The odd pause lasted just a moment, and then she was back. “I’m making breakfast. Do you want some?”
“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” he said.
He got up and followed her into the kitchen. He sat on a stool at the counter, and she poured him another cup of coffee.
“Unless you’re used to it, you should drink this only in the morning,” she said. “In the evening it’d keep you glued to the ceiling all night.”
She took out eggs and bacon and butter from the refrigerator and started breakfast, her movements swift and efficient, as if she were a short-order cook. But then everything McGarvey knew about her from firsthand experience and from her fitreps was of a woman who was highly competent.
“What did my father tell you about me, or aren’t I supposed to know?”
“That he loved you, but didn’t understand you.”
“He never did,” Gloria said. “But it wasn’t his fault, not entirely. I was a difficult kid, and never got better. I got worse.”
“He said that, too.”
“What’d he tell you about Raul? Havana?”
“He liked your husband, thought it was a good match. But he didn’t know what happened in Havana. He had only some secondhand opinions and guesses. But he was proud of the fact that you were enough of a survivor to get out in one piece.”
A brief look of pleasure crossed Gloria’s face. “He said that?”
“Yes.”
She finished cooking and served McGarvey his eggs, bacon, and toast at the counter. She sat down next to him.
“I would have thought you’d make huevos rancheros,” McGarvey said.
“That’s Mexican. Cubans eat this if they can get it.”
They ate in silence for a minute, CNN in the living room little more than background noise, the sounds of traffic outside rising.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked finally.
“I want you to become a dancer for General Liu.”
Gloria fell silent again, finishing her breakfast. When they were done she rinsed their plates and silverware in the sink and loaded the dishwasher. McGarvey figured it was busywork, to give her time to think.
She turned back to him. “For you, darling, I’ll do anything,” she said. “Even that.”
“It’s not like that,” McGarvey said.
She nodded. “Yes it is. It’ll always be like that. I love you.”
“You know that nothing will ever happen.”
She nodded. “Doesn’t change how I feel,” she said. “But hey, listen, it’s not your problem. It’s mine, and I’ll deal with it.”
“We start making the rounds of the clubs tonight to get you established,” McGarvey said. “This won’t be pleasant, but it’s the only way I can think to get to him.”
“He has a weakness for women.”
“He hates them, for whatever reason. And he’s already killed at least three and probably more, so you’re going to have to be extremely careful.”
“But not so careful that he gets suspicious from the start.”
“Something like that,” McGarvey said. “First you’ll need the right clothes.”
“I thought that we would probably be going in this direction, otherwise you wouldn’t have taken me to the Wild Stallion,” she said. “Hang on a second.”
She went into the bedroom, leaving McGarvey sitting at the kitchen counter. Two minutes later she was back, dressed in a fluorescent white cocktail dress with almost no back, a neckline that plunged to her navel, exposing all but her nipples, and an uneven hemline that was well above her knees. The effect against her dark skin was stunning.
“Something like this?” she asked, doing a slow turn.
“You’re a beautiful woman. If any men in the clubs aren’t turned on, they’re dead above the neck.”
She smiled. “I’m only interested in turning on one man.”
“Yeah, General Liu,” McGarvey said.
SIXTY-FOUR
THE APARTMENT
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get close to Liu,” Gloria said after she’d changed back into her blue jeans and turtleneck top. “Anything. But first you’re going to have to level with me. If I’m going to stick my head—my entire body—into the lion’s mouth, I want the whole story.”
“I agree,” McGarvey told her. “But it’ll have to be a two-way street. You’ll have to be straight with me. No bullshit. If I find out that you’ve lied to me, you’ll be outside looking in.”
“And if this plan of yours works, and I get to Liu, what then?”
“Whatever you want,” McGarvey said. “At the very least back in the CIA with McCann off your back.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “What are we looking for exactly? What has the general done that has the CIA so interested?”
“And got Updegraf assassinated,” McGarvey said.
An odd expression came into her eyes and the set of her mouth, as if she were doing everything within her power not to let her anger show.
“What?” McGarvey asked.
“It was so stupid, getting himself killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“He wasn’t trying to burn some code clerk, that much was obvious from the start. But he didn’t do his homework.”
“How do you know?”
“I said it was obvious,” she snapped, all but dismissing the question. “Are you going after Liu because Louis got himself killed? Or do you have something else?”
McGarvey could not tell if she was lying. She was not as transparent as Shahrzad or as Monique in New York. But if she was holding something back, as her father suggested she’d done all of her life, then she was a master.
“One of Otto’s research programs was starting to show lavender when the National Reconnaissance Office came up with a couple of satellite shots of Liu here in Mexico City, and the threat level started to go ballistic. He ran a quick background check on the general and stumbled across a couple of old FBI files naming Liu as a principal suspect in a series of murders in New York and Washington.”
“But that wasn’t enough for them to call you out of retirement. There had to be something else.”
