Dance with the Dragon (47 page)

He cut a thin line, came over to the bed, and held it for her. “Take another hit,” he told her. “I want to watch.”

She held one nostril closed as she took the line through the straw. She looked up into his eyes as she handed him the compact, and then the drug hit her. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said softly. The room was in soft focus, but orange and green and yellow sheets of light shimmered on the ceiling and in the air like the southern lights she’d seen once in Chile.

“Kill her,” Liu said.

Gloria couldn’t help but smile. “No shit?”

“She’s an Iranian intelligence officer sent here to spy on me.”

“Why?”

“They don’t trust me,” Liu said. “Kill her and we’ll make love.”

Gloria turned and looked at Shahrzad, who was mumbling something incoherent, her eyes dilated. Liu’s seductive words came from a long distance, yet his voice seemed to be coming from inside her head. She could think only of Kirk, his strong arms holding her, whispering in her ear what to do.

“Kill her,” Liu whispered sweetly.

Gloria pulled Shahrzad’s nearly inert form to a sitting position and without hesitation clamped her left arm around the girl’s neck and with her other pulled the girl’s head sharply to the right, the neck bones breaking with an audible pop, the spinal column instantly severed.

Shahrzad’s body went limp and the light went out of her eyes. Gloria shoved her aside, then lay down on her back, her legs spread.

Liu cut a big line of doctored coke from the compact and took the hit in his left nostril. He set the compact aside, then got undressed and joined her on the bed.

“This is how I like it,” he said, putting his powerful hands around her neck and squeezing. “It’s the only way I like it.”

Almost immediately Gloria began to see spots, and she tried to pull his hands away, but he was too strong. Somehow he was immune to the doctored coke, and she thought that it was such a stupid way to die, but there was nothing she could do about it; his body held her down, and his grip was unbreakable.

“Kirk.” The word exploded in her brain like a billion stars, and she began to black out.

EIGHTY-THREE

ZONA ROSA

Before Mexico City Gil Perry figured that his career and life had only one direction in which to go: straight to the top. He was well connected in the Building; his last three duty stations, in Madrid, Caracas, and Bogotá, had gone well; and even his short stint in Baghdad had earned him high marks.

Station Mexico City was his reward for a lot of years of dedication, hard work, and especially loyalty.

Standing naked in front of the eighth-story window of the luxury tourist Hotel Four Seasons, a 9 mm Beretta autoloader in his right hand, he was saddened by what he knew his co-workers would say about him. But then, the blame wasn’t theirs; it was entirely his.

It had started to go bad within his first year down here, when he began to realize that the lifestyle he had carved out for himself and his wife was costing more than he was making.

They’d tightened their belts in an effort to economize, but the heavy social scene was a part of his cover. He’d picked it, so he had to pay for it. No slush fund existed for these sorts of expenses, though for a brief period he managed to siphon off some off his discretionary funds, money used to pay informers. But when he couldn’t report any decent product for the money he was spending he had to stop the fraud.

Standing now looking down at the sparse early morning traffic on the Paseo de la Reforma, he could trace the exact steps that he’d taken to bring him here to this hotel.

He’d met General Liu at a cocktail party held for the new Chinese ambassador to Mexico at their embassy. Something had bothered Perry from the moment he’d laid eyes on the man, but it had taken him several weeks of digging through old CIA files to find that Liu had a history not only with Company, but with the FBI, which suspected him of rape and murder.

In two days he had a friend at the Bureau send him a hard copy of the FBI’s files, and his problem had been solved. He would blackmail Liu for some serious money. If the general refused, Perry planned on burning him. His stock within the CIA would rise, and he could claim a decent amount of money in expenses for what he would manufacture into a major operation.

Of course, that extra money would have been only a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage, but his tradecraft was good; he would have found another source.

It hadn’t been necessary, because Liu had agreed at once. He had even agreed each time Perry had raised the amounts. Only later did Perry realize that the general might have been only too eager to go along because he had something else, something even more important, to hide from the CIA.

