White House, page 35
“He’ll either see me this morning, or I’ll go to Sam Blair.”
“That’s your prerogative,” Nance said coolly. “Although it would probably mean your position.”
“Tell the President that I have some new information.”
“We’re busy over here just now.”
“Do it,” McGarvey said. “He’ll want to know about this right now. I’ll hold.”
“Send it over.”
“I don’t think so. And neither would you. Now tell him, goddammit. I’ll hold.”
“Very well,” Nance said after a moment. He was gone for about a minute and when he came back he sounded angry. “Ten o’clock.”
“Thank you,” McGarvey said.
“Don’t be late.”
McGarvey hung up and went to the door. Otto was just coming in. He looked like he’d been put through the wringer, his out-of-control red hair practically standing on end. But he had a gleeful look in his eyes.
“Oh, boy, you did it again,” he said, his boyish voice hoarse.
“Have you eaten anything this morning?” McGarvey asked. “Other than Twinkies?”
Rencke shrugged indifferently, as if the thought of food was the farthest thing from his mind.
“There’s enough breakfast coming for both of you,” Ms. Swanfeld said. “But Mr. Murphy called again, and you have to speak with Mrs. McGarvey.”
“Is she awake already?”
“She didn’t get much sleep last night,” Ms. Swanfeld explained. “But she insisted on speaking to you the moment you arrived.”
“Okay. Stall the general for as long as you can, and tell my wife I’ll be right there.”
“What about Mr. Adkins?”
“I’ve already seen him,” McGarvey told her. “And if anyone else calls, I’m out.”
Ms. Swanfield gave her boss a faintly amused look. “Yes, sir.”
McGarvey took Rencke back into his office and closed the door. Standing next to the computer expert was like being near high voltage lines. A low-pitched hum of energy seemed to radiate from him.
“Maryland H. P. put on the wire that they had gunfire, an explosion and four unidentified males down at Morningside,” Rencke said. “Since your name wasn’t mentioned, I figured you’d done okay.”
“Sandy Patterson was out there with them. But she decided to switch sides.”
“Good thinking,” Rencke said. “Did you get anything useful from her?”
“This is all some Joseph Lee plot that’s been in the works for a couple of years,” McGarvey explained. “After Croft killed himself I was their number-one target. She was sure about that part.”
“Lee thought you could hurt him somehow,” Rencke said dreamily. “Something out of your past.”
“Lindsay is the only connection I can see,” McGarvey said. “But I still don’t know how deeply he’s involved with Lee, or what they’re up to.”
Rencke blinked. “Tanegashima,” he said. “Joseph Lee is at the Japanese space launch center.”
“How do you know that?”
“NSA recorded a portion of a phone message before the encryption device was activated. The call originated at the space center and was directed to MITI headquarters in Tokyo. The computer said there was a ninety-six percent probability of a match between the voice calling from Tanegashima and a file recording of Lee.”
McGarvey turned that over in his mind. Lee was at Tanegashima for the upcoming launch of the space station module. So what? Security at the center was very tight, so he could simply have gone there to lay low. But that didn’t seem right. “There’s still no tie between Joseph Lee and myself.”
“Not directly. But there is a connection between you and President Lindsay, who has, in turn, a strong connection with Lee.”
“And the space shot?” McGarvey wondered out loud.
“Could be Lindsay arranged a transfer of technology to the Japanese in exchange for campaign funds. Lee could have been the intermediary. It’s happened before.”
McGarvey shook his head. “It has to be something more than that. I don’t think they’d try to kill me merely because of some engineering advice or NASA trade secrets.”
“It’s got something to do with the launch,” Rencke said. “Lee’s being there isn’t a simple coincidence.”
“That only gives us a couple of days to figure it out.”
“Yeah,” Rencke said, resting his weight on one foot. He did that whenever he was deeply in thought. “We better not forget North Korea’s nukes,” he said softly. “That’s how all this started, you know.” Rencke blinked again. “The connection is there, Mac. I just don’t have it yet.”
“I’m going to see someone this morning who might have the answers. Or at least some of them. But you’re going to have to stick around to backstop me. In the meantime tell Adkins where Lee is hiding out.”
Rencke’s eyes focused on McGarvey. “David is going after Goliath? Storming the White House?”
“Something like that.”
“Nothing’s going to be the same.”
“It never is,” McGarvey said.
As a breakfast cart was being wheeled in from the executive dining room, McGarvey walked next door to the conference room where his wife and daughter had set up housekeeping last night. Kathleen, still dressed in the same clothing she’d been wearing at the safe house, her hair a mess, her makeup smudged, was pacing. She looked up in relief.
“I tried to stop her, Kirk. But she wouldn’t listen to me.”
McGarvey went around the long table to her, the same vise clamped around his heart. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s Elizabeth. She went over to Bethesda Hospital about an hour ago, and there wasn’t a thing I could say to talk her out of it.” Kathleen’s lower lip quivered but she was refusing to give in to her fear or her tiredness. “At least Dick Yemm is with her.”
