“Mac,” he croaked, his voice harsh, as if he had a bad cold.
“Are you okay?”
Rencke shook his head. “No.” He sat up, crossed his legs and ran his fingers through his totally out-of-control hair. He shook his head again. “And neither are you … going to be okay, you know. It’s lavender. Oh, boy, really deep shit lavender, you know?”
McGarvey made his decision. “Come on, I’m getting you out of here. You look like shit, and you need a shower, something decent to eat and some sleep.”
“Now that I’ve finally hit pay dirt you want to fire me?”
McGarvey took him by the arm and helped him down off the table. “You can tell me on the way back to my apartment. Now what the hell did you do with your shoes?”
“No, Mac, it’s not done,” Rencke cried desperately, clutching at McGarvey. “This is big shit, the biggest, you know. None of us is safe now. Pandora’s box. Open it and all the shit is going to come out. Except hope. That’s it, hope.”
McGarvey had never seen him so agitated, so strung out, even frightened. “In English, Otto, I’m not following you.”
“Well, follow this,” he started viciously. “You’re not going to be safe in your ivory tower at Langley, nor are Mrs. M. and Liz no matter where you stash them. I don’t even think I could run and hide this time even if I wanted to.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rencke pushed McGarvey aside and rummaged through the files on the table, coming up with a photograph of a young man, possibly in his midtwenties wearing a tattered Oxford sweatshirt. His hair was down around his shoulders, and he wore a full beard.
“Recognize him?” Rencke asked.
The eyes were familiar, but McGarvey couldn’t place him. He shook his head.
“He was the kid you pulled off the wall in Berlin. The one who was so pissed off.”
“Who is he?”
“Wait,” Rencke said. He found a thick bundle of files, brought them around to where McGarvey stood and slapped them down on the table. “Santiago, Chile. Remember that operation? All here in living black and white.” His lips twisted into a snarl. “Correction, Kemosabe, almost all here.”
McGarvey didn’t have to look through the records. Santiago had been his last official assignment for the CIA. He’d been sent to the Chilean capital to assassinate a general who’d been responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people. It was the last of the Carter days in which the Agency had its guts torn out by an idealistic President who saw evil lurking everywhere.
The assassination had been called off. It wasn’t in the national interests. But it had been too late to reach McGarvey because by then he’d already gone to ground in Santiago, and three days later he had taken the general out. When he returned home, the Agency fired him and Kathleen had kicked him out.
Bad times, he thought, reliving those years in his mind. He’d run to Switzerland, where he’d hidden until the Company came to him for the first of several freelance assignments, but by then he’d lost everything that was dear to him.
“You remember it?” Rencke pressed.
“Yes I do.”
“The Senate Subcommittee on Central Intelligence had oversight duties in those days. The administration could fart in the wind all it wanted to, but the subcommittee held the real power. It was the committee who axed the hit, and it was the committee that—” Rencke picked up a document. “And I’m quoting now: ‘It will be the committee’s responsibility to advise the director of Central Intelligence on all matters before it.’” Rencke looked up. “‘In a timely manner.’”
“I’d already gone deep by then.”
“Wrong answer, recruit,” Rencke said. “The decision to call you off was made two days before you made your final call to the Santiago COS.” Rencke’s eyes were bright. “Somebody dragged their feet until they knew for certain that you would be unreachable.”
“Darby Yarnell,” McGarvey said.
“He was one of the senators on the committee. The one you thought screwed you. But he wasn’t given the assignment to notify Langley. It was someone else. A junior senator. And I’ll give you three guesses who it was, but the first two don’t count.”
McGarvey glanced at the picture of the young man with the Oxford sweatshirt. “Him?”
“Bingo,” Rencke hooted. “One and the same. Rhodes scholar in those days. Came home, went into politics in a big way. Oklahoma state representative, U.S. representative, then U.S. senator.”
McGarvey supposed he’d somehow known in the back of his mind since after Georgetown. It was one of the reasons for his increasing unease. “You have to believe in something,” his father had told him. “Or else you’ll have nothing, you’ll never get anywhere and you’ll never be anything.”
He shook his head. “No guessing, Otto.”
Rencke pulled out another file folder, slapped it on top of the Santiago file and opened it to an eight-by-ten glossy photograph.
“Shit,” McGarvey said softly, still wanting to deny what he finally knew the truth to be. “Revenge? All those years since Germany, and he went that far just to get back at me?”
“Okay, so maybe he was manipulated into it,” Rencke said, though it was clear he didn’t buy that theory. “But records wouldn’t show anything like that. And most of the guys on the subcommittee are either dead or doddering old idiots somewhere.” He glanced at the photograph. “Our guy was the junior member on the committee. One, of the youngest senators ever to be elected.”
“No.”
“You’d better believe it, Mac, or else come up with another plausible explanation, because your life depends on what you do next. So do the lives of Mrs. M. and Liz.”
“Is that why you’ve locked down the mainframe here?” McGarvey asked. “You didn’t want anyone to know?”
Rencke nodded diffidently. “The President of the United States, James Lindsay, has sold us out to the Japanese — for political expediency to keep the peace out there, or for whatever reason — with help from Joseph Lee, who funneled money into the White House through the Far East Trade Association, and with the help of Tony Croft, his adviser on foreign affairs, who passed information back to Lee and therefore the Japanese. At the very least he’s a traitor—”
“A fool,” McGarvey broke in. “Not a traitor.”
Rencke inclined his head. “A fool, then. And a murderer.”
“The White House went along with my appointment,” McGarvey said, trying to find fault with Rencke’s insane conclusions.
“He was damned if he supported you and damned if he didn’t,” Rencke said. “Think it out, Mac. Murphy put you up for the job. If the White House hadn’t gone along with it, questions would have been asked. And someone might have discovered what I did. But if he did get behind your nomination, he had to know that you might go looking.” Rencke shrugged. “So they tried to kill you.”
“Not Lindsay.”
“Maybe not him. But Croft knew the score, and he passed the concern over to Joseph Lee. It was probably one of the reasons Croft killed himself. He knew that once this all came out he’d be the one left holding the bag. And I’m sure that Lee’s people made that perfectly clear.”
“Have you been in the FBI’s system?”
“From the start, so I know all about Judith Kline and Bruce Kondo and Sandy Patterson. The only thing I haven’t nailed down yet is who it is over there leaking shit onto their public access Website. But I’ve got the list narrowed down to a half-dozen guys, all of them Tony Croft’s pals.”