’s first visit, we started chumming around with other couples from our own embassy.”

“Other CIA?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Though at the time I didn’t know it. I didn’t even know that Darby worked for the Company. That didn’t come until later.”

“How did you find out?”

“Valentin told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“That Darby worked for the CIA, and that he also worked for … KGB.”

“And that they worked together?”

She nodded. “That too.”

“Did he mention anyone else? Another American working with them both?”

“Not that I can remember. But he was proud of himself. Proud of the relationship. He wasn’t any older than Darby, or at least not much, but he was more like a father to him than a friend. A father confessor, his priest.”

“And for you, Evita?” McGarvey asked gently.

She looked at him, her eyes wide, but she said nothing.

“What was Baranov to you? What did he become to you?”

“My husband’s friend.”

“That’s it?”

“What do you want?” she flared, but it wasn’t very convincing. Her emotions were by now rubbed beyond the point of simply raw. She was overloaded. The majority of the hurt might have happened more than twenty years ago, but the pain was still very fresh and very real to her.

“What was your husband’s reaction to this?” McGarvey asked.

“To what?”

“To your knowledge that he was working for the KGB as well as the CIA?”

“He said it wasn’t true ….”

“But he admitted that Baranov was KGB?”

“Of course. But he told me that not everything was as it seemed. There was more in this world than simple black and white. He kept talking about geopolitics and balances of power. We were on a teeterboard; Western democracy on the one side, and Russian Communism on the other, with nuclear weapons in the middle.”

McGarvey had heard the argument before. The Soviet Union and her satellite states were balanced by the Western European nations. It was important that the United States and Canada be balanced by Cuba and others in the Western Hemisphere. Only in this way could nuclear war be safely avoided. It was why the Russians had called the Cuban missiles “peace missiles.”

“Did you believe him?”

“What did I know? I told you I was a little girl with stars in my eyes. But already Darby was beginning to change, you know. He was busy. He was gone a lot those days. If I was at our town house, he might spend a weekend in the mountains, leaving me behind. Business, he said. Or if I was at the mountains, he might go to the seashore for a week, sometimes even longer.”

Baranov began coming around, then. He took her out to dinner once, and afterward to the Ateneo Español, but the place frightened her. They were real revolutionaries, radicals who talked endlessly about shooting and burning and tearing down the establishments. They all had a great deal of respect for Valentin in that place, but he promised never to take her back. He was sensitive to her needs. McGarvey suspected he had been digging a deeper hole into which Evita would eventually be dropped once she realized what was and had been happening around her.

Everything else seemed to change then for Evita. She’d become an American, her parents told her. And her father died within ten months of the wedding. Darby was sent out of town at that exact moment; exactly when she needed him more than she’d ever needed anyone in her life. Her final lesson came the very evening of the funeral.

Valentin was there at the house, Evita said. It was late, her sisters had stayed with their mother, and she had gotten the feeling that they didn’t really want her there with them, that her place was at home waiting for her husband as any good wife should. Her father was dead, her husband was gone, and the rest of the family was beginning to ostracize her.

He was waiting in the conservatory, Evita’s favorite room in the house. He had dismissed the staff for the evening. He knew that she would be coming back, and he even knew in which room she would bury herself when she did return, so he had set it up for her return with champagne and flowers. She asked him what he was doing there like that, at that hour, but she was secretly glad he had come, whatever the reason. The champagne was Mumms, the very driest, he said. He poured her a glass and watched her drink, even held her hand for a time while she cried. He talked then about dying; about the old moving aside to make room for the young and how it was the responsibility of the young therefore to make a difference in the world, to make life just a little nicer, a little safer, so that when it was time to hand things over to the next generation we could be proud to do so. As her father must have been proud to do for her, in the end.

“I don’t know what I would have done that night without him there,” Evita told McGarvey, her eyes glistening.

McGarvey lit a cigarette and handed it to her. She accepted it gratefully. The gesture made him think of Owens. The two of them — Evita and Owens — had a lot in common; both of them had been badly abused by Darby Yarnell, and in the end by Baranov.

It wouldn’t be easy, Valentin had told her, keeping up appearances, keeping a stiff upper lip, keeping up with their work. She was one of them now, and even if her father could not have known what great services she would perform, Valentin did, and he was very proud of her. Then he had a glass of wine with her, and somehow, ridiculously, she was in his strong, wonderfully gentle arms. He smelled clean of soap and of cologne, and of wool and leather. (Which was odd, McGarvey thought, for a Russian. But then Baranov, by all accounts, was not an ordinary Russian.)

“He told me that I should just let go. That if I needed strength he had plenty for me, and for Darby, too. I thought he had enough strength then for the entire world. ‘Trust in me, Evita,’ he said to me. ‘I will always be there for you. No matter where. No matter why.’ Goddamnit, I believed him, you know.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I believed in him all the way.”

And still did, at least in some measure, McGarvey thought.

Baranov took her to the big bedroom that looked toward the glittering city in the distance where he gently undressed her, telling her all the while that he was proud of her, that Darby would understand, that all of us needed to gain strength from someone else from time to time, there was no dishonor in it for either of them. He, too, needed strength. And he was so different from Darby, the only other man who had ever touched her. She had such a terribly infinite need that there was a fire in her head that would have been impossible to quench in any other way, even with Darby himself, had he been there. They made love, or rather, she said, Valentin made love to her. She was like a puppet beneath him; he pulled every string, and he knew exactly which strings to pull, and his touch was perfection.

She stopped in midsentence and looked up again, realizing perhaps for the first time who she was talking to and just what she’d been saying.

“Goddamnit to hell,” she said without anger.

“He is a very bad man, Evita,” McGarvey suggested. “What happened was not your fault.”

“But I loved it, don’t you see? I even loved the danger. But it wasn’t enough in the end. I wasn’t nearly enough for them. But then they had each other.”

23

Evita got up and put on some music. It was Spanish classical guitar, very good, very sad, very distant. They sat across from each other, smoking cigarettes, drinking, listening to the music, allowing the music to soothe, in a measure, the embarrassment she’d felt by her admission of faithlessness not only to her husband, but to the new system she’d embraced with her marriage: the U.S.A.

“It wasn’t all so black and white,” Evita explained. “You don’t live your life, ordinarily, thinking how history will judge you. It happens hour by hour, sometimes second by second. Am I going to be prosecuted for it after all these years? Are you a real cop after all? Are you going to try to arrest me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you are after Darby.”

“Yes,” McGarvey said.

“And Valentin?”

“Him too.”

“You might have said him especially. He is the devil. But I don’t think it will happen. He’s too smart, and he has too many friends. He told me an old Russian saying once: ‘Before a fight two men are boasting; afterward only one.’ It will be him in the end who will do the boasting. You’ll see.”

“Not if you help me,” McGarvey said earnestly, sitting forward.

She laughed. “What, a disenfranchised cop and me, a drug addict?”

McGarvey listened to her in utter amazement. She did not know his real name, she did not know who he worked for or what he was after, she did not know a thing about his background, he was just a face professing to know something about her past, and yet she’d called him a “disenfranchised cop.”

Had she been waiting for him, or someone like him, to show up all this time? Had Baranov predicted he, or someone like him, would come sniffing around her as if she were a bitch in heat. Did Yarnell attract that type? Or had the remark simply been coincidental? Was he jumping at straws? Christ, how did one know in this business; everyone lied about practically everything, to practically everyone. A great depression seemed to settle on him. He thought about all the women in his life. His mother, his sister, his ex-wife, his Swiss girlfriend, and now Evita Perez. There wasn’t one of them in the bunch who’d liked him for what he was, or who had told him the complete truth about anything.

McGarvey sat back, his feet propped up on a white lacquered coffee table, willing himself to remain calm.

“That shocks you, I see,” Evita said, moistening her lips. She stood up and got a small silver box from the mantel. She brought it back and opened it, taking out a tiny mirror, a razor blade, a tiny golden straw, and a small vial. She smiled. “There are worse habits,” she said. She opened the vial, carefully tamped out a tiny bit of cocaine on the surface of the mirror, then closed the vial and replaced it in the silver box. Her movements were very slow, very deliberate, very precise; she was a chemist working with a precious substance in an important experiment. She was overcoming her guilt and paranoia with a certain belligerence. She cut three lines of coke and quickly bent down sniffing a line up her right nostril with a practiced hand. She waited a moment, then sniffed the second line up her left nostril and immediately the third up her right again. She sat back with a long, languorous sigh. Her eyes were shining.

She put the paraphernalia back in the box, and then took her time about replacing the box on the mantel. She’d done something fine. She was becoming cocky. She even swaggered a little. “What else do you want to know, Glynn, or whoever you really are?”

“Darby came home eventually. He must have known that something had happened,” McGarvey said. “What did he say to you?”

