White House, page 24
“Don’t count on it, Dave,” Hamilton said, as they left the bridge together.
In the distant haze off the port side of the mammoth nuclear-powered Nimitz class aircraft carrier, they could just make out Cape Tappi on the Honshu headland at the western end of Tsugaru Strait that opened to the Sea of Japan. In a matter of hours his battle group would be out of the confining waters of the strait and into waters where they would have some maneuvering room. It wouldn’t be too soon for Hamilton, whose primary love was the sea, not some confining office in Yokosuka or Washington.
The marine guard followed them, and at the admiral’s quarters, opened the door for them and saluted smartly.
It took a couple of minutes for the call from the White House to go through, time enough for Merkler to pour them some coffee. Hamilton put the call on the speakerphone.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Hamilton said. It was ten-thirty in the morning there, which made it 8:30 P.M. in Washington. “I have Dave Merkler with me.”
“Good morning, Admiral,” President Lindsay said. “I’m glad to hear it because this is for both of you. How is everything going out there?”
“We’ll be in the Sea of Japan in a few hours, and so far nobody seems to be taking any notice of us.”
“I’m glad to hear that too. But the situation might not hold together much longer, and it’ll be up to you to make sure nothing gets out of hand.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. President,” Hamilton said, exchanging a glance of puzzlement with Merkler. “Could you be a little more specific?”
“There’ve been some new developments between the Japanese and Chinese navies that you need to be aware of,” the President said. For the next fifteen minutes he went into detail about the destruction of the Chinese Han class submarine, the reactions of the Chinese and Japanese ambassadors, the continued buildup of naval resources off the North Korean coast and his warning to both governments to keep a one-hundred-mile zone of separation between their ships and North Korea.
“Good lord,” Hamilton said. “Mr. President, are you ordering me to place my carrier groups down there to enforce the separation zone?”
“That’s exactly what I want you to do, Jim,” Lindsay said. “With all possible speed.”
“What if someone takes exception to our presence?”
“I’m giving you the authority to defend yourself at all times. Someone shoots at you, shoot back.”
“No, Mr. President, that’s not what I mean,” Hamilton said. “What do you want us to do if they simply ignore us? These are international waters, but considering what happened at Kimch’aek and Pyongyang’s warnings, the Japanese would be fools not to maintain a strong presence down there. Add to that the probability that the Chinese have gotten themselves in the middle of it because Pyongyang has asked for their help, and they might just start shooting at each other in earnest. We could hardly blame them for something like that.”
The President had never served in the military. He hesitated a moment. “If you place your ships between them I don’t think they’ll be foolish enough to start anything.”
“Yes, Mr. President. But what do I do if someone makes a mistake?” Hamilton said. Getting a politician to make a straight statement was usually impossible, so the President’s next order came as a surprise.
“Stop them with whatever force you think is necessary, Jim.”
“I see,” Hamilton said quietly. “Can I assume that Tom Logan knows the score?” Air Force General Thomas Logan was in charge of all U.S. forces on Okinawa.
“He does,” the President said. “But I want you to be perfectly clear on our intent here, and that’s to prevent an all-out shooting war between Japan and North Korea and whoever Pyongyang has as its ally.”
“Yes, sir.” Hamilton figured that no matter how this turned out, relations between the U.S. and Japan would never be the same again.
“I won’t leave you to hang out to dry, Jim,” the President said. “I’ll have my orders sent to you in writing within the hour.” That came as another complete and somewhat welcome surprise to Hamilton.
“I appreciate that, sir. We’ll do the very best we can.”
“I know you will. Good luck.”
Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia
McGarvey parked in the visitor’s lot and took the elevator eight hundred feet down to the main records storage level. He’d called ahead so that the night security people were expecting him, and they let him inside without delay. He passed through a pair of heavy steel doors, his DDO pass keying the electronic locks. Rencke was waiting with a golf cart, his long fuzzy hair even wilder and more out of control than usual.
“Oh boy, Mac, thanks for comin’,” Otto gushed as McGarvey climbed into the cart beside him. They took off immediately from the central square down a long, broad avenue that led through the tall stacks for as far as they could see.
“Are you okay?” McGarvey said. Rencke looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. His clothing was dirty and rumpled, and the laces were loose on one of his sneakers and missing on the other. He didn’t smell so good either.
“No time for that now,” Rencke said. “There’s bad shit lying around all over the place down here.” He shook his head in wonder. “It’s like looking for a word in a dictionary; you get sidetracked to some really weird shit sometimes.” Tears suddenly came to his eyes and he glanced at McGarvey. “Your folks were good people, Mac. Top shelf, the best, really the best. It was that bastard Baranov and Trotter who did it to them, ’cause they were afraid of you.”
“You saw the records?”
Rencke’s lips compressed, and he nodded. “But you don’t want to see them. Not ever.”
