Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  “How could Baranov possibly know that someone like you would be coming?” Day asked.

  “He set Basulto on you and Trotter. He knew that you wouldn’t take it to the CIA because of Powers’s friendship with Yarnell. He figured that you might be calling in an outsider. Someone who knew the game. A radical.”

  “How do you know that Yarnell wasn’t actually a traitor?”

  “Because of the quality of the intelligence he sent back on every assignment he was ever given. His boss, Darrel Owens, had nothing but praise for his protege’s work in Mexico City and in Moscow, although he hated him.”

  “Why?” Day asked. They were leaving him behind again, but it didn’t matter now. McGarvey figured that Trotter would explain it to him later.

  “Yarnell was probably sleeping with his wife.”

  “Why in heaven’s name?” Day chirped.

  “He was hedging his bets,” Trotter said. “He was an ambitious kid and wanted to get to the top as quickly as he possibly could. The cuckolded husband is almost always the first one to cooperate lest he make a public fool of himself.”

  Admiration and hate often went hand-in-hand in this business, McGarvey thought, recalling his afternoon with Owens. No one, he suspected, had ever been neutral about Darby Yarnell, who in the end had made the most tragic mistake of his life. He had simply out-thought himself. In the end neither he nor Powers had been a match for Baranov’s skills.

  “What about Janos Plónski?” Trotter asked, breaking into McGarvey’s thoughts. “He’d found something in the records that got him killed.”

  “My fault,” McGarvey said tiredly. He supposed Pat and the kids had returned to England where her mother still lived. Eventually, he knew, he would have to face them, but only after he found the right words.

  “What did he discover?” Trotter prompted.

  “He looked up Basulto’s track. Several of his operations had been pulled from their jackets. But it was done years ago.”

  “By whom, if Yarnell and Powers were innocent?”

  “There wasn’t time to get the dates straight, but I suspect Roger Harris did it. He was Basulto’s case officer and he suspected there was a mole in the agency and he wanted to hide what Basulto was doing for him—namely finding the traitor.”

  “Who killed Harris in Cuba then …” Trotter started to ask, but a sudden understanding dawned on him. “Basulto,” he said into the breach.

  “Yeah,” McGarvey replied.

  “Well, what about Yarnell’s bodyguards,” Day wanted to know. “That’s not what you would consider normal behavior for an innocent man.”

  “Yarnell was never what you would think of as normal,” McGarvey countered. “He’d always surrounded himself with a crowd. Admirers, some of them, others actual bodyguards. Maybe he’d gotten paranoid in his old age. Maybe he thought Baranov would be coming after him someday. I don’t know.”

  Day sat back in his chair, his hands in front of him on the desk. “Still doesn’t answer the question of why Yarnell went to see Powers last night. Why he shot him. Not the actions of an innocent man.”

  Darby Yarnell had been an arrogant sonofabitch. But a romantic for all of it. An overzealous patriot who had thrown himself body and soul into being a spy in defense of his country. The ends, for him, justified the means. Any means. And it was those very qualities that Baranov had recognized early on, that he had used to manipulate Yarnell. All the signs were there, but McGarvey had seen them too late. As they all had. Only Baranov had known the outcome from the very beginning. Only Baranov truly knew about honor and dishonor, and how to use this understanding to the best advantage. McGarvey took the miniature tape recorder out of his jacket pocket and laid it gingerly on Day’s desk.

  “Yarnell remembered that night in Mexico City when Powers came to his house and was seduced,” McGarvey began. “He remembered the party, the music, the girls, and mostly he remembered Baranov. We were led to believe that there was a mole in the CIA. A man at high levels who was selling us out to the Russians. Baranov’s handmaiden. In Yarnell’s mind, everything pointed to his old friend Powers, whom he thought was being blackmailed. He thought he understood Baranov. He thought Baranov had used that night to turn Powers. Or was about to do it. So he went to the house and shot him. It was his patriotic duty, as he saw it.”

  Day and Trotter were staring at the tape recorder as if it were a wild beast about to devour them.

  “I took this from Yarnell’s body last night. It was running. No one else knows about it. No one but us.”

  “You’ve heard it?” Trotter asked, looking up.

  McGarvey nodded. “Yarnell had loved his country and had given his life in her defense. He thought he was thwarting Baranov when in actuality he had played the score the Russian had laid out for him, the first notes of which had been written twenty-five years ago.”

