The business with Updegraf’s widow had been carefully swept under the rug, and Perry sincerely hoped that the same would be true in Gloria’s case.
But he didn’t believe it was going to work out so neatly. Trouble was, he had no idea yet what he could do about it, other than follow orders.
Gloria showed up a couple of minutes later, her purse on one shoulder, her laptop on the other. She was ready to leave for the day, and she seemed irritated that she’d been called to see the boss.
“It’s been a long day, Gil,” she said. “What do you want to see me about?”
“Close the door, would you? I don’t think this needs to be announced for the entire building’s benefit.”
“Cristo,” Gloria swore softly. She closed the door and sat down. “Couldn’t this have waited until morning?”
“I’m afraid not,” Perry said. Truth be told, he’d been itching to do this from the day she’d come to work for him. He passed the original message from McCann across the desk to her. “This came today.”
Gloria set her laptop on the floor and quickly read the brief letter, which ordered her immediate termination from the CIA. She looked up in wonder. “Doesn’t say why,” she said. She tossed the letter back. “Have you been complaining to Howard about my short skirts?”
“No. And it’s Mr. McCann.”
“Howard or Mister, he’s a prick just like you. And just like you he’s wanted to get rid of me for a long time.” She smiled, and got to her feet. “Well, good luck, Gilbert. But I will fight this. Maybe I’ll bring a sexual-discrimination suit against the Company and a sexual-harassment suit against you.”
“Of course those are your prerogatives,” Perry said. “I want your identification card if you’re carrying it, your weapon, and your laptop.”
“I’m not so stupid as to carry a CIA ID card. The weapon is my personal property, and so is the laptop.”
“You may keep your weapon, but until we can sanitize your hard drive the laptop stays here in the embassy. It will be returned to you when we’re sure you weren’t trying to carry secrets out the door.”
“Fuck you,” Gloria said, and she headed for the door.
Perry picked up the phone and punched a three-digit number. “Security,” he said. “This is Perry. I want two men, with their sidearms, up here on the double.”
Gloria turned back and looked at him with nothing but contempt on her face. She came back and laid the laptop on his desk. “Call when I can pick it up,” she said evenly.
“Thank you,” Perry said. “One last thing.” He slid a Secrets Act statement across for her signature; it promised that she would never divulge anything of a classified nature she’d learned while in the employ of the CIA, under penalty of imprisonment for possibly as long as life.
She took the pen he offered, and signed it. “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” she said.
“I hope so, Ms. Ibenez,” Perry said. “I think that you could have been a damned fine officer, but I think that you’ve been working some sort of a freelance operation. That’s the sort of thing Louis was doing, and it got him assassinated. I won’t have another death on my watch.”
“A word of warning, Gil,” Gloria said.
“Yes?”
“Watch your step. Something big is going down.”
He started to object but she held him off.
“I’m not being shitty now, I swear it. But just tell all your people to watch their backs. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, it’ll be big. I’m sure of it.”
Perry didn’t think that he’d ever despised anyone more than he did Gloria at this moment. But she was right. Something big was coming his way, and he still hadn’t figured out how to handle it. It was Updegraf and his fucking meddling.
He handed Gloria a manila envelope. “It’s your termination letter, something about the Secrets Act form you just signed, something about your hospitalization program and 401(k), and your severance check. The Company was generous.”
“I’ll bet,” Gloria said.
Two marines in undress blues, their pistols holstered, showed up at the door.
“Hi, guys,” Gloria said brightly. “Care to walk a lady to her car?”
“Ms. Ibenez is leaving,” Perry said. “She is no longer authorized in any nonpublic area of the embassy. I want her pass before she clears Post One.”
FORTY-FIVE
CIA HEADQUARTERS
Dick Adkins’s secretary buzzed him a few minutes before seven as he was getting ready to call for his driver to take him home. Howard McCann was waiting in the outer office. For just a moment Adkins was a little irritated that his deputy director of operations had taken so long to answer the summons from earlier this afternoon, but everyone in the building had been running at top speed ever since Rencke’s lavender warning.
