“Find him,” the DCI ordered.
“We’re watching his ex-wife’s house. He’ll show up there sooner or later.”
“Good. The minute he does, I want him up here.”
Chapter 20
Otto Rencke thought in colors. He had been doing so for seven years, ever since he’d stumbled across a series of tensor calculus transformations concerning bubble memories that he could not visualize.
He’d hit on the notion of thinking of his calculations in a real-world fashion, coming up at length with the question of how to explain color to a person who’d been born blind.
With mathematics, of course. And he’d devised the system, which turned out to be his bubble memory transformations. If it worked in one direction, there was no reason to think it couldn’t work in the other.
Lavender, for example, was among the simplest of all. In his mind’s eye he could visualize an entire multidimensional array of complex calculations that described a many-tiered and interlocking series of traps leading into the CIA’s computer system.
Someone had found and negated his old screen door program, which would have allowed him fairly easy access, replacing it with a complex system of fail-safes. Enter the program from the outside, or in an improper manner, and the incoming circuit would be seized, traced to its source, and an alarm automatically issued … all without the intruder knowing he’d been discovered.
A few minutes after ten in the morning, Rencke suddenly smiled. On his main monitor, which glowed lavender, the CIA’s logo appeared in the upper left hand corner, beneath which the agency’s computer asked him:
WELCOME TO ARCHIVES DO YOU WISH TO SEE A MENU?
He jumped up and went into the kitchen where a half-dozen cats swarmed around him, meowing insistently. “Yes, my little darlings, I hear you,” he cried. “Patience.
The color is lavender and you dears must have patience.”
Opening several cans of cat food and distributing them around the kitchen floor, he took a nearly full half-gallon carton of skim milk back into the living room, drinking from it as he went, milk spilling down his front and soaking his sweatshirt.
But he didn’t give a damn.
“The sonsabitches thought they could fuck me,” he shouted, dancing around the lavender screen. “But they were wrong. Hoo, boy, they were wrong!”
McGarvey paid off his cabby and stood for a moment or two at the end of the long driveway leading up to his ex-wife’s house in Chevy Chase. The country club was across the street, and in the distance he heard someone shout: “Fore!”
The house was an expensive two-story colonial set well back on a half acre of manicured lawn. A half-dozen white pillars supported a broad overhang protecting a long front veranda.
Whatever Kathleen was or was not, he thought, starting up the walk, she was a classy woman. They’d been divorced for eight years now, after a twelve-year marriage, and it was often difficult for McGarvey to remember clearly what their life together had been like, but it had been stylish.
Stormy at the end, though, in those days when he was gone more than he was at home.
She’d guessed, in an offhanded way, that he actually worked for the CIA, that he was, in her words, a macho James Bond spy. But she’d fortunately never guessed the true extent of what he did, the fact that he had killed people in the line of his assignments.
But she’d always maintained a lovely, proper home (she had come into their marriage not wealthy, but certainly independent), and in public she presented a self-assured, dignified image. Not aloof, or snobbish, simply well put together.
It had come to a showdown: He’d had to choose either her, or his career. He’d just returned from Santiago where’d he’d taken out a Chilean general who would have probably taken over the country by coup. But his orders had been changed in midstream. The general was not to be killed. Even though the change in orders reached McGarvey too late, he’d been fired from the CIA.
On that night, not knowing what had happened, Kathleen had issued him the ultimatum.
Even though her demand that he quit the business had been a moot point at that moment, he’d turned her down.
“We cannot have a marriage in which one of us dictates the other’s life,” he told her.
“You’re right,” she said, and he’d turned around and walked out, not even bothering to unpack his bag from his trip.
He’d been younger then, more sure of himself, more arrogant, and yet in some respects more frightened that something out of his past would be coming after him now that he no longer had
the backing of the Agency.
What he hadn’t counted on was the loneliness, and the missing his daughter, who when he had left was eleven years old.
Kathleen answered the door almost immediately. She was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt, her feet bare, her hair pinned up in back, and no makeup, yet she looked like a model out of a fashion magazine. Her neck was long and delicate, her features precise yet not hard. But it was her eyes that most people noticed first.
They were large beneath highly arched eyebrows, and were a startling, almost unreal shade of green.
She smiled. “Hello, Kirk. When did you get back?”
“Last night. But it was too late to call.”
She stepped back. “Come in,” she said.
He followed her through the house to the large kitchen overlooking the swimming pool.
The sliding glass doors were open, the odor of chlorine sharp.
“Sorry about the awful smell, but the poolman was just here,” she said. “Coffee?”
“Sure,” McGarvey said, sitting at the counter. “What have you heard from Liz lately?”
“Elizabeth,” Kathleen corrected automatically. “Everything is fine. She loves school, but she misses home a little. That I got between the lines.”
“Does she need anything?”
“No,” Kathleen said, bringing their coffee over. “She called Saturday. Said everyone at school was talking about the Swissair flight that was shot down… She stopped in mid-sentence.
“Everybody in Paris was talking about it too,” McGarvey said, sidestepping Kathleen’s next question. “There’ll always be crazies out there.”
“The news said that the terrorist had been cornered by an unidentified American.”
“So I heard.”
Kathleen was staring at him. “Are you home for good this time?” she asked stiffly.
“Almost.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Almost?” she asked. “Almost, as in, not yet?”
“There’s something I have to take care of first…
“No,” Kathleen said simply.
“I’m sorry, Katy, but it’s important.”
Kathleen reared back. “My name is Kathleen,” she screeched. “Not Katy.”
The doorbell rang.
“I want you to leave,” she said. “Now! I want you out of my house, and I don’t ever want to see you back here!”
The doorbell rang again.
“All right,” she screamed. She spun on her heel and stormed back out to the stairhall.
McGarvey got up and went to the kitchen door as Kathleen opened the front door, and he just caught a glimpse of two men dressed in light slacks and sportcoats standing on the veranda.
Kathleen said something that he couldn’t quite catch.
McGarvey ducked back. They definitely were Company. The Agency would have to know that he would show up here sooner or later. They’d merely misjudged their timing, but not by very much. Whatever Murphy wanted, it had to be important to go to these lengths.
In the old days, Kathleen had always kept the car keys on a hook by the garage door.
It was tidy, she said, and the keys would never be misplaced.