McGarvey turned away from the fire to look at the old man. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly gotten a little thin. “Baranov?” he asked.
Owens turned. “As a matter of fact, yes, that’s the one. A real sharp cookie. I suppose there was some kind of a vendetta between him and Yarnell for Mexico City. So Innes became a special case for both of them.”
19
It was nearly time to leave. There was little or no doubt in McGarvey’s mind what was coming next. Owens had come back to his chair so that he could be nearer to the fire. The wind in the flue sounded cold; it made the room a little smoky.
“Did you ever meet him? Baranov?” McGarvey asked.
“I saw photographs of him. Never actually came face-to-face with the man, though.”
“Had Yarnell?”
Owens looked up. “I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. I suppose he might have in Mexico City.”
“But not in Moscow?”
“I don’t know.”
“They were enemies though?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” Owens flared. “Of course they were enemies.”
“Yet the Russians let Yarnell come to Moscow. They knew he was a spy. They knew he had worked wonders in Mexico. They even knew that he had been involved in the Bay of Pigs, and in at least some measure with the Cuban missile crisis, yet they let him accept an assignment in Moscow.”
“That’s not so unusual. You should know that. If you have a good operative spotted, you can do one of two things; bar him from your country, in which case he might drop out of sight and then God only knows what mischief he’ll get himself into, or you can keep him out in the open, in plain sight, where you can watch him. KGB has a sophisticated setup in Moscow, as you might suspect.”
McGarvey offered a nod of understanding. “Yuri Suslev was brought to Moscow for the trade?”
“No. He was being held in Maryland. The plan was to bring him to Washington, where we would hand him over to representatives from the Soviet embassy. They could provide him with his transportation home. Meanwhile, KGB would be handing Sergeant Innes over to us on our front doorstep.”
“Where?”
“In front of our embassy.”
“During the day?”
“No. Everyone agreed that would be too risky. No one wanted any publicity about this. Suslev had been a damned effective spy—”
“Whose brains we had picked clean,” McGarvey interrupted.
“Naturally,” Owens said. “They picked Innes clean.”
“Of disinformation.”
“Suslev didn’t fall into our hands with any guarantees. It’s a game. You know about it.”
“What were the safety signals?” McGarvey asked. “I mean, how were we to know in Washington, for instance, when exactly to turn Suslev over to his people?”
“We set up a radio link. Actually it was pretty sophisticated. Both ends of Tchaikovsky Street within a block of the embassy had been blocked off all day for construction. The switch was to take place at four in the morning, our time. In Washington it was eight in the evening, so the switch took place in the parking lot of the Marriott Twin Bridges. Our people brought Suslev over by car, and the Russians brought Innes to us the same way. The embassies were in communication with the drivers and bodyguards in both places and with each other on trans-Atlantic links.”
“Yarnell was in on the switch? I mean, he was actually down there on the street in front of our embassy?”
“Yes,” Owens said. “Our people got out of the car with Suslev, and the message was radioed to us and to the Russians on Tchaikovsky Street. Two of them got out of their limo with Innes between them. I was watching through binoculars. The sergeant looked pretty rough. He’d apparently had a hard time of it.”
“Drugged?”
“As it turns out, yes. At the time it was hard to tell at that distance and in that light, but he didn’t look like himself. He looked as if he had aged a couple of hundred years.”
“Then what?” McGarvey asked, envisioning the early morning scene.
“We let Suslev go. Our people simply got back into their car, and Suslev started to walk toward his people. Again a radio message was sent, and Sergeant Innes’s guards climbed back into their car. Innes just stood there for the longest time. I still remember it. ‘Come on, kid,’ I said out loud. I thought one of us was going to have to go to him and help him back. But I think one of the Russians said something to him, because he looked back and a moment later started for us.”
“What about Yarnell?”
“He got out of the car on the opposite side from me so I didn’t really see what he was doing. Not until it was too late. I got out when the sergeant was about halfway, and as soon as he saw me, he stopped. ‘Sergeant Innes,’ I called to him. ‘Barry,’ I said. ‘Come on. We’re waiting for you.’ But he just stood there. Close up he looked like a zombie. He was dirty, bruised. I remember thinking that we were probably giving them Suslev in a hell of a lot better condition.”
“Then?” McGarvey prompted.
“Innes turned around and started back, Darby stepped around from the side of the car and fired four shots, every one of them hitting the kid in the back, one of them taking off half his head. And that was the end of that. The Russians turned around in the middle of the street and drove off, leaving us to pick up the pieces.”
“Did he give you any explanation?”
Owens looked away from the fire. “Darby? None was needed. It was obviously a double cross. The kid had lured us into exchanging him for Suslev, and once he figured Suslev was safe, he tried to make it back to his pals. I didn’t agree with how it had been set up, but Darby did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Operation Hellgate absolutely depended on it. You have to realize that we gave Innes a lot of important bogus material, along with the good. Material we wanted the Russians to swallow. Innes had to be legitimized. And he was.”
