Rencke glanced at him again. “That might be the point after all. Revenge. It’s worse than hunger or lust.”
McGarvey figured they must have gone a half a mile or more into the underground installation when Rencke turned left down a narrower side avenue. They passed four intersections, and then he turned right and stopped fifty feet later. A tall ladder on wheels was drawn up to a eighteen-foot-high section of shelves. Several plastic bins had been brought down and set on the floor. File folders and envelopes were strewn around the base of the ladder. The light back here was barely good enough to read by.
“Midseventies,” Rencke said, hopping out of the golf cart. “Your first CIA duty station, Berlin. Remember?” He rummaged through the loose file folders, finally coming up with the one he wanted.
“That was a long time ago. I was just a kid.”
“A trained CIA field officer in the badlands, that’s what you were,” Rencke said. He was beat, his mood brittle, but a look of pride had come into his tired expression. “All your FI-TREPS gave you the highest marks. Dean Fields, the chief of Berlin station, made no bones how he felt about you. In his books you were the tops.” Rencke looked a little sly. “If you had one fault, according to him, you were too brash, too quick to pass judgment. ‘Just like a tent revival preacher,’ he wrote in one of your fitness reports.”
McGarvey chuckled. “He was right.”
Rencke handed him the thin file folder, which contained a brief, three-page incident/encounter sheet. Most of it was typewritten, but McGarvey recognized the handwritten notes as his own, although at first he couldn’t recall the incident.
“Does that bring back anything?” Rencke asked.
“Just a minute,” McGarvey said, and he quickly read through the report. It was early in the morning, New Year’s Day 1979, a hundred yards west of Checkpoint Charlie, near the Philharmonic Hall and National Gallery. McGarvey had been on his way back to his apartment off Potsdammerstrasse after a party, when he spotted a group of a half-dozen people trying to climb over the wall.
He parked in the shadows and trotted around back, thinking at first that he was seeing a group of East Germans trying to escape over the wall to the West. Instead, he walked into the middle of what one of them called a prank. They were Americans, graduate students and postdocs on Christmas break; all of them drunk, out looking for a little fun. An adventure.
It was starting to come back to McGarvey now; vague memories of how cold it was and how the kids looked guilty, foolish (and they knew it), stupid, ashamed and finally angry that someone their same age was putting a stop to their lark.
All of them were dressed in tattered blue jeans, sandals and wool socks, hair down around their shoulders, and McGarvey remembered being mad as hell at them. They were college students, probably rich, who were trying to look like hippies. They were fucked up in the head, he remembered telling them that. And one of them had responded that he should mind his own fucking business.
McGarvey had zeroed in on that kid, who was much older than the others and who seemed to be the leader, or at least their spokesman, and reamed him out. Told him that he had been seconds away from getting himself and his friends shot to death, and that if he hadn’t learned anything better than that in college, maybe he should go back to his mother’s lap so that he could have a few more years to grow up.
There’d been more words, and the kids were going to simply ignore him, when he flashed his gun and his CIA identification. It had been a stupid move on his part, he knew that now. But it had worked. The kids, pissed off, left. Now McGarvey vaguely remembered the look of embarrassment and hate on the one kid’s face, but nothing more.
He looked up. “I remember it, but that’s about all.”
“You made an enemy, Mac,” Rencke said.
“He was just a kid, and that was a long time ago. He’d have to be a complete idiot to still harbor a grudge.”
Rencke shrugged, conceding the point. “Did you get their names?”
“Evidently not, or I would have mentioned it in my report.”
“Do you remember any of them? I mean can you remember what they looked like?”
“Hippies. College kids with long hair. It was party time for them. Lot of that going on over there in those days. What’s your point, Otto?”
“I’ve worked out all the major shit in your background, all the obviously bad guys who might still hold a grudge, and now I’m working on the little shit. This one sorta stuck out.”
McGarvey shook his head. “I think we should stick with trying to find the Japanese connections.”
“I’m doing that, Mac,” Otto said, the vagueness back in his voice. “There’s just something about this.” He looked up. “If I came up with some photographs, do you think you could pick any of them out?”
“Maybe,” McGarvey said. “When have you slept last?”
“I don’t keep track,” Rencke said. “I’ll take you back to the elevators.”
“Listen, Otto, maybe you should come back to Washington with me. You can stay at my place or out at the safe house. We’ll have some dinner, a couple of beers and you can get a few hours sleep.”
Rencke gave him a long, penetrating look. “You gave me a job to do, Mac, and I’m doin’ it, you know.” He shifted his weight to his left foot and raised his right a couple of inches off the floor, as if he were an ostrich. “They came after Liz, and Mrs. M. We can’t let that happen again, so you gotta let me keep looking here. Okay?”
McGarvey had to shake his head again. “It’s your call.”
“Oh, boy. Great.” Rencke said, without much enthusiasm and he gave McGarvey a hug. “We’ll get the bastards, Mac. It’s not chartreuse anymore, but we’ll get the bastards.”
FIFTEEN
Fred Rudolph met the District of Columbia SAC Jack Hailey in the parking lot of the new International Trade Association building off Dupont Circle a few minutes after ten.
“Thanks for coming out tonight, Jack. May be nothing, but I figured you wanted to be kept in the loop.”
“I appreciate it,” Hailey said. “Had to be some kind of world record, getting a search warrant that fast.”
“Judge Miller is one of the good guys who still thinks we’re doing an okay job,” Rudolph said. The fact that he and the federal judge were next-door neighbors and belonged to the same country club hadn’t hurt either. Over the past few years they had developed a mutual trust and respect on and off the golf course that sometimes paid off, like tonight.
A half-dozen FBI agents in blue windbreakers had secured the front and rear entrances to the twelve-story building, and while a nervous night watchman made two calls, one to the building’s manager and the other to the office manager of the Far East Trade Association, Dan Parks and twenty special agents had gone up to the top floor to open the offices and begin their preliminary search.
He came back down on the elevator and trotted over to where Rudolph and Hailey were waiting at the desk in the lobby. He was a short, heavyset man with dark curly hair who had been a computer programmer by trade until he had signed on with the Bureau’s Special Investigations Division. He could sniff out a hidden computer cache a mile away.
“Okay, we’re in,” he said. “Do you want us to get started now, or should we wait until Far East sends someone over?”
“Anybody up there?”
“No. The place was locked up for the night.”
“Find anything interesting?” Rudolph asked.
“Computers on both floors, but it looks as if they’re all tied to the same mainframe on eleven. Some locked file cabinets in the mail room and a couple of the offices and a big wall safe in one of the front offices. We can peel the safe.”