Dance with the Dragon (28 page)

Rencke answered on the first ring when McGarvey called him. “Oh, wow, Mac, what’d you find out?”

“She confirmed Shahrzad’s story, but Liu was in business here at least ten years ago, and maybe longer. Did you get a line on those two guys who tried to jump me outside Richmond?”

“Ex–Mexican special forces. GAFE. And you’ll never guess where they got some of their training? Right here at Bolling Air Force Base.”

“They’re no longer in the service?”

“No, but their records are clean so far as I can find out. They resigned their commissions about six months ago, supposedly to work for a security consulting firm where they could make more money. Evidently no one blames them.”

McGarvey looked up as a man came across the lobby directly toward him. “Hold on,” he told Rencke.

There was something familiar about the face, but McGarvey couldn’t place it, and before the man got all the way across he angled left toward the bar.

“False alarm,” McGarvey told Rencke. But he wasn’t at all sure it had been.

“You’re in the hotel, but where?” Rencke asked.

“The lobby. I thought I saw someone I might have recognized, but I’m not sure.” He glanced up toward the busy cocktail lounge but the guy had disappeared. “The French woman told me that she burned a young CIA field officer who worked at the UN.”

“Did she remember a name?”

“Joseph Schilling. But it was most likely a work name.”

“Hang on, I’ll check,” Rencke said.

McGarvey glanced again toward the busy cocktail lounge, but the guy he thought he might have recognized was nowhere in sight.

When Rencke came back he sounded out of breath. “You’re not going to believe this shit, Mac,” said. “Joseph Schilling left the UN mission a little over nine years ago. Wanted a transfer to our embassy in Beijing. Did a good job supervising a string of Chinese nationals working for us. Good product. Great fitreps. And you’re right, Schilling was his work name.”

It came to McGarvey all of a sudden. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “Updegraf.”

“Bingo,” Rencke said. “Louis Updegraf worked for the Guoanbu for the last nine or ten years of his life. So why did Liu snuff him?”

“Updegraf probably tried to turn the tables and burn him. He came across Shahrzad and used Liu’s weakness for women against him.”

“Or tried to,” Rencke said.

“No mention in his jacket about a possible problem with drugs?”

“There wouldn’t be if he was turning in good product,” Rencke said. “You sat on the seventh floor, you know the realities better than anyone else.”

Alcohol, drugs, money, sex, the fast life. All those held the same kinds of allure for the right person as the act of spying did. The good field officer was the man or woman who lived outside the envelope, and a lot of the time way outside the letter of the law.

Updegraf had played with fire the first time, and got himself burned. The second time he got himself killed.

The timing bothered McGarvey. What was Liu doing in Mexico that Updegraf tried to interfere with, and that forced Liu to kill a man who’d probably been one of his star sources?

But something else bothered him, too. He glanced a third time toward the cocktail lounge. “Run a search on Liu’s and Updegraf’s assignments for the past nine years. I think they’ll probably match. Updegraf probably got to each of his postings a few months before Liu, in order to pave the way.”

“I’m on it,” Rencke said.

“If that pans out, see what you can find in Updegraf’s file for each assignment. Did something out of the ordinary happen to him or around him? Did he come up with something big? Or maybe the Chinese made big scores wherever Updegraf and Liu were stationed together.”

“If there’s a pattern I’ll find it.”

“I hope so, because I think we’re going to need it to figure out what the hell Liu is up to down there that’s so fully developed he didn’t need Updegraf.”

“What about the French woman?” Rencke asked.

“I’m going back over to her apartment to find out if she had any contact with Updegraf after that night. If he was trying to get something on Liu he might have tried to use her, like he used Shahrzad.”

“I’m on that too,” Rencke said. “Then what?”

“I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection, the tickle still at the back of his neck.

He finished his drink, pocketed his phone, and went up to his room to get his pistol. Just before the elevator door closed he looked across the lobby toward the bar one last time, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

FORTY-THREE

THE APARTMENT

This part of the Upper West Side was a neighborhood of families. Traffic on Broadway was fairly light; most people were home from work, the kids were home from school, and supper was on the stove.

