Dance with the Dragon (21 page)

She nodded. “Do you want some company?” she asked hopefully. “You could join Todd and me for dinner.”

McGarvey had shaken his head. “Not tonight, sweetheart,” he’d told her.

That had been earlier this afternoon, and since then she’d let him alone, nor had anyone from the nine thousand plus acres questioned him about his presence here.

The assassination of a CIA officer in the field was rare but nothing new, of course. When it happened a special investigating team would be sent to help the chief of station, but only if the COS requested help. Most of the assassinations had occurred in terrorist countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan, or in war zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Those kinds of affairs were understandable in the context of the war against America that had been raging for decades, especially ever since the U.S. proved that it was vulnerable in Vietnam.

But the killing and beheading of Updegraf in Mexico made almost no sense unless it could be proven that he’d gotten his hands dirty in the drug trade, and something had gone wrong. But everything Rencke had come up with so far, and almost everything he’d learned from Gil Perry and Gloria, pointed to a man who was a zealous but loyal field officer.

Only Shahrzad’s story was different. If she could be believed, Louis Updegraf was more than a zealot; he was a man bent on some mission that involved a high-ranking Chinese intelligence officer, and possibly some of the shadowy figures General Liu had surrounded himself with. He had kept his true purpose from Shahrzad and from Perry his boss, and apparently had kept no encounter sheets or any other sort of a file or daybook or computer record of his mission. He had confided in no one.

That in itself was not terribly unusual. There had been plenty of rogue agents in the CIA who’d preferred to work on their own. McGarvey was one of them.

But it was the
where
and the
when
of Updegraf’s assassination that were so worrisome, and that had moved Adkins to send for McGarvey. Mexico was directly on our border and therefore of vital interest to the U.S. A highly dangerous Chinese intelligence officer had been spotted in Mexico City. Rencke’s search programs were coming up lavender. And shortly after his death, it had been alleged not only that Updegraf had been seen in Liu’s company, right along with a drug cartel moneyman, a U.S. congressman, and a shadowy figure who was probably a Middle Easterner and possibly even an Iranian, but that he had been dirty: a double agent working for the PRC.

It was only one possible explanation for what Updegraf had been doing down there, but at this point it was a compelling one.

So in McGarvey’s mind it came down to finding out what General Liu was doing in Mexico, and what skill or knowledge Updegraf possessed that the Chinese wanted that led finally to his assassination.

In order to do that he first needed to go back to the source—General Liu. But before he did that he needed to find out everything he could about the general’s background and record, as well as the backgrounds, records, and personalities of as many people as possible who’d had dealings with the man.

The path angled away from the river and started up a slope that McGarvey took with an easy stride. He’d been retired for a year now, but he hadn’t let himself go. He still had his wind and his muscle tone, assets he had a feeling he was going to need very soon.

Otto Rencke was just pulling up in his battered old gray Mercedes diesel when McGarvey topped the rise and headed through the woods to his cabin.

The Company’s director of special operations, bedraggled as usual, his long frizzy hair flying everywhere, making him look like a redheaded Einstein, got out of his car and opened the trunk. He looked up when McGarvey came out of the woods and onto the road.

“Hiya, Mac,” Rencke greeted his friend. But there was little enthusiasm in his voice.

The trunk was filled with plastic boxes of files marked “
FORT A. P. HILL
,
ARCHIVES
.” The CIA stored its paper records dating back to even before the beginning of the Cold War in an underground bunker at the military reservation about eighty miles north of the Farm. With the Freedom of Information Act, many of the files had been opened to scholars and historians, but that openness had all but ended after 9/11. Gaining access to the entire collection was not easy these days, not even for a CIA officer of Rencke’s position, except over the signature of a deputy director or higher.

“Did you run into any trouble?” McGarvey asked.

Rencke shook his head. “Nah. They know me too well.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“I don’t like lying to friends.”

“Katy?”

