“If part of my job is telling you tales out of school, you may have my resignation now,” she said.
McGarvey shook his head. “I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”
“I never had any doubt of it, sir,” she said. “I can tell you that Phil Carrara thought highly of Mr. Adkins.”
“I know. And I’m going to count on you and Dick to keep me out of trouble, because I’m no administrator.”
“We’ll do our best.”
“That’s all I can ask. But it’s going to make for some long hours.”
“Whatever it takes.”
“Very well. I want a staff meeting in my conference room in fifteen minutes. And dig out all their personnel files. In the meantime get me Colonel Galan on the phone.”
“Do you wish to see Mr. Adkins first?”
“No,” McGarvey said.
It was coming up on six in the evening in Paris when McGarvey’s call went through. Galan, who headed the French Secret Intelligence Service’s American and Western Hemisphere Division, had been Jacqueline Belleau’s boss and had taken her involvement with McGarvey very personally. Her death had deeply affected him.
“Thank you for returning my call, Monsieur McGarvey,” Galan said. “May I offer my congratulations on your appointment.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” McGarvey said. He could hear the barely suppressed anger in the French intelligence officer’s voice. “I assume you’ve seen the report of the incident.”
“Oui, and it seems as if you did all that could have been done. Are there any further leads on who ordered the bombing?”
“We’re working on it with the FBI. I’m told that you’re sending two of your people over to help.”
“There has been a delay, but they will arrive at our embassy tomorrow afternoon. Will they have your cooperation?”
“Naturally. We can use all the help we can get.”
“Then we will find the bastards, hein?”
“Definitely.”
Galan hesitated a moment. “The report placed Jacqueline at the exit from the restaurant when the bomb exploded. Was she coming or going?”
“She was leaving,” McGarvey said. “I was sending her back to Paris.”
Again Galan hesitated, evidently struggling with what he wanted to say next. His voice was thick. “Better to have sent her home sooner, or perhaps never to have brought her to Washington in the first place.”
“Yes,” McGarvey said. “It would have been better.”
“Tant pis,” Galan said sadly. “Will you write to her parents? They have asked about you.”
“I will.”
“Bon. Then that is all I can ask of you for the moment. Good hunting, monsieur. Get the men who were ultimately responsible for this terrible act.”
“I will, Colonel, you can count on it.”
The Directorate of Operations, which used to be called clandestine services, was, with a staff of more than ten thousand professionals and clerical types, the largest of the CIA’s four divisions. The DDO’s conference room, laid out much like the President’s situation room beneath the White House, was a long, narrow, windowless space dominated by a large conference table that could easily seat twenty people. A large rear projection television monitor was built into the wall at one end of the room, a technician from Technical Services operated the display and projection equipment from a console at the other side. When McGarvey walked in five minutes before noon and took his position at the head of the table, Adkins and six other men were already seated. Each of them had a stack of file folders and other materials in front of them. Miss Swanfeld sat directly behind her boss at a small table equipped with a telephone and recording equipment. She would take the minutes.
“Good morning, gentlemen. Sorry to have interfered with your lunch hour, but we’re under the gun here, and I have a lot of catching up to do. Dick, could you make the introductions?”
“Yes, sir, congratulations on your appointment,” Adkins said. He was a short, husky man with light wavy hair and a pale complexion. He looked as if he hadn’t seen the sun in six months. He sat on McGarvey’s left, and he introduced the other six around the table, starting with Randy Bock, who headed the DO’s Foreign Intelligence staff which was responsible for espionage activities. Beside him was Jared Kraus, the heavyset and sometimes ponderous director of the Technical Services Division, which designed and built the secret equipment field officers used: miniature cameras, disguises, special weapons. Next to him was Scott Graves, chief of Counter Intelligence and then Arthur Hendrickson, head of the Covert Action staff whose job, among others, was propaganda and disinformation. Seated near the end of the table was Raife Melloch, who headed up the DO’s Missions and Programs Division which was responsible for bureaucratic planning and budgeting. Finally, next to him was David Whittaker, Area Divisions chief, responsible for the stations and bases around the world and the area desks for Russia and former Soviet bloc nations, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, Near East, Africa and domestic and special operations. His was the largest of the DO’s division, and he’d been running his shop for ten years with such an efficiency that most of his staff thought he was a magician or at the very least a genius.
McGarvey looked around the table. “We’re missing Tyron. Where is he?” Alfred Tyron was the head of Operational Services, which set up cover stories and legends for field officers on clandestine missions.
“He asked that we start the meeting without him,” Kraus said. “He was going to stop by the cafeteria to grab something to eat.”
McGarvey had had a chance to briefly look over all of their dossiers and division personnel rosters before the meeting. Tyron had been one of Ryan’s handpicked men, with a special note attached to his file that he was someone to be watched for possible advancement. He knew his place.
“Mr. Tyron is relieved of his present duties,” McGarvey said. He turned to his secretary. “Have Ms. Jordan join us with the division reports.” Brenda Jordan was Tyron’s assistant division head. “She’ll be our new chief of Operational Services.”
“What do you want done with Tyron?” Adkins asked.
“That’ll be up to his new boss,” McGarvey said. He looked around the table again. “Gentlemen, whatever you’ve heard about me is probably all true. I’m going to make a lousy boss because I don’t accept excuses or apologies, nor will you have to accept them from me. I want straight answers to straight questions. If you don’t know something, admit it, don’t try to blow smoke up my ass.” A few around the table chuckled. “I’m not much of an administrator, which means I’m likely to be in the field more than any other DDO ever was. So as of this moment Dick is no longer my assistant DDO, he’s my chief of staff. Whatever he says, goes, and when I’m out of the office this directorate will not shut down; he’ll make the decisions. Anybody have a problem with that?”
“What if I don’t want the job?” Adkins said evenly.
“That’s not an option, Dick. In the meantime we have work to do, so let’s get going.”
Adkins looked down at the stack of thick file folders in front of him. Each of them was marked with a code name and was color coded to indicate the degree of classification of the material it contained.
“Getting you up to date any time soon is going to require some serious homework on your part, Mr. Director.”
“Mac.”
Adkins looked up. “Okay, Mac.” He handed McGarvey two fat file folders. “There’s no doubt that the top of the agenda today is the developing situation in the Sea of Japan between our forces and those of Japan, China and North Korea. In the meantime you can look through the National Intelligence Estimate and the current Watch Report. There are some points of interest in Iraq, Bosnia, Greece, Columbia, Cuba and of course the current extremely unstable situation in Russia, especially in Moscow and along the border with Iran, as well as India and Pakistan.”