What would you have done under the circumstances? Owens wanted to know, but McGarvey had no comment. He was listening to the wind, to the sound of the crackling fire, to the sounds of the house and the surf on the beach; and he was listening to some inner voice that was telling him to proceed with care. There was something else here. Something else was going on.
When they stepped out it was cold on the porch. The clouds had come and rain was beginning to fall in fits and starts. Lightning flashed in the distance out to sea. It wouldn’t be long, McGarvey figured, before the full brunt of the storm came ashore. He had called a cab. It would be along soon. He didn’t want to hold the old man out here very long. He had gotten most of what he needed in any event. There were only a couple of things he was still curious about. Among them, Owens’s attitude at the beginning of their conversation.
“I’m a little confused.”
“Aren’t we all, McGarvey, aren’t we all?”
“When we started, you said that Yarnell was too big for his britches. You asked me what the sonofabitch had done.”
“He could have killed your Roger Harris. But that’s a long time ago. Could have is a whole hell of a long ways from did.”
“You spoke of Yarnell as your friend.”
Owens had been looking down at the waves. He turned to McGarvey. “Let me put it this way, I had a lot of admiration for the man. It started out at nearly one hundred percent, but as time went on it became less and less. Sort of got eaten away, if you know what I mean.”
“Because of how he treated his wife?”
“That and some other things. Little day-to-day piss ant things that didn’t amount to a hill of beans by themselves but taken together were arrogant. The company he kept, the presumptions he made going in and out of everyone’s lives and work.”
“And then Moscow?”
“Yeah,” Owens said, nodding. “Then Moscow. Hellgate had all the numbers, you know, all the right moves, all the right results.”
“But it was too expensive for your tastes,” McGarvey put in, takin
g a guess. He’d hit the mark. He saw it in Owens’s eyes.
“Sergeant Innes was just a young kid who had gotten himself off the track somehow.”
McGarvey thought it was very likely that Sergeant Innes had been completely innocent. He had been nothing more than Yarnell’s dupe, a stooge whom Yarnell had used to pass along real information to his own Soviet control officer, Baranov. And when the operation was over with, he had gunned the kid down.
“He should have been sent home,” McGarvey suggested.
“He shouldn’t have been killed. It didn’t have to get to that point,” Owens said. But there was even more that bothered him. “It was the look on his face,” he said, turning away, unable for the moment to face McGarvey.
“Innes? I thought you said he was walking away from you when he got shot.”
“I’m talking about Darby. The look on his face. I was just across the hood of the car from him. The light was right. I could see everything.” Owens hesitated even then. He shook his head again. “Darby enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed killing the kid. The sonofabitch was smiling. He looked at me and he was proud. I didn’t know him, finally. I just didn’t know him any longer.”
The telephone rang in the house. Owens looked over his shoulder.
“I won’t keep you, Mr. Owens,” McGarvey said. “Thank you for your help.”
The phone rang again.
“I hope it was a help,” Owens said.
“What happened after that? After Yarnell went home and you finally went back to the States?”
“Darby got out of the agency. Became a U.S. Senator.”
The telephone rang a third time.
“Did you and he have any contact afterward?”
“None.”
“Never?”
“Come to think of it, I did run into him once, several years later …” The phone rang a fourth time. “Hang on,” he said, and he hurried back into the house.
McGarvey heard him catch it on the fifth ring, and he could hear him talking, though he could not hear what was being said. A couple of seconds later Owens was back.
“Must have been a wrong number,” he said, irritated. “I was having lunch at the Rive Gauche on Wisconsin Avenue when Darby walked in with Anne Sutton on his arm. God, what a vision. She was more beautiful in person than on the screen. Stopped the place dead.”
“The movie actress?”
“Marilyn Monroe’s pal. One of the crowd that hung around the Kennedy fringes, at least that’s what I heard. He spotted me and came over to my table, introduced her, and told me that I was looking good.”
“Was he?”
“Like a million bucks. He was tan, and this was in the middle of winter, so I figured he and the Sutton woman had been off somewhere. Probably the Caribbean.”
“Seen him since?”
“Not in person,” Owens said, regretfully. “On the television, in the newspapers. But do you think you can prove he killed this Roger Harris in Cuba? Prove it so that it’ll stick?”
McGarvey shrugged.
“Are you going to kill him, McGarvey? Is that why you came to me? For ammunition?”
The cab came down the road and beeped its horn twice. It was the same one as before. McGarvey could see the old driver waiting impatiently.
He smiled, and offered his hand. Owens took it. “Thank you for your help.”
“Just be careful, McGarvey. I’m telling you. Yarnell was a sharp operator. I don’t think anything has happened to change anything. On the contrary, he’s probably a lot wiser and sharper, and from what I hear out here he still surrounds himself with a mob wherever he goes.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep it in mind,” McGarvey said. He stepped down off the porch into the wind, bent low, and hurried up to the waiting cab. Before he got in he looked back, but Owens was gone. A moment later sparks came out of the stone chimney.
