Dance with the Dragon (5 page)

“What’s he doing in Mexico?”

“Bingo,” Rencke said, clapping his hands. “You just asked the sixty-four-dollar question. We don’t know. In fact, we didn’t even have a clue until two weeks ago when Louis Updegraf, one of our guys, was found shot to death up in Chihuahua. Apparently he’d been trying to burn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy.”

“What was he doing in Chihuahua?”

“No one knew. Not even the station chief. At least not until a couple of days ago, which is when we were able to connect General Liu to the situation. And it’s got Dick plenty worried, ya know. He doesn’t know what to put in the NIE or how to brief the president.” The NIE, or National Intelligence Estimate, and a weekly document called the Watch Report were generated by the CIA and the other thirteen intelligence agencies in Washington under the umbrella of the national director of intelligence. Both were distributed to the National Security Council, and outlined every place on earth where fighting was taking place, and attempted to identify and warn about every threat that the U.S. was facing. “Whatever Liu is up to in Mexico has gotten one of our people killed, and it’s not going to get any better unless somebody stops it. We need to know what he’s doing before it bites us.”

“I’m retired, Otto,” McGarvey said.

“All Dick wants is for you to listen to someone,” Rencke said. He nodded toward Longboat Key. “And she’s right over there.”

SEVEN

SARASOTA

Traffic on the South Trail was heavy especially when they reached the turn for the Ringling Bridge over the ICW. It wasn’t quite the start of the tourist season, but plenty of locals spent their weekends playing on the islands and having lunch on St. Armand’s Circle.

Rencke was driving a Toyota van with deeply tinted windows that he’d rented at the airport when he’d arrived last night. “It was too late to call you,” he said. “Anyway, we wanted to get settled in first.”

McGarvey used his cell phone to call his wife. She answered on the first ring.

“Tell me that you’re taking me to lunch and I’ll be a happy camper.”

“No,” McGarvey told her. “But listen to me, Katy. They don’t want me back in the field. Dick just wants me to talk to someone this morning. Give him my opinion.”

“About what?”

McGarvey let it hang for a moment. “I’ll call as soon as I can.”

“Today? Tomorrow? Next week?” she asked. She was brittle. “Any clue on that score you’d care to give? Or should I just expect you when you walk through the door?”

“Today,” he said. “Look, I’m okay. I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’ve almost always been worried about you,” she said. “Didn’t you know? You tend to attract the bad guys like flies to honey. I’ve seen you in action, remember?”

“It’ll be fine, Katy. Trust me.”

“Right,” she said, and broke the connection.

McGarvey thought about calling her back, but then shut off his cell phone and put it in his pocket.

“Ms. M okay?” Rencke asked.

“She doesn’t trust us.”

Rencke had to laugh. “I don’t blame her.”

Driving over the high bridge onto the chain of barrier islands that began with Bird Key and ended twenty-five miles north on Anna Maria Island in Tampa Bay was like coming from the real world into a cross between a South Seas paradise and a sophisticated European setting of palm trees, sidewalk cafés, and beaches. The islands had always reminded McGarvey of France’s Côte d’Azur on the Mediterranean.

“Who’re you taking me to see?” McGarvey asked.

“Her name is Shahrzad Shadmand. She’s an Iranian belly dancer who worked in one of the clubs in Mexico City.”

They made it through the traffic around St. Armand’s Circle, which was a trendy area of shopping and sidewalk cafés much like Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and headed north to the New Pass Bridge and Longboat Key. McGarvey felt a twinge of guilt because of his missed lunch date with his wife, but his unsettled feeling had spiked the moment Rencke had shown up, and had continued to grow driving out to the islands.

“Is she Iranian intelligence?” McGarvey asked.

Rencke gave him a sidelong glance. “We don’t think so. She’s been freaked practically out of her skull, and she’d have to be pretty good to fake that. Anyway, she’s a walk-in, and that type usually doesn’t do things that way.” A walk-in was someone who showed up out of the blue at a U.S. embassy or consulate somewhere with information, usually in trade for something, most often money or a visa to the U.S., or both.

“Does she know who killed Updegraf? And why?”

