Dance with the Dragon (7 page)

Solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence. We all bore the burdens at one point or another. McGarvey’s was in the early morning hours, when he would awaken from his dreams bathed in sweat. Sometimes Katy would be awake, and she would hold him until his heart stopped pounding. But most of the time she was sound asleep and he would be alone. Shahrzad never had someone to hold her close, and tell her that she was loved, and be telling the truth.

“It was a Thursday night when the club usually wasn’t so busy that I had to sit with too many other customers, when Louis and I went back to our room and I started to dance for him,” she started. “He wasn’t himself that night. He was watching me, but I don’t think that he was really seeing me, you know.”

Rencke nodded, encouraging her to continue.

“It was the same when we made love. It was as if he wasn’t there with me. He was someplace else. And it hurt. I thought that it was probably the beginning of the end for us, which made me really sad. Like I said, I was in love with him, and for goodness’ sake, I thought he was in love with me. But right then I wasn’t so sure.

“Afterward when we got dressed he liked to have a cigarette and a bottle of champagne. I had never smoked before, but I smoked with him. Because of him.” She was looking inward now. “I don’t think he realized that I was making little sacrifices like that for him.” She shrugged. “But it didn’t matter as long as we were together.”

“And he was paying you so that you could get to the U.S.,” McGarvey said sharply, not sure why he was baiting her, except that he still wasn’t sure if she was genuine, or an MOIS double.

She ignored the gibe. “Sometimes we would talk, mostly about little things. You know, about baseball, about Ghirardelli Square, about South Beach, places I wanted to visit.”

“But not that night,” McGarvey prompted.

She shook her head. “No,” she said. She looked up as if she were coming out of a daze. “Not that night. He said that he wanted me to help him with something. ‘Anything you want, Louis,’ I told him. And I meant it, and he believed me, because he admitted that he was an American spy.”

“God in heaven,” Perry blurted.

“He wanted me to find out about some people. If I did that for him, he would make sure that I would get a real visa to come to America, and that I would never have to worry about money again.”

“The bastard lost his mind,” Perry muttered.

“No,” Shahrzad cried. “He said this was very important. The most important job of his career. More important than I or anyone else could possibly imagine. And we were going to be the heroes.”

“You were to become a spy for him,” McGarvey said.

“That’s right.”

“The Chinese?”

She went a little pale and her hand shook as she reached for her glass. “That’s right,” she said. “But mostly just one man. An important man. General Liu.”

ELEVEN

LONGBOAT KEY

They took a short break. Toni was summoned to escort Shahrzad to the bathroom, and when they were out of earshot McGarvey was the first to speak.

“If she’s here of her own free will, why the babysitter?” So many things weren’t adding up in his mind that he didn’t know where to begin.

“One of my people was shot to death, after all,” Perry said earnestly. “I’m not taking any chances.”

“Beyond the ones that you’ve already taken,” McGarvey said.

Perry’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what you mean. What chances?”

McGarvey had to wonder if anyone told the truth. “Updegraf had to be a busy man, running a one-man show with just the help of the girl.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. We’ve already established that much.” Perry waved his hand in a sweeping gesture toward where Shahrzad had been sitting. “All of this is news to me.”

“I understand,” McGarvey said. “But your field officer was a
busy
man. Gone all hours of the day and night. You must have noticed something.”

“He was going after his code clerk.”

“A lot of work for a code clerk, wouldn’t you say?” McGarvey asked rhetorically. “But you had to be taking a big chance that with all that activity, something else might have been going on. Something that as station chief you would be responsible for.”

A sudden shrewdness came into Perry’s eyes, a sudden understanding of what McGarvey was getting at and how best to respond. “Every chief of station worth his salt has his own philosophy. My method is to allow my senior officers the latitude to develop their own sources without hindrance. If they strike gold, or even if they catch a glimmer, they come to me and we put our heads together. Come up with a winning strategy. Heavens, man, I’m a spy, not a paper pusher. Surely you of all men can understand.”

“But Updegraf wasn’t playing by the rules. I’d say that a senior Chinese intelligence officer was something more than just a glimmer.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Perry cried, throwing his hands up.

