It was nearly four in the afternoon by the time McGarvey emerged from the station. He was moving fast now. If anyone had tailed him to this point, he decided they were damned good. He hadn’t spotted a thing. But he had to give it one last chance. He took a cab out to National Airport on the river south of the Pentagon, rented a plain Chevrolet Caprice, and headed north along the parkway, sometimes going ten miles per hour faster than the flow of traffic, sometimes ten miles per hour slower.
By five-thirty he was a long way up into the Maryland countryside, but he was finally satisfied that no one could possibly be behind him. Extraordinary lengths, they might say at the Farm in Williamsburg. But when your life depended on it, you’d go to any lengths … to the moon if need be.
He turned and headed south again, back across the river into Virginia; Annendale Acres with its Pine Crest Golf Club, A&P Supermarkets, Ace Hardware, green rolling hills and curving streets with cute names along which were mile after mile of contemporary houses, some in brick, some with shake roofs, some with split-rail fences, but all of them depressingly neat and similar. The neighborhood was twenty years old, and showed it.
It was dark by the time McGarvey finally parked across the street from a split-level ranch with attached garage and a lot of new trees and bushes. It had been a long time for him. Nothing much had changed. The garage door was up. Two cars were parked inside; one older and a little beat up, the other a new Ford station wagon. A basketball hoop and backboard were centered over the open door. The house was lit up. He went up the walk, hesitated a moment, then rang the doorbell. He could hear it chime inside. A dog barked. Someone shouted … one of the kids? And the porch light came on. A woman wearing blue jeans and a gray sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, opened the door. Behind her, carpeted stairs led up to the living room and down to the finished basement.
“Pat? It’s me. Kirk,” he said.
She looked at him for a very long time, a range of emotions playing across her broad, pleasant features; surprise, disbelief, uncertainty and sadness, and then just a little fear.
“Good Lord, where did you come from?” she asked softly.
“Is Janos here?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second, then shook her head. “He’s out. They sent him up to New York ….”
“Like the old days?”
“Yeah, like the old days ….”
A big shaggy dog appeared on the stairs from the basement, its tail wagging, Janos right behind it.
“Pat? Who’s at the door?”
“No one,” she said wryly, looking into McGarvey’s eyes.
The dog sniffed at McGarvey’s shoes. He reached down and scratched behind the animal’s ears. Janos had stopped halfway up the stairs.
“Hello, Janos,” McGarvey said. “Long time no see.”
Janos Plónski, majordomo of all things recorded in the archives at the CIA’s Langley headquarters, was a big, barrel-chested bear of a man with a face so ugly that even a mother would have a hard time warming up to him. When he was little he lost his hair to scarlet fever and one year later had a severe case of chicken pox that left permanent scars. He didn’t care, and his wife and two children, Barney and Elizabeth, all adored him. He was born in O
wi
cim, forty miles west of Kraków, Poland, in 1935, and lived there through the war and concentration-camp days (Auschwitz was just outside of town), while his father collaborated with the Nazis. Just before the war’s end, his mother shot his father to death and managed to make her way completely across Europe, all the way to England, with her ten-year-old son in tow. She joined a Polish émigré group that during the war had fought Nazis and afterward fought Communists. By the time he was twenty, Janos had completed his college studies at Oxford (he was something of a hero because of his mother), immigrated to the United States, and joined the army as a translator and intelligence analyst. His career afterward was spectacular. He was dropped into Poland on at least half a dozen occasions; he did work in East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, and then he gave it all up when his young wife became pregnant with their first child.
“Running the show in the basement may not be the most exciting job in the world, Kirk,” he once told McGarvey. “But it makes Pat happy and me, too. This way I can be at home in bed with her every night. And I like her cooking.”
Janos pulled McGarvey inside, and they sat on stools in front of a long workbench in the basement. Pat brought them beers and then shooed the children away from the stairs, shutting the basement door. No one had asked him to stay for supper, though he could smell it cooking upstairs. Of course he was out, Janos was in. The association would have to be considered dangerous, no matter the closeness of the friendship.
“So, Kirk, my old friend, what has brought you back? It was my understanding you were tucked away somewhere … Switzerland?”
“Lausanne. I had a little bookstore there. An apartment. Not much.”
Janos smiled appreciatively. He was very proud of what he had in the way not only of material possessions, but of his position with the Company as well as within the community.
“You’re here for a visit? Is that it?”
McGarvey looked at him for a moment. He was glad Pat had gone upstairs. She’d always been the tough negotiator. She was English. Cockney. She understood real poverty even more than Janos did. And she didn’t want to go back.
“Not really,” McGarvey answered softly. He took a swallow of his beer. “I’m doing a job, actually.”
Janos seemed pained. He sat forward. “For who, Kirk? Who are you working for? Not the Company; I would have heard.”
The implication was obvious. By answering it, McGarvey would be dropping to Janos’s level. But then it had always been that way. Despite his experience, Janos was one of the most naive, direct men he’d ever known. Once, at a party, Pat confessed it was that very innocence that caused her to fall in love with him in the first place.
“I came all this way, Janos, to be practically turned away at the door, and then to be insulted by my friend?”
Janos sat back, his beer between his big paws. “I’m sorry, Kirk, really I am.”
“How have Pat and the kids been?”
“Very good, actually. The tops. We’re a happy family here, you know that. At least in that, nothing has changed.”
“I thought about you a lot over the years.”
Janos shrugged. “We missed you, too, Kirk. You and Kathleen.”
“It’s over between us. You knew that.”
Again Janos shrugged. “Yes, we both knew it. And it saddened us. But she is still Elizabeth’s godmother. Will she ever come back to us?”
“I doubt it,” McGarvey said. He felt like hell. She was only in Alexandria. Christ, it seemed like a million miles.
Janos sensed something of that. “Does she know you’re back?”
“No,” McGarvey said softly. “How are things in the Company these days?”
Janos brightened cautiously. “A lot better, Kirk. Believe me, under Reagan and Powers there is no comparison to the old days.”
“Danielle is running ops now?”
“He’s doing a good job, Kirk, even if he is a little mouse. We have a lot of respect now, you know. It didn’t used to be that way. Of course cross-Atlantic operations have shifted from Eastern Europe to the Eastern Med. But even I am getting used to it.”