White House, page 41
Joseph Lee was having trouble maintaining his composure in the wake of the launch delay and his security chief’s inability to find and deal with McGarvey. He sat in front of a low table, his back erect, an austere expression on his narrow features, as two girls served him his lunch.
Kunimatsu was busy at launch control and with the international news media at the media center five thousand meters from the pad, so he wasn’t available to explain the trouble with the rocket’s computer system. Nor was Miriam here to lend him her good counsel. He didn’t dare telephone her at their Washington home, because he knew the lines were bugged. He was alone with his thoughts, a rare occurrence that he did not enjoy.
Time was against them now. The extra thirty hours gave McGarvey a chance to somehow make it here, and the time gave the media that much more of an opportunity to find out about the death of Major Ripley, even though the rest of the American Tiger team had been isolated from the news people and were being denied access to outside telephone lines or cell phones.
Hirota telephoned from Nagano, and Lee dismissed the two young women.
“It was my people in the car,” the security chief said. “He shot one of them to death and somehow broke the other’s jaw and neck.”
Lee held himself in check. “Were there no witnesses?”
“Not after they arrested him at the train station in Ichinobe,” Hirota said. “Every shinkansen station and every airport in Japan is being watched, but so far he hasn’t shown up.”
“You should have sent more men. You underestimated him.”
“There was a need to keep this contained,” Hirota said, respectfully. “But flying across the Pacific and driving all night, he has to be tired. And without transportation he must be hiding somewhere here in Nagano.”
“No,” Lee said emphatically. “I disagree.”
“Hai,” Hirota replied immediately. Lee appreciated the security chief’s instant compliance; it was so much unlike Kondo.
“He is long gone from Nagano, and well on his way here by now. Come back and we will plan for his arrival.”
“But how will he get to the island?”
“He’s going to steal a boat,” Lee said. He looked out the window that faced the launchpad, the rocket standing tall in the azure sky, and he felt powerful, all-seeing, as if he could foretell the future. “You must admire this man, Hirota-san,” he said dreamily. “Before he dies I wish to talk with him. You will see to that.”
“Hai,” Hirota said, but this time his answer wasn’t so quick in coming.
Kyushu
It was dark by the time the congested four-lane highway crossed the narrow strait from Shimonoseki and McGarvey arrived on the south island of Kyushu. This was Japan’s most ancient region, and the feeling of the lush but volcanic countryside changed immediately from the hustle-bustle frenetic pace of the north, to the more rural, relaxed atmosphere of the south.
Traffic thinned out, and a light, gentle rain began to fall, with a mysterious mist rising from the Inland Sea. The main highway bypassed the coastal town of Kokura, splitting southeast toward Beppu and southwest to Kyusho’s largest city, Fukuoka. He headed southwest.
He had checked into the Fujiya Hotel in Nagano. The desk clerk at the three-hundred-year-old ryokan had been very helpful renting him the royal suite for three days at ¥30,000 per day and arranging for a rental car for the entire period. McGarvey had taken a long, leisurely bath, changed clothes and was on the road by 9:00 A.M.
The Lexus ES400 was supremely comfortable and very fast. Since he was driving a car with the proper paperwork, he got on the main north-south toll road and made excellent time, stopping only for something to eat when he refueled the car.
By noon, when he was well away from Nagano, he telephoned Rencke with his new plans.
“They’ll never expect that,” Rencke said. “It’ll take me about twenty minutes. Can I call you back?”
“Yes.”
Traffic had been very heavy on the toll road, but it moved fast, though not as fast as the interstates in the U.S.
Rencke was back a half hour later. “Okay, you want to go to Fukuoka. I’ve booked you a room at the Hotel New Otani Hakata under your Allain work name. Everything else should be set within the next couple of hours, and I’ll fax the package to you at the hotel.”
“You might take some heat for this, so cover yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me, just watch yourself,” Rencke warned. “It’s you with your ass hanging out in the wind, and when Lee looks up and sees you standing there, he’s going to be one unhappy camper.”
McGarvey had to laugh. “I hope so.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tanegashima Space Center
When Maggie finished packing, it was coming up on 8:00 P.M. She looked out the window where two guards were waiting with the van that was to take them to the airstrip. The countdown clock was at T-minus three hours, and activity at the launchpad and in launch control was heating up. But she and the rest of the Tiger team would miss it.