“It’s more complicated than that, Mac,” Rencke said. “You just gotta hear her out.” He shook his head. “Gil Perry, the station chief, is convinced she’s legitimate. In fact he brought her up here on Dick’s okay
without
letting McCann know anything about it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This girl came to the embassy four days ago. Said she wanted to talk to Perry, by name. Anyway, after all the delays and security hassles—you know, there’s no one by that name here—Perry finally agrees to see her. After one hour he’s impressed enough to call the seventh floor direct ’cause he’s scared shitless and he doesn’t know who to trust.”

“Evidently Dick agreed with him,” McGarvey said. “What does she want?”

“That’s just it, she hasn’t asked for anything except for you.”

McGarvey was startled. “Me?”

“Yup. She told Perry just enough to prove that she was legitimate, and convince him that we’re facing a bigger problem with the Chinese than we can possibly imagine, but she wouldn’t say anything else to anyone except you.”

“I’ve never heard of her,” McGavey said.

“Well she’s heard of you,” Rencke replied. “And you’re going to see her face-to-face in about five minutes.”

EIGHT

LONGBOAT KEY

Two thirds of the way up the long, narrow island, Rencke pulled off the road and stopped at a security gate, where he entered a code on the keypad. From the entry the roofline of a very large house was just visible right on the beach, but not much else was, because of the dense foliage.

“This is Tommy Doyle’s place,” McGarvey said as the gate swung open. Until his retirement a couple of years ago Doyle had been the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence. He’d come from East Coast money, and with his inheritance and shrewd investments over the years he was a multimillionaire. McGarvey had had almost no contact with him after they retired. “Is Tommy in on this?” he asked.

“No. He’s over in Baghdad doing some consulting work. Said we could use his house for as long as we needed it.” Rencke glanced over at McGarvey. “We wanted to make it as convenient as possible for you.”

“Thanks.”

They drove through the gate and down a long driveway that seemed as if it had been hacked out of a very carefully tended jungle. Doyle, like a lot of men who’d held big jobs within the intelligence community, valued his privacy above almost everything else.

The lane opened up to a large area at the sweeping front entrance of the three-story glass, concrete, and massive-wood-beamed mansion, which McGarvey figured had to be at least fifteen thousand square feet. Tennis courts were off to the left next to an Olympic-size pool with a high diving platform. An eight-car garage was off in the trees to the left near what was probably a three- or four-bedroom guesthouse. Doyle had done very well for himself.

“Who’s here besides the woman?” McGarvey asked.

“Gil Perry brought her up, along with a babysitter.”

“Any house staff?”

“A gardener, a cook, and husband-and-wife caretakers,” Rencke said, pulling up in front of the house. “She cleans the place and he’s the handyman. Tommy vouches for them.”

“What I don’t get is why some woman in Mexico City asked to talk to me by name,” McGarvey said. “Did you do a background check on her to see if there was ever any connection between us?”

“Nada,” Rencke said. “She left Iran a few years ago to be on her own because, she says, it’s no place for a modern woman.”

“Are we sure she’s not a double?” McGarvey asked. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security was among the top agencies in the world, and it had tendrils on every continent.

“Not so far as I could find out,” Rencke said, shutting off the van’s engine. “But if she is, she’s a lot better than I think she is. I only got to talk to her for a few minutes last night, but I got the impression that she’s just a scared kid, and we’re her last resort.”

“How old is she?”

“She says twenty-five, but her birth records in Tehran say thirty.”

McGarvey nodded. “There’s one lie anyway.”

“Just listen to her, Mac, that’s all,” Rencke said. “We gotta find out what the Chinese are doing down there, and if she has some of the answers maybe you can get them from her.”

They got out of the van and went up the broad steps to a wide veranda, planked with teak. “Before you meet her, Gil wants to have a few words with you. Give you some background.”

“What’s your take on him?”

“He doesn’t get along with McCann,” Rencke said. “Of course nobody does, but beyond that his file is clean. He’s got ambition. Wants to be DDCI some day. Says he’s a spy, pure and simple. No messy politics for him.”

“God save us from
pure
spies, whatever they are,” McGarvey said.

“Amen.”

The CIA babysitter, a pretty young woman named Toni Dronchi, let them in and directed them through the soaring stair hall back to the great room, which looked out over the Gulf of Mexico. “Your daughter Liz and I are friends, Mr. Director,” she told McGarvey. “I’m getting married in a couple of months and she and Todd are going to stand up for us.”

