Without Honor - 01

by David Hagberg

  The service is like a narcotic, someone once told him. Years ago it had been, and although he remembered the effect the words had had on him, for the life of him he could not remember who told them to him.

  No matter. Perhaps it was time for another fix. But Christ, it was … what? Juvenile?

  He turned back. “What exactly is it you want me to do for you, John?”

  “Go after Yarnell. Prove that he worked for the Russians.”

  “Is it so important … all those years ago …?”

  “Yarnell had lunch with the president last week. He was at a party at the German embassy with Donald Powers a couple of days ago.”

  “You think he’s still active, then?”

  “I don’t see any reason for him not to be.”

  McGarvey thought about that for a moment. This was different now. He glanced toward the doorway. They had pulled Basulto out of here before coming up with this new tack.

  “How about the Russian … Baranov?”

  “We don’t know where he is, for sure. Probably Moscow, but he could be anywhere.”

  “As Yarnell’s case officer?”

  Trotter shrugged. But there was something in his eyes. Something that was causing him a lot of trouble.

  “What is it, John? You want me to return to the States and find out if Yarnell is still active? Then what?”

  Trotter turned away. He poured himself a stiff cognac, and drained the glass. When he looked back, his lower lip was trembling.

  “There can’t be a trial, Kirk,” Trotter said. “It would be ten thousand times worse than Watergate. It would tear the country apart. The CIA would go down the tubes, and even the president would suffer. We’d be years recuperating. Perhaps we’d never fully recover.”

  “Then what, John? What’s the alternative? Send him packing to Moscow? Why not go to the president with this?”

  “That’s the entire point, isn’t it? It’s why we decided to come to you.”

  “What am I missing here?”

  “Yarnell almost certainly suspects he’s being investigated.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We’ve had a tail on him. Routine surveillance. Twice he’s ditched them. Naturally we had to back off.”

  “You told me no one else was in on this business except you and Day.”

  “I have my leg men, of course. I can’t work in a vacuum. It was to be a routine background investigation.”

  “You botched it, and now you want me to pick up the pieces.”

  “You’re the unknown element.”

  “Yarnell has already gone to Powers and to the president with this?”

  Trotter nodded glumly. “I’m sure he hasn’t come right out and said he was being investigated as a spy. But he’s almost certainly worked himself in solid with them. He’ll begin digging in now. But, Kirk, listen to me, the man has his Achilles’ heel. He has a weak side.”

  “Don’t we all,” McGarvey muttered.

  “Yarnell was married back in the late fifties to a girl in Mexico. Very young, very pretty.”

  “I thought he was a bachelor.”

  “They divorced a long time ago. She’s living in New York City these days. Her name is Evita Perez. She has a club. In SoHo, I think.”

  “Christ,” McGarvey said softly.

  Trotter suddenly turned away again. “We’re asking a lot of you, Kirk. I know it; Leonard knows it.”

  The house grew very quiet. It was all coming to McGarvey now, and he felt very fragile, as if he were a delicate crystal vase that would shatter at the slightest vibration.

  “There cannot be a trial; you can’t or won’t go to the president with this; he’s Powers’s friend; you’re not sure of the bureau. So what, we send him back to Moscow? Is that it, John?”

  Trotter shook his head.

  “No, it would be another Kim Philby. They’d crow about it for years. The effect would be worse than a trial, wouldn’t it?”

  A lot of thoughts came tumbling, one over the other, into McGarvey’s head. The business in Chile was uppermost in his mind. It was still an active file. He could still be prosecuted for murder. Were they holding that over him?

  “We’re talking about murder, here, John, aren’t we? About the assassination of a former U.S. senator, one of the most influential men in Washington.”

  Trotter held himself very still.

  “Does Leonard Day know about this? Has he approved this plan?”

  “We didn’t talk about it … not in so many words.”

  “But the implication was there between you, goddamnit, wasn’t it?”

  Trotter nodded.

  God, he couldn’t believe any of this. “What if I do kill him, John? What then? Where would that leave me? No official sanction from the agency, certainly none from the bureau or Justice. We just don’t do those sorts of things, do we? What happens if I’m caught?” He couldn’t believe any of this.

  “You would have Leonard’s personal help, as well as mine, all the way.”

  “You would take the fall with me if I was arrested?” McGarvey said. “Turn around, for Christ’s sake, and look at me!”

  Trotter turned. He was pale. Sweat lined his brow and his upper lip. “I’ve thought the possibility through. Believe me, I have. If that were to happen, we would go to Powers and to the president and lay it out for them piece by piece. Make them understand.”

  “If you are willing to do that in extremis, why not now? Go to them now!”

  “We’re not sure!” Trotter cried.

  “I’m to make sure, first, is that it? I’m to suck after his ex-wife, dig through his dirty laundry. I’m to make sure and then kill the bastard. No trial. Nothing!” McGarvey wanted very much to hit something.

  “We didn’t know who else to turn to,” Trotter said miserably.

  “American justice has broken down,” McGarvey said quietly. “Will I get a medal when it’s over? Or will I be the next embarrassment? You have someone in the wings to put a bullet in the back of my head?”

