First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “Katy!” he shouted.

  She turned, a sour look on her pretty face, her left hand up as if she were waving him off.

  He got to her, shoving her to the sidewalk with his left hand as he raised his pistol over the roof of the cab at the same moment the Buick was opposite them. The men in front and back opened fire at the same time. Large-caliber pistols, maybe even ten-millimeter—the thought flashed across Mac’s head at the speed of light, as he fired one deliberate shot after the other.

  As the Buick passed, Mac rose up and followed it, firing until his Walther went dry. He ejected the spent magazine, took the spare from his jacket pocket, seated it in the handle, cycled a round into the chamber and continued firing until the Buick was around the corner.

  ELEVEN

  Baranov had stayed the night at the embassy, and in the morning he was having breakfast with the KGB’s chief of station Anatoli Kaplin when an aide came directly to their table.

  “Captain, there is a telephone call for you in the referentura.” The room, or quite often a series of rooms and meeting spaces in every Soviet embassy, was the one area completely secure from any form of electronic or physical bugging.

  “The call you were expecting?” Kaplin asked.

  “Da,” Baranov said, putting down his napkin and rising.

  “Good news, I hope.”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  The windowless strategic-planning office on the third floor was deserted. The single-line phone was off the hook. As soon as the aide had withdrawn and closed the door, Baranov picked it up.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Henry,” the man in Washington said. The call, which was being relayed through a re-dialer in Luxembourg, was not encrypted, but was reasonably secure. Nevertheless they used false names and discussed their subject obliquely.

  “Anything new?”

  “The objective was achieved, though I didn’t see the need.”

  The man spoke with a U.S. East Coast accent. Baranov had turned him in Moscow a number of years ago, mostly out of vanity on the American’s part. He was the type who always thought he was the smartest man in the room. He believed he was smarter than Baranov, which was just fine. He thought he was getting away with something no one else could understand. It was amusing.

  “Just the message, nothing more?”

  “Then I assume that you’re going to proceed?”

  “Of course,” Baranov said. “It’s a favor to you, actually.”

  “It’ll get us off the hook.”

  “Quid pro quo, my friend. Nothing more.”

  “Yes,” Henry said, and he hung up.

  The attack on the young American CIA officer had failed. He would be coming to Chile after all.

  Baranov went across the hall to the well-equipped signals room, about the size of a Pullman car, with banks of electronic equipment manned by operators along both long walls. A supervisor sat at her desk at one end.

  “Any word from my SQ surveillance team?” Baranov asked the attractive and bright young woman.

  “Yes, sir. As a matter of fact he and his wife just left their dacha and are driving into town.”

  “Here?”

  “San Antonio.”

  “I’m taking a staff car with a radio; let me know wherever they go. And tell the team that they must not be spotted.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  The highway down to San Antonio was broad, modern and well paved. Despite the fairly heavy traffic Baranov made good time in one of the embassy’s Mercedes sedans. He had planned on inviting Varga to his compound after the attempted assassination of McGarvey. But he had figured that wouldn’t happen until tomorrow, possibly Sunday.

  The general had a source within the DINA who had warned him that an American was coming to kill him. Pinochet knew about it as well. But Baranov had not been able to find out who the source was, nor how he’d gotten his information—presumably from inside the CIA’s directorate of operations.

  It was a loose end. Bothersome. Yet something had held him back from asking Henry—someone who would know about the leak, and more important, the reason for the leak. Something else just beyond his ken was going on.

  For now he wanted to get to Varga with the news before his DINA source did. It would be another opening move in an overture of friendship. Trust building. Basic tradecraft.

  Twenty kilometers outside of San Antonio the signals day supervisor radioed him. “They’re at the Club Las Brisas de Santo Domingo,” she said. “Do you know it? Over.”

  “Yes, I do. Let me know if they leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Las Brisas was actually a golfing club. Such places had become immensely popular ever since the president had taken up the game. General Varga was reportedly pretty good, which had gained him favor. His disposal work—as it was being called by those in the know—was vital to Pinochet and was another plus for Varga. At this moment the general was a very popular man in Chile—in some circles.

  Driving up to valet parking, Baranov was struck by how young and smartly dressed everyone seemed to be, whereas he was dressed in khakis, a red polo shirt and a shabby tweed sport coat. It was an image he sometimes projected, of a man who offered absolutely no threat to anyone. The sprawling clubhouse was about as modern as anything in the country and so were the people. Mercedes, Jaguars and a lot of big fancy American cars filled the parking lot. Whatever else might be said about el Presidente he and his Chicago Boys had turned the country around economically. The word miracle was used just about every day in just about every newspaper in Chile. Even the term president for life had taken on a life of its own.

  Chile was vital to the Soviet Union’s interests in the hemisphere.

  On the basis of the diplomatic plates, Baranov was granted entrance to the club, where he told the manager that he had come to speak to General Varga at the president’s suggestion.

  “I’m very sorry, sir, but the general is presently on the driving range. However, Mrs. Varga is on the patio. Shall I present you?”

