The two events — the falsifying of his parents’ records and the subsequent revelation of the truth — were so central to McGarvey’s core that they would make a test of the validity of the records here.
Under McGarvey’s biographical record at Langley there was a reference from this spring of an internal investigation, with a subsequent amendment to his deep background. Rencke retrieved that file and dumped it into the printer. The signatory on the order for the reinvestigation was Howard Ryan, McGarvey’s predecessor as director of Operations. In Rencke’s estimation the man was a jerk and a dangerous fool, but not a traitor.
Bringing up the file address, Rencke drove the golf cart back into the stacks. Avenues were alphabetic A through Z then AA through ZZ, and so on. Streets were numeric beginning with 000. Each stack was divided L, left, and R, right, alphabetized by shelves, and numbered by bins. Nonetheless, because of the vastness of the facility, it took Rencke nearly a half hour to find the bin near the middle of one of the stacks, load the file contained in a drawer-sized plastic container on the cart and make it back to the map room.
The bin contained a dozen or more thick envelopes, each marked with codes that could be cross-referenced to other files and laid out in reverse chronological order, the most recent information at the front. The first file contained the Ryan-instigated investigation and was marked Secret. Otis Brenner, the chief internal security investigator on the case, began with the conclusion that Herbert and Claire McGarvey had never spied for the Soviet Union. The allegations were false and had been planted in CIA records by an unknown party or parties at some unknown time for some unknown purpose. But that was a crock of shit as far as Rencke was concerned. The date on the file was in April this year, and by that time the Russians had already confirmed that the disinformation plot had been engineered by Baranov to discredit McGarvey. The KGB was getting worried that McGarvey would become an even more effective agent than he already was, and that he would possibly rise to some position of considerable power in the CIA. It was something Baranov didn’t want, which gave Rencke pause to wonder if it wasn’t the Russians after all who wanted to stop Mac from becoming deputy director of Operations. But Baranov was long gone, the KGB had been broken into two parts — one for internal security and the other for external operations — and no one was left who cared anymore. Russia’s political agenda had changed since Glasnost and Perestroika, and Baranov’s old circles of influence were either dead or very old men retired to their dachas.
Brenner even lamented at one point in his report that finding anyone who’d been alive at the time was a major problem. It was a dead issue as far as the CIA was concerned, except that it was necessary to set the record straight for the sake of the principal target of the KGB plot, namely, Kirk McGarvey.
The file outlined in fairly precise detail the bits and pieces that in the seventies brought the CIA to believe that the McGarveys were spies. Most of it was circumstantial, such as Russian paymaster decoded transmissions which gave a series of dates and payment amounts. Their dates and dollar amounts matched deposits made in the McGarvey’s checking and savings accounts in the First National Bank of Garden City, the small town in southwestern Kansas where their ranch was located. But there was an alternative explanation, of course, which Rencke spotted immediately. The deposits were money that the McGarvey ranch had earned, and the Russians had lifted the deposit records after the fact to create a backtrack. The dates and payment amounts matched too precisely to bank records, which almost never occurred in real life. But no one at the time bothered to check it out, though why the CIA had investigated the McGarveys’ bank records in the first place was something of a mystery.
An addendum to the first report indicated that after the McGarveys’ death in an automobile accident, Kirk had discovered payment records and a Russian code book hidden in his parents’ personal effects. (See additional files, ref #2237-QQ-CKDONNER.) The addendum also reported that the Kansas Highway Patrol had interviewed one eye witness to the tragic accident in which the McGarveys’ car swerved off the highway one evening and smashed into a power pole, killing them instantly, who said it looked to her as if they’d “been run off the road” by a large dark car, possibly a Cadillac or Chrysler, possibly with out-of-state license plates. But the car was never found, nor did any other witness come forward to corroborate the story. (See additional files ref #2239-QS-CKDONNER.)
Rencke turned next to the reference 2237 file, which outlined Kirk’s discoveries at his parents’ ranch. That had been in the midseventies. But one of the signatories on the final investigation was John Lyman Trotter, a friend of Kirk’s who had eventually become deputy director of Operations and who subsequently had been found out to be a traitor. McGarvey had killed his old friend in a shootout in Germany. But the most interesting aspect of the file, in Rencke’s mind, was that Trotter didn’t sign the file until 1992, only nine months before his death, and a very long time after the car accident. It didn’t make sense, except that Trotter had been working for Baranov. But again no one in the CIA at the time bothered to question the dates.
Sloppy work, Rencke wondered, or had it been a carefully crafted oversight? Trotter certainly had the influence at the time, and in those days proper records were not yet so fully backed up or cross-referenced on computer as they were these days. To this point, however, he was not seeing any indications that the records had been tampered with recently.
The next file was the accident report, complete with copies of the Kansas Highway Patrol’s photographs of the scene. Some of the grainy black-and-white pictures were so graphic that Rencke had to put the file down, get up and leave the room. He drove the golf cart around the vast repository for nearly a half hour, trying without much success to blot the gruesome images out of his head. He hoped to God that Mac had never seen the pictures, or ever would. It wasn’t something a family member should be subjected to. The pain it would cause would be immense and of no use. Rencke figured that his own problem was his overactive imagination. Riding around in the cart he found himself reliving the terrible last moments leading up to the crash. The fear, the momentary flash of pain as the car was destroyed and the light went out for them. Not a scene to remember for long, though he knew the pictures would stay in his head for the rest of his life. At that moment he felt closer to Mac and his ex-wife and daughter than he’d ever felt to anyone else. He felt a kinship now that he had shared a family tragedy. He felt part of them, and at this moment the feeling was bittersweet.
Rencke drove back to the map room, where he put away the accident file and opened the first envelope, therefore the oldest, in the bin. The two photographs staring up at him were of Herbert Cullough McGarvey, and his wife Claire Elizabeth (née Leesam) McGarvey, taken when they were in their twenties at Los Alamos. The resemblance of Kirk to his father and Liz to her grandmother was so startling that for an instant Rencke could fully understand one aspect of Kirk’s love for his daughter. Every day he saw her, he had to be reminded of his mother, a woman he’d loved with all his heart and soul. And every time Kirk looked into a mirror, he had to see bits of his father staring back at him. It would be wonderful, Rencke decided, to live with such memories. He didn’t have them himself, so he could envy his friend’s.