Murphy eyed him. “But?”
It was a few minutes past two-thirty and they were alone in the DCI’s office. “Our networks in Japan are coming up empty-handed. Some of them aren’t even responding which could mean they’ve been blown. It also means that this incident has the government’s backing.”
“It’d have to, otherwise the MSDF wouldn’t be out there in force. What are you getting at?”
“Tokyo was in it from the start. It’s almost as if they set out to provoke the North Koreans into demanding help from Beijing.”
“I’m with you so far, Mac. And I can’t say as I blame them. As soon as they found out about the nuclear weapons at Kimch’aek they went after them. We could have done the same thing in Cuba in the sixties.”
“But we didn’t because Kennedy was worried about touching off a nuclear war between us and the Soviet Union.”
“A war we couldn’t have won. Or at least it would have been a draw, and we would have all been back in the horse and buggy era.”
“But that’s not what the Japanese think,” McGarvey said. “They’re pushing the Chinese to the wall. Why?”
“I see what you’re getting at.”
Danielle came in from his connecting office without knocking. He looked as if he’d just gotten some bad news. “You’d better see this. Turn on CNN.”
“What happened?” Murphy asked, switching on the television.
“They found Tony Croft dead at the Hay Adams. He was shot in the head.”
As the television came on, Murphy’s phone rang.
McGarvey sat back. “Shit,” he said softly, and Danielle caught it.
“What nasty thought just occurred to you, Mac?”
“Croft briefed Joseph Lee on Saturday, and the next day Lee left the country.” He shook his head. “His death is no coincidence.”
“They’re calling it suicide.”
“It’s no coincidence, Larry, I’d bet my life on it.”
THIRTEEN
“Jack Hailey is a good man, and if Croft didn’t kill himself, he’ll find out,” FBI Director Dr. Gerald Pierone Jr. said. “He’s moving fast on this one. I have his assurances.”
“I have no doubt,” Fred Rudolph said carefully. “But he’s working under a handicap, because he doesn’t know all the facts. He might stumble across something that will make no sense to him, and we’ll miss an opportunity.”
“Facts that you have,” Pierone said. They were in his office.
Rudolph nodded glumly. “I’m going to need your okay to proceed.”
He had been at a meeting with the antiterrorism division until an hour ago and hadn’t heard about Croft until then. Hailey, who was the Bureau’s special agent in charge of the District of Columbia, had taken over the investigation from the Metropolitan Police as soon as the call had come in. He had immediately sent a team of forensics specialists and special agents to the Hay Adams. Croft’s body had been discovered by a maid apparently within a half hour of his death. The medical examiner’s snap judgement was that Croft had killed himself with a single .38 caliber bullet to the brain within an hour of having sex. The hotel staff remembered seeing a young, good-looking woman coming and going from Croft’s room on several occasions over the past six months, but she’d never been a registered guest of the hotel. She was obviously a prostitute, she had the look, but she’d never been blatant and the Hay Adams was a discreet establishment. The staff had also seen Croft in the company of a slightly built Asian man in the lobby bar and across the street from the hotel at the entrance to Lafayette Square at least twice in the last twenty-four hours. He was registered in the hotel under the name Thomas Wang, a South Korean businessman. He’d not checked out, but his room was empty of any personal belongings, nor had the bed been slept in or the bathroom used. Hailey’s people were checking now for fingerprints. Rudolph had got all that from Hailey’s operations officer twenty minutes ago.
“This is a high-profile case, and before I take it out of Jack’s hands and give it to you, I’m going to have to be convinced it’s the right move.” Pierone wasn’t happy.
“At this point it’s the only move. A lot of stuff has started to pile up since Friday. Most of it circumstantial, but everywhere I turn I come back to the same starting point.”
Pierone knew what Rudolph had been working on, and he was beginning to draw the same conclusions, it was obvious from his suddenly dour mood. “What starting point is that, Fred? Exactly where are you taking this?”
“The White House.”
“The comparison with the Vince Foster thing is already being made.”
“This time we have some better leads,” Rudolph said. “One of the Georgetown terrorists that Kirk McGarvey took out was a Japanese named Akira Nishimura. Two years ago he was fired from his job at the Pacific Rim Development Institute in Hong Kong. The President’s friend Joseph Lee owns the institute. In fact, Lee and his wife were staying at the White House that night. The next morning Lee was given a private briefing by Tony Croft, and the next day he went back to Taiwan in such a hurry that he didn’t wait for his private jet to pick him up; he flew commercial, something he never does.”
Pierone shook his head. “Okay, I don’t like this, but you have my attention. What else do you have?”
“Kirk McGarvey has come to the same conclusions as I have and the CIA is helping out on this one. Lee showed up at his home in Taiwan, met with some of his directors and then disappeared. They’ve issued a world-wide alert to all their stations to be on the look out for him.”
“That’s one,” Pierone said. He had a doctor’s mentality; the logical, scientific approach was the only way.
“Croft left a brief suicide note apologizing not only to his wife but to the President.”
“For his suicide?”
“Maybe. But he’d apparently been screwing a high-priced call girl for the past six months. Why pick right now of all times to kill himself?”
“That’s fitting the timing with the facts after they’ve happened. You can do that with anything. Monday morning quarterbacking.”
“He was spotted by the hotel staff twice in the last twenty-four hours meeting with a man by the name of Thomas Wang, a South Korean businessman, who has also disappeared.”
“Any connection with Lee?”
“That’s one of the leads I want to work on,” Rudolph said. “I could turn my files over to Jack, but I’d like to keep the need-to-know list as short as possible. At least for the time being.”
“You have three leads: Lee, a prostitute and a South Korean businessman. What else?”
“That’s it for now, but something’s going on here. The minute McGarvey is put up for DDO, somebody tries to take him out, and they don’t care how many other people they kill trying to do it. At least one of the shooters had a connection to Lee. Then Tony Croft gives Lee a briefing and a couple of days later he blows his brains out.”
“If you can connect Thomas Wang to Lee you might have something.”
“It’s a fictitious name,” Rudolph said dismissing the director’s suggestion. “The real point is if the two incidents are connected, whoever is behind this hasn’t given up. They’ll try again.”
“You’re suggesting that Croft was murdered?”
That was a stumbling block for Rudolph too, because the only conclusion that seemed to fit — a suicide rather than a murder — was even more frightening. He shook his head. “I think he killed himself.”
“Why?”
Rudolph, who’d been looking inward, focused on the director. “Because I think Tony Croft was feeding Lee information. He had almost total access to us and the CIA and every other agency in Washington. I think it finally got to him that he was committing treason, so he blew his brains out.”