for treason, and there was a warrant for his arrest. Same with the FBI guys who made the bust.”
“Shit,” Pete said, turning away for a moment. She felt overwhelmed. It had become a nightmare at Arlington when her partner had been killed in the blast and McGarvey had gone on the run. Bodies had piled up all over the place, and now with a possible shooting war between China and Taiwan, which made absolutely no sense, the numbers could rise astronomically.
“He knew that he was going to get arrested,” Otto said, and Pete turned back to them. “By walking in there and confronting Foster he gave us the last pieces of the puzzle.”
“He solved it for us,” Adkins said.
She shook her head. “I don’t see any of it,” said. “Solved what?”
“What Foster was trying to do,” Adkins said.
“Push China into starting a war, but how’s knowing that going to help Mac?”
“There’s going to be no war,” Louise said. “Never was.”
Pete’s head was buzzing. “You’re making no sense.”
“Mac saw it before I did,” Otto said, smiling. “Think about who Foster is. What he is. What he’s always been.”
Pete spread her hands. “I don’t know. A lobbyist?”
“Right,” Otto said. “So instead of trying to find out how he was trying to spark a war, I looked for how he was making his money. Starting with the polonium thing. A Chinese intelligence officer, supposedly under orders from Beijing, used Mexico as a staging ground for what looked like a series of terrorist attacks against the United States. Made Mexico look as if Beijing had played it for the fool.”
“Foster’s a lobbyist for Mexico?” Pete asked.
“Definitely not,” Otto said. “Pemex, which is the Mexican government — owned oil and gas monopoly, was on the verge of signing a trillion-dollar oil deal with the Chinese. Oil that we needed. But Foster had enough of his people in the White House and Congress and State — all over Washington — so he could pull this off for the Department of Energy and a few key congresmen who didn’t want to see Mexico sell its oil to China.”
“We never found that any polonium crossed the border,” Adkins said. “It was his first major scam. And except for the people who lost their lives over it, the U.S. came out on top. Pemex canceled its contract with China and the oil came to us instead.”
“The guy really is nuts,” Pete said. “So who paid him?”
“I don’t know that part yet,” Otto said. “But it was someone on this side of the border.”
“What about Pyongyang? How did he make money by nearly starting a nuclear war between China and North Korea?”
“Think of who would have had the most to gain by getting rid of Kim Jong Il, and possibly even reunifying the Koreas.”
“Us, I suppose,” Pete said. “Certainly would have helped reduce tensions over there if the nuclear issue had been solved.”
“There wouldn’t have been a war,” Louise said. “Nobody, not even Kim Jong Il, and especially not the Chinese, are that crazy. That never was the real issue. But by driving a wedge between North Korea’s only ally it strengthened South Korea’s bargaining position to build automobile factories in the north, something the Chinese wanted to do.”
“Beijing is rushing full tilt into the twentieth-first century, and the only way they can keep up the pace is to find new markets for their products,” Adkins said. “They’re approaching saturation level here, and each time we have an economic downturn the U.S. debt China holds looks less and less promising. So they create new markets in places where workers earn enough income to afford the cars and televisions and stereos.”
“North Korea is poor,” Pete said.
“Build factories for them and the workers will earn the money to buy Chinese products,” Adkins said. “Simple economics.”
“China was stopped again, so who paid Foster?”
“At this point it looks like a consortium of South Korean car makers to the tune of fifty million dollars,” Otto said.
“They were willing to risk nuclear war for the sake of money?” Pete asked. “Or am I being too naive?”
Louise smiled. “Naive, and that’s not such a bad thing.”
“And Taiwan?”
“Haven’t got that one totally figured out yet,” Otto said. “Except that the B-252 didn’t have an actual emergency landing, they were on a training mission to deliver spare parts, not missiles — although a Chinese sleeper agent was fed that info, and China began rattling its sabers. Something it’s been doing for a long time.”
“Who paid Foster?”
“Probably a cabal in Taiwan very similar to the one Foster ran here: Taiwan for the Taiwanese. It’s too dangerous to go head-to-head with Beijing on a political level, so Foster was able to engineer something like this to give China another black eye.”
Pete was amazed. “People died for this nonsense. Money. Position. And if things had gotten out of hand in Mexico City, or Pyongyang or Taipei, we might have gotten embroiled in some sort of a nuclear exchange.”
“Wars have started for less,” Adkins said.
“Still leaves Mac in jail, and Foster’s people on the loose to figure out their next scam,” Pete said. “What can we do about it?”
Otto and Adkins exchanged a glance, and Otto touched a finger to the send box in the header of what looked like an e-mail message. “Just did it.”
“Did what?”
“We wrote an e-mail detailing everything we just told you, and sent it to every name from Remington’s flash drive and Whittaker’s laptop.”
“Don’t you think they’ll fight back?”
“With what?” Otto asked. “We have the proof, and Mac got it for us.”
“Now we wait,” Adkins said.
PART FIVE
Thirty-six Hours Later
SEVENTY-SEVEN
At the Central Detention Facility, known as the D.C. jail, McGarvey sat on his cot, his back against the dirty concrete wall. His clothing had been taken from him when he’d been admitted thirty-six hours ago, and he was dressed now in jeans, a light blue denim shirt, and black shoes, no laces.
He was in a special holding cell away from the general population used for prisoners on suicide watch, prisoners who were in danger from the other inmates, and occasionally a special case like McGarveys ordered held by the Bureau or the U.S. Marshal Service.
So far no one had come to talk to him, and the jailer who delivered his meals had said nothing, merely sliding the metal plate, tin cup of Kool-Aid, and the spoon through the slot in the metal door, and returning in twenty minutes to retrieve the dirty dishes.
The single light set behind a grille in the ceiling never went out, and there was no window.
Everything hinged on Otto, as operations in the past so often had, but he hoped that Dick Adkins and Pete had managed to make it to safety and keep their heads down until the dust settled.
There were going to be repercussions, and it was almost certain that Foster would fight back using whatever connections were left in place and still loyal to the cause. But it was anyone’s guess how it would turn out.
