First Kill--A Kirk McGarvey Novel

by David Hagberg

  McGarvey made sure that they had spotted him, then walked out into the lobby as a police car pulled up. The man he’d confronted in the corridor was outside to meet it.

  Angling around the corner to the elevators he went up to his room, again checking the corridors and easing his door open before he went inside to make sure no one was waiting for him. He phoned Trotter.

  “Paul and your two guests are dead. Someone shot them at close range.”

  “He was better than that. He knew that he was coming into a likely hot zone.”

  “Was he a chauvinist?”

  Trotter was at a loss. “What?”

  “Was he divorced?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Was he divorced?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “He got himself killed because he couldn’t believe that a woman could be a hit man. And you’d better pass that along to the instructors at the Farm. The CIA is no longer just an old-boys club.”

  “I’m still not following you.”

  McGarvey explained what he’d seen and guessed from the time he’d had dinner in the restaurant until he’d found Reubens and the two Chileans shot dead, and the cops showing up.

  “Are you going to wait for the travel agency to send someone?”

  “It may have been the woman. Maybe they’re less worried about me than they are about the people around me.”

  “Points back to the mole here at Langley,” Trotter said. “To me.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was well after midnight when Baranov got to the Vargas’ compound. He’d called ahead to let them know that he was on the way.

  “We were retiring for the evening,” the general said.

  “I’ve just come from meeting with the president and with Torres. This is important, Mati. And delicate.”

  “Now I’m curious.”

  “I’ll explain everything when I get there. But at some point I’ll need to meet with all the officers on your security detail as well as your house staff.”

  Varga had hesitated for just a moment. “Will this be strictly business? I have a couple of new films.”

  Baranov had laughed. “We’ll have the whole night—I promise.”

  * * *

  The gate swung open as he reached the bottom of the hill, and he was passed inside without having to stop for an ID check. Karina, wearing a sheer nightshirt, was waiting at the door for him, an amused look on her face.

  “You have Mati all excited. Can you give me a hint?”

  “I’m going to kill him. And I have the blessing of el Presidente.”

  For just an instant her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open, but then she realized that he was joking. “That’s not a very nice way to start the evening.”

  “There’ll be a state funeral with all the trappings for a fallen hero.”

  Karina turned and headed back to the bedroom suite. “We’ll sit at the pool,” she said over her shoulder. “I could use a drink.”

  Baranov went outside to the pool deck, where he poured a de Jerez for himself and sat at the table. The evening was cool, not like Moscow or even Mexico City at this time of the year, but pleasant. For the past few days he’d felt that the Chilean part of his assignment was nearly at an end. If McGarvey showed up, he would be shot before he got to the compound wall. In a way Baranov supposed he would be returning to Mexico with his op here considered a failure.

  But he wasn’t so sure. Maybe McGarvey would come to Mexico City after all, and they could have their little pas de deux, which would be delicious.

  He tossed back his drink and was about to get up for another when Karina, now dressed in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, came out with Mati, wearing khaki slacks and a Chile national football team shirt. Neither of them was smiling.

  “You came as a man of surprises, and this evening you’re back with still another,” Varga said.

  Karina brought the brandy bottle and a couple of glasses to the table, and she and her husband sat down facing Baranov. She poured them drinks.

  “I’m going to assassinate you. Torres, with the approval of the president, suggested that there be a state funeral. It’ll mean that you’ll have to remain here out of sight for several days, maybe even a bit longer.”

  “Why?” the general asked.

  “Because you’ll be dead.”

  “I meant why such an elaborate plot? I have a lot of work to do, and I don’t want to be interrupted. El Presidente has to understand this. Or does this have something to do with the assassin who you say is on his way here?”

  “It has something to do with him, of course, but there is more.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I have a contact inside Langley, and Torres has his own inside the CIA’s training facility outside of Washington.”

  “The Farm.”

  “Da. It’s how we both knew that an assassin was being sent. As you know, I sent men to kill him, but they missed. But now someone else is trying to stop him, and neither Torres nor I know who it is. Or what their reasons might be.”

  Varga exchanged a look with his wife.

  “Stand back and let them do it,” she said. “Solves our problem.”

  “The real problem is why they’re doing it. Why they’re trying to stop McGarvey before he comes here.”

  The general was silent for a moment. “When you say that someone is trying to stop him, do you mean trying to kill him?”

  “After they tried to kill his wife and daughter, he sent his friend and the man’s family away in case whoever it was tried the same thing on them. In the meantime two field officers who Torres sent to Washington to find out more about McGarvey’s plans were shot and killed outside the motel where he was staying.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Karina said. “Whoever this third party is, do they want McGarvey to come here and try to assassinate Mati, or do they want him to fail?”

  Baranov had thought long and hard about that very thing. “It could be that they’re trying to distract him. Make him angry.”