  Trotter’s eyes went wide. “Good God, what do you take us for, Kirk?”

  “We’ve already established that, John. Now it’s just a question of degree. Nothing more.”

  The young girl with the sommersprossen drove McGarvey back up to Lausanne in the blue van while Trotter remained behind to close down the house. She knew nothing of the real reason for the Swiss trip or McGarvey’s part in it, and he was of no mind to enlighten her. Instead he sank down within his own dark thoughts, quite oblivious to the lovely scenery, unaware that the day had become nice.

  He could run. Paris. London, perhaps. Maybe the coast of Spain, or the Greek isles. But then, in the end, he would just be running away from himself. And that was impossible, wasn’t it?

  Like an old football injury, his sudden call to arms had come to him with a hurtful intensity. He became aware of his old wounds, both mental and physical; the cold fear that clutched at his gut whenever he was in the field rising strong.

  Once a spy always a spy? But God in heaven he couldn’t think of himself as a murderer. Not that. When they were married Kathleen used to tell him: “Plunge forward, it’s the only direction.” But she never had an inkling of exactly what it was that bothered him.

  He had a very sharp vision of the man he killed in Chile. He had been close enough to see the look of fear in the general’s face. The abject terror in the man’s eyes. It was a vision that haunted him and would continue to haunt him for the rest of his life.

  There had been others, too. Not many. Not in the numbers a combat soldier would experience, but for him they were a dark, dreadful legion.

  “It is war,” Alvin Stewart had told him in the old days. “Our survival or theirs. Simple.”

  War, yes. But it wasn’t simple.

  There are a million crossroads in our lives. At each intersection we have a choice that will forever determine the rest of our existence. How many wrong paths had he taken? Kathleen hadn’t understood, n
either had his sister, yet they both instinctively understood fear and how it worked its changes. They were experts at it, while it was his master.

  Trotter had given him a Washington telephone number. Nothing else. It was the beginning.

  9

  The nondescript gray Mercedes 240D clattered up the switchback above the lake and finally pulled over just before the long flight of stairs that connected the terraced roadways. Marta Fredricks, wearing a white sweater, dark slacks, and a gray raincoat, sat on the passenger side. She felt as if she had been kicked in the gut by a friend; the pain was there but it was hard to believe.

  Swiss Federal Police Supervisor Johann Mueller switched off the engine and turned to her. He was like a father to Marta. She had worked for him even before this assignment.

  “He is a dangerous man, Mati,” Mueller said.

  Marta looked up sharply, almost resentful that he was using that name … now. “If he leaves Switzerland?”

  “Then that would be the end of it as far as concerns us. But there are no guarantees. You knew that from the beginning. From the very beginning.”

  She turned away.

  Mueller reached across her and, with his fingertips at her chin, gently turned her face back to him. “Listen to me now, young lady. If your father were alive, he would be proud of you.”

  “But it hurts,” she cried.

  “Yes, oh yes, I am sure it does. But do you think you are the only one who has ever made a sacrifice for Switzerland? I could tell you …”

  She tossed her head and turned away from him again. The day had turned lovely, though the wind off the lake was still very cold. Oh, Kirk, she cried inside. She’d always known it would come. Eventually. But, God, she had not counted on the pain. Nothing at the school in Worb, outside of Bern, had prepared her for this. Not the confidence course. Not the tradecraft lectures, certainly nothing to do with the law, Swiss or international, had forewarned of this.

  The surveillance had been spotted two days ago. Then this morning Kirk had been run down off the square. They had followed him to a house about an hour south.

  He had taken his gun. It was the one damning bit of evidence against him.

  “Men of his ilk don’t rush for their guns unless they mean to use them,” Mueller had said.

  But she had been so proud of him, until his recent bout of restlessness. Liese had been trying to get him into bed for the past year and a half without results. Only just lately she had come to think … to dream that he loved her. That she could tell him everything and that they could run. But to where?

  Marta could feel her eyes filling. It was still another thing they had not prepared her for at Worb. Big girls don’t cry, that was how it went in the song, wasn’t it?

  “You either believe in your heritage or you don’t,” Mueller was saying gently.

  He was like a Jew with his guilt. But she knew what was coming next.

  “It should never have gone on this long. I should never have let you talk me into continuing. I should have seen the signs.” Mueller sighed, almost theatrically, although Marta knew it was for real. “If you can’t do this, tell me. Other arrangements will be made.”

  A sudden panic rose in her breast. She spun around. “No!” she cried. “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do. Perhaps more than you want me to. But he must be neutralized. We cannot have an operation going on under our noses. He has a gun. He has been given his brief, apparently, and we must—Marta, I have to emphasize must—consider him a danger to Swiss law and order. To our peace.”

  If he meant by “a danger” that he was angry, then yes. Angry and dangerous. Kirk was all that and more. But dangerous to the precious Swiss law and order? No, she could not believe that, although there had definitely been something bothering him lately.