  “You can’t expect us to believe such a story,” Day said halfheartedly.

  “Yes, I do,” McGarvey replied. He switched on the tape recording, then turned and walked out as Darby Yarnell’s voice came from the tiny speaker.

  “Hello Donald. We have a problem, you and I.”

  “Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers said.

  McGarvey had gone from day into night with the same thoughts, the same voices in his head following him like a shadow, like an alter ego, at once frightening and somehow strangely comforting in that he finally understood. Riding in the taxi from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan, he wondered how Day and Trotter were taking it. Powers had died shortly before noon. A counsel for the CIA had admitted the DCI had been assassinated by Darby Yarnell, a longtime friend, but a spokesman for the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where both men had been taken, hinted about a possible brain tumor in Yarnell’s frontal lobe. It would be days, possibly weeks, before anything conclusive would be known, but Yarnell quite possibly had not been in control of his faculties at the time of the crime. Meanwhile, the president had given the Russians an ultimatum: The missiles in Mexico would have to be dismantled within the next forty-eight hours or a complete air and sea blockade of Mexico would commence. The United Nations was meeting in emergency session. Gorbachev had so far made no response. Nor had the Mexican government. The world, as it had in the sixties, was holding its breath.

  “We have a problem, you and I,” Yarnell had said on the tape.

  “Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers had replied.

  “It’s Valentin.”

  McGarvey would never forget the longish pause on the tape. On first hearing it, he had been concerned that something had gone wrong. That the machine had somehow malfunctioned. But then Powers made the first of his damning statements.

  “I’ve been expecting this for a lot of years, Darby. You know, now that it’s come I’m actually glad.”

  “It’s been a burden,” Yarnell said.

  “Yes. It has.”

  Yarnell had gone there to accuse his old friend of being a traitor, and Powers had been expecting Yarnell to come forward finally and admit that he was the traitor. It should have been a comedy, but too many lives had already been lost—and more were in the balance—for it to be humorous.

  The lights of Manhattan suddenly came into sight across the East River. McGarvey had always liked this view of the city; it was power, to him, and success and excitement. “The American dream,” his father once told him, “is to light up the universe.” We’d gotten a pretty good start in New York City. It made him sad to think how much he would miss it.

  “ … knew he’d be coming for you,” Yarnell’s words stood out in McGarvey’s head. “I simply never imagined the lengths to which the man is willing to go. It staggers the imagination.”

  “Even yours?” Powers had replied, and McGarvey had plainly heard the slight note of derision in the DCI’s voice.

  There was another longish pause on the tape until Yarnell said that Baranov had sent for them.

  Powers laughed.

  “Evita telephoned from Mexico City, Donald.
She says she knows everything. Basulto is with her. And someone else, McGarvey something or other.”

  “Of course she could not know everything,” Powers said.

  “Not without Valentin’s help and advice. Which brings us to an interesting juncture, you and I.”

  “Yes. I thought you’d be coming someday.”

  “Me, or someone like me.”

  “You,” Powers had said. He sounded final, and so very sure of himself.

  They passed through the Midtown tunnel and into Manhattan, and merged with traffic heading south on Second Avenue toward SoHo. It was a Friday night. The daytime city of offices and businesses had fallen silent, while the nighttime city of restaurants and bars and clubs had come alive. A dangerous, wonderful place, he thought. Alive.

  “Why me?” Yarnell had asked.

  “You’ve been his lapdog all these years.”

  “What?”

  “I never had the proof until tonight, until just now. Valentin called and you jumped. It’s gotten too difficult for him in Mexico I suspect, so he sent you here.”

  “He’s blackmailing you …”

  “And you’ve come with the ransom demand.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Yarnell had said, the words echoing again and again in McGarvey’s head. “Don’t be a fool … A mole in the agency … at the highest levels. You, Donald. It has been you all these years …”

  “We were friends … Baranov has wanted me for a long time … you were the traitor, not me … .”

  A single gunshot, the sound distorted in the tiny machine, cut Powers off in midsentence. For a moment there was silence on the tape, and then rushing sounds, like water over a cliff, the definite sound of a car door closing and the engine coming to life.

  An East Coast accent, Evita had said, as had Basulto. Powers’s accent was East Coast, but he’d been Baranov’s mark from the first day. The Russian had bided his time, had saved the single indiscretion like money in the bank until it earned enough interest to make the withdrawal significant. He had wanted to destroy Powers, and he had.