  “What good would that do?” she asked, and her husband answered it for her.

  “Angry men tend to make mistakes.”

  “Which has to mean that they want McGarvey to come here,” Karina said. “But they want him to screw up. To fail. It’s political.”

  In the end everything was political, Baranov wanted to tell her. But he held his tongue.

  It was obvious that the general understood. “When do you want this to happen?”

  “I’m leaving for Mexico City in the morning, so let’s do it now.”

  “I have some things to take care of in Valparaíso first.”

  “Your assassin wouldn’t miss an opportunity for the sake of your schedule.”

  * * *

  It took a full fifteen minutes for Captain Luis Riquelme, the officer in charge of the security detail, to get out of bed, get dressed and make it over to the main house. The buttons on his uniform blouse were misaligned, and his eyes were still heavy with sleep.

  “I’m sorry for the delay, but I wasn’t expecting to be called into the general’s presence on such short notice,” he said, bringing his boot heels sharply together. He was a slightly built man, clean-shaven. A standout in his class at the academy, according to Varga.

  “Something extraordinary is going to happen here this morning, and you’ll have to keep your wits about you all week, perhaps even longer.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m going to assassinate the general and Mrs. Varga as soon as you go back to your quarters,” Baranov said.

  Riquelme was not armed but he instinctively reached for his pistol.

  “Of course I’m not actually going to do it, but you will be the only one in the compound who knows differently. We’ll depend on you to help pull off the deception.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand, Luis,” Varga said. “But I need your help. Tell us what you need.”
>
  The captain was at a loss for a moment.

  Baranov motioned for him to sit down.

  “You’ll have to stage the murder without noise—perhaps in the bedroom—and then leave as normal,” Riquelme started. “I assume that you’ll also be leaving Chile. There will be a manhunt, of course.”

  “My flight leaves at ten.”

  “Cook will call me when you do not rise and ask for breakfast,” the captain told Varga. “I will discover your bodies.”

  “You’ll have to keep everyone else away,” Baranov said. “Including the police at first.”

  “This is strictly a matter for the DINA. I’ll put a guard on the room, with instructions that no one be allowed inside without my orders.”

  “What about the doctor?” Karina asked.

  “I’m sorry, señora, but this will have to be kept quiet until the captain is aboard his flight and well outside Chilean airspace.”

  “Why?” Varga asked.

  “Because at first your deaths will be made to look like a murder-suicide,” Riquelme said. “The incident will have to be hushed up.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Forty-five minutes later another windowless van pulled up next to the one Reubens had been driving. Two men jumped out of the back, and McGarvey watched from the window in his room as they moved Reubens’s body to the rear and covered the bloody front seat with a piece of plastic.

  They were careful with their movements, making sure that they didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Someone in the van that had brought them out from Langley would be monitoring their surroundings as well as the police bands to make sure no one was watching or reporting anything suspicious going on in the hotel parking lot.

  In less than sixty seconds they were done, and both vans headed away.

  A couple of minutes later the police cruiser from out front made a slow pass through the parking lot, and finally turned around and left. Incidents of men running around with pistols in hand weren’t all that uncommon in the Washington area. No shots had been reported, and there were no bodies or blood to be found. Besides, the man McGarvey had encountered in the downstairs corridor had been drinking.

  The music from downstairs finally stopped, and the bar closed at two. Within twenty minutes the hotel had settled down for the night.

  McGarvey waited another half hour before he slipped out of his room and took the fire stairs down to the rear exit across from where he’d moved his rental car. Instead of going that way he went down the corridor to the lobby, where a maintenance man was cleaning the floor. Another was on a tall stepladder changing a fluorescent light tube in a ceiling fixture, but no one was behind the front desk.

  Outside he stepped away from the automatic doors and walked out from under the portico to a spot where he was partially in shadows and somewhat, but not completely, concealed by a tall flowering bush.

  The only noise was the hum of traffic on the nearby parkway, and from somewhere across the river another siren. Like any big city there were always sirens at night.

  But someone was here. He could feel them, and the hairs at the nape of his neck rose.

  “Trust your instincts,” he and the others had been told in class. “Very often they’re all you have to go on. Hunches, anomalies, the out-of-place thing just at the edge of your peripheral vision or almost below your threshold of hearing.”

  Their instructor was a former British intelligence officer. “Keep a sharp eye, ladies and gentlemen, or one day something you should have paid attention to is likely to jump up and bite you in the arse.”

  Taking out his pistol, McGarvey darted directly away from the hotel to the first row of cars in the lot, where he pulled up and crouched beside a Caddy. He looked over his shoulder at the second- and third-floor balconies, but if anyone was there he couldn’t make them out in the darkness. Televisions were on in a few of the rooms, but mostly the hotel was asleep.

  But someone was watching.

