embraced.
“You look fit, my old friend,” McGarvey said.
“And you do as well,” the old man replied, the smile fading from his face. “I just learned last night about our little Mati.” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry, Kirk.
We all are. She was so full of life.”
“It’s why I came back. I thought perhaps I might speak with her parents, maybe her friends. She was in Paris to see me, you know.”
Fuelm nodded. “Yes, I know, Kirk. And believe me, I wish that you could stay in Switzerland, but it’s just not possible.”
McGarvey stepped back, careful to keep his hands away from his jacket.
“He’s armed,” Fuelm told the two men who’d put down the art book.
“We wish for no trouble, Herr McGarvey,” one of the men said. They both looked like professional boxers.
“I didn’t come expecting trouble,” McGarvey said.
One of the Federal cops took the pistol from McGarvey’s belt at the small of his back. Fuelm had felt it during their embrace.
“Then why are you armed, Kirk?” Fuelm asked.
“Old habits.”
Fuelm nodded sadly. “You must leave Switzerland immediately. These gentlemen will escort you back to Cointrin. Where do you wish to go? Back to Paris?”
“Washington.”
“Very well.”
“I left a rental car at the Lausanne-Prince. My bag is in the trunk.”
“The car has already been taken care of, Kirk. And your bag is on its way to the airport.”
McGarvey smiled. “You Swiss can’t be faulted for lack of efficiency.
“No,” Fuelm said. “And I’ll pass along your condolences to Mati’s people. She often spoke of you to them, and they always wanted to meet you. Her father especially.”
“I’m sure they’re good people.” “Yes, they are,” Fiielm said.
He and McGarvey shook hands. “Take care, Dortmund.” Fiielm leaned in close and lowered his voice. “Find the monsters who did this to our little Mati, Kirk. Find them, and kill them!”
Chapter 17
McGarvey thought about Otto Rencke all the way across the Atlantic from London, and by the time his Northwest flight touched down a few minutes before eight at Washington’s Dulles International Airport, he’d decided to use the man.
No one was waiting for him at customs or in the Arrivals Hall, which was surprising.
He thought that the Swiss would have sent word that he was coming in, just as an interagency courtesy.
There was little doubt in his mind that Murphy wanted him involved in the Swissair business, just as the French did. But before he made any decision he needed more information than he expected the DCI would be willing to give him.
He’d thought a lot about that between Geneva and London, and then on the long flight across the Atlantic, and he had come to the conclusion that if he could find Rencke and convince the man to help, he would go through the back door. With any luck he would learn what he had to know for his own safety before anyone out at Langley knew what was happening.
Although he was getting no sense that anyone was behind him, or that anyone was watching, he thought it would happen sooner or later. “Trouble has a way of finding you,” he’d been told more than once. And it was true.
He took a cab to the Marriott Key Bridge Motel and after it was gone he took another cab across the river to Union Station, where he took still another cab to the Holiday Inn Georgetown where he registered under the name of Tom Patton, paying with some of the cash he’d changed at the airport. For the moment, at least, he wanted anonymity here in Washington.
As of a couple of years ago, Rencke lived with his computers and a dozen cats in an ancient brick house that had once been the quarters for the caretaker of Holy Rood Cemetery. Then he had been a computer systems consultant on a freelance basis for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. His particular talent was an almost superhuman ability to visualize entire complex systems, including supercomputers, satellite links, data encryption devices, and all the peripheral equipment and connections that linked them, and make them user friendly.
But at thirty-nine he was already a has-been from a dozen different jobs and callings.
Trained as a Jesuit priest, he’d been, at twenty, one of the youngest professors of mathematics ever to teach at Georgetown University. But he liked women too much, so in 1974 he’d been fired from his job and defrocked all in the same day.
From there he’d enlisted in the army, as a computer specialist, but he’d been given a bad conduct discharge nine months later, because he also liked boys if there were no girls immediately available.
For a year he’d dropped out of sight, but then had shown up on the CIA’s payroll, his Jesuit and Army records apparently wiped completely clean, so that he passed the vetting process with ease.
McGarvey had run into the man on several occasions at Langley, where Rencke had taken charge of the Agency’s archives section, bringing it into the computer age.
They’d worked together again in Germany, and once in South America where Rencke had come to straighten out the station’s electronic equipment.
In his spare time, Rencke had updated the Company’s entire communications system, standardized their spy satellite input and analysis systems (so that CIA machines could crosstalk, thus sharing information, with NSA equipment), and devised a field officer’s briefing system whereby pertinent, up-to-date information could be funneled directly to the officer on assignment when and as he needed it.
His past had caught up with him a few years ago, and like McGarvey, he’d become a pariah across the river.
It was after ten by the time McGarvey had reassembled his pistol (the Swiss had returned it to him on condition he show them how he’d gotten it through Cointrin’s X-ray equipment) and he walked across the street into the cemetery. The evening was dark, the sky overcast and the air extremely humid. A light fog had formed from the river, muffling sounds and forming halos around the streetlights. It was a Sunday night; nothing much was moving in Washington.
The small, two-story house at the rear of the cemetery looked to be in reasonable condition, but deserted. There were no curtains or blinds in any of the windows, except one large bay window on the ground floor, nor was there a car in the carport, or a lawnmower, or paint cans, or anything else that would indicate Rencke was still in residence.
McGarvey stood in the shadows across a narrow lane watching the front of the house for any signs of life. As he remembered, Rencke had been a night person, preferring to sleep during the day. Of course there was no reason to believe that he was still here, or that something else in his past hadn’t caught up with him and landed him in jail. But there also was no reason to believe he wasn’t still here.
“Boo,” someone said softly behind him.
McGarvey, startled, reached for his pistol, but then relaxed and turned around. It was Rencke; he’d recognized the voice, even in that one word.
The computer whiz looked like a twenty-year-old kid, with long, out-of-control frizzy red hair, wild eyebrows, and a gaunt, almost ascetic frame. He was dressed in Nikes, ragged blue jeans and a Moscow State University sweatshirt, its sleeves cut off at the shoulders. He was grinning.
“So, Mac, what’re you doing wandering about in a cemetery in the middle of the night?”
