The FBI reported that the young women found dead in New York and in Washington that Liu may have been involved with had been murdered that way.
“The next morning I packed an overnight bag, got my passport from Liu’s desk, and, using the credit card he’d given me, bought an airline ticket to Paris. He didn’t say a word, no one tried to stop me, and by Sunday afternoon I was in Lyon with my sister, who put me in a rehab clinic the same day.”
Monique and Shahrzad had been damaged, probably beyond repair, by Liu, yet they were the lucky ones. “Why’d you come back to New York?”
“I like the States. Life is too restrictive in France, or just about anywhere else in Europe. Anyway, I made sure that Liu no longer worked at the UN, and I figured I had something to prove to myself. So I came back and got my old job translating.”
“What happened?”
“At first it was good. About six months after I started back to work I met a man—he was one of the supervisors—and we moved in together. But he liked to smoke a little grass before we made love, and once I went along with him I was back to the races.”
She absently tugged at a strand of hair above her left ear, her eyes vacant, staring backward in time; this set of memories was obviously just as painful as all the rest.
“I lived in a fog for a couple of years, spending everything I earned on drugs, and by then it wasn’t the good shit. I was taking some raw stuff. It was a wonder I survived. I finally got fired, of course, and Jim Allison, my boss, finally had enough, so he sent me back to my sister in Lyon. But she’d had enough of me, too, so I was on my own at the rehab center.”
“You got clean again and came back to New York,” McGarvey said. “I’d have thought that by then you would have learned your lesson. This place is not very safe for you.”
“I’m a stubborn woman,” Monique admitted with a wan smile. “Always have been. I had to prove something to myself, so I came back again. This time of course I couldn’t get my old job back, so I made my rounds of the publishers, finally getting a job translating a book from the French. Then there were a couple of Chinese books, though most of them are translated into English before they ever leave China. They have more control over the content that way.”
“And you’ve been clean ever since?” McGarvey asked.
She nodded. “So far so good,” she replied dreamily. But then she focused on McGarvey sitting across from her. “Is that what you came here to find out?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you,” McGarvey said. “Will you allow me to leave you some money?”
She shook her head. “Just kill him,” she said with sudden emotion. “As soon as you can. Put a bullet in his brain, like you did bin Laden.”
Something lurched inside McGarvey’s chest. He’d been on a freelance operation for the CIA last year, which had ended in tracking Osama bin Laden to a hideout in Karachi, where he’d put a bullet in the man’s head. The mission had been kept top secret for fear of the blowback from Muslims across the world. Within a week a bin Laden double had sent a tape to the al-Jazeera, network, and the war against terror had continued without missing a beat.
“I don’t know where you came up with something like that,” he said.
“I don’t work at the UN, but I still have friends who hear stuff,” she said. “Diplomats never seem to notice their translators. We’re like ghosts, and there’s almost nothing a translator loves more than to share gossip.”
It was a new wrinkle that McGarvey, and he suspected everyone else down at Langley, had never considered. “Whatever you think you know, I’d suggest you keep it to yourself.”
She shrugged. “Kill him soon.”
FORTY-TWO
UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS
It was just about closing time for the public as McGarvey watched the replica of Foucault’s pendulum ponderously swinging on its heavy weight, the tip scribing a series of lines in a circular pit of sand on the floor.
The device proved that the earth was turning on its axis, and here in the General Assembly Building it seemed an appropriate symbol because the UN, rightly or wrongly, had its missions and troops on just about every continent on the planet.
He hadn’t known what he’d expected to learn by coming over here directly from Monique’s apartment, except that he wanted to get a feel for the place where Liu had ensnared her as he had so many others. He suspected that Liu hadn’t set out to kill any of his women; the deaths had been accidents during his rough brand of sex. Liu was confident enough to believe that none of them would go to the authorities to accuse him of being a spy for the Chinese. By the time they figured out that much, they themselves were in so deeply that no one would believe their stories. McGarvey hadn’t completely believed Shahrzad until this afternoon listening to Monique’s tale.
The pendulum was suspended from the soaring ceiling on about fifty feet of thin wire. Once it was set in motion the weight would continue to swing back and forth for a very long time.
Shahrzad had been tethered to Liu by her professed love for Updegraf, so she’d swung from one side to the other in a short time. Monique, on the other hand, had fallen in love with Liu, so her tether had been very long. It had taken her all of ten years to get to the point where she could talk about Liu.
The next step would be to find a new pendulum with enough weight to break the tether altogether. And it was this step that bothered McGarvey the most. People who tried to play in the general’s league ended up dead or damaged beyond repair.
Loudspeakers announced that it was ten minutes until closing time as McGarvey walked back across the public lobby and outside. A small crowd of people had gathered in front of the gate, some of them holding signs protesting the latest round of sanctions against Iran, but they weren’t being noisy, and the few cops on duty seemed bored as they leaned against their patrol cars. Almost every day some group demonstrated outside the UN; most of the time the crowds were small and peaceful, like this afternoon’s, because people no longer seemed to care. In the past few years the UN had become a joke, and it had lost most of its effectiveness.
