“You’re not going to make me give up my gun?”
McGarvey glanced at his ex-wife and shook his head. “You can keep it. I just don’t want you shooting Van Buren by mistake. It’d make him even less happy with you than he is right now.”
“He’s a strutting shit.”
“Who’s trying to do the job he was ordered to do,” McGarvey told his daughter. “Of course he could be replaced with Don Billings,” he said slyly.
“Yes, sir,” Liz said. “I get the point.”
McGarvey went into the bedroom as Liz hopped stiffly off the window seat and started setting up the laptop.
“Paul Isaacson seems competent,” Kathleen said, lowering her voice.
“It’s a good setup here. You and Liz will be safe.”
Kathleen looked into her ex-husband’s eyes. “I’m not blind, Kirk. Ten minutes after we got here, he called out the cavalry, and most of them are hidden in the woods. What’s going on?”
“The fact that you’re here has shown up on a nonsecure Website. We’re trying to figure out where it came from, but in the meantime since it’s now public knowledge, Paul figured he’d step security up a notch.”
“That should provide a clue as to who’s behind this,” Kathleen said shrewdly.
“It’s possible. We’re looking into it. In the meantime this is still the best bet for you and Liz. If they could get to you here, which they can’t, they’d be able to get to you anywhere. At least here we’re ready for them. No surprises.”
Kathleen touched her husband’s face. “Life is full of surprises, haven’t you learned that yet?”
McGarvey took her in his arms and held her close. “You’ll be fine here.”
“Get the bastards, my darling. I don’t want to live in fear anymore.”
“Guaranteed,” McGarvey said, unaware that their daughter was watching them from the sitting room door, a happy glow on her battered face.
The facility was perfect. Kondo and Kajiyama made a quick inspection tour of the building that had once housed a Kmart store and was now supposedly leased to the government as a surplus office equipment storage center. No one would bother them here, nor would the neighbors in what had become an industrial park take any special notice of the two plain gray vans and gray Ford Taurus with government plates that they would be using.
Sandy Patterson, executive director of the Far East Trade Association, met them in an upstairs office at the back of the building. A small, vivacious woman of fifty with a small round face and pixie hairstyle, she had once been Joseph Lee’s mistress in Hong Kong, and she now oversaw some of his more shadowy, arm’s-length endeavors here in the States. She was totally dedicated to Lee, and if he had taught her nothing else, he had instilled in her the value of ruthlessness.
“Is this place to your liking, Mr. Kondo?” she asked coolly.
“You have done a good job as usual,” Kondo said. “Where are the rest of my people?”
“I put them up in three motels nearby until you arrived and approved the arrangements. I’ll bring them here later this evening.” She pursed her lips. “This time I was given sufficient notice to do it right. I apologize for the last fiasco.”
“There were unforeseen circumstances beyond your control.”
“Yes,” she said dryly.
Kondo turned and looked through the one-way glass at the piles of desks, chairs and file cabinets on the main floor. “The equipment I requested is here?”
“Yes,” the woman answered. “May I ask where you gentlemen will be staying?”
“Mr. Kajiyama will remain here with the others, and I have taken a room at the Hay Adams.”
Sandy Patterson’s left eyebrow rose. “If you’ll be using the car, I suggest you park it someplace inconspicuous and take a cab to and from the hotel.”
“A good suggestion.” Kondo looked at his watch. “Now, if there is nothing else, I have an appointment in town.” He looked at Kajiyama. “Get the men settled in, then inspect the equipment that Ms. Patterson was so kind to arrange for us. I’ll be back no later than nine.”
Kajiyama nodded.
“There is one thing,” Sandy Patterson said, and Kondo turned his expressionless gaze to her. “Arnold Toy and the others at the house are keeping the FBI’s surveillance teams busy, but something did come up that you may not have been told about yet. Unfortunately you were already in transit.”
“What is it?”
“One of the FBI teams stopped Toy and asked if he knew anything about Pacific Rim, or Akira Nishimura.”
Kondo thought about it for a moment. “Is there any way that the FBI could link Nishimura or the others to you?”
“No. But the fool telephoned the embassy for instructions. It’s possible that his call was traced.”
“That won’t present a problem,” Kajiyama said.
Kondo nodded. “Anything else?”
“No,” Sandy Patterson said.
Aside from a couple of CIA historians and a half-dozen file clerks, the vast underground records storage facility was devoid of life and activity. The abandoned salt mine had been fitted out with acoustical tile ceilings, proper walls, painted concrete floors and climate controls. There was absolutely no dust, nor was there any odor. All the old files were in the same condition they’d been in the day they were brought here, and would remain so presumably far into the foreseeable future.
Rencke installed himself in one of the map rooms furnished with a large table so that he had plenty of room to lay out the documents and files he intended retrieving. He hooked up his powerful laptop computer to a printer and to one of the phone lines so that he could connect with the Central Reference Section at Langley, as well as the mainframe here. And, declining the services of a clerk, he was assigned an electric golf cart so that he could get around the miles of eighteen-foot-tall stacks.
He took a package of Twinkies from his canvas bag and a quart of heavy cream from the cooler he’d brought with him, then connected with Langley, bringing up McGarvey’s personnel file, and dumping it across to the printer. If he was going to have any success finding the bad guy or guys out of Mac’s past who might be gunning for him now, and the reasons they were doing it, Rencke figured he first needed to know how accurate the files were. It was possible that someone had come through and sanitized the record, or worse, erased it. If that were the case he would have to direct his efforts toward looking for who did that, instead of looking for the clues in the records.
The watershed at both ends of McGarvey’s career was his parents, who at the end of the second World War were engineers on the Manhattan District Project to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. McGarvey had been very close to them, so that in the mid-seventies when he was already working for the CIA and they were killed in a car accident, he was devastated. He went back to their ranch in southwestern Kansas to close out their house, and close out their papers when he made a discovery that was even more devastating to him than losing them. From what he found in Kansas and later in CIA records, he pieced together that his parents had been spies for the Soviet Union. A part of the network that, along with Klaus Fuchs, had sold atomic secrets. From that moment he was a changed man. Except that his parents never were spies. The records had been planted by Valentin Illen Baranov, possibly the most effective spy master ever to work for the KGB. It was an operation designed to ruin McGarvey, whom the Russians were seeing as a serious threat. But it wasn’t until six months ago when the truth finally came out, and again the news had profoundly affected McGarvey, changed him for the second time in his life. He was a man who didn’t know what to believe in or whom to trust. A killing machine, a loner and a lonely man.