STROKE; EVEN BRING DOWN ENTIRE ORGANIZATIONS. NOT ONLY KILL THE MAN, BUT KILL THE IDEA…
Rencke crossed the river on 1-495, but instead of taking the George Washington Memorial Parkway back to the CIA, he continued to 1-95 and headed the fifty miles south to the Agency’s records storage facility outside of Fredericksburg. He wasn’t exactly a welcome figure at the underground installation, but his presence was tolerated because everyone there knew what he could do to the place with the proper computer virus. The records at A.P. Hill were old files, going all the way back to 1946, when the CIA was formed, and some even farther back to the WWII days of the OSS. They were paper documents, stored in file folders, classified by era, and cross-referenced by department, operation or finance track, and tucked away in bins stored on shelves stacked eighteen feet high, that ran row and tier for miles. All of it was eight hundred feet underground in what had been an old salt mine.
Lighting had been installed, along with plumbing, tile floors, in some places walls and doors, and offices and conference rooms, along with a sophisticated air-handling system that kept the place at a dust-free constant temperature and humidity. But all of it was run by computer, using, almost exclusively, programs that Otto Rencke had designed and installed some years ago when he had done the freelance work of reorganizing the CIA’s computer system. No one knew more about A.P.
Hill than Otto did. So he was never turned away when he came knocking at the door. He set up his laptop in one of the conference rooms, plugging into the system’s mainframe. He was assigned an electric golf cart so that he could get around the stacks. But he was not offered any assistance. The file clerks and computer custodians knew better.
If Rencke needed something, he would find them. But when he had the bit in his teeth he wanted to be left alone. Rencke stopped in midstride and looked out the windows. They faced the broad main aisle that ran the entire length of the facility. The overhead lights disappeared in the distance. The last time he was here about two years ago he had looked down McGarvey’s past because of another difficult operation. Those had been sad days when he’d seen the Kansas Highway Patrol’s graphic accident scene photographs of Kirk’s parents. They’d been killed by the Russians, maybe even at General Baranov’s behest.
Even then it was obvious in some circles what McGarvey would become.
He’d shown his mettle in Vietnam. And he’d shown his nature at the CIA’s training facility, acing all of his courses, and in every case showing up even his instructors. Was that it after all? General Valentin Illen Baranov come back from the grave to carry out his revenge for not only what McGarvey had done, but for what he was about to become? Nikolayev’s initial message from Paris had hinted at as much. But then he disappeared. He was not answering Rencke’s queries.
Maybe he had gotten frightened off. Or maybe the SVR had gotten to him and either taken him back to Moscow or killed him. But so far the death of a Russian man, other than Trofimov, in Paris or elsewhere in France, had not shown up on any of Rencke’s search engines. But that didn’t mean much. Maybe Nikolayev’s body had been hidden. Rencke focused on the aisle through the stacks. Nothing moved out there. But the answers, if they were anywhere on earth, were here. And he had a starting point; or rather he had two out of three legs of a triangle, with McGarvey at one point and Baranov at the second. The third was the assassin who had gone active under Network Martyrs. The three names were bound by the most intimate of relationships, that of the killers and their victim. He went back to his laptop, pulled up a search engine, and found and printed out a surprisingly short list of Baranov references. When the computer was finished, he took the cart out into the stacks, stopped at the address for each of the Baranov files, retrieved them from their bins, and moved on to the next. He was finished in less than twenty minutes and he took the eight files back to the conference room, where he spread them in chronological order on the long table. He began to read. Valentin Illen Baranov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, a true Cossack he was fond of telling his staff, during the Second World War, though his exact birth date and parents’ names were not known. He was not a particularly outstanding student, except that unlike the other boys he never fought or got into trouble. His talent had been to get the other boys to fight for him, even though they didn’t want to. Even then he was perfecting his leadership talent. The secret is easy, he confided to an intended victim whom McGarvey rescued, you simply have to believe in people.
