“Goodbye, Evita. I’m truly sorry for you now.”
“You’ll burn in hell, Darby. They’ll get you! I’ll see to it …”
The connection was broken. For a moment they could hear the continued hiss of the long-distance line, but then the tape machine stopped and the speaker fell silent.
It came to McGarvey that for all the evidence, for all the testimony against him, Yarnell might be innocent after all. Or, if he had worked with Baranov in the old days, maybe he had long since quit. Maybe he had retired from Baranov’s service on the same day he had retired from the CIA. Perhaps Baranov’s visit to Evita had been nothing more than a manipulative effort to get Yarnell back into the game. Force him to run when McGarvey closed in on him. Force him back into the Russian’s service by allowing him no other options. “Speculation will be the bane of your existence if you let it get ahold of you,” one of the old hands had told him. “There’s no end to it, boyo. Leads you down so many dark alleys that you might just as well give up ever seeing the light of day again.” Good advice, if overcautious. So now what? What he had set in motion had a life of its own. It would continue on its path with or without his continued participation.
“Now what?” Trotter echoed his own thoughts softly.
“He’s either a damned good actor, or he’s innocent,” McGarvey said.
“It would appear so.”
“Whatever he is, he’s got his choices now.”
“If he ignores her call, there wouldn’t be a thing we could do to him. No way of proving his innocence or guilt.” Trotter glanced at the tape machine.
“He’ll either call or he won’t call.”
“If he doesn’t, we’ll be right back where we started.”
“Worse,” McGarvey said glumly. “Now he knows my name, and knows what we know. If he holds tight, he’s won.”
At the window McGarvey once again looked down toward Yarnell’s house. He wondered what the man was doing at this moment, what he was thinking. He wondered if someone was there with him. Perhaps Kathleen had stayed over. He realized now, too late, that he should have called her at home so that he could make sure that at least for tonight she would be out of the fray, insulated in some small way from whatever might happen. Too late, too late, he thought. Often we made the right decisions, but we delayed our choices until they no longer mattered. By omission we were often as guilty as the hotheads. He wondered if Yarnell was sitting next to his telephone, his hand perhaps hesitating over the instrument as he tried to make his own decision, a decision that stretched back, in all reality, more than twenty-five years to an initial indiscretion in Mexico City. At the very least he suspected Yarnell was looking back at his life, wondering where his own mistakes had been made. Wondering how he had come to be here and now.
A vision began to develop in McGarvey’s breast of an older Yarnell looking back at himself as a young, arrogant, conceited man, filled with a desire to change the world singlehandedly. A lot of that had gone on in the late fifties and especially in the early sixties. Camelot, they’d called President Kennedy’s administration. And everyone had believed it and believed in it. Nothing was impossible for the honorable men. A bit of verse from the French poet Boileau-Despéraux came to him: “Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.” It was a hearkening back to his own past, to a simpler time in college, when his own choices were unlimited. “They were men without honor,” someone else had written. Finally he understood the they.
Yarnell’s metallic gray Mercedes sedan appeared out of the mews onto Q Street and turned the corner onto 32nd, its taillights winking in the distance.
“Christ! He’s on the move,” McGarvey cried. He crossed the room in four steps, tore open the door, and was halfway down the corridor to the stairwell before Trotter emerged at a dead run from the apartment.
Yarnell had not made a telephone call. He had run instead. To whom? To where? McGarvey hadn’t counted on this.
The stairwell was well lit and smelled of concrete. McGarvey raced headlong down the staircase, his feet barely touching the steps. He could hear Trotter above him. If Yarnell had stayed put, he would have won. The man had finally made a mistake. At the bottom he slammed open the door, waited until Trotter caught up, and then rushed across the lobby and out onto the street to the car.
Trotter climbed in behind the wheel, his hand fumbling with the keys until he got the engine started and they accelerated down 31st Street, slowing at the intersection of Q Street. A taxi was just turning the corner from Dumbarton Oaks, but there was no other traffic. Ignoring the stop sign Trotter gunned the engine, slamming on his brakes as they came to P Street. The big Mercedes was just passing beneath a streetlight two blocks east.
“There he is. We’ve got him,” McGarvey said. “Don’t lose him.”
“Where the hell is he going?” Trotter asked, turning the corner. “What is he doing?”
McGarvey was thinking about Evita, so he didn’t bother to answer. He pulled out the card on which he had written the number for the Del Prado Hotel and picked up the cellular telephone receiver from its cradle. Trotter kept glancing over at him as he dialed.
They crossed Rock Creek and a few blocks later turned southeast onto Massachusetts Avenue. Traffic was heavier now. Trotter knew what he was doing. He kept two cars behind Yarnell, switching lanes from time to time so that he would present much less of a constant image in the Mercedes’s rearview mirror.
The international circuits were busy. McGarvey had to dial the number four times before he finally got through. They’d passed Mt. Vernon Square, turning northeast onto New York Avenue, the Mercedes still half a block ahead of them. Yarnell wasn’t going out to either National or Dulles airports. McGarvey realized that he was probably going to his CIA contact.
“Del Prado,” the hotel operator answered.
McGarvey gave Evita’s room number. After a slight hesitation, he supposed because he was an American, the connection was made and the phone was ringing.
“Where in God’s name is he going?” Trotter mumbled again.
Evita answered on the first ring. She sounded all out of breath. “Yes?”
“It’s me,” McGarvey said. “Are you all right?”
“Cristo! Basulto is gone. The floor maid said he checked out about six o’clock. What’s going on?”
“Listen to me carefully, Evita. I want you to get out of there right now.” McGarvey was cold. “If there’s no late-night flight out, check into another hotel and take the first flight out in the morning.”
“I called him, just like you asked. But he didn’t believe me.”
“I know,” McGarvey said. “I heard. Just get out of there now, Evita. Leave the gun and go.”
They weren’t too far from Union Station. McGarvey wondered if Yarnell was going to double back and take a train out of Washington. It didn’t make sense.
“I’m scared. What’s going on up there?”
“Get out right now. Hang up and leave. Don’t even bother checking out. Just get away from the hotel.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” she cried.
“New York,” McGarvey said. The Mercedes had turned onto Florida Avenue, and he suddenly realized with a terrible clarity where Yarnell was headed and why he was headed there, who his contact was within the CIA and what it all meant. A deep, final pain pulled at his gut. God help us all, he thought in horror.
“Will you be there?” Evita was demanding.
“I’ll be there,” McGarvey said. “Go. Run!” He slowly hung up the telephone and looked at Trotter, whose complexion had turned ghostly pale in the darkness.