look great, Mrs.
M.,” Yemm said. Kathleen dismissed him with a gesture. “You know that we have to be careful. Because of the hearings. Everybody in Washington is watching us.” “Not where we’re going,” McGarvey said.
“And even if they are, it doesn’t matter.” Kathleen shook her head.
“It might not matter to you, Kirk. But appearances matter to just about everyone else in Washington.” She smiled at Ensign Dietrich, who stood in the galley separating the main cabin from the cockpit. “Women know more about these things than men do.” She was verging on the edge of hysteria. “Bill Clinton and his two-hundred-dollar haircut.” She laughed. “Jimmy Carter and the killer rabbit, or his ridiculous Playboy interview. Lust in his heart, indeed.” She laughed again and turned to her husband. “Do you remember Darby Yarnell, darling?” It was a name out of the clear blue sky, and there was a clutch at his heart. He nodded. “That was the old days.” Yarnell, who had worked for the CIA in the fifties and sixties, had been a two-term senator from New York. He had been one of the people responsible for getting McGarvey burned after Santiago. He had been brought down during the Donald Powers investigation, and had been shot to death in front of the DCIs residence a million years ago. McGarvey could feel the pistol in his hands. Feel the recoil as he fired three shots at the man he thought was a traitor. Killing him. He closed his eyes for a moment, and he could see the image in the surveillance camera trained on Yarnell’s Georgetown house. The third-story bedroom window. Kathleen was there in YarneU’s arms. It was an image that was etched in his brain. Of course the final blow came when they realized that Yarnell wasn’t a traitor after all. But the man had caused a lot of damage.
Ruined a lot of people because of his arrogance, his cocksure attitude that his was the only vision. “It was before you came back from Switzerland the first time,” she said. “Darby was part of the in crowd, and I was trying to storm the gates, as my father would say.”
“He hurt a lot of people,” McGarvey said. “That’s my point,” Kathleen countered, and McGarvey had no earthly idea where she was going with the story, or why she had brought YarnelTs name up. “I don’t understand.” “He was the one man at the time in Washington for whom appearances meant everything. And yet he was the only man I ever met who apparently didn’t need to care. Everything he did was perfect. His house was perfectly decorated. The clothes he wore were perfect; his shoes were always shined, his cologne wasn’t overpowering and his parties were the best in the city. He spoke a half-dozen languages, he could quote Shakespeare, and there wasn’t a restaurant or private collection in Washington that had a better wine cellar than his.” “I still don’t understand.” “Why, appearances mean everything,” she said, as if she were telling him a universal truth that everyone instinctively knew. “He was a spy, after all. And a bastard. Yet everyone in Washington, including me, thought that he was perfect. We were drawn to him like moths to a flame.” She gave her husband a wistful smile. “That’s what’s important in Washington, don’t you see, my darling? It doesn’t matter if you’re the best DCI ever to sit on the seventh floor if Washington doesn’t accept your appearance. It doesn’t matter if you’re good; the only thing that matters is if you look like you’re right for the job.” McGarvey forced a smile. “I don’t really care ”
“You should.” Kathleen held out her glass for more champagne. “Hammond and his bunch do.” She was brittle. “It doesn’t matter if they confirm me or not. They’ll get somebody else.” “Don’t be silly, Kirk. You’re the best DCI there ever was. It’s only the idiots who don’t know it yet.” A dark cloud passed over her. “But once you’re there, even your friends will try to cut you down.” Then she smiled. “Isn’t that so, Dick?” “It’s part of the job, Mrs. M.,”
Yemm answered. He was glum. “Do you think someone will shoot him?”
Kathleen asked. The question startled everyone. Ensign Dietrich almost dropped the champagne bottle, and the pilot looked over his shoulder through the open cockpit door.
“Come on, Katy, we’re supposed to be on vacation.” McGarvey tried to stop her, but she held up a hand.
“No, wait. Let him answer my question. I have a right to know if someone out there wants to make me a widow.”
“There’s a lot of them want it,” Yemm said. He glanced at McGarvey, who shrugged.
