Coming back he would be facing his own past in living color, a past McGarvey had to admit he’d been running from all of his life. He no longer knew if he had the stomach for it. But seeing Liz lying in the hospital bed gave him resolve.
“Call Murphy,” he said.
“It’s too bad we can’t follow him.” Mark Morgan watched Joseph Lee disappear through the security arches leading to the blue concourse. They were scheduled to pull another twelve-hour shift, but now that Lee was leaving their jurisdiction, it would be up to their Los Angeles field office, which would have him only long enough to watch him switch planes for Honolulu and then again for Taipei.
“I don’t get why he’s not taking his own plane,” Kuchvera said. “Unless it’s down with a maintenance problem. Something we’re going to have to check out. But you gotta ask why he’s in such a big hurry all of a sudden.”
It didn’t make sense to Morgan either. Lee’s secretary had called from his home barely three hours ago to make the last-minute reservations. United to L.A. and Honolulu, and then Taiwan Air to Taipei. It had come out of the blue, and they had to scramble to alert their field officer. But until Lee actually left U.S. soil, he’d have a tail.
“If I had to make a wild-ass guess, I’d say he learned something at the White House and wants to get back home with it as soon as possible.” He looked at Kuchvera. “Something so hot he couldn’t even trust it to his encrypted phone line.”
McGarvey and Doyle walked over to the DCI’s office and went straight in. Murphy was just finishing up a phone call.
“How is your daughter?” he asked, hanging up.
“The doctor says she’s going to come out of it just fine.” McGarvey said. “But I want a guard kept on her and my ex-wife for the duration.”
“No problem. And as soon as Elizabeth gets out of the hospital we’ll put her and her mother into a safe house. That’s if they’ll stand for it.” Murphy was genuinely concerned about them, and it gave McGarvey some comfort. “As of this moment Seventh Fleet is ready to sail, but they’re not going anywhere until the President gives his word.”
“Convince him to at least get them out of Tokyo Bay. But the logical place for them is going to be off North Korea’s coast.”
“I tend to agree with you, but he also wants to know how we’re going to get away with kidnapping Kabayashi and Hironaka.”
“We’re not, at least for the moment. They wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. At this point the situation out there is still a political one. If we can put the Seventh between Japan and North Korea before the Chinese submarines show up, and before either North Korea or Japan does something stupid, we have a good chance of heading off a confrontation. Or at least delaying it. Has there been any word from Pyongyang or Tokyo?”
“Nothing.”
“What about Seoul? Have they sent someone up there?”
“They have, but there’s been no word yet,” Murphy said.
“Anything new from our submarine?”
“The Japanese have sent a couple of P-3s from Sasebo, and they’re running search patterns.”
“Will they find her?”
“I’m told it’s possible,” Murphy said. “But if Seventh Fleet shows up it’ll become a moot point. Podvin would like to avoid a confrontation, but under the circumstances no one is suggesting that we simply ignore what’s going on.”
McGarvey glanced at Doyle, and he knew what the DDI was thinking. “What about Internal Affairs?”
“These kinds of investigations tend to take a long time. What you did on the bridge was crude, ill thought out and dangerous, but I don’t think anyone will recommend you stand trial for it. A lot of us have daughters too.”
“I’ll take the job, if it’s still open, General.”
Murphy nodded. “As of this moment you’re my acting DDO, until we can get Senate confirmation. I’ll inform the President. Carleton will work with the White House staff on a strategy, something that’ll make sense.”
“We’ll have to sanitize his background,” Doyle suggested.
A faint smile crossed the general’s face. “Larry can work with records on that bit of legerdemain, but Mac is going to have to help out. In the meantime Dick will have to get him up to speed. The sooner the better.”
“Tomorrow,” McGarvey said. “I’m going to do a little digging myself.”
“Do you think that the bombers were directed by someone out of your past? Have you any idea who or why?”
“I’m going to need Otto Rencke.”
Murphy sat back. “I was wondering when his name would come up. Is he still in France?”
“He’s gone to ground somewhere; maybe Rio, but I’ll find him and convince him to come back with no repercussions.”
Murphy had to smile at that. “I wouldn’t know where to start, because if I made a mistake he’d wipe out every computer in the building.”
“It’d be better to have him on the inside,” Doyle observed.
Murphy nodded after a moment. “I’ve been wrong about a lot of things, Mac. About you, about Otto. But I don’t want to compound my mistakes by being even more wrong now than I was before. You’re getting a shot here, but it’s your last shot. No vendettas, no rogue operations. As you’re fond of saying, ‘Don’t shit the troops.’ I expect the same from you, complete honesty.”
“Don’t try to micromanage me, General. Just let me do my job.”
“Fair enough, but don’t blindside me either.” Murphy got up and extended his hand.
McGarvey took it and looked into his eyes. “Thank you.”
SIX
The main display, which covered the back wall ninety feet wide and thirty feet tall, showed the real-time position and track of every U.S. intelligence-gathering satellite in orbit. Ranged in semicircular tiers facing the board were the individual control consoles from which satellites could be directed and to which downlinks provided the data, some of it electronic emissions monitoring, but most of it high-resolution photographs or infrared images. Far Eastern Division night supervisor air force Captain Louise Horn, seated above and behind her six console operators, nervously lit a cigarette, as she always did when something of interest crossed her board, and immediately placed it in an overflowing ashtray.
A half-dozen or more heat blooms had suddenly shown up along China’s northeast coast, leaving tracks heading south into the Yellow Sea. She didn’t have to ask what they represented; she knew, and she shivered in anticipation. They had been waiting for three days for this development.
She dialed up a large scale map of that section of coastline on her console master display and quickly clicked and dragged the pointer icon on reverse headings from the IR tracks, all of them originating, as she expected they would, from three coastal cities.
Next she pulled up the short list of available KeyHole and Lacrosse satellites, which would be coming up on the region within the next hour and computed tracks, times and camera angles so that the two available birds could take real-time images of the ships at sea, if that’s what they were, and automatically downlink the digital signals produced by the CCD, or charge coupled device, aboard. One of the satellites was already in position, and within seconds data began to flow on the downlink. She brought up the first images on an adjacent screen and waited impatiently for the computer to enhance the pictures.