First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

  “What about security?”

  “We have a couple of teams from Housekeeping, but believe me, our johns are not runners. They’re too goddamned frightened.”

  Of what or who? McGarvey wanted to ask, but didn’t. That question, along with a ton of others, would hold for now.

  FOUR

  McGarvey followed Trotter through the mudroom just off the kitchen, then down a short corridor past the dining room and into the front stair hall, where one of the housekeepers was waiting.

  “Any trouble from our boys?” Trotter asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Paul Reubens, Kirk McGarvey,” Trotter said, making the introductions.

  Reubens was a solidly built man, a bit over six feet with broad shoulders, thick dark hair, blue eyes and a warm smile. “Heard your Moscow run turned out good,” he said, shaking hands.

  “I got lucky that no one at the bank realized the money was counterfeit. Could have been dicey. But I’m a little surprised that someone outside the team knows about it.”

  “Paul works special ops,” Trotter said. “He ran the same scam in Beijing eighteen months ago, and we used him as a planning adviser on your gig.”

  “How’d you end up in housekeeping?” McGarvey asked. It was a rude question. The implication was that Reubens had done something wrong and was demoted. But the man was here backstopping something that was supposedly stunning.

  “This is special,” Trotter said. He and Reubens exchanged a look. “I just want you to listen to these guys, hear them out.”

  “May I ask a question or two?”

  “Of course. This will be a transparent operation—at least this segment of it will be. Afterward we’ll just have to see how the chips fall.”

  It was there again. Trotter was afraid of something—McGarvey was sure of it. The way the man held himself. The way he spoke, stiff, almost too formal, as if he’d practiced the words in front of a mirror. The way his eyes darted, never lighting on anything or anyone for longer than a moment or two.

  “Do you want them both down or one at a time?” Reubens asked.

  “Both,” McGarvey said, and Trotter nodded.

  Reubens went upstairs and Trotter led McGarvey into the fairly small and poorly furnished living room. Rough-hewn beams crossed the low ceiling, and only one small window looked out on the woods in the general direction of the OHB. They could have been deep in some colonial-era forest with no living soul for fifty miles in any direction. A pair of wingback chairs had been drawn up in front of a ratty Queen Anne couch, a low table between them.

  The room was cold and so quiet that McGarvey could hear the low sounds of a conversation upstairs.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Trotter asked. “We have coffee made, or some water.”

  “How about a beer?”

  Trotter went back to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Heineken as someone came down the stairs. “We want your opinion—we need it.”

  “Why me especially?” McGarvey asked. He’d always been wary of liars, and especially of their motives. A friend of his in the OSI had said that Mac’s bullshit meter was the best he’d ever seen. McGarvey had taken it as a compliment.

  “Because there’s no shrink on staff who can match your combination of field experience and knowledge of abnormal psychology.”

  “Are these guys psychos?”

  “I don’t know. It’s up to you to tell me. Do you understand?”

  “No. But I’ll listen to them, and then we’ll talk about whatever you want to talk about. I’ll want to know what you want me to do. And I’ll take written orders on it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Two men appeared at the stair hall doorway and stopped, Reubens towering behind them. They were short, under five-five, but stout, thick-chested, as many South American mestizos tended to be, with olive complexions, black hair and deep-set eyes. They were dressed alike in jeans, black T-shirts and sandals. The one on the left had a scar on the side of his face, part of that ear gone. He’d been shot some time ago. The one on the right had a six-inch tattoo of a cross from which blood dripped high on his right arm, where his sleeve was rolled up.

  McGarvey’s first impression was that they were even more frightened than Trotter was, but determined, focused. They wanted something very specific and he thought that it wasn’t as simple as a defection.

  “Lucas Munoz with the tattoo—we call him the warrior. And Juan Campos, who we call the preacher. Until eight days ago, when they came to our embassy in Mexico City, they were on the run from their own people in the DINA,” Trotter said, introducing them.

  “Maybe now you finally believe us?” Campos said. His accent was thick, but his English was good. He was educated.

  “I want you to tell your story to this gentleman, who’ll have some questions. Then we’ll see.”

  “Screw that, Trotter. We gave you the crown jewels and now we want to be turned over to the FBI’s WPP.” The WPP was the Bureau’s Witness Protection Program. But McGarvey was surprised that the Chilean intelligence officer knew Trotter’s name. It made no sense. Interrogators never let their subjects learn their real identities.

  “You’ll have to earn it.”

  “Fuck it,” Munoz said. “And who the fuck is this guy supposed to be?”

  McGarvey put his beer on the table, sat in one of the wingback chairs and crossed his legs. “Sit down, please.”

  “Screw this,” Munoz said.

  Reubens gently laid a hand on his shoulder. “This is the end of nice.”

  Munoz looked up at him, but then nodded and he and Campos came the rest of the way in and sat down on the couch facing McGarvey.

  Trotter remained where he stood, and Reubens leaned against the doorframe. They had the remainder of the day, or however long it would take. No one was in a hurry.