“What happened after that, you want to know.” She came back and sat down on the couch, pulling her dress above her knees so that she could sit cross-legged. “Valentin was a much better lover than Darby. And Darby was damned good, you know. It was grand for a while. When Darby was in town Valentin got scarce. But when Darby was gone, Valentin was there. Sometimes Darby would hardly be out of the driveway and Valentin would be coming up in his big, flashy Buick with all the chrome. Never saw it dirty. Must have had a boy or someone polish it every day. Wouldn’t let me smoke in that car. He was proud of his cigarette lighter. It had never been used. You could see it was new. He’d pull it out and show it off.”

“What did you do for him?” McGarvey asked. With her legs spread he could see everything. She wore no panties. He averted his eyes. She laughed.

“For Valentin? Nothing much. Attended a few meetings. Waited once in his car for him outside the Ateneo Español. He said he wanted to talk to someone. But mostly we went dancing, and sometimes we went to parties.”

“Just you and Valentin?”

“Sometimes Darby and I would go to a party. But if I was with Valentin it meant Darby was gone. He was seeing other women, of course, Darby was. He’s always had his women on the side, so I didn’t feel so goddamned bad.”

“Who was at these parties that you went to with Baranov, then? Americans? Mexicans? Russians?”

“Yes. And Bulgarians and Spaniards and a few Cubans from time to time. I met Uncle Fidel when he was just a piss ant lawyer. He was nothing big in those days.”

“Americans?” he asked again.

“Some.”

“CIA?”

Evita shrugged. “I never asked. They were good times. Everyone was having a lot of fun. Sometimes we’d fly over to Acapulco … that was before it became really big. Sometimes we’d fly over to Cancun on the Gulf Coast. One night we had a picnic, a bunch of us, in front of a Mayan pyramid. We went up to the top, just Valentin and me, and we made love there. I was an offering to the gods. That’s what he told me.”

“Did you love him?” McGarvey asked gently.

She smiled dreamily and leaned her head back, her eyes toward the ceiling, her lips parted, her hands on her lap as if she were in some yoga position. “Maybe if you explained what that word means …” She drifted. “I used to know, but then it seemed to change. Every time I thought I had it, it would change again. Damndest thing, you know. There weren’t any answers anywhere … not even in the Mayan temple. Even the old ones didn’t know. So who was I, a lesser mortal, to figure it out? Darby wanted me sometimes. I understood that. Valentin wanted me at other times. I understood that, too. But it didn’t last very long.”

She’d been a little girl looking for love and security, McGarvey thought. What she’d gotten instead were lies and manipulation. Owens had seen the confusion and unhappiness in the girl, and it had made him angry at his student, at his superstar. Life was filled with disappointments, though. He didn’t know anyone who was guiltless, or anyone who had never suffered.

After the revolution came to Cuba and Castro installed himself in office, Mexico City cooled down for a time. Baranov stopped bringing her past the Ateneo Español to wait for him while he talked with friends. Even the nightlife seemed subdued compared to what it had once been. People had become more serious, Evita said. She had been flying high, and she began to come down. A week, or sometimes two, might pass during which she would see neither her husband nor Baranov. She had no idea where either of them were getting themselves off to in those days (later she learned that Baranov was bouncing back and forth between Mexico and Moscow, while Darby was commuting on a weekly basis between Mexico and Washington, D.C.). She did know that they were very busy. When they were together, she said, they seemed preoccupied, distant, as if only a part of them had returned to her. Big things were in the wind, she knew at least that much. And a year later, when the Bay of Pigs story broke in all the newspapers, she’d known what her husband and Baranov had been up to all that time, but by then, of course, she had been installed in their Washington house, and she became pregnant with Juanita. After that she rarely saw her husband, and only once in that first year, shortly after her daughter was born, did she see Baranov.

“I was a widow, but I was too dumb to realize it at the time,” she told McGarvey, sitting up. Already she was starting to come down from her coke high. Her tolerance was up. McGarvey figured she probably had a pretty heavy habit for it to work off so fast. She’d probably be on crack before too long. The cycle was common from what he’d read about it.

What about the three houses in Mexico? The town house that Owens had called a palace, the mountain house, the beach house? She had never gotten herself involved with the finances of their marriage. Darby was a more than adequate provider. She never wanted for anything. The bills were always paid, their house staff in Mexico City and again in Washington, operated a household account which took care of their physical needs, and five thousand dollars was automatically deposited into her own checking account each month. If she’d wanted more, even twice that amount, she knew that Darby would have given it to her, no questions asked. Not once in the years they were together had she ever balanced her checkbook, or even noted a check in the register. There simply was no need for it. Such work, when she first came to New York, was so alien to her, so outside the realm of her ordinary knowledge, that she immediately hired an accountant who did it all for her, and who was still doing things with numbers to keep her afloat. She was even quite prosperous in her own right, she’d been told a couple of years ago. But money meant nothing to her. It never had meant anything to her. She had wanted a relationship, plain and simple. It’s all she’d ever wanted, really.

“There were a lot of years there when I was alone, raising Juanita. And I didn’t mind being alone. Not really. Mexico City had been fun, but now I was a mother. That to me was a million times more important than all the little intrigues and schemes we’d played. I don’t think I even read a newspaper or looked at a news show for five years. I had my own little world raising my daughter, and I was content in it.”

“No friends?” McGarvey asked.

“I didn’t need any. Darby would breeze in every now and then. We’d get dressed up and make the rounds of the Washington parties. But it never lasted very long. A weekend, sometimes a little longer. Never more than a week. Which was fine with me. I’m telling you, I was done with that life. Completely done with it.” Her eyes glistened.

“But you still loved him. Your husband.”

“I wanted to, believe me, I wanted nothing more than to be in love with my husband and him with me.”

“And Valentin Baranov?”

“Sure,” she said noncommittally, glancing toward the silver box on the mantel. “Him too.”

McGarvey got up and poured Evita a fresh glass of champagne and himself another bourbon and water. It was still morning down on the street. He felt as if he’d actually lived through those twenty years with her since he’d come up here. But then it was an occupational hazard. He’d been a specialist at attaching himself to other people’s lives; listening to them, watching them, reading their mail and their personal notes, their diaries, even their shopping lists. Seeing where they had been, what they were up to now and in which directions they were likely to go in the future. He knew their schedules and routines, their habits and pet complaints. He got to know some people so well that like any competent biographer, he could lay out his subject’s life better than the subject could. Along with this occupational hazard or vice or whatever came another gift; he could tell when people were lying to him by commission, but especially if they lied by omission. Evita had left a gap a mile and a half wide back there sometime between the preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion and her move to Washington, D.C. Something had happened in Mexico City, something terrible, something that irrevocably changed her life, transformed her overnight from a still-naive little girl to a hardened woman for whom isolation in a large city in a foreign land without her husband or any other emotional support was no particular strain. In fact, like a fallen princess who seeks the convent for solace, she had gotten along quite well in her solitude. She was content, she’d said, to remain alone in Washington raising her daughter without friends, without worries, without concerns. But it didn’t last.

“I sent Juanita away to boarding school when she was thirteen,” Evita explained.

“Why?”

“I went through a bad period there. She was growing up without a father. There was a lot I didn’t know. A lot I couldn’t give her. I knew that much.”

“Did you get to see her very much in those days?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, pushing her hair back away from her eyes. A car horn honked outside, startling her. She glanced toward the window then looked away guiltily. “But not enough. She was starting to ask questions that I couldn’t answer ….”

They drank their drinks. The band had started to practice downstairs. They could hear the hard thumps of the drums and the harsh notes of the trumpet.

McGarvey had come this far and had only got half the story. He wasn’t going to leave without the rest of it. But there was something from her past, something from Mexico City that had shamed her, that had frightened her and had made her grown up all at once. He suspected she’d been trying to bury it all these years.

“Something happened to you in Mexico City, Evita,” he said. “Before you moved up to Washington. Before you got pregnant with Juanita. I think it’s important.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she flared.

She was crashing from her coke high, and already she’d gone too far with him, answered too many of his questions, revealed too much of her past to him for her to stop now. Her resistance had very nearly totally collapsed.

It was a strange year during which she had tried to ingratiate herself with her family, she said. She spent a lot of time with her mother and with her sister. But it wasn’t the same any longer, and she’d known at the time that she had crossed some invisible bridge, not only because she had married an American, but because of her infidelity. Her mother had looked into her eyes and had seen as clearly as if it was written there. It was a thing she was incapable of hiding from someone who had known her so well. Her sister knew or suspected, too, that something was amiss. She became terribly busy that year, too busy with her own family for Evita, which added still another burden in a load that was rapidly becoming impossible to hold up let alone carry. “Get on your knees and ask forgiveness from God,” her mother told her. But by then she figured it was already too late for her. She was a spy and an adultress. How could there be any forgiveness for her? For a time she traveled, moving from their city house to their mountain chalet, where she would stay for a month or a week or sometimes for just a day. Then she would pack a few things in her sports car and drive recklessly fast down to their house on the sea, where she would isolate herself even from the house staff, sometimes remaining in her room for days on end, eating only a small meal every second or third day so that she lost a lot of weight. She began to be sick all the time. Her movements became erratic. She traveled all over Mexico. Sometimes staying at their homes, sometimes in luxury hotels, sometimes in terrible, dirty, bug-infested village inns from which she would come away even sicker than before. She was trying to find herself. Trying to make some sense out of her life. And not doing a very good job of it.

