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Authors: David Hagberg

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“Based in Mexico City.”

Danielle nodded.

“And who runs this super organization? Who is the man in charge? The brains?”

At this Danielle shook his head. “That's all, John. As it is, I've overstepped my charter.”

The symphony on the stereo was over. The silence held an ominous note.“Then let's go after them, Larry. You and I.”

“Stay out of it, John. As one friend to another, I'm telling you to stay clear. There'll be a lot of fallout in the months to come. The man with the clean hands and clear conscience will come out on top.”

Before Danielle turned and walked out of the room, Trotter suddenly realized that there was something about his old friend just then that he had never seen before. The way the older man held himself, the set of his shoulders, the hooded expression in his eyes, the tightening of his jaw. It took a moment, though, before Trotter recognized just what it was he had seen, and the effect on him was profound, deeper than any mere words could adequately describe. But forever afterward Trotter would swear that at that moment in time he had seen fear written all over the deputy director of Central Intelligence Agency operations.

That very night, Donald Suthland Powers stood alone at the window in his office on the seventh floor of the Central Intelligence Agency's Langley complex, trying to see into the future. He was short, somewhat stoop shouldered and slight of build, with a squarish, scholarly face, thick eyebrows, and absolutely the most penetrating, intelligent blue eyes that had ever peered across the DCI's desk. At fifty-six he wasn't so terribly old that he had slowed down, yet he was of the age when he could begin looking back at his youth, to a time when the future
was a bright penny still untarnished. Since the president had appointed him DCI a year ago, his goals had seemed very clear. At least they had until this night. Terrible goals in the sense that he was a general waging a war in which casualties were being incurred, but exciting in that the endeavor was right: his president and his nation were behind him.

He had spent most of his life in service to his government in one capacity or another, but never from such an awesome position of responsibility and never with such a strong, clearly defined mandate. For the first time, though, the future wasn't clear to him.

“Perhaps you should speak with Trotter,” Danielle had suggested. “He'll stand down. He'll give us the room.”

Powers was frightened. He needed time. Use the considerable Powers charm, he counseled himself. The power of this office, of your experience and charisma. There would be a lot of fallout. Jules and Asher were only the first. They had been lost in the opening salvo. There would be more, many more. Could he stand it?

God knew he had tried to get out of the agency after his father died. For a year in Hartford, operating the Political Action Think Tank, he had very nearly succeeded. But when the president called him back to arms, he had not been surprised or very saddened. Here was where he would wage his battles. From this very fortress was where he would expiate the sins of deadly competition, nuclear confrontation, and, on a smaller but much more intensely personal scale, the murders of Jules and Asher. They would be the cry to arms. The point around which all of them would rally.

Powers had allowed himself in the years past, rising in the ranks of the agency to deputy director
of intelligence before his short-lived retirement, to play the game according to the rules: to honor the status quo. Push a little in Turkey, or Iran or Lebanon, but give a little in Afghanistan, in Poland, and in the Caribbean Basin. But it was over. The honeymoon had ended. The opening shots had been fired in a war that could no longer be denied.

Kennedy had held his Cuban missile crisis. Here now was another crisis. Much subtler, perhaps, but none the less deadly for its obscurity.

Powers turned away from the window. In appearance as well as in intellect, he was reminiscent of William F. Buckley, Jr., with perhaps a bit of William Colby thrown in. He listened now to the ghosts of ten thousand decisions made from this office and wondered if, indeed, he was the right man for the job.

“Baranov,” Powers said softly, no longer able to hold the memory in check. They had done battle before, and it was said he was back in Mexico City. Back at the helm of CESTA. They said he was just an agent runner. A network man, not another Andropov, but Powers knew differently.

He looked again at the window, but this time he focused on his own reflection in the glass. He looked haggard. Worn-out. His daughter Sissy told him he wasn't eating his Wheaties. But Katy Moss, his secretary, and Lawrence Danielle both knew the trouble â¦ or thought they did. When you're frightened, push ahead; it's the only cure. Whoever had said that never sat behind this desk, Powers decided. And through the entire season he would stop at odd moments to think back to this very evening. To the beginning.

A frigid winter had given way to a nasty spring in Lausanne, Switzerland. Kirk Collough McGarvey, an expatriate American in his early forties, lay awake in bed on an early April morning, morosely listening to the hiss of the rain against the windows and the breakfast sounds of Marta Fredricks in the kitchen. Tall, husky, he was the archetypical form of the disgruntled American living overseas: his hair was too long; he wore an unkempt beard; and his clothes always seemed a bit too shabby, ill-fitting, and hastily chosen. In the several years he had lived here he had taken on the manner of a somewhat bemused scholar whose concentration on his studies left little time for the more mundane day-to-day routines of modern life. In his role, he would have fit in well in the intellectual community of any university or exclusive English boarding school for gifted scholars. But it was nothing more than a role, a protective barrier against a world he figured had gone quite mad; a role that was beginning to wear quite thin, however.

