First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “My apartment isn’t far,” Maria said.

  McGarvey hustled her over to a cab and ordered the driver to take them to the airport. American Airlines.

  Maria relaxed a little. “You’re really leaving?” she asked as the driver pulled away.

  “No reason for me to be here,” McGarvey said. The surveillance officers would be watching the arrivals gates, and not those passengers coming to catch flights. Just as it wasn’t so risky for him to show up outside the bus terminal. The DINA officers were watching the buses, not people on the streets.

  * * *

  Maria said nothing further on the ride out to the airport, which was west of the city. Traffic was heavy—cars, trucks, buses and shuttles plus taxis. The spring morning was fresh, the air clear enough to see the Andes behind them in crisp relief.

  There was no smog here, like in Mexico City. Almost everything was different, but if Baranov and his Russian masters had their way, everything would start to turn toward the Mexican model, with drugs, crime, spy networks. And he had to wonder if at least some things might get better if they got rid of Pinochet and his regime.

  A Boeing 727 was coming in for a landing from the east when the driver dropped them off in front of American Airlines. McGarvey paid the fare and he and Maria went inside. The modern glass and steel terminal was busy with long lines at the ticket counters.

  He stepped to one side and for a full two minutes he watched the comings and goings, looking for men in suit coats and ties not standing in any of the lines, obviously not businessmen on their way somewhere, but surveillance officers, with nothing to do other than look for someone.

  “What is it?” Maria asked. “Do you already have a ticket?”

  “No,” McGarvey said. And holding her arm by the elbow he turned and headed to the terminal’s main concourse, where they took an escalator up two levels to a skyway bridge across the busy eight-lane arrivals driveway, then back down where signs in Spanish and English directed them to Parking.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  A lot of people were coming from the parking area to ticketing, while others, having arrived by air, were heading to where they’d left their cars.

  “I need to find a car, and you’re coming with me.”

  Maria tried to break free but his grip on her upper arm was too strong.

  “You got me past security at the bus depot—how the hell would you explain to your boss why you brought me out here? Are you a traitor?”

  She backed down. “Cabrón!” she practically spat at him. Bastard.

  “I’ll let you loose as soon as we get clear of the city. You can tell them that I forced you at gunpoint. You fought back but I was too strong.”

  They had stopped in the middle of the corridor, but except for a few mild glances by passersby, no one paid much attention to them. A couple arguing, nothing unusual.

  “I won’t hurt you if you cooperate. You have my word. I’m just going to make a run for the border.”

  “Even if you make it that far, you won’t get across.”

  “That’ll be my problem.”

  She shrugged. “For that alone they’ll not hesitate to shoot you.”

  “My problem, not yours.”

  “As you wish,” she said.

  They followed the signs for under-roof parking to the elevators, which they took up to the third level. The floor was not completely full, so they went down to the second, where a sign directed drivers up one level because this floor was at capacity. Any cars coming into the garage would not look for a parking space here.

  In five minutes McGarvey found what he was looking for—a car with the parking ticket on the dash showing it had been brought in last night. It was a white BMW 535i four-door, maybe five years old or older, but in reasonable condition.

  Two people were loading their luggage into a car several rows away, and McGarvey waited until they left before he picked the lock on the driver’s door with his thin-bladed knife.

  Maria had backed off a couple of paces.

  “I’m not going with you,” she said.

  No one else was on the floor, but someone could come off the elevator at any moment.

  McGarvey pocketed his knife and went to her, but she produced a switchblade from inside her shirt between her breasts, and popped the blade.

  “You’re not going anywhere either!” she screeched and she attacked him, swinging the knife in an underhand thrust toward his stomach.

  McGarvey easily sidestepped the thrust and grabbed her wrist, but not before she had switched hands and swung the blade directly at his throat.

  In that instant he knew exactly what would happen next, and he regretted it, though he had no other option.

  He grabbed her wrist as he moved the other way. Her body was pulled in toward him, turning slightly to the left, and the arc of her thrust, directed down now, buried the blade to the hilt between the ribs to the left side of her sternum, piercing her heart. She slumped to the floor.

  “Goddamnit,” he said. It wasn’t what he’d wanted. Not this.

  He pulled her body out of sight between the BMW and the next car. Finding the trunk release he popped it and, making sure that no one was coming, manhandled her body into the trunk.

  There was a fair amount of blood on the front of her dress, but none was flowing now. Before he closed the lid he found a rag and wiped the small amount of blood from the concrete floor and then his hands.

  They knew he was coming and they had sent a girl to out him.

  Bastards.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Baranov reached the Russian embassy shortly after three-thirty, where he was stopped by armed security guards at the back service entrance and made to show his credentials. Even then he had to wait until Kaplin personally vetted him.

  The COS met him at the rear door. The man’s hair was mussed, his eyes bloodshot and he had a deep five o’clock shadow. “All hell has broken loose in the past twenty-four hours,” he said on the way upstairs. “I assume Pinochet got back into the palace in one piece.”

  “There was a riot and some deaths, but this was never about him,” Baranov said.

