First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel Page 7

  Some mournful guitar music from a stereo played softly in the background, the lights were low, the night soft, isolated, sensuous. Baranov could almost feel the heat radiating off the general and his wife. And something else as well. Anticipation, perhaps.

  He smiled and raised his glass. “I would like to do business on behalf of my country by helping save your life. But first I think that we should get to know each other a little better, don’t you agree?”

  “We have read your dossier,” Varga said. “You’ve done things.”

  “And I’ve read yours. Your wife’s.”

  “Please call me Karina.”

  Baranov nodded. “With pleasure. And I’d like to see your paintings.”

  Varga was somewhat startled though he tried to hide it, but Karina smiled. “But first a movie, and afterward we can discuss exactly how you mean to help us and why you think that we need you here.”

  “And why Moscow as opposed to Washington,” Varga said.

  Baranov laughed out loud as he stood and took off his jacket. “Let’s become friends. You have your movies and paintings and I have something to give.”

  * * *

  The movie was without sound, which made the black-and-white images on the 16-mm screen seem all the more brutal and surreal. Except that Baranov had seen the real thing in person at a couple of the gulags in the Far East; he’d heard the screams, the pleadings, smelled the blood and excrement and fear.

  But the real thing as well as the movies were boring. He preferred his opponents to fight back. He preferred the intelligent operator to the bovine victim being led to slaughter.

  It was different for Varga and his wife, who both became visibly aroused within the first minute or so of the first movie.

  At one point Baranov chuckled. He got another brandy and came back.

  “Do you think this is amusing, these completely helpless people dying like that?” Karina asked.

  “Actually, I do,” he said. “There are no innocent enemies of the state, didn’t you know? If they were so helpless, why did they take part in such a foolish revolution? Why didn’t they run away? Or at the least keep their fucking mouths shut!”

  An older woman, naked, with large pendulous breasts, came on-screen. Varga strode up beside her and lopped off her left breast with a razor-sharp machete. She fell back, mouth open in a scream, silent on the screen, blood gushing from the massive wound.

  The general turned to look directly at the camera, an enigmatic smile on his narrow lips. La Joconde at the Louvre, was the first thought to come to Baranov’s mind, and he gave voice to it.

  For a longish moment Varga and his wife were dead silent, but then Karina clapped her hands and Varga threw his head back and roared with laughter. “You understand,” he said, choking between breaths. “You understand.”

  Everything Baranov had read about them was correct; they were certifiably insane. They killed simply for the pleasure of it. The units of the Gulag Archipelago, on the other hand, served a valuable purpose: they cleansed the state.

  But there was a purpose here too: CESTA del Sur.

  The thought hung on the air for a long time, until Varga and his wife exchanged a glance.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked her husband.

  “Not for lobster,” he said.

  “Valentin?” Karina asked.

  “Not for dinner, no,” Baranov said. “But friends call me Vasha.”

  “But you’re hungry?”

  Baranov turned his attention back to the images on the screen. What he was watching reminded him of the movies he’d seen from the Nazi concentration camps. The victims were just that—victims and not people, at least not in the social sense of the world. No friends, next-door neighbors, fellow workers, lovers, wives, husbands, children. Just objects whose status was less than that of barnyard animals at the slaughterhouse.

  He’d supposed then as now that the run-of-the-mill Nazi concentration-camp soldier was able to carry out his gruesome duties because he could separate the identities of the victims from their status as real people.

  Looking at Varga and his wife, he had the feeling—chilling even for him—that they had never needed that fiction.

  “Never been more hungry in my life,” he said, putting down his drink.

  Karina and Varga got to their feet, and between them they led Baranov from the lanai and inside the house to the bedroom.

  FOURTEEN

  Janos Plonski had spent the entire day after his unsettling meeting with McGarvey falling behind. He’d gotten to his meager office at the records section in the basement of the OHB on time, and puttered, not getting anything of any real value done.

  As he drove back now around midnight, traffic was light, the air damp and still, his windows down. With his head fully extracted from his ass, as he would tell his boss Tony Winston in the morning, he had the feeling that someone was looking over his shoulder. And it was not a friend.

  Janos was also unsettled about how he had left it with Pat. She’d always liked Mac, but she’d once admitted that she was frightened of him.

  “He’s a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Janos,” she’d said. “If he falls—which he will do someday—he could take us all down with him. You especially.”

  “Why me especially?” he asked.

  She’d looked away for a moment. “Because you’re so bloody much like him. You admire him. You’d like to be him.”

  “He’s just a friend.”

  “Why a friend like him?” she’d screeched. “Can you explain at least that much to me, so that I can understand your fucking fascination?”

  Because he’d never had anyone else to trust—other than his wife. Not his parents, who’d been too busy for him. Not his brother, who’d died young; no sisters, all the aunts and uncles and cousins dead. No one out there who gave a damn about whether he lived or died. No one, other than Pat, who would listen to him. And even Pat had never been the total answer for him, simply because he couldn’t discuss the details of the most classified operations he dealt with.

