Without Honor

26

McGarvey had a small room in the Four Seasons Hotel. The place was old but well kept and the bed was reasonably comfortable, though he hadn’t come to sleep. The day had closed in on him, and in the afternoon he had found himself wandering almost aimlessly around the city; first to the White House, as if he thought to catch another glimpse of Yarnell the diplomat; then out to Chevy Chase where he passed his ex-wife’s house, but her Mercedes was not in the driveway and the windows were all dark; and finally, dangerously, past Yarnell’s fortress a block up from the safe house where Trotter’s team was — or had been — doing its job. He’d returned to take a shower and change his clothes, then went down to the bar where he had a beer and a sandwich. They’d wanted him to back down for the moment, the Mexican crisis would first have to be contained, was their argument. But it made increasingly less sense to McGarvey, who was beginning to see that Baranov and whoever worked for him were the Mexican crisis. Yarnell was their only viable lead. At nine he headed on foot back into Georgetown along 29th Street. The traffic was heavy; the air was thick and smelled of exhaust fumes. The brownstone houses were expensive and implacable in their rows, like soldiers at attention. He turned left on R Street, passing Oak Hill Cemetery, the trees standing as natural counterparts to the grave markers, some of which were ornate and monumental, some of which were small and sad, lost in the darkness. At 3 I st Street he stopped and looked up toward Dumbarton Oaks Park. He thought about Marta back in Lausanne. Alone, he hoped. Sad. He’d begun to believe that she had told him the truth, that in the beginning she had watched him for the federal police, but that later she had fallen in love with him. But there wasn’t a thing he could do about, or for, her now. Even if he wanted to do something, which he wasn’t at all sure he did.

A pale yellow Mercedes coupe pulled up in front of the Boynton Towers Apartments across the street, and a woman got out from the passenger side. McGarvey decided there was something familiar about her. She turned and looked back inside the car, the street light illuminating her face and hair. She was Lorraine Hawkins, the girl with the sommersprossen. This evening she was dressed elegantly in a tight-fitting evening dress and her hair was done up in the back. She was background noise, McGarvey thought. Cover. Yarnell might notice the setup. Might become suspicious. If and when he did, they hoped he would notice her. A normal girl with friends who came and went. Nothing suspicious here. She made a gesture, then shut the passenger door, crossed the sidewalk, and entered the building. A moment later the Mercedes moved off. McGarvey caught a glimpse of the man behind the wheel, but he didn’t recognize him.

Day had told him that there were more important considerations now. That Powers and the president would have to be brought in on this. But Janos had not been Day’s friend. Day would not have to face Pat and the children. Nor had Day come face-to-face with Owens; he hadn’t listened to the old man’s story, hadn’t looked into his eyes, hadn’t in the end been witness to the cold wind whipping the flames hundreds of feet above the beach house.

The block was quiet for the moment. The watchers and the watched. As had been happening to him all along, he had the feeling that someone was lurking in the shadows, their eyes on him. But no one was about. There were no odd cars or trucks or vans with too many aerials. No lingering pedestrians. Nothing at all to suggest that his feeling was anything other than paranoia, plain and simple. There was more here though. Something else in the equation. Something he felt he should be aware of. Some flash of intuition that would make all the pieces fit.

He crossed the street, a taxi rushing past just behind him, and he went inside. The elevator was on its way back down. Lorraine had taken it up to the eighth floor but had thoughtfully sent it back. They were paying attention to the details, McGarvey thought, which was very good. Their lives could very well depend on their tradecraft. No use in advertising her floor number. Yet he was surprised that they were still here. He would have thought that by now Trotter would have called them away. Unless his were not the only second thoughts.

Riding up he took out his gun and checked the action, holstering it finally when the door opened onto an empty corridor. The building was quiet. He made absolutely no noise on the carpeted floor as he approached the apartment door. From inside he could faintly hear the murmur of someone talking, but then it fell quiet. He knocked and a moment later it opened. Lorraine Hawkins, her hair down now, stood in the doorway, the Mexican, Gonzales, right behind her, a long-barreled Smith & Wesson .357 in his right hand. The apartment was in darkness. McGarvey could smell the night air from an open window. A big infrared Starlight scope was set on a tripod across the room. The telephone monitoring equipment had been set up on the buffet. Sheets, the tan mack from Lausanne, was speaking softly into the other telephone.

“Anything from his phone calls?” McGarvey asked.

“Nothing that’s worth anything,” Lorraine said, moving back away from the door. “He came in an hour and a half ago. His daughter is with him.”

McGarvey stepped inside. Lorraine closed and locked the door behind him. Gonzales holstered his gun and went back to the scope that was trained across 32nd Street on Yarnell’s house. Sheets turned his back to them and continued with his telephone conversation.

“Anyone else?”

“I just arrived myself.”

She was hiding something, he could see it in her eyes. “Who else is down there?”

Gonzales looked away from the scope. “Your ex-wife showed up about twenty minutes ago.”

“Alone?”

“With a man named Phillip Brent,” Lorraine said.

“They’re over there now?”

“Yes.”

This was not how he had imagined it would be coming back to the States, he thought; Kathleen involved in this business, wittingly or not. From the beginning she’d distanced herself from his work, then later from him. Now she was in the middle of it. At the dangerous core.

He went to the window and looked across toward Yarnell’s house. Even without the glasses he could make out the lit upper-story windows and the vague black squares of the dark attic windows. The watchers and the watched. The listeners and the listened to. A bit of De la Mare came to him; “Tell them that I came, and no one answeredl/ That I kept my word.” But that didn’t matter. There was no honor here, he thought. No one else kept his word.

But why Kathleen? he wondered. Why her of all people? She had nothing to do with this. She’d never had anything to do with it. And for years she hadn’t even had anything to do with him.

“Mr. Trotter is on his way over,” Sheets said, putting down the telephone. “Apparently he’s been trying to reach you all afternoon.”

“Well, he’s found me,” McGarvey growled, dragging his eyes away from Yarnell’s house.

“Would you like something to drink, Mr. McGarvey?” Lorraine asked abruptly.

“We’re shutting down,” Sheets said before McGarvey could say a thing.

“Not with my wife down there you’re not!”

“I’m sorry, sir, but—”

“We’ll just wait until John gets here. You can give me at least that much.”

“He said break it down,” Sheets insisted.

“Bingo,” Gonzales said softly from the Starlight scope. He straightened up and stepped aside, his eyes narrow, his lips pursed. He glanced at Sheets and then at McGarvey and shrugged. “Maybe you want to take a look, maybe you don’t.” He nodded toward the scope. “But it’s something.”

He walked away and went down the hall to the back bedroom. Lorraine and Sheets were watching McGarvey, who felt as if he were on center stage in a sideshow. He looked out the window. Nothing had changed as far as he could tell with his naked eye. Look, don’t look. Stay, go. Think, don’t think. Just run away and keep running. Don’t ever look back. Christ, never look back.

Slowly he bent down to the scope’s eyepiece. At first the images were fuzzy, but when he adjusted the focus, the distant window frame leapt into sharp view, the open weave of the curtains like a patchwork gauze. He was looking into an upstairs bedroom of Yarnell’s house. From this angle he could only see the forward half of the room. A man and a woman stood locked in an embrace next to a four-poster bed. It was a dangerous game they were playing. They had probably snuck off, leaving the others downstairs. The man’s back was toward the window. When they parted, McGarvey was looking into the face of his ex-wife. Because of the effects of the infrared scope, Kathleen looked flushed, which in any event, he supposed she was. The man half turned, as if by request, giving McGarvey a clear view of him. Yarnell.

Oh, Kathleen, he thought. She’d always played dangerous games, but this time she could not know how precarious her position really was. For her as well as for Elizabeth. With nothing to lose, nothing seemed important. All of a sudden he felt a rush of protectiveness toward his ex-wife, and he didn’t know why.

“What is it, Mr. McGarvey?” Lorraine asked.

Yarnell tenderly caressed Kathleen’s cheek with his fingertips, and then kissed her forehead, her nose and again her lips, as if she were the most important person in the world to him, as if this were the most important moment, as if no one else in the world existed. Even from here McGarvey could feel the man’s power. Kathleen would be helpless. Except, he suspected, she’d gone looking for it. But she didn’t know, she could not know Yarnell’s power.

Lorraine was beside him. “Is it your ex-wife?” she asked softly.

McGarvey looked up into her eyes. She seemed like a kind, sensitive girl, genuinely concerned for him. She was one of the good ones, he supposed, who cared. Unless she watched her step very carefully, she wouldn’t last long in this business. The kind ones never did. There was no room for such sentiment.

“She’s with Yarnell,” he said, and he stepped away from the scope.

Lorraine watched him for a moment or two. “She couldn’t know about him.”

“I don’t think so.”

Lorraine looked through the scope for just a second, then straightened up. “Looks like they’re putting on a show down there.” She turned to Sheets. “We’ll stick around at least until Mr. Trotter shows up. Did he say when?”

Sheets had already backed off for whatever reason. “He’s in town. Said he’d be here in a minute or two.”

McGarvey lit a cigarette. He stood beside the window looking out into the night, the city glowing in every direction, even up toward the Naval Observatory in the center of its own big park along with the vice president’s mansion. The only darkness seemed to be in his own mind. Unwanted light was everywhere else. Strange and unfair, he thought. Thankfully Elizabeth was away at school. At least she would be spared the immediate hurt. Once again he was reminded of the women in his life: his sister, his ex-wife, his Swiss police watchdog, and Evita Perez, waiting for him in New York. They were all of a kind; judgmental women who in the end were very weak. Or, he wondered, was it merely his own chauvinism which made him think so?

Trotter was all out of breath when he barged into the apartment, as if he had just run up the eight flights of stairs. He stood puffing in the center of the room while he mopped the sweat off his brow with a handkerchief. He was flushed, and his glasses were steamed up. McGarvey noticed that he hadn’t shaved since this morning and that he still wore the same clothes he had worn at their lakeside meeting with Leonard Day. He had to wonder what his old friend had been up to.

“I need time, John,” McGarvey said.

“You were there this morning!” Trotter cried, his sudden emotion all out of proportion with what he was saying. “You heard him!”

“Forty-eight hours is all I need.”

“To do what—?” Trotter started, but then realizing exactly what it was he was saying, and in front of whom, he cut it off.

“I’ll get you and Leonard your proof, and you won’t have to do a thing except keep watch on Yarnell from here. Just like you’ve been doing for the past three days. Just like you’ve done today.”

“We can’t, Kirk, don’t you understand? It’s over now.”

Someone had gotten to Trotter. It was written all over the man’s face. “What happened, John? Today? Who’d you see? Who else knows about this now?”

“We cannot go on.”

“My wife is down there!”

Trotter seemed genuinely pained. “I’m sorry, Kirk. My hands are truly tied. In this you must believe me. Just get out while you still can.”

“Disappear, you mean?”

“Yes.”

McGarvey shook his head. “Who was it who got to you, John? Who’d you see today?”

“I have my orders …”

“From the bureau, John? From Day? Who?”

Trotter was cornered. He seemed to be all arms and legs. Gangly. “The president,” he whispered. “The president told me to stop.”

27

Time had truly and honestly run out. Winter, spring, day, night; it no longer made any difference to McGarvey. He was a man who had finally come face to face with his own demons, who had come foursquare against his own inner voice, which whispered like some troll in the scuppers that he was not master of his own fate let alone the future of others. Kathleen would say — and had — that he was a man driven by unseen forces. Insanity or simple willfulness, who could say. In the morning he took the shuttle flight up to New York after spending an intense evening with a new Trotter; a Trotter he’d never imagined existed, a man beside himself with fright, cowed into submission by the awfulness of the situation. “Here we have the potential for the ultimate disaster,” he’d cried at one point, not knowing where to turn or in whom to seek comfort or solace. All the forces were aligned against them. What did it matter if they believed they had the blessing of being right right on their side? What did it matter the distance they had come? Or the lives that hung in the balance? Trotter had no answer. No guarantees, in the end — and who among us could expect such assurances, had any right to expect such assurances? — but Trotter would do what he could. Basulto would be held for another forty-eight hours and the team at the Washington safe house would unofficially continue their surveillance. (They’d volunteered for it, with no backup should the situation fall apart!) Lastly, Basulto would be released on McGarvey’s recognizance with travel funds and documents when the time came. “If he ran, I would say good riddance,” a defeated Trotter said. “Nor at this point do I wish to know what you have in mind, where you would be taking him, or for what purpose.”

“We may not be much, John, but we are honorable men.”

Trotter shook his head. “There is no such animal, didn’t you know?”

“Did the president talk to you directly, John? Did he telephone you, send you a memo? Did a messenger come? What?”

But Trotter never answered, and as he entered the city through the Midtown Tunnel, he put his old friend out of mind. Just for now, just until he had all the pieces lined up. By then what he was setting in motion would have a life of its own. He would be able to step back and watch and wait for the end of the world or for his salvation, for all their salvations, though he didn’t think there’d be any thanks handed round at the end.

He paid the cabbie on the corner around the block from Evita’s club and went the rest of the way on foot. SoHo was not a morning neighborhood in the sense of daylight. There were people out and about, workmen, students on their way to school, mothers with their children, but the majority of the residents, the well-to-do artists, the connected businessmen, the chic women with their entourages, were still indoors, sleeping.

The front door to St. Christopher’s was locked. There was no bell and it took nearly five minutes of pounding before the big black man who acted as Evita’s bodyguard opened the door to McGarvey’s summons. He wore a gray jogging suit and a sweatband around his massive forehead. He had a permanent scowl on his face.

“She’s asleep,” he said before McGarvey could say anything. “You’ll have to come back tonight.” He started to close the door, but McGarvey blocked it.

“I have to talk to her. This morning. Now.”

“Motherfucker,” the big man said, the word drawn out. “You don’t hear so good.” He yanked the door all the way open and poked a massive paw into McGarvey’s chest, shoving him backward and nearly off the step. “Come back tonight.”

“I don’t want any trouble with you, Harry,” McGarvey said, spreading his hands in front of him. “So if you’ll just be a good boy and run upstairs and tell Ms. Perez that I’m here …”

The big man shoved McGarvey back another step. “I’m getting powerful tired of you, white boy. I want your lily white ass out of here now.”

McGarvey didn’t want this. It was stupid, and yet he had been feeling a confrontation building up inside of him ever since Trotter had shown up in Lausanne. Even before that.

“This is important, Harry,” he said, trying one last time to be reasonable. He put his overnight bag down on the stoop.

“Shit,” the big man swore, coming forward. He grabbed a handful of McGarvey’s jacket and swung him around, bouncing him hard off the door frame. McGarvey didn’t resist; he went with it. He sagged as if his legs were giving out. The bouncer was very strong, but he wasn’t very sophisticated. A street brawler, McGarvey figured.

Harry hauled him to his feet, leaving himself wide open. McGarvey drove a knee into the big man’s groin. All the air went out of him and he staggered backward. McGarvey hit him in the solar plexus, the force of the blow sending the big man sprawling back into the vestibule. McGarvey came after him, driving a right into the man’s face, then a left and two more solid right jabs, causing blood to gush from the big man’s nose and mouth where his lip was all cut up. He sank to the floor, his eyes fluttering, his breath coming in big blubbering gasps.

McGarvey hauled the bouncer the rest of the way into the vestibule, looked around on the street to make sure that no one had witnessed the confrontation, grabbed his bag, then closed and locked the door.

Except for the bouncer’s labored breathing, the building was quiet. The man was unarmed. He hadn’t been expecting trouble, or at least he hadn’t been expecting someone too tough for him.

McGarvey’s right shoulder ached from where he had been slammed into the doorway. He hauled the bouncer across the vestibule and into the darkened club room, where he dumped him behind the bar. He’d be out for a while yet, and McGarvey didn’t think he would be in much shape to continue the fight when he did finally come around.

Leaving his bag by the entry to the vestibule, he went upstairs to Evita’s apartment. The living room was a mess. There’d apparently been a party here last night and no one had bothered picking up afterward. The place smelled of stale booze and cigarettes, and the sweeter, burned-leaves odor of marijuana. Evita’s cocaine paraphernalia was out on the coffee table in front of the fireplace; the vial lay open and empty. He listened but heard nothing, not even noises from out on the street. St. Christopher’s was taking a holiday.

He went to the back of the apartment, past an efficiency kitchen, the sinks and counters filled with dirty dishes, and down a short corridor to the rear bedroom. The door was open. He stepped inside. The curtains were closed over the four tall windows, leaving the large room in semidarkness. A raised platform at the center was dominated by a large circular bed. Evita was sprawled out asleep on the bed, her arms and legs spread. She was naked. In sleep her body seemed dissipated, tinged a little in blue as if she had circulatory problems, sagging here and there, flattened out, her neck too thin, her knees and ankles too bony.

For a moment McGarvey nearly turned around and walked away. She’d suffered enough. But he couldn’t think of any other way of doing what had to be done; of calling Yarnell out, of exposing the mole in the CIA and of stopping Baranov once and for all. Looking down at her on the bed he had trouble seeing her as the little girl in Mexico City, as Yarnell’s and Baranov’s plaything, yet he knew it was true.

He went into the bathroom, switched on the light, and turned on the cold water in the shower. He laid out a towel and a robe, then went back into the bedroom. Evita was just beginning to stir. He picked her up. She was surprisingly light.

“What?” she mumbled, her eyes fluttering.

McGarvey carried her into the bathroom, opened the shower door with his toe and put her down on her feet at the edge of the spray. She reared back all of a sudden, but he shoved her under the cold stream and shut the door. She screamed at the top of her lungs and then thumped against the door.

“You sonofabitch! Cristo!”

“We’re leaving in twenty minutes,” McGarvey called. “I’ll put on the coffee.”

Evita was still crying and sputtering when he went back out to the apartment. Harry, the bouncer, stood in the doorway weaving on his feet. His nose and mouth were bloody. He had a gun.

“I didn’t kill her,” McGarvey said. “I just put her in the shower.”

“Get out of here,” the big man growled.

“I’m trying to help her.”

“She don’t need your kind of help, you sonofabitch.”

McGarvey didn’t move. “I’m going to make some coffee. Then we’ll be leaving.”

“Not with her.”

“Someone is trying to kill her, Harry. I’m trying to stop it.”

“All sorts of people trying to do that lady harm …”

“Herself included,” McGarvey said. “I’m here to put a stop to it. Give her some peace.”

“Shit.”

“I’m not leaving without her, Harry. One way or the other.”

The bouncer raised his pistol. It looked like a toy in his massive paw. But the edge of his anger was gone. This was beyond his ken. He didn’t know what to do or say.

“Ask her, Harry. As soon as she’s out of the shower, listen to her.”

“Who the hell are you? You a cop or something?”

McGarvey shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Believe me. I’ll bring her back in a couple of days and you’ll never be bothered again.”

“Fuck you!”

“Save your breath, Harry, you don’t have a chance in hell,” Evita said from the bedroom doorway. She had put on a robe and wrapped a towel around her hair.

