“She’s all that’s left, don’t you see? Darby went up to school and charmed her. She fell under his spell, and she never comes here anymore, never calls, never writes.”
“Then we’ll have to stop them both. You’ll help me.”
“It’s impossible. They’re old pros, both of them. What chance would I have? What chance did I ever have?”
“None, unless you try.”
“Try,” she said disdainfully. Her lower lip was quivering again. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know them. Darby alone could have held the Alamo. With Valentin’s help they’re impossible to beat. They know everything. They’ve each got their armies. Impossible.”
McGarvey could hear again Darrel Owens’s words about his young protégé, bitter words that had still, after all that had gone on, after all the years, been tinged with open admiration. It was the same now with Evita. After everything that had been done to her, she’d still made love quite willingly with Baranov, and she still had a great deal of awe, fear, and respect for her ex-husband. Darby Yarnell was simply the very best there ever was, Owens had said. No one could resist his charm. What a powerful weapon he’d been and continued to be in Baranov’s arsenal. And now Yarnell had the ear of the director of Central Intelligence and the president of the United States. It was frightening. Such men did not fall easily.
“There can’t be a trial, Kirk,” Trotter had said in Switzerland. “It would be ten thousand times worse than Watergate. It would tear the country apart. The CIA would go down the tubes, and even the president would suffer. We’d be years recuperating. Perhaps we’d never fully recover.”
“We’re talking about murder, here, John, aren’t we?” McGarvey had said. “About the assassination of a former U.S. senator. One of the most influential men in Washington.” It had only been a notion then, now it was becoming a dreadful reality.
The band was still practicing downstairs, and Evita got unsteadily to her feet and went to the sideboard as she sang a few off-key words to the song. She poured herself another glass of champagne and then stood looking out the window at the street below.
“I think it is enough now,” she said without turning. “I’d like you to go. There’s nothing to be done. Nothing I can help you with.”
But there was one last thing McGarvey had to know. Baranov was Yarnell’s Soviet control officer, but Yarnell had someone here in Washington. He’d had someone in Washington all along. Someone within the CIA. At the upper echelons. Someone like Lawrence Danielle, who would have access to Operations, and who would also have a direct pipeline down to Archives. Someone who had been betraying his country all these years just as Yarnell had, or had perhaps unwittingly been a betrayer if he had simply been outmaneuvered as Darrel Owens had been. “There was someone else in Mexico City, Evita. Another American. Someone Baranov had cultivated just as he had cultivated Darby.”
“There were many of them,” she said softly.
“This one in particular would have been young. Another whiz kid like Darby, perhaps. Someone for whom Valentin might have had a great deal of respect.”
She turned around. Her tears had stopped, but her eyes were red and her complexion wan.
“Maybe he was in Mexico City for a short time. Darby would have known him, or known of him. He would have respected the man. And Baranov would have treated him as a special case. Does that ring a bell, Evita? Was there anyone like that in those days that you can remember? Someone you met, perhaps, at a party or a reception? Someone Baranov may have mentioned, just in passing?”
She was remembering. He could see it in her eyes, in the set of her shoulders. It was coming back to her. She was returning to those days and nights in Mexico, when her life at the start, to hear her tell it, had been a long fairy-tale dream that in the end turned into a nightmare. But for a while all of Mexico was at her and Darby’s feet.
“There was someone else,” she said. “Just once. It was very early on. Darby and I had just gotten married, and we’d just opened our beach house north of Acapulco. There was a party.”
Her voice was soft. He had to strain to hear her. She came back to the couch and sat down. He lit her a cigarette, and she pulled the smoke deeply into her lungs, exhaling slowly. Her cocaine high had completely left her, and her eyes had grown dull.
“There were a lot of people at this party?” he prompted.
“A lot of Valentin’s friends. Most of them I’d never seen. And there were girls, too. Always girls.”
“Girls?” McGarvey asked. “What girls?”
“Whores from Mexico City. High-priced call girls. Prime beef. The very best. Nothing was too good for Valentin’s friends. Nothing. The best of everything.”
“Did this always happen? The girls at the parties?”
“Not always. But sometimes Valentin or Darby wanted to impress someone so they’d bring the women. At the time I was very naive about it. I thought they were models or movie actresses or something like that. I didn’t know they’d been paid to go to bed with Valentin’s friends.”
It had been the proverbial honey trap. In those days the Russians used it all the time. If they wanted to turn a man they’d arrange for him to be seduced (Americans seemed the easiest to burn), during which time they’d take photographs and make audio tapes of course. Outwardly, morality ran high in the States in those days, so that trap worked very well.
“And there was one American in particular that night?” McGarvey asked. “You met him? You were introduced? Perhaps you can remember a name, even a first name, or his face? Anything?”
But she had not actually seen the man, though she had heard his voice. It was late, probably after one in the morning when Darby, who had been talking with Valentin in the corner for nearly an hour, broke away and came over to her. The lights were low, the music soft and already a lot of the men had paired off with the whores, some of whom had gone out to the changing house by the pool, while others had simply wandered off into the gardens or down to the beach. The guest house in back was reserved always for special guests. The entire cottage was set up with the photographic and recording equipment, all of it evidently state of the art at the time. Anything that went on inside the cottage, even in the bathrooms, no matter the light conditions, would be picked up. It was the perfect setup. “I saw some of the photographs that came out of that place, and let me tell you they left nothing for the imagination, nothing at all.” They’d burned a lot of people there, and they were proud of their accomplishment. “But I wasn’t. I thought what they were doing was despicable. Of course, that was later, you understand. At the time we’re talking about I had no idea what was going on. Darby just broke away from Valentin, came over to me, and we started dancing. He was holding me close, whispering in my ear, kissing my neck. It didn’t take very long and we were upstairs on the balcony making love.”
“What about the American?” McGarvey asked. “Did he arrive afterward? Or had he been there all along? What? I don’t understand, Evita.”
Their bedroom was on a balcony that was open to the large living room below. The bed, however, was set far enough back so that no one from below could see up, nor could she see down. But from the window she did see the flash of a car’s headlights on the beach road that led down from the highway. When she tried to get up to see who was arriving, Darby pulled her back down onto the bed. By then it had quieted down quite a bit so she heard Baranov welcoming their new guest. But without names, Evita answered McGarvey’s question before he could ask it. “We never used names in those days. Everyone thought it for the best.” But their voices were very plain, and Darby didn’t seem to mind that she was listening, he just didn’t want her to go down there. Baranov was respectful toward the American, that much she could tell from what he was saying, and how he was saying it. By then she’d known him well enough to pick that out. And the American sounded young and eager, but she had thought at the time that he was probably hiding something. He was being too polite, she figured. Here he was at one or two o’clock in the morning, at a party with beautiful girls, booze, and music, and he was being terribly proper, formal. It didn’t seem to fit.