Without Honor Page 37

  “Yarnell!” McGarvey shouted.

  Yarnell’s figure filled the window opening and he fired, the shot ricochetting off the pavement. McGarvey fired three times, the first catching Yarnell in the chest, the second smacking into the door panel and catching him in the groin, and the third hitting him in the neck just above the sternum, destroying his throat and filling his lungs with blood.

  Trotter was racing up the road.

  “See about the guard,” McGarvey shouted, approaching the Mercedes with caution.

  Another car raced down the driveway from the house and skidded to a halt in the street.

  “FBI! FBI!” Trotter shouted.

  McGarvey didn’t bother looking back. Yarnell half lay, half sat in a bloody heap beside the Mercedes, his head lolling back on the leather-upholstered seat. A beretta automatic lay beside him. He was dead, there was absolutely no doubt of it. His eyes were open and his tongue filled his mouth as if he were gagging on something. Even in death, however, McGarvey could feel the power of the man. For two and a half decades no one had been able to touch him. Twenty-five years or more he had been allowed to operate unchecked. McGarvey thought how the man should have seemed diminished in death. But he didn’t.

  Stuffing Trotter’s pistol in his pocket, McGarvey bent down over Yarnell’s body and went through his pockets. No proof. Still there was no proof of anything other than the fact that Yarnell may have tried to assassinate the director of Central Intelligence tonight.

  In Yarnell’s breast pocket he found a miniature tape recorder. It was still running. McGarvey switched it off, and glanced over his shoulder. Four guards had come down from the house. One of them had broken away and was coming this way. McGarvey quickly stuffed the tape recorder in his pocket and got to his feet. In the distance he could hear the sounds of the first sirens.

  “An ambulance is coming,” the guard said, out of breath.

  “Yarnell won’t need it,” McGarvey said stepping aside.

  The guard caught sight of Yarnell’s body and he stopped short. “Christ,” he said. “You two put it to him, didn’t you?”

  “He was trying to escape. Shot your gate guard.”

  “What the hell were you two doing here in the first place?” the bodyguard asked, his eyes narrow. “We weren’t informed of any bureau operation.”

  “We were following Yarnell,” McGarvey said. “What happened at the house? We heard the shot.”

  “Following Mr. Yarnell for what reason, exactly?” There would be an investigation, and the man was thinking about his own future.

  “He was suspected of working for the Russians. How is Powers?”

  , “Damn,” the guard said glancing down at Yarnell. He shook his head. “Not good, I’d say. This bastard shot him in the head from close range. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. Christ, they’re old friends. Have been for years. How the hell were we supposed to know?”

  “How about your gate guard?” McGarvey asked.

  “Charlie is dead. There’ll be hell to pay for this all. A lot of hell for a long time.”

  “Shit runs downhill,” McGarvey said.

  “Yeah, ain’t that just the truth now,” the man said, walking off.

  Trotter came across the street as the ambulance arrived and was directed up to the house. One of the guards went with it while the others kept a watchful eye. Other sirens could be heard in the distance.

  “In a very few minutes this place is going to be crawling with some angry people who are going to have a lot of questions,” McGarvey told him.

  “And I don’t know what the hell to tell them,” Trotter said. He was staring down at Yarnell’s body. He sighed. “What an incredible mess.”

  “We can try the truth, John, or at least some of it. But they’re going to want to know who the hell I am.”

  Trotter looked up. “Powers probably won’t make it from the way his bodyguards were talking. No need to prove anything now.”

  McGarvey thought about the tape recorder in his pocket. He took out the gun and handed it to Trotter. “For the record you shot him.”

  “There is enough circumstantial evidence, I suppose,” Trotter said.

  “Keep my ex-wife out of it,”

  “I’ll try, Kirk, that’s all I can promise.”