  There had been a time, she thought, when they spent most of their waking hours together in bed. In fact, they used to share a joke: Why rent an apartment when all they needed is their bed and a closet large enough for their clothes? Then they’d laugh. Who needed clothes?

  In the summer when it got warm, they wouldn’t stop. Sometimes they’d crawl out of bed and look back at the outlines their bodies had left in sweat on the sheets after hours of lovemaking.

  But it wasn’t all sex, was it? Liese with her antics proved that. She certainly was a beautiful and desirable young woman, but Kirk had never once even hinted that he might want to take her up on her propositions.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Mueller said sympathetically. “But you’re a professional.”

  A young couple came up the stairway hand-in-hand and hiked off in the opposite direction. Marta watched them until they disappeared around the corner. Then she glanced up at the apartment she had shared with Kirk for nearly five years.

  An entire period in her life was coming to an end now, and she didn’t know if she was going to have the courage to see it through.

  Mueller had suggested someone else handle it. Kirk could be arrested and then deported back to the States. But in his present state of mind, that would be a very dangerous operation. There was no telling what he might do. Marta was convinced that he would never surrender. He would run. She could see, in her mind’s eye, what that might lead to. In that, at least, he was a danger to Swiss law and order.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, looking back.

  Mueller stared at her for a long time. “I’ll be here for you,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It’s all right, Johann. I can handle it.”

  “You’ll need backup. I insist on it.”

  “No,” she screeched. “Don’t you understand what I am saying to you?”

  “What are you saying to me?” Mueller asked softly.

  “If he leaves Switzerland then it is over. You agreed to that.”

  “If his brief includes an operation here … ?”

  “If he leaves Switzerland,” she insisted.

  “If he goes without a fuss, then there will be no problem as far as I am concerned.”

  “Very well,” Marta said. She rubbed her eyes and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  Mueller reached in his pocket and withdrew a pistol. It was a snub-nosed .38 Smith & Wesson. He held it out to her, but she shrank away from it.

  “Whatever you think or feel, Mati, we consider him dangerous. You will not go to him unarmed. I simply will not allow it.”

  “Do you honestly think I could use it against him?” she said, aghast.

  “If your survival depended on it.”

  “What in God’s name do you think he is?”

  “We know that, Mati. Listen to me … he is an assassin.”

  “Was!” she cried. “He quit. He dropped out. He’s done with it. It’s over for him.”

  “Then why did he run for his gun this morning?”

  Oh, Kirk, she cried again inside. She looked from Mueller’s eyes to the gun and back again. He did not waver. She believed him. At last she reached out, took the weapon, and stuffed it in her purse.

  “I want you away from here,” she said. “Do that much for me. If he’s spooked it might get difficult even for me.”

  Mueller looked at her critically. He nodded. “We’ll listen on the monitors. But, Mati, at the first hint of trouble we’re coming in.”

  Marta got out of the car and walked up the street without looking back. Before she got to the apartment she heard the Mercedes start up, turn around, and drive off. Only then did she look back. The street was empty.

  McGarvey stood at the end of the Avenue d’Ouchy, looking up toward the Place Saint-Francois, only now the familiar scene seemed somehow strange to him. Disjointed. Alien. It could have been the first time he had ever been to this city, though he watched the traffic with a practiced eye. It was all coming back to him; the precautions and the adrenaline that gave him an edge, the tradecraft. It was as if he had never left the service. But there was nothing untoward going on here. He had expected police, perhaps some of Trotte
r’s team to make sure he did the right thing. Marta might have sent someone, he told himself as he crossed with the light and headed up to the bookstore. But if they were here, watching, they were well hidden. If that were the case, it would not matter what he did or didn’t do.

  Darby Yarnell, according to the Cuban slimeball, had been and possibly still was a spy for the Soviet Union. He had murdered a CIA agent back in the sixties. He had been married to a young Mexican woman. And his Soviet case officer was a brilliant star named Valentin Illen Baranov.

  Yarnell’s intelligence product was said to be fantastic.

  It all fit, according to Trotter. Leonard Day was on his side. The big guns were lined up. There was enough evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, to make at least a prima facie argument. But there were so goddamned many holes.

  McGarvey continued around the square, an almost preternatural awareness coming to him. A catalog developed in his mind of cars and vans and trucks; of an antenna half-bent, a Mercedes limousine, a window down, two kids on motorbikes, a bus. No repeats, no passenger switches, no studiously indifferent faces, no dark, mysterious figures.

  At the corner he crossed with traffic and walked back to the bookstore. Through the front windows he could see Füelm speaking with an older, white-haired man. Two women were in the art section, browsing among the Degas and Rembrandt books, and a stocky, youngish woman clutched a thin book to her breasts as if it were a baby.

  Inside, Fuelm looked up. “Ah, Kirk. Are you back now, for the day?”

  “Only just for a moment. Can you close up this afternoon?”

  “Of course,” Füelm said after the briefest of hesitations.

  McGarvey took the spiral stairs up to his office and stopped a moment just inside the door to let his eyes roam critically around the room. Nothing had been touched since he had been here this morning. No one had come up searching. Looking.