“You all right?” Harry asked.

“None of us has a chance in hell,” she said. “Go get your face fixed. And put away that gun, for Christ’s sake.” She turned and went back into the bedroom.

Harry seemed deflated. He lowered his pistol and looked from the bedroom door to McGarvey. He shook his head. “What have you people done to that woman? You fucked her up royal, that’s what.” He shook his head again.

“What people?” McGarvey asked softly.

“Shit.”

“Who else has come up here?”

“There’s always someone here. Someone after her. Pushing her. Telling her stories. Making her do … things.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Names don’t matter. But I see things. I watch things. We all do.”

“Her husband?”

“I would have killed the bastard if he ever showed up here,” the big man said with sudden feeling.

“Baranov? Does that name ring a bell, Harry? Have you heard that one? Was he here?”

“I don’t know shit,” the bouncer said. “You want her? You can have her. I don’t need this shit anymore.”

“I’ll bring her back …”

“She’ll never leave Mexico. Not this time.” The bouncer stuffed the gun in his pocket and went to the door.

“When was she in Mexico last, Harry? It’s important.” McGarvey hadn’t expected this.

The big man looked at him. His shoulders had sagged. He was carrying an impossibly heavy burden. “A year ago,” he said softly. “Maybe a little longer.”

“Did she go alone?”

“She was looking for him.”

“Who?”

“Baranov.”

“Did she find him?”

“Don’t ask me. But she’s been fucked up ever since.”

“Did he come here? Did he come to see her?”

“I don’t know, I’ve already told you. And I’ll tell you something else. If you’re taking her to see him, you’ll lose her. She’s right, you know.”

“About what?”

“She hasn’t got a chance in hell.”

McGarvey watched him leave. He heard him on the steps, his tread slow and even, as if he were a man either starting out on a very long journey or just returning from one.

“He’s a good man,” Evita said from the bedroom door.

McGarvey turned to her. She had gotten dressed, but she looked like hell, her eyes red, her face wan, drawn. “It’s time for the truth now,” he said. “All of it.”

“Are we going after Darby and Valentin? Is that why you’ve come?”

“Yes.”

She seemed to think about it for a long moment. “Then the truth is what you’ll get,” she said. “Only I don’t think you’re going to like it very much.”

It was late afternoon. Their flight was due to touch down in Mexico City a few minutes before eight. The plane was barely half-filled so they had three seats to themselves in the smoking section near the rear. A thin haze hung over them. They had drinks, but had passed on the dinner. The stews had left them alone for the past half hour. Evita was strung out. “I don’t know what will happen to me if I have to meet face-to-face with him again. You can’t imagine what he’s like.”

They were all bastards, McGarvey thought.

“He’s worse than Darby,” she said, looking out the window. “More ruthless. More sure of himself.” She turned back. “He gets what he wants. Always.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that you went to Mexico City to see him?”

“It wasn’t important.” She shrugged. “It had nothing to do with what you wanted.”

“Did you see him?”

“No. But I found him. That part was easy. He’s living in our old house. Same staff for all I know,” she said bitterly. “I had to find out.”

McGarvey hadn’t been following her until that moment when it suddenly occurred to him what she was talking about. “It was your daughter, Juanita.”

“Someone told me she was there.”

“With Baranov?”

“I didn’t know. She went down with some of her friends from school. He would know she was there.”

“Was she with him?”

“What do you want from me?” Evita flared. “Cristo!”

“Was she there? Was your daughter with Baranov?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “She and her friends were there. But I didn’t find out about it until later. I didn’t know at the time.” She shook her head. “She was proud of herself. For all I know Darby made the introductions.”

“Why didn’t you do something about it?”

“I wanted to,” she flared again. “I wanted to take a gun and shoot him dead. I wanted to make him suffer like I had. But it wasn’t possible. Nothing is possible against him.”

“Why did he come to you in New York, then?”

“He offered to give her back,” she said. Her eyes were filling. “Do you understand me? He offered to sell me my own daughter. Which was a laugh because when she finally did come back to the States she went straight to her father. So everything I’ve done in the past nine months has been for nothing.”

It was coming now, McGarvey thought. The truth, so far as Evita knew it. And he thought he had a good guess what it might be. All a part of Baranov’s plan. The Russian had made his calculations well.

“What was the price?” he asked. “That you spy for him?”

“I had been his whore in the early days. It was time to graduate. To grow up. It was important that we all expand, that each among us finds our place, our purpose in life.”

“You supplied the club and the call girls?”

She nodded. “And Valentin arranged for the marks. Most of them were diplomats from the UN. But we got a steady Washington crowd, too, especially on the weekends.”

“The tables are wired for sound?”

“That’s right. The cameras are in the ceilings and in my apartment, of course.”

“Who collects the film?”

“No film. It’s all electronic this time. Goes out over a phone line to somewhere in the city.”

“No one comes to maintain the equipment?”

“Not in the nine months since it was installed.”

“Do you have a switch so that you can turn the system off?” McGarvey asked. “When you want privacy?”

She shook her head.

“Everything that’s said or done in the club, in your apartment, is transmitted?”

She nodded.

“Including our conversations?”

“Yes,” she said. She smiled wanly. “I tried to warn you.”

“But I wouldn’t listen,” McGarvey mumbled to fill the gap.

“Men never do.”

He might not have heard her. He was thinking of everything that had gone before. The unexplained, the unexplainable had come clear. Or at least a significant portion had. But he hadn’t told her everything. She hadn’t been told, for instance, about Janos. She was a leak, but she wasn’t the only one. He wondered then, about his own stupidity. He had made a colossal blunder with Evita. What other blunders had he made? In how many other instances had Baranov forseen his moves; in how many other places had Baranov anticipated his actions and lain in the bushes waiting for him? Somewhere a long time ago he had heard the notion that some lives are inevitable and that of those lives some are terrible yet necessary. It wasn’t fate; rather it was more akin to the ball rolling downhill — once it began its journey nothing short of catastrophe could stop it, which was ironic because at the bottom of the hill lay another sort of catastrophe. McGarvey felt at that moment as if he were rushing headlong down his own path of inevitability, and had been ever since Santiago.

Evita told him a story about a young boy who lived in the small town of Bellavista and dreamed someday of going to the big city and doing great things. The problem was, he had no idea what a big city was and even less of an idea what a great thing might be. Nevertheless, he prayed every night for his dreams to come true and eventually they did. Only they turned into nightmares because of his stupidity.

It was clear she was telling a story about herself. “What happened?” McGarvey asked.

“It’s simple. He got in over his head. He attracted too much attention and the vultures came after him.”

“And?”

“In all of his life, the young boy never had more than a single centavo to call his own. One coin in his pocket. So his wish was that as often as he put his hand in his pocket, there would be a centavo for him. Hundreds of centavos. Thousands of centavos. Millions. But still only one centavo at a time.”

“So he went to the big city. Did he do great things?”

“You don’t understand. Who cares about a single centavo at a time, no matter how many of them there are? The little boy was not only very stupid, but he turned out to be a freak and finally an outcast among his own people.”

“The problem is, I can’t figure out what it is that Baranov is really after,” McGarvey said. “He’s been working on it for months, perhaps even years, and something is about to happen. Do the names Ted Asher or Arthur Jules mean anything to you? Anything at all?”

“Never heard of them,” she said. “What have they got to do with this? Are they friends of Darby’s?”

“They were murdered last year on their way to Mexico City.”

Her eyes widened. “Valentin?”

“Most likely.”

“Why? Were they investigating him?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “But I’d guess they were.”

“He’ll kill us, too, you know.”

“He might try.”

“He’d be crazy not to,” Evita said. “And why are we going to him like this? What exactly do you hope to accomplish? Are you going to try to kill him?”

McGarvey thought again about Janos and Owens, and about himself. Baranov had had plenty of opportunities to have him killed. But not so much as one attempt had been made on his life. Baranov knew about him and so did Yarnell, through the surveillance equipment in Evita’s club if nothing else. So why hadn’t someone come after him in the middle of the night? Why hadn’t someone planted a bomb in one of the cars he had rented? Why hadn’t his hotel been staked out? Why hadn’t they come after him and Basulto in Miami? Especially Basulto. It was the Cuban who blew the whistle, who fingered Yarnell and therefore Baranov.

“He owns Mexico City,” Evita said. “He’s been there twenty years or more. What do you think you can do against him?”

McGarvey just looked at her.

“What are you doing? You an ex-CIA officer and me a whore.”

“He knew I was coming. He knew that someone like me would be talking to you.”

“He knows everything.”

“How, Evita? How could he know? Nine months ago I didn’t even know.”

“He’s a magician.”

“He’s a Soviet spy, nothing more.”

“He has friends everywhere.”

“Like you?”

“I’m no friend of his!” she flared.

“But you worked for him.”

She passed a hand over her eyes. “You don’t understand, you can’t understand even after everything I told you.” She looked up. “But you will if you ever meet him face-to-face. Then you’ll see.”

“Does the name Basulto mean anything to you, Evita?” he asked. She stiffened. “Yes?” he prompted.

“It’s a cubano name,” she said. “Fairly common.” She wasn’t convincing.

“Francisco Artime Basulto. He was in Mexico City in the old days.”

She closed her eyes. “Maybe,” she said hesitantly. “Did he say he’d gone to the Ateneo Español? Was he ever there? Did he know the names and places?”

“Yes. Do you remember him?”

“He was young. A fancy dresser. Threw his money around.”

“That’s the one,” McGarvey said. “Did you know him?”

“He was around.”

“You saw him, at the Ateneo?”

“At some of the parties, too.”

“Was he ever with Baranov?”

She nodded. “And Darby. He was one of the regular crowd for a while.”

“Baranov knew him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever talk about Basulto with you? Did he ever mention his name? Say what kind of a person he was? Who he worked for?”

She was trying to remember. She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe. But he wasn’t much, or I would remember him better. There were so many of them.”

“Did he ever do any work for Baranov, that you know of? Or maybe for your husband?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to him?”

“He just left, I guess. I wasn’t paying much attention in those days, I’ve already told you. Most of them were leaving then anyway. It wasn’t the same any longer.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him now?”

“I might,” she said.

“Did Baranov ever mention his name to you? In New York, perhaps, nine months ago?”

She was finally catching his drift. She looked a little closer at him. “No he didn’t. What does Basulto have to do with this?”

“He told me that he saw your husband and Baranov together in Mexico City, when the Ateneo was going strong. Before the Bay of Pigs.”

“So?”

“But he didn’t know who your husband was, only that he was an American.”

“That’s hard to believe. Everyone knew Darby in those days.”

“Basulto was arrested in Miami a few weeks ago. He told the FBI that your husband was working for the Russians. He said your husband was on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, where he murdered a CIA case officer who might have had certain suspicions.”

“He’s lying to you.”

“About what?”

“About not knowing Darby and probably about everything else. He was at our house. More than once.”

“He’s coming to Mexico City to help us.”

She laughed. “Then you are a bigger fool than I thought you were. If that Cuban is in on this, you’ve been led into a trap. All of us have.”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” McGarvey said.

The night was very hot and still. A dense smog hung over the great city. Riding in from the airport in a beat up old taxi, McGarvey could taste the air and feel it at the back of his throat and in his eyes. Evita sat next to him, looking straight ahead, her slight body held rigidly erect. She had not said a thing since they landed except when the customs official asked if she had anything to declare. She did not, and she was passed through. Traffic was very heavy. The city was ablaze with lights. Much of the damage from the recent earthquake was still evident, and poverty was apparent everywhere from the side of the road. They came to the Hotel del Prado, across from La Alameda Park downtown, and McGarvey paid off the cabbie. Evita did not want to go upstairs immediately, so McGarvey gave their bags to an oddly reticent doorman and they walked across the street.

“It doesn’t feel like home and yet it does,” she said. “It’s all different now.”

“How?”

“I’m not a little girl anymore, and there’s no one left for me.”

“Harry didn’t think you’d leave if you came back here.”

“He’s probably right, because there is nothing for me in New York or Washington, either.”

“Your daughter …”

“Was lost to me the day Darby took over. And if she’s been with Valentin, she’s doubly lost.”

Some sort of demonstration was going on across the park along the Avenida Hidalgo. People were hurrying toward the noise from all over the park and the surrounding streets. McGarvey thought the crowd sounded angry, but Evita didn’t seem to notice at first.

“You’ll be safe once this is finished,” McGarvey said, trying to sound convincing. A bonfire was burning in the street. They could see the flames through the trees. “You’re her mother. Once her father and Baranov are exposed, she’ll come back to you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Everything will be different …”

They suddenly came within sight of the large crowd choking the avenue. Evita pulled up short. Long banners had been hung in the trees and between the streetlights. A lot of people carried signs.

“I think we should go to the hotel,” she said.

“What do the banners say?”

“‘Glory to work,”’ she read. “‘The party and the people are united. Long live the Soviet people, builders of Communism.”’

McGarvey took her by the arm and they headed back toward the protective darkness of the park. A huge roar went up from the crowd. McGarvey turned around in time to see a straw-filled figure dressed in tails, red-striped trousers and a top hat, a white goatee on its chin, burst into flames over the bonfire.

“Libertad!” the crowd screamed. “Libertad!”

28

At ten that evening McGarvey called Hialeah. “Morgan here, who’s calling?”

“This is Kirk McGarvey. Let me talk to Artimé.”

“Oh, they said you’d be calling,” the FBI field man said. “When do we get rid of this scumbail?”

“In the morning. I want him on the first plane to Mexico City. But stay with him until the plane actually takes off.”

“We’ve babysat the bastard this long, another ten or twelve hours won’t hurt much. How much money do you want us to give him?”

“Fifty bucks. I don’t want him having enough to wander off on me.”

“Listen pal, once we get him aboard that plane in the morning and watch it take off, he’s no longer our responsibility. I just want to get that straight with you. Once he leaves, he’s your headache.”

“Has anyone else called or tried to come up there?”

“No one except Washington.”

“Trotter?”

“Yes.”

“Put Basulto on, would you?”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “It’s for you,” McGarvey heard the man say away from the phone.

“Yes?” Basulto answered the phone cautiously.

“It’s me. You’re coming to Mexico City. We’ve got some work to do.”

“Are we going to nail that bastard, Mr. McGarvey? Are we finally going to get him? Is he down there now? I thought he would be in Washington.”

“I’ll tell you about it when you get there. They’ll take you out to the airport in the morning. I want you in Mexico as soon as possible.”

“Sure thing. Will you be meeting me?”

“I want you to take a cab downtown. To the Hotel Del Prado just across from La Alameda.”

Basulto laughed. It was the same hotel at which he had met his case officer, Roger Harris, in the sixties. “Sure,” he said. “I think I can find the place. What room?”

“I haven’t checked in yet. I’ll leave word for you at the desk.”

“Are you in Washington?”

“That’s right,” McGarvey lied. “We’ll be flying down in the morning.”

“We?”

“An old friend. Anxious to meet you as a matter of fact.”

“Who is this …?”

“Tomorrow, Artime. We’ll talk tomorrow.” McGarvey hung up.

Their room was on the small side, but clean and reasonably well furnished. A crucifix hung over the bed, and on the opposite wall, over the bureau, was a large print of the Last Supper. A braided rug covered most of the tiled floor, and the large windows opened inward from a tiny balcony. Evita stood at the balcony’s ornamental grillwork and looked across the park at the demonstration still going on.

“They don’t like Americans,” she said. “They’ve always blamed their poverty — and even their earthquakes — on the Americans.”

“Is there anything more I should know about Basulto before he gets here?”

“Kirk McGarvey is a good name,” she said seriously. “Better than Glynn, I think.”

“Evita?”

“I told you everything I know.” She turned around. “Nobody liked him. I don’t think anybody trusted him. There was a rumor that he had worked for the Batista government. We were surprised that Castro’s people didn’t assassinate him.”

She’d been a naive little girl, intimidated by events around her, yet she remembered Basulto from twenty-five years ago even though she’d said she only saw him a few times. Who could he trust? Who could he believe? He didn’t know any longer. Perhaps he’d never really known.

“Let’s take a drive.” McGarvey removed his pistol from the false bottom of his toiletries kit. “We’ve talked enough about Baranov; I want to see him.”

Despite the lateness of the hour, McGarvey was able to arrange for a rental car through the hotel. The desk clerk asked him twice how long he would be staying in Mexico City and seemed pleased when McGarvey replied that unfortunately business would probably be taking him back to Washington in a day, two at the most.

The clerk looked at Evita as if he knew her, or wanted to. She said something to him in Spanish and he reared back as if he had been slapped. Leaving the hotel she refused to talk about it. McGarvey thought she looked ashamed.

Their car was a gray Volkswagen beetle with a very loud muffler and a radio that did not work. McGarvey found a street map in the glove compartment.

“It’s in the south,” Evita said. Her face was pale in the light from the hotel entrance. The doorman was watching them.

“What?” McGarvey asked, looking up.

“Valentin’s house. Our old house. San Juan Ixtayopan. In the mountains.”

“We’ll get out there. First I want to swing past the Soviet embassy.”

“It’s just around the corner,” she said automatically.

McGarvey put down the map. “You have been there?”

“Yes. With Valentin,” she said defensively. “He sometimes took me there at night. To the referentura. He was showing me off.”

The referentura in all Soviet embassies was the equivalent of a safe room or screened room. Physically and electronically secure from the rest of the facility, it was the room in which KGB plans were formulated and carried out. It was the heart of KGB operations in any country. Even Baranov had to have taken chances bringing her there. But then the Russian was young in those days. And brash?

“Did you ever go over there with your husband?”

Evita shook her head.

“Did he ever go there alone to meet with Baranov?”

“I don’t know. He never said and I never asked.”

Traffic along the Avenida Juárez was heavy. Even over the blare of their muffler, they could hear the crowd noises from across the park. McGarvey waited for a break and then pulled out.

“What are we going to do at the embassy?” Evita asked.

“Maybe they’ll offer us a nightcap if they recognize you,” McGarvey said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his voice. Still she was lying to him. Even now she was holding back, telling him only what she thought he wanted to hear at the moment. It was habit from a lifetime of lying. A lifetime of deceit for fear that she would be found out for what she really was; a poor silly girl without a mind of her own. He wanted to despise her, yet he found he couldn’t. If anything he felt sorry for her.

He turned left on Lopez which ran along the east end of the park, then right onto the broad Calzada de Tacubaya after the traffic light changed. Behind them they could see the huge mass of the crowd completely filling the Avenida Hidalgo, several bonfires now lighting up the night sky, armed policemen behind barricades at all the corners leading toward the disturbance.

The Russians would be pleased with this latest round of unrest. In 1971 they nearly succeeded in maneuvering Mexico into a civil war. This time it seemed possible they might succeed. Certainly the mood of the Mexican government was different now than it had been in 1971; more hostile toward the U.S., under seige this time because of falling oil prices, massive unemployment, and several devastating earthquakes over the past few years, not to mention the continuing strife over the drug issue.