McGarvey didn’t know how he could help her. He wanted to reach out and take her into his arms and hold her close and tell her that those times were long past, that memories alone could not hurt her, not really. But he suspected she was beyond even that sort of comfort.

Evita was staring past him into the fireplace, her eyes filling, tears running slowly down her cheeks as she relived the personal hell she’d been subjected to. She could have been alone in the room for all that she was aware of his presence.

“Evita?” he said gently.

She blinked and nodded.

“I was no longer a mexicana, don’t you see?” she said. “I had lost my country, but I hadn’t found a new home. Not yet. I was alone. Drifting. Darby and Valentin had both left me, though I hadn’t realized it yet.” She closed her eyes.

“What happened to you down there?”

“I got my education, didn’t you hear?” she whispered. “I saw my family and my country as a gringo would see them, as a foreigner would see them, and what I found wasn’t very pretty. Especially the part where everyone was looking back at me. I had become a stranger in my own land, and my own people looked at me like I was a foreigner. I’d been to the north and to the south. I’d been west to the Pacific and to the ancient East. But there was nothing left for me. Nothing at all.” She held out her glass. “I’d like more champagne.”

“Don’t you have a show tonight?” McGarvey asked.

“More.”

McGarvey poured her another glass of wine and brought it back to her. He lit her a cigarette. He was getting a little worried about her. Between the wine and the cocaine she was very strung out.

“What happened, Evita?” he asked. “What did they do to you down there?”

“I walked in on Valentin and Darby,” she said. “They were together in my bed making love to each other.”

McGarvey had expected almost anything except that, but although he was startled he did not allow it to show on his face. Baranov was a powerful man. He’d heard it a dozen different ways now, and still he had not begun to suspect just how powerful and dedicated a man the Russian was until now. Baranov had got Yarnell to spy for him and had then cemented the relationship by seducing first his wife and then Yarnell himself. He had ruined them both as a couple and both, ultimately, as individuals. Yarnell the superstar had met his match, and Evita the naive little Mexican princess had succumbed simply as a matter of course. Her turning had to have been ridiculously easy. Hardly a challenge for the likes of Yarnell or Baranov. Yet they had taken the time and effort to do it. Why? Yarnell because he wanted an image during his tenure in Mexico. But why Baranov? What more could he have hoped to have gained by seducing first the wife and then the husband … unless Yarnell had made a desperate attempt to control the situation instead of himself being controlled? If that had been his battle, he had lost. Yet later, in Washington and then in Moscow, Yarnell had comported himself as the perfect spy. He hardly faltered. By then Baranov’s control had probably been so utterly complete that Yarnell was no longer even thinking for himself. And poor little Evita had been left behind in the dust. So why pick on her again? She’d said Baranov had been here less than a year ago.

“He wanted Darby and me to get back together,” she said. “Because we both needed each other, we both were drifting and there was more to life than that. He came here in the middle of the night and let himself in. The first I knew he was here was when I woke up with him in bed beside me. And we made love. He still knows me. Knows my body, which buttons to push, which chains to rattle. And I enjoyed it, do you understand? It was wonderful. Had he asked me, I would have run off with him anywhere. Even to Moscow.”

“But he didn’t ask.”

“No.”

“What then, Evita? Why did he come here? What did he want?”

She looked away.

“What did he say to you?”

“He told me about you.”

“By name?”

“No. He said that someone who had once been in the Company would be coming around asking questions about him and about Darby. He was specific in that you no longer worked for the Company. You don’t, do you?”

“No,” McGarvey said.

“He told me that I should tell you everything. That I should be completely honest with you.”

“Except about his visit.”

She closed her eyes. “He never knew that I saw him and Darby together. He knows everything except for that. It’s been my own secret.”

She was getting back at Baranov. Now, after all these years, she had finally struck a blow at the man who in her estimation had ruined her marriage. It was the real reason she had talked to McGarvey. Or at least one of the reasons. There was another. Fear.

“Now he wants Juanita, doesn’t he?”

Evita opened her eyes. “You bastard!” she said with a lot of feeling. “You sonofabitch! You’re all alike.”

“Darby will give her up to save his own position and you know it.”

“She’s all that’s left, don’t you see? Darby went up to school and charmed her. She fell under his spell, and she never comes here anymore, never calls, never writes.”

“Then we’ll have to stop them both. You’ll help me.”

“It’s impossible. They’re old pros, both of them. What chance would I have? What chance did I ever have?”

“None, unless you try.”

“Try,” she said disdainfully. Her lower lip was quivering again. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know them. Darby alone could have held the Alamo. With Valentin’s help they’re impossible to beat. They know everything. They’ve each got their armies. Impossible.”

McGarvey could hear again Darrel Owens’s words about his young protégé, bitter words that had still, after all that had gone on, after all the years, been tinged with open admiration. It was the same now with Evita. After everything that had been done to her, she’d still made love quite willingly with Baranov, and she still had a great deal of awe, fear, and respect for her ex-husband. Darby Yarnell was simply the very best there ever was, Owens had said. No one could resist his charm. What a powerful weapon he’d been and continued to be in Baranov’s arsenal. And now Yarnell had the ear of the director of Central Intelligence and the president of the United States. It was frightening. Such men did not fall easily.

“There can’t be a trial, Kirk,” Trotter had said in Switzerland. “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.”

“We’re talking about murder, here, John, aren’t we?” McGarvey had said. “About the assassination of a former U.S. senator. One of the most influential men in Washington.” It had only been a notion then, now it was becoming a dreadful reality.

The band was still practicing downstairs, and Evita got unsteadily to her feet and went to the sideboard as she sang a few off-key words to the song. She poured herself another glass of champagne and then stood looking out the window at the street below.

“I think it is enough now,” she said without turning. “I’d like you to go. There’s nothing to be done. Nothing I can help you with.”

But there was one last thing McGarvey had to know. Baranov was Yarnell’s Soviet control officer, but Yarnell had someone here in Washington. He’d had someone in Washington all along. Someone within the CIA. At the upper echelons. Someone like Lawrence Danielle, who would have access to Operations, and who would also have a direct pipeline down to Archives. Someone who had been betraying his country all these years just as Yarnell had, or had perhaps unwittingly been a betrayer if he had simply been outmaneuvered as Darrel Owens had been. “There was someone else in Mexico City, Evita. Another American. Someone Baranov had cultivated just as he had cultivated Darby.”

“There were many of them,” she said softly.

“This one in particular would have been young. Another whiz kid like Darby, perhaps. Someone for whom Valentin might have had a great deal of respect.”

She turned around. Her tears had stopped, but her eyes were red and her complexion wan.

“Maybe he was in Mexico City for a short time. Darby would have known him, or known of him. He would have respected the man. And Baranov would have treated him as a special case. Does that ring a bell, Evita? Was there anyone like that in those days that you can remember? Someone you met, perhaps, at a party or a reception? Someone Baranov may have mentioned, just in passing?”

She was remembering. He could see it in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders. It was coming back to her. She was returning to those days and nights in Mexico, when her life at the start, to hear her tell it, had been a long fairy-tale dream that in the end turned into a nightmare. But for a while all of Mexico was at her and Darby’s feet.

“There was someone else,” she said. “Just once. It was very early on. Darby and I had just gotten married, and we’d just opened our beach house north of Acapulco. There was a party.”

Her voice was soft. He had to strain to hear her. She came back to the couch and sat down. He lit her a cigarette, and she pulled the smoke deeply into her lungs, exhaling slowly. Her cocaine high had completely left her, and her eyes had grown dull.

“There were a lot of people at this party?” he prompted.

“A lot of Valentin’s friends. Most of them I’d never seen. And there were girls, too. Always girls.”

“Girls?” McGarvey asked. “What girls?”

“Whores from Mexico City. High-priced call girls. Prime beef. The very best. Nothing was too good for Valentin’s friends. Nothing. The best of everything.”

“Did this always happen? The girls at the parties?”

“Not always. But sometimes Valentin or Darby wanted to impress someone so they’d bring the women. At the time I was very naive about it. I thought they were models or movie actresses or something like that. I didn’t know they’d been paid to go to bed with Valentin’s friends.”

It had been the proverbial honey trap. In those days the Russians used it all the time. If they wanted to turn a man they’d arrange for him to be seduced (Americans seemed the easiest to burn), during which time they’d take photographs and make audio tapes of course. Outwardly, morality ran high in the States in those days, so that trap worked very well.

