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Authors: David Hagberg

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BOOK: Dance with the Dragon
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A pair of babysitters from Security had met them at Andrews with an unmarked van that was set up as an ambulance, and had taken Janet Updegraf off his hands. The strange thing was that Dr. Zywicki had refused to shake his hand when they parted. It was damned odd, he thought.

And, if dealing with Louis’s widow wasn’t enough, he had to face McCann when all he wanted to do was return to Mexico City and do his job.

He presented his credentials at the main gate and was directed to the Visiting Employees parking lot. On the drive up he could see himself coming this way each weekday morning. Only, as the deputy director of Central Intelligence, he’d be riding in the backseat of a chauffeured Cadillac limo, and he would be dropped off inside the underground garage at the VIP elevator. It was a happy thought just now.

He wasn’t carrying a weapon, but he was required to step through the security arch and on the other side open his attaché case for a security guard. But he didn’t mind. These sorts of routines were a comfort.

Upstairs on the seventh floor, McCann’s secretary put him in the small conference room to wait until the DDO was finished with his afternoon briefing to the DCI. “We’d expected you much sooner, Mr. Perry,” she said. “I’ll tell Mr. McCann that you’re here.”

“Thanks,” Perry said, but the woman was already out the door. “Bitch.”

The DDO’s conference room was furnished with a table for eight people, a credenza on which was a carafe of water and glasses, and a couple of seascapes on the walls. Perry opened his attaché case and laid out copies of Updegraf’s personnel file, Chauncy’s initial report and the autopsy results, Gloria’s one-page summary of her legwork, which contained absolutely nothing of value, and his own brief summary of the events subsequent to Updegaf’s assassination.

Slim pickings, but it was to be expected given the delicacy of the situation in Mexico and the ridiculous time constraints he’d been given.

He was just pouring a glass of water when the door opened and Howard McCann breezed in. The DDO was a short man, with a round face, narrow glasses, and thinning light brown hair. But he was dressing better these days, though certainly not Armani or Gucci, and he was clean-shaven even at this hour of the afternoon.

“I had to brief the director
without
your report,” McCann said, taking a seat at the head of the table.

Perry put down the glass. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I was delayed taking care of Updegraf’s widow.” He sat down to McCann’s left.

“How is she?”

“You were right to be concerned about her. She became hysterical—”

“Something you should have anticipated,” McCann interrupted. “I expect my station chiefs to show some initiative.”

“Yes, sir,” Perry replied, biting his tongue. McCann was a DDO to be admired because he ran a tight operation. But he was being unfair just now.

“What’s going on in Mexico that got one of my people murdered?”

Perry laid the files in front of McCann. “It’s not much yet, but it’s all there.”

McCann didn’t bother looking down. “I’ll read these later. For now I want you to tell me what the hell is going on. Why did you send him to Chihuahua? If something important is going on up there, why didn’t you send him some backup? You know my drill, goddamn it. When you send assets into the field, you send them in pairs.”

“I didn’t send him to Chihuahua,” Perry said. “The first I heard Louis was up there was when my assistant COS called to tell me that his body had been dumped at the emergency-room door of the hospital.”

McCann sat back. “You’re telling me that you have no control over your people?”

“I’m telling you, Mr. Deputy Director, that I have no control over a field officer who has his own agenda. Perhaps if he had been better vetted before he was sent—”

“He was your man, and you got him killed,” McCann interrupted.

“Yes … sir.”

“Are you one hundred percent confident that Updegraf didn’t commit suicide?”

“The Air Force doctor who performed the autopsy said the entry wound was at an impossible angle to be self-inflicted.”

“Continue,” McCann said after a moment.

“We still don’t know what he was doing in Chihuahua the night he was killed, but we think that he may have been running an operation to burn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy.”

“Where’s the connection?”

Perry spread his hands. “We don’t know yet. But my people are backtracking Louis’s movements for the past ninety days, although his encounter sheets are turning out to be almost useless. He was lying to us.”

“Why?” McCann demanded.

“I don’t know,” Perry said. “I think he was trying to make a mark for himself. The big score. He wanted my job.”

“Is anyone else on your staff working a Chinese connection?” McCann asked.