They passed behind the Palace of Fine Arts and across San Juan Letran, the main post office. A statue of Charles IV stood in front of the College of Mines. Traffic was moving at a breakneck pace. McGarvey wanted to slow down, but the drivers behind him honked their horns impatiently.

“It’s number 204, behind the tall iron fence on the next block,” Evita said. “Valentin’s office will be on the second floor.”

McGarvey pulled over out of traffic and parked across the street. The Soviet embassy was housed in an old Victorian villa complete with shuttered windows, ornate cupolas, tall brick chimneys, the roof bristling with antennae and aerials. Two light globes were perched above the entry gate, and inside the grounds were ablaze with light. Something big was happening at the embassy, something very big. McGarvey thought about the crises he had weathered at other embassies around the world. It was the same as this. Every window in the building was lit. The cipher machines would be running full tilt. Messages would be streaming back and forth between Moscow. The Mexican unrest, the missile crisis.

A dark Ford van came down the avenue and turned in at the embassy gate. The driver flashed his headlights and moments later the gates swung open and the van drove through, the gates closing behind it.

“He’s probably inside now,” Evita said in a small voice.

McGarvey glanced at her. Her eyes were wide, her lips pursed. She was shivering. “There’s trouble. He’ll be preoccupied. Time now for him to make a mistake.”

She shook her head. “He never makes mistakes.”

“We’ll see,” McGarvey said.

A man inside the compound came to the gate and looked across the street at them. He didn’t move. A second man joined him, they said something to each other, and he turned and went away.

“They’ve seen us,” Evita said.

“But they can’t know who we are. Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for? For Valentin to show up? Let’s get out of here. We can’t do anything.”

McGarvey stared across at the other man for a long time. He wanted the Russians to see them. He wanted them to know they’d come. He wanted them to know that everything wasn’t going to go their way this time. At least in this one thing, Baranov was going to lose.

“Please, Kirk,” Evita said. “I am becoming frightened.”

“Where is the American embassy?” McGarvey asked. “Is it far from here?”

“Not far,” she said. “On the Paseo de la Reforma. Back the way we came.”

McGarvey put the car in gear, waited for a gap in the traffic, and made a U-turn so that they passed directly in front of the Soviet embassy gate. Evita turned her head so that she would not be seen, but McGarvey looked directly at the Russian guard. Tell Baranov I’ve come for him. Tell him it won’t be long now. And then they were past and turning again at the barricades blocking Hidalgo, the demonstration still building. Even more police had arrived, and they were anxiously directing traffic away from the park.

The crowd had spilled clear across the park onto the Avenida Juárez. They had to drive two blocks farther south before they could turn back to the west past the Hotel Metropol.

“What can you hope to accomplish here like this?” Evita asked. “Just driving around the city at night. Sooner or later someone will spot us. Valentin has his spies everywhere.”

“I want him to know that we’re here.”

“This is insanity!”

“The insanity, Evita, has been going on for twenty-five years. I’m going to end it.”

“It’ll end when you’re dead,” she cried. “He’ll kill us all, and in the end he’ll get his way.”

She was beginning to come apart. It was too soon. He needed her for a little while longer. “Listen to me, Evita. You’re going to have to be strong, but just for a couple of days.”

“I can’t,” she cried.

“You won’t have to do a thing except make a phone call. One call tomorrow night. After that you can come back to New York. I promise you.”

“Then what are we doing out here like this tonight?” she screeched. She held out her hand. “No, you don’t have to tell me, you bastard! You’re provoking him! You’re parading around his city with me. You’re showing him that you aren’t afraid of him. Well I am!”

She was right. But he needed her. “I’ll put you on a plane first thing in the morning, if that’s what you want.”

“You’re goddamned right that’s what I want!”

“He and your husband will have won.”

“I don’t care!”

“And Juanita will be theirs. Body and soul. She’ll have about as much chance as you had.” He was thinking about his ex-wife, Kathleen, and his, daughter. They didn’t have much of a chance either. Maybe it was too late for them after all. Maybe he was charging at windmills. Maybe he should have remained with Marta in Switzerland. Lausanne seemed so terribly far away just now. Unattainable. Unreal. As if that part of his life had never occurred.

“Oh, you bastard,” she said.

“Forty-eight hours, maybe less,” he told her, turning the corner onto the Paseo de la Reforma. She buried her face in her hands and began to sob.

A double row of tall trees lined the main boulevard, Mexico City’s most magnificent. Stone and bronze statues of national heroes seemed to be everywhere. It reminded McGarvey of Rome’s Via Vento or Paris’s Champs Elysées. He expected to see legions marching in broad phalanxes to the roar of cheering crowds.

They came around a traffic circle at the center of which was a towering monument to Cristóbal Colón, which was the Spanish name for Christopher Columbus. If anything, traffic was much heavier now. There seemed to be an urgency throughout the city. A stridency to the note of the horns, to the snarl of the engines, to the movement of the pedestrians crossing against the lights and in the middle of the blocks.

Banners still proclaimed the opening of a new gallery in the Banco International next to the Hotel Continental and the statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, still rose above the intersection with Avenida Insurgentes — and all of it was cast in a violet glow from the streetlights. Mexico City was a pagan arena.

They could hear the roar of the crowd before they could see it. Traffic began immediately to slow. Evita looked up and sat forward.

“What is it now?” she asked.

“I think it’s our embassy,” McGarvey replied absently as he looked for a place to turn around. He did not want to get caught in a traffic jam here.

A blue and white police car, its lights flashing and its sirens blaring, raced past, followed by three ambulances. In the distance they could hear gunfire.

“What’s happening?” Evita cried, holding her ears.

Two canvas-covered army trucks roared up from a side street and careened around the traffic circle, pulling to a halt on the grass. Immediately two dozen armed soldiers leaped from the trucks and on their officer’s orders took up positions across the boulevard. Traffic came to a complete standstill and began to back up. A huge explosion lit the night sky with a tremendous flash and a heavy thump. A ball of fire rose from a building on the next block. Some of the soldiers looked over their shoulders, while others ran forward up the broad boulevard, motioning with their weapons for the cars and trucks to turn around. But it was impossible. Already traffic was backed up for several blocks.

People began piling out of their cars, talking excitedly with each other, shouting at the soldiers and pointing toward the flames and sparks shooting up into the sky. In the distance, from all directions, it seemed, they could hear sirens converging on the scene of the explosion. McGarvey had little doubt that it was the American embassy. Already he was considering the danger he was in because of his nationality. Evita might get by, but he didn’t know more than a dozen words in Spanish. The mood of the crowd on this side of the army barrier was rapidly turning ugly. He’d found out what he wanted to find out in any event. The mood in Mexico City was rabidly anti-American, and the Soviet embassy had seemed to be on standby for an emergency.

They were near the head of the traffic jam. McGarvey eased the Volkswagen out from behind a taxi and bumped slowly up onto the median strip, ignoring the shouts for him to go back. One of the soldiers rushed down from the traffic circle, brandishing his rifle and shouting for them to stop.

“You’re sick,” McGarvey told Evita. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

Evita’s eyes were wide. She looked from the advancing soldier to McGarvey and back.

“Hospital! Hospital!” McGarvey shouted out the window.

Another grim-faced soldier raced over. Evita suddenly held her gut and doubled over, screaming in what sounded like agony.

McGarvey took his pistol out of his pocket and laid it on the seat beside his right leg. He’d come too far, he decided, to be caught like this without a fight.

“Hospital,” he shouted out the window again. And Evita moaned as if she were half-dead. It was a convincing performance.

A crowd was beginning to gather around them. The soldiers held a hurried conference and then stepped aside, waving McGarvey onto the traffic circle toward a side street that headed north.

“Hospital de la Raza,” one soldier shouted. “De la Raza.” He was gesturing toward the north. “Insurgentes Norte,” he shouted as McGarvey passed.

The other soldiers watched them curiously as they drove past. Before they turned up Calles Rhin, McGarvey got a clear view down the broad boulevard at the huge crowd. The front of the U.S. embassy had been blown away and had collapsed into the street. Half the block was engulfed in flames. Soldiers seemed to be everywhere. The sounds of gunfire were clearly audible over the screaming and shouting of the crowd, the sirens, and the blaring bullhorns warning the people back.

They had to wait for three army trucks racing down from Avenida Lerma before they were able to cross and head back east, making a wide circle around the traffic backed up along the Paseo de la Reforma.

“Where are we going now?” Evita shouted.

“I want to see Baranov’s house,” McGarvey said, turning south along Avenida Bucareli. Traffic was heavy here, too, but in the opposite direction. The entire city, it seemed, was rushing toward the U.S. embassy.

“You’re crazy. Let’s go to the airport. Now. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“First Baranov. And then we’ll return to the hotel and stay there, out of sight.”

“No.”

“Yes, Evita. We’ve come too far to be stopped now. He’s not going to win this time.”

“He already has,” she cried. “It wasn’t the Russian embassy that was blown up. He’s won, can’t you see it? What use will it be if we’re killed?”

McGarvey looked over at her. She had pinned up her long hair, but it was coming loose and hung in wisps around her face. She looked vulnerable. There was an hysterical edge to her voice now, and her eyes were a little wild.

“Do you think it’ll make any difference if we return to New York? If he wants us, he’ll get us no matter where we are.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Maybe he’ll make a mistake.”

“And then you’ll kill him? Is that it? Is that what you’re doing here?”

“If need be.”

“But it’s not just him you’re after,” she said.

“You want Darby, too, and maybe someone else. Is that it? Is there someone else? Another spy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what are we doing here like this? I’m supposed to telephone someone tomorrow? Who? What am I supposed to tell this person?”

They turned onto the broad Fray Servando Teresa de Mier; traffic was still heavy but moving much faster now, allowing McGarvey to speed up.

“If I’m to help you, I need to know what I’m supposed to do.” She was trying to be reasonable.

“I want to see Baranov’s house. I want to see where he lives.”

She looked out the window. “What if I don’t give you directions?”

“He’s near Ixtayopan,” McGarvey said tiredly. “I’ll ask around.”

“You’re completely crazy.”

“Probably. But I’m not going to stop.”

“You’d never find him.”

“It would take time, but I’d find him,” McGarvey said. “Because he wants to be found. He knew that I was coming to see you, and he knew that you would help me.”

She closed her eyes. “I don’t understand.” “Neither do I,” McGarvey said.

“What?” she asked, opening her eyes.

“Did Baranov tell you why I would be coming to see you?” he asked her. “Did he tell you that I would be coming after your husband and that you were to cooperate with me? Did he make you promise to tell me all about Mexico City in the early days? How your husband was a spy and how he worked for the Russians as well as the Americans?”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” She was avoiding his questions.

“It’s all right if it scares you, Evita, it scares the hell out of me, too.”

“But what is he after? What kind of a plot has he hatched?”

“It has something to do with the Soviet missiles here. And something else. Someone he may be trying to protect.”

“Valentin wants Darby to be found out. He wants you to arrest him.”

“I think so.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, Evita. But that’s why we’re here. It’s the one thing Baranov did not expect us to do.”

To the southeast the road rose in tiers from the high plateau valley toward snow-capped mountains. Back the way they had come the city spread itself out across half the horizon, wonderfully lit avenues and streets stretching across the valley like long necklaces; tall buildings, radio towers, and even moving traffic along the broader avenues were clear despite the smog that blanketed the valley. They passed through Culhuacan, Tezonco, Zapotitlan, Tlalenco, Tlahuac, and Tulyehualco — cities that had been all but swallowed by the city’s sprawl. Each was a little smaller than the previous one, and each had its own character, but they all seemed in a touristy way to want to return to the days of the Aztecs. Eighteen miles out from the center of the city traffic had finally thinned out so that now, driving southwest out of San Juan Ixtayopan toward the peak of Cerro Tuehtli, they were finally alone on the dark road. Their car was very loud as they crossed the mountains, but then McGarvey wasn’t interested in hiding his presence; he wanted Baranov to know that someone was coming, that his Mexican fortress wasn’t as impregnable as he might suspect it was. So what are you trying, you bastard? Everything points toward Darby Yarnell, your old pal and confidante, even your lover if Evita is to be believed (and he thought she was). Did he quit on you? Did he get too big for his britches, demand too much? Or did he want asylum just when you finally tired of him and wanted to get rid of him? Or had Darby Yarnell simply outlived his usefulness, and now it was time to dump him? What was he missing? McGarvey asked himself. Where was the one twist, the one fact, the one lie that in the light of day would make everything clear?

As they crossed a bridge spanning a deep ravine, they could see a large house alive with lights perched on the edge of the mountain above them. The road entered the trees and curved left before switching back. Suddenly they could see the house again, much closer now, and they could pick out dozens of automobiles parked in a front courtyard. Japanese lanterns hung in the trees, and they could see people dancing on a broad veranda that was cantilevered out over the side of the hill.

McGarvey pulled up a hundred yards below the house, doused his lights, and shut off the engine. In the sudden silence they could hear music and laughter and even bits of conversation, voices raised in celebration. Baranov was Nero: he was throwing a party while Mexico City burned.

He hadn’t expected this. Baranov should have been at his embassy. The country was in crisis. And yet there seemed to be a logic to it. Baranov had envisioned some master plan, and now he was apparently celebrating his victory. The notion made the hair on the back of McGarvey’s neck stand on end.

Evita sat back in her seat, shivering. She was remembering what it had been like for her in the old days.

“He’s an arrogant sonofabitch,” McGarvey said, reading her thoughts. “He does think he’s won.”

The band stopped playing and they could hear applause. McGarvey got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side. He took out two cigarettes, lit them both, and handed her one through the open window. At first she didn’t move, but then she reached up and accepted the cigarette from him.

“The question is, what has he won?” McGarvey drew deeply on his cigarette. He stepped a few feet down the road so that he could better see the house above. “He must really impress the Kremlin. Do you know that the Russians have apparently constructed missile bases just south of our border? Mexico has come a long way since the sixties.” Someone laughed from above and the music started again; this time the tune was a rumba. “He likes people. Have you any idea what he’s up to?”

“He wants to take over the world,” Evita said from just behind him.

McGarvey didn’t bother to turn around. But he knew she had gotten out of the car. He heard the door close softly.

“He was afraid that the moderates would someday take control of the Soviet Union and give away everything they had gained since the war,” she said.

“He wanted to speed things up.”

“He wanted to be first secretary and premier.”

“Maybe he will be.” McGarvey flipped his cigarette off the side of the road and walked back to the car. Evita stood, one hand on the roof, her hip leaning against the door as if she needed support, which in a way she certainly did.

“I could go up there now and he would welcome me with open arms.”

“Do you want to take the car, or walk?”

She looked up toward the house. “Who’s to say he isn’t right?”

“And I’m wrong?”

She looked at him. “Yes.”

“Depends upon the geography. If we were standing below his dacha outside Moscow, I’d have to concede that he was right. But we’re not.”

She thought about this for a moment, then shook her head. “Can it be that simple?”

“Probably not. But I’ve run out of answers. Two good people have been murdered in the last few days because of him. One of them was my friend. He left a wife and children.” He started for the other side of the car.

“No, don’t,” Evita said.

“Whatever you do or don’t do, I can’t leave it,” McGarvey said. He thought again about Kathleen and about Marta. Both were strong women. And yet he couldn’t get over the feeling that Evita was vulnerable, that she needed someone to hold her close, that that was all she had ever needed.

“Then go up and kill him!”

“I need the answers first.”

“They won’t do anyone any good.”

“I think they will.”

“No.”

“Yes, Evita,” he said softly. “I want your help. I need your help.”

“I can’t,” she cried in anguish.

“Then go to him,” McGarvey said harshly. “I’ll do it myself.”

He got in the car, started the engine, and switched on the headlights. Evita stood at the side of the road for another moment or two, then turned, opened the door, and got in. She hunched down in the seat, silent and pale, a little leaf of Autumn caught against her will in the ocean currents, totally without hope or control.

29

It was after two in the morning by the time they got back into the city. Traffic was still heavy. Fires could be seen here and there. Big crowds had gathered on many of the street corners, in some of the plazas and squares, and in front of American business establishments and offices. Banners seemed to be everywhere, proclaiming “Liberty from North American Aggressors,” “Freedom From American Colonialism,” and “True Independence At Last.” Ordinary traffic was still barred from a wide area around the U.S. embassy so they couldn’t get close enough to see what was happening. They returned to the hotel instead.

“What happened between you and that desk clerk earlier this evening?” McGarvey asked as they rode up in the elevator.

“Nothing,” Evita said woodenly.

“Did he say something to you? I couldn’t hear it.”

She looked up. “Nothing. It was in his eyes.” She looked away again. “He thought I was your whore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “You know the funny thing about it is that I’ve been nearly everyone’s whore except yours.”

“What did you say to him?”

She actually smiled a little. “I told him that if he couldn’t keep his dirty little thoughts to himself I would cut off his balls and stuff them down his throat.”

McGarvey sat in a chair by the open window smoking a cigarette and watching the dawn break over the city as Evita slept on the bed. She was keyed up. She had wanted to talk, to be comforted by him, but he had made her take a bath and crawl in between the clean sheets. “You’re going to need your strength when Basulto shows up,” he told her. She wore one of his shirts as a nightgown. He had tucked her in and had kissed her on the forehead as he might a young child. She was asleep within a minute or two.

The demonstrations across the park had broken up sometime in the early morning hours, and from here the only traces of unrest he could detect were the lingering odors of smoke from the fires. Blue and white police cars continued to cruise past at regular intervals, each time a different car. Most of Mexico City’s police force seemed to be on duty this morning. At four o’clock a convoy of army trucks rumbled past. At four-thirty a big automatic street washer lumbered by. At five the morning delivery vans and trucks began coming, bringing milk and bread and laundry and fresh meat and vegetables to the hotels and restaurants. At five-thirty the eastern sky began to lighten perceptibly.

His mood darkened with the morning. It was exhaustion, he knew, yet he could not help himself from sliding toward the edge of despair, where he began to doubt his abilities as well as his sanity. He was frightened that he no longer had anyone to trust and just a little intimidated by a sudden inability to envision Marta’s face in his mind’s eye. When he tried to think of her, he could only see Evita’s face and eyes framed by her long dark hair. Thinking that way was nonsense because in truth she had been everyone’s whore except his. And he felt more pity for her, he thought, than lust.

He turned around. Evita was sitting up in bed, the covers gathered in her lap. She was watching him, her eyes wide, her face almost serene, guileless in this light.

“I want you,” he said, surprised by his own words.

“I don’t want charity.”

“It’s not charity.”

“The spoils of war, then.” Her voice was flat, dull.

“Not that either. I don’t think I give a damn about any of it now. If Baranov wants Mexico he can have it. It’s not up to me to decide, or to change the world. I don’t care if there is a traitor in the CIA. That’s not up to me to fix, either. And I don’t know if I really care about you. I don’t know if I’m still capable of caring, if I was ever capable of it. I only know that I want you.”