  The first of the police cars showed up just ahead of Leonard Day in a stretch limousine. Powers was taken away in the ambulance, its lights flashing, its siren screaming. Two other ambulances showed up moments later. Trotter walked over to where Day was talking with a District of Columbia police lieutenant, a secret service agent, and a couple of Powers’s bodyguards. For the moment they were ignoring McGarvey. Even more sirens were converging from around the city. The first of the television vans arrived, but the police had already blocked off the narrow street and wouldn’t allow the reporters to cross the barriers.

  McGarvey got his bag out of Trotter’s car as the coroner came over and checked Yarnell’s body. Police photographers took a series of pictures, the flash units blinding in the darkness. And then one of the ambulance crews respectfully lifted Yarnell’s body onto a stretcher, strapped it in, and took it away.

  A crowd had finally gathered. There were uniformed police officers and plainclothesmen everywhere, but everyone made a point of avoiding McGarvey. Confusion will come to the very end of every operation. Confusion and disdain. It was nearly axiomatic. The dustbin crew they were called. The investigating officers, the forensics specialists, the accountants of the business at hand, there to pick up the pieces and put them back together in neat, platable ledger books.

  His part in it was done, or very nearly done. Yet he was less certain now of what had really happened than he had been at the very beginning. As he waited he tried to examine his feelings as an accident victim in shock might try to determine the extent of his injuries. But nothing came to mind, and he understood that he was numb, and whatever he was thinking now would all be changed by morning, or by next week, or next month.

  It was nearly two in the morning. McGarvey sat in the back of the stretch limousine with a shaken Trotter and a pensive Leonard Day. They’d crossed Constitution Avenue on Third Street below the Capitol and headed toward the river. He was out. Day had taken care of everything so that he had become the invisible man as far as concerned the investigating officers. An extraneous object hardly worthy of a second glance. The man had the power, which was just as well because for all practical purposes the business was finished. And still he had no real idea what Baranov had hoped to accomplish. Yarnell might not have been able to provide the Russian with much in the way of hard intelligence these days, but my God, the director of Central Intelligence had to be the ultimate of gold seams.

  “I want you to leave the country,” Day said. “Back to Europe where we dug you up from under a rock.”

  A week ago he would have resented such a remark. It didn’t matter any longer. “What’s our story?”

  Day looked at him, his lips compressed. “You, mister, have no story. Plain and simple, you keep your mouth shut. You were never here, you know nothing about it.”

  “Keep my ex-wife out of it,” McGarvey said tiredly. “Other than that you’re welcome to it.”

  “We’ll just see now, won’t we,” Day said, puffed up with self-importance. “From what I can see she was very deeply—”

  McGarvey reached over in the darkness and clamped his fingers around Day’s throat, cutting off the man’s wind. “If need be, I’ll come back and kill you. It’s easier than you think.”

  Day’s eyes were bulging nearly out of their sockets, and his face was beginning to turn red. He tried to struggle, but McGarvey’s grip was iron tight. Trotter had reared back, he didn’t know what to do.

  “Make certain my ex-wife isn’t involved in any way, and I’ll keep my end of the bargain. Do you understand me, Mr. Deputy Attorney General?”

  Day nodded frantically and McGarvey let go. He lit a cigarette and for the remainder of the trip over to th
e Marriott he sat back in his seat and stared out the window, ignoring the other two. In the morning he would leave. He found that he was actually anxious to see Marta again, hold her in his arms, if she would come away with him. Not Switzerland, of course, but they would find solace somewhere together. He resolved to be a better person. He’d stepped back into the fray and found that the rules of the game, if not the class of participants, had drastically changed. It wasn’t for him. He might be dissatisfied in the future, there never could be a guarantee against that. But he didn’t think he’d ever again pine away for the agency.

  He reached in his pocket and felt for the miniature tape recorder he’d taken from Yarnell’s body. He thought about turning it over to them, but had decided against it. At least for the moment. They had their story in any event. Yarnell had been a traitor. Donald Powers had somehow discovered his friend’s duplicity and when he had confronted him with it, Yarnell shot him. Yarnell was killed during his attempt to escape. Spectacular headlines, but it was a story they all could live with. There’d be no one to dispute it, whether or not Powers died of his wound. He thought again that he didn’t know a thing about honor.

