White House, page 26
“This is getting completely out of hand, and I’m going to have to make some tough decisions today,” Rudolph said. It was obvious he hadn’t slept last night. His suit was rumpled, and his eyes were red. He looked done in.
“How’d the raid on Far East’s offices go?” McGarvey asked. “Did you find something?”
Rudolph laughed, and glanced at the four men in the booth across from them. “Joseph Lee was funneling money not only to the White House, but to nine senators and twice that many representatives. We found cash, payment records and lobby points. We’re still working on that, but on the surface it looks as if Lee was representing the Japanese. Specifically the Ministry for International Trade and Industry.” MITI was as close to a Japanese central intelligence agency or intelligence clearinghouse as any governmental bureau in Tokyo. Their stated goal was the domination by Japanese business, and therefore political interests, in the eastern hemisphere.
The fact wasn’t surprising to McGarvey, only the extent of it. “Have you turned that over to Sam Blair yet?”
Rudolph shook his head. “That’s one of the decisions I have to make. Because once I do, it’ll leak to the media and all hell will break loose. After everything else that’s happened, Congress will almost certainly start impeachment hearings.” He rubbed his eyes. “Christ, what a mess.”
“Did you pick up Sandy Patterson?”
“We have a warrant for her arrest, but she’s disappeared, and that’s not the half of it. Apparently she was the one who introduced Tony Croft to the call girl. Her name is—or was—Judith Kline. She’s dead. Run over by a taxi in front of the convention center last night.” Rudolph looked beseechingly at McGarvey. “I had her on the phone, and she panicked. An accident.”
“She’s the one who told you that Croft was murdered?”
Rudolph nodded. “The ME says he killed himself, no doubt about it. But the woman took some photographs of a man she saw meeting with Croft. Right after Tony killed himself, she said she saw this guy coming out of the Hay Adams in a big hurry, carrying what looked like a manila envelope. And it’s a break, if you want to call it that. We got the film from her purse and developed it. He was registered at the Hay Adams under the name Thomas Wang. His real name is Bruce Kondo, and he works for Lee.”
McGarvey sat back. All the pieces were starting to come together. Trouble was he had no idea what it all meant or where it was leading.
Rudolph read something of that from his face. “What the hell is going on?”
“Lee is buying influence for the Japanese, and Tony Croft was giving them information,” McGarvey said. “That part’s easy. Question is, why’d they come after me, and why’d Croft pick this time to kill himself? Did the woman say anything else?”
“Nothing that makes any sense, except that Tony Croft was worried enough about what he was doing that he kept mentioning to her something about the White House. But she said he told her that he wasn’t talking about that White House, whatever the hell that means.”
“The cabby who hit her comes up clean?”
“Yeah. It was an accident. She was there in front of him, and he couldn’t do a thing about it.”
“Anything else on the film?”
“Nothing that means anything, unless she was planning on blackmailing Croft.”
“What about Far East’s records?”
“We’re just starting to sift through it all. Dan Parks and his people are still hauling stuff out of there. But it’s going to take weeks before we’re through it all. In the meantime what am I supposed to do?”
“Your job, Fred. You’re a cop investigating a crime.”
Rudolph nodded. “Dr. Pierone said the President wants to be kept informed.”
“I’ll bet he does,” McGarvey said, but his mind was elsewhere, spinning out connections between what was happening here in Washington to what was going on in the Sea of Japan. Something, some link between the two, was tickling the edges of his consciousness. Anomalies. The one fact that didn’t seem to belong. But he wasn’t quite seeing it yet.
“How is your daughter doing?” Rudolph asked, breaking McGarvey out of his thoughts.
“She’s on the mend, thanks,” McGarvey said. “Have you found out who put the safe house on the Web?”
“That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. But Croft had a lot of friends in the Bureau, so if you want to carry a dark thought in that direction, it could be one of them. We’re still checking.”
McGarvey dropped back into his thoughts.
“Whatever it is, it’s going to happen soon, isn’t it,” Rudolph said.
McGarvey looked up, another piece of the puzzle suddenly falling into place. “That’s it.”
“What is?”
“They have a time table,” McGarvey said. “All we have to do is find it.”
SIXTEEN
Morningside, Maryland
Kondo checked the plain gray government vans to make sure that nothing was missing. They’d brought them inside with Sandy Patterson’s blue Toyota van and loaded them last night. Then everyone had spent the night resting. After this operation there would be others, of course, but nothing would ever have the same urgency and flavor as this, because Japan would no longer have to hang her head in shame for something that had happened more than a half-century ago. India with her large navy and nuclear arsenal, China with her vast population and even ridiculous North Korea with her nuclear weapons, the triggers of which were held by a rabid madman, would no longer threaten the home islands. Japan would, at long last, take her rightful place in the eastern hemisphere, and no power on earth could resist her. It was a heady feeling. Melodramatic, but it had symmetry. The U.S. would be the dominant superpower in the West, and Nippon the new superpower in the East. Nothing on earth could stop them now.