“It looked like the Chinese might be up to something down here, and when Updegraf was assassinated after supposedly going after a clerk in the Chinese embassy, Liu’s presence began to raise some serious question marks, at least in Otto’s programs.”
Gloria was shaking her head. “I still don’t get it. Why didn’t McCann send a flying team down here to find out who killed Louis and why?”
“Nobody wants to upset the Chinese just now,” McGarvey told her.
“Trade issues.”
“Something like that. But it’s possible that Liu is running his own operation for a reason or reasons unknown to his own government.”
“So they sent you,” Gloria said. “Still doesn’t make any sense.”
“We think it’s possible that Perry is dirty.”
They had gone out to the teak chairs and table on the balcony to talk. Gloria sat back. “Cristo!” Her eyes were wide, and for the first time McGarvey thought that he could see fear in them. It wasn’t the reaction he’d expected.
“Did you have no idea?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I suppose I should feel glad or something, but I don’t. He’s a prick and I don’t like him, but I would never have guessed he was anything but a Boy Scout. He wanted to be the deputy director someday.”
“Tell me about him,” McGarvey prompted.
She took a moment before she answered. “He was a crappy manager, I can tell you that much with certainty. He has no people skills.” She shook her head again and laughed. “I’m telling you, Mac, this is hard for me to accept. I would have thought he was too chickenshit to work for the opposition.”
“We’re not sure about him; could be he just has a lousy memory,” McGarvey admitted. “Did you know that Updegraf was fluent in Mandarin?”
Gloria nodded. �
��It was a weird kind of hobby for him. When he was a kid he started tinkering around with the language. He’d wanted to be an artist, but he had no talent. The next best thing was reading and writing the Chinese pictographs. He was pretty good at it, but he used to joke that it was a good thing his Spanish was lousy, otherwise he would have ended up in China.”
“Would Perry have known that?”
“I would imagine so.”
“Perry told me that he wasn’t aware of it,” McGarvey said.
“You met Gil, you talked to him?”
“Yeah.”
“Here?”
“No,” McGarvey said. It was plain that she wanted to know more, but he didn’t volunteer anything and she didn’t ask. “Tell me about working for him.”
Gloria took a moment to gather her thoughts. She shrugged. “One thing he was a stickler for was our day sheets and encounter records. Everything we did and anyone we met had to be logged, and no one was supposed to see our logs except for Gil. We weren’t supposed to co-op information without his approval. He was in charge and he made no bones about it.
“But he wanted to be pals. I think he sometimes fancied himself everyone’s dad, or uncle or big brother, something like that. Of course everyone was laughing their asses off behind his back.”
“But you got work done. The station reports I read looked pretty good,” McGarvey said.
“Oh, the work got done all right, despite Gil’s best efforts. And some of the embassy staff seemed to like the attention he gave them. After all, he was the CIA chief of station, and that’s a big deal. He used to throw after-work wine parties for the people who worked the comms center, and I know for a fact that he had a hand in getting Sam Eggert her new apartment not too far from his. Sam was his secretary, and rumor was that they were having an affair. I wouldn’t put it past him, but I’d also thought Sam had better taste than that.”
“Did he ever hit on you?” McGarvey asked.
“Practically from day one. He wanted to get me an apartment downtown. I think he was probably trying to set up a harem for himself. I just laughed in his face, which pissed him off. After that I did just about everything I could to irritate the little prick.”
“Did he give up that easy?” McGarvey wanted to know.
“No. And you had to give him marks for trying. But after a while, maybe three or four months after I got here, something changed.” Gloria looked away for a moment, choosing her next words with care. “It was almost like he was running scared.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Last year sometime. But then about seven or eight months ago he perked up. Like it was almost an overnight change. He was still a jerk, but he went from a nervous jerk to a happy jerk.” Gloria laughed. “I don’t know which was worse.”
“What were you doing all this time?” McGarvey asked.
“My job,” Gloria shot back.
“Would you care to be a bit more specific?”
Gloria stared at him for a long time before she averted her eyes. “Actually I wasn’t getting much of anything done. Gil blocked me every chance he got.” She turned back. “I joined one of the downtown Rotary clubs that was big with some of the top guys in the attorney general’s office and the LE people, including the Seguridad idiots. Figured I could get something going, but when Gil found out what I was trying to do he told me to back off. Said he had those guys covered, especially the intel types in the Seguridad.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“None whatsoever. You jump at any chance you have of getting close to the opposition. The more roads to Cibola the better.”
“What do you suppose Perry’s chances are of becoming deputy director?”
Gloria looked to see if McGarvey was kidding, and then she laughed out loud. “If he’s dirty, then he’ll go to jail, I hope. If not, he’ll probably make it. He’s kissed way too much serious booty not to make it.”
“According to you this station is a mess. But from the reports I’ve seen, Perry’s doing a good job.”
“Come on, Mac,” Gloria said. “Who the hell do you think writes the bloody reports? The whole operation down here has been a mess, and still is.”
“Sour grapes?” McGarvey suggested.
