“Safe,” Lipton said.
“Then let’s get out of here. I could use a drink.
BOOK FOUR
Chapter 62
Roland Murphy watched from his seventh-floor office at CIA Headquarters as the sun came up on what promised to be a beautiful day. His mood, he decided, should be expansive, instead it was dark with worry.
Unable to sleep, he’d had his driver bring him back at four this morning, and he’d had the overnight supervisor bring him up to speed. The world situation was reasonably calm; no major wars or conflicts involving American interests, no serious threats to any of their in-place networks, no crises needing immediate attention.
Nothing doing, in fact, except for the situation they’d hired McGarvey to investigate.
It had not changed. The threat still existed, but no one had so much as a clue what to do about it.
Murphy’s secretary wasn’t here yet, so he got an outside line himself and called the fifth-floor isolation ward at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center.
“This is Roland Murphy. If you need to confirm that, I’m at my office. I’ll instruct the Agency operator to put your call through.”
“I’m Dr. Singh, and that won’t be necessary, Mr. Director, I recognize your voice.”
“How is your patient?”
“We’ve had him here for less than twelve hours,” the doctor said cautiously. “But he is by all appearances a singularly remarkable man. He is already on the mend.”
“How long?”
“For what, General?”
“Until he will be fit to resume his… duties.”
“Under normal circumstances, three months, perhaps four,” Dr. Singh said. “But if his presence is of vital importance, all other considerations secondary, I would say six weeks at the minimum.”
“Is he conscious?” Murphy asked, masking his bitter disappointment. McGarvey was a man after all, not a superman.
“Oh, yes, he is very much conscious. He refuses all pain medications and sedatives.”
“Someone will be along this morning to interview him,” Murphy said.
“Seven days.”
“This morning.”
“General, I could refuse you.”
“I think not,” Murphy said. “But we’ll wait until this afternoon. We’ll give you that much time.”
“Him, General, not me. You need to give him time to heal.”
Murphy called a meeting for his top three at 8:30 a.m. in the small dining room adjacent to his office. Besides the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Lawrence Danielle, the Deputy Director of Intelligence Tommy Doyle and of course the Deputy Director of Operations Phil Carrara, CIA General Consul Howard Ryan was at the breakfast gathering.
Murphy dropped the bombshell.
“I was told earlier this morning that McGarvey will recover from his wounds, but he’ll be out of commission for at least six weeks, perhaps longer.”
“Shit,” Carrara swore crudely, but he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Ryan had a smug look. “Then whatever did or did not happen on Santorini, K-l was successful.
They wanted him off the case, and that’s what they got.”
“It would seem so,” Murphy answered heavily. “He’s awake and apparently coherent.
Phil, I want you to go over there this afternoon and talk to him. He must have seen or heard something that’ll be of use to us.”
“Yes, sir,” Carrara said. “In the meantime we’ve come up with a tentative identification on the woman that Elizabeth described for us.” He took several black and white glossy photos from a file folder and passed them across the table to Murphy. “Her name is Liese Egk.”
“Former STASI?” Murphy asked, studying the photos, then passing them over to Danielle.
“Yes. Her speciality is assassination.”
Danielle’s eyebrows rose, and Ryan took the photos with interest.
“Still no trace of her or Ernst Spranger?”
“None,” Carrara said. “The Greeks are, needless to say, oversensitive just now. Apparently there were two local businessmen who somehow got involved, and got themselves killed, in addition to the two fishermen whose boat was found abandoned in the port of Thira.”
“The Navy wants to be keyed in to what we’re doing,” Danielle said softly. “Admiral Douglas telephoned yesterday afternoon after you’d already gone for the day. One of their boys was killed on the island.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That we’d get back to him, but that the young man definitely did not give his life on some fool’s errand.”
“That’ll have to do for now,” Murphy said. “If he presses, invite him over for lunch.
I’ll talk to him then.”
There was a momentary silence that Tommy Doyle finally broke.
“Which brings us back to Tokyo. We’re getting a lot of mixed signals from the Japanese on the official as well as the unofficial level.”
“What about the news media?”
“So far they’ve been relatively silent about the killings, which in itself is spooky.”
They were all looking at Doyle.
“What are you trying to say, Tommy?” Murphy asked.
“It’s my guess that whatever is going on has at least the tacit approval of someone at ministry level or higher.”
“Tough charge,” Ryan suggested, but Murphy ignored the comment.
“It’s time we pulled Kelley Fuller out of there,” the DCI said. “With McGarvey out of commission she’s on her own.”
“You don’t mean to write off our Tokyo station,” Carrara said. “Not now, General.”
“We’ll have to restaff. There’s not much else for it. In the meantime it’s possible that McGarvey’s action on Santorini scared them off, or at least delayed their plans.”
“Six weeks is a long time,” Doyle said.
“Send someone else,” Ryan suggested.
“Who?” Murphy asked bluntly.
“I don’t know. We must have a Japanese expert on staff somewhere who could make some quiet inquiries for us.”
No one said a thing.
“We don’t have to send a maniac whose solution to every problem seems to be shooting up the local citizenry.”
“Right,” Murphy said. He turned back to Carrara. “As soon as you talk to McGarvey get back to me, would you, Phil?”
“Yes, sir,” Carrara said. “Maybe we’ll have something by then.”
Chapter 63
The morning was beautiful. McGarvey stood at the window, his body cocked at an odd angle, his neck, right arm and shoulder and his right leg swathed in bandages. He’d gone from night into day; from danger to safety, but the assignment wasn’t over.
A CIA psychiatrist who’d examined McGarvey after a particularly harrowing operation early in his career had come to the conclusion that though McGarvey had a low physical threshold of pain response, he had an extremely high psychological threshold. He felt pain easily, but he was able to let it flow through and around him without it affecting his ability to function.
He was in pain now, but he continued to refuse any medication, preferring to keep his head straight. Spranger and the woman with him were gone. Lipton had admitted it before they’d left Santorini. And as long as that monster was still on the loose none of them would be truly safe.
McGarvey’s right shoulder had stiffened up and his burns still hurt, but his biggest problem was the flesh wound in his right thigh. Walking was difficult at best. If he found himself in a situation where he had to move quickly to save his life, he might not make it.
But lying in a hospital bed fretting wouldn’t help despite what the doctors told him. They’d backed up their warnings by posting a guard at the door. At least he hoped the hospital had ordered the security and that it hadn’t been done at the Agency’s request.