First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

“He’d want to find out if General Varga was actually dead.”

  “I’ll call Justin and have him keep an eye out for McGarvey,” Danielle told the DCI. Justin Watson was the chief of station in Mexico City.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Baranov stood on the sidewalk just a few meters from the driveway into the Four Seasons. He wore a long coat, dark glasses and carried a white cane. Pinned to the front of his coat were a string of Mexico’s national lottery tickets.

  In the ten minutes since he had taken up position to watch the hotel’s entrance he’d sold five 60,000-peso tickets—each worth around two U.S. dollars. Blind people, ciegos, standing on street corners sold lottery tickets. They were so common they seemed to be on every street corner. And they were never cheated.

  He was too early to meet McGarvey face-to-face, but he wanted to see the man. To take his measure. One of the female clerks at the Russian embassy whose English was perfect left a message at the hotel for McGarvey that Justin Watson wanted a meeting in his office as soon as possible after lunch. It was around that time now.

  A cab pulled up, and a man slightly under six feet with the build of an athlete came out of the hotel. He wore a dark blue blazer, khakis and an open-collar white shirt. And even at this distance, through tinted glasses, Baranov could see the aura of self-confidence radiating off the man, like heat from glowing coals. And he could also see the obvious tradecraft, the searching of passing traffic, the roof lines across the street, the pedestrians. His gaze lingered for a moment on Baranov and then he crossed to the cab and got in.

  There was absolutely no doubt in Baranov’s mind that the man was Kirk McGarvey. He could have recognized him from the end of the block, in part from the couple of photos he’d seen, but mostly from the stories Henry had told him. What stuck out at this moment, though, was the measure of the man. He was a force—he’d already proved that at the Farm, at his home when the two men had come for his wife and child, and again at the Marriott—that wouldn’t be as easy to stop as Baranov had first suspected.

  McGarvey was young and, in the way he moved coming out of the hotel, and then climbing into the cab, was like a ballet dancer going through his steps. Light on his feet, his movements seemingly effortless. Henry said that his scores on the firing range, at close-quarters combat drills, on the Farm’s difficult confidence courses and in the various tradecraft disciplines—explosives, weapons and weapons systems—had been consistently at the top of his class.

  Formidable. The term crossed Baranov’s mind, and he had to smile. McGarvey was going to be an interesting opponent.

  He sold another two tickets before he left his spot and, taking off his dark glasses, collapsing the cane, and removing his long coat, walked around the corner to where he’d had a man park his four-door BMW.

  Parking was another quirk peculiar to Mexico City, where traffic downtown was almost always impossibly heavy. Older guys would stake out four or five parking spots at the curb, and rent them out for petty change by the hour. It was entrepreneurship, and the cops never bothered with them.

  He paid his parker, giving the man a little extra, and drove off to a small bar and dance club on Avenida Moreles across from the Plaza de la Constitución y Parroquia de San Agustín de las Cuevas in the area of Tlalpan on the city’s south side. Called the Ateno Español, the somewhat seedy place occupied the ground floor of an old three-story apartment building. For a long time, even before the Cuban revolution, it had served as an informal gathering place for Mexican dissidents, communists, Cubans, even the emerging Russians who came to Mexico to make a lot of money, almost always by extortion schemes, kidnapping, murder-for-hire and, lately, drug running.

  Luis Alvarez ran the place from behind the old bar. He was an arranger, for a fee, who knew everybody and could connect you with whatever sort of muscle-for-hire you needed. No questions ever asked, and guarantees that nothing would ever splash back to the man with the cash. And no one screwed with him. In his younger days he’d been a professional boxer, and when he put on too many pounds, he became a professional wrestler, known as the Killer.

  When Baranov came in, Luis poured him a stiff measure of a good Polish vodka. “Ah, Vasha, I heard you were out of town for a while.”

  They spoke English, which had always been the lingua franca of the place, even when Castro and the others came here in the fifties.

  “Someday you might hear too much.”

  Luis laughed, his big frame shaking. “People talk. What am I supposed to do, turn a deaf ear?”

  “I’ve a little job for you,” Baranov said. “Maybe not so little, but it’s important to me.”

  “How important?”

  “Five thousand U.S. for two men.”

  Luis was interested. “Wet work?”

  It was the old KGB term for mokrie dela, the spilling of blood. Assassination.

  “Yes. He’s a CIA operator and good, from what I’ve been led to believe.”

  “Not Watson?”

  “No, no one local. But he’s someone who’s come here to stick his nose into my business.”

  “How soon?”

  “Now. Tonight. He’s staying at the Four Seasons.”

  “Only the poor gringos are bums. Drunks, running from jealous wives, jealous husbands, jealous prosecutors. But not this one?”

  “No.”

  “Will he be armed?”

  “Almost certainly. But he’s the sort of man who might not need a pistol or a knife. It’ll warrant your best.”

  Luis went to the other end of the bar to pull beers for a pair of Mexicans in business suits who just came in. When he returned he nodded. “Difficult business killing a CIA officer. What’s he doing here?”

  “He came to kill me.”

