“Yarnell was in on the switch? I mean, he was actually down there on the street in front of our embassy?”
“Yes,” Owens said. “Our people got out of the car with Suslev, and the message was radioed to us and to the Russians on Tchaikovsky Street. Two of them got out of their limo with Innes between them. I was watching through binoculars. The sergeant looked pretty rough. He’d apparently had a hard time of it.”
“Drugged?”
“As it turns out, yes. At the time it was hard to tell at that distance and in that light, but he didn’t look like himself. He looked as if he had aged a couple of hundred years.”
“Then what?” McGarvey asked, envisioning the early morning scene.
“We let Suslev go. Our people simply got back into their car, and Suslev started to walk toward his people. Again a radio message was sent, and Sergeant Innes’s guards climbed back into their car. Innes just stood there for the longest time. I still remember it. ‘Come on, kid,’ I said out loud. I thought one of us was going to have to go to him and help him back. But I think one of the Russians said something to him, because he looked back and a moment later started for us.”
“What about Yarnell?”
“He got out of the car on the opposite side from me so I didn’t really see what he was doing. Not until it was too late. I got out when the sergeant was about halfway, and as soon as he saw me, he stopped. ‘Sergeant Innes,’ I called to him. ‘Barry,’ I said. ‘Come on. We’re waiting for you.’ But he just stood there. Close up he looked like a zombie. He was dirty, bruised. I remember thinking that we were probably giving them Suslev in a hell of a lot better condition.”
“Then?” McGarvey prompted.
“Innes turned around and started back, Darby stepped around from the side of the car and fired four shots, every one of them hitting the kid in the back, one of them taking off half his head. And that was the end of that. The Russians turned around in the middle of the street and drove off, leaving us to pick up the pieces.”
“Did he give you any explanation?”
Owens looked away from the fire. “Darby? None was needed. It was obviously a double cross. The kid had lured us into exchanging him for Suslev, and once he figured Suslev was safe, he tried to make it back to his pals. I didn’t agree with how it had been set up, but Darby did the only thing possible under the circumstances. Operation Hellgate absolutely depended on it. You have to realize that we gave Innes a lot of important bogus material, along with the good. Material we wanted the Russians to swallow. Innes had to be legitimized. And he was.”
What would you have done under the circumstances? Owens wanted to know, but McGarvey had no comment. He was listening to the wind, to the sound of the crackling fire, to the sounds of the house and the surf on the beach; and he was listening to some inner voice that was telling him to proceed with care. There was something else here. Something else was going on.
When they stepped out it was cold on the porch. The clouds had come and rain was beginning to fall in fits and starts. Lightning flashed in the distance out to sea. It wouldn’t be long, McGarvey figured, before the full brunt of the storm came ashore. He had called a cab. It would be along soon. He didn’t want to hold the old man out here very long. He had gotten most of what he needed in any event. There were only a couple of things he was still curious about. Among them, Owens’s attitude at the beginning of their conversation.
“I’m a little confused.”
“Aren’t we all, McGarvey, aren’t we all?”
“When we started, you said that Yarnell was too big for his britches. You asked me what the sonofabitch had done.”
“He could have killed your Roger Harris. But that’s a long time ago. Could have is a whole hell of a long ways from did.”
“You spoke of Yarnell as your friend.”
Owens had been looking down at the waves. He turned to McGarvey. “Let me put it this way, I had a lot of admiration for the man. It started out at nearly one hundred percent, but as time went on it became less and less. Sort of got eaten away, if you know what I mean.”
“Because of how he treated his wife?”
“That and some other things. Little day-to-day piss ant things that didn’t amount to a hill of beans by themselves but taken together were arrogant. The company he kept, the presumptions he made going in and out of everyone’s lives and work.”
“And then Moscow?”
“Yeah,” Owens said, nodding. “Then Moscow. Hellgate had all the numbers, you know, all the right moves, all the right results.”
“But it was too expensive for your tastes,” McGarvey put in, taking a guess. He’d hit the mark. He saw it in Owens’s eyes.
“Sergeant Innes was just a young kid who had gotten himself off the track somehow.”
McGarvey thought it was very likely that Sergeant Innes had been completely innocent. He had been nothing more than Yarnell’s dupe, a stooge whom Yarnell had used to pass along real information to his own Soviet control officer, Baranov. And when the operation was over with, he had gunned the kid down.
“He should have been sent home,” McGarvey suggested.
“He shouldn’t have been killed. It didn’t have to get to that point,” Owens said. But there was even more that bothered him. “It was the look on his face,” he said, turning away, unable for the moment to face McGarvey.
“Innes? I thought you said he was walking away from you when he got shot.”
“I’m talking about Darby. The look on his face. I was just across the hood of the car from him. The light was right. I could see everything.” Owens hesitated even then. He shook his head again. “Darby enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed killing the kid. The sonofabitch was smiling. He looked at me and he was proud. I didn’t know him, finally. I just didn’t know him any longer.”
The telephone rang in the house. Owens looked over his shoulder.
“I won’t keep you, Mr. Owens,” McGarvey said. “Thank you for your help.”
The phone rang again.
“I hope it was a help,” Owens said.
“What happened after that? After Yarnell went home and you finally went back to the States?”
“Darby got out of the agency. Became a U.S. Senator.”
The telephone rang a third time.
“Did you and he have any contact afterward?”
“None.”
“Never?”
“Come to think of it, I did run into him once, several years later …” The phone rang a fourth time. “Hang on,” he said, and he hurried back into the house.
McGarvey heard him catch it on the fifth ring, and he could hear him talking, though he could not hear what was being said. A couple of seconds later Owens was back.
“Must have been a wrong number,” he said, irritated. “I was having lunch at the Rive Gauche on Wisconsin Avenue when Darby walked in with Anne Sutton on his arm. God, what a vision. She was more beautiful in person than on the screen. Stopped the place dead.”
“The movie actress?”
“Marilyn Monroe’s pal. One of the crowd that hung around the Kennedy fringes, at least that’s what I heard. He spotted me and came over to my table, introduced her, and told me that I was looking good.”
“Was he?”
“Like a million bucks. He was tan, and this was in the middle of winter, so I figured he and the Sutton woman had been off somewhere. Probably the Caribbean.”