First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “My bedroom?” Baranov asked.

  The general nodded again, a faint smile on his thin lips. “Too bad we don’t have any films.”

  “Yes, too bad,” Baranov said, rising. “Bring the bottle.”

  * * *

  It was nearly noon before the Vargas left, neither of them bothering to take a shower, which bothered Baranov to no end. He’d never liked dirty people. After he’d cleaned up and got dressed in light linen slacks and a loose cotton shirt, he went out to the pool, where the cook laid out a lobster salad, croissant, butter and a bottle of Chopin, his favorite Polish vodka.

  “Have the others gone?” he asked in Spanish.

  “Si.” She nodded and left.

  She’d acted as if she were frightened of him from the first day he’d hired her. But he was almost 100 percent certain that she was a spy for Torres. A lot of what he said and did out here was for her benefit, except for his phone calls. He swept the lines and the entire house every day, and always made certain that when he was talking to someone important it was out of earshot of her and the gardener.

  He left a message at Henry’s number. While he waited for the call back he ate his lunch, the salad fantastic—spy or not, the cook was very good—the croissant fresh and the vodka so cold it almost hurt his throat.

  Henry must have been out of his office and away from his safe location, because it was twenty minutes later before he called. “You’ve heard by now.”

  “Yes. Is it true?”

  “I’m not sure. They found his blood and a jacket on-site, but the Bureau came up with something else. There apparently was a break-in and robbery overnight at a Red Cross bloodmobile in Norfolk. But nothing was taken except for a collection bag and a needle set.”

  “I can’t imagine that he’d be that sloppy.”

  “It was the fifteenth of the month, the day they take inventory. It’s the only way they discovered it so soon; otherwise, it would have been next month before they noticed the discrepancy.”

  Baranov wanted to believe that it was a coincidence, and he said so.

  “There’s more. One of the records supervisors on campus is a friend of McGarvey’s. He knew about the assignment. He knew about the laser. And he admitted that McGarvey told him there was a mole at the Farm and probably one on campus.”

  The news shook Baranov. By all accounts McGarvey was some kid just out of the Air Force OSI, and so far had only been on a couple of soft assignments. It was the main reason he’d not been overly concerned. McGarvey was to have been a sacrificial lamb. A very small pawn in a very large game of geopolitical chess.

  “How do you know all this?” he demanded.

  Henry chuckled. “I feed you information, but I won’t give away my methods or especially my resources any more than you would. Not yet at least.”

  “Yeb vas. Is he reliable?”

  “Very,” Henry said. “I think that McGarvey’s still alive, and I think that he’s going to try to out me. But I think you better adjust your thinking down there, just in case I’m right.”

  “Da,” Baranov said, and he hung up.

  For a long time he drank his vodka and stared at nothing as he tried to calm down. If he had been there, he would have put a bullet into Henry’s brain. One shot with a 9mm Makarov to the back of his head.

  But the first principle in dealing with informants was to make their lives as simple as possible.

  “Coddle them, make them feel loved, necessary, useful, comforted,” an instructor in field tactics at the KGB’s School One had lectured. “Hell, even fuck them, man, woman or child, if it will help the cause.”

  * * *

  At two he phoned his control officer, where it was seven in the evening. “There may be complications that would delay the delegation.”

  “Tell me.”

  Baranov told him. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “See that you do.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  McGarvey’s bus hadn’t reached Washington’s downtown terminal until nearly three. From there he took a cab over to the Marriott just across from the Pentagon. He registered under the work name Michael Larson, one of three IDs in his go-to-hell kit. It wasn’t until four before he was downstairs in the bar having a beer and a ham sandwich.

  The hotel was old and nearing the downside of shabby, but it suited his purpose of anonymity just fine for the moment. He was going to Chile to finish the op he had been given, but first he was going to cover his back by finding the mole or moles. And the only way to do that, he decided, was to paint a very large, very visible target on his back, and sit back and wait for whoever it was to come out of the woodwork.

  But he needed Janos’s help one last time, and Pat was the problem. Putting himself under the gun was one thing, but engaging it was something else.

  When he was finished at the bar, he got a couple of dollars in quarters, and walked down the block to the PDQ, where he used a pay phone to call Sergeant Major Carol in his quarters at the Farm.

  Carol answered on the second ring. “Yes.”

  “Are you alone?”

  The line was silent for a long time. “Yes.”

  “There’s a McDonald’s at one-oh-four. It’ll take me four hours to get there. Let’s say nine-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there,” Carol said and hung up.

  One-oh-four was the exit off I-95 about twenty miles north of Richmond.

  McGarvey called for a taxi to take him over to Washington National, and when it came, he instructed the driver to drop him off at the arrivals terminal for Pan Am. “I’m meeting a friend,” he explained.

  It took only a few minutes for the short ride, and McGarvey tipped the driver reasonably, but not so well that the man would remember his face. It took him less than fifteen minutes to arrange for a Chevy at Hertz, paying for five days with a Diners Club card, and fifteen minutes later he was on I-395 heading south to I-95, less than an hour from the 104.