“Send him in, Dahlia, then call Hank, and you may go home for the evening.”
“Yes, Mr. Director. Have a good evening.”
“You, too.”
McCann walked in. “Sorry for the delay, Dick, but I’ve been slammed with meetings all afternoon.” He glanced at his watch. “Fact is I have a Technical Means staff meeting next door in twenty minutes.”
Adkins waved him to a chair across the desk. “I’m afraid I have another headache for you to deal with.”
McCann sat down and nodded, darkly. “I figured as much. What’s come up?”
“The president has changed his mind. Since we have assets inside Mexico, he wants us to launch a full-scale investigation into Congressman Newell’s activities down there.”
“Come on. That’s a job for the Bureau and you know it. We have enough crap on our plate without chasing after some stupid politician who shoots off his mouth just before an election year.” McCann shook his head. “Anyway, if it ever came out that we were bird dogging an elected official, you would have some tough questions to answer on the Hill.”
It was about the reaction Adkins had figured he’d get. Dave Whittaker, his DDCI, had been a hell of a Clandestine Services director. And before him, of course, McGarvey had done the job brilliantly. He’d never been an administrator, but he’d run the DO with a lot of imagination.
McCann, on the other hand, was a great administrator, but he came up short on imagination. He was more of a bureaucrat than a spy.
“According to the White House, Newell also made a trip to Beijing four months ago. The president wants us to find out what he did when he was there. Who he saw, where he went.”
“We can refuse this.”
“Fred Rudolph’s people are looking into his activities in Arizona and here in Washington.”
McCann was stunned. Fred Rudolph had recently taken over the new FBI Division of Intelligence and Counterterrorism. Spying on Newell by Rudolph’s people meant the president and FBI suspected the congressman had a connection with some terrorist organization. “If the media got onto to something like this it’d go ballistic. Because of 9/11, naming one of our politicians as a terrorist would be bigger than Watergate. Shit, it could bring down Haynes if he’s wrong.” He gave Adkins a hard look. “It could damn well mean Rudolph’s job. And ours.”
“Nonetheless, we’ve been asked to take on a job, and we’ll do it,” Adkins said.
McCann pursed his lips. “What’s going on, Mr. Director?”
“We’ve been asked to check out Newell—”
“I mean what’s really going on. First I’m told to fire Gloria Ibenez because she won’t obey orders. And now I’m being told to help Fred Rudolph investigate an Arizona congressman who made a speech in Mexico City. Ibenez worked for McGarvey last year, and is in love with the guy, from what I hear. Rudolph and McGarvey are buds. And McGarvey was standing right there in front of the Chinese embassy while Newell was making his speech. So what’s the connection?”
Adkins was careful not to let any surprise show on his face. He nodded. “Where’d you hear that McGarvey was in Mexico?”
“Come on, Dick.
Gil Perry may be a pompous ass sometimes, but he didn’t fall off a hay wagon last year. He’s sharp, and he knows his people. And he also knows whom he’s working for.”
“Yeah,” Adkins said. “Me.” He shoved a thick file folder across to McCann. “This is the material on Newell that Dennis Berndt gave me. It’s a start. Needless to say you have to keep tight control of the inquiries.”
“I’ll say,” McCann agreed. He looked at the file as if it were an animal ready to pounce. “I’ll follow whatever orders I’m given, of course, Mr. Director. I always have. But this time I have to ask that you put them in writing.”
Adkins had anticipated that reaction as well. “You’ll find my letter in the jacket. I’d just ask that you take care with whom you share it.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” McCann said. He got to his feet and picked up the file. “I’ll take a great deal of care.”
FORTY-SIX
EN ROUTE TO LA GUARDIA
McGarvey had checked out of the Grand Hyatt and caught a cab in front, the sight of Monique’s strangled body sharp in his mind. Halfway to La Guardia his cell phone chirped. It was Rencke.