“Not that I know of,” Perry said evenly. “Unless it’s another rogue operation.”

McCann pursed his lips, but then nodded. “I suggest that you return to your station and find out,” he said. He got up, gathered the files, and left the conference room without another word.

For a long minute or two Perry sat stock still, staring across the room at nothing in particular.
The big score. That’s what it was all about, what it had always been about.

Finally he closed his attaché case and left the room to catch a commercial flight back to Mexico City. First class.

FOUR

OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

It was seven o’clock and dark as Richard Adkins stood slump-shouldered at the floor-to-ceiling Lexan windows in his seventh-floor office looking out at the lights toward the Potomac. He was stumped, and the problem was that he didn’t know anyone to call for help. The only man who might have the answers, or know how to get them, was finally retired with his wife in Florida, and had promised in no uncertain terms: “Retired means retired!”

Something was coming at them, he was sure of at least that much. Perhaps another 9/11, perhaps something even bigger, but all the signs were there. Otto Rencke, the director of Special Operations, was talking lavender, which in the CIA’s resident genius’s lexicon meant that we were on the verge of taking a major hit.

At fifty-four, Adkins was a slightly built man with a pale complexion, small blue eyes, and wispy light hair. He’d lost his wife to cancer a few years ago, and since that time he’d thrown himself into his job first as deputy director of Central Intelligence under Kirk McGarvey, and then as DCI when McGarvey had retired. His Senate confirmation hearings had taken only two days, and had been the least rancorous of any nomination in recent history. It had been anything but a lovefest, but the media had dubbed the proceedings the “Senate Sleep-in of the Decade.”

He’d done nothing of note when he’d served as number two under McGarvey, and he’d done nothing of note since then. Even the media, which post-9/11 had practically camped out in the press officer’s briefing room, rarely showed up now. The Company was quietly going about its business, there were no new wars or crises looming on the horizon, and for once the CIA was not being blamed for doing nothing.

Rencke was a flake, but he was never wrong. This time his lavender had to do with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Guojia Anquan Bu, Guoanbu for short, especially with one of its senior intelligence officers, who had been spotted in Mexico City recently. Rencke had only stumbled across a hint that the man had been recorded making a telephone call to Beijing from the Chinese embassy.

There’d been nothing in the daily reports from the CIA’s station down there, which Rencke had found odd because Army General Liu Hung was one of China’s most important intelligence experts on Western affairs. Over the past few years General Liu had conducted operations from the UN and from the Chinese embassy in Washington, and it was believed that under his leadership the Chinese had practically gone on a military-technology shopping spree right under the noses of the FBI.

He had dropped out of sight for more than a year, presumably back to Beijing, until he’d shown up in Mexico City. Rencke had confirmed it four days before by repositioning a KH14 satellite to watch the Chinese embassy, where he caught a clear, face-up shot of Liu getting into a Mercedes limousine at the rear of the compound. Two days later the satellite caught another shot, this time of Liu standing on a rear balcony of the embassy.

This too had been a clear picture, with Liu looking directly up as the satellite passed overhead. “Like the guy knew when our bird would be there, and went out to look up and say, ‘Hiya, guys, I’m here,’” Rencke said. He had been hopping one foot to the other, something he did whenever he was excited and had a bone in his teeth.

“Any doubt that it’s Liu?” Adkins had asked hopefully.

“Nada,” Rencke said. “How about giving Perry the heads-up? He’s got some pretty neat people down there. Someone could take a quick pass.”

“That’s exactly what we’re gong to do, but first I want some more information. Anything you can dig up on Liu. They wouldn’t have put one of their best people into an embassy operation unless something important is going on.”

“Bingo,” Rencke said. “The sixty-four-dollar question: What are the Chinese doing in Mexico?”

That had been four days ago, and this afternoon Gil Perry had flown up with the widow of one of his officers who had been trying to turn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy and had gotten himself shot to death in Chihuahua.

Rencke had gone home early. He and his wife, Louise Horn, who was director of photo analysis for the National Security Agency, were leaving on vacation in the morning, the first either of them had taken in years, and Adkins hadn’t the heart to call him back with the latest news.