She pushed the covers back. Without taking her eyes off his, she took off his shirt and let it fall to the floor. Her chest was heaving, her nipples were erect, there was a faint flush to her forehead and cheeks, and her lips shimmered. She lay back on the pillow and reached out a hand for him.

“Come,” she said. “I will be your whore as well.”

He got up and took off his clothes. She watched him. When he came across the room she spread her legs and reached up to him, pulling him down. He entered her immediately, gathering her in his arms, kissing her deeply, her tongue darting against his. Her hips rose to meet his, and she wrapped her long dancer’s legs around his waist, drawing him even more deeply inside of her.

“It will never be all right between us,” she said softly. A low moan escaped her lips as he thrust against her, trying to bury himself in her.

“Only now matters,” he said.

“We may be dead tomorrow.”

He wanted to say they were dead already, but he was losing himself with her, and nothing truly mattered except for this moment.

“I don’t love you,” she cried.

“No.”

“I’ve never loved anyone.”

They lay in each other’s arms watching the sun rise, listening to the sounds of the city coming alive beneath their open window.

“As a young girl I studied to become a classical guitarist.” She touched a scar on his chest with a long, delicate finger. “I used to wonder how my life would have turned out had I never met Darby or Valentin.”

A car horn beeped outside and in the distance they could hear a siren. But it was much quieter than it had been last night. He reached over and kissed her breast. She lay back and held his head in her hands.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” she said. “I don’t know what you expect of me with this Cubano coming, but I’ll do it. I think from the moment you showed up at the club I knew that I would do something for you.”

McGarvey looked into her eyes. “I’m returning to Washington this afternoon.”

“Leaving me here with Basulto?”

He nodded. Her eyes were very dark and very deep. He felt as if he might fall into them. If that happened he knew he would never get back out.

“You didn’t mean what you said before, about not caring any longer.”

He shrugged.

She smiled sadly. “I understand how it is with your kind. It’s the Holy Grail you’re all after. Only most of the time you never get it. You never even come close.”

“I have to see it to the end.”

“Naturally,” she said. “Who will I call for you?”

“Your husband.”

She closed her eyes and opened them. “And tell him what?”

“That you’re down here with a Cuban who knew him from the Bay of Pigs. That it was I who brought you both down here, and that I know everything about him and about Baranov and about the other one in the CIA.”

“He’ll run.”

“Tell him that I want to make a deal. It’s no longer safe for him up there and he’d better get out while he can still save himself. Tell him Baranov is here waiting for him, too. That you’ll all be together again like in the old days.”

“When? What time?”

“Eleven in the evening; nine local time. This evening.” Mexico City time was two hours behind U.S. eastern daylight time.

“And you’ll be there. Watching him. Waiting to see who he runs to.”

McGarvey touched her hip. She shivered.

“Maybe he won’t run after all,” she said, covering his hand with hers.

“He will.”

“And then you’ll know who else has been corrupted. And it’ll be finished for you.”

“Hopefully,” McGarvey said. He wondered though if he truly cared, or if he had just been going through the motions. Except for poor Janos Plónski and the old man, Owens, he might not have come this far. Might not have pushed as hard as he had. Might have backed down when Day ordered him to.

“Valentin will know that I am here,” she said softly.

“He doesn’t want you any longer. You’ve served his purpose.”

“He’ll warn Darby. Maybe he’s already warned him.”

“No,” McGarvey said. He reached over and lit a cigarette. “He wants Darby to fall.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She sat up, her eyes suddenly bright. “He knew you’d find out. He wanted you to find out. Which means there’s something else happening. He never does anything without a purpose.”

“It looks like it.”

“Is Basulto working for Valentin?”

McGarvey had thought about it, of course. Now he weighed the possibilities again. On the surface it seemed likely that the Cuban had been working for the Russians in the old days, and that he had set up his case officer, Roger Harris, to be killed at the Bay of Pigs. But it was just as possible that Basulto wanted out now. He had watched Harris fall, and he was at least in part the reason why Yarnell would fall. Maybe he saw his own future in the same terms. The game had gotten too rough for him, so he was trading Yarnell’s life for his own. The coincidental timing was hard to accept, unless of course Baranov’s sources had told him about Basulto’s defection and he had worked up his own program to take advantage of Yarnell’s fall.

“I don’t know that either,” he said quietly.

“I see.”

Where did it fit? he asked himself, watching how the light made Evita’s skin take on a golden glow. He had felt the Russian’s presence almost from the beginning, and he supposed he had behaved badly in not protecting the people who had helped him.

“You want me to stay here with him, is that it?”

“Not in the same room.”

She laughed.

“I’ll leave you my gun.”

“Maybe I’ll save us all a lot of trouble.”

“How?”

“By shooting him and then myself.”

The clerk was clearly hostile when McGarvey went down to the desk to arrange and pay for Basulto’s room. Evita had promised not to leave the hotel, but it was clear that she was barely hanging onto her nerves. He promised that it would be over by morning, but she didn’t believe it, and he wondered if he did.

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” McGarvey told the clerk. He would be out and back before anyone knew that he was gone.

“Perhaps it would be wiser, senor, if you left Mexico today.” He was young, with an olive complexion and a pencil-thin mustache. His manner was oily. “The hotel, of course, cannot guarantee your safety under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?” McGarvey asked stepping a little closer.

“There is unrest here, senor.” The man’s eyes strayed to a pile of newspapers at the end of the counter. One of them, the Mexico City News, was in English. Its headlines blared: AMERICAN SPY PLANE SHOT DOWN OVER MEXICO.

McGarvey quickly scanned the article. An SR-71 spy plane had been shot down sometime yesterday thirty miles inside Mexican territory. The information was scant; the story obviously censored by the government. But the plane was definitely American. The pilot’s body had been recovered and identified.

McGarvey looked up. The clerk was staring at him.

“Have my bill prepared. I’ll be leaving before noon.”

“And Miss Perez?”

“Her brother-in-law is coming this morning. He will stay with her.”

“He is cubano.”

“Are you at war with Cuba as well?”

The clerk reared back. “Your bill will be waiting for you.”

“When Senor Basulto arrives, tell him to meet me at Roger Harris’s. He knows the place.”

“Yes, senor.”

The clerk went back into his office. McGarvey crossed the lobby and went outside, conscious of the pressure of the gun in his belt at the small of his back.

He found a public telephone three blocks away, across the street from the national lottery building. The international lines, especially to the States, were jammed, and it took more than ten minutes to get through to the number Trotter had given him.

It was answered, as before, on the first ring by the same man. “Yes?”

“Basulto is on his way to Mexico City. What time does he arrive?”

“Pan Am, 9:05 local.”

“Tell Trotter to meet me at the safe house tonight at ten-thirty.”

“He wants to talk to you …”

McGarvey hung up. It was already nine o’clock. If Basulto’s plane was on time and there were no delays with customs, he would be at the hotel sometime between 9:30 and 10:00. His own flight left at 1:25, getting him in at Washington’s National Airport at 9:40. The timing was tight, but it was coming to a head finally. By tonight it would be over, with only the repercussions to deal with. This time when he thought about Marta he could see her face. Switzerland was out, but perhaps she wouldn’t mind living in France or Greece. Or was it simply wishful thinking; another product of his exhausted state?

By ten McGarvey, waiting across from the hotel in the park, was becoming impatient. Something might have gone wrong in Miami. Baranov certainly knew by now that Basulto was there. Perhaps he had ordered the man assassinated. It wasn’t unthinkable considering everything else that had gone on. The Cuban had outlived his usefulness, hadn’t he? Or was there a flaw in that thinking? Baranov had been celebrating last night, or at least he had put up a damned good show of it. Which meant, as far as Baranov was concerned, this business was as good as done. As it had last night on the mountain road below the Russian’s villa, the thought raised the hair at the back of McGarvey’s neck. Circles within circles. Lies within lies. Plots within plots. Baranov was the master.

Sitting on a bench watching the busy traffic he turned his thoughts to Evita; poor, frightened, abused little Evita waiting upstairs in the hotel room. He was astonished at his own behavior, and all the more guilty because he knew with certainty that Marta would understand. Or at least she would pretend to understand though he suspected she would secretly be hurt. But even more astonishing to him were his feelings toward Marta which had surfaced in the morning. He was allowing himself to think for the first time in a very long time that he was actually in love with someone.

In Lausanne the apartment would have been cleared out by now and Marta would be in her own place. He wondered what her real home was like and if she went back there when he was away at work, only returning to their apartment when he was coming back. It made him sad to think how he had treated her during their last years, especially the last weeks.

He had taught her how to ski after she had cheerfully admitted she was probably the only Swiss in history who didn’t know how. It was in the early days of their relationship. He had learned to ski as a boy in Colorado and Montana. They spent a week in Zermatt working every morning on the lower slopes, making love in their room all afternoon, and dancing in the evening in the lodge. On the first day he had spent a frustrating two hours trying to teach her the basic snowplow turn. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen an older man in knickers, a bright red and blue sweater and a Tyrollean hat leaning against his ski poles watching them. Each time Marta would lean into the turn she would fall until at last she got it right, and he had hugged her, lifting her right out of her skis. The man watching them executed a perfect jump turn and schussed off down the hill yodeling in the best Swiss tradition. Marta had noticed him from the beginning. She laughed.

“I don’t know who had more patience, him or you,” she said.

The next week they found an apartment together and she learned just how impatient he really was.

A taxicab pulled up in front of the Hotel Del Prado, and Basulto, wearing a collarless gray sport coat, the sleeves pushed up nearly to his elbows, a small black overnight bag clutched in his left hand, got out and went inside. It was fifteen minutes after ten. McGarvey remained seated on the park bench in plain sight. The morning was already beginning to get warm, and traffic had picked up. Behind him a couple of banners from last night still hung in the trees. By tonight there would be another demonstration here, but by then he figured he would be long gone and this business finished. He had been in other cities like this before. Cities under stress, cities in crisis. Santiago came to mind. He didn’t speak Spanish, but no one seemed to mind. Keep a low profile when the bullets start to fly and you’ll be all right. Strange advice for an assassin, he’d always thought. But then it was war; and one country’s holy mission was another’s terrorist attack.

The two doormen in front of the hotel were talking with each other when Basulto came back out. They didn’t bother looking up. He walked to the curb and looked across the street directly at McGarvey. He started to wave but then thought better of it, turning instead and hurrying to the corner. The light changed and he crossed the avenue.

McGarvey watched him coming, watched him trying to maintain an air of nonchalance. But it was obvious the Cuban was excited. McGarvey could see it in his walk, in the way he held himself like a boxer ready to dodge the next jab, and in the way he kept looking around, his eyes always moving, watching for a tail. But there was no one behind him. No one watching them, no one to care, yet.

“Is it so good meeting out in the open like this?” Basulto asked nervously, coming up.

“Sit down, Artimé,” McGarvey said, not bothering to look at him.

Time, he thought, like truth, was such a precious commodity and yet everyone seemed to abuse it, to squander it. Once it was lost, there was no going back. The same with truth. He was short on both just now.

“You called and I came. I’m here. Are we going to burn him now? What’s the plan?”

“Tonight. He should be down here by morning at the latest. Him and his pal Baranov.”

“Why here?”

“It’ll be just like old days.”

“Why not Washington? Just shoot the bastard. Or arrest him. Why here?”

“His wife is across the street just now. She’s going to telephone him at nine. Tell him that she’s here waiting for him. That you’re here, too, and want to make a deal.”

McGarvey glanced over at Basulto, whose eyes had grown wide. He looked as if he would jump off the bench at any moment and run, screaming, out into the street.

“What wife?” he squeaked.

“You might have to talk to him on the telephone. Convince him that you mean business. Convince him that you want to trade. But when he gets here, you’re going to kill him instead.”

“You’re crazy. He’s got no wife.”

“Her name is Evita.”

“Never heard of her.”

“You knew her from the old days, Artime. She didn’t think much of you. Thought you’d been working for Batista before you signed on with Yarnell and Baranov.”

“She’s lying. I swear to God, Mr. McGarvey.”

“I don’t think so,” McGarvey said quietly. He wanted to be almost anywhere but here.

“What can I say or do to convince you …?”

“It doesn’t matter. When Yarnell gets here tomorrow, you’re going to have to kill him. I’ll give you the gun.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going to kill Baranov.”

“I don’t need this shit,” Basulto said starting to get up.

“Where will you go?”

“I got friends.”

“So do I,” McGarvey said, looking up. “And so does Yarnell. He knows you fingered him. Just like you fingered your case officer, Roger Harris.”

Basulto stood very still, as if he were afraid he would break something if he moved so much as a muscle. The morning sun glinted on his forehead and pomaded black hair. His eyes were filled with fear.

“You knew Darby Yarnell in those days. You knew who he was, and you knew that he worked for Baranov. But when Roger Harris came to you looking for a fellow agency officer who had turned traitor, it wasn’t Yarnell he was after. It must have come as a big shock to you all. A big relief.”

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

“I think you do. I think that Baranov told you to lie. You were all biding your time, waiting for the right moment to get rid of Harris.”

“I swear to God …”

“I know all about it, Artime. So do Trotter and Day. But our deal with you still stands if you’ll cooperate. Nothing has changed. We still want Yarnell. After all, it was he who actually pulled the trigger on Harris. Not you.”

Tears began to fill Basulto’s eyes. He sat down. “I loved Roger Harris. He was a good man to me.”

“He just got mixed up with something that put him in over his head,” McGarvey suggested.

“They knew about me.”

“Who did?”

“The Russians. Baranov. They were going to blackmail me. There was nothing else to do, nowhere to run.” He shook his head. “I should have went up into the mountains with Uncle Fidel when I had the chance, you know. Maybe it would have been different for me. There were a lot of heroes.”

“Dead heroes,” McGarvey said.

“They had respect.”

“So you told them about Harris?”

“Yeah, I told them.”

“Did you ever know the name of the man Roger Harris was really looking for?”

“No. I swear to—” Basulto stopped. He shook his head. “No.”

“Did Baranov or Yarnell?”

“I think so. They were excited about it.”

“Frightened.”

Basulto managed a slight smile. “No. Not Valentin. Nothing frightened him.”

“Then what happened? I mean after the Bay of Pigs?”

“I ran, just like I told you.”

“Into the hills?”

“Yes.”

“But Cuba and the Soviet Union were allies. You must have known that Baranov would come looking for you.”

“They weren’t allies at first. Besides, I hadn’t done anything wrong in their eyes. And Valentin told me that I could get out any time I wanted. So I did.”

“And he never came looking for you?”

“Never.”

“Not even nine months ago? He didn’t look you up, which at this point would have been very easy for him. He didn’t look you up and tell you that he needed your help? ‘Just one more little job, Comrade Basulto.’ He didn’t tell you to get yourself caught?”

“No,” Basulto said.

“But if he had, you would have gone to work for him, like in the old days?”

Basulto’s anger flared, but then he held himself in check. He lowered his head. “Probably. But it didn’t happen, and I was sick of it. All of it. Living that way. I wanted out. I want out now.”

The Cuban had not told the truth before, and there was no reason to believe that he had told the entire truth this time. But McGarvey had a feeling that this version of the story was a lot closer to the truth than the others. Yet there was something missing. Something else. Something beyond his understanding, still, and he suspected beyond the understanding even of Basulto, who after all had been and continued to be nothing more than one of Baranov’s pawns in a very large and complicated game.

“Not yet,” McGarvey said, “Not quite yet.”

With a strange intensity, Basulto threw up an arm. “I’ll do it, Mr. McGarvey. Whatever it is you want of me. Because I’m tired and I want it to end. All the years. Cristo. You can’t know. If you want me to kill him, I will. Just get me out. As one man to another, I’m asking you, just get me out.”

McGarvey got to his feet, suddenly ashamed of himself without admitting why. “Come on,” he growled. “I want you to meet someone.”

The sun shone in her hair from the open window, making it seem almost as if a halo surrounded her head. She turned, and McGarvey could see the shock of recognition in her eyes as she saw Basulto. Last night and this morning she had seemed vulnerable. At this moment she seemed diminished.

“You,” she said as if it were an indictment.

“It’s all changed, I swear it,” Basulto said from the doorway.

She laughed. “Don’t you know? Nothing changes.”

McGarvey thought she looked beautiful just then, and tragic. A lost soul barely hanging on to her sanity and her life.

“I’ll be here for you,” McGarvey lied, looking into her eyes.

“We’ll manage,” she said. “We’re old friends.”

“By tomorrow it will be over.”

“One way or the other.”

It was getting late. Time to go, and yet McGarvey was having a hard time leaving her. He was getting old, he decided. And soft in the head.

“Call at nine tonight,” he said. “Put Artime on if you think it’s necessary.”

She said nothing. They’d already gone over this. “I’ll be here,” he said unnecessarily.

Basulto had been standing just within the doorway. He backed out. Evita said something to him in Spanish and he smiled, his eyes narrowing a bit.

He replied. “Si.”

She nodded, and Basulto turned and disappeared down the corridor to his own room.

“He is genuinely frightened,” she said.

“I think so.”

“So am I.”

McGarvey felt like a bastard leaving her like this. He didn’t know where this story would end, but he knew that he would have to see it to whatever the conclusion would be. They would all have to see it to the end. He took out his pistol, laid it on the table, and then crossed the room and took her into his arms. “They’re the bad lot, not us,” he said.

She looked up into his eyes. “I’m not so sure,” she said. “Are you?”

30

His bill was ready. McGarvey crossed the lobby with his overnight bag in hand, stopped at the desk, and took out his wallet. The bill was for a lot more than it should have been, and the clerk refused to look up at him. McGarvey paid it without comment. There was a lot of activity in the hotel this morning. A lot more than there had been yesterday, or even last night. There were, however, very few foreigners around. A lot of military officers had come in, but no one paid him the slightest attention. He was a nonperson. The pile of newspapers at the end of the counter was gone. Across the lobby a group of civilians were gathered around a television set. They seemed very nervous and tense. He picked up his bag.

Out on Avenida Juárez he got a taxi immediately, though the driver didn’t seem very happy that his fare was a norteamericano. Traffic was light for this time of day. More banners had been strung up, and at some of the intersections they passed crews putting up even more. “Libertad!” “Heroísmo!” “Reforma!” The city was taking a holiday. Most of the shops were closed, big placards in their windows. McGarvey could only guess at some of the words and slogans, but the overall meaning was clear. A big break was coming between Mexico and the U.S., and the Soviet Union was expecting to pick up the pieces. It was frightening everyone silly.

A military roadblock was set up on the entrance ramp to the international terminal at the airport. Traffic was backed up several hundred yards in front of the barricades. Everyone was being stopped and their papers scrutinized. Only a few cars were being allowed through; others were being turned back and still others were being shunted off the road onto a large grassy field. A shuttle bus seemed to be going back and forth between the barricade and the terminal about a mile away. McGarvey paid the cabbie and walked up to the soldiers. He held out his U.S. passport.