  “It’s not necessary,” Baranov said, and he followed the manager to a patio that overlooked the first tee.

  Karina sat with her back to the doors. She was drinking what looked like brandy from a small snifter. Her shoulders were narrow, her body slight, but her sleek black hair hung thick and long nearly to the middle of her back. She was dressed in a stunning white sundress, white gloves and black-and-white heels.

  Most of the half-dozen or so other tables were occupied with couples or foursomes. But she was alone, and when Baranov walked over, she looked up, a very slight smile playing at the corners of her sensuous mouth.

  “Here to see Mati?” she said, lifting a hand for him to take.

  He kissed it. “May I join you?”

  “Of course, but only if you promise not to drink that dreary vodka.”

  “A de Jerez would be nice.”

  She smiled faintly and motioned for the waiter to bring them a drink. “You’ve done your homework, or was it a lucky guess?”

  “While in Rome.”

  After their drinks came, she came directly to the point. “What is it that you want my husband to do for you, Captain?”

  “And you’ve done your homework, Mrs. Varga,” Baranov said, returning her smile. “But it’s not what your husband can do for me; it’s what I can do for him.”

  “Which is?”

  “Save his life, of course.”

  This time she laughed out loud. “I think you had best call me Karina,” she said. “You’re speaking about the assassin the Americans are supposedly sending?”

  “His name is Kirk McGarvey. I had friends in Washington try to kill him, at el Presidente’s suggestion, but they failed.”

  “If he comes here, he will certainly die.”

  “Perhaps, but I would like to help make it so.”

  “Why?”

  “May I explain that to you and your husband?”

  “My husb
and will be at least another hour or two practicing. But perhaps you’ll join us for dinner this evening at our compound. This time at eleven?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  TWELVE

  Mac and Katy had been tied up with the police until nearly midnight. Now as the sun was just coming up, he stood at the bedroom window watching his wife sleeping.

  Somewhere along the line things had started to go wrong for them. Their marriage had come to several crises points over the past year or so, about his unexplained absences and his work for the CIA, but last night had been different. After the shooting she’d been calm, even friendly.

  “You were quite good, Kirk,” she said on the way home. “Even the police officers were impressed.”

  He didn’t know where she was going with this and he was wary. “My training just kicked in. It was automatic.”

  “But no one came down from Langley to see if you needed help. Isn’t that unusual?”

  He wanted to tell her no, that it wasn’t. The Company expected its field officers to take care of themselves. If they couldn’t in their own country, how could they manage in badland?

  “It was over too fast, but in the morning I’ll have to go out there to make a report and then a couple of interrogators will ask me some tough questions wondering why I had instigated a shootout downtown in front of a lot of innocent bystanders. Didn’t I understand collateral damage?”

  “But it wasn’t your fault,” she’d blurted.

  “It was, by virtue of my job, what I do,” he said, and he regretted opening his mouth the moment the words came out.

  She’d turned away, her mood suddenly brittle. “What you do,” she said. “What you are. What you’ve become.”

  When they got home, she’d taken a shower and had gone straight to bed, leaving him downstairs. When he finally came up around three she was sound asleep, and he didn’t have the heart to join her, wondering about their future.

  * * *

  He cleaned his pistol and reloaded the two magazines, then took a shower, got dressed and left the house before Katy woke up. He drove through Bethesda and crossed the river at the American Legion Bridge near Turkey Run Park—the route he normally took to work—but instead of turning south on the parkway he headed out to Dulles International.

  Parking his car out of the way in one of the long-term lots, he went to the car rental agencies and got an anonymous gray Ford Sierra. Once he was clear of the airport and reasonably certain that he hadn’t picked up a tail, he got on the Beltway.

  At one point he suddenly switched lanes and got off at Jefferson, immediately got back on the highway, getting back off again at Annandale. No one was behind him, no one had taken any notice, and unless a Rusian spy satellite had been retasked to track his moves—which he thought highly unlikely—he was in the clear.

  At eight-thirty he pulled up and parked in the driveway of a well-maintained split-level ranch, shut off the engine and waited. The garage door opened almost immediately and Janos Plonski came out, his wife, Pat, watching at the kitchen door. She waved uncertainly and Mac waved back.

  Janos was a Polish immigrant who worked as a senior archivist for the Company. His mother had been a hero of the resistance against the Soviets, and Pat was a Cockney girl whom he had met while he was studying at Oxford. He’d gone through training at the Farm with Mac and they’d become fast friends. Janos thought Mac was competent and Mac thought Janos was one of the kindest, gentlest and most honest men he’d ever known.

  “Christ, you’re an ugly son of a bitch,” one of the instructors had said. Janos was a large man—six-five—with a wrestler’s build, completely bald with a wildly large nose and a heavily pockmarked face from a bad case of childhood chicken pox.

  Janos had smiled good-naturedly. “But I have a good heart, Senior Master Sergeant.”

  Everyone in the class had laughed, and every one of them had become his instant friend and admirer. One of the women recruits had put it best: Janos has cojones.

  Janos got in beside McGarvey. “I heard about your trouble last night. Is Kathleen okay?”

