Dance with the Dragon (20 page)

“You must kill him as quickly as possible,” Liu said.

“It won’t be easy.”

“Nevertheless, it will be your highest priority.”

“There will undoubtedly be serious fallout,” Roaz warned. “McGarvey is an important man.”

“When his body is found, it will be without his head.”

Roaz saw the plan, and he nodded his approval. “Alvarez will take the initial heat, but because of the increased attention that will be placed on him by the FBI and CIA, as well as our own Seguridad, the cartel families will withdraw their support. It is a very delicate situation. If I were in Thomas’s shoes, I would trade your head for mine.”

“Exactly why you’ll have to kill him as well,” Liu said.

Roaz smiled. “It will be as you wish, General,” he promised. “Perhaps there will be a dramatic shoot-out, in which Thomas is killed. Unfortunately, someone will be needed to take his place.”

“I will put in a good word for you.”

“Thank you.”

Sitting in a modified lotus position on his balcony, Liu tried to calm his mind in order to believe that Roaz would arrange to kill Kirk McGarvey and Thomas Alvarez within a few days, and he would be free to continue without interference.

He could easily conjure up an image of McGarvey’s face in his mind’s eye, and he had the unsettling feeling that this business would spiral out of hand, and it would be him, not Thomas Alvarez, in a final shoot-out with McGarvey.

After a long time, the eastern horizon beginning to glow with the dawn, Liu smiled and opened his eyes, finally at peace. If it was his destiny to destroy the American CIA officer, or be destroyed himself, he would let the energy flow through his spirit and embrace the task with a loving heart.

THIRTY

CHINESE EMBASSY

Liu, dressed in an impeccably tailored Savile Row suit, driving his own metallic gray Range Rover, showed up at the Chinese embassy at his usual time of eight in the morning. He was admitted through the front gate, parked the car in back, and took the elevator to his small office next to the deputy ambassador’s on the fourth floor.

He had no secretary or assistant inside the embassy; he’d always preferred to work alone. Nor was he connected in any way with Colonel Lin Hochin, the station chief for Guoanbu activities here in Mexico, and the seven-man, three-women staff, though Colonel Lin believed that despite their difference in rank, Liu actually worked for him.

The only man he reported directly to in the field was the deputy ambassador, and then only if whatever Liu was involved with had something to do with the relationship between China and the host country. Normally his intelligence product was sent directly to Beijing, where Lieutenant General Xiao Zhang, who headed Special Agency Eight of the Second (Foreign) Bureau, analyzed the material and saw to it that it was distributed only to those men in the government who had a need to know. The agency had been created solely to handle Liu’s product, and Xiao, whose family had been a close friend of the Liu family since before Liu had been born, had naturally been picked to head it. Xiao was the only man on earth that Liu was close to, and even their relationship was troublesome at times. Liu often thought that Uncle Xiao was a meddling old fool, and Xiao still thought of Liu as a dangerous young boy who needed to curb his brash, intemperate ways.

But it was an arrangement that worked well. Fully one third of China’s success at reorganizing and practically reinventing its armed forces could be credited to Liu’s spy networks in New York and Washington, which had connections all the way from the Pentagon out to California’s Silicon Valley and back. The Chinese Space Agency’s manned missions to space owed their spectacular success in part to Liu’s spying on NASA. And in the past eleven years Chinese industry had practically exploded because of its uncanny ability to home in on just the right consumer markets at just the right time, especially in the U.S., where Liu had surround himself with manufacturing and marketing people in the know.

He’d once admitted to his uncle that the real secret of his success was letting the enemy do the spying for him. “They
want
to tell me their secrets,” he’d said. “And sometimes I have to listen even though the information is old and useless to me. When their trousers are down around their ankles they become stupid fools. It’s as simple as that.”

China’s latest target was a lock on the world supply of oil, which had to be engineered in such a way that the U.S. would not know for sure what was being done, or how, until it was too late.

