First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

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  FOR LORREL, AS ALWAYS

  We must know what we are talking about—and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth—I only regret in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.

  —HENRY JAMES

  INTRODUCTION

  Kirk McGarvey first appeared in Without Honor, published in 1989. In that novel and in several others, I alluded to his first kill. The first assignment in which he carried out an assassination. Mokrie dela—“wet work,” the spilling of blood, as the KGB called such actions; or black ops, the CIA’s term.

  I’ve been asked a number of times to go back to when McGarvey was just starting out with the Company, and tell the story of his first black op. How it developed, how it turned out, and how it deeply affected the rest of his life—and ultimately, the price just about everyone close to him paid.

  In this story Mac is young and inexperienced, so cut him a little slack; after all, it was his First Kill.

  PROLOGUE

  Driving through the night from Santiago, Chile, to the coast, Army Brigadier General Matias Varga was not worried nor was he in any particular hurry, though he’d been warned that someone from the CIA would be coming to assassinate him. For operating outside what were considered the norms of decent human behavior. For crimes against humanity. For executions without trials. For torture, hangings, beheadings, whippings, even the burnings of those still alive.

  Sometimes he would wake in the night hearing the screams in his dreams. But there’d never been regrets, only a sense of enjoyment that neither he nor his wife, Karina, ever found odd.

  At forty-three, Varga was a lean man with thick black hair, an angular face and thin lips that never smiled. It was said that his wide black eyes could bore into a soul of a man where the truth of crimes against the state existed. If the accused denied the charges, Varga would find them guilty just for the pleasure of knowing that they would be executed.

  One of Pinochet’s bright boys, Felipe Torres, who was the deputy director of DINA, the Directorate of National Intelligence, had called him at noon for lunch at the military academy, where the little puta had told him that the CIA was sending someone for him.

  “How do you know this?” Varga had asked, careful to keep his tone neutral. He’d felt no fear—in his entire life he’d never known the emotion. But Torres was an important man.

  “We have our sources.”

  “Reliable?”

  Torres smiled and dabbed his lips and pencil-thin mustache with his napkin. Like a lot of people in the regime, the deputy director had come from humble stock—his father had been a cowboy and his mother had worked in the ranch owner’s kitchen, and possibly the man’s bed. And like others working for Pinochet he had taken on the manners of a grandee—a man of cultured stock. Even his fingernails were manicured. “Si.”

  “Why have I been singled out? Perhaps you or even el Presidente would make more enticing targets for the Americans.”

  “But infinitely more difficult to kill than you,” Torres said. “The fact is that you have become the nation’s…” He searched for an appropriate word. “I was going to say garbageman, because you see to the removal of our rubbish, but perhaps with too much zeal for some.”

  Varga wasn’t impressed. He’d survived the coup d’état that had brought Pinochet into power. And he’d survived several assassination attempts in the past few years, ever since he’d begun mass executions at the soccer stadium in Valparaíso. “If they send an army across our border, they’ll be stopped.”

  “Apparently this will be one man.”

  “Mano a mano.”

  “Si,” the deputy director said. “And let me be perfectly clear, how you handle this is your business. I’ve brought you the warning and you understand the reasons they want you eliminated. They believe that with you dead the special program will end.”

  “It won’t,” Varga said. “With or without me the need exists.”

  “Without you, my dear Matias, the necessary work would not proceed so efficiently.”

  * * *

  Well away from Santiago’s bright lights, the stars were brilliant, sweeping from horizon to horizon, and even in the hills above the coast, above the port city of San Antonio, it seemed as if the Pacific was insignificant in comparison to the heavens.

  Torres had promised that their agents in Washington were working around the clock to learn the identity of the assassin, and exactly when he would be coming, but he could offer no promises. Nor could he offer any official assistance. President Pinochet would have to remain at arm’s length. For deniability.

  The soccer stadium where many of the executions took place was only one hundred kilometers from Santiago, but the president had not been to Valparaíso in at least one year. Arm’s length enough.

  Only one man, Varga mused. Coming alone from Washington. Or, perhaps he was already here.

  He had stayed at his office in the military academy very late, attending with his staff to the results of the interrogations of eighteen more prisoners who had been rounded up last week in a dingy warehouse on the north side of Santiago’s industrial district. The thirteen men and five women had been working on an anti-Pinochet demonstration that was supposed to have taken place this weekend. The trouble was they’d told too many people about their plans and word had gotten back to someone attached to the Army Intelligence Directorate and therefore to Varga.