  The cabbie dropped McGarvey off in front of St. Christopher’s on Broome Street. The club was dark, not a single window was lit. A couple of passersby glanced up at him as he mounted the single step and rang the bell. He could hear it inside. He glanced down the street as the taxi turned the corner and was gone. He had thought about calling ahead in Washington and again at LaGuardia, but had decided against it, wanting to come here in person to face her, though he had no real idea what he wanted to say to her.

  He rang the bell again and then tried the door. It was open. Just inside the vestibule he closed and locked the door and, leaving his bag, passed through to the club where the only illumination came from the exit signs. He took the stairs up to Evita’s apartment and let himself in. She was curled up on the couch, her hands clutched at her bosom. Her feet were bare and her silk nightgown was hiked up nearly to her hips. She was sleeping, McGarvey thought at first as he came across the living room. Her cocaine paraphernalia was laid out on the big coffee table in front of her. But there was an unnatural stillness about her. He stopped a few feet away and watched for her chest to rise and fall; for a movement, any movement, a little twitch, a flexed muscle in sleep. But she was absolutely motionless, and he knew that she was dead.

  With Baranov out of reach and Darby Yarnell dead, there had been no reason for her to continue living. She had had her fantasies, as we all do, about somehow regaining her youth or whatever it was she perceived she had lost by growing older, until Baranov had set out on his mad plot to bring Powers down. She’d heard the news this morning, of course, and she had killed herself.

  He gently touched her cheek. Her flesh was already stiff and cool. She had been dead for half a day at least. Probably since noon.

  Baranov had let her leave Mexico City knowing how she would end up. She had been the last link to the old days. The very last one who could do him any harm. But he’d known her better than anyone else.

  It had been her hands that had tapped out the coke on the tiny mirror, her hands that had cut it into lines and her hands that had held the tiny straw to her nostrils. But Baranov had killed her as surely as if he had held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger himself.

  Darby Yarnell had killed her, too, with his arrogance, with his mad energy, as if she had been a delicate moth attracted to a raging inferno.

  The system had killed her. The bureaucracy of government, by its insensitivity to the people it was supposed to serve, had destroyed her. The aristocracy of lies and dishonor had proven to be a fatal attraction.

  He thought about Baranov, who was surely celebrating by now. The magician, Evita had called him. He cannot lose. He cannot be beaten. Perhaps she had been right.

  McGarvey turned and left the apartment. Downstairs he collected his bag, let himself out, and headed up toward Houston, where there would be more of a chance to catch a cab at this hour of the night. It was over, he thought. Time now to try to find the peace he had been searching for all of his life.

  NOVELS BY DAVID HAGBERG

  Twister

  The Capsule

  Last Come the Children

  Heartland

  Without Honor

  Countdown

  Cross Fire

  Critical Mass

  Desert Fire

  High Flight

  WRITING AS SEAN FLANNERY

  The Kremlin Conspiracy

  Eagles Fly

  The Trinity Factor

  The Hollow Men

  Broken Idols

  False Prophets

  Gulag

  Moscow Crossing

  The Zebra Network

  Crossed Swords

  Counterstrike

  Moving Targets

  Winner Take All

  Kilo Option

  “Hagberg, a maven of mach speed mayhem, intricately moves [the] pieces around his global chessboard, until many bodies, plane crashes, and a running sea battle later, action hero McGarvey wipes out the bad guys. Hagberg’s long yarns always muscle their way to the top of the techno-intrigue-warfare genre.”

  —Booklist on High Flight

  “Hagberg may have out-Clancied Clancy. High Flight ends the twentieth century with a bang, Russia versus Japan, with the U.S. caught in the middle. Perhaps it’s time. There’s a lot of techno and a lot of thrills in High Flight. Better strap in and hang on when you go for this ride.”

  —Stephen Coonts

  “A tale of international hi-tech intrigue that draws and grips you like a superconducting magnet … .Compelling suspense and visceral drama.”

  —Bill Pogue, SkyLab astronaut, on High Flight

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WITHOUT HONOR

  Copyright © 1989 by David Hagberg

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Tor Books on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.tor-forge.com

  Cover art by Danilo Ducak

  eISBN 9781466813595

  First eBook Edition : February 2012

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN: 0-812-50413-5

  Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 88-50998

  First edition: January 1989

 

 

 
filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share