Without Honor - 01

by David Hagberg

  He watched television sporadically, especially the news broadcasts and news-magazine shows. In his Swiss life he had kept himself relatively isolated from world events. The country was geared to this state of isolation; in Switzerland if you didn’t want to hear what the superpowers were up to, you merely ignored Swiss Television One and any foreign newspaper. You weren’t considered odd, at least no odder than the average Swiss, for whom neutrality was not only a badge of long-standing honor but one of smug indifference to the other four billion inhabitants of the planet. (The only oddity in Switzerland was the man who didn’t read the financial section!) The isolation had spawned in him a hunger for hard news of the American television variety, even if the networks’ editorial positions were blatantly espoused. U.S.–Mexican relations were troubled again. Coincidence, he wondered as he watched the news, or was this part of some larger picture that somehow included Yarnell, the man’s ex-wife, and Baranov, the Russian everyone seemed so respectful of?

  By then, however, he had developed what he called his “short list of rogue’s rogues” and Trotter had telephoned with the setup. Finally it was time for his duty call.

  The address was in Chevy Chase, on a curving street that just looked over the south side of the country club. Half dozen white pillars fronted the big Colonial house that sat well back on half an acre of manicured lawn. A powder blue Mercedes 450SL convertible was parked in the driveway, and McGarvey nearly drove past, his courage flagging at the last moment. Kathleen had always wanted just this sort of house. A proper place to raise a daughter, she said. She’d be a member of the country club, which probably was where she’d met her attorney friend; there’d be bridge, debutante balls, and the dozen or so black-tie parties each year. She’d gotten a healthy part of the ranch money, but even that probably wouldn’t have been enough to support this life-style. But then she’d always been an opportunist. It was one of the reasons they’d married—he was an up-and-comer. And of course in the end they had divorced over it when he turned out to be not so much of an up-and-comer after all. He parked behind the Mercedes and got out of his rental car, hesitating only a moment before he went up the walk and rang the bell. A basket of spring flowers hung at eye level. He reached out to pick one when he heard footsteps and withdrew his hand. The door swung inward.

  She was standing there—suddenly, it seemed —with one hand on the edge of the door, the other up as if in greeting. It struck McGarvey that she had not aged; in fact, if anything she had somehow learned the secret of eternal youth and become younger. She was dressed in a silk lounging suit, high heels on her feet, her hair done up, wearing only the slightest bit of makeup and a thin gold chain around her long, slender neck. She smelled of lilac; clean and fresh and new. He hadn’t remembered that her eyes were so green.

  “Hello, Kathleen,” he said, finally finding his voice.

  “You should have called,” she replied, her voice smoother than he remembered, well modulated, cultured. She’d definitely changed over the past five or six years. For the better.

  “I’m sorry. I can come back. I was nearby …”

  “You never were much on timing,” she said wryly. She looked beyond him to his car. “You’d better come in, then.”

  “I can only stay for a minute,” he said, stepping past her into a large hall.

  “Yes. I was just leaving. If you’d come five minutes later you would have missed me.”

  She led the way into a large living room, extremely well furnished with Queen Anne furniture. A harpsichord, its sound-box lid propped open, its finish an antique lacquer, dominated one end of the room. A large oil painting of Kathleen and Elizabeth hung over a natural-stone fireplace. McGarvey walked over to it.

  “Elizabeth is away at school. I’d rather you not bother her there.”

  McGarvey couldn’t tear his eyes away from the portrait. His daughter was a beautiful young woman; not the little girl in braces he had left, but a young woman with straight, fine features, long lovely hair, and graceful limbs. How much like her mother had she become? The spitting image, he hoped. Yet couldn’t he see a spark of rebellion in his daughter’s eyes?

  “She is a lot like you, Kirk,” Kathleen said. “I suppose I should be grateful. She’ll probably grow up to do great things. They absolutely adore her at school. And Phillip thinks the world of her. But she is tiresome at times.”