McGarvey buzzed Monique’s apartment and glanced over his shoulder as a man carrying a load of dry cleaning over his shoulder walked past on the other side of the street. At the corner two men were involved in what appeared to be a heated discussion, and beyond them a woman carrying a bag of groceries entered an apartment building.

Nothing out of the ordinary. But he was spooked.

He turned back and hit the buzzer again. But after a full twenty seconds when there was no answer, he rang for the second-floor front apartment. A woman answered.

“Who is it?”

“Police,” McGarvey said.

The door lock buzzed, and McGarvey went inside the dimly lit hall and held up his open wallet for the elderly woman who came to the head of the stairs. She seemed nervous. “What is it?”

“There’s been a disturbance on the third floor,” McGarvey said, starting up. Alarms were jangling in his head. “But Ms. Thibault does not answer.”

“I’ve heard nothing,” the old woman said, glancing toward the stairs up to the third floor.

“I’ll just see,” McGarvey said. “Go back into your apartment, please.”

The old woman nodded uncertainly and went back into her apartment, from where she watched through the partially open door as McGarvey passed. He smiled reassuringly at her.

Monique did not answer his knock. If she was inside and had bolted the door, he wouldn’t be able to get inside without making a lot of noise. But if she had merely stepped out, she would only have used her key. He used a credit card to fish around between the door and door frame to trip the latch, but it wasn’t necessary—the door was not locked.

He stepped back, pulled out his pistol, and, standing to one side, eased the door open with the toe of his shoe.

“Monique,” he called softly.
“Ici Pierre, encore.”

The apartment was silent.

McGarvey slid inside, keeping low and moving fast, sweeping his pistol left to right.

Monique’s body lay spread-eagled between the couch and her easy chair. Her T-shirt had been ripped open, exposing her small breasts, flattened in death, and her painter overalls had been pulled off and tossed into the kitchen. She had been strangled with her own panties, which were still twisted tightly around her neck. Her face had turned a deep purple, her eyes bulging, her tongue protruding from her half-open mouth.

McGarvey made a quick sweep of the apartment to make certain the killer was gone, then went back into the living room.

The door hadn’t been forced, and it didn’t look as if Monique had put up a struggle. Maybe she’d known her killer and had let him in. Maybe she’d even been expecting him.

Whatever the case, Liu was responsible for her death, there was no doubt about it. Nor was there any doubt that killing her was a clear message to McGarvey: Keep away.

He holstered his pistol and left the apartment, making his way down to the street and to the end of the block before he called Rencke on his cell phone. “The French woman is dead. I just left her apartment. It was meant to look like she was raped, which is possible, and then she was strangled to death with her own panties.”

“Liu,” Rencke said.

“Probably one of his henchmen,” McGarvey said. “But it’s a message.”

“What do you want to do, Mac?”

“Get one of our teams over here to reduce it to a heart attack, and get an obit in the newspaper.”

“That’ll get his attention,” Rencke said. “It’s too bad about her.”

“Yeah, I should have taken her out of there when I had the chance. We could have put her with Shahrzad in Longboat Key.” It was a mistake that McGarvey would think about for a long time to come.

“I came up with something else on those two guys you offed near Richmond. They were ex-GAFE, but their records weren’t so clean after all. They’d been forced to resign their commissions because they were probably involved in a drug-smuggling operation.”

“No trials, no jail time?”

“Some money probably changed hands, so they walked,” Rencke said. “Could be that Liu is working outside regular Guoanbu channels, and using drug cartel muscle to do his dirty work. It would explain what Alvarez was doing hanging around.”

“Is Liu still in Mexico City?”

“Yeah, and he’s making himself real visible all of a sudden. Makes you wonder what the prick is getting ready to spring on us.”

“Whatever it is, it’ll come soon, and it’ll be something big that we haven’t thought of yet.”

FORTY-FOUR

U. S. EMBASSY, MEXICO CITY

The day shift was just getting off work and leaving the building when Gil Perry phoned next door and asked Gloria to stop by. Word had come down from Langley this morning along with her package, which had been signed off by the DDO himself, but it had taken Perry until now to actually do what he’d been ordered to do.

