First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  “Do you think that the ambassador or our station chief will go along with you?”

  “I’ll be in and out before they’ll know I was there.”

  “You’ll have to get into the country first. I assume you’ll be flying in from Mexico City under false papers.”

  “I’ll be coming from the sea,” McGarvey said.

  Carol shook his head. “I’m not going to ask how you plan on pulling that off, but it’s six klicks from town to the compound, so you’ll have to steal a car.”

  “Or take a taxi.”

  “Something could go wrong. Lots of complications, laddie. You’ll have to whack the general, then get out without rousing the guards. That alone will be something. But I suppose that you have a plan.”

  “That’ll be the easy part. But getting back out might be tougher. I want to set something up down at the dock. Maybe a mock-up of one of the loading berths. And I’ll need four one-kilo blocks of Semtex and acid fuses.”

  “We can’t detonate anything that large so close to the river.”

  “I’ll only need a few ounces here for the mock-up. Just to get a feel for the timing.”

  “But you’ll be taking four kilos with you, plus weapons, civilian clothes and whatever gear you’ll be needing to jump ship once it reaches port. And after the hit and the diversionary explosion, then what?”

  “I’m working on it, Sarge,” McGarvey said. “How soon can you set something up on the river?”

  “How accurate do you want it? A commercial loading dock is a fairly large structure.”

  “I’ll need the base of the crane, maybe up to ten feet tall, and a fifty-foot section of the seawall. In wood, not concrete.”

  “You won’t be going out the same way you came in.”

  “That part I might have to play by ear. But I figure everyone’s attention will be on the docks long enough to give me a break.”

  Carol was skeptical, but he nodded. “I’ll get Connelly’s authorization, but I think we can get something knocked together by tonight. You’re planning a night op?”

  “Yeah,” McGarvey said.

  * * *

  McGarvey left the facility shortly after five and drove directly down to the Greyhound bus depot in Norfolk, where he stashed his go-to-hell kit and the leather bag with his extra clothes in one of the lockers, then bought a round-trip ticket to Washington on the 8:00 A.M. bus under the name Larson.

  He called Janos from a pay phone. Pat answered.

  “I don’t know what the hell you and Janos have got cooked up, but he’s been walking on eggshells for the past twenty-four hours,” she practically shouted. “This stops now, Kirk. I mean it.”

  “It ends tonight—I promise you. May I talk to him?”

  “Aren’t you listening to me?” she screeched, but she was cut off.

  “Hello, Kirk,” Janos said. “Has it started?”

  “Tonight. But I’ll need your help, and no one, not even Pat, can know about it.”

  “Can’t keep something like this from her—you know how it is.”

  “You can tell her that you’re helping me, but she can’t know the details. I need your word on that.”

  Janos hesitated for a long beat. “You have my word. What do you have in mind?”

  McGarvey told him.

  * * *

  It was after seven when McGarvey stopped for gas just west of downtown. He paid cash inside then got the addresses of the two Red Cross offices in town, one just off Southampton Avenue and the other on Providence Road. On the front of the Yellow Pages was a street map of the city, which he tore out.

  The Southampton office was closed for the night, but he picked the rear door lock and quickly searched the building, without finding what he was looking for. He got lucky at the other office, behind which a bloodmobile bus was parked. No one was around as he picked the lock in under ten seconds and let himself in.

  Enough light came through the windows for him to find a blood bag, a needle and tubing set, disinfectant, gauze and a roll of tape.

  He set up the bag at the side of a reclining chair, rolled up his sleeve, disinfected the inside of his arm beneath the elbow and stuck the needle in a vein. As he released the clamp his AB negative blood began slowly draining into the bag.

  * * *

  A rough mock-up of one of the San Antonio loading docks had been knocked together. When McGarvey, dressed in black, a rucksack over his right shoulder, showed up in one of the jeeps, the last of the construction crew was driving off.

  It was past ten and Sergeant Major Carol came over with a small brick of Semtex and the fuse set. “I didn’t know where you wanted to place this, so it’s up to you.”

  “I don’t want any observers, at least not for this. We’ll do a walk-through of the compound in the morning, and I’ll go through the gate afterward. You can tell me what I did wrong.”

  “But not this?”

  “No.”

  “Any particular reason I should know about?”

  “I’ll tell you over a beer when it’s over,” McGarvey said. “Go back up to the dining hall and have a cup of coffee. When you hear the explosion, come on down.”

  “You’ll be waiting here?”

  McGarvey shrugged.

  Carol gave him a skeptical look but got into his jeep and drove off.

  For a full minute McGarvey listened to the night sounds. A night op was in full swing on the other side of the hill, the gunshots just audible on the light breeze. In the distance the horn of a small boat sounded twice.

  He went to the base of the loading crane, where he taped the Semtex to one of the legs. From his rucksack he pulled out the bag of his blood, still a little warm, slashed the top of it with his knife, then splashed it across the dock to the river.

