Dance with the Dragon (36 page)

Reason was an unknown factor. Courts of law meant nothing. Codes of conduct were a joke.

Since 9/11 a terrible passion had gripped the world. It was like road rage only more widespread and certainly deadlier. No place was safe. No country, including China, was without its own brand of terrorist who was mad at the world.

In the morning he would go over to the White House to brief the president, but standing at the window in his office looking down toward the Potomac, Adkins had no idea what he would say except to report the bare facts and speculations. He had no idea what to recommend. He didn’t even know what the president might want to hear. Nor did he hold much hope for the director of National Intelligence, whose job, it seemed, had devolved almost from the beginning into a purely political entity whose only function was to
study and collate.

The only solid thing that he could give to the president, he decided, was a warning that something terrible was coming their way, this time apparently from a different direction than 9/11. As certain as the sun rose and set the U.S. would be hit again unless McGarvey could stop it.

PART

THREE

The next day

SIXTY-ONE

MEXICO CITY

It was still a few hours before dawn when the CIA’s Gulfstream IV touched down at Benito Juárez Airport and taxied over to the VIP terminal.

McGarvey had managed to get a few hours’ sleep in the six-hour flight from Andrews, but he’d dreamed about Gloria and about what this assignment would probably do to her. She had her own agenda, one that he hadn’t gotten a handle on yet. It was possible that she was working Liu in the same way Updegraf had. And it was possible that she had become freelance, offering her services to the highest bidder.

It sometimes happened that the burned-out field officer went looking for enough money to pay his or her way out: the “big score” Updegraf had told Shahrzad about.

He didn’t know where Gloria fit, but he would find out in the next few days, and he knew it wouldn’t be pleasant. She was in love with him; that was a certainty. And he was going to use it against her, whether she was innocent of being a double or not.

McGarvey gathered his hanging bag as the male attendant opened the hatch and lowered the stairs. A lone Mexican official in a dark uniform came out of the terminal and walked across to the jet. He looked half asleep.

Once they had entered Mexican airspace up around Tampico the pilot had announced their intention to fly directly to Mexico City with a U.S. diplomat aboard. No special services were required other than an early morning customs and passport check. The aircraft would require refueling, and would depart for Miami immediately.

The door to the cockpit was open when McGarvey went forward. The attendant stepped aside, and the pilot and copilot looked up.

“Good flight. Thanks, guys,” he said.

“Glad to be of service, Mr. Director,” the pilot said.

“You sure you got all your things?” the attendant asked.

“Yes, thanks.”

Outside, McGarvey handed his diplomatic passport to the official, who flipped it open, glanced at the data, then looked up to compare the photo with McGarvey’s face.

“Do you wish me to stamp your passport, señor?”

“It’s not necessary,” McGarvey said.

“Welcome to Mexico. Your rental car is waiting in front.”

The kerojet truck was just pulling up to the Gulfstream when McGarvey went through the deserted terminal. A light gray Volkswagen Jetta was parked just outside. A bored cop sitting behind a glass booth looked up when McGarvey tossed his bag in the backseat, then looked away.

The fact that an American diplomat had arrived in the middle of the night with no one to meet him raised no eyebrows. But this was Mexico. Almost no one would have taken notice if he had flown in from Colombia, or from Mars. In many respects Mexico was a perfect place for a man such as Liu. Almost anything was possible here for the right amount of money.

Traffic on Boulevard Puerto into the city was almost nonexistent, and in less than forty minutes he was downtown, where he parked on a side street a couple of blocks from the Hotel Catedral on Donceles, then went back on foot.

The city center was normally a busy, dangerous place to be after dark. But this time of the morning was too late for the pickpockets and thieves. In an hour the first deliverymen would begin their rounds, but for the moment it seemed as if the D.F. were holding its collective breath. It was a city asleep.

The night clerk at the old but still respectable hotel, which very few Americans and certainly no businessmen or diplomats ever used, came out to the front desk when McGarvey rang and checked him in, under another work name.

