with Todd.” Yemm chuckled. “Either I’m slipping or your son-in-law has gotten a whole hell of a lot better since he married Liz.” “They’re competing with each other.” Yemm pulled out of the driveway and got on the radio. “Hammerhead in route.
ETA twenty-five.” “Roger, one.” “Anything interesting in the over nights McGarvey asked. He unlocked the slender steel case that Yemm had brought out from Operations and withdrew the leather-bound folder that contained the highlights of what the Agency had taken in and analyzed over the weekend. “Pretty quiet for now, knock on wood.”
“Let’s hope it stays that way,” McGarvey said absently. He started to read and was back on the job, unaware that Yemm was watching him in the rearview mirror. Pakistan and India were rattling their nuclear sabers again, no surprise. Tribal wars continued to erupt all over Afghanistan, but there wasn’t much we could really do about that situation either, except provide support to our peacekeeping forces there. The international hunt for terrorists went on, amidst sharp protests from Iran and North Korea and bombast from Baghdad. The murdered American in Havana hadn’t been a tourist, he was a military intelligence officer from Guantanamo Bay. McGarvey made a mental note to have his acting deputy director Dick Adkins find out what the hell was going on and why this joker had been in Havana in the first place.
Mexico was being besieged by an independent group of wealthy businessmen to destabilize the peso in favor of the American dollar.
Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Russian nuclear stockpiles, the rusting sub fleet in Vladivostok, another attempt on the Pope’s life in Rome and riots in Brazil, where a hard liner faction of military generals were again gaining power. A dozen other trouble spots around the world to absorb his thoughts so that by the time they arrived at CIA headquarters and drove around to the DCI’s private entrance, he was up to speed and ready for Monday morning, the nagging worries of the weekend gone now that he was in the middle of the real world. He had been coming to this place in the woods outside of Washington for a quarter century; he had seen a lot of changes, including the addition of the two annexes behind the main seven-story building of glass and steel. An air of mystery here; of men and women scurrying about with dedicated purpose; rooftops bristling with antennae and satellite dishes; armed guards, closed-circuit lo-lux television monitors, infrared and motion detectors; metal detectors and watchful serious people on every floor; a dark, cathedral hush once you were admitted to the inner sanctum sancto rum of America’s intelligence establishment.
He wanted to hate it, hate its necessity, but each time he came back something stirred in his blood. He glanced toward the main parking lot. It was already filling with a steady stream of traffic off the Parkway; by nine, a half hour from now, more than eight thousand people would be at work here. Monday morning. Some of them excited at the prospects for the new week; some hating it, but for most the same weary acceptance of a job that everyone felt. He and Yemm took the elevator up to the seventh floor, the broad corridor carpeted in soft gray, reasonably good art, including an eclectic mixture of Wyeth, Picasso and Warhol prints on the walls, his suite of offices straight ahead through double glass doors, the offices of the deputy directors of Intelligence and Operations in the corners. The guard at the main elevator down the corridor was on his feet. He’d seen them on the television monitor. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Mornin’ Charlie.”
“Will you be needing me this morning, boss?” Yemm asked. “I don’t think so.” “I’ll be in the ready room. We’re trying to straighten out the security schedules. You’re not making it any easier going it alone at the house, you know.” “I may not be working here next week.”
Yemm’s eyes narrowed with good humor. “Right, I’ll believe that when I see it.” Yemm took the elevator back down, and McGarvey went into his office. His secretary Dahlia Swanfeld, had his safe opened and was laying out classified material on his desk, along with his schedule for the day and the remainder of the week, his telephone appointments, speeches, staff briefings and meetings, awards ceremonies for outstanding officers, visiting dignitaries and the heads of friendly foreign intelligence services, plus the new ambassador to India, who was coming in for his CIA briefing. A highly competent woman in her early sixties, Ms. Swanfeld had worked for the Agency longer than McGarvey had. Never married, no children, no siblings, no real life that anyone knew about beyond the job, everyone who met her for the first time fell immediately under her spell of good cheer and kindness.
