First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “But?”

  “We’re next to worthless when it comes to the little bits and pieces. The lone gunman who slips under our radar and manages to put a bullet into someone’s brain. A couple of guys hijacking an airliner. The bomb maker who decides to take out a football stadium in the middle of a game.”

  “Extrajudicial sanctions.”

  “Actions Washington can’t take because of our laws.”

  “Who decides what needs to be done?” the shrink asked. “You?”

  “The president. The DCI. The Bureau. Not me.”

  “You want someone to point you in the right direction and send you off.”

  “It worked in the early days of Vietnam. But everything started to go bad when we put more boots on the ground, and it got even worse when we started bombing Hanoi. All our nuclear weapons, all our aircraft carrier groups and all our ground troops and economic sanctions could not win the war.”

  “You want to be an assassin, is that it?”

  McGarvey had nodded, not at all surprised by the look of disappointment, even revulsion, on the psychologist’s face. But the need was valid. In his first three years he’d been sent on a half-dozen deep-cover assignments in Europe and twice to the Middle East. Brief missions, usually nothing more than a little fly in the corner, nothing more. Observe and report. HUMINT—Human Intelligence—operations. He’d seen and reported and had given his recommendations.

  * * *

  He headed down the hill as the hand-to-hand-combat instructor, Marine Sergeant Major Tom Carol, pulled up in a jeep on the dirt road at the bottom of the hill. He was deceptively mild looking, not someone you would expect could teach you how to kill a man with your bare hands in a dozen different ways. His desert camos were crisp as usual. “They said I’d find you out here. How’d it go?”

  “Easier the second time. What’s up?”

  “Someone’s down from Langley—wants to have a word with you. Get in.”

  McGarvey climbed in and they headed to Admin. “Who is it?”

  “Didn’t say, but I’d bet even money that he’s a DO man. Has the look.”

  The DO was the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which handled clandestine missions. McGarvey’s assignments had originated from the DO, and he supposed this would be more of the same. It had been several months since he’d been sent to Moscow to explore setting up an American dollar account at Arvesta Bank. The idea was to funnel hard currency into the country that could be used to directly fund some low-key intel ops. The CIA wanted to test the KGB’s reach.

  His part was a success. He’d managed to open the account with one hundred thousand cash. The irony and the danger for him was that the hundred dollar bills were counterfeit. But he’d gotten in and back out with no problems.

  Between soft assignments like that one, he’d come out here to the Farm to work out with the new recruits so that he could keep his edge. Not only his physical sharpness, but his skills on the various firing ranges and his ability to take care of himself under the sergeant major’s tutelage.

  “Take care of yourself, Mac,” Carol said, pulling up at Admin. “I got a feeling about this one.”

  “Me too, Sarge,” McGarvey said and he almost smiled.

  TWO

  Bob Connelly, the Farm’s director, beckoned McGarvey into his office. Before he’d quit the navy and joined the CIA, he had been a highly decorated SEAL lieutenant commander, the sort of special operations officer who’d never been afraid to get his hands dirty in the field with his boys. And like so many special ops people he was an amiable man, not large, but fit.

  “Just a word before you go in,” he said.

  “Sergeant Carol said someone from Langley was here to talk to me. What’s up?”

  “Do you know a guy by the name of John Trotter?”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “He’s number two in our Special Activities Division and apparently he knows all about you. Spouted the highlights of your service record both with us and the OSI. Thinks that you’re a hothead.”

  Before he’d been recruited into the CIA, McGarvey had worked in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. His two specialties at Kansas State had been the French philosopher Voltaire and abnormal psychology. His unit CO had told him point blank that philosophy was a total waste of time, especially French philosophy, but he had use for a man who could get inside the head of a nutcase.

  McGarvey had made the offhand comment that sometimes ignorance was a dangerous bliss.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” the major had asked.

  “It can bite you in the ass, sir.”

  It had been the first of a number of insubordinations, but McGarvey was also commended for excellence and outstanding abilities. When he had quit the service after three years, the same CO, who was now a light colonel, shook his hand. “I don’t know whether I’m going to miss you or if I’m glad to get rid of you. But the CIA apparently wants to give you a chance.”

  * * *

  Connelly stared at him the way he did at the recruits during their first briefing. It was called the eval look, and if you didn’t pass muster you were out, no explanations given.

  “Any idea what this guy wants with me?”

  “No, but I wanted to give you a heads-up. If you want to continue with the Company, don’t fuck with him. I have a feeling he can either make you or break you. He comes across as way-over-the-top serious.”

  “Aren’t we all?” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  Trotter was perched on the edge of the table in the small conference room down the hall from Connelly’s office. He was a tall man and exceedingly thin, almost ascetic looking. Bottle-thick glasses were perched on the bridge of his large misshapen nose. His suit and correctly knotted tie looked as if they had just come back from the cleaners.

  When McGarvey walked in he jumped up, his face all smiles. “John Lyman Trotter, Junior,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you, all of it simply stunning. I mean stunning.”

