Dance with the Dragon (27 page)

“You had to realize by then that Liu was a spy for the Chinese.”

“You still don’t get it,” Monique flared. “I wasn’t a real human being by then. I’d played with fire and got my fingers burned. Nothing I could do would have turned the clock back. I wouldn’t have cared if he was an alien from Mars.”

“How’d you get Schilling to get high with you? He was supposed to be a trained CIA officer,” McGarvey asked. It was another stupid question, but it seemed to be the day for them. Spies were very often notoriously unstable people.

“We had sex first. Probably took all of ninety seconds, and when I took out my stash he was right there snorting a couple of lines with me. Said he’d never tried coke before. He was like a kid with candy. He couldn’t get enough, but for a few hours before he got stupid and went to sleep the sex was pretty spectacular. He had lots of stamina, and he was willing to do anything for me that I asked.”

“What time did Liu show up?”

“I don’t know,” Monique replied. “It was still dark out. Maybe four thirty or five. But it was funny because Liu was out in the corridor telling us to shut up or we’d have to leave the hotel, while poor Joseph was so out of it he wasn’t even snoring.

“Anyway, I opened the door for Liu before I got dressed. But he only had eyes for Joseph, spread out on the bed. ‘You did a good job here,’ he told me. He was all excited, like my brother was when he went hunting with my father and shot his first pheasant.”

“Did you stick around to see how Liu was going to handle Schilling?” McGarvey asked.

Monique lowered her eyes. She wasn’t as animated as she had been. “It had been fun to that point, but with Joseph lying there naked and vulnerable because of what I had done to him, I didn’t want to see what came next, I put on my clothes and got out of there as fast as I could.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Back to Liu’s apartment,” she said, looking up. “Where the hell do you think I would have gone?”

FORTY-ONE

THE APARTMENT

“Under Liu’s direction you burned an American CIA officer, thus putting him into the hands of Chinese intelligence,” McGarvey said, and when she started to object he held her off. “By then it wasn’t your fault; you’d been conditioned by drugs and emotions to do whatever you were told to do. I understand that much.”

“Thank you,” Monique replied.

“But at the beginning you knew what you were doing. You had a husband, yet you let yourself be seduced by the bastard. It was the big leagues, money, power, connections, and you loved it all.”

She nodded.

“Even if you’d known or suspected how it was going to turn out, you still would have gone along with him.”

“
Non
. What do you take me for?”

“You’ve already established what you were, what you are.” McGarvey gave her a hard look, even though he felt genuinely sorry for her. She’d been a young woman flattered by the attentions of an older, powerful, handsome man. It had been as easy for Liu to seduce her as it had been for her to seduce Schilling. They’d both been johns ready for the plucking.

Monique’s eyes welled up.

“Save it for later,” McGarvey said harshly. “I want to know the rest of it. What happened to Schilling, and what finally happened after Liu was finished with you, because surely after that night he no longer had need of your services.”

Monique wanted to be angry, but she didn’t have the emotional strength for it. “The hotel room had been bugged, of course, microphones and video cameras. Everything that happened from the moment I checked in on Thursday until a couple of Liu’s people showed up and got Joseph out of there was recorded.”

“Was he dead?”

“No. Liu spent a few hours in the hotel room with him, but it was never physical, just a hypo of something, probably heroin, and a little chat about the realities of life.”

“Did he ask Schilling to spy for him?”

“Nothing like that,” Monique said, her voice monotone. “He just told Joseph how they were going to be friends in the years to come. ‘I’ve watched your career since the Farm, and I’ll keep in touch with you. Someday we’ll be able to team up, work together for our mutual benefit. But in the meantime we won’t be seeing much of each other. You met a young woman, had some wild sex—if you want to admit that to your friends in Langley—but it was nothing more than a one-night stand.’

“Joseph wasn’t so out of it that he couldn’t realize what a terrible jam he’d gotten himself into. He tried to bluff his way out of it. Said that Liu was finished in the U.S. He was going to shut down the entire Chinese operation. By the time he got done, Liu would be working for the CIA. But when he saw the tapes he knew he’d lost. It wasn’t the sex, it was the drugs.”

