It was only one possible explanation for what Updegraf had been doing down there, but at this point it was a compelling one.
So in McGarvey’s mind it came down to finding out what General Liu was doing in Mexico, and what skill or knowledge Updegraf possessed that the Chinese wanted that led finally to his assassination.
In order to do that he first needed to go back to the source—General Liu. But before he did that he needed to find out everything he could about the general’s background and record, as well as the backgrounds, records, and personalities of as many people as possible who’d had dealings with the man.
The path angled away from the river and started up a slope that McGarvey took with an easy stride. He’d been retired for a year now, but he hadn’t let himself go. He still had his wind and his muscle tone, assets he had a feeling he was going to need very soon.
Otto Rencke was just pulling up in his battered old gray Mercedes diesel when McGarvey topped the rise and headed through the woods to his cabin.
The Company’s director of special operations, bedraggled as usual, his long frizzy hair flying everywhere, making him look like a redheaded Einstein, got out of his car and opened the trunk. He looked up when McGarvey came out of the woods and onto the road.
“Hiya, Mac,” Rencke greeted his friend. But there was little enthusiasm in his voice.
The trunk was filled with plastic boxes of files marked “FORT A. P. HILL, ARCHIVES.” The CIA stored its paper records dating back to even before the beginning of the Cold War in an underground bunker at the military reservation about eighty miles north of the Farm. With the Freedom of Information Act, many of the files had been opened to scholars and historians, but that openness had all but ended after 9/11. Gaining access to the entire collection was not easy these days, not even for a CIA officer of Rencke’s position, except over the signature of a deputy director or higher.
“Did you run into any trouble?” McGarvey asked.
Rencke shook his head. “Nah. They know me too well.”
“What’s wrong then?”
“I don’t like lying to friends.”
“Katy?”
“Yeah, she called last night, and again this morning. Insisted that I knew where you were and she wanted me to tell her.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I don’t get it, Mac. Why not call her? She’s worried, you know.”
McGarvey stared at the boxes of files in the trunk. Something bad was coming. All of his instincts were humming like high-tension wires. And he knew that if he talked to his wife she’d sense that something was wrong, and want to come to him, or at least know where he was.
But there was no danger here, nothing to be worried about. He kept telling himself that; yet he had developed a strong look-over-your-shoulder feeling that someone was gaining on him. And each time he’d gotten that feeling, the people around him had gotten into some deep trouble. More than one of his bosses in the Air Force and the CIA had come to the conclusion that being around McGarvey when he was in the field was a dangerous place to be. People were going to get killed, and sometimes it was the good ones who got hit.
Not a day went by that he didn’t thank the stars that his daughter had gotten out of the field. And he would do everything in his power to keep her there, and to keep Katy out of harm’s way, even if it meant lying and completely distancing himself from them until he was finished.
He looked back at Rencke and shook his head. “Not yet,” he said quietly. “Now, help me get this stuff inside. How long do I have?”
“It’s gotta be back first thing in the morning.”
“Maybe you’d better stay the night.”
“That’s what I thought. I brought a laptop—I thought I could do a little more snooping inside the FBI’s mainframe.”
“Louise going to be okay?”
“I told her I’d be with you,” Rencke said.
“What does she know about this?” McGarvey asked.
“Everything,” Rencke admitted. “I can’t lie to her.”
“I know what you mean,” McGarvey replied.
THIRTY-TWO
THE FARM
It was a few minutes before dawn when McGarvey stepped outside and did a few stretching exercises to ease the cramp in his back from sitting at the dining-room table all night and reading the files that Rencke had brought down. He’d always liked this time of day; the air was sweeter and very few people were up and about. It gave him time to think in peace.
Last night he and Rencke had driven down to the dining hall to get something to eat. It was well after the normal dinner hour, so there were only a few stragglers, none of whom paid them the slightest attention, and after a quick bite they’d come back to the cabin—McGarvey to begin his reading, and Rencke to hack into the computers not only of the FBI, but of the law enforcement systems of half a dozen places where Liu had set up shop, including Paris and London as well as New York and Washington.
McGarvey had also asked Rencke to see what else he could dig up about Shahrzad and her father, especially anything out of the old KGB files about their relationship with Baranov fifteen years ago.
The first thing that became clear to McGarvey was Liu’s position in Beijing. Despite the FBI’s suspicions since his posting to the UN in New York that he had raped and killed at least one young woman, possibly more, the Chinese government had apparently dismissed the charges out of hand. Because of the general’s family he was a favorite son, totally outside any normal channel of Chinese justice.
It wasn’t just that, though. The CIA believed that Liu was probably a first-rate intelligence officer, possibly the best in the Guoanbu, and very likely the equal of the legendary Russian, Valentin Baranov, whom McGarvey had killed in what was then East Berlin. Like Baranov, Liu was always very transparent, or at least it seemed that way. He was a party boy who had inherited a small fortune from his parents, and starting in New York had begun to plow through it. He lived in very large, very expensive apartments or houses. He dressed in the best clothing—usually suits and shoes tailored in London—he drove expensive cars, drank the finest wines, had accounts at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and whenever the need arose he seemed to have a Gulfstream or Lear bizjet at his disposal.