“Is she hurt? Sick?”
“No. That’s where they took Todd Van Buren, and she wanted to be with him,” Kathleen said. “She figured that since you were going after the terrorists she didn’t have to stay here any longer. She was sure that you would take care of them, so she didn’t have to worry.”
McGarvey forced himself to calm down. In this instance his daughter was probably right. Lee had failed twice, his people here were all dead, Sandy Patterson, his stateside manager, had defected and he had hidden himself at Tanegashima. He wasn’t going to try again.
“You don’t need to stay here any longer, Katy,” he told her.
She looked at him, the expression on her face a mixture of relief and uncertainty. “You caught them?”
“Yeah.” McGarvey thought of everything his family had gone through because of him. It was over for them, and he was grateful for at least that much.
“There’s no possibility they’ll escape?”
McGarvey shook his head. “They’re dead.”
Kathleen shivered, as if a cold draft had come from somewhere.
“Get your things and I’ll drive you home.”
“Will you be able to stay—”
“My part’s not over with yet, Katy,” McGarvey said. “Could be a couple more days.”
“In that case you’d better take me over to Bethedsa. I want to be with our daughter.”
“I’ll have our people keep an eye on both of you. Just in case.”
“Good idea, Kirk.”
The White House
McGarvey arrived at the White House from Bethesda a couple of minutes before ten, assured that Dick Yemm would keep a close eye on his wife and daughter for as long as it took to straighten this out. But he had no idea how long that might take, because what he was about to do this morning was nothing short of challenging the Constitution. He was about to go farther out on a limb than he’d ever been before, and he was still clutching at straws, because he didn’t know the entire story. He couldn’t even guess at some of it yet, yet he was going up against the President of the United States.
Dale Nance came from his office, a look of contempt on his face. “Is this really necessary, McGarvey?”
“Yeah.”
“Stay here. I’ll see if he’s ready for you.” Nance went into the Oval Office, and came out a half minute later. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said. “Go on in.”
President Lindsay was seated at his desk, while Harold Secor poured a cup of coffee at the sideboard. One of four television screens in a bank of monitors was on and turned to CNN, but the sound was low. Two co-anchors were talking about something, their voices just audible.
“We were happy to hear that your family came out of the attack unharmed,” Secor said, bringing his coffee and sitting down across from the President. “Dr. Pierone has been instructed to pursue the investigation with the utmost vigor.”
“It won’t be necessary,” McGarvey told them. “We found the rest of them.”
“They’re in custody?” Secor asked his face lighting up.
“They’re dead. But we arrested Sandy Patterson, who worked for Joseph Lee. She’s agreed to tell us everything.” McGarvey looked directly at the President. “She and I had quite a talk this morning. About Tony Croft and me, and about Joseph Lee and his connection with the Japanese space program. We found him. He’s at their space center now.”
“You know this for a fact?” the President asked.
McGarvey nodded. “Yes, sir. NSA monitored some of his telephone conversations with MITI in Tokyo.”
“CNN is doing a piece on the launch right now,” Secor said indicating the television. An aerial view of the space launch facility could have been taken from above Kennedy Space Center. Tanegashima was a miniature version of the Cape.
“Our satellite pictures are better,” McGarvey said.
“I’m sure they are,” the President said. “But I wasn’t aware that we were monitoring them so closely.”
“You need hard intelligence, Mr. President. Not guesswork. Especially with what’s going on over there right now.”
“Harold, could you leave us alone for a few minutes? There’s something I’d like to say to Mr. McGarvey in private.”
Secor gave the President a look of surprise, but then left the room, closing the door softly.
The President touched a button on his telephone console, then looked at McGarvey standing in front of his desk like a principal might look at a student in trouble.
“Okay, mister. We’re alone, and I’ve switched off the digital recorder. Obviously you have something to say to me. Well, now’s your chance.” The President sat back in his leather chair.
“I don’t have everything yet, but I do have enough to know that at the very least you are a liar and a fool. At worst you’re a traitor.” McGarvey had psyched himself up for this moment, but now he wasn’t so sure he was doing the right thing. But Lindsay reacted about the way McGarvey thought he would.
“You can’t talk to me that way, McGarvey. Not even in private.”
“I sincerely wish I didn’t have to, sir. But a lot of very good people are dead either because of you directly, or because you allowed your staff to do it for you. And the hell of it is, when the heat was turned up, you let your friends like Tony Croft take the fall for you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the President said angrily. His face was red.
“Croft was in direct contact with Joseph Lee not only to accept payments to your campaign fund, but to pass along information which made its way to the Japanese government.”
“No secrets were passed.”
“That’s up to a congressional review committee to decide, Mr. President. And there will be an investigation when I turn over what I know. But besides trading information for cash, and allowing Croft to kill himself for your sake, why come after me and my family?”