  McGarvey turned. Kathleen hadn’t changed after all. “She is beautiful. Like you.”

  The compliment was her due. She barely acknowledged it. “When did you return from Switzerland?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Business?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. I also wanted to see you.”

  “If it’s about Phillip’s letter, the alimony …” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She was actually embarrassed by her own crude comment. “No,” she said. “It wouldn’t be that, would it. But you are back in the States for good?”

  “I don’t know, Kathleen. I doubt it.”

  “Then what?” she asked softly. He’d known her for a couple of years before they were married, and they were married for twelve years; they’d been separated now half that long. Yet he was conscious that this was probably the very first time he had ever seen her for what she really was; merely a woman, like others, trying to find her way. He could see her now not blinded by love, nor confused by hatred. And in a small measure he felt sorry for her loneliness—though he also felt a great deal of pride that this self-sufficient, classy, and certainly tough woman had once been his to love, had once been in love with him. He could see her now through more objective eyes, however. He saw that she had indeed aged, but that the process had not been unkind to her. She’d matured, advanced along with the times; she was a modern woman in makeup, dress, life-style, and certainly in attitudes. There was no lagging for her. He saw also that she was frightened of him. Frightened that he would somehow disrupt her carefully constructed life. But perhaps also frightened that she was still vulnerable to him.

  For the very first time he felt no need or desire to find out.

  “I never knew what to say to you,” he said. “Is Elizabeth the same? Does she hate me?”

  She softened. “I haven’t taught her that, Kirk. I promise you. She doesn’t hate you.”

  He wondered why he had come here. He looked back up at the portrait over the fireplace.

  “I wanted to make sure,” he said. He turned back.

  “We were on a different plane, Kirk. We still are, for that matter. Nothing has changed … or if it has, it’s changed for the worse.” Her eyes glistened. “The odd part is that I never stopped loving you, Kirk. It’s just that I can’t live with you.”

  She took out a handkerchief and daubed her eyes with it. She came across the room and took his arm. Her touch shocked him with its sudden tenderness. Together they looked up at the painting of their child. Theirs. The artist had only rendered what they had created with their love, with their bodies. At this moment looking at their creation, they were both proud. They could feel their pride in each other. It was something at least.

  “Phillip is a good man, Kirk,” she said. “Elizabeth has a lot of respect for him.”

  Of all the statements she had made that one hurt the most. “Will you marry him?”

  “It’s possible. He hasn’t asked yet.” She looked into his eyes. “I plan to say yes when he does. Happiness is out there for some of us, you know.”

  “He writes a nasty letter.”

  She laughed. “You didn’t take it that seriously, I hope. Good Lord, Kirk, you haven’t changed that much have you? Even I might get to like you if you had, you know.”

  They no longer knew each other. Maybe they never had, he thought.

  He drove away wondering again why he had come out to see her. Elizabeth was away at school. He knew that, yet he had come out anyway. It was a beautiful spring day, quite different from a lot of the days he had had in Lausanne.
He’d never really given Marta a chance. Another of his mistakes. She had put up with a lot of his uncertainties, which had caused him to do a lot of lashing out. At first it had been duty, she tried to tell him. “I swear it was only duty at first. Not later. I love you, Kirk.” She had pleaded with him. “I have loved you for a long time. Didn’t you know that, too?” They used to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning to each other:

  When no song of mine comes near thee,

  Will its memory fail to soften?

  The Boynton Tower apartments on the corner of R and 31st streets in Georgetown, overlooked Dumbarton Oaks Park to the north and Yarnell’s fortress to the south across 32nd Street in its own little mews. McGarvey adjusted the the focus on his powerful binoculars, and the roof and top two floors of the house came into sharp focus. The attic window was dark, though as he watched a man in short sleeves, his tie loose, appeared momentarily and then disappeared. He looked bored to McGarvey. Bored but professional and very dangerous. He had seen the type before.

  “Do you know him?” Trotter asked, standing at his elbow.

