made him tick. He hadn’t come up with any of the answers to the dozens of questions he was asking himself, or at least he wasn’t coming up with any answers that made much sense. He could not reconcile his first instinct to run with his extremely strong sense of responsibility for the people he loved and for the weaker people around him. Had Senator Madden pressed him on the incident in high school with the football bullies, he would not have been able to tell her the real reason he’d stepped in. It had been something automatic. Despite the opinion of the people in the Agency and in several White House administrations he’d served under, he was not a hero. He was a pragmatist, a realist, probably an egoist someone who was self-centered, arrogant, conceited, even selfish. Maybe all that, but he could not think of himself as a hero to anyone, for the simple reason he had no earthly idea what heroism was. Voltaire, among others, had hinted that egoism, which McGarvey figured was his driving trait, was the idea that morality, in the end, always rested on self-interest. McGarvey wasn’t a hero; he was simply a man who did not know how to follow orders, a man who valued his opinion above the opinions of almost everyone else, but a man who did not know how to give up. When he ran, it was always to find a new ground on which to fight his battles. Not much of a prize for Katy and Liz, he thought. But it was all he had to give them, and he did love them with everything in his soul. Grassinger came to the snow-covered gravel road that led away from the federal parkland along the river, one mile to the house around 9:00 A.M. The forest was thick with tangled underbrush that even in winter provided a lot of cover.
The house looked as if it had been plucked from a Kentucky horse farm and transported here. It was complete with expansive lawns, white wooden fences, paddocks, horse barns and an indoor riding arena, as well as other outbuildings. A couple of years after the Aldrich Ames case had broken, another criminal in the CIA had been discovered. This one didn’t make the news because he hadn’t sold out to the Russians.
Instead, he had ripped off the Agency for something over four million dollars by tapping into several of the CIA’s offshore operating funds accounts. The Cropley house nestled on one hundred acres of forested hills, had been his. Now it belonged to the CIA. Anonymous and therefore safe. There were fresh tire tracks in the still-falling snow, and some footprints leading from the house back into the woods, but no activity that they could see driving up. It wasn’t until McGarvey got out of the car that he smelled the woodsmoke coming from a fire on the living room hearth. Smoke began to come out of the broad chimney. Somebody had just laid the fire. John Blatnik, the chief of on-site security, came around the east corner of the house, speaking into his lapel micHe had a Colt Commando slung over his shoulder. He looked very serious in his white parka and snow boots. “Welcome to Cropley, Mr. Director,” Blatnik said. Like a lot of men in the Office of Security, he looked like a linebacker. “Mr. Van Buren and your daughter are inside.” Stenzel and Gloria Sanchez helped Kathleen out of the limo. She was almost asleep on her feet. “I’m putting her to bed right now,” Stenzel said. “Put her in the master bedroom,”
McGarvey told them. “Upstairs, in the back.” Kathleen gave him a flaccid smile, and Stenzel and Gloria took her inside. Todd came out of the house. “Hello, Mac. Any trouble on the way out?” “No. How’s Liz?” “She didn’t get any rest last night. But she promised to get some sleep as soon as she saw her mother and talked to you.”
Grassinger stepped away to speak to Blatnik, but Chris Bartholomew remained a few feet away from McGarvey. She’d unbuttoned her jacket.
“What’s the situation here?” McGarvey asked. He wasn’t ready to go into the house yet. “Tony’s got some good people working for him. The house is secure. They have the infrared and motion detectors up and running around the perimeter, as well as the built-in stop sticks and explosive charges on the driveway. And they’re adding two lines of claymores on either side of the driveway to give us another layer of defense. We’ve mounted infrared sensors on the roof as well as a remotely operated portable radar unit behind the barn. It’s not very big, but I’m told it’ll give us a good warning of anything incoming.”
“That depends on how badly they want to hit us,” McGarvey countered.