  She would not understand. Only Mac could. Which made him not only a friend but a refuge.

  “He’ll kill you one of these days,” she’d told him, her voice bleak. “Mark my words, guys like that always leave bodies in their wake.”

  As Plonski pulled up at the main gate the security guard slid open the window and waved him through. The campus was in full operation 24/7 so it wasn’t unusual for officers to show up at all hours of the night or day.

  He’d been totally honest with McGarvey about his job in records keeping. The system’s attention to detail—a voucher for every aspect of every operation—was its strength against congressional oversight as well as its weakness, a point he made more than once to his superiors.

  “Tell that to the folks who control our budget,” Larry Danielle, the assistant deputy chief of the Agency, had made it clear.

  “Including our Black Budget?” someone had asked. It was during a meeting in the DCI’s seventh-floor conference room.

  “Especially for those ops. But with care, gentlemen. The record trails need to be handled with exactly the same attention to detail that the actual operations demand.” Danielle had looked across the table at them as if he were a god looking down from Mount Olympus. “Lives are at stake. Don’t ever forget that you are not simply dealing with bits of paper in a file box somewhere.”

  Driving up to the seven-story OHB, Janos parked in the front lot and went through security in the main lobby. The first-floor corridor was mostly quiet, only a couple of staffers in the coffee shop to the right, and his footfalls seemed loud to him. Damning, in his mind, marking him as a thief in the night.

  Downstairs in Records, Dominique Walters and Patsy Cline were filing the day’s bits and pieces, and doing standby duty for anything needed to be pulled by someone in a field office somewhere in another time zone.

  It was another of Plonski’s suggestions that had gone unheeded: al
l operations worldwide, including here at Langley, should be on the Zulu clock—Greenwich Mean Time. Everyone would be playing from the same deck.

  Patsy was on a rolling ladder just around the corner from Janos’s office and she slid over when he walked in. “Came down to find out if we’re having a party?” she quipped.

  “I’ve heard stories, but I haven’t seen the line item requests yet,” he said. “Anything doing in the overnights?”

  “Mr. Trotter asked for a clarification on a line item from Station Santiago.”

  Plonski stopped himself from reacting. “Anything important?”

  “They’ve got one of the new laser surveillance units. Now they’re asking for authorization, after the fact.”

  “Big bucks.”

  “I’ll say. But at least he’s not lit a fire.”

  Plonski’s office was in the corner of the exposed basement with a window that used to overlook a sloping wooded area that had been recently cleared for construction of a new building. The CIA was growing by leaps and bounds.

  He draped his jacket over his chair and went out to Patsy, who rolled her chair back.

  “Pull Santiago’s budget requests and voucher summaries for the past ninety days, please. And pull the DO’s replies and any special ops orders.”

  Patsy hesitated. “Those were the same you looked at the other day, weren’t they?”

  “Just the last thirty days. I want ninety.”

  “Looking for something specific, boss?”

  “No, just curious about why they already got the laser and only now are asking for the pay order.”

  Janos went back into his office and sat looking out the window for ten minutes until Patsy came in with four large accordion files on a wheeled cart. “These are just the summaries.”

  “These’ll do for now. But I want you to start looking for the same requests for surveillance equipment from some of our other stations. Mexico City, Caracas, Bogotá, Quito, Lima.”

  The girl, actually a woman in her late thirties, who refused to wear skirts or dresses or makeup, was the picture-perfect librarian. Just about everything she did she took seriously. Plonski had often tried to kid her nto believing that he thought that she was a secret party animal, and sometimes, like earlier, she’d take him up on it. But she was very serious now.

  “If you can give me a hint where you want to go, maybe I can help.”

  He smiled. “Just fishing for now. If I get a bite, I’ll let you know.”

  When she left, he opened the first accordion folder and pulled out a file marked SECRET, STATION SANTIAGO above the subheading Line Items for the Month of September—two and a half months ago.

  He glanced at the clock on his desk, the Brandenburg Gate from the East Side, a gift from Pat. It was eight minutes after one when he began reading. Robert Stanwick, request for an update on his health insurance policy and a revision to his will. Toby McIntyre, request for transfer to Station Berlin. His wife was German and she wanted to go home for a while. Requisition for one thousand rounds of 9mm pistol ammunition, above the usual monthly resupply of five hundred rounds for proficiency practice.

  Curious, Plonski called for an explanatory file, which Patsy found and brought to him, without comment, in under five minutes. A shooting competition had been arranged between the U.S. and British embassy teams, and the Agency had fielded four competitors who needed the practice. Turns out the U.S. won handily.

  Ten minutes after two his telephone rang. One hour and two minutes. Actually a bit longer than he’d thought would be the case. It was Trotter.

  “Burning the midnight oil, are we, Janos?”

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “I have the same problem myself. Especially when I have a bee in my bonnet. Do you have a bee?”

  Plonski was a little disappointed, but not surprised. “I got behind today—don’t know what happened but I sorta went blank.”

  “Mac has that effect on people. Even me. Anything new for him?”

