Without Honor - 01

by David Hagberg

  If you’re not careful, you’ll think that you can see and understand everything. Every car, every truck or bus, every person standing on a street corner, every window up or down, every bit of trash lying in an alley, every chalk mark on every fence post. You can’t, of course, know everything. Drive yourself crazy trying to. So you damned well better learn to be selective if you want to survive.

  He crossed with the light at 31st Street and continued up to 32nd, where he turned away from the park and started past Scott Place, on which Yarnell’s citadel was situated. There was a smell of flowers and cut grass and trees from the park, made more noticeable now that he was away from it. This was definitely not the lower end of Georgetown’s socioeconomic scale. Even the street was swept and washed, the cars parked along it all polished, chrome gleaming.

  A second, narrower lane led left off Scott Place. McGarvey stopped a moment with his foot up on a fire hydrant to tie his shoelaces. Yarnell’s home was behind a tall brick wall, so that the first floor windows couldn’t be seen. It was a large, three-story European-looking house with several chimneys, dormers across the front, and a steeply pitched roof. It sat at an angle to 32nd Street. A window in what would probably be the attic was open. It caught McGarvey’s eye. The room behind it was dark, but he got the curious impression that someone was there, watching. As he straightened up, he glanced over his shoulder, back the way he had come, following a line from the window back out to R Street. He looked up again. From that window an observer could see the entire neighborhood, north-to-south, along 32nd Street as well as both parks. It would be difficult if not nearly impossible to mount any sort of a serious surveillance operation, at least from this side. Assuming Yarnell had the usual equipment up there—microwave, audio dishes, infrared, electronic monitoring—this side would not provide a safe vantage point.

  A small Toyota Celica came out of the lane as McGarvey reached Q Street. He had to wait for it to pass before he could cross. He got a momentary glimpse of a good-looking young woman, with dark hair and an olive complexion, well dressed, alone. She had seemed very intent, as if she were in a big hurry to get someplace important. Again out of old habit he looked at the license plate. It was a D.C. tag. He memorized the number, murmuring a mnemonic as he crossed.

  Just around the corner, another narrow lane led back at an oblique angle toward the park. McGarvey stepped down the cobblestoned path, and within fifty feet he could see the back of Yarnell’s house, protected as in front by a tall brick wall. The twin of the front attic window was open, affording a view of Wisconsin Avenue and the other east-to-west approaches.

  Yarnell was paranoid, McGarvey told himself backing off. Paranoid men were wont to make mistakes. But more importantly, paranoid men in this business usually had something very concrete about which to feel paranoid. An Achilles’ heel, as Trotter had described Evita Perez. Yarnell had made a dreadful mistake marrying her. What other mistakes had he made? What mistakes might he be making right at this moment? The thought was intriguing.

  Once again on the corner, McGarvey could look down the narrow lane as well as down 32nd Street as they diverged. This one spot, and fifty feet or so up either leg of the angle, constituted a blind spot in Yarnell’s surveillance. It was not much, he decided, but it was something.

  He walked up to Wisconsin Avenue, which was busy with traffic, and got a taxi within a few minutes, telling the driver the Holiday Inn, which was less than ten blocks away.

  It was time for him to get to work now. If he was going to do this thing for Trotter and Day, he would need more information and he would have to start taking some precautions.

  McGarvey had lunch in his hotel, then went into town to do the sights. With the weather warming and the cherry blossoms starting to bloom, Washington was filling with tourists. Traffic was terrible, though it still wasn’t quite as bad as Lausanne in the summer. The cabbie left him off at the end of Bacon Drive between the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and the Lincoln Memorial. He dawdled for more than an hour looking at the long, polished black stone tablets on which were engraved the names of those who died in the Vietnam War, stopping and starting, hanging his head as if he were in deep sorrow … which in a way he was. It was impossible not to feel something standing in front of such an overwhelmingly tragic reminder of a world somehow gone wrong. As his heart overflowed, his motions naturally became erratic. Twice he thought he might have picked out someone. A pink sweater in the crowd. A torn field jacket across the walkway. But then they were gone, in opposite directions, one by bus, the other on foot. He strolled up to the Lincoln Memorial, where he circled the building with its thirty-six columns, then headed on foot at a brisk pace back up to Constitution Avenue.

  He was wearing his tweed sport coat, and a shirt and tie; Washington was warm after Switzerland, and he was sweating. He took a bus to Union Station, where he mingled with the crowds inside for a while; buying a newspaper at a stand, making a phone call to his room at the hotel, getting a cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup and drinking it while he read the newspaper as he had his shoes shined.

  It was nearly four in the afternoon by the time McGarvey emerged from the station. He was moving fast now. If anyone had tailed him to this point, he decided they were damned good. He hadn’t spotted a thing. But he had to give it one last chance. He took a cab out to National Airport on the river south of the Pentagon, rented a plain Chevrolet Caprice, and headed north along the parkway, sometimes going ten miles per hour faster than the flow of traffic, sometimes ten miles per hour slower.

