He was a man of about fifty, in superb physical condition because of a daily regimen of hard physical exercise overseen by Jim Grassinger, his bodyguard, and the physical trainers and docs at the Central Intelligence Agency. It didn’t do to allow the director to get flabby, especially not this director. He wasn’t overly handsome, but his face was pleasant, his gray-green eyes honest and direct, and he exuded the quiet self-confidence of a man who was supremely capable of taking care of himself no matter what the situation was. People who got close to him, and who were perceptive enough to understand who he was, felt protected, as if they were under an umbrella where the rain could never reach them.
He had more than twenty-five years’ experience working for the government, first in the Air Force as an intelligence and Special Ops officer; next with the CIA as a case officer with assignments everywhere from Vietnam to Berlin and back; then as a freelance working what in those days were called “black operations,” which more often than not resulted in the death of one or more bad guys; and finally, reluctantly, back to Langley as the Company’s director.
Whenever he had a choice, he opted for a field assignment over a desk job, which was a curious contradiction to his main passion, besides his family: the study of Voltaire, the eighteenth-century French philosopher whose thoughts on everything from religion to government to science he found fascinating.
Otto Rencke, the best friend he’d ever had, who worked for him as special projects director, was fond of telling anyone who’d listen that Voltaire was okay for a Frog, except that he’d never known when to keep his opinions to himself. Which was the same criticism usually thrown at McGarvey. Common sense is not so common, Voltaire wrote in 1764, and as far as Mac was concerned, nothing had changed in the intervening two and a half centuries.
The sign on Truman’s desk had read that the buck stopped there, but the sign on McGarvey’s desk should have warned The Bullshit Stops Here. He hated nothing worse than liars, cheats, and bullies. Tell it like it is, or keep your mouth shut. Don’t blow smoke up my ass. Lead, follow, or get out of the way, but don’t whine about it. Anything but that.
A knight in shining armor, his wife Katy called him, but almost never to his face, and certainly not in public. He would have been embarrassed.
“Hey, how long are you going to keep me locked up?” Kathleen asked from inside the cab.
McGarvey, realizing he had been wool gathering, took her hand and helped her out. “Sorry about that,” he said.
She laughed, the sound light, almost musical. It was her happy, if not contented, noise, a mood he was finally beginning to recognize and understand without having to ask. She was tall for a woman, and slender, with short blond hair that framed a perfectly oval face, high cheekbones, full lips, finely formed nose, and a Nefertiti neck. She was fifty, but it was impossible to tell her age by looking at her, because her complexion was nearly flawless, and she was in almost as good physical shape as her husband, and for some of the same reasons — a lot of exercise and a strict attention to diet. In addition, though she would never admit it, she’d had a couple of brief, but expensive sessions with a plastic surgeon. Katy wasn’t denying her age, but she wasn’t letting it get the better of her. Not just yet.
“What a beautiful boat,” she said with pleasure.
“Ship,” McGarvey corrected, automatically. They weren’t the first of the ninety-six passengers aboard, but they were not the last, and the dock was busy with cabs, a couple of Cruise West courtesy buses, and people pushing carts with their luggage. No one seemed to mind that it was dark, raining, and in the low forties. The scenery on Alaska’s Inside Passage — hundreds if not thousands of islands, mountains, glaciers, and dense, almost primeval, forests — and the wildlife, including whales, would make the holiday worth just about any discomfort. The Spirit of ’98, a magnificent four-deck cruise ship built in the style of a turn-of-the-century steamer, had actually been used in the Kevin Costner movie Wyatt Earp. She had all the modern amenities including diesel engines, a full suite of electronics, lifeboats, a first-class gourmet kitchen and staff, plush upholstery, carved wooden cabinetry, and a player piano in the Grand Salon, but she looked like a gold rush ship. She had a single funnel just aft of the sweeping bridge, sharply vertical bows complete with pennant staff, and fine, old-fashioned lines.
McGarvey paid the cabby for the lift from Juneau’s airport as his bodyguard Jim Grassinger took the bags from the trunk. Needing a bodyguard was one of the downsides of the job as DCI. He had been used to taking care of himself for most of his life. But having a bodyguard was in his charter, and he’d already had one killed out from under him, proving the necessity. But he still didn’t like it, though he had developed a great deal of respect and trust in Grassinger over the past year.
“I hope it stops raining sometime this week, Jim,” McGarvey said. “I’d like to see you work on your tan.”
“We’re in the wrong part of the world for that, boss,” Grassinger replied. He was not a very large man, and almost no one would take a second look at him. He had a round face, pale blue eyes, thinning, sand-colored hair — his mother was Swedish — and in a suit, the jacket always cut large to accommodate his hardware, he could easily pass for the manager of the appliance section at Sears. But behind his bland, pleasant demeanor was a body of hard bar steel and the determination to match. First in hand-to-hand combat at the CIA’s training facility in Virginia; first in marksmanship with a whole host of weapons including handguns, foreign and domestic, assault rifles, riot guns, submachineguns, RPGs, and handheld missile launchers such as the Stinger, the Russian Grail, and the LAW; and first in surveillance and countersurveillance methods, he repeatedly turned down offers from the Secret Service to protect the president. He liked working for the CIA. And as far as bosses went, McGarvey was the best in his book.
He never stopped scanning the dock, and his jacket, beneath which he carried a 9mm Glock 17 with a nineteen-round box magazine, was loose as usual. He was doing a job that he would not quit until he was fired, retired, or killed, none of which he figured was going to happen anytime soon.
McGarvey and Katy each took a bag and walked across the covered boarding ramp into the ship. It had begun this cruise last week in Fairbanks, and would head down to Seattle in a few hours.
Normally, Grassinger would have gone ahead to check out the ship, but this time the crew and all the passengers had been vetted by the CIA and by the DoD because the former secretary of defense Donald Shaw and his wife, Karen, were also on board. Both he and McGarvey were significant targets for groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Quaida, but they both traveled with bodyguards, the Coast Guard was nearby, the ship would be under almost constant satellite surveillance, and Shaw’s and McGarvey’s names had not been made public. Even their travel arrangements from Washington had been kept strictly under wraps.
Both couples needed the time off, the Shaws because of the continuing strife in Iraq, for which the former SecDef was working in an advisory capacity for State, and the McGarveys because of the horrible ordeal they had gone through less than a year ago in which Katy had been brainwashed into actually attempting to assassinate her husband.
Their only daughter, Elizabeth, who worked for the CIA as a field officer and instructor, had suffered too. She’d been four months pregnant but had lost the baby in an arranged accident. Now she and her husband, CIA combat instructor Todd Van Buren, could not have children. They were in their twenties, head over heels in love with each other, and Elizabeth’s hysterectomy had devastated them.