“Yes?” Basulto answered the phone cautiously.
“It’s me. You’re coming to Mexico City. We’ve got some work to do.”
“Are we going to nail that bastard, Mr. McGarvey? Are we finally going to get him? Is he down there now? I thought he would be in Washington.”
“I’ll tell you about it when you get there. They’ll take you out to the airport in the morning. I want you in Mexico as soon as possible.”
“Sure thing. Will you be meeting me?”
“I want you to take a cab downtown. To the Hotel Del Prado just across from La Alameda.”
Basulto laughed. It was the same hotel at which he had met his case officer, Roger Harris, in the sixties. “Sure,” he said. “I think I can find the place. What room?”
“I haven’t checked in yet. I’ll leave word for you at the desk.”
“Are you in Washington?”
“That’s right,” McGarvey lied. “We’ll be flying down in the morning.”
“We?”
“An old friend. Anxious to meet you as a matter of fact.”
“Who is this …?”
“Tomorrow, Artime. We’ll talk tomorrow.” McGarvey hung up.
Their room was on the small side, but clean and reasonably well furnished. A crucifix hung over the bed, and on the opposite wall, over the bureau, was a large print of the Last Supper. A braided rug covered most of the tiled floor, and the large windows opened inward from a tiny balcony. Evita stood at the balcony’s ornamental grillwork and looked across the park at the demonstration still going on.
“They don’t like Americans,” she said. “They’ve always blamed their poverty — and even their earthquakes — on the Americans.”
“Is there anything more I should know about Basulto before he gets here?”
“Kirk McGarvey is a good name,” she said seriously. “Better than Glynn, I think.”
“Evita?”
“I told you everything I know.” She turned around. “Nobody liked him. I don’t think anybody trusted him. There was a rumor that he had worked for the Batista government. We were surprised that Castro’s people didn’t assassinate him.”
She’d been a naive little girl, intimidated by events around her, yet she remembered Basulto from twenty-five years ago even though she’d said she only saw him a few times. Who could he trust? Who could he believe? He didn’t know any longer. Perhaps he’d never really known.
“Let’s take a drive.” McGarvey removed his pistol from the false bottom of his toiletries kit. “We’ve talked enough about Baranov; I want to see him.”
Despite the lateness of the hour, McGarvey was able to arrange for a rental car through the hotel. The desk clerk asked him twice how long he would be staying in Mexico City and seemed pleased when McGarvey replied that unfortunately business would probably be taking him back to Washington in a day, two at the most.
The clerk looked at Evita as if he knew her, or wanted to. She said something to him in Spanish and he reared back as if he had been slapped. Leaving the hotel she refused to talk about it. McGarvey thought she looked ashamed.
Their car was a gray Volkswagen beetle with a very loud muffler and a radio that did not work. McGarvey found a street map in the glove compartment.
“It’s in the south,” Evita said. Her face was pale in the light from the hotel entrance. The doorman was watching them.
“What?” McGarvey asked, looking up.
“Valentin’s house. Our old house. San Juan Ixtayopan. In the mountains.”
“We’ll get out there. First I want to swing past the Soviet embassy.”
“It’s just around the corner,” she said automatically.
McGarvey put down the map. “You have been there?”
“Yes. With Valentin,” she said defensively. “He sometimes took me there at night. To the referentura. He was showing me off.”
The referentura in all Soviet embassies was the equivalent of a safe room or screened room. Physically and electronically secure from the rest of the facility, it was the room in which KGB plans were formulated and carried out. It was the heart of KGB operations in any country. Even Baranov had to have taken chances bringing her there. But then the Russian was young in those days. And brash?
“Did you ever go over there with your husband?”
Evita shook her head.
“Did he ever go there alone to meet with Baranov?”
“I don’t know. He never said and I never asked.”
Traffic along the Avenida Juárez was heavy. Even over the blare of their muffler, they could hear the crowd noises from across the park. McGarvey waited for a break and then pulled out.
“What are we going to do at the embassy?” Evita asked.
“Maybe they’ll offer us a nightcap if they recognize you,” McGarvey said, not bothering to hide the sarcasm in his voice. Still she was lying to him. Even now she was holding back, telling him only what she thought he wanted to hear at the moment. It was habit from a lifetime of lying. A lifetime of deceit for fear that she would be found out for what she really was; a poor silly girl without a mind of her own. He wanted to despise her, yet he found he couldn’t. If anything he felt sorry for her.
He turned left on Lopez which ran along the east end of the park, then right onto the broad Calzada de Tacubaya after the traffic light changed. Behind them they could see the huge mass of the crowd completely filling the Avenida Hidalgo, several bonfires now lighting up the night sky, armed policemen behind barricades at all the corners leading toward the disturbance.
The Russians would be pleased with this latest round of unrest. In 1971 they nearly succeeded in maneuvering Mexico into a civil war. This time it seemed possible they might succeed. Certainly the mood of the Mexican government was different now than it had been in 1971; more hostile toward the U.S., under seige this time because of falling oil prices, massive unemployment, and several devastating earthquakes over the past few years, not to mention the continuing strife over the drug issue.
They passed behind the Palace of Fine Arts and across San Juan Letran, the main post office. A statue of Charles IV stood in front of the College of Mines. Traffic was moving at a breakneck pace. McGarvey wanted to slow down, but the drivers behind him honked their horns impatiently.
“It’s number 204, behind the tall iron fence on the next block,” Evita said. “Valentin’s office will be on the second floor.”
McGarvey pulled over out of traffic and parked across the street. The Soviet embassy was housed in an old Victorian villa complete with shuttered windows, ornate cupolas, tall brick chimneys, the roof bristling with antennae and aerials. Two light globes were perched above the entry gate, and inside the grounds were ablaze with light. Something big was happening at the embassy, something very big. McGarvey thought about the crises he had weathered at other embassies around the world. It was the same as this. Every window in the building was lit. The cipher machines would be running full tilt. Messages would be streaming back and forth between Moscow. The Mexican unrest, the missile crisis.
A dark Ford van came down the avenue and turned in at the embassy gate. The driver flashed his headlights and moments later the gates swung open and the van drove through, the gates closing behind it.
“He’s probably inside now,” Evita said in a small voice.
McGarvey glanced at her. Her eyes were wide, her lips pursed. She was shivering. “There’s trouble. He’ll be preoccupied. Time now for him to make a mistake.”
She shook her head. “He never makes mistakes.”
“We’ll see,” McGarvey said.
A man inside the compound came to the gate and looked across the street at them. He didn’t move. A second man joined him, they said something to each other, and he turned and went away.