to step in because coal was coming up against the increasingly powerful global warming lobby, and wind and solar technologies weren’t ready yet to fill the gap.
She didn’t have all the proof, but it was enough in her mind to make a damned good case for the CIA to spend some of its resources to take a closer look.
Two motorcycle cops pulled up beside them and waved them over. They were on the highway now, the airport within sight a few miles across an open field.
Lorraine didn’t know if she should be alarmed yet. The plates on the SUV were diplomatic and even though she was CIA, her embassy title was Special Adviser to the Ambassador, which gave her diplomatic immunity. But Venezuela was Miguel Octavio’s country, and just now President Chavez was acting particularly unkindly toward the U.S. And things happened down here.
“Were we speeding?” she asked the driver as he slowed down and pulled over to the side of the busy road.
“About ten miles over the limit, ma’am, the same as everyone else.”
“Better get your passport out, Mrs. Fritch,” her bodyguard said. “This is probably just a routine hassle. Been happening a lot lately.”
When they were stopped the driver powered down his window as one of the cops came over, while the second came around to the passenger side as Lorraine’s bodyguard lowered his window.
“Is there some trouble, Officer?” the driver asked.
Lorraine opened her purse, looked at her 9mm Beretta for just a second, but then grabbed her passport. Normally she didn’t travel armed, but this time she was spooked.
The first gunshot was so loud in the confines of the car that she was so startled, so distracted she didn’t realize for the first instant that her bodyguard’s blood had splashed her face. She looked up as the second shot was fired, this one hitting the driver in the forehead, and then she was looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, a SIG-Sauer, she thought, before a billion stars burst inside her skull.
TWENTY-TWO
All the way back up to Washington the next morning McGarvey had the feeling that nothing in his life had ever been meant to last. Not his work in the Air Force, not his career in the CIA, not with his wife and daughter and certainly not his retirement from the field.
Getting out of the cab with Gail in front of the three-story brick-and-glass building that was home to the operational division of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Tysons Corner, just outside the Beltway, it struck him hard that his days as a teacher and Rapid Response team adviser were finished, and had come to an end the moment he and Lundgren had responded to the Hutchinson Island call.
The morning was bright and fresh, the countryside southern and lush, but McGarvey wasn’t noticing any of it, he was so tightly focused. And he had to ask himself if he was glad for the chance to get back into action, or regretful. He thought he knew but he didn’t want to admit it to himself, not yet, anyway, but the call from the Division of Emergency Operations Director Joseph S. French had been straight to the point: Drop everything and get up here as soon as possible, and he had responded without hesitation.
“I’m sorry about Alan,” Gail said. “He didn’t deserve it.” She’d come up here to make her report to her boss, Louis Curtley, the operations manager in charge of in-place security operatives, the position she’d held — still held — at Hutchinson Island.
“None of them did,” McGarvey said, and he really looked at her for the first time since yesterday afternoon.
She was ragged, her oval features pinched with stress and fatigue. No one had gotten much sleep in the aftermath, but right now she seemed to be more affected than she should have been, almost beside herself.
He stopped her halfway up the walk to the front entrance. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was exactly my fault,” she said angrily, her black eyes wide, haunted. And he knew what she was seeing. “I was in charge of security. I let the bastard get into my control room six months ago, and I let the other just waltz into my facility like any fucking tourist.”
“You’re not an engineer, so there’s no way you could have known about the sabotaged systems. That was Strasser’s job. And it wasn’t yours to vet every person who ever took the tour.”
She looked up into his face, her anger like a halo. “He walked right past me, Kirk. And I knew something was wrong, I could feel it, but I did nothing. Like you said, it wasn’t my job to vet those people. But it was most definitely my responsibility to follow my gut. And that’s something else you said. Remember?”
She was on the verge of tears now, and McGarvey wanted to reach out for her, but he knew that she would resent anything like that, figuring that he would take her for being a weakling.
“I remember,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”
“But at what terrible cost,” she said bitterly.
“We keep going. You keep going.”
“And do what? I’m practically out of a job until — or if — Hutchinson Island gets rebuilt. Or do you think Curtley’s going to give me a new assignment as a reward?”
“Prove your plant was sabotaged, find out who did it and why, and go after them.”
She said nothing.
McGarvey could see that he’d told her something she hadn’t expected. “You know that the engineer inside the control room was a part of it, and you have a suspect who you saw get in his car and drive away. It’s a start.”
“The monitoring system is probably fried. The South Building took a big hit of radioactive water and steam.”
“It may not have gotten inside the building,” McGarvey said, and he took out the disk he’d taken from the monitoring station. “The visitors center parking lot camera.” He’d planned on giving it to Otto to work on, but he suspected that Gail needed it.
“You went back,” she said, taking the disk from him.
“I figured I owed you that much.”
“You paid your debt, Kirk, and then some,” she said with emotion. “If it hadn’t been for you taking charge and keeping Carlos from screwing things up, a lot more people would’ve been hurt.”
“Well, it could be a lead, especially if you can lift the license number,” he said with more gentleness in his voice than he felt. The security lapses at Hutchinson Island were only a small part of the real problem, starting with Homeland Security that in some ways still believed the major threat to the U.S. was by air, just like 9/11.
“Eric can do it,” she said, a hint of her old sparkle and excitement back in her face. Eric Yablonski was the NNSA’s resident computer geek, and served in a similar function for the administration as Otto Rencke did for the CIA. And now she had something to do that had merit, worth, and it was enough for her. A lifeline.
Joseph French had one of the corner offices on the third floor, and although this division of the NNSA had been pulled out of the DOE’s headquarters in the city, technically banished from the seat of power, he didn’t seem to mind. Out here, he’d once explained to McGarvey, he had a free hand.
He was a short, tightly built man in his late fifties, with an athletic grace that came from playing racquetball twice a week, and the thousand-yard stare acquired from his naval career from which he had retired as a two-star rear admiral. He had been boss of a Sixth Fleet battle group, which should have qualified him for a more important position in the DOE, but he was an action man who was perfectly happy to spend his retirement years out of the bustle of Washington and especially away from the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.
“You were right and everyone else at the DOE was wrong,” he said when McGarvey walked in. “Coffee?”
“No thanks on the coffee,” McGarvey said. “And the other is no consolation. We lost some good people.”
“It could have been worse,” French said, his mood unreadable. He’d been black shoe navy, and had never been able to completely trust the sometimes maverick tactics of special ops forces, including the Navy SEALs, and