When he’d met with President Hu Jintao several months ago, Liu had suggested that Mexico’s oil fields would make for an interesting exercise. At the very least it would keep the Americans very busy worrying about what China was doing so close to its border. “So busy, Mr. President, that they might not notice what we will do in Venezuela and elsewhere.”

“How will you bring this about?” Hu had asked.

“That, sir, you can leave entirely up to me,” Liu had replied.

“And your uncle,” Hu had added.

Liu had smiled inwardly, his secret triumph sweet. He had found a way to solve his problem while still making it appear as if he were doing his country a great service. “Yes, and Uncle Xiao.”

This early the embassy wasn’t very busy, and getting off the elevator Liu was mildly surprised to see Lee Chingkuo standing in front of the open door to the secured conference room.

“Good morning, General,” the deputy ambassador said warmly. “May we have a few minutes of your time this morning?”

“Of course,” Liu said, a minor alarm bell ringing at the back of his head. Lee was a cautious man who wanted someday to be appointed ambassador to the United States. He felt that he was within eight or ten years of that goal, and he was doing everything within his power not to make a mistake that could embarrass Beijing. He seldom made a move without first clearing it with the ambassador, who himself was a shrewd old man adept at covering his own ass.

The Chinese knew how to play the game very well; they’d been doing it for more than three thousand years.

But Lee was also a man who wanted to know what was going on at all times in
his
embassy. His interference was a nuisance that Liu was usually able to sidestep. No one in the embassy, and not even Uncle Xiao in Beijing, ever knew the full extent of Liu’s spying, and he intended to keep it that way. Some secrets, he’d decided long ago, were simply too important to share.

Liu followed the deputy ambassador into the conference room, where Guoanbu station chief Colonel Lin was seated at the long black lacquered table, several thick file folders stacked neatly in front of him.

“General Liu, congratulations on your tremendous coup,” Lin said, looking up. He was smiling, but only with his mouth, not with his eyes. He had his nose so far up Lee’s ass, Liu had to wonder how the man was able to breathe.

“I’m glad that my work meets with your approval, Colonel,” Liu replied coolly.

“Of course, I don’t like surprises in my shop. You could have warned me.”

“I don’t work in your shop, as you put it,” Liu shot back.

“Gentlemen, please,” Lee said. He was slightly built man with a small voice. He always seemed to be in perfect control of himself, precise. “The general is an independent agent within this embassy, and he enjoys certain freedoms until his efforts come in conflict with our mission.” He smiled tightly. “I think we can have a consensus on at least that.”

“Which efforts are those?” Liu asked, the alarm at the back of his head growing a little louder.

Lee closed the door and flipped a switch on a wall plate that activated the windowless room’s sophisticated antisurveillance equipment. He motioned for Liu to have a seat across from Lin, and he himself took a seat at the head of table.

“The matter at hand, of course, is Congressman Newell’s sudden arrival to insist that he take part in the deal memo we have with our Sinopec oil ministry and that of Mexico’s Pemex.”

“It was something I reported to Beijing more than a month ago,” Liu said. “If the bureau sees fit not to notify you, then that is their decision.”

“Yes, I understand this perfectly,” the deputy ambassador said politely. “And we do understand the nature of your accomplishment and congratulate you.”

“I don’t see a problem.”

Lin tapped a delicate finger on the top file folder. “Can you explain the exact nature of your relationship with Congressman Newell? He says that he was a houseguest of one of our deputy ambassadors. He meant you, of course.”

“The little fiction was necessary—”

“But he’s returning to Washington convinced that you are in fact a spy,” Lee interjected sharply.

“How do you know this?”

“He telephoned me last night and told me that he was displeased. He claimed that he and his Mexican friends have been manipulated and that the oil deal is probably some manner of ruse meant to make him look bad personally and to damage the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.”

Liu managed to laugh. “The man is right, of course.”

“You fool, have you any idea what President Haynes will say to our president the moment Newell returns to Washington with his report?” Lin retorted angrily.

Liu held his temper in check. “The next time you address a superior officer in such a manner, I will personally see to your return to Beijing for a court-martial.”