  “Actually it’s nothing directly for him, though he’s asked me to check around.”

  “Check for what, exactly?”

  “Station ops, routine shit. He’s on a mission and he wants to cover his ass. Looking for the anomalies.”

  Trotter was silent for just a moment. “Have you found any anomalies?”

  “Nothing other than the request for laser surveillance equipment that’s already been delivered. An expensive item.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m wondering why they need it.”

  FIFTEEN

  Cook, who was an old mestizo with no expression on her lined face, served coffee to Baranov on the pool deck just as the sun was rising on a beautiful day. Morning was his favorite time, and being alone was his favorite state of being. After last night he was glad for the moment.

  He’d not drunk any of the champagne because it was laced with enough LSD to have an effect on Varga and his wife, but he had reaped the benefits. They were not hooked, but they were vulnerable.

  He’d never been married, though once as a young man at Moscow State University and again at the KGB’s School One he’d fallen for girls. But they had been girls—especially at the university. And the KGB recruit had been tough, almost emotionless—sex was little more than another physical exercise.

  On an early assignment in London he’d made contact with an MI6 cipher clerk at a Turkish bathhouse and over the next months, developing his john, he’d engaged in a homosexual relationship. But it had never seemed odd or unnatural to him, even from the beginning. He was a field officer, working a john for valuable product. It was sex, not love, just like with the college girls and the KGB recruit.

  And the Vargas, in exchange for information and position.

  Karina, dressed in a bikini bottom and T-shirt, came out and sat down. Her hair was a mess and she wore no makeup. Her eyes were red and puffy but she managed a faint smile. “That was something,” she said.

  Cook came out with her coffee and a small glass of de Jerez.

  “How’s Mati?”

  “He was just coming around when I got up. He’ll be okay—he has a very strong constitución,” Karina said. She tossed back the brandy and sipped her coffee. “You are a formidable hombre who wants something important, I think. The problem is how what you want will affect us. Or your methods—how destructive will they be?”

  “I’m here to help—”

  She waved him off. “Save the speech, Captain. I had visions last night, fantasies, and so did my husband. But not you. When I woke up, my head was clear, and I counted the champagne glasses. Only two of them. What was in the wine for us?”

  “A stimulant. Nothing harmful, I promise you.”

  “But why did you think it was necessary to drug us? For the sex? None of what happened was new to either of us, just the chemical. So my question remains: What do you want from us? What does Moscow want?”

  “Chile,” Baranov said.

  She was amused. “Then you must have a very high notion of us. Me, to get to my husband. My husband, to get to who? El Presidente? But you have taken a ride around the golf course with him. If you wanted Chile, why didn’t you ask him? Or did he turn you down?”

  “We only talked about your husband and the assassin the CIA is sending to kill him. And the why of it.”

  “Because of the cleansing at Valparaíso.”

  Baranov almost laughed. “It’s become an embarrassment to Washington. At lot of money, time and diplomacy has been spent by them.”

  “Yes, for copper.”

  “More than that. For stability in this hemisphere.”

  “A stability that you have been ordered to interrupt.”

  “Just to change—from Washington to Moscow.”

  A light blinked on in Karina’s eyes. “Cuba,” she said. “If you can get Pinochet to cooperate, the others will—Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. Castro would be contained to the north and the south. But first must come us. And what doe
s my husband have to do with your grand plan?”

  Very often at this point in a turning, the issue of truth came out. Sometimes a little truth was more harmful in the end than the entire truth—or at least some version of it. The point was not to be caught in a lie at a later juncture that would puncture the balloon.

  “I have a friend in Washington who warned me about the plan to assassinate your husband, and Washington’s reason for it. And he is enough of a friend to understand how the news would benefit me.”

  “And Moscow.”

  Baranov nodded.

  “Who is this guy, another Kim Philby?”

  “That, you will never know,” Baranov said.

  “Maybe my husband will turn it over to his boss. Maybe word will get to el Presidente that you are not so much of a good friend as you present yourself to be. Maybe an assassin will come for you.”

  “Maybe I’ll step aside and let the CIA kill your husband.”

  Karina’s anger spiked. “Puta,” she said. “Do you think that we are afraid of some cowboy? Look around you—we are prepared here.”

  “Yes, here. But there are a thousand other places for it to happen. Even if he were to ride around in the middle of armored columns. And even if he were to suddenly stop his work, which of course we don’t want to happen, they’d still send someone.”

  “But you can singlehandedly save my husband,” she said, now suddenly amused.

  “Yes. Because I know who he is, and I’ll be told when he’s on his way, and how he intends to do it.”

  “You have resources in Washington—kill him before he tries to come here.”

  “We want him to try.”

  “And of course I’m to be the bait for your little trap,” Varga said from the door.

  “Exactly,” Baranov said, looking up. He’d known for a minute or so that Varga was standing there listening to them. It was the reason he’d stretched out his explanation.

  The general came across and sat down next to his wife, who kissed him lightly on the cheek and gave his shoulder a squeeze.

  Cook came with his coffee and refills for Karina and Baranov, including more brandy.