  They shook hands. “You have me at a disadvantage,” McGarvey said.

  “We’ll soon rectify that. Let’s go for a walk; I want to tell you a story.”

  To McGarvey’s way of thinking the man could have stepped directly out of the Sunday comics page, or a twenties silent film. He was a caricature of a real person, all angles with impossible hair that stuck out in every direction as if it had been placed that way on purpose. Even his gait was jerky and he walked in fits and starts, making it almost impossible to keep in stride with him.

  They took a path that led down toward the docks on the river a half mile away, but Trotter didn’t say a thing until they were well out of sight of the administration compound.

  “What’s the very worst thing you can think of?” he asked.

  “An innocent man convicted of murder.”

  Trotter laughed. “Voltaire. He’d rather see a guilty man go free, than convict the one innocent. But then you’re something of a scholar, aren’t you, Kirk?” He pulled up short. “I can call you Kirk, can’t I?”

  “My friends do.”

  “I’d like to be your friend,” Trotter said. “But perhaps not for all the obvious reasons. I’ll never ask you to have a beer with me or a backyard barbecue, go fishing, play a round of golf now and then. Nothing as silly as that. I’m talking about something that could depend on deeper issues.” He gestured toward the compound. “Like what some of these people here are training to do. Am I making any sense?”

  Strangely, what the man was saying did make sense, but McGarvey shook his head. Trotter was being too earnest. “No, sir.”

  “I’m talking about trust. Basic, right down to the gut level of two friends unconditionally trusting each other with the keys to the keep.”

  It was a setup, of course. Trotter wanted something important, and McGarvey didn’t want to make it easy. He didn’t want the pep talk; he wanted the truth. Besides overearnest men, he’d learned to mistrust people who cou
ldn’t or wouldn’t come to the point without first dumping a load of horseshit.

  “What I’m talking about are life-and-death issues.”

  “I’m not a team player, Mr. Trotter.”

  “Good heavens, I know that. We all do. You’ve already developed a reputation as the lone wolf. Point him in the right direction, Lawrence told me, and then get the hell out of his way.”

  Lawrence Danielle was an assistant deputy chief of the agency. He was a rising star and would almost certainly run the entire Company one day.

  “You’ve come down from Langley to ask me to do something for you. What is it?”

  Trotter was surprised. “Not for me, nothing like that. Heavens.”

  “For the Company.”

  “Actually, for humanity.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Anything but,” Trotter said earnestly. “But first I want you to listen to someone, nothing more than that. Two of them, actually, and what they have to say is nothing short of stunning.”

  “Stunning,” McGarvey said. “You like that word.”

  “Have you ever heard the name Josef Mengele?”

  “The Nazi doctor.”

  “Experimented on concentration camp Jews. Dreadful stuff.”

  “We’re using some of it.”

  “If you mean the results of the hypothermia experiments, you’re right,” Trotter admitted, and he seemed to regret it.

  In the Nazi experiments, a Jewish man was stripped naked and put into a barrel of ice water up to his neck. This was outside during the winter. It didn’t take long for him to lose consciousness and die soon after. The idea of the experiments was to find the best way to revive an unconscious man before he died, and before damage to the heart and brain became irreversible.

  At first the experiments failed. All the subjects died or had to be executed because they had become cripples or brain dead. The Nazis were trying to come up with something to revive German pilots who’d been shot down over the English Channel or North Sea.

  Meticulous records had been kept. Heating blankets, warm showers, rubdowns, sauna baths—nothing worked, until the near-dead subject was put to bed with two naked women who revived him with their body heat. Some of the subjects got erections and had intercourse. That method never failed.

  “Chile may have its own mad doctor.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  Trotter looked away. “There are other political considerations.”

  “That shouldn’t stop us.”

  “This time is different.”

  “What exactly are you asking me to do, Mr. Trotter?”

  “For now nothing more than listen to what we have to tell you.”

  “And afterward?”

  Trotter couldn’t look him in the eye, and McGarvey got the distinct impression that the DO officer was either afraid or ashamed or both. “Just listen, please.”

  THREE

  On the interstate heading north toward Washington, traffic was fairly light until they were well past Richmond and it picked up. Trotter was driving his own anonymous Chevy Impala with Maryland plates, and for the first hour he kept to himself, only making an occasional comment about the weather, which was warm, or that the traffic around D.C. was always terrible.

  McGarvey thought again, as he had earlier at the Farm, that something was troubling the man. And he had the instinct to trust his hunch that whatever was bothering Trotter was going to send more than a simple assignment his way.

  “You were going to tell me a story,” he said.

  Trotter glanced over. “Actually I’ll leave that to Munoz and Campos. I don’t want to affect your judgment with any spin I might put on it. And God knows there’s already been plenty of that to go around. At the highest levels, I can say that much.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional,” Trotter said. “Part of Pinochet’s bully boys until it started getting too rough for them.”

  “Defectors?”

  Trotter nodded. “Bearing gifts. I can also tell you that what they brought has been…” He hesitated.

  “Stunning?”