  They got off the elevator on the fourth floor. “You told them that the American was coming to assassinate the president! You did! Pizdec.”

  “I needed to get their attention.”

  “Which you did!”

  “McGarvey’s actually made it this far, and I had to get Torres to believe me and do something.”

  “The Americans don’t believe Varga is dead—is that what you’re telling me?”

  “The Americans might, but McGarvey doesn’t. I think he’ll try to make the hit tonight.”

  “Impossible,” Kaplin said.

  “I think that we need to help him actually do it.”

  They had reached Kaplin’s office, and the COS was stopped in his tracks. A lot of functionaries were coming and going and there was a constant buzz of telephones ringing, news broadcasts on radio and television, conversations, typewriters and teletypes. But Baranov had spoken in low tones so that only Kaplin could have heard him.

  “We’re taking this conversation down the hall.”

  They went into the referentura. Once the door was closed and the anti-surveillance system was switched on, the COS turned on him.

  “We’re in the middle of what looks like to me a mounting shitstorm, Captain. Would you mind sharing your thoughts with me for a fucking change?”

  “McGarvey’s better than I thought he was. Varga is a problem for Washington—no one really believes the general is dead. So we let McGarvey kill him, and then capture him after the fact.”

  “If he’s as good as you think he is, might he not make it back to Langley?”

  “Then we kill him in Washington. Maybe we take out his wife. And child.”

  “Christ.”

  “We’d be killing two birds with one stone. Eliminating Varga, thus keeping Washington happy. And eliminating McGarvey, keeping Santiago and
Moscow happy. The point is a delicate one. Varga will be replaced—there is absolutely no doubt of it. Pinochet will keep his purges going while getting rid of his lightning rod, and we will be rid of someone who has the potential of becoming a serious threat to our operations here, but especially in Mexico.”

  “Do you have any comprehension what you’re saying, Captain? Every day you change your mind about McGarvey, and about the situation here. How do you know that you’re right this time? Or the last time, or any time?”

  “Washington will know all about it as soon as Beckett can send a twixt to Langley about this conversation.”

  “We’ve defeated their laser.”

  “How?”

  “It’s a state secret.”

  Baranov hadn’t expected Kaplin’s change of attitude, though he supposed he should have. The most important game when dealing with Moscow was covering your own ass. At all costs.

  “I need to make a phone call,” Baranov said.

  “I spoke to General Leonov this morning. He said that I was to handle the situation from this point on.”

  “I’ll call him anyway.”

  “He won’t be in.”

  Baranov picked up the phone at the end of the small conference table and called Henry’s contact number. “I’m back in Santiago in the referentura.” He hung up.

  “Who did you call?”

  “My Langley contact.”

  Kaplin was incredulous. “He has this number?”

  The phone rang and Baranov picked it up. “Where is McGarvey?” he said.

  “We still haven’t made contact. He could be anywhere, but I’m betting he’s there.”

  “The op has been canceled. No change?”

  “No change. If you find him, kill him. But don’t take any chances you might regret.”

  Something wasn’t right. He could hear it in Henry’s voice. “Is your position secure?”

  “The possibility that we have a leak on campus has reached the seventh floor.”

  “It has to be a small list. Are you on it?”

  “I imagine that I am.”

  “Then take care, my friend,” Baranov said. He had a feeling that it was only a matter of time now before he lost his resource, and that would be too bad. DKHENRY had been a longtime gold seam. The information that he’d provided important enough on which to build a career.

  Finding an equal replacement would be nearly impossible. Which left CESTA del Sur and all that was going to happen in Mexico in the next few years. Startling things. World-shattering things.

  Kaplin was leaning against the opposite side of the conference table. When Baranov hung up, the COS shook his head. “I want you out of here as soon as possible. You’ve meddled in my business far too long already. You’ve made relationships with Torres and with President Pinochet. You’ve actually met with Beckett. And from what I’ve been able to piece together you may have gotten yourself into some sort of a twisted relationship with General Varga and his wife.”

  “Charming couple,” Baranov said. “I’ve fucked them both.”

  “You sick bastard,” Kaplin said. “Get out of here.”

  “Two more calls, Anatoli, and then I promise I’ll be gone from Chile first thing in the morning.”

  Kaplin was married and had brought his wife and two children with him to this posting. His was the perfect Russian family. “There’s no room in the service for people like you.”

  Baranov had to laugh. “Where were you on the day at School One when the instructor talked about the effectiveness of honey traps? Oldest ploy in the business.”

  “Fuck you,” Kaplin said and he walked out.

  Baranov left word at flight ops for Major Dyukov that he would be flying back to Mexico City first thing in the morning after all. Then he got through to Torres at DINA headquarters.

  “I’m at the embassy,” Baranov said. “Any word yet?”

  “He’s here as you said he would be. He came on a bus from Mendoza that got in just as the funeral was starting. One of my people was on the bus as a spotter and now both of them are missing.”

  “Are you sure it’s him?”