He’d spent the day trying to figure out what the ramifications would be. He didn’t want even the hint of any blowback coming his way. His shop was in enough disarray without Gloria raising some kind of hell.

The business with Updegraf’s widow had been carefully swept under the rug, and Perry sincerely hoped that the same would be true in Gloria’s case.

But he didn’t believe it was going to work out so neatly. Trouble was, he had no idea yet what he could do about it, other than follow orders.

Gloria showed up a couple of minutes later, her purse on one shoulder, her laptop on the other. She was ready to leave for the day, and she seemed irritated that she’d been called to see the boss.

“It’s been a long day, Gil,” she said. “What do you want to see me about?”

“Close the door, would you? I don’t think this needs to be announced for the entire building’s benefit.”

“Cristo,”
Gloria swore softly. She closed the door and sat down. “Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”

“I’m afraid not,” Perry said. Truth be told, he’d been itching to do this from the day she’d come to work for him. He passed the original message from McCann across the desk to her. “This came today.”

Gloria set her laptop on the floor and quickly read the brief letter, which ordered her immediate termination from the CIA. She looked up in wonder. “Doesn’t say why,” she said. She tossed the letter back. “Have you been complaining to Howard about my short skirts?”

“No. And it’s Mr. McCann.”

“Howard or Mister, he’s a prick just like you. And just like you he’s wanted to get rid of me for a long time.” She smiled, and got to her feet. “Well, good luck, Gilbert. But I will fight this. Maybe I’ll bring a sexual-discrimination suit against the Company and a sexual-harassment suit against you.”

“Of course those are your prerogatives,” Perry said. “I want your identification card if you’re carrying it, your weapon, and your laptop.”

“I’m not so stupid as to carry a CIA ID card. The weapon is my personal property, and so is the laptop.”

“You may keep your weapon, but until we can sanitize your hard drive the laptop stays here in the embassy. It will be returned to you when we’re sure you weren’t trying to carry secrets out the door.”

“Fuck you,” Gloria said, and she headed for the door.

Perry picked up the phone and punched a three-digit number. “Security,” he said. “This is Perry. I want two men,
with
their sidearms, up here on the double.”

Gloria turned back and looked at him with nothing but contempt on her face. She came back and laid the laptop on his desk. “Call when I can pick it up,” she said evenly.

“Thank you,” Perry said. “One last thing.” He slid a Secrets Act statement across for her signature; it promised that she would never divulge anything of a classified nature she’d learned while in the employ of the CIA, under penalty of imprisonment for possibly as long as life.

She took the pen he offered, and signed it. “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” she said.

“I hope so, Ms. Ibenez,” Perry said. “I think that you could have been a damned fine officer, but I think that you’ve been working some sort of a freelance operation. That’s the sort of thing Louis was doing, and it got him assassinated. I won’t have another death on my watch.”

“A word of warning, Gil,” Gloria said.

“Yes?”

“Watch your step. Something big is going down.”

He started to object but she held him off.

“I’m not being shitty now, I swear it. But just tell all your people to watch their backs. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, it’ll be big. I’m sure of it.”

Perry didn’t think that he’d ever despised anyone more than he did Gloria at this moment. But she was right. Something big was coming his way, and he still hadn’t figured out how to handle it. It was Updegraf and his fucking meddling.

He handed Gloria a manila envelope. “It’s your termination letter, something about the Secrets Act form you just signed, something about your hospitalization program and 401(k), and your severance check. The Company was generous.”

“I’ll bet,” Gloria said.

Two marines in undress blues, their pistols holstered, showed up at the door.

“Hi, guys,” Gloria said brightly. “Care to walk a lady to her car?”

“Ms. Ibenez is leaving,” Perry said. “She is no longer authorized in any nonpublic area of the embassy. I want her pass before she clears Post One.”

FORTY-FIVE

CIA HEADQUARTERS

Dick Adkins’s secretary buzzed him a few minutes before seven as he was getting ready to call for his driver to take him home. Howard McCann was waiting in the outer office. For just a moment Adkins was a little irritated that his deputy director of operations had taken so long to answer the summons from earlier this afternoon, but everyone in the building had been running at top speed ever since Rencke’s lavender warning.