Last night he had been cruel again. He and Marta had argued bitterly, and he had said some things he wished he hadn't, no matter their truth.
She had stood her ground and taken every bit of it, which had increased his blind rage.

“Fight back, for Christ's sake,” he bellowed. “Don't stand there taking the bullshit.” God, how he despised meek compliance. Namby-pamby subservience. Downtrodden acceptance of whatever any asshole wished to dish out.

Yesterday had been a bitch of a day. It had begun at the bookstore when a haughty Swiss customer pretended that she could not understand his French. He had turned her over to his partner, Dortmund Fuelm, whose French was nearly nonexistent. The woman, confronted with a gentleman of her own nationality, suddenly blossomed like a wilted rose having been given a fresh spray of cool water. The post had come around noon and included a longish, nasty letter from his ex-wife's lawyer in Washington, D.C., saying that it was once again time for him to increase the amount of his alimony and child-support payments. If need be, the attorney hinted, the matter could be brought into the Swiss courts, which probably would not be effective in jarring loose money, but it would certainly be an embarrassment to him. The between-the-lines message was that the attorney was sleeping with Kathleen and was taking McGarvey's intransigence personally. He was probably a Washington up-and-comer who deserved Kathleen, though McGarvey wondered if the poor sod understood that he was being used by a woman who was probably the most self-centered bitch in a town devoted to self-service. That very afternoon he had whipped off a particularly scathing letter, but better sense stayed him from posting it until he could calm himself down. He walked over to the Lausanne Palace Hotel for a late lunch on the terrace with its magnificent view. But
his peace did not last. Dortmund's beautiful though bratty twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Liese, had followed him and now barged right up to his table.

“Aren't you going to ask me to join you? Buy me some lunch?” she said. She worked for an engineering firm nearby. “Or wouldn't Marta approve?”

Instead of the leisurely filet of sole and half bottle of pouilly-fuissÃ© he had contemplated, the two hours seemed to drag interminably with the egocentric kid prattling on about how he should dump Marta and move in with her.

“Daddy adores you, of course, but if you didn't want him to know, it could be our little secret.”

“No secrets.”

“Fine,” she said, brightening even more. “Then we'll tell him that â¦”

“We'll tell him nothing, Liese, because nothing will happen.”

Finally managing to disentangle himself by three o'clock, he walked up to the library to continue the research he had begun six weeks ago on Voltaire, who had lived and worked for a time in Lausanne. But he found that his concentration had been shot to hell; reading a rare edition (with notes in the margin) of
Candide,
his mind bounced back and forth between Kathleen, Liese FÃ¼elm, and Marta, so he gave it up and was back home by four-thirty.

“Bad day?” Marta asked innocently when he came in. She was ten years younger than he but looked even younger than that, and had a glow about her. She was tall, not unattractive, with long dark hair, wide eyes, and sensitive lips. She carried herself with an athletic grace. In the winter she skied, in the summer she swam, and year-round she jogged five miles each morning, rain or shine, after which they would have breakfast and then often make love.

“Kathleen has sent a lawyer after me, and Liese is up to her old tricks again,” he said, throwing off his coat, and opening a beer.

Marta smiled. She was fixing their dinner. “There's nothing your ex can do to you in Switzerland. As far as concerns Liese, why don't you jump her bones. She'll back off fast enough. She's only flirting, you know.”

“Fucking. That's your goddamned answer for everything, isn't it?” McGarvey snapped. “Christ on a cross!”

She looked up, her eyes bright. “I'm sorry, Kirk â¦”

“Yes, you are.”

She had started to cry then, which really set him off, so he had proceeded to take her apart, piece by piece, bit by bit, attacking her eating habits, her physical fitness insanity (as he called it), her sense of clothing style or lack of it, her constant prattling about totally inconsequential shit, and her sex-solves-everything juvenile attitude. And she stood and took every bit of it. Had it been him on the receiving end of such a tirade, he would have lashed out. She had not, which made him even angrier.

It was his turn to be sorry this morning, though he knew it didn't really matter. He suspected he could say or do almost anything to her, and she would remain. Out of love, or loyalty, or for some other, darker reason?

“You awake in there?” she called from the kitchen.

He reached over to the night table, got himself a cigarette, and lit it before he answered. “Just coffee, Mati. It's all I can stand.”

He could hear her laughing. It was a musical sound.

She appeared in the doorway with a cup of
coffee in hand, a big grin on her face. Her hair was pinned up, and she had changed out of her jogging suit into a thick robe.