  “They’d admitted to much more than a simple demonstration,” Varga told his people. “In fact they were planning to execute the president. We found a sniper rifle.”

  One of his lieutenants had actually smiled. “A Russian sniper rifle?”

  “Of course not. An American weapon.”

  The others had laughed, because just now anti-American sentiment was growing. He did not, however, share what Torres had told him.

  It was midnight by the time he got off the nearly deserted highway and headed south along the narrow paved road that led through the hills, roughly parallel to the coast. Five kilometers farther a branch of the road turned east, deeper into the hills, finally dropping into a narrow valley in which his compound had been constructed in the midst of boulders, scrub brush and hardscrabble soil five years ago—about the same time his extrajudicial executions had begun in earnest.

  Roving spotlights illuminated the razor-wire coils that ran along the top of the twelve-foot reinforced-concrete walls. Motion sensors and even the newly acquired American infrared detector ringed the four-acre compound. No one
could get close without silent alarms sounding, which would call to arms a lieutenant and eight men on duty each twelve-hour shift, 24/7. Their orders had been simple from the beginning: Shoot to kill any person or persons unknown to the officer on duty. No warning shots; no attempts to wound or capture would be made against the assailants.

  A strong light atop the steel gates brightly illuminated the interior of the car as he pulled up. A moment later the light went out and the gates swung open for him.

  No one came to greet him as he parked in front of the rambling one-story ranch-style house. But the gates swung shut and someone would come to put away his car.

  Before he went in, he cocked an ear to listen for sounds, any sounds other than the highly muffled noise of the electrical generator in its shed off to the far left. But there was nothing. A half-dozen other buildings were scattered here and there, including the barracks for the troops and bungalows for the three officers. A mess hall was on the other side of a small parade ground, beyond which was a small-arms-training range, and the shells of three buildings, one of them two stories, that were used for urban incursion and hand-to-hand-combat training.

  Three years ago, at Karina’s insistence, they had constructed a well-lighted studio where she could work on her paintings without disturbing the house staff. And she’d also insisted that he build a putting green complete with a difficult sand trap.

  “The officers must not only indulge in the opera and ballet, but mark my words, Mati, the time will come when the president will take up the game, and those of his officers who play, and play well, will gain his ear.”

  Who has time for stupid games? he’d thought then, but Karina had been right. A few months later Pinochet had begun taking lessons and Varga had been at his side. His position in the army and the government was more secure than ever.

  * * *

  Cook had made them a nice dinner of roast beef, potatoes and salad and Karina had laid out a bottle of de Jerez, their favorite Spanish brandy, in the dining room. A movie screen was set up beyond the end of the long table, and on the left an easel held her latest painting, covered by a cloth.

  He set his briefcase on the floor next to the 16mm projector and she came into his arms, her thin nightgown falling open, her nude body forever exciting him like no other woman’s ever had. Not even the women he’d tortured to death, some of them as young as twelve or thirteen and quite pretty at the start, moved him like Karina.

  “How was it this afternoon?” she asked.

  He had married her eight years ago when she was fifteen, a country girl up near the town of Monte Patria where at the time as a light colonel he’d taken part in a mountain defense exercise. She’d waited tables at a small taberna on the outskirts and the moment he laid eyes on her he knew that she would become his wife. Her father had no objections; he had seven other daughters and only one son.

  “You’ll see,” Varga told her.

  It only took him a minute or so to load the first of the three film reels onto the projector and start the machine. They’d been taken today—two at the stadium and the third in the autopsy and special preparations room—and developed and dried in time for him to bring them home.

  Karina poured the brandies and they sat side by side as the film began, with General Varga in combat fatigues, the main star of the drama.

  Nine men, seven women and three children—two of them girls around ten and one boy five—came into view, all of them naked, all of them showing signs of abuse. Two of the women had their breasts cut off, the wounds roughly stitched up. All of the men had been castrated, five of them their penises cut off. All of them had been whipped, long bloody stripes along their torsos, some had their teeth chiseled out, almost all had no nails on their fingers or toes, and not one of them could walk without help.

  Karina clapped, the nipples of her breasts erect. “My God, Mati, I wish I could have been there,” she cried. “From the beginning when they were still fresh.”

  “This time I have some of that work on film too. But I wanted to save it for next to last.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait that long. I want you now.”

  On film Varga had his pistol out and he shot the children in the face. They fell back and not one of the adults made any move to stop what was happening.

  “They’re not fighting back,” Karina said.

  “They did earlier. My God, it was fabulous. You’ll see.”