  “We finished interrogating the imbecile of a bus driver about a half hour ago. He said the man got on in Buenos Aires, and on the highway west of Mendoza he shot and killed a pair of heavily armed highwaymen who were about to rob the passengers and most likely kill them. Everyone was so grateful no one wanted to say a word.”

  “I thought you said you had people watching all the terminals.”

  “They got off three blocks early. We’ve checked her apartment but she and McGarvey have vanished.”

  “He probably killed her and hid her body somewhere. He’ll need a way to get out to San Antonio so check with the car rental places, and check for reports of stolen cars.”

  “There are more than a hundred cars reported missing every day.”

  “Try the parking lots and garages at the airport and anywhere else in the city where people leave their cars for extended periods,” Baranov said. “He’s on his way to the Vargas’ compound, and I’ll tell you what we need to do.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  The main highway southwest from Santiago was modern and divided for the first twenty-five miles. At the town of Talagante it split to the west to San Antonio. From that point the relatively narrow highway was filled with all manner of trucks going to and from the port.

  For now the car McGarvey had stolen from the airport was anonymous. But there was a fair amount of police traffic and the anonymity wouldn’t last. If his luck ran out, the owner would return at any minute, find his car missing and report it stolen to the police.

  Combined with the missing DINA agent, they would put it together and San Antonio would be the bull’s-eye.

  The afternoon was too flawless for Mac’s taste. The sky was a crystal- clear blue with no hints of any clouds. And even when he topped the rise of the hills that led down into the city of eighty thousand, there were only a few clouds low on the horizon out to sea.

  Last night there’d been a nearly full moon. Conditions couldn’t have been worse.

  Munoz had drawn a rough sketch of Baranov’s compound above the city, and just four or five kilometers from the Vargas’ place. McGarvey had only glanced at it, but he could have made a perfect copy from memory. It was another bit of tradecraft that had been drummed into their heads at the Farm.

  You need to speed read upside down, right to left. You need to glance at a row of figures and write them down two days later. You need to take a quick look at a map, or chart, or aerial photograph, or a building’s layout, the plan for a town center, and instantly recognize your escape routes. Your memory could be the only thing that saves your life. Trust me, people, perfect it.

  Just beyond the suburbs in the hills above the city, McGarvey took a gravel road that led south, paralleling the coast. He checked the rearview mirror for traffic on the highway, watching for someone to pull off behind him; no one came.

  Nor was there anything in the sky: no light planes, no helicopters, no military traffic with aerial spotters or cameras on board. In fact, the sky was empty, which was bothersome.

  The DINA would have to suspect that he was here. When Maria hadn’t shown up at the terminal, the bus driver and passengers would have been questioned. She and McGarvey had gotten off a few blocks before the terminal.

  I’m sorry, señor, but he saved our lives last night, and there is nothing illegal about letting someone off early, the driver might have explained. And the streets were in confusion because of the parade. It would have been easier to let everybody off early.

  How he and the passengers had been treated afterward was anyone’s guess, but it was a fair possibility that at least some of them would eventually wind up at the soccer stadium in Valparaíso.

  The highwaymen he’d taken out were scum, but people on the bus—all but Maria—were innocent of everything except being grateful for a man with a gun who’d saved their lives in the middle of
the night.

  Around a sloping curve the road dipped down into a long, narrow ravine, and a mile farther, a long driveway cut off to the left, up and over the next rise and down into the next narrow valley, where he stopped.

  Below was Baranov’s walled compound just as Munoz had described it. Two hundred feet on a side, spotlights were perched at each corner of the ten-foot-tall stuccoed walls.

  McGarvey got out of the car and took the binoculars from his pack. The front gate was open, and the place looked deserted. No car was parked at the house, nor were there any signs of movement at either of the small outbuildings, one of which he took to be the generator shed. It had an air intake vent on one side, a propane tank below it and an exhaust pipe on the roof. The weather flap on the pipe was motionless; the generator wasn’t running.

  Baranov wasn’t in residence, and it appeared as if his house staff were gone as well. It was possible that the Russian was still in Mexico City tending to his network.

  McGarvey lowered the binoculars, and listened with all of his senses for something, anything, but the afternoon was quiet. Too quiet.

  From the get-go he’d had the option of turning down the assignment, or making a one-eighty whenever it started to go bad for him. But Trotter had shown him General Varga’s file, and the two Chilean defectors had made it clear what the man had been doing at Valparaíso. All of Chile feared they could be next.

  But he’d never really had the option of backing down. He was in all the way. He’d tried to explain to Katy that it was what he was. I am what I am. I can’t change.

  Or won’t? he asked himself.

  Back in the car he laid his pistol on the passenger seat and trundled slowly down the uneven rocky driveway. He looked for the chance gleam of reflected sunlight off the lenses of a surveillance officer’s binoculars, or from the forward lens of a sniper rifle scope. Someone along the top of the wall.

  But there was nothing, and his hackles rose the closer he got.

  If they thought it was likely that it was him on the bus today, they might suspect that he would make his way to San Antonio, but they might also suspect that he wouldn’t just march blindly into the Vargas’ compound and take them out. He would have to first scout the lay of the land. Observe. Plan.