“My plane leaves at 1:25,” he said.

A young lieutenant with a pockmarked face took his passport and closely compared the photograph with McGarvey’s face. “Your ticket,” he demanded.

“I have only reservations.”

“Impossible,” the lieutenant snapped hostilely. He handed McGarvey’s passport back. “The airplane is full. All the airplanes are full.” He rested his hand on his holstered gun.

McGarvey put down his bag, pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket, and stuffed it in his passport. The lieutenant watched him through pig eyes. His lips were wet with spittle.

“It is important that I leave on that airplane,” McGarvey said, handing his passport back to the officer. “You will see that my passport is in order.”

The lieutenant glanced over at the captain, whose back was turned to them at that moment. He slipped the bill into his pocket. “I could have you shot, senor,” he said, a slight smile baring his teeth.

McGarvey said nothing.

The officer handed his passport back. “You will have to hurry to catch your airplane. The shuttle will take you.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t return to Mexico,” the lieutenant said, and he swaggered off.

McGarvey picked up his bag and started around the barricade. The shuttle was returning from the terminal. Half a dozen other people were nervously waiting for it to arrive. Several soldiers, their automatic rifles slung over their shoulders, were watching them. A military helicopter swooped overhead from beyond one of the big maintenance hangars and headed toward the city.

It was late now, nearly one o’clock. There was a distinct possibility, he thought, that his reservations had been canceled. A lot of people, it seemed, wanted to get out of Mexico at this moment.

“Alto!” someone behind McGarvey shouted.

He kept walking. The soldiers looked around. One of them unslung his rifle, though he seemed uncertain.

“Alto!” the man shouted again.

This time McGarvey stopped and turned back as the burly captain, brandishing a pistol, raced up from the other side of the barrier. He looked angry; his face was red as he squinted into the harsh sun. His khaki uniform was wet with sweat. The lieutenant was nowhere in sight.

“Your papers! Your papers!” the captain shouted.

McGarvey smiled reassuringly. He calmly handed over his passport. The other people waiting for the shuttle bus studiously avoided looking over. “Your lieutenant already checked my passport.”

“Well now I’m checking it, too.” The captain flipped through the passport. “What is your destination?”

“Washington.”

“Your tickets. Let me see your tickets.”

“My tickets are in the terminal.”

“You do not have tickets? You cannot go through. Impossible.”

McGarvey stepped forward a little. The captain’s hand tightened on his pistol. “This has already been taken care of. What are you doing to me?”

“What are you saying?”

“The five thousand dollars. I gave it to your lieutenant. Didn’t you get your share? Christ, talk to him, but I’ve got to be on that plane.”

The captain grinned. “Five thousand dollars. What do you take me for, that I would fall for a little trick like this? …”

“Bullshit,” McGarvey swore, raising his voice. “You keep the goddamned passport. Just take me to your colonel. Right now. We’ll see what he’s got to say. Maybe he’ll want a piece of the action!”

The captain was suddenly alarmed. McGarvey made a move to step around him and go back to the barricade, but the captain handed back his passport.

“I don’t want any trouble here, señor. You have tickets at the terminal, then you shall go.”

For just a second McGarvey refused his passport, and the captain practically pressed it on him.

“Leave now. Your bus is waiting. Just go, señor, and—”

“I know,” McGarvey said, pocketing his passport. “Don’t return to Mexico.”

There were no problems with his tickets; McGarvey picked them up at the airline counter and boarded his plane immediately. They were delayed taking off for nearly an hour, but once they were airborne the pilot told them that most of the lost time would be made up in the air. No one really cared. Everyone was simply glad to be out of Mexico.

McGarvey ordered a drink, and when it came he sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. He tried to think about his sister, about Kathleen, and with guilt about poor Evita behind him in Mexico City. Each time his thoughts returned, unbidden, to Marta waiting in Lausanne. She had been the strong one, but he had not recognized it, and now he was sorry.

Tonight Evita would telephone her ex-husband at his home in Georgetown. Now that he had set his plan into motion, he wasn’t so sure that it would work. She was to say that she had come to Mexico City at McGarvey’s orders, but that she wanted it to be like it was in the old days. It was too dangerous now for them in the States. Especially now with Soviet missiles along the southern border. If need be Basulto would be there to support her story. He knew everything from the old days. He knew about Harris and about the other one Yarnell was working with in the CIA. That was the key finally. Yarnell might have been the superstar within the agency at one time, but he was on the outside now. He spoke with presidents and was friends with Donald Powers, but the real harm was being done by whoever was inside. Someone Baranov was grooming as early as the late fifties to take over for Yarnell someday. Surely Baranov had seen how brightly Yarnell’s flame burned in those days. Certainly he knew that it could not last, that Yarnell was bound to burn out — more likely sooner than later. Someone had been waiting in the wings even then. Someone young. Someone who twenty or twenty-five years later would take up where Yarnell had left off. A steadier hand perhaps. Someone from the East Coast. Old family? Money? The right schools?

On the other hand, Yarnell could very well ignore her. Perhaps he had heard this sort of thing before. He wasn’t a stupid man. He or someone else had marked McGarvey’s trail the entire way.

Or he could run to his contact within the CIA and warn him. It is time to get out. Time to cut and run. Baranov is calling.

The plane touched down at Washington’s National Airport, across the Potomac River from Boiling Air Force Base, a few minutes before ten.

In the airport McGarvey was cleared through customs with no delays. Crossing the busy terminal toward the waiting cabs, he got the feeling he was being followed. When he turned, John Trotter was coming his way, a grim, determined look on his face, his eyes large and moist behind his thick glasses.

“It’s gone too far,” Trotter said. “The team is gone. We’ll dismantle the equipment tomorrow. But as of this moment, you’re done.”

It was about what he thought might happen, so he wasn’t surprised, merely a little disappointed in his old friend, who had gotten in over his head after all. Trotter was a cop, not a politician, but he’d known that all along.

“Then you and I will finish it,” he said.

“No, Kirk, it’s truly over. And that is by a direct order from the president.”

“Yarnell has gotten to him,” McGarvey said.

Trotter looked away, as if by not facing his old friend he would not have to face up to his own troubles. “Apparently.”

“Then he’s won.”

“It’s not for me to decide.”

“You’d already decided when you came to me in Lausanne.”

“That was a hundred years ago.”

McGarvey looked at his watch. “And now we’re down to the last forty-five minutes.”

“What do you mean by that?” Trotter said, alarmed. “Exactly what is it you’re talking about?”

“Come on,” McGarvey said. “We can talk on the way into town.”

Trotter’s car was parked across from the departing-passenger ramp. A lot of people had come up from Mexico City on the same flight, and the area was crowded. McGarvey watched for surveillance, a face, an attitude, or a posture out of the ordinary. Mexico was Baranov’s for the moment; it wasn’t impossible that he would know McGarvey had gotten out. But there was no one as far as he could tell. He tossed his bag in the back seat and they headed north up the George Washington Parkway, past the Marriott Twin Bridges Hotel, the Pentagon in the distance across the Boundary Channel and Lagoon.

“I can get you some money, Kirk,” Trotter said. “Not much, but something. For what you’ve done already.”

“Later.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ve still got work to do.”

“No, goddamnit. It’s over. I’ve already told you. Day has told you. Am I going to have to arrest you?”

“It’s too late, John.”

“I don’t give a damn about Basulto, if that’s what you’re talking about. The little bastard can rot in hell for all anyone cares.”

“Yarnell’s ex-wife is down there, too. They’re going to telephone Yarnell tonight at eleven our time. Less than an hour from now.”

Trotter glanced over. “You’ll just have to stop her. Tell her the deal is off.”

“I’m not going to quit.”

“It’s because of Janos, isn’t it,” Trotter said gently. “We can’t even prove that Yarnell or his people did it. Someone else could have been responsible. Use your head, Kirk.”

“He’s working with someone in the CIA, John. Someone we don’t know about. Someone who Baranov turned in the late fifties. Now he’s active.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You’d better. It’s not going to stop just because we stop. Mexico is just the tip of the iceberg. Baranov has been planning this entire business for a lot of years, and he’ll keep going until someone stops him. Everything he’s worked for is finally coming to a head. If he wins he’ll make even more points at home. The Kremlin is already in love with him. Think what his position will be if he hands them Mexico on a silver platter. Is that the sort of man you want running the Soviet Union? And he’ll get it if he wins here.”

They were approaching the Arlington Bridge, which would take them across the river. Trotter started to pull toward the off ramp. “What hotel are you staying at?”

“The safe house, John.”

“No.”

“I want to listen to that telephone conversation.”

Trotter shook his head, but he didn’t take the ramp.

“It’s all I’m asking.”

“And then what?” Trotter asked.

“See what he does. See how he reacts.”

“What do you think he’ll do? What do you want him to do, Kirk? Go to the president? Is he your inside man?”

“I’m hoping he’ll call his contact. Warn him.”

“And what if it was the president?” Trotter suggested wildly.

“It’s not,” McGarvey said. “He’s from California, not the East Coast.”

“Christ, what’s that supposed to mean?”

He kept going back to Lausanne in his thoughts, and yet at the end there he hadn’t been happy or satisfied. He’d been looking for change, for just this or something like this. The old magic. Now that he was here he wanted out. Be careful what you wish for, he’d heard, you just might get it.

“His contact within the agency has an East Coast accent,” he said, watching Trotter for any sign of recognition.

“How do you know this?”

“Basulto told me. I finally got more of the truth from him. He was lying to you about almost everything.”

“About the East Coast accent, I mean. How did he know?” There was something there, something in Trotter’s myopic eyes. Some hint of a dawning recognition.

“Roger Harris told him. It wasn’t Yarnell, though. It was someone else. Someone who showed up at the party Yarnell and Baranov threw outside of Mexico City. Evita Perez heard his voice that night.”

“Did she say who it was? Did she know?”

“No. She only heard his voice, she was never allowed to see his face.”

Trotter thought about it. “We can come up with the embassy staff directories for those years. Shouldn’t be too hard to put together who was around then and now, and who has an East Coast accent.”

“He might not have been stationed in Mexico City. He might have been visiting. Or he might have been down there on special assignment.”

“He could have erased the records by now in any event,” Trotter said. He was getting caught up in it. “All these years,” he mused.

“How has Leonard Day been taking it?”

“I don’t know,” Trotter said. “I haven’t seen him all day. He won’t return my calls.” He glanced again at McGarvey. “It’s the missile thing, isn’t it? That was Baranov’s plan from the start.”

“That’s part of it, but there’s more.”

“They won’t get away with it,” Trotter continued. “They didn’t get away with it in Cuba, and they certainly won’t succeed this time either. The situation must be very bad in Mexico City. Did you run into any trouble?”

“Jules and Asher, the CIA field officers killed in Havana last fall. Why were they going to Mexico City?”

Trotter blinked. “Replacements. Reinforcements. I don’t know.”

“One of our spy planes was shot down yesterday.”

“Yes …”

“What else have we done to confirm those missile installations? Have we sent anyone down there?”

“How in God’s name would I know, Kirk? I don’t have any contacts over at the agency except for Larry Danielle, and he certainly wouldn’t say anything. What is it?”

McGarvey looked at his watch. They had barely twenty minutes before Evita was due to place her call. But there was something else, always something else. He could feel it. He could practically taste it. Baranov never did anything by halves. At least McGarvey had got that impression listening to Evita. It was the timing that had bothered him all along. The murders of Jules and Asher, Basulto’s coming out, and Baranov’s visit to Evita in New York (the trip itself very risky for the Russian); all had occurred in too narrow a time span for McGarvey’s liking. Too coincidental not to be carefully orchestrated.

They merged with the traffic crossing the Key Bridge. Washington was a city bright and alive and vibrant. But beneath the surface it was a metropolis, like Mexico City, under siege, holding its collective breath, waiting for the outcome.

“I just want you to listen to the telephone call, John. After that it’ll be up to you.”

They crossed the canal and turned right on M Street past the City Tavern, and then the Rive Gauche Restaurant. People lined up around the block to get in.

“How sure are you about this, Kirk?” Trotter asked. He was looking for guarantees. He was a drowning man and he needed a lifeline. But there wasn’t one within reach.

“I’m just guessing.”

The Boynton Towers apartment was in darkness when Trotter let them in. McGarvey wouldn’t allow him to switch on the lights. All the equipment had been turned off, but it was still in place, ready for the cleanup crew to come along in the morning and remove it. Trotter stood in the middle of the living room, while McGarvey went to the window and looked down across 31st Street toward Yarnell’s fortress. Only a few of the windows were lit. No party tonight.

“If he calls his contact,” Trotter asked softly, “then what, Kirk? I mean, how are we going to handle it? The same as before?”

McGarvey was thinking about his ex-wife over there in Yarnell’s arms. It was going to come as a very large shock for her. He didn’t know how well she would handle it, but he sincerely wished her well.

“Are you going to kill him? Nothing has changed, you know. He is still friends with the president and with Powers. The scandal would wreck our government. Christ, we can’t let that happen, especially not now. We need our strength. Solidarity. This could ruin everything.”

Trotter was truly frightened. “There’s no proof of any of this. You were correct. Good Lord, it never was anything more than circumstantial. There could be a dozen different explanations, some of which might possibly be quite innocent.”

No, McGarvey thought. Evita had been correct. No one was truly innocent.

“Once we step over that line, there’ll be no going back, Kirk. Not for any of us. Not ever.”

McGarvey turned away from the window. “It’s time, John. Turn on the tape machine, would you?”

31

In the mews behind Scott Place, the streetlights cast a violet glow on the brick walls and buildings, and from where McGarvey stood in the safe house he imagined he could see eyes watching him from the attic windows of Yarnell’s citadel. It was well after eleven, the recorder on the telephone tap was on and ready. Trotter stood poised, though the equipment was automatic. He hadn’t said a thing in the last fifteen minutes. McGarvey could feel his fear and his impatience. Evita hadn’t called. She couldn’t go through with it; she was in trouble; Basulto had stopped her; she was lying dead in a pool of blood. All of it ran through McGarvey’s mind as he brooded like an anxious father waiting for his daughter to come in out of the night after her first date. He’d erred in thinking she could actually betray Baranov and her ex-husband. He’d erred in trusting Basulto, he’d erred in listening to Trotter and Day in the first place. He’d erred all of his life because he had never found a place in which he felt that he belonged. Not Kansas, not Washington, not South America nor Europe; not the service, nor the agency, nor the bookstore. He supposed he might be considered a loner, and yet he could not stand being alone.

He could not see the actual driveway into Yarnell’s place, but he could see where the mews opened south on Q Street and fifty yards north on Reservoir Road. Anything or anyone coming or going then, would be visible at either end of the lane. Of course there could be a back way for a man on foot, or even a front way across the mews into a fronting building, then through its rear door onto 32nd Street. Somehow McGarvey didn’t think it would be necessary this evening to go down onto the street. At least not until Evita called. When she called. If she called. The night had deepened. Black clouds had rolled in from across the river, and a mist hung over Georgetown.

It was possible, of course, that Yarnell wasn’t at home this evening. In fact, considering the Mexican crisis, he might already have cut and run. But for some reason McGarvey didn’t believe it. Yarnell was there. He could feel the man’s presence out ahead of him in the darkness, just as iron filings can feel the effect of a hidden magnet. The power was there.

Yarnell’s telephone rang. The reels of the tape machine began to turn. McGarvey looked away from the window. Trotter’s eyes were wide. The telephone rang again, the sound from the speaker soft, muted. “Have you got a gun with you?” McGarvey asked. Trotter nodded. The telephone rang a third time. “Maybe he’s not home—” Trotter started to say.

“Hello,” Darby Yarnell’s calm, cultured, self-assured voice came from the machine. They could hear the hollow hiss of the long-distance connection.

“Darby?” Evita said. She sounded very far away. Frightened and very much alone. “Is that you? Can you hear me?”

“You just missed Juanita. She’s off with her friends.”

“I didn’t call to speak to her.”

“Oh?” Yarnell said without missing a beat. McGarvey could understand already, at least in a small measure, what they’d said about him. “Are you in New York, darling? The connection is awful.”

Evita didn’t answer. Come on, McGarvey said to himself.

“Evita?”

“I’m in Mexico City. We have trouble. You and I, you know.”

“What in heaven’s name are you doing down there, especially now? Are you at your sister’s?”

“The Del Prado. Downtown. You remember it?”

“I think you should go to Maria. If you want I’ll telephone her for you. Or at the very least get yourself over to our embassy and stay there.”

“Darby, you’re not listening to me,” she said, and McGarvey could hear that she was trying to be strong, trying to hold on, but he could hear the fragility in her voice. She was on the verge of breaking.

“What is it?”

“You’re going to have to come down here.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Do you, darling?” McGarvey could almost hear him smiling. “Whatever it is you’re doing down there in Mexico City, I’m sure that I can’t help you by joining you. Why don’t you take the first plane out in the morning. You can spend the weekend up here with us. Your daughter would love to see you.”

“Goddamnit, you’re still not listening,” Evita shrieked. “You never listened. Just like Valentin. The two of you were quite the pair.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Yarnell said patiently. “I’ll telephone our embassy and tell them that you need assistance. Take care of yourself—”

“Don’t you dare hang up, you bastard,” Evita interrupted. “Because I’m not down here to see my sister. McGarvey brought me here.”

“What are you talking about? McGarvey who? Is he someone from your club? What?”

“Ex-Company. He was hired to assassinate you.”

“Good God almighty,” Trotter said. “What did you tell her?”

McGarvey motioned for him to be quiet.

“Are you drinking?” Yarnell asked, and McGarvey could hear genuine concern in his voice. “Or are you taking something else?”

“He knows everything, Darby. I swear to God. I’m not here alone. He brought someone else with him. Someone from the old days.”

“I think you should go to bed and get some rest.”

“Don’t you want to know his name? He was the one who blew the whistle on you.”

“For God’s sake, Evita.”

“That is, before I told McGarvey everything I knew.” She laughed, the sound was brittle. “All about you and Valentin in the old days. And now you’re in big trouble. You won’t be able to talk your way out of this one so easily.”

“You need help. Let me call someone.”

“His name is Artime Basulto. Remember him? The little scumbag. Says you killed a man named Roger Harris. Shot him dead. And now he wants to get back at you. He told someone in the Justice Department, who told someone in the FBI, who hired McGarvey to kill you. Just like the old days, Darby, lots of helpers.”

Trotter had stepped away from the tape machine as if it were about ready to explode. “On an open line,” he said in amazement.

Again McGarvey motioned him to keep quiet.

“Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yarnell said, not so much as a waver in his voice. McGarvey had to admire the man’s presence of mind and control.

Except for the hiss and pop of the imperfect connection, the line was silent for a pregnant second or two.

“Evita?” Yarnell prompted again.

“Valentin came to New York nine months ago. Said McGarvey or someone like him would be coming asking questions, snooping around.”