“Are you on the way out to the airport? I’ve got something on Liu.”
“Yeah, I’m catching the eight clock to D.C.,” McGarvey said. “What’s up?”
“I missed it earlier, but one of my search engines picked up one of Liu’s work names from an American Airlines flight to New York.”
“He’s here in the city now?” McGarvey demanded.
“No, he’s on the Washington shuttle that left about ten minutes ago. Do you want me to have someone follow him?”
McGarvey thought about it for a moment. “I think it’s already too late. He’s finished what he came up here to do. Is he booked on a flight back to Mexico City?”
“First thing tomorrow morning.”
“He’ll most likely check with his embassy, although they probably won’t be happy to see him. The FBI doesn’t want him back, and his people won’t want the possible hassle.”
“I can give Fred the heads-up.”
“No. Just make sure that he goes back to Mexico in the morning. If he misses his flight, give me a call.”
“What else do you need?” Rencke asked. “Can I set anything up for you here tonight?”
“I want to talk to Dick, but I’ll take care of that myself. In the meantime, pull up the dates of the rapes and murders that Liu was suspected of up here and Washington.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I want to know if they match the times that he was with Monique Thibault.”
“Okay, give me a minute,” Rencke said.
McGarvey laid the phone on the seat beside him and opened his overnight bag to get his air marshal ID so that he could fly commercially while carrying his pistol. He came across the file that Liz had given him at the Farm. All this time he hadn’t gotten around to reading it. He pulled it out and flipped through the pages.
This was material that Rencke had come across at the last minute, including a psych evaluation that had been completed just before Gloria had been assigned to Station Mexico City.
He picked up the phone. “Otto?”
“Thirty seconds,” Rencke said.
McGarvey put the phone down again and started reading Gloria’s psyche evaluation. When he’d become DCI, he’d required every field officer to undergo an evaluation by the Company’s shrink before each posting. It was a notion that Jim Angleton had floated but that no one at the time had cared to do. The idea was to spot some indications that the field officer might be going off the deep end, or worse, going over to the other side. In the last couple of years the system had worked, to a degree, and the occasional drunk or nutcase had been weeded out.
But it had not worked to spot Updegraf’s apparent maverick tendencies, or if it had neither Perry nor McCann had done anything about it.
The same thing seemed true for Gloria. She was a woman who had apparently been walking a very narrow line of sanity ever since her husband had been captured by Cuban intelligence in Havana, tortured, and killed. She had become a different person, even beyond what could have been expected because of the shock she’d gone through.
The main point of the psychological evaluation summary was that Gloria seemed incapable of feeling sadness or remorse. She was a good officer, and an otherwise stable person, but she had no regrets, and couldn’t have them.
McGarvey looked up. She’d been broken up about the death of her partner during an operation at Guantánamo Bay last year. If this was correct, she’d been faking it. But why?
He picked up the phone. “Otto?”
“I ran the matches,” Rencke said. “One of the murders in New York that Liu was suspected of being involved with happened before Ms. Thibault went to work for him. But she was on board during the times of the two others. Do you think she was somehow involved?”
“No,” McGarvey said. One of the answers he had been looking for had just dropped in place for him. “I think he has two kinds of women. Ones like Shahrzad and Monique, whom he seduces and then uses to spy for him. And then he has party girls. His sex toys whom he has to end up killing.”
“He’s a disturbed man,” Rencke said softly.
“He’s all of that and more,” McGarvey said.
“Dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“You still don’t want me to have him followed until you get here?” Rencke asked. “We could end this tonight.”
“We still don’t know what he’s up to in Mexico. Just let me know if he doesn’t go back in the morning.”
“Will do.”
“Do you know where Gloria’s dad is living these days?”
“Miami, I think. Hang on.”
