Mueller wasn’t happy, but the other cop acted as if he were confused, and neither one of them seemed to know what to do with the pistol and especially not the silencer.
For a seeming eternity no one moved, and McGarvey kept asking himself why these idiots weren’t taking the next step, and frisking Sandberger and Remington and especially Sandberger’s bodyguards. The fact that Sandberger’s muscle were shooters stood out like a neon sign. Stupid lapses like that could get a field man killed in a hurry; it was why they were desk jockeys. Most BND officers McGarvey had met were damned good.
He glanced over at Sandberger and the others and he could see that they were thinking the same thing.
But the moment ended when Mueller handed his partner the pistol, ammunition, and silencer. “You’ll have to come with us now. Your diplomatic passport does not cover this.”
“No, I suppose not,” McGarvey said.
“You’re not going to cause trouble, sir?” Mueller said.
“You have my gun,” McGarvey said, and he turned again to Sandberger. “As I said, watch your backs, because I’ll be there.”
McGarvey rode in the backseat of a slate gray Mercedes C350, the younger BND officer driving, traffic heavy as they skirted downtown and headed up to the north side of the city.
Mueller turned and looked back. “What is your relationship with those four men in the hotel lobby, Herr McGarvey?”
“I came over to ask them a few questions.”
“Concerning what?”
“The assassination of my son-in-law, who was a CIA officer. He and my daughter ran the CIA’s training center.”
Mueller’s eyebrows rose. “The Farm. Yes, I know of this place in Virginia. And we know that he was shot to death outside Washington. And you came to Germany because you think Herr Sandberger’s company had something to do with it?”
McGarvey’s opinion of the BND desk jockeys went up a notch. They might not have been field officers, but they had done their homework before coming over to the Steigenberger to find out why the former chief of the CIA had come to Germany on what was likely a fake diplomatic passport.
“It’s possible they might have information I need.”
The cop digested this for a moment. “And what exactly was meant by your comment for those men to watch their backs, you’ll be there.”
McGarvey looked out the window. They’d left the skyscrapers behind and had turned off the busy autobahn into a pleasant area of apartment buildings, some new and some old probably dating back to before the war. “Did you know that two of his men were probably armed?”
“I asked you a question.”
McGarvey turned back. “So did I, and that’ll be ‘sir’ to you.” They were leaning and he was leaning back. He had wanted to make two points here: one was putting Sandberger on notice, and the second was to place his suspicions into the record of at least one government’s law enforcement or intelligence apparatus so that when he came into the CIA’s spotlight, dealing with him would no longer be a simple matter of the dismissal of a grief- stricken father-in-law.
A bleak expression came into Mueller’s eyes, as if his hopes of an easy assignment had just been dashed, and he turned around to face forward.
They finally turned down Homberger Landstrasse, another reasonably pleasant tree-lined street of some apartment buildings, and what might have been small government installations or military barracks, called
“I didn’t know the BND was using the Drake Kaserne,” he said. The series of mostly low buildings behind a tall iron fence had first been occupied in 1930 by the German army. After the war, from 1956 to 1992, the U.S. Third Armored Division had headquartered here, until the German government took it back using it to house various agencies, including the customs unit of the Federal Border Police.
He’d been here once, before the Germanys were reunited, when he had stalked a Russian KGB general hiding out in East Berlin. It was a bad period, which he didn’t care to remember, except that it had stuck in his mind then as now that Germans, at least at the governmental level, were still trying to live down the Nazi era, and never knew quite how.
“Yes, you were here, I saw that in your record,” Mueller said. “So, you have a very good memory, which will be excellent for our purposes.”
They pulled up to a gate at the
“May I call my consulate here in Frankfurt?”
“I’m sure that whoever you sent those photographs to will have already notified your people,” Mueller said. “And we’ll find out who you called.”
McGarvey couldn’t help himself, and he smiled. “I don’t think so.”
“We have some pretty good people on this side of the pond, too, you know, you arrogant bastard.”
Another little bit of the puzzle dropped in place for McGarvey. “What exactly is it that Administrative Solutions does for the German government? Can you at least give me a hint?”
But Mueller said nothing, until they stopped at a nondescript, one-story building near the rear of the installation, and he and his partner got out and Mueller opened the rear door.
McGarvey got out and went into the building, which looked very much like a military interrogation and holding center, and was led down the corridor to a small room furnished only with a metal table and two chairs. The walls were bare concrete, the floor plainly tiled, with a single dim lightbulb set into the ceiling and covered with wire mesh.
He sat down at the table and Mueller sat across from him; his partner leaned against the wall beside the door.
“Shall we begin with why you came to Germany under a false passport, but aboard a CIA aircraft?” Mueller said.
“To talk to Roland Sandberger, as I’ve told you.”
“Why did you bring a pistol?”
“I always travel armed. Have for years.”
“And what about the silencer?” Mueller asked. “Were you planning on killing Herr Sandberger?”
McGarvey shrugged. “Only if I felt that it was necessary.”
“What would have constituted a necessity?”
McGarvey took a moment to answer. “I had a reasonable expectation that either he or his bodyguards would have tried to assassinate me.”
Mueller glanced over his shoulder at his partner then turned back. “I see. And now what are your expectations, Herr McGarvey?”
“That you’ve just run out of questions. That you’ll be reporting this to your superiors in Pullach. That you will not interfere with the movements of Sandberger or his employees. That this incident has been reported to the consul general here in Frankfurt, and most likely via some old-boy connection to Langley. And that sometime tomorrow someone will show up to fetch me.”
Mueller was not happy.
“Have I left something out?”
“Fuck you,” Mueller said, and he and his partner left the interrogation cell.
“And the horse you rode in on,” McGarvey added.
SIXTEEN
It was around two the next afternoon when David Whittaker, the deputy director of the CIA, showed up at