  Keeping low, his movements broken, he made his way between the cars to the far corner of the lot from where he could see his rental car. He’d parked it as far away from the overhead lights as possible to keep it in relative shadow, but he couldn’t miss seeing a slightly built figure dressed in dark clothes suddenly appear on the driver’s side of the car as if they had suddenly stood.

  He was about twenty yards away, and crouching low again he made his way to the rear of his car as the person, their back to him, was looking toward the hotel. They were dressed in black trousers, probably sweatpants, a black T-shirt and a black watch cap.

  McGarvey stood. “Did the travel agency send you?”

  The figure turned around and McGarvey raised his pistol. It was Marlene.

  “We thought you might be watching from your room, but you weren’t there,” she said calmly.

  “You came to kill me. Why?”

  “For interfering in our business. Though if you’d care to join us, the money is better than anything the Company could ever pay you.”

  “Dr. Morris doesn’t exist.”

  She shrugged. “Just a work name. You know the value of those sorts of choses.”

  “DGSE?” McGarvey asked. It was the French intelligence service.

  “That was a long time ago.” She smiled.

  McGarvey glanced beyond her to the hotel. “You’ve come to kill me, as you promised you would, and you’ve brought help. So it might be for the best if we got out of here.” He pulled his car keys from his pocket and tossed them to her. “You drive.” It was another of the little homely lessons he’d learned: Never put your car keys in the same pocket as your gun hand.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Either that or I shoot you before your friends show up.”

  She started to look over her shoulder.

  McGarvey raised his pistol. “Now, please,” he said.

  “I placed two kilos of Semtex under the driver’s seat.”

  “How does it detonate?”

  “An accelerometer. First bump you hit.”

  McGarvey knew the trigger mechanism. “Or if I slam the door hard. Or something hits the rear fender.” He bumped his hip against the side of the car.

  Marlene shrank back. “Jesus.”

  “Disarm it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Ease out one of the detonator wires.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “You came here to kill me, sweetheart. If you remember what they taught you in tradecraft school at Orléans, you’ll do fine. But take your pistol out, butt first, and lay it on the hood.”

  She pulled out her pistol, which looked like a compact Glock, and placed it on the hood. “You won’t leave this place alive.”

  “Let’s take that one step at a time. The Semtex first.”

  She dropped down out of sight, and McGarvey took a knee so that he could see her under the car.

  “What then?” she asked, their eyes meeting.

  “We find your friends. I want to know who’s coming after me and why.”

  “They’ll never tell you.”

  “We’ll see,” McGarvey said. “Do it.”

  She wiggled her way farther under the car, and McGarvey looked up. Someone was coming.

  He scrambled around the back and made it two cars down, when his rental went up with an impressive bang and a fireball, sending debris fifty feet into the air. Most of the windows on the hotel’s ground floor were shattered, as were half on the second floor and some on the third. Fire alarms shrieked and even from here McGarvey could see that the sprinkler systems inside the hotel had popped off.

  Unless she was incredibly inept and had done something stupid, the explosives had probably been booby-trapped without her knowledge, in case McGarvey had either discovered the package or had gotten the drop on her.

  A bullet slammed into the body of the car just inches from his head.

  He moved back toward the burning wreckage, rather than away, and once he was past it, another two shots hit the windshie
ld of the car he’d been hiding behind.

  The shooter was using an infrared targeting system, which was defeated by the heat from the explosion.

  Someone was at the open slider of his room. He could just make out the glint of the fire’s reflection from the lens of a scope.

  Holding his right wrist with his left hand, and steadying his elbow on the rear fender of the Ford he stood behind, he fired four shots in measured succession—one at the scope, one to the right and the last two to the left.

  The glint of firelight from the scope’s lens disappeared.

  McGarvey holstered his pistol and went back to the front of the hotel, where people were beginning to come into the lobby, to help with the evacuation. He was pissed off with himself for missing the obvious fact that the woman would have a backup willing to take her out if the need arose, and for missing the opportunity of taking the shooter alive.

  He was making too many mistakes and they were beginning to pile up on him.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Baranov’s flight on Lan Chile Airlines direct to Mexico City was scheduled for takeoff at ten. He’d already packed a few necessities at his compound, just the right amount to make it look as if he had been in a hurry to leave. Yesterday he’d done the same at his quarters in the embassy, packing only a few things, except for a different reason. He was coming back to Chile if in fact McGarvey actually made it that far.

  Driving into the city from San Antonio he couldn’t get the thought out of his head that a third party or parties in Washington also wanted McGarvey to fail. In itself it wasn’t a bad thing. He’d lose some standing with Pinochet for not having stopped McGarvey himself. But the final objective of the still-unknown third party was bothersome. It was a loose end, something Baranov had never been comfortable with.

  “The dangling threads will in almost every case be the final determinant of an operation’s success or failure,” one of their strategy instructors at School One had lectured.