Rencke asked. “Let me guess. You’re looking for bad guys. You’re working freelance, still. And you’ve come to ask for my help. Is that about it?”
McGarvey had to smile. “You could have gotten yourself shot, you stupid bastard.”
Rencke’s head bobbed as if it were on springs. “Your control is better than that.
I’m not stupid. And I’m not a bastard. Oh, well, I figure one out of three isn’t so bad under the circumstances.”
“I am here to ask for help, but what were you doing sneaking around in the cemetery at this hour? I thought you’d be at your computers.”
“I had a Twinkie attack.” Rencke wasn’t carrying a bag. He grinned sheepishly. “Couldn’t wait, so I ate them already. Bad me.”
“I need to get into Langley archives, and maybe an operational file or two,” McGarvey said. “Possible?”
Again Rencke’s head bobbed up and down. “Anything is possible, Mac. Weren’t you taught that in school? Come on, let’s see how tough they’ve made it these days.” He winked.
“Of course it depends on whether they’ve discovered my screen door.”
“Screen door?” McGarvey asked, as he followed Rencke across to the house and inside.
The front door wasn’t locked.
“We can put a screen door into a computer program… most of them leak like a sieve, you’d be surprised… but no one’s figured out how to successfully install a screen door in a submarine. Especially a Los Angeles class boat. Right? Right?”
Rencke was almost bursting with suppressed humor and enthusiasm.
“So you’ve kept up with me,” McGarvey said. He’d been involved with an incident over a hijacked Los Angeles class sub a couple years ago. “Why?”
Rencke led them into the living room, packing paper taped up over the bay windows.
Soft lights automatically came on, as did a half-dozen monitor screens. He stopped and turned back to McGarvey.
“Do you want me to tell you something, Mac?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer.
“Okay. I find you endlessly fascinating. You’re like a computer, only I can’t figure out the CPU. I haven’t even got your clock speed yet. So I keep watching. It’s better than the Dodgers used to be.”
“The man’s name is Karl Boorsch. He was the shooter at Orly on Friday. Did you hear about it?”
“The Swissair flight. It was in all the newspapers. I’m not a hermit here.”
“He’s ex-STASI, I recognized him, and the SDECE made him as well. They suggested that he might be working for a well-funded organization of ex-STASI officers on the run from the new German government.”
“Just like the Odessa,” Rencke said. “The organization of former Nazi SS officers, you know. Big thing in the fifties and sixties. They mostly all died off, though.”
“There were a couple of Agency types aboard that flight. Probably Boorsch’s target.”
Rencke’s head was bobbing. “You want to know about this STASI outfit. You want to know who funds it. You want to know who they are, where they’re hiding these days, and who their leaders are.” He took a deep breath. “And, you want to peek at operations to see what they had cooked up. That about it, Mac?”
McGarvey nodded. “The general wants to see me, and I wanted to be prepared before I went over there. I don’t like surprises.”
“I see what you mean,” Rencke said knitting his eyebrows. His complexion was very pale, his lips red. “Surprises are fun unless they start shooting at you.” He dropped into a chair in front of a terminal and pulled up a telephone line.
“Can you help?”
“Go away,” Rencke said, his voice already distant. “Come again another day.” The Central Intelligence Agency’s logo, a shield topped by an eagle’s head, appeared on the screen. “Bring some Twinkies when you come back. A lot of Twinkies.”
Chapter 18
“I hate pigeons. They shit over everything and yet the city protects them.”
Tom Lynch looked up from where he was seated on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg as a heavily built, swarthy man approached and sat down next to him. It was a few minutes after nine in the morning, the day already pleasant. It was Monday so there weren’t any children around.
“Squab.”
“Nothing but an overpriced dead pigeon,” Phillipe Marquand said. He’d brought a small paper bag of cracked corn and he tossed out a handful for the birds who immediately flocked around.
“I thought Frenchmen were all gourmands.”
“I’m a Corsican,” Marquand flared. “And I didn’t come here to discuss food.”
“I didn’t think you had,” Lynch said mildly. He didn’t like the SDECE colonel, but this was a friendly country in which the CIA had to walk with care. His instructions from Langley were to meet with the man, but give him nothing. The official line was that our people were making a routine trip to Switzerland, and that the terrorist attack had been nothing more than just that… a random act of violence.
The U.S. State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force was working hand-in-hand with the French, which was as far as the White House wanted it to go for the moment.
“The Swiss kicked McGarvey out yesterday, did you know that?” Marquand asked. “We tracked him through London as far as Dulles, but then lost him. You wouldn’t happen to know where he is now?”
“No,” Lynch said. “Should I?”
“I would think that someone would want to ask him a few questions about Friday.”
“I understand you and he spoke.”
Marquand nodded.
“Is that why you knew he’d gone to Switzerland? It was an old flame of his aboard that flight. He’d known her from Lausanne. Said he was going to pay his respects.”
“He is apparently a generous man, your McGarvey. But it was not the only reason he went to Switzerland.”
“No?” Lynch said quietly.
“He was showing his face, hoping that the friends of Karl Boorsch might show themselves.”
“Should I know this name?”
“He’s the man who shot down one-four-five,” Marquand said. “Former East German STASI hitman. Belongs to an organization of ex-STASI thugs who’ve gone freelance.”
The information given so freely was breathtaking, but Lynch managed to maintain his control. “Have you any other names?”
“Not for now. But obviously Boorsch and his people want to stop your inquiries in Switzerland. Would you care to share anything with me?”
“Not at this moment,” Lynch said looking the Frenchman straight in the eye.
Marquand’s jaw tightened. “There were Frenchmen aboard that flight. Vacationers, most of them. Some with their families. In one case it was the mother and father, twin five-year-old girls, and the old grandmother. They will be buried in a common grave, what bits of their bodies were found, that is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, we all are. But it was no random act of terrorism, as you would like us all to believe.”
Lynch started to object but Marquand held him off.
“Two of your people were escorting a Swiss citizen to Geneva. It is our belief that the STASI group wanted them stopped. We simply want to know why. What are you investigating?”
“I can’t say, Phillipe,” Lynch replied carefully, realizing by even telling the SDECE colonel that much he was giving away more than Langley had wanted him to give away.
Marquand nodded. “I told McGarvey this…?
“He is a civilian.”