  McGarvey looked up from the binoculars. Trotter was worn out, though here he was in his element. It was like the old days.

  “No. Do you?” McGarvey asked.

  “There’s another up there, too. Shorter. Black, I think. Maybe a Mexican. God only knows. We’ll run photos on them both.”

  McGarvey nodded. “In two hours? By yourself?” Trotter had held the others back for just a moment or so. He wanted to get a few things straight with McGarvey first.

  “They’re watching, all right. But I don’t think they’re expecting anyone, Kirk. They’re sloppy. Our advantage.”

  Trotter had found them a top-floor apartment in the eight-story building; it was just tall enough for them to have a clear line of sight to Yarnell’s house and Wisconsin Avenue beyond, yet it wasn’t so far away that they couldn’t make out a reasonable amount of detail with optics. The only disadvantage was that they had no clear view of the garage behind the house where the cars were kept. The first they would know that Yarnell or anyone else was on the move would be when a car came around the corner of the house and emerged from the gate directly onto Scott Place and then 32nd Street. But by then the angle would be all wrong for them to see inside the car. Yarnell could come and go as he pleased unless they permanently stationed a man down on the street, which at best was dangerous, no matter how lax Yarnell’s people seemed to be. But if anyone showed up they would know it. And they had a clear view into at least six rooms of the house.

  “We couldn’t get much closer, in all good conscience, Kirk,” Trotter explained. “I don’t want his people picking us out. He’d go to ground immediately.”

  McGarvey straightened up and lit a cigarette. From here they would begin their surveillance of Yarnell. For better or worse, whether the man picked them out of the crowd or not (and McGarvey suspected he would), he wanted to see what Yarnell was up to, what his routine was. He wanted a measure of the man’s daily habits; his comings and goings; the time the electric meter reader came by; the time the postman delivered the mail; the grocery runs, the emergencies, if any. McGarvey wanted it all. Once a base had been built, then they would find the weak link in the man’s armor.

  “Have you got good people for me, John? Anyone I know? Experts?”

  Trotter had to smile. “You know two of them from Lausanne. They’re professionals, believe me. They’ll do the job for you.”

  McGarvey glanced again out the window toward Yarnell’s fortress. Yes, he thought, there was a job to be done here. But that was only a part of it. He himself had watched Yarnell while poor Janos was being shot to death at some service station beside the highway, his body stuffed unceremoniously in a men’s room. Yarnell had his army. But was he the king … or was he merely a general?

  The apartment was large and well furnished. It contained two bedrooms, an efficiency kitchen, two bathrooms, and a long living room–dining room combination in which the surveillance equipment had been set up.

  “They’ll be back within the hour,” Trotter said. “I sent them away for the afternoon. I wanted to have a little chat with you before they got started. Ground rules.”

  McGarvey didn’t feel like showing his old friend much mercy. “You want me to kill Yarnell for you, but you don’t want your crew to know about it.”

  Trotter’s jaw tightened. “We’ve gone a long way for you, Kirk. We’ve bent over backward to accommodate your needs. Don’t push us too far.”

  “Then I’ll quit and return to Switzerland.”

  This time Trotter did not react the way he had before. This time McGarvey had Janos’s murder on his conscience. It was a psychological weapon Trotter was going to be using regularly from now on. McGarvey could see the entire plan, and it saddened him in a way. Nothing had changed, it seemed, in the five years he’d been out of the fold. There was no honor here, as someone at the Farm had once told him about the spy business. “We’re dealing in what is fundamentally one of the most dishonest occupations in the world; that of inducing perfectly ordinary people to betray their country, to go back on their principles and ideals. Don’t expect any honorable men in the profession,” he’d been told. “And don’t expect to keep your honor intact for very long, not if you want to be very good at your job.” But then, assassins were not to be treated with honor in any event; respect, of course, but not honor.