This morning the team was in a subdued mood as they checked and rechecked their weapons, night-vision oculars, radios and other equipment.
Kajiyama came back from the front of the warehouse. He was dressed, as the others were, in street clothes. They wouldn’t change into their all-black uniforms until nightfall and time for deployment. “It’s ten o’clock. Time to head out.”
“Is everybody ready?”
“Hai,” Kajiyama said. His mood was bright, full of nervous energy. He glanced up toward the offices on the second floor. “What about the woman?”
Kondo followed his gaze. “Has she made all the final arrangements?”
“So far as I know, she has.”
“I’ll check with her.”
Kajiyama looked at him. “And then what, Kondo-san?”
“Get the men aboard the vans and pick up the boat at Riverview. We’ll rendezvous up river at Barton at five.”
“Is she coming with us, or with you?”
“Neither,” Kondo said.
“Kill her now,” Kajiyama said simply, and he went to gather the men as Kondo went upstairs.
Sandy Patterson was watching CNN on a small television in the manager’s office, where she’d slept last night. She looked up guiltily.
“Has there been anything about you or the Far East Trade Association?” Kondo asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She looked like she was on the verge of cracking up. There were splotches of color on her forehead and high cheeks, and her lower lip quivered.
“Did you call this morning to make certain the boat is ready for us?” he asked calmly, gentling her like a trainer might do with a skittish horse.
“Yes, you have the slip number.”
“The helicopter pilot has his instructions?”
She nodded.
“The Bonanza pilot is ready for another sight-seeing tour?”
“He’s waiting for you at Woodmore.”
“Did you tell him that you would be coming along for the ride, the same as last time?”
Her eyes narrowed in surprise. “No. You told me that it’d be best if I stayed here until … afterward.”
“Very good,” Kondo said.
Cropley, Maryland
Rudolph’s speculation that whatever was going to happen would happen soon bothered McGarvey. Back at his office he started work on the daily intelligence report that Murphy would use to brief the President later in the day, but he couldn’t keep his mind on the paperwork. He told his secretary that he would be gone for a couple of hours and drove out to the safe house, calling ahead so that Isaacson’s people would be expecting him.
Nothing had changed out here. The weather remained beautiful, and the house and grounds looked like a summer camp or health spa. Idyllic, calm, peaceful. But he couldn’t shake the dark cloud that seemed to hang over him. It was a sixth sense of impending disaster that an Agency psychologist had once explained was nothing more than a highly developed and finely tuned subconscious awareness of everything and everybody around him.
He parked his Nissan Pathfinder in front, and like before an armed guard appeared from around the corner of the house.
“I won’t be long, so don’t bother putting it in the garage,” McGarvey told him.
The guard waved, then said something into a lapel mike and went back around the corner.
Paul Isaacson and Todd Van Buren were in the dining room operations center having a cup of coffee when McGarvey came in.
“How’s it going this morning?” he asked.
“Quiet,” Isaacson said. “How about you? Anything new?”
McGarvey cocked his head to listen to the sounds of the house. Music was playing somewhere, and he thought he could hear someone talking in the kitchen. Normal sounds. Nothing out of the ordinary, but he was spooked. Someone was walking over his grave.
“Nothing that makes any sense,” he said distantly.
“But you’ve got the feeling.”
McGarvey laid a copy of the photograph Rudolph had given him on the table. “His name is Bruce Kondo, and he’s here in Washington.”
Isaacson studied the picture and handed it to Van Buren. “Do we have anything on him?”
“He works for Joseph Lee, we’ve got that much. And it looks like Lee is working for MITI. But if he’s the same guy we have in our files, he was involved in the Yokosuka riots a couple of years ago, working for the same group that I came up against.”
“It’s a revenge thing?”
McGarvey shrugged. “Unknown. There were no photographs in our files, and the Bureau doesn’t have much on him either.”
“But they could have sent him after you,” Isaacson pressed.
“It’s possible,” McGarvey conceded. “But if it’s the same guy, he was involved in Tony Croft’s death. So we’re looking for some kind of connection.”
“Is this guy any good?” Van Buren asked.
“Another unknown.” McGarvey shook himself out of his funk “I just came out to see how Katy and Liz were doing, and to tell you to keep on your toes, because I think if something’s going to happen, it’ll go down pretty soon. Maybe in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Isaacson had been studying him. “You’re worried.”
They went back together long enough that McGarvey wasn’t offended by the observation. “The Georgetown bomb was overkill. And if Kondo somehow drove Croft to suicide, he has finesse.”
“Quite a combination.”
“That it is,” McGarvey said. “Are they upstairs?”
“Yes, sir,” Van Buren said. “They went up to get ready for lunch. Will you be staying?”
“I have to get back,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see how they’re doing then get out of your hair.”
Isaacson got up and went out into the stairhall with him. “They’re as safe here as they would be anywhere else.”
It wasn’t very comforting, but McGarvey nodded. “I know,” he said. He went upstairs, knocked once and went in.
