“We weren’t given the heads-up. Nobody has heard of such an operation.”
“Well, it’s under the DCI’s personal imprimatur, so if you want to know anything else, you’ll have to take it up with him.”
“If we could just have a file reference, it would help “
“Get out of here,” Otto shrieked. He hopped up and down from one foot to the other. “Oh, man, get the fuck outta here now. I mean it.”
Hartley stepped back in alarm. “Okay, take it easy, Mr. Rencke. We don’t need that information right this instant.”
Otto moved away from the door, keeping the big table between himself and the IA officer. “Just get out of here. I’ve got work to do, man.
No shit, Sherlock. No happy crappy. I shit you not.”
Hartley turned and walked out of the office, leaving Otto vibrating like an off-key tuning fork.
A telephone chirped somewhere, and someone slammed a file drawer or cabinet door. His eyes strayed to his search engine monitors. They were all varying shades of lavender, but on one of them locusts were jumping all over the place.
Nikolayev had found his message and had sent a reply. Already.
Bingo.
Alone with his thoughts, McGarvey stood at the tall windows at the end of the busy hospital corridor from Katy’s room. She had drifted off to sleep again, which, according to Stenzel, was the best thing for her.
It was her brain’s way of protecting itself so that it could heal. Her subconscious was sorting out her conflicting emotions. Or at least the process was beginning. He wished that he could do the same; drop out, turn around and run away, bury himself in some remote European town, set himself up as an eccentric academic. It was a role that he had played to the hilt in Lausanne when the Swiss Federal Police had sent Marta Fredricks to fall in love with him.
Who watches the watchdog? It was a fundamental problem that every intelligence organization faced. And one that every intelligence officer had to grapple with at his own personal level. The business got to some good people burned them out, ruined them, so that when they retired they were no longer fit to stay in the service; nor were they equipped to step so easily into civilian life. “If you don’t have someone you can trust, you have nothing,” his father had advised him when he was having his troubles in high school. “Don’t give in to the Philistines, but don’t close your heart.” He’d mistaken his father’s meaning for years, thinking that the old man had meant that he should find a woman to fall in love with and make a life. He’d tried in college and again in the military, but until Kathleen every woman he’d gotten close to finally repelled him. Either they were idiots, figuring that they could catch a man by playing dumb, or they made it their life’s ambition to transform him into something he wasn’t; into what their ideal man was supposed to act like, dress like, talk like.
When he met Katy all that changed. The first time he saw her, his chest popped open, and his heart fell out onto the floor. She was good-looking, and she was smart. A bit arrogant, somewhat self-centered and opinionated, but so was he all those things, and she was all the more interesting for those traits. In the end, though, after Elizabeth was born, and after his first few years with the CIA and the unexplained long absences and finally Santiago, she had finally tried to change him, mold him to her own ideal image. She gave him the ultimatum: Quit the CIA or leave. He left. His father had been wrong.
Only his father hadn’t been wrong. A few years later, when John Lyman Trotter called him back from an uneasy retirement to unravel a problem at the highest levels within the CIA, he found out the hard way that without trust, without honor, there was nothing. In the aftermath of those difficult times the best DCI ever to sit on the seventh floor was dead, the victim of a General Baranov Department Viktor plot; Kathleen’s onetime lover, Darby Yarnell a former spy himself and a former U.S. senator, lay shot to death in front of the DCI’s house, and ultimately, John Trotter, one of the few men McGarvey had ever trusted, was dead as well at McGarvey’s hands. Trotter had been the ultimate spy within the CIA, the deeply placed mole that Jim Angleton had nearly brought down the Agency trying to catch. His father had been right after all. If you have no one to trust, then you have nothing. That was his life for a lot of years until he came back. Until he and Kathleen remarried, until their daughter came back into his life, until he brought Otto in from the cold, until he surrounded himself with good people. Yemm, Adkins, Dave Whittaker, Carleton Paterson. “Trust,” he said to himself, unable finally to hold back his fears. He couldn’t trust any of them. And yet for his own salvation he had no other choice. He turned as a very large man in a dark suit and clerical collar emerged from the elevator and shambled like a bear up the corridor to the nurses’ station. He wore old-fashioned galoshes, unbuckled, but no overcoat. There was something vaguely familiar about the man, though McGarvey was certain they’d never met. Peggy Vaccaro got to her feet, and McGarvey walked back to her. “Are we expecting anyone?” he asked. “Someone called from Mrs. M.“s church a couple of hours ago, asking about her.” A nurse came out of the station and brought the cleric back. “This is Father Vietski from Good Shepherd Church. He asked if I would verify who he was.” She was grinning.
“He’s okay, as long as you don’t let him get started telling jokes about the Lutherans and Baptists.” “Next time I have a story about evil nurses,” Vietski said. His voice was rich and deep, with maybe a hint of a New York accent. “I don’t want to hear it,” the nurse said laughing, and she left. The priest gave Peggy a warm smile, then turned his gaze to McGarvey, a little sadness at the corners of his mouth. “I’m Kathleen’s parish priest. You must be Kirk McGarvey.” “I don’t think we’ve ever met,” McGarvey said. “But you look familiar.”
“I have one of those faces,” he said. “And maybe you saw one of our church bulletins. Kathleen has been helping out in the office whenever she can.” He glanced at the door. “Will she be all right?” “We hope so,” McGarvey said. “The poor woman has been driving herself unmercifully lately. Trying to be all things for everyone. She can’t go on.” “What do you mean?” McGarvey asked, careful to keep his tone neutral. This was something new, something he didn’t know anything about. “The church,” Vietski replied. He shook his head. “Good Shepherd is falling apart. We need eleven million dollars to rebuild, and dear Kathleen has taken it upon herself to raise the money. All of it.” “I’m sorry, she hasn’t said anything to me about it,” McGarvey admitted. “We’ve had some family problems ” Vietski reached out and touched McGarvey’s arm. “No need to explain,” he said. “All of us have our trials. And I think at times she might be a little ashamed of her faith, if you know what I mean.”
It seemed to McGarvey that the priest was reaching out for his own assurances. It was as if he was trying to draw strength instead of give it. “I don’t think that my wife would have remained with something she didn’t believe in.”
Vietski smiled and nodded. “May I go in for just a few minutes?”
“Maybe later, she’s sleeping now.”
“I won’t wake her, I promise,” Vietski said earnestly. “But just a few minutes. I’d like to sit with her and say a little prayer. I think it would mean something to her.”
McGarvey glanced at Peggy, who raised her eyebrows. Then he nodded.
“Okay.”
Vietski went into Kathleen’s room, closing the door softly behind him.
“He’s a troubled man,” McGarvey said.
“But he seems to care,” Peggy Vaccaro replied. “That’s something.”
The blinds were shut and the room was dark. Kathleen was asleep.
Vietski moved to her side and made a sign of the cross over her head and began to pray, his voice soft, but filled with emotion. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me …”
TWENTY-SEVEN
BLOWBACK
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness tell us truths. Win us with honest
