The lake near Leonard Day's house was calm, not the slightest breeze rippled the water. There were no fishermen this morning, nor was there any traffic on the road that led back through Indian Creek Park to Kenilworth Avenue. It was Tuesday; everyone was at work in the city by now. McGarvey had caught Day and Trotter before they'd left for work, and they'd agreed to meet with him. At McGarvey's suggestion they talked outside as they walked around the lake. Trotter was highly charged, he half walked and half ran along the footpath. Day, on the other hand, seemed contemplative, as if he were deeply troubled but by something else. He seemed distracted. They made an odd trio, McGarvey thought; the bureaucrat, the cop, and the spy.
“When John first came to me with this problem, and mentioned your name in conjunction with it, I was frankly skeptical,” Day said. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his maroon jogging suit. He wore a sweatband around his head, making him look boyish. “I'm still skeptical.”
“Good heavens, Kirk, even you have to see that what you're saying is hard to swallow,” Trotter piped up, looking back. He was nervous around Day after what McGarvey had told him two days ago.
“But we're stuck with it,” McGarvey said. He'd expected the objections, but he wanted to see how Day would react.
“We can hardly turn from it. Not at this stage of the game, especially not now.”
“Yarnell is almost certainly still actively working for the Russians, and he almost certainly has a contact man in the CIA.”
“Who?”
“I don't know. But it's someone at high levels.”
“What makes you believe that?”
“The quality of his information.”
“Such as?”
“He knew that I would see Darrel Owens, his old boss. He also knew that I'd sent Janos Plónski searching after Basulto's files.”
“Which means, of course, that he knows you're coming after him,” Trotter said.
“Then why hasn't he had you eliminated?” Day asked sharply. “I'd do it.”
It was the one question for which McGarvey had found no satisfactory answer, but he gave voice to the only possibility that even seemed plausible. “Because something else is happening, or is about to happen, and I'm an important source for him.”
Day pulled up short, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “I don't understand.”
“It's a two-way street. I check on him, and in the process he finds out about me.”
Trotter had stopped a few feet farther along the path, and he was looking back now, his eyes wide behind his thick glasses.
“What else?” Day demanded.
McGarvey took out a cigarette and lit it. He gazed across the lake. “John knows why I was called back to the States, and so do you. Who else?”
“Basulto,” Trotter said.
“He's isolated,” McGarvey replied, his eyes never leaving Day's. “Who else?”
“No one,” Day said evenly. The morning air seemed to have gotten thin.
“There's my team,” Trotter chirped.
“Do they have contact with the agency?”
“No.”
“I do,” Day said. “But I have discussed this situation with no one.”
“Have you made notes? Left them on your desk?”
“Nothing has been committed to paper. Not by me.”
“Mentioned it to Powers, or the president?”
“No.”
“Discussed it on the telephone with John?”
“My telephone, along with John's, is swept.”
“That's right, Kirk,” Trotter said. “Absolutely. There simply are no leaks.”
“Yes there are,” McGarvey said softly. “We just haven't found them yet.”
“Perhaps it's you,” Day suggested. “His people could have spotted you from day one.”
“He would have to have been tipped off as to why I came back.” McGarvey was thinking about his ex-wife and her lawyer boyfriend. It was not coincidence that they were friends of Yarnell's. But that had been going on for more than a year now. Where was the logic?
“Could be Yarnell's ex-wife,” Trotter said. “You went to see her. What'd you two talk about?”
McGarvey turned to him. “About the fact that Yarnell was working for the Russians as early as the late fifties in Mexico City. It's one of the reasons he married her. For cover.”
“Mexico City?” Day asked.
“He was stationed out of our embassy until after the Bay of Pigs thing. Then he moved to Washington
and finally out to Moscow. Each time his control officer went with him.”
“You know this man?”
“Valentin Illen Baranov,” McGarvey said. “Now he's back in Mexico City, running what's called the CESTA network.”
“Good Lord,” Trotter said. He and Day exchanged glances.
“What is it?” McGarvey asked.
“How certain are you of Yarnell's connection with this Baranov and CESTA?”
“Very.”
Trotter had been holding his breath. He blew it out all at once as if he were a racer trying to clear his lungs of carbon dioxide. He needed oxygen and he wasn't getting it.
“That's it, then,” Day said. “I'll have to go to Powers and the president with this now. I'm putting you on hold.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” McGarvey asked, trying to keep his temper in check.
“It's CESTA, Kirk,” Trotter stepped into the breach.
Day shot him a warning glance.
“It's gone too far, Leonard. We never suspected this connection. Not really. And it's simply gone too far now. His life is on the line.”
McGarvey waited. He understood at that moment that he had been lied to all along; not lies of commission, rather lies of omission. He had a feeling that what he had not been told was legion compared to what he had.
Day looked away momentarily in disgust, as if he were being forced into a decision he had wanted to avoid at all costs. When he turned back he nodded.
“Seven months ago an Aeromexico flight out of Miami was hijacked and diverted to Havana,” Trotter
said. Day was watching him, his eyes big and bright. “The two hijackers got off the plane with two hostages. Before they got ten yards from the plane, all four of them were shot and killed by the Cuban militia.”
“Who were they, John?”
“The hostages had been on their way to Mexico City. Agency for International Development.”
“CIA?”
“Right.”
