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Authors: David Hagberg

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BOOK: Dance with the Dragon
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“Well, let’s just get started then, shall we?” Perry said. “Let’s not keep the good man waiting.”

“Who gave you Gil Perry’s name as chief of station?” McGarvey asked.

“Louis,” Shahrzad replied in a small voice.

“Louis Updegraf,” Perry put in. “He’s the officer who was assassinated in Chihuahua, though what in heaven’s name he was doing all the way up there is beyond me.”

“Spying,” Shahrzad shot back.

“Who gave you my name?” McGarvey asked.

When she had flared she’d turned to Perry, but now she looked back at McGarvey, and this time she did not avoid his eyes. “My father told me about you fifteen years ago.”

“In what context?”

“My father was General Razed al-Deyhim,” Shahrzad said. “Is this name familiar to you?”

“I know that name,” Rencke said. “He was chief of the American desk for the MOIS in Tehran until about two years ago, when the Revolutionary Guards decided he was overstepping his mandate by getting himself involved with the nuclear issue, and they had him shot as a traitor. I did a paper for an NIE.”

“He wasn’t a traitor,” Shahrzad cried. “He loved his country.”

“Did you marry?” McGarvey asked. “Is that why your last name is different?”

Shahrzad shook her head. “I changed it when I left Iran. My mother and sisters went to Paris afterward, and they wanted me to come with them. But the Guards have people there, and I figured it would only be a matter of time before they found me.”

“What do they want with you?”

“I know things,” she said. “My father talked to me like a son. He always did. He told me stuff.”

“Secrets,” McGarvey said. “That’s how you first heard my name?”

“It was the Russian general who came to our house and stayed for a weekend. I was a teenager, and I think he liked me. We went horseback riding along the river outside Tehran, and afterward he sent me some nice presents from Moscow.” She looked at McGarvey, almost pleading for him to understand. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not a whore.”

“I never said that you were,” McGarvey told her, intrigued despite himself. Seeing her now, and listening to her, he could just imagine what the riverside rides had been all about. But Toni’s assessment of the girl was probably spot on. None of what McGarvey was hearing made any real sense. What the hell was she doing in Mexico, if not spying for the MOIS?

“My father had just been promoted and assigned to the American desk, and General Baranov came from Moscow to brief him. He was an important man.”

All the air left the room, but McGarvey was careful to hide his reaction, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Rencke had caught it too. If it was the same Baranov that McGarvey had dealt with in Mexico City and had eventually killed in East Berlin, then whatever he’d been doing in Tehran had to have been important.

“What did he have to say about me?” McGarvey asked.

“That you were a dangerous man,” Shahrzad replied. “He had a great deal of respect for you. He told my father that unless someone were to put a bullet in your brain, you would probably run the CIA someday. And he said that would be a disaster for us. I think he was planning on killing you, and he might have wanted my father’s help. I didn’t hear that part.”

“What did you call him?” McGarvey asked.

Shahrzad was confused. “What do you mean?”

“How did you address the man? General Baranov? Sir? What?”

“At first, General, but later he asked me to call him by his Christian name, Valentin.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen,” she said.

“Didn’t your father raise any objections about you riding off into the wilderness with no one else but the general? I would have.”

Shahrzad’s eyes lowered. “The general told us about you, and I remembered your name, that’s all. I didn’t know who else to talk to. With Louis gone I was alone down there, and I wanted to get out.”

“Why not go to your family in Paris?” McGarvey asked.

She looked away and didn’t answer.

“Maybe because your mother kicked you out of the house?”


Merde,”
she said softly. “I wanted to come here, to the United States. This is where I wanted to live. But since bin Laden and the al-Qaida attacks I couldn’t get a visa.”

“Arabs are not well liked,” Perry suggested.

“I’m Persian, not Arab.”

Perry hid a slight smile. “Whatever.” He waved her off.

“There is a difference,” she said sadly. “Louis knew it.”

It came to McGarvey that the woman was battered. Some turn of fate had knocked her down, and she was having a nearly impossible time getting back up. She was like the victim of a brutal rape who believed she would never get clean again. The question was what she wanted.