“Valentin who?”

“Come off it, Darby. I know everything now. I mean everything.”

“Good-bye.”

“I saw you and him that night,” she said. Her voice was shaking badly now. “You didn’t know it, but I walked in on the middle of your … lovemaking with Valentin. Oh, God.”

For the first time Yarnell was at a loss for words. McGarvey turned and looked toward the man’s house. He could imagine him holding the telephone to his ear, his mind racing to all the possibilities that he was suddenly faced with.

“They know it all, Darby,” she cried. “I’m sorry. They know about Valentin and they even know about the one from the party that night in Ixtayopan. They know he’s still with the Company and that you’re working together. I swear to God, they know it all. You’ve got to get out of there. You can come down here. McGarvey will make a deal. Valentin will help us. It’ll be just like the old days. Oh, God, please, Darby. You have to listen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Evita. You always did have a wild imagination, but now I think it’s finally gotten the better of you. I honestly think that you need professional help now. If you come back here, I’ll arrange something for you. I promise …”

“You promise?” she cried, half laughing. “You’re a traitor. A goddamned spy. And you promise? You don’t know the meaning of the word.”

“Goodbye, Evita. I’m truly sorry for you now.”

“You’ll burn in hell, Darby. They’ll get you! I’ll see to it …”

The connection was broken. For a moment they could hear the continued hiss of the long-distance line, but then the tape machine stopped and the speaker fell silent.

It came to McGarvey that for all the evidence, for all the testimony against him, Yarnell might be innocent after all. Or, if he had worked with Baranov in the old days, maybe he had long since quit. Maybe he had retired from Baranov’s service on the same day he had retired from the CIA. Perhaps Baranov’s visit to Evita had been nothing more than a manipulative effort to get Yarnell back into the game. Force him to run when McGarvey closed in on him. Force him back into the Russian’s service by allowing him no other options. “Speculation will be the bane of your existence if you let it get ahold of you,” one of the old hands had told him. “There’s no end to it, boyo. Leads you down so many dark alleys that you might just as well give up ever seeing the light of day again.” Good advice, if overcautious. So now what? What he had set in motion had a life of its own. It would continue on its path with or without his continued participation.

“Now what?” Trotter echoed his own thoughts softly.

“He’s either a damned good actor, or he’s innocent,” McGarvey said.

“It would appear so.”

“Whatever he is, he’s got his choices now.”

“If he ignores her call, there wouldn’t be a thing we could do to him. No way of proving his innocence or guilt.” Trotter glanced at the tape machine.

“He’ll either call or he won’t call.”

“If he doesn’t, we’ll be right back where we started.”

“Worse,” McGarvey said glumly. “Now he knows my name, and knows what we know. If he holds tight, he’s won.”

At the window McGarvey once again looked down toward Yarnell’s house. He wondered what the man was doing at this moment, what he was thinking. He wondered if someone was there with him. Perhaps Kathleen had stayed over. He realized now, too late, that he should have called her at home so that he could make sure that at least for tonight she would be out of the fray, insulated in some small way from whatever might happen. Too late, too late, he thought. Often we made the right decisions, but we delayed our choices until they no longer mattered. By omission we were often as guilty as the hotheads. He wondered if Yarnell was sitting next to his telephone, his hand perhaps hesitating over the instrument as he tried to make his own decision, a decision that stretched back, in all reality, more than twenty-five years to an initial indiscretion in Mexico City. At the very least he suspected Yarnell was looking back at his life, wondering where his own mistakes had been made. Wondering how he had come to be here and now.

A vision began to develop in McGarvey’s breast of an older Yarnell looking back at himself as a young, arrogant, conceited man, filled with a desire to change the world singlehandedly. A lot of that had gone on in the late fifties and especially in the early sixties. Camelot, they’d called President Kennedy’s administration. And everyone had believed it and believed in it. Nothing was impossible for the honorable men. A bit of verse from the French poet Boileau-Despéraux came to him: “Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.” It was a hearkening back to his own past, to a simpler time in college, when his own choices were unlimited. “They were men without honor,” someone else had written. Finally he understood the they.

Yarnell’s metallic gray Mercedes sedan appeared out of the mews onto Q Street and turned the corner onto 32nd, its taillights winking in the distance.

“Christ! He’s on the move,” McGarvey cried. He crossed the room in four steps, tore open the door, and was halfway down the corridor to the stairwell before Trotter emerged at a dead run from the apartment.

Yarnell had not made a telephone call. He had run instead. To whom? To where? McGarvey hadn’t counted on this.

The stairwell was well lit and smelled of concrete. McGarvey raced headlong down the staircase, his feet barely touching the steps. He could hear Trotter above him. If Yarnell had stayed put, he would have won. The man had finally made a mistake. At the bottom he slammed open the door, waited until Trotter caught up, and then rushed across the lobby and out onto the street to the car.

Trotter climbed in behind the wheel, his hand fumbling with the keys until he got the engine started and they accelerated down 31st Street, slowing at the intersection of Q Street. A taxi was just turning the corner from Dumbarton Oaks, but there was no other traffic. Ignoring the stop sign Trotter gunned the engine, slamming on his brakes as they came to P Street. The big Mercedes was just passing beneath a streetlight two blocks east.

“There he is. We’ve got him,” McGarvey said. “Don’t lose him.”

“Where the hell is he going?” Trotter asked, turning the corner. “What is he doing?”

McGarvey was thinking about Evita, so he didn’t bother to answer. He pulled out the card on which he had written the number for the Del Prado Hotel and picked up the cellular telephone receiver from its cradle. Trotter kept glancing over at him as he dialed.

They crossed Rock Creek and a few blocks later turned southeast onto Massachusetts Avenue. Traffic was heavier now. Trotter knew what he was doing. He kept two cars behind Yarnell, switching lanes from time to time so that he would present much less of a constant image in the Mercedes’s rearview mirror.

The international circuits were busy. McGarvey had to dial the number four times before he finally got through. They’d passed Mt. Vernon Square, turning northeast onto New York Avenue, the Mercedes still half a block ahead of them. Yarnell wasn’t going out to either National or Dulles airports. McGarvey realized that he was probably going to his CIA contact.

“Del Prado,” the hotel operator answered.

McGarvey gave Evita’s room number. After a slight hesitation, he supposed because he was an American, the connection was made and the phone was ringing.

“Where in God’s name is he going?” Trotter mumbled again.

Evita answered on the first ring. She sounded all out of breath. “Yes?”

“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “Are you all right?”

“Cristo! Basulto is gone. The floor maid said he checked out about six o’clock. What’s going on?”

“Listen to me carefully, Evita. I want you to get out of there right now.” McGarvey was cold. “If there’s no late-night flight out, check into another hotel and take the first flight out in the morning.”

“I called him, just like you asked. But he didn’t believe me.”

“I know,” McGarvey said. “I heard. Just get out of there now, Evita. Leave the gun and go.”

They weren’t too far from Union Station. McGarvey wondered if Yarnell was going to double back and take a train out of Washington. It didn’t make sense.

“I’m scared. What’s going on up there?”

“Get out right now. Hang up and leave. Don’t even bother checking out. Just get away from the hotel.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” she cried.

“New York,” McGarvey said. The Mercedes had turned onto Florida Avenue, and he suddenly realized with a terrible clarity where Yarnell was headed and why he was headed there, who his contact was within the CIA and what it all meant. A deep, final pain pulled at his gut. God help us all, he thought in horror.

“Will you be there?” Evita was demanding.

“I’ll be there,” McGarvey said. “Go. Run!” He slowly hung up the telephone and looked at Trotter, whose complexion had turned ghostly pale in the darkness.

The Mercedes turned onto the grounds of Gallaudet College. Trotter followed at a respectful distance. “It’s Powers,” he said unnecessarily.

McGarvey wanted to say that he had known it all along. That he had suspected the director’s complicity from the beginning. But he had not. This now came as a complete surprise. Powers was the very best. The brightest. The most trustworthy. He was the man with the right stuff. Handpicked by the president, with the trust not only of the government and of the general public, but of the case-hardened professionals who worked for him. It was as if the news had suddenly broke that Kennedy himself had been a Russian spy. The realization that Powers was a traitor was no less stunning.

Just for a moment McGarvey wanted to turn around, get his things, and go back to Europe. To the south of France, or Greece or even the Costa del Sol. Anywhere so that he could forget. I shouldn’t have been involved with this in the first place, he thought. He had believed that he was inured to dishonor. Now he understood that he’d never known the first thing about it. Philby had been nothing by comparison.

Powers had betrayed not only his country, he had betrayed the very notion of the loyal American. The last bastion of truth and justice, it seemed, remaining in an age of betrayal. Powers had been, since the early sixties — perhaps even earlier — a traitor. And yet he had done fine things in defense of his country. The Russians had indeed suffered reverses at his hands. All a sham, McGarvey wondered, or had he traded one victory against several larger victories for Baranov? Like Kim Philby, Powers had been raised amongst the elite of his homeland; the finest upbringing, the most prestigious schools, the brightest future. And like Philby, his perfidy had come as the least suspected, most shocking of all surprises.

The college grounds were dark and mysterious at this time of the night; a fine mist lay in the trees and swirled across the road. They said nothing to each other as they followed Yarnell past the school buildings and then up the private road, where they doused their headlights and hung back as the Mercedes stopped at the gate house. The guard came out, said something to Yarnell (whose figure they could clearly see in the lights now), and then the gate opened and the Mercedes disappeared up toward the house, the lights of which were just visible through the trees.

For a long time they sat in their car not knowing what to say or really what to do now that they had come to this point. No way back, McGarvey thought. No way to erase what had gone on before. No way to expunge Yarnell’s sins, or Powers’s sins, or his own, for that matter. He glanced at Trotter.

“You’d better telephone Day,” he said. “Tell him that we’re going to need some help over here.”

“Sure,” Trotter said. “Sure.” But he made no immediate move to reach for the telephone.

Evita Perez lost her virginity to Darby Yarnell when she was barely twenty years old. She lost another sort of virginity when she had been drawn into Baranov’s circle. And once again she had sinned by betraying her past. She didn’t know which had been worse; they had all hurt her deeply. Nor, she decided, had anything she’d done provided her with the satisfaction she’d gone looking for. “Just let go,” Baranov’s words from years earlier came back to her. “I will always be there for you. No matter where. No matter why.”

She sat now staring at the telephone as she had for the past half hour, trying to let go, but knowing that she couldn’t. Trying to believe that Valentin would be there for her, but knowing that, of course, he would not be. He had never been. Trying to force herself into an overt action that she’d known all along was the only path to her survival, yet realizing she hadn’t the strength or resolve for it so she was trying to psychologically pump herself up for at least an attempt.

“Get out,” McGarvey had told her. “Run!” She forced a smile. He didn’t understand. Even now he had no real comprehension of what they were up against. We can’t run, she’d wanted to tell him. None of us are innocents. None of us are free of sin. We’re all of us by a certain age locked into a future whose parameters are fairly sharply defined. Plumbers might climb mountains but they seldom become artists. Artists make lousy accountants. And foolish little girls who sell their souls for imagined royalty end up bitter, indecisive old hags on some trash heap somewhere.

It was just midnight by the time she finally roused herself enough to change her clothes and put on a little makeup. McGarvey had left her his pistol. He’d shown her how to use it, but she still wasn’t quite certain about the safety catch. She took the gun out of the night table drawer and hefted it. The metal was slightly cool, with an oily odor. It felt foreign to her and ridiculously heavy in her hands. Melodramatic. Yet deadly. She raised the gun and sighted along the receiver as he had shown her. “Pull the trigger and keep pulling the trigger,” he said. “If nothing else, the noise will scare him to death.” He’d meant Basulto, of course. She didn’t think Valentin would frighten so easily. With him she would have to fire at point-blank range. To the head. Over and over again.

She lowered the pistol with shaking hands and then stuffed it in her purse. Before she left the room, she looked out the window. There were more demonstrations tonight in the park. She’d have to be careful crossing the city, but then this had been her town, her country once upon a time, and she knew it well. This time, she thought, she wasn’t some naive little kid incapable of caring for herself.

At the door she stopped for a moment and looked back at the few things she was leaving behind. She wanted a drink and she wanted, even more than that, a couple of lines of coke. She knew where to get those things here, but she’d fought the urge. Now her nerves were raw, her mouth was dry, and her stomach was fluttering. An hour ago her heart had begun to palpitate, but she had steeled herself against the outward symptoms. The pleasure principle, it was called. She’d forgo the immediate pleasure of relief for a much greater pleasure later.

She took the elevator down to the second floor and crossed the empty ballroom to the rear stairs. Once in the service corridor on the ground floor, she hurried to the loading docks behind the kitchens and outside into the still, muggy night. The sounds of the demonstration in the park were loud, ominous. Moving fast she walked around to the parking ramp where McGarvey had left the rental Volkswagen. He hadn’t turned in the keys in case she needed a quick way out. She found the car on the second level. Again, as she had in the room, she hesitated. McGarvey had told her to run. Meaning to “run away from trouble, not toward it.” But she was repaying a long-standing debt wasn’t she? It was up to her now to make sure Valentin did not ultimately win. Someone was going to have to stop him, and it wasn’t going to be McGarvey because he simply did not understand what he was up against; what they had all been up against from the beginning.

Traffic was light around Independencia, a block south of the hotel, and along the broad Lázaro Cardenas, but a car was on fire at the Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, so Evita had to make a broad detour east before she could turn south again, picking up San Antonio Abad, the main highway south out of the city. She was able to speed up, a cloud of blue smoke trailing the car, as she rattled into the quiet night. Behind her when she bothered to look into the rearview mirror, she could see Mexico City ablaze with lights and fires and even fireworks rising on long, ragged plumes into the sky. She had to admire, despite herself, Baranov’s handiwork. He had wanted Mexico from the very beginning. It was one of the reasons, she supposed, that he had targeted Darby, who had practically owned Mexico City from day one. And now at long last it seemed as if he was going to get his wish.

It got dark south of Tezonco. It was a Thursday night, everyone had gone up to the city for some action. New York would be the same tonight, she thought. The Thursday parties getting ready for the weekend. No one gave a damn if they stumbled around in a daze on Friday, because the week was over and they had Saturday and Sunday to sleep in. But it depressed the hell out of her, the meaningless rat race. Monday came along and she hardly wanted to open the club. Sometimes just for the hell of it she didn’t because on most Mondays there weren’t enough customers to pay for the staff let alone the building mortgage or any kind of a profit. They all lived for the weekends, Evita most of all. Or maybe an occasional couple of days down in Atlantic City. Once, she’d even thought about going down to Florida in mid-February. But something had come up. Something always comes up, doesn’t it, she thought. And it was a sweltering July before she realized that she had missed her chance. She was babbling to herself now, but she couldn’t help it. She always got this way when she was frightened. The mountains shimmered in the distance. Along some stretches of highway they seemed so close she felt she could reach out of the car window and touch them. As she drove she was alternately freezing cold and boiling hot. Partly from fear, partly preliminary withdrawal symptoms from her cocaine habit. Just a little longer she told herself between bouts. She could hold on because she knew that she must.

Ixtayopan was all but deserted when she drove down the main street and then turned southwest up into the mountains, the air decidedly chillier here than it had been down in the valleys. The car’s exhaust rumbled and crackled off the mountainsides as the narrow macadam road switched back and forth, rising higher and higher toward the peak of Cerro Tuehtli. She crossed the bridge and suddenly she could see the house above. There were not so many lights as before when she was here with McGarvey and a party had been in progress, but someone was in residence up there. She had been up this road hundreds of times. Yet she didn’t feel as if she were coming home, or even returning to a place that once had been her home. This time she felt like a complete stranger. An intruder, in fact, come with intent to do harm. The law was on his side.

She had trouble downshifting and ground the gears badly coming through the trees. She headed up the steep driveway to the plateau on which the house and grounds had been constructed. All of a sudden, coming over the crest of the driveway into the front courtyard, it struck her what she had done and why she had come here tonight. The car bucked and stalled out, rolling to a stop in the middle of the parking area twenty yards from the house, the headlights shining on the front veranda. Very little had changed in twenty-five years. The rambling one-story ranch-style house still seemed new and modern and prosperous. The living room windows were dark, but the east wing where Darby’s study had been located and where the master suite looked back toward Mexico City, was lit up. There were no cars parked in the driveway. The garages were around back. He was probably in the city at the embassy. Tonight had been a fool’s errand. Her hands shook very badly as she opened her purse and pulled out the automatic. She toyed with the safety catch, switching it down and then up and then down again. She couldn’t remember about it and she could feel panic rising in her chest. He would have a staff out here. Perhaps even bodyguards. He was an important man. They would probably shoot first and ask questions later. Maybe she didn’t care. She opened the door and got out of the car, standing for a moment on wobbly legs before she started up to the house, the pistol in her right hand hanging at her side.

“Trust in me,” he had told her. “I have enough strength for you as well as for Darby.” His words seemed to hang in the crisp mountain air. “Someone is coming,” he’d told her in New York. “I need your help. It’s time now to repay old debts.” She’d laughed then and she laughed now, because if there had been any debt owed it was his debt to her for everything he and Darby had done to her. Yet she had done exactly what he had asked of her. She’d told McGarvey everything. She’d even slept with him. And now she felt truly dirty for the first time in her life. It was even worse for her now than it had been in the old days.

The sliding glass doors to the living room were open. Baranov stepped out of the darkness onto the veranda. Evita stopped short. He had changed and yet he hadn’t. He was short and stocky, his thick neck was like a bull’s, his features were dark and broad and very Russian. But even from a distance of twenty feet, she could feel heat radiating from him as if he were a furnace. She could feel his power, his self-assurance, and even a bit of his humor from where she stood. He wore khaki trousers and an open-necked shirt. A bit of gold chain around his neck was illuminated in the already fading glow of the Volkswagen’s headlights. She felt a silly urge to run back to the car and switch off the lights before the battery was fully dead. It would be hard starting the engine when it was time to return to town.

“You are a wonderful girl,” Baranov said softly. “I thank you for your help. You did good.”

Just let go, she thought, and there was a certain comfort in the notion. Give in. Don’t fight him, because winning is impossible. She closed her eyes, and she could see a kaleidoscopic image of her entire life; Valentin, Darby and Juanita. All ruined. All gone. All harshly used.

“McGarvey knows about Darby,” she said, opening her eyes again. “And about you. Everything.”

“I know,” he said.

“That doesn’t matter to you?”

“On the contrary, it matters very much to me, Evita. In this you must believe me. Before this night is over, we will have triumphed, you and I.” He smiled. She could clearly see his perfectly white teeth. He beckoned to her. “Come. We’ll wait together.”

“They’re going to arrest Darby,” she said.

“I know.”

“They know that he’s working with someone inside the CIA.”

“Worked,” Baranov corrected her.

Evita felt light headed. “What?”

“Darby hasn’t been active for years and years, my dear. Didn’t you know? Hadn’t you guessed?”