“Next time I talk to her I’ll tell her I saw you,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your impression of your guest?”

“I think I should feel sorry for her, but she’s been doing a fair amount of lying. I don’t know if it’s because she’s scared or she doesn’t trust anybody, or she’s just confused, but she’s told some really stupid whoppers.”

McGarvey had to smile. “For instance?”

“She says she doesn’t speak Spanish, but she has a Mexican driver’s license, and when we picked her up she had a copy of
La Crónica de Hoy
in her carry-on bag. That’s Mexico City’s main newspaper. I asked how long ago she’d left Iran, and she told me she’d been gone only a few months. But she told Mr. Perry that she’d left Iran four years ago. And that’s just some of it.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” McGarvey said.

“Any idea how long we’ll be on this assignment, sir?”

“I guess that’ll be up to Gil Perry,” McGarvey said. “I’m only here to find out what the woman has to say.”

“I’ll go up and get her,” Toni said, and left.

Perry, dressed in a white linen suit with a dark shirt and tie, despite the warm weather, came bounding into the great room right behind them from the stair hall. “By God, am I glad to meet you, Mr. McGarvey,” he said effusively. “Maybe we can finally get this nasty mystery resolved and get back to business.”

They shook hands, and McGarvey got the impression that Perry was a politician looking for votes, not a station chief who’d lost a man and whose operation was apparently in shambles.

“I’m just here to listen.”

“Well, she mentioned you by name, so I should hope so,” Perry said. “I mean, we can use the help.” He glanced at Rencke with obvious distaste. “Have you been briefed?”

“Only that one of your people trying to burn a Chinese code clerk was found shot to death nine hundred miles north of Mexico City, and that this girl you want me to meet probably knows something about it.”

“There’s a lot more,” Perry said.

“I’m sure there is. Probably even more than you know yet, and probably more than this dancer will want to admit. But she does want something. She didn’t walk into the embassy with our names on her lips for a reward. Or has she asked for money?”

Perry shook his head, and McGarvey could almost see the man’s thoughts generating in his brain and slowly making their way past his eyes to his lips. Plodders had always driven McGarvey nuts. He wanted to finish their sentences for them. But he could also see something else in Perry’s face. The man might be slow, but he was a thinker. Right now he was figuring the angles, whatever they might be, that would help advance his career out of this apparent mess.

“She’s asked for nothing, except you. She keeps telling me that you’re the only one she’ll talk to. You’re the only one who’ll understand.” Perry shook his head again. “Do you two know each other from somewhere?”

“Never heard of her.”

“If you want, I’ll brief you before we begin.”

McGarvey glanced over Perry’s shoulder as Toni Dronchi appeared with a young, slightly built, exotic woman with a beautiful tawny complexion, very high delicate cheekbones, and devastatingly foreign dark eyes of a perfect almond shape, all framed by long, flowing black hair that seemed to shimmer with a light all its own. She was dressed in sandals, a long white peasant skirt, and a lace, off-the-shoulder white blouse, and wore a gold chain around her tiny neck.

“You’re too late,” McGarvey said.

Perry turned around, vexed. “We were having a conversation here,” he told Toni.

“Sorry, sir, but I thought Mr. McGarvey would want to get on with it as quickly as possible.”

“That’s all right,” McGarvey said before Perry could order the girl to be taken away. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

The girl’s eyes met McGarvey’s, and the slight smile that had formed on her full, rich mouth slowly died and she looked away. For just a moment he’d seen something there, some hint of recognition followed by a flash of fear, as if she had been taught to be an animal trainer, and the first time she entered the cage she realized that she might just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Well, for goodness’ sake, you wanted to talk to him, and we’ve brought you all this way,” Perry shrilled. “Shahrzad Shadmand, this is Kirk McGarvey. So why don’t we all get to it and begin.”

NINE

LONGBOAT KEY

It was nearly eleven o’clock by the time they’d all settled down around a teak table beneath a green market umbrella on the expansive back veranda that looked out across a white sand beach to the swimming-pool blue of the Gulf. McGarvey and Rencke sat across from Perry and Shahrzad, as if they were on opposing teams. The woman from the house staff had brought them a large pitcher of sangria and cold glasses, and then she and Toni had withdrawn. Perry and especially the girl seemed nervous.