Involving Louis was a terrible mistake, but by then Perry was beginning to understand that all good things came to an end sooner or later. And when this operation went south he’d wanted to be insulated. He hadn’t thought Louis would actually get himself killed. And when he tried to point his staff in directions that would lead them to believe that Louis had been shaking down the general, he never suspected that Adkins would send somebody like McGarvey to figure everything out.

But that’s exactly what had happened, what was happening. The message recalling him to Langley was proof that it was over.

Perry smiled wryly. He would have liked to live in Washington as one of the players. He would even have enjoyed the confirmation hearings, which were often brutal. He would especially have liked the respect that he would have earned.

“Fuck it,” he mumbled.

He flicked the safety lever off, raised the muzzle of the pistol to his temple, and without hesitation pulled the trigger.

EIGHTY-FOUR

XOCHIMILCO

McGarvey, dressed in black, night-vision glasses hanging by a strap around his neck, waited in the willows at the side of the road twenty-five yards from the compound wall. He’d driven over to the Four Seasons to retrieve his equipment in the aluminum case and had gotten down here less than a half hour behind Liu and the girls.

Nothing moved in the night, and no sounds marred the stillness. Even the light breeze that had rustled the leaves had calmed down.

Everything depended on Gloria. If he was right about her he would be walking into a trap, but other than house staff he didn’t think there would be many of Roaz’s people over there this morning; and there would be Liu’s driver and the two bodyguards who had followed in the AMG.

He sincerely hoped he was wrong about both of the women. But he suspected that Shahrzad worked for Iranian intelligence and that Gloria had become an independent operator even before she’d gone back into Cuba with her new husband.

Too many coincidences had accumulated around both of them to be merely
coincidences.

What he couldn’t fathom was what all the pieces added together could possibly mean. If it weren’t for Otto’s programs turning up lavender and now violet he would have bet almost anything that this was nothing more than a shakedown operation that had gone sour. Updegraf was assassinated when he and Perry pressed too hard. Shahrzad was a walk-in at the embassy to put the pressure back on Perry, and the congressman’s oil deal between the Chinese and Mexican governments was nothing more than a smoke screen.

But to hide what?

The lights along the top of the compound walls suddenly went out.

McGarvey got to his feet, slung his small pack over his shoulder, made his way to the water’s edge, and headed along the shoreline in knee-deep water. In addition to his Walther PPK, Rencke had sent down a suppressed version of the Steyr AUG assault machine gun that fired subsonic 9 mm ammunition, making it deadly and silent.

Gloria was expecting him to come up the road, where she was supposed to open the main gate. If it wasn’t a trap, she would be waiting alone for him. Otherwise Liu’s bodyguards would be there.

McGarvey wasn’t going to risk his life to find out that way.

He reached the wall on the west side of the compound, facing the lake, in ten minutes. It was plaster painted white over concrete block, and was twelve feet tall. Lights rose from short stanchions every twenty-five feet. Closed-circuit television cameras were mounted at the corners and above the front and rear gates. The motion detectors and infrared sensors that Rencke’s ESMs receiver had picked up when McGarvey had been here last were hidden from view. If this was a trap, whoever was manning the surveillance equipment knew that he wasn’t coming through the front door.

The countdown clock was ticking now.

McGarvey took from his pack a grapnel with big padded hooks attached to one hundred feet of nylon line, made sure the line was coiled properly, and tossed it up and over the wall.

It caught on the first throw, and after a moment to listen for an alarm to be sounded, he clambered to the top of the wall and eased his head high enough to see down into the compound.

A slightly built figure stood in the shadows by the front gate about seventy-five feet away. Nothing else moved in the compound.

McGarvey took a couple of turns of the rope around his left arm, and pulled the night-vision glasses up to his eyes with his free hand.

Gloria’s figure fluoresced dark green in the glasses. He scanned the parking area and the front of the house, but as far as he could tell no one else was there.

He lowered the glasses, pulled himself up and over the wall, retrieved the grapnel and line, and dropped soundlessly to the ground on the inside.

