“What do you think?” McGarvey asked.
“It could be that easy, or it could be somebody else from your past gunning for you. Or both.” Ryan thought for a few moments. “What do you know about a man by the name of Joseph Lee? A Taiwanese businessman?”
“Never heard of him.”
“He’s a heavy hitter. From what I’ve been hearing — and this is very hush-hush — Lee and his wife are under investigation by the FBI for illegal campaign contributions. Sam Blair is the special prosecutor, and he’s one tough bastard.”
“What does Taiwan have to do with this?”
“Nothing. Point is that Lee’s background is suspect. He may have some connections with the Japanese government. His business interests include a number of think tanks in Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo. As it turns out he’s in town now, meeting with President Lindsay. Matter of fact he and his wife spent last night in the White House. I think he’d be worth a look. Maybe he’s somehow connected with Kamiya’s old crowd. He’s worth something over four billion dollars, and guys at that level have connections with just about everybody. If he is working with the Japanese he might be interested in seeing you dead, or at least forcing your nomination to be sidetracked.”
“Can you find out more for me?”
Ryan shrugged. “I guess I owe you,” he said. “But this goes all the way to the White House, so you have to understand that in my position I’m going to have to be damned careful. I have a lot to lose here. If I were you I’d search the Agency’s records to find out if you ever had any connection with Lee or any of his business interests. Might be a starting point. That, and ID the terrorists, see if they can be traced back to one of Lee’s businesses.”
“Will you help?”
Ryan nodded. “Like I said, I owe you. But what about your daughter? Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s a tough kid, she’ll survive.”
Ryan smiled. “She’d have to be, wouldn’t she. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, but at the time I thought I was doing a good job so I made a lot of mistakes. And part of it was that I hated you.”
“I know,” McGarvey said. He got up to go.
“Did you really think that there was a possibility I had something to do with the bombing?”
McGarvey looked at him. “It crossed my mind, but I dismissed it almost immediately. You might have been a lousy DDO, but you’re not a murderer.”
“Thanks for that. I’ll leave word at Langley if I come up with something.”
“Do that,” McGarvey said, and he left, his feelings about Ryan confused.
Because of the crisis in the Sea of Japan, the CIA was on emergency footing. Tommy Doyle met McGarvey at the front entrance at 8:30 P.M. and took him upstairs to his office.
“Where’ve you been?” Doyle asked, settling down behind his desk.
“Am I being followed?”
“We’re watching your apartment. You haven’t been there all day, and you left the hospital at two.”
“I drove down to Milford to check on my house and tell them I won’t be taking the teaching post after all.”
Doyle was strung out. He raised his eyebrows. “Are you coming aboard?”
McGarvey had fought depression all of his adult life, starting when he’d discovered by chance that his parents might have been spies for the Russians during the war. He used to tell himself that the CIA had made him what he was. An assassin. But you couldn’t make a lamb into a leopard by simply painting spots on its fleece. So he’d come to accept who and what he was, but after each assignment he fell into deep depressions which sometimes lasted months. He’d also learned that his only way out was by action. Not necessarily another assignment, but physical or mental action of any sort. One step at a time, beginning with the first. Fencing, swimming or running to the point of absolute exhaustion. Pushing himself to his limits, and then pulling up a reserve and continuing. The exercise gurus talked about the release of mood altering endorphins, but for McGarvey, pushing himself was simply one method of clearing his mind, bringing his entire being into the sharp focus of self-preservation.
He’d told all of that to Katy and Liz this morning at the hospital. And they’d listened without comment. Afterward he’d driven to Milford on the Chesapeake, where at Slaughter Bay he had run ten miles in the sand.
Back in Georgetown, he’d spotted the surveillance unit outside his apartment, sneaked past them into the building next door, where he took to the roof, crossing to his own apartment building. He’d taken a shower; changed clothes; dug out his emergency kit of spare passport and identification papers including credit cards, ten thousand dollars in cash and his gun, silencer and spare magazine of ammunition hidden in a fake laptop computer, then left the apartment the same way.
From the time he’d left the hospital until he’d shown up at Ryan’s house, he’d made no decision. He’d simply given himself the option of running to ground if need be. He’d thought of going to Japan on his own to seek out Kabayashi and Hironaka, working independently as he had most of his life. But he didn’t think there was anything to be accomplished there. Even if they admitted there was some kind of a plot to make war on North Korea, he would be no closer than he was before in finding out who had killed Jacqueline and nearly killed his daughter. For that he was going to need the CIA, and Ryan had provided him with the first possible clue. The rest would have to come from his past, documented in the Agency’s archives.
“Is Murphy here?”
“Yes. I’ll tell him we’re on the way over.” Doyle reached for the telephone.
“Wait a minute, Tommy,” McGarvey said, and Doyle drew his hand back. “We’ve known each other for a long time. Am I going to get the runaround here?”
Doyle smiled wistfully. “You better believe it. Bureaucratic bullshit comes with the job. But I have a feeling you’ll find a way to cut through most of it. Dick Adkins is a good man. He knows what he’s doing, and you won’t get anything but a hundred percent from him. No resentments.”
“Whose idea was it to offer me the job?”
Doyle shrugged. “I don’t know, but the consensus was that you were just what we needed, but that there wasn’t a chance in hell that you’d take it.”
“Why?”
“You can answer that yourself,” Doyle said. “But Carrara used to say that if you ever got rid of that chip on your shoulder you’d make one hell of a DDO.”
“Has it been that bad?” McGarvey asked, but he knew it had been.
Doyle looked at him for a long moment. “Do you want the truth?”
McGarvey nodded.
“You’re afraid of responsibility, of commitment, and you’ve been running away all of your life on one big adventure after another. One relationship after another. You say you leave to protect the people you love because being around you is dangerous. From where I sit, I think that’s a load of crap. If I want to protect someone I stick around and do it. I don’t take off.”
Doyle’s words were like hammer blows between his eyes, all the more so because McGarvey knew that they were true.
“Let me hazard a guess, Mac. You got past our people outside your apartment and picked up your gun and papers. Either that or you’ve stashed them somewhere you can get to them easily. A little hidey-hole somewhere.”
“Is that the consensus around here too?”
“Screw the consensus. No one is going to beg you to take the job, and frankly Howard Ryan was probably right when he said you were a prima donna pain in the ass. But if you can stop for one minute blaming everybody else for who and what you are, there are a lot of good people in this building — including me and the general — who think you’d be the most effective DDO there ever was. The bullshit would definitely stop at your desk, and we could get back to kicking some serious ass around here.”