“Right now — they’re still there. Tina’s travel agency is on the ground floor, and she was working late, so she saw them coming in and she checked on it. There’s a federal warrant for my arrest.”
“Okay, take it easy. Is there anything in your offices that could lead them here?”
Sandy Patterson was shaking her head. “No, nothing. They’re probably after our financial records. And if they can break the encryption codes in our computers, they’ll find out about Mr. Lee.” Her eyes were wide. “But that’s not all. They know about you.”
“You said there were no records tying you to me,” Kondo said, wanting to lash out at the stupid woman, break her neck, but he held his temper in check.
“Judith called right after my sister.”
“The whore?”
Sandy Patterson nodded. “She said she was going to tell the FBI that Tony Croft was murdered. She said she took your picture in front of the Hay Adams. She wanted to know if she was doing the right thing, and she didn’t know who else to talk to.”
“What did you tell her?”
“She said that she was calling from a pay phone in the Grand Hyatt, so I told her to stay there and not to call anyone, and I’d send someone over to take care of everything.” Sandy Patterson shook her head again, as if she couldn’t believe that this was happening. “I didn’t know what else to say.”
“Does she know about this place?” Kondo asked.
“No.”
“Does anyone else know about it or about your connection here?”
“No. I rented the building through a triple blind. There’s no way that anyone could trace it back to me. Not in a million years. It’d be impossible.”
“Then nothing has changed,” Kondo said. “This operation will continue as planned.”
“What about Judith?”
Kondo looked at the woman with a mixture of anger and disgust. She had served them well to this point, but Lee would understand perfectly well when Kondo told him that she was dead. “There’s nothing she can tell the FBI that would hurt us. Tony Croft killed himself and by now the FBI knows it. Besides, she could not know my real name unless Croft told her.”
“What about me, then?”
“Your work here is finished, so you’ll have to come with us.” Kondo smiled. “I’m quite certain that Mr. Lee will give you everything that you deserve.”
Sandy Patterson looked like she was on the verge of collapse. But it was obvious that she understood she had no other options.
“Naturally you’ll have to stay here until we’re finished, and then you’ll be getting out of the country with us,” Kondo said. “We’ll talk later, after I finish the briefing, and figure out what role you can play for Mr. Lee.”
Otto Rencke untied a bundle of file folders that he had secured with one of his shoelaces and spread the documents on the map table. After McGarvey left he had entered the photographs of the students at the Berlin Wall into a computer recognition program that from time to time spit out a possible match.
Within the first ten minutes he’d come up with a name so surprising that it took even his breath away, and he’d returned for the Berlin station’s annual summaries for 1978, ‘79 and ’80, searching for further possible references to the incident Mac had been involved with, or with repercussions because of it. If Mac was right and the kids were graduate students and postdocs, their egos would have demanded that they do something in retaliation. Vietnam was the major issue, and the CIA was the enemy. But nothing of any consequence was showing up except for the one name.
The computer was giving a 58 percent probability that the photograph and name were a match and asked for more photographs or further data. But there was nothing else in the Berlin files. Apparently it had been an isolated incident.
Rencke stared at the photograph and the name for several minutes, his thoughts lost in a maze of floating, flowing, blending colors. Years ago he’d been trying to devise a series of tensor calculus transformations involving complex bubble memory systems. He’d hit on the question of how to explain color to a blind person. With mathematics, so sweetly elegant that even a person who could not even begin to understand the notion of color could “see.” If it worked one way, he figured there was no reason it shouldn’t work in the opposite direction. Since then, whenever he had to deal with something complex, he thought in colors. Lavender this time.
He slid over to his computer, brought up an outside line and within seconds was in the mainframe computer system for the United States Senate.
It was 0530 GMT and Captain Harding couldn’t sleep. He was hunched over one of the plotting tables in the control room studying their track. They were five miles behind the Japanese submarine Natsushio, which was continuing southwest, its projected course taking it through the eastern channel of the Korean Strait south of Tsu Island. The last message they’d received from CINCPAC confirmed that the Chinese fleet of six surface ships and two submarines were headed into the Sea of Japan through the western channel. It didn’t seem likely that the Natsushio was trying to make an end run on the fleet. It could not match their speed, so it would never be able to catch up. CINCPAC thought that it was possible the MSDF sub was heading to Tokyo, but that didn’t make any sense to Harding either.
“You’re supposed to be getting some sleep, Captain,” Rod Paradise said at his shoulder.
Harding looked up. “I’m trying to figure out what this guy’s up to. He kills a Chinese submarine, then bugs out like he’s getting ready to attack the entire fleet. But he’s not going to do that.”
“You don’t think he’s going to Tokyo?”
Harding shook his head. “With the Seventh gone, Yokosuka is theirs. Nothing left in Tokyo Bay to challenge them, so why bring in another submarine when all the action is on this side?”
Paradise studied the chart. “Nothing else makes any sense.” He looked up. “Of course he could be heading up the Korean coast. Maybe stand off Chungsan. Pyongyang is only thirty miles inland. If something did start up, they’d be in a good position to strike back.”
“That’s a cheery thought,” Harding said. “But it’ll be another twenty-four hours before he has to start his turn. North to Pyongyang or south toward who knows?” Harding picked up his coffee cup. “How’s it looking behind us?”
“So far so good,” Paradise said. “We’ve been stopping to clear our baffles every six hours.”
“Make it every two hours, Rod,” Harding said. “It’ll slow us down, but we won’t lose the Natsushio, and I want to make damned sure that no one is sneaking up on us.”
Rudolph watched as the contents of the safe were laid out on a conference table. It was better than he expected. In addition to reams of documents, they’d found more than one hundred thousand dollars in small bills, in bundles of a thousand dollars each. Some of the bundles were actually marked with names, almost all of them U.S. senators and representatives, others marked simply The White House. Antus had become increasingly nervous, but the Far East Trade Association’s attorney Calvin Wirtz maintained his composure. Rudolph figured he would have an answer for everything they were finding, but whether or not it would hold up in a court of law was another matter. From what they’d already seen — and this was just the preliminary search — he had a feeling that Sam Blair was going to be one happy camper. This would almost certainly end up another media field day when it came out, because already Dan Parks and his people were coming up with connections not only to Joseph Lee, but to Tony Croft as well. It was a bonanza.