“God bless the media,” McGarvey quipped. The attack had hit the front page of just about every newspaper in the world.
“He won’t stop, you know,” Adkins said.
“I hope he doesn’t,” McGarvey said. “Arlington was a mistake. Who knows, maybe he’ll make another.”
“When do you leave?”
“Soon as I can round up Gloria.”
“She’s down at the Farm, finishing her debriefing,” Adkins said. “Did you know?”
“No,” McGarvey said. “Sounds like Howard McCann’s doing.”
“She’ll be glad to be rescued.”
McGarvey’s visitor’s pass would not allow him to access Technical Services’ Research and Development corridor, so Jared Kraus had to come out and personally escort him inside. Kraus was a portly man in his late thirties, with a serious demeanor. Nothing was ever a joke to him. His staff claimed he had no sense of humor whatsoever.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Director,” he said. “Mr. Rencke is waiting for us in the conference room.”
“Were you able to come up with what I need?” McGarvey asked. Kraus’s left eyebrow rose a notch, as if the question was a personal insult. “Of course.”
The doors to most of the R & D labs and testing facilities were secured with retinal print identification devices that would open only into safe boxes that acted like air locks aboard a spaceship. The inner door to the facility itself could not be opened unless the outer door was closed and locked.
The wing was a beehive of activity, but no one spoke above a whisper. This place and the people who worked here, dreaming up toys for field operations officers, had always struck McGarvey as science fiction, something out of the old Mission Impossible.
“Just in here, sir,” Kraus said at the conference room next to his office at the end of the corridor.
Rencke was sitting cross-legged on top of a long table, fiddling with what appeared to be an ordinary satellite telephone. Beside him was a small leather case, about the size of a thick notebook.
He looked up, his eyes bright like a kid with a new toy. “Oh, wow, I just finished programming the third Keyhole, and nobody will be able to detect what I’ve done.”
“You know that we have a serious limitation in size,” McGarvey said.
“We’ve taken care of that for you, Mr. Director,” Kraus said. “Actually we’ve been working on the technology for a few years now, even before you left the Company.”
“What have you come up with?”
Kraus zippered open the leather case and took out one of four hypodermic syringes, each about a quarter-filled with a milky solution, and handed it to McGarvey. “It’s nanotechnology.”
The opening at the business end of the syringe was larger than most needles, and was covered by a plastic sheath. “What is it?”
“That’s the good part. The liquid is actually a derivative of sodium thiopental — truth serum. But also contained in each syringe is the GPS transmitter you wanted, no bigger than a grain of sand.”
McGarvey held the syringe up to the light, but he could not make out the device. “It can’t have much range.”
“That’s why I programmed three satellites,” Rencke said. “The Keyhole will be able to pick up the signal only if the transmitter is almost directly beneath it. It’ll show up on the sat phone, but the signal will be intermittent, depending on a satellite pass.”
“How do I activate the phone?” McGarvey asked.
“Four syringes, four GPS transmitters. Enter three ones and pound, and the phone will display the latitude and longitude of the first transmitter. Three twos and pound, gets you the second unit, et cetera.”
“There’s another downside,” Kraus said. “Battery life. Best we can do is seven days, so you’ll have to be quick about it. The good news is that the batteries won’t go active until they’ve been exposed to the subject’s body heat for sixty to ninety minutes.”
“We’re giving you four of them so Weiss won’t be sure if you and Gloria came back just because of al-Turabi,” Rencke said. “It’s all going to depend on how quickly he can get them out of there and into the hands of Cuban intelligence. Since the last break, Gitmo has been locked up tight.”
“He’ll manage,” McGarvey said. “Al-Turabi is just too big a catch.”
It was about two in the afternoon when McGarvey got down to the CIA’s training facility off I-64 outside Williamsburg. Located in a remote section of Camp Peary Naval Reservation on the York River, it was where recruits were taught basic tradecraft that field operations officers needed, and it was also where old hands went to hone their skills or to pass along things they’d learned, usually the hard way.
McGarvey’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Todd Van Buren, had taken over as camp commandants shortly after 9/11 when recruitment levels were at an all-time high. They were young enough that the recruits could relate to them, but experienced enough that the recruits had respect for them.
“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” the guard at the gate said. “Mrs. Van Buren is expecting you up at the office.”
“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and he followed the long drive through the woods to the collection of rustic buildings that housed the camp’s headquarters, classrooms, and the POW center where recruits were subjected to rigorous, sometimes even brutal, interrogations as if they were spies captured by a foreign power. The mess hall, dayrooms, and housing units were also located in the administration area.
Several cars were parked in front of the main office, and across in the parking lot a blue bus with U.S. Air Force markings had pulled up and fifteen or sixteen new recruits were piling out, to be greeted by several instructors dressed in BDUs.
Elizabeth, who was slender, with a pretty round face and short blond hair, practically a twin of her mother at that age, came out of the administration building as McGarvey pulled up. Like the instructors she was dressed in army camouflage, her boots bloused. In addition to running the camp she and Todd also taught many of the classes, including hand-to-hand combat, night field exercises in the swamp, and demolitions. She liked to blow up things as much as her husband did.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said, and she and her father embraced.
“How are you, sweetheart?” McGarvey asked.
“Just peachy,” she said. She linked her arm in his. “Let’s go for a walk.” She seemed brittle, on edge.
They headed down a dirt track behind the administration building that led eventually to the outdoor firing range, and beyond that the demolition training bunkers and urban warfare village.
“Everyone can pretty well guess why Dick Adkins called you back,” she said. “We’ve had no luck at all finding bin Laden. You’re the only one who’s come face-to-face with him and lived. And the fact that they tried to hit you at Arlington pretty well proves he knows that you’re gunning for him.”
“That could work to my advantage, when the time comes,” McGarvey said.
Elizabeth suddenly stopped and looked up into her father’s eyes. “Were you aware that Gloria Ibenez is in love with you?”
It took him completely by surprise. “No.”
“Well, she’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that she is,” Elizabeth said. “So if you’ve come here to ask her to help you, just be careful, Daddy. She’s an intelligent, beautiful woman, and I think she’d do just about anything to seduce you.”
McGarvey had to smile, despite the seriousness of the situation. “Is this a subject that a daughter should be talking to her father about?”
Elizabeth wanted to argue, but after a moment she lowered her eyes and nodded. “I’m sorry.”