McGarvey got up and holstered his pistol at the small of his back. “It’s the only game in town until we find out who the contractor is.”
“Rain check on dinner?” Gail asked.
“Yes.”
THIRTY-NINE
McGarvey’s cell phone rang as he was passing the Kennedy Center on his way over to pick up Eve Larsen at the Watergate. It was Otto. “How’d it go with Page?”
“He wants me to be the unofficial point man on the investigation,” McGarvey said. “They said you’d left the building. Anything I need to know?”
“Sorry, Mac, but we didn’t want to worry you until we were sure. It’s about Audie. We took her to the doctor this afternoon.”
Something so cold, so alien, so completely beyond understanding flashed through McGarvey’s body, nearly causing him to run off the street. But then he got hold of himself. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing, honest injun. It’s just an ear infection. The doc gave her some antibiotics and eardrops and said she’ll be fine.” Rencke was talking in a rush. “But she had a fever last night so Louise stayed home with her, and she called me this morning. Anyway, it’s okay now.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Otto said. “Raising a kid isn’t as easy as Louise and I thought it would be. But I’m not complaining. We love her, and there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for her. And not a day goes by when I don’t think about Todd and Liz who should be here with her.”
McGarvey settled down and it was like starting to hear again after being temporarily deafened by a sudden loud noise, and things seemed to be just slightly out of focus. “I’m on my way over to pick up Eve Larsen and take her to the Fox studio on North Capitol. Get into the D.C. police system and see if Reverend Schlagel has a permit to stage a demonstration on the street.”
“Just a sec,” Otto said.
McGarvey turned off New Hampshire Avenue at the parking entrance for the Watergate Mall and the East and South buildings, and drove around to the lobby of Eve’s building.
Otto came back. “Yup. Leonard Sackman, who’s the Soldiers of Salvation Ministry special events coordinator, if you can believe that, arranged for the permit. It’s been limited to one thousand people, for ninety minutes from six thirty to eight. So if you’re on the way you’ll definitely run into them. But there’ll be plenty of cops, and none of those people will be allowed inside.”
“Have you tried to get anything from the computers in Schlagel’s organization?”
“Yeah, and it was easy, but nothing important’s there. It looks like all the major decisions are made face-to- face. Probably paper records at their McPherson headquarters. I suppose we could find someone willing to break in and give it a try.”
McGarvey had been born and raised on a ranch in western Kansas and he knew the state well. Most of the towns out on the plains, well away from Kansas City and Wichita, were small. Just about everybody knew just about everybody else. Strangers tended to stand out. It was one of the reasons the FBI had such a tough time getting any in-depth information on the reverend. “Take a look at their security measures. If you can get inside the system without attracting any attention, do it. And find out about the local and county cops. See what sort of a relationship they have with the church.”
“Or if any of them happen to be on the payroll.”
“It’s worth a shot,” McGarvey said, pulling up under the sweeping portico of the East Watergate building. “I’m at the Watergate now, I’ll talk to you later.”
Eve, dressed in a stylish charcoal gray pin-striped suit and a white blouse with long collar points under a jacket with turned-up sleeves that showed off the white, came out of the lobby as McGarvey got out of his car and came around to her. She seemed tense, understandably so.
“Thanks for this,” she said, and they shook hands. “Anyway, it’s my treat for dinner.”
“It’s a deal,” McGarvey said. He started to help her into the SUV but she looked at him as if she wondered what he was doing, and he just smiled. The message was clear: she was a capable, self-sufficient woman. Modern. A scientist, not fluff. She was accustomed to opening her own doors.
Heading down Virginia Avenue to Constitution, traffic reasonable at this hour, McGarvey decided to wait until after the program to bring up the security concerns for her at the Nobel ceremonies. And for her part she kept her silence, her thoughts elsewhere, probably a combination of how many of Schlagel’s people would be in front of the studio and what their mood would be and how she would come across in the live segments of the program.
Fifteen minutes later, after turning left at Louisiana Avenue onto North Capitol Street, they got the answers to one of the questions: there were a great many more than one thousand people in the crowd, and Schlagel himself, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, was using a bullhorn to exhort his flock about the extreme danger of allowing someone, anyone, to play God.
Police were everywhere, many of them on horseback, others dressed in riot gear with shields, batons, and helmets with Lexan facemasks, trying to keep the mob to one side of the street. But Schlagel’s people completely ignored them, their attention totally riveted on their reverend.
A half-dozen television vans had gathered at the fringes covering what was turning out to be a major media event, three helicopters circled overhead, and cameramen were shooting the scene from the roof of the building that Fox shared with NBC and C-SPAN.
McGarvey pulled up short. “We’re not getting through this way,” he said.
Eve’s cell phone rang. It was Jeff Meyers, the Fox producer for the special, who told her to stay away from the main entrance and use the E Street doors.
“Someone will meet us there,” she told McGarvey, who made a U-turn onto D Street, up to New Jersey Avenue, and then went east on E Street where he found a parking spot not too far from the side entrance.
Traffic was nearly normal here, but some of the mob had spilled out beyond the intersection a half a block away, and as they hurried up the street they could hear Schlagel’s amplified voice, loud but distorted, echoing and reechoing off the buildings.
A tall, muscular man in a dark blue blazer unlocked the door for them, as a slender man in his late twenties came down the corridor, and introduced himself as the show’s producer.
He and Eve shook hands after she’d stepped through the security arch.
McGarvey held back. He pulled out his NNSA identification wallet and held it up. “I’m carrying a weapon.”
The guard in the blazer stiffened. “You can’t come in here armed.”
“Do you know what’s going on in front of this building?”
“The police are handling it.”
“Mr. McGarvey is providing security for me,” Eve told Meyers.
“He’ll have to leave his gun down here,” the security guard said. “No need for it past this point.”
“Do you know who he is?” Eve said, her voice rising a little in anger.
“Ma’am, I know who he is and I have a great deal of respect for him. But he’s not coming any farther carrying a weapon,”
“Do your interview,” McGarvey told Eve. “I’ll be here when you’re finished.”
“I’d like you to see it,” she said, and from what McGarvey already knew of her, he figured it had to have been tough for her to ask.
“I’ll give you a couple of disks of the program,” Meyers said.
“Fair enough,” McGarvey said, and he gave Eve a smile. “Break a leg, this is the easy part.”
She gave him an odd look as if she didn’t understand what he’d meant, yet she thought she should have, but then she nodded, and headed down the corridor with the producer.
“Sorry, Mr. McGarvey, but I don’t know of any television studio anywhere that allows armed men,” the security guard said.