“You’re damned right, but it doesn’t alter the fact that Perry is a fucking idiot. It’s a wonder he’s come this far. But if going after Liu will help burn Perry, then it’ll be a fringe benefit for me.”
SIXTY-FIVE
THE APARTMENT
Morning traffic was in full swing. In the distance they could hear sirens, a sound common to every large city 24/7. And already the haze of automobile exhaust had begun to build. By afternoon the air over Mexico City would be unfit to breathe because of the air inversion against the mountains that trapped the dense smog.
“Did you know Updegraf very well?” McGarvey asked. “You worked together; maybe you held Perry as the common enemy.”
Gloria laughed again. “Indeed we did,” she said. “Louis was a nice guy who tried to live down his midwestern blue-collar upbringing. Perry was East Coast Ivy League, and he was forever dropping little unsubtle hints about how differences in backgrounds and education could influence a man’s perception of reality.”
“Perry pissed you off from day one, but how did Updegraf handle the situation?”
“It didn’t seemed to bother him most of the time. He was doing his job, and he knew that if he kept his nose clean he’d eventually be reassigned, hopefully with a better COS to work for.” Gloria shook her head again. “It’s why I can’t understand how he got himself into that kind of a situation up in Chihuahua. He was a lot smarter than that.”
“Apparently not as smart as Liu,” McGarvey said. “On the surface, how did he and Perry get along? There was tension between them, but was there any outright animosity?”
“Only once,” Gloria said. “And strangely enough, the incident seemed to clear the air between them.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was in the spring, maybe six or seven months ago. I was out in the courtyard behind the embassy having my lunch, a sandwich and a Coke from the commissary, when Louis came out and sat down next to me. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, which I didn’t. I thought he was a bright guy, sort of attractive in an odd way. Maybe it was his eyes, or his smile. He was almost always smiling about something.… So we starting talking.”
“Shop talk?” McGarvey asked.
“God no,” Gloria said. “The usual stuff, you know, the weather, movies—he was a movie buff—things back in the States.”
“Skiing?” McGarvey prompted.
She gave him a sharp look but shook her head. “I hate the snow,” she said. “What made you ask that?”
“I thought I saw a note somewhere in your file that you took a summer leave and went skiing in Chile,” McGarvey said. “I must have been mistaken.”
“You were,” Gloria said. “Anyway, Gil evidently spotted us together, and he practically ran across the courtyard to where we were sitting and demanded to know what we were talking about.
“‘We’re talking about the Yankees. Any law against that?’ I asked him. He went ballistic, called me a goddamned liar, and said that he would fire off an e-mail to McCann that I was unreliable unless I fessed up.” Gloria smiled. “He actually used the word ‘fessed.’ It was a new one on me, I had to look it up later, but I understood what he was telling me.”
“How did Updegraf take it?”
“Not very well,” Gloria said. “He jumped up and went eyeball-to-eyeball with Gil. ‘What we were discussing is none of your fucking business,’ Louis told him. Perry was almost having a heart attack. ‘Everything in my shop is my business!’ he shouted.
“‘Even baseball, you moron?’
“‘Even baseball.’
“‘Don’t be such an asshole,’ Louis said. All of a sudden Gil got super calm. ‘That’s exactly what I mean when I talk about upbringing and education,’ he
told Louis. ‘How we’ve been educated to perceive reality determines how we will react. There’s never a good reason to overreact and become crude.’”
“Was that the only time you ever saw something like that between them?” McGarvey asked.
“Just the once,” Gloria said. “But then the oddest thing happened. Wasn’t more than a couple of months afterward that Louis and Gil became the best of pals. They even went over to Acapulco a couple of weekends with their wives. I never understood what had changed, or why.”
“Did you ever ask Updegraf about it?”
“Once, but he just laughed at me and said I was making a mountain out of a molehill. We all had to work together, so we might as well make the best of it.”
“Did you go to bed with Updegraf?” McGarvey asked.
Gloria flared for just an instant before she managed to control herself. He had hit a nerve and it was painfully obvious.
She nodded. “He was nice, and he defended me that day in the courtyard. I thought he was sweet, and I was lonely.”
“When was that?” McGarvey asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t write down the date like a schoolgirl with a crush. I found the man attractive and I had sex with him. No big deal.”
“The next day after he’d told off Perry? The next week? One month later?”
“It was several weeks later, I think,” Gloria said, and this time McGarvey could tell that she was holding something back.
“Or was it after Updegraf and Perry became the best of buds?” McGarvey pressed.
She nodded. “It might have been.”
“You wanted to know what was going on. Why the big switch in attitudes. You went to bed with him and that’s when you asked.”
She looked away momentarily. “Perry had just about cut me off from most of the day-to-day operations. He had me clipping and translating articles from a dozen Spanish newspapers and magazines.”
“It was driving you crazy not knowing what was going on,” McGarvey suggested.
“They were working some operation, at least that much was obvious.”
Dance with the Dragon Page 30