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Authors: David Hagberg

Without Honor (23 page)

BOOK: Without Honor
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He thought back to his own years in the Company, to the things he had done in the name of loyalty, to the projects he'd seen other case officers do, and he remembered that almost any single act in the business could be construed seventeen different ways. It was such an inherently clandestine business that no one could have all the answers all of the time, not even the DCI himself.
Sipping his drink, he found himself thinking about the earliest days he had spent at the Farm outside Williamsburg. Where had the idealism gone, he wondered. It had been bled away by a dozen assignments in which the entire truth would never be known; it had been sapped by thousands of lies told by hundreds of liars; it had been drained by the uncounted double crosses by the legion of men without honor; and in the end, for him, it had been destroyed by assassination. With the first man he had murdered had gone something indefinable within him. It was something, some force, some emotion, he supposed, that became invisible if he tried to examine it too closely, but became a bright, even hurtful beacon when he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye.
He had been different after that. Changed. Frightened. It had marked the beginning of the end of his marriage, and, he supposed, the long slide down the far side of his career. When assassination becomes a necessary expedient, it was wise to put the very best man into it. But afterward the taint on him would be terrible: oh, the stain makes it impossible
to get very near such a man. Use him, then, for as long as he can be stomached and then get rid of him. It's the only way. At times like this, McGarvey was truly surprised that they hadn't simply put a bullet through the back of his head. It would have been so much easier for them in the long run—though the problem would have been technical; reduced to the question of who kills the killer? He'd given a lot for his country, he thought morosely; his livelihood, his self-respect, his marriage, and in the end his honor. All the while he had never questioned if it was worth it. He'd always thought so, of course. But now he wasn't so sure. He could not change, could he? None of us could in the end.
Yarnell would feel nothing, he suspected, turning his thoughts to the other concern. Men such as him never did. They accomplished their given tasks, lived their lives, married their women, had their children, even endured their divorces, all barely ruffling a feather. The Yarnells of the world were the self-assured ones. You could pick them out of a crowd, standing head and shoulders above the competition. (Actually there was little competition for men such as Yarnell, except for the projects they were involved with, and the manner in which they worked their particular magic.) The Einsteins ran the sciences, the Barrymores the stage and screen, and the Yarnells the world of the spy.
 
At ten he got up from his chair, stiff from sitting so long, his throat raw from too many cigarettes, but his mind clear despite his lack of rest and the brandy he had drunk. He'd been missing something all along. It had bothered him during the afternoon he had spent with Owens, and it had nagged at him tonight. It was something he had meant to ask out there but had not. Owens would know. He had been
there at the end, back to the States after Moscow. McGarvey wanted to know why Yarnell had quit the CIA. What excuse had he given? What projects had he left behind? And even more importantly, who had he left behind to fill his spot? In a broader sense, McGarvey wanted to know who Yarnell had worked with and for in Mexico and back in the States besides Owens himself. Who was their boss? Who had been next up the chain of command? Especially at the end. He knew that he could have it looked up for him, but Owens had been there. He wanted to hear it from the man's lips.
Owens had made no attempt to hide his presence on Long Island from anyone. His name was listed in the telephone book. McGarvey got an outside line and dialed the number. It was likely that Owens would be in bed asleep by now and would resent being awakened to answer even more questions. Couldn't it have waited until morning, Owens would ask.
The connection was made, and the telephone in Owens's ramshackle beach house began to ring. McGarvey leaned back against the nightstand as he listened to the burr of the distant instrument. He counted the rings as he stared out the window at the still rising wind and rain, an uneasiness mounting. After ten rings he broke the connection and tried again with the same results. He dialed for the operator and had her try. Still there was no answer.
“I'm sorry, sir, the line does seem to be in order, but there is no answer.”
 
The town's three off-season cabs had quit running for the night. It took McGarvey less than fifteen minutes to get dressed and then convince a startled night clerk to rent out his car for a couple of hours. Driving as fast as he possibly dared on unfamiliar
roads, wind and rain blowing in long, spiteful gusts, McGarvey kept telling himself that Owens was hard of hearing, he was asleep in his bed and he had simply not heard the telephone. Or at night he shut off his telephone so that he would not be disturbed by damn fool callers and wrong numbers.
