David Hagberg
White House
This book is for Lorrel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment and thanks
are given to my friend, editorial assistant,
typist and advisor, Nancy Nebel.
PART ONE
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
ONE
Kirk Cullough McGarvey had nearly lost his life three months ago in Moscow. Although the pain he felt from his wounds had already begun to fade, the scars, both physical and mental, would never go away. This time his daughter, Elizabeth, had almost been killed, and he blamed himself.
He pulled up at the CIA main gate in his leased Nissan Pathfinder a few minutes before 8:00 A.M. Friday. It was a beautiful summer morning with a perfectly blue sky and almost no haze. Everything that had to be said after the operation — the summaries, the debriefings, the contact sheets and budget lines and weapons reports — had been gone over in endless detail with the headhunters in Internal Security. Yet he was answering the summons again, as he had been doing for twenty-five years.
“The general would like to see you tomorrow morning, eight sharp.” Tommy Doyle, deputy director of Intelligence, had phoned last night. He supposed that the DCI wanted to have a final word, as he himself did. In fact he had a lot to say, most of which Roland Murphy was not going to like.
He gave his driver’s license to the uniformed security guard, who checked his name from a list then handed the license back. “Visitor’s parking lot is on the left, sir.”
“Thanks,” McGarvey said. Coming back from Moscow he’d been angry because of the way the Company had bungled everything, and had involved his daughter against all rules of ethics and decency. But that had faded. Most of the people responsible were gone.
The grounds were lush and August green, the trees in full foliage as they’d been the first time he’d come here as a young case officer from the Agency’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia. He’d been full of ambition, a real sense of purpose, “gung ho,” as his instructors described him, but with some inner demons that drove him to excel beyond the level of any trainee before or since. Now it was very nearly over. After a quarter-century of service to his country, good times and bad, he was getting out.
He had to show his license again to the guard at the visitor’s lot, where he found an empty parking space, then walked up to the main building. Bad times, he thought. He’d had plenty of them. The men he’d killed in the line of duty weren’t a legion, but there were a lot of them. He remembered each of their faces, the look in their eyes when they died. Anger, rage, disappointment, surprise. They were flesh-and-blood human beings with dreams and ambitions like anyone else, their lives ended suddenly by an assassin’s bullet. Bad men, Phil Carrara would have said, but men nonetheless. Not fair, they’d wanted to say at the end. And he had empathy for them, the killer for his victims. It was a special bond like no other. He agreed, it had never been fair.
Nearing fifty, McGarvey was tall, with the physique of a rugby player and the coordination of a ballet dancer. He had thick brown hair, gray at the temples, and a wide, honest face that many women found handsome. His eyes were deep, sometimes green, other times gray and almost always filled with emotion, an attitude that he knew something, had seen things that most people couldn’t know, let alone understand. His friend Jacqueline said he had Dr. Zhivago eyes from the movie staring Omar Sharif. He ran and swam everyday, rain or shine, unless he was in the middle of an operation, fenced when he could find a worthy opponent and honed his skills with firearms on any firing range or gun club that would have him.
But it was never enough. He never felt as if he were completely ready. He always doubted his competence, always pushed himself to the limit.
It was over, he told himself again, passing through the automatic doors into the main reception hall. And after this morning’s meeting he was going to try to convince Liz to get out while she still could. One spook in the family was enough. He didn’t want his daughter following in his footsteps, despite the fact she was very good, very dedicated and, according to what he was hearing, the best student at the Farm, maybe even better than he was.
Tommy Doyle, the tall, thin, dapper-dressing deputy director of Intelligence, was waiting for him at the security checkpoint in the lobby with a visitor’s pass.
“Thanks for coming out this morning,” he said. “The general asked me to bring you directly upstairs, the others should already be in his office.” He seemed harried, but McGarvey had seen the look before.
“Others?”
“Yeah,” Doyle said, handing McGarvey the pass. “We have a situation brewing in the Sea of Japan.” Doyle was one of the old school, the “Club,” and along with the late Phil Carrara, who’d been deputy director of Operations, Larry Danielle, the deputy director of Central Intelligence and General Murphy, he had been responsible for bringing the CIA back from near emasculation after the Carter administration.
“I’m out, Tommy. That’s what I came to tell him this morning. It’s the only reason I’m here.”
Doyle’s lips compressed. “Maybe that’s not possible right now.”
“It’s the way it’s going to be.”
Doyle faced him. “Ryan is gone and the situation in Moscow has stabilized for the moment, if that’s what’s worrying you. All we’re asking is that you listen to us, for Christ’s sake. You can give us that much.”
McGarvey glanced over at the inscription on the marble wall. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John VIII: 32. In twenty-five years he’d heard so many lies that he sometimes doubted if anyone here had ever read the biblical quote.
He put the security pass on a chain around his neck, nodded tightly and fell in beside Doyle back to the elevators.
Santiago, Berlin, Lausanne, Lisbon, Paris, Tokyo and three months ago, Moscow. His past came crushing down on him like a load of bricks as he rode up to the seventh floor. Each incident had been started by a man or men with the frightened, uncertain, desperate look that he was seeing now in Doyle’s eyes. A “situation” they called such things. Already McGarvey could smell the stench of death.
It was exactly 8:00 A.M. when they entered the large, well-appointed office of Roland Murphy, director of Central Intelligence. The general was seated at his desk watching CNN and drinking a cup of coffee. He was a large man with thick arms, a broad, square face and deep-set eyes beneath bushy eyebrows that were patient rather than cynical, as one might expect. He’d survived four presidents as DCI and was considered one of the toughest, most competent men ever to sit at this desk. He was apolitical, and no president was willing to replace him for fear of what his loss would mean to the CIA.
Seated across from him was Carleton Paterson, the patrician former New York lawyer who was the agency’s new general counsel.
Murphy muted the sound on the television. He motioned toward an empty chair. “Thanks for coming out here this morning.”
Lawrence Danielle, aging, stoop-shouldered, his jowls looser, his hair thinner and whiter than the last time McGarvey had seen him more than two years ago, came from his office adjoining the DCI’s and laid a bundle of files on the desk. “Good Morning, Kirk. How are you feeling, wounds healing and all that?”
“Good morning, Larry,” McGarvey said. “I’ll live.”
“I should hope so,” Danielle said brightly. Unlike the others he still seemed to have his sense of humor. But then he’d been around even longer than Murphy. He was deputy director.