Because it was the off-season, the nearest comfortable motel was a Best Western at Riverhead, nearly twenty-five miles down the island. The evening flights had been canceled and in the end McGarvey hadn’t felt much like renting a car and driving all the way down to LaGuardia just to catch a late plane back to Washington. Morning would be soon enough. He took a shower and changed clothes, then had an early dinner in the motel’s adequate dining room. Afterward he went back up to his room where he ordered a bottle of brandy from room service. When it came he poured himself a stiff drink and sat by the window, the room lights out, watching the wind and the rain kicking up whitecaps on an inlet of Great Peconic Bay.
There was very little doubt left in his mind that Yarnell had been a traitor to his country, and probably still was one. Nor was there much doubt that the Russian called Baranov was his control officer. McGarvey’s only concern now was the possibility that Yarnell had not worked alone—was still not working alone—that he had had, either then or now, one or more Americans on his payroll. His specialty in Mexico had been turning Mexicans, there was no reason to suspect he hadn’t done the same thing with his own countrymen.
He thought back to his own years in the Company, to the things he had done in the name of loyalty, to the projects he’d seen other case officers do, and he remembered that almost any single act in the business could be construed seventeen different ways. It was such an inherently clandestine business that no one could have all the answers all of the time, not even the DCI himself.
Sipping his drink, he found himself thinking about the earliest days he had spent at the Farm outside Williamsburg. Where had the idealism gone, he wondered. It had been bled away by a dozen assignments in which the entire truth would never be known; it had been sapped by thousands of lies told by hundreds of liars; it had been drained by the uncounted double crosses by the legion of men without honor; and in the end, for him, it had been destroyed by assassination. With the first man he had murdered had gone something indefinable within him. It was something, some force, some emotion, he supposed, that became invisible if he tried to examine it too closely, but became a bright, even hurtful beacon when he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye.
He had been different after that. Changed. Frightened. It had marked the beginning of the end of his marriage, and, he supposed, the long slide down the far side of his career. When assassination becomes a necessary expedient, it was wise to put the very best man into it. But afterward the taint on him would be terrible: oh, the stain makes it impossible to get very near such a man. Use him, then, for as long as he can be stomached and then get rid of him. It’s the only way. At times like this, McGarvey was truly surprised that they hadn’t simply put a bullet through the back of his head. It would have been so much easier for them in the long run—though the problem would have been technical; reduced to the question of who kills the killer? He’d given a lot for his country, he thought morosely; his livelihood, his self-respect, his marriage, and in the end his honor. All the while he had never questioned if it was worth it. He’d always thought so, of course. But now he wasn’t so sure. He could not change, could he? None of us could in the end.
Yarnell would feel nothing, he suspected, turning his thoughts to the other concern. Men such as him never did. They accomplished their given tasks, lived their lives, married their women, had their children, even endured their divorces, all barely ruffling a feather. The Yarnells of the world were the self-assured ones. You could pick them out of a crowd, standing head and shoulders above the competition. (Actually there was little competition for men such as Yarnell, except for the projects they were involved with, and the manner in which they worked their particular magic.) The Einsteins ran the sciences, the Barrymores the stage and screen, and the Yarnells the world of the spy.
At ten he got up from his chair, stiff from sitting so long, his throat raw from too many cigarettes, but his mind clear despite his lack of rest and the brandy he had drunk. He’d been missing something all along. It had bothered him during the afternoon he had spent with Owens, and it had nagged at him tonight. It was
something he had meant to ask out there but had not. Owens would know. He had been there at the end, back to the States after Moscow. McGarvey wanted to know why Yarnell had quit the CIA. What excuse had he given? What projects had he left behind? And even more importantly, who had he left behind to fill his spot? In a broader sense, McGarvey wanted to know who Yarnell had worked with and for in Mexico and back in the States besides Owens himself. Who was their boss? Who had been next up the chain of command? Especially at the end. He knew that he could have it looked up for him, but Owens had been there. He wanted to hear it from the man’s lips.
Owens had made no attempt to hide his presence on Long Island from anyone. His name was listed in the telephone book. McGarvey got an outside line and dialed the number. It was likely that Owens would be in bed asleep by now and would resent being awakened to answer even more questions. Couldn’t it have waited until morning, Owens would ask.
The connection was made, and the telephone in Owens’s ramshackle beach house began to ring. McGarvey leaned back against the nightstand as he listened to the burr of the distant instrument. He counted the rings as he stared out the window at the still rising wind and rain, an uneasiness mounting. After ten rings he broke the connection and tried again with the same results. He dialed for the operator and had her try. Still there was no answer.
“I’m sorry, sir, the line does seem to be in order, but there is no answer.”
The town’s three off-season cabs had quit running for the night. It took McGarvey less than fifteen minutes to get dressed and then convince a startled night clerk to rent out his car for a couple of hours. Driving as fast as he possibly dared on unfamiliar roads, wind and rain blowing in long, spiteful gusts, McGarvey kept telling himself that Owens was hard of hearing, he was asleep in his bed and he had simply not heard the telephone. Or at night he shut off his telephone so that he would not be disturbed by damn fool callers and wrong numbers.
It was this last that bothered him the most on the drive out. Wrong numbers. Who was it who had telephoned as he was leaving? A legitimate wrong number, or someone calling to check that Owens was there? Alone.
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