It was this last that bothered him the most on the drive out. Wrong numbers. Who was it who had telephoned as he was leaving? A legitimate wrong number, or someone calling to check that Owens was there? Alone.
At another time he might have missed the turnoff in the darkness and rain, but not this night. Despite the storm he could see the flames rising from Owens's house more than a mile away. Whipped by the wind into long, ragged plumes, sparks shot a hundred feet or more into the sky. Closer he could see flashing red lights of the emergency vehicles along the unpaved track in the sand. There was little left of Owens's house. Nor, McGarvey suspected, driving past without stopping, would there be anything left of Owens.
Warren Nicols crossed the Texas border at Big Bend National Park and entered Mexico a few minutes after ten in the evening. He had no problem fording the shallow Rio Grande, which here barely came up to his chest. Pushing the dirt bike on its inflated raft was a snap. On the far side he deflated the bag, buried it in the sand, shouldered his MAC-10 machine pistol and kit bag—containing a Handie-Talkie capable of transmitting and receiving via the CIA's communications satellite, his night-vision spotting binoculars and high-speed camera, and his provisions—and headed away from the river.
There were no roads here. The nearest paved highway was more than twenty miles to the east, across the low Sierra de la Encantada mountains. Overhead the stars shone as brilliant, hard points in the crystal clear desert air. Nicols concentrated on driving without lights. To have a serious spill here on the open desert would almost certainly mean death. He would not be listed as missing for a full seventy-two hours, though his first transmission via satellite to Langley was scheduled in barely six hours.
He had spent the past four days camped in the park with a Boy Scout troop from Joliet, Illinois.
They were background noise. No one would
officially
miss him for the next three days. Nor would anyone from the campsite miss him until breakfast in the morning. By then, however, if everything went as planned, he would be back.
The 75-cc dirt bike with long-range tanks, a specially designed engine shroud and hi-tech muffler to minimize noise, and a highly sophisticated satellite-navigation system by which he could pinpoint his location anywhere on earth within ten meters, was capable of open-road speeds in excess of seventy miles per hour and nearly the same across open country provided the track was reasonably smooth and the driver had the guts and stamina to hang on. Nicols had both.
He followed a general line along the base of the mountains, which according to the analysts and planners would make him hard to spot either from direct surveillance or from the ground scatter radar the Russians probably employed in the region. If he painted at all, he might look like a wind devil, a fast-moving desert hare or perhaps even a low-flying bird.
Nicols was a large man, over six feet tall without boots and two hundred pounds. He had returned three months ago from Afghanistan, where he had distinguished himself in the field not only because of his strength, stamina, and courage, but because of his intelligence and understanding. At forty he wasn't a spring chicken, but what he might lack in youthful zeal he more than made up for in experience and reliability. He was married and had three children who all adored him because he was a kind and gentle man.
He had spent the past two weeks at the Farm outside Williamsburg preparing for this assignment. Nothing the instructors or planners had come up with, they had finally decided, could work effectively
for him as a cover story. Americans armed with equipment such as he had simply had no business in the Mexican desert—except to spy. At the last they had allowed him to pick whatever weapon he wanted. The MAC-10 seemed correct. It was light, reliable, and deadly. In addition, he carried a World War II bayonet in a sheath taped to his chest beneath his shirt. It had been his father's. He was an expert with it.
For the first few miles he ran on underinflated tires because of the loose sand and sand dunes which rose and fell like swells on the open ocean. Farther away, however, the desert smoothed out to a hardpan. He stopped long enough to inflate the dirt bike's tires and then continued, pushing harder, driving at times at an almost reckless forty miles per hour, yet in the next instant having to slow to a bare crawl because of rocks, in a few places ancient lava flows, and in eight places in one mile washouts from desert flash floods.