She went back to the bed where she zippered up her B4 bag and folded it. She could not get the vision of Frank’s broken, bloodied body out of her mind. She’d lived with it for nearly forty-eight hours, going over and over the part where she’d bent down to touch his cheek, but then recoiled. She was frightened that she didn’t have better self-control. She was an engineer, a pilot, an astronaut, and yet she’d been afraid to touch the body of the man she’d loved.
She went into the tiny bathroom, where she splashed some cold water on her face, brushed her hair and then studied her haggard reflection in the mirror. They had murdered Frank for what he had seen, or thought he had seen, and for once in her life she didn’t know what to do. The enormity of it was staggering. And the past two days of house arrest had been surreal; her isolation made all the more complete because the one man she could have talked to about what was happening was dead.
Frank had made an unauthorized trip to the top of the payload service tower, where he apparently lost his balance and fallen over two hundred feet to his death. There were no witnesses. Kimura and another man who’d been identified as chief of security for the center were sympathetic but skeptical when Maggie and the others swore they didn’t know why Frank had gone out there.
Afterwards, when she had tried to telephone Hartley, her call had been blocked, and she and the others had been taken to their quarters where they were placed under house arrest. They had served her meals in her room, refusing to answer any of her questions about what was going on, why they were treating her like this and what was happening to Hilman and others. Her laptop had been taken away, the phone and television were dead and she had nearly lost her mind with fear, anger, boredom and guilt about Frank.
A half hour ago, one of the security people in white coveralls with the NSDA logo on the breast had come up and informed her that she must pack; she and the others would be leaving the space center sometime before the launch.
“Once we get back everything will come out, you bastard,” she blurted.
The security officer looked at her without blinking, then turned and left.
She sat down on the bed now, her hands clasped between her knees, and tears of rage and frustration slipped down her cheeks. She was being foolish; she knew that, but she didn’t think that she would ever trust a Japanese again. They had murdered Frank, and they were arrogant enough to send the rest of the team home without so much as a word of explanation.
“Bastards,” she said softly. “Bastards.”
Joseph Lee, dressed in a dark blue business suit, rode in the backseat of a Mercedes limousine from his quarters to launch control. In the distance, the giant H2C rocket was brightly lit on the pad, and the entire base was alive with last-minute activity. He looked out a window at a ten-passenger van which came from a connecting road and headed directly for the media center and viewing grandstands across a field from the vehicle assembly building. The decision to allow the international media to witness the launch had been made in Tokyo, overriding his strong suggestion that the center be placed strictly off-limits to the outside world. His driver pulled into the launch control building parking lot and went directly to the back entrance.
Miriam was on her way over finally. Once she was airborne she’d called to tell him that she’d been followed to Dulles but that no one had interfered with her movements. For at least that much he was relieved. He thought it might have been a mistake leaving her there. He’d considered the possibility that McGarvey might have gone after her in retaliation. But now that she was safely away he no longer had to worry about her. He could concentrate his complete attention on McGarvey, who had dropped out of sight as if he had never existed.
He’d seen a partial transcript of the man’s dossier, but until now he had dismissed most of the fantastic report as the probable figment of someone’s imagination. But after everything that had happened, he was no longer sure about his assessment. By all accounts McGarvey was an extraordinary man. He was in Japan at this very moment, of that there was no doubt. And on the drive over, Lee had trouble keeping his own imagination in check, wondering if the man had somehow gotten here to the space center and was lurking in the shadows or crawling up the beach like some nocturnal sea monster.
The countdown clock on the side of launch control switched to T-minus 1:28:00 as Lee got out of the limo and went inside. The armed guards knew him by sight. Hirota was upstairs in the security operations center. Three walls of the long narrow room were filled with television monitors that were connected to hundreds of lo-lux closed-circuit cameras around the space center. Every centimeter of the perimeter, and especially the approaches from the beaches, was covered, as was nearly every square meter of the entire sprawling base. Embedded in the security pass that everyone wore were computer chips that contained the personal data of the bearer, his or her specific job, as well as a transponder that radiated a locator signal. Anyone unauthorized anywhere on base would be detected immediately and the appropriate closed-circuit television camera would home in on them.
“Any sign of him yet?” Lee asked.