  * * *

  McGarvey sat drinking a coffee in one of the booths from where he could see the frontage road. He had spent the better part of an hour and a half cruising back and forth on the interstate between routes 110 and 98, just at the outskirts of Richmond, looking for anything out of the ordinary. He drove with the windows open and the radio off to listen for the sounds of circling helicopters, or even a spotter plane flying low enough to effectively surveil the McDonald’s.

  Satisfied no one was coming, he went to the restaurant, which was moderately busy at this hour. He was on his second cup of coffee when an old D-series Volvo pulled up and Carol, dressed in khaki slacks and a light yellow V-neck pullover, got out.

  He spotted McGarvey and went to the counter for a cup of coffee before he came over and sat down. “You’re something of a surprise, laddie. Just about everyone thinks that you’re dead.”

  “Who made up the fuse?”

  “I got it from Sam Nellis.” Nellis was the chief armorer at the Farm. “But one of his people probably did the work.”

  “Can you find out without making a fuss?”

  “Sure, but fuses do go bad from time to time. One of the hazards of the occupation. The Bureau’s forensics people collected some physical evidence; they might find something.”

  McGarvey said nothing. If there was any evasiveness or guile in Carol’s expression, he couldn’t see it.

  “If I were in your shoes, I would be the chief suspect, so I can’t blame you,” Carol said. “How’d you get out of there in one piece?”

  “I had a hunch that something was wrong.”

  Carol eyed him skeptically.

  “I think there’s a mole at the Farm and I’m target one because of my assignment.”

  “Me or someone in the armory?”

  “Or someone else who would be in a position to get his hands on the fuses.”

  “The Bureau found blood traces, your type. Were you hurt?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. He told the sergeant major about the bloodmobile, and aga
in he saw nothing but mild surprise.

  “They’re still dragging the river.”

  “Has Trotter been down to see what’s going on?”

  “He spent most of the morning supervising. Connelly wasn’t all that happy, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could say.”

  “Did he say or do anything that struck you as odd? You were there most of the morning, I suspect.”

  “Yes, I was. Do you mean Trotter or Connelly? Because if you mean Trotter—he’s an asshole, by the way—he called your friend Janos Plonski down from Langley. They had a powwow right there at the scene, but I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying. They were together five minutes, is all, and then Plonski got back in his car and drove off.”

  McGarvey’s heart ached. Janos was already in deeper than he should have been, and it was far from over for him. “What did Trotter have to say to you?”

  “I was with him one-on-one in the conference room for nearly three hours this afternoon. He wanted to know everything you’d ever done or said for as long as I’d known you. All the way back to when you first came to the Farm. Did we sometimes have beers together? Picnics on the beach with you and Katy and me and Barbara?”

  “You told him everything?”

  “Everything I could remember,” Carol said. “We didn’t get to the bit by the river until three, and I went over every detail of every step until I heard the explosion and came running. Then he made me go over it again, looking for discrepancies, I imagine. Trying to catch me out as a liar.”

  Carol wasn’t the mole—McGarvey was 99.9 percent sure of it.

  “He asked me if I was surprised when I realized that there’d been an accident and you were dead.” Carol shook his head. “I didn’t know what the hell to say except no, I wasn’t surprised. Shit like that has happened on just about every battlefield I’ve ever been on, including training evolutions. We’re in a dangerous business.”

  “What else?”

  “He said the whole mess was ‘simply stunning and terribly unfortunate.’ Then he relieved me of duty, but ordered me to stick around at the Farm until further notice.”

  “Will you be missed tonight?”

  “The guys at the gate are friends.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t level with you from the get-go, but afterward I didn’t want you to have to lie for me. I don’t think you’re very good at it.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, but what comes next?”

  “You’re not the mole.”

  “Thank you, but the question still stands.”

  “I’m going to make contact with everyone I suspect.”

  “Starting with me. What can I do?”

  “Get me the names of everyone who could have had access to the fuse. Accidents do happen, but I’m betting someone tampered with it.”

  “Then you’ll have a little chat with them, hoping what? That sooner or later if you strike a nerve the son of a bitch will come gunning for you again?”

  “Something like that,” McGarvey said.

  Carol fell silent for a time, his face long, his eyes distant. “We’re surrounded,” he mumbled. He looked up. “On the battlefield the enemy was mostly out front, unless you were walking into an ambush. Even then you knew who was doing the shooting. But this is different. I’ve seen the enemy and he is us. Just like Pogo, the comic strip character.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The night was long, and McGarvey got little sleep worrying about Janos and Pat. And about Katy. Her life in the ordinary sense of the word wasn’t in the same jeopardy as Janos’s and Pat’s, but if someone from the CIA came out to the house and told her that her husband was dead, she would be changed forever.

  He got up a half hour before dawn, took a quick shower and left the hotel just as the sun was breaking over the river and the Tidal Basin on the far shore. Normally the shift change on Campus was at nine, but Janos was an early riser and usually got to his desk an hour or more before everyone else. It gave him time to order his mind, to get the cobwebs out.

  “Don’t tell Pat, but I don’t have to put up with getting the kids off to school,” he’d told McGarvey the week after Elizabeth was born. “They’re primordial beasts at that hour.”

