didn’t like to leave it at that, with lies. Once you started down that path there was almost never a redemption. People remembered lies much longer than they remembered the truth. But he wasn’t sure of anything, or anyone, now. Whoever pushed the button in the VI was no stranger, because if they were, it meant there was a mole somewhere here, within earshot of the director’s office. Neither possibility was comforting. Adkins came to the door. “Staff is set for ten. All but Otto.” “Why?” “No one knows where he is. He’s not here, but Louise swears that so far as she knows he’s at his desk.” McGarvey closed his eyes for a moment.
“Is she lying?” “I think so. Whenever Otto wanders off she gets hyper. She sounded okay this time.” “Have Security find him.” “Why bother?” Adkins asked with a trace of bitterness. Looking for Otto had become an almost full-time job. “Because he probably has the key to finding out who’s gunning for me,” McGarvey explained. “And because he’s one of us. And because I said so.”
Ms. Swanfeld walked into his office ten minutes later. She looked pale. “Mr. Director, it’s your son-in-law on three. He’s calling from Denver General Hospital.” McGarvey had been trying without much luck to concentrate on the India-Pakistan NIE updates that Otto had prepared two days ago. He looked up, a vise around his heart. “Thank you.” He picked up the telephone after Ms. Swanfeld withdrew. “What happened, Todd?” “Elizabeth has been hurt. She’ll be okay, but it wasn’t an accident, that’s why we’re using our work names.” “Someone is with you?” “We’re secure,” Todd said. He sounded shook-up, but steady. “Okay. From the top. What happened out there?” McGarvey asked. “We were skiing off pi ste when Liz’s bindings came apart and she hit a tree head-on. But they were set to blow. Somebody packed them with Sem-tex. She never had a chance.” The whispering was loud now, like a waterfall just around a bend in the path. “But I don’t know about the detonator. Probably an acid fuse, anything else would have been too big. Technical Services can retrieve her skis and check it out.” “That means somebody out there at Vail must have set them.”
“That’s what I figured.” “Let me talk to her,” McGarvey said. “She’s in the recovery room,” said Todd, his voice deflated. “She’ll be out of it for a while.” “You said that she’ll be okay ”
“Yeah. But we lost the baby.” Todd choked up. “She never had a chance, the doctor said. They tried to save her. But they couldn’t.” Again Todd was overcome, and he had to stop. All the air had left McGarvey’s office.
He looked up. Adkins was there listening in on the extension. He was slowly shaking his head. “It was our daughter, and they killed her,”
Todd said. “There was no reason for it, Mac. They could have come after me, one-on-one. I would have fought them any time, anyplace under any conditions they wanted. Christ.
“Stick with her, Todd,” McGarvey said. He had to force the words out of his throat, force his lips to move. “I’m sorry, Dad. God help me, I should have made her stay home. I should have been more responsible.”
TWENTY-THREE
THE SCRATCHING, NAGGING WAS BACK. THE WATERFALL HURLING ITSELF DOWN A MILLION FEET TO CRASH MADLY ON THE JAGGED ROCKS DROWNED OUT RATIONAL THOUGHT.
No one was safe now, McGarvey thought. Word about the attack on the director’s daughter spread through the building like wildfire. Or at least McGarvey supposed it had. Bad news always traveled faster than good. It had been a girl. An innocent baby, lost for no reason. Who would be next? he had to ask himself as he sat at his desk once again trying without much success to concentrate on the NIE and Watch Report.
How he was going to break the news about the baby to Kathleen he couldn’t even guess. But he had a fair idea what it would do to her when she found out. No one was safe, he thought, staring at the open folder on his desk. But that wasn’t quite true. The run wasn’t on the Company; it was on him and his family. Otto was almost like a son to them. There weren’t many people who knew that fact, but it wasn’t unknown in some circles. And now Otto had gone missing again.