“He’s not here,” Hirota said, looking up from a bank of monitors he was standing in front of. “Everyone is accounted for, unless he somehow managed to steal a valid pass. But he would have had to get on base first. And that’s impossible.”
The center’s fourth wall was made of one-way glass that looked down on the launch control center, extremely busy now that the clock had reached and passed the T-minus-ninety-minute mark. Lee looked down at the launch director’s console, where Kunimatsu was holding a conference with a half-dozen people.
Hirota came over. “Even if he got as far as Kyushu, he’s simply run out of time.”
Lee looked at his security chief. He wanted to argue, but he couldn’t. The base was tight. And even if McGarvey was here, there was nothing he could do now to stop the launch short of blowing up the rocket or the launch control center, both of which were under heavy guard. For that he would need a substantial quantity of explosives. But something Hirota said suddenly struck him.
“What do you mean, ‘Even if he got as far as Kyushu’?”
Hirota’s lips compressed. “A man who roughly matches McGarvey’s description might have checked into a hotel in Nagano about the same time we found the missing men from Ichinobe.”
“Why wasn’t he arrested?” Lee demanded sharply.
“We didn’t find out about it until a couple of hours ago. He rented a car yesterday, and he never came back. But it wasn’t until this afternoon when the hotel reported it.”
“It’s him.”
“Possibly, Lee-san. But even if he made it to Kyushu, and we’re checking every hotel and parking lot on the island, he still had to face the problem of crossing eighty kilometers of open sea. No boats have been reported missing in the past forty-eight hours.”
“What about a light airplane?”
“None have been reported missing.” Hirota said. “In any event we would have picked him up on radar. And there aren’t that many places on the island where he could have landed. But even if he somehow had got that far, someone would have spotted the airplane.” Hirota shook his head. “McGarvey is not here, and the launch will go on as scheduled.”
Lee looked down at the tiers of consoles. Kunimatsu had finished his conference and had returned to his own desk on the upper level. Lee’s eyes strayed to the consoles reserved for the American Tiger team. The monitors were lit up, but no one was seated there.
“When does the American team leave?” he asked.
“They’re giving us some trouble, as we expected they would. But my people are with them, and they’ll be leaving at any minute.” Hirota looked more sure of himself than he sounded. “The problem will come afterward,” he went on. “They’ll demand an investigation.”
Lee managed a slight cruel smile. “By then it won’t matter.”
McGarvey climbed out of the airport van and hurried into the media service center with the half-dozen other last-minute reporters he’d joined in Fukuoka. His credentials were checked for the fourth time, and just inside the door he was issued a base pass, which hung around his neck. He went with the others to the briefing room where they were given media packets, watched a five-minute tape on the mission and were quickly advised on the use of the facility’s communications center.
On the short drive from the airstrip, he had pretended to be asleep in the backseat while through half-lidded eyes he watched out the window for an opening, anything that would help him. Tanegashima was very much like Kennedy an hour or so before a launch; there seemed to be traffic and activity everywhere, and they had to pass six security checkpoints in as many miles. Now that he was here, he needed to figure out how to stop the launch, and for that he needed more information.
The press credentials and launch invitation package that Otto had worked up and faxed to the hotel were perfect. The Japanese media officers and security people didn’t raise an eyebrow when he presented himself for this morning at the Tanegashima offices in the Fukuoka Prefecture Police Department. His name and description had to be posted in every police department in Japan, but they were looking for Kirk McGarvey, an American spy trying to steal a boat, not Pierre Allain, a Belgian journalist here to cover the launch.
He had missed the morning plane to Tanegashima, but he’d been told that a few reporters were coming down from Tokyo at the last minute and would be meeting at the Hotel New Otani. A final flight was being arranged to get them out to the space center in plenty of time for the launch.
Back at the hotel, McGarvey kept out of sight for most of the day, checking from time to time with the front desk for the latest information on the last flight to Tanegashima. He was committed to this course of action, and there was very little he could do except wait. It would have been practically impossible to steal a boat in the daylight hours and make it to the island without being spotted. And by the time it got dark it would be far too late for him to try, unless there was another delay in the launch, something he could not count on. Nevertheless, it had been a long, difficult afternoon for him with nothing to do but keep out of sight.