“Why did you go to Mexico?” he asked. “Were you planning on sneaking across the border on foot?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. She fingered the heavy gold braided chain around her neck. “When I left Tehran I had only a few thousand French and Swiss francs, and a few pieces of jewelry—this necklace my father gave me on my twenty-first birthday.”

She was wearing a diamond ring that looked to be four or five carats on her right hand. “Your father give that to you too?” McGarvey asked.

She dropped her hand and said, “No,” but then thought better of it. “It wasn’t for my birthday,” she added.

“One of the presents from the general?”

She opened her mouth to say something, but then shook her head in a gesture of irritation. “It’s none of your business.”

“Do you know who killed Louis Updegraf?” McGarvey asked.

She just looked at him.

“Why he was killed?”

She said nothing.

McGarvey pushed away from the table and got to his feet. “Sorry, Perry, but she’s all yours. I’d suggest that you take her back to whatever Mexican sewer she crawled out of and dump her.”

“Wait!” she cried.

“Let’s go,” McGarvey told Rencke. “We can meet Katy for lunch.”

“Please wait, you
salopard!
” Shahrzad screeched, tipping over the edge for just a moment.

McGarvey looked at her. She seemed lost, and vulnerable, completely strung out, at wit’s end.

She sat stock still for several seconds before she lowered her eyes again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been telling lies for so long that I’m not sure if I know the truth.”

“You came to us,” McGarvey said. “You wanted to talk to me. Here I am.”

“I don’t know who killed Louis, or exactly why, but I have my ideas.”

McGarvey glanced at Perry and then looked out at the Gulf. The water this morning was almost flat calm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Katy was right, it was time finally to retire all the way. Sail their boat, travel, work on another book, take long naps on weekday afternoons, play golf or tennis. Yet when Otto had shown up on his doorstep he hadn’t turned his old friend away. He’d insisted that he was retired, yet he had come out here to listen to this woman, and find out what was going on in Mexico that had gotten a CIA field officer shot to death. And now that he had come this far he was back in the game.

He turned back to her. She was lying to them, and he was going to find out why. “How old are you?”

She started to speak, but then held off for a moment. “Thirty,” she said.

“Who gave you the ring?”

“General Baranov.”

“Did you have sex with him when you were fifteen?”

Her nostrils flared, and her eyes darted from Perry to Rencke and back to McGarvey. “It’s none of your business,” she said.

“Yes it is,” McGarvey told her. “Because I suspect that you were having sex with Updegraf, and I want to establish a motive.”

“I was in love with Louis. It’s something you have to understand from the beginning.”

“Did you have sex with Baranov?”

Again her eyes darted to Perry and Rencke. Then she nodded. “Yes,” she said in a small voice. “He raped me.”

TEN

LONGBOAT KEY

Rencke poured a glass of sangria for Shahrzad, and after she’d taken a sip, he gave her a sad smile. “It must have been terribly difficult for you, all alone in Mexico City, not knowing a soul.”

She nodded. “Mr. McGarvey was right. I figured that I could find work, and as soon as I had saved enough money I could head north, maybe to the Texas border, and get into the States. But I wanted to do it right, I wanted to have the correct papers, and my green card.”

“And did you find work so that you could save some money?” McGarvey asked.

“Yes, but it wasn’t easy.”

“Easy enough so that you weren’t forced to sell your necklace or ring.”

“I didn’t have anything else,” Shahrzad flared. “Once they were gone I’d be stuck.” She looked away for a moment. “It was degrading. All the men were just like you; when they looked at me they thought I was a whore.”

McGarvey wanted to feel sorry for her, but he wasn’t convinced that it was anything more than a very good performance. “Belly dancing?”

She started to answer, but Perry cut her off. “Not quite belly dancing,” he said. He gave Shahrzad a disparaging look as if he were examining a bug under a microscope. “I believe the euphemism for what she did is exotic dancing, though I don’t believe it has any connection with either.”

“It paid good money,” she said.

“Downtown is filled with those sorts of establishments,” Perry said. “Especially in Polanco and Zona Rosa. Strip joints. Lap dancing. Massage parlors. And much worse.”

