Dance with the Dragon Read Free

figure out what happened. Once you get her settled, you can brief me on what progress you’ve made. Hopefully the situation will be resolved by then.”
    Perry closed his eyes. Three days. It was impossible. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll see you on Saturday.”
    After he hung up he turned his chair so that he could look out the window toward the modernistic Torre Mayor skyscraper, which at fifty-five stories was one of the tallest buildings in Latin America. It was supposed to represent Mexican progress into the twenty-first century, and Mexican engineering. It had been designed to withstand even the strongest of earthquakes. But knowing what he knew about Mexico and Mexican engineering, Perry had long ago decided he wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the skyscraper in even a minor quake.
    In fact at this moment he didn’t want to be anywhere near Mexico, but since he couldn’t run away from this business, he would have to deal with it.
    He asked his secretary to find Gloria Ibenez and have her come to his office. Surprisingly, she was in the building for a change, and she showed up five minutes later, dressed in a very short khaki skirt, sandals with no nylons, and a white peasant blouse that left little to the imagination. He’d warned her repeatedly about dressing suggestively, but she’d completely ignored him. “If you don’t like what I’m wearing to work, don’t look,” she’d once told him, actually laughing in his face. She was a Cuban-born American, and had been with the CIA seven years. Mexico City was the perfect assignment for a Spanish-speaking woman who was beautiful, intelligent, and experienced, and had good contracts. Her father was General Ernesto Marti, who was an adviser to the CIA on Cuban affairs, and just last year she’d been involved on an assignment with Kirk McGarvey when they finally tracked down and eliminated Osama bin Laden. She was a pain in the ass, and Perry had wanted to get rid of her within the month after she’d arrived, and now he saw his chance.
    She sat down across the desk from him, a bright smile on her oval, dark face. “Good afternoon, Judge,” she said brightly, which Perry was sure she did to needle him, as if she were making fun of him. “What’s up?”
    Perry studied her for several long seconds, as if he were examining a bug under a magnifying glass, but then he shoved Updegraf’s personnel file across the desk to her. “Louis was shot to death last night up in Chihuahua.”
    Gloria had reached for the file, but she stopped, the smile fading from her lips. “My God,” she said softly. “Are you serious?”
    “I’m always serious,” Perry replied drily. “I sent Chauncy up there to take charge of the situation, and I’ve talked to the Mexican authorities, who’ve agreed to keep it out of the media for the time being.”
    “What about his wife?”
    “I’ll take care of her,” Perry said. He laid a thin buff folder stamped TOP SECRET on top of Updegraf’s dossier. “It’s what we have so far, which isn’t much. Louis’s body was dumped outside the hospital early this morning. But we don’t have any idea what he was doing up there, except it may have involved Chinese intelligence.”
    Gloria’s eyes narrowed. “Their intelligence presence isn’t very strong in Mexico. Anyway, I wasn’t aware that we were running any ops against them.”
    “Neither was I until I opened Louis’s safe this morning.”
    “What’d you find?”
    “I don’t know what it means yet, I’m still working on it,” Perry said. “But I know enough to think that he was trying to turn an embassy clerk. Someone in their communications section.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Run his background. Find out what he was doing with the clerk, and find out if he’d ever approached anyone else over there.”
    “I’ll need to see Louis’s encounter sheets so I can get the name of the clerk,” Gloria said. “That’d at least be a start. But what about