“You have a little less than twenty minutes to prepare your initial dispatches for filing,” Tsuginoni Moriyama, the media rep, was telling them. His English was impeccable, and he constantly smiled. “We would like you to move to the viewing stands no later than T-minus sixty minutes. Or, if you wish, you may elect to remain here and watch the launch on the television monitors. Tapes will be provided for you after the launch. But I must caution you that we have only a limited number of telephones and digital feeds off the island. Because of other sensitive equipment here, you may not use cellular or satellite equipment from now until T-plus thirty minutes.”
There were a number of groans, and several heads shot up.
The press officer looked around the room. He was still smiling. “If there are no questions, other than the use of cellular or satellite equipment, this will be your last briefing until after the launch when we will meet here at T-plus thirty minutes.”
An attractive, middle-aged woman raised her hand. “Judith Rawlins, New York Times. I would like to interview the American Tiger team before the launch.”
“I’m sorry, that is not possible,” the press officer said. “At this moment, as you might guess, they are extremely busy at the launch control center.”
McGarvey, who was sitting a few feet away from the New York Times reporter, heard her say, “Bullshit.”
“No more questions?” The press officer looked around the room, then nodded. “Well then, wish us luck, and we’ll see you back here once we’re in orbit.” He stepped away from the podium and disappeared through a door in the back.
The New York Times reporter remained seated and took some notes while the others headed down the corridor to the media communications center. A table was set with a coffee and tea service. McGarvey poured two cups of coffee and came back to where the reporter was seated. He held a cup out to her.
“I didn’t know if you used cream or sugar,” he said.
She looked up, smiled pleasantly, and took the coffee. “Black will do fine,” she said. “Thanks. Do I know you?”
“Pierre Allain, AP Brussels.”
“Judith Rawlins, New York Times.” They shook hands, and McGarvey sat down beside her.
“I had an ulterior motive bringing you coffee,” he said.
She laughed warily. “Most men do. What’s your story?”
“I’d like to get an interview with Frank Ripley too, or at least with one of his team members, before the launch. But if they’re in launch control I’m afraid I’m out of luck. But you didn’t seem to think the press officer was telling the truth.”
“They’re not there. They’ve been taken off the mission.”
“How do you know that?”
She eyed him speculatively, then shrugged. “I have a friend in Houston. What’s your interest in Ripley?”
Kunimatsu was busy at launch control and with the international news media at the media center five thousand meters from the pad, so he wasn’t available to explain the trouble with the rocket’s computer system. Nor was Miriam here to lend him her good counsel. He didn’t dare telephone her at their Washington home, because he knew the lines were bugged. He was alone with his thoughts, a rare occurrence that he did not enjoy.
Time was against them now. The extra thirty hours gave McGarvey a chance to somehow make it here, and the time gave the media that much more of an opportunity to find out about the death of Major Ripley, even though the rest of the American Tiger team had been isolated from the news people and were being denied access to outside telephone lines or cell phones.
Hirota telephoned from Nagano, and Lee dismissed the two young women.
“It was my people in the car,” the security chief said. “He shot one of them to death and somehow broke the other’s jaw and neck.”
Lee held himself in check. “Were there no witnesses?”
“Not after they arrested him at the train station in Ichinobe,” Hirota said. “Every shinkansen station and every airport in Japan is being watched, but so far he hasn’t shown up.”
“You should have sent more men. You underestimated him.”
“There was a need to keep this contained,” Hirota said, respectfully. “But flying across the Pacific and driving all night, he has to be tired. And without transportation he must be hiding somewhere here in Nagano.”
“No,” Lee said emphatically. “I disagree.”
“Hai,” Hirota replied immediately. Lee appreciated the security chief’s instant compliance; it was so much unlike Kondo.
“He is long gone from Nagano, and well on his way here by now. Come back and we will plan for his arrival.”
“But how will he get to the island?”
“He’s going to steal a boat,” Lee said. He looked out the window that faced the launchpad, the rocket standing tall in the azure sky, and he felt powerful, all-seeing, as if he could foretell the future. “You must admire this man, Hirota-san,” he said dreamily. “Before he dies I wish to talk with him. You will see to that.”
“Hai,” Hirota said, but this time his answer wasn’t so quick in coming.