“And there was one American in particular that night?” McGarvey asked. “You met him? You were introduced? Perhaps you can remember a name, even a first name, or his face? Anything?”

But she had not actually seen the man, though she had heard his voice. It was late, probably after one in the morning when Darby, who had been talking with Valentin in the corner for nearly an hour, broke away and came over to her. The lights were low, the music soft and already a lot of the men had paired off with the whores, some of whom had gone out to the changing house by the pool, while others had simply wandered off into the gardens or down to the beach. The guest house in back was reserved always for special guests. The entire cottage was set up with the photographic and recording equipment, all of it evidently state of the art at the time. Anything that went on inside the cottage, even in the bathrooms, no matter the light conditions, would be picked up. It was the perfect setup. “I saw some of the photographs that came out of that place, and let me tell you they left nothing for the imagination, nothing at all.” They’d burned a lot of people there, and they were proud of their accomplishment. “But I wasn’t. I thought what they were doing was despicable. Of course, that was later, you understand. At the time we’re talking about I had no idea what was going on. Darby just broke away from Valentin, came over to me, and we started dancing. He was holding me close, whispering in my ear, kissing my neck. It didn’t take very long and we were upstairs on the balcony making love.”

“What about the American?” McGarvey asked. “Did he arrive afterward? Or had he been there all along? What? I don’t understand, Evita.”

Their bedroom was on a balcony that was open to the large living room below. The bed, however, was set far enough back so that no one from below could see up, nor could she see down. But from the window she did see the flash of a car’s headlights on the beach road that led down from the highway. When she tried to get up to see who was arriving, Darby pulled her back down onto the bed. By then it had quieted down quite a bit so she heard Baranov welcoming their new guest. But without names, Evita answered McGarvey’s question before he could ask it. “We never used names in those days. Everyone thought it for the best.” But their voices were very plain, and Darby didn’t seem to mind that she was listening, he just didn’t want her to go down there. Baranov was respectful toward the American, that much she could tell from what he was saying, and how he was saying it. By then she’d known him well enough to pick that out. And the American sounded young and eager, but she had thought at the time that he was probably hiding something. He was being too polite, she figured. Here he was at one or two o’clock in the morning, at a party with beautiful girls, booze, and music, and he was being terribly proper, formal. It didn’t seem to fit.

The music started again after that, and she could hear the others talking softly as they danced, the tinkle of ice cubes in glasses, laughter. Still Darby kept her upstairs, and before long they were making love again. He had an amazing capacity in those days, she said, and so did she.

“We were all a lot younger, Mr. Glynn. And foolish and uncertain about what we were supposed to do with our lives. In a way life was a lot easier then; there didn’t seem to be so much to worry about as now. It’s this American who showed up at the party that you’re after too, isn’t it? I can tell. Valentin came up later and I heard him tell Darby that their friend had gone over to the cottage, and that everything was set. It didn’t mean all that much to me at the time, though later I figured out that they were probably going to blackmail the poor bastard.”

“No idea who he was? Did he work at the embassy? Was he a visiting businessman, a doctor? What?”

“I only knew he was an American from his accent,” Evita said.

McGarvey held himself in check. “Accent?” he asked.

“He was a gringo.”

“From the South, this American? Maybe from Texas? Maybe from Georgia or Alabama? That South? Did it occur to you at the time?”

She shrugged. “Not the South, more to the Northeast, I think. Maybe Massachusetts. Maybe Connecticut or Maine. A funny accent, but not that strong. It was there, though.”

“Cultured?”

“You mean like Darby?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe,” Evita said. “I don’t know. I didn’t hear all that much, and I had my mind on other things at the time.”

“He was gone in the morning?”

“I didn’t get up until noon, and by then he was gone. Darby or Valentin never mentioned him again. And the only reason I still remember it is that I’d never heard Valentin so respectful of another man as he was of that American that night. It struck me as odd, that’s all. I figured the American had to have been someone important.”

Or someone who would someday become important, McGarvey thought.

“And that’s all of it,” Evita said tiredly. She finished her champagne. “That’s all I know. You’ll never beat them. Like I said, the^y’ve been at it far too long for you to do anything about it. Give it up. You’ll lose. We all will.”

She laid her head back and closed her eyes. She had come a long way, and the journey had inflicted a terrible weariness on her.

The band had taken up a new tune. Watching her resting, McGarvey was struck by how Evita’s life had been so irrevocably ruined by Darby Yarnell and Valentin Baranov. But there’d been a purpose, of course. And he suspected it had gone beyond a simple legitimization of Yarnell in Mexico City at the time. He had come to suspect that Baranov had been, and still was, a man gifted with a far-sighted vision of things to come. He was a planner and mover who apparently deeply understood basic human motivations. Whatever he had set in motion more than twenty years ago was now finally coming to fruition. He had laid his plans, had gathered and trained his troops, and now the real battle was just beginning. In spite of everything he had learned though, McGarvey felt as if he were operating mostly in the dark. If Baranov’s gift was clarity of vision, and Yarnell’s was dedication to a purpose, McGarvey’s failing would be a basic lack of understanding of the big picture. There was so much more going on that he felt as if he were a blind man preparing to cross a very dangerous mountain range.

“Valentin’s in Mexico City again,” McGarvey said softly.

Evita dragged her eyes open. “You’ve already said that.”

“Something is going to happen very soon. Something he has been planning since the late fifties. It’s why he came back here to you. He wants to use Juanita merely as a motivator. He wants you to do something for him. You and Darby. Just like the old times.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked, her voice slurred.

“I need your help.”

“To do what?.”

“To prove that Darby was and still is a spy. To expose whoever is working with him in Washington these days — the man from that night in your beach house. To defeat Baranov. And to protect your daughter.”

“Impossible—”

“Not if you help me, Evita. I promise you.”

Evita looked at him for a very long time, and when she finally nodded her assent, the motion was barely perceptible. She got unsteadily to her feet, looked again at him, and then turned and left the room. He heard the bathwater running a minute later, and he let himself out.

At LaGuardia he had to wait until five for a flight, and while he waited he worried about her, worried that she would end up like Owens and Janos Plónksi, whom he now suspected had only been the tip of an iceberg that threatened to sink them all.

24

McGarvey arrived in Miami a few minutes after eight, retrieved his single bag from the carousel, and rented a car, which he drove into the sprawling city. The night felt warm and humid after New York. He passed some sort of Cuban demonstration in which an effigy of Castro was being burned at the stake. City police were directing traffic around the disturbance, which had spilled out from a rat warren of streets and up onto the expressway. He found a place to park the car then checked into a small hotel just off Biscayne Boulevard, directly across the bay from the towers of Miami Beach. He walked to a pay phone five blocks away where he telephoned the number Trotter had given him. He was taking no chances that something would go wrong. If Trotter’s contact man was the conduit back to the agency, he’d know that McGarvey was in Miami, of course, but they would not be able to find him so fast. It would take time. He did not intend remaining here that long. The city was just coming alive with the night. Traffic was endless and the lights from the big hotels shimmered across the black water. Somewhere a big boat horn tooted mournfully, and down the street he could hear the raucous sounds of steel drums. Always there were sirens in the distance. He’d heard that Miami today was like Havana of the fifties; a big, wide open melting pot of Caribbean humanity in which the rich lived in garish contrast to the miserable poor; where every human depravity imaginable went on day and night at breakneck speed. He’d never known either city, not really. He’d been too young for Havana, and his assignments had never taken him here. But he could well imagine what Havana must have been like. And he figured this was Basulto’s kind of city. It must have been like coming home for him to be here.

The same voice as before answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

“I want to see Basulto,” McGarvey said. “I’m going in, sixty minutes from now. Tell them to expect me.”

“We’ll need more time.”

“Sixty minutes. Talk to Trotter.”

“He’s not here.”

“Call him.”

“That will take time.”

“Where is he being kept?”

“Can you hold?”

“I’m at a pay phone,” McGarvey said. The line went immediately dead. He held the telephone between his shoulder and cheek as he lit a cigarette. He looked at his watch. It was a couple minutes past nine-thirty. He thought about Evita alone and frightened for all of these years. And he could practically feel Baranov’s presence, watching him, knowing his every move. It had become clear to him that all of this had been carefully engineered by the Russian as early as ten months ago when he had gone to Evita in New York to tell her that an ex-CIA agent would be coming to her for information. The implications were staggering. And for the first time since Trotter had come to him in Switzerland, McGarvey was beginning to have some doubts in his own abilities.

“He’s at a residential motel in Hialeah, near the race track,” the Washington man said. He gave McGarvey the address. “Make certain that you are not followed.”

McGarvey hung up. He went to his car and drove immediately over to the address although they weren’t expecting him for an hour. He wanted to see who else might show up. The only way to survive, he figured, was to understand the possibility that Baranov had ears everywhere.