“That’s where you met Updegraf?” McGarvey asked.

She nodded.

“Did he tell you that he worked for the CIA?”

“Not at first.”

“But you spotted him in the audience, and you danced for him in particular,” McGarvey said. “I just want to get this part clear in my mind. Why him?”

“He was sort of handsome. And he was very nice. A kind man.”

“He was a rich American who could help you get to America,” McGarvey suggested. He was getting a pretty fair idea where this was going. But he wanted to hear the details from the girl’s own mouth.

“That too, at first,” she admitted. “But he didn’t hit on me, which I really appreciated, you know. He was a gentleman in that respect.”

McGarvey refrained from asking in what respects Updegraf
hadn’t
been a gentleman, because he thought he might already know the answer. Anyway, the subject was going to come up soon. “How often did you dance at the clubs?”

“It was the same club,” she said. “The Wild Stallion in Zona Rosa. I danced five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, from eleven until three in the morning.”

“How often did Updegraf show up to catch your act?”

“After the first couple of times, he was there just about every night I danced.”

“Did he ask you to sit with him at his table, buy you drinks?”

“At first.”

“Did he give you presents, like the general had done?”

Her jaw tightened. “It wasn’t like that,” she said. “It was never like that.”

McGarvey turned to Perry. “What the hell was one of your field officers doing there? Or was that where his code clerk hung out?”

Perry spread his hands. “I don’t know. There was nothing in any of his encounter sheets that he was doing the club scene. Supposedly he was meeting the code clerk at a coffee bar just around the corner from the embassy.”

“Sounds to me like he was playing with fire,” Rencke suggested.

“Was General Liu also one of your admirers?” McGarvey asked, taking a stab in the dark.

Shahrzad was about to take a drink, but her hand suddenly shook so badly she nearly dropped the glass. “I didn’t know anything about him until much later,” she blurted. She turned to Rencke as if she wanted help. “The club was always packed. It was almost impossible to pick someone out of the crowd. They all looked the same to me.”

“Except for Updegraf,” McGarvey said.

“He stood out.”

“I’ll bet he did,” McGarvey said drily. “When did you start having sex with him?”

She took a moment to answer, and when she did she hung her head, the gesture almost theatrical. “It was about a week or so after I first saw him that I started doing lap dances for him in one of the private rooms.”

“I assume that he paid you for those sessions, and you had to share the money with your boss.”

She nodded. “But then I fell in love with him,” she said. “He was kind and gentle, and he had a good sense of humor.”

“You knew that he was married,” McGarvey said.

She nodded again. “It’s why we never could go to his place. And my apartment was a dump, so we had to use the club.” She smiled with the memory. “It was perfect at first. He liked to watch me dance, and afterward we would make love.” She looked up. “He was a sweet man. I’m going to miss him.”

“I’ll bet you are,” McGarvey said.

“It wasn’t like that,” she replied softly. “I loved him.”

“He gave you money for the dancing. Did he pay you for the sex?”

Her eyes suddenly filled. “I was in love with him. And I think that he was in love with me.”

“But he gave you money,” McGarvey persisted. He was almost certain where this was going now, and he was disgusted. Updegraf had recruited her by playing the role of the perfect gentleman, and it would have been easy for a woman in Shahrzad’s state to believe in him. “I want to be clear on this point before we continue.”

She glanced at Rencke and Perry, who were offering no help. “He knew that I wanted to go north, and he promised to help me.”

“In exchange for what?” McGarvey asked. They were finally coming to the point. “I mean other than the dancing and the sex.”

This time she managed to take a drink with a steady hand, and McGarvey had to admire her resilience and her ability to compose herself. She must have been a dream come true for Updegraf, who was a field officer with at least as much ambition to make his mark as Perry. The girl was not only bright and beautiful, but also vulnerable, willing to do whatever the man she’d fallen in love with told her to do.

Yet there was more than just that. He could see in her eyes that she was embarrassed by some of what she was telling them, and she had to look away. And he could see it in the way she held herself, as if it had been so long since she had truly relaxed, and perhaps shared a laugh with a friend, that she had no idea that such a thing was even possible.

BOOK: Dance with the Dragon
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