“Bastards,” she said softly. “Bastards.”
Joseph Lee, dressed in a dark blue business suit, rode in the backseat of a Mercedes limousine from his quarters to launch control. In the distance, the giant H2C rocket was brightly lit on the pad, and the entire base was alive with last-minute activity. He looked out a window at a ten-passenger van which came from a connecting road and headed directly for the media center and viewing grandstands across a field from the vehicle assembly building. The decision to allow the international media to witness the launch had been made in Tokyo, overriding his strong suggestion that the center be placed strictly off-limits to the outside world. His driver pulled into the launch control building parking lot and went directly to the back entrance.
Miriam was on her way over finally. Once she was airborne she’d called to tell him that she’d been followed to Dulles but that no one had interfered with her movements. For at least that much he was relieved. He thought it might have been a mistake leaving her there. He’d considered the possibility that McGarvey might have gone after her in retaliation. But now that she was safely away he no longer had to worry about her. He could concentrate his complete attention on McGarvey, who had dropped out of sight as if he had never existed.
He’d seen a partial transcript of the man’s dossier, but until now he had dismissed most of the fantastic report as the probable figment of someone’s imagination. But after everything that had happened, he was no longer sure about his assessment. By all accounts McGarvey was an extraordinary man. He was in Japan at this very moment, of that there was no doubt. And on the drive over, Lee had trouble keeping his own imagination in check, wondering if the man had somehow gotten here to the space center and was lurking in the shadows or crawling up the beach like some nocturnal sea monster.
The countdown clock on the side of launch control switched to T-minus 1:28:00 as Lee got out of the limo and went inside. The armed guards knew him by sight. Hirota was upstairs in the security operations center. Three walls of the long narrow room were filled with television monitors that were connected to hundreds of lo-lux closed-circuit cameras around the space center. Every centimeter of the perimeter, and especially the approaches from the beaches, was covered, as was nearly every square meter of the entire sprawling base. Embedded in the security pass that everyone wore were computer chips that contained the personal data of the bearer, his or her specific job, as well as a transponder that radiated a locator signal. Anyone unauthorized anywhere on base would be detected immediately and the appropriate closed-circuit television camera would home in on them.
“Any sign of him yet?” Lee asked.
“He’s not here,” Hirota said, looking up from a bank of monitors he was standing in front of. “Everyone is accounted for, unless he somehow managed to steal a valid pass. But he would have had to get on base first. And that’s impossible.”
The center’s fourth wall was made of one-way glass that looked down on the launch control center, extremely busy now that the clock had reached and passed the T-minus-ninety-minute mark. Lee looked down at the launch director’s console, where Kunimatsu was holding a conference with a half-dozen people.
Hirota came over. “Even if he got as far as Kyushu, he’s simply run out of time.”
Lee looked at his security chief. He wanted to argue, but he couldn’t. The base was tight. And even if McGarvey was here, there was nothing he could do now to stop the launch short of blowing up the rocket or the launch control center, both of which were under heavy guard. For that he would need a substantial quantity of explosives. But something Hirota said suddenly struck him.
“What do you mean, ‘Even if he got as far as Kyushu’?”
Hirota’s lips compressed. “A man who roughly matches McGarvey’s description might have checked into a hotel in Nagano about the same time we found the missing men from Ichinobe.”
“Why wasn’t he arrested?” Lee demanded sharply.
“We didn’t find out about it until a couple of hours ago. He rented a car yesterday, and he never came back. But it wasn’t until this afternoon when the hotel reported it.”
“It’s him.”
“Possibly, Lee-san. But even if he made it to Kyushu, and we’re checking every hotel and parking lot on the island, he still had to face the problem of crossing eighty kilometers of open sea. No boats have been reported missing in the past forty-eight hours.”
“What about a light airplane?”
“None have been reported missing.” Hirota said. “In any event we would have picked him up on radar. And there aren’t that many places on the island where he could have landed. But even if he somehow had got that far, someone would have spotted the airplane.” Hirota shook his head. “McGarvey is not here, and the launch will go on as scheduled.”
Lee looked down at the tiers of consoles. Kunimatsu had finished his conference and had returned to his own desk on the upper level. Lee’s eyes strayed to the consoles reserved for the American Tiger team. The monitors were lit up, but no one was seated there.
“When does the American team leave?” he asked.
“They’re giving us some trouble, as we expected they would. But my people are with them, and they’ll be leaving at any minute.” Hirota looked more sure of himself than he sounded. “The problem will come afterward,” he went on. “They’ll demand an investigation.”
Lee managed a slight cruel smile. “By then it won’t matter.”
McGarvey climbed out of the airport van and hurried into the media service center with the half-dozen other last-minute reporters he’d joined in Fukuoka. His credentials were checked for the fourth time, and just inside the door he was issued a base pass, which hung around his neck. He went with the others to the briefing room where they were given media packets, watched a five-minute tape on the mission and were quickly advised on the use of the facility’s communications center.
On the short drive from the airstrip, he had pretended to be asleep in the backseat while through half-lidded eyes he watched out the window for an opening, anything that would help him. Tanegashima was very much like Kennedy an hour or so before a launch; there seemed to be traffic and activity everywhere, and they had to pass six security checkpoints in as many miles. Now that he was here, he needed to figure out how to stop the launch, and for that he needed more information.
The press credentials and launch invitation package that Otto had worked up and faxed to the hotel were perfect. The Japanese media officers and security people didn’t raise an eyebrow when he presented himself for this morning at the Tanegashima offices in the Fukuoka Prefecture Police Department. His name and description had to be posted in every police department in Japan, but they were looking for Kirk McGarvey, an American spy trying to steal a boat, not Pierre Allain, a Belgian journalist here to cover the launch.
He had missed the morning plane to Tanegashima, but he’d been told that a few reporters were coming down from Tokyo at the last minute and would be meeting at the Hotel New Otani. A final flight was being arranged to get them out to the space center in plenty of time for the launch.
Back at the hotel, McGarvey kept out of sight for most of the day, checking from time to time with the front desk for the latest information on the last flight to Tanegashima. He was committed to this course of action, and there was very little he could do except wait. It would have been practically impossible to steal a boat in the daylight hours and make it to the island without being spotted. And by the time it got dark it would be far too late for him to try, unless there was another delay in the launch, something he could not count on. Nevertheless, it had been a long, difficult afternoon for him with nothing to do but keep out of sight.