  Luis laughed again, but this time without humor. “Kill him yourself. Save the money.”

  “There’re reasons that wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

  “What has he against you?”

  “You’ll never know,” Baranov said, a hard note in his voice. “Will you take the job?”

  “Of course. Fifteen thousand Swiss francs.” It was steep—at the current exchange rate a bit over ten thousand U.S.

  “Agreed.”

  “For each man, plus me.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of money. It’ll take me a few days to arrange it.”

  “But you want the job done immediately.”

  “Yes, it’s important,” Baranov said.

  Luis reached across the bar and they shook hands. “Then it will be a matter of trust between us. And you know what that means, tovarich.” His grip was like steel, as was the look in his eyes. I’ll do the job, but if you don’t pay, you’ll be next.

  “His name is Kirk McGarvey, but we believe that he’s traveling under the name Kenneth Whiteside,” Baranov said. He gave Luis the two photos that Henry had sent him in Santiago. “I saw him leave the hotel a little while ago. He took a cab to the U.S. Embassy.”

  “Does he travel with bodyguards?”

  “He feels there is no need for it.”

  “The ones believing they are invincible usually fall the hardest and the easiest.”

  “Do you want a down payment now? I have dollars.”

  “I’ll wait. The Swiss are to be trusted more than the Americans or the Russians when it comes to managing their money.”

  The rumor was that Luis had money in stocks and bonds in several exchanges around the world, except for London, New York and Moscow. It was said he was rich enough to retire, but that he stayed here to play the game.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow with some of the money—in Swiss francs.”

  “It should be an interesting evening,” Luis said, grinning.

  Baranov tossed back his drink. “There will be no payment for failure.”

  “The ones I am sending do not fail.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  The cabbie dropped McGarvey off in front of the U.S. embassy on the Paseo de la Reforma a little before two in th
e afternoon. Traffic was horrible as usual, and the air stank of car exhaust and something else not pleasant. The embassy building itself was a five-story fairly modern structure, just blocks from the Zona Rosa section, which was essentially the downtown of the city, and only a few blocks from his hotel. But the front desk had recommended that he take a cab, which would be air conditioned, because of the air inversion and horrible smog today.

  He showed his passport at the reception desk, and told the young woman that he had been called to a meeting with Justin Waston.

  She called upstairs and gave McGarvey’s Whiteside name on the passport. She looked up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Whiteside, but Mr. Watson’s secretary says that you are not on this afternoon’s appointments list.”

  “Tell them that I’m a friend of Larry Danielle’s.”

  She relayed the message.

  “Someone will be down to escort you,” she said, handing McGarvey’s passport back and giving him a visitor’s pass.

  A young man in a white shirt and loose tie but no jacket showed up a minute later and they took the elevator up to the fifth floor. “You must be Kirk McGarvey. We were told you might be showing up.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Mr. Danielle, of course.”

  Watson’s office was on the east corner of the building, the last in a suite of offices and cubicles the CIA occupied that took up nearly half the entire floor. They were shown straight in, and the young man turned and left, closing the door behind him.

  The chief of station was a gruff-looking bear of a man, with a crew cut, a sloping forehead and hair on the backs of his hands. His jacket was off, his tie loose, and sweat stained the armpits of his shirt. He did not seem friendly.

  “What are you doing here, McGarvey?”

  “I’m looking for someone. And when he and I have a little chat, I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Back to Langley?”

  “No.”

  “You’re on an op?”

  “Just beginning.”

  “But not here, not in Mexico, or at least I wasn’t told any details. Larry said that you’d fill me in.”

  Watson had not gotten up from behind his desk, nor had he motioned for McGarvey to take a seat.

  “There’s not much I can tell you, except that I’ll be out of your hair by tomorrow morning.”

  “Exactly who is this person you came here to chat with?”

  “A Russian by the name of Valentin Baranov.”

  Watson reacted as if he had been shot. “No.”

  “He already knows that I’m here and he told me so. He had someone leave a message at my hotel that you wanted to meet with me.”

  “That’s not surprising, but no, you’re not going to have so much as one minute of eyeball time with him. Not today, not any day. I want you out of Mexico on the first flight that leaves for anywhere.”

  “Do you read the daily summaries that the DI sends you?” McGarvey asked. He’d expected that Baranov would find out that he was here, but just not so fast. It had to mean that this source in Washington was highly enough placed that they knew what was going on in Chile, and what his role was to be.

  “Of course.”

  “The murder-suicide of General Varga and his wife?”

  Watson’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Go on.”

  “Baranov was in Chile until just yesterday. There’s a very real possibility that he was somehow involved. I want to ask him about it.”

  “We wondered where the bastard had gotten himself to. We figured he’d come home. But the answer is still no. I want you out of here now.”

  “We think he wants to expand CESTA del Sur to Chile. He courted Pinochet, and the general. This latest event might have something to do with it.”

  “Christ, do you have any idea what the fuck you’re talking about?” Watson demanded angrily. “Whoever the fuck told you about that operation will be hung by the balls.” He phoned someone. “Have you got a minute, sir? I have a gentleman from Washington here you might want to listen to.” He looked at McGarvey. “No, sir. Langley.”