  * * *

  He got over to Janos’s house in Annandale a little past seven-thirty, parked half a block away and shut off his lights. Janos would have to come this way in order to get on I-495 up to the George Washington Parkway and to the road into the CIA’s campus.

  Fifteen minutes later Janos passed by in his green VW bug and got on the highway, five miles per hour under the speed limit in the right lane, traffic seriously building.

  McGarvey hung back a half-dozen cars watching to see if Janos was being followed. But so far as he could tell traffic was normal for this time of the day; no one was paying attention.

  It was another bit of tradecraft they had been taught at the Farm: Slow down if you want to blow a surveillance operation against you. If you’re the slowest vehicle on the highway, just about everyone passing you in a rush, the car, van or even bus that matches your speed is either another nerd like you or your tail.

  A couple of miles before the parkway, McGarvey pulled up and matched speed in the left lane long enough for Janos to see him, then got ahead. Almost immediately after they made the turn, McGarvey signaled for the exit to Turkey Run Park, which bordered the Potomac.

  Janos got off the highway and followed McGarvey to one of the picnic areas, deserted at this hour of a workday. It would have been different in the summer, but kids were in school now, families back at work.

  “All hell is breaking loose, but no one is making a noise above a whisper,” Janos said, perching on the edge of one of the picnic tables, his feet up on the bench seat. He was frightened but determined, like a soldier getting ready for a gunfight.

  “Has Trotter said anything to you?” McGarvey asked, a little sick to his stomach for asking. But it was another tradecraft tenet: Trust no one, especially not your friends.

  “He called me down to the Farm yesterday morning, wanted to know if you had contacted me. I told him no, but that I knew you were going to Chile to kill a general, just like you told me to say.”

  “How’d he react?”

  “He was surprised. But when I told him that you thought there was a mole at the Farm and possibly on campus, he squinted just like you said he would. He looked like he’d seen a ghost but was trying to hide it.”

  It was too easy for McGarvey. Sergeant Carol had been his prime suspect as the mole at the Farm, and Trotter had seemed to fit the bill for the traitor on campus, but he was certain it wasn’t Carol and his gut was telling him it wasn’t Trotter. He was back at square one.

  “Pat wants me to stay away from this. She says that sooner or later you’ll get me killed.”

  “She might be right.”

  “But I’m in it up to my neck now. So what’s next?”

  “I’m truly sorry, Janos.”

  “It’s what friends do for each other. My mum told me that, in the end, friends are all we have. Now what?”

  “I’m sure about Carol, and I think I’ll be sure about Trotter after I talk to him.”

  “And if it’s not him?”

  McGarvey had given that possibility some thought last night. It was a long shot but he didn’t have a lot of options left. “Let it slip to your secretary that I’m still alive and getting set to head off to Chile.”

  Janos got a puzzled look on his broad Slavic face. He shook his head. “What’ll that do?”

  “Secretaries take breaks together in the cafeteria. They talk.”

  “I see,” Janos said. What he left unsaid was that the rumor would come back to him, and it was clear he was worried, and McGarvey understood both.

  * * *

  It was noon when McGarvey walked into the Hay-Adams and used a pay phone to call Trotter in Langley. His secretary answered and McGarvey told her his name and asked to be put through.

 
“That wasn’t so smart, using your real name,” Trotter said evenly. “Where are you?”

  “Not far. We need to talk.”

  “You can come here, or we can meet somewhere off campus. Turkey Run Park should be fairly empty.”

  McGarvey nearly dropped the phone. It was possible Janos had been followed, though McGarvey hadn’t detected any surveillance cars or aircraft. And the picnic area was fairly open. Could have been a homing beacon in the car, and the monitoring team might have wondered what the hell Jonos had been doing stopping at the park on the way to work. Or Trotter’s suggestion could have been a coincidence.

  “Union Station at four-thirty.”

  “The height of rush hour,” Trotter said. “Someone tried to kill you outside the Capitol Hill Club and again at the Farm. Janos said you thought there were moles, so I understand your caution. But moles working for who, the Russians?”

  “It would fit with what your Chilean friends told us.”

  “No friends of mine, believe me. And once your op is either completed or scrapped—your call—they’ll be turned over to the Bureau.”

  “Or shot trying to escape.”

  “Good heavens, what do you mean by that, Kirk? What do you think is going on?”

  “We both know what’s going on, and why, but not who. Union Station at four-thirty. Through the front doors. Leave your minders behind, but bring Munoz and Campos. I have a couple of questions for them.”

  McGarvey hung up before Trotter could reply.

  He was fairly certain that the call had not been traced; nevertheless, he went into the bar and had a beer and a ham and cheese sandwich in the corner, almost willing a couple of minders to show up and try to arrest him. It would solve a number of questions, if not the key ones: What the hell was really going on and what was his part in it?

  The room was filled mostly with businessmen, but the service was good, and after a full hour when no one showed up, he paid his bill with cash and drove back to the Marriott. At one point he almost switched directions and headed home to see Katy. He wanted to tell her everything so that she would understand what he was doing and why.