McGarvey smiled gently. “All the time we want,” he told her. “But it’s not going to happen.”
“Later?” she said hopefully.
“You’re a beautiful woman, and I’m complimented that you want to go to bed with me.”
Her face fell and she shrugged. “It was worth the try,” she said. “No offense?”
“None taken. It’s just that I’m a man who happens to be in love with his wife.”
She nodded, but didn’t lower her eyes though she was clearly disappointed. “Lucky her,” she said. She turned around. “Just the zipper this time. Scout’s honor.”
The shortest route to the cemetery would have been through downtown, but the quickest was around the city on the Capital Beltway, then the George Washington Memorial Parkway along the river, the city off in the distance like an ancient Rome with its monuments in white marble.
“Thank you for coming with me today,” Gloria said. She’d been quiet since they’d left her apartment, embarrassed by what she’d tried. And now as they got closer to Arlington the reality of what had happened in Cuba was finally starting to sink in.
McGarvey had read all of that from her body language and her reaction on the Parkway as they passed the mileage sign to the cemetery. “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her.
“If I had followed orders, Bob wouldn’t have gotten killed,” she said, staring out the window.
“You were set up. Weiss is probably on the payroll. No matter what you did or didn’t do he wasn’t going to let you take your investigation any further.”
She turned and looked at McGarvey, her jaw tight. “I will be there when the man is brought down,” she said. Her eyes glistened, and she shook her head. “But I don’t know what I’m going to say to Toni and the kids.”
McGarvey never knew what to say in these kinds of situations either. “The truth,” he suggested. “She deserves at least that much.”
“Yeah,” Gloria said, and she turned away again to stare out the window.
McGarvey had taken a look at her personnel file. Ever since her husband had been captured and killed by Cuban intelligence she had thrown herself into her work. She was a damned fine field officer, even driven, but she had to be desperately lonely. According to Internal Affairs’ latest annual background investigation, she did not date. The only man currently in her life was her father, and they only occasionally saw each other. Her mother was dead, what relatives there were in Cuba who hadn’t been rounded up and shot after her father had defected were out of reach, and there never had been children.
Ten minutes from the cemetery, McGarvey telephoned Rencke, who answered on the first ring.
“Pavlosk is a wash,” Rencke said sharply. He sounded angry with himself. “Weapons up the ying yang, waiting for anyone to pick them up, but no Kilo boats. Just derelict nukes.”
“Any possibility one of them could be activated?”
“Most of the reactors have been cut out. The others leak like hell. They’d be death traps. The crew would never make it to Panama.”
“What’s next?” McGarvey asked.
“Let Louise do her job with the NRO’s assets, and in the meantime I’ll keep looking,” Rencke said. “We’ve at least eliminated one possibility.”
“Keep on it, Otto. We have to know where he’s coming up with a boat.”
“He might already have one, ya know,” Rencke said. “Could be he’s already on his way.”
“That’s what worries me most,” McGarvey agreed. “The boat we can’t find.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Al-Turabi lowered his binoculars and glanced at his watch. It was precisely four o’clock as a black Cadillac limousine with government plates pulled up and parked at the head of a line of nine cars and the long hearse. He was crouched in the back of one of the PWCS vans parked one hundred meters up the gently sloping hill from the gravesite. He’d not spotted McGarvey yet and he was beginning to get worried.
The six men crowded into the van with him were all dressed in deputy uniforms, with the correct badges and identifications, so they’d not been questioned by Park Police when they’d entered at Columbia Pike. But all the planning would be for nothing if McGarvey never showed.
His men were looking at him as he turned back to the silvered window and raised his binoculars to see who got out of the limo.
Two bulky men, in dark business suits, obviously bodyguards, jumped out of the front seat, their heads on swivels as they swept the area immediately adjacent to the gravesite. One of them spotted the sheriff ’s van and looked directly at the silvered window behind which al-Turabi was watching him, but then, apparently satisfied there was no threat, turned away.
The second van with Odeah in charge was parked fifty meters farther away from the south gate where the three cars were waiting. Between them they would catch the mourners in a cross fire from which nobody could possibly survive.
One of the bodyguards turned his head and his lips moved. Al-Turabi realized that he was speaking into a lapel mike. The bodyguard looked up and nodded at his partner, who opened the rear door on the passenger side.
A slightly built man with sandy hair got out first, and al-Turabi instantly recognized him as Richard Adkins, the director of the CIA. He turned and helped a tiny woman, dressed in black, a veil covering her face, out of the limo. She was followed by a boy, dressed in a dark suit, and a little girl, dressed like her mother in black, but without the veil.
They would be the spy’s widow and family, al-Turabi figured. Well, they couldn’t begin to guess that they would soon join the man they’d come to mourn this afternoon. One happy little American family together again. It would be interesting to be at the gates of Paradise to see how Allah received them. They would get no martyr’s welcome.
Adkins said something to his bodyguard, and then he took the widow’s arm and they headed the few meters down the slope across the grass to where a knot of about fifteen or twenty people had gathered on folding chairs around the open grave and the flag-draped coffin. The bulk of the Pentagon loomed large in the background, and the sound of traffic on Washington Boulevard and Jefferson Davis Highway was constant.
But McGarvey was not among them, and al-Turabi was beside himself with fury. The funeral service was about to begin and their target had not shown up. How in Allah’s name could he have been so wrong? What was he going to tell bin Laden? And what would Odeah, who’d been perfectly correct to suggest killing McGarvey at home, report to bin Laden?
“Where is he?” Odeah radioed from the second van. “Do you see him from your position?”
Al-Turabi wanted to scream at the bastard for breaking radio silence. It was only supposed to be for an emergency.
One of the bodyguards, who’d followed Adkins and the family down to the grave, suddenly stopped and brought his right hand up to his ear. Someone was speaking to him.
He turned and looked up the road, his eyes passing the sheriff’s van. He was searching for something or someone. And it suddenly came to al-Turabi that Odeah’s transmission had been monitored. The infidel bastards knew that something was about to happen.
Adkins and the family had reached the gravesite, and the mourners had all got to their feet. At that precise moment, a man in a dark suit stepped out from behind a tree thick with foliage.
Al-Turabi was struck dumb. The man was saying something to the bodyguard up the hill. Al-Turabi focused on his face. It was McGarvey. He must have gotten to the cemetery first, and had been hiding like a coward all this time.