  “Good-bye, Kirk,” Trotter said outside the hotel. They shook hands. Day remained in the car.

  “Take care of yourself,” McGarvey said, and he meant it.

  “You too.”

  33

  For the rest of the morning, McGarvey lived in a state that could only be called disbelief and horror. He had not gone to bed after Trotter and Day had dropped him off; instead, he had listened to the recording that Yarnell had made of his conversation with Powers. And then he had listened to it again. He had telephoned Evita’s club twice, but there was no answer. He called the Del Prado in Mexico City, but the clerk knew nothing about Ms. Perez. She had not checked out, but she hadn’t returned to her room either. No one had seen her leave the hotel. He ordered from room service with the gray, overcast dawn, but when his breakfast came he found he didn’t have the stomach for it and drank barely a half a cup of coffee. He telephoned Trotter a few minutes before eight.

  “I don’t think there’s anything left to be said, Kirk,” Trotter growled.

  “Is he still alive?”

  “Powers? As of six when he came out of the operating theater he was in critical condition.”

  “Can he speak? Will he regain consciousness?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Trotter demanded. “Just go, Kirk. Leave it be.”

  “I have to know.”

  “Maybe we treated you shabbily. I have no defense. It’s just the way it went. But there’s nothing to be gained—”

  “Is he conscious?” McGarvey persisted.

  Trotter sighed. “I don’t think so. From what I understand he may never come out of it, and if he does he’ll probably be a vegetable. It’s all over. Go.”

  “But he was innocent.”

  “We know that.”

  “So was Yarnell.”

  “What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying? Good Lord, haven’t we gone through enough?”

  McGarvey looked at the tape recorder lying on the desk. “It was a Baranov plot,” he said. “And he will have won if you publish the story that Yarnell was a traitor.”

  “We have the evidence.”

  “Circumstantial, all of it,” McGarvey said. He was thinking about Basulto’s story, about Owens’s hatred of Yarnell, who was probably guilty of seducing his mentor’s wife and of arrogance and of a certain hardness of character and purpose. He thought about Evita and everything she’d told him. She’d been manipulated all right, but by Baranov not by her husband, who had in his own way tried in the end to insulate her. And he thought about poor Janos, who had died on a fool’s errand. Yarnell had not murdered them. Baranov had.

  “John?”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ll meet you at Leonard Day’s house. Right now. This morning. Call him and tell him we’re on the way out.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I think you will.” He hung up. It was all clear to him now. All the pieces fit, from the hijacking of the flight out of Miami in which the two CIA officers were murdered to the incident last night. Yarnell had been doing his duty as he saw it up there. Nothing more.

  McGarvey cleaned up, ordered a rental car through the hotel desk, and drove out of the city up to Day’s palatial home on Lake Artemesia near College Park. The morning was cool and windy. The lake was dotted with whitecaps. No one was fishing. A plain gray Chevrolet sedan with government plates was parked under the overhang when McGarvey drove up. It was at places like this, he thought, that the real work of government service was often conducted. It didn’t offer him much comfort.

  Inside Trotter and Day were waiting for him in the study. They were drinking coffee. Trotter looked terrible; his eyes were bloodshot, his tie undone, his jacket disheveled. He hadn’t changed from last night. Day, on the other hand, seemed fresh in his three-piece pinstriped suit. He also looked angry, even imperious, sitting behind his big leather-topped desk.

  “I haven’t got time for your asinine bullshit this morning, McGarvey. I want that straight from the beginning here,” Day said. “You want money we’ll give it to you, although John tells me that you refused his very generous offer.”

  There had been no offer, but it didn’t matter. “Yarnell and Powers were both innocent,” McGarvey said, facing him across the desk like a schoolboy before his masters.

  “So John has told me. And what of your painstakingly gathered evidence?”

  “I was wrong.”