“Something, I suppose.” McGarvey shrugged. “It was your man who got himself killed. Is there anything else about Updegraf that I should know about? Anything that’s not in his jacket or his OPR?” McGarvey asked. An OPR was an Officer Performance Report that was written every year by an agent’s immediate supervisor.

Perry shook his head. “No.”

Shahrzad came back and took her seat, and Toni withdrew. “Could we maybe stop and have some lunch? I’m starved.”

“Later,” McGarvey said. “You were in love with Updegraf, so you agreed to become a spy for him.”

“That’s right,” she replied defensively. “It’s what people who are in love do for each other. Without sacrifices there is nothing. It’s a special bond that maybe you don’t understand.” She glanced at Perry. “Well, I understood, and so did Louis.”

It occurred to McGarvey that this little girl had no idea what love was. She was merely spouting some cliches that sounded good to her, wrapping up her feelings for a man she couldn’t have known well in a tidy little package that made sense, that gave her a sense of self-worth. If this American spy she was having sex with loved her, then she was validated as a woman.

He had to wonder what her life had been like in Tehran with a father who as a spy had set her up with a Russian general old enough to be at least her father, and possibly her grandfather. The same thing had happened to her again in Mexico City. A man she loved was setting her up with another general, and for the same reasons.

McGarvey felt a genuine pity for her, yet was wary. She may have been misguided, but she was playing a dangerous game that her father had taught her, and which General Baranov had perfected.

“How did it happen?” McGarvey asked.

“The first thing I did was quit dancing at the Wild Stallion and become Louis’s full-time girl,” Shahrzad began. She smiled wistfully, which made her appear to be all the more vulnerable.

“But that didn’t last long.”

She shook her head. “Just a few days. Then we made the rounds of all the clubs, mostly right there in Zona Rosa and Coyacan and Condesa, but we finally wound up at a place called the Doll House in Polanco. It was fancier than most of the others, and more expensive, so there was a better class of clientele who showed up.”

“Heavy hitters,” Rencke suggested.

Shahrzad smiled uncertainly. “I never heard that term before.”

“Rich guys with lots of power.”

She nodded. “They were mostly heavy hitters in that place. And the acts were better. You know, prettier girls, younger mostly, and white mostly, although there were a couple of cute Japanese kids. The average age was maybe fifteen or sixteen. I felt ancient.

“The third night we were there General Liu showed up with a couple of women, and Louis got all excited. ‘It’s him,’ he told me. ‘It’s our mark.’ We were going to target the general, and once we had him we could write our own ticket. We would be the emperor and empress of the moon.”

“What happened next?” McGarvey asked.

“Louis said that we would have to take it easy, let the general come to me,” Shahrzad explained. “If I came on too strong he’d know he was being set up. Liu got the VIP treatment whenever he was in the club. Miguel Roaz, the owner, would personally escort the general to a table right in front of the stage where they did the dancing and the sex shows. He always drank champagne, usually Krug but sometimes Dom Pérignon, and he always had a couple of women with him. Sometimes they would go into one of the back rooms with him, and the Doll—that was Roaz’s nickname because he had a baby face—would send one of the dancers back to entertain them.”

“And have sex?” Rencke asked.

Shahrzad seemed embarrassed. “Sometimes. That’s the whole idea of these clubs. And there’re a lot of them in Mexico City. Clubs for gays and lesbians, for the S&M freaks, even a few clubs for men, and some women, who liked to do it with animals. Big dogs, Shetland ponies, snakes.”

“But the Doll House was for the straight crowd,” McGarvey said.

Shahrzad nodded. “I never liked the other sort of places. They made me nervous.”

“I’ll bet they did,” McGarvey said, but she didn’t catch his sarcasm. “Didn’t you wonder why an important Chinese man such as the general would take the risk of going to such a club? If he were to be seen and reported to Beijing he’d be in big trouble.”

She shook her head, and her soft lips pursed in disgust. “Anyway, in between the acts couples could dance on the floor, and sometimes it was like an orgy. The music was wild, the place was practically pitch black except for a spotlight that moved around the floor, and by the time they were ready to start the next show everyone was all but screwing their brains out.”