McGarvey made his way around the crowd, then crossed the street at Forty-second and walked the couple of blocks back up to the Grand Hyatt Hotel, where he’d stayed the previous night. It had been an odd bit of coincidence that Monique had come here to burn Schilling. Yet the hotel was near the UN, so it had been a convenient place to hold the party.
The soaring atrium lobby was busy with late arrivals, the cocktail lounge filled with the after-work crowd, but McGarvey found a spot at the far end of the bar. He ordered a Martell cognac neat and glanced over his shoulder, a tickling at the back of his neck.
He’d never trusted coincidences, but there’d been no reason for Monique to name the Grand Hyatt as the hotel where’d she’d burned Schilling, even if she’d been informed that McGarvey was registered there and would be paying her a visit.
That line of reasoning made no sense, yet her knowing that he’d assassinated bin Laden last year made no sense either.
He let his gaze drift across the lobby, looking for the one face that didn’t belong, the odd man, neither checking in nor checking out, neither coming nor going. The one figure who shouldn’t be there. After the incident yesterday north of the Farm he’d been having the feeling that someone was coming up behind him. But if anyone was here looking down his trail, McGarvey couldn’t pick him out.
He paid for his drink and took it down to the next lower level, where he sat in an easy chair at a coffee table. He’d left his pistol up in his room, knowing that he was going over to the UN and wanting to avoid the security issue, but he felt naked without it now.
Rencke answered on the first ring when McGarvey called him. “Oh, wow, Mac, what’d you find out?”
“She confirmed Shahrzad’s story, but Liu was in business here at least ten years ago, and maybe longer. Did you get a line on those two guys who tried to jump me outside Richmond?”
“Ex–Mexican special force
s. GAFE. And you’ll never guess where they got some of their training? Right here at Bolling Air Force Base.”
“They’re no longer in the service?”
“No, but their records are clean so far as I can find out. They resigned their commissions about six months ago, supposedly to work for a security consulting firm where they could make more money. Evidently no one blames them.”
McGarvey looked up as a man came across the lobby directly toward him. “Hold on,” he told Rencke.
There was something familiar about the face, but McGarvey couldn’t place it, and before the man got all the way across he angled left toward the bar.
“False alarm,” McGarvey told Rencke. But he wasn’t at all sure it had been.
“You’re in the hotel, but where?” Rencke asked.
“The lobby. I thought I saw someone I might have recognized, but I’m not sure.” He glanced up toward the busy cocktail lounge but the guy had disappeared. “The French woman told me that she burned a young CIA field officer who worked at the UN.”
“Did she remember a name?”
“Joseph Schilling. But it was most likely a work name.”
“Hang on, I’ll check,” Rencke said.
McGarvey glanced again toward the busy cocktail lounge, but the guy he thought he might have recognized was nowhere in sight.
When Rencke came back he sounded out of breath. “You’re not going to believe this shit, Mac,” said. “Joseph Schilling left the UN mission a little over nine years ago. Wanted a transfer to our embassy in Beijing. Did a good job supervising a string of Chinese nationals working for us. Good product. Great fitreps. And you’re right, Schilling was his work name.”
It came to McGarvey all of a sudden. “Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “Updegraf.”
“Bingo,” Rencke said. “Louis Updegraf worked for the Guoanbu for the last nine or ten years of his life. So why did Liu snuff him?”
“Updegraf probably tried to turn the tables and burn him. He came across Shahrzad and used Liu’s weakness for women against him.”
“Or tried to,” Rencke said.
“No mention in his jacket about a possible problem with drugs?”
“There wouldn’t be if he was turning in good product,” Rencke said. “You sat on the seventh floor, you know the realities better than anyone else.”
Alcohol, drugs, money, sex, the fast life. All those held the same kinds of allure for the right person as the act of spying did. The good field officer was the man or woman who lived outside the envelope, and a lot of the time way outside the letter of the law.
Updegraf had played with fire the first time, and got himself burned. The second time he got himself killed.
The timing bothered McGarvey. What was Liu doing in Mexico that Updegraf tried to interfere with, and that forced Liu to kill a man who’d probably been one of his star sources?
But something else bothered him, too. He glanced a third time toward the cocktail lounge. “Run a search on Liu’s and Updegraf’s assignments for the past nine years. I think they’ll probably match. Updegraf probably got to each of his postings a few months before Liu, in order to pave the way.”
“I’m on it,” Rencke said.
“If that pans out, see what you can find in Updegraf’s file for each assignment. Did something out of the ordinary happen to him or around him? Did he come up with something big? Or maybe the Chinese made big scores wherever Updegraf and Liu were stationed together.”
“If there’s a pattern I’ll find it.”
“I hope so, because I think we’re going to need it to figure out what the hell Liu is up to down there that’s so fully developed he didn’t need Updegraf.”
“What about the French woman?” Rencke asked.