“You’re probably right,” McGarvey said. But he’d already seen them. “What have you come up with? Anything we can use right now?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been through your record, and I’ve even come up with a list of names. People still alive, with the position and power to come after you if they wanted to. You’re going to have to consider them, but as far as I can tell that angle’s not going to wash. Some of them, like a couple of Tarankov’s people and a few Mafia guys from Moscow, hate your guts. But killing you wouldn’t do them any good, not if you consider the kinds of risks they would have to take and compare them with what they have to lose if they fail. And none of them is going to get in much trouble just because you’re the new DDO. No real gain for them if you were taken out.”
“Just revenge,” McGarvey said.
Rencke glanced at him again. “That might be the point after all. Revenge. It’s worse than hunger or lust.”
McGarvey figured they must have gone a half a mile or more into the underground installation when Rencke turned left down a narrower side avenue. They passed four intersections, and then he turned right and stopped fifty feet later. A tall ladder on wheels was drawn up to a eighteen-foot-high section of shelves. Several plastic bins had been brought down and set on the floor. File folders and envelopes were strewn around the base of the ladder. The light back here was barely good enough to read by.
“Midseventies,” Rencke said, hopping out of the golf cart. “Your first CIA duty station, Berlin. Remember?” He rummaged through the loose file folders, finally coming up with the one he wanted.
“That was a long time ago. I was just a kid.”
“A trained CIA field officer in the badlands, that’s what you were,” Rencke said. He was beat, his mood brittle, but a look of pride had come into his tired expression. “All your FI-TREPS gave you the highest marks. Dean Fields, the chief of Berlin station, made no bones how he felt about you. In his books you were the tops.” Rencke looked a little sly. “If you had one fault, according to him, you were too brash, too quick to pass judgment. ‘Just like a tent revival preacher,’ he wrote in one of your fitness reports.”
McGarvey chuckled. “He was right.”
Rencke handed him the thin file folder, which contained a brief, three-page incident/encounter sheet. Most of it was typewritten, but McGarvey recognized the handwritten notes as his own, although at first he couldn’t recall the incident.
“Does that bring back anything?” Rencke asked.
“Just a minute,” McGarvey said, and he quickly read through the report. It was early in the morning, New Year’s Day 1979, a hundred yards west of Checkpoint Charlie, near the Philharmonic Hall and National Gallery. McGarvey had been on his way back to his apartment off Potsdammerstrasse after a party, when he spotted a group of a half-dozen people trying to climb over the wall.
He parked in the shadows and trotted around back, thinking at first that he was seeing a group of East Germans trying to escape over the wall to the West. Instead, he walked into the middle of what one of them called a prank. They were Americans, graduate students and postdocs on Christmas break; all of them drunk, out looking for a little fun. An adventure.
It was starting to come back to McGarvey now; vague memories of how cold it was and how the kids looked guilty, foolish (and they knew it), stupid, ashamed and finally angry that someone their same age was putting a stop to their lark.
All of them were dressed in tattered blue jeans, sandals and wool socks, hair down around their shoulders, and McGarvey remembered being mad as hell at them. They were college students, probably rich, who were trying to look like hippies. They were fucked up in the head, he remembered telling them that. And one of them had responded that he should mind his own fucking business.
McGarvey had zeroed in on that kid, who was much older than the others and who seemed to be the leader, or at least their spokesman, and reamed him out. Told him that he had been seconds away from getting himself and his friends shot to death, and that if he hadn’t learned anything better than that in college, maybe he should go back to his mother’s lap so that he could have a few more years to grow up.
There’d been more words, and the kids were going to simply ignore him, when he flashed his gun and his CIA identification. It had been a stupid move on his part, he knew that now. But it had worked. The kids, pissed off, left. Now McGarvey vaguely remembered the look of embarrassment and hate on the one kid’s face, but nothing more.
He looked up. “I remember it, but that’s about all.”
“You made an enemy, Mac,” Rencke said.
“He was just a kid, and that was a long time ago. He’d have to be a complete idiot to still harbor a grudge.”
Rencke shrugged, conceding the point. “Did you get their names?”
“Evidently not, or I would have mentioned it in my report.”
“Do you remember any of them? I mean can you remember what they looked like?”
“Hippies. College kids with long hair. It was party time for them. Lot of that going on over there in those days. What’s your point, Otto?”
“I’ve worked out all the major shit in your background, all the obviously bad guys who might still hold a grudge, and now I’m working on the little shit. This one sorta stuck out.”
McGarvey shook his head. “I think we should stick with trying to find the Japanese connections.”
“I’m doing that, Mac,” Otto said, the vagueness back in his voice. “There’s just something about this.” He looked up. “If I came up with some photographs, do you think you could pick any of them out?”
“Maybe,” McGarvey said. “When have you slept last?”
“I don’t keep track,” Rencke said. “I’ll take you back to the elevators.”
“Listen, Otto, maybe you should come back to Washington with me. You can stay at my place or out at the safe house. We’ll have some dinner, a couple of beers and you can get a few hours sleep.”
Rencke gave him a long, penetrating look. “You gave me a job to do, Mac, and I’m doin’ it, you know.” He shifted his weight to his left foot and raised his right a couple of inches off the floor, as if he were an ostrich. “They came after Liz, and Mrs. M. We can’t let that happen again, so you gotta let me keep looking here. Okay?”
