Dance with the Dragon (38 page)

“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.”

“Do you think that whatever they were working on involved Liu?”

“I don’t know,” Gloria said. “I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t want to go to Perry, so you went to Updegraf. Did he move in with you?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Gloria said. “We went to bed only the one time.”

“So you could find out what was going on.”

“I’m a spy, goddamn it,” Gloria shot back. “I was trained to come up with answers whatever it took. And it’s in my nature because of the way my father treated me when I was growing up.”

Gloria’s story so far was about what McGarvey had expected to hear. No surprises, except that Perry and Updegraf had apparently become so close. “When he wouldn’t tell you anything, you dumped him, is that about right?”

“That’s right,” Gloria said. “I never loved him, and I certainly wasn’t interested in making him leave his wife, although it would have been easy.”

She wanted to say more, so McGarvey didn’t reply.

“If that makes me a whore, then so be it,” she said. “Not much different from what you’ve come here to ask me to do.”

“I’m not asking you to sleep with him, just dance.”

“Right,” Gloria said.

Another thought occurred to McGarvey. “Were they still buddies when Updegraf got killed?”

“No. The lovefest between the two of them lasted only a couple of months, and then it was back to business as normal.”

SIXTY-SIX

THE APARTMENT

Most of what Gloria had told him had the ring of truth to it, but there were little bits and pieces that didn’t add up in McGarvey’s mind. Why had she lied about skiing? Why her almost indifferent reaction to her father’s murder? And most important, her lousy relationship with Gil Perry: She was a manipulator. Perry should have been an easy mark for her.

The evening chill was gone, and already the morning was warming up. By noon it would be in the high eighties or low nineties, with rotten air.

“How did you find out that Updegraf had been assassinated?” he asked.

“Gil told me. Said he had no idea what Louis had been doing up in Chihuahua, but his body had turned up in front of the hospital, and Tom Chauncy was taking care of things up there. He wanted me to backtrack Louis’s last couple of months.”

“Did he mention Liu?”

“No, just that Louis had apparently been trying to burn a communications clerk in the Chinese embassy,” Gloria said. “Was he going after Liu?”

“Liu was probably up in Chihuahua that night,” McGarvey replied, looking for a reaction. But there was none.

“He never said anything to me, and there was nothing in the file Gil gave me.”

McGarvey let it rest for a moment.

“Would you like some more coffee?” she asked.

“No thanks, I’m flying as it is,” McGarvey said. “How did you feel when you heard Updegraf was dead?”

“Shocked.”

“Saddened?”

“A little.”

“Surprised?”

“Not really,” Gloria said. “Louis was something of a loose cannon. He was looking for what he called the ‘big score.’ When it happened he was going to write his own ticket straight to the top.” She smiled. “Sometimes he could be melodramatic.”

“But you understood what he was saying.”

“Oh, sure,” Gloria said. “What field officer doesn’t?”

“Is there any reason you can think of that Liu would know your face?”

“Not unless the Guoanbu has access to embassy files,” she said. “Do you think that’s possible?”

“Everything’s possible. I’m just trying to eliminate the improbabilities.”

SIXTY-SEVEN

THE APARTMENT

Gloria took their cups into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink. McGarvey followed her inside and waited until she had closed the sliding glass doors and the window in her bedroom, and turned on the air conditioner.

“It’s not so much the heat, it’s the air pollution,” she said. “By noon it’s impossible unless you seal everything up. It’s like being on Venus or something.”

“Do you want to go for a walk before it gets too bad out there?” McGarvey asked.

“Sure, why not,” she said.

McGarvey left his jacket in his car and they headed down the path, past the park bench, silent at first, lost in their own thoughts. Like Shahrzad, Gloria had lied about a number of things. McGarvey was reasonably sure of it. What he didn’t know was why.

Last year he and Gloria had been on a mission that took them from Guantánamo Bay in Cuba to Karachi in Pakistan. Several times during that operation he had stopped suddenly to look over his shoulder at what had just happened. Each time he did it he came up with a question about her. He hadn’t known then if he could trust her, and talking with her father hadn’t helped. Nor did seeing her now give him any confidence.

They had gone a couple hundred yards down the path in silence when she looked at him. “I still don’t get why McCann didn’t send a flying team down here to find out who killed Louis and why.”