He pulled the Steyr from its sling on his back, charged the weapon, and switched the safety to the off position. With his finger outside the trigger guard, he straightened up and started across the compound, all of his senses superalert for any sign that this was a trap.

The night remained silent. No shots were fired from somewhere inside the house. No lights suddenly blazed, no sirens blared.

He got within a few feet of Gloria before she sensed something and turned around. Her hand went to her mouth and she stumbled backward against the partially open gate.

“Mother of God,” she blurted. “Kirk.” She was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

McGarvey stepped into the shadows, his back to the wall. “You came here in a party dress,” he said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I don’t know whose shit this is,” she shot back. She was wired. “If we’re going to run I needed something better than a dress.”

“Where’s Liu?”

She hesitated for just an instant. “In the master bedroom.”

“What about the guy on surveillance?”

“He’s down, but I didn’t have time to take out Liu’s driver and bodyguards.”

“Did you give him the coke?”

She nodded. “It didn’t work. He didn’t tell me anything.”

“Take me to him.”

“Goddamn it, he’s out of it. Won’t do us any good.”

“Now,” McGarvey said. He was getting an itchy feeling between his shoulder blades. No trap had been set at the front gate, but he still didn’t trust her.

“You’re playing with fire,” she said. “We’re outgunned.” She turned and padded off in the dark.

McGarvey followed her into the house, keeping within the deeper shadows as they crossed the expansive living room. They went out onto the pool deck and then through the open sliding glass doors into the master suite.

Liu was lying on his back in the middle of a very large bed with black silk sheets. He was naked, one muscular leg crossed over the other, his eyes fluttering. Shahrzad lay crumpled, half bent over, next to him. Her head was twisted at an impossible angle, her neck obviously broken.

“He killed her,” Gloria said from behind him.

“Why?”

“He said she was an Iranian spy.”

“I thought the coke didn’t work,” McGarvey said. He crossed to the bed and felt for a pulse at Liu’s neck. It was strong but irregular, as if he had a heart murmur. It was what the fact sheet Kraus had sent with the compact had said to expect.

“We have to get out of here before someone checks with surveillance,” Gloria said. “The people around Liu don’t sleep through the night. Never.”

“Where’s your weapon?”

“I didn’t bring it. Remember?”

McGarvey took out his Walther and tossed it to her. “Watch my back.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“What I came here for,” McGarvey said.

“The son of a bitch doesn’t know anything.”

“Go,” McGarvey ordered. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Gloria looked at Liu’s figure on the bed. “He’s not worth it,” she said. For just that moment she sounded like a feral cat ready to pounce, a low rumble at the back of her throat.

She turned and left, disappearing around the corner back into the living room.

McGarvey looked down at the general, who was still out of it, then quickly searched the suite, finding a laptop computer on a desk in an adjacent alcove. He laid the Steyr on the desk and turned the computer on. When it booted up, a message prompt in Chinese script dropped down with a blank box. It was asking for a password.

He turned it off, closed the lid, picked up the gun, and turned around.

Liu, still naked, stood in the doorway, a SIG-Sauer pistol in his hand, no signs whatsoever that he had taken the doctored coke.

“You have a heart murmur,” McGarvey said.

“Since I was a child,” Liu replied pleasantly.

“My people know that I’m here.”

“I’m sure they do, but I’m curious to know why you have come here like this. What do you want, Mr. McGarvey? Surely not to arrest me for some trumped-up charges of rape and murder back in the States. I won’t go back with you.”

“Not that.”

“Fair enough.” Liu nodded. “Gloria tells me that you are an assassin. Did you come here with the intent to murder me?”

“That’s part of why I’m here,” McGarvey admitted. He held up the laptop. “This is the rest of it, unless you want to tell me what you’ve been doing down here for the past ten years, and what it has to do with Iranian intelligence.”

“Poor Shahrzad?” Liu asked. “I didn’t kill the girl. Gloria did it.”

“I meant the intelligence officer who was at your party here, hiding in the shadows.”