lavender.
Turning back into the stairhall, McGarvey stopped and cocked an ear to listen. Still there were no sounds from anywhere in the house.
It was possible that Rencke’s computer hacking had been detected and he’d been arrested, but McGarvey doubted it.
“Otto?” he called out.
There was no answer. He went to the foot of the stairs and stopped again to listen.
Had there been a movement on the second floor?
“It’s me. It’s Mac.”
A toilet flushed, and Rencke, still wearing the same clothes from last night, appeared at the head of the stairs.
“Did you bring my Twinkies?” He asked, yawning as he came down.
McGarvey smiled and nodded. The man was incredible. “I brought them,” he said, putting away his gun. “The house was quiet, I thought something was wrong.”
“What were you intending on doing, shooting my cats?” Rencke asked. “They’re outside.
Now, my Twinkies, I’m starving.”
McGarvey gave Rencke the bag and followed him back to the kitchen. Unwashed dishes were piled in the sink, and a pot of something had been allowed to cook down to a charred mass on the stove. The burner had been turned off, but the pan had been left as is. Empty cat food cans littered the floor, and in a back hallway, several litter boxes were full to overflowing.
Rencke got a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “Did you see it?”
“What?”
“My beautiful lavender. Or are you color-blind?”
“I saw it,” McGarvey said. “Did you get in?”
“Just like raping a willing virgin,” Rencke said, brushing past McGarvey and heading back to the front of the house. “With ease. With ease.”
“What did you find out?” McGarvey asked, following him.
Rencke plunked down in front of the lavender terminal. “It’s a scary world out there, Mac. And it’s getting scarier, if you know what I mean.”
He opened a package of Twinkies, ate them both and then drank nearly half the milk, some of it spilling down his front. No crumbs or milk, however, got anywhere near the equipment.
“Some Company hotshot evidently found my rear-entry program and replaced it with a fairly sophisticated system of interlocks. They’re finally starting to use their heads over there. A day late and in this case a dollar short, but they’re thinking.”
Rencke drank some more milk. “I don’t think there are more than three people in the world besides me who could have gotten in like I did.”
“Were you detected?”
“No,” Rencke said. “At least I don’t think so. But this is hot stuff, Mac. I mean short of Russian tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, the hottest.”
“Did you make printouts?”
Rencke was eating another Twinkie. He nodded. “But when I was done I shredded the lot,” he said, his mouth full. “I didn’t want that kind of shit lying around here.
I’d rather have a hundred ks of blow with a sign on it on my front porch.”
McGarvey had pulled up a chair. “Tell me what you found out.”
“First I want something from you.”
“Name it.”
“You said Karl Boorsch was the rocket man at Orly last week. What were you doing there? What was your relationship with him and this STASI group?”
McGarvey told Rencke everything, including his history with Marta and the Swiss Federal Police, Colonel Marquand’s information, and about the pair who’d showed up at Kathleen’s house this morning.
“You’re certain they were Company muscle?” Rencke asked.
“It was a Company car. I have no reason at this point to suspect they were anything but Murphy’s people.”
“You would have been leaving your ex in a hell of a jam otherwise,” Rencke said thoughtfully.
McGarvey had had the same thought.
“You weren’t followed here? By anyone?”
“No.”
Rencke looked at the lavender screen. “They’re busy over there this morning, so it’s too dangerous to get back in. If you want to wait until tonight, I’ll show you what I came up with. But if you’re in a hurry-and I think you should be in one hell of a hurry-you’ll have to rely on my memory as well as my veracity.”
“I trust you, or else I wouldn’t have come here in the first place,” McGarvey said.
“What are your intentions? You said you’d meet with Murphy.”
“It might depend on what you’ve come up with. Marta was a good friend.”
Rencke was silent for a long moment or two. McGarvey thought he could hear the cats mewing at the door.
“I dipped into your file while I was at it,” Rencke said. “You’ve been up against the best, and survived, though not without injury. A couple of times you almost bought it.”
McGarvey said nothing.
“This one is bigger, or at least I think it could be. Maybe more important. But you’d be up against a highly trained and well-motivated group. Not just one Russian hitman.”
“Then there is a group of ex-STASI field officers?”
“They’re called K-l, but what the significance of that is, or even if it’s true, isn’t clear. You have to remember that all I’m giving you is what came out of CIA archives, and out of one Operations file. Any of that could be in error. You know the drill.”
“Do you know where they’re headquartered?”
“There’ve been rumors that they went to ground somewhere in the south of France.
Provence. Maybe even Monaco. But no one down there is talking, even to the SDECE.”
“If the Action Service involves itself that might change. Anything on the leadership?”
“There were about three dozen names on the possibles list, which I think is nothing more than a list of STASI goons still missing. Boorsch was on the list, and so was General Ernst Spranger.”
“The butcher of the Horst Wessel,” McGarvey said. He’d been number three in the STASI, in charge of Department Viktor, modeled after the KGB’s assassination, kidnapping and sabotage section. His intelligence was outdone only by his ruthlessness.
“You know the name?”
McGarvey nodded. “If he’s on the loose he’ll be the one in charge. And in fact it was probably Spranger who formed the group. But what about their finances? They couldn’t have gotten much out of East Germany. There wasn’t much there to get at the end.”
“We’ll come back to that. First, do you know why Boorsch shot that airliner out of the sky?”
“It had to do with a couple of CIA case officers aboard. But the Paris COS wouldn’t tell me a thing.”
“Don Cladstrup and Bob Roningen,” Rencke said. “They were on their way to Lausanne with a Swiss national by the name of Jean-Luc DuVerlie. Do any of those names tickle your funnybone?”
“Roningen was a weapons expert at the Farm, I think,” McGarvey replied. “But who was DuVerlie?”
“An engineer with the Swiss firm of ModTec.”
There was something in Rencke’s eyes. Something, suddenly, in his voice. McGarvey sat forward.
“What is it, Otto?”
“Do you know what ModTec is into? Among other things.”
“No.”
“In order to construct a nuclear weapon these days you only need three high-tech elements. The rest of the components are of the hardware store variety. You need a critical mass of weapons-grade fuel-plutonium or