  “I was going to say nearly unbelievable.”

  As part of his training in the OSI and then the Company, McGarvey had studied the case files on dozens of defectors, most of them from the Soviet Union. The ones who’d come in with the routine bits and pieces of spycraft or statecraft—the dirty little secrets of one minister or another’s affairs, sometimes with boys—were the most easy to swallow. But the superstar wannabes who came over offering the sun and the moon were almost always con artists and opportunists looking for some payoff. One million well-used U.S. hundred dollar bills, nonsequential serial numbers, was the usual starting bid.

  “Are you guys worried about making fools of yourselves?”

  “Only if we take it to the White House, which no one is suggesting at this point. For the moment it stays on the seventh floor.”

  The DCI had his office on the seventh floor of the Original Headquarters Building at Langley.

  “And the third floor.” It was where the Clandestine Service, or DO, the largest of the directorates, was located.

  “To this point we’re just the middlemen—trust me on at least that much, Kirk. We pump product upstairs and the advice comes down for us to keep our collective mouths shut.”

  “Do you want me to kill these guys?” McGarvey asked on impulse just to see what Trotter’s reaction would be.

  “It’s been suggested, and from where I sit it might be the easiest course. But no, it won’t be that simple.”

  “What, then?”

  “Just listen to them. Tell us what you think.”

  “Us?” McGarvey asked.

  “Me.” Trotter was sharp. “And I’m advising you right at this moment that before this goes one step forward you’ll agree to sign a Secrets Act agreement. No one outside the op we’ve designated DKDISTANTMOONLIGHT will be privy to what you’ll learn—even if you don’t accept the assignment in the end, or heaven forbid, fail. That means your friends, even your wife. No bragging rights. My God, the Post and Times would crucify us. Emasculate the lot of us.”

  And that was the rub for McGarvey. Kathleen knew that he worked for the CIA, but she only had a vague idea of what he actually did—an analyst of some sort, she wanted to believe. The type who sat behind a desk thinking big thoughts.

  But in the three years of their marriage that image had never squared for her. In the first place, in her estimation her husband was a man’s man. He was too physical, his muscles too finely tuned, his gaze and manner too direct, to be desk-bound, though sometimes lately she had complained that he had become distant.

  And his disappearances almost always with little or no warning—one minute he was there and the next minute he was gone, and never an explanation when he came back of where he had been or what he had done—bothered her to no end.

  After the Moscow trip, which had taken him away for the better part of two weeks, she had accused him of having an affair.

  “Who is the bitch?” she shouted.

  Upstairs, Elizabeth, their three-year-old daughter, was asleep.

  “There’s no woman,” he’d told her. “And let’s not wake Liz.”

  “I’ll give you one mistake, Kirk. But it goes no further than this.”

  “Sometimes my job takes me away.”

  “To do what?” Katy screeched, but then turned away to get control of herself.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Are you saying that you’re a spy? Some fucking sneak thief in the night?”

  He had no answer for her.

  “You’ll end up getting yourself shot to death or put in some prison somewhere, and I’ll never be told what happened to you.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “My God, Kirk, what am I supposed to tell our daughter? Daddy’s off getting himself shot?” She laughed, but it was without humor. “It would be easier to tell her that you were shacked up somewhere a
nd decided to leave us.”

  He waited for her to calm down a little. “I love you, Katy, but you have to understand that what I’m doing is necessary. It’s like I’m a soldier.”

  “Oh, no. If you were a soldier, I could understand it. You’d be off fighting some war—even like Vietnam—but you’d be serving a purpose. You wouldn’t be a dirty little spy.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No,” she’d said. “Soldiers don’t shoot each other in the back.”

  * * *

  It was midafternoon by the time they reached the CIA campus outside Langley. Trotter was waved through security at the main gate but drove right past the executive parking lot at the rear of the OHB.

  It always struck McGarvey as odd coming here. He wasn’t an NOC—the field officer who never showed up on campus—but he detested bureaucracy and all the petty conventions that went with it. No one saluted in the Company, but one’s government service rank defined the pecking order. Pay grade was important, though the real people didn’t give a damn about the money, or at least pretended not to. Most of them were in the game because, as one Watch officer had told him: “We get to know everything.” Working here made you an insider. But the price in petty bullshit was high.

  “We’re holding them at the Hartley House—too dangerous to put them up someplace along the Beltway,” Trotter said.

  Honorous Hartley had been a Civil War colonel whose roots went back to before the War of Independence. Like other properties in the Washington environs, the sprawling CIA campus just south of the George Washington Parkway that followed the Potomac once had been civilian, but had been absorbed by the government.

  The house was a typical two-story colonial, with white clapboard siding and green shutters. It had not been kept in good repair, and in fact most of the case officers and interrogators who used the place to debrief their johns referred to it as the Slums.

  In general the least important defectors were housed here, and McGarvey said something about it.

  “Serves its purpose, doesn’t it?” Trotter said, pulling up and parking on the gravel driveway at the rear of the place. “We don’t want to call any attention to the op.”