“You were a real shit last night, you know,” she said.

“I know,” he said, turning away. It was hard to face her. He had drunk too much, and this morning he had a splitting headache. So why couldn't he tell her he was sorry?

Her grin faded and she came the rest of the way into the bedroom, setting the coffee down and perching on the edge of the bed. She reached out and touched his knee beneath the covers. “What is it, Kirk?”

“Nothing,” he mumbled.

“It worries me when you get like this,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Liese?”

McGarvey laughed, though there was no pleasure in it. “It's not that.”

She studied his face. “What then, boredom?”

“Yes, that.”

“You're forty-four and your life is passing you by. You're no longer in the fray, is that it?”

McGarvey said nothing. It seemed like years since his life had even had a semblance of real purpose. Yet in the seventies when he worked for the Company he had been just as frustrated: only it was in a different way. The Carter administration had ended it for him. A dozen places, a hundred faces all passed through his mind's eye with the speed of light. Santiago, Chile, had been the end. Afterward he had been recalled, and within six months he had been dumped. Overexuberance. Taking matters into his own hands. Operating outside his sanctions. Failure to keep a grasp on the world political climate.

“I talk in my sleep. That's it, isn't it?”

“All the time,” she said.

“Do you write it all down, Mati? Have you got a little black book?”

She started to rise, but he sat forward and grabbed her arm.

“I want to know.”

“Why are you doing this, Kirk? Haven't you had enough? Do you forget what you were like when you got here? You were a wreck.”

“And you were Joan of Arc riding in on your white charger, your armor all polished, your sword sharp, raised to do battle. Are you telling me that, Mati?”

Her nostrils flared and there was a momentary spark in her eyes, but her control was marvelous, and she ended her little battle by merely shaking her head. “We can't go on. Not like this.”

McGarvey released her arm and lay back on the bed. Christ, he felt rotten. Marta was almost certainly a watchdog of the Swiss federal police, sent to his side so that they could keep track of him. Former Central Intelligence Agency operatives made a lot of people nervous, especially the Swiss, who valued their clandestine CIA banking operations above all personal considerations.

Was she his watchdog? Or was it love he saw in her eyes?

“No, we can't,” he said.

She got up from the edge of the bed and went back into the kitchen.

He sometimes thought of that part of his past as the glory days. And they were that, weren't they? he asked himself. Ruefully he had to admit a certain nostalgia, even though he understood that the reality wasn't anywhere near as exciting or interesting as his memory of it.

Why did he get out in the first place? The end was coming long before they kicked him out. He
could have changed things to prevent it. Only he was too blind, too stupid, to see it. Stewart had made a great show of fighting for him. Yet, later, after Alvin had bought it in Geneva, McGarvey had heard that Stewart had bad-mouthed him all over the agency. It was Washington. It was the power that had corrupted them all. The ends justified the means, didn't they? By then Phillipi was out, Mason had been killed short of the runway at Andrews, and like the meek inheriting the earth, the quiet but sly Danielle had been bounced upstairs.

McGarvey threw back the covers, got out of bed, and padded into the bathroom, where he looked at himself in the mirror. Already there was a lot of gray creeping into his hair, flecks of it throughout his beard. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, and the beginnings of a paunch were showing, though his legs and arms still had something left to them.

It occurred to him that his life had happened in three quantum jumps, each more debilitating to him than the last. The first stage was his childhood and youth, which ended with the death of his parents in a car crash. His sister was given their cash, their stocks, and their bonds, but he was given the ranch in western Kansas which he sold for something under three quarters of a million dollars. Living on the interest, he had enjoyed a certain financial independence from that moment on, but the loss of his parents and the harsh disapproval of his sister, who had wanted the ranch kept in the family, had left him out in a spiritual wasteland. The second devastation had come with his dismissal from the Central Intelligence Agency because he had killed a tinpot general in Santiago on orders that had changed, unbeknownst to him, in midstream. Now this, his retirement to ostensibly the most neutral
place in the world, was the third stage. He had the feeling it was also coming to an end, and when the finish came the results would be catastrophic for him, as had the ends of the first two stages of his life.

Marta came to the doorway. “I can't help if you close up on me,” she said softly.

He looked at her reflection beyond his in the mirror. He was afraid of her. Afraid that after all she was nothing more than a Swiss police watchdog sent to keep track of him. And even more afraid that she was not pretending that she loved him.

His sister said he could not understand what a commitment was â¦ what it meant. “Do us all a favor, Kirk, and grow up.”

“Like you and Al?”

“Why do you think the ranch was left to you?”

“I don't know.”

“Mom and Dad hoped it would change you. Settle you down.”

McGarvey focused on Marta. “Sorry,” he said. “I'm sorry.”