Someone knocked at the open door to his outer office and Adkins turned around, expecting it was his bodyguard to tell him that it was time to go home, but Rencke stood there, his red hair flying all over the place, a Red Sox baseball cap askew on his head.

“I just heard,” Rencke said. He was gaunt looking, arms and legs too long, head impossibly big for his frame, wide green eyes and a broad forehead. He looked and acted the part of an eccentric genius, which was exactly what he was.

“About what?” Adkins asked.

“Louis Updegraf. One of my computer programs caught it and called me.”

“You’re leaving on vacation.”

“It’s the Chinese connection,” Rencke said. “I called Louise and she understands.” He began hopping foot to foot. “Oh, boy,” he said. “You oughta see the shade of lavender now.”

PART

ONE

Ten days later

FIVE

CASEY KEY, FLORIDA

A cold front from up north had been unable to penetrate as far as Florida’s west coast, so the summer pattern of very warm, tremendously humid air hung over Sarasota County like a damp wool blanket in a sauna.

But it wasn’t tourist season, and the locals knew enough to stay indoors with the AC on, which suited Kirk McGarvey just fine. He had the beach all to himself for his early morning five-mile run along the water’s edge.

His wife, Kathleen, had gotten up with him while it was still dark and brought a bottle of water to the downstairs exercise room, where he began his morning routines on a weight-training machine. She’d been in one of her patient moods, which she used whenever he was irascible and feeling cooped up. As he had been for the past few weeks.

“Are you ready to talk about what’s eating you?” she’d asked.

He knew the tone of voice, and he wanted to snap at her for being patronizing, but he managed a thin smile because she was right. “Pretty soon,” he said.

He was pulling two hundred pounds behind his shoulders from above, and his body glistened with sweat. He was a couple of years over fifty and in superb physical condition because of a daily regimen of exercise that had begun more than thirty years ago when he was in the Air Force, and had continued through his years with the CIA, where he finally rose to the seventh floor as DCI, a job he hated. He was about six feet tall, with a pleasant face and gray-green eyes that never missed much. He had started and ended his career as a field officer, an assassin on the few occasions when such a black operation became absolutely necessary, and he exuded an air of supreme self-confidence. He was a man who could take care of himself. The few people who had gotten close to him, and were perceptive enough to understand what he was, felt an aura of safety around him. When Kirk was nearby, everything would work out. He would make sure of it.

“How about right now?”

He finished his last three reps and took the water bottle from his wife. “Have I been that bad?”

“Yep,” she said. “You’ve been a real poop.”

McGarvey took a drink of water, then put the bottle aside and toweled himself off, the muscles in his shoulders and back in a pleasant slow burn. He shook his head. “I wish I knew, Katy. Maybe it’s teaching again. I guess I’ve lost my taste for it.” One of his loves was the writings of the eighteenth-century French philosopher Voltaire, about whom he’d written a book that was critically acclaimed. He was teaching the subject on a part-time basis at the University of Florida’s New College in Sarasota. They were less than two months into the semester and already he was bored. Voltaire had maintained that there was nothing
less
common than common sense, and he was seeing the lack in many of his students, but then he supposed he was being a little hard on them because of his dark mood.

“Quit,” she said.

He smiled. He was a lucky man, married to a beautiful, intelligent woman whose short blond hair framed an oval face, high cheekbones, a finely formed nose, and full lips, and whose complexion was nearly flawless even without makeup. She was tall for a woman and slender, and it was impossible to guess that she was the same age as her husband. “That’s not really an option, Katy. I’m committed at least until spring.”

She had given him an odd look that stuck with him as he ran on the beach. It was as if she knew something about him that he didn’t, which possibly had something to do with his dreams. They’d started again a couple of weeks ago, as they had from time to time over the past ten or fifteen years, and always began with the same one. He was in the catacombs beneath a castle outside Lisbon. The tunnels were flooding and it was almost totally dark. His escape would be cut off at any second, yet he could not leave until he finished what he had come to do. Before he left this place he had to kill Arkady Kurshin, a KGB intelligence officer and assassin whose operations were as brilliant as they were bloody.

BOOK: Dance with the Dragon
3.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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