In one long stretch of at least five miles, the going was comparatively easy and Nicols was able to engage in the luxury of thinking. As had been the case over the past few weeks, his thoughts automatically went to the briefing he had been given by the DCI himself.
“The Soviets have armed Siberia to threaten our northernmost borders. They tried in the south to arm Cuba with offensive weapons and failed, and now we think they are trying again in northern Mexico.”
Nicols had been stunned. It wasn't possible. Mexico was our friend. He was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to being fluent in Russian and Chinese (from college), he was also fluent in the romance languages (from his boyhood chums)—Spanish, French, and Italian. It was a facility of his, languages.
“But we are not sure, Warren. Not one hundred percent certain,” Powers had admitted. They were alone, seated across a coffee table from each other in the DCI's office.
“What can I do, Mr. Director?” he'd asked.
“Someone has to go across the border and see them firsthand. Take some photographs from the ground.”
“Of the installation?” Nicols said naively.
“Of the installation, yes, that too. Ideally we'd like to have photographs of the missiles themselves. Their serial numbers.”
Nicols had smiled. He suddenly saw the entire operation and beyond, like a long, clear highway out to the horizon. “We can invent a satellite-surveillance photograph, but not a serial number, sir.”
Powers laughed out loud, but then he suddenly sat forward, an intense look in his eyes. “I don't want you to get yourself shot up or captured, Warren. If someone—I don't care who—should happen to get in your way, it'll be too bad for them. Whatever happens, whatever you do, you will have my personal backing. Is that perfectly clear?”
It had been perfectly clear then, and it was clear now. The situation was not the fault of the Mexicans. They'd been taken in just as so many other poor nations had been. Soviet influence was like quicksand he'd been told over and over again by the Afghan rebel leaders. Get your leg caught in it and you have troubles. Jump in or slip in with both feet—no matter which—and you're dead.
As he drove he began to think about what would happen within the next few hours. He began to hope that he would run into someone. A guard. An engineer. An officer. His fingers tightened on the handle grips.
He slowly picked his way across a dry riverbed
and on the other side maneuvered the bike to the top of a rise, where he stopped a moment to check his position. Far to the south he thought he caught a glimpse of a light, but then he wasn't sure. It had to be over the horizon from him, at least fifteen miles away. The SatNav gave his position in grid coordinates. He opened the panel, flipped a couple of switches, then compared the readings with a plasticized chart he carried in a leg pocket of his black coveralls. The suspected Soviet-built missile installation was directly south of him, about eighteen miles away.
The land flattened out on the other side of the rise, and as far as he could tell no one had come this way for a very long time. There were no tracks anywhere. He had studied the satellite surveillance photographs that had been overlaid onto a topographical map of the region. The missile installation, which was still under construction but apparently nearing completion, was nestled between parallel ridges in the mountains, the rises about three miles apart. The land in between was perfectly flat, forming a natural amphitheater with good protection on three sides, open only to the southwest toward the open desert. The construction was meant to look as if a large oil exploration project was underway. It had not fooled the agency's analysts, nor would it fool anyone who came for a closer look, except perhaps for the farmers in the area. But they would be of no bother. They were very poor. A few pesos would guarantee their complete cooperation.
He covered two-thirds of the distance in less than twenty minutes before he stopped again. This time he shut off the bike's engine, took out his night-vision binoculars, and trained them on the hills rising to the east, beyond which lay the construction site. At first he saw nothing. He looked specifically for lights, any kind of lights, as well as for
fences, movements such as patrols might make in jeeps, on horseback, or on foot, or any kind of a track in the sand.
A thin white light flashed in the sky just above a cut in the hills, probably an arroyo. For a second he thought it might have been a spotlight of some kind, but then the light bounced into the sky again, and he realized what he was seeing. The light had moved from right to left. A couple of seconds later he saw a much smaller red light wink on, then off, and then there was a pair of them. Taillights, he thought. A patrol vehicle was working its way along the ridge, which offered views down the one side into the valley where the missile base lay, and down the other across the open desert to where Nicols crouched beside his dirt bike.