Kyushu
It was dark by the time the congested four-lane highway crossed the narrow strait from Shimonoseki and McGarvey arrived on the south island of Kyushu. This was Japan’s most ancient region, and the feeling of the lush but volcanic countryside changed immediately from the hustle-bustle frenetic pace of the north, to the more rural, relaxed atmosphere of the south.
Traffic thinned out, and a light, gentle rain began to fall, with a mysterious mist rising from the Inland Sea. The main highway bypassed the coastal town of Kokura, splitting southeast toward Beppu and southwest to Kyusho’s largest city, Fukuoka. He headed southwest.
He had checked into the Fujiya Hotel in Nagano. The desk clerk at the three-hundred-year-old ryokan had been very helpful renting him the royal suite for three days at ¥30,000 per day and arranging for a rental car for the entire period. McGarvey had taken a long, leisurely bath, changed clothes and was on the road by 9:00 A.M.
The Lexus ES400 was supremely comfortable and very fast. Since he was driving a car with the proper paperwork, he got on the main north-south toll road and made excellent time, stopping only for something to eat when he refueled the car.
By noon, when he was well away from Nagano, he telephoned Rencke with his new plans.
“They’ll never expect that,” Rencke said. “It’ll take me about twenty minutes. Can I call you back?”
“Yes.”
Traffic had been very heavy on the toll road, but it moved fast, though not as fast as the interstates in the U.S.
Rencke was back a half hour later. “Okay, you want to go to Fukuoka. I’ve booked you a room at the Hotel New Otani Hakata under your Allain work name. Everything else should be set within the next couple of hours, and I’ll fax the package to you at the hotel.”
“You might take some heat for this, so cover yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me, just watch yourself,” Rencke warned. “It’s you with your ass hanging out in the wind, and when Lee looks up and sees you standing there, he’s going to be one unhappy camper.”
McGarvey had to laugh. “I hope so.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tanegashima Space Center
When Maggie finished packing, it was coming up on 8:00 P.M. She looked out the window where two guards were waiting with the van that was to take them to the airstrip. The countdown clock was at T-minus three hours, and activity at the launchpad and in launch control was heating up. But she and the rest of the Tiger team would miss it.
She went back to the bed where she zippered up her B4 bag and folded it. She could not get the vision of Frank’s broken, bloodied body out of her mind. She’d lived with it for nearly forty-eight hours, going over and over the part where she’d bent down to touch his cheek, but then recoiled. She was frightened that she didn’t have better self-control. She was an engineer, a pilot, an astronaut, and yet she’d been afraid to touch the body of the man she’d loved.
She went into the tiny bathroom, where she splashed some cold water on her face, brushed her hair and then studied her haggard reflection in the mirror. They had murdered Frank for what he had seen, or thought he had seen, and for once in her life she didn’t know what to do. The enormity of it was staggering. And the past two days of house arrest had been surreal; her isolation made all the more complete because the one man she could have talked to about what was happening was dead.
Frank had made an unauthorized trip to the top of the payload service tower, where he apparently lost his balance and fallen over two hundred feet to his death. There were no witnesses. Kimura and another man who’d been identified as chief of security for the center were sympathetic but skeptical when Maggie and the others swore they didn’t know why Frank had gone out there.
Afterwards, when she had tried to telephone Hartley, her call had been blocked, and she and the others had been taken to their quarters where they were placed under house arrest. They had served her meals in her room, refusing to answer any of her questions about what was going on, why they were treating her like this and what was happening to Hilman and others. Her laptop had been taken away, the phone and television were dead and she had nearly lost her mind with fear, anger, boredom and guilt about Frank.
A half hour ago, one of the security people in white coveralls with the NSDA logo on the breast had come up and informed her that she must pack; she and the others would be leaving the space center sometime before the launch.
“Once we get back everything will come out, you bastard,” she blurted.
The security officer looked at her without blinking, then turned and left.
She sat down on the bed now, her hands clasped between her knees, and tears of rage and frustration slipped down her cheeks. She was being foolish; she knew that, but she didn’t think that she would ever trust a Japanese again. They had murdered Frank, and they were arrogant enough to send the rest of the team home without so much as a word of explanation.
“Bastards,” she said softly. “Bastards.”
