First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Read online

  “Did you?”

  “Of course,” Munoz said. “We were professionals by then.” He glanced at his partner. “We hadn’t lost all of our naivete, but we were learning.”

  McGarvey waited.

  “Peña had a car and driver and he took us over to the interior ministry. They let us right through the gate without stopping, which was a very big deal. A mob had gathered the day before and did some damage. Bus fares had gone up again and the people were pissed off. They did some damage, not much, but the entire place, including the Presidential Palace, was on lockdown.”

  “Who was it that wanted to talk to you?”

  “Señor Cardenas. A big-shot.”

  “Mauricio Cardenas, foreign trade minister,” Trotter said.

  “What the hell was a foreign trade minister doing at Interior?” McGarvey asked. Anomalies bothered him.

  “Unknown.”

  “Did you see him?” McGarvey asked.

  “Eventually,” Munoz said. “Peña took us up to a conference room on the second floor where we were told to sit down and keep our mouths shut. He went next door, but left the door open a little. We could hear them talking.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “We couldn’t hear the words and I didn’t think that it was such a good idea to stick our noses in too far,” Campos said. “Lucas wanted to listen at the door, but I talked some sense into him.”

  Again McGarvey held his silence. He had the feeling that something was coming that none of them was going to like very much. Maybe even the real reason—or at least one of them—why he’d been called here.

  “You have to understand that this was important. We were about to go over to the Russian embassy to get close to this captain, maybe even turn him, or at the very least find out what the hell he really wanted and how he intended on getting it. But first Señor Cardenas was going to give us a pep talk.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” McGarvey said.

  “Didn’t to us either,” Campos agreed. “But after a couple of minutes Peña came back and told us we’d have to wait a little longer, and then he left.”

  “Back to Cardenas’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the minister’s door was still open a little.”

  “Si.”

  “What happened?” McGarvey asked.

  “Someone else came to see him.”

  “They had a conversation?”

  “Si.”

  “You could hear them talking but not what they were saying, right?”

  All of a sudden Campos was nervous, uncomfortable, which didn’t make a lot of sense to McGarvey. The men had already told this story to Trotter. Campos was just repeating it.

  “For the most part.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “How they were talking sounded strange. Different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until whoever it was talking to the minister raised his voice.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “‘Don’t fuck with me. There’s likely to be blowback,’” Campos said. “In English.”

  McGarvey didn’t let his surprise show. It was a setup for the one-way case officers. But he’d expected the Russian to be there. “Did he have an accent at all?”

  “Norteamericano.”

  “Had either of you ever heard that voice before?”

  “No.”

  “Or after? Maybe a guest at the Russian embassy?”

  Campos shook his head. “Their meeting didn’t last long. And when they were done, Peña came for us and brought us in to meet Cardenas. The minister said he was proud of us, and that he couldn’t stress how important our mission was.”

  “Again, what was your mission?” McGarvey asked.

  “To find out about Baranov. Cardenas acted as if he had a lot of respect for the Russian.”

  “Then what?”

  “Sir?”

  “After you found out about this captain, you were ordered to try to turn him, but if that became impossible, were you to assassinate him?”

  Campos started to answer, but Munoz cut in. “Peña said that there might be something else later. Something even more important.”

  More important than an American warning a foreign trade minister not to fuck with him? That there would be blowback? It was a CIA term, meaning unintended consequences.

  “Let’s take a break, shall we?” Trotter said. “Paul, bring our guests something to drink, would you?”

  McGarvey went out into the stair hall with Trotter. “The American was CIA, someone from our Santiago station?”

  “Dick Beckett swears up and down it was not his operation,” Trotter said. Beckett was chief of Santiago Station. “We had them listen to a series of regional voice recognition programs. Pinned it down to a reasonable level of confidence that the speaker was educated somewhere in the Northeast. Maybe Boston or somewhere close. He was likely born elsewhere, but educated at MIT or some smaller school thereabouts.”

  “Is the DO running any independent op down there?”

  “Three, but none involving anyone with that voice.”

  “What did Beckett say?”

  “He’s not involved.”

  “He’s the COS; it’s his AOR.” Area of Responsibility.

  “I don’t make the rules, Kirk.”

  Another lesson learned. No one person knew everything, or they were not disposed to talk about it. “What do you want me to do? What’s my assignment?”

  “There’s more,” Trotter said.

  SEVEN

  “We were going over as representatives from the Ministry of Culture to meet Baranov, who was posing as the new cultural attach“é to the Russian ambassador,” Campos said.

  “But we were warned that he probably knew or guessed that we were sent to find out what he wanted,” Munoz added.

  “He knew that he’d been pegged as a spy,” McGarvey said. “But were you ever given a hint at what he might be after?”

  “No,” Munoz said.

  “Cardenas seeing them had to have been an oblique hint,” Trotter intervened. “The foreign office had sat up and taken notice.”

  Reubens had brought them beers and they’d already drained the bottles, but they had sense enough not to ask for more.