“You and Louis?” McGarvey asked.

She looked away for a moment. “He wanted me to try to seduce him, but he said everything from now on was for the general’s benefit. That night I was half naked, rubbing against Louis’s arm, when the spotlight came to us. Louis shoved me back and hit me in the mouth. I never saw it coming, and it hurt more than you can imagine. I fell down on the floor, and the next thing I knew the bouncers had grabbed Louis and were throwing him out.” Shahrzad appeared to be on the verge of tears. “I thought they were going to toss me out too, but Roaz helped me back to the table, and the waiter brought me a bottle of Krug. ‘From an admirer,’ the Doll told me. I was welcome to stay as long as I wanted.”

Perry was staring at the girl, an intent, almost admiring, look on his face. He caught McGarvey watching him, and flushed. The exchange lasted only an instant, and neither Shahrzad nor Rencke noticed, but McGarvey thought the station chief’s reaction to the girl’s story was odd. Something was out of place.

“I tell you that it felt strange to be sitting all alone in a place like that,” she continued.

“The admirer was General Liu, of course,” McGarvey said. “You were in.”

“Not quite. He didn’t speak to me that night, which Louis said would probably be the case. So I was to ask the Doll for a job dancing in the show. But he just laughed at me, at first. Said I was too old and the wrong color. Unless I had what he called ‘special talents.’”

“Which were?”

She hesitated.

“He wanted to know if you were good in bed, and willing to service perhaps the admirer who’d sent you the champagne.”

She held her silence.

“That’s why Louis seduced you, to see if you were any good. And when he found out that you were, he made you fall in love with him so that you’d do whatever he wanted you to do.”

“You can’t
make
someone fall in love with you,” Shahrzad flared.

“But you fell in love with Louis, and he asked you to seduce General Liu. He asked you to become his whore, and you agreed.”

“It was important,” she said weakly. Now her eyes
were
filling with tears.

“How long did it take before the general asked you to his table?”

“It was the second week,” she said. She shook her head. “I just wanted someone to love me. Is that so terrible a thing?”

TWELVE

LONGBOAT KEY

They had talked for nearly an hour and a half when the woman on the house staff wheeled in a serving cart laden with Cuban sandwiches, black bean soup, and small salads, along with iced tea. McGarvey asked for a beer, and while the others were serving themselves he stepped to the edge of the veranda and looked out to the horizon. The sky was cloudless, the day was warm, but the humidity had dropped. It was what the locals called chamber of commerce weather.

He could hear Rencke behind him talking to the woman in quieting tones about her early days in Iran when she was just a little child, how happy she must have been. Gardens surrounded their house, she said. Fruit trees, flowers, a topiary where she would play hide-and-seek with her older siblings. And tall grasses grew along a winding creek that was cool in the summer. Rencke was trying to calm her nerves so that she would better be able to face up to the next part, which would probably be difficult.

Updegraf had apparently done his homework on General Liu, figuring that the general’s weakness was women. But if Updegraf had done
all
his homework he would also have learned that Liu had been suspected of brutally murdering several women in New York and Washington and possibly again in Mexico City. He was sending the woman he professed to love to become his whore so that she could seduce the general and then spy on him, and for that there was a very good chance she would be murdered.

For this job, Updegraf had been paying her, with the promise that if she was a success he would guarantee her a U.S. visa and the prospect of a future in which she would not have to worry about money. The sad part was that if Updegraf had done a proper job of his due diligence he would have realized that merely loving the girl would have been enough.

It was the one statement she’d made that McGarvey believed wholeheartedly. All she wanted was for someone to love her. It’s all she’d wanted ever since her father had sent her to General Baranov’s bed.

After her father had been assassinated and her mother had fled to Paris, there had been no place for Shahrzad to go. Her family would have rejected her because in places like Iran, women were always blamed as seductresses. If a young girl was raped, she would be held responsible. In some not very remote villages, she would even be put to death for her crime. It was almost never the man’s fault.