  Watson tightened his tie, put on his jacket and they took the elevator up to the top floor. The engraved nameplate on the door at the end of the broad corridor read HON. ROBERT B. MASLAK. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico. They were shown directly inside to the ambassador’s palatial office, which looked to the west toward the mountains.

  Maslak was a tall, somewhat patrician-looking man who’d played basketball at Northwestern for all four years, and at one time had even considered going pro. Instead he moved on to Harvard for his law degree, and made a name for himself in New York City defending multinational corporations and their CEOs and CFOs, mostly against anti-trust disputes.

  “This the gentleman?” Maslak asked.

  “Yes, sir. Let’s take this into your conference room.”

  They went into the adjacent windowless conference room, which, unlike the ambassador’s office, was safe from surveillance.

  Watson introduced McGarvey and they sat down at a small table, where he recounted their conversation. The ambassador didn’t seem overly surprised.

  “I was briefed on the situation in Valparaíso about six months ago,” he said. “I had dealings there with the financial team working with President Pinochet, and I was asked for my opinion. Which was that General Varga’s program had to go at whatever the cost to us. Has that something to do with your assignment, Mr. McGarvey?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not at liberty to discuss it with anyone,” McGarvey said. If Baranov had meant him to be tied up like this and maybe even be sent home, his plan was working.

  “You were not sent here yet you came to talk with Justin, which, as you say, was Valentin Baranov’s doing. And now you want to talk to the Russian about his spy network? Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. I think he’ll have some answers that could be a help.”

  The ambassador was a little surprised. “And you think that he would cooperate with you?”

  “I can be persuasive, sir.”

  “What do you know about CESTA del Sur?”

  “Only that it’s a Russian spy network in this hemisphere and that it’s possible Baranov has been ordered to expand it into Chile.”

  “It makes sense from their standpoint. But I still don’t see why—as you say you were not assigned here—you came to talk to him.”

  “It has something to do with the deaths of Pinochet’s chief executioner and his wife,” Watson said.

  “If there’s a connection, we’ll find that out. We have someone working from the State Department on the issue. Actually, until recently one of yours. And quite good.”

  “May I be told who he is?”

  Watson shook his head. “You’re not cleared for that. You have to understand that the issue is very sensitive for us at the moment.”

  “The Russians are offering the Mexican government the sun and the moon for concessions,” Maslak said. “Exactly what they are, we’re trying to find out.”

  “Which is why you can’t go running around crowding Baranov,” Watson said. “It’d screw up everything we’ve worked on for the past year and a half. I want you gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McGarvey, but I’ll have to insist,” the ambassador said.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Meeting with Watson and the ambassador meant almost nothing to McGarvey except for the fact that Baranov had maneuvered it. What was interesting, however, was that Baranov had made the call knowing that McGarvey might be ordered out of Mexico.

  The next step, then, was to make a show of going nowhere, at least for the time being, until either Watson sent a couple of minders from his shop to take him to the airport, or Baranov sent someone for him.

  He was betting on the latter.

  The same escort who’d brought him upstairs to Watson’s office took him back to the lobby. “Have a nice day,” he said with no sincerity and walked away.

  “You too,” McGarvey said.

  He
took a cab back to the Four Seasons, and when he got out under the portico, he looked over to where the blind lottery vendor had been standing, but the man was no longer there. At the time the guy had seemed out of place to him.

  The uniformed valet who’d opened the cab’s door for McGarvey stepped back and raised a salute to the brim of his cap.

  “Did you happen to notice the blind man who was selling lottery tickets earlier?” McGarvey asked him.

  “Indeed I did, sir. He was new.”

  “You were here when I came out of the hotel less than an hour ago?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long after I left did the lottery vendor leave?”

  “Actually I thought it was odd, sir. As soon as you were around the corner, the ciego left.”

  “That is odd,” McGarvey said, and he went inside. The blind man was Baranov come to watch for him—he was almost certain of it.

  He went up to his suite, where he loaded his pistol, screwed a compact silencer on the muzzle, and holstered it at the small of his back, under his jacket. Pocketing a spare magazine of bullets, he went back to the lobby bar, where he drank a Heineken. It was just a little after three in the afternoon but the bar was already half full, mostly with foreign businessmen meeting with their Mexican counterparts.

  No one paid any particular attention to him. He signed for his beer and left the hotel.

  “A cab, sir?” the same valet as before asked.

  “I’ll walk.”

  Broad swaths of trees lined sections of both sides of the broad avenue, providing some shade. But the day was hot and the air so polluted that the mountains were not visible, nor were the clouds straight overhead. Within a block of the hotel McGarvey was already feeling the effects of the terrible air and the elevation—Mexico City was over seven thousand feet above sea level.

  Traffic was extremely heavy, and it took him one light to make it to the big fountain in the center of the roundabout with a dozen other people, and a second before he could get all the way across with several others. Many people stayed in the middle, to sit downwind and enjoy the occasional spray of water that drifted across.