McGarvey had to hope he was safe. Security had its hands full, but they were looking for him, just as they were in Denver protecting Todd and Elizabeth, and just as they were working the puzzle on Hans Lollick Island. But McGarvey wasn’t sure of himself, of how he fit here, what kind of a job he was supposed to be doing, or even what kind of a job he was capable of. The closer people got to him, the more they depended on his good judgment and his strength. That was their common mistake, because the fact was he wasn’t any stronger than anybody else.
He didn’t have all the answers. When it came right down to it, he’d abandoned his wife and daughter when they were young and needed him the most. He’d had his pride; no one was going to tell him how he would conduct his life. So he had run, and no one near him had ever been safe again. In the end now he had come full circle. Was it one last go-around? he asked himself. Or was this just another operation in a string of operations that stretched forever into the future? Ms.
Swanfeld came to the door. “Your staff is in the conference room,” she told him. She looked tired and frightened. It was the first time he’d ever seen the combination of expressions on her face. She held a crumpled handkerchief in her left hand. McGarvey recognized that like the others she was looking for reassurance that everything would turn out fine. “They’ll be okay,” McGarvey told her. He was in charge.
His blanket of protection covered them all. “What’s happening to us, Mr. Director?” “I don’t know, but I have a feeling that we’ll find out pretty soon and put a stop to it.” He gathered his notes and the NIE and Watch Report and went across to the conference room. Adkins, along with the deputy directors of Operations, Dave Whittaker, and Intelligence, Tommy Doyle, and a few of their key staff were gathered.
Missing were Jared Kraus, who was heading up the investigation in the USVI, and the deputy director of Management and Services, whose departments, except for Security, had little to do with these kinds of operations. Dick Yemm sat in for Security and Bob Johnson for Technical Services. Also still missing was Otto Rencke. “No word yet on Otto?” McGarvey asked, taking his seat at the head of the long table. The conference room was windowless. It was mechanically and electronically isolated from the rest of the building, and from the outside. Anything said or done here would leave the room only in the minds and the notes of the people present. “He’s not on the grounds, and he’s not at his apartment,” Yemm said. “Major Horn isn’t screaming for help, so I don’t think that he’s in any trouble. But I do have people out looking for him although we’re starting to get spread out pretty thin, Mr. Director.” “Keep on it,” McGarvey ordered. He opened his NIE briefing book, which outlined all the problems worldwide that the CIA was tasked to gather intelligence on. But before he began he looked at his people. Old friends, some of them. They had histories in the CIA. Just like Aldrich Ames, he supposed. But he wouldn’t become another witch- hunter. The CIA could not withstand another full-scale mole hunt. “We have to assume that there’s a purpose to these attacks,” he said. “Some sort of an ultimate goal, other than my death.” “We can’t know that,” Adkins replied, as if he had expected McGarvey to say something like that. “The first attack was against Otto ”
“He admitted working on the brakes himself, Mr. Director,” Johnson reminded. “Yes, but I want his car checked again.
Front to back, including fingerprints and any material containing DNA that you can find.” “I’ll send a forensics unit over first thing Monday morning.” “Today,” McGarvey countered. “This morning, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Johnson said. “The second attack was against me, my wife and Dick. We can’t assume that the bomb was meant solely for me. The Semtex had probably been placed inside a beach bag that was the exact twin of the one my wife was carrying. Maybe she was the target.” “I’m sorry, boss, but if it was anyone except for Mrs. M.” she would be the prime suspect,” Yemm said. He didn’t turn away from McGarvey’s sudden flare of anger. “What are you suggesting, Dick?” McGarvey asked coolly. “We have to keep an open mind. Just because the bomb was in a look-alike beach bag doesn’t mean you weren’t the target.”
“What about my daughter? Where does she fit into the pattern? Her ski bindings were packed with Semtex. No mistaking who they were after.”
“Let’s take the opposite argument then,” Adkins said. “Otto was a target. Your wife and now your daughter were targets.” Adkins shook his head.
“What’s the objective? Get you to quit?” He glanced at the others around the table. “It wouldn’t make me want to give up. Just the opposite. I’d be a hundred times more motivated to nail the bastards.”