  “I’ve not been briefed, except that you gentlemen defected from the DINA, which means there’s a price on your heads—unless you’re just some low-level scumbags,” McGarvey began.

  “We don’t have to take this kind of shit,” Campos said. He started to rise, but McGarvey motioned him down, and he complied.

  It was bluff and bravado—the message came across loud and clear. But bluffing about what, and why the bravado? Presumably they knew that they were safe here, out of reach of anyone who wanted them dead. But they didn’t act as if they believed they were beyond Pinochet’s reach.

  “It started when the Russian field officer showed up out of the blue. We’ve already told Mr. Trotter this,” Munoz said, but McGarvey interrupted him.

  “Take me back to the beginning—your beginning. I want to know where you were recruited, who was your first training supervisor, what were your courses like, your instructors, your classrooms, your field training, hand-to-hand, firearms, explosives, codes, languages, structure.”

  Munoz looked to Trotter, who turned away.

  McGarvey could see that Trotter understood that before the messenger could be believed, his background had to be nailed down. If the two DINA officers told the truth about their early days, their triumphs and perhaps some of their failures, a baseline could be established from which the truth could be separated from the self-serving bullshit that was sure to follow.

  They were reluctant at first, but it wasn’t long before they were back six years in Munoz’s case, a few months earlier for Campos, when they had been recruited from their high schools, both of them in Santiago for the Escuela Militar—the military academy. Munoz studied the history of warfare, while Campos studied international relations.

  Good years, they agreed. Hard studies because they were on state-sponsored scholarships that included ROTC training. But good because there had been parties and a lot of city girls who were more than willing to spread their legs for the prospect of marrying a future military officer.

  But after four years the day of reckoning came in the late fall, just before graduation, when a man in a civilian suit came to interview them. H
e told them about an exciting career in the DINA, protecting Chile’s freedom.

  It was better than going back to farming or ranching. And infinitely better than taking some desk job as an ordinary functionary. Travel, adventure and even more girls, an endless supply of women.

  Paradise. At first.

  FIVE

  It was in the middle of the Pinochet era when el Presidente was at the height of his power. That was a full seven years after the so-called Caravan of Death in October 1973, when seventy-two people were killed by the regime. But those numbers soon rose; at one estimate in the following year more than twenty-one hundred people were murdered, among them ninety children younger than twelve, and thirty thousand were tortured.

  “We were just kids, naive, you know,” Munoz said. “We had our degrees, but they amounted to little more than book learning and repeating our professors’ opinions. Word for word got us the highest grades. We were little yellow parrots.”

  “Except for the norteamericanos,” Campos said.

  “Si, a few ROTC cadets from somewhere in Massachusetts, I think, showed up for one semester. And those guys could say anything they wanted to. Arrogant pricks. We thought that they would get all of us in trouble. But no one bothered them, and they went home with good grades.”

  “It was Señor Ortiz who recruited us,” Campos said. “Once we were in we never saw him again, but in the two months it took to check our backgrounds and run us through an endless series of tests, he was there every day. He had us call him Uncle Bastian. Sometimes he took us out for steaks and beers. We were special, he said.”

  “We were his boys,” Munoz agreed. “Told us he had the highest hopes for us. We were destined to do great things—me with my understanding of war, and Juan knowing how diplomacy was supposed to work.”

  “You knew each other by then?” McGarvey asked.

  “We were roommates at school almost from the beginning.”

  Someone at the DINA had spotted them early on, their professors instructed to make sure they did well. They had been a matched set from the beginning. Groomed first in school and nurtured in the service for some long-range operation. But one-trick ponies. Once they had finished the one op, they were to be discarded.

  Tossing away highly educated and well-trained officers wasn’t done lightly in any intelligence service. There were those trained for missions in which survival was less than a fifty-fifty shot; that wasn’t uncommon even in the CIA. Every NOC understood the risks they were taking; the stars on the granite walls in the OHB lobby attested to it. But there was a class of operatives who worked pretty much in the open. Usually at embassies around the world, or at UN headquarters in New York, where they were expected to come into regular contact with representatives of foreign governments—targeted representatives. And from time to time one of them would be found as a victim of an apparent traffic accident, or drowning in the East River, or suicide.

  “When did you suspect that you were being set up for a one-way mission?” McGarvey asked.

  Munoz was startled but Campos took the question as if he had expected it.

  “We didn’t at first, though I began to have my suspicions a few months in,” he said. “The other recruits spent several months on the confidence courses, firing ranges, close-order battle drills, explosives, but our drills involved partying until we could pass as someone who had been born wealthy and expected fine service.”

  Trotter had evidently not heard this part. “The training mustn’t have been effective.”

  McGarvey held him off. “What else?”

  “Listening,” Campos said. “And understanding what we were hearing. We got to be sympathetic listeners. Even better, we learned to ask the right questions at the right time. When to press, when to back off. Even when to offer a shoulder to cry on, give some advice.”

  “Love?”

  Campos nodded. “That too.”

  “Sex?” McGarvey asked.