“Then why …?”

“It wasn’t him I was after. It was someone else.”

“There were people killed.”

“Not Darby’s doing, believe me.”

She shook her head.

He smiled sympathetically. “I’d sincerely hoped you would show up here tonight, you know. You can wait here. In the morning I’ll drive you down to the airport. I don’t think Mexico would be such a good place for you just now.”

“You bastard,” she said. She raised the gun and switched the safety catch down and fired, the pistol jumping in her hand. Baranov didn’t move a muscle. She fired again, breaking something inside the living room. She started forward, firing a third time and a fourth, still Baranov didn’t move, his eyes locked into hers, a slight smile creasing his features. She fired a fifth and sixth time, her elbow aching from the recoil, her ears ringing from the noise. He was invincible, invulnerable; nothing could hurt him. He was God, he was untouchable. She had known that from the very first day she had laid eyes on him, and here, now, the wild thought ran through her mind, was the living proof. He was not an ordinary mortal man. He could not be killed with bullets. He would live forever.

She held the pistol in both hands and sighted on the middle of his chest. She stood flat-footed about fifteen feet down from the veranda. He held up a hand, like a benediction.

“It’s enough, Evita,” he said sadly.

She squeezed slowly on the trigger, like McGarvey had told her to do, tears slipping down her cheeks, a great big hollow feeling inside of her. Her life had come down to this one act: either she would kill him and continue to live, or she could not and she would have to die.

He moved to the left at the same moment the gun went off, and he staggered backward against the edge of the doorway, a big splotch of blood suddenly appearing on his left arm, just above the elbow.

She took another step closer and fired a second shot, this one catching Baranov high in the left shoulder just below the collarbone. He cried out in pain and slumped to the floor, half in and half out of the house.

She came up on the veranda as Baranov was trying to crawl into the house. He stopped and looked up as she reached him.

“You sonofabitch,” she cried. She raised the pistol to his head, the barrel inches away from his temple.

His eyes softened. “You will not kill me. Not after what we have been through together, you and I.”

Her hands were shaking so badly that she could barely keep the gun pointed at him. There was no fear in his eyes, however, and it infuriated her. But it frightened her, too.

“I will require some medical assistance, so it will be best that you not stay here this evening after all.”

“Fuck you,” she said and she pulled the trigger. The hammer slapped on an empty chamber.

Baranov managed a slight, depreciating smile. “Mr. McGarvey has always had the habit of loading only eight bullets into his Walther. Fortunate for me, his predictability.”

Evita pulled the trigger again, but nothing happened. She could not believe that she had come this far, had come this close, and still had lost. “No,” she cried.

“Go,” he said. “Killing me wouldn’t have done much in any event, except land you in jail. The die is cast, my dear. You must see that now.”

She looked down at him in sudden horror, thinking that she had ever believed in him, that she had slept with him and done his bidding. Perhaps it was the blood on his arm and shoulder, and the pain which she could clearly read in his eyes, that made him somehow more human for her than before. He wasn’t a god, at all. Nor was he an infallible giant. He was only an ordinary man. An extraordinarily evil man. But simply a man for all of it. She stepped back and let the gun fall to the floor.

“No one will be coming after you,” he said. “You are safe. Trust me.”

She turned, crossed the veranda, and started for her car. He said something to her from the house, but she couldn’t quite make out the words. She looked back but she couldn’t see anything in the darkness, and now the house was a stranger’s house to her. She had never been here, not to this place. Nor would she ever have a desire to return. That much she knew for certain. Everything else was a mystery to her.

Francisco Artime Basulto stepped from the airplane at Havana’s José Marti International Airport and breathed deeply of the warm, moist night air. He was home at last and he felt ten feet tall. At the very least he would get a medal along with his promotion. And he damned well deserved it and more, by his reckoning. The past few months had been bad for him, much worse than he had suspected, especially with McGarvey. He’d get that man’s ass sooner or later. Baranov had promised him. “You will get everything coming to you, Artime,” the Russian had said at their first meeting nearly a year ago. “Believe me when I tell you that everyone will be satisfied.” What’s not to believe, he’d wondered. With Baranov anything was possible. The sky was the limit.

Twenty or thirty people had come on the late-night flight from Mexico City, and Basulto went with them across the parking ramp and into the customs hall of the big terminal. They’d been held on the plane for nearly a half hour while their luggage had been off-loaded and brought in. He would stay downtown for the weekend and have a little fun. He deserved it. Monday would be soon enough for him to check in. Baranov would be coming over and they would go through the debriefing together. Even the colonel would be impressed.

He stood in line at the check-in counter and when his turn came he surrendered his passport and baggage claim ticket. He was tired and wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. He was out of cigarettes, he was hungry, and he needed a drink. A big drink.

The clerk, an older, horse-faced woman in a militia uniform was staring at him. There was something about the expression in her eyes that was bothersome.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Comrade. Is there?” she asked.

A bulky man in civilian clothes came across the hall. He was smiling. “Ah, Comrade Basulto, welcome home, welcome home,” he said effusively, and the knot that had suddenly tightened in Basulto’s gut immediately began to loosen.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s good to be back among friends.”

“Colonel Alvarez would like a word with you before you go into town,” the civilian said. He took Basulto’s passport and baggage claim ticket from the woman and motioned for Basulto to come with him.

“I hope this won’t take long. I’m tired and I—”

“Yes, we understand,” the civilian said pleasantly. “It will take just a moment, believe me.”

They went past the customs inspection counters to the back of the hall where a door to an office stood open. Several soldiers were gathered around a table on which Basulto’s suitcase lay open. Ten feet away he could see that there was something packed in his suitcase that he hadn’t put there. For just an instant he was confused. But then he recognized what he was seeing and he stopped short. Inside his suitcase there had to be at least twenty kilos of cocaine wrapped in one-kilo plastic packages. He’d handled the stuff enough to recognize it when he saw it. He had been set up.

“Comrade?” the civilian asked, turning around.

“No,” Basulto said, taking a step backward. “That’s not mine.”

“Just come in and we’ll straighten it out,” the civilian said reasonably.

They didn’t give a shit about him. He had served his purpose, and now.they were throwing him on the trash heap. Cristo! He wasn’t going to spend his life in Uncle Fidel’s jail.

The civilian was reaching in his suit coat as Basulto turned and bolted for the main doors. Not like this, goddamnit! It wasn’t going to end like this! Someone shouted to him, but he didn’t understand. Not like this!

Something very hot and hard slammed into his back and he could feel himself being propelled forward, off his feet, the sound of a gunshot booming in his ears. Before he hit the floor a million stars burst in his head and he was dead.

32

McGarvey and Trotter sat in the darkened car watching the gate house and the driveway up to Powers’s residence. Occasionally they would say something to each other, but for the most part they had kept their silence, each absorbed in his own glum thoughts. Powers the traitor. Still McGarvey found it difficult to fathom. Trotter had called a disbelieving Leonard Day, who nonetheless agreed to come over as soon as he possibly could, though it might take him an hour or more because he had guests who wouldn’t be all that simple to shoo away. That had been nearly an hour ago. It had come to McGarvey, in the meantime, that at the very least Trotter and Day were treating this as nothing more than some sort of an unfortunate mistake. Powers simply could not be their traitor. Not Powers. There would be another explanation. There had to be. It also came to him that he had become a worrier. At times like this he thought about the people he knew and how they were making mistakes with their lives. He could see the way clear for each of them, the way out of their troubles. He thought about his sister for whom land, duty, and responsibility were more important than people, and he thought about Kathleen, who was cut of much the same cloth and would never be completely happy until she learned to love herself a little less and a man — any man — a little more completely. Marta and Evita, on the other hand, were the direct opposites of his sister and ex-wife. They were women who loved too completely, at the nearly absolute exclusion of everything else, including their own previous loyalties and common sense. He thought also about Powers and Yarnell, men so far out of what might be considered a “normal” category that they lived their lives unaware of the realities of the majority of the people they had set themselves up to serve. It was not arrogance, he thought, so much as insularity. They were islands unto themselves, for the most part ignorant of the natives on the beaches but forever watching the distant horizons for threats from afar. These sorts, when they fell, were always surprised.

“At least he didn’t bring his mob with him this time,” Trotter said into the darkness.

McGarvey glanced over at him. “They’ll have to be dealt with.”

“That depends upon what happens tonight.”

“I’m not going to assassinate him for you, John, if that’s what you mean,” McGarvey said. “It’s gone beyond that now. No need any longer to protect Powers.”

“I meant with Leonard. He’ll have to talk to them.”

“They’ll deny it.”

“Probably.”

“Maybe they’ll shoot him dead.”

“Good Lord, it’s not Donald Powers,” Trotter blurted. “It simply cannot be. And let me remind you that you don’t have a shred of proof linking him to any crime, to any wrongdoing.”

Looking out the window again, McGarvey had to admit that it was true. There was no proof. Not even proof against Yarnell now that Basulto had skipped out. Evita’s testimony would be thrown out of any court; she was an ex-wife with a grudge, she was a prostitute, and a drug addict. Hardly a reliable witness. He was an assassin who had been fired by the Carter administration for political unreliability. Owens, with his testimony about the old days, was dead, as was poor Janos and his story about altered records: There was no one left. And all the while, lurking in the background, was Baranov. This was his doing. Why? What had he hoped to accomplish? What were they still missing?

“It’s all such a mess,” Trotter murmured. “An incredible, stinking mess.”

They both heard the shot from up at the house, like a tiny firecracker popping.

“Good Lord,” Trotter said, looking up.

“Give me your gun,” McGarvey demanded, and he jumped out of the car.

Trotter fumbled in his jacket pocket, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

“Come on, John!” McGarvey snapped. He looked over his shoulder toward the house.

Trotter handed him the gun, a big, bulky nine-millimeter automatic. “What the hell is going on, Kirk?”

The guard had come out of the gate house. He was looking up toward the house, his pistol drawn.

“Block the driveway and then get the hell away from the car,” McGarvey shouted over his shoulder as he raced across the street. He levered a round into the firing chamber and switched the safety off.

Behind him Trotter started the car and pulled up the street, screeching to a halt just in front of the gate house. The guard had spun around as Trotter, his badge held high over his head, jumped out of the car. “FBI,” he shouted. “FBI!”

Automobile headlights appeared at the head of the driveway, flashing in the trees and illuminating the thickening fog. A powerful car engine was racing at top speed. Lights were coming on all over the house above, and a siren began to sound, its metallic wail piercing the night.

The gate guard was looking from Trotter, who had backed away from his car, to the driveway and back again, not quite sure what was happening but understanding that a situation of some sort was rapidly developing in front of his nose. He had not spotted McGarvey, who had taken up position in the shadows off to the side.

There had been only one shot, but any lingering doubt that tonight’s meeting between Yarnell and Powers had been innocent in purpose was gone. Baranov had set up the mechanism, McGarvey had managed to push all the right buttons, and now the principle players had leapt into action.

The car’s headlights suddenly backlit the iron bars of the gate, throwing long shadows across the road and over Trotter’s car. McGarvey dropped into a shooter’s crouch, both hands on the pistol, his arms extended. All at once Yarnell’s Mercedes burst into view on the driveway, moving at a high rate of speed. The guard just barely managed to leap aside as the car hit the gate with a tremendous crash, sending one half of the heavy metal structure flying off to one side. At the last possible instant, the Mercedes swung very hard to the left in a futile effort to avoid crashing into Trotter’s car, its right fender caving in Trotter’s door, both cars skidding across the street and up onto the curb.

The gate guard rushed down the driveway as Yarnell half rolled, half fell out of his car.

“Stop! Stop!” the guard shouted.

Yarnell was hidden behind the open car door. McGarvey started across the street as two shots were fired in rapid succession. The guard was thrown backward off his feet, a big geyser of blood erupting from the center of his chest.

“Yarnell!” McGarvey shouted.

Yarnell’s figure filled the window opening and he fired, the shot ricochetting off the pavement. McGarvey fired three times, the first catching Yarnell in the chest, the second smacking into the door panel and catching him in the groin, and the third hitting him in the neck just above the sternum, destroying his throat and filling his lungs with blood.

Trotter was racing up the road.

“See about the guard,” McGarvey shouted, approaching the Mercedes with caution.

Another car raced down the driveway from the house and skidded to a halt in the street.

“FBI! FBI!” Trotter shouted.

McGarvey didn’t bother looking back. Yarnell half lay, half sat in a bloody heap beside the Mercedes, his head lolling back on the leather-upholstered seat. A beretta automatic lay beside him. He was dead, there was absolutely no doubt of it. His eyes were open and his tongue filled his mouth as if he were gagging on something. Even in death, however, McGarvey could feel the power of the man. For two and a half decades no one had been able to touch him. Twenty-five years or more he had been allowed to operate unchecked. McGarvey thought how the man should have seemed diminished in death. But he didn’t.

Stuffing Trotter’s pistol in his pocket, McGarvey bent down over Yarnell’s body and went through his pockets. No proof. Still there was no proof of anything other than the fact that Yarnell may have tried to assassinate the director of Central Intelligence tonight.

In Yarnell’s breast pocket he found a miniature tape recorder. It was still running. McGarvey switched it off, and glanced over his shoulder. Four guards had come down from the house. One of them had broken away and was coming this way. McGarvey quickly stuffed the tape recorder in his pocket and got to his feet. In the distance he could hear the sounds of the first sirens.

“An ambulance is coming,” the guard said, out of breath.

“Yarnell won’t need it,” McGarvey said stepping aside.

The guard caught sight of Yarnell’s body and he stopped short. “Christ,” he said. “You two put it to him, didn’t you?”

“He was trying to escape. Shot your gate guard.”

“What the hell were you two doing here in the first place?” the bodyguard asked, his eyes narrow. “We weren’t informed of any bureau operation.”

“We were following Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “What happened at the house? We heard the shot.”

“Following Mr. Yarnell for what reason, exactly?” There would be an investigation, and the man was thinking about his own future.

“He was suspected of working for the Russians. How is Powers?”

, “Damn,” the guard said glancing down at Yarnell. He shook his head. “Not good, I’d say. This bastard shot him in the head from close range. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. Christ, they’re old friends. Have been for years. How the hell were we supposed to know?”

“How about your gate guard?” McGarvey asked.

“Charlie is dead. There’ll be hell to pay for this all. A lot of hell for a long time.”

“Shit runs downhill,” McGarvey said.

“Yeah, ain’t that just the truth now,” the man said, walking off.

Trotter came across the street as the ambulance arrived and was directed up to the house. One of the guards went with it while the others kept a watchful eye. Other sirens could be heard in the distance.

“In a very few minutes this place is going to be crawling with some angry people who are going to have a lot of questions,” McGarvey told him.

“And I don’t know what the hell to tell them,” Trotter said. He was staring down at Yarnell’s body. He sighed. “What an incredible mess.”

“We can try the truth, John, or at least some of it. But they’re going to want to know who the hell I am.”

Trotter looked up. “Powers probably won’t make it from the way his bodyguards were talking. No need to prove anything now.”

McGarvey thought about the tape recorder in his pocket. He took out the gun and handed it to Trotter. “For the record you shot him.”

“There is enough circumstantial evidence, I suppose,” Trotter said.

“Keep my ex-wife out of it,”

“I’ll try, Kirk, that’s all I can promise.”

The first of the police cars showed up just ahead of Leonard Day in a stretch limousine. Powers was taken away in the ambulance, its lights flashing, its siren screaming. Two other ambulances showed up moments later. Trotter walked over to where Day was talking with a District of Columbia police lieutenant, a secret service agent, and a couple of Powers’s bodyguards. For the moment they were ignoring McGarvey. Even more sirens were converging from around the city. The first of the television vans arrived, but the police had already blocked off the narrow street and wouldn’t allow the reporters to cross the barriers.

McGarvey got his bag out of Trotter’s car as the coroner came over and checked Yarnell’s body. Police photographers took a series of pictures, the flash units blinding in the darkness. And then one of the ambulance crews respectfully lifted Yarnell’s body onto a stretcher, strapped it in, and took it away.

A crowd had finally gathered. There were uniformed police officers and plainclothesmen everywhere, but everyone made a point of avoiding McGarvey. Confusion will come to the very end of every operation. Confusion and disdain. It was nearly axiomatic. The dustbin crew they were called. The investigating officers, the forensics specialists, the accountants of the business at hand, there to pick up the pieces and put them back together in neat, platable ledger books.

His part in it was done, or very nearly done. Yet he was less certain now of what had really happened than he had been at the very beginning. As he waited he tried to examine his feelings as an accident victim in shock might try to determine the extent of his injuries. But nothing came to mind, and he understood that he was numb, and whatever he was thinking now would all be changed by morning, or by next week, or next month.

It was nearly two in the morning. McGarvey sat in the back of the stretch limousine with a shaken Trotter and a pensive Leonard Day. They’d crossed Constitution Avenue on Third Street below the Capitol and headed toward the river. He was out. Day had taken care of everything so that he had become the invisible man as far as concerned the investigating officers. An extraneous object hardly worthy of a second glance. The man had the power, which was just as well because for all practical purposes the business was finished. And still he had no real idea what Baranov had hoped to accomplish. Yarnell might not have been able to provide the Russian with much in the way of hard intelligence these days, but my God, the director of Central Intelligence had to be the ultimate of gold seams.

“I want you to leave the country,” Day said. “Back to Europe where we dug you up from under a rock.”

A week ago he would have resented such a remark. It didn’t matter any longer. “What’s our story?”

Day looked at him, his lips compressed. “You, mister, have no story. Plain and simple, you keep your mouth shut. You were never here, you know nothing about it.”

“Keep my ex-wife out of it,” McGarvey said tiredly. “Other than that you’re welcome to it.”

“We’ll just see now, won’t we,” Day said, puffed up with self-importance. “From what I can see she was very deeply—”

McGarvey reached over in the darkness and clamped his fingers around Day’s throat, cutting off the man’s wind. “If need be, I’ll come back and kill you. It’s easier than you think.”

Day’s eyes were bulging nearly out of their sockets, and his face was beginning to turn red. He tried to struggle, but McGarvey’s grip was iron tight. Trotter had reared back, he didn’t know what to do.

“Make certain my ex-wife isn’t involved in any way, and I’ll keep my end of the bargain. Do you understand me, Mr. Deputy Attorney General?”

Day nodded frantically and McGarvey let go. He lit a cigarette and for the remainder of the trip over to the Marriott he sat back in his seat and stared out the window, ignoring the other two. In the morning he would leave. He found that he was actually anxious to see Marta again, hold her in his arms, if she would come away with him. Not Switzerland, of course, but they would find solace somewhere together. He resolved to be a better person. He’d stepped back into the fray and found that the rules of the game, if not the class of participants, had drastically changed. It wasn’t for him. He might be dissatisfied in the future, there never could be a guarantee against that. But he didn’t think he’d ever again pine away for the agency.