McGarvey glanced at Gloria’s psych evaluation summary again. If he was going to use her to take a run at Liu, he needed to know a lot more. Her life could depend on it. He didn’t want her ending up dead like Monique, or broken like Shahrzad.
“I was right,” Rencke said. “He’s in Little Havana.”
“Cancel my shuttle reservations, would you? And get me a seat on the next flight to Miami. I want General Marti’s file waiting for me.”
“Oh, wow, Mac. What’re you thinking?”
“Has Perry fired Gloria yet?”
“It was supposed to happen sometime today,” Rencke said. “I’ll check on it. Are you going to use her to get to Liu?”
“I think so,” McGaervey said. “But I still have some homework to do, and in the meantime I’ll try not to get anyone else killed.”
“Not your fault, kemosabe.”
“Yeah,” McGarvey said. But it was his fault.
FORTY-SEVEN
EN ROUTE TO MIAMI
Sitting at the very rear of the airplane, McGarvey had the last row of seats to himself. Since he was flying as an air marshal he couldn’t have a drink, and no dinner was being served, so he used the two and a half hours to take a closer look at Gloria’s psych evaluation.
The death of her husband had hit her very hard, as was to be expected. For the first couple of weeks she’d had trouble focusing, and she’d had frequent outbursts of temper, flying off the handle almost uncontrollably. When the assistant DDO, Chuck Bratton, suggested she take a leave of absence for a month or two, she’d become so enraged that security had to be called to get her under control.
The Company shrinks hospitalized her for seven days, but she’d bounced back and been certified fit for service, though none of her co-workers or her immediate supervisor on the Latin American desk where she’d been assigned believed it.
Yet she’d been assigned to Paris Station on the recommendation of Dr. Norman Stenzel, chief of the CIA’s Medical Services Psychological Division, who’d written that leaving her at Langley could possibly damage her sense of self-esteem badly enough to make her nearly useless in future field assignments. But sending her back to a Spanish-speaking country would almost certainly cause even more damage, forcing her to
relive the almost unbearable experience of her husband’s arrest and the news that he’d been executed.
Three weeks after she’d transferred to the French section of the European desk to prepare for her assignment, she’d suddenly come awake, as if she’d been in a trance since Cuba. Her initial fitrep gave her absolutely top marks: “extremely intelligent … fast learner … positive attitude.”
Six months later she’d gone to Paris to start her field assignment under Peter Avalon, who was a no-nonsense straight shooter who expected his people to be first-rate, or he’d kick them out.
Although Stenzel’s psych evaluation that Rencke had managed to pull up and get to McGarvey made no mention of the types of assignments she’d been involved with in France, it did include glowing reports from Avalon. For the first eight months she was his rising star.
But then her father paid her a visit and everything changed.
It was the opening paragraph that had caught McGarvey’s eye in the cab on the way out to La Guardia.
“Subsequent to General Marti’s two-day visit with FO Ibenez, she asked for and was granted a fifteen-day leave of absence. The COS noted in her CIA 3467 that her father’s visit ‘apparently has brought back painful memories of her husband’s death that she is having some difficulty dealing with.’”
She dropped out of sight for the two weeks, or at least no mention was made of where she’d gone, but when she returned she seemed to be a changed woman. Avalon’s memos in her personnel file mentioned mood swings and an oftentimes sarcastic attitude, especially toward her immediate superiors; yet her work was first-class. She was a superior field officer with a lousy attitude, not such an unusual combination in the CIA.
Seeing her father had touched off something troubling inside of her. At her next psych evaluation, she’d explained that her father had come to Paris to talk her into quitting the CIA. He wanted her to get married again, settle down, and have babies. He wanted his daughter to have a normal life.
She’d refused, of course, which had caused a falling-out with her father. The two men most important in her life were gone: her husband killed in a Havana jail cell, and her father back in Little Havana drinking coffee and smoking cigars all day while he played dominoes with his cronies.
Dance with the Dragon Page 23