Joseph Lee, dressed in a dark blue business suit, rode in the backseat of a Mercedes limousine from his quarters to launch control. In the distance, the giant H2C rocket was brightly lit on the pad, and the entire base was alive with last-minute activity. He looked out a window at a ten-passenger van which came from a connecting road and headed directly for the media center and viewing grandstands across a field from the vehicle assembly building. The decision to allow the international media to witness the launch had been made in Tokyo, overriding his strong suggestion that the center be placed strictly off-limits to the outside world. His driver pulled into the launch control building parking lot and went directly to the back entrance.
Miriam was on her way over finally. Once she was airborne she’d called to tell him that she’d been followed to Dulles but that no one had interfered with her movements. For at least that much he was relieved. He thought it might have been a mistake leaving her there. He’d considered the possibility that McGarvey might have gone after her in retaliation. But now that she was safely away he no longer had to worry about her. He could concentrate his complete attention on McGarvey, who had dropped out of sight as if he had never existed.
He’d seen a partial transcript of the man’s dossier, but until now he had dismissed most of the fantastic report as the probable figment of someone’s imagination. But after everything that had happened, he was no longer sure about his assessment. By all accounts McGarvey was an extraordinary man. He was in Japan at this very moment, of that there was no doubt. And on the drive over, Lee had trouble keeping his own imagination in check, wondering if the man had somehow gotten here to the space center and was lurking in the shadows or crawling up the beach like some nocturnal sea monster.
The countdown clock on the side of launch control switched to T-minus 1:28:00 as Lee got out of the limo and went inside. The armed guards knew him by sight. Hirota was upstairs in the security operations center. Three walls of the long narrow room were filled with television monitors that were connected to hundreds of lo-lux closed-circuit cameras around the space center. Every centimeter of the perimeter, and especially the approaches from the beaches, was covered, as was nearly every square meter of the entire sprawling base. Embedded in the security pass that everyone wore were computer chips that contained the personal data of the bearer, his or her specific job, as well as a transponder that radiated a locator signal. Anyone unauthorized anywhere on base would be detected immediately and the appropriate closed-circuit television camera would home in on them.
“Any sign of him yet?” Lee asked.
“He’s not here,” Hirota said, looking up from a bank of monitors he was standing in front of. “Everyone is accounted for, unless he somehow managed to steal a valid pass. But he would have had to get on base first. And that’s impossible.”
The center’s fourth wall was made of one-way glass that looked down on the launch control center, extremely busy now that the clock had reached and passed the T-minus-ninety-minute mark. Lee looked down at the launch director’s console, where Kunimatsu was holding a conference with a half-dozen people.
Hirota came over. “Even if he got as far as Kyushu, he’s simply run out of time.”
Lee looked at his security chief. He wanted to argue, but he couldn’t. The base was tight. And even if McGarvey was here, there was nothing he could do now to stop the launch short of blowing up the rocket or the launch control center, both of which were under heavy guard. For that he would need a substantial quantity of explosives. But something Hirota said suddenly struck him.
“What do you mean, ‘Even if he got as far as Kyushu’?”
Hirota’s lips compressed. “A man who roughly matches McGarvey’s description might have checked into a hotel in Nagano about the same time we found the missing men from Ichinobe.”
“Why wasn’t he arrested?” Lee demanded sharply.
“We didn’t find out about it until a couple of hours ago. He rented a car yesterday, and he never came back. But it wasn’t until this afternoon when the hotel reported it.”
“It’s him.”
“Possibly, Lee-san. But even if he made it to Kyushu, and we’re checking every hotel and parking lot on the island, he still had to face the problem of crossing eighty kilometers of open sea. No boats have been reported missing in the past forty-eight hours.”
“What about a light airplane?”
“None have been reported missing.” Hirota said. “In any event we would have picked him up on radar. And there aren’t that many places on the island where he could have landed. But even if he somehow had got that far, someone would have spotted the airplane.” Hirota shook his head. “McGarvey is not here, and the launch will go on as scheduled.”
Lee looked down at the tiers of consoles. Kunimatsu had finished his conference and had returned to his own desk on the upper level. Lee’s eyes strayed to the consoles reserved for the American Tiger team. The monitors were lit up, but no one was seated there.
“When does the American team leave?” he asked.
“They’re giving us some trouble, as we expected they would. But my people are with them, and they’ll be leaving at any minute.” Hirota looked more sure of himself than he sounded. “The problem will come afterward,” he went on. “They’ll demand an investigation.”
