“How’s it going this morning?” he asked.
“Quiet,” Isaacson said. “How about you? Anything new?”
McGarvey cocked his head to listen to the sounds of the house. Music was playing somewhere, and he thought he could hear someone talking in the kitchen. Normal sounds. Nothing out of the ordinary, but he was spooked. Someone was walking over his grave.
“Nothing that makes any sense,” he said distantly.
“But you’ve got the feeling.”
McGarvey laid a copy of the photograph Rudolph had given him on the table. “His name is Bruce Kondo, and he’s here in Washington.”
Isaacson studied the picture and handed it to Van Buren. “Do we have anything on him?”
“He works for Joseph Lee, we’ve got that much. And it looks like Lee is working for MITI. But if he’s the same guy we have in our files, he was involved in the Yokosuka riots a couple of years ago, working for the same group that I came up against.”
“It’s a revenge thing?”
McGarvey shrugged. “Unknown. There were no photographs in our files, and the Bureau doesn’t have much on him either.”
“But they could have sent him after you,” Isaacson pressed.
“It’s possible,” McGarvey conceded. “But if it’s the same guy, he was involved in Tony Croft’s death. So we’re looking for some kind of connection.”
“Is this guy any good?” Van Buren asked.
“Another unknown.” McGarvey shook himself out of his funk “I just came out to see how Katy and Liz were doing, and to tell you to keep on your toes, because I think if something’s going to happen, it’ll go down pretty soon. Maybe in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Isaacson had been studying him. “You’re worried.”
They went back together long enough that McGarvey wasn’t offended by the observation. “The Georgetown bomb was overkill. And if Kondo somehow drove Croft to suicide, he has finesse.”
“Quite a combination.”
“That it is,” McGarvey said. “Are they upstairs?”
“Yes, sir,” Van Buren said. “They went up to get ready for lunch. Will you be staying?”
“I have to get back,” McGarvey said. “I’ll see how they’re doing then get out of your hair.”
Isaacson got up and went out into the stairhall with him. “They’re as safe here as they would be anywhere else.”
It wasn’t very comforting, but McGarvey nodded. “I know,” he said. He went upstairs, knocked once and went in.
Kathleen, her hands on her hips, stood in the middle of the sitting room watching Elizabeth, who’d opened the window and was trying to pry open the latch that held the security shutter in place. The shutters on all the windows had been closed last night.
“Are you trying to escape?” McGarvey asked.
“They’re treating us like prisoners,” Elizabeth snapped crossly, a table knife on the latch. She grinned sheepishly. “Hi, Daddy.” She put the knife down, came over and gave her father a hug.
“If Paul wants the place buttoned up, leave it be, will you?”
Elizabeth nodded.
McGarvey gave Kathleen a hug. Dressed in a cream-colored skirt, matching blouse and flats, she looked as if she’d stepped out of the pages of Vogue.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I’m not an administrator, and if it wasn’t for some good people out there I’d go crazy,” McGarvey said, trying to keep it light, but it was obvious Katy saw through him.
She gave him a questioning look. “Are you okay?”
McGarvey hadn’t been quite sure what he was going to say to them, but he decided that no matter how bad the truth was, it was better than a lie. He’d been telling them lies for too long a time.
“I don’t think the situation will last much longer,” he said to both of them. A look of concern crossed Kathleen’s face, but Liz lit up.
“Good,” she said viciously. “I want to get it over with.”
“What is it, Kirk?” Katy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing, but I’ve got a feeling that whatever they’ve planned is going to happen within the next day or two, so I want both of you to keep your heads down and listen to what Paul tells you.” McGarvey motioned to the window. “That means no screwing around with the security measures.”
Kathleen studied his face. “Are you going to be all right, Kirk?”
“If I don’t have to worry about you two.”
“I’ll behave,” Elizabeth promised.
On the way back to Langley, McGarvey’s cell phone chirped. It was Rencke and he sounded completely strung out.
“Oh, boy, Mac, you gotta get down here right now!”
“Have you found something?”
“The whole enchilada. Or at least the first course, and it’s a pisser!”
“I’m on my way.”
“Mac?” Rencke said, his tone suddenly guarded.
“Yeah?”
“Watch yourself. Really watch yourself this time.”
On the second pass, McGarvey’s gray Nissan SUV was gone, and at first Kondo thought that it had been put in the garage. But then he spotted it on the river road heading south toward Interstate 495.
“I’ve seen enough,” he told the Capital City Aviation pilot. “We can head back to Woodmore now.”
“Did you want to try the other side of the city, sir?”
“Next week,” Kondo said pleasantly.
McGarvey had come out to check on his wife and daughter this morning, which might mean he would be back this evening. It would be perfect, because they could make a clean kill and get out of the country without having to do a kidnapping, which was always more risky than an assassination. But they were running out of time and options, and McGarvey had to be stopped. Once they had the women, they would lure McGarvey to an isolated spot and kill them all. Not elegant, but it would work.
Catching a last glimpse of the safe house as the pilot banked to the southeast, he was bothered that the security team down there had shuttered all the windows in the house. That fact, along with McGarvey’s visit this morning, meant they were expecting trouble. Had there been a leak from Sandy Patterson’s office, he wondered? If so, it was too late now to find out. And too late to change their plans.
The operation would happen tonight, and Kondo found that he was truly looking forward to the challenge. He’d read McGarvey’s file and was struck by the obvious exaggerations in it. No man, he decided, could be that good.
Weekday traffic was a bitch on I-95, so it was after 2:00 P.M. by the time McGarvey reached the CIA’s Central Archives on the military reservation. The small parking lot in front of the two-story concrete block administration building was full, and security procedures were tougher than they were at night. But he was the DDO and was admitted to the elevators without delay, reaching the main floor of the storage vault eight hundred feet underground a few minutes later.
Rencke was not waiting for him this time, so after he signed in, a nervous air force staff sergeant drove him back to the map room.
“Sir, my supervisor, Captain Parker, asked if you could have a word with Mr. Rencke.”
“Has he made a mess of the files?”
“Yes, sir, but that’s not the problem. He’s pretty well locked down our mainframe. We have work to do here, but he’s somehow restricted our access to the system.”
“I’ll talk to him,” McGarvey promised. “But he’s just about done with his project. And it’s top priority right now.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.
Rencke, his sneakers off, lay flat on his back on top of the files, computer printouts and photographs strewn on the-long map table. His arms were crossed on his chest, and his eyes were open, staring up at the fluorescent lights and acoustical tile ceiling. For a split second McGarvey thought he was dead, but then Rencke turned his head.