“Yeah, she called last night, and again this morning. Insisted that I knew where you were and she wanted me to tell her.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t get it, Mac. Why not call her? She’s worried, you know.”

McGarvey stared at the boxes of files in the trunk. Something bad was coming. All of his instincts were humming like high-tension wires. And he knew that if he talked to his wife she’d sense that something was wrong, and want to come to him, or at least know where he was.

But there was no danger here, nothing to be worried about. He kept telling himself that; yet he had developed a strong look-over-your-shoulder feeling that someone was gaining on him. And each time he’d gotten that feeling, the people around him had gotten into some deep trouble. More than one of his bosses in the Air Force and the CIA had come to the conclusion that being around McGarvey when he was in the field was a dangerous place to be. People were going to get killed, and sometimes it was the good ones who got hit.

Not a day went by that he didn’t thank the stars that his daughter had gotten out of the field. And he would do everything in his power to keep her there, and to keep Katy out of harm’s way, even if it meant lying and completely distancing himself from them until he was finished.

He looked back at Rencke and shook his head. “Not yet,” he said quietly. “Now, help me get this stuff inside. How long do I have?”

“It’s gotta be back first thing in the morning.”

“Maybe you’d better stay the night.”

“That’s what I thought. I brought a laptop—I thought I could do a little more snooping inside the FBI’s mainframe.”

“Louise going to be okay?”

“I told her I’d be with you,” Rencke said.

“What does she know about this?” McGarvey asked.

“Everything,” Rencke admitted. “I can’t lie to her.”

“I know what you mean,” McGarvey replied.

THIRTY-TWO

THE FARM

It was a few minutes before dawn when McGarvey stepped outside and did a few stretching exercises to ease the cramp in his back from sitting at the dining-room table all night and reading the files that Rencke had brought down. He’d always liked this time of day; the air was sweeter and very few people were up and about. It gave him time to think in peace.

Last night he and Rencke had driven down to the dining hall to get something to eat. It was well after the normal dinner hour, so there were only a few stragglers, none of whom paid them the slightest attention, and after a quick bite they’d come back to the cabin—McGarvey to begin his reading, and Rencke to hack into the computers not only of the FBI, but of the law enforcement systems of half a dozen places where Liu had set up shop, including Paris and London as well as New York and Washington.

McGarvey had also asked Rencke to see what else he could dig up about Shahrzad and her father, especially anything out of the old KGB files about their relationship with Baranov fifteen years ago.

The first thing that became clear to McGarvey was Liu’s position in Beijing. Despite the FBI’s suspicions since his posting to the UN in New York that he had raped and killed at least one young woman, possibly more, the Chinese government had apparently dismissed the charges out of hand. Because of the general’s family he was a favorite son, totally outside any normal channel of Chinese justice.

It wasn’t just that, though. The CIA believed that Liu was probably a first-rate intelligence officer, possibly the best in the Guoanbu, and very likely the equal of the legendary Russian, Valentin Baranov, whom McGarvey had killed in what was then East Berlin. Like Baranov, Liu was always very transparent, or at least it seemed that way. He was a party boy who had inherited a small fortune from his parents, and starting in New York had begun to plow through it. He lived in very large, very expensive apartments or houses. He dressed in the best clothing—usually suits and shoes tailored in London—he drove expensive cars, drank the finest wines, had accounts at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and whenever the need arose he seemed to have a Gulfstream or Lear bizjet at his disposal.

One CIA analyst, a Tommy Doyle–trained man, was tracking down the whiff of a rumor that a special agency within the Guoanbu had been set up for the sole purpose of dealing with Liu’s product. If that was the case, it would mean that Liu was an even more important figure in the intelligence apparatus than anyone in the West had suspected. If true it would also mean that the intel Liu had provided was over the moon.