Lee managed a slight cruel smile. “By then it won’t matter.”
McGarvey climbed out of the airport van and hurried into the media service center with the half-dozen other last-minute reporters he’d joined in Fukuoka. His credentials were checked for the fourth time, and just inside the door he was issued a base pass, which hung around his neck. He went with the others to the briefing room where they were given media packets, watched a five-minute tape on the mission and were quickly advised on the use of the facility’s communications center.
On the short drive from the airstrip, he had pretended to be asleep in the backseat while through half-lidded eyes he watched out the window for an opening, anything that would help him. Tanegashima was very much like Kennedy an hour or so before a launch; there seemed to be traffic and activity everywhere, and they had to pass six security checkpoints in as many miles. Now that he was here, he needed to figure out how to stop the launch, and for that he needed more information.
The press credentials and launch invitation package that Otto had worked up and faxed to the hotel were perfect. The Japanese media officers and security people didn’t raise an eyebrow when he presented himself for this morning at the Tanegashima offices in the Fukuoka Prefecture Police Department. His name and description had to be posted in every police department in Japan, but they were looking for Kirk McGarvey, an American spy trying to steal a boat, not Pierre Allain, a Belgian journalist here to cover the launch.
He had missed the morning plane to Tanegashima, but he’d been told that a few reporters were coming down from Tokyo at the last minute and would be meeting at the Hotel New Otani. A final flight was being arranged to get them out to the space center in plenty of time for the launch.
Back at the hotel, McGarvey kept out of sight for most of the day, checking from time to time with the front desk for the latest information on the last flight to Tanegashima. He was committed to this course of action, and there was very little he could do except wait. It would have been practically impossible to steal a boat in the daylight hours and make it to the island without being spotted. And by the time it got dark it would be far too late for him to try, unless there was another delay in the launch, something he could not count on. Nevertheless, it had been a long, difficult afternoon for him with nothing to do but keep out of sight.
“You have a little less than twenty minutes to prepare your initial dispatches for filing,” Tsuginoni Moriyama, the media rep, was telling them. His English was impeccable, and he constantly smiled. “We would like you to move to the viewing stands no later than T-minus sixty minutes. Or, if you wish, you may elect to remain here and watch the launch on the television monitors. Tapes will be provided for you after the launch. But I must caution you that we have only a limited number of telephones and digital feeds off the island. Because of other sensitive equipment here, you may not use cellular or satellite equipment from now until T-plus thirty minutes.”
There were a number of groans, and several heads shot up.
The press officer looked around the room. He was still smiling. “If there are no questions, other than the use of cellular or satellite equipment, this will be your last briefing until after the launch when we will meet here at T-plus thirty minutes.”
An attractive, middle-aged woman raised her hand. “Judith Rawlins, New York Times. I would like to interview the American Tiger team before the launch.”
“I’m sorry, that is not possible,” the press officer said. “At this moment, as you might guess, they are extremely busy at the launch control center.”
McGarvey, who was sitting a few feet away from the New York Times reporter, heard her say, “Bullshit.”
“No more questions?” The press officer looked around the room, then nodded. “Well then, wish us luck, and we’ll see you back here once we’re in orbit.” He stepped away from the podium and disappeared through a door in the back.
The New York Times reporter remained seated and took some notes while the others headed down the corridor to the media communications center. A table was set with a coffee and tea service. McGarvey poured two cups of coffee and came back to where the reporter was seated. He held a cup out to her.
“I didn’t know if you used cream or sugar,” he said.
She looked up, smiled pleasantly, and took the coffee. “Black will do fine,” she said. “Thanks. Do I know you?”
“Pierre Allain, AP Brussels.”
“Judith Rawlins, New York Times.” They shook hands, and McGarvey sat down beside her.
“I had an ulterior motive bringing you coffee,” he said.
She laughed warily. “Most men do. What’s your story?”
“I’d like to get an interview with Frank Ripley too, or at least with one of his team members, before the launch. But if they’re in launch control I’m afraid I’m out of luck. But you didn’t seem to think the press officer was telling the truth.”
“They’re not there. They’ve been taken off the mission.”
“How do you know that?”
She eyed him speculatively, then shrugged. “I have a friend in Houston. What’s your interest in Ripley?”