“I had nothing to do with any of that,” Lindsay said shaking his head. Most of his anger had dissipated. He seemed numb. “I swear to you.”
“Are you still holding a grudge against me after all these years?”
A puzzled look came over the President. “What are you talking about?”
“Santiago,” McGarvey said. “You were on the Senate watchdog committee that withdrew authorization for my assignment to kill General Paolo. Do you remember that?”
“I remember serving on the Senate Subcommittee on Central Intelligence. But no specific incident.”
“I have the file, Mr. President. You were the senator who was supposed to inform the Agency about the decision to pull me out. But you waited until you knew it was too late for me. Why?”
The President shook his head again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How about New Year’s Day, nineteen seventy? Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie.”
The President’s jaw tightened.
“I probably saved your life, Mr. President, but I embarrassed you in front of your friends. Made you look like a fool.”
“What’s your point?”
Out of the corner of his eye McGarvey noticed that CNN was displaying a cutaway model of a launchpad gantry at Tanegashima.
“The Japanese have no love for me, but Lee had no reason to order my assassination simply because I had been appointed to head the Directorate of Operations.”
“Do you honestly think that I ordered your death because of some incident that supposedly happened thirty years ago?”
“I think that in discussions with your staff about Joseph Lee and what you and he were doing for each other, the fact that he was connected with the Japanese government, and not Taiwan, came up. As did anything that could possibly hurt your arrangement, such as my appointment.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not on the surface. But you knew from past experience all about me, and Lee was told. Your people may even have told him about Berlin and Santiago, and he made the decision on his own to have me killed. Maybe he was concerned that if I started snooping around as DDO, I might uncover your real connection with him. And his actual agenda.”
McGarvey glanced again at the television screen. The various parts of the launch gantry were being labeled and their functions explained. He could just make out the newsman’s words.
“What do you think that agenda is?”
A large, enclosed elevator ran up the outside of the gantry to a sealed chamber at the top, opposite the rocket’s payload section. As the announcer continued to talk a label appeared beside the chamber: The White House.
The bottom dropped out from beneath McGarvey. He turned back to the President and looked at the man in amazement. Lindsay was not a traitor, McGarvey had been wrong about that part. But the President had been manipulated, as had the twenty or thirty senators and congressmen who Joseph Lee had bought. They had given him exactly what he had wanted to buy when he came to Washington. The incredible part of the entire affair was that it was completely out in the open. It had been from the start.
McGarvey looked at the TV screen again. Japan had been awarded a bigger slice of the international space station than it had been previously awarded at the behest of Lindsay and a group of senators and congressmen paid for by Lee. This, despite the fact Japan’s economy was nearly in shambles and building and launching the bigger module was straining their financial abilities to the breaking point.
Was it simply for a space station module? McGarvey didn’t think so. Whatever the Japanese were about to put into orbit would have nothing to do with Freedom, and Tony Croft knew or guessed something about it. According to the call girl he’d been sleeping with, his biggest worry was the white house. But not the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was worried about the one at Tanegashima. And whatever the Japanese were going to launch also had something to do with North Korea’s nuclear capability and the explosion at Kimch’aek. He could think of a number of possibilities, none of them very comforting because Lee was willing not only to suborn a U.S. President, he was willing to assassinate a deputy director of CIA Operations, no matter what the cost or political fallout might be.
“I asked what you think that agenda is,” the President said.
“Mr. President, I owe you an apology, sir,” McGarvey said.
Lindsay gave him a wry smile. “Yes?”
“You’re not a traitor, sir, but your people are guilty of murder, or at least complicity to murder. A stink goes all the way back to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. Your foreign policy is a joke. And you’ve unwittingly made a lot of questionable deals because of it.” McGarvey shook his head. “But no, Mr. President, you’re no traitor. You’re a fool.”
“You’re fired,” the President shouted, enraged. “You’re finished. If I can arrange it, and I think I can, you’re going to jail for a very long time.”
McGarvey turned and walked out of the Oval Office.
“You sonofabitch,” Lindsay shouted after him. “You sonofabitch!”
TWENTY-THREE
Seawolf
“Conn, sonar. Sierra seventeen is turning inboard to port,” Seaman Fischer reported excitedly.
“Does he have positive contact on us yet?” Harding demanded.
“I don’t think so, Skipper. The current is probably messing up his sonar, but he suspects something. And if he keeps it up he’s going to find us.”
The problem was they lay on the bottom in three hundred feet of water at the southwestern extremity of the Eastern Channel below Tsushima Island. They weren’t deep enough to enjoy the protection of a thermocline, and they didn’t have much maneuvering room. The only things going for them were the fierce current in the channel, ten foot seas on the surface and the fact that when Seawolf was rigged for ultrasilent operations she was extremely quiet. In addition, it was thirty minutes past midnight. Despite radar and collision avoidance systems, operations like this in which so many ships were in close proximity to each other—sonar had identified eleven surface targets—the darkness of night made everything all the more dangerous. Accidents could and often did happen.
