“Yes,” Carrara said. “The STASI group, which we’re calling K-l, had approached another ModTec engineer with an offer to buy the switches. When the engineer held out for more money they killed him and hid his body. But DuVerlie found out about it, and figured he would be safer dealing with us than them, and probably make just as much money in the bargain.”
“You knew about this K-l group before DuVerlie approached you?”
“Yes,” Carrara answered. “And we’d picked up rumors that one-four-five would be shot down.”
“Because of DuVerlie?”
“We didn’t know that.”
“But you made the connection.”
“Yes.”
“But did nothing,” McGarvey said, his stomach knotting up. “You didn’t warn Swissair. Hell, you didn’t even hold your own people from taking the flight.”
“We warned Interpol that there might be trouble on an international flight out of France.”
McGarvey could no longer sit down. He got to his feet. “That was fucking big of you.
The public be damned.”
“I don’t set policy, McGarvey.”
“Who does?”
Carrara looked away.
“You sonsofbitches ignored it all, and because of it more than a hundred fifty innocent people are dead.” McGarvey went to the window and looked outside at the beautiful day. “There were other considerations, weren’t there? Sources that would have been revealed if you’d warned the public.” He turned back. “Christ, to what end, Phil?
Tell me, have you or I or the entire CIA made even the slightest difference on how events have turned out over the past fifty years?”
Carrara looked up at him. “I have to believe we have, McGarvey. Else why do we do our jobs?”
The conviction that his entire life had been nothing but an exercise in futility suddenly welled up in McGarvey’s breast. “Christ,” he said softly, Mati’s face rising up in his mind’s eye. It took everything within his control not to turn on Carrara.
“Jim Shirley, our chief of station in Tokyo, was murdered on Friday by two as yet unidentified Japanese,” the DDO said. “We learned overnight that Ed Mowry, our acting chief of station, may be next on their list.”
McGarvey was listening with one part of his mind, while with another he was still thinking about Marta. Her mistake had been falling in love with him. It had cost her her life.
“Shirley had apparently been conducting a series of meetings with a man by the name of Armand Dunee, who supposedly was a spy for a Belgian bank operating in Tokyo.
But he was an imposter.
In the beginning, in Lausanne, Mati had been a diversion. His real work had been the bookstore and his research on the French writer-philosopher Voltaire. But he’d been deluding her and everyone else, including himself. Once a spy, always a spy.
Hadn’t he heard that line somewhere?
“We have a blind source there who may have spotted one of Shirley’s assassins following Mowry.”
Mati had wanted him to give it up, as did Kathleen. But neither of them understood the thing inside of him that was his driving force. His sister had come close a number of years ago when she’d pleaded with him not to sell their parents’ ranch in western Kansas after they had died. She’d inherited the cash and securities, but he had been given the land. “There’s nothing wrong with being tied to the land,” she’d argued.
“A piece of ground cannot be tainted. Not that way.”
But he’d disagreed, and had sold his parents’ property without going back to see it. Daughters are not guilty of the sins of their fathers, he’d told another of his women. But what about the sons?
“We have a team in Tokyo, but no doubt they’ve been spotted. You might have a better chance of not only protecting Mowry, but finding out who wants to kill him and why.”
McGarvey turned around. “Have you warned him?”
“He’s been told that he may be a target. I sent over some help from Technical Services.
But you’ve got to understand that we’re limited in what we can overtly do just now.
The Japanese authorities are very touchy.”
“Have you told him about your blind source?”
Carrara looked uncomfortable. “Of course not.”
“So Mowry doesn’t specifically know that he’s being tailed?”
“No.”
“How about the Technical Services team?”
“We’re keeping the need-to-know list to a minimum.”
McGarvey shook his head. “What the hell is going on, Phil? The Company never did this sort of thing before.”
“The world has changed,” Carrara replied tightly.
“And that’s it? The world has changed?”
Carrara said nothing.
“What’s going on in Tokyo? Why was your chief of station killed, and why the blind asset?”
“I’m sending a briefing book with you so that you can familiarize yourself on the flight over. But in broad strokes we were asked to investigate the possibility that a Japanese corporation, or consortium of corporations, were going to institute an all-out technological-economic war on us. Specificially in the military-aerospace electronics field. First they would mount an espionage operation against U.S. companies doing research and development in order to find out to what point we’d taken the technology. And then they would simply better it.”
“To what end?”
“Economic blackmail. Either we buy their new developments or they’d sell them on the world market.”
“Shirley was killed because he was on to them?”
“It may not be that simple, Kirk. It may be that Shirley was involved in kickbacks. We’re just not sure. But what’s at stake here amounts to billions of dollars.”
“Maybe they’re after improvements in nuclear technology as well.”
“ModTec is not the only manufacturer of those switches, nor are they the best.”
“Assuming Shirley got caught in the middle, why target Mowry?” McGarvey asked.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he was involved as well, or they think he was. Either way we’d like you to find out.”
“What about your blind asset?”
Carrara handed McGarvey a photograph of Kelley Fuller. “She works as an interpreter for the USIA at our embassy under the name Yaeko Hataya.
She was Jim Shirley’s lover.”
“Shit,” McGarvey mumbled half under his breath as he studied the photograph. She was a good-looking woman.
“You’re going to have to stay out of the way of the Tokyo police. Needless to say they won’t be sympathetic.”
“Do you think the government is involved?”
“I don’t know. I hope not, but I don’t know.”
“What’s the girl’s situation? How will we make contact?”
“Mowry has put her up in one of our safehouses. Once you’re settled in Tokyo she’ll get word to your hotel. She knows you’re coming.”
“But Mowry knows nothing about this?”
“That’s right.”
McGarvey had to shake his head. “When do I leave?”
“Immediately,” Carrara said.