One CIA analyst, a Tommy Doyle–trained man, was tracking down the whiff of a rumor that a special agency within the Guoanbu had been set up for the sole purpose of dealing with Liu’s product. If that was the case, it would mean that Liu was an even more important figure in the intelligence apparatus than anyone in the West had suspected. If true it would also mean that the intel Liu had provided was over the moon.
But almost all of that was purely speculation, based mostly on a lot of circumstantial evidence. Neither the FBI nor the CIA nor the Law Enforcement and intelligence organizations of the countries where Liu had worked had ever come up with a shred of proof. And although no one, including the U.S., wanted to see him come back, Liu was too important a Chinese citizen to deny entry.
Like Baranov, Liu operated mostly outside of the apparatus wherever he was stationed. He set up shop in lavish digs and created a social scene of his own that in New York, Washington, and Mexico City had taken only a few months to become the place to be.
And, like Baranov, Liu apparently stayed behind the scenes, for the most part, in order to allow the mix of people he surrounded himself with to interact among themselves.
It was actually a nifty bit of human chemistry that Liu was practicing. Almost from the start of McGarvey’s reading he came to realize that Liu was probably not involved in the drug trade, at least not if his inherited fortune was still intact. But he’d pulled Thomas Alvarez into the mix to act as a catalyst. The drug cartel banker, with his finger on a cash flow estimated to be in the billions per year, had to attract a certain amount of fascination, especially among the power hitters in Mexico’s government and military establishment. Yet just being near Alvarez placed them at risk. They were like moths to a flame, with Liu waiting in the wings
to snag them with his net and killing jar.
McGarvey had also learned from his first night of reading that Liu would have no fear of bringing cops or intelligence offices into his inner circle. The general evidently thought of himself as bulletproof. The worst that could ever happen to him was to be declared persona non grata, which to his mind was a remote possibility. The FBI in New York and again in Washington had some pretty fair evidence that Liu had been involved in murder and rape, enough evidence to bring to the Department of State, which in turn had delicately brought it to the attention of a deputy minister of the interior in Beijing. The first time Liu had been recalled home from New York, but had shown up a few months later in Washington. The second time he had returned to Beijing on his own, and had popped up just recently in Mexico City.
Liu was not only brilliant, but also well connected, and apparently fearless.
In New York he’d probably set up spy rings to watch the other delegates, but he’d also surrounded himself with a lot of the upper-level managers and engineers who’d set up offices in New York to attract foreign business by working with the various UN delegations. As a Chinese millionaire who had the reputation as a deal maker, Liu had been like a magnet to the very people whose secrets he wanted to steal. The high-tech guys wanted to do business with China, and they were willing to do or say just about anything to get connected.
In Washington he’d done the same thing, working out of a big four-story brownstone in Georgetown, this time attracting a lot of middle-level managers from the Pentagon who salivated at the possibility of getting the inside story of China’s reorganization and modernization of its military. A lot of aerospace reps had been regular fixtures at his almost nightly soirees, hoping to tap into the vast Chinese market. And many of them didn’t go away empty-handed. From time to time Liu had apparently been authorized to leak a few of China’s secrets in order to seed the pot. Put a little on the table in order to suck in a much larger return.
The general’s failing, however, was his apparent penchant for young women, whom he used not only as bait at his parties, but for his own purposes.
One Directorate of Intelligence psychological analyst, using material supplied by the FBI in New York and Washington—all of it admittedly hearsay evidence—suggested that Liu might have a deep-seated need to dominate women by first drawing them into his circle and then humiliating them, perhaps even raping and killing them in the end. It could be that he was impotent and was lashing out, or it could be something out of his childhood, possibly involving his mother, or some other close female relative. He may have been psychologically scarred as a young boy, and now as a man he was acting out his aggressive fantasies.
At least that much of what Shahrzad had told them had the ring of truth to it, though Updegraf could have read the same DI report and shared it with her.
When it came to her, however, there was almost nothing in the CIA’s archives or what Rencke had been able to find in the mainframe of the Sûreté in Paris, except that her mother and other family members had immigrated to France, where they owned a vineyard and château in Bordeaux and were wealthy, highly respected citizens.
Which raised the question why she had tried to earn money in Mexico as a dancer, a spy, and a whore. It made no sense unless there were unresolved issues between the young woman and her mother, or perhaps her actions were some sort of a legacy that her father had left behind for her.
McGarvey heard Rencke stirring in the cabin behind him, and he turned as the special ops director came out of the door, yawning deeply and scratching himself with one hand while tightly clutching his laptop with the other.
“I left the Homeland Security background file on Congressman Newell on the table, along with the personnel files for Gil Perry, Gloria Ibenez, and Louis Updegraf.”
“Anything unexpected?” McGarvey asked.