McGarvey had to shake his head again. “It’s your call.”
“Oh, boy. Great.” Rencke said, without much enthusiasm and he gave McGarvey a hug. “We’ll get the bastards, Mac. It’s not chartreuse anymore, but we’ll get the bastards.”
FIFTEEN
Washington
Fred Rudolph met the District of Columbia SAC Jack Hailey in the parking lot of the new International Trade Association building off Dupont Circle a few minutes after ten.
“Thanks for coming out tonight, Jack. May be nothing, but I figured you wanted to be kept in the loop.”
“I appreciate it,” Hailey said. “Had to be some kind of world record, getting a search warrant that fast.”
“Judge Miller is one of the good guys who still thinks we’re doing an okay job,” Rudolph said. The fact that he and the federal judge were next-door neighbors and belonged to the same country club hadn’t hurt either. Over the past few years they had developed a mutual trust and respect on and off the golf course that sometimes paid off, like tonight.
A half-dozen FBI agents in blue windbreakers had secured the front and rear entrances to the twelve-story building, and while a nervous night watchman made two calls, one to the building’s manager and the other to the office manager of the Far East Trade Association, Dan Parks and twenty special agents had gone up to the top floor to open the offices and begin their preliminary search.
He came back down on the elevator and trotted over to where Rudolph and Hailey were waiting at the desk in the lobby. He was a short, heavyset man with dark curly hair who had been a computer programmer by trade until he had signed on with the Bureau’s Special Investigations Division. He could sniff out a hidden computer cache a mile away.
“Okay, we’re in,” he said. “Do you want us to get started now, or should we wait until Far East sends someone over?”
“Anybody up there?”
“No. The place was locked up for the night.”
“Find anything interesting?” Rudolph asked.
“Computers on both floors, but it looks as if they’re all tied to the same mainframe on eleven. Some locked file cabinets in the mail room and a couple of the offices and a big wall safe in one of the front offices. We can peel the safe.”
“Stick to the computers for now. I want to see what kind of a reaction we get from their people when they show up and we ask for the combination. We’ll be up when they get here.”
Parks smiled humorlessly. “If there’s a connection to Croft or Lee, we’ll find it.” He turned and took the elevator back up.
“I’ll wait down here, if you want to go up,” Hailey said.
“Won’t be necessary,” Rudolph replied, spotting two men at the front doors. “Looks like the opposition is about to storm the gates.”
He and Hailey went over and let them in. The older of the men was dressed in a tuxedo, the other in a pair of blue jeans and a short-sleeved Izod. Neither of them looked happy.
Rudolph showed them his FBI identification. “I assume that you gentlemen work for the Far East Trade Association?”
“That’s right,” the man in the tuxedo said indignantly. “I’m Calvin Wirtz, the association’s legal counsel. What’s going on here?”
“Who are you, sir?” Rudolph asked the other man.
“He’s Christopher Antus, the association’s office manager,” the attorney spoke for him.
“Will your executive director, Sandy Patterson, be showing up tonight?”
“She’s unavailable.”
“Where is she?” Rudolph asked.
“Out of the city, but I couldn’t tell you where,” Wirtz said.
“Now that I’ve answered your questions, tell me what you’re doing here.”
Rudolph handed him the search warrant. “The association’s records will be subpoenaed in the morning, for now we’re conducting a search of the offices.”
Antus looked guiltily toward the elevators. “No,” he said, starting forward, but Wirtz put out a hand to stop him.
“They’re within their rights, Chris,” the attorney said. He glared at Rudolph. “But all they can do tonight is look. We’ll just see about the subpoena in the morning.”
“There’s a safe in one of the offices. Would either of you gentlemen know the combination?” Rudolph asked.
“No,” Antus said, and Rudolph was sure he was lying.
“That’s okay, we’ll get it open,” Hailey said. It was obvious he’d taken an instant dislike to both men.
“You’ll be liable for damages,” Wirtz warned. “But if you’ll tell me what you’re looking for, we might be able to speed this up tonight. I’m sure we can work something out with Sam Blair, something to everybody’s satisfaction.”
Rudolph smiled inwardly, though he let nothing show in his expression. Blair’s name wasn’t mentioned on the search warrant.
“We’ll just have to look around upstairs. You’re certainly welcome to observe.”
“Damn right we will,” the attorney said.
Antus stepped back. “These guys are probably going to be here all night,” he told Wirtz. “I think I’ll go home and leave it to you.”
“I think not,” Rudolph said sternly. “Jack, do you want to read Mr. Antus his rights?”
“What’s this?” Wirtz exploded.
“A criminal investigation, counselor,” Hailey said. “You don’t think we’d stay up all night for anything else, do you?”
Morningside, Maryland
They’d spread the topographic maps and aerial photographs of the Cropley safe house on a conference table on the main floor of the warehouse. Kondo, Kajiyama and their six commandos were gathered around the table shortly before midnight. It was to be their final briefing before the operation.