  By five-thirty he was a long way up into the Maryland countryside, but he was finally satisfied that no one could possibly be behind him. Extraordinary lengths, they might say at the Farm in Williamsburg. But when your life depended on it, you’d go to any lengths … to the moon if need be.

  He turned and headed south again, back across the river into Virginia; Annendale Acres with its Pine Crest Golf Club, A&P Supermarkets, Ace Hardware, green rolling hills and curving streets with cute names along which were mile after mile of contemporary houses, some in brick, some with shake roofs, some with split-rail fences, but all of them depressingly neat and similar. The neighborhood was twenty years old, and showed it.

  It was dark by the time McGarvey finally parked across the street from a split-level ranch with attached garage and a lot of new trees and bushes. It had been a long time for him. Nothing much had changed. The garage door was up. Two cars were parked inside; one older and a little beat up, the other a new Ford station wagon. A basketball hoop and backboard were centered over the open door. The house was lit up. He went up the walk, hesitated a moment, then rang the doorbell. He could hear it chime inside. A dog barked. Someone shouted … one of the kids? And the porch light came on. A woman wearing blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, opened the door. Behind her, carpeted stairs led up to the living room and down to the finished basement.

  “Pat? It’s me. Kirk,” he said.

  She looked at him for a very long time, a range of emotions playing across her broad, pleasant features; surprise, disbelief, uncertainty and sadness, and then just a little fear.

  “Good Lord, where did you come from?” she asked softly.

  “Is Janos here?”

  She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook her head. “He’s out. They sent him up to New York … .”

  “Like the old days?”

  “Yeah, like the old days … .”

  A big shaggy dog appeared on the stairs from the basement, its tail wagging, Janos right behind it.

  “Pat? Who’s at the door?”

  “No one,” she said wryly, looking into McGarvey’s eyes.

  The dog sniffed at McGarvey’s shoes. He reached down and scratched behind the animal’s ears. Janos had stopped halfway up the stairs.

  “Hello, Janos,” McGarvey said. “Long time no see.”

  Janos Plónski, majordomo of all things recorded in the archives at the CIA’s Langley headquarte
rs, was a big, barrel-chested bear of a man with a face so ugly that even a mother would have a hard time warming up to him. When he was little he lost his hair to scarlet fever and one year later had a severe case of chicken pox that left permanent scars. He didn’t care, and his wife and two children, Barney and Elizabeth, all adored him. He was born in Owicim, forty miles west of Kraków, Poland, in 1935, and lived there through the war and concentration-camp days (Auschwitz was just outside of town), while his father collaborated with the Nazis. Just before the war’s end, his mother shot his father to death and managed to make her way completely across Europe, all the way to England, with her ten-year-old son in tow. She joined a Polish émigré group that during the war had fought Nazis and afterward fought Communists. By the time he was twenty, Janos had completed his college studies at Oxford (he was something of a hero because of his mother), immigrated to the United States, and joined the army as a translator and intelligence analyst. His career afterward was spectacular. He was dropped into Poland on at least half a dozen occasions; he did work in East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, and then he gave it all up when his young wife became pregnant with their first child.

  “Running the show in the basement may not be the most exciting job in the world, Kirk,” he once told McGarvey. “But it makes Pat happy and me, too. This way I can be at home in bed with her every night. And I like her cooking.”

  Janos pulled McGarvey inside, and they sat on stools in front of a long workbench in the basement. Pat brought them beers and then shooed the children away from the stairs, shutting the basement door. No one had asked him to stay for supper, though he could smell it cooking upstairs. Of course he was out, Janos was in. The association would have to be considered dangerous, no matter the closeness of the friendship.

  “So, Kirk, my old friend, what has brought you back? It was my understanding you were tucked away somewhere … Switzerland?”

  “Lausanne. I had a little bookstore there. An apartment. Not much.”

  Janos smiled appreciatively. He was very proud of what he had in the way not only of material possessions, but of his position with the Company as well as within the community.

  “You’re here for a visit? Is that it?”

  McGarvey looked at him for a moment. He was glad Pat had gone upstairs. She’d always been the tough negotiator. She was English. Cockney. She understood real poverty even more than Janos did. And she didn’t want to go back.

  “Not really,” McGarvey answered softly. He took a swallow of his beer. “I’m doing a job, actually.”

  Janos seemed pained. He sat forward. “For who, Kirk? Who are you working for? Not the Company; I would have heard.”

  The implication was obvious. By answering it, McGarvey would be dropping to Janos’s level. But then it had always been that way. Despite his experience, Janos was one of the most naive, direct men he’d ever known. Once, at a party, Pat confessed it was that very innocence that caused her to fall in love with him in the first place.

  “I came all this way, Janos, to be practically turned away at the door, and then to be insulted by my friend?”

  Janos sat back, his beer between his big paws. “I’m sorry, Kirk, really I am.”

  “How have Pat and the kids been?”

  “Very good, actually. The tops. We’re a happy family here, you know that. At least in that, nothing has changed.”

  “I thought about you a lot over the years.”

  Janos shrugged. “We missed you, too, Kirk. You and Kathleen.”

  “It’s over between us. You knew that.”