“I’m going back over to her apartment to find out if she had any contact with Updegraf after that night. If he was trying to get something on Liu he might have tried to use her, like he used Shahrzad.”
“I’m on that too,” Rencke said. “Then what?”
“I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection, the tickle still at the back of his neck.
He finished his drink, pocketed his phone, and went up to his room to get his pistol. Just before the elevator door closed he looked across the lobby toward the bar one last time, but the man was nowhere to be seen.
FORTY-THREE
THE APARTMENT
This part of the Upper West Side was a neighborhood of families. Traffic on Broadway was fairly light; most people were home from work, the kids were home from school, and supper was on the stove.
McGarvey buzzed Monique’s apartment and glanced over his shoulder as a man carrying a load of dry cleaning over his shoulder walked past on the other side of the street. At the corner two men were involved in what appeared to be a heated discussion, and beyond them a woman carrying a bag of groceries entered an apartment building.
Nothing out of the ordinary. But he was spooked.
He turned back and hit the buzzer again. But after a full twenty seconds when there was no answer, he rang for the second-floor front apartment. A woman answered.
“Who is it?”
“Police,” McGarvey said.
The door lock buzzed, and McGarvey went inside the dimly lit hall and held up his open wallet for the elderly woman who came to the head of the stairs. She seemed nervous. “What is it?”
“There’s been a disturbance on the third floor,” McGarvey said, starting up. Alarms were jangling in his head. “But Ms. Thibault does not answer.”
“I’ve heard nothing,” the old woman said, glancing toward the stairs up to the third floor.
“I’ll just see,” McGarvey said. “Go back into your apartment, please.”
The old woman nodded uncertainly and went back into her apartment, from where she watched through the partially open door as McGarvey passed. He smiled reassuringly at her.
Monique did not answer his knock. If she was inside and had bolted the door, he wouldn’t be able to get inside without making a lot of noise. But if she had merely stepped out, she would only have used her key. He used a credit card to fish around between the door and door frame to trip the latch, but it wasn’t necessary—the door was not locked.
He stepped back, pulled out his pistol, and, standing to one side, eased the door open with the toe of his shoe.
“Monique,” he called softly. “Ici Pierre, encore.”
The apartment was silent.
McGarvey slid inside, keeping low and moving fast, sweeping his pistol left to right.
Monique’s body lay spread-eagled between the couch and her easy chair. Her T-shirt had been ripped open, exposing her small breasts, flattened in death, and her painter overalls had been pulled off and tossed into the kitchen. She had been strangled with her own panties, which were still twisted tightly around her neck. Her face had turned a deep purple, her eyes bulging, her tongue protruding from her half-open mouth.
McGarvey made a quick sweep of the apartment to make certain the killer was gone, then went back into the living room.
The door hadn’t been forced, and it didn’t look as if Monique had put up a struggle. Maybe she’d known her killer and had let him in. Maybe she’d even been expecting him.
Whatever the case, Liu was responsible for her death, there was no doubt about it. Nor was there any doubt that killing her was a clear message to McGarvey: Keep away.
He holstered his pistol and left the apartment, making his way down to the street and to the end of the block before he called Rencke on his cell phone. “The French woman is dead. I just left her apartment. It was meant to look like she was raped, which is possible, and then she was strangled to death with her own panties.”
“Liu,” Rencke said.
“Probably one of his henchmen,” McGarvey said. “But it’s a message.”
“What do you want to do, Mac?”
“Get one of our teams over here to reduce it to a heart attack, and get an obi
t in the newspaper.”
“That’ll get his attention,” Rencke said. “It’s too bad about her.”
“Yeah, I should have taken her out of there when I had the chance. We could have put her with Shahrzad in Longboat Key.” It was a mistake that McGarvey would think about for a long time to come.
“I came up with something else on those two guys you offed near Richmond. They were ex-GAFE, but their records weren’t so clean after all. They’d been forced to resign their commissions because they were probably involved in a drug-smuggling operation.”
“No trials, no jail time?”
“Some money probably changed hands, so they walked,” Rencke said. “Could be that Liu is working outside regular Guoanbu channels, and using drug cartel muscle to do his dirty work. It would explain what Alvarez was doing hanging around.”
“Is Liu still in Mexico City?”
“Yeah, and he’s making himself real visible all of a sudden. Makes you wonder what the prick is getting ready to spring on us.”
“Whatever it is, it’ll come soon, and it’ll be something big that we haven’t thought of yet.”
FORTY-FOUR
U. S. EMBASSY, MEXICO CITY
The day shift was just getting off work and leaving the building when Gil Perry phoned next door and asked Gloria to stop by. Word had come down from Langley this morning along with her package, which had been signed off by the DDO himself, but it had taken Perry until now to actually do what he’d been ordered to do.
He’d spent the day trying to figure out what the ramifications would be. He didn’t want even the hint of any blowback coming his way. His shop was in enough disarray without Gloria raising some kind of hell.
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