Make them believe in you. Make them believe in their heart of hearts that they can do absolutely anything so long as someone believes in them. In a way it was exactly like love, he said. After four years at the University of Moscow, where he studied international law and four languages English, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic he enlisted in the Missile Service where he was assigned to the GRU, Military Intelligence unit. This was during the era when the missile defense ring around Moscow was being constructed. Security on the massive project was so tight that the CIA files (see cross ref CKBANNER through CKOTIS) contained very little information of any real strategic value.
Following four years in the service he was discharged as a major, when he went immediately to work for the NKGB, where his rise was even more spectacular than it had been in the military. He had the Midas touch.
Every operation he became involved with turned out to be a gold seam, providing the Soviet Union with a wealth of information. He was rewarded with limos and drivers. He was given a brand-new, one-thousand-square- meter luxury apartment on Kusnetzki Prospekt in leadership row. He was given a dacha on the Istra River outside the city. He was given not only a free rein over the KGB’s Department Viktor, but he was awarded with a highly prized diplomatic passport. He had money and power and the freedom to travel anywhere in the world at any time he wanted to for any purpose that he desired. Presidents and prime ministers didn’t have that kind of power.
Rencke tried to read between the lines. Had Baranov been seeking the ultimate challenge? A lot of men in his position couldn’t be satisfied with routine assignments. Had McGarvey become his Everest? Darby Yarnell had probably been one of Baranov’s unwitting pawns from the very beginning of Yarnell’s CIA career in Moscow. Darby was a man who had an overabundance of belief and confidence in himself. And his attitude manifested itself in the way he dressed, in the gourmet style he preferred to dine in, in the Jaguars and Aston-Martins he drove, and in the way he treated people. Yarnell had convinced himself that Staff Sergeant Barry Innes, a young crypto operator at the Moscow embassy was on the KGB’s payroll. He never explained how he knew this, he just did. Rather than simply find the proof, arrest the kid and send him home for trial, Yarnell came up with Operation Hellgate. The Russians had snatched one of our people, and Yarnell wanted to cause them as much grief as possible. He wanted to stick it to them. Quid pro quo.
But it depended on pretending that we didn’t know Sergeant Innes had been turned. Innes was promoted to technical sergeant, placed in charge of CIA encrypted communications and was practically force-fed information that was so fantastic that the Russians slavered at the bit for more. But the most clever part of Hellgate was the specific information given to Innes. Most of it was false, but not all of it.
Yarnell argued that the Russians would have to be given something legitimate, from time to time. Something that they could verify as true, so that they would swallow the lies. And that’s exactly how headquarters approved it. In that way actual intelligence information was passed to the Russians. It had been the most perfect of Baranov’s schemes to that date. No one knew who was pulling the strings, not poor, dumb Sergeant Innes, who was spying for the money so that he could support his young wife and child living back home in San Diego.
Not anyone from the embassy, or back in Langley. And most especially not Darby Yarnell himself, who in the very end was proven to be nothing but a dupe. Sergeant Innes got himself shot to death by Yarnell’s manipulations, the spy of ours whom the Russians had snatched was given back, and Hellgate was deemed a success. Yarnell was a rising star.
McGarvey was not a part of that Moscow operation, but Darby Yarnell became the bridge that linked him to Baranov. After Moscow, and after a brief stint in Langley, first on the Russian — —desk and then, at Yarnell’s own request, on the Latin America desk, Yarnell was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. He was the logical man for the job. He had taught himself Spanish in eight months flat, he had worked the CIA’s Latin America desk, and with his Moscow background he could counter what was the largest KGB operations center out of Moscow, in the Soviet’s Mexico City embassy. Baranov was the star there as he had been in Moscow, running a pair of intelligence networks called CESTA and Banco del Sur, which collected information throughout Latin and South America. The game in those days, before the Bay of Pigs, was to infiltrate as many governments and government agencies as possible. The Soviets, and the Americans, did this by befriending various government employees in a variety i of ways. The seductions very often involved honey traps, with beautiful | young women imported from
