He glanced again at the withdrawal slip, June 14, 1964. Then he thumbed through the main body of the file, which like the first contained nothing but book pages, telephone directory pages, some blank pages, a few ruled sheets, also blank. The third file, titled OPERATION: WHITE OUT, was the same.
Slowly he retied the jackets and stacked them with the others ready to be sent back. Someone had concealed Basulto’s activities back in 1964, in anticipation that he would be under a drug investigation twenty-three years later? Or, he asked himself, had the files been tampered with more recently than that and simply not been signed for?
Each question raised a dozen more. Each possibility admitted a thousand dark avenues down any one of which was some unknown danger.
I want you to pay real close attention. This Cuban we’re talking about worked for the Company a long time ago. He might still be working for the Company.
For whom, Kirk? he wanted to ask. The back door was wide open, and no one was there covering it for him. The next time he was going to get more information before he went off half-cocked.
For the next half hour he made himself work through the remainder of the files he had requested, going through all the motions of checking them against the card catalog. When he was finished, he bundled up his own files and put them back in his briefcase along with his tablets and pencils. Mary came over from the counter.
“Well, how’d we do this time, Janos?” she asked. She did not seemed worried, nor did it seem to him that she could see he was upset.
“You were a little slow on 201,” he said casually. “But it was within limits. I’m not a hardass here, Mary.” He got up. His legs felt a little weak. It was from sitting in the car, and then here at the table.
She laughed. “Oh, I don’t know about that.” She glanced at her watch. “Are we done here? Can I get these back to the roost?”
“Sure. You did a good job here, Mary, as usual. All of you did.” He locked his briefcase and hefted it.
“Are you heading back to Langley?” she asked.
“Why?”
“I thought I’d buy you a drink at the club. Something I’d like to talk to you about.”
He looked guiltily down at the files. Had she found him out? She was sharp. Christ, she could have looked in each jacket before bringing them over to him. She could have seen what Basulto’s contained. Now she wanted to find out from him why he hadn’t said anything about it. And that was the least of it. At this moment there should have been a four-alarm fire beneath the tail of every man, woman, and child on this post. Or, she could be working for whoever was still running the Cuban.
“Janos?”
“Another time, Mary,” he blurted. Careful, Janos he cautioned himself. “I’ve really got to get back.”
Disappointment showed on her face. “How about later this week, then? I could drive up to your office. I’d really like to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“Maybe I’d like to apply for another position.”
“What?” he asked stupidly. He felt dense.
“At Langley. In computers.”
Then he understood, and he laughed in relief. “Sure,” he said. “Sure thing, Mary. But I’ve got to go now. Call me later this week. Better yet, next week. I need a … I’m busy this week. Next week we’ll talk.”
“Thanks,” Mary said.
In the front office, Lieutenant Guthrie had stepped out. Janos signed himself out, then headed north again, sweat making his shirt stick to his back. This time he had no stomach for music, Russian or otherwise. He could only think what a disappointment McGarvey had been. He was an old friend and yet he hadn’t warned Janos — at least, he hadn’t made his warning clear enough. Be careful, Janos, he could have said. I mean be really careful, Janos. I don’t want you to get hurt. You are a good friend. I want to protect you. Right now there could be a lot of trouble coming down — for all of them. It was all right for Kirk, the man had resilience; he was like a rubber ball. When he was knocked down, he always seemed to come back up with just as much strength as before. But for Janos, who felt as if he were a man out on a very long, shaky, and dangerous limb, it wasn’t all right.
Ten miles north of Charlottesville, he pulled off at a Mobil station, where from a pay phone near the men’s room, he telephoned a number McGarvey had given him. It was answered on the second ring by a gruff male voice. “Yeah?”
Janos could hear a lot of talking and laughter in the background. It sounded like a bar.
“Is Mack Kirtland there?” he asked.
“Who’s calling?” the man demanded.
“His mother,” Janos snapped. The man laughed. Janos glanced out at his car. The attendant was washing the windows.
“Hello, mother,” McGarvey came on the line.
“Three jackets. Nothing in any of them. Someone was there first.”
“Easy now,” McGarvey said soothingly. “You’re calling from a secure phone?”
“Absolutely, Kirk. I swear it.” Trucks were rumbling by on the highway.
“Tell me what happened, then, Janos. Everything.”
Janos told him everything he had found and exactly how he had gone about it. He also share his speculation that the files could have been cleaned out at any time after the date in June 1964, and before the archives had been moved down to McGillis.
“But I’m mad, Kirk, that you didn’t give me a better warning.”
“Nothing has happened yet, Janos,” McGarvey said. “But if it’s any consolation, I had no idea someone would have wiped out his files. There wasn’t a thing?”
“Nothing, Kirk. Now what happens?”
The line was silent for a second or so. When McGarvey came back his voice sounded strange. “Go home, Janos. Just go home, now, and forget about it.”
“What’s going on?”
McGarvey hung up.
A dark blue Mercedes had come into the gas station, and two men got out as Janos hung up the telephone. He stood by the telephone for a moment or two as one of them came across from the island.
“Through with the telephone, sir?” the man said.
Janos looked at him. He was short, thin beneath a well-tailored blue pinstriped suit. But there was something about his eyes, something dark and cruel, something Janos had seen before.
The man suddenly had a large handgun in his right hand. It was an automatic, but it was silenced. In a fleeting. instant before he was shot and killed, Janos realized that he not only recognized the gun, he understood exactly what was happening. He never heard the shots that killed him.
13
Until this day McGarvey had had a fairly clear sense of his own past and at least some idea what possibilities the future might hold. He was not proud of his past, nor did he hold much real hope for the future. But they were his, nonetheless. He’d always thought, for instance, that despite his previous bad luck with women he would eventually settle down with a good one. He could see himself at a ripe old age, finally understood. Now he wasn’t so sure.
Up to this point he had not really committed himself to Trotter and Day. Oh, he’d gone through the motions all right. He had left Switzerland, hadn’t he? No matter. The end there had been inevitable. And once back he had gone to see Yarnell’s ex-wife, though how much of that had been out of idle curiosity and not his duty was a moot point. And he had come here to Washington to take a run past Yarnell and a brief look see down Basulto’s track. He wanted to do his preliminary sums before he got himself totally committed. A lot of what they had told him in the mountain safe house an age ago didn’t seem to make sense; the twos and fours were coming out nines and thirteens. “After the Bay of Pigs business, Yarnell was assigned to the embassy in Moscow,” was how Trotter had begun to build his case. After that he became assistant DDO, then a U.S. senator, and now he was one of the most influential men in Washington. This morning McGarvey had driven over to Yarnell’s house, where he waited around the corner up on Wisconsin Avenue out of sight of the attic windows, and at ten when Yarnell had emerged, he had followed him over to an office building on 16th, a couple of blocks from the Sheraton-Carlton. The entire day had been a waste. Yarnell had not moved. Once in the first hour, twice in the second, and six times every hour after that, McGarvey had said the hell with it and had started away. Each time something drew him back. Like iron filings to a magnet, or more like a hungry bear to a cache of tender meat, McGarvey returned. At four Yarnell went on the move, and by 4:20 McGarvey had gotten his reward.