“When did you see the tapes?”

“A few days later. And I was okay right up until the point that Joseph broke down and cried,” Monique said. She shook her head in wonderment. “Liu had reduced a grown man to tears. It was an amazing, sad thing to see, and I couldn’t understand it. ‘The boy is ambitious,’ Liu told me. ‘He wants to go places, do big things, make great coups of intelligence gathering. And I will help him along the way.’”

“How’d it make you feel?”

She looked away. “I didn’t care anymore. About anything. That whole year had burned everything out of me. That night Liu came to my bedroom and said that it was finally time for us to make love. He promised that it would be special. Something I’d never experienced before.”

McGarvey thought that she looked like a woman at the end of her emotional life, that at any moment she was going to get up out of her chair, find a tall building, and leap to her death. Then again, maybe she’d already done that years ago, and she just didn’t know that she’d been dead all along.

“I didn’t care that he had the smallest, softest dick I’d ever seen. I would have laughed, but it didn’t matter.”

It was the same story Shahrzad had told at the Longboat Key house.

“But then he nearly killed me, and that did matter,” Monique said, and she looked back at McGarvey. “What got him excited was strangulation. He even had me convinced that the only good sex was an orgasm at the point of unconsciousness. And I just lay there like an idiot with a death wish, letting him put his hands around my neck, cutting off my air until I was seeing spots and I tried to fight back. He got his erection and he fucked me, or at least I think he did, because I was mostly out of it.”

The FBI reported that the young women found dead in New York and in Washington that Liu may have been involved with had been murdered that way.

“The next morning I packed an overnight bag, got my passport from Liu’s desk, and, using the credit card he’d given me, bought an airline ticket to Paris. He didn’t say a word, no one tried to stop me, and by Sunday afternoon I was in Lyon with my sister, who put me in a rehab clinic the same day.”

Monique and Shahrzad had been damaged, probably beyond repair, by Liu, yet they were the lucky ones. “Why’d you come back to New York?”

“I like the States. Life is too restrictive in France, or just about anywhere else in Europe. Anyway, I made sure that Liu no longer worked at the UN, and I figured I had something to prove to myself. So I came back and got my old job translating.”

“What happened?”

“At first it was good. About six months after I started back to work I met a man—he was one of the supervisors—and we moved in together. But he liked to smoke a little grass before we made love, and once I went along with him I was back to the races.”

She absently tugged at a strand of hair above her left ear, her eyes vacant, staring backward in time; this set of memories was obviously just as painful as all the rest.

“I lived in a fog for a couple of years, spending everything I earned on drugs, and by then it wasn’t the good shit. I was taking some raw stuff. It was a wonder I survived. I finally got fired, of course, and Jim Allison, my boss, finally had enough, so he sent me back to my sister in Lyon. But she’d had enough of me, too, so I was on my own at the rehab center.”

“You got clean again and came back to New York,” McGarvey said. “I’d have thought that by then you would have learned your lesson. This place is not very safe for you.”

“I’m a stubborn woman,” Monique admitted with a wan smile. “Always have been. I had to prove something to myself, so I came back again. This time of course I couldn’t get my old job back, so I made my rounds of the publishers, finally getting a job translating a book from the French. Then there were a couple of Chinese books, though most of them are translated into English before they ever leave China. They have more control over the content that way.”

“And you’ve been clean ever since?” McGarvey asked.

She nodded. “So far so good,” she replied dreamily. But then she focused on McGarvey sitting across from her. “Is that what you came here to find out?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” McGarvey said. “Will you allow me to leave you some money?”

She shook her head. “Just kill him,” she said with sudden emotion. “As soon as you can. Put a bullet in his brain, like you did bin Laden.”

Something lurched inside McGarvey’s chest. He’d been on a freelance operation for the CIA last year, which had ended in tracking Osama bin Laden to a hideout in Karachi, where he’d put a bullet in the man’s head. The mission had been kept top secret for fear of the blowback from Muslims across the world. Within a week a bin Laden double had sent a tape to the al-Jazeera, network, and the war against terror had continued without missing a beat.

