captain and crew thanked him.
“Makes us feel a lot better having you guys aboard,” one of the flight attendants said, flashing him a smile.
But he was focused and had simply nodded, and went inside where he took the train to the main terminal and the rental car counters where Rencke had arranged for a car under the same work name — Joshua Taylor — but with no reference to him as anyone other than a private citizen.
He was out of there by midnight heading down I-4 to Tampa and the Gulf Coast, where he would take I-75 south to his home on Casey Key. But it didn’t seem like coming home to him. All of Florida was empty now, devoid of any life, or any purpose of any happiness. It was just another place he was traveling through, because when this business was finally over and done he would never come back.
Traffic was light at this hour and he made good time. Once he reached the outskirts of Sarasota he called Rencke on the sat phone.
“Any trouble?” Rencke asked.
“None so far. Have you heard anything from the seventh floor?”
“Dick Adkins was fired. Apparently he and Langdon had it out, and on Shapiro’s strong recommendation, Dick was given the boot.”
“Has anyone been appointed interim DCI?”
“Dave Whittaker. The White House doesn’t want to put someone new in place until you’re brought in.”
“Is anyone looking for you and Louise?” McGarvey asked. It was the only thing left he had to worry about, except for his granddaughter. But whatever happened she was safe at the Farm.
“Not officially, but Tommy Doyle has sent out a number of posts on a couple blogs I check out from time to time.”
Doyle had been the deputy director of intelligence when McGarvey was DCI. He retired a few years ago, so it was tough to figure if he was trying to make contact with Otto on his own in order to find McGarvey, or if Whittaker or someone at Langley had put him up to it. Either way it would be too dangerous to respond to his queries and Otto agreed.
“The Bureau has two guys at your house, three teams rotating every eight hours. The off-duty guys are staying at a Holiday Inn up in Venice. I didn’t get any names, but their shifts start at oh six hundred, so if you mean to get in sometime this morning the guys on the twenty-two hundred shift should be getting bored and tired around four in the morning. It’d give you two hours to get in and get back out.”
“The timing’s right,” McGarvey said, thinking ahead. The closer he got the odder it seemed to him that he was going to break into his own house. It wasn’t real. When it was over he would go back to Greece, at least for the interim, until he healed. If ever.
“Honest injun, Mac, these are the good guys. Louise is right, you can’t go in there and do something… stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” McGarvey said. “I won’t hurt anything but their pride.”
“That’s bad enough.”
The village section of Siesta Key with its restaurants, bars, and nightspots, one barrier island north of Casey Key, was lit up and busy as normal on an evening, but the residential areas, especially south of the village, were dark and quiet as was also usual for this time of night.
It was past the tourist season, and many of the houses on the Gulf side of the island as well as the Intracoastal Waterway side were closed down, no one in residence until sometime around Thanksgiving. McGarvey had no trouble finding a stretch of half a dozen such houses on the ICW that were dark, and he shut off his headlights and pulled into one of the driveways.
The house next door had a small inboard/outboard powerboat on a lift out of the water. McGarvey jimmied the lock on the back door of the house, first making sure there wasn’t an alarm system, and in the kitchen found the boat’s keys, and in the garage found a couple of jerry cans of gas and after a couple of minutes searching a roll of duct tape.
Ten minutes later he had the boat cover removed, had lowered the boat into the water, had gassed it up and started the engine, which kicked into life on the third try. Since it was an I/O, its exhaust and engine noises were quieter than those of an outboard motor hanging on the transom. It was a small bit of luck.
Easing away from the lift, he gingerly made his way across the shallow water of Little Sarasota Bay to the green 57 ICW marker and turned south in the middle of the channel before he turned on the boat’s navigation lights and increased the throttle. It was just coming up on three-thirty in the morning, the air perfectly still, the overcast sky pitch black except for the glow of Sarasota.
His house, about four miles south, was just north of the smaller swing bridge at Blackburn Point. These were waters he knew well. Besides their sailboat, which they kept in downtown Sarasota at Marina Jack, they had a small Boston Whaler runabout that he and Katy often took up the ICW as far as Anna Maria or sometimes down to the Crow’s Nest in Venice for leisurely Sunday brunches.
Just now the two houses north of his on Casey Key and several to the south were empty for the summer. All of them maintained private markers leading to small backyard docks.
Twenty minutes later he throttled back to idle, switched off the boat’s nav lights, and angled west to the island just after marker 37, no need to raise the engine because water depths here in the channel were three feet at lower low tide right up to the docks, less than five hundred yards outside the channel.
From here he could see the red and green lights on the Blackburn Point bridge and make out the silhouette of his house, and the spindly outline of the gazebo in the backyard where Katy had loved to have a morning cup of tea or an early-evening glass of wine.
At the last moment he cut the boat’s engine and drifted to the dock two houses up from his, and tied bow and stern lines to the cleats. He speed-dialed Rencke’s number, and Otto answered on the first ring.
“I’m tied up just north of my place. Can you cut the house alarm system?”
“Stand by,” Rencke said.
Now that the boat’s engine was off, the night had become silent, except for the frogs and other animals and the sounds of what was probably a night hunting bird in the distance.
“Done,” Rencke said.
“I’ll let you know when I’m out of there,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection.
Pocketing the duct tape, he jumped up on the dock, and headed through the sea oats and tall grasses at the water’s edge to the edge of his property. Only a few people had put up fences or security walls down here, which was just as well because McGarvey had a clear sight line, and he spotted the Bureau agent sitting in the gazebo almost at the same moment he smelled the man’s smoke and saw for just a brief moment the glow from the tip of the cigarette.
It was damn sloppy, but it told McGarvey that at least this man wasn’t expecting trouble, which in a slight way was troublesome. If the Bureau didn’t expect McGarvey to show up here, why had they posted guards, at least one of whom was lax?
He waited in the darkness a full five minutes to make sure the second man wasn’t on this side of the house, and that no communications passed between them, then he angled away from the water, his path between the house and the gazebo.
The agent, stood up, took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the water, and McGarvey silently raced the last five yards, leaped over the gazebo’s low rail and hit the man low in the back with enough force to knock him down, but not enough to break his back.
McGarvey put pressure on the man’s carotid arteries and within seconds the agent was out. Working quickly McGarvey slapped a piece of tape over the agent’s mouth, then taped his wrists and elbows behind his back, his ankles and knees together and finally his torso and his legs to the gazebo’s rail.
The agent was beginning to come around when McGarvey disappeared up to the house, opened the rear door, and slipped inside, into the kitchen where he was brought up short.
He could smell Katy’s scent, and he stepped back, the same dark rage from Arlington threatening to blot out his sanity. It had only been a few days since they had left for Washington to see about Todd, yet it was a lifetime, ten lifetimes ago. But she was here.
He stayed at the kitchen door for a full minute, before he was able to rouse himself enough to go upstairs to
