“Yes, sir,” Wylie said.
Mueller hung up, and shuffling into the bathroom he was struck with the notion that he’d known something like this would happen ever since he’d learned that Elizabeth McGarvey had enrolled in a Swiss school. Death and destruction followed the girl’s father wherever he went.
Chapter 39
“When I was a child in Honolulu my grandfather told me stories about the western desert,” Kelley Fuller said.
McGarvey was seated in a tub of extremely hot, scented water to his neck. He turned at the sound of her voice as she closed the rice paper door. He could hear traditional Japanese music playing elsewhere in the building.
“He said that he was sent there simply because he was of Japanese descent.” She pinned her hair up, exposing her tiny ears and long, delicate neck. “He hated America until he died.”
“I thought you were sleeping,” McGarvey said. It was nearing noon, but in this place time seemed to have no meaning.
It was called the Sunny Days Western Ranch, and was housed in a nondescript but expansive two-story building off a crowded back street in the Shinjuku’s Kabukicho District.
On the first floor were the public baths, hostess rooms and kitchens, while the second floor was reserved for suites. They had rented a bedroom, sitting room and small bath.
The tariff was fabulously expensive, but the place was absolutely safe. No questions were asked or answered here. McGarvey had drawn an American Express card under a workname from his Channel Island account before he’d left Paris. A few eyebrows might be raised in Jersey when the bills started coming in, but they would be paid without hesitation and in secrecy.
“It was not possible to sleep. So I have come to wash your back, McGarvey-san,” Kelley said. She wore a snow-white kimono which she opened and dropped to the floor. She was nude, her legs long and delicately formed, her belly nearly flat, her hips almost boyish, and her breasts small, the nipples large and very dark. She looked exotic.
“This isn’t necessary.”
“You will save my life, I believe. I wish to thank you now, while there is still time.” She sat on a small stool and using a big natural sponge and a wooden bucket of warm soapy water, washed herself.
McGarvey watched her. “We may not find anything,” he said. “In the end you may have to return home.”
She glanced at him, her eyes round, almost as if she were a startled deer. “But your friend told you something this morning that troubled you.” She shook her head. “You will not leave Tokyo until you have struck back.”
“I need a name and a face before I can do anything.”
“You will find what you are seeking,” she said serenely. She rinsed herself with a bucket of clear water and a ladle, then joined McGarvey in the tub, kneeling on the bench behind him so that she could scrub his back with a rough towel.
“Perhaps not.”
“It’s terrible to live in fear. I have, all of my life, you know. Now, there is nothing to go back for.”
“What about your parents?”
“My parents also hated America, and they taught this to me so that when I finished school I decided to work for the Central Intelligence Agency so that I could learn secrets which I could give to their enemies.”
“Did you become a traitor?”
“No. In the end it was impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because I saw that my grandfather and my parents were wrong.”
McGarvey turned to her. She was crying silently, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Slowly, carefully, as if she were a fragile, easily breakable objet d’art, he gathered her into his arms, and they began to make love.
“I understand,” he said. And he did, because he’d also been afraid.
It was after midnight in Washington and McGarvey could hear the strain in Rencke’s voice on the telephone. The man had probably worked around the clock since he’d been handed the problem.
“I may be on to something,” Rencke said.
“Have you got a name for me yet?” McGarvey asked. He was calling from a private cubicle just off the manager’s office on the first floor. He’d been assured that the phone was completely untraceable.
“I did what you suggested, looked for a motive. What we’re talking about here, I figure, is a case of hate and contempt. I mean really massive. Combine that with the money to do something about it … we agree that this dude is well-heeled…
well, there’d have to be some public notice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody would catch it for what it really was, I don’t think. But look, if you’re worth let’s say a billion dollars, and you spend your life trying to screw Americans, something will come up.”
McGarvey was beginning to see what Rencke was getting at, and it did make sense.
“State might have something.”
“Them and the Company’s Intelligence Directorate’s archives, and of course the Defense Intelligence Agency’s files.”
“You’ve been in their computers?”
“Of course. But the real paydirt came when I checked out the New York Times’
files, with cross references in three newsmagazines and two television networks.
I came up with a nifty little search program that sought out anti-Americanisms based on a weighted scale… one to a hundred. For instance: Making a flat-out public statement that a man hated America and would do everything within his power to bring it down, would be worth anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred points, depending on whether or not the man had control of enough money to buy and put to use one of the devices K-l is going after. Do you follow my drift so far?”
“Go on,” McGarvey said.
“I came up with beaucoup names. Seems as if there’s a lot of dudes in the empire who’ve got varying degrees of hardons for us. So I had another brainstorm. Wait’ll you hear this one. Just for the hell of it I added two other parameters to my search program. Number one: I figured that in order to pull this sort of a thing off our bad guy would have to be worth at least a hundred large. I mean a hundred million U.S. Agreed?”
Terrorism was fabulously expensive if it was to be successful. Many small countries couldn’t afford it. A hundred million wasn’t out of line. “Agreed.”
“Hang on to your socks. Now come motives, and I came up with a few dillies. For instance: How about former prisoners of war? How about Japs whose businesses had failed because of U.S. policies?” Rencke giggled. “Or the grand-dilly of them all. How about dudes who lost families or loved ones in Hiroshima or Nagasaki?”
McGarvey was speechless for a moment or two. Christ, it fit. A man whose family had been destroyed by an American atomic bomb, and who’d later made his fortune, could be thinking of revenge. But there’d have to be more.
“Have you come up with a name yet?”
“No,” Rencke admitted. “But I’ve come up with a half-dozen candidates whose birthplaces, and whose backgrounds during that period of history are unclear. I’m working on that.”
“I want you to throw in one other consideration,” McGarvey said. “I don’t think simple revenge would be enough. Whoever this person is, he is rich. In order to get there he has to be smart; shrewd, at the very least, perhaps even brilliant.”
“Which means he’d have to have another motive. He’d have something to gain by using his little toy.”