  “Take me through what happened next,” McGarvey said. “You showed up at the Russian embassy, presented your credentials and made your way through the crowd—I’m assuming there were a lot of people—looking for Baranov.”

  “We were on the guest list, and yes, there were maybe seventy-five or a hundred people there.”

  “From other embassies? Perhaps ours?”

  “No, mostly just us and the Russians. A lot of our artists, musicians and practically the entire state ballet company. The directors of the Bolshoi and Kirov were there, along with several of their principal dancers.”

  “Anyone besides you two from the Ministry of Culture?”

  Munoz shook his head. “It would have been awkward. We were briefed on some of the staff, the people we supposedly worked with and answered to, but we’d never actually met them.”

  “Keeping the ministry out had to have been ordered either by Pinochet himself or Nunez,” Trotter said. General Armando Nunez was the new DINA director. “No one would have questioned their orders.”

  “We didn’t have to look for Baranov—he found us right at the start,” Campos said. “Came over, shook our hands, then hugged us like we were all best of friends.”

  “The bastard was built like what you norteamericanos call a brick shit house,” Munoz said. “Solid. I think he might have been a wrestler at one time. I got the feeling that he was telling me that he could crush my body any time he wanted to do it. And I believed it.”

  “He knew who we were and he wanted to let us know about his power,” Campos added. “He was looking for respect.”

  “Did you get the sense that someone was watching all of this?” McGarvey asked. “Maybe someone from the KGB?”


  “We spotted a couple of them, plus a couple of our own guys.”

  “I wasn’t clear how you could tell,” Trotter said.

  “They were the only four people in the room who weren’t drinking,” Munoz said.

  “But Baranov and you were,” McGarvey said.

  “Vodka,” Munoz said.

  “I hated it,” Campos said, but Munoz just smiled.

  “No one bothered to introduce them around,” Trotter said.

  “Within ten minutes he asked if we wanted to go to a real party, and we had to say yes. Our brief was to do whatever the man wanted us to do. We were to gain his confidence.”

  “Were you also briefed to hint that you might want to defect?” McGarvey asked. He had a fair idea where this was going now.

  “Especially that, but only after we found the right time and place to admit who we really were and what our mission was.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “That night,” Campos said.

  Baranov hadn’t been long in the country, and although he had an apartment at the embassy his real place was down in San Antonio, on the coast about one hundred kilometers from Santiago. It was a compound that a Russian friend of a friend on Pinochet’s staff had found for him. Out of the way but only an hour from the capital. The place came complete with a housekeeper, a cook and an all-around handyman, plus some Russian muscle from time to time.

  “It was incredible. Here we were a half hour after meeting him, in his car on the way to his compound, when he told us about his Russian minders. No denials that he was KGB.”

  “He practically drew them a goddamned picture,” Trotter said. “Nothing left to the imagination.”

  “We were way out of our league,” Campos said. “Nothing in our training dealt with the situation we were in.”

  “Improvise, we were told,” Munoz added. “But what the hell are you supposed to do when the fucking ship is sinking right out from under you?”

  Something else struck McGarvey at that moment. Both men were using a lot of American slang. Not Spanish or Russian, as he expected would be the case, considering their assignment. And he was getting the uncomfortable feeling that the op Trotter had brought him concerned not the Russian, but the mysterious American who’d gotten tough with the foreign minister. “Where was this place, exactly? And how was it laid out?”

  Trotter gave Munoz a pad of paper, and the Chilean drew a sketch of the interior of the main house, and directions to the place. “Not easy to find.”

  “Who was at the compound when you got there?”

  “More people than I could count. The place was lit up like Christmas, cars parked inside the walls and outside—Mercedes, a couple of Rolls, even a Ferrari and a couple of Caddies. An American country-and-western band was playing in the courtyard, and just inside the main room three guys were playing Russian guitars.”

  “Balalaikas,” Trotter said.

  “Upstairs on the balcony a woman played a violin, something sad, the entire night.”

  “The pool was lit up,” Munoz said.

  “Tables filled with food and booze,” Campos added. “Bartenders, waitresses everywhere.”

  “Don’t forget the hospitality table,” Munoz said.

  “Really big bowls of coke. Just about everyone there was drugged out.”

  “Stoned,” Munoz agreed. “And happy. Everyone was laughing.”

  “And women. At least two for every man. All of them young and beautiful and naked.” Campos shook his head. “I never saw so much tits or pussy in all my life. Never even dreamed about it.”

  “It must have been great,” McGarvey said.

  “We were too goddamned scared to enjoy ourselves,” Campos said. “At first, anyway.”

  “But something must have come out of that night. You must have brought product back to your handler. Or didn’t you continue? Was that the end of it?”

  “Not the end. There were more parties. And yes, we brought back information about their new over-the-horizon radar to counteract the Americans’ OTH in northern Greenland somewhere. Got the names of two Russian spies trying to turn one of our cryptanalysts. And the name of one of our people who’d been turned in Moscow.”

  “Your handler must have been happy.”