The Surfside Motel was a full five miles from any of the beaches and looked as if it had been neglected for a lot of years. It was located six blocks from the racetrack on a broad street that specialized in car dealerships and fast food restaurants, but was tucked behind a low cement block fence that was further screened by a mostly unkempt line of bamboo. There was a sad, dirty, little outdoor pool between the fence and the driveway that McGarvey could just see through the brush. A few plastic chaise lounges and two rusting patio tables flanked the pool. McGarvey pulled into a MacDonald’s just across the street and went inside where he got a cup of coffee and took a seat by the window. He could see the motel office beneath the canopy down the short driveway, as well as the line of second floor units, barely a third of which seemed to be occupied. There was no movement. McGarvey checked his watch. It hadn’t yet been fifteen minutes since he’d telephoned Washington. They were not expecting him for another three quarters of an hour. It would have taken more than fifteen minutes for even Baranov to arrange something. He was fairly confident that if anyone was going to show up here tonight, he’d beat them. But then we were never certain, were we? It was part and parcel of the business. It had been a long time for him, this over the shoulder feeling, this sustained watchfulness, the edge that made the difference between survival and failure. Christ, it galled him to think that he’d been so easily sucked back into the morass. “Once it’s in your blood there’s no going back,” he’d been told once, but for the life of him he could not think who’d said it. His trouble now was that he had begun to have difficulty distinguishing between what was good and real and what was not, between what was truth and what were lies. Who to trust, who to love, where to run, where to hide. He thought again about Evita and about Darby Yarnell. They both were under Baranov’s spell. They were the man’s strength, but they also were his weakness.

Traffic was light. No one had entered or left the motel. McGarvey went out to his car and drove at a normal speed twice around the block, watching his rearview mirror, watching the other cars, watching the few pedestrians. But there was no one there. No one watching. No one had come.

He pulled into the motel’s driveway, passed the office, and parked at the far end of the building. He switched off the headlights and the engine and sat in the darkness for a few moments, watching, listening, waiting for someone to come, for a curtain to part. But the motel could have been a haven for the dead or the deaf. He took out his gun, checked to make sure it was ready to fire, then got out of his car and climbed the stairs to the second-floor balcony, where he stopped in the shadows. The light in the exit sign was burned out. The place smelled of garbage and of sulphur water and urine and something else, something spicy and exotic. He slipped the Walther’s safety catch off and moved quietly along the balcony on the balls of his feet. Now he could hear music from one of the rooms, and conversation, perhaps from a television, from another. Basulto was being kept in 224, which was four rooms from the end. When McGarvey reached the door he paused before knocking. No light came from behind the curtains, nor could he hear any sounds from within.

He knocked. Softly.

“It’s open,” someone inside said.

McGarvey flattened himself against the cement block wall, brought his gun up, and with his left hand eased the door open a couple of inches.

The room stank of stale beer and cigarettes. It was dark.

“It’s me, Artime. From the house in Switzerland. Do you recognize my voice?”

“It’s him,” Basulto said cautiously after a second or two.

“Are you sure?” someone else asked.

“Yeah,” Basulto said. “It’s okay, Mr. McGarvey. Just a minute, we’ll have a light.”

McGarvey remained against the wall as the light came on. He could see into the room. The double beds were unmade. Dirty laundry lay everywhere, along with empty beer cans and liquor bottles. Ashtrays were overflowing, the bureau and a small table were piled with MacDonald’s bags and wrappers, the remnants of a large pizza still in its flat cardboard box, and several potato chip bags. Basulto, wearing nothing more than baggy trousers and a dirty tank T-shirt, stood by the bathroom door. A husky man with thick dark hair stood next to him. His weapon was drawn.

“I’m alone,” McGarvey said, making a show of lowering his gun as he stepped around the corner into the room.

“You’d better be,” the agent across the room said.

The second man stood in the corner at the window, his gun out, his eyes wide. He wore a jacket. McGarvey got the impression he might have just come in.

“I’m here to talk. Nothing more.”

The two agents looked at each other, and then they lowered their weapons, uncocking the hammers. “You’re five minutes late,” the one by the window snapped. He was nervous.

McGarvey closed the door, then pushed the window curtain aside so that he could look out. Nothing moved below. No one had come. No one was out there, and yet he could not shake the feeling that someone was looking over his shoulder. That Baranov, or whoever, knew that he was here and was watching him.

“Is this it?” Basulto asked. “Are we ready to get that bastard, Mr. McGarvey? You and me?”

He turned back.

“I hope to Christ you came in clean,” the one by Basulto said, gruffly. “It’s one thing being cooped up in this pigsty, but it would be another defending this little prick.”

“See?” Basulto cried. “See what I have to put up with here.”

“Why don’t you two take a walk. Give yourself a break.” McGarvey looked at Basulto. “I’d like half an hour with my friend here.”

Again the agents exchanged glances. “What the hell.” The bigger one shrugged. “They said cooperate, so we’ll cooperate.”

“I’ll take full responsibility,” McGarvey said.

“You’re goddamned right you will,” the big one said. He grabbed a jacket and he and his partner left without bothering to look back.

McGarvey locked and chained the door. Alone, Basulto seemed a little more sure of himself than with Trotter’s two men. He didn’t seem so tense, though there still was a wariness about him. His life, at least, according to what he had told them in Switzerland, was on the line. Which meant he would cooperate so long as it would benefit him, but only as far as he felt was necessary and no farther. McGarvey swept the debris off the table with a clatter, sat down, put his feet up, and lit a cigarette. Basulto wasn’t impressed, but McGarvey knew he had his attention.

“There’ve been some killings,” McGarvey said.

“What killings? Where? Nobody’s told me a thing down here. I just sit and wait and sweat in this stink hole. What are you talking about?”

McGarvey loosened his tie. “He was a friend of mine, Artime. A very good friend. I had him make a few inquiries for me, and he was shot to death for his trouble. Left a wife and children.”

“I told you, goddamnit. I sat there and told you over and over again. But nobody would believe me. Called me a slimeball. Well, maybe now you believe me.”

“He’ll probably be coming after you next.”

A momentary look of alarm crossed Basulto’s face. McGarvey got the impression that it might have been a put on. But then Basulto was an unusual man and hard to read.

“Then we’d better get the bastard.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“Have you got a plan?” Basulto asked eagerly.

“I’m going to need your help, Artime,” McGarvey said, patiently. He took a drag on his cigarette. He wanted to be almost anyplace except here.

Beside the dresser was a large paper bag. Basulto pulled a couple of beers out of the bag, opened them, and brought them over to the table. A peace offering. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and his complexion was red and splotchy. He’d probably been boozing it pretty hard, cooped up here like this. He smelled ripe.

“Anything,” he said eagerly. “I’m a pretty good trigger man. Christ, Mr. McGarvey, I don’t give a shit, see. As long as you guys hold up your end of the bargain, I’ll do my part. Anything.”

“We appreciate it, believe me,” McGarvey said, accepting a beer. He motioned for the Cuban to sit down.

“Anything, Mr. McGarvey,” Basulto said sitting across the table. “I mean anything. Goddamnit, I love this country. You could be Roger Harris’s twin, you know.”

“He was quite a guy.”

“Yes, he was …”

“Ambitious, from what I gather,” McGarvey said. He took a deep drink of the warm beer, then raised the can to Basulto; two conspirators gathered to share a little secret.

“You talked to someone else about him,” Basulto said. “You looked up his record. Found out about him. All right, so what are you doing here? What do you want from me? I told you I’d give you anything.”

“The truth, Artime,” McGarvey said.

Basulto drank his beer with a nervous energy, as if he were a man just off the desert who’d suddenly found himself in the midst of a grand party; he didn’t know which way to look or how to behave.

“Okay. What do you want? Just ask me,” he said defiantly. “I’ve gone over this so many times, not only with them, but in my own mind, that I’m not sure of anything. Do you know what I’m saying? You capice?”

He’d internationalized his act, but it was no more convincing than it had been in Switzerland.

“Just a couple of minor points, nothing terribly important. Just something I have to get straight in my mind before we fly off the handle. Lives are at stake here, you know.”

“Yeah, mine for one.”

“Back to Miami. I’m interested in that period,” McGarvey said softly. “After Roger Harris had recruited you and you’d been sent up here for training. I’d like to know about that. You never really did cover those days in any detail.”

Basulto just looked at him, his eyes unblinking.

“I’d like to know about the team that trained you. Their names if you can remember them. Maybe their methods. What sorts of things they were filling your head with in those days. What kind of a place they put you up in.”

“A dump,” Basulto said, and he took another drink of his beer. “Not far from here. But it’s all gone by now. Torn down. Progress.”

McGarvey handed him a cigarette and held a light for him.

“Who was it got wasted?” he asked. “Anyone I know?”

“There were two of them.”

Basulto’s hand shook.

“One of them was looking up your records, and the other was Darby Yarnell’s old boss.”

“Christ,” Basulto swore softly. “Christ.” He glanced at the door. “Were you followed down here?”