But almost all of that was purely speculation, based mostly on a lot of circumstantial evidence. Neither the FBI nor the CIA nor the Law Enforcement and intelligence organizations of the countries where Liu had worked had ever come up with a shred of proof. And although no one, including the U.S., wanted to see him come back, Liu was too important a Chinese citizen to deny entry.

Like Baranov, Liu operated mostly outside of the apparatus wherever he was stationed. He set up shop in lavish digs and created a social scene of his own that in New York, Washington, and Mexico City had taken only a few months to become
the
place to be.

And, like Baranov, Liu apparently stayed behind the scenes, for the most part, in order to allow the mix of people he surrounded himself with to interact among themselves.

It was actually a nifty bit of human chemistry that Liu was practicing. Almost from the start of McGarvey’s reading he came to realize that Liu was probably not involved in the drug trade, at least not if his inherited fortune was still intact. But he’d pulled Thomas Alvarez into the mix to act as a catalyst. The drug cartel banker, with his finger on a cash flow estimated to be in the billions per year, had to attract a certain amount of fascination, especially among the power hitters in Mexico’s government and military establishment. Yet just being near Alvarez placed them at risk. They were like moths to a flame, with Liu waiting in the wings to snag them with his net and killing jar.

McGarvey had also learned from his first night of reading that Liu would have no fear of bringing cops or intelligence offices into his inner circle. The general evidently thought of himself as bulletproof. The worst that could ever happen to him was to be declared persona non grata, which to his mind was a remote possibility. The FBI in New York and again in Washington had some pretty fair evidence that Liu had been involved in murder and rape, enough evidence to bring to the Department of State, which in turn had delicately brought it to the attention of a deputy minister of the interior in Beijing. The first time Liu had been recalled home from New York, but had shown up a few months later in Washington. The second time he had returned to Beijing on his own, and had popped up just recently in Mexico City.

Liu was not only brilliant, but also well connected, and apparently fearless.

In New York he’d probably set up spy rings to watch the other delegates, but he’d also surrounded himself with a lot of the upper-level managers and engineers who’d set up offices in New York to attract foreign business by working with the various UN delegations. As a Chinese millionaire who had the reputation as a deal maker, Liu had been like a magnet to the very people whose secrets he wanted to steal. The high-tech guys wanted to do business with China, and they were willing to do or say just about anything to get connected.

In Washington he’d done the same thing, working out of a big four-story brownstone in Georgetown, this time attracting a lot of middle-level managers from the Pentagon who salivated at the possibility of getting the inside story of China’s reorganization and modernization of its military. A lot of aerospace reps had been regular fixtures at his almost nightly soirees, hoping to tap into the vast Chinese market. And many of them didn’t go away empty-handed. From time to time Liu had apparently been authorized to leak a few of China’s secrets in order to seed the pot. Put a little on the table in order to suck in a much larger return.

The general’s failing, however, was his apparent penchant for young women, whom he used not only as bait at his parties, but for his own purposes.

One Directorate of Intelligence psychological analyst, using material supplied by the FBI in New York and Washington—all of it admittedly hearsay evidence—suggested that Liu might have a deep-seated need to dominate women by first drawing them into his circle and then humiliating them, perhaps even raping and killing them in the end. It could be that he was impotent and was lashing out, or it could be something out of his childhood, possibly involving his mother, or some other close female relative. He may have been psychologically scarred as a young boy, and now as a man he was acting out his aggressive fantasies.

At least that much of what Shahrzad had told them had the ring of truth to it, though Updegraf could have read the same DI report and shared it with her.

When it came to her, however, there was almost nothing in the CIA’s archives or what Rencke had been able to find in the mainframe of the Sûreté in Paris, except that her mother and other family members had immigrated to France, where they owned a vineyard and château in Bordeaux and were wealthy, highly respected citizens.

Which raised the question why she had tried to earn money in Mexico as a dancer, a spy, and a whore. It made no sense unless there were unresolved issues between the young woman and her mother, or perhaps her actions were some sort of a legacy that her father had left behind for her.