They were obviously expecting intruders, or at the very least they were prepared for such a possibility. Let them be Russians, Nicols told himself mounting his bike and starting it. Not Mexicans. Let them be Russians, please God. After Afghanistan he had a few old scores to settle.
He cut straight across the desert now, directly for the northern edge of the arroyo, the last place he had seen the lights of the patrol vehicle. Whatever their schedule might be, he did not think they would be making a pass by any one spot more than once or twice each night. He would be relatively safe up to that point for the next few hours, he figured. From there he would descend into the valley on the other side, make his way onto the base, take his photographs, and then get the hell out. God help the man who got in his way. Especially if he was Russian. Here on this continent! Christ, it made his blood boil.
The desert dipped down toward the base of the first hills, then rose on an alluvial fan that spread out beneath the broad cut above. Leaning into the pitch
of the hill, Nicols gunned the little bike, rocks and sand spitting out behind him and clattering down the hill as he spurted up. He was making too much noise, and he knew it. But he wanted to gain the first rise in the series of hills below the main crest. He figured he would find a spot to conceal the bike somewhere there and then make it the rest of the way on foot. If he was lucky the patrol vehicle he had seen earlier would be a long distance off by now. He did not think they would have installed any other kind of short-range surveillance equipment out here; heat sensors, motion detectors, pressure grids buried just beneath the surface. At least he hoped they hadn't.
His luck ran out just at the top of the lower ridge. The headlights of at least half a dozen jeeps suddenly came on, catching him in a blinding glare. He tried to spin the bike around so that he could take off back down the hill the way he had come, but the rear wheel got away from him on the loose sand and gravel and he went down.
Moving purely on instinct, Nicols rolled left, away from the still sliding bike as he grabbed his MAC-10, yanked the bolt back, thumbed off the safety, and came around on his belly into a shooting position.
He fired one short burst at the nearest jeep to his left, and as the headlights suddenly were extinguished and a man cried out, he rolled left again.
A split instant before a withering rain of automatic weapons fire slammed into Nicols's body, he heard someone shouting “Left! He has gone left!” at the top of his lungs. In Russian. They were the last words he ever heard.
 
It was two in the morning, a time that Donald Suthland Powers had always found the most enchanting, the most mysterious, a time when things
always seemed to go bad. If you could somehow get past three A.M., the rest would naturally fall into place. Or at least anything that might happen afterward would be manageable. Like many of his predecessors, Powers had developed the habit of staying at his office during crucial operations when lives were on the line; lives of men and women he had personally sent out into the field. It was a part of the business that he had never become accustomed to. Here in his office on the seventh floor of the headquarters building at Langley, he felt more secure than he did at home, more in control, as if he were a direct part of whatever operation was in progress. As if his mere presence here would lend strength to the battles on distant fields. There was no one at his home in any event. Sissy was away at school, the housekeeper had taken the week off, and how many years had it been since Janet? More than he cared to count. It was at times like these he missed her the most. The nest was empty. This was home.
Danielle, his DDO, felt the same way although for different reasons. He sat across the desk from Powers, and they both looked up as they heard someone running up the corridor outside the open door. Stuart Flagler, Powers's bodyguard, was sitting in the anteroom. He jumped up, his hand automatically reaching for his weapon.
Powers stiffened. He had had a premonition of disaster since this afternoon. Was this it, then? he wondered. “Stuart, see who that is,” he called.
“Yes, sir,” Flagler answered over his shoulder as he stepped to the outer door.
Danielle got to his feet as Tom Josten, one of his young staffers out of operations, appeared, out of breath.
“Mr. Danielle,” he called past Flagler.
“It's all right, Stuart,” Powers said.
The big bodyguard stepped aside and the young man rushed in. He brought with him a half a dozen computer-enhanced and printed photographs from their surveillance satellite. They were infrared tracings. “There's trouble with Banyan Tree, sir,” Josten said, spreading the photos on Powers's desk. Banyan Tree was the code name of Warren Nicols's operation.
BOOK: Without Honor
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