Day interrupted. “This is classified top secret, McGarvey. No matter what has happened before this moment, if you release what I’m about to tell you, I will personally see that you are prosecuted under the Secrets Act. To the full extent of the law.”
The man was a pompous ass. “Talk to me,” McGarvey said.
Again Day and Trotter exchanged glances.
“The Russians are apparently building six missile-launching facilities in the Mexican desert barely forty miles south of our border,” Trotter blurted.
McGarvey had come to believe, over the years, that he was sufficiently inured to bad news that his tolerance for shock was high. He could never become nonplussed. At this moment, however, he was truly frightened. He did not know what to say. He could feel it as a weakness in his legs, a hollowness in his gut, and a tightening in his chest.
“CESTA?” he said.
“They’re almost certainly involved,” Day agreed.
“Baranov, who runs CESTA, is Yarnell’s control officer.”
Day nodded.
“Yarnell has a man in the CIA. He fingered the two AID officers on the plane.”
“It would go a long way toward explaining everything,” Day said heavily.
Another thought struck McGarvey. “How do you know about this?”
For the first time Day suddenly seemed unsure of himself. He hesitated. McGarvey was having a bad feeling.
“Donald Powers is a personal friend of mine.” Day said.
“And Yarnell?”
Again Day hesitated. He nodded. “Darby and I go back a lot of years together.”
McGarvey realized he was shaking. Day stepped back a pace. “I swear to God that I didn’t tell anyone about you. Not even Powers.”
“If I ever find out you lied to me, I’ll kill you,” McGarvey said softly.
“For heaven’s sake, Kirk,” Trotter said.
Day straightened up a little, a determined look coming back into his eyes. “I’m going to Powers and the president with this. No one else. They must be informed. In the meantime you’re to make no move, no move whatsoever, without first clearing it through me.” He said it as an order, but then he softened his tone. “You do understand what’s at stake here. It’s no longer simply a case of proving Darby Yarnell is a spy who works for the Russians. Now it’s a matter of another missile crisis. This one a hell of a lot closer to our border than Cuba.”
“A crisis made impossible for us to win because the CIA is an open book to Baranov.”
“The bastard,” Day said with much feeling.
Driving back into the city, McGarvey tried to put a name to exactly what it was he was feeling. He had a sense that they all were racing madly down a long roller coaster whose brakes had failed, and yet he knew that someone was in control, that someone had planned the ride from the beginning. But to what end? Offensive missiles in Mexico? It was impossible for him to believe even now, although the Russians had gotten what they had wanted in Cuba. In exchange for removing their missiles they had extracted a promise from us that we would never intervene militarily with the Castro government. Perhaps the same things were happening in Mexico. But there was something else as well. Something more. He could feel it. He’d been glad to get out of the agency because of what it had done to him, and what he had seen it do to others. Yet when Trotter and Day had shown up in Switzerland he had almost gladly followed them. Hell, he had damned near jumped into their laps. His retirement had already begun to break down before they’d shown up. But now he wondered if coming back had been the right thing for him.
“You’re forty-four and your life is passing you by. You’re no longer in the fray, is that it?” Marta had asked, coming very close to the mark.
His life had passed him by in Switzerland, at least five years of it had. He had become anxious without admitting why. Or at least without admitting that he missed the business. “You are either a part of the problem or a part of the solution,” his father used to say. He’d tried to step out of himself, and in the end it had been impossible.
Day had ordered him to step aside. But that, too, was impossible now.
The day had seemed six months long. Eight o’clock in the evening seemed never to come. Yet when it did and Leonard Day found himself driving onto the grounds of Gallaudet College in Brentwood Park, he wished he could somehow stop time. Powers had seemed preoccupied on the telephone, but he’d agreed to meet Day at eight at his home. “Only if it’s very important, Leonard,” Powers had said at the last. “It’s getting just a bit hairy around here at the moment, if you catch my drift.” How many crises had he weathered in this town? he wondered. How many late night meetings, private conferences, for-your-eyes-only memos passed hand-to-hand had he seen? Here in Washington at the top, among the elite — the policy makers, the movers and shakers — the big decisions were made, but so were the colossal blunders. The U-2 flight of Francis Gary Powers, the Bay of Pigs, the entire Vietnam debacle, the abortive hostage-rescue attempt from Tehran, Watergate, the Iran-Contra Affair. The list was endless. This small town on the Potomac was very nearly an exclusively all-white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male enclave. The chosen few belonged to comfortable clubs where they could rest from the vigors of leadership. Golf courses came with bar service out on the fairways. Restaurants and hotels were so exclusive that eighty percent of the city (the blacks) could not gain entrance except through the service doors as busboys and waiters and bellhops. But God, it was exciting to be a part of it. First California, Day thought, now the center of the universe.
Driving past the college it was dark inside the car. The narrow road wound its way deep into the park, the trees and pathways mysterious in the warm night. Day lowered his window as he turned up the driveway to Powers’s home. Lights shone through the trees as he reached the security gate. He’d been here many times in the night. But never quite like this. Never with this intent. Never with this edge of fear that rode with him like some dark entity.
From the gate house the security man came over. A handgun was holstered at his hip. “Good evening, Mr. Day,” he said.
“I’m a little late.”
“Yes, sir. So is the director, but you can go on up; I’ll tell them you’re coming.”
Them? Day wondered as he proceeded up from the gate to the main house. Two cars were parked in the long circular driveway in front of the big three-story brick Colonial that Powers had taken over since becoming DCI. “A big rambling wreck of a mansion,” was how he described it. But with a certain fondness, Day had always suspected. Of course Powers had been raised with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth and expected always to live this way. It was his due. Getting out of the car, however, Day thought again that the house was ostentatious in its size, in its location, and certainly in its security precautions.
In the distance he suddenly could hear the dull chop of helicopter rotors beating the air. On the front step of the house he stopped and looked up as the DCI’s machine came low over the trees from the southwest, its landing lights coming on as it swung left and settled in for a landing on the helipad at the rear of the house.
“Just this way, sir,” someone from the open door said. Day turned. “They’re in the study,” the houseman said politely.
Day followed the man through the great hall beneath the U-shaped balcony and back along a narrow corridor to a pair of open doors that led into Powers’s study, a large, book-lined room with French doors leading to a veranda, a long leather-covered desk, and a grouping of couches, chairs, and Queen Anne tables in front of the fireplace. A high tension room. Not a retreat. The man who occupied this place was under the gun twenty-four hours a day, and Day had a huge respect for him. A lot of them were carried out feet first, but not Powers.