  The fuse could be crimped from six minutes at one end to ten seconds at the short. He stuck it in the brick then crimped the long end. The fuse went immediately active, and he had just a second to throw himself off the dock into the river when the plastique blew with an impressive bang. Without looking back he managed to get the rucksack over his shoulder then swam with the current toward the opposite bank.

  * * *

  Janos, at the wheel of his eighteen-foot ski boat moving just above idle, appeared out of the darkness and McGarvey clambered aboard. Janos, throttling up slightly, let the river current do most of the work of getting them away.

  “I have dry clothes for you in the truck at the boat launch by the Yorktown park. Only a few campers tonight, but no one paid any attention to me. You were cutting it awfully close back there.”

  “Not a word to Pat?” McGarvey asked. He didn’t know what to say, but he wasn’t going to tell Janos that the fuse had been sabotaged to blow early. To kill him.

  “Someday I’ll have to tell her, but only when you’re back safe and sound. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  “Where to now?”

  “The Greyhound bus depot in town, and then a motel just down the block from it,” McGarvey said. He looked over his shoulder the way they had come, but they were far enough from the Farm that nothing was to be seen.

  “They’ll come looking for you,” Janos said.

  “They certainly will.”

  And in a day or two, someone would drive out to the house to tell Katy that her husband was missing, presumed dead in a terrible training accident. He would make it up to her, or at least try, but thinking about her now, he knew it would probably be the end for them.

  The most immediate problem was Sergeant Major Carol. McGarvey couldn’t bring himself to believe the man was the saboteur.

  PART

  TWO

  The Mole

  TWENTY-SIX

  Janos showed up at the Farm’s main gate around nine in the morning and his hand shook as he held out his CIA identification wallet to the guard, who looked at the photograph.

  “They’re expecting you at river dock B, sir,” the guard said, handing the wallet back. “Do you need an escort?
”

  “I can find my way, unless the layout’s changed since I went through the course a few years ago.”

  “No, sir.”

  Janos drove slowly through the gate. A quarter of a mile through the woods the road split and he took the dirt track that went up on a low hill to the east. His nerves were jumping all over the place, Pat’s warning before he left coming back at him over and over.

  He’s going to get you killed!

  He’d just hung up from talking with Trotter, who wanted him to come down to the Farm immediately. The expression on his face had been bad enough that it had frightened her. “Kirk’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Some sort of a training accident last night at the Farm. Mr. Trotter wants to see me right away.”

  Pat had realized in one piece what was going on. “You were there last night, helping him, goddamnit. You got yourself involved and now they want to know what the hell you were doing.” She turned away for a moment. The kids were upstairs, hopefully still asleep despite the racket she was making. “Maybe they’ll just fire you. It’d probably be for the best in the long run.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Are they going to put you in jail, is that it? Did you and Kirk do something illegal last night, something that got him killed?”

  “He’s not dead.” Janos let it slip.

  Pat looked at the phone. “But you just said Trotter told you he was dead.”

  “Shut your mouth and just listen to me for a minute.”

  She reacted almost as if she’d been slapped. They’d never talked to each other that way, and it shocked her.

  “He’s on a difficult assignment and there’s probably a spy inside the Company who wants to stop him. He was faking his own death last night, but something went wrong and he was almost killed for real. He thinks the explosives he was using were sabotaged to blow prematurely.”

  “And now you’ll have to lie for him.”

  “He’s a friend.”

  * * *

  The morning was pretty, the air crisp, the leaves turning. He and Kirk had gone through the course together at this time of the year, and he remembered their sneaking off base on some nights to have a burger and beer in Williamsburg. They’d been co-conspirators then, watching each other’s six.

  And it had been fun. He remembered that part, but cresting the hill and starting down to training dock B on the river, he couldn’t bring back the feeling of fun they’d had. A darkness had settled over him. Not only had he gotten himself involved, but he’d inadvertently sucked Pat into it.

  A half-dozen students in battle fatigues, plus several men in blue windbreakers—housekeepers from Langley, he figured—were sifting through the wreckage of the commercial berth mock-up at the river’s edge. An FBI forensics truck was parked nearby, several technicians busy at work. They would find the blood and Kirk’s jacket, which he said he hadn’t had time to grab. Out in the middle of the river and for several hundred yards downstream, four York County Sheriff’s boats were working a zigzag pattern, dragging for Kirk’s body.

  Trotter, dressed as usual in a three-piece suit, broke off from talking to one of his people and came over as Janos pulled up and got out of his car.

  “Have you found anything yet?” Janos asked. He was working hard to keep his head straight. He wasn’t used to lying, especially not on a scale this large.

  “Some blood. The Bureau’s already typed it. Same as Kirk’s.”

  Janos looked out at the sheriff’s boats. “A body?”

  “No. But if he’s out there, we’ll find him,” Trotter said, and his tone brought Janos around.

  “Sir?”

  “You were working on something for him that had to do with his Chile assignment. Did he contact you last night? Maybe a phone call just to check up on a fact or two? You were running down the laser requisition. Anything new that you might have passed on to him?”

