“Good morning, Tony,” Secor said. “I hope you don’t mind if I just sit in the corner for a few minutes. I promise to behave myself.”
“Always glad to have you aboard, Harold.” Croft laughed heartily. He was a corpulent man whose clothes seemed to be tailored for a man three sizes larger. He usually looked like an unmade bed. “Have you met our distinguished guest, Mr. Joseph Lee?”
“I can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure, though I’ve certainly heard a lot of good things.” Secor had purposely kept himself at arm’s length. He shook hands with the slightly built man whose eyes held a look of amusement as if he’d just been told an off-color story.
“I’m sorry that my wife and I missed you and Mrs. Secor for cocktails and dinner last night. But the President and Mrs. Lindsay were most gracious.”
“Perhaps next time.”
“Yes, of course.”
One of the staffers brought a chair, and Secor sat down near the door. “Please go ahead, Tony. I only have a few minutes before I have to get back.”
“Actually we were just about finished here,” Croft said. “I’ve gone over in rough terms the incident at Kimch’aek and the response, or rather lack of response from Pyongyang, and Mr. Lee was about to give us his words of wisdom on what effect this situation might have on the region.”
Secor was stunned, but he covered his discomfiture without missing a beat. Croft would not have discussed the situation so openly unless the President had given his okay. “I would be most interested in his views.”
“I can only truly speak for Taipei, but I think my government’s reaction must be very similar to Singapore’s, Malaysia’s, the Philippines’s, and of course Japan’s. Kim Jong-Il is quite simply insane, and he means to embroil the entire region in an all-out war.”
“One that he cannot possibly win,” Secor said.
Lee turned his bland gaze to Secor. “The chances are very much against him winning such a conflict. But his chances for survival should he do nothing may be, in his perception, even less. An animal with its back to the wall is likely and capable of doing some amazing things.”
“Do you think such a conflict is likely?”
“I truly wish that I could say no with certainty, but there are other factors to consider. Such as appropriate responses.”
“By whom?” Secor asked. He could scarcely believe he was having this conversation.
“By someone with a firm hand,” Lee said without batting an eye. “A government willing to take decisive steps, shall we say, definitive steps, to rein in Kim Jong-Il.”
“Is this a message we should take to President Lindsay?” Croft asked.
“I discussed the issue with the President last night, but of course at the time I did not have all the facts. It is, I suspect, why he wished you to brief me this morning.”
“Do you have any sense of exactly what these definitive steps should be?” Secor asked.
Lee smiled and shrugged. “I am a businessman, so naturally my immediate concern is to keep the peace in the region. A protracted war never benefited anyone — neither the loser nor the winner.”
“That I can agree with wholeheartedly,” Dewitt said, practically falling all over himself with good cheer and bonhomie. The President still owed eighteen million from his last campaign, plus legal fees, and the vice president was already gearing up for a major campaign fund-raising push.
Secor suddenly got to his feet. He couldn’t take any more of this. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Lee. I hope that you and your wife are having a good visit.” He smiled. “But unfortunately duty calls, so I’ll leave you in these gentlemen’s capable care.”
Croft shot him a concerned, worried look. “Do you have a few minutes this afternoon, Harold?”
“Of course,” Secor said. “Have a good day.” He shook hands again with Lee and left, concerned that they were all chasing too recklessly after the bitch goddess money. It was something else that had fallen on deaf presidential ears.
McGarvey was having a cup of coffee in the sixth-floor waiting room, sun shining brightly through the windows, when Kathleen came down the corridor. She’d gotten no sleep overnight, and she looked all in, but some of the worry was gone from her face, and she held herself a little more erect, more like the old Kathleen, than she had earlier this morning.
“She’s awake, and she’s asking for you,” Kathleen said.
“How is she?”
“The doctor just left. He said she’ll be on her feet in a few days.” Kathleen gave her ex-husband a searching look. “She can go back to work in a few weeks, but it’ll be six months before she’s back to normal.”
“Did he say if there’ll be any permanent damage?”
“Some scars that can be taken care of, but other than that no permanent physical damage.” Kathleen looked away momentarily. “She’s only a baby girl, Kirk. Make her quit. Tell her that she can return to her job in New York with the UN.” Kathleen shook her head in desperation. “I don’t know how much more of this I can live with.”
“If she won’t quit, I’ll have her fired.”
“We were able to divorce each other, but we cannot divorce our daughter.” Kathleen was shaking. “Oh, Christ, Kirk, I don’t want to lose her. I’ll die if anything else happens to her, can’t you understand that?”
“I’ll do what I can, Katy.”
“Kathleen,” she corrected automatically. “You’re going to have to convince her that she has to leave. She has to do it of her own free will. She’s as bad as you are, she wouldn’t let you fire her. Nobody could fire her, because she’s your daughter.” Kathleen closed her eyes. “It was my fault. I could have turned her against you when I had the chance. Especially after Greece, but I didn’t.”
McGarvey’s heart was aching for his ex-wife. If he could he would have gladly taken her pain into his own body, erase it from her as if it had never been there. He could have done that a long time ago, but not now. He remembered the night he returned from Santiago and she’d given him the ultimatum. She wanted him to choose between her or the CIA. She didn’t know that the CIA had already fired him, but at the time it would not have made any difference to him. His terrible fault was that he hadn’t even tried to explain it to her that night. Instead, he’d walked out of the house without looking back. He’d run to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he’d hidden himself as a bookstore owner until the CIA came to him for the first of many freelance assignments. By then, coming back was impossible.
Elizabeth was a mass of bandages, an IV drip attached to her left hand and a wire from the monitor to her left arm. Her mother had fixed her hair, but she’d refused any makeup. She looked pale and very small in the middle of the hospital bed, but her face lit up when McGarvey came in.
“Daddy, am I ever glad to see you. Nobody wants to give me a straight answer.”
McGarvey pecked her on the cheek, it was all he could do not to take her in his arms. “You look a lot better than you did yesterday. How do you feel, Liz?”
“Like I’ve been hit by a Mack truck,” she said sharply. “Next question?”