Van Buren nodded. “But they have to find us first.” He looked toward the tree line. “Short of stationing the National Guard out here, we’re about as safe here as we’d be anywhere else.” They went into the house, where McGarvey was introduced to four of Blatnik’s security people. They were all young, and were friends of Todd and Liz, so they were taking this situation personally. Someone brought the bags in from the car and took them upstairs. Elizabeth came down before McGarvey could go upstairs to see how
Kathleen was doing. His daughter looked battered. Her face was puffy and terribly bruised. She walked hunched over and stiff because of the pain. But when she saw her father she managed to smile.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
He took her in his arms and gently held her for a few moments, a lump in his throat. The bastards had hurt his baby girl. They had killed his granddaughter. They would pay. God, how they would pay.
“You should be in bed,” McGarvey told her.
“Later,” she said. “Has Otto found Nikolayev, yet?”
“He went back to France to look for him. How long have you two suspected that something was going to happen?”
“Since early September, but we weren’t sure of anything.” She looked inward and shook her head. “I wish we had said something. Maybe none of this would have happened. But we just didn’t know.”
“They would have found another way,” McGarvey said. “But, yes, you and Otto should have given us the heads-up. We could have put some more resources on it.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Elizabeth said, her eyes brimming. She was angry with herself for being so weak. Her internal struggle was plain on her face. “I left a disk for you in the front study. It has everything that we managed to come up with.”
“I saw Otto’s copy,” McGarvey said. He glanced at his son-in-law, who looked as if he was ready to rip the arms off someone. Anyone. “I’m sending Todd back to Langley to wait for Otto.”
“I want to go, too,” Elizabeth said.
“Don’t be a dumbbell,” Todd told her.
She flared, but backed down. “He’s a friend of the family, so don’t go playing macho man.”
“He’s my friend, too,” Todd told her.
Grassinger had come in with Blatnik. “Right,” he said. “I’d like to hold a security briefing now, then I suggest that we all settle down for a few hours. It’s been a long night, and it could get even longer.”
McGarvey was tired, but Grassinger’s security briefing had been short and to the point. Anything within a mile or two of the house was in detectable range. That included vehicles passing on the highway and anything in the sky. The first lines of defense were the perimeter sensors and alarms. The second line were the stop sticks that would shred tires and the explosives that would shred bodies. The final line was the house itself, which had bulletproof polycarbonate windows, steel-reinforced doors and a bombproof safe room in the basement. The phone and electrical lines were encased in flexible steel sheaths and buried deeply. In addition there were wireless links to the outside world from every room in the house. And there were silent alarms connecting to the CIA, FBI, Maryland Highway Patrol, and Montgomery County Sheriffs offices. Terrorists had breached the house a couple of years ago, but the security measures had been considerably beefed up since then. Such an attack could not succeed this time. Yet everyone felt gloomy. It was a bunker mentality that was almost as bad as it had been for some people in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. McGarvey had seen the mood in the eyes of his staff during the afternoon’s teleconference. And he could hear it in their voices as he spoke to them at various times during the interminably long day.
Fred Rudolph from the FBI was having no luck tracking the blue Mercedes, at least not in the immediate area of Washington, D.C.” so the search had gone nationwide. Nor were there any signs that the Russian intelligence operation in Washington and New York was getting back to normal. “Runkov and everyone else are hunkered down and staying there,” Rudolph said. “It’s unprecedented. They know something that we don’t, but they’re not talking to us.” McGarvey looked in on Kathleen after lunch but she was still sound asleep.
Stenzel said that she might sleep the rest of the day and through the night. “It would be the best thing for her,” the psychiatrist said.
He came down to the kitchen with McGarvey to get something to eat. The refrigerator, freezer and pantry were well stocked, but no one had developed an appetite for much of anything other than coffee and sandwiches. Elizabeth came in from the study. “I just talked to Todd.
Otto is on his way back. Nikolayev is with him.” “When do they get here?” “Late tonight,” Elizabeth said. “I talked to Tom Lynch, too, and he said everything went well. The French were cooperative, and there was no trouble whatsoever.” “That’s good to hear. Can we talk to Otto in the air?” “I tried. He’s probably turned off his phone for some reason, so unless you want to call the crew on an unsecured channel, we’ll have to wait until they get here.”