Her gray hair in a bun, her suits always proper, she came from another era; even her voice and diction were those of Miss Manners. “Good morning, Mr. Director,” she said. “I trust that you and Mrs. McGarvey spent a pleasant weekend.” “Relaxing. How about you?” “A very quiet weekend, thank you.” It was the same answer she always gave. She took his coat, and while he flipped through his schedules she went for his coffee. At nine the first meeting of the day with the top officers in the CIA was held in the main conference room. This morning’s agenda covered his Senate subcommittee hearings, a request by the NRO for increased funding to upgrade the present Jupiter satellite system that watched over India and Pakistan; a request by the Directorate of Science and Technology for an expansion of its system QK, which monitored every officer in the field from every foreign station on a twenty-four-hour-per-day basis, comparing each individual’s work with everyone else’s. They would also go over the draft of a brief that McGarvey was scheduled to give the National Security Council on the nuclear situation between Pakistan and India, a half-dozen requests from the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the television networks for interviews on his appointment as DCI, as well as requests for back grounders on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cuba and Chechnya. At ten he was to meet with the U.S. Intelligence Board, which consisted of the heads of all the U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies, over the Pakistan issue. There was a possibility that Pakistan and India would soon be going thermonuclear. The President and his National Security Council were going to want a very tight estimate on the situation, and soon. At noon he was scheduled to award four medals to two of Dave Whittaker’s clandestine ops people for work they’d done in Tajikistan uncovering the links between four Russian officers who’d stolen a small nuclear device from a military depot in Dushanbe and Osama bin Laden.
Afterward he was having lunch with four post docs from Harvard who were working on research papers dealing with the economic impact that the CIA’s presence in some third world countries was having. His job was to help them as much as possible to find the right answers and point them in directions that would do the least harm to the Company. At one he would be returning phone calls and working on the draft of his opening statement to the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee on Intelligence. At two he would be meeting with the CIA’s general counsel, Carleton Paterson, about the hearings. At four he had a series of meetings with various department heads in the Directorates of Operations and Intelligence on specific issues and concerns, many of them about personnel, committee appointments, mission emphasis and, as usual, funding. Sometime after that he had to fit in the new ambassador to India. By six he would do his laps in the CIA’s basement swimming pool, and hopefully by seven he could leave for the day.
Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the snow-covered woods, and for a moment McGarvey stopped to think how many decisions had been made from this room some of them good, even brilliant, others incredibly stupid all of them affecting the lives of someone somewhere in the world. Now it was his turn if he wanted to run the gauntlet in the Senate. Something he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to do. There were a couple of Wyeth prints on the walls, bookcases along one, couch, leather chairs and a coffee table along another; a private bathroom and, directly off his office, a small private dining room that he often used for small conferences. A door connected directly with the office of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Underlined in red was the meeting with Carleton Paterson. The patrician former New York corporate attorney had a respect for McGarvey that just bordered on the grudging, but he had done his best to pave the way for the hearings.
“Hammond will try to embarrass you and the Agency at every possible turn,” Paterson kept warning. “His aim is to get you to withdraw of your own accord; short of that he’ll want to prejudice public opinion so badly against you that the President will be forced to pull your nomination. It’s happened before.”
“Maybe Hammond is right,” McGarvey told him. “About you being the wrong man for the job?” Paterson asked. He shook his head, took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with his handkerchief. “The CIA has been run by political animals for too long.” McGarvey started to object, but Paterson held him off. “In the end the general became your friend, I understand your feelings. But Murphy was primarily a politician. Something you are not.” Paterson put his glasses back on.
“When someone cuts open my chest I don’t want it to be the president of the hospital board. I want it to be the surgeon who’s gotten his hands bloody; someone who’s done a thousand heart transplants, the last dozen of which he did just last week.” He inclined his head. “You, my scholar with a gun, are just that man.” He chuckled. “The problem will be getting you confirmed. Hammond’s not your worst enemy. You are.” Ms. Swanfeld set his coffee down. “You’re free after lunch, the four professors from Harvard canceled, and the pool is yours at six.”