“None of this bickering is necessary,” Lee said. “But you have managed to put us in a potentially difficult position, which I will have to report to the ambassador, who will undoubtedly ask Beijing for a clarification. As soon as Newell goes public with his suspicions of you, the game will be over here for us.”

“Newell will not go to the president or the FBI or the media with his suspicions.”

“How can you be so sure?” the deputy ambassador asked.

“He’s already made his announcement promising forty-dollar-per-barrel oil, which he hopes will leverage him into running for the presidency. He and Haynes are bitter political enemies, so he won’t go running to the White House with what amounts to unprovable suspicions. Nor will he report to the FBI or the CIA, or especially not to the news media.”

“He telephoned me,” Lee said.

“He may have felt like a fool, and he was, as the Americans say, venting his anger on someone,” Liu said. “But what would he tell the FBI or the media? That he had been a houseguest on numerous occasions with a PRC citizen who’d supplied him with young girls and cocaine?”

Lee paled visibly. “We shall proceed no further.”

“I should imagine not,” Liu agreed. Sometimes, he thought, a little truth was enough to convince the listener of a bigger lie. He got to his feet. “If there is nothing else, I have my Beijing report to attend to.”

The station chief was looking up at him with a tight smirk. “One of these days, General, you will go too far, and despite your connections you will fall. I’d like to be there when it happens.”

Liu nodded. “I shall include your sentiment in my report,” he said, and he walked out of the conference room.

THIRTY-ONE

THE FARM

The CIA’s field operations training facility 140 miles south of Washington sprawled across most of Camp Peary Naval Reservation on the York River. Established in 1952, shortly after the Company was chartered by President Truman, the facility nestled in the heavily wooded rolling Virginia hills had graduated thousands of field officers over its fifty-plus years of history. It was a boot camp where recruits were turned into agents.

The late-afternoon sun was low in the sky over McGarvey’s left shoulder as he jogged along one of the footpaths that paralleled the river. He had driven directly down here yesterday after his meeting at Adkins’s house, and his daughter had set him up in one of the rustic VIP cottages, the one farthest away from the camp’s administration, classroom, and barracks area. As he’d explained to her, he needed to get back into shape by day and do his homework by night with as few distractions as possible. His only regular visitor would be Rencke.

“Do you want to tell me about it, Daddy?” Liz asked just after he’d arrived and been shown to his cabin. “Is it the thing in Mexico?” She was compactly built, with a pretty oval face and wide eyes like her mother’s. This afternoon she wore a T-shirt and blue jeans, but as often as not she dressed in BDUs because she taught hand-to-hand combat in field exercises.

“Something like that,” he’d said, unpacking his hanging bag.

“Does Mother know that you’re back in the States?”

“No.”

Liz was vexed, as she often was with her father when he was in the middle of something and wouldn’t share it with her. She knew that for the most part he’d been a loner all of his career, but she loved him more than any man except for her husband, Todd, and she wanted to know what he was doing. And she was a spy—though for the past couple of years she and her husband had come in from the field to take over running the Farm—which meant she was naturally curious. She had a need to know everything.

“Are you going to call her?”

McGarvey stopped what he was doing and turned to her. “No, I’m not going to call her, because I’m in the middle of this thing and I have no idea where it’s going to take me, or how long I’ll be gone. She tends to worry less when she doesn’t know what I’m doing.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t to you, but you’re married to a field officer who knows the score. Your mother, on the other hand, has been involved, without training, in what I’ve been doing, and it’s damned near gotten her killed four times.”

Liz’s eyes widened a little. “I only know of three—”

McGarvey held up a hand. “Later.”

She wanted to press him, but she nodded after a beat. “What are you going to need?”

“A couple sets of training BDUs and a dining-hall pass, and spread the word that I’m to be left alone.”

“Will you need to use the confidence course or situation ranges?”

“Not this time, but I’ll probably need the indoor pistol range.”

“How long do you think you’ll be here?”

“I don’t know,” McGarvey told her. “Probably just a few days. Depends on what Otto can dig up for me.”