“Do you wish for the services of a bellman, señor?” the young, pimply-faced kid asked, handing over the old-fashioned room key.

“No,” McGarvey said.

“Do you wish for a wake-up call?”

“No.”

“Welcome to Mexico, señor,” the clerk said, still half asleep, and he disappeared into the night office before McGarvey got halfway across the marble lobby to the elevators.

Upstairs in his fifth-floor room facing the spires of the Catedral Metropolitana, McGarvey stopped a moment to look out. He had a sense that rough beasts were slinking around in the dark, and that whatever solutions he found, the answers would be anything but simple, anything but easy.

He broke the diplomatic seal on his hanging bag, finished unpacking, and retrieved his pistol, holster, and spare magazine of ammunition. He dressed in jeans, low-topped sneakers, a short-sleeved pullover, and a dark nylon windbreaker against the morning chill. Mexico City could be blazingly hot during the day, while at night it often cooled down to near freezing.

Downstairs he crossed the empty lobby and walked back the couple of blocks to where he’d parked his car. It had not been disturbed yet, but he would have to find a secure parking place before it got dark again. At the very least thieves would strip the wheels, smash the windows, and steal anything inside.

He drove the few blocks over to the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma, the streets just starting to come alive with the first trucks and vans, but cruised past the front entrance without stopping. If Perry had put the embassy on emergency footing because of Updegraf’s assassination, no outward signs of it were visible from the street; no heightened security measures such as a sandbagged entry, no guards on the roof.

Next he went out to the Chinese embassy in Colonia Tizapan San Angel and cruised slowly past its front entrance. He had no real idea what he was looking for, but if he’d expected that the Chinese had done more than the Americans to prepare for the coming troubles, he was disappointed. So far as he could see it was business as usual.

A storm was gathering, and there were people in both places who knew it, yet the castle gates had not been closed nor had the moat been flooded.

Finally, he drove over to Colonia Lomas Altas, past the Iranian embassy, also quiet this morning, and up the hill to Gloria’s apartment complex, where he parked next to her Mini Cooper.

He sat thinking about the other times and places he’d holed up waiting for dawn to come, and for the battle to begin. Most of the time he’d gone into the field alone, no one to help or hinder him. He’d always preferred it that way.

But now he was going to have to juggle a dancer and a spy against a consummate, dangerous player in the new world order.

Just as the eastern sky was beginning to lighten, McGarvey got out of the car and headed down the path to the park bench that over looked the city, deciding once and for all that there would be no more nightmares and regrets.

Since last year, when he’d put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s brain, a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. He’d finally begun to accept himself for who and what he was. In that he was a step behind Katy and a couple of steps behind his daughter, but now that he had made the transition he was ready to go to work with a clear conscience.

The legendary spymaster Lawrence Danielle, his mentor in the early days, had once told him that he was a kid with the fire in his belly.

“So long as it doesn’t end up consuming you in flames, you’ll make one hell of an opponent for the other side.”

Danielle’s battle had been with the OSS against the Germans during the war, and then with the newly formed CIA against the Soviets at the start of the Cold War.

He had died in his bed years ago, but he would easily have recognized the new war for exactly what it was: a conflict with an order of fanatics bent on nothing less than the destruction of modern civilization. Such a thing could never happen, short of the result of a global thermonuclear war, but that wouldn’t stop the jihadists, who had to be destroyed. It was this that Danielle would have understood with a clarity that seemed to have gone missing just about everywhere.

“You came back,” Gloria said from over his shoulder.

McGarvey looked up. Gloria, dressed in a track suit, a towel around her neck, her hair plastered with sweat to her forehead and the sides of her neck, was grinning. “You’re out early,” he said.

“Have to keep in shape,” she replied. “Is it time now?”

McGarvey nodded. “But it’s going to be tougher than I first thought. Especially for you.”