  “Over the moon, but then General Varga and his wife started showing up at the parties, and shit started to get weird,” Campos said. “That was about two months ago, when we began to realize that it might be time to get out while we could.”

  “Who is Varga?” McGarvey asked.

  “They call him the Butcher,” Munoz said. “Lots of blood on his hands. Chilean blood.”

  “He and his wife are both crazy,” Campos said. “Have to be, considering what they were supposedly doing. But Baranov told us he was going to have them both because with them in his bed he would have the essence of Chile in his soul.”

  “Did he bed them that night?” McGarvey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Munoz said and Campos shook his head. “We were otherwise occupied trying to figure a way out.”

  “It was the only time we ever saw them and Baranov together,” Campos answered before McGarvey could ask.

  “But that wasn’t the last time you were at one of Baranov’s parties.”

  EIGHT

  The story was winding down. Other than Baranov’s admission about the Russians’ work on OTH radar, the attempt on the cryptanalyst in Santiago, and the Moscow field officer who’d been turned, nothing else of any real value came out of the parties, except that it seemed as if just about everyone who was anybody showed up out there.

  “He had spotted us from the beginning, fed us something to keep our handler happy and then turned his back on us,” Campos said. “We had served his purpose.”

  “Did you get the feeling that maybe it was time for you to stop going out there?” McGarvey asked.

  “Yes, but Peña insisted we stick with it. Said the bastard was going to make a mistake sooner or later and he wanted to nail him.”

  “But?” McGarvey asked. He’d heard a slight hesitation in the Chilean’s voice.

  Campos glanced at Munoz. “There was something else. Peña never said anything specific, but each time we reported to him he asked a lot of questions about who else was at the parties. Who Baranov might be sleeping with. The women were of no interest—it was the men the Russian was fucking that Peña wanted to know about.”

  “Any names in particular?”

  “If you mean the American, no. There were no Americans there.”

  “And we never mentioned what we heard outside the minister’s office,” Munoz said. “Self-preservation.”

  “Maybe insurance,” McGarvey suggested.

  “Only if we got in deeper, learned something new, came face-to-face with this gringo.”

  “Which you never did.”

  “No,” Campos said.

  Not long after their last night in San Antonio, Baranov announced that he was flying to Mexico City on business. Peña arranged for Campos and Munoz to take the very next flight out. The drill was for them to hang around the Russian embassy until they spotted Baranov and then follow him, see who he met, what he did. It was so loose it was laughable. But they were fixed up with bulletproof passports identifying them as Mexican citizens, and enough cash to wait it out for at least a month. Under no circumstance were they to make contact with their own embassy. And they were to report directly back to Peña only if and when Baranov did something significant.

  “Did he tell you what he meant by significant?” McGarvey asked. The story was way over the top.

  “Said we’d know it if we saw it,” Munoz said.

  “But you didn’t follow him, did you?”

  “No. We went to ground in a cheap hotel—the Catedral—in Zócalo and read the newspapers, watched TV at a bar down the street.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Anything that might involve the Russians.” Munoz shook his head. “But there was nothing, so w
e decided to run. To the American embassy first, but they didn’t give a shit about us. If they knew about Baranov, they didn’t admit it, just sent us on our way.”

  “They showed up in Miami a few days ago and called our eight hundred number, said they had a great idea for a movie involving a Russian spy and a norteamericano in Santiago,” Trotter said. “Actually quite inventive. They were transferred over to the public affairs office and finally to Carl Thompson, who’s our new film industry liaison. Took him about two seconds to realize who these guys were and he bounced them up to me.”

  There it was again, another anomaly, to McGarvey’s way of thinking—this one wide enough to drive a truck through. A couple of Chilean low-level intelligence officers wanting to defect in exchange for some fantastic story about a Russian in San Antonio should not have been believed for all the copper in the country—not without a lot of verification.

  Yet Trotter had picked up on it, and had them brought up here for a second telling, and then got McGarvey for the third go-around. But not a team of interrogators—even though the CIA had the best of them just about anywhere.

  Trotter motioned for McGarvey to step outside.

  “Now what?” Munoz asked.

  “We’ll check out your story, and then we’ll see.”

  “Goddamnit,” Munoz protested, but McGarvey followed Trotter to the stair hall and then outside.

  “Smoke?” Trotter asked.

  “Sure,” McGarvey said. Katy was trying to get him to quit, and he supposed he would sooner or later, if not for her, certainly for himself, for his wind. “What’s the op? Digging out the American?”

  Trotter was startled. “Heavens no; even if he exists outside their imaginations, we’d need to turn over an entire deck of cards before we could be sure of our position. My guess is that it was an embellishment to their basic story. Something meant to make us sit up and take serious notice. Which we have.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Trotter, but that’s crap.”

  “Please call me John. I don’t want any formality to get in the way of what I think is an extremely important task. And believe me, I’m not alone in that opinion.”

  “The Russian?” McGarvey said. “Have we established who exactly he is and what he’s doing throwing parties down there?”