“How could Baranov possibly know that someone like you would be coming?” Day asked.
“He set Basulto on you and Trotter. He knew that you wouldn’t take it to the CIA because of Powers’s friendship with Yarnell. He figured that you might be calling in an outsider. Someone who knew the game. A radical.”
“How do you know that Yarnell wasn’t actually a traitor?”
“Because of the quality of the intelligence he sent back on every assignment he was ever given. His boss, Darrel Owens, had nothing but praise for his protege’s work in Mexico City and in Moscow, although he hated him.”
“Why?” Day asked. They were leaving him behind again, but it didn’t matter now. McGarvey figured that Trotter would explain it to him later.
“Yarnell was probably sleeping with his wife.”
“Why in heaven’s name?” Day chirped.
“He was hedging his bets,” Trotter said. “He was an ambitious kid and wanted to get to the top as quickly as he possibly could. The cuckolded husband is almost always the first one to cooperate lest he make a public fool of himself.”
Admiration and hate often went hand-in-hand in this business, McGarvey thought, recalling his afternoon with Owens. No one, he suspected, had ever been neutral about Darby Yarnell, who in the end had made the most tragic mistake of his life. He had simply out-thought himself. In the end neither he nor Powers had been a match for Baranov’s skills.
“What about Janos Plónski?” Trotter asked, breaking into McGarvey’s thoughts. “He’d found something in the records that got him killed.”
“My fault,” McGarvey said tiredly. He supposed Pat and the kids had returned to England where her mother still lived. Eventually, he knew, he would have to face them, but only after he found the right words.
“What did he discover?” Trotter prompted.
“He looked up Basulto’s track. Several of his operations had been pulled from their jackets. But it was done years ago.”
“By whom, if Yarnell and Powers were innocent?”
“There wasn’t time to get the dates straight, but I suspect Roger Harris did it. He was Basulto’s case officer and he suspected there was a mole in the agency and he wanted to hide what Basulto was doing for him — namely finding the traitor.”
“Who killed Harris in Cuba then …” Trotter started to ask, but a sudden understanding dawned on him. “Basulto,” he said into the breach.
“Yeah,” McGarvey replied.
“Well, what about Yarnell’s bodyguards,” Day wanted to know. “That’s not what you would consider normal behavior for an innocent man.”
“Yarnell was never what you would think of as normal,” McGarvey countered. “He’d always surrounded himself with a crowd. Admirers, some of them, others actual bodyguards. Maybe he’d gotten paranoid in his old age. Maybe he thought Baranov would be coming after him someday. I don’t know.”
Day sat back in his chair, his hands in front of him on the desk. “Still doesn’t answer the question of why Yarnell went to see Powers last night. Why he shot him. Not the actions of an innocent man.”
Darby Yarnell had been an arrogant sonofabitch. But a romantic for all of it. An overzealous patriot who had thrown himself body and soul into being a spy in defense of his country. The ends, for him, justified the means. Any means. And it was those very qualities that Baranov had recognized early on, that he had used to manipulate Yarnell. All the signs were there, but McGarvey had seen them too late. As they all had. Only Baranov had known the outcome from the very beginning. Only Baranov truly knew about honor and dishonor, and how to use this understanding to the best advantage. McGarvey took the miniature tape recorder out of his jacket pocket and laid it gingerly on Day’s desk.
“Yarnell remembered that night in Mexico City when Powers came to his house and was seduced,” McGarvey began. “He remembered the party, the music, the girls, and mostly he remembered Baranov. We were led to believe that there was a mole in the CIA. A man at high levels who was selling us out to the Russians. Baranov’s handmaiden. In Yarnell’s mind, everything pointed to his old friend Powers, whom he thought was being blackmailed. He thought he understood Baranov. He thought Baranov had used that night to turn Powers. Or was about to do it. So he went to the house and shot him. It was his patriotic duty, as he saw it.”
Day and Trotter were staring at the tape recorder as if it were a wild beast about to devour them.
“I took this from Yarnell’s body last night. It was running. No one else knows about it. No one but us.”
“You’ve heard it?” Trotter asked, looking up.
McGarvey nodded. “Yarnell had loved his country and had given his life in her defense. He thought he was thwarting Baranov when in actuality he had played the score the Russian had laid out for him, the first notes of which had been written twenty-five years ago.”
“You can’t expect us to believe such a story,” Day said halfheartedly.
“Yes, I do,” McGarvey replied. He switched on the tape recording, then turned and walked out as Darby Yarnell’s voice came from the tiny speaker.
“Hello Donald. We have a problem, you and I.”
“Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers said.
McGarvey had gone from day into night with the same thoughts, the same voices in his head following him like a shadow, like an alter ego, at once frightening and somehow strangely comforting in that he finally understood. Riding in the taxi from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan, he wondered how Day and Trotter were taking it. Powers had died shortly before noon. A counsel for the CIA had admitted the DCI had been assassinated by Darby Yarnell, a longtime friend, but a spokesman for the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where both men had been taken, hinted about a possible brain tumor in Yarnell’s frontal lobe. It would be days, possibly weeks, before anything conclusive would be known, but Yarnell quite possibly had not been in control of his faculties at the time of the crime. Meanwhile, the president had given the Russians an ultimatum: The missiles in Mexico would have to be dismantled within the next forty-eight hours or a complete air and sea blockade of Mexico would commence. The United Nations was meeting in emergency session. Gorbachev had so far made no response. Nor had the Mexican government. The world, as it had in the sixties, was holding its breath.
“We have a problem, you and I,” Yarnell had said on the tape.
“Yes, I suspect we do,” Powers had replied.
“It’s Valentin.”
McGarvey would never forget the longish pause on the tape. On first hearing it, he had been concerned that something had gone wrong. That the machine had somehow malfunctioned. But then Powers made the first of his damning statements.
“I’ve been expecting this for a lot of years, Darby. You know, now that it’s come I’m actually glad.”
“It’s been a burden,” Yarnell said.
“Yes. It has.”
Yarnell had gone there to accuse his old friend of being a traitor, and Powers had been expecting Yarnell to come forward finally and admit that he was the traitor. It should have been a comedy, but too many lives had already been lost — and more were in the balance — for it to be humorous.