When they were all seated, Murphy called his secretary and told her to hold everything until he advised her differently. “Coffee?” he asked McGarvey.
“No.”
Murphy studied him for several seconds. “I’ve never believed that assassination solved anything. But I was wrong this time, and you were right. If you hadn’t killed Tarankov, Russia would have become the same threat to the world that Hitler’s Germany was.”
“It remains to be seen.” McGarvey shrugged. Now that he was here he decided that he had no final words after all. It no longer seemed to matter. Seeing the worried looks on their faces had dissipated his anger. “I’m here, what do you want?”
“We need your help.”
“I won’t accept another assignment, General.”
“I’m told the DGSE wants Ms. Belleau to return to Paris,” Doyle said. “Will you go back to France with her?” Jacqueline Belleau worked for the French secret service. She was in love with McGarvey, and after the Moscow operation she had come to Washington with him.
“I don’t know,” McGarvey said.
“I’m not offering you an assignment,” Murphy said. “I’m offering you a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Deputy director of Operations.”
McGarvey had to laugh. “You have to be kidding.”
“You’re the perfect man for the job, Kirk,” Danielle said reasonably. “No one has your operational experience. And you say that you won’t take another field assignment.”
“I’m out,” McGarvey said. “And even if I wanted the job, which I don’t, my appointment would never make it through the Senate. I was a shooter. No one in their right mind would even consider me.” McGarvey looked at them. “I’m an anachronism, remember?”
“You have too much valuable experience to waste teaching Voltaire to a bunch of kids who couldn’t care less,” Murphy said.
McGarvey looked out the bullet-proof windows behind the general’s desk. Outside was freedom from knowing the frightening secret of just how fragile the world really was. In here they waged a constant battle that never seemed to end. And it was up to the deputy director of Operations to see that the war was fought efficiently in a way that seemed to make the most sense. With the most honor.
That had never seemed clearer than during the Rick Ames affair. Fifteen or twenty good people had been killed because no one inside this building, the deputy director of Operations included, had bothered to ask the most obvious question: How could Ames afford an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house, and thirty thousand a month in credit card bills on a salary of fifty or sixty thousand?
Ames had sold out to the Russians, and every agent he’d identified had been murdered. Blood had been shed. A river of blood because of bullshit, timidity and indifference. And still the battle raged on.
He studied the general’s eyes. Everything was different now. Less clear than it had been during the Cold War when we knew who our enemy was. We’d been the good guys and the Russians bad. But times had changed. Now just about everyone was a potential enemy. No place was truly safe; not New York City, not Oklahoma City, not Waco.
So who was left to fight the battles, McGarvey asked himself. The incompetents? If that were the case then we’d already lost.
“I’ll listen.”
“Good,” Murphy said, and he seemed genuinely relieved, as did the others.
Paterson took a form from a file folder. “Before we get started we’d like you to sign this. Outlines your responsibilities to the information you’ll be given this morning. Most of it is classified top secret or above.”
McGarvey signed the document without reading it and handed it back. A brief look of annoyance crossed the general counsel’s face.
“What’s going on in the Sea of Japan that has you worried enough to offer me Ryan’s old job? If it’s Japan, you have a lot of good people in this building who know more about them than I do.”
“Your name was put up two months ago,” Danielle said. “But the decision was to give you five or six months to catch your breath after Moscow.” Danielle shrugged apologetically.
“There was an underground nuclear explosion in North Korea twelve hours ago,” Murphy said. “It was at one of their abandoned nuclear power stations on a deserted section of their east coast. A place called Kimch’aek.”
“Was it a test, like India’s and Pakistan’s?”
“That’s how it’s going to play when the story breaks later today. The White House is going to stonewall it, at least for the time being, because frankly nobody knows what the hell to do. At the very least calling it an underground test is going to put a lot of pressure on Kim Jong-Il.”
“The Japanese are already screaming for help,” Doyle said. His mood was brittle. “They want us to move the Seventh Fleet into the Sea of Japan as a show of force.”
McGarvey watched the interplay between them. “If it wasn’t a test, what was it?”
“The North Koreans were using the place to stockpile what we believe were five working bombs. Three days ago they started moving something out of there in a big hurry, and then this happened.” The general looked tired. “There were North Korean soldiers there, and civilian technicians, when the blast occurred. Maybe as many as two hundred of them.”
“An accident?”
The general shook his head. “The skipper of one of our Seawolf submarines on patrol in the area spotted a Japanese MSDF submarine about five miles off the coast, possibily communicating with someone in the power station. Could be they sent a team ashore to verify what the North Koreans were storing there.”
“Either that or it was a kamikaze team,” Doyle said.
“If it had been a test, Pyongyang would have made a statement by now,” Danielle put in glumly. “It’s not something Kim Jong-Il would sit on.”
“The Seawolf radioed back that the Japanese submarine was damaged in the blast and sent up an emergency beacon. The Japanese are sending rescue units.”
“Which the North Koreans will try to block,” McGarvey said. He thought that he’d lost his capacity for surprise. But he wasn’t so sure now.
“It gets worse,” Murphy said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “Within two hours of the explosion, a pair of Chinese Han class nuclear submarines were spotted leaving the inlet at Qingdao and heading into the Yellow Sea.”
“Not much of a threat. They’re rust buckets.”
“It’s more of a political statement, I should think,” Danielle said.
“Are we going to send the Seventh Fleet out there?”
“The President is considering it,” Murphy said after a brief hesitation. “But for the moment the bulk of the fleet is still at Yokosuka. If we send them into the Sea of Japan, Kim Jong-Il will take it as a direct threat.”
“So what?” McGarvey asked. “He won’t attack us or Japan, he’s not that stupid. And sending the Seventh would be a clear message: Back off. Even the Chinese would stand down just like they did a few years ago when Taiwan held its elections. Nobody is going to start a shooting war over there. And North Korea has lost its nuclear weapons.”
“The explosion had an estimated yield of twenty kilotons,” Doyle said. “One bomb. We think they had five, four of which they’d managed to move out of there.”
“I don’t buy it, General,” McGarvey said. “They’re not going to start a war they couldn’t win.”
“Unless they’re nudged,” Doyle said. He took a couple of photographs from a folder and handed them to McGarvey. “Do you recognize either of these men?”
Both pictures were of the same two old men seated across from each other in what appeared to be a Japanese teahouse garden. They were dressed in expensive-looking business suits. In one photograph a geisha girl was serving them something, and in the second picture she was gone.