“Nothing much. Newell wants to run for president, which is probably why he was screwing around with the Mexican oil deal, but he won’t make it. Perry wants to become deputy director, and he’ll probably make it unless he screws up. And Gloria, well, nobody knows about her. Her fitreps are all the same; she’s a damned fine field officer, but she doesn’t follow orders and she’s a major pain in the ass.”
“Updegraf?”
“A good officer across the board, and nobody knows what the hell could have happened to him down there. The fact that he was running an operation without reporting to Perry is right off the chart. Nothing in his file, including his psyche evaluations, could have predicted it.”
“What about his wife?” McGarvey asked. “Has she gone public yet?”
Rencke shook his head. “Adkins convinced her to go back to Wisconsin and let us get to the bottom of what happened. Whatever it was, we’d let her know.”
“Open the trunk and I’ll help you load the files,” McGarvey said.
Rencke put his laptop in his car and opened the trunk as McGarvey came out with the first box to be returned to Archives. It took them only a couple of minutes to finish the job.
“What else do you want?” Rencke asked.
“First off, I want all the Bureau’s files on Liu,” McGarvey said.
“I think I got most of them,” Rencke said. “What’re you looking for, Mac? Something specific?”
“I saw the files on the women whom the Bureau thought Liu had raped and killed. But there was no mention of the other women who hung around in New York and Washington. Someone must have interviewed them.”
“If they’d known something it would have shown up in a Bureau report, and I would have seen it.”
“Maybe they asked the wrong questions,” McGarvey speculated. “Maybe there’s another Shahrzad out there who had an affair with Liu but managed to get out before it was too late.”
“I see what you mean,” Rencke said. “I’ll get on it as soon as I get this stuff back.”
“Get some sleep.”
“Yeah, right,” Rencke replied. He looked like an unmade bed, all rumpled and bleary eyed, but then he always looked that way. “What else?”
“What about the guy in the shadows at Liu’s compound? Have you come up with anything new?”
“Not yet,” Rencke admitted. “But I’ve got one of my programs chewing on it. I’m using the assumption that he’s Middle Eastern, with most of the weight on Iranian, and that he’s either a businessman, specifically someone involved with Iran’s oil ministry, or an intelligence officer. I’m betting intel.”
“What the hell are the Iranians doing in Mexico?”
“Whatever it is, the prez ain’t gonna like it,” Rencke said. “I’ll get what I can from the Bureau’s files and anything else I can come up with and send it down with a courier. I don’t think I want to trust the Internet with this shit.”
“Make it early. I may be leaving tonight.”
“Where are you going?”
“That depends on what you can come up with. But probably New York. I’d like to see if Liu left any pieces behind that the Bureau didn’t pick up.”
THIRTY-THREE
THE FARM
McGarvey had slept until noon and was just finishing reading the personnel files of Perry, Updegraf, and Gloria as well as Congressman Newell’s Homeland Security jacket when a courier showed up around three with a thin manila envelope stamped TOP SECRET.
Rencke had gone back into the FBI’s computer system in New York, where he had dredged up the very short encounter sheets for three women someone named Special Agent E. J. Charles had interviewed a couple of years ago. They’d apparently had some connection with Liu, and been part of the initial investigation. In each case the files had been stamped NO FURTHER ACTION AT THIS TIME.
The information was not very important, but Rencke always handled files he had hacked from other computers as top secret material. A number of people understood that their systems weren’t secure from Rencke, but nothing could be proven and he wanted to keep it that way.
He had included a short note in
his nearly illegible handwriting that a trace of the three women came up blank except for one of them. She was Monique Thibault, who had worked as a French translator at the UN and apparently had a brief relationship with Liu, though what sort of a relationship wasn’t explained in the FBI file. Rencke had found her at an address on New York’s Upper West Side.
In a brief postscript, Rencke had written that assuming Liu’s mystery guest was an Iranian intelligence officer for the sake of his analysis program had deepened the lavender by two shades. “Keep in touch,” he had added.
McGarvey looked up from the note. It was exactly what he had hoped for. Shahrzad had painted a picture of Liu that was in none of the CIA’s files. Not even Tommy Doyle’s people had guessed at the depth of the Chinese intelligence officer’s weakness for women, as she had described it. If Monique Thibault could confirm even a part of the story, McGarvey would have two out of the three pieces of the puzzle he needed to unravel the mystery of what the Chinese were really doing in Mexico.
The third part, he suspected, was probably going to turn out badly for some good people, and he wasn’t looking forward to forcing the issue, yet he knew that it could not be avoided. Just like Baranov, Liu had set up fail-safes for himself, much like the booby traps the VC had left behind in ’Nam. Pick up the wrong thing at the wrong time and it could explode in your face, killing you and anyone nearby.
He shredded the encounter sheets, Rencke’s note, and the other files and sealed them in a burn bag. He thought about going over to the dining hall for a late lunch, but decided against it. Now that he had done his reading and Rencke had come up with at least one name, he wanted to get it over with, and the sooner he started, the sooner he would be finished.
Dance with the Dragon Page 17