  “Build the case for them, Kirk. Tell them all the little bits you want—of course, they already understand that a surveillance operation on our Mr. Yarnell has been ordered. Tell them, if you’d like, how you were recruited, or why, and that you’ve been brought in as an outsider to prove Yarnell’s guilt. But leave out the part about the prosecution, will you? It’s all we’re asking. Not much.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “They will be withdrawn.”

  “By then it would be too late. If they know what might happen and it actually does, they will come forward during the investigation that will follow.”

  “No they won’t, Kirk.”

  Again McGarvey glanced out the window. “I won’t take that risk, John.”

  “Under the circumstances I don’t think you have much choice.”

  McGarvey turned back. There was an odd light in Trotter’s eyes. “What circumstances?”

  Trotter puffed up a little. “We had to have our insurance, too. You must understand that. You would not be welcomed back in Switzerland, that part of your life is over with. There is simply nothing left there for you to go back to. And, from what I understand, Kathleen will probably marry Phillip Brent.”

  “What are you getting at?” McGarvey asked softly.

  “Do you know this man? Have you heard of him?”

  “He wants to sue me for an increase in Kathleen’s alimony. Harassment …” Another chilling thought suddenly struck McGarvey. “Who is he, John? What does he have to do with this?”

  “It wasn’t up to me,” Trotter said. “I mean, I knew nothing about it until after the fact.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t catch it. But then you were out of the country so long that the name couldn’t have meant anything to you. And these past couple of days have been hectic at best … confusing.”

  McGarvey was having a very bad premonition about this.

  “Phillip Brent is one of Darby Yarnell’s closest friends and associates. They do a lot of business together. In fact, Kathleen and Elizabeth have been frequent houseguests—”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” McGarvey swore softly. “Down there?” he demanded, pointing toward Yarnell’s fortress.

  “There. Yes.”

  A wave of anger and disbelief washed over McGarvey. That and fear, not only for what was and had been happening, but fear for what he might do.

  “How long has it been going on?” he asked.

  Trotter said nothing.

  “How long, John?”

  “A year
. Maybe a little longer.”

  “My ex-wife and daughter and Phillip Brent have been pals with Darby Yarnell for more than a year?”

  Trotter nodded.

  McGarvey could feel his blood pressure rising. The old meanness was coming back. Only this time he felt dangerous. “Not only didn’t you mention this in Lausanne, it was the very reason you came to me in the first place, wasn’t it? Whose idea was it, yours or Leonard Day’s? The joke was on me the whole time, wasn’t it? You must have had quite a few laughs.”

  “No one is laughing about this, Kirk. On that you must believe me. Yarnell was and is a very dangerous man—”

  “Who is involved with my ex-wife and daughter!”

  “He must be eliminated.”

  “And I am the only man for the job, is that it? Can’t miss with Kirk. He has a personal stake in this.”

  “If you warn her and she suddenly withdraws, Yarnell will become suspicious. It would be extremely dangerous for her, Kirk. Surely you can see that.”

  “You don’t involve families, John. Don’t you remember the old score?” McGarvey was sick at heart. He realized now that he knew absolutely nothing about dishonor. He’d never really known about it.

  “It’s bigger than families, can’t you understand that?” Trotter’s eyes were wide behind his glasses. He looked like a fanatical revolutionary. “The man is friends with the director of Central Intelligence, for God’s sake. He is on a first-name basis with the president of the United States. Let’s put it in perspective!”

  Trotter’s team showed up later in the afternoon, all bright and full of cautious enthusiasm. Among them were Lewis Sheets, the tan mack from Lausanne, and Lorraine Hawkins, the girl with the sommersprossen. Bill Porter, the bureau’s resident electronics expert, and a Mexican second-story man, Emiliano Gonzales, rounded out the little group. McGarvey behaved himself, but he would forever remember having the feeling that they all were playacting and everyone knew it. The deception was part of the new regime. They’d watch Yarnell on his home turf. Meanwhile, the ball of string saved up all these years had to be unwound, and McGarvey thought he knew where the starting bit might be.