  “He was wrong,” Day hooted looking over at Trotter. “What do you suppose he was wrong about? on his loyalty. Throw our entire secret service into shambles just at the moment we most need its services.”

  “But what did Jules and Asher have to do with it, Kirk,” Trotter asked.

  “I expect that operation was designed to do nothing more than get Powers’s attention. He and Baranov have known each other for more than twenty-five years.”

  “It was him in Mexico City?” Trotter asked.

  McGarvey nodded.

  “What are you talking about?” Day demanded. “Who? What about Mexico City?”

  “When Yarnell was in Mexico City he worked Baranov, who at the time was his counterpart at the Soviet embassy. One evening Powers apparently showed up at a party that Yarnell threw and at which Baranov had supplied the women.”

  Day’s eyes narrowed. His sarcastic manner was gone. “And there was an indiscretion?”

  McGarvey nodded. “Most likely. Just that one night. Yarnell might not have thought much about it at the time, but Baranov had, and so had Powers.”

  “It was the link between them all these years,” Trotter said, understanding the situation at a much deeper level than Day because of his training.

  “Why in God’s name did he run to Powers last night? Why did he shoot him? It doesn’t make sense, McGarvey.”

  “It didn’t to me at first,” McGarvey said. “Not until this morning. But first you have to understand that this entire affair, everything that has happened, was orchestrated by Baranov.”

  “He’s that good?” Day asked.

  McGarvey nodded.

  “And it started, you say, with the deaths of Jules and Asher?”

  Darby Yarnell’s guilt or his innocence?”

  “It was a Soviet plot,” McGarvey went on doggedly. He wanted to get this over with and leave before he did something truly stupid like going across the desk and smashing Day’s pretty face.

  The study was a pleasant room. It smelled of books, leather, Day’s cologne, and coffee. A lot of the books were privately bound in matched covers. McGarvey wondered if anyone had ever read them.

  “It began with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami,” he said. “Planned and financed by the Soviet-run CESTA network.”

  Trotter sat forward a little. “The weapons were Soviet made. Supplied by CESTA.”


  “Because of the missile thing?” Day asked. “Is that why those two were shot down? Were the Russians afraid of an early discovery?”

  “No,” McGarvey said patiently. “I think the missile thing will turn out to be simply another Cuba.”

  “Simply,” Day said in amazement.

  “The Cuban missile crisis got the Russians exactly what they wanted all along. A promise from us to never again intervene in Cuban affairs. It worked then, and I suspect it will work in Mexico.”

  “If that wasn’t the Soviet’s goal, and I’m certainly not saying that I agree with you, then what?”

  “How effective was Powers as a DCI?” McGarvey countered. He was thinking about the tape recording.

  “Very,” Day said. “The best we’ve ever had, bar none.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the hospital, of course—”

  “Baranov has won,” McGarvey said quietly. “Powers was a thorn in his side. Has been for years and years, so he wanted to get rid of him. Cast doubt

  “By killing them and making sure that Powers knew the weapons were Russian made and CESTA supplied, Baranov was putting Powers on notice that trouble was coming.”

  “He warned Powers.”

  “In effect. He wanted Powers to become defensive. Just one more link in a very long chain of evidence.”

  Day shook his head, and Trotter had to explain it for him. “Innocent men aren’t generally defensive. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence.”

  “The Cuban was working for Baranov, of course,” Day said.

  “From the beginning,” McGarvey said. “And you have to admire him. He did a fine job.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Havana, I suppose. Picking up a medal. Or a bullet.”

  “And Darby’s ex-wife?” Trotter asked.

  “Hopefully on her way to New York. Baranov actually came to New York about nine months ago to see her. He told her that someone like me would be coming around asking questions about her ex-husband. She had a grudge, and she had seen things in Mexico City that she couldn’t possibly have understood. At the time Yarnell was very close to Baranov. They did everything together. Two young spies, both brilliant, both headstrong and arrogant, were working each other. Seducing each other, playing the game on a grand scale. What was a poor little Mexican princess supposed to believe when she saw them together?”