  Again Janos shrugged. “Yes, we both knew it. And it saddened us. But she is still Elizabeth’s godmother. Will she ever come back to us?”

  “I doubt it,” McGarvey said. He felt like hell. She was only in Alexandria. Christ, it seemed like a million miles.

  Janos sensed something of that. “Does she know you’re back?”

  “No,” McGarvey said softly. “How are things in the Company these days?”

  Janos brightened cautiously. “A lot better, Kirk. Believe me, under Reagan and Powers there is no comparison to the old days.”

  “Danielle is running ops now?”

  “He’s doing a good job, Kirk, even if he is a little mouse. We have a lot of respect now, you know. It didn’t used to be that way. Of course cross-Atlantic operations have shifted from Eastern Europe to the Eastern Med. But even I am getting used to it.”

  “You don’t miss the field?”

  Janos started to shake his head, but then he laughed self-deprecatingly. “I could never lie to you. Yes, of course I miss it. But only sometimes. It is like smoking, Kirk. When you first give it up, it’s hell. But then the urge finally begins to go away. It doesn’t ever disappear, sometimes it gets very bad, even for me, but by then you know that you have it licked. I’m just fine.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Sincerely, my friend.”

  Janos nodded solemnly. “You have come as a very large surprise.”

  “Pleasant, I hope.”

  “Pat is frightened.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Barney and Elizabeth will want to see you before you go.” Janos stopped. “Are you back in Washington for good?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  “No,” Janos said. “But you did not tell me who has engaged you. It is important.”

  “I can’t, Janos. It’s very sensitive,” McGarvey looked into his eyes. “But it’s legitimate. In this you must believe me.”

  “I do.”

  McGarvey leaned forward. “I’m going to need your help.”

  “My charter—”

  “I don’t care about your charter,” McGarvey interrupted sharply. Janos had to be handled this way sometimes. “Your mother never cared about charters. No one does. Just listen and then if your heart tells you no, you can walk away with a clear conscience.”

  “You are a friend, but I have my position here!” Janos said, raising his voice. “I signed the Secrets Act. For me it is a very important thing. They could easily send me back to England. And from there you know where—straight back to Poland.”

  “I signed the same act. And there is no way in hell they’d send you back to Poland unless you shot the president or something.”

  The color drained from Plónski’s face. “Don’t even joke like that, Kirk. For God’s sake.”

  “I need help, Janos. Some information out of your machines. Nothing terrible or bad. Nothing about anyone who makes any difference in this world.”

  Janos looked down at his beer. “We all make a difference. I don’t think you ever understood that.”

  “His name is Artime Basulto. Used to work for us in the very early days. Fifties, early sixties.”

  “Cuban?”

  “He worked out of Havana watching Batista. Got in on the Bay of Pigs thing, then dropped out.”

  “He’d be in the old records down in Lynchburg. Army. But what about him, Kirk? Is this an old vendetta? Are you writing a book?”

  “He’s been running cocaine out of Matanzas.”

  Janos brightened. “You’re working for the DEA?”

  “I didn’t say that,” McGarvey replied quickly.

  Janos chuckled. “You want his track?”

  “I want to know everything.”

  “Of course.”

  “No, Janos, listen to me. I want to know everything. From day one. What he did, how much he was paid for it, his day sheets, who he worked for. Everything, do you understand?”

  “I understand, Kirk,” Janos said, happy now that he believed McGarvey was working on a legitimate operation. “But this could have come through channels.”

  McGarvey put his beer down. He looked at his old friend. “Listen very carefully this time. Very closely. I want you to pay real close attention. This Cuban we’re talking about worked for the Company a long time ago. He might still be working for the Company.”

  Janos sat back as if he had been slapped
. “For who?”

  “I don’t know. But open inquiries might cause trouble, if you see what I mean.”

  “Oh, I understand,” Janos said.

  “I’m sure you do, Janos.”

  “I love this country, Kirk. I want you to know that.”

  12

  If Janos Plónski wasn’t particularly proud of his job as deputy director of records at Langley, he was at least proud of his own past record, and of the renewed strength the Company was enjoying since its emasculation by the Carter administration. Of the old hands he was one of the very few to have come out of that dark era unscathed. His wife, Pat, understood his moods of depression when he sometimes thought about the old friends who died in Eastern European operations, or were scalped like McGarvey. But Janos had kept his nose clean, hadn’t he? And that counted for something in this day and age. That, and his wife and children, for whom he would do anything, were his world.

  Janos had become the star of archives. Who better than an operations type—an ex-field hound —to understand the practical side of an intelligence service’s record-keeping system? The college grads were mainly interested in the historical perspective. The computer whiz kids tinkered with their machines. Administration had always been, and always would be, dedicated to following the financial trail of all operations … fitting each little budget line into the whole picture. And the bookworms, who were a class all to themselves, gave a damn only about order versus chaos. Janos knew better. The only reason for the existence of an archives in this business was to provide operations planners and field men with the accurate and timely information they needed when and as they needed it. No excuses about perspective or downed data links or administrative holds on jackets. Somewhere in the great bloody pile of facts and figures is the needed bit, get it now, Janos.