Free Without Honor by David Hagberg Page A

mistakes. I don’t think I liked him better than that morning.” Basulto looked from McGarvey to Trotter
and then to Day for emphasis. “I was just a kid then. What the hell did I know. Roger was everything.”
    â€œHarris, among other things, was his bank,” Trotter said dryly. “If I know my man here, he probably held out for more money.”
    â€œThat’s a goddamned filthy lie!” Basulto cried. “We’ve gone over this ground already. I told you, I loved that man. I wouldn’t have done a thing to hurt him.”
    Harris had probably been blind, McGarvey figured. He had seen it in others. The man was working way outside his charter. Looking for the big coup that would give him his battlefield commission.
    â€œDon’t be tiresome,” Day said softly. “Your neck is still on the line here.”
    â€œI told Roger what I had seen the night before,” Basulto plunged on. “I told him that the Ateneo had all but closed down. I had to go over and over it again, ten times for him. He wanted every single detail. The color and make of the car. What kind of clothes they were wearing. How they parted their hair, for Christ’s sake. Were they clean shaven or not? I could see a lot through those glasses, but they weren’t that good. So then he brought out the photographs. And there the Russian was. There was a picture of him getting out of the car. One of him standing in front of a hotel. One as he was coming from an airplane with a group of people. But there was no mistaking him. No mistake at all. It was in his eyes.”
    â€œAs best as we can gather, they were surveillance photos probably taken right there in Mexico City two years earlier,” Trotter said.
    â€œKGB?” McGarvey asked.
    Trotter nodded. “A very sharp individual. One of the very best, bar none. Name of Valentin Illen Baranov.”

    â€œHow about the other one?”
    â€œThat came later. We’re assuming—only assuming, mind you—that it was the American for whom Harris was looking. And he was probably the one who killed Harris.”
    â€œI know he was,” Basulto said sullenly.
    McGarvey jerked forward. “What—”
    Trotter interrupted again. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, Kirk. Believe me, I want you to hear the entire story in chronological order. It’s essential that you understand the timing. I want you to be perfectly clear.”
    Nothing, of course, was ever perfectly clear for McGarvey. He had built a career in the Company on seeing beyond the obvious in supposedly “clear” operations. He had listened to the sages lecture at the Farm outside Williamsburg. They had called such things “anomalies.” Look for the glitches in the fabric of any operation, and there you will find an anomaly that more often than not will lead to the core of the situation. To the truth.
    Basulto was watching them with a strange, expectant look in his eyes, as if he were a condemned man, knowing the ax was going to fall and waiting for its coming.
    â€œThere was no photograph of the American?” McGarvey asked.
    â€œNo, but Roger had an idea who it was, I think,” Basulto said.
    â€œBut he wasn’t sure.”
    â€œNo. He had a camera with a very long lens and high-speed film. He showed me how to use it, and the next time they showed up I was to take as many pictures as I could.”
    â€œAnd in the meantime?”
    Basulto didn’t catch McGarvey’s meaning.
    â€œYou were to return to the apartment and take
some pictures. Meanwhile, what was Harris going to do? Come along with you? Stay there at the del Prado? Go home? What?”
    â€œHe was going to stay there for forty-eight hours. If something turned up, I was to come back to him. Eight, noon, then eight again at the park. First the east side, then the north, and finally the west.”
    â€œIf nothing came up in that