“Why were they grabbed?”
“We didn't know at the time. Except that Lawrence Danielle worked with us on the preliminary investigation. He told me that the weapons the hijackers had used had been supplied to them by CESTA.”
“CESTA presumably knew who they were, arranged for the hijacking, and further arranged for their assassination,” Day said.
“Why?” McGarvey asked. He thought about Baranov coming to see Evita ten months ago. It had been barely weeks before the incident.
“I didn't know about this until two days ago,” Trotter said. “I promise you, Kirk.”
“John came to me with Baranov's name. Said you thought he was connected with the Yarnell thing.”
“I didn't believe it at the time. It was impossibleâ”
Day interrupted. “This is classified top secret, McGarvey. No matter what has happened before this moment, if you release what I'm about to tell you, I will personally see that you are prosecuted under the Secrets Act. To the full extent of the law.”
The man was a pompous ass. “Talk to me,” McGarvey said.
Again Day and Trotter exchanged glances.
“The Russians are apparently building six
missile-launching facilities in the Mexican desert barely forty miles south of our border,” Trotter blurted.
McGarvey had come to believe, over the years, that he was sufficiently inured to bad news that his tolerance for shock was high. He could never become nonplussed. At this moment, however, he was truly frightened. He did not know what to say. He could feel it as a weakness in his legs, a hollowness in his gut, and a tightening in his chest.
“CESTA?” he said.
“They're almost certainly involved,” Day agreed.
“Baranov, who runs CESTA, is Yarnell's control officer.”
Day nodded.
“Yarnell has a man in the CIA. He fingered the two AID officers on the plane.”
“It would go a long way toward explaining everything,” Day said heavily.
Another thought struck McGarvey. “How do you know about this?”
For the first time Day suddenly seemed unsure of himself. He hesitated. McGarvey was having a bad feeling.
“Donald Powers is a personal friend of mine.” Day said.
“And Yarnell?”
Again Day hesitated. He nodded. “Darby and I go back a lot of years together.”
McGarvey realized he was shaking. Day stepped back a pace. “I swear to God that I didn't tell anyone about you. Not even Powers.”
“If I ever find out you lied to me, I'll kill you,” McGarvey said softly.
“For heaven's sake, Kirk,” Trotter said.
Day straightened up a little, a determined look coming back into his eyes. “I'm going to Powers and
the president with this. No one else. They must be informed. In the meantime you're to make no move, no move whatsoever, without first clearing it through me.” He said it as an order, but then he softened his tone. “You do understand what's at stake here. It's no longer simply a case of proving Darby Yarnell is a spy who works for the Russians. Now it's a matter of another missile crisis. This one a hell of a lot closer to our border than Cuba.”
“A crisis made impossible for us to win because the CIA is an open book to Baranov.”
“The bastard,” Day said with much feeling.
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Driving back into the city, McGarvey tried to put a name to exactly what it was he was feeling. He had a sense that they all were racing madly down a long roller coaster whose brakes had failed, and yet he knew that someone was in control, that someone had planned the ride from the beginning. But to what end? Offensive missiles in Mexico? It was impossible for him to believe even now, although the Russians had gotten what they had wanted in Cuba. In exchange for removing their missiles they had extracted a promise from us that we would never intervene militarily with the Castro government. Perhaps the same things were happening in Mexico. But there was something else as well. Something more. He could feel it. He'd been glad to get out of the agency because of what it had done to him, and what he had seen it do to others. Yet when Trotter and Day had shown up in Switzerland he had almost gladly followed them. Hell, he had damned near jumped into their laps. His retirement had already begun to break down before they'd shown up. But now he wondered if coming back had been the right thing for him.
“You're forty-four and your life is passing you
by. You're no longer in the fray, is that it?” Marta had asked, coming very close to the mark.
His life
had
passed him by in Switzerland, at least five years of it had. He had become anxious without admitting why. Or at least without admitting that he missed the business. “You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution,” his father used to say. He'd tried to step out of himself, and in the end it had been impossible.
Day had ordered him to step aside. But that, too, was impossible now.
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The day had seemed six months long. Eight o'clock in the evening seemed never to come. Yet when it did and Leonard Day found himself driving onto the grounds of Gallaudet College in Brentwood Park, he wished he could somehow stop time. Powers had seemed preoccupied on the telephone, but he'd agreed to meet Day at eight at his home. “Only if it's very important, Leonard,” Powers had said at the last. “It's getting just a bit hairy around here at the moment, if you catch my drift.” How many crises had he weathered in this town? he wondered. How many late night meetings, private conferences, for-your-eyes-only memos passed hand-to-hand had he seen? Here in Washington at the top, among the eliteâthe policy makers, the movers and shakers âthe big decisions were made, but so were the colossal blunders. The U-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers, the Bay of Pigs, the entire Vietnam debacle, the abortive hostage-rescue attempt from Tehran, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair. The list was endless. This small town on the Potomac was very nearly an exclusively all-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male enclave. The chosen few belonged to comfortable clubs where they could rest from the vigors of leadership. Golf courses came with bar
service out on the fairways. Restaurants and hotels were so exclusive that eighty percent of the city (the blacks) could not gain entrance except through the service doors as busboys and waiters and bellhops. But God, it was exciting to be a part of it. First California, Day thought, now the center of the universe.