“Unit one, this is unit two, go ahead.” There was nothing but the soft hiss of a dead frequency. He hung up the phone. “Put him somewhere secure. I don’t want him sneaking up on me tonight and slitting my throat.”
“I’ll put him in the dry storage locker in the galley,” Schumatz said. “He won’t be bothering anyone. I’ll get his gun.”
“Just get him out of here, I’ll take care of the gun,” Panagiotopolous said.
“Do you want me to send Rudi up?” Rudi Gunn was the second officer.
“He’s scheduled to come on at midnight. I’ll stay until then,” Panagiotopolous said. He looked at Green. “See if you can get anything out of him, Lazlo. Something is going on around here that I can’t quite put my finger on.”
“I don’t think so, Liz,” McGarvey said.
“I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not leaving until you see my point,” his daughter said. It was seven and they were alone in his office. He’d known that she was bringing trouble by the look in her eyes and the set of her shoulders. Girding herself for a battle.
Yet what she wanted to do went way beyond the pale of her duties as a CIA case officer, even in this instance in which she had so much personally at stake. Elizabeth had almost lost her life on the golf course. It was just luck that McGarvey had gotten there in time to spot the van heading out onto the fairway and recognize it for what it was. Just blind luck that he was there to break up what would have been a good hit. Both shooters had been heavily armed and both were well motivated. Since Elizabeth had been cut off from her weapon, she’d done the only thing left open to her, and that was to run. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do. The terrorists had herded her and her mother into a killing ground and would have finished the job if Liz hadn’t gotten to her father’s gun.
Now she wanted to step up to the plate again; deliberately put herself into harm’s way. He was proud of her and angry with her at the same time. And vexed too. Goddamnit, nothing was ever simple. But she had a point and he knew it.
“I’m going to your mother’s,” he told her. “I need something to eat and a few hours’ sleep. You can ride down with me to my car.”
“Good, maybe Dick can talk to you—”
“This has nothing to do with my driver,” McGarvey said. “You’re an intelligence officer, not a Secret Service bodyguard.”
“But I know her, Dad,” Elizabeth said.
McGarvey stopped. He tried to work out where she could possibly have met the President’s daughter. It was impossible, he told himself. They came from two different worlds.
“What are you talking about, Liz?” he asked her.
“I’ve been doing my homework on her and Sarah bin Laden,” she replied. She looked away for a moment and shook her head. “We’re all cut out of the same cloth, you know.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does! We’re about the same age, our fathers are, for better or worse, important men and we all have handicaps. Sarah couldn’t have any kind of a normal life because there was a price on her father’s head and they were stuck in the mountains. Deborah has Down syndrome. And I—” Her lower lip quivered.
“And you what, Liz?”
She looked up into his face, searching, as if she was looking for an answer. “I want to be just like you, Dad. I want to follow in your footsteps, but I can’t. I can’t.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, sweetheart.”
“But I wanted it all my life,” she said. “And now I’m falling in love with Todd, and he wants me to get out of the Company. My mother and father want me to quit. Somebody is trying to kill me. And I’m scared.” She was appealing to her father for help that he could not give her. “But Sarah was scared too, and so would the President’s daughter be If she knew what was going on. It’s why I have to be with her until we stop the bastard.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to, Dad. It’s what we do for a living.”
“The Secret Service is watching her. Twenty-four hours a day. She can’t make a move without them seeing it.”
“That’s the difference. They’re watching her. I want to go out there and be with her. She deserves at least that much from us, don’t you think?”
McGarvey nodded after a long time, and he never suspected how much pain such a simple gesture could bring nun. “Take Todd with you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“His name is Gordon Guthrie,” Cheryl Cook said in the main saloon of Papa’s Fancy. She was distraught. “But I don’t know where he came from. England, maybe.”
Jim Lane, NYPD gold shield detective, looked up from his notebook with interest. “Why do you think that it was this guy and not one of the crew, or maybe a burglar caught in the act?”
Cheryl had come down to New York to be with Captain Walker for a few days. They had been having an affair over the past six months, and although she knew that it would never come to anything, she did love him in a way. They were supposed to meet at the Plaza, but when he didn’t show up she came over to see what was going on. She still couldn’t believe what she had walked into. She looked over to where she had found his body. She could still smell the foul odor of his death lingering on the air.
“The captain got along real well with the crew, but Mr. Guthrie showing up all of a sudden was creepy.”
“Creepy how?”
“We were in the middle of our annual haul-out when Mr. Richter, the owner, ordered us to drop everything and get up to Washington to meet him.”
“What’s so creepy about that?” Lane’s partner, Nicole Nickles, asked.
Cheryl shivered. “Just the way he came aboard, smiling all the time. But there was something wrong with his eyes. Like he had X-ray vision, or something. Whenever he was around I felt like I wasn’t wearing any clothes.”
“Where’d he go?” Lane asked. The young woman had made the initial 911 call, and until the ME had taken a look at the body and found the probable cause of death, she’d been a chief suspect.
“The day after we got back from Bermuda he told us that he was done with the yacht for a couple of weeks. He packed up everything except the aluminum case and left.”
“You already told us about that. But the case isn’t on the boat now. Could he have come back and got it?”
“Anything’s possible,” she admitted. “But if you find him, you’ll have the captain’s murderer. I’d bet anything on it.” She lowered her head and began to cry. “Damn.”
Nicole put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “We’ll find him.
Guaranteed,” she said. “But we’re going to need your help. Is that okay?”
Cheryl looked up and nodded.
“We’re going to need a better description of him. You can work with a police artist to come up with a drawing of his face. And then you can look at some photographs. Are you up for that tonight?”
“Whatever it takes to catch him.”
“Okay, just hang in there. We have a few things to take care of here, and then we’ll drive you downtown.”
The yacht was filled with evidence technicians who were going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. So far they hadn’t come up with much except that the man identified as Guthrie had fine, light brown hair, which they found on the pillows in his cabin.
Lane turned back to the girl. “By the way, why did Captain Walker pick last night to check on the yacht?”
“I think Mr. Richter asked him to do it.”
“Any idea why? I mean was this something that normally happened when the crew was away for a while?”
