At Andrews Air Force Base the CIA’s Gulfstream with the same crew that had brought McGarvey over to Frankfurt in the first place taxied over to the government hangar and inside and the engines spooled down.
“Good luck, Mr. Director,” Debbie said as McGarvey hesitated for just a moment at the hatch.
He nodded to the pilot and copilot and winked at the girl, then went down where a pair of U.S. marshals was waiting for him, badges hanging out of the lapel pockets of their suit coats. They were large men, alert, their jackets unbuttoned, earpiece comms units and sleeve mics.
For an awkward second or two the four of them, including Whittaker, stood at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t every day that a former director of the CIA was taken into custody, and especially not a man of McGarvey’s experience and reputation, and everyone was taking this seriously.
The larger of the two — square-jawed, with a no-nonsense look about him — stepped forward. “Mr. Director, I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Ansel.” He nodded toward his partner. “Deputy Marshal Mellinger. Sir, at this time we are placing you under arrest on a federal warrant on a charge of treason. Do you want your Miranda rights explained to you?”
“No.”
“If you’ll give us your word that you’ll cooperate, there’ll be no need for handcuffs.”
“You have my word. Where are you taking me?”
“To the D.C. Superior Courthouse annex for booking,” Ansel said. “Afterward you’ll be transported to Langley until your trial.”
“We need to finish your debriefing,” Whittaker explained.
And it was about what McGarvey figured. He would be treated with kid gloves until after the funeral, everyone knew that he wouldn’t make a move until then. “Whatever I tell you will be used against me at my trial. That about it, David?”
“You know the drill, Mac. You’ve been in these sorts of situations before. The more you tell us the easier your life will be.”
“I don’t think you’re going to like what I tell you. And it’s not very likely Dick will pass my version along to the White House. It’s something none of them will want to hear.”
He and Whittaker had spoken only a few words on the long flight back from Germany, amounting to little more than conveying the entire Company’s sympathies about Todd’s death.
“He was a good man, Mac.”
“Too good,” McGarvey had said, and after a moment Whittaker had turned away to stare out the window at nothing.
After a dinner of lobster, a light salad, and French bread with a good pino grigio, and coffee and brandy, McGarvey had gotten a few hours of sleep, waking only briefly when they’d landed at Prestwick, Scotland, to refuel, the sun chasing them as they headed west.
Standing now in the hangar at Andrews, McGarvey turned to tell Whittaker that none of this was the CIA’s fault, but the DDCI had walked away to an armored Cadillac limousine, at least in a symbolic way washing his hands of the entire affair for the moment.
“Sir?” Ansel said, politely.
McGarvey went with the two deputy marshals and got into the backseat of a Cadillac Escalade SUV, with no access to the door locks, which snapped into place once they headed out.
The base was fairly busy this afternoon, and Air Force One had been trundled out to the apron, where people were beginning to gather. Mellinger was driving and he stayed well away from the security zone around the blue and white 747.
“Where’s the president heading off to?” McGarvey asked.
Ansel half-turned in his seat and looked back. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. But then he shook his head, his face long as if he’d just thought of something disturbing. “Some of us had a lot of faith in you.”
“Maybe the charges against me are wrong.”
“Personally, I hope so. But the consensus is otherwise.”
“Guilty till proved innocent, that it?” McGarvey asked. He was on the verge of lashing out, but he held himself in check. Consensus was almost always more important than just about anything else. It was the basis for nearly all the principles of a democratic government. Except that an important lawyer of the sixties and seventies once said that the Constitution hadn’t been written to protect the masses from the individual, be he a criminal or not, but to protect the individual from the masses.
“We’re just doing our jobs,” Ansel said, and turned forward.
And that was the problem, McGarvey thought, too many people just doing their jobs and nothing more. It was a philosophy he’d never understood. It was, in his estimation, a coward’s way out.
They were admitted through the sublevel sally port into the booking and holding area of the courthouse, where McGarvey was taken directly into a small room where a technician took his fingerprints with an electronic reader under the watchful eyes of Ansel and Mellinger who were behind a bulletproof window.
Afterward he was stood against a wall with inches and feet marked on a scale and photographed in right profile, face on, and left profile.
In an adjacent room he turned out his pockets onto a counter where a uniformed clerk inventoried his things — wallet, watch, some money, and a compact, razor-sharp knife in an ankle holster, which the Germans had not caught, and which raised an eyebrow here. His things were bagged in a large manila envelope, but instead of being logged into the property room the bag was turned over to Ansel.
“Anything else we should know about?” the deputy marshal asked.
“I gave you my word, and that’ll have to be enough, unless you want to do a full cavity search,” McGarvey said.
“No, sir,” Ansel said, but he was wary and it was obvious he wanted nothing better than to get rid of his prisoner.
Mellinger had stood to one side through all this, his hand inside his jacket.
McGarvey looked over at him. “Tell your partner to take his hand off his pistol. It makes me nervous.” He looked into Ansel’s eyes.
“Listen here, pal—” Mellinger said, but Ansel cut him short.
“We don’t want any trouble, believe me.”
“No, you don’t.”
Twenty minutes after they arrived, they were back downtown and headed across the Roosevelt Bridge and north up the busy Parkway toward the entrance to the CIA campus.
“What have you heard?” McGarvey asked, breaking the silence once they were across the river.
“Treason,” Ansel said. “Something to do with an incident in North Korea a few months ago. Apparently you went head-to-head with President Haynes over it, and he may have backed down, but President Langdon doesn’t agree.”
“No, I didn’t expect he would,” McGarvey said. “What else?”
“The word on the street is that your people are going to the mat for you.”
“You mean the CIA?”
“Yes, sir,” Ansel said. “We were given word that you were to be treated with kid gloves, and that was at the request of Langley. Specially Mr. Adkins.”
Dick Adkins had been promoted to DCI by President Haynes after McGarvey had left, and he’d been kept on an interim basis by the new president until a replacement could be found. In the past six months no one suitable had been named. And in fact a lot of high-level staff positions in Washington had yet to be filled.
“It’s shaping up to be a fight between the CIA and the White House.”
“Right,” McGarvey said. “And we know who’ll win that one.”
They were stopped at the main gate where the CIA’s general counsel Carleton Patterson was waiting in the parking lot with his white Mercedes S550. He got out when the U.S. marshals pulled up, and walked over.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said. He’d been the Company top legal beagle for almost ten years, coming down