“He knows I’m here, Artimé. And there’s a good chance he knows you’re here, too.”

“Oh, well, that’s just goddamned fine now, isn’t it. Why didn’t you take out a full page ad in the newspapers? Send the bastard a printed invitation.”

“We’re running out of time.”

“No shit.”

“I’m going to need your help. The truth now, it’s the only thing that’s going to save your ass. We’re going to have to burn Yarnell, and whoever he’s working with. But in order for me to do that, I need to know everything.”

“It’s his army, isn’t it? His mob.”

McGarvey looked at the man in amazement. “Where’d you hear that?” he asked softly.

Basulto hadn’t heard or understood the question. He was sweating now, nervously tapping the cigarette against the edge of the ashtray until the ash fell off. “I don’t know how the hell we’re going to nail him now. You were supposed to be the best. What a joke.”

“You mentioned Yarnell’s mob. Where’d you hear about that?”

“I don’t know,” Basulto said absently, his mind still on his own troubles. He looked up. “Mr. Trotter mentioned that we were going to have to be very careful. He was talking with Mr. Day and some of the others. They said Yarnell had his own private army.”

“A mob?” McGarvey asked again, wondering why it was that sometimes the little things bothered him more than the bigger issues.

“Mob. Army. Crowd. Christ, I don’t know. Crucify me for a choice of words.” Basulto was becoming agitated again. “If he sends his army down here after us, we won’t have a chance in hell.”

“What makes you think that?”

Basulto shook his head. “The sonofabitch has managed to survive this long, hasn’t he?”

“But we know about him now.”

“So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to talk him to death?”

“Do you think it would work?”

“Not fucking likely!” Basulto snapped. “You’re going to have to blow him away. It’s the only way. He’s too smart for you. Roger Harris got in his way, and he got wasted for his stupidity. Don’t you be next, because this time my ass is really on the line. I got no place else to go.”

“He’s working with someone, Artimé.”

“Yeah, his army.”

“He’s a spy. He has a control officer. Someone who calls the shots. Someone he reports to. He’s got his own Roger Harris.”

“The Russian from Mexico City.”

“Perhaps. But that was a long time ago.” McGarvey was watching the Cuban’s eyes. There was no clear-cut reaction.

“Maybe he’s still around.”

“It’s possible. But Yarnell has someone else he’s working with, or for. Someone in Washington.”

Now Basulto’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

Again Basulto glanced toward the door. “Mr. Trotter? Could it be him? He’s trying to burn us both and keep his hands clean? It sounds like something Yarnell might have done.”

“Had you ever met him before they brought you to Switzerland?”

“No.”

“How about Mr. Day?”

“No, never saw either of them until they showed up down here.”

“Yarnell never made an appearance during your training here in Miami?”

“I would have recognized him in Mexico City. We went through all this before. He never came here. Neither did Roger, for that matter. I was sent up here for my training, and when I was finished they shipped me back to Havana.”

“So how many people were here in Miami for you, Artimé? Two? Three? A dozen?”

“Two of them, mostly. And don’t ask because I can’t remember their names, except for the communications expert. He was the third man. Showed up for a couple of days then left. He was called Scotty. Had just gotten out of the army.”

“How is it you remembered his name and not the others’?”

“I don’t know. It’s just one of those things, you know. He was nice, knew what he was talking about, didn’t have an ax to grind. Leastways not with me.”

“The others did?”

“They didn’t really give a shit. I was just another piece of dog meat as far as they were concerned.”

“Anyone else stop by?” McGarvey asked. “Just pop in for a visit or a look-see? Anyone introduce themselves?”

Basulto shrugged. “There were a few. I couldn’t tell you about any of them though. I was pretty young, and my eyes were filled with stars. This was the big time for me. I was going to be a spy.”

Just then Basulto’s words reminded McGarvey of Evita’s. When she’d been turned in Mexico City she too had been young, with stars in her eyes. It almost sounded like a well-used script.

“Were they all Americans? Can you remember that, Artime?”

“All Americans. WASPS, they were.”

“Young? Old? Remember anything on that score?”

“They were older than me. I was just a kid. But I suppose they all were in their twenties, early thirties. Ex-military, I think. I remember they sometimes ran the place like boot camp.”

“Not a foreign accent in the lot?”

“No.”

“Southerners, some of them, do you suppose?”

“You mean like Alabama or Mississippi?”

“Or Texas?”

“There might have been.”

“East Coast, Artime? Intellectuals. Maybe some young kid with a holier-than-thou attitude? Silver spoon in the mouth?”

“They were all intellectuals.”

McGarvey looked at him. “It’s important.”

“Why do you keep asking about it?” Basulto asked, his voice going a bit soft.

“I didn’t know I had.”

“What the hell is so important about an East Coast snob anyway? Who gives a shit. It doesn’t make any difference. Yarnell wasn’t there, otherwise we would have nailed him then … me and Roger Harris.”

There it was again, McGarvey thought. Basulto, for all his isolation, knew too much. Yarnell’s mob. And now the fact there might have been an East Coast snob. Someone important. Someone such as the man Evita told him about for whom Baranov had had a great deal of respect. It was beginning to come together now for him.

“Did Roger Harris have a name for him?”

“For who? What are you talking about?”

“The East Coast snob?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The man Roger Harris hired you to find for him, Artime, who did you think I was talking about?”

“I haven’t got a clue,” Basulto said, but this time McGarvey could see that the Cuban was lying. His eyes were wide, and a small bead of perspiration had formed on his upper lip.

McGarvey got slowly to his feet, lit another cigarette, and stood at the window looking down into the night again. If anything, it was quieter on the street now than when he had arrived. Hialeah was holding its breath. He had underestimated Roger Harris. As early as the late fifties Harris had known about Baranov and had suspected that the Russian was running at least one American. He apparently had not suspected Yarnell but had targeted someone else. The same one, possibly, who had shown up at the party in Mexico, and the same one who might have stopped by the training house here in Miami to see how young Basulto’s indoctrination was coming. Harris had figured on using Basulto as his eyes and ears. First here in Miami, next in Havana, and finally in Mexico, where Baranov kept his headquarters. Sooner or later, Harris figured, his suspect should have shown up and Basulto would finger him.

Basulto had not moved from the table. He was looking up at McGarvey.

“I didn’t understand until now, Artime,” McGarvey said, sitting down again. “I’m out of practice, or something.”

“Understand what?” Basulto asked warily.

“What Roger Harris really wanted from you.”

Basulto didn’t speak.

“It didn’t make any sense to me, your emergency signal for Mexico City. You were supposed to telephone Roger Harris’s sister in San Antonio, Texas, with the single word alpha.”

“In case of an emergency.”

“Right. But what emergency, Artime? I mean, what constituted the emergency that Roger Harris prenamed alpha? An earthquake? A tornado? A riot? The appearance of Baranov with an American?”

“I was supposed to watch the Ateneo Español ….”

“For who?” McGarvey asked. “Did he give you a name?”

Basulto was cornered. “No name.”

“A description?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“We’re getting into an area here that I don’t want to get into,” Basulto cried desperately.

McGarvey sat forward, slamming his palm on the tabletop, the noise like a pistol shot. “You little sonofabitch!”

“There’s no call for that,” Basulto squeaked.

McGarvey was feeling mean again, to the point where he was almost frightened of himself. Yet a great clarity seemed to come over him, as if he could see everything and everyone, all the relationships in this business, all the truths and the lies from the fifties all the way to this moment. He’d asked if there was a bridge between then and now; Day had called it the “Golden Gate.” He pulled out his gun, pulled the hammer back, and pointed it across the table into Basulto’s face. The Cuban went white.

“What did alpha mean? Who was alpha?”

“I don’t know. I swear to God. Cristo!”

“Talk to me, Artime.” McGarvey began to squeeze the trigger.

“It was a voice,” Basulto blurted. “Nothing more.”

“What voice?”

“An East Coast voice. Connecticut or something. An intellectual.”

“I’m listening.”

“Back in Washington Roger overheard a telephone conversation between a Russian and this American.”

“Baranov?”

“Yes, Baranov and this American.”

“Where?”

“At CIA headquarters.”

“The American was CIA?”

“Yes. Roger thought so.”

“He was talking with Baranov from a telephone within the building?”

“Yes.”

“So he sent you to Mexico City to watch for Baranov and an American? Any American?”

“Yes.”

“If you saw an American you were to call with the code word alpha. But what about the voice?”

Basulto said nothing.

“The voice, Artime? How were you to recognize the voice unless you were near enough to hear it, which you could not have done from your room overlooking the Ateneo.”

“I was a member,” Basulto said softly.

“Of the Ateneo Español?”

“Yes.”

McGarvey lowered the gun. It had become too heavy for him; his trigger finger had begun to shake. “You didn’t see Baranov and Yarnell from the window. You saw them inside. You were down there with them, then.”

Basulto nodded. “But it wasn’t him. His voice was different.”