  One of the nurses in a white coat handed him a baseball bat and he beat three of the women and one of the men to death, crushing their skulls.

  Sitting watching the film, remembering all of it, his eyes flitting to his wife’s breasts and her pudenda, her legs spread for him, he got an erection.

  “Let me see your painting,” he said.

  Drink in hand, Karina went to the easel and pulled off the cover. She’d painted a beach scene, huge waves crashing against the shore. It had been painted on the tanned and stretched skin of one of his victims—a woman whose back had been perfect.

  “Wonderful,” Varga said. “Mengele’s wife couldn’t have done better.”

  PART

  ONE

  Call to Arms

  ONE

  Kirk Cullough McGarvey, at twenty-eight, was in such superb physical condition that near the end of the eight-mile confidence course he had raised only a light sweat. He had the circuit all to himself this morning, his second go-around for the day.

  None of the fourteen recruits midway through their training at the Farm, the CIA’s facility along the York River near Williamsburg, had elected to run with him again, and he was secretly glad for the solitude, something hard to come by here.

  He had demons riding on his shoulder, whispering scandalous secrets in his ear, not only about Katy, his wife of three years, but about someone coming for him. Someone lying in wait for him to make a mistake, turn the wrong corner, fail to keep up with proper tradecraft; to forget to always mind his six, be forever hyper-aware of his surroundings, any little bits and pieces that seemed to be out of place.

  It was the field agent’s stuff that done right saved your life, but done wrong—just one mistake that often led to a chain of missteps—would cost you your life, or at the very least end you up in a gulag somewhere.

  The last mile wound its way through the woods along a path that was mostly uphill, some of it steep. In the distance to the left, away from the river, the sound of small-arms fire drifted his way on a light breeze. Someone shouted something, the words indistinct, followed by a sharp explosion. Urban incursion exercises.

  At the final rise McGarvey stopped. He was a little under six feet with eyes that were sometimes green or sometimes gray depending on his mood or the circumstances, husky without being muscle-bound, and handsome in a rugged sort of way. Most women found him devastatingly masculine.

  Spread out below was the Farm’s center—the administration buildings, barracks, dining hall and the various classrooms where experienced field agents, some of them who’d worked deep cover in badland as NOCs, No Official Covers, taught the newbies how to survive. It was something that was very often impossible. The stars, no names, on the granite wall in the lobby of the original CIA Headquarters Building at Langley marked the deaths of field officers who could never be publically recognized for their service.

  Truth, justice and the American way was their motto, but at times situations became so goddamned lonely that McGarvey had to stop in midstride, like now, to wonder why the hell he, or anyone, for that matter, would opt for this sort of life.

  But his answers from the beginning of his three-year career to this point were: It’s what I do. Who I am.

  At one of his annual psych evals a Company shrink pressed him on his motivations. “Are you in it for the money?”

  “Not on a GS-13’s pay,” Mac had shot back.

  “But then you’re a rich guy, aren’t you? You inherited your parents’ cattle ranch in Kansas and instead of following the family tradition you sold it. So mon
ey has no meaning for you. But maybe it’s ego that drives you. You want to prove a point that you’re the smartest man in the room. Maybe you get a laugh or two. Or maybe it’s something buried in your conscience? The beating you gave the high school players you caught trying to gang-rape a girl? Maybe you regret it.”

  That eval had been in the late fall, just like now. The day had been gloomy at Langley, a low overcast sky, a light drizzle that was close to snow. It had infected just about everyone on campus, so tempers were short. His included. He was tired of being fucked with.

  “MICE, is that what you’re talking about, doc?” It was the company’s acronym for why people became traitors to their country: Money, Ideology, Conscience or Ego. The shrink was asking him if he’d thought about defecting.

  The psychologist had glanced down at McGarvey’s file and smiled. “You’re married, you have a young child and plenty of money to give them a very good life.” He looked up. “So why go through this kind of shit? They want you for black ops, but of course you know that because you volunteered. So what’s the real deep-in-your-gut why of it, Mr. McGarvey?”

  “Maybe I want to make a difference.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Maybe I hate bullies and I want to even the score.”

  “More bullshit,” the shrink said. “Your primary evaluator wrote that you were a man who values the truth above just about everything else. Sounds good on paper. But why are you here? What do you want, McGarvey? The truth, now.”

  “Washington is great at solving the big problems,” he’d said. “Winning the space race. Building the biggest nuclear arsenal. Flexing our financial muscle to bring some dictator into line. Fielding a first-class army. Deploying more carrier fleets than every other country combined.”