  “A little shook up, but they missed.”

  “Any idea who they were, why they wanted to take you down?”

  “A couple of ideas, but it’s why I came out here. I need your help.”

  Pat was still at the kitchen door. Janos looked at her. “This is a bad business, Kirk. What I’m hearing is that you’ve gotten yourself into something outside our charter. There’re to be repercussions.”

  “Who said that?”

  “No one, everyone. Who knows how these things get started? Word is out that you’ve stepped over the bounds.”

  “I need some information from you. About a man with a New England accent. Could be fairly high up in the Company, but maybe not. Definitely a Washington insider.”

  “Are you listening to me, Kirk? You could be a marked man now. Maybe it is time to get out.”

  “He was in Chile within the last month.”

  “Pat wants me to get a regular job here on the Beltway. Consulting, maybe for security work.”

  “He is someone who carries some weight with at least their foreign ministry.”

  Janos turned to him. “Computers are the next big thing, Kirk. I shit you not. They’ll revolutionize everything. I’ve been studying. IBM has come out with some very excellent tutorials. If I keep my nose clean, I could head the new department. It’s coming.”

  “This guy could have a connection with a KGB captain by the name of Valentin Baranov.”

  “CESTA del Sur,” Janos said almost automatically in response. His expression suddenly turned sheepish.

  “The Soviet’s hemisphere network. They want Chile as a back door to Mexico, then Cuba and finally us. I need to know—”

  “What?” Janos interrupted. “Be careful what you wish for. More than once you’ve said that shit could rise up and bite you in the ass. But my ass is on the line too. So is Pat’s and Barney’s and Elizabeth’s.”

  Barney and the baby Elizabeth were their children. Katy had been godmother to the baby, whom the Plonskis named after Mac and Katy’s daughter.

  “Trotter is sending me to Chile to assassinate someone.”

  “General Varga.”

  McGarvey was shocked to the core. “How the hell do you know this?”

  “Vouchers,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We work on vouchers, Kirk. All of us, all the time. Vouchers for our paychecks. Vouchers for when you need a new typewriter ribbon or ream of paper. Vouchers for food, ammunition, weapons, bedsheets, bath towels, at the Farm. Vouchers for a coffin when you die in the line of duty.”

  “Even for black ops?”

  Janos nodded sadly. “Accountability is the new key word. ‘The days of reckless spending are over, Janos,’ they tell me. ‘Keep track.’ We need accountability for someday when Congress decides that the American people need to know. Even for unspecified travel.”

  “Was my name mentioned specifically?”

  “Trotter’s was. Chile was. I merely put two and two together just now.”

  “I need to know the name of the American with an East Coast accent who was there. And why he was there,” McGarvey said.

  “What’s Trotter say?”

  “He’s lied to me, I think.”

  “And yet you’re going through with it?”

  “I don’t have a lot of choices,” McGarvey said. “So it comes down to the truth. Will you help me?”

  THIRTEEN

  Baranov came down the long winding dirt road to the Vargas’ compound a few minutes before eleven in the evening, the windows in his staff Mercedes down. The night sky was perfectly clear and there was only a hint of a breeze off the ocean. Sounds carried forever, even the rollers breaking on the shore kilometers away.

  He had thought long and hard about his role here in Chile before accepting the bigger assignment and switching operations from the embassy in Mexico City.

&nb
sp; CESTA del Sur was the key to making inroads from the Americas. Winning Pinochet’s trust was the first major step, and finding a way to him was the method that Varga would provide.

  He stopped at the entrance, a brilliant spotlight from the top of the wall completely blinding him for several seconds until it was shut off and the gate swung open and he drove inside.

  A lieutenant directed him to the main house, where the general himself came out to meet him.

  “Promptness is a good thing,” Varga said. He was dressed in linen slacks, a yellow guayabera and sandals.

  Baranov took a leather satchel out of the backseat and brought it over. “Good evening, sir. I brought some de Jerez and a few bottles of Krug as a peace gesture.”

  “Peace for what?”

  “For interrupting your game of golf with the president.”

  “I was told that you didn’t play.”

  “Never learned the game. But I wanted to talk to him in an unofficial setting. About you, actually. And the norteamericano the CIA is sending to kill you and how that could work to our advantage.”

  “Come in, then; we have lobster and sea bass.”

  “And perhaps some home movies?”

  “Of course.”

  The cook took the satchel of wine and Baranov followed Varga through the house to the swimming pool just off the living room, where Karina was seated in a chaise lounge sipping brandy. She was stunning in a black French bikini, only partially concealed under a sheer pool jacket cinched at the waist.

  “Captain Baranov, so good of you to join us. And your offer to help my husband. We’re intrigued.”

  She held up a hand and Baranov went over and kissed it. “So am I by the stories I’ve been hearing.”

  “All good, I hope.”

  “All interesting to Moscow, and possibly to our advantage if we can arrange for the CIA to stumble.”

  Varga brought fresh brandies for his wife and Baranov and himself, and the two men sat in patio chairs on either side of Karina.