“I don’t know where you came up with something like that,” he said.

“I don’t work at the UN, but I still have friends who hear stuff,” she said. “Diplomats never seem to notice their translators. We’re like ghosts, and there’s almost nothing a translator loves more than to share gossip.”

It was a new wrinkle that McGarvey, and he suspected everyone else down at Langley, had never considered. “Whatever you think you know, I’d suggest you keep it to yourself.”

She shrugged. “Kill him soon.”

FORTY-TWO

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS

It was just about closing time for the public as McGarvey watched the replica of Foucault’s pendulum ponderously swinging on its heavy weight, the tip scribing a series of lines in a circular pit of sand on the floor.

The device proved that the earth was turning on its axis, and here in the General Assembly Building it seemed an appropriate symbol because the UN, rightly or wrongly, had its missions and troops on just about every continent on the planet.

He hadn’t known what he’d expected to learn by coming over here directly from Monique’s apartment, except that he wanted to get a feel for the place where Liu had ensnared her as he had so many others. He suspected that Liu hadn’t set out to kill any of his women; the deaths had been accidents during his rough brand of sex. Liu was confident enough to believe that none of them would go to the authorities to accuse him of being a spy for the Chinese. By the time they figured out that much, they themselves were in so deeply that no one would believe their stories. McGarvey hadn’t completely believed Shahrzad until this afternoon listening to Monique’s tale.

The pendulum was suspended from the soaring ceiling on about fifty feet of thin wire. Once it was set in motion the weight would continue to swing back and forth for a very long time.

Shahrzad had been tethered to Liu by her professed love for Updegraf, so she’d swung from one side to the other in a short time. Monique, on the other hand, had fallen in love with Liu, so her tether had been very long. It had taken her all of ten years to get to the point where she could talk about Liu.

The next step would be to find a new pendulum with enough weight to break the tether altogether. And it was this step that bothered McGarvey the most. People who tried to play in the general’s league ended up dead or damaged beyond repair.

Loudspeakers announced that it was ten minutes until closing time as McGarvey walked back across the public lobby and outside. A small crowd of people had gathered in front of the gate, some of them holding signs protesting the latest round of sanctions against Iran, but they weren’t being noisy, and the few cops on duty seemed bored as they leaned against their patrol cars. Almost every day some group demonstrated outside the UN; most of the time the crowds were small and peaceful, like this afternoon’s, because people no longer seemed to care. In the past few years the UN had become a joke, and it had lost most of its effectiveness.

McGarvey made his way around the crowd, then crossed the street at Forty-second and walked the couple of blocks back up to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where he’d stayed the previous night. It had been an odd bit of coincidence that Monique had come here to burn Schilling. Yet the hotel was near the UN, so it had been a convenient place to hold the party.

The soaring atrium lobby was busy with late arrivals, the cocktail lounge filled with the after-work crowd, but McGarvey found a spot at the far end of the bar. He ordered a Martell cognac neat and glanced over his shoulder, a tickling at the back of his neck.

He’d never trusted coincidences, but there’d been no reason for Monique to name the Grand Hyatt as the hotel where’d she’d burned Schilling, even if she’d been informed that McGarvey was registered there and would be paying her a visit.

That line of reasoning made no sense, yet her knowing that he’d assassinated bin Laden last year made no sense either.

He let his gaze drift across the lobby, looking for the one face that didn’t belong, the odd man, neither checking in nor checking out, neither coming nor going. The one figure who shouldn’t be there. After the incident yesterday north of the Farm he’d been having the feeling that someone was coming up behind him. But if anyone was here looking down his trail, McGarvey couldn’t pick him out.

He paid for his drink and took it down to the next lower level, where he sat in an easy chair at a coffee table. He’d left his pistol up in his room, knowing that he was going over to the UN and wanting to avoid the security issue, but he felt naked without it now.