Kathleen, her hands on her hips, stood in the middle of the sitting room watching Elizabeth, who’d opened the window and was trying to pry open the latch that held the security shutter in place. The shutters on all the windows had been closed last night.
“Are you trying to escape?” McGarvey asked.
“They’re treating us like prisoners,” Elizabeth snapped crossly, a table knife on the latch. She grinned sheepishly. “Hi, Daddy.” She put the knife down, came over and gave her father a hug.
“If Paul wants the place buttoned up, leave it be, will you?”
Elizabeth nodded.
McGarvey gave Kathleen a hug. Dressed in a cream-colored skirt, matching blouse and flats, she looked as if she’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I’m not an administrator, and if it wasn’t for some good people out there I’d go crazy,” McGarvey said, trying to keep it light, but it was obvious Katy saw through him.
She gave him a questioning look. “Are you okay?”
McGarvey hadn’t been quite sure what he was going to say to them, but he decided that no matter how bad the truth was, it was better than a lie. He’d been telling them lies for too long a time.
“I don’t think the situation will last much longer,” he said to both of them. A look of concern crossed Kathleen’s face, but Liz lit up.
“Good,” she said viciously. “I want to get it over with.”
“What is it, Kirk?” Katy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but I’ve got a feeling that whatever they’ve planned is going to happen within the next day or two, so I want both of you to keep your heads down and listen to what Paul tells you.” McGarvey motioned to the window. “That means no screwing around with the security measures.”
Kathleen studied his face. “Are you going to be all right, Kirk?”
“If I don’t have to worry about you two.”
“I’ll behave,” Elizabeth promised.
On the way back to Langley, McGarvey’s cell phone chirped. It was Rencke and he sounded completely strung out.
“Oh, boy, Mac, you gotta get down here right now!”
“Have you found something?”
“The whole enchilada. Or at least the first course, and it’s a pisser!”
“I’m on my way.”
“Mac?” Rencke said, his tone suddenly guarded.
“Yeah?”
“Watch yourself. Really watch yourself this time.”
In the Air Above Cropley, Maryland
On the second pass, McGarvey’s gray Nissan SUV was gone, and at first Kondo thought that it had been put in the garage. But then he spotted it on the river road heading south toward Interstate 495.
“I’ve seen enough,” he told the Capital City Aviation pilot. “We can head back to Woodmore now.”
“Did you want to try the other side of the city, sir?”
“Next week,” Kondo said pleasantly.
McGarvey had come out to check on his wife and daughter this morning, which might mean he would be back this evening. It would be perfect, because they could make a clean kill and get out of the country without having to do a kidnapping, which was always more risky than an assassination. But they were running out of time and options, and McGarvey had to be stopped. Once they had the women, they would lure McGarvey to an isolated spot and kill them all. Not elegant, but it would work.
Catching a last glimpse of the safe house as the pilot banked to the southeast, he was bothered that the security team down there had shuttered all the windows in the house. That fact, along with McGarvey’s visit this morning, meant they were expecting trouble. Had there been a leak from Sandy Patterson’s office, he wondered? If so, it was too late now to find out. And too late to change their plans.
The operation would happen tonight, and Kondo found that he was truly looking forward to the challenge. He’d read McGarvey’s file and was struck by the obvious exaggerations in it. No man, he decided, could be that good.
Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia
Weekday traffic was a bitch on I-95, so it was after 2:00 P.M. by the time McGarvey reached the CIA’s Central Archives on the military reservation. The small parking lot in front of the two-story concrete block administration building was full, and security procedures were tougher than they were at night. But he was the DDO and was admitted to the elevators without delay, reaching the main floor of the storage vault eight hundred feet underground a few minutes later.
Rencke was not waiting for him this time, so after he signed in, a nervous air force staff sergeant drove him back to the map room.
“Sir, my supervisor, Captain Parker, asked if you could have a word with Mr. Rencke.”
“Has he made a mess of the files?”
“Yes, sir, but that’s not the problem. He’s pretty well locked down our mainframe. We have work to do here, but he’s somehow restricted our access to the system.”
“I’ll talk to him,” McGarvey promised. “But he’s just about done with his project. And it’s top priority right now.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.
Rencke, his sneakers off, lay flat on his back on top of the files, computer printouts and photographs strewn on the-long map table. His arms were crossed on his chest, and his eyes were open, staring up at the fluorescent lights and acoustical tile ceiling. For a split second McGarvey thought he was dead, but then Rencke turned his head.
“Mac,” he croaked, his voice harsh, as if he had a bad cold.
“Are you okay?”
Rencke shook his head. “No.” He sat up, crossed his legs and ran his fingers through his totally out-of-control hair. He shook his head again. “And neither are you … going to be okay, you know. It’s lavender. Oh, boy, really deep shit lavender, you know?”
McGarvey made his decision. “Come on, I’m getting you out of here. You look like shit, and you need a shower, something decent to eat and some sleep.”
“Now that I’ve finally hit pay dirt you want to fire me?”
McGarvey took him by the arm and helped him down off the table. “You can tell me on the way back to my apartment. Now what the hell did you do with your shoes?”
