“Can you help?”
“Go away,” Rencke said, his voice already distant. “Come again another day.” The Central Intelligence Agency’s logo, a shield topped by an eagle’s head, appeared on the screen. “Bring some Twinkies when you come back. A lot of Twinkies.”
Chapter 18
“I hate pigeons. They shit over everything and yet the city protects them.”
Tom Lynch looked up from where he was seated on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg as a heavily built, swarthy man approached and sat down next to him. It was a few minutes after nine in the morning, the day already pleasant. It was Monday so there weren’t any children around.
“Squab.”
“Nothing but an overpriced dead pigeon,” Phillipe Marquand said. He’d brought a small paper bag of cracked corn and he tossed out a handful for the birds who immediately flocked around.
“I thought Frenchmen were all gourmands.”
“I’m a Corsican,” Marquand flared. “And I didn’t come here to discuss food.”
“I didn’t think you had,” Lynch said mildly. He didn’t like the SDECE colonel, but this was a friendly country in which the CIA had to walk with care. His instructions from Langley were to meet with the man, but give him nothing. The official line was that our people were making a routine trip to Switzerland, and that the terrorist attack had been nothing more than just that… a random act of violence.
The U.S. State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force was working hand-in-hand with the French, which was as far as the White House wanted it to go for the moment.
“The Swiss kicked McGarvey out yesterday, did you know that?” Marquand asked. “We tracked him through London as far as Dulles, but then lost him. You wouldn’t happen to know where he is now?”
“No,” Lynch said. “Should I?”
“I would think that someone would want to ask him a few questions about Friday.”
“I understand you and he spoke.”
Marquand nodded.
“Is that why you knew he’d gone to Switzerland? It was an old flame of his aboard that flight. He’d known her from Lausanne. Said he was going to pay his respects.”
“He is apparently a generous man, your McGarvey. But it was not the only reason he went to Switzerland.”
“No?” Lynch said quietly.
“He was showing his face, hoping that the friends of Karl Boorsch might show themselves.”
“Should I know this name?”
“He’s the man who shot down one-four-five,” Marquand said. “Former East German STASI hitman. Belongs to an organization of ex-STASI thugs who’ve gone freelance.”
The information given so freely was breathtaking, but Lynch managed to maintain his control. “Have you any other names?”
“Not for now. But obviously Boorsch and his people want to stop your inquiries in Switzerland. Would you care to share anything with me?”
“Not at this moment,” Lynch said looking the Frenchman straight in the eye.
Marquand’s jaw tightened. “There were Frenchmen aboard that flight. Vacationers, most of them. Some with their families. In one case it was the mother and father, twin five-year-old girls, and the old grandmother. They will be buried in a common grave, what bits of their bodies were found, that is.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, we all are. But it was no random act of terrorism, as you would like us all to believe.”
Lynch started to object but Marquand held him off.
“Two of your people were escorting a Swiss citizen to Geneva. It is our belief that the STASI group wanted them stopped. We simply want to know why. What are you investigating?”
“I can’t say, Phillipe,” Lynch replied carefully, realizing by even telling the SDECE colonel that much he was giving away more than Langley had wanted him to give away.
Marquand nodded. “I told McGarvey this…
“He is a civilian.”
“But a special man. I also told him that we believe the ex-STASI group is well financed, maintaining its bank in Switzerland. Did you know this?”
Lynch held his silence, but he was seething inside. McGarvey should have told him about his meeting with Marquand. But he had lied.
“What we didn’t know … or I should say suspect … is who has provided the bulk of their financing.” Marquand looked away. “In the old days we might have suspected the Soviet Union. Perhaps the PLO, they sometimes fund outside groups. But it was none of these.”
“No?” Lynch said.
Marquand turned back. “No,” he said. “Our sources in Switzerland tell us that the currency paid into those accounts was in the form of yen. Japanese money. Now, what do you think about that?”
Seventy-five yards away, a man dressed in a French police uniform stood at an open window on the second floor of the School of Mines main building. He’d followed Marquand from Action Service Headquarters off the Boulevard Mortier, and it was only by happenstance that he spotted Lynch seated alone on the park bench in time to get into position.
He’d put it together that Marquand had come here to meet with the American CIA chief of station, and he knew that whatever those two men had to say would be of extreme importance.
He had missed the opening chitchat, but not the meat of their conversation. Lowering the four-inch parabolic antenna, which he’d carried in a leather haversack, he watched as Lynch walked off.
Spranger would pay well for this information, especially because it was the worst of all news.
Chapter 19
The Director of Central Intelligence’s chauffeured Cadillac limousine headed down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House a few minutes before 9:30 a.m. As usual, Monday morning traffic was heavy, but the day promised to be beautiful.
Murphy was in a puzzled, almost pensive mood. For the first time in his long government service career he was running up against a situation for which he had no clear answers.
They could provide the President with the data-speculations, actually, because that’s all they really had to this point-but it would be up to him to make the decisions.
In the transition period between the Cold War and what the politicians were now starting to call the “new world order,” there was no predicting what could and would happen.
“Look at the war with Iraq and the subsequent fallout in the Gulf region,” he’d told a gathering of U.S. military intelligence chiefs at the Pentagon. “There was no way in which we as an intelligence-gathering service could have foreseen even in broad strokes what came to pass.
“We can provide the raw data. We can provide spot analysis. And we can even point out what we believe are the current trends. But when the leadership of a foreign power we’re monitoring doesn’t even know where it is going, there is no chance for us to provide any realtime recommendations.”
The unspoken crux of the situation, however, as all of them that day knew, was that their customers-the leaders who made use of the intelligence information they were provided-wanted the realtime advice.
As the President would today, he thought. Only this time there were no answers, not even any clear speculation.
Murphy’s limo was passed through the White House gate to the West Portico, where he was ushered immediately upstairs to the Oval Office, his bodyguard waiting downstairs.
It was precisely 9:30. The President rose when Murphy came in and went around to the serving cart. He poured two cups of coffee and handed one to his DCI.
“You know, whenever you come in here with that look on your face, Roland, I automatically brace for the worst,” the President said. He was a tall man whose face showed the strain of the office. But his eyes were penetratingly sharp, and he seldom if ever missed a beat. His staff had to keep up with his schedule, not the other way around.