“I take it that your talk with your mother wasn’t entirely successful.”
Her lips compressed and she fought back a tear, but she didn’t turn away. “She simply doesn’t understand.”
“Understand what? That she loves you and that she’s worried about you?” The same vise was clamped on his heart seeing how battered she was. She was extremely brittle. “And being a smart aleck will get you nowhere. They were trying to kill me, Liz, and they damned near succeeded. It was blind luck that you and I got out of there alive. Jacqueline wasn’t so lucky. So before you condemn your mother, think about Jacqueline’s mother. What do you suggest I say to her?”
“You got the bastards, Daddy. Mother told me about it. They never had a chance.”
“I was lucky,” McGarvey said.
“Bullshit!”
McGarvey’s fear suddenly turned to anger. “You willful little bitch, do you think all of this is some little game for your pleasure? Twenty people are dead; real people whose families are mourning for them and wanting to find out who did it and why such a terrible thing happened to them. Do you want to say something to them? Some smart-ass, flip remark? Something about how your father killed three men in front of a dozen people who will probably never walk down a street in broad daylight and feel safe for the rest of their lives?”
Elizabeth refused to cry or back down. “I’ll tell them that without men like you the carnage would be a hundred times worse. And they’d better thank their lucky stars that you were able and willing to do what you did.”
“You’re wrong, Liz, and this time your mother is right. She’s probably been right all along.”
“Don’t say that, Daddy,” Elizabeth said softly, the words choking in her throat. “Ever since I was little and found out that you worked for the Company, it’s what I wanted to do. I used to dream about it. About working with you, about making a difference, because without the Company we’d all be in serious trouble.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “You’re all I have to believe in; don’t take that away from me.”
McGarvey’s heart was aching. “If you’re going to believe in something, you need to know all there is about it first.”
“I know enough.”
McGarvey shook his head, an infinite sadness coming over him. “No you don’t. And maybe it’s time I told you everything, starting with your grandparents.”
“May I sit in on this?” Kathleen said from the doorway. Her anger had changed to compassion.
“Come in and close the door, Katy.”
“PARA/MEDIC is on the move,” the radio in the Perfection Cleaning Company van blared. The FBI surveillance vehicle was parked in the Corcoran Gallery of Art parking lot on E Street. The primary team was watching the White House from a suite in the Hay Adams Hotel.
FBI Special Agent Paul Kuchvera pulled out into traffic and shot up 18th Street in time to spot the black Mercedes limousine with Virginia plates passing the Renwick Gallery on Pennsylvania Avenue across the street from the Executive Office Building.
“Unit Two, we have the subject in sight,” Special Agent Mark Morgan, riding shotgun, radioed.
“Is PARA/MUTUAL traveling with the subject?”
“Affirmative.”
As the Mercedes entered Washington Circle, Morgan took three photographs showing the limo, its license plate and the clearly defined landmark. The date and time were automatically stamped on the negatives.
The FBI, under the orders of the special prosecutor investigating illegal campaign funding, which in the last presidential campaign had set an all-time precedent for the huge amounts of off-shore money, had concentrated the bulk of their efforts over the past six months on Joseph Lee. His code name was PARA/MEDIC, his wife’s code name PARA/MUTUAL.
It had come as no real surprise that Lee and his wife had been invited to spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom and attend a lavish reception and dinner at the White House. But what had come as a surprise was that one of their sources inside the White House told them that Lee had attended a briefing earlier this morning with Tony Croft and some other staffers and special assistants. Not only had Lee’s money, the source of which was also under intense scrutiny, gained him and his wife access to the President, it had also apparently gained him a voice that the White House policy makers were listening to. It made Morgan mad thinking that while his father had won the Medal of Honor early in Vietnam, he and his family did not have the ear of the President or anyone else in government for that matter, while a wealthy Taiwanese businessman, not even a U.S. citizen, did.
Kuchvera was an expert driver, sometimes tailing directly behind the limo, at times dropping back behind several cars, and sometimes even passing, only to fall back again, so that by the time the Mercedes crossed the Key Bridge and headed north on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, they were certain they had not been spotted, though it was likely that Lee’s people knew that they were under surveillance.
“They’re heading for home,” Morgan said.
“Looks like it,” the taciturn Kuchvera agreed.
Morgan got on the radio. “We have subject north on the G.W. Parkway. Looks like they’re heading for OREGON.” It was the codeword for the Lees’ palatial home overlooking the Potomac River between Langley and Great Falls Park. It was something else the average hardworking American couldn’t afford, and every time Morgan thought about it, he was frosted. This op had become something personal to him, and it was going to give him a great deal of pleasure to be there when the sonofabitch was knocked off his perch.
FOUR
It was five o’clock in the morning when Frank Ripley hauled himself out of bed and stumbled into the pocket-sized bathroom to splash some cold water on his face. Just about everything in this country was tiny. And after three weeks the confinement was starting to get on his nerves. Aboard the shuttle, and during his three months on Mir, it had been different. There you expected to be confined. Besides, the science was exciting, and weightlessness made everything seem larger because you not only lived on the floor, but you were able to live and work on the walls and ceilings too. Here the only things full scale were the fourth-generation H2C multistage rocket and boosters, the vehicle assembly building and the big gantry at the Yoshinabu launch complex down on the beach.
Only a few days to go, and if the launch went off without a hitch he and his NASA Tiger team of expediters would be out of here, back to Houston where they could get a steak dinner that didn’t cost a month’s salary — the steaks here were small too — and be among people who smiled and actually meant it.
He was in front of the visitors’ housing building in his sweats and jogging shoes at five-fifteen, the predawn air thick with humidity and redolent with the smells of the sea and something else he could only describe as Orientaclass="underline" a sort of sweet soya sauce and fragrant wood chips odor. All around him for as far as he could see were various buildings and structures illuminated in a complex jumble of lights and shapes, very reminiscent of the Kennedy Space Center after which Tanegashima was modeled.
Although the tension among the staff and security people had taken a quantum leap for some reason two days ago, the armed guards were used to his morning runs. They no longer stopped him to check his identification, which he’d learned always to take with him after the first day, but they never waved or cracked a smile. It was as if the Japanese were seriously pissed off that they had to put up with the American team.
“Frank, hold up.”