“The voice Roger Harris was looking for wasn’t Yarnell’s.”

“No,” Basulto said, hanging his head.

“Then why did you call San Antonio? Why did you use alpha?”

“I was frightened. Roger knew about one of them, but there was someone else working with Baranov. I thought he would want to know.”

McGarvey holstered his gun and got to his feet. He looked down at Basulto for a long time. There were still many questions, many holes in the man’s story, but for the most part he had got what he had come looking for; confirmation that Yarnell wasn’t Baranov’s only conquest. That there was indeed someone else in the equation.

“I’ll come back for you. In a few days.”

“We’re going to burn Yarnell?”

McGarvey nodded. “Him and the other one.” At the door he hesitated a moment. “At the Ateneo, did Baranov see you? Does he know your face?”

“Yes,” Basulto said. “God help me, yes.”

“Well, we’re going to burn him, too, Artimé.”

25

The lake near Leonard Day’s house was calm, not the slightest breeze rippled the water. There were no fishermen this morning, nor was there any traffic on the road that led back through Indian Creek Park to Kenilworth Avenue. It was Tuesday; everyone was at work in the city by now. McGarvey had caught Day and Trotter before they’d left for work, and they’d agreed to meet with him. At McGarvey’s suggestion they talked outside as they walked around the lake. Trotter was highly charged, he half walked and half ran along the footpath. Day, on the other hand, seemed contemplative, as if he were deeply troubled but by something else. He seemed distracted. They made an odd trio, McGarvey thought; the bureaucrat, the cop, and the spy.

“When John first came to me with this problem, and mentioned your name in conjunction with it, I was frankly skeptical,” Day said. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his maroon jogging suit. He wore a sweatband around his head, making him look boyish. “I’m still skeptical.”

“Good heavens, Kirk, even you have to see that what you’re saying is hard to swallow,” Trotter piped up, looking back. He was nervous around Day after what McGarvey had told him two days ago.

“But we’re stuck with it,” McGarvey said. He’d expected the objections, but he wanted to see how Day would react.

“We can hardly turn from it. Not at this stage of the game, especially not now.”

“Yarnell is almost certainly still actively working for the Russians, and he almost certainly has a contact man in the CIA.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. But it’s someone at high levels.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“The quality of his information.”

“Such as?”

“He knew that I would see Darrel Owens, his old boss. He also knew that I’d sent Janos Plónski searching after Basulto’s files.”

“Which means, of course, that he knows you’re coming after him,” Trotter said.

“Then why hasn’t he had you eliminated?” Day asked sharply. “I’d do it.”

It was the one question for which McGarvey had found no satisfactory answer, but he gave voice to the only possibility that even seemed plausible. “Because something else is happening, or is about to happen, and I’m an important source for him.”

Day pulled up short, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a two-way street. I check on him, and in the process he finds out about me.”

Trotter had stopped a few feet farther along the path, and he was looking back now, his eyes wide behind his thick glasses.

“What else?” Day demanded.

McGarvey took out a cigarette and lit it. He gazed across the lake. “John knows why I was called back to the States, and so do you. Who else?”

“Basulto,” Trotter said.

“He’s isolated,” McGarvey replied, his eyes never leaving Day’s. “Who else?”

“No one,” Day said evenly. The morning air seemed to have gotten thin.

“There’s my team,” Trotter chirped.

“Do they have contact with the agency?”

“No.”

“I do,” Day said. “But I have discussed this situation with no one.”

“Have you made notes? Left them on your desk?”

“Nothing has been committed to paper. Not by me.”

“Mentioned it to Powers, or the president?”

“No.”

“Discussed it on the telephone with John?”

“My telephone, along with John’s, is swept.”

“That’s right, Kirk,” Trotter said. “Absolutely. There simply are no leaks.”

“Yes there are,” McGarvey said softly. “We just haven’t found them yet.”

“Perhaps it’s you,” Day suggested. “His people could have spotted you from day one.”

“He would have to have been tipped off as to why I came back.” McGarvey was thinking about his ex-wife and her lawyer boyfriend. It was not coincidence that they were friends of Yarnell’s. But that had been going on for more than a year now. Where was the logic?

“Could be Yarnell’s ex-wife,” Trotter said. “You went to see her. What’d you two talk about?”

McGarvey turned to him. “About the fact that Yarnell was working for the Russians as early as the late fifties in Mexico City. It’s one of the reasons he married her. For cover.”

“Mexico City?” Day asked.

“He was stationed out of our embassy until after the Bay of Pigs thing. Then he moved to Washington and finally out to Moscow. Each time his control officer went with him.”

“You know this man?”

“Valentin Illen Baranov,” McGarvey said. “Now he’s back in Mexico City, running what’s called the CESTA network.”

“Good Lord,” Trotter said. He and Day exchanged glances.

“What is it?” McGarvey asked.

“How certain are you of Yarnell’s connection with this Baranov and CESTA?”

“Very.”

Trotter had been holding his breath. He blew it out all at once as if he were a racer trying to clear his lungs of carbon dioxide. He needed oxygen and he wasn’t getting it.

“That’s it, then,” Day said. “I’ll have to go to Powers and the president with this now. I’m putting you on hold.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” McGarvey asked, trying to keep his temper in check.

“It’s CESTA, Kirk,” Trotter stepped into the breach.

Day shot him a warning glance.

“It’s gone too far, Leonard. We never suspected this connection. Not really. And it’s simply gone too far now. His life is on the line.”

McGarvey waited. He understood at that moment that he had been lied to all along; not lies of commission, rather lies of omission. He had a feeling that what he had not been told was legion compared to what he had.

Day looked away momentarily in disgust, as if he were being forced into a decision he had wanted to avoid at all costs. When he turned back he nodded.

“Seven months ago an Aeromexico flight out of Miami was hijacked and diverted to Havana,” Trotter said. Day was watching him, his eyes big and bright. “The two hijackers got off the plane with two hostages. Before they got ten yards from the plane, all four of them were shot and killed by the Cuban militia.”

“Who were they, John?”

“The hostages had been on their way to Mexico City. Agency for International Development.”

“CIA?”

“Right.”

“Why were they grabbed?”

“We didn’t know at the time. Except that Lawrence Danielle worked with us on the preliminary investigation. He told me that the weapons the hijackers had used had been supplied to them by CESTA.”

“CESTA presumably knew who they were, arranged for the hijacking, and further arranged for their assassination,” Day said.

“Why?” McGarvey asked. He thought about Baranov coming to see Evita ten months ago. It had been barely weeks before the incident.

“I didn’t know about this until two days ago,” Trotter said. “I promise you, Kirk.”

“John came to me with Baranov’s name. Said you thought he was connected with the Yarnell thing.”

“I didn’t believe it at the time. It was impossible—”

Day interrupted. “This is classified top secret, McGarvey. No matter what has happened before this moment, if you release what I’m about to tell you, I will personally see that you are prosecuted under the Secrets Act. To the full extent of the law.”

The man was a pompous ass. “Talk to me,” McGarvey said.

Again Day and Trotter exchanged glances.

“The Russians are apparently building six missile-launching facilities in the Mexican desert barely forty miles south of our border,” Trotter blurted.

McGarvey had come to believe, over the years, that he was sufficiently inured to bad news that his tolerance for shock was high. He could never become nonplussed. At this moment, however, he was truly frightened. He did not know what to say. He could feel it as a weakness in his legs, a hollowness in his gut, and a tightening in his chest.

“CESTA?” he said.

“They’re almost certainly involved,” Day agreed.

“Baranov, who runs CESTA, is Yarnell’s control officer.”

Day nodded.

“Yarnell has a man in the CIA. He fingered the two AID officers on the plane.”

“It would go a long way toward explaining everything,” Day said heavily.

Another thought struck McGarvey. “How do you know about this?”

For the first time Day suddenly seemed unsure of himself. He hesitated. McGarvey was having a bad feeling.

“Donald Powers is a personal friend of mine.” Day said.

“And Yarnell?”

Again Day hesitated. He nodded. “Darby and I go back a lot of years together.”

McGarvey realized he was shaking. Day stepped back a pace. “I swear to God that I didn’t tell anyone about you. Not even Powers.”

“If I ever find out you lied to me, I’ll kill you,” McGarvey said softly.

“For heaven’s sake, Kirk,” Trotter said.

Day straightened up a little, a determined look coming back into his eyes. “I’m going to Powers and the president with this. No one else. They must be informed. In the meantime you’re to make no move, no move whatsoever, without first clearing it through me.” He said it as an order, but then he softened his tone. “You do understand what’s at stake here. It’s no longer simply a case of proving Darby Yarnell is a spy who works for the Russians. Now it’s a matter of another missile crisis. This one a hell of a lot closer to our border than Cuba.”

“A crisis made impossible for us to win because the CIA is an open book to Baranov.”

“The bastard,” Day said with much feeling.