He reached in his pocket and felt for the miniature tape recorder he’d taken from Yarnell’s body. He thought about turning it over to them, but had decided against it. At least for the moment. They had their story in any event. Yarnell had been a traitor. Donald Powers had somehow discovered his friend’s duplicity and when he had confronted him with it, Yarnell shot him. Yarnell was killed during his attempt to escape. Spectacular headlines, but it was a story they all could live with. There’d be no one to dispute it, whether or not Powers died of his wound. He thought again that he didn’t know a thing about honor.

“Good-bye, Kirk,” Trotter said outside the hotel. They shook hands. Day remained in the car.

“Take care of yourself,” McGarvey said, and he meant it.

“You too.”

33

For the rest of the morning, McGarvey lived in a state that could only be called disbelief and horror. He had not gone to bed after Trotter and Day had dropped him off; instead, he had listened to the recording that Yarnell had made of his conversation with Powers. And then he had listened to it again. He had telephoned Evita’s club twice, but there was no answer. He called the Del Prado in Mexico City, but the clerk knew nothing about Ms. Perez. She had not checked out, but she hadn’t returned to her room either. No one had seen her leave the hotel. He ordered from room service with the gray, overcast dawn, but when his breakfast came he found he didn’t have the stomach for it and drank barely a half a cup of coffee. He telephoned Trotter a few minutes before eight.

“I don’t think there’s anything left to be said, Kirk,” Trotter growled.

“Is he still alive?”

“Powers? As of six when he came out of the operating theater he was in critical condition.”

“Can he speak? Will he regain consciousness?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Trotter demanded. “Just go, Kirk. Leave it be.”

“I have to know.”

“Maybe we treated you shabbily. I have no defense. It’s just the way it went. But there’s nothing to be gained—”

“Is he conscious?” McGarvey persisted.

Trotter sighed. “I don’t think so. From what I understand he may never come out of it, and if he does he’ll probably be a vegetable. It’s all over. Go.”

“But he was innocent.”

“We know that.”

“So was Yarnell.”

“What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying? Good Lord, haven’t we gone through enough?”

McGarvey looked at the tape recorder lying on the desk. “It was a Baranov plot,” he said. “And he will have won if you publish the story that Yarnell was a traitor.”

“We have the evidence.”

“Circumstantial, all of it,” McGarvey said. He was thinking about Basulto’s story, about Owens’s hatred of Yarnell, who was probably guilty of seducing his mentor’s wife and of arrogance and of a certain hardness of character and purpose. He thought about Evita and everything she’d told him. She’d been manipulated all right, but by Baranov not by her husband, who had in his own way tried in the end to insulate her. And he thought about poor Janos, who had died on a fool’s errand. Yarnell had not murdered them. Baranov had.

“John?”

“I’m here.”

“I’ll meet you at Leonard Day’s house. Right now. This morning. Call him and tell him we’re on the way out.”

“I won’t.”

“I think you will.” He hung up. It was all clear to him now. All the pieces fit, from the hijacking of the flight out of Miami in which the two CIA officers were murdered to the incident last night. Yarnell had been doing his duty as he saw it up there. Nothing more.

McGarvey cleaned up, ordered a rental car through the hotel desk, and drove out of the city up to Day’s palatial home on Lake Artemesia near College Park. The morning was cool and windy. The lake was dotted with whitecaps. No one was fishing. A plain gray Chevrolet sedan with government plates was parked under the overhang when McGarvey drove up. It was at places like this, he thought, that the real work of government service was often conducted. It didn’t offer him much comfort.

Inside Trotter and Day were waiting for him in the study. They were drinking coffee. Trotter looked terrible; his eyes were bloodshot, his tie undone, his jacket disheveled. He hadn’t changed from last night. Day, on the other hand, seemed fresh in his three-piece pinstriped suit. He also looked angry, even imperious, sitting behind his big leather-topped desk.

“I haven’t got time for your asinine bullshit this morning, McGarvey. I want that straight from the beginning here,” Day said. “You want money we’ll give it to you, although John tells me that you refused his very generous offer.”

There had been no offer, but it didn’t matter. “Yarnell and Powers were both innocent,” McGarvey said, facing him across the desk like a schoolboy before his masters.

“So John has told me. And what of your painstakingly gathered evidence?”

“I was wrong.”

“He was wrong,” Day hooted looking over at Trotter. “What do you suppose he was wrong about? on his loyalty. Throw our entire secret service into shambles just at the moment we most need its services.”

“But what did Jules and Asher have to do with it, Kirk,” Trotter asked.

“I expect that operation was designed to do nothing more than get Powers’s attention. He and Baranov have known each other for more than twenty-five years.”

“It was him in Mexico City?” Trotter asked.

McGarvey nodded.

“What are you talking about?” Day demanded. “Who? What about Mexico City?”

“When Yarnell was in Mexico City he worked Baranov, who at the time was his counterpart at the Soviet embassy. One evening Powers apparently showed up at a party that Yarnell threw and at which Baranov had supplied the women.”

Day’s eyes narrowed. His sarcastic manner was gone. “And there was an indiscretion?”

McGarvey nodded. “Most likely. Just that one night. Yarnell might not have thought much about it at the time, but Baranov had, and so had Powers.”

“It was the link between them all these years,” Trotter said, understanding the situation at a much deeper level than Day because of his training.

“Why in God’s name did he run to Powers last night? Why did he shoot him? It doesn’t make sense, McGarvey.”

“It didn’t to me at first,” McGarvey said. “Not until this morning. But first you have to understand that this entire affair, everything that has happened, was orchestrated by Baranov.”

“He’s that good?” Day asked.

McGarvey nodded.

“And it started, you say, with the deaths of Jules and Asher?”

Darby Yarnell’s guilt or his innocence?”

“It was a Soviet plot,” McGarvey went on doggedly. He wanted to get this over with and leave before he did something truly stupid like going across the desk and smashing Day’s pretty face.

The study was a pleasant room. It smelled of books, leather, Day’s cologne, and coffee. A lot of the books were privately bound in matched covers. McGarvey wondered if anyone had ever read them.

“It began with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami,” he said. “Planned and financed by the Soviet-run CESTA network.”

Trotter sat forward a little. “The weapons were Soviet made. Supplied by CESTA.”

“Because of the missile thing?” Day asked. “Is that why those two were shot down? Were the Russians afraid of an early discovery?”

“No,” McGarvey said patiently. “I think the missile thing will turn out to be simply another Cuba.”

“Simply,” Day said in amazement.

“The Cuban missile crisis got the Russians exactly what they wanted all along. A promise from us to never again intervene in Cuban affairs. It worked then, and I suspect it will work in Mexico.”

“If that wasn’t the Soviet’s goal, and I’m certainly not saying that I agree with you, then what?”

“How effective was Powers as a DCI?” McGarvey countered. He was thinking about the tape recording.

“Very,” Day said. “The best we’ve ever had, bar none.”

“Where is he now?”

“In the hospital, of course—”

“Baranov has won,” McGarvey said quietly. “Powers was a thorn in his side. Has been for years and years, so he wanted to get rid of him. Cast doubt

“By killing them and making sure that Powers knew the weapons were Russian made and CESTA supplied, Baranov was putting Powers on notice that trouble was coming.”

“He warned Powers.”

“In effect. He wanted Powers to become defensive. Just one more link in a very long chain of evidence.”

Day shook his head, and Trotter had to explain it for him. “Innocent men aren’t generally defensive. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence.”

“The Cuban was working for Baranov, of course,” Day said.

“From the beginning,” McGarvey said. “And you have to admire him. He did a fine job.”

“Where is he now?”

“Havana, I suppose. Picking up a medal. Or a bullet.”

“And Darby’s ex-wife?” Trotter asked.

“Hopefully on her way to New York. Baranov actually came to New York about nine months ago to see her. He told her that someone like me would be coming around asking questions about her ex-husband. She had a grudge, and she had seen things in Mexico City that she couldn’t possibly have understood. At the time Yarnell was very close to Baranov. They did everything together. Two young spies, both brilliant, both headstrong and arrogant, were working each other. Seducing each other, playing the game on a grand scale. What was a poor little Mexican princess supposed to believe when she saw them together?”

“How could Baranov possibly know that someone like you would be coming?” Day asked.

“He set Basulto on you and Trotter. He knew that you wouldn’t take it to the CIA because of Powers’s friendship with Yarnell. He figured that you might be calling in an outsider. Someone who knew the game. A radical.”

“How do you know that Yarnell wasn’t actually a traitor?”

“Because of the quality of the intelligence he sent back on every assignment he was ever given. His boss, Darrel Owens, had nothing but praise for his protege’s work in Mexico City and in Moscow, although he hated him.”

“Why?” Day asked. They were leaving him behind again, but it didn’t matter now. McGarvey figured that Trotter would explain it to him later.

“Yarnell was probably sleeping with his wife.”

“Why in heaven’s name?” Day chirped.

“He was hedging his bets,” Trotter said. “He was an ambitious kid and wanted to get to the top as quickly as he possibly could. The cuckolded husband is almost always the first one to cooperate lest he make a public fool of himself.”

Admiration and hate often went hand-in-hand in this business, McGarvey thought, recalling his afternoon with Owens. No one, he suspected, had ever been neutral about Darby Yarnell, who in the end had made the most tragic mistake of his life. He had simply out-thought himself. In the end neither he nor Powers had been a match for Baranov’s skills.

“What about Janos Plónski?” Trotter asked, breaking into McGarvey’s thoughts. “He’d found something in the records that got him killed.”

“My fault,” McGarvey said tiredly. He supposed Pat and the kids had returned to England where her mother still lived. Eventually, he knew, he would have to face them, but only after he found the right words.

“What did he discover?” Trotter prompted.

“He looked up Basulto’s track. Several of his operations had been pulled from their jackets. But it was done years ago.”

“By whom, if Yarnell and Powers were innocent?”

“There wasn’t time to get the dates straight, but I suspect Roger Harris did it. He was Basulto’s case officer and he suspected there was a mole in the agency and he wanted to hide what Basulto was doing for him — namely finding the traitor.”

“Who killed Harris in Cuba then …” Trotter started to ask, but a sudden understanding dawned on him. “Basulto,” he said into the breach.

“Yeah,” McGarvey replied.

“Well, what about Yarnell’s bodyguards,” Day wanted to know. “That’s not what you would consider normal behavior for an innocent man.”

“Yarnell was never what you would think of as normal,” McGarvey countered. “He’d always surrounded himself with a crowd. Admirers, some of them, others actual bodyguards. Maybe he’d gotten paranoid in his old age. Maybe he thought Baranov would be coming after him someday. I don’t know.”

Day sat back in his chair, his hands in front of him on the desk. “Still doesn’t answer the question of why Yarnell went to see Powers last night. Why he shot him. Not the actions of an innocent man.”

Darby Yarnell had been an arrogant sonofabitch. But a romantic for all of it. An overzealous patriot who had thrown himself body and soul into being a spy in defense of his country. The ends, for him, justified the means. Any means. And it was those very qualities that Baranov had recognized early on, that he had used to manipulate Yarnell. All the signs were there, but McGarvey had seen them too late. As they all had. Only Baranov had known the outcome from the very beginning. Only Baranov truly knew about honor and dishonor, and how to use this understanding to the best advantage. McGarvey took the miniature tape recorder out of his jacket pocket and laid it gingerly on Day’s desk.

“Yarnell remembered that night in Mexico City when Powers came to his house and was seduced,” McGarvey began. “He remembered the party, the music, the girls, and mostly he remembered Baranov. We were led to believe that there was a mole in the CIA. A man at high levels who was selling us out to the Russians. Baranov’s handmaiden. In Yarnell’s mind, everything pointed to his old friend Powers, whom he thought was being blackmailed. He thought he understood Baranov. He thought Baranov had used that night to turn Powers. Or was about to do it. So he went to the house and shot him. It was his patriotic duty, as he saw it.”

Day and Trotter were staring at the tape recorder as if it were a wild beast about to devour them.

“I took this from Yarnell’s body last night. It was running. No one else knows about it. No one but us.”

“You’ve heard it?” Trotter asked, looking up.

McGarvey nodded. “Yarnell had loved his country and had given his life in her defense. He thought he was thwarting Baranov when in actuality he had played the score the Russian had laid out for him, the first notes of which had been written twenty-five years ago.”

“You can’t expect us to believe such a story,” Day said halfheartedly.

“Yes, I do,” McGarvey replied. He switched on the tape recording, then turned and walked out as Darby Yarnell’s voice came from the tiny speaker.

“Hello Donald. We have a problem, you and I.”

“Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers said.

McGarvey had gone from day into night with the same thoughts, the same voices in his head following him like a shadow, like an alter ego, at once frightening and somehow strangely comforting in that he finally understood. Riding in the taxi from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan, he wondered how Day and Trotter were taking it. Powers had died shortly before noon. A counsel for the CIA had admitted the DCI had been assassinated by Darby Yarnell, a longtime friend, but a spokesman for the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where both men had been taken, hinted about a possible brain tumor in Yarnell’s frontal lobe. It would be days, possibly weeks, before anything conclusive would be known, but Yarnell quite possibly had not been in control of his faculties at the time of the crime. Meanwhile, the president had given the Russians an ultimatum: The missiles in Mexico would have to be dismantled within the next forty-eight hours or a complete air and sea blockade of Mexico would commence. The United Nations was meeting in emergency session. Gorbachev had so far made no response. Nor had the Mexican government. The world, as it had in the sixties, was holding its breath.

“We have a problem, you and I,” Yarnell had said on the tape.

“Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers had replied.

“It’s Valentin.”

McGarvey would never forget the longish pause on the tape. On first hearing it, he had been concerned that something had gone wrong. That the machine had somehow malfunctioned. But then Powers made the first of his damning statements.

“I’ve been expecting this for a lot of years, Darby. You know, now that it’s come I’m actually glad.”

“It’s been a burden,” Yarnell said.

“Yes. It has.”

Yarnell had gone there to accuse his old friend of being a traitor, and Powers had been expecting Yarnell to come forward finally and admit that he was the traitor. It should have been a comedy, but too many lives had already been lost — and more were in the balance — for it to be humorous.

The lights of Manhattan suddenly came into sight across the East River. McGarvey had always liked this view of the city; it was power, to him, and success and excitement. “The American dream,” his father once told him, “is to light up the universe.” We’d gotten a pretty good start in New York City. It made him sad to think how much he would miss it.

“ … knew he’d be coming for you,” Yarnell’s words stood out in McGarvey’s head. “I simply never imagined the lengths to which the man is willing to go. It staggers the imagination.”

“Even yours?” Powers had replied, and McGarvey had plainly heard the slight note of derision in the DCI’s voice.

There was another longish pause on the tape until Yarnell said that Baranov had sent for them.

Powers laughed.

“Evita telephoned from Mexico City, Donald. She says she knows everything. Basulto is with her. And someone else, McGarvey something or other.”

“Of course she could not know everything,” Powers said.

“Not without Valentin’s help and advice. Which brings us to an interesting juncture, you and I.”

“Yes. I thought you’d be coming someday.”

“Me, or someone like me.”

“You,” Powers had said. He sounded final, and so very sure of himself.

They passed through the Midtown tunnel and into Manhattan, and merged with traffic heading south on Second Avenue toward SoHo. It was a Friday night. The daytime city of offices and businesses had fallen silent, while the nighttime city of restaurants and bars and clubs had come alive. A dangerous, wonderful place, he thought. Alive.

“Why me?” Yarnell had asked.

“You’ve been his lapdog all these years.”

“What?”

“I never had the proof until tonight, until just now. Valentin called and you jumped. It’s gotten too difficult for him in Mexico I suspect, so he sent you here.”

“He’s blackmailing you …”

“And you’ve come with the ransom demand.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Yarnell had said, the words echoing again and again in McGarvey’s head. “Don’t be a fool … A mole in the agency … at the highest levels. You, Donald. It has been you all these years …”

“We were friends … Baranov has wanted me for a long time … you were the traitor, not me ….”

A single gunshot, the sound distorted in the tiny machine, cut Powers off in midsentence. For a moment there was silence on the tape, and then rushing sounds, like water over a cliff, the definite sound of a car door closing and the engine coming to life.

An East Coast accent, Evita had said, as had Basulto. Powers’s accent was East Coast, but he’d been Baranov’s mark from the first day. The Russian had bided his time, had saved the single indiscretion like money in the bank until it earned enough interest to make the withdrawal significant. He had wanted to destroy Powers, and he had.

The cabbie dropped McGarvey off in front of St. Christopher’s on Broome Street. The club was dark, not a single window was lit. A couple of passersby glanced up at him as he mounted the single step and rang the bell. He could hear it inside. He glanced down the street as the taxi turned the corner and was gone. He had thought about calling ahead in Washington and again at LaGuardia, but had decided against it, wanting to come here in person to face her, though he had no real idea what he wanted to say to her.

He rang the bell again and then tried the door. It was open. Just inside the vestibule he closed and locked the door and, leaving his bag, passed through to the club where the only illumination came from the exit signs. He took the stairs up to Evita’s apartment and let himself in. She was curled up on the couch, her hands clutched at her bosom. Her feet were bare and her silk nightgown was hiked up nearly to her hips. She was sleeping, McGarvey thought at first as he came across the living room. Her cocaine paraphernalia was laid out on the big coffee table in front of her. But there was an unnatural stillness about her. He stopped a few feet away and watched for her chest to rise and fall; for a movement, any movement, a little twitch, a flexed muscle in sleep. But she was absolutely motionless, and he knew that she was dead.

With Baranov out of reach and Darby Yarnell dead, there had been no reason for her to continue living. She had had her fantasies, as we all do, about somehow regaining her youth or whatever it was she perceived she had lost by growing older, until Baranov had set out on his mad plot to bring Powers down. She’d heard the news this morning, of course, and she had killed herself.

He gently touched her cheek. Her flesh was already stiff and cool. She had been dead for half a day at least. Probably since noon.

Baranov had let her leave Mexico City knowing how she would end up. She had been the last link to the old days. The very last one who could do him any harm. But he’d known her better than anyone else.

It had been her hands that had tapped out the coke on the tiny mirror, her hands that had cut it into lines and her hands that had held the tiny straw to her nostrils. But Baranov had killed her as surely as if he had held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger himself.

Darby Yarnell had killed her, too, with his arrogance, with his mad energy, as if she had been a delicate moth attracted to a raging inferno.

The system had killed her. The bureaucracy of government, by its insensitivity to the people it was supposed to serve, had destroyed her. The aristocracy of lies and dishonor had proven to be a fatal attraction.

He thought about Baranov, who was surely celebrating by now. The magician, Evita had called him. He cannot lose. He cannot be beaten. Perhaps she had been right.

McGarvey turned and left the apartment. Downstairs he collected his bag, let himself out, and headed up toward Houston, where there would be more of a chance to catch a cab at this hour of the night. It was over, he thought. Time now to try to find the peace he had been searching for all of his life.