  “Not last night. But he told me that he was coming down here to train.”

  “Train for what?”

  “He said he had orders to kill a general in San Antonio. The Butcher.”

  Trotter was genuinely surprised. “Good heavens, he told you that? How extraordinary.”

  “Yes, sir, I thought so. He was worried about it.”

  “In what way? Worried how?”

  Janos and Kirk had talked for more than an hour last night about just this conversation. “John is a suspicious man by nature.”

  “I’m not a very good liar, Kirk.”

  “I know. Which is why I want you to tell him the truth. What you’ll have to say will feed so directly into his doubts that he’ll have to believe you.”

  “And what’s that truth?” Janos had asked.

  “That I was worried about there being a mole at the Farm and possibly even one up at Langley.”

  Janos had been taken aback. “They’ll put me in jail.”

  “For repeating what I told you?” McGarvey said. “I want you to pay very close attention to his response.”

  “Maybe he won’t say anything,” Janos said. He was in over his head.

  “He will. But I want you to look at his mouth and his eyes. Whenever he’s worried, he smiles at the same time he squints.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah,” McGarvey said. “But some son of a bitch tried to kill me, and I need to know who it was before I go any further.”

  “Who brought you the Semtex?”

  “Sergeant Carol, but I can’t believe it was him.”

  “You don’t want to believe.”

  “No.”

  * * *

  Trotter was looking at him. “Worried how?”

  “He told me that he thought there was a mole here at the Farm, and maybe even one at Langley. He thought his ass would be on the line if he didn’t find out who it was before he left.”

  Trotter squinted against the morning sun, and his smile when it came was thin, just lips, no teeth.

  Janos had to catch his breath without making it obvious. He glanced again out at the sheriff’s boats. “Seems like he might have been right.”

  “Who else have you told about this?”

  “No one.”

  “Pat?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then don’t,” Trotter said.

  “Why?”

  “He might be right,” Totter said. “And Janos?”

  “Sir?”

  “Soon as you hear from him, have him call me.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Baranov was having one of his house parties at the compound in the hills above San Antonio. It had started around ten and was roaring strong a half hour later. By then most of the young women he’d brought in from the city were in the pool naked, or were draped around some general or another, sometimes two women to a man. But by two the house had already settled down, most of the pairs off to find a place to be alone, some in the house, others in the long narrow cabana with its eight changing rooms.

  The Vargas, both of them naked, sat at the pool drinking brandy, as the sun came up their feet dangling in the water when Baranov came out of the kitchen with a glass of hot tea. He was dressed in swim trunks and a pool jacket. The morning was gloriously cool without being cold, the cloudless sky high and deep blue, the scent of wildflowers mingling with that of the sea five kilometers away. In the distance a ship’s horn sounded one long blast as it backed out of its loading berth.

  “You two don’t look any the worse for wear,” he said.

  They looked back, grinning. “A little tame for our tastes, actually,” Karina said.

  “No movies?”

  “Exactly,” Matias said. “Maybe you would like to see another?”

  “I can hardly wait,” Baranov said. His stomach did a slow roll, not so much at the gruesome sights they’d captured on film—he’d seen stuff like that from the gulags—but rather their reactions. No revulsion there, not even indifference, no turning away at the worse parts, but as before, genuine pleasure
, arousal. They were like American kids watching cartoons, especially the Road Runner. Beep beep. He smiled.

  Karina smiled back, telling him with a shrug and a look that their secret liaison was still a secret and would remain so.

  The poolside telephone rang. It was Torres calling from Santiago. “Good morning, Captain.”

  “Good morning,” Baranov said. “Is this an official call or are you in the blind?”

  “Actually I’m in my office. The deed has been done. It was a training accident, just as you wished. I found out an hour ago.”

  “Do they have a body?”

  “Some blood, a piece of clothing. Apparently an explosive went off prematurely.”

  “Have you told el Presidente?”

  “Not yet. I was waiting for your reaction.”

  “It’s good news. Now Moscow is willing to send a small diplomatic group to open a dialogue.”

  “In secret.”

  “Of course,” Baranov said.

  “One curious aspect, though,” Torres said before he rang off. “They’d built him a mock-up of a commercial berthing dock of the type we have at San Antonio. The explosion was apparently to be used as a diversion. He was either coming by sea or leaving that way.”

  “Or both,” Baranov said.

  “Si.”

  Or neither, Baranov said to himself after he hung up.

  He put his tea aside, took off his pool jacket and swim trunks, got an empty glass and sat down beside the Vargas, his feet in the pleasantly warm water. He held out his glass and Karina poured some brandy for him.

  “Pretty morning,” she said.

  “Indeed it is,” Baranov said. He took a drink. Harsh, filthy stuff compared to vodka. Even champagne—a good vintage—was better. But while in Rome. “Good news, you two.”

  Matias glanced at the phone. “Who was it?”

  “Torres. He said that your would-be assassin is dead.”

  The general nodded, but Karina raised her glass in salute. “That’s good, Vasha. Very good. We need to celebrate.”