Driving back into the city, McGarvey tried to put a name to exactly what it was he was feeling. He had a sense that they all were racing madly down a long roller coaster whose brakes had failed, and yet he knew that someone was in control, that someone had planned the ride from the beginning. But to what end? Offensive missiles in Mexico? It was impossible for him to believe even now, although the Russians had gotten what they had wanted in Cuba. In exchange for removing their missiles they had extracted a promise from us that we would never intervene militarily with the Castro government. Perhaps the same things were happening in Mexico. But there was something else as well. Something more. He could feel it. He’d been glad to get out of the agency because of what it had done to him, and what he had seen it do to others. Yet when Trotter and Day had shown up in Switzerland he had almost gladly followed them. Hell, he had damned near jumped into their laps. His retirement had already begun to break down before they’d shown up. But now he wondered if coming back had been the right thing for him.

“You’re forty-four and your life is passing you by. You’re no longer in the fray, is that it?” Marta had asked, coming very close to the mark.

His life had passed him by in Switzerland, at least five years of it had. He had become anxious without admitting why. Or at least without admitting that he missed the business. “You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution,” his father used to say. He’d tried to step out of himself, and in the end it had been impossible.

Day had ordered him to step aside. But that, too, was impossible now.

The day had seemed six months long. Eight o’clock in the evening seemed never to come. Yet when it did and Leonard Day found himself driving onto the grounds of Gallaudet College in Brentwood Park, he wished he could somehow stop time. Powers had seemed preoccupied on the telephone, but he’d agreed to meet Day at eight at his home. “Only if it’s very important, Leonard,” Powers had said at the last. “It’s getting just a bit hairy around here at the moment, if you catch my drift.” How many crises had he weathered in this town? he wondered. How many late night meetings, private conferences, for-your-eyes-only memos passed hand-to-hand had he seen? Here in Washington at the top, among the elite — the policy makers, the movers and shakers — the big decisions were made, but so were the colossal blunders. The U-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers, the Bay of Pigs, the entire Vietnam debacle, the abortive hostage-rescue attempt from Tehran, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair. The list was endless. This small town on the Potomac was very nearly an exclusively all-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male enclave. The chosen few belonged to comfortable clubs where they could rest from the vigors of leadership. Golf courses came with bar service out on the fairways. Restaurants and hotels were so exclusive that eighty percent of the city (the blacks) could not gain entrance except through the service doors as busboys and waiters and bellhops. But God, it was exciting to be a part of it. First California, Day thought, now the center of the universe.

Driving past the college it was dark inside the car. The narrow road wound its way deep into the park, the trees and pathways mysterious in the warm night. Day lowered his window as he turned up the driveway to Powers’s home. Lights shone through the trees as he reached the security gate. He’d been here many times in the night. But never quite like this. Never with this intent. Never with this edge of fear that rode with him like some dark entity.

From the gate house the security man came over. A handgun was holstered at his hip. “Good evening, Mr. Day,” he said.

“I’m a little late.”

“Yes, sir. So is the director, but you can go on up; I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

Them? Day wondered as he proceeded up from the gate to the main house. Two cars were parked in the long circular driveway in front of the big three-story brick Colonial that Powers had taken over since becoming DCI. “A big rambling wreck of a mansion,” was how he described it. But with a certain fondness, Day had always suspected. Of course Powers had been raised with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth and expected always to live this way. It was his due. Getting out of the car, however, Day thought again that the house was ostentatious in its size, in its location, and certainly in its security precautions.

In the distance he suddenly could hear the dull chop of helicopter rotors beating the air. On the front step of the house he stopped and looked up as the DCI’s machine came low over the trees from the southwest, its landing lights coming on as it swung left and settled in for a landing on the helipad at the rear of the house.

“Just this way, sir,” someone from the open door said. Day turned. “They’re in the study,” the houseman said politely.

Day followed the man through the great hall beneath the U-shaped balcony and back along a narrow corridor to a pair of open doors that led into Powers’s study, a large, book-lined room with French doors leading to a veranda, a long leather-covered desk, and a grouping of couches, chairs, and Queen Anne tables in front of the fireplace. A high tension room. Not a retreat. The man who occupied this place was under the gun twenty-four hours a day, and Day had a huge respect for him. A lot of them were carried out feet first, but not Powers.

“Would you care for a drink, sir?” the houseman asked.

“No,” Day said at the doorway.

Lawrence Danielle stood at the French doors, holding the curtain back as he watched outside, and General Murphy, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, spoke on the telephone at the desk, his voice low and gruff. The room smelled of stale cigars and polished wood, and the only light was on the desk, casting the room in deep shadows. They were in crisis here, Day saw. All of them, each for a different reason, or perhaps the same one, had come to Powers for their salvation. Supplicants to the great man who sat on the seventh floor at Langley at the right hand of the president himself. In the days and nights to come he would always remember this exact moment as a watershed, as a bloody continental divide.

“He’s just now touched down—” Danielle started to say, dropping the curtain and turning around. He stopped in midsentence.

“Hello, Lawrence,” Day said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Donald agreed to see me.”

“About what?” Danielle demanded, remaining by the window. Danielle was always the dapper dresser. This evening, however, his tie was loose, his collar open, and his face was red and looked as if he had just run up six flights of stairs. His eyes were bloodshot.

How far to go with this? There was a leak, according to McGarvey. One they hadn’t found yet. One at high levels within the agency. Danielle was number three. General Murphy was number two. And number one had just now landed.

“When did you speak with him?” Danielle asked harshly. “We’re busy here. Maybe yours can wait.”

“This morning,” Day said. “He asked me not to come if it wasn’t terribly important.”

Danielle didn’t move, seeming as if he were listening for something, waiting for something to happen. He hadn’t shaved; a bit of stubble darkened his chin.

“Mexico?” Danielle asked softly.

Day remembered a bit of T. S. Eliot from the old days.

It was from a poem called “The Hollow Men.”

He remembered the exact moment that Trotter had come to him, what seemed like centuries ago, with his story. “Because I trust you,” he’d explained. “Because you’re close to Powers and Yarnell.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding slightly.

General Murphy was gazing across the room at him. “He’s just arrived,” he said into the telephone. “I’ll call you later.” He put down the telephone abruptly, his eyes narrow. He was a big man. An old friend of Powers who had pulled him from the army for duty as deputy director. Where Powers was sophisticated, Murphy was blunt. They made a wonderful team.

“What about Mexico?” he asked menacingly.

“I have some information,” Day said hesitantly. “For the director,” he added.

Murphy and Danielle exchanged glances. From out in the corridor they heard someone coming. Day stepped away from the doorway as Powers came around the corner, his bodyguard just behind him.

“Hello, Leonard,” he said. His bodyguard closed the doors behind him. “It’s confirmed, then?” he asked Murphy.

“I’m afraid it is, Donald,” the DDCI replied.

“Has the president been notified?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should speak with Leonard first, and then we can get on with it, Mr. Director,” Danielle suggested.

Powers took Day by the arm and led him the rest of the way into the room. “Leonard is a very old friend. My eyes and ears over at Justice, as a matter of fact. Didn’t you know? He understands the essentials. I believe we can trust him on this one.” He turned back to Day. “Isn’t that right?”

Day felt as if he were standing next to a live high-tension wire. A wrong move and he would be killed. Instantly. “Yes, Mr. Director.”

“We’ve discussed the missile crisis, from the legal standpoint,” Powers said. “The latest now is that one of our SR-71 spy planes has unfortunately been shot down thirty miles south of the Mexican border. Not a pleasant bit of news to bring to the president.”

“There are actually missiles then, sir?” Day asked. “It’s certain?”

“It looks like it.”

“God.”

“Yes,” Powers said.

“He’s come with something about Mexico,” Danielle interjected in his quiet voice.

“I thought as much,” Powers said. “What have you got for us, Leonard? What have you found out?”

“And from where?” Danielle added.

Day had always been a cautiously ambitious man. His father had been a banker, but had gone too far too fast and had lost everything he’d worked a lifetime for, after which he had committed suicide. At this moment Day felt as if he were standing on the edge of the same chasm.

“What i have to say is for your ears only, Mr. Director,” he said, girding himself.

Powers patted him on the arm. “It’s all right, believe me.”

“We can step outside for a moment,” Danielle suggested, breaking the sudden awkward silence.

“No,” Powers said without taking his eyes off Day. “We’re terribly busy here, Leonard. I’ve yet to get over to the White House. We’re in a shambles at the moment. It’s going to get rough around the edges.”

Still Day hesitated. Perhaps McGarvey’s original assessment about Basulto’s story was correct. Perhaps there was nothing to it at all. But then who had killed Plónski, who had killed Owens, and why? Something was happening inside of Day. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Yet he knew it had to do with fear of the second kind. The first was concern for oneself, while the second was fear for the world. For existence.

“It’s about Darby Yarnell, Mr. Director,” he said. “I have reason to believe the man is a Soviet spy.”