She had been moving from foot to foot, keeping warm so that she wouldn’t stiffen up in the morning chill, but she stopped, the smile fading from her lips. “You’ve come to tell me something.”

“It’s about your father.”

“What about him?”

“He’s dead. He was shot to death yesterday in his apartment.”

Gloria held McGarvey’s eyes for a long beat, but then turned away and looked down toward the city.
“¡Hijo de puta!”
she said half under her breath. “It’s the DGI. They were going to get him sooner or later.” She turned back. “The old fool wouldn’t take care of himself.”

“I think it was Liu,” McGarvey said.

She didn’t believe it. She shook her head. “But why? It makes no sense, unless he somehow knows that I’m working with you again.”

“I went to Miami to see your father. That night after I left he was hit.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What did you want from him?”

“I wanted to know how the DGI got to your husband. Somebody probably fingered you. I thought he might have had contacts down there who might have known something.”

She shook her head again. “It was a coincidence, your being there.”

“A few days ago I talked to a woman in New York, one of Liu’s girlfriends from when he worked out of the UN. Within a couple of hours after I left her apartment she was murdered.”

Gloria’s eyes were filling, but she was angry. “Why didn’t you warn him?”

“I warned his bodyguards.”

She looked away again, trying to assimilate what she was being told. “It still doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If Liu wants to stop you, why go after the people you talk to? Why not you?”

“He’s tried twice, three times if you count the night I went out to his compound.”

A wan smile returned to the corners of her mouth. “My father always knew that he would never make it back to Cuba. He knew that he’d be hit either in Washington or most likely in Little Havana. But he never really took any precautions.”

“We think that one of his security people might have been in on it. Otto’s checking it out.”

She straightened her shoulders. “Now we know Liu figures you’re too tough to screw with, at least directly, so he’s going after the people you get close to. I’m next.”

“Something like that.”

“Okay,” she said. “How do we start?”

SIXTY-TWO

THE WHITE HOUSE

At nine in the morning Adkins was chauffeured over to the White House, where Dennis Berndt met him at the corridor into the West Wing.

“What news of McGarvey?” the president’s national security adviser asked.

“He’s back in the field,” Adkins said. “He came out to Langley last night and we talked. He brought me up to date, and I don’t think the president is going to like what I’m going to have to tell him.”

“From the look on your face, I don’t expect he will.”

They went down to the Oval Office, where President Haynes, already in shirtsleeves, was just ending a phone call. He hung up and waved them in. “Good morning, Dick.”

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “I’ll take only a few minutes of your time this morning.”

“This is about McGarvey and the business in Mexico, I presume.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The situation may be changing,” the president said. He motioned for Berndt to close the door and for him and Adkins to have a seat. “I’m going to Beijing in two weeks to discuss a number of trade issues, among them this business about Mexican oil, which I think is nothing more than a damn fool stunt that Walt Newell got himself mixed up with. But Hu is bound to bring up the arms-for-Taiwan deal that’s on the table, and that could cause us serious trouble down the road.”

Selling antimissile defense systems to Taiwan was nothing new, except that China had been rattling its sabers with increasing frequency and intensity over the past six to eight months: missile drills on the mainland, naval maneuvers in the strait, and mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

“I understand, Mr. President,” Adkins said. “But the problem in Mexico will not disappear on its own.”

“We can’t afford to jeopardize our trade relations with China. Not now. Possibly not for another ten years, until South America is brought online.”

One of President Haynes’s goals was to provide enough aid and direction to countries like Brazil and Chile, where labor was much cheaper than in the U.S., so that manufacturing jobs lost to China could be brought back to the Western Hemisphere. It was a long-range goal that had bipartisan support, although no one had a clear-cut vision of how such a thing could be accomplished.

“Yes, sir,” Adkins said.

Haynes glanced at Berndt, then nodded. “You understand the situation we’re faced with, so tell me what’s happening in Mexico. Have we identified Updegraf’s assassins?”