wearing his raincoat, and there were a few stares, but no one came over to them.
“Damn it, I knew it,” he said above a sudden gust of wind.
“You go ahead, Admiral,” she said. “I’m parked in the next block.”
“Right. Look, I’ve decided I do want to talk to that detective. “
“Good,” she replied, holding on to her hat. Then she remembered von Rensel’s suggestion. “How about doing the meeting at your house instead of in the Pentagon? Tomorrow night?”
“Okay,” he said. “Would you set it up? And call me in the morning? Oh, and thank you for coming tonight, Karen.” Then he was jogging away down the sidewalk as the rain began in earnest. Karen followed with her head down, reflecting on how everyone was always anxious to get away from a funeral. Her mother had organized a service for Frank out in Chevy Chase, and she had dreaded leaving the church when it was over. Probably because they then had to go to the cemetery. Elizabeth Walsh had spared them that trauma by donating her body to medical science.
She looked back to see if Sherman had reached his car, when she heard the dissonant sound of a motorcycle coming toward them. She looked up the street and saw the bike and its rider approaching down the inside righi lane, pursued by a small vortex of rain and traffic mist. The motorcycle looked like a fat wingless wasp, shiny and black, with chrome exhaust pipes, an oversized headlight, and only a small windshield. Its engine was running rough, battering the evening air with a painfully loud staccato that seemed incongruous in this neighborhood of older homes and nicely fenced yards. The helmeted rider, wearing a sleeveless, black T-shirt and dark jeans, looked too spindly to be piloting the big two-seater machine. As the bike drew abreast of where the admiral was fumbling with his car keys, she suddenly realized that the’rider had his visor raised and was looking right at Sherman.
Karen, who had stopped about thirty feet away, saw the admiral look back at the rider and then freeze. He whirled around as the bike went by, but it was already accelerating along the right lane in a cone of smoky spray. Karen stood there for a second and Was about to start forward, but the admiral was scrambling to get his car door open, as if anxious to pursue the bike and its rider. But it was not to be: The stream of rush-hour traffic made it impossible for him to get out of his parking place, and she saw him thump the steering wheel in frustration. The rain became heavier, and she hurried to reach her own car. She looked back once more and saw the admiral push his way into traffic, provoking an angry constellation of brake lights and horns behind him.
She got in and struggled out of her dripping raincoat. The rain drummed hard on the roof, and she decided just to wait it out for a few minutes, turning on the engine to get the defroster going. So what the hell was that all about? she wondered. She had had only the briefest glimpse of the rider’s face. The predominant impression was - thin: thin face, narrow hatchetlike head, a hank of greasy-looking black hair down one side, the flash of an earring. But there was no doubt that he had been looking at the admiral, almost as if he had been willing the admiral to see him.
Mystified, she switched on her car phone, got out Mcnair’s card, and placed a call to his office. She got his voice mail. She asked if it would be amenable to meet with Admiral Sherman at his home in Mclean at 6:00 P.m. tomorrow night and said to call her if this would work. As the rain squall passed, she began watching the traffic for an opening. She made a mental note to close the loop with von Rensel first thing in the morning. She would also have to figure out how to put off any questions from Carpenter for one more day.
As he piloted his Suburban carefully through the evening rush-hour traffic on I-95, Train von Rensel made a mental inventory of some things he needed to do before the lovely lady commander got herself too much further into the Sherman matter. A disappearing letter from a disappearing, SEAL who was also supposed to be an MIA-he shook his head.
Assuming the good admiral was being honest, Train felt that his first comment in the snack bar had been the simple truth. Navy SEALS have the reputation of being the baddest of the bad in the Special Forces world, where bad inferred supreme competence rather than a capacity for malice.
If a SEAL had been declared ‘missing in action and then had reappeared back in the States some time afterward, still being carried as an MIA, then there was a high probability that he had found himself a new government job.
Fortunately, Train still had one contact in that organization all the spooks loved to hate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dr. Mchale Johnson was a senior scientist in the Computer Operations and Machine Intelligence Division of the FBI’s Washington laboratories, or at least that’s what he said he was. Train had first met him during an NIS counterintelligence operation connected with the Walker cryptography spy ring. Up to that point in his career, Train had been under the nayve impression that there were rigid rules governing the boundaries of counterintelligence operations, with the FBI solely in charge of domestic counterintelligence, while another agency dealt with security issues beyond U.S. borders. Mchale Johnson quickly had disabused him of this quaint notion, demonstrating repeatedly that both federal agencies had their own interpretations of this rule.
During a subsequent Joint Intelligence Board debriefing on the Walker case, a board member from that other agency had tried to pin Train down as to whether or not he had seen any evidence that the FBI ever operated off the reservation. Train had testified solemnly that he had seen absolutely no evidence of any violations of’this rule during the investigation. Since then, Mchale Johnson had been available for informal consultations from time to time. The FBI kept score.
But first, he needed to be convinced that this wasn’t some kind of smoke-blowing exercise on the admiral’s part. He was a little bit surprised that Karen Lawrence would be so ready to believe such a story.
On the other hand, she was a commander and Sherman was a flag officer.
He had long since learned never to underestimate the capacity of naval officers to put the star-wearing elect of the military congregation up on exceedingly high pedestals.
Train stared out at the stalled river of evening commuters.
Being that he considered himself a Washington-area native, he should be used to this. Born in 1949, he had been the only child of Gregor von Rensel and his wife, Constance.
He had grown up on the family’s riverside home near Aquia, Virginia, which was about thirty-five miles south of Washington.
His father, a Washington attorney, had been on Macarthur’s staff during World War 11. He had followed Macarthur to Tokyo when the war ended, and he’d spent two years on the Tokyo Occupation Staff. Despite being part of the hated army of occupation in that devastated city, Gregor found himself quite taken with the Japanese approach to life.
When he came home to the Washington area in 1947, he met and subsequently married the daughter of an American banker, Hiram Worthfield, of the San Francisco Worthfields, who had himself taken a Japanese wife long before the war.
Wolfgang had been born two years later, growing up on the family estate at Aquia until his ninth year, when his mother contracted breast cancer and then died a year later.
The Worthfield family,- conscious of Gregor’s old-world attitudes about raising their only grandchild, prevailed upon him to accept two young Japanese retainers from their own San Francisco household, Hiroshi and Kyoko Yamada.
Kyoko had quietly become Train’s surrogate mother, while her husband, Hiroshi, took over as groundskeeper, chauffeur, and general factotum.
Hiroshi had generally ignored young Wolfgang until the child’s twelfth year, at which point Gregor von Rensel, aware of impending puberty, had had a quiet word.
With patience and quiet persistence, Hiroshi had infiltrated Wolfgang’s nonschool hours, skillfully bringing the prepubescent boy into his orbit and teaching him the essential arts of manhood. To the young Wolfgang’s eyes, Hiroshi was an aloof, taciturn, stoical man of little apparent humor who was inexplicably starting to take up a lot of his time.
But over the next three years, the rapidly growing teenager was exposed to the best concepts of the Japanese upperclass traditions: a strong sense of honor, an -awareness that there was such a thing as duty, and the iinpoilance of personal integrity. Hiroshi had come from a military family and had received extensive military - training in anticipation of -the impending U.S. invasion of the home islands. When the time came to instruct his new master’s son in the duties of manhood, he imparted a high regard for personal selfsufficiency, including extensive and daily instruction in the martial arts.
Content with Hiroshi’s work, Train’s father insisted on boarding school as the next step, then prelaw at the University of Virginia. It had been Train’s . idea to try military service, and he served for thirteen years in the Marine