  Munoz bridled, but Campos stayed calm, though he was uncomfortable. “If need be.”

  “You learned to be actors.”

  Munoz jumped up. “What the hell do you think we were, you bastard?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “What were you?”

  But he figured he knew the answer to that question, though he had only a vague notion where it might lead, except that the two of them had been trained for a very special onetime operation that would involve someone likely at the highest levels of government in a compromising situation. One in which some useful flow of intelligence would occur. They had been trained to prospect for a gold seam.

  “Puta.”

  “Oh, sit down,” Trotter said as if he had no idea what else to say.

  “When did you two go operational?” McGarvey asked.

  “Twelve months ago,” Campos said. Munoz sat down.

  “And when did you learn that you were marked for execution after you completed the mission, whatever it was?”

  “Two weeks ago. It was why we ran.”

  “Take me through it.”

  “There was so much confusion, so many things going on that it seemed like twenty hours a day, every day,” Campos said. “It was so easy to get caught up in it, get lost, that I don’t think I can give you any logical order of things, or even their nature.” He glanced at Munoz, who had a forlorn expression in his dark eyes.

  “Every time we asked our control officer if we were doing the right things, he told us that we were on a mission. Keep up the good work.”

  “Was Uncle Bastian your control officer?”

  “No, a rat-faced little son of a bitch who I think was the one who’d pull the trigger when the time came.”

  “Do we have a name?”

  “Cristobal Peña.”

  McGarvey glanced at Trotter.

  “Almost certainly a work name—we’re checking it out.”

  “What was the first thing you did?”

  “Went to a party at the Russian embassy,” Campos said.

  “What were your legends?”

  “I was Eduardo Parra. My father was Daniel Celsi Parra. Lucas was Franco Reyes, my cousin on my mother’s side.”

  “Daniel Parra is the king of copper in Chile,” Trotter said. “One of the richest men in the country. Without him Pinochet would never have commanded anything higher than a battalion.”

  McGarvey knew the name; Parra was an aging jet-setter, a handsome man whose background was Castilian—Spanish nobility. “These two don’t fit the mold,” McGarvey said to Trotter. “They have the education and might have learned the bearing, but not the look.”

  “Parra always kept his wife in the background. She’s mestizo. I don’t see what the trouble is.”

  Trotter’s response was one of McGarvey’s first insights into the basic tradecraft principle that people saw, heard and thought what they expected they’d see and hear. His OSI buddy called it the Sheeple Principle: People are herd animals, Mac. Plain and simple; they follow the flock.

  “If Parra père is as connected as well as we all think he is, he would have known that these guys were masquerading as his son and nephew.”

  “As a favor to Pinochet.”

  “As a favor to copper,” McGarvey said. “It hasn’t been nationalized yet.” He turned back to the Chileans. “You cleaned up and took a limo to the embassy?”

  “A cab,” Munoz said. “We weren’t exactly show-offs.”

  “Who was your mark?”

  “A Russian captain by the name of Valentin Illen Baranov,” Campos said. “He was new to Santiago, but I think that he or someone like him had been expected even before we were recruited.”

  Even though the operation had occurred nearly one year ago, it was fresh enough in the Chilean defectors’ minds that it was obvious they were reliving it in 3D.

  “We were told that he was a party boy, and that he was well connected to our government.”

  “How well connected?” McGarvey asked.

  “Pinochet?” Trott
er said.

  “I think so, but we had no idea at the time,” Campos said.

  “How did you approach him?” Trotter asked. He was eager; he had the nervous energy.

  But McGarvey held up a hand. “I’m curious about something before we continue. Is he still there?”

  Campos shrugged. “So far as we know. He was spearheading something called CESTA del Sur, some sort of a spy network in the hemisphere south of the U.S. border.”

  SIX

  Trotter leaned forward, the bit in his teeth now. “But there was a complication, wasn’t there?” he said to the Chileans. “You left that out.”

  “Still is, last we heard,” Munoz responded glumly. “That was the part that really scared the shit out of us, you know. Made us think twice about coming here. It’s why we went to Mexico City first. But the place is a madhouse. Damned near as many Russians and Cubans as there were norteamericanos. Not a safe place for us.”

  No place was safe, McGarvey wanted to tell them. It was another lesson among a growing list he was beginning to learn. There would always be complications. He almost felt that he was in school with these guys.

  “From the beginning again,” he said. “I’m assuming that this ‘complication’ happened before your first party at the Russian embassy.”

  “The same day,” Munoz said, and fear was written sharply on his face, especially in his squinting eyes, as if he were a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

  “Peña picked us up at the SIM, said someone wanted to have a word with us before we went in.”

  “SIM?” McGarvey asked. He wasn’t familiar with the term.

  “Simulated environment. It was in the same compound as the urban warfare complex. Anyway, this place was a pretty fair mock-up of the Russian embassy’s main reception area—where they held their parties, dinners, VIP receptions, things like that.”

  “Were there mock-ups of the rest of the embassy and its grounds?”

  “That was in another space, but yes, we were required to memorize all of it.”