“But will they go for it?”
After a moment Yemm nodded. “I think so.”
“Well,” Kathleen said. She looked at the others. “Isn’t that peachy.”
They landed on St. Thomas when the sun was low on the horizon. By six it would be dark and after the stress of Washington, Kathleen admitted that she was too tired to eat out. She wanted to get directly over to the house on St. John, sit on a veranda with a cup of tea and look at the tropical stars. Captain White taxied over to the private aviation terminal. When the engines spooled down, Ensign Dietrich opened the hatch. A pleasant, soft- spoken immigration official in short sleeves came aboard and checked their papers and aircraft registration. Even though these islands were a U.S. Territory, the formalities were still observed. When the man found out who he was dealing with he practically fell all over himself with hospitality. Drug trafficking throughout the Caribbean was a big problem; that, along with money laundering and gun running had corrupted officials all the way up to the USVTs governor’s office. It made the people here very nervous.
Yemm took the man aside. They would be here only for the weekend. They did not want to read about the director’s visit in the newspaper or hear about it on the radio. There would be no meetings with territorial officials. The CIA would take it unkindly if the news were to leak. “Do you think that he’ll tell anybody?” McGarvey asked.
Kathleen was in the Gulfstream’s head, touching up her makeup. “The first man he sees,” Yemm said. “But he’ll pass along my warning, too.
We’ll be okay.” The crew would stay at a nearby hotel for the weekend.
They were busy securing the aircraft’s systems. Even here at the airport, security was a problem. Yemm made a brief call with his cell phone. “Island Tours is sending over a helicopter,” he told McGarvey when he was done. “It’ll be faster than the boat.”
“Good idea,” McGarvey said. He, too, was tired after the busy week.
The Island Tours Bell Ranger helicopter came over and settled down on the tarmac twenty yards from the Gulfstream. McGarvey glanced out the door. It was just the pilot in the blue-and-white machine. He wondered how fast news traveled in the islands, if the pilot knew who his passengers were. He and Yemm gathered up their bags, and when Kathleen was finished in the head they walked across to the chopper. He wondered if two days was going to be anywhere near enough time for them to come down. McGarvey and Kathleen rode in the back while Yemm rode shotgun next to the pilot. They headed immediately over Lindbergh Bay, then Water Island, skirting the south coast of St. Thomas. The sun had just dropped below the horizon, but already it was dark, and the hills rising up behind the city of Charlotte Amalie were studded with lights. Three cruise ships, lit up like store windows at Christmas, were getting under way from the main docks east of downtown. The entire harbor was filled with more than one hundred boats of every size and description; most of them cruising sailboats escaping the northern winter. Traffic along the waterfront and commercial docks in town was heavy. This was a weekend at the height of the season; everyone in the islands played. Pillsbury Sound, which separated St. Thomas from St.
John, was only three miles wide. As they rounded Long Point, the smaller island came into view, as did the British Virgin Islands of Tortola and Jost Van Dyke to the north. All of the islands, including dozens of smaller ones, many of them uninhabited, rose out of the sea like something out of a James Michener South Seas adventure. McGarvey had been here before, but he never got tired of the scenery. He could feel his tension beginning to subside. Kathleen was looking out the window, her shoulders hunched forward as if she were carrying a huge weight on her back. She was strangely silent. McGarvey touched her arm. “Are you okay, Katy?” “They don’t have a clue,” she said. “Most of them. This is where they come when they want to climb off the real world. Tune out.” She sounded tired and bitter. He studied her profile. An unaccountable sadness rose up inside of him for all the years that they had lost together. But it was getting better, and he would make sure that they stayed on track. His premonitions of disaster were nothing more than the result of a guilty conscience. For years he had gone to sleep every night dreaming about the people he’d killed in the line of duty. Those dreams were coming back to haunt his waking hours now.
Yemm motioned for McGarvey to put on a headset. “The pilot wants to know if you’d like to do a little sight- seeing tonight